I Want Him Dead

by Anthony Masters

  Anne was so busy that she didn’t seem to notice they were drifting so far apart, but when she finally woke up to the truth, she was devastated. Paul then realized that Anne had genuinely thought all was well, that their careers had taken them over and that sex and companionship were on hold, but the illusion was soon shattered and her spirit broken.

  He had been horrified by Anne’s response, imagining that she had half known and that when the official break came it would be civilized. She had threatened him with her still sparkling career, but he had, at least temporarily, demolished it and his feelings were a mixture of guilt and genuine regret. Usually the guilt won, making Paul distance her just as she had distanced him.

  The lights of The Lord of the Manor were a comforting sight, and he anticipated his ration of two large gins with considerable pleasure.

  Rachel was always worried by Paul’s weight and sedentary life. “You’re workaholic and overweight. You’ve inherited a fortune. Why not take it easy?”

  Paul always promised that he would, but he found leisure time exceptionally difficult for it brought to the fore not only his guilt about Anne’s misery but also the fact that he still loved her, despite the fact that she threatened him — that she and her success had merged so that the two seemed indivisible. In addition to all this, Paul was prone to wonder, when he wasn’t working flat out, whether his relationship with Rachel was not simply a case of settling for another supportive mother, rather than his original partnership with Anne.

  Once again his thoughts turned to Peter, and then to the more rewarding and escapist subject of Ben. It had surprised Paul how much better he got on with her son than his own. Ben found his driving force admirable; Peter turned away from it. Ben seemed to enjoy talking to him; Peter remained silent in his presence. Ben played poker with him; Peter hated card games. Ben asked him about Cafferty Steele; Peter never seemed to have heard the name.

  Opening the door of the saloon bar, Paul was depressed to see George Heyworth, an acquaintance who was in public relations and whose company he tried to avoid. George was loud and brash but perceptive, not an enemy exactly, but someone to be cautious of.

  “Paul — by all that’s unholy.”

  At least George didn’t have his normal crowd of acolytes around him. He was alone, looking as if he had been thinking of going home but been arrested by Paul’s arrival.

  “What are you having?”

  “Large gin.”

  “Make that two.” George was full of his usual bonhomie. “How’s it going?”

  George actually meant his relationship with Rachel, but at the beginning of their first bout Paul deliberately took him to mean Cafferty Steele. “Did I tell you I got Stanford Waters on the list?”

  “Don’t think so.” George changed the subject abruptly for he didn’t enjoy other people’s success stories. “I hear your missus had a hard night at The Rose.”

  “Did she?” asked Paul uncertainly.

  “Apparently she was with Penelope Davidson. Know her?”

  “Vaguely.” He didn’t want to hear any of this — whatever it was.

  “Apparently Penny took her knickers down — her own, I mean, not Anne’s.” He laughed. “Had to be asked to leave immediately. I mean — she would.”

  “Would she?” Paul was perturbed.

  “She’s a real goer when she’s had a few.” George bellowed with hearty laughter. “Must have been awkward for Anne, though.”

  “They got chucked out, you say?” Paul wanted to get the story straight.

  “Apparently the management couldn’t cope with Penelope’s cunt. I’m sure I could.”

  Paul took a sip of gin and nodded. “Can’t be any doubt about that,” he assured him.

  “How was your run?” was George’s next enquiry.

  “Slow, but a tracksuit makes me feel positive, particularly when I take it off.”

  George laughed rather more vaguely. He had a spare figure himself but continually drank and ate to extremes without the slightest effect on his waistline, an injustice that infuriated Paul.

  “And the French dream-house?” he asked, changing to a more productive topic.

  “We’ve put down the deposit.”

  “What about all those laws about land rights?”

  “What about them?” asked Paul warily, sure that George was trying to patronize him.

  “Who’s acting for you out there?” He was businesslike now, the grin replaced by an alert look that usually meant he was going to score some points.

  “Local estate agent.”

  “They sold to Brits before?”

  “I don’t know.” Paul deliberately sounded casual but was secretly worried. What had he missed? Anne had always been scrupulous in checking details but Rachel was a camp-follower, as optimistic as he was.

  “Don’t get rattled, old boy,” advised George.

  “I’m not,” replied Paul defensively.

  “Give them a ring.” There was a triumphant gleam in his eye. “Get them to double-check. Have a look at the contracts. Read the small print. That kind of thing.”

  “Another gin?” asked Paul pointedly.

  “No. I must get back. I brought some work home tonight. That’s what I’m doing up here — avoiding it.” His booming laughter rang out again and Paul winced. “Don’t get upset.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Best to check though.”

  “I’ll give the agent a ring from the office in the morning.”

  “They speak English?”

  “Yes,” Paul grated. How long was George going to keep this up?

  “Get it all sorted out, and Marissa and I’ll drop in when we’re next that way.”

  “We’d love you to.” Not if we see you coming, Paul thought bitterly.

  “Want a lift?”

  “No thanks. What do you think this tracksuit’s for?”

  They walked out together into the car park, Paul furious at being deprived of his second gin but somehow not having the incentive to stay in the pub alone. George had unsettled him and he wanted to get home to Rachel. She would reassure him as she always did.

  “How’s Marissa?”

  “She’s on top form,” George assured him. “Did you know she went and bought herself a Peugeot out of her ceramics money? I have to hand it to her. When she first bought that kiln —” George broke off and Paul watched his expression change, almost comically, from self-satisfaction to rising apprehension.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Move!” George’s voice was shrill. “Fucking move!”

  He half grabbed at Paul and then threw himself to one side as the Suzuki jeep with bull bars came out of the darkness, headlights blazing, roaring towards them. Paul bounced over its bonnet like a rag doll.

  The monstrous vehicle accelerated, brakes screaming, heading back in the direction it had just come from and narrowly missing an oncoming van which mounted the pavement. Then it swerved down a side street and was lost to sight.

  “Paul?” George knelt beside him.

  The crowd was gathering rapidly, and try as he might he couldn’t make out what had happened to the top of Paul’s head, which seemed to have become compressed. There was little blood, but grey and white strands were poking up through his sparse hair, like the tubers of some alien crop.

  Paul’s mouth opened at the same time as his eyes. They remained open.

  “It’ll be all right about the house,” said George. “These agents — they’re OK. Particularly if they speak English.”

  A small, dark ribbon of blood trickled down Paul’s face. He seemed to move slightly and there was a stench of shit.

  “Don’t worry about that, old boy.” George was reassuring. “It’s the shock. You’ll be fine. They’re not going to mind brown pants in hospital. That’s where my mother was wrong, always telling us to wear clean underwear each day in case we got in an accident and had to go to hospital. I mean — we’d probably have shit ourselves anyway. She never t
hought of that and —”

  “He’s dead, you silly bugger,” snapped a woman. “Can’t you see the poor bastard’s dead.”

  Some of the crowd were drunk, all breathed alcohol fumes over George and the man he couldn’t believe had so suddenly become a corpse.

  “He’s in shock, that’s all,” he protested.

  “For fuck’s sake,” said a young man, and noisily began to be sick.

  George stood up. “He’s going to be all right, I tell you — We were talking about a house. A house in France. He’s just concussed.”

  “You’re the one who’s in shock,” said the landlord’s wife. “Come inside. I’ve called an ambulance — and the police,” she reassured him, taking his arm.

  “Hit and run,” said someone. “Anyone get the number?”

  No one replied.

  “You’ll be all right, old boy,” said George, breaking into hard, dry sobs as the landlady took him away. “Put a blanket over him,” he rasped. “Make him comfortable. Go on — don’t just bloody stand there.” George finished on a high, keening cry that seemed to hang in the air long after he had been taken inside.

  “A shroud would make him more comfortable,” said someone.

  Peter was cycling home from his music lesson when he saw the man get out of the jeep. He stooped down under the street light to wipe something off the bull bars, got back in and drove off. Peter cycled on. He wondered if he should have a tattoo. It might give him distinction. It would also make his parents go bananas.

  Five minutes later he rounded the corner to see the police cars outside The Lord of the Manor and a ring of spectators.

  “What’s happened?” he asked a woman with a dog who was standing and staring. Usually he would have been too shy to have spoken to a stranger, but the drama was too great for inhibition.

  “Bloke got knocked down. Hit and run.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “He’s dead, poor sod. Someone’s father — someone’s son,” she added with gloomy relish.

  PART

  TWO

  Hell’s Gate

  Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed.

  In one self place; for where we are is hell,

  And where hell is, must we ever be.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: Doctor Faustus

  Chapter 1

  Paul’s funeral was held a week later, a few days before Christmas, at a small church at the Firehills near Hastings where his parents had lived and were also buried. As Anne arrived in one of the limousines, she saw the tall Victorian spire protruding from a hollow in the hills like a long, warning finger.

  Anne had been completely numb ever since Paul’s death and she suspected Peter was the same. She felt neither responsibility nor guilt — just a total emptiness that made her unable to relate to anyone or anything. She recognized the reaction; she had felt exactly the same after her father’s stroke and again at his subsequent death.

  As the priest prated and the distant words were chanted, Anne gazed around at the packed congregation and realised hazily how many lives Paul had touched. To them he was a friend, but she was in the presence of a spirit she seemed to have forgotten, although his death had exorcised her rage. Some more lines of Blake came into her mind.

  Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache.

  Do be my enemy — for friendship’s sake.

  She had certainly not acted like a friend. Instead she had been Paul’s executioner.

  As she somewhat haphazardly organized his funeral Anne knew she should have felt something — relief, guilt, even triumph — but the emptiness never went away and Anne was hardly able to drag herself through the days that followed his death.

  It had been Rachel who had told her, beating the police by a few minutes. She had come to the door on a freezing cold night, the hoar frost crackling under her shoes and gleaming wickedly in the bright moonlight.

  “What do you want?” Anne had asked, knowing what she was going to say, the emptiness sliding into place. She had felt no sense of shock nor even satisfaction that the little man hadn’t cheated her after all.

  “Can I come in?”

  “No. This is my home.”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Paul.”

  “I won’t divorce him.”

  “You won’t have to.” Rachel’s face had been gro tesquely twisted, her lips moving but no sound coming out for some time.

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What?” Anne’s voice had been monotone and she knew that she had to do better than that. “What?” she had repeated with assumed vehemence.

  “He was knocked down. By a hit-and-run driver. He was killed at once.” Rachel had begun to weep soundlessly, the tears coursing down her cheeks while Anne gazed back at her with what she hoped was incredulity.

  “You’d — when did this happen?”

  “An hour ago.”

  “Where did they take him?”

  “To the mortuary. Can you — do you want to identify him?”

  “Have you been?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll —I don’t—”

  Peter had then appeared, white-faced, having caught something of the conversation but not enough.

  “What’s happening?”

  “It’s Daddy,” she had said. “He’s had an accident. He’s dead.” Anne remembered how her own mother had opened the door of her room without knocking. “Daddy’s dead,” she had said woodenly, her fingers plucking at the loose skin of her neck. “Daddy’s dead.”

  Anne had still felt utterly drained of any feeling as Peter’s face crumpled and he ran into her arms, sobbing, his tears dampening her blouse. How long will this go on, she had wondered. How long will it all take to finally settle down? When can we go back to normal?

  But why didn’t she feel anything? Why couldn’t she at least feel something for Peter and his terrible grief? She hadn’t even got the excuse of being anaesthetized by alcohol for she had only had time for a couple of Scotches before Peter came home.

  Rachel had stood on the step not knowing what to do, weeping now, her own grief matching Peter’s, and Anne had hurriedly taken them into the house, not being able to stand the noise any longer. But almost immediately the bell rang and she had to go through the ordeal again with a nervous police officer.

  Later, leaving Rachel with Peter, Anne was driven down to the mortuary and taken into a coldly sterile room, its walls banked with steel drawers, that looked like a familiar TV film set.

  Flanked by two women police officers, she had watched his corpse emerge, the steel drawer sliding out, propelled by a white-coated attendant who avoided her eyes.

  She had gazed down at Paul, his face chalk white and much younger looking, the wrinkles gone, the flesh smooth, a bandage masking his forehead. He wasn’t there, she had thought. Not there. Death really is nothing at all.

  I wanted you dead, she told him in her mind. And now you are.

  The congregation burst into piously hooting the hymn Anne had chosen:

  The God of love my shepherd is,

  And he that doth me feed:

  While he is mine and I am his,

  What can I want or need?

  I need his money, thought Anne. I have his money. He owed me. She gazed into the carved stone face of a blandly smiling angel and wondered fleetingly if God would strike her dead as a just punishment. Could that happen? If there was a God? To arrange his death and then attend his funeral in her widow’s weeds — or at least a black suit she had bought for the occasion at Harrods — was inviting a thunderbolt. But it didn’t come.

  Anne stood by the open grave as the coffin was lowered into heavy clay.

  “Such a tragedy —”

  “So deeply sorry —”

  “A very great publisher.” This from a pitiably obsequious Mr Andrew.

  “A fine man —”

  “A good man �
��”

  “A goodly, fine —” The words became confused as Anne sought for remorse, for guilt, shock, anything but the blankness that was, after all, perhaps shock itself. She comforted herself with the thought.

  Only one rather bizarre “sign” had occurred, but it left her mildly amused rather than afraid. Just as the coffin was being lowered into the earth, a large black cat had jumped into the soft clay and curled up, as if claiming residence. There was much clearing of throats, and a particular kind of British awkwardness hovered on the air until the undertaker scrambled down and chased the cat away.

  No one had dared smile.

  Anne stood by the coffin for a while on her square of imitation grass and threw down a small rose while she thought of the halting telephone conversation she had had with Rachel yesterday morning.

  “It’s just that — as you’re organizing the funeral — I wondered —” she had faltered, close to tears.

  “Yes?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll see you at the church.” Anne had put down the phone. She had never found out what Rachel had wanted.

  She had, of course, tried to talk to Peter. “Daddy didn’t feel anything,” she had told him.

  He had allowed himself no comment.

  “The doctor said he must have died instantly.”

  “Yes.”

  “Apparently he was having a drink with George after jogging. Do you remember him?”

  “Dad?” He had looked at her in surprise.

  She had flushed. “No, silly. I mean George. He’s that awful PR man with the loud laugh and caustic asides. I could never understand what your father saw in him, but then I suppose he was just a drinking companion.”

  Peter had said nothing.

  “Do you want to talk?” she had asked hopelessly.

  “Why did he leave us, Mum?”

  “It happens.”

  “He didn’t want us any more?”

  “He didn’t want me.”

  “She’s got that Ben.”