Dirty Tricks (18 page)

In short, Clive was not only a prick, he was a vindictive prick. Since he could no longer reach me in any other way, he’d reached me through my wife. It wasn’t Karen that Clive was fucking, it was me. A terrible fury swept over me, a rage so intense it was physically painful. But anger would avail me nothing, I knew. The teachers who had taken Clive’s on-your-bike homilies at face value got angry when they discovered how they’d been bought and sold, but their anger didn’t repay their bank loan or give them their jobs back. It merely confirmed what losers they were. While they got mad, Clive got even. That’s what I would do, I decided. I wasn’t an ineffective dreamer any more. If Clive wanted to play dirty, that was fine with me. With Garcia on my side, I could play dirty in ways that Clive had never even imagined.

Over dinner that evening, Karen announced that her mother had to go into hospital for observation as her chronic back complaint had taken a turn for the worse. She felt she should go up to Liverpool for the weekend to be with her. I generously offered to drive her, but she said she preferred to go by train. I would only be in the way, she went on, becoming rather flustered, there was really no point in it. I conceded the point, but insisted on at least driving her to the station. This she accepted. She would be getting the 10.14, she said. I already knew this, having overheard her and Clive arranging to meet at Banbury, where the train stopped twenty minutes later. I thought it was quite a wheeze getting your husband to drive you to the train and your lover to meet you off it, but Karen did not seem unduly impressed. Ever the pragmatic scrubber at heart, she saw no more in this arrangement than its convenience.

Next morning I was up betimes. First stop was the railway station, where I consulted timetables. Then it was back in the BMW and up the road to Banbury, a pleasant market town some twenty miles north of Oxford. Its railway station proved to be a charmless sixties structure with a large car park tarmacked over uprooted sidings. Once the morning rush hour had subsided it appeared little-used, and between trains was almost completely deserted. It only remained to locate the facility which I thought of abstractly as ‘the site’. After driving around the countryside for several hours, I eventually settled on a disused quarry a few miles outside Banbury. A lorry-load of broken concrete fence-posts and other construction waste had been tipped near the entrance, but there was no other sign that anyone had been there recently. There were no houses in the vicinity, and once inside one was completely hidden from the road.

When Garcia appeared at our rendezvous that lunchtime, he was almost beside himself with furtive cockiness and suppressed self-satisfaction. The manifest reason for this was that he had filled the order and was about to deliver the goods, but the real cause was malicious glee. Not only wasn’t he the cuckold, but he knew who had made me one. I swiftly pulled the rug from under his feet by revealing that I did too.

Garcia’s first thought was that I was trying to get out of paying him. He was therefore pleasantly surprised when I handed over the agreed sum without a murmur. I then asked how much he still needed. His face fell. It was quite a lot. When I asked how he’d like to have it on Monday he looked at me like the pooch in the Pedigree Chum commercials.

‘You want me to keep watching? Take some photographs maybe?’

By now we were driving around the ring road, Garcia munching his way through a pack of sandwiches I’d bought at a garage. With what I had in mind, we couldn’t risk being seen together, even at a roadside eatery with a high turnover.

‘There’s no need for that. I know enough. It’s time to act, to punish those responsible.’

‘Your wife?’

I shook my head.

‘I’ll deal with her. No, I’d like to put your professional skills to use.’

He looked suitably flattered.

‘Clive has hurt me. He’s hurt my pride, my honour. All I can do in return is hurt his body. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do for now. I would handle it myself, but I’m afraid I’d get carried away. He’d call the police and I’d be charged with assault.’

Garcia shook his head in disgust. The discovery that British justice offered no protection to husbands who took revenge on the man who had dishonoured them confirmed his worst suspicions about his country of exile.

‘But for me it’s an even bigger risk,’ he pointed out.

‘I’ll make it worth your while. Everything you need to leave, plus a hundred pounds fun money.’

‘Two hundred.’

We haggled amicably for some time.

‘Clive is planning to go away with my wife this weekend,’ I explained, once Garcia’s scruples had been overcome. ‘She’s taking the train to a town called Banbury, where Clive is meeting her. I’ll drive her to the station and put her on an earlier train. She won’t dare refuse for fear of making me suspicious. What she won’t know is that this train doesn’t stop at Banbury. My wife will thus have been sent to Coventry, a phrase which you may recall from our work on idioms but which in the present case is to be interpreted literally.

‘As soon as I’ve seen her off, I’ll come and collect you. The train Clive is meeting doesn’t arrive till ten forty, which will give us plenty of time. When we reach Banbury, you lie down in the back of the car with a blanket over you. I’ll go and find Clive and tell him that I know all about him and Karen, and I think we should have a little talk. In broad daylight, in a public place, he’ll have no reason to be suspicious. I’ll get him to come and sit in the car so that we can discuss the situation without being overheard. Then, when the coast’s clear, I’ll turn on the radio. That’s your signal to come out of hiding and disable him.’

‘Forget the radio. Just punch him in the balls, like this.’

He made a fist and brought it down like a hammer between my thighs, pulling up at the last moment. I stifled a premature gasp of pain.

‘While he’s busy counting his nuts,’ Garcia continued unperturbed, ‘I give him a little tap on the head.’

By way of illustration, he skimmed my scalp with the open palm of his right hand.

‘I knew you were the man for the job.’

‘Then what?’

‘Well, once Clive’s feeling no pain, to use an idiom which I don’t think we studied but which seems particularly appropriate in this context, we hood him and proceed to a secluded spot I have in mind where the two of you can conduct your business in complete privacy. When you’ve finished, we leave him there and drive back to Oxford, where you pop into a travel agent and book a seat to the destination of your choice.’

This vision glowed in Garcia’s face for a moment. Then he frowned.

‘But he’ll know it was you.’

‘Exactly. I
want
him to know it was me. What I don’t want is for him to be able to prove it. And he won’t, as long as you do your job right. The important thing is that you leave no marks. Can you do that?’

Garcia pursed his lips.

‘We need electricity.’

‘Electricity? You must be joking.’

‘Believe me, it’s the best! Clean, convenient, effective. No fuss, no mess.’

I tapped the steering-wheel impatiently.

‘You’re wasted as a torturer, Garcia. You should be writing ads for Powergen.’

As our eyes met, I had a chilling glimpse of how he must have looked to his victims, bent over them, electrode in hand, ready to place it on nipple or penis, or insert it in vagina or anus. But why should I worry? Garcia’s skills were no threat to me. On the contrary, they were at my service.

‘Anyway that’s out of the question. We’re talking about a disused quarry miles from anywhere. Strictly no mod cons.’

‘No problem. Hire a generator, one of those petrol-driven ones. We’ll need a resistor, too, to vary the current, and some leads and a couple of spoons.’

We were now stuck in a traffic jam at the roundabout by the Austin-Rover works. The rear window of the car in front informed us that the owner loved Airedale terriers, that blood donors did it twice a year and that if we could read this, we should thank a teacher. Since he couldn’t, Garcia didn’t thank me.

‘And it really hurts?’ I asked.

‘Worse than anything you ever imagined. It’s like your body’s coming apart at the seams. And afterwards there’s nothing to show, as long as you use the spoons properly. It’s like cooking meat. You’ve got to keep them moving, otherwise it burns. We had an instructor from the CIA give us a demo when they delivered the equipment, but later on some of the guys got a little sloppy. You know how it is.’

‘There’s no risk of him dying, though?’

‘I’ll keep the current down.’

‘Not
too
low.’

Garcia laughed briefly.

‘Don’t worry, he won’t think it’s too low.’

We drove on past Sainsbury’s and over the soft-running Thames.

‘What about noise?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we should gag him?’

‘If you like. But they don’t really sound human. Anyone who hears us will think we’re castrating pigs.’

It was perhaps this bucolic image that caused me to start whistling a tune which I later identified as the traditional folk song,
As I Was Going to Banbury
.

‘Well that all sounds jolly satisfactory,’ I said.

If my arrangement with Garcia had included the usual ‘cooling-off period’ designed to protect consumers from rash decisions, I’d probably have invoked it that evening. Once I’d had a chance to think the whole thing over I realized that it had all got a bit out of hand. What I’d envisaged was basically an up-market beating, tastefully applied, but essentially a good, old-fashioned, hands-on job. Somehow Garcia had made this scenario seem crude and unsatisfactory. It was like talking to a builder. You say, ‘I’d like this and that done,’ and he gives you this withering look and replies, ‘Well if you’re sure that’s what you want, squire, we can certainly do that for you toot sweet, no problem at all, it’s entirely up to you.’ Which is how people end up with knocked-through en-suite kitchen conservatories when all they wanted was a cure for that damp patch on the loo wall.

It was the weekend, so of course every rental generator in Oxford and environs was already booked. In the end I had to drive to High Wycombe. In case Clive attempted to press charges I was using Dennis’s driving licence as identification. Another incredible thing I am going to have to ask you to accept is that in Britain driving licences are accepted as valid identification despite the fact that they carry no photograph and do not expire until well into the next millennium. Since I was posing as Dennis Parsons, though, I couldn’t use my own cheques or credit cards, so on top of everything else I had to make time-consuming side trips to cashpoint machines to finance the rental. Add a three-mile tailback on the A40 coming into Oxford, and there was another day gone.

Karen was in the shower when I got home. I took advantage of her acoustic isolation to phone Alison Kraemer. I hadn’t as yet told Alison about Karen’s pregnancy. Since that tea-time conversation in Holywell Street our relations had been friendly but correct. Now I felt the time had come to take her further into my confidence, and I therefore proposed meeting for lunch the next day. Quite apart from anything else, this would do me no harm at all in the event of Clive invoking the law. ‘Now let me just get this straight, officer. Your contention is that prior to meeting Ms Kraemer for lunch at Fifteen North Parade – I can really recommend their venison in madeira and celeriac sauce, and the Château Musar ’82 is drinking very nicely – I had spent the morning torturing someone in a quarry near Banbury. Is that correct?’

After some humming and hawing Alison agreed to see me, although she said she’d have to be home by four.

‘I’ve got the Barringtons and the Rissingtons to dinner and I’m making a rice timbale. It’s very good, but God, the preparation!’

The splashing and banging noises from the bathroom were still in full swing when I put the receiver down, so when Karen turned on me that evening and accused me of carrying on an affair with Alison behind her back, I was taken completely by surprise.

Karen and I shared the chores like the thoroughly modern couple we were. One night I loaded the microwave and Karen the dishwasher, the next we reversed roles. That day it was her turn to be creative. She’d selected something which looked like a slab of concrete wrapped in plastic foil when it went into the oven, and like a miniature hot-mud geyser when the timer pinged three minutes later. At no point did it resemble the illustration on the packet, but we ate it anyway, although as so often I felt that it would have made more sense to eat the packet and throw away the contents. We washed it down with one of the last surviving bottles from Dennis’s cache of wine, a ballsy Australian red weighing in at about fourteen degrees. This was of course on top of our two official G and Ts each, plus whatever Karen had been tippling on the side.

Dessert consisted of some slug-like tinned fruit in a slimy liquor, topped with a non-dairy aerosol mousse whose main selling point appeared to be the fact that the propellant was environmentally friendly. Once we’d scoffed this off, Karen launched her assault. On returning home, it seemed, she had phoned British Rail information to check the time of her train the next morning. The line was engaged, so she went to have a shower and tried again later, using the automatic re-dial facility. Since I had called Alison in the interim, her call was answered not by BR’s timetable touts but by a female voice which she identified as belonging to ‘that Crammer woman’.

Everything that happened subsequently was really down to my inability to react fast enough to this freak occurence. What I should have done, of course, is concoct a specious excuse for having phoned Alison. This would not have been so hard. I could have claimed to be returning a call from her I’d found recorded on the answering machine, for example. This would have given me time to work out a suitable cover-story, and also to brief Alison in case Karen phoned her to check.

Instead, I stupidly denied that I had ever made such a call. Alison was one of those people who recite their number when answering the telephone, so Karen had been able to confirm her suspicions by checking with the directory. Not only wasn’t I believed, but by lying about the call I had made it impossible to claim that it had been insignificant or innocent. There was no help for it, I realized reluctantly. I was going to have to go nuclear.