‘She’s … pregnant?’ he breathed.
‘That’s right. And I opted out of parenthood several years ago. I don’t affect the tie, but I’m a fully-fledged member of the cut-and-run club. Which leaves you holding the baby.’
He sat staring straight ahead through the windscreen.
‘Did Kay know that?’ he said eventually.
His use of the past tense startled me, until I realized that it referred to the implied continuation ‘when she married you’. It’s little things like that which can be so tricky to explain to a class.
‘About my vasectomy? Of course. You don’t think I’d keep a thing like that from my wife, do you?’
His face lit up.
‘Then she did it on purpose!’
He sounded disgustingly moved.
‘Of course she did!’ I retorted. ‘To trap you into marrying her.’
‘All it proves, Clive, is what everyone already knew, namely that you’re a first-rate prick.’
I had raised my voice, which unfortunately attracted the attention of the Marina owner, who was still loading Granny into his wallymobile.
‘I’m sorry,’ Clive replied in a soothing tone. ‘I forgot how painful all this must be for you. How did you find out about us? Did Karen tell you?’
‘Not in so many words. I overheard her talking to you on the telephone the other day. Do you know how that felt?’
‘I can imagine,’ he murmured sympathetically as the Marina drove away.
‘No, you can’t. But you don’t need to. It felt like this.’
And I hammered my fist into his groin.
From behind the wheel of the Lotus, the entrance to the quarry looked bumpier than I had remembered. The possibility of the low-slung sports car grounding out occurred to me for the first time. I revved up and took a run at it. There were one or two loud metallic sounds like waves slapping the bottom of a dinghy, then I was inside the quarry. A few moments later the BMW appeared, cruising with ease over the uneven ground. Everything was going my way. A patina of the Lotus’s underbody paint would remain like lichen on the rocks at the entrance to the quarry for the forensic experts to find, while the high-riding BMW would leave no trace of its presence.
The quarry had not been in use for a long time, and owing to the friability of the local stone and the thick covering of weeds and undergrowth it might have been mistaken for a natural feature except for the perfectly level floor of reddish earth. That brick-red soil interested me, because I knew it would interest the police. It was distinctive, characteristic and definable. It could be weighed, measured, subjected to chemical and spectroscopic analysis and then produced in court in a neat little plastic bag marked ‘Exhibit A’. In short, it was a
That’s why I’d brought the wellies for Garcia. He was going to drive the BMW, and since the BMW had never been to the quarry, we couldn’t have any of the distinctive red soil ending up inside it. He parked alongside the Lotus, as I’d instructed him, revving up the engine in the best macho fashion before switching off. I opened the front door of the BMW. Clive was lying in a foetal crouch forward of the front passenger seat, the sponge-bag tightly laced around his neck. The bag was a sporty model for jocks on the trot, sheeny acrylic with a go-faster stripe. It complemented Clive’s outfit so well he might have chosen it himself.
Our departure from Banbury had gone very smoothly. While Clive was still writhing, a blanket-draped form had risen from the back of the car like the awakened kraken to apply the
While Garcia struggled into the green wellies I carefully wiped the door handle, fascia and leather-work of the BMW to remove any prints which Clive might have left. Then we lifted his inert body back into a sitting position in the front seat, taped his ankles and knees together, twisted his arms behind his back and taped them just above the wrist. It was strong packing-tape, easy to cut but impossible to tear, and less likely to leave marks than wire or rope. By the time we had finished, Clive was trussed like a chicken. I got out his key-holder and inspected the contents. There were big keys, small keys, short keys and tall keys, each marked with a different coloured blob of paint to tell Clive which compartment of his life it opened. Only one, a battered Yale tethered next to the Lotus’s ignition key, bore no marking. I removed it from the case and placed it carefully in my wallet.
The boot of the Lotus contained Clive’s overnight bag and a slurry of EFL promotional material. We transferred this to the back seat and pulled the spare wheel out of its housing. I told Garcia to dump it among the rocks on the far side of the quarry. As he rolled the tyre away I opened the boot of the BMW. The lid slid smoothly up on its hydraulic supports. I almost screamed aloud at the sight that met my eyes.
Seven hours earlier, back at the house on Ramillies Drive, I had carefully packaged Karen’s body for the journey. I had taped her arms and ankles together, then fetched the roll of plastic dustbin-liners from under the sink and worked one bag over the head, shoulders and chest and another over the legs, hips and stomach. I then wrapped a third bag around the overlap between the other two and taped the whole issue together in the manner approved by the Post Office for large and bulky objects of irregular shape. I was amazed at how easy it was to think of Karen as a large and bulky object of irregular shape. Her death didn’t mean anything to me. In my heart, I believed she was upstairs in our bedroom, snoring in the way which Dennis had so graphically described on another occasion. In the morning we would greet each other grumpily over breakfast as usual. Meanwhile I had this body to dispose of.
I picked up the bundle, lifting carefully from the knees so as not to do myself an injury, and carried it through to the back hallway. The BMW was still on the gravel sweep at the side of the house where I’d parked it when I came home that afternoon. The same streetlight that illuminated the tree in the bedroom window fell on the car, and I didn’t want any insomniac neighbour noticing that Karen was leaving home horizontally, so I let off the handbrake and pushed the car round the corner into the shadows at the back of the house. The boot was filled with all the miscellaneous junk I had rented or bought for my now-aborted project with Garcia. I transferred the portable generator to the garage and the rest to the back seat, then returned to the house, picked up my homemade body- bag and loaded it into the boot. This amorphous, impersonal package was what I’d been expecting to see when I lifted the lid again at the quarry. Instead, I was confronted by a dishevelled mass of torn plastic through which Karen’s feet, elbows and horribly distorted face projected like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis.
I touched her cheek. It was almost cold. She was dead now all right, but apparently she hadn’t been when I put her there. At some point she must have regained consciousness, only to find herself entombed in a cold steel vault. Perhaps she had called out. She had certainly struggled hard to free herself, but all she had been able to do was muss up her plastic shroud a little and prepare a nasty surprise for me, a surprise which had used up the precious seconds I needed to do what had to be done. Already Garcia was on his way back.
‘Not there!’ I called to him. ‘Further away! In the bushes!’
Once his back was turned again, I picked up the corpse and carried it over to the Lotus, dumped it in the boot and ripped the remains of the plastic sheathing off. I then snipped through the tape bindings with the scissors and let the limbs fall freely and naturally into place. I soon realized that Karen’s delayed death had actually worked to my benefit, since rigor mortis had not set in before I could remove the tape. I then carried over one of the broken concrete fence-posts I had noted among the construction waste on my first visit to the quarry and laid it out next to Karen. I hurriedly added her suitcase, coat and handbag. By the time Garcia returned, the Lotus was closed and locked and I was lining the boot of the BMW with plastic bin-liners split and taped together.
The next shock was that Clive was no longer on the front seat where we had left him. A moment later I saw him grovelling helplessly about among the driving pedals, his back bent at a painful angle over the gear housing, calling for help in a voice muffled by the sponge-bag. I bent down and struck the garishly swaddled head hard with my fist.
