Every afternoon she parked and walked off at five past four, leaving the car for her ex-husband who lived opposite my office, her clothes changing as the trees changed, wrapped up as leaves fell, insulated under bare branches, exposed flesh returning with green’s return. 

Skeletal trees appeared again. I watched her parking, expecting to see candelabra-tree shadows on her disappearing back; but she walked towards her ex-husband’s flat, the first time I had seen this, her arms swinging, back upright, intention gripping her face.

She entered her ex-flat. Then: SWERRAAAACCCC!

My work colleague looked at me.

“A car back-firing?” I offered.

“I didn’t hear a car,” Peter replied.

“OH MY GOD!” the ex-husband screamed. “OH MY GEAWWWDDD!!”

X’s voice flailed tentacle possibilities in my head. Our manager crossed the road and knocked on X’s door. I wanted to charge through the office’s back door, and he was knocking on that door, standing before it like a brave man facing a firing squad.

Fortunately, the door didn’t open. Leafless trees, like the stoic figures of irreversible destinies, rose over him as he came back across the street, twiggy fingertips scratching shadowy cracks into the facades facing us, scratching everyone out eventually with those irrepressible fingers.

Then the police’s blue lights placed garish radiance upon the street’s anaesthetised staidness. Faces appeared at windows. Police action generates the thrills our ancestors regularly experienced, perhaps explaining why disaster fascinates in civilised suburbia. 

Flak-jacketed police destroyed X’s door, battering-ram thumps booming in suburbia’s desolate quietude. Safety now made me want to see violence. I had returned to TV surrealism, to prehistory, calmed by those trained to face the flak.

The handcuffed ex-wife looked cleansed from the trammels that had besieged her as she descended the stairs that led from her ex-husband’s front door, her relaxed lips parted. Clouds, like gnarled-finger illumination, shone above her, as if guidance had been given by a heavenly hand. Bare branches, quivering like tuning forks in the breeze, reached towards that gnarled-fingered being that gripped the heavens with iridescent fingers. 

The ex-wife entered a police car, tenacity in her satisfaction, the receptionist telling a detective: “Yes, she was carrying something. And she always parks the car and leaves. And she looked furious. After she went inside, he screamed: ‘Oh my God!’ after the gunshot.”

I went home. Leafless trees along the long road united into a grey, twig mist in which soaked timber resembled veins carrying black blood; cars and people swarmed under this misty canopy. An apartment block, above this mist, exuded serenity, its height, location, and separation giving it a contented ambivalence that is the only consolation if the eternal heavenly variety seems fanciful.

An ambulance stopped. Fracas irises, seemingly on stalks, were scurrying through a street directory.

“Left at the end,” I said, “then first left.”

I imagined what the receptionist might have said had she come from a different background, and had she been less thrilled with scornful joy: “Despite her grimness, one was surprised by a firearm’s report that followed her entry into her previous abode. Why! That sound almost caused me to spill my brandy and soda! Memories of Uncle Archibald decimating a partridge in the drawing room in ’94 flooded into one’s mind, a beast executed by The Blaster of Blenheim Gardens. Believe me officer: I know a firearm when I hear one.”

To me, the ex-wife had looked calm, her resentment having found a legitimate target.   

*

The victim had been the killer’s second husband. The receptionist believed that the ex-wife had also murdered her first spouse and that long-term imprisonment had been avoided through diminished responsibility. I was just happy that XW hadn’t crossed the road and sprayed bullets into everything that would have screamed, cowered and yelped, glad she had avoided where her second husband had worked as an embalmer.

Her second husband had seen numerous corpses, many ending this tragedy of limitations called life by jumping in front of trains. I wondered if he had thought that that meat he used to handle, that used to breathe and speculate, to love, dream and smile, to cause pleasure and to receive it, to ridicule and be ridiculed – I wondered if he had ever wondered what that meat had thought, or felt, or even if he had ever considered that some of the deceased might have once possessed genius. I wondered if he had ever been moved by the fact that that vacant-eyed poultry, that had helped to enhance his lifestyle, had once been conscious, or even what happens to that consciousness that vanishes in that moment we all must face.   

He might have thought while dying that he was going to be looked at, naked, bruised and dead, by someone he knew.

“He died,” the receptionist said, now less thrilled, “at three-thirty in the afternoon the day after.”

I wondered what would have happened had the ambulance been quicker.

*

The deceased’s lover went to identify the body, better I suppose that someone accustomed to corpses do the deed. I saw her leaving: An embalmer like that! Before joining the company, I had assumed that embalmers had small mouths and tiny eyes, and round glasses perched upon twitching, rodent noses. Her green eyes glittered. Her round face and neck resembled an upturned amphorae vase of silkiness. She smiled with pained, tentative, refined warmth. I assumed she wouldn’t be back for days.

When she returned soon after to continue working amazement belted me. Straight back to death! From having seen her mutilated lover! Straight back to lifeless coldness: to open-eyed blindness.

Maybe cool clarity helped her to accept obvious conclusions? I couldn’t think of any other explanation for her brave composure. She must have possessed perfect adjustment. Her suffering would be spread out to enable her to function. I would have spent weeks staggering in a psychological hole had I been her.      

*

The receptionist said: “Rob – someone’s here to see you.”

Unexpected visitors in London are usually debt collectors, hit killers or the police. This time it was the police.

A huge man with a chubby, rosy-cheeked face and creamy skin, like Fibreglass under black hair, wanted to speak to me. His black-whiteness suggested to my worked-up imagination behavioural extremes, his dark eyes filled with worrying certainty.

“Hello,” he said. “Robert Elder?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Alastair McCormack from Scotland Yard. I would like to interview you about some thefts in Wimbledon. Is there somewhere where we can talk?”

His off-putting calmness suited his black eyes’ predatory glow. My temples throbbed. I lived in Wimbledon. 

“Yes,” I replied. “Follow me.”

His shoulders formed a metre-long curve. We sat down in a meeting room.

“I was just joking about the thefts,” he said. “I’m here for the murder.”

I felt as if I had just escaped from a harrowing future, a common fantasy. I grinned as if wires were ripping my lips open.

“So now there’s someone else around here living off death,” I said.

His eyes shone like polished marble.

“The product,” he said, “is guaranteed.”

“The only product whose brilliant performance under normal conditions get even better under appalling ones.”

Dimples reproduced dimples, like cells dividing to create life, his teeth minuscule amid a vast frame.

“You’re Canadian, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’d love to emigrate there. A friend has just gone.”

“I’m sure,” I replied, “that a homicide detective wouldn’t have a problem racking up the points. I presume you don’t have a police record?”

“Nothing the Canadians could find out about.”

“I can’t imagine you as a Mountie.”

“If I got on a horse, I’d be arrested for mistreatment of animals. So what did you see?”

“She left the car and went into the flat. He screamed: ‘Oh my God’, after what sounded like a gun went off.”

“How long was it between her going into the flat and the sound?”

“Ten seconds – if that.”

“Just enough time to produce a weapon?”

“Exactly.”

“Can we call you up as a witness – if we have to?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

He stopped rising when I asked: “Can I ask you something?”

“Fire away. Pardon the pun.”

“How guilty is she?”

His chin rose on thermals of curiosity. 

“She’s unlucky,” he replied.

“Is that why you’re a homicide detective?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he smiled.

“The luckiest people,” I said, “know how to recognise and accept conclusions quickly.”

“Some people,” he replied, “haven’t had the opportunity to learn how to do that.”

“The art of shrugging things off.”

“Exactly.”

He returned to his car. Our interlude had been short; but he existed more powerfully for me than most others did. My crimes, born from my parents’ wildness, weren’t illegal, just chance my craziness wasn’t dangerous – except to me – and who cared about that?

Seeing madness as involuntary helps you rebel against disunity.               

“We’ll be pushing for diminished responsibility,” he had said. “I suffer from it myself.”

*

I imagined the ex-husband’s head shooting up with the unexpected rattling of keys, his veins filling with strange, time-expanding chemicals, his ex-wife’s eyes glaring ferociously. I imagined her pulling out a shotgun from the bag hanging off her shoulder. I imagined him starting to rise as pink patches studded his legs, surprise stunning his eyes, the patches oozing blood, red tributaries flooding down his snowy legs, the gun tearing flesh off his thighs and shattering a knee, two barrels blowing holes in the sofa, explosions causing pin-stabbing aches in his ears. I imagined his right shoulder striking the floor. I imagined her entering the kitchen and returning with a carving knife. I imagined her slamming the blade into his body, his hands reddening as he tried stopping her thrusts while screaming: “OH MY GEEEAWWWDDD!” I imagined her eyes glowing, her right arm working piston-like. I recalled his voice finding tenor depth. I imagined his peripheral vision blurring as the knife plunged. I imagined his heart pumping his voice out, leafless twigs shaking outside as if moved by shockwave wailing. I imagined his hands feeling the sharp intrusions of her attacks, like cold stabs of electricity. The accumulated bitterness of every slight she had ever received I imagined her releasing with a conviction that slaughtered rationality. I imagined him seeing visible objects becoming diffused. I imagined the warm secretion of blood running down his arms and the aching throbbing in the bones of his legs.

Satisfied with the destruction caused, I imagined her slicing up a cooked chicken in the kitchen. She didn’t care about the knocking on the door. I imagined her chewing slowly, X in expanding red. I imagined her enervating justification as her ex-husband’s gasps filled the silence, leafless, lightning-bolt branches outside shaking those turning-fork fingers that sought to clutch the sky’s illuminated knuckles on that misty hand that gripped the heavens.

“Our neurosis,” Alastair said, “push hope into belief, just luck if your madness is less pushy.”

*

Alastair had never seen a murderer so serene. He had seen snarling resistance, bewildered innocence, grumpy reticence; never the euphoria of having performed greatness. Faith, he realised, turns unfortunate realities into transient anomalies.    

“The Lord,” she said, “commanded me. Some get called early because the Devil has inflicted them with moral poison; killing them is merciful.”

“Thank you, Alison,” Alastair said. “Please go with Sergeant Morrison. She’ll look after you.”

Alastair stayed in the room after Alison left. Her deceased X, lying in red, filled Alastair’s mind. While dying, he thought, I wonder if he regretted having rejected religion. Taking so long to die, he may have thought about it. You would have to be very special to accept a conclusion so unwanted without having some final hope of saviour. Being horrified by obvious facts and conclusions we can believe anything to maintain hope: Maybe even me when the time comes?

– Kim Farleigh