Research (27 page)

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because when John fucks you he’ll notice that someone has fucked you already.’ I paused. Colette was keeping me inside her. ‘Won’t he?’

‘Of course he won’t. Not unless he goes down on me and he never does. With him it’s always the same
cinq à sept
,
douche comprise
. It’s become a sort of joke with us. Besides, I don’t want to change these sheets before he comes down here. So, go ahead and come in me.’

I shifted a little, pushed my cock right up to the neck of her womb – thank God for Cialis – and almost immediately rediscovered some urgency in my pelvic movements; a couple of minutes later I was rolling off her and giving her a tissue and struggling back into my underpants – to protect her Frette bed linen.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I thought you’d like the idea of – what’s that disgusting phrase you have in English?
Remuant sa soupe
.’

‘Stirring someone else’s porridge.’ I laughed. ‘You’re right. Now I come to think of it, I do like that idea. Or else I am a Turk.’

‘What does
that
mean?’

‘Nothing.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Now then. You’re quite clear about what to do when he gets here?’

‘Yes. Only I’m trying not to think about it. I feel terribly sick when I do.’

‘So, forget about it. Pretend it isn’t happening. That it’s got nothing to do with you. If it makes you feel any better you can ask me not to go through with it.’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Let’s not do this, Don. Really. I’ve got cold feet about the whole thing.’

‘There you are,’ I said. ‘And now that you’ve asked, I bet you’re feeling better already. Look, I’m happy to have this on my conscience.’

‘I don’t believe you have one.’

‘Not since Warrenpoint, no.’

‘Warrenpoint. That’s the place in Ireland where your friend was killed, wasn’t it?’

I nodded. For a moment I replayed some very vivid frames of that particular horror movie. A beautiful sunny day in August – the bank holiday; and me, an Armalite rifle over my shoulder, a cigarette between my trembling lips, picking through the still smoking, mangled wreckage of a four-ton lorry with a stick, looking for human body parts, finding a man’s hand with a wedding ring on the finger and then vowing eternal, undying hatred for the Irish.

‘Look, I’d better have a wash myself. He’ll be here in less than an hour.’

I showered and dressed and checked over the automatic I’d sourced from a dealer in Genoa. It was a Walther 22, identical to one that John had bought for Orla but still only a back-up weapon in case her gun wasn’t in the bedside drawer where, according to John, she usually kept it. Then I lay down
on the bed in Colette’s spare room and read a novel on my Kindle to help take my mind off what I was about to do. The novel was by Martin Amis and, in spite of what the critics had said, I was enjoying it rather a lot. No one writes a better sentence than Marty, even if it does take several attempts to scale the sheer cliff-face of his intellect and know exactly what the fuck it is he’s driving at. Sometimes I wonder who the critics would beat up if they couldn’t beat up Marty.

At about 11.30 I heard a knock on Colette’s front door, and when she went to answer it she was wearing a rather fetching little baby-doll nightdress that had me smiling at the predictability of John’s taste. He’d always had a thing for the kind of sleazy bedroom wear that was hardly worth wearing. She pulled a sheepish, embarrassed sort of face before pushing me back into the room and closing the door. I switched out the bedside light and tiptoed into the en-suite bathroom. Then I heard the low murmur of voices, some laughter, the pop of a champagne cork and then silence as they moved swiftly into the bedroom. Colette had not exaggerated about John getting straight down to business: if anything,
cinq à sept
was optimistic. A few seconds later I received a text on my phone; it was a prewritten
Vas y
message from Colette that John’s tracksuit – she hated the fact that he always wore a tracksuit for his midnight visits to see her – containing his all-important door key, was now lying on the drawing-room floor.

I hurried through and searched John’s pockets for his door key, but to my irritation and horror there was no sign of it, and several valuable minutes passed before I spied it lying beside his phone on a table in the hall beside the front door. Then I put on John’s tracksuit, pulled up the hood, picked up my backpack, went out into the corridor and headed up
the fire stairs to the forty-third floor. The tracksuit was an inspired, last-minute touch, just in case anyone saw me.

But no one did.

I opened one of the double doors, stepped into the sky duplex and closed the door behind me. None of the curtains or blinds was drawn and it was easy to find my way around the apartment, which was as big as the rooftop palace in a Sinbad movie. I went straight through to the master bedroom. Scenting a stranger in the apartment Orla’s dogs had started to bark and I was half inclined to go back and shoot them in case they woke her up. But opening the bedroom door and illuminating the darker room with a small LED flashlight it was immediately plain that the figure in bed and facing away from the room toward the double-height window was soundly asleep and that the hounds of hell could not have awakened her, let alone a couple of irritating spaniels. They say people with dogs live longer; Orla was about to become the proof that this is not always the case.

It was a while since I had looked at Orla without seeing a scowl appear on her face the moment she saw me; she looked as peaceful as she was undoubtedly beautiful. Her long blonde hair – the roots seemed much darker – was strewn across the white pillow and she was wearing a nightdress made of peach-coloured, almost transparent silk. I was irresistibly reminded of a painting entitled
Flaming June
by Sir Frederic Leighton and which – thanks to the toxic oleander branch that also features in the picture – symbolizes the fragile link between sleep and death; this seemed only appropriate in the circumstances. I wasn’t about to allow the recollection of a nice pre-Raphaelite painting to stop me, of course. I’ve never believed Ruskin’s nonsense that art is morally improving. The hideous Ulster Museum – is there an
uglier building in the whole United Kingdom? – has a rather fine painting of St Christopher carrying the Christ child that I was always rather fond of while I was serving in the province, but it certainly never deterred me from putting a bullet in anyone’s head. Besides, I’d been dreaming of killing Orla for a long, long time; ever since the wedding.

I rolled on a surgical rubber glove, opened her bedside drawer and found the Walther exactly where John had said it was, not to mention a number of sex-toys that had my eyes out on stalks. I fetched the gun, screwed on the Gemtech sound suppressor I’d brought along – there was no point in making more noise than was needed – checked the breech and then racked the slide to put one in the chamber. I’m not a cruel man and I’d already rejected the idea of waking Orla up so that she could see it coming. If it was done it was best done quickly and without much drama, so I pointed the silencer at the centre of her Botoxed forehead, muttered a quiet ‘Good night, you Fenian bitch’ and then – holding a thick square of Kevlar behind her skull, to prevent the possible egress of the bullet – I squeezed the trigger. The gun shifted in my hand with a sharp click almost as if the pistol was empty; with the Gemtech a Walther P22 makes no more noise than a table lighter and certainly nothing like a silencer sounds in movies. Her head jerked a little on the pillow at the impact as though I’d struck her, but the rest of Orla’s body hardly moved; then, slowly, her mouth sagged a little as if the life had indeed gone out of her and pressing a finger against her larynx I felt for a carotid pulse but did not find one.

To my relief her cranium had remained intact. I checked for any blood with my finger but there was none. This was important. Any of the 38s in John’s gun cabinet would have
blown the back of her head off, and this, of course, was exactly why I’d preferred to use the smaller, less powerful 22. Meanwhile a small snail trail of blood trickled down her forehead, along the line of her eyebrow and underneath her cheek. Just as crucially, her body remained in the same attitude as when she had been alive, so that it was now quite possible that in the absence of any blood on Orla’s pillow John might climb into bed beside her later on without knowing that she was in fact dead.

‘I’m sorry, Orla,’ I said. ‘It was you or me, I’m afraid.’

I placed the gun on the bed for a moment and, for the forensics, I dabbed a little blood on the right sleeve of John’s tracksuit before hunting for the ejected brass cartridge on the floor; when I found it I used a Q-tip to extract a fine amount of cordite which I smeared on the same sleeve. These days, thanks to people like Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, everyone’s a scenes-of-crime expert and you wonder how it is that anyone is dumb enough to get caught.

I picked up the Walther and was on the point of making it safe, but the constant barking of the dogs persuaded me I’d always hated her fucking dogs almost as much as I’d hated Orla and that I’d certainly relish killing them, too. So I went along to her dressing room and, carefully, so as not to let the dogs escape, opened the door and switched on the light.

My first thoughts were not of the dogs but of Orla’s wardrobe, which revealed such a large number of dresses, coats and shoes that it looked like a designer sale – albeit a shop with two very irritating dogs. On the only area of the walls not given over to closets were several movie posters featuring Grace Kelly – including
Rear Window
.

‘Hello, boys,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come to say hello.’

The ‘boys’ – which, nauseatingly, is what Orla used to call
them – were black-and-white cocker spaniels and yapped furiously at my ankles. Is there a more irritating breed of dog than a cocker spaniel? I don’t think so.

I chuckled. ‘And goodbye.’

The second dog uttered a rather pleasing yelp as I shot the first twice in the chest. Then I pumped two into the second mutt, and I must have hit the dog’s aorta or something because in the seconds before the thing died it started haemorrhaging blood all over the place. I’d never shot an animal before; not even for sport. I never see the point of all that Glorious Twelfth stuff where you shoot as many grouse as you can. But it gave me enormous pleasure to silence these two dogs, for ever. This wasn’t exactly akin to Atticus shooting the mad dog in
To Kill a Mockingbird
 – besides, that dog is only really a metaphor for the lynch mob that features earlier on in the book – but both of ‘the boys’ badly needed killing; and suddenly the world felt like it was a less malodorous and canicular place without such loathsome creatures in it. Quieter, too.

I made the little Walther safe and, unscrewing the silencer – after just five shots it was surprisingly hot to the touch – I pocketed it, went back into the bedroom, and tossed the .22 onto the carpet on Orla’s side of the bed, where it was not likely to be discovered immediately. Job done.

And yet you might say it was the dogs who had the last laugh, for as I made my way out of the door and hurried back along the corridor and downstairs I realized that I’d stood in some of their shit. This discovery caused me to slip and almost fall down a whole flight of steps, and I pulled a muscle in my shoulder as I held on to the handrail, narrowly arresting my fall. I turned around and saw a neat series of footprints ascending the stairs behind me like
a trail of stinking breadcrumbs. I took off my shoes and for a moment I stood there debating with myself what to do next. This would have been funny if it hadn’t been so forensically awkward. You didn’t have to be working in CSI to see that.

‘This never happens in Agatha Christie,’ I said. ‘Talk about the curious incident of the dog in the night.’

But there was little time for any postmodern analysis of my predicament. It seemed I had little option but to return to John’s apartment, find some cleaning materials and try to erase my footprints. To do otherwise would have left the police in no doubt that Orla’s murderer had left her apartment after killing her, which might easily have left John in the clear.

I left my shoes where they were and ran back upstairs in my socks; in John’s apartment I switched on my flashlight and went into the kitchen where I found some rags and some bleach. By now I had decided that I hardly needed to clean the dog shit from the carpet in the apartment; that could have happened to anyone, including John himself; it was the shitty footprints between the front door and the door to the fire stairs that were the real problem, and inside the apartment I restricted myself to dabbing a bit of dog shit on one of his shoes. But in the corridor outside the apartment I spent the next ten minutes cleaning away my own footprints, and it was fortunate for me that the owners of the sky duplex next to John’s were – according to Colette – away for the summer on a yacht in St Barts. Glancing at my watch, I saw that I’d been gone for just over thirty minutes.

I moved out onto the fire stairs and worked my way carefully down almost ten flights, checking each step with my flashlight for traces of shit; and only when I was satisfied
that every trace of the stuff was gone did I pick up my shoes and open the fire door on 29.

Then, if all that wasn’t enough, outside Colette’s door I couldn’t make her key work and another nervous minute passed before I discovered it was actually John’s key I was using and not hers, since the two were more or less identical. These small errors can mean the difference between success and failure, of course; they’re not exactly Freudian slips – I had no subconscious desire to get caught – more what you might call fate’s attempts to trip you up. That’s what makes life interesting; and of course murder creates its own unique gestalt.
The Gestalt of Murder
; it’s probably the title of a crime novel by John Creasey; with more than six hundred novels to his name something usually is.

In Colette’s apartment I placed John’s key on the table by the door where I’d found it, jumped out of his tracksuit, tossed it back on the floor and, breathing a little heavily now, went back into the spare room, where I dressed in the dark and waited for him to finish what he was so vociferously doing in the bedroom. It didn’t bother me that he was fucking Colette; on the contrary it meant that she was playing her part right and that he was quite unaware that his wife was dead.