Read Online Blind Needle by Trevor Hoyle - Free Book Online

served me without so much as a disinterested glance through her diamante spectacles, which looked as if at any moment they might take off and fly round the room.
    I ordered food – some kind of reconstituted offal and fat pressed into a flat cake, with fried onions, inside a white spongy muffin that looked and tasted like cotton wool, served on a bed of thin chips in a congealed basket – and ate it beneath a varnished ship’s wheel and a brass lantern with a pink bulb.
    The place was dimly lit, with more shadow than light, the people mostly middle-aged, neither prosperous nor poor. As usual I felt that I didn’t fit in, that everyone here was engaged in some monstrous conspiracy from which I alone was excluded. But this didn’t matter. I was used to the feeling. Dr Morduch’s bit of medical jargon for it was ‘externality’.
    We had often talked about ‘externality’, though I never fully understoodwhat he meant – something about renouncing the self, I think. I’d made the fatal mistake of discussing it with S –. That’s all there was to do at the clinic, talk and watch TV, and S – was very easy to talk to, understanding and sympathetic. He would quietly listen for hours, nodding, stroking his beard with a rather delicate hand, taking it all in, absorbing everything – ‘imprinting’ it (more jargon) so that in the end he seemed to know more about me than I did myself.
    His large, bright, slightly bulbous eyes were fixed on my lips, as if he wanted to see the shape of the words as they issued out. I told him everything. Childhood. Parents. School. Jobs. Friends. Marriage. And then doubts. Suspicion. Anger. Panic. Blankness. Breakdown. I talked it all out of me, and he took it all in. Morduch ought to have warned me – I knew nothing about S –, his background, the things he had done. I assumed – quite wrongly as it turned out – that he had undergone a similar trauma – that his life, like mine, had been smashed by a cataclysmic emotional shock. From time to time I asked him about his past life, but at first he wouldn’t talk about it. The hurt was too great. That’s what I thought.
    The truth, when I learned it, was the complete reverse of what I had imagined.
    One day, out of the blue, he told me with a faint smirk on his lips that he had committed the Perfect Murder. He had killed his wife, he confided, and got away with it.
    Was he amused by the fact of having killed her or because no one, not even Dr Morduch and Dr Pitt-Rivers, knew about it? I think he relished the notion of having fooled everyone and got off scot-free. He’d put one over on them, the useless pathetic cretins, and he loved that. I didn’t believe him, of course, I thought it was just empty boasting, something to build himself up in my eyes. He wanted me to think of him as somebody powerful, who mattered, whose opinion others sought, whose wise words people hung on, rapt and fascinated. They didn’t, so he had to invent fantastic stories about what he had achieved, the more fantastic and grotesque and horrifying the better. That way he built himself up, impressed them with the force and depth of his exotic personality, which in truth was non-existent. He was actually, I came to think, a zero, a non-person, a vacuum waiting to be filled.
    It didn’t help his credibility that he gave more than one version of how he had got rid of his wife. That’s why at first I didn’t take him seriously. He had devised, so he said, an elaborate scheme, worked it out in every tiny, precise detail. What he would do was this: he would follow her to an isolated spot on the moors near where they lived, knowing she was going there to meet her lover. Once there, he surmised, she would leave her car and get into his and drive off somewhere. S – ’s plan was devious and yet simple, relying on the steepness of