Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

Her solemn face swung from side to side in fervent negation.

‘Now then, do you happen to know where the phone is? I need to make a quick call, let Clive know everything’s all right.’

She led me into the next room and pointed out the combined phone and answering machine. While I pretended to dial, I extracted the tape cassette from the machine and slipped it into my pocket. I put the phone down.

‘No answer. He must have gone to bed. Which is where you should be, young lady.’

I left Clive’s key on the hall table and walked Juliet back to the front of the house.

‘Remember,’ I told her, ‘not a word to anybody !’

She nodded seriously. I was pretty sure I could depend on her not to talk. The trusting child thought that poor Clive’s fate was in her hands. As it was, indeed, although not in quite the way she believed.

One of the many false starts in my life was when I tried to take up golf. My father considered golf, like the Daily Telegraph and Bell’s whisky, to be one of the essential elements of civilized male society. As in the palaeolithic era, learning to swing a club was a rite of passage. To me it was just a game, and a singularly boring one, just the sort of thing a bunch of old buffers like my dad would go in for. The last straw was the way the coach kept on about ‘working on your follow-through’. Once the ball’s gone it’s gone, I thought. How you swing your club through the air afterwards can’t make a damn bit of difference to where it ends up.

So I thought at fifteen. Now, at forty-something, I finally understood what my old golf coach meant, and as a result the following Sunday was very far from a day of rest for me. I didn’t get home until almost 2 o’clock that morning, by which time I was too exhausted to do more than verify that the tape I had taken from Clive’s house was indeed the one containing Karen’s incriminating call, and then erase it. There was a message for me on my own machine, but I felt unable to cope with any more news, either good or bad, and went straight to bed. It took true grit to set the alarm clock for 7 o’clock, but I didn’t want to botch my follow-through.

The first thing I did on awakening was return the various household items I had used to their place, having first carefully cleaned them. I devoted especial care to removing all traces of the red mud from the Wellingtons Garcia had worn at the quarry. Then it was time to take out the rubbish. I packed all the plastic sheeting, the gloves, the sponge-bag and the used packing tape into a large dustbin-liner, put it in the BMW and drove around until I found a house where building work was being done, and dumped the sack in the skip outside. Then I proceeded to the car-wash at Wolvercote roundabout, where the BMW was mechanically sluiced, mopped, hosed, scrubbed, waxed, rubbed and blown dry. Thanks to Clive’s incontinence the boot stank like a public lavatory, so I bought a litre of motor oil from the garage and poured most of the contents over the carpeting. Then I cross-threaded the cap so that it wouldn’t close properly, and tossed the container in.

Back home I phoned Karen’s mum in Liverpool. Old Elsie and I had never got on. She disapproved of her daughter’s hasty remarriage, and still more of her choice of partner. Oddly enough, Elsie was the only one with the courage to come out and speak the truth, which was that Karen should have ‘stuck to someone of her own sort’. This was a remarkable intuition. Dennis Parsons and I were not born that far apart on the social ladder, and by the time he had gone up in the world and I had gone down, the difference was as subtle, if as definitive, as that between Bordeaux and Cotes de Bordeaux. But such distinctions are second nature to women of Elsie Braithwaite’s generation. She spotted immediately that Dennis, for all his glam, was ‘Karen’s sort’, while for all my grot, I was not. Our Elsie was also a member of a fundamentalist sect which believes that making a phone call on the Sabbath constitutes an infringement of the Fourth Commandment, so I got doubly short shrift. No, I certainly couldn’t speak to Karen. Karen wasn’t there, and Elsie didn’t know what on earth had possessed me to think that she was. I made my apologies and hung up.

The action of replacing the phone triggered one of those abdominal depth-charges which are nature’s way of telling you that you’ve cocked up. Phones, the fatal row with Karen, my call to Alison, our luncheon date! While I was cavorting up the motorway in hot pursuit of Garcia, Alison would have been sitting in the restaurant where I’d arranged to meet her, glancing repeatedly at her watch while the waitresses and other customers tittered amongst themselves and whispered ‘She’s been stood up!’ No woman would easily forget or forgive such a slight, least of all Alison Kraemer. Once the facts of the case came to light, my whereabouts on the Saturday in question were bound to be a critical issue. If Alison were to inform the police that I had not only unaccountably failed to show up, but hadn’t even phoned to explain or apologize, my position would become awkward in the extreme.

I took a deep breath and called her number. The phone was answered by young Rebecca.

‘Can I speak to your mother, please?’

‘Who’s speaking?’

I hesitated.

‘Thomas Carter. It’s about the madrigal group.’

‘Hi, Tom! You sound a bit strange.’

‘I’ve got a cold. Is your mom there?’

‘She’s gone to Dorset. Grandfather’s been taken poorly.’

‘Oh I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do? She hasn’t left you there alone, has she?’

‘No, Alex and I are staying with friends. I just came over to practise. Mum will be ringing tonight. Can I give her a message?’

‘No, no, don’t bother her. It’s not urgent.’

As I hung up, I recalled the winking light on the answering machine the night before and spent five frantic minutes searching for the tape, which I had removed in order to erase the one I had taken from Clive’s.

‘I’m sorry not to reach you in person,’ said Alison’s voice, ‘but I’m forced to concede that these machines do have their uses after all, and I suppose in the circumstances it’s safe enough to leave a message.’

It took me a moment to realize that the circumstances she was referring to were Karen’s supposed trip to her mother’s. Already I was having a hard time remembering who knew which part of what story.

‘I won’t be able to make lunch today after all. My father has had a stroke, so I have to go down there and organize things. I’ll be in touch as soon as possible.’

I capered round the living room like a manic morris dancer. With luck like this, how could I lose? I snatched up the phone again and called the police. Not 999, just the number in the book. After all, this wasn’t an emergency, I told the woman who answered, at least I didn’t think so. It was probably nothing at all, in fact, there was most likely some perfectly obvious and innocent explanation, only I was just a bit worried because, well, the fact of the matter was that my wife seemed to have disappeared.

On Monday I took the portable generator back to the hire shop in High Wycombe. When I got home, the police were waiting for me in an unmarked Ford Sierra. There were two of them, a tall sturdy bearded fellow and a shorter, slighter man with the studiously glum expression of a school prefect. I’ve forgotten their names. Let’s call them Tom and Dick. Tom, the bearded one, approached me as I parked the BMW, introduced himself and his colleague, and asked if they could come in for a moment.

‘Perhaps it would be better if you sat down, sir,’ he suggested once we were inside. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got some rather bad news.’