Peter James: The Perfect Murder

She went back and peered at him. Neither man had moved. Don stood still, his eyes wide open, his mouth open even more.

‘Bloody hell,’ he gasped.

Victor lay still, with his skull cracked open like a broken coconut, blood spurting in all directions. His eyeballs bulged, unseeing, from their sockets. His tongue had shot out and stayed out. An orange and grey goo of brains leaked through his shattered temple.

Don said, ‘I think he’s brown bread.’

Joan had heard cockney rhyming slang in gangster films. She knew what brown bread meant. It meant dead.

She said nothing.

There was hair and blood on the end of the hammer. She stared at it, as if she had just performed some conjuring trick. Now I have a clean hammer. Abracadabra! Now I have blood and hair on it!

Now she had a dead husband.

A dead husband leaking blood and brains onto the sofa.

Leaking forensic evidence.

She put the hammer down on the floor and started shaking wildly, as she began to realize just what she had done.

She looked at Don in desperation. He was staring at Victor, wide-eyed, his mouth still open, shaking his head from side to side. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus.’ Then he looked back at her.

She had no idea what was going through his mind.

‘Why – why did you have to hit him so hard?’ he asked.

‘You’d have hit him softer, would you?’

After some moments, Don said, ‘This is probably not the time for an argument.’

Chapter Nine

In the utility room off the kitchen, Joan had a big chest freezer squeezed in next to the washing machine and the tumble dryer. Victor had got angry when she’d bought the freezer. He told her it was a waste of money and where the hell were they going to put it?

Joan had replied that it would pay for itself because of all the sell-by-date bargains she could buy in her supermarket. Now she stood over it, with the lid open and icy vapour rising. She was pulling out all those bargains she had been piling into it for the past year.

Out came a packet of lamb cutlets with a Special Offer! sticker. Then came a big bag of frozen peas and a huge tub of Wall’s vanilla ice cream. There were three chocolate cheesecakes that she had been planning to eat by herself. She thought they were too good to share with Victor! She handed each item to Don, who placed them on the floor.

Every few moments she would peer out of the window. They had drawn the curtains and blinds on all the other windows downstairs, just in case anyone happened to peer in. However, the blind on this window had fallen down months ago. Lazy Victor had never bothered to put it back up again.

She could see the lights of the houses in the valley below and the dark outline of the Downs in the distance. She could see the stars and the rising moon. It was almost a full moon. In the light from it she could see the little greenhouse in the garden. She thought for a moment about the tomatoes Victor had planted. He was never going to see them, or eat them. Victor wasn’t even going to see daylight ever again.

For a moment, just for a tiny moment, she had a choking feeling in her throat. Victor wasn’t so bad, she thought to herself. Not really so bad, was he? He had good points, didn’t he?

Don’s voice cut harshly through her thoughts. ‘Come on, keep it coming, nearly done!’

She stooped over, reached down to the bottom and pulled up a frozen sponge cake in its box. Then some Special Reduction pork chops.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

Then she peered in, nervously, all her thoughts in turmoil. What if he did not fit?

Five minutes later, Don and Joan had removed all Victor’s clothes. They also took off his watch and his wedding band.

‘No point letting anything go to waste,’ Joan had said.

Then they struggled to carry his fat, blubbery body through the kitchen and into the tiny utility room. They left a trail of blood spots and brain-fluid droplets as they went.

It was lucky Don was strong because Joan felt she had no strength left in her. With some pushing and shoving, they got Victor up over the lip of the freezer. Then, to her relief, he slid down easily to the bottom. She just needed to arrange his arms and legs so they would not obstruct the lid. All the time, Joan avoided looking at his bulging eyes. In fact, she avoided looking at any part of him.

She couldn’t help glimpsing his tiny penis, though. That’s the bit of you I’ll be missing least of all, she thought. Then she began to pile the frozen foods back in on top of him.

‘Hope he doesn’t wake up feeling hungry,’ Don said, as he finally slammed the lid down.

Joan looked at him in shock. ‘You don’t think—?’

He laid his big, meaty hand on her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. ‘He’s dead, don’t worry. He’s as dead as dead gets.’

They spent the rest of the evening cleaning. They scrubbed the downstairs carpets and the kitchen floor. They had to scrub the livingroom walls too, because they found spots of blood and brain fluid there as well. There were more on the ceiling and on one of the lampshades. A spot of blood was even on the television screen.

‘Hope Poirot doesn’t notice this one,’ Don said, wiping the tiny fleck from the screen.

Joan did not smile.

Chapter Ten

Shortly before midnight, exhausted from cleaning, and shaking from too much coffee, Don had to go home. He would be back first thing in the morning, he said.

Joan stayed downstairs for a long time. She stared at the dents in the armchair cushions where Victor had been sitting when she’d hit him. The house was silent. The air felt heavy, as if it was pushing down on her. She could hear the occasional tick of the fridge. But she didn’t dare go into the kitchen on her own, not tonight, not while it was dark.

Eventually, she went upstairs. The bathroom smelled of Victor’s colognes and aftershaves. The bedroom smelled of him too, but not so strongly. There were a couple of strands of his hair in the basin. That was another thing that annoyed her about him. He was always leaving hairs in the basin, the lazy bugger. He could never be bothered to remove them. She scooped them up now with a tissue. It was the last time she would have to do that, she thought with some small joy, as she dropped them into the pedal bin. The lid shut with a loud clang that startled her.

God, I’m jumpy, she thought. Hardly surprising.

She drew the bathroom curtain, then went through into the bedroom and closed the curtains there. She hoped none of the nosy neighbours were looking out of their windows. They would think it odd that it was after two in the morning and she was closing the bedroom curtains. She and Victor were normally in bed by eleven.

She took off all her clothes and put them in a black bin liner, as Don had instructed. He was going to take them to the municipal tip in the morning. He would also take Victor’s clothes and the hammer, which he had put into the bottom tray of his toolbox.

After pulling on her nightdress, she swallowed two aspirins. She removed Victor’s striped pyjamas from his side of the bed and put them on the floor. Then she climbed into the empty bed, which smelled of Victor, and switched the light off. She switched it back on again at once. The darkness scared her tonight. So much was buzzing in her head. There was a list of things she had to do tomorrow, which she had worked out with Don.

She stared at the blank television screen on the shelf just beyond the end of the bed. She looked at Victor’s brown leather slippers on the floor and at the Agatha Christie novel on his bedside table. She listened to the silence of the night. It seemed so loud. She heard a faint, tinny ringing in her ears. The distant wail of a siren from a police car, or an ambulance, or perhaps a fire engine. Then the screech of two cats fighting. One of them was probably Gregory, she thought. She watched her bedside clock.