Lamb to the
Slaughter
by Roald
Dahl (1916-1990)
The room was warm and clean, the curtains
drawn, the two table lamps alight-hers and the one by the empty chair opposite.
On the sideboard behind her, two tall glasses, soda water, whiskey. Fresh ice cubes in the Thermos bucket.
Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to
come him from work.
Now and again she would glance up at the clock,
but without anxiety, merely to please herself with the thought that each minute
gone by made it nearer the time when he would come. There was a slow smiling air about her, and
about everything she did. The drop of a
head as she bent over her sewing was curiously tranquil. Her skin -for this was her sixth month with
child-had acquired a wonderful translucent quality, the mouth was soft, and the
eyes, with their new placid look, seemed larger darker than before. When the
clock said ten minutes to five, she began to listen, and a few moments later,
punctually as always, she heard the tires on the gravel outside, and the car
door slamming, the footsteps passing the window, the key turning in the
lock. She laid aside her sewing, stood
up, and went forward to kiss him as he came in.
“Hullo darling,” she said.
“Hullo darling,” he answered.
She took his coat and hung it in the
closer. Then she walked over and made
the drinks, a strongish one for him, a weak one for herself; and soon she was
back again in her chair with the sewing, and he in the other, opposite, holding
the tall glass with both hands, rocking it so the ice cubes tinkled against the
side.
For her, this was always a blissful time of
day. She knew he didn’t want to speak
much until the first drink was finished, and she, on her side, was content to
sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone in the house. She loved to luxuriate in the presence of
this man, and to feel-almost as a sunbather feels the sun-that warm male glow
that came out of him to her when they were alone together. She loved him for the way he sat loosely in a
chair, for the way he came in a door, or moved slowly across the room with long
strides. She loved intent, far look in
his eyes when they rested in her, the funny shape of the mouth, and especially
the way he remained silent about his tiredness, sitting still with himself
until the whiskey had taken some of it away.
“Tired darling?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m tired,” And as he spoke, he
did an unusual thing. He lifted his
glass and drained it in one swallow although there was still half of it, at
least half of it left.. She wasn’t really watching him, but she knew what he
had done because she heard the ice cubes falling back against the bottom of the
empty glass when he lowered his arm. He
paused a moment, leaning forward in the chair, then he got up and went slowly
over to fetch himself another.
“I’ll get it!” she cried, jumping up.
“Sit down,” he said.
When he came back, she noticed that the new
drink was dark amber with the quantity of whiskey in it.
“Darling, shall I get your slippers?”
“No.”
She watched him as he began to sip the dark
yellow drink, and she could see little oily swirls in the liquid because it was
so strong.
“I think it’s a shame,” she said, “that when a
policeman gets to be as senior as you, they keep him walking about on his feet
all day long.”
He didn’t answer, so she bent her head again
and went on with her sewing; bet each time he lifted the drink to his lips, she
heard the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass.
“Darling,” she said. “Would you like me to get you some
cheese? I haven’t made any supper
because it’s Thursday.”
“No,” he said.
“If you’re too tired to eat out,” she went on,
“it’s still not too late. There’s plenty
of meat and stuff in the freezer, and you can have it right here and not even
move out of the chair.”
Her eyes waited on him for an answer, a smile,
a little nod, but he made no sign.
“Anyway,”
she went on, “I’ll get you some cheese and crackers first.”
“I don’t want it,” he said.
She moved uneasily in her chair, the large eyes
still watching his face. “But you must
eat! I’ll fix it anyway, and then you
can have it or not, as you like.”
She stood up and placed her sewing on the table
by the lamp.
“Sit down,” he said. “Just for a minute, sit down.”
It wasn’t till then that she began to get
frightened.
“Go on,” he said. “Sit down.”
She lowered herself back slowly into the chair,
watching him all the time with those large, bewildered eyes. He had finished the second drink and was
staring down into the glass, frowning.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“What is it, darling? What’s the matter?”
He had now become absolutely motionless, and he
kept his head down so that the light from the lamp beside him fell across the
upper part of his face, leaving the chin and mouth in shadow. She noticed there was a little muscle moving
near the corner of his left eye.
“This is
going to be a bit of a shock to you, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I’ve thought about it a good deal and
I’ve decided the only thing to do is tell you right away. I hope you won’t blame me too much.”
And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at
most, and she say very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed
horror as he went further and further away from her with each word.
“So there it is,” he added. “And I know it’s kind of a bad time to be
telling you, bet there simply wasn’t any other way. Of course I’ll give you money and see you’re
looked after. But there needn’t really
be any fuss. I hope not anyway. It wouldn’t be very good for my job.”
Her first instinct was not to believe any of
it, to reject it all. It occurred to her
that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she herself had imagined the whole
thing. Maybe, if she went about her
business and acted as though she hadn’t been listening, then later, when she
sort of woke up again, she might find none of it had ever happened.
“I’ll get the supper,” she managed to whisper,
and this time he didn’t stop her.
When she walked across the room she couldn’t
feel her feet touching the floor. She
couldn’t feel anything at all- except a slight nausea and a desire to
vomit. Everything was automatic now-down
the steps to the cellar, the light switch, the deep freeze, the hand inside the
cabinet taking hold of the first object it met.
She lifted it out, and looked at it.
It was wrapped in paper, so she took off the paper and looked at it again.
All right then, they would have lamb for
supper. She carried it upstairs, holding
the thin bone-end of it with both her hands, and as she went through the
living-room, she saw him standing over by the window with his back to her, and
she stopped.
“For God’s sake,” he said, hearing her, but not
turning round. “Don’t make supper for
me. I’m going out.”
At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up
behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in
the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head.
She might just as well have hit him with a
steel club.
She stepped back a pace, waiting, and the funny
thing was that he remained standing there for at least four or five seconds,
gently swaying. Then he crashed to the
carpet.
The
violence of the crash, the noise, the small table overturning, helped bring her
out of he shock. She came out slowly,
feeling cold and surprised, and she stood for a while blinking at the body,
still holding the ridiculous piece of meat tight with both hands.
All right, she told herself. So I’ve killed him.
It was extraordinary, now, how clear her mind
became all of a sudden. She began
thinking very fast. As the wife of a
detective, she knew quite well what the penalty would be. That was fine. It made no difference to her. In fact, it would be a relief. On the other hand, what about the child? What were the laws about murderers with
unborn children? Did they kill then
both-mother and child? Or did they wait
until the tenth month? What did they do?
Mary Maloney didn’t know. And she certainly wasn’t prepared to take a
chance.
She carried the meat into the kitchen, placed
it in a pan, turned the oven on high, and shoved t inside. Then she washed her hands and ran upstairs to
the bedroom. She sat down before the
mirror, tidied her hair, touched up her lops and face. She tried a smile. It came out rather peculiar. She tried again.
“Hullo Sam,” she said brightly, aloud.
The voice sounded peculiar too.
“I want some potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.”
That was better. Both the smile and the voice were coming out
better now. She rehearsed it several
times more. Then she ran downstairs,
took her coat, went out the back door, down the garden, into the street.
It wasn’t six o’clock yet and the lights were
still on in the grocery shop.
“Hullo Sam,” she said brightly, smiling at the
man behind the counter.
“Why, good evening, Mrs. Maloney. How’re you?”
“I want some potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.”
The man turned and reached up behind him on the
shelf for the peas.
“Patrick’s decided he’s tired and doesn’t want
to eat out tonight,” she told him. “We
usually go out Thursdays, you know, and now he’s caught me without any
vegetables in the house.”
“Then how about meat, Mrs. Maloney?”
“No, I’ve got meat, thanks. I got a nice leg of lamb from the freezer.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know much like cooking it frozen, Sam,
but I’m taking a chance on it this time.
You think it’ll be all right?”
“Personally,” the grocer said, “I don’t believe
it makes any difference. You want these
Idaho potatoes?”
“Oh yes, that’ll be fine. Two of those.”
“Anything else?” The grocer cocked his head on
one side, looking at her pleasantly.
“How about afterwards? What you
going to give him for afterwards?”
“Well-what would you suggest, Sam?”
The man glanced around his shop. “How about a nice big slice of
cheesecake? I know he likes that.”
“Perfect,” she said. “He loves it.”
And when it was all wrapped and she had paid,
she put on her brightest smile and said, “Thank you, Sam. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Maloney. And thank you.”
And now, she told herself as she hurried back,
all she was doing now, she was returning home to her husband and he was waiting
for his supper; and she must cook it good, and make it as tasty as possible
because the poor man was tired; and if, when she entered the house, she
happened to find anything unusual, or tragic, or terrible, then naturally it
would be a shock and she’d become frantic with grief and horror. Mind you, she wasn’t expecting to find
anything. She was just going home with
the vegetables. Mrs. Patrick Maloney going home with the vegetables on Thursday
evening to cook supper for her husband.
That’s the way, she told herself. Do everything right and natural. Keep things absolutely natural and there’ll
be no need for any acting at all.
Therefore, when she entered the kitchen by the
back door, she was humming a little tune to herself and smiling.
“Patrick!” she called. “How are you, darling?”
She put the parcel down on the table and went
through into the living room; and when she saw him lying there on the floor
with his legs doubled up and one arm twisted back underneath his body, it
really was rather a shock. All the old
love and longing for him welled up inside her, and she ran over to him, knelt
down beside him, and began to cry her heart out. It was easy.
No acting was necessary.
A few minutes later she got up and went to the
phone. She know the number of the police
station, and when the man at the other end answered, she cried to him,
“Quick! Come quick! Patrick’s dead!”
“Who’s speaking?”
“Mrs. Maloney.
Mrs. Patrick Maloney.”
“You mean Patrick Maloney’s dead?”
“I think so,” she sobbed. “He’s lying on the floor and I think he’s
dead.”
“Be right over,” the man said.
The car came very quickly, and when she opened
the front door, two policeman walked in.
She know them both-she know nearly all the man at that precinct-and she
fell right into a chair, then went over to join the other one, who was called
O’Malley, kneeling by the body.
“Is he dead?” she cried.
“I’m afraid he is. What happened?”
Briefly, she told her story about going out to
the grocer and coming back to find him on the floor. While she was talking, crying and talking,
Noonan discovered a small patch of congealed blood on the dead man’s head. He showed it to O’Malley who got up at once
and hurried to the phone.
Soon, other men began to come into the
house. First a doctor, then two
detectives, one of whom she know by name.
Later, a police photographer arrived and took pictures, and a man who
know about fingerprints. There was a
great deal of whispering and muttering beside the corpse, and the detectives
kept asking her a lot of questions. But
they always treated her kindly. She told
her story again, this time right from the beginning, when Patrick had come in,
and she was sewing, and he was tired, so tired he hadn’t wanted to go out for
supper. She told how she’d put the meat
in the oven-”it’s there now, cooking”- and how she’d slopped out to the grocer
for vegetables, and come back to find him lying on the floor.
Which grocer?” one of the detectives asked.
She told him, and he turned and whispered
something to the other detective who immediately went outside into the street.
In fifteen minutes he was back with a page of
notes, and there was more whispering, and through her sobbing she heard a few
of the whispered phrases-”...acted quite normal...very cheerful...wanted to
give him a good supper…peas...cheesecake...impossible that she...”
After a while, the photographer and the doctor
departed and two other men came in and took the corpse away on a
stretcher. Then the fingerprint man went
away. The two detectives remained, and
so did the two policeman. They were
exceptionally nice to her, and Jack Noonan asked if she wouldn’t rather go
somewhere else, to her sister’s house perhaps, or to his own wife who would
take care of her and put her up for the night.
No, she said.
She didn’t feel she could move even a yard at the moment. Would they mind awfully of she stayed just
where she was until she felt better. She
didn’t feel too good at the moment, she really didn’t.
Then hadn’t she better lie down on the
bed? Jack Noonan asked.
No, she said.
She’d like to stay right where she was, in this chair. A little later, perhaps, when she felt
better, she would move.
So they left her there while they went about
their business, searching the house.
Occasionally on of the detectives asked her another question. Sometimes Jack Noonan spoke at her gently as
he passed by. Her husband, he told her,
had been killed by a blow on the back of the head administered with a heavy
blunt instrument, almost certainly a large piece of metal. They were looking for the weapon. The murderer may have taken it with him, but
on the other hand he may have thrown it away or hidden it somewhere on the
premises.
“It’s the old story,” he said. “Get the weapon, and you’ve got the man.”
Later, one of the detectives came up and sat
beside her. Did she know, he asked, of
anything in the house that could’ve been used as the weapon? Would she mind having a look around to see if
anything was missing-a very big spanner, for example, or a heavy metal vase.
They didn’t have any heavy metal vases, she
said.
“Or a big spanner?”
She didn’t think they had a big spanner. But there might be some things like that in
the garage.
The search went on. She knew that there were other policemen in
the garden all around the house. She
could hear their footsteps on the gravel outside, and sometimes she saw a flash
of a torch through a chink in the curtains.
It began to get late, nearly nine she noticed by the clock on the
mantle. The four men searching the rooms
seemed to be growing weary, a trifle exasperated.
“Jack,” she said, the next tome Sergeant Noonan
went by. “Would you mind giving me a
drink?”
“Sure I’ll give you a drink. You mean this whiskey?”
“Yes please.
But just a small one. It might
make me feel better.”
He handed her the glass.
“Why don’t you have one yourself,” she
said. “You must be awfully tired. Please do.
You’ve been very good to me.”
“Well,” he answered. “It’s not strictly allowed, but I might take
just a drop to keep me going.”
One by one the others came in and were
persuaded to take a little nip of whiskey.
They stood around rather awkwardly with the drinks in their hands,
uncomfortable in her presence, trying to say consoling things to her. Sergeant Noonan wandered into the kitchen,
come out quickly and said, “Look, Mrs. Maloney.
You know that oven of yours is still on, and the meat still inside.”
“Oh dear me!” she cried. “So it is!”
“I better turn it off for you, hadn’t I?”
“Will you do that, Jack. Thank you so much.”
When the sergeant returned the second time, she
looked at him with her large, dark tearful eyes. “Jack Noonan,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Would you do me a small favor-you and these
others?”
“We can try, Mrs. Maloney.”
“Well,” she said. “Here you all are, and good friends of dear
Patrick’s too, and helping to catch the man who killed him. You must be terrible hungry by now because
it’s long past your suppertime, and I know Patrick would never forgive me, God
bless his soul, if I allowed you to remain in his house without offering you
decent hospitality. Why don’t you eat up
that lamb that’s in the oven. It’ll be
cooked just right by now.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sergeant Noonan said.
“Please,” she begged. “Please eat it. Personally I couldn’t tough a thing,
certainly not what’s been in the house when he was here. But it’s all right for you. It’d be a favor to me if you’d eat it
up. Then you can go on with your work
again afterwards.”
There was a good deal of hesitating among the
four policemen, but they were clearly hungry, and in the end they were
persuaded to go into the kitchen and help themselves. The woman stayed where she was, listening to
them speaking among themselves, their voices thick and sloppy because their
mouths were full of meat.
“Have some more, Charlie?”
“No.
Better not finish it.”
“She wants us to finish it. She said so. Be doing her a favor.”
“Okay then.
Give me some more.”
“That’s the hell of a big club the gut must’ve
used to hit poor Patrick,” one of them was saying. “The doc says his skull was smashed all to
pieces just like from a sledgehammer.”
“That’s why it ought to be easy to find.”
“Exactly what I say.”
“Whoever done it, they’re not going to be
carrying a thing like that around with them longer than they need.”
One of them belched.
“Personally, I think it’s right here on the
premises.”
“Probably right under our very noses. What you think, Jack?”
And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to
giggle.
