Felix always disliked getting rid of the evidence. It all felt rather grubby. What the Exiteers were doing was not illegal, of course, he had made very sure of that. So long as they didn’t actively help the clients. Didn’t encourage them. Didn’t supply the cylinder of nitrous oxide – or what Geoffrey called ‘the instrument of death’. So long as they just sat there and witnessed the end of life, then everything was fine. The client died quickly and without pain, and the family could be assured that their loved one had not died alone, without themselves being implicated in their death. Everybody got what they wanted. Sometimes insurance companies were cheated of a few premiums, but as unnecessary lingering and suffering were prerequisites of their contractual fulfilment, Felix’s conscience was crystal clear. Even so, it would have been foolish to leave anything lying around that might prompt a suspicious mind to ask awkward questions about what had at first appeared to be the wholly expected death of a terminally ill patient. And Felix Pink had never been a foolish man.
He opened the corner cupboard. His own nitrous oxide cylinders were behind the dog food. He had secured them from the same tame dental surgeon that Geoffrey had recommended, after the third or fourth Exit he’d attended. Mrs Casper – a sweet-seeming woman with motor neurone disease. By then Felix had seen enough to know how easy, how kind an end it brought to life. He bought a fresh cylinder every so often, just to be sure it was all in working order. One day he’d need it, and it would be there. Sooner rather than later, he hoped. Although not before Mabel, of course, because in these days of Bichipoos and Poodledoodles, nobody wanted to adopt a scruffy old mongrel – especially a scruffy old mongrel who enjoyed sliding her face through fox poo.
But when Mabel was gone, then his time would come . . .
Mabel had had Lamb and Vegetables last night, so he thought she should probably steer clear of red meat tonight. Tuna Surprise, perhaps, or Chicken Terrine. He held the can at arm’s length so he could read the ingredients on the Chicken Terrine and was disappointed to find that it contained only seven per cent meat products. Meat products. That left the door open for some of those seven per cent not even being chicken. Felix speculated as to what meat could be so much less than chicken that the makers would just call it ‘meat’ rather than tell it like it was and trumpet it on the label.
Mabel nudged his calf with her nose.
‘All right, all right,’ he said. He tipped the Tuna Surprise into her bowl and put it on the little plastic mat that saved the floor from spills.
By the time he’d straightened up with due deference to his hip and had glanced down again, Mabel had eaten the Tuna Surprise and was looking up at him expectantly. He ignored her and went slowly up to their bedroom to put away his navy mac. It would be the last time he wore it this year, unless there was a sudden cold snap.
He stood for a while with the doors open, surveying his wardrobe with a pragmatic eye.
Felix Pink’s days of buying clothes were over. He had bought his last three-pack of Y-fronts a year ago, and the socks he had now would see him out. It was a strange feeling – that he would be outlived by his socks.
Although it had already happened with other things, of course.
The last house.
The last car.
Felix wondered how finely he might judge it. How low he could go. The last can of shaving foam? The last jar of jam? He sometimes wondered whether his dying thought would be of a half-pint of milk going to waste in his fridge.
He had three suits – tweed, navy pinstripe and black – and five shirts: four white and one in a muted country-check. For outdoor pursuits, supposedly, although he only ever wore it in the garden. Two pairs of slacks, one grey, one brown, three ties and three pairs of shoes – to whit: brown brogues, shiny black funereals, and some misguided loafers, which he never wore because loafers of any type were anathema to him.
He hung the navy mac on the rail, next to a short beige zip-up jacket.
Felix was at peace with most of his wardrobe, but the beige zip-up jacket still bothered him. Margaret had bought it from Marks & Spencer years ago, and he’d been secretly appalled. Felix was no adventurer, but he had never dreamed that he would wear such a staid thing. Such an old man thing. He’d seen old men in that very jacket for decades. Often with matching flat cap and walking stick. He had a hazy recollection of his father in the same jacket, and quite possibly his grandfather. The fact that Margaret had apparently felt the jacket was suitable attire for him at the age of sixty-four had come as something of a blow.
The trouble was, he now wore it all the time! It was warm but not hot. It machine-washed, and dried in a jiffy, looking like new, and it went with everything else in his wardrobe, somehow making the smart look casual and the casual look smarter. On principle, Felix had spent ten years looking for something more suitable to replace it with when it finally wore out, but it never did wear out, and he was far too much a man of his generation to dream of discarding something when it was still entirely serviceable, even if he had an existential crisis every time he wore it.
He closed the wardrobe door, went downstairs and watched the recording of that afternoon’s Countdown.
Mabel barked to let him know that she needed help getting on to the sofa.
Margaret had never allowed Mabel on the sofa, but once she was gone Felix had thought, Why not? He creaked to his feet to lift the dog on to the neighbouring cushion, but before he could even bend down, she jumped up, scurried behind him and plopped herself down on his warm patch.
‘Off there, Mabel,’ he said sternly, but she ignored him.
‘Oi,’ he said, and poked her. ‘On your own seat.’
Mabel feigned death in every respect but a rolling eye, and Felix sighed. This was why not. Just one more thing Margaret had been right about. Mabel was a very determined dog and never gave up this particular battle. The only thing that prevented her winning it every time was his physical ability to pick her up and move her. Felix suspected that if Mabel had possessed the same power, he would at this very moment be watching Countdown from the garden, with his nose pressed against the living-room window.
He left her where she was and instead went into the kitchen and sat down to finish the jigsaw.
He’d always fancied himself a solver of puzzles, so had plumped for a very challenging two-thousand-piece snowscape featuring reindeer, called Frozen Waste. And what a waste it had become . . . The reindeer were not a problem. They were virtually complete. The snow, however, was a problem. Felix had four corners and most of the edges, and several random patches of white snow or blue sky that had fallen into place more by luck than by judgement, but most of the snow and tufty yellow grass remained in the box in a tantalizing tundra. Felix had been building the jigsaw for coming up to six months now, and rarely found homes for more than a couple of pieces a day. He had completely overreached himself, but he hated to give up.
He picked up a tuft. It looked like a hundred other tufts but he knew it was the same tuft that had haunted him for weeks. He had examined every possible option for it minutely, leaning over the picture on the box with a magnifying glass so that he might match every tiny detail – the scrappy brown grass, the smooth white snow at the base – and yet this tuft seemed to belong to another puzzle altogether. Nonetheless Felix spent fifteen minutes brooding over it before putting it aside for tomorrow and picking up some sky from the sky pile. Pale blue, featureless, with three ins and an out. He didn’t know what the proper names for the ins and outs were, or even if they had proper names, but that’s what he called them. Ins and outs. Not that it mattered: they were all in the wrong place, or were the wrong subtle shade of blue.
The box said AGE 8+. Felix snorted.
The phone rang and he tutted and frowned at the clock. It was after nine, so it could only be Geoffrey. Even before nine he rarely got calls from anyone except telemarketers,