Beggars Banquet

I lay on my back compliantly, wondering whether it was best to feign sleep and wait it out till the wee small hours, or try to get some sleep and trust to my internal alarm clock. I needed to be clear-headed, which suggested sleep. So I closed my eyes and dreamed of a long beach on which I walked for hours and hours, while friends kept swimming ashore as though from some shipwreck.

Alice woke me with a mug of tea and a couple of biscuits. I sat up sluggishly. It had been a long, exhausting night. I looked at the clock: five minutes to eight. My body was stiff, arms aching.

‘You look rough,’ Alice agreed, starting to dress. I planted my feet on the cold floor and ran fingers through my hair. It took me a while to admit that I’d done nothing about the body in my car-boot.

I’d slept the whole night away.

Over breakfast, I pressed Alice about what she’d said in bed. Her face was grey and puffy like an inmate’s. She’d given up looking for a job a year or so ago, and filled her days with shopping, gossip and TV. She gossiped at the shops, often discussing the doings in one or other daytime soap. Her life too was an eight-track cartridge. The sofa had taken her shape, so that I no longer felt comfortable sitting on it. Usually I sat on a beanbag on the floor, reminding myself to get it refilled one of these days. I even ate breakfast (a bowl of cereal) on the beanbag, while Alice sat on the sofa, both of us staring towards breakfast TV with its little onscreen clock in the corner, telling us it would soon be time for work or, in Alice’s case, for yet more television.

She ignored my question, so I repeated it.

‘What did you mean last night about Maxwell?’

‘He’s gay.’

‘What?’

‘Gay.’

I hooted disbelief. ‘Who told you that?’

‘He did. Well, not in so many words, but women just know. The way he talked to me one day…’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know, a few months back. He came round, and you’d been kept at school by some meeting.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything. He sort of talked around it. You had to read between the lines.’

This from someone who didn’t even read a newspaper.

‘He goes out with loads of women.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Because he’s scared to admit the fact. I bet the reason he’s so successful at dating is because his dates are so safe with him.’

‘You’ve been watching too many of those problem-airing programmes.’

She shrugged. But Alice, bless her, had given me an idea. There was a run-down cemetery in the city known to be frequented after dark by gays. What a fine ironic place to dump the body. Then I thought of Do

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘Why should I?’ She gave me one of her looks and disappeared into the kitchen. I could hear ru

Then, without any warning, the real plan leapt into my head, so focused that it seemed like a gift from above.

I took a long detour on my drive to school, stopping at Maxwell’s. The lane was as empty as ever. I used his key to let myself in, climbed the stairs quietly and opened his bedroom door. Fingerprints didn’t concern me. As a close friend and frequent visitor, my prints would be everywhere anyway. I removed a couple of the videos from Maxwell’s wardrobe and while I was there, sniffed around in search of some secret hoard of gay stuff. But I didn’t find anything other than some football magazines under the bed.

‘Whatever turns you on,’ I said to myself as I debated bringing the body back into the flat, but decided against it. I wanted to set everything up before allowing Maxwell to be found. So he stayed in the car-boot all the way to school. I did consider rigor mortis. I wasn’t sure about these things, but reckoned he was going to be stiff by the time I got him back to the mews. He’d be all bunched up. I wasn’t sure what the police or the pathologist would make of that. TV detectives were infallible, but I had doubts about their real-life counterparts. I hoped my doubts were well founded.

The two free periods before lunch were my real break. There was no one in the video lab, so I could edit to my heart’s content. There were three videos in all, two from Maxwell’s wardrobe and one from his living-room. This last video was shot at one of his parties. You know the sort of video I mean. The camera is aimed at you, so you open your mouth and eyes wide and wave wildly into the lens, sometimes saying something crass at the same time. Either that or you studiously ignore the contraption, despite the film-maker’s enticements. And you still look a prat. Of course, Maxwell being behind the camera most of the time, there were lots of shots of the women in their party dresses, with attendant leg and cleavage, Max calling out a cod director’s ‘Enthuse, darlings, I want some passion from you!’

After an hour, I had basically what I wanted. It didn’t look great. I wasn’t at all sure that it looked even halfway persuasive, and I was about to drop the whole scheme, but there was fever in my brain now. It was all or nothing. I was risking all my wi

‘To hell with it, it’ll do.’

I knew the police wouldn’t be watching for clues anyway. They’d be watching for other things, and finding them.

During the lunch-hour, I drove back to the mews, this time pulling Maxwell out of the boot and laying him at the bottom of the stairs. Who could tell, maybe the whole thing would be taken for an accident after all. I didn’t put the porn videos back in the wardrobe – they were en route to the dump – but I did put my little home-made ensemble in there. Then I sat down in Maxwell’s study and switched on his word processor. I’d been thinking about the letter, and it proved easy to write. I read it through and it seemed convincing, so I printed it out. Then I crumpled the sheet of paper and placed it beneath the occasional table at the top of the stairs.

I was back in the study, checking everything was as it should be, when the downstairs door opened. For a hysterical second I thought: It’s him! Maxwell’s back! How was I going to explain…?

But then I heard a sort of squeal, and a protracted thud. I tiptoed into the hall and looked down. A middle-aged woman was lying inside the door. Maxwell’s cleaning lady. I’d never set eyes on her before, but I knew he had a ‘Mrs Mop’: he never tired of repeating the fact. I crept quickly downstairs and out of the door, and kept my eyes on the rearview mirror all the way back along the mews.

It all moved surprisingly slowly, I thought. In the movies they wrap up these sorts of cases within a good ninety minutes (or occasionally a supremely lousy ninety minutes), but even after we buried Maxwell no one had been asking the obvious questions. Then one evening Mark and Jimmy phoned, one after the other. Both had the same story to tell. They’d been asked to go along to the police station, and there had been shown a video recording. Both said the same thing.

‘They told me not to mention anything to you, but I thought… you know. You being a mate and all.’

And then there was a ring at the doorbell. Alice answered, and after a few moments came back into the living-room. She didn’t look well.

‘It’s the police,’ she said. ‘They want to talk to me about Maxwell. Down at the station.’

And indeed there were two grim-faced constables loitering on the stairwell.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked them.