The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The forensics were clean, of course. The fire department and the Centre for Forensic Sciences had done sterling work there, as usual. These gas explosions were unfortunately commonplace in some of the older houses, where the owners might not have had their furnaces serviced or replaced for a long time, as had happened at the house on Silver Birch. An accident waiting to happen.

  But police work, thank God, wasn’t only a matter of forensics. There were other considerations here. Three of them.

  Again, Aiken went through the files and jotted down his thoughts. Outside on College Street it was raining, and if he looked out of his window all he could see were the tops of umbrellas. A streetcar rumbled by, sparks flashing from the overhead wire. Cars splashed up water from the gutters.

  First of all, Aiken noted, the victims hadn’t been husband and wife, as the investigators and media had first thought. The husband, Lloyd Francis, had flown back from a business trip to Vancouver – giving himself a nice alibi, by the way – as soon as he had heard the news the following day, and he was doubly distraught to find out that not only was his wife dead, but that she had died in bed with another man.

  No, Lloyd had said, he had no idea who the man was, but it hadn’t taken a Sherlock Holmes to discover that his name was Ray Lanagan, and that he was a sometime actor and sometime petty crook, with a record of minor fraud and con jobs. Lanagan had been clean for the past three years, relying mostly on TV commercials and bit parts in series like Da Vinci’s Inquest, before CBC canned it, and The Murdoch Mysteries. But Aiken knew that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t been up to something. He just hadn’t got caught. Well, he had definitely been up to one thing – screwing Lloyd Francis’s wife – and the penalty for that had been far more severe than for any other offence he had ever committed. He might have been after the broad’s money, too, Aiken speculated, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to get that now.

  The second thing that bothered Aiken was the insurance and the money angle in general. Not only were the house and Laura Francis’s life insured for hefty sums, but there was the post-production company, which was just starting to turn a good profit, and Laura’s inheritance, which was still a considerable sum, tied up in stocks and bonds and other investments. Whoever got his hands on all of that would be very rich indeed.

  And then there was Lloyd Francis himself. The young beat cop who rang the alarm bell had thought there was something odd about him when he had accompanied Lloyd to the ruins of the house. Nothing obvious, nothing he could put his finger on, of course, but just that indefinable policeman’s itch, the feeling you get when it doesn’t all add up, like when the soundtrack doesn’t synchronize with the picture in a movie. Aiken hadn’t talked to Lloyd Francis yet, but he was beginning to think it was about time.

  Because finally there was the one clear and indisputable fact that linked everything else, like the magnet that makes a pattern out of iron filings: Lloyd Francis had spent five years working as a heating and air-conditioning serviceman from just after he left school until his early twenties. And if you knew that much about gas furnaces, Aiken surmised, then you didn’t have to bloody well be there when one blew up. You could be in Vancouver, for example.

  Lloyd felt a little shaken after the policeman’s visit, but he still believed he’d held his own. One thing was clear, and that was that they had done a lot of checking, not only into his background, but also into the dead man’s, Ray Lanagan. What on earth had Laura seen in such a loser? The man had petty criminal stamped all over him.

  But what had worried Lloyd most of all was the knowledge that the man, Aiken, seemed to have about his own past, especially his heating and air-conditioning work. Not only did the police know he had done that for five years, but they seemed to know every job he had been on, every problem he had solved, the brand name of every furnace he had ever serviced. It was all rather overwhelming. Lloyd hadn’t lied about it, hadn’t tried to deny any of it – that would have been a sure way of sharpening their suspicions even more – but the truth painted the picture of a man easily capable of rigging the type of furnace in the Silver Birch house until it blew up on the first cold snap of the year.

  Luckily, Lloyd knew they had absolutely no forensic evidence. If there had been any, which he doubted, it would have been obliterated by the fire. All he had to do was stick to his story, and they would never be able to prove a thing. Suspicion was all very well, but it wasn’t sufficient grounds for a murder charge.

  After the funeral, he had lain low in a sublet condominium at Victoria Park and Danforth, opposite Shopper’s World. At night the streets were noisy and a little edgy, Lloyd felt, the kind of area where you might easily get mugged if you weren’t careful. More than once he had had the disconcerting feeling that he was being followed, but he told himself not to be paranoid. He wouldn’t be here for long. After a suitable period of mourning he would go to Vancouver and decide he couldn’t face returning to the city where his poor wife met such a terrible death. He still had a few colleagues who would regret his decision to leave, perhaps, but there wasn’t really anybody left in Toronto to care that much about Lloyd Francis and what happened to him. At the moment, they all thought he was a bit depressed, “getting over his loss”. Soon he would be free to “meet” Anne-Marie and start a new life. The money should be all his by then, too, once the lawyers and accountants had finished with it. Never again would he have to listen to his wife reminding where his wealth and success came from.

  The Silver Birch explosion had not only destroyed Lloyd’s house and wife, it had also destroyed his car, a silver Toyota SUV, and he wasn’t going to bother replacing it until he moved to Vancouver, where he’d probably buy a nice little red sports car. He still popped into the studios occasionally, mostly to see how things were going, and luckily his temporary accommodation was close to the Victoria Park subway. He soon found he didn’t mind taking the TTC to work and back. In fact, he rather enjoyed it. They played classical music at the station to keep away the hooligans. If he got a seat on the train, he would read a book, and if he didn’t, he would drift off into thoughts of his sweet Anne-Marie.

  And so life went on, waiting, waiting for the time when he could decently and without arousing suspicion, make his move. The policeman didn’t return, obviously realizing that he had absolutely no chance of making a case against Lloyd without a confession, which he knew he wouldn’t get. It was late November now, arguably one of the grimmest months in Toronto, but at least the snow hadn’t come yet, just one dreary cold grey day after another.

  One such day Lloyd stood on the crowded eastbound platform at the St George subway station wondering if he dare make his move as early as next week. At least, he thought, he could “go away for a while”, maybe even until after Christmas. Surely that would be acceptable by now? People would understand that he couldn’t bear to spend his first Christmas without Laura in Toronto.

  He had just decided that he would do it when he saw the train come tearing into the station. In his excitement at the thought of seeing Anne-Marie again so soon, a sort of unconscious sense of urgency had carried him a little closer to the edge of the platform than he should have been, and the crowds jostled behind him. He felt something hard jab into the small of his back, and the next thing he knew, his legs buckled and he pitched forward. He couldn’t stop himself. He toppled in front of the oncoming train before the driver could do a thing. His last thought was of Anne-Marie waving goodbye to him at Vancouver International Airport, then the subway train smashed into him and its wheels shredded him to pieces.

  Someone in the crowd screamed and people started running back towards the exits. The frail-looking old man with the walking-stick who had been standing directly behind Lloyd turned to walk away calmly through the chaos, but before he could get very far, two scruffy-looking young men emerged from the throng and one took him by each arm. “No you don’t,” one of them said. “This way.” And they led him up to the street.

  Detective Bobby Aiken
played with the worry beads one of his colleagues had brought him back from a trip to Istanbul. Not that he was worried about anything. It was just a habit, and he found it very calming. It had, in fact, been a very good day.

  Not because of Lloyd Francis. Aiken didn’t really care one way or another about Francis’ death. In his eyes, Francis had been a cold-blooded murderer and he had got no less than he deserved. No, the thing that pleased Aiken was that the undercover detectives he had detailed to keep an eye on Francis had picked up Mickey the Croaker disguised as an old man at the St George subway station, having seen him push Francis with the sharp end of his walking-stick.

  Organized Crime had been after Mickey for many years now but had never managed to get anything on him. They knew that he usually worked for one of the big crime families in Montreal, and the way things were looking, he was just about ready to cut a deal: amnesty and the witness relocation plan for everything he knew about the Montreal operation, from the hits he had made to where the bodies were buried. Organized Crime were creaming their jeans over their good luck. It would mean a promotion for Bobby Aiken.

  The only thing that puzzled Aiken was why? What had Lloyd Francis done to upset the Mob? There was something missing, and it irked him that he might never uncover it now the main players were dead. Mickey the Croaker knew nothing, of course. He had simply been obeying orders, and killing Lloyd Francis meant nothing more to him than swatting a fly. Francis’s murder was more than likely connected with the post-production company, Aiken decided. It was well-known that the Mob had its fingers in the movie business, often for the purpose of money-laundering. A bit of digging around might uncover something more specific, but Aiken didn’t have the time. Besides, what did it matter now? Even if he didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together, things had worked out the right way. Lanagan and Francis were dead and Mickey the Croaker was about to sing. It was a shame about the wife, Laura. She had been a good-looking woman, from what Aiken had been able to tell from the family photographs, and it was a pity she had died so young. But those were the breaks. If she hadn’t being playing the beast with two backs with Lanagan in her own bed, for Christ’s sake, then she might still be alive today.

  It was definitely a good day, Aiken decided, pushing the papers aside. Even the weather had improved. He looked out of the window. Indian Summer had come to Toronto in November. The sun glinted on the apartment windows at College and Yonge and the office workers were out on the streets, men without jackets and women in sleeveless summer dresses. A streetcar rumbled by, heading for Main station. Main. Out near the Beaches. The boardwalk and the Queen Street cafés would be crowded and the dog-walkers would be out in force. Aiken thought maybe he’d take Jasper out there for a run later. You never knew who you might meet when you were walking your dog on the beach.

  THE VELOCITY OF BLAME

  Christopher Fowler

  “THE BEST WAY to get rid of a really big Cambodian cockroach is to wrap it in tissue paper, drop it in the toilet and pour Coco de Mer Body Butter over it so it can’t climb the walls of the bowl, because the buggers have clawed feet and can really shift. Even then, they sometimes manage to shuck off the paper and use it to climb back up out of the toilet into your bathroom.” That’s what Dorothy’s guidebook said. She was always reading me passages from the damned thing. It had a bunch of tips for dealing with the kind of problems you encounter over there. When they didn’t work, she added her own twists. It was one of those guidebooks obsessed with hygiene and the strength of the dollar, and so paranoid about being ripped off that you lost faith in human nature the longer you kept reading it. I made her throw it away when we decided to stay on.

  I’ll admit, it took us a while to get used to the bugs in South East Asia, but I thought they’d turn out to be the least of our problems. There would be other issues to deal with. The food, the people, the heat, the past, the politics. I should have added another problem to that list; lack of communication.

  We came to Siem Reap to do the tourist thing, hire bikes and see the temples of Angor Wat at sunset, climbing over the temples of Ta Keo and Ta Prohm, where great tree roots entwine the carvings until it’s impossible to tell what is hand-carved and what is natural. We wanted to ride elephants, hang out in bars where you could still smoke beneath slow-turning fans, drive along the endless arrow-straight roads to the floodplains of the Tonle Sap Lake, eat fat shrimps in villages that had survived through the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, but no one had told us about the people, how kind, placid and forgiving they were. No other country in the world could have survived so many horrors and still have found such power to forgive. It didn’t make sense to me, but then I come from a land that specializes in Christian vengeance.

  It was our first visit to South East Asia, and we immediately fell in love with the place.

  Siem Reap was little more than a dusty crossroads crowded with ringing bicycles, lined with cafés and little places where you could get a foot and shoulder massage. There were covered markets at each end of the town selling intricate wooden carvings, pirated books and gaudy silks, and barns where farmers sat on the floor noisily trading their produce, with their kids running everywhere, laughing and fooling around, the closest definition I’d ever seen of real community. That’s a word we’re fond of using at home, but there it means something entirely less friendly.

  After watching Chinese dealers testing precious stones that had been dug out of the mountains, running little blowtorches over gems to prove their integrity, I bought Dorothy a ruby for thirty dollars.

  “I’m not going to have this made into anything,” she said happily, “I just want to keep it somewhere in a box so I can look at it and remember.’

  Instead of frying ourselves by the hotel pool we wandered around the streets, where every merchant was calling out, trying to lure us into their store with special offers. Not so pushy that they were annoying, just doing business and quickly leaving us alone as soon as they realized we didn’t want to buy. Now that Cambodia was finally stable, the Russians and the French were competing to build along the town’s main road, and ugly concrete blocks were going up behind the 1930s colonnades. No plumbing, no drainage but plenty of internet access; welcome to the new frontier, where you could use an ATM machine but still had to step over duelling scorpions to do so. A national museum had opened, absurdly high-tech, half the interactive exhibits not functioning, as though some rich outsider had insisted that this was what the town needed to draw tourists. Less than a decade of peace and the nation was embracing its future with a kind of friendly ferocity, but you feared for the transition process, knowing that everything could still be lost overnight.

  And I was finally vacationing with my wife. Gail and Redmond had married and left home and were now living in Oakley, Virginia, which left me and Dorothy rattling around the house in Washington with too many bedrooms and memories. I’d been promising Dorothy that we’d eventually travel, but it proved harder to get away from work than I’d expected. After thirty-seven years of marriage, during which time we’d hardly ever left the country, I decided enough was enough and applied for two months’ leave, although I eventually had to take it unpaid. Of course, whatever time you pick to go away is never the right time, and this proved to be the case; there was an election pending and everyone was expected to help, but Dorothy put her foot down and told me she’d go by herself if I didn’t step away this time and make good on my promise to her. She said: “Politicians are like policemen, the work never stops and they never make much of a difference, so take a vacation.”

  So I booked the tickets and off we went.

  When I first saw the officials at Siem Reap airport emptying their collected visa-cash into leather suitcases right in front of the tourists who paid them, I’ll admit I thought the worst, that the corrupting influence of past dictators lived on – and maybe it does in other ways – but after that day I saw nothing else like it and we had a wonderful time.

  On one of our last trips o
ut beyond the river we found ourselves in a town almost completely surrounded by dense jungle. The Tonle Sap lake is tidal. For most of the year it’s barely three feet deep, but during the monsoon season it connects with the Mekon River and reverses its flow, flooding the surrounding plains and forests, filling a vast area with breeding fish. The Vietnamese families living in the floating villages at the lake’s edge aren’t much liked by the Cambodians, but on the whole everyone rubs along. The effluvial soil is rich and the landscape is lush with vegetation. On that day we stopped in a village so small that no one living in it could decide what it was called, and that was when we saw the house.

  It was just a white brick box in a small square of cleared grass, but the surrounding forest canopy glowed emerald even at noon, and it looked like the happiest place on earth. What’s more, the little house was available to rent. I mentioned it to Dorothy, who dismissed the idea at once, but I could see she was excited. A light had come into her eyes that I had not seen in years. Dorothy never went out without makeup and jewellery. She cared about appearances, and what people thought of her. She was concerned about making a good impression. It’s a Washington habit. But I could tell she relished the thought of not having to bother, even if it was just for a month.

  “Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a look,” she said finally, so we visited the owner, a tiny little old lady called Madame Nghor, and she showed us around. It was just about as basic as you can get. There was really just one room with a single small window, because the kitchen and toilet were kind of outside. They stood on a half-covered deck with a wood rail that overlooked the fields and the forest. There was also a plank terrace at the front facing the road. Life was lived mainly out of doors.