Read Online Blind Needle by Trevor Hoyle - Free Book Online Page B

the distraught hubby, frantically trying to revive his beloved. Easily done, the doctors would tell him sympathetically, trying to lessen the blow, unless the user kept a strict check on dosage levels and daily intake, which it now transpired his wife hadn’t done; and that, according to S –, was exactly what the doctors did tell him.
    No suspicion fell on him. He had set out to commit the Perfect Murder and had achieved it.
    This might have been another of his boastful fantasies, part of his frantic desire to be thought charismatic, wickedly cunning and superior to ordinary mortals, and perhaps I would have dismissed it as such except for two things. The first was that he was very precise about the extra insulin he had injected into her: a full two millilitre syringe, or 200 units, equivalent to four times the normal dose. The second thing, which actually convinced me, was what had taken place during the night as he lay beside her corpse. She might have mocked him in the past for his inadequacy and rejected him in favour of her lover, but he was dead set on having the last fuck as well as the last laugh.
    And he actually did laugh, or rather giggled, as he told me this, as if delighting in his own fiendish cleverness and inviting me to join in his complicity, to celebrate with him the stunning success of all his schemes and stratagems.
    When I came to read the diary, several weeks later, it was the way he described these cold, methodical preparations to murder his wife that really chilled me. He even talked, or gloated, about how much his wife ‘trusted’ him – about how ‘caring’ and ‘attentive’ he had been, while all the time planning and plotting to do away with her. That was why I feared him so much, and believed he was capable of killing me with the same dispassionate madman’s logic. In his tortured mind he had transferred the blame to me: I was the ‘Murdering Bastard’ who had done the deed and I was going to pay for it. Next time, instead of toenail clippings in the mashed potato, it would be powdered glass.
    I finished my glass of beer and went to the gents along a passage which led outside to a small flagged yard. The lavatory was a primitive structure, drizzle whipping through the gap between the corrugated iron roof and whitewashed brick walls, coating the flagstones which gleamed slickly in the light of a frosted globe inside a wire cage. I heard the scrape of a shoe, and a low mumble of voices that went silent as I came in.
    There were two men – I registered no more than that one was young and pale and fat, his stomach bursting through the buttons on his shirt, the other dark, thin, one-dimensional. There was a washbasin in the corner with a single tap, but no plug, soap or towel of course.
    They hadn’t spoken since I entered, but now as I stood at the stained slab one of them said behind my back, ‘Need some stuff, squire?’
    I turned round, buttoning my coat, having done nothing. My heart was beating against my rib-cage; I wondered if they were homosexuals.
    â€˜We’ve god some prime stuff,’ the pale fat one said in a friendly, wheedling tone, ‘if you god the readies.’ He had some kind of speech impediment or his nostrils were blocked with mucus. He winked slowly and pressed an imaginary plunger into his arm with a hand like a bunch of sausages.
    The other man nudged him sharply in the ribs. There was an irregular stain on his cheek, a birthmark in the shape of a chicken-claw. ‘We don’t know him,’ he muttered without moving his lips. ‘Shut your bloody hole.’
    â€˜He looks all right to me,’ the fat one grinned, and even in the poor light I could see that his teeth were small and square, brown at the roots. ‘What about it, squire? You’re not CID, are you?’
    He gave a throaty cackle with his head lowered, watching me craftily from beneath puffy eyelids.
    I felt