The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  It’s time, he thought.

  ‘Rachel!’

  He looked up and saw the shape of a big man moving fast towards them. She looked at the shape, then back to him, her mouth open and something unreadable in her eyes.

  He dug out a smile. ‘Nice to see you again . . .’ he said.

  With the blade of the knife flat against his wrist, he turned and jogged away along the path that ran at right angles to the one they’d been on.

  ‘Was that him? Was that him?’

  ‘He was a jogger. He just . . .’ Lee’s hand squeezed her neck, choked off the end of the sentence. He raised his other hand slowly, held the phone aloft in triumph. ‘I know all about it,’ he said. ‘So don’t try and fucking lie to me.’

  There were distant voices coming from somewhere. People leaving. Laughter. Words that were impossible to make out and quickly faded to silence.

  Lee tossed the phone to the ground and the free hand reached up to claw at her chest. Thick fingers pushed aside material, found a nipple and squeezed.

  She couldn’t make a sound. The tears ran down her face and neck and on to the back of his hand as she beat at it, as she snatched in breaths through her nose. Just as she felt her legs go, he released her neck and breast and raised both hands up to the side of her neck.

  ‘Lee, nothing happened. Lee . . .’

  He pressed the heels of his hands against her ears and leaned in close as though he might kiss or bite her.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  She tried to shake her head but he held it hard.

  ‘Or so help me I’ll dig a hole for you with my bare hands. I’ll leave your cunt’s carcass here for the foxes . . .’

  So she told him, and he let her go, and he shouted over his shoulder to her as he walked further into the woods.

  ‘Now, run home.’

  Alan had given it one more minute ten minutes ago, but it was clear to him now that she wasn’t coming. She’d sounded like she was really going to try, so he decided that she hadn’t been able to get away.

  He hoped it was only fear that had restrained her.

  He stood up, pressed the redial button on his phone one last time. Got her message again.

  There were no more than a couple of minutes before the exits were sealed. He just had time to retrieve the bracelet, to reach up and unhook it from the branch on which it hung.

  He’d give it to her another day.

  Standing alone in the dark, wondering how she was, he decided that he might not draw her attention to the newest charm on the bracelet. A pair of dice had seemed so right, so appropriate in light of what had happened, of everything they’d talked about. Suddenly he felt every bit as clumsy as his father. It seemed tasteless.

  Luck was something they were pushing.

  He stepped out on to the path, turned when he heard a man’s voice say his name.

  The footwork and the swing were spot on.

  The first blow smashed Alan’s phone into a dozen or more pieces, the second did much the same to his skull, and those that came after were about nothing so much as exercise.

  It took half a minute for the growl to die in Lee’s throat.

  The blood on the branch, on the grass to either side of the path, on his training shoes looked black in the near total darkness.

  Lee bent down and picked up the dead man’s arm. He wondered if his team had managed to hold on to their one-goal lead as he began dragging the body into the undergrowth.

  Graham had run until he felt his lungs about to give up the ghost. He was no fitter than many of those he treated. Those whose hearts were marbled with creamy lines of fat, like cheap off-cuts.

  He dropped down on to a bench to recover, to reflect on what had happened in the woods. To consider his rotten luck. If that man hadn’t come along when he had . . . A young woman with Mediterranean features was waiting to cross the road a few feet from where he was sitting. She was taking keys from her bag, probably heading towards the flats opposite.

  She glanced in his direction and he dropped his elbows to his knees almost immediately. Looked at the pavement. Made sure she didn’t get a good look at his face.

  The next High Barnet train was still eight minutes away.

  Rachel stood on the platform, her legs still shaking, the burning in her breast a little less fierce with every minute that passed. The pain had been good. It had stopped her thinking too much; stopped her wondering. She sought a little more of it, thrusting her hand into her pocket until she found her wedding ring, then driving the edge of it hard against the fingernail until she felt it split.

  Alan had thought it odd that she still took the ring off even after she’d told him the truth, but it made perfect sense to her. Its removal had always been more about freedom than deceit.

  An old woman standing next to her nudged her arm and nodded towards the electronic display.

  Correction. High Barnet. 1 min.

  ‘There’s a stroke of luck,’ the woman said.

  Rachel looked at the floor. She didn’t raise her head again until she heard the train coming.

  <>

  * * * *

  Jake Arnott

  Ten Lords A-Leaping

  A discrepancy which often struck me in the character of my friend was that, although in his method of thought he was among the most well ordered of all mankind and in his manner of presenting an argument or pursuing an argument or pursuing a case or theory he was impeccably efficient, he was nonetheless in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a colleague to distraction. His disorderly study was strewn with manuscripts, books and periodicals. Scattered about the room were knives, forks, cups with broken rims, Dutch clay pipes, discarded pens, even an upturned inkpot. He kept his cigars in the coal scuttle and his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper. His unanswered correspondence was transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece. Everything was, one might say, ‘topsyturvy’.

  His rooms reeked with the odour of the cheap tobacco that he had purchased from a small shop in Holborn, in the spirit of one of his more obscure economic inspirations. He had been taken by the slogan in the shop front that promised that ‘the more you smoke the more you save’ and had pointed out to me that by switching to this inferior brand he could save one shilling and sixpence a pound and, if he forced himself to smoke enough of the wretched stuff he might one day be able to live on his ‘savings’. I had long since given up trying to point out the absurdity of the ‘logic’ to one of the greatest materialist thinkers in Europe, just as I had also given up complaining about the downright untidiness of his domestic affairs. I have become familiar enough with them to no longer take much notice of these strange habits and idiosyncrasies, but in the process of introducing the young Lord Beckworth to him on that fateful afternoon (the intercession of a complete stranger forces you to renew what the first impressions are of an old friend), I confess that there was a brief moment of embarrassment on his behalf.

  Yet if the young nobleman was at all taken aback by the odd circumstances of the great man, he showed it not one jot. Perhaps in deference to my colleague’s reputation for mental prowess, he simply overlooked this disordered clutter, or quietly acknowledged it as one of the vagaries of genius. I do not mind admitting my own deference to my old friend as a thinker, and resent not that his powers of reasoning and deduction far outstrip my own. I am resigned to the obvious fact that he is the dominant one in our partnership and see it as my duty to assist and support his great mind without complaint or jealousy, or even much thanks from the possessor of it. Indeed, it merely falls to me to facilitate, from time to time, the practicalities needed for this prodigious consciousness to bear fruit and to keep a sober eye on the mundane matters that he all too often neglects, his thoughts, as they say, being on higher things.

  It was to this end that I had, in the first instance, invited the young Lord Beckworth to my friend’s lodgings. Lord Beckworth had expressed to m
e, when we had met earlier that year, at the house of a common acquaintance, a progressive Manchester manufactory owner, his great admiration for the work of my colleague and, more importantly, his desire to support, or even to sponsor, the continuation of his endeavours. My old friend was, at first, reluctant to be beholden to any third party in the way, convinced as he is of the need for independence in all matters. However, I managed to persuade him that he would be in no way compromised by any arrangement with this enthusiastic nobleman, and that the work itself was important enough for him to seek help from the most unlikely of sources.

  Beckworth had his manservant with him, a dark, handsome-looking fellow called Parsons. The conversation that afternoon started out amiably enough with the character of a harmless politeness, but very soon it became strangely weighted with a darker and more sinister nature. Formalities had been observed with a certain jocular awkwardness. My colleague made a seemingly harmless remark about social class, I think it was an attempt to include Beckworth’s butler, when Lord Beckworth announced, one could almost say blurted out, as if wishing to unburden himself of a dark and terrible secret: ‘Privilege, sir, is a curse!’ My friend nodded and gave a vague and expansive gesture, as if agreeing that this ‘curse’ extended to us all, but the visitor shook his head vigorously and continued:

  ‘No, sir, I speak not of a general curse, but a very specific one! The hereditary principle, the very fact of primogeniture that one might call a bane on the world of men, is for me a very personal scourge.’

  ‘What?’ My friend retorted, frowning.

  ‘It is a matter of bad blood, sir. Parsons here is forever entreating me to deny the blight on my family name, but I cannot, sir.’

  Beckworth looked for a moment at his manservant, who shrugged.

  ‘Well,’ said the butler slowly, ‘I have always wanted my lord to find blessings in life, also.’

  Beckworth smiled briefly at this, then his mood darkened once more. And, as the early evening light faded, with a foreboding he recounted, the ‘curse’ of the Beckworths. It was related to us that the first lord of this unfortunate house was a certain Ralph Beckworth, of yeoman stock, who had found employment in the household of James I. He was, by all accounts, a good-looking youth and he soon became one of that king’s many ‘favourites’. He gained his title and no small fortune, but did so without merit or breeding but rather from an exploitation of the baser instincts. Ambition, lasciviousness and a general moral incontinence that had secured him an elevated station in society, all conspired to corrupt him fully once he had attained his rank. His were the temptations of power, without the necessary moderations of genuine nobility. His debauched revels became legendary and culminated in a terrible scandal. It seems that in 1625, the first Lord Beckworth, now grown ugly and malicious in appearance, had taken a shine to a young footman in his employ and no doubt wished to make him his own ‘favourite’, just as he had himself been despoiled as a young man so many years before. The footman, however, was not as compliant as his masters had been, but despite defending his honour with vigour, found himself imprisoned by that degenerate peer in an upper chamber of his Great Hall. Lord Beckworth and a crowd of flatterers and hangers on sat down to a long carouse, as was the nightly custom. The poor youth upstairs was likely to have his wits turned at the singing and shouting and the terrible oaths which came up to him from below, for they say that the lightest words used by Beckworth, when he was in wine, were such as might damn a man who used them. As it was, that evening there were loud declarations that he intended to exercise upon his unfortunate servant adroit de seigneur of the most appalling and perverse kind. The hapless footman, no doubt in utter despair at his fate, threw himself out of the upstairs window to his death on the cobbled courtyard below.

  After this awful incident the first Lord Beckworth grew melancholy and brooding. He quickly developed an utter terror of high places, a vertiginous fear of falling. Not of heights so much: we know after all, that vertigo is not the fear of heights. It is a fear of depths, of a fall. And it manifests itself not as a fear, but rather a compulsion, a desire even, for a return from the insubstantial loftiness of our aspirations, back down to earth, as it were. And it was, with this awful realisation, that the first Lord Beckworth went into a long decline, a descent into gloom and enervation. Cursed by a strange madness, he climbed up upon the roof of his Great Hall and hurled himself down.

  Our young noble visitor then went on to recount the litany of his cursed family. The next Lord Beckworth had been part of the Royalist defence of the castle of Banbury, a stronghold that had been of strategic importance in the Civil War, or what my old friend would have insisted was the ‘English Revolution’. In any case it seems, in a lull in the battle between Roundhead and Cavalier, the second Lord Beckworth had thrown himself, without apparent reason, from the battlements to his death.

  The third Lord Beckworth had lived in exile until Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, and then had tripped and broken his neck on the stone staircase of Windsor Castle. The fourth lord was thrown from his horse during a fox-hunt; the fifth, a commodore in the Royal Navy, was captured by Barbary pirates and made to ‘walk the plank’; the sixth fell from scaffolding whilst inspecting repairs to the Great Hall; the seventh slipped and plunged to his death from a precipice while on a walking tour of the Swiss Alps and the eighth, after an assault by footpads on Blackfriars Bridge, had been hurled into the treacherous waters of the Thames.

  ‘And my own father,’ concluded our guest, ‘the ninth Lord Beckworth, was killed in a ballooning accident five years ago, leaving me this awful inheritance. The family curse is a joke to many. We are known as the “Leaping Lords”.’

  He gave a hollow and humourless laugh as he ended his story. I have to admit to feeling an almost disabling bafflement at the conclusion of this extraordinary narrative. My colleague maintained a more thorough and hard-headed attitude to the bewildering unravelling of this supposed ‘curse’. Knowing him as I do, I observed that expression of effrontery on his countenance which manifested itself whenever he found himself confronted with any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that contradicted his precious materialism. His method, after all, was a method of elimination: he always sought to eliminate the impossible in order to arrive at the truth. And yet, as the street lights were being lighted that evening, I saw my esteemed friend for once on the defensive, ‘on the back foot’ as prize-fighters are wont to say.

  ‘Well, your class is tainted with superstition,’ he muttered, as if trying to make sense of what he had heard. ‘You’re, you’re feudal, barbaric. I’m sorry, I don’t mean this as a personal insult nor a slur on your character but just —’ his gestures for a moment looked helpless, as if he was signifying the very search for meaning, ‘a, a psychology, isn’t that the word? Maybe this “curse” that you speak of is merely that.’

  Our young nobleman merely nodded at this and the conversation quickly turned to more practical matters. He invited us both to his townhouse in Mayfair the following day and bade us farewell, as my friend and I had an evening appointment.

  I remember feeling an absurd sense of lucidity in the artificial illumination by gaslight of the darkened streets we sauntered south into Soho for our assignation that night. The words that our noble visitor had uttered that very day still affected me deeply, their insistence reverberating in my mind with a contagious fear. I was somewhat reassured to find that my old friend, despite his abundant intellect and rationality, had been no less impressed by the strange unfoldings of the story of the Beckworths’ curse.

  ‘An interesting case,’ he finally admitted as we passed through Bloomsbury. ‘A series of coincidences, no doubt. But what if they were not?’

  We proceeded to amuse ourselves with a kind of intellectual banter, trying to apply theories of historical materialism to what we had heard that afternoon. My friend then suggested that, perhaps, the new and controversial ideas of evolution could be related to this ‘curse’.

>   ‘His class is dying out, after all,’ my colleagues reasoned.

  ‘You’re surely not proposing that, somehow, one branch of a social class is somehow spontaneously accelerating its own extinction?’ I retorted. ‘I wonder what Mr Darwin would think of that.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of him, but rather of the work of Pierre Trémaux.’

  My friend had recently become besotted with this French naturalist who maintained that evolution was governed by geological and chemical changes in the soil and manifested itself in distinct national characteristics. I had no time for this Frenchman’s far-fetched notions and did not hesitate in expressing my doubts to my esteemed friend.

  ‘His theories are preposterous!’ I exclaimed. ‘No, no, not preposterous,’ my colleague insisted. ‘They are elemental, my dear Engels.’

  * * * *

  When we arrived at Greek Street for a meeting of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, our thoughts turned to the business of that evening and no more mention was made of our young nobleman and his family ‘curse’. Except when one of the delegates brought up the proposal that ‘All men who have the duty of representing working-class groups should be workers themselves’, hastily adding with a deferential nod in the direction of my colleague, ‘with the exception of Citizen Marx here, who has devoted his life to the triumph of the working class’; and my friend muttered to me: ‘Well, they should have seen me hobnobbing with the aristocracy this afternoon.’ But the very next morning, when we went to call upon Beckworth at his house in Mayfair, we found a police constable posted at the front door and we were informed that the young lord had died, having fallen down the stairs and broken his neck.