The Dark Corners Page 9

  The warden settled back in his chair, adopting an expression of polite interest. He had, if truth be told, been booked to play in a foursome later that afternoon, but he felt that all things considered it would have been churlish to have mentioned it…

  MIRROR, MIRROR

  Kevin Sharp was twenty-seven when he fulfilled the fairly commonplace, and generally calculating ambition of many by marrying the boss’s daughter.

  Despite the manifest advantages of such an alliance, this particular coupling was in fact precipitated by an element not all that often found in marriage and almost unheard of in one so ostensibly expedient. Simply, this deviation from the norm consisted of a remarkably high degree of instant rapport between them, a promise of rare compatibility that was mutually detected at the moment of introduction. They were in tune at once, counterpointing each other with the effortless smoothness of a well-rehearsed musical duo, his laconic, slightly wry humour matched by hers. Apart from her more obvious attractions she was, Kevin was delighted to find, the first woman he had met capable of producing remarks which he would have been quite happy to have had credited to himself.

  Physically, too, they were beautifully paired. She was fair; near-blonde, slender, and four inches shorter than his raven-haired five feet, eleven inches. Standing in a corner of the main studio, ignoring the innocuous drone of office party talk around them but always conscious of her father’s benevolently cautious eye aimed in their direction from the other side of the room, Kevin traded admiring stares and lightly bantering conversation with Moira Langley and amusedly wondered if falling in love could really be as painlessly simple as this.

  Apparently it could. A fortnight after meeting they slept together, a relaxing, soothing liaison where they meshed, like two meticulously engineered components of the same machine. The following day they became engaged, two months later they were married.

  Kevin had joined Langley, Labone & Partners as studio manager. They returned from their honeymoon to find George Langley sufficiently reconciled to the situation to elevate him to the level of a junior partnership, a step-up that was accompanied by the hint of even greater advancement in the future. Within eighteen months the company’s masthead had been amended to Langley, Labone, Sharp & Partners, a development that Kevin and Moira celebrated with a month in the Bahamas, pleasurably anticipating the further jaundiced scrutiny of their less solidly based contemporaries.

  They were, understandably, the envy of their friends. Despite the fact that she was the boss’s daughter, their evenly floating relationship was so plainly genuine, so patently unforced, that it automatically became the focal point for the collectively wistful glances of those whose own marriages existed—or had already foundered—on rather more traditionally rocky terrain. Kevin and Moira knew it, were entertained by it, and mutually delighted in the lack of effort required to maintain this equilibrium.

  They had been married for a little over three years when it suddenly dawned on Kevin that he was becoming unutterably bored by their relationship.

  Dismayed and painful consideration soon told him why. Living with Moira was like living with his own reflection; endless posturing in front of a mirror that distorted the surface details of its resultant image while simultaneously preserving the true nature of its source. Predictable, Kevin thought dully, that was the word. It was as though his shadow danced in constant attendance, arriving at the same whim, the same conclusion, the same decision at exactly the same point in time. It was, in fact, a genuinely uncanny alliance that had been doomed to failure precisely because of their enviously observed similarities; a narcissistic, bruiseless existence that now appalled him with its promise of well-oiled infinity.

  He could have tried arguing with her, employing deliberate provocation, but he shrank from that. Apart from the fact that it would be a kind of self-flagellation, there was always his position in the firm to be considered. He was a fully-fledged partner, but there was never any question that George Langley held the reins firmly in both hands and was perfectly capable of employing them in his direction should he have reason to suspect that he was in any way giving Moira a hard time.

  The company was opening a branch in Los Angeles shortly after this stunning realisation hit him. To his relief, George Langley asked him to direct the operation during its initial stages, a task that was likely to keep him occupied for several months at least.

  He and Moira had just purchased a new house in Bridgeport but hadn’t yet given a great deal of thought to the question of decorations and additional furniture. He persuaded her to stay behind and handle these herself, coupled with the promise that he would make it back each weekend.

  It was a sensible arrangement, with no hint of anything other than a genuine desire to see that their new home was completed as soon as possible. It might even help in the long term, he told himself. Maybe the break will have a recuperative effect; absence makes the heart grow fonder, that kind of thing. The thought had an insubstantial feel to it, its hollow fragility mocking him as he kissed her goodbye and boarded the plane.

  An hour after arriving, in Los Angeles, he met Lynne Craddock.

  She had been hired by Langley during one of his preliminary scouting expeditions of the new territory, and he hadn’t known what to expect. Langley had described her as an ideal secretary for use at executive level, Kevin found a dark, faintly Spanish woman, with an apparently disciplined smouldering quality that he immediately found rather irritating. She was attractive, and her file of employment told him that she was a year older than him. Bitter, explosive type, Kevin decided sourly, and wondered why Langley had hired her instead of some cool, detached woman who would surely have been more suitable.

  Maybe he had a secret taste for that kind of prickly exotica, Kevin shrugged, and got on with the multi-detailed business of organisation.

  He found that working with her only increased his irritation. She seemed efficient, but she emanated an air of resentment in his presence, as though he was guilty of some undetectable—to him, at least—social failing that her own good manners forbade her from pointing out. Kevin bit back the sarcasm that he found regularly on the tip of his tongue, and maintained a curt impartiality that seemed the best way of handling such additional burdens to his already overloaded plate.

  Late on the Friday, they were the last two in the office. They were checking estimates for equipment, another aggravating chore that should have been completed earlier in the week. Her excuses had been reasonable, but he had a plane to catch in little over an hour and was both exasperated and tired.

  “Hell,” he said. He threw his stylus on the desk, from where it bounced out of sight to the floor. They had just compared figures for the third time, once more finding them differing by several hundred seemingly unaccountable dollars. He glared at the sprawl of papers in front of him, hating their impassive refusal to give up their secrets. “Look, this is getting just plain ridiculous, and I have to get to the airport. I’m going to have to ask you to work on these over the weekend and get them tied up by Monday morning”.

  He sensed her stiffen.

  He said, carefully, “I don’t like asking you to do this, you understand, but when all’s said and done they are your responsibility. If you’d only raised it in the middle of the week when we had—”

  “You know as well as I do that it hasn’t been possible to get to them before this,” Lynne Craddock said, angrily. The smouldering quality was very near the surface now, could almost literally be felt. Kevin found himself loathing her with a tight-jawed, sinewy intensity. “And you damned well know the hours I’ve had to work to get things this far. In any case, why should it be my figures that are wrong? I know my own mathematical ability, but I certainly don’t know yours”.

  She reached out a hand to pick up the sheet that held his own calculations. Furious, Kevin grabbed at her wrist.

  It was like an explosion, the slamming together of two ingredients that remained only potentially dangerous as long as the
y were kept from direct physical contact with each other. He found that their eyes were locked, and that he was shaking, almost palsied.

  “God”, he said, thickly. He stood and pulled her around the desk to him, feeling her reciprocal clawing the moment she was against him.

  It was a ferocious, bruising encounter, one that was later continued at her apartment where he spent the night. There was none of the placidly pleasant, almost mathematically balanced activity that habitually took place between himself and Moira. This was urgent, hungry business, unlike anything that he had known before and seemingly insatiable.

  The following morning he managed to get a cancelled booking on the New York flight. He left Lynne crying in a taxi outside the airport—a still-rational precautionary corner of his mind told him that such a place, even in a relatively strange city, was not an ideal site at which to be seen with an attractive and obviously distressed woman—and it was only when he and his fellow-passengers were somewhere over Kansas that the full implications of the situation hit him like a blow from a fist composed of solid ice.

  He was married to the boss’s daughter, and now he had become inextricably involved with a member of the staff; a passionate, soul-wrenching relationship that he already knew would flatly refuse to be denied. During the past fourteen hours he had discovered depths of longing inside himself that he had never dreamed were there, coupled with an ability to stir emotions that was like a blinding revelation.

  It was a hopeless situation. The ways open to them were grimly apparent, none of them offering an even half-satisfactory answer. He could, presumably, set up house with Lynne, sustaining the empty mockery that his marriage had become by sticking painfully to the already promised routine of returning home at the weekends, but it would be risky. And what about when the branch was established and he was required to return to New York to resume his duties there? She could give up her job and follow him, he supposed—he never doubted for a moment that she would be willing to follow such a course of action—but apart from the fact that it might possibly arouse suspicions among the L.A. staff, it just wouldn’t work.

  He wanted her permanently, as his wife. He knew this with unswerving certainty, as surely as he knew that the sun rose daily in the east. He wanted to live with her, to watch the endless unfolding of points of contrast with himself, to share the daily miracle of being with her, his blood and imagination stirred by her presence. He thought, painfully, about his marriage, the dream that had only been a dream, now sliding smoothly down to drown in its own interminably boring lack of conflict.

  There was divorce, of course, he thought about what this would mean, both from the business and social points of view. It would be death, on both counts. No outsider, seeing the sleek surface of his marriage, would accept that he was doing anything other than discarding the perfect, loyal partner to satisfy some lunatic passion, the act of an inherently unstable personality who would logically be a bad bet for really responsible employment.

  Because he would have to look for a job, naturally. The moment divorce was mentioned, he’d be out on his ear, partner or no partner. And this might eventually destroy them.

  He knew that it was possible for relationships to stay constant and even blossom in the face of such difficulties, but he was still enough of’ a pragmatist to seriously doubt that theirs would survive if subjected to too much in the way of deprivation. In itself it was a miracle, but it was an earth-bound miracle, composed of heat and flesh and emotional collision. It required, cushioning, conditions where it could rest and recuperate between the bouts of violence, both verbal and physical, that would surely be the endless stimulating pattern.

  He was still warring with himself when the plane landed, Moira was there to meet him, cool, affectionate, pleased to see him in the way that one accepted a foregone conclusion. She made only a passing reference to the call that he had somehow remembered to make on the previous evening. He winced as he recalled it, desperately hoping that the guilt in his voice had been neutralised by distance and a thankfully indifferent line. As he kissed her smiling mouth, he wondered what his own face showed.

  He struggled through what was left of the weekend somehow. Moira was initially talkative, producing fragments of fabric and details of colour schemes that she abandoned as soon as she sensed his out-of-kilter mood. He pleaded overwork, a reasonable explanation that she plainly accepted and which gave him the excuse to spend much of the time ostensibly dozing. He tried to hide his relief and mounting excitement as he kissed her goodbye and boarded the plane on the Monday morning.

  He saw as little of Lynne as possible—during office hours, but as soon as they were finished, even before they left the building, it resumed, ravenous and compelling. His last reluctant hope for a return to unruffled normality vanished, and he knew that this was final, a binding contract that only an accident or death could destroy.

  A routine was established, an uneasy, fretful compromise that he temporarily accepted. During office hours their initial reaction to each other continued, something that in itself was not difficult to maintain. Every evening that contained no business appointment he spent at her apartment.

  These times of privacy only confirmed his belief in the permanency of their passion. He was alive at last, roused to a pitch of response and awareness that made his previous existence appear as a series of pale, detached shadows, insubstantially based on self-love and self-admiration. This was tangible by comparison, warm and solid, an environment from which he could look at the world and its wonders with freshly un-blinkered eyes.

  They talked about Moira often, Lynne with bitter resentment and sometimes despair. Kevin with questing hopelessness. Despite the quality of their relationship he was essentially a non-violent person, and the restrictions that this automatically placed on his search for a solution meant that he baulked utterly at the idea of murder. It was something that happened every day something that a great many people got away with, but it was not for him. Oddly, he could imagine circumstances where he would kill Lynne, but not Moira. Moira was his mirror-image, essentially without passion in the way that he had come to understand it, but still a part of him. Lynne was an individual, emotional quicksilver with the violence never far below the surface and readily capable of igniting his own previously low-keyed responses.

  The weekend trips back to Moira were purgatory, but he preserved what seemed to be an acceptable façade, most of the time managing to simulate something resembling nonchalant affection, Moira seemed much the same as ever; light, gay, full of plans for the house. There were periods when an unaccustomed touch, of timidity seemed to shadow her behaviour, but he found this an understandable reaction to his own occasional lapses into introspection. At such times he hated himself for what he was doing, but he was committed, the thought of Lynne clouding his mind and eyes so that he was virtually blind to his surroundings and the people in them, impatient only for the moment when he could be with her again.

  He assumed on the evidence that Moira suspected nothing. He wondered what she would have done about it if she had hired a private investigator; he was sickened by the thought, picturing how such a course of action would inevitably distort its findings, reducing the relationship to something which could be made to look dirty and shameful if nothing but the cold facts were catalogued on paper.

  It wasn’t a possibility that he took very seriously, but at one point in his thinking he did take it to the extent of mentally putting himself in Moira’s shoes. The answer was reassuring. If the reverse had been the case, if he’d had reason to suspect that Moira had established a similar relationship, the answer was that he would have done nothing about it. He would have waited, shaken, but confident that she would return after recognising her affair for what it must surely have been, a dalliance that could only temporarily ruffle the smooth surface of their marriage.

  Poor Moira, he thought wryly, poor kid. If only she knew what had happened to him, the strength of the emotional upheaval that had turned h
im head-over-heels and which still had him spinning like some irrational perpetual motion machine.

  Two and-a-half months after their initial physical encounter, Lynne told him that she was pregnant.

  He received the news with something vary like calm acceptance. Although he and Moira had never produced children, something that neither of them had greatly cared about, the ultimate confirmation of his love for Lynne had been when he realised that this was an essential part of his feelings for her, the desire to father her child. If the will, he thought, was all too appropriately the parent to the deed, then this was another rock-solid certainty that all the precautions in the world would not have been able to prevent.

  He also knew, regretfully, that he would have to kill Moira.

  It was now the only way. If this conception had not taken place, it was at least on the cards that the present arrangement would have blundered fitfully along until the time of his permanent return to New York, when they might have worked something out. It had been a slim chance, but marginally possible.

  But now his child was going to be born, a situation that changed everything. There could be no back-street upbringing, no fatherless infant whose mother was maintained by cheques from some shadowy benefactor. The alternatives offered by the adoption authorities and the abortionist never entered his mind. The child would grow up in a home with both a mother and father present, its own natural parents tending it through its vulnerable formative years.

  He said, nothing to Lynne about his decision, but he was sure she knew and also that she didn’t care. The primitive part of her make-up, always present, was magnified to a degree where only the protection of her child and her feelings for him mattered, an instinctive withdrawal to essentials that he sensed were prepared to ignore the rules of law and society/