Neither heard the return of Ranjit’s Transit, the click of the multiple locks, the dull rattle of a chain, the squeak of his foot on the stair, but Lennie saw the door handle turn and got in behind it just as it opened.
Amirya sat up in bed holding the sheet in front of her breasts.
‘Ranjit, why have you come back so soon, my dear?’
‘I forgot to take with me my copy of the holy writings of the sixth guru. But Amirya, what are you doing in bed, my dear, and why is the shop below closed?’
A heavy brass vase presented itself to Lennie’s hand, or so it seemed to him, and he used it to hit Ranjit on the head. Ranjit sank to his knees, shook his head, attempted to get up. Lennie lifted off Ranjit’s turban and hit him again, this time from above and with more conviction.
The night before, at supper, with the Lambrusco safely in the fridge and the single candle glowing sweetly over a bottle of Tesco’s Corbieres, Ben had asked Beatrice one of the three questions authors always get asked: ‘And what’s the next one going to be about?’
(The other two are: And what name do you write under? to which I always answer: Frederick Forsyth, and Where do you get your ideas from?)
Now the other two are boring, but this one touches a chord: you’ve just finished what you knew was going to be a masterpiece, but now you’re not so sure, while the idea that lies behind the next one is a surefire all the way winner. Beatrice expounded, attempting to sling wholewheat spaghetti with green lentil bolognese on to her fork:
‘I have cats, you know that… No, don’t laugh. And what has always of course made me sad about them, is the way they play with mice.’ She spoke in the clipped, controlled way she usually adopted after two glasses of wine. ‘So like prolonged torture, although of course they don’t know that. Now the other day Molly, my silver tabby, brought in a mouse. I intervened of course and as a result the mouse escaped and hid under the piano. I can’t move the piano, and Molly can’t get under it. The mouse was safe. But it did not stay there. It came out and allowed itself to be caught again… In short, and this is what my book will be about, the mouse was a willing victim. Seeking to renew the pleasure of being hunted and toyed with, out it came again.’
‘You mean, some species are willingly preyed on because they enjoy it?’ asked Ben. ‘And you are going to write a detective story about someone who wills her or himself to be a victim? Because they enjoy it.’
‘Something like that. It goes like this, I think. The mouse gets a huge adrenalin rush, then it’s caught, and carried, the way a cat carries a kitten, and at that time I think it probably feels secure, loved. Then the cat puts it down and tries to make it run again, and when the cat at last hurts it, it does run. Then the whole pleasurable sequence all through again. But if the mouse does get away to a spot where the cat can’t get it, it has to come out again…’
‘You may have something here,’ said her sister. ‘It makes evolutionary sense too. The lemming impulse. Rodents are terribly successful survivors. Pleasurable death at the hands of the hunter eases their overcrowding problem… and on the other side it helps to keep the not too successful predators fed, who in turn play their part in keeping rodent numbers down to a viable level…’
Clearly she was not going to stop if no one made the effort: that’s a training in social sciences for you. Ben made it with the wine, but not too much, they might be forced back on to the Lambrusco, and asked what was for dessert.
‘Rhubarb crumble: our first picking of the year. I’ll go and get it. But really Vron, I think that’s a jolly good idea.’ [So do I, and it’s mine! J.R.]
As they were going to bed Beatrice overheard Amanda say: ‘It’ll be autobiographical you know. Vron was born a victim, such a wimp.’
The following morning Ben and Amanda, already dressed for work (he in check shirt and jeans, she in business suit, high heels and frothy blouse), cleared away the muesli bowls and instructed Beatrice on how she should let herself out when the time came for her to leave. Unpressured by clocks she sat at the table, dressed in a long cotton dressing-gown over Viyella pyjamas, nursing a mug of Sainsbury’s Keemun.
‘When do you have to be at your publisher?’ Amanda asked.
‘Eleven o’clock.’
‘Lucky for some,’ she glanced at her watch. ‘Oh come on Ben.’
‘Please leave the dishes. I’ve got plenty of time,’ Veronica murmured.
But Ben had no intention of leaving any unnecessary opportunity for his sister-in-law to break anything. Whenever she came to stay she broke something: last time it had been an art-deco teacup, quite rare, a wedding present.
‘Now, I’ll leave the spare keys on the table by the front door just in case you want to go out and come back in again…’
‘I shan’t.’
‘But you may,’ said Amanda with uncalled for sharpness.
‘But if you don’t, then you don’t have to touch them. Simply pull our front door to behind you, and then the outer front door, making sure that in both cases they are properly latched. All right?’
‘Of course. I’m not an idiot, and I have done it twice before.’
‘Come on, Ben, don’t just stand there. Vron, have a bath if you want, make yourself coffee or whatever if you feel up to it, we must dash.’
Swift kisses all round, and the double closing of outer doors. Even from the tiny kitchen at the back Beatrice (who hated to be called Vron or Veronica, even by her sister) could hear the repeated chugging of the Lada, but at last it fired, and they were gone. Yes, she thought, a bath would be nice. But first she must attempt to reconstruct a large armchair out of the put-u-up she had slept on. It was the sort of task she found particularly difficult.
Amirya was shocked and frightened, but the contemplation of her husband’s brains sharpened her very capable intellect and in twenty minutes she had worked out a plan. Lennie of course, once he had washed human tissue, some of it still palpitating, from his naked torso, could do nothing but sit on the edge of the bed and, head in his hands, rock and moan.
‘Lennie love, here’s what you must do. Lenn-ee, kill that row or I call the police right now, all right? Listen. I’m going to take the van down to near Tower Hamlets and dump it, then I’ll go to my sister’s in Leyton, where she’ll tell the pigs when they come I’ve been there since nine o’clock. While I’m gone you bag the ol’ man up in plastic bin liners an’ put him in one of those skips. Then you clear off right out of here… No, no. You stay until the skip’s been took, then you clear off out…’
Lennie was not devoid of imagination and various unwelcome scenarios scrolled down his inner eye. ‘But what if when they get to the dump the plastic tears, or… or anything.’
‘Listen love. It’ll be on the top of the skip, so when they tip it off, first in the pit, first to be covered. Anyway once the skip’s gone you buzz me at my sister’s and then you sod off.’
‘What’ll you do?’
‘I’ll come back here and clean up so no forensic scientist in the world will get the least littlest clue as to what happened. One thing I do know is cleaning. One good thing… you were naked when you did it, nothing on your clothes.’
‘An’ after that?’
‘I stay at my sister’s an’ from there I sell the shop: it’s half in my name anyway. Then I move up north, with the kiddies, buy another shop and then I ask you to come, like if you still want to. All you got to do, lover, is get that on the top of a skip. OK? Now I’m gwine to get dressed and you should do too. No, honey, I’m not interested in Marley right now. You shot the sheriff and it’s a question of first things first. Oh, oh… oh. All right.’