The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “She hated it. He did all sorts of despicable things to her, but she didn’t think she could protest. She kept thinking of the money.”

  “And I’ll bet he ran off without paying her!”

  “No. He paid her. Thirty thousand. And an extra five for her tears. But before he handed it over, and when he was still lying on top of her, he said, just one more thing. Kiss me and this time use your tongue.”

  She hadn’t used it at all. She was keeping it for her boyfriend. Using her tongue somehow seemed more intimate than any of the unspeakable acts she had so recently partaken of.

  I ask the Derby woman if she understands why the woman in my story was so reluctant to use her tongue.

  The woman from Derby nods. “But did she, in the end? Did she give in and use her tongue?”

  “She did. She did. And he gave her the money, and he left and she never spoke of what had happened, never told a living soul.”

  “Gosh,” the woman from Derby says.

  It is not a word you hear very often these days.

  Gosh.

  “What kind of despicable things?” is her next question.

  Despicable is another word you don’t hear very often.

  The chances of somebody coming up to you in a courtroom, after the verdict has been handed down, and saying, “Gosh, you are despicable,” must be extremely remote indeed.

  I tell her about his despicable acts in considerable detail, and she pretends to be shocked, but it brings colour to her cheeks and there’s a coy look to her as she murmurs, “Still, thirty-five thousand pounds.”

  I smile, and pat my jacket pocket, and her brow furrows, and I raise an eyebrow, and there’s a sudden sparkle in her eyes and for a long, long moment she believes that I have thirty-five thousand pounds for her.

  She whispers, “You’re not ugly at all,” and she’s right, because as we have already established, for the purposes of this story, I am gorgeous. But then I laugh and tell her that I’m a writer and the story of the lottery winner with the cash for sex offer is from one of my short stories. She looks disappointed. I say, forget the money, I’m still capable of despicable acts. And that gets her laughing, where really, it shouldn’t. She asks me if that’s really how the story ends and I tell her no, that after the lottery winner left the woman went back down to the bar and ordered a bottle of champagne, being thirty-five thousand pounds better off, but when she tried to pay for it the bar man held her twenty up to the light and said it was counterfeit, and upon further examination, they all were. She took the thirty-five thousand pounds out of her bag and threw them on the ground and stamped and tore at them, and just at that point her boyfriend returned, all ready to apologize, but such was her rage that she blurted out what had happened, and he stormed out again, this time for good.

  My woman goes, “Oh!” and “Oh!” and that’s just a horrible story.

  She’s quite drunk now, and she is relatively easily persuaded to her room. She finds it exciting, at first, the tearing off of the clothes and the fumbling and tumbling, because her boyfriend might return at any moment, but when we make love she seems disappointed that I do not perform despicable deeds upon her, and she urges me to hurry up and finish, which is difficult now that I can sense her regret.

  As I lay upon her, I say there was an alternative ending to that story about the lottery winner and the woman of easy but expensive virtue.

  And she says, “What?” as in what are you talking about the short story for while you’re supposed to be finishing off.

  And I say, she didn’t really go down to the bar and find out she’d been fobbed off with dodgy banknotes. Didn’t you pick up on the fact that if she worked in a bank, she would probably have recognized straight away that the twenties were fake?

  She sighs and says: “Well, what then?”

  My lips move to her ear and I whisper, “The reason she never spoke about it again was that she couldn’t. When she put her tongue in his mouth, he bit it off. She bled to death there beneath him, and he stared at her the whole time she was dying, and she couldn’t move because of the weight of him upon her, and the fact that he was still inside her.”

  I think it is unlikely that she will have an orgasm now.

  “What kind of a writer are you anyway?” she hisses as she tries to get out from under me. “Who would come up with a nasty, disgusting sort of a story like that?”

  And I tell her that when I was learning how to become a writer, the best piece of advice my tutor ever gave me was to write about what you know.

  He was a good creative writing teacher.

  He came to our prison every week.

  But he always had a problem with my unhappy endings.

  RUN, RABBIT, RUN

  Ray Banks

  TERRY DAVIES STARTED on the beers around kick-off, and continued through final whistle until his knees felt loose. Now he held on to a table, a fresh pint in his free hand, nodding as Marto gave him the lad’s name.

  Billy Lewis.

  Didn’t ring any bells; could’ve been anyone. But the way Marto told it, nobody called the lad Billy, anyway: to him and the blokes Marto had been talking to on Terry’s behalf, the lad’s name was Rabbit, and Rabbit was a smackhead on licence with priors coming out his arse. It was juvenile odds and sods that put him in the big boys’ nick, and Marto wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t Keyser fucking Söze they were dealing with here.

  “Lad’s done some shite – breaking and entering you know about. Handling stolen goods. Got done for possession with intent, and that’s the most serious, like. But I don’t want you to think he’s owt worth getting scared about.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Nah, I know you’re not scared,” shouted Marto against the noise of the pub. “I didn’t mean it like that. All I’m saying, you want to do something—”

  Terry waved his hand, looked behind Marto at the people lining the far wall, but didn’t really see any of them. “I haven’t made a decision yet.”

  “You were the one wanted us to keep an ear out.”

  “I know. I appreciate it.”

  “Not like I give a fuck what you do, like. I’m not putting any pressure on or nowt.”

  “I know you’re not, man.” Terry smiled, but it didn’t seem to stay on his face. “I’m just saying that I want to have a think about it.”

  Marto held up one hand. “Nae bother, son. You do that, take all the time you need.” He leaned in, trying to keep his voice down, but the gist was clear: “But he’s not fuckin’ hard, if that’s what’s worrying you. Streak of piss, stiff breeze’d knock him on his arse.”

  “He’s a runner,” said Terry.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Rabbit.”

  “Wey aye, that’s why. I never thought.”

  Terry tapped a temple. “Fuckin’ brains, me.”

  “So y’are.” Marto gulped back some of his beer, showed his teeth and bucked his head as he belched. “How, tell you, see if it was me? And he’d done to me what he did to you?” He pulled a sick face. “I’d chin the cunt into the middle of next week.”

  “I know you would.”

  “But that’s me.”

  “Aye, that’s you.”

  “I’m fuckin’ emotional.” One last drink to punctuate, then: “All I’m saying is, you want to find him, the lad’s easy fuckin’ found.”

  “That right?”

  “Has to go to the Addictions to give a sample, else he’s back in the nick. Big car park outside the place, you could wait there, nobody’d bat a fuckin’ eye.”

  Terry rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He was warm, felt sweaty. “What does he look like?”

  “Like a smackhead streak of piss,” said Marto. “Shaved head, got this tattoo of a Jew star on the side of his neck.”

  Terry grimaced. “His neck?”

  “That don’t make him hard. He’s soft as clarts, everyone says.”

  “Everyone?”

/>   Marto grinned, held up his empty pint glass. “How, you want all the gen, you’re gonna have to get another round in.”

  ***

  They stepped out of the pub and leaned against the wall to focus. Their breath misted in front of their faces.

  “You need any help … on it,” said Marto.

  “Nah.”

  “You’ll think?”

  “Aye.”

  “Wey, then. Take care.”

  Terry clapped him on the shoulder, and Marto lumbered off down the road. Terry watched him go, the street lights throwing a sick orange glow over everything. Marto walked with his legs going in opposite directions, and Terry knew he’d be the same once he pushed away from the wall.

  Promised he’d think about it, but there wasn’t a lot to think about. What Marto told him, if Terry didn’t do it, someone else would. This lad Rabbit owed cash all over the fucking shop, pissed off the kind of villains who wouldn’t think twice about battering fuck out of a junkie, even if it was just for giggles and small change.

  He launched himself off the wall and dug both hands in his jacket pockets, striding forward as straight as he could. He wanted a tab, but didn’t think he’d be able to smoke and walk at the same time, so he kept concentrating on the pavement, watching his feet, until he got home. There he fished around for his keys, scratched at the front door for a good minute before he realized they’d had to change the locks.

  His missus came to the door, one fist keeping her dressing gown closed, her other hand trembling with something other than the cold. She opened up on the chain first and regarded him with blank eyes. Then she unlocked the door, left it ajar and went back to the lounge.

  She hadn’t been sleeping, which meant Terry hadn’t been sleeping, either. Wide awake and stiff as a board at the slightest noise, convinced that it was happening again, and she wouldn’t take anything for it, wouldn’t relax. When he suggested medication, it was as if he’d suggested she take cyanide instead of Nytol. So he stopped suggesting it, and tried to find other options.

  “You’re late.” She was perched on the edge of the settee, watching the telly, some cheap drama about cops and killers. “You stink an’ all.”

  “I know.” He sat on the settee next to her, watched a couple of cops banter on for a bit. “I saw Marto.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He got us a name.”

  She nodded, a sharp little movement. “That all?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  He glanced across at her. In the flickering light of telly, she looked older than she was, her eyes hollow and short wrinkles slashing at the edges of her perpetually pinched mouth. She looked at her hands, knotted together in her lap, and swallowed.

  “So what you going to do?”

  He looked back at the telly. The cops were at a crime scene, a body face down in the middle of the floor, and they were talking about the pretty patterns the blood had made when it sprayed up the wall. Terry put one hand over hers and squeezed.

  “I’m going to sort it,” he said.

  ***

  On Monday morning, nice and early, he phoned in sick. Said he had a bug, he’d been up all night with the sickness and diarrhoea, didn’t think he’d be in for a couple of days at least. There weren’t many questions after that. People he worked for, they didn’t want to know the gory details, and with Terry’s clean sick record, he reckoned they probably owed it to him anyway. He drove to Freehold Street, where he parked a good way back from the entrance to the Addictions place and got settled in for the day.

  By nine o’clock, the Addictions place was open. He watched them come and go, got to know the clients by the way they looked. A couple with a bairn in a pushchair, the girl with a fat arse and telling the stocky bloke that she’d seen these lush tops in Primark, and as soon as she got her dole, that’d be her. An old man with a face like a burst balloon who looked more like an alkie than a smackhead, shambling pigeon-toed and tired, and who trailed a lingering smell that could strip paint. Two lads on bikes, swinging around the car park, waiting on a third, older lad, who came out of the Addictions smiling yellow and black, announcing that his piss test was done.

  The afternoon came, and Terry put on the radio, confident that nobody had seen him. Classical music filled the car. Sort of thing he listened to when he had the Cavalier to himself, none of your avantgarde stuff, just the standards. Relaxation music.

  Terry took a drink of water. Just a sip to wet his mouth. Last thing he needed was to be bursting for a piss when Rabbit showed his face. He put the cap on the bottle, and the bottle on the dash, and he swallowed against a quickly drying throat. Got to thinking about what he had to do, like if he was the kind of bloke to go out and bray a lad, even if he had a fucking good reason. He hadn’t been in a fight since he was a kid, and even then it’d been mostly just him defending himself against bigger lads. Marto – oh aye, Marto – now he was the kind of bloke who could be the full-on radge merchant, no sweat, but Terry wasn’t sure about himself. Wasn’t that he didn’t have the bottle – he had plenty of that; enough to spare, even – but it wasn’t something he’d done before, and there was a loud part of him that was worried he’d freeze.

  He looked at the rounders bat. He’d taken it from the garage, where it had sat in the summer box with the swingball. Kids wouldn’t miss it, and he’d replace it before the holidays. Couldn’t have his bairns playing rounders with a bloodstained bat. Just like he couldn’t have his missus staying up all night every night, going steadily mental to ITV Nightscreen. It wasn’t right. Terry looked up, blinked against the sunshine. The radio was playing Wagner, that tune that reminded him of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Elmer Fudd ran around in a horned helmet.

  Kill da wabbit and all that.

  He smiled, moving away from the light. Shielded his eyes and saw a figure heading towards the Addictions. He was a long lad, a wide walk on him, and a thin layer of stubble covered his head. Terry shifted in his seat, tried to get a better look.

  Rabbit. Maybe. Could’ve been. He couldn’t really tell at this distance.

  Terry reached for the bat.

  The lad turned a little, and then Terry saw it, the tattoo, the one of what Marto had called a Jew star. It was large and spindly and blue, and it covered the left side of Rabbit’s neck from shoulder to just under the ear. Couldn’t miss it.

  And then he was gone, ducked inside the Addictions place.

  Terry took another swig of water, a large one. No longer worried about needing a piss. This would be over soon enough. He felt the weight of the rounders bat and breathed through his nose. His heart threw itself against the inside of his ribcage, and he noticed a tremor in his arms. He didn’t know how long Rabbit was going to be in there, but he needed to get himself sorted for when the lad came out. He wouldn’t get many chances like this, not if the lad was a runner.

  So he focused on the entrance to the Addictions. Pictured the lad going up the stairs to reception, taking a seat. If he was on licence, he was probably doing a piss test, and it didn’t take very long to drop off a sample. Terry watched a couple of blokes, same loose limbs as the rest of the smackheads who’d been in there this morning, and his gut lurched. He hadn’t thought about witnesses, had it all planned different.

  The two blokes stopped by the entrance, their backs to the door. One of them, a gadgie with long black hair, lit a tab and passed the pack to his mate, who had the strong but fattish build of a doorman.

  Fuck it, it didn’t matter if there were people around or not.

  Three minutes by the clock in the dash, and Rabbit stepped out of the Addictions. Terry pushed out of the car in one movement, picking up the bat as he went. Kept his head down, thinking it was now or never, thinking about the missus, thinking about the kids, thinking about the broken conservatory window and the stolen jewellery, PS3 and DVDs. Thinking about that junkie fuckin’ scum, deserves everything he gets, and getting his blood up so Terry could do this, go b
ack to his missus and tell her everything was okay, everything was sorted, that she could sleep tonight safe in the knowledge that the man who’d violated their home was twitching in the gutter outside the Substance Abuse Team office—

  He heard a scream, and a car alarm went off.

  “Howeh, the fuckin’ money, Rabbit, eh? You fuckin’ holding or what?”

  Terry looked up. Saw the doorman with Rabbit thrown up on to the bonnet of an old-style Merc, and Rabbit was trying to yell for help through the blood in his mouth. The bloke with the long black hair had something in his hand, something wicked sharp that caught the light and flashed it across the tarmac, while the doorman went to work on Rabbit’s gut.

  Terry ran towards them. Couldn’t help himself. He yelled at them, the words scrambling out of his mouth before he had a chance to stop and think. “Fuck off, the pair of youse, he’s mine.”

  The doorman turned his head, the other bloke stepping back. Both glanced at the bat in Terry’s hand, then at the look in his eyes. Terry kept walking, couldn’t stop now. The doorman laughed and let Rabbit slide off the bonnet, then the pair of them started backing off.

  “Fuckin’ hell, Rabbit, you’re popular the day, aren’t you?” The bloke with the hair grinned at Terry. “You’re welcome to sloppy seconds, mate.”

  Terry raised the bat, and the two men moved a little quicker. The car alarm still shrieked, made his head hurt. Rabbit lay in a pile on the tarmac. Blood all over his face. Already beaten. There was a gash in his side, and his T-shirt was soaked red, but he was still breathing. Terry looked up at the Addictions building; people in the windows, looking back at him and Rabbit.

  His arms buzzed with adrenaline, and he was aware he was breathing through his teeth.

  Rabbit looked up. “Thanks, man.”

  Terry felt the energy drain from him, and he lowered the bat. His brain screamed at him to use it, but his body had other ideas. He looked around him, and he felt like crying. He gripped the bat in both hands like handlebars, then threw it on to the tarmac. It clattered and rolled towards the Merc. Rabbit watched it, then looked back up at Terry. “I know you?”