The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The ignition method couldn’t involve anything electronic. That too might leave traces. No, he needed something that would disappear in the general conflagration, offering no clues to outside intervention.

  A fuse, it had to be some kind of fuse.

  He looked around the shed for inspiration. He still felt confidently calm. He was in a zone where he knew that the right solution would come to him. Greg Lincoln could not fail.

  But nothing he saw inside rang the right bells. Pensively, he moved out into the garden, and found himself drawn to the bonfire he had observed earlier. The bonfire that was still burning three days after Dan had lit it.

  The centre of the fire was dead white ash, but from the circle around the edges little spirals of smoke rose. Greg’s tasselled loafer probed tentatively into the smoulderings, and instantly found what he was looking for.

  Amidst the embers were some strands of brown garden twine. One or two were glowing, alight but burning very slowly.

  He found a big ball of twine in the shed. Unwilling to risk accidents inside the incendiary bomb that he had created, he conducted his experiments in the garden.

  First he tried soaking a length of the twine in petrol, but it burnt too quickly. Besides, that might leave some forensic trace. Then he just lit the twine as it was and found, to his intense gratification, that it worked perfectly. If he held his fuse up and lit the end, it flamed only for a few seconds, but continued to burn. A red glow moved slowly along, and the twine was consumed at a satisfyingly steady rate. The smouldering burn was resilient, too; however much he shook the fuse or waved it about, the twine continued inexorably to burn. It must have been treated with some flammable preservative.

  He tested his fuse’s effect on a pool of petrol on the red-brick path. When the tiny red glow reached the fluid, a very rewarding flare-up ensued.

  Consciously slowing down his pulse rate, Greg Lincoln experimented until he had a fuse that would burn for almost exactly twenty minutes. Perfect. The following morning he would wait until Shelley and Dan had gone into the shed, then come down the garden, check his locking device had worked, and bang on the door to say he was off. By the moment of combustion he would be safely in the golf club, surrounded by witnesses.

  He laid the fuse to run through a knothole into the shed and to end up in a pool of petrol behind the impregnated sofa-bed. He set the latch bar in the upright position. Then he returned to Lovelock Manor to reward himself with a large Scotch. He resisted the temptation to ring Vicki Talbot. Much better to contact her with the fait accompli, the news that his wife was dead, and that he was free to spend the rest of his life with his lover.

  That evening he was particularly solicitous to Shelley, showing uncharacteristic interest in the booty she had brought back from the garden centre. He didn’t dislike his wife. Her personality was too pallid to inspire dislike. And he felt a mild regret about the fate that awaited her the next morning. But not enough regret to make him change his plan.

  He slept surprisingly well, but woke early, round six, to the sound of heavy rain. His first reaction was delight. Rain would ensure that, once Shelley and Dan got into the shed, they wouldn’t leave it in a hurry. They would work out their horticultural strategy in the dry, rather than venturing out into the garden.

  But no sooner had he had this heart-warming thought than he was struck by another, less pleasing, consequence of the heavy rain. His twine fuse would get soaking wet!

  Greg managed to get out of bed and collect his clothes without rousing Shelley. His wife continued to breathe evenly, little knowing that what she would wake to would be the last morning of her life.

  Greg’s carefully cut twenty minutes of twine was indeed very wet. Not wishing to re-enter the booby-trapped shed, he had brought a lighter with him from the kitchen. When he fed a flame to the frayed end, the twine did catch alight and flare briefly, but then sputtered and soon no glow showed. He threw it down on the ground in frustration, and tried to think of some other way of detonating his time-bomb.

  For a tiny moment he felt doubt. The possibility crept into his mind that he might fail. But he quickly extinguished the unworthy thought. Of course he would succeed. He was Greg Lincoln.

  It didn’t take long for the solution to come to him. Simple, really. Better than the twine fuse. The only surprise was that he hadn’t thought of it earlier.

  He opened the shed door, and carefully left it open. To lock himself in would not be very clever, he thought with a chuckle. And as soon as he walked inside, he realized just how perfect his new plan was. The overcast sky made the interior darker than ever. Which meant that when Shelley and Dan came in, the first thing they would do would be to light the candle.

  Cylindrical and large, probably three inches in diameter – ideal for his purposes. A half-inch of blackened wick showed at the top.

  Taking advantage of the tools he found in the shed, Greg worked with confident efficiency. First he used a Stanley knife to take a quarter-inch slice off the top of the candle. Careful not to cut through the wick, he eased off the disc of wax and put it to one side. Then, again digging around the wick, he excavated a hole about two inches across and three down into the centre of the candle.

  He cut the wick, so that it was three inches long, and poked the blackened end through the hole in the disc. Lighting the wick briefly ensured that the surrounding wax melted and cemented it into position.

  The next bit was easy. He simply poured petrol into the little wax reservoir that he had created and replaced the lid he had cut off, so that its trailing white wick was immersed in the fluid. He then used the warmth of his fingers to seal the wax and hide the mark of his cut. He would rather have used a flame, but prudence warned him against the unnecessary risk. Anyway, Dan wasn’t going to look at the candle closely. The first thing he’d do when he and Shelley entered the gloom would be to find his lighter and put it to the candle wick.

  And then – boom. Conflagration. Greg Lincoln almost hugged himself at his own cleverness.

  He was about to leave the shed when he was stopped by the sound of approaching voices.

  “Where’s Greg?” asked Dan’s voice, deep and throaty.

  “He’s gone. He said he had some golf thing.”

  “At this time in the morning?”

  “I don’t know. I never ask what he’s doing.”

  “No, you let him ride roughshod over you.”

  “Dan … ” There was a note of pained pleading in Shelley’s voice.

  “Well, the way he treats you … it makes me mad.”

  “He’s my husband, Dan.”

  “Useless kind of husband. He doesn’t care about you at all. The only person he thinks about is himself.”

  “That’s not true. Yesterday he bought me a hundred pounds-worth of gardening tokens, and he really sounded interested in the garden.”

  Greg was touched by his wife’s tribute to his solicitude. But he remained aware that he was in rather an awkward situation – geographically, at least.

  “Oh, yes?” asked Dan cynically. “He doesn’t care about you. I’m the only one who cares about you. I’m the only one who loves you, Shelley.”

  Hm, thought Greg, there’s a turn-up for the book. And he waited with interest to hear what would come next.

  “I know you do, Dan. But—”

  “And you love me too. Go on, you’ve told me you do.”

  “I may have said things like that in the past, Dan … ” Shelley wasn’t finding what she was saying easy. “But the fact is that Greg is my husband. I’m a Catholic, and I believe that marriage is for life.”

  “Even a rotten marriage that makes you unhappy?”

  “Maybe it’s only a rotten marriage because I haven’t worked hard enough to make it a better one. And the fact is that Greg is my husband and we have both sworn to stay together until death do us part.”

  Oh, thought Greg, what a splendidly loyal little woman I married. Pity I’ve got to murder her.

&nbs
p; “And if death did you part?”

  “What do you mean, Dan?”

  “If Greg died, then would you marry me?”

  There was a long silence, then Shelley’s voice said quietly, “Yes, Dan. I can give you that satisfaction at least. If Greg were to die, I would marry you.”

  Oh well, there’s a nice warm thought for them to end their lives with, thought Greg.

  “Thank you for saying that,” murmured Dan, his voice thick with emotion. Then Greg heard him approaching the shed, even putting his hand on its open door. “So I can’t tempt you in?” asked the gardener. “Just for a quick cuddle?”

  “No,” said Shelley firmly. “It wouldn’t be fair to Greg.”

  Her husband was divided between respect for his wife’s loyalty and annoyance at the realization that, if she wouldn’t go into the shed, he was going to have to find another way of murdering her.

  “All right. If that’s what you feel … ” And, as a petulant punctuation to his words, Dan slammed the shed door shut.

  Things happened very quickly then. Just at the moment Greg heard the clunk of the wooden door latch finding its slot and locking him in, he was aware of a sudden roar of combustion behind him. He turned back to the inferno that had once been a sofa-bed, and saw flames licking along the floor towards him from every direction.

  Greg Lincoln had been a very good planner, after all. His twenty-minute twine fuse hadn’t really gone out. Burning more slowly because of the damp, its spark had still crept inexorably towards the knothole and the pool of petrol inside the shed.

  Realizing that that’s what must have happened was the last thought of Greg Lincoln’s unlamented life.

  And his last sight, through the flames and the cracking windows of the garden shed, was his wife Shelley, held in the protective arms of the gardener Dan. Which was where she would stay for the remainder of her very happy life.

  FINDERS, WEEPERS

  Adrian Magson

  THE RUNNER STANDS blinking into the sunlight like a small, pudgy rodent. He’s wearing a neat Paisley-print silk dressing gown and leather slippers, and looks like one of the Wise Men from a nativity play.

  I don’t need to check the photograph to see we’ve got the right man. Plumper than when the snap was taken, and wearing a tan he didn’t have a year ago, but it’s him: Gerald Martin Bream, once of south London – until he decided to go runabout with a bagful of his employer’s money.

  Problem is, he’s got one hand behind his back and I can’t see what he’s holding.

  Even small, paunchy rodents have teeth.

  I look at the large brown envelope in my hand. “Uh … Mrs Tangmere? I’ve got a package.”

  Bream’s gaze slips instinctively to the envelope, which holds a couple of old magazines, but he shakes his head.

  “This is Mandeville Cottage, though, right?”

  “Yes. But there’s no Mrs anybody here. I’m renting.”

  “Oh. Must be a computer glitch. Sorry.”

  I leave the Paisley-print dressing gown and go back to the car where my partner, Reece, is waiting. We’ll come back later and pick him up.

  Reece and I are people finders. We get called in when all other methods have been exhausted. Understandably, not all of the people who disappear want to be found – it’s why they did a runner in the first place. Among their reasons for going are debt, guilt, anger, confusion, loss and fear. Fear is the biggie; it makes people go deeper than most. Fear of death, fear of retribution – sometimes fear of fear itself.

  Bream, though, doesn’t quite fit this category; he’d just got greedy without thinking it through; an accountant with dreams of freedom. After a lot of pointless dithering – mostly to do with professional reputation – the company had called in Reece and me.

  By then, Bream had probably already spent a lot of the stolen money trying to hide his tracks. But he’d been dumb enough to hang on to his mobile phone. One call to the number, pretending to be a call centre offering a big cash prize, and he’d given away where he was hiding.

  All we have to do now is go back and pick him up when he’s dropped his guard, and we’ll collect our fee. We don’t always get asked to take the runners back, but Bream is what we call a “take-away” – the client wants him on a plate.

  Back down the lane, Reece is in the Range Rover, scowling over the Telegraph crossword. He’s stuck on twenty-six down.

  “It’s our boy,” I confirm, sliding in alongside him. “Dinner or coffee?”

  “Too many letters.” He hurls the Telegraph into the back, a sign the crossword isn’t going too well. “I need sustenance.” Another sign.

  We find a decent restaurant, eat dinner, then go back for Bream. We park down the lane again and walk up to the house and through the front door.

  But someone has got there before us.

  Bream’s Paisley-print gown is no longer neat, due to two bullet holes in the front.

  Unfortunately, Bream is still inside it.

  ***

  “Stone me,” says Reece. We split and do a rapid tour of the place to make sure no one is waiting to pounce on us. It’s soon obvious that nothing has been touched. Even if we’ve never been inside a place before, we can tell if a place is naturally tidy or if it’s been cleaned up after a search. This one looks normal.

  I feel uncomfortable and peer out of the window. The street lights are just coming on, and if anyone is waiting for us to come out again they’ll have a clear shot.

  “This is some weird shit,” mutters Reece, staring around the room. “If they were after the money, why didn’t they toss the place?”

  “Maybe that wasn’t the point.” I peer closely at Bream’s body. Just visible in the skin of his upper chest are two vivid impressions, like knuckle marks, only deeper.

  He’d been punched before being shot. One of his slippers is across the other side of the room, confirmation of a struggle, as if he’d been forced back in off the doorstep.

  We hoof it back to the car. Death doesn’t happen often in our business – at least, not by our hand. We’ve tracked down people who died before we got to them, and we once found a man who had a heart attack the day after he returned home.

  But nothing like this.

  I ring Jennings. He’s a sort of Mr Fixit who makes his living in various ways, mostly security related. Rumour says he used to be a high-level government spook. He approached us not long ago when one of his regular stringers was off sick, and we’d picked up several tracing jobs since then. Some were on the run after doing something illicit; others were unfortunate souls who went walkabout with no rational explanation. Either way, someone wanted them back and was willing to pay.

  Jennings doesn’t react well to the news.

  “What the hell were you wasting time on Bream for?” he explodes, as if we’ve been laying waste to the home counties with a flame-thrower. “Melinda Blake is your current assignment.”

  Melinda Blake, late of Her Majesty’s armed forces, is a private investigator whom nobody has seen for over a month, which is apparently out of character. Jennings sent us the brief a week ago, with a key to her flat so we could do an audit of her belongings. It wasn’t going well, but along the way, we’d tripped over Bream’s trail. Sometimes multi-tasking does that; one door closes, another opens.

  “Change of plan,” I explain. “We got a lead to Bream’s whereabouts. It paid off. Well, almost. Blake’s next on the list. What’s the problem?”

  “Leave it,” he says after a lengthy pause. “I’ll deal with the Bream thing. Get on Blake – and ring me when you find her.” He clicks off before I can use the phrase I keep for people who upset me.

  ***

  The Corpos Fitness Centre is a modern, single-storey building near Battersea Park, catering to those who like their exercise in air-conditioned comfort. Forget pounding the streets in the wind and rain; that’s for freaks, army types and London Marathon wannabes.

  Melinda Blake, according to a membership card we’d f
ound in her flat, is a member, so it seems a good place to start our search.

  Finding where runners might have gone can be a laborious process. Nine times out of ten, there’s a link, a clue, no matter how tenuous. Usually it’s to a place from their past life – maybe their childhood – even somewhere they’ve fantasized about but never been. Reece and I work on the basis that tucked away in the fabric they leave behind, there’s always something, often overlooked by friends and family.

  We call this process the audit. It involves going through any rubbish we can find, from theatre tickets to the fluff in their pockets. We once found a runner from a dumped photo album. After drawing a blank everywhere else, we’d noticed snaps of a tiny village near St Tropez, southern France. It was a long shot, but that’s where we found him one afternoon, drinking a cold Stella at a bistro in the local square, enjoying his new life.

  So he’d thought.

  Five thirty in the afternoon is evidently a quiet time in the world of sweatbands and leotards, and from our vantage point in a café across the road, we count three people entering the gym. All are young-ish, good looking and self-aware in the latest sportswear, which draws from Reece a sour comment about some people having no jobs to go to. He’s still having trouble with the crossword.

  “What’s the story here?” he says with a sigh.

  “Slim,” I tell him, like the information we’d been given by Jennings. “Ex-army, a private investigator. Her brother is worried about her and reckons she might have been threatened by somebody – possibly from a past job. A couple of her regular clients say she hasn’t reported in, which isn’t like her.”

  We give the last fitness freak two minutes, then leave the café and push through a set of glass doors. The foyer shows photos of muscular men and women doing unnatural things with complicated equipment, and the décor is a mixture of Greek tiles, thick carpets and tinkling fountains. A vague smell of air-freshener and soap hangs in the air, with that faint gamey element wherever bodies gather together in exercise.