police want is a token statement. You won’t be under oath, no one is going to cross-examine you. You’ll just be confirming what they already know, namely that I was in Oxford that day and therefore can’t have had any hand in what happened in Wales.’
Alison stared at me for longer than I would have believed possible. Time must have got jammed, I thought, or maybe I was suffering a stroke. Then there was a thunder of feet on the stairs, a thrush gave voice outside the window, and Rebecca burst into the room.
‘Crime!’ she cried.
Alison’s face melted back into an expression of maternal warmth. I realized how unnaturally set and strained it had become.
‘What do you mean, dear?’
The solution to that crossword clue. It’s an anagram. The iceman is Mr Ice.’
I forced a congratulatory smile.
‘And “buyeth not his round”?’
‘Crime doesn’t pay.’
As she strode out to the hallway, I felt a shiver of panic, like one who realizes he is the victim of black magic. In the mouth of that unsuspecting child the phrase resounded like the judgement of the Delphic oracle. I knew that nothing would go right for me now.
‘I don’t know what amazes me more,’ Alison said quietly, ‘that you should be prepared to perjure yourself or that you imagined that I would. Evidently we don’t know each other as well as I thought.’
The Perrier had flowed like water during lunch, but we had consumed nothing stronger. When I tried to stand up, though, I staggered like a drunk.
‘Well thanks, Alison. It’s been real. The police will be in touch some time this afternoon or tomorrow, I expect. A Chief Inspector Moss. I’d keep an eye on him if I were you. Just between the two of us, he struck me as a bit of a DOM. Prosing on about female pulchritude with his hands buried deep in his raincoat pockets, that sort of thing. I have a feeling that you’re the sort of woman he might go for in a big way, Alison.’
She stared at me in shock. I had never spoken like this to her before. I had never been flippant, ambiguous or disrespectful. Above all, I had never mentioned the Wonderful World of Sex.
‘I think you’d better leave,’ she said with quiet dignity.
Quiet dignity, like
I walked along the hallway to the front door. The strains of the piano rang out from the living room, where Rebecca was practising. It was the same piece I had heard over the phone, but the effect was quite different now, like a landscape one is leaving for ever.
On the way home I made a detour through the back-streets of East Oxford, just for old times’ sake. I found myself staring out of the window of the BMW with something approaching envy. Yes, there was squalor and despair, but also a range of human contact, a warmth and vivacity quite foreign to the genteel suburbs where I now lived. What violence there was here was only for show, a desperate appeal for help or attention, the uncoordinated flailings of a drunk too far gone to do any damage. But Alison and her kind were kung fu masters, all formal smiles, elaborate politeness and swift, vicious dispatch.
I had thought I was one of them, that was my mistake. I thought my birth and education entitled me to a place among them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My place was here, among the people I despised. Them I could manipulate, as I had Dennis and Karen. From the moment I tried to move up to Alison’s level I was lost. I’d wanted her because she was the real thing. It had never occurred to me that I was not. But the real thing is not charm and chat but a clinically precise sense of what you can get away with. And that I lacked. Otherwise I would never have made the fatal blunder of trying to seduce Alison morally. I had mistaken her for a jumped-up shopgirl like Karen, to whom the ties of romantic love were sacred and who would sacrifice anything to stand by her man. Karen would have lied to the police for me without a second thought, but to propose it to Alison was as gauche as asking her to give me a blow-job in the Bod.
Yes, if I had been the cold, calculating killer portrayed by the press, I would have stayed well clear of any further entanglements with Ms Kraemer. Even without her support, I had little to fear from the law. It would have taken more than Clive’s word and the lack of an alibi to convict me. If any of the witnesses Moss had mentioned had been able to identify me positively, there could have been no question of keeping the file on the case closed. Even if they had, my chances would have been no worse than even. Not only does the law send innocent men like Clive Phillips and Hugh Starkey to prison, it even more frequently allows the guilty to walk free, particularly if they are white, middle-class, well-heeled and don’t speak with an Irish accent.
But if Alison had been dismayed to find that we didn’t know each other as well as she had thought, the effect on me was no less traumatic. The woman I had idolized for so long, and for whose sake I had run the most terrible risks, had revealed herself to be a shallow, selfish prig. After all these years, Alison Kraemer still thought right and wrong were as clear and unambiguous as right and left. Even a decade of radical and regenerative government hadn’t taught her that her moral code — a ragbag of oddments from religious and philosophical uniforms which no one was prepared to wear entire any more — was as irrelevant to the contemporary world as theories about the great chain of being or the music of the spheres.
Well, the time had come to set her right about this. It was my intellectual duty, as one Oxford man to another, so to speak. It was the least I could do in return for all she had done to me. Mind you, I won’t try and pretend that my motives were wholly altruistic. There was undeniably an element of personal satisfaction involved as well. I wanted to scare the living shit out of the stupid bag, to scar her psyche with scenes of horror she would relive every night until she died.
Perhaps if I’d had time to think it over, cooler counsels might have prevailed. But it so happened that the madrigal group met that very evening, so I could count on Alison’s absence from the house. The children would be there, of course, but I could take care of them. I rounded up some tools and my trusty rubber gloves, and sat sipping a tumbler of The Macallan until it grew dark.
The lane leading to the house was as quiet as an alley in a cemetery. Most women would have been frightened living there by themselves, but Alison Kraemer’s imagination was as well-trained as one of Barbara Woodhouse’s dogs. That could change though, I thought as I flitted across the lawn. That docile and obedient pooch was about to go rabid. A light was on in one of the front bedrooms. Rebecca was still up. When she heard me, she would assume at first that Mumsy had returned earlier than usual from her glees and catches. By the time she realized her mistake, it would be too late.
Don’t worry, it’s not going to get
I made my way along the side of the house to the kitchen door. This would be locked and bolted, but the window next to it was forceable. Alison had told me she meant to get a security lock fitted, but I knew hadn’t got round to it. I slipped on my gloves and got to work jemmying the sash. It took longer than I had anticipated, but in the end the catch snapped in two, sending a fragment of cast iron tinkling loudly about the stone floor. I pushed the window up, hoisted myself on to the ledge and crawled through.
The nocturnal silence was promptly shattered by an astonishing crash as a glass bowl I had failed to notice on the draining-board fell to the floor. My muscles locked up in panic, but no one came running or called out. I lowered myself gingerly to the ground, my shoes crunching on the fragments of broken glass. The light switch was by the open doorway leading to the hall. I made my way across the glass-strewn flagstones towards it, my eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness. I was about three feet away from the door, my hand already raised to the switch, when a disembodied limb reached in out of the darkness of the hallway and clicked it on.
All vision went down in a blinding white-out as the fluorescent tube on the ceiling came to life. I blinked
