I was standing in my bathroom with my back against a hot towel rail with both hands firmly attached to it at either end.
Peter Enstone seemed to relax a little. He had been as frightened of me as I was of him.
‘What does it take to stop you?’ he said.
‘Honesty,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so bloody self-righteous,’ he said. ‘You have ruined my life.’
‘You ruined it yourself,’ I said.
He ignored me.
‘Do you know what it’s like to hate your own father?’ he said.
‘No.’
I had never even known my own father.
‘And do you know what it’s like to spend your life trying to please someone only for them to despise the very ground you walk on?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Do you?’ he shouted.
‘No,’ I said.
‘It becomes your whole existence. Looking for things he will like but only finding things he hates. And all the time he thinks you’re an idiot, an imbecile, a helpless child, with no feelings.’
I stood there looking at the monster. This man was no helpless child.
‘Then I found a way of breaking out of the cage,’ he said. ‘I found a way to control his emotions. To make him happy, to make him sad, and especially to make him angry with someone else for a change.’
He came closer to my face. I could almost have leaned forward and kissed him. Provided, that is, I wanted to kiss the devil.
‘And now you have taken all that away, and worse still, he will now know that it was me that was controlling him. He’s going to be so angry with me again.’
He’s not going to be the only one, I thought. He sounded like a petulant schoolboy caught with his hand in the biscuit tin.
‘Do you know what it’s like to have someone angry with you all the time?’
‘No,’ I said. Actually I did. People were often angry with me for exposing their misdeeds. I had always rather enjoyed it, but I decided not to say so, not now.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘It eats away at your soul. When you’re a child, it’s frightening. I spent my whole childhood being frightened of him, every single minute. He would beat me for being naughty, and the harder I tried to be good, the more he saw me as naughty. “Hold out your hand, Peter,” he would say. Then he would hit me with a wooden bat. Then he would smile and say it was for my own good.’
He went quiet for a moment and stared off into space; I could tell he was reliving incidents elsewhere.
‘He used to hit my mother as well,’ he said. ‘He drove her away. At first, she used to protect me from him but then she left. She deserted me and he killed her.’ He paused then went on. ‘Well, he didn’t actually kill her, but as good as. She was desperate to get away from him and she agreed to everything he said so long as he would leave her alone. He saw to it that she left with nothing, no money, no home and no chance of ever seeing me again. I was twelve.’
She obviously hadn’t had a very good solicitor, I thought. Times had changed.
‘He never spoke about her. It was as if she had never existed. I found out much later that she had been absolutely destitute and had even been begging in the street.’ He made it sound like the most shameful thing in the world. I had occasionally seen my own mother beg. It had sometimes made the difference between life and death for us both.
‘She tried to get him to give her some money to live on but he refused. When she tried to take him to court to get access to me, his lawyers blocked her. They just tore to shreds the hardly qualified Legal Aid lawyer that my mother had to resort to.’
Definitely not a good solicitor.
‘She walked straight out of her lawyer’s office and under a number 15 bus. Funny,’ he said, ‘ever since I found that out, I’ve never been able to ride on a number 15 bus, just in case it was the one.’
He sat down on the edge of the bath. The longer he talked, the greater the chance that Muscles would come back with the girls and save my skin, but I would probably need to survive for another hour if the cavalry were to arrive in time.
‘The inquest said it was an accident, but I reckon she did it on purpose. My father killed her as sure as if he’d been driving the bus himself.’
He had tears in his eyes. I wasn’t sure whether it was for the loss of his mother or for the reaction the incident may have produced in Jonny Enstone. Peter’s relationship with his father was highly complex.
‘When I got older and bigger, he stopped hitting me. I told him that if he hit me again I’d hit him back. So he’s changed his tactics from physical to mental abuse. He puts me down at every opportunity. He belittles everything I do. He tells his friends that I am useless, and that I can’t be his true son as I am no good at business. I hate him. I hate him.’
Why then, I thought, don’t you go and shoot him instead of me?
‘And then when I find I am good at something, you go and wreck it. At last I discovered that it’s me that has the power, it’s me that’s in control, and it’s me that people are frightened of.’ He looked up at my face. ‘Everyone except you. You’re not even frightened now.’
Yes, I was. But I didn’t say so. I stood there in silence and watched him.
I began to sweat. In spite of the insulating effect of the towels against which I was leaning, I was getting very hot. I was worried that he should think that my skin was damp due to fear. But did it matter? Yes. It did to me.
‘You should be frightened,’ he said. ‘I am going to kill you. I’ve got nothing to lose now, thanks to you. I’ll get done for the other two murders so why not for three. Three life sentences are just as long as two. And in all those years ahead, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that it was me that beat Sid Halley. I won. I might be in jail but you will be pushing up the daisies. And then one day I’ll be out, but there’ll be no bringing you back from the dead.’
He smiled. I began to be more than frightened. I became angry.
Why, I thought, should this little worm use his father as his excuse for his actions? Yes, his father was an ogre and a bully, but Peter was thirty-two years old and there are limits to how much and for how long you can blame the parents.
The rage rose inside me as it had done in the hospital. I raged, also, at my predicament. Damn it, I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live. I wanted to marry Marina. I especially didn’t want to die like this, trussed up and at the hands of Peter Enstone.
‘I think I’ve talked enough,’ he said suddenly, standing up. ‘I get fed up with all those silly films where the gunman spends so long telling his victim why he’s going to kill him that someone finally arrives to stop it. That’s not going to happen here because I’m going to kill you now, then I’m going to wait and kill your girlfriend when she gets home. She can keep you company in hell.’
He laughed.
He leaned forward until his face was just six inches away from mine.
‘Bye, Sid,’ he said. ‘Now be a good boy and open your mouth.’
Instead, I hit him.
I hit him with all the pent-up anger and frustration of the last three weeks.
I hit him with the stump of my left arm.
The look on his face was more of surprise than hurt. But I had put every ounce of my considerable strength into that blow and he went backwards fast. The edge of the bath caught him behind the knees and he went over it. There was a satisfyingly loud thud as the back of his head hit the far rim of the bath near the taps. Thank goodness for old-fashioned values, I thought. This bathtub was not one of the modern flexible cheap plastic things; it was solid cast-iron and very hard.
Peter was lying face up in the bath but he was half turned, with his chin pushed into his chest. He groaned a little but he was unconscious. But for how long?