biscuit tin.
‘Do you know what it’s like to have someone angry with you all the time?’
‘No,’ I said. Actually I did. People were often angry with me for exposing their misdeeds. I had always rather enjoyed it, but I decided not to say so, not now.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘It eats away at your soul. When you’re a child, it’s frightening. I spent my whole childhood being frightened of him, every single minute. He would beat me for being naughty, and the harder I tried to be good, the more he saw me as naughty. “Hold out your hand, Peter,” he would say. Then he would hit me with a wooden bat. Then he would smile and say it was for my own good.’
He went quiet for a moment and stared off into space; I could tell he was reliving incidents elsewhere.
‘He used to hit my mother as well,’ he said. ‘He drove her away. At first, she used to protect me from him but then she left. She deserted me and he killed her.’ He paused then went on. ‘Well, he didn’t actually kill her, but as good as. She was desperate to get away from him and she agreed to everything he said so long as he would leave her alone. He saw to it that she left with nothing, no money, no home and no chance of ever seeing me again. I was twelve.’
She obviously hadn’t had a very good solicitor, I thought. Times had changed.
‘He never spoke about her. It was as if she had never existed. I found out much later that she had been absolutely destitute and had even been begging in the street.’ He made it sound like the most shameful thing in the world. I had occasionally seen my own mother beg. It had sometimes made the difference between life and death for us both.
‘She tried to get him to give her some money to live on but he refused. When she tried to take him to court to get access to me, his lawyers blocked her. They just tore to shreds the hardly qualified Legal Aid lawyer that my mother had to resort to.’
Definitely not a good solicitor.
‘She walked straight out of her lawyer’s office and under a number 15 bus. Funny,’ he said, ‘ever since I found that out, I’ve never been able to ride on a number 15 bus, just in case it was the one.’
He sat down on the edge of the bath. The longer he talked, the greater the chance that Muscles would come back with the girls and save my skin, but I would probably need to survive for another hour if the cavalry were to arrive in time.
‘The inquest said it was an accident, but I reckon she did it on purpose. My father killed her as sure as if he’d been driving the bus himself.’
He had tears in his eyes. I wasn’t sure whether it was for the loss of his mother or for the reaction the incident may have produced in Jonny Enstone. Peter’s relationship with his father was highly complex.
‘When I got older and bigger, he stopped hitting me. I told him that if he hit me again I’d hit him back. So he’s changed his tactics from physical to mental abuse. He puts me down at every opportunity. He belittles everything I do. He tells his friends that I am useless, and that I can’t be his true son as I am no good at business. I hate him. I hate him.’
Why then, I thought, don’t you go and shoot him instead of me?
‘And then when I find I am good at something, you go and wreck it. At last I discovered that it’s me that has the power, it’s me that’s in control, and it’s me that people are frightened of.’ He looked up at my face. ‘Everyone except you. You’re not even frightened now.’
Yes, I was. But I didn’t say so. I stood there in silence and watched him.
I began to sweat. In spite of the insulating effect of the towels against which I was leaning, I was getting very hot. I was worried that he should think that my skin was damp due to fear. But did it matter? Yes. It did to me.
‘You should be frightened,’ he said. ‘I am going to kill you. I’ve got nothing to lose now, thanks to you. I’ll get done for the other two murders so why not for three. Three life sentences are just as long as two. And in all those years ahead, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that it was me that beat Sid Halley. I won. I might be in jail but you will be pushing up the daisies. And then one day I’ll be out, but there’ll be no bringing you back from the dead.’
He smiled. I began to be more than frightened. I became angry.
Why, I thought, should this little worm use his father as his excuse for his actions? Yes, his father was an ogre and a bully, but Peter was thirty-two years old and there are limits to how much and for how long you can blame the parents.
The rage rose inside me as it had done in the hospital. I raged, also, at my predicament. Damn it, I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live. I wanted to marry Marina. I especially didn’t want to die like this, trussed up and at the hands of Peter Enstone.
‘I think I’ve talked enough,’ he said suddenly, standing up. ‘I get fed up with all those silly films where the gunman spends so long telling his victim why he’s going to kill him that someone finally arrives to stop it. That’s not going to happen here because I’m going to kill you now, then I’m going to wait and kill your girlfriend when she gets home. She can keep you company in hell.’
He laughed.
He leaned forward until his face was just six inches away from mine.
‘Bye, Sid,’ he said. ‘Now be a good boy and open your mouth.’
Instead, I hit him.
I hit him with all the pent-up anger and frustration of the last three weeks.
I hit him with the stump of my left arm.
The look on his face was more of surprise than hurt. But I had put every ounce of my considerable strength into that blow and he went backwards fast. The edge of the bath caught him behind the knees and he went over it. There was a satisfyingly loud thud as the back of his head hit the far rim of the bath near the taps. Thank goodness for old-fashioned values, I thought. This bathtub was not one of the modern flexible cheap plastic things; it was solid cast-iron and very hard.
Peter was lying face up in the bath but he was half turned, with his chin pushed into his chest. He groaned a little but he was unconscious. But for how long?
Now what?
My left forearm hurt.
I had been gradually easing it out of its false case for some time and the seal around the elbow had finally separated as I had cautiously flexed it back and forth without his noticing. Now I looked at the end of my stump. It was sore and bleeding, such had been the force of the blow.
The task now was to get out of the bathroom before Peter came round and finished off what he’d started.
I tugged at the handcuffs on my right hand. I twisted and pulled, I jerked and heaved but made no impression whatsoever on the metal, I simply tore and chaffed my wrist until I was bleeding on both sides.
I trod on my arm battery that was lying on the floor. How do I pick that up, I wondered? I kicked off my shoes and used my left big toe to pull the sock off my right foot. I tried to pick up the battery in my toes but it was too big to grasp.
Peter groaned again. I was getting desperate now. I bloody refused to be still attached to this bloody towel rail when he came round.
I went down on my knees and tried to get my mouth down to the battery but it was too far. I used my toes to pull the battery a little closer and, between my right foot and left stump, I managed to upend it so that it sat vertically on the floor. I hung down with most of my weight on my sore handcuffed right wrist, but I didn’t care. I stretched my body down and forward as far as I could reach and put my mouth over the end of the battery.
I could feel a tingling on my tongue as it touched the battery electrodes. I had freshly charged it the previous night.
Peter groaned again and this time more loudly. I looked at him in alarm. He was being sick. I could see the vomit as it came down his nose and out of the corner of his mouth. I hoped he’d choke on it.
I knelt on the floor again and tried to use my mouth to push the battery into its holder in the fibreglass shell that stuck out rigidly sideways from the mechanical hand that was firmly gripping the towel rail. It was simple really. Place the lower end of the battery under the lugs at the wrist end of the holder and snap the upper end in under the sprung plastic clip. A task I performed day in, day out, hundreds of times a year. But always with my
