Michael Dibdin: Dirty Tricks

‘Right, that’ll do for now,’ Harry told me. ‘I wonder where those two lads from Kidlington have got to. You’re not planning on leaving the Oxford area, I take it? Only we may need to get in touch again, see. It’s a pity no one saw you that Saturday. Someone you know, I mean. Someone who could …’

The words ‘… provide you with a much-needed alibi, failing which you are liable to find yourself in dead lumber with regard to this one, John’ hung almost visibly in the air.

I once lived in a flat whose previous tenant kept an incontinent dog. The Parsonage stank of its former owners in much the same way as that flat did of dog piss, and eventually I could stand it no longer. I knew that clearing out my late wife’s possessions so soon after her death wasn’t the coolest possible thing to do, but I hadn’t gone to all that effort just to end up entombed in a perpetual monument to the Parsons’ trashy lifestyle. I needed open vistas and unfettered horizons. So the following Monday, a week after my return trip to Wales, I gathered some of the most offensive items together and took them to a charity shop in Summertown.

There was still no clear indication of the line the police were taking with regard to Karen’s death. I had heard nothing from either Kidlington or Llandrindod Wells, and the newspaper reports were sketchy in the extreme. An inquest was opened on the Thursday following my trip to Wales, and promptly adjourned to allow the police to pursue their investigations. But beyond the fact that they were treating the case as one of murder and that a senior officer had been brought in to ‘head up’ the inquiry, little detail emerged.

I had phoned Alison several times during this period, but luckily she was still away tending her aged relative. Until I knew which way the police were going to jump I wanted to keep my options open. The less I told Alison about what had happened, the easier it would be to change my story later if the need arose.

I was in the shower, scouring away the smell of the charity shop with a Badedas body rub, when the doorbell chimed. It’s just like the ads say, I thought, things happen. But when I went to the door in a terrytowel bathrobe, I found not a blonde astride a white steed, but Harry.

‘All right?’ he said.

I assumed this meant ‘Are you coming quietly or do I have to use the cuffs?’

‘I’ll just get dressed,’ I said.

‘Fair enough. Only it won’t take a moment.’

His tone seemed to suggest that he wasn’t there to arrest me. ‘All right?’ I belatedly remembered, was simply the Welsh for ‘How are you?’

‘I’m just down this way to tie up a few of the loose ends,’ he went on, ‘so I thought I’d drop by and put you in the picture. We haven’t given it to the media yet, but now we’ve got the confession it’s all over bar the shouting.’

‘Come in,’ I said.

Still feeling shocked, I poured myself a whisky. Harry accepted a bottle of beer.

‘It was finding the spare tyre in that quarry that did it,’ he explained. ‘Up until then he’d denied everything, but when we showed him the telex from Kidlington he broke down. “I suppose I must have done it,” he said. Near to tears he was. It’s a great relief, you know, getting it off your chest.’

‘Yes, it must be.’

For a moment I found myself wondering if Clive really had murdered Karen. Not only did the police think so, but so did Clive himself, apparently. Well, he should know, shouldn’t he? It was difficult to say what had really happened. My own memories remained clear enough but they were no longer attached to that invisible but solid backing by which we distinguish fact from fancy. They were floating free, just another version of events, perfectly possible, although not quite as plausible as the official account.

Harry now claimed that Clive’s kidnapping story had never been taken seriously. That wasn’t the impression I had received when he questioned me in Llandrindod Wells, but I didn’t say anything. At some point in that last week, a policy shift had taken place which effectively ruled me out of contention as a suspect. At the time, of course, I had no way of knowing what had caused this. Nor did I care. If Harry wanted to rewrite history in the light of this new approach, I certainly wasn’t going to embarrass him by pointing out the inconsistencies.

There was one more role I had to play, however, namely the distraught widower who having barely recovered from the shock of his wife’s tragic death now learns that she was murdered by a family friend with whom she had been carrying on a clandestine love affair and by whom she was pregnant at the time of her death. I think we can dispense with a blow-by-blow account of this, the predictable emotions (disbelief turning to indignation and disgust), the predictable lines (‘Do you mean to tell me, Inspector …’). It was a lousy part and I did it justice with a lousy performance. It didn’t matter. Now Clive had confessed his guilt, my act of innocence could be as amateurish as I liked. The critics had gone home, the reviews were in. I was a smash. Clive had bombed.

It was very satisfying to learn that all the clues I’d left had been painstakingly uncovered. Karen’s suitcase and handbag had been recovered from the reservoir, revealing both the victim’s identity and the fact that she had a single ticket to Banbury rather than a return to Liverpool. Forensic analysis revealed traces of fibres from her clothing in the boot of Clive’s car. Paint scrapings from the Lotus confirmed that it had been on the bridge from which the body had been dumped and also at the quarry from which the concrete post had been taken, and where the spare wheel had been abandoned in order to make room for the body of Clive’s murdered mistress.

‘But why did he kill her, Inspector? In God’s name, why?’

‘Apparently they’d planned to go away together for the weekend. That much he admitted right from the start. He didn’t know about her being in the family way, he says. She was only a couple of months pregnant, so most likely she’d been saving the news up till they were alone together. But somehow she blurted it out right away, and he took it badly. Words turned to blows, and …’

I shook my head.

‘I suppose I should hate him, but I just can’t. All I feel is this tremendous pity for both of them. Do you think that very wrong of me?’

Harry smiled a long, wan, lingering smile, expressive of his familiarity with every freak and foible of human nature. He waggled his glass from side to side.

‘You wouldn’t ever have another of these, would you?’

The mills of British justice grind so slowly that the trial did not take place until almost a year later, but since it represented the conclusion to the events I have just described it seems appropriate to include it here. The digression will be a brief one. When Regina v. Clive Phillips finally reached the courts, it was no contest. Regina cleaned up in straight sets. She hardly dropped a point. Clive was totally outclassed.

Considered as a spectator sport, the trial actually had more in common with cricket than with tennis: long stretches of appalling tedium which so numb the mind that you miss the occasional rare moments of interest. The proceedings invariably started late and were continually being adjourned on some pretext or other. I spent much of my time with Karen’s brother Jim, a car salesman from Southampton, who was representing the family. Jim’s line on his sister’s death was that it was ‘a shocking thing, quite shocking’. He reiterated this with the forceful delivery of a public bar philosopher delivering his considered opinion on the topic of the day. I gradually gathered that the most shocking thing about it from Jim’s point of view was all the commission he was losing. The reason I cultivated him was that he turned out to be very handy at seeing off the various journalists who pestered me.