The Accident

by S D Monaghan

  Shay was no longer smiling. All pretences were off. He spoke softly: ‘Do I sound confused to you?’

  Tara’s eyes widened. Where had that come from? Neighbours were supposed to behave to each other with distant courtesy. Was he trying to intimidate her? Would he talk to David like that?

  ‘The blockage is on your side, Tara. It has to be. The pipe travels under your patio. The drains people have told me this. Common sense tells me this. We’ll have to get rods down your access point on the patio and figure out what’s going on under there.’ As Tara’s smile melted, Shay’s friendly smile returned. ‘So, if you can get Ryan to organise the sewer rods for your patio as soon as possible, that would be appreciated. We’d really like this sorted before it escalates.’ Shay waved adios over his shoulder and retreated to the penance of his home life.

  Back inside, Tara released Dora to the mammoth task of scenting every edge and corner of her new home. Finally, it felt that the future had arrived and that it was good. The move had come so fast, it was as if Tara had been abducted in her sleep and then awoken somewhere entirely new. She thought back to when she’d originally moved in with David, only a week after kissing him for the first time. Tara had embraced the unprecedented jolt of no longer being alone and had slipped so easily into the pockets of his life. Her belongings had simply vanished into his tiny one-bed apartment.

  Tara’s bare feet tested the condition of the carpet beneath her toes. The fabric’s quality thrilled her. The perfect vacuum lines left by the cleaner gave the wool the look of a manicured pitch before a cup final. She remembered when wealth had meant nothing to her. It had never been a driving force. It had never dictated her life choices. But then she’d grown up, made money of her own and suddenly experienced what it could do – permit travel, build a house, allow both herself and her husband the freedom to be what they wanted to be.

  Dora was curled up on the living room windowsill, pushing her head against Tara’s hand before exposing her throat, demanding attention after the trauma of the move. Suddenly a car pulled in from the road and swooped round the circle of the driveway. It wasn’t David. A man stepped out of the car. He was tall and broad and she knew just by looking at him – at how he surveyed the face of the Georgian, how he observed her through the front window as if he was invisible – that something was about to be awful.

  Chapter Three

  That morning, after leaving Lawrence Court, David had driven the thirty-minute journey to the university to wait for Gordon. On the way, he turned off his phone. He needed to think without Tara calling and reminding him of her great betrayal. His brain went round in circles. What exactly does Gordon know? How does he know it? What does he want?

  As he pulled into the university car park, he muttered the words, ‘It was just an accident.’ But he wasn’t sure if he believed them. There were two contradicting voices in his head: you overreacted and he deserved it. David remembered punching Ryan, watching him stagger backwards and wobbling on the border of where the Juliet balcony should have been. Could he have grabbed him in time?

  Once parked at the back of the bunker-like arts block, he entered the heaving concourse encircled by lecture halls. It was like stepping into a storm. On the quiet third floor, a dark, narrow corridor led to his office. Waiting at the door were two attractive female students: one from Dublin who was struggling with the weight of her laptop, and one from Galway in low-hanging tracksuit bottoms. They were both hoping for ten minutes’ alone time to discuss their thesis proposals. For weeks it had been obvious that both girls nurtured a crush on him. See how easy it could’ve been, Tara? There were so many opportunities in the everyday mix of university life that, if he paid attention to them, the world outside of its sanctified walls would seem like a miasma of drear. But he hadn’t paid attention to them. I should choose one of them now. Take her over my desk. It would be easy. It would be fun. Instead, David thought of Ryan, before apologetically telling his students that he couldn’t see anyone until at least the end of the week, and closing his door.

  In effect, David’s office was his fiefdom from where, amid preparing lectures and finally giving his PhD research paper – ‘Discovering Resistant Opposition: World War Two in the Savage’ – the attention it deserved, he also managed Tara’s career. It was a sideline that he’d taken very seriously from the moment he’d conjured her big break from thin air in the lobby of the Shelbourne Hotel, transforming Tara from a weekend art enthusiast into an international attraction. From that point on, he’d handled every deal, show and global exhibition she’d had over the last three and a half years. The success of Erdős Landscapes had ensured that he could remain an undergraduate lecturer, taking just a few specialised classes, rather than waste his time as a full-time member of faculty who had to support his then struggling artist girlfriend and pay the home nursing bills for his seventy-six-year-old mother. His sister took no responsibility for their mother; she had emigrated to Australia when she was eighteen and hadn’t visited Ireland in over a decade. Over the years, she and David had basically lost touch and anyway, with a small café to run, two teenagers and no husband, she didn’t have the money to help out.

  David poured a coffee from the espresso maker and sat at his desk. It was from here that he wielded his power. It was here that he made important decisions. It was from this desk that he’d got Leonardo DiCaprio to write the catalogue intro for Tara’s first US exhibition – or rather, to put his name to the intro that David had written. Up to nine months ago, he used to sit at this desk, take a call and inevitably end up naming a ridiculous figure in a sentence that included the word ‘bargain’. David had a gift for sniffing out the buyers with serious money and rounding them up like a sheepdog.

  But these days, it was usually some rich asshole phoning him up not to buy something. He’d known it wouldn’t last. Fresher meat had been destined to replace Tara in the corporate art sandwich. That was just the way it was. But David and Tara didn’t mind. When Tara’s career had ignited, David had finally begun his doctorate. But time constraints had forced him to put it on hold – he simply hadn’t been able to correct papers, prepare lectures, manage Tara’s career and write a dissertation. But now that they finally had the financial security that had come from getting his wife everything she’d ever wanted from her career – artistic recognition – they’d both agreed that it was time for David to get what he’d always wanted from his career – academic recognition. Until now, their plan had been simple and graceful; the way things were supposed to be when you were a solid, tight team.

  He leaned over the espresso and sniffed covetously. His trembling hand sent a small tide of liquid slopping into the saucer. David lit a cigarette and watched the ceiling fan chop the blue smoke out of existence. On the computer screen was the start of an email waiting to be written to Tara’s PR consultant: the kind of New York publicist who had his own publicist. The blank page stared out reproachfully, as if he was hurting it by not typing on it. David didn’t have many emails to send these days.

  On the other side of the door, twenty feet away along the corridor, the elevator dinged. David flicked the cigarette out of the window. Footsteps approached, and he looked into the white glow of the email as if it was some type of crystal ball. Knuckles rapped on the door and before he could answer, Gordon entered, his undone suit revealing a small, stowaway paunch. He dropped his body into the chair like an anchor.

  David put on his sombre face, usually reserved for expressing disappointment in a favoured student. ‘Look, you and Ryan are close and worked—’ Be careful. ‘Work well together. But Jesus, me, kill Ryan?’

  Gordon’s silence was galling. Each passing second felt like a step towards a cell. And still Gordon waited, because he knew there would be more.

  ‘Why would you think such a thing? You’d want to be careful, Gordon. As I tell my students, madness is just one small step to the left of being imaginative – that’s why Hitler was an artist. I mean, are you on crack? Me? Murder Ryan?�
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  Gordon’s head tilted slightly. He did this when feigning confusion. ‘Finished?’ He was enjoying giving David the space and time to embarrass himself further. ‘OK. Ryan was a mess in that pit. His head, it was…’ Gordon gazed up to the narrow window. ‘The only thing that didn’t break in Ryan’s face was his fucking teeth.’

  ‘Jesus. So is he... Did I…’

  ‘Ryan is dead.’

  David took a sip of coffee to hide his face.

  ‘Rigidly dead. Stone-cold dead,’ Gordon explained further, as if there were degrees of deadness.

  So it was true. David really had killed him. Ryan wasn’t wandering the streets with amnesia. Ryan wasn’t comatose in a hospital. Ryan wasn’t out drinking with a friend. For a moment, he had difficulty digesting this news. David didn’t have much first-hand experience of death. His school friends who had OD’d had only become junkies after David had left them behind. In fact, until his father had died, he had considered bereavement to be something like a literary theme or a sombre movie premise.

  ‘It was an accident.’ David spoke those words as if they contained a sacred truth.

  ‘An accident?’ Gordon exclaimed, his smooth, moisturised face suddenly turning red in an instant. ‘I’ll tell you what it was – it was brutality. Brutality above and beyond the call. Wow – you can take the thug out of Cawley but you can’t take—’

  ‘I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to... You know... I had no choice. I had to hit him.’

  ‘It was a crime of passion. I understand. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.’

  ‘What?’

  Dismissively, as if answering a particularly slow nephew, Gordon elucidated, ‘If you can’t reach heaven, raise hell.’

  ‘I hit him and he staggered backwards and... The rail hadn’t been put in.’

  ‘That’s better, isn’t it? Speaking the truth. No more repressing, hiding, sneaking around. It’s a weight off the old shoulders.’

  David sighed long and deep into his hands. ‘Christ, I told him to get it done last week. I told him! He didn’t deserve to die. His wife’s now a widow. I’m responsible for that. Look at me, Gordon – I have to live with this.’

  Gordon pointed at him. ‘You’re talking about guilt? That’s just the bullshit indulgence of the loser. You didn’t feel guilt when you thought you were getting away with it.’

  David wanted to say – to insist – that he had felt guilt from the moment it had happened. But what he really felt was massive regret. He wished it hadn’t happened. And of course, he felt fear. But guilt? No.

  ‘Dave, there are just two types of people in the world. Diers and killers. Most are diers. And despite your humble origins, I would never in a million years have guessed that you were the other one – the more interesting one. But I suppose you had much to protect. And a man who has much to protect has much to live for.’

  David’s forefinger touched the fading bruise on the side of his forehead. ‘I know what Ryan was doing in my house at midnight. But what were you doing there?’

  The architect maintained insouciance, but there was a subtle twitch beneath his cheek. He pretend-yawned to iron it out. ‘I was due to meet Ryan when he was finished with Tara. He liked to multitask. We both work late – sometimes very late – and were meant to be finalising things. I wanted to know that everything was shipshape. I was on the middle floor when Ryan flew by the window and went splat. I went up to your office and saw you pawing at your hair as you looked down at the patio. So just as you turned away from the window, I floored you with a hammer. It was risky. Took expert timing. A second too late and you would’ve seen me. A fraction too hard and I could’ve killed you.’

  ‘You hit me? I knew I couldn’t have... What happened to the body?’

  Gordon blinked twice. That was as discombobulated as he got. ‘I scooped clay over him, and scoop by scoop, Ryan was rubbed out. Manual work always gets to feel rhythmic and almost pleasurable. I should do it more often. Soon I was walking across the shallow grave, hardening down the soil. Then when Bruno arrived, he got going with the digger to tier the top of the foundation for the rest of the dry-lay. And just like that, Ryan was gone, as if he was never here. Sunk beneath your gorgeous tumbled travertine, his life weighed down with Virginia Woolf rocks. Or rather, crushed limestone – to be precise.’

  David pictured Ryan being eaten by worms, ripped apart by earwigs and nested in by beetles. ‘Why have you done this, Gordon? Why have you helped me?’

  ‘Helped you? What do you think this is – Eat, Pray, fucking Love?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  The conversation had finally reached the point where Gordon had wanted it to go. ‘Oh, I can see your fear Dave... It’s in the air, like a mist.’ He waved a lazy hand like he was clearing the room of an odour.

  ‘What. Do. You. Want?’

  ‘It’s not like I want the moon and the stars. I just want money, money and... Let me see... Oh yeah, money.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘They’re all very good reasons, Dave.’

  ‘You’re shaking me down? You – you’re blackmailing me?’

  ‘I’m giving you a chance to get away with it scot-free.’

  David’s thought processes jackknifed on his unconscious superhighway. ‘Scot’ was a redistributive taxation levied in the early tenth century as a form of municipal poor relief. That’s where ‘scot-free’ comes from.

  Focus! Stop hiding. ‘How much?’

  ‘One point four million.’

  David closed his eyes. ‘One. Point. Four. Million?’

  The architect smiled. ‘It’s just a number.’

  David opened his eyes. ‘Pi is just a number. One point four million is one point four fucking million.’ On the first day of David’s university scholarship, exhausted from another ten-hour nightshift driving the massive Caterpillar P3500 forklift, he’d been ticked off by a professor in front of the whole auditorium for casually saying ‘bullshit’ in a class discussion. Since then, he’d rarely cursed again.

  ‘Getting away with murder comes at a price.’

  ‘We’ll be ruined.’ David’s finances were complicated, but not that complicated. One point four million was everything they had. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Most of that money was there to repay the bridging loan for the renovation. If they defaulted on that, they’d lose the house, on which they had taken out a two-million-euro mortgage.

  Gordon said, ‘Remember my mantra during the design stage? “Sometimes you have to spend to earn.” Well, this will be the best money you’ve ever spent. It’ll keep you out of jail for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Tara’s paintings have crumbled in price. She’s over. She’d be lucky to total one hundred k for the rest of her life, even if she continues to paint and sell regularly.’

  ‘True. I don’t know much about the art world, but I know enough to realise that someone like Tara will never again come up with something so zeitgeist-kissing as Erdős Landscapes. I suppose she’s the art world equivalent of the novelty song – a one-hit wonder. But you know, Dave – don’t let that diminish your pride in her or indeed yourself. You both made your strike, and it was a bullseye.’

  Less than two months ago, David had been gazing down in disbelief at their bank statement. He could barely fathom that there was a number of such enormity printed beneath their names. Now it might be all about to vanish – as if it had never been there.

  ‘If we lose the house then we lose everything,’ he said. ‘Lecturing here barely covers the rent of a one-bed apartment. We’re having a kid. And my mother... Jesus, she had a stroke. I’m now paying for her home help. She’ll be dependent on welfare handouts without me.’

  ‘Look, what’s your point? You come from filth, Dave. You come from the Cawley Estates and therefore probably still secretly think that it’s cool to be poor. Therefore when the inevitable happens, you can deal with it. Or maybe you won’t. I don’t really care.’

&nb
sp; ‘You can’t do this to us. Just take four hundred thousand. Five hundred. But leave enough for repaying the bridging loan. That’s our house.’ David could feasibly keep the sudden loss of half a million from Tara for a few years – which could possibly give him enough time to come up with something to plug the gap in their finances. He could go back to working nights in the warehouse, which along with his university salary might just pay the mortgage, while Tara might – just might – make the occasional big sale to supply the flow of funds required to bring up their child in the manner Tara was planning.

  Gordon looked at him with a vague disinterest. ‘One point four million. You’re going to give your architect what he wants and deal with the repercussions later. You’ll have enough left to get through the next few months without Tara knowing. Then when your kingdom falls, I’ll be long gone, to the States, and you’ll have come up with some sorry story as to why you have idiotically invested all your money in a doomed but very legal get-rich-quick scheme without her knowing.’

  ‘A get-rich-quick scheme?’

  ‘Tomorrow I’m having a contract drawn up that you’re going to sign, that says you’re investing in an apartment complex I’m planning to build – but not really. You will give me the money in forty-eight hours – Wednesday morning. Your money will be legally invested in my company. Of course, the apartments will never be built, and I will move far away across the ocean. But way before then, the building society will have taken back Lawrence Court and chased you for the loan that you can’t repay. You’ll lose your house, end up officially bankrupt – but free. In other words, Dave, you’ll have got away with murder.’

  David thought of the account he held with Tara in KLT. Withdrawals only required one to sign. Once Gordon got what he wanted, then there would be about forty thousand left. So he could keep the unavoidable threatening letters secret from her for a few months. David paid the bills. Tara always left the statements unopened for him. And then... And then...