A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  “It was one of those weird twists of fate. My mother didn’t give a damn about Fred Snark. As far as she was concerned, he was just another born loser who would have done time one way or another, whatever happened. She was just relieved her son was going straight at last. I’d never seen her so happy. Then she got one of those viruses that attack the central nervous system, died in four days. Of course, when you’re young you feel guilty anyway. And my father always blamed me for her death, told everyone it was my fault, which didn’t help.”

  Thirst was quiet for a long moment. He twisted in his seat, spoke in a whisper. “Daisy said that to survive, you put one whole part of yourself on ice. Overcontrolled, that was her favorite phrase for you. She said my agony was a relief compared to the vacuum inside of you. She said we were like two halves of the same person. I had the bits that in you weren’t functioning.”

  “But she didn’t stay with your half, either.”

  An empty laugh. “No. In the end she needed to be idolized. Only you could do that. Programming from her daddy, I suppose. I always knew she was an idle, horny little bitch. She was never going to be my virgin princess. Are you ready now?”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Oliver.”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll make it easy for you.”

  He was complacent about his power to make me kill him. I was afraid that he might be right. I wanted, above all, to escape from that confined space.

  “I’m leaving the keys in the car,” I said. “You can drive it away, steal it, go home, go to prison. Drive it off a cliff—I don’t care, just get out of my life. Just get out of my fucking life for good.”

  I stepped out into the deserted street, a dull, squalid London street. I had driven blindly and now did not know where I was. I started walking. It was impossible, somehow, to leave the gun in the car, or anywhere else for that matter. I held it in my right hand and hardly noticed it. Then I heard his footsteps behind me.

  “Stick like shit, don’t I?”

  I didn’t answer but kept walking.

  “There’s one thing you’ve left out, James—one thing that can reach you. She was great that night when her mother died. So soft and seductive. Did everything I wanted, and believe me, I made her do things you’d never dared to ask her to do. Of course it was even better when we were married. She loved being my slave. Even if she didn’t love it, I made her do it anyway. I remember once at a party I made her go down—like this, James—on her knees, in front of all the blokes, and I took out my cock—”

  He was kneeling in the street some five yards behind me. I turned on my heel and took the few steps back. With as much malice aforethought as is possible to cram into a split second, I aimed the gun. My index finger whitened on the trigger. I felt no compunction about killing him, but after a couple of seconds my finger relaxed. I let my hand drop.

  “You’re probably lying,” I said. “Anyway, I just don’t hate you that much.”

  He lowered his eyes. “So do it for love, old son,” he said gruffly.

  In what seems to me when I think of it (as I still do every waking hour) to have been a casual reflex, I raised my hand again and this time pulled the trigger. He fell back instantly. At his feet I dropped the gun that he’d thoughtfully taped to protect me.

  —

  The last few paragraphs were now showing on the screen.

  You’re a wicked man, George. In biblical times they would have said that you were unclean. You have had congress with evil. You must have sweated blood when Thirst was killed.

  You knew right away that it was me, for the same reason that Feinberg now knows and Carlford knows, even if you hadn’t guessed from tapping his phone. That young boy saw my car. He couldn’t read the number, and he was too far away to see if I was a man or a woman, but he was just the right age to recognize and remember the latest Jag. You needed at all costs to close the file on Thirst before you retired. You could not afford to have some ambitious young detective ferreting out unexplainable coincidences.

  Above all you could not risk a prosecution against Thirst’s murderer, especially not after your visit to my house that Sunday. I guess a part of you must have relished that visit. The Someone Big must have been watching you carefully for you to go to the length of wiring yourself up and using that radio van so that detection could be seen to be done. That pathetic old van with its two bored operators trapped inside was probably the only joke we’ve shared, you and I. There you were—interviewing the man you knew to be guilty, anxious that I not confess—and there I was threatening to tell all on tape if you pressed me too hard, and poor Vincent as usual not quite knowing what was going on.

  When I let you know that Thirst had told me all about you, you hit upon the idea of prosecuting Daisy. And then when it finally dawned on you that I would confess rather than let Daisy go to prison, you hit upon one of the cleverest, maddest ideas of your career—a prosecution against Daisy which would fail, but fail in such a way that the world and Scotland Yard would believe her guilty and close the file on Thirst, so you could enjoy your retirement in peace. That’s why you briefed Nigel Monkson. Why you wouldn’t allow that boy to give evidence. Why you delayed the trial so that Daisy was seven months pregnant when it started. But it didn’t work, George. I’m guilty. I can prove it.

  Daisy looked up. I stepped over to the computer and pressed some keys. The legend DELETED flashed up on the screen. I knelt beside her chair, took her hand, kissed it.

  “I really was going to confess, if they’d convicted you. You know that, don’t you? I made sure George knew that; that’s why I kept waving those papers at him. He knew exactly what I meant.”

  She waited a long moment before speaking. “Well, it worked, didn’t it? His crazy stratagem? You wrote the letter in case it failed, but it worked, like all his other schemes. I honestly don’t think a woman would ever be so demonically cunning. How does he live with himself? How does he sleep?”

  “According to Thirst, he’s a connoisseur of fine drugs. Very disciplined about it—administers to himself exactly the dose he needs for the effect he requires. Sleep isn’t a problem. Never touches the hallucinogens, of course. Favors cocaine.”

  She shuddered. “And the world really is run by men like him?”

  I left the room to fetch a large glass of Armagnac to steady my nerves. When I returned I patted her large belly. “Well, we came through, didn’t we?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I think relationships are very weird,” she said after a while. “You know why I did all that—went through that trial and so on? You know what kept me going all these months?”

  “Guilt. Love, I hope. That sort of thing.”

  “Not really. Love doesn’t keep you going—it disappears when things get tough, I now realize. This is the first day for months I’ve been able even to think about loving you. During the trial I simply hated you. Mostly what kept me going was machismo. We’ve been dumb to think that only men have machismo—women have it, too, right? It’s the only way anyone keeps going. A kind of grim bravado, the quiet satisfaction of doing something real, of playing for real stakes. I didn’t really think I had to gain your forgiveness for sleeping with Oliver that time; that was just a game you made me play. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to seek comfort from a friend the night my mother died; you were an asshole for making such a fuss about it. I went down on my knees to you not because I was wrong but because I wanted you back. I was doing it for love, I mean Love with a capital L, not for the sake of your little ego. You weren’t big enough for love, so I married Oliver. But what stayed in my mind, all through the years, was your mockery of me. The way you would always say that I never had the grit to really make anything happen, I was all hot air. I suppose deep down I thought you had a point. I got sick of my own wimpishness. I thought being married to Oliver would cure me of all that, but actually Oliver was pretty pathetic—he spent more or less the whole of his life feeling sorry for himself. Self-pity he
lped him justify everything, even beating me up.

  “I wanted to have my name carved on a rock somewhere, somewhere secret maybe, but somewhere hard. I’m not smart like you, but what I’ve got, when it comes down to it, is nerve. That was the side to Oliver that I liked. You thought I married him out of revenge while I really loved you all the time. Partly true, but I also loved the amazing audacity that emerged when he wasn’t feeling too sorry for himself. You know who I was being all through that trial? I was being Oliver, and I was doing it better than he would have because I didn’t let self-pity get in the way and I didn’t blow it all by showing off as a man probably would have done. I learned something, too. It’s possible that breaking the law in a big way is the only real thing left to do in this country full of wankers. Well, it worked—I got my man off a murder rap so he can be a father to this child.”

  She looked at me and laughed.

  She seemed happy but distant, as if she did not want to be contaminated by me.

  42

  We went through a bad patch soon after the child was born. We were married by then, and my practice had gone to pieces. More or less overnight, the bar decided that I was a spent force with dangerous connections. It was not just the trial itself; I suspected someone of gossiping. Perhaps Feinberg, more likely Carlford. They both knew I had killed Thirst, and Carlford was too eminent, rich, and old to care if he hurt me. I think the whole case had amused him and provided him with a source of stories at dinner parties. Whatever the reason, solicitors stopped sending me work.

  It was not the loss of income that shook me, so much as the collapse of identity. I grew increasingly nervous and moody. By the time Oliver was born, I was in a bad way. But it was the change in Daisy that caused my final breakdown.

  Nothing had prepared me for the appalling banality of motherhood. My last great dream of love drowned in a tepid baby bath. Daisy gave her soul to Oliver—he crawled around with it while she watched him with dumb adoration. I’d reluctantly agreed to the name out of a reflex of guilt, as if the life I’d put an end to could be continued through a word, but the magic worked against me in a way I could never have foreseen: he seduced her.

  Daisy lost her edge, did not make a good joke for months. Forgot all about the heroism of crime. Her conversation became meticulously mediocre, as if any sharpness might hurt the child. She even smiled sweetly at the small army of nurses, social workers, and doctors apparently necessary for modern motherhood. She professed, all of a sudden, not to be able to understand the wickedness in the world. She read carefully the ingredients list on the outside of food packets, was concerned about the environment, used only prescribed drugs. Quite often she watched children’s television in the afternoon, even though Oliver was too young to follow it. She would smile happily at jokes intended for five-year-olds.

  Oliver manipulated her. His mewling could call her out of the deepest sleep. And she didn’t really like me to hold him. She would wince to see him in the arms of a murderer.

  I felt no wish to bond with him; he had taken Daisy away from me more effectively than his namesake ever had. If Daisy suspected that black thoughts tempted me when I was alone with him, she was right.

  But I resigned myself to fate. Our son would be brought up by an empty mother and a disappointed father, just like all the other kids. Of all the punishments, that seemed to me to be the least endurable.

  —

  I have no idea when it was that Daisy finally realized what I was up to at night. I imagine she had some trouble crediting her own worst fears. The first automobile I pinched was an old Morris Minor. I vomited in the street afterward, but it did me good. I knew then that it was going to become a habit. I assumed, without really thinking about it, that sooner or later Daisy would find out and turn me in. I was amazed the other night when she said that she was coming with me.

  It was a Porsche, a red one. I took her to see it a couple of times before I stole it. I wouldn’t let her hang around with me at the heist itself, just in case I got caught. The drive off is the dangerous moment. I had her wait in a side street near South Kensington underground station.

  We had a lovely ride. She has nerves of steel, Daisy. Afterward, we made love for the first time in months. I know in my bones that our new game is going to bring us together again. I could tell by the shine in her eyes and the wicked jokes she thought up on the way home.

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