The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I watched him, day after day.

  Finally, in the second week, I walked with him.

  ~ * ~

  As they approached now, his expression was grim. The others looked the same. It was as though they’d passed around an emotion to wear before heading out this morning, like Vaseline at an autopsy. I heard the scuff of their boots on the sand.

  “Jonathan.”

  Hague nodded as he drew to a halt in front of me, his fellow officers grouping behind.

  I nodded back. “Morning.”

  “It is morning, yes.” Hague looked over my shoulder at my house. “It is that. But not a good one. You’ll have been following the news?”

  “A little.”

  “You’ve heard about Charlotte Evans?”

  Yes. Ten years old, but she looked younger. Her photograph had been on the news the past few nights: curly blonde hair and plump, sun-red cheeks. She wouldn’t look like that any more.

  “I saw something on the television.”

  “It’s been three days now.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “Real bad, yeah. So it’s not going to be a good result. But we’re walking the shore for her. There’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find her.”

  I probably said that too quickly, but I didn’t care. He was making me sad - this man who always kept looking - and I wanted him to go away.

  Hague inclined his head. Looked at me curiously.

  “You don’t?”

  “You know what the sea’s like around here. It happens, and it’s awful, but I think that she’s probably gone.”

  “Well, maybe.” He frowned. “Maybe not. People have a way of turning up in all sorts of different places. Don’t they?”

  “Do they?”

  He looked at me.

  “Sometimes they do. They sure do.”

  I heard the fluttering of the helicopter alter slightly as it moved away. The sea, behind the police, was making steady progress up towards us. For a long moment, Hague and I stared at each other. And then the spell was broken. He came back to life.

  “Well, I guess we’d better get moving. You keep your eyes open, Jonathan. Let us know if you see anything.”

  I nodded. As they headed off, I watched him talking into his radio, and I knew that he suspected. Something, at least. Something that was too alien to make any real sense to him.

  That’s the way it is though.

  In my own way, I’m as incomprehensible as God.

  ~ * ~

  Eight months ago, when I volunteered to walk with Hague, it had been out of frustration. Every day, I’d watched him trailing alone along the shore, knowing the whole time he would never find the little boy. I’d wanted to make him understand. Or maybe, more simply, I’d wanted him to stop.

  At some point, as we walked, I tried to explain the truth of the matter. The little boy is gone, I told him. Because that is what the sea does. It only takes; it never gives back.

  We stopped walking.

  “Not necessarily.” He looked at me strangely for a moment, then shifted gears as empathy took over. “I mean, I know we never found Anna - but we looked. We walked then. I— “

  I missed the rest of what he said. Memories washed the words under. Her soft, brown arms, clear beads of water clinging to her skin. The tangled dreadlocks of her wet hair. The coconut scent of her suntan cream. And then the look of fear on her face as the sea’s strong fingers circled our waists and pulled.

  Swim.

  Jonathan - swim.

  Her screams, after we were separated, the sound of them slashed apart by the waves.

  The last I heard of her.

  I interrupted him.

  “It would be wrong, wouldn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “It would be wrong. If it got to choose.”

  “Jonathan...”

  I should probably have noticed how uncomfortable Hague had become, but I didn’t, or else I didn’t care.

  “No,” I told him. “It wouldn’t be fair. If it took Anna and didn’t give her back, for no reason at all, why would it be different for anyone else? Why should it?”

  He stared at me, helpless, not knowing what to say, then gestured at the sea: a motion that didn’t need accompanying words. It’s chance, he meant. Chaos. It must make sense on some unfathomable level ... but we can never understand. All we can do in the face of it is walk the shore.

  Take whatever scraps are thrown our way.

  That’s what he meant.

  I shook my head in disgust and walked away from him, not looking back. But I felt his gaze following me as I left. I don’t know what he thought.

  I do know that, after our conversation, Hague stopped looking for the little boy.

  ~ * ~

  Later - after I’d put the stinking rucksack at the far end of the cellar - I went outside again and made my way down the beach. The police and helicopter were gone now, and the sea was retreating. I spent some time following it down, stepping on its angry edges. If I was swimming in it then it could and would take me. But the beach and the coast were mine. It needed to know that.

  “Fuck you.”

  I kneeled down and flicked at the water with my fingers.

  And I told it that it couldn’t choose people and single them out. I wouldn’t let it - and I didn’t care if it didn’t understand, or if it was angry about that. Here, on the cusp of incomprehensibility, we would meet each other halfway, or not at all. It could decide what it took; I would decide what it gave. And if it wouldn’t give me Anna back then it wouldn’t give anyone anything.

  “Fuck you if you think she’s going home.”

  As I stood up and walked away, I sensed a groan in the faraway water behind me, a melancholy whale-song of sound. The scent of coconut oil followed me as I made my way back up the beach. But there was no contempt in it this time. I understood deep down that it was simply giving me all that was left of her now.

  I didn’t acknowledge it - just kept walking.

  The sea was giving me all it could. And perhaps, in its own vast, alien way, it was unable to understand why that wasn’t enough.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  STARDUST

  Phil Lovesey

  S

  omeone - it doesn’t matter who - once told me we’re all stardust. Just strange organic composites of the carbon atom; walking, talking, loving, killing. Humanity reduced to powder. Perhaps it was the dull old spud who attempted to teach me science; maybe the warbled lyrics from a prog-rocker; or a TV presenter doing his best to enliven some sort of astrophysics documentary - like I say, it doesn’t matter who - but the words, the concept of it, have remained with me since. Brought me comfort over the years at times, helped me sometimes to zoom out from the chaos, the injustices of life, see myself as merely a cosmic speck at the mercy of the universe and its frequent bitter ironies.

  Pretty existential for a petty thief, I guess.

  Then again, I have had the occasional six or nine months locked away with my thoughts and battered prison library paperbacks to think some of this stuff through. A not-very-good petty thief, in truth.

  Anyway, back to the stardust and ironies ...

  I’d just finished a short stretch at one of Her Majesty’s less-than-salubrious hotels for the wretched, and had found myself fetched up in front of my new front door as sorted by the dear folk from the Probation Service. A good system this, for the serial offender like myself. Get given nine months, keep the old nose clean for five of them; smile, make the right noises, tell the panel how much you’ve changed, how nights wracked with remorse have brought about a life-changing conversion to go straight ... and hey presto, they’re sorting you new digs, clothes and some cash in your pocket to tide you over.

  Best bits of thieving I’ve ever done ... and all from the taxpayer. Shame on me, you might say. But seriously, in my sh
oes, you’d do the same. Your dust ain’t no different from my dust.

  It’s a horrible door, in a horrible block of flats, in a horrible part of town. The probation guy tries to sell it to me as an “apartment”, as if by his Americanizing the shabby place I’ll not notice the damp, the cracked windowpanes, worn furniture, and bare bulbs. But I smile and thank him anyway. After all, I tell him, home’s what you make it. Or what you take from others. He doesn’t react to the quip. He’s young, this one - would probably refer to himself as a “rookie” - and simply wants to go. I let him, knowing there’s no banter to be had. He’s too desperate to “check in for a burger and fries” somewhere, the perfect twenty-something product of a life made bland by corporate domination.

  Like I said, I’ve had a lot of time to read this sort of stuff.

  Now, there’s a drill for this sort of place. It goes like this - let them come to you. They always will. For where there’s one shabby Probation Service flat in a block, there’ll be others. And the occupants will soon know when the new bloke hitches up. And then comes sniffing, scratching, seeing what’s to be had. It’s just how it is - I’ve done it myself.

  Sure enough, within ten minutes of the College Boy leaving, a bearded, lanky heap of methadone-using stardust is on my doorstep, trying to ingratiate himself, his pink eyes swimming in a pallid head that nods and twitches as he asks me for “a few quid - just for a few days, like”. I invite him in, give him the money in exchange for some essential “local” information.

  He’s called Rambling Ian - apparently - and has served the usual amount of time in the past. We talk about various jails, wings, screws - not reminiscing but testing each other for truths, lies, connections, mutual friends and enemies we’ve made along our less-than-merry way. I think he’s probably all right, and he goes on to describe himself as a “standard human road accident on the heroin highway”.

  I ask him about others in the block. He tells me we’re the only two “insiders”, the other flats housing the predictable assortment of single mothers, forgotten pensioners, unemployed divorcees, and immigrant workers. No rich pickings to be had here, then. But I’d guessed that already. Rambling Ian follows up with a few possible opportunities for a spot of nocturnal thievery just a few streets away.

  “Big places,” he says. “Fancy.”

  “And full of alarms,” I reply, knowing where this is heading.

  “Maybe, but with the two of us ... you know ...”

  I smile. I’m not about to shatter his illusion that he’s on the verge of hooking up with a latter-day Raffles, because however ridiculous the notion may be, I need him onside for a while; he may have his uses. So I tell him I’ll think it over, and he makes for the door.

  “‘Course,” he adds on his way out, “there’s always Buzz on the top floor. He’s an odd old geezer.”

  “Buzz?”

  “As in Lightyear, from the kid’s film. You know, all those toys comin’ to life an’ that?”

  I shake my head. Children’s films were never my thing, unless it was to try and pick a few adult pockets or rob a hassled mum’s handbag in the gloom of the cinema. My spoils from the Hollywood film industry.

  “American, he is,” he goes on. “Crazy old fella. Lives on his own at the very top with just a telescope. Never lets anyone through the door. Rumour round here is that he used to be some sort of spaceman or something.”

  “Spaceman? As in an old druggie?”

  My new “partner” looks a little hurt by this. “No. The real deal. That he went up on one of those Apollo missions back in the seventies. Walked on the moon, drove one of them buggy things, the lot.”

  “And, naturally, he ends up living on top of a crummy block of flats in South London.”

  “I’m telling you what folk say about him,” he replies. “Never met the fella myself.”

  “Yeah,” I say, trying to sound sympathetic. “Well, I reckon there’re a few people pulling your leg, Ian.”

  “Ask around if you don’t believe me,” he insists. “They’ll maybe even tell you about the moon rock he keeps up there. Size of your fist, it is, and he brought it back from the moon itself. Smuggles it out of NASA, brought it over here.”

  “Be worth an awful lot of loot for a lump of stone?”

  “A moon rock,” he replied, wide-eyed, clearly not getting it. “A sacred piece of the heavens.”

  “And right now,” I said, closing the door, “I need to get a sacred piece of sleep.”

  ~ * ~

  Rambling Ian was right about one thing: we were the only two “probys” in the block. Indeed, from mostly law-abiding observations over the next few days, I began to realize that of the twenty-six flats, maybe a third of them were empty, boarded and shuttered. One day an Asian family moved out, the next day the boards and shutters appeared. The whole block felt like it was dying - a good thing, probably. I guessed that I was the last “resident” who had been allowed in, and now the powers that be were simply waiting until people moved out, or on to pastures new, in order that it could be pulled down without the cost of rehousing remaining residents. Robbery in its own way, but conveniently legal.

  As for me, familiar urges were beginning to return, fuelled by dwindling money, lack of real employment opportunity for someone like me, and just ... let’s call it old habits dying way too hard. It’s not excusable what I do, it’s not exciting - or glamorous - it’s just what I do. And like I say, I’m not even that good at it. But just as some are born to be judges, I reckon some are born to be judged. Without us, there’s no them. Universal balance, I guess.

  Of course, the eternal problem for the burglar is cash conversion. Finding a trusted fence to whom to pass over your liberated goods in exchange for some of the lovely folding stuff. A dying breed, the local fences, literally. None of the youngsters see the opportunities presented by the profession, preferring the easier, more obvious routes. Granted, there’ll still be a bloke in the local pub who’ll mention that he’ll give you a couple of hundred quid for a wall-mounted plasma television, but honestly, you try getting those things off the damn wall in the first place. I guess you could say I’m part of a dying breed, too. Forty-seven and too old to rob and roll...

  So, I’m looking for easier places, easier things to swipe. Never been good with any kind of vehicle, so they’re out. Leaves me with houses - big ones, mostly, for obvious reasons. Not too big, though, as I’ve never had the know-how to bypass alarm systems. However, as most medium-sized places nearly always have unlinked alarms, they don’t present the same problem an engine-disabled Mercedes does. In fact, as any competent housebreaker will tell you (and I do count myself as competent at breaking in, it’s the getting out and away with it that tends to be a little more problematic), the appearance of an alarm box on the side of your home is the finest advertisement for opportunists like me. Forget a blaring siren, just have a recorded message that shouts: Hey! Up here on the wall! Yeah, look at me! Lots of lovely stuff inside, and no one’s going to give a damn if I start screaming! Get in, help yourselves! The same with half-drawn curtains, lights blazing away inside. The genuinely rich got that way by saving money, not wasting it on electricity. Their curtains will be drawn, just one light in the room they’re in. Couple of pointers from the other side for you, that’s all. Happy to oblige.

  Anyway, one night I’m returning after a little late-night work a few streets away from the block, not much of a haul, jewellery mostly, but enough to last another week if I can fence the stuff, when I get back to the flat and discover a note has been slid under the door:

  You went in the front downstairs window. Used a glass cutter. Turned the lights off once you were inside. You went to the front upstairs bedroom. Again, turned the light off. Then left three minutes later. I may have some work for you. Number 26.

  I’d been spotted.

  ~ * ~

  It was an impressive telescope. Very impressive. Not that I’m the least au fait with optical
devices, but this was impressive because it didn’t even look like a telescope. Not the normal kind, anyway, the type you might see jammed over a pirate’s eye in a swashbuckling yarn. No, this was something you’d expect from a fifties sci-fi B-movie, a great white barrel of a thing, with pipes, meters, and humming electronic devices secured to it, mounted on a sturdy tripod. And, at this precise moment - pointing from its vantage point right at the house I’d just broken into.

  I had my eye pressed to an insignificant-looking tube at its side, but the image was crystal clear. Made more impressive by the green night-vision.