The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She stared up at the shining copper works and saw Madame Montaud holding up two evening dresses, the navy blue and the green. What discount will you give me, Madame Garreau, if I take both? I see. Well, thank you for your time, but I think I’ll drive into Angoulême and see – Why, yes, Madame Garreau. Ten percent would be perfectly acceptable. But shall we say twelve?

  “Madame Montaud was elegant, successful, she drove a hard bargain, but by all accounts she was fair. While a man who blends cognac that not only his successor won’t see sold but his successor either, is a man who is patient, clever and selfless.”

  Luc scratched his head. “Are you saying he did or he didn’t?”

  Marie-Claude straightened her hat in the boiler’s reflection. “It’s late,” she said. “I have to get back to the shop.”

  “Some joint,” she murmured as they snubbed the workforce’s entrance in favour of the broad sweep of the drive.

  “Twelve bedrooms, five wings and ceilings so high you can house a giraffe in each room, should you so desire,” Luc said. “And to prove how handsomely this business pays, the house is surrounded by seventeen hectares of beautiful but totally unproductive parkland.”

  “If you think I’d live there, you’re mistaken,” Marie-Claude said. “Look at the number of windows for a start. And the height of them! I’d spend all my day washing them.”

  “You’d have people to do that for you.”

  “I would not,” she protested.

  What? Strangers trooping all over her house, snooping all over her business?

  “Some people might envy the rich for their lifestyle,” she said firmly. “Not me. Madame Montaud may have been successful, but the poor woman was a martyr to the business, she barely took a day off, and look at that sister of hers. Dresses like Grace Kelly, but never gets a chance to breathe, much less be her own person. No privacy, not even a house to call her own, and when her husband leaves the shop, it stinks of stale wine and cigars for simply hours.”

  “Oh? And what do I stink of?”

  “Nutmeg and citron and cool, mountain forests,” she said, and his eyes weren’t just green, they crinkled at the corners and were flecked with red, grey and brown, and his mouth twisted sideways when he smiled. With his thick mop of dark hair and square practical hands, she was glad Luc would have no trouble finding a new wife once she’d gone.

  “Hmm.”

  He stuffed his square practical hands in his pockets and whistled Mambo Italiano under his breath as they sauntered past the bustling vineyards down the hill towards the river. Since the Domaine was only a fifteen-minute walk from the house, they hadn’t bothered with the car, and Marie-Claude was wrong about the cardigan. She hadn’t needed it at all.

  “I don’t suppose this sudden obligation to duty has anything to do with the sister?” he asked after working his way through Three Coins in the Fountain, Smile and Hernando’s Hideaway.

  “Madame Montaud wasn’t having an affair with her cellar master,” Marie-Claude said, wondering at what point her arm had become linked with his. “She ordered far too many evening gowns for an illicit liaison.”

  More likely she was being courted discreetly, preferring to wait and see how things developed before going public with the relationship.

  “Loose women aren’t taken seriously in business,” she pronounced. “But the sister, Madame Delaville, now that’s a different story.”

  Husband reeking of stale booze and smoke, choosing all her clothes? She’d lost count of the number of times she’d seen him sitting in Madame Garreau’s plush armchair, squat and potbellied like a cocky little toad, while his wife paraded in unflattering suits with slow and mechanical precision.

  “Natalie Delaville is a woman of loose moral standards?”

  “Exactly the opposite,” Marie-Claude said, turning the key in the shop. “Her husband has the word bully all but etched on his forehead, but the more I think about it, the more I remember that her chin hasn’t drooped quite so much lately, there’s been colour in her pale cheeks, and miracle of miracles, Madame Delaville actually called in half a dozen times on her own over the past month. I want to look up what she – voilà!”

  “Well?” Luc held out his hands in exasperation. “Are you going to tell me what the little mouse bought?”

  “Certainly not.” Such matters were private! “But I can tell you that the dresses were feminine and flattering, and I can tell you whose account they were charged to, as well.” She shot her husband a sideways glance. “Alexandre Baret.”

  “All right . . .” Luc rubbed his jaw in thought. “But is this actually getting us anywhere?”

  “It explains his unease and reluctance to provide an alibi.”

  “Because he was protecting Natalie Delaville.”

  “Absolutely.” She locked the door and tested the catch. “Now all we have to do is prove how that bitch killed Martine.”

  “Metamorphosis is a wonderful thing,” Luc observed, stretching his pace to match hers. “One minute she’s a mouse, the next she’s a bitch – what? What have I said?”

  “Honestly!” Marie-Claude stopped outside the baker’s and shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know where you get your ideas, sometimes! Not Madame Delaville, Luc. She didn’t kill Madame Montaud.”

  It was Madame Baret, of course. Alexandre’s wife.

  “And she killed the wrong woman.”

  As the hills slowly turned to russet and gold and the French populace finally came to terms with defeat in Indochina, the Empire State Building had been eclipsed as the world’s tallest structure, civilization was facing extinction from something called Rock and Roll, and Luc had been proved right about Suez, especially in light of that botched attempt earlier on the Egyptian president’s life.

  “By the way, Marie-Claude, I received a letter from the Commissioner this morning.”

  More and more these days Luc had taken to joining her on walks along the tow-path, although sometimes their route took them through the town hall park or onto the islands, where they would take a picnic providing they wrapped up warm.

  “He writes that he has finally rounded up everyone involved in the blackmail and extortion ring. Some seven police officers are awaiting trial, he says, and commends me for a job well done.”

  “That the letter?” Marie-Claude tossed it into the Charente, where a squadron of ducks came steaming in, mistaking it for a bread roll. “You know my opinion of the Commissioner.”

  “For the life of me, I can’t imagine why.”

  “He said I was truculent, selfish and a pain in the cul.”

  Luc laughed. “Well, if you overheard that much, you’d have also heard him qualify his statement by adding that you were spirited, funny, and I was lucky to have you.”

  Couldn’t agree more, sir, Luc had replied, and damn those horrid children upstairs for drowning out the Commissioner’s words.

  “He congratulated me on the Montaud murder, as well.” Luc stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Being a high-profile case, I suppose word found its way back to his desk, but what I’m getting to is that he ended by saying that, now the corruption ring’s been wrapped up and my life is no longer in danger, there’s a job for me in Paris, should we want it.”

  “You never told me your life was threatened!”

  “Hell hath no fury like a Chief Inspector jailed. So, then. Do we? Want that job, I mean.”

  “It might have been high-profile, but it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, Luc.”

  All those late nights in the distillery, indeed! I did not conduct an affair down here with Madame Montaud, the cellar master had insisted, that’s simply too sordid to contemplate. Quite right. It may have been his employer’s sister he’d been carrying on with, not his employer, but he wouldn’t have dreamt of taking the delicate, browbeaten Natalie to the distillery had it not been the only place where they could meet and not be either seen or overhead. His office was too close to the main works. They dared not be seen in public. So the
y either sat down there, talking long into the night, or they sneaked off in his car to plan their new life together, and what a lot of planning there was. For all that cellar masters are handsomely paid and live in grand houses, they still don’t live like the Montauds! There would be no majestic mansion for Natalie once she left Delaville. No parklands, no servants, no prestigious balls. Alexandre had wanted her to be one hundred percent sure before making the leap. He knew there would be no going back.

  For her part, of course, Madame Baret hadn’t believed for a second that her husband had been required to work late.

  In the way of deceived wives everywhere, she followed him, saw the lights in the distillery, knew about the bed, heard him whispering on the telephone in the hall. She’d had no trouble tracing the number to the Domaine and knew immediately who he was carrying on with. (Who else was there, for goodness sake? Hardly that pale, downtrodden sister!) So, again in the way of deceived wives everywhere, she hoped and then prayed the affair would blow over. Until the day she overheard him talking about their new life together . . .

  From that moment on, revenge was all that consumed her. Revenge on the woman who had destroyed her life. Revenge on the man who discarded her.

  “The marble bust might look like the instrument of a crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment decision, grabbing the first object to hand,” Marie-Claude said, as they paused to watch the churning waters of the millrush merge with the stately river. “But equally it smacked of a squeamish reluctance to be facing the victim.”

  A uniquely feminine approach to murder. As was the cold-blooded planning.

  “It was easy enough to get a set of her husband’s keys cut.”

  “One of the locksmiths confirmed it straight away, but as evidence it was still far from conclusive.”

  “No, but it all mounted up.” She kicked the fallen leaves as she walked. Alder, willow and poplar. “Madame Baret’s mistake was planting the desk key in Marline’s pocket.”

  Good heavens, women as elegant as Madame Montaud don’t use pockets! They tuck them away tidily in their Chanel handbags, which meant someone had used that key to get into her desk and replaced it in a hurry. And if it wasn’t to take something out, then it must be to put something in.

  A quick check of the keys proved that the letter had been typed on the Barets’ private typewriter, not in the office at the Domaine, but it had been a clever move on Madame Baret’s part. If the head of a cognac house wanted rid of their cellar master, this would not be made public knowledge. A gentleman’s agreement between the two parties, however bitter underneath, would not show on the surface. Both had too much invested in the business to jeopardize their reputations.

  “She was smart about fingerprints, too.”

  Taking care the only ones lifted were her husband’s, and who would think anything odd about seeing a lady of quality going round in evening gloves? Exactly. And whatever excuse she’d used to lure Madame Montaud down to the cellars, she must have thought it was her lucky day when Martine agreed so easily. But then, of course, she didn’t know she was setting a trap for the wrong woman.

  “Too smart about the fingerprints,” Luc said. They had stopped to watch one of the wooden, flat-bottomed gabarres pass through the lock, laden with casks lashed with ropes. “That was one of the things that bothered me from the outset. That if Martine Montaud was exerting so much passion in the cellar master’s quarters, why weren’t hers there, too?”

  “She misjudged the calibre of Madame Montaud’s jewellery, as well.”

  How cold must her heart have been, as she stood over the corpse, unscrewing the emerald cluster? Extracting the key from Martine’s handbag, placing the letter of dismissal in her desk, then walking out as if nothing had happened and secure in the knowledge that her husband would not plead crime passionel. Why should he, after all? The man was innocent.

  “Never mind Madame Baret,” Luc said. “Just tell me whether we want that job in Paris.”

  Marie-Claude watched the gabarre sail round the bend and disappear from sight. Above, the sun shone through the falling leaves and blackbirds foraged in the litter. Next week “Dial M for Murder” would be running back to back with “Rear Window” and in subtitles, plus she still hadn’t finished those curtains for the bathroom, the cellar really needed a new blind, the old one was a disgrace, the bedroom could use fresh wallpaper, ditto the salon now she came to think about it, and she’d promised Madame Garreau two more days a week with the winter collection.

  “Maybe when the rains come,” Marie-Claude said slowly.

  Besides. She wasn’t sure Luc was quite ready to live alone yet.

  WISH

  John Rickards

  Four days since I called in sick. I think.

  I’ve been awake for three of them straight. I think.

  My fellow gardai would piss themselves if they could see me, no doubt. Then they’d have me committed.

  But they don’t know. They haven’t seen. They’re all out getting drunk, or off fucking their wives, or fucking their mistresses and lying about it to their wives, or passed out in front of their TVs in their nice safe homes while I’m

  fucking

  dead.

  And I don’t know if even I believe it.

  It started with Michael. A mental case, low-grade nut. We have quite a few. A handful of paedophiles, stalkers, minor assaults. Care in the community jobs, not criminal enough to be locked up for good, criminal enough to be in and out of the cells on a regular basis. Since jail seems to do fuck all by way of curing them – worse, many come out of it even more damaged than they went in – my own policy is not to arrest. Talk, threaten, watch, but don’t arrest if possible. Jail only makes them more of a risk to everyone in the long run.

  Some of these guys are homeless, but not Michael. It’s a shithole of a flat, though, overlooking the railway tracks not far from where they cross the Tolka, north of Dublin’s city centre. Building that smells of boiled vegetables and cat piss. Walls the colour of boiled vegetables and cat piss.

  “That woman hasn’t been poisoning your kitten, Michael. She doesn’t even know who you are. She wouldn’t know how to poison a kitten, even if she wanted to.”

  “Could swear I’ve seen her . . .”

  “No, you haven’t. She hasn’t done a thing. Trust me on this, OK? Jesus, they train me for this sort of thing and, believe me, if she was guilty, I’d know and I’d have dealt with her. You’ve got to stop yelling at the woman and threatening her, Michael.”

  Sullen look. A child being unfairly chided. A flash of malice. I wish for something to shut him up. I wish for something to stop this kind of shit.

  So I do it. I drop the threat. Let the genie out of the bottle. Make the wish.

  “And you listen good to me, Michael. You leave that woman alone from now on, or else I’ll send your name, address and photo to Iron Kurt’s Gay Nazi website.”

  Let me explain. I have a friend, Curt, who’s funny, erudite, can hold his drink remarkably well, and who happens to be gay. One night in Fallon’s, the conversation turns to gay rights and marriage, a subject which he understandably feels strongly about. He speaks his piece, and someone else makes some comment about him being a “fascist homo” or something. Funny in its stupidity. And so the remark resurfaces and transforms, blossoming into something so much more.

  It helps that there’s been trouble with a couple of Neo-Nazi crackpots in the city on TV recently, even with the NSRUS pulling out of Ireland. Nazis make the best bad guys. Ask Indiana Jones. And I see a twitch of fear or homophobia in Michael’s eyes.

  “I’ll do it,” I tell him. “And you know what’ll happen then . . .”

  Of course, his mind fills in the blank with its own worst fears. He promises to be good.

  And over the next few weeks, he is. And I trot out the same threat to other lunatics I have to deal with. And they don’t see me as a punisher. Iron Kurt is the punisher. I’m just the messenger. So they don’t even resent me f
or it.

  My fellow gardai find the whole thing fucking funny. Some of them start using Kurt themselves. And Dublin sleeps safer at night. Kurt’s out there, watching over the city. A spectre in the fog blowing in off the harbour, creeping upriver. A paper tiger keeping evil at bay.

  One afternoon, I see William, one of our deranged, sitting in the doorway of a boarded-up shop with an Iron Cross badge pinned proudly to his battered old blue Leinster rugby top. Next to him is a scratched metal strongbox.

  “Hey, William.”

  “It’s . . . you’re gonna beat me.”

  “Leave it alone, William. What’s in the box?”

  “They’re mine, see.”

  “Fine. But show me what you’ve got.”

  “It’s private. Mine.”

  “Last time we had this conversation, you had a petrol bomb on you. I just want to make sure you don’t have another one. Anything else, you can keep.”

  He thinks, pops open the box. Inside, an untidy pile of black fur.

  “Why are you carrying a bunch of dead rats around?” I ask.

  “They pay me. It’s my deal. Not yours.”

  “I’ve got no ambitions of being a ratcatcher. Who pays?”

  “The big red building down Castleforbes Road. Food warehouse. To set traps. Ten cents a rat.”

  “And you get them from somewhere else, and they pay for them.”

  “Yeah. It’s a good job.”

  “Good for you. What’s with the Iron Cross?” I point at his chest.

  “It’s protection, is what. Keith saw Iron Kurt.”

  I try not to smile. “Yeah?”

  “And he said, you wear stuff like this and you’ll be OK.”

  “Unless you’ve been posted on his website.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “While we’re on the subject, you’re keeping away from that playground, right?”