The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Sitting there in the warmth of the May sun, I spotted something on the ground and my heart skipped a beat. It was a feather, shed by some passing bird. A white feather. I bent to pick it up then I held it for a while, turning it in my fingers before throwing it back onto the ground and grinding it into the grass with my heel. Such small things can have such catastrophic consequences.

  Jack had been sent home from France, unfit to fight. Every loud sound had made his body shake and he had woken each night, crying out at the unseen horrors that tormented his brain. He’d wander, half crazed, from room to room, staring with frightened, unseeing eyes until one of us would guide him gently back to his own bed. How Mother cried in that year to see her only son, a boy who had always been so cheerful and good-natured, with his mind blasted into insanity by war. Sometimes I wished he could have been maimed some other way; even losing an arm or a leg wouldn’t have been as bad as the way he suffered. But his body had been intact … then.

  It was when Jack had been home almost a year that Betty Bevan and her stupid mother began their campaign. All men not at the front, they said in their loud, braying voices, were cowards. They collected white feathers and distributed them to the men they accused, haranguing them with insults as they did so. Their tongues were spiteful and wicked. How I wished I could have had them sent to the front to see how they liked crawling through mud and corpses to certain death.

  Jack had always been a proud man and the accusation of cowardice caused him such shame. Mother, Rose and I tried to tell him that he was sick but he didn’t understand. He saw only his strong body and his intact limbs and he swore that he was fit to return to France to fight. Nothing we said would dissuade him from contacting his regiment to say that he was recovered and ready. But his regiment had not heard his screams of terror as he dodged those phantom shells and bullets each night and they hadn’t seen the empty fear and bewilderment in his eyes.

  The Bevans must have known how he was. His cries through those thin walls must have kept them awake as they did us. But those two women ignored my mother’s pleas and explanations and a month after Jack left for France, we received the telegram to tell us that he had died a hero.

  The Bevans showed our family no mercy. And I showed them no mercy in return. It was a simple matter to soak fly papers and add the arsenic they produced to the soup Mother took to Mrs Bevan each day. It had suited my purpose well for Betty to get the blame when the police found the powder I had placed in their scullery. And now the law had punished her – albeit for the wrong crime for she killed my dearest brother as surely as if she had rammed a knife into his heart.

  I suppose the death of Betty Bevan had been my second murder and it had been so easy, just as second murders are reputed to be. A third, I suppose, would be easier still. All sins, I imagine, improve with practice.

  I examined the little watch pinned to the front of my dress. It was nearly time for my appointment with Albert Winslow. He said that on our marriage, he will insure his life for a large sum of money so that, should the worst happen, I would be very well provided for.

  How I look forward to our wedding day.

  THE DECEIVERS

  Christopher Fowler

  * * *

  THIS IS A police statement, but they said I could tell it in my own way. So I’m not writing it down, I’m dictating it into the desk sergeant’s laptop, like he even knows how to operate it. He sticks Post-It notes on the lid, the keys are filthy and there’s software on it from before I was born.

  I’m not worried. I’m going to get out of here because there’s someone coming who can prove what really happened.

  They want me to put everything down, so first I have to explain about the hill.

  The boundary line between Devon and Cornwall is dotted with small villages that pretend they’re towns, but they’re not. For a start, everyone who lives in them is either really old, over forty at least, and has lived there all their lives, or they’re from London and only come down at the weekends. The locals all hate them, although my Dad says we should smile as we charge them double, like the French do. There’s no one of my age to hang out with here, and nowhere to go if you do find someone. If you travel to one of the bigger towns with your mates, there’s a good chance you’ll get beaten up just because you’re from somewhere else.

  My folks are obsessed with getting fresh air. “Let’s go for a walk and get some fresh air”, like there’s ever anything else to do. “Let’s go up to the hill.” We live in a village called Trethorton Hill. It consists of a short high street, about a hundred and twenty houses, two pubs and a hill. That’s it. There’s nothing even remotely interesting about the hill, it’s just a huge pimple of grass and scrub with a single white rock set in the top, not even a proper standing stone, and when they get up there hikers say things like “You can see all the way to Dartmoor from here”, as if that’s a good thing. I hate hikers, with their billycans and red knees and woollen hats, and their rulebooks and guidebooks and hard little eyes. But that’s what everyone around here does every Sunday. On Saturdays they go to Liskeard for their shopping, and on Sundays they go up the hill. I used to think that was boring until I realized that people actually come here from other towns to go up the hill, and what does that make their villages, if it’s more interesting here than staying where they are?

  The locals think they’re cool and that they’ve been around, but they haven’t. I heard some old guy in the supermarket telling the cashier that he’d just been up North, and she was reacting in amazement, like he’d just told her he’d been to Alpha Centauri. Then he added, “Yes, I went all the way to Tintagel”, and I realized he meant North Cornwall. Jesus.

  I have an older sister, and she got out while she could. I say “got out”, what she did was get pregnant by some docker who’d gone to work on container ships out of Liverpool, so now she’s stuck in Swansea with two bulldog-faced kids, in a hell of her own making.

  Not for me. Once I get a job offer you won’t see me for dust. I’m smart, I’m awake, I’ve got a mind. But it doesn’t pay to be too clever in a village. People get suspicious of you. Best to keep your mouth shut and stay indoors mucking about on the internet, talking to smart people on the other side of the world. Someone asked me if we had Wi-Fi, and I had to explain we don’t even get decent mobile phone reception here. The internet stops you from getting too lonely, because there are people in places with exotic sounding names, and they’re just as bored as you are, so it makes you feel better.

  I made one friend but he’s not my friend any more, a kid called Daniel who came from the next village. I met him at IT club, and then at the Trethorton Charity Climb – we weren’t taking part, we were just hanging around – and I thought, “We’re alike. He’s awake too.” Daniel lives in a damp shadowy dell called Crayshaw. It’s a village which loses its sunlight before lunchtime even at the height of summer. Daniel’s parents are rich – his old man had invented rubberized flooring for factories and had sold it all around the world. So Daniel got an amazing allowance but had no one to share it with, because he had a gimp leg which meant he couldn’t play football, and the flybrains at school treated him like dirt because he was from the wrong village and couldn’t do sports. He never told them he had money, but he told me after I stuck up for him in a fight.

  Daniel got excused from double games on Fridays (he only did the midweek swimming) and I didn’t go because I hated it. I once forged a doctor’s letter to Mr Phelps the gym teacher saying I had a defective heart valve and couldn’t do contact sports, and the moron never even bothered to check it out with my folks. So every Friday afternoon we kicked around Trethorton Hill looking for ways to annoy the hikers. Once we tied fishing wire over the grass and filmed them, all falling over, on our phones.

  Although Daniel had money he couldn’t really spend it. He was only allowed to catch the bus as far as Liskeard because of his leg, so it wasn’t like we were going to whip off to Ibiza for the weekend, but we bought stuff onl
ine, and for a while we had a lot of fun hanging out together.

  My old man says when things go wrong there’s always a woman involved, and in this case it was a girl called Tara Mellor. She was in our year and had been suspended twice for wearing incorrect school uniform. She was tall and thin with cropped blonde hair, and I was nuts about her, but for some incredible reason she seemed to prefer Daniel. But at the start the three of us hung out together a lot.

  The lardy desk sergeant just came by, saw what I was writing and said could I get to the point. I wanted to say, “Could you get to the gym?” but he’d already waddled off.

  I think the problem was that Daniel and I kept trying to impress Tara. To his credit, he never flashed his cash at her – he was too cool for that – and besides, she wasn’t interested in money. She wasn’t like the other girls we knew from school, who spent all their spare time planning shopping trips to town on Saturdays. She read a lot, and was interested in ancient history. The trouble started on the day she dragged us to Liskeard’s “Man, Myth & Magic” Museum. The locals wanted to get rid of the word “man” because they said it was sexist, and rename it “The Liskeard Early Civilization Centre”. We wrote in to the Liskeard Gazette with a suggestion of our own, but I guess they worked out that the acronym we suggested would be pronounced “Dogs’ Cocks” and they didn’t run our letter.

  We were in the museum and there was a section on local legends, the usual guff about ghosts, human sacrifices, phantom hounds and highwaymen, and Tara said there was no proof that any of the stories were true, they were just made up by drunk old publicans, and she pointed out that Trethorton Hill didn’t even have any decent legends attached to it, that’s how lame the place was, and that’s when we decided to make one up.

  We decided it had to be a believable legend, something with evidence to back it up. It also had to be something that could scare the hikers off the hill. So Daniel said how about aliens, and I said no because crop circles had been discredited years ago, all you needed was a couple of dopeheads armed with a piece of rope and a plank. We needed something more sophisticated. I thought we should create a plausible unsolved mystery, so we decided on a desperate sailor who had come ashore after murdering his violent captain in a mutiny, and who for some unknown reason dragged a local girl up the hill and cut her throat. Then we added a supernatural element that would provide proof of the legend, a ghostly wailing you could hear on certain nights when the air was still.

  PC Porky just came by again and asked me if I was writing a novel, and I told him if I was I’d let him know so he could hire someone to read it to him.

  Daniel knew quite a lot about sound technology, and figured we could rig outdoor speakers around the hill, running from two synced-up MP3 players. We decided to record the ghost crying and phase the sound so that it appeared to circle the hill, and preset the time so that we wouldn’t have to be there when it happened. I didn’t involve Tara in this because I wanted to surprise her, to show I was interested in myths and stuff. We ordered the components we needed on Daniel’s Paypal account, and when they arrived we tested everything in the fields beyond Trethorton, down near the river.

  Next, we needed to record the sound of the crying woman, and Daniel said he had a bit of software that could replicate the human voice but also distort it. We aimed for something between a child in pain and a fox at night. It had to be haunting and other-worldly, and after a weekend of experimentation we had mixed it to perfection. The effect was so spooky it made the hairs on my arms stand up.

  Then it was time for the trial run.

  Late one night we loaded the equipment into our backpacks and set off for the hill. It took over three hours to set up the sound parameters because we hadn’t allowed for the wind noise up there, but we eventually got it so that the crying echoed from one speaker to the next. The effect was subtle, so that you weren’t aware you were being directed between the speakers. And Daniel had recorded it a dozen times, switching the equalizer settings so that you never heard the same sound arrangement twice. He was also able to vary the start times, so we set the switch-on at different hours between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. We figured the battery charge on the MP3 players would hold for a long time because they were only being used for a few minutes at a time. Then we sealed the players in plastic bags and buried them. The four speakers were more of a problem because we needed them to be above ground. We put one deep inside a hawthorn bush and another in a wet ditch, after first making sure that the connections were all covered. The other two we hid in clumps of grass, hoping that no one would stumble across them.

  Then we went home to write the letters. We targeted both of the local papers, the Gazette and the Chronicle, and used false names. We assumed different identities, becoming hikers and pensioners, fathers and kids, and varied the content of the letters. One said he’d heard a sound like a trapped animal on the hill, another said it sounded like a woman being tortured, and so on. Daniel thought there was a risk the paper might check the senders’ addresses, but I said why would they? Two weeks after the first letter appeared, we hooked our first outsider – some old guy had been walking his dog and heard the sound for himself, and wrote in to the Gazette.

  After another two weeks had passed and a handful of letters had been published, describing the eerie sounds on the hill, we hit them with Phase Two – the legend. This letter appeared to have been sent from a retired schoolmistress, now living in Wales (I got my sister to post it, but I didn’t let her read the contents). The schoolmistress explained the source of the strange sounds on Trethorton Hill. She repeated the bare bones of our legend about the sailor and the girl, and the Chronicle published it as their star letter of the week.

  I know what you’re thinking. How bored did we have to be to do this? Pretty damn bored, I guess, but it was fun winding up the locals. Soon, the hiking club members were taking turns to check out the ghost of Trethorton Hill, and created a chart detailing exactly when and where the ghost could be heard, according to which direction the wind was coming from. They put it up in the village hall and asked others to add to it with different coloured marker pens. Hikers like stuff like that.

  The main thing, from our point of view, was to get everyone in the village to believe in it before we exposed the whole thing as a hoax. It was our revenge on everyone for being so boring and sheep-like. With each passing week, the letter pages became more polarized between huffing walkers who refused to believe the legend, and others who said they’d heard it for themselves.

  Daniel and I went up the hill at the weekends and found whole groups of drunk Emos hanging around waiting to hear the cry of the murdered woman. We thought they’d start poking about, trying to find out where the sound was coming from, so Daniel periodically turned off the system from his remote, because we were worried they might start digging up the ground and tearing the bushes apart, but most of them seemed content to lie around on the grass drinking and making out. I think they really wanted to believe.

  The week after this, Tara suddenly became much more friendly with me, and was cooler around Daniel, to the point where it seemed like she didn’t want to see him. They’d obviously had some kind of falling out, but neither of them was prepared to talk about it. Maybe he’d tried it on with her and she wasn’t having it. Daniel acted like he wasn’t bothered and it didn’t affect our friendship, and then I realized that Tara and I were kind of going out, so everything was OK.

  Hang on, the sergeant is waving his stubby sausage fingers at me.

  It turns out he just wanted to offer me a cup of tea. Bless.

  So. Then one Friday – this was about six weeks after the whole thing had started – I opened the Chronicle to find a letter from a genuine schoolteacher – some retired guy in Portsmouth, citing precedence for the legend.

  Dear Sir,

  I have been following the discussions about Trethorton’s Sobbing Woman with great interest. When I was a child, I well remember my late father taking me to the top of the hill to
hear the cries of this poor tortured soul. He told me that she was a local Liskeard girl who had been murdered by her swain some time in the 1800s. Whenever I think of my holidays there, the memories of our trips to the “Black Hill” send shivers down my spine.

  Yours sincerely,

  Arthur Parkyn

  Schoolteacher (retired)

  Black Hill? It was never called the Black Hill. What was he on about? Not to be outdone, a builder from Liskeard wrote in and put a lot more meat on the bones. I still have the cutting here.

  Dear Chronicle Letters,

  Concerning the legend of Trethorton’s Sobbing Woman, the name of the victim was Ennor Maddern. From the age of eight she worked at what was then called the Anchor Inn (demolished in 1893), where she eventually met and fell in love with a sailor named Carne Greenway. Carne was a sailor on board the HMS Sans Pareil. He served under a cruel, violent captain named either Sambourne or Sanborn, and led the mutiny against his captain in March of 1827. The captain was killed and thrown overboard to general approval of the long-suffering crew, but as Greenway was the leader of the mutineers, he was hunted by the local sheriffs as soon as he set foot on land.

  The horrors of the mutiny affected this young man dreadfully. He was hounded from one county to the next and became a smuggler in order to survive. When he was finally able to make his way back to see his beloved Ennor, he discovered that she was about to marry the corrupt town magistrate. Carne came calling at her window one wild night, and she pretended to be thrilled to see him, and arranged to meet him later at Trethorton Hill. But when he arrived there Carne found that Ennor had betrayed him, and had rallied a gang of ruffians to join with her from Portlooe, where HMS Sans Pareil was docked. These men sought revenge for the death of their captain. In the ensuing fight, Carne took the girl as a hostage, and as the men came at him he took a knife to her throat as punishment for this act of betrayal.