The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He just laughs. “You’re the one who should be reported. Have you thought about early retirement?”

  An almighty hubbub breaks out. Before I can quell the riot a deep groan emanates from the floor and does the job for me.

  A couple of students haul Spotty to his feet. He’s pale and groggy with dark smudges for eye sockets. Supported by his friends like a drunk, he glares at me.

  I wag my finger at him. “Are you sure you’re cut out for forensic medicine, young man? It takes a certain type of character, you know. The ability to detach is essential. You failed to detach.”

  “That’s it, I’ve had enough,” says Woolly Hat. “I’m off.” He shoves his headgear back on and strides out, followed by his pathetic cohort.

  For a few minutes I can hardly breathe. I feel as if I’ve been punched in the stomach. Then I rub my aching eyes, put my glasses back on.

  The room looks like a butcher’s shop. The cadaver is a hollow gourd, its innards scooped out and discarded. There are bloody organs spilling out of the bucket, the floor is slippery with body fluids. The stench of death is overwhelming. Vagal inhibition. I wish I’d thought of that. Far less messy. But that night, after the ballet, sheer force of professional habit made me reach for a knife . . .

  “I have supped full with horrors,” I murmur.

  Taking a deep breath I peel off my scarlet-stained gloves and pick up the manila folder. Threatened to leave abusive partner . . . found hanging . . . partner served in Gulf War . . . extensive collection of martial arts films . . . is death suspicious? Report needed asap.

  I fish my dictaphone from my pocket. I outline the findings of the post-mortem and state my interpretation of the evidence. “I conclude that lack of inflammation at site of rope marks indicates deliberate compression of neck leading to inhibition of the vagus nerve, stopping the heart and causing death within seconds.”

  It takes some time to tidy up and finish my paperwork. When everything is done I stroll out to the car park.

  It’s cold outside, colder than the mortuary, and already growing dark. A flock of rooks circle high over the grounds and land in perfect sequence on the branches of the tall tree they have made their home. Their cawing cries sound like the cackling of witches on a misty heath.

  Or the scrape of knife on bone.

  Shaking my head I muse on the events of the afternoon. Young people, these days. Quite frankly, I could cheerfully murder the lot of them.

  STAR’S JAR

  Kate Horsley

  CONRAD MULONDO SLOUCHED into Kisendi one hot Wednesday when the red dust stuck to the sweat of knees and napes and the blue turaco called raucously from the thorn tree. His wife, Star, hadn’t seen him in weeks. She blinked at the shine of his black shoes in the sunlight, the glare of his white dress shirt.

  Conrad always wore nice clothes when he came back to her. They hugged and Star felt ashamed of her scruffy pink gomesi and cropped hair. Conrad let go of her and sat on the sofa, his hand smoothing the doilies Star’s mother had given them for their kwanjula. He cast an eye over the cement walls he’d been promising to paint, the wheelbarrow full of baked-mud bricks.

  “Been moving round trying to make a shilling so you can fix this place.”

  “Kulikayo, Conrad. Thought you were lost,” said Star and walked to the cupboard of a kitchen.

  She’d been calling Conrad all the names God didn’t like her using, but as she emptied the sachet of powder into a jug, she hummed under her breath. There was a mirror sticker on the side of the clapped-out fridge. She peeked round and saw the blue-black sheen of her cheeks, her straight white teeth.

  “Still pretty.”

  Over the scent of hot earth and burnt grass, Star could smell roasting maize. She kicked the back door open, waved to the bicycle vendor blaring speeded-up Uganda gospel down the potholed main road. Her boys kicked a saggy football across the scrub-grass yard and the baby wailed in a washtub.

  “Joyce, rinse the soap from her eyes!” shouted Star to her eldest girl.

  Star would take a jerry can bath then spend the afternoon making love to Conrad. That’s what hot days were for. She stirred the orange soda with a spoon and pulled two Daffy Duck glasses from the washing tub. With a glass in each hand and her big toe curled round the edge of the living-room door, Star stopped like lizard caught in torchlight.

  “I need to change for tonight,” said a woman’s voice.

  “Well, keep your bum there and gossip with her while I get the money.”

  Star bit her lip and walked into the living room. Conrad started up when he saw her then sat back slightly away from the girl Star recognized as Mukasa Olive. She pushed one glass into Conrad’s hand, pushed the other at Olive who looked down in disgust at a fly creeping round the rim.

  “Hello, Mrs Mulondo,” said Olive. Her smooth, brown face was framed with crisp curls of fake hair, silver-beaded at the scalp. Conrad saw Star looking Olive up and down and smirked.

  “She’s beautiful out of her school uniform,” he said.

  Star held her back very straight as if she might get taller by doing so. Conrad set his drink down on the table next to him.

  “Can I wash my hands, Star?”

  A baby cockroach slurped at the sweat balling off Conrad’s glass.

  “If you can find the tub.”

  Conrad usually fought with Star, but she’d seen him be polite to dupes. She wilted on to the edge of the armchair and Olive started in.

  “We’re taking that place across from you so Conrad can be near . . .”

  “I’d better find him some soap,” snapped Star.

  He wasn’t in the bathroom, but belly down on the dirt floor of the messy bedroom. The lid of their money tin clunked and he wriggled from under the bed. Star sat down on the bed and began to cry.

  “I can’t even afford matoke, Conrad.”

  He sat next to her and hugged her awkwardly while she wiped at her eyes.

  “Life’s tough, Star. Robert hasn’t paid me yet . . .”

  “You said there’s cash in Kisendi for those in the know . . .”

  Conrad laughed. “That’s true. Give me time.” He kissed her on the nose.

  Star took Conrad’s face between her hands and kissed his mouth. She lay back on the pink, plush coverlet with Goofy stitched into it and pulled him on top of her. He kissed her, pushed his hand between her thighs. She tugged his shirt up and stroked his back.

  “Conrad!” shouted Olive from the living room.

  “I have to go,” said Conrad. He tucked in his shirt. “Welaba, Star.”

  Star lay where she was, her skirt round her hips. The wind-up radio was gone. Olive’s shrill giggle sounded through the window. Star reached under the bed for the tin. It was empty. Her family would go hungry tonight. Conrad had left her six times and given her a child on every return.

  “This time he won’t come back. And he won’t pay me back either.”

  Star went to the kitchen and found a Royco jar with the label half washed off. She dumped the beef powder into a five-shilling bag and stuffed it in the rusted metal rack with her tubs of this and that spice.

  “You’ll be better off in here,” she said.

  In the living room, their faded wedding photo was the one ornament. There the happy couple stood: Star in her gold changing dress and Conrad in his blue suit that everybody said looked smart. Star laughed as she lifted the photograph down, felt happy yanking the picture from its frame and ripping it in two. She made small tears around Conrad’s body until she had a jagged cut out of her husband. He fitted perfectly in the Royco jar.

  With the old T-shirt of Conrad’s she used as a dish rag, Star rubbed at the white bottom of the label till the jar came clean and she could see her husband’s wedding day face.

  For the other ingredients, Star had to wait until night when her children were jumbled together in bed. Odd sighs and belly rumbles told her that none of them were really asleep. They hadn’t eaten more than posho for a week and the s
mell of Mama Esther frying chicken next door had them drooling on their bed sheet.

  Star took a black plastic bag and crept into Esther’s unkempt sorghum patch. She caught a grasshopper – more by luck than skill – and dropped it cricicring into the bag. Nearby, a white stone shone in the moonlight, so she picked that too, then a pinch of red clay, a chicken feather, a henna flower crushed between her fingers ’til it bled.

  On the smoothed-mud doorstep she swept so carefully each morning, Star made her mother’s recipe: the cricicring nsenene (like a tiny chicken when you roasted it), the chicoco feather smeared with orange henna, the white stone blooded with red earth.

  The thorn tree in her yard had snared the moon.

  “Don’t feel stressed,” Star told it, “you always slip out of that tree.”

  It was an old moon, half chewed down. Beneath it, Conrad once bit her ear and told her he loved her. Star took Conrad from his glass house and ran her thumb over his face. A sob shook her by the ribs and the last ingredient fell into the Royco jar, bitter and salt. She put him back and screwed the lid shut.

  “What’s Tata’s picture doing in there?”

  It was Joyce. She sat down next to Star and pulled her nightshirt over her knees. Star wiped her wet face on the sleeve of her T-shirt and thought. At thirteen, Joyce was in the church choir and loved Jesus like a brother, nothing like either of her parents.

  “Tata left us again,” said Star.

  She pulled Joyce’s beaded braid, but the stubborn girl moved her head away.

  “Promise you’re not going to hurt him, Mama?”

  “Of course I won’t hurt him, Joyce. I love him,” she replied, aware that her mother had spoken those very same words the week Star’s own Tata died.

  Star waited until Joyce was back in bed. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, but the rent was overdue and Conrad would be too busy with Olive to find food for them. He was always bragging that there was a pile of money to be found in Kisendi and rubbing the side of his nose to show he knew where. He just needed a push. She fished in her bra for her last 300 shilling and placed them on the lid of the Royco jar.

  Clutching Conrad and the shillings to her breast, Star went round the back of her house where bitter tomatoes grew wild. She dug down to the roots and in a shallow grave, buried the money and the jar.

  “Draw him to money,” she told it.

  The image she held in her head sent chills through her guts and made her heart pound.

  Conrad and the boys were outside the one-room police station playing poker on a fold-out table. Clumps of black hair blew across from Sandra’s Salon and gathered at the belly of a dog dying in the middle of the dirt path. The mutt’s demise was the closest thing to action since the pool hall caught fire. Conrad had a book on how long the corpse would stay there.

  There was no crime in Kisendi because two years back Paddy the thief stole Robert’s TV and ended up gut-shot in the swamp. No one stole after that except for Robert. It was said he kept wads of bills down the toilet and hidden in his roof. He was Chief of Police, so he took what he liked from the villagers. Right now he was doing the bribe-rounds on the Celtel shacks that mildewed the main road.

  Conrad thought about Paddy’s body, the sour papyrus stench, how the bloated face gleamed when their torches flicked over it. Robert told them where to start looking and arrested no one for the crime.

  “He wouldn’t got burned anyhow if he’d stayed in Kisendi.”

  Conrad shuddered. The words gut-shot and swamp made him shit himself. Since that night Conrad and Jackson fenced the odd radio but mainly they just played cards. He stole a look at Jackson’s hand – well, well, a pair of Queens! Jackson had been in the toilet for hours and he was holding up the game. But these days he was edgy, up to something for sure and not sharing it. Maybe he knew where Robert kept his stash. God knows, Conrad could use the money what with six kids and a new wife. Everybody seemed to get a piece except for him.

  It would be funny to sneak up on Jackson, see what he was up to. Conrad didn’t usually play jokes but today the urge was irresistible. He stuffed his cards in his pocket and went round the back. There was a row of cubicles with wooden doors and padlocks. The sow lived in one, her farrow making a motorcycle-engine noise every feeding time.

  The toilet cubicle was next door to the pigpen and the door was ajar. Conrad drew out his revolver and used the muzzle to nose it open. A billow of flies hit him in the face but the cubicle was empty. Jackson must have taken a long call because it stank more than usual in there and he’d left the padlock on the ledge, the toilet roll unfurled and soaking piss from the floor. Robert would kill them if he found the place like this.

  Conrad bent to pick the roll up and saw a flash of white down the squat hole. He set his gun on a plank and hunkered down to look closer. He could still hardly see it in the stinking dark, so he shut his mouth and pearl-diver-like ducked his head parallel with the hole. It was a Capital Shopper Market bag hanging from the back plank of the latrine.

  There was his piece.

  He reached in the hole and yanked the bag free. His foot slipped in a smear of shit and the gun flew in the hole with a splash. Conrad laughed at the sound. He felt drunk and later when he found himself up on the iron roof of Robert’s barn, he giggled. This was a bold move and about time. He crawled over the corrugated metal slowly slowly, listened to it tick as the heat of day drained away. The banana leaves whispered to him and a gust of warm wind peppered his face with dust. There was another bag of money hidden in the storm drain. He peered at it, reached down.

  Back at the house, Olive had her feet up in front of the TV. She was watching a Nigerian movie while the pink paint on her toenails dried.

  “You’re late,” she said, “and you’re filthy. Where’ve you been?”

  “I dunno,” said Conrad and began to cry like he sometimes did when he was badly hungover. He nuzzled the neck of her dress.

  “Are you cheating on me?” Olive landed him one on the ear.

  “Don’t hit me. My head is paining!” he moaned.

  Olive pushed him away with a cluck of disgust and switched off the TV.

  What had kept him out ’til 10 o’clock? He struggled to sort his head out but couldn’t make out more than an image here and there like strobes on dancing bodies in a karaoke club. He saw his fingers brrr a Nightjar’s song through worn green bills. He teetered on a roof one minute and the next fell on his knees in the bush to dig.

  Conrad looked at his dirty nails. Something else was horribly wrong. He groped his trouser waist.

  Where in Jesus’ name was his gun?

  The next morning, Star woke with a nervous feeling. She didn’t dress or even put on her flip-f ops, just ran barefoot to the bitter tomato bush. With her hands, she dug around the roots. There, sure enough, was the black plastic bag full of money. She held it to her face. It was dirty, but she kissed it.

  It rained for weeks after that. The wet charmed mosquitoes out of the papyrus swamp, drove the white ants from their hills and into the village. Men snatched ants from the air, pulled off the wings and ate the sweet flesh. Star’s children caught them in cupped hands for her to fry.

  Star pulled a yellow bag over her head to protect her new braids and went to the patch of dirt where green plantains and charcoal lay in sloppy piles. She bought coal and matches so she could light her burner without begging fire from Mama Esther. At the take-out shack, she got a bag of chicken and chapattis. When the power went out for load-shedding, they sat around the paraffin lamp and let it burn while they sucked the faintest flavours from thighbones.

  Star wasn’t in the habit of saving and most of the tomato-bush-money went into school fees. The first day her kids left for school, Star had time to make herself sweet porridge, feed the baby and scrub the step. She put on her new red dress with the patent leather pumps. Why not brag a little now that she could? She was tying the baby round her waist when a woman’s voice shouted from the yard.

  �
�Let me first come!” called Star.

  “Eh, eh. I have all day,” grumbled the voice.

  Star finished the knot at her waist and went out. There in a blue plastic chair sat Olive. She was playing with a mobile phone Star recognized.

  Olive looked over Star’s red dress and shoes and clucked.

  “I know he’s paying you, Star. Your kids have new shoes while I can’t get money for lard. You’ve fooled him and I’ll find out how.”

  “What I have, I earned,” Star retorted. She padlocked the door and went to the shops.

  When Star returned a few hours later, Olive was in the blue chair drinking a can of soda. She’d placed the chair under the thorn tree to shade herself.

  Star set her charcoal burner out and brought out the blue tub, a bag of potatoes and her knife. Olive watched Star peel with eyes half-closed and the neighbours peered around their net curtains. The baby crawled over to Olive and played with the strap of her sandal. Olive wasn’t used to babies. As the moon rose, she stretched from the chair and stuffed the phone into her bra.

  “You keep the ring, Star, I’ll keep the man. I’ll get that money back, too.”

  Olive kicked the soda can so hard it bounced off the step and hit the baby in the arm. Star cradled her and made soothing noises. She picked up the coke can and crushed it with her foot. In the bedroom, she laid the baby on the coverlet, then pulled out the jar and pressed her cheek against the cool lid.

  “Your Olive is a bad woman, Conrad. She came to my house and hurt our baby.”

  The soda can had a coin-shaped flatness.

  “Draw him from Olive,” she told the jar and slipped the can underneath it.

  She held a very pleasing image in her head.

  When her children caught the matatu to school, Star went to the timber lean-to where Margret sold onions and green peppers. Later she would make a stew and cast into the pot the small bitter tomatoes that kept her pressure down.