Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

Advertising executives dream about people like me. Such was my slavish adherence to the ‘clunk, click, every trip’ slogan that even when driving away from a mountain reservoir after dumping my wife’s body, I had not neglected to fasten my seat-belt, so I was shocked rather than crippled for life by the collision. When I tried to reverse out of the mud, though, I discovered that the car was hopelessly stuck. All the better. My original idea had been to disable the Lotus by driving a nail into one of its tyres — the spare wheel had been removed at the quarry, supposedly to make room for Karen’s body — but my accident had achieved exactly the same purpose, and even more convincingly.

Garcia rolled up in the BMW a few minutes later. We drove back up the valley and across the bleak mountain pastures to a spot I had selected earlier, just beyond a cattle grid. I parked the car so that the headlights illuminated the field of operations and gave Garcia careful advance instructions. When we opened the boot, Clive looked a very Sorry Rabbit indeed, lying there on the plastic sheeting, his co-ordinated leisurewear steeped in his own urine. I cut through the tape binding his ankles, knees and arms. I replaced his key-holder in his pocket, minus the Yale front-door key I’d retained, and motioned to Garcia to help me lift him out of the car. When we laid him down in the road he showed the first sign of life so far, moving his limbs feebly like a clockwork soldier in need of rewinding.

We picked him up and frog-marched him off the unfenced road and across the adjacent wilderness to the top of a steep slope overlooking a marshy depression at the end of the upper reservoir. There we stopped, holding him by one arm each. He made no attempt to struggle. I loosened the sponge-bag from around his throat and looked expectantly at Garcia. Then I plucked off Clive’s hood, and in the same moment we heaved him forward over the edge of the slope. He fell without a cry, rolling head over heels, arms and legs flailing uselessly until the darkness below swallowed him up.

The return journey passed uneventfully. It was shortly after midnight when we reached the pub where I had picked Garcia up that morning. I handed him a sealed envelope containing the sum we had agreed on. He counted it carefully. I then outlined the true nature of the events in which he had just participated, and explained that in the eyes of the law he was an accessory to murder. This resulted in a prolonged outburst of unpleasantness in the course of which aspersions were cast upon the legitimacy of my birth, the virility of my anonymous father was openly derided, and it was further alleged that my mother habitually engaged in unnatural practices involving donkeys, goats and — I found this a bit far-fetched — vultures. For his final sally Garcia switched to English.

‘You drop me into it, you bloody heel!’

‘You were already in it, amigo . But if you shut up and move fast, this will get you out.’

He stuffed the cash into his pocket and climbed out of the car, slamming the door behind him. I never saw him again, but I eventually learned from Trish that he had disappeared from the school the following week. This had aroused no particular comment. Garcia’s precarious situation was by now notorious, and everyone assumed that he had fled without warning in an attempt to throw the human rights hounds off the scent. In any case, no one at the Oxford International Language College cared much what had happened to Garcia by then. They were too absorbed in the latest twists and turns of the real-life soap opera starring their very own principal, Mr Clive Phillips.

I had one more chore to attend to before going home. This involved driving across town to the up-market Victorian property on the side of Headington Hill where Clive lived. The lower floor was dark, but a light showed in one of the bedrooms and another from a small window in the roof. I parked the BMW some distance away, slipped on my rubber gloves and made my way back on foot. The gate had been stolen or vandalized. I walked up the tiled path to the front door. From the nearby Cowley Road came whoops of drunken revelry. I got out the Yale key I had removed from Clive’s holder and tried it in the lock. It went in all right, but it wouldn’t turn.

I almost wept. After all I’d been through, I just couldn’t handle this. Then a light suddenly came on in the hallway. The front door consisted of a semi-transparent sheet of ornamented glass through which I could now make out a flight of stairs. I followed the path round the corner of the house and hid in the shadows. A moment later the door opened. It didn’t immediately close again, however. Instead, there ensued a leave-taking whose ardour and duration made the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet look like a skinhead kiss-off. About a quarter of an hour passed before Romeo reluctantly dug his bike out of the bushes and took off. Juliet bolted the front door and ran upstairs to weep in her pillow.

It was the sound of the bolt that did it. Surely Clive wouldn’t be best pleased if he returned home unexpectedly to find the door bolted against him? So maybe that wasn’t the door he used. Maybe the front door was for the lodgers, while Clive retained a separate entrance to which he alone possessed the key. I followed the path along the side of the house. Sure enough, it ended at a door near the rear of the premises. This too was fitted with a Yale lock, and the key turned in it.

I switched on the lights and started to search the flat. The front hallway of the original house had been narrowed into a mere passageway leading from the front door to the stairs and the rented rooms upstairs, while the original sitting and dining rooms together with an extension containing a modern kitchen and bathroom had been retained for Clive’s personal use. I’d been expecting fake-fur rugs and see-through cocktail cabinets, recessed strobe lights and a sunken Jacuzzi. The stud’s stable, in short. Clive Phillips will be standing tonight. Service while you wait. Instead, it looked like a student’s crash-pad. Clive was the next best thing to a millionaire, yet he’d been living in virtual squalor.

Then I saw the photo. It was a framed enlargement, sitting on a table which Clive had used as a desk. It was not a recent shot. Karen was sitting on a wooden bench, squinting slightly in the bright sunlight. She looked prettier than I had ever seen her, younger too, almost a different person. I had been obliged on several occasions to look through the Parsons’ photographic archive, all sixteen volumes of it, but I had never seen this picture before.

‘Clive?’

The door of the living room opened as though of its own accord.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not Clive.’

On the threshold stood Juliet, poised for flight.

‘I’m a friend of Clive’s,’ I told her, smiling nicely. ‘He knows I’m here. Look, he gave me the key.’

She was in her early twenties, the ideal clarity of her teenage beauty already slightly compromised by the gravity of the adult she would become.

‘I see lights on. I will telephone to the police, but then I think maybe he is come back before.’

‘Good for you. The thing is, Clive’s in a spot of trouble. There are one or two things he has here, documents and so on, which he doesn’t want falling into the wrong hands. So he asked me to come round and pick them up for him.’

‘Why he doesn’t come himself?’

‘He can’t, darling. He just hasn’t got a window free for anybody.’

I picked up a pile of papers from the table as though these might be the incriminating documents I had come to remove. I noticed Juliet staring suspiciously at my rubber gloves. I held them out to her, strangler fashion.

‘I’m not supposed to be here. Understand? I’ve never been here. No one has ever been here. Above all, no one has taken anything away. This is very important. Otherwise Clive will be sent to prison for a very long time. I’m sure your family wouldn’t want you involved in anything like that, now would they?’