Bottled Spider

by John Gardner

  ‘Whatcher done with my dog?’ this little girl asked him. Standing there by the garden gate wearing a thin, long pink cotton dress. She had lovely hair: long, right down her back. He’d come outside, opened the back door. They’d left a key inside and he just turned the key and stepped out when the girl appeared.

  ‘Done nothing with your dog. Here, you want to see something good?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind what. You come. En’t half good,’ and he went back into the house. She was like all little girls. Inquisitive, Beaky like his mum, so she came straight through the door and he took her from behind. Didn’t mean it. Didn’t mean to hurt her, but she went down like a sack of bricks and before he knew it she was dead and he had this lovely warm feeling. He put his arms round her and gave her a big squeeze and kissed her and she didn’t try to get away from him like other girls did. He touched her all over and she didn’t squirm or cry out or push him away. She let him do anything he wanted, and when he’d finished he went to the shed out the back of the house. Stayed there while people searched for her, calling out — ‘Delphine ... Delphine where are you? ... Delphine ...?’

  They didn’t find her that night and he was away before dawn, well away. Knew enough to travel at night, and travel he did. Away from Andover, back the way he’d come. Four days of lying up and four nights travelling. He got nearly to London before they caught him and brought him back to Mr Gregory’s school, St Hilda’s School — called that because St Hilda had started a monastery for men and women, both, and that was what the school was: boys and girls, both. Delinquent boys and girls.

  He expected to be beaten, but that didn’t happen. The police asked him all kinds of questions. Where did he go first when he ran away? ‘You went to Andover didn’t you, lad?’

  ‘No. Never been there. Went near to Newbury. Was going to London. That’s where I wanted to be.’

  ‘Boys get into trouble in London.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Delighted.

  He stuck to his story. When they got cunning he was more sly; when they were full of guile he was foxy as hell.

  ‘Golly, we know you didn’t kill that girl —’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘Come on, Golly, we know.’

  ‘What you talking about? What girl?’

  ‘She fell, Golly. We know she fell, caught her head on those stone slabs. Had what they call an eggshell skull. Broke easily. Nobody knew about her skull.’

  ‘What you talking about? Eggshells?’

  ‘But you killed the dog, Golly. We know that because someone strangled the dog. Very expert job that. You did well.’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. I never did nothing to nobody, or a bloody dog.’ He knew he was safe. He had listened to plays on the wireless, and he’d listened to the stories Mr Gregory and Miss Rae read to them. So he knew about fingerprints, upcoming science, and he had wiped the window ledge and cleaned off the doorknob, and the key in the back door. Saw his face in it, the doorknob, outside and in.

  In the end it went away, and they didn’t ask any more. Well, only about every six months, Mr Gregory would come out with it. Talking about something else he’d suddenly say, ‘Golly, what was that girl wearing?’ But he had become immune to that. It was a word that Mr Gregory had taught him. Immune. For Golly it meant counting to ten before ever answering any question. Twenty sometimes.

  So he did another one almost straight away when he got back to London. Just happened and he was not even twenty. She was a kid, fourteen, fifteen maybe. Hackney it was, where they had begun to demolish some houses. He’d gone over to deliver a message from Mickey, and was going back towards the Tube. Met her and she said, ‘You’ve got an ’orrible face. Ugh.’

  The anger fizzed up inside him like it did. He wanted her because she was a nice bit, face like an educated monkey. That was what Bruce said when there was a picture of her in the papers a couple of days later — HACKNEY SCHOOLGIRL MISSING FEARS. He saw red, and she didn’t have time to scream and she was light as a feather. Lovely. Light as a feather and tight as a drum. They must have demolished the house the next day and accidentally buried her. Still there probably.

  As he saw it he was doing them a wonderful favour. He believed in God, the Father Almighty and all that. When he choked a girl she went straight to God. The life everlasting, Amen.

  Now, on this Boxing Day morning, in the bitter cold, he only got as far as the outskirts of Basingstoke before it got light. He found an old detached house with a For Sale notice outside, crept in, made sure there was nobody living there and broke in through some poorly secured French windows. Went through the entire place, all the furniture was covered with sheets, and dustcloths. But he gathered some bedding together, then tucked himself up near the front door and ate his sandwiches, turned on the water under the sink in the kitchen and had a drink. Then he slept.

  Tonight he’d have to walk faster, move quicker. Sleep.

  Miss Baccus didn’t come to him with her orders. Maybe he could put it right in London. If he could get there in time.

  *

  ‘So when we got all this information from Abelard, about Golly and what a bad lad he was, we stooged over to Rupert Street, hoping to have a word with Golly, or maybe Lavender.’ They had progressed to Dandy Tom’s private office where he offered her breakfast.

  The tea Billy Mulligan had brought from the canteen had been filthy. But now with the skill of a suave magician, Tommy Livermore produced a coffeepot, a gas ring and a kettle, and he made toast on the gas fire at the end of the room. The toast was good and he had some great strawberry preserve that he had ‘coaxed out of Fortnum’s just before the festivities.’ There was also rich, creamy butter, golden in a lordly dish.

  ‘Home farm?’ she asked him.

  ‘Guilty.’ He looked point nine of a shade sheepish and she said, ‘No need to feel guilty. Home farms are very nice things to have in the family. Please go on. I want to have Two-Faced Golly on toast, just like this.’

  ‘We went in mob-handed and found nobody at home, except a pair of dykey girls in the flat one floor up. I think we disturbed them. Anyway they had a touch of the vapours and I had to be kind and gentle, and tell them we needed a word with Golly.’

  ‘We need to talk to Golly,’ he said, and Dawn from the flat upstairs looked dropped on.

  ‘He’s usually here. Maybe he’s gone home with Lavender,’ she said, all of a’tremble.

  Dandy Tom looked across at Suzie who was taking a bite of toast dripping with butter. ‘Guess where Lavender lives, heart.’

  ‘Tell.’

  ‘Lavender has a house in Camford. Dyers Road. Number fourteen.’

  Suzie’s jaw dropped.

  ‘So, heart, I rang your colleague, WDC Shirley Cox, and she went along to Dyers Road and chatted up Lavender. Golly has stayed there occasionally, but he’s gone to spend Christmas with his old mum.’

  The state of play at this hour was, two constables and Molly Abelard round the corner from Rupert Street, just in case Golly returned. Out in darkest Hampshire there were four constables and a Home Guard detachment waiting in the dark, watching to see when they were up and about in Ailsa Goldfinch’s cottage. ‘She’s an elderly lady and it’ll be alarming for her, so I’ve told them to hang on ’til dawn. There’s a light on downstairs, but no movement and it’s silent as the grave.’ He wasn’t worried about Golly. Golly was probably having a good sleep, and another four uniforms and a car would be arriving at first light. With any luck they’d have Golly in the net soon after six thirty. In any case he wanted them to wait for the car. Didn’t want premature ejaculatory Home Guard people dragging Golly Goldfinch along the road.

  ‘And if he’s not there?’

  ‘Perish the thought. More coffee?’

  ‘Please. But if he really isn’t there?’

  ‘We send the lads into the highways and byways; compel him to come in. They’ll find him. We’ll bracket him, then we’ll move in and nab him, feel h
is collar. Okay, heart?’ That smile again, the ravishing one that started at the corner of his mouth then spread right up his face. That, coupled with the ‘heart’ seemed to do the trick. He had a special way of saying that one word that shrunk everything down to the two of you and nobody else. Magic, she considered. Pure, unadulterated white sparkling magic, heart.

  And he didn’t overuse it, or use it indiscriminately. He was careful and protective in its use.

  Great heavens, Suzie sighs silkily. I want to explore him inside and out. Preferably outside first. Then, when I know every smooth, subtle inch of his skin, and when I’ve explored every fold in it, and after he’s lit my fire about two million times, I’d like to check into his head. Mainly to see what he doesn’t know, because I think he probably knows practically everything, so he’ll make up for my deficiencies. Between us we could be one decent human being.

  She asked him to kiss her, but he said certainly not. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to, Suzie. It just wouldn’t be right. This place is like a cathedral and you wouldn’t steal a kiss in St Paul’s, now would you?’

  She supposed not, then the telephone on his desk started to ring and they both knew, by its shrillness, that it was bad news. It certainly broke the mood in more ways than one, because it was Bert speaking from darkest Hampshire. He carried news of Mrs Ailsa Goldfinch.

  She looked at her watch. It was seven a.m. Didn’t time fly when you were cruising off among the stars?

  ‘Since the first moment I saw you,’ she said to her Dandy Tom.

  ‘Never happened to me before,’ he said.

  ‘Never ever happened to me.’

  Twenty-Three

  There were four Home Guard private soldiers with rifles round the back of the cottage, among the trees, and three at the front, standing well away from the hedge, with a pair of coppers at the back as well and two, including a sergeant, at the front.

  ‘You sure those rifles work?’ the police sergeant asked, very sarky, as they made their way towards the cottages.

  ‘Course they work. We were all out on the range with them last month. This is a squad of picked men, Sergeant. Expert shots.’

  ‘Picked bloody men, I should cocoa. Sooty Gibbs the sweep, Arthur Arbury from the outfitters, Fishy Whitcombe, Bill Badger from Ladies Fashions, Fanny Farmer from the Gasworks, and young Aubrey Kent who delivers groceries on a Saturday. I bet you’re giving Hitler the heebie-jeebies.

  ‘Trained men,’ replied Bill Cotterel who ran the toy shop with the two Miss Lewises and didn’t have a girlfriend, which was the cause of a lot of talk. ‘Trained men.’

  ‘How come you got those rifles anyhow?’ The sergeant pressed home his assault. ‘I’ve heard tell there’s a lot of Home Guard units armed only with pikes and old bayonets.’

  ‘Well, we’re lucky. The whole area’s lucky because we’ve got them from the Grammar School Armoury, from the OTC, Officers Training Corps. Eight Lee-Enfield Mk IV .303s and plenty of ammo an’ all.’

  They stopped the chattering as they drew close to the cottages where they split up and waited, shivering with cold in the dark.

  Around twenty past six, as the sky started to streak into a lighter shade of grey, and a rusty stain spread along the base of the clouds, a police car came rolling down the lane, freewheeling, out of gear, its engine switched off. And with the car came a uniformed inspector full of importance, carrying a revolver and the latest technical marvel in the fight against crime — a megaphone that transformed your voice through its little microphone, magnifying and projecting your speech and, more often as not, distorting it out of all recognition.

  There was a flurry of whispered instructions from the inspector — ‘When I give the order, rush the door ... but not until I give the order ...’

  ‘When he gives the order ...’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘... rush the door. Who d’you think? The Inspector ...’

  ‘Not until he gives the order ...’

  ‘Home Guard, if I tell you to shoot, you will fire over people’s heads, unless I instruct you otherwise.’

  ‘Won’t make no difference, none of them is going to hit anything,’ muttered the police sergeant, ‘’cept us, perhaps.’ There followed a lengthy wait while young Aubrey Kent was sent scuttling round the back to pass on the instructions.

  Then — ‘This is the pol ...’ The rest was lost in a screech of electronic scribble that finally disappeared. ‘... the police. This is the police.’ More distortion. ‘All occupants of Number One The Cottages come to the front door and leave the building with your hands on your heads. I repeat ...’ This, or variations of it, were repeated three times and the sergeant switched on the portable spotlight, aiming it at the porch, even though daylight was starting to lift the gloom.

  Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

  Children, bleary eyed, hung out of the upstairs windows of the second cottage, wanting to see what all the fuss was about.

  Not a sound from Ailsa Goldfinch’s cottage, and the inspector was getting antsy. One last try with the megaphone, after which his options ran out.

  ‘Armed Home Guard cover me. We’re going in.’ The inspector sounded very uncertain, so added in a lower voice, ‘Sergeant, you and one constable go ahead. Smash the door down if you have to. I’ll be right behind you.’

  They clattered across the lane with the Home Guard lads flinging themselves down in the prone position on the iron-hard earth, rifles aimed at the door with their safety catches, sadly, in the on position. The sergeant and constable had their truncheons out, banging at the door.

  Nothing.

  ‘Break it down,’ the inspector ordered and the sergeant leaned forward, turned the doorknob and pushed. The door opened inwards against a dead weight. The sergeant pushed harder and thought there was a bundle of old clothes in the way. Then he saw the blood and the pulverized face.

  ‘Christ,’ he said and threw up all over Ailsa Goldfinch’s legs.

  The face was a pulp, the bones broken and the flesh ruptured in a dozen places. Her dentures had fallen from her mouth, making it look as though they had been ripped out together with the gums, because a lot of blood had somehow found itself gushing out of the mouth. The head lay strange and crooked to one side, the result of the neck being broken by whoever threw the walking stick across her throat and then put their weight on it. The stick lay nearby as though cast truculently aside. It was covered in blood.

  Golly’s goodbye kiss.

  *

  They brought Abelard back for the conference, leaving the two DCs still on surveillance, covering Lavender’s building. They had been there for some time now and had only seen Dawn — from the flat above — come out with her girlfriend. Dawn was really fed up with the police presence and hoped they would go away before she started working again tomorrow. Friday.

  Golly’s reappearance was unlikely as yet, the Detective Chief Superintendent said. ‘It’s not really on the cards that Golly’s going to make it into London this quickly. Unless he’s grown aerodynamically unsound wings on his ankles like Mercury, messenger of the gods.’

  He had put down the telephone after talking to Bert in Hampshire, so Suzie was the first person to get the news. ‘Golly’s out of control, heart,’ he said, and told her they’d found the battered body of Ailsa Goldfinch in her cottage.

  A couple of hours later he held the conference for all his Spear Carriers except for Dave, Pete and Bert, who were still working the crime scene in Overchurch. Dandy Tom had spoken to the constabulary in Andover and arranged for his three lads to join whoever was taking a look at the Goldfinch cottage. ‘No harm in having the lads there. They know what to look for.’ He sounded distracted, as well he might. ‘They’ll see things the local helmets won’t even think about.’

  The sense of distraction had vanished by the time he rose to address the Spear Carriers. As ever, he was brisk and concise, telling them there was n
ow a good case against Golly Goldfinch, who, it seemed, had done away with his mum sometime late on Christmas night or early Boxing Day morning.

  ‘Means we have to pull out all the stops. Lightning fast. Full-scale manhunt to be called “Operation Bullring”. Comb the ground between Whitchurch and London: search woodland, barns, empty buildings, any possible hiding place. Deny the countryside to Golly Goldfinch. Cut him off and hunt him down before he gets into London and has another go, object of the exercise really.’

  For the last hour and a half Tommy Livermore had been on the telephone arguing, wheedling and pleading with representatives from other constabularies: Hampshire; Dorset, in case he ran the other way; Berkshire, and right up through Surrey into Greater London.

  ‘He’ll try to get back into London because he’s botched one killing.’ He put his hand on Suzie’s shoulder and filled in the blanks regarding Charlotte’s death: outlining his theory that Golly would possibly be obsessed with vengeance, his heart set on killing the right person. ‘Suzie’s agreed to be our tethered goat,’ he told them.

  She had agreed no such thing, but it stood to reason that the obvious way forward was to have her staked out in some quiet place where Golly could get at her. In any case she was so besotted with Dandy Tom that if he had said, ‘Stand on your head in the Dilly,’ she’d have gone straight down, done it and hang the indignity.

  ‘This is all Grade A blind, deaf and dumb stuff. The full three wise monkeys.’ As he had already told them, he had spent the past hour and a half pleading his case to the top brass of various police forces — the prime movers being the Commander (Crime) at the Yard; the chief constables of assorted counties, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who wanted the whole business tied up yesterday, or quicker if they could manage it. Nobody was going to be happy until Golly was under lock and key.

  Dandy Tom explained that he was more inclined to put a blanket over everything. There was a ninety per cent possibility that Golly was being manipulated. ‘Trust me,’ he said now, just as he’d already said to the top brass. It was almost impossible to get the powers that be to listen to him.