* * *
A sinuous cloud of freezing mist curled at me out of the brook as I crossed the footbridge. Reaching the wicket gate, I disengaged the latch and lowered it to its housing. Then I rammed the gate back as fast as I could, causing an indignant shriek to add itself briefly to the night sounds. I stole up the path and through the old cemetery that was Uncle Bob's last resting place, to the porch, where I groped for the keyhole. In total blackness I guided the key into the lock, gave it a sharp twist, shoved the door, and stepped inside.
Church air is like no other. It is the air the dead breathe, humid, old, and frightening. It echoes even when there is no sound. Feeling my way to the vestry as quickly as I dared, I located the cope cupboard, opened it, and, with my palms flat on the ancient stones, wriggled up the spiral staircase to my sanctuary and put on the light.
I was safe. I could think the unthinkable at last. A whole internal life that I dared not acknowledge, let alone explore, until I was secure inside the confines of my priesthole, was once more open to my scrutiny.
Mr. Timothy D'Abell Cranmer: How do you say? Did you or did you not, on or about the night of September 18, at Priddy Pool in the County of Somerset, murder by battery and drowning one Lawrence Pettifer, formerly your friend and secret agent?
* * *
We are fighting, as only brothers can. All my gentling and cossetting of him, all the careless insults I have swallowed whole—beginning with his sneering asides about Diana, my first wife; continuing for twenty more years with gibes about my emotional inadequacy, about what he calls my rent-a-drool smile, and my good manners that do duty for a heart; and culminating in his wanton theft of Emma—all my cancer-giving forbearance, has turned outward in a pent-up, furious revolt.
I am showering blows on him and probably he is hitting me back, but I feel nothing. Whatever is hitting me is merely an obstruction on the path to him, because I am going to kill him. The intention I have come with is about to be fulfilled. I am hitting him as we hit when we are boys, wild, heaving, artless blows, everything we are taught not to do at combat camp. I would tear him apart with my teeth if my fingers weren't strong enough for the job. All right! I am shouting. You called me an espiopath, now you've got a bloody espiopath! And between whiles, without the least hope of getting an answer, I am shouting the questions at him that have been burning my soul ever since Emma left me: What have you done with her? What lies have you told her about us? I meant what truths. What have you promised her that she can't get from me?
A full moon is shining. The long sour grass beneath our feet has grown into great tufts under the lashing Mendip winds. Advancing on him, swinging blows at him, I feel the mounds thumping at my knees. I must be falling, because the moon swings away from me and then comes back, and I see a vertical skyline with the jagged rims made by the opencast mining. But I am still hitting him with my gloved hands, still shouting questions like the worst interrogator in the world. His face is wet and hot, and I think he must be bleeding all over it, but in the shadowy light of the moon nothing is to be trusted: a film of sweat and mud can look like an obliterated face. So I trust nothing and keep hitting him and screaming at him: Where is she? Give her back to me! Leave her alone! His taunting has given way to self-pitying sobs as I strike home. I have defeated him at last, Larry, the true version of me, as he calls himself, the Timbo Unbound whose life I never dared to lead until I led it vicariously through him. Then die, I yell at him as I hit him—with my elbow now; I am tired and am remembering a few tricks. In a minute I'll be giving him a chop to the windpipe, or thrusting his lusting eyes back into their sockets with the leading fingers of my gloved hand. Die, and then there'll be only one of us to live my life. Because two of us living it, Larry, old boy, is actually a crowd.
It has been a long conversation, you understand, all this talk of breaking omerta and whose life is whose, whose girl is whose, where she is hiding and why. It has reached into our far, dark past. All the same, talk is only talk, and I have come to kill him. I have the .38 in my waistband, and in the fullness of time I intend to shoot him with it. It's an unattributable gun, unnumbered, unsourced. Neither the British police nor the Office has ever heard of it. I have arrived here in a car that is nothing to do with me, wearing clothes I shall never wear again. It is clear to me by now that I have been planning Larry's murder for years without being aware that I was doing so, perhaps from the day we embraced each other in St. Mark's Square. Perhaps already at Oxford, where he took such pleasure in publicly humiliating me: Timbo, who can't wait to be middle-aged; Timbo, our college virgin, our bourgeois striver, our boy bishop. Perhaps even at Winchester, where for all the caring I invested in him, he was never sufficiently in awe of my exalted status.
I have been crafty too. Everything covert, like the old days. This is no Sunday lunch cooked by Timbo, dialogue courtesy of Lamy, and a romantic stroll with Emma thrown in afterwards. I have invited him for a clandestine meeting up here on the Mendip Hills, on this moonscape plateau nearer to the sky than to the earth, where the trees throw dead men's shadows on the whited lane and no cars pass. I have suggested an urgent but unspecified operational context to allay his suspicions. And Larry has presented himself early, because for all his bohemian posturing, after twenty years of my patient manipulation he is Operational Man to his fingertips.
And I? Do I shout? No, no, I don't think so. "It's actually about Emma, Larry," I explain by way of introduction as we face each other under the moon. I probably give him my rent-a-drool smile. Timbo Unbound is still waiting to spring free. "About our relationship."
Our relationship? Whose relationship? Emma's and mine? Larry's and mine? Theirs and mine? You pushed me at him, Emma is saying through her tears. You set me up for him without even knowing it.
But he sees my face—distorted, I am sure, by the moonlight and already wild enough to raise a warning in him. And instead of taking fright he produces a reply so insolent, so perfectly in keeping with all I have learned to hate about him over thirty years, that unknowingly he signs his death warrant. It is a reply that has rung in my head ever since. It hovers before me in the dark like a lamp I must track down and put out. Even in broad daylight it echoes brazenly in my ear.
"Hell's your problem, actually, Timbo? You stole my life. I stole your woman. Simple as that."
I realise he has been drinking. I smell Scotch as well as autumn on the Mendip wind. I hear that arrogant extra note that gets into him when he's about to deliver one of his word-perfect monologues, complete with subordinate and relative clauses and, practically, the semicolons. The notion that he is not clear-minded fills me with indignation. I want him sober and accountable.