Solar

He said, ‘Now you can leave. I’ll be at the Centre tomorrow and I’ll see you in Jock Braby’s office at eleven.’

As Beard crossed the room, Aldous was pleading, almost shouting. ‘No one will ever hire me again. You know that, don’t you? This is too important for private revenge.’

As he reached the sitting-room door, Beard turned and said, ‘Before you go, clear up the mess in the hall.’

‘Professor Beard!’

Aldous was starting to run at him, arms outstretched, his head shaking in denial, his lips stretched across his huge teeth, and it was probably his intention to throw himself at Beard’s knees and beg for mercy. He certainly would have had it, for Beard had no wish to set his domestic humiliation before Braby, and therefore the whole Centre. The Chief betrayed, made an ass of by one of the ponytails. But Aldous never reached Beard, he barely made it two metres into his run. The polar-bear rug on the polished floor was waiting for him. It came alive. As his right foot landed on the bear’s back, it leaped forward, with its open mouth and yellow teeth bucking into the air. Aldous’s legs flew up before him and there was a moment when his considerable length was parallel to the ground, and then his legs rose even further and, though his arms flailed instinctively downwards to break his fall, it was the back of his head that made first contact, not with the floor, not with the edge of the glass table, but with its rounded corner, bluntly penetrating the nape of his neck.

A deep, smothering silence settled on the room, and several seconds passed.

‘No, no, please no,’ Beard muttered as he crossed the room.

Aldous lay at full stretch on the floorboards, as though laid out by an undertaker, with only minimal space between arms and torso, eyes wide open, lips parted, the dressing gown covering him decently. Beard kneeled down by the young man’s shoulder. No breathing, no pulse. There was a halo of blood under his head about nine inches across, and for some reason it did not grow larger. Then Beard saw that blood was seeping away, no, cascading down the gaps between the boards. Blood loss alone would have finished Aldous.

‘Oh fuck… oh fuck…’ Beard whispered to himself over and over. Something impossible had happened and he was willing it away, undoing it, reversing it, simply because it could not be. It was too improbable. But with each second the new reality advanced on him, pushed his efforts aside and settled into place. It was true. He also thought of what he should have been doing, of heart massage, of mouth-to-mouth. Like all laboratory workers, he was required to learn these techniques. But something quite still, possessing authority, not so much a voice as a presence lying safely beyond his distress, suggested that he should not touch the body.

He got up and went to the telephone. He was shivering. The stillness of Belsize Park intensified as his hand hesitated above the receiver. The same reasonable presence proposed that he think carefully before dialling. He was not a naturally indecisive man. What was wrong with him? His hand felt dead. It took him some moments to catch up with his own good sense and read the situation as others might. Here was how it looked: a man returns from abroad to find his wife’s lover in the house. A confrontation follows. Twenty minutes later the lover is dead from a blow to the back of the head. He slipped, I tell you, he slipped on the rug as he ran across the room towards me. Oh yes? And why was he ru

At the thought he felt weak in his legs, in the tendons behind his knees, but he did not sit down. It was clear. Only those who loved him would believe him. And no one loved him. He should have had children, grown-up daughters, indignant on his behalf, busy in his defence. He walked across the room towards the hall and then came back. He did not know what to do. Then he did. He went out of the sitting room into the hall, stepped carefully over the trail of puddles and walked into the kitchen, to the drawer where tinfoil and clingfilm and greaseproof rolls were kept. Also in that drawer was a carton of transparent disposable gloves.

He drew on a pair. Nothing criminal in that, but once his hands were encased, he felt invisibility, invincibility steal over him, over his entire body. A mental state, to be sure, but what other states did he have? He did not have a plan, he simply enacted one. His body had a plan. And he walked it through, as though experimentally, believing at every stage he could undo it, go back to the begi

Tom Aldous did not look different, but the rug’s frozen laugh appeared sinister to Beard as he kneeled down beside the body. The bear’s hard, glassy eyes each captured a warped parallelogram of the sitting-room windows and looked murderous. It was the dead polar bears you had to watch. He set out the four items from the carrier bag in a neat row, staring at the fragment of dried-out apple core, wondering how it might help him. But he could think of no possible use for it and returned it to the bag. As he took the hammer in his hands he understood that his calculations about the precautionary principle, about returning to the begi

He stood at last and paused, wondering if there were a simple mistake he was making. Not so far. He put the hammer and the comb and kitchen towel in the bag and went to the front door. Still wearing the gloves, he walked unhurriedly down the garden path and stopped by the gate to look around. There was no one about. He took out the hammer and tossed it into the shrubbery by the front wall, and then went back into the house, removed the gloves and put them in with the apple core, comb and kitchen roll, then folded the bag carefully, so its bloodstained handles were not exposed, and shoved it into an outer zip compartment of his suitcase.