The Dark Corners

by Robert J. Tilley

  And it must be now, he told himself, while the resolve is strong. If he waited, too much thinking about it could undermine his nerve. No, he mustn’t hesitate. He and Lynne nodded a final goodbye to each other as he left for the airport that Friday afternoon, twin signal of decision that told him she understood and that she would be waiting for him.

  He had only a casual interest in the daily quota of violence reported by the media, and crime fiction something that he read only occasionally. He was, in a sense, completely unfitted for such a venture, but this in itself was a kind of advantage. His normal attitude to such things was known to his acquaintance which meant that it was extremely unlikely that suspicion of any sort would be directed towards him on the social level.

  There would be no reason why it should. The timing would have all the external appearances of an accident, one of those day-to-day fatalities that struck with sudden meaningless cruelty, with nothing but innocent grief to show for its passage.

  There must, of course, be no hint that it could be anything other than this. If only the slightest untoward thing was noticed by some sharp-eyed observer it could all too easily become a matter for police investigation, and he knew what that meant. In such instances the husband immediately and quite understandably became the principal suspect, his private activities thoroughly investigated.

  He must run no risk of any kind. However it was done, it would have to be uncomplicated; a safe, simple routine that required no careful memorising of a detailed plan or timetable. He remembered reading somewhere that cleverness of this kind often resulted in the cases that were the easiest to break down; the often brilliantly conceived webs of apparent accident or suicide and unshakeable alibi, that ultimately trapped their creators in the strands of their own ingenuity.

  He had no intention of being snared in this way. When he did it, it would be direct, uncomplicated and final. And it would succeed, because it had to, ensuring that the chain of subsequent events betrayed no detectable connection.

  It was impossible for Lynne and himself to be married when their child was born, but the circumstances of her own birth and situation had already inspired his draft scenario as to how this would eventually come about. Her mother, unmarried and alone, had died when she was only months old, and she herself had moved to Los Angeles from Tampico shortly before being employed by Langley, so had no real local intimates. Even with this promising foundation on which to build, what happened after Moira’s death would inevitably be more complex than the event itself. But, he told himself doggedly, it would work, handled with cunning and care. There would be Lynne’s nervous breakdown, followed by her departure for several months to another part of the country, ostensibly to recuperate with helpful friends, the careful choosing of discreet foster-parents before the birth, her return to L.A., their chance meeting at the office at the time of her social call on old colleagues and his contrived visit there if one should be necessary, their publicly displayed mutual commiseration on their respective misfortunes, and, at last, marriage, and the adoption of a fictional unmarried sister’s child, following her accidental death.

  It would be tricky and it would take time, perhaps even a year or two, but it could be done, he was sure. Thank God, he thought, for their initial public clash of personalities. Despite the intensity of their passion, they had been discreet about their meetings, and he was more convinced than ever that, if Moira had suspicions she would have kept them to herself, her vanity refusing to accept the danger to their marriage was anything other than temporary.

  So he had nothing to fear from that source. The only real danger visible at this point was from himself, if he should fall into the ever-waiting trap of attempted cleverness.

  Direct, he thought again, uncomplicated, final.

  He rang for a drink, and began to plan.

  * * * *

  He took a cab from the airport and a train from the city. Moira no longer met him off the plane, the mutually agreed reason for this being that she too had her hands full and that it really was rather too far to come when it was a comparatively simple business for him to make his own way home.

  At Bridgeport he took another cab, cautiously relieved to note that the driver was one who had taken him home before and who clearly recognised him. He settled back against the cushions, studying the back of his head and considering what sort of witness he was likely to make if called on.

  He was tense, but not overly so. The drinks that he’d had on the plane had taken the edge off his nervousness, and he was sure that externally at least the impression that he gave was one of normality. It was possible that this might be important at this stage. In any investigation, this stranger’s testimony could easily tip the balance, decide the police whether or not his behaviour immediately preceding the accident warranted further enquiries being made.

  On an impulse, he said, “What’s the weather going to be doing over the weekend? Any idea?”

  “Dry”, the driver said. “Light winds, I think they said,” he eased the cab around a corner with nonchalant expertise. “Golf?”

  Kevin laughed. “I was thinking about it, but we’ve still got a lot to sort out in our new place. I’d sure like to get out and shake the rust off, though.”

  For the remainder of the journey they discussed the current form of Tiger Woods, the driver critically, Kevin with concealed delight.

  Minutes later they stopped at the end of the freshly asphalted road. As the cab drove off and he walked up the path, he saw that there was a light visible through the front door, another behind the drawn curtains of the living room. He took out his key, unlocked the door, and went in. As he was closing it, Moira’s voice said, “Kev?”

  He turned, startled. It was not the fact of this almost instantaneous greeting in itself that had caught him by surprise, but the direction from which it appeared to have come. He raised his head, his heart running a shade faster, and stared at Moira where she stood at the top of the stairs.

  When he had been making his plans, the location, of the accident had suggested itself more or less automatically. It had to be indoors, concealed from possible witnesses, which meant that there was only one place in the house where it could happen without in any way appearing to have been contrived.

  It had been his intention to go upstairs directly on entering the house, and once there call her. The inference would have been that he had brought her a present of some kind, possibly something for utilization in the bedroom. He would have met her at the top of the stairs, manoeuvred her to face down them again, and then pushed.

  He felt a chill pass over him, like the shadow of a cloud. There was no earthly reason why she should not have been upstairs at the time of his arrival, but now the situation seemed somehow unreal; a nightmare stage production where actors moved at the behest of some malignant director, acting out his darkly devised narrative. She stood looking down at him, her face shadowed; the poised victim, her position marked with scratches of invisible chalk.

  He felt slightly sick. He placed his bag on the floor, and said, “Hi. Don’t come down. Something I want to show you.”

  Smiling he advanced up the stairs.

  She waited for him without moving, She had one hand on the rail, the other down by her side, clenched stiffly he now saw. It was almost as though she knew what was about to happen and was tensing herself for it, seeing his approach as the measured step of the executioner, relentless and inescapable.

  This was impossible, but he sensed her tautness as he stepped up to stand beside her on the lending. And still, inexplicably, she faced, away from him down the stairs, a rigidly posed partner in some insane ritual dance that demanded to be performed.

  He stepped behind her, placed his hands flat against her shoulders, and pushed with all his strength.

  She whimpered slightly as she toppled out and flailed jarringly down to the hallway. When she was almost there, he caught a glimpse of her face, an image that stayed clamped in his mind like the result of an imperfec
t camera shot: blurred, but sufficient in detail. Her expression showed shock, but something else, too, something that to Kevin looked strangely like remorse.

  She hit the polished wooden floor, slid two or three feet, and lay still.

  He steeled himself before going down to her. Reason had already told him that it was possible that he would find himself in the sickening position of having to administer a coup de grace should the fall have actually failed to kill her. This would be risky, but perhaps necessary. He was breathing raggedly as he knelt beside her, but even before his damp fumbling failed to detect any pulse-beat in her limp wrist the position of her head told him that he had been spared the performance of this final brutality.

  He picked her up and carried her into the living room, placing her carefully on the couch, and as he did so the barrier that had somehow neutralised any deep emotion that he might have felt before this dissolved abruptly.

  He sat on a nearby chair, weeping. What was done was irrevocable, and it was only with the completion of the actual deed that he found himself capable of a return to something close to true rationality. For the first time for months he caught a fleeting glimpse of the strange balance between them as it had existed before his realisation and subsequent deceit; a unique thing of anticipation and echo, doomed by its own perfection. It had not been her fault, or his. It had simply been one of those unfeeling quirks of fate that seemingly at random select certain people and then inexorably steer them towards its inescapable outcome, victims of some warped caprice whose only possible ending was tragedy.

  It had been an important part of his plan that he phone the local hospital as soon as it was over. His story was simplicity itself; his arrival home, his announcement of his presence, the unseen fall down the stairs as he waited for her in the living room. That was all. Medical examination would confirm the time of her death, and surely that would be all that would be needed by investigating officials; no evidence of physical conflict, no sign of any kind that the real circumstance were in any way different from what he had told them. They would simply find a desolate man and his dead wife, the quality of whose relationship would be solemnly sworn by literally dozens of convincingly appalled acquaintances.

  It slowly dawned on him that he had been sitting there a long time. He looked at his watch, and was shocked to find that almost thirty: minutes had passed since last checking it before starting up the path to the house. But somehow this time-lag that should have terrified him with the way that it introduced a suggestion of possible deceit into his story failed to stir him in any great measure. Either they believed him, or they didn’t. There was no incriminating evidence of any kind, and he found that he was now contemptuous of mere suspicion. He shrugged mentally, recognising his apathy as the inevitable reaction to the destruction of part of himself, repugnant to him though it had become, the smashing of the mirror, removing for all time the opportunity to study himself, to preen and to admire the image that he presented to the world.

  He shook his head, rose, and went to the telephone. As he picked up the receiver, the front door chimes rang.

  He stood poised uncertainly for a moment, then replaced the receiver. It was pointless to pretend that he hadn’t heard, or that the house was empty. The lights were on in both the hallway and the living room, providing clear evidence of occupancy. No, hesitancy could only work against him. Far better to answer the door immediately, his bloodless complexion now facing him from the mirror above the telephone table giving veracity to his story and especially to his newly added coda, that he had collapsed on finding the body.

  He went to the door, and opened it. A man stood on the step, a tall, heavy, blondish man, possibly a year or two his senior. He looked, oddly, to be extremely nervous. Kevin had never seen him before in his life.

  The man said, “Well? May I come in?” He seemed to take it for granted that this would be acceptable.

  He walked heavily past Kevin, turned, and faced him. He looked drawn, but resolute. He said, thickly, “I can see she’s told you. It must have been a hell of a shock.”

  Kevin said nothing, staring at him. The man said, “Look, I can understand how you feel, but you must try and see our side of it, too. I never wanted to get into anything like this, and neither did Moira, but it’s an honest-to-God fact that we couldn’t help ourselves.” His mouth became stubborn. “I don’t think that very many people would understand, not really. It’s a one-in-a-million thing that you just…”

  He talked on, with muted, shame-faced passion.

  Kevin watched him, silently. It was as though he was seeing the gradual reassembly of a mirror, a slow, agonised exercise that was now permitting him to view its other side, seeing at last beyond the bland surface image that it had always presented to ram. Odd parts of this man’s discourse were new—something about furniture design and manufacture, his own business—but these were details only. For the most part the pattern was painfully familiar, a logical reflection of events that must surely have concluded as they were doing, reaching the end of the only path that had ever been open to them.

  Balance, he thought. The completion of the circle, pre-ordained and perfect in its simplicity. Me, Moira. Moira, me. Moira, me. He found with a calmly accepting absence of surprise that he was actually amused by the sheer structural beauty of it all, the immaculate precision of its resolution.

  He said. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” The man’s floundering: tumble of words trickled to a halt. He stared, uncomprehendingly, his mouth slightly open. Kevin felt a surge of something darkly bitter at the back of his throat, a grotesque and barely containable desire to laugh. He shook his head. “If I had, there’d have been no need—” He stopped, indifferent to his indiscretion but choked into silence by the relentlessly growing pressure inside him.

  After a moment, the man said, slowly, “What are you talking about? You mean she didn’t tell you?” His eyes slid past, Kevin, focussing on something beyond the open living room door. He stiffened abruptly, his face shocked with sudden disbelief.

  He made an anguished sound, and lurched forward. Seconds later, his sobs could be heard, muffled against the sprawled, waxen figure that he pawed with large, hopeless hands.

  Watching him, in a distant way sharing his grief, Kevin thought briefly and with deep sadness of Lynne and the unborn child that he would now never see, feeling them drift away from him into a future where he knew he had no part, leaving behind an emptiness in which the dream had died in unison with Moira.

  For every action, he thought, tiredly—how did it go?—there is an equal and opposite reaction. Something like that. And never, never more reasonably than now. Again, he marvelled at the completeness and absolute symmetry or the pattern, the clinical rightness of its logic.

  Direct, he told himself, uncomplicated, final.

  His laughter welled, a suddenly unstoppable flood. He stood there, head thrown back, the harshly raucous sound filling the house as he waited for the weeping man’s return.

  DARK DILEMMA

  Her mother was talking on the hallway phone when she left the house, automatically restricting their goodbye’s to a mutual waving of hands. She closed the door behind her and began to walk down the garden path, only then becoming aware of the man stood motionless on the opposite pavement, staring fixedly in her direction.

  Even though he was at least thirty yards away she registered a clear image of unblinking eyes, sunk deep in an unhealthily pale face and now rigidly focussed on her and her movements. Discomfited, she quickly averted her own gaze, glancing up and down the street. Other people had just passed the house, near-neighbours that she often chatted with at the bus stop. Relieved by their proximity and still keeping her eyes averted, she reached the pavement and headed briskly away from him towards the main road.

  Odd, she thought. Pretty creepy, really, although not enough to rouse real alarm, not in broad daylight and with other people nearby. There’d been nothing threatening about his pose, anyway, simply the sugge
stion of a protracted vigil; as though he’d been standing there for a while, waiting for her to emerge.

  The raincoat he was wearing was unseasonable, but its seemingly inappropriate usage could have been linked to the matter of his health, she reflected. Perhaps he was someone she’d encountered at the hospital, his bad colour evidence of an on-going condition; some mildly unstable ex-patient who’d developed a fixation on her while he’d been in her care. Without being overtly vain she knew she was attractive, and that kind of thing had happened before, but if this was another case of it she hadn’t recognised him. People looked different in street clothes, though, she reminded herself, so it was perfectly possible that he’d passed through her hands at some forgotten point, subsequently fantasising—

  She heard footsteps behind her, rapidly approaching. Then he was beside her. “Excuse me.” His breathing was wheezily laboured. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if you could help me.”

  Despite the disquiet she’d experienced at the time of her first sighting of him, the fact that he appeared to be ailing in some way had tempered her unease with a modicum of sympathy. Now, reluctantly dragging her eyes away from the retreating backs of the street’s other inhabitants, she turned her head in his direction, what she saw reinforcing this aspect of her initial reaction.

  His paleness contained a greyish shadow, and his eyes were dark-ringed with the fatigue of illness. He was around fifty or so, she judged, although he could easily have been several years younger, possibly by as much as a decade. His face still prompted no actual recognition, although there was something—

  Whatever it was, she couldn’t place him. She slowed, but kept moving, anxious not to be separated too far from the people up ahead. He paced her, slowly gathering his breath before speaking again with obvious discomfort.

  “I’m trying to find a David Simmons. I don’t know his address, but I was told he lives somewhere around here. Do you—?” As they reached the corner, a fit of coughing took him, bringing him to a halt.