The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 38

I’d never killed in cold blood before.

Sitting in Richard Lisle’s apartment on a winter’s night in 1948 when the ice was beginning to scratch its teeth across the inside of the window, waiting for him to come home, I knew that I would be perfectly capable of pulling the trigger. My anxiety, therefore, was not so much as to whether I could commit the deed, but as to how confident I was of this fact. It is not so far from such a state of mind to absolute sociopath, I reflected. Would it be appropriate to wail? To sob? To bite my lip, to acquire perhaps a nervous twitch? I hoped that my body, if not my mind, would at least have the good grace to demonstrate some psychosomatic disorder, some unconscious manifestation of guilt at the deed I was about to commit. I spent the long waiting hours sitting in the silence and the dark, reproaching myself for my lack of self-reproach. A self-defeating exercise, but even when the logical absurdity of my own thought processes became apparent to me, I was rather annoyed that even this slim manifestation of conscience was so intellectual. I would have far preferred crying into my pillow at night over this calm analysis of my own moral degeneration.

I broke into Richard Lisle’s apartment at 9.12 p.m.

He did not come home until 1.17 a.m.

This wasn’t particularly uncharacteristic, but nine o’clock had been the optimum time between neighbours settling down and my entry causing an unnecessary disturbance. I kept the light off to avoid questions and waited, gun in my lap, silently in the chair in the living room, which was also the bedroom and, partitioned by a low work surface only, the kitchen too.

He was tipsy without being drunk when he came in.

The sight of me, black leather gloves and small silenced pistol, brought an instant return of struggling sobriety. Rationality, if not intellect, can still overwhelm alcohol when death is on the line.

I should have shot him right then, but the sight of him standing in the door, keys still dangling from their ring, which was threaded over his index finger, a brown woollen vest pulled over his green woollen jumper and face smeared grey from the smog, froze me as well as him. I had no desire to speak to him–nothing I could possibly say–but as I reached for the trigger he blurted, “I don’t have much for you to take, but anything you want is yours.”

I hesitated, then raised the gun.

“You don’t want to do this.” His voice was a bare whisper, his words really rather banal as I was already resolved that this was precisely what I wanted to do, and even if I did not, this was now something that needed to be done. “Please.” He dropped to his knees, the tears already flowing down his face. “I never done nothing wrong.”

I thought about it.

Then pulled the trigger.