Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  The places we stopped at, on all of which we left our mark, I will not mention in detail, but we rarely stopped long enough to need a warning from Codlin and Short. We were on to a very good thing. Our lives changed, however, when we happened on the village to which the schoolmaster whom we had encountered early on in our travels had moved. Here he was, large as life and just as dispiriting. He was still mourning the bright young pupil he had had years before, and still polishing the young hypocrite’s halo every day of his life. A right little teacher’s pet that limb of Satan must have been! It occurred to us that this was the sort of place we could well settle down in.

  Well, as soon as the idea occurred to us, we wrote to Codlin and Short. We explained that there were several towns within walking distance, as well as several lucrative hell-holes. We had made a series of nocturnal excursions after the village was asleep (at about 8.30, in order to save candles), and we really felt the place would answer, at least for a year or two. We heard back from them that they could think of no reason why it shouldn’t, and they would keep us informed as to anything they heard of that could be construed as a threat. And so things went on for three or four months.

  Then I got bored.

  I suppose we should have expected that. The night excursions still held a charm, but the daytime was terrible - catching up on sleep and enduring shiver-making visits from the schoolteacher or from his equally unappetizing friend The Bachelor - a local notable of similar habits and notions (my impersonation of infantile goodness and sweetness confirmed all his preconceptions about the non-carnal nature of the English female). I was tired of them all. I wanted London, I wanted stir, glamour, rich pickings. I was even nostalgic about Dan Quilp, one of our London friends, who had managed to evict grandfather from the Old Curiosity Shop: beneath his ugly, dwarfish exterior there lurked a diabolical energy, both criminal and sexual. He radiated an indiscriminate hunger and love of wreaking havoc. I understood why women were both repelled and thrilled by him. I wanted to get a share in that electricity, match myself with him. I hadn’t been so excited since those lovely years when I was the only girl member of Fagin’s gang.

  I always remember the ending of Codlin and Short’s letter, when we had written to them to broach the problem. It read:

  “Why doesn’t she die?”

  When we wrote asking them to elaborate on the question, they sketched in the plan which eventually with slight changes we adopted.

  “Have dear little Eleanor sicken, slowly, inexorably. Orchestrate a chorus of village concern as she sinks, passing into a better world. Resist the temptation to open the deathbed scene to the general public at a shilling a time. Do it all tastefully. Have her practise short breathing - getting tiny gulps in a way that hardly moves the lungs. When she is ‘dead’ have a simple funeral, though one marked by inconsolable local grief. Take the coffin to the local church and have grandpa mount guard over her all night. Keep a supply of sand in the vestry (NOT rubble, it tends to rattle). Fill (or half fill) the coffin with it. In the morning have the ceremony, bury the sand, and get Nell off to London suitably disguised - as her real self, we would suggest. Hey presto! In the future she can come back to visit her grandad if she wants to - posing as a long-lost cousin.”

  It was a wonderful idea! It left grandad free to use his great gifts in the country gaming holes, and it left me in London sampling the high life of Mayfair and the low life of Dan Quilp and his haunts. I liked the idea so much that I fell ill the very day we got the letter.

  I didn’t overdo it, of course. I am nothing if not tasteful. At first I was very brave, denying that I was ill at all. When they commented on my pallid complexion (flea powder) I shook my head bravely, then said there was nothing wrong. Then I thought it must be something I had eaten. Then I lost the use of my legs (they all shook their heads gravely at that). Before ten days were out I was permanently confined to bed, offering my visitors sickening platitudes, and sweetly prophesying I would soon be up again and as busy as ever. Tears flowed like cataracts. Behind their hands everyone started making suggestions for the gravestone.

  The end was unutterably poignant. We made it semi-public. The schoolmaster and The Bachelor were there, and a couple of rustics who could be relied on to get everything wrong and then rehash their account to the whole village, over and over again. I was visibly failing, and much whiter than the sheets on my bed. When the little knot of witnesses was assembled I began the tearful climax to my short life.

  “Grandad,” I said (he was sitting on my bed, and now clutched my hand in his horny one), “I think a change is coming. I think I am getting better. Is the sun shining? How I would love to see the sun again. It is getting light. The whole world is becoming brighter. I feel I am in a new place - better and more lovely than anything I have known before—”

  And so on. And on. I managed about ten minutes of this, and then my voice started to fade. Words could be heard - “world”, “bright”, “sun” and others, but nothing together that made sense until I suddenly said “Grandad, give me the sun” and my head fell back on the pillow, and my grandfather let out an anguished howl.

  Artistic, I’m sure you’ll agree.

  The witnesses clustered round, observing the lifeless corpse and the sobbing frame of that old fraud my grandfather. Then he stood up, still wracked with sobs, and ushered them out of the door.

  He drew the heavy curtains, locked the door, and then the pair of us had a good if quiet laugh. After a while grandad slipped out to order a coffin from the village carpenter. He found it was almost ready, as the carpenter with his practised eye had made a note of the likely size and had done most of the work a couple of weeks earlier. We, or he, took delivery that evening.

  We made a slight change of plan. The nights were drawing in and the days were nippy. I didn’t fancy (as we had planned) a long day in the staircase leading up the church tower while the funeral went ahead and night fell. We agreed to do the substitution in the cottage. We had a showing of me in the coffin next day, when the whole village and rustic dolts from miles around filed past uttering idiocies like “She do seem at peace” and “Oh what a ‘eavenly hexpression she do ‘ave”. When that collection of human rubble had passed through I jumped out of the coffin. Grandfather and I heaved the sack of sand (purloined by him from a building site) into the coffin and he nailed it down extremely tightly. We heaved it on to a trestle and went to bed in Grandad’s bed. It will not have passed my sharper readers by that, whatever else he was, Grandad was certainly not my grandfather.

  I have, writing now from the Old Curiosity Shop and awaiting another visit from dear, excitable Mr Quilp, who is finding me a bit of a handful, only one or two details to add. The next day, the funeral, was a big laugh. It was the last day of Little Nell, that brilliant creation the world had come to love. The vicar was in church, and the schoolmaster, the Old Bachelor, the gravedigger and Grandad assembled in our cottage to carry the coffin to the churchyard. As they were heaving it up on to their shoulders the schoolmaster said, in his typically spiritless tone of voice:

  “I’m sure Little Nell is already there, at home in Paradise, chanting with the heavenly choir.”

  “I’d lay you ten pounds at whatever odds you choose to name that she’s up there now, singing along with them other angels, lungs fit to bust,” said Grandad, winking towards the bedroom door, where I was surveying the delicious scene through the keyhole and barely suppressing my roars of laughter.

  I laugh when I think of that now. We made such fools of them all, Grandad and I. Putty in our hands, that’s what they were. I long to have Mr Quilp helpless like the yokels, also putty in my hands. Already he is mad with jealousy every time I look at a London swell, which is fairly often, because they’re on every street corner. But I must go very slowly. I have so much to learn from Mr Quilp about crime, about gaining the upper hand over the fools around me. I learned a lot from Fagin, but I could not use my sex with him, for obvious reasons. With Quilp I can use my sex to
get from him every jot and tittle he knows. I said to him two evenings ago I needed above all to learn, and he was my chosen master, the one who would lead me up the path to my being Europe’s Queen of Crime. “Wait till I see you next time,” said my dear Quilp. “I’ll give you a lesson as’ll last you a lifetime.”

  I think that’s him. Those are his uneven steps on the stairs. I can’t wait to see his delicious deformed body. His hands are on the doorkn—

  * * * *

  Here the creator of Little Nell fell silent for ever.

  <>

  * * * *

  JOHNNY SEVEN

  David Bowker

  His name was Johnny Seven.

  You think the name is weird, you should have seen his eyes. They were real blue and bright, like the eyes on some kind of light-up action figure. First time I saw him, there was this silence, like that part in a western when the stranger walks into the saloon. The new kid was thin and not very tall, with longish fair hair. He had a tiny rip in the left elbow of his jacket, like his folks were on welfare or something. Pretty neat jacket, all the same. He sure didn’t carry himself like he was on welfare.

  We were all sitting down, waiting for the teacher to show. For a few moments, Johnny boy hung around in the doorway of the classroom like he’d rather be somewhere else. But then Griff came up behind him, put his hand on Johnny’s shoulder and steered him right in. “This is Jonathan Severn and I’m sure you’d all like to welcome him.”

  Griff wasn’t even our real teacher. He was some fucked up old man who they brought in when the real teachers were sick. He probably should have been in an old people’s home. He was always telling us things that weren’t suitable for middle school kids to know, like what the Germans did to the Jews in the war. Once he gave us all paper and crayons and asked us to draw a Martian pancake. The point was that no one knew what a Martian pancake looked like, so everybody had to use their imaginations. I drew a car crash with bodies on the road and blood everywhere. Griff said to me: “That isn’t a Martian pancake.” I said: “How the fuck do you know?” so he sent me to the Vice Principal.

  It was unlucky for Johnny Seven that the first teacher he met was this senile old guy who wasn’t even his real teacher. When Griff asked us all to welcome Johnny, no one did. So Johnny just stood there, hanging his head like he found the whole situation humiliating. He walked over to the only free desk, some of the girls smiling at him, then he sat down, not really looking at anyone, eyes straight ahead. Griff launched straight into his dull old routine. “Johnny, maybe you have an opinion about what took place today?”

  “Took place where?” said Johnny. No sir, no nothing.

  I laughed. Griff shot me a look that said shut the fuck up.

  “You’re from New Jersey and you really don’t know what happened?” Griff just wasn’t buying this.

  Johnny shook his head, real steady and slow. The way he did it, you could tell he knew exactly what had happened that day. Griff knew it too. Suddenly there was this electric feeling in the air. Something different was happening. Everyone could feel it. Griff was doing what teachers always do. He was holding up a hoop for good little boys and girls to jump through. But the new kid just wasn’t playing.

  Griff looked around the class. “Anyone?”

  Bugaski put up his hand. Bugaski always put up his hand whether he knew the answer or not, just so it looked like he was making an effort. Bugaski’s report card probably says “This kid has got a name like one guy sticking it to another guy, he’s practically a vegetable, but he sure as hell can wave his arm in the air.”

  “Sir!” said Bugaski.

  At first, Griffiths ignored him.

  “Sir, sir!” said Bugaski, wriggling and pleading like he was about to hatch a monster turd. “Sir, was it Bob Hope?”

  “No,” said Griff. “Come on. The news today. Someone must know. Anyone?”

  Blank fuckin’ faces.

  “Come on. Something happened to someone associated with this state.”

  Anne Marie held her hand in the air. I like her, she’s so nice you hardly even notice she’s a whale. “Somebody Davies,” she said.

  “Hallelujah,” said Griff. Real sarcastic. “That’s close enough. Jack David. He was executed this morning. Anyone know why?”

  “Was he a poor black guy that never did anyone any harm?” I said.

  “Be quiet, Newton,” said Griff. He turned back to Anne Marie. “Maybe you could tell us?”

  “He blew up a library.”

  “Blew up a library?” said Warren Sherman, real shocked. “Really? They executed a guy just for blowing up a library?”

  Griff sneered. “It had people in it, Sherman.”

  Even so . . .

  This is how fucked up Griff was. I complained to the Vice Principal about him but she never listened. He should have been teaching us about algebra or some shit. Instead, he asked us whether we thought the US government having the power to kill one of its own citizens was good or bad. Bugaski put up his hand as usual and said, “Sir, sir, is it a good thing, sir?”

  Griffiths kind of sighed. “Bugaski, this is not a quiz.”

  I said: “If you ask me, it’s a terrible example to set to children.”

  “But no one’s asking you, Newton,” said Griffiths.

  As well as being senile, Griff was a Christian. He was one of those weird Christians who hates the whole human race. He once told us wars were terrible things, but they were useful for keeping down the excess population. Guy like that, would he count murderers as excess population? I guess he would.

  Kirsten Wells, dumb but gorgeous, held up her hand. “If Jack David didn’t want to die for his crime, he shouldn’t have planted the bomb in the first place.”

  Wow. Great fuckin point, Kirsten. A real sizzler.

  Griff gave a nod, just to humour her. He was probably thinking he had to stay on the right side of her, in case the bomb went off and him and Kirsten were the last two people left alive. Dumb or not, a girl who looked like Kirsten could be pretty useful in a post-nuclear situation.

  My dad already explained why Jack David did it but I wasn’t really listening. It was something to do with protesting about the government. All I know is the whole senate ganged up on this guy. It wasn’t just a state crime, it was something called a federal crime, which means you’ve insulted the whole of America. Like saying, “Fuck off America.”

  And now I was feeling sorry for Griffiths. All he wanted was for the new kid to throw him a bone but Johnny was sitting there like Whistler’s mother. Griff tried again. “Five years ago in this very city, the Melton Library was blown apart by a bomb that David left in an elevator. Over two hundred people died.”

  Big silence. Suddenly the new kid sighed, like he wanted to get something out but didn’t know how. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t like talking about it, sir, but actually, yeah,” said Johnny, all solemn and still. “I remember that day very well.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I didn’t want to say, sir. My mom worked in the City Library. We lost her that day.”

  Shit. The whole room was in shock. Griffs face turned purple nearly, and his mouth dropped wide open. Teachers aren’t meant to have feelings, but now he looked like he was about to cry. “Oh. Oh.” That’s all he said. It’s like he couldn’t move, he was paralysed.

  “I didn’t want to say,” said Johnny like he was about to cry. “You forced it out of me.”

  “I’m extremely sorry, boy,” said Griff. He said it like he meant it.

  “Wasn’t just mom. We lost my dad that day,” said Johnny. “And my big sister. They were only returning their books, too.”

  Griffiths stared, open-mouthed.

  “Yes sir, Mr Griffiths, sir. My uncles and aunts all got killed, too,” said Johnny. “Along with the little dog who lived down the fucking lane.”

  Griff kind of rocked on his heels and his face went all pink. Then Gri
ffiths dragged that kid out of his chair and damn near threw him halfway across the room. “How dare you! Get out!” Griffiths was screaming.

  Johnny left like he was told. He looked real happy to be going.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” I told Griffiths. “Throwing kids is against the law.”

  That’s all I said, but the way Griff turned on me, you’d have thought it was me who blew up the fucking library. “You too, Newton.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said get out!” I get a real big blast of his breath. It smelled like he’d been eating dogshit with a mayonnaise dressing.

  “Hey!”

  “Don’t ‘hey’ me, boy! Out!”