Mice

43

I followed her into the house, completely confused now.

‘Call for help? I don’t understand. What’s going on? What are you doing?’

Mum explained in a rapid machine-gun burst of words as she strode down the hall into the kitchen.

‘I’m going to call the emergency services and say that we were sitting in our lounge when a strange car pulled up in our drive and a man got out, clutching his chest, and collapsed. I’ll say that he’s unconscious and he doesn’t seem to be breathing and we don’t know what to do and can they send an ambulance straight away!’

She glanced at me over her shoulder but it was all too quick for me to take in.

‘He died of a heart attack, Shelley. There are no marks on him, there’s nothing to make them suspect that we had anything to do with his death. They’ll just assume he started to have a heart attack at the wheel of his car and made for the first house he saw to try and get help, but died before he could make it to the front door.’

She studied the face of her wristwatch, her lips moving with her thoughts, then snatched up the phone.

‘But I’ve got to call them right away. It’s ten o’clock already — he’s been dead for half an hour.’

I stood there speechless as Mum’s plan slowly sank in. Like all the best ideas, it seemed obvious once you heard it — but I was sure it would never have occurred to me. It was incredibly bold. And it would take nerves of steel to pull it off. The ambulance would get rid of the fat man’s corpse for us. The police would get rid of the fat man’s car for us. The authorities themselves would get rid of all the most incriminating evidence of our crime for us. We wouldn’t have to do anything. We would be above suspicion — the good Samaritans who vainly tried to help a stranger.

Mum wedged the receiver between her cheek and shoulder.

‘Take those slippers upstairs now and put them away like I told you,’ she said as she dialled the number with a trembling index finger.

The ambulance arrived surprisingly quickly, given how remote Honeysuckle Cottage was. It came bumping up the drive at a quarter past ten, its siren wailing and blue lights flashing, full of earnest, boy-scout eagerness to do good. I was dreading meeting the ministering angels who were racing to save the life we’d just taken (would they be able to see what had really happened when they looked into my eyes?), but at the same time I was bored by the thought of the melodramatic rigmarole they were about to go through to try to save the fat man’s life. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men weren’t going to be able to put this Humpty together again.

Two paramedics — one in her wrinkled fifties with dyed blonde hair and frameless glasses, the other much younger, chipmunk-cheeked with a masculine crew cut — got out to attend to the fat man. They didn’t run, but sauntered over calmly; smiling, experienced professionals who knew how important it was to keep everyone calm, how important it was not to rush. Meanwhile, the driver, a tall gangly youth with horrendous acne, started to unload equipment from the back of the ambulance: an oxygen cylinder and plastic tube with some sort of bag attached to it, a black box like a guitar amplifier that I could see from his limping gait was heavier than it looked.

Mum fussed around the two paramedics, playing the shocked householder who’d had her quiet Saturday morning shattered by the unexpected arrival of this human tragedy on her doorstep. She answered their questions with a well-feigned anxiety to help. When did he collapse? Ten — no, about fifteen minutes ago. Have you given any CPR? I’m sorry, I don’t know how, I’m sorry. . Have you moved him? No, I haven’t, I wouldn’t dare. . No one would have thought that she was telling black lie after black lie.

The paramedics effortlessly turned the fat man onto his back in one perfectly synchronized manoeuvre. ‘No pulse, no breathing,’ Dyed Blonde declared matter-of-factly, as if she were making no more than an idle observation about the weather.

I didn’t want to stay to see the whole farce acted out, but I didn’t think I should just disappear either — I didn’t want to do anything that might arouse suspicion. So I went back inside the house but stayed in the hallway by the door, where I could still see and be seen. I was playing the role of the sensitive sixteen-year-old who couldn’t bear to watch something so raw, something so real as the life-and-death struggle that was taking place in our drive. In reality, I just wanted them to go, I just wanted them to take the corpse and go away. Once they’d gone, it would all be over. The long nightmare would be over at last. The incredible piece of good luck we’d had with the fat man dying of a heart attack, and Mum’s quick thinking, had suddenly, unexpectedly, brought us out of the complex labyrinth we’d been lost in, and I just wanted to be left alone with Mum to enjoy our miraculous escape.

I slouched against the wall, glancing from time to time at my watch, scratching nervously at the wallpaper with my thumbnail. What was taking them so long? Couldn’t they see that he was dead, dead, dead? I glanced outside to see Chipmunk Cheeks cutting the fat man’s yellow T-shirt right up the middle with a big pair of scissors, exposing the tangle of grey and black hairs, the tumid white hummock of his belly, the fat breasts with their enormous pink nipples.

When I looked outside again a few minutes later, Dyed Blonde was connecting curly cables to the black box on which — when Mum wasn’t blocking my view — I could see a green light flashing.

Mum turned to look at me and, still in the role of the appalled householder, made a face that said, Isn’t this terrible, Shelley? The poor, poor man! Then she turned back to the paramedics, a hand anxiously worrying at her mouth.

Dyed Blonde was now holding two black pads like flat irons above her head, while Chipmunk Cheeks methodically removed the fat man’s Rolex, identity bracelet and copper arthritis band. The moment the green light changed to orange she plunged the pads down hard on his chest. The fat man’s arms and legs convulsed violently for several seconds, as though he was having an epileptic seizure. Dyed Blonde rocked back on her haunches and got ready to do it again.

The shuddering and jerking of the corpse’s limbs was sickening to watch, but at the same time it made me want to burst out laughing. I turned away, covering my smirk with my hand, and went into the kitchen, where no one would be able to see me. I just stood there, waiting for the fit of giggles to pass, wishing away the time, staring at the various objects on the breakfast bench without actually seeing any of them.

Alone in the kitchen, I started to worry about the discrepancy between the time the fat man had really died and the time we’d told the paramedics. All in all I reckoned there was a difference of about three-quarters of an hour. Had the paramedics noticed anything odd about the body already? Had they been able to tell the moment they arrived that the fat man had been dead for longer than we were telling them? When did rigor mortis start to set in? With Paul Hannigan it had been within the first two hours — could it be earlier? Was that the telltale clue that had already caught us out in our lies? Were they already exchanging knowing glances, planning to pass on their suspicions to the police as soon as they could? Was the gangly youth running his hand over the blackmailer’s car at that very moment and noting that the engine was cold when it should still have been warm if we were telling the truth?

Although I usually feared the worst in every situation, even I couldn’t manage to build this up into a very real anxiety. I couldn’t convince myself that the paramedics would notice anything suspicious about the corpse. The fat man was the victim of a massive heart attack; he was stone dead when they arrived. Surely they wouldn’t bother to look into things much further than that? And I simply couldn’t believe that a mere forty-five minutes would give rise to any significant forensic changes. We were safe, I was sure of it, we were safe. .

When I went back outside, the paramedics were assembling a stretcher. The acne-pocked youth went over to Mum.

‘Would you like to come with us to the hospital, or are you going to follow in your own car?’

Mum was completely wrong-footed by the question. The last thing she wanted was to have to keep this act up at the hospital, possibly for hours.

‘But I don’t know him,’ she said pleasantly. ‘As I explained to your colleagues, he just pulled up here in his car and collapsed.’

The young man seemed equally taken aback by Mum’s answer. He was momentarily lost for words, as if no one had ever refused to come with them to the hospital before. ‘OK,’ he said finally, twisting at the fat teardrop of his ear lobe and trying to smile to cover his incomprehension.

Mum clearly felt the need to explain more, as if she were being accused of hard-heartedness. ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life,’ she said. ‘He’s a total stranger.’

The youth kept nodding as Mum spoke, but still looked unconvinced and slightly appalled.

The two paramedics had carried the fat man into the ambulance and were working on him indefatigably in its submarine-like confines. Dyed Blonde had put an oxygen mask over his mouth and was feeling his neck with two fingers of her right hand, while Chipmunk-Cheeks was tying a tourniquet around his arm and preparing to attach a drip.

The gangly youth walked back to the ambulance and closed one of the rear doors. He was starting to close the other one when Dyed Blonde suddenly cried out as if in pain. The youth froze with a grimace as if he thought he’d caught her finger in the door and peered anxiously inside. Then I saw his whole body stiffen.

I tried to see what was going on, but his white back blocked my view. I’d begun edging closer to the house when Dyed Blonde screamed again — all professional calm shattered now, consumed with excitement, uncontrollable, frantic excitement — ‘There’s a pulse! There’s a pulse! I’ve got a pulse!’

Mum and I stood side by side and watched the ambulance accelerate down the drive, its deafening siren painting giant blue spirals in the air around it. We were still standing there long after it had disappeared from sight, both of us speechless and immobile.

When Mum finally stirred and turned to go indoors, she noticed the blackmailer’s glasses still lying on the gravel where she’d placed them. The paramedics either hadn’t seen them, or had forgotten them in all the excitement. She knelt down and picked them up and contemplated them. A symbol of her carefully laid plan that had gone so disastrously wrong.

A black look shook her features, and for a moment I thought she was going to hurl the glasses against the wall, but the rage passed, and instead she carefully folded the raised arm as gently as if it had been an injured bird’s broken wing.