Gordon Reece - Mice

When she saw I was back, she said, ‘Your slippers, you lost your slippers somewhere in the drive. Quickly go and find them, then put them upstairs in your bedroom where you usually keep them.’

I ran off into the drive, my feet actually stinging more now in shoes and socks than when I’d been walking around barefoot. I found one slipper straight away but the other one was nowhere to be seen. It was several minutes before I finally found it suspended in one of the rhododendron bushes.

When I got back to the house Mum was carefully placing the blackmailer’s glasses on the ground a few feet in front of the body. When she was happy with the way they looked (lenses on the gravel, one arm closed, the other arm open), she left them and went over to the turquoise car. She closed the passenger door that the fat man had been holding open for her, then went to the other side and opened the driver’s door. She walked right around the car, eyeing it critically, then made her way to the island in the centre of the driveway, glancing back over her shoulder as she went as if she didn’t trust the car to stay as she’d left it when her back was turned.

Mum picked up her handbag from the shrubbery where she’d dropped it when she set off after the blackmailer. She didn’t slip it onto her shoulder, but held it in her hand, and the long leather strap hung down and curled itself into the shape of a noose.

She looked back towards the car, but now she seemed to be looking beyond it into the farmer’s field, in the direction of her first shot. Then she turned and squinted across at the trees, where her second shot had gone. I followed her gaze and found myself looking at the ash with the white tear high up in its trunk. Mum stood there frozen in contemplation, the only movement her long white fingers kneading the soft leather of her handbag, then set off resolutely down the driveway.

I waited until she’d disappeared from sight before discreetly following her, knowing full well that she didn’t want me near her right now, and that any questions were likely to provoke a furious rebuke.

At the point where the drive dog-legged, I concealed myself behind a bush and spied on her through the foliage. She was down by the gatepost. She seemed to be clawing at it with her fingers, rubbing at it furiously with her sleeve. Then she dropped into a crouch and began moving slowly across the gravel on her hands and knees like an animal. What on earth was she doing? Had she gone mad?

When she finally stood up, clapping her hands and cuffing at her knees, I slipped back to the house and waited for her by the front door.

She reappeared a little while later and, after pausing for a moment as though running through a checklist in her mind, began walking towards me at a funereal pace, her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her. She stepped over the fat man’s corpse with fastidious care — as if avoiding a dirty puddle — then stopped suddenly and picked something up. I took a pace closer and just managed to catch a glimpse before she dropped it into her handbag: it was the fat man’s half-smoked roll-up that he’d flicked away before coming into the house. Mum snapped her handbag shut and stood up with a loud cracking of her knees.

She stood there intently surveying the scene like a film director who wants to be absolutely sure that every detail of the set is perfect, every prop is in the right place, before crying action! I surveyed the scene too — the loathsome car with its driver’s door wide open, the blackmailer’s corpse humped face-down in the drive, the glasses lying on the gravel with one arm erect like a cocked ear — but I understood none of it.

‘I’ve got my slippers,’ I said as I came up behind her.

My voice made her jump and she turned round abruptly, unsmiling.

‘Good. Now put them upstairs like I told you.’

‘OK. Then what? What’s next?’

‘Next?’ She put her hands on her hips and looked at me strangely. ‘Next, we call for help.’

I followed her into the house, completely confused now.

‘ Call for help? I don’t understand. What’s going on? What are you doing?’

Mum explained in a rapid machine-gun burst of words as she strode down the hall into the kitchen.

‘I’m going to call the emergency services and say that we were sitting in our lounge when a strange car pulled up in our drive and a man got out, clutching his chest, and collapsed. I’ll say that he’s unconscious and he doesn’t seem to be breathing and we don’t know what to do and can they send an ambulance straight away!’

She glanced at me over her shoulder but it was all too quick for me to take in.

‘He died of a heart attack , Shelley. There are no marks on him, there’s nothing to make them suspect that we had anything to do with his death. They’ll just assume he started to have a heart attack at the wheel of his car and made for the first house he saw to try and get help, but died before he could make it to the front door.’

She studied the face of her wristwatch, her lips moving with her thoughts, then snatched up the phone.

‘But I’ve got to call them right away. It’s ten o’clock already — he’s been dead for half an hour.’

I stood there speechless as Mum’s plan slowly sank in. Like all the best ideas, it seemed obvious once you heard it — but I was sure it would never have occurred to me. It was incredibly bold. And it would take nerves of steel to pull it off. The ambulance would get rid of the fat man’s corpse for us. The police would get rid of the fat man’s car for us. The authorities themselves would get rid of all the most incriminating evidence of our crime for us. We wouldn’t have to do anything. We would be above suspicion — the good Samaritans who vainly tried to help a stranger.

Mum wedged the receiver between her cheek and shoulder.

‘Take those slippers upstairs now and put them away like I told you,’ she said as she dialled the number with a trembling index finger.

The ambulance arrived surprisingly quickly, given how remote Honeysuckle Cottage was. It came bumping up the drive at a quarter past ten, its siren wailing and blue lights flashing, full of earnest, boy-scout eagerness to do good. I was dreading meeting the ministering angels who were racing to save the life we’d just taken ( would they be able to see what had really happened when they looked into my eyes? ), but at the same time I was bored by the thought of the melodramatic rigmarole they were about to go through to try to save the fat man’s life. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men weren’t going to be able to put this Humpty together again.

Two paramedics — one in her wrinkled fifties with dyed blonde hair and frameless glasses, the other much younger, chipmunk-cheeked with a masculine crew cut — got out to attend to the fat man. They didn’t run, but sauntered over calmly; smiling, experienced professionals who knew how important it was to keep everyone calm, how important it was not to rush. Meanwhile, the driver, a tall gangly youth with horrendous acne, started to unload equipment from the back of the ambulance: an oxygen cylinder and plastic tube with some sort of bag attached to it, a black box like a guitar amplifier that I could see from his limping gait was heavier than it looked.

Mum fussed around the two paramedics, playing the shocked householder who’d had her quiet Saturday morning shattered by the unexpected arrival of this human tragedy on her doorstep. She answered their questions with a well-feigned anxiety to help. When did he collapse? Ten — no, about fifteen minutes ago. Have you given any CPR? I’m sorry, I don’t know how, I’m sorry. . Have you moved him? No, I haven’t, I wouldn’t dare. . No one would have thought that she was telling black lie after black lie.