‘We do their dirty work for them and they won’t even help out when things get tough. Look what they did to Noriega! Makes you sick.’

  ‘What do you expect, Garcia, unemployment insurance? That sounds like Commie talk to me.’

  ‘A man should stand by his friends,’ the unhappy eater complained.

  His own friends, it turned out, were now lying low in a certain Central American republic, and Garcia’s only wish was to join them. The problem was that he needed the best part of a thousand pounds to obtain a false passport and a plane ticket. I told him that I would be prepared to make a substantial contribution and then explained what I wanted. Garcia flicked his hand as though brushing away a fly.

  ‘No problem,’ he said in his evil English.

  Back at Ramillies Drive, I bugged the telephones. The law covering electronic surveillance is a koan on which those who seek enlightenment about the British way of doing things would be well-advised to meditate. Under UK law it is legal to buy and sell bugging equipment, but a criminal act to use it. Thus the purchase of a sophisticated radio tap transmitter and actuator switch like the one I bought in the Tottenham Court Road, solely and specifically designed for the clandestine interception of other people’s telephone calls, is no more problematic than that of a clock-radio. Parents who use an intercom to monitor their baby’s sleep, on the other hand, are guilty of criminally violating the infant’s privacy.

  The hardware set me back a couple of hundred pounds, but the salacious details I hoped to pick up would certainly be worth a bob or two when it came to the divorce. I knew from personal experience that Karen’s sexual behaviour was fairly unfettered, so depending on the proclivities of her partner there seemed a good chance that they might drop the odd reference to one of those practices which can so alienate the sympathies of a jury. I imagined my counsel fixing Karen with a beady eye. ‘In the course of a telephone conversation with the co-respondent, you referred amongst other things to a bottle-brush, a set of rubber bands and a jar of mayonnaise. Would you explain for the benefit of the court the precise use to which these items were subsequently put?’

  The first few recordings yielded nothing more interesting than a long conversation between Karen and her mother about the trials and tribulations of early pregnancy, but on the Thursday afternoon I struck gold. Karen had made two calls that morning. The first was to a hotel in Wales, reserving two single rooms for Saturday night and quoting her Barclaycard details in lieu of a deposit. The second was answered impatiently by a man whose tone promptly went all smarmy the moment Karen identified herself. But I wasn’t listening to her. I was listening to the background noise, the cacophonous Eurobabble, the sudden eruptions of pidginshit English. In my mind’s eye I stood surrounded by the polyglot bratpack, fielding questions about the difference between ‘they are’ and ‘there are’ from a neurotic Basque girl while waiting for Clive to finish on the phone so that I could go in, cap in hand, and ask for an advance on next month’s salary.

  But Clive was in no hurry to finish. He was gazing out of his window at the traffic on the Banbury Road, the receiver clutched tightly in his sweaty paw, his voice caressing his caller like a cat licking its fur. He was discussing their forthcoming weekend in the Elan Valley. He was discussing it with my wife. She told him that the surroundings were lovely and she could recommend the hotel. She had been there, she said, before.

  If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t be here, Karen wouldn’t be dead, none of this would have happened. Karen was no longer of any concern to me. I’d got what I wanted out of her. All I wanted now was rid. If it had been anyone else, I’d have wished them both the best of British and turned the matter over to my solicitors.

  But it wasn’t anyone. It was Clive, and that changed everything. Karen didn’t matter to me, but Clive did. Clive and I went way back. We had scores to settle. I don’t just mean his shabby treatment of me at the school. That particular Clive Phillips was merely the latest model in a continuing series which had haunted my life. Back in the sixties, when I was demonstrating against the Vietnam War, having meaningful relationships, pondering the purpose of life and seeing God in a grain of sand, the Clives were out there wheeling and dealing, cheating and hustling, packaging my dreams and hopes and selling them back to me at a profit. It didn’t bother me, not then. From the lofty parapets of my ivory tower, I looked down on them going about their mean, grubby business in the mire far below and reminded myself that they hadn’t enjoyed my advantages in life and were thus to be pitied rather than despised, difficult though this was.

  Most of my peers came down to earth during the seventies, but I kept floating. OK, the acid dream was dead, flower power a flop, but hey, it’d been a learning experience, right? And the alternative still stank. I got into booze and books, travelled widely, did a bit of casual work to make ends meet, and had less and less meaningful affairs. The Clives were a lot closer now. I had dealings with them as employee and tenant. I felt their contempt for me, and it shook me. So I went abroad, insulating myself in the cocoon of expatriation. On my return to this country ten years later, I found the Clives in charge. They’d been there all along, of course, but keeping their heads down, disguising their true nature. Now the wind had changed and they’d come out of the woodwork, big and hungry and confident. I was tossed to them like a badger to dogs. When Clive Phillips condescended to use me, I was grateful, and when he turned me out I went quietly, because by then I had finally accepted the rules of the game. Instead of making vain protests to the referee or sulking on the sidelines, I set out to win. As we have seen, I succeeded.

  Now I found myself humiliated and despoiled once more. Clive wasn’t to know that he was doing me a favour by giving me a motive to divorce Karen. Clive didn’t do anyone any favours. Like all free enterprise propagandists, he hated competition in any form, and took a particularly dim view of any of his employees trying to emulate his success. When three of his teachers left to open a school of their own, Clive told everyone that giving the consumer a choice kept everyone honest and he wished the lads well. Then he got his Italian agents to make block bookings at the new school for the next six months in the name of a fictitious company. The owners of the new school were ecstatic at this stroke of luck, and having spent a lot of money on advertising they were forced to turn down all requests for places as the school was full until Christmas. At the last moment the Italian company mysteriously cancelled its bookings, and that summer the school had more teachers than students. In October the bank foreclosed on the loan, and in November the teachers asked Clive for their jobs back. He said he would put their names on the list, but it was first come first served, fair was fair.

  In short, Clive was not only a prick, he was a vindictive prick. Since he could no longer reach me in any other way, he’d reached me through my wife. It wasn’t Karen that Clive was fucking, it was me. A terrible fury swept over me, a rage so intense it was physically painful. But anger would avail me nothing, I knew. The teachers who had taken Clive’s on-your-bike homilies at face value got angry when they discovered how they’d been bought and sold, but their anger didn’t repay their bank loan or give them their jobs back. It merely confirmed what losers they were. While they got mad, Clive got even. That’s what I would do, I decided. I wasn’t an ineffective dreamer any more. If Clive wanted to play dirty, that was fine with me. With Garcia on my side, I could play dirty in ways that Clive had never even imagined.

  Over dinner that evening, Karen announced that her mother had to go into hospital for observation as her chronic back complaint had taken a turn for the worse. She felt she should go up to Liverpool for the weekend to be with her. I generously offered to drive her, but she said she preferred to go by train. I would only be in the way, she went on, becoming rather flustered, there was really no point in it. I conceded the point, but insisted on at least driving her to the station. This she accepted. She would be getting the 10.14, she said. I already knew this, having overheard her and Clive arranging to meet at Banbury, where the train stopped twenty minutes later. I thought it was quite a wheeze getting your husband to drive you to the train and your lover to meet you off it, but Karen did not seem unduly impressed. Ever the pragmatic scrubber at heart, she saw no more in this arrangement than its convenience.

  Next morning I was up betimes. First stop was the railway station, where I consulted timetables. Then it was back in the BMW and up the road to Banbury, a pleasant market town some twenty miles north of Oxford. Its railway station proved to be a charmless sixties structure with a large car park tarmacked over uprooted sidings. Once the morning rush hour had subsided it appeared little-used, and between trains was almost completely deserted. It only remained to locate the facility which I thought of abstractly as ‘the site’. After driving around the countryside for several hours, I eventually settled on a disused quarry a few miles outside Banbury. A lorry-load of broken concrete fence-posts and other construction waste had been tipped near the entrance, but there was no other sign that anyone had been there recently. There were no houses in the vicinity, and once inside one was completely hidden from the road.

  When Garcia appeared at our rendezvous that lunchtime, he was almost beside himself with furtive cockiness and suppressed self-satisfaction. The manifest reason for this was that he had filled the order and was about to deliver the goods, but the real cause was malicious glee. Not only wasn’t he the cuckold, but he knew who had made me one. I swiftly pulled the rug from under his feet by revealing that I did too.

  Garcia’s first thought was that I was trying to get out of paying him. He was therefore pleasantly surprised when I handed over the agreed sum without a murmur. I then asked how much he still needed. His face fell. It was quite a lot. When I asked how he’d like to have it on Monday he looked at me like the pooch in the Pedigree Chum commercials.

  ‘You want me to keep watching? Take some photographs maybe?’

  By now we were driving around the ring road, Garcia munching his way through a pack of sandwiches I’d bought at a garage. With what I had in mind, we couldn’t risk being seen together, even at a roadside eatery with a high turnover.

  ‘There’s no need for that. I know enough. It’s time to act, to punish those responsible.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’ll deal with her. No, I’d like to put your professional skills to use.’

  He looked suitably flattered.

  ‘Clive has hurt me. He’s hurt my pride, my honour. All I can do in return is hurt his body. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do for now. I would handle it myself, but I’m afraid I’d get carried away. He’d call the police and I’d be charged with assault.’

  Garcia shook his head in disgust. The discovery that British justice offered no protection to husbands who took revenge on the man who had dishonoured them confirmed his worst suspicions about his country of exile.

  ‘But for me it’s an even bigger risk,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I’ll make it worth your while. Everything you need to leave, plus a hundred pounds fun money.’

  ‘Two hundred.’

  We haggled amicably for some time.

  ‘Clive is planning to go away with my wife this weekend,’ I explained, once Garcia’s scruples had been overcome. ‘She’s taking the train to a town called Banbury, where Clive is meeting her. I’ll drive her to the station and put her on an earlier train. She won’t dare refuse for fear of making me suspicious. What she won’t know is that this train doesn’t stop at Banbury. My wife will thus have been sent to Coventry, a phrase which you may recall from our work on idioms but which in the present case is to be interpreted literally.

  ‘As soon as I’ve seen her off, I’ll come and collect you. The train Clive is meeting doesn’t arrive till ten forty, which will give us plenty of time. When we reach Banbury, you lie down in the back of the car with a blanket over you. I’ll go and find Clive and tell him that I know all about him and Karen, and I think we should have a little talk. In broad daylight, in a public place, he’ll have no reason to be suspicious. I’ll get him to come and sit in the car so that we can discuss the situation without being overheard. Then, when the coast’s clear, I’ll turn on the radio. That’s your signal to come out of hiding and disable him.’

  ‘Forget the radio. Just punch him in the balls, like this.’

  He made a fist and brought it down like a hammer between my thighs, pulling up at the last moment. I stifled a premature gasp of pain.

  ‘While he’s busy counting his nuts,’ Garcia continued unperturbed, ‘I give him a little tap on the head.’

  By way of illustration, he skimmed my scalp with the open palm of his right hand.

  ‘I knew you were the man for the job.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Well, once Clive’s feeling no pain, to use an idiom which I don’t think we studied but which seems particularly appropriate in this context, we hood him and proceed to a secluded spot I have in mind where the two of you can conduct your business in complete privacy. When you’ve finished, we leave him there and drive back to Oxford, where you pop into a travel agent and book a seat to the destination of your choice.’

  This vision glowed in Garcia’s face for a moment. Then he frowned.

  ‘But he’ll know it was you.’

  ‘Exactly. I want him to know it was me. What I don’t want is for him to be able to prove it. And he won’t, as long as you do your job right. The important thing is that you leave no marks. Can you do that?’

  Garcia pursed his lips.

  ‘We need electricity.’

  ‘Electricity? You must be joking.’

  ‘Believe me, it’s the best! Clean, convenient, effective. No fuss, no mess.’

  I tapped the steering-wheel impatiently.

  ‘You’re wasted as a torturer, Garcia. You should be writing ads for Powergen.’

  As our eyes met, I had a chilling glimpse of how he must have looked to his victims, bent over them, electrode in hand, ready to place it on nipple or penis, or insert it in vagina or anus. But why should I worry? Garcia’s skills were no threat to me. On the contrary, they were at my service.

  ‘Anyway that’s out of the question. We’re talking about a disused quarry miles from anywhere. Strictly no mod cons.’

  ‘No problem. Hire a generator, one of those petrol-driven ones. We’ll need a resistor, too, to vary the current, and some leads and a couple of spoons.’

  We were now stuck in a traffic jam at the roundabout by the Austin-Rover works. The rear window of the car in front informed us that the owner loved Airedale terriers, that blood donors did it twice a year and that if we could read this, we should thank a teacher. Since he couldn’t, Garcia didn’t thank me.

  ‘And it really hurts?’ I asked.

  ‘Worse than anything you ever imagined. It’s like your body’s coming apart at the seams. And afterwards there’s nothing to show, as long as you use the spoons properly. It’s like cooking meat. You’ve got to keep them moving, otherwise it burns. We had an instructor from the CIA give us a demo when they delivered the equipment, but later on some of the guys got a little sloppy. You know how it is.’

  ‘There’s no risk of him dying, though?’

  ‘I’ll keep the current down.’

  ‘Not too low.’

  Garcia laughed briefly.

  ‘Don’t worry, he won’t think it’s too low.’

  We drove on past Sainsbury’s and over the soft-running Thames.

  ‘What about noise?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we should gag him?’

  ‘If you like. But they don’t really sound human. Anyone who hears us will think we’re castrating pigs.’

  It was perhaps this bucolic image that caused me to start whistling a tune which I later identified as the traditional folk song, As I Was Going to Banbury.

  ‘Well that all sounds jolly satisfactory,’ I said.

  If my arrangement with Garcia had included the usual ‘cooling-off period’ designed to protect consumers from rash decisions, I’d probably have invoked it that evening. Once I’d had a chance to think the whole thing over I realized that it had all got a bit out of hand. What I’d envisaged was basically an up-market beating, tastefully applied, but essentially a good, old-fashioned, hands-on job. Somehow Garcia had made this scenario seem crude and unsatisfactory. It was like talking to a builder. You say, ‘I’d like this and that done,’ and he gives you this withering look and replies, ‘Well if you’re sure that’s what you want, squire, we can certainly do that for you toot sweet, no problem at all, it’s entirely up to you.’ Which is how people end up with knocked-through en-suite kitchen conservatories when all they wanted was a cure for that damp patch on the loo wall.

  It was the weekend, so of course every rental generator in Oxford and environs was already booked. In the end I had to drive to High Wycombe. In case Clive attempted to press charges I was using Dennis’s driving licence as identification. Another incredible thing I am going to have to ask you to accept is that in Britain driving licences are accepted as valid identification despite the fact that they carry no photograph and do not expire until well into the next millennium. Since I was posing as Dennis Parsons, though, I couldn’t use my own cheques or credit cards, so on top of everything else I had to make time-consuming side trips to cashpoint machines to finance the rental. Add a three-mile tailback on the A40 coming into Oxford, and there was another day gone.

  Karen was in the shower when I got home. I took advantage of her acoustic isolation to phone Alison Kraemer. I hadn’t as yet told Alison about Karen’s pregnancy. Since that tea-time conversation in Holywell Street our relations had been friendly but correct. Now I felt the time had come to take her further into my confidence, and I therefore proposed meeting for lunch the next day. Quite apart from anything else, this would do me no harm at all in the event of Clive invoking the law. ‘Now let me just get this straight, officer. Your contention is that prior to meeting Ms Kraemer for lunch at Fifteen North Parade — I can really recommend their venison in madeira and celeriac sauce, and the Chateau Musar ’82 is drinking very nicely — I had spent the morning torturing someone in a quarry near Banbury. Is that correct?’