Want You Dead

by Peter James

  Ten minutes later they boarded a bus.

  Happy holiday! he thought. You ugly fuckwits.

  As soon as it was as dark as it was going to get, he left his car, pulled the hood of his raincoat over his baseball cap until it almost totally obscured his vision, then grabbed the tools he thought he might need from the rear of his van. With their stupid clothes, and all their luggage, that couple were going away for a while for sure. He had all the time in the world.

  With a single blow of his hammer he smashed the side window of the BMW, reached inside and yanked the door handle. The alarm parppp-parppped. He ducked inside, yanked the bonnet release handle, raised the bonnet and rapidly cut the alarm wires, silencing it. Then he looked around, warily, his nerves jangling. But no security guard came running. Apart from an empty bus making its rounds like a forlorn robot searching for a soulmate, the car park was deserted.

  He clamped a protective locking disc, which he had stolen from a fire engine’s equipment at the airport, over the BMW’s steering wheel. It was designed for firefighters to cut people out of crashed cars when the airbag had not deployed to prevent it doing so accidentally. Then he ducked under the wheel, and with his blade cut away the protective outer shield of the airbag. Next, being careful to avoid the trigger sensors, he sliced into the airbag itself, and allowed the salt-white sodium azide crystals to fall into the plastic beaker he had taken from a filling station on the way here.

  Sodium azide was one of the most toxic chemicals in the world. It was far more rapid acting than cyanide and, unlike cyanide, where the poison could be neutralized with amyl nitrate, there was no antidote. It was tasteless, and would bond with the haemoglobin in the blood causing death within minutes. And it had the bonus of being virtually undetectable, unless you were specifically looking for it.

  He wasn’t sure he would need it, but it gave him another option. You could never have enough options!

  Oh baby, oh Red, you should never have driven me to this, really you shouldn’t!

  I’d hate to think of you swallowing sodium azide. Really I would. But I guess, if the truth be known, I would prefer that to seeing you screw Dr Karl Murphy.

  But sodium azide. It’s not a nice death. Not nice at all.

  Mercifully quick, that’s the upside.

  But after what you did to me, would I really want it to be quick?

  If you want to know the truth, Red, I would really like to see you suffer. To hear you scream out how much you love me. How desperately badly you want me back. That you would do anything to get me back.

  That you would swallow sodium azide, if that’s what it took.

  Then I could look into your eyes and say to you, ‘Sorry, Red. There is no antidote. If you’d stayed with me, you would be looking forward to a whole long future. Kids. Grandchildren. Family Christmases. Happy old age. All that stuff.

  Now all you have is less than a minute.

  Moments to contemplate your regrets.

  Moments to think about how sorry you are.

  Moments to think how good it could all have been for you and me.

  People often say that’s how it goes in life. Shit happens. But you know, that’s a cop-out. You know what the reality is? Shit falls from its own weight.

  Think about that.

  He flipped back through the early texts from Red on his phone. Stopped at one.

  God, I so love what you do to me ))) I’m so full of sweetness and love when I think of you, and I like that! Actually I LOVE that! These feelings are awesome. Wish you were here right now, holding me naked in your arms and deep inside me.

  Shielding the cup against the falling rain, he hurried back to his van, and eased himself back into the driving seat, put the cup into a plastic bag, and carefully knotted the top, sealing it.

  Sodium azide would kill someone, agonizingly, within sixty seconds. It was only found in older car airbags, and when they deployed in collisions, the other chemicals in there neutralized it.

  By the time the ugly couple returned from their holiday, and found their BMW had been broken into and the airbag tampered with, he would be long gone.

  And maybe the sodium azide would be long gone, too.

  God, Red, I can’t live without you. And I can’t watch you with another man. Really, the pain would be too much for me to bear.

  Blame it on your parents. That poet Philip Larkin got it right, didn’t he, when he wrote: They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

  Oh boy, Red, yours really did. Royally.

  26

  Friday, 25 October

  Roy Grace sat at home, on the sofa, with the initial post-mortem report on Dr Karl Murphy lying beside him and Humphrey asleep on his back, paws up, at his feet. He was watching Cleo giving Noah his supper, and making another check on the list of wedding acceptances. Noah, in a red and white striped top, had a mush of food in front of him on the white plastic tray.

  ‘Noah having supper!’ she said, breezily, as she spooned some sweet potato purée into the baby’s mouth. ‘Hello Noah, what are you eating today? Yum!’

  It reminded Grace he needed to fill Marlon’s food hopper. The goldfish was eleven, still forever circumnavigating his bowl. Every morning when he came downstairs, he half expected to see the fish floating lifeless and was always relieved to see it was still active, still as mournful-looking as ever. But it was a link with Sandy, the only living link he had. He’d won it at a fairground with her. And he was heartened to find, on an internet trawl, that the current record for longevity for a goldfish was thirty-four years.

  Using two of his fingers and his thumb, Noah tried cramming some mashed banana into his mouth. As he sucked, bits dropped down, some bouncing off the tray and falling onto the mat below him, and a thin stream of dribble slid down his chin.

  ‘Mmm, yum yum, Noah!’ Cleo encouraged him, dabbing away the dribble.

  There were times when Roy Grace found himself unable to take his eyes off his son. Scarcely able to believe this was his child, his and Cleo’s creation. The emotions he felt for him were completely overwhelming. And he felt moved almost to tears by the love and happiness he could see in Cleo’s face.

  He reached down and rubbed Humphrey’s belly for some moments. The black Labrador-Border Collie cross made a happy grunting sound, his right hind leg jigging. Then Grace picked up the post-mortem report and looked at one section which he had ringed in red ink. Traces of the anti-depressant Paxil were present in Murphy’s blood, on which there had been a fast-track analysis. The pathologist had made an annotation that there was a possible, but unproven, link between this drug and suicides.

  Suddenly turning to him, Cleo said, ‘Any joy, darling, with that clue?’

  The Times, open on the crossword page, lay on the sofa beside the wedding list, along with a book of sudoku. Cleo was struggling with her studies for an Open University degree, at times unable to concentrate during these first months of Noah’s life but determined to continue. So to help keep her brain active, she had taken to doing crossword puzzles and sudoku.

  Grace looked down at the clue in The Times, for 4 across, eight letters, which had been marked in red by Cleo. It was three words. Percussionist be calm!

  Grace tried to think. ‘Doldrums?’ he suggested.

  ‘Doldrums?’ she repeated, frowning.

  ‘That’s an area of ocean around the tropics where sailboats often get becalmed for days.’

  ‘It can also mean down in the dumps, can’t it?’ Cleo said. Then she gave Noah a chiding as he spat mashed banana onto the floor beneath him. ‘Tut, tut, tut, naughty Noah!’ She turned back to Roy. ‘Yes, doldrums, I like it. I think you’re right, and it fits!’ She wrote it in.

  As he watched her, he remembered how when he was a child his mother had been keen on crossword puzzles, but he never cared for them much, especially now, with his work on major crimes – they tended to be puzzles enough. His thoughts returned to the suicide of Karl Murphy, which he was continuing
to fret over as he read through the pathologist’s report again very carefully. Karl Murphy’s sister had been interviewed earlier in the day and she had stated that the doctor had talked of killing himself several times after the death of his wife, although just recently he had seemed more cheerful.

  So far the evidence for suicide was stacking up convincingly.

  So why, Grace wondered, was he still not convinced?

  27

  Sunday, 27 October

  At 3 a.m. the alarm went off. Bryce sat bolt upright, shaking sleep out of his head. He climbed out of bed, padded through into his bathroom, ran the tap, filling a glass with water, and swallowed two anabolic steroid tablets.

  Then, naked, he settled down into the rowing machine on his floor, and worked feverishly for fifteen minutes. Afterwards he lay on his stomach and did one hundred press-ups. All the time thinking of Red. Thinking of being inside her. Then he did fifty sit-ups, feeling the tightening of his abs. He followed it with twenty minutes of crunches with the weights. When he had finished, he went back to bed and lay there.

  Thinking about Red’s beautiful, thick strands of hair. About the scent of her body. About all the things she had said to him.

  God, Bryce, I can’t keep my hands off you. I feel you so intensely, craving you every second we are apart. I’m feeling the craving growing stronger and stronger every second we are apart. 20,047,210 seconds until we are together again. 20,047,141 now! God, I want you. Sooooooo much ))) XXXXXXXXX

  And then you dumped me. Threw me out of your flat. Gave me back the beautiful watch I’d given you.

  You didn’t mean to do that, did you, Red? You were poisoned, weren’t you? By your toxic mother. It wasn’t your fault. I should forgive you, shouldn’t I? Really I should.

  But I don’t think that’s possible now. Killing you is the only option.

  He looked up at the bank of monitors. The infrared camera in Red’s bedroom showed her stirring. You’re so troubled, aren’t you, so troubled? They shoot wounded horses out of kindness. It will be an act of kindness to kill you, too.

  28

  Sunday, 27 October

  Red woke up crying. The clock by her bed said 3.52 a.m. She had cried for most of Saturday. She felt so confused and scared, and most of all sad. A terrible sense of loss and helplessness. In reality, they had been lovers for such a brief time, and although she had secretly checked him out, she felt she hardly knew Karl Murphy. Shit, how do you grieve for someone you barely knew? She had never met his parents or any of his family, and did not know how she might contact them. Yet she felt a deep sense of loss.

  And she felt a terrible sense of guilt. Was there something she could have done, should have done? Should she have noticed the signs and reached out to him? What was it that had pushed him over the edge? What was the inadequacy in her that had failed to change his mind about life not being worth living?

  She lay in the darkness, thinking through all the conversations they had had. Sure, he had talked about his love for his children. And the intense sadness he felt about his wife. Yet, all the things he had said to her about moving on, about the importance of being strong for his children and giving them a proper family life, just did not chime with him committing suicide.

  Karl had told her on more than one occasion that, deeply though he had felt the loss of Ingrid, his obligations lay with his children. To ensure they grew up loved. The connection Red had felt with him was very definitely less passionate than in the early days of her past relationship with Bryce Laurent; it was more gentle, more of a friendship. He was such a sweet guy. She wracked her brains, as she had done continually during the past days, for any clues, for anything he might have given her, anything at all he had said, that gave an indication that he had felt suicidal.

  But she could find none.

  He had told her how much he loved his children, and that they would always come first in his life.

  She’d now heard he had mentioned suicide to his sister a couple of times, in the early days after his wife had died. One concern was that he had been taking anti-depressants, and she had read that there were some kinds that could suddenly, without warning, send people into a suicidal spiral. Had that happened to him?

  She fell back into a deep, dreamless slumber, and woke again at 6.15 a.m. Knowing she would be unable to sleep any more, she got up, pulled on her jogging kit, went downstairs and let herself out of the front door, then ran down in the darkness to the seafront. She crossed the Kingsway, normally busy with traffic but deserted at this hour on a Sunday morning, ran down past the bowls club and onto the promenade, where she turned right. She jogged past the Hove Lagoon, the Deep Sea Anglers club building, and then past the terrace of white, elegant Moorish-style beachfront houses, home to a number of local celebrities, including Adele, Nick Berry, Norman Cook and Zoë Ball, and on along the perimeter of Shoreham Harbour.

  Suicide?

  He was a doctor. He was smart. He would have known which anti-depressants not to take.

  Surely?

  29

  Sunday, 27 October

  Shortly after 11.30 a.m., Bryce, dressed in jeans, work boots and a fleece jacket over a sweater, turned left off the road that led up to Brighton’s Devil’s Dyke onto the bumpy cart track that wound down for half a mile, south, past the farmer’s house, then on through farmland and towards the cluster of once derelict outbuildings that now housed his workshop and stores, and which he rented under a false name. The same name this vehicle was registered under.

  The dark green Land Rover Defender bounced and lurched along the muddy track on its hard, sturdy springs. The vehicle suited him well; it was a true chameleon – like himself. It looked as much at home parked on a city kerb as it did in a rural field; it was the kind of workhorse that was a familiar sight to most people, and was therefore unlikely to raise eyebrows wherever he was.

  And therefore unlikely to be remembered.

  He skirted a tumbledown barn with an ancient plough entwined in brambles, and a short distance on passed a rotting railway carriage that looked as if it might once have been converted into a dwelling, and which sat incongruously here in the middle of nowhere. Then he drove down a short incline, past an abandoned horsebox trailer that sat on four flat tyres, a pile of rusty scaffold poles, and patches of scorched earth where he had conducted some of his experiments. He pulled up on the hard surface between his three small, well-secured buildings – a barn that was a former grain store, a large workshop, and a disused dairy – and climbed out.

  A mile to the south was the residential sprawl of the Hangleton area to the west of the city of Brighton and Hove, with Southwick and Portslade beyond, and Shoreham. He could see the tall smokestack of the power station, and on a clear day he would have been able to see the English Channel, if he had cared. But there was a steady drizzle falling, and the sky was misty with rain. And the view did not interest him. It might have done once, in former days, in another life.

  Life with Red.

  Everything had interested him then. He had seen the world through different eyes. He had seen beauty in everything when he had been with her. With Red it had truly been a world of colour. Now it was all monochrome. He had never brought her here, to his secret place. Sure, he had planned to, to the place where he developed his conjuring tricks and his escapology tricks. He had learned about explosives during his time as a sapper and bomb disposal expert in the Territorial Army – before they had thrown him out. And he had learned about electronic security systems in his time installing alarms for a Brighton security company called Languard Alarms, before they had – totally unjustifiably – fired him.

  But that was then.

  He jumped down from the Land Rover and hurried through the rain to the workshop, which had bars across the frosted glass windows and a sign on the front door which read: PT FIREWORKS LTD.

  As a registered fireworks manufacturer he was able to order all kinds of explosives without any problem. He unlocked the heavy-duty padloc
k and the two deadlocks, went inside, closing and double-bolting the door behind him, and switched on the lights.

  As always he began with a quick check that everything was in order, as he had last left it. His eyes roamed around the plywood-panelled walls; the tanks of oxyacetylene gas, oxygen, nitrous oxide; a lathe; a chest freezer filled with dry ice; a fridge full of chemicals; the racks of Dexion shelving stacked with computer equipment, instruction manuals, cylinders of chemicals, dials, gauges, tubing; and one shelf piled high with tarnished silver cups he had won for his magic tricks at conventions around the country.

  Oh yes, he was good. He was damned good! Other people recognized that. But not Red’s mother. And Red never gave him the chance to show it. One day she would be sorry, they both would. He was the best. The best ever. Eat your fucking heart out Houdini, David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy.

  But what consumed his thoughts right now was the bank of television monitors on the wall. He hit the power switch to activate them, and moments later they flickered into life. He saw Red at her desk in her spare bedroom, typing on her computer. Sending emails? Facebook posts? Tweets? He’d check all that out when he got back home – everything she typed got emailed, every fifteen minutes, to the computer in his flat.

  She was dressed in conservative clothes. A black roll-neck sweater, a tweed skirt, black leggings and boots. All set for Sunday lunch with her mother – the witch – and her father. And her older sister who intimidated her with her successful career and her perfectly planned pregnancy and her pompous husband. Poor you! But with luck, you’ll be spared! All sorted!

  And she was again wearing that cheap watch she had worn on their first date. The one he had replaced with the Cartier, which she had returned when she dumped him.

  Not good, Red, he chided silently. You are one classy lady. You should be wearing a Cartier, honestly. Whatever else may have happened between us, I so want you wearing a quality watch.