‘What is it, Graham? Is it another woman?’
‘No, it’s not.’ As he got control of himself he started to regret the mention of the murder. Better feed her a bit of truth before she started to think about it. ‘No, it’s George’s job.’
‘Oh, of course. Have you heard yet?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Not good. I haven’t got it.’
‘What!’
He shone the torch again in Merrily’s face and saw there some of the disappointment and betrayal which he had felt when he heard the news.
Her disappointment, however, was purely materialistic.
‘But we need the money, Graham. There are lots of things that need doing to the house, and I haven’t got a stitch to wear.’
Merrily was very put out for the rest of the evening. She made no secret of the fact that she felt her husband had let her down.
Simply to get her off that subject, Graham again raised the question of his having an affair. He denied it, with perhaps a little too much vehemence. And in bed he made love to her to convince her of his fidelity.
Again, perhaps with a little too much vehemence.
The events of the evening had suspended his fears about the murder, but they came back when he woke sweating at three in the morning. He soon gave up the hope of further sleep, and walked round the house to control the trembling of his body.
To give himself something to do, he looked at other electrical fittings and found what he had feared, the same old wiring with its perished insulation.
That added a new panic. He tried to recapture the nonchalance that being a murderer had sometimes given and ask himself how potentially lethal wiring could matter to a man who had taken the life of another, but it didn’t work. He switched off the mains.
At eight-thirty, having shouted down the rest of the family’s moans about the lack of light, radios, hot water and hot food, he rang an electrician, asking him to come round and say how serious the danger was.
The post then arrived, bearing a letter from his bank manager, complaining about the abuse of the Marshalls’ overdraft ‘facility’ and demanding a ‘remittance’.
While he was recovering from this blow, Lilian Hinchcliffe rang to say her little Fiat had a flat tyre. Would Graham be an angel and come round and fiddle with whatever needed fiddling with?
No, he bloody wouldn’t. He curbed this response before he voiced it, but said unfortunately he couldn’t because he was waiting in for the electrician, Lilian would have to get in touch with a tyre place and get the thing mended herself (like ordinary bloody people did). But they charged so much, Lilian whined, surely it wasn’t a lot to ask for Graham to just come and have a little
Merrily, who had gone up after their cold breakfast to dress, came down in the ragged T-shirt and patched jeans she wore for painting. Since they weren’t ever going to have any money ever again, she announced, she’d better get used to their new style of life. The gesture was characteristic, particularly in its totally inappropriate timing.
As if this weren’t enough, Emma, about to leave for school, said she felt funny, and turned out, on examination by Merrily, to have started, at the tender age of eleven, her first period.
Henry, uninformed by his father — or indeed anyone else — about such matters, did not understand and made some inapposite remark, which sent the two women (as they both now were) into floods of tears.
At this moment the doorbell rang. Graham would almost have welcomed a policeman come to arrest him, but it turned out to be the electrician.
Tight-lipped, Graham showed him round the house. The electrician fingered the odd wire that all too easily came out of the wall, tapped a few plugs and tutted over junction boxes. Then, with the understanding gravity of a cancer surgeon, he said the house was a deathtrap, and it would need complete rewiring, at a cost of one thousand four hundred pounds. Excluding V.A.T.
What about switching the power back on — would it be safe? The electrician shook his head dubiously. Well, he wouldn’t like to be responsible. Still, have to take the risk till it was all properly done. What? No, he couldn’t think about doing it for three weeks. Up to here he was. Oh yes, but no question it was urgent. Very urgent.
Graham Marshall thought of Stella with her little flat and no more weighty decision than which cinema to go to that evening.
He thought of Robert Benham, with his potential Head of Personnel’s salary and his weekend trip to Miami.
He thought of himself, who, on top of everything else, was a murderer.
And he thought that at least, when you’re in prison for life, you don’t have any responsibilities.
CHAPTER SIX
Time continued to pass and for Graham Marshall the balance between peace and fear slowly changed. The panics still came, terrors could still clutch at him when least expected, but they did not come so often and they did not stay so long.
Murder, he began to think in moments of detachment, was like any other new experience. Like sex, maybe. The first time it seemed all-important, as if it would dominate the rest of one’s life, but gradually it came to be accepted, even taken for granted. How many married men, he wondered, questioned on their way to work, could remember whether or not they’d made love to their wives the night before.
Sex only became an obsession when the impulse was unnaturally strong or when it was infected with guilt.
Continuing his analogy, he found that his impulse to murder was not unnaturally strong. Nor did he feel any guilt about the one that he had committed.
He sometimes wondered idly whether he’d feel any different if the victim were someone he knew.
Of course, the big distinction between sex and murder was that one wanted to make a habit of the first, and probably not of the second.
Graham Marshall certainly didn’t. Three weeks after the event he still found the shock was sufficient to last him for a lifetime. And he would do anything to avoid the paralysing fear of discovery.
But that fear was receding. Increasingly logic told him he was going to get away with it.
Committing the murder had been a stroke of bad luck; getting arrested for it would be really appalling luck.
And, as the fear left him, his attitude to the crime changed. Previously he had not dared to examine his feelings, but now he found he kept coming back to the incident with something approaching relish.
It was not everyone who had committed a murder.
He began to feel a certain exclusivity. The crime gave his life an unpredictable dimension. It filled the void the loss of George Brewer’s job had left in him.
The feeling was comparable to that he had felt in the old days at work when talking about Lilian’s show- business friends or when unconventionally dressed: that there was more to Graham Marshall than met the eye.
Except, of course, he couldn’t really tell his colleagues about the murder. It had to be his secret.
But it was a secret from which he drew strength. When Robert Benham was at his most patronising, when Merrily at her most precious, or Lilian at her most demanding, Graham Marshall would say to himself: ‘What you don’t realise is that I am a murderer, that I have taken human life.’
And the thought gave him a sense of power.
