Just a Murder (1)

Maybe it’ll inspire a ghost story, thinks Simon, about three hours into his drive down. It’s the perfect location to write something spooky, The Murder House. It’ll almost write itself. All he’ll have to do is describe the house, add a couple of ghosts and a few page-turny bits and it's done.

 

Terri mentioned a magazine asking if he could write a Christmas chiller for them. This would be the perfect time and place, he can put off starting the novel for a week or so. It’s good money too. Who knows, it could be the start of a lucrative sub-genre for him.

 

“Nobody’s lived there for three years, not since Malcolm died,” Jan said.  He tries to imagine what the house must be like, unlived in for all that time, tries to think how he’ll describe it, what he’ll write, but all he can imagine is a clichéd scene from a movie, cobweb-infested, rotting, full of sheeted-over furniture and the ghost of the dead man creeping round the house looking for his killer.  

 

Maybe he’ll do better when he actually sees the place.

 

However, as soon as he pulls up outside the house he abandons the idea. It’s not that sort of house at all. It’s an idyllic holiday cottage with a view of the sea, clean, bright and cheerful.

 

He’d expected an overgrown garden, half forest, triffids strolling up and down the path, but instead he’s greeted by a scene from Heavenly Garden Magazine: an immaculate lawn, not a weed to be seen and an array of flowers, grasses and shrubs that betrayed time, effort and no small degree of horticultural talent.

 

He finds the key where Jan said, in a jam jar, ‘buried in a shallow grave’, under the mulberry bush in front of the door.

 

Letting himself in, Simon finds that the house is as clean and well-maintained as the garden. Not just clean, the surfaces are positively shiny and sparkling. He remembers Jan mentioning that ‘Trish from the village looks in from time to time.’

Jesus, Trish should get her own TV show, Dead House Clean. Every surface, every wall, everything anywhere in the house is perfectly maintained. Good god, he can actually see his reflection in the kitchen floor. Trish clearly takes ‘looking-in’ seriously.

 

It makes sense, of course, Jan is trying to sell the place, he’d hardly let it become overrun. But it means there’ll be no inspiration for a ghost story in this house, not with this level of cleanliness. He might be inspired to write an article for Good Housekeeping, ‘Why every house should have a Trish from the village’.

 

He is relieved, of course. For all his bravado about staying in The Murder House, he really wants an idyllic, clean, bright and airy cottage by the sea, not a creepy haunted castle. He needs to sort himself out, not fuck himself up even more.

 

He unpacks the bag of food he’d bought from the ‘supermarket’ in the ‘nearby’ ‘town’. They use language differently down here. Maybe I’ll set the novel in a little village like this one, he thinks, but immediately realises it’s a bad idea. With a small population every character in the place has to be a murder suspect, or a victim, it’ll end up like a Miss Marple or a Midsummer Murders, where everyone in the village turns out to the long lost sister of the victim, a secret lesbian lover of the murderer, or both.

 

The fridge is alive and humming and the light sparkles at him as he opens the door. The kettle works too. Coffee. He needs coffee. It’s been a long drive. He got up early to ensure that he arrived with a couple of hours of daylight left so that he wouldn’t be freaked out by the dark, dusty, cobweb-strewn horror-fest he’d imagined he’d find. 

 

He finds a drawer which contains only spoons. Strange, he thinks, but at least that’s all he needs, he’ll look for the rest of the cutlery later. After opening a few cupboards he finds a mug and a cafetiere, which is good, as he hadn’t thought to bring one.

 

As he waits for the potion to brew, he suddenly recoils. He realises he is standing in the kitchen. ‘The’ kitchen, the one where it happened. The murder scene. He takes out his phone and checks the picture of the crime scene he is using as a screensaver. Yep, there it is, the kitchen table, in exactly the same position, identical. Well, not identical. In the picture the blood is still on the wall, which is now sparkling clean, almost shiny. Trish’s handy work.

 

Of course, Trish wouldn’t have cleaned the blood away. There are specialist cleaners for that. The police would have put Jan in touch with them.

 

Simon smiles, tickled by a memory, and strokes the wall, like a satisfied housewife in a cleaning product advert. His first attempt to write a novel, he remembers, was a about a crime-scene cleaner who spotted a pattern in a series of bloody murders he was cleaning up, one the police forensics had missed.

 

“It’s a good idea,” Terri had said, that first time he’d spoken to her, “but it’s too intense, too detailed, too gore-focussed. You’ve used the phrase ‘splatter-range’ 27 times in the first eight pages.”

 

“But,” he’d started to say.

 

“But,” she’d interrupted, “do sent me the next thing you write. You’ve got a clean, crisp way with words and you just might write something brilliant one day.”

 

“Well, here’s hoping,” he thinks, six years’ later.

 

He sets up his laptop, on the very table where Malcolm died.

 

‘This is why I’m here,’ he thinks, ‘I’m writing a murder mystery at the scene of a murder mystery. What’s not to like?’

 

The wifi works like a dream, no dodgy middle-of-nowhere reception. Even the password Jan gave he works first time. The first thing he does is check his facebook account, after all he’s been driving for hours. 37 friends, he notices, two down since he left home. He scans the list trying to work out who has unfriended him, finally pinning it down to Brenda and Carl. Sally’s been working her poison again. She didn’t even like Brenda and Carl. In fact, they aren’t even listed as her friends, so she must have found their details via his account. ‘Bitch.’

 

He checks his other facebook page. ‘HIS’ facebook page, the alias, Nathan Graham. 17,162 followers, up by several hundred since he’d last checked. 

 

He should post something. Let his fans know what he’s doing, staying in a murder house for inspiration to write a murder mystery. He takes a picture of the murder scene as it is now and posts it on Nathan’s facebook page next to a nearly identical picture of the murder scene as it was, with bloodstains.  ‘Perfect place to write about a murder mystery’ he writes underneath.

 

That done, he closes the laptop. He’s not ready to start the novel yet, he’s still in the ideas phase, and doesn’t want to get distracted by irrelevant messages, news headlines or the million and seven distractions that wait from him online.

 

He takes his coffee and his notebook outside, into the back garden, which is as immaculate as the front.   Finding a bench he sits down and scribbles something on the blank page. Everything he writes begins here, in a cheap, bog-standard notebook, 37p from Asda. He finds putting pen to paper more creative than tapping his keyboard. Later on, mid-novel, he’ll thump straight onto the keyboard, 60 wpm, desperate to get the ‘bloody thing’ over and done with. But now, in these early days, when he really cares about what he’s about to write, the touch and feel matters. It’s exciting, physical, real, every ink-stain could lead to an unexpected sub-plot.

 

He’s already mapped out the plot and characters, but here, under the last remnants of late-summer / fledgling autumn sun he works on the practicalities, how he’ll approach writing it, how he’ll ‘tell’ the tale.

 

He decides to write it in the first person.  Technically it will prove more difficult, pacing a detective novel with nowhere to hide the clues, no magic-switch of perspective to reveal the killer. But the story can only be told first-person. He pictures the scene, the opening scene of the novel: the detective, there in his friend’s house, looking at his friend’s body, the bloodstains over the chair he’s lounged in a thousand times, the smell of blood mingling with the scent of a home he knows as well as his own.

 

The scene writes itself. Simon scribbles a few things in the book, but there’s no need really. It’s already written in his head.

 

Coffee finished, daylight fading, he goes back inside. There are a few things he wants to check while it’s still light. He tours the house, checks the light bulbs work, but of course they do, Trish has ‘looked in’.

 

There are clean sheets on the beds, he can take his pick of which room he sleeps in. He opens the wardrobe of the main bedroom, Malcolm’s room as was – empty, all trace of Malcolm cleaned away, not so much as a fleck of dust, as clean as the once-bloodstained wall. It smells of furniture polish.

 

He suddenly realises why the house doesn’t sell, why Jan was so keen for him to spend a few months here working on his novel.

 

The house is clean, yes, but too clean. It’s unlived in. Empty. Hollow. It’s not the ghosts that are driving buyers away. It’s not the reputation, the rumour, even the nickname it’s acquired, The Murder House. It’s the lack of soul. The absence of human touch. Human smell. Human imperfection. Even Trish can’t supply that.