Mice

by Gordon Reece

  I could hear heavy footsteps making their way slowly across the gravel, coming closer to the front door.

  ‘Leave everything to me, Shelley.’

  She freed herself from my grip and tried to go into the hall, but I held on to her, seizing hold of her fleece, gripping the belt of her jeans.

  ‘Don’t open the door, Mum!’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t let him in here!’

  Mum pulled my hands roughly off her. ‘Don’t be stupid, Shelley!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t get hysterical! We have to let him in! This has to be brought to an end one way or another!’

  There was a resounding thump at the front door that shook the entire frame and set the chains rattling.

  I followed Mum down the hall and leaned against the balustrade for support. I watched her undo each of the locks and chains and slip the bolts – one at the bottom, one at the top – and as she yanked the front door open, I fully expected to be confronted by the vengeful, bloody ghost of Paul Hannigan.

  38

  But it was no ghost.

  A small, comical-looking man of about fifty, with an enormously distended pot belly, stood on the doorstep. He’d tried to cover his baldness by combing the long strands of hair that grew above his right ear over the top of his crown and flattening them into place with some kind of grease. The podgy swag of his double chin hung down almost as far as his sternum. A pair of large-framed plastic glasses perched on a small snub nose, a roll-up fag dangled from a flabby bottom lip. He wore a grease-spotted yellow T-shirt stretched almost to breaking point, baggy grey tracksuit bottoms and a pair of decrepit trainers.

  But what caught my attention even more than his huge stomach was the man’s arms. They were short, truncated, almost like a dwarf’s, yet powerfully muscled, the bloated, marble-veined biceps covered in the faded hieroglyphs of ancient tattoos. On one hairy wrist there was a chunky identity bracelet and one of those copper bands that are supposed to cure arthritis. On the other, a gold Rolex flashed in curious contrast to his otherwise shabby appearance.

  He stood there jangling his car keys and the loose change in his pocket, waiting to be invited in. I don’t know who Mum had been expecting, but she seemed as taken aback as I was. We both stood gawping at the fat man, speechless.

  He peeled the saliva-sodden cigarette from his bottom lip and flicked it away across the gravel.

  ‘I think you know what I’m here for,’ he said, with a belligerent thrust of his lower jaw.

  But I didn’t. It was only slowly that my brain connected this caricature to the battered turquoise car, only slowly that I came to the only conclusion possible: that, in spite of all my hysterical expectations, this was the blackmailer.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ Mum said and opened the door wider for him to enter.

  The fat man stepped into the hallway and for a moment all three of us stood there squashed close together, awkward and embarrassed, like strangers in a lift. The only sound was the fat man’s strained breathing, the only movement the rise and fall of his enormous yellow gut.

  Mum hesitated, seemingly unsure what to do next. Her hand hovered at the mouth of the fleece pocket. Was she going to shoot him right then and there in the hallway? Was she going to press the gun against that swollen belly and pull the trigger before he could take another step into the house? But her hand dropped back to her side and she turned and walked slowly down the hallway and into the kitchen.

  The fat man followed her and, reluctantly, I followed him. Although I lagged several paces behind, I couldn’t help noticing that he limped, his body keeling sideways every time he shifted his weight onto his left foot. One of his trainers made a squelchy fart sound at every step, like the comic honk of a clown’s car.

  When we were all in the kitchen, Mum turned to face the blackmailer.

  ‘So I suppose you’re responsible for this?’ she said, holding up the note like a schoolmistress reproving a delinquent pupil.

  ‘I am indeed!’ he said jovially. Moving towards the chair Mum had just been sitting in, he asked, ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Yes, I bloody well do mind!’ she snapped fiercely, but he ignored her and eased himself into the chair.

  When he was settled, he looked around with a selfsatisfied smile, pushing his glasses back up his nose with an obscene jab of his pink index finger.

  He had the perennially youthful face of many obese people, as if those full cheeks and dimpled chins are immune to the usual ravages of time. Sitting there at the kitchen table in a chair that his great bulk reduced to kindergarten proportions, he resembled a monstrously overgrown schoolboy, a bald, criminal Billy Bunter, who could no longer fit comfortably behind his desk. His face, with its pouty feminine lips and turned-up nose, could almost have been the face of a victim, of a mouse, if those soft features hadn’t been contradicted by the short tattooed arms. They told a different story, of hours spent bench-pressing in the gym to turn them into lethal weapons, brutal pistons that broke jaws and snapped noses. He folded them now across the yellow egg of his paunch and calmly looked Mum up and down.

  ‘So what’s it to be then, luv?’ he said. ‘Are you gonna pay the twenty grand or do I go to the cops?’

  ‘I’ll pay the money,’ Mum said, without hesitation.

  ‘Good,’ he beamed. ‘Very sensible. Now, how long will it take you to get it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, gnawing again at her bottom lip. ‘I’ll have to apply for a mortgage, but it shouldn’t take long, no longer than two or three weeks.’

  ‘I can wait a few weeks,’ he said magnanimously. ‘And how much can you give me today? Right now?’

  ‘I’ve got about fifteen hundred pounds in the bank,’ she replied, after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Can you get that for me today?’

  ‘Yes, I can. If we go to my bank in town I can take it out of the ATM—’ She inhaled sharply. ‘No, I’ve just remembered – there’s a daily limit on both my accounts. I can only take out three hundred from each.’

  ‘That’ll do for a start, that’ll do for a start.’ He slapped his thighs and beamed warmly at me as if all was right with the world and there was nothing for anyone to feel the slightest bit down about. ‘What are we waiting for then?’

  I was amazed at his light-hearted breeziness. It was as if he was completely unaware that he was committing any crime at all. He seemed totally untroubled by any guilt or bad conscience, as if he was merely collecting a debt that Mum owed him, recovering money that was rightfully his.

  Mum took a few agitated paces around the kitchen and then came back to the table, her hands gripping the back of the empty chair like the claws of a bird alighting on a branch (but what kind of bird – a songbird trapped in the hunter’s net or a bird of prey with a victim in her sights?).

  ‘I’m not going to hand it over just like that!’ she burst out.

  ‘I don’t see that you’ve got much choice, luv,’ the blackmailer replied. The baby face darkened and the stunted arms unfolded themselves and dropped menacingly onto the kitchen table. ‘I know you killed him. I know you killed Paul Hannigan.’

  The name meant nothing to Mum. But it meant everything to me. To hear it spoken out loud like that made me flinch as if struck, and even though I was standing at the other end of the kitchen, as far away from them as possible, I shrank even deeper into my corner.

  ‘Before I give you any money,’ Mum persevered bravely, ‘there are things I need to know.’

  The fat man made a series of disgusting grunting noises from deep in the back of his throat, raking phlegm up into his mouth. He whipped out a handkerchief with surprising dexterity, spat a green wad into the dishevelled nest, then fumbled it away into his pocket. He impatiently poked his glasses back into place, and eyed Mum quizzically.

  ‘Like what?’ he said. ‘What things? You ain’t in a position to make demands.’

  ‘I need to know how you found out.’

  He gave a deep, treacly chuckle. ‘That’s easy enough,’ he said.
‘I know what happened, luv, because I was with Paul Hannigan the night he came out here to rob you. I was with him! I was here!’

  39

  Although Mum did her best to disguise it, I saw the shock register on her face, a crease like a crack in a wall breaking across her forehead, a sudden slacken ing around her jaw. We’d always assumed the burglar had been alone. It had never entered our heads that he’d had an accomplice. But that was exactly what the grotesque clown in our kitchen was saying.

  ‘I want to know everything,’ Mum said, recovering remarkably. ‘I want you to tell me everything that happened that night.’

  ‘You want to know everything,’ the fat man repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why’s that, then?’

  ‘So that I can move on, so that I can put it all behind me. I have to know everything that you can tell me about that night.’

  ‘Everything, eh? No details spared?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘And then we’ll go and get the money?’

  ‘And then we’ll go and get the money.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, but for the first time a suspicious look clouded his features. He glanced at Mum and then at me as if he felt he might be walking into some sort of trap. What he saw must have reassured him, because the look disappeared as quickly as it had come. After all, what possible threat could there be from this neurotic, mousy woman and her neurotic, mousy daughter? He wiped his hands on his thighs and raked a little more phlegm up from his throat, which he was content to swallow this time.

  ‘All right. Let’s see – I bumped into Paul Hannigan in the pub that night. It was a Monday. Monday, April tenth. I didn’t know him that well – I’d bought some knock-off from him and he’d come back to my flat a few times, but I wouldn’t say we was close. More acquaintances, like. He’d only been down this neck of the woods a few months. He’d been in prison up north, and he said he’d moved down here hoping his luck would change.’

  His luck changed all right, I thought to myself. But it had changed for the worse. It had changed for the worst.

  ‘After closing time, he came back to my flat and we carried on drinking. We really gave it one that night. We got through the best part of a bottle of whisky and a bottle of vodka and God knows how much we’d had in the pub beforehand. Anyways, he kept going on about how desperate he was for money. He said he had an idea for a job, but he needed a car, and because he knew I had a car he kept on nagging me to come in on it with him.

  ‘His idea was to rob a secluded house in the country. He said that houses out in the country were easier to rob than houses in town – they had old windows that were easy to force, they often didn’t have alarms, and there were no nosy neighbours nearby to call the police. Like I say, I didn’t know him that well, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t over-fond of him. There was something about him that weren’t quite right. He had a bit of a screw loose somewhere, he talked a load of old rubbish most of the time. He was a real loose cannon, you know, always flashing this big hunting knife he carried around with him everywhere. He tried to tell me he’d been inside for murder, that he’d cut someone up who’d double-crossed him, but I knew from other people that he’d only been inside for drug dealing.

  ‘Anyways, he kept on nagging and nagging me to come in on this job with him. He kept on about the antiques that people kept in these country houses, and that if we got lucky we could find something worth a fortune and we wouldn’t have to worry about money for a good long time after that. Anyways, I was so drunk I ended up saying I’d go with him. We agreed that if anyone in the house woke up he was just to tie them up, there wasn’t to be no violence. I found some old rope in the cupboard under the sink and we had a snack before we set off because we was both starving by that time.’

  A snack. Paul Hannigan’s last supper. I remembered the loud, sour belch. Sorry, ladies . . . I shouldn’t have had them eggs. Them eggs was off.

  ‘Paul wanted to drive. He said he knew where to go. I didn’t mind ’cause, to tell you the truth, I think I was in a much worse state than he was. I’d drunk so much I could hardly see straight, let alone drive in the dark.

  ‘I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I kept dropping off to sleep in the car. We seemed to be driving for ages, going round and round all these twisty country lanes . . . and then Paul spotted this place.

  ‘We parked out the back there.’ He gestured vaguely with his thumb in the direction of the lane, where I’d first seen the car from my bedroom window. ‘It was late, round about three-thirty. The plan was that I’d stay in the car and keep lookout while Paul did the actual robbing. I was to honk the horn three times if anyone showed up. Paul got out the car and I saw him slip through the hedge back there and into your garden.’

  He knew the date, he knew the time, he knew where the car had been parked. He wasn’t lying. He really had been there that night.

  ‘I waited in the car for ages but I was so drunk I couldn’t stay awake. I was woken up by the sound of some girl screaming and Paul shouting – it sounded close, like they was outside in the garden. I got out the car to see what the hell was going on and went through the hedge the way I’d seen Paul go. I could see right into the kitchen – I only stood there for a few seconds but that was long enough for me. I saw Paul chasing her over there – ’ he nodded his head in my direction – ‘round and round this table.’ He prodded the table three times with his stubby index finger as if to prove the veracity of what he was saying.

  (Stabbing and slashing at the burglar’s back. ‘We’re playing musical chairs now! We’re playing musical chairs now!’ The flailing knife snagging his neck and loosing a geyser of bright arterial blood.)

  ‘She was screaming her head off and I could see she was covered in blood,’ the fat man went on. ‘I figured she’d disturbed Paul while he was robbing the house and he’d gone psycho and started cutting her up with his hunting knife. I thought the kid’s parents would come running downstairs to help her any second and Paul’d kill them too. I remember thinking to myself: He’s got the bloodlust on him. He’s gonna kill everyone in that house. He’s gonna cut them all up. There’s gonna be a right royal massacre.’

  The fat man raked up a little more phlegm with a few short, violent pig grunts and slid his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Well, basically, I panicked. I mean, a bit of robbing’s one thing, but I didn’t want to get caught up in no murder. I decided to get out of there sharpish-like.

  ‘But when I got back to the car I remembered that Paul had taken my car keys with him. I’ve never learned how to hotwire a car; nicking cars ain’t my thing. But the screams coming from the house were bloody shocking, so I just legged it back the way we’d come. It was as black as a witch’s hat out here that night, I can tell you, and I got myself well and truly lost in all them lanes, but I just kept going. All I knew was I had to get as far away from this house as I could.

  ‘Anyways, I found my way out onto the main road finally and ended up walking all the way back to town. It must’ve taken me close on three hours. As soon as I got in I called the mobile number I had for Paul. It rang and rang but there weren’t no answer.’

  (Soft, muffled, a series of musical notes like a bird or maybe even an insect. It stopped and then a few seconds later it started again.)

  ‘I was expecting Paul to turn up at my flat at any minute all covered in blood, saying he’d done something terrible, and asking me to hide him or help him to get out of the country. But he didn’t show up. I called his mobile again, but now it was switched off. I left loads of messages, but he didn’t call me back. I kept the local radio on all day expecting to hear that there’d been a bloodbath in a house out in the country, but there was nothing about no killings. All I could think was that they just hadn’t found the bodies yet. As it got later, I started to think he must have done a runner in my car. Too scared to come back here in case the police were waiting for him. I figured he was probably miles away by
now, lying low up north.’

  It was a strange sensation to hear my own murder being described; it made my arms come up in goose bumps. And I couldn’t help thinking that it could so easily have turned out that way. If we’d said the wrong thing while Paul Hannigan was holding us at knife point or if we’d tried to make a run for it, everything the fat man thought had happened so easily could have – and on the Tuesday morning Roger would have found Mum and me butchered like cattle on a slaughterhouse kill floor.

  ‘I was a bloody fool to get involved with a kid like Paul Hannigan. I knew he weren’t right in the head. Now I was worried sick that if the police caught him I’d get dragged into it and end up facing murder charges. As well as all that, my car had all my work tools in it – I’m a plumber, see – so I couldn’t work neither till I got it back. And I couldn’t exactly call the police and report it stolen, could I?’

  He laughed and looked up at Mum as if expecting her to laugh along with him, but she remained stonyfaced.

  ‘Anyways, the next day there was still nothing on the radio about no murders and there was nothing the next day neither. I figured that if Paul had killed someone out here, the police would’ve found out about it by now. Why weren’t it all over the papers and the TV?

  ‘And that’s when I started to think that maybe I’d got the wrong end of the stick and there hadn’t been no killing. I called Paul’s mobile again and again but it was always switched off. I didn’t know what to do, so I decided it was best to do nothing – just sit tight and wait and see what happened.

  ‘And then on the Friday morning I got a call from the police. My first thought was, they’ve caught Paul and he’s gone and grassed me up. Now I’m gonna get done as an accomplice to murder. But it was nothing like that. They said they’d got a complaint from the Farmer’s Harvest restaurant about a car that had been left in their car park. They said they’d run the number plate through their computer and it had me down as the owner and would I move it sharpish-like. And that was that! Nothing about Paul. Nothing about no murders.