Snap_‘The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’ Val McDermid

by Belinda Bauer

  Louis’s girlfriend, Lorraine, had a proper job, and didn’t see why they should pay for childcare when Louis was at home all day.

  So Jack jiggled the buggy.

  He liked it here by the canal. It was quiet and smelled good, and sometimes there was a kingfisher skimming the surface of the water like a brilliant pebble.

  On the opposite towpath a large skewbald horse dragged a narrowboat so slowly that the water bent rather than rippled around the bow, and left a wake of lazy humps instead of waves. The horse was called Diamond, and the man who walked at his shoulder was Stan.

  They knew Stan, but he didn’t acknowledge them.

  Somebody might see.

  ‘One sixty-five,’ said Louis.

  ‘What?’ Jack was miles away. Hadn’t heard him.

  ‘One seventy then,’ said Louis, plucking pinkly at his knee. ‘As it’s you.’

  Jack laughed and they shook on it.

  Louis didn’t give him the money, and Jack didn’t give him the stuff. That wasn’t the way Louis worked. He never touched the goods or carried more than a few quid. When they parted, he would walk away and get one of his boys to leave the money in a place, and Jack would pick up the money and leave the stuff in that same place.

  Then on his way back from the lock, Stan would pick up the stuff and – with Diamond clopping alongside him – take it to Louis at another place.

  Not his home. Not the timber yard.

  Jack never asked where. That was Louis’s business, not his.

  It was all about trust.

  Jack watched Louis shave. Hairs too short to bend before the blade popped off his leg like sparks.

  ‘Sharp,’ said Jack.

  Louis twisted the knife in the sun to make it glint. ‘Jay Fisher,’ he said. ‘My proudest possession – apart from the Bazster, of course. Cost a fortune but it’ll last for ever.’

  And back to his shin …

  His was an obsession so weird that people gave him funny looks in the street. But Jack didn’t care how odd he was.

  Because Smooth Louis Bridge had saved his life …

  One morning – two years after his mother had left them – his father had gone to the shop for milk, and never come home.

  They’d waited for the milk for a week.

  Nobody missed them. They’d never been back to school after their mother’s death, just as their father had never been back to work. Arthur Bright had called it home schooling, but that was a grand term for not watching television between nine and three. And while the few neighbours in their short row had been kind in the immediate aftermath of their mother’s death, two years down the line they had returned to their own lives, their own troubles. The children had their father, after all – which was more than many could say in this day and age.

  With his father gone, it was the hard shoulder all over again. Jack was in charge, only this time he was frozen – not knowing whether to stay in the house or go out to find help.

  The priority was still to keep Merry from crying …

  He’d told her they were in an experiment and, for the first two days, it was almost like fun. Merry coloured in Donald’s shell with felt tips, while Jack read out loud to her about the Viet Cong. Joy, who’d always been the most conscientious student, opened her algebra but then just stared at the door, and chewed her pen so hard that it leaked blue on her lips.

  So Jack used what he had left of his pocket money to buy food, and then used Joy’s. It wasn’t much. By the fourth day, he roamed restlessly about the house, hunting for money and clues, while Joy sat on the sofa and cried.

  ‘Social Services will take us away.’

  ‘He’ll be back soon,’ Jack had insisted.

  ‘We’ll have to go into care,’ Joy had wept. ‘And then we’ll all be adopted!’

  ‘Shut up!’ Jack had hissed. ‘Or Merry will hear you.’

  ‘What’s adopted?’ said Merry.

  The electricity had run out on the fifth day, the food on the sixth. They’d gone to bed hungry and woken up hungry and Joy was still crying and then Merry started, and Jack didn’t know what to do.

  Mrs Coyle next door might have lent him a tenner – but now that Joy had mentioned adoption, Jack didn’t want anyone to know that their father hadn’t come home, in case that actually happened. The only relative they knew they had was Uncle Bill in Ireland, and they all agreed that they’d rather live in a box than with Auntie Una – even Merry, who’d never met her.

  On the seventh day, there was a knock at the door and Joy hissed, ‘Social Services!’ And the three of them had crawled under the living-room window and cowered behind the newspapers that were already piling up around the walls. Joy had held a finger to Merry’s lips, and Merry had brushed it away and whispered loudly, ‘I’m not talking!’

  A few minutes after they hadn’t answered the door, the little window over their heads had rattled and scraped and then somehow opened, and – to their utter astonishment – a young man with no eyebrows had slithered through the crack. He’d stopped when he’d found himself face to face with the three frightened children looking up at him, and hung there, folded in the middle and with his legs still outside the house.

  ‘Ahoy there!’ he’d saluted, and they’d all giggled.

  Within minutes of dropping hands-first into the front room, Louis Bridge had bypassed the meter and got the lights back on. Then he’d left and come back with cheeseburgers.

  While they had filled their bellies to drum skins, Smooth Louis had searched the house with a burglar’s eye and found an envelope with three hundred pounds in it in the toe of a tennis shoe in their father’s wardrobe, and a folder containing household bills and bank statements. He’d spent an hour running through what needed to be paid every month, and made a list for Jack.

  ‘We’ve taken care of the electric,’ he’d said, as if Jack had somehow been involved in that cleverness. ‘You think you can handle the rest?’

  ‘No,’ Jack had told him bluntly. ‘I’m thirteen.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So, what can I do?’

  Louis had looked him up and down for a minute, then said, ‘Plenty.’

  And that’s when he had started to teach Jack how to get into houses and stay out of prison.

  First – the basics: stay thin, wear gloves, secure your exit first, and always be ready with a lie and a smile. Then he’d taught him the ins and outs of the business of breaking and entering. Locks. Hinges. Catches. Flashings. PVC v. wooden windows. Phillips v. Velux star points. Which tools to carry so you couldn’t be done for going equipped; the best order of a search; what sold; what didn’t; who to trust (him) and who not to trust (everybody else) – and the basics of criminal law.

  ‘My brother’s a copper,’ he’d said once with pride. ‘I know all the tricks of the trade.’

  Jack had been brilliant at it from the start. Burglar was not a job he’d ever aspired to but he took it as seriously as if he’d signed for a Premiership football team. He was small and wiry and stole all the right food to keep himself that way. Fruit and veg and brown rice and chicken. He stole books on nutrition. When the opportunity arose, he stole organic. He did light weights, and stretched industriously, until he could touch his knee with his nose, and the back of his head with his heel.

  He stole enough to put money away for emergencies, until there was a secret bag with nearly two thousand pounds in it on top of the wardrobe in his room.

  Burglary was like magic to Jack. Like conjuring money.

  And food. And clothes and books …

  He always knew it wasn’t right, but his anger made it feel fair.

  Jack had never asked Louis why he’d decided to help them instead of rob them blind, he was only grateful for it. So, at a time in his life when he hadn’t trusted anyone, Jack had chosen to trust Smooth Louis Bridge – thief, fence …

  And liar.

  ‘Hey, Louis,’ Jack said tentatively. ‘You ever been inside?’

 
Louis stopped shaving and squinted at him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ shrugged Jack. ‘Just asking.’

  Louis frowned. ‘Once,’ he said, them turned back to his leg and continued to scrape sparks from his skin.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The cops happened,’ he snapped. Then he shook his head and Jack thought that was all he was going to say. But after a moment he went on, ‘I was up for B&E for the first time as an adult. Before that it had just been slap-on-the-wrist stuff, but I knew this time I could go inside, so I did a deal.’ He shook his head and snorted at his own stupidity. ‘I thought, give them something really tasty so I’d have a bit of leverage to plead it down, y’know? So I did, and they said thank you very much and took it and gobbled it up for dinner … and then they had me for afters anyway.’

  Jack’s eyes widened.

  ‘Four months inside. Just like that.’ Louis clicked his fingers, and nodded sombrely. ‘Don’t ever trust a copper, mate, whatever they promise you – those greedy bar stewards will always get you for something.’

  Baz grizzled but Louis continued to stare at Jack until he nodded his understanding of cops.

  ‘You all right to jiggle him?’ said Jack. ‘I got to go to HomeFayre.’

  ‘Nah, he needs to run around a bit or he’ll be up all night and Lorr will kill me.’ He got up and lifted the toddler out of the buggy. ‘All right, Baz mate? How you doing?’

  Baz screwed up his face and dropped his head on to his father’s shoulder.

  Louis rubbed Baz’s back, then took a scrap of paper from the tiny pocket of his son’s fat-with-nappy jeans and handed it to Jack.

  ‘Shawn says they’re in Thailand till Saturday.’

  ‘Cheers, mate.’

  ‘You remember what I said.’

  ‘I will.’

  Louis set Baz on the ground and clipped the dog lead to his belt loop. The little boy yawned and looked around – then made a beeline for the canal.

  Jack almost didn’t ask. ‘What did you give them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The cops. What tasty thing did you give them?’

  Louis gave a bitter laugh. ‘My old man.’

  Jack laughed too. Then he walked away towards Gold Street. Before he turned the corner, he looked back to watch as Louis expertly applied drag to the line to slow Baz down and bring him around in an arc, like a marlin.

  HOMEFAYRE SOLD EVERYTHING, but its USP was chaos.

  The window display was not unconventional for a small market town – casseroles, school supplies and sheep wormer – but HomeFayre customers must ideally have been born and bred in Tiverton to have any grasp of its random stock and bizarre layout, which had been created by a creeping annexation of neighbouring shops over many years. Immediately inside the door, the floor sloped steeply up to the back of the shop more than fifty yards away, and branched out sideways up and down the street, behind the doors and windows of other shops, like a big fat cuckoo tree.

  The bell on the door rang behind Jack and he leaned into the carpeted hill and climbed past greetings cards and frying pans, board games and lampshades, magic wands and thermal socks and litter bins, all the way to the back of the shop, where the floor and the ceiling threatened to meet, and tall regulars ducked, while tall tourists bumped their heads and smiled ruefully because it was all part of the charm.

  There – fully twenty feet above street level and under a wall of quiet clocks – Jack picked up a box of latex gloves, turned, and started his descent to the till.

  There were several routes down, and he took a different one. Sewing thread, fake flowers, car oil, icing bags, they passed him faster and faster as he picked up speed …

  Just before hair accessories he stopped, with some difficulty. Then he backed up the hill a little to look at a shelf full of photo frames – each with the same fake family smiling happily behind the glass: a girl, a boy, and a beach ball. Always a beach ball.

  Jack ran a narrow eye down the row of frames.

  He picked up two to compare them, then put one back.

  He only paid for the gloves.

  Then he remembered he’d warned Joy, so he walked up to the Busy Bee and cancelled the newspapers. Mr Dolan – the already morose newsagent – nearly cried.

  In the bedroom he rarely used, Jack edged through the stacks of papers, past the bed piled with news, to the window.

  He took the stolen photo frame from his pocket and studied it. The two children and the beach ball were a garish contrast to his own gloomy surroundings. They were so clean! Even their fingernails. Their hair was washed and their teeth were straight and white. He imagined the bedrooms they would have – all the toys and the books and the clean bedding – in homes filled with warmth and light and love.

  Jack slid the picture from the frame and crumpled it to the floor. Then he placed the empty frame on the sill.

  Somehow, having it there, ready and waiting, gave him hope that he might find the photo to fill it.

  He felt better for having it, even though he knew it was childish.

  Hope was hard to come by, and even a little bit went a long way …

  Jack drew back sharply at a movement in Mrs Coyle’s garden.

  For a year before she’d died, Mrs Coyle had been in a wheelchair and had rarely gone outside. She’d been deaf and cantankerous, and had no interest in getting involved with anything or anybody.

  Jack had liked her. He’d done her shopping, and mowed her lawn – always opening with ‘My dad sent me round’ to head off suspicion.

  But there was a new neighbour now. Merry had said so, and there she was. Thin but ramrod straight. She wore a straw hat, and carried a trowel in one hand and a black bucket in the other, but wasn’t dressed for gardening, in a pale pink shirt, white trousers and sandals.

  She didn’t do anything with the trowel – just walked to the centre of the patchy lawn and made a slow circle to survey her new domain – and beyond.

  As she turned his way, he withdrew even further from the window so that he was in shadow and could not be seen.

  But the old woman tilted her face up to the window, as if she knew he was there.

  Jack got a tiny rumble of disquiet in his gut.

  Even from here, the new neighbour looked nosy.

  IT WAS BEDTIME and Adam was at the back door, calling the cat.

  ‘Chiiiiips! Chiiiii-ips! Come on, Chips!’

  Catherine smiled to herself. Chips always made Adam beg. She never begged. She called, he came, or she locked him out for the night. Simple. Chips knew that, and always shot in from the garden like a furry white arrow. But he had Adam wrapped around his little claw, and wouldn’t come in until his own personal human had been thoroughly humiliated – whistling, wheedling, and shaking the box of treats like Barry Manilow on the maracas.

  The phone rang.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ she said, and heaved herself off the sofa at the second attempt.

  ‘Who can that be?’ she asked the baby, but the baby apparently didn’t know.

  ‘Hello?’

  Silence on the line.

  ‘Hello?’ she said again.

  ‘Chips! Come on, my good Chipper!’

  But nothing from the caller.

  Catherine opened her mouth to say ‘Hello’ a third time, then slowly shut it again. The silence was too deep, too dark, to be a fault on the line.

  Somebody was there. They just weren’t talking.

  The memory of the night of the knife dripped down the back of her neck, like slow black oil, coating her in slick fear.

  Somebody breathed shakily.

  Maybe it was her.

  Somewhere a long, long way away, Adam shook the box of treats as if he was at the Copacabana.

  ‘What do you want?’ whispered Catherine. And when no answer came immediately she said it again, like the start of a panic. ‘What do you want?’

  There was a small intake of breath.

  Then nothing. Onl
y the abyss in her ear.

  ‘What do you want?’ This time her voice was so low that she wasn’t even sure she’d made a sound.

  A long, low nothing. Had the person hung up?

  And then came a whisper – as quiet as her own – as if he, too, didn’t want to be overheard.

  ‘I could’ve killed you.’

  Catherine’s face went numb. She couldn’t feel her mouth.

  There was no menace in the voice. It was a statement of fact. No more, no less. But her legs felt like jelly, and she put a hand on the wall to steady herself.

  Then the seashell of silence was replaced by something close and technical, and Catherine knew he was gone.

  Slowly, she lowered the phone.

  Behind her, Adam said, ‘Who was it?’

  She didn’t turn around. ‘What?’

  ‘On the phone?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Wrong number.’

  She turned then. Adam had the cat in his arms, all fluffy and smug.

  ‘I hope they apologized,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly eleven.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said haltingly. ‘She said she was sorry.’

  Adam frowned at her. ‘You OK, Cath?’ he said. ‘You look a bit pale.’

  She gave a weak smile. ‘I think I got up too fast.’

  Adam spilled Chips from his arms and on to the floor. He steered Catherine gently back to the sofa, then knelt on the rug in front of her, looking up into her face anxiously. ‘Would you like some water? Or tea? I can make tea?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes please, sweetheart. Tea would be lovely.’

  She wanted him to go into the kitchen – go anywhere – so she wouldn’t have to pretend. Wouldn’t have to lie to him.

  But he stayed. ‘Are you sure that’s all?’ he said. ‘I can call the hospital. Get the bag …?’

  Her bag had been packed and beside the front door since her fourth month. Back then she could still wear size 12 jeans, and it had seemed surreal that she would ever need it. But now she looked at it every day, just to make sure it was still there. Sometimes she added things, or changed something for a better something.

  ‘It’s not the baby,’ she reassured him. ‘I just got up too quickly to answer the phone, I think. Went a bit dizzy.’