Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “They’ll explain that in due course,” said Steve, wanting to do some detective work of his own. “When did you last see her, Rachel?”

  “It was ages ago,” she said, brushing away tears. “Angie went off to the loo and never came back.”

  “Didn’t you go looking for her?”

  “Well, no. I mean, we didn’t want to spoil her fun. All the lads chase Angie. She’s drop-dead gorgeous. If she’s in the mood, she sometimes picks one out. That’s what we thought she’d done.”

  “What about the young man sitting close to you?”

  “Oh, he was horrible!”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “Jez,” she said. “He told us to call him Jez. Not that he took any notice of Helen and me. All he wanted to do was to touch up Angie. He just wouldn’t leave her alone. We were so glad when he got thrown out by one of the stewards. His name was Phil.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He came back to tell us that Jez wouldn’t bother us again.”

  “What did Angie say to that?”

  “She was grateful – very grateful.” The wail of a siren made her jump. “An ambulance – is it that serious?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Kavanagh. “Look, why don’t we see if we can find a cup of tea or something for you and Helen? You’ve had a terrible shock.” He walked away. “Stay here with Steve.”

  “You said that he came back,” noted Steve, resuming his questioning. “When he’d kicked Jez out, you said that Phil came back to speak to you.”

  “He wanted to reassure Angie, that’s all.”

  “Was she that upset?”

  “Oh, yes. Jez was a real pest. His hands were all over her.”

  “Why didn’t you move?”

  “We did, but Jez and his mate followed us.”

  “Then Phil came to your rescue?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What exactly did Angie say to Phil?”

  “She thanked him, of course.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” said Rachel. “She gave him a big kiss.”

  * * *

  After he’d given a full statement to the police, Steve was free to go. Returning to his motorcycle, he sat astride it and brooded. When he’d first stumbled on the corpse, his mind had been racing. One obvious suspect occurred to him. Jez was persistent. He was also vengeful. It wouldn’t have been impossible for him to climb back in. The area around the stage was well lit but there were shadows around other parts of the perimeter. Somebody as lithe and determined as Jez could have slipped back in unnoticed. Steve’s theory was that Jez would have loitered near the toilets on the off-chance that Angie would go there sooner or later. He’d pounced, enticed her out of the compound and, when she resisted, overpowered her and dragged her off. In the deafening blast of sound from the band, nobody had heard the girl’s desperate cries for help.

  Steve was now examining another suspect. Phil Denton. He and Jez had something in common. Both were obsessed with Angie. Phil had abandoned his duties in order to watch over her, and had used unnecessary force to eject his rival. The difference between the two men was their appearance. Jez might be a nuisance but he was a handsome young man with a seedy charm. Denton, however, was coarse, ugly and almost twenty years older than Angie. On an impulse of gratitude, she might kiss him but he’d have no other appeal for her.

  Denton had two advantages over Jez. As a steward, he was in a privileged position that allowed him to move where he wished. More to the point, he knew the combinations of the locks on the gates. If he’d encountered Angie on her way to the toilets, he could have let her out through the fence and spirited her away. Nobody would have stopped them. When they saw a man in a yellow jacket hustling someone away, they’d have assumed that she was being thrown out for a good reason. The more he thought about it, the more Steve became convinced that Phil Denton had to be the prime suspect. Jez was eager to have sex with Angie but he wouldn’t kill to get it. Denton was a retired boxer who didn’t know his own strength. He could easily have misinterpreted Angie’s kiss as a promise and – when she rejected him – taken her by force. Steve could almost see the scene being enacted before him.

  Putting on his crash helmet, he gunned the engine and drove off. When he got to the main road, however, he didn’t turn right and ride towards the motorway that would carry him to London. Instead, he turned left and went the short distance to the huge entrance gates of Westonbirt School. Steve dismounted and peered through the wrought-iron bars. Set in the middle of extensive grounds, the school was some distance away but Steve got a glimpse of it through the trees that lined the long, curving drive. Silhouetted against the sky, the building was a perfect example of Victorian Gothic and looked rather like a haunted house in a horror film. Its size was daunting, its solidity impressive and it sported hundreds of extravagant decorative touches. As he studied the school, it occurred to Steve that anyone who climbed into one of its upper rooms would have to be something of an athlete.

  Another name suddenly came into contention as a major suspect. Steve remembered how Nick Hooper had boasted about taking drugs and having sex at every pop concert where he’d worked. Because he’d lived so close, Hooper knew the arboretum intimately. He’d be aware of the nearest and best place to take a girl for privacy. As a steward, he’d been assigned to duties inside the compound so he wouldn’t have failed to see someone as gorgeous as Angie arriving there with her friends. Again, he’d have the combination of the locks on the gates. He’d be able to slip away in the shadows. Jez might have assaulted the girl out of revenge and Denton would have been driven by lust. Neither of them would have been able to lure Angie away.

  Nick Hooper was different. He was as handsome as Jez and had infinitely more sex appeal than Denton. Steve remembered his earlier conversation with Hooper. Women, drugs and booze were there for the taking. That was his philosophy. Hooper was powered by a sense of entitlement. Whether it was in an exclusive girls’ school or in a clearing in the arboretum, he expected to get what he wanted. If there was resistance, Hooper would feel insulted. Even a girl as lovely as Angie couldn’t be allowed to get away with that. She’d have to be punished. While the band was still pounding away nearby, Hooper had taken his chance.

  Who was the killer – Jez, Phil Denton or Nick Hooper? It took Steve only a matter of seconds to pick out one name. Taking out his mobile phone, he dialled 999 and asked to speak to the police.

  It was days later when Steve got a call from Charlie Kavanagh. He recognized the Irishman’s rich brogue immediately.

  “Hi,” said Charlie. “Can I speak to Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Hello, Charlie.”

  “I’ve just talked to the boys in blue. After grilling Nick Hooper until he cracked, they’ve now charged him with the murder. Her full name was Angela Wilbourne, by the way. I dare say you picked that up from the papers. Thanks to you, the crime is solved. You were the one who first fingered Hooper.”

  “It was something he told me,” said Steve. “It stuck in my mind. But I can’t take all the credit. It was really an educated guess.”

  “And a bloody good one at that,” said Charlie. “They didn’t catch him with a smoking gun exactly but they got something just as good. When he was arrested, Hooper was carrying a silver pendant with her name on it.”

  “That’s what made me think of him, Charlie. He took me for a walk around the Old Arboretum and pointed out places where he’d had sex with various women. Hooper bragged that he always took away a little souvenir for his collection. In this case,” said Steve with a sigh, “it was the girl’s pendant.”

  “To be honest, I thought it might have been Phil Denton.”

  “So did I at first.”

  “He was acting so suspiciously once the murder came to light.”

  “He did pay Angie a lot of undue attention.”

  “Nick Hooper got there before him. It’s a pity,” said Charlie. “I know that Hooper was a randy so-and-s
o but he was one of my regulars. From now on, he won’t be on my payroll for a long, long time. I’ll have to replace him with someone who knows how to keep his eyes peeled and his wits about him.” He tried to sound casual. “Know anyone in need of a more permanent job?”

  Steve was thrilled. “Funny you should ask that,” he said with a laugh. “When do I start?”

  A Good Man

  N. J. Cooper

  It’s people you leave, not places. I’d been wrong about that, too. For years, I’d told myself it was this empty landscape I’d hated. Only the shushing of the wind in the willows and the calling of birds broke the silence, and they’d never been any use to me.

  I gazed at the garden, still a big semicircle with the grass bordered by flowering shrubs and the odd fruit tree among the willow saplings. Whoever the current owners were, they must have shared his taste for nature only barely tamed.

  The river still ran along the bottom of the lawn, with the orchard on the far side and the wet empty fields beyond. I could just make out the distant hills, and I thought of how I’d hated the flatness and the loneliness.

  A big white bird flapped down on to the rickety bridge he’d made when he’d bought the land for the orchard, and I heard his rich deep voice echo in my head: “That’s an egret, Kim. Have you ever seen one before?”

  How could I? Only six when I’d first come here, but already the dangerous victor of eight failed fosterings, I’d never been outside a city.

  This place had seemed like a prison, and he my jailer. I’d known he must be weird from the start. If I hadn’t hurt so many of the other children, I’d never have been sent here. He’d been the carer of last resort, a man who’d had some success with tough boys in the past. This time, when they’d run out of options, they’d given him a girl. Me.

  The egret lifted itself from the bridge up into the sky. Today the great space above the wetland was clear bright blue. I didn’t remember that, any more than I remembered the wild flowers that were turning the fields ahead of me into a yellow and white froth. Everything here was beautiful. Why hadn’t I seen it then?

  The low-built old farmhouse had friendly looking green-painted windows in its sturdy white walls, and a steeply sloping roof of terracotta tiles, rippled like the sea.

  “Double romans, they’re called, Kim,” he’d once said, always teaching, pointing things out, trying to make me someone I wasn’t.

  There were no cars at the front of the house and neither sound nor light from inside, so I let myself push open the side gate and walk right into the semicircular garden. If anyone challenged me, I could pretend I thought the house was for sale. I saw at once that someone had changed the scrubby vegetable patch into a neat set of raised beds, beautifully kept and showing pristine rows of new growth.

  I thought of the slugs, horrible squelchy things, that I’d collected once when he’d pissed me off, nagging about my homework or my clothes or hair. I must have been eleven by then. The slugs had seemed fair revenge for the nagging and the way he’d fallen asleep in his chair, leaving his mouth open . . .

  A cloud sidled across the sun and took away even the thin, inadequate English warmth I’d felt on my face, making me shiver. Or was that memory? Or guilt?

  The slugs had been the least of it. I saw so much now, more or less the age he must have been when he’d taken me in. I hadn’t understood any of it then: how badly I’d needed him to be safe and kind and so how hard I’d pushed him to make him reveal himself the opposite.

  I’d never known an adult who couldn’t be cruel. All those failed fosterings had proved to me that any one of them, however calm they’d seemed at first, could be driven to take off their masks of kindness. Only he had resisted nearly everything I’d tried to make him do.

  None of my malice or my violence had made him hit me or lock me up. I still don’t know what a sight of my true feelings might have done because I’d never let him see those.

  I used to watch him, tall and upright and shabbily dressed, smiling at me as he calmly talked on and on, using words as reins and bits and goads and whips. Now I wondered what would have happened if I’d howled and told him what it had been like before and flung myself into his arms. Would he have picked me up and cradled me and made it all safe and different?

  Or would he have stuck to his line of teaching me the things he liked, trying to make me into what he wanted?

  Sometimes I had tried. But never for long. Waiting for horror to descend had been unbearable. I’d always rather have done something to bring it down quickly and get it over.

  “He’s a good man,” my social worker said. One of my social workers. I don’t remember which. They blurred at this distance.

  I walked now across the lawn, remembering the opportunities for rebellion the grass had given me. I’d refuse to mow when he asked me to, or mess about with the straight lines he’d left on the lawn, or hide small dangerous stones in the longer grass to bugger up the mower blade and give him trouble.

  Standing at last on the edge of the river, I wondered if I’d see the kingfisher today. I never had. I don’t think I’d even believed it existed. I’d thought he was lying about that too.

  “You have to be quiet, Kim. And very still. And you have to watch. Once you’ve seen one for the first time, it’ll get easier. You’ll learn to recognize the flash of greeny blue, just above the water. Once they’ve let you see them the first time, they seem to slow down for you.”

  Not for me, I’d thought then. I thought it still. No beautiful wild thing would change its course for me. Why should it? I’d always been a lost cause. The source of endless trouble for anyone who’d ever been lumbered with me. That’s what one set of foster parents had said. Dangerous, too.

  In England anyway. Out in Australia, I’d learned to be different. Someone else. I’d had friends and work and my own money. Never much money. With a messed-up education like mine, you didn’t get well-paid work. But I’d done okay. I’d even found a bloke. He was a good man, as well as the reason why I was here now, smelling the wetness of the peat and clay all around me, the squashed grass, the horses in the far field, and the sweetness of the wildflowers, remembering.

  “You’d better go back, Sally,” Sam had said a week ago, using the name I’d chosen for myself when I’d run away to become someone else. “Something’s not right in you and you’re talking more and more about England. Go back and lay the ghosts. Make your peace with your memories, whatever they are. I’ll buy you an open ticket so you can take your time. We can afford it. Don’t come back until you’re ready.”

  “When will that be?” I’d asked, standing on the beach, with the sun drilling down into my shoulders, my ears full of the crashing surf and the shrill calls of happiness from the unknowing people all around us. I’d felt sullen in a way I’d almost forgotten, ready to dump it all on someone else again.

  “You’ll know when you’re ready,” Sam had said, tucking stray wisps of hair behind my ears under the sun hat. “I can’t tell you.”

  When I was six my hair had been white blonde, then it had darkened. Later I’d dyed it all kinds of colours, chosen to make him angry. By the time I’d stolen the passport at Heathrow, I’d had a mousy-brown ponytail, like the girl I’d picked out of the London-bound taxi queue as my target. The Aussie sun had bleached it since.

  Looking back, I can’t see why I wasn’t afraid at Heathrow. I’d had a bagful of his money – all I could get from the house and the cash machines – and the nicked British passport. Why hadn’t I been afraid a report of what I’d done might get to Sydney before me so that I’d be arrested on the plane? Why had I felt cocooned in some transparent casing no one would be able to break?

  I still didn’t understand it, but once I’d got to Sydney unmolested I chucked the passport into the sea, then found the kind of bar where they’re happy to give you work for cash, even if you haven’t any proof of identity. It was also the kind of place where people who offer fake ID documents can be found. I’d waited
till I was sure of one, then paid his price without letting him know how much I hated him. Once I’d paid I was free. For the first time in my life, I was free.

  No one could do it now. Not with CCTV cameras everywhere, and DNA and email.

  It was the first thing I’d ever done well. I’d tried to make it the start of someone I could like. Sally. For a time I’d thought I’d won. But memories had grown in the dark silence until they’d devoured my sleep and my health.

  He walked with me everywhere now, and his face hung over me as I lay in bed. I couldn’t forget the warmth in his dark eyes when I’d done something that pleased him, or their hardness when I’d failed.

  He must have been lonely, too. I can see that now. But then he’d seemed all-powerful, without feelings or fears or needs.

  I turned my head away from the river. His voice sounded again, bumping around in my mind, as smooth and comforting as rich hot chocolate:

  “Sometimes they say that only people who deserve it actually see the kingfisher, but I think that’s sentimental, Kim.”

  “Then I am sentimental,” I said aloud to the space he’d once inhabited. “I don’t deserve it.”

  I turned my back on the river and walked at last towards the rhubarb patch, where we’d had our last encounter. It was a mound, carefully sloped to make the water drain away so that it wouldn’t rot the crowns. How well I remembered the care he’d lavished on those red stalks and their poisonous yellowy-green leaves. Bending down over them, he went on talking to me even as he weeded around his acid, horrible fruit.

  “I know you’ll be legally free to go on your birthday, Kim. But you can’t. You may be nearly old enough, but you’re not fit to live alone. Not yet. One day, I’ll help you go. But for now you must stay here. And I . . .”

  He’d never managed to say whatever it was he’d do because I’d raised the old iron bar like an axe above my head and brought it crashing down on to the back of his head and then his spine.

  Now I looked at the scarlet stalks of rhubarb, asking the old questions that had come to torture me: Had he died at once? Who had found him? Could he have been saved? Why hadn’t they come after me?