Copyright © 1998 by Peter Lovesey
“Because It Was There” was first published in Whydunit (Severn House) 1997;
“Bertie and the Boat Race” in Crime Through Time (Berkley) 1996;
“Bertie and the Fire Brigade” in Royal Crimes (Signet) 1994;
“Disposing of Mrs Cronk” in Perfectly Criminal (Severn House) 1996;
“The Case of the Easter Bonnet” in the Bath Chronicle, 1995;
“The Mighty Hunter” in Midwinter Mysteries 5 (Little, Brown) 1995;
“Murder in Store” in Woman’s Own, 1985;
“Never a Cross Word” in You ( Mail on Sunday) 1995;
“The Odstock Curse” in Murder for Halloween (Mysterious Press) 1994;
“A Parrot Is Forever” in Malice Domestic 5 (Pocket Books) 1996;
“Passion Killers” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, 1994;
“The Proof of the Pudding” in A Classic Christmas Crime (Pavilion) 1995;
“The Pushover” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, 1995;
“Quiet Please—We’re Rolling” in No Alibi (Ringpull) 1995;
“Wayzgoose” in A Dead Giveaway (Warner Futura) 1995.
Cover Painting by Carol Heyer; cover design by Deborah Miller
Crippen & Landru logo by Eric D. Greene
Crippen & Landru, Publishers
P. O. Box 9315
Norfolk, VA 23505
USA
Web: www.crippenlandru.com
E-mail: [email protected]
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
BECAUSE IT WAS THERE
BERTIE AND THE BOAT RACE
BERTIE AND THE FIRE BRIGADE
THE CASE OF THE EASTER BONNET
DISPOSING OF MRS CRONK
THE MIGHTY HUNTER
MURDER IN STORE
NEVER A CROSS WORD
THE ODSTOCK CURSE
A PARROT IS FOREVER
PASSION KILLERS
THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING
THE PUSHOVER
QUIET PLEASE—WE’RE ROLLING
WAYZGOOSE
FOREWORD
Are you sitting comfortably?
The appeal of a short story is that it may be read at a sitting, comfortably. In bed, bath, aircraft, cruise ship or train; waiting for one’s case to come up in court; under cover of a prayer book in church; propped up against the cornflakes packet over breakfast.
For the writer, also, compactness has attractions. Over the years I have plotted, if not written, short stories in many of the locations mentioned above. Occasionally an idea emerges from a few minutes in one memorable place. In this collection, “The Pushover” was inspired by the sunset celebration at Key West; “Bertie and the Boat Race” by a strange incident at the Henley Regatta; and “The Odstock Curse” by the sight of a gravestone on a dark day in a churchyard in Wiltshire.
To tell it to you straight, your comfort is not high in my priorities. If these stories are comfortable reading I am failing in my job. My hope is that you will find in them crimes that make your heart beat faster and twists that take your breath away. One or two at a sitting ought to be enough—which explains the title I chose.
Peter Lovesey
BECAUSE IT WAS THERE
They are dead now, all three. Professor Patrick Storm, the last of them, went in August, aged eighty-two, of pneumonia. The obituary writers gave him the send-off he deserved, crediting him with the inspiration and the dynamism that got the new theatre built at Cambridge. The tributes were blessedly free of the snide remarks that are almost obligatory two-thirds of the way into most of the obits you read—“not over-concerned about the state of his dress” or “borrowing from friends was an art he brought to perfection.” No such smears for Patrick Storm. He was a decent man, through and through. A murderer, yes, but decent.
The press knew nothing about the murder. I don’t think anyone knew of it except me. Patrick amazed me with it over supper in his rooms a couple of years ago. He wanted the facts made public at the proper time, and asked me to take on the task. I promised to wait until six months after he was gone.
This is the story. About January, 1975, when he had turned sixty, he received a phone call. A voice he had not heard in almost forty years, so it was not surprising he was slow to cotton on. The words made a lasting impression; he gave me the conversation verbatim. I have it on tape, and I’ll reproduce it here.
“Professor Storm?”
“Yes.”
“Patrick Storm?”
“Yes.”
“Pat, late of Caius College?”
“ ‘Late’ is the operative word,” said Patrick. “I was there as an undergraduate in the nineteen-thirties.”
“You don’t have to tell me, old boy. Remember Simon Brown?”
“To be perfectly frank, no.” He didn’t care much for that over-familiar “old boy.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” the voice at the end of the line said in the same confident manner. “I had a nickname in those days. You would have known me as ‘Cape’—short for ‘Capability’. Does it ring a bell now?”
Patrick Storm had not cast his thoughts so far back in many years. So much had happened since, to the world, and to himself. The thirties were another age. Faintly a bell did chime in his brain. “Cape, you say. Are you a Caius man yourself?”
“The Alpine Club.”
“Oh, that.” Patrick had done some climbing in his second year at Cambridge. Not much. He hadn’t got to the Alps. The Welsh Mountains on various weekends. He didn’t remember much else. So “Cape” Brown had been one of the Alpine Club people. “It’s coming back to me. Didn’t you and I walk the Snowdon Horseshoe together, with another fellow, one Easter?”
“Climbed, old boy. Climbed. We weren’t a walking club. The other chap was Ben Tattersall, who is now the Bishop of Westbury, would you believe?”
“Is he, by Jove?”
“You remember Ben, then?”
“Certainly, I remember Ben,” said Patrick in a tone suggesting that some people had more right to be remembered than others.
Cape Brown said, “You wouldn’t have thought he’d make it to Bishop, not the Ben Tattersall I remember, telling his dirty joke about the parrot.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“The parrot who worked for the bus conductor.”
“Oh, yes,” said Patrick, pretending he remembered, not wanting to prolong this. “What prompted you to call me?”
“Old time’s sake. It’s coming up to forty years since we asked some stranger to take that black and white snapshot with Ben’s box Brownie on the summit of Snowdon. April 1st, 1936.”
“As long ago as that?”
“You, me and Ben, bless him.”
“If what you say is right, he can bless us,” Patrick heard himself quip.
Cape Brown chuckled. “You haven’t lost your sense of humour, Prof. Might have lost all your other faculties—”
“Hold on,” said Patrick. “I’m not that decrepit.”
“That’s good, because I was taking a risk, calling you up after so long. You could have had a heart condition, or chronic asthma.”
“I’ve been fortunate.”
“Looked after yourself, I’m sure?”
“Tried to stay fit, yes.”
“Excellent. And you’re not planning a trip to the Antipodes this April? You’re game for the climb?”
“The what?”
“The commemorative climb. ‘Walk’, if you insist. Don’t you remember? Standing on the top of Snowdon, we pledged to come back and do it again in another forty years. The first suggestion was fifty, but we modified it. Three old blokes of seventy might find it difficu
lt slogging up four mountain peaks.”
Patrick had no memory of such a pledge, and said so. He had only the faintest recollection of standing on Snowdon in a thick mist.
“Ben didn’t remember either when I phoned him just now, but he doesn’t disbelieve me.”
“I’m not saying I disbelieve you . . .”
“That’s all right, then. Ben has all kinds of duties for the Church, but Easter is late this year, and April 1st happens to fall on a Thursday, so he thinks he can clear his diary that day. He’s reasonably fit, he tells me. Does a fair bit of fell walking in the summer. You’ll join us on the big day, won’t you?”
It would have been churlish to refuse when the bishop was going to so much trouble. Patrick said he would consult his diary, knowing already that the first week in April was clear. “Where are you suggesting we meet—if I can get there?”
A less decent man would have made an excuse.
* * *
April 1st, 1976, in the car park at Pen-y-pass. The three sixty-year-olds faced each other, ready for the challenge. “We may have deteriorated in forty years, but the equipment has improved, thank God,” Cape Brown remarked when the first handshakes were done.
Ben the bishop allowed the Almighty’s name to pass without objection. “I think I was wearing army boots from one of those surplus stores,” he said. He looked every inch the fell-walker in his bright blue padded jacket and trousers and red climbing boots. Patrick remembered him clearly now, and he hadn’t altered much. More hair than any of them, and still more black than silver.
If the weather was favourable, the plan was to walk the entire Horseshoe, exactly as they had in 1936. A demanding route that each of them now felt committed to try. And a sky of Cambridge blue left them no last-minute get-out. There was snow on the heights, but most of the going would be safe enough.
“Just before we start, I’d like you to meet someone,” Cape said. “She’s waiting in the car.”
“She?” said Patrick, surprised. He had no memory of women in the Alpine Club.
“Your wife?” said the bishop.
Patrick could not imagine why a wife should be on the trip. What was she going to do while they walked the Horseshoe? Sit in the car?
“A friend. Come and meet her.”
She was introduced as Linda, and she was dressed for climbing, down to the gaiters and boots. However, she was far too young to have been at Cambridge before the war. “You don’t mind if Linda films us doing bits of our epic?” Cape said. “She won’t get in our way.”
“She has a cine-camera with her?” said the bishop.
“You’ll see.”
Linda, dark-haired and with an air of competence that would have seemed brash in the young women of the nineteen-thirties, opened the boot of the car and took out a professional-looking movie-camera and folding tripod.
“I didn’t know you had this in mind,” Patrick said confidentially to Cape Brown.
“I thought it was just the three of us,” the bishop chimed in.
“Three men.”
“Don’t fret. She’ll keep her distance, Ben. Just pretend she isn’t there. How do you think they film those climbs on television? Someone is holding a camera, but you never see him. We’re the stars, you see. Linda is just recording the event. And she’s a bloody good climber, or she wouldn’t be here.”
In the circumstances it was difficult to object. Nobody wanted to start the walk with an argument. They set off on the first stage, up the Miners’ Track towards Bwlch y Moch, with Cape Brown stepping out briskly between the blue-black slate rocks and over the slabs that bridged the streams. Linda, carrying her camera, followed some twenty yards behind, as if under instructions not to distract the threesome on their nostalgic trip.
They paused on Bwlch y Moch, the Pass of the Pigs. Below, Llyn Llydaw had a film of ice that the sun had yet to touch. They hadn’t seen a soul until now, but there were two climbers on the coal-black cliff across the lake. “Lliwedd,” said the bishop. “I remember scaling that with the Alpine club.”
“Me, too,” said Cape. “Wouldn’t want to try it at my age. Shall we move on, gentlemen?”
The path leading off to the right was the official start of the Horseshoe. Crib Goch, the first of the four peaks, was going to be demanding as they got closer to the snowline. Towards the top it would need some work with the hands, steadying and pulling.
Once or twice Patrick Storm looked back to see how Linda was coping. She had the camera slung on her back and was making light work of the steep ascent.
After twenty minutes, weaving upwards through the first patches of snow, breathing more rapidly, Pat Storm was beginning to wonder if he would complete this adventure. His legs ached, as he would have expected, but his chest ached as well and he felt colder than he should have. He glanced at his companions and drew some comfort from their appearance. The bishop was exhaling white plumes and wheezing a little, and Cape Brown seemed to be moving as if his feet hurt. He had given up making the pace. Patrick realised that he himself had become the leader. Aware of this, he stopped at the next reasonably level point. The others needed no persuading to stop as well. They all found rocks to sit on.
“In the old days, I’d have said this was a cigarette stop,” Patrick said. “Time out to admire the view. I’m afraid it’s necessity now.”
The bishop nodded. He looked too puffed to speak.
Cape said, “We set off too fast. My fault.”
They spent a few minutes recovering. Each knew that after they reached the summit of Crib Goch, the most challenging section of the whole walk lay ahead, a razor-edged ridge with a sheer drop either side, leading out to the second peak, Crib-y-Ddysgl.
Presently a cloud passed across and blotted out the sun. The cold began to be more of a problem than the fatigue, so they went on, with Patrick leading, thinking what an idiot he had been to agree to this.
Unexpectedly Cape said, “Tell us a joke, Ben. We need one of your jokes to lift morale.”
The bishop managed an indulgent smile and said nothing.
Cape moved shoulder to shoulder with him. “Come on. Don’t be coy. Nobody tells a dirty joke better than you.”
Patrick called across, “We’re not undergraduates, Cape. Ben is a bishop now.”
“So what? He’s a human being. You and I aren’t going to think any the worse of him if he makes us smile. He isn’t leading the congregation now. He’s on a sentimental walk with his old oppos. Up here, he can say what he bloody well likes.”
They toiled up the slope with their private thoughts. Climbing did encourage a feeling of comradeship, a sense that they were insulated from the real world, temporarily freed from the constraints of their jobs.
Cape would not leave it. “The one that always cracked me up was the bus conductor and the parrot. Remember that one, Ben?”
The bishop didn’t answer.
Cape persisted, “I can’t tell it like you can. I always get the punchline wrong. This bus conductor was on a route through London that took him to Peckham via St Paul’s and Turnham Green. He got fed up with calling out to people, ‘This one for Peckham, St Paul’s and Turnham Green.’ ”
“No,” said Ben unexpectedly. “You’re telling it wrong. He was fed up with shouting, ‘This one for St Paul’s, Turnham Green and Peckham.’ ”
“Right,” said Cape. “I can’t tell them like you can. So what happened next? He bought a parrot.”
The bishop said in a monotone, as if chanting the liturgy, “He bought a parrot and taught it to speak the words for him. And the parrot said the thing perfectly. Until one day it got in a muddle, and said, ‘Bang your balls on St Paul’s, Turnham Green and Peckham.’ ”
Cape Brown made the mountainside echo with laughter and Patrick felt compelled to laugh too, just so that it didn’t appear he disapproved. The joke was at the level of a junior school of forty years ago. Odd, really, that a bishop should have retained it all this time, but then not many risqué jokes are
told to bishops.
Ben Tattersall’s face was already pink from the effort of the climb. Now it had turned puce. He took a quick glance over his shoulder.
Fortunately Linda and her camera were well in the rear.
The cloud passed by them, giving a stunning view of the Glyders on their right.
Scrambling up the last steep stretch, they reached the summit of Crib Goch in sunshine. Ahead, the mighty expanse of Snowdon was revealed, much of it gleaming white. Cape Brown unwrapped some chocolate and divided it into three.
“Shouldn’t we offer some to your friend Linda?” Patrick asked.
“She’s not my friend, old boy. She’s just doing a job.”
And when Linda caught up, she did her job, circling them slowly with the camera, saying nothing.
“So what’s the world of academia like?” Cape asked Patrick, when the filming was done and they were resting, trying not to be intimidated by the prospect of the next half-hour. “At each other’s throats most of the time, are you?”
“It is competitive at times,” Patrick confirmed.
“And is it still a fact that a pretty woman can get a first if she’s willing to go to bed with the prof?”
“In my case, definitely not.”
“A clever woman, then.”
“A clever woman gets her first by right,” Patrick pointed out.
“The clever ones don’t always have the confidence in their ability,” said Cape. “They can be looking for another guarantee.”
“I won’t say it hasn’t happened.”
“We’re all ears, aren’t we, Ben?” said Cape.
The bishop gave a shrug. He was staring out at the black cliffs of Lliwedd. He’d looked increasingly unhappy since finishing the joke about the parrot.
Patrick sympathised. Out of support for the wretched man, he felt an urge to be indiscreet himself, to share in the impropriety up there on the mountain. “There was a student a few years ago,” he said.
“Quite a few years, I ought to say. She was very ambitious not merely to get a first, which was practically guaranteed because she was so brilliant, but to beat the other high flyers to a research scholarship.”
Do Not Exceed the Stated Dose Page 1
