by Matt Rudd
‘Calm down, Johnson. This isn’t a game.’
‘We’re going to nail Bob like we nailed Alex.’ Pure glee. Of course, we had nailed Alex. We’d exposed him for the marriage-wrecking, wife-stealing maniac that he was. And it had all been thanks to Johnson going all investigative journalist. But this was quite a bit more serious.
‘Alex was only trying to break up my marriage. Bob is a murderer. Not only that, he’s trying to frame me for it. And when we were nailing Alex, I didn’t have to spend ten days going mad in a Travelodge because you needed time to plan the operation.’
‘We had to wait until today. The pub’s closed today. We’ve got a better chance. And besides, it’s the first time I could get out of the office without Anastasia noticing.’
‘We really, really shouldn’t be here at all,’ says Andy who looks like he’s been dragged all the way here by Johnson. Which he probably has. ‘It’s not going to help. It will make things worse. Which is typical of life. Every time you try and make things better, they get worse.’
‘You tried to patch things up with Saskia?’
‘Yes, and she won’t have any of it. She says I’m pathetic.’
‘Yadayadayada,’ says Johnson. ‘Now can you two cheer up? Look, he’s leaving.’
From our hiding place in the scrub off the side of the village green, we watch Bob walk to his car, look suspiciously in both directions and then drive off.
‘Don’t you think it’s going to look bad if we’re found with a murder suspect ferreting around in the garden of the murder victim?’ asks Andy, scrabbling around in a box hedge.
‘Shut up and keep looking,’ replies Johnson. ‘We don’t know how long he’ll be gone.’
‘I am looking, but I can’t find anything. How do we even know he didn’t get rid of the body?’
‘Ninety per cent of killers fail to dispose of the bodies properly,’ says Johnson without the slightest hesitation, kicking a hydrangea.
‘He’s right, though, Johnson,’ I say. ‘If I get caught here, I’m in serious trouble.’
‘You already are in serious trouble,’ says Johnson. ‘Now, look behind that wagon wheel.’
Five worrying minutes later, we have searched the whole garden and found no bludgeoned whippets. Andy and I reconvene by the gate while Johnson tips out a fertiliser bag. You have to admire his dedication, but this is plainly hopeless.
‘Come on, Johnson. I think I’d better take my chances down at the police station.’ I look down at my feet. It is only then that I notice that the patio stone under my foot is loose. I lever it up to find a thin crust of poorly laid concrete. Just the sort of botch job you’d expect from a cold-hearted whippet-smasher. The crust crumbles as I prod it with a stick. I feel more excited than you’d expect at the prospect of finding the bludgeoned remains of a whippet and start scraping away, whippet-like, at the hole. Andy drops to his knees to help, but before we can get much further, Johnson hisses, ‘Hide!’
There is only time to throw the patio stone back down. I have to leave the dirt and concrete. Even then, I only just manage to dive behind the barbecue with the others before Bob strides angrily through the gate, straight over the newly disturbed patio and into the pub, slamming the door behind him.
‘We have to make a run for it,’ I whisper.
‘We’re staying put. He might go out again.’
So we wait. And Johnson starts telling Andy how he made a lucky escape.
‘Marriage is never a good idea,’ he whispers.
‘Married men live longer,’ Andy whispers back.
‘That’s only because they’re forced to eat vegetables and they’re banned from going to the pub. Being married means being nagged and nagging makes you die slower. The more they nag, the longer you live and the sooner you wish you could die. I should know. And so should he. Look at the mess he’s in and only half of that is to do with the whole murdering thing. Just be glad you’re not him.’
They’re both looking at me now and Andy is nodding in agreement. I’m about to tell them to stop making each other feel better by being glad they’re not me when the gate opens again. A ferrety woman with a headscarf, a neat fringe and dark glasses tiptoes across the patio, kicking the pile of dirt. She looks familiar, but I can’t place her immediately…
Bob opens the door, looks even more suspiciously in both directions and lets her in.
‘Who was that?’ asks Johnson.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Right, let’s make a run for it,’ says Andy.
‘Well, wait a minute. Those two were acting a bit strange, don’t you think? Shouldn’t we hang on and find out what’s going on?’
‘No,’ we reply in unison, but Johnson says he’s not moving. This is his chance to prove his friend is innocent. He’ll stay. We can save ourselves. So we stay.
Twenty minutes later, the woman comes out again, her scarf now loosely over her ruffled fringe. I peer over the barbecue as she makes for the gate, but her face is turned away from me. Bob is closing the door when the woman turns and runs back. He looks angry but then smiles and kisses her as passionately as a man called Bob could kiss a woman with a headscarf. And as she turns, I finally recognise her.
Bob has been shagging the village shopkeeper.
‘It’s the shopkeeper,’ I whisper, shocked at Bob’s infidelity and at how one man could sleep with the two most spiteful women in one village without getting himself into trouble, when I can’t even sleep exclusively with one lovely woman and not get into the worst trouble of my life.
‘I’ve got the evidence,’ says Johnson and, for once, one of his gadgets – his 3G, nine-billion-byte video-phone, the one he regularly strokes like a beloved pet – has come in handy.
The door of the pub is about to close when Bob steps out on to the patio again. His eyes narrow as he takes three further steps into the garden. A ceramic gnome looks unperturbed as Bob crouches down. He has noticed the loose cement. He looks around suspiciously, lifts the stone a little, looks around again and then heads back indoors.
‘We have to go now,’ I say, determined.
‘Okay.’
We’re just getting off our knees when the door opens again. Ducking down, we watch as Bob comes out with a pickaxe and a shovel. He works quickly, digging down through the cement and then he stops. He stands straight, peers around again and then stoops down towards the hole. With his hands, he clears away the dirt and grabs something.
Johnson is tapping me on the shoulder, miming that he’s still recording all this on his phone, and I’m miming, ‘I know, shut up and stop tapping me,’ when Bob pulls a whippet-shaped clear plastic bag from the ground. For the first few seconds, it’s hard to make out anything distinct from all the gunk. Only when Bob turns to carry the bag indoors does it spin round and the three of us gasp. There, squashed against the side of his plastic-bag coffin, is the skeletal grimace of an ex-pet.
Then Johnson’s phone rings.
‘Shit,’ he whispers, pulling it down and under his shirt, but it’s too late. The Girls Aloud ring tone (‘It’s ironic, honest’) has alerted Bob to our presence.
In the worst horror films, the killer comes at his victims slowly, usually dragging a leg, growling a bit. The harder the victims try to escape, the more of a hash they make of it. They trip. They stumble. They get their clothes caught in barbed wire. They run stupidly down dead ends when they could quite easily have gone in a more sensible direction. They jump in cars they don’t have the keys for. And all the while, the killer, dragging his leg, gains on them. It’s the hare and the tortoise, with axes.
Bob wasn’t slow at all. Within seconds, he’d grabbed the pickaxe and was sprinting towards us. We split up, running back through the garden. Of course, he went for me first. We did four loops of a pub bench before I made for the pergola, shouting all the time for him to calm down. But he took one swipe – and the pergola was gone. I grabbed a garden fork as he bore down on me, deflected a blow and fell against the ken
nel of one of Bob’s earlier victims. Before I could fully comprehend the grim irony, I saw the pickaxe swinging down again. All I could think was, ‘You idiot. You’ve made a right hash of your first year of fatherhood and now you’re going to get killed by a mad pickaxe-man. How disappointing.’
I didn’t die. Andy flew at Bob, and the pickaxe crunched through the roof of the doghouse rather than my head. Between the two of us, we wrestled the weapon free, but Bob was like a crazed animal, shouting, spitting, furious with rage. We really needed another man to help hold the maniac down. We needed Johnson.
Where was Johnson?
‘I’m getting all this on my WAP phone!’ he yelled excitedly.
‘Help!’ I yelled back.
‘Oh, right,’ he replied before jumping on Bob as well and then pointing the phone back at himself from arm’s length.
‘Stop videoing and call the police!’ yelled Andy breathlessly.
‘Oh, right,’ said Johnson again, but a voice came up from the other end of the garden. ‘That won’t be necessary. We’re here already.’
They had been on to Bob for days. Even before I had fled to my Travelodge, they were pretty sure I was innocent. They had to follow all lines of enquiry, though, given that this was a murder hunt. It hadn’t helped my cause when I had vanished, but my wife had convinced them that when confronted with a sensible option and a stupid one, I often chose the latter. It didn’t make me a murderer.
Bob, on the other hand, was a murderer, but he’d been so confident he could get away with it that he’d treated it almost like a game. ‘He’s not talking much now,’ the detective had confided. ‘But the shopkeeper’s telling us everything.’ It turned out that Bob and Brenda had had a terrible row the night she died because he’d told her he was leaving her. She’d threatened to tell everyone in the village about Bob’s animal killings if he did. So he lost his temper and Brenda went the way of the whippet.
Not only had he then convinced the besotted village shopkeeper to give him an alibi, but, together, they had then doctored her security camera to show me staggering across the green an hour later than I said I had. How did they even know I’d been in the area? The village policeman had let it slip in the pub. (He had now been placed on desk duties at another station. Serves him right.) After that, the planted baseball bat was easy.
The shopkeeper was also responsible for the anonymous tip-off implicating me in the whippet murder. It was another part of Bob’s swaggering plan. He had told her they could spend the £10,000 on their honeymoon when he finally divorced Brenda. When he murdered her instead, the promise of the honeymoon kept the shopkeeper from running to the police.
‘You’re in the clear now, mate,’ the detective had concluded, hours after I’d arrived at the police station to give a statement. And that’s when I knew everything would be all right.
Everything, of course, except my marriage.
I’d already called Isabel to tell her that it was over and that I would be home soon. She had said, ‘Okay.’ And after a few seconds of silence and me asking if she was still there, she’d said, ‘Yes,’ in a strange, high-pitched voice. Followed by, ‘I can’t talk. Jacob’s waking up. Call when you’re out.’
This meant one of two things: she couldn’t talk because Jacob had woken up or she couldn’t talk because she was furious with me and Jacob’s waking was a convenient excuse. And now here I was, hours later, standing before our front door trying to work out which one it had meant.
Even with the whole horror of the murder behind us, the situation didn’t look great. I was still technically in thrown-out mode. Isabel might have phoned to warn me the police were coming and it sounded like she’d done a lot to convince them that I wasn’t a murderer while I had been on the run, but that didn’t mean all was forgiven. It still left the flooding, the gambling, the (accidental) snogging, the resigning and all the other horrible things I’d put her through. In her first year of motherhood. On reflection, it didn’t look great at all.
I took two steps back off the porch. Perhaps I should go back to Andy’s and take up my rightful place on the sofa. It was late now. I hadn’t called because it was too late, but turning up on the doorstep was hardly any better. I could talk to Isabel tomorrow. That would be the sensible thing to do. But then I wouldn’t see her. And I needed to see her.
I took a step forward and paused. No, tomorrow was almost certainly another day. Better to come back then.
It was only when I’d again turned to walk away, resolving to come back tomorrow, that I heard the door open. I stopped and looked round to see Isabel standing in the doorway in my dressing gown.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ she replied. This was not good. Even though she was in my dressing gown, which suggested that at the very least she hadn’t chopped up all my clothes and burned them, she didn’t sound or look happy to see me. And in that moment, I realised that I had probably lost her. No one could blame her. She had had to cope with all the pressures of being a new mother while her husband had done everything he could to make that even harder. There was nothing I could say to make that better. There was no killer first sentence. No Hollywood password to a happy, schmaltzy ending.
I looked into her eyes and saw great tiredness. I saw anger and hurt, and I saw that she was sad. These are not the things you want to see in the woman you love. And at that same moment, I wished I were a million miles away, ruining someone else’s life.
Then she said, ‘Come in.’
After a few seconds, I walked to the doorway. She stood aside to let me past, but as I stepped into the hall, she took my hand. I looked back and saw that she had tears in her eyes. Suddenly, so did I. I put my arms out and we hugged. For a long, long time. And I vowed to myself that I would never let go. This thing I had – this wife, this baby, this family – was more precious than I had ever imagined and I would never let go.
Friday 13 December
Anastasia has resigned. She’s off to work at Life &Times’ arch rival. She’s such a social climber. Johnson is to be the next Editor. He wants me to be his deputy now that I don’t have a criminal record. Deputy and head of blogging.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I tell him. ‘I have to clear away a few boxes first.’
Janice says she’s sorry she ever doubted me. She’s sorry for what she told the police. She’s delighted the man who killed Snowy’s brothers and sisters is finally going to get his comeuppance. She wants me to have my ‘Good enough to eat?’ column back. Because I’m better at it than she is.
I am pretty good at that column.
Wednesday 18 December
The pub. Andy.
‘Andy, I have learned something in these last twelve months and I need you to hear it. Everything I’ve ever advised anyone about women and relationships is wrong. The only reason I’m still married is because my wife knows, if she ignores the things I say and do, that I love her and I am probably the right man for her. Everything would indicate otherwise, but she’s smart enough to ignore it. The secret to the perfect relationship is for the man to do as few stupid things as possible and the woman to realise that when he’s doing those stupid things, he doesn’t mean to.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because the woman who was destined to ignore the stupid things you do is Saskia. It was only the stupid things I did and said that have put that in jeopardy.’
‘It’s too late.’
‘It’s not too late.’
‘It is. She’s going back to New York.’
Thursday 19 December
The coffee shop. Saskia. Her breasts aren’t looking quite as pointy this time. The jab, she says, is wearing off. She’s going to be reinflated before she leaves London. I tell her Andy loves her. I tell her he made a mistake. ‘He shouldn’t have listened to me. He shouldn’t listen to any bloke. Blokes are always wrong, particularly this one and, secondarily, that one.’
‘Why isn’t he here telling me this?’
<
br /> ‘Because he now thinks you’re better off without him.’
‘But I love him.’
‘I told him that – but only after I’d told him never to believe anything I told him. So he won’t believe me. He’s a bloke, you see. He’s an idiot. We’re all idiots.’
Friday 20 December
The coffee shop again. Alex and Geoff.
‘Why is he here? I thought you wanted to talk about your bloody kitchen.’
‘And why is he here? I thought I told you I hated him and never wanted to see him again.’
‘Right, you two. Stop talking and let me speak. You love each other. You are great for each other. But you have a problem. You are both blokes and blokes, as I have learned in the last twelve months, are rubbish at lots of things, but mainly relationships. Usually they have a sensible, level-headed, rational woman to ignore their stupidity but, in your case, there is no woman. You’ve both been asking me advice about relationships over the last few months. This, I now realise, is a terrible idea. You should be asking a woman.’
‘This is all sounding a bit sexist, Will.’
‘No, it’s practical. I am to blame for you two breaking up. If I hadn’t advised you, you’d quite possibly still be together. You need to ask women about relationship longevity and, if they’re not available, ask each other. You love each other. You’re great together. You have a lifetime of ruining other people’s houses ahead of you. Only an idiot couldn’t see that. Now, I’m going to go back to work and you two are going to talk. And from now on, you’re going to stick to Isabel’s advice, not mine.’
Wednesday 25 December
Christmas Day
‘Breast or leg, Dad?’
‘Leg, darling. Always like a bit of leg.’