Хилари Боннер - A Deep Deceit

I had still not covered myself. I was not functioning at all. I just stood there before him naked, bruised, bloody and shivering. But I had not realised how bitterly cold I was until he touched me and I felt the warmth of his arms enfolding me. I began to tremble then. My whole body was shaking.

I leaned against him heavily. ‘He’s in the bedroom,’ I said in a very small voice.

Carl nodded. He asked no questions. If he hadn’t guessed before he certainly had then. He took off the raincoat he was wearing and wrapped it round me.

The door to the kitchen was ajar. Carl led me back there and sat me in a chair, making sure I was sitting up straight, almost as if he was afraid I might fall over. Then he went upstairs.

I expect he was only out of the kitchen for a couple of minutes but it seemed like for ever. Everything appeared to happen in a kind of slow motion that morning.

When he reappeared he was carrying a heavily bloodstained knife.

I began to remember, then – as much as I ever remembered any of it. It began when I decided that the next time Robert beat me I would be ready for him. Most of Robert’s attacks occurred in the bedroom, happened in bed, in some horrible way linked for him with the act of sex. I could not take any more. And I could imagine only one way to escape my tormentor and that was to destroy him. I think he had made me half mad with pain and fear. I sought out the sharpest and most lethal knife in the house, my four-inch Kitchen Devil, with its point like a needle, which I used for peeling vegetables, and tucked it under the mattress of the bed I shared with the husband I had grown to hate and fear so much.

I did not tell Carl what I had done because I did not want him to share my burden of guilt. But inevitably he eventually had to. Because, of course, it was to Carl I turned at once after the deed was done.

I still could not believe that I had actually used the knife, but I knew I must have done.

The night I killed him, Robert had found the knife under the mattress where I had hidden it. He had taunted me with it, grabbed me round the neck and shaken me as he asked me very softly what I planned to do with it.

And as I sat trembling at the kitchen table, when I put my hand to my throat I could still feel the angry weals he had left there. No wonder my voice was so strange and hoarse.

Robert had been horribly angry and had beaten me more viciously than ever. I knew that at some stage he had punched me so hard that he had knocked me off the bed. I thought I must have hit my head on the bedside table, or on something, and been concussed for a few moments, because after that everything was shadowy. Perhaps Robert had been afraid that he had finally gone too far. Perhaps he had backed off, then, allowing me to grab the knife and use it on him. I could still see and feel the hot sticky blood spurting out of him, hitting me full in the face.

I had some vague recollection of eventually crawling off, maybe only half conscious, to the sanctuary of the bathroom, but that was all. The rest was a blank.

Carl sat down next to me and put the bloodstained knife on the table in front of us.

‘Oh my God,’ I said. ‘What have I done?’

‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you,’ he said gently.

I nodded, staring at him. Of course I knew. I just didn’t want it to be true. ‘I’ve killed Robert, I’ve stabbed him to death,’ I responded simply.

‘Yes,’ he said and his voice was very solemn. ‘We’ve got to leave now. Quickly.’

I started to cry, then, and the tears brought some relief, but not as much as his presence, his calm strength.

‘Nobody is ever going to hurt you again,’ he said.

He took me upstairs to the bathroom, stood me in the shower and washed me. He found clean towels in the airing cupboard and dried me with them. Then he fetched me some clothes from the bedroom – I could not go in there again – and dressed me.

When I was clean, dry and fully clothed, at last I began to feel marginally better. ‘Shouldn’t we telephone the police?’ I asked in a fairly half-hearted manner. From the start that never seemed a very attractive proposition.

‘Oh darling,’ he soothed, putting his arms round me again. ‘Do you think you have the strength to deal with all that?’

I hesitated. ‘I s-suppose not,’ I stammered.

‘Honey, at the very best you would need to face a trial and would have to plead guilty to manslaughter,’ he went on. ‘But it could be worse than that. You could well be charged with murder. You must accept that. You stabbed your husband repeatedly. He was a clergyman. Respected. Popular. I know what you did was in self-defence and that you acted out of desperation, that you were frantic, beside yourself, not responsible. Of course I know that. But who else is going to believe it? That is what you have to ask yourself.’

His words soothed me the way they invariably did. I was sure he must be right. He was always right.

‘You and I know that you destroyed a monster,’ said Carl. ‘I’m not going to let that destroy us.’

Carl had driven over in his old red van.

‘The transport’s not up to much, but it’s good enough, I reckon, to take us plumb away from here, someplace new. We are just going to leave the past behind us.’

Nothing could have seemed more attractive at that moment. Carl packed a small bag for me, just clothes. I didn’t care what I left behind as long as I could get out of that house, and away from Robert’s body and all the dreadful memories, as quickly a possible.

I was in a kind of dream as we left the manse, but Gran’s bike, the only possession I really cared about, stood in the hallway and as we passed it I asked Carl if there would be room to take it with us.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything you want...’

Later I regretted that I had not taken the few books I owned and valued, including several that Gran had given me and written messages in, but at the time I did not care about anything except getting away.

Carl wheeled the bike out to his van and I took the key from where it lived on a hook in the hallway and, out of habit, locked the front door of the manse.

First we drove to Carl’s Sheen Road flat and he asked me to stay there while he visited a couple of local galleries which had sold some of his work and owed him money. ‘We’re going to need all we can get,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be quite safe. Nobody knows you are here. Nobody even knows we know each other, do they?’

I said I certainly hoped that was so.

He was only gone for a couple of hours, but it seemed much longer. When he finally returned he began to load the van with what possessions he wanted to take with him, mainly his painting gear. He also prised up a floorboard and removed an old leather document case. ‘Cash,’ he said. ‘I’m not into banks. I only deal in cash and I stash away what I can. I collected three hundred-odd quid this morning. We should have enough now to last us till we get settled.’

One way and another it was almost mid afternoon before we clambered back aboard the van and embarked irrevocably on our Great Escape. I remember that I did not even ask Carl where we were going. I didn’t care as long as it was away from my past and my terrible crime. I was vaguely aware, as we ploughed through the slow moving traffic of the Sheen Road, down through Mortlake, over Chiswick Bridge, along a short stretch of the A4 and on to the M4, that we must be heading west.

‘We’re going to Cornwall,’ Carl announced. ‘St Ives. It’s the place for a painter. Don’t worry, honey. As long as I have my paints I can provide for us.’

Of course I hadn’t given the practical side of what we were doing a thought. I had never had to think about that sort of thing, not even with Robert. The drizzling rain continued through most of our journey and even though it was warm in the van I sat shivering by Carl’s side all the way to Cornwall.