The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Franklin in a nutshell. Ab ovo. English. Thirty-four years old, five foot ten, one hundred and fifty pounds. Eyes of blue, hair of brown. Born in a Swiss clinic beneath the benign and sunny sign of the Lion three weeks after his father was immolated in the Austrian Grand Prix. His much-married mother, the slovenly scion of a minor, ruined aristocratic family, was notorious for having been involved in a sleazy sex-scandal (Top Totty Brings Down Government, according to one tabloid headline at the time).

  Franklin left London for Scotland, managing to scrape into Stirling University on a media studies course, and after graduation he joined a local radio station from which starting point he climbed, like a salmon up a ladder, to the dizzy heights of being a script editor on a Scottish TV soap, Green Acres – a violent yet couthy mix, as if The Sopranos had relocated to Brigadoon and all the script editors had media studies degrees from Stirling.

  Franklin felt that one day he would be tested, that a challenge would appear out of the blue – a war, a quest, a disaster – and that he would rise to this challenge and not be found wanting. It would be the making of him, he would come into his own. But what if this never happened, what if nothing was asked of him? Would he have to ask it of himself? And how did you do that?

  Franklin was also unbelievably unlucky, descended from a long line of bad luck, only child of an only child of an only child and so on, and had become reconciled to the fact that no matter how many times the wheel of fortune turned he would always find himself stuck on the underside like gum on a shoe. Connie seemed like the very person who might change his luck.

  “What does your family do, Franklin?” Connie asked.

  Franklin, unfortunately, had only his lone, infamous parent to offer.

  “There’s just my mother, I’m afraid,” he said. “She’s” (he made rabbit ears) “a widow.”

  ***

  Franklin was surprised when less than an hour after leaving the pub he found himself naked on the beech laminate flooring of Connie’s basement flat in Cumberland Street, kissing her grazed knees in an odd combination of first aid and foreplay. Their modest intake of wine, the Beethoven and her generally demure demeanour had led him to think that Connie wasn’t the kind of girl who kissed on a first date, let alone shed her clothes before she’d hardly got the key in her front door. He said something to this effect to her afterwards when they were lying in a tangled, sweaty knot on her “Beware of the Cat” doormat and she laughed and said, “Of course I’m not that kind of girl, but it’s not every day you fall – literally – head over heels in love.” Franklin felt both alarmed and flattered in equal measure by this statement.

  It turned out that Connie had the easygoing nature of a girl who had never had a worry in her life greater than whether or not flat shoes made her calves look fat. She was “almost a vegetarian”, did Pilates twice a week and played for the Edinburgh Netball Club. She was thrillingly well-organized with no self-doubt whatsoever. For Franklin, a person continually in the throes of an apprehensive nihilism, this last was a compelling quality. Furthermore, Connie’s hair was straight and brown and never seemed to tangle, her breath was always slightly minty no matter the time of day and she was possessed of the kind of flawless complexion that you only got from a clear conscience.

  Conversations with Connie tended to be based on an endless series of ethical dilemmas. Franklin knew it was a test he was bound to fail eventually. “If I was trapped in a burning building with a cat, which of us would you rescue?” Connie asked as they came out of the Cameo cinema.

  “You, of course,” Franklin said without hesitation.

  “What about the cat?”

  “What about the cat?”

  “You would just leave it to burn to death, Franklin?”

  They pursued a hectic month of courtship. It was an exhausting and somehow very public chase – theatres, cinemas, museums, cafés, endless meals out in restaurants. On top of that there were race meetings in Musselburgh, walks in the Botanics and Holyrood Park, athletic ascents of Arthur’s Seat. Connie seemed particularly fond of the outdoors. Franklin would have preferred to have stayed home and had sex, although, thankfully, Connie’s diary managed to make room for a lot of that too.

  Franklin found it difficult to keep up with Connie – literally – when they were out together, rather than being intimately coupled up, arm in arm, Connie was always shooting ahead (he’d never met anyone who walked so fast), leaving him trailing behind. He hoped the pace would slow down soon.

  Barely a month after meeting Connie, Franklin found himself meeting “Mummy and Daddy” for the first time, invited for the weekend to their house in Cramond.

  “Sherry?” Mr Kingshott asked, hefting a heavy crystal decanter. (“Daddy can be a wee bit gruff,” Connie had murmured, to Franklin’s alarm, as they made their way up the Kingshott’s impressive drive.)

  “Thank you,” Franklin said. He felt acutely conscious of his manners in this delicate environment. It seemed inevitable that something would be broken. Drinking sherry before lunch – lunch itself – was just one of the many attractive things that Connie would bring to his life if he married her. He would swim in the Kingshott gene pool like a happy sun-kissed otter.

  Mr Kingshott was smaller than Franklin had expected, a little gamecock of a man, strutting around his lovely Cramond drawing room, pecking at his brood. Franklin felt that if he were going to have his heart operated on he would prefer it to be done by a bigger man, a man whose hand was large enough to hold his heart firmly without any danger of it slipping from his overly petite fingers. He also felt that he would not like his heart to be tended by a man who continually grunted and sighed with irritation and impatience, Mrs Kingshott apparently being the usual beneficiary of this malcontent. (“Daddy’s a bit of a tyrant,” Connie said cheerfully.) Franklin thought that he would like the man operating on his heart to be singing, light opera, nothing too dramatic, Gilbert and Sullivan perhaps.

  “Mummy!” Connie exclaimed as a rather large, soft woman entered the drawing room, holding a wooden spoon in her hand as if it were a wand. She had the distracted air of someone who had wandered into a room without having the slightest idea why she was there.

  Mummy smiled sadly at Franklin as if she knew some terrible thing that was to befall him and then wandered out of the room again, spoon aloft.

  All of Mummy’s brood had pitched up at the Cramond house. (“The nest full again,” Connie said.) “So we can meet the beau,” Patience said. Patience was both the eldest and the largest of the three sisters. (No Chekhovian gloom in the Kingshott household, no longing for a golden somewhere else, Franklin was relieved to note. Except possibly from Mummy.) Patience, in Birkenstocks and a paisley blouse, had a suggestion of heaviness about her, as if one day she would be in possession of the stout figure and bovine slowness of her mother. Faith, the youngest, on the other hand, had her father’s height and his bird-boned frame. Franklin was struck by the sight of the three sisters together, Patience was too big and serious, Faith too small and flighty, but Connie was, in the wise words of Goldilocks, just right. If he could love anyone, surely it would be her.

  “Have a seat,” Connie said, indicating a sofa that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a royal palace. It was more a mansion than a house. There was a library and a tennis court, endless well-kept lawns.

  “Mind the cat,” Connie said hastily as Franklin narrowly missed sitting on what he had taken to be some kind of strange cushion but which turned out to be a dish-faced, long-haired white cat that glared malevolently at him. “Pedigree,” Patience muttered, as if that explained everything.

  Patience, who clearly lacked Connie’s sunny nature, downed a schooner of sherry in one and said to Franklin, “If you were a musical instrument what musical instrument would you be, Franklin?” She seemed to regard the question as one of real interest. She had a kind of Germanic earnestness about her that made Franklin feel shallow.

  All three sisters stared at him, waiting for an an
swer. “Violin,” he hazarded. To say “Cello” would have seemed sycophantic, given that it was Patience’s own instrument. A violin seemed a safe bet, like the cello it had strings, and it wasn’t quirky like a bassoon or a tuba or grandstanding like a piano, but Patience raised her eyebrows at his answer as if he’d just fulfilled her expectations by saying something banal.

  Franklin was relieved when they moved into the dining room and settled at the (enormous) table. Mrs Kingshott carried in a platter and ceremoniously presented a poached salmon (one dull eye glared out at them) to Mr Kingshott. The salmon, apparently, fitted happily into Connie’s “almost vegetarian” philosophy. Mr Kingshott dissected the fish as if he were conducting a post-mortem. Franklin found himself wondering what Connie would taste like if he bit through her smooth skin and into the firm yet tender flesh beneath. The breast of an Aylesbury duck or a particularly good pork sausage perhaps. Franklin realized that the very fact that he had thoughts like this made him incredibly unsuitable to be in possession of the Kingshott’s middle child. He suspected that in her parent’s eyes (and in his own too if he was honest) he must seem feckless and totally unworthy of the gift of their daughter.

  “What is it you actually do, Franklin?” Mr Kingshott asked suddenly, as if he’d been struggling with this quandary since the sherry. For a moment Franklin thought this might also be some kind of game (If you were a job what job would you be?). “For a living,” Mr Kingshott clarified when Franklin looked blank.

  “Oh,” Franklin said. “I work in television.”

  “Television?” Mr Kingshott repeated, his face contorted as if he was in some kind of exquisite pain. Previously Franklin had always felt a certain amount of pride when announcing this fact, it had taken him a long time to squirm his way up to where he was now. “On Green Acres,” he added.

  “A farming programme?” Mr Kingshott looked incredulous, as well as he might. “You?”

  “Oh, Daddy,” Mummy laughed. “It’s a soap opera, everyone knows that. Daddy likes Wagner,” she said to Franklin, as if that explained everything.

  “Mummy’s an addict, Frankie,” Faith said.

  “God,” Franklin said to Mrs Kingshott, “how awful for you.”

  “Of Green Acres,” Connie said.

  “Of course,” Franklin said.

  He suddenly realized that Faith was studying his face across the centrepiece of yellow roses (“St Alban,” Mummy said) as if he were a fascinating new life form. He felt something rubbing against his calf and wondered if it was the cat again. He glanced down and was shocked to see a naked foot, the scarlet nails like drops of blood, arching and contracting as it stroked the denim of his jeans. The foot could only belong to Faith unless Patience, sitting at the other end of the table, possessed freakishly long legs. Perhaps he wouldn’t be such a happy otter if Connie’s sisters were in the pool with him, circling like sharks.

  “So, Frankie,” Faith purred, “If you were a disease what disease would you be?”

  ***

  There was a mutually declared break before the appearance of a raspberry mille-feuille that was waiting rather anxiously in the wings. “I really wasn’t in the mood for pastry-making,” Mummy said, frowning at the yellow roses as if they were about to do something unpredictable.

  “Still on the Prozac, Mummy?” Patience said. (“Daddy fills all Mummy’s prescriptions,” Connie said.)

  Connie leaned closer to Franklin. She smelt fresh and flowery. “Let’s go outside,” she said.

  “Mummy’s pride and joy,” Connie said, rather brutally snapping off a delicate rose the colour of peaches and cream and holding it beneath Franklin’s nose. It was a lovely perfume, the inside of old wardrobes, China tea on a summer lawn, Connie’s skin. “Pretty Lady,” she said.

  “You are,” Franklin affirmed.

  “No, it’s the name of the rose,” Connie said. “I think we should get married.”

  For some reason, Franklin’s dumbfounded silence was taken as an affirmative and the next thing he knew he was lost in a shrieking scrum of Kingshott women, only Mr Kingshott, more interested in the raspberry mille-feuille, remained aloof from the hysteria. Franklin wasn’t sure why they were shrieking. He wondered if it was horror. “Just like Jane Austen,” Connie said, fanning her flushed face with her hand.

  Seeing that a romantic gesture was expected of him, Franklin drove back into town, put a thousand pounds on a handy little bay running in the last race at Beverley that came in at 10/1, strolled down the street with a winner’s easy gait and bought a diamond engagement ring from Alastair Tait, the jeweller. (“Any vices, Franklin?” Mr Kingshott had asked with mock amiability after the celebratory champagne was opened and the raspberry mille-feuille was finally consumed. “Oh, just the usual,” Franklin laughed.)

  On his return, Mr Kingshott coerced Franklin into a game of tennis on the hard court at the back of the house. “Reach for it, boy!” Mr Kingshott yelled at him, lobbing an impossible ball high over Franklin’s head towards the back of the court. Despite his size, Mr Kingshott, it turned out later, was the doyen of the local tennis club, whereas Franklin hadn’t played since listlessly knocking a ball about at university.

  Mr Kingshott took great pleasure in reporting back, over an elaborate afternoon tea that Mummy had prepared, that he had “soundly trounced” Franklin. “Well, Daddy wouldn’t play anything he couldn’t win,” Connie said later to Franklin as if that was the most reasonable thing in the world.

  By the time they had eaten a supper of chicken sandwiches and drunk more champagne (they seemed to do nothing but eat and drink) Franklin couldn’t wait to retreat to the attic guest-room. Kingshott daughters were not allowed to share a bed with their beaux beneath the family roof. (“Daddy likes to pretend that we’re all virgins.”)

  Franklin opened the door to the little room under the eaves and nearly had a heart attack. A figure was standing quite still at the open casement window, gazing out at the darkness. The figure turned around and to Franklin’s relief it was only Mrs Kingshott.

  “Mrs Kingshott?” Franklin said softly. For an awful moment he wondered if she was thinking of jumping.

  “Oh, Franklin,” she said as if she was surprised to see him. “I was just … ” she gestured vaguely at the narrow single bed. She was holding a carafe of water and a glass which she placed gently down on the bedside table. She moved carefully like someone made of something breakable. She sat on the bed and stroked the cover as if it were a sick animal. “Sometimes I wish … ” she said.

  “What do you wish for, Mrs Kingshott?”

  “Oh, nothing. Silly me,” she said. “It’s just … ” she sighed, a tremulous, sob-bearing sigh, and absentmindedly plumped up the pillows on the bed. “You know. The death of hope.”

  Franklin tried to think of something to say that would mollify this rather bleak existential statement but Mummy jumped up and said brightly, “Night, night, Franklin.”

  Soundly asleep, Franklin incorporated the opening of the squeaking bedroom door into a dream he was in the midst of. The monstrous but indeterminate predator that had been hunting him through an abandoned railway goods yard was closing in on him. He could hear its ragged breath, could feel the heat of it, the strange, soft texture of it. It was smaller than he had imagined but it wrapped itself around him and started to probe and pull at his body with its small hands. Perhaps not a monster but an alien? Without warning, it thrust its tongue into his mouth. He screamed the mute scream of the nightmare victim.

  “It’s all right, Frankie,” a familiar female voice said quietly in his ear. “It’s just the doctor here to examine you.”

  There was a festive air about the house the next morning. “Not every day we manage to get one of them off our hands,” Mr Kingshott said, over an extensive cooked breakfast. “Although, of course, no man should marry, Balzac says, until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”

  Franklin tried very hard not to catch faithless Faith’s eye over the
table. He needn’t have worried, she hardly gave him a second glance and if it hadn’t been for the scratches and the teeth-marks on his body (more wildcat than woman) he might have dismissed last night as the nightmare that it was.

  “Sleep well?” Connie said, kissing him lightly on the cheek before sitting down at the table. Franklin almost choked on his guilt.

  Mummy slid a fried egg on to his plate and patted him on the shoulder as if he was a dog.

  Franklin felt compelled to accompany Connie and Mrs Kingshott to church.

  “Then you can meet the minister who’ll be marrying us.”

  She spent most of the service admiring her ring in the sunlight that cascaded through the church windows while Franklin weighed his soul and found it sadly wanting.

  More sherry before lunch. Franklin hadn’t realized what a potent drink it was.

  “Fetch another bottle from the kitchen, would you?” Mr Kingshott said to Franklin in the same tone of voice he might have used with a waiter.

  The big six-door Aga that Mrs Kingshott treated with a mixture of servitude and fear (much the same relationship as she had with Mr Kingshott) was pumping out heat on what was an already stifling day. Mrs Kingshott was putting the finishing touches to a peach pavlova.

  “Can I do something to help?” Franklin asked. He felt strangely compelled to treat Mrs Kingshott like an invalid.

  She shook her head in a tragic way as if to say no but then said, “That’s very kind of you. Perhaps you could slice a lemon for me?”

  “Of course,” Franklin said. He felt strangely comfortable with Mrs Kingshott (or “Mummy” as he had begun to think of her). How much better off he would have been with a mother like Mrs Kingshott. She would have sent him to scout camps and concert performances of A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and given him sound advice, unlike his own mother. (“Remember the rule of the three Fs, Franklin – if it flies, floats or fucks, then, for God’s sake, rent it.”)