Nutshell by Ian McEwan Page A

Helpful to establish that she and John were on terms again.
    This, he says, must look like suicide, like Cairncross made a cocktail for himself to improve the poison’s taste. Therefore, on her final visit she’ll leave behind the original empty bottles of glycol and shop-bought smoothie. These vessels must show no trace of her fingerprints. She’ll need to wax her fingertips. He has just the stuff. Bloody good too. Before she leaves John’s flat, she’ll put the picnic remains inside the fridge. Any containers or wrapping must also be free of her prints. It should seem as though he ate alone. As beneficiary of his will, she’ll be investigated, a conspiracy suspected. So all traces of Claude, in bedroom and bathroom especially, must be eradicated, cleaned to extinction, every last hair and flake of skin. And, I sense her thinking, every no-longer thrashing tail, every stilled head of every last sperm. That may take some time.
    Claude continues. No concealing the phone calls she has made to him. The phone company will have a record.
    “But remember. I’m just a friend.”
    It costs him to say these last words, especially when my mother repeats them as in a catechism. Words, as I’m beginning to appreciate, can make things true.
    “You’re just my friend.”
    “Yes. Called round from time to time. For a chat. Brother-in-law. Helping you out. Nothing more.”
    His account has been neutrally rendered, as though he daily murders brothers, husbands for a living, an honest high-street butcher by trade whose bloody apron mixes in the family wash with the sheets and towels.
    Trudy starts to say, “But listen—” when Claude cuts her off with a sudden remembered thought.
    “Did you see? A house in our street, same side, same size, same condition? On the market for
eight
million!”
    My mother absorbs this in silence. It’s the “our” she’s taking in.
    There it is. We’ve made another million by not killing my father sooner. How true it is: we make our own luck. But. (As Claude would say.) I don’t know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked. The absence of prints on the glycol bottle will be suspicious. When my father starts to feel ill, what stops him calling the emergency services? They’ll pump his stomach. He’ll be fine. Then what?
    “I don’t care about house prices,” Trudy says. “That’s for later. The bigger question is this. Where’s your risk, what’s your exposure here when you’re wanting a share of the money? If something goes wrong and I go down, where will you be once I’ve scrubbed you out of my bedroom?”
    I’m surprised by her bluntness. And then I experience not quite joy, but its expectation, a cool uncoiling in my gut. A falling out among villains, the already useless plot ruined, my father saved.
    “Trudy, I’ll be with you at every step.”
    “You’ll be safe at home. Alibis in place. Perfect deniability.”
    She’s been thinking about this. Thinking without my knowing. She’s a tigress.
    Claude says. “The thing is—”
    “What I want,” my mother says with a vehemence that hardens the walls around me, “is you tied into this, and I mean totally. If I fail, you fail. If I—”
    The doorbell rings once, twice, three times, and we freeze. No one, in my experience, has ever come to the front door so late. Claude’s plan is so hopeless it’s failed already, for here are the police. No one else rings a bell with such dogged insistence. The kitchen was bugged long ago, they’ve heard it all. Trudy will have her way—we’ll all go down together.
Babies Behind Bars
was a too-long radio documentary I listened to one afternoon. Convicted murderers in the States, nursing mothers, were allowed to raise their infants in their cells. This was presented as an enlightened development. But I remember thinking, These babies have done nothing wrong. Set them free! Ah well. Only in America.
    “I’ll go.”
    He gets up and crosses the