* * *
Deciding to kill her husband after years of unconscious vacillation was like the sudden arrival last autumn at a decision to shift the sofa from against the back wall of the drawing room— where it had languished for as long as she could remember— over to beneath the window.
Complacency and a lack of adventure were the prime offenders and, just like it had been with the sofa, Maureen now saw lots of reasons why this was the obvious thing to do. More than that, it provided her with a frisson of excitement that had been missing from her life more or less since she and Stan had married in 1967.
The newspapers had called it the "summer of love" —either that year or the one before or after: Maureen couldn't exactly recall which— but for the newlywed Walkers it had been the year of
"business pretty much as usual."
In other words, the spectacle of the panting, groaning figure of her husband (slimmer then, it had to be said, but still carrying a stone or so too much flesh) climbing on board the good ship Maureen for a quick launch before rolling over into a sleep promoted by Black Sheep and interspersed with raucous snoring.
The snoring had sometimes grown so loud that Maureen had taken to pinching her husband's buttocks between her fingernails to interrupt his slumber. It proved to be highly effective and— Maureen now realised in the flush of her decision to do away with her resident market-gardener (who now carried some four stones more than was ideal for his age and height) —it was strangely enjoyable in a kind of sadistic way.
So, there was the snoring: that would end; and there were the monosyllabic conversations in the Conservative Club or The Three Pennies— those would stop. And all the half-baked get-rich-quick schemes and the long-promised Big One that would keep them in clothes-pegs and manure for the rest of their empty lives. Not to mention, of course, the daily intake of Black Sheep, the constant loamy smell of earth and outdoors that Stan wafted in front of her when he deigned to return home for his food, and— worst of all, she now realised— Stanley's occasional need to remove his striped pyjama bottoms and claim his conjugal rights while Maureen stared over his thrusting shoulders at the bedroom curtain blowing in the breeze from the open window… imagining, lying there with her legs spread wide, she was Tinkerbell in the Peter Pan story, preparing to fly off into the night and over the spires and sooty roofs of Luddersedge into a new and distant morning somewhere far away. Somewhere better.
Yes, it would be just like moving the sofa.
But how to do it was the question.
Eventually, having discounted garroting and knifing (she didn't have a gun, so shooting was a nonstarter), Maureen had almost lost hope— already starting to convince herself that the whole thing had been a pipe dream… the naive whimsy of a bored housewife, like something out of a macabre version of Mills & Boon— when BBC2 ran a film about a hit man hired to murder the wife of a wealthy industrialist.
The film was complex— all the more so because Stan spent the entire duration of it slouched in the easy chair by her side snoring so loudly that she kept missing pieces of dialogue— but it was the basic principle that attracted her. For the first time in a long time, she felt randy— really randy: not the dull ache she got watching Billy Roberts but something almost primal… accentuated by the fact that Stan was right by her side, oblivious to the drama unfolding before his closed eyes.
"I'm going to do this to you," Maureen whispered, nodding toward the TV, her face bathed in the flickering glow of the screen on which a man stealthily crept around the outside of a house that, in Luddersedge, would have been a stately home. "I'm going to hire a hit man. What do you say to that?"
Stan snuffled and moved his head to one side before resuming his cacophonous drone.
* * *
The following day, with Stan already gone for a full session at the allotment, his pack-up of tuna-and-mayonnaise sandwiches in his little Tupperware container, Maureen did the dishes while she stared out of the window and wondered where she should go to hire someone to kill her husband.
Somehow, the prospect seemed daunting.
What went on in America— a fabled land that Maureen had never visited— seemed hard to translate in English terms. And even harder to translate in terms of Luddersedge.
It was like pop music, she mused, placing her favourite floral-designed plate lovingly in the back of the draining rack beside the sink. Like "Twenty-four Hours From Tulsa" (she had always loved Gene Pitney) —you could never imagine it being "Twenty-Four Hours From…": from where? Tottenham? It had to begin with a "T" to preserve the alliteration (that wasn't how she thought of it, not knowing alliteration from an adverb, but she did recognise the need for a
tuh
sound to balance the one in "
tuh
wenty-four"). Torquay?
She sang the first line over the sound of Terry Wogan, while he rambled on about the DG in Auntie Beeb. "Own-lee twenty-four hours from Tor-quay… own-lee one day away from your harms…" She chuckled and dropped cereal spoons and a butter knife into the holder, trailing suds across the crockery already drying.
It was comical but it was serious, too. It was serious because it was impossible… ridiculous and impossible. Where on earth could she find a hit man around Luddersedge… or even in the comparative metropolises of Halifax and Burnley and Bradford? The watery autumn sunshine through the kitchen windows was already making the whole idea seem a nonsense, the idle dream of a woman too long in one place and far too long in one relationship; a relationship which had spawned nothing but familiarity and indifference.
The answer came, as answers so often do, when Maureen was quietly but firmly prepared to abandon the problem that had called for it.
It came with the clatter of the post-box in the front door and the dull plop of something landing in the hallway, resounding so emphatically over the sound of the radio that Maureen half expected Terry Wogan to comment:
Well, listeners, let's
fi
nd out what's in the "Big Goody" that the postie's just dropped through the post-box of Luddersedge's very own Maureen Walker!
The Big Goody in question was neither big nor good: It was only an update catalogue from Empire Stores. It lay on the mat with two letters at its base, looking briefly, for all the world, like a skull and crossbones. One of the letters, Maureen saw even as she stooped to pick them up, was a window envelope containing the gas bill. The other, a franked brown job, had Stan's name carefully typed in bold.
It was accepted in the Walker household that all post could be opened by whoever picked it off the mat in front of the door, no matter who it was addressed to. Thus it was that Maureen opened the official-looking letter that turned out to be from the local council.
The letter, from a clerk (of unknown gender and indecipherable signature) who went by the unlikely multisyllabic name of S. Willingtonton (surely a typo), said in formal tones which oozed insincere regret that, as had been "previously intimated," the "allotment facility" in which Stan "heretofore owned a one-sixth portion" was to be "compulsorily withdrawn" and sold to a "local consortium" for "extensive redevelopment" by their (unnamed) client. Stan would be, S. Willnigtonton continued, "duly recompensed." It closed with (a) a request for Stan to contact the council offices as soon as possible and (b) the assurance that the author remained— "sincerely," no less— Stan's.
She clutched the single sheet of paper in a quivering hand and smiled up at the ceiling.
Her husband's beloved allotment was soon to be no more and he was about to become depressed.
Very
depressed. Moreover, though he did not yet know it, he was about to become suicidal.
Maureen had her hit man— it was Stanley himself.
* * *
The next day was a maelstrom of activity for the soon-to-be-widowed Maureen Walker, but then speed was essential.
Clearly, Stan could not be allowed to see the letter. Even a man as docile as Stanley Walker would be spurred to frenetic activity by the prospect of losing all that he held dear in life. Telephone calls would be made and, perhaps (God forbid), in the face of organised resistance on the part of the gardeners affected, the council might even reconsider its decision.
The letter therefore duly disappeared into the labyrinthine recesses of Maureen's handbag, a shadowy and even hostile (being overtly feminine) terrain of mirrors and lipsticks and thick bandages with flyaway wings that Maureen inserted into her pants for a few days every month. It was a domain into which Stan seldom ventured unless pressed.
However, if Stan were to be rendered so uncharacteristically distraught, Maureen reasoned that the letter from S. Willingtonton— effectively her husband's suicide note— would not realistically be sat upon for too long. For the scenario she had concocted to work, he must receive it and he must take action immediately, while the balance of his mind was on the blink (or whatever they usually said in such cases).
Poison was the answer. And, with Stan's allotment shed undoubtedly containing all manner of suitable candidates for the job— slug pellets, greenfly sprays, and other assorted insecticides— Maureen recognised an almost comical irony in the situation: An enemy for so long, the allotment was proving to be the means of her very salvation.
How to administer the answer to her prayers, however, posed something of a problem… but not for long. The solution, when it came, brought with it a pleasantly appropriate subtext: It would be in a healthy glass of Masham's finest. Stan would be put to rights by a Black Sheep.
Who
done it? Maureen mused to herself as she sat in bed on the night of the fateful letter's arrival, with her husband happily snoring by her side, oblivious to the trip he was about to make out of her life forever.
Ewe
done it!
It was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud. But she didn't think that would be either appropriate or fair: After all, letting him sleep undisturbed, even without the usual pinching of the fleshy pads masquerading as Stan's buttocks, was tantamount to a last meal. Let him enjoy it.
The small puzzle as to how Maureen might gain access to Stan's allotment shed without Stan being there was also neatly and unexpectedly solved the next morning when Stan announced over his breakfast that he wouldn't be needing his customary pack-up because he had to go into Leeds. Maureen didn't ask what the reason for this expedition might be: She didn't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth and, anyway, Stan occasionally made the trip to Leeds when something was needed for his allotment. (They had shops there that actually catered for the devoted gardener, their shelves replete with all manner of equipment and tools… not to mention a healthy supply of poisonous substances: Maureen hoped that Stan already had plenty of these in his shed.)
"Will you be coming straight back?" she asked, hardly daring to hope too much for the response she wanted. "I mean, do you want me to make you some sandwiches for later in the afternoon?"
Stan shook his head silently and spooned sugar into his pot of tea. Without even looking up from his
Sun
newspaper, Stan explained that he would get something in Leeds.
Maureen felt like doing a little dance but managed to maintain her self-control and, instead, put two more pieces of bread into the toaster by means of celebration. "Getting something in Leeds" meant that Stan would call in at one of the pubs that served Black Sheep— he knew them all— but, more importantly as far as Maureen was concerned, it meant that his palate would, she hoped, already be so suitably fogged by the time she presented him with her "special" bottle that he might not notice any unusual additional ingredients… or, at least, not until it was too late.
Stan left the house for the ten o'clock Rochdale-to-Halifax bus (he would change for the Leeds bus in Halifax) and Maureen watched him walk along the path with something that might almost— almost— have been sadness, short-lived though it was.
The rain started as she finished the washing-up, further evidence— if any were needed, she thought— that the gods favoured her plans: The rain meant that any other would-be market gardeners would think twice before spending time in their allotment, so there shouldn't be too many (if any) witnesses to her visit. Even Stan was reluctant to venture out of the house in the rain and, for a moment, Maureen became concerned that the change in the weather might dissuade him from the trip to Leeds.
She sat on the bed watching out of the window until the bus came. She could see the top of it through the gardens across the street, though she couldn't see if anyone was standing at the stop. But the bus stopped— so there must have been someone there— and then, just to make sure, she waited a few minutes to see if Stan returned before setting out, her hands encased in a pair of light blue Marigold gloves and the shed key tucked safely in her coat pocket, on the first part of her mission.
By the time she reached Honeydew Lane, the rain had grown heavier and the skies across Luddersedge— and across the entire valley, Maureen reasoned, looking over to the horizon in each direction— were slate grey and menacing.
Maureen slipped through the metal gate, cringing at the sound of hinges in desperate need of a drop or two of oil, and made her way to Stan's section.