The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He was able to see his hostess properly too, and she him. She was old - of course, he had known that, but so old now that he looked at her skin, folded in hundreds of tiny wrinkles that looked powdery soft and delicate. She had high, slender eyebrows that she had drawn herself in an unlikely brown-pencil arc, and the remains of bright pink lipstick feathered the edges of her mouth. So she still cared about her appearance. You wouldn’t have known it from the dress she wore - a shocking thing it was, black but you could still see the stains of food and God knows what down the front. A few inches of hem hung down at the side. She had a shawl around her shoulders pinned carelessly with a crescent brooch that had the yellowish, muted dazzle of filthy diamonds. No rings on the hands that still looked strong despite the veins that wormed across their backs, the loose skin dappled with age spots. That made sense. She hadn’t ever married. He could smell cigarettes off her from where he stood. The front of her hair was yellow-grey with nicotine staining, and her teeth were as brown as if they’d been carved out of wood.

  Unconsciously he ran his tongue over his own set: capped as soon as he could afford it, Persil-white and even. He was twenty-seven - almost thirty, which he couldn’t believe personally, but at least he looked younger. Baby-faced was what they’d always said. He played up to it, with the big blue eyes and a smile he practised every time he was alone with a mirror. The smile said, trust me. The smile said, I’m only a young fella. The smile said, I’m harmless. He kept his hair short and his clothes neutral, dark, unmemorable.

  He had a story prepared about being a pharmaceutical salesman but there was no need for it; she went past him to the door of the room where he’d seen her sitting.

  “You’ll be warmer in here.” The handle was loose and rattled as she turned it - a bad noise, distinctive and hard to muffle. The dog had its nose up against the door, desperate to get out. He hadn’t heard it bark but it was on to him all right. It pushed out past her, lunging towards him, wheezing aggressively. Without meaning to, he stepped back, away.

  “Don’t be frightened. He won’t harm you.”

  “Good boy,” Anthony said feebly.

  “He’s deaf. Getting old.” She stood holding the door, too polite to tap her foot but impatience in every angle of her body. “You’re letting the heat out.”

  “Sorry, I—” He gestured helplessly. The dog was standing between him and the door. He itched to kick it. A good punt in the ribcage. If she wasn’t looking, maybe.

  “Oscar.” There was a whipcrack of command in her voice and the dog squinted back at her, reluctant to obey. She tapped her thigh and it moved at last, stomping past her on its short little legs, heading for the rug in front of the fire. He slunk after it, looking around with frank admiration once he had gone through the door.

  “Beautiful room.”

  “It was once.” She sat down in her chair and picked up the book that she had left on the floor. She was going to start reading again, he realized, wondering with a flare of panic what she expected him to do with himself.

  “I suppose I should introduce myself. Graham Field.” A nice Proddy name.

  She looked up briefly. “My name is Hardington. Clementine Hardington.”

  Clementine Lavinia Hardington, daughter of Colonel Greville Hardington (d. 1963) and Audrey De Courcy Hardington (d. 1960). Last of her line.

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Hardington.” Shit. “Or is it Mrs Hardington?”

  “Miss.”

  No “call me Clemmie” he noted, sitting down opposite her and stretching his hands out to the fire. Know your place, young man.

  She had gone back to her book. He scanned the room, seeing signs of neglect everywhere now that he was inside. The plaster ceiling was missing chunks of its frieze and had a huge water stain over most of it. The upholstery was frayed on every chair, the stuffing spilling out. The silk on the walls was in tatters. Long curtains at the window were two-tone from years of exposure to sunlight. They were threadbare along their folds, torn in places, probably riddled with moths. The rug was worn to its backing in places and the pattern was hard to distinguish, coated as it was in a thick layer of dog hair. And why was it that all dogs, no matter what colour their coat, seemed to shed grey hair?

  “Have you lived here long?” He’d got the tone exactly right. Innocent curiosity.

  “I was born in this house.”

  “Very good,” he said, as if she had done something impressive. Pure chance was all it was. Pure chance had left her sitting in her big house with the grand paintings and the high ceilings. You couldn’t respect that.

  But you could respect the collection of eighteenth-century miniatures on both sides of the fireplace. And you could respect the collection of Japanese figurines on the table beside him: topsy-turvy animals, twisted people, weird things like a plum being eaten by a wasp, a mouse fighting with a lizard. He itched to pick them up for a closer look but didn’t dare. He looked around stealthily. What else? A pair of silver-mounted horns caught his eye but he could see the inscription engraved on the base: too identifiable. Blue-and-white china in various shapes and sizes, fragile and faded. Matching vases that were probably Meissen, but one was chipped. Forget it. The paintings now: they were worth a second look. Not on this trip, though. Too big, too awkward.

  He turned his attention to the other side of the fireplace and choked despite himself. A pair of shotguns, the real deal, fine engraving on the silver side plates and polished walnut stocks.

  She looked up at the noise and saw where he was staring.

  “The guns? They were my father’s. Purdeys. Quite the best game gun there is. They were made for him in 1936.”

  And nowadays they were worth about a hundred grand, easy. “Do they still work?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you shoot?”

  “Of course,’ she said again, turning the page. “My father taught me.” My faw-ther. And that would be him in the silver photograph frame on the table beneath the guns, he presumed. Big moustache. Heavy jaw. Small eyes.

  He looked at the guns again, longingly. No point in trying to take them. Twenty-eight inches long; he’d never get them out without being spotted. Another time.

  She had lit a cigarette and now, without looking, she tilted her hand to tap the ash into a vast cut-glass ashtray at her elbow. She missed and a shower of grey flecks drifted down on to the floor. Easy to see why the carpet was in a jocker. It would be a long time before anyone pushed a Hoover around it either.

  She must have noticed him watching her. “I didn’t offer you a cigarette.”

  “I’m grand.” He was gasping for one, but Graham Field was a clean-living non-smoker. He wouldn’t have taken a drink if she’d asked him to. Not an issue so far, it had to be said. But he was obviously making progress, because she put down the book.

  “Are you hungry?”

  A polite answer was no. He hesitated for long enough that he was sure she got the message he was lying. “No. Not at all.”

  “Did you have your dinner?”

  “No,” he said again. “No. I don’t need anything, though.”

  “You can’t go to bed hungry.” She stood up. “I can make you something. An omelette.”

  He couldn’t stand egg in any shape or form. “Lovely. But I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  She didn’t bother to say it wasn’t any trouble, but she didn’t sit down again either. Bending with a sigh, she tweaked the fireguard across the hearth, then switched off the lamp beside her, leaving only the dying fire to light the room. Anthony got the message and stood too, letting the dog have a head start in the race to join her.

  There was a pile of fur on a chair by the door. When she picked it up and shook it out, it resolved itself into a full-length coat that must once have been beautiful. It stank of mothballs, but by the looks of things they hadn’t worked. Slinging it around her shoulders, she turned and gave him a sidelong smile. “Brace yourself.”


  It was good advice. After the heat of the drawing room, the cold in the hall struck into his very bones. His clothes had dried on him, more or less, but the chill found out the patches of damp behind his knees, along his shoulders, down his back. He would catch his death, he thought, not quite closing the drawing-room door before following Miss Hardington to the back of the hall, Oscar shambling between them with an occasional wary look in his direction. There was an archway leading to a short flight of stairs that twisted into a passageway dimly lit with a weak bulb. He thought at first that the walls were decorated with more pictures, frame upon frame jostling for space, but when he looked he saw beetles and butterflies and moths lovingly mounted on rubbed green velvet.

  “Who likes the bugs?”

  “My grandfather was a keen naturalist.” Disapproval in her voice. A warning to him to watch himself and a timely one at that.

  It had been an Anthony question, not a Graham one. He, Anthony, wouldn’t fancy looking at a load of insects on his way to the kitchen, but Graham might see the point.

  “Very interesting.”

  She didn’t respond. She was grappling with the door handle, another brute that screeched with a nerve-shredding sound of metal on metal when it finally gave way. The door opened and he peered into the kitchen, which proved to be smaller than he had imagined and disappointingly prosaic - sterile white cupboards and a too-bright fluorescent light. No big Aga keeping the place warm, either. It was arctic. Nothing to interest him here. The gas cooker looked to date from the 1960s at the latest, but that didn’t make it an antique - just a health hazard.

  “Sit down there.”

  “There” was a plain wooden table with rotting feet from years of standing on a much-washed tile floor. He sat gingerly on a chair that threatened to give way under him, wondering if woodworm ever turned on humans. The table and chairs were riddled.

  “Water?”

  If that was all that was on offer. “Yes, please.”

  A glass landed on the table in front of him, a cheap tumbler. “There’s a tap in the scullery.”

  And you can get it yourself, he filled in silently, taking it and going through to the next room where he found a sink and shelves weighed down with old Waterford glass: bowls, decanters, glasses, vases. They were dusty, untouched for years at a guess, and as he washed out his own glass fastidiously and waited for the water to run cold again, he found himself eyeballing a dead fly in the wineglass directly in front of his face. One that my grand-faw-ther missed, he thought, allowing himself a small chuckle.

  She had been busy; the omelette was almost done when he got back, and there was a fork and a folded napkin on the table. The napkin was starched linen, at least two foot by two foot when he unfolded it, and the folds were so stiff that it stood up in his lap as if he had an erection, which was far from being the case. The omelette was heavy on bits of eggshell and light on filling. He had an awful suspicion that the flecks in it were not black pepper but cigarette ash.

  She sat opposite him, sideways to the table, smoking, and didn’t seem to notice when he slipped the guts of the omelette into the napkin and flicked it under the table to the dog.

  “That was very nice. Thank you very much. Were the eggs from your own hens?”

  A blue glare. “I bought them in Supervalu.”

  Right. Enough of trying to make friends. Fuck it. He was only going to rob her anyway. “It’s getting late. I don’t want to keep you up. I can tidy up here if you just point me to where I’m to sleep.”

  “There’s no need to tidy up. It can wait.” The dog had dealt with his leftovers and was now investigating the frying pan. She had left it on the floor for him. Anthony felt his stomach heave. No cooked breakfast for him in the morning, thank you. She stood and it still came as a surprise to him that her posture was better than his, perfectly straight, not hunched over like the doddering old lady he’d expected. She should have looked ridiculous in the fur coat but she wore it as if it were the obvious thing, and so it was for the conditions. He’d have dressed like a fucking Eskimo if he’d lived in that house.

  He’d expected to go back to the main hall so he could get his bearings, but there was another staircase, a wooden one that climbed up the back of the house. The creaks from it were chronic.

  “I’ll put you in the guest room. The bed isn’t made up but the sheets and blankets are on the end of it.”

  “No problem.”

  “It may be a little cold.”

  “I’ll be grand.” I’ll be keeping busy ...

  “The bathroom is here.” She indicated a room off the half-landing where they had paused. It reeked of Dettol, which was better than he might have hoped even if not exactly inviting. Anyway, he wouldn’t be committing himself there. Face and hands only. Stripping for a bath was out of the question.

  The bedrooms opened off a narrow central hall. His, she indicated, was at the very end of the house, and he went down the hallway counting doors, noting creaking floorboards, marking out his route. Opening the door, he recoiled as if someone had punched him. He would not have thought it was possible for the air temperature to be so low in what was technically a sound structure. The bed was a few inches shy of being a double and looked as if its last occupant had died in it. The curtains on the window didn’t meet in the middle when he pulled them. The bow-fronted chest of drawers listed to one side. The pictures were dismal flower studies, definitely the work of an amateur. This was not a house that welcomed visitors.

  He made some attempt to make the bed, laying the sheets and blankets over it. One blanket to protect him from the mattress which was probably jumping with vermin. Two to go over him. And his damp coat over that. He would still freeze. He huddled under them, smoking, reckless of being caught as she would never be able to tell it wasn’t the smell of her own smokes. Usually he would have been worried about falling asleep, but there was no chance of that. He was shaking too much. At least it was no longer raining. He hoped it would stay that way. He had to drive back to Dublin the following day and it would be quicker if the roads were dry. He would boot it the whole way, with the car’s heater knocked up to the max, he promised himself.

  When he finally uncoiled himself and slid out from under the blankets, he was stiff. He stretched, rolling his head from one shoulder to the other, shaking out his arms, breathing deeply the way he’d seen runners prepare before fitting themselves into the starting blocks.

  “Off we go.” He slipped through the bedroom door into the hallway. It was pitch dark. No streetlights. No moonlight. Just him and his trusty torch, hooded so it only cast a speck of light. He drifted down the hall, silent in his socks, holding his breath as he went past the door of the woman’s room. The stairs were an unknown quantity which he didn’t like, he didn’t like at all, and he took his time going down them, testing each tread before he put his weight on it. Then the hallway, the stone floor cold under his feet but solid, reliable, and he could pick up the pace.

  He started in the dining room, playing his torch over the paintings on the walls, the long table, the fine chandelier and the twenty-four matching chairs, before he got down to business. Most conveniently, there was plenty on display that he liked the look of: silver, mainly. Serving spoons engraved with what had to be the family crest, a sauce boat standing proudly on tiny clawed feet, a pair of oval salt cellars with blue glass liners, a silver dish ring decorated with leaves and bunches of grapes. It was hard to stop himself from taking too much. He couldn’t go mad. He had to take enough to make it worth his while but not so much that she’d notice straightaway. He wrapped everything that he took in strips of dusters, brand-new and soft, to cushion them from damage and keep them from banging together when he carried them upstairs. It was a matter of pride to make neat bundles, folding the material intricately. He should have been hurrying but he took his time over it.

  In the drawing room he hesitated, suddenly struck by what he was doing, unsettled by the look
s he was getting from the family portraits on the walls. Her ashtray was still there, her book over the arm of her chair. She sat in there day in, day out, surrounded by the things that had been passed down to her by her family. Who was he to take them?

  Except that why shouldn’t he? She and her family had had the best of everything through at least two Irelands: the one where they were top of the heap and the ordinary peasants were just there to admire them and pay them rent, and the one where the proles suddenly had the power, riding the crest of a wave of prosperity, buying up the old houses and furniture and art as if there would always be money, as if there were nothing but. She had held on to what was hers, even then. And in the third Ireland, the new one, the one where no one had a euro to their name, it was time to share out what there was. Specifically, with him. Why should she keep it anyway? She wasn’t really Irish, Anthony thought, conveniently forgetting the generations of Hardingtons who had lived and died in the house. This was practically his duty as a proud Irishman.