Dirty Tricks (17 page)

What do you mean, you don’t believe this? Are you aware that no lesser an authority than Her Majesty’s Home Secretary has given this scenario his seal of approval, and that it forms the basis of the extradition proceedings currently before this court? What’s that? You find no mention of a poncho? Very well, I’ll waive the poncho. Strike the poncho from the record. The fact remains that I am accused of conspiring with a person or persons unknown to murder my wife.

There is one point which needs to be made right away, which is that instead of providing me with a motive for murder, the discovery that Karen was pregnant removed any interest I might otherwise have had in her death. So far from the jealous fury wished on me by the press, my feelings were of quiet satisfaction. Had I not been wondering how to rid myself of Karen without prejudicing my financial position? Now all my problems were resolved: I had Karen exactly where I wanted her. She was no longer the woman who had been taken advantage of, but a common adulteress. I was no longer a ruthless and cynical adventurer, but the deceived husband. Since I was demonstrably not responsible for inseminating Karen, all I needed to do was find out who was. Once the identity of the lucky donor was revealed, I could start divorce proceedings. The proof of my wife’s treachery was alive and kicking in her belly, and a paternity test would prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Mr X was indeed the proud father. After that, the hearing would be a mere formality. Karen would be packed off to make the bed she had lain in while I wept all the way to the bank.

It should thus be clear to the meanest intelligence that even if I could have disappeared Karen without the slightest risk to myself, it would not have been in my interests to do so. As always, I stress my interests, because in them you can trust. I make no claims about what I might have done in other circumstances, I simply assert that those circumstances did not in fact arise. And legally, gentlemen, as I need hardly remind you, that is all I
need
to do. This court is not required to decide whether I am a nice person, but whether there is reasonable evidence that I committed the crime named in the extradition request. But it was simply not in my interests to commit such a crime. It was a fact
against
my interests.

What were those interests, by this time? When I first met the Parsons they had been very simple. I wanted the lifestyle which other people of my age and education enjoyed but which I had forfeited because of the wayward direction given my life by the humanistic propaganda I was exposed to in my youth. I didn’t crave fabulous riches or meaningless wealth, I simply wanted my due. Now I had achieved that, and I had also met Alison. She was my equal, my complement, my destined mate. The time and effort I had spent cultivating Mrs Parsons had not been wasted, however. While I had had no qualms about courting Karen without a penny to my name – she was bloody lucky to have
me
, never mind money as well! – I couldn’t have approached Alison on those terms.

But if personal insolvency would have created awkwardnesses
du côté de chez Alison
, the violent death of my wife would have been still less desirable. ‘We have already missed three trains,’ Wilde’s Lady Bracknell observes. ‘To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform.’ As always, Oscar is right on the money when it comes to the English gentry. To be exposed to comment was still the nightmare of Alison and her kind, and whatever the other disadvantages of murdering one’s wife, it does inevitably tend to make one an object of some general interest. If the previous husband of the wife in question has also died in mysterious circumstances not long before, with the result that one has inherited the couple’s entire estate, then one may expect to attract a very lively class of comment indeed.

Quite apart from the not-inconsiderable risks of plotting to kill Karen, I thus had two excellent reasons not to do so. Dead, she would have proved a considerable social embarrassment. Alive, and carrying another man’s child, she guaranteed both my financial future and a smooth transition to life with Alison, who would welcome me with the sympathy due someone who had tried in vain to make an honest woman of a deceitful slut. True, I would have to reconcile what I had told Alison about Karen’s hysterectomy with the news that she was pregnant, but that could easily be made to seem like one more strand of the wool which had been pulled over my innocent eyes. As long as Karen was alive, I had nothing to fear and everything to hope for. So far from hiring someone to kill her, I would, if I’d known how, have striven officiously to keep her alive.

What I
did
need to do was find out the identity of my stand-in. I lacked both the patience and the experience to do this myself. I needed an outsider, a professional. Money was a problem, however. Our bank accounts were in both our names, but since love’s sweet song had ceased to work its magic, Karen had taken to scrutinizing the statements with an eagle eye and demanding explanations for every penny I withdrew. In common with all middle-class householders, we received a large amount of junk mail practically begging us to borrow money from them for any purpose whatsoever. I now replied to one of these offers, from a financial institution with which we had no previous connections, and had no difficulty in securing a loan of £5,000. I planned to use the capital to meet the monthly repayments until the divorce settlement came through, then repay the principal in full.

I still hesitated to call a private detective agency, though. To make my situation a matter of record with a third party who was subject to various legal constraints wasn’t necessarily in my interests. Suppose Karen’s paramour turned out to be married, with cash on tap and a reputation to lose. In that case it might well be advantageous to make a settlement out of court, the terms to be arranged after mutual consultation between the interested parties. I didn’t want any officially accredited ex-policeman limiting the options available to me, eg blackmail. Ideally I needed someone who was himself compromised, someone marginal and transient, with no leverage on the mechanisms of power. It was just a matter of time before I thought of Garcia.

Trish had given me a brief account of the allegations against him, but just to be on the safe side I phoned Amnesty International, posing as a researcher for a TV current affairs programme. Their response was unequivocal, a detailed catalogue of union leaders, students, newspaper editors, civil rights workers, Jews, feminists, priests and intellectuals tortured and murdered, a whole politico-socio-economic subgroup targeted and taken out. I was dismayed. With a record like that, Garcia might well regard the menial task I had to offer him as beneath his dignity.

I needn’t have worried. In the event Garcia proved only too eager to co-operate in any way, as long as there was money in it. The mysterious rendezvous where we hatched our devilish scheme, incidentally, was a roadside cafeteria near Eynsham called The Happy Eater. I bought Garcia a hamburger and chips and listened to him bewail his situation. It did sound rather bleak. His student visa ran out in a month and he couldn’t renew it without proof of re-enrolment at the school. Clive had stoutly resisted the teachers’ attempts to have Garcia blacked, but his idealism did not extend to forgoing the fees. Garcia’s funds were almost exhausted, and he couldn’t replenish them without putting his student status in jeopardy and risking instant deportation. Nor was his
persona
particularly
grata
outside the United Kingdom. No other country in Europe would take him, and, much to Garcia’s disgust, neither would the United States.

‘We do their dirty work for them and they won’t even help out when things get tough. Look what they did to Noriega! Makes you sick.’

‘What do you expect, Garcia, unemployment insurance? That sounds like Commie talk to me.’

‘A man should stand by his friends,’ the unhappy eater complained.

His own friends, it turned out, were now lying low in a certain Central American republic, and Garcia’s only wish was to join them. The problem was that he needed the best part of a thousand pounds to obtain a false passport and a plane ticket. I told him that I would be prepared to make a substantial contribution and then explained what I wanted. Garcia flicked his hand as though brushing away a fly.

‘No problem,’ he said in his evil English.

Back at Ramillies Drive, I bugged the telephones. The law covering electronic surveillance is a koan on which those who seek enlightenment about the British way of doing things would be well-advised to meditate. Under UK law it is legal to buy and sell bugging equipment, but a criminal act to use it. Thus the purchase of a sophisticated radio tap transmitter and actuator switch like the one I bought in the Tottenham Court Road, solely and specifically designed for the clandestine interception of other people’s telephone calls, is no more problematic than that of a clock-radio. Parents who use an intercom to monitor their baby’s sleep, on the other hand, are guilty of criminally violating the infant’s privacy.

The hardware set me back a couple of hundred pounds, but the salacious details I hoped to pick up would certainly be worth a bob or two when it came to the divorce. I knew from personal experience that Karen’s sexual behaviour was fairly unfettered, so depending on the proclivities of her partner there seemed a good chance that they might drop the odd reference to one of those practices which can so alienate the sympathies of a jury. I imagined my counsel fixing Karen with a beady eye. ‘In the course of a telephone conversation with the co-respondent, you referred amongst other things to a bottle-brush, a set of rubber bands and a jar of mayonnaise. Would you explain for the benefit of the court the precise use to which these items were subsequently put?’

The first few recordings yielded nothing more interesting than a long conversation between Karen and her mother about the trials and tribulations of early pregnancy, but on the Thursday afternoon I struck gold. Karen had made two calls that morning. The first was to a hotel in Wales, reserving two single rooms for Saturday night and quoting her Barclaycard details in lieu of a deposit. The second was answered impatiently by a man whose tone promptly went all smarmy the moment Karen identified herself. But I wasn’t listening to her. I was listening to the background noise, the cacophonous Eurobabble, the sudden eruptions of pidginshit English. In my mind’s eye I stood surrounded by the polyglot bratpack, fielding questions about the difference between ‘they are’ and ‘there are’ from a neurotic Basque girl while waiting for Clive to finish on the phone so that I could go in, cap in hand, and ask for an advance on next month’s salary.

But Clive was in no hurry to finish. He was gazing out of his window at the traffic on the Banbury Road, the receiver clutched tightly in his sweaty paw, his voice caressing his caller like a cat licking its fur. He was discussing their forthcoming weekend in the Elan Valley. He was discussing it with my wife. She told him that the surroundings were lovely and she could recommend the hotel. She had been there, she said, before.

If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t be here, Karen wouldn’t be dead, none of this would have happened. Karen was no longer of any concern to me. I’d got what I wanted out of her. All I wanted now was rid. If it had been anyone else, I’d have wished them both the best of British and turned the matter over to my solicitors.

But it wasn’t anyone. It was Clive, and that changed everything. Karen didn’t matter to me, but Clive did. Clive and I went way back. We had scores to settle. I don’t just mean his shabby treatment of me at the school. That particular Clive Phillips was merely the latest model in a continuing series which had haunted my life. Back in the sixties, when I was demonstrating against the Vietnam War, having meaningful relationships, pondering the purpose of life and seeing God in a grain of sand, the Clives were out there wheeling and dealing, cheating and hustling, packaging my dreams and hopes and selling them back to me at a profit. It didn’t bother me, not then. From the lofty parapets of my ivory tower, I looked down on them going about their mean, grubby business in the mire far below and reminded myself that they hadn’t enjoyed my advantages in life and were thus to be pitied rather than despised, difficult though this was.

Most of my peers came down to earth during the seventies, but I kept floating. OK, the acid dream was dead, flower power a flop, but hey, it’d been a learning experience, right? And the alternative still stank. I got into booze and books, travelled widely, did a bit of casual work to make ends meet, and had less and less meaningful affairs. The Clives were a lot closer now. I had dealings with them as employee and tenant. I felt their contempt for me, and it shook me. So I went abroad, insulating myself in the cocoon of expatriation. On my return to this country ten years later, I found the Clives in charge. They’d been there all along, of course, but keeping their heads down, disguising their true nature. Now the wind had changed and they’d come out of the woodwork, big and hungry and confident. I was tossed to them like a badger to dogs. When Clive Phillips condescended to use me, I was grateful, and when he turned me out I went quietly, because by then I had finally accepted the rules of the game. Instead of making vain protests to the referee or sulking on the sidelines, I set out to win. As we have seen, I succeeded.

Now I found myself humiliated and despoiled once more. Clive wasn’t to know that he was doing me a favour by giving me a motive to divorce Karen. Clive didn’t do anyone any favours. Like all free enterprise propagandists, he hated competition in any form, and took a particularly dim view of any of his employees trying to emulate his success. When three of his teachers left to open a school of their own, Clive told everyone that giving the consumer a choice kept everyone honest and he wished the lads well. Then he got his Italian agents to make block bookings at the new school for the next six months in the name of a fictitious company. The owners of the new school were ecstatic at this stroke of luck, and having spent a lot of money on advertising they were forced to turn down all requests for places as the school was full until Christmas. At the last moment the Italian company mysteriously cancelled its bookings, and that summer the school had more teachers than students. In October the bank foreclosed on the loan, and in November the teachers asked Clive for their jobs back. He said he would put their names on the list, but it was first come first served, fair was fair.