Dirty Tricks (27 page)

Yes, if I had been the cold, calculating killer portrayed by the press, I would have stayed well clear of any further entanglements with Ms Kraemer. Even without her support, I had little to fear from the law. It would have taken more than Clive’s word and the lack of an alibi to convict me. If any of the witnesses Moss had mentioned had been able to identify me positively, there could have been no question of keeping the file on the case closed. Even if they had, my chances would have been no worse than even. Not only does the law send innocent men like Clive Phillips and Hugh Starkey to prison, it even more frequently allows the guilty to walk free, particularly if they are white, middle-class, well-heeled and don’t speak with an Irish accent.

But if Alison had been dismayed to find that we didn’t know each other as well as she had thought, the effect on me was no less traumatic. The woman I had idolized for so long, and for whose sake I had run the most terrible risks, had revealed herself to be a shallow, selfish prig. After all these years, Alison Kraemer still thought right and wrong were as clear and unambiguous as right and left. Even a decade of radical and regenerative government hadn’t taught her that her moral code – a ragbag of oddments from religious and philosophical uniforms which no one was prepared to wear entire any more – was as irrelevant to the contemporary world as theories about the great chain of being or the music of the spheres.

Well, the time had come to set her right about this. It was my intellectual duty, as one Oxford man to another, so to speak. It was the least I could do in return for all she had done to me. Mind you, I won’t try and pretend that my motives were wholly altruistic. There was undeniably an element of personal satisfaction involved as well. I wanted to scare the living shit out of the stupid bag, to scar her psyche with scenes of horror she would relive every night until she died.

Perhaps if I’d had time to think it over, cooler counsels might have prevailed. But it so happened that the madrigal group met that very evening, so I could count on Alison’s absence from the house. The children would be there, of course, but I could take care of them. I rounded up some tools and my trusty rubber gloves, and sat sipping a tumbler of The Macallan until it grew dark.

The lane leading to the house was as quiet as an alley in a cemetery. Most women would have been frightened living there by themselves, but Alison Kraemer’s imagination was as well-trained as one of Barbara Woodhouse’s dogs. That could change though, I thought as I flitted across the lawn. That docile and obedient pooch was about to go rabid. A light was on in one of the front bedrooms. Rebecca was still up. When she heard me, she would assume at first that Mumsy had returned earlier than usual from her glees and catches. By the time she realized her mistake, it would be too late.

Don’t worry, it’s not going to get
that
nasty. Murdering children has never appealed to me any more than the other English national pastimes. All I was planning to do to the kiddies was lock them up somewhere while I got on with my business. I was planning to start with the cat, run it through the Magimix and smear the purée liberally about the walls and furniture. After that I’d improvise. It’s astonishing how much damage you can do once you put your mind to it. I was quite looking forward to it. Let’s face it, there’s a bit of the yob in all of us.

I made my way along the side of the house to the kitchen door. This would be locked and bolted, but the window next to it was forceable. Alison had told me she meant to get a security lock fitted, but I knew hadn’t got round to it. I slipped on my gloves and got to work jemmying the sash. It took longer than I had anticipated, but in the end the catch snapped in two, sending a fragment of cast iron tinkling loudly about the stone floor. I pushed the window up, hoisted myself on to the ledge and crawled through.

The nocturnal silence was promptly shattered by an astonishing crash as a glass bowl I had failed to notice on the draining-board fell to the floor. My muscles locked up in panic, but no one came running or called out. I lowered myself gingerly to the ground, my shoes crunching on the fragments of broken glass. The light switch was by the open doorway leading to the hall. I made my way across the glass-strewn flagstones towards it, my eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness. I was about three feet away from the door, my hand already raised to the switch, when a disembodied limb reached in out of the darkness of the hallway and clicked it on.

All vision went down in a blinding white-out as the fluorescent tube on the ceiling came to life. I blinked frantically, trying to stop my eyes down to a point where I could see what was going on.

The first thing I took in were the feet. They looked absurd, comic-book clodhoppers, all bumps and lumps and knobbly toes. Above them rose hairy legs, the left one bulging with varicose veins. The rest of the body was clad in a pink silk peignoir secured by a belt of the same material in a contrasting shade. A broad, flat, hirsute chest rose from the
décolletage
, and above it a head I recognized as belonging to Thomas Carter.

‘Let’s just get one thing straight,’ he said. ‘I was with Special Forces out in Nam. There are at least fifteen ways I could kill you with one hand.’

I laughed aloud. He looked utterly ridiculous, standing there in a woman’s pink silk dressing-gown five sizes too small for him, talking tough.

‘Tom? Tom?’ a woman’s voice called from the stairs.

‘I’m OK.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’ll handle it. Go back to bed.’

A series of creaks ascended towards the ceiling.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘I’ve suspected for a long time that you and Alison had something going. What I don’t quite see is where I fit into all this. Can’t you keep her satisfied, Carter, even with your big all-American Vietnam vet’s cock?’

There was a blur of movement, and the next thing I knew I was lying crouched on the floor, a piece of broken glass up one nostril and the taste of recycled malt in my mouth.

‘That was what we used to call a SOB,’ I heard a voice remark somewhere in yawing spaces above me. ‘A euphemism that’s also an acronym, we really ate those up. A “soften-up blow”. Very popular in the brig.’

‘I’ve never witnessed such a display of unprovoked, cold-blooded brutality,’ I gasped indignantly, struggling to my knees.

‘Oh but
I
have! I’ve seen things I couldn’t believe were happening even when I was watching them. And the people who were doing these things were kids I’d grown up with, played ball games with, gone to movies with. A month before they’d have peed their pants at the thought of the cops catching them driving out to the lake with an open six-pack on the back seat. Now they were napalming babies, raping moms, torturing grand-dads, never mind what we used to do to any suspected Vietcong we got our hands on. Ordinary everyday atrocities, committed by ordinary everyday guys who would otherwise have been selling cars or pumping gas or serving hamburgers.’

I stood up, leaning on the Welsh dresser. Alison’s collection of Sabatier cooking knives protruded invitingly from a wooden block just a few feet away.

‘That’s what brought me here,’ Carter went on. ‘When I got back to the States, I found I couldn’t pass a car showroom or a gas station or a burger bar without remembering what I’d seen. I didn’t believe in natural decency any more. I needed a society with a keel, a tradition of culture and civilization strong enough to balance all that. You want to grab one of those knives? Go right ahead. Stick it up your own ass, it’ll save me the trouble.’

I drew my hand back.

‘Of course!’ I cried. ‘I get it! I was the stooge, the decoy! That’s why Alison took me to that restaurant that night, knowing that you and Lynn would be there. And that’s why you invited us both to dinner right afterwards. It was all designed to divert Lynn’s suspicions from you and Alison.’

So potent was Thomas Carter’s aura of moral righteousness that I half-expected him to deny the whole thing and claim that he and Alison were just rehearsing a scene from a bedroom farce for a local amateur dramatic society production. I was really quite shocked when he calmly admitted the whole thing. Yes, he and Alison had been in love for several years, but they had kept it secret so as not to upset the children. Once or twice a month Rebecca and Alex were packed off to sleep over with friends the night the madrigal group met, leaving Thomas and Alison free to ‘make music together’. Just when Lynn had started to become suspicious, I had conveniently appeared on the scene. Alison had taken advantage of my infatuation as a cover behind which she and Thomas could continue their affair in safety.

‘Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘the real question is what we’re going to do about you now, my friend. What the fuck are you doing here anyway?’

‘I was beside myself with frustrated desire. I was going to strip naked, put on that dressing-gown and toss myself off to a cracked seventy-eight of Nellie Melba singing “Come into the Garden, Maude”. Do you ever get urges like that?’

For a moment I thought he was going to hit me again. Then he grinned, showing his bad teeth.

‘Of course I could just call the police and have you charged with breaking and entering.’

‘But you won’t, because then you’d have to explain what you’re doing here at this time of night. Look, why don’t we just pretend this never happened?’

Carter shook his head.

‘You can expose Ally and me any time you want. I can’t risk that.’

‘So what are you going to do, kill me?’

He looked at me for a moment as though considering the idea. It was the first time I had ever been regarded as a potential victim by someone who was capable of making me one. I must say it was very uncomfortable.

Carter’s face suddenly cleared.

‘I know! Alison told me about you asking her to fake an alibi. Well I’ll do the opposite. I’ll contact the cops and tell them that the Saturday your wife disappeared I went round to your house to keep an appointment we’d made, only you weren’t there. I tried several times that afternoon. Your car wasn’t in the garage, so I figured you’d gone out. I even rang later that evening, but there was still no reply.’

I stared at him blankly.

‘If you do that …’

‘Yes?’ he said with menacing emphasis.

I sighed.

‘Then I’m fucked.’

We both burst out laughing.

‘Now get the hell out of here,’ he said, ‘so I can get this goddamn housecoat off.’

I stepped over the broken glass to the back door. As I unbolted the door he added, ‘You know the funny thing? We all liked you. We really did.’

I jumped forward like a parachutist, obliterating myself in the night.

The next day I rang my broker and instructed him to liquidate the bulk of my investments and transfer the funds to an off-shore bank account. I had just hung up when the doorbell rang. A police car was parked outside the house. On the front doorstep stood a bulky, balding man in a heavy overcoat, his back turned to me. It looked like Moss. The doorbell rang again, more insistently. I crouched down behind the sofa. The doorbell rang again and again. Finally he gave up and the car drove away.

I ran upstairs and set about packing. It didn’t take long. I threw a selection of clothes and some toilet accessories into a suitcase, checked I had all the relevant documents, then showered and changed into a sober business suit, Jermyn Street shirt and old college tie. Before leaving, I indulged a long-standing desire to pee on the Parsons’ orange-tawny velveteen sofa. It was extraordinarily satisfying, and I was giggling as I walked out to the BMW.

The last-minute hitch has become such a thriller cliché that I was amazed to reach Heathrow without incident. Traffic on the M25 was even flowing freely, for a wonder. Inside the terminal the information board was fluttering like a flock of nervous pigeons. When it settled I selected a Varig flight to Rio de Janeiro which was leaving in two hours. There was plenty of room in first class, and it was an added luxury to pay with a credit card for which I would never receive a statement.

I put up at a luxury hotel in Copacabana while I made the necessary arrangements to draw on my off-shore bank account, then made my way here. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the recent currency devaluations had made me even wealthier than I had expected. Less than a month after my departure from Ramillies Drive, I moved into a pleasant furnished apartment in the fashionable Buena Vista district.

What a pleasure it was to be back! It was the small things I noticed most, the details I had forgotten. The constant rain of drips in the street from air-conditioning units, the puddles of condensation that form around your bottle of cold beer in the humid heat, the parked car that seems to move all by itself as someone further along bumps the whole row to get out, the streets studded with crown stoppers embedded in the warm asphalt. Above all it was the people, the men very beautiful, the women very handsome, both sexes pulsating with pride and drive and desire. Each moment of every day was a precious token of a way of life which I only now realized how much I had missed. I spent days at a time simply walking the streets or riding the
collectivos
, immersing myself in the rich and varied scenes on every side. Every night I would seek out the most crowded districts and mingle in the passing throng, exulting in the brutal, explicit, merciless, uncensored scenes I had been reading for too long in the ‘improved’ and improving versions which the English prefer to the original text.

My only regret was that the friends I had been looking forward to seeing again all seemed to have disappeared. I had been away for some time, of course, but it still seemed surprising that the entire group of which Carlos Ventura was the acknowledged leader had totally dispersed. Even many of the places where we used to meet, bars, restaurants and bookshops, had closed down or changed hands. It was almost as if a deliberate attempt had been made to erase all my memories. This absurd notion was strengthened when I bumped into one of my former students who had been on the fringes of the group I’ve just referred to. At first he claimed not to recognize me, so to jog his memory I mentioned a mistake in one of his essays which had become a running joke around the school. It was a piece describing the system of government. José had intended to say ‘the council of generals are responsible for running the country’, but instead of ‘running’ he had written ‘ruining’. To my amazement, he now denied any knowledge of this incident, and when I asked what had become of Carlos and the others he replied angrily that he had no idea who I was talking about, and abruptly took his leave.