The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “The lad on that bike was fifteen,” Croft said. “He died at the scene.” He pulled another picture from the stack, seeming to do it at random though Kip found time to wonder later if it had all been planned. The photograph, an enlarged detail, showed a pair of hands bound at the wrists with a coil of barbed wire. The thumbnails were caked with blood, so thick in places that Kip thought at first it was mud. There were long vertical gashes around the wrist bones, showing clearly how the wire had been dragged into place before it was tied.

  Kip could not tell if the hands belonged to a man or a woman though the crooked, rather ugly shape of the top thumb joint gave him the feeling it was probably a man. The photograph was horrible, yet it was also beautiful, immortal somehow, like a still from a documentary about the First World War. It was clear as life, with the kind of singing exactitude people meant when they talked about photographic clarity even when most photographs taken by ordinary people, Kip knew, were not clear at all. Most amateur shots were blurred or badly composed, off kilter in some way. The photograph of the bound hands was so true to life it leaked its atmosphere all over the room, the drizzle-grey of a cold morning in November when a man had died in pain with his face in the mud.

  “This guy turned up on a building site in Charlton,” Croft said. “He was dead when they found him. I took these pictures while we were waiting for the ambulance.”

  “Did they catch the killers?”

  Croft nodded. “It was a gang crime. Seven men were arrested. Two of them got long prison sentences.”

  “And your photos helped to get them put away?”

  “Maybe. Probably. But that’s never the thing you think about, at least not until later. At the time all you care about is the picture, about getting it right. I hardly gave that poor guy a thought while I was taking these shots, he was just a subject. I despise myself for that, but it doesn’t change anything. But you already know all this, Kip, you’re an intelligent boy. If what you wanted was to help catch murderers you’d become a detective inspector, not a photographer.”

  Kip stared down at the photograph. He knew that what Croft said was true, truer even than Croft realized. If Kip’s interest lay in solving crimes he would have reported Croft to the police a fortnight ago. Instead he had taken pictures of him, and now he was here in Croft’s house, talking with him about photography. He did not care if Croft was the monster, only that he was here to have this conversation. He was glad the police had arrested Steven Jepsom instead of him. He wondered if Croft would help him with his college application.

  “Can I use your loo?” Kip said suddenly. It was not just that he needed the toilet, although the can of Coke had filled his bladder to bursting. Mostly it was that he wanted to get away from Croft for a couple of minutes. Being with him was exhausting. He was also curious to see the upstairs of Croft’s house.

  “It’s the first door upstairs, to your right,” Croft said. “We could go for a curry later, if you like.”

  “That’d be good,” Kip said. He got up from the couch. He tried to smile at Croft, but the smile seemed to slide from his face at the last moment.

  He made his way back down the hall. He noticed that the door to the understairs cupboard had a bolt on it, wondered briefly why that was and then supposed that the basement floor was where Croft kept his darkroom. He went upstairs, stepping over the bin bags, which looked to be full of old clothes. There were four doors on the upper landing. Kip opened one at random and found Croft’s bedroom, the bed unmade, a crumpled T-shirt strewn across the floor. The room next door was piled high with old furniture.

  The bathroom, when he found it, was at least clean. The window was open, letting in the outside air. There was a faint smell of disinfectant.

  He used the toilet and then washed his hands. He thought he would tell Croft that he had decided against the curry, that he should go home, that he had schoolwork to do, something or anything, he did not know why. He turned to go back downstairs, glancing as he did so into the one room he had not yet entered, a narrow room at the back, a spare bedroom most likely, or the bedroom that had belonged to Croft’s dead father. There was a wooden bedstead, the mattress stripped to its striped cover, stained with age, the shallow depression towards the centre where the old man had lain. Kip wondered if he had died there. He felt instinctively for the Nikon, then realized he had left it downstairs. He pulled the door to, wondering if Croft might give him permission to photograph the room anyway, whether it would be rude or strange to ask.

  He noticed there were some photographs propped by the skirting board, enlargements mounted on cardboard and protected by cellophane. They did not look like forensic shots. Kip bent to look at them, curious. He remembered how Croft had talked of using some of his father’s money to buy a new camera. He wondered what kind of photography Croft was into, now that he was no longer working for the police.

  There were six photographs, and they were all of Rebecca Riding. Two were in colour. Kip recognized her red jumper from the Crimewatch reconstruction, the fair hair hitched up on one side by a slide in the shape of a butterfly.

  The rest of the pictures were in black-and-white, four miraculous, pristine prints that revealed the child for what she was: the only girl in the world at that moment, and Dennis Croft her only audience. In the final shot she looked straight at the camera, her gappy teeth bared in a sweet, shy smile that seemed to suggest she knew she was being looked at, but didn’t mind.

  She did not seem in the least afraid. Kip felt a rush of nausea, and then of cold, as if he were going down with a virus. The girl was so there in the photographs it was impossible to accept that she was no longer alive.

  He turned the pictures around to face the wall then went back into the bathroom. He leaned over the toilet bowl, wanting to be sick, but the only thing that came was a kind of dry gagging. He ran water into the basin, turning both taps on full to make the maximum noise. Then he flushed the toilet again. He knew he had to go back downstairs, that his life might now depend on him being able to act as if nothing had happened.

  He crossed the landing to the head of the stairs. He stared down into the hallway, at the front door with its stained-glass fanlight, the delicate leaded panes arranged in a design he believed was called fleur de lys. The door was probably not locked, Kip could not remember Croft locking it. The idea that he might have done was crazy, of course, but all Kip could think of was the image that had come to him before: worlds colliding, a wrecking ball spinning on its chain as it crashed through the wall of the known universe.

  He heard footsteps at the end of the hall. A moment later Croft’s voice came rising towards him up the stairs.

  “You okay up there?” Croft said. “I want to show you the darkroom. Dad’s cellar was part of the reason I moved back in here permanently.”

  Kip stayed where he was, paralyzed by the sound of his own breathing. He knew that what he did in the next few seconds would decide everything.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  WHO KILLED SKIPPY?

  Paul D. Brazill

  ONE

  C

  ould be worse, could be raining,” said Craig, pretty much as soon as it started pissing down.

  A big grin crawled across his flushed face like a caterpillar. He was sniffling away and wiping his runny nose with the sleeve of his leather jacket. Craig had just snorted a sugar bowl full of Colombian marching powder and popped a veritable cornucopia of multicoloured pills. He was talking ten to the dozen and doing my napper in no end.

  I forced a smile, though I was none too pleased. I was getting soaked to the skin in a vandalized cemetery after spending the last half-hour digging a grave while Craig turned himself into a walking pharmaceutical experiment.

  “Let’s get on with this,” I said, grabbing the dead kangaroo by its legs. But Craig was away with the fairies again, watching a flock of black birds land on a cluster of graffiti-stained gravestones.

 
“A murder of crows,” said Craig. “That’s the collective noun for crows, you know? A murder.” Craig was an autodidact, hooked on learning a word a day, as well as many other things.

  “Yes, Craig, I did used to be an English teacher, you know,” I said. My patience was getting frayed. The rain had slipped down the back of my shirt, trickled down my spine and crept into my arse crack.

  “They say that crows are harbingers of death, eh, Ordy? Have you ever wondered why they never seem to talk about harbingers of good things?”

  I was now inches away from picking up the shovel and twatting Craig, but thankfully he suddenly seemed to break out of his trance. He bent down and grabbed the kangaroo.

  “Let’s get a move on, Ordy, eh?” he said. “It’s Super Seventies Special at the Grand Hotel tonight. We haven’t got all day, you know.”

  ~ * ~

  TWO

  The Grand Hotel, like a fair number of its clientele, was all fur coat and no knickers. It had lived up to its name once upon a time and its facade was still pretty impressive but the interior, however, left a lot to be desired. For many years, it had survived as a nightclub which was just about bog standard, with the emphasis on the bog.

  Every Thursday it was Super Seventies Special because, unsurprisingly, the music that was played was from the seventies and all drinks were seventy pence. Unfortunately, most of the clientele were knocking on seventy, too, which was why it had the earned its reputation as a “grab a granny night”. Which suited Craig Ferry down to the ground.

  Craig was the youngest of the four Ferry boys and he’d been born premature and weak, leading his mother to become a tad overprotective of him. For most of his childhood he hardly left her side and had, it seemed, developed a bit of an Oedipus Complex. Hence, his regular attendance at the Super Seventies Special.

  Which meant that I had to go there too, since, to all intents and purposes, I was Craig’s minder. Not that I was anyway near a tough guy. And not that Craig needed a bodyguard. He was well over six foot with a physique worthy of Mike Tyson.

  Craig had been a sickly child, as I said, but when he reached sixteen and his mother died, he transformed himself, in a manner akin to that of Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk, albeit at a decidedly slower rate.

  When he was a kid Craig was almost anorexic, but with his mother off the scene he soon became a fast-food-and-beer-consuming monster. And that, combined with his scoffing of steroids and frequent trips to the gym, spawned the behemoth that was stood before me, gargling cider and blackcurrant and singing along to Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us”.

  No, I wasn’t employed by the Ferry family to protect Craig from other people. I was paid to protect him from himself.

  ~ * ~

  THREE

  I’d first met Craig when I was about twelve. We went to different comprehensive schools, so I didn’t have much contact with him but I’d sometimes notice this gangling, scarecrow of a kid hanging around the local betting shop, which was owned by Glyn and Tina Ferry. He always looked lost, sat on the step reading Commando war comics and sipping from a bottle of Lucozade.

  One day, during a long hot summer, bored and kicking a ball against a wall, I noticed Craig and asked him if he fancied a game of football. I never would have bothered normally, you could tell by the look of him that he’d be rubbish at football, but all my friends were away at Butlin’s or Pontin’s, or some other holiday camp, and needs must.

  Craig must have been bored himself, I think he’d read the ink from the stack of comics he had next to him, and he said yes.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll do penalties. You’re in goal.”

  Craig shuffled over to the side of the garages. One of the walls had the wobbly-lined shape of a goal painted on it. He stretched his arms and legs wide.

  I put the heavy leather ball on the penalty spot and stepped back for a run.

  “Blow a whistle,” I shouted at Craig.

  “Eh?”

  “A whistle.”

  He pursed his lips, looking more than a bit girly, and I started to giggle.

  “No, like this, yer big girl’s blouse,” I said, and put my fingers inside my mouth to show him. But before I could start, I heard a shriek.

  I jumped, but not as much as Craig. An overweight woman wearing a sleeveless, polka-dot dress was running towards him, her bingo wings flapping.

  “Get here now,” she said, clasping him towards a bosom that would be accurately described as ample, before pulling him back to the betting shop.

  ~ * ~

  FOUR

  It was now creeping towards the part of the night that I really hated. It was close to midnight and Craig was hammered.

  “The pint of no return,” he said. He downed a pint in one and staggered across the sticky carpet to the dance floor.

  The Grand was crowded, hot and clammy. Billy Blockbuster, the DJ and quizmaster, was playing smoochy songs back-to-back. As “Betcha By Golly Wow” played, Craig canoodled with a couple of members of the cast of The Golden Girls. He could hardly stand up, and the pensioners were doing all that they could to support him, but it wouldn’t be long before Goliath would crash down.

  And before you could shout “Timber!” he was over, crushing one of the women beneath him. Two bouncers in Crombies, Darren and Dane Greenwood, ran over, but when they saw it was Craig they just stepped back and looked at me.

  You could hear the screams of the old woman who was trapped beneath Craig so Billy Blockbuster quickly changed the song to The Jam’s “Going Underground” and pumped up the volume.

  “Well?” said Dane.

  “Aye,” I said.

  Darren went back to the door and Dane bent down and grabbed Craig’s ankles while I took hold of him by his, frankly minging, armpits.

  He was a dead weight as we dragged him up, just enough so someone could pull the woman from underneath him. We struggled and turned him on his back. He was in a deep sleep, snogging with Morpheus and snoring like a Kalashnikov.

  And then it was the hard part.

  ~ * ~

  FIVE

  Craig’s father, Glyn Ferry, was a terrifying man by reputation although he was rarely seen in action. His foot soldiers were his boys: Alanby, William and Dafydd. William did most of the muscle work while Dafydd did the greasing of palms and the like. And Alanby, well, he was known as The Enforcer and he was in prison for murder for most of my childhood. But, of course, one day when I was about thirteen he got out.

  I’d just finished my supper, cheese spread on toast, and was sitting with my mum watching Callan. My dad was on night shift at the Lighthouse and the house was calm until there was a rapid knock at the door. My mother, ever stoic and unruffled, slowly got to her feet and, keeping one eye on the television, looked out of the window.

  “By the cringe!” she said. This was as much as she swore. “What does he want at this time of night?”

  Callan and Lonely were arguing on TV and I wasn’t really paying attention to her but I looked up when she came back from the door with Craig, who was white and shaking.

  “It’s Wednesday,” I said, angrily. “Comic club is Thursday nights.” It had been a tradition over the last few years that every Thursday, Craig and a couple of other waifs and strays came to my house and we swapped comics.