The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Dan is aware they could prove to have an overwhelming nature, could defeat him, and he never does handle this bit too well. The panic is up and in him before he can jump and be ears full of water, wrapped by it and washed and free. He concentrates on being glad of Frank and Gobbler: the carrying, discomfort, distraction.

  And he knows that once he’s swimming he’ll be fine. These days he goes on his back and is quite accomplished, purposeful, almost steers in the directions he intends.

  “Nearly there, then.”

  “Well, I had actually guessed that, you mong – cos of the fucking pool being right fucking here.” Gobbler shifts his weight and they stagger to the edge faster than intended.

  Dan makes a point of exhaling and starting to grin. He is about to improve himself. He has grasped the theory, read the leaflets – people like him need a way to ignore their reminders, the signs of wounding which are their obvious and inconvenient new shape. His body is not an aid to mental rehabilitation. So he swims, makes everything glide and be jolly. This means he’ll improve faster. But never as fast as he would without his injuries. That’s a medical fact – if he still had his foot and the rest of his arm, he’d be finding life much better than he is.

  He frowns, brings his thinking forward, peers ahead of his skin and his skull to the spot where Pete is already bobbing, hand at rest on the side and frowning up at a woman who is pacing and speaking to Fezman and Jason. They are both still dry and standing on the tiles, Fezman in these mad, knee-length trunks like he’s going to play football in the 1920s but with Day-Glo palm trees and dolphins and surf on them. You can tell he fancies himself in them and they’re new. They maybe are from a girlfriend.

  The speaking woman is round-shouldered and wears a blouse and a long skirt so tight it almost stops her walking, only this isn’t good because she has no arse, no pleasantness to see. When she angles herself and faces Dan, he ends up looking right at the curve of her little belly and her little mound and he doesn’t want to. They make him sad. Everything about her is sad – browny grey and bloody depressing – hair, clothes, shoes that she clips and quarter-steps along in – and Dan can tell she’s a teacher, because she’s got that fake cheerful thing about her mouth and darty little eyes that are tired and want to find mistakes. Every now and then, her lips thin together and it gets obvious that her job has gone badly for her, and probably also her life. And here she is taking her class for swimming lessons on a Tuesday afternoon – for safety and fitness and possibly something else that she can’t quite control. Dan is of the opinion that she should not have any kind of care over children.

  “Excuse me.” The teacher doesn’t speak to Dan, although she has left the others and drawn really near to him. She’s maybe only in her forties, but he notices she smells of old lady.

  “Excuse me.” She focuses on Gobbler. “I realize you’ve been here, that you come here quite often … ” She swallows and angles her head away, starts seriously watching the children – you’d think they were going to catch on fire, or something – not that she’d be any use to save them. “And I’ve explained you to them, but now—”

  “What d’you say, love?” Gobbler interrupts her and his arm around Dan flexes. “You’ve explained …?”

  “Yes, I could explain you to them.”

  Gobbler’s arm getting ready for something, thoughts roaring about inside it, Dan can hear them.

  “Don’t know what you mean though, love. How you’d explain me. What you’d be explaining.” Gobbler is nearly giggling which the woman shouldn’t think is him being friendly, because Dan knows he’s not. “Is that like I need translating? Like I’m a foreign language, because that’s not it – British me, British to the core.”

  Dan wanting to clear off out of it, avoid, and also wanting to do what he must, what he does – he goes along with the lads: Fezman, Frank, Jason, even Petey in the water, they close up alongside Gobbler, make a curvy sort of line, and they watch the woman regret herself, but still think she’s in the right. “It’s the children – I know you can’t help it – but they get upset.”

  Dan’s voice out of him before he realizes, “They don’t look upset.”

  “One of the girls was crying.”

  “They look fine. Splashing away and happy. I mean, they do. I wouldn’t say it, if they weren’t.”

  She tries going at Gobbler again which is unwise and Dan wonders how she managed to qualify, even get to be a teacher, when she is this thick and this shit at understanding a situation. “I told them you were as God made you.”

  “What?”

  “But with so many … it isn’t your fault, but you must see that you’re disturbing.” Her hands waver in front of her, as if she can’t quite bear to point at them. “You are disturbing. I’m sorry, but you are.” She nods. “There must be places you can go to where you’d be more comfortable.” Her fingers take hold of her wrists and cling.

  And the lads don’t speak. She stays standing there and hasn’t got a fucking clue. And the lads don’t speak. Dan can tell that she has no idea they’re deciding to be still, to be the nicest they can be, working up to it by deciding they will mainly forget her and what she’s said and who they are.

  And the lads don’t speak.

  She gives them a disapproving face, touch of impatience.

  And Fezman nods, thoughtful, and says – he’s very even, gentle with every word – says to her, “These are new trunks. I like these trunks. They are DILAC trunks, which you don’t understand.” He presses his face in mildly, mildly towards her, “They are Do I Look A Cunt in these trunks? trunks and I am going to swim in them this morning. And you look a cunt and you are a cunt, you are an utter cunt and I am sorry for this, but you should know and you should maybe go away and try being different and not a cunt, but right here, right now – a cunt – you’re a cunt. You are a cunt.” He nods again, slowly, and turns his face to the water and the girls and boys.

  Dan watches while the woman stares and her head jumps, acts like they’ve spat at her, or grabbed her tits and his gone arm trembles the same way that Gobbler’s does and he wants to run, can’t run, wants to – wants to throw up.

  The woman kind of freezes for a moment and then takes a little, hobbled step and then another, everything unsteady, leaves them.

  The lads wait.

  Dan sees when she reaches the opposite wall and starts yakking to a guy in a DILAC suit, guy who’s standing with a Readers’ Wives type of bint – they’re colleagues, no doubt, fellow educators. He decides that he has no interest in what may transpire.

  Dan and the lads take a breath, the requisite steps, and drop themselves into the water. They join Petey. They swim – show themselves thrashing, ugly, wild.

  Dan watches the ceiling tiles pass above him and has his anger beneath him, has it pushing at the small of his back, bearing him up. It wouldn’t be useful anywhere else.

  And he makes sure that he watches – regularly watches out – twists and raises his head and strains to see, makes sure that the kids have cleared out of his way, out of everyone’s. He wants no accidents.

  In his heart, though, in his one remaining heart, there is a depth, a wish that some morning there will be an accident: a frightened kid, scared boy, choking and losing his way. When this happens Dan will be there and will save him.

  He practises in his head and in the water – the paths that his good arm will take, the grip, the strength he’s already developed in his legs.

  Once that’s over it will mean he has recovered himself again – become a man who would rescue a boy, who would always intend and wish to do that – would not be any other man than the man who would do that, who would be vigilant, be a brave bastard and take care.

  He never would have done the thing that he couldn’t have. He never would have been the man he couldn’t be. He never would.

  No tricks of the darkness, no sounds in the pre-light, no panic, no confusion, no walking downstairs to find it, to see how it lies like it
’s frightened and shouldn’t be hurt. No mistake.

  There should be no mistake. There should be no mistake. There should be no mistake.

  ROBERT HAYER’S

  DEAD

  Simon Kernick

  “I USED TO have a boy like you,” the man said quietly. “A son. His name was Robert.”

  The kid didn’t say anything, just kept his position, sitting on an upturned plastic bucket in the corner of the cellar. He was staring down at the bare stone floor, staring hard like it mattered. His naturally blond hair was a mess – all bunched and greasy – and his clothes, which were the usual early teen uniform of baggy jeans, white trainers, white football shirt, had a crumpled, grimy look like he’d been sleeping in them, which he had.

  “I’m going to tell you about my son,” continued the man whose name was Charles Hayer. He was standing five feet away from the boy, watching him intently, his face tight and lined with the anguish he felt at recounting the story. “He was all I ever had. You know that? Everything. His mother and me, we were still together but things between us … well, y’know, it just wasn’t right. Hadn’t been for a long time. We’d been married getting on for twenty years, and the spark, the love, whatever you want to call it, it had just gone. You’re too young to understand but that’s sometimes the way it goes between a man and a wife. You’ll find out one day.”

  “Will I?” asked the kid, still not looking up. No obvious fear in the voice. More resignation.

  Charles Hayer gave the kid a paternal smile that the kid missed. “Sure you will,” he said. “But you’ve got to listen to me first. The fact is, Robert was my life. He was a good kid, he never hurt anyone, and he was everything a father would ever want in a child.

  “Then one day when he was thirteen years and two months old, they came and took him.”

  He paused. Waited. The kid said nothing. The kid knew.

  Hayer continued. “There were three of them involved. The one driving the car was called Louis Belnay. He was forty-two and he had convictions going back to when he was in his mid teens. Bad convictions. The kind that get you segregated when they put you behind bars. He should have been locked up for life because everyone knew he was going to remain a constant danger to young boys, because he always had been, and even one of his psychiatrists said he was untreatable, but I suppose that’s not enough for some people. And Belnay was no fool. He knew how to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That’s why he’d only ever done time twice, just a couple of years on each count, which isn’t a lot considering he’d been a child molester for more than a quarter of a century.

  “He didn’t look like a child molester, though, that was the thing. They often say they don’t. He just looked like a normal guy. One of his tricks if he didn’t have a kid he knew to hand, and he needed to get hold of one, was to impersonate a police officer, a plainclothes guy. Flash the badge, call them over, and bingo, he was away. That’s how he did it with my son. Robert was walking home from his friend’s place – and we’re talking about a walk of a hundred yards here – one night last summer. It was about a quarter past nine, and it wasn’t even fully dark. Somewhere on that hundred yards, Louis Belnay pulled up beside him, flashed that false badge of his, and called Robert over. Robert was a trusting kid. He had no reason not to be. His mother and me had warned him about talking to strangers plenty of times but this guy was a cop, so of course it should have been no problem. He did as he was told and approached the vehicle, and while Belnay spoke to Robert, his accomplice came round the other side of the car, had a quick check round to see that the coast was clear, then bundled him in the back, putting a cloth soaked in chloroform over his face to make sure he stayed nice and quiet. The accomplice’s name was Patrick Dean.”

  Hayer couldn’t entirely suppress a shudder. Just repeating Dean’s name aloud could do that to him. Always would now.

  “Now some people say that child molesters can’t help what they do, that they’re diseased rather than wicked, and I don’t know, maybe that’s true for some of them. But not Dean. Dean was – is – just pure fucking evil. He just liked to hurt people, kids especially. It was a power trip to him, a way of showing how strong he was to the world, that nothing was sacred to him. If he was here with you now, he’d hurt you bad. Do things to you that you cannot even begin to imagine. Sexual things, painful ones. And he’d enjoy every minute of it too, right up to the moment he put his hands round your neck and squeezed, or put the knife across your throat.”

  The kid flinched. Hayer saw it. Like someone had threatened him with a slap. He still didn’t look up. Hayer felt bad. He didn’t like putting the kid through it, didn’t like putting himself through it. But there was no other way. He had to explain.

  “Dean was strong. Big too. Six-three and fifteen stone. That’s why they used him for the physical stuff. That, and the fact that he didn’t scare easily. Ten years ago, while he was in Brixton prison, serving time for some assault and molestation charges, he made a formal complaint to the governor about the way he was being treated. The guards doing the mistreatment warned him if he didn’t drop the complaint, they’d stick him in with the general jail population and let him take his chances. He told them to go fuck themselves. They carried out their threat, he got the shit kicked out of him, but he still went through with the complaint. The guards ended up suspended, several of them lost their jobs, and he got released early even though he was what one detective called ‘a walking timebomb’.

  “And on that night, the walking timebomb met my son and Robert never stood a chance. He must have seen Dean coming round the car but because he thought he was a cop he didn’t run. Maybe if he’d been a couple of years older he would have done, and I guess they counted on that. It was all over in seconds. One minute he was walking down the street minding his own business, looking forward to the holiday the three of us were going to be going to have in Spain the following week, the next he was unconscious in the back of a car, being driven away by two dangerous paedophiles who should never have been out on the streets in the first place. And no one saw a thing.

  “I don’t know how long he lived after that. I don’t like to think about it, to tell you the truth. It’s too much. Either way, they took him back to the home of the third guy, Thomas Barnes, and that’s where they raped and killed him. Barnes said that the other two made him film it … everything … but the police never found the tape, so I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not. But then, why would you lie about something like that?”

  Hayer sighed. His throat was dry. He felt awkward standing there, looking down at a silent boy who was only a few months older than Robert had been on the night they’d taken him. Hayer wanted to cry again, to let his emotions do their work, if only because it would show the kid that he wasn’t such a bad man – that he too felt pain – but no tears came out in the way they’d done on so many occasions before. It seemed like the well of sorrow and self-pity had finally run dry.

  “After they’d finished with him, they cut up the body. Took off his legs, his arms, his head, and tried to burn the pieces separately. It didn’t work properly – apparently the body fat melts and it acts to stifle the flames – so they ended up having to put everything in separate bin bags and dumping them at different sites. The bag containing one of his partially burned legs and a section of his torso was found washed up on a riverbank a couple of months later by a man walking his dog. Other parts turned up after that beside a railway line, and at a landfill site. But they never found his head. We had to bury him in pieces.”

  This time the kid did look up. His face was streaked with tears. “Listen, please. Why are you telling me all this? I don’t want to hear it.” His eyes were wide, imploring. Innocent.

  Hayer’s inner voice told him to be strong. “You have to hear it,” he said firmly.

  “But I don’t … ”

  “Just listen,” snapped Hayer.

  The kid stopped speaking. His lower lip began to quiver and his face crinkled and
sagged with emotion. Robert had pulled an expression like that once. It had been after he’d broken an expensive vase while he’d been fooling about in the family kitchen. The vase had been a birthday present from Hayer to his wife, and on discovering what Robert had done, Hayer had blown his top on the boy, shouting so loudly that he could have sworn his son’s hair was standing on end by the time he’d finished. But when Robert had pulled that powerless, defeated face, all the anger had fallen away to be replaced by guilt at his own unnecessary outburst. God knows, he hadn’t wanted to hurt him. His only child. His dead and gone son.

  “They found DNA on some of the bodyparts,” he continued, his voice as dispassionate as he could manage under the circumstances. “The DNA belonged to Barnes, who was also a convicted child sex offender. Barnes was arrested, admitted his part in the death of my son, and expressed terrible regret. He also named Belnay and Dean as being involved.

  “Belnay and Dean both went on the run but were caught quickly enough and charged with murder, as was Barnes. We buried what was left of our son and waited for some sort of closure with the trial. But of course we never got it. Because a man called Gabriel Mortish denied us that.”

  “Oh God,” said the kid.

  Hayer nodded. “Oh God, indeed. Gabriel Mortish QC, one of the best defence barristers in the country, well known for taking on the cases that no one else wants to touch. He’s defended all sorts. Terrorists, serial killers, rapists. If you’re one of the bad guys, he’ll be there supporting your right to maim, torture and murder with everything he’s got. If you’ve never done a thing wrong in your life, tried to treat others like you’d want to be treated yourself, then he’s not interested in you. So, of course, it went without saying that Mortish took on the defence of Belnay and Dean. Not Barnes, because Barnes had shown some remorse for what he’d done, admitted that he’d played a part in it. That made him part-human and Mortish is only interested in helping out sub-humans.