Gordon Reece - Mice

‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’ He shrugged, but after a moment’s thought he seemed to accept that this wouldn’t count for much in the circumstances, and he tried to give her a little bit more.

‘Listen, luv,’ he said. ‘I’ve done three long stretches inside, and every time it was because someone grassed me up. I don’t tell no one nothing no more. I’ve learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut.’

‘Why did you wait so long before coming here?’ Mum asked. ‘You found the driver’s licence — ’ she calculated quickly — ‘on the twenty-second of April: that’s over a month ago.’

He winked at me conspiratorially like a mischievous uncle. ‘She don’t miss a trick, your mum, does she?’ He turned back to her and his smile faded. ‘I was in hospital. I’ve got a dodgy ticker. I was in hospital almost a month. They only let me out the day before yesterday. Now, I think that’s enough questions. When are we gonna go and get this six hundred quid?’

Mum ignored him. ‘What about Paul Hannigan’s relatives? What about his friends? Won’t they be looking for him?’

‘He didn’t have no family,’ he said with growing impatience. ‘He was an orphan, so he told me. Said he’d grown up in care.’

‘What about his friends?’

‘He’d only been living down here a few months. He only knew a handful of people. He weren’t the sort that made friends easy. I probably knew him better than anyone. No one’s gonna miss Paul Hannigan, luv, believe me. And no one else is gonna figure out what happened neither. I’m the only one who knows. I’m the only one you’ve got to worry about.’

The fat man didn’t realize it, but everything he said was making the killing option more and more attractive. If he was telling the truth, then he was the last remaining loose end. Him and him alone. But now we were being given a second chance to tidy that loose end away.

‘How do I know you’re not going to keep coming back for more money?’ Mum said.

If there’d ever been any real doubt that the blackmailer would be back for more money again and again, his reaction to Mum’s question dispelled it for good. He jumped angrily to his feet, sending his chair scraping back across the tiles with such a lacerating screech that my hands automatically flew up to my ears.

‘That’s enough questions!’ he yelled. The jolly, avuncular persona he’d assumed vanished, and now there was only an ugly pouting mask, a monstrous, bloated baby face that was going to scream the whole world down because it wasn’t getting its own way. His truncated, muscle-swollen arms flew out from his sides, ready to punish, ready to hurt. ‘I’ve answered enough of your questions! You ain’t in a position to ask no questions! You ain’t in a position to make demands!’

There was a tense, awkward silence. I felt my heart racing wildly. Mum had shied away from him as if fearing a blow. The fat man stood glowering at her, his lips twisted into a pantomime scowl, his arms twitching with malignant energy. Some thin strands of hair had escaped the grip of his hair grease, and now waved like antennae above his bald scalp.

‘We go and get the six hundred now! No more questions! No more time-wasting!’

‘There’s no need to get aggressive,’ Mum said, putting up her hands in a submissive gesture. ‘I always said I was going to pay. We’ll go and get the money right now.’

She stood up and looked around distractedly, muttering, ‘Handbag. Where’s my handbag?’ She found it beneath one of the stools by the breakfast bench, picked it up and slipped it over her shoulder. ‘Now I just need my car keys,’ she said, patting her pockets and scanning the kitchen again, but at the same time not really looking, her mind detached, elsewhere. She was trying to make up her mind, I was sure of it. Trying to decide what to do: to pay the blackmailer or to kill him? To live with this gross leech sucking on her flesh for years to come, or, like a desperate gambler, risk everything on one more throw of the dice and take out the gun and shoot him dead.

‘Don’t worry about your car keys,’ the fat man said. ‘We’ll go in my car. It’s better that way.’ He looked scornfully at Mum and for a moment I saw her through his eyes: a scatty, spoiled, middle-class housewife, a stupid plump hen for his vulpine teeth to devour at leisure, a meal ticket for the rest of his life.

‘Are you sure you’ve got everything you need?’ he growled at her. ‘I don’t want to get all the way there and then find you ain’t got the right cards with you or you’ve forgotten your pin number or something.’

‘No, I’ve got everything I need.’

‘Come on, then, let’s go.’

He walked out of the kitchen, his anger forgotten, back to his jolly avuncular self, a hand in his pocket merrily jangling his car keys and change. ‘We won’t be long.’ He winked at me as he passed, like an old and much-loved family friend.

Mum still hesitated, a dazed expression on her face. She was trying to make up her mind, trying to decide what to do. Her hand went to the mouth of the fleece pocket but darted away again when the fat man barked at her: ‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’

Mum walked past me, her eyes on the floor, and followed him into the hallway. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but if she hadn’t shot him by now, surely she wasn’t going to — it had to be better to kill him inside the house than outside. There was no risk of being seen inside; the gunshots were less likely to be heard by someone passing. All I could think was that she’d decided to pay him the money after all.

I followed Mum up the hall, so close that I was almost tripping on her heels. The blackmailer had already opened the front door and stepped out into an idyllic May morning. He was walking across the gravel towards his car, and he was whistling, he was actually whistling , as if he didn’t have a care in the world! He opened the passenger door, then looked round for Mum. When he saw her hovering in the hallway, he called out angrily again, ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake! Hurry up!’ He held the car door open, waiting impatiently.

Mum turned to me and seized my shoulders fiercely. She brought her cheek close to mine and under the cover of a goodbye kiss whispered urgently into my ear: ‘What should I do, Shelley? What should I do?’

I stared straight at the blackmailer over her shoulder, at the bullfrog neck, the inflated dwarf arms, the obscene gut, the hand idly scratching at his groin, and with my face pressed close to hers, pretending to return her pretend kiss, I replied without hesitation.

‘ Kill him, Mum .’

Mum pulled sharply away from me and walked determinedly out of the house and across the drive towards the blackmailer, deftly switching her handbag from her right shoulder to her left as she went. When she was about two metres away from him she stopped and plunged her hand deep into her fleece pocket.

The fat man had started to move towards the front of the car on his way to the driver’s side, but he stopped when he saw Mum pointing the gun at his head, clutching it tightly in both hands, her left eye closed, taking careful aim.

His hands shot up in surrender and he pressed himself against the car’s front wing, arching his torso backwards over the bonnet, pathetically trying to increase the distance between his face and the gun as if those few extra inches could mitigate the bullet’s brutal impact. He cringed, unable even to look in the direction of the gun, squinting desperately away to his left and right as if convinced that the slightest eye contact with Mum would induce her to pull the trigger.

‘All right, luv,’ he said, over and over again, ‘all right, luv, everything’s all right now, luv, everything’s all right now, it’s all right, luv, it’s all right, everything’s all right.’