How to Be Bad (23 page)

“You've got to kill Danny,” said Caro. “He could ruin everything.”

“Everything's already fucking ruined.”

“Are you going to do it or not?” said Caro.

“Why does it have to be me who kills him?” I said.

“Because I killed the last one.”

“Yes, but you didn't need to kill her. So it doesn't count.”

“
Doesn't count?
What are you? Eight years old?”

The gas boiler was roaring. Danny was definitely running himself a bath. I took one of Caro's cigarettes and lit it. I didn't smoke it; I just needed to do something with my hands. “Okay,” I said. “I'll do it.”

She nodded darkly and waited.

“What?” I said.

She passed me a sharp knife from the kitchen drawer. I accepted it unwillingly. “Does it have to be a knife?”

“Well, I don't see any trains for you to push him under. What's the matter, Mark? First you can't bring yourself to kill a mouse, now this. Are you a killer or not?”

Tell her the truth.

No, don't. It'll ruin everything.

Everything is already ruined. Look around you. There's a rotting corpse in the next room and a naked blackmailer upstairs.

“I…”

“What?” said Caro.

“I'll do it now,” I said.

CHAPTER 12

FATHER FIGURE

I
WALKED
through into the stinking hall, the soles of my shoes sticking on the fluid that had oozed out of Mrs. Mather's body. The landing light lit my way as I slowly climbed the stairs. When I was halfway up, I stopped and listened. I could hear water running in the bathroom. I looked down at the knife in my hand. The blade was about six inches long, and both its edges were sharp. I wasn't sure what it had been designed to cut. All I knew was that it would make quite a mess of my old art teacher. I held the knife upended in my hand, the flat of the blade hidden behind my wrist.

The bathroom door was half open. I moved slowly toward it, step by step, desperately trying to remember which floorboards creaked and which were silent. When I was close enough, I stood to one side of the doorway and peered through the steam into the bathroom. I couldn't see Danny anywhere. I entered the room. Water was starting to run down the sides of the tub. The bath was full to the brim. I turned off the taps and walked out onto the landing.

Searching methodically, I opened each door on the first floor. None of them contained Danny. That only left our bedroom at the top of the house. I walked up the remaining flight and found him lying on our bed, fully clothed and snoring softly. His lips were parted as if he were about to make an “Ah” sound. His arms were spreadeagled, and the fingers of his right hand were still entwined around the Kimber.

I inched closer to the bed, expecting Danny to jerk awake and point my own handgun at me. But his eyes remained closed, his mouth gaped, and his chest rose and fell gently until I was close enough to stab him. I looked down at him, trying to work out where to inflict the wound. Would cutting his throat work best? Perhaps, but I didn't have the stomach for that. The thought of sawing through his windpipe made me feel ill.

If I plunged the knife into the left side of his chest, through his shirt, it would pierce his heart but might only feel like poking him. So that was what I decided to do. I held the blade high, left hand clasped over my right, and prepared to deliver the fatal blow.

While I took aim, I thought about what I was doing. This was Danny, whom I didn't hate and had once really liked. Yes, he'd stolen my girlfriend from me, but I couldn't condemn him for that. In the end, Caro had dumped him, a ruinous blow from which he had clearly never recovered. All right, Danny had called me lots of names. He had burned down my shop. But unhappiness makes men reckless. Did he deserve to die for being in pain?

No. But I still needed to get rid of him. He was a deranged person who knew that Caro and I had committed murder. With my eyes averted, I slammed the knife down into Danny's chest. There was a crack, and half the blade broke off and flew across the bed. The knife had broken on Danny's bones.

Danny drew in breath sharply, opened his eyes, and sat up. He looked at the broken knife in my hands, opened his shirt, and found a fresh scratch on his sternum that was beaded with blood.

“It's not how it looks,” I protested.

“You stab me, then tell me it's not how it looks? Okay, pansy boy. If it's not how it looks, how is it? Eh? How the fuck is it?”

Danny scowled in contempt as he leveled the gun at my belly.

“It's funny,” I said, “how you keep using words like ‘pansy' as an insult. Because when we were at school, you were one of the few teachers with liberal views. You always taught us that names like queer and nigger and paki were invented to dehumanize minorities and make it easier to hate them.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You were a pretty inspirational guy. Danny. What the fuck happened to you?”

“I was struck by lightning, man. The same fucking bolt that hit you.” Abruptly, Danny's expression changed. The dark loathing in his face gave way to a look of dejection. “You didn't actually
want
to kill me, did you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Caroline forced you to do it, didn't she? Come on. Be honest with me.”

I tried not to respond, but Danny must have read the answer in my eyes, for he nodded and said, “Oh, I don't blame you. She can be very persuasive. She once asked me to do the same thing to you. When I'd started seeing her and you wouldn't stop following her around, she begged me to kill you.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Oh, yes. I came very close. I once spent a whole day following you around in the car, just hoping for a chance to run you over.” I could think of absolutely nothing to say. Seeing me sweating, Danny pursued his advantage. “See this?” He held out his hand to indicate his wedding ring.

“What about it?” I said.

“I notice you're not wearing one.”

“Caro and I don't bother much with social conventions.”

“Maybe she thinks wearing your ring would be a lie too far,” said Danny, grinning unpleasantly.

“What are you talking about?”

“Caro isn't married to you. How could she be? She's still married to me. I got a quickie divorce from my first wife in the spring of '96. Then I married your wife. Or should I say, my wife.”

“That's shit and you know it.”

“Ask her,” said Danny.

“She took out a court order against you,” I said. “The marriage was over.”

“It was never formally annulled,” said Danny. “Technically, she's a bigamist. As well as a murderer, a fraudster, and a first rate bitch.”

I swallowed noisily. Danny gazed down at the gun in his hands. “But what am I telling you for? You know what she's like as well as I do. It doesn't stop us from wanting her.” He flicked off the safety catches and aimed at my head. “But Mark, we can't both have her. One of us has gotta go.”

“Don't shoot,” I said.

“I have no choice,” said Danny.

Then he pushed the muzzle of the weapon into his own mouth and squeezed the trigger. There was a short, ludicrously loud
BLAM.
The back of Danny's head burst open, bucketing oily red blood all over the wall behind him. Death was not instantaneous. Danny lived long enough to blink twice and murmur one last word. It was muffled by the gun in his mouth, but I'm pretty sure he said,
“Ow.”

I didn't like seeing him there, sucking on a gun barrel, so I took the Kimber from him. Then Caro rushed in, to see Danny's blood everywhere and me holding the gun with its gory red barrel. Naturally, Caro automatically assumed I'd shot him myself. “God,” she said. There was real awe in her voice. “You don't fuck around, do you?”

“Get away from me,” I said.

“What?”

“You heard. Fuck off, bloodsucker.”

She backed away in fear. “I understand,” she said. “You're all psyched up. That's all it is. I'll talk to you later. Okay?”

*   *   *

I
COULDN'T
stay angry with Caro for long. I had barely digested what Danny had told me before I started making excuses for her. Maybe she did tell Danny to kill me. So what? She didn't mean it. She was seventeen, little more than a child.

She must have said something rash in the heat of the moment that Danny had taken seriously. He was obviously sick in the head, even then. He had to be. What kind of forty-year-old man would be insane enough to embark on a sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old girl?

What kind of forty-year-old man would be insane enough not to?

I found her lying on a bed in one of the empty rooms. You could really tell that paying guests used to sleep here. The bed was covered in a pink candlewick counterpane. On the wall hung a bad watercolor that some idiot had painted in his sleep. Probably while he was having a nightmare. The room had its own washbasin that gurgled when you turned on the tap.

We lay in each other's arms, dozing without really sleeping. I noticed that she was shaking and wondered whether she was scared of me or the fact that there were two corpses in the house. I was vaguely aware of the light arriving and birds singing. I closed my eyes and drifted for a while, then heard someone shouting my name. “Mark! Mark?”

The room faced onto the square. I went to the window and peered out through the curtains. To my absolute horror, my mum and dad were standing down in the square, beside their well-polished Citroën. They were staring straight up at me. I ducked back into the room, but it was too late. I knew they'd seen me. Mainly because my mother had waved.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I said.

“Is it the police?” said Caro, sitting up in bed.

“No, worse,” I said. “It's my fucking parents.”

During this exchange, my dad continued to whistle and shout.

“You'll have to talk to them,” said Caro.

“How? There's a dead body in the back room!”

“Use the window,” advised Caro.

I opened the window and leaned out.

“Hi,” I said.

My dad smiled up at me. “Are you still in bed, you idle bugger? It's half past eleven in the bloody morning!”

“We had a late night.”

“Pardon?”

I repeated myself, this time shouting so he could hear me.

“Are you going to let us in or not?”

“I can't.”

“Don't be so soft,” said my dad. “Open the bloody door.”

“It's not a good time.”

“We wanted to surprise you,” said Dad.

“You have done.”

My mother's face darkened. “Is that all you've got to say? We've driven a hundred and odd miles to see you.”

“Caro's really ill,” I explained. “She's got chicken pox. We've been told not to come into contact with anyone.”

“We've both had chicken pox,” said my mum.

“But you can still get it again,” I countered.

My mother looked skeptical. “Stop making excuses and let us in.”

“I'll tell you what,” I improvised. “There's a pub round the corner. I'll meet you there in about ten minutes. We could have lunch.”

“All right. But you're bloody paying,” shouted Dad.

They held an emergency conference. I saw my dad trying to be reasonable, my mum waving her arms about and shaking her head. I felt like crying as I watched them walk away. Mum and Dad. Dad and Mum. They had only ever wanted the best for me, and here I was, two corpses in the house and Christ knows how many more on the way.

*   *   *

“I
SUPPOSE
Tom told you where to find us?” I said.

Dad nodded.

“You look terrible,” said my mum.

“What's going on?” asked my father. “Hasn't Caro been feeding you properly?”

“Dad, we're a modern couple. The woman isn't expected to do all the cooking these days.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “And just what exactly is she expected to do? Sit on her backside all day, I suppose?”

We were sitting at a table in the pub's dining room, each holding a crap menu. My mother still hadn't recovered from being turned away from the house. “You could at least have offered us a cup of tea,” she said.

“We can have tea here,” I said brightly. “Should I order a pot now?”

“I think you know what your mother means,” said my dad, warning me with his eyes.

“I don't know whether you've heard of it,” I said, “but there's this wonderful new invention called a tel-e-phone. That's what people do nowadays. They phone to arrange a visit.”

“We shouldn't have to arrange anything,” said Mum. “We're family. When I was little, my mum's sister and brothers were always dropping in unannounced.”

“It was a bit of a bloody nuisance, though,” said Dad, laughing.

“No!” said mum. “People liked to see each other. We saw each other because we all got on. We didn't try to get rid of each other by making up cock-and-bull stories about chicken pox.”

I suddenly felt a massive gush of love for her. I got out of my chair, walked over to her seat, and kissed her. “Mum, I'm sorry.”

Tears came to her eyes, and I knew I was forgiven.

A waitress arrived to take our order. We asked her to come back in five minutes.

“It's just that things between the two of us haven't been working out,” I said. “That's why I made up the chicken pox lie. The atmosphere in that house is poisonous. We're at each other's throats twenty-four hours a day.”

“I know,” said Mum.

“How do you know? What do you mean?”

My dad smiled indulgently. “You know your mother's dreams. She's been dreaming about you a lot lately.”