The murder quadrille, p.8
The Murder Quadrille, page 8
Martin steered out into the High Street and sat for ten minutes, in a solid block of stationary traffic, grinning.
Now what?
He had to run the whole scenario through his head once more and then decide how to deal with whatever it presented. When they’d all been talking at that bloody dinner Martin had been thinking how easy it would be to cover up if you’d killed someone. You just assumed an attitude then maintained it. It had never occurred to him how you had to chop and change from moment to moment.
So—the story so far was that his wife had left him after a row. Then a couple of days later he read in the papers that a body, which answered to her description, had turned up very near their home. So what would he do? Would he go to the police? Or would that turn him into one of those ghouls who went on TV and gave themselves away by weeping about the one they had just murdered?
As Martin drove past the Common he couldn’t resist taking the road through it, just to see what was going on. The pub on the corner looked the same as it always did on a sunny day, buzzing with people. Martin turned into the single track road lined with parked cars which ran up behind it towards the thicket. He couldn’t see any signs of police activity. It wasn’t like it was on TV, no blue flashing lights or crowds of people held back by tape reading “Crime Scene—Do Not Cross.” Not even a glimpse of those people with clipboards, wearing white space suits and padding about in white paper shoes.
He passed the thicket, glancing over his shoulder to see if there was any more going on the other side. But there seemed to be nothing other than the usual sprawl of sunbathers, and cottaging gays. Martin pulled the car into the dirt and cinder car park, usually only used when a circus or fairground was installed. Spraying dust from his tyres, he span the car’s bonnet to face the green sward, switched off the engine and sat looking out at children kicking balls around with their mothers.
He pulled the newspaper from his briefcase and read the whole report through again. Looking at it a second time, without those two reptiles ogling him, Martin believed he should not do anything at all now, but go home. If he presented himself at the police station what would that do except draw attention to himself? The most important rule was to lay low, keep the police out of it. That’s how he had dealt with the burglary and that is how he would deal with this new twist.
That’s right. He must go home. It was ludicrous, but first he’d check the flower bed. To be sure. Then he would try Sarah’s mobile phone again, listening at the back door, just in case the patch of soil did start to ring. He would leave the message he had intended to leave earlier. After all, no one thought Sarah was dead, remember. She had just left him.
So those morons in the office were mere hysterics who had jumped to conclusions, but the fact was, and Martin of all people knew this for sure: that woman they’d found in the ditch had to be someone other than Sarah.
He knew where Sarah was.
And he was the only person who did.
When he let himself into the house Martin found another stack of bills on the mat. He stepped over them, then ambled through to the garden and took a quick look at the flower bed. He stared down at the geraniums in their neat municipal lines, and recalled a nursery rhyme his mother had sung around the house when he was an infant:
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?
With cockle shells and silver bells
And pretty maids all in a row.
Only one pretty maid out there though.
After a few hours sitting in the silent living room, Martin felt restless. It seemed all wrong to be there in the house during the day, without even a TV to take his mind off the situation.
And it wasn’t just the Sarah situation, it was the money situation too. He was broke. Worse than broke. He was drowning in debt. Before the Sarah incident, finance had been the main worry. Now he had two things giving him hot flushes of panic.
Kevin had had a good idea when he talked about Martin moving house and downsizing. It was certainly one way out of the money problem. But Martin wondered how practical it would be. Obviously he couldn’t sell up now, not until the manatee had rotted down and he could take away the loose bits, and put them some place where no one would find them. He’d drop them from the side of a cross channel ferry, or lose them piece by piece in the domestic rubbish.
But how long would it take before the garden “problem” could be…dealt with?
He had no idea.
So there we are. That was something useful he could do now to get him out of the oppressively quiet house.
In fact, he could do two things—get some milk and bread from the supermarket and then swing into the library beside it to find out how long a body took to vanish back to dust.
Martin found a place in the supermarket car park, and spent a quarter of an hour browsing round the shop so that it would look like a decent amount of time to be there. Then he slipped next door to the library.
The bright but stuffy room was packed with pensioners. Martin wondered if it was some special event. He’d never seen so many old people in one room since he attended a matinée performance of some tiresome Alan Ayckbourn play at the National Theatre.
The catalogue readers and online computers were all busy, so Martin browsed along the Non-Fiction corridors. He’d find what he was looking for, he imagined, under True Crime.
After a long stroll past Travel, Motoring and Geography, Martin arrived at Crime. He scanned the shelves, pulling out a couple of books to look at their covers. They seemed to be no more than lurid accounts of serial murderers, like the Yorkshire Ripper, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
‘Could I be of any assistance?’ A bossy looking woman in a dowdy tweedy suit and spectacles stood before him. She glanced down at the book in his hand. The cover photo showed the contorted face of a screaming woman, baring her neck to a knife wielded by a gloved hand. It was called The Murderous Handbook. Martin crammed it back onto the shelf.
‘Just browsing,’ he said and walked on. Of course he didn’t want her help. A woman like that would surely remember a man who came in asking if there were any books detailing how fast a body decomposed when buried in a bin liner in a London back garden.
He giggled to himself. It was funny really, when you thought about it.
In this strange nether world of drab spinsters, wholesale bus-pass holders and slightly smelly books he felt oddly free, and for the moment he didn’t feel in the least frightened or horrified by what he had done.
He wondered if perhaps that was why the tiresome Yank next door always seemed so jolly and cheerful. Maybe the contrapuntal medley of murder and books had some strange calming influence on the soul.
He came to the end of a row. A glance at the adjacent spines showed he was back in Fiction. He turned back and took a saunter down a different stack.
If this type of book wasn’t shelved under Crime, where could it be? He tried Medicine next, but those aisles were packed with garishly illustrated volumes about mother and baby, and self help manuals—How to Keep Supple With Arthritis, You Can Have a Full Life After a Stroke, Coping with Psoriasis, Surviving Death.
Well there was a comical thought! With the possible exception of Jesus Christ, whoever had ever managed to survive death? Who’d write such a load of tosh? He had pulled the book from the shelf and one glance at the cover made him realise that it was in fact about coping with bereavement. The cover drawing, depicting a lily covered coffin, made him feel edgy, so he put the book back and moved along, ambling through History till he found himself in Social Sciences.
He saw a sub-division marked Police, which was obviously a subject closely allied to Crime, and lo! There was just the book he wanted: Lecture Notes on Violent Crime Together with an Illustrated Atlas of Forensic Pathology.
Grabbing the book, Martin dived into the index. When he saw the number of references and the size of the chapter on human decomposition he decided to take the book to a dark corner, where he could study it in detail. There was a tattered armchair by a low Formica table at the end of Transport and Engineering. He sat down under the artificial shade of a dusty plastic palm set in a tin pot full of dry grey stones, and started to read.
There were plenty of case histories, tales of lumps of boiled flesh being pulled out of the Thames, found in sewers or discovered in people’s attics. One woman had been fed to pigs. Mind you, like Max said, even there, with no body at all, the police still caught her killers. And that was in the old days before all these ultra-violet lights, computers and DNA. Good lord! There was a woman back in the 1880s who’d gone round trying to sell human dripping to pub landlords. That would make him think twice, if ever he was tempted by a hawker selling packets of those pub-grub home-made pork scratchings. The porkers might have been human-fed, and their piggy remains fried in some other poor person’s discarded boiled-down flab.
Some murderers, he read, had tried to speed the process of rotting down the corpse by putting quicklime around the body. Martin skimmed across the page. This stuff could be useful. He’d seen huge plastic sacks of lime piled up near the compost when he bought the snapdragons. He could go back and buy some this afternoon. But when he got to the end of the article he understood that not only did the use of lime sometimes backfire by preserving the corpse, but that anyway garden centres had changed their lime recipe long since, after the days of 10 Rillington Place, so there was no point.
Martin flicked to the appendices to see the section called The Atlas. Eeeugh. The word Atlas was, in his opinion, a sarcastic euphemism for a photo album of horror. After a quick glance at a study of a cadaverous leg complete with shark bite, the close up of a dead man’s purple mottled arse with a corkscrew sticking out of his anus, and the blackened tortured face of a dead burns victim, he quickly turned back to plain black and white text.
There he found a basic chart of stages of decomposition. That would be just the thing he needed.
The process of putrefaction started after about 48 hours after death. Martin looked at his watch, as though that would be any help. Around now, he supposed. He read through the description of how bacteria bubbled up within the intestines then spread through the blood vessels, so that technically the body destroyed itself from within. After two to three days the abdomen turned green. Within three weeks everything about the body was swollen and unrecognisable, and a week later it started to liquefy.
With a shudder, Martin realised that one day this would happen to him too.
Unless he chose to be cremated, of course.
He realised he hadn’t taken a breath in about a minute and his head started to swim.
After a few deep breaths he felt better.
It was horrible enough reading about it, but too awful to think that it was happening just outside his back window, and to Sarah.
He gulped drily and read on.
The progress from corpse to skeleton took on average a year, warm weather speeding up the process, but it was delayed by things like tight fitting garments.
Damn.
Why had he insisted Sarah wore that outfit for dinner?
DAMN.
Still, a year wasn’t too long to wait before he sold up. Financially, he might be able to blag his way through twelve months.
Insects accelerated the stages of decomposition, he read, as did animals, foxes and the like. Well, of course! If a bloody fox took great bites out of you, naturally you’d disappear quicker—down their gullets. But Martin realised he could well do without some urban vulpine vermin digging down to Sarah, and leaving a foot or hand on the topsoil in the next door garden for all to see. That would be all he needed.
Sarah had had a thing about foxes. Like her mother. In fact, the bloody batty old cow was probably at this second sitting in her cell in that ruddy home sending out mental instructions to every fox in Lambeth to come to his back garden and expose Sarah’s body to the elements.
Martin flipped the page.
‘Professor Glaister’s study shows that decomposition times are reduced by the following ratios when the corpse is not in open air: Water x 2. Earth x 8.’
Times Eight? Burying a body slowed down the decomposition times eight. Eight years before he could move!
Why, by then he’d be over forty.
Christ!
He wished now that he’d listened more to that thing they were talking about where the man used a grease gun. What was a grease gun, anyway? He’d never heard of such a thing.
Sarah would have known how to do it.
Oh damn it.
If only she was here to help him in this predicament.
Martin thought again of The Exorcist ghost-woman howling at him in the night. How it was Sarah and yet wasn’t.
Oh God!
And now, to think that, because of him, the real Sarah was starting to liquefy and rot from within.
Augh.
Shutting his eyes, and inhaling deeply, Martin leaned back in the chair, a finger resting on his place in the book.
A hand landed on his shoulder.
‘Gotcha!’
Martin spun round, paralysed with shock, flinging the book to the floor in an effort to distance himself from it.
‘Oh heck, Martin, I’m so sorry. Were you asleep?’ It was Tess, as ever grinning that Satchmo toothy smile of hers. ‘These libraries get very airless, especially when all these old people cram themselves inside. I think someone at the old folks’ homes must have told them that the library was doling out free muffins or hip replacements.’
Tess stooped to retrieve the forensic book from the floor, crashing heads with Martin as he went down in an attempt to snatch it first.
‘Ouch!’ Tess rubbed her scalp. ‘Holy Moly, you have one heck of a solid cranium, Martin. What do you keep in there, rocks?’ She looked down at the book. ‘Hey! Lookit. My favourite book in the whole wide world. Fancy you picking that out. Are you using it for an ad campaign or something?’ She flipped the pages back to the plastic sealed dust jacket. ‘By the way, I do know why you didn’t go to a bookstore and buy it!’
She tapped the side of her nose and gave Martin an elaborate look.
Good god!
Martin sank down into the chair again, gripping the edges of the plastic padded arms with stiff fingers. He tried to swallow but his throat seemed not only to have dried up but utterly constricted. His tongue made an involuntary clicking sound.
This bloody woman. She knew. She’d known all along. She’d heard everything through the wall, watched him dig the grave, seen him roll the manatee into it and cover it with pretty spring flowers.
Tess knew he had killed Sarah.
‘Look at that! See!’ Tess pointed to the price tag: £85. ‘Eighty five of your best English quids. I didn’t take you for a library kind of a guy, but, hey, who’s got that kind of moola to throw around?’
With a cheery wink Tess handed the book back.
Martin breathed again.
Tess smiled in that Mona Lisa like way of hers.
‘Don’t worry, Marti. I won’t tell anyone your little secret.’
She turned and swaggered off in the direction of True Crime.
What little secret?
My god.
She really did know.
And how enigmatic she’d been about the ruddy horrible book too.
And she had called him Marti! No ‘N’ on the end. Like the sodding ring. Marti! She’d heard his row with Sarah too.
She really, really did know.
Martin wondered exactly how much more torture Tess was going to put him through before she came out with some demand. It was clear that the fucking annoying woman was toying with him.
What could she want?
Well, if it was money—tough. He didn’t have anything to offer but debt.
Mind you…If she really knew, why hadn’t she already gone to the police?
Or maybe she had?
Was this all a clever game to make him give himself away, expose himself? A sting, they called it on TV. Perhaps she would come over and give him a peck on the cheek, like Judas Iscariot, and the next thing the room would be swarming with special branch officers, wielding guns and marching him out into a waiting van with a blanket on his head.
Martin stood up. His legs felt quite weak. There was no way he could get out of here now without it looking as though he was avoiding her. That was if he could walk at all.
What a bitch! What a vixen! What a cat! That was it. She was a cat, a feral cat, stalking him. And he was a poor limp, dead sparrow in her fat cat’s maw, waiting only for her razor claws to tear him to shreds.
Trying to look casual, Martin crept along the edge of the aisle and slid the revolting forensic book back into its place.
He couldn’t see that American bitch at all now. Perhaps she had gone as quietly as she had come. Or maybe she was lurking in some vantage point, perching on a stool on the mezzanine floor, looking down at him, inspecting his body language for tell-tale signs of a psychopath, or schizo, or whatever he was for having done what he had done to his lovely, elegant, funny, clever wife.
Martin stood at the end of the stack, trying to look carefree and business-like. He took another deep breath, checked either side then walked vigorously towards the exit.
His path was blocked by a gaggle of cackling pensioners. He had no idea what was supposed to be so funny but he wanted to kick these babbling dotards into next week, to seize their sticks and zimmer frames and smash them down on their fluffy white heads.
He shouldered his way through them. He had almost reached the door when he noticed that one of the online computers was free. What a brilliant idea. Now that there was no computer at home, why not make use of this one? He took the seat, and logged onto the internet. He could check the bank account and see if he could find out why his card had been refused, without having to exchange words with that arsehole Czech. That would also save him the embarrassment of having to explain away the fact that there was no way he could sell up for another eight years, on account of the fact his wife wouldn’t have rotted down sufficiently till then.
