Gordon Reece - Mice

The thought of this sinister clown following us through the labyrinth of country lanes, shadowing us up and down the bright aisles as we filled our trolley, watching us select our most intimate personal items — soaps and shampoos, Tampax and toilet rolls — filled me with revulsion. I remembered the dream I’d had the night after we’d killed Paul Hannigan: the car parked in the narrow lane that began to follow the van taking us to prison, the shadowy figure behind the wheel. Who’s that? Mum had asked me in the dream. It’s the watcher , I’d replied. Was it possible I’d known all along that Paul Hannigan hadn’t been alone, but at a level so deep in my subconscious it could only reveal itself in a dream?

‘Like I say,’ he went on, ‘I couldn’t work it out. I’d seen your girl covered in blood, I was sure Paul had been doing her in. Now here she was, out shopping, all hunky-dory. And Paul had disappeared off the face of the earth. No one had seen him, no one had heard from him. None of it made any sense. And when I tried his mobile, the line was just. . dead.’

( The strange grimace on Mum’s face as she’d beaten the mobile into a masticated pulp. )

‘And that’s when I started to think that maybe you two had done something to him.’

The morning clouds had dispersed completely now, and the kitchen was filled with bright golden sunlight. It reflected off the fat man’s glasses so that when he turned towards the window his eyes disappeared behind two white rectangles of glare.

The ebullient spring sunshine was completely out of tune with the tense scene unfolding in the kitchen. I couldn’t help thinking that if this were a novel or a movie, the blackmailer would have arrived in the middle of a ferocious thunderstorm, a day of growling thunder and lurid yellow forks of lightning, torrential rain lashing the gravel drive. But this wasn’t any fiction, this was real life. There he sat in our sun-filled kitchen, slowly unpicking the stitches of the shroud that hid Paul Hannigan’s decomposing corpse, while the day outside called for picnics and barbecues and ice-creams at the seaside.

He looked directly at Mum now, his hands holding his belly like a bright yellow beachball he’d just caught and was preparing to toss back to her. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s when I started to think that you two might have done something to Paul.

‘I tried to think back to that night and what I’d seen in those few seconds when I’d been standing in the garden looking into the kitchen. I could remember it pretty clearly, considering how drunk I’d been: the kitchen lit up like a TV set and Paul chasing the girl round and round the table. I went over it and over it in my mind. I had to be missing something, because Paul hadn’t killed no one. It was driving me crazy — and then at last I cracked it!

‘I’d been concentrating on Paul all the time, see, I’d been looking at what he’d been doing. But when I focused on the girl instead — well, the whole picture changed like magic. Paul weren’t chasing her around the table any more — she was chasing Paul ! And if she was chasing Paul,’ he added, smiling, ‘then maybe the blood she was covered in weren’t hers.’

Mum’s right hand slipped subtly into the fleece’s pouch pocket. I knew she had her hand on the gun. Was she taking the safety catch off? Was she getting ready to shoot him?

The blackmailer hadn’t noticed her surreptitious movement. He continued with his story, apparently suspecting nothing.

‘If something had happened to Paul in this house, I was sure there’d be some sort of clue left behind. So I decided to come back to have a poke around and see what I could find.’

I saw Mum draw herself up to her full height and straighten her back. She knew there’d been no clues for him to find in the house; she’d taken care of that herself, she’d dotted every i , she’d crossed every t . But I had a horrible presentiment of what the blackmailer was going to say next, and I felt my knees start to tremble in my pyjamas.

‘I’d seen you go shopping in town that Saturday morning, so I drove down here the very next Saturday, betting that this was a regular weekly outing. Sure enough, at about ten I saw your car go past with the two of you in it chattering away like a couple of canaries. So I drove on up to the house and let myself in.’

‘How did you get in?’ Mum asked, horrified.

‘Paul may have talked a load of rubbish most of the time, but he weren’t wrong about the windows on these old properties — easy to force as anything. I see you’ve had new locks fitted to them now. Very sensible.

‘Anyways, I searched the place from top to bottom and I couldn’t find nothing. The whole place was as clean as a whistle and I’d almost given up, to tell you the truth, when I found this .’

He leaned forwards and reached into his back pocket, his face turning an unhealthy claret with the effort, his breathing coming in phlegmy rasps. Finally he tossed a pink plastic card onto the kitchen table. Mum picked it up, not understanding, having to squint closely at the childish signature with its silly arabesque and the postage-stamp-sized photo before — with an involuntary grimace — she understood what it was.

She was unable to resist throwing a hostile, accusatory glance at me.

‘It’s Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence,’ the fat man said. ‘I found it upstairs, hidden away in a little box in your girl’s dressing table. I knew that if this was here. . then Paul Hannigan had never got out of this house alive.’

Mum watched him struggle to put the driver’s licence back in his pocket. She seemed somehow reduced, deflated. She collapsed in the chair opposite him as if she feared she’d fall down if she didn’t move quickly.

She’d been defeated by the blackmailer, by the obese bullfrog grinning at her across the table. And she’d been defeated, ironically, by the person she’d been trying so hard to protect: me . I’d given the enemy the key that had enabled him to get inside our fortress, to get behind her carefully prepared defences and force our surrender. She couldn’t hide her bitter disappointment, her sense of betrayal.

‘It weren’t difficult to work out what must have happened,’ the fat man said, smiling smugly at his own cleverness. ‘You disturbed Paul while he was robbing the house, and there’d been a fight. Somehow your girl here managed to get his knife off of him and in the struggle he’d ended up dead. You thought you could cover the whole thing up. You thought you could outsmart everyone and just carry on with your nice little lives as if nothing had happened. But you hadn’t counted on me cropping up, had you?’

He put his muscled dwarf arms behind his head and leaned back in his chair.

‘I’d bet money he’s buried out there in the garden somewhere. Am I right or am I right?’ He chuckled his phlegmy treacly laugh again. ‘Yeah, I thought so.’ He grinned, Mum’s sullen silence all the confirmation he needed.

He stared steadily at Mum, obviously savouring every second of her misery. Her hand had long since dropped out of the fleece pocket and was hanging limply by her side.

‘There you go,’ he said cheerily, ‘now you know everything . So are you gonna pay the twenty grand, or do I have to write a little note to the boys in blue?’

‘How many other people have you told about this?’ Mum’s voice was hoarse and frail.

‘None,’ he answered flatly.

‘How can I be sure about that?’ she persisted. ‘How do I know you haven’t blabbed about this in every pub in town? How do I know you’re not just the first of God knows how many blackmailers who are going to come crawling out of the woodwork?’