Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  The boy laughs delightedly, and Croft takes his hand. The journey passes uneventfully. The boy seems captivated by every small thing – the pale mist rising up from the streets, the lit-up shop fronts, the endlessly streaming car headlights, yellow as cats’ eyes.

  The only glances they encounter seem benign.

  When they arrive at Symes’s house, Alex rushes up the driveway to the front door and rings the bell.

  “And who is this young man?” Symes says, bending down.

  “Dennis says you’ve got a tiger, but I don’t believe him,” says the child. He is beginning to flag now, Croft senses, just a little. He is overexcited. The slightest thing could have him in tears.

  “We’ll have to have a look, then, won’t we?” Symes says. He places a hand on the boy’s head. Croft steps forward out of the shadows and towards the door.

  Once he is inside, he knows, it will begin. He and Ashley Symes will kill the child. The rest will watch.

  “You have done well,” Symes says to Croft, quietly. “This won’t take long.”

  “Will there be cookies?” Alex says.

  Croft stands still. He can feel the thing moving inside him, twisting in his guts like a cancer.

  He wants to vomit. Croft gasps for breath, sucking in the blunt, smoky air, the scent of macadam, of the hushed, damp trees at the roadsides and spreading along all the railway lines of southeast London. The fleet rails humming with life, an antidote to ruin.

  He smells the timeswept, irredeemable city and it is like waking up.

  Above him, bright stars throw up their hands in surprise.

  “Come here to me, Sasha,” Croft says. He is amazed at how steady his voice sounds. “There’s no time now. We have to go.”

  “But the tiger,” the child whimpers. He looks relieved.

  “There are no tigers here,” Croft says. “Mr Symes was joking. Come on.”

  The boy’s hand is once again in his and he grips it tightly.

  “Will we be home soon?” says the boy.

  “I hope so,” Croft replies. “We should be, if a bus comes quickly.”

  He does not look back.

  The Long Shadow

  Peter Turnbull

  Arresting.

  It was the only word that the man could think of to describe the sensation. He was strolling past the shop window, not paying any particular attention to the items for sale, when he stopped in his tracks, arrested, as if his subconscious eye had seen, rather than his conscious eye. For there it was. About six inches in height, a greyish brown colour, “dun” being the proper name for the hue, as was his favourite pub “The Old Dun Cow” in his village. And it was the figurine, the small chip at the base said so. The man stood and stared at it. It was like meeting an old friend, yet a friend with whom unpleasant experiences had been shared. So how many years had it been. Eighteen, nineteen? He stood and smiled despite painful associations and said, “Well, well, well, and where have you been all this time?” It was Sunday, in the forenoon, the Minster bells peeled joyously over old York town, echoing in her alleyways and snickets, and the shop was shut. But tomorrow he would return. As soon as the shop opened he’d be there, like the alcoholics who can always be seen standing outside the pub doors in the city centre just before opening time, then when the doors are flung open they stampede to the bar, happy to drink stale beer which has spent the last twelve hours in the pipes. Tomorrow he’d be at the shop, he’d be the first customer over the threshold, anxious to buy the figurine or he’d lose it forever.

  Oh, and he’d bring the police with him. He thought he’d better do that. He thought he’d better ask the police to accompany him, because eighteen or nineteen years ago his parents had been murdered during the course of the theft of the dun figurine of Dresden china. During the same burglary, quite a few other items had been removed from the house. The robbers quite calmly carrying item after item out of the house, past the dead or dying bodies of his parents.

  The man returned home, said little to his wife and nothing about the figurine, though their relationship was warm and well. He spent the evening in his study and that evening he retired early.

  The following day, the last Monday of that merry month of May, the first people to enter Lashko’s Antiques, Micklegate, close to the medieval walls of the ancient city, and met pleasantly by Julius Lashko, were a middle-aged, prosperous-looking man with a pleasant and fulfilled countenance and, behind him, a much younger man who was trim and muscular. Julius Lashko thought that they were father and son.

  “Mr Lashko?” The young man spoke, and instantly Lashko realized that the first two customers that day were not father and son. In fact, they were not even customers at all.

  “Yes, ’tis I.”

  “I am Detective Constable Sant, City of York police. This is . . .”

  “Mr . . .” said the older man.

  “Mr Toucey,” Sant continued.

  “Oh, yes. How can I help you?” A note of concern had crept into Lashko’s voice. He was a small man with a pointed nose and a weak chin, and wild, woolly hair. Sant felt that antiques dealers are not dissimilar to second-hand car dealers in that at one end of their way of business they nudge criminality, at the other they are above reproach. Sant, while keeping an open mind, felt that Lashko fell into the latter category.

  “By allowing us to look at that figurine in the window.”

  “Certainly,” Lashko said after a pause. He moved to the window and removed the figurine from where it stood between two Edwardian clocks and handed it to Sant. Sant handed it to Toucey, who held it lovingly.

  “Yes,” Toucey said. “This is she all right, one of a pair, in fact . . . it’s the small chip on the base that identifies it. It’s rare, eighteenth-century Dresden, quite valuable as it is. Without the chip on the base, and with her partner, she would be very valuable indeed.”

  Lashko looked on in silence, paling slightly. Sant addressed him. “Mr Lashko, can you tell me how you came to obtain this item?”

  “I bought it from a man who came into the shop about ten days ago. He didn’t seem suspicious . . . I have to be careful, some shifty types come into the shop, usually young, usually in pairs, wanting to sell stuff that they don’t know anything about. Clearly proceeds of a burglary. I decline to purchase from such people and notify the police as soon as they have left the shop. The police often pick them up before they get far. But the chap who offered me the figurine didn’t fit that type at all. He came in a few days earlier, asked me to value it, something a thief wouldn’t do. He also seemed to know something about it . . . he correctly identified it, said it had been in his family for some time and he seemed reluctant to part with it. He was giving off all the right signals and I felt that I had no reason to be suspicious.”

  “Well, unfortunately, we have reason to believe that it has been stolen.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Lashko seemed to Sant to be genuine. “It does happen. I’ve been in the business a long time and there have been one or two previous occasions when, to my shame, I have found that I have bought a proceed from a burglary. It’s an occupational hazard, and I lose, because having bought it, I have to surrender it and chalk up the loss.”

  “As may be the case here. I’ll have to take this into custody of the police in the first instance.”

  “Of course,” Lashko nodded. “You’ll let me have a receipt?”

  “Yes. Did the person who brought it to you wear gloves at the time?”

  “No. Not that I recall. But if you’re hoping to lift fingerprints I think you’ll be out of luck – the whole shop is given a good dusting every other day. Got to keep them dust free if I’m going to sell them.”

  “It’s worth a shot, though,” Sant placed the figurine in a large envelope. “Did you buy anything else from him?”

  “Him? Oh, the man who sold me that, no I didn’t . . . don’t think so . . . certainly not a regular. There ar
e people from whom I buy regularly; one lady is trickling antiques on to the market to provide herself an income in her declining years. I have one or two other customers like her. I also have customers who have money and are putting it into antiques, and so, like all businessmen, I have my regular customers. But that chap was not one of them.”

  “Can you describe the man?”

  “Well, it’s going back a few days now . . . but I did see him twice and he did deal with me, unlike the sort who treat the shop as though it were a museum, just wander in and look around and then wander out again. That’s another occupational hazard. So the man . . .” Lashko shut his eyes. “He was middle-aged . . . slim build . . . he hadn’t put on a lot of weight as many men of his age would do. He had an appearance which I have heard described as ‘genteel shabby’.”

  “Genteel shabby?”

  “I take the expression to mean a person who has been used to the finer things in life but who has fallen on hard times and, while trying to keep up appearances, has become a little threadbare, but what was threadbare was still of the best quality. He had a calm manner, he seemed warm about the eyes . . . he seemed emotionally fulfilled. He wore a ring.” Sant scribbled on his pad.

  “Dark hair . . . not greying and hadn’t lost any of it. Had worn well for his years, he’d retained much of his youth. Can’t think of anything else about his appearance to report . . . carried himself proudly, erect, like a former soldier. He had a soft Yorkshire accent, as if moderated by education . . . not a broad Yorkshire accent of the football terraces, but a softer version, of the golf club or the boardroom. Oh, he was left-handed. I paid him cash and he held out his left hand.”

  David Sant accessed the file on the murders of Daniel and Olivia Toucey of The Limes, Harrogate Road, York. He settled down with a mug of coffee in hand and read it. It was a story of a burglary and murders which he felt was passing brutal. The elderly couple, he a retired barrister, she a retired pathologist, lived in well-earned luxury at The Limes, a rambling mid-Victorian mansion, sufficiently large that when it was sold, it was sold to White Rose Care Ltd, who turned it into a nursing home for the elderly. White Rose Care Ltd was, to the best of Sant’s knowledge, one of the newly formed companies that had jumped on to the money-spinning bandwagon of “granny farming”, as a response to Britain’s ageing population, a consequence of which was that Britain now had one pensioner for every person in employment, all of whom had to be provided for. But eighteen years ago, the Touceys lived in The Limes, having given a lifetime of unblemished public service and successfully brought up three children, by then away from home and consolidating their own careers. One fateful night in the autumn of the year, their house appeared to have been stormed by at least four men . . . Mr Toucey had died of a head injury; Mrs Toucey had died of a heart attack induced by the shock and trauma. A removal lorry had then been reversed up the drive and the house stripped of all valuable contents. It was a crime which had shocked York and its environs. Hardly surprising, thought Sant, who at the time would have been just starting to read.

  There was little for the police to go on. Known housebreakers all had good alibis, the felons had all worn gloves, no fingerprints “alien to the crime scene” had been found, and none of the items stolen from the raid had surfaced, until now, in the form of a six-inch-high figurine, dun-coloured, of the finest Dresden porcelain.

  So now where? Sant stood and walked over to the table by the window on which stood the electric kettle and the coffee jar and the teabags and the powdered milk and the mugs. He made himself a second mug of coffee. It was his pattern, when in the police station, to drink endless mugs of coffee, until he was awash with the liquid, and then he would drink nothing for the rest of the shift. He glanced out at the Ouse, glistening in the sun, the rowing skiffs and the pleasure boats. All that the police had to go on was the description of a man, who seemed down at heel, who might have come across the porcelain figurine quite legitimately, not knowing it to have been stolen, and who may not have had anything to do with the murder of the elderly Touceys, but also who would have been a youth eighteen years ago, probably hot-headed, whose local accent had been subsequently modified and softened by education.

  David Sant finished the shift at 2 p.m., signed out, and walked into the warm afternoon air, just the weather for a light jacket. He drove home to his cottage in Thornton le Clay, parked his car in the drive, and checked his telephone answering machine; just one message, from his wife, confirming his access visit to their son later in the week. When they had separated, he hadn’t contested custody in return for a generous level of access. He had never seen the purpose of wanting custody; it was, he felt, a legal state which didn’t affect the relationship between parent and child, but access did, for it was during the access that bonding occurred and relationships developed. In the evening, he felt the urge to go for a short walk.

  A short walk to the Queen’s Head, which stood on the edge of the village green and had an ancient pair of stocks outside, sometimes used for charity fundraising events, as had recently happened when the community constable had been placed in the stocks for an hour so that the villagers could throw cream cakes (donated by the baker) at him, one pound for five cakes. Fifty pounds had been raised to help keep the village play-school open.

  That evening, the pub was quiet, as it most often was on Monday evenings, a few old boys playing dominoes, the landlord (who had amply rewarded the good humour of the community constable with not a few pints of strong beer once the cream had been washed off) involved in a game of darts, leaving his wife to pull the pints. Not an onerous task, for on Mondays the frequency of pint-pulling is perhaps one every ten minutes. Sant asked for a pint of Timothy Taylor and stood at the bar. He pondered the postcards which had been sent by the regulars and enjoyed the low hum of conversation, the rattle of dominoes, the thud of darts into cork, and in the winter months there would be the crackling of the log fire. This, he felt, was how a pub should be; not for him the crush and loud music of the city-centre pubs.

  “I don’t believe him,” Sant said to himself, but loudly so.

  “Sorry, love?” The landlady smiled at him.

  “Nothing.” Sant returned the smile. “Nothing at all. I was just speaking aloud.”

  “Don’t believe who, love?” For the landlady of the Queen’s Head was like a dog with a bone where gossip was concerned. She was, in fact, considered second only to the post-mistress as a source of gossip. She was quite good at it too, so it was thought, and well she ought to be, because before she and her husband had taken the pub they had had the post office in the neighbouring village.

  “Oh, just this fella,” Sant said, thinking that he’d get a better pint if he gave the woman something. “Fella I spoke to this morning. I believed him at the time, but now I don’t.”

  “No?”

  “No . . . not now. Sometimes it’s like that, you know, looking back over time, only a bit of time sometimes. You see that you’ve been fed a pork pie and this was a convincing pork pie as porkies go, but now I see it as just too pat.”

  The landlady reached forward and took Sant’s half-empty glass and replenished it and handed it back to him. “A crime, was it?” she said.

  “A witness.” Sant took his glass of beer. “Thanks, that was good of you.”

  “Just taking care of my regulars. Witness, you say?”

  “At the time I thought so . . . now I think a change of status from witness to suspect is probably appropriate.”

  “Serious crime?”

  “Double murder.”

  “Serious enough.”

  Sant drained his glass and walked home, aware that he was on duty at 6 a.m., which meant he had to be up at five. He didn’t think he’d given the landlady anything that compromised his integrity or the investigation, but he’d given her enough to lubricate the machinery of his standing as a “regular” in the Queen’s Head. It is, he thought, the way the ball bounces, the way the world goes round. He enjoyed the walk
home, the rural night air, the scent of herbs and crops. In the sky he was able to pick out the Plough and Orion.

  “I just didn’t believe him, sir.” Sant sat in front of Leif Vossion’s desk. “I mean, the description of the man seen only twice about ten days ago, his ‘genteel shabby’ appearance, left-handed, local accent moderated by education . . . for heaven’s sake . . . it just doesn’t ring true. It’s fiction.”

  “Putting us off the scent, you think?”

  “That’s what my intuition tells me.”

  “So, shall we go with your intuition?” Vossion looked keenly at Sant, with steely blue eyes.

  “I think I’d like to.”

  “First step?”

  “Interview him, sir.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I can’t see another way forward.”

  “Can’t you? He handled the figurine yesterday, didn’t he?”

  “Yes!” Sant’s eyes brightened. “Latents. Of course.”

  “That’s your first step. The murders are eighteen years old, so forensics won’t give your request priority. Carmen Pharaoh and Simon Markov have a city-centre stabbing which is still less than twenty-four hours old, Ken Meninnot is up to his eyeballs in requests for forensic analysis, but if there’s a result to be had, they’ll get it for you.”

  There was, in fact, a result to be had, though because of the backlog, it took Forensic Science Laboratory at Weatherby three weeks to process Sant’s request. But he thought the wait well worth it. The fingerprints on the figurine, once his and Toucey’s had been isolated, didn’t belong to Julius Lashko. In fact, they belonged to a man called Shane Cody. When Sant entered Cody’s name and numbers into the computer, he came up with gold dust. Cody had graduated from petty theft to the safer, less violent, but prosperous crime of receiving stolen goods. He was, in criminal speak, a “fence”.

  “Well, well, well.” Sant peered at the information which had appeared on the monitor screen. The implication was that the entire contents of Lashko’s Antiques, Micklegate, York, were “hot”. The fuller implication was that Cody may well have had a part in the double murder of the elderly Touceys eighteen years ago.