by Richard Blake

For the avoidance of doubt, I have never killed anyone, and have no present intention of doing so. If either of these claims were false, it would be at least unwise to write and publish this article. I also assume that you are not planning a murder. If you write to me with any untoward confessions, I will report you to the police.

These preliminary disclaimers made, I will say that killing someone and not getting caught is one of my occasional topics of conversation. I am a writer, and, if my novels are generally set in the distant past, or in a world very different from our own, I like realism in the details of a narrative. I have never written a novel without at least one violent death. Therefore, the matter of how to dispose of a body is something I find of general interest. I could write a book on my various reflections. Instead, I will focus on one likely scenario that involves me and my known abilities, and is set in my home town. My reason for doing so is that anything else risks a spiralling into multiple improbabilities – possessing things that few ordinary people have, or knowing unlikely friends, or just ignoring the modern world as it is. Let us therefore assume that I kill in what I think at the time is self-defence. I make this limitation because I can easily imagine killing someone in defence of my life and property, and because a premeditated killing would involve much preparation specific only to that killing.

So let us assume that someone breaks into my house at three in the morning. Since my house is reasonably secure, I am not sure how anyone could break in. But burglars know things about forced entry that I do not, and I will not waste time on speculating how he might have got in. I will only say that I wake up and hear someone moving about downstairs. I wait for half a minute, to make sure that I am not dreaming and that there really is an intruder. I reach for the police truncheon that I might keep under the bed. Not putting on my slippers, I go softly downstairs.

I have a plain obligation to check whether this really is an intruder, and that he has come in with some hostile intention. But I will skip over this matter by saying that I find him in the basement kitchen, with a torch about his head and digging through a box of unspecified but precious things.

If this were America, I would take the safety catch off my gun and point it at him from about ten feet while clearing my throat. I would then make him lie face down on the floor with his arms spread out. A telephone call to the police would end the matter. Sadly, guns are illegal in England. All I have is eighteen inches of heavy wood that I have never learned how to use. My hand is sweaty. My arms are beginning to shake. I have no idea what to say, or if my voice is up to saying it. I could go upstairs and call the police with one hand, while keeping the truncheon in the other. But this does not cross my mind. I stand watching him from behind. I let the truncheon down, so it hangs uselessly at my side. My legs as well now are shaking.

At last, the intruder turns and sees me. He springs to his feet. He pulls out something that glitters in the reflected light of his torch and swears at me. There is a smell of cannabis in the room. Because the only way out of the kitchen is past me, he runs at me. Without thinking, I lift the truncheon and take a swing at his head. I have never hit anyone before with a heavy object. I have no idea how much force to use, or how much force I am capable of using. I hit him on the side of his head with a force that knocks me against the wall. When I have steadied myself, the intruder is a still shadow on the floor. I turn on the light. His eyes are open. He is not moving, and may not be breathing. There is a pool of blood on the floor.

Woken by the noise, my wife comes down. Because she is not deep into shock, she checks the intruder and confirms that he is dead. I manage to say that he came at me with a knife. All she can find is a bicycle tyre lever that he must have used to pry open the box he had been rummaging through.

What next? I could call the police. They might be understanding. They have moved on from the Tony Martin case. I could take something large from the knife block and press this into his dead hand. On the other hand, the law regarding “reasonable force” is ambiguous. In the dark, the intruder had looked big and powerful. In the light, he is a smallish teenage boy. Again, even if the police do not prosecute, the boy might have friends and family who will never leave me alone. Such things happen in England. Yet again, which hand for the carving knife? He might have been left-handed. I once saw a crime programme on television where picking the wrong hand got someone into serious trouble.

We sit talking while I begin to calm down. At first, I insist that we should call the police. My wife is against the idea. Her arguments are unanswerable. She makes tea. She tells me we must get rid of the body.

Easier said than done. How do you get rid of a body in a place like Deal? We try moving the body from the middle of the kitchen. It may not be more than eight stone, but the arms and legs flop about, giving us no leverage. All we manage is to spread the pool of blood into a four-foot smear. We drink our tea.

How to get rid of the body?

I could bring the car round. We could put the body in the boot and dump it somewhere. But the boy might not have been alone. There might be others waiting outside. If not, the neighbours might notice the car. If so, they would notice something the size of a body manhandled into the boot. And then where to take it? Deal is a town of thirty thousand people. If it has deserted places – better still, deserted places with deep holes – I am not aware of them. There is countryside all about. We could drive to a wood somewhere and leave the body. But there are traffic cameras everywhere. There is no place, however apparently deserted, where a body will not be found. I could dig a hole. But we have no digging tools. Even if we had some, I have no experience of digging. I remember how, when I was much younger, I buried my mother’s dog in her garden. It took an hour of attacking compacted earth with a shovel to make a hole two foot deep and about that across. I know that a proper grave is beyond me. Anything less will be useless.

Before you suggest it, we have only a small garden. It is covered with a foot of gravel. I might dig this up and then dig a grave. But I feel a strong revulsion against having a rotting body on my own property. Besides, anyone looking for it would find it in about half an hour.

Deal is on the coast. I could weight the body and drop it into the sea. But I have no boat. I have no convenient weights. Again, there are cameras everywhere.

Acid? I once wrote a novel in which a body was dissolved in a vat of acid. But all we have at hand is a pint of sulphuric acid for clearing the drains. We have no container big enough for a body. Where to buy fifty gallons of the right acid – whatever that may be – and a large vat? How to buy and not be reported straight to the police? I am not sure how long it takes a body to dissolve, nor any idea what to do with it afterwards.

We could throw the body into a quiet road, and hope the police will assume the boy was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The consideration is still there of possible associates outside, and of neighbours, and of those omnipresent cameras.

I could do with some help and moral support. My wife has turned rather naggy. The only other person I can trust lives seventy miles away. It would take him hours to get here. I have no wish to leave any telephone records.

Here is an option. We could wrap the body in a blanket and put it on some plastic sheeting in the back basement room. We could wait for our daughter to get up and go to school. Then, we lug the body upstairs and dump it in the bath. We undress it. We cut off the limbs with an electric saw. We disembowel it with a carving knife that we keep resharpening. We use the electric saw to sever the spine, thereby cutting the trunk in two. We cut off the lower jaw and knock out all the teeth with a hammer and chisel. We snip off the fingers with a pair of secateurs. We clean the blood in the kitchen with bleach. We flush out the bath with bleach and cold water. We take the body parts and begin getting rid of them. It will be at least a week before they start to go seriously off. Losing an upper arm here, a jaw there, is much easier than dumping an entire body. Clothes can be washed and left outside a charity shop.

Oh, but dream on! Slicing pork for a sir-fry is one thing. The last time I took a sharp object to anything that had plainly once been alive was when I dissected a rat at school. That left me upset for days. I may have the technical means, but carving up the body of a teenage boy is probably as far beyond me as learning Sanskrit in a week. If it were that or the hangman’s noose, I might be able to do it. I might….

Or have we the technical means? Our electric saw has a four-inch blade. It cuts dry wood easily enough. How will it perform on flesh and bones? Will it foul up? Will it burn out? Will opening the stomach stink the house out for days? How many carrier bags for the guts once they are pulled out and washed? How easy to quarter a trunk? I assume that severing the spine will halve it – but I have the vaguest knowledge of anatomy. Can it all be done before our daughter comes back from school? How can I avoid vomiting all over the body? DNA evidence everywhere, and no means I know of removing it. A Google search is out of the question.

Or suppose the boy’s friends or relatives know where he went, and call the police when he fails to come out again? There will be difficult questions if the police knock on the door when I am spattered with blood and there are body parts lying in the bath.

And if everything does go to plan – and if we can dump the body parts without being caught – what then? My wife and I are both reasonably firm of mind. But we have never had to clean up after a killing. Stress is a terrible thing. I know that from experience. It may have a first external cause. Remove that, and it will look for another. The body may never be found. After a flurry of reports in the local newspaper, and some tears from a blowsy mother on the television, the boy may go on an already huge list of missing persons. We are still looking forward to a lifetime of guilt and apprehension. Every little reverse will set us off again – an untoward tax demand or water bill, an argument with someone in a car park, a blown lightbulb on Christmas Eve. Sleep no more indeed!

If you have read this far in search of some clever scheme, I will confess that I have none. I will take that four-inch carving knife from the block. I will press it into the boy’s right hand, then his left hand, then his right hand again. After that, I will call the police.

Killing is a rarity in a country like England. Undetected and unsolved killings are rarer still. I could wish I were more like the characters in my novels. I could wish for fewer cameras, or a house in the middle of nowhere. On the whole, Deal is probably the right place for me as I actually am. I lock up at night, and I sleep easy in my bed. The only place in my life for killing is between the covers of a book. I am glad of this. And I hope that is how it will be for a long time to come.