by Alan Judd
I stuck out my arm to stop him grabbing the sword. I did not want a sword fight. I hadn’t forgotten I was holding Shakespeare’s sword and I think my split-second intention was to interpose the blade between Gerald and the sword he was reaching for, rather as one might threaten with a walking stick. But he must have moved faster and farther than I thought because my point pierced his cheek. Newly sharpened as it was, it slid in easily. I felt no resistance.
I think we were as shocked as each other. He staggered back, dropped his cap and put his hand to his cheek, blood streaming between his fingers and over the back of his hand. But with his other hand he had grabbed the mortuary sword. I pulled my arm back and for a long moment we stared at each other. Then, like the MI6 man in the book, I looked at the tip of my blade. There was a small smear of red, not much, less than half an inch. I remember thinking, inconsequentially, ‘I wonder if it’s ever done that before.’
Gerald continued to stare as if I were doing or saying something of consuming interest. He no longer clutched his cheek, having lowered his hand, apparently oblivious of his bleeding. Then he raised his sword above his head, cutting edge towards me. I shouted – this I am certain of – ‘No!’ again, raising my left arm to protect myself and stepping back. At the same time I jabbed at him with my right arm, my sword arm, as if to deter or push him away. But of course the sword was still at the end of that arm. This time the long blade was lower and it entered his left shoulder about level with the top of his tweed lapel. There was a little more resistance than with his cheek but the point still slid in with disconcerting ease. It was not like a knife through butter, as the saying goes, more like pushing a sharp kitchen knife into a potato.
The effect was dramatic. He dropped the mortuary sword and staggered back a couple more paces, still open-mouthed, still staring. He said something – I think it was ‘You’ – and may have repeated it. Then his lips went bluish and his eyes widened as in surprise or outrage. His knees buckled and he fell heavily, knocking over a sidetable by one of the armchairs. The back of his head thumped on the floor. For a long moment Charlotte and I stood looking at him, then at each other. Stephanie’s vacuum cleaning continued. I don’t think it occurred to either of us to attempt to revive him, even had we known what to do. Then Charlotte smiled. ‘Simon, darling, well done. That was brilliant.’
Chapter Seven
‘I never thought you’d do it,’ she said over a whisky the following evening. ‘I really didn’t.’
So far as I was concerned, I hadn’t. She was crediting me with an intention I never had, though I could hardly deny the act. But I didn’t tell her that because by then, as my sword’s original owner wrote, I was ‘in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er’. I find I read him more now than I did.
The evening of Gerald’s – what? His accidental death? His disposal? His removal? His murder? – was busy, as you might imagine. Charlotte was the first to recover. While I was still holding the sword and wondering whether the charge would be murder or attempted murder or manslaughter and whether I could convince the police that the action which caused his heart attack was genuinely unintended, Charlotte was four or five steps ahead. She came up with a plan as if she had taken it fully formed from the shelf, laying down a path I have followed obediently ever since.
She held out her hand to me. ‘Give me your sword. Don’t touch him or his sword. I’ll put it back on the wall. Take your golf clubs but leave the other sword, the new one, where it is. Go and take Stephanie home now. Don’t let her in here, she mustn’t see this. I’ll tidy up while you’re gone but when you’ve settled her come back and help me dispose of the body. Don’t park outside the house and try not to let anyone see you return.’
I still wasn’t with her, still thinking conventionally. ‘But the police . . .’
She smiled. ‘Don’t be silly, darling, we don’t want the police to know about this, do we? Not until we’re ready, and in our own way.’
It proved easier than I thought to get Stephanie out of the house. She had just turned off the vacuum cleaner as we entered the kitchen. Charlotte gushed over her, telling her what a wonderful job she’d done and suggesting tasks for her next visit while fetching her coat from the hall. She also asked – a brilliant touch, this – if Stephanie would cook a couple of rashers of bacon at home and bring them next time for Millie who loved bacon and hardly ever had it because Gerald couldn’t bear the smell in the house. Stephanie was pleased but still a little nonplussed, since she normally stayed longer and did more, but she could see I had the car keys in hand and she was always easily swayed by Charlotte’s extravagant attentiveness. She still is.
At home we had scrambled eggs for supper with salmon and mushroom, one of her favourites. I had to force myself to eat. Afterwards we cooked two rashers of bacon for her to take next time. When I suggested we both had an early night she said she wanted to look at cats on her iPad. I said she could take it to bed with her, something I don’t often allow because she has been known to stay awake most of the night with it and is then crabby and uncooperative the next day. But I wanted no trouble that night and she went to her room meekly enough.
Luckily, her bedroom light went out after half an hour or so and I crept out of the flat. I don’t worry about leaving her alone at night though normally I tell her and assure her that everything will be locked and safe. During the drive to Winchelsea I was tempted not to turn off into the town but to keep going and going, to Truro, Kendal, Halifax, anywhere. The images of my sword entering Gerald, the surprise in his eyes as his lips turned blue, the inertness of his body and then the emptiness of his eyes as they stared at the ceiling were permanently present. Nor did I even attempt to think about what we might do next. It was not mental paralysis, exactly, so much as a heightened dreamlike irresponsibility, as if I were on some drug. Already I was leaving everything to Charlotte.
I parked as she had suggested in a quiet adjacent street, though I might just as well have parked outside the house since the only sign of life apart from traffic on the main road below was my own footsteps. By now I felt as carefree as if I were just popping round for a drink. Perhaps it helps you do something serious if you’re not thinking about it.
She met me at the door with her finger to her lips. The hall light behind her was turned off and she closed the door quietly. ‘No need to advertise comings and goings,’ she whispered. ‘Is Stephanie all right?’
‘Tucked up in bed.’
‘So sweet.’ She took my hand. ‘Everything’s ready. I just need your help with the rug. He’s such a heavy old lump.’
The room was restored to order, sidetable and lamp righted, the mortuary sword back on the wall, Stuart’s sword in the hearth with the other fire irons and a copy of Country Life open on the sofa. Even Gerald’s body was neater, his feet parked together and his hands by his side as if lying at attention. The previous day’s Daily Telegraph was spread beneath his shoulders and head. It had absorbed some blood but not much had flowed.
‘Where’s—’
‘The other sword? Your sword. I’ve hidden it. That was the only one used, wasn’t it? The only one likely to have traces of his blood and your DNA on it. It’s quite safe, don’t worry. And no one will notice the new one in its place. So clever of you to think of that.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘But try as I might I couldn’t get him fully onto the rug by myself. I was always telling him not to eat so much.’
Gerald was lying partially on, partially off the hearth rug. ‘Why do you want him on it?’
‘So we can roll him up in it and carry him out to the car. Then we can get rid of him and it at the same time. It’s got blood on it so we’d have had to get rid of it anyway. And I’ve never much liked it. Time we had a new one.’
My expression must have been eloquent of something because she smiled again and tugged at my hand, as she did with Stephanie. ‘Don’t you see, silly? We can’t have him found here with sword holes i
n him, even though he died of a heart attack. You’d be in the most frightful trouble, wouldn’t you, darling?’
I noted the move from plural to singular.
‘Much better that he’s found elsewhere,’ she continued, ‘in a state in which your swordplay would not be revealed. The sea is the answer, don’t you think? So helpful that he wandered off the other week and was rescued by the police. They’ll know he has a history of that sort of thing. What if he wanders off tonight, letting himself out without my knowledge, and simply doesn’t come back? And when he is eventually found – if he is – there’s only what the fishes and gulls haven’t eaten. And the rug goes with him. Don’t you think that would be best, darling?’
Her tone was light and cajoling as if she were trying to persuade me of the need for new curtains or the colour of the new rug. I don’t recall agreeing but I certainly didn’t disagree. Anything to get rid of the problem.
He was indeed a heavy old lump. I’m used to shifting furniture but furniture is usually tidy, it doesn’t flop or roll. We edged him inch by inch onto the rug, with me at one point hoisting him by the feet, hooking them through my arms in order to lift his pelvis. The edges of the rug, which was long enough but not wide enough, only just met when we folded it over him. We had to get string from the kitchen to tie it round him, which meant lifting him and it. By the time we finished I was panting and sweating. ‘I’ll have to bring the car round. We’ll never carry him to it.’
‘We couldn’t fold him into our Golf, crumple him up a bit?’
‘It would be much more difficult.’
Despite panting as much as me, she managed a laugh. ‘I always used to tell him he was unbending.’
‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. A quote from Shakespeare. I’ll get my car.’
‘I love Shakespeare, I adore him.’ She still says that.
I reversed my estate car into their drive. It was a Volvo so I couldn’t extinguish the driving lights but I did switch off the interior lights so that they wouldn’t display to the world what we were doing when we had the tailgate open.
Getting him out of the house was worse than trussing him up. We started with each of us holding one end of the rug, she at the head and me at the feet. But she couldn’t hold it, even on the straight bits. We swapped ends and, a foot or two at a time with frequent gasping rests, we got him out of the drawing room and along the hall to the front door. After a longer rest she opened the door and we began the ten-yard journey to the back of the car. It was tempting to drag him on the pebbles but that might have made too much noise, so we sweated, panted, strained and heaved. Once we dropped him, the thick carpet slipping through our weakened fingers.
‘God, he’s so awkward. I never did like him,’ she whispered.
‘Why did you marry him?’
‘Another time.’
There was an anxious moment when a car drove slowly down the road, its headlights sweeping across the front of the garden and the Volvo. We lowered Gerald to the floor and crouched. I imagined the police cruising around looking for anything suspicious. But the car turned the corner away from us and stopped outside a house at the far end of the lane.
‘The Witneys,’ she whispered. ‘The judge and his wife. You met them here, remember?’
The hardest part was to come, lifting his whole upper body high enough to get him onto the floor of the car. It took four or five goes and we finally managed it only with each of us either side of his head and shoulders and linking hands beneath. I’d let the back seat down but it was still hard work to slide him in. We had to bend the rug and his legs to close the tailgate.
‘How long before rigor mortis sets in?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know. All the more reason to hurry. I’ll just lock the house and we’ll go up to Fairlight Cliffs. That would be the best place, don’t you think?’
‘What if the police stop us for some reason? What would we say?’
‘There’s no reason they should, is there? Anyway, you hardly see them these days and if they ask what we’re doing up there we can just say . . . well, we’re off to do what couples normally do on the cliffs at night.’
We were standing together behind the car and I could make out her smile in the dark. As she finished speaking she felt exploratively for my groin. It was so unexpected that at first I did nothing. Then I rested my palm on her bum and stroked her through her skirt. Whether it was a primitive urge to assert life in the presence of death that was arousing, or whether it was the thrill of the clandestine, I don’t know. What I do know is that sex was a million miles from my own thoughts until she did that, but then awareness of her arousal aroused me and for the rest of that evening provided a parallel fantasy to the seeming unreality of what we were doing.
It wasn’t far to the cliffs, a chalk outcrop east of Hastings that relieves an otherwise featureless coast. The wind was getting up and there were gusts of rain, which made it somewhat unlikely that an adulterous couple would go sporting in the gorse. All the way through the winding lanes to the cliffs she kept her hand on my thigh. On the tighter corners Gerald’s body shifted slightly in the back.
Nor was it a good choice for anyone with a car and a heavy load. The coast road is some hundreds of yards from the cliff edge, to reach which you have to turn into the visitor centre, park and walk. Not surprisingly, we were the only car there at that time of night apart from a clutch of vehicles parked outside the former coastguard cottages, beyond which you couldn’t drive. There was no question of parking and carrying Gerald, quite apart from the now-steady rain which would have made the rug – and presumably his tweed – even heavier. Even had we got there, I now remembered, the cliff edge was rarely sheer and we would have had to throw him impossibly far out to ensure he didn’t roll onto a ledge or rock below. I had thought vaguely of this on the way up but had assumed Charlotte knew some accessible place.
‘Can’t say I do,’ she said, sounding as if it was nothing to do with her. ‘It’s years since I’ve been up here. Can’t remember much about it, to be honest. We’ll have to go down to Pett Level where it’s open beach and do it there. Pity because I thought if we could get him onto the rocks the waves would bash him about a bit.’ She gave my thigh a squeeze. ‘Come on, let’s get down there.’
Rain and wind worsened as we followed the road inland, then looped back to the coast, this time at sea-level. There were a few houses, then a pub and a lifeboat station with access to the sea, but there was little chance of doing anything unseen there. After that came a high sea wall intersected every hundred yards or so by steps. We were no more likely to be able to lug Gerald up those steps and across the shingle to the sea than to drive the Volvo up and over the wall. Fortunately, there was little traffic to note us as we crawled along the sea road, stopping at the occasional concrete ramps allowing official vehicle access to the wall, each with a locked barrier at the bottom.
‘Stop, go back, that one moved,’ said Charlotte.
I got out to have a look. Sure enough, the plastic barrier hadn’t been padlocked to its metal strut and was swinging to and fro with the wind. I walked up the ramp onto the wall, buffeted by wind, spray and rain as I crested it. The tide was up and, better still, the ramp led to a short stone breakwater or groyne just wide enough to take a vehicle. Waves were breaking over it at the far end and the water either side looked reasonably deep. An outgoing tide would be helpful.
‘We must get him out of the rug,’ said Charlotte when I reported back, dripping wet. ‘We must dump that somewhere else. Don’t want him found anywhere near it.’
I waited until an oncoming car had passed and then reversed through the swinging barrier and up the ramp. We would leave tyre tracks, perhaps, but they wouldn’t last long. Once we were on the wall Charlotte opened the door to get out and watch me back, then promptly closed it.
‘I can’t go out in these clothes, they’ll be ruined
. It’s awful out there. Have you anything I can put over it?’
I hadn’t but reckoned I would manage. The reversing lights weren’t strong enough for me to rely on wing mirrors so I had to open the window and stick my head out, squinting against the spray and rain blowing straight off the sea behind us. Slowly, keeping the car parallel to the edge of the groyne, I edged along it, leaving myself just enough room to get out.
‘You stay here and I’ll see if I can drag him out myself.’
‘I don’t think I could get out anyway, we’re right on the edge this side, I’d go straight into the sea. Have you got something to cut the string with?’
‘Yes.’ I am the kind of person most people consider boring because I always go prepared, as Boy Scouts were supposed to. I don’t mind that, I like boring things. If they still made them and I didn’t need more room in a car I’d drive a Morris Minor. A penknife, tape measure, notepad and pen or pencil are necessities of my trade, even with the advent of smartphones. As I squeezed through the door the wind seemed to increase, buffeting and bullying with an almost personal spite. I clung to the door handles to steady myself. Volleys of spray showered me from the far end of the groyne, only a few yards beyond the car. When I opened the tailgate it jerked violently out of my hand as the wind got beneath it. I cut the string round the rug and began dragging Gerald out. It was nothing like as hard as getting him in but he remained to the end a solid, resistant lump.
‘Are you sure you can manage?’ Charlotte called when I had his feet on the ground and his head and shoulders still in the car. ‘It’s blowing wet in here with the back open.’