Belinda nodded.
‘Yes, I know, but something strange happened that night. Something that I can’t explain.’
The sun dropped behind the hills and the promise of black night flooded the terrace.
‘When my aunt died,’ Belinda continued, ‘they said she fell down the stairs, that the carpet was loose and she lost her footing. Yet when I inspected the cottage after her death, the carpet was firmly in place, not loose, and it’s been like that all the time I’ve been living here. That’s why I was convinced that her death was not an accident.’
‘So?’
‘Well,’ said Belinda slowly, ‘when Mr Munro fell to his death, the carpet on the top stair was loose, as though it had never been fixed to the step. It moved under his feet when he trod on it, and that’s how he lost his balance and fell.’
Belinda transferred her gaze to the facade of the cottage, which in the twilight was etched with pitch-black shadows.
‘The next morning,’ continued Belinda, ‘after the police had taken his body away, after they’d all gone, I went up the stairs – and the carpet on the top step, which had been loose the night before – was fixed firmly and solidly to the floor.’
***
If you enjoyed Capable of Murder, you might also enjoy The Nightwatchman by Scott Griffin, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from The Nightwatchman by Scott Griffin
PROLOGUE
I leave the Criterion building and don’t look left or right as I use my swipe card to get out into the warm rain.
I can hear Ed shouting behind me, then the reactions of the people in the street. I realise I don’t look so hot, particularly as I’m drenched in someone else’s blood.
Thunder is still punching the clouds but as moisture rinses the tackiness from my face I can feel a more intense heat across the edge of my belt. I wonder if the bullet is still inside me or if it travelled out the other side. Regardless of its resting place I know it’s left a hole in my stomach big enough to allow my own hot blood to run down my leg and into my shoe.
The breath goes out of me and I realise I’m lying on my side, the sound of squealing tyres inches from my eardrums.
But as people scream and scurry about me I have just one vivid image in my head and I use it to exclude everything else.
ONE
The sweltering bodies around me lurch in unison as the tube train rounds another bend and yanks everybody’s thoughts briefly back inside it. My meditations fragment and I tug the knot of my tie further down my damp chest.
There are too many faces here I don’t want to remember so I stare straight ahead, trying not to log the pimpled relief of the teenage boy seated opposite me quizzically eyeing the dried pasta bracelet that Nell made me.
I’ve already got too many people locked inside my head. Maybe you’re in there as well. A lingering glance is all it takes and every minute facet of you has been stored.
If you’ve ever passed my security desk, I could remember you. If you’ve ever waited at the bus stop opposite the Criterion apartment building, I could remember you. I stare at its occupants from my position at reception eight hours a day.
Let’s say you’re seated across from me on a busy tube like the one I’m on now. Focusing on your Kindle you’d be even more oblivious to the reluctant snap shot I’ve taken of you; the angle of your head, the dirt under one of your nails as it grips the back of the unit, the arrangement of your features as your eyeballs roll across each line.
But an instant in your life has been unalterably suspended, a sliver of your existence perfectly preserved. That moment the digital pages in your hand absorbed you, you’ve been absorbed by me, your heedless expression appropriated for as long as my heart is beating.
I may recollect you days from now, months, years or never but you’re forever suspended, every unflinching component of your image in storage, never to deteriorate. Meet me again and I’ll automatically locate your last imprint, flicking through a high-speed montage of similar faces before pasting previous beside present, comparing one against the other.
There’s no selection or premeditation, it’s a reflex faculty that I’ve possessed since infancy. And, of course, I know exactly what that first childhood memory was, contemplating, in sheer terror, the seemingly hundred foot drop down my father’s back to the cork kitchen tiles below and peering down the banner of white vomit I’d just unfurled from my eight-month-old stomach.
Every component of the tableau still has maximum definition; the set of feet belonging to my mother and the way the bare toe of her right foot was bright red from being pressurised by its blue sandal strap, the enormity of her paisley maternity dress hovering over them like an air balloon, the expectant face of the ginger cat crouching at the bottom of the woollen cliff face and the way the droplets of regurgitated milk suspended themselves on the purple fibres of my father’s sweater.
It’s as crystal to me now as it was to my eye then and there’s something about those flashbacks that mollifies me. Perhaps it’s the circumstances of their recording that prompts me to extract them with increasing regularity. I was safe then, guileless and vacant of facsimiles of everything that has occurred since.
How long ago was my cat, Fletcher, buried? An image of sodden earth presents itself; the soil decorated with pebbles, two lollipop sticks held together by grubby elastic bands serving as a headstone.
I was eleven when they interred the cat, twenty-four years ago, and I can still scrutinise the row of press ganged family mourners’ feet - my father’s grubby moccasins with one lace untied and the tiny, blue, backless slippers my mother’s trunk legs terminated in. I can even see an impression of my own shoe in the crushed and bruised bluebell leaves beside the grave. It’s one of the images I examine in my dark room.
How big is your dark room? It’s probably the size of your bedroom - maybe a little smaller - and exists between around two and six in the morning. I awake inside mine and it’s full of terrible possibilities, the sort of possibilities normally shunted aside by daylight and routine.
When I’m there, my mind accelerates through all of them, from looming bills to the hundred and one alternative explanations for the dry cough Nell sometimes has. It’s never the most likely explanation, instead the darkness forces me to select one that pushes me out of bed to check on her, shivering in her doorway until I’m thawed out by the light bulb in the passage and how peaceful and oblivious she is to me.
There is a way out of them, though. If you don’t want to suffocate between those walls, there is an alternative to chewing handfuls of sleeping pills. Sure they work for a while but you’re only forestalling the inevitable and you can guarantee that the next time you wake in that room it’s going to be about half the size and backed up with all your unfinished business from the nights you had off.
Try thinking it big instead. Visualise its black boundaries and push them back. The more room you make, the more latitude there is for the other possibilities, the ones that get you through the day.
The compartment light flickers and I look down at my tan, nylon uniform trousers. Seventeen years working as a security guard. Yes, I’ve certainly misapplied my talent and used up my superabundance of empty hours dwelling on it ever since. Seventeen years spent gazing through swing and swivel doors, a sentry for a chamber between other people’s external and internal lives. The last six of them I’ve worked in an exclusive apartment complex in Fitzrovia where my wages are barely bolstered by selling the odd pencil sketch portrait to its residents.
I politely acknowledge people who have earned the right to ignore me. Every day I monitor them, escorting their bags of shopping and golf clubs in and out of the building; a conveyor belt of the cosmetically enhanced.
I have every one of their before and after photos reluctantly embedded in my database but whatever they’ve had lifted, nipped or stapled, while they wait for the lift, each one still manages to maintain the same expression of being distracted by anythin
g other than my presence.
Even the ones who sat for me, the ones who called me Gabe and briefly allowed me into their exclusive enclaves to sketch them or their pets - the next day the haughtiness returned, the meeting conveniently scrubbed from their memory while mine necessitates them becoming another unwanted part of me.
It’s another dark room - not just where the uninvited but faithfully replicated faces are stockpiled - but the place where every unpleasant episode, every horrific image that I glimpse on the TV news is developed and stored. They don’t pale or get buried like they do for other people. They just mount up in the dark room, fuelling it with the same patent dread I felt the moment my eyes first manacled them to my brain.
I often wonder what will happen when I run out of space and can’t push the walls back any further.
Capable of Murder Page 17