Connery (Part 5)

Paris

The first time I went to Paris I was nineteen years old. I took the National Express coach from Victoria at about five o’clock and I was in Paris at around eleven. Maybe midnight. It was July. My parents thought I was staying with a girlfriend in London and my girlfriend thought I was going to meet another friend in Chichester, but I was really going to Paris. I had got my passport but had not told anyone about it. It was very important to me that there was as light a trail as possible even though I would be doing nothing wrong. I didn’t want witnesses. The idea was simple. A dry run. I was going to go to Paris; I was going to stay the night in a hostel, I was going to go back home. I had money saved from my birthday and Christmas and I worked at the McDonald’s in Barrow during the holidays and did long shifts whenever I could. I got stars on my badge to show what a diligent worker I was. I remember a little airplane badge as well, but I don’t know why.  They had little signs up everywhere: ‘Time to lean, time to clean,’ one of them said. I thought that was a great philosophy. Money built up because I also very rarely bought anything. I didn’t feel any need to buy things. I didn’t have that urge, which I have found to be a piece of good fortune. I am not attached, even now, to material dross. Most people need to buy stuff, not because they need the stuff but because they have been programmed to become temporarily happy when they buy something. They get a little spurt of brain happiness and which becomes a damp stain before they even get out of the shop. Fortunately, I was relatively immune. Other people are more like cattle, or sheep, in that respect. That is only an observation. I don’t mean to be rude. But luckily that isn’t the way I feel.

I had been to the library and looked through travel books and I had also been to various travel agencies and taken many, many, many brochures about Paris and the rest of France as well, especially Normandy. Although some of these I had immediately discarded. I was very good at French. Mrs. Glove had been amazed by my renewed application at school following the trip to La Rochelle, and how I had gone from being a moderately adept student, which meant I didn’t scornfully mock her and put in zero effort, to a star pupil who seemed to actually relish the subject. I would earn the animus of my fellow students by requesting extra homework and reminding her – if she forgot – that we were owed her a test. I didn’t care and after the La Rochelle incident, my classmates would moan and complain all together in the class, but no one would actually confront me about it. Not caring was a superpower of sorts. I realized that the more you acted like you didn’t care, the less you had to accommodate to other people and their opinions. People only get angry and upset with people who register that anger and modify their own behaviour accordingly. If someone makes it clear they are going to do whatever it is they want to do, then people stop complaining and just start working around you as if you are an immoveable obstacle. They’ll make noises like a train trying to get up a steep grade, but the noise is just the worrying of their engine and the extra strain they have to bear; the work they have to do. It doesn’t mean anything. If you are unbothered, you won’t be bothered.

Of course, I wasn’t becoming a wonderful student because I wanted to be a wonderful student or please Mrs. Glover or irritate my friends but rather because I had a mission. The epiphany – I learned what that was much later when we were doing James Joyce’s Dubliners in the VIth Form – but the epiphany I had in La Rochelle had changed my life totally. The idea was very simple. I was going to kill someone and get away with it. It would be the so-called perfect murder. What I marvel at today – and it doesn’t feel vain to have such admiration for your younger self because we really are like two different people, so far away from each other are we – is how I knew to focus and learn and wait at such an early age. There was no way I could kill someone – except perhaps a child – when I was only thirteen. I just didn’t feel I was physically strong enough and I was already thinking about weapons. A gun came with a lot of collateral problems. And knives were going to be messy. And probably not instant. So, there was all of that to consider. That was one part of the problem. But it was really the end part. And not even the most important. What I had to do was work out how to get to the end of a whole number of steps. I had decided I would kill someone, a complete stranger with no motivation whatsoever, at a location which was very far from where I lived. So I decided on France, because that was where the idea of the perfect murder first came to me. I decided on Paris because there were a lot of people and it was very easy to escape in lots of different directions from the scene of the murder. That was another step: my escape from the immediate scene of the infamy. I’m not presenting this to you very methodically. I’m sorry. But in a way, that is in keeping with how I approached the actual crime and my mission. It grew organically and not necessarily sequentially. It would be something I would think about all the time and new ideas would occur to me; problems to be solved; solutions for problems I hadn’t even considered. A lot of ideas would hit me when I was in the shower, as soon as the water hit my head, it was like it released thoughts. I don’t know how. I also watched a lot of Colombo which was chock full of perfect murders that then went wrong. To make things more difficult I realized from really early on that I couldn’t write anything down. No notebooks; no secret diaries. Nothing someone could reveal halfway through a conversation, just after they said something like: ‘Are you absolutely sure there’s nothing you want to tell us?’ Hidden things are always found; secret diaries are always read; secrets – it lies in their very nature – are always, always, always discovered.

And so the plan that formed, formed in my head and only in my head. It was tacked to a breezeblock wall in the inside of my skull with everything laid out and tied together with a spider’s web of red thread. Big boxes in my mind labelled: weapon, victim, location, immediate getaway, alibi, travel logistics, cover story. There were many advantages to proceeding in this way. No one ever murdered anyone the way I was going to murder someone. No one ever planned it years in advance. No one ever chose their GCSEs and later A Levels on the basis of some murder they planned to commit years in the future. No one put all this effort into murdering someone they’d never met for no reason other than the idea, the clean, pristine, beautiful idea of doing it and having done it. And – most importantly – getting away with it.

My preliminary trip to Paris was intended to familiarize myself with the city; the metro system; the general geography and the feel of the place. I didn’t want to be wandering around disorientated, jumping at the sound of every siren – even if they were from fire engines or ambulances – and have blood on my hands. I had a backpack and I noticed there were many teenagers like me. I met one who had a Canadian flag on his backpack. I got talking to him. He was a theology student and I gathered quickly he was probably very religious, maybe from some sort of sect. I asked him about the flag, and he told me he hated being mistaken for an American – that is someone from the US. I didn’t have time to go to the Louvre or into Notre Dame or up the Eiffel Tower. These places were generally awash with so many people anyway there was nowhere you could murder someone and be sure of not being instantly discovered red handed so to speak. In fact, I began to wonder if I should murder someone in a place; I mean inside somewhere. A hotel room or hallway. A lavatory. But there was a feeling of claustrophobia that horrified me; the potential feeling of being trapped or cornered. So, I explored the back streets of the Latin Quarter. I stayed up late and walked the streets looking for likely corners, alleyways. I noticed how sometimes people would be drifting along. It didn’t have to be anyone in particular. I was utterly indifferent. It could be a tourist – there were plenty of them around. Otherwise, it could just as easily be a Parisian going about their normal business. A street cleaner. A baker. A man in a beret with a baguette under his arm. A policeman (the audacity!) or a school child on their way home from school with a rolled-up drawing to stick on the fridge and a story about something the teacher said on their lips ready to be spluttered out.

In the hostel, I lay awake listening to the breathing and farting of my dormitory companions. They’d shared a large bottle of white wine and no one seemed particularly adept at drinking. I could easily kill one of these, but it didn’t make any sense at all. Here they had my name and my details. I had to separate myself from the murder and that made me realize another idea. I didn’t necessarily have to sleep in Paris. I could stay in a nearby town, come into Paris, murder someone and then go straight back to England on the night coach. I could even come into Paris on the night coach, murder someone and leave on the night coach the night after and leave no trace of my actual presence in Paris. This was the plan I ultimately decided on.

The morning was cool, but that coolness that precedes an early hot day in the summer. A fresh heat and everyone looks lively and happy to be alive, the sky a distant blue haze that breaks your heart just to look at it. Like the start of a modernist novel where everything happens in one day, someone going to buy flowers, someone else killing themselves. Even the traffic has the noise of birdsong inside it. The smell of freshly baked bread wafting from the boulangerie. You hear people talking around you and you can imagine their lives. It feels so good to be here in the middle of a large European city. You feel like you are at the heart of something. People going past you. The mortal coil. It’s not true what people say about big cities and how people are indifferent. I find that people smile gently at you and occasionally make eye contact. More so in France and Italy than in London and New York: it’s true, but even there. And it doesn’t take much – almost nothing at all – to get people suddenly to break down the barriers and actually start up a conversation. I stopped at one of the many tourist shops and bought a patch for my backpack with the Canadian flag. I would sew it on when I arrived in Paris on my next trip and then remove it as I left. I bought a coffee and croissant and ate it at the bar having learned that was the cheap way of doing it. I noticed the public pissoirs, the way you had to ring a doorbell to get into a normal bank, the bookstalls by the Seine, the French skies above our heads, the French buildings like something from a Disney film, coloured in blue and grey with yellow for the windows and the moon.

I spoke French and when the man complimented my French, I told him, ‘Je suis Canadien’.

I got on the coach and I slept until we were in Dieppe and then I spent the crossing thinking about what I had learned and trying to put all the relevant ideas in the appropriate boxes. I had decided on a method; I had worked out a small number of people who I might credibly target, or at least look out for if the opportunity arose; I had an area – although I wasn’t going to be tied down. There was ultimately a limit to my planning. The idea wasn’t to have a plan and then see it through. Not when it came to the murder itself. Getting there and getting away – those were the two steps that I had carefully planned with the most deliberate attention to detail. For the murder itself I had a whole series of options and I liked the idea of keeping it loose so that I could take what was coming. After all, this was the advantage of not actually caring who you killed. Improvisation. If someone was sitting on a ledge with a nice drop beneath – no one around paying particular attention – oops sorry, arrrrrrrggh. And then away. Or an interruption in a toilet cubicle – ‘occupé!’ slash, squirt, glug and flush. Or someone standing at the curb of an extremely busy road with cars whistling past at high speeds. The speed of the traffic even in congested areas in the middle of the city struck me as very impressive. And potentially lethal.

When I got back to London, I surprised my girlfriend outside the UCL library where she was working, and we went and ate at a cheap Chinese restaurant in Soho and then drank two or three expensive beers in a pub near the river. Her mother was angry because I hadn’t called, and she was a little bit angry anyway. She didn’t like me: I had already gathered as much. I didn’t think it really mattered. She had hair the colour of paint and I wasn’t planning on marrying my girlfriend or anything of that sort. I haven’t even mentioned her name here, but in the end, we did stay together for about two years. Her name was Carolyn by the way. I didn’t fully understand what she saw in me, but we had a very good time together and we rarely argued. I felt that I was something of a placeholder for her. And I looked extremely handsome. There was that. I can look in the mirror and see that I look very attractive. I have a good body. I could look at myself naked for a long time. I look good. But also, I have kind eyes. One of my comparative literature professors at university told me I had a good soul. ‘You can see that through your eyes,’ she said. She had long hair that she wore in a ponytail that hung down her back to her waist, in a way that told you instantly that she owned a pony as a child. She came to university on a bike and she drank red wine all day, every day. This is the comparative literature professor I’m talking about now, not Carolyn. The comparative literature professor put her hand on my leg when she told me that thing about my eyes and my soul, and I looked down at it, the hand, genuinely puzzled. I am so bad at reading signals, it would appear. I was looking to see if she was brushing off some lint or perhaps slowly swatting a fly or something. Then when I looked back up and her face was appreciably closer than it had been a few seconds ago, I sort of said ‘Oh!’ and we kissed. The alternative would have been much more embarrassing. Shoving her back or something. The things we do to avoid embarrassment. Mum used to say to us that we needed to have clean underwear on at all times in case we got hit by a car. And it lodged in my head that getting hit by a car was above all potentially embarrassing. More than anything else. One of my aims in life is never to be embarrassed. That’s why I always had a fear of getting caught. There was the loss of freedom, the restrictions that would necessarily involve with my quality of life going forward, but there would just be the awful, face flushing embarrassment of it all. Being led out of a restaurant or a crowded theatre by the police, and everyone staring and muttering and the irresistible urge to shout out something obscene. Even the thought made me gasp and go red, red, red. Later on, I developed a plan, when I thought that capture and public discovery became a very real possibility, I developed a plan to mitigate – there was no way of eliminating – embarrassment that would attend arrest and prosecution.

I am getting very much ahead of myself and I have to think back now to some of the things I have not told you that might be important and which I don’t want to have to circle around and explain later. Here we are with professor of comparative literature planting herself firmly against my face, the tongue already prising apart my lips to demand entrance, a rude slug intruding, and a luscious burgundy vapour intoxicating me and I haven’t said so many things. She was so drunk I could drink wine through her. I haven’t even established a clear chronology and I haven’t developed some of the background you need to understand. Yes, I think I need to go back some way. But before I do, I would like you to rest assured that this tale will progress, and you won’t be left in needless suspense. You need to take on another important point which I took a great deal of satisfaction in and which will close this part about Paris. My surveillance and research left me at a point of readiness that was fairly complete. My body was ready, and my mind was ready and as far as the logistics were concerned, I could see no obstacles in my way. I could have retraced my steps the next week and believe me I did consider it as a course of action. But whether from a delicious wish to prolong anticipation or out of some practical consideration of safety, or if I had simply become accustomed to doing everything according to a long gestating time frame, I wouldn’t return to Paris and complete my plan for another two years. I would be 21 when I finally murdered somebody and although it hadn’t occurred to me at the time it was propitious that my coming of age would be marked by such a long-awaited accomplishment of one of my most burning ambitions.

I would be a murderer.