“No,” he says. “I have other things to think about.”
“Then let me do it,” I say.
“It’s our anniversary, Tina,” he says. “You can’t clean the floor tonight.”
I sigh. If I can’t clean the carpet, I might as well eat. “What’s for pudding?” I ask.
* * * *
7:40 p.m.
He thinks I’m joking.
I don’t push.
He already looks like he might cry and I don’t want to send him over the edge.
“Why did you stop working?” I ask him.
He looks at me, eyes dark and uncomprehending.
“You said you used to be a postman.”
He nods. That’s it, though,
I have to help him.
“Were you a postman for long?”
He plays with his fork again.
I anticipate another clatter.
“Five years,” he says.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Yeah.”
“So what happened?”
“They let me go.”
Another topic I shouldn’t have introduced. I’m on a roll.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.
“Me too,” he says.
And as I’m watching, he slams the fork into his hand.
Screams.
I scream too.
He wrenches the fork back out.
Blood’s leaking out of the four holes he’s made, running together, tracking down the back of his wrist.
“What the fuck?” I say. “What the fuck are you doing?”
His mouth’s open and he’s panting.
“He’s after me,” he says. “Don’t look at me like that. He is.”
“That’s maybe so, James,” I say. “But put the fork down and let’s see what you’ve done to your hand.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I feel better.”
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“It does,” he says. “But it takes a little pain to let the evil out.”
* * * *
7:42 p.m.
Holy shit.
I’m torn between legging it out of here and making sure James is okay. He needs to go to the hospital. Leave him here on his own and God knows what he’ll do to himself.
Between last year and now, he’s turned into a headcase.
Presumably there was nobody on the phone. He made all that up about somebody telling him he only had thirty minutes to live.
This guy who was after him was a figment of James’s fucked-up brain.
But the phone had rung. Someone had called.
I get to my feet.
* * * *
7:43 p.m.
“Where are you going?” he says. “Don’t leave me.”
He’s cradling his hand now.
“I’m going to check something out,” I tell him. “I’ll be right back.”
I walk over to the phone. Punch in the code to find out who just called.
And hear: You were called today at 7:30 p.m. The caller withheld their number.
So much for that theory.
* * * *
7:44 p.m.
“Let me take you to get your hand fixed,” I say.
“No.” He shakes his head hard.
“Then let me look at it.”
He thinks about it. Then relaxes. Holds his hand out to me.
It’s a bloody mess. The puncture wounds have coagulated, though. The blood’s stopped flowing.
Not that deep.
Good.
He’ll be okay.
“You got a first-aid kit?” I ask him.
“No,” he says.
“Antiseptic wipes? Plasters?”
He looks vague.
“A clean cloth? Water?”
He grins. “Of course.”
* * * *
7:46 p.m.
So I’ve got the stuff and I’m cleaning his hand.
He winces like I’m scraping my nails on his heart.
“How come you had to do that?” I ask him.
For a moment he forgets to act pained. “Huh?” he says.
“Stabbing yourself. Seems . . . extreme.”
He shrugs.
“You do that often?” I’ve never noticed any scars.
“My feet,” he says. “The soles of my feet.”
Ow.
“To let the evil out?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” he says.
Thing is, I do.
I do.
Me and razor blades, we go way back. Not that I’m going to tell James, though. None of his business.
He’s my business, not the other way round.
I opt for, “You’d be surprised.”
He gives me a look, winces again.
“You said he was after you,” I say, dropping the cloth in the bowl of water.
“This is going to bruise.” He flexes his fingers.
“I expect so. Who’s after you?”
“I can’t say.”
“Maybe I can help,” I tell him.
* * * *
7:47 p.m.
His words come out slow and staggered. I’ll summarize.
Started about a year ago when James began to feel he was being followed every time he walked home. Never spotted anyone, but just had the sense someone was watching him. Heard footsteps but couldn’t swear they weren’t echoes of his own.
And then he felt he was being followed whenever he left the house, too.
He started taking the car.
A vehicle always followed him. Not always the same vehicle, though. So it was sometimes hard to spot.
I wanted to ask him if he had surveillance cameras under his fingernails, and transmitters implanted in his brain.
I held my tongue.
He carried on. Told me how he was being watched all the time now. His stalker was close. Maybe watching him now. Him and me.
I say, “But if this is true, why does injuring yourself help?”
A textbook case of paranoia.
“Because of what I’ve done,” he says.
Do I want to know?
“If you tell me,” I say, “will you have to kill me afterwards?”
* * * *
7:50 p.m.
“My uncle came back,” he says.
He has an uncle?
“I thought you had no family,” I say.
He says, “He’s not really an uncle. He . . . went out with my mum for a while.”
“Came back from where?” I ask.
“Disappeared a long time ago,” he says. “Went off to Brazil. Never heard from him again. You assume the worst after a while.”
“So you thought he was dead?”
He nods.
“And he’s not?”
He nods again.
“And you stabbed yourself in the hand because of that?”
“No, no,” he says. “It’s a lot more complicated.”
I expected so. I look at my watch.
“Maybe you better keep it simple,” I say. “According to your uncle, you only have ten minutes to live.”
A cheap shot, I know.
So I’m a bitch. What can you expect from a whore?
* * * *
7:51 p.m.
“It wasn’t him,” James says. “I’d have recognized his voice.”
“But you do think he’s behind it?”
“Yes,” he says. “No question. He’s made my life hell since he’s been back.”
He flexes his fingers, a pained expression scrawled across his face.
“He must have hired somebody to make the call,” he says.
“And why would he do that?”
“To scare me,” he says.
“You think the threat’s serious?”
“Definitely.”
“James,” I say. “What did you do to him?”
* * * *
7:52 p.m.
He tells me.
“It’s not t
hat bad. Not the sort of thing you’d kill somebody for.
Listen:
“I torched his car.”
See?
“His dog was in it.”
Oh.
“But I didn’t know that.”
Still.
“And he said he’d have to leave the country or he’d kill me.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because of the dog.”
“No,” I say. “Why did you torch his car?”
“Because,” he says, and swallows. “He raped my mum.”
* * * *
7:53 p.m.
There’s not much more to it.
Uncle goes out with Mum. Mum calls it off after a few weeks. Uncle returns and rapes mum. She won’t go to the police, and who can blame her, the way we’re all made to feel like it’s our fucking fault. What were you wearing? As if that makes any fucking difference. Anyway, James torches dog and car. Uncle leaves country. Uncle returns several years later. Uncle’s still angry.
But there’s no way he’s still going to be murderously angry. Not after all that time.
I say, “He’s messing with you.”
James says, “No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Cause I know him. I know what he’s capable of.”
“Well,” I say, and I can’t think of anything to add, so I say, “well,” again and leave it at that. There’s only one way to prove to James that it’s all a hoax and that’s to sit it out with him. I owe him that.
After all, he’s paying for my time.
“I like dogs,” James says. “Honest.”
“I believe you,” I say.
* * * *
7:54 p.m.
Back in the sitting room, James keeps glancing towards the door.
He’s shaking all over, poor soul.
No, I do feel sorry for him. I do.
He did something he shouldn’t have. But he did it out of love. The dog was an accident.
But when I think about it, I can’t imagine a dog not barking. They’re territorial. A stranger approaches the car, close enough to set it alight, the dog would let him know it was there.
Wouldn’t it?
James is lying.
But why?
Is he lying about the whole event? Or is he just lying about the dog?
* * * *
7:55 p.m.
“You did it deliberately, right?”
“What?”
He knows what I mean.
I stare at him till he looks away.
He doesn’t deny it.
But I have to say it: “You killed the dog.”
He says, quietly, “It was an accident.”
“So why do you cut yourself? What evil is it you’re letting out?”
He makes that face again.
“Jesus,” I say. “How long ago was this?”
“I was seventeen.”
“Then it’s about time you forgave yourself,” I tell him.
“I can’t,” he says. “I can’t, Tina.”
“Well,” I say. “I don’t blame you, really.”
“You don’t?”
He starts to cry. Before long these horrible wracking sobs are jerking his shoulders up and down.
I put my arms round him, let him rest his head against my neck. His tears drip onto my neck, but what the fuck. I’m used to that.
“Thank you,” he squeezes out between sobs.
“Shhh,” I say, like he’s a baby.
* * * *
7:56 p.m.
He stops as suddenly as he started.
“How long?” he asks, wiping his eyes.
I tell him.
“I have to lock the door,” he says.
He jumps to his feet, runs through to the hall where I can’t see him any longer.
I hear him scrabbling about.
Then I don’t hear anything.
For a while.
For too long.
I get worried.
* * * *
7:58 p.m.
There’s no sign of him anywhere.
He’s not in the hall.
Not in any of the bedrooms.
Not in the bathroom.
He’s gone.
Did he leave of his own accord?
If so, why didn’t he tell me he was leaving?
Did his uncle sneak in, grab him, steal him away?
Sounds dramatic, and I don’t believe a word of it.
I check the front door. It’s locked. There we go.
It’s crazy, I know, but I go back through all the bedrooms, look in the wardrobes, under the beds. I check everywhere, but he’s definitely not here.
I’m feeling uncomfortable.
I get my things together.
I’m not hanging around here.
I’m going home.
* * * *
8:00 p.m.
Outside, the traffic’s busy.
Across the road, I see a face I recognize.
James.
He’s wearing that screwed-up expression, the one I’d never seen until I mentioned his father.
He’s standing by the curb, an older man in a long raincoat by his side.
I raise my hand, wave.
James stares right through me.
I shout to him.
The man in the raincoat thinks I’m shouting at him.
I can’t say whether James is pushed in front of the bus, or whether he steps in front of it.
The impact is swift and brutal.
He never had a chance.
I wet myself.
After the shock passes, I remember the man in the raincoat.
But he’s gone.
The bus has stopped.
The street is silent.
Nobody moves.
We’re frozen like this, like a painting, and I wonder if James still has that expression on his face.
<
* * * *
HEROES
Anne Perry
Nights were always the worst, and in I winter they lasted from dusk at about four o’clock until dawn again toward eight the following morning. Sometimes star shells lit the sky, showing the black zigzags of the trenches stretching as far as the eye could see to left and right. Apparently now they went right across France and Belgium all the way from the Alps to the Channel. But Joseph was only concerned with this short stretch of the Ypres Salient.
In the gloom near him someone coughed, a deep, hacking sound coming from down in the chest. They were in the support line, farthest from the front, the most complex of the three rows of trenches. Here were the kitchens, the latrines and the stores and mortar positions. Fifteen-foot shafts led to caves about five paces wide and high enough for most men to stand upright. Joseph made his way in the half dark now, the slippery wood under his boots and his hands feeling the mud walls, held up by timber and wire. There was an awful lot of water. One of the sumps must be blocked.
There was a glow of light ahead and a moment later he was in the comparative warmth of the dugout. There were two candles burning and the brazier gave off heat and a sharp smell of soot. The air was blue with tobacco smoke, and a pile of boots and greatcoats steamed a little. Two officers sat on canvas chairs talking together. One of them recited a joke—gallows humor, and they both laughed. A gramophone sat silent on a camp table, and a small pile of records of the latest music-hall songs was carefully protected in a tin box.
Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Page 48
