Iain Banks: Dead Air

Mr Merrial nods slowly. ‘And my wife?’

I let my brows tremble. I glance at Celia, who is looking aghast at her husband. In a small voice I say, ‘I, ah, may have referred to her as… a gangster’s moll, or something.’

I have half a hope this might get a laugh, or at least a smile, but Merrial looks quite serious. ‘And so you thought you’d burgle my house?’ he says, not sounding completely convinced. Not sounding at all convinced, in fact.

‘I realised what I’d done when I woke up,’ I tell him. ‘So I called your house again. The answering machine was still on so I guessed you were away for the weekend. I drove to your place, climbed into the garden from the roof of my Land Rover, found a key to the back door in one of those artificial stone things, realised the alarm wasn’t switched on and thought, Hey, the Gods are with me here.’ I shift in my seat. This is a mistake. The shit feels like some disgusting jelly inside my pants and jeans, and is already seeping through to my overalls. ‘Then I really, really needed to take a dump, so I started looking for a toilet. I finally found one. Then I went back down to the study, wiped the tape and-’

‘You’re leaving my wife’s bedroom out of all this,’ Merrial said. He glanced at Celia, then smiled. ‘I can’t help noticing.’

Celia glared at me and crossed her arms.

‘I’d thought earlier that if there was any sign I’d – anybody had – been in then I should try to make it look like a robbery,’ I tell him. ‘So I took a couple of rings from Mrs Merrial’s dressing table. Then, after I’d got the tape cleared, I realised taking the rings would just draw attention to the fact that somebody had been in the house, so I went back to her room and put them back where I’d found them.’ I look at Merrial. He looks sceptical. I shrug as best I can. ‘I’d never done this sort of thing before, Mr Merrial. I’d talked to people; I knew about artificial stones and fake Campbell ’s Soup tins and pretend mains sockets for hiding valuables in and stuff like that, but I didn’t think I’d get in and out without an alarm going. But it didn’t matter. I was going to get in no matter what it took; smash a window, break down a door; anything, because even if I was caught by the cops, whatever sentence I got, whatever fine I was hit with or time I had to serve, it had to be less… less unpleasant than what would happen to me if you heard that answering machine tape.’

‘And if my friends in the Met had caught you, what were you going to claim was your purpose in breaking into my house?’

I shrug again. ‘My, ah, first thought was to claim that I’d become obsessed with your wife, but then I thought you’d probably be pretty upset about that, too, so I decided I’d claim that I’d become a… vigilante or something, that I was looking for evidence of your criminality, or just wanted to give you a taste of your own medicine, subjecting you to crime. It didn’t matter how stupid it sounded, how lame, as long as I got that tape wiped.’

‘But the study was locked, Kenneth,’ Merrial says reasonably. ‘How did you get in there?’

I frown. Just lie, I think. Deny the video, the recorded evidence. Pretend it’s Lawson Brierley we’re dealing with here. Trust to the graininess of the image, the awkward angle the camera has of that door and the big gloves I was wearing to obscure the fact I used a key. ‘No it wasn’t,’ I tell him. ‘The study was open.’

‘Kenneth,’ Merrial says gently. He nods at the Range Rover where Kaj put the laptop. ‘We can see it was locked.’

‘It wasn’t!’ I protest. ‘I stuck my head in, saw it wasn’t a bedroom, caught a glimpse of the answering machine and kept going!’ I look at Kaj. ‘I did! It took about two seconds; I was desperate. I was about to…’ I let my voice fall away and look down at my lap. ‘I was about to do what I’ve just done, for Christ’s sake. I took a very quick look, closed the door and kept on going.’ I’m breathing deep and hard. There are tears in my eyes. I look at Merrial. ‘God, man, what I’m telling you is bad enough; what more could make it worse?’

Merrial looks slowly from me to Celia. He looks thoughtful. ‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself, Kenneth.’ He switches his gaze to Kaj. ‘That possible? What he just said?’ he asks.

Kaj shrugs massively. ‘Perhaps,’ he says. His voice is deep but not as Swedish as I’d been expecting. ‘The frame capture rate is about one per three seconds. He might have had time to open and close the door between frames.’

Merrial looks at me. ‘The study was locked when I got back yesterday,’ he says.

I shrug again. ‘Well, I don’t know!’ I say, almost wailing. ‘Maybe I put the sneck down.’

Merrial looks puzzled. ‘The what?’

‘Scottish word,’ I say desperately. ‘The, the, the catch thing down, on the lock inside the door. Anyway, I was about to leave when you came back, so I hid in the cupboard in the gym. I heard you on the phone to your wife saying you were calling somebody called Sky or Kyle or something. Then when you were showering I almost made it to the front door when, when -’ I gesture at Kaj ‘- when he came in, so I hid in the cloakroom by the front door. Once he’d gone upstairs I just walked out.’ I let out a deep, juddering breath. ‘That’s it. Whole truth. Nothing but.’

Mr Merrial purses his lips. He looks at me for a few moments, and I grit my teeth and return his stare. He nods.

And I realise then that there is – just – the hint of a chance. There’s a hint of a chance because, complicit in the conspiracy Ceel and I are involved in here, attempting to deceive Mr Merrial, there is, surprisingly, a third person, and that third person is Merrial himself.

The man doesn’t really want to find out he’s been cuckolded. He knows he has to be suspicious – suspicion is sensible, suspicion is safe, suspicion is how he lives his entire professional life – but, ultimately, he’d rather not discover his wife and another man have made a fool of him. He will go so far to make sure it looks like nothing’s happened – as far as is reasonable, as far as he must to establish the truth beyond something like reasonable doubt – but he won’t pursue the matter as doggedly and as determinedly as he might a debt, or an insult from another crook.

His own pride puts him on the same side as Ceel and me; none of us wants him to know the truth.

Merrial makes a sort of huffing noise that might be a laugh and gets down from the Bentley, walking slowly over to me, his hands raised in front of his chin as though in prayer. He stops and looks at Celia. ‘Maria was last out, apparently,’ he says. ‘I think we need a new maid.’ Celia’s frown deepens. Merrial comes up to me. He sits down, gently, on my right knee. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Totally fucking wrong about all the above. Oh fuck. Here it comes.

He smiles at me. ‘This is on account, Kenneth,’ he says easily, in a pleasant voice. ‘Nothing compared to what’ll follow, I should think, but this is personal, from me, for invading my privacy.’

He takes a good back swing and punches me hard in the balls.

I’d forgotten how much it hurt. School playground, last time this happened. I’d forgotten the lights, the nausea, the waves and waves of subtly differing types of pain that course through your body when this is done to you. Not being able to double up properly just makes it worse. It was as though your brain had stored up all the orgasms you’d ever had in your whole life to that point, then paid them back, all in one go, with the polarity reversed so that what had been ecstasy became agony and what had been over in seconds each day was lumped together over five or ten consecutive minutes of pure, grisly, pulsating pain.