Mum was so tense when she finally put the phone down that she couldn’t cope with ringing any of the other local hospitals he might have been taken to.
It wasn’t until late that afternoon that we were finally put out of our misery.
The police car whose arrival I’d long imagined, signalling our imminent arrest and the end of our attempt to escape the consequences of killing Paul Hannigan, finally pulled into our drive just before six o’clock.
Unlike my premonitions, however, the police car’s blue light wasn’t flashing and the knock at the door when it came was timid, almost apologetic. Nor were we confronted by the black-uniformed goons with crackling radios that I’d always imagined. Instead, when Mum opened the door, there was a young officer in a white short-sleeved shirt, dangling his peaked cap in his hands because it was too hot to wear. He looked like a Renaissance cherub, with blue eyes and rosy cheeks and curly blond hair that lapped his collar and was surely longer than police regulations allowed. My first thought when I saw him was:
He can’t be here to arrest us. They wouldn’t have sent an angel with such terrible news
. . .
‘Mrs Rivers?’ he asked gravely.
Mum nodded, too nervous to trust herself to speak, and showed him into the lounge. The atmosphere around us was heavy, dense, like wading through water. We all sat down and the policeman took out a little notebook from his breast pocket and a miniature, lizard-green pencil. He flicked through the pages, looking for one in particular. (
Did it have that formula written on it that they had to read out every time they made an arrest? Did he have to read it because he could never remember how it went – ‘Anything you do say may be used in evidence . . .’?
)
We waited in silence and I had the strange sensation of time slowing, slowing right down, almost coming to a complete standstill. I saw everything around me as if in slow motion: the young policeman turning a page of his notebook, the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth with concentration; Mum sitting on the very edge of her chair, frown lines like claw marks across her forehead, her hands pressed to her face like the figure on the bridge in Munch’s
Scream
.
In the next few seconds the young policeman would deliver judgement on us. The fat man was alive, he’d told the police everything and we were under arrest; the fat man was dead and we were safe . . .
And at that moment I felt a strange calm come over me, the calm that comes with resignation in the face of the final crisis. It was as if I’d been through so much that I was drained of emotion, and in its place resignation fell like a blanket of snow, numbing me, protecting me from the pain that was about to come. I wondered whether people who were about to be executed felt this same calm, this same sweet resignation, whether it descended to protect them in their final moments of agony, as the noose was tied around their necks, as their hands were tied behind the stake, allowing them to die at peace . . .
The policeman found the right page at last and looked sharply across at Mum.
‘I’m afraid it’s my duty to inform you,’ he said, ‘that the man who was taken ill here today – Mr,’ he glanced down at his notes, ‘Mr Martin Craddock – died before they could get him to the hospital.’
‘Oh, how awful,’ Mum said, with the perfect timing, the perfect intonation of a gifted actress – genuinely sad but with the tiniest dash of stiff-upper-lip stoicism. ‘That’s too bad. That really is
too bad
.’
I felt a rush of joy and relief that I had to struggle to control. I wanted to leap into the air and dance around the room, I wanted to fling my arms around the policeman’s neck and cover his cherubic face in kisses.
He was dead! The fat man was dead!
The policeman pulled a pained expression that was meant to express his sympathy at Mr Craddock’s sudden death that morning, but didn’t quite succeed. I saw him sneak a look at his watch. He wanted to keep this short; he wanted to be somewhere else.
He went over Mum’s version of events again but seemingly more out of politeness to her than because it was of any real interest to the police. He nodded and uh-huhhed in agreement, but didn’t write anything in his notebook and had already put the miniature pencil carefully back in his pocket. He looked around the lounge as if he was hoping a little dog would suddenly come bounding in and give him an excuse to change the subject.
When Mum had finished, there was a long, awkward silence. The policeman, who was clearly anxious to go, struggled to find something appropriate to say.
‘He’d a long history of heart trouble, I understand. He’d only just come out of hospital.’
‘Is that so?’ Mum said. ‘How very sad.’
After another uncomfortable pause he tried some homespun philosophy. ‘Oh well, that’s life for you. Every minute someone’s born, every minute someone dies. That’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’
There was a cringingly embarrassing moment while his words hovered in the air, which Mum sensibly brought to an end before either of us could burst out laughing. She jumped to her feet and said, ‘Yes, well, you must be a very busy man. We do appreciate you taking the time to come out here and let us know how it all ended. It’s very kind of you.’
I stood up as well, and, seeing me, the policeman sprang out of his chair with rather more eagerness than was fitting. The three of us stood there uncertainly, each of us hiding our relief that the interview was over.
‘Oh, before I forget.’ Mum took the fat man’s glasses from the top of the piano. ‘The ambulance people left these behind.’
The policeman held up the large frames, and seemed to be about to make a joke about them when he remembered the circumstances in which they’d been lost. They just fitted into his breast pocket.
We walked the policeman to the door and out onto the drive.
‘Is that his car?’ he asked, pointing with his cap.
‘Y-yes,’ Mum said, unable to conceal the nervous catch in her voice.
He went around to the driver’s side of the battered, turquoise car and leaned inside. He stayed there for several minutes. I threw Mum a questioning glance, and she just shrugged her shoulders back at me, but I could see the frown lines had returned to her forehead.
The policeman finally closed the driver’s door, then walked right around the car and stood with one hand on his hip, the other scratching his temple.
‘That’s strange,’ he said, with a perplexed smile.
‘What is, Officer?’ Mum’s whole demeanour was suddenly less convincing than before. Her expression was strained, fragile.
‘Well, it’s parked so
neatly
.’ At last he’d found something to interest him in this tedious little errand he’d been sent to run. ‘I mean, he was having a heart attack, but he managed to park his car perfectly behind yours. And not only that, he’s put it in neutral, he’s put the handbrake on, he’s turned the engine off and he’s pocketed the keys – all while he must have been in excruciating pain. It’s amazing!’
He beamed at Mum, but she seemed unsure how to respond; she was having great difficulty meeting his clear blue gaze.
‘Force of habit, I suppose,’ she said drily.
‘It must have been,’ he laughed, hooking a thumb into a trouser pocket, ‘it must have been. But it’s incredible, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Mum was reluctantly forced to agree. ‘It’s hard to believe.’
The policeman stared at the car with amused bewilderment for a few moments more, then with a final shake of the head that said he’d never cease to be amazed by the things he saw in his line of work, he turned away and walked back to his patrol car.
‘We’ll get someone out to you tonight to tow it away,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’m sure you don’t want that blocking your drive for weeks on end!’
And with that he started his engine and, with a casual mock salute, drove away.
45
The next day, Sunday, Mum and I slept in. We broke our routine and treated ourselves to a huge cooked breakfast – eggs, bacon, mushrooms and fried tomatoes – and ate it sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through the numerous supplements in the Sunday paper.
Mum looked ten years younger, the exhaustion, the dreadful strain of the previous morning, had vanished from her face.
‘Did you sleep well?’ I ventured.
She smiled broadly. ‘Very well, thanks, Shelley, very well indeed. Like a baby.’
I smiled too. Mum was sleeping again. That was a good sign.
That day had a special, magical quality to it, like Christmas Day. After everything that had happened the day before, after everything we’d been through since the early hours of April the eleventh, the nauseating roller-coaster ride that our lives had become, the relief that it was all finally over was exquisite.
I was in a state of bliss. I felt like the survivor of a shipwreck who, after drifting for weeks in an open lifeboat, lashed by storms, capsized again and again by waves the size of houses, is rescued against all the odds and suddenly finds herself sitting before a blazing fire, wrapped in blankets, sipping a hot drink. I relished every small, mundane detail of the world around me as if I were witnessing a miracle: the way the mushroom cloud of milk slowly spread its looping tentacles into the darkest depths of my coffee, the motes of dust gyrating like miniature solar systems in the sunlight slanting through the kitchen window, the minuscule purple veins on Mum’s lowered eyelids as she read the paper, the distant church bells that merged into one faint, crystalline note and seemed to speak of an idyllic, chocolate-box past. I relished all of it, I loved everything that there was for being.
We didn’t get dressed until eleven, and even then we just sat back down at the kitchen table and carried on reading the paper and made yet another pot of coffee.
We didn’t talk very much about the events of the previous day, but every now and then a thought would float into our heads and one of us would speak.
‘Do you think the blackmailer was telling the truth?’ I asked. ‘You know, when he said he hadn’t told anyone else that we’d killed Paul Hannigan?’
Mum considered. ‘Yes, I think he was. He told us the truth about his heart condition, after all.’
‘And about Paul Hannigan not having any close family who’ll come looking for him?’
‘That’s harder to say. That’s just what Hannigan told him. All I can say is that my gut feeling is it’s over now. I really believe it’s over now.’
A little later Mum exclaimed, ‘Imagine if I’d hit him, Shelley! We’d have had his body to get rid of,
and
that blasted car.
Imagine!
’
I shook my head, appalled at the thought of how close we’d come to having to enter that chamber of horrors all over again. What on earth would we have done with the fat man’s body? Buried it in the garden? Dug a grave in the vegetable patch? And what would we have done with the car? Abandoned it somewhere else with all the risks that entailed, or would it have been possible to sink it in one of the mine shafts in the national park as I’d suggested? It didn’t bear thinking about . . .
‘Thank God you’re so cack-handed,’ I joked, but Mum didn’t laugh as I’d expected.
‘It’s like a
miracle
,’ she said. ‘I mean, how could I have missed from that close? The gun was virtually touching the back of his neck. It’s not possible, Shelley. It’s just not possible.’
Later still, thinking about the conversation we’d had the day before (
Zugzwang. It’s an expression from chess.
), I said, ‘It’s all been a bit like a game of chess, hasn’t it?’
‘I suppose so, in a way. We certainly had to think hard about every move we made.’
I thought about all the decisions Mum had made since she’d brought the chopping board crashing down on Paul Hannigan’s skull: to bury him in the garden instead of calling the police, to keep on with our routine as if nothing had happened, to dump the bin bags in the abandoned mines where they were never going to be found, to keep the gun, to stage the fat man’s death for the paramedics the moment she realized he’d died of a heart attack. So many difficult decisions, so many right moves.
‘You played a brilliant game of chess, Mum.’
‘We both did, Shelley. We both did.’
When my back was starting to ache from sitting in the wooden chair for so long and I was tired of reading about new fashion trends and new diets and new movies and new starlets, I said, ‘I don’t feel guilty about what we’ve done, Mum. I’m glad they’re both dead. I don’t feel guilty about any of it – not even about yesterday. He got what he deserved. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Everything we’ve done,
everything
– it’s all been in self-defence. Even yesterday.’
After lunch we drove into the countryside and went for a long walk through the water meadows by the river. It was another glorious day, and the colours of the landscape seemed incredibly vibrant. The yellow of the rape flowers was so bright I could hardly bear to look at it; it was like staring into the broiling heart of the sun. The sky was a deep cerulean blue, the distant hills an exquisite lavender, the young trees along the riverbank a lime green verging on yellow, the tall tussocky grass a rich emerald and the wild flowers that grew among it the purest zinc white.
‘It’s like being in a Van Gogh painting,’ Mum said. ‘It’s as if the colours haven’t been mixed on the palette at all, they’ve just come straight out of the tube.’
When we reached a secluded part of the river where the stinging nettles had been left to grow out of control, Mum made sure there were no walkers or fishermen around, then took the gun from her handbag and quickly tossed it into the river. It disappeared with a pleasing
plosh
.
‘What about water always giving up its secrets?’
‘Let it. They’ll never be able to trace the gun back to us. I just didn’t want it in the house any more.’