Guilty Parties

by Martin Edwards

  Bennie stepped out of the estate and onto the main road. One of the other residents, a widower who lived alone in a top floor flat, was returning, laden with four orange plastic bags bulging with shopping. Somebody ought to be helping him with stuff like that. At his age.

  ‘Hi, pal! How’s it going?’ said Bennie.

  The old man gave him a wary nod, and gulped silently. Then he quickened his pace. A few minutes later, he would stumble over a child’s body, with a single bullet hole in the back. But he didn’t know that yet.

  ‘Suit yourself, dickhead,’ said Bennie cheerfully. And he set off down the road, dragging his left foot slightly, jingling the coins in his pocket.

  THE ART OF OLD AGE

  Yvonne Eve Walus

  Yvonne Eve Walus lives in New Zealand. She is a doctor of Mathematics, wife, mother as well as a poet, novelist and writer of short stories. She wrote her first poem when she was four and her first short story when she was nine. Her first publishing success (a short story in a local magazine) came when she was 22. Yvonne has lived on three continents and her work reflects the range of her cultural background. Her latest thriller, Operation: Genocide, is published by Stairway Press.

  New Zealand Herald

  21 June 2013

  Robber raids elderly victims

  Police are warning the elderly in Auckland to be wary after several were confronted by a robber – in some cases while he was lying in ambush awaiting their return home.

  There have been eight incidents in recent days where people have been challenged and robbed while they were at home. In all cases the victims were elderly.

  Sometimes I wonder who these people used to be, the ones I rob. They all look the same, dotted with freckles of old age, their skin leathered and thinned and in urgent need of ironing. Their shoulders are always caved in, their backs rounded like tortoiseshell, and their eyes emit that switched-off look even when they stare right at you from above the gag.

  Sometimes I wonder whether it’s an ex-model I’m tying to her dining-room chair, as rickety as her own eighty-year-old frame. Whether the old man who’s pissed his pants in fear used to swish – immortal and forever young – in his sports car. Whether this couple, holding hands as they shuffle hand-in-hand into their golden-years cottage where I lie in wait, used to bicker the way my parents did. Have they ever been unfaithful? Felt tempted to throttle the living daylights out of one another? Is the hand-in-hand shuffle a bluff? Usually I can tell as soon as they see me. It’s whether they choose to protect themselves or the spouse.

  The old rimu wood floor looks like solid honey but it’s hell on my elbows. Give me a carpet over wooden planks any day.

  With single old folks, I knock on the door and pretend to sell vacuums or cheaper electricity plans. Sometimes I’m a gas inspector or a police officer. Starved for company and for something to do with their infinitely long day, they usually let me in.

  Couples are trickier. That’s why I wait for them inside.

  Here they come now. The garden gate squeaks on its slanted hinges. I part the slats of the venetian blind. The old woman has her thin arm zigzagged through his, the Louis Vuitton handbag hanging off the other arm for counterbalance. Against all odds, she’s wearing high heels. Not stilettos, granted, but still about a metre too high for an old bird like her.

  The old geezer is carrying a plastic bag from the local electronic shop. Oh, good. Normally, I take what’s in their houses and wallets, which doesn’t amount to a lot. A brand new gadget, still in its box and with a receipt attached is a bonus.

  Old age is a nuisance, I think, as my wife switches her bag to the other hand and weaves her arm through mine to steady herself. Anybody who’s experienced the aches, the insomnia, the shortness of breath, can tell you that old age sucks. For me, though, old age is more than a nuisance. It’s a nightmare.

  I used to run ten kilometres every morning to stay fit. My handgun would find its target within a hundred metres. I was a wizard with explosives. The perfect spheres of my biceps could lift a woman and throw her onto a bed. I used to do a fair amount of that back in Russia, before I met my wife. And after, if truth be told. What can I say? The times were tough, the future uncertain. Under Stalin and under those who came after him, we learnt to take life one day at a time, one pleasure at a time, one enemy at a time.

  Back then, we knew the meaning of the word ‘fear’. Fear made me fake and kill friends and brown-nose my way out of trouble.

  And now? Now I’m holding a new laptop computer a thousand times more powerful than Stalin ever was. Now my greatest problem is that the footpath between our garden gate and the front door is strewn with brown leaves, as ugly as the face I see in the mirror when shaving.

  Old age is more than a nuisance and a nightmare. It’s also unsightly.

  My wife lets go of my arm, pokes the key into the lock and turns the handle. ‘Tea with jam?’ she asks.

  She used to offer blowjobs in that tempting tone. Now it’s tea. Old age, I tell you, it’s worse than death.

  ‘Tea with jam?’ I ask.

  My husband has no time to reply. A shadow detaches itself from the window and pins him to the floor. Isn’t it the other way round, I wonder, aren’t you supposed to pin your shadow down? I’m sure there was a story like that.

  I used to like stories, back when I was young. Younger. Back then my husband was a great storyteller, able to explain every smear of lipstick on his collar, every bundle of hundred-rouble notes hidden under the mattress, every visit from grey-suited officials. I ooh-ed and aah-ed and nodded. Knew better than to believe a single word.

  While my husband played soldier-spy, I tinker-tailored our existence from a room shared with two other couples into our own luxurious villa on the peripheries of Moscow and a palace-like dacha on the pebbly beach of the Black Sea. I had the body and the brain to achieve it. I had the cunning and the KGB training to hold onto what I’d achieved, and once the system had crumbled, I had the foresight to flee to New Zealand.

  While my husband is flailing on the beautiful wooden floor, in vain trying to force his muscles to remember how to be the James Bond of the Eastern Block, I swing my designer handbag. The weight of make-up, hand cream, hairbrush, coins for the parking meter, three pens, a book and everything else we women carry around, makes contact with the intruder’s skull.

  Before he has time to recover, I yank off one of my shoes and aim its heel at his temple. It’s not my first time. It’s why I always wear heels, even on days when my lower back is demanding slippers.

  The beauty of old age is that nobody ever expects it to fight back.

  ‘You get rid of the body,’ I tell my husband. ‘Like in the old days. Meanwhile, I’ll make the tea.’

  I feel half a century younger. Perhaps we should do this again. Soon.

  New Zealand Herald

  21 December 2013

  Christmas For Cops

  The last six months saw a sudden plunge of burglary statistics across Auckland. But the real Christmas gift for our police force came when they entered twenty-five abandoned premises, each full of stolen goods.

  ‘It’s like Christmas has come early,’ says Detective Ian Macdonald. ‘We got this anonymous letter with the addresses. Had no idea what we’d find.’

  The police are still looking for the owners or lapsed tenants of the properties, but word on the street is, they’re not looking too hard.

  THE MAN IN THE NEXT BED

  Laura Wilson

  Laura Wilson was brought up in London and has degrees in English literature from Somerville College, Oxford, and UCL, London. She lives in Islington, London, where she is currently working on her twelfth novel. She is the crime fiction reviewer for the Guardian newspaper, and teaches on the City University Crime Thriller Novel Creative Writing MA course.

  ‘… all these poor bastards, and they keep on finding ’em dead. Months go by, and there’s more and more of ’em, always in this one room that’s off the main ward, and no o
ne knows why. Then they’ve only realised–’ Spicer gave a phlegmy chuckle ‘– they’ve only realised it’s always on a Friday this happens, and that’s when the cleaner goes in, see? She don’t speak a word of English and she’s been plugging in the hoover or whatever – only to do that she has to unplug this other thing, and it’s only—’

  ‘The life support system,’ Nick finished, eyeing the scratched plastic side of the jug on his bedside locker. The water looked grey, and there were specks of something floating in it.

  ‘You’ve heard it before,’ Spicer wheezed, disappointed.

  ‘I guessed.’ Nick pressed the buzzer or bell or whatever it was, but the nurse at the station at the end of the ward didn’t look up from her computer screen. He’d assumed that a light must come on to indicate when a patient needed something, but if it had she wasn’t heeding it. It wasn’t just the water. He wanted to know what was going on. The brisk efficiency of his admission that morning had subsided, after half an hour or so, into unfocussed uncertainty, with talk of procedures being ‘put back’ and notes misplaced. A nurse – the previous one, not the current screen-gazer – had said she’d find out, but that was over four hours ago. Four hours during which he’d had no choice but to receive a thorough grounding in the life and opinions of Tommy Spicer, up to and including his age: 50, three years younger than Nick, although he definitely looked older; his height: 1.82m ‘or 6ft 1 in old money’, the same as Nick; and his current weight: 238kg or ‘down to 17 stone now’. That was about four stone more than Nick, at least at the moment. Before the diagnosis, he’d been pleased to be losing weight. Now, it worried him.

  He’d seen quite a bit of Spicer’s 238kg during a display of his children’s names, which were tattooed on his arms and chest. Ryan (‘I was only 18, so he’d be over 30 now’) and Amber (‘always my princess’) on his biceps, Ashley (‘Should be ee at the end, but the muppet got it wrong’) and Briana (‘Different, innit? Brian’s my middle name, see, after my Dad’) above his nipples. Slightly further down, the names of the three mothers of these four had been buried under arrangements of crosses and roses. Judging from his remark about Ryan, Nick suspected that Spicer hardly ever saw his children, much less paid maintenance. Perhaps he thought that having their names engraved on his body was commitment enough. Briana. God Almighty.

  Listening to Spicer was worse than being in the back of a cab. At least then you were going somewhere and you knew it would soon be over – and taxi drivers didn’t insist on showing you their body art. He’d seen a photograph of Amber, too, on Spicer’s phone: orange and laminated, with tits out to here. (‘Sent that to me at Christmas. Only run off to Huddersfield or some fucking place with her mum’s new bloke, hadn’t she? Real chip off the old block, she is.’). Not that Nick could afford cabs nowadays. He couldn’t actually remember the last time he’d taken one.

  Spicer probably earned far more than he did. Cash only, of course. As he’d talked, Nick had imagined him, a cheerful bodger, causing more damage than he ever repaired and pulling all sorts of strokes on the side – nicked copper, pilfered lead, half-inched garden ornaments. He’d obviously got form. ‘I asked them to give me treatment for it when I was in there, but they never. But it was just, like, normal burglaries,’ he’d added, virtuously. ‘I’ve never took from old people or kids or if they was poor or nothing.’

  Presumably, thought Nick, a ‘normal burglary’ meant robbing someone like him. Spicer appeared to think that this was not only all right but actually praiseworthy, which was ironic, given their respective circumstances. Spicer was a council tenant. He rented the house his mum had lived in for £85 a week, and it was secure for the rest of his life. Nick knew the estate. It was one of the older ones, with most of the houses – semi-detached boxes in two-tone pebble dash – sold off to private owners.

  They were probably worth a bit, too, because of the location. Nick wondered whether, if push came to shove, if he and Cath could afford one. They still had a mortgage of over £100,000 on their four-bed Victorian terrace, and keeping up with the payments was a struggle nowadays. Christ knew what they’d do when interest rates went up, although that wasn’t supposed to happen for a couple of years. Would he even be around when it did?

  Spicer was still talking. Something about unjust persecution by the police for something he couldn’t help (the stealing, presumably). ‘Always at my door, when I ain’t done nothing. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at me.’ Nick was tempted to comment that perhaps the coppers couldn’t help it, either, but of course he didn’t.

  He’d tried to get stuck into the Booker prize winner he’d brought along, but it was impossible. Not that he actually wanted to read the bloody thing, but Cath had been going on about it after her book group and he’d thought it would be nice to show willing. He imagined the two of them talking about it. It would be a topic of conversation that wasn’t how his work had dried up almost completely or how they couldn’t downsize because Holly and Josh were coming back to live at home or why they weren’t talking anymore, just arguing, or where the bloody hell had he been this time or what are we going to do if. That was the worst, because it was blindingly obvious what he was going to do if. He was going to fucking die, wasn’t he? It was also the worst having to listen to Cath oscillating between the pointless recital of ‘potential scenarios’ and bracing statistics accompanied by anecdotal evidence about somebody’s friend or brother or aunt who’d had what he’d got ten years ago and was now completely cured and running marathons or swimming the channel or about to be launched into space. Or something. And then he’d get the of-course-if-you-hadn’t-gone-freelance-we’d-still-have-private-healthcare speech. She’d been all for it at the time – but this was revised, now, to ‘going along with it for your sake.’

  What was he lying here pressing the stupid buzzer for, anyway? He wasn’t immobile. Hating himself for being so quickly reduced to querulous dependency, he pushed back the covers and swung his legs out of the bed. He could perfectly well walk down the ward, take the jug thing with him for a refill and ask the nurse what was happening.

  ‘Don’t worry, mate. She’ll be back.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, the one with the arse. That nurse who said she’d find out what was going on.’

  ‘She’s probably gone off duty.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now, aren’t you? They’ll have to do something. You’re entitled.’

  ‘I’m going to find out.’ Nick reached for his robe. ‘I can’t use my phone in here anyway.’

  ‘Or,’ Spicer grinned, revealing teeth like rotten fenceposts, ‘is it that girl brought you in this morning?’ His rasping laugh turned into a fit of liquid coughing. ‘Your face!’

  ‘How …?’

  ‘Obvious, mate. Give us a minute, and I’ll come with you. I could do with a fag, as it goes.’

  ‘A fag? You told me you’d got—’

  ‘Won’t make no difference now, will it?’

  ‘They’re taking half your—’

  ‘I’ll still have one, won’t I? That’s all you need. My Dad, he was on the oxygen at the finish. Used to sit there – one puff of that and a puff on the roll up – all day, doing that. And it don’t make no difference. When all this started I told the doctor I’d give up, and every time he’s seen me, he’s only said he can see the improvement now I’ve stopped, so what do they know? Anyway,’ he added, fatalistic, ‘my mum had emphysema, too, so it runs in the family, dunnit?’

  ‘Did she smoke?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’ Spicer shook his head at the stupidity of the question. ‘Like a chimney. Mind you, that was my dad. The stress of living with him. Until he done a runner, that is. Come on, give us a hand. And don’t worry about the bird –’ Spicer’s leery, exaggerated wink hailed him as a fellow member of the fraternity of middle-aged adulterers ‘– I won’t tell if you won’t.’

  Nick hadn’t intended to go outside the hospital, but found himself standing, slippered, in front of the litter
-strewn car park trying to call Cath while Spicer, propped against a bollard, sucked on a Mayfair Kingsize. Cath wasn’t picking up. The meeting, which was the reason why she hadn’t given him a lift to the hospital, was an important one about a new contract – ‘one of us has to earn something’ – and, now he thought about it, she’d said something about lunch afterwards, hadn’t she? No message from her, but a text from Holly wishing him good luck with a line of kisses, and three texts from Natalie as well as four messages. He started listening to the first one – ‘Darling, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything, I’m so worried for you …’ and then deleted it, and the ones that followed, unheard.

  He didn’t want to talk to Nat. He hadn’t wanted her to bring him here this morning, either, but she’d insisted on meeting him outside the tube station in her car. She’d been so tearful and needy when they’d talked about it that he’d agreed, fearing that if he didn’t she might actually turn up at his house. No, he wouldn’t call her. What was there to say? Nothing had happened, and he didn’t have the energy to console her about her feelings when he was the one with the potentially fatal illness.

  It was all to do with mortality, of course, even before the diagnosis and before he’d started feeling generally under the weather with the collection of minor symptoms that had given rise to it. Although not, probably, before the cancer itself – Dr Gomberts had told him it could take as much as three years before a single cancer cell divided and divided again until it grew to a noticeable size. If that was right – he thought that was what Dr Gomberts had said, but those first meetings, he hadn’t taken much in beyond the word itself – then that made it around the time he’d noticed his pubes were starting to turn white. He’d been lying in the bath and when he looked down, there it was, a single hair, gleaming palely in the sunlight.