The following Saturday we met Jack and Stacy for dinner at the country club – same as always. I watched Stacy and Doug. And pretty soon I realised Jack was watching Stacy and Doug also. And, it turned out, me.
‘When did you work it out?’ he asked me when we went outside for a cigarette.
I didn’t ask him what he was talking about. I could see the hurt. ‘Not long ago. You?’
‘I’ve known for a while.’
I lit a cigarette and passed it to him. Then lit one for myself. ‘Are you going to do something about it?’
He considered the question, inhaling a lungful of nicotine as he did so. ‘I haven’t decided. You?’
‘The same.’
We said nothing for a while. Jack blew perfect smoke rings that hung on that summer evening air like grey shadows.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Me too.’
‘Doug though? Fucking Doug?’ When Jack spoke it was in a low growl. ‘I think her fucking him is more about you than Doug. She fucking hates you.’
I sighed.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said. ‘That came out wrong.’ He stubbed out his cigarette on a marble column, leaving a black smudge, and then dropped the butt onto the gravel.
Normally that would have annoyed me. But I didn’t seem to care much that night.
Angela knew about Stacy and Doug. It turned out the reason Stacy didn’t like Angela Romano is that she’d let Stacy know she knew. I didn’t ask Angela why she hadn’t told me. I wouldn’t have either.
I went over our finances with a different eye, wondering if they’d stretch to cover two households. Not very well, it turned out. Not if we wanted to put the kids through college. We had stocks; we had two rental properties in Brooklyn but they weren’t producing much return; we owned the house outright. In capital terms, we were solid. But income was a problem. And it would be another twenty years before Doug would be getting that fat Klein & Lynch pension.
A thought occurred to me. I looked at the pension terms. I looked at the life insurance policies we had. Then I looked at our expenses.
The thing was, if Doug died suddenly, things looked pretty good again.
I don’t know why I looked. Matt was eighteen. He was a confident, attractive young man – he wasn’t a boy anymore. I didn’t need to worry about him.
But suddenly I knew something wasn’t quite right.
It had been going on a while.
Stacy fucking Kropotkin.
I’d seen how Sally had become withdrawn recently and I’d thought it was just a growing-up thing. But when I found out about Stacy and Matt, I thought I’d check it out. I looked at Sally’s social media accounts. Someone had been targeting her. Someone who knew a lot about me, and Sally, and Doug, and Matt.
I called up TJ, the guy who installed the software, and asked him to try and trace it.
He did.
I wondered what was the point of it all – Stacy picking apart my family.
I decided to ask her.
We met for a coffee on a Saturday morning. It was unusual for us to meet up, just the two of us, especially since I’d left The Firm.
I watched her as she walked through the room towards the corner table I’d taken. I didn’t want us to be overheard. She smiled at me as she sat down. There was a challenge in that smile. And there was pleasure. She wanted me to know. That was the point of it all.
I was going to ask her why, but I didn’t. I watched her drink her coffee and she watched me drink mine. We didn’t say one fucking word. There wasn’t anything to be said.
Eventually she stood up to leave. ‘I’m glad we had this conversation,’ she said.
I watched her walk away – how her shoulder blades moved under her tight cotton shirt. How vulnerable her pale neck was above the collar.
It was a tragedy. No one could understand how it happened. They were together in a cheap motel room on the other side of town. There was a fire. A gas explosion. They said death was instantaneous. They found Stacy on top of Doug. I believe the position is called ‘reverse cowgirl’. The heat was so intense that their bodies fused together. We had to pay the undertaker to cut them apart. He said it was impossible to be certain which bit belonged to who.
So I buried most of Doug and some of Stacy. And Jack did something similar.
Jack and I were thrown together by the deaths. We’d always liked each other. One thing led to the next.
It was a small wedding.
Brad Schmidt came to visit me after a couple of months. He said they had a partnership opening and would I consider it? I looked at Brad and thought of him naked in the poolside cabana in Reno. He asked why I was laughing.
I apologised.
I didn’t take the job.
Angela brought me the original fire report from the motel. She explained to me how the accelerant had worked, how the gas leak had been caused by a cut pipe. She explained how the inspector had been paid to overlook these small details.
I said nothing.
She placed the report on the coffee table between us. ‘My gift to you. A sign of our friendship.’
I nodded. I knew enough not to say anything. She could be wearing a wire.
‘Do you know what I did before?’ she said.
I considered the question. I decided it was safe to answer with another. ‘Before what?’
‘Before I ended up in the programme and they set me up here in River Hills?’
Maybe she didn’t need to wear a wire. I’d have TJ come and sweep the house for bugs.
‘No.’
‘I was a sort of an agent. For people like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘People with a certain skillset and a certain mental aptitude. You know what I’m talking about.’
I said nothing.
‘The thing is,’ Angela said, ‘I hate fucking flowers. And you’re bored. And you have that certain skillset and that mental aptitude.’
I thought about it. I looked around our comfortable lounge area – mostly beige, a lot of natural wood. Elegant. Classy. I guess I was bored, now that Angela brought it to my attention.
‘I’m listening,’ I said.
About the Authors
Martine Bailey writes about food and mystery and was credited by Fay Weldon as inventing a new genre, the ‘culinary gothic’. Her debut in the genre was An Appetite for Violets, and while living in New Zealand she wrote The Penny Heart (retitled A Taste for Nightshade in the US). Martine is an award-winning amateur cook and now lives in Cheshire.
Gordon Brown lives in Scotland but splits his time between the UK and Spain. He’s married with two children and has been writing since his teens. So far he has had five books published – his latest, Darkest Thoughts, being the first in the Craig McIntyre series. Gordon also helped found Bloody Scotland – Scotland’s International Crime Writing Festival.
Paul Charles was born and raised in the Northern Irish countryside. He is the author of the Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy series, set in Camden Town, and the Inspector Starrett series, which is set in Donegal in Ireland. The short mystery in this collection features retired PSNI Detective McCusker from Down on Cyprus Avenue. Paul is currently working on a second McCusker novel.
Ann Cleeves began her crime-writing career with a series featuring George and Molly Palmer-Jones, and followed it with books about a cop from the North-East, Inspector Ramsay. More recently she has won international acclaim for two further series, featuring Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez, respectively, which have been successfully adapted for television as Vera and Shetland. Raven Black won the CWA Gold Dagger, and in 2017 Ann was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger.
Julia Crouch has been a theatre director, playwright, drama teacher, publicist, graphic/website designer and illustrator. It was while she was doing an MA in sequential illustration that she realised what she really loved was writing. Her debut novel, Cuckoo, was followed by Every Vow You Break, Tarnished, The Long Fall and Her Husband’s Lover.<
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Judith Cutler has produced no fewer than five series of crime novels and more than thirty books in all. Her first regular detective was Sophie Rivers, and since then she has featured Fran Harman, Josie Welford, Tobias Campion and Lina Townend. She has also published standalone novels, and is a former secretary of the CWA.
Carol Anne Davis is the author of seven novels and eight true-crime books, the latest of which is Masking Evil: When Good Men and Women Turn Criminal. She is currently one of the judges for the CWA ’s Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction, and when she’s not reading or writing she loves to dance. Unfortunately she’s dyspraxic so can’t tell her left from her right and has been in the beginner’s flamenco class for the past five years.
Martin Edwards has published eighteen novels, including the Lake District Mysteries. The Golden Age of Murder won the Edgar, Agatha, H.R.F. Keating and Macavity awards. He has edited thirty-five crime anthologies and has won the CWA Short Story Dagger, the CWA Margery Allingham Prize and the Poirot award. He is president of the Detection Club and current chair of the CWA.
Kate Ellis worked in teaching, marketing and accountancy before finding success as a writer. The latest title in her series featuring Wesley Peterson is The Mermaid’s Scream, while she has also published a series about another cop, Joe Plantagenet, and two historical crime novels, including A High Mortality of Doves.
Paul Gitsham started his career as a biologist, before deciding to retrain and impart his love of science and sloppy lab skills to the next generation of enquiring minds as a school teacher. Paul lives in a flat with more books than shelf space, where he writes the DCI Warren Jones series of police procedurals and spends more time than he should on social media.
J.M (Jeanette) Hewitt is a crime-fiction writer living on the Suffolk coast. She is the author of Exclusion Zone, The Hunger Within and The Eight Year Lie. Her short story ‘Fingers’ was published in Twisted50, a horror anthology, and she was the winner of the BritCrime Pitch Competition in 2015, a success that led to the publication of Exclusion Zone.
Susi Holliday grew up in Scotland and now lives in London. She was shortlisted for the CWA Margery Allingham Prize with her short story ‘Home from Home’. She has published three crime novels set in the fictional Scottish town of Banktoun, and her latest novel is a Christmasthemed serial killer thriller, The Deaths of December.
Maxim Jakubowski is a crime, erotic, science-fiction and rock-music writer and critic. He is also a leading anthologist. Born in England to Russian-British and Polish parents, he was raised in France and ran the Murder One bookshop for many years. He is the current chair of judges for the CWA Debut John Creasey Dagger, and also serves as joint vice chair of the CWA. He is a frequent commentator on radio and television.
Ed James writes crime-fiction novels, predominantly the Scott Cullen series of police procedurals set in Edinburgh and the surrounding Lothians. He is currently developing two new series, set in London and Dundee, respectively. He also writes the Supernature series, featuring vampires and other folkloric creatures.
Ragnar Jónasson was born in Reykjavik, where he still lives, and is a lawyer. He teaches copyright law at Reykjavik University and has previously worked on radio and television, including as a TV news reporter for the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. His novels include the Dark Iceland series.
Vaseem Khan is the author of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels, a series of crime novels set in India. The books feature retired Mumbai police inspector Ashwin Chopra and his sidekick, a baby elephant named Ganesha. Vaseem says that elephants are third on his list of passions, first and second being great literature and cricket, not always in that order. He plays cricket all summer, attempting to bat as an opener, while fielding as little as possible.
Peter Lovesey’s short stories have won a number of international awards, including the Veuve Clicquot Prize, the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award and the CWA Short Story Dagger. When the Mystery Writers of America ran a competition to mark their fiftieth year, The Pushover was the winner. Peter is a recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger (among many other honours) and also a former chair of the CWA.
Anna Mazzola writes historical crime fiction. She studied English at Pembroke College, Oxford, before becoming a criminal justice solicitor. Her debut novel was The Unseeing, and her second, about a collector of folklore on the Isle of Skye, will be published in spring 2018. She lives in Camberwell, London, with two small children, two cats and one husband.
William Burton McCormick’s fiction appears regularly in American mystery magazines. A Nevada native, William earned his MA in novel writing from Manchester University, was elected a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland and has lived in Russia, Ukraine and Latvia. His novel Lenin’s Harem was the first fictional work added to the Latvian War Museum’s library in Rīga.
Before Christine Poulson turned to crime, she was a respectable academic with a PhD in the history of art. Cambridge provided the setting for her first three novels, Dead Letters, Stage Fright and Footfall, which were followed by a stand-alone suspense novel, Invisible. The first in a new series, Deep Water, appeared in 2016. Her short stories have been short-listed for a Derringer and for the CWA Margery Allingham Prize.
Sarah Rayne is the author of a number of acclaimed psychological thrillers, and ghost-themed books. Much of the inspiration for her settings comes from the histories and atmospheres of old buildings, a fact that is strongly apparent in many of her books. She recently launched a new series, featuring the music historian and researcher Phineas Fox.
Kate Rhodes went to the University of Essex and completed a doctorate on the playwright Tennessee Williams. She has taught at universities in Britain and the United States, and now writes full time. Her first books were two collections of poetry, and her novels Crossbones Yard and A Killing of Angels are both set in London, her birthplace. She lives in Cambridge.
William Ryan is an Irish writer, living in London. He was called to the English Bar after university in Dublin, and then worked as a lawyer in the City. He now teaches crime writing at City University. His first novel, The Holy Thief, was shortlisted for four awards, including a CWA New Blood Dagger. His latest book is The Constant Soldier.
Shawn Reilly Simmons lives in Frederick, Maryland, and has worked as a bookstore manager, fiction editor, convention organiser and wine rep. Currently she serves on the Board of Malice Domestic, is a member of the Dames of Detection, and an editor and co-publisher at Level Best Books. Her Red Carpet Catering Mysteries feature Penelope Sutherland, an on-set movie caterer. She has also published several short crime stories, and co-edited crime anthologies.
Chris Simms graduated from Newcastle University then travelled round the world before moving to Manchester in 1994. Since then he has worked as a freelance copywriter for advertising agencies throughout the city. The idea for his first novel, Outside the White Lines, came to him one night when broken down on the hard shoulder of a motorway. More recently he has written a series featuring DC Iona King.
Cath Staincliffe is an award-winning novelist, radio playwright and creator of ITV’s hit series Blue Murder. She was joint winner, with Margaret Murphy, of the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2012. She also writes the Scott & Bailey books, based on the popular ITV series. She lives with her family in Manchester.
Michael Stanley is the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Both were born in South Africa and have worked in academia and business. Their first mystery, A Carrion Death, introduced Detective ‘Kubu’ Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department, and was a finalist for five awards, including the CWA Debut Dagger. Their third book, Death of the Mantis, won the Barry Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award.
C.L. Taylor was born in Worcester, studied psychology in Newcastle and has had a variety of jobs, including fruit picker, waitress, postwoman, receptionist, shipping co-ordinator, graphic designer and web developer. Her debut novel was Heaven Can Wait and in 2011 she won the RNA Elizabeth Goudge Trophy. More recently
she has enjoyed success with psychological thrillers such as The Missing and The Escape.
Copyright
Orenda Books
16 Carson Road
West Dulwich
London SE21 8HU
www.orendabooks.co.uk
This collection first published by Orenda Books in 2017
Collection copyright © The Crime Writers’ Association 2017
Introduction copyright © Martin Edwards 2017
All stories copyright © the respective authors 2017, except ‘The Queen of Mystery’ copyright © Ann Cleeves 2016, and commissioned by BBC Radio 4 as part of their The Crime Writer at the Festival series
The authors of the stories herein have asserted their moral rights to be identified as the authors of their respective works in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
HB ISBN 978-1-910633-91-5
PB ISBN 978-1-910633-92-2
eISBN 978-1-910633-95-3
Mystery Tour Page 32