The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Advancing on Danny, Tarasov laughed again.

  “Fuck off,” Danny yelled, wondering if this would be a good time to run, but knowing he couldn’t leave Adam at the mercy of this grinning freak.

  Then he had a brainwave. He snatched the painting up and shook the canvas. Tarasov stopped, a look of pure horror on his face.

  “No, no … Do not damage it.” His eyes burned into Danny’s. “I will give you anything.”

  “Do yer honestly think for one minute that I’d trust you, yer creepy bastard?” Danny shook the painting again, as Len, finally untangled from Dupri, bent down to help Adam.

  Tarasov curled his lip, “Enough of this,” he shouted, his arms held high. Each long blade caught the light as he prepared to leap forward again.

  “Oh yes, well said, definitely enough of this.” DI Lorraine Hunt hurried into the church with Luke Daniels and Carter close behind.

  They had been cruising round the Seahills estate, visiting a couple of known criminals recently released from Durham prison when Lorraine had suddenly remembered something Carter had said about the church. On a hunch they had quickly sped up to Houghton.

  “Kirill Tarasov, I am arresting you on … Well, just about any crime known to man.”

  “Fucking hell.” Danny wiped sweat from his brow. “Talk about saved by the bell.” He bent down to see to Adam, but Len stared at him and shook his head.

  “NO!” Danny yelled.

  Using the sudden distraction Tarasov ran at Lorraine, but she was ready for him. Using a karate sidestep, she swiftly moved to one side, and as Tarasov ran past her she kicked his leg from under him. He fell to the floor, and Carter and Luke were on top of him in seconds.

  Luke cuffed him. Tarasov looked at Lorraine; mixed with the contempt was a smattering of admiration. “Brought down by a woman.”

  “Save it, creep.” Lorraine moved to check on Adam. It took her a few moments to find a pulse, but find it she did: erratic, but still a pulse. She took Len’s hand and pressed it over the wound in Adam’s neck. “Keep it there … ” She looked over her shoulder. “Carter? Ambulance.”

  “On its way, boss.”

  Danny and Len breathed twin sighs of relief. Lorraine looked at them, shook her head and said, “Please tell me why I am not at all surprised to find you bloody lot here.”

  HOMEWORK

  Phil Lovesey

  English homework

  Judy Harris – Year 10.

  IN YOUR OPINION, is Hamlet merely faking his madness, or is he really insane?

  This term we have been studying Hamlet, a play written ages ago by William Shakespeare. It’s quite good, though the words are all strange for modern people to really understand. There’s lots of stuff that is really, really old, that Sir needed to try and explain to us before it made any sense, not that most of the class seemed bothered, goofing around as usual.

  Most of us thought that the film was better than the book, but that Mel Gibson bloke still used all the old words, so that when there wasn’t much going on except him talking, I noticed quite a few of the class were either mucking about or texting. I even told Sir about this after one lesson, but all he did was sort of smile at me, then tell me that Shakespeare wasn’t for everyone, and maybe it was better for me if the class didn’t think I was telling tales, which seemed quite harsh, as I was only trying to help him.

  The story of Hamlet sort of goes like this: There’s this prince (Hamlet) who lives in another country a long time ago. His dad dies and his mum marries Hamlet’s uncle, so Hamlet doesn’t get to become the king. He gets real mad about this, and reckons his mum’s a bit of a whore for marrying his uncle, especially when the ghost of his dad comes back and tells Hamlet that the pair of them were an item before he died, and that his brother even dripped poison into his ear and murdered him, just so he could get off with Hamlet’s mum and become King.

  This was quite a spooky bit in the film, the ghost thing, and most of the class were watching, except Cheryl Bassington, who was still texting her boyfriend under the desk. He’s an apprentice plumber who lives down our road, and I often see him pick her up on his crappy little motorbike thing. She says they’ve done it lots of times, which I think is really lame at her age, as I reckon you should save yourself for someone who really loves you.

  Hamlet has a woman who loves him. Her name’s Ophelia, and she sort of hangs around the palace, pining for him. It’s that Helena Bonham Carter in the film, and all the lads in the class were right crude about her in her nightie. Steve Norris made a sort of “joke” about boning-Bonham-Carter which even Sir sniggered at, but I just thought it was sick. I think Ophelia’s really sad, because she really does love Hamlet, and when he starts acting a bit mental, she gets really upset. He even tells her that he never loved her, and that she should go away and become a nun. Even Polonius (her own dad) uses Ophelia to test if Hamlet really is mad, which seems, well, odd – but then Polonius gets stabbed behind a curtain anyway, which serves him right for being such a bad dad in the first place.

  My dad wouldn’t ever do such a thing to me, regardless of what the papers said about him at the time of the robbery.

  It seems that in Hamlet, everyone’s only after power, and that they’re prepared to do anything to get it, even if it means killing their family, marrying incestuously, using their kids, or faking madness that really hurts people. I think that’s very bad of all of them. Ophelia is so cut up about Hamlet being horrible to her that she goes and drowns herself, and even Hamlet doesn’t seem that bothered. Neither did the boys in the class, who asked for that bit to be shown again, as they reckoned you could see Helena Bonham Carter’s tits through the wet nightie. Thank goodness that someone tells Ophelia’s brother what a schemer Hamlet is, so that he comes back really angry and tries to kill Hamlet in a duel.

  We all thought that the ending was right crap, because nearly everyone dies, Hamlet, his uncle, his mum, Ophelia’s brother; they all end up dead in this big hall, either poisoned or stabbed with poison-tipped swords. Dave Coles reckoned that the Macbeth we did for SATS in Year 9 was better because there were real nude women to perv over, and hangings and beheadings and stuff. When I told him I’d hated that film, loads of people laughed at me, and I felt right stupid, especially as Sir didn’t tell them off for being so cruel.

  Maybe that was when I decided to do what I’ve done to you, Sir. Maybe that was the moment that it all made a sort of sense. Like I’ve written, maybe some people simply want power, and don’t care about other people’s feelings. Like you, then. Just two terms in the school, obviously wanting to be the trendy young teacher, joining in with them, laughing at me, not stopping it like other teachers would have done. Perhaps it was just another tiny, all too quickly forgotten moment for you, but believe me, Sir, it went well deep with me. Well deep.

  That night, I told my mum about what had happened in your class, how you’d let them laugh at me. She was cooking – well, I say cooking, putting a ready-meal in the microwave for Uncle Tony for his tea, more like. Because she has to have it on the table for him when he gets in, or there’s trouble. He rings on his mobile from The Wellington Arms, tells her to have it ready in five minutes, then suddenly she’s all action, heaves herself up from the sofa and sends me up to my room as she gets done.

  Once, his meal wasn’t ready. I heard the result. Lots of shouting, then a scream. Mum’s scream. Then what sounded like moaning. I didn’t come down until the door slammed half an hour later, and I saw Uncle Tony walking away from the house from my bedroom window. Mum wouldn’t look at me, sort of flinched when I tried to put my arm round her. She was trying to stick a torn-up photograph of her and Dad back together, but her hands were shaking too much, and she was trying not to cry. I asked if I could help. It was a nice photo – her and Dad on honeymoon in Greece, both of them looking right young and happy on a beach in front of all these white hotels. She swore at me and told me to get back upstairs to my room.

  Hamlet used to love his dad a
s well. Then he went away to some college somewhere, and when he came back his dad was dead, and his uncle had married his mum. The problem is that his dad is now a ghost, and tells him that he was murdered, so that makes Hamlet really angry. He also doesn’t know if it’s just his mind being tricky with him, so he decides to set a trap to see if his uncle is really guilty or not. Hamlet gets these actors to do a play which is sort of like his uncle killing his dad, and watches his uncle’s reaction. He wants to “prick his conscience”.

  Dave Coles went “wheeey!” when Mel Gibson said the word “prick” – which everyone but me thought was real funny. I thought it was a good plan of Hamlet’s. He wasn’t saying “prick” like a penis; he was saying it like a needle, pricking his uncle’s brain to see if he was guilty. I think I’m cleverer than most of them in the class because I read more and understand these things, know that words can have more than just the obvious meaning. I think it’s because I’m not allowed to use the computer at home (Uncle Tony’s on it most of the time he’s in), so I don’t have any MSN or anything. Or a mobile phone. Just books, really. A bit of telly sometimes, downstairs, when Mum’s finished watching the soaps. But mostly I’m in my room, thinking and reading.

  I write to Dad a lot. Tell him about school. Mum says I can’t talk about some of the stuff that goes on in the house, as it would only upset him. She says that even though Uncle Tony isn’t my real uncle, he’s doing us a massive favour by staying with us when Dad’s away. They used to be good mates, Dad and Uncle Tony, working at the warehouse together, going down to the pub, but when it all went wrong, and the police came for Dad, they sort of fell out.

  What’s really great is that Dad’s letters are getting longer each time he writes back to me. Just a page in the beginning, now it’s often three or four. His spelling’s really coming on too, because of all the classes he’s been taking. He’s been well behaved, so they’ve allowed him more time to study. He says he’s taking his GCSEs too! Strange, isn’t it, Sir? There I am, in your class, studying Hamlet for my English GCSE Shakespeare coursework, and my dad’s doing exactly the same thing. At thirty-eight, too. He reckons once he’s done his English, Maths, and Science, he’ll do loads more subjects after that. He says one bloke further down the wing he knows has got nineteen GCSEs! See, Sir? They tell you all this stuff about people in prison being right thick and scummy, but there’s some of them really trying to improve themselves. Dad’s got another two years left, so I reckon he’ll have more qualifications than me when he gets out. How weird will that be?

  In Dad’s last letter, he talked about Uncle Tony, and said that even though they weren’t best friends any more, it was good that he had agreed to lodge at our house, and help pay the rent and stuff. He said it was the least Uncle Tony could do, because really, he owed Dad big time. He also said that the years would fly by, and when he finally got released, he’d got a surprise that would keep me, Mum, and him happy for years. When I showed Mum the letter, she screwed it up and chucked it away, said my dad was talking nonsense, told me never to mention it again. I’m not sure, but I think it was to do with the robbery at the warehouse. Thing is, although the police had CCTV film of Dad loading stuff into a van when he shouldn’t have been, the actual stuff was never found. The local newspaper said it was worth over a £100,000 – though you can’t believe everything they say, can you, Sir?

  Dad doesn’t like me to visit, see him where he is, so every other Saturday, when Mum and Uncle Tony go to Norwich, I go to the reference library in town. It’s nice there, warm. I don’t use the Internet stuff. I prefer to look through the books and old newspapers they have on this stuff called microfilm. Honestly, Sir, it’s amazing. Thousands and thousands of newspapers from all over the place going back years and years. All catalogued to make searches easier. People think that the Internet is the way to find out stuff, but I reckon searching through old newspapers in the reference library is better. There’s loads of interesting stuff in those papers, articles people can’t be bothered to upload on to the Web, because I guess it would simply take too long. Can be frustrating, though, and you have to have a little bit of luck and patience.

  Yeah, luck. I guess that’s how I managed to find you, Sir. Luck and patience, And, of course, a really good reason. And you made sure you gave me plenty of those, didn’t you. Sir? Calling me a sneak, not helping me when the others laughed at me. I began to wonder why you did that. Why you wouldn’t help me. And then I noticed, figured out why. Just one of those chance things that no one else saw, but I did.

  It was a Wednesday, the last lesson before lunch, and we were all in your classroom as Mel Gibson was waffling on about whether or not to kill himself (To be, or not to be; remember, Sir, you made us watch the bloody thing ten times that lesson?), and true to form, I could see Cheryl Bassington texting away in the darkness on her mobile under the desk. Except it wasn’t her plumber boyfriend she was texting, was it, Sir? Because when she pressed Send, the next thing that happened was you got your phone out from your jacket and read the screen as discreetly as possible. I saw you, Sir. Watched it happen. You, Sir. Someone who should be trusted to educate us; getting secret texts from a fifteen-year-old girl. Well, naturally, my conscience was “pricked”, as Shakespeare might have said …

  I began wondering what Hamlet would do in my situation. You know, needing to find stuff out, but not wanting to be caught doing it. So I did what he did – pretended to be a loony for a bit. That lunchtime, I went and sat right next to Cheryl Bassington and started eating a bit weirdly, mixing my pudding into my pizza and making stupid noises and giggling. Very Hamlet, Sir, you’d have been proud. Anyway, I could see my plan was working, and that Cheryl and her mates couldn’t wait to get up and leave. The next bit was so easy – just as they were going and calling me all sorts of names, I suddenly leant over and clung on to Cheryl, slipping a hand into her coat pocket and grabbing the mobile as she yelped and tried to hit me to get away. Mr Price came over and began shouting at us to behave, but Cheryl and her mates just swore at him and ran off. He asked me if I was all right, and I said I was fine. Next, I went straight to the toilet block, locked myself in, and went through the phone.

  They’re really quite easy to figure out, these mobile things. There’s a kind of main menu with all sorts of helpful symbols to direct you to all the stuff stored on it. I found myself looking at Cheryl’s pictures first, and let me tell you, Sir, there’s some right rude stuff on there. Not just bits of the plumber, either, but stuff of you, as well. And not like shots taken in class when you weren’t watching, but photos of you smiling right at the camera, in bed, with her … Well, you were there, you know the rest …

  I couldn’t believe how bloody stupid you’d been, what a crazy risk you were taking. If Cheryl showed any of this stuff to the wrong person – you’d be out of a job, wouldn’t you, Sir? They’d probably stick you in prison, too, wouldn’t they? And my dad tells me what they do to people like you in prison, Sir. Really horrible things that even the wardens (he calls them “screws”) turn a blind eye to. Really, really stupid of you, Sir.

  Next, I went into the text menu, and found loads and loads. From you, to her; from her back to you. Some of them went back as far as six weeks, which, considering you’ve only been teaching here for just over two terms, kind of makes you a very fast worker, I guess. They have names for people like you, Sir.

  Anyway, the most recent series of texts between the two of you were about meeting up on Saturday night. At the usual place, apparently, wherever that was. You suggested half-eight, and Cheryl had simply replied with one of those really lame smiley-face things. Sad. And sick.

  But seeing as no one had complained, no rumours had started, I had to assume that no one else knew about you and her. Except me, of course. Which really made me think about things for a while.

  Strange life you’ve led, Sir. Like I say, the reference library comes up with all sorts of stuff. One of the main reasons I went there was to find out more about what
had happened to my dad. It even made one or two of the national papers, because I guess it was what those newspaper people refer to as a “slow news week”. Seems one of the main things about it was the fact that the police reckoned Dad had to have had someone helping him that night. There were two CCTV cameras that covered the warehouse, but only one was trained where it was supposed to be, on the loading yard. The other one was pointing across the road at (and here I’m going to use a quotation, just like you told me to) “the entrance to a nearby youth club, where a group of underage girls could be seen to be drinking and cavorting with young lads”.

  See what I’m saying, Sir? If someone had been helping Dad (and he’s never admitted as much, even to me) then the camera wasn’t pointing the right way to catch them. It was watching young girls instead. Maybe it was looking for trouble from them, but then again, you know better than that, don’t you, Sir? For guess what I found when I researched our town’s CCTV company a little further? That’s right, a picture of you, stood with the two other operators on the launch of the company five years ago. You – unmistakably. Your name on the caption thing, everything. A big photo of all three of you, smiling in front of loads of little television screens, the article telling people how you could remotely direct and move all these little cameras around the town to catch criminals and keep us safer. Sort of like you playing Big Brother, wasn’t it, Sir? Only, not the crappy programme on the telly – the book by George Orwell. Like I say – I read a lot, I really do.

  And once I found out about your “preferences” from Cheryl’s mobile, things started to drop into place. I began piecing it together as I sat in those toilets on that Wednesday lunchtime. Just under a year, you’ve been teaching. Eighteen months my dad’s been inside. According to the papers, at Dad’s trial, the CCTV company admitted they’d received a resignation from one of their operators for “failing to comply with company policy whilst monitoring the immediate area around the warehouse”. That was you, wasn’t it, Sir?