Mice

44

Mum and I sat in the lounge dazed, stupefied, as if we’d just been caught in a bomb blast and couldn’t speak or hear each other for the ringing in our perforated eardrums.

We sat slumped on the sofa unable to process what had just happened (There’s a pulse! There’s a pulse! I’ve got a pulse!), unable to believe that the paramedics had managed to resuscitate the fat man after all that time. We’d been so close, so close to a happy ending, so close to a brilliant resolution that would have solved everything, so neatly, so perfectly — only to have it snatched away from us at the very last moment.

I sat paralysed, dumb, staring at the richly patterned rug under the piano, shaking my head in disbelief. We think we control the course our life takes, we think we’re the captain of the vessel with our hand on the wheel, but in fact it’s luck (or fate or destiny or God or whatever we choose to call it) that’s really in control. We might as well take our hands off the wheel and go to the back of the boat and sleep, because it’s this other force that really decides whether we make it to the shore or we sink without trace. We think we have all the control, but in reality we have none.

How could they have resuscitated the blackmailer after so much time had gone by? It was impossible, it was against all logic, it was against all common sense. But this other force had decreed that it should happen and so it had happened and that was all there was to it.

Mum was inconsolable. She’d been so worried about keeping the gap between the real time of ‘death’ and the arrival of the paramedics as short as possible that she hadn’t stopped to think she might be giving them enough time to save the fat man’s life.

She frantically flicked through the few medical books we had in the house — a medical dictionary, a reference work for personal injury lawyers, a criminal law book entitled Forensic Evidence — and at last found a relevant passage. It said that resuscitation after periods as long as an hour was possible, but would almost certainly leave the victim with severe brain damage, a vegetable incapable of thought or speech. Mum rallied a little after reading this, but she soon lapsed back into self-recrimination and black depression.

Unable to bear the torture any longer, she rang the local hospital to see if they could give her any news. She adopted the role of the anxious householder once more and went through her story all over again. We were in our house this morning when a strange car pulled up in our drive and a man got out clutching his chest. . She was transferred from department to department and patiently went through her story word for word three more times. No, she didn’t know the patient’s name. No, she didn’t know what ward he was in. No, she wasn’t a relative. After almost a quarter of an hour of being transferred and left on hold, she was finally informed that they’d had no admissions that morning that fitted the description she’d given.

Mum was so tense when she finally put the phone down that she couldn’t cope with ringing any of the other local hospitals he might have been taken to.

It wasn’t until late that afternoon that we were finally put out of our misery.

The police car whose arrival I’d long imagined, signalling our imminent arrest and the end of our attempt to escape the consequences of killing Paul Hannigan, finally pulled into our drive just before six o’clock.

Unlike my premonitions, however, the police car’s blue light wasn’t flashing and the knock at the door when it came was timid, almost apologetic. Nor were we confronted by the black-uniformed goons with crackling radios that I’d always imagined. Instead, when Mum opened the door, there was a young officer in a white short-sleeved shirt, dangling his peaked cap in his hands because it was too hot to wear. He looked like a Renaissance cherub, with blue eyes and rosy cheeks and curly blond hair that lapped his collar and was surely longer than police regulations allowed. My first thought when I saw him was: He can’t be here to arrest us. They wouldn’t have sent an angel with such terrible news. .

‘Mrs Rivers?’ he asked gravely.

Mum nodded, too nervous to trust herself to speak, and showed him into the lounge. The atmosphere around us was heavy, dense, like wading through water. We all sat down and the policeman took out a little notebook from his breast pocket and a miniature, lizard-green pencil. He flicked through the pages, looking for one in particular. (Did it have that formula written on it that they had to read out every time they made an arrest? Did he have to read it because he could never remember how it went — ‘Anything you do say may be used in evidence. .’?)

We waited in silence and I had the strange sensation of time slowing, slowing right down, almost coming to a complete standstill. I saw everything around me as if in slow motion: the young policeman turning a page of his notebook, the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth with concentration; Mum sitting on the very edge of her chair, frown lines like claw marks across her forehead, her hands pressed to her face like the figure on the bridge in Munch’s Scream.

In the next few seconds the young policeman would deliver judgement on us. The fat man was alive, he’d told the police everything and we were under arrest; the fat man was dead and we were safe. .

And at that moment I felt a strange calm come over me, the calm that comes with resignation in the face of the final crisis. It was as if I’d been through so much that I was drained of emotion, and in its place resignation fell like a blanket of snow, numbing me, protecting me from the pain that was about to come. I wondered whether people who were about to be executed felt this same calm, this same sweet resignation, whether it descended to protect them in their final moments of agony, as the noose was tied around their necks, as their hands were tied behind the stake, allowing them to die at peace. .

The policeman found the right page at last and looked sharply across at Mum.

‘I’m afraid it’s my duty to inform you,’ he said, ‘that the man who was taken ill here today — Mr,’ he glanced down at his notes, ‘Mr Martin Craddock — died before they could get him to the hospital.’

‘Oh, how awful,’ Mum said, with the perfect timing, the perfect intonation of a gifted actress — genuinely sad but with the tiniest dash of stiff-upper-lip stoicism. ‘That’s too bad. That really is too bad.’

I felt a rush of joy and relief that I had to struggle to control. I wanted to leap into the air and dance around the room, I wanted to fling my arms around the policeman’s neck and cover his cherubic face in kisses.

He was dead! The fat man was dead!

The policeman pulled a pained expression that was meant to express his sympathy at Mr Craddock’s sudden death that morning, but didn’t quite succeed. I saw him sneak a look at his watch. He wanted to keep this short; he wanted to be somewhere else.

He went over Mum’s version of events again but seemingly more out of politeness to her than because it was of any real interest to the police. He nodded and uh-huhhed in agreement, but didn’t write anything in his notebook and had already put the miniature pencil carefully back in his pocket. He looked around the lounge as if he was hoping a little dog would suddenly come bounding in and give him an excuse to change the subject.

When Mum had finished, there was a long, awkward silence. The policeman, who was clearly anxious to go, struggled to find something appropriate to say.

‘He’d a long history of heart trouble, I understand. He’d only just come out of hospital.’

‘Is that so?’ Mum said. ‘How very sad.’

After another uncomfortable pause he tried some homespun philosophy. ‘Oh well, that’s life for you. Every minute someone’s born, every minute someone dies. That’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’

There was a cringingly embarrassing moment while his words hovered in the air, which Mum sensibly brought to an end before either of us could burst out laughing. She jumped to her feet and said, ‘Yes, well, you must be a very busy man. We do appreciate you taking the time to come out here and let us know how it all ended. It’s very kind of you.’

I stood up as well, and, seeing me, the policeman sprang out of his chair with rather more eagerness than was fitting. The three of us stood there uncertainly, each of us hiding our relief that the interview was over.

‘Oh, before I forget.’ Mum took the fat man’s glasses from the top of the piano. ‘The ambulance people left these behind.’

The policeman held up the large frames, and seemed to be about to make a joke about them when he remembered the circumstances in which they’d been lost. They just fitted into his breast pocket.

We walked the policeman to the door and out onto the drive.

‘Is that his car?’ he asked, pointing with his cap.

‘Y-yes,’ Mum said, unable to conceal the nervous catch in her voice.

He went around to the driver’s side of the battered, turquoise car and leaned inside. He stayed there for several minutes. I threw Mum a questioning glance, and she just shrugged her shoulders back at me, but I could see the frown lines had returned to her forehead.

The policeman finally closed the driver’s door, then walked right around the car and stood with one hand on his hip, the other scratching his temple.

‘That’s strange,’ he said, with a perplexed smile.

‘What is, Officer?’ Mum’s whole demeanour was suddenly less convincing than before. Her expression was strained, fragile.

‘Well, it’s parked so neatly.’ At last he’d found something to interest him in this tedious little errand he’d been sent to run. ‘I mean, he was having a heart attack, but he managed to park his car perfectly behind yours. And not only that, he’s put it in neutral, he’s put the handbrake on, he’s turned the engine off and he’s pocketed the keys — all while he must have been in excruciating pain. It’s amazing!’

He beamed at Mum, but she seemed unsure how to respond; she was having great difficulty meeting his clear blue gaze.

‘Force of habit, I suppose,’ she said drily.

‘It must have been,’ he laughed, hooking a thumb into a trouser pocket, ‘it must have been. But it’s incredible, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Mum was reluctantly forced to agree. ‘It’s hard to believe.’

The policeman stared at the car with amused bewilderment for a few moments more, then with a final shake of the head that said he’d never cease to be amazed by the things he saw in his line of work, he turned away and walked back to his patrol car.

‘We’ll get someone out to you tonight to tow it away,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’m sure you don’t want that blocking your drive for weeks on end!’

And with that he started his engine and, with a casual mock salute, drove away.