Dennis didn’t mean to kill him.
It was an accident; a terrible accident. Like something out of a bad dream. A nightmare, more like. Except it was real. All too real. He had this lifeless body to prove it. And it made him angry. Angry, not so much because a life had been meaninglessly snuffed out – this man meant nothing to him – but because the even rhythm of his own life had been disrupted.
Order was important to him. As a single man, with no partner or children to consider he was used to his own space. He liked things to be under his control, all tidy and manageable and predictable. It was deeply satisfying for him to know that he had created for himself such a smooth-running, highly organised life-style. Nothing flash, for sure. Pretty ordinary, in most respects. But he took pride in the knowledge that every element of his adult life, every piece of his present way of living, had been carefully dovetailed into place by his own hand. What he had, modest though it might seem, he owed to his own talents and his own efforts. This pleased him enormously.
He had secured three part-time jobs, for example. How many people could manage that, he wondered? Let alone juggle them successfully into the bargain. He had two daytime jobs: one at Lowther’s, the big wholesale butchers in the nearby market town, Monday to Friday mornings; the other at Banner’s, the main department store in the same town, where he worked in the dispatch section, Monday to Thursday afternoons. They complemented perfectly his evening job at the ‘Full Moon’ club, where he worked as the main attraction male stripper – though these days, he preferred to rejoice in the title of ‘principal artistic dancer’.
It was in his student days that he had begun stripping. First as a joke, doing a stripogram as a favour for a friend, then later making a few bob for an enterprise calling itself, ‘Birthday Treats’, which offered the whole range of ‘entertainments and delectations’ from children’s parties to stripograms to high-class escorts – all the way to the serious end: thinly-disguised male prostitution.
He had worked the whole gamut, acquiring a c.v. that had impressed the ‘Full Moon’ management. That was three years ago, during which time he had gradually perfected his act, upgrading it from ‘raunchy stripper’ status to its present level of artistry. He was not above a bit of prostitution on the side – with carefully selected clients, of course and always observing the rule of the house: namely, that it had to be discreet and off-site.
His act was one of a number at the ‘Full Moon’ club, and for just three short performances each night on Friday and Saturday, he was well paid. Not well enough, however, for him to buy his own little bungalow and enjoy a comfortable life-style. So early on he had looked around for other forms of employment, wisely bearing in mind during the search that he had to choose some backroom job where he could remain anonymous. It would be too embarrassing – for employer and employee alike – if he came face to face with a member of the public who came out with something like, “Oooh! Saw you at the ‘Full Moon’ last Sat’day. Nice act. Nice arse!” In his line of work, you had to be discreet.
The job at Banner’s had come first. It was what he was looking for: work behind the scenes. A good firm to work for, too. Pension rights, good canteen, nice crowd: the lot. Except they didn’t pay very much. More to the point, it was unskilled work. You just parcelled things up. It was hardly fulfilling. So when he saw the advert in the paper for Lowther’s – they even offered training for a suitable beginner – he thought, ‘Why not?’ He enjoyed a good beef steak and wasn’t at all squeamish about the sight and smell of raw meat, so why not learn the trade that made a carnivore’s diet possible? Why not see how meat just off the hoof was turned into meat on the plate? It was what he was looking for, too: skilled work. And again, crucially, he’d be working out of sight, out of the public gaze. Dressed like all the others, in his white hat, white overalls and white rubber boots, he’d even be anonymous at work.
At first it was all a bit tight, a bit of a strain, going from one day job to the other. But after a while, once he’d proved himself at Lowther’s, he negotiated an earlier start in order to finish at eleven-thirty, thus allowing himself a generous lunch break during which he swam for an hour on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and ran for an hour on Tuesdays.
Personal fitness was a high priority for him. He regarded himself as a dancer; a trained athlete. He had to look and feel attractive at all times, he argued; and he had to be fit enough to perform his athletic routines without a hint of strain. For this reason, he worked in the gym on his afternoon off each Friday, and again on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Saturday and Sunday afternoons – without fail, come rain, come shine – were reserved for long runs of between ten and fifteen miles.
He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and, apart from ‘clients’, didn’t bother with women. What time he had in the evenings was divided evenly between his two great passions in life: jig-saw puzzles (he liked putting the pieces in place) and graphic novels (he liked a frame round things – and no they weren’t comics.)
He didn’t waste his time with TV – which he thought was largely rubbish: ‘the opium of the people’ – or with newspapers, which he thought were pure propaganda. Every hour of every day of his every week, his every year, was planned, thought out, mapped out. Life for him was satisfying – just the way he’d always wanted it: strict, disciplined, orderly, unvarying.
Until now, that is. Now that he had a dead body on his living room floor.
What did you do with a dead body, for Christ’s sake? Or rather, what did you do with a body whose death you were responsible for? It wasn’t a question most people have to give serious thought to, was it? With your normal death you would ring for a doctor; and then an undertaker. But in this case, the police would have to be informed first, surely – and for the moment he found himself reluctant to involve them. What should he do?
He decided to go for a run. It was the middle of the night – but so what: he was used to running in the dark. And he badly needed some thinking time.
He often did this: went running for a think. And for the moment, time was on his side. The man, whoever he was, wasn’t going anywhere, was he? Another hour or so wasn’t crucial. Within reason, he could take his time. And with a dead body on your sitting room floor you needed time, didn’t you? Time to think, to work things out. Above all, you had to stay calm. He knew that. As calm as it’s possible to be that is, when you’re staring a corpse in the face. You needed to keep a grip on yourself. You needed some space to think things through.
He loved running. When you were fit, really fit, you could switch onto automatic pilot as soon as you got into your stride. You just left the body to cover the ground: no conscious control was required. So the mind, untroubled by pain or discomfort, was free to range over any number of excitements and problems.
Sometimes, on exceptional days, the landscape, the weather and a rare peak in his physical condition, would conspire to conjure a feeling of well-being so profound that it seemed to touch the very core of his being, uplifting not only his spirit but also his feet, creating a wonderful weightless feeling, as if he were running on air.
Not so, however, on that particular morning. His mind was free, right enough – but free to relive a nightmare.
The intruder had come at him from nowhere. Just as he was about to lock his door. Seconds before he had seen the woman to her taxi, and he was feeling good. Yes, well satisfied and no wonder – with eighty pounds tucked away in his back pocket. Suddenly, the man was there. In Dennis’s face. Pushing at the door with his foot. Prising it open. Forcing an entry. And forcing upon him his ugly, jealous, drunken rage. Who was he? Not his client’s husband: he was sure of that. And where had he sprung from? Had he followed her? Had he been waiting out there while they were ‘transacting’? Or was it by chance that he had noticed her leaving the house? It obviously had something to do with his client – or some woman, anyway – but it was a mystery; all of it.
What was clear, however, was the man’s blind passion. He was not to be reasoned with. From the outset, he had come at Dennis with murderous intent. At one point, he even had his strong hands around his throat. But then, as they grappled with one another, Dennis desperately trying to defend himself by pressing his fingers into his assailant’s eye sockets, the man had stumbled and was thrown off-balance by Dennis’s lunging weight. Locked together as they were, his fall took Dennis with him, and the two bodies, Dennis on top, crashed heavily to the ground.
And that was it. Just a loud noise like a nut cracking, as the man’s head hit the stone hearth and Dennis was left clinging to a corpse.
The impact alone may have killed him. Yet there was very little blood. Perhaps his rage had brought on a heart attack? Who knew? But one thing seemed crystal clear to Dennis: the police would never believe his story. He could just imagine. Dancer...? Dancer, my arse! Common stripper, more like. Or more like your common prostitute. Yes, a right Dancing Queen, this one: pulling tricks for both sides. Queer as a nine-bob note! Ah-haa – a criminal record, too ... for indeed Dennis had once been charged with causing an affray ... Yes, gotcha.
No: who was likely to believe his story? Especially as he hadn’t reported the death straightaway. Why, he had even – and Dennis could hear them saying it – taken himself off for a fucking run, ice-cold, this one.
‘No, Dennis, old son,’ he said to himself. ‘Report this how it happened – tell this how it was – and you’ll be behind bars faster than a whore can drop her drawers’
So he was back with the problem; the problem most people never have. How do you dispose of a body? Drive to the coast and drop it in the sea...? Push it down a mineshaft...? Lay it out on a main line railway track...? Slide it into that slurry pit at Brown Edge Farm...? Leave it in a skip somewhere...? Dissolve it in a bath of acid...?
He was into the final leg of his running route by now, with the dawn light just beginning to inch up; and he was getting desperate. He’d had plenty of ideas, but one by one they had been rejected. All the possibilites he’d seen, or heard, or read about, seemed either fanciful or fraught with risk; or both. He needed inspiration.
And then he realized: his mind had been running on the wrong track. He had been thinking the complete jig-saw, the whole book – instead of thinking piece by piece, frame by frame. Once this thought occurred to him, the rest was ... well, if not exactly easy, relatively straightforward.
Two hours later, after a cleansing shower and shave, he was on his way to work as usual. This was important: he had to keep to his normal routine. So far, all he had done was undress the man and burn his clothes and personal possessions in the wood-burning stove – although he had kept the forty-seven pounds and fifty four pence found in his pockets. This Dennis considered, was owed him for expenses about to be incurred.
He had his large, red sports-bag with him as usual when he entered Lowther’s – only when he clocked off at eleven-thirty he didn’t walk to the baths for a swim, but went instead back to his car and then on to Timberland, where he bought a cheap wooden door. He still had time for a sandwich, and to re-park his car, before getting across town to Banner’s for his afternoon shift. He was seen arriving with the familiar red sports bag. After work he did a bit of shopping at the Co-op, part of his normal routine for a Thursday, before getting back to his car and driving home.
Arriving at his house, he left his car on the drive and carried the door into the garage. Once the garage door was pulled down, he set to work. He drilled twenty or thirty holes at various points along the length and breadth of the wooden door, before carrying it along to the bathroom where he set it in place over the bath. It overlapped a little, but otherwise was not a bad fit. He then pulled the bathroom carpet away from its grips and rolled it back, well away from the bath. Only when he was struggling through the doorway with the man’s body did he appreciate that it might have been wiser to reverse these two procedures.
Leaving the cadaver on the makeshift table, above the bath, he returned to his car carrying a hold-all into which he placed the morning contents of his sports-bag. Then, carrying bag in one hand, hold-all in the other, he went back to the bathroom where he unpacked both. He left the contents of the sports-bag outside the door, within reach, and placed the selection of saws and cleavers from the hold-all in a neat row alongside the corpse. There was no time to lose: the man was beginning to stink.
For the next two-and-a-half hours he laboured away, employing the skills of his twin trades. When he had finished – that is, after he had cleaned up after himself, scouring the table, the bath and its surrounds, then scouring himself under the shower – he made three trips to the garage, carrying in all twelve professionally packaged parcels. He set them down in a tidy row – four small, five medium-sized and three large – while he emptied his chest-freezer.
Only when his parcels were safely shut away for the night, did he think about food and drink. Despite the grisly tasks he had just undertaken, he prepared and ate a surprisingly hearty meal of steak, oven chips and defrosted peas, followed by ice-cream with raspberry sauce dripped over it. Afterwards, he went straight to bed. It was early, but he’d had quite a busy day.
The following day, Friday, was his afternoon off. After doing his morning shift at Lowther’s he came straight home to pick up all but the three largest parcels. He drove to a minor road, just short of Muker which took him up onto the high moor to an area littered with shake holes, swallow holes and disused pits and mine shafts, known as Satron Moor.
He had often walked and run in that area, parking in the lay-by then moving south, following the east bank up and onto The Tops, a wild, secluded area. That afternoon, however he went up in the car, parking off the road on a patch of grass cropped short by browsing sheep. Two trips were sufficient, thankfully, to allow this bona fida-looking walker to leave his car and walk into the mist to deliver his parcels, posting them down one opening in the ground after another.
On his way back home, he had a real stroke of luck. The bridge at Gunnerside was being strengthened (to conform to EU specifications), and while he was waiting at the lights he watched fascinated as tonnes of concrete were being poured onto the reinforcing girders below. Later that day, when it was dark, he returned to this spot to dispose of the remaining parcels. One by one – Christ, they were heavy – he carried them from his car and dropped them over the side of the makeshift pontoon bridge which had been erected alongside the original eighteenth century structure. After satisfying himself that each one had submerged completely, he returned to his car, smiling at the thought of this new concept in reinforced concrete!
It was a weary man who that night settled down at the dining table with a mug of coffee to finish his latest jig-saw acquisition: a fifteen hundred piecer. It was a whopper. A behemoth of a puzzle, if ever there was one. He had been on with it for the best part of a week – wrestling with sea that looked like sky, sky that looked like sea – and now, at long last, there were just a few dozen pieces to put in place.
It took him all of eight minutes to do this – after which he sat back beaming with satisfaction. All the pieces back in place. That’s how he liked it. Things had had him worried these last few days.
Suddenly, he shook with laughter. The outburst surprised him. Delayed shock, perhaps? Then he broke the picture into small pieces again. He had done it, he had put it together – and he knew he could do it again if he had to... it felt good to be in control once more.
© Patrick Belshaw 2008