A Shock to the System

by Simon Brett

  ‘So how about the one after?’

  ‘Sounds fine.’ Graham remembered that that was yet another weekend that Lilian was coming to stay. Which made it sound even finer.

  He assimilated Robert’s news about the weekend in Miami. It was the sort of flamboyant gesture he might have made a few years back. When he’d had the money. A move designed to impress and confuse his colleagues.

  With difficulty, Graham resisted the temptation to be impressed and confused.

  In the Levi sweatshirt, too, he could recognise his own style. He had worn his flowered ties for the same purpose (though he liked to think he’d never looked quite that scruffy). Nowadays, like George Brewer, he favoured suits.

  No, Robert Benham was using all Graham’s old tricks, so Graham would have to beat him at his own game. Because there was no doubt, one way or the other, he was going to beat him. He’d lost the latest round due to carelessness, but now he had the measure of his opponent, he was not going to be caught napping again.

  Suddenly, Graham remembered that he was about to be arrested for murder, and the incongruity of any future planning seemed laughable. He felt a surge of almost manic irresponsibility.

  As he left George’s office, he asked Stella if she’d like to meet for a drink after work.

  Travelling home on the Tube, he thought about Stella. Talking to her had taken him back into a world from which he had long been unwittingly banished.

  First it had been, albeit mildly, a sexual encounter. No physical contact had been made, no suggestions voiced, but the circumstances, a man inviting a woman to have a drink with him a deux, had sexual overtones. And the automatic way in which Stella walked with him out of the building to a wine bar rather than turning right by the lifts to the company bar, showed that she recognised this.

  Graham also found, to his surprise, that he slipped easily into the observances of ‘chatting up’. It was a style of speech which he had not practised for over fifteen years, but it seemed to come back. Again, it was very mild, just small-talk, but relaxing. It was so long since he had spoken to a woman he did not know to the point of tedium, or about topics of mutual interest, rather than mutual responsibility.

  The second difference he felt with Stella was that between their worlds. She had been divorced nearly as long as he’d been married and was childless, so her preoccupations were totally unlike his. For her, spare time was for entertainment, not for maintaining houses, tolerating mothers-in-law, and marshalling unresponsive children. She spoke of films she had seen, theatres, exhibitions. For Stella, London was a huge complex of varied entertainments to be explored and tasted; whereas, for Graham, it was somewhere he lived so that he had a less intolerable journey to work.

  Her need to fill spare time so avidly was perhaps born of the single person’s obsessive fear of loneliness, but to Graham it seemed an ideal of freedom. It joined with Robert Benham’s trip to Miami in an image of a world he had once known, and might still know, if he hadn’t taken another course.

  Since the reasons he had taken that other course — wife and children — now meant nothing to him, he felt unjustly excluded from the free world, in which people did what they wanted to when they wanted to without committee decisions and unwelcome company.

  He wanted to be shot of his family.

  It was because he was a murderer that he could feel so irresponsible. Once again he thought how trivial other lapses were when compared to the crime of taking human life.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  Merrily looked wan and weepy when he got home. It was not late, still daylight, so he felt annoyed by her demand.

  ‘Why?’ Answer a question with a question, the resource of the devious in all walks of life.

  ‘It’s awful, Graham. I’ve had a shock.’

  She started crying and came forward into his arms. He clasped them automatically and held her, murmuring apposite reassurance. But he felt for her no more than he would for the unknown victim of a car accident.

  ‘What do you mean — shock? What happened?’

  ‘Electric shock. I was changing a light bulb in the utility room and — ’

  ‘Show me.’

  She led him through. The row of square white appliances watched impassively as he reached up towards the old brass light-fitting.

  He stopped. ‘Did you switch off the power?’

  ‘What?’ Merrily’s voice was even smaller with self-pity.

  ‘The mains — did you switch them off?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t, Graham. I just had a horrid shock.’

  ‘I know, but to avoid getting another shock — indeed, to avoid me or the children getting a shock — you should have switched the electricity off at the mains.’

  ‘And am I expected to know where the mains are?’

  ‘Yes, you bloody are. This house is in both our names and you should be responsible for it just as much as I am.’

  ‘Well, I don’t understand about electricity and things like that.’

  The petulant contempt she put into the last three words made it hard to remember that her lack of practicality had once been part of Merrily’s winsome charm. It was an attitude her mother had encouraged through childhood; Lilian had always worked on the principle that, whatever went wrong technically, there would always be some ardent young actor around to fix it. The trouble was, the supply of ardent young actors had dried up, leaving Graham to deal with all the dripping taps, ‘funny bonking in the hot-water pipes’ and ‘silly little red lights that keep coming on in the car’ for his mother-in-law. And for her equally useless daughter.

  Merrily, he had recently decided, was not even a very good housewife. The house always looked faintly messy and, though she often averred that this was a matter of policy, a determination not to be obsessed by cleaning and polishing like the older generation, Graham suspected it was just old-fashioned inefficiency. And when Merrily did do a major cleaning project, it was never simply in the cause of hygiene; it was an accusation, some subtly charged probe to make him feel guilty or to let him know she wanted something. Merrily’s methods were very like her mother’s.

  He switched off the electricity, got a torch and climbed a ladder to inspect the defective fitting.

  It didn’t take more than a glance to see what was wrong. The positive and negative wires were red and black, the old system. Old enough for the insulating rubber to have perished. He could see where the shiny exposed wire touched the brass bulb-holder. The whole fitting was live.

  He fetched a screwdriver to take it off. Have to buy a replacement. As he pulled the wire free, he saw that even more of the rubber was perished. Presumably that meant the whole electrical system was the same. The house had never been properly rewired; the old round-pin plugs had just been replaced with square-pins. Have to get an electrician to look at it. Damn, that was bound to mean more expense.

  While he was perched on the ladder, separating the wires so that they didn’t fuse everything when the power came back, Merrily’s little voice floated plaintively up to him.

  ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This evening — who were you with?’

  ‘Eh?’

  He pointed the torch down, bleaching her little face. She blinked, but pressed on. ‘Graham — are you having an affair with someone?’

  ‘What!’ He almost laughed at the incongruity of the question. God knows, he hadn’t done anything with Stella. But had Merrily got some amazing radar that could pick up the fact that he’d invited the girl out for a drink?

  He came down the ladder. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, there’s something funny going on, Graham. You’ve been so twitchy the last week. You leap up every time the ’phone goes — or the front doorbell. You’re acting exactly as if you’d done something you shouldn’t.’

  He almost laughed. ‘And you think the thing I shouldn’t have done is to sleep with another woman?’

  ‘Y
es.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t. No, the thing I shouldn’t have done. .’ he continued nonchalantly.

  ‘Is what?’

  The words were out before he had time to think. ‘Oh, just murdering someone.’

  But the confession only got a ‘Ha, bloody ha’ from Merrily. The humour of the situation hit Graham and he giggled uncontrollably.

  ‘What is it, Graham? Is it another woman?’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ As he got control of himself he started to regret the mention of the murder. Better feed her a bit of truth before she started to think about it. ‘No, it’s George’s job.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Have you heard yet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘Not good. I haven’t got it.’

  ‘What!’

  He shone the torch again in Merrily’s face and saw there some of the disappointment and betrayal which he had felt when he heard the news.

  Her disappointment, however, was purely materialistic.

  ‘But we need the money, Graham. There are lots of things that need doing to the house, and I haven’t got a stitch to wear.’

  Merrily was very put out for the rest of the evening. She made no secret of the fact that she felt her husband had let her down.

  Simply to get her off that subject, Graham again raised the question of his having an affair. He denied it, with perhaps a little too much vehemence. And in bed he made love to her to convince her of his fidelity.

  Again, perhaps with a little too much vehemence.

  The events of the evening had suspended his fears about the murder, but they came back when he woke sweating at three in the morning. He soon gave up the hope of further sleep, and walked round the house to control the trembling of his body.

  To give himself something to do, he looked at other electrical fittings and found what he had feared, the same old wiring with its perished insulation.

  That added a new panic. He tried to recapture the nonchalance that being a murderer had sometimes given and ask himself how potentially lethal wiring could matter to a man who had taken the life of another, but it didn’t work. He switched off the mains.

  At eight-thirty, having shouted down the rest of the family’s moans about the lack of light, radios, hot water and hot food, he rang an electrician, asking him to come round and say how serious the danger was.

  The post then arrived, bearing a letter from his bank manager, complaining about the abuse of the Marshalls’ overdraft ‘facility’ and demanding a ‘remittance’.

  While he was recovering from this blow, Lilian Hinchcliffe rang to say her little Fiat had a flat tyre. Would Graham be an angel and come round and fiddle with whatever needed fiddling with?

  No, he bloody wouldn’t. He curbed this response before he voiced it, but said unfortunately he couldn’t because he was waiting in for the electrician, Lilian would have to get in touch with a tyre place and get the thing mended herself (like ordinary bloody people did). But they charged so much, Lilian whined, surely it wasn’t a lot to ask for Graham to just come and have a little look at it. Very well, he’d see if he could get over later.

  Merrily, who had gone up after their cold breakfast to dress, came down in the ragged T-shirt and patched jeans she wore for painting. Since they weren’t ever going to have any money ever again, she announced, she’d better get used to their new style of life. The gesture was characteristic, particularly in its totally inappropriate timing.

  As if this weren’t enough, Emma, about to leave for school, said she felt funny, and turned out, on examination by Merrily, to have started, at the tender age of eleven, her first period.

  Henry, uninformed by his father — or indeed anyone else — about such matters, did not understand and made some inapposite remark, which sent the two women (as they both now were) into floods of tears.

  At this moment the doorbell rang. Graham would almost have welcomed a policeman come to arrest him, but it turned out to be the electrician.

  Tight-lipped, Graham showed him round the house. The electrician fingered the odd wire that all too easily came out of the wall, tapped a few plugs and tutted over junction boxes. Then, with the understanding gravity of a cancer surgeon, he said the house was a deathtrap, and it would need complete rewiring, at a cost of one thousand four hundred pounds. Excluding V.A.T.

  What about switching the power back on — would it be safe? The electrician shook his head dubiously. Well, he wouldn’t like to be responsible. Still, have to take the risk till it was all properly done. What? No, he couldn’t think about doing it for three weeks. Up to here he was. Oh yes, but no question it was urgent. Very urgent.

  Graham Marshall thought of Stella with her little flat and no more weighty decision than which cinema to go to that evening.

  He thought of Robert Benham, with his potential Head of Personnel’s salary and his weekend trip to Miami.

  He thought of himself, who, on top of everything else, was a murderer.

  And he thought that at least, when you’re in prison for life, you don’t have any responsibilities.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Time continued to pass and for Graham Marshall the balance between peace and fear slowly changed. The panics still came, terrors could still clutch at him when least expected, but they did not come so often and they did not stay so long.

  Murder, he began to think in moments of detachment, was like any other new experience. Like sex, maybe. The first time it seemed all-important, as if it would dominate the rest of one’s life, but gradually it came to be accepted, even taken for granted. How many married men, he wondered, questioned on their way to work, could remember whether or not they’d made love to their wives the night before.

  Sex only became an obsession when the impulse was unnaturally strong or when it was infected with guilt.

  Continuing his analogy, he found that his impulse to murder was not unnaturally strong. Nor did he feel any guilt about the one that he had committed.

  He sometimes wondered idly whether he’d feel any different if the victim were someone he knew.

  Of course, the big distinction between sex and murder was that one wanted to make a habit of the first, and probably not of the second.

  Graham Marshall certainly didn’t. Three weeks after the event he still found the shock was sufficient to last him for a lifetime. And he would do anything to avoid the paralysing fear of discovery.

  But that fear was receding. Increasingly logic told him he was going to get away with it.

  Committing the murder had been a stroke of bad luck; getting arrested for it would be really appalling luck.

  And, as the fear left him, his attitude to the crime changed. Previously he had not dared to examine his feelings, but now he found he kept coming back to the incident with something approaching relish.

  It was not everyone who had committed a murder.

  He began to feel a certain exclusivity. The crime gave his life an unpredictable dimension. It filled the void the loss of George Brewer’s job had left in him.

  The feeling was comparable to that he had felt in the old days at work when talking about Lilian’s show-business friends or when unconventionally dressed: that there was more to Graham Marshall than met the eye.

  Except, of course, he couldn’t really tell his colleagues about the murder. It had to be his secret.

  But it was a secret from which he drew strength. When Robert Benham was at his most patronising, when Merrily at her most precious, or Lilian at her most demanding, Graham Marshall would say to himself: ‘What you don’t realise is that I am a murderer, that I have taken human life.’

  And the thought gave him a sense of power.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘And I bought the paddock too, because you could easily land a helicopter there.’

  Graham laughed indulgently at the fancy, then realised from his host’s face that Robert Benham wasn’t joking. He didn’t joke. When he said he’d bought the paddock adjacen
t to his cottage as a helipad, that was exactly why he had bought it. And for someone who had become Head of Personnel at Crasoco by the age of thirty-four, the idea of owning a helicopter was not fanciful.

  With sudden clarity Graham realised the truth that had only been hinted at hitherto — that Robert Benham’s ambition and potential did not stop at Crasoco, that Head of Personnel there was only another step on a staircase that would lead through many companies, ever onward and upward. Robert Benham was destined to lead the sort of life in which helicopters were necessary, the life of a real ‘success’. Even in ambition his new boss outstripped him. Graham felt diminished and parochial.

  He searched for some comfort, as he always did when threatened, in his opponent’s failings. Everyone has an Achilles’ heel — a flaw of character, an awkward mannerism, a past failure, an ill-chosen mate, an unsuitable home — that can alleviate the pang of envy.

  But in the case of Robert Benham, Graham could not find it. Certainly, judged on an absolute scale, the young man had moral shortcomings, but these were not of a kind to solace his rival. Rather the reverse, for Graham recognised his own qualities of efficiency and ruthlessness reflected with more intense concentration. Robert Benham shared his approach to life, but was better at it.

  Benham’s mannerisms, too, were hard to fault. The inadequacies which Graham had immediately identified on their first encounter had been proved by success to be more than adequate to the challenges they faced. What Eric Marshall would have described as ‘a common accent’ and ‘lack of social graces’ had proved positive advantages. Benham had been preferred over Graham for being, amongst other things, ‘more in touch with the work force’. And Robert’s strong regional identity only increased the sense of rootlessness Graham had felt since his parents’ deaths.

  As to past failures, there seemed unfortunately to be no blots on the Benham curriculum vitae.

  Nor did his choice of accommodation let him down. Graham was prepared to take the Dolphin Square flat on trust; though he had not seen it, the address was sufficient to make him bitterly nostalgic for his own lost life in Kensington and Chelsea.