Mice (28 page)

He put his muscled dwarf arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair.

‘I’d bet money he’s buried out there in the garden somewhere. Am I right or am I right?’ He chuckled his phlegmy treacly laugh again. ‘Yeah, I thought so.’ He grinned, Mum’s sullen silence all the confirmation he needed.

He stared steadily at Mum, obviously savouring every second of her misery. Her hand had long since dropped out of the fleece pocket and was hanging limply by her side.

‘There you go,’ he said cheerily, ‘now you know
everything
. So are you gonna pay the twenty grand, or do I have to write a little note to the boys in blue?’

‘How many other people have you told about this?’ Mum’s voice was hoarse and frail.

‘None,’ he answered flatly.

‘How can I be sure about that?’ she persisted. ‘How do I know you haven’t blabbed about this in every pub in town? How do I know you’re not just the first of God knows how many blackmailers who are going to come crawling out of the woodwork?’

‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’ He shrugged, but after a moment’s thought he seemed to accept that this wouldn’t count for much in the circumstances, and he tried to give her a little bit more.

‘Listen, luv,’ he said. ‘I’ve done three long stretches inside, and every time it was because someone grassed me up. I don’t tell no one
nothing
no more. I’ve learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut.’

‘Why did you wait so long before coming here?’ Mum asked. ‘You found the driver’s licence – ’ she calculated quickly – ‘on the twenty-second of April: that’s over a month ago.’

He winked at me conspiratorially like a mischievous uncle. ‘She don’t miss a trick, your mum, does she?’ He turned back to her and his smile faded. ‘I was in hospital. I’ve got a dodgy ticker. I was in hospital almost a month. They only let me out the day before yesterday. Now, I think that’s enough questions. When are we gonna go and get this six hundred quid?’

Mum ignored him. ‘What about Paul Hannigan’s relatives? What about his friends? Won’t they be looking for him?’

‘He didn’t have no family,’ he said with growing impatience. ‘He was an orphan, so he told me. Said he’d grown up in care.’

‘What about his friends?’

‘He’d only been living down here a few months. He only knew a handful of people. He weren’t the sort that made friends easy. I probably knew him better than anyone. No one’s gonna miss Paul Hannigan, luv, believe me. And no one else is gonna figure out what happened neither. I’m the only one who knows. I’m the only one you’ve got to worry about.’

The fat man didn’t realize it, but everything he said was making the killing option more and more attractive. If he was telling the truth, then he was the last remaining loose end. Him and him alone. But now we were being given a second chance to tidy that loose end away.

‘How do I know you’re not going to keep coming back for more money?’ Mum said.

If there’d ever been any real doubt that the blackmailer would be back for more money again and again, his reaction to Mum’s question dispelled it for good. He jumped angrily to his feet, sending his chair scraping back across the tiles with such a lacerating screech that my hands automatically flew up to my ears.

‘That’s enough questions!’ he yelled. The jolly, avuncular persona he’d assumed vanished, and now there was only an ugly pouting mask, a monstrous, bloated baby face that was going to scream the whole world down because it wasn’t getting its own way. His truncated, muscle-swollen arms flew out from his sides, ready to punish, ready to hurt. ‘I’ve answered enough of your questions! You ain’t in a position to ask no questions! You ain’t in a position to make demands!’

There was a tense, awkward silence. I felt my heart racing wildly. Mum had shied away from him as if fearing a blow. The fat man stood glowering at her, his lips twisted into a pantomime scowl, his arms twitching with malignant energy. Some thin strands of hair had escaped the grip of his hair grease, and now waved like antennae above his bald scalp.

‘We go and get the six hundred now! No more questions! No more time-wasting!’

‘There’s no need to get aggressive,’ Mum said, putting up her hands in a submissive gesture. ‘I always said I was going to pay. We’ll go and get the money right now.’

She stood up and looked around distractedly, muttering, ‘Handbag. Where’s my handbag?’ She found it beneath one of the stools by the breakfast bench, picked it up and slipped it over her shoulder. ‘Now I just need my car keys,’ she said, patting her pockets and scanning the kitchen again, but at the same time not really looking, her mind detached, elsewhere. She was trying to make up her mind, I was sure of it. Trying to decide what to do: to pay the blackmailer or to kill him? To live with this gross leech sucking on her flesh for years to come, or, like a desperate gambler, risk everything on one more throw of the dice and take out the gun and shoot him dead.

‘Don’t worry about your car keys,’ the fat man said. ‘We’ll go in my car. It’s better that way.’ He looked scornfully at Mum and for a moment I saw her through his eyes: a scatty, spoiled, middle-class housewife, a stupid plump hen for his vulpine teeth to devour at leisure, a meal ticket for the rest of his life.

‘Are you sure you’ve got everything you need?’ he growled at her. ‘I don’t want to get all the way there and then find you ain’t got the right cards with you or you’ve forgotten your pin number or something.’

‘No, I’ve got everything I need.’

‘Come on, then, let’s go.’

He walked out of the kitchen, his anger forgotten, back to his jolly avuncular self, a hand in his pocket merrily jangling his car keys and change. ‘We won’t be long.’ He winked at me as he passed, like an old and much-loved family friend.

Mum still hesitated, a dazed expression on her face. She was trying to make up her mind, trying to decide what to do. Her hand went to the mouth of the fleece pocket but darted away again when the fat man barked at her: ‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’

Mum walked past me, her eyes on the floor, and followed him into the hallway. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but if she hadn’t shot him by now, surely she wasn’t going to – it had to be better to kill him inside the house than outside. There was no risk of being seen inside; the gunshots were less likely to be heard by someone passing. All I could think was that she’d decided to pay him the money after all.

I followed Mum up the hall, so close that I was almost tripping on her heels. The blackmailer had already opened the front door and stepped out into an idyllic May morning. He was walking across the gravel towards his car, and he was whistling, he was actually
whistling
, as if he didn’t have a care in the world! He opened the passenger door, then looked round for Mum. When he saw her hovering in the hallway, he called out angrily again, ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake! Hurry up!’ He held the car door open, waiting impatiently.

Mum turned to me and seized my shoulders fiercely. She brought her cheek close to mine and under the cover of a goodbye kiss whispered urgently into my ear: ‘What should I do, Shelley? What should I do?’

I stared straight at the blackmailer over her shoulder, at the bullfrog neck, the inflated dwarf arms, the obscene gut, the hand idly scratching at his groin, and with my face pressed close to hers, pretending to return her pretend kiss, I replied without hesitation.

‘
Kill him, Mum
.’

Mum pulled sharply away from me and walked determinedly out of the house and across the drive towards the blackmailer, deftly switching her handbag from her right shoulder to her left as she went. When she was about two metres away from him she stopped and plunged her hand deep into her fleece pocket.

The fat man had started to move towards the front of the car on his way to the driver’s side, but he stopped when he saw Mum pointing the gun at his head, clutching it tightly in both hands, her left eye closed, taking careful aim.

His hands shot up in surrender and he pressed himself against the car’s front wing, arching his torso backwards over the bonnet, pathetically trying to increase the distance between his face and the gun as if those few extra inches could mitigate the bullet’s brutal impact. He cringed, unable even to look in the direction of the gun, squinting desperately away to his left and right as if convinced that the slightest eye contact with Mum would induce her to pull the trigger.

‘All right, luv,’ he said, over and over again, ‘all right, luv, everything’s all right now, luv, everything’s all right now, it’s all right, luv, it’s all right, everything’s all right.’

I hovered at the door, willing Mum to shoot. She shook her hair from her face and took a few shuffling steps closer.

The fat man tried to say something, but he could only talk in terrified tongues and his babbling sputtered out in confused silence. A dark stain spread over his crotch and down the thick trunk of his right thigh.

I held my breath, still waiting for the gunshot.
It must come now, any second now, any second now!
But Mum still didn’t pull the trigger. From where I was standing I could see the gun in her outstretched arms start to sway from side to side, a dead bough in the breeze, but I only realized what was happening when I saw the expression on the blackmailer’s face change. His eyes still darted anxiously all around him, but not because he couldn’t bear to look in the direction of the gun any more – he was getting ready to make a run for it.

That’s when I knew Mum had lost her nerve. She wasn’t able to pull the trigger.

I ran out into the drive screaming: ‘
Do it, Mum! Do it! Do it now! Do it!
’

I was right beside her, screaming into her face, my hand tugging at the back of her fleece. The sudden, deafening whipcrack of the gun made me scream and jump high in the air. The recoil drove Mum backwards three huge strides and spun her around almost one hundred and eighty degrees, so that she ended up pointing the gun at the lounge window.

I stared at the blackmailer, looking for the blob of strawberry jam in the middle of his forehead, the slow emptying of his eyes as his soul fled, waiting to see him crumple to the ground in a lifeless heap. To my amazement, he seemed entirely unchanged. He still stood by the car, arching backwards as far as he could across the bonnet, his arms still raised, the fat pink hands waggling at his shoulders like starfish.

He realized what had happened – that Mum had missed him – much faster than we did, and with astonishing speed for a man of his size he pushed himself off the car and sprinted down the drive.

Mum was still recovering from the vicious recoil, dazedly trying to steady the leaden weight of the gun and aim.

‘Shoot him, Mum! Shoot him!
He’s getting away!
’

I knew that if he got out of the drive and onto the public road, we wouldn’t be able to chase after him; the risk of being seen was just too great. If he made it to the road, if he escaped the tree-screened privacy of Honeysuckle Cottage, he’d be safe, and all we’d have to look forward to would be his terrible revenge, a revenge I was sure wouldn’t be long in coming.

Mum pointed the gun at his receding figure and there was another ear-splitting explosion. A white wound appeared high up in the trunk of one of the ash trees at the top of the drive, and I knew she’d missed again.

The blackmailer had disappeared from sight around the corner of the drive where it straightened leading down to the road. I could just see glimpses of his yellow T-shirt flashing through the foliage. Mum and I set off after him.

It was impossible to run in my slippers in the thick gravel and I had to kick them off as I went. The sharp little stones stabbed into the soles of my feet, but I swallowed the pain –
we had to stop him getting to the road!
Mum was lagging behind me, bent double with a stitch after just a few paces, holding her side, hardly looking where she was going. I screamed at her to hurry up, that he was going to get away, and wincing with pain she forced herself to run faster and managed to catch me up.

As we entered the straight leg of the drive, we saw that the fat man’s pace had slowed dramatically, his sprint declined to no more than a limping jog. And he was still twenty metres from the gate and the safety of the road.

Mum and I gained on him quickly. He looked back when he heard us coming up behind him, his face a shocking black-red like blood in a test tube. He tried to shout something at us, his lips curled up into a snarl, but he was so short of breath he couldn’t form the words and all I heard was something like ‘
Ha! – Fa! – Pa!
’ His face was drenched with sweat and he had to keep his finger pressed permanently to the bridge of his nose now or his glasses would have fallen off. He turned his attention back to the gate, the finishing line he was desperately trying to reach, but he was hardly moving forwards any more, he was virtually jogging on the spot, and I knew now that Mum and I would catch him before he could get to the road.

As we closed in on him, I became aware that I was giggling as I ran, giggling in excited anticipation of the moment when we’d overtake the fat man and Mum would shoot him. In those last few seconds before we caught up with him, running barefoot in the drive, my dressing gown flapping open around me, I felt something I’d never felt in my life before. It was a totally new emotion, a liberating, exulting sweetness that flooded through my veins like a drug. It was as if everything artificial in my life suddenly fell away and I was fleetingly in touch with a primitive truth, a reality older than life itself. And I felt like a giant, I felt like a
god
!

And then we were so close I could have reached out and grabbed hold of the fat man’s filthy T-shirt. Mum, still clutching at her side as she ran, held the gun out until it was just a few inches away from the folds of fat on the back of his neck and squeezed the trigger.