warnings, the Marshalls’ overdraft had increased and the manager demanded a ‘speedy settlement’; if this was not forthcoming, he threatened ‘withdrawal of facilities’.
Graham sat for some time over cheque book and calculator, trying the sums in a variety of ways, but the overdraft he came up with was still one hundred and fifty pounds short of the figure the bank quoted. The thought that the bank’s computer had made a mistake began to glow inside him. He liked the idea of computers being fallible; it seemed in some way to strike back at Robert Benham. He started to frame sarcasms for the letter he would write to the manager.
‘Are you coming to bed?’
Merrily’s voice fluted behind him. She leaned childishly in the doorframe, a nightdress like an oversize T-shirt sagging from the sharp edges of her body.
‘I will be soon. You haven’t been doing any joint account cheques I don’t know about, have you?’
‘No. I don’t think so. Not big ones.’
‘Good. The bank manager’s got a — ’
‘Oh, except for Henry and Emma’s music lessons. .’
That turned out to be the missing figure. Seventy-five pounds for each child. Graham felt too tired even to lose his temper. He made some caustic remark and turned back to his calculator.
He assumed Merrily had gone and was surprised, two minutes later, to hear her repeat, ‘I said, are you coming to bed?’ Fourteen years of marriage had not left any room for ambiguity in the invitation. He swung his chair round to contemplate his wife. But he was too angry and the memory of Tara Liston’s perfect proportions was too recent for him to feel any stirring of lust.
‘No, not yet,’ he replied.
She came across to him and, with that mistaken sense of timing she shared with her mother, kissed his lips and fumbled down at the inert folds of his lap.
He jerked his head away. Merrily’s hand came up to either side of his face, holding him in imitation of some film she had once seen.
‘Who is it, Graham?’
‘What?’
‘Who is the woman you’re seeing?’
‘Merrily. .’ Weariness at her stupidity sapped him.
‘No, come on. Am I expected to believe this story about spending the weekend with your new boss?’ Her small voice had grown squeaky with emotion. ‘Go on, are you going to tell me who it is?’
Was it from now on to be his fate, Graham wondered, to be accused of peccadillos he had not committed, while his great crime went undetected? Again he felt the exhausted urge to laugh, but he restrained himself.
‘No, Merrily, I am not.’
She looked at him with what was designed to be a searching, reproachful look, and walked out of the room. He watched her go, irritated by her irrelevance.
Before she was out of sight, she was out of his mind.
Money.
That was the main problem. Somehow he had to raise his income, or cut their expenses. He felt his father’s meanness rising in him, and hated it. He wanted country cottages and boats and expensive women, not that awful small-minded cheese-paring to which he too now seemed to be sentenced.
He got out a bank statement, resentfully remembering the number of occasions he had seen Eric Marshall do the same, and started to check through the regular payments.
There was only one that could be reduced and make any worthwhile saving. It was the figure of nearly a hundred pounds paid each month to an insurance company, the endowment part of their endowment mortgage. If he could convert the mortgage back to a simple one. . The endowment was a good long-term investment, but his problems had to be resolved in the shortterm. He reached for the folder which contained all the documents relating to their recent house purchase.
The endowment mortgage had been arranged through a broker and Graham had not before studied the documents in detail. Now he did, and found out on exactly what terms he and Merrily had made the purchase of their house.
And what he found out, he relished.
One phrase in particular appealed to him. It was the definition of the endowment policy by which the mortgage was guaranteed:
JOINT LIFE WITH SUM INSURED PAYABLE ON FIRST DEATH.
CHAPTER NINE
Once he had decided to kill Merrily, Graham Marshall felt a kind of peace. He had reached a logical decision and now could allow himself a lull before he implemented that decision. He felt the lightness that follows arrival at a destination.
He had no doubts about the logic of what he had decided. There were three unanswerable arguments in favour of killing his wife.
The first was the financial one. To have the mortgage paid off would revolutionise his life. The payments to the building society and insurance company were by far the largest monthly drains on his income. With them out of the way, he would start again to feel some financial latitude in his affairs.
The second argument was that being married was a bar to the kind of lifestyle he was now determined to recapture. He had sufficient self-knowledge to realise that he was not dependent on close emotional ties. He should have been aware of this earlier, before he was trammelled by the bonds of family, but now he had recognised his nature, he owed it to himself to get out of his current situation as soon as possible.
The third reason for killing Merrily was that he couldn’t stand her.
And the qualms and uncertainties that would divert most potential murderers between the intention and the act did not affect Graham Marshall. Thanks to the old man on Hammersmith Bridge, he had no doubts about his capabilities. He had committed murder. He had gone the distance.
Increasingly he found his thoughts translating the murder into sporting metaphors. This was a habit that had been with him from schooldays. Though unexceptional on the track and field, he had always seen academic competition in terms of a race. Revision had been a period of intensive training, to ensure peak fitness and performance on examination day.
The murder was now part of the same imagery, a major challenge which he had met. It was as if he had completed his first marathon. From now on he knew he could go the distance; it was just a matter of improving his performance.
Having decided Merrily’s fate, he felt again as if he were entering a period of intensive training.
He also felt renewed strength in his identity when it came under threat.
Which was just as well, because his identity received a considerable blow on the Monday morning, when he was summoned to Robert Benham’s office.
After Stella had showed him in, Graham began by thanking Robert for ‘a really terrific weekend’.
‘Oh yes. Glad you enjoyed it.’ The dismissive tone made this sound like a reprimand, as if Graham were gratuitously introducing his private life into office hours. Robert moved quickly on. ‘Listen, I’ve just had a letter about a three-day conference in Brussels. Set up by some EEC committee. I gather it’s a comparative study of personnel methods in the member countries. I want you to go and wave the Crasoco flag.’
Graham was gratified. Very few foreign trips came the way of the Personnel Department. He got the occasional day or maybe an overnight at one of the regional offices, but other countries were administered either locally or from America. On the rare occasions when opportunities for travel had arisen in the past, George Brewer had appropriated them.
So it was good news. The Brussels trip sounded like a classic non-essential freebie. Maybe, Graham began to think, life under Robert Benham wouldn’t be so bad.
‘Oh, that sounds. .’ He was about to say ‘fun’, but realised that the word might lack gravity, so
