Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Rootie’s in the church now, dressed in black from head to toe, looking the height of funereal fashion, but he was always a snappy dresser. He might be pushing seventy with a curly mop of snow-white hair, and just the hint of a stoop, but the chick with him would have difficulty getting served in the local bar, and you know what they say: You’re only as old as the woman you feel. This girl’s a beauty too, with a skirt so short she could hang herself with it. A couple of people give her dirty looks, including my long-term mistress, Trudy T. Trudy’s always been a good woman – we had something going on and off for years – but she’s turned a little bit conservative ever since she found the Lord a couple of years back, and I think she’s forgotten what a wild one she was in her day. Seeing that miserable look on her face now, I want to pipe up and remind her of that home-made porno movie we made on the 8 mm back in the mid-seventies – the one in that hotel room in Tijuana where Trudy was on her hands and knees snorting lines of coke off the flat, golden belly of a nineteen year-old Mexican whore while I brought up the rear, so to speak. Religion, I conclude, has a lot to answer for, although I sympathize with Trudy for wanting to hedge her bets now that the end’s a lot nearer for her than the beginning.

  Talking of coke, that’s what really made us. There was money in marijuana – no doubt about it – but it was nothing compared to what could be made trading in the white stuff. By the end of the seventies, we were bringing close to a thousand kilos a year into the States, using Rootie’s distribution network to market it to the people, and clearing ten mil in straight profit. We could have got greedy but the thing about Danny and me was that, first and foremost, we were businessmen. We pumped our profits into legit businesses – construction, property and tourism, in the main – and eventually we were able to pull out of the smuggling game altogether.

  Just in time, as it turned out. Within months Rootie got busted and, because he showed loyalty and refused to name the people he was involved with, he got shackled with a fifteen to twenty-five sentence, and ended up serving twelve.

  It served as a good lesson to Danny and me. Always be careful. And we were. We built up an empire together – one that was turning over thirty million dollars a year – and we staffed it with men and women who showed us the same loyalty as Rootie had shown. We were a success story. I can look back and claim, with hand on heart, that I truly made it, and you can see that by the numbers of people in this church today. Three hundred at least. Friends, employees, lovers. Lots of lovers. Trudy T was one, but I’ve always been a man with appetites – they used to call me the Norse Horse, back in the day – and there were plenty of others. Row six, to the left of the aisle, sits one. Claire B was a movie star once upon a time, with the kind of perfect good looks made for the silver screen. She’s eighty years old now and used to call me her toyboy. We had a lot of fun together, and that’s why she’s weeping quietly into her white handkerchief now while an old geezer, who must be close to a hundred, puts a wizened arm round her shoulders.

  I scan the room and see Mandy H – a former Vegas show-girl I had a fling with back in the summer of ’79 – beautiful once, now cracked and hardened with age, her face as impassive as an Easter Island statue as she stares straight ahead; then there’s Vera P who took up with me for a while in the late eighties, after the death of her husband, a man who was one of my longest-serving employees. She was lonely and I was horny, a combination that was never going to work, but I guess I must have had some effect on her because she’s sobbing so ferociously it’s making her hair stand on end. And the service still hasn’t even started yet. I should be impressed but I’m forgetting it already as I catch sight of Diana, as regal as an Ice Queen, sitting right down at the front.

  Diana. My wife; my widow; my one true love – still as beautiful in her fifty-ninth year as she was the day we met on a snowy New York afternoon, twenty-five years ago. I was in Central Park for a business meeting with one of our Manhattan-based partners that I didn’t want anyone snooping on. Not only because we were talking details that weren’t entirely legal, but also because we were giving the guy a bit of a beating on account of the fact that he’d been cheating the organization. I’d just broken a couple of his fingers and was leaving him to two of my most trusted men to finish off, when as I came out from behind some bushes, I saw her gliding along the path in my direction – this gorgeous willowy blonde with a fur hat perched jauntily on her head and a little dog on a lead – and this cool, languid look in her eye. Man, I knew straight off, I had to have her. Within an hour, we were sharing cocktails. Within three, we were sharing a bed. Inside a month, we were man and wife. I’m nothing if not a fast worker.

  I always wanted kids, but Diana couldn’t have them. That’s why there are none here today. It doesn’t matter. We had each other, and for me, that was good enough. Everything had come up roses. The money was rolling in; the cops could never touch us; and I was married to the woman of my dreams.

  Life was good. All the way up until last month it was good.

  And then it all went wrong and twenty-five pounds of plastic explosive placed on the underside of my Mercedes Coupe, directly beneath the driver’s seat, ended the life of Francis Edward Hanson, aged fifty-eight: lover, friend, businessman and killer.

  A homicide investigation started right away, and there are currently plenty of suspects, but no one who really stands out. We’d killed or bought off most of our rivals years ago. The two homicide cops are in here now, sitting at the back of the church, trying without success to blend chameleon-like into their surroundings. They’re wearing cheap suits and furtive expressions and they couldn’t really be anything else. One or two of the guys turn and give them the look. No one in our organization likes the cops.

  The service lasts close to an hour. It’s too long really, especially in this heat. They sing my favourite hymn: Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken”, and I remember I once amputated a man’s leg to that particular song, which brings a smile; and Danny does a reading from one of the psalms. I’ve never believed in a Supreme Being, I’ve seen too much injustice for that. But I’ve always hoped there was some sort of afterlife, somewhere you can kick back and take it easy, and I’m pleased to announce that there is one, and that so far it looks like it might be pretty good.

  And then it’s all over. My coffin moves effortlessly along a conveyor belt to the right of the pulpit and disappears behind a curtain. In keeping with my express wishes, my remains are to be cremated rather than buried. The cops aren’t too happy about this, you know, seeing their evidence go up in smoke, but they’ve finished with my body now, so they haven’t got any grounds for refusal. There’s a final bout of loud sobbing – mainly from the women – and then the mourners file slowly out into the furnace-like heat of a New Mexico afternoon.

  I see Danny move close to Diana. They talk quietly. It looks to the untrained eye as if he’s offering her comfort and condolences, but I know better. His hand touches her shoulder and lingers there a second too long, and they walk through the graveyard together, continuing their conversation. Several people turn their way, with expressions that aren’t too complimentary, but they don’t care. Danny’s the boss now and I’m reminded of that old English phrase: The King is dead. Long live the King. Life goes on. I’m the past. Like it or not, for these people, Danny’s the future.

  Except he isn’t.

  There’s going to be a wake back at the ranch that I’ve called home for these past twenty years. They’ve got outside caterers coming in and it sounds like it’ll be a huge party. I’m only pissed off I can’t attend. And look at this: Danny and Diana are travelling back there together. They ought to be more careful. The cops are going to get suspicious. But they seem oblivious.

  Diana gets into the passenger seat of Danny’s limited edition, cobalt-blue Aston Martin. I’ve always liked that car. He gets in the driver’s side and then, three seconds later: Ka-Boom! There’s a ball of fire, a thick stream of acrid black smoke, and when it finally clears, a bu
rnt-out chassis with four spoked wheels, and very little else.

  People run down towards the site of this, the second assassination of a member of our organization in the space of a month. They want to help, but there’s nothing they can do. Trudy T, she of Christian faith and Tijuana hotel rooms, lets loose this stinging scream that’s probably got every dog in a ten-mile radius converging on the church, and the two cops shout for everyone to keep calm and stay put, one of them already talking into his radio. They are roundly ignored.

  I just keep walking, ignored by the crowd, knowing that my disguise, coupled with the plastic surgery I’ve recently undergone, means that no one will have recognized me.

  Now that I’ve got my revenge, it’s time to start my new life. I always trusted Danny, and I think that’s been my problem. I don’t know when his affair with Diana started, but I guess it must have been a while back. Me and her haven’t been so good lately and this has been the reason why. I think it was a bit much that they wanted to kill me, though, and make it look like an assassination. Not only is it the worst kind of betrayal, but it was stupid, too. How did they think I wouldn’t find out about it? Maybe love makes us all foolish.

  Anyways, I did find out. A friend of Rootie’s knew the bombmaker and it didn’t take much to get him to tell me when he was going to be planting his product under my Merc. Diana’s got an older brother, her last living relative, but a guy she rarely sees. His name’s Earl and he lives alone. At least he did. He’s dead now. Being roughly my height and build was a bit unfortunate for him. I had him killed, just to spite her, and his body planted in the Merc on the morning that I was supposed to die. Rather than being ignition-based, the bomb was on a timer (something the cops’ll probably work out eventually, not that it’ll do them much good), and when it went off, tearing the corpse into a hundred unrecognizable pieces, everyone simply assumed it was me who was dead in there.

  Not wanting to give anyone the chance to disprove this theory, I disappeared off the scene, having already opened bank accounts in false names and bought a house for myself in the Bahamas. Only thing was, I couldn’t resist coming back to watch my own funeral and, of course, see the bombmaker’s talents put to work for a second time. And it was a nice bonus, too. Getting both of them at once. Saves me tracking down Diana later.

  As I get in my own car, and leave the scene of carnage behind, I think back to the friendship Danny and me had, and it makes me a little melancholy that it had to end like this. Like the time with Blue, though, I don’t have any regrets. Danny knew the score. It had been banged into him from our earliest days.

  To dishonour your comrades is to deserve their bullets.

  And now he’s had mine.

  I think that if he wasn’t splattered all over the sidewalk, he’d probably approve.

  A Three Pie Problem

  Peter Lovesey

  Peter Diamond wasn’t Scrooge, but Christmas could be a pain. For one thing, he missed Steph more than ever at this time of year. For another, people took pity on him and invited him to stay. His in-laws, Angela and Mervyn, asked him each year to go up to Liverpool for “a proper family party” and he was forced to think of excuses. He’d tried saying Raffles, his cat, needed looking after, but they didn’t regard that as a reason. “Put him in a basket and bring him with you,” Angela had said. “We’ll fuss him up, same as you.” Raffles, like Diamond, wouldn’t relish being fussed up.

  This year, Angela had a different strategy. “You know what I’m going to say,” she told him on the phone about the second week of December, “and I know what you’re going to say, so forget it. If you won’t come to the party, the party is coming to you. It’s ages since we visited Bath and we do so enjoy looking round. Don’t panic, Peter. I’ll do all the cooking and Mervyn will organize the games.”

  Games? He almost dropped the phone.

  “It’s fixed, then. We’re arriving the Saturday before and we’ll stay until the New Year.”

  “I could be on duty,” was all he could think to say.

  “Come on, you’re the boss, aren’t you?”

  “A major incident.”

  “At Christmas?”

  This Christmas, please, he thought.

  There was no stopping Angela. They arrived with their hatchback stuffed with suitcases and all the festive paraphernalia, including a plastic tree. Raffles took refuge in the airing cupboard.

  For reasons nobody cared to go into, Angela thought the police in general were beneath contempt and her late sister Stephanie – she always used the full name – should never have hitched herself to one of them, let alone an overweight slob like Diamond. His rank did not impress her. His skills as a detective were disregarded. He hadn’t papered the walls since they’d bought the house. Hadn’t weeded the garden, washed the windows, mended the Hoover, removed the tidemark from the bath. He pampered the cat and cheated at cards. All this was pointed out to him on the first evening.

  So the call from Bath Police Station on Christmas Eve came as glad tidings, even great joy, to the beleaguered head of CID.

  “Sorry to disturb your Christmas break, sir.”

  “No trouble at all. Do you need me there?”

  “It could be nothing at all.”

  “But on the other hand . . .” he said with a rising note.

  “There’s an outside chance it was murder.”

  “Say no more. Duty calls.”

  Angela rolled her eyes upwards and Mervyn looked aghast at the prospect of being alone with his wife. “Could I come with you, as a sort of observer?”

  “No,” Diamond said. “Too horrible for a man of your good taste. Why don’t you redecorate the Christmas tree? Angela thinks my effort was crap.”

  He was gone.

  Bath police had been alerted to the death of one Fletcher Merriman, aged seventy-eight, the senior partner in Merriman & Palmer, a small firm of accountants with an office above a shop in Gay Street. Old Mr Merriman had died two weeks ago of heart failure in the Royal United Hospital.

  “There are suspicious elements,” Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, told Diamond. “I wouldn’t put it any higher than that. He wasn’t admitted with a heart condition. They treated him for gastroenteritis following an office party. He was in considerable pain, I gather. The heart attack came later.”

  “Poison?”

  “The post-mortem was inconclusive. They tested for the known poisons and found nothing of note. He was on medication for a heart problem anyway, so there were traces of various substances in the stomach contents, but nothing lethal.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “I hope we’re not wasting your time, Peter. It’s just that the circumstances could have come straight out of Agatha Christie. He wasn’t a nice old man at all. In fact, he was appalling. Everyone at the party had reasons to knock him off.”

  “Everyone? How many is that?”

  “Three.”

  “Small party.”

  “All the easier to question them. It could wait until after Christmas, but you left the message saying you wanted to be notified if any serious crimes were reported.”

  “Absolutely, ma’am. Maybe if I spend Christmas on this one I can take days off in lieu at a later date.”

  “You mean when the in-laws have left?”

  He grinned.

  The surviving partner, Maurice Palmer, had agreed to be in attendance at the office in Gay Street, but it was a woman’s voice on the entry-phone. Diamond gave his name and entered.

  “Sylvie Smith, junior accountant,” she said. She was smart, in her twenties, with dark, intelligent eyes. “He’s expecting you.”

  “And did he ask you to come in on Christmas Eve just to show me in?”

  “It’s a chance to tidy my desk.”

  “Don’t go away, then. I’d like to speak to you later.”

  Palmer appeared from an inner room and introduced himself. Fiftyish, in the obligatory dark suit and striped tie, he looked well
capable of tangling with tax inspectors. Or police inspectors.

  “Decent of you to see me,” Diamond said. “I hope this hasn’t messed up your holiday plans.”

  “Not as yet,” Palmer said, “but I hope we can clear up any questions now. I’m booked on a flight to Tenerife tonight.”

  “Is that a tax haven?”

  “If it is, it doesn’t come into my plans. I’m going for some winter sunshine, I hope.”

  Diamond glanced about him at the filing cabinets and computers. “So is this the room where the party was held?”

  “No, in point of fact. This is the office where the ladies sit,” Palmer said. “The party was in here.” He swung open the door he’d come through. “My room.”

  Diamond stepped in. “Nice.”

  It was oak-panelled, with a high corniced ceiling and a marble fireplace with gas flames that looked realistic. Leather armchairs, an expensive-looking carpet and a rosewood table with matching chairs testified to the status of the firm. “Fletcher Merriman used it for many years before he retired from the practice in 2001.” He went to the doorway and said to Sylvie Smith, “Why don’t you finish off what you were doing?” Then he closed the door.

  “So old Mr Merriman came in just for the party?”

  “His annual visit. It became a tradition. Every December he’d zoom in – you know he used a wheelchair? – with all the seasonal fare, three bottles of sherry, sweet, medium and dry, a dozen mince pies and a huge branch of mistletoe, and tell us it was party time. He loved surprising people.”