She smiles. He is very, very cold; this helps the pain but dulls his thoughts. He can see that her attitude is somehow wrong, but he cannot bring his sluggish thoughts to wonder why. She says, “I'm sorting things out."
"Hurry up ... please."
"It won't be long."
Another creak from the wheel.
* * * *
He said, “We could live here."
He wasn't talking to me, but to himself.
Was he also talking to his girlfriend ...?
And the money...
How far have your plans gone, Greg? How close are you to leaving me?
* * * *
Gilly is starting to feel strange. Her head is filling with all sorts of ideas and possibilities that have sprung into febrile activity, that scurry from corner to corner, feeding on all that has been done to her. She makes a last effort to control them, to counter the dizzying revolution in her mind.
She glances back at the phone, sees for the first time a time and date. It is from Nikki and it is full of anticipation, apparently agreeing to meet him that afternoon.
It is dated the sixth of June and it was sent at five minutes to two in the afternoon.
* * * *
It would all have been different if we could have had children. Perhaps that is what the problem was, the reason for his infidelity; I have not been able to give him children, could only promise him a handicapped baby...
This attempt is futile; worse, it is the fuel that causes the smouldering to erupt into conflagration.
No!
I'm being so stupid, so trusting, so blind.
He never wanted children. Not really. He was lukewarm about the idea, at best. He saw it as something to give to me, to shut me up. It probably would have suited him to give me a baby to look after; it would have been a distraction for me, while he bedded “Nikki,” pleasured her as she desired...
No, no, no!
God, how could I be so stupid?
He doesn't want me to have children! They would only complicate matters for him, make leaving me more problematic ... more expensive. His twenty-six thousand pounds wouldn't go too far then...
This serpent of thought is now alive and feeding hungrily. Within seconds it is all that there is in her soul.
* * * *
He made me abort Belle. He said that it was for the best, but whose best?
He made me murder her.
She might have been beautiful, like that little girl. Sweet and passive and somehow luminous in her innocence.
All so that his life would be easier, so that he could screw around.
He will say that he is leaving me because he wants children and I haven't given him any.
Gilly looks down at the phone, decides that it is time to call for help.
* * * *
There is yet another creak from the wheel.
Gilly looks down at Greg. He is only half conscious.
"Greg?” she calls.
He responds slowly, first of all looking around, only raising his eyes after a while. His face contains pain, his voice is husky, as if he has phlegm in his throat.
"Yes?"
"I've rung for help."
"Thank God..."
"She may take some time to get here."
He does not realise what she has said for a few seconds.
"She? Who do you mean?"
Gilly smiles.
"Nikki."
She enjoys the look on his face, savours it for a moment, then in a single movement grasps the plank of wood that is jamming the wheel.
"I hope she's in time,” she says.
She pulls the plank free and the wheel at once begins to turn. Greg screams, but it is a very short scream, ended abruptly as he is taken beneath the water and then wedged against the bed of the stream.
As Gilly walks out of the cottage she sees the little girl again. She is sitting on the wall of the bridge talking to a woman. The woman is laughing and joking with her, clearly her mother.
Gilly walks across to them to experience their shared pleasure.
* * * *
I will have a child one day. I will be free of this curse.
I am the same as I always was.
I am the same as I always was.
Copyright © 2009 Keith McCarthy
[Back to Table of Contents]
Fiction: GHOSTS by John Harvey
John Harvey's 100th work in print, the novel Far Cry, was released in spring of 2009 to critical acclaim. The book features Will Grayson and Helen Walker, the Cambridgeshire-based police detectives from his 2008novel Gone to Ground. In June, 2009, the Nottingham-based publisher Five Leaves brought out a small-format, hardcover, limited-edition collection of Harvey stories called Minor Key. Included are four previously uncollected stories featuring his famous series character Resnick.
* * * *
Art by Jason Eckhardt
* * * *
It was mid morning, and Kiley was in his office two floors above a charity shop in Tufnell Park, stranded between his second cup of coffee and his third. Investigations, read the ad in the local press, Private and Confidential.All kinds of security work undertaken. Ex-Metropolitan Police. The absence of carpet made it easier to hear footsteps on the stairs. A pause and then a knock.
She was late-thirties, dressed ten years younger, and looked all of forty-five, with the eyes of someone who woke up every day expecting to be disappointed and was rarely, if ever, disabused.
"Jack Kiley? Rita Barnes."
Her hand was all cheap rings and bone.
Kiley knew the name and a moment later he knew why.
"Bradford Barnes, he was my son."
The flowers had spread across the pavement close to the spot less than a hundred meters away where he'd been killed; tiny candles had burned through the night. Photographs and messages taped to the wall. Always remembered. A tragic waste. Bradford had been on the way home from a party, not late, a little after twelve, and had inadvertently brushed the shoulder of a young woman heading the other way. When he'd stopped to apologise, one of the men with her had raised his voice and then his fist. Punches flew and then a knife. When the group sauntered off laughing, they left Bradford where he lay. A still-warm statistic, choking on his own blood. The twenty-second young person to have been stabbed to death in the capital that year and still months to go. Gang stuff, drug deals gone sour; the wrong look, the wrong word, the wrong place at the wrong time. Respect.
"I remember,” Kiley said.
The flowers had long since faded and been swept away; the photographs torn down.
"A year ago next week he was killed,” Rita Barnes said, “three days short of his birthday, an’ the police still in't got a bloody clue."
She took an envelope from her bag and counted the notes out on his desk. “There's two hundred and fifty. I'll get more. Find the bastard as did it, okay?"
What was he supposed to say? It was a waste of his time and her money?
Well, he had the time.
When she'd gone, he put in a call to a DI he knew at the local nick. Jackie Ferris met him in the back room of The Assembly House, its dark wood panelling and ornamented windows harking back to palmier days.
"Not got a clue, that's what she says?” Still on duty, Ferris was drinking lemon and lime.
"She's wrong?"
"We've had more than a clue since day one. Jason Means. It was his girlfriend Barnes bumped into. He's got form and a mouth to go with it, but forensics didn't give us shit and, surprise, surprise, no one's talking. Least, not to us.” Ferris raised her glass. “You might have more luck."
* * * *
Rachel Sams lived on the seventh floor of an eight-floor block close to the closed-down swimming pool on Prince of Wales Road. Three of the flats on her level were boarded up and padlocked fast. The first two occasions Kiley called, she refused to open the door and then, when she did, it was only to slam it in his face. It took a fierce squall of rain—Rachel hunched agains
t the wind as she maneuvered a buggy laden with supermarket carrier bags and containing a wailing two-year-old—for Kiley to open negotiations.
"Here, let me help."
"Piss off!"
But she stood back while, after freeing the bags and handing them to her, he lifted the buggy and led the way.
Kiley followed her into the flat and, when she didn't complain, closed the door behind him. The interior was dominated by a wide-screen plasma TV, the furniture, most of it, third- or fourth-hand. Toys were scattered here and there across the floor. While Rachel changed the child's nappy, Kiley found a jar of instant coffee in the kitchen.
They sat at either end of the sagging settee while the boy piled wooden bricks on top of one another, knocked them down with a loud whoop, and started again.
"Darren, for Christ's sake."
"He's Jason Means’ boy?” Kiley said.
"What of it?"
"Jason see him much?"
"When he can be bothered."
"Bradford Barnes’ mother came to see me, a week or so back."
"So?"
"She wants to know what happened to her son."
"She buried him, didn't she? What else she wanna know?"
"She wants to know who killed him.Wants some kind of—I don't know—justice, I suppose."
"Yeah, well, she ain't gonna find it here."
Kiley held her gaze until she looked away.
* * * *
After that he called round every week or so, sometimes bringing a small present for the boy.
"Listen,” Rachel said, “if you reckon this is gonna get you into my knickers..."
But, stuck up there on the seventh floor, she didn't seem overburdened with friends and now, as soon as he arrived, Darren scrambled up into his lap and happily pulled his hair. Kiley hadn't mentioned Bradford Barnes again.
Ten days short of Christmas, the sky a low, flat, unpromising grey, he got round to the flat to find Rachel hurling bits and pieces over the balcony, tears streaming down her face.
"That bastard! That lousy bastard!"
Kiley tried to calm her down and she lashed out, drawing blood from his lip. When he finally got her back inside, she was still shaking; Darren cowering in the corner afraid.
"One of my mates rung an’ told me, he's only gettin’ married, i'n it? To that skanky whore from down Stockwell. Saw it in Facebook or somethin'.” Picking up a half-empty mug, she hurled it against the wall. “Well, he's gonna learn he can't treat me like that, i'n he? He's gonna pay."
Kiley listened while she told him what had happened that night, how Jason Means had stabbed Bradford Barnes three times, once in the neck and twice in the chest, and then walked off laughing. He phoned Jackie Ferris and listened while Rachel told her story again, then promised to look after Darren while the two of them went to the station so that Rachel could make a statement.
Three days later, Jason Means was arrested.
Rita Barnes had tears in her eyes when she came to thank him and ask what more she owed him and Kiley said to forget it, it was fine. He would have given the two-fifty back if it hadn't been for a little matter of paying the rent.
"You're sure?"
"Sure."
She kissed him on the cheek.
That night, Kiley walked past the spot where Bradford Barnes had been killed. If you looked closely, you could just make out the marks where the photos had been taped, a young man smiling out, his life ahead of him, ghosts on the wall.
Copyright © 2009 John Harvey
[Back to Table of Contents]
Fiction: RETURN TO SENDER by Val Davis
Husband and wife writing team Robert and Angie Irvine pair up here for a classical mystery. More often, they use their joint pseudonym, Val Davis, for thriller novels such as Track of the Scorpion and Flight of the Serpent. Both Robert and Angie, who each also write separately, made their fiction debuts in EQMM's Department of First, in 1973 and 1992, respectively.
The pigeonhole was stuffed. Bunny eyed the pigeon, her private name for postal boxes, with disfavor. It was cram-med so full that there was hardly room for the “box full” notice that she painfully managed to slip between a copy of Arts and An-tiques and a catalogue from The Sharper Image. The pigeon's owner, Don Rogers, was a collector of al-most anything and everything, from crystal chandeliers to real estate, and often neglected his box, to the inconvenience of postal workers like Bunny Booker, who would have to search out his excess mail when he came calling at his leisure.
She moved on to the next box and stopped. She ran a finger lovingly over the empty pigeonhole. It was her way of saying goodbye to an old friend. Reverently she sealed the pigeon. It would remain empty until a new resident applied for mail service in town.
Bunny sighed. In the nearly thirty years that she had worked for the post office in Carmel-by-the-Sea, each pigeonhole had become something like a friend. True, some she knew better than others. Some she knew not at all. But over the years she'd come to know hundreds of people, if not thousands. All because she diligently examined each piece of mail.
Because there were no street numbers in the town, the post office had more than seven thousand pigeonholes, each one representing a resident of Carmel and its environs, each protected by an ornate brass door, three inches by six, with a double-dial combination lock, as old as its old-fashioned look. Outsiders had boxes, too. Outsiders, by Bunny's reckoning, were all those people who could prove some association with the coveted 93921 ZIP code, either by owning property or a place of business. They might claim the address, but they didn't actually live in the one square mile that defined the town.
The sealed pigeon, number 7412, had belonged to the widowed Winnetta Belnap, whom Bunny had known since Sunset Grade School. Winnie, or Pooh, as Bunny had lovingly called her, had opened her pigeon door promptly at ten each morning, six days a week. Last week, when she'd missed two days in a row, Bunny went calling. When her knock at the front door went unanswered, Bunny headed for the police station and called on Chief Del Bennett, who at the sight of her got one of his long-suffering, spaniel looks.
"What is it this time, Elmira, another Peeping Tom?"
Del Bennet was the only person in town who still called her Elmira, her given name, which he had yelled every time he'd pulled her pigtails in grammar school. He'd been two grades behind her, but big for his age and something of a bully. Everyone else called her Bunny, since she started collecting stuffed bunnies as a teenager.
"I was right the last time, wasn't I?"
He sighed, progressing from spaniel to hound eyes. “How did you sneak into my office without an appointment?"
"How long have you known me, Delbert?” she said, her tone rebuking. “You don't think that young buck of a desk sergeant you've got out there could stop me."
"Just get to the point."
"It's Winnetta Belnap,” Bunny said firmly. “She hasn't picked up her mail and she didn't answer when I knocked on her door not five minutes ago."
The chief perked up. Winnetta Belnap, like Bunny Booker, was no spring chicken.
"I'll take a look while you go home and get some rest."
He said the same thing in the squad car, and again when they arrived at Winnie's, and all the way to the front door. When he forced his way inside, he told her to say behind, but Bunny, deaf when it suited her purposes, stayed beside him step for step. They both saw Pooh hanging there, from one of the open beams in her Comstock cottage.
That had been five days ago. Today's paper had run Pooh's obituary. She was a grandmother many times over, survived by four daughters, all scattered across the country. No one of modest means who hadn't lived in Carmel for decades could afford to live there now, since coastal real estate in California was more attractive than the 1849 gold rush. Cause of death was not mentioned. But then, suicide seldom was, that being the chief's unofficial verdict, despite Bunny's protestations.
"How did she climb up there?” Bunny had asked.
"See this c
hair?” The police chief pointed to a small, armless Victorian chair that lay overturned near the body. “She climbed up on that. Everybody knows you have to use a chair to hang yourself."
"Delbert, I've sat in that chair more times than I care to think of, and it's the lowest chair in the house. Winnie was a little bitty thing. There's no way that she could reach the rafters on that."
"Let's see,” the chief said, righting the chair and standing on it. The chair promptly collapsed under his weight. “Dang it, Elmira, look what you went and made me do. Now you've gone and made me destroy evidence. It was suicide, I tell you. Case closed."
No fool like an old fool, Bunny had thought. Delbert had never been the brightest bulb in the firmament, not even in kindergarten.
At work, Bunny clipped Pooh's obit and slipped it into an envelope for safekeeping. Later, she'd add it to her ever-growing scrapbook of departed friends.
How many were left now? she mused during lunch at the Little Swiss Cafe, one of the few local establishments left in the tourist-driven town. Mentally, she ticked off her childhood friends. The count was down to the fingers on one hand. The same fingers that ached most of the time. The same ailment had plagued Pooh. So how in the name of police stupidity had an arthritic old lady managed to reach up to an eight-foot-high beam and anchor a rope around it while standing on that low Victorian bridal chair?
Leaving her lunch half eaten, Bunny hurried back to the post office. There, once her work was done, she hovered near Chief Bennett's pigeonhole, 7277, waiting for him to make his daily pickup. The moment his pigeon door opened, she leaned close and blurted, “Winnie could never have reached that beam."
"Dammit, Elmira, you startled me."
"She was murdered,” Bunny persisted.
"Thanks to you, we'll never know, will we? The only piece of evidence was destroyed."
Bunny sighed. Delbert had always blamed others for his mistakes. What annoyed Bunny so much was that sometimes he got away with it.
"Besides, nothing was touched, nothing was taken. Nobody has a motive,” the police chief continued.
"Something has to be missing."
"What?"
"I don't know, but I sense it. Besides, at today's prices, her house is worth a fortune."
EQMM, September-October 2009 Page 24
