A Shock to the System

by Simon Brett

  ‘Oh dear. That makes not getting it all the more disappointing.’

  She smiled at him.

  He smiled back. But he wasn’t really smiling at her; he was smiling at the incongruity of anyone framing pretty compliments only ten hours after murdering an old man.

  There was no policeman waiting for him in his office, but Robert Benham was there, poring over some files on his desk.

  The Head of Personnel Designate looked up without apology. ‘I’ve been in for an hour or so checking through some stuff.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘That report you did for George on Human Resources, you know, staffing in the ’Eighties. .’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘His copy’s locked in his files, so I’m checking yours.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Disagree with your conclusion that the size of Department’s right. There are a lot of idle buggers who don’t pull their weight.’

  ‘I know that, Robert, but George was very keen to maintain the Department at its present size.’

  ‘So you came up with the conclusions he wanted?’

  Graham shrugged. Robert Benham nodded brusquely and closed the file. ‘Of course. As I’ve said, I’m more concerned with productivity than maintaining the status quo.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We must have a long talk about it. No time in ordinary office hours. You come down to my cottage at Stoughton one weekend. It’s near Chichester. We’ll fix a date.’

  ‘Oh, but I — ’

  ‘But what?’

  But what indeed? Graham didn’t continue the sentence he’d been framing about Merrily and the children and trying to keep the weekends free as far as possible. He couldn’t pretend he enjoyed Saturdays and Sundays en famille. Anyway, for a man shortly to be arrested for murder, what did it matter whether or not he fulfilled his family responsibilities?

  ‘Nothing. No, I’ll look forward to that. Any weekend’ll be fine.’

  At that moment George Brewer’s harassed face appeared around the door. ‘Oh, er, Robert, I was looking for you. I. . er — ’

  ‘I’ll be along in a moment.’ Robert Benham gestured his boss away without finesse, almost snapping his fingers at him. George’s head withdrew.

  When Robert had gone, Graham had another attack of the shakes. They hadn’t found the body yet; it had been swept along by the river.

  But they would find it soon.

  And then they’d come and get him.

  ‘More sherry, Lilian?’

  He knew the answer. He had never known his mother-in-law to refused. Since she had moved to Barnes, they’d got through a lot more sherry. At least he’d managed to wean her off the Tio Pepe and on to a cheaper brand. But it was still expensive.

  He always had money to worry about in the rare moments of not worrying about being arrested.

  Three days had passed, three days of nausea, broken by brief intervals of calm. The calm only came with oblivion, often after a few drinks, when he could forget about the old man, wipe the whole episode from his mind, pretend it hadn’t happened. But these moments did not last; soon his thoughts would be invaded by another image of the murder, or a recollection of having lost the job he’d hoped for.

  The two injustices had by now become inextricably entwined in his mind. If he hadn’t been cheated of his job, he wouldn’t have had to kill the old man. The murder was Robert Benham’s fault, George Brewer’s fault for not standing up for his protege; anyone’s fault but Graham Marshall’s.

  The killing itself had elaborated in his imagination. Though the reality of the episode had lasted less than half a minute, in his mind it had spread into a slow-motion horror film, with the sickening crunch of the blow to the victim’s skull, an endless dying gurgle, and long sprawling fall down to the dark water of the Thames.

  The old man had assumed a face, too. It was the face of Graham’s father.

  These were the images that kept the metallic taste of vomit in his mouth. But between the nausea and the snatched moments of calm, there were other thoughts, thoughts he could not yet fully define, but whose shadows were not displeasing.

  Lilian Hinchcliffe let out an operatic sigh as her son-in-law recharged her sherry glass. It was more than her usual call for attention. On this particular day she had some substance on which she could build her performance, a dramatic theme round which she could improvise with increasing elaboration. The previous evening’s television news had announced the death in Switzerland of the distinguished film actor, William Essex. He had been found by his companion of many years, a considerably less distinguished actor.

  To Graham, who watched bulletins in terror for announcements of bodies discovered or police investigations launched, the news had meant little. To Lilian it had been a licence to stage a major production of sentiment, nostalgia and meretricious grief. The climax of this performance had been reached the night before, but the sobs were reminders, after-echoes, each one requesting enquiry and solicitude.

  Graham wilfully withheld both. A side-effect of his recent shock had been to liberate him from the need for pretence. He could now recognise, without guilt, the irrelevance of things that did not interest him.

  ‘Sherry, darling?’

  Merrily had just come into the room from putting the kids to bed.

  ‘Thank you, darling.’

  The ‘darlings’ were as automatic as a sailor’s obscenities. And as meaningless.

  Merrily sank into an armchair. ‘Oooh, they’ve been wearing today.’

  ‘Poor you. I remember just what you and Charmian were like at the same age.’ Perhaps because of her background as an actress, Lilian Hinchcliffe could not avoid bringing every observation back to herself. Her sympathy for Merrily demanded, however retrospectively, sympathy for herself.

  ‘Where is Charmian, anyway? I thought she was meant to be coming this evening.’ She made her elder daughter’s absence sound like a personal affront, a particularly vicious affront in the circumstances, following the death of Lilian’s alleged lover.

  ‘She’ll be along soon,’ said Merrily. ‘I told Emma, if she’s here by nine, Charmian’d read her a story.’

  ‘Emma used always to want me to read her stories.’

  ‘Yes, Mummy, but she doesn’t see as much of Charmian these days as she does of you.’

  Lilian Hinchcliffe swept her hair back with a petulant gesture. ‘Familiarity, no doubt, breeding contempt.’

  Having given his women their sherry, Graham poured himself another large Scotch and took a long swallow. There was no doubt that drink helped. He felt steadier, the taste in his mouth less bitter.

  The calm he felt now was subtly different. For the first time it came not from blotting out the murder, but from the tiny hope that it might never be discovered.

  The doorbell rang, strangling the new idea at birth.

  ‘I’ll go.’ As he rose, the nausea and the terrible interior trembling returned. There would be a policeman at the door; the moment had finally come.

  It was Charmian. He kissed his sister-in-law perfunctorily and she ran upstairs to see the children. Henry and Emma got on very well with her, better than they did with their parents or grandmother. She had the glamour of a career, of having no children, and of treating them like adults.

  She seemed to love them too, something Graham found inconceivable. No doubt it was easier when they weren’t your own.

  His calm was broken again and another large Scotch didn’t mend it. There is no way you can get away with murder. It was only a matter of time before they caught up with him.

  Charmian came down. He equipped her with a gin and tonic and refilled the glasses of the other two, emptying the sherry bottle. God, have to buy more.

  ‘Jesus, they were playing a horrible game when I went up there,’ said Charmian.

  ‘What?’ Merrily drawled, putting into the monosyllable a reminder that she had been putting up with her children’s ‘horrible games’ ever since they came back from
school, and indeed for years before that, while her sister only swanned in every now and then, so it was hardly surprising that she had novelty value for them. Merrily got more like her mother daily.

  ‘Henry said he was the Yorkshire Ripper and Emma was one of his victims.’

  ‘How revolting,’ Lilian emoted emptily.

  Merrily shrugged. ‘It’s not surprising. There was so much in the papers, on the radio, television.’

  ‘There’ll be more when the trial starts,’ Lilian contributed gloomily.

  ‘Do you think he is the right bloke — the one they’ve got?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Charmian, with the authority of her Fleet Street connections.

  Merrily shuddered. ‘Quite horrible, the whole business.’

  Lilian wasn’t going to be emotionally outdone by her daughter. ‘Quite, quite horrible. What makes someone do something like that, to kill just for. . ugh, it’s beyond belief.’

  You’d be surprised, thought Graham. People will kill for strange reasons. Because they’ve lost a job, maybe.

  For the first time, his secret seemed valuable. He didn’t want to be identified with the Yorkshire Ripper; their crimes had nothing in common. And yet there was something, an exclusivity almost, in being a murderer.

  ‘Did you see that film on the box last night,’ Charmian began, ‘about a mass murderer? God, it was terrible. Some awful ’Fifties B-feature. Bad script. Terrible acting.’ She paused before the afterthought and sting of her statement. ‘It was the one they showed as a “tribute” to William Essex.’ The remark was aimed straight at Lilian, another salvo in the strange warfare that was their relationship. With absolute predictability, she rose to her daughter’s slight.

  ‘William Essex was one of the finest actors of his generation.’

  ‘Richest, maybe. Most exposed, perhaps. But, if you’re talking about talent, he wasn’t even on the map.’

  ‘Now listen, Charmian!’ Lilian screeched. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about! When William and I were lovers. .’

  And so on. The same tired old stories. The same justifications. The same recriminations and tears. The same eternal sparring between mother and daughter.

  Graham felt weary. He narrowed his eyes and sighted his mother-in-law along his toecap. From an early age, long before the Bond films had popularised such gadgetry, he’d had a fantasy of a machine-gun along the sole of his shoe. You point it at someone, press down with your toe, and. . bang, bang, bang. The person vanishes, obliterated, gone for ever.

  A childish fantasy.

  Except, of course, now he had taken one step nearer to realising that sort of fantasy.

  Graham Marshall smiled.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Death is the only power that actually stops time. Love and fear can suspend it; intense concentration or pleasure can make people unaware of it; but only death can stop it.

  And since Graham Marshall didn’t die, time passed for him. It didn’t pass quickly, or comfortably, but it passed. He weathered an agonising weekend, and soon a whole week had gone by since the murder. Still there had been no policeman at the front door, no discreet but firm detective to greet him in the office.

  Gradually the intervals of sanity between the panics grew longer. An attractive new logic crept into his thinking. There had been no witnesses to the murder. Even when the body was found, there might well be nothing to connect the death with him. Surely immersion of any length in the Thames would make accurate forensic examination difficult.

  And, as for marks on his own clothing and the murder weapon. . well, he’d inspected them himself and seen nothing. But to be on the safe side, he had had the suit cleaned (a regular procedure which would not raise any suspicion). And, though it showed no apparent signs of its unconventional employment, he had contrived to leave his umbrella on the Piccadilly Line (again something he had done more than once before, guaranteed to prompt the not-quite-teasing comment from Merrily that he was getting old).

  Given the circumstances of the death, the police were going to be hard put to it to point the finger at Graham Marshall. And since the victim was presumably a homeless vagrant, they weren’t going to make their investigations too exhaustive.

  That was even assuming that they found the body. Graham remembered reading stories of corpses long submerged, cliches about rivers being ‘slow to give up their secrets’. Every day that passed with the body undiscovered would make more difficult the identification of the victim, and certainly of his murderer.

  At times Graham’s calm was coloured by a sort of humour. If you’re going to murder someone, he thought wryly, choose a victim you have never met — it’s so much safer.

  But such thoughts only came when he was at his most relaxed. And, though the intervals of calm were increasing, nausea and panic still stalked him and would pounce suddenly. And because he had dared to hope they might be gone for ever, each new attack seemed to come with increased force.

  He had committed murder, and there was no way he could get away with it.

  The worst attack of panic came on the Thursday morning of the week after the old man’s death. Graham had woken feeling moderately human and, while Merrily refereed the children’s breakfast in the kitchen, had taken his toast and coffee through to the sitting-room for a leisurely riffle through the papers.

  Sunlight streaked in at the tall windows and what he could see of the garden suggested spring. For almost the first time, he saw the benefits of the new house, space and a bit of elegance. And an investment. Oh, there was a lot that still needed doing to it, but somehow they’d manage. Even without George’s job there’d still be the odd increment and pay settlement.

  The loss of the job didn’t at that moment seem too appalling. Graham knew so much about the Department that Robert Benham was constantly asking him for information. And controlling the flow of that information gave Graham a kind of power. Besides, Robert’s urgency for change might make him too unpopular to stay long as Head of Personnel.

  Graham had seen other bright young men overreach themselves.

  His own role was clear — to wait in the wings, giving Robert Benham apparent, but limited, support, until something, as it inevitably must, went wrong. He certainly did not intend to tie his career so closely to that of the new Head as he had to the old.

  He took a sip of coffee and glanced at the papers. The Daily Telegraph and, being Thursday, The Barnes and Mortlake Times. They only really had the local paper for cinema times and property prices; its news content of restaurant licences refused, under-13 swimming galas and resistance to ring-road schemes was less than fascinating.

  But out of habit, he glanced down the columns.

  There it was — at the bottom of the front page:

  BODY FOUND

  The body of an elderly man was found in the Thames near Putney Bridge on Saturday. He has not yet been identified, but is described as being in his late sixties and shabbily dressed.

  Saturday. Only two days after the killing. That didn’t give long for the water to remove any clues as to how he died.

  The happy vision, that the murder might never be discovered, shattered. The police had had five days to investigate. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Graham was seized by a trembling so strong that he had to put down his coffee cup to avoid spilling it.

  At that moment Merrily came into the room. She was wearing one of her fluffy lace dressing-gowns. When she had been young and waiflike, they had made her look like a fledgling in a downy nest; Graham had even used the image in the early days of their marriage. Now they only emphasised her angularity and the scrawniness of her neck; if any bird came to mind, it was a plucked chicken.

  She looked down at the sun marking parallelograms on the floor. ‘This carpet,’ she observed, ‘rather belongs to the bear called Frederick.’

  Graham was in no mood to sort out one of her precious remarks. ‘What?’

  ‘Fred Bear. Threadbare, darling.’

 
; ‘Oh.’

  ‘We’ll have to get a new one. Apparently there’s a sale at Allied Carpets. .’

  Graham rose jerkily, upsetting his plate. The remaining slice of toast flopped on to the floor, marmalade-side down.

  ‘Oh, daaarling.’ Merrily had her mother’s knack of extending vowels beyond their natural span. And of infusing them with reproach. ‘Now we’ll have to get a new carpet.’

  ‘I must go,’ he blurted out. The trembling was worse. Merrily looked at him, concern emphasising the wrinkles of her tight little face. ‘Are you all right, darling?’

  ‘Yes, I. .’ He reached down to the local paper and roughly folded it so that the front page was hidden.

  ‘Graham, is there something. .?’ Merrily laid a thin hand on his sleeve.

  He twitched his arm away as if she had been a nettle.

  His mood at the office was subtly different, the panic dulled to a kind of acceptance. The bright image of ‘getting away with it’ had been shown up as a fantasy. Doggedly, like a condemned man, he went through his work, wondering how long he had got, waiting for the summons.

  But the only summons came from Robert Benham, who asked him to go up to George Brewer’s office. Once inside, Graham was waved to a chair by his prospective boss, casual in a faded blue Levi sweatshirt.

  ‘I told George to take the day off. He’s looking pretty washed out and, quite honestly, he’s just a nuisance round the office these days, fussing like an old woman every time I want to look at a file.’

  ‘He is still Head of Personnel,’ Graham felt bound to say.

  Robert read no reproach into this remark. ‘Yes, damn it. Still got a couple of months to go. Last few weeks, though, he’ll be kept out of mischief with company cocktail parties. But it means it’ll be some time before I can get down to any proper work.

  ‘Look, wanted to say — about this weekend down at the cottage to talk through things. .’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Got one of the directors coming down this weekend, next one I’m going to Miami. .’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘No, I just need a break. I’ll be reading reports and things, of course. .’