Cupid's Dart (21 page)

I went to Gallows Corner the next morning, drove there in my little car. If anything is likely to depress the depressed and worry the anxious, it is the North Circular Road. From time to time I felt a strong temptation to pull the Mem Saab into the path of a lorry and end it all there and then. Even now I can hardly believe that I didn't, so strong was the urge, so great my anger, so black my despair. However, I kept telling myself that I must not harm innocent people, that I was not a monster, that it was unfair to hate the rest of the world and kill the innocent driver of a white van – I was particularly tempted by white vans; I have always hated them – because of one woman's heartlessness.

Besides, I had trouble with that word – heartlessness. I could not quite bring myself to see Ange as heartless. I clung to a glimmer of hope, hope that there was some other explanation for her failure to visit me, and for her silence. Was I not being unduly precipitate in deciding that she had jilted me?

I crawled along Eastern Avenue, not a glimmer of anything of beauty the whole way: this was the twentieth century's heritage. I was in the East End of London and I kept my doors locked against drug addicts, psychopaths and terrorists. I saw only ordinary, tired people. At last I reached Gallows Corner – how that name suited my mood – and had no difficulty in finding her street, which was set back close to the accurately named Straight Road.

I was shaking with anxiety and tension. I parked near the end of her road and waited. I was waiting for her to come out of her house and set off across Romford to her work, and I was waiting for the postman. Yes, I had decided to intercept him.

I waited for more than three hours. I became very self-conscious. I felt that I must be extremely noticeable, sitting there, hunched in my Saab. Maybe scared housewives would phone the police.

I
was scared too. Our society was collapsing into anarchy and violence. Strangely, I saw no sign of it that morning. Everything seemed very peaceful. People smiled at each other, and nobody stared nervously at my Saab.

For three hours I kept watch over that road and its small brick houses built in clumps of four. They were dull rather than ugly. This very ordinary road was the road she had walked down time and again. How incongruous her beauty must have looked.

I rehearsed what I would say to the postman.

'You won't know me but I'm a friend of a young lady in number 62. I sent her a love letter, addressed to Ms A Clench. You know how it is with love letters. You get carried away and say things you regret. Would it be the most awful impertinence to ask you to do me a terrific favour and tear up any letter with a Prague postmark addressed to Ms A. Clench? I am very happy to offer you a small sum to buy a drink. Would a tenner be acceptable?'

You may think that it wouldn't be too difficult to say this to a postman, but I became extremely nervous. I felt so out of place in these mean streets: a philosophy don in Gallows Corner. I felt that my words would sound ridiculous, that I would feel humiliated by the exchange, that the postman would look at me with scorn and refuse to perform what was, I knew, an illegal act.

There he was. My heart began to beat very fast. I opened the door but I couldn't get out. I felt rooted to the seat. You may think that I was inventing an excuse for inaction, but the moment I saw the postman I realised that my desire for Ange not to see the letter had been valid only while we were in a relationship. Now that something had occurred to end or interrupt that relationship, there was no longer any risk in her seeing the letter. It could not make matters worse, and it just might make them better. In fact it had become my only hope. It just might touch her to discover how much I loved her, how much more beautiful than Prague I thought she was. Of course it was quite likely that she had no idea that Prague was beautiful. She might have thought my letter was the equivalent of saying, 'You're gorgeous, more gorgeous even than Middlesborough.'

The postman gave me a suspicious look, and I decided that I had better drive off. I drove up her road, heart still beating furiously. I slowed down outside number 62. It would need painting soon, and the garden looked unloved. It was heartbreakingly ordinary, but not dramatically decrepit.

I had to be brave, I had to find out what had happened. I needed to know – but I didn't dare, didn't dare walk up that ordinary path, knock on that ordinary door. Did I fear that Ange would be there and that she would turn out to be ordinary too, and all my belief in her beauty was the illusion of a sad old man? No! Not that!

The human mind is brilliant at inventing excuses for inactivity, and mine came up with a very good one. I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of information before I actually called on Ange. I needed to do a bit of research first. I could always call on her later.

I parked in a little street where there was a cluster of small shops. There was the Ocean Blue Fish and Chip Shop, the Crescent Pharmacy, the Bread Basket, the Flower House, and Terry's Gents and Ladies Hair Stylists. It was all surprisingly neat and cosy, barely horrific at all. I went into the corner shop, and discovered that the local paper, the
Romford Recorder
, would be out next day. Next day! I couldn't face driving all the way back to Oxford. There was nothing for it but to go to a Travel Lodge. These places are so impersonal that nobody would notice that I hadn't any luggage, and you paid in advance, so in the morning I could just slip out unshaven.

Next morning I was in that newsagent's almost before the elaborate process of unlocking it was finished. The Asian gentleman who sold me the
Romford Recorder
was extremely friendly and spoke with an estuarine accent. The estuary was the Thames and not the Ganges.

I couldn't see a park or an open space or a seat of any kind, so I hurried back to my car, and there I read the paper from cover to cover.

'The text that led to mum's murder'. 'Fears for young in syringe strewn garden'. 'Crowbar too much for car thieves'. 'Ram raiders fail in off licence heist'. 'Maggots dripping from ceiling at flats'. That is just a small selection of the headlines I found in the
Romford Recorder
, headlines which contrasted strangely with the good humour in the quiet streets all around me.

'Sad Accident of Gallows Corner Pedestrian', 'Street mourns "happy-go-lucky" Ange', 'Skip temp in Meteorite Horror', 'Killer Driver Had Drunk Eighteen Vodkas', ' "She Was Only A Temp, But We Loved Her" – Skip Boss', 'Tragic Death of "Dart in the Temple" Girl. "She died at the game she loved" – mother'. That is just a small selection of the headlines I didn't find.

There were also no Bedwells or Clenches in the Deaths column.

I thought about going back to her street and summoning up the courage to call at number 62, but I had another excuse to hand, and it was a good one. I had not been able to shave or clean my teeth at the Travel Lodge, since I had not taken any luggage. I was wearing dirty clothes. The face that stared back at me from the mirror in my car was haggard and exhausted. I couldn't call on Ange looking like that, couldn't let her mother see me looking like that.

I waited for more than an hour, watching that street, but Ange didn't emerge.

I hadn't slept well, and on my drive back to Oxford I had a constant fear of falling asleep. I was having to force my eyelids to stay open. I would wet my hand on my saliva, take off my glasses and rub my eyes. I was a danger to traffic. I stopped three times for little naps. It was such a battle to stay awake and alive that I felt no temptation to drive in front of a lorry. It was only too likely that it would happen.

How drab my rooms were, and how quiet, how desperately quiet. I looked at all my books and thought, 'There is no solace now in any of them.'

I plucked up my courage, picked up the phone, dialled Ange's number, then rang off the moment I heard the tone. I couldn't speak to her in this condition.

I ran a hot bath, washed myself thoroughly, shampooed my hair, shaved, cleaned my teeth, dried my hair, put on clean clothes, looked at myself in the mirror, mouthed, 'You'll do', and rang Ange's number again.

It took me quite a bit of courage to resist the temptation to ring off. The phone rang and rang and rang. Her house sounded so empty. There was no answermachine message. I rang off, exhausted and limp.

I felt utter black despair, a deep childish anger with the world. The phone rang and I grabbed it angrily.

'Yes?' I barked.

'It's me. Where are you?'

Oh God. It was her day.

'That is a very stupid question, Mother. You've rung me at home, and I've answered the phone, so it doesn't take a genius to work out where I am.'

'Well, well, well. We are getting rude to our mother.'

'Mother, I am not plural, as you have pointed out you aren't.'

'I'm just glad your father's not alive to witness your manners. I just don't know where you get it from. You should be here, Alan. It's your day.'

'I'm sorry, mother. Things have cropped up.'

'Cropped up? What things? Why have things started to crop up all of a sudden? Things never used to crop up.'

'I'm sorry, Mother. I'll come tomorrow.'

'That's all very well, but I was looking forward to my cake.'

That was the moment that tipped the scales. I banged the phone down and thought, 'I
will
kill you.' There I was, in love and jilted by the girl whom I had thought loved me, utterly alone and in despair, and the only relative I had in the world had revealed that it wasn't me that she was missing, it was her sodding cake.

As I drove to the Home with my cake the next day, I listened to a symphony on Radio Three. I don't listen to Classic FM, they keep telling me to relax, which makes me almost as tense and angry as traffic calming does. That symphony could have been my story. There was a little phrase that kept coming in, almost innocent at first, but steadily getting more and more ominous, just like my thoughts about killing my mother. At first I hadn't taken them seriously, but their insistence had forced me to, and yesterday they had exploded just like that phrase was doing now as the symphony was reaching its climax. Sadly, I don't know what symphony it was or even the composer. I'm not very musical, and I arrived in the car park before it had finished, and I didn't dare be late for my mother. 'Sorry, I'm late, mother, but I was listening to a lovely symphony and I just had to find out who wrote it.' 'I see. Your own mother is less important than a symphony. It's come to that.' Just not on.

'I've brought you a cake, Mother. It's a fruit cake for a change.'

'I hope it's not too heavy.'

Relax. This wasn't
the
cake. This wasn't poisoned. I realised that I would need to do a lot of research before I would be ready to take a poisoned cake.

It wasn't the poison that presented the problem. Well, I didn't think it would. I was going to use a concoction gleaned from the only Inspector Didcot mystery that I had ever managed to finish. The murder had been committed by the coroner (a typically incredible Lawrence touch) who had killed his wife's ecologically sound but morally dubious lover with a poisoned loaf of organic wholemeal bread. The poisons were listed. How the coroner obtained them was revealed in detail. Lawrence prided himself on his authenticity, and, being entirely selfish, had no qualms about his books being used as an instruction manual for murder.

I, on the other hand, wish harm to nobody. Not now, anyway, not this morning as I write this in my little twelve-foot-by-ten space, with no view of the outside world. I will not risk telling you what the poisons were in my cake, or how I procured them, for fear that among my readers there is one person as mad as I was at that time.

I would not have been able to even contemplate killing my mother if I had thought that there was the slightest risk of her offering a slice of cake to one of the inmates or nurses. I only wished that I would be able to tell her how her meanness had contributed to her death.

No, my problem was with the cake mixture. I had never baked a cake, and if it wasn't up to my mother's high standards she wouldn't eat it, and if she didn't eat it, she wouldn't die. It didn't take a philosopher to work that out.

My mother was particularly depressed that day. She couldn't
remember what she'd had for lunch. She was convinced that her memory was beginning
to go. She recited several aches and pains, and told me that it wasn't much
fun being eighty-seven. She couldn't understand a word the new Polish nurse
said, and she didn't like to be seen on the commode in front of a foreigner.
I persuaded myself that, had my mother been happy that day, I would have abandoned
my plan to murder her. I persuaded myself once more . . . maybe I was too
easily persuaded . . . that it would be a mercy killing.

I needn't go into great detail about my attempts to bake a cake nice enough to tempt my mother. I produced cakes that didn't rise and cakes that exploded through their icing like tiny volcanoes. I produced a cake that came out in strata resembling the Jurassic Coast of Dorset and Devon. I produced burnt offerings. I thought of a silly joke to tell Ange. It was said of good gardeners that they had green fingers. It was said of good bakers that they had sponge fingers. I smiled, and then I remembered that there was no Ange to tell, and that, having learnt quite late in life to enjoy silly jokes, I would in all probability never again have anyone to tell them to.

At last, I felt ready to produce
the
cake.

'Some cake?'

'Thank you.'

I was being given tea by Lawrence and Jane. I could hardly bear to sit with them in the cool elegance of the sitting room of Kierkegaard, eating tiny sandwiches, cutting my piece of cake with an antique cake fork, sipping Lady Grey tea from a Royal Doulton cup.

'There's good news, Alan. Very good news,' said Lawrence. 'I've got you that sabbatical. No problem.'

'There you go,' I thought. Even Lawrence is saying 'No problem' now. The language is dead. I was surprised his invitation hadn't said 'will u come 4 t?' (Ange had shown me her text messages. Oh, Ange, Ange, Ange, to have you here now, in this room, outraging these sad people.)

A year's freedom on full pay. It was meaningless now. I tried to look enthusiastic, but I knew that I was using too many adjectives to compensate for the lack of excitement in my eyes.

'Terrific,' I said. 'That's wonderful. That's really good news. Oh, how splendid. That is exciting. Thank you, Lawrence.'

They looked at me with synchronised concern.

'How
are
you?' asked Jane.

'Yes, how
are
you,' echoed Lawrence.

'I'm fine,' I said. 'Lovely cake.'

An imp tried to persuade me to add, 'I'm trying to bake cakes. I'm having no luck.'

I resisted.

There was a slightly awkward silence.

'So,' I said, 'I gather from your card – thank you for that, incidentally . . .'

'No problem.'

'I gather that young Mallard made a bit of a mess of the Ferdinand Brinsley.'

'He was out of his depth.'

'Oh dear. I'm sorry.'

'Yes, it was sad.'

There was another slightly awkward pause.

'That girl,' said Lawrence. 'Ange, was it?'

'It was.'

'Are you still seeing her?'

'Yes. Yes. Yes.'

There was a silence, a horrible silence, a deep silence this time, not a slight silence. In the depth of the silence my stomach gurgled. I was on my third cup of tea.

I heard my father saying, 'Don't be soppy, boy. Don't be weedy. Face the music. Always better when you face the music.'

'I use the word "Yes" in a rather personal sense, meaning "No",' I said. 'She didn't turn up for her birthday. I think she's jilted me.'

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Jane's eyes and lips both said. 'Well, we did warn you', but she resisted the temptation to say the words, and I was grateful for that.

'I didn't know people used that word any more – "jilted",' said Lawrence at last.

'Lawrence!' said Jane. 'I'm sorry, Alan. Only a man who puts language before emotion could have said that.'

'I don't think Alan is in the mood to hear us washing our dirty linen in public,' said Lawrence.

'Nor to listen to clichés,' I said.

'Quite right, Alan,' said Jane sweetly. 'Well said.'

I knew that Jane was only being nice to me because she wanted to score off Lawrence, but I was grateful none the less. What an attractive face she had on the rare occasions when she wasn't looking superior.

'I hope you don't use clichés in your novels, Lawrence,' I said. 'I ought to read one some time and find out.'

He flushed slightly. Jane smirked slightly. I prided myself slightly – everything was being done in such a restrained manner, as befitted such an elegant tea – on the way I had introduced the lie that I had never read any of Lawrence's books, and could not therefore have got the poisoned cake idea from him. I felt that I was thinking of everything, minimising every risk. I think now that it shows how unhinged I was at that time. The risk was enormous. There could be no other suspect, if my mother died from poisoned cake that I had brought.

'We're sad to see you like this, Alan,' said Jane. 'Very sad . . . but, as you may well come to realise one day, it is probably the best thing for you.'

'No!' I said, with passion.

Jane frowned. My passion clashed with the room.

'No!' I repeated. 'Never. You despise her, but we have been so good for each other. We went to Italy. I taught her about Palladio and she taught me about Fellatio.'

They stared at me, open-mouthed. It was a good moment, but I was too tense to enjoy it.

I had a second slice of cake, and went home, and baked . . .
the
cake.

I telephoned Ange twice that evening, uncertain whether I was doing it in moments of strength or moments of weakness. Once I rang off before she had a chance to answer. The other time I hung on and on, but there was no answer machine, and no reply. I could hear the phone, ringing out over that drab street near Gallows Corner. I could smell the emptiness of the house.

Why was the house empty? Where had Ange gone? Where had her mother gone?

I was shaking as I slipped the poison into the mixture for my chocolate sponge cake, carefully following Lawrence's instructions in his book.

I was shaking as I slipped the fatal cake into my rusty old oven.

I was shaking as I removed it.

It looked good. It looked appetising. It was her favourite. There was no doubt that she would cut herself a slice.

But was it good inside? Was it too dry or too heavy or too soggy? If so, she might not eat enough.

I had to take it on trust. I couldn't cut it open to see.

I set off, in my ancient Saab, to murder my ancient mother.