How to Be Bad (20 page)

And as she turned to walk away, Caro stepped forward, swung back the spade, and slammed the flat of the blade onto Janet Mather's skull.

It was a tremendous blow. The clang of metal against bone resounded through the square. Mather's eyes rolled and her knees gave way. Then she fell facedown on the gravel before launching into an unsightly convulsion, shaking and twitching as if she'd been electrocuted. At last she lay still.

Caro burst into spontaneous, uncontrolled laughter. So did I. All she had done, after all, was what I would have done myself had I possessed the courage (and the spade).

Three seconds of silence followed. I waited for the blood to well out from the wiry lavatory-brush hair. But no blood came. Encouraged by her efforts, Caro stepped forward to strike Mrs. Mather again.

In that instant, I breathed in and seemed to smell piss, sweat, and bleach. I knew it was the smell of prison, a place I had no desire to visit. I held out my forearm to block Caro's follow-through but, with my usual lack of coordination, fully absorbed the impact rather than rotating my arm to deflect it. “Ow, fuck, shit! You stupid bitch.”

“Sorry.”

Now it wasn't funny anymore.

I gripped Mather's wrist, feeling for a pulse. “Why? Why did you have to do that?” I asked Caro.

Caro held her hand to her mouth and started giggling. “I couldn't think what else to do,” she said.

“What?”

“That's what Mather said, isn't it? When she burned Dale? ‘I didn't know what else to do.' That's what we should tell the police when they ask why we killed her,” she said. Caro laughed quietly and then started sobbing.

I knelt down to look at the stricken woman's face. The eyes were wide open, but they saw nothing. The tiniest filigree thread of blood was trickling out of her left ear. Janet Mather had gone to the great village hall in the sky.

CHAPTER 11

ABOUT A CORPSE

W
E DRAGGED
the body into the hall and locked the door. Then we sat in the kitchen for a long time, drinking strong tea, searching for a way out.

“I was upset,” said Caro helplessly. Her eyes were ringed with shadow, her face bloodless. “I didn't mean to kill her.”

“Oh, that's all right, then,” I said. “You mad cow.”

“You've got no room to criticize me,” snapped Caro. “You're the real murderer, not me. It's still 2–1 to you.”

She was quite wrong, of course. It was 1–0 to Caro. I was finding my situation confusing. Having lied and dissembled to convince Caro how dangerous I was, in the end it turned out to be she who took the first life. The temptation to tell her the truth was stronger now than it had ever been, yet I feared that Caro would crumble if she knew I was not a killer. She wanted, actually
needed
me to be bad. A bad motherfucker could protect her from justice. What use could a star-crossed bibliophile be?

“Okay,” I said. “She was visiting the village hall. She wasn't planning to drop in on us. She only spoke to us because we were in the garden. So if someone asks us, we never saw her. Plus we hardly knew her. What possible motive would we have for killing her? We have not seen her. Caro, listen to me. We haven't seen her. It's vital that we don't contradict each other. Do you understand?”

“But they'll see her lying in the hall,” said Caro dazedly.

“No.” Her state of mind was worrying me. I reached over the table and took her hand. “I'm going to move the body, Caro. I'm going to hide it.”

“I'll help you,” said Caro.

“No,” I said. “I don't expect that.”

“But I want to,” she said. “I helped to kill her. She really was a vile woman. Wasn't she?” The question contained a note of desperation.

“She was a fucking nuisance,” I admitted. “She's even more of a nuisance now.”

“A woman who deliberately burns a child doesn't deserve to live, does she?”

“Well, I don't know about that,” I said. “But she certainly deserved a bloody good kicking.”

“Yeah,” said Caro dreamily. “She got off lightly, really. Didn't she? She should have been burned alive with her husband's bollocks crammed down her throat. I'd have liked to have seen that.”

I looked at her skeptically. “Would you really?”

She thought about it for a few seconds. “No. But I'd have liked to have seen her run over by a tractor.”

I excused myself, feeling that the conversation was taking a distinctly bizarre turn.

Trying not to look at the corpse, I took the spade from the hall and went upstairs. All I could think about now was DNA. What if tiny traces of Mather's blood or skin still clung to the spade that had killed her? I took the spade into the bathroom and half-filled the bath with hot water. Then I scrubbed both sides of the blade with bleach. Sure enough, a single frizzy brown hair floated to the surface of the water. I scooped up the hair in a piece of tissue and flushed it down the lavatory.

Next, I held the blade up to the light and examined it minutely for marks that might correspond to the indentation in Mather's skull. There were none. Relief surged through me. Then I was violently, effortlessly sick.

When I went downstairs, I was hit by an unsavory smell, like brussels sprouts and overboiled cabbage. Then I noticed that the body was lying next to a hot radiator. I straddled the corpse, grabbed it under the arms, and shunted it along the floor. I looked up to see Caro standing in the kitchen doorway.

“She isn't worth going to prison for,” I said.

“Who?” said Caro vaguely.

“What do you mean ‘who'? Her! This woman you just killed.”

I noticed that the shape of Mrs. Mather's head had altered. Her forehead appeared to have inflated, and the back of her cranium had been completely flattened. “Look at that,” I said. “Look how hard you hit her.”

“I don't feel very well,” said Caro.

*   *   *

C
ARO RAN
upstairs to the bathroom. I turned off all the lights and sat in the shadows of the front room, sipping brandy and looking out on the square. It was late and the heating had gone off, but I was sweating like a sunbather at noon. The enormity of what had occurred staggered me. I didn't want to believe that Janet Mather was lying in the hall, but every time I stepped out of the door, there she was.

The wind had grown stronger. It was playing a tune in the empty milk bottles outside. Every thirty seconds or so, the front door shuddered and a blast of icy air rattled the letterbox and washed through the hall.

Sometime after midnight, I heard unsteady footsteps on the gravel. Someone coughed. It was an old man's cough, so I guessed it was Ricky, reeling home from the pub. Silence reigned for a few moments, as if he were looking toward our house and listening. Then I heard his front door slam.

Shortly after one, headlights washed over the village hall. The Mathers' Volvo Estate sped through the parking lot and skidded to a halt. Philip Mather got out of the car, moving with some urgency, hunching forward as he hurried to the village hall and unlocked the doors.

Soon he was inside and the lights flashed on, one by one. I could picture him looking for Janet behind the stage, in the lavatories, in the kitchen, and behind the stacked chairs, unaware that all the time she was lying in our hallway, growing steadily colder and colder.

After about three minutes, the building went dark. Only the security light in the lobby remained on when Mather reappeared at the entrance. He locked the hall, walked over to the Volvo, and removed something from the trunk. He was holding a powerful flashlight, which he now shone around the square. Mather's attention was caught by a white van in the corner. Wobbling unhealthily, he aimed his beam through each of the van's windows in turn.

Then he moved off toward the hall again and vanished behind it. Now he would be searching through the bins, shining his flashlight at the coastal path, unlocking the shed where the lawn mower was kept. When that failed, I knew he would be peering down the cliff face, hoping not to see his wife lying on the concrete far below.

After another short interval, the flashlight glinted on the hood of Caro's BMW. Instinctively, I got out of my chair and sank to the floor. No sooner had I moved than a bright arc of light appeared on the wall behind me. In his zeal, Mr. Mather had shone the flashlight directly through our living room window. Two seconds passed and the light moved on. I felt a sudden stab of fear and, on my hands and knees, crawled out through the doorway into the hall.

If Mather was impertinent enough to shine a light through the window of a house, what was to stop him from aiming the flashlight through the letterbox to see his wife's body lying in the hall? My fears were well grounded. I was approaching the front door when I heard the gate creak and light flooded through the opaque oval of glass set high in the front door. I reached for the letterbox and held it shut with both hands, sensing Mather's presence on the other side of the door. I heard a sniff and the faint scuff of a heel on concrete.

For a long time, there was no other sound. I was afraid to swallow, convinced that Mather was still out there, listening intently for the merest sound. Then the Volvo's engine rumbled into life, and I heard the tires grinding gravel as the big car turned and headed out of the square.

Thirty minutes elapsed before I found the courage to stand up and peer through the glass in the door. There was no one out there. I unlocked the front door and walked to the end of the short path. All was quiet. No light shone in the windows of Ricky's house. I suddenly felt certain that this was the time, that I must act now or face evil consequences.

I turned on the landing light and went upstairs. In the airing cupboard, there were several old, dusty blankets. I removed two of them. After turning off the light, I took one out to the car and lined the trunk with it. I wrapped the other round the body and used cord to bind it tightly. I was grateful for the whine of the wind as I dragged the bundle out into the dark. It was so heavy that all I could do was grip the end and heave it forward, six inches at a time.

When the corpse was clear of the front doorstep, I closed the door behind me. I was about to open the gate when I heard a car approaching. I crouched down and peered through the gaps in the wooden gate. There was now a police patrol car outside the village hall. A lone officer got out of the car and, leaning against the hood, spoke into his radio.

Here's how it was. There was a police officer two hundred yards away and I was hiding behind a gate with the newly slaughtered body of the woman he was searching for. I had never been in such an incriminating position in my life.

Had it not been such an unpleasant night, the police officer might have been a little more conscientious. As it was, I doubt he was thinking of anything but the warm bed awaiting him at the end of his shift. Without conviction, he shone his flashlight through the windows of the village hall, walked halfway round it, and strolled back to the car. Then he leaned against the hood for a few seconds while he lit an illicit cigarette. I saw the little pinprick of light glow and fade as he drew the first blast into his lungs.

A great gust of wind raced across the square. Somewhere behind me, a shed door clattered and banged. An abandoned Coke can rattled belligerently in the village hall parking lot. That was enough for the police officer, who got back into his car to finish his cigarette.

Eventually, the car rolled forward, executed a loop, and headed slowly out of the square. When its headlights hit the gate in front of me, I flung my head earthward.

As soon as the sound of the engine had died, I opened the gate. It immediately swung shut. I found a brickbat in the front garden and used it to wedge the gate open, then heaved the body through. So intense was my guilt that I felt I was being watched and had to keep stopping to scan the dark windows of the neighboring houses. I could see no one, but my sense of public shame persisted. I had the peculiar feeling that the spirits of my forebears were looking down at me, shaking their heads in sorrow and disbelief.

The thought of my ancestors brought forth a childhood memory of my aunt Edna defending me against my mother's suspicions when my kid brother ratted on me for kicking him.
Not Mark,
she had insisted.
Mark would never do a thing like that.
My aunt's loyalty brought tears to my eyes then and did so now.

Sniffling, I unlocked the trunk of the Audi. The automatic light flashed on, unhelpfully providing illumination for anyone who wanted a grandstand view of a man in his early twenties trying to lift a dead woman into a car.

I flattered myself that I was strong, but that was before I tried to lift one hundred and fifty pounds of dead meat off the ground. The effort almost gave me a hernia, and still I got nowhere. The body on the ground made an eerie hissing noise as air escaped from it. It was as if Janet Mather were booing me from beyond the grave.

Someone tapped me on the back. Bucking like a startled cow, I spun round to see Caro standing behind me. When I'd finished swearing, she seized my shoulders and kissed my brow. “I'm feeling better now,” she whispered. “I want to help.”

*   *   *

T
OGETHER, WE
lifted Mrs. Mather into the trunk. Then we sat in the car, discussing what to do next. “What about the beach hut?” I said. “We could store her in the beach hut and throw her into the sea, a bit at a time.”

“I've got a better idea,” said Caro.

She fetched the spade from the house and told me to drive to Bloxham Church.

We parked the car on a dark track along the side of the church and wandered into the cemetery. Even without a flashlight, we could see where the latest arrival had been interred. There was a fresh mound on the north side of the church, made luminous by the pale flowers heaped upon it.

In the churchyard, Caro grabbed me and stuck her tongue down my throat. I wasn't remotely aroused and pushed her away.