Dirty Tricks

‘Then what?’

‘Well, once Clive’s feeling no pain, to use an idiom which I don’t think we studied but which seems particularly appropriate in this context, we hood him and proceed to a secluded spot I have in mind where the two of you can conduct your business in complete privacy. When you’ve finished, we leave him there and drive back to Oxford, where you pop into a travel agent and book a seat to the destination of your choice.’

This vision glowed in Garcia’s face for a moment. Then he frowned.

‘But he’ll know it was you.’

‘Exactly. I want him to know it was me. What I don’t want is for him to be able to prove it. And he won’t, as long as you do your job right. The important thing is that you leave no marks. Can you do that?’

Garcia pursed his lips.

‘We need electricity.’

‘Electricity? You must be joking.’

‘Believe me, it’s the best! Clean, convenient, effective. No fuss, no mess.’

I tapped the steering-wheel impatiently.

‘You’re wasted as a torturer, Garcia. You should be writing ads for Powergen.’

As our eyes met, I had a chilling glimpse of how he must have looked to his victims, bent over them, electrode in hand, ready to place it on nipple or penis, or insert it in vagina or anus. But why should I worry? Garcia’s skills were no threat to me. On the contrary, they were at my service.

‘Anyway that’s out of the question. We’re talking about a disused quarry miles from anywhere. Strictly no mod cons.’

‘No problem. Hire a generator, one of those petrol-driven ones. We’ll need a resistor, too, to vary the current, and some leads and a couple of spoons.’

We were now stuck in a traffic jam at the roundabout by the Austin-Rover works. The rear window of the car in front informed us that the owner loved Airedale terriers, that blood donors did it twice a year and that if we could read this, we should thank a teacher. Since he couldn’t, Garcia didn’t thank me.

‘And it really hurts?’ I asked.

‘Worse than anything you ever imagined. It’s like your body’s coming apart at the seams. And afterwards there’s nothing to show, as long as you use the spoons properly. It’s like cooking meat. You’ve got to keep them moving, otherwise it burns. We had an instructor from the CIA give us a demo when they delivered the equipment, but later on some of the guys got a little sloppy. You know how it is.’

‘There’s no risk of him dying, though?’

‘I’ll keep the current down.’

‘Not too low.’

Garcia laughed briefly.

‘Don’t worry, he won’t think it’s too low.’

We drove on past Sainsbury’s and over the soft-running Thames.

‘What about noise?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we should gag him?’

‘If you like. But they don’t really sound human. Anyone who hears us will think we’re castrating pigs.’

It was perhaps this bucolic image that caused me to start whistling a tune which I later identified as the traditional folk song, As I Was Going to Banbury.

‘Well that all sounds jolly satisfactory,’ I said.

If my arrangement with Garcia had included the usual ‘cooling-off period’ designed to protect consumers from rash decisions, I’d probably have invoked it that evening. Once I’d had a chance to think the whole thing over I realized that it had all got a bit out of hand. What I’d envisaged was basically an up-market beating, tastefully applied, but essentially a good, old-fashioned, hands-on job. Somehow Garcia had made this scenario seem crude and unsatisfactory. It was like talking to a builder. You say, ‘I’d like this and that done,’ and he gives you this withering look and replies, ‘Well if you’re sure that’s what you want, squire, we can certainly do that for you toot sweet, no problem at all, it’s entirely up to you.’ Which is how people end up with knocked-through en-suite kitchen conservatories when all they wanted was a cure for that damp patch on the loo wall.

It was the weekend, so of course every rental generator in Oxford and environs was already booked. In the end I had to drive to High Wycombe. In case Clive attempted to press charges I was using Dennis’s driving licence as identification. Another incredible thing I am going to have to ask you to accept is that in Britain driving licences are accepted as valid identification despite the fact that they carry no photograph and do not expire until well into the next millennium. Since I was posing as Dennis Parsons, though, I couldn’t use my own cheques or credit cards, so on top of everything else I had to make time-consuming side trips to cashpoint machines to finance the rental. Add a three-mile tailback on the A40 coming into Oxford, and there was another day gone.

Karen was in the shower when I got home. I took advantage of her acoustic isolation to phone Alison Kraemer. I hadn’t as yet told Alison about Karen’s pregnancy. Since that tea-time conversation in Holywell Street our relations had been friendly but correct. Now I felt the time had come to take her further into my confidence, and I therefore proposed meeting for lunch the next day. Quite apart from anything else, this would do me no harm at all in the event of Clive invoking the law. ‘Now let me just get this straight, officer. Your contention is that prior to meeting Ms Kraemer for lunch at Fifteen North Parade — I can really recommend their venison in madeira and celeriac sauce, and the Chateau Musar ’82 is drinking very nicely — I had spent the morning torturing someone in a quarry near Banbury. Is that correct?’

After some humming and hawing Alison agreed to see me, although she said she’d have to be home by four.

‘I’ve got the Barringtons and the Rissingtons to dinner and I’m making a rice timbale. It’s very good, but God, the preparation!’

The splashing and banging noises from the bathroom were still in full swing when I put the receiver down, so when Karen turned on me that evening and accused me of carrying on an affair with Alison behind her back, I was taken completely by surprise.

Karen and I shared the chores like the thoroughly modern couple we were. One night I loaded the microwave and Karen the dishwasher, the next we reversed roles. That day it was her turn to be creative. She’d selected something which looked like a slab of concrete wrapped in plastic foil when it went into the oven, and like a miniature hot-mud geyser when the timer pinged three minutes later. At no point did it resemble the illustration on the packet, but we ate it anyway, although as so often I felt that it would have made more sense to eat the packet and throw away the contents. We washed it down with one of the last surviving bottles from Dennis’s cache of wine, a ballsy Australian red weighing in at about fourteen degrees. This was of course on top of our two official G and Ts each, plus whatever Karen had been tippling on the side.

Dessert consisted of some slug-like tinned fruit in a slimy liquor, topped with a non-dairy aerosol mousse whose main selling point appeared to be the fact that the propellant was environmentally friendly. Once we’d scoffed this off, Karen launched her assault. On returning home, it seemed, she had phoned British Rail information to check the time of her train the next morning. The line was engaged, so she went to have a shower and tried again later, using the automatic re-dial facility. Since I had called Alison in the interim, her call was answered not by BR’s timetable touts but by a female voice which she identified as belonging to ‘that Crammer woman’.

Everything that happened subsequently was really down to my inability to react fast enough to this freak occurence. What I should have done, of course, is concoct a specious excuse for having phoned Alison. This would not have been so hard. I could have claimed to be returning a call from her I’d found recorded on the answering machine, for example. This would have given me time to work out a suitable cover-story, and also to brief Alison in case Karen phoned her to check.

Instead, I stupidly denied that I had ever made such a call. Alison was one of those people who recite their number when answering the telephone, so Karen had been able to confirm her suspicions by checking with the directory. Not only wasn’t I believed, but by lying about the call I had made it impossible to claim that it had been insignificant or innocent. There was no help for it, I realized reluctantly. I was going to have to go nuclear.

‘So did you manage to get through to station information in the end?’

‘Don’t try and change the subject!’