Stead’s near-death experience has brought a certain clarity to his thinking, and presumably the understanding that I’ve no desire to hurt him.  We sit on the ledge as he stares at me open mouthed, struggling to gain his breath.  Eventually he speaks, his voice cracking. “You saved me, why did you save me?”

I don’t answer and just shrug. I soak my handkerchief in a puddle of rainwater and gesture for him to wipe away the streaks of blood from the side of his face.  After a few minutes his breathing starts to settle and the colour returns to his complexion as he turns to face me.  “What happens now? … Are you going to let me go?”

I nod back to him. “Of course, I never wanted to hurt you.  It’s not the kind of person I am.”

For several seconds all is quiet again before he responds: “What sort of person are you then? ... You saved me but why did you kill that Musgrove fella?”

For the next few minutes I tell him about my problems at work, the depression, Helen’s affair and then my inadvertent run-in with Musgrove in the Earl of Arundel pub and the deadly consequences.  I talk freely; presumably my hope is that he’ll see me as a normal person who just got caught up in an extraordinary situation.  He nods periodically but never interrupts, and, perhaps like a good detective, lets me talk.  Eventually I stop, probably after thirty minutes of monologue, and with my throat dry I waited for some kind of response. “But you still haven’t explained why you killed him – was it just revenge?  Why didn’t you just go the police?”

What's the expression – in for a penny in for a pound. So I press on, starting with the day I first planned to Murder Musgrove.

 

It was 7:00 a.m. the morning after I’d met Bosworth and Musgrove in the New Inn.  I’d slept fitfully on the floor of my parents’ house, all the time obsessing over the realisation that Musgrove had been responsible for the hit-and-run and that unwittingly I’d initiated his actions.  A number of times after Helen and the boys’ deaths, I’d thought back to Musgrove’s bizarre drunken offer to kill Helen, but I’d always quickly dismissed the idea, putting it down to the words of a deluded junkie.  Clearly I’d misjudged him though, and now, compounding my grief and guilt, I had the added worry of Musgrove’s blackmail threat.

With my parents’ house now sold and the last box of their possessions in storage, I’d arranged to hand over the keys to the estate agents later that morning.  In the previous few days, in fact pretty much since I’d accepted the offer on the house, I’d been worried about how I’d react to leaving my childhood home and the many happy memories.  But following the run-in with Musgrove, my sole preoccupation was his blackmail attempt; my previous anxieties appeared trivial.

With several hours to wait before the estate agent’s opened for business, I made tea and with mug-in-hand did a final check of the house.  I felt an emotional heaviness as I went to each room in turn, now completely empty of their cluttered contents, a shell that I barely recognised as my childhood home.  I went into the back bedroom, my bedroom from birth to eighteen years, and looked through the window into the garden.  Almost like it was yesterday, I remembered as a child playing football and swinging on the old climbing frame, now dismantled at the back of my own garage, my dad having always planned to paint and reassemble it for my boys.

I shook myself out of my melancholic reminiscences and moved through the rest of the house double-checking that the windows were closed and the lights switched off.  After a final check I headed out to the garden.  It was a space my parents had cherished.  They’d spent hours tending the flowerbeds and rockeries, but just a couple of months after their deaths they were already overgrown with weeds.  I began to pull out some of the more offensive culprits but after a few minutes there was little visible sign of any improvement and I knew my limited efforts were futile.  In any case I had more pressing worries to concentrate my attentions.  I went inside, washed my mug and put it in my rucksack, along with sleeping bag and overnight wash-bag.

Knowing that I would never return, I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled as I locked the front door for the final time.  After again checking from the outside that the windows were closed, I set off on the five-minute drive to the estate agent’s.  It was still only 8:30 a.m. by the time I arrived, and another thirty minutes before it opened.  Parking directly outside, I phoned my solicitor, and with the phone ringing I said a small prayer that there would be no last-minute hitches with the contracts; I needed to move on with my life and I couldn’t face any delays or complications.  To my irritation, after a few rings I was directed to the answer machine and a voice informing me that office hours were 9:00 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.  I considered leaving a message, then thought better of it and pressed the cancel button.

I sat in the car waiting the thirty minutes for the solicitors to open.  The radio was on in the background but I barely paid it any attention. My thoughts were focused solely on Musgrove and the events of the night before, and what, if anything, I should do about it.  I was angry with Musgrove, of course, but I was also angry with myself for being so weak and pathetic.  Why was I so scared of a piece of shit like Musgrove?  I felt disgusted with myself.

At exactly 9:01 a.m. I phoned the solicitor’s office.  This time a receptionist answered almost immediately and I was transferred to the conveyance department.  To my relief the funds had cleared, the paperwork was all in order and I could hand over the keys.  As I turned towards the estate agent’s, a young woman was just unlocking the front door and I got out of the car and made my way inside.  Within a few minutes I’d signed the final piece of paperwork, handed over the keys, and was back in the car heading for my own home.

On the way, I stopped briefly at the supermarket to pick up some essentials; my cupboards at home were bare after the weeks of staying at my parents’ house.  Leaving the supermarket and preoccupied with Musgrove, I drove without thinking past the church and the site of the hit-and-run.  Previously I’d always taken a detour to avoid the area, and it was the first time I’d been back to the stretch of road where my world had started to unravel.  I pictured Musgrove from the night before, a smug grin plastered over his face, as anger and frustration raged inside me.  You bastard, Musgrove, you fucking bastard, I hissed as I dug my fingers into the steering wheel, the nail-beds turning white.  Driving well above the speed limit, I continued along the winding road with my anger simmering away.  I imagined Musgrove standing in the middle of the road – how desperately I wanted to plough into him, in the same way he’d done to my boys.

Still fuming, within a couple of minutes I turned into our quiet cul-de-sac and was home a little after 10:00 a.m.  I parked on the drive and stared at the house in front of me; my attachment to what had been our family home had long since faded and it didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore.  I remember how excited we’d been when we’d bought the house and planned to fill it with our children.  Based on our salaries alone there was no way Helen and I could have afforded such a place, but Helen’s parents had died a few years earlier and she’d inherited close to £250,000, which we’d used as a deposit.  Now I just wanted to get rid of it.

Walking through the front door, the house felt cold and the air damp even though I’d left the central heating on its normal cycle.  I gathered together the post that had accumulated on the doormat and sat at the bottom of the stairs, separating out the fast-food fliers and miscellaneous other junk mail.  I placed the remainder, a couple of bank and credit card statements, an electricity and telephone bill, on the hallway telephone table, and headed through to the kitchen to put the shopping away.  About to throw the junk mail in the bin, I caught sight of a small manila envelope sticking out from the edge of the pile.  The dog-eared envelope had been recycled by the sender and it had a typed address on the front which had been scribbled out.  Above it, and hand-written in black ink (although the writer was clearly having problems with the pen, as the first two letters were almost carved into the paper): “JULIAN”.  I didn’t recognise the writing, and at first suspected that it might be one of the many letters of sympathy I’d received, often from complete strangers having read about the hit-and-run in the paper.