In any event, I did kill him, obviously. Partly it was because I got distracted when I found an old car battery at the back of the cellar when I was looking for new things to use on him and I believe he expired from lack of oxygen while I was still trying to get the acid out of it. I thought he might be pretending at first. He was completely limp, and there was no pulse in either wrist or under his jaw, but you could never be sure. I used pliers on his fingernails – the fingers were all loose and granular-feeling because I’d already smashed them with the hammer – but he did not react so I concluded he really was dead. I tied the bin bag back round his head – tied tightly, reckoning that if he was dead I ought to be sure of it.
The thing is, I had thought my heart could not have beaten harder and faster than when I’d been breaking into the house in the first place but I’d been wrong. It thrashed in my chest like something wild as I tortured Mr F and although I won’t pretend that I was in any way professional, I felt powerful and in charge and as though I had finally found something that I just naturally knew how to do.
What I had not done, of course, was actually put any questions to him. I hadn’t asked him whether he’d raped his daughter, or what he might have done with his wife. I’d thought of it, but in the end I was too frightened that my voice would betray my nervousness, or he’d scream loud enough to attract a neighbour. I suppose I could have got him to respond to questions through simply nodding or shaking his head but that didn’t really occur to me. I just wanted to inflict a lot of pain on him for what he had done to GF and, as the night went on, I suppose, yes, I thought I might as well kill him, even though he hadn’t seen my face, I hadn’t spoken to him and I was fairly sure he’d never be able to identify me. It just seemed like the right thing to do. The tidiest.
I unlocked the front door and put the key back under the flowerpot where I had found it. The last thing I did was break the window in the spare room from the outside to make it look like I’d come in that way. I’d left enough of a clear area on the carpet beneath the window for it not to be obvious this had happened after the ransacking. I got home and back into bed, unseen. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
The next day I went for a walk in the woods. I took the rucksack with all the clothes I’d worn that night, far into a dense plantation, and burned it. Then I dug a hole nearly a metre deep and buried the ashes.
A business colleague of Mr F found him two days later, the day before GF was due back from the camp. Relatives came to look after her and took her away for nearly a month. The police said they were looking for one or two burglars and announced that it was probably a robbery gone wrong. Everybody in town apart from myself slept very badly for the next few weeks. I slept like a baby. All I had to do to cover my tracks was keep the swagger out of my walk and the sneer from my lips. I knew what I had done, and felt proud and manly and in control. I was even more proud that I had been able to see through to the end what I had done to Mr F than I was of getting away with murder.
When I heard they were fingerprinting all the men in the town I went along to the police station without grumbling; not one of the first to go, but not reluctantly either. I was never even questioned. The police concluded the ghastly crime had been committed by an unknown person or unknown persons from out of town and gradually life returned to normal.
Nevertheless, what I had done had been amateurish and out of control and I had acted like policeman, jailer, judge, jury and executioner. I admit that this did seem wrong to me. I had discovered something that I was good at and even – in a sort of righteous but I hope not perverse way – had enjoyed, but this was not altogether right. There have to be limits, there has to be some sort of apparatus of judgement and rightful jurisdiction, an oversight, if you will, that gives the torturer proper authority.
I had got away with what I had done but if I hoped to do anything like it again then I felt I could not repeat my actions. I certainly was not about to start murdering people in their cellars like some seedy serial killer. Mr F had deserved what had happened to him and I had been the means of delivering justice to him, but that was that. I had to accept that through sound preparation, good judgement and good luck I had succeeded in my mission and been able to walk away.
GF came back and stayed with one of her aunts in a town-centre hotel until the funeral. I left a message and we met in our usual café. She seemed distant and yet relaxed and I realised she was probably on some sort of medication. She no longer wore the braces on her teeth and said that she had missed me and had stopped cutting herself, for now at least.
I didn’t go to the funeral; she didn’t ask me to.
She started at the same college I attended and got a flat with another girl. I moved into a place nearby with a couple of guys. GF and I started going out again and soon became intimate once more, though neither of us ever again suggested any bondage games.
She never talked about her father, but then she rarely had.
One day we both had time off and had gone to bed in my flat.
“Remember these?” she asked, producing a packet of Sugar Cherries from her bag. “Confiscated them from a Junior Forester.” She popped one into my mouth and another into her own. We chewed on them noisily for a while. I tried to remember the last time I had eaten one. “I used to love these,” I said.
Then she sat upright in the bed and stopped chewing and looked down at me, her face looking drained. One of her hands stroked her other wrist and forearm, where the old marks were. She got out of the bed and took the sticky mess that was all that was left of the Sugar Cherry out of her mouth and threw it into the waste bin. She started to dress.
I asked her what was wrong.
She didn’t answer. She just shook her head. I could tell that she was crying. I kept on asking her what was wrong but she would not reply and left soon afterwards.
We were never intimate again and she refused to engage in any proper conversation thereafter, not quite ignoring me but treating me very coldly.
Had I written this two or three years ago I would have concluded by admitting, genuinely mystified, that I never understood why this happened, why she suddenly left me. However, now I think that I do know why: I was betrayed by a remembered taste. (No, I must be honest; my betrayal was revealed by a remembered taste.) Considering all that I have seen and done, it is remarkable that it is this – such a tiny, trivial thing, so many years ago, before our relationship had even properly begun – that brings a blush of blood to my face when I think about it and makes me feel ashamed. I have done things most people would be ashamed of and watched things done I would be ashamed of, yet it was for the taking of one sweet – not even that, perhaps; for not owning up to that petty theft, and the implication that it had been me who had stolen her pencil-sharpener blade as well – that I was condemned then and still feel soiled now.