Life's Lottery (56 page)

Mary’s face is stone. Then it cracks just a little. ‘We’ve found out some things,’ she admits. ‘Your sister is better off.’

Then she goes.

* * *

You want Mary to think Sean is on the run somewhere, pursued by dangerous criminal associates. After a few months, you think it would make sense if his body were to show up in the sea somewhere, identifiable only by dental records.

Laraine doesn’t want to dig him up.

You construct stories, strong enough to believe. You see connections between Councillor Hackwill and his shadowy business partners and organised crime. You imagine deals gone wrong at dead of night, with Sean floundering under blows from a thug’s blunt instrument as a godfather smokes a cigar.

It makes sense. You try to will Mary into parallel thoughts.

Laraine clings, insisting you take the risk of staying with her at night, sharing the bed where she once slept with the man now lying dead under the compost heap. She uses sex to keep you there, making herself desperately available whenever you want to draw away.

You worry about her. She is under strain. If Sean were found and Persons Unknown took the blame, this would all be over.

You go through Sean’s den. There are files on business deals. Most of it is beyond you. You’ve burned a few, just to back up what you told Mary.

How can you make this more incriminating?

* * *

Laraine answers the phone one evening and a deep voice asks for Sean. She gasps and hangs up. Wrong attitude.

You try to believe it. In this world, Sean was taken away by the mob, tortured and killed. You and Laraine are innocent bystanders. Maybe you’re in danger. Maybe Sean’s killers didn’t get what they wanted from him and will be coming after you.

You are authentically worried. You tell Mary the calls are continuing. They do. You take a few yourself. The voices – there are more than one – mean nothing to you.

‘Where’s the merchandise, Mr Marion?’

That’s the calmer, suaver voice. You imagine a ’50s face, with a slash of moustache and plenty of hair oil. An astrakhan collar. A cigar.

‘Tell Rye he’s fucked.’

That’s the one you think of as a cross between Arthur Mullard and Moose Malloy. A big bruiser who crushes nuts in his hands and has scars on his face. An ex-wrestler, with tattoos done in jail.

‘Where’s the merch?’

Laraine is going spare. You’re caught between panic and disbelief. Surely, you can’t have willed these callers into existence, to back up your story? It has to be a coincidence.

Sean really was crossing gangsters and you took him out of the circuit. Because he’s dead, he hasn’t made payments or committed crimes. His confederates are getting heavy, assuming he’s hiding out. You could be in real danger.

Mary is reassuring. This is too big for one WPC, you think. A disappearance, she can handle. A murder, she could cope with before the CID showed up. A major case against a crime organisation is way out of her fighting weight. But she is still your preferred police contact.

* * *

You think you’re being followed. Cars keep just out of sight. Unmarked vans are parked wherever you go. You imagine the red dots of laser sights playing over your skull.

While you are away, people break into the house and search. Somehow, Laraine doesn’t notice. She’s becoming a zombie. In the evenings, she clings to you, too wrung out to speak.

You wonder if this stage of the affair is through.

An anonymous envelope arrives. It contains blown-up photographs, taken through your bedroom window. You and Laraine. Unmistakably fucking.

Laraine goes white and emits a single sob. You look for a note. For a demand. Nothing.

The next call is from Mr Suave. ‘There’s someone here who’d like to talk to you, Keith.’

Laraine is in the room. You look at her. She’ll be no help.

‘Keith?’ says a small, tired voice.

It’s Sean. The world spins.

‘Is Mrs Rye with you?’ Mr Suave asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You’re unusually close, aren’t you?’

You imagine the sneer of contempt tinged with lechery.

‘Perhaps you’d put her on, Keith. Our friend would like to talk to her.’

‘She’s in no state –’

‘And neither are you. Not to get between man and wife.’

You hold out the phone and look at Laraine’s eyes as she hears the voice.

‘Sean?’ She can’t believe it.

‘Yes… no… yes.’

She hangs up. ‘They want money. Or they’ll kill him.’

You dig up the compost heap. You go down almost to bedrock and find nothing. It’s a bad time for Mary to call by.

‘Busy work,’ you explain. ‘Just trying to sort things out.’

‘There’s a lot of money missing at the bank. And Councillor Hackwill’s had a domestic incident with a paper guillotine. Four fingers gone.’

‘An accident?’

‘That’s what he’s calling it. Funny thing, though. He claims he was alone, but his secretary says he was in a meeting with two unfamiliar men at the time.’

You are sweaty and filthy, neck-deep in a grave. Mary hunkers down at ground level, looking into the hole.

‘Not a good place to plant,’ she says. ‘The shade from the wall.’

‘Buried treasure,’ you say. ‘I found a pirate map in Sean’s desk.’

Mary smiles.

* * *

‘I don’t care what they do to Sean,’ Laraine says. ‘But they have those pictures.’

Your mind isn’t working round this. ‘Laraine, they can’t do anything to Sean. It’s too late, remember?’

‘No, they have Sean.’ She has been able to wipe her memory.

This is your fantasy, though. You can’t impose it on reality.

‘It would be best if they killed him. If they showed him the pictures, he’d kill us. Both.’

Laraine is satisfied with the thought. ‘If we give them what they want,’ she says, ‘they’ll kill him for us.’ She flings her arms round your neck.

‘But what do they want?’ you say.

‘They call it “the merchandise”.’

‘But what’s that?’

You didn’t think your story through in enough detail. You wanted to drop hints, to leave gaps to be filled. As a consequence, you’ve no idea what the people who have Sean mean by ‘the merchandise’. It could be money, drugs, gems, postage stamps, a tin of marbles. You search the house over and over again. If Sean can disappear, the merchandise can appear. If the world has shifted to back up your story, that’d be logical. Is a suitcase full of fissionable material hidden in the basement? An ancient Aztec sacrificial idol with a hideous curse on it behind the fireplace? Cap’n Kidd’s treasure buried a dozen paces due east of the compost heap?

Laraine spends more and more time in a daze. Her grip on reality is so skewed she is no back-up at all. You have only what you see and feel to go on.

You know the house is being watched. Whoever took the pictures is out there on the wetlands, up a tree pretending to be a bird-watcher. You take to staying out of the sightlines of the windows. Doing as much as you can in the dark.

* * *

You receive a package containing four severed human fingers. At first, you think of Hackwill but Laraine recognises Sean’s wedding ring. The fingers seem fresh.

You call Mary. She is amiably baffled and says some explanation will come along.

Mr Thug laughs at you down the phone. ‘Next time, it’s your dick on the chopping block.’

You wake up in the middle of the night, a pillow over your face, pressing down? Is Laraine trying to stifle you? No. You hear her struggling, trying to cry out around a big hand clamped over her mouth.

Your wrist is wrenched and a metal cuff clamped around it. This is an arrest. It’s over. You are almost relieved. The pressure is off the pillow. Your nose hurts and you think it might be bleeding.

Laraine sobs.

You expect to be wrestled out of bed. But you aren’t. Doors close.

You tug on your cuffed arm. You’re tethered to something, perhaps the bed. You brush the pillow off your face. A smell of putrefaction assaults your gummy nostrils. You are handcuffed to something indescribably foul.

Laraine turns on the bedside lamp.

You look at the green mess that was Sean’s face.

The hand you are cuffed to has a thumb but no fingers. You work the cuff off the stump and are free, albeit with a dangling charm bracelet.

Sean, as you always knew, is dead. He has been for a while. There are dots on his face you didn’t make. Cigarette burns? But the dent in his skull looks as if it was done with a poker.

Laraine sits, useless, in a chair at her dressing-table, head in her hands.

Sean is making a mess on the duvet. You didn’t cut off his fingers, so far as you remember.

‘Did you see their faces?’ you ask. ‘There must have been two or more of them.’

She just cries.

What to do with Sean?

There’s still the hole where the compost heap was. You’ve not shovelled it back yet. You order Laraine to help. Meekly, she takes Sean’s stinking feet. You carry the body downstairs and out into the garden, then unceremoniously dump him in the hole.

You shovel in a few spades of earth, then see your mistake.

You and Laraine haven’t killed Sean. Mr Suave and Mr Thug did that, and dumped the body on you. Why should you cover up their crime? Mary has been following the plot. She saw the fingers. She knows you’re innocent. God, you
are
innocent. You didn’t do this. You might have dreamed up the people who did, but you are guilt-free.

It’s near dawn.

* * *

You finish your call to Mary and hang up. The handcuffs clink on your wrist. They make you look guilty but you decide not to try to get them off. They are part of the evidence.

There must be a ton of it.

Mr Thug and Mr Suave. Hackwill’s secretary saw them; and so, presumably, did Hackwill. You and Laraine have heard them on the phone. They’ll have been seen by others. They must have killed Sean somewhere, which will be scattered with gobbets of forensic evidence. And they must have come by car – didn’t you hear an engine when they left? – which someone might have seen.

It is odd that you never saw them. But there was something pressing that pillow to your face.

Mary turns up, not alone. There are several police cars. Inspector Draper, Mary’s boss, has been rousted from bed and isn’t happy.

‘Mr Rye was delivered here and handcuffed to you?’ Draper says.

‘Yes,’ you admit. ‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘So why did you put him in this hole?’

You’ve stepped off a cliff and are looking down. You were going to haul him out and take him upstairs again.

‘Looks like he’s been down here a while,’ a voice says from the hole. Mary climbs out, knees earthy.

‘The fingers,’ you say.

Mary shrugs, having no idea what you are talking about.

‘Keith Oliver Marion,’ Draper says, holding a document, ‘I have here a warrant…’

And so on.

‘
T
hem,’ you say.

Chris howls in fury. Mary is surprised.

‘You must be some kind of liquid filth,’ she says.

Shane tears the twins away from Chris, who claws and bites as Grebo grabs her.

You are a zombie. Moving, but dead inside.

‘Do you
really
mean it?’ Mary asks.

She admires your decision. It makes you like her.

You think about it.

If you really mean it, go to 166. If you don’t, go to 179.

B
ob Monkhouse makes jokes about VC Conyer’s punk princess days, which the somewhat haggard rehab survivor takes in good part. You realise you were at Sedgwater College with the woman, though you can’t remember ever speaking with her. Clare was scathing about the singer–songwriter’s miserabilism.

An envelope is delivered by Royal Marines who rappel into the studio. Then they go over to the machines, Arthur and Guinevere. The apparatus of oppression.

You know you’ll have achieved something.

As the first number is drawn, a wave of heat and sound and light blasts you.

Go to 0.

S
ean writes you a cheque for £2500. You took the sum out of the air. He tears the cheque out of the book – he’s with a rival bank, you note – and holds it out. You take hold of the slip of paper, but he doesn’t let go.

‘This is the last of it, Keith,’ he says, looking you in the eye.

‘Of course, Sean.’

He lets go.

* * *

During Sean’s leaving do, you take him aside and tell him you’ve thought about it and that he should pay you another £2500.

‘Think of it as a retainer.’

‘Why does blackmail make people talk like that?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Suddenly, you’re purring out of the side of your mouth. Like George Sanders.’

‘Two and a half grand. Tonight.’

‘And that’s Bob Hoskins.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘No, fuck you.’

‘Okay. But just pay.’ You still have the flimsies. The evidence.

‘Later.’

The mayor wants Sean to make a speech. Sean is reluctantly pulled away and puts up with a lot of embarrassing joshing. As you watch, thrilling to the power you have over him, Ro sidles up.

‘Watch the bastard squirm,’ she says.

Your heart catches. Has Sean told Ro about you?

You are called up to give Sean his leaving present. A bottle of Scotch older than he is. You smile at him. He thanks you, eyes incandescent with rage. This is good for you.

You drink too much and Vanda drives you home in the new car you bought with your ‘windfall’. There will be more luxuries from now on. Whatever Sean makes, you will be on a percentage. It’s a no-risk investment, with a far better yield than anything he could have sorted out. You have the new cheque in your tuxedo pocket.

Vanda parks the car.

‘What is it, darling?’ you ask.

‘Now,’ she says, not to you.

There is a blur. A thin line descends, close to your eyes. Something brushes your nose and chin. A line of pain cuts into your neck. It burns. Someone has a wire noose around your throat.

‘Pull, you bastard,’ Vanda shouts.