by J. S. Mahon
“I saw you coming out of Linda Gill’s house last Wednesday,” he said, all casual, as if he’d mentioned the weather.
“And what of it?” I asked, trying to sound unconcerned.
“Oh, nothing. She’s a nice bit of stuff though,” he said with a leer.
I didn’t see much point in saying that I’d been round there fixing her washing machine as it was well known in the town that she was a youngish widow who was pretty free with her favours, so I said nothing and carried on reading the paper, or trying to. He sat down opposite me with his coffee and the silence was what you might call pregnant, something I’d made sure Linda wouldn’t be, not by me at least. Dennis was one of those nutters who run up and down hills in all weathers, so I asked him if he’d done any races recently. He told me that he hadn’t done any for a while, so I asked him if he was doing much training, anything to keep off the subject of women. He told me that he got up the fells at the weekends and ran on the roads during the week, which interested me about as much as the paint on the wall, though I mention it because of what’s to come.
I hadn’t seen Linda since the night that he saw me and I never saw her again, apart from once in the street a few weeks later when she looked straight through me. She moved away that summer, which suited me just fine. I’d been seeing her once a week for about three months, which made a change from going down the pub. Don’t think that I did that sort of thing all the time, but I suppose I was flattered because I was nearly fifty then and she still thought me worth bothering with. There wasn’t much hanky-panky going on at home by that time, you see, and I thought I might as well have one last fling before my teeth started falling out. (My grandfather’s teeth lasted for many more years and he was a fit-looking man well into his 70s.)
As winter turned into spring I thought no more about Dennis’s comment, but I always made a point of treating him well and showing interest in his running, because he lived quite near to us, alone, and was peculiar enough for me not to trust him not to say anything to your grandma. We got quite friendly after a while, though, and I began to put his remark about me and Linda down to the fact that he was a bit of a loner and had wanted to make me sit up and take notice of him. He was an ugly, skinny bugger, too, and can’t have had much success with the ladies, so perhaps he just brought the subject up because he was impressed, or so I thought then.
It was April when we got the bad news. The power cuts had ended, but work was slack and there were to be layoffs. Of the 300-odd men in the factory, 50 had to go and although it wasn’t my decision, of course, I was asked who I thought should get the chop on my shift. Dennis wouldn’t have been on my list anyway because he was a good grafter, being so fit from all that running, but after what he had said about my nocturnal affairs there was no way I’d have risked getting on the wrong side of him. The management thought differently, however, as he was never keen on doing overtime or covering for blokes who were off sick, and he was made redundant at the end of the month. I assumed he’d got a decent payoff and I didn’t think he’d have any trouble getting another job once things picked up again, but even so, I made a point of telling him that I’d wanted to keep him on. He looked at me in a funny way, a mixture of bitterness and scorn, and said that we’d see. I asked him what we’d see, but he just shook his head and walked off.
It was about two months later when I found out what he’d meant. Other factories had followed our lead and started to lay blokes off too, so things were looking grim for the town and the last person I expected to see walking into my local pub was Dennis, considering that I’d only ever seen him there at Christmas before. I was up at the bar with a couple of pals and watched him order a pint and take it to a little table and sit down. I tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t look my way and once he’d sat down over in the corner I’d have had to turn right round to see him. I could feel his presence and knew he was up to something, so rather than leaving just before eleven as I usually did, I stayed on for last orders. As far as I knew, he hadn’t budged from his table and I thought it better to find out what was on his mind rather than going home and worrying about it.
At about eleven he finally came up to the bar to refill his glass and this time he did return my nod, before going back to his table. I went over and asked him how he was doing and he asked me, or rather told me, to sit down. Knowing that he probably hadn’t found another job, I asked him about his running.
“I’m not here to talk about running, Jack. I’m here to talk about this,” he said, before sliding a polaroid photograph across the table. It was of me and Linda sitting on her settee, me with my arm around her. She had a fancy camera and had put the timer on to take the snap of us, for her collection, she’d said, laughing. I wasn’t best pleased that she’d taken it and had wanted to tear it up, but she’d said not to be silly as it was just for her. That wasn’t long after I’d started seeing her and I was feeling pleased with myself and didn’t want to spoil things, so I just made her promise that she wouldn’t show it to anyone, which she did.
As I fingered the photo it struck me that it was the only one of us together, but Dennis must have been reading my thoughts as he then said that it was only a copy. I dropped it onto the table and he pocketed it. I asked him where he’d got it from.
“Linda’s my cousin, Jack, and she had a party a couple of weeks ago. When I went up to the toilet I had a quick shufty through her drawers and found what I was looking for, so don’t think badly of her,” he said, a placid smile on his ugly mug.
“What do you want?” I asked him quietly.
“What you’ve got and I won’t have soon. Money.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“Well spotted. You always were a bright spark,” he said, leaning back in his chair as if he thought I might thump him.
I did feel like lamping him one just then, but I was a much stronger man before you knew me and he was such a scrawny little sod that it wouldn’t have been right, not even if I’d asked him outside like folk used to do to settle arguments back then. (Even in his old age my grandfather was over six feet tall and strongly built.)
“I’m not giving you any money, Dennis,” I said when I’d calmed down enough to speak quietly.
“Well, I’ll be giving the photo to your wife then and I’ll be telling her how long you were seeing Linda for,” he whispered. “Linda talks when she drinks, you see. She drank at that party and I stayed behind for a little heart to heart with her.”
“How much do you want?” I asked, expecting him to ask for fifty quid or so.
“A grand.”
“Fuck off,” I said, more loudly than I should have. You have to realise what things cost then to know how much £1000 was in those days. I earned about £50 a week, I think, and our semi that we’d bought a couple of years earlier cost us just over £4000. A thousand pounds was a fortune. I told him that he must be joking and he said that he didn’t expect me to pay it all at once, which made me laugh out loud. A few months later I was glad about that laugh and hoped that it made up for me swearing at him if anyone had been paying attention to us. Excuse the language, Tommy, as you never heard me swear, but that’s what I said and it might have been my downfall.
Knowing your grandma when you did, you might be thinking that I should have told him to go ahead and tell her, and that all I would have got was a good rollocking and a few weeks of long faces, but she wasn’t so calm and gentle when she was younger and there would have been terrible consequences. She knew nothing about a couple of flings I’d had in the early days and the affair would have come as a great shock to her. Although she died when you were quite young (when I was 15, in fact) you’ll remember that she was a staunch churchgoer and a piece of news like that might have been the end of us. I loved her and, to be honest, depended on her too much to risk everything, so I asked Dennis, very quietly, how much he expected me to pay him and how often.
“Twenty quid a month until it’s all paid, which you being clever enough to be a f
oreman will know that it’ll take you fifty months. Then you’ll get all the copies of the photo. I’ll come here for a pint on the first Tuesday of every month and it’s up to you to get that money into my pocket as best you see fit.”
“And if I report you?” I asked him to test his mettle.
“I deny everything. If it came to court your wife could come and watch, couldn’t she?”
“It’s too much money.”
“I know what you earn and I know that if you’re clever about it, you’ll be able to manage it without her finding out.” He stood up. “Don’t worry, in four years all this’ll be over. Goodnight.”
Rather than sitting staring at my pint, I drank up and left the pub soon after he did, but I took my time walking home to let it all sink in. Whether he’d planned this before he got laid off from work, I didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter. As I paced the streets I weighed up my options and my first thought was to pay up and shut up. If I cut down on my smokes and pints down the pub and worked a bit more overtime, I could just about manage it, but four years was a long time and would feel like a prison sentence.
When I got to the end of our street I’d more or less decided to start paying him and think of a way out of it later. It had just crossed my mind that I could pay someone to break into his house and find the photos when I stopped in my tracks. Photos? Could you get copies of polaroid photographs? The photos just developed in the camera and I’d never heard of anyone getting a copy. If you couldn’t, I could have just stuffed that damn photo into my pocket, walked outside, and burnt it or ripped it to shreds. Now it didn’t matter if he had one or a dozen copies because I very much doubted that I’d be seeing it again. I went home so that Barbara wouldn’t think I was on a bender and found her getting ready for bed. I told her I was going to have a bit of supper and went back down the stairs, opened the French windows onto the garden patio and sat down to breathe in some more cool night air. That’s when I first had the idea of murdering him.
2
(The original story wasn’t divided into chapters, but I’ve made the breaks where I’ve considered most appropriate. In this case it was when I first realised that I’d be reading it straight through.)
I didn’t come to any conclusions about how I was going to kill him that night and the next morning, a Saturday, I dismissed the idea as a stupid one and decided to go fishing before Barbara got up. Back then I fished more or less the same places as the ones that I used to take you to and that morning I headed up to Clowdon Reservoir, preferring the open space to the better fishing of the smaller lodges. I hadn’t bothered to take my fly rod to have a go at the trout, preferring to just cast a weighted line and have a good think.
In the cold light of day I could see no other option than to start paying him off. I had a bit of cash tucked away, so for the first three or four months I wouldn’t have any trouble finding the money. Perhaps a few months down the line I would pluck up the courage to tell Barbara about my affair, which would be a thing of the past by then, and if I also told her that I was being blackmailed it might draw her sting a little bit. On the other hand, she might conclude that I’d only stopped seeing Linda because of the blackmail, which would make it even worse.
I reeled in and changed the bait. And what about that mad idea of killing him? I don’t know if some kind of thought process had been going on in my mind while I was sleeping, but I realised that the place to kill him would be up on the hills while he was out running. I looked across the reservoir up onto the moors. There were a few folk walking around the reservoir path, but I couldn’t see a soul up on the tops, which was the sort of place I imagined he would run. I could find out where he ran, lie in wait for him and clobber him to death with a big rock. But how would I catch the slippery sod? And what would I do with his body once I’d cracked his skull?
I chuckled to myself and reeled in a few yards. I was about as likely to kill a man as I was to catch anything fishing with maggots on the bottom of the reservoir, apart from the odd useless perch that might be down there, but it was amusing to think about it and it took my mind off my troubles. If I was going to be thinking about the bastard anyway, I might as well be thinking about doing away with him. My line had snagged, but after a couple of tugs I got it free again. It was a fairly deep reservoir and I couldn’t remember it ever being emptied; the perfect place to dump an unwanted corpse. Not this one, though, as it was too close to home, and how would you get the body out into the middle without a boat? I chuckled again as I reeled in, before putting a float on the line to give me something to look at.
I thought about all the places that I’d ever fished and one lodge sprang to mind that would be perfect. I don’t think I ever took you there, but it’s about fifteen or twenty miles north of here, fairly isolated, quite deep and not too far from the road. It isn’t a source of drinking water either, so they’d be less likely to test it for contamination. I didn’t catch anything that day, except the murder bug, and the fact that Barbara said I looked thoughtful when I got home rather than worried sick made me think that a bit of hypothesising never did anyone any harm.
The next day I surprised Barbara by telling her that instead of going fishing, I was going to go for a walk in the hills. I said that I was getting fed up of carrying those extra pounds around and that I didn’t get much exercise fishing. She was just off to church with your mother and told me to try not to get lost. There was no danger of that as I’d dug out my old Ordinance Survey map and studied it over breakfast. As far as I could see, there were three likely areas where Dennis would do his weekend running. I knew them all, of course, but supposing that he’d run for at least an hour, I ruled out one of them as being too small for his purposes. I reckoned that Spurton Hill was the most likely spot, so I drove to the village at the foot of it and set off walking.
It had been a long time since I’d been up there and once I’d huffed and puffed up the steep track out of the village I saw straight away that, being something of a local landmark, there were far too many people around for peaceful running, or for cracking a runner on the head for that matter. Still, I’d set off, so I climbed the hill and then followed a path along the ridge which brought me round alongside a stream to a track leading back into the village. I walked about six miles that day and, once I’d put Dennis out of my mind for the moment, I found the walk quite enjoyable and decided to get myself some decent boots. That was also the day that I stopped smoking, mainly to save money, and as I sit writing this at nearly eighty years old it’s one thing I can thank Dennis Black for.
That Tuesday was my blackmailer’s first payday and I went to the pub straight from work and found him sitting at the same little table in the corner with a pint that looked as flat as his head would be if I ever carried out my little fantasy. I greeted him cheerfully before getting a pint, sitting down at the table and asking him how he was. He looked scared at first, perhaps thinking that I’d talked it over with Barbara and had decided to shop him, but when I pushed the little envelope under his wrist and carried on talking as if we were best mates, he relaxed a bit.
“I don’t want us to meet here next month,” I said with a smile on my face. “I’ve written the name of the pub where I’ll see you inside the envelope. It’s not far away and it’ll be a different one the month after, but it’d look suspicious us meeting here just once a month for four years, wouldn’t it?” I said, laughing and patting him on his skinny shoulder.
“Right. I must say you’re taking this well,” he said, trying to look as cheerful as me, but looking, and probably feeling, like the worm that he was.
“Well, worse things happen at sea,” I said, before drinking up and leaving.
After making that first payment I felt like I’d lifted a weight from my shoulders and dropped it onto his. I still wasn’t serious about doing him in, but him having accepted that first envelope made him a blackmailer and he knew it. It opened up a whole series of options for me, like calling his bluff, hiring some heavi
es to rough him up, or arranging a burglary, but the idea of making him disappear was the one that I couldn’t get out of my mind.
3
You only knew me when I was an old man and after you’ve read this you’ll see me as a very different person, so I’d better tell you something about my younger days so that you’ll know a bit more about me. I’m writing it for myself too, as I’ve often wondered what there was about me that made me do what I did. By the age of twelve I was already a big lad, but at the school I went to it didn’t make any difference to the masters, who clobbered me just as much as the others. A whack round the head, a lash of the belt or a caning was their answer to everything and I wouldn’t have minded so much if they’d made up for it by teaching us something useful, but in those days it was only those who got into the Grammar School who got a decent education.
I think violence only breeds more of it and we were a rough lot when we were out of sight of the teachers, but I only remember having one serious fight and that was with a much older lad who’d been baiting me. I remember pushing him so hard against a wall that he cracked his head against it and slithered to the ground. He was groggy for a while, but soon got up and that was the first time I realised the strength I had and that I’d better be careful how I used it. No-one bothered me after that and looking back on those days now I wonder if it would have been better if I’d been a bit smaller, so that I’d have had to learn how to get out of scrapes like the others did.
When I left school at fifteen it seemed like war was just around the corner and there didn’t seem much point in trying to get an apprenticeship and learning a trade, so I just got a job in one of the mills so I could take some money home and keep a bit for myself. It wasn’t long after that I got a taste for beer and from then until I was called up in ‘44 me and my mates would spend our spare cash in the boozers. Not then nor even after I was sent for training at the barracks near Manchester did I ever have any trouble with anyone, partly due to my size and partly because I was a likeable type, I think, and never gave anyone cause to want to pull me down a peg or two.
