The Perfect Murder

‘No one will know!’ Joan replied. ‘How will they know?’

‘Handwriting experts!’ Don hissed. He looked down at Victor and was startled to see his eyes struggling to open. Hastily, he stepped back, out of sight.

‘But where would we put the body?’ she said.

‘Did you say something about a blow job?’ Victor slurred.

‘A blow job, my darling husband? Coming up!’ Joan said. ‘Just wait two minutes for the blow job of your life, my darling!’

She hurried into the kitchen and pulled on her yellow rubber gloves. Then she dashed into the garage where Victor’s tools were hanging neatly from their hooks. She selected a medium-weight claw hammer and hurried back into the lounge. Holding the hammer behind her back, she said, ‘Would you like your blow job now, my darling?’

Victor nodded. ‘Yerrrr.’

Before Don even noticed what she was holding, Joan brought the hammer down hard on the side of Victor’s forehead. She had never hit anyone on the side of the forehead with a claw hammer before, so she did not know quite what to expect.

Looking at him as soon as she had hit him, she thought that she would not need to hit quite so hard another time. Her stomach heaved and shockwaves pulsed through her. She took one more look at him, then ran into the kitchen and threw up in the sink.

She went back and peered at him. Neither man had moved. Don stood still, his eyes wide open, his mouth open even more.

‘Bloody hell,’ he gasped.

Victor lay still, with his skull cracked open like a broken coconut, blood spurting in all directions. His eyeballs bulged, unseeing, from their sockets. His tongue had shot out and stayed out. An orange and grey goo of brains leaked through his shattered temple.

Don said, ‘I think he’s brown bread.’

Joan had heard cockney rhyming slang in gangster films. She knew what brown bread meant. It meant dead.

She said nothing.

There was hair and blood on the end of the hammer. She stared at it, as if she had just performed some conjuring trick. Now I have a clean hammer. Abracadabra! Now I have blood and hair on it!

Now she had a dead husband.

A dead husband leaking blood and brains onto the sofa.

Leaking forensic evidence.

She put the hammer down on the floor and started shaking wildly, as she began to realize just what she had done.

She looked at Don in desperation. He was staring at Victor, wide-eyed, his mouth still open, shaking his head from side to side. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus.’ Then he looked back at her.

She had no idea what was going through his mind.

‘Why – why did you have to hit him so hard?’ he asked.

‘You’d have hit him softer, would you?’

After some moments, Don said, ‘This is probably not the time for an argument.’

Chapter Nine

In the utility room off the kitchen, Joan had a big chest freezer squeezed in next to the washing machine and the tumble dryer. Victor had got angry when she’d bought the freezer. He told her it was a waste of money and where the hell were they going to put it?

Joan had replied that it would pay for itself because of all the sell-by-date bargains she could buy in her supermarket. Now she stood over it, with the lid open and icy vapour rising. She was pulling out all those bargains she had been piling into it for the past year.

Out came a packet of lamb cutlets with a Special Offer! sticker. Then came a big bag of frozen peas and a huge tub of Wall’s vanilla ice cream. There were three chocolate cheesecakes that she had been planning to eat by herself. She thought they were too good to share with Victor! She handed each item to Don, who placed them on the floor.

Every few moments she would peer out of the window. They had drawn the curtains and blinds on all the other windows downstairs, just in case anyone happened to peer in. However, the blind on this window had fallen down months ago. Lazy Victor had never bothered to put it back up again.

She could see the lights of the houses in the valley below and the dark outline of the Downs in the distance. She could see the stars and the rising moon. It was almost a full moon. In the light from it she could see the little greenhouse in the garden. She thought for a moment about the tomatoes Victor had planted. He was never going to see them, or eat them. Victor wasn’t even going to see daylight ever again.

For a moment, just for a tiny moment, she had a choking feeling in her throat. Victor wasn’t so bad, she thought to herself. Not really so bad, was he? He had good points, didn’t he?

Don’s voice cut harshly through her thoughts. ‘Come on, keep it coming, nearly done!’

She stooped over, reached down to the bottom and pulled up a frozen sponge cake in its box. Then some Special Reduction pork chops.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’