When I see it, this is what I see.
Teddy stretched his legs and followed the stewardesses off the plane. He joked about overtime payments with his co-pilot as he picked up his bags and headed through the blue channel. He asked Mike if he wanted to catch one before hitting the traffic, but the flight had been late and Mike begged off. Teddy wasn’t surprised – Mike was a real family man. There was a time once when all Teddy had wanted to do was get out of the airport and go home too. But not tonight. He patted Mike on the back, told him goodnight, waved at the stewardesses, and headed for the bar.
Teddy could have gone and sat in the first-class lounge but for some reason he chose the espresso bar the public use, which serves a good cocktail as well as the coffee. He took off his cap, ordered a Scotch and soda, and thought of the caiporenias he had drunk three nights ago in Rio. He looked around the sterile, white airport and then he checked himself out in the bar mirror. He ran a hand through hair which was still full but turning slowly from sandy to grey. He was OK. He looked just like an airline pilot. He stretched out his face to try to lose some of the lines around his eyes, smiled to himself at the stupidity of it, and relaxed.
In the mirror Teddy noticed that a youngish man in a baseball cap, sitting three stools down, had seen him mugging to himself and he was embarrassed for a second until the man gave him a broad smile as if to say it’s all right, I’ve done that. Teddy smiled back and took a long hit from the drink that had been placed in front of him. He yawned. He took another drink. When he glanced back up at the bar mirror a minute or so later, he noticed that the man in the baseball hat was looking straight at him.
Teddy and the man in the baseball hat chatted for thirty minutes or so, mostly about Teddy’s job, because the younger man seemed quite reticent. Interested but reticent. All Teddy could get out of him was that he had just got back from a week in Paris and his friend was late picking him up. Two hours late by now; he was going to have to get the train. Teddy asked him if he lived in London and when the man said he did, and it was only ten minutes from Canonbury where Teddy lived, Teddy told him he was welcome to a lift if he wanted. The man shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Sure, why not?’ but didn’t look too grateful. He hadn’t looked too grateful when Teddy had bought him a beer either.
Teddy finished his second Scotch and soda and stood down from the stool. The younger man followed suit. The barman watched the two men walk off together at about ten-thirty, Teddy putting his cap back on, the other man swinging a medium-sized black leather grip over his shoulder. The barman knew it was around then because that was when the night barman came in. He remembered the bag because he liked it and needed one himself, although he didn’t think he could afford one like it. He told the police that he had never seen either of the men before but that it wasn’t all that uncommon for some of the flight staff to stop off at his bar and offer lifts home to stray passengers, if they knew what he meant.
Teddy chatted as he drove, casually mentioning that his wife was away on business, saying how much he hated going home to an empty house after a long trip. The man just nodded now and then and said yes or it must be, and then why not? when Teddy asked him if he wanted to come in and do some damage to a case of champagne he had won in a raffle. Teddy said great and he laughed out of nervousness. It was the first time he had done this, invite a stranger into his home, and he still wasn’t sure if he was doing it or not or what was going to happen. He pulled into the forecourt of his building, drove through it and round the back, and pressed a button on a remote control device which activated a door to rise slowly in front of his car. Then he scraped the wing of his Rover as he put it in the garage and, laughing it off, blamed his wife for parking her Golf convertible too far over on his side.
Teddy was talking a lot now, about anything and nothing. He thought about his brother. The man in the baseball hat followed him through the garage and the back door, into the stylish, modern, spacious, two-bedroom flat, which Teddy shared with the wife who parked in so selfish a manner, and with whom the touching of car wings was as intimate as Teddy and she had been in almost six months. He turned to face the man behind him.
’So!’ he said, rubbing his hands enthusiastically. ‘Champagne!’
Teddy went to the fridge to fetch a bottle.
When Teddy’s wife came home next morning, four hours earlier than expected, she found it, two-thirds full, standing next to one half empty glass, and one full glass, on the side of the American-style hot tub they’d had installed in the white tiled bathroom. It had gone flat. In the master bedroom, where she had gone after calling out her husband’s name, she found another bottle of champagne and she found Teddy.
Teddy was on the bed, naked. The champagne bottle, or at least the top half of it, was protruding, like the funnel of an ocean liner, from Teddy’s abdomen. The rest of it was scattered in pieces across his torso. Teddy’s face had been smashed in, and a long spike of glass stuck out of what had once been his upper jaw but was now a crumpled hole encompassing both his mouth and his nose. Even someone as unqualified in medical matters as Teddy’s wife could see that he was dead. Very. Mrs Morgan screamed, ran into the living room, and called the police who got a couple of flatfoots round there in minutes.
The two policemen found a woman who was obviously in shock, and a day-old corpse covered in broken glass. Later, at the morgue, another police officer found more glass fragments as well as a quantity of semen, and some of Teddy’s blood, a long way up Teddy’s anal canal. While it is true that nothing should be taken for granted in cases such as these, it can probably be assumed that the semen had arrived there first.