Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

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.

‘There’s no one here to help you, Clive. There’s no one here but me, and I’m not going to help you. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’ve got a pair of garden shears here, Clive. I’m going to use them on you. I’m going to prune you. You’ve been getting a bit rampant lately, Clive, a bit rank and luxuriant. I’m going to have to cut you back, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to dock you.’

I paused.

‘Or there again I may not. It all depends. It depends on so many things. On my mood, on the weather, on the number of magpies, black cats and squashed hedgehogs we pass, on whether I can pick up anything worth listening to on the radio and whether my piles are giving me gyp after a day in your shoddy little bucket seats. It depends on all that and more, far more than I could ever express in words. But one thing all those ineffable factors have in common is that there isn’t a single solitary effing thing you can do about them. You would therefore be well-advised to make the most of the one way in which you can attempt to influence the eventual outcome, Clive, which is by SHUTTING THE FUCK UP!’

The hooded figure was silent and still. I took Garcia to one side — it wouldn’t do for us to be heard conversing in Spanish — and told him to put Clive in the boot. I’d had enough of humping bodies about for one morning.

When I had planned out the day’s activities earlier that morning, the drive to Wales had appeared as a sort of entr’acte between the strenuous and demanding dramatics before and after. To them I had devoted intensive care and detailed scrutiny, but I’d hardly given a thought to the journey itself. Time was not a factor. We could do nothing until darkness fell anyway. Since the Lotus and the BMW were too distinctive to risk them being seen together on the little-used cross-country roads, I had planned a roundabout route using motorways as much as possible. Garcia’s instructions were very simple. He was to maintain a constant speed of 60 mph. I would remain some distance behind, keeping the BMW always in view. As we approached each junction, I would accelerate past and lead him to the correct exit.

Foolproof, eh? I certainly thought so. But I hadn’t done any motorway driving since returning to Britain, so I was unaware that in practice the 70 mph limit now indicates a minimum speed, barely acceptable even in the slow lane. Poor Garcia did his best to obey my instructions, but what with the queue of irate and contemptuous drivers building up behind him, and the exciting responsiveness of the BMW to the slightest pressure of his foot on the accelerator, he was very soon out of sight. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could about it, because Clive’s fancy little roadster turned out to be underpowered, badly tuned and apt to ramble all over the road if you took your mind off the driving for a second. It was while I was staring gloomily at the speedometer that I noticed the needle of the fuel gauge leaning over like a drunk against a bar, deep inside a red zone marked EMPTY.