Prologue

Everyone dies. Most don’t know when. My wife, Laura, for example, does not realise that her time is up during the Lough Ree International Pike Festival.

I know because I’m going to kill her.

Despite evidence to the contrary (see above), I don’t think that I’m a bad person. I pay my taxes, walk our dog and I simply cannot empathise with those who lay an unkind hand on others. As a teacher (vice principal to be pedantic), I’ve reported abuses of all kinds when I’ve seen them. I could add that I was woke before it was a thing.

I’ve supported those who champion progressive causes. When I registered to vote in Ireland, I gave my Number One to presidential candidate Mary McAleese – and it wasn’t just because I fancied the girl who canvassed for her, a girl who soon became the reason why I remained in Ireland after graduating from Trinity. She, however, decided that saving whales was more important than saving our marriage.

That’s gratitude for you.

Laura, whom I married years later, once found my ex’s social media page. It depicted Michelle in a powerful twin-engine Zodiac, harassing a Japanese whaler off the Falkland Islands. She somehow had managed, in high seas, both to take a selfie and piss off Japan. Laura noted that my ex was having a bad hair day. I remarked that even a top-of-the-range GHD might struggle in a South Atlantic gale.

I slept in the spare room that night.

The mistake in speaking aloud was mine and plays no role in my wife’s imminent demise. Unlike the minke whales who writhe at the end of an explosives-tipped harpoon, her passing is going to be both swift and bloodless. She would be furious if I ruined her Egyptian cotton bedsheets. We couldn’t really afford them, but they do set off the room.

Murderers can be nice.

Although you probably shouldn’t turn your back on one.

I’ll not rejoice when it is done (I’m not a monster) but I anticipate learning to live with being a widower. My neighbours will gift buns. I’ll find tinfoil wrapped meals left in the porch. There will be talk of my stiff upper lip. I expect that I can overcome feeling guilty— I just don’t want a jury declaring it.

I plan to get away with it, BTW.

I’m therefore writing these notes for an audience of one.

Me.

Notes that will both document the evolution of this perfect crime and remind me why I set out on this homicidal pathway in case my resolve weakens. As someone from my home county once wrote:

“Conscience makes cowards of us all.”

Shakespeare himself would surely sympathise as these notes sink with the memory card below the surface of the lake (remember when I mentioned about getting away with it?). My tragedy is that this story will never grace the pages of The Times Literary Supplement. It’s fated to remain forever lost in time, like Homer’s Margites or Roy Batty’s memories of the Tannhäuser gate, at the end of Blade Runner.

No one can ever know how I reduced the world’s population (7.8 billion) by just one.