Already Dead

4

The garage door began to rise with a faint hum as Charlie Dean thumbed the remote. As he waited for Barbara, he stood on the drive for a few minutes under his folding umbrella, looking at the sky, wondering if it would stop raining today. A clear sky and a bit of sun made his job easier, encouraged his prospective buyers into a more cheerful and optimistic frame of mind, making them more likely to sign on the dotted line

He was feeling a lot better this morning, more like his real self. In fact, he was back to the old confident Charlie who was such a talented property negotiator and so attractive to women. It felt good to be back to normal. The events of the night before had started to feel like an exciting little adventure that he might joke about with his mates in the pub for years to come.

Last night, he’d decided to go to the Old Horse for the last half-hour before closing time. He did it partly because he went there most nights, and a rare absence might be commented on by someone who knew his wife. But he went mostly because if he came home smelling of whisky, Barbara would never question where he’d been all evening. The word ‘alibi’ kept going through his mind, though he’d done nothing to feel guilty about. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking logically when he turned into the pub car park, but seeking reassurance, the comfort of doing something. Or maybe it was just the drink he needed.

The Old Horse stood on a busy corner in the centre of Wirksworth. The old folk said this little Derbyshire market town once had a lot more pubs, but they’d been steadily dwindling in numbers. A couple more would close in the next few years, and the Old Horse would probably be one of them. It still relied largely on local custom, people who lived within walking distance in the town. It hadn’t reached out to the tourists the way some of the other pubs had.

So Charlie had been in no doubt he’d see familiar faces in the bar, a few individuals who knew his name, would speak to him to say hello and would remember he was there. The landlord had a good memory for customers, and was always sober, even if none of his regulars were.

As soon as he got the first whisky in his hand, he’d begun to feel a bit more comfortable. The man in the red rain jacket had scared him, he had to admit. The thought that the stranger had come out of the woods made him go cold. He and Sheena had been in there only a few minutes before. He couldn’t stand the idea that the man in the red jacket might have been a lurking presence, watching them all the time. What a bastard. He ought to be locked up.

But that wasn’t going to happen, was it? It would involve talking to the police, and telling the story. The one thing that Charlie couldn’t do.

He checked his phone for messages while he waited for the garage door to complete its arc. When it had stopped, he put the phone back in his pocket and looked up and down the road impatiently. He was supposed to be giving Barbara a lift this morning, dropping her off at the hairdresser’s in the Market Place to get her roots done. She was scared to death of reverting to her natural colour. He couldn’t even remember what it was now.

Sheena had been terrified on that roadside last night too. She’d told him many times that she was sensitive, that she could detect things about people by some sixth sense. It wasn’t quite like reading auras, she said, but close to it. Dean didn’t know what auras were, or how you’d read one, but he didn’t say so. It was easier just to let Sheena talk when she got going. If she was interrupted, she got confused, and then tetchy. So he’d allowed her to tell him over and over again about this business of her sensitivity. She’d look at someone and say they were sad, or that she had a positive feeling about them. And Dean would nod and grunt, as if he understood. It was enough for her.

But when they’d stood by the side of the road that night and the stranger’s car had pulled up behind them, he’d noticed an expression on her face that he’d never seen before. She looked like one of those young women in a horror film when they see the monster for the first time, or hear the deranged killer approaching. In the car headlights, he’d seen the pale oval of her face, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. Terror and dread. The frozen rabbit expression.

And for the first time, he’d believed that she might be sensitive about people. Because he’d felt it himself a few moments later, a sensation like a dark shadow falling across him, even though it was night-time. A chill that struck to his heart and made the tiny hairs stand up on the back of his neck. My God, he couldn’t get away fast enough.

Charlie noticed Barbara standing in the lounge watching him through the window. She’d be wondering what he was up to, as usual. She was on the phone, of course, chatting to one of her friends, and no doubt complaining about him. But rather than concentrating on the conversation, she’d moved to a position where her eyes were fixed on his movements, staring with hawk-like intensity. She was gossiping about him and spying on him at the same time. And probably making an obscene gesture towards him with her other hand. He supposed she would call that multitasking.

He gave her a thin smile and rotated his finger in a ‘hurry up’ sign. But she stared straight through him and carried on talking. Charlie sighed. He and Barbara had been married for ten years and he’d been experiencing the seven-year itch for nine of them.

Last night in the pub, he’d taken a long gulp of Scotch and tried to think seriously about his relationship with Sheena. They’d met on a driving course at a hotel in Chesterfield. That was ironic. It was like a reversal of speed dating. They’d both moved a bit too fast once, driven over some artificial speed limit by a few miles an hour on an empty road, and got caught by one of those damn cameras. They’d had to sit in a classroom for four hours and be lectured about what naughty children they were. He liked to refer to it enigmatically as an SAS course. Let people interpret it in any way they wanted. He knew that SAS stood for Speed Awareness Scheme.

But four hours. And no driving involved.

‘What?’ he asked a mate who’d done the course before. ‘So that’s four hours doing … what? Sitting in a classroom being lectured?’

‘You get to watch a video.’

‘Oh, great.’

Four hours. It was enough to make you want to jump in your car and put your foot flat down on the pedal, just to prove that the rest of the world didn’t move so slowly. Four hours. It felt more like a year off his life. He hadn’t been kept in detention since his last year at school, and that wasn’t for four sodding hours. He could have reported the school for breaching his human rights, if they’d tried it. But because his car registration number appeared on that camera, he was stuck in a room all afternoon to avoid getting three penalty points on his licence. It would have been terminally boring without Sheena to look at. Their speed had led to their meeting, but their first encounter had been slow.

Charlie made a deliberate pantomime of checking the refuse containers after yesterday’s collection. They had no wheelie bins this far up The Dale, but there was a green kerbside food caddy, a blue box for glass and cans, and a blue bag for paper and cardboard. He checked that Barbara had removed the kitchen caddy and taken it back indoors, then locked the handle back down again. The smell of rotting food was unpleasant. He ought to clean that out one day.

He picked up a bit of rubbish from the drive, a scrap of paper dropped by a passing youth or a careless binman. Let Barbara find some reason to complain about that.

Yes, that driving course in Chesterfield had changed Charlie’s life. At first, it had reminded him of the management seminars he’d been obliged to attend when he was a middle manager at the finance company, before he left to get a job selling property at Williamson Hart. You had to look interested at those things, and you were expected to participate. It had all the same buzz phrases and acronyms too. This one started with the Three Es for improvement of road safety — Education, Engineering and Enforcement.

Two-thirds of the class had been caught by speed cameras going over the limit in a thirty zone. The oldest attendee complained that he’d been driving for sixty-four years, always kept his insurance, tax and MOT paid up to date all that time, then got caught by a speed camera doing thirty-seven miles per hour, no doubt in his Fiat Uno or something. Another man said he’d volunteered for the course to get his insurance premiums down. One woman admitted she’d taken a re-test after being convicted of drink driving.

On the other hand, there were a couple of decent blokes there who’d been a good laugh. One of them had arrived a few minutes late, looking flushed and sullen. He claimed to have done some advanced driver training in the military, and hinted at Special Forces. But throughout the session he shouted out the stupidest comments and answers he could think of, suggesting that from a pollution point of view it was better to flog a V8 Range Rover to death, then shoot a cow, because it produced just as many emissions as the car. As the afternoon wore on, he’d become more and more outrageous, until the presenter finally lost patience with him and threatened to throw him off the course, which would have resulted in three points on his licence. The other bloke had admitted he liked to drive fast, and blamed the government, speed cameras and the police for his presence on the course. It probably wasn’t the attitude that was expected of them.

Well, they were the only people who’d made those four hours of his life even remotely worthwhile. At the end of the session, Charlie had got Sheena’s phone number, and gone to the pub for a drink with the two blokes. It was one of them who’d made the joke about calling the session an SAS course. They were both full of it, really. But Charlie could see exactly where they were coming from.

Charlie had felt a bit sorry for that presenter, though. He looked professional, had his name badge on a yellow lanyard round his neck, and a Dell laptop running a PowerPoint presentation. He’d shown them an animated reconstruction of a multiple pile-up on the M4, in which fifty vehicles had collided in fog, causing ten fatalities as a truck loaded with gas canisters exploded and started a massive blaze. Then he handed out handsets to vote on test questions. What was the national speed limit on a dual carriageway? Half the group got it wrong. They discovered they could have been driving faster after all. Well, fast legally anyway.

The course was run by AA DriveTech. Didn’t the AA used to stand up for motorists? He had a vague impression of his grandfather talking about driving his old car and being warned by an AA patrol of a speed trap ahead. Now they were part of the process of persecuting motorists, no doubt taking a decent share of the proceeds from the people in that classroom.

While the presenter was speaking, Charlie had done a quick calculation on his notepad. Twenty-six people here, who’d each paid more than ninety pounds to be on the course. The presenter said this was one of three sessions today. If the other sessions had the same number of people, that came to … over seven thousand pounds for the day. And that was just for the one venue. There were other places in the county he could have chosen. Nice work, if you could get it.

He pictured those two dozen people gathered in a room at a hotel on the Chesterfield bypass, next to a Tesco supermarket. He bet that some of them didn’t even drive often enough to get their cars dirty.

Charlie Dean stopped what he was doing. His eyes glazed over as he stared across the narrow street at the stone wall opposite. His umbrella sagged on to his shoulder and rain began to fall on his face. But he hardly noticed.

He’d just remembered the mud on his car. It must be all over the bodywork and the hubcaps, and coating the inside of the wheel arches. He’d forgotten about it last night, when he came back from the pub, but it would be obvious this morning in daylight. He recalled that he’d even plastered some over his number plate, in a misguided attempt at secrecy. If the number was still illegible he could get stopped by the police — not that many police officers were seen in Wirksworth these days. Just as bad, his bosses at Williamson Hart might start asking questions. He would be ruining his image. He couldn’t do anything about it now, though. He’d have to find time to go through the car wash on the way to the office.

He looked at his watch. Damn, he was going to be late if Barbara didn’t hurry up. He hated that. He wanted to be known as the perfect employee — the best salesman, the top negotiator, the guy who always arrived on time and stayed until the work was done. That made it much easier to get away with the rest of it.

So what was she up to? Surely she couldn’t still be on the phone? He knew she must be doing this deliberately. For some reason, she had it in for him this morning. Well, what was new? She’d never needed a reason before.

Charlie looked down at the surface of the drive he was standing on. Lumps of wet mud lay on the concrete, either side of a set of dirty tyre tracks. Could he blame the binmen for that? Probably not. They came to The Dale too early in the day. Anyway, Barbara would notice the mud as soon as she set eyes on the car.

He took a deep breath, and knew he’d have to face the worst. He had a couple of minutes perhaps to come up with a credible story. A new property that was half built, a site where construction hadn’t been finished and the access road was full of mud? It might work.

Last night, he’d driven in forwards and parked the BMW pointing towards the back of the garage. He normally reversed in, to give himself an easy exit. But last night he didn’t want to be messing about turning in the road. There were always too many nosy people around, too many pairs of eyes peering from behind their curtains in The Dale.

He unlocked the doors of the car, and the lights flashed. He turned back from the road and looked at the BMW.

‘Oh, shit.’

He froze, not knowing what to do. Or, at least, what to do first. He thought about panicking, kicking the walls, sitting in the car and turning on the engine to fill the garage with exhaust fumes and ending it all, right here and now. It would be preferable to going indoors to Barbara and telling her everything. He might as well kill himself now, rather than wait for her to do it. He could make it painless anyway. Barbara wouldn’t consider that option.

Finally, he fumbled for the remote and closed the garage door, glancing over his shoulder again to see if anyone was outside the house, watching. He had a horribly vivid vision of the man in the red rain jacket, hood up against the downpour, watching him from the dark. But the road was empty. The coast was clear.

Dean let himself into the house, and poured warm water into a bucket with a trembling hand. He added a splash of washing up liquid, though he’d always told people it was too astringent and could damage your paintwork. He went back to the garage and found an old sponge on the shelf. He hesitated for only a moment before he began to remove the bloody hand print from the boot of his BMW.