A Shock to the System (6 page)

Sunlight streaked in at the tall windows and what he could see of the garden suggested spring. For almost the first time, he saw the benefits of the new house, space and a bit of elegance. And an investment. Oh, there was a lot that still needed doing to it, but somehow they'd manage. Even without George's job there'd still be the odd increment and pay settlement.

The loss of the job didn't at that moment seem too appalling. Graham knew so much about the Department that Robert Benham was constantly asking him for information. And controlling the flow of that information gave Graham a kind of power. Besides, Robert's urgency for change might make him too unpopular to stay long as Head of Personnel.

Graham had seen other bright young men overreach themselves.

His own role was clear – to wait in the wings, giving Robert Benham apparent, but limited, support, until something, as it inevitably must, went wrong. He certainly did not intend to tie his career so closely to that of the new Head as he had to the old.

He took a sip of coffee and glanced at the papers.
The Daily Telegraph
and, being Thursday,
The Barnes and Mortlake Times.
They only really had the local paper for cinema times and property prices; its news content of restaurant licences refused, under-13 swimming galas and resistance to ring-road schemes was less than fascinating.

But out of habit, he glanced down the columns.

There it was – at the bottom of the front page:

BODY FOUND

The body of an elderly man was found in the Thames near Putney Bridge on Saturday. He has not yet been identified, but is described as being in his late sixties and shabbily dressed.

Saturday. Only two days after the killing. That didn't give long for the water to remove any clues as to how he died.

The happy vision, that the murder might never be discovered, shattered. The police had had five days to investigate. It wouldn't be long now.

Graham was seized by a trembling so strong that he had to put down his coffee cup to avoid spilling it.

At that moment Merrily came into the room. She was wearing one of her fluffy lace dressing-gowns. When she had been young and waiflike, they had made her look like a fledgling in a downy nest; Graham had even used the image in the early days of their marriage. Now they only emphasised her angularity and the scrawniness of her neck; if any bird came to mind, it was a plucked chicken.

She looked down at the sun marking parallelograms on the floor. ‘This carpet,' she observed, ‘rather belongs to the bear called Frederick.'

Graham was in no mood to sort out one of her precious remarks. ‘What?'

‘Fred Bear. Threadbare, darling.'

‘Oh.'

‘We'll have to get a new one. Apparently there's a sale at Allied Carpets . . .'

Graham rose jerkily, upsetting his plate. The remaining slice of toast flopped on to the floor, marmalade-side down.

‘Oh, daaarling.' Merrily had her mother's knack of extending vowels beyond their natural span. And of infusing them with reproach. ‘Now we'll
have
to get a new carpet.'

‘I must go,' he blurted out. The trembling was worse. Merrily looked at him, concern emphasising the wrinkles of her tight little face. ‘Are you all right, darling?'

‘Yes, I . . .' He reached down to the local paper and roughly folded it so that the front page was hidden.

‘Graham, is there something . . . ?' Merrily laid a thin hand on his sleeve.

He twitched his arm away as if she had been a nettle.

His mood at the office was subtly different, the panic dulled to a kind of acceptance. The bright image of ‘getting away with it' had been shown up as a fantasy. Doggedly, like a condemned man, he went through his work, wondering how long he had got, waiting for the summons.

But the only summons came from Robert Benham, who asked him to go up to George Brewer's office. Once inside, Graham was waved to a chair by his prospective boss, casual in a faded blue Levi sweatshirt.

‘I told George to take the day off. He's looking pretty washed out and, quite honestly, he's just a nuisance round the office these days, fussing like an old woman every time I want to look at a file.'

‘He is still Head of Personnel,' Graham felt bound to say.

Robert read no reproach into this remark. ‘Yes, damn it. Still got a couple of months to go. Last few weeks, though, he'll be kept out of mischief with company cocktail parties. But it means it'll be some time before I can get down to any
proper
work.

‘Look, wanted to say – about this weekend down at the cottage to talk through things . . .'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Got one of the directors coming down this weekend, next one I'm going to Miami . . .'

‘Business?'

‘No, I just need a break. I'll be reading reports and things, of course . . .'

‘So how about the one after?'

‘Sounds fine.' Graham remembered that that was yet another weekend that Lilian was coming to stay. Which made it sound even finer.

He assimilated Robert's news about the weekend in Miami. It was the sort of flamboyant gesture he might have made a few years back. When he'd had the money. A move designed to impress and confuse his colleagues.

With difficulty, Graham resisted the temptation to be impressed and confused.

In the Levi sweatshirt, too, he could recognise his own style. He had worn his flowered ties for the same purpose (though he liked to think he'd never looked quite that
scruffy).
Nowadays, like George Brewer, he favoured suits.

No, Robert Benham was using all Graham's old tricks, so Graham would have to beat him at his own game. Because there was no doubt, one way or the other, he was going to beat him. He'd lost the latest round due to carelessness, but now he had the measure of his opponent, he was not going to be caught napping again.

Suddenly, Graham remembered that he was about to be arrested for murder, and the incongruity of any future planning seemed laughable. He felt a surge of almost manic irresponsibility.

As he left George's office, he asked Stella if she'd like to meet for a drink after work.

Travelling home on the Tube, he thought about Stella. Talking to her had taken him back into a world from which he had long been unwittingly banished.

First it had been, albeit mildly, a sexual encounter. No physical contact had been made, no suggestions voiced, but the circumstances, a man inviting a woman to have a drink with him
a deux
, had sexual overtones. And the automatic way in which Stella walked with him out of the building to a wine bar rather than turning right by the lifts to the company bar, showed that she recognised this.

Graham also found, to his surprise, that he slipped easily into the observances of ‘chatting up'. It was a style of speech which he had not practised for over fifteen years, but it seemed to come back. Again, it was very mild, just small-talk, but relaxing. It was so long since he had spoken to a woman he did not know to the point of tedium, or about topics of mutual interest, rather than mutual responsibility.

The second difference he felt with Stella was that between their worlds. She had been divorced nearly as long as he'd been married and was childless, so her preoccupations were totally unlike his. For her, spare time was for entertainment, not for maintaining houses, tolerating mothers-in-law, and marshalling unresponsive children. She spoke of films she had seen, theatres, exhibitions. For Stella, London was a huge complex of varied entertainments to be explored and tasted; whereas, for Graham, it was somewhere he lived so that he had a less intolerable journey to work.

Her need to fill spare time so avidly was perhaps born of the single person's obsessive fear of loneliness, but to Graham it seemed an ideal of freedom. It joined with Robert Benham's trip to Miami in an image of a world he had once known, and might still know, if he hadn't taken another course.

Since the reasons he had taken that other course – wife and children – now meant nothing to him, he felt unjustly excluded from the free world, in which people did what they wanted to when they wanted to without committee decisions and unwelcome company.

He wanted to be shot of his family.

It was because he was a murderer that he could feel so irresponsible. Once again he thought how trivial other lapses were when compared to the crime of taking human life.

‘Where have you been?'

Merrily looked wan and weepy when he got home. It was not late, still daylight, so he felt annoyed by her demand.

‘Why?' Answer a question with a question, the resource of the devious in all walks of life.

‘It's awful, Graham. I've had a shock.'

She started crying and came forward into his arms. He clasped them automatically and held her, murmuring apposite reassurance. But he felt for her no more than he would for the unknown victim of a car accident.

‘What do you mean – shock? What happened?'

‘Electric shock. I was changing a light bulb in the utility room and  –'

‘Show me.'

She led him through. The row of square white appliances watched impassively as he reached up towards the old brass light-fitting.

He stopped. ‘Did you switch off the power?'

‘What?' Merrily's voice was even smaller with self-pity.

‘The mains – did you switch them off?'

‘No, of course I didn't, Graham. I just had a horrid shock.'

‘I know, but to avoid getting another shock – indeed, to avoid me or the children getting a shock – you should have switched the electricity off at the mains.'

‘And am I expected to know where the mains are?'

‘Yes, you bloody are. This house is in both our names and you should be responsible for it just as much as I am.'

‘Well, I don't understand about electricity and things
like that
.'

The petulant contempt she put into the last three words made it hard to remember that her lack of practicality had once been part of Merrily's winsome charm. It was an attitude her mother had encouraged through childhood; Lilian had always worked on the principle that, whatever went wrong technically, there would always be some ardent young actor around to fix it. The trouble was, the supply of ardent young actors had dried up, leaving Graham to deal with all the dripping taps, ‘funny bonking in the hot-water pipes' and ‘silly little red lights that keep coming on in the car' for his mother-in-law. And for her equally useless daughter.

Merrily, he had recently decided, was not even a very good housewife. The house always looked faintly messy and, though she often averred that this was a matter of policy, a determination not to be obsessed by cleaning and polishing like the older generation, Graham suspected it was just old-fashioned inefficiency. And when Merrily did do a major cleaning project, it was never simply in the cause of hygiene; it was an accusation, some subtly charged probe to make him feel guilty or to let him know she wanted something. Merrily's methods were very like her mother's.

He switched off the electricity, got a torch and climbed a ladder to inspect the defective fitting.

It didn't take more than a glance to see what was wrong. The positive and negative wires were red and black, the old system. Old enough for the insulating rubber to have perished. He could see where the shiny exposed wire touched the brass bulb-holder. The whole fitting was live.

He fetched a screwdriver to take it off. Have to buy a replacement. As he pulled the wire free, he saw that even more of the rubber was perished. Presumably that meant the whole electrical system was the same. The house had never been properly rewired; the old round-pin plugs had just been replaced with square-pins. Have to get an electrician to look at it. Damn, that was bound to mean more expense.

While he was perched on the ladder, separating the wires so that they didn't fuse everything when the power came back, Merrily's little voice floated plaintively up to him.

‘Who were you with?'

‘What?'

‘This evening – who were you with?'

‘Eh?'

He pointed the torch down, bleaching her little face. She blinked, but pressed on. ‘Graham – are you having an affair with someone?'

‘What!' He almost laughed at the incongruity of the question. God knows, he hadn't done anything with Stella. But had Merrily got some amazing radar that could pick up the fact that he'd invited the girl out for a drink?

He came down the ladder. ‘What on earth are you talking about?'

‘Well, there's something funny going on, Graham. You've been so twitchy the last week. You leap up every time the 'phone goes – or the front doorbell. You're acting exactly as if you'd done something you shouldn't.'

He almost laughed. ‘And you think the thing I shouldn't have done is to sleep with another woman?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, it isn't. No, the thing I shouldn't have done . . .' he continued nonchalantly.

‘Is what?'

The words were out before he had time to think. ‘Oh, just murdering someone.'

But the confession only got a ‘Ha, bloody ha' from Merrily. The humour of the situation hit Graham and he giggled uncontrollably.

‘What is it, Graham? Is it another woman?'

‘No, it's not.' As he got control of himself he started to regret the mention of the murder. Better feed her a bit of truth before she started to think about it. ‘No, it's George's job.'

‘Oh, of course. Have you heard yet?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh, good.'

‘Not good. I haven't got it.'

‘What!'

He shone the torch again in Merrily's face and saw there some of the disappointment and betrayal which he had felt when he heard the news.

Her disappointment, however, was purely materialistic.

‘But we need the money, Graham. There are lots of things that need doing to the house, and I haven't got a stitch to wear.'