Grid Recalculation

GRID RECALCULATION

BY

DAVID POLLARD

I had played the long game. Seven years was all it took. I had played the long game and I had got away with it. Now I was free.

I had wanted to marry when Kate and I did the deed. She seemed a pleasant person, easy to please without any obvious vices and she had money. The money was of course an essential element. I was looking forward to settling down to a comfortable life. Sadly, in reality there was nothing comfortable about life with Kate.

Pretty soon it dawned on me that sharing a life with anyone was not for me. I'm not the tolerant kind and little habits soon become irksome when you are sharing a house or even worse a bed with someone. She had expectations too. I was supposed to do my share of running the home. We were supposed to share each other's leisure time; take an interest in each other's pursuits.

I'll tell you frankly that there were some of my pursuits that I didn't want to share with anyone. A man should be entitled to a private life, married or not.

Above all else though the one thing I found intolerable was having to convince the woman every time I wanted to do something that entailed an expense. A new car? The endless persuasion that that required! A little holiday? Somewhere pleasant in the West Indies or the Maldives? I almost had to make a business case every time I wanted a little pleasure.

Then it turned out that our ideas of what was a pleasure were diametrically opposite. She didn't like foreign climes. The heat disagreed with her. She was an enthusiast for snow. She liked only plain food.

It wasn't that we argued. A good row might have cleared up a few things between us. She was always calm. She always had a pertinent viewpoint which she expressed succinctly. And her rejection of any idea always meant just that. Discussion closed.

What was hardest to swallow was that she was the one with the money and she let me know it.

Given the fiasco of the marriage you might think that I'm one for precipitate action. I admit that in this case I was momentarily blinded by the thought of all that money sitting in a bank and going to waste. Then, as I've said, Kate seemed to be a quiet and unassuming creature with no vice in her. She had me fooled there. Nevertheless, I don't usually act without due consideration of all the consequences, and in the case of this difficulty I took plenty of time to lay my plans.

Why not just get a divorce I hear you ask? It's back to the money. I had none and she had pots of it. And please don't start talking about finding suitable employment.

So it came down to one course of action. Kate had to go but in a way that would leave me in the clear and free to enjoy a happy and well-funded future. In short she had to disappear without trace and no suspicion – or at least provable suspicion – that I had been the cause of said disappearance should linger.

I took my time with the planning, looking about me for a suitable place for my wife's disappearance. I had an inkling of the ideal solution and it didn't take long to come up with the right place. Where's the best place to hide a body? Among other bodies of course. My researches pointed me in the direction of cemeteries and graveyards within striking distance of home and pretty soon I found what I was looking for.

Some twenty miles from the house I found a sleepy village with a fine Norman church sitting in the middle of a rather unkempt graveyard. There probably hadn't been a burial there for a quarter of a century but right alongside the church there was an ornate family tomb that was quietly crumbling to dust. I looked around the village and found a venerable pile that had once been the manor house and the home of the family who had once owned the tomb. A discrete enquiry at the pub assured me that that family was long extinct and the house was now in different hands.