Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

A wish for children was about the only thing Karen and Manuela had in common, apart from their interest in me. Even where the sexual acts were identical, there was an essential difference. I did them to Manuela, but with Karen. Objectively, Karen was prepared to go almost as far as her predecessor, and her eager greed more than made up for the thrill I used to get from subjecting dogged, cow-like Manuela to the same routines. But Karen’s sexual behaviour was in marked contrast to her rigid conventionality in all else. For people of my generation, children of the sixties, sex and freedom are so inextricably connected that it is difficult for us to accept that someone can be totally uninhibited in bed and still have a Reader’s Digest mentality. For Karen, though, good sex was just one of the amenities to which everyone aspired. Like videos, satellite TV, whirlpool baths and microwaved paella, it was a form of in-home entertainment, an affordable luxury to enhance your lifestyle. Karen kept The Joy of Sex by the bed and The Joy of Cooking by the stove, and approached both activities with the same brash, cheerful, unsubtle gusto. If I’d suggested to Manuela that we murder someone, she would no doubt have gone along with it as she went along with everything else I suggested. She might have drawn the line if I’d suggested murdering her , but even then I wouldn’t have counted on her being able to break the habit of a lifetime. But with Karen such frankness was out of the question, and without her co-operation, getting rid of Dennis looked like just another of the many pipe-dreams I had indulged in over the years. But this one was to come true almost immediately, without my even lifting a finger.

The first thing to say about what happened is that it was Dennis’s idea from the start. So much for the jerk-off theories put forward by the police, in which I figure as an adulterous version of George Joseph Smith — not the brides in the bath but the wittol in the water. I would be tempted to suggest that the Thames Valley CID read too many detective stories, except that I doubt whether they read at all. Late-night TV is more their speed. Wee-hours brain-numbers, junk videos from the 8-till-late take-out, that’s what’s formed their model of reality. The trouble with that stuff is not that it’s bad, but that it’s not bad enough . Life makes the worst video you’ve ever seen look like a masterpiece, and the episode I’m about to relate was well down to par in this respect.

One of the many alienating features of unemployment is that weekends lose their magic. On the contrary, I was coming to dread them. Not only was there no chance of seeing Karen, but Trish and Brian took over the house with heavy hints about housework that needed doing or how if only the back garden was cleared we could plant organic vegetables. To avoid this aggravation, I used to spend my weekends going for long walks by the river. I joined it at Donnington Bridge and walked downstream, past Iffley Lock and under the by-pass to Radley, or up to Folly Bridge and through the back-streets of Osney to Port Meadow and Godstow. In summer the water is home to huge plastic bathtubs in which unhappy families sit self-consciously picking at their dog’s dinners, or pudgy louts grow raucous on tinned beer. By October, though, these wally wagons had given way to splinter-thin rowing shells in which muscular lads sweated and gasped over their oars while a weedy wimp goaded them on to still greater suffering. I always relished this sight, which closely resembled the fantasies I had harboured at school, a gang of jocks and bullies tormented by a puny swot. A different pleasure was afforded when the cox was female. Not seldom were my solitary walks enlivened by the spectacle of some plain Jane on her back in the stern of the boat, imploring the team of half-naked, sweat-drenched males to keep it coming, watch their finishing, keep it firm, keep it hard.

On exceptionally fine days I used to prefer Oxford’s other river. The Cherwell is quite different from the Thames, a toy stream winding through stately parks and bucolic meadows miraculously unencroached upon by the dreary outskirts of the city. Shy and secretive, not quite real and very safe, it is an apt setting for the young enthusiasts who flock thither on summer afternoons to recreate scenes from Brideshead Revisited . Striking is the contrast between their artfully-poled craft, laden with wind-up gramophones, teddy bears and pints of Pimms, and the aquatic dodgems of your average punter, bearing ghetto-blasters, squealing skirt and six-packs of Australian lager. Numerous collisions result, yet — such is the nature of class conflict in Britain — no damage is done, and the respective crews pass on their way as though oblivious of each other, hiding in silence and averted eyes the embarrassment of foreigners with no common language.

Despite the sunshine, there were more ducks than punts on the river that Saturday. It was brilliantly sunny, but with an autumnal edge, perfect walking weather. I strolled along the narrow path with the anticipatory exhilaration a fine morning bestows, that quids-in glow of youth, confident that there is more and better to come. But the wisdom of age told me that this parabola of promise would not be maintained indefinitely, but would peak and then decline. A psychological astronomer, I calculated its apogee at approximately 2 to 3 o’clock, unless of course I stopped for a drink. In that case I would peak earlier and higher and then feel like hell for the rest of the day. If I wanted to be happy I should have avoided the pub altogether, or at least had nothing stronger than mineral water. I knew that. So I ordered a pint of bitter, and then another. What it comes down to is that I can’t handle happiness. I don’t know what to do with it.

As I walked back from the bar with my second pint I caught sight of Karen and Dennis at a table in the corner. We all made much of the coincidence, though not as much as the police, for whom it amounts to damning evidence of collusion, malice aforethought, cold-blooded premeditation and goodness knows what else. Is it likely, they argue, that both the Parsons and I should have decided, quite independently, to visit that particular pub on that particular day at that particular time? If they had bothered to get off their bums and ask some questions, they would have discovered that the pub in question was a regular haunt of the Parsons, who went there for lunch every Saturday on their way back from the supermarket. As it also happens to be the only drinker on the Cherwell until you get to Islip, the murderous conspiracies and dark plots which so excite the Kidlington Kops amount to nothing more than the fact that when I opened my curtains that morning I saw the sun shining in a cloudless blue sky and decided to go for the longest and most pleasant of the river walks open to me.

The same fact was responsible for Dennis’s insistence that we should take to the water. Here the police’s version of events is not merely contentious but downright absurd. To believe them, Karen and I shanghaied the shrinking Dennis on to a punt by some underhand ruse worthy of a ‘once-aboard-the-lugger-and-the-maid-is-mine’ melodrama. It seems almost a pity to subject these lively fancies to the stern test of verisimilitude, but I feel constrained to point out three facts. The first is that the?20 deposit required on hiring the punt was secured by means of a personal cheque drawn on Dennis’s account and duly signed by him. The second is that from the Cherwell boathouse to the point where the tragedy occurred is a distance of over two and a half miles, including a strenuous portage, and took us nearly an hour. And lastly, when we reached Magdalen Bridge, Dennis insisted on coming alongside so that he could visit an off-licence at the Plain and buy a bottle of champagne, the sale being recorded in his credit card records. If you combine these three facts with another, namely that Dennis’s fortieth birthday had fallen on the previous Thursday, an alternative explanation presents itself.