The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I saw him last week. First time in ten years. In the street outside Smiths. Still the same Keeg, the same tatty jeans and holey T-shirt. He looked me up and down and laughed.

  “Wanker,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, at least I’m not a loser.”

  We stood toe to toe, face to face.

  “I know stuff about you,” he said, softly. “I know about homeless kids and winos, and old gits whose hearts go pop the first time you say boo. Don’t you piss me off!”

  “I know things about you too,” I said.

  Maybe I’ve lost my accent a bit, being away. A huge grin cracked his face and he said in a prissy precious voice, “Know things too? Can’t speak proper any more, right?”

  That got to me somehow. Like saying I wasn’t real. “Sod off,” I said.

  He muscled in on me, till we were nose to nose. I could feel his hard-on.

  “This is my town,” he said. “You sod off!” And he added, whispering, “You were the one that chickened out, remember. You were the one who sicked his guts up rather than tackle a pansy pervert.”

  “Sod off,” I said again, and walked away.

  And ever since, he and his mates – once my mates – have been prancing around outside my flat. Fuck knows how they found me. First couple of nights they tossed stones into the courtyard and against the wall of the flats. The security guard went out and yelled at them; minutes later a bizzy car cruised by. By then Keeg and his mates had gone.

  But tonight they’re in the courtyard and the guard’s nowhere to be seen. Course, I could call the law, but if I did that, Keeg could land me in the shit. That’s what he’s betting on, that I won’t dare do anything. Shop him and I shop myself. Of course someone else in the flats is probably calling the cops. That’s why I’m going to have to sort it. Now.

  Keeg doesn’t stand a chance.

  I take the lift down. From the glass doors in the foyer, I can see the security booth at the gate, which I couldn’t see from above. I can see feet in polished black shoes, toes up on the floor. That takes care of what happened to the security guard, I guess.

  They come for me the minute I walk out the door but Keeg roars at them; they give him sour looks but stop.

  “Me and you,” I say, hands in the pockets of my leather jacket.

  “Yeah,” he says, and the others jump on the low walls of the ornamental flowerbeds and sit there, beer cans in hand, legs swinging like they were at the football.

  “Make it fast,” Keeg said. “Someone’ll have called the cops.”

  “Sure,” I say and swagger up to him. He stinks of beer and piss and vomit, and once I stank like that too. This is what I left behind, this is what I could have been. And what’s he seeing? A smart guy, with looks and brains, the kid he once was, who made it out of here and who got everything life has to offer. And what do I feel?

  Sick to the heart. It’s all shit and show. Nothing but nothing.

  Nothing like what Keeg and me had. Why am I here? Because I left him behind. I walked out on him, and left him to the shit and the crap and the boredom and the beer, and all the rest of the nothing we had when we were kids. I let him down. He was my mate and I walked out on him. He’s shit but I’m shit too, just shit covered with a fine coat and we both know it.

  We stand nose to nose, face to face, chest to chest and Keeg’s not the only one with a hard-on. And I’m thinking: this is it, this is real. All that other shit is just pretend. The only difference is that it pays, and means you can stand up and say look at me. I’m an executive with my own internet business. I’m respectable.

  Yeah. Right. I let him down and that makes me worse than him. Ten times worse.

  And that’s the way it’s going to stay. If I can’t be better, I’ll be worse. No way he’s going to get the drop on me. No way he can take me down. And I slip the kitchen knife between his ribs and he stares wide-eyed and gives an odd little gurgle and slips down the length of me, like an old pair of jeans shucking off. And then he’s lying on the ground and there’s a smear of blood down my T-shirt.

  Simple as that. No big deal. And you know – no fun at all. It’s all shite. But at least I don’t feel guilty any more. What’s to feel guilty about? Keeg got left behind and I didn’t. I look at the three yobos. They’re still staring at Keeg’s body with the knife in it.

  “So he got in and killed the guard,” I said. “Then he panicked and did for himself. Right?”

  They hop down from the walls, pause, nod. Then they’re sauntering away towards the gate as if nothing has happened. So long, Keeg. So long, mate. No offence, but you’re just history.

  I bend to wipe the knife clean of my fingerprints and close Keeg’s hand around it.

  And why didn’t I get caught? Keeg took the cameras out of course, when he did for the guard. Just like I knew he would. So no one would see what happened. He knew tonight was the night we sorted it.

  ***

  In the dark room, the moon stripes the polished floorboards. I look out of my window at the courtyard. Empty. Just a new guard in the security cabin, a cat prowling round the flowerbeds.

  Empty.

  I did what was necessary. It was always going to come down to me and Keeg facing off. And there could be only one winner.

  But that’s the point. He’s dead, just a pile of ashes scattered for the dogs to crap on. And without him, I’m nothing. Just another fucking bag of shite with nowhere to go. We were two sides of one coin and I destroyed it.

  In a way, he won.

  I’m going to go get myself someone. A wino maybe or a Big Issue seller, or a foreign student who doesn’t know where the hell he is. Someone to kill some time. Someone to kill.

  Hey, Keeg, this one’s for you.

  THE WOMAN

  WHO LOVED

  ELIZABETH DAVID

  Andrew Taylor

  ON THE EVENING that Charles died I actually heard the ambulance, the one that Edith Thornhill called. I was putting out the milk bottles on the porch. I didn’t take much notice. Our house was on Chepstow Road and so was the hospital; we often heard ambulances.

  He died on the evening of the day the rat-catcher came – the last Thursday in October. Our house was modern, built just before the war, but in the garden was a crumbling stone stable. Charles planned to convert it into a garage if we ever bought a car, which was about as likely as his agreeing to install a telephone. In the meantime we used it as a sort of garden shed and apple store. Almost all the apples had been ruined by rats in the space of a week. Hence the rat-catcher.

  Charles was late but I had not begun to get worried. After he closed the shop, he often dropped into the Bull Hotel for a drink. Then the doorbell rang and I found Dr Bayswater and Mrs Thornhill on the doorstep. I know Edith from church, and Dr Bayswater is our doctor.

  “I’m sorry, Anne,” Edith said. “It’s bad news. May we come in?”

  I took them into the lounge. Edith suggested I sit down.

  “Charles? It’s Charles, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead,” Edith said.

  I stared at her. I did not know what to say.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “Coronary thrombosis.”

  “A coronary? Do you mean a heart attack? But he was only forty-eight.”

  “It does happen.”

  “But he doesn’t have a weak heart. Surely there’d have been some—”

  “I’d seen him three times in the last month.” Bayswater examined his fingernails. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Of course he did. But that was indigestion.”

  “Angina. Some of the symptoms can be similar to indigestion.”

  The doctor and Edith went on talking to me. I didn’t listen very much. All I could think of was the fact that Charles hadn’t told me the truth. Instead of grieving that he was gone, I felt angry with him.

  My memory of the next few weeks is patchy, as if a heavy fog lies over that part of my mind. Certain events rear out of it like
icebergs from a cold ocean. The funeral was at St John’s and the church was full of people wearing black clothes, like crows. Marina Harper was there, which surprised me because she wasn’t a churchgoer. Charles had an obituary in the Lydmouth Gazette. It was not a very long one. It said that he came of a well-respected local family and referred in passing to Nigel.

  It was unfortunate that Nigel, Charles’s younger brother, was in Tanganyika, looking at some sawmills he was thinking of buying. I never really understood what Nigel did for a living. Whatever it was, it seemed to bring him a good deal of money. Once I asked him and he said, “I just buy things when they’re cheap, and sell things when they’re expensive. Nothing to it, really.”

  I sent a telegram to Dar es Salaam. Nigel cabled back, saying he would be home as soon as possible. He and Charles had always been very close, though Nigel was my age, a good ten years younger than his brother. He was also Charles’s executor.

  In the meantime, everything was in limbo. Until Nigel came home, I could have very little idea of what the future held for me. I did not even know whether I would be able to stay in the house. In the meantime, the shop – Butter’s, the men’s outfitters in the High Street – was left in the charge of the manager, a man who had worked for Charles and his father for many years.

  What struck me most was the silence. In the evenings, when I sat by the fire in the lounge, there was a quietness that I could not drive away by turning on the wireless. After a while, I stopped trying. I would sit in my chair, with a book unopened on my lap, and stare at the familiar room which had grown suddenly unfamiliar: at my mother-in-law’s dark oak sideboard, which I had always loathed; at the collected editions of Kipling, which Charles and Nigel had laboriously assembled when they were boys; at the patch on the hearthrug where Charles had left a cigarette burning one Christmas-time.

  I don’t know when I realized something was wrong. I think the first thing that struck me was the key. When the hospital sent back Charles’s belongings, the contents of his pockets had been put in a separate bag. There was nothing unexpected except for the key. Charles had other keys in a leather pouch with a buttoned flap – keys for the house, for the shop. This key, however, was loose – a Yale, made of brass and obviously quite new. I tried it unsuccessfully in our only Yale lock, the one on the old stable. I took it down to the shop, but it didn’t fit any of the locks there, either.

  On the same morning, I went to the bank to draw some cash – something I had to do for myself now Charles wasn’t here. The cashier said the manager would like a word. Our account was overdrawn. The manager suggested that I transfer some money from the deposit account.

  As I was walking down the High Street on my way from the bank to the bus stop, Mr Quale was sweeping the doorstep of the Bull Hotel.

  “Morning, ma’am. Sorry to hear about Mr Butter.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Very nice gentleman. I saw him just before it happened.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Right as rain. He’d been in for a quick drink – left a bit earlier than usual. Thought he must be in a hurry for his supper.”

  “Earlier?” Charles had collapsed on the pavement outside the Thornhills’ house in Victoria Road a little after seven-thirty. “Surely you mean later?”

  Quale shook his head. “It was about a quarter-past six.”

  “I expect he looked in at the shop on the way home.”

  I said goodbye and joined the queue at the bus stop. Charles had never worked in the evening. I was standing there, turning over in my mind what Quale had said, when there was a loud tooting from the other side of the road. It was Marina Harper in her little two-seater. She drove across the road and pulled up at the bus stop.

  “Hop in, Anne. I’ll give you a lift.”

  I was tired, and it was beginning to rain. Otherwise I might have tried to find an excuse. I never knew quite what to make of Marina. She had fair, coarse hair and a high-coloured face with small, pale eyes. She was comfortably off – her father used to own the local bus company. We had known each other since we were children but we weren’t particular friends. And I was old-fashioned enough to feel that a wife should live with her husband.

  Marina talked unceasingly as she drove me home. “I’ve just had a couple of days in town.” Her husband worked in London. He and Marina had a semi-detached marriage: his job kept him in London while she preferred to live in Lydmouth. “ … And you’ll never guess who we met at a party last night. Elizabeth David – yes, really. Absolutely wonderful. Such style. She looks how she writes, if you know what I mean.”

  “Elizabeth who?”

  Marina raised plucked eyebrows. “Elizabeth David. The cookery writer. You know, she’s always in Vogue. And she’s written this super book about Mediterranean food. Why don’t you come to lunch tomorrow? We can try one of the recipes.”

  Marina dropped me in Chepstow Road. After lunch, I went into the dining room. Charles kept cheque books and other documents relating to money on the top drawer of the bureau. I settled down and tried to work out how the money ebbed and flowed and ebbed again in our lives. I found the most recent bank statement among the pile of business letters which I had left on the hall table for Nigel. I wished he were here now.

  At the date of the statement, our personal account had not been overdrawn, but it now was. In the week before his death Charles had made out a cheque for one hundred and eighty-nine pounds, nineteen shillings and eleven pence.

  I leafed through the cancelled cheques enclosed with the statement. The cheque in question had been made out to H. R. Caterford Ltd and paid into a branch of Barclays Bank in Cardiff.

  Feeling like a detective, I put on my hat and coat, walked to the telephone box on the corner of Victoria Road and consulted the telephone directory. H. R. Caterford Ltd was a jeweller’s in the Royal Arcade. Suddenly the solution came to me: Charles must have bought me a present. The dear man knew I had been a little low since coming out of hospital in September. (Knowing one will never have children is a little depressing.) But in that case, where was the present? Christmas was two months away. He would hardly keep it until then.

  On impulse I dialled the number in the directory. The phone was answered on the second ring, which was just as well as I was beginning to get cold feet about the whole business.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “May I speak to Mr Caterford?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Mrs Butter, from Lydmouth. Mrs Charles Butter. I believe my husband—”

  “Mrs Butter. How pleasant to hear from you. You’re well, I hope?”

  “Yes, thank you. I was wondering—”

  “Oddly enough, I was just thinking of you. Only yesterday afternoon the lady who sold us the brooch came in with the matching ring. Platinum and opal. Said she didn’t want that either, because her daughter had told her that opals are unlucky unless you’re born in October. Not that you need to worry about that, of course.”

  “Oh?”

  “As you’re one of the favoured few.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “It’s rather a lovely ring. The opals are a perfect match for your eyes, if I may say so. Anyway, would you like to have a word with Mr Butter about it? Then perhaps he could telephone me. I’ll hold it for a day or two. It’s always a particular pleasure to oblige an old customer.”

  “Yes, thank you. Goodbye.”

  I put down the phone and walked home. A platinum and opal brooch. Charles knew I didn’t like platinum. Then the opals: unlucky unless the wearer had been born in the month of October. My birthday was in March. And how could opals match my eyes? They are brown. Finally, Mr Caterford had spoken to me as if he knew me. But until this afternoon I had never heard of him.

  The following morning, I found the rat. The rat-catcher had warned me this might happen. “That’s the trouble with rats, look,” he had said. “You can never tell where they’re going to pop up.”

  The rat was lying on the path that led
from the old stable to the road. It was dark, with a long tail. There had been a frost in the night and its fur was dusted with droplets of ice, like sugar. Actually, it looked rather sweet. Because of the frost, the ground would not be easy to dig, so I decided to bury it after lunch – my lunch with Marina Harper.

  Marina lived in Raglan Court, a block of modern flats overlooking Jubilee Park. The place looked very nice, I’m sure – if you like hard, modern furniture and American gadgets. There was a lounge-cum-dining room with a huge picture window overlooking the park and a serving hatch to the kitchen. The place stank of garlic.

  “I’ve just made dry martinis,” Marina said. “You don’t mind if I put the finishing touches to lunch, do you? We can talk through the hatch.”

  As she poured the drinks, light glinted on a silver brooch she was wearing. Rather a pretty brooch with opals set in it.

  Not silver: platinum?

  “That’s a lovely brooch,” I said.

  “Yes, it is pretty, isn’t it?”

  “Aren’t opals unlucky?”

  Marina laughed, a gurgle of sound like water running out of a bath. “Not if you’re born in October. Then they’re lucky. Now why don’t you sit here while I finish off in the kitchen?”

  I watched her through the frame of the hatch – the flash of a knife, the glint of platinum – and all the time she talked.

  “I thought we’d have filet de porc en sanglier. It’s one of my Elizabeth David recipes. Pork that tastes like wild boar. The secret is the marinade. It has to be for eight days. And you can’t skimp on the ingredients either – things like coriander seeds, juniper berries, basil. There’s a little shop in Brewer Street where you can get them. I think it must be the only place in England.”

  Black market ingredients, I thought. Pork and all. The bitch. The cow.

  While Marina talked, the rich, unhealthy odours of the meal wafted through the hatch into the living room. My hands were sweaty on the cold glass. In my nervousness, I finished the drink more quickly than I should have done.