The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  And all he could think to say was, “You walked all the way in from fucking Leopardstown?”

  “There was another girl,” she said. “In the room. I think she was Thai.” She reached up and removed the sunglasses, holding them out for him to take. Her right eye was closed behind a blackening bruise spreading from forehead to cheek. “They preferred her.”

  He swallowed dry. “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “What room, though?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” she whispered.

  He didn’t believe her.

  He drove to the far side of the green in the middle of the estate and reversed the car so that he was looking directly at the house. He opened the boot, found the wheel-brace, sat in the car again and lit a cigarette, huddling back in the seat to watch the house over the rim of the steering wheel.

  Sean arrived walking, maybe an hour or so later. Smaller than James remembered, stick-thin even beneath the overcoat. He trudged to the driveway and stood outside looking up at the house with his hands buried deep in the pockets. Then his shoulders seemed to fall forward and he trudged up the driveway. He reached with the key, reconsidered, and rang the doorbell instead. He rang three times before the door opened but when it did he stepped inside straight away.

  Now Jay got out of the car and jogged across the green, sidling up the side of the driveway out of sight of the living room window. He gained the porch and stood with his back to the wall, half-crouched, the wheel-brace held rigid behind his thigh. Then he punched the doorbell with his forefinger and left it there, jammed down.

  They didn’t answer. Four times he pressed the doorbell, half-crouched against the wall, looking out at the quiet estate. Wondering if he could be seen from behind the lowered blinds that faced their house. He pounded on the door but no one came.

  He looked out across the estate to where the sun was sinking behind the horizon. The icebergs were gone. The porch lights hummed, flickered, winked on. On the far side of the green his car seemed impossibly distant.

  He wondered how long was reasonable to stay before walking away.

  THE SAME AS

  SHE ALWAYS WAS

  Keith McCarthy

  I AM THE same that I always was.

  I am the same that I always was.

  Acts do not change us. Acts spring from what we are, and what we believe, and perhaps most important of all, what we desire. I am still the Gilly I was on the first day I met Greg, as I was on the day that he left me, as I was on the day that the police came to call.

  It was Greg that changed not me, Greg who altered the bargain, who changed the rules, who ripped up the contract. Greg who stole my life from me without even realizing it.

  I still love Greg and I always will, until the day I die.

  The rain comes suddenly but not unexpectedly. When Greg and Gilly set out on their walk from the pub in the Forest of Dean where they are staying for the weekend, the wind was blustering and clouds, fluffy and bright, moved briskly before it, casting huge, travelling shadows on the land around them. He said to her then that he thought it would rain and she said, “Maybe, but let’s go anyway.”

  Gilly loves walking. When Greg first met her, eleven years ago, it was on a walk, one for a breast cancer charity, because her mother had died of the disease and because his mother had had a cancerous lump but was cured. She has vividly red hair and freckles and Greg has loved her from the first moment he saw her.

  “We should take waterproofs.”

  “Why?” she asks. “If there’s a shower, we’ll find some shelter somewhere; wait for it to stop.”

  “If it does stop.”

  She laughs. “So what if it doesn’t? We’ve nowhere else to go, nothing to be late for.”

  And so they set out, walking through the lush green valley, beside dry stonewalls, past pretty cottages and copses and fields of potatoes, corn and grass. They have not been here since their honeymoon and the smells, the sights, the tastes bring back that time, reminding them of just how much they need the relaxation and respite from the stresses of their oh-so-busy lives.

  Especially now.

  A marriage is a pact. Everyone knows that, don’t they? And a pact involves sharing and pooling, giving and taking, so that something is created, something that exists that had no existence before. Gestalt. A third entity that is part man, part woman, but most important of all, part neither of them. A creation that is every bit as real as a work of art, or an invention …

  Or a child.

  They have come because they need to escape their troubles. They know that a week in the Forest of Dean will be only a temporary respite but they also hope that it will allow them to see each other anew, to regain something that they both know (without saying as much) they have lost and, more importantly, that their relationship has lost.

  Recent times have been hard.

  Greg’s IT consultancy has been going through a difficult phase and he has had to lay off all but one of the eight people he once employed; he has hopes to gain a new contract from a national retail distribution company but fears that he is too close to the event horizon of financial breakdown, the point beyond which no business returns.

  And Gilly …

  Poor Gilly has just terminated a pregnancy. She is thirty-eight now and she fears that she has made the wrong decision.

  Who can blame her?

  Three miscarriages preceded this pregnancy, one of which was at eighteen weeks and therefore the worst; she had dared then to hope that she might gain her prize.

  The only prize that she has ever really wanted.

  When did I realize that a child was all I ever desired?

  How odd it feels, to have longed for something for so long, yet not to have known it, not until recently. When I was young, I played with my dolls and teddies, yet I did not consciously appreciate that this was all that I wanted; when I was a teenager, I had boyfriends but not, I am sure, because I saw them as a means to motherhood. Yet now I know that that was precisely my reasoning.

  It frightens me, this recognition that I am driven, that I always have been driven, that perhaps all my decisions in life were guided by an imperative over which I have had no control, that was wired into me, whether by fate, or blind chance.

  Or God.

  After forty-five minutes, when they have just stopped to admire two ponies in a field, he asks her, “Are you all right?”

  She looks up at him and smiles. “Oh, yes.”

  This starts off fine but ends with a catch in her throat. She looks quickly away, back to the ponies.

  “Hey,” he says gently, tapping her on the shoulder.

  A nod. Shoulders hunched and a nod that is tensely sprung. She does not look at him.

  “Gilly.”

  He puts his arm around her shoulders, grasps the soft blue cashmere, squeezes them gently, lowers his face to be level with hers. Another quick nod but this time with a sniff; still no words.

  The ponies are skittish, kicking and suddenly galloping in short spurts. Perhaps they sense the coming rain.

  Greg says quietly, in her ear, “You did the right thing.”

  For a moment, she continues to stare fixedly at the ponies but the sniffs come more and more quickly until she suddenly begins to cry continuously. Another squeeze of her shoulders and she turns to him and buries her face in his thick, woollen jumper; she smells his eau de cologne, the one that she gave him for their first Christmas and that he still says that he likes.

  “We couldn’t have coped.” He is so calm, so reassuring, so certain.

  “But … ”

  “We both agreed, didn’t we? Do you remember, Gilly? How we agreed?”

  Face still buried in his sweater, still trying to burrow into him, to hide from her grief, she nods slowly and only after hesitation. He is holding her tightly but she likes this, draws comfort from it. He says, “You’re not strong enough on your own. You would have needed me, and at this moment,
with things so difficult, I couldn’t have given you the support and got the business going again.”

  There is no nod this time. She withdraws slightly, looks up into his face where she has always found so much security. “I didn’t realize that it would be so horrible.”

  He holds her face in his hands, smears tears with his thumbs. “I know, I know,” he whispers although she wonders just how he can know. “In a few years, when we can more easily afford it, when we’re more established.”

  “But I’m getting old. What if I can’t have any more?”

  A laugh, one that tells her she is being silly, that of course she will have more.

  “You will,” he says. There is something of a command about this but it is couched in the softest, most gentle of tones. “These days, no one is too old.”

  It is flippant, almost insulting. The easy response to the unimportant fears of a subordinate.

  “I knew that it wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t think it would be this hard … ”

  For a moment he does not speak, then, “You’re too close to it, Gilly. It was only a month and a half ago. By the time Christmas comes, you’ll be able to think logically. You’ll see then that it was all for the best.”

  And this makes her realize that he does not understand at all, that he had thought it was easy, that he still thinks it is. A light anaesthetic, a short sleep and – hey presto! – no more problem.

  Yet six weeks on, she still feels dirty, filled with sin, tainted by guilt.

  She says, “I hope so.” But she is thinking through his words, his tone, the thoughts that must lie behind them.

  A smile and what he presumably believes is a warm laugh as he replies, “You’ll get over it, Gilly. This will help. You’ll see.”

  And then he kisses her and holds her again for a long, long time.

  “Okay?” he asks.

  She says that, yes, she is, because she can see that this is what he wants her to say.

  They continue on their walk.

  Greg rescued me.

  That sounds like an overstatement – hyperbole, I believe they call it – but that is what I always believed.

  My mother had died after a long illness and I thought that I was coping by being busy and by helping Dad come to terms with the situation, and by jumping into charity. Except that I wasn’t. I was fading, day by day, good deed by good deed, and I was completely ignorant of it all.

  Greg gave me back a skyline, something to aim for, a concept that there was an outside world as well as the place where I lived.

  I just wish that I thought that he knew what he was doing.

  I’m afraid, you see, that he did not perform any of his chivalrous acts consciously, that he had always been blithely unaware – if not uncaring – of what he did.

  Which is fine, I thought at first.

  After all, most good in this world is done unconsciously, as an unintended byproduct of acts performed for different, perhaps selfish, reasons.

  Oh, dear.

  I wish I hadn’t said that.

  They are staying in an old coaching inn. The bed is fairly comfortable although Greg complains that the mattress is too soft and giving him backache.

  They have not made love for six months.

  The meals are hearty, with far too much on the plate; the puddings are straight out of Gilly’s childhood, gorgeous, fat-filled sweetnesses that steam and beckon the diner with siren sighs.

  Gilly is not really hungry.

  It is a friendly pub, with a husky, deep-voiced landlady and low beams and the scents of scenes still remembered.

  Gilly suspects that Greg is having an affair.

  The first drops come after two hours. They are large drops, cold but not startlingly so. Greg looks up into the sky, his prominent nose and Adam’s apple silhouetted against the sky in which the clouds are now grey but still bright. He looks at Gilly. She has fully recovered, is back to a young, professional woman on a short break.

  “I think it’s going to be heavy,” he says. There have been occasional, mild flurries of rain, but this is different; the wind has got up and there is a slight chilled dampness around them.

  They are in the middle of a small hump-backed bridge that crosses a fast-running stream that cuts deeply into a gully. Greg is leading because Greg always leads and Gilly is happy with that. She loves him, after all.

  She looks around, points. “There’s an old cottage over there. Why don’t we shelter there?” It is some distance away, through some overgrown woods; it looks deserted, almost a ruin, but the roof appears to be intact.

  He nods, holds out his hand for her, then they run together over the bridge and to their right, off the single-track road and into the woods. The rain becomes harder, the noise of its attack louder. By the time they reach the cottage, it is surprisingly torrential and they are very, very wet.

  How did I know that he no longer loved me?

  This question torments me.

  If I could answer it, I would be so much happier, so much more contented, but contentment is a rare commodity, worth killing for perhaps. I would be happy because then I would be certain in my mind, and uncertainty is killing me.

  But it is not to be. Certainty is second only to contentment in scarcity.

  Yet, without a doubt, I knew that he had a lover.

  It was like something seen out of the corner of my eye, a dancing spectre that teased me by leaping away as I turned my head to catch it.

  But that did not mean that it does not exist.

  The knowledge was there in his smile, his kiss, his kindnesses.

  All I lacked was proof.

  But I still loved him. I will always love him. He had his faults but so do I. I thought to learn to live with it.

  Because I love him.

  The cottage had once been whitewashed, was now flaking. The faded blue front door is half off its hinges, the windows without glass. There are the remains of a garden with a path in front of it.

  There is even a well.

  Breathless from the exertion, Greg says, “The gingerbread’s fallen off.”

  Gilly laughs. “I hope the witch has gone, too.”

  Greg looks around. There is no hallway and they are standing in the sitting room. There is no furniture and leaves are piled in the corners. The ceiling is low and beams cross it.

  “It would have been a nice house, once.”

  “I guess.”

  He is taking every detail in, examining it, almost as an architect might, seeing possibilities in the decay. “We could live here,” he says but he does not say it loudly, although she hears it.

  “I couldn’t.”

  He looks around and the thing that she sees is a good-humoured smile. “It’s wonderful! What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s small and pokey and probably subsiding and almost certainly damp. And it’s nowhere near anywhere.”

  He laughs. “But it’s charming, too.”

  “I don’t want to live in charming, Greg. I want to live in convenient, warm, spacious and cheap.”

  A shrug of the shoulders. “You can’t have everything.”

  “And what about work, Greg? We’re in the middle of nowhere here.”

  “You know that I can do most things remotely. If I arranged matters properly, I would only need to be in the office one day a week.”

  “Does that send the right message? I mean, does that tell your clients that you’re completely committed?”

  He becomes angry. “My clients understand that commitment is nothing at all to do with sitting in a box in a city.”

  Wondering why he is so defensive she backs away, changes the subject. “What about children? I’m not sure that this would be a particularly suitable place to raise a family.”

  At once he says, “Maybe not.”

  And she is puzzled. Such acquiescence is unusual for Greg. He likes to win arguments.

  “I didn’t know that you wanted to move.”

  “I was just thi
nking.”

  “If you’re not happy where we are, we can start to look around.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “If you’d said something … ”

  “I said, it doesn’t matter.” His tone is abrupt, annoyed and she is forced into timid silence.

  Gilly thinks that she has come to terms with Greg’s infidelity. She believes that love will overcome everything and that whatever his reasons for the affair, love is not one of them. She fears that she has failed him in some way, that this is a message to her to improve. Her logic starts from the premise that he loves her; if he loves her, then he must need something more, or something different, from a relationship than he gets from her. All she needs to do is find what that thing is and supply it.

  She has gone through in her mind everything that seems to her to be likely, but cannot think of anything. She is certain that he enjoys the sex, that her cooking and housekeeping are a reasonable standard. The only thing that she wonders about is the number of rows that they have had in recent months and she has made a conscious decision to be less confrontational. This is hard for her, for she is by nature combative, but she calculates that it is worth trying.

  “I wonder why this is deserted,” he says.

  “It’s probably unsafe,” says Gilly.

  Greg has begun to explore, examining recesses and alcoves; when he moves out of the sitting room into the darkness beyond she says, “Be careful, Greg.”

  “I will.” He says this with marked irritation chiselled into the words and she bites down on her own annoyance at his retort because she thinks that perhaps she is being too maternal towards him.

  She waits nervously, glancing around her and then back to the corridor down which he has disappeared.

  “Greg?”

  His voice comes back from the dimness, replete now with a hinted reverberation, “I’m fine.” The reverberation does not disguise the tone.