Mice

40

The morning clouds had dispersed completely now, and the kitchen was filled with bright golden sunlight. It reflected off the fat man’s glasses so that when he turned towards the window his eyes disappeared behind two white rectangles of glare.

The ebullient spring sunshine was completely out of tune with the tense scene unfolding in the kitchen. I couldn’t help thinking that if this were a novel or a movie, the blackmailer would have arrived in the middle of a ferocious thunderstorm, a day of growling thunder and lurid yellow forks of lightning, torrential rain lashing the gravel drive. But this wasn’t any fiction, this was real life. There he sat in our sun-filled kitchen, slowly unpicking the stitches of the shroud that hid Paul Hannigan’s decomposing corpse, while the day outside called for picnics and barbecues and ice-creams at the seaside.

He looked directly at Mum now, his hands holding his belly like a bright yellow beachball he’d just caught and was preparing to toss back to her. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s when I started to think that you two might have done something to Paul.

‘I tried to think back to that night and what I’d seen in those few seconds when I’d been standing in the garden looking into the kitchen. I could remember it pretty clearly, considering how drunk I’d been: the kitchen lit up like a TV set and Paul chasing the girl round and round the table. I went over it and over it in my mind. I had to be missing something, because Paul hadn’t killed no one. It was driving me crazy — and then at last I cracked it!

‘I’d been concentrating on Paul all the time, see, I’d been looking at what he’d been doing. But when I focused on the girl instead — well, the whole picture changed like magic. Paul weren’t chasing her around the table any more — she was chasing Paul! And if she was chasing Paul,’ he added, smiling, ‘then maybe the blood she was covered in weren’t hers.’

Mum’s right hand slipped subtly into the fleece’s pouch pocket. I knew she had her hand on the gun. Was she taking the safety catch off? Was she getting ready to shoot him?

The blackmailer hadn’t noticed her surreptitious movement. He continued with his story, apparently suspecting nothing.

‘If something had happened to Paul in this house, I was sure there’d be some sort of clue left behind. So I decided to come back to have a poke around and see what I could find.’

I saw Mum draw herself up to her full height and straighten her back. She knew there’d been no clues for him to find in the house; she’d taken care of that herself, she’d dotted every i, she’d crossed every t. But I had a horrible presentiment of what the blackmailer was going to say next, and I felt my knees start to tremble in my pyjamas.

‘I’d seen you go shopping in town that Saturday morning, so I drove down here the very next Saturday, betting that this was a regular weekly outing. Sure enough, at about ten I saw your car go past with the two of you in it chattering away like a couple of canaries. So I drove on up to the house and let myself in.’

‘How did you get in?’ Mum asked, horrified.

‘Paul may have talked a load of rubbish most of the time, but he weren’t wrong about the windows on these old properties — easy to force as anything. I see you’ve had new locks fitted to them now. Very sensible.

‘Anyways, I searched the place from top to bottom and I couldn’t find nothing. The whole place was as clean as a whistle and I’d almost given up, to tell you the truth, when I found this.’

He leaned forwards and reached into his back pocket, his face turning an unhealthy claret with the effort, his breathing coming in phlegmy rasps. Finally he tossed a pink plastic card onto the kitchen table. Mum picked it up, not understanding, having to squint closely at the childish signature with its silly arabesque and the postage-stamp-sized photo before — with an involuntary grimace — she understood what it was.

She was unable to resist throwing a hostile, accusatory glance at me.

‘It’s Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence,’ the fat man said. ‘I found it upstairs, hidden away in a little box in your girl’s dressing table. I knew that if this was here. . then Paul Hannigan had never got out of this house alive.’

Mum watched him struggle to put the driver’s licence back in his pocket. She seemed somehow reduced, deflated. She collapsed in the chair opposite him as if she feared she’d fall down if she didn’t move quickly.

She’d been defeated by the blackmailer, by the obese bullfrog grinning at her across the table. And she’d been defeated, ironically, by the person she’d been trying so hard to protect: me. I’d given the enemy the key that had enabled him to get inside our fortress, to get behind her carefully prepared defences and force our surrender. She couldn’t hide her bitter disappointment, her sense of betrayal.

‘It weren’t difficult to work out what must have happened,’ the fat man said, smiling smugly at his own cleverness. ‘You disturbed Paul while he was robbing the house, and there’d been a fight. Somehow your girl here managed to get his knife off of him and in the struggle he’d ended up dead. You thought you could cover the whole thing up. You thought you could outsmart everyone and just carry on with your nice little lives as if nothing had happened. But you hadn’t counted on me cropping up, had you?’

He put his muscled dwarf arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair.

‘I’d bet money he’s buried out there in the garden somewhere. Am I right or am I right?’ He chuckled his phlegmy treacly laugh again. ‘Yeah, I thought so.’ He grinned, Mum’s sullen silence all the confirmation he needed.

He stared steadily at Mum, obviously savouring every second of her misery. Her hand had long since dropped out of the fleece pocket and was hanging limply by her side.

‘There you go,’ he said cheerily, ‘now you know everything. So are you gonna pay the twenty grand, or do I have to write a little note to the boys in blue?’

‘How many other people have you told about this?’ Mum’s voice was hoarse and frail.

‘None,’ he answered flatly.

‘How can I be sure about that?’ she persisted. ‘How do I know you haven’t blabbed about this in every pub in town? How do I know you’re not just the first of God knows how many blackmailers who are going to come crawling out of the woodwork?’

‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’ He shrugged, but after a moment’s thought he seemed to accept that this wouldn’t count for much in the circumstances, and he tried to give her a little bit more.

‘Listen, luv,’ he said. ‘I’ve done three long stretches inside, and every time it was because someone grassed me up. I don’t tell no one nothing no more. I’ve learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut.’

‘Why did you wait so long before coming here?’ Mum asked. ‘You found the driver’s licence — ’ she calculated quickly — ‘on the twenty-second of April: that’s over a month ago.’

He winked at me conspiratorially like a mischievous uncle. ‘She don’t miss a trick, your mum, does she?’ He turned back to her and his smile faded. ‘I was in hospital. I’ve got a dodgy ticker. I was in hospital almost a month. They only let me out the day before yesterday. Now, I think that’s enough questions. When are we gonna go and get this six hundred quid?’

Mum ignored him. ‘What about Paul Hannigan’s relatives? What about his friends? Won’t they be looking for him?’

‘He didn’t have no family,’ he said with growing impatience. ‘He was an orphan, so he told me. Said he’d grown up in care.’

‘What about his friends?’

‘He’d only been living down here a few months. He only knew a handful of people. He weren’t the sort that made friends easy. I probably knew him better than anyone. No one’s gonna miss Paul Hannigan, luv, believe me. And no one else is gonna figure out what happened neither. I’m the only one who knows. I’m the only one you’ve got to worry about.’

The fat man didn’t realize it, but everything he said was making the killing option more and more attractive. If he was telling the truth, then he was the last remaining loose end. Him and him alone. But now we were being given a second chance to tidy that loose end away.

‘How do I know you’re not going to keep coming back for more money?’ Mum said.

If there’d ever been any real doubt that the blackmailer would be back for more money again and again, his reaction to Mum’s question dispelled it for good. He jumped angrily to his feet, sending his chair scraping back across the tiles with such a lacerating screech that my hands automatically flew up to my ears.

‘That’s enough questions!’ he yelled. The jolly, avuncular persona he’d assumed vanished, and now there was only an ugly pouting mask, a monstrous, bloated baby face that was going to scream the whole world down because it wasn’t getting its own way. His truncated, muscle-swollen arms flew out from his sides, ready to punish, ready to hurt. ‘I’ve answered enough of your questions! You ain’t in a position to ask no questions! You ain’t in a position to make demands!’

There was a tense, awkward silence. I felt my heart racing wildly. Mum had shied away from him as if fearing a blow. The fat man stood glowering at her, his lips twisted into a pantomime scowl, his arms twitching with malignant energy. Some thin strands of hair had escaped the grip of his hair grease, and now waved like antennae above his bald scalp.

‘We go and get the six hundred now! No more questions! No more time-wasting!’

‘There’s no need to get aggressive,’ Mum said, putting up her hands in a submissive gesture. ‘I always said I was going to pay. We’ll go and get the money right now.’

She stood up and looked around distractedly, muttering, ‘Handbag. Where’s my handbag?’ She found it beneath one of the stools by the breakfast bench, picked it up and slipped it over her shoulder. ‘Now I just need my car keys,’ she said, patting her pockets and scanning the kitchen again, but at the same time not really looking, her mind detached, elsewhere. She was trying to make up her mind, I was sure of it. Trying to decide what to do: to pay the blackmailer or to kill him? To live with this gross leech sucking on her flesh for years to come, or, like a desperate gambler, risk everything on one more throw of the dice and take out the gun and shoot him dead.

‘Don’t worry about your car keys,’ the fat man said. ‘We’ll go in my car. It’s better that way.’ He looked scornfully at Mum and for a moment I saw her through his eyes: a scatty, spoiled, middle-class housewife, a stupid plump hen for his vulpine teeth to devour at leisure, a meal ticket for the rest of his life.

‘Are you sure you’ve got everything you need?’ he growled at her. ‘I don’t want to get all the way there and then find you ain’t got the right cards with you or you’ve forgotten your pin number or something.’

‘No, I’ve got everything I need.’

‘Come on, then, let’s go.’

He walked out of the kitchen, his anger forgotten, back to his jolly avuncular self, a hand in his pocket merrily jangling his car keys and change. ‘We won’t be long.’ He winked at me as he passed, like an old and much-loved family friend.

Mum still hesitated, a dazed expression on her face. She was trying to make up her mind, trying to decide what to do. Her hand went to the mouth of the fleece pocket but darted away again when the fat man barked at her: ‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’

Mum walked past me, her eyes on the floor, and followed him into the hallway. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but if she hadn’t shot him by now, surely she wasn’t going to — it had to be better to kill him inside the house than outside. There was no risk of being seen inside; the gunshots were less likely to be heard by someone passing. All I could think was that she’d decided to pay him the money after all.

I followed Mum up the hall, so close that I was almost tripping on her heels. The blackmailer had already opened the front door and stepped out into an idyllic May morning. He was walking across the gravel towards his car, and he was whistling, he was actually whistling, as if he didn’t have a care in the world! He opened the passenger door, then looked round for Mum. When he saw her hovering in the hallway, he called out angrily again, ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake! Hurry up!’ He held the car door open, waiting impatiently.

Mum turned to me and seized my shoulders fiercely. She brought her cheek close to mine and under the cover of a goodbye kiss whispered urgently into my ear: ‘What should I do, Shelley? What should I do?’

I stared straight at the blackmailer over her shoulder, at the bullfrog neck, the inflated dwarf arms, the obscene gut, the hand idly scratching at his groin, and with my face pressed close to hers, pretending to return her pretend kiss, I replied without hesitation.

‘Kill him, Mum.’