Gordon Reece - Mice

The fat man’s glasses had gone skittering across the gravel with the impact of the fall, and without them his face looked different, strangely naked, almost featureless. His eyes were closed, and in death his face had lost all the snarling anger it’d had when he’d shouted at us over his shoulder. It was tranquil now, almost serene. The face of a favourite uncle, always ready with a funny story or risqué joke, passed out on the sofa after an enormous Sunday lunch. The stunted, over-muscled arms lay at his sides and I thought of all those wasted hours in the gym, straining to build up arms that could punch their way through doors only to find that at the moment of crisis they’d been useless, raised meekly in the air in surrender.

I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, looking at the blackmailer’s corpse. No guilt. No pity. No regret. He was not a human being to be mourned, he was just a problem to be solved. We’d have to find a way to get rid of that huge corpse and the car — unbelievably, we’d have to get rid of the battered turquoise car for a second time .

‘There’s no blood,’ Mum muttered, more to herself than to me.

‘Huh? What do you mean there’s no blood? There must be blood.’

‘Look for yourself. There’s no blood. There’s no bullet wound .’

She was right. His head, which should have been blown apart by the exiting bullet, was completely intact. The great yellow hump of his T-shirt was spotted with greasy food stains and peppered with dirt from the gravel, but there wasn’t a single drop of blood on it. Apart from a small graze on his chin and a little gash on his forehead where he’d crashed to the ground, there was no sign of a wound anywhere.

I went to say something, but Mum had already wandered off down the drive.

‘You’re right,’ I called after her, completely astonished, not understanding. ‘There’s nothing at all!’

‘And look at this!’ Mum was standing by the righthand gatepost, pointing at something near the top. The straight line of the post’s edge was broken, as if a bite had been taken out of the wood.

‘I must have missed him,’ she said incredulously. ‘Somehow I must have missed him. From two inches away!’

She began to walk back, stooping to pick up the blackmailer’s glasses, which appeared completely undamaged.

‘What killed him, then?’ I asked when she was standing beside me again.

‘What killed him?’ Mum laughed a dry, humourless laugh. ‘ We killed him, Shelley. We scared him to death. It looks like he’s had a massive heart attack, but it’s just the same as if my bullet had hit him — it’s still murder in the eyes of the law.’

We scared him to death . We scared that enormous brute with those vicious little arms to death. The thought filled me with a curious satisfaction and pride which I would have liked to savour, but the thought of all the hideous work which lay ahead loomed in my mind and overshadowed everything else.

‘We’d better move him,’ I said. ‘If someone drives past. . ’

‘Yes, we’d better.’

I went round to his feet and bent down to pick up one of his legs, but Mum gently touched my back to tell me to stop.

‘He’s too heavy to drag, Shelley. Let’s bring the car down and take him back up to the house that way.’

It was no easy task to get the fat man’s body into the back of our car. He must have weighed nigh on sixteen stone, and although we could just about manage to lift him between the two of us, the problem was to manoeuvre him onto the back seat before he got so heavy we had to put him down again. After several failed attempts, we decided that the only way we could manage it was by Mum actually sitting on the back seat with the fat man’s head in her lap and then dragging him back in on top of her while I held on to his legs, looking away, trying not to breathe in the ammonia stink of urine from his tracksuit bottoms. When half his torso was inside the car, Mum extricated herself from beneath his inert gelatinous mass, wriggling frantically like an insect trapped in jam, and let herself out of the other door. With me pushing from one side and Mum pulling from the other, we eventually got the body into position on the back seat.

Mum was very worried about injuring his head or legs when we closed the back doors, and she spent a long time trying to get his legs in a position where the sharp edge of the door wouldn’t strike them. Eventually I had to lean over from the passenger seat and hold them until she managed to slam the door shut.

It was only a short distance back up to the house in the car, but we both automatically put our seat belts on. The irony almost made me laugh out loud — the two of us buckled up for a fifteen-second journey like the conscientious citizens we were, while the body of the man we’d just murdered lolled precariously across the back seat.

Mum parked the Escort exactly where it had been before, right in front of the blackmailer’s car.

She turned off the engine and in the ensuing silence I asked, ‘What are we going to do with him, Mum?’

She seemed miles away, lost in thought, and I mistook her silence to mean she didn’t know.

‘I’ve got an idea!’ I said, turning to her excitedly. ‘What about the mines? We could put him in his car, then push the car into the mine shaft that you used before. A car would be able to fit into the shaft, wouldn’t it?’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Mum said flatly, turning to look at me now. ‘But we’ve got to act fast .’ She glanced at her watch and gnawed at her bottom lip. ‘If we take too long it might not work.’

She leaned over and looked me intently in the eyes, her hand on my knee. ‘I want you to do everything exactly as I say, Shelley. Do you understand? Exactly as I say .’ Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence was still fresh in her mind and I nodded emphatically, determined to show her that she could trust me one hundred per cent from now on.

‘Good. Now help me to move him,’ she said, and started to get out of the car.

‘Move him where ?’ I groaned, suddenly overcome with horror at the thought of digging another grave in our garden.

‘There’s no time to explain now, Shelley! Just do what I tell you! ’ she snapped.

Mum dragged the fat man’s corpse out of the car, heaving backwards with her arms locked beneath his armpits until his buttocks were on the very edge of the back seat and I was able to take hold of his legs.

We carried him towards the house, stopping every few metres or so to rest. When we were roughly halfway between his car and the front door, Mum cried out to me to put him down and we lowered him gently onto the gravel. I noticed that his Rolex now had a large semi-circular crack in its lower half, which reminded me of the smiley faces I used to draw on my exercise books at junior school.

‘We have to turn him over,’ she said, and we turned him so he was lying face-down, his head pointing towards the house. Mum knelt down and vigorously brushed away the small leaves and smudges of dirt that the back of his yellow T-shirt had picked up from the gravel. When she was satisfied she stood up, and taking the gun out of her fleece pocket, handed it to me.

‘Take this upstairs to my room and hide it under my pillow. Then get dressed and come back out here as quickly as you can. Go on!’

I did what she said at the double. I had no idea what she was doing; all I understood was that we were involved in some sort of race against the clock. When I came back downstairs, Mum was kneeling by the fat man’s corpse, fishing through his back pocket. I saw her take out Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence and I shrank back into the hallway, not wanting to provoke an outburst by appearing just at that moment. I waited until she’d slipped it into her jeans’ back pocket before I stepped outside.