Tamper
Genre: Dark Comedy Thriller
CHAPTER ONE
Andres
It was an unfortunate coincidence that Andres Delaney discovered a body next to the wheelie bin outside his house twenty years after killing his wife.
She had charged at him with a marble chopping board. He’d torn it from her hands and smashed it over her head—better to take the blow himself than have it land on her. He didn’t give the smash much thought: one second, and then shock. No panic. It was over.
His wife wasn’t built like him. She hadn’t had a belly that looked three months past her due date. His beer gut could have acted as a buffer when she came at him; she could have bounced right off it.
And it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d ‘lost it’. If panic and rage hadn’t consumed him, he would have been smart—taken the chopping board, set it on the table, and tried to reason with her. He hadn’t been smart that day, but he’d vowed to be smart every day since.
His honesty had secured him an unlawful manslaughter charge. He’d done his prison time—eleven years. He didn’t want to do it again. But if he wasn’t careful, that damned body was going to put him right back where he started—in hell. He had no intention of calling the police, not with his record. He didn’t want to be number one on their list of suspects. No way, hosay.
He sat outside his local library on a circular metal bench, flicking through a book called ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’. From what he could surmise, it was about a beautiful man who’d sold his soul to the devil. Every now and again, a honking horn or the blaring music from the steady flow of traffic freed him from his grim predicament, and he glanced at the road, watching lines of cars and the occasional passerby.
Well, he was no Dorian Grey.
He was thirty-seven on the eve he’d murdered his wife; now he was a flabby, fifty-seven‑year‑old with a balding crown.
His thoughts were consumed with how the body had found its way to his front door and how he would get rid of it. For a crazy moment, he thought it was his former wife’s corpse.
He thought someone was trying to set him up—someone who’d known him when he was on the inside. Not that he’d gone out of his way to make friends with the other inmates or to keep in touch after his release. He’d grown close to one inmate, a man named Bruce Mills; Bruce had been released a month before him and said he was going to Manchester—far enough from London for Andres not to worry.
You befriended inmates on the inside because you didn’t have much choice. You’d go mad if you talked to the walls. Bruce had been in and out of prison his whole life. What if he thought Andres owed him a favour? He hadn’t changed his name. Anyone of his former inmates could have gotten his address off the blasted internet.
“Are you coming in, Andres?”
He glanced up to see Pam standing over him. She was one of five ardent book club members who rarely missed the Monday evening meet‑up.
“Not today,” he said. The body had messed with his routine—that was the problem. He’d only missed one meeting since joining four years ago, and he’d watched other would-be members come and go because they couldn’t commit to the monthly reads like the rest of them.
Pam smoothed the back of her skirt and sat down. She rested her hand on his arm. “Is everything okay?”
Andres stared at her hand: the polished pink nails, the age spots, the raised blue veins like contours on a map. It was always the left hand, never the right. He didn’t look at her when he spoke. The smell of her perfume—roses dipped in vodka and chocolate—seemed to stick in his throat. His eyes wandered to her large, blotchy breasts. She wore clothes that showed off her cleavage. He didn’t find her sexy, but it didn’t stop the Breast Alarm going off in his head.
He wedged his thumb between pages of the book; he’d read it so many times he’d stretched its spine. “I got a call from my manager—I have to do an extra shift at work.” It didn’t explain why he’d spent the last two hours sitting on the bench when he’d been the first to arrive.
“We could cancel. Arrange for another time,” she said, nudging a strand of brittle hair away from her shoulder.
He felt oddly touched that the book club members were willing to change the meeting to accommodate him.
“No,” he said to her breasts. “You go ahead.” He patted the book’s cover. “I’ve still got a bit of a way to go with this one.” He rose, tucking the book under his arm. “I’ll see you next week.”
“Would you like to come to dinner one evening?”
She gazed at him under half‑closed lids weighed down with layers of mascara.
“Who else is going?” He had his favourites at the book club—Yvette and Harinder—and he would go if they were.
She smiled. “It’ll be just the two of us.”
It would be a little bleak with just the two of them: a chronic drunk and an ex‑con with a corpse on his mind. The only person he’d spent any time with outside the book club was Harinder. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m tied up at work. Some other time. Bye.”
He turned his back on her and hurried towards the subway.