Life's Lottery (52 page)

There are bars on the window – a rare sensible precaution – so you have to find another room.

Laraine has the shells. You have the gun. You turn out the lights and leave.

The landing light comes on. Hackwill is bringing people upstairs.

‘I’ve a new Purdey,’ he says. ‘Beautiful lines.’

You only know a Purdey is a gun because it was the name of Joanna Lumley’s character in
The New Avengers.

You silently open a door and pull Laraine into a dark room. Hackwill drones on about guns, anticipating the vermin-blasting season.

Your eyes get used to the dark. You’re in a small bedroom at the back of the house, a baby’s room, with a dangling Postman Pat mobile. Someone small is asleep in a crib. Hackwill and Helen have an eighteen-month-old daughter, Samantha.

You open a window and look down at the garden. A fan of light spills from french windows, but beyond is a stretch of shadowed lawn. Laraine breaks the gun again, to make sure you’ve taken the shell out, and drops it out of the window. It thumps, and lies in the shadows.

Samantha wakes up and gurgles. You freeze. The gurgle becomes a whine, the whine threatens to become a scream. You look at Laraine, willing her to do something. She shrugs. The incipient scream starts coming.

You both stand over the crib, cooing. The scream stops and down-shifts to something like a gurgle but with the occasional sniff-verging-on-a-sob.

‘Pick her up,’ Laraine whispers.

You can hear Hackwill and his guests in the next room. Voices are raised, Sean’s among them. They must have come upstairs to continue the argument out loud, away from the others.

You pick up the small baby-bundle and cuddle it. Her. Thank God, she’s not wet.

There’s a sharp slap from the next room.

‘Just get the money, Rye,’ Hackwill says.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Hackwill lost it, hauled out one of his prized guns and shot Sean dead?

The world doesn’t work like that.

Tiny hands pull at the lapels of your jacket. It’s as if Samantha were frisking you.

‘Present,’ she says, a perfectly formed word. She’s been taught acquisitiveness before she can walk. She presses your hankie pocket. There’s something there, a hard cylinder. ‘Gimme,’ she says.

You fish it out and give it to her.

‘Present,’ she says, satisfied, clutching it in tenacious little fingers.

Laraine gasps.

You put Samantha back in the crib. The baby sticks the shell in her mouth and starts gumming the metal end.

It’s not going to go off.

Samantha makes a tastes-bad face and throws the cartridge away. You scoop it out of the crib. Luckily, the baby’s vocabulary isn’t developed enough for her to give anything like a credible account of this incident.

You sneak out and go downstairs. Laraine returns to the party and you creep out the front door. You feel your way round to the garden, find the shotgun, and nip back to Sean’s car. Laraine has left the boot unlocked and there’s a cloth inside to wrap the gun. You put the shells beside it, rearrange things to conceal the murder weapon, then lock the boot.

The hard part seems over.

A little giddy, you go back to the party and one drink gets you pretty drunk. You’re satisfied that Hackwill and Sean are skulking around glaring at each other, and concentrate on enjoying yourself. To rub it in, you flirt with Helen and suggest charades. You give a distracted Sean ‘How to Steal a Diamond in Six Un-Easy Lessons’, and watch him make an ass of himself. After a few more drinks, you can’t stop laughing. Laraine gets quite embarrassed, but it’s not as if you were married.

* * *

The difficult thing is managing it when Hackwill doesn’t have an alibi. If you make an effort to lure him out of the way, he’ll know you’ve framed him. He might not be believed but you want not to be involved at all.

You have to be ready to kill Sean at a moment’s notice, depending on Hackwill’s movements.

This means an agony of waiting. Over the days – weeks – your nerves stretch.

Sean gets antsy about the way you spend all your evenings hanging around his house, not least (you suspect) because it cuts into his bitch-busting. The loaded shotgun is in the larder, hidden behind the ironing-board. As Laraine says, Sean is never going to look there.

Laraine’s biggest sacrifice, which she bitterly resents, is that she has to let the char go and do all the vacuuming and ironing herself. That ought to carry a mandatory death sentence in itself, she claims.

Finally, while you’re all watching
Top of the Pops
, you get a break. Sean receives a telephone call that makes him uncomfortable.

‘Keith,’ he says, after hanging up, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

‘I’m sorry,’ you say.

‘Rob’s coming over. Business. Confidential.’

Bingo.

‘Do you want me to go too, dear?’ Laraine asks.

He shakes his head. ‘No.’ He is sweating.

Excellent. If ever there was a credible murder set-up, this is it. Sean and Hackwill are like actors in your play.

‘When will he be here, dear?’

‘Five, ten minutes… Keith,
please
.’

‘Of course,’ you say. ‘I understand.’

‘You’re a mate.’

If he’s at most ten minutes away, Hackwill must be on the road now.

‘I’ll put on the kettle,’ Laraine says. ‘Will Councillor Hackwill be bringing anyone?’

‘No. Just Rob.’

Perfect. No witnesses. No alibi.

You make a fuss of finding your coat and gloves. Laraine sees you to the door and gives you the gun, which she has fetched. You drape your coat over it.

Sean fusses and frets inside.

This would have been an uncomfortable meeting for him. He’d probably rather be shot in the face than meet Hackwill tonight. You’re doing him a favour.

On the doorstep, Laraine kisses you. Since you’ve been plotting, the affair has been less intense physically, but you’re obviously more intimately and deeply involved than before.

‘It’ll be over soon,’ you say.

Has Hackwill taken the Sutton Mallet turn-off yet?

You think you hear his car coming. You smile, to encourage Laraine.

You break the shotgun in your gloved hands and check. It’s loaded. It’s been thoroughly cleaned, which means Hackwill’s prints aren’t on it either. You hope that’s misleadingly suspicious in itself.

You and Laraine stand well away from the porch.

‘Sean,’ Laraine shouts, loud enough to get her husband’s attention, ‘there’s a problem with Keith’s car.’

He comes to the door, grumbling.

Can you do this?

You bring up the shotgun.

If you blast the bastard, go to 147. If you hesitate, go to 151.

S
ean makes no pretence of being angry that you’ve pried into his files. That irritates you a little: he assumes you’re the sort of person who habitually sneaks and spies and looks into other people’s business.

You’ve visited him in his office and laid out everything you know he’s done. You’ve kept the flimsies with your ‘signature’.

Sean has two more weeks at the bank. You can see he’s thinking, looking at you as a problem he has to solve. What is he capable of? Why is it that you are the one who feels uneasy?

‘I suppose you want something.’

You really haven’t considered that.

Could you report him? He’s your friend. And there would be a scandal that would hurt the bank. Dad wouldn’t have liked that.

But what do you want?

If you try to persuade Sean to give himself up, go to 137. If you try to force Sean to pay you off, go to 140.

‘
D
ad, you have to,’ Jasper pleads.

‘Not this way. Not at James’s expense.’

‘I’m your son.’

‘James is family.’

He looks as if his toys have been taken away.

‘You’ll come out alive. No mind-jail time. And Zazza will be looked after. Sam too. But I can’t let you abuse and betray James. He’s been betrayed enough.’

Jasper is impatient, disgusted. He has no idea what you mean.

‘Put things right,’ you say. ‘Put the credit back where it should be. And resign. Retire early. I’ll seed you in any business you like up to a hundred K. But that’s it.’

Jasper is used to dictating terms not being forced to them. He has acquired power without learning to be tough. His survival has been based on what he knows, on tricks he can pull off. Without James behind him, and you, he wouldn’t be in this office.

He is in a sulk, being forced to a corner.

Finally, he goes through with it.

You stand over him, watching him as you once watched him do unwanted homework properly or rake up garden leaves. He could be wiping the mainframe for all you know but is just scared enough – of James finding out – to do a decent job of reparation. When it’s over, he’s empty.

For the rest of your life, you’re going to have a sorrow you can never share with James, with Christina, with anyone. There will always be Jasper. The taste is bitter. But Jasper isn’t everything.

And so on.

‘
S
ean, you have to tell someone what you’ve done.

‘Who do you suggest? The police?’

‘Warwick.’

‘Warwick!’

‘He can help you.’

‘He’ll love that.’

‘Sean, you can’t go on like this.’

‘Actually, Keith, I think I can. In two weeks’ time, I’ll make the last repayment. Nobody will be any the wiser. When I leave this office, I’ll take my
private
files with me. Nobody will get hurt.’

‘But it’s wrong. Legally, morally. You’ve abused trust. The bank’s trust. Our customers’ trust. My trust.’

‘Keith…’

‘Dad trusted you, Sean. You wouldn’t be here without him.’

‘Neither would you. He made us take you on. You and your bloody CSEs.’

‘That’s irrelevant.’

‘No it’s not, it’s a hippopotamus.’

‘You won’t do anything?’

‘Keith, not everyone wants to spend his life in some provincial bank branch. We used to call your father “Captain Mainwaring”. Being manager here isn’t all there is.’

‘What’ll you do?’

‘That’s not the question. What will you do?’

‘…’

‘Well?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So, Keith, it’s make-your-mind-up time.’

You have to talk to someone. If Tristram, go to 142. If Vanda, go to 146.

‘
Y
ou can’t,’ you tell James. ‘It’d be murder. It’d make you like
him
.’

James’s gun wavers.

‘You’re right,’ he says.

‘
Mary
,’ Hackwill shouts.

She levels her gun and neatly shoots James in the head, swivels, levels again, and shoots Victoria.

‘Pity about Shane,’ Hackwill says.

* * *

Blit blurt.

* * *

Hackwill’s face is changing. It becomes liquid, bloats, whitens. For a moment, you see him as a middle-aged woman: Mrs Fudge, the Ash Grove dinner lady. So he was behind that too, the ordeal of custard. Hackwill has always been the monster in your life.

Mrs Fudge’s red eyes grow, become compound. The Hackwill-cum-Fudge head loses all semblance of humanity. Black bristles swarm all round the egg-shaped mass. A ruff of spider-legs sprouts from his neck. It was an Arachnoid. All along.

Mary’s gun is aimed at you.

‘Finish it,’ the shadow-spider says, with Hackwill’s bark.

You hear the shot that kills you.

Go to 0.

‘
M
e,’ you say, mouth dry.

‘Pardon?’ Mary asks.

You clear your throat. ‘Me.’

Mary is surprised. She can’t understand anyone who’d volunteer for death.

‘I’m sorry,’ you say.

‘What for?’ Mary snaps.

‘That you don’t get it. I’m sorry for you.’

‘Bloody cheek,’ she says, and shoots you in the knee.

Agony explodes. Chris screams, the twins screech.

‘Promise me,’ you say through tears.

Mary is almost sad. She can’t promise. Chris knows their names and has seen their faces.

‘Spare the children,’ you say. ‘Kill her, but spare the children.’ Your heart is a stone.

Grebo moans disappointment. ‘I want to
fuck
.’

Mary thumps him in the face with the butt of her gun.

‘You’re harder than your brother,’ Mary says. ‘Much.’

‘Give me your word. Kill Chris, but not the twins.’

‘Want me to adopt them?’

‘No, just make sure they’re found. Make an anonymous call.’

Chris has stopped crying. She’s scared speechless, but you know your wife agrees with you.

‘Okay,’ Mary says. ‘I respect you.’

You try to remember Mary as a little girl, as a teenager. You knew her so little. Will she honour her word? She seems stranger even than you expected. Shane and Grebo are the mindless thugs you thought Hackwill would send. Mary is incalculable. Can she kill babies?

Mary points her gun at Chris’s forehead. Your wife’s eyes are expectant, eager, hopeful.

If you trust Mary not to kill the twins, go to 181. If you don’t, go to 194.

‘
W
hat do you want?’ Sean asks. ‘Money.’

It occurs to you that Sean could arrange things so that when he leaves, you – not Tristram Warwick – become manager.

Or you could go for a pay-off now, and more later.

If you ask for money, go to 155. If you ask to be made manager, go to 165.

‘
I
f a man did that to me,’ Mary says. ‘I’d kill him.’

Funny you should say that…

You catch the laugh before it escapes, but Mary spots the smirk.

‘I thought so,’ she says.

Your heart throbs.

You’re in the kitchen with Mary. She looks at you, a cat-smile playing around her lips. You remember the monster she used to be.

Laraine comes in. She’s been shopping, in town.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Rye,’ Mary says, warmly.