The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Everything had gone more or less according to plan. Possibly less, actually.

  The difference was that when I’d pulled over to a layby to take the call and been rushed by a gang of heavies, they hadn’t duffed me up and left me for dead, taking just the table. They’d picked me up and shoved me in the back of their van.

  The only light came round the edge of a badly fitting door.

  I’d no idea where they were taking me. I couldn’t very well ask them because they’d taped my mouth when they’d tied up my hands. And for good measure one of them had stamped on my mobile phone.

  So what would they do with me? They didn’t want me, just the table. What if they decide to dispose of me? I had a sudden vision of disappearing from the face of the earth, never being found for Griff to grieve over and bury. But I couldn’t indulge in tears, self-pitying or otherwise, because something was happening.

  The van slowed, went over a cattle grid, drove up a gravelled drive, and stopped. Feet walked round to the back doors. I lay as if I were still unconscious. There was a scrape and a curse as the table was removed. I was locked in again.

  While I knew in my head that Will and his colleagues must know exactly where I was, my heart told me I wanted to be free as soon as possible.

  Should I get my hands free now?

  No. Already footsteps were approaching the van, heavily, as if they were carrying the table, so I went back to inert mode. I didn’t even protest when one of them kicked me to make sure I was still out cold. I just flopped back into the position they’d found me.

  But the moment the van started - down that drive and over the grid again - my hands were free. Then my feet. I didn’t bother with my mouth. There wasn’t any time for that. It was time to check out that table.

  I had to hand it to Smudger; if I hadn’t known exactly how to unlock that hidden section, I’d never have managed it. But I did. And found the little device, not much larger than a flattened pea, was sharing the space with another small object, small as the palm of my hand, wrapped in chamois leather. It fitted in my bra, not comfortably but at least unobtrusively. The chamois bag went back where I’d found it, a handkerchief inside folded to roughly the right size and shape. It wouldn’t fool anyone taking more than a casual glance, but perhaps that was all they would give it.

  Then - miracle of miracles - I realized that you could open the doors from the inside. I could leap out the moment the van stopped. Or I could if it wasn’t locked from the outside.

  At last we drew to a halt and I decided it was time to make a run for it. I ran at the doors, pulling on the handles and pushing outwards as hard as I could. Free!

  Someone was trying to grab me. Fist-fighting was something I knew all about, and I winded one of them and kicked another so hard he might not need family planning for a week or so. It was only as the red mist in my head cleared that I realized that I’d only gone and assaulted a couple of police officers - and was now pinioned very firmly myself. It was the somewhat breathless arrival of Will that saved me the inconvenience of being arrested.

  ~ * ~

  “Ostensibly they were only exporting furniture, you see,” I explained to Griff on the phone that night, pleased to have used a word he’d spent a long time explaining to me. “No one was interested in the odd bit of Victorian mahogany or burr walnut. And even if Customs had gone poking around, they wouldn’t have found the secret compartment. So the thieves could transport all sorts of small items that would never have got export licences. Some jewellery, but mostly miniatures. I’ve never had a Hilliard in my hands before, Griff. You should see the colours!” I didn’t embarrass him by telling him where else the tiny painting had been.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, dear heart?”

  “I’m absolutely fine.”

  “Which means you’re not.”

  “It means this time I am. I might even be in line for a reward. Because not only were the gang using the tables they stole to get priceless stuff out of the country, replacing them with copies, they then used the tables to bring in the drugs that are sloshing around Glasgow and Newcastle at the moment. “

  “Well, I’m blowed. So how are you going to celebrate?”

  “I shall have a very good haircut. When they taped my mouth they got some of my hair stuck too and I look a bit patchy. Griff, you’re breaking up,” I lied. “I love you!”

  And then it was an early night for me and the teddy bear Griff had given me. Will had invited me to dinner, but I never did like threesomes. And in my heart I still resented his wife for being so much larger and taller than me that I’d had a very nasty few hours.

  Still, I told myself as I applied cream to my sore face, it’s not every girl who can say that she’s clasped Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to her bosom, and lived to tell the tale.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  HANDY MAN

  John Harvey

  I

  t was his hands I noticed first. Really took in. Broad, dependable hands. A ring on the wedding finger, dull gold. And the nails, surprisingly even, rounded, no snags, not bitten down; no calluses on the fingers, such as you might expect from a working man, a man who worked with his hands. Only the suggestion of hard skin around the base of the thumb, hard yet smooth.

  Harry.

  A simple name. Straightforward, simple.

  The things I knew about him later: time he’d spent in the army, Northern Ireland, Iraq. Things he would never really talk about, just hints, nightmares, dreams. His anger. Not so simple really. Harry.

  Nine years I’d been living in the house then, the first time I set eyes on him. Nine years since the divorce and then all that business with Victor, and I suppose it’s true to say for the last two or three years I’d let things go. Easy enough to do when you’re living on your own. The cupboard door that won’t open without a tug, and once the handle’s snapped off, won’t open at all; the window that’s permanently stuck; the shower that leaks; the wardrobe rail that keeps collapsing under the weight of all too few clothes.

  I must have mentioned something to Marie over lunch, just as a way of making conversation, how things seemed to be falling apart. The second Tuesday of each month, that’s when we meet. Years now. The Yacht Club, where she’s a member, or the Blue Bell down by the river. Every month, save for November when she and Gerald go off to their timeshare in Florida, and, recently, June, which these days they tend to spend with their daughter and her family somewhere near Lake Garda. Otherwise, it’s a nice white wine, not too dry, chicken escalopes, pumpkin risotto or Dover sole, and then rather too much about Gerald’s progress, greasing his way up the slippery pole of investment banking. Although, to be fair, she’s been quieter on that front of late. What we’ve had are the grandchildren instead. First words, first steps, potty-training disasters that are meant to elicit laughter, photos of chubby faces, each, to me, indistinguishable from the other. Isn’t he gorgeous? Isn’t she lovely?

  I do my best, I really do. Make an effort to show some interest, manifest concern. Marie is my best friend, after all. Just about the only one I still have since all the hoo-hah of the divorce, the dirt that Squeegeed out on to the front page of the local paper. What kind of a woman is it who argues for financial parity over the custody of the children? A woman who was clearly no better than she should be, that’s what. A husband’s long-term adultery with his secretary more acceptable than a wife’s dalliances with a PR client on a jolly to Cap d’Antibes. All of that before Victor had slithered on to the scene.

  And so because she’s stuck with me all this time, I do try, between the crème brûlée and the coffee, to share Marie’s delight in her burgeoning family. But children, other people’s children, I’ve always found it hard to warm to, and where grandchildren are concerned, well, I’m just not ready. I mean, I am, of course. Chronologically, biologically - but mentally ...

  It’s one of the great advantages of marrying early, Marie says
, not like so many women today: you have your grandchildren when you’re young enough to enjoy them. Maybe. But there are other things I feel young enough to enjoy and they don’t include a return to nappy changing or singing “Baa-Baa Black Sheep” for the umpteenth time.

  Which led, I suppose, to Victor, a black sheep if ever there was one, though a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  And then to Harry. Poor Harry.

  “What you need,” Marie told me solemnly, after yet another report of some small domestic malfunction, “is a handy man.” Straight-faced, not a trace of innuendo. “Here, look ...” And from her bag she took a business card, not new, turned down a little at the corners.

  CARPENTER/HANDY MAN

  Shelves, doors, locks, windows, floors

  Good work, friendly service

  Estimates free

  References available

  Harry Campbell

  “We’ve used him once or twice,” Marie said, “just for little things. Not too expensive, I’ll say that for him. Turns up when he says he will, too. Not like some. And quiet. All I could do to drag a word out of him.” She smiled. “Tea with milk, no sugar. You could do worse.”

  I started fishing around for something to write down the phone number, make a note of the email, but Marie said to keep the card, so I slipped it into my bag and that’s where it lay for quite a while. Until one afternoon when I pulled hard at the cutlery drawer and the whole front came away in my hand.

  All I got at first was an automated message on his answer phone; then when he called back that evening I was just on to my second glass of wine and settling down to watch Kenneth Branagh in something Swedish and bracing.

  “Mrs Francis? It’s Harry Campbell. I’m not disturbing you? It’s not too late to call?”

  His voice was a trifle slow, but sure; traces of an accent I found hard to place.

  “No. No, Harry, it’s not too late.”

  Harry. First-name terms from the start. For me, at least. He would continue to call me Mrs Francis for quite some little time.

  ~ * ~

  Eight o’clock, he’d said, and there he was on the doorstep, true to his word. Brown cord jacket and denim shirt, grey-green trousers - chinos, I suppose they were; canvas tool bag slung over his shoulder, grey van parked on the street behind. Broad-shouldered, tall. Imposing, is that the word?

  “I’m not too early?”

  “No, no. Not at all.”

  I hadn’t quite finished dressing when he rang the bell; the wretched zip on my skirt had stuck, not for the first time, and I’d scarcely had time to run a brush through my hair. Standing there, I fastened another button on my blouse before stepping back to let him in.

  “You’d like a cup of tea, I dare say?”

  He’d set his bag down in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  “No, I’m all right for now, thanks. Maybe in a while.”

  I hadn’t been meaning to stare.

  “Something about a busted drawer?” he said. “A few other things that needed sorting?”

  I showed him what required attention and left him to it for the best part of an hour. Made the bed, fixed my face, watered the plants and riffled through the pages of a magazine. A voice I didn’t recognize burbled away between songs on Radio 2. The Telegraph still lay, folded and unopened, on the table in the hall.

  “How about that cup of tea?” I said.

  He was stretched out on the floor, ratcheting something underneath the sink.

  Slowly, his head eased back into sight. “Thanks. Just a drop of milk and ...”

  “... and no sugar.”

  “That’s right.” When he smiled, the skin crinkled around his eyes.

  “I would offer you a biscuit, but...”

  “It’s okay.” He patted the flat of his stomach. “Got to watch the weight.”

  The cup seemed so small in his hand I thought it must break.

  “I suppose you’re kept busy,” I said aimlessly, unable to sit there saying nothing.

  “Busy enough.”

  His eyes were pale blue; his hair, quite wiry, was starting a little prematurely to go grey. I supposed it was prematurely. He was what? Late-thirties, forty, little more. Not so great a gap. His other hand, on the breakfast bar, rested innocently close to mine.

  “These units,” he said, glancing round, “I’ll do what I can, but it’s a bit like, you know, shifting the deckchairs on the Titanic.”

  “You mean we’re going to drown?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Kate Winslet, I thought. Leonardo DiCaprio. Little more than a boy.

  “You could get them replaced. IKEA. B&Q. Needn’t be expensive, if you don’t want.”

  “I don’t know. This place, I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to stay.”

  “Well, just a thought.” He set down his cup and was quickly to his feet. “Thanks for the tea.”

  “You’ve not finished already?”

  “Good as. I’ll sweep up those shavings if you’ve a dustpan and brush.”

  “Only I was wondering ...”

  He looked at me then, waiting.

  “The shower, upstairs, it’s been leaking. Quite badly now.”

  “Seal’s gone, I dare say, needs replacing. I’ll take a quick look, but I’ve not got the right stuff with me now.” He glanced at his watch. “I could probably drop back later.”

  “Yes, all right. Do. I mean, if that’s okay with you?”

  It was raining hard when he returned. A darkening across the shoulders of his jacket and, as he came into the hall, careful to wipe his feet, a few drops fell on to his face from where they’d caught in his hair and I wanted to wipe them away.

  Desperate Housewives, I thought. I was in danger of becoming a cliché.

  The next time he came, a week or so later, I was careful to make myself scarce, dropping a set of keys into his hand the minute he arrived and asking him to pop them back through the letterbox when he was through.

  “Off to work, then?”

  “Something like that.”

  The one good thing that came from my distant divorce, as long as I avoided undue extravagance and was careful to tread within my means, there was no more need for nine to five, not regularly at least. The occasional bit of market research, filling in from time to time at the agency where I used to be employed, and that was enough.

  So instead I loitered over a latte and Danish at the local coffee franchise; gave over some time to a manicure and polish change; finally took a stroll down by the river, just as far as where they’re starting to fill in one of the old gravel pits, turn it into a country park.

  As I neared home I tried to ignore the soft flutterings in my stomach, the lingering hope that he would still be there. In his stead, he had left some catalogues showing various styles of kitchen cabinet, appropriate pages turned down.

  I stowed them in the bottom of a drawer. Pushed Harry to the back of my mind. Even flirted momentarily, crazily, with the idea of getting back in touch with Victor. One stupid, desperate day I even got as far as the door of the club - part bar, part casino - where he used to spend much of his time.

  “Victor? No, he’s still away, I think. Out of the country. But if you want to leave a name?”

  I shook my head and turned away, legs unsteady as I walked back to my car. Nothing - no promise of pleasure, however strong, however intense - could make me want to go through all of that again. Better by far to stay home with a good book, something comforting on the TV, Valium and a large G & T. The fleeting fantasy of a working man’s hands.

  Just a few mornings later, as I left the house, my breath caught in my throat; across the street, at the wheel of an almost brand new Merc, window wound down, cuff of his white shirt turned back just so, sat Victor. Victor Sedalis. Smiling.

  I should have walked away as if he weren’t there; gone back inside and locked the door. Instead I continued to stand there
like a fool.

  “I hear you’ve been looking for me,” he said.

  “No.”

  “A couple of days ago. Wanting to welcome me back home.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  An eyebrow rose in that sceptical, amused expression I knew so well. “All right,” he said, “but you will.” He slid the car into gear. “Either that or I’ll come looking for you.”