One Good Turn

34

Gloria spent the evening at the hospital. She watched Graham closely and wondered if he was faking it, if he had decided that being dead to the world was a way of dodging all the problems that were piling up around him. “Can you hear me, Graham?” she whispered in his ear. If he could, he was keeping schtum about it.

The colossal wreck now as weak as a kitten, as quiet as a mouse. Ozymandias toppled. “Half sunk, a shattered visage lies.” Gloria had been very fond of Shelley when she was younger. She had given Graham a beautifully illustrated Folio Society copy of the collected poems for his sixtieth birthday, on the basis that you should give a present you would like to receive yourself.

Naturally, being Graham, he had misread the poem, seeing only the triumphal hubris of “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Gloria couldn’t think, offhand, of a present she had ever received from any member of her family that she had actually wanted. Last Christmas, Emily (“and Nick”) bought her a food mixer, an inferior brand to the one she already owned, and Graham gave her a Jenners gift token, which hardly required much thought and had probably been bought by his saleswoman-cum-mistress-cum-would-be-wife, Maggie Louden. Gloria had had no intuition that the woman standing in front of her Christmas tree, waving away a mince pie, was planning to be the next Mrs. Graham Hatter. “The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”

She drank a cup of tea that a nice nurse brought her and flicked through a copy of the Evening News that she had bought from the shop downstairs. “Police are asking if anyone saw a young woman go into the water.” Her eye was caught by the words “earrings in the shape of crucifixes.” She put her tea down and read the short piece from the beginning again. “Go into the water”-what did that mean?

When she got home, Gloria went down to the basement to set the security system for the night. Something moved on one of the CCTV screens, a pair of eyes glowing monstrously in the night- a fox, a big dog-fox, carrying off the remains of Gloria’s supper from last night. Then, unexpectedly, the screen went blank.

Then all the other screens went blank, one by one. No little ro-bots moving this way and that, keeping their electronic eyes on things. The lights on the alarm system flickered and went out, and then all the electricity in the house failed. This was what it would be like for Graham when he died.

A fuse must have blown, Gloria told herself. Nothing to worry about. She felt her way in the absolute dark of the basement toward the wall where the fuse box was. Then she heard a noise. A footfall, a door opening, a floorboard creaking.

Her heart started thudding so loudly that she thought it must be like a beacon pinpointing her position in the dark. A man had been beaten to death in Merchiston this morning-who was to say that the murderer hadn’t moved on to another suburb on the south side? She wished she had a weapon. She made a mental inventory of what was available. The garden shed provided the biggest arsenal-weed-killer sprays, an ax, the electric hedge trimmer, the strimmer-she imagined you could probably do quite a bit of damage to someone’s ankles with a strimmer. Unfortunately there was no way she could get to the garden shed without passing whoever was in the house. Did they have eyes of diamond and jet, were they as tall as a bear?

She suddenly remembered Maggie Louden’s words: “Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria?” What if she wasn’t talking about divorce, what if she was talking about murder?

Of course, that was exactly what Graham would do! If he di-vorced Gloria, he would lose half of everything he had, and no way in the world would Graham be prepared to do that, but if Gloria died he could keep everything. It was as melodramatic a concept as anything in Emmerdale yet somehow perfectly credible. He would hire someone-Graham had a way of never getting his own hands dirty. He would pay someone to get rid of her. Or he would use Terry. Yes, that was what he would do, he would use Terry.

Gloria held her hand over her heart in an attempt to muffle its telltale thumping. Another floorboard creaked, much closer this time, and Gloria realized that there was someone standing at the top of the basement stairs, a figure outlined faintly with an aura of moonlight from the atrium skylight in the hall.

The figure started to descend the stairs. Gloria took a deep breath and said stoutly, “I think you should know before you come any farther that I am armed.” A lie, of course, but in these circumstances the truth was hardly a weapon. The figure hesitated, it bent down to get a better view of the basement, and then a fa-miliar voice said, “Hello, Gloria.”

Gloria gave a little scream of horror and said, “I thought you were dead.”