Murder by Numbers No1 - sample
When I came to write this tailor made murder I realised that an important aspect was missing from the questionnaire last week - tone. I went back to piggy and asked, light or dark? Nice or nasty?
Dark and nasty was the reply, so please be aware, you will have read nicer things. If however, you do actually make the sorbet, you will have rarely eaten anything nicer.
Here is the updated questionnaire from last week:
Who? Old friend
How? The common cold
Where? In the basement of victim’s home
When? Late winter
Why? Breach of trust, theft, adultery
Tone? Dark
Recipe? Blood orange sorbet
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Hate in a Cold Climate
‘We both love beautiful women. It’s who we are. And there’s nothing wrong with that though possession is an issue. Take my wife. Or, no, that was clumsily put,’ the man said, correcting himself. ‘Let me use my wife as an example.
‘Obviously, I do not own her. And not just because times have changed and it’s now frowned upon. But because, no matter how much power one might wield, no human can own another, whatever anyone says. A man might have dominion over a woman, never ownership. Having said all this, she is my wife. Not yours. And possession is nine tenths of the law.
‘You pretend to desire justice for those you perceive to be weaker than yourself, but I happen to know it is a facade. There is only one person you are interested in. Yourself. And my wife apparently. And anything that belongs to me. I wonder why.’
The man paused for a moment, pulled his coat tighter around him. He tried to blow a smoke ring with his breath. It was a particularly cold morning and despite his breath pouring from him like a dragon, he failed.
‘You know, when I think of you, my sphincter clenches. I know you want what I have, and ultimately I think you want to possess me. Or perhaps consume?’
Out of nowhere, he sneezed loudly into a handkerchief that he had whipped out of his pocket in time to catch the discharge.
‘Sorry about that,’ he continued, balling the snotty thing and putting it back in his pocket. ‘There was no reason why you couldn’t go out and get your own wife. You’re handsome still, intelligent up to a point and the emptiness at the centre of you is well hidden.’
He went over to the horizontal window set at eye level with the lawn outside, and looked out. The grass stood frozen upright. A chill ran up his back. It had been a hard frost, as forecast. It arrived in the night, descending from a cloudless, black sky and settled itself on the surface of the world. Or this tiny suburb at least. He smiled. He liked it when he was being grandiose, even to himself.
The metal of the boiler tank in the corner and radiators along the wall clicked as they cooled. He sighed.
‘So disappointing,’ he said. ‘How does it feel, I wonder? To ride on the back of another, only to arrive at your goal and shoot the one who carried you. That is no kind of justice that I understand.’
The lover flinched as the husband leant in and sniffed him. The lover knew that the less sense this man made, the more dangerous he was.
‘Are you comfortable?’
The lover’s bare feet, pale and long, were in a big zinc planter. The hairs were still stuck to his skinny ankles. The skin still crinkled from the top of the socks he had been wearing. The husband crouched down, rolled the lover’s trousers up a couple of turns and stood back. There was something of the 1950’s British holiday maker about him. The husband smiled, pulled out his handkerchief again and blew his nose into it. The sound came thick and wet.
The cotton square had seen some good use in the last twenty-four hours. He stetched the thing out and as he knotted the corners, another shiver ran through him. His own feet were still cold where the frost had clung to his shoes after he had crossed the lawn at the back of the house. He wasn’t worried about the footsteps he had left. No one would be looking and when they did come looking, he and the frost would be long gone. So would the lover.
The man, cable tied to the chair, looked up at him, a plea in his eyes.
‘Oh, don’t use that doe-eyed look on me,’ he said, putting the hanky into his pocket, taking out a cut throat razor and opening the blade. The lover convulsed under his restraints. ‘I know what it means now. Took me long enough but I have seen through it. It has évaporé, as I presumed it must have for many before me. Those you have left in your wake. Now, I want you to be careful and keep still or there might be an accident.’
He crossed over to him in a stride, took hold of the hair on the top of the lover’s head and began dry shaving it from the back and behind his ears. It was over quickly and speckles of blood welled where the knife had scraped away skin as well as hair.
‘There, that wasn't so bad, was it?’ the husband said, folding away the knife and going back to tying knots in the corners of the handkerchief. ‘You look chilly so I made you this. Look, there, it’s finished.’
He took the handkerchief out and shook it. It was damp in places, crusted in others, its corners tied in clumsy knots. He placed it on the lover’s head. ‘Goes with your turn-ups and your new hairdo. You look like one of those randy men in those seaside postcards, only it’s your nose that is red, not your cheeks.’
And mimicking an artist appraising his work, he stood back and rubbed his chin.
‘You know what’s missing?’ he asked. ‘A string vest. Are you wearing one?’
The knife was in his hand again. The lover arched away as he came in, the muscles in his neck bulging as if trying to get to the blade.
‘You are a willy worrier, aren’t you?’ the husband said. ‘No need for alarm though. I’m good with a knife.’
And he grabbed a hold of the lover’s jersey and hacked upwards. As the blade reached the neckline, he paused the moment, seemed to make a calculation, and then sliced upwards, nicking the lover’s chin as the cut-throat passed. The jersey fell open revealing a monogrammed shirt.
‘Told you,’ the husband said, and grabbing the handkerchief from the lover’s head began to dab, then wipe left and right, opening and staunching the cut at the same time. The man whined in pain, trying to stretch away.
‘Oh, don’t be such a wimp. It’s a teeny little cut. Nothing to get upset about.’
When he had stemmed the blood, he put the hanky back in place. Still with the knife in his fist, he pulled the sweater away and ripped open the shirt. The buttons pinged off in all directions, making the tiniest clicks as they landed on the stone floor.
Slipping the blade into the cuffs above the ties, he carelessly cut up the length of the arms and pulled the jersey and shirt material away.
‘I have to say, I was expecting a string vest,’ he said, disappointed. ‘I had you down for someone who wears a vest. Well, never mind I’ll go upstairs and see what I can find.’
He checked the ties on his ankles and wrists, yanked the strap around his chest a ratchet tighter and went upstairs.
The man in the chair struggled to break free, but his assailant had come prepared. Three heavy duty ties on each wrist and ankle and the ratchet strap around his chest. The mechanism had been rigged so that if he struggled, or appeared to struggle, as he found out when he had coughed, the ratchet would crank up a notch, tightening it.
He closed his eyes. Why had he done it? He knew his once friend’s cold blooded approach to problems. Why had he not thought it through? Thought what would happen if he himself was the problem? Deep down he knew. No, he didn’t have to go deep at all. He knew the husband was right. He wanted to take things from this man who had carried him with him all these years.
He had already been cold before his clothes had been cut away, and now, naked except for a pair of trousers, he began to shiver.
What did that maniac have planned for him? Because there would be a plan. There was always a plan. He closed his eyes and tried to think. He had watched videos of people breaking free of cable ties. Why had he watched it? He couldn’t remember and it didn't matter now and he knew that there was no way he could twist his way out of the ties anyway. Too strong. Too many.
The turn-ups of his once smart trousers had soaked up some of the near freezing water. He could feel the cold creeping up his legs like a disease worming its way through his veins, sapping the warmth. The shivers became shudders.
The husband returned, carrying a bowl.
‘No vests at all. But I did find these,’ he said, holding out the bowl and showing him a net of blood oranges and a bag of icing sugar. ‘I hope you don’t mind. We’ve been invited out to dinner and I said I’d make a pud. It would be a shame to waste them.’
‘When did you say you were back at work?’ he continued, cutting the six oranges in half and squeezing the juice into the bowl and stirring in what looked to the lover like about a hundred and fifty grammes of sugar. ‘Next weekend, was it? I know you will have cancelled your cleaner for the week. Will you her pay for the lost hours, oh warrior for the weak? I wonder. Somehow I doubt it.’
When the sugar had dissolved, he poured the thick syrup into a wide flat tupperware and put the lid on.
‘I’ll pop that in the freezer when I get home and give it a stir every hour or so. When its completely frozen, I’ll use the stick blender. It gives it the most marvellous texture,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’m going to spoil your holiday. You know it’s predicted to be almost as cold here as it is in the Alps this week. The irony, eh?’
The man in the chair sniffed thickly, catarrh already building.
‘Do you need to blow your nose?’ he asked. ‘Hold on. I’ll give you something.’ And he pulled off the handkerchief and held it to the other man’s nose.
‘Blow,’ he said. The man shook his head. The husband pulled out his knife and thumbed it open again. The lover blew and snot flew into the cotton.
‘Better?’ he asked, putting the handkerchief back on the man’s head and rubbing it in as he did so
‘Well, I’m nearly done here,’ he continued, and went over to the window. ‘I wish it hadn’t turned out this way, but it had to end somewhere. And you did bring this on yourself.’ He reached up to the catch and it fell open half way. He prized off the stops on each side and the window swung open fully, crashing down against the wall leaving a wide hole in the concrete wall. ‘Would you believe it?,’ he said, looking out. ‘Snow. That wasn’t in the forecast.’
Wet, sleety, English snow had begun to fall.
Next he went to the electric box, lifted the lid and flicked all the switches to off, bar the wall sockets in the basement where they were. He wanted the chest freezer left on. He lifted its lid and propped it open with a broom handle. He pulled out two bags of ice and emptied them into the planter. The lover’s feet and ankles had gone an unhealthy white.
The husband picked up his tool bag from the floor and swung it into the man’s face. Blood from his nose splattered the bag. He ripped away the single piece of duct tape that had started to come away from one side of the lover’s mouth and wiped away the blood with the severed jersey. Then he pulled out a roll of duct tape from the bag and wound it around the man’s half shaved head covering his mouth. The tape reached from the bottom of his chin up to just below his nostrils. Snot was already beginning to run with the blood.
‘That it took me so long to see you for the weasel that you are will always amaze me. Then again, perhaps I knew all along and just didn’t want to admit it to myself. I felt sorry for you, I guess. That’s why I wanted things to work out.
He put on the lover’s bobble hat and sunglasses and got behind the wheel of the SUV loaded with ski gear. He clicked the garage door to open and buzzed the window down.
‘So long, old friend’ he said, as the car pulled out of the basement, the doors already sliding back to close behind him. ‘Mind you don’t catch a cold.’
Diabolically Chilling.