Turning the neck of the black plastic bag, he slung it into the well behind the front seats. He would have put it in the boot, but didn’t want to risk the noise of slamming the lid.
He sat in the car, breathed deeply and tried to control the chattering of his teeth. A light came on in a curtained upstairs window of a house opposite. Probably just some elderly incontinent making his way to the bathroom, but Graham didn’t want to wait to find out.
With a little choke, the car started first time. He turned the heater on full and drove slowly out of Bosham.
As he did so, it started to rain. Heavy, steady rain. Rain to wash away footprints and mud from the fibregiass and boards of Tara’s Dream.
Graham grinned. The random gods of chance were on his side.
It was 3.13.
There was a builder’s skip outside a demolition site on the outskirts of Haslemere. Graham’s bag of sea-wet clothes was shoved into it under a pile of broken lathes and torn wallpaper.
When he reached Barnes, he parked the Chevette exactly where he had driven it off from some four and a half hours earlier.
He put his key in the door of the Boileau Avenue house at 4.54. As he did so, he caught a strong whiff of seaweed. At the same moment another panic gripped him. Suppose Stella had woken up.
The light from the landing was sufficient for him to see her through the half-open door. In fact, the breathing reassured him before he looked. The snores had given way to deep sighs. She had shifted her position and now lay sideways, the slipped duvet revealing breasts squashed together by her arms.
3:01 was displayed by the clock radio.
The immersion heater had not been switched off since Merrily’s death. Since she had spent more time in the house than Graham, she had always controlled the central heating and immersion. And since the latter had been switched on at the time of her death, Graham found a plentiful supply of hot water for his bath.
He had to wash everything including his hair.
Already Stella was no doubt finding his behaviour in bed odd; if he came to her smelling of seaweed she was going to find it odder still.
The hot water restored him. He still ached, but he felt very satisfied, warm and drowsy. Mustn’t go to sleep yet, though. A large Scotch after the bath and then to bed. Must remember to wash his shirt and underpants. And his socks. Yes, and take the jacket and trousers to the cleaners, get rid of the smell.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
Stella stood in the doorway. Her body sagged and bulged. He realised that in his preoccupation he had not previously taken in her nakedness, the tight little breasts, not stretched like Merrily’s by children, the bulge of the hips, the surprising tuft of blackness between her legs. He felt distaste for what he saw.
But her eyes mattered more, and they were still rolling with satisfactory drowsiness.
‘What are you doing?’ she repeated.
Time for a bit more of the abject act. ‘I just thought it might relax me.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve been lying there awake for hours, after. . you know, after I couldn’t. . we didn’t. .’
‘I told you not to worry.’ It was automatic reassurance; she was still very sleepy.
‘It’s different for a man. It makes you feel. . I don’t. . I don’t know how long I’d been lying there.’
‘It’s about quarter past three now,’ she slurred.
Wonderful. How kind. She was doing his job for him. He’d had visions of having to wake her and draw her attention to the time.
‘Well, I was just feeling so awful, so strung up, I thought maybe if I had a bath, calmed down, it might be better.’
‘Let’s have another try when you come back to bed. Eh?’ Her wink was meant to be provocative, but it gave Graham a stab of anger, again for her likeness to Merrily.
‘Just have a pee and see you in a minute,’ she mumbled, and disappeared.
He didn’t hurry out of the bath and when he got to the bedroom she was, as he had hoped, once again deeply asleep.
Just as well. Behind the curtains the sky was beginning to lighten.
Graham’s hand was now steady. With the buttons of the clock radio he corrected the time to 5:52.
Then he lay back and thought of his victim. High tide at Bosham that morning was round quarter to seven. Knowing his rival’s enthusiasm for sailing, he reckoned it wouldn’t be long after that that Robert Benham boarded Tara’s Dream.
With that comforting reflection, Graham Marshall drifted easily into sleep.
They woke about half past eight. Graham felt as if he had been dragged from the bottom of a deep well, encased in an old-fashioned diving suit, or as if he was into his third month of Gestapo interrogation. Every tiny muscle of his body ached.
Stella, too, claimed to be exhausted, which surprised her.
‘It’s that Bailey’s Irish Cream,’ Graham joked, taking pleasure in the irony of the remark.
‘But I don’t feel hungover. Just incredibly sleepy.’
‘You must be relaxed.’
This she took as a cue. ‘And how about you? Are you more relaxed now?’
Her right hand came across to his stomach and started to make ever widening circular movements. It stirred nothing. Then she took his penis and tried to coax life into it, first with one hand, then with two. When this proved ineffectual, she threw back the duvet and brought her lips into play. Graham looked dispassionately down at her head, noting that a few of the hairs were grey at the roots, and wondered which of his colleagues had taught her this particular trick.
But the kiss of life was as fruitless as her other ministrations. She might as well have been playing with an empty balloon.
Time for more histrionics, Graham thought wearily.
‘I’m sorry. I had hoped. . it just seems that so soon after a wife’s death — even a wife you didn’t care for. .’
Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.
He felt quietly confident about what was happening in Bosham, though he was of course desperately anxious to know the outcome of his plan. But he could ruin everything by unseemly curiosity. He had to wait until something was publicly announced. Possibly wait till the next day at work. Possibly even, if the booby trap had failed, he would wait for ever. If the matches didn’t light, or if the lethal combination of gas and air didn’t ignite, or if the gas had all seeped away, he might never hear anything. Robert Benham might not even be aware of the sabotage.
An empty gas cylinder would perhaps puzzle him briefly, but the triggering device might never be noticed. Since the top hatch was usually only closed when Tara’s Dream was empty, and in the forward position the sandpaper was invisible, it could easily pass undetected for years.
But this was defeatist thinking. Graham convinced himself it was going to work. All he could do was wait.
And cultivate his alibi. To this end he took Stella out for a walk by the pond in Barnes and repaired to the ‘Sun’ pub at lunchtime. Both of these excursions produced a few nods from acquaintances and, to make the alliance even more public, Graham took her for a large Sunday lunch in a local restaurant.
He found conversation difficult, but she appeared not to. They talked of colleagues at work and a variety of subjects they had discussed before. Graham was very tired, but did not worry about occasional silences. He could rely on the aptitude of his emotions for masquerade. Silence and a soulful look would be interpreted as anxiety, born of bereavement and impotence, and rewarded by a gentle squeeze of the hand.
After lunch, when they had enjoyed a lot of wine, they returned to the house and lazed on the sitting-room floor with the Sunday papers. By four o’clock they were both asleep.
Graham woke with a start and looked at his watch. 5.52. Twelve hours exactly since he had completed his plan. He rose slowly, stretching his aching limbs. Stella lay splayed against the sofa, breathing evenly. He went into the kitchen to make some tea. While he was waiting for the kettle to boil, he switched on the radio.