I paused.

  ‘Or there again I may not. It all depends. It depends on so many things. On my mood, on the weather, on the number of magpies, black cats and squashed hedgehogs we pass, on whether I can pick up anything worth listening to on the radio and whether my piles are giving me gyp after a day in your shoddy little bucket seats. It depends on all that and more, far more than I could ever express in words. But one thing all those ineffable factors have in common is that there isn’t a single solitary effing thing you can do about them. You would therefore be well-advised to make the most of the one way in which you can attempt to influence the eventual outcome, Clive, which is by SHUTTING THE FUCK UP!’

  The hooded figure was silent and still. I took Garcia to one side — it wouldn’t do for us to be heard conversing in Spanish — and told him to put Clive in the boot. I’d had enough of humping bodies about for one morning.

  When I had planned out the day’s activities earlier that morning, the drive to Wales had appeared as a sort of entr’acte between the strenuous and demanding dramatics before and after. To them I had devoted intensive care and detailed scrutiny, but I’d hardly given a thought to the journey itself. Time was not a factor. We could do nothing until darkness fell anyway. Since the Lotus and the BMW were too distinctive to risk them being seen together on the little-used cross-country roads, I had planned a roundabout route using motorways as much as possible. Garcia’s instructions were very simple. He was to maintain a constant speed of 60 mph. I would remain some distance behind, keeping the BMW always in view. As we approached each junction, I would accelerate past and lead him to the correct exit.

  Foolproof, eh? I certainly thought so. But I hadn’t done any motorway driving since returning to Britain, so I was unaware that in practice the 70 mph limit now indicates a minimum speed, barely acceptable even in the slow lane. Poor Garcia did his best to obey my instructions, but what with the queue of irate and contemptuous drivers building up behind him, and the exciting responsiveness of the BMW to the slightest pressure of his foot on the accelerator, he was very soon out of sight. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could about it, because Clive’s fancy little roadster turned out to be underpowered, badly tuned and apt to ramble all over the road if you took your mind off the driving for a second. It was while I was staring gloomily at the speedometer that I noticed the needle of the fuel gauge leaning over like a drunk against a bar, deep inside a red zone marked EMPTY.

  Objectively speaking, the fifteen minutes which followed could hardly have been more banal, but they were in fact the most stressful part of the entire day. As I said, my plan was constructed on a series of strict exclusion zones. I was in one of these and Clive’s Lotus in another, and never the twain should meet. I had been extremely careful to avoid leaving any traces of my presence in the car, but all that would count for nothing if I broke down on the motorway and had to be rescued by the police. Even if they didn’t happen to open the boot and find the remains of a Caucasian female, the incident would be logged, and the link between me and the Lotus thus become a matter of official record. By keeping speeds low and coasting down any hills I managed to keep the Lotus going through a seemingly endless tract of motorway without turn-offs or signs of any sort, but when an exit finally appeared I knew I was going to have to take it. Apart from anything else, there was far less chance of attracting the attention of the police once I was off the motorway. As for Garcia, I tried not to think about what he might be getting up to all on his own.

  I found petrol almost right away, on one of the roads leading away from the junction roundabout. I hastily filled up and returned to the motorway. A few miles further on I had to slam on the brakes when I caught sight of the BMW parked on the hard shoulder with the hazard flashers going, the doors wide open and Garcia standing there in his bouncer’s outfit and rapist’s gloves having a smoke and admiring the scenery. The only thing missing was a large sign saying BOOT SALE HERE TODAY.

  After that things went relatively smoothly. I kept Garcia in sight to the end of the motorway, just beyond Telford, and then overtook to lead him along the country roads to our destination. Dusk was just falling as we left Llangurig along a verdant valley in which one of those squeaky-clean Welsh streams was fleetingly visible. After about ten miles we turned right up a narrow mountain road which climbed steeply to a pass and then dropped into the high valley of the Elan river, at this point little more than a shallow stream artificially widened by the dammed waters of the upper reservoir. I parked the Lotus by the roadside and walked back to join Garcia in the BMW. I was no longer worried about the cars being seen together. Apart from a few neurotic-looking sheep, there was no one to see them. We ate the rest of the food I had brought while the darkness gathered. From time to time there was an occasional thump from the back of the car. I mentally drafted a letter of complaint to BMW. ‘Dear Sir: On long trips my wife and I are frequently disturbed by the weeping and wailing of our Filipino maids, who travel in the boot. It is quite intolerable that a car of this supposed quality …’ Sign it with an Arab name and an address in Knightsbridge.

  When we had finished our snack I gave Garcia further instructions. They were brief and simple. He was to wait one hour exactly, then drive on along the road until he saw me. I left him there with a pack of chocolate digestives, a can of Coke and a rather faint and crackly German pop station he had managed to find, and drove off in the Lotus.

  The road ran for several miles along the hillside overlooking the upper two lakes, before dipping down into a wood and zigzagging across the overflow stream to hug the eastern bank of the lowest and largest of the three reservoirs. It was dark by now, but I remembered the scene clearly from the walk Karen and I had taken on the last day of our stay in the Elan Valley. I particularly recalled Karen’s shiver as she looked at the black waters far below.

  I continued along the bank of the reservoir and across the narrow viaduct of roughly finished stone carrying a forestry trail off into the mountains on the other bank. When I reached the far side I turned the car around, then drove part of the way back. It was pitch-dark and had started to rain, a steady hushing which merely seemed to intensify the silence. I opened the boot of the Lotus and propped the torch on the support strut. Karen showed no further signs of undead activity. There was no doubt now that I was dealing with a corpse, pale, cold and stiff, the back of the legs and neck a nasty greyish-blue colour, as though posthumously bruised by bumping around in the Lotus’s boot. I’d always assumed that there was a big difference between the living and the dead, some glaring and obvious distinction, but apart from the cosmetic details I’ve mentioned, a sort of accelerated ageing, Karen seemed much the same person I’d known and loved all along. If there was something missing then it certainly wasn’t anything I’d cared much about in the first place. For most men, I suppose, sex rarely amounts to much more than necrophilia with the living.

  Rigor mortis was fairly advanced by this stage, so instead of trying to wrap Karen’s arms around the concrete post I laid it along her spine. I had originally intended to tie the body to the post with the lengths of electric wire I’d bought for the torture session, but among the miscellaneous items in Clive’s boot was a tow-rope, so I naturally used that instead. I wound it round and round the two rigidities and tied the ends together in a no doubt excessive number of knots.

  The next step was to hoist the corpse on to the broad parapet which ran along the bridge to either side at about chest height. As soon as I tried to do this I realized that I had made a mistake in roping it to the post first. I simply couldn’t lift Karen and the length of reinforced concrete. But I simply had to. At the first attempt we both ended up lying in the roadway, me on my knees and Karen flat out in the gutter. By leaving one end of the post there, I was able to hoist the other on to the edge of the parapet, with Karen roped to it like Joan of Arc at the stake. It was at this point that a pair of headlights appeared on the other side of the reservoir.

  The vehicle circled round in the parking area at the far end of the bridge and drew up facing the water. It had to be the local Water and Sewage Authority officials, I reckoned. I couldn’t see what anyone else would be doing up there at that time of night. They would no doubt feel the same, and drive over to investigate. It was too late to heave the body over the side without being seen and apprehended, if only for contributing to the state of the nation’s water supplies which has led to an understandable confusion in many people’s minds between the two activities for which the Authorities are responsible. No, I was just going to have to bluff my way through it. ‘Good evening. Just admiring the view. This is my wife. Yes, she’s rather poorly, I’m afraid. Well in fact she’s dead, but we don’t like to mention it in front of her.’

  Fear lent me new strength. I heaved the other end of the post up on to the parapet, slid it across, and shoved the whole issue over the edge. A moment later there was a satisfyingly loud splash. I opened Karen’s handbag and added the single ticket to Banbury I had bought that morning, then threw that in along with her suitcase and coat. I slammed the boot shut, got back into the Lotus and drove it hard into the parapet, denting the wing and scraping a bright patch of yellow paint off on the stonework. Another clue. The cops were going to love this one.

  As I slowed to turn off the bridge I caught sight of two pale faces peering out at me through the misted glass of the parked car. Just a courting couple out for a Saturday night snog. I drove fast along the bank of the reservoir, over the stream and up the winding road through the forest to the bare moors above. There were only ten minutes left of the hour I had allowed before Garcia came looking for me. I must have been feeling a bit light-headed. It had been a day of uncommon stress and responsibility, following an almost sleepless and extremely fraught night. At any rate, I totally misjudged one particularly sharp and inclined hairpin, and the Lotus spun off the road, hit a tree and bounced off into a large patch of mud.

  Advertising executives dream about people like me. Such was my slavish adherence to the ‘clunk, click, every trip’ slogan that even when driving away from a mountain reservoir after dumping my wife’s body, I had not neglected to fasten my seat-belt, so I was shocked rather than crippled for life by the collision. When I tried to reverse out of the mud, though, I discovered that the car was hopelessly stuck. All the better. My original idea had been to disable the Lotus by driving a nail into one of its tyres — the spare wheel had been removed at the quarry, supposedly to make room for Karen’s body — but my accident had achieved exactly the same purpose, and even more convincingly.

  Garcia rolled up in the BMW a few minutes later. We drove back up the valley and across the bleak mountain pastures to a spot I had selected earlier, just beyond a cattle grid. I parked the car so that the headlights illuminated the field of operations and gave Garcia careful advance instructions. When we opened the boot, Clive looked a very Sorry Rabbit indeed, lying there on the plastic sheeting, his co-ordinated leisurewear steeped in his own urine. I cut through the tape binding his ankles, knees and arms. I replaced his key-holder in his pocket, minus the Yale front-door key I’d retained, and motioned to Garcia to help me lift him out of the car. When we laid him down in the road he showed the first sign of life so far, moving his limbs feebly like a clockwork soldier in need of rewinding.

  We picked him up and frog-marched him off the unfenced road and across the adjacent wilderness to the top of a steep slope overlooking a marshy depression at the end of the upper reservoir. There we stopped, holding him by one arm each. He made no attempt to struggle. I loosened the sponge-bag from around his throat and looked expectantly at Garcia. Then I plucked off Clive’s hood, and in the same moment we heaved him forward over the edge of the slope. He fell without a cry, rolling head over heels, arms and legs flailing uselessly until the darkness below swallowed him up.

  The return journey passed uneventfully. It was shortly after midnight when we reached the pub where I had picked Garcia up that morning. I handed him a sealed envelope containing the sum we had agreed on. He counted it carefully. I then outlined the true nature of the events in which he had just participated, and explained that in the eyes of the law he was an accessory to murder. This resulted in a prolonged outburst of unpleasantness in the course of which aspersions were cast upon the legitimacy of my birth, the virility of my anonymous father was openly derided, and it was further alleged that my mother habitually engaged in unnatural practices involving donkeys, goats and — I found this a bit far-fetched — vultures. For his final sally Garcia switched to English.

  ‘You drop me into it, you bloody heel!’

  ‘You were already in it, amigo. But if you shut up and move fast, this will get you out.’

  He stuffed the cash into his pocket and climbed out of the car, slamming the door behind him. I never saw him again, but I eventually learned from Trish that he had disappeared from the school the following week. This had aroused no particular comment. Garcia’s precarious situation was by now notorious, and everyone assumed that he had fled without warning in an attempt to throw the human rights hounds off the scent. In any case, no one at the Oxford International Language College cared much what had happened to Garcia by then. They were too absorbed in the latest twists and turns of the real-life soap opera starring their very own principal, Mr Clive Phillips.

  I had one more chore to attend to before going home. This involved driving across town to the up-market Victorian property on the side of Headington Hill where Clive lived. The lower floor was dark, but a light showed in one of the bedrooms and another from a small window in the roof. I parked the BMW some distance away, slipped on my rubber gloves and made my way back on foot. The gate had been stolen or vandalized. I walked up the tiled path to the front door. From the nearby Cowley Road came whoops of drunken revelry. I got out the Yale key I had removed from Clive’s holder and tried it in the lock. It went in all right, but it wouldn’t turn.

  I almost wept. After all I’d been through, I just couldn’t handle this. Then a light suddenly came on in the hallway. The front door consisted of a semi-transparent sheet of ornamented glass through which I could now make out a flight of stairs. I followed the path round the corner of the house and hid in the shadows. A moment later the door opened. It didn’t immediately close again, however. Instead, there ensued a leave-taking whose ardour and duration made the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet look like a skinhead kiss-off. About a quarter of an hour passed before Romeo reluctantly dug his bike out of the bushes and took off. Juliet bolted the front door and ran upstairs to weep in her pillow.

  It was the sound of the bolt that did it. Surely Clive wouldn’t be best pleased if he returned home unexpectedly to find the door bolted against him? So maybe that wasn’t the door he used. Maybe the front door was for the lodgers, while Clive retained a separate entrance to which he alone possessed the key. I followed the path along the side of the house. Sure enough, it ended at a door near the rear of the premises. This too was fitted with a Yale lock, and the key turned in it.

  I switched on the lights and started to search the flat. The front hallway of the original house had been narrowed into a mere passageway leading from the front door to the stairs and the rented rooms upstairs, while the original sitting and dining rooms together with an extension containing a modern kitchen and bathroom had been retained for Clive’s personal use. I’d been expecting fake-fur rugs and see-through cocktail cabinets, recessed strobe lights and a sunken Jacuzzi. The stud’s stable, in short. Clive Phillips will be standing tonight. Service while you wait. Instead, it looked like a student’s crash-pad. Clive was the next best thing to a millionaire, yet he’d been living in virtual squalor.

  Then I saw the photo. It was a framed enlargement, sitting on a table which Clive had used as a desk. It was not a recent shot. Karen was sitting on a wooden bench, squinting slightly in the bright sunlight. She looked prettier than I had ever seen her, younger too, almost a different person. I had been obliged on several occasions to look through the Parsons’ photographic archive, all sixteen volumes of it, but I had never seen this picture before.

  ‘Clive?’

  The door of the living room opened as though of its own accord.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not Clive.’

  On the threshold stood Juliet, poised for flight.

  ‘I’m a friend of Clive’s,’ I told her, smiling nicely. ‘He knows I’m here. Look, he gave me the key.’

  She was in her early twenties, the ideal clarity of her teenage beauty already slightly compromised by the gravity of the adult she would become.

  ‘I see lights on. I will telephone to the police, but then I think maybe he is come back before.’

  ‘Good for you. The thing is, Clive’s in a spot of trouble. There are one or two things he has here, documents and so on, which he doesn’t want falling into the wrong hands. So he asked me to come round and pick them up for him.’

  ‘Why he doesn’t come himself?’

  ‘He can’t, darling. He just hasn’t got a window free for anybody.’

  I picked up a pile of papers from the table as though these might be the incriminating documents I had come to remove. I noticed Juliet staring suspiciously at my rubber gloves. I held them out to her, strangler fashion.

  ‘I’m not supposed to be here. Understand? I’ve never been here. No one has ever been here. Above all, no one has taken anything away. This is very important. Otherwise Clive will be sent to prison for a very long time. I’m sure your family wouldn’t want you involved in anything like that, now would they?’

  Her solemn face swung from side to side in fervent negation.

  ‘Now then, do you happen to know where the phone is? I need to make a quick call, let Clive know everything’s all right.’