“I know, miss.They’ve got more money.” It was a story or a novel. Archie was writing a novel? When pigs flew. And if Archie wrote a novel it wouldn’t be this kind of novel, it would involve the de-struction of the world by robotic cyber machines, with compliant sex-doll women thrown in for good measure. She went into “My Documents.” The novel was on a CD. Definitely not Archie’s, there was correspondence from an “Alex Blake,” apparently replying to fan letters. Other correspondence with the same address from a Martin Canning. There was a part of a manuscript, a novel-several chapters of something called Death on the Black Isle. This was what Archie and Hamish had been reading out loud last night. “I think there’s more to this than meets the eye, Bertie.”
Then it had hit her-“Alex Blake” was the name of the guy whose house Richard Mott had been murdered in. Martin Canning was his real name-or was it the other way round? Her son, her harmless son, was in illegal possession of something that must have come from a murder scene. What else had they done? She felt something scooped out and hollow where her stomach used to be.
39
Gloria had intended the early-morning blaze in the garden brazier to be symbolic, a pyre for the past Gloria (Graham’s wife) and a signal for the future Gloria (Graham’s widow). She had imagined herself emerging from the flames like a phoenix, so it was rather disappointing that her wardrobe hadn’t made more of a show, even if it was only a couple of evening dresses-expensive designer things that she had worn for company dinner dances. Gloria had an uncomfortable vision of herself teetering into a succession of hotel ballrooms over the past thirty-nine years, mutton dressed as mutton, her body stuffed into the glittering carapace of a spangled dress, and her small feet (“pig’s trotters,” Graham called them) bound in unsuitable shoes.
Because he would soon be dead, she felt sure of it. Dead as a dodo. Dead as mutton. Dead as a doornail. Why a doornail? Why was a doornail deader than anything else? (The door itself, for example-equally dead, surely?) Did “dead” exist in the compara-tive? Could something be deader than something else? Dead, deader, deadest. Graham would be deader than Gloria. He would be superlatively dead. It had taken a lifetime for Gloria to realize how much she disliked Graham.
There was more smoke than fire, so she threw a firelighter into the brazier and watched the little tongues of green and blue flames as they began to lick at a rhinestone-encrusted bolero jacket by Jacques Vert. Mineral to mineral, dust to dust. The clothes hadn’t reduced to the soft, powdery ash she had imagined.
The electronic gates opened and closed several times. If Gloria hadn’t known that the man from the security company was down in the basement checking the system, she would have thought that a crowd of invisible people were being slowly filtered onto the property.
She watched a thrush pulling an elasticated worm from the lawn. Birds (apart from magpies) were Good Things. Even when they were killing other things. The birds ate the worms, the worms might soon be eating Graham. Graham had eaten birds (chicken, turkey, duck, pheasant, grouse, partridge), so the cycle of life would be complete. Since Graham’s authoritarian regime was suspended unexpectedly, Gloria hadn’t eaten anything that breathed. Graham always said he wanted to be burned, not buried, at the end, but Gloria thought it would be a shame to deprive all those small industrious creatures of a good meal.
Let the punishment fit the crime. She had attended a particu-larly rousing amateur production of The Mikado at the King’s last year. She was very fond of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, at least the better-known ones. Some things were obvious-a man who kicked a dog to death, for example, should himself be kicked to death, preferably by dogs, but that wasn’t really possible, the anatomy of a dog didn’t lend itself to kicking. Which said a lot about dogs, if you thought about it. Gloria would be happy to undertake the kicking herself, if necessary. But as for Graham-what would be a suitable punishment for him?
Perhaps he should be forced to sit (or, better still, stand like a Victorian clerk) in an airless, windowless office all day, shuffling his way through endless sheaves of papers-insurance claims, VAT returns, tax returns, double accounting ledgers-all of which he would have to fill in accurately and truthfully by hand. Or, better still, he would have to stand all day and all night for the rest of time counting other people’s money without ever being allowed to pocket so much as a farthing for himself. Gloria missed far-things, the littlest coin with the littlest bird on it.
She gave the brazier one last poke. Perhaps she should cremate Graham after all, just to make absolutely sure that he couldn’t come back.
In the paper (she must cancel the newspapers, they weren’t healthy) there was an article about a court case-a teenager had broken into an old people’s home and stolen wallets and purses and watches from the rooms, and then he had taken an old woman’s pet budgerigar from its cage, wrapped Sellotape round and round its body, and then thrown it out the window-five floors up. And this was civilization! How satisfying it would be to wind that teenager in Sellotape and throw him out a fifth-floor window. Was there no one meting out justice in this world? Were the yobs and the magpies and the Grahams and the kitten-eating men and the budgie-taping teenagers just going to get away with it?
Upstairs in her bedroom, Gloria pushed aside the black plastic bag of twenty-pound notes in her wardrobe and retrieved a little-worn red velour “leisure suit” that had been stuffed in the back of the wardrobe after only one outing because Graham had despised it at first sight, saying it made her look like a giant tomato. She regarded the image reflected back to her by the vast mirrors of the built-in wardrobes. A touch of the tomato, it was true, and it made her arse look enormous, but it covered her matronly bosom and iguana belly, and it was comfortable and rather jaunty, the sort of thing a sporty Mother Christmas might have worn. Graham had never liked her using words such as “arse,” he said a woman should be “ladylike,” like his own mother, Beryl, who, before she acquired her sponge-brain syndrome, had always referred to her rear end as her “derrière,” possibly the only French word she knew.
“Arse, arse, arse,” Gloria said to her mirrored behind. The red velour suit felt soft and snug, she imagined this was how babies felt in their clothes. She put on the trainers she had bought for her “Nifty Fifties” class, still more or less box-white and unsullied. As she made her way downstairs, she felt lighter on her feet, as if she were ready for something. Ready to run.
Gloria sighed. She could hear Graham’s whiny secretary, Chris-tine Tennant, speaking to the answering machine again. “Graham, you’re really needed here!” Gloria picked up the phone and said, “Christine, what can I do for you?” adopting the efficient tones of a woman who had worn heels and little business suits instead of slipping off a bar stool and following her prospective husband like a dog.
“The Fraud Unit has been here again,” she said. “They want to question Graham. He’s not really in Thurso, is he?” she added, sounding sad rather than bitter. “He’s betrayed us all, hasn’t he? He’s run off and left everyone else to face the music.”
“I don’t know, Christine.” She replaced the receiver. She almost felt sorry for Christine, all those years of faithful service and nothing to show for it. Perhaps she could send her flowers or a fruit basket. A fruit basket was a nice thing to receive.
The man from the security company emerged unexpectedly and molelike from the basement. “There’s something wrong with the sensors on your gates,” he announced, with more histrionics than seemed strictly necessary to Gloria. “I’ve got your screens back up, and your panic buttons, but I’ll have to come back later with new parts. I don’t know what’s been going on down there.”