Victims

by Richardson,Robert

  ‘Keep quiet, you prat. Sounds travel at night.’

  Jowett swung on his arm as he went dizzy, and for a moment it seemed that he would fall into the Cam. Lambert leapt to his feet and reached him in two long strides, tearing his shirt collar as he pulled him backwards violently. ‘Come on! There’s no point in sitting here. I’ve got some stuff at my place that’ll sort you out.’

  ‘I’m not taking anything!’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s good shit. Peterson sold it me. He’s OK. You need a few hours of unreality.’

  Panting on the grass, Jowett shook his head. ‘No way. Not unless it’s enough to kill me.’

  Suddenly Lambert lost his temper, kneeling beside Jowett, his fingers digging deep into bony shoulders as he shook him furiously.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t loosen up! They’re dead! Got that? We did it — you’re as fucking guilty as I am. But nobody is going to suspect us unless we do something stupid. So we don’t. I’m not about to sacrifice my bloody life for this.’

  He thrust Jowett back on to the grass as though throwing something away and stood up, staring across the river at the shadowed soaring walls of King’s College Chapel. Now Jowett was looking at the sky; stars he could not name, moon of creamy wax, winking lights of an airliner, unheard and far, far above him. Two hundred or so people, probably asleep, unknowingly passing through a few moments of his awareness. Innocent people who were able to fly away.

  *

  Randall could not understand why he remembered something as meaningless as the weathervane on the gable end so vividly; the silhouette of an angler cut out of metal, dark against a sky of pale, solid blue. He recalled thinking that someone must have taken a lot of trouble over the details: tufted hat, outline of thigh-deep waders, rod thinning until it blended into the wire used for the curve of the fishing line. It was too high up to be certain, but there might even have been a tiny pipe in the mouth. The afternoon was very still, the miniature man facing south-west, motionless since his last rotation. Why was it so memorable? Perhaps because it was the first thing he had consciously seen as they reached the farmhouse, a touch of the domestic, a symbol of normality. He saw it through the eye-slits of the plastic Margaret Thatcher joke mask — Giles had bought two of them in a crowded W. H. Smith’s on a Saturday morning when no one would remember him; he constantly drew Randall’s attention to his care over the smallest details.

  ‘Never speak,’ Giles warned again. That he had felt the need to repeat such a basic precaution gave the impression he was nervous, but Randall, rigid with excitement, did not think about it. Giles reached behind and took the shotgun from the metal floor of the van. Just to frighten them, he said; in case they resisted.

  At first they thought the house was deserted. The farmyard was empty and there was no sound as Randall turned off the engine. Three cars were parked next to a tractor: a Vauxhall, L-registration Volvo and a Golf hatchback.

  ‘Windows are open,’ Giles muttered. ‘They’re here somewhere.’

  They got out, uncertain despite all their planning as to what exactly they should do. Randall had imagined knocking on the door, pointing the gun at whichever one opened it as a mute order, entering the house to find the other conveniently inside, tying them to chairs, loading up the van —

  ‘In the barn!’

  Randall heard it as well — what sounded like a creak and the rustle of feet on dry straw, loud in the simmering afternoon. The wall facing them was blank, and they ran to stand with their backs to it before edging towards one end, a parody of small boys imitating television heroes in a game of cops and robbers. Randall felt a sudden impulse to run, a last-minute surge of panic … but Giles had already reached the end of the wall and was turning the corner, shotgun raised.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ The question was aggressive, half shouted, not afraid.

  Randall’s scream dissolved into the first explosion and his crotch felt warm as he wet himself He could hear Giles cursing, then there was a cry of alarm from the house. The next few moments were no more controllable than events seen in a film. As Giles reappeared, a little girl ran into the yard; she seemed to have no fear as he drew nearer. Surely he wouldn’t … As Giles shot her, Randall banged the back of his head against the flint wall, hurting himself, needing to suffer, and clasped his arms across his stomach. Then the old woman appeared, and it made no sense that she just stood in the doorway as Giles fumbled in his pockets and reloaded. For God’s sake run away … She couldn’t now.

  Randall’s legs lost their muscles and he slithered down the side of the barn until he was sitting in the dampness of his urine, sobbing with terror. He heard the fourth and fifth shots faintly from inside the house. Then he was aware of nothing until he felt a violent kick against his leg.

  ‘Move it!’

  ‘Sure … yeah … shit … what …?’ He didn’t know how he was managing to struggle to his feet, but at least the van was only …

  ‘Where the fuck are you going? We’ve got to get the stuff.’

  ‘The stuff? Oh, yeah. The stuff. Right.’ He had no more control over his speech than his actions. He followed Giles into the house, where the sight of two more bodies had no capacity to deepen fear already inflamed to its limits. His hands felt sticky inside the rubber gloves, but he followed Giles’ orders as they collected the most obvious valuables and piled them on the living-room table.

  ‘Get that picture down while I get the bags,’ Giles snapped.

  The Constable hung above the sofa in front of which the woman lay. Randall forced himself not to look down as he stepped over her and muttered ‘Sorry’, as though he were being ill-mannered. He briefly felt the warmth of her body through thin socks as his ankles touched her, then stepped on to the sofa and fumbled with the frame, pulling the hook out of porous plaster as he wrenched it from the wall. Fragments sprinkled down, bouncing off the sofa back, one larger lump landing in the woman’s shattered eye socket, instantly starting to soak up blood. He wanted to brush it away. From out of the headphones lying on the carpet beside her seeped the faint, tinny sounds of disco pop.

  ‘Here.’ Giles returned with the black bin bags, holding one up then pulling it swiftly downwards so that the thin plastic crackled and billowed open. He dropped silverware in carelessly, but took more time over porcelain and glassware. They rapidly filled five sacks, then carried them all to the van in one journey.

  ‘Where’s your mask?’ As they put the last bags in the back, Randall had suddenly registered that he could see Giles’ face.

  ‘Fuck, it must be in the barn. Turn the van round.’

  He ran across the yard and disappeared for what seemed a long time, then emerged carrying the mask, white loop of elastic flapping loose from one ear. As he opened the passenger door and scrambled in, Randall was fumbling with the unfamiliar seat belt.

  ‘Leave it, you stupid cunt!’ Giles reached across and Randall’s mask split as he snatched it off. ‘Just fucking get going!’

  *

  ‘Do you think they’ll have found them yet?’

  ‘There was nothing on TV about it. That’s good. They can’t start an investigation until the morning.’ Lambert wondered if Jowett would feel better if he went over all the precautions they had taken. ‘Think about it, Randy. We tested the bloody plan to destruction. Everybody thinks we were in London — we showed them what we bought. OK? Nobody knows we got off at Luton and picked up the van.’

  ‘But I gave them my real name when we hired it!’

  ‘We discussed that. If they’d checked back and found anything dodgy, they’d have been suspicious. But you were just another customer who wanted to hire a van for the day. And why should anyone connect it with something that happened nearly a hundred miles away?’

  ‘Somebody could have seen us leaving the farm.’

  ‘Think, dickhead. We didn’t see another vehicle until we’d gone through the village. And what would anyone have seen anyway? A van with two men in it. Do y
ou think they stopped and wrote down the colour, make and number? Just in case there’d been a murder and the police would be asking for witnesses? People do that all the time.

  ‘We were bloody careful to make sure there wasn’t a mark in the van. We used clean plastic bags and wiped the steering wheel before we returned the keys. Anyway, how the hell can the police find it? There are bloody millions of hire vans on the road. And we certainly didn’t leave any prints at the farm.’

  ‘What about … tyre tracks or something?’

  ‘If there are any, they’re no use unless they can find what made them. So the police have a run-of-the-mill tyre track, but experts can tell them the make. Big deal — unless they’ve got someone with a crystal ball who says, “Hey, why don’t we look at vans hired from that place in Luton? Then we’ll catch them.” They’re not Sherlock Holmes, Randy, they’re thick country coppers. The clothes and shoes we wore are in that mechanical skip at — Christ, I can’t even remember where it was. But that bag’s crushed between God knows what else by now. Come on, we covered every bloody thing.’

  *

  Giles had argued that only stupid crooks were caught, and second-year Cambridge undergraduates were not, by definition, stupid. They had approached the idea at first as a piece of research, reading about police investigations and watching television reconstructions of crimes, noting where criminals had made fatal mistakes. It was interesting that insane coincidences occurred much more in reality than in fiction. One man had been caught because he was seen passing a house at the precise moment a goal had been scored in the Cup Final, which wrecked his alibi; in another case, the police traced a girl’s killer because a cab driver at Waterloo station happened to notice her shoes, a man had been recording car numbers following a completely unconnected robbery in the area where the body was dumped and a dentist’s assistant had found a cast of the murderer’s teeth which was thought to have been thrown away. Giles had dismissed such incidents as chaos theory, impossible to allow for. And how many crimes remained unsolved because they had not been exposed by such freak chances?

  There would be no reason for them to be suspected, but they ought to have an alibi. Two weeks before the robbery Giles had gone to London, where he had paid cash in the Virgin record store and for the clothes at Mr Byright on Oxford Street, throwing away the receipts, but keeping the carrier bags. He knew Randall’s sizes, and had shopped while both shops were crowded. He had returned when his parents were in bed, so they had not seen what he had bought. Everything was in his rucksack when he arrived to spend a few days with Randall, and they had hidden it all in the boot of Randall’s car, still in carrier bags. Giles had also brought his shotgun; both he and his father were licensed owners and he’d been shooting since he was fourteen. His father was away and his mother would not notice that one of the guns was missing. He had promised Randall it would not be loaded, but why should anyone hand over their possessions to unarmed men? Randall had felt uneasy, but by now the plan had achieved a momentum that was sweeping him along with it. He did not know that the bag Giles used to carry the gun and the clothes he would change into for the robbery also contained ten cartridges.

  They left Randall’s house early and parked near Bedford station, then bought return tickets to London. The train was full, and they were among several passengers who got off at Luton. Giles had added the farcical touch of a false moustache; it looked ridiculous, but he said it was a misleading detail that people would remember in the highly unlikely event that someone noticed them and gave a description to the police. They collected the van, booked by phone the previous day. As the receptionist checked his licence, Randall casually mentioned they were helping a friend to move and what was the latest time it could be returned? By ten o’clock the following morning, but they could drop the keys through the door before that as long as they made sure the petrol tank was full again.

  Giles insisted they put on rubber gloves the moment they got in the van as a precaution against leaving any traces of their presence. As they drove towards Suffolk, staying with other traffic on main roads as much as possible, he discussed the precautions they had taken as though admiring a well-written thesis. Stopping for lunch was out of the question — someone might remember them — but neither was hungry. Carefully observing speed limits, they were near Tannerslade Farm by half-past one, the timing Giles had worked out in advance; people rarely made visits at lunchtime, so the couple would be alone. They pulled in to the side of the road and climbed into the back of the van in turn, putting on jeans and denim jackets, old shirts and worn trainers, nondescript clothes that would be thrown away later. Tension that had started to build up imperceptibly with the planning, more vividly with the establishing of the alibi, relentlessly since they had set off that morning, was acting like a stimulant. As the gate to the farm appeared, Giles’ breath came faster and Randall’s mouth felt dry.

  Giles murmured reassurance as the distance diminished; no cars in sight, no one in the fields. Turn. Stop. Masks on. Let’s do it.

  *

  Randall was gibbering within minutes of them rejoining the main road, and Giles yelled at him as the van swerved crazily. ‘You stupid bastard! Slow down!’

  ‘They’re dead! They’re all dead!’

  For a nerve-racking moment Giles thought the van was going to crash into the ditch, but he grasped the wheel and hauled it away.

  ‘Look! Just ahead … pull in there.’ Randall obeyed and Giles leapt out and ran to the driver’s side. ‘Move over. I’ll drive.’

  ‘But you’ve not got a full licence. You need L-plates.’

  ‘L-plates!’ Giles screamed. ‘Jesus fucking Christ! Just move!’

  Randall scrambled into the passenger seat as Giles climbed in, then wrestled with the gearstick before the van moved forward jerkily. Randall was staring out of the side window, twitching with muffled, hysterical sobs; inside the rubber gloves his fists were fiercely clenched.

  ‘We’ll stop in a minute,’ Giles assured him, as they passed a sign that welcomed careful drivers to Finch. ‘Once we’re through this place. Open the window. You need some air.’ Randall wound the glass down, then moved his head so that the wind struck his face. Giles glanced at him occasionally as they drove through the village and out again, back on to deserted roads. In the two years they had known each other, Randall had always been susceptible to persuasion, even allowing Giles to mock him into taking the drugs they had become unable to afford. Giles began to look for somewhere to stop; nowhere too visible or the van might be seen and remembered, but it had to be soon. Trees appeared on the left and he saw a narrow dirt path leading into them. The van rocked over dried mud, then he stopped, anxious lest he hit something and marked the bodywork.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just a couple of minutes. There could be someone around. You want to throw up?’

  Randall shook his head. ‘They’ll hang us.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, they stopped hanging people fucking years ago! Anyway, they’re not going to catch us.’

  Randall turned to face him, disbelieving. ‘You mean … we just … just carry on with it?’

  ‘What else is there?’ Randall winced as Giles, the captor of his mind, leant towards him. ‘You know the next stage. We worked it all out. Let’s just do that, OK? Afterwards we can talk it over. There’s a lot to take on board here, but we can’t piss about now.’

  ‘We just go ahead? Hide it like we planned? Then go home?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying.’ When Randall remained silent, Giles leant across him and opened the passenger door. ‘Or you can get out now. Go back to that village and find the local copper — but just give me time to get out of here. You want to do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Then close the door.’

  As Giles started the van again and struggled to find reverse, Randall slammed the door, conscious that he should have refused, but the impact of metal on metal was helpless commitment.

  Back in Bedfordshire
they stopped in an isolated lay-by, and while Giles plunged into the bushes to hide the bags Randall climbed into the back and changed again, stuffing the mask and the clothes he had worn at the farm into another plastic sack. Giles returned and did the same. The risk of someone finding the bags in the next few hours was minimal. Just outside Luton they pulled into the council rubbish tip, where Giles casually walked past waiting cars to drop the sack of clothes into a skip, mechanical steel jaws crushing it up with garden refuse, building rubble, household waste, a pair of decrepit deckchairs. They returned the van by six o’clock and caught the next train to Bedford. Back at Randall’s they displayed what they said they had bought in town; Giles’ present for Mrs Jowett to thank her for having him as a guest — a headscarf printed with London landmarks — had been a neat touch.

  Randall appeared just about under control, but Giles was apprehensive that he might suddenly go to pieces. But Isobel Jowett, obsessed only with the disaster of finding herself in an alien world where the cost of a hair appointment was now a problem, had not noticed anything. All that mattered to her was that her husband’s financial crisis denied her the right to entertain whenever she wanted; that she would fail to become the ladies’ golf captain because the membership fees could not be met. She had paid scant attention when Giles mentioned meeting a friend on the train who had invited them out that evening and that they might stay over. They left the house again before nine o’clock.

  Randall said he could not eat, but Giles bought himself a Chinese takeaway and ate it in the car before they went for a drink; it was still summer light and they could not return to the lay-by until darkness fell. They chose a busy pub, where they would not be remembered; Giles remarked that they — he — had thought out even the tiniest details. He was unable to decide if Randall was becoming calmer or had fallen into some sort of inertia; he would not talk and two young men sitting drinking in silence might be noticed. So Lambert was loquacious, telling jokes, inventing college gossip, asking questions that forced Randall to respond. Both of them stared at the television over the bar when News at Ten came on. They could not hear it, but headline footage of George Bush, African famine, a rock star kissing a supermodel and a shot of a cricketer meant that a multiple murder at a farm in Suffolk was not the main story; after a few moments someone changed channels.