The only time I had trouble finding the spoor was where the alley crossed a street near a couple of stores. Seems they went into one of the stores, then headed back for the alley.
After another block I began to find beer cans they had handled.
At first I picked each can up, carefully, and I put it where I could find it again. But once I had one can from each of the men, I ignored the rest. I followed the trail with increasing confidence. I figured I knew where they were going.
The long, narrow park by the river is popular on a summer’s night. I could tell immediately that it was teeming with life, and not just because so many scents crossed that of the trio I was following. All you have to do is listen. A dozen human beings, not to mention the other creatures.
But my trio made it easy again. They were down by the riverside, whooping and hollering and throwing things into the water.
I was extremely cautious as I drew close. I wasn’t quite sure what I would do. I only knew that I would do something.
I saw them clearly enough. Young, boisterous men, rough with each other and loud. They picked up stones and swung thick sticks to hit the stones into the river. Already drunk and unsteady, most of the time they missed, but when one connected they would all make a terrible din to celebrate the crack of stick on stone.
Lying in the grass behind them were more cans of beer and a pile of jackets. There was also a fire. A fire! On a hot night like this.
It wasn’t until I crept near that I realised that in the fire they had been burning something belonging to the old man. The old man who gave me meat. The old man they had beaten to death.
I was sorely tempted to sink my teeth into the nearest one, maybe push him over the bank and into the water. But I was self-disciplined. A ducking was too good for these three, these murderers.
I edged close to the fire, to the beer cans. To the jackets.
The idea was to grab all three garments, but just as I made my move, one of the louts happened to turn around and see me in the light from the embers.
He yelled ugly things to his friends, and they reeled back towards me… I am not a coward but they did have sticks. And I am considerably bigger than a stone.
I grabbed the top jacket and ran for it.
They chased for a while, but they were no match for me running full out, even lugging the flapping jacket. And this was no small, lightweight thing. It was a heavy leather, and not clean.
But I got ‘clean’ away, and the last I heard of the three young killers was what I took for loud, angry swearing as it floated across the humid night air.
I went straight back to the body of the old man. I laid the jacket down by one of his hands and pushed a sleeve as best I could into its forceless grasp. I spread the jacket out.
I left the old man three more times. After each trip I returned with a beer can. Each can reeked of a killer. Other men might not be able to track them from the smell, but each of the cans bore a murderer’s finger marks.
Then I sat and rested. I didn’t know what it would look like from higher up, but from where I sat the scene looked as if the old man had grabbed the jacket of one of the men who had attacked him. Beer-drunk men. The old man had grasped and wouldn’t let go. They, cowards that they were, ran off.
Cowards that they were, if one of them was brought to justice from his jacket, he would squeal on the other two from his pack.
I was pleased with my justice.
I raised my eyes to the moon, and I cried for the dead man. I cried and cried until I heard living men near the alley open their doors. Until I heard them come out into the still summer night. Until I heard them make their way to the alley to see what the fuss was.
Once I was sure they were doing that, I set off into the darkness.
Cold and Deep
Frances Fyfield
The ice had formed over eighteen hours. Sarah could sense it on the outside of the train travelling north from King’s Cross to the Midlands. Fortunately, it was too cold to snow. Snow would only trap her for longer, and she was trapped enough already. What a fool, what a silly idiot she was to agree to help her sister when it wasn’t as if she even liked children.
In a split second, on stepping from the train, Sarah examined her reasons for being where she was and found them lacking. It was simply that she was so successful at being single, she had nowhere else to go. Mary had asked, and Christmas was a nightmare anywhere.
There would be quite a crowd. Sarah struggled to remember how many. Mary, of course, with her husband Jonathan, plus two daughters aged six and eight, plus a baby. Then there was Richard, Jonathan’s brother, and his utterly devoted fiancée, the lovely Fiona, who had been on site three days in advance to organise provisions and prepare the house.
Richard would follow her slavishly like the Magi in thrall to the star in the East, the way he always did. While the rest, Mary said in admiration, bowed to her practical wisdom and followed her order…
In comparison to this elegant paragon, the prospect of the elderly father was almost appealing in Sarah’s estimation. He and she could celebrate their single status, with herself in the role of a hard-bitten aunty, and he as a hard-drinking Grandad. They could survive the season with the aid of a litre of gin. Since grandfather was recovering from a stroke, Sarah doubted the accuracy of this dream, but it was the best she could do.
The station of the small industrial town – foreign territory to a refugee from the fleshpots of central London – was ugly, chilly and not a place to linger. Sarah remembered her instructions to call the invincible Fiona, but somehow baulked at the idea when she saw the queue for the phone. Get a taxi, she thought, with the lazy London habits her successful career allowed her to afford. Ask the driver to stop at the end of the road, walk to clear her head from the foggy warmth of the train, anything to postpone the claustrophobic wretchedness of it all.
At least there would be a dog for company. A bitch, with puppies, Sarah recalled, and in the remembering, she was violently sick while standing at the rank. On that account, it took a while longer to get a taxi.
In a slow-moving car, approaching the same town from Manchester, weary bickering had trailed into dreary pauses. “I don’t know why we have to do this,” Mary was saying for the last time. Jonathan was beyond yelling and banging the wheel by now; all that had come earlier. He could scarcely speak. His head was full of the incessant calculation of how long his redundancy money would last, sums which buzzed and hummed like a persistent insect. The New Year beckoned like an old nightmare. Mary was trying to be noble, attempting to hide a kindred form of depression which left her constantly tired, often petulant.
“You know for why: because it’s good for us. The girls get to run around. Dad can’t come to us since he had his stroke, which is just as well for the sort of Christmas we’d be able to give him. And,” he added cunningly, “with Fiona there, you don’t have to do anything, except sleep. Surely Sarah will help?”
Oh clever, very clever, Mary thought. The prospect of sleep was unbearably appealing. Jonathan looked at Mary’s face in the rear view mirror, and saw a pinched, exhausted look beyond his expectations or his curing. He envied the insouciance of his younger brother and the careless decade which came between them. He envied not only Richard’s life, but his car and delicious, competent, caring Fiona.
“We got Sasha! With puppies, this time!” Beth shrieked, sick of the silence. “And I can go swimming in the lake!”
Mary winced. “I don’t think so, darling.”
“Can I tell you something, Daddy? Can I, can I, can I?” Beth continued. Mary’s eyes closed. She was remembering the only holiday they could afford that past summer: a week with Richard and Fiona at Grandad’s, just before his stroke. Fiona had been wonderful: so wonderful she had made Mary feel perfectly useless. Sylvie was always getting scratches, but somehow all the children’s noisiest toys,
such as Sylvie’s recorder and Beth’s drum, had disappeared.
Mary still wondered why it was that the children stayed so clean and mysteriously quiet around Fiona. It had been such a relief, herself so grateful, she had failed to question, and she was too anxious for peace to question now.
“What do you want to tell me, love?” Jonathan asked Beth. The child drew breath.
“I don’t like Fiona, she wears horrible rings. Not after the summer holidays, I don’t like her. Not much.”
Mary’s eyes opened and her voice rose in desperation.
“Don’t be silly. Fiona’s lovely. Everyone loves her.”
“Sasha doesn’t. Grandad doesn’t. I doesn’t.”
Mary lost control. “Rubbish! You must be mad! Without Fiona, we don’t eat or sleep for two whole days. So shut up… Just shut up!”
Silence fell until another small voice rose from the back.
“How very long till we get there, Daddy? How long? How long?”
“Soon. If you’re good, you can play with Grandad’s dog.”
A yellow bitch, mostly labrador, called Sasha and still Richard’s pet.
“We’ll have to be very patient,” Fiona was saying to him on his car phone. “But at least we’ve got the best bedroom and the best bed,” she breathed seductively. Richard smiled like an idiot. He liked the sound of bed.
“Was Dad pleased to see you?”
“Oh yes, but not as much as the home helpers and the night nurse when I took over. I thought they were going to kiss me. But he doesn’t really like me. You know that…”
Her voice was velvety, like the soft pouches beneath the labrador’s jaw where Richard tickled until she rolled on her back, presenting her pink and yellow belly in ecstasy. Clutching the beloved car phone, his business as well as his delight, in lane three of the motorway, Richard checked the mirror at the same time and saw himself grinning. There was another BMW on his tail. He made it wait.
“You know your father doesn’t like me,” Fiona was saying sensibly, “but I thought I’d better warn you, he’s much worse. Swears like a trooper, when he can talk at all. Says awful things about people, me included; you, even. Much worse than last month. He may not say much this evening because he’s very tired, but he might blow bubbles.” She kept thinking of bubbles.
“What kind of bubbles?” Richard asked stupidly, but the car lurched and the line began to crackle. No snow, his phone dead without apology, the BMW behind suddenly in front as he drifted left and he hadn’t had a chance to ask about his darling golden bitch Sasha, and her late, aberrant pregnancy.
* * *
As he witnessed his father’s judgement diminish, Richard saw himself losing one rudder to replace it with another. He shook his head and spurred the car into life. Fiona was simply a miracle.
The pudding was almost cooked. There was a brace of geese stuffed and wrapped in the larder. What an ugly house this is, Fiona thought. No country mansion, but pre-war Gothic, stuck on the edge of an awful conurbation once made rich by the industries of coal. The villa was the last in the road; a privileged position, with a field sloping down the bank to a pond in a gully – a stagnant stretch of water which Jonathan and his romantic brother still described as ‘the lake’.
This puddle might have looked larger to kids, Fiona admitted condescendingly, but it was still only a pond. Small, but deep and cold, or so she had discovered as she warmed her hands in the sink after a second brisk walk to the crumbly edge, just to get out and see how the ice was progressing. It had been forming slowly ever since she arrived, more solid by the hour.
There was a keening sound from the dog’s basket; a vague noise of distant thumping from the living room reached by a horrible lino passage. Sasha regarded Fiona with eyes of helpless misery. The bitch lay on one side with her milk-swollen tits exposed, the blanket beneath her freshly clean as a replacement for the torn and bloody newspaper of yesterday.
Fiona strode across and forced a pill between the unresisting pink jaws. The effort left her own fingers damp with saliva. She looked at them with disgust. “There,” she said. “Vet’s orders, you revolting beast. You mothers are such a trial.” She kicked the dog lightly with a small, well-shod foot. “Come on, show a leg, you stupid brute. Come on.”
The almost labrador obeyed with ponderous reluctance, her unclipped claws clicking on the lino, which gave way to a tartan carpet. There was nothing here she would want to keep, Fiona thought, everything frightful. But it could make a beautiful and valuable dwelling.
We’ll commute, Fiona planned. Have stone flags for the garden; gravel for the driveway. Plenty of ground. The pond could become a swimming pool. I could call Richard from there on his best mobile phone and ask him to bring down the champagne.
Sarah approached on foot, passing closed-up dwellings with eyeless windows set back from the road, the odd glimmering of light emphasising her own exclusion, until she reached the last house. The rutted drive was large enough for three cars in a row, containing only one, which must be Fiona’s.
That single smart and feminine motor told Sarah she was the first of the other guests and made her reluctant to knock; left her standing in a state of uncertainty by the front door next to an enormous terracotta plant pot, pretentiously out of place and housing a small shrub on a bed of fresh compost. The shrub branches were festooned with tiny baubles, tinkling softly as she breathed, the whole decoration slightly repellent in its tasteful newness.
Still reluctant, inhibited by this sign of festivity, Sarah moved to her right and looked into a window. There were leaded panes through which she could see multicoloured fairy bulbs on a Christmas tree, hear muffled sounds, blurred like the lights, by the distortions of the glass.
An old man was sitting in an armchair, so far upright he might easily have risen with the aid of the stick which someone else had placed out of reach, leaning against the door sixteen feet away. He seemed to be yelling for his prop, screaming with rage and beating his wrists on the arms of his seat. There was a tall, fair-haired young woman about the business of shushing him, followed by a faded yellow dog with a pink underbelly.
Sarah stared and rubbed her eyes. She thought she saw a plastic bib ripped from the crêped neck, revealing a clean, white shirt; a hearing aid rammed in, the stick retrieved and placed where it belonged; a brush dragged through the thick, grey hair, yanking back a full, round face into a scream. He looked like a baby. Sarah felt sick all over again. The bright blue eyes in his face turned to the window as if for redemption, saw headlights behind her and began to focus.
Sarah scuttled towards the door. Her back was illuminated as she rang the bell, a dinky, irritating chime which defied the last illusion of ancestral splendour and also cut across the modern good taste of the expensive pot. One car pulled up behind her, another, more slowly behind that. Fiona flung open the door, framed in the light like an angel, laughing her hallos, uttering warm and lovely platitudes. “Come in, come in, how clever of you all to arrive at once, come and see Daddy…”
Father smiled at Richard. He was desperate to talk, it seemed, but Fiona was busy organising which room was whose, wash your hands and come and eat. Besides, father looked healthy, clearly so well cared for he must be content.
Then there was home-made soup; sandwiches, biscuits and Coke for the kids. Lots of red wine for the adults. Perfect for a family on Christmas Eve.
It was Beth, as usual, who created the discord by pointing at Sasha with a trembling finger. “Where are her puppies?” she shouted impatiently, forgetting her manners and the lecture in the car.
Grandad arched in his chair, looked as if he was about to shout, but hissed instead. “She didn’t want…” he began. “She didn’t want…”
“Oh dear,” said Fiona, laying a hand on his arm, looking at Beth with sympathy. “I think it was a false alarm.” She turned to Richard. “Hysterical pregnancy; Sa
sha’s had them before, the vet told me. So I’m sorry, darlings, no puppies this time. The poor thing thought she was: her poor old body thought she was, but she wasn’t. She just got fat.”
Beth began to weep. Slow, solid tears of frustration.
I wish I was like that, Sarah thought wryly. I wish that my condition was the result of hysteria instead of careless fornication. I like my single, trouble-free life, my prospects of promotion to partnership over the heads of other accountants. I need nothing. I do not like spending Christmas marking time until I can find the right kind of discreet clinic for an abortion, so I can go on as before, and the awful misery I feel can only be because I always detested Christmas, anyway.
The dog raised a paw, suddenly acquiescent with a child warm against her throbbing flank. Dad thumped his stick. He shouted for scissors to deal with his sandwiches; ate with voracity the pieces which Fiona had cut so kindly and without comment or condescension, staring at her calm and beautiful face.
Yes, you are wonderful, Sarah thought. Richard’s a lucky man. Mary’s eyes were closed again. “He has such trouble with his speech,” Fiona explained, leaning away from her prospective father-in-law, “since his stroke.”
The children and Sarah were in one heap by now, as if Sarah had somehow acquired them all. How peculiar it was that little girls and boys should take to her so, Mary thought. They lollop towards her like puppies.
So it was Sarah who took them to bed soon after Grandad had been shepherded away by Fiona without protest, as if to give a good example.
The ugly house was strangely silent apart from the plumbing: the children spoke in whispers. They should be more excited, Sarah reflected. Suddenly protective of their dreams and against her better judgement, which applauded the convenience of their subdued behaviour, she found herself trying to stimulate some of the old and naughty fever.
“What’s Santa bringing you? Will he be able to get everything down the chimney?”
Vintage Crime Page 19
