The Brief

by Simon Michael

‘Etta, honey, don’t cry. I’m sure we can sort it out – whatever the outcome. But we both know this can’t go on. We’re just making one another completely miserable.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll make something for dinner. You’ll need to get a cab from the station.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the car, I’d forgotten. Did you book it in?’

  ‘Yes, but as it needs towing, they’re too busy to come for a few days.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll be there around seven.’

  Henrietta put the receiver down, and cried. She thought of calling her mother, but didn’t think she could stand an hour’s worth of “I told you so’s”. So she dried her eyes and went out to the garden. Gardening normally calmed her down, but she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing. After fifteen minutes she decided to cycle into the village. She put her gardening gloves on the garden table and went to the garage for her bike.

  At first she didn’t appreciate the significance of the emptiness of the garage. Then, with a shock, she remembered that Charles didn’t have the car in London, that it was not in the drive, and that it should have been where she and the men from the farm pushed it the day before. She did all the foolish and illogical things one does when refusing to believe the obvious: she checked the drive and the road and even looked over the road to the stable yard. It wasn’t there. Eventually she acknowledged with surprise that someone really had stolen it.

  ‘What idiot would steal a car that doesn’t run?’ she said out loud in astonishment. She caught part of herself enjoying in anticipation Charles’s frustration when he found out, but the nicer part of herself telephoned the local police. There wasn’t a police station in the village but there was a police house with a blue lamp outside it where the local bobby lived. She rang the number but received no reply. She scribbled a note informing him that her husband’s broken down car had been stolen from a locked garage. She read the note again, wondering if it would read like a practical joke, but shrugged. It fulfilled her duties as the owner’s wife. She locked the house and cycled into the village to drop the note through the police house letterbox.

  In fact, Henrietta need not have bothered. Late that night, while she was asleep, the same man that had stolen the car quietly drove up to the house in it, now repaired, carefully opened the garage doors as he had before, and backed the car into the garage. Had Henrietta looked in the garage the next day and seen the Jaguar there, she would no doubt have thought that she was going mad, or perhaps that she had been drinking too much gin. In fact she had no cause to go to the garage again on the following day, and she never realised that the car had been returned.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Henrietta watched out of the window as Jo, the stable girl, closed the stable gates opposite the house. Jo waved goodbye to someone still in the stables and walked off down the lane, her riding boots crunching on the gravel at the side of the road. There was no pavement on that side of the road. The tarmac disintegrated into gravel, and then there was a strip of tall grass, and the brook.

  It was 6.40 pm. and Charles might arrive at any minute. The thought caused Henrietta to pick up her gin and tonic and gulp down what remained of it. She knew what was on the agenda for the evening’s discussion. She had been hoping for a frank but kind conversation between the two of them for months – years in fact. But now it was imminent, she hadn’t decided what she was going to say or what conclusion she wanted. About the only two fixed points in her emotional reference frame were that, firstly, she had been right to finish the thing with Laurence, and secondly she knew she still loved Charles. Maybe some counselling? She had heard someone at the tennis club talking about the Marriage Guidance Counsel. The idea of discussing their marriage with a total stranger filled her with embarrassment, but maybe they just had to. On the other hand, maybe it was best to call it a day?

  Despite her earlier promise to herself, she took her empty glass back to the cocktail cabinet and poured another two inches of neat gin. She looked at herself in the mirror above the mantelpiece. She had made an effort with her makeup and she wore a long, quite formal dress which showed off her slim figure. The smell of Basque lamb stew, one of Charles’s favourites, drifted from the kitchen. If it was going to end, she wanted Charles to see what he’d be missing.

  She peered closer at her reflection, and saw that her eyelids were puffy and her eyes slightly bloodshot. Too much gin and too many tears, she thought, and for a second her nerve deserted her, and she thought of calling a taxi and disappearing.

  She took a deep breath, smiled experimentally at herself in the mirror, and went into the kitchen to poke at the stew and check that the pommes dauphinoise were browning nicely. She had thought to calm her mood earlier by playing some music but she was so distracted that, an hour later, Albinoni still revolved soundlessly under the raised stylus. She threw herself into an armchair looking out of the window into the garden.

  All of Henrietta’s movements around the house had been observed by a man hiding at the rear of the garden. He was not the same man as the one who had stood in the identical position, observing the house over the previous days. He was smaller in build, and his clothes were clearly unsuitable for sneaking around others’ gardens. He wore pressed pinstriped trousers hidden under a long mackintosh, well-polished black brogues, a hat, and he carried an umbrella. By his feet, and now becoming slightly damp from the grass, were a briefcase and a large blue bag made out of what looked like heavy curtain material, tied by a white rope drawstring. The last was a typical barrister’s bag, used for carrying court robes.

  The man had been watching Henrietta pace from room to room for the last hour. He looked nervous, or perhaps cold, as he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot and looking about himself. Every now and then he pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and consulted it, stuffing it back into his raincoat when he was satisfied, only to take it out a few minutes later. When he appreciated that Henrietta had at last settled in one room, he picked up his bag and briefcase, pulled the hat lower down over his face, and picked his way carefully across the lawn towards the back door of the house. He kept to the bushes and the lengthening shadows, and had just reached the corner of the garage and the house when he was alerted to a noise from behind him, at the rear of the garden. He scurried around the side of the garage, and watched.

  Charles puffed, panted and cursed his way over the stile at the back of the garden. He was hot and sweaty, and extremely irritated. He had arrived at the station to find himself in a losing battle for the one taxi waiting there. He was thus forced to carry his briefcase and coat for a mile and a half across rutted and extremely muddy fields made all the more treacherous by the recent rain. He’d taken off his jacket and started to carry it just in time to slip and get it and his knees covered in mud and grass stains. His shoes heavy with adherent mud, he trudged across the garden, aware that he was leaving footprints on Henrietta’s beautiful lawn, and clattered through the back door, throwing everything he had been carrying onto the floor. Henrietta, startled by the noise, ran into the kitchen to find him swearing as he tried to hook his shoes off without touching either of them with his hands.

  She looked at him, aware of the risks of laughing, but unable to suppress giggling at him.

  ‘You look quite a sight,’ she said, holding her hand to her face to hide her laughter.

  ‘Can you get some newspaper?’

  ‘Okay, hold on. Just stay there.’

  Henrietta opened a cupboard and took out an old newspaper which she spread on the floor in front of Charles. He attempted to hook a shoe off the heel of one foot with the toe of the other, managing only to spray gobbets of mud onto the clean floor.

  ‘Mind out Charles!’ shouted Henrietta. ‘This is a decent dress. Be patient, and I’ll do it!’

  He obeyed, and looked down at her head as she crouched in front of him. He saw the stains all over his clothes, the mud on the kitchen floor and felt the sweat running off his brow.

  ‘
I had planned such a civilized, dignified entrance,’ he said wryly.

  ‘Right,’ said Henrietta, standing up, having taken the second shoe off. ‘I think the shoes have had it – they’re saturated inside and out. You actually look as if you’ve been wading. And your socks and trousers are a complete mess. Why don’t you go up and have a bath, get changed, and I’ll put dinner on hold.’

  ‘Won’t it spoil?’ he asked. ‘I’m already late.’

  ‘No, luckily, it’s quite forgiving. 20 minutes won’t do any harm.’

  Charles did as he was told. To his surprise, while he was in the bath there was a knock on the door and Henrietta came in with a glass of sherry for him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling ‘that’s kind.’

  ‘Mind if I stay?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Charles patted the side of the bath. Henrietta got a hand towel and dried enough space for herself, and sat down. She leaned forward on impulse and kissed Charles on the lips. She meant it to be a light gesture of affection, but Charles’s lips softened, and he bit her lower lip gently. She responded with her tongue, and leaned into him, bracing herself with her hands on the tiles above Charles’s head. Charles would have touched her – earlier in their marriage he’d have pulled her into the bath on top of him, clothed or not – but he kept his hands to himself and after a moment Henrietta disengaged and sat up.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how nice that was.’ She looked down at his hairy muscular body, and the dark triangle of hair between his legs. ‘I see you approve.’

  Charles looked down at his growing erection and lay back in the warm water.

  ‘You’re not in the least shy, are you?’ commented Henrietta.

  ‘Not with you, no. God knows what I’d be like with someone else.’ The comment, meant to be innocuous, touched a nerve in Henrietta, and she flushed as she remembered her brazen behaviour with several “someone elses.”

  ‘I’ll see you downstairs, then,’ she said, and left without making eye contact with him.

  Twenty minutes later, cleaned and refreshed, Charles sat down at the kitchen table opposite Henrietta.

  ‘Well,’ said Henrietta brightly, as she took a spoonful of soup, ‘you called this meeting.’

  Charles took a deep breath and put his spoon down. ‘Okay. Before anything else I want you to believe that despite everything, despite the fact that I may be the worst husband on the planet, and despite the fact that I know we have torn huge chunks out of each other, I love you. That has never changed.’

  ‘Thank you for saying that.’

  ‘But – ’

  ‘There’s a “but”?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t live together. I don’t know how to make you happy, Etta. And I don’t think you really want me to try anymore.’

  ‘But upstairs – ’

  ‘That’s never been the problem, has it? The passion’s always been there. But it’s the rest. I can’t live with this constant fighting. The ups are wonderful but the downs are too depressing, and too frequent. I would trade half the passion for some peace and quiet with someone who wants to share my life.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying I think we should divorce.’

  Charles looked up as he said that, the first time he had looked at Henrietta since he’d started speaking, and realised that she had stopped eating too. She stared silently into her soup, her arms resting on the table either side of her bowl. He stood up and stared out into the darkening garden.

  ‘I’ve known you been having an affair for some time.’ Henrietta didn’t reply. ‘And it’s so out of character for the girl I met at Cambridge. You were so repelled by your father’s affairs over the years, so scathing of him, and yet here you are doing exactly the same. But I don’t think that alone would make me give up on us. It’s more that.. well… I think it just tells us how unhappy you are. And…’ he paused, ‘… I think it makes you hate yourself, and me.’

  He turned to look at her again, and saw a fat tear roll down her cheek and splash into her home-made tomato soup. She seemed unaware of the spots of red accumulating on the tablecloth and her dress.

  ‘Oh, Etta – ’ he said, from the heart, and rushed over to her.

  ‘No, Charles! Don’t touch me!’ She shoved her chair back from the table, scraping noisily on the tiles, and retreated from him to the kitchen door, her shoulders heaving. After a moment she controlled her breathing enough to speak quietly, with deathly calm. ‘I want you to go. Right now. Don’t say another word, just leave.’

  ‘But – ’

  ‘I mean it! Not another word. It’s over. You said so. So, just leave.’

  Charles hesitated, and then brushed past her into the hallway. He walked swiftly upstairs, packed a bag and collected a spare suit. He forced his feet into his ruined saturated shoes and within ten minutes he was walking back up the muddy lane.

  The man in the garden, still hiding behind the garage, had watched through the lighted kitchen windows as the events unfolded. He smiled grimly and approached the back door. Henrietta was still in the kitchen, crying as she emptied the soup into the sink. She heard the back door and assumed that Charles had forgotten something. She didn’t turn round when she heard footsteps behind her. She was unaware of the cosh as it descended onto the back of her head. She did however move at the last moment, and it ended its downward arc by striking her cheek and then her shoulder. She cried out in pain and surprise and turned for the first time. The man raised the cosh again, but before he could bring it down she lashed out with the heavy ironware saucepan in her hand. It struck her attacker in the eye, and he grunted with pain. He nonetheless got in his second blow, and this one landed directly on Henrietta’s temple. She collapsed the instant it landed.

  The man bent over the sink and washed cold water into his eye. It was extremely painful and already closing, but it wasn’t bleeding very much. He bent and retrieved the saucepan which had rolled onto the floor. Holding it by his gloved hand, he rinsed it thoroughly under the hot tap and placed it neatly with the other utensils in the drying rack. Pressing a dishcloth to his face to prevent blood dripping onto the floor, with his free hand he dragged Henrietta’s unconscious form by an ankle into the lounge. He placed her in the middle of the Persian rug, and took a cutthroat razor out of his coat pocket. Bending over her from behind, and careful to stand away from the direction of his swing, he brought the blade down swiftly and efficiently across her throat. Blood spurted out in a great leap, arcing over the coffee table and splashing in bright red washes over the wall. It continued pumping for a few seconds, and then gradually stopped, as Henrietta’s life ebbed away.

  The man stood, picked up a chair and threw it at the display case of vases given to Henrietta and Charles for their first wedding anniversary by her godparents. It smashed, sending shards of glass and porcelain over the room. He then turned over the other occasional table and flung the decanters at the wall. At the same time he shouted; oaths, curses, meaningless words, a one-sided argument, concluding in a long, high-pitched shriek.

  He raced back to the kitchen where he had left the briefcase and blue cloth bag, picked them up, and left by the kitchen door. He entered the garage. He unlocked the main doors from the inside but didn’t push them open. He ran back to the house, sprinting through it to the front door, the cloth bag and briefcase sending an umbrella stand flying, and re-emerged onto the front drive. He pulled wide the garage doors, allowing them to crash back with force against the walls. He unlocked the Jaguar, threw the case and bag inside, got in, and started the engine. He revved it loudly, and then, just to make sure, drove the car at an angle out of the garage, so that the coachwork was dragged along the concrete doorpost. The screech of tearing metal could have been heard a street away.

  The Jaguar shot out of the drive, sending dust and gravel into the air, and disappeared down the lane.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was nearly mi
dnight when Charles reached the flat in Fetter Lane. He threw his things on the couch and sat down, staring out of the window. The streets were almost deserted. An occasional vehicle passed beneath his window, its true colours leached by the yellow sodium lights on the pavement. He was exhausted, having trudged both ways from the station to the house and back again, and then having to endure the last all-stations slow train back into London, but he knew that sleep would be impossible. After a while he got up, fixed himself a Scotch, and returned to the fraud papers he had left open on the kitchen table.

  Half an hour later he realised that he had forgotten to bring Archbold, the criminal practitioner’s Bible, from his desk in the Temple. With a heavy sigh he put his muddy shoes back on, threw on a jacket and walked down the staircase to the street.

  The streets of the City were empty. Not a single vehicle was in sight as Charles crossed Fleet Street. There was an unnatural stillness, as if the night was holding its breath. Charles walked through the arch into the Temple. The trees were utterly immobile, their branches, now in full leaf, fixed against the night sky. His footsteps echoed around Chancery Court. He was about to climb the staircase to number 2 when he noted that one of the lights on the first floor had been left on. It took him a moment in the dark to find the right key for the great studded outer door. It stood open during office hours and the barristers, although supplied with keys, rarely had to use them. Eventually he got both doors open, and walked through the silent waiting room and up the stairs to the first floor. The light had been shining from a room opposite his but, having reached it, all the rooms on that side of the landing were now in darkness.

  ‘Hello?’ he called.

  There was no answer. He reached forward to push open the door to his own room when the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly rose and he knew he wasn’t alone. He whirled round, and remembered nothing more.

  •