Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

It should thus be clear to the meanest intelligence that even if I could have disappeared Karen without the slightest risk to myself, it would not have been in my interests to do so. As always, I stress my interests, because in them you can trust. I make no claims about what I might have done in other circumstances, I simply assert that those circumstances did not in fact arise. And legally, gentlemen, as I need hardly remind you, that is all I need to do. This court is not required to decide whether I am a nice person, but whether there is reasonable evidence that I committed the crime named in the extradition request. But it was simply not in my interests to commit such a crime. It was a fact against my interests.

What were those interests, by this time? When I first met the Parsons they had been very simple. I wanted the lifestyle which other people of my age and education enjoyed but which I had forfeited because of the wayward direction given my life by the humanistic propaganda I was exposed to in my youth. I didn’t crave fabulous riches or meaningless wealth, I simply wanted my due. Now I had achieved that, and I had also met Alison. She was my equal, my complement, my destined mate. The time and effort I had spent cultivating Mrs Parsons had not been wasted, however. While I had had no qualms about courting Karen without a penny to my name — she was bloody lucky to have me , never mind money as well! — I couldn’t have approached Alison on those terms.

But if personal insolvency would have created awkwardnesses du cote de chez Alison , the violent death of my wife would have been still less desirable. ‘We have already missed three trains,’ Wilde’s Lady Bracknell observes. ‘To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.’ As always, Oscar is right on the money when it comes to the English gentry. To be exposed to comment was still the nightmare of Alison and her kind, and whatever the other disadvantages of murdering one’s wife, it does inevitably tend to make one an object of some general interest. If the previous husband of the wife in question has also died in mysterious circumstances not long before, with the result that one has inherited the couple’s entire estate, then one may expect to attract a very lively class of comment indeed.

Quite apart from the not-inconsiderable risks of plotting to kill Karen, I thus had two excellent reasons not to do so. Dead, she would have proved a considerable social embarrassment. Alive, and carrying another man’s child, she guaranteed both my financial future and a smooth transition to life with Alison, who would welcome me with the sympathy due someone who had tried in vain to make an honest woman of a deceitful slut. True, I would have to reconcile what I had told Alison about Karen’s hysterectomy with the news that she was pregnant, but that could easily be made to seem like one more strand of the wool which had been pulled over my innocent eyes. As long as Karen was alive, I had nothing to fear and everything to hope for. So far from hiring someone to kill her, I would, if I’d known how, have striven officiously to keep her alive.

What I did need to do was find out the identity of my stand-in. I lacked both the patience and the experience to do this myself. I needed an outsider, a professional. Money was a problem, however. Our bank accounts were in both our names, but since love’s sweet song had ceased to work its magic, Karen had taken to scrutinizing the statements with an eagle eye and demanding explanations for every penny I withdrew. In common with all middle-class householders, we received a large amount of junk mail practically begging us to borrow money from them for any purpose whatsoever. I now replied to one of these offers, from a financial institution with which we had no previous connections, and had no difficulty in securing a loan of?5,000. I planned to use the capital to meet the monthly repayments until the divorce settlement came through, then repay the principal in full.

I still hesitated to call a private detective agency, though. To make my situation a matter of record with a third party who was subject to various legal constraints wasn’t necessarily in my interests. Suppose Karen’s paramour turned out to be married, with cash on tap and a reputation to lose. In that case it might well be advantageous to make a settlement out of court, the terms to be arranged after mutual consultation between the interested parties. I didn’t want any officially accredited ex-policeman limiting the options available to me, eg blackmail. Ideally I needed someone who was himself compromised, someone marginal and transient, with no leverage on the mechanisms of power. It was just a matter of time before I thought of Garcia.

Trish had given me a brief account of the allegations against him, but just to be on the safe side I phoned Amnesty International, posing as a researcher for a TV current affairs programme. Their response was unequivocal, a detailed catalogue of union leaders, students, newspaper editors, civil rights workers, Jews, feminists, priests and intellectuals tortured and murdered, a whole politico-socio-economic subgroup targeted and taken out. I was dismayed. With a record like that, Garcia might well regard the menial task I had to offer him as beneath his dignity.

I needn’t have worried. In the event Garcia proved only too eager to co-operate in any way, as long as there was money in it. The mysterious rendezvous where we hatched our devilish scheme, incidentally, was a roadside cafeteria near Eynsham called The Happy Eater. I bought Garcia a hamburger and chips and listened to him bewail his situation. It did sound rather bleak. His student visa ran out in a month and he couldn’t renew it without proof of re-enrolment at the school. Clive had stoutly resisted the teachers’ attempts to have Garcia blacked, but his idealism did not extend to forgoing the fees. Garcia’s funds were almost exhausted, and he couldn’t replenish them without putting his student status in jeopardy and risking instant deportation. Nor was his persona particularly grata outside the United Kingdom. No other country in Europe would take him, and, much to Garcia’s disgust, neither would the United States.

‘We do their dirty work for them and they won’t even help out when things get tough. Look what they did to Noriega! Makes you sick.’

‘What do you expect, Garcia, unemployment insurance? That sounds like Commie talk to me.’

‘A man should stand by his friends,’ the unhappy eater complained.

His own friends, it turned out, were now lying low in a certain Central American republic, and Garcia’s only wish was to join them. The problem was that he needed the best part of a thousand pounds to obtain a false passport and a plane ticket. I told him that I would be prepared to make a substantial contribution and then explained what I wanted. Garcia flicked his hand as though brushing away a fly.

‘No problem,’ he said in his evil English.

Back at Ramillies Drive, I bugged the telephones. The law covering electronic surveillance is a koan on which those who seek enlightenment about the British way of doing things would be well-advised to meditate. Under UK law it is legal to buy and sell bugging equipment, but a criminal act to use it. Thus the purchase of a sophisticated radio tap transmitter and actuator switch like the one I bought in the Tottenham Court Road, solely and specifically designed for the clandestine interception of other people’s telephone calls, is no more problematic than that of a clock-radio. Parents who use an intercom to monitor their baby’s sleep, on the other hand, are guilty of criminally violating the infant’s privacy.

The hardware set me back a couple of hundred pounds, but the salacious details I hoped to pick up would certainly be worth a bob or two when it came to the divorce. I knew from personal experience that Karen’s sexual behaviour was fairly unfettered, so depending on the proclivities of her partner there seemed a good chance that they might drop the odd reference to one of those practices which can so alienate the sympathies of a jury. I imagined my counsel fixing Karen with a beady eye. ‘In the course of a telephone conversation with the co-respondent, you referred amongst other things to a bottle-brush, a set of rubber bands and a jar of mayonnaise. Would you explain for the benefit of the court the precise use to which these items were subsequently put?’