Mice

38

But it was no ghost.

A small, comical-looking man of about fifty, with an enormously distended pot belly, stood on the doorstep. He’d tried to cover his baldness by combing the long strands of hair that grew above his right ear over the top of his crown and flattening them into place with some kind of grease. The podgy swag of his double chin hung down almost as far as his sternum. A pair of large-framed plastic glasses perched on a small snub nose, a roll-up fag dangled from a flabby bottom lip. He wore a grease-spotted yellow T-shirt stretched almost to breaking point, baggy grey tracksuit bottoms and a pair of decrepit trainers.

But what caught my attention even more than his huge stomach was the man’s arms. They were short, truncated, almost like a dwarf’s, yet powerfully muscled, the bloated, marble-veined biceps covered in the faded hieroglyphs of ancient tattoos. On one hairy wrist there was a chunky identity bracelet and one of those copper bands that are supposed to cure arthritis. On the other, a gold Rolex flashed in curious contrast to his otherwise shabby appearance.

He stood there jangling his car keys and the loose change in his pocket, waiting to be invited in. I don’t know who Mum had been expecting, but she seemed as taken aback as I was. We both stood gawping at the fat man, speechless.

He peeled the saliva-sodden cigarette from his bottom lip and flicked it away across the gravel.

‘I think you know what I’m here for,’ he said, with a belligerent thrust of his lower jaw.

But I didn’t. It was only slowly that my brain connected this caricature to the battered turquoise car, only slowly that I came to the only conclusion possible: that, in spite of all my hysterical expectations, this was the blackmailer.

‘You’d better come in,’ Mum said and opened the door wider for him to enter.

The fat man stepped into the hallway and for a moment all three of us stood there squashed close together, awkward and embarrassed, like strangers in a lift. The only sound was the fat man’s strained breathing, the only movement the rise and fall of his enormous yellow gut.

Mum hesitated, seemingly unsure what to do next. Her hand hovered at the mouth of the fleece pocket. Was she going to shoot him right then and there in the hallway? Was she going to press the gun against that swollen belly and pull the trigger before he could take another step into the house? But her hand dropped back to her side and she turned and walked slowly down the hallway and into the kitchen.

The fat man followed her and, reluctantly, I followed him. Although I lagged several paces behind, I couldn’t help noticing that he limped, his body keeling sideways every time he shifted his weight onto his left foot. One of his trainers made a squelchy fart sound at every step, like the comic honk of a clown’s car.

When we were all in the kitchen, Mum turned to face the blackmailer.

‘So I suppose you’re responsible for this?’ she said, holding up the note like a schoolmistress reproving a delinquent pupil.

‘I am indeed!’ he said jovially. Moving towards the chair Mum had just been sitting in, he asked, ‘Do you mind?’

‘Yes, I bloody well do mind!’ she snapped fiercely, but he ignored her and eased himself into the chair.

When he was settled, he looked around with a selfsatisfied smile, pushing his glasses back up his nose with an obscene jab of his pink index finger.

He had the perennially youthful face of many obese people, as if those full cheeks and dimpled chins are immune to the usual ravages of time. Sitting there at the kitchen table in a chair that his great bulk reduced to kindergarten proportions, he resembled a monstrously overgrown schoolboy, a bald, criminal Billy Bunter, who could no longer fit comfortably behind his desk. His face, with its pouty feminine lips and turned-up nose, could almost have been the face of a victim, of a mouse, if those soft features hadn’t been contradicted by the short tattooed arms. They told a different story, of hours spent bench-pressing in the gym to turn them into lethal weapons, brutal pistons that broke jaws and snapped noses. He folded them now across the yellow egg of his paunch and calmly looked Mum up and down.

‘So what’s it to be then, luv?’ he said. ‘Are you gonna pay the twenty grand or do I go to the cops?’

‘I’ll pay the money,’ Mum said, without hesitation.

‘Good,’ he beamed. ‘Very sensible. Now, how long will it take you to get it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, gnawing again at her bottom lip. ‘I’ll have to apply for a mortgage, but it shouldn’t take long, no longer than two or three weeks.’

‘I can wait a few weeks,’ he said magnanimously. ‘And how much can you give me today? Right now?’

‘I’ve got about fifteen hundred pounds in the bank,’ she replied, after a moment’s thought.

‘Can you get that for me today?’

‘Yes, I can. If we go to my bank in town I can take it out of the ATM—’ She inhaled sharply. ‘No, I’ve just remembered — there’s a daily limit on both my accounts. I can only take out three hundred from each.’

‘That’ll do for a start, that’ll do for a start.’ He slapped his thighs and beamed warmly at me as if all was right with the world and there was nothing for anyone to feel the slightest bit down about. ‘What are we waiting for then?’

I was amazed at his light-hearted breeziness. It was as if he was completely unaware that he was committing any crime at all. He seemed totally untroubled by any guilt or bad conscience, as if he was merely collecting a debt that Mum owed him, recovering money that was rightfully his.

Mum took a few agitated paces around the kitchen and then came back to the table, her hands gripping the back of the empty chair like the claws of a bird alighting on a branch (but what kind of bird — a songbird trapped in the hunter’s net or a bird of prey with a victim in her sights?).

‘I’m not going to hand it over just like that!’ she burst out.

‘I don’t see that you’ve got much choice, luv,’ the blackmailer replied. The baby face darkened and the stunted arms unfolded themselves and dropped menacingly onto the kitchen table. ‘I know you killed him. I know you killed Paul Hannigan.’

The name meant nothing to Mum. But it meant everything to me. To hear it spoken out loud like that made me flinch as if struck, and even though I was standing at the other end of the kitchen, as far away from them as possible, I shrank even deeper into my corner.

‘Before I give you any money,’ Mum persevered bravely, ‘there are things I need to know.’

The fat man made a series of disgusting grunting noises from deep in the back of his throat, raking phlegm up into his mouth. He whipped out a handkerchief with surprising dexterity, spat a green wad into the dishevelled nest, then fumbled it away into his pocket. He impatiently poked his glasses back into place, and eyed Mum quizzically.

‘Like what?’ he said. ‘What things? You ain’t in a position to make demands.’

‘I need to know how you found out.’

He gave a deep, treacly chuckle. ‘That’s easy enough,’ he said. ‘I know what happened, luv, because I was with Paul Hannigan the night he came out here to rob you. I was with him! I was here!’