Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  I’ve only ever told one person about the man I killed.

  I don’t see Maurice on the evening train, because he usually goes to the pub. Instead, I stare out of the window as the world goes whooshing by. I have bought flowers for Emma, which is something I do: It’s not a birthday thing, or an anniversary thing, or even a Friday-night thing. It is a recurring statement of intent: I will always bring you flowers. Tonight they are roses, and to my fellow passengers possibly look like an apology. But I have nothing to be sorry for, and intend to keep it that way.

  Emma hums as she arranges the roses in a vase.

  “How was your day?” she asks.

  “It was fine. Yours?”

  “Same old, same old,” she says, and this is our private joke. Emma does not work — I earn enough for both of us — and her same old is someone else’s leisure.

  I potter around the sitting room as she prepares the supper. I drink a glass of white, and pick things up and put them down — ornaments, books, a candlestick; a pale silk scarf left draped across a chair — and remember where each came from, and which were my gifts to her. It is not only flowers I bring her: I buy gifts. That scarf; this candlestick. I made her a present long ago of my deepest secret: of the man I killed on a lonely stretch of canal, unobserved by God or anyone. She wept — we both did — but she understood what my telling her meant: that I was placing all I was, and ever hoped to be, in her hands. Ever since, I’ve known we’ll never drift apart.

  I bought her those books, those CDs, and the pictures on our walls.

  And last year, for her birthday, as a special treat, I bought her a smart red sports car.

  With a personalised numberplate.

  Remain in control. Stay detached.

  Maurice says, “Why so interested? I told you all this yesterday, you’re like yeah, yeah, are we nearly there yet?”

  We have seats this morning. There’s never any telling which days are going to be crowded; which are going to be like somebody declared a Bank Holiday and never told you. Maurice sits opposite me, and I can see he’s missed a spot shaving; one of those difficult places under the chin that mirrors don’t always notice, but wives do.

  “It’s just bad behaviour,” I tell him.

  “Well, it wasn’t the only kind of bad behaviour on their mind. I can promise you that.”

  He reminds me that it happened in the Cotswolds, then goes off on a tangent, telling me why he was there himself. I spend the interlude recalling that Emma had gone shopping on Saturday afternoon.

  “Couple of miles along the road, I see the car parked by a wood. Like they’re nature-lovers, right? Guy with a shaved head, a freakin’ earring, the only wildlife he’s interested in is a bit of outdoors horizontal jogging.”

  Maurice can be loud sometimes. His words riffle through the carriage like a cat in long grass.

  That day, I call Emma twice from work. She answers both times. I say I just wanted to hear her voice.

  “That’s sweet.”

  And in the evening, I dig out our most recent phone bill. Emma has a mobile — of course she does — so there’s no earthly reason a landline should betray her. Even so, there are numbers I don’t recognise. But Google tells me they’re innocent. Mail-order firms; the local library. A plumber. For a while I entertain visions of Emma wrapped in highly coordinated intercourse with an overalled handyman, plungers and piping arrayed all around. But then I recall a leaky tap in the upstairs bathroom. Of course she called a plumber. Who else is going to fix a leaky tap?

  “You’re very quiet,” she says over supper. “Is everything all right?”

  She’s a beautiful woman, Emma; more beautiful to me than anyone else, it’s true. But beautiful. It always surprises me that she doesn’t take a good photo. I buy her gifts; when you get down to it, I feed and clothe her. But none of this makes her my possession. She is my wife, and that places her deeply inside my space, but she’s not my possession. In my absence, who knows where she walks?

  “I’m fine,” I tell her. “Everything is fine.”

  “We’re strictly audio-visual, our end,” Maurice says. “And v. much aboveboard. Public stuff, like the South Bank getout, plus offices and home security systems and all that. What you’re talking about’s bugging. You can buy phone taps over the counter, or over the Internet, same difference. But it’s legally touchy. You put up signs saying this area’s under remote surveillance, everyone knows where they stand. Nobody puts up a sign saying this phone’s tapped. And if you did, you could put up another one saying out of order, you’d get more traffic on it.”

  The device, which arrives at my office from friendlyear.com, is no bigger than a watch battery, and transmits to a recorder the size of a memory stick. Feel more secure, the packaging invites, though its actual purpose is to confirm one’s insecurities. The instructions read like they’ve been translated from the Portuguese by someone who speaks only French, but owns two dictionaries.

  It weighs my pocket down as I leave, and I wonder if the dogs at the station will bark me out — the police dogs that wait on the concourse, trained to sniff for bombs, guns, and fear.

  On the train, Maurice says, “You’re looking pressured. Markets heading for a fall?”

  It is such a surprise that Maurice notices anything beyond his own concerns that I’m not sure how to answer. “Same old, same old,” I say at last.

  He looks out on a darkening view of warehouse yards and traffic jams. “Tell me about it. We’ve got a citywide systems check on — every camera, every lens, every angle. Guess which muggins gets to coordinate that little lot?”

  “Don’t the cameras get checked all the time?”

  “Individually, yes. This is a systems audit.” He leans forward. “Means we have to close whole chunks of it down. You want to pull some riverside mischief and not get caught, this week’s good.”

  “I presume you’re not advertising that.”

  “Jesus, don’t joke.” He brushes imaginary crumbs from his lapel. The real ketchup stain on his tie is unimpressed. “Big Brother never sleeps. That’s our story, anyway.”

  At home, I place the bug on the standard lamp. The recorder goes in a drawer. It’s noise-activated, which means that when nothing’s happening, it goes to sleep. Along with hours of sound, it can capture aeons of unremembered silence.

  “What are your plans for the rest of the week?” I ask Emma over supper; a strangely formal construction.

  “I thought I might go up to London one morning. Do some shopping. But don’t worry, I’ll avoid the commuter crush.”

  “That’s good,” I say. “Maurice doesn’t like noncombatants stealing our seats.”

  She smiles at this. She knows Maurice.

  All night it rains, and I lie awake wondering if the pattering on the windows will trigger the bug. Already I can picture myself listening to it: hours of secondhand rain; a memory of overnight weather.

  Emma hums as she moves from room to room; she hums as she changes the roses’ water. And talks to herself, too, snatches of dialogue — single words, mostly — meant to act as memos-to-self: milk, she will say, for obvious reasons, or oven, less obviously. She takes a call on her mobile, and walks out of range while gossiping with a book-club friend. I hear all this hours later, in the bathroom, the recorder’s earpiece clamped to my head.

  She interrupts my surveillance by calling upstairs.

  I go down to eat, and admire her food. I applaud the industry with which she passes her days. I notice that the oven sparkles; its ceramic buffed and polished. My attentions amuse her.

  “Sometimes you act like a brand-new husband,” she tells me.

  “Would you like a brand-new husband?” I ask.

  “I’m quite content with the old one,” she says. “But it’s nice to be appreciated.”

  Later, I return to the bathroom, and continue listening to the day’s messages.

  More humming.

  Light bulbs.

  The friendly clatter of
a woman preparing to go out, followed an unknowable amount of time later by the sound of the same woman returning home.

  She takes a call on her mobile.

  Yes... Tomorrow, that’s right. Well, thank you for confirming. What time’s check-in? Any time after eleven? That’s fine.

  Damn, she tells herself sometime later. I forgot to buy the bread.

  I hear myself arriving back from work, and removing the recorder from its drawer.

  And then all I hear is silence, taking place in real time.

  In the morning, before she’s up, I take her mobile from her coat pocket, and jot a number down from Call Register. When I ring it from my own phone, a hotel receptionist answers. I find I can’t speak.

  Emma emerges, in her dressing gown. “I’m going to London today, too,” she says. “But I’ll go in on the ten o’clock.”

  “Shall we come back together?” My voice is rusty, as if it belongs to somebody older.

  “Oh, I’ll be home before rush hour.” She kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll leave the rough stuff to you men.”

  On the train, Maurice complains about the continuing rain. He also complains about fare increases, the government’s pensions policy, and the number of reality shows on TV.

  “Don’t those guys know their T.S. Eliot?” Those guys are the guys we all hate: the ones responsible for whatever disgusts us at that moment. “ ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality.’ Did they think he was kidding, or what?”

  “I don’t think modernist poetry factors in much in TV scheduling, Maurice.”

  “Well, I don’t think basic intelligence factors in much in TV scheduling. They got freaking cheerleaders doing the weather, for God’s sake.” He pauses. “Actually, that bit’s not all bad.”

  On the concourse he says, “Let’s be careful out there.”

  “Do it to them before they do it to you,” I tell him.

  But I don’t head for the Tube. Instead I make for the daylight, or what little there is of it — it’s wet and grey as I walk to Hyde Park Corner, where I buy a cup of coffee in a franchise opposite Victoria’s Hotel, and use my mobile to call in sick. There’s a newspaper on my table, and I pretend to read while I watch the comings and goings.

  At ten to eleven a shaven-headed man with an earring pauses at its steps, checks his watch, then goes in.

  At ten past, my wife arrives in a taxi. She smiles as she tips the driver.

  Stay detached. Remain in control. Let go of the space around you.

  But everything inside that space is yours.

  I spend so long in that cafe, it starts to feel like my kitchen. I drink so much coffee, I start to feel like hell.

  In the newspaper I’m not reading is a grainy picture from CCTV footage. It shows two kids in hoodies stomping a homeless man to death.

  Three hours later, Emma leaves the Victoria. Through a circle I’ve rubbed in the steamed-up window I watch as she sets off for the station, and she looks the same to me as she always does. There’s no scarlet letter branded on her forehead. She might have been taking a business meeting in the hotel’s conference room. Out of view she walks, her good grey coat and umbrella keeping her dry. Once she’s gone, I return my attention to the hotel entrance. It swims a little, but I blink away newfound knowledge. When the shaven-headed man emerges five minutes later, my vision is clear again, my purpose undimmed. I pay the bill and follow him round the corner. I’m half an escalator behind him as he dips into the underground.

  The Tube map has been played with many times; its stations replaced with constellations, philosophers, authors, famous drunks. It is an attempt, I think, to find poetry in the ordinary. He changes trains, then, at the Great Bear, and I loiter yards from him as he waits on the platform. Every so often he checks his watch. Perhaps he’s heading back to work — playtime over; alibi used up. I wonder what excuse he phoned in before heading for the Victoria: a dental appointment? A checkup? He is wearing a suit beneath his raincoat, and his earring flashes when it catches the light. I imagine him in the passenger seat of my wife’s red car, his hand up her skirt; or in a hotel bedroom, that suit folded onto a hanger before their fun begins. Then the Tube arrives in a silvery whoosh, and we board the same carriage, and sit ten seats apart.

  Dylan Thomas; W.B. Yeats; Ezra Pound... The carriage fills, but no one sits next to me. Perhaps I’m giving off the wrong signals. Perhaps no one wants to check if I’m dead. I feel dead, it’s almost true, as we reach our destination and emerge into the same grey, grubby weather of twenty minutes ago. He walks across Hungerford Bridge, collar pulled up to protect his shaven skull. I follow some way behind. My hair is plastered to my head, and rainwater pours down my neck. Everyone I pass has the same expression stamped onto their features: a look that says stay out of my space. On the South Bank he veers left, and heads towards Tate Modern. Before reaching it he turns from the river, and without ever looking behind him — as if he enjoys a clear conscience — leads me to an office block, into which he disappears.

  Forever, I wait in an alley opposite. Ages of unrecorded time, whose silence spools into nothingness.

  When he emerges, it’s long past office hours. Perhaps he’s compensating for his morning’s absence, or perhaps his office role is important enough to spill into the evening shift. He seems tired when he appears at last, talking into his mobile phone; shaking his head and waving his free hand around in a pointless underlining of his words. This conversation lasts way up the South Bank, where he stops at last at a pub beyond the Globe.

  From a corner table I watch as he drinks his way through three large scotches.

  Outside, it is full-on dark. The rain is back with a vengeance, and has cleared the evening streets. I nurse a single pint until he rises to leave, then follow him along the unwatched river, heedless of the switched-off cameras we pass. He is somewhat drunk, I expect. I’m mildly wobbly myself, after beer on an empty stomach.

  What happens next — the sudden acceleration, the blow to the head, the heave into the water — seems both familiar and surprisingly straightforward. For a minute afterwards I stand there, hardly able to believe that such a large problem can vanish so instantly. In the morning, I expect, it will feel like another strange dream.

  And then I catch the last train home, to find Emma waiting, anxious.

  “You’re so late!”

  “I went for a drink. Sorry.”

  “You could have called.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “How was your day?”

  “Same old, same old,” she tells me.

  The papers make great play of the irony: The murder of the London head of a global security outfit captured on his firm’s CCTV. There are shots of me trailing him halfway up the river. Even I recognise myself in the blown-up footage. But at the trial I don’t mention Maurice’s subterfuge about the system being shut down because — as both he and Emma point out — last thing I need is another drowned body surfacing. Even a twenty-year-old murder would muddy the waters. One life sentence is enough.

  They send me a photo from the wedding. This takes place the week after our divorce comes through. Maurice looks fit and spruce, but then he has no further need to play down-at-heel, and the extra £15K for stepping into the boss’s shoes can’t hurt. He’s maintained his predecessor’s habit of holding brunch meetings at the Victoria, I gather. Its conference room is ideal. I sometimes think about Emma killing three hours in the cafe there, and wonder if she drank as much coffee as I did while waiting for suspicion to harden.

  In the photo, she looks beautiful.

  Blog Bytes

  by Bill Crider

  © 2007 Bill Crider

  The idea of the “group blog” seems to be catching on lately. Instead of one writer doing all the posts, writers band together to share the load. A fine example, and one that should be of particular interest to readers of this magazine, is Criminal Brief (www.c
riminalbrief.com/), which is a blog devoted to discussion of the writing and marketing of short stories. Saturdays are devoted to a “Mystery Masterclass” with “distinguished guest contributors,” the first of whom was Ed Hoch. It would be hard to find anyone who knows more about the short story than Ed. Regular contributors are James Lincoln Warren (on Monday), Melodie Johnson Howe (Tuesday), Robert Lopresti (Wednesday), Deborah Elliott-Upton (Thursday), Steven Stein-bock (Friday), and Leigh Lundin (Sunday).

  Another entertaining group blog is Poe’s Deadly Daughters (poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com/), property of Julia Buckley, Sandra Parshall, Elizabeth Zelvin, Sharon Wildwind, and Lonnie Cruise. Sandra’s recent post on “book lust” really hit home with me. Lonnie often does interviews with other writers, and there’s plenty of discussion of writing and personal things. Sharon might reprint one of her reminiscences of Vietnam, or Julia will talk about a favorite poem. Guest bloggers show up occasionally, too. Reed Farrel Coleman put in an appearance just the other day.

  Murderati (www.murderati.typepad.com/) has the largest group of the three. Mondays belong to Pari Noskin Taichert, and on Tuesday either Louise Ure or Ken Bruen takes over. Wednesday brings Robert Gregory Browne or J. D. Rhoades, whereas Thursday belongs to Simon Wood. J. T. Ellison has Friday, and Alexandra Sokoloff gets Saturday. Sunday Mike McLean has the floor. Guest bloggers Naomi Hirahara and Toni McGee Causey give the others an occasional break. As you can see, there’s bound to be lots of variety, and topics have included a review of the first season of Freaks and Geeks, a report on the Romantic Times conference, and a report on Malice Domestic, with photos.

  Bill Crider’s own blog, Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, can be found at billcrider.blogspot.com.

  A Rat’s Tale

  by Donna Andrews

  © 2007 by Donna Andrews