Both Hillary Stubbs and Sonia Cribbage had seen stories they’d written subsequently attributed to Miss Fullerton. One was published in an anthology, one broadcast by the BBC. Both stories had been entered for the Allerton Bywater festival short story competition. Artemesia took a sleeping pill before she laid her head on the pillow. An hour later she took another and eventually fell into a restless sleep.
The Sunday morning speaker was introduced as a publisher, although her actual position in the company was typing pool supervisor, who explained what her magazine was looking for. Then the organising chairman thanked everyone for their attendance, looked forward to seeing them next year and wished everyone who wasn’t staying for lunch a safe journey home. Artemesia, Hillary, Sonia and Raoul met in the lounge, as they had arranged the night before, and ordered coffee.
Artemesia, after quickly and somewhat rudely grabbing the cream and fixing her own drink, explained why they were there. Jessica Fullerton must know someone involved with the Allerton Bywater festival short story competition, she told the others. That was the common denominator. They’d sent their best efforts to the competition, lured by the £500 first prize, and Jessica was given a free rein to look at, or possibly even take away, all the entries that didn’t win prizes.
‘She read our stories and used the ideas she liked most,’ Artemesia concluded.
‘And we paid £5 each for the privilege,’ Pawinski said, remembering the entrance fee.
After a moment’s silence, as the situation sank in, Sonia Cribbage said: ‘The cow!’
‘The bloody bitch!’ Hillary Stubbs agreed.
‘The fat bastard!’ Raoul Pawinski added.
Artemesia was taken back by their vehemence, but felt justified by it. ‘So what are we going to do?’ she asked.
‘Expose her,’ someone suggested. ‘Go to the press, show her up for what she is.’
‘She’ll deny it, say it’s all coincidences.’
‘And meanwhile the publicity will send her sales through the roof.’
‘That’s true.’
‘So what’s the alternative?’
They sat in silence for nearly a minute. Stubbs sipped his coffee, Pawinski stroked his chin. It was Sonia Cribbage who put the unthinkable into words.
‘Kill her!’ she said.
Three pairs of eyes turned to her.
‘Yes, kill her. I slaved over that story, wrote it from the heart. I don’t have a gift, like she has. I have to work at it, to struggle. I wanted to write since I was five years old, but I had to go to work for a living. I supported elderly parents and a dying husband. I wrote my first story in an exercise book while sitting at his bedside. People like Jessica Fullerton make me sick. They steal from other people just as surely as if they’d broken into our houses and robbed us, but without the risk. I hate her.’
Another silence, until Pawinski said: ‘I agree. Kill her.’
Artemesia looked at Hillary Stubbs. He caught her gaze and gave a slow nod of agreement.
‘So,’ she said, ‘that’s settled, then. The only question now is: How?’
‘For goodness sake,’ Sonia replied, irritated. ‘We’re writers, aren’t we? If we can’t think of a way, who can?’
Pawinski, true to his East European origins, said: ‘A bomb. Blow her up. Boom! No evidence.’
‘I’m for shooting her,’ Hillary Stubbs told them. ‘A bullet in the head. It’s clean and it’s merciful.’
Artemesia turned to the other woman. ‘A blunt instrument has always been my favourite MO,’ Sonia Cribbage confessed. ‘One is always readily available, and if applied with sufficient conviction it’s as deadly as a bullet.’
‘Thank you, Sonia,’ Artemesia said. ‘That leaves me. I’m a poisoner. Poison has a certain subtlety that has always appealed to me.’
Hillary Stubbs glanced nervously over his shoulder and crossed the road. He was in an area of the city where he’d never ventured before. If you believed the local newspaper, drug dealing and prostitution were the norm around here, and Stubbs, like most white people, believed it. What he saw did nothing to persuade him otherwise. All the shops had metal grills over the windows and litter blew in eddies on every corner. Two youths in woolly hats standing outside the Hakuna Matata electrical emporium watched him as he stepped onto the pavement and Stubbs was glad that he had no money on his person.
Before they left the conference the Famous Four had agreed that each would pursue their chosen method of execution to evaluate the practicalities. They would then meet, two weeks later, to finalise a plan. Hillary Stubbs’ task was to procure a firearm.
Either of the two youths in woolly hats would have done, but Stubbs was nervous at the thought of being outnumbered. Several other people walked by but each time he thought of an excuse not to talk to them. As he walked back down the street, in front of a parade of shops, a tall man in a sparkling white T-shirt and dreadlocks came out of the newsagents, perusing a folded paper. It was now or never.
‘Um, excuse me,’ Stubbs said.
The man blinked big brown eyes and looked at him.
‘I wonder if you can help me?’
‘I’ll try,’ the man replied, tucking the paper under his arm.
‘Right. Well, er, thank you. The truth is, I’m trying to purchase a gun.’
‘A gun?’
‘Um, yes. Not a big gun, just, you know, a pistol. Not a real one. A replica. A real one would do, of course. Might even be better. Replicas never look quite right, don’t you think?’
The man looked puzzled and bemused. ‘What do you want a gun for?’
‘Oh, it’s er, it’s er, for a play I’m producing. Um, Annie Get Your Gun. Not a play, a musical. Couldn’t have a title like that without a gun in it, could you?’
‘No, I don’t suppose you could. Have you tried a theatrical suppliers?’
‘Theatrical suppliers? No, I haven’t. Do you think they might have one?’
‘Bound to have. There’s one on Regent Street, near the clock.’
‘Right. Thanks for your help. I’m very grateful.’
‘No problem,’ the man said, and strode away shaking his head.
Stubbs stood awhile before walking off in the opposite direction, bathed in sweat and trembling with embarrassment. The man was probably a doctor or a lawyer, he told himself. He had an educated accent.
The two youths in the woolly hats were still outside the electrical store, sitting on the rail put there to discourage ram raids. They wore jogging bottoms six sizes too large, hooded tops and big trainers with the laces undone. Stubbs, feeling strangely emboldened by the earlier encounter, approached them.
‘Hey boys, I need some help,’ he said.
‘Help? Waddya want, man?’ one of them replied.
‘I need a little favour doing. For which I’ll pay, of course.’
‘Hey, man, we’re big on favours, ain’t we, Lloyd?’
‘Sure is, man. Favours is our strongpoint. Just afore I came out mah mamma sez to me: “You ged oud dere and do some favours, boy, or you ain’t no son o’ mine.”’
Stubbs smiled with satisfaction. This was more like it. ‘Fact is, boys, I need a shooter,’ he confided.
‘A shoodah?’
‘Yeah, a shooter.’
‘What’s a shoodah?’
‘You know.’ He demonstrated with an outstretched forefinger.
‘You mean a gun?’
‘Yeah, a gun. A revolver.’
‘Wow, man. That’s wicked. You’re talking big Gs there, mistah.’
‘Can you help me?’
‘Ah do’ know. Waddya think, Lloyd?’
‘Hey, man. This is bad stuff. We don’t normally do heavy stuff like dat.’
‘Do you know anyone who might help me?’
‘Hey, waid a minute, man. Ah didn’t say we couldn’t help you, just that, ya know, we haven’t seen your credentials, like.’ He rubbed a thumb and forefinger together to show exactly what credentials he meant.
/> ‘Oh, I can pay,’ Stubbs assured them. ‘I haven’t any money on me but I can get some. How much will we be talking about?’
‘Dunno. Need to talk to someone.’
‘I’d be grateful if you would.’
The boy pulled a state-of-the-art Sony cell phone from a pocket, flipped it open and walked away, out of earshot. Stubbs tried having a conversation with the remaining youth but abandoned it after a few barely intelligible replies.
Lloyd came back, still holding the phone to his ear. ‘Yoose in luck, man,’ he told Stubbs. ‘Mah contact has just taken delivery of a nice liddle shoodah that he’s willing to pass on to you as a special favour.’
‘How much?’ Stubbs asked.
‘Two hundred big ones.’
Stubbs had read a newspaper article that said guns could be obtained for as little as £100. ‘One hundred,’ he said.
Lloyd relayed the message. ‘One fifty,’ he came back with.
‘OK,’ Stubbs told him. ‘One fifty. It’s a deal.’
‘Great. Pleasure to do business wid you, man.’ He held out a hand, palm up, and Stubbs slapped it like he’d seen on TV.
‘You need bullets?’ he was asked.
‘Of course I need bullets.’
‘Bullets is fifty.’
Stubbs agreed to be back in thirty minutes with the money. He went to a bank and drew £200 from the ATM with the debit card he’d concealed in his shoe. He slipped £100 in his trouser back pocket and £100 in his shirt pocket, in case of muggers. He was enjoying this, thinking like they thought, and he felt more alive than he’d done in his entire life. Streetwise, that’s what it was called, and the material he was gathering that would be of use in stories was beyond belief. He slipped the card back into his shoe and strode off towards the assignation.
Raoul Pawinski’s task was to make a bomb. As a schoolboy he’d learned that the magic ingredients were saltpetre, sulphur and carbon. As an adult he knew that fertilizer was used extensively in the manufacture of homemade explosives. He wasn’t sure but he imagined that saltpetre was some sort of nitrate, as used in fertilizer. Charcoal would do for carbon, which just left the sulphur. He consulted Yellow Pages.
There were not many entries under Chemicals, but enough for his purpose. The first one he rang only dealt in chemicals for water treatment plants and the next one supplied the manufacturers of dyes. Yes, they did supply sulphur and would he like to open an account with them? He didn’t.
After another couple of fruitless calls he decided that this was a futile avenue to follow. He went to the library and logged one of their computers on to the internet. ‘How to make a bomb’ produced immediate results. Pawinski pulled out a notebook and started writing furiously.
Batteries, he learned, were a source of magnesium oxide, which, when mixed with hydrogen peroxide, made a respectable explosion. He carefully copied the instructions right to the end, then lowered his pen in dismay. ‘Shake well,’ it said, ‘then run away as fast as possible.’
That was no good. The idea was to leave the device under her car, primed to explode as soon as she drove off and completed the simple electrical circuit he’d already designed. He clicked the next entry.
There were bombs made from match heads, bombs made from fireworks, even detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to make an atom bomb, but he decided that one of those was over the top. Killing Jessica Fullerton was one thing, but wiping out half of the north of England in the pursuit of her demise would be counter-productive. Almost all of the entries had come from foul-mouthed, illiterate weirdos, probably in America. Those that weren’t of the throw-and-run type required some sort of detonator to trigger the explosion, but the instructions for obtaining detonators never went beyond ‘steal them’. Pawinski closed his notebook and wondered if the whole thing had been such a good idea.
Sonia Cribbage eyed the blue and steel wrecking bar in the window of the Ace DIY store and decided it was just what she wanted. And it wasn’t expensive, either.
‘Ah, you mean a jemmy,’ the thin man behind the counter replied when she asked for one. ‘We sell a lot of these. Not taking up burglary, I hope, Madam.’
‘No,’ Sonia replied with a smile, deciding not to add ‘Murder’ by way of explanation. ‘It’s for raising some crazy paving.’
‘Heavy work,’ he told her as he placed the bar in a bag. ‘Don’t attempt it yourself.’
She thanked him and left the shop, surprised at how heavy the bag felt. One decent blow with that should finish off the most thick-skulled victim. Driving home she reconsidered that thought. One blow to incapacitate her; a second, really violent blow to finish her off and a third as insurance. That was how to do it, but first of all she’d experiment with the two over-ripe watermelons she’d purchased in the market.
Back in her own kitchen she pushed the table against the wall and moved the chairs out of the way. When there was sufficient room – to swing a jemmy, not a cat, she told herself with a grim smile – Sonia fetched a travelling rug from the bedroom cupboard and laid it in a crumpled heap on the floor. She placed the riper of the two melons on it and arranged the rug to hold it loosely in position.
Sonia picked up the jemmy and gave a few trial swings with it. If she held on to the bent end, she decided, there was less chance of it slipping from her grasp. She tapped the melon lightly, like a golfer taking a practice putt, then raised the jemmy above her head and brought it down with all her strength.
Thwack! She closed her eyes at the moment of impact and raised the jemmy again. Spladge! And again. Splodge!
Sonia opened her eyes to survey the damaged, noticing that she was puffing as much as when she climbed the stairs at the shopping mall. The melon had been reduced to a mass of pulp. Juice and seeds covered the kitchen floor and she realised that what she’d thought was perspiration running down her cheeks was more juice. The front of her dress was soaked in it. She raised her eyes to survey the walls and the ceiling and saw that they too were covered in the remnants of the melon. She tried to imagine what the real thing would look like, if the juice were arterial blood and the pips fragments of skull or brain, and felt herself swoon.
They met at the Mad Hatter teashop in Masham, north of Ripon, which was as central a location as they could find. Pawinski arrived deliberately early and lunched on steak and kidney pie followed by spotted dick. It was a small, if expensive, treat that he’d promised himself. He was wearing a belted tweed jacket with a high collar, even though it was a warm day, and cavalry twills. His size six shoes had brass strips around the toes and gleamed like moonlight on still water.
Hillary Stubbs was next to arrive. He wore pale blue lightweight slacks bought by mail order via the Sunday Times colour supplement and a Greenwoods zipper jacket in sage green. The women arrived together five minutes later, Artemesia in her customary flowered dress and Sonia looking cool in a crisp white blouse and pleated skirt. They shook hands with the men and exchanged air-kisses.
After tea and sandwiches, with Pawinski excusing himself from anything to eat on the grounds of mysterious dietary requirements, and the usual grumbles about the prices, they got down to business. Artemesia acted as chair person.
‘I’m afraid I failed, miserably,’ she confessed. ‘My task was to come up with a way of poisoning Jessica, but it was harder than I expected. The poison bit was no problem, but I had to have a way of delivering it, and that’s where I came undone. I rang her publisher, saying I wanted to invite her to a function, and they told me that she was in this country, not the Isle of Man, for the summer. She still owns a cottage in Robin Hood’s Bay and the address is in the Association members’ directory, so I went there.’
‘You went there!’ someone exclaimed.
‘Yes. It’s not too far for me. And if I was serious about this it was obvious we’d have to meet, somewhere along the line.’
‘That’s true,’ Pawinski agreed, nodding with understanding.
‘So what did you do?’ Sonia asked.
/>
‘I followed her. I waited on a bench opposite her cottage. Incidentally, it’s not as grand as I expected. Just a little thing in a terrace. Very neat, but quite small.’
‘And probably worth about half a million,’ Stubbs told them.
‘Yes, I imagine so,’ Artemesia replied. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘after about three quarters of an hour Jessica came out and I followed her. She has a routine, which includes going for morning coffee to a certain café on the seafront at ten thirty every day. I’d had the foresight to arm myself with one of her books – Lust in the Sun – which is as dire a tome as you could imagine, and I seated myself facing her usual place. As my Earl Grey arrived I plucked up courage and approached her, asking if she was Jessica Fullerton, saying I was a great fan of hers, and could she possibly autograph my latest purchase. I apologised for interrupting her break and much to my surprise she invited me to join her.’
‘She invited you to join her!’ Sonia echoed.
‘Yes, so I did. I had a scone and butter and she had a Welsh rarebit. It looked delicious. She doesn’t do lunch, she said, but has a morning break and afternoon tea instead.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Hillary Stubbs commented. ‘Stopping for lunch does tend to disrupt the day when you’re writing.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t do without a break to listen to World at One,’ Sonia said.
‘Never mind that,’ Pawinski interrupted. ‘What happened next?’
‘Well, I casually mentioned that I did some writing and had had a modicum of success, and she was most interested. Well, actually, she sounded thrilled to bits. She invited me to have afternoon tea with her. Said she was having difficulty with a new story, about an unmarried mother. She said the boundaries were being pushed back a little further every year, but she didn’t know how far she dare go with it. My opinion would be gratefully appreciated. Can you believe that? Jessica Fullerton asking for my opinion.’
Pawinski said: ‘It sounds as if you would have plenty of opportunity to administer the fatal dose,’ and all eyes turned back to Artemesia.
Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories Page 9