The Dumb House (16 page)

I was tired. Now that the first rush of adrenaline had ended, I could feel the energy bleeding away. I stopped kicking. I knew Jimmy was still alive – I could hear him breathing, a thick, gurgling sound as if the blood had run into his mouth and throat. I looked around. There was no one in sight, yet I felt I was being watched, all of a sudden. It was quite dark by then. The lamp in the alley had come on, a pale orange that made the blood seem dark and flat around the fallen man. I looked down. My clothes were spattered with blood, but in that light it might have been oil, or dirt. Nobody seeing me would have known what had happened. A second wave of energy ran through me – a slow warmth, not a rush like before, but a wave, a gradual movement that filled my whole body. I was aware of a profound pleasure, but it was not altogether mine, it was abstract somehow, as if it came from everything around me, from the shrubs and the light and the dark blue of the sky. The world was so massive, so mysterious. I remembered a game I had played with myself as a child. Standing like this, under an orange streetlamp, I would look at my clothes and wonder what colour they really were – were they grey and blue, as they seemed in the daylight, or were they really, for that moment at least, this other colour they appeared to be under the light? The absurdity of this memory struck me immediately, and I almost laughed out loud.

I looked at Jimmy. He seemed small and empty, and I felt sorry for him again. He had never really understood anything that had happened to him. Even he had probably seen that his need for Lillian was pitiful, the craven attachment of a desperate man to whatever drifts his way. He had been on shifting ground all his life. Everything he had ever said was bravado.

I bent over the body and peered into Jimmy's face. It was cold now, and I was pretty certain he would die if I left him there, in his light clothes. On the other hand, someone might
find him. The only logical thing to do was to finish him off-there was no other choice. If he was found, and managed to report what had happened, he might put the experiment in jeopardy. I reached into my pocket for a weapon and found it empty. The Stanley knife must have fallen out somewhere, yet I was sure it had been there when I left the house.

I looked around. I was not quite sure what I wanted – a stick, a piece of rope – I wasn't thinking straight. My eyes lit on the plastic bag under the bench. It was still there, where he had left it; when I looked inside, I found what I instantly understood was the answer to my problem and I was strangely grateful, as if he had provided the solution deliberately. The bag contained a full bottle of supermarket whisky – not the cider I had imagined – a packet of cigarettes and a box of Swan matches. Everything I needed was there. I dragged Jimmy into the shadow of the bushes near the fence, then poured the whisky over his face and chest. I emptied the whole bottle, making sure as much as possible coated his face and shirt, then I struck a match and tossed it on to the body. It caught fire with a sudden rush, a bluish flame that turned to red immediately. Jimmy moved, as if he wanted to stand up, but it only lasted a moment, before he fell back, wrapped in a sheath of fire.

I backed away. I was surprised by the heat, and how easily he had caught fire. The shirt was burning, it was some kind of synthetic, and that was what I smelled at first. Then, within moments, something else broke through – a sickening aroma of burning skin and hair, nothing like what I would have imagined. The face blistered and seared in the flames, the hair fizzled away, and I knew, before I left him, that there was no way he could have survived.

It was finished. It was a little unpleasant, at the end, when he was burning, but I soon put it behind me and walked away
as casually as I could. The thought that someone was watching from somewhere occurred to me again, but instead of bothering me, it made me feel even more detached, as if what I had done was sanctioned by that invisible witness. I remembered a story Mother had told me, about an Antarctic expedition – how the men had imagined that someone was walking alongside them, but when they turned to look at him, he disappeared. The explorers had said that this phenomenon had never made them uneasy; they had even felt comforted by it, when they ran into difficulties. That was how my secret accomplice felt to me – an elusive companion whose presence was eerie but, at the same time, oddly reassuring.

It was that beautiful time of night when the air is fresh and the stars begin to show in the dome of the sky. The houses on Cuthbert Street were lit. I had an image of the people inside, sitting down to supper in their warm rooms, made quiet by the time of day and the season. I imagined them behind their curtains, diffident with one another, careful of things, aware of their own precious transience. I knew they were there, but I still felt alone in the world; it was as if they existed in a parallel space, like my unseen companion. I might have been invisible at that moment, running my hands through a wet hedge to rinse off the blood and dirt, stopping again under each streetlamp, to look at the blood on my shoes and clothes. I was sure it could easily have been taken for oil. Not that it mattered. I knew nobody would see me.

At the end of the street, near the car park, a large house stood detached from the others, in its own grounds. It was a Georgian house – it had been painted pink, and was half-obscured by a hedge of chamaecyparis. Someone inside was listening to music; I recognised the piece, and I stopped to listen. The singer was Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and I felt a wave of emotion,
a mixture of joy and regret, a sense of the beauty and transience of the world. I knew I was being sentimental, but that did not detract from the poignancy of the moment. I pushed open the wrought-iron gate and stepped into the garden to listen. The front garden was paved, like a courtyard, but it contained a number of large containers of evergreen shrubs, camellias and rhododendrons, tensed with bud, wrapped in a cold film of frost. There was a square stone pool on one side, surrounded by coloured flagstones. It was filled with thirty or more Japanese carp, far too many for the size of the pool, crowded together like opium smokers, golden and red, their plump bodies hanging in the water, almost motionless. I stood there, in a stranger's garden, gazing at them. They seemed to me utterly amazing: miraculous, absurd presences, suspended in the black water. I wondered what would happen to them when the really hard frosts came, when the water froze and they lay helpless, in their sleeves of ice, or pressed to the hard bed of the pool, unable to disappear into the mud.

As I drove home, it began to snow, slowly at first, then heavy and quick, filling the windscreen till I could barely see the road ahead. By the time I reached the edge of town, it had begun to settle, fledging the trees and the empty fields on either side, augmenting the distance between one familiar object and the next, till the landscape seemed wider and emptier than before. I was tired now; I could hardly see the road, and I found it difficult to drive after I had left the streetlamps of Weston behind me. At one point, I pulled into a lay-by and sat in the car with the engine running. My watch had stopped. More than an hour had passed since the episode in the churchyard – maybe two hours – but it felt like minutes. I was surprised at how much it had affected me. Not long before I had been elated, filled with
energy, convinced that what I had done was a logical necessity. Now I was exhausted, and the whole thing seemed arbitrary and absurd. I got out of the car and walked a few yards in the thick snow: I wanted to be out in the open, to breathe the cold air and think. I was parked on the highest point of the road, on a ridge looking down over the partly wooded valley. I could see the lights of a farmhouse at the foot of the slope and it occurred to me that this was the house that had once belonged to a friend of my parents. I had even visited there as a small boy, one Sunday afternoon in winter. All of a sudden I had a vivid memory of standing in the hall in a bow tie and flannel trousers, waiting for someone to take my coat. It must have been Christmas: I could smell mince pies and my fingers were tingling with frost. The memory was instantaneous and clear: a long hallway led to the kitchen, at the back of the house, a large painting of a horse hung on the wall to the right of the door, a wooden staircase rose into the darkness. I was trying to remember the name of my host, a man about my father's age, whose wife had died young – Thompson, Thomason – when, in my mind's eye, a light came on above me and a girl slowly descended the stairs. Helen Thompsett. She was carrying something. I couldn't see what it was, but I knew there was an object in her hand. For some reason, I had the idea that it was a candle.

Now the house belonged to someone else. I had no idea where Helen was. It was the first time I had thought about her in twenty years, but now I could see her clearly: her hair was dark-brown, tied back with a pale blue ribbon; she would have been two or three years older than me then; she was dressed for a party, in blue satin. I could see her eyes, they were the same deep-blue colour as her dress. I had been in love with her for a while; perhaps it had even begun that evening, though I hardly ever saw her, she attended a girls' school on the other
side of the county, and only ever came home in the holidays. I had probably only seen her three or four times, once for that evening around Christmas and on the rare visits she and her father made to our house, but I could see her clearly in my mind's eye: radiant, mysterious, unbelievably beautiful. For one absurd moment, a wave of regret passed through my body, a truly physical sensation, like sudden blood loss, or vertigo. I wanted desperately to go back to that moment, to see her descending those stairs again, to have power over time. Once, in childhood, I had read a story where a boy has the ability to move through time, because of a magic word he has learned from an ancient Persian scholar. For several months, I really believed this word existed.

In the farm below, someone was out in the yard, moving about with a torch or a lamp. The house was lit too: these were the only lights I could see across the whole valley, though I knew there were two or three cottages further along the single-track lane that ran down from the main road to the farm. Above the lights, the woods were filling quickly with snow. I stood a while, watching it fall, and I tried to imagine that I was looking back into the past. I imagined, if I drove on to the junction and found that narrow road, I could drive down into the yard where Mother was leaving the house, laughing softly, calling goodnight to the people behind her and I was turning back for a last glance at Helen, too shy to speak, or even wave.

Things were falling apart. My sense of elation had completely disappeared, and I was beginning to be afraid, wondering if the body had been found, if I had left any clues. Maybe the Stanley knife had fallen out of my pocket during the scuffle, and now it was lying there in the dark, covered with my fingerprints, a few feet from the body. For a moment, I even considered the absurd idea of going back and checking to see if I had left it behind, but
I managed to put that notion out of my mind. I got back into the car and drove on, peering over the wheel to see my way in the snow. I had to move slowly: the snow on the road was thick and fresh, and I could hear it crunching under the tyres. I repeated a list of words I had memorised years before, a list of place names from Canada. I was surprised I still remembered so many. I had liked the Indian words, because they seemed old and rounded, like stones smoothed in a riverbed, but some of the new names were beautiful too, with their suggestion of a new life, and the promises the settlers had made to themselves as they wandered in handfuls across the country: Vermilion Bay; Fort Hope; Fort Resolution. I was tired now, and it was hard work concentrating. At one point, an animal – a dog, or a fox – ran across the beam of my headlamps and I hit the brakes, skidding slightly, though there was no danger of hitting the creature, I was moving so slowly and it was so far ahead it had been and gone before I could even tell what it was.

That night I hid my bloodstained clothes in the shed and bathed thoroughly as soon as I got home. Lillian was still asleep when I slipped in beside her. I remember thinking how lucky it was that she slept so deeply. The next day I checked the car and washed away some traces of blood, then I drove back to Weston. I parked in the usual place and began walking slowly in the direction of the library. When I reached the churchyard entrance, I found it closed. There were four policemen in uniform, and several other men in civilian clothes; they were searching the grounds, wandering up and down between the headstones in the early afternoon sunlight. Much of the snow had thawed here, but patches remained in places, in the shadow of the hedge and around some of the shrubs by the graves. A small crowd had gathered by the gate to watch, casual shoppers
and office workers on their lunch breaks, hoping to catch a glimpse of the murder weapon. There was a small tent pitched near the steps, where I assumed the body was concealed. I was a little surprised, as I thought Jimmy had fallen a little further away.

I stopped and joined the other watchers. I was surprised that nobody tried to move us on, the way they do in the films. I half-expected a gruff, good-natured constable to wander across and wave his arms, telling us all to go home, that there was nothing to see, that it was all over. Instead, the men in the churchyard ignored us: they were going about their business, a little bored, perhaps, yet suitably thorough, systematic in their approach, as any professional will be when he is being observed at work, treading a fine line between complacency and interest, maintaining the appropriate gravity of the position. One man, who seemed to be charged with watching the crowd for any potential interloper, stood next to the thin plastic tape that was stretched across the entrance to the churchyard. From time to time he glanced at a young woman by the gatepost, and gave her small, shy smiles, which she returned brightly. He was younger than the other men, and had grown a moustache to seem older, but this only had the effect of exaggerating his youth. It amused me, I must admit, despite my anxiety about the knife, to imagine these two people flirting at the scene of my crime. I lingered for a few minutes, half-hoping the policeman would speak; perhaps he was too conscious of his position, perhaps he was just shy, but he did no more than smile for a few minutes longer, and after a while the girl moved off with her friends, presumably to get back to work. I glanced at my watch. It was one thirty. I considered whether it was correct to ask the young policeman what had happened, or whether this was expressing too much of an interest. I didn't want to draw unnecessary attention to
myself, yet it seemed a harmless enough question. Suddenly, I heard a voice at my shoulder, and I turned to find the librarian, Miss Patterson, standing beside me.