Michael Dibdin: Dirty Tricks

Rebecca wrinkled her nose.

‘The reference to O’Neill is clear enough. Too clear, in fact. Probably a red herring. Oh drat, I shall have to think about it,’ she concluded world-wearily, getting up from the table.

‘Don’t forget your French essay,’ Alison called after her.

‘ J’essaierai! ’

‘Isn’t she amazing?’ I said with feigned warmth.

Alison smiled deprecatingly.

‘They all are at that age. It’s easy to be amazing. What’s difficult is to settle down to being ordinary. I fancy Rebecca may find that quite a struggle.’

She rose to make coffee.

‘So what was it you wanted to ask me?’

I laughed lightly.

‘It’s a bit of a bore, I’m afraid. The thing is, the police have been in touch. It’s quite incredible. Apparently there was some irregularity in the way the case against Clive Phillips was prepared, and as a result he’s being set free. It’s a total travesty of justice, of course. No one has the slightest doubt about his guilt, but because the correct procedures weren’t observed they have to let him go.’

‘How appalling!’

‘What’s even worse is that the Crown Prosecution Service is considering reopening the case. The police very decently warned me about this in advance, and asked if there was anyone who could vouch for the fact that I was in Oxford on the day Karen disappeared.’

‘To give you an alibi, you mean?’

I laughed.

‘Well I suppose that’s the legal term, but it’s just a formality really. I mean no one’s accusing me of anything, least of all the police. But they’ve got to go through the motions, you see, even though they know perfectly well that Phillips was responsible for Karen’s death.’

Alison brought two miniature Deruta cups brimming with espresso coffee.

‘That’s jolly thoughtful of them,’ she said. ‘But how frightful to think that that man is going to go free. Aren’t you scandalized?’

I sighed deeply and shrugged.

‘He’s not going free. He’s just being released into another prison, the prison of his own conscience. For the rest of his life, he’s going to have to live with the knowledge of what he did.’

Alison nodded.

‘How very true.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, the main thing is to avoid the whole unsavoury business being dredged up yet again. I just want to forgive and forget. That’s why it’s so vital to do what the police suggest and find someone who will verify that I was here.’

She nodded again.

‘Of course. Have you spoken to any of the people you saw that day?’

‘That’s why it’s a bore,’ I sighed. ‘You see, when you cancelled our lunch date, I was so depressed I just couldn’t face doing anything else. I’d really been looking forward to seeing you. In the end I sat at home all day and read, did some cleaning, listened to music, that sort of thing. No one called, no one saw me.’

I marshalled the loose crumbs on the tabletop into a neat line.

‘Actually, I was wondering if perhaps you’d do it.’

Alison sipped the last of her coffee and bent over the cup, studying the swirl of grounds on the glazed ceramic.

‘Do what?’

‘Vouch for me.’

‘Me? I wasn’t even here myself!’

‘What time did you leave?’

‘Well, I suppose I left the house about one thirty or two, but …’

‘That’s good enough. Instead of phoning, let’s say you drove over to tell me in person that you wouldn’t be able to make lunch. We had a brief chat, then you went on to Dorset. It would have been on your way, more or less.’

Alison frowned.

‘But I didn’t.’

‘No, but you might have.’

‘But I didn’t !’

I nodded vigorously, as though we were discussing some abstract issue such as nuclear power or the poll tax.

‘I see your point, Alison, but I wonder if you aren’t being slightly over-literal about this. Why should we have to go through months of grief and disruption just because fate intervened to break our lunch appointment? All the police want is a token statement. You won’t be under oath, no one is going to cross-examine you. You’ll just be confirming what they already know, namely that I was in Oxford that day and therefore can’t have had any hand in what happened in Wales.’

Alison stared at me for longer than I would have believed possible. Time must have got jammed, I thought, or maybe I was suffering a stroke. Then there was a thunder of feet on the stairs, a thrush gave voice outside the window, and Rebecca burst into the room.

‘Crime!’ she cried.

Alison’s face melted back into an expression of maternal warmth. I realized how unnaturally set and strained it had become.

‘What do you mean, dear?’

The solution to that crossword clue. It’s an anagram. The iceman is Mr Ice.’

I forced a congratulatory smile.

‘And “buyeth not his round”?’

‘Crime doesn’t pay.’

As she strode out to the hallway, I felt a shiver of panic, like one who realizes he is the victim of black magic. In the mouth of that unsuspecting child the phrase resounded like the judgement of the Delphic oracle. I knew that nothing would go right for me now.

‘I don’t know what amazes me more,’ Alison said quietly, ‘that you should be prepared to perjure yourself or that you imagined that I would. Evidently we don’t know each other as well as I thought.’

The Perrier had flowed like water during lunch, but we had consumed nothing stronger. When I tried to stand up, though, I staggered like a drunk.

‘Well thanks, Alison. It’s been real. The police will be in touch some time this afternoon or tomorrow, I expect. A Chief Inspector Moss. I’d keep an eye on him if I were you. Just between the two of us, he struck me as a bit of a DOM. Prosing on about female pulchritude with his hands buried deep in his raincoat pockets, that sort of thing. I have a feeling that you’re the sort of woman he might go for in a big way, Alison.’

She stared at me in shock. I had never spoken like this to her before. I had never been flippant, ambiguous or disrespectful. Above all, I had never mentioned the Wonderful World of Sex.

‘I think you’d better leave,’ she said with quiet dignity.

Quiet dignity, like omelette aux fines herbes , was very much Alison’s forte. She did it superbly well.

I walked along the hallway to the front door. The strains of the piano rang out from the living room, where Rebecca was practising. It was the same piece I had heard over the phone, but the effect was quite different now, like a landscape one is leaving for ever.

On the way home I made a detour through the back-streets of East Oxford, just for old times’ sake. I found myself staring out of the window of the BMW with something approaching envy. Yes, there was squalor and despair, but also a range of human contact, a warmth and vivacity quite foreign to the genteel suburbs where I now lived. What violence there was here was only for show, a desperate appeal for help or attention, the uncoordinated flailings of a drunk too far gone to do any damage. But Alison and her kind were kung fu masters, all formal smiles, elaborate politeness and swift, vicious dispatch.

I had thought I was one of them, that was my mistake. I thought my birth and education entitled me to a place among them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My place was here, among the people I despised. Them I could manipulate, as I had Dennis and Karen. From the moment I tried to move up to Alison’s level I was lost. I’d wanted her because she was the real thing. It had never occurred to me that I was not. But the real thing is not charm and chat but a clinically precise sense of what you can get away with. And that I lacked. Otherwise I would never have made the fatal blunder of trying to seduce Alison morally. I had mistaken her for a jumped-up shopgirl like Karen, to whom the ties of romantic love were sacred and who would sacrifice anything to stand by her man. Karen would have lied to the police for me without a second thought, but to propose it to Alison was as gauche as asking her to give me a blow-job in the Bod.