“What?”
Her knuckles were white against the steering wheel. “He’s always been lazy and now he doesn’t have time for anyone or anything but your wife. The creditors are pressing, Terry. Better watch out, or they’ll take your money as well as his.”
I didn’t speak again for a couple of minutes, I just gazed out of the window, watching the pylons in the fields, their arms outstretched as if denying guilt. Until then, I suppose I’d had pangs of conscience. I’m not a naturally violent man. In principle, I think it’s right to turn the other cheek. But there are limits, and I had raced past mine.
“You can stop him,” I said eventually. “That’s why I needed to talk to you, Olivia. Not to weep and wail. I just want an end to it.”
Ideas were shifting inside my head, even as I sat beside her. I hadn’t been thinking straight. I’d thought: What if she kills herself? It wasn’t nice, but looking at it another way, you might say it was only a question of time before Olivia stopped crying for help and finally went all the way. Imagining the headlines gave me grim satisfaction. Faithless Financier Finds Wife Dead. Betrayed Woman Could Not Take Any More. It would finish everything between Sarah-Jane and Patrick. Their relationship would be tainted for all time. I knew enough of him to be sure he would want to get out of it, make a new beginning with someone else. Someone else’s wife, most likely.
But maybe there was a different solution, leaving less to chance. Bernard’s words lodged in my brain. He was no fool, he had Olivia’s number. She was a loose cannon, they didn’t come any looser. What if she was fired at Patrick himself?
Signs were scattered along the grass verge warning of police speed enforcement, pictures of so-called safety cameras and a board bragging about how many poor old motorists had been caught exceeding the limit in the past six months. None of it seemed to register with Olivia. The yellow camera wasn’t hidden from view, there was no panda car lurking in the bushes, she had every chance to slow down before we reached the white lines on the road, but far from easing off the accelerator, she put her foot down. We leapt past the camera and it flashed twice in anger. I couldn’t help wincing, but at the same time I felt blood rushing to my head. This was a sort of liberation. I was manoeuvring Olivia as if she was a car to be squeezed into a tight parking space. And Patrick’s luck was about to run dry.
“He deserves to suffer,” she said.
“Yes.”
She tossed me a glance. It was gone in a moment, but for the first time since I’d known her, I thought she was actually seeing me. But I still couldn’t guess what she thought about what she saw.
“Olivia loves the special edition,” I told Bernard. “I offered her the chance to take it home, try it out for twenty-four hours before she signs on the dotted line. The insurance is fine, she’s not a time-waster, trust me.”
He gave me the sort of look you give delinquents on street corners, but said nothing. No way could he guess the thoughts jockeying inside my head. My voice was as calm as a priest’s, yielding no hint of the excitement churning in my guts.
I had made a sale, the biggest of my career.
Olivia had told Patrick she’d be out shopping all day. She was sure he’d have seized the chance, taken Sarah-Jane home so that the two of them could romp in the comfort of the king-size bed. She was going to drive straight home and catch them out.
What weapon would she choose? From our visit to their lovely house, I remembered the array of knives kept in a wooden block on the breakfast bar. And there was a cast-iron doorstop, a croquet mallet, the possibilities were endless.
Pictures floated through my mind as I shuffled through price lists for gadgets and accessories. Patrick’s damaged face peeping from out of the covering sheet in the mortuary. Solemn policemen, shaking their heads. Sarah-Jane, pale and contrite, kissing my cheek. Whispering the question: Could I ever forgive her?
Of course I could. I’m not a cruel or bitter man. I’d promise her that we would work at the marriage. Pick up the pieces.
Patrick was right about one thing, I decided. People are like cars. They just need the right driver.
My mobile rang. I keyed Answer and heard Olivia. Breathless, triumphant.
“So easy, Terry, it was so easy. They were on the drive outside the porch. Kissing, they only had eyes for each other.”
“You — did it?”
She laughed, a high, hysterical peal. “It’s like nothing else. The feeling as your wheels go over someone. Crushing out the life — squish, squish. The screams urge you on. I felt so empowered, so much in control. But I reversed over the body, just to make sure.”
“So...”
I heard her gasp and then another voice on the line. A voice I never wanted to hear again. Frantic, horrified.
“Terry, you put her up to this, you bastard. You jealous, murdering bastard.”
It was Patrick, Lucky Patrick.
My mind stalled, useless as an old banger. I couldn’t take this in, couldn’t comprehend what Olivia had done. If Patrick was alive — what had happened to Sarah-Jane?
Copyright © 2006 Martin Edwards
The Night of the Wolf
by Paul Halter
We try not to repeat authors in Passport to Crime so that we may bring as many different voices to you, from as many countries, as possible. But Paul Halter’s stories have a special combination of atmospheric setting and brilliant classical plotting that makes them irresistible. A Frenchman from Alsace Lorraine whose most famous fictional protagonist is an Englishman called Dr. Alan Twist, Mr. Halter appears in our pages here for the third time.
“Daddy, Daddy, tell us a story.”
The chieftain looked at the little group that was devouring with gusto the deer that had been killed a few hours before. He pricked up his ears and glanced in exasperation at his son.
“Yes, Daddy, please,” insisted another of his children.
“Another one?” he growled. “You’d do better to occupy yourselves with more important things! You’re old enough to hunt now. The winter’s been hard and spring is still a long way off. How many times do I have to tell you that to live you have to eat, and to eat you have—”
“Yes, we know, but please, Daddy, please tell—”
“Now you’re bothering me! I don’t know what else to tell!”
His companion trotted through the snow to rub herself against him: “You can tell them the story of Wolf.”
“The story of Wolf!” he bristled. “But they’re much too young.”
“Yes, tell us the story,” his turbulent offspring clamoured in unison.
He bared his teeth in anger, but he soon relented; he knew that, one way or another, he would not be able to escape the daily chore. And after all, if they were old enough to hunt, they were old enough to know.
He gazed for a long time at the plain covered in snow and, in the distance, the dark line of the pine trees bowing to the wind. With his red eyes fixed on his sons, he began:
“It’s a very sad story. Most among us claim that ‘those things’ only exist in the minds of a few crazy creatures. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Wolf was a friend...”
The snow was falling in large flakes on Malmort, a small town in the Lorraine, nestled in lonely isolation in the foothills of the Vosges. The sad gray houses that clustered around the church seemed gradually to become engulfed by the thick white blanket, as if seeking to be forgotten: to blend into a landscape more desolate here than in the rest of the Lorraine. Even the mountain range itself, a twisted rock barrier dotted with firs, appeared to loom more ominously in this part of the region than anywhere else. It was only eight o’clock at night, yet already the inhabitants had locked and bolted their doors. Terror, rather than the rigors of winter, was what chilled their hearts. Only two days had gone by since the murder of old Pierre Wolf. A particularly grisly murder, yet — curiously — it was not so much the ferocity of the crime that worried the villagers, but what it implied. “He is back,” they could be heard whispering. “Mon Dieu, what will become of us? Our women? Our children?”