He grinned. “No problem. My stepbrother Ben is my doctor. He signed the death certificate. Merle picked up the life insurance and here we are — Mr and Mrs Finch. The fake passports cost us a packet, but we could afford them. Isn’t this a great place to retire?”
“But there was a funeral.”
“That didn’t cost much.”
“Too true.”
“A lot of them were in on this,” he confessed. “My cousin Jerry runs an undertaking business in the next village. He supplied the coffin.”
“And a corpse?” I said, appalled.
“A couple of sandbags.”
“You’re a prize bastard, Danny Fox.”
He chuckled at that. “Aren’t I just? And the prize is in the bank.”
“What you did is sick.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Who loses out? Only the insurance company. I had to pay huge premiums.”
“There were people in that church who genuinely grieved for you.”
“Horseshit.”
That hurt. “I grieved.”
“Jesus — what for?” His eyebrows jutted in genuine puzzlement.
I started to say, “If you don’t remember—”
Danny cut me off with, “All that was thirty years ago. And then it was only—”
“Night exercises,” I completed the statement for him.
“What?”
“Night exercises. That’s what you thought of me, didn’t you?” I stood up and faced him. “Admit it. Say it to my face, you skunk.”
There was a pause. The night had virtually closed in. Danny up-ended his last can of beer. “All right, if that’s what you heard from Merle, it must be true.” He laughed. “Let’s face it, Susan — that’s what you were. P.O. didn’t stand for Pilot Officer in your case, it stood for pushover.”
I said, “That’s unbelievably cruel.”
Unmoved, Danny told me, “If you really want to know, I couldn’t even remember your name that day we met in Brighton. I remembered your car, though.”
That was one injury too many — even for a coward like me. The precious flame I’d guarded for thirty years was out. Our relationship had been the one experience in my life that I thought I could call truly romantic. Nothing since had compared to it. Danny had made me feel beautiful, desired, a woman fulfilled.
He knew the pain he had just inflicted. He must have known.
“Danny.”
“Yes?” He looked up.
By that time Mallory Dock was deserted except for us. The water there is deep enough to moor a cruise liner.
The body of the middle-aged male washed up on Key West Bight a week or so later was identified as that of the man who sometimes danced on the dock at sunset. Nobody knew his name and nobody claimed the body for burial.
Quiet Please — We’re Rolling
A naked man on a tropical beach was chasing a small white dog that had just run off with his swimming trunks. The scene was shot from the rear. Once in a while, a bare bum is acceptable for early evening viewing.
Albert Challis, in his bedsit in Reading, reached for another can of lager, his eyes never leaving the screen of the small portable TV. “Jesus! I don’t know how they get away with this. It’s bloody obvious most of it is faked.”
His wife Karen continued mending the jumper on her lap, oblivious to Albert’s ranting. She didn’t enjoy the programme, and she had a long evening in prospect, repairing clothes. There was no escape from the TV when you lived in a bedsit.
Albert continued, after a belch, “When this show first went out, I reckon most of the clips were genuine. Then they started offering a few hundred quid for new material. Stands to reason people are going to fake the incidents. They set up someone making a fool of himself, roll the camera and cash in.”
He watched in cynical expectation as a grey man in a grey room began painting a door frame. A second later the door opened and the hapless decorator was dowsed in red.
“Well, knock me down with a feather,” said Albert with heavy sarcasm. “I never saw that one coming. It’s like I say, Karen. The whole thing’s a set-up.”
Karen folded the jumper and placed it on her ‘done’ pile, then turned her attention to a black woollen sock. It was one of Albert’s, the survivor of a pair he had worn so proudly on their wedding day, eighteen years ago. Now it contained as much darning wool as original thread, but Albert insisted it wasn’t ready for the rag-box yet.
On the screen a well-dressed woman in a stable yard started walking beside the half-doors where the horses were kept.
“Ay up!” said Albert. “Watch what happens to her big straw hat. There it goes!”
Sure enough, a horse’s head appeared suddenly from one of the stables and got the woman’s hat between its teeth and whipped it off her head and out of reach.
“I bet they rehearsed it three times.”
Karen had looked up and watched the clip, prompted by Albert’s “Ay up!”
“If they did,” she said, “they must have got through more than one hat. It’s very destructive. I’ve never had a hat as nice as that.”
Albert said, “It seems to me all you have to do is buy one of these bloody camcorders and the money’s yours. They’ll take anything, slipping on some ice, falling into a pond, being hit on the head by a football, any bloody thing. You could make one a week, I reckon. Shoot it on Saturday, send it to the television people on the Monday, and, bingo, the cheque arrives on Wednesday. We could live like kings on that sort of money, Karen.”
Karen looked down at her darning again. “Well why not, if it’s so simple? Why not get one of those cameras and try it?”
Albert had no immediate answer. He placed his can on the aged carpet and folded both arms across his ample beer-belly. The best he could manage in response was a smile that was meant to be superior.
Karen said, “You’re all mouth and trousers, Albert Challis. You say it’s all a con, but you don’t have the bottle to prove it.”
Albert found his voice. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly, my sweet,” he said. “You did just suggest buying one of those camcorders, didn’t you? When was the last time you looked in the bloody shop window? Have you any idea of the price of those things?”
Karen shook her head. They didn’t have the sort of money most other people seemed to have. Nothing in their household had been bought new. They got it all secondhand. Whatever broke, burst or wore out had to be repaired.
“They cost a bloody fortune, woman,” Albert ranted. “Hundreds of pounds. Can you imagine that, a little piece of black plastic costing five hundred quid?”
Karen shook her head, returning to the rhythmical comfort of needle and thread.
Albert finished his lager, watching a fat woman being chased across a field by a goat while the studio audience guffawed. “The point is,” he said in support of his apparent caution, “I’m not prepared to splash out five hundred on a camcorder when we only stand to make two hundred and fifty back.”
“But you just said you could make one a week and we could live like royalty,” Karen reminded him. “Soon as I call your bluff, you back off.”
Albert shot her a filthy look. “Don’t you provoke me.”
“It’s not as if we haven’t got the money,” Karen persisted. “We must have more than five hundred in the bank.”
“Never you mind what we have or haven’t got in the bank, Karen.”
“I do mind,” she said. “It’s mine as much as yours. I work to keep us going, same as you. The cooking, the cleaning, the mending. I think we ought to have a joint account and then I’d know how much we’re worth.”
“You’d spend it in a week,” said Albert. “Look, if anything happened to me, God forbid, that money goes to you, right? All my worldly goods. Satisfied?”