Weird Sister (19 page)

‘Save him Elizabeth,’ he whispered.

‘What?’

‘Save him from that tart.’ He looked down the bar meaningfully. Robert had his arm around Geraldine. She was looking up at him lustfully.

As far as village tarts go Geraldine Andley is a poor excuse. But that’s Warboys. She’d had a reputation for as long as I could remember but no one I knew had ever slept with her, or at least no one admitted to sleeping with her. Given the chance, she’d go on at you about her past lives. She was into anything vaguely New Age; she shared this interest with Doris Senior, Lolly’s mother, but not even Doris was able to get on with Geraldine.

Over the years I had tried to be her friend. Occasionally I offered to buy her a drink. She always accepted, but we found we had nothing to talk about. I think she thought I was trying to chat her up. She was a good ten years older than us, she wore – still does – very short skirts and too much make-up. She wasn’t a prostitute but she was supposed to be easy. Horrible thought. I’m sure she’d always had her eye on Robert, probably does to this day.

I walked the length of the bar and squeezed myself between them. I gave Robert a great suggestive kiss in the hope that he’d turn his attention to me. He did. We had sex in the tunnel under the yew hedge behind the house – a favourite location. I’d completely forgotten about Michael that evening. When I woke up – alone – the next day I knew I couldn’t marry him.

Agnes discusses Elizabeth

‘She’s a funny one, isn’t she?’ Agnes and Robert are in bed. Robert is caressing Agnes’s breast. It is round and full and the nipple points straight upwards and Robert thinks it’s miraculous. Agnes is staring at the ceiling.

‘Who? Aren’t all the women round here funny?’

Agnes frowns, shifts away. ‘Your friend Elizabeth.’

‘Oh,’ says Robert. ‘Her.’ He feels a tiny pang of disloyalty.

‘There is nothing very deeply felt about her.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She hasn’t really lived through anything.’

‘I don’t know about that. She’s had – she’s got – her life. There was her professional trouble. And her parents are dead. She’s like you that way.’

‘She seems shallow to me. I can’t see into her. Perhaps there is nothing to see.’

‘Agnes, that’s so harsh.’

‘I know but –’ She turns to her husband and slips her hand under the covers, between his legs. Robert trembles. ‘Why didn’t you marry her?’ She is stroking him.

His voice is thick, his throat a little constricted. ‘I married you.’

‘Before.’

He sighs with pleasure, and weariness at having to reply. ‘She wasn’t – it never – oh Agnes, you’ve just told me what she’s like.’

Agnes giggles and Robert finds her subtle malice thrilling. Where he grew up everyone pretended to be nice.

Robert

Things were going from bad to worse with the renovations – lead piping, dodgy wiring, wet rot, dry rot, decrepit boiler. I was getting into a real mess over the payments; the foreman had begun to lose his patience and that morning we’d had a shouting match. For every bill I paid, there were three or four I couldn’t pay. January was a very quiet time of year for the estate and our income was low, perilously low. I was at my desk, punching numbers into the calculator, almost in tears. Agnes came into the room. She pulled up a chair and sat close beside me. Her hair was wet, she must have come straight from the shower. She often took a shower before lunch, after she’d been out walking.

‘How’s tricks?’ she asked.

I looked at her, I looked into her eyes. Ask, I thought. Ask her for money. But I couldn’t. We were too happy. I’d find a way through. She gave me a kiss and her brow creased when I didn’t respond. At least tell her there’s a problem, I thought. Just say it. But I couldn’t do that either. She raised her skirt and straddled my lap.

Agnes could always make me forget my worries.

Graeme tells Agnes everything

Agnes and Graeme are fucking. At least once a week, usually before lunch. Robert is in his office working, Agnes tells him she is going out for her walk. Jenny is at school. Karen is busy in the house – Karen is always busy in the house, as Agnes observes one day, ‘Karen is basically our maid. Except we don’t have to pay her.’

‘It’s not true,’ Robert objects.

‘Yes it is,’ she replies and he knows she is right.

Graeme is doing what Graeme usually does – he is unaccounted for. He goes upstairs to his room and gets out his new suit; he keeps it shrouded in drycleaner’s plastic at the back of the wardrobe where he thinks Karen won’t find it. He puts it on with a clean white shirt and a tie, his good shoes, then throws his suede jacket on over it. He limps out to the holiday cottages, swinging his cane, keeping clear of the mud. He doesn’t care who sees him heading that way. Agnes is altogether more discreet, she goes the back way, through the woods.

The cottages are always very cold, unless they are lucky and one has been let recently. But in winter this is rare. Usually the radiators haven’t been on for weeks. The mattress is bare, slightly damp – clammy. Graeme and Agnes add their stains to the ones already present.

It is rough, their sex. Graeme doesn’t love Agnes, he wants her. Agnes enjoys his wanting her. She taunts him, his limp, his cane, his leg, and flaunts herself before him. She knows he finds this powerfully erotic. They are both unembarrassed – they like doing this thing.

‘Nice suit,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ returns Graeme, full of purchased grace.

She brushes something off his shoulder, straightens his tie. These wifely gestures make Graeme wince. He grabs her hand and lowers it.

Their sex doesn’t take long, and it is bruising. Sometimes, later in the afternoon, Graeme finds himself wondering how Agnes withstands his assaults on her body. He dips his head in something approaching shame. Fucking his sister-in-law, penetrating her body; it is as sensual as it is corrosive. He stifles his dim conscience by telling himself it’s not his fault. She asked for it. She is bewitching.

During their sessions in the cottages – Agnes refers to it as ‘cottaging’, a little joke that Graeme hates – they rarely speak to each other beyond issuing carnal instructions. But this afternoon Graeme can’t help himself. He has orgasmed deep inside her and now he is drifting. He feels compelled to explain to her how he got his cane. That’s how he thinks of it – how I got my cane, as if the cane is a kind of trophy – not how he injured his leg. Not how he came to be unemployed, leaving behind what was once, however briefly, his vocation.

‘I shot a man in Peterborough one evening,’ he says, unprompted. ‘An unarmed man.’ And he tells Agnes his story. She is silent throughout. From time to time she nods encouragingly.

‘I had been a cop for more than a dozen years. I had a reputation in the force for being mean in both senses of the word – stingy as well as cruel.’ He laughs. ‘They used to say I would dodge my round of drinks in the pub and kick a man when he was down. And it was true. As the years went by and I was passed over for promotion, I got meaner still. I was a good policeman, I got results, I could be relied upon. But that didn’t add up to my fellow officers liking me. And they did not,’ he boasts.

Andrew is four months old when it happens, Francis has not yet been conceived. The baby is not sleeping at night, waking every few hours for feeding. Karen is drawn and exhausted, still carrying much of the weight she put on during the pregnancy. Lactating and tearful, her baggy clothes spotted with baby milk and baby sick, Karen knows that Graeme finds her completely unattractive. There are other women once again, and she knows that as well. But she is stoic, uncomplaining and completely in love with the baby, so she gets on with things.

Graeme and another officer are out on their rounds. It is a warm summer evening, after midnight, and they have walked through one of the city’s rougher housing estates. The area is quiet. Now they are on a leafy street, large brick houses with gardens and new mock-Victorian garages, when PC Carl Dodgson, the other officer, thinks he sees a light flash on and off in a house that is otherwise dark. They stand behind a car on the opposite side of the street and watch for a moment and, indeed, a light sweeps around the sitting room. Someone inside the house draws the sitting room curtains. A burglary in progress. Carl radios in to the station and they go to investigate.

The back door of the house is ajar, the pane of glass above the handle smashed. Carl enters first and Graeme follows. They stand inside the dark kitchen and listen. Voices are coming from the sitting room around the corner; two men are having an argument. Torchlight jumps around the room like a little demon.

‘You fucking cunt, leave that crap behind, we don’t want it.’

‘They’ve got great movies! Look at this,
Gone with the Wind
,
Lawrence of Arabia
– it’s great stuff.’

‘Leave it! We’ve fucking got enough to carry anyway.’

‘If we’d borrowed your sister’s car like you said we were going to do . . .’

‘She had to take her wee lad swimming. What was I supposed to say – “oh that’s okay, I don’t need it ’til midnight”. Now come on. They’ll be fucking coming home soon.’

There is a pause and the sound of furniture being shifted. Graeme and Carl look at each other. Carl begins to move toward the sitting room.

‘That would be funny, wouldn’t it.’

‘What?’

‘If they came home while we were in the middle of this.’

‘Funny?’

‘Yeah, like in a movie,’ he begins to giggle. Graeme thinks they sound stoned. ‘A mad-cap caper movie.’

‘Yeah, right, we’d fucking have to kill them, wouldn’t we? Now that would be funny.’

‘Trust you, Greg, killer instinct.’

By now Carl is at the entrance to the sitting room. Graeme is directly behind him. He can hear a heart pounding, he isn’t sure if it is his. Carl hits the light switch on the wall, expecting the room to flood with light. A small lava lamp comes on in the corner near where the two burglars are standing. It casts enough wobbly orange light for Graeme to see a gun lying on the side table next to him. Carl shouts ‘You’re under arrest!’ at the same time as the man called Greg heaves the video recorder he is holding in their direction. Graeme picks up the gun, pulls off the safety, and shoots Greg in the chest.

Graeme has used guns in training and at target practice but has never been on armed detail. He is unfamiliar with this particular type of handgun. The recoil from the shot he fired is so strong that it pushes him backward, off his feet, and onto the floor. He drops the gun and it clatters forward. The other burglar throws himself down and grabs it. He lets out a scream and shoots Graeme in the leg.

Carl dives across the room, landing on top of the gunman. ‘Fuck, you fucking fuck –’ their obscenities get tangled. Carl wrestles the gun away. Graeme, propped up on one elbow, clutches his leg above where the bullet entered. There is a small hole in the trousers of his uniform, a neat hole that gives no indication of the pain caused by the smashed and seared flesh and bone below. He allows himself a whimper.

Graeme looks at the burglar called Greg, the man he shot. Greg is dying, blood pumping directly from his heart onto the carpet. He stares solemnly back at Graeme. Outside a back-up car arrives, lights flashing.

Graeme is in the hospital for weeks recovering from the shotgun wound; the upper femur in his thigh is completely shattered. They keep him on his back, the leg in traction, later operating to pin the knee together. He is placed on a slow programme of rehabilitation.

PC Carl Dodgson tells his Commander himself that he isn’t sure why Graeme shot the burglar. He says, ‘I don’t think he meant to kill him.’ He pauses. ‘Did he?’ The Commander, over-worked himself, pleased to have an arrest, decides that Graeme’s explanation – self-defence – will do. Besides, the dead man’s family is too messed up to make a formal complaint. The other burglar is charged with attempted burglary and attempted murder; he has a lousy solicitor, pleads guilty, and is sent down for a long time. The case does not attract attention from the national papers.

As far as the Commander is concerned there is no question about Graeme’s future; he will not be allowed to return to work in any capacity. Graeme tells Agnes the Commander had never liked him, and had been trying to get him to transfer for years. Despite Graeme’s vehement objections the force retires him on disability. The Commander makes it clear there is no alternative; if Graeme registers a complaint or tries to appeal, the circumstances of the suspect’s death will be investigated. And Graeme doesn’t want that, does he?

So there is Graeme, jobless and crippled, aged thirty-three. He makes a good recovery, refusing to use a wheelchair, he says there isn’t room for two wheelchairs in one family. His leg will always be stiff, the knee not flexible more than a few degrees. It will always cause him considerable pain, and on cold nights he can feel the metal pins under his skin, piercing his bones.

He rubs his leg, shifts, looks toward Agnes and finds her stare unnerving. She sniffs once, yawns, and speaks. ‘Why?’ she asks. ‘Why did you kill him?’

Graeme doesn’t know why he shot the burglar that night, and no one, not even Carl Dodgson, especially not Carl, has ever asked him to explain. The gun was there, it seemed a good idea to use it. He replies slowly. ‘I joined the force expecting action but really the job was dead dull. Paperwork, endless training, community liaising, the last one the most fucking boring of all. Maybe I wanted out,’ he pauses. ‘Maybe I joined the force in the first place so that I could kill someone. And I did. Now people can whisper “Graeme Throckmorton, he killed a man, didn’t he?”’ Graeme laughs, takes hold of Agnes’s breast, squeezes. He has never felt any guilt, only a mild surprise that someone could die so easily.

Sometimes he wishes that the circumstances of the incident had been a little more heroic. Undercover work, informers, corrupt local politicians, a high-speed chase, something like that. But it wasn’t to be. Instead it was sordid and small, a little event that was visited upon him and then went away again.