The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix Read online

  ‘It works!’ I hissed, barely able to contain my euphoria. ‘They look exactly the same! We’ve done it! It’s like Sherlock Holmes!’

  Emily smiled, balancing the real pill in her hand. I reached out for it, but she stepped backwards and fixed me with a look of utmost seriousness (Emily had the most serious look of anyone I have ever known. It really did stop you in your tracks).

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘First you must tell me what you’re going to do with it.’

  ‘Do with it?’

  ‘Yes. I have to make sure it’s safe to give it to you. It’s dangerous, you know.’

  ‘I’m not really going to do anything with it,’ I said. ‘I just want to have it. To keep it. I like it.’

  I was silent for a moment, before adding:

  ‘I’m not going to use it to kill anyone, if that’s what you think.’

  ‘Do you promise?’ she said.

  ‘Of course I do. I’ll never use it on anyone. It’s quite safe with me.’

  ‘Vow it,’ she insisted.

  ‘I do vow it, Emily. I vow it on my life. I vow it more than I’ve ever vowed anything before. Oh, let me have it now?’

  She held me in her eyes for a moment – her big, burning, green eyes – and then passed The Pill across.

  ‘And make sure you don’t tell anyone what we’ve done,’ she said. ‘Or we could be in real trouble.’

  I barely had time to clutch my prize before a clatter of feet on the stairs alerted us to the descent of the dreaded Miss Wasply. I glanced swiftly, triumphantly, at The Pill – my pill now – and then stuffed it into the pocket of my breeches, whereupon Emily’s governess swept furiously into the shop.

  ‘What on earth do you two children think you are doing in here?’ she shrilled. ‘You know full well that entry into your father’s shop is forbidden!’

  Emily opened her mouth to protest, but before she had the chance to proffer her excuses Miss Wasply had manoeuvred her considerable bulk across the shop floor and positioned herself behind the two of us; a hand placed firmly on each of our backs.

  ‘You two should be outside, getting some fresh air,’ she said, herding us purposefully towards the back door, ‘not meddling and causing mischief where you are not wanted.’

  ‘But my fever, Miss Wasply,’ pleaded Emily, dragging her feet. ‘I don’t feel well. Can’t we just go back to the nursery?’

  Miss Wasply snorted and thrust coats and hats into our hands. ‘It’ll do you good!’ she said and swung the back door open; an icy blast swept through the cloakroom. ‘Hurry up now, you can have half an hour in the garden before it gets dark.’

  With one final push, she propelled us outside into the frosty winter air and closed the door firmly behind her.

  Emily sniffed despondently, shivering as she pulled her woollen hat down to cover her ears. To my shame, my thoughts were not primarily for the welfare of my dearest friend, and while I did momentarily offer an arm around her shoulders to fend off the bitter chill, my mind was elsewhere. Buoyed with the excitement of my recent acquisition, I raced to the end of the garden and started turning cartwheels.

  ‘Keep moving, Emily! It’s the only way to warm up!’

  ‘Thank you,’ she sighed, now perched on the garden bench and resigned to her fate. ‘But I think I’ll just watch.’

  And so the afternoon continued. We did eventually return to the warmth of the house, and until last night, the affair was never again mentioned between us.

  Which is, in a nutshell, how I got The Pill. My pill. The pill of death. And if I vowed never to use it on anyone, you will note I made no promises whatsoever with regard to using on my own self. Whatever other crimes I might have committed, I’d never dream of breaking my word.

  I’ve now possessed The Pill for ninety years (or perhaps I should say, The Pill has now possessed me for ninety years). Sometimes I’ve kept it in my wallet, sometimes in a glittering gold locket around my neck, sometimes Sellotaped beneath my armpit, sometimes in a ring on my finger, but it’s always been within reach. Always present. Death has never been further than a few inches from my outstretched hand. Aside from The Photo, it is by far and away my most treasured possession.

  It’s with me now, as I write this note. In the pocket of my cotton pyjamas. I dip in and tickle it, gently, reverentially, as a worshipper might an icon, a lepidopterist a rare butterfly wing. One and a half grains of strychnine, one and a half grains of arsenic, half a grain of salt of hydrocyanic acid and half a grain of crushed ipecacuanha root, and soon it’ll be time to take it. ‘Not long now, my old friend,’ I whisper. ‘Not long now. At last your moment is nigh.’

  My name is Raphael Ignatius Phoenix and I am a hundred years old – or will be in ten days’ time, in the early hours of 1st January 2000, when I kill myself. Observant readers will notice that my initials spell R. I. P. A most fitting coincidence, as you will shortly discover.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I COMMITTED MY last and most recent murder 14 years ago. In 1985. It was at Nannybrook House, and her name was Bunshop. Mrs Ethel Bunshop, née Boocock. I can smell it even now: the acrid, nose-searing perfume of burning flesh. And hear it too. The whoosh and the scream and the crackle. Hideous old trout.

  Her removal falls into that group of murders to which I can ascribe a very definite motive. In some instances I have killed on but the most flimsy of pretexts; in others done so without really meaning to kill at all.

  With Ethel Bunshop née Boocock, however, I had a veritable sackful of valid inducements. Her nocturnal farts, for one thing. And those awful droopy knockers, and the way she said ‘Sherry, Mr Phoenix?’ as though offering me a sexual favour rather than a glass of tepid amontillado. She was in every respect a vile old bucket, and her immolation a source of deep and continued satisfaction to me.

  That said, even with so many justifiable reasons for knocking her off, her death was in no way a premeditated one. I had not thought about it, or planned it, or prepared the ground beforehand. Rather, it was a sudden, intuitive, spur-of-the-moment type affair, an unavoidable rush of circumstance, and one that took the perpetrator (i.e. me) as much by surprise as the victim (i.e. old fruit bat).

  Such has been the case with so many of my murders. Some I can justify to myself, some I can’t, but all, with the possible exception of Miss Wasply, have come completely out of the blue, with little by way of intent on my part. I am not, so to speak, a thinking murderer. More an instinctive one. A natural-born killer, if you like. Yes, that’s me. A natural-born killer.

  It was Emily who got me into Nannybrook. Made all the arrangements, filled out the registration forms and paid my fees for the nine years I was there. Or at least I presume it was she who paid my fees. She never mentioned it, and I never asked. I can’t think who else would have done it. I have no other friends.

  God alone knows how she found me, a foul drunken vagrant slumped in a urine-sodden doorway in the middle of London. God alone knows how she ever finds me. But find me she did, and take me in her arms, and raise me up on to unsteady feet.

  ‘Come on, Raphael,’ she said. ‘You can’t live like this. You’d better come with me. I’ll sort you out.’

  And so we got in a black London cab, windows wound down because after five years on the tramp I stank abominably, and drove through the spring morning to Nannybrook House. And at Nannybrook they seemed to be expecting us, because I was met at the front door by a puffing, red-faced doctor, and taken upstairs, and bathed and shaved and examined and clothed and installed in a bright and airy room at the back of the house with a view over the flowery rose gardens beneath. And there I remained for nine years.

  Nannybrook was a retirement home for the elderly. During the Fifties it enjoyed a certain celebrity when its warden pioneered a method of counteracting the ageing process by suspending residents upside down for an hour each day inside a specially adapted greenhouse. The Nannybrook Treatment, as it came to be known, made headlines around the world and sparked an internatio
nal inversion craze amongst the over-seventies. Subsequent research, however, suggested that far from prolonging their lives, suspension of the elderly merely exacerbated their varicose veins, and by the time I arrived the experiment had long since been abandoned. In the nine years I was there nothing half as interesting happened, except when the brakes failed on Mr Guttleib’s wheelchair and he rolled out of the front gates into the path of an oncoming laundry van (shades of Lord Slaggsby there). Nannybrook was, above all else, a very sedate place to while away one’s twilight years.

  It occupied a large ramshackle Edwardian building at the top end of Putney Hill to which, over the years, various annexes and extensions and conservatories and wheelchair-access ramps had been added, so that, taken as a whole, it resembled something a dysfunctional child might have constructed out of Lego bricks. It had an enormous red front door, a weathervane that, even in the strongest winds, never pointed in any direction other than south, and was fenced off from the main road by a high stone wall with broken bottle shards cemented into the top, although whether the latter was to discourage vandals from getting in, or pensioners from getting out, I never discovered. The building was girded by a covered wooden veranda, and boasted extensive gardens to the rear, including a defunct orchard, several rose beds and a large vegetable patch wherein rheumatoid residents would cultivate curiously rheumatoid courgettes.

  My room was on the second floor, at the back of the house. I had a bed, which was made for me every morning and which could, by the manipulation of various attached cranks and pulleys, be raised or lowered or tilted or swivelled depending on how one liked to sleep; also a desk, a lamp, an armchair and an en suite bathroom with special hand-grips beside the lavatory to stop me falling off when I was having a crap. I had my own phone, as did every Nannybrook resident, although I never used it because I had no one to call; whilst everywhere, all over the room like a pox, were strategically placed red electronic buttons which I could jab if I felt a coronary coming on. In nine years I never felt even the ghost of a coronary, but that didn’t stop me jabbing the buttons anyway, just to annoy the staff.

  There was also, in one corner of the room, built into the wall, a large, warm cupboard, and here I hid my most precious possessions: The Photo and The Pill. During my vagrant years I had kept the latter Sellotaped beneath my left armpit. With my arrival at Nannybrook, however, I was able to provide a more refined abode, wrapping it in a green silk handkerchief and secreting it each night in the cupboard behind a loose brick, removing it in the morning and transferring it to the pocket of whatever trousers I happened to be wearing that day. Needless to say, no one knew of its existence, and needless to say, I didn’t tell anyone. The Nannybrook warden was bad enough about smoking. If he’d found out there were one and a half grains of strychnine, one and a half grains of arsenic, half a grain of salt of hydrocyanic acid and half a grain of crushed ipecacuanha root on the premises he’d have gone quite apoplectic. (Incidentally, this was not the same warden as had pioneered the Nannybrook Treatment back in the Fifties. He, by all accounts, had emigrated to South America to continue his research in a Bolivian prison.)

  I was, I believe, one of some 50 people in residence, although it was difficult to put an exact figure on it because, what with old residents constantly dying, and new ones arriving to take their place, the population of Nannybrook was in a constant and bewildering state of flux. In one week alone, for instance, the entire house bridge team expired (a result, I suspect, of the pressures generated by their forthcoming grudge match against a home in Croydon). With such a high turnover any accurate census was impossible. There could have been as few as 30 residents, or as many as 70. I put the figure of 50 simply because that’s how many turned out to cheer Eric Morecombe when he came to open the new physiotherapy room.

  I was at the lower end of the Nannybrook age scale (76 when I arrived and 85 when I bumped off Mrs Bunshop). Most residents were well into their nineties, and several were over a hundred. One woman, the unfortunately named Mrs Yurin, celebrated her 106th birthday whilst I was there, although, somewhat to my amusement, she died in the middle of it. Just keeled over into her birthday cake whilst trying to blow out the candles. Her 88-year-old daughter, also a resident, was inconsolable, not least because she’d spent four days icing the bloody thing.

  Although I wasn’t the youngest person at Nannybrook – Mr Chudleigh was only 71 and, if the rumours were to be believed, Ms Clissold was a prematurely aged 26 – I certainly looked it. Indeed, judged on appearance alone I shouldn’t have been there at all, for the wrinkles and cracks and droops and fissures so evident on the faces of my co-residents were markedly absent from my own long, pale-skinned visage.

  After half a decade of living rough I did, of course, have a rather haggard look about me, and I certainly wasn’t as sprightly as I had been in my youth. Given my age, however, I was in a most remarkable state of preservation. My back remained straight, my eyesight as good as ever and my muscles bouncy and active. Say what you like about murder, it certainly keeps you spry.

  My fellow residents were, I suppose, a decent enough bunch, although there were few, if any, to whom I was close. Bernie Mtembe, Nannybrook’s sole black resident, was always good for a game of backgammon; and when Mrs Goshen – she of the Australia-shaped birthmark splatted in the middle of her face – drank too much vermouth the results could be most amusing. Naturally I kept a good supply of vermouth concealed in my bedroom and regularly spiked her afternoon tea. She eventually fell down the stairs and broke her neck after her Margaret Thatcher-inspired pussy-bow blouse became entangled with the bannister, but as I hadn’t done any spiking that day my conscience was clear.

  I was, I think, quite popular, in a removed sort of way. People said good morning to me, and engaged me in faltering conversations, which I would reciprocate with as much interest as I could possibly muster. I always received several Valentines cards, most of them, I suspect, from an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s; and was never forgotten at Christmas or on my birthday. On 1st January 1983 I was given a beautiful gold-plated fountain pen, inscribed ‘R.I.P., from all at Nannybrook House’. There was a little tea party in my honour at which I made rather a witty speech and was arthritically applauded by all and sundry, bent and wrinkled hands slapping together like appreciative porpoises.

  My only real friend at Nannybrook, however, if such he could be called, was Archie Bogosian, a small, pinch-faced leprechaun of a man who had, depending on what mood you caught him in and how much Guinness he had drunk, been a diamond smuggler, a big game hunter, an arms dealer, an astronaut, a mercenary, a racing driver and a bodyguard to the Shah of Iran.

  ‘Let’s cut the shit, Phoenix,’ he’d whisper, leaning across to me as we sat downstairs in the day room. ‘I’ve killed people and I don’t mind admitting it.’

  ‘Me too,’ I’d sigh, patting his arm.

  ‘Good, good,’ he’d chuckle. ‘We’re professionals; not like these other fuckwits. We’ve lived, by God! Done things. People like us have to stick together. I remember during the war when I was airdropped over Berlin . . . have I told you this one?’

  ‘No,’ I’d lie.

  ‘Well, it was a midnight drop, very hush hush, direct orders from Churchill . . .’

  And off he’d go on some wonderfully exotic tale of how he’d been sent to assassinate Hitler or perform some equally unlikely mission, for which he’d been awarded a veritable fruit salad of gallantry medals. I later found out from his sister that he had been unable to fight in the war because he had a spastic colon. He had done his bit for the voluntary fire service, and then spent the rest of his life working for a large company selling ladies’ underwear in Swindon. It didn’t matter. He had, if only in his mind, made of his life something fantastic, and I respected that. At least he didn’t go on about gout and pension payments, which was the staple conversation of everyone else I lived with.

  Thrown together by a shared sense of mischief, Archie and I became the Nannybrook
pranksters, a task for which I was particularly well qualified, following my years with The World Freedom League.

  We didn’t do anything too outrageous; just dumped a small spanner in the works whenever the opportunity arose. We would, for instance, press the alarm bell in the lift, and then watch gleefully from round the corner as nurses came rushing with oxygen masks and flapping rubbery stethoscopes. Or pin small notes to the Residents’ Notice Board with messages such as ‘Bugger the Warden’ and ‘Want a blow-job? Contact Mrs Yurin Jnr in Rm 10’ written on them. So intense became our note pinning, indeed, and so disgusting, that the entire board was eventually moved into the house office so it could be kept under constant surveillance, whereupon we took to graffiti-ing disgusting limericks on the walls of the downstairs lavatory.

  Ultimately, however, our small revolutions caused little stir, for Nannybrook was essentially an easy-going place. There are, I have heard, retirement homes run along the lines of some Russian gulag, their residents herded back and forth like dangerous political malefactors, but Nannybrook, at least during my time there, was not one of these. Of course there was organization if you cared for it, and it was more than easy to spend one’s entire twilight years in a tightly regulated round of communal calisthenics, cribbage competitions, Batik classes and trips to places of outstanding natural beauty. If none of that interested you, however – and it didn’t interest me very much – one could simply do whatever one wished.

  For myself, I didn’t really do very much at all. I watched television – I was a particular fan of Mike Yarwood, and The Two Ronnies – and cultivated the odd, abortive crop of runner beans in the Nannybrook garden. I spent a lot of time sitting out on the front veranda smoking cigarettes and staring at The Photo, did the odd crossword, and supplemented my meagre pension by regularly drubbing Bernie Mtembe at backgammon. (‘You done me again, man!’ he would wail. ‘I gotta stop this bloody backgammon. You wiped me out!’)