A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3)
Read A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) Online
Authors: John Dolan
A POISON TREE
by
John Dolan
___________
TENTION BOOKS
This book is intended entirely as a work of fiction. Although it contains incidental references to real people, this is solely to provide a relevant historical and geographical context. All other characters, names and events are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
All quoted words in this book are believed to fall under the category of fair use. However the publisher is sensitive to the rights of copyright owners and should any such copyright owners have cause for concern please contact the publisher.
A POISON TREE
published by Tention Publishing Limited
Kindle Edition
Copyright John David Dolan 2014
John David Dolan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including, but not restricted to, Google, Amazon or similar
organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
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ISBN 978-0-9573256-5-4
Cover photograph copyright
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I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
William Blake, A Poison Tree
A church. Of all the places I might have chosen to seek refuge, I would never have guessed it would be a church.
Even in my current state I can still register the smell of damp and dust, still see the darkness in old corners, feel the desperate yearning of the supplicant who cannot pray to a god he knows does not exist.
I hear the door open and close behind m
e, but I don’t turn around. I don’t care who is there. It no longer matters.
All that concerns me now is the recording of events.
It has struck me that I have to write down all of it. I feel driven, compelled to do this. I need to be able to reassemble the fragments of my life, somehow to restore a measure of order to this chaos of my existence.
To sift the wreckage, to inspect it, to categorise, to understand.
But this is not an easy process. The shards of my mirror are many and far-flung, and sharp. My fingers and hands are bloody from their edges and angles. My mind’s eye is full of images I cannot switch off; images of bodies pulsing and throbbing in innumerable acts of sexual congress. Images of anguish and pain. My brain hums like some relentless machine.
W
ho am I now? I need to know.
DAVID
“I’m thinking of killing my wife,” said Jim. “Can we talk about that for a while?”
“Sure,” I replied. “Why not?”
My drinking companion looked at me for a few seconds as if he were a barrister examining some witness for evidence of his reliability. He was probably wondering just how drunk I was. Although we had both been downing beers and whisky chasers, he appeared stone-cold sober. Rather too sober in fact, rather too in control.
He gave a s
mall shrug, sipped his beer and ran a finger across the condensation on the glass.
During the slight pause
, I asked my alcohol-slowed brain to remember how and when I had first met Jim Fosse. I had the feeling it had been at some unmemorable Midlands Chamber of Commerce dinner, not unlike the one we had sat through this evening. We were hardly close friends, although he lived in Leicestershire in the next village to ours. Indeed, I knew little about this chubby American other than he came from Greensboro, North Carolina – a town with which I am completely unfamiliar – and that he was some kind of ‘fixer’ on international energy deals. Based on his patter, he seemed to spend a lot of time travelling to exotic places, usually in Africa or South East Asia. I gathered that he was currently retained by a Midlands-based power company, assisting them in governmental negotiations on projects in Thailand and the Philippines.
Of cou
rse the question I should have been asking myself was how we had arrived at the discussion topic of uxoricide.
Jim cleared his throat.
“My first wife, Carol, had the decency to poison herself with mushrooms just as she was becoming tiresome. But this one shows no signs of dying anytime soon,” he drawled.
“Your first wife died of
mushroom poisoning
?”
“Yup.
Accidental poisoning, I might add. I was in Nigeria at the time getting a pipeline contract closed. It came a bit of a shock. The timing was convenient as it turned out, but the
modus mori
itself was somewhat unexpected. Yes, I will always be grateful to that little helping of toxic fungus. It saved me a fortune in lawyer’s fees and alimony.”
“When was th
is?”
“Eight years ago. A year before I married Monique. I figured I’d better get back in the saddle quickly
as hookers get expensive after a while. You want another drink?”
“No, I’m good,” I responded.
He raised an eyebrow. “Worried about what your little woman will say?”
“I think we were talking about
your
little woman.”
“Ah yes,” he took a mouthful of beer. “Not so little actually. Have you met Monique?”
I shook my head.
“Shapely, she is. She has the best breasts
my money could buy.”
Jim’s expression became serious and he put a hand on my shoulder.
“Tell me, David, are you a fan of black and white films?”
“Is this pertinent to the subject of your killing Monique?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well then, I like some
old films.”
“Such as?”
“Um …
Casablanca
, perhaps?”
He looked pained.
“You’re not into romances, then, Jim?”
“I’m more of a devotee of
film noir
, David. You know the sort of thing? The shadowy world of the femme fatale, the cynical detective, the scheming bad guy who is never short of a quip. That’s my kind of world. One of moral ambivalence where nothing is as it seems and everyone has a secret.”
Jim made an expansive gesture, spilling some of his beer in the process.
“Whereas today’s entertainment – nay, today’s
life
– is so colourful and yet so unutterably boring. Nothing is blurry or in soft focus any more. It’s obvious who the good guys are, or so they would have us believe.”
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked.
He touched the side of his nose. “You know who ‘they’ are, David. Everybody knows. They are the people who want us to live law-abiding, insipid lives punctuated with mortgages, children, pensions and all the other fuckwit paraphernalia of the modern age.” He paused and leaned towards me. “I hate that sort of shit. I was born in the wrong era. I should have been out there on the mean streets of Prohibition New York, going to jazz clubs, getting involved in racketeering and machine-gunning anyone who pissed me off.”
“And wearing spats.”
“Exactly.”
We clinked glasses and drank.
The pub – The Bell – was still busy, though nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the two middle-aged businessman talking nonsense at the corner table. I couldn’t remember how we had ended up there, but I was glad we had. It was my local and I could walk home afterwards and leave my car in the car park. Jim was
definitely
going to need a taxi.
“Anyway, to get back to my original subject,” Jim continued
. “Killing Monique.”
“Sounds difficult,” I proffered, noticing how thick my tongue felt.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Killing your wife is easy. There are a gazillion ways to do it. Trust me on this. It’s getting away with it that is the difficult part.”
“Ah.”
“That is where writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and James M Cain were such geniuses. They had great ideas on how to escape the consequences of unacceptable behaviour. And not only that, but original, imaginative concepts on how to go about the unacceptable behaviour in the first place.”
“So you’re planning on doing away with your wife based on the plot of a
bleak, over-stylised detective novel?”
“Maybe.
Have you seen a film called
Strangers on a Train
?”
“I don’t recall it.”
“Released in 1951, I believe. One of Alfred Hitchcock’s better efforts. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel. A
woman
, but a good writer nonetheless,” he added.
I finished my beer and contemplated what I hoped would be my final whisky.
I became aware that Jim was peering at me again.
“Please continue,” I said.
“I am listening.”
He looked doubtful but continued anyway.
“Well, the plot revolves around two strangers who meet up by chance.”
“On a train I presume?”
“Shut up
, David. As they talk, they discover that each of them has someone whom they’d like bumped off. Then one of them suggests they murder each other’s problem people. As they explore the idea further, they realise they can arrange the timing of the killings so that the appropriate individual has a watertight alibi. Since they are ‘strangers’, no reasonable man would suppose they were in cahoots to carry out a double murder scheme. Indeed there would be nothing to connect them to each other at all.”
“
Ingenious, Jim, but where is this going?”
Jim pursed his lips in a thoughtful fashion.
“It occurs to me, David, that most people would categorise us as acquaintances rather than friends. After all, we don’t know each other that well, do we?”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“It would be better if we were complete strangers, but that is where fiction parts company with reality, I’m afraid. We have to work with what we have.” Jim gave a deep sigh.
I picked up my whisky.
“So what you’re saying, Jim – if I’ve followed this correctly – is that you’d like me to kill your wife for you.”
“You catch on fast.” Jim knocked back his whisky and smiled at me.
“Presumably I would do this while you are out of the country on one of your business trips so that no suspicion falls on you.”
He nodded before adding, “Whatever method you like, provided it’s not mushroom poisoning. That would be a giveaway.”
“And in return, you do what for me?”
“I kill your wife, of course.”
“But I don’t want Claire killed.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Quite sure, yes.”
Jim scratched his chin.
“Is there anybody else you’d like killed? Your wife would have been the obvious choice, but maybe there’s somebody else I could take out for you.”
I shook my head
again.
“Oh, come
on
, David,” said Jim with impatience, “you can’t tell me there isn’t
somebody
.”
“Nobody springs to mind at present, I’m afraid.” I downed my whisky.
“Well, that’s disappointing.”
“So how did the story end?”
“What?”
“The
Strangers on a Train
story.”
“Oh, not so well.” He sounded morose. “One of the guys thought the other wasn’t serious, so it came as a shock when he found he had to deliver a corpse.”
“He thought the other guy had been joking all along?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmn. Tricky.”
“Yes.”
Jim drummed his fingers on the table, a faraway look in his eyes.
The Bell
was starting to empty.
“You could always hire a hit man, Jim, if all else fails. Some of the places you travel to, I’m sure you could find a gun for hire.”
“Without a doubt,” he responded, although he didn’t sound enthusiastic. “In Pakistan you could have someone disappear and still get change from fifty bucks. Although no gun would be involved. Bullets are too expensive, whereas knives are always available. The same goes for India, as a matter of fact.”
“Sounds like a bargain. Even if you had to pay for their return flight to England.”
Jim scrunched up his nose. “Naw, those guys operate on a strictly local basis. If I wanted the job done here I’d have to hire a real professional and they’re expensive. Then you have all the aggravation of sorting out their payment in cash so that nothing can be traced through bank accounts. The money laundering regulations and the access that government and law-enforcement agencies have to your bank account records these days is shocking.”
“Hard for an honest criminal to make a living, eh?” I observed, but Jim’s attention was elsewhere. “Anyway, you seem to know a lot about this stuff
.”
He sniffed. “Maybe I just watch a lot of old films,” was his response.
I waited for his face to break into a laugh and for him to tell me that he loved Monique and that he wouldn’t want to harm a hair on her expensively-coiffured head, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “I guess a hit man would be my last resort, but if you do change your mind about wanting your wife knocked off you will let me know, David, won’t you?”
“Of course I will.”
He fished a business card from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. It was white and embossed. There was no company logo. It read,
James Fosse, Consultant
, and under the name was a mobile number and an e-mail address. Anonymous and somewhat enigmatic – like the man himself.
We rose from the table and I waved goodnight to Ian who was standing behind the bar looking like his glass was half empty, as indeed it
inevitably was. As usual he acknowledged the gesture with reluctance. What looked like a scowl illumined his wrinkled features. The term ‘curmudgeon’ might well have been coined for Ian Kenney, Proprietor and Licensee of The Bell.
As soon as the cold night air hit me I felt nausea rise in my throat and
I was grateful that my front door was less than a ten-minute walk away, even after making an allowance for zig-zagging.
Jim was
insistent that he did not need a taxi and was quite capable of getting himself home. There was little point in reasoning with him on the perils of driving while well over the legal limit. He struck me as a man who would have no truck with anything he regarded as petty bureaucracy.
I will say, though
, that as his car left the pub car park and disappeared around the bend in the road, it didn’t move like it was driven by a man who had consumed, by my count, six pints with whisky chasers. Any uninformed observer would have concluded the driver of the vehicle was rational, clear-headed and acutely aware of everything he was doing.