The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “So what do you want me to do?” I says to the geezer.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  “Well, you know, it’s all about degrees, ain’t it, mate.”

  He nods, like he understands what I’m getting at.

  “I got a price list here, if you wanna gander.”

  I get me “menu”, as I like to call it, out me other pocket. It’s a bit screwed up and the writing’s a bit smudged where I’ve had me hand in me pocket, but it’ll do.

  I hand it over to him. It’s me basic list, but I can get as creative as they want, for the right money, if you know what I mean.

  He puts down the contract what he’s been holdin and has a close look at me list. Up and down. Got a face on him like a kid in a sweet shop.

  “What’s this?” he says, showin me the list, his face all screwed up. “Andycappin?”

  “Andycappin. You know, break their legs, feet, toes, whatever you want. Andycappin.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Handicapping.”

  “That’s right,” I says. “Andycappin,” I take me list off him and start reading it out. “Andycappin, neecappin, kidnappin.”

  I tell him the kidnappin thing ain’t their kids and that. I don’t do none of that shit. I got me morals. I’m dead serious when I say that to him. I ain’t no perv or nothing.

  “They’re me Level Ones,” I says. “Then it’s up a level to your basic shootin and your stabbin.”

  I look dead in his eyes. Hold him there.

  “So, what’ll it be?” I says.

  He’s gone all quiet. He’s thinkin hard on whether he really wants what he thinks he wants. They all go like this when I show em the list. I ain’t got no truck with timewasters, see, so I lay it on pretty thick at this stage.

  But, to his credit, he comes up smilin.

  “I want him gone, Mr Splinters. Taken out. I’m prepared to pay whatever it takes.”

  That’s what I like to hear.

  I nudge the contract across the table towards him.

  “Have a read of that, and sign at the bottom, please, mate.”

  He gives it a quick once-over and asks me for the pen.

  “Don’t you wanna read the small print, you know, acquaint yourself with all the particulars?” I says.

  And he don’t. He takes the pen and he signs and he shakes me hand and he’s off.

  Never even read the small print.

  * * *

  Briscoe tipped me off this Hammond geezer worked late at the office on a Thursday. In the industrial park on the outside of town. So here I am. Behind a stack of pallets. Waitin. All blacked up, I am. Not like Al Jolson or nothing, I mean, just me clothes. The only light’s from the office, so when that goes out it’ll be dark as fuck out here.

  I got me shooter down the front of me trousers. Don’t even know what it is, you know, the make or nothing. Never been interested. Got it second-hand off Twinkles MacKenzie from the bookies. I never give him nothing for it, but I slice him off a wedge whenever it comes into play, like. Got a silencer and everything. Never let me down yet, it hasn’t.

  The light in the office goes out. Pitch black. Door opens. Door shuts. Locks up. Here he comes. I wait till he’s just passed before I make me move. Then I jump him. Before he knows it, he’s got his face in the dust and me knee in his back. I pull the shooter out the front of me trousers. Touch it to where the back of his head meets his neck, pointin up a bit.

  Phht. Phht. Job done.

  I’m just gettin up when I see something move from behind another load of pallets to me left. A shadow in the dark. Comes straight for me, holdin out his hand. That Briscoe bloke. The fuckin idiot. Wanted to see his boss go down in a right load of bullets like off the Westerns. Right made up, he is.

  “Mr Splinters, this is the happiest day of my life. You’ve no idea how—”

  He’s stopped. Cos I’m pointin the gun in his face. He’s proper shittin it. To be expected, I suppose. Given his situation.

  One. Two. Three.

  “Did you not read the small print, Mr Briscoe?” I says, knowin he knows I know he never.

  He shakes his head. Slow and scared. I move the shooter to the middle of his forehead.

  I know this one off by heart. Thought it up meself when I was talkin the whole deal over with Ronnie one night in The Rabbits.

  “In the event of the punter – that’s you – turnin up to have a gander at the contracted party – that’s me – doin the business, the contracted party – that’s me again – is beholden unto himself to do the punter in by any means necessary. That’s you again, I’m afraid, Mr Briscoe.”

  I stuck this one in the small print as a safeguard, if you like. Happens more often than you think. Matrimonial cases, normally. Want to see their cheatin other half get what’s comin to em. But I can’t have no witnesses, see. Gotta look after meself. No other cunt’s goin to.

  That’s the thing with the small print. The thing this Briscoe bloke ain’t counted on. All them words at the bottom that are too little to see, if you don’t keep your eyes peeled, it’s them little words what’s gonna fuck you up. Cos they’re too easy to overlook. That’s what it is. We don’t pay enough attention. We just wanna go on our merry little way, thinkin everything’s gonna be all right. But it ain’t.

  It’s like when you’re born. You come bouncin out, eyes full of wonder. You’ve chose your mum and you’ve chose your dad. You’ve read the contract: go to school – get a job – get married – two kids, one boy, one girl. And you live happily ever after.

  Piece of piss.

  But you never bothered to read the small print. The dad that beat the crap out of you if you ever dared open your fuckin mouth. Small print. Gettin beat to shit every day at school for bein a fuckin moron and watchin your old man beatin the shit out of your mum and you not bein able to do a fuckin thing about it. Small print. The sound of her cryin and screamin through your bedroom wall breakin your heart as you lay awake at night. Small print.

  Your nan, your dear old nan, the only person you loved in the whole world, peggin it on your thirteenth birthday. Small print. The tears you shed that day. Small print. The gettin laid off at the factory and never gettin a proper job ever again. Small print. The wife that left you for the plumber downstairs. Small print. The kids. The kids you never had. Fuckin small print.

  One. Two. Three. Deep breath.

  Phht. Phht.

  Briscoe crumbles to the ground, blood spillin out a hole between his eyes.

  Small print.

  EAST OF SUEZ, WEST OF CHARING CROSS ROAD

  John Lawton

  * * *

  UNHAPPINESS DOES NOT fall on a man from the sky like a branch struck by lightning, it is more like rising damp. It creeps up day by day, unfelt or ignored until it is too late. And if it’s true that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, then the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts in Tolstoy’s equation, because George Horsfield was unhappy in a way that could only be described as commonplace. He had married young and he had not married well. In 1948 he had answered the call to arms. At the age of eighteen he hadn’t much choice. National Service – the Draft – the only occasion in its thousand-year history that England had had peacetime conscription. It was considered a necessary precaution in a world in which, to quote the US Secretary of State, England had lost an empire and not yet found a role. Not that England knew this – England’s attitude was that we had crushed old Adolf and we’d be buggered if we’d now lose an empire – it would take more than little brown men in loincloths … OK, so we lost India … or Johnny Arab with a couple of petrol bombs or those Bolshy Jews in their damn kibbutzes – OK, so we’d cut and run in Palestine, but dammit man, one has to draw the line somewhere. And the line was east of Suez, somewhere east of Suez, anywhere east of Suez – a sort of moveable feast really.

  George had expected to do his two years square-bashing or polishing coal. Instead, to both his surprise and pleasure, he was considered offic
er material by the War Office Selection Board. Not too short in the leg, no dropped aitches, a passing knowledge of the proper use of a knife and fork and no pretensions to be an intellectual. He was offered a short-service commission, rapidly trained at Eaton Hall in Cheshire – a beggarman’s Sandhurst – and put back on the parade ground not as a private but as 2nd Lt H. G. Horsfield RAOC.

  Why RAOC? Because the light of ambition had flickered in George’s poorly exercised mind – he meant to turn this short-service commission into a career – and he had worked out that promotion was faster in the technical corps than in the infantry regiments and he had chosen the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the “suppliers”, whose most dangerous activity was that they supplied some of the chaps who took apart unexploded bombs, but, that allowed for, an outfit in which one was unlikely to get blown up, shot at or otherwise injured in anything resembling combat.

  * * *

  George’s efforts notwithstanding, England did lose an empire, and the bits it didn’t lose England gave away with bad grace. By the end of the next decade a British Prime Minister could stand up in front of an audience of white South Africans, until that moment regarded as our “kith and kin”, and inform them that “a wind of change is blowing through the continent”. He meant “the black man will take charge”, but as ever with Mr Macmillan, it was too subtle a remark to be effective. Like his “you’ve never had it so good” it was much quoted and little understood.

  George did not have it so good. In fact the fifties were little else but a disappointment to him. He seemed to be festering in the backwaters of England – Nottingham, Bicester – postings only relieved, if at all, by interludes in the backwater of Europe known as Belgium. The second pip on his shoulder grew so slowly it was tempting to force it under a bucket like rhubarb. It was 1953 before the pip bore fruit. Just in time for the coronation.

  They gave him a few years to get used to his promotion – he boxed the compass of obscure English bases – then Lt Horsfield was delighted with the prospect of a posting to Libya, at least until he got there. He had thought of it in terms of the campaigns of the Second World War that he’d followed with newspaper clippings, a large cork board and drawing pins when he was a boy – Monty, the eccentric, lisping Englishman, versus Rommel, the old Desert Fox, the romantic, halfway-decent German. Benghazi, Tobruk, El Alamein – the first land victory of the war. The first real action since the Battle of Britain.

  There was plenty of evidence of the war around Fort Kasala (known to the British as 595 Ordnance Depot, but built by the Italians during their brief, barmy empire in Africa). Mostly it was scrap metal. Bits of tanks and artillery half-buried in the sand. A sort of modern version of the legs of Ozymandias. And the fort itself looked as though it had taken a bit of a bashing in its time. But the action had long since settled down to the slow-motion favoured by camels and even more so by donkeys. It took less than a week for it to dawn on George that he had once more drawn the short straw. There was only one word for the Kingdom of Libya – boring. A realm of sand and camel shit.

  He found he could get through a day’s paperwork by about eleven in the morning. He found that his clerk-corporal could get through it by ten, and since it was received wisdom in Her Majesty’s Forces that the devil made work for idle hands, he enquired politely of Corporal Ollerenshaw, “What do you do with the rest of the day?”

  Ollerenshaw, not having bothered either to stand or salute on the arrival of an officer, was still behind his desk. He held up the book he had been reading – Teach Yourself Italian.

  “Come sta?”

  “Sorry, Corporal, I don’t quite …”

  “It means, ‘How are you?’ sir. In Italian. I’m studying for my O level exam in Italian.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir. I do a couple of exams a year. Helps to pass the time. I’ve got Maths, English, History, Physics, Biology, French, German and Russian – this year I’ll take Italian and Art History.”

  “Good Lord, how long have you been here?”

  “Four years sir. I think it was a curse from the bad fairy at my christening. I would either sleep for a century until kissed by a prince or get four years in fuckin’ Libya. Scuse my French, sir.”

  Ollerenshaw rooted around in his desk drawer and took out two books – Teach Yourself Russian and a Russian-English, English-Russian Dictionary.

  “Why don’t you give it a whirl, sir, it’s better than goin’ bonkers or shaggin’ camels.”

  George took the books and for a week or more they sat unopened on his desk.

  It was hearing Ollerenshaw through the partition – “Una bottiglia di vino rosso, per favore” – “Mia moglie vorrebbe gli spaghetti alle vongole” – that finally prompted him to open them. The alphabet was a surprise, so odd it might as well have been Greek, and as he read on he realized it was Greek and he learnt the story of how two Orthodox priests from Greece had created the world’s first artificial alphabet for a previously illiterate culture by adapting their own to the needs of the Russian language. And from that moment George was hooked.

  Two years later, and the end of George’s tour of duty in sight, he had passed his O level and A level Russian and was passing fluent – passing only in that he had just Ollerenshaw to converse with in Russian and might, should he meet a real Russki for a bit of a chat, be found to be unequivocally fluent.

  Most afternoons the two of them would sit in George’s office in sanctioned idleness talking Russian, addressing each other as “comrade” and drinking strong black tea to get into the spirit of things Russian.

  “Tell me, tovarich,” Ollerenshaw said. “Why have you just stuck with Russian? While you’ve been teaching yourself Russian I’ve passed Italian, Art History, Swedish and Technical Drawing.”

  George had a ready answer for this.

  “Libya suits you. You’re happy doing nothing at the bumhole of nowhere. Nobody to pester you but me – a weekly wage and all found – petrol you can flog to the wogs – you’re in lazy buggers’ heaven. You’ve got skiving down to a fine art. And I wish you well of it. But I want more. I don’t want to be a lieutenant all my life and I certainly don’t want to be pushing around dockets for pith helmets, army boots and jerry cans for much longer. Russian is what will get me out of it.”

  “How d’you reckon that?”

  “I’ve applied for a transfer to Military Intelligence.”

  “Fuck me! You mean MI5 and all them spooks an’ that?”

  “They need Russian speakers. Russian is my ticket.”

  * * *

  MI5 did not want George. His next home posting, still a lowly First Lieutenant at the age of twenty-nine, was to Command Ordnance Depot Upton Bassett on the coast of Lincolnshire – flat, sandy, cold and miserable. The only possible connection with things Russian was that the wind which blew bitterly off the North Sea all year round probably started off somewhere in the Urals.

  He hated it.

  The saving grace was that a decent-but-dull old bloke – Major Denis Cockburn, a veteran of the Second World War, with a good track record in bomb disposal – took him up.

  “We can always use a fourth at bridge.”

  George came from a family that thought three card brag was the height of sophistication but readily turned his hand to the pseudo-intellectual pastime of the upper classes.

  He partnered the Major’s wife, Sylvia – the Major usually partnered Sylvia’s unmarried sister, Grace.

  George, far from being the most perceptive of men, at least deduced that a slow process of match-making had been begun. He didn’t want this. Grace was at least ten years older than him and far and away the less attractive of the two sisters. The Major had got the pick of the bunch, but that wasn’t saying much.

  George pretended to be blind to hints and deaf to suggestions. Evenings with the Cockburns were just about the only damn thing that stopped him from leaving all his clothes on a beach and disappearing into the North Sea for ever. He’d hang on to them.
He’d ignore anything that changed the status quo.

  Alas, he could not ignore death.

  When the Major died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack in September 1959, seemingly devoid of any family but Sylvia and Grace, it fell to George to have the grieving widow on his arm at the funeral.

  “You were his best friend,” Sylvia told him.

  No, thought George, I was his only friend and that’s not the same thing at all.

  A string of unwilling subalterns were dragooned into replacing Denis at the bridge table. George continued to do his bit. After all it was scarcely any hardship, he was fond of Sylvia in his way, and it could not be long before red tape broke up bridge nights for ever when the Army asked for the house back and shuffled her off somewhere with a pension.

  But the break-up came in the most unanticipated way. He’d seen off Grace with a practised display of indifference, but it had not occurred to him that he might need to see off Sylvia too.

  On 29 February 1960, she sat him down on the flowery sofa in the boxy sitting room of her standard army house, told him how grateful she had been for his care and company since the death of her husband, and George, not seeing where this was leading, said that he had grown fond of her and was happy to do anything for her.

  It was then that she proposed to him.

  She was, he thought, about forty-five or -six, although she looked older, and whilst a bit broad in the beam was not unattractive.

  This had little to do with his acceptance. It was not her body that tipped the balance, it was her character. Sylvia could be a bit of a dragon when she wanted, and George was simply too scared to say no. He could have said something about haste or mourning or with real wit have quoted Hamlet, saying that the “funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table”. But he didn’t.