The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn

Author:Jonny Glynn [Jonny Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

A clean pair of boxer shorts, cotton socks, blue shirt, red silk tie and a rather smart, well-fitted, black suit from Hugo Boss. A pair of black brogues–a half a size too large, but nothing that an extra pair of socks and the odour-eaters from my shoes couldn’t correct. A new watch, removed from Adrian’s very rigid, blood-encrusted wrist–Ellesse, chunky stainless steel and good to a depth of two hundred meters, very reliable. Beth’s spectacles–asexual wire-framed oval lenses, covered in blood but soon rinsed clean, wiped dry and slipped on. I looked very professional, trustworthy even, honest and a success. Nothing like the scabrous oaf now famous throughout the region for the Sudder Street Slaughter.

‘You look like someone,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

And we looked at me in the mirror and considered…He was right, I did look like someone, who was it?

‘It’s Tony Blair,’ he blurted.

And he was right. I look just like Tony Blair. A slightly bruised, characterfully haggard, somewhat raffish, paranoid Tony Blair…I admired myself, smiled and felt confident.

‘You know who that makes you then, don’t you?’ I said, and he looked at me, glowering. ‘That makes you Gordon Brown.’ He rolled his tongue along the inside of his lower lip, smiled and looked bashful.

‘And you know what he said, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Better to die roaring like a lion than braying like a donkey.’

‘Did he really say that?’

‘No–but he did say that courage is not the absence of fear, it is the realization that some things are more important than safety.’

‘Indeed.’

‘A lesson Adrian might have learnt.’

‘Yes.’

We smiled sagely, congratulated each other, and then went in search of the car keys. I found them in the pocket of a three-quarter-length macintosh hanging on the back of the hall-cupboard door. I slipped the mac on and took one last look around the flat. Adrian was lying with his face buried in the seat of the big white armchair, his legs splayed out behind him, blood everywhere. Beth was twisted beneath the duvet, her arms delicately crossed and her little hands folded into fists, her stomach split, and her pretty hazel eyes still staring…What have I done? I thought. What have I done…? And then other thoughts festered and started to seethe. On the mantelpiece were two photographs–one of Adrian and one of Beth, both of them smiling and looking happy. Those will be the photographs they’ll put in the newspaper, I thought, beneath the headline: Two Found Dead in E5 Bloodbath. Yes, I pondered, that will be forever how Beth and Adrian are remembered–smiling, happy, and butchered…That is, of course, if they are remembered at all. But I’m sure they will be–they’re the connected type. They’ll each have a mother and father, each have brothers and sisters, each have friends and colleagues…They’ll be missed and remembered…Their deaths are, after all, exceptional in their brutality and futility, so there’s a chance they may make it onto the television. And then there’ll be a wave of mawkish sympathy. Shrivelled bunches of daffodils bought

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