Dirty Tricks (20 page)

‘Clive? Clive? You know who this is, Clive? It’s me, Clive. Me, Karen.’

A long silence.

‘Why d’you tell him, Clive? You shouldn’t’ve told him. Now he hates me.’

Silence.

‘I don’t want to stay here, Clive. I’m frightened. Please come and take me away.’

Silence.

‘Please, Clive! There’s no love here. No love. It’s cold and dark, and things could happen.’

Silence.

‘Just for a few days, darling. Until things have settled down again. I don’t want to stay here. I’m frightened.’

This was followed by a dull thump, then a groan, and finally a click as Clive’s answering machine broke the connection.

I sat there in a daze for some time, replaying the tape again and again. Each time it sounded worse.

Back in the living room, Karen lay where I had left her. She looked utterly lifeless. I couldn’t feel any pulse in her wrist, she didn’t seem to be breathing, her skin was cold. For the first time I began to worry that she might have injured herself seriously. I recalled an article in the local paper about a child who had fallen off his bike. He seemed perfectly all right at the time, but the next morning had complained of a persistent headache. A few hours later he was rushed into hospital in an irreversible coma and they’d unplugged his life support machine a few weeks later.

Under normal circumstances I would have called an ambulance, but these were not normal circumstances. The message on Clive’s answering machine constituted apparently damning evidence against me.
I
knew that the thump on the tape must have been caused by Karen drunkenly knocking over the phone, but to the police it would sound like the blow inflicted with the traditional ‘blunt instrument’ by the jealous husband who had come into the living room to find his wife secretly phoning her lover. When it was revealed that Karen was pregnant with Clive’s child, and that they had been planning to go away together the following day, inverted commas would close in around the word ‘accident’ like a pair of handcuffs.

I gave Karen another brisk dose of the ‘Now stop all this nonsense and snap out of it’ treatment, but without the slightest effect. Suddenly I knew she was dead. What else did the word mean if not this maddening indifference, this infinite capacity for sullen withdrawal? The dead are so selfish, so irresponsible! They just piss off, leaving the rest of us to clear up after them. All the arrangements I had so carefully made would now have to be cancelled. Not only was there no hope of getting even with Clive, but I stood a very good chance of being accused of killing Karen into the bargain. A monstrous miscarriage of justice was in the making. It was so unfair, so totally unfair!

The alternative version which eventually began to take shape in my mind seemed at first nothing but a daydream, a childish fantasy of punishment fitting the crime. In an ideal world, if anyone had to take the rap for Karen’s death then it would be
Clive
. Quite apart from his unsavoury intervention in my marriage, he was a thoroughly unpleasant character who richly deserved whatever was coming to him. The day he was convicted, a resounding cheer would be heard throughout the EFL world as the victims of his dirty tricks celebrated their vicarious revenge.

At first, as I say, this vision remained purely abstract, but as time passed I began to speculate idly about how it might be put into practice. I fetched a pen and paper and started making notes, more and more excitedly as the scheme came together in my mind. Gradually the plan took on a life of its own, and by the time I had finished working out all the details I couldn’t have backed out if I’d tried. The thing demanded to be done, and there simply wasn’t anyone else to do it.

I had arranged to meet Garcia near his lodgings in Botley, a suburb of Oxford which sounds like a form of food poisoning and looks like its effects, gobs of half-digested architectural matter sprayed across the countryside with desperate abandon. I reached the rendezvous shortly after 8 o’clock, having stopped at the station to show off the BMW and buy a single ticket to Banbury. I’d only had a few hours sleep, and felt exhausted and depressed.

When there was no sign of Garcia at the grim thirties estate pub where we were to meet, a feeling of panic overwhelmed me. All my plans depended on his help, and by now it was too late to abort them. I drove past the pub and circled the area for a few minutes. When I returned he was there, squeezed into his jeans and leather jacket like one of the apes which spinsters proverbially lead in hell.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine.’

‘Your wife …?’

‘All taken care of.’

I passed him one of the pairs of rubber gloves I’d brought and told him to put them on before getting into the car. The beauty of the plan I had worked out was that every one of its numerous and minute details were generated by a simple set of exclusion zones. I existed in the BMW but not in Clive’s Lotus. Karen and Clive existed in the Lotus but not in the BMW. As for Garcia, he didn’t exist at all.

On the back seat stood Karen’s suitcase, coat and handbag as well as a couple of Salisbury’s shopping bags containing a roll of bin-liners, an assortment of nails, scissors, a pair of Wellington boots, a navy-blue blanket, plastic food bags, a torch, a large sponge-bag, packing tape and a selection of food and drink to see us both through the day.

‘And the generator?’ asked Garcia.

‘There’s been a change of plan. We’re going to kidnap him instead. That’s almost as good, and far less risky. Twelve hours is a long time to spend bound and gagged in a car boot, particularly when you don’t know what’s going to happen when the car stops.’

‘And what is going to happen?’

‘Nothing. We just turn him loose in the middle of nowhere. By the time he gets to the police we’ll be home. There’s no evidence of any kidnap, no generator to trace.’

Garcia clearly thought that this was a pretty wimpy sort of vengeance, but as long I was paying he wasn’t going to argue.

Traffic was light and we made good time. A few miles south of Banbury I turned off the main road and let Garcia take the wheel. He had assured me that he could drive, which was true, in the sense that chickens can fly and horses swim. When it came to piloting military vehicles in a country where they enjoy absolute priority over all other traffic, Garcia’s roadcraft was no doubt perfectly adequate, but for the purposes of my plan he had not merely to get the BMW from A to B while avoiding collisions with other vehicles and the surrounding landscape, but also without attracting the attention of the police. It was too late to worry about this now, however.

After Garcia’s brief test drive we pulled over to review the practical arrangements. He pointed out that Clive wouldn’t be able to breathe through the waterproof lining of the sponge-bag I’d brought to use as a hood, so I stabbed a few holes in it with the scissors. Then we slid the front seats of the car forward, making room for Garcia to lie down in the back. I covered him with the blanket and we set off.

The station car park was full of rows of commuter cars, but apart from a few taxis there were only two vehicles outside the station building. One was a florist’s van, the other Clive’s yellow Lotus sports car. I gave a sigh of relief. My greatest anxiety had been that Clive might have replayed the messages on his answering machine, suspected that something was wrong and stayed away. I parked on the other side of the florist’s van. The train from Oxford arrived six minutes late. The passengers dispersed rapidly on foot and in the taxis. The van driver emerged with three flat cardboard boxes of flowers. He gave the BMW an incurious glance before roaring off.

Inside the station building, Clive was just hanging up the receiver of one of the public telephones when he caught sight of me. He glanced away again, as though it might be one of those embarrassing cases of mistaken identity. I walked over to him. He looked again. This time there was no mistake. It was me all right. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.

‘I think we’d better have a little talk,’ I said, gesturing towards the BMW.

Clive followed without demur. He knew there was no point in trying to bullshit his way out of it. If I was there, it could only be because Karen had confessed.

We got into the car. Clive adjusted his nifty blouson and chinos and sat there like the player he was, waiting for me to pitch. Already he was looking calmer, more his old smarmy self.

‘I know what’s been going on,’ I said.

‘Do you?’

His tone was aloof, almost scornful.

‘You’ve been stuffing my wife.’

Clive regarded me with distaste.

‘Yes, I suppose that is how you’d see it.’

I would have hit him there and then, but an ageing Morris Marina had just pulled into the slot vacated by the florist’s van. A bald man wearing a baggy cardigan and trousers with perpetual creases emerged from the Marina. He looked around with a vaguely benevolent smile and then toddled off into the station.

‘Where is Karen?’ Clive asked.

I was terribly tempted to tell him!

‘She changed her mind about this weekend. There’s a message on your answering machine. Didn’t you check it?’

He shook his head.

‘I was out pretty late last night.’

‘Quite right too. Make the most of your freedom while it lasts.’

He looked at me and frowned.

‘Pardon?’

‘Oh, didn’t she tell you? You’re going to be a daddy, Clive.’

In the rear-view mirror I could see the bald man returning with an elderly woman who was walking with the aid of an aluminium frame. I just had to keep the conversation going for a few more minutes. Then they would be gone, and Clive’s brief reprieve would be over.

‘She’s … pregnant?’ he breathed.

‘That’s right. And I opted out of parenthood several years ago. I don’t affect the tie, but I’m a fully-fledged member of the cut-and-run club. Which leaves you holding the baby.’

He sat staring straight ahead through the windscreen.

‘Did Kay know that?’ he said eventually.

His use of the past tense startled me, until I realized that it referred to the implied continuation ‘when she married you’. It’s little things like that which can be so tricky to explain to a class.

‘About my vasectomy? Of course. You don’t think I’d keep a thing like that from my wife, do you?’

His face lit up.

‘Then she did it on purpose!’

He sounded disgustingly moved.

‘Of course she did!’ I retorted. ‘To trap you into marrying her.’

‘Trap
me? I’ve been begging her to marry me for years, but all she’s ever done is go out with me a few times when the marriage wasn’t going well. But this proves she’s changed her mind!’

‘All it proves, Clive, is what everyone already knew, namely that you’re a first-rate prick.’

I had raised my voice, which unfortunately attracted the attention of the Marina owner, who was still loading Granny into his wallymobile.

‘I’m sorry,’ Clive replied in a soothing tone. ‘I forgot how painful all this must be for you. How did you find out about us? Did Karen tell you?’

‘Not in so many words. I overheard her talking to you on the telephone the other day. Do you know how that felt?’

‘I can imagine,’ he murmured sympathetically as the Marina drove away.

‘No, you can’t. But you don’t need to. It felt like this.’

And I hammered my fist into his groin.

From behind the wheel of the Lotus, the entrance to the quarry looked bumpier than I had remembered. The possibility of the low-slung sports car grounding out occurred to me for the first time. I revved up and took a run at it. There were one or two loud metallic sounds like waves slapping the bottom of a dinghy, then I was inside the quarry. A few moments later the BMW appeared, cruising with ease over the uneven ground. Everything was going my way. A patina of the Lotus’s underbody paint would remain like lichen on the rocks at the entrance to the quarry for the forensic experts to find, while the high-riding BMW would leave no trace of its presence.

The quarry had not been in use for a long time, and owing to the friability of the local stone and the thick covering of weeds and undergrowth it might have been mistaken for a natural feature except for the perfectly level floor of reddish earth. That brick-red soil interested me, because I knew it would interest the police. It was distinctive, characteristic and definable. It could be weighed, measured, subjected to chemical and spectroscopic analysis and then produced in court in a neat little plastic bag marked ‘Exhibit A’. In short, it was a
clue
.

That’s why I’d brought the wellies for Garcia. He was going to drive the BMW, and since the BMW had never been to the quarry, we couldn’t have any of the distinctive red soil ending up inside it. He parked alongside the Lotus, as I’d instructed him, revving up the engine in the best macho fashion before switching off. I opened the front door of the BMW. Clive was lying in a foetal crouch forward of the front passenger seat, the sponge-bag tightly laced around his neck. The bag was a sporty model for jocks on the trot, sheeny acrylic with a go-faster stripe. It complemented Clive’s outfit so well he might have chosen it himself.

Our departure from Banbury had gone very smoothly. While Clive was still writhing, a blanket-draped form had risen from the back of the car like the awakened kraken to apply the
coup de grâce
. Garcia’s idea of ‘a little tap on the head’ consisted of a vicious blow from what looked like a salami wrapped in a sock. It certainly did the trick. Clive collapsed like a marionette whose strings have been cut. Garcia explained the construction of the weapon – a sand-filled hemp bag covered with cotton and a plastic sheath – and assured me there would be nothing to show. It was all his own work, he added proudly, right down to the motto inked into the cotton underlay: TRADICION, FAMILIA Y PROPIEDAD.

While Garcia struggled into the green wellies I carefully wiped the door handle, fascia and leather-work of the BMW to remove any prints which Clive might have left. Then we lifted his inert body back into a sitting position in the front seat, taped his ankles and knees together, twisted his arms behind his back and taped them just above the wrist. It was strong packing-tape, easy to cut but impossible to tear, and less likely to leave marks than wire or rope. By the time we had finished, Clive was trussed like a chicken. I got out his key-holder and inspected the contents. There were big keys, small keys, short keys and tall keys, each marked with a different coloured blob of paint to tell Clive which compartment of his life it opened. Only one, a battered Yale tethered next to the Lotus’s ignition key, bore no marking. I removed it from the case and placed it carefully in my wallet.