The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “She’s pregnant,” the sergeant went on. “You see that? Can’t you?”

  The unseen man sighed softly, a note, perhaps, of hesitation. She felt there was some flicker of hope reflected in Sergeant Kelly’s eyes.

  “Get up … ” the foreign voice ordered.

  She stumbled to her feet. Her knee hurt. Her entire body seemed racked by some strange, unfamiliar, yet not unwanted pain.

  Her captor’s young face was now just visible. He was looking towards the tower of Big Ben.

  “We’re going in there,” he insisted, nodding towards the black iron security gates. “If you try to stop me … she’s dead.” He nodded at the armed officers circling them. “Them or me. What’s the difference?”

  She wondered how long the men with guns would wait, whether they were already gauging how wide to make the arc of their circle so that they might shoot safely in order to guarantee a kill, yet not be subject to their own deadly fire when the moment came.

  It will be soon … she thought, and found her hands returning to her belly, as if her fingers might protect what was there against the hot rain of gunfire.

  Someone thrust aside the barrel of the closest weapon. It was the sergeant again, swearing furiously, not at her assailant, but at the officers with guns. Harsh words. Harsher than she’d ever heard him speak before.

  “There are choices,” Sergeant Kelly insisted as he pushed them back.

  Hands high, empty, face still calm, determined, he wheeled round to confront the man who held her.

  “Choices … ” the policeman repeated quietly. “She’s pregnant. Isn’t there,” he shook his head, struggling to locate the right words, “ … some rule that says it’s wrong to kill an unborn child?” Sergeant Kelly shrugged. “For me there is, and I don’t believe in anything much, except what I can see and touch. If you believe,” his right hand swept briefly towards the sky, “ … something, isn’t it the same?”

  “You are not my preacher, policeman,” the voice behind her spat at him.

  “No.” Sergeant Kelly was so close that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her face and it smelled of peppermints and stale tobacco. “I’m no one’s priest. But tell me this. What will your god say of a man who knowingly takes the life of an unborn child?” The man gripping her leaned forward, bending his head to one side, as if listening, curiously. “Will he be pleased? Or … ”

  A stream of angry, foreign words filled the air. The London policeman stood there, his hand out, beckoning.

  “She doesn’t belong here,” he said. “Let her go with me. After that … ”

  He shrugged.

  “You … and they … ” The way he nodded at the others, the men with the guns, shocked her. It was as if there was no difference between them and the one who had snatched her, out in the bright, stifling day in Parliament Square. “You can do what the hell you like.”

  Silence, followed by the distant caterwauling of sirens. This was, she knew, the moment.

  “I beg you … ” Melanie Darma murmured, not knowing to whom she spoke.

  The grip on her neck relaxed. A choking sob rose in her throat. She stumbled forward, out of the young man’s grip, still clutching the bag with the portcullis logo close to her stomach.

  “Quickly … ” the policeman ordered, beckoning.

  She lurched forwards, slipped. Her knee went to the ground once more. The pain made her shriek, made her eyes turn blurry with tears.

  One set of arms released her. Another took their place. She was in the grip of Sergeant Kelly, and the smells of peppermint and tobacco were now secondary to the stink of nervous sweat, hers or his, she didn’t know and didn’t care.

  She fell against him. His arms slipped beneath hers, pulling, dragging, demanding.

  They were close to the gate. She found herself falling again, turning her head around. She had to. It was impossible to stop.

  The young man from the Tube had his hands in the air. He was shouting, words she couldn’t understand, foreign, incomprehensible words, a lilting chant that seemed to veer between anger and fear, imprecation and beseechment.

  “Melanie … ” the police sergeant muttered, as he pulled her away. “Don’t look … Don’t … ”

  It was futile. No one could not watch a scene like this. It was a kind of theatre, a staging, a play in real life, performed on a dirty stone stage in the heart of London, for all to see.

  Not far away there were men with cameras, people holding cell phones, recording everything. Not running the way they should have been.

  That puzzled her.

  She fell to one knee again, and felt glad the pain made her wake, made her pay more attention.

  The dark shapes with the rifles were around him again, more close this time, screaming obscenities and orders in equal measures. Yet his eyes were on the sky, on something unseen and unseeable.

  The rucksack flew from his hand. The ugly black metal creatures burst into life in the arms of their owners and began to leap and squeal. She watched the young man she had spoken to on the Tube twitch and shriek at the impact, dancing to their rhythm as if performing some deadly tarantella.

  His bag tumbled through the air, falling to the ground, the wire that linked device to owner flailing powerlessly like a snapped and useless tendon.

  That part of the performance was over. It was the dance now, nothing but the dance.

  Sergeant Kelly didn’t drag her at that moment. Like Melanie Darma he realized the bomb, or whatever it was, had refused to play its part. Like her, he could only watch in shock and terrified wonder.

  She closed her eyes, gripping her stomach firmly, intent on ensuring everything there was normal, as it ought to be. As she half-knelt there, feeling the policeman’s strong arms on her shoulder, she was aware of two thin lines of tears trickling slowly down her face. And something else …

  “Melanie,” Sergeant Kelly murmured, looking scared.

  She looked at him. There was worry, concern in his face, and it was more personal now, more direct than such a vague and ephemeral threat as explosives in a young man’s bag.

  Following the line of his gaze she saw what he did. Blood on the pavement. Not that of the man from the Tube. Hers. A line of dark, thick liquid gathering around her grazed knee, pooling as it trickled down her leg.

  The wailing of sirens grew louder. Vans and police cars seemed to be descending upon them from every direction. Men were shouting, screaming at one another. A couple were bent down over the broken body leaking on to the ground a few yards away.

  Before she could say another thing he bent down, looked in her face, breathed deeply, then scooped her up in his strong, certain arms.

  “There’s a nurse inside,” Sergeant Kelly muttered, a little short of breath, as he carried her through the security gate, past the door, and the gawping, wide-eyed officers next to their untended machines, and on into the cool, dusty darkness of the Houses of Parliament.

  ***

  She knew the medical room, could picture it as he half-stumbled, half-ran along the narrow corridors. In the very foot of the tower, a clean and windowless cubicle with a single medic in attendance, always. Twice, she’d stopped by, for advice, for support, only to be told to see her own doctor instead of troubling the private resources of the Palace of Westminster.

  Except in emergencies.

  Sergeant Kelly turned down the final passageway, one that led into the very core of the building. The stonework was so massive here it scared her. Trapped beneath several hundred feet and untold tons of grimy London stone, an insignificant creature, like some tiny insect in the bowels of a towering anthill, she felt herself carried into the brightly lit room, lifted on to a bed there, placed like a specimen to be examined.

  It was the same nurse. Thickset, ugly, fierce. The place smelled of drugs and chemicals. The lights were too bright, the walls so thick she couldn’t hear a note of the chaos that must have ensued outside.

  The nurse took one look at the dry
ing stain on her ankle and asked, “When are you due?”

  “Four weeks.”

  Her flabby face contorted in a scowl.

  “And you’re coming to work? Good God … Let’s take a look.”

  She was reaching for a pair of scissors, casually, with no panic, no rush. It was as if life and death cohabited happily in this place, one passing responsibility to the other the way day faded into night.

  He was still there as the woman came towards the hem of her dress with the sharp, shiny instrument, staring at the Palace of Westminster bag which she continued to clutch tight against the bump, as if it still needed protection.

  “You don’t need that any more,” Sergeant Kelly said, half amused, reaching down for the carry-all in her hands.

  She let go and released it into his grip. The nurse advanced again with the scissors, aiming at her dress.

  “Sergeant …?” Melanie Darma objected, suddenly anxious.

  “I’m a London copper, love,” he answered, laughing a little. “There’s nothing I haven’t seen.”

  “I don’t want you to see me,” she told him firmly.

  The nurse gave him a fierce stare.

  Sergeant Kelly sighed, held the bag up for her to see, and said, “I’ll look after your things outside.”

  As he opened the door, the faint wail of sirens scuttled through then died as he closed it again.

  It wasn’t like an anthill, she thought. More akin to being in the foundations of a cathedral, feeling the weight of ages, the massive load of centuries of tradition, of a civilization that had, at one time, dominated the known world and now had the power to do nothing more than bear down on her remorselessly.

  “The doctor might be a man, love,” the nurse said as she cut the fabric of the cheap dress in two, all the way up to the waist.

  Then she stepped back, eyes wide with surprise, unable to speak.

  It was all there. The plastic bag with the fake blood, and the telltale path it had left down the side of her leg after she burst it with her fingers. And the bulge. The hump. The being she had brought to life, day-by-day, out of stockings and underclothes, napkins and tea towels, until that very morning. The morning. When something else took its place.

  She knew the wires, every one, because he’d told her about each as he placed them there, around the soft, fat wad of material they’d given him, the night before. There was, she wanted to tell the nurse, no other way to penetrate this old and well-protected inner sanctum of a world she had come to hate. No other means to escape the attention of the electric devices, the sniffers, the security people prying into everything that came and went in this great palace, a monument that meant so much to so many.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, reaching for the band of yellow cable, taking the tail to the mouth, as she’d learned and practised so many times in the small, fusty bedroom of the apartment she could barely afford.

  The foreign phrase he taught her wouldn’t come. They were, in any case, his words, not hers, codes from a set of beliefs she did not share.

  What she did know was the Circle. It seemed to have been with her forever, since the moment she first set foot in the dark world beneath the ground, hand in hand with her father, as he took the first step on the journey to his bleak, cruel end. Ahmed – this was not his real name, she understood and accepted that – had woken the slumbering beast one cold morning that spring when he talked his way into her life after she left the Palace of Westminster. But he was its creature too, not that he recognized the fact.

  Her mind could not dismiss the image of Ouroboros at that moment, the picture of the serpent devouring itself. Or the words of the book that was now in the hands of Sergeant Kelly who was, perhaps, a little way away, outside even, eyeing the shattered body in the street.

  The living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed. And all that he did or suffered took place in and by himself.

  From nothing to nothing, round and round.

  With unwavering hands Melanie Darma held the wires above her belly like a halo, bringing together the ends with a firm and deliberate motion, filled with the deepest elation that this particular journey was at an end.

  A GOOSE

  FOR CHRISTMAS

  Alexander McCall Smith

  1

  OLD FARMER HONDERCOOTER had a place near a hill that everybody called Birds’ Hill. He had 250 acres, which was a reasonable size for a dairy farm in that part of the country. Sheep people had far more – thousands of acres, whole plains, it seemed, whole mountainsides, but dairy people had no need of such wide horizons. “I can walk across my land,” he sometimes said. “I know every inch of it. The good bits, the bad bits – I know the lot.”

  As well as keeping cows, Hondercooter usually had at least six geese about the farmyard, a flock of laying hens, and a dog of indeterminate breed, Old Dog Tray. This dog was named after a dog in the German children’s book, Struwelpeter, in which the faithful dog Tray is tormented by a cruel boy. Eventually Tray turns on the boy and defends himself. Hondercooter had that book read to him when he was a child and found it frightening. But the name Tray struck him as being a good name for a dog, and so he chose it when the dog first came to him as a puppy.

  “Old Tray is a good dog,” he said to visitors. “Looks after the place. Follows me round. Barks. Does everything you need a dog to do.”

  2

  Hondercooter was of Dutch extraction. His father had gone to New Zealand as a young man and taken up farming near the Abel Tasman in the South Island. In those days it was not a particularly fashionable part of the country. Later, it became popular with people of an alternative outlook – hippies, in particular, liked the atmosphere, and settled there to grow their own vegetables and run small pottery and batik workshops. The farmers were bemused by these people, but by and large got on well with them.

  Hondercooter was a New Zealander through and through, although he was proud of his Dutch ancestry. “Dairy farming is what we do,” he said. “You can’t find a better dairy farmer than a Dutchman. It’s in the blood.”

  He had never married. “Wives are expensive,” he joked. “Look at what it costs to keep a wife. Just look!”

  The fact that he was unmarried meant that there were no obvious heirs. “He may have cousins somewhere,” people speculated. “You never know.”

  3

  Hondercooter’s nearest neighbour was a farmer called Ted Norris. Ted was a bit younger than Hondercooter, and, unlike him, was married. His wife was called Betty, and she had a substantial reputation as a cheese-maker. She had won prizes for her cheeses in Auckland and Wellington, and had even been chosen for a New Zealand Cheese exhibition in Melbourne. That trip to Australia was her first trip abroad. “It opened my eyes,” she said when she returned.

  After that experience, Betty hankered for another foreign trip.

  “Waste of money,” said Ted Norris. “Airports. Rush. All that stuff. Why don’t we drive down to Dunedin instead? Or Christchurch, maybe.”

  Betty got her way, though, and a few years later they went on a trip to Rome and Paris. Rome was chosen because Ted was a devout Catholic. Paris was for Betty. She had never converted to Catholicism, although she was on good terms with the local priest, who regularly dropped in on the farm to play a game of chess with Ted.

  Another regular social engagement for Ted and Betty was the visit of Hondercooter, who came for Sunday dinner once a month. After the meal the three of them would sit in the living room and drink a cup of coffee while Ted erected a screen to show his slides of the trip to Rome. Hondercooter knew these slides well, but did not mind looking at views of St Peter’s while Ted explained the finer points of its architecture. It reassured him to hear these facts – in a changing world, it was helped to be reminded that there were people who took the long view, who thought in terms of eternity.

&n
bsp; 4

  Hondercooter reciprocated this hospitality, even though he was not much of a cook. Ted and Betty came for dinner every other month, and they then played canasta for the rest of the evening. Betty took the opportunity, too, to tidy up Hondercooter’s house a bit. This became something of a private joke with them, and Hondercooter would issue his invitation by saying that he would be pleased if Betty came round to tidy things up a bit. She could bring Ted, of course, and there would be a bite to eat afterwards. This never failed to amuse them.

  5

  Hondercooter was quite well-off. His father had done well for himself and had made good investments. By the time he died and they came to Hondercooter, they were worth a considerable sum. Hondercooter never touched them. They were looked after by a lawyer in Nelson, a cadaverous-looking man called Bollingworth, who sent a report every six months of the state of the investments. He usually used the same words to describe the portfolio of shares. “Very good, on the whole.”

  Hondercooter also had one or two personal items of some value. One of these was a small painting in an ornate gilded frame. This had belonged to his maternal grandmother’s family, and had been brought out to New Zealand by Hondercooter’s father. It was typical of Dutch painting of the late sixteenth century, and depicted a group of peasants working on the harvest. In the background, the sails of a windmill could be made out, half hidden by a stand of trees.

  This painting was by Pieter Brueghel, although the small gilt lozenge glued on to the bottom of the frame claimed the artist as Jan Brueghel the Younger. This attribution, which would have considerably reduced the painting’s value, was false.

  “Nice painting, that,” commented Ted Norris. “By a Dutchman?”

  “I think so,” said Hondercooter. “It was my grandmother’s. There are an awful lot of Dutch paintings, you know. Lots of old ones.”