from his body. He started at every knock on his office door, every ring from the phone, every stranger he met in the corridor. Each one could be the summons, the polite voice of officialdom asking for a few words in connection with the death of Robert Benham. And this time there would be no easy let-off, no grieving widower to be distracted by commiseration. This crime wasn’t on Laker’s patch, this one, he felt sure, was being investigated by a mind as cold-blooded and as logical as his own.
As he thought of this, he realised what a blazing trail he had left. He had been relying on the assumption of an accident; once the idea of crime had been planted in an investigator’s mind, there were any number of pointers that would lead straight back to Graham Marshall.
Suppose his shoes had been washed up. Or the brand-new waders. It wouldn’t be hard to trace those back to Farlow’s in Pall Mall and, even though he had paid cash, he was sure that his ignorance of technical details, where he was going to fish and so on, had made him memorable to the rather snooty assistant.
Then there were footprints or fingerprints. It was only canteen conjecture that most of
Or the car might have been seen, its number memorised and traced back to the hire firm. Thence to George Brewer and, once he had been eliminated, suspicion could not be long in moving to his assistant.
Then there were the clothes in the skip in Haslemere. . Everything he thought of had the same effect. It was as if, suspended over his head, was a huge black arrow with the legend ‘HE DID IT’.
The rest of the Monday in the office was excruciating, but even then, through his fear, Graham could see once again how his emotions were misinterpreted. Everyone recognised his state of tension, but everyone put it down to shock at the news of Robert Benham’s death. Rather than revulsion, the murderer attracted sympathy.
Things were even worse when he returned home. He was back to the state he had been in after killing the old man. There was no confident glow, no feeling of immunity, of being set above the herd. Graham Marshall felt terrified, and abjectly ashamed of his own incompetence.
He couldn’t eat, but managed to drink a lot of whisky. He tried watching television, but nothing could engage his attention for more than a few minutes.
Sleep was as much out of the question as eating, and Graham spent the night in the sitting-room, where Sunday papers were still scattered over the floor. He drank steadily and the whisky aggravated the rancid taste of fear at the back of his mouth.
His thoughts spiralled ever downwards. At one point, for the first time in his life, he contemplated suicide. Death, he knew, had power, and bringing about his own might perhaps be the last expression of that power he could achieve.
But the idea did not stay with him long. He knew he lacked the kind of nerve the act required and, besides, even at this nadir of his hopes, some tiny glimmer remained. His luck had been incredible over the last few months; why shouldn’t his ration last just a little longer?
The deepest of his pain came from the knowledge that he was no longer in control of events. Nothing he could do now could either slow down or accelerate the investigation into Benham’s death. He could only sit and wait. And go through the motions of as normal a life as possible.
He bathed at about six and put on clean clothes, but the change didn’t refresh him. The whisky, of which he had consumed the best part of a bottle, had not made him drunk, but left him with a grinding headache.
He geared himself up to leaving at the normal time for work, and then remembered he had arranged to go in late. The Post Office engineer was coming that morning to make the connections for the Ansaphone in his study.
Now even having the device seemed pointless. He tried to recall in what mood of euphoria he had bought it and realised, with shame, that it had been simply in imitation of Robert Benham. So much of his recent motivation had been to reproduce the lifestyle of his latest victim. In Graham’s current state, it all seemed rather petty.
He also shared, for the first time, some of the belittling contempt for the Personnel Department which prevailed throughout the rest of Crasoco. Even the job for which he had strived so hard, he realised, was a failure’s job, chief elephant in the elephant’s graveyard. He had taken all the risks for nothing.
Cramming himself into normality like a smaller man’s clothes, he waited for the Post Office engineer, then watched the fitting of the new jack plug and made suitable jokes about the sort of outgoing messages he could leave. When the engineer departed, Graham congratulated himself that the man would have found nothing untoward in his client’s behaviour.
But that small triumph gave only brief respite from the fear. Next Graham had to go into the office.
Terry Sworder was sitting at his desk. The right side of his face was red. His eyebrows and the fringe of his hair were frazzled to wisps of woodshaving.
Graham was momentarily immobilised by shock, then felt a perverse kind of relief. At least now he could find out how much the police knew, and begin to put some time limit on his fate.
‘Terry, are you all right?’ he asked as he sat down.
‘Still pretty shaken.’ The young man withdrew a thin cigar from his mouth with trembling hand as if to emphasise the point. ‘Physically O.K. But it’s the shock, you know.’
‘Of course. What actually happened?’
In the previous forty-eight hours Terry Sworder had become accustomed to this question and polished his reply into a neat little dramatic routine. But none of his audiences had listened to it with as much attention as the current one.
‘It was terrible. So quick, for a start. And I was bloody lucky. What happened was. .’ He paused, warming to the performance. ‘I was in the rubber dinghy and Bob had stepped on to the boat. He told me to hang on a min. till he’d opened the cabin, because it’s fairly cramped in the well there, and fortunately I didn’t tie the dinghy up, just hung on to the back. They reckon that’s how I was saved from worse injury. Because what happened was, the minute Bob opens the hatch — woomph, the lot goes up like a bomb. .’
Even through his anxiety Graham felt a little spurt of excitement.
‘Well, the blast tosses the dinghy back just like it was a balloon and that’s what saves me. It seems I keep hanging on to a bit of rope on the dinghy’s side and, God, I go through the water upside down, arse over tit, don’t know where I am. When I come to, I’m beside the dinghy and that’s upside down and deflating fast, and I’m still hanging on to this bit of rope.’
‘What about
Terry Sworder would not have his narrative hurried. ‘And I look across the waves and there I see this great column of flame on the water, and black smoke pouring out above it. There’s other boats rushing there to help, but
Then there’s this great hiss and a load of steam and what-have-you. And down she goes.’
‘The weight of the keel. .’
‘That’s it. And whatever’s left of Bob gone down with it.’
‘Yes.’ Well, at least it had worked. There was comfort in that. And not much had been left for forensic examination — also a bonus. But there remained a grave danger to Graham’s safety, a danger that the accident’s witness could unwittingly have unleashed in his account to the police.
Graham shook his head. ‘It’s terrible, really terrible.’ Time for the big question. ‘How do the police reckon it happened?’
‘Well, it was the Calor Gas of course that went up. Must’ve leaked. The police don’t reckon Bob would have left it on by mistake. He was too careful for that. Anyway, he hadn’t been on the boat for a couple of weeks, and most of the gas would probably have leaked out and dispersed in that time if it had been left on.’
‘Oh?’ Graham had difficulty keeping the tension out of his voice.
‘No, what they reckon happened was that the boy from the boatyard who changed the cylinder, he left it on.’
Another ‘Oh’, equally non-committal.
‘Apparently, Bob gets down there so rarely, so pushed for time usually, that he gets the boatyard to do all that routine stuff, so’s the boat’s ready to sail when he wants it, see. And this poor sod who changed the cylinder must’ve left it turned on. Only put in last Friday, so just nice time to build up a really explosive mixture of gas and
