‘We had a house in Chatham,’ she continued. ‘Our housekeeper’s family were in the East End and of course she was terribly worried, and when she got the news her father had died, well, we all thought, bloody Germans. It transpired, however, that he was a famous drunk. They lived in a tenement. You won’t remember tenements, they’re all gone now. Anyway, he had gone out one night and got very badly drunk and arrived home in such a state that he fell asleep downstairs in front of the fire, with his mouth open. When they found him dead the next morning nobody knew quite what had killed him, so they cut him open.’ She popped her last forkful of egg into her mouth. ‘His stomach was full of beetles. All those places were infested. The beetles had smelt the beer and climbed in and choked him.’
I swallowed. She looked at me.
‘That’s what my book is based on. Do you think it’s a good idea?’
‘The snails did it?’ I asked, unable to keep a note of incredulity out of my voice.
‘Well, in a way,’ she replied. ‘But they had help, of course. You can’t have a murder story and finish it with a load of molluscs being the guilty party.’
I leant back in my chair. ‘It sounds original.’
‘The thing is,’ she said, blowing her nose on her napkin, ‘I’m worried that it’s a bit tasteless, now that there really has been a murder round here. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that was what had given me the idea.’
‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that,’ I said carefully.
She shrugged.
I left Miss Crabbe just after eleven, skipping the few feet between our front doors. As I opened my own door, I paused and looked behind me.
The lane was dark, the sky flesh-soft and starless. There was a breeze so faint it was scarcely detectable; a long, slow exhalation from the surrounding countryside.
There was a copper-beech hedge opposite the cottages, untrimmed and clotted with dry brown leaves. It seemed odd to me that the leaves were so dead and crisp at that time of year, when everything else was green and babyish. They rattled lightly, as if the hedge was full of locusts.
I always double-lock my doors and check the bolts, but that night I did it twice. Two people had been killed nearby, just over a week ago.
In my bedroom, I huddled down under the duvet and listened to the comforting clumping of Miss Crabbe walking up and down her teak gallery. Perhaps I should have asked her back here to check my windows, I thought. I fell asleep thinking about beetles, aware of the nothingness outside.
I was in work early the following day. Our deadline was approaching. Doug and Cheryl were there already.
The photofit had arrived and was sitting on my desk. I pulled off my coat as I sat down. Cheryl was making me a coffee.
‘The quality is really good,’ she said, as she approached me, mug in hand. ‘Doug thinks we should definitely go with it.’
I was looking down. Cheryl put the coffee on the edge of my desk but I scarcely registered her action, reaching out for it with an automatic hand. I was staring at the photofit, wondering if I was imagining it – but the more I stared the more certain I became. The hair was longer. There was no earring. The nose was a little too big and I didn’t know that he owned a pair of loose red trousers – but they were just the sort of thing he would have picked up on his travels. It looked like Andrew, my brother.
4
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
Raymond Chandler
The Simple Art of Murder
Miss Crabbe’s favourite was Have His Carcase. She would often flick through it in search of inspiration. ‘Carcase’ was a wonderful word. A lesser writer would have used ‘corpse’ – but you could always rely on Dorothy to move beyond the expected phrase. That was why, in Miss Crabbe’s opinion, she was streets ahead of boring old Agatha Christie. ‘Agatha Crispy’, Miss Crabbe called her – all that brisk prose.
The discovery of the body was the most important single event in a murder story – far more important than the murder itself, which usually happened off-stage and quite right too. She couldn’t stand those modern novelists who went in for graphic garrotting and exploding eyeballs. How tasteless to describe all those horrible things happening to a living person.
A dead person was fair game. You could be as horrible as you liked to the dead – the more horrible the better. It was important to establish from the outset that your victim was a thing, a conundrum.
Harriet put the head down again and felt suddenly sick. She had written often enough about this kind of corpse, but meeting the thing in the flesh was quite different. She had not realised how butcherly the severed vessels would look, and she had not reckoned with the horrid halitus of blood, which steamed to her nostrils under the blazing sun. Her hands were red and wet. She looked down at her dress. That had escaped, thank goodness.
Miss Crabbe learnt something every time she re-read Have His Carcase. It was vital, for instance, that your protagonist was shocked. It would be very bad form if they weren’t.
‘Butcherly’ – what a wonderful adjective.
Much as she loved murder, Miss Crabbe had no feelings either way about violence. Real violence was to her – like having a child or eating peanut butter – quite unimaginable.
Like many things with the potential for inspiring fear, it had a tendency to inspire amusement. Occasionally, at the weekend, she would catch a repeat of Bugs Bunny or Tom & Jerry and would sit roaring at the television. It seemed entirely reasonable that if you hit somebody in the face with an iron, their features would flatten momentarily before springing back. She loved hospital dramas. The build-up to the calamity was best. Who could resist watching the old man cross the street, the schoolboy climb a tree, the mother drive with her toddler strapped safely into the back seat? Somehow, and soon, they would all coincide in the same casualty department. It was pure Sophocles.
Channel Four had recently started running a first-aid series, one of those ten-minutes-because-there’s-a-gap-in-the-schedule programmes. Miss Crabbe tuned in religiously. It amazed her how stupid some people could be. Especially mothers. Mothers were the most stupid of all.
One episode was about how to deal with scalds and burns. A mother with a lot of Formica in her kitchen was cooking dinner; pie in the oven, vegetables on the hob. A silly little boy, eight years old or so, rushed into the kitchen and tipped a pan all over himself. Naturally, he began to scream and the mother dialled 999. At this point, a handsome-sounding man began a voiceover: ‘Run cold water over him for fifteen minutes’ etc. When the paramedics rushed in and asked what had happened, the panicking housewife shouted, ‘He scalded himself! The carrots!’
Faced with melodrama such as this, Miss Crabbe had a tendency to become literal-minded. ‘It wasn’t the carrots,’ she murmured at the screen, ‘it was the hot water, actually.’
To her way of thinking, such mishaps were intimately connected to the intelligence of the recipient. Violence happened to people who, unlike her, did not have the common sense to avoid it.
On Sundays, she was fond of skimming through the colour supplement of her newspaper on the lookout for her favourite advertisement. It featured an elderly woman sprawled helplessly on the sitting room carpet, next to a beige sofa. A telephone sat on a coffee table, a tantalising three feet away. The elderly woman could not reach it. Fortunately, she had a large red button strapped to her wrist. While her face looked sadly up at the distant phone, the finger of her other hand was pressing the button. The caption beneath the picture read, ‘Mrs Hope knows help is coming. Would you?’
Week in, week out, the same advertisement appeared, although the picture varied. Sometimes, Mrs Hope would have tumbled down the stairs. Her arms would be splayed and she would appear to be in a coma but she must have managed to press the button before she sank into unconsciousness because she still knew help was coming. On other occasions, she had slipped in the bathroom. It seemed she had been t
rying to get out of (or into) the bath while wearing a fluffy dressing gown and full make-up.
Miss Crabbe found herself quite addicted to Mrs Hope’s exploits and would leaf through the supplement each Sunday while other sections of the paper lay on the coffee table unread. ‘Mrs Hope knows help is coming. Would you?’ I have a question of my own, Miss Crabbe would think, reaching out a languid hand for her Sunday morning treat, a Bourbon biscuit, ‘Why is Mrs Hope so accident-prone?’
Miss Crabbe had first come to Rutland in 1974, just after it had officially lost its county status. Her sister was married to an Edith Weston man who had a job in the cement works at Ketton. Miss Crabbe’s sister had lived in Edith Weston since she married, and was bored and lonely. She had persuaded Miss Crabbe to come to the area by sending her a leaflet from the library entitled Rutland, England’s Hidden Secret. Miss Crabbe had needed no more persuading.
At that time, the guerrilla war waged by local activists was at its height. County signs which said ‘Leicestershire’ were torn down in the night and ‘Rutland’ ones re-erected. Ladies handed out leaflets in the market place in Oakham every Wednesday and Saturday with titles like The Fight Goes On. Local council meetings were rumoured to be stormy.
Miss Crabbe joined the ladies with the leaflets for a few weeks. It was a good way to make friends, although she was careful not to mention that she had only recently moved into the area. She researched Rutland’s history in the local library in order to help write a pamphlet for visitors. It was mentioned in the Domesday Book, she discovered – which seemed very fin de siècle – although at that time it was little more than a ditch on the way to Northumbria. It was always being bequeathed to people – queens, dukes, mistresses – as if the county and its people were an expensive lapdog. The Duke of Rutland was often a minor character in historical dramas, a secondary conspirator betrayed by a larger man, although both of them would end up with their heads lopped off. The present Duke lived in the Vale of Belvoir – technically outside Rutland’s border – and was threatening to lie down in front of the tractors of an open-cast mining company which had spotted coal beneath the green and pleasant valley. England was a battleground once more.
Miss Crabbe thought it all wonderfully futile and heroic. She had moved from Kent, which was very twentieth century.
She had first moved into her cottage as a tenant. It was originally owned by the inhabitant of the neighbouring cottage, mad Mr Willow. Mr Willow’s family had lived in Nether Bowston for generations. Miss Crabbe would pop round once in a while and he would ramble to her as he wandered about the cottage picking things up, then putting them down again. He knew all the old inhabitants of the village and would casually refer to favours done or slights given going back to the previous century. Miss Crabbe’s predecessor in the cottage had been a Mrs Goldaming – but Mrs Goldaming’s family had been nothing, he said. Her father was a didakoi, from over Peterborough way, who had done well to marry a local girl. When Mrs Goldaming’s father first arrived in Nether Bowston he had slept in ditches. He had caught rats with his bare hands, then taken them to the pub and offered to bite them in return for a pint.
Miss Crabbe let slip that her father had been a circuit judge. She was thus assured of mad Mr Willow’s unrelenting friendship and confidence.
She was sad when he died but cheered up no end upon the discovery that she was a sitting tenant. He had died intestate and had no close relatives, so there was some confusion over what would happen to the properties. The solicitors dealing with it eventually let her buy hers at a snip. Mr Willow’s cottage remained empty for over two years while everything was sorted out. Then there was a sudden flurry of potential buyers, mostly smarmy young couples. One had a toddler – horror of horrors. Miss Crabbe spotted them arriving with the estate agent and spent the whole of their visit clumping loudly up and down the gallery and singing at the top of her voice through the party wall.
Miss Akenside had been calm, measured and not over-friendly. The ideal neighbour. It was through her that Miss Crabbe had begun working as a Village Correspondent for the Record, a job which she regarded as a useful training ground for higher things. Miss Crabbe had dabbled in fiction throughout her life, even publishing a couple of short stories in People’s Friend. But murder was her passion. Only through a murder story could you feel the tug and sway of history – a line which connected you to the very greatest of storytellers: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dorothy L. Sayers. Funny how they all began with S.
After her young neighbour had departed that evening, Miss Crabbe put the omelette plates in a plastic bowl in the sink and climbed the stairs to her gallery. The length of the gallery was shelved – the staircase led up to the centre of it and you had then the option to turn right or left. At one end, there was an oxblood leather armchair, roomy enough to sink into on a cold winter’s evening. (The gas fire was downstairs but most of the heat ended up in the gallery anyway.) At the other end, there was a roll-top desk which she had bought not long after she had moved in, from an auction house in Oakham. Miss Crabbe knew that there was never any hope that she would be able to keep her notes in order, so a roll-top was the only way to prevent them colonising the entire cottage. She loved rattling it down at the end of a hard evening’s work, then rattling it back up again the following day. She felt as she imagined a shopkeeper might feel lifting the grille on his premises each morning. When she settled in her typist’s chair and pushed back the lid on her project, she knew she was open for business.
Underneath the desktop were two sets of tiny drawers, one on either side, in which she kept paperclips, treasury tags and sticky labels (the left); and spare staples, pencil stubs and liquorice toffees (the right).
She pulled out a pencil stub and stuck it behind her ear. Then she opened the red envelope wallet which lay on top of the papers in the middle of the desk. She often found it necessary to re-read the beginning of her work, to get herself in the mood before she got on with it. She had done a hundred and fifty pages but the manuscript was still handwritten, in pencil. She would have to pay somebody to type it up when it was finished. She had never learnt to type herself. Her mother had warned her that if she did, that was all she would ever do.
Miss Crabbe removed the pencil stub from behind her ear and held it poised. Sometimes she would find she was chewing it while she was reading – a filthy habit and the main reason she tried to keep the stubs behind her ear. When she felt her tongue grate against a flake of paint, she would stick the pencil back in place, sometimes absentmindedly reaching for another from the drawer and discovering the first one only upon retiring, as she brushed her hair.
‘She knew instantly that he was dead.’ This was the phrase that echoed in Miss Hartington’s head as she regarded Edward Little’s motionless body. It resonated so because it was demonstrably untrue. She had not stared at him and thought, oh, he’s dead. On the contrary, she had been standing there for fully three minutes before it finally filtered through to her that she was indeed, for the first time in all her eighty-three years, regarding a corpse.
Most people in the village assumed Miss Hartington to be an elderly eccentric. This was an image which she liked to promote. It seemed to her very jolly that being eighty-three enabled her to misbehave in the way that normally only children were allowed to, and for her misbehaviour to be received with the same benignity. Every now and then, she would pad down to the village shop in her slippers, just to see how everybody politely ignored her unconventional footwear.
Edward Little had been an attractive man and death had, as yet, not marred his finely chiselled features. Not for nothing had he featured in a popular magazine’s 1937 list of Britain’s One Hundred Most Eligible Bachelors. His photo then had shown a slim young man, with an almost feminine elegance, although the eyes betrayed a certain hardness. The war had knocked the edges off him somewhat. Miss Hartington could remember him returning looking greatly aged, although it only became clear over time just how much damage the war had done. He
had been expected to marry. His fiancée had been Emily Grace, a shy but forthright girl from a good family in Cambridgeshire. She had joined the Land Army the instant war had been declared and was later killed by an awful accident involving a tractor while Edward was serving in Egypt. Friends said he had never got over the shock.
He had returned to the family seat but found management of the estate difficult. The old structures had broken down. It was impossible to get staff and he was forced to sell land to survive. It was not for several years that he hit upon the idea of snail farming.
It was one of his livestock which betrayed his current state of mortis to Miss Hartington, as she stood in his paddock that Sunday afternoon, with the bells for evensong beginning to toll in the distance. At first glance, Edward Little looked asleep. His eyes were closed, unusually for a corpse, although his mouth hung open slightly. His arms were slack by his side. He was wearing a worn Norfolk jacket and in a sitting position, leaning against a tree trunk as if he had sat down by it for a rest on the mellow grass and simply dozed off. To his left were the snail hutches, and Miss Hartington’s subconscious registered dimly that the wire mesh doors were open. She had only just noticed the dark shapes in the grass and their attendant silvery trails when she saw the irrefutable evidence that Mr Little had departed this world.
In the corner of his half-open mouth, something was moving. Miss Hartington leant forward to see, unwilling to step closer. Many a woman her age would have required glasses at this juncture, but thankfully her eyesight was still excellent.
There was a small, glistening shape. It was a tiny head. Two tiny black tentacles protruded from it, and they were waving from side to side like antennae, as if the horrid little creature was deciding where next to go. The eyes of a snail were located at the base of the tentacles, Miss Hartington knew, although it always looked to her as though they were in the roaming globules at the tip. They had extremely sharp tongues, sharp enough to saw their way through large amounts of vegetation. Edward Little had often been seen returning from market with crates full of lettuces past their best. They also ate dead animals.
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