Vintage Crime

by Martin Edwards

  I went down to Wales to write the final chapters, taking with me, as part of my research, the Purdey my father had given me for my twenty-first birthday, and the Heckler & Koch P7K3 I borrowed from Martin which he had acquired in (according to him) rather strange circumstances while he was in Germany

  The book went like a dream. I wrote ferociously, getting up early every day, working well into every night, existing on strong coffee and frozen meals. Every lunchtime, I went out for an hour with the guns, taking pot shots at crows and rabbits, experiencing for myself the pull and kick, noting the eye-hand co-ordination needed, the smell of the thing, the weight, the determination needed to aim at a target, to blow away a piece of vermin, be it animal or human. It was what gave my books that personal yet professional touch, according to Anna.

  When I was ready, she came down to Wales to work on the typescript. As with Marty, all those years ago, we worked, we walked, we worked again. In the evening, we sat over a bottle or two of wine and talked, as always. I of my Susanna, she of her ambitions and of Martin. This time there was a new theme to her conversation: biological clocks, the running out of.

  “I’m nearly thirty five,” she said.

  “Aren’t we all?” I joked.

  “Children,” she said. “Until now, my career has been everything to me. I never thought I’d feel the urge to be a mother, but suddenly, I do.”

  “What will Martin think?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid he won’t like the idea. I’m afraid he won’t want to share me. We love each other,” she said simply, “we’re everything to each other. We’ve always lived in each other’s pockets, perhaps almost too much and I don’t know how our relationship will stand the strain of enlarging the magic circle.”

  “It’ll survive,” I said.

  “I’m sure it will. It would have to. I couldn’t live without Martin.” She picked up the H&K which was lying on the windowsill. “He’s got a gun just like this.”

  “It’s his, actually.”

  “Oh.” Her mouth – that engulfing slash of a mouth – drooped. “Gerry, I’m so torn.”

  “Poor love,” I said sympathetically.

  “I mean, I really want a baby. Really really.” Maybe she was a little pissed, maybe just being sincere. “But if anything happened to destroy the relationship between Marty and me, I might just have to kill myself.” Before I could stop her, before I could do a damn thing about it, she had pointed the gun – laughing – at the side of her head and pulled the trigger.

  Everyone knows you should never do that.

  My fault. It was all my fault. I’m not usually so careless. Like anyone who’s ever had anything to do with guns, I know how vital it is to remove the cartridges. Normally, I always do. This time…I could only plead pressure of work. I hadn’t touched the damn thing for several days, since before Anna came down. And now – well, it was like South Africa all over again. She was dead long before she hit the floor.

  v. Martin:

  I might have bought it. Probably would have, if the next Gerard O’Connell hadn’t featured a love affair between a man and his best friend’s wife. Ostensibly, it was the usual bollocks about a bloke getting into and out of trouble in any political trouble-spot you cared to name. But this time, it was really a sex manual for retards. Lust in Leningrad. Sex and saunas in Sarajevo. Passion under the palm trees. An exposé, if you please, of his liaison with my wife. At the end of the book, she turns on him, spurns him, tells him she’s moving on, that she loves her husband and it’s all over. He picks up a gun – his best friend’s gun, at that – and shoots her. “If I can’t have you, no one else will,” he grates. Gerry’s heroes are good at grating.

  I couldn’t believe the brass neck of the man. Perhaps the results of the inquest, which, while noting his carelessness, exonerated him of any blame, made him feel that he was God. That he could get away with anything. It was clear that he’d seduced Anna, and when she tried to get away from him, his overweening vanity wouldn’t allow it, and he’d shot her. I told the coroner this but he dismissed it. I wrote letters but nobody would take any notice. I spread the story among my pals in the newspaper world but they didn’t want to know. Accused me of paranoia. I went to see Susanna, told her of my suspicions. She just laughed. Said I was jealous. Jealous? Of Gerry?

  It was the perfect crime. He’d got away with it. Or so he thought. That’s when I decided to do something about it. Follow him. Haunt him. He’d know that I knew. He’d never get rid of me, until death did us part. Just as it had parted Anna and me. So I went where he went. Where he lodged, I lodged as well. Always there, down the road, round the corner, across the lane. A reminder that there’s no such thing as a free fuck. Especially not with someone else’s wife. I’m not even discussing the emptiness I feel. The despair. The hole she has left in my life. The hole I fill with alcohol. The bottomless pit.

  Yes. I have become disgusting. Red faced. Coarse featured. My hands shake most of the time. My clothes are not clean. I don’t know when I last had a bath. I’m not proud of it. I smoke too much – first thing I do when I wake is to light up. Drink too much – most of the time I sit among the whisky bottles and think about Anna. About the fairy on my Chernobylled Christmas tree. About the icing on my poisoned cake, the dirge in my heart. When I don’t think about her, I think about him.

  And when I’m not thinking, I’m packing up my increasingly meagre possessions, ready to follow where they lead, ready to go where they go. Moving on.

  vi. Gerard:

  All right. It was insensitive of me. Damned insensitive. Even Susanna said so and she doesn’t often criticise me. But Anna herself had taught me all about what she called the Fuck Mother factor. That is, the answer to the timid author’s question: But if I write that, what will Mother say? A bestselling author, she told me, has no room for sensitivity. He is shameless, he uses the material to hand and never mind who objects. So I fucked Mother. Used Anna’s accident. I know she’d have wanted me to. I dressed it up with an affair, added some steamy sex scenes in various places, had the man kill her when she spurns him, and then get away with it. He suffers, of course. He tries to expiate the crime and in the end dies nobly, sacrificing himself to save someone else. The critics thought it was the best book I’d done.

  It honestly didn’t occur to me for a single minute that old Martin would take it as some kind of confession. Anna and I had a professional relationship, nothing more. She wasn’t my type. We could have shared a bed naked, and I doubt if I’d have raised a stand. She simply didn’t turn me on. Martin can’t believe that. Cock-ridden himself, he believes everyone else must have been too. He thinks I killed her for spurning my advances. I’ve tried to explain but he won’t believe me.

  The persecution started about ten years ago. Susanna and I decided to move, just because I couldn’t bear the guilt of what had happened and wanted to get out of our house. When Marty turned up living practically next door, I thought at first that it was a bizarre coincidence. I found it impossible to write with him so close. Naturally I felt guilty enough about what had happened without him there all the time as well, a living breathing reproach. We sold up again before the place had even been redecorated and moved elsewhere. So did he. The third time, I realised it was deliberate. I’ve tried to choose places he’ll hate; I’ve tried swearing the agents, the solicitors, my publishers to secrecy; I’ve even bought a new house without selling the old. It’s no good; he always manages to track us down.

  I’ve tried to persuade Susanna to move to Hollywood: it wouldn’t be difficult, with the first three books under option to one of the major studios and principal photography already started on the first. Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock and Gene Hackman or Anthony Hopkins – it should be good. But Susanna doesn’t want to leave England, or her family. The trappings of fame and fortune don’t mean a lot to her, frankly. Our houses are always fairly modest, and so are our cars, tho
ugh we splash out on holidays and own a place in Italy. I’ve told her that if we moved on, went upmarket, we’d be able to shake Martin off just because he couldn’t afford the kind of place that we can, but she says that after what we saw in South Africa, she’d feel uncomfortable in anything too grand. As a matter of fact, so would I.

  Now, with the For Sale sign up once more, with the wellsprings of creation dried up yet again, as I think of that poor sad bastard just down the lane, the quiet reproach on his face, the hatred I sense in his heart, I realise that something must be done. I’ve thought about it for a while. I’ve plotted it as though it were a book.

  Given the condition he’s sunk to, given the vices he increasingly gives in to, the fags, the booze, I don’t think it will be terribly difficult. I know him too well. Starts the day on a fag, ends it at the wrong end of a whisky bottle. I can see exactly how to do it. I can’t think why I didn’t do it before.

  THE SOUTHBURY & DISTRICT CHRONICLE

  At the inquest today on Martin Blowers, 44, a journalist, of Linstead Lane, the Coroner paid particular attention to the deceased’s lifestyle as having a significant bearing on his death. Peter Atkinson, landlord of the Three Feathers in the High Street, stated that Mr. Blowers was a regular customer and on the night in question, had consumed at least six pints of bitter followed by several double brandies. Asked if, in his opinion, the deceased was drunk, Atkinson said that he would not necessarily have said drunk but certainly well lit up. Since he knew that Mr. Blowers, who lived about half a mile from the pub, would not be driving home, he had not considered it necessary to limit the amount served to him. In answer to a question from the Coroner, he agreed that with hindsight, it might have been wiser to refuse to serve him.

  Mrs. Maggie Clifford stated that she had worked as a domestic for Mr. Blowers for the past eight months, ever since he had bought the house in Linstead Lane. She said that in her opinion, he was an accident waiting to happen. Asked by the Coroner to explain this remark, she said that for instance, she had come in one morning to find water coming through the ceiling, and on going upstairs, had found the bath taps full on and Mr. Blowers slumped asleep on the landing outside the bathroom. Just a week earlier, he had put a pan of water to boil on the gas stove and then forgotten about it. If a neighbour hadn’t noticed the smoke and called the fire brigade, anything might have happened. She said that the deceased often forgot to lock the doors of his house at night, despite the fact that in recent weeks, he had been burgled twice. She added that the way he left lighted cigarettes lying around, it was a miracle that he hadn’t either burned down the house or blown himself to bits long before this.

  Mr. Gerard O’Connell, the well-known thriller writer and a neighbour of Mr. Blowers, stated that he had known the deceased since their undergraduate days, and that in the past three or four years, Mr. Blowers’ physical condition had deteriorated markedly. Asked to what he attributed this deterioriation, Mr. O’Connell said that in his opinion, following the death of his wife, Mr. Blowers had developed a serious drink problem.

  Coroner: In other words, he was an alcoholic?

  O’Connell: I don’t think that would be overstating the case.

  Asked if he had noticed any other indications of impaired faculties, Mr. O’Connell mentioned his friend’s recent inability to meet deadlines at work, and an increasing degree of memory impairment. He agreed with Mrs. Clifford that Mr. Blowers often failed to secure his house at night, and said that it was he who had, on a recent occasion, seen smoke pouring from the kitchen windows and had called the fire services before entering the house to find Mr. Blowers passed out on the sofa in the living room. He added that it had been extremely difficult to rouse him.

  Coroner: In your opinion, was he suffering, on that occasion, from the effects of alchohol?

  O’Connell: In my opinion, for what it is worth, yes, I would.

  Evidence was given by the chief fire officer, who stated that on the night in question, the gas fire in the living room had been turned full on but not lit.

  Given Mr. Blowers’ habit of smoking as soon as he woke up, before getting out of bed, he gave it as his opinion that by the time Mr. Blowers had struck the match for his first cigarette of the day, the whole house would have been full of gas fumes.

  Verdict: accidental death, aggravated by the problems of a reliance on alcohol.

  From the Sunday Times:

  PERFECT CRIME BY GERARD O’CONNELL

  Steven Laidlaw

  Another thumping good read, the new Gerard O’Connell is very much the mix as before, with plenty of action in various exotic locales, the statutory gorgeous bimbo, evil villains, and right, in the end, overcoming might.

  In this one, our hero – all jutting jaw and steely eyes – seeks to revenge the death of his best friend in what seems to be a domestic gas explosion. Best friend is a burned-out wreck who is slowly drinking and smoking himself into an early grave. Although the police consider it an accident, our hero is convinced that the forces of evil – possibly the Yakuza, whom his dead friend investigated during his days as a journalist in Tokyo – are responsible, having sneaked into the house while the best friend was sleeping off his most recent binge, turned on the gas fire and deliberately left it unlit.

  There are plenty of the sort of thrills and spills which only O’Connell can provide, with much convincing technical detail, elegant sex, graphic fisticuffs and the hero conquering all. But there is more to it than this. In his most recent books, O’Connell has definitely moved on from producing mere hokum; there is a dark and satisfying edge to his recent work which transcends the genre in which he has chosen to make his mark and this latest example offers glimpses of a real – I might even suggest a great – novelist trying very hard to fight his way out from under.

  Steven Laidlaw’s new thriller, Root of Evil, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in September (£15.99)

  The Woman Who Loved Elizabeth David

  Andrew Taylor

  On the evening that Charles died I actually heard the ambulance, the one that Edith Thornhill called. I was putting out the milk bottles in the porch. I didn’t take much notice. Our house was on Chepstow Road and so was the hospital; we often heard ambulances.

  He died on the day the rat-catcher came – the last Thursday in October. Our house was modern, built just before the war, but in the garden was a crumbling stone stable. Charles planned to convert it into a garage if we ever bought a car, which was about as likely as his agreeing to install a telephone. Meanwhile, we used it as a garden shed and apple store. Almost all the apples had been ruined by rats in the space of a week. Hence the rat-catcher.

  Charles was late but I had not begun to get worried. After he closed the shop, he often dropped into the Bull Hotel for a drink. Then the doorbell rang and I found Dr. Bayswater and Mrs. Thornhill on the doorstep. I know Edith from church, and Dr. Bayswater is our doctor.

  “I’m sorry, Anne,” Edith said. “It’s bad news. May we come in?”

  I took them into the lounge. Edith suggested I sit down.

  “Charles? It’s Charles, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead,” Edith said.

  I stared at her. I did not know what to say.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “Coronary thrombosis by the look of it.”

  “Do you mean a heart attack? But he was only forty-eight.”

  “It does happen.”

  “And he doesn’t have a weak heart. Surely there’d have been some—”

  “I’d seen him three times in the last month.” Dr. Bayswater examined his fingernails. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Of course he did. But that was indigestion.”

  “Angina. Some of the symptoms can be similar to indigestion.”

  The doctor and Edith went on talking. I didn’t listen very much. All I could think of was the fact that Charles hadn’t to
ld me the truth. Instead of grieving, I felt angry.

  My memory of the next few weeks is patchy, as if a heavy fog lies over that part of my mind. Certain events rear out of it like icebergs from the ocean. The funeral was at St. John’s and the church was full of people wearing black clothes, like crows. Marina Harper was there, which surprised me because she wasn’t a churchgoer. The obituary in the Lydmouth Gazette was not a very long one. It said that Charles came from a well-respected local family and referred in passing to Nigel.

  Unfortunately Nigel, Charles’s younger brother, was in Tanganyika, looking at some sawmills he was thinking of buying. I never really understood what Nigel did for a living. Whatever it was, it seemed to bring him a good deal of money. Once I asked him and he said, “I just buy things when they’re cheap, and sell things when they’re expensive. Nothing to it, really.”

  I sent a telegram to Dar es Salaam. Nigel cabled back, saying he would be home as soon as possible. He and Charles had always been very close, though Nigel was my age, a good ten years younger than his brother. He was also Charles’s executor.

  Until Nigel came home, I could have very little idea of what the future held for me. I didn’t even know whether I would be able to stay in the house. The family shop – Butter’s, the men’s outfitters in the High Street – was left in the charge of the manager.

  What struck me most was the silence. In the evenings, when I sat by the fire in the lounge, there was a quietness that I could not drive away by turning on the wireless. After a while, I stopped trying. I would sit in my chair, with a book unopened on my lap, and stare at the familiar room which had grown suddenly unfamiliar: at my mother-in-law’s dark oak sideboard, which I had always loathed; at the collected edition of Kipling, which Charles and Nigel had laboriously assembled when they were boys; at the patch on the hearthrug where Charles had left a cigarette burning one Christmas-time.

  I don’t know when I realised something was wrong. I think the first thing that struck me was the key, when the hospital sent back Charles’s belongings. He had kept his keys in a leather pouch with a buttoned flap – keys for the house, for the shop. This one, however, was loose – a brass Yale, quite new. I tried it unsuccessfully in our only Yale lock, the one on the old stable. I took it down to the shop, but it didn’t fit any of the locks there, either.