Shadow Play (3 page)

‘There was an incident my mother told me about when I was older, years after she'd left my father. My great-aunt had had one loyal servant, an elderly man from Bihar, who had been with them since they were children. He cleaned her room, cooked for her, went each day to the market, things like that. He'd spent his entire life with the family, had held my grandfather's kite as a boy and bowled cricket balls at him, and he moved with them to Calcutta.

‘One day he was found hanging from a beam in his room. My uncles unanimously declared that he'd been caught with a hoard of household money and had killed himself the same night. They also spread another slander – that he broke down and confessed when they grilled him about the nature of his relations with my great-aunt.

‘But Ma said there was never any kind of police inquiry, even though there had been a post-mortem. My uncles must have taken care of it. What I remember is that my mother was furious at Baba one whole night, and for weeks afterwards refused to speak to him. Of course you're aware no one else in the house ever spoke to us, although my cousins were still permitted to play with me. A year later, when I was ten, Ma left the house and I was taken with her. Baba still lives there, in the same room where I grew up. When I was younger Ma made me go over and spend nights with him, but afterwards I myself
stopped visiting. We had less and less to say to each other, and the older I got, the more I despised the house itself.

‘In fact, sometimes we had so little to say, Baba and I, that we would go to my great-aunt's room and leave her to do the talking. She had a gramophone; she'd put on scratchy old music and question me in detail about school, my friends and my games. She often said things that embarrassed me at the time, like how I was to come over to her school one day without telling my mother and she'd point out some girls from Class Nine who were extremely pretty. She confided that she'd extended the same favour in his time to my father, and boy, was I more handsome! “To make them even say hello to your father, I literally had to threaten them with beatings and dire results in exams.” Obviously none of it was true, but that part always had the three of us laughing.'

By now we were outside and Sylvie was crying, and I held her close on the pavement. We returned to my place in silence, and I reflected how I had run out of stories to recall about this old woman too.

The Perfect Worker

(The Unusual Career of Charles Robert Pereira)

Every year I used to commit a murder. I'll recount it briefly because I'm impatient to get to my real story. The first time was ten years ago, in a common, when I drew a knife and drove it into a complete stranger. The idea had occurred to me as an image two weeks earlier, walking home above Hampstead Heath at three in the morning. If it was unpremeditated, I was unconnected to my victim, and I never discussed it with anyone before or after, then who could ever out me?

You grasp the pattern. In repeating it for the next four years, my randomness remained my trump card – randomness, and the fact that I never crowed about it to anyone. I felt no urge to deliver anonymous letters, leave calling cards, taunt detectives or give interviews. It wasn't sexual, so that left nothing for forensics. In fact, never did it require any more than the most rapid of thrusts, and I had never dropped anything or been spotted. There was no particular common I frequented or any sort of signature victim that I picked. Darkness, emptiness, the certainty that there weren't any witnesses, the first person walking along that looked likely, and I'd strike: once from the front, and then through the throat to be sure. No other touching, no lingering or gloating (I made it a point to avoid staring into a face), a hike through a
few neighbourhoods, and I'd be on the night bus home. Even now detectives are divided: some discerned a pattern emerging, others declared it the work of copycats, and there are still a few obtuse enough to insist they might be unrelated. And of course they were obliged to investigate the victim's biography, which led them all over the place and occasionally made for interesting reading when I discovered who they had been after having murdered them for no reason.

For example, there was an idea I had after reading about the chequered history of one of my casualties (I obviously cannot divulge anything more specific). What the police uncovered in that instance led me to question the entire concept of ‘innocent' victims, such as newspaper headlines commonly proclaim after a bombing or a hijack – ‘fifty innocent bystanders were killed'; ‘they have heinously taken the lives of innocent people'. I started wondering whether everyone, no matter how randomly selected, is only relatively innocent, or rather, contextually innocent, which simply means there was no reason for them to be capitally punished at that particular time or place. Yet each accident, each outrage, mine included, freezes criminals in their tracks: wife-beaters, sex-offenders, people with rapes and theft and religious rioting in their history, yes, as well as bigots, arms-dealers, white-collar criminals and their slime-ball lawyers. This is strictly by-the-by, a mere observation – I've no wish to formulate an ideology by which to defend my actions. Death snapshots the living in the full flow of life, which is never as pure and sacred as they claim. And anyhow, one thing you can be certain of: I never maintained a file of newspaper clippings.

I wish to begin with a strange story, one that has gripped my entire adult life. It dates from long before I embarked on this
career, from the time decades ago when I was a young man still living in India, yet perhaps there are underlying connections. I loved a woman once who was normal in every way except she could turn into a cat. That, and the fact that she too once committed a murder. It was out of love for me, and there was no other way she could have done it. Her cat identity I had been aware of – it was always ginger with a bushy tail and bigger than you'd have imagined, because she had black hair and was tiny. She waited a whole year before confiding in me, to be certain we were absolutely in love first. But during that year she couldn't resist playing a few tricks on me. I'd leave the room and when I returned she would be nowhere. I would search every corner of the flat, call out her name, even look out of the sixth-floor window at the ledges below, and she had me sitting down in worry and bafflement before she rang the bell and entered. Of course she'd slipped out as a cat, changed back in an alley and calmly taken the lift up. The night she finally told me, she changed in front of my eyes. The first few weeks after that I kept requesting her to transform, but then it just became one of those things and almost never came up again between us.

Until the day of the murder. It was her uncle she disposed of, her father's only brother. For some years now he had been an irritant. He disappeared in his twenties after quarrelling with everyone, and nothing was heard from him for four decades. It was her father who went and sought him out – one of the many ill-planned actions he undertook during the excess of sentimentality that overcame him after his first heart attack, in the six months that he lived until the second. Now her uncle was claiming that one of the last things his brother had promised him was his rightful share of the family fortune, and
he produced a written agreement to prove it. We were certain it was a forgery, but he brought out numerous witnesses who swore their presence on the emotion-soaked evening that the document was drawn up. His position was that his contrite brother had contacted him for no other purpose and would surely have redrafted his will as his very next action. He hired some lawyers of average skill, which was enough to keep the case simmering for two years, two years during which no one else, not even the dead man's only daughter, could touch any of his assets.

So she grew impatient. She stole up to his room one night and fixed his nightly medication. She told me how she'd watched his habits for two weeks, and practised entering and leaving his room and garden. She had pinched samples of his medicines to find out what combinations would prove lethal. That night, she slipped into his garden as a cat, climbed up to his room, changed in the dark once she was certain of being alone, placed the altered tablets at his bedside, then changed back and retreated into the veranda until she was sure he'd swallowed them. She watched him convulse and collapse. She knew from her ‘research' that his heart would stop in another half-hour. All this she told me she'd accomplished just forty-five minutes ago: she was still breathless with excitement and tension.

‘Of course they will have an enquiry, and even a post-mortem, but they'll be bound to conclude it was an accident. What else can they say even if one of them suspects how convenient it's proved for me? There's no poison to be found, no signs of any struggle or weapons. There are no prints of any kind. No one saw anybody enter or leave the compound; no one could even claim to have noticed anyone familiar in the entire
neighbourhood. Anyhow, he had made enough enemies during his long and charming life to send them off on numerous false trails. And finally we can be married. We'll have our home back, and we can flee on the longest of honeymoons.'

What looms large of her from those moments and keeps returning in my memory are her eyes: at first wild while telling her story, then brimming over with tears, of relief as much as anticipation, then suspended in uncertainty, wondering why I wasn't reacting. After that they probably screwed themselves into expressions of disbelief and terror, but I can't really be sure, because by then I had lost myself.

My first words were silly: ‘But that means you have killed him!' I exclaimed, to which she didn't reply. The tears had stopped forming and she had run out of justifications. What more could she have said, after all: she had meant it to be a huge surprise, she expected me to understand instantly. I had been with her from two years before her father died. She took a few steps towards me and was possibly going to say something when she realized I was shrinking away, moving back around the bed on which I'd been sitting. Neither of us knew then that we had already touched each other for the last time.

Anyone would have reasonably expected me to be startled, even shocked, and afraid immediately, like any law-abiding middle-minded type, of the crime not being perfect after all and somehow being traced back to us. Perhaps even an instinctive recoil, a lightning reconsideration of the person before me, seeing what she'd proved herself capable of. But I have never understood myself what next overcame me, what extremely powerful feelings of revulsion, what absolutely blind terror. With my back to the wall and my hands guiding me against it,
I crept as far away from her as possible and, in a voice that kept rising, commanded her to stop approaching. She continued ahead with outstretched arms, asking me what had happened, asking me to let her come near, eventually begging me merely to recognize her. But by then hysteria had transformed me and wiped away every faculty until it was I who had become an animal.

Holding a vase in my left hand I started screaming for help, and that there had been a murder. I screamed continually; then to make some extra noise I hurled the vase at the mirror. She was living at the time in a single room along a corridor that went around an inner courtyard, and I knew the neighbours on either side would have heard me. She was still trying to comfort and stop me – ‘Darling, what are you doing? What are you afraid of? It's only me, don't you see? Everything is done already. Just let me come close to you, let me come and hold you, let me explain how I did it' – even though she must have started to realize something utterly unforeseen had occurred, that I had snapped out of shock and fear.

But until the minute I sprang to the door to answer the knocking, she could never have understood that we were no longer in this together – that not only was she alone, but from now on I was actively against her. ‘There's been a killing and she's the one that did it. I know, because she just confessed to me,' I announced to the three men who were outside, one of whom was her neighbour, ‘so shut the door and spread out if you want to get her.'

Finally she reacted, in the only way left to her. It must have been a moment's decision, because no one even had time to shut the door before she'd turned into a cat again. Or perhaps
everyone was so transfixed from not quite knowing what was expected that it bought her a precious few seconds. After all, there was no one else in the room, just me shouting, until they noticed a cat. Only, and I realized this later – at the time I thought it further evidence of her cunning – she was so transformed by terror at the prospect of being cornered that she went straight to being a kitten, less than a fifth of her usual size.

It was I who broke the silence as she dashed into a corner. ‘Don't stand there like that, don't be fooled. It's a trick of hers, I know it well. That's how she committed the murder. Grab the cat and you've got her.' I pushed the man nearest to me towards her. He knelt forward uncertainly and she seized the chance to make for the door. I shouted at the others to close their legs and bunch together. But by the time they reacted, she was outside and scurrying down the veranda.