Mice

42

Mum tried to click the safety catch back into position, but her hands were shaking too much. It seemed an age before she finally managed it and put the gun carefully back into her fleece pocket.

I was exhausted from the chase, my lungs burning and my breath coming in rapid gasps. Sitting down on one of the large whitewashed boulders at the edge of the drive, I put my head in my hands and concentrated on reining in my galloping breathing. The birds, scared away by the gunshots, slowly reassembled in the treetops, chattering and burbling as if excitedly discussing this latest twist in the drama they were enjoying from on high. I stared at my feet. They were black with dirt, and covered in hundreds of tiny indentations and cuts.

I was the first to break the silence.

‘Do you think anyone heard the shots, Mum? They were so loud!’

Mum just made some noncommittal noise. She was circling the enormous mound of the blackmailer’s corpse, which lay in the middle of the drive like a beached whale. He must have been dead before he hit the ground, because he hadn’t even put those iron arms out to break his fall, and they’d ended up pinned fast beneath the copious folds of his belly.

Mum knelt down and put two fingers to his neck.

‘There’s no pulse,’ she said, quietly, as though not wanting to wake him. ‘He’s stone dead.’

I didn’t budge. I knew we’d have to move the corpse quickly, as it could be seen from the road, but I had to rest for just a little bit longer. I needed to get my breath back, I needed time to try to absorb what had just happened. I wasn’t sure I could hold back the meltdown if I didn’t. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go through with the next stage — the disposal of the body, the disposal of the car.

‘That’s funny,’ I heard Mum say.

‘What is?’ I said, looking up.

‘Come here. Help me turn him over.’

Reluctantly, I stood up and went over to her. She leaned over the corpse and seized its right shoulder, I grabbed the grey tracksuit bottoms at the hip and we pulled. There was a moment when we had to strain hard, but once we’d got it to a certain point the fat man’s body rolled over easily and flopped onto its back. I wiped my hands furiously on my dressing gown, convinced I’d touched something wet.

The fat man’s glasses had gone skittering across the gravel with the impact of the fall, and without them his face looked different, strangely naked, almost featureless. His eyes were closed, and in death his face had lost all the snarling anger it’d had when he’d shouted at us over his shoulder. It was tranquil now, almost serene. The face of a favourite uncle, always ready with a funny story or risqué joke, passed out on the sofa after an enormous Sunday lunch. The stunted, over-muscled arms lay at his sides and I thought of all those wasted hours in the gym, straining to build up arms that could punch their way through doors only to find that at the moment of crisis they’d been useless, raised meekly in the air in surrender.

I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, looking at the blackmailer’s corpse. No guilt. No pity. No regret. He was not a human being to be mourned, he was just a problem to be solved. We’d have to find a way to get rid of that huge corpse and the car — unbelievably, we’d have to get rid of the battered turquoise car for a second time.

‘There’s no blood,’ Mum muttered, more to herself than to me.

‘Huh? What do you mean there’s no blood? There must be blood.’

‘Look for yourself. There’s no blood. There’s no bullet wound.’

She was right. His head, which should have been blown apart by the exiting bullet, was completely intact. The great yellow hump of his T-shirt was spotted with greasy food stains and peppered with dirt from the gravel, but there wasn’t a single drop of blood on it. Apart from a small graze on his chin and a little gash on his forehead where he’d crashed to the ground, there was no sign of a wound anywhere.

I went to say something, but Mum had already wandered off down the drive.

‘You’re right,’ I called after her, completely astonished, not understanding. ‘There’s nothing at all!’

‘And look at this!’ Mum was standing by the righthand gatepost, pointing at something near the top. The straight line of the post’s edge was broken, as if a bite had been taken out of the wood.

‘I must have missed him,’ she said incredulously. ‘Somehow I must have missed him. From two inches away!’

She began to walk back, stooping to pick up the blackmailer’s glasses, which appeared completely undamaged.

‘What killed him, then?’ I asked when she was standing beside me again.

‘What killed him?’ Mum laughed a dry, humourless laugh. ‘We killed him, Shelley. We scared him to death. It looks like he’s had a massive heart attack, but it’s just the same as if my bullet had hit him — it’s still murder in the eyes of the law.’

We scared him to death. We scared that enormous brute with those vicious little arms to death. The thought filled me with a curious satisfaction and pride which I would have liked to savour, but the thought of all the hideous work which lay ahead loomed in my mind and overshadowed everything else.

‘We’d better move him,’ I said. ‘If someone drives past. . ’

‘Yes, we’d better.’

I went round to his feet and bent down to pick up one of his legs, but Mum gently touched my back to tell me to stop.

‘He’s too heavy to drag, Shelley. Let’s bring the car down and take him back up to the house that way.’

It was no easy task to get the fat man’s body into the back of our car. He must have weighed nigh on sixteen stone, and although we could just about manage to lift him between the two of us, the problem was to manoeuvre him onto the back seat before he got so heavy we had to put him down again. After several failed attempts, we decided that the only way we could manage it was by Mum actually sitting on the back seat with the fat man’s head in her lap and then dragging him back in on top of her while I held on to his legs, looking away, trying not to breathe in the ammonia stink of urine from his tracksuit bottoms. When half his torso was inside the car, Mum extricated herself from beneath his inert gelatinous mass, wriggling frantically like an insect trapped in jam, and let herself out of the other door. With me pushing from one side and Mum pulling from the other, we eventually got the body into position on the back seat.

Mum was very worried about injuring his head or legs when we closed the back doors, and she spent a long time trying to get his legs in a position where the sharp edge of the door wouldn’t strike them. Eventually I had to lean over from the passenger seat and hold them until she managed to slam the door shut.

It was only a short distance back up to the house in the car, but we both automatically put our seat belts on. The irony almost made me laugh out loud — the two of us buckled up for a fifteen-second journey like the conscientious citizens we were, while the body of the man we’d just murdered lolled precariously across the back seat.

Mum parked the Escort exactly where it had been before, right in front of the blackmailer’s car.

She turned off the engine and in the ensuing silence I asked, ‘What are we going to do with him, Mum?’

She seemed miles away, lost in thought, and I mistook her silence to mean she didn’t know.

‘I’ve got an idea!’ I said, turning to her excitedly. ‘What about the mines? We could put him in his car, then push the car into the mine shaft that you used before. A car would be able to fit into the shaft, wouldn’t it?’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Mum said flatly, turning to look at me now. ‘But we’ve got to act fast.’ She glanced at her watch and gnawed at her bottom lip. ‘If we take too long it might not work.’

She leaned over and looked me intently in the eyes, her hand on my knee. ‘I want you to do everything exactly as I say, Shelley. Do you understand? Exactly as I say.’ Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence was still fresh in her mind and I nodded emphatically, determined to show her that she could trust me one hundred per cent from now on.

‘Good. Now help me to move him,’ she said, and started to get out of the car.

‘Move him where?’ I groaned, suddenly overcome with horror at the thought of digging another grave in our garden.

‘There’s no time to explain now, Shelley! Just do what I tell you!’ she snapped.

Mum dragged the fat man’s corpse out of the car, heaving backwards with her arms locked beneath his armpits until his buttocks were on the very edge of the back seat and I was able to take hold of his legs.

We carried him towards the house, stopping every few metres or so to rest. When we were roughly halfway between his car and the front door, Mum cried out to me to put him down and we lowered him gently onto the gravel. I noticed that his Rolex now had a large semi-circular crack in its lower half, which reminded me of the smiley faces I used to draw on my exercise books at junior school.

‘We have to turn him over,’ she said, and we turned him so he was lying face-down, his head pointing towards the house. Mum knelt down and vigorously brushed away the small leaves and smudges of dirt that the back of his yellow T-shirt had picked up from the gravel. When she was satisfied she stood up, and taking the gun out of her fleece pocket, handed it to me.

‘Take this upstairs to my room and hide it under my pillow. Then get dressed and come back out here as quickly as you can. Go on!’

I did what she said at the double. I had no idea what she was doing; all I understood was that we were involved in some sort of race against the clock. When I came back downstairs, Mum was kneeling by the fat man’s corpse, fishing through his back pocket. I saw her take out Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence and I shrank back into the hallway, not wanting to provoke an outburst by appearing just at that moment. I waited until she’d slipped it into her jeans’ back pocket before I stepped outside.

When she saw I was back, she said, ‘Your slippers, you lost your slippers somewhere in the drive. Quickly go and find them, then put them upstairs in your bedroom where you usually keep them.’

I ran off into the drive, my feet actually stinging more now in shoes and socks than when I’d been walking around barefoot. I found one slipper straight away but the other one was nowhere to be seen. It was several minutes before I finally found it suspended in one of the rhododendron bushes.

When I got back to the house Mum was carefully placing the blackmailer’s glasses on the ground a few feet in front of the body. When she was happy with the way they looked (lenses on the gravel, one arm closed, the other arm open), she left them and went over to the turquoise car. She closed the passenger door that the fat man had been holding open for her, then went to the other side and opened the driver’s door. She walked right around the car, eyeing it critically, then made her way to the island in the centre of the driveway, glancing back over her shoulder as she went as if she didn’t trust the car to stay as she’d left it when her back was turned.

Mum picked up her handbag from the shrubbery where she’d dropped it when she set off after the blackmailer. She didn’t slip it onto her shoulder, but held it in her hand, and the long leather strap hung down and curled itself into the shape of a noose.

She looked back towards the car, but now she seemed to be looking beyond it into the farmer’s field, in the direction of her first shot. Then she turned and squinted across at the trees, where her second shot had gone. I followed her gaze and found myself looking at the ash with the white tear high up in its trunk. Mum stood there frozen in contemplation, the only movement her long white fingers kneading the soft leather of her handbag, then set off resolutely down the driveway.

I waited until she’d disappeared from sight before discreetly following her, knowing full well that she didn’t want me near her right now, and that any questions were likely to provoke a furious rebuke.

At the point where the drive dog-legged, I concealed myself behind a bush and spied on her through the foliage. She was down by the gatepost. She seemed to be clawing at it with her fingers, rubbing at it furiously with her sleeve. Then she dropped into a crouch and began moving slowly across the gravel on her hands and knees like an animal. What on earth was she doing? Had she gone mad?

When she finally stood up, clapping her hands and cuffing at her knees, I slipped back to the house and waited for her by the front door.

She reappeared a little while later and, after pausing for a moment as though running through a checklist in her mind, began walking towards me at a funereal pace, her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her. She stepped over the fat man’s corpse with fastidious care — as if avoiding a dirty puddle — then stopped suddenly and picked something up. I took a pace closer and just managed to catch a glimpse before she dropped it into her handbag: it was the fat man’s half-smoked roll-up that he’d flicked away before coming into the house. Mum snapped her handbag shut and stood up with a loud cracking of her knees.

She stood there intently surveying the scene like a film director who wants to be absolutely sure that every detail of the set is perfect, every prop is in the right place, before crying action! I surveyed the scene too — the loathsome car with its driver’s door wide open, the blackmailer’s corpse humped face-down in the drive, the glasses lying on the gravel with one arm erect like a cocked ear — but I understood none of it.

‘I’ve got my slippers,’ I said as I came up behind her.

My voice made her jump and she turned round abruptly, unsmiling.

‘Good. Now put them upstairs like I told you.’

‘OK. Then what? What’s next?’

‘Next?’ She put her hands on her hips and looked at me strangely. ‘Next, we call for help.’