Not to be Trifled With
Bill Newman
I parked the car in the underground lot and struggled up the stairs to my twelfth floor apartment. I
could have used the elevator, especially since I was carrying three grocery bags, but in the winter I
needed the exercise. Besides, I could claim I was doing my bit for the Kyoto Accord by not wasting
valuable electricity.
The phone was ringing as I entered my apartment. I dropped the bags and answered it.
“Andrew?”
“Yes, who’s this?” I asked.
“Katie.”
I didn’t recognize her voice. “Christ, why are you calling?”
I thought it was a reasonable question to ask my ex-wife. Actually, Katie was my first ex-wife. The
other ex lived only a few kilometers away.
“Just wanted to wish you a happy New Year.”
“What about the other thirty New Years?”
She laughed. “Still the same old sense of humour?”
“I seem to recall that you didn’t find me very amusing when we were married.”
“I did at first, but it got tiresome after a while.”
She was right. In the end, my scintillating wit couldn’t save the marriage. “How did you manage to
find me?”
“Easy. I Googled you on the Internet and found a technical paper you wrote. The bio gave me
enough information to track you down.”
“I’m retired now.”
“Yes, but I assumed you wouldn’t go far. There’s only one Andrew Walsingham in the Toronto
phone book. Besides if I want to find someone, I will.”
“Very clever. So, why are you calling me?”
“Just for a chat, Andrew. And I need some advice. I’m thinking of getting married again.”
“Again?”
“Yes, Peter is very nice. I live with him, actually. He has a big house near where you and I used to
live. Peter is special, nothing like you or Silas.”
“I didn’t know you and Silas were divorced. What happened? Grow tired of him too?”
“We weren’t compatible,” she said, ignoring my jab. “He wanted to retire early and live off me.”
“Yes, I can imagine how pleased you’d be at that prospect.” Who doesn’t want to retire early, I
thought but didn’t say so. Silas was a prick, and I didn’t want to sound as if I was on his side. “You
cited incompatibility as the reason you left me when you ran off with Silas.”
“Yes. Soccer versus the ballet, Beatles versus Mozart, and nights in the pub drinking with your
friends versus dinner parties with mine.”
She was right. Fortunately, we’d had no offspring, so the divorce was easy. “Yeah, so incompatible
I sometimes wonder why we ever got married.”
“You know why you married me,” she said.
“You were the sexiest woman on the planet, and had an amazing ability to—”
“Yes, that’s all I meant to you wasn’t it? Do you recall the advice I gave you when we split up?”
How could I not remember? She had written me a letter, which I still had. “I believe you told me to
spend time looking around and find someone compatible—that word again. ‘Play the field’ were your
exact words.”
“That’s right, and did you?”
“Yeah, I met lots of women, but unlike you, I waited until after we’d separated.”
“Silas was the only one, but let’s not get into that.”
I didn’t want to pursue it either. I knew she’d only start carping on about Silas being better than I
was. Although, in the end, apparently not. “You still haven’t told me why you want my advice. You’re
divorced and getting married again. What’s the issue?”
“It’s about my new guy, Peter. I figured you’d be the best person to answer it because you’ve been
there.”
“Been where?”
“When you and I were…you know… I suspect Silas caused you to go through a period of—”
“Of what? Self-doubt? I did, for quite a long time. Christ, Katie, do you know how it feels to be
replaced by a complete asshole?”
“Yes, well, I know that about him now.”
I realized that Katie had hooked me. I couldn’t be mad at her. I still had the vivid memory of the
beautiful blonde bride, my first true love. And she was now agreeing with my assessment of Silas. “So
tell me what advice you want me to dispense. Not that I’m the expert because I couldn’t keep you
happy.”
“No, but I’m not asking for that kind of advice. I’m concerned about Silas’s mental state.”
“You mean his anger level at what you’ve done to him?”
“In a nutshell, yes. Peter and I are worried he might do something...” Her voice trailed off, leaving
me to imagine what it was that Silas might do.
“Look, it’s one thing to be mad at you for getting rid of him, but are you saying he blames Peter
enough to want to harm him?”
“Possibly. What I wanted to know is: how close did you come?”
“How close did I come to what?”
“To killing him.”
Kill Silas? I definitely felt like it at the time. I even dreamed up a hit-and-run, but not seriously. “It
was different for me; I was younger. I soon found plenty of female company, and in the end was
pleased he’d cuckolded me. It got me out of the lousy relationship with you.”
Katie ignored my snide remark. Something she would never have done if she hadn’t wanted
something from me.
“But we’re older now, Andrew. It’s not that easy for him to find a woman at his age.”
“Hey! He’s the same age as me.”
“Yeah, but you’ve probably kept in shape. Silas is over the hill. You’d never recognize him: fat,
bald, and to top it off he hasn’t been able to find a job.”
“I thought you said he was retired.”
“He was, but when I no longer supported him he had to start working again. His pension isn’t very
big.”
“Is he coming after you for money?”
“No, we settled the finances a year ago. He received half of the proceeds from the house sale, but
we had a mortgage so he wasn’t left with enough for even a decent deposit on another one. Not that
he can afford the monthly payments on a mortgage now.”
I couldn’t hear any joy in her voice at Silas’s demise. I figured she was concerned that he had
nothing to lose by harming her. And it would not be in her nature to consider subsidizing her former
husband. “Why don’t you go to the police?”
“They’d think I was nuts.”
“Tell them he’s got a gun.”
“Oh, you remembered that did you? When I knew I wanted to divorce him, I used to precipitate
arguments that turned into full-blooded shouting matches. Then I told him I was scared of what he’d
do to me, so I’d chucked the gun off a bridge into the river.”
“Had you?”
“No. I wrapped it in plastic and buried it in the garden, the ammunition, too. I wanted to keep it just
in case.”
“Hang on a moment, Katie. I’ve just got in from the shops with some groceries. I need to put some
of it in the fridge. Can I call you back?”
It was an excuse. I needed some time to think.
“No, it’s eleven-thirty here. I’m in a phone-box outside the pub. I’ll call tomorrow. Is this a good time
for you?”
I told her it was.
* * * *
I harbored mixed emotions for dear Katie. She wasn’t the kind of woman one could forget, but had she
retained the title of Most Devious Female? The woman who had tortured me for a year by parading
her perfect boyfriend Silas in front of me, while reminding me of my own shortcomings? Even so, thirty
years had elapsed; why call me now?
I hadn’t forgotten Silas either, nor his penchant for guns. We’d been friends once. But I realized,
too late, that Katie had engineered this friendship with Silas and his first wife, Susan, as a means of
seeing him on a regular basis. “Take Andrew down to the range,” Katie had suggested once, when
the four of us were in the pub one evening. It seemed harmless enough, but while we were there,
Katie invited Susan round for tea and scones, and a chat. Susan later told me that Katie said Silas
had made a pass at her. More like it was the other way around, but Susan swallowed it—the start of
the cancer that destroyed their relationship and helped push Silas into my wife’s arms. Not that he
needed much pushing; Katie made his wife look positively dowdy.
* * * *
“I’m phoning from outside the pub again,” Katie said.
She had called the following evening at roughly the same time, but why a payphone? I knew this
couldn’t be a coincidence. “Isn’t your phone working?” I asked.
She ignored my question. “Listen. You remember that time Silas took you target shooting?”
“Yes.”
“Do you also remember how you came home and told me you were a better shot than him?”
“Yes.” Where was this leading?
“Were you boasting or was it true?”
“It was true. I had a much smaller spread, and closer to the centre. I showed you the target, didn’t
I?”
“Yes, but frankly I wasn’t interested.”
“What did Silas say about our relative shooting abilities?”
“I didn’t ask him. It wasn’t important at the time.”
No, she was more concerned with the caliber of his real phallus. “So why is it important now?”
“I want you to kill him.”
“What!”
“Don’t answer straightaway; think it over. Oh, my phone card is running out. Must go now.”
“The answer’s no,” I said, but the line had already gone dead—convenient.
* * * *
Katie was smart, probably more so than me. But I figured that if I was clever enough to once earn a
six-figure salary, I should be able to work out what her agenda was.
I made myself a cheese and lettuce sandwich, turned off CNN, and sat at the table with a blank
sheet of paper in front of me. I ate the sandwich before putting pen to paper. I then wrote:
1. Katie must be serious. She’s phoning me from payphones with a calling card
she probably paid for in cash. Moreover, I can’t call her, since I don’t know the
surname of her new guy. That means there’ll be no calls to or from Canada
showing up in the phone company logs.
2. She knows I hate Silas’s guts.
3. She’s probably not lying when she says she’s worried about the welfare of her
new partner, Peter. Or is that just the excuse for some other more compelling
reason?
4. She now knows that I’m divorced a second time, and I wouldn’t have put it past
her to have tried to reach me at work and discovered that I’d got laid off. In
other words, she knows that, like Silas, I don’t have much to lose.
5. She has Silas’s gun.
6. Her new guy, Peter, is in on the scheme and will doubtless provide her with
an alibi.
7. After a lapse of thirty years, no one would suspect me of killing Silas. Or
would they?
I wrote down the numeral eight, but didn’t transfer the corresponding thought to paper. Anyway, it
was sort of redundant: that Katie hadn’t settled with Silas financially, and he was coming after her for
a chunk of cash.
I fed the sheet of paper into my shredder and in doing so felt like part of the conspiracy already.
Something nagged at me, though. What was it?
* * * *
Waiting for Katie’s call, I wondered what she looked like after all this time. Was she still the same foxy,
slender blonde? I mused that, as a condition of doing her bidding, I should ask for one last night in
the sack. But knowing Katie, in the unlikely event that she granted the wish, she’d probably give me a
failing grade. She wasn’t the kind of woman with whom one trifled.
The phone rang.
“Andrew, have you thought about it?”
“Yes, when do you want me over there?” I found it easy to acquiesce. I would be getting to see my
former wife again, and I could pull out at any time. I’d already alerted my brother in Leeds, telling him
that I wanted to visit him for a short break from Canada’s brutal winter. He didn’t query it. He’d been
over for Christmas once and frozen his balls off.
“Oh, great.” Katie sounded surprised but went on to tell me how “we” were going to do it.
On the face of it, the plan seemed foolproof.
“One other thing, Katie, I’m a bit short of cash, so I’ll need money for the expenses?”
“Sure. I was going to offer you five thousand pounds as an inducement. You can take the
expenses out of that.”
* * * *
A week later, I caught the Air Canada evening flight to Heathrow. I imagined I was a CIA agent
dispatched to perform a hit on someone the government wanted out of the way. Did they still call it
“wet work?” In the departure lounge I studied the other passengers, wondering how many of them
were on similar assignments.
In London, the following morning, I rented a car and headed south. Odd how easy it was for me to
jump into a car with the steering wheel on the right hand side and then drive on the wrong side of the
road—a bilingualism of sorts. This random thought helped distract my brain from the butterflies in my
stomach.
The Hampshire countryside hadn’t changed much: still as green as the emerald isle, even in
winter. I navigated by autopilot on roads familiar to me thirty years earlier, but indelibly stored like an
inbuilt GPS.
Katie had given me her address in a village just outside Wickham, halfway between Portsmouth
and Southampton. She’d also given me Silas’s address in nearby Havant. “He lives alone,” she told
me.
I first drove to Silas’s rented townhouse.
The plan called for me to carry the gun in a large sports bag. “It doesn’t matter if anyone sees you go
in,” Katie said. “You’ll be long gone. But don’t park your car nearby.”
Duh!
I cruised by Silas’s house and noted that he drove a rusting ten-year-old Vauxhall. Next stop, a
restaurant, I was hungry. I waited until nine at night then drove past Silas’s house once more. His car
was still there and the living room light was on.
It took me twenty minutes to reach Katie and Peter’s place, a classy, converted cottage on the
outskirts of Wickham, a quarter of a mile from the nearest house. I could see why Katie had fallen for
Peter. She’d always been nagging me to buy a place like this, mainly because she was a total snob
and liked the idea of being a “country” lady. We’d viewed a similar one in the days when we were still
in love with each other. I had complained the upkeep would be too much work.
Katie opened the front door and looked me over but didn’t proffer a cheek. “Ah, I was right; you have
kept in shape.”
It would have been unkind of me to say that she hadn’t. She had put on weight round the middle,
but her complexion hadn’t changed, and she still had the dirty-girl look; that had enticed me thirty-plus
years earlier.
“You’re late,” she said, letting me into the hall.
“The plane was delayed.”
She didn’t comment on the implausibility of the excuse. The plane would have needed to have
been diverted via Athens for me to be that late.
The bag containing the gun sat in the hallway. She stood blocking the way to the rest of the
house. I wasn’t going to be offered tea and biscuits, it seemed. “We’ve been invited to a party at
seven, tomorrow, so you can do it any time between seven and eleven. Remember, it has to look like
a suicide.”
“Yeah, for my own self preservation, if nothing else.”
Katie gave me a look that said she didn’t quite understand my remark. “Good. It’s important.”
“And if he’s not in?” I asked.
“We’ll be at the pub with someone else the following evening, at the same time. But don’t worry; he’
ll be in. He doesn’t have much money, and he doesn’t have a woman.”
“Do you have the cash you promised me?”
Katie turned around, cupped her hand, and called Peter.
He arrived carrying an envelope. He gave it to me. It wasn’t sealed. I looked inside, removed the cash,
counted it, and stuffed the fifty £100 notes into my pocket.
“I need to check the gun,” I said. “And the ammunition. It’s been stored for a long time. It might not
work.”
Katie turned bright red. “Good God, Andrew, you can’t try it out here!”
“Well, where do you suggest?”
Peter came to her rescue. “There’s a bag of sand in the garage; you can shoot it into that. No one
will hear you.”
Katie looked at me as though trying to read my mind. She turned to Peter. “Make sure you retrieve
the bullets and dispose of them.”
“Yes, dear, and the cartridge cases,” Peter said. He picked up the sports bag and led the way into
the garage. Katie and I followed him.
I removed the rifle from the bag, unwrapped it, then tore open the box of two-two-three caliber bullets.
They seemed to be in perfect condition. I fed four of them into the gun’s internal magazine and
pushed the bolt forward to feed the first one into the chamber.
“Why do you need four?” Katie asked.
“Just to be sure,” I said. I aimed at the sandbag. Katie put her hands over her ears. I let off the first
round. The sound of the shot echoed around the garage.
“Seems to be okay,” Peter said.
I loaded the second cartridge.
“One’s enough,” Katie said.
I turned around and shot her in the head. I already had the third bullet in the chamber by the time
Peter could react. I shot him, too.
After making sure Katie and Peter were both dead, I wiped the rifle clean using some old rags that
were lying around. I dropped the gun beside Katie, the rags, too. Now my clothes, they’d have residue
on them. I retrieved clean clothes from the trunk of my car, where I’d placed them on top of my
suitcase. The contaminated clothes went into a garbage bag I found in the kitchen. I planned to dump
the bag in a trash can in a service area on the M-1 motorway. No one would look for evidence two
hundred miles away.
Before leaving, I called Silas’s number. Not that I wanted to speak to Katie’s ex, but I figured the
police would check the phone records and notice the call. Silas answered—a bonus. I mimicked Peter’
s voice as best I could. “Katie wants you to come over,” I said and hung up.
* * * *
Before leaving Canada, I had worked out the other part of Katie’s plan. She knew she’d be number
one on the list of police suspects, with perhaps Peter a close second. Attention would have switched
to me when she told the cops that I’d once threatened to kill Silas. Katie and Peter would have had
alibis, and I wouldn’t. I had been set up.
Back in Canada and scanning the BBC News on the Internet a year later, I discovered that Silas
had been found guilty of the double murder. The police found his prints on Katie’s doorbell and they
had possession of a gun registered in his name. On Katie’s computer they found threatening emails
asking for money.
The circumstantial evidence convicted him, the BBC report said.