Chapter Four
Four
Carol had taken to carrying around poison.
Just a little packet of strychnine, a white powder that at a glance looked like any other white powder.
She’d had it in her handbag for about a month now after doing a week as a temp receptionist in a laboratory.
She’d flirtatiously extracted some information from a young scientist in the canteen one day, then stayed late and made herself a little sample.
Just the one packet. Enough to do the job, apparently, though there was many a time when she wished she’d stocked up. Would have made things a lot easier.
This was a long time ago, at the end of the seventies.
Documentaries would have you believe that Britain was wall-to-wall punks and industrial strife, but Carol didn’t remember it that way.
If she tried to picture the late seventies now, the biggest cultural change came not from the Sex Pistols or the emergence of Margaret Thatcher but from the microwave and the SodaStream.
People’s minds weren’t on economic decline and the end of an empire.
They were on the wonder of homemade fizzy pop.
People, back then, had started to annoy Carol, men particularly. Loudmouths on trains, gropy bosses, taxi drivers who farted as if they weren’t sharing an enclosed space with another human being.
The poison was a comfort. Did she think she’d ever use it? Probably not. But the knowledge that she now had it within her power to take matters into her own hands added a thrill to the daily grind.
It was in the Red Lion on Walworth Road, on a Friday night in November, that Carol had begun her new pastime.
Television was so boring back then. Just a couple of channels.
She liked to read but if it was a Friday and she had nothing else on, Carol liked to pop down to the Red Lion for a couple of Bacardi and Cokes.
This was before the Sunday roastification of the London pub scene, when they were still all smoke-filled drinking dens with sticky carpets and an air of glamorous menace.
Why might a man go to the pub on his own? For a bit of atmosphere, a couple of drinks in company, some music, maybe a game of pool? All the same reasons that Carol was there, yet some in the Red Lion could not get past the idea that she must, simply must, be a slut on the prowl.
Karl Chilvers was the worst. “You all right, darling? Let me get you a drink, darling. Don’t look at me like that, darling.
I’m only touching your arse, darling.” The way he looked at her, through her, as if she were nothing but a means to an end, a gift that came with the pub to be leched over, to be claimed as a prize for the lucky winner, taken home and made use of.
So why did she still go there, if that was her experience? Because it was her right. She had had a hard week too. This was a public house, and the fact that she possessed a womb did not disqualify her from enjoying what it had to offer.
It was at the pool table that Carol decided to murder Karl Chilvers.
She was good at pool. She was about to beat him for the third time in a row, but that hadn’t stopped him from telling her how to play each shot, pointing to exactly where she ought to hit the object ball, even putting his arms around her, “teaching” her how to hold a cue.
She watched him assess the table. Thought of how she’d seen him shout at his daughter in the street back in spring, how his girlfriend Denise had had a black eye last week, of how grating his loud, not-an-ounce-of-self-doubt South London voice was.
Leave the world a better place than when you got there. By ridding it of Karl Chilvers, she’d be working toward that.
On the back of the chair she was sitting on hung his leather bomber jacket. She put her hand into its right pocket.
No.
Then its left.
Yes. There it was.
She knew all those trips to the toilet had been for a reason. A little plastic bag. No need to check. She palmed it into her handbag and replaced it with her own little packet.
Karl missed his pot and shouted at Kev Trout, his wiry sidekick.
“Don’t walk right fucking past me while I’m taking the fucking shot, Kev! Jesus Christ.”
Carol got up and potted the black, then shook Karl’s hand. “Thanks for the game, Karl.”
Karl leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Fancy a line, babes?”
“No, thank you. But you fill your boots. I won’t tell.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” he said, pointing at her, then heading to the toilets, stopping off at his jacket on the way.
Carol sat at the bar and took a folded-up Evening Standard and a ballpoint from her handbag.
“Go on. Give us a clue,” said Dennis, the bald and genial landlord.
“Four letters. Ending with ‘D.’ ‘Perished.’ ”
“Oof. Tricky one, that,” said Dennis. “But I know it.”
“You do?”
“Yes, love. Think I do, anyway.”
“All right, what is it?” said Carol. She liked Dennis. The world could do with more Dennises and fewer Karls. He pointed to her paper.
“ ‘Dead.’ ”
“DENNIS! CALL AN AMBULANCE!” Kev was running out of the toilets. “I THINK KARL’S FUCKING KILLED HIMSELF!”
Carol looked down at her crossword and filled in three down, with pleasure.