One of Us Is Dead

41 Monday 3 October 2022

‘I said you wouldn’t be pleased about it,’ Fiona Rorke said, and pulled her cigarettes out of her handbag. The stub of the one she had just crushed out was still smouldering in the ashtray. She was nervous, he could tell. Her hands, with their exquisite nails, were shaking. She only chain-smoked when she was nervous.

‘You always were good at understatement,’ Paul Anthony retorted, standing up and walking over to his cocktail cabinet. He poured himself two fat fingers of Haig Club Blue then sat back down opposite her again, frowning. ‘What the fuck?’

‘What the fuck indeed, Rufus. What the fuck were you doing at Barnie Wallace’s funeral? Are you mad?’

‘Paying my respects.’ He shrugged.

She lit her cigarette, inhaled deeply then blew an angry jet of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Showing your face there was completely crazy. Pure arrogance. There’s two of us in this, right? We’re partners here.’ She glared at him and drew on the cigarette again.

She was right. They were partners. Reluctant partners who hated each other, held together by the bond of mutual greed.

When the police were closing in on him, because of his stupid error over the CCTV cameras on the Ormondes’ house, Fiona was only too well aware that if he went down, she stood to lose a very large part of her lifestyle under a confiscation order. So despite the fact they had been in the early stages of divorcing, they’d struck their own kind of Faustian bargain.

She got to carry on living the moneyed life of luxury that she’d always considered her birthright. But the price was that she would forever have to conceal the truth — or face prison for being an accessory to murder, along with the loss of most of what she had. He reinvented himself in a new life, and the price for him was never seeing his sons again. Nor anyone else he had ever known or loved, although the latter wasn’t important. The boys were. But not as important as evading prison.

‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘Just what the hell were you thinking? When you jeopardize yourself you jeopardize both of us. I still don’t think you’ve told me the truth about how Barnie sussed you. What did you do, turn up to an old boys’ reunion dinner or something?’

He grinned and downed his whisky. ‘Hey, come on, credit me with a bit more than that.’ The smell of her cigarette was tantalizing him more and more. ‘How’s your wine, by the way?’ he asked.

Fiona looked at him almost incredulously. ‘You want to know about the wine at a time like this?’

‘I always want to know about the wine.’

During their years together they had amassed a formidable collection of rare high-end Bordeaux and Burgundies, across many of the finest vintages of the last century. They were stored in the extensive cellars beneath the house where Fiona now lived, which had once been their shared home. She had always drunk heavily and when she was getting drunk she became reckless.

There had been too many occasions, each of them resulting in a row, when she had staggered down to the cellar to get a second bottle of wine, and without considering the value of the bottle, grabbed something rare and popped the cork. One memorable night he’d been out and when he arrived home around 11 p.m. he was greeted by her, sitting on the sofa in front of the television, totally sloshed, an almost empty bottle of red wine on the coffee table, telling him in a slurred voice that the wine was crap and she’d almost choked on a mouthful of sediment.

The bottle was one of their most prized, a 1947 Cheval Blanc, considered one the world’s finest wines and possibly the finest vintage year ever. It was worth £14,000.

‘The wine is very happy,’ she said. ‘I take it for walks with the dogs, and it enjoys that.’ She drained her glass of whisky.

‘Very funny.’

‘It’s a very funny question you asked, Rufus, when we have such a big fucking problem.’ She shook her head, tossing her blonde hair disdainfully. ‘You and I loved watching true crime on television. Don’t you remember — and we didn’t just hear it once but many times — detectives talking about how they would turn up to the funerals of murder victims, in order to study the mourners, because the killers sometimes went along to watch.’

‘I remember that well, Fi.’ Then he hesitated. That had always been his pet-name for her. Was the hit of whisky making him affectionate? There was no hint of affection in the way she was glaring at him. ‘Barnie’s funeral wasn’t the funeral of a murder victim, it was a poor bastard who’d been a victim of mushroom poisoning.’

‘All part of the nice, low-key service you offer your clients, eh?’ she said with unveiled sarcasm, stubbing out the cigarette already down to the butt and delving in her bag for the pack again. ‘The Sussex media has been all over it for the past week. Headlines screaming “The Phantom Mushroom Switcher”.’ She shook her head. ‘Nice discreet job — not. I never realized I’d married a total fuckwit.’

‘Hey! That’s not fair. It would have been fine if that idiot woman golfer hadn’t gone and picked those damned death caps. It would have been a perfect murder. She’s the fuckwit here.’

‘What are you going to do about Taylor?’

‘I’m on it.’

She lit her cigarette. ‘You are? Do you call turning up to Barnie’s funeral being on it?’

She blew more smoke at the ceiling.

God, he wanted to cadge one from her. But that would have been a show of weakness. ‘You forget, I look very different now, unrecognizable.’

She stared at him with a look almost of pity, as if she was watching a pleading puppy in an animal rehoming centre. ‘You and James Taylor go back to what age? Eleven?’

‘About that.’

‘At Brighton College until eighteen?’

He nodded.

‘I’d recognize my best friends regardless of what they did to their faces or hair. After we’ve known someone even a short while, we don’t look at their features or notice their hair. It’s their mannerisms — how they move, all the little subtle nuances. That’s what we clock.’ She took another drag. ‘You were presumably in disguise at the funeral?’

‘Of course.’

‘So James Taylor might have thought it was you but there was no way he could have been completely sure, without actually going up to you and talking to you.’

The rich, sweet smell of her cigarette was driving him nuts. ‘Can I cadge one of those off you?’ he asked, finally.

‘Buy your own, you tight bastard,’ she said.

He gave her a bemused grin. ‘Hey, come on, Fi!’

‘It’s Fiona, to you.’ She clipped her handbag shut, as if to show him she meant it. ‘You know what you are? You’re a twat.’

That really stung. Paul Anthony felt his cheeks redden. Twat. No one had ever called him a twat before in his entire life. Until now. Anger flared inside him. Anger fuelled by guilt, because she was right, it had been incredibly stupid to go to the funeral.

‘You’ve put us both in danger. Now there’s only one thing you can do. Understand what I’m saying?’

He hesitated. ‘I think so.’

She shook her head. ‘Do you? Really? You and your Three Musketeers bullshit. All for one and one for all. Barnie had cottoned on to you and was threatening to blackmail you, and you got rid of him. What’s your plan with James Taylor? Are you going to let him keep sniffing around?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I told you, I’m on it. I’m thinking about it.’

‘You don’t need to think about it, Rufus. You know exactly what you have to do.’