That second night in the pub. On her own. Said she needed someone to take care of something for her. Someone she could trust.
Threat management.
Tony. The one who gave her the broken arm. Who thought women were there to do what he wanted. Who couldn’t take no for an answer. Who claimed they were never an item in the first place but couldn’t accept it when she dumped him. Who threatened to hurt her even more.
Hurt her bad.
Wanted someone to do that to him.
And once he was gone she would be grateful. Very grateful.
I was out of the bushes, adrenalin pumping the stiffness out of my legs, straight on him. My arm round his neck, his head in a tight lock, I pulled hard as I could, cutting off his air supply. He choked and gurgled. I pulled harder. Got my mouth close to his ear, said something unpleasant of my own.
He kept struggling.
With my other hand I grabbed for the knife, twisted him round. Saw fear in his eyes. Knew that feeling well. Had enough of that in the army. When you’re up against something you don’t know, something that could kill you. For me it was in Basra in Iraq. It was shellshock. It was anger. It was things I did there that I know will haunt me till I die. What I got thrown out of the army for. For him it was someone bigger and harder than him when he was only used to hurting girls.
He let her go. Now it was just him and me.
I heard her voice.
Take him . . . do it . . .
I twisted his hand, felt something snap. He dropped the knife. Gave a strangled gasp. I still had him round the throat, didn’t want to let him get away. I pulled harder. Even in the darkness I could see him start to change colour.
I started to pull him away. Just like we planned. Into the bushes round the back of the flats, give him a talking to, get a bit heavy, teach him a lesson. Threat management. Dead easy. I started to drag him away.
Didn’t get very far.
Because she was there, in front of him, on his chest. Calling him stuff that I would never have imagined she would ever say, stuff even I wouldn’t say out loud.
Hissing at him, her voice low, like liquid hate pouring out of her mouth. I was stunned, she was like a whole different person. An angry, nasty, venomous one. I didn’t know her.
The gurgling sound in his throat changed tone. I looked down. She had the knife in both hands and it was buried in his chest, right up to the hilt. Blood pooling round it, running down, staining through his clothes.
She stepped back, stared. Smiled. It wasn’t pretty.
I didn’t know what to do, I was too stunned to react. I left go of him, let him drop. He crumpled to the ground.
Ambulance ... I said. Oh, Jesus Christ, call a fucking ambulance . . .
She gave me a look, shook her head with a look on her face like she was laughing at sadness, then ran inside the block of flats.
I looked at him. Felt helpless. No phone, like I said. Just stood there, with this bloke I didn’t know but was supposed to hate because she had said so, watching the life drain out of him, his face wet with tears and rain.
He flopped and squirmed, like a fish hooked out of water and gasping, trying to get its gills to work properly and failing.
I don’t know how long I stood there. But it didn’t seem long before the sirens arrived. Police and ambulance. The works. Suppose I should have felt important.
She came out of the flat then. In tears. Looked like her old self, the one I had enjoyed being with so much. The pretty one, beautiful and vulnerable.
The one I absolutely, honestly, hadn’t fallen in love with.
I heard her talking to the police. Picked out words.
Delusional.
Alcoholic.
Dangerous. Anger management issues.
Mental problems.
I said nothing. Just stared at her. Stood there in the rain with my parka hood up, face in shadow like some horror movie monk.
Threat management. I could have laughed.
She was a solicitor. A legal mouthpiece.
I forgot that.
She was clever.
They put me in the car. I let them. No sense in arguing. Drove me to the station, processed me, stuck me in an interview room. I told them everything. Everything I’ve said here.
Well, they listened, I’ll give them that.
Then they went out. Left me.
And here I am. I don’t know when they’ll be back, but it doesn’t matter. Because I know what they’ll do with me. I know what’s going to happen. And it’s nothing like the future I was planning a few days ago.
The fantasy future. If anything was delusional, that was.
So what can I do now? Nothing.
But at least I’ve told the truth. I didn’t make it up.
Honest.
I’ve told it exactly how it happened. Exactly.
So I suppose that’s something. I suppose that’s progress.
<
* * * *
FINGERS TO THE BONE
Andrew Taylor
1: The Arteries of Wealth
Robbie Trevine saw Mary Linnet before she saw him. She was standing under the archway, tucked in the angle between the wall and a trolley laden with corded boxes. She wore a dark cloak that belonged to her mother, and she had drawn up the hood, holding it across her face with her hand. Her fingers were white and thin, like bones.
Two trains had recently come in, one of them Robbie’s, and people hurried through the archway to the city of Bristol beyond. He wriggled through a group of soldiers, arrogant in scarlet and gold, and touched her on the arm. She flinched and pulled away, jarring her shoulder on the wall. She glared at him as if he were a stranger.
“Mary, what is it? It’s me.”
“Creeping up like that! You scared the life out of me!”
“What are you doing? Collecting?”
“No.” She looked away. “Not today.”
Sometimes Mary collected money for the Rodney Place Missionary Society, though usually she took her box up the hill to Clifton or down to Queen’s Square, where the pickings were better because the people were rich enough to afford to be generous. Sometimes she was sent further afield, to Bath or Chippenham or Swindon. The railways had made the world smaller, more manageable.
“So why are you here?” Robbie asked.
“Taking the air.”
“Here? At Temple Meads?”
“Why not? The doctor brought a nurse, Mrs. Allardyce. She’s sitting with Ma.”
“How is she?”
“No better. Worse, if anything. And what are you doing here?”
“Tried for a job. Just digging, that was all. Foundations for a signal box. But they’d already—”
“Robbie,” she cut in. “Go now, please. Go.”
He gawped at her. “But why?”
A door had opened on the other side of the porter’s trolley. A man laughed. A cloud of cigar smoke wafted through the air.
Mary gripped his arm. “Too late. Look at that notice. You don’t know me.”
“You’ve lost your wits.”
“Just do as I say.”
He turned away and pretended to study a notice concerning the transport of livestock on the Great Western Railway. The fact that he could read it all was due to Mary’s mother. Several gentlemen emerged through the doorway. They exchanged farewells and most of them strolled through the archway to waiting carriages.
But two of the gentlemen lingered. Side by side, cigars in hand, they surveyed the seething crowds. Porters shouted and cursed. Trains murmured and hissed and rattled. The sounds rose to the high vault of the roof.
“Ten years ago this wasn’t here, Sir John,” said the younger and smaller of the two. “Twenty years ago it was barely conceivable. Thirty years ago it would have been beyond the wildest dreams of an opium eater.”
“Impressive, I grant you,” answered his companion, a white-haired gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age. “But the noise is intolera
ble.”
“Noise? Yes, indeed. It’s the sound that money makes. The Great Western Railway has restored prosperity to the towns it touches. Railways are the arteries of wealth. As you yourself will discover, I trust, when the Lydmouth and Borders Railway is built.”
“You go too fast for me, sir.”
“Because there is no time to waste!” cried the younger man, waving his cigar. “The fruit hangs ripening on the tree. If we do not pluck it, then someone else will. Which is why my directors and I are so desirous of your joining us on the board. Where Sir John Ruispidge leads, other men will follow. Your position in the county, sir, your influence with the administration, your friends in Parliament—you have it in your power to smooth our way considerably and, I may add, to reap a just reward for doing so. Once the line is built, you may transport your coal at a fraction of the price you now pay, and at many times the speed. The general prosperity the railways bring—the freer movement of people and capital—cannot but have a benevolent effect on the fortunes of all those concerned.”
“Ah, but the investment must be considerable. Nothing will come of nothing, as the Bard tells us.”
“I speak from experience. You must allow me to show you the figures from South Devon.” There was another wave of the cigar. “And consider the convenience of it. You will be able to travel from your country seat to your house in town within a day, and in the utmost comfort. If Lady Ruispidge desires quails in aspic from Fortnum’s, they could be on her table within a few hours.”
“You are a persuasive advocate.” Sir John took out his watch. “Alas, I must leave you until tomorrow.”
“Good God! Is that a Breguet watch?”
“It is indeed. You have sharp eyes, Mr. Brunel.”
Robbie’s eyes swung towards the little man. The great Brunel himself!
“I trust I have a sharp eye for any piece of machinery so elegantly conceived and finely constructed as one of Monsieur Breguet’s watches. But in this case I have a personal interest. My father sent me as a very young man to work for Monsieur Breguet in Paris. He told me there was no better person from whom I might learn what I needed.”
Watch in hand, Ruispidge bowed. “Your father was indeed a man of perspicacity.”
The watch was dangling on its chain from the old man’s hand, swinging to and fro like a pendulum, coming perilously close to the wall. Mr. Brunel, Robbie thought, was growing agitated for the watch’s safety.
At that moment, the world tilted on its axis and became an entirely different place. Mary came to life. His friend Mary, whom Robbie had known since he was a child in short-coats; who had played the part of sister to him for most of his life; who went to church at least once, usually twice, on Sundays—his friend Mary, with whom he was more than half in love—well, she picked up her cloak and skirt with her left hand and ran forward, keening like a madwoman.
She snatched the old man’s watch from his hand. Sir John and Mr. Brunel froze, both with their cigars moving towards their open mouths. Mary dived into the crowded station yard, dodging among the carriages and horses and wagons until she was lost in the seething mass of humanity.
* * * *
2: A Gown of Yellow Silk
Robbie Trevine lodged above a cobbler’s near the market, where they let him sleep under the rafters in return for sweeping floors and running errands. By the time he had finished his jobs for the evening, the sky was darkening. He slipped out of the house and made his way to Hotwells, to the damp and crowded house by the river where Mary and her mother lodged in a tiny room up four pairs of stairs.
Mary opened the door. When she saw him, she stepped back to allow him into the room. He glanced towards the curtained alcove beside the empty fireplace.
“She’s asleep,” Mary whispered. “The doctor gave her something.”
“Give my love when she wakes.”
Robbie reckoned that Mrs. Linnet had given him more love than his own mother, though that wasn’t hard because, when he was three years old, his mother had gone off for a few days’ holiday with a Liverpool publican and never come back.
Mary’s face was impossible to read in that shadowy room. “I was afraid you’d come.”
“Why did you do it? Why did you steal the gent’s watch at the station?”
“I had to do something. The doctor don’t come cheap, and Ma needs medicines, and proper food. The nurse is coming back later this evening. It all costs money.”
“But if they catch you—”
“They won’t.”
“But selling something stolen is almost as risky as taking it in the first place.”
She shrugged and turned her head away from him. “There’s someone I know.”
“This isn’t the first time, is it?”
Mary said nothing. They listened to the breathing of the sick woman.
Robbie said: “I’d do anything to help. You know that.”
“Go now,” she said. “Just go. I don’t want you here.”
Robbie stumbled out of the room. He crossed the street and took shelter in the mouth of the alley on the other side. There was a tavern on the corner, and the constant bustle of the place made him almost invisible.
A distant church clock chimed the quarters and the hours. He calculated that he waited nearly an hour and a half before Mary appeared in the doorway of her house. She was hooded and cloaked as before, but he would have known her anywhere. She set off up the street, her wooden pattens clacking on the cobbles. He followed her, holding well back, keeping to patches of shadow and varying his pace. Soon they began to climb towards the dark mass of Clifton Wood.
Mary followed the rising ground towards the Downs in the northwest. They were not far from the tower of Brunel’s unfinished suspension bridge, looming over the Gorge and the river Avon. Before she reached the Downs, however, Mary turned into a terrace of great stone-faced houses set back from the road. Only one of the houses had shuttered windows, and this was the one she approached. Robbie, watching from across the street, saw her dark figure descending into the basement area in front of the house.
He crossed the road. A plate had been screwed to one of the gateposts. It was too dark to decipher the words engraved upon it. He ran his fingertips over the brass, tracing the cold metallic channels of each letter.
THE RODNEY PLACE MISSIONARY SOCIETY
Mary knocked on the basement door. A candle flame flickered in the black glass of a nearby window. Bolts scraped back. The door opened.
“Child,” said Mr. Fanmole in his soft voice. “You are long past your time.”
“I beg pardon, sir. The nurse was late and I couldn’t leave my mother.”
When she was inside, Mr. Fanmole closed and bolted the door. He wore a long grey dressing gown of a silken material that gleamed in the candlelight; his little head was perched on a broad neck that rose from narrow shoulders.
“Come, child.” He led the way along a whitewashed passage vaulted with brick, his shadow cavorting behind him on the wall. “You saw him?”
“Yes, sir. He came out with the other gents, and then he stopped for a while and talked with one of them. Mr. Brunel himself.”
She followed Mr. Fanmole into a room at the back of the house. A coal fire burned in the grate and there were shutters across the two windows. He sat down at a mahogany table laden with papers and angled his chair to face the fire. He beckoned her to stand before him.
“Well, child? What did you learn?”
“He’s interested in a new railway, but he hasn’t made up his mind. He’s lodging at the Great Western Hotel. And ... and I took his watch.”
Mr. Fanmole slapped the palm of his hand on the table, and his pen fell unnoticed to the carpet. “I told you to be discreet, you little fool. This was not an occasion for thieving.”
“But he was playing with it, sir, just asking for it to be prigged. And my ma, she’s took bad again, and she needs a nurse as well as a doctor—and it’s a good watch, too, sir. You give me a sovereign for
the last one, and I’m sure—”
“Hold your prattle.”
Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Page 56
