The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Whatever was Mr Prout doing in the Bathurst Arms?” Jill asked. “I hadn’t put him down as a drinking man.”

  The blush intensified. “Of course not. He was collecting for the Mission Society. Anyway, he said, there were two young men in there, obviously rather the worse for wear if you know what I mean, at one of the tables in the saloon bar. They didn’t give him anything – just waved him away; people can be so rude, can’t they? Ronald was almost certain that one of them was Little Joe. He wasn’t sure, or he would have said something.”

  “Has he got a car?” Jill said. “Little Joe, I mean. What’s his real name, by the way?”

  “Mark. Mark Joseph. And I don’t think he’s got a car. He can’t be more than nineteen or twenty. He couldn’t afford it. But he might have the use of his father’s. I know Mr Joseph’s got one, I’ve seen it at chapel. It’s black. Why do you ask?”

  “I just wondered.” Jill picked up her handbag, which was beside the desk.

  “Are you going out again?”

  Before Jill could answer, Amy’s telephone rang in the next room. She went to answer it. As Jill was leaving her office a moment later, Amy waylaid her. There was a pink, moist spot on each of the secretary’s powdered cheeks.

  “Well, I never,” she said. “That was Ronald – Mr Prout. He went to see his mother at the hospital after lunch. And guess who he saw being carried out of an ambulance there? Little Joe.”

  * * *

  Acute carbon monoxide poisoning turns your cheeks cherry-pink and gives them a misleadingly healthy appearance. By that time, however, you may well be dead or comatose.

  Mark Joseph was alive, but only just. The consultant thought it likely that, if the boy recovered, his neurological functions would be considerably impaired, perhaps in the long term. Translated, that meant it might be a long time before the police would be able to get any sense out of him – assuming, of course, that he survived.

  Sergeant Lumb and a policewoman had been to the house in Little Russia. On his return Lumb told Thornhill that Little Joe had used strips of dustsheet to attach the hose of the vacuum cleaner to the exhaust of his father’s car, which was parked in a garage beside the house. He had run the hose through the driver’s window and sealed up the cracks with Sellotape and brown paper. Then he had climbed into the car, started the engine and waited to die.

  “It was the sister that saved him,” Lumb said. “Sylvia – she’s ill, having a day or two off work. Came downstairs to make herself a drink, and she heard the engine running. Doc said he’d have been dead in another half-hour.”

  “Why did he do it?” Thornhill asked.

  “Don’t know, sir. But it was suicide – he left a note: but all he said was sorry. And he sent his love to his sister.”

  Thornhill considered. Then, “Not to his parents?”

  “Mother’s dead. He don’t get on with his dad. To be fair, not many people do – they call him Uncle Joe round here. As in Stalin. He’s a nasty old bugger, excuse my French, the holier-than-thou type.”

  “Has he been told?”

  Lumb shook his head. “He’s staying with friends in Scotland. No telephone. We’ve contacted the local boys, asked them to take a message over.”

  “I’ll go and take a look at the house. I’d like to talk to the sister, too.”

  Thornhill took his own car, along with the uniformed WPC who had accompanied Lumb to Little Russia earlier in the day; it was all too likely, Thornhill thought, that Sylvia Joseph would be difficult to handle – emotional, possibly hysterical – and dealing with that sort of thing was woman’s work.

  The problem was, he realized when he drew up outside the Josephs’ house in Little Russia, the wrong woman had already turned up to deal with it. A green Morris Minor was parked outside. He walked quickly up the concrete path, buttoning his overcoat for the air seemed much colder here. Jill Francis opened the door before he had time to ring the bell. For an instant they stared at each other, both of them conscious of the silent policewoman at Thornhill’s side.

  He raised his hat. “Good afternoon, Miss Francis. We’ve come to see Miss Joseph.”

  “She’s downstairs now,” Jill said. “In the sitting room.”

  “How is she?”

  “Shocked. Miserable. Just sits there eating sweets and hoping it will all go away. Would you like to come through?”

  “Perhaps you and I might have a word beforehand.” He turned to the WPC. “Go and see Miss Joseph. I won’t be long.”

  The young woman glanced at him, the confusion evident on her face. But she said nothing. Jill showed her into the room where Sylvia was sitting. Thornhill glimpsed a childlike figure in a dressing-gown. She seemed scarcely older than his own daughter. She was sitting in a chair, her fingers delving into a green and purple box on her lap, and she did not raise her head to look at him. Lank brown hair curtained her face. The door closed.

  Jill draped her coat over her shoulders like a cape and joined him on the doorstep.

  “What are you doing here?” Thornhill whispered to Jill, conscious that once again she had put him in an absurd position.

  “I told you this morning – my job.” She stared ahead, declining to look at him. “It’s a story. A boy tried to kill himself. You’ll want to see the garage, won’t you? Why don’t we talk there?”

  It was as good an idea as any. The garage was a brick building that leaned against one side of the house, with double doors now propped open. The car was a large black Austin, at least twenty years old. The vacuum cleaner hose still ran from the end of the exhaust to the driver’s window.

  “You’d better not go inside,” he said. “We’ll need to look in here.”

  “I already have been inside.” Her voice was flat. “Sorry. Shall I tell you why he did it? Little Joe, I mean.”

  He stared at her. “I think you’d better.”

  “In a way it’s because Timothy Wynoll had seen a film up in London. Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean and Natalie Wood. It only opened a week or two ago. I saw it the other day when I was up in town.”

  “For God’s sake. Jill, I haven’t time for this.”

  “Bear with me. There’s a scene in which James Dean and another boy have what they call a chickie run. Each of them has a car. They drive towards a precipice. And the first one to bail out is chicken. In the film, the other boy tries to jump out but a strap on his jacket catches on the door handle. And he goes over the edge inside his car.”

  “But there’s nothing to—”

  “Mr Prout saw Timothy Wynoll and Mark Joseph in the Bathurst Arms last night. Arguing about something. I think it ended with Wynoll challenging him to play chicken. But Wynoll didn’t bail out in time.”

  “You’ve no evidence for that.”

  But as he spoke, Thornhill remembered the mauve tickets he had found near the barn this morning. Cinema tickets? Or was that too fanciful? Anyway, what had the tickets been doing outside the barn?

  “Look at the nearside wheel,” Jill said.

  Thornhill stared at it. There were spots of the pinkish-brown mud on the rim, just as there were on the rims of his own car, and also something white embedded in some of the tread and smeared on the side of the tyre.

  “I think it’s plaster,” Jill said. “Someone dumped a sack of it in the layby above Little Russia. So that car was up there, and recently.”

  Thornhill smiled, not at her but because, as he grasped what she was suggesting, a possible solution to a small puzzle slotted into his mind. “I wondered how he lit the cigarette.”

  “Who?”

  “Wynoll,” he said. “You see, he was smoking when he went over the edge. But he didn’t have any matches or a lighter with him. And the car doesn’t have a cigarette lighter, either. I thought it was odd from the start. Then Wynoll kills himself without meaning to, is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “Yes,” Jill said. “And then Mark tries this stunt” – she glanced at the car – “because he blamed himself fo
r Wynoll’s death. It’s—”

  “You don’t have the ticket stub, by any chance?” he interrupted.

  “What?”

  “From when you went to see that film.” But perhaps she wouldn’t have the stub, Thornhill thought, because a man had taken her, and of course the man would have paid.

  “I don’t know.” She looked up at him. “Perhaps.” She opened her handbag, took out her purse and rummaged inside it. “I’m not sure – so much rubbish accumulates – what about these? Yes, look, you can make out ‘ion’ on that one. The film’s on at the London Pavilion.”

  He looked down at the palm of her hand at two mauve ticket stubs. A man would have paid. He felt a small and squalid relief, almost worse than the absurd jealousy that had preceded it.

  The front door opened. They both turned towards the sound, pulling sharply away from each other as though jointly guilty of a nameless crime. The girl was walking stiffly towards them, an overcoat over her dressing gown. The policewoman hovered anxiously behind her.

  “Sylvia,” Jill said, starting forward, “you shouldn’t—”

  “It’s my fault,” the girl said in a thin, dull voice. “I can’t wait.”

  “Miss Joseph,” Thornhill said. “Your brother’s still alive. He’s very ill but—”

  “Not him,” she snapped, with a flash of temper. “Tim.”

  He stared at her. “You’d better say what you mean by that.”

  Sylvia nodded at Jill. “She guessed some of it. Did she tell you? Tim was down at Christmas. We met at the Young Conservatives party in the Ruispidge Hall. I – I was a bit tiddly. And we – well, I was stupid and so was he. And I realized what had happened when I was late.” She ran out of words.

  “Her period,” Jill said, and touched the girl’s arm.

  “You’re pregnant?” Thornhill said to Sylvia.

  She didn’t speak.

  “She was,” Jill said. “She miscarried last night.”

  “Dad would have killed me if he found out,” the girl whispered. “Me first, then Tim.”

  “So you got rid of it?” Thornhill said, thinking that the last thing he wanted was an illegal abortion on his plate as well.

  “No!” she glared at him. “It wasn’t like that. I wanted Tim to marry me, to make it all right. But he laughed at me. Mark was home on leave so I told him, and he said he’d talk to Tim and make him see sense. They met in the Bathurst. All they did was quarrel and get drunk and do the chickie run in Little Russia.”

  “Did your brother tell you?”

  “Yes.” Sylvia gave a brittle laugh. “When he came in last night. It was because of that James Dean film. Tim thought it was marvellous. He took me to see it when I went up to London – to tell him about – about the baby. I told him after we’d been to the cinema. I thought perhaps if we got married …” The thin, anguished voice sank to a murmur. “He said I wasn’t a patch on Natalie Wood. He didn’t really like me at all. He only went with me that one time because he was drunk. And all he really wanted to talk about was that stupid bloody film.”

  The ticket stubs, Thornhill thought. The blood on the blanket. The lighted cigarette. The wallet. Something was missing. Something that made it all add up. Then suddenly there it was – the connection: two colours glowing brightly and freshly in the forefront of his mind. Tenuous but undeniably there. Freshly, that was the point.

  “Sylvia should be sitting down,” Jill said. “She’s lost a lot of blood because of the miscarriage. And a doctor should see her.”

  Thornhill ignored Jill. “Where were you last night?”

  Sylvia’s eyes widened. “Here, of course.” She touched her stomach. “I was already feeling – you know – funny down there.”

  “Richard,” Jill said. “Is this really necessary? Here?”

  The policewoman took a step forward, looking to Thornhill for direction.

  “But you weren’t here at all,” Thornhill said to Sylvia. “You were in Wynoll’s car, weren’t you? Waiting while he was in the pub, perhaps, maybe hoping for a reconciliation? You were with him when he drove up the hill to the layby. You lit the cigarette he was smoking when he went over the edge.”

  Sylvia clung to Jill’s arm for support.

  “You survived,” he said harshly. “Timothy Wynoll didn’t. You took out his wallet after the crash. What were you looking for? A letter from you? A photograph?”

  The girl’s expression changed, cracking like ice on a frozen pondwhen someone throws a stone in the middle.

  “The ticket stubs for that film were in his pockets,” he went on, “probably in his wallet. I found them this morning near the barn in the woods between here and the car. Still dry, so they hadn’t been there long – they wouldn’t have lasted long like that in this weather. You must have dropped them last night.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” Jill said. “He might have dropped them there himself – before last night, I mean.”

  Thornhill shook his head, his eyes still on Sylvia. “Wynoll didn’t reach Lydmouth until yesterday afternoon. The tickets in his pocket prove that. So who dropped the tickets in the woods over there? It can’t have been Wynoll or your brother, Sylvia. It must have been you. How else could they have got there?”

  “She – she might have paid for the tickets herself,” Jill said in a voice not much more than a whisper.

  “I doubt it. Why should she, when she was with a man who wasn’t exactly short of money?”

  Jill glared at him. But he didn’t notice. The tickets were by the barn, he thought, and there had been blood on the blanket.

  Another link in the chain?

  “You stopped in the barn on your way back here last night,” he said to Sylvia. “You were already bleeding from the miscarriage.”

  Sylvia let go of Jill’s arm. She stared at the grubby concrete of the path, her face invisible behind the lank hair. “I hate you,” she muttered. “I hate you.”

  Who was she talking to, Thornhill wondered – himself or Wynoll? The entire world? The unwanted baby? Or even herself? He turned to the policewoman. “Take Miss Joseph inside. Stay with her until I tell you otherwise. Don’t leave her alone for any reason.”

  When they were alone, Jill turned on him. “What in God’s name are you doing? She’s a victim, can’t you see that? Anyway, there’s nothing to show she was there, nothing to prove it.”

  “She was there.” He stared at her. “And I think she might have—”

  He broke off. Sylvia had had the presence of mind to search Timothy Wynoll after he was dead. All along, there was something cold and calculating about her behaviour. Had she prevented Wynoll from braking? Or had she hit him afterwards, with a rock or even the whisky bottle with the blood on the label? He had nothing like hard proof, of course, he was far short of that. But he’d send the SOCOs into Little Russia immediately, and once they had the pathologist’s report on Wynol and his head injuries—

  “Tell me what you think happened,” Jill said softly. “What gave you the idea she was in the car in the first place? Trust me.”

  He shook his head. Accepting the invitation would be like signing a blank cheque.

  “Chicken,” she said.

  Thornhill looked at her. A blank cheque? Who cared? He would bankrupt himself if she asked him. He opened his mouth to speak, to say, “Brashers Mint Imperials are wrapped in green and purple papers.”

  The wrappers on the car floor hadn’t been there long. Sylvia had been eating them in the house this afternoon as if her life depended on them.

  But the front door opened before he had time to say anything at all. The policewoman was running down the path towards them. He knew at once what had happened from her white face and her open mouth, from the red smear on her navy-blue skirt and the door hanging open behind her. He knew that it was too late for Sylvia, and also perhaps for himself and Jill.

  LITTLE OLD LADIES

  Simon Brett

  * * *

  BRENDA WINSHOTt was an unw
illing investigator of crime. But then she’d never been one to push herself forward. Given a more forceful manner, she might well have been elected Chairwoman of the Morton-cum-Budely Village Committee. She certainly had the administrative skills and people skills to discharge the job efficiently. But because she generally kept so quiet, no one considered her for the role. Instead, the members had elected as “Chair” (an appellation that Brenda Winshott silently detested) Joan Fullerton, whose administrative skills were minimal and whose people skills non-existent.

  But Joan Fullerton was a woman of unassailable conviction in her own rightness. The thought had never occurred to her that she might be wrong. Throughout a long marriage, she had worn down her husband to such a point that, when he finally found peace, there was so little of his personality left that he did not so much die as simply evaporate. Her two sons had been subjected to a similar emotional bludgeoning, with the result that they had almost as little will left in them as their deceased father. Piers had repeated the errors of the previous generation by marrying Lynette, who was almost as bossy as her mother-in-law. She ran Morton-cum-Budely’s only restaurant, The Garlic Press, which prided itself on its locally sourced organic menu, and where her husband acted as an ineffectual greeter. Tristram, the younger son, far too terrified by seeing what had happened to his father ever to risk taking on a wife himself, was equally ineffectual in his job as a French teacher in a nearby girls’ school, Grantley House. Neither son would dare to admit, even to themselves, how much they loathed their mother.

  Nor did Joan Fullerton endear herself to the other residents of Morton-cum-Budely. It was a Devon village of almost excessive prettiness, populated largely by the retired. And since men were made of frailer stuff, most of those who survived were little old ladies, punctiliously polite to everyone they met face-to-face, and equally poisonous about them as soon as their backs were turned.

  So the loathing in which Joan Fullerton was held by the entire village would never have been guessed from the genteel charm with which all the locals greeted her in her perambulations up and down the High – and indeed only – Street of Morton-cum-Budely. For Brenda Winshott, naturally quiet, there was perhaps not so much difference between her public behaviour to and private opinion of Joan Fullerton, but in others the contrast was more marked. Queenie Miles, who lived in Yew Tree Cottage and had always felt that chairing the Village Committee was her birthright, never ceased from vilifying the incumbent “Chair”, except in Joan Fullerton’s presence, when her unctuous obsequiousness was as exaggerated as her inner hatred.