The Wanderer

By Graham Dwyer

No longer able to endure the misery of the cold and hunger of self-imposed homelessness on the streets of Woolwich, London, Don plots a means of escape from his depressed desperate plight, one that leads him to commit two brutal murders. After first killing a miserly pawnbroker with a stolen butcher’s knife, he is driven to turn the same weapon on the pawnbroker’s sister when she stumbles upon him attempting to loot her dead brother’s hidden money box. Don is soon apprehended by the police, although not initially for the crimes carried out, but because his own sister has reported him missing. He undergoes a series of interrogations and each time is released, but due to the pain of self-inflicted torture later returns voluntarily to make a full confession. Although he is driven to do this because of profound felt guilt in the case of the murdered pawnbroker’s sister, viewing this as tragic loss of human life, he is morbidly without remorse for the killing of the pawnbroker himself. In prison there are signs of a move towards becoming open to the teachings of the New Testament scriptures; despite this, however, Don is still unable to acknowledge that the killing of the pawnbroker involved actual murder, the act itself remaining for him merely the elimination of a disease-ridden insect from which the world has been cleansed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pustaka Digital Media
• Release date: Apr 2, 2021
• ISBN: 6580541606616

Book preview

http://www.pustaka.co.in

The Wanderer

Author:

Graham Dwyer

For more books

http://www.pustaka.co.in/home/author/dr-graham-dwyer

Digital/Electronic Copyright © by Pustaka Digital Media Pvt. Ltd.

All other copyright © by Author.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

The Wanderer

Graham Dwyer

In Memory of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 1

In the white, polished plastic tray, a trail of blood formed itself into a small rivulet. Blackish red. It soon joined other trails that gathered into pools before spilling over the end of a thin stone slab and eventually draining off into a stainless-steel gutter. From behind the tilted glass a handful of pig liver was removed for the first customer of the day – an old woman who requested it to be sliced. It was done, obligingly, and then weighed and dropped into a blood-stained transparent bag. The meat was for the old woman’s cat. Don observed from the outer doorway as she began to leave the same knife used next to cut through huge chunks of steak followed by the removal of a pig’s head. It seemed to work with unfettered ease. The old woman stopped momentarily by the side of Don, as she slowly negotiated her steps passed him, and gave him a look of utter condemnation, one brimming with disgust, as though loitering in front of her was the most monstrous criminal in creation, a hellish demon who had murder in his eyes. She turned and left at once. Other customers now filled the butcher’s shop. Don’s gaze settled on the knife again, which had been placed on to a rough block of wood while chicken carcasses were hurriedly suspended from hooks. On the blood-stained block with butcher’s saw marks in it, the knife he beheld was long, and it curled up at the end into a fine point. It was the ideal instrument to do the job, he told himself, a job that could be carried out with one single, swift action.

Don turned his head away for a moment and then walked slowly on by, stumbling over a broken beer bottle. A musty smell assaulted his nostrils. It was the next shop – old clothes in it sold for charity. He could not even afford them. A pock-marked mannequin with missing feet wore pin-stripe trousers and a purple shirt. It had on a trilby and stared back at him with empty eyes. To the left of it was a dusty old guitar with missing strings, and to the right of it a floral-patterned crockery set: six big plates and six matching smaller ones stacked on top of one another, encircled by six tea cups and saucers – a pretty little ring but with a layer of dust on it too. He turned back to the meat shop and watched again the knife at work in the butcher’s skilful hands. The glass on the door near where he stood was thin. Easily broken. The razor-sharp edged knife he would return for tonight. Without doubt. Not many hours away.

Don did not know how many hours that would be, did not know what time it was now, exactly. But it was morning still. One hour of any day had become much like the next, every day the same as the one that followed on after it, or that preceded it. All days melted into each other for Don, had become indistinguishable and without purpose. They were merely periods of light punctuated by long nights – freezing nights, all too often, or just horribly wet, miserable attempts to stay warm in a sleepless doorway shelter. That is how it was living on the street. But this night would be different.

Yet he had time to think – time to work it all out, as he sat begging for small change. He had been homeless for just six weeks. That was the reality of it. Nonetheless, it seemed almost as if years had gone by since he had been sleeping rough. His beard had grown during the time into filthy knotted clumps, and his hair had become matted, greasy and grimy, the scalp underneath intolerably itchy. His homelessness was his own fault, and there was no one else to blame for it. He could go back home any time to where his sister lived with her boyfriend. It was his house as much as it was hers. But it was because of them he had left in the first place. He could not stand it there any longer. It was not the same after his mother died. When he had departed from the house he had jointly inherited with his sister under a dark cloud of deep depression, he had with him only the clothes he stood up in and three pieces of his late mother’s jewellery: a pearl necklace, a small diamond bracelet and, most precious of all, a solid gold locket, which had a photograph of his mother inside. The necklace and the bracelet were gone now. Pawned. He would never be able to get them back without money. And it was money he needed again at this very moment to buy food – and a hot drink.

Don drifted across the busy high street. One or two cars hooted their horns at him as he made his way. That was due to his sluggishness. He walked like a drunkard, although he had not touched a drop of drink. And soon he was back in his usual spot, sitting next to the automatic doors outside Tesco’s with a stained empty paper Costa coffee cup for gathering coins. As he sat there, he moved the cup between his splayed legs on to the smooth concrete, his back propped up against the uneven wall. Don did not bother to ask for change. Passers-by either tossed a few coins his way or just ignored him. Usually the latter. In a way he did not much care anymore now that he had lost his mother. But since leaving home he was always hungry. He looked pitiful in his black stained trench coat with his unkempt, dirty hair hanging limply over its up-turned collar. A newly acquired Manchester United cap that had blown across the street one lucky night covered the top of his head. It was beer-stained and dirty, too, but he could easily allow the peak of it to cover his tired eyes with a simple downward bend of the neck whenever he wanted to blot out the world in front of him. The worst thing, though, was having to converse from time to time with random strangers, with the do-gooders he depended on for food. Sometimes he was slipped a Five Pound note – even at times a tenner – by one of them and felt he had to talk a bit in return to show gratitude or to encourage them to give again another day. On these occasions he would often be asked how long he had been on the street or quizzed with other such questions – questions he considered far too personal and invasive. At these times, too, he would frequently be offered advice about somewhere he might consider going for help. And he was tired of it all; yet need of any do-gooder’s charity somehow or other always compelled his difficult civility.

After sitting for some time on the concrete floor next to Tesco’s automatic doors – the spot Don had made his own – he reached into the inside pocket of his thick, stiff coat and removed the gold locket from within. He opened it to look at his mother’s smiling face. She was in her early forties in the black and white photo, about the same age Don was now; and she had smooth, unwrinkled skin, her hair tied up in a bun. There was not a hair out of place. It was coiffured, gracefully combed back and held in place by a simple pin. She was aristocratic looking and wore a white patterned blouse with a high ribbed collar buttoned all the way up. It finished off under her slender chin where nestled a small brooch made from ivory and jet. About her neck was the same solid gold locket he held in his hand now, given to her by her own mother long, long ago. The locket felt heavy in his hand as he held it. He had deep affection in his eyes combined with sadness because she was lost to him, gone forever. A tear fell down his right cheek. The gold locket, which had a fine clasp and a beautiful, ornate design engraved on both the front and back of it, was suspended on a thick, gold chain. It was the same gold chain worn by his mother in the very black and white photo inside and which now wreathed his hand as he examined the treasured object. But he knew he might soon have to part with it – the locket as well as the chain. He would take it with him tonight to Mr Bakr, the greedy pawnbroker who savagely undervalued everything punters brought him. Whatever Mr Bakr was presented with and out of sheer desperation, he gave in return rock bottom cash loans. The more desperate the customer, the better for him. That brought him his happiness, his miserly joy. And, when it came to the resale, it was done without delay, as soon as punters reached the end of their allotted re-purchase time – their desired possessions then lost forever. The fact that any re-purchase, in any case, meant a minimum levy of 25 percent interest rendered them almost unattainable. But whatever was pawned invariably ensured a steady profit for Mr Bakr, no matter what the outcome, far more being gained by him through resale, however, which happened more often than not.

After sitting for an hour or two longer, Don put the locket with its chain back inside his inner coat pocket, looked across the busy high street and focused his gaze on the butcher’s shop once more. He was hungry but tired as well. He fell asleep.

Chapter 2

The butcher’s shop closed, finally. And the owner of it, a short fat man with a bloated pink face and red-stained hands, locked the door behind himself and straight away left. As he waddled down the high street home, with his rotund middle and heavy barrel chest precariously balanced on top of his thin, spindly legs, he looked back from where he had just departed – twice. He had about him a distinct air of suspicion, or so it seemed. Standing to his feet now at the entrance of Tesco’s, Don closely watched the butcher as he first passed the charity shop and then the greengrocer’s store before crossing the road to the bus stop on the other side. Within minutes he was gone. The bus passed by, stopping momentarily at traffic lights from where the last glimpse of him was caught.

Don crossed the high street as soon as the bus moved away and stared up at the red and white glossy laminate sign upon which his eyes had become intensely focused: Len’s Quality Meats, Family Butcher, it read. When he got to the shop he peered in through the window, staring searchingly around it. A rush of unexpected heat seared up from within as he did so, heat that rose instantly to the top of his head. He removed the Manchester United cap to wipe his perspiring brow and scratched his scalp. Remnants of an old, flaking scab above his left ear wedged powdery particles under a broken finger nail. Reaching next for the brass door handle, he noticed his hand in front of him shake. There was a distinct tremor in it at the end of a stiff arm, and it seemed barely recognisable at first, appeared like an alien extension; yet he knew, at once, that it was his own hand; for the dirt on it, especially on the inner parts of the fingers and thumb, had an oily, ingrained familiarity. And it was certainly his own grimy trench coat arm guiding the hand to act, strangely behaving as though it had a will of its own. The brass handle resisted the weight applied to it, however, defying all movement. The door was most definitely locked – quite securely. It seemed bizarrely unexpected, even though he had, in fact, observed mere minutes earlier the overweight shop owner with rickety legs put a long key into the key hole there before turning it once and departing.

People walked by without giving Don a second glance. For he was just another vagabond, another loathsome beggar, no longer with value or legitimate place in society. Society, which had also become a detached abstraction for him, had sloughed him off, he felt, like dead skin scales. He was quite simply invisible to it. Being homeless does that and with its own peculiar mysteriousness somehow, following its own insidious logic but bringing without question a fully aware excluded consciousness. Unmistakeably, he felt as if he had been rendered absent, null and void. Even now no one cared at all to acknowledge his existence, even as he applied increasing menacing force to the butcher’s shop door handle. He put the full force of his whole body on it, all the strength he could muster. But it was impossible. Immoveable. Relinquishing his grip of the thick brass handle he decided to give up on it and then noticed it had on it an intricate swirling design. It reminded him of the pattern engraved on the gold locket close to his chest in the inner pocket of his coat. It was nothing like it. Not really. But a sudden temptation to remove it, to study it and look upon his mother’s graceful face in the precious photo it guarded, arose within him. Don’s mind, however, again soon shifted focus and returned to the question of how to get into the shop. It would clearly have to be done another way. No matter how he set about that task, he assured himself that his own