Ian Rankin - Beggars Banquet

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘Why should I?’ She gave me one of her looks and disappeared into the kitchen. I could hear running water. She was washing her cereal bowl. She hadn’t even thought to take mine, empty and on the floor beside me. I stared at the TV. No more porno evenings at Maxwell’s flat. No more fucking around with the remote. No reason to leave my own flat on a Friday night…

Then, without any warning, the real plan leapt into my head, so focused that it seemed like a gift from above.

I took a long detour on my drive to school, stopping at Maxwell’s. The lane was as empty as ever. I used his key to let myself in, climbed the stairs quietly and opened his bedroom door. Fingerprints didn’t concern me. As a close friend and frequent visitor, my prints would be everywhere anyway. I removed a couple of the videos from Maxwell’s wardrobe and while I was there, sniffed around in search of some secret hoard of gay stuff. But I didn’t find anything other than some football magazines under the bed.

‘Whatever turns you on,’ I said to myself as I debated bringing the body back into the flat, but decided against it. I wanted to set everything up before allowing Maxwell to be found. So he stayed in the car-boot all the way to school. I did consider rigor mortis. I wasn’t sure about these things, but reckoned he was going to be stiff by the time I got him back to the mews. He’d be all bunched up. I wasn’t sure what the police or the pathologist would make of that. TV detectives were infallible, but I had doubts about their real-life counterparts. I hoped my doubts were well founded.

The two free periods before lunch were my real break. There was no one in the video lab, so I could edit to my heart’s content. There were three videos in all, two from Maxwell’s wardrobe and one from his living-room. This last video was shot at one of his parties. You know the sort of video I mean. The camera is aimed at you, so you open your mouth and eyes wide and wave wildly into the lens, sometimes saying something crass at the same time. Either that or you studiously ignore the contraption, despite the film-maker’s enticements. And you still look a prat. Of course, Maxwell being behind the camera most of the time, there were lots of shots of the women in their party dresses, with attendant leg and cleavage, Max calling out a cod director’s ‘Enthuse, darlings, I want some passion from you!’

After an hour, I had basically what I wanted. It didn’t look great. I wasn’t at all sure that it looked even halfway persuasive, and I was about to drop the whole scheme, but there was fever in my brain now. It was all or nothing. I was risking all my winnings on another turn of that wheel. Greedy, that’s what I was. Avarice was my sin of the moment.

‘To hell with it, it’ll do.’

I knew the police wouldn’t be watching for clues anyway. They’d be watching for other things, and finding them.

During the lunch-hour, I drove back to the mews, this time pulling Maxwell out of the boot and laying him at the bottom of the stairs. Who could tell, maybe the whole thing would be taken for an accident after all. I didn’t put the porn videos back in the wardrobe – they were en route to the dump – but I did put my little home-made ensemble in there. Then I sat down in Maxwell’s study and switched on his word processor. I’d been thinking about the letter, and it proved easy to write. I read it through and it seemed convincing, so I printed it out. Then I crumpled the sheet of paper and placed it beneath the occasional table at the top of the stairs.

I was back in the study, checking everything was as it should be, when the downstairs door opened. For a hysterical second I thought: It’s him! Maxwell’s back! How was I going to explain…?

But then I heard a sort of squeal, and a protracted thud. I tiptoed into the hall and looked down. A middle-aged woman was lying inside the door. Maxwell’s cleaning lady. I’d never set eyes on her before, but I knew he had a ‘Mrs Mop’: he never tired of repeating the fact. I crept quickly downstairs and out of the door, and kept my eyes on the rearview mirror all the way back along the mews.

It all moved surprisingly slowly, I thought. In the movies they wrap up these sorts of cases within a good ninety minutes (or occasionally a supremely lousy ninety minutes), but even after we buried Maxwell no one had been asking the obvious questions. Then one evening Mark and Jimmy phoned, one after the other. Both had the same story to tell. They’d been asked to go along to the police station, and there had been shown a video recording. Both said the same thing.

‘They told me not to mention anything to you, but I thought… you know. You being a mate and all.’

And then there was a ring at the doorbell. Alice answered, and after a few moments came back into the living-room. She didn’t look well.

‘It’s the police,’ she said. ‘They want to talk to me about Maxwell. Down at the station.’

And indeed there were two grim-faced constables loitering on the stairwell.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked them.

‘Nothing to worry about, sir,’ said the more loquacious of the pair.

Well, I thought, thank God for that.

I didn’t go with Alice. I lay along the sofa, finding it curiously comfortable. The TV wasn’t on. I stared at the blank screen until, hours later, there was the sound of a key shivering in the lock. Alice looked exhausted and numb. Without demur she flopped on to the beanbag.

‘You won’t believe this,’ she said. ‘They think I had something to do with it.’

I sat up. ‘What?’

‘They think there was something going on. Between Maxwell and me.’

‘What?’ This time I stood up. Alice eyed the empty sofa, so I sat back down again. ‘They think what?’

So she told me about the interrogation. She called it that, not an interview but an interrogation. A nice WPC who didn’t say anything except when the two fat male detectives left the room.

‘She asked me if I wanted a cup of tea.’

The whole thing had been tape-recorded. ‘They kept on at me about Maxwell, how well I knew him, what he was like, did we ever see one another alone. Christ, he was your friend, not mine. Besides, I told them he was gay. One of them smiled. He didn’t say anything, but he grinned and shook his head at me.’ She looked like she might cry, but only for a moment. Soon enough she was all anger and retribution. She’d talk to our solicitor.

‘Solicitor?’

‘The one we used to buy this place. I told them, I said I was going to talk to my solicitor.’

‘What did they say?’

She swallowed drily. ‘They said that might be a good idea.’

The following morning, they came for me.

Not constables this time, but a detective sergeant and another man. The other man drove, while we sat together in the back. The detective sergeant had bloodshot eyes and was overweight. He took me to an interview room where Detective Inspector Claverhouse was waiting. There was a tape recorder on the table between us. On another table sat a TV monitor with a video player built into its base. We had something similar at the school.

It took a lot of questions, some of them about parties I’d attended at Maxwell’s flat. Then Inspector Claverhouse rose from his chair.

‘There’s something we’d like to show you, sir. Just so you can give us an opinion.’

Although they must have watched the video a dozen times, they still drank it in, especially the latter sections. Then they turned to me.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the first bit… with my wife…’

‘You recognise your wife then?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘That was her. At a party of Maxwell’s. I didn’t realise he’d taken so much film of her.’ He hadn’t, of course. After a while he’d handed the camera to me, and I’d concentrated for a few minutes on Alice, trying to work out if she looked better or worse through a lens. Better was the answer. The distance helped, and she did possess a camera-ready figure.