Ten Year Stretch

by Martin Edwards

  ‘And Ellen?’

  ‘I think it was the same for her. More so, even. As if—what was it she said?—as if her body had been sleeping. And now…I just don’t…I just don’t understand.’

  Kiley didn’t know how to respond, what to say. He knew that people responded, some people, in terrible ways when faced with choices they felt unable to make, situations from which they could see no escape. He knew they opened up their arms, took pills, threw themselves in front of trains, climbed up to some high place and stepped free. He knew people who had assumed new identities, slept rough, become travellers, cut themselves off from their past lives so completely they forgot who they were, who they had once been. He knew Ellen could be any one of those. Or none.

  ‘I ought to be getting back,’ Leah said, rising to her feet.

  ‘I’ll walk down with you.’

  ‘No need.’

  He watched until only a hint of her auburn hair stood out amongst the withering grey and then not even that.

  In Bristol it was raining. Nothing spectacular, just that fine English rain that laced across your face and, without you noticing, seeped into your soul. Kiley took a cab from Temple Meads Station to the edge of College Green. A first-year student, Andrew Carpenter’s accommodation was in a row of terraced houses converted into flats. When he heard Kiley wanted to talk to him about his mother, the blood drained from his face and he steadied himself against the iron railing alongside the door.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Kiley said, ‘I’ve no reason to suspect anything’s happened to her. No reason at all.’

  ‘Wait then. We can’t talk here.’

  He re-emerged minutes later with an anorak thrown over his shoulders, hood pulled up.

  ‘Coffee, yeah?’

  ‘Fine.’

  The place was busy with students earnestly staring at their laptops, women feeding their babies while they sipped chai lattes; there was a vacant table upstairs, looking down over a dampened garden.

  ‘My dad sent you, that’s what you said.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Then what…?’

  ‘He told me where you were, what you were studying. That you were worried about your mother.’

  ‘He had no right…’

  ‘But you are worried?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course I am. She’s always, you know, since I’ve been down here, kept in touch. Just a text or something. And now…’ His mouth puckered sharply as if he had just tasted something bitter and unpleasant. ‘It’s that woman, isn’t it?’

  ‘Leah?’

  ‘Yeah, her. She doesn’t want her to have anything to do with us, does she? Not any of us. As if we didn’t bloody exist.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  Andrew looked back at him defiantly, disbelieving, then down at his hands, fingernails broken and bitten to the quick.

  ‘What I think Leah wants from your mother is to know where she stands. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think that means turning her back on you at all. I think she realises how important you are to her, you and your brother.’

  ‘What about my dad?’

  ‘That’s something they have to work out for themselves, him and your mum.’

  Andrew stared down at his almost empty cup and then out through the window at the darkening, sodden earth, the false shine of stonework in the rain. What was he, Kiley thought? Eighteen? Nineteen? What had he been like himself at that age? Ignorant. Cocksure. If he couldn’t be a professional footballer, then he was going to join the police. His parents—unimaginative, solid, dependable; his father in the same job since he was seventeen; roast on Sundays, cold meat Mondays, what was still remaining into the mincer for shepherd’s pie on Tuesdays; two weeks holiday every summer, Filey, North Yorks coast, bracing, blow the cobwebs away, get ready for another year. If his parents, either of them, had as much as strayed, never mind left home, walked out, walked away, fallen in love…

  ‘There’s a photo,’ he said, ‘in your mother’s flat, on the wall. The two of you. By the sea somewhere; it looks like…’

  ‘Cape Cornwall. Summer before last. We went down there, just mum and I. Sort of treat for doing well in my exams. AS-levels. She used to go there when she was a girl, she said. Her parents. Not been back since.’

  ‘Looks as if you were both having a nice time.’

  ‘We were.’

  He looked away and Kiley knew Andrew didn’t want him to see the tears in his eyes.

  She was staying in St Just, a small grey town a short distance inland and just a few miles from Land’s End. This far out of season there were few visitors and those who were there were easy to find. Ellen Carpenter had taken a late breakfast in a small café-cum-book store—poached eggs and bacon on granary toast—lingering over a latté while leafing through that week’s Cornishman. Small of stature, greying hair; a face that had once been pretty and had grown into something more attractive, eyes that were intelligent and alive. Kiley waited until she was upstairs amongst the second-hand books.

  ‘Ellen?’

  The paperback she’d been looking at slipped through her fingers to the floor.

  ‘It’s okay. No need to be alarmed.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  Kiley explained, needing to gain her confidence, quell her fear.

  There were two seats in the far room and they sat there surrounded by history, biography, people’s lives.

  ‘You think I’m running away, don’t you? And I suppose I am. It’s cowardly, I know. But whatever I decide to do—and I know I must…make a decision, I mean—it’s going to result in someone getting hurt. Someone I love.’

  ‘People adjust.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘I think so, usually. Yes.’

  ‘So do I. Rationally, I suppose. But people aren’t rational, are they? Not everyone. Not all the time.’

  ‘You’re thinking about your husband?’

  She gave the sleeve of her cardigan a little tug. ‘Derek’s a prisoner to his own feelings. Instincts, I suppose. Faced with something he can’t quite understand, can’t control, he strikes out. Oh, afterwards he’s sorry, even if he can’t bring himself to say so. But that doesn’t stop it happening again. Just the mention of Leah, if I do try to talk about what’s happening, try to explain…Well, he feels threatened, I expect you can understand, another woman especially. And if I had to tell him I was going—we were going—to New Zealand. Moving there…’

  ‘Maybe if you had someone else there with you when you told him? Then he might not react so…well, violently.’

  ‘Maybe, supposing that’s what I decide to do.’ She rose quickly to her feet. ‘I’m going down to look at the ocean. Come with me if you like.’

  They climbed the steep short path over the headland to the tall chimney stack at the head of the cape, remnant of the mine that had operated there from the last years of the nineteenth century, extracting tin and copper from under the sea, and sat on a bench seat, looking out over the rocks, the water lashing from both directions, throwing up spray. Powerful. Angry.

  ‘I’m trying not to—and I know being on my own like this doesn’t help—but I keep thinking about those dreadful things you read about in the paper. Men who’ve been rejected. And it is always men. Sometimes there are children involved, sometimes not. Rejected, anyway. And they sit on it, brood, send themselves into I-don’t-know-what…dark places, until suddenly, one day, they can’t keep it down anymore and it’s, “If I can’t have you, no one else will.” And they set homes ablaze and they stab and they kill.’

  ‘And that’s what’s frightening you? Keeping you here?’

  ‘Of course it’s bloody frightening me.’

  ‘Yet you must know, those cases, they’re awful, but they’re rare.’r />
  ‘And they still happen.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But not—’

  ‘Not what? Not to me?’

  ‘It’s unlikely.’

  ‘Unlikely! Is that the best you can do?’

  They walked back around the side of the headland, with views across a broad bay towards what remained of a derelict mine, close by the shore.

  ‘You know,’ Ellen said, ‘along with whatever metals they used to take out of the ground, they used to process arsenic. Great for pesticides, apparently. Not only that. Back in Victorian times, women used to use it as a cosmetic. Dr Simms’ Arsenic Complexion Wafers. Guaranteed to result in clear and blooming skin. Drank it, even.’

  ‘No idea, presumably, that they were taking poison?’

  ‘No, but they did. It said so, there on the bottle. Dr Fowler’s Solution. Caution: Poison.’

  ‘Then, why…?’

  ‘Because they thought the way they looked was important, perhaps more important than anything else. And because, like people today who read Smoking Kills on a cigarette packet and light up all the same, they think it won’t happen to them. So they’re prepared to take the risk.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘Would I take arsenic to improve my ageing complexion?’ Ellen laughed. ‘I think perhaps not. Would I go back to smoking Marlboro Lights, like I did when I was twenty-one? Not now. No way. But does that make me a coward or just sensible? Risk-averse, is that the term?’

  ‘I dare say.’

  ‘It’s not just the as-you-say remote possibility of being the victim of uncontrollable anger that’s preventing me from making up my mind, it’s everything. Do I want to relocate halfway across the world and leave behind everything I’ve spent the best part of fifty years putting together? My two boys, my sons. Anthony, he’d be okay, but Andrew…’

  ‘There’s always Skype,’ Kiley said. ‘Or so I’m told.’

  Ellen stopped on the cliff edge. ‘It’s different for Leah. She doesn’t have children. And she knows what she wants. She wants to go to New Zealand. And she wants me. If I don’t agree to go with her, it means I don’t love her. At least, not enough. That’s what she’ll think. And she’ll go without me if she has to, I realise that. She’s been after a job down there for ages and the chance may not come again. She’s not going to throw it away now.’

  A gull flew close overhead and wheeled off across the bay.

  ‘It sounds to me,’ Kiley said, ‘as if you’ve made up your mind.’

  ‘Does it?’ Ellen’s laughter caught on the wind. ‘Then you better tell me what it is.’

  Sunday afternoon. The band was on stage and the skateboarders were in the square. Kiley was back in his usual seat. As the drummer battled it out with the ensemble in an arrangement of “Skin Deep,” Kiley saw Ellen making her way down past the men playing dominoes, a steady walk, not looking round, the walk of someone who knew where she was going and why.

  Number over, the drummer stood to acknowledge the applause, flicked sweat from his brow.

  ‘Now,’ the bandleader was saying, ‘it’s my pleasure once again to bring to the microphone, on tenor saxophone, Leah Temple.’

  As the music started, Kiley turned to see Ellen walk into the room, step forward, stop and listen, the expression on her face not giving anything away. “Blue and Sentimental.” Leah was lost to everything but the moment, the sound that rose and fell around her as she played, her eyes tightly closed.

  How Many Cats

  Have You Killed?

  Mick Herron

  I saw a snake once, near the railway track in Oxford. This must have been thirty years ago. I didn’t get a clear view; just saw a section of its length, wrapped round a fencepost. The rest was hidden in long grass. It was moving, very slowly, and was inches thick: definitely not indigenous. God knows where it came from—abandoned pet? Escapee from a circus? I didn’t want to get closer (it was a few yards away), so I just stood and watched and eventually it slithered from view.

  This really happened. I didn’t report it, though I should have done: I remember thinking, who’s going to believe me? I was a student at the time, or an unemployed graduate; definitely layabout territory, so I didn’t think turning up at a police station and explaining I’d just seen a really huge snake would meet anything but scorn. So, anyway. That’s a short story for you; the real kind, which has nothing up its sleeve, and no twist in the tail. It’s just something that happened once, that’s all. I saw a snake that had no right to be there. And none of us are ever going to know what that was about.

  I remembered this for the first time in decades the other day, because somebody asked me how many cats I’d killed.

  Okay, rewind. There was a train of thought there, and a perfectly logical one, too. I’m a novelist. Like just about everybody else in this hotel right now, I’m a crime novelist; I invent dark stories, and people die. Occasionally, too, pets die, and this is one of the issues we novelists like to raise in the bar at places like CrimeFest—how many animals have you done away with? ‘How many cats have you killed?’ we ask each other, and laugh about it; and then we get asked the same question in public forums, and God help us if we show amusement at that point, because one thing readers are hot on—are very hot on—is animal cruelty. You can slaughter prostitutes, tabloid journalists, politicians, and bankers (the more the merrier, frankly), but if you’ve put away a moggy in a book, you’re beyond the pale. That’s a no-go area. And the whole ‘it’s only a story’ get-out doesn’t help either. Case in point: in my book Dead Lions, there’s an opening passage in which I describe Slough House, the location for most of my recent novels, by writing something like: ‘Let’s imagine a cat got in,’ and then following the passage of that imaginary cat through the building. It was a way of introducing characters; their individual responses to the intruder giving the reader an insight into what they’re like, and I had fun with it up to and including the point at which the cat reaches the final room, whereupon it’s tossed out of the window and hit by a passing car. So okay, technically a cat dies. But you know, even within the realms of fiction, it was an imaginary cat. Not merely a fictional animal, a pretend fictional animal. And still this drew gasps of dismay from an audience once. (Americans, if you’re interested. I don’t mean anything by that, but it happened in America. Just saying.)

  But anyway, why this question ‘How many cats have you killed?’ drew the snake to mind was this: it occurred to me while delivering my well-rehearsed answer that I never use real experiences in my books. I’ll happily describe the adventures of an imaginary cat, but I never talk about the snake. Avoiding truth, I make stuff up instead. Which isn’t a bad approach for a novelist, I’ve always said, but the bad news I got this morning has left me with second thoughts. So I’ve decided to use my contribution to this anthology celebrating CrimeFest’s tenth anniversary (Happy Birthday, guys!) as a platform from which to make an honest statement about my real life. Hence my mention of the snake, which has been waiting years to appear in a piece of fiction, and my now addressing—candidly, for once—the question that all crime writers get asked (the one about killing cats), and the other one that all espionage writers face: ‘Have you ever been a spy?’

  Cards on the table, then. How many cats have I killed? None. Not one. Not a solitary kitten.

  And have I ever been a spy?

  Yes. Yes, I have.

  Still am, in fact.

  But not for my own country. I’d better make that clear from the outset. I mean, I’m as patriotic as the next novelist, but let’s face it, the pay is just stupid. Besides, I don’t actually know anything that would be of use to MI5: I get pretty much all my information from Radio 4, and I imagine it’s got that covered. No, let’s just say that the country I work for is not the one you might expect; is not commonly understood to be hostile to our own; and has a far bigger budget for covert activities than
Wikipedia, for a start, is aware of. I’m not giving any more clues, except to say that it’s the size of Wales (but isn’t Wales, obviously. That would be ridiculous).

  Anyway, it all started shortly after Slow Horses—my first spy novel proper—was published, and in a manner embarrassingly familiar to anyone versed in the rules of tradecraft. There I was, sitting on a park bench reading a newspaper, like you do, when two bowler-hatted men came and sat either side of me. The first—who looked a lot like Trevor Howard, if that helps—said, very politely, ‘I wonder if you’d care to come along with us, sir?’ except, the way he said it made it clear I had little choice in the matter. (That was what the second man was for. He looked a lot like Dwayne Johnson.) I was somewhat nervous, obviously, but also curious, as well as outnumbered, I got into their car and, after being driven a very long way, almost exactly the amount of time it would take to drive to, say, Cardiff (but not Cardiff), found myself delivered to an underground complex beneath a rugby stadium. And there my life as a spy began.

  Because, as it turns out—and this was explained to me in great detail—almost all spy novelists are, in fact, spies. And how they get to be spies happens in exactly the way it had just happened to me: they publish a spy novel, which attracts the attention of MI5 (apparently, spooks do a lot of reading), which then recruits them on account of the crafty brilliance displayed in their book. Put like that, it sounds like a reasonable process, a no-brainer even, though I’ll admit I was quite surprised to begin with. But it seems it’s a widespread practice across the crime-writing industry. Did you know, for example, that most cosy-crime writers are in fact undercover taxidermists or cupcake designers or whatever? True fact. But anyway, most espionage novelists are real-life secret agents, which no doubt gives them a chuckle when they’re asked, at conferences and in interviews, ‘Have you ever been a spy?’ (Though that remains a ridiculous question, and the fact that the honest answer should almost always be ‘yes’ doesn’t make asking it any more sensible. I mean, the answer’s going to be ‘no’ regardless, right? Either because it’s the truth or, especially, because it isn’t. QED.)