Blind Needle (7 page)

How and where and under what circumstances had Susan come to know Benson? It was infuriating that such details were so vague in my
patchwork quilt of a mind. But shock treatment does that to you, robs you of essentials and leaves you with trivia. Perhaps it wasn't important – the tiresome details, the logistics – whether they had met by chance in the street, in the park, or even an instant naked glance of desire from car to car at the traffic lights. The fact was that they had met, and become lovers, and then Benson had been the cause of her death by ‘misadventure', which in this case was another name for suicide.

Looking back, I now realised that I must have had my suspicions while this liaison was going on. But it's very difficult to catch a woman out in this way, unless the evidence is there in front of your eyes. A man carries incriminating traces with him: lipstick smears, strange perfume in his hair, pins and odd bits of jewellery down the back seat of his car. With a woman, such clues are absent. She has her own female smell, far stronger than any lingering whiff of musk-ox aftershave. She leaves the house neat and groomed and comes back the same. She attends to the laundry, disposing of any soiled garment that might lead a husband to speculate. So the clues are absent, nonexistent. All that remains are discrepancies in times and dates and places. In a court of law none of it would stand up, not even as circumstantial evidence.

Yet I did know. More exactly, I had my doubts. It was, I suppose, what you might call her ‘attitude'. She was more attentive. She was jolly for no apparent reason. She performed little acts of kindness, went out of her way to be pleasant. In bed she was more, not less, eager. All these signs and portents I absorbed without really understanding what they meant: like a necromancer sifting through the ashes, stirring the dead bones, pondering the tale they had to tell.

It was only after her death that I fully realised the truth. Her unfaithfulness, as much as her death, caused my mental blackout. The world caved in, became thick with shadows, hung like cobwebs. Sometimes I couldn't even remember my own name. And neither, ridiculously, could I bring to mind Susan's face. I could picture her walking towards me in sunlight, long straight dark hair framing a perfectly blank oval, like a badly developed photograph, as if my memory had chosen deliberately to obliterate this one spot.

Susan had suffered for her sins; I was still suffering, perhaps for sins
I didn't know I had committed. It was only natural justice, surely to God, that Benson should have his share. He had a business. He was a councillor. He probably had a wife, children perhaps. There were several ways he could be grievously hurt before the final blow.

For the first time in many, many months my mind began to clear, to see daylight instead of being stifled in the hot suffocating darkness of blind futility. Now my anger had cooled and hardened, become tempered into cold, tensile, unforgiving purpose. I would have my revenge.

There was a cold wind blowing from the sea. It was full of the raw, primordial smells, stinging to the nostrils, of ocean depths and the creatures that move in them. After the stale odours of closed overheated rooms and supine comatose bodies it was crude and invigorating, making me feel light-headed. I realised I was hungry.

Keeping to the backstreets and guided by the wind in my face I found a small pub down by the granite wall of the old harbour. I had done my best to make myself presentable, and was sure I had when the people in the saloon bar turned back to their conversations and drinks and the large woman behind the bar with rings and burnished blue hair served me without so much as a disinterested glance through her diamante spectacles, which looked as if at any moment they might take off and fly round the room.

I ordered food – some kind of reconstituted offal and fat pressed into a flat cake, with fried onions, inside a white spongy muffin that looked and tasted like cotton wool, served on a bed of thin chips in a congealed basket – and ate it beneath a varnished ship's wheel and a brass lantern with a pink bulb.

The place was dimly lit, with more shadow than light, the people mostly middle-aged, neither prosperous nor poor. As usual I felt that I didn't fit in, that everyone here was engaged in some monstrous conspiracy from which I alone was excluded. But this didn't matter. I was used to the feeling. Dr Morduch's bit of medical jargon for it was ‘externality'.

We had often talked about ‘externality', though I never fully understood
what he meant – something about renouncing the self, I think. I'd made the fatal mistake of discussing it with S –. That's all there was to do at the clinic, talk and watch TV, and S – was very easy to talk to, understanding and sympathetic. He would quietly listen for hours, nodding, stroking his beard with a rather delicate hand, taking it all in, absorbing everything – ‘imprinting' it (more jargon) so that in the end he seemed to know more about me than I did myself.

His large, bright, slightly bulbous eyes were fixed on my lips, as if he wanted to see the shape of the words as they issued out. I told him everything. Childhood. Parents. School. Jobs. Friends. Marriage. And then doubts. Suspicion. Anger. Panic. Blankness. Breakdown. I talked it all out of me, and he took it all in. Morduch ought to have warned me – I knew nothing about S –, his background, the things he had done. I assumed – quite wrongly as it turned out – that he had undergone a similar trauma – that his life, like mine, had been smashed by a cataclysmic emotional shock. From time to time I asked him about his past life, but at first he wouldn't talk about it. The hurt was too great. That's what I thought.

The truth, when I learned it, was the complete reverse of what I had imagined.

One day, out of the blue, he told me with a faint smirk on his lips that he had committed the Perfect Murder. He had killed his wife, he confided, and got away with it.

Was he amused by the fact of having killed her or because no one, not even Dr Morduch and Dr Pitt-Rivers, knew about it? I think he relished the notion of having fooled everyone and got off scot-free. He'd put one over on them, the useless pathetic cretins, and he loved that. I didn't believe him, of course, I thought it was just empty boasting, something to build himself up in my eyes. He wanted me to think of him as somebody powerful, who mattered, whose opinion others sought, whose wise words people hung on, rapt and fascinated. They didn't, so he had to invent fantastic stories about what he had achieved, the more fantastic and grotesque and horrifying the better. That way he built himself up, impressed them with the force and depth of his exotic personality, which in truth was non-existent. He was actually, I came to think, a zero, a non-person, a vacuum waiting to be filled.

It didn't help his credibility that he gave more than one version of how he had got rid of his wife. That's why at first I didn't take him seriously. He had devised, so he said, an elaborate scheme, worked it out in every tiny, precise detail. What he would do was this: he would follow her to an isolated spot on the moors near where they lived, knowing she was going there to meet her lover. Once there, he surmised, she would leave her car and get into his and drive off somewhere. S – 's plan was devious and yet simple, relying on the steepness of the moorland roads. While they were gone he would loosen the brake linkage on her car and drain off all the fluid. He admitted that he knew nothing about cars or mechanical gadgets in general, but he was prepared to study the manual and familiarise himself with what had to be done while the car was in the garage at home. An hour's concentration, a little patience, he was capable of that.

Would they stay in his (the lover's) car for sex or drive off to a pub to sit over drinks, priming themselves with alcohol and breathless titillation, sneaking kisses in a darkened corner? The plan would have to allow for either eventuality. It really didn't matter to him either way, he said, except for the different margin of risk. I think he would have preferred them to stay – coupled together in the lover's gently rocking steamed up car while S – worked just a few yards away with torch and spanner. But if they did go to the pub first he would smile as he drained off the brake fluid, thinking of them sitting (he told me this giggling) cosy and breathless, generating sexual heat, with him smiling, anticipating, in the black bitter night.

In his mind's eye he could see the plan working, and its triumphant conclusion: the headlong brakeless skid over the edge. By that time he would be back at home, or better still with a friend somewhere, as an alibi. He even practised contortions of grief. The shock of her death, the period of mourning … then bearing up bravely and managing a wan smile now and then. Life must go on.

Had he really killed his wife, as he claimed? Was she even dead? Did he even have a wife to begin with? I'd already told him about Susan and something (not everything) of her entanglement with Benson, and it struck me that S – was trying to match my story with his, match it and beat it if he could, as if he couldn't bear to be outdone. Almost as if he was jealous. I had a wife who had betrayed
me, therefore so had he, though he had gone one better and manfully done something about it, not suffered in pathetic wimpish silence and self-torturing impotence.

This must have been the point at which ‘transference' (as Dr Morduch would say) began to take place. S – was living partly in his own fantasy world and borrowing bits of mine as and when it suited him. He hadn't yet begun to make threats against me, and indeed I was still sceptical about his ‘Perfect Murder' and whether in fact a murder had taken place at all.

Then came the new revised version. Well, not so much revised as completely different from the original, another scenario altogether.

He confessed to me one day that the story about tampering with the brakes of his wife's car wasn't strictly true. It was true to the extent that he had thought of doing it – had even begun to plan it in the meticulous way he had described – but then he'd had a better idea. A much better idea. It was stupid of him, he said, blind and bloody stupid not to have thought of it before, particularly when the method for the Perfect Murder was staring him in the face …

His wife, S – told me, had been diabetic and had to inject herself daily with insulin. He himself had been instructed how to give the injection in case she missed one by accident and lapsed into a coma and was unable to administer it herself. What could be simpler? All he had to do was wait until she was asleep, prepare a dosage three or four times the prescribed level, and shoot it into the cheating, lying bitch. Even if she woke up, it wouldn't matter; it would be too late. With that much insulin swilling about her system he simply had to prevent her getting to the phone and calling for help in the few minutes' grace she had before her metabolism went into massive hypoglycemic shock. And that would be that. He would lie down beside her and go to sleep, and in the morning awake the distraught hubby, frantically trying to revive his beloved. Easily done, the doctors would tell him sympathetically, trying to lessen the blow, unless the user kept a strict check on dosage levels and daily intake, which it now transpired his wife hadn't done; and that, according to S –, was exactly what the doctors did tell him.

No suspicion fell on him. He had set out to commit the Perfect Murder and had achieved it.

This might have been another of his boastful fantasies, part of his frantic desire to be thought charismatic, wickedly cunning and superior to ordinary mortals, and perhaps I would have dismissed it as such except for two things. The first was that he was very precise about the extra insulin he had injected into her: a full two millilitre syringe, or 200 units, equivalent to four times the normal dose. The second thing, which actually convinced me, was what had taken place during the night as he lay beside her corpse. She might have mocked him in the past for his inadequacy and rejected him in favour of her lover, but he was dead set on having the last fuck as well as the last laugh.

And he actually did laugh, or rather giggled, as he told me this, as if delighting in his own fiendish cleverness and inviting me to join in his complicity, to celebrate with him the stunning success of all his schemes and stratagems.

When I came to read the diary, several weeks later, it was the way he described these cold, methodical preparations to murder his wife that really chilled me. He even talked, or gloated, about how much his wife ‘trusted' him – about how ‘caring' and ‘attentive' he had been, while all the time planning and plotting to do away with her. That was why I feared him so much, and believed he was capable of killing me with the same dispassionate madman's logic. In his tortured mind he had transferred the blame to me: I was the ‘Murdering Bastard' who had done the deed and I was going to pay for it. Next time, instead of toenail clippings in the mashed potato, it would be powdered glass.

I finished my glass of beer and went to the gents along a passage which led outside to a small flagged yard. The lavatory was a primitive structure, drizzle whipping through the gap between the corrugated iron roof and whitewashed brick walls, coating the flagstones which gleamed slickly in the light of a frosted globe inside a wire cage. I heard the scrape of a shoe, and a low mumble of voices that went silent as I came in.

There were two men – I registered no more than that one was young and pale and fat, his stomach bursting through the buttons on his shirt, the other dark, thin, one-dimensional. There was a washbasin in the corner with a single tap, but no plug, soap or towel of course.

They hadn't spoken since I entered, but now as I stood at the stained slab one of them said behind my back, ‘Need some stuff, squire?'

I turned round, buttoning my coat, having done nothing. My heart was beating against my rib-cage; I wondered if they were homosexuals.

‘We've god some prime stuff,' the pale fat one said in a friendly, wheedling tone, ‘if you god the readies.' He had some kind of speech impediment or his nostrils were blocked with mucus. He winked slowly and pressed an imaginary plunger into his arm with a hand like a bunch of sausages.