The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “That will change nothing,” he said scornfully. “You don’t imagine you’ll be anything different than you are now? Than you’ve always been?”

  She flinched, but held steady. “In the eyes of the law.”

  “The law.” He snorted. “The law is an ass. It has nothing to say about you. It has no idea what you are.” His gaze on her was horrible.

  “I may as well go now,” she said quietly.

  “Go? What are you talking about?”

  “You are right that a few months will change nothing. You are pleased with the situation; I am not. So I shall leave.”

  She looked from me to Jesperson, saying, “If it’s not too much trouble ...”

  He was swift to take her meaning. “Of course, come with us. Any help we can give—”

  I heard the rattle, and saw that the Chinese vase was rocking violently back and forth, until it tilted too far and fell, shattering against the hard floor, and spilling its burden of umbrellas and walking sticks.

  Only one of the sticks did not come to rest with everything else on the floor, but shot through the air, straight at Jesperson.

  If it had struck where it aimed, against his throat, I have no doubt it would have killed him, but he was quick. Almost as if he’d expected the attack, he stepped lightly aside, his arm rising, fluid and graceful, to catch the handle.

  Unlike an ordinary thrown object, the stick continued to move after it was caught, writhing and struggling to escape while he gripped it more firmly, frowning as he looked for a thread or wire and tried to work out the trick of it.

  Certain there would be no invisible thread, I looked instead at Harcourt. His expression was nothing like those I’d seen on the faces of mediums or mentalists; he looked utterly astonished, and thrilled. If he had caused the stick’s activity, it was through a power hidden from his conscious mind, something he did not suspect and could not control.

  Then another movement, glimpsed from the corner of my eye, caught my attention, and as I turned to look, I heard the terrible grating, grinding noise made by the stone gargoyle as it ponderously rocked itself across the floor. Although no one was near enough to be at risk if it fell over, I nevertheless called out a warning.

  Flora took one look and shouted: “Stop it! Stop it right now!”

  The gargoyle stopped moving, and so did the stick, although Jesperson still kept a tight hold and a wary eye on it.

  Harcourt took a hesitant step forward, his eyes still fixed upon the stick. “Give - give it to me, if you please, Mr Jesperson,” he said. “That - that is the weapon that killed poor Mr Adcocks; and before that, a young man in Plymouth. If not for your exceptionally quick reflexes, you would have been its third victim.”

  After a reluctant pause, Jesperson handed over the stick, saying, “You expected this might happen?”

  “Never,” the man gasped, staring at the stick in his hands with an unhealthy mixture of lust and fear. “Who would imagine that the instinct to kill would be inherent?”

  “You imagined it inherent in me,” said Flora. “A mindless, killing force so powerful that it could use me - a living, intelligent being - without regard for my own free will?”

  “No, no, certainly not,” he said, without conviction. “You were a mere infant, with no ability to think or act for yourself, when fate used you to terminate the lives of three innocent souls. It is quite different now.” He had been looking at her, but the lure of the object in his hands proved too much, and he soon returned to staring at it like a besotted lover.

  “You’ve always thought of me as another piece in your collection,” Flora said bitterly. “A mindless, soulless thing, and not even your favourite.”

  “Dear Flora, don’t be absurd. I know you are no ‘thing’. You have been like a daughter to me. Have I not always cared for you as best I could? Bought you whatever your heart desired? My only concern has ever been to see you safely and happily married to the man of your choice, when the time came.”

  While my sympathies were entirely with Flora, I recognized that to an outside observer she would seem hysterical, and Harcourt the sane one.

  “Yet you must have wondered,” Jesperson said, as if idly. “Eh, Harcourt? You surely wondered if your ward was intended by Fate for family happiness. Perhaps you saw her first engagement as a scientific experiment. The result was not as you hoped, but perhaps as you feared ... ?”

  They exchanged a look, man to man, and although Harcourt shook his head ruefully, I saw the smug satisfaction beneath the solemn expression.

  “You’re vile,” Flora murmured. She cleared her throat and announced, “I can never marry. I won’t put another life at risk.”

  This time, Harcourt did not protest. He shrugged and sighed, and said, “I would never force you to go against your will, no matter how foolish it seems to me.”

  “That’s not all. I’m leaving your collection today, Mr Harcourt—”

  “Oh, come now. Don’t be childish. You can’t blame me for what you are!”

  “Not for what I am; only for what you’ve tried to make me. The atmosphere in this house is hideous, not because of the objects, but because of your gloating fascination with murder and violent death. I’m going. I won’t set foot in this house again as long as you are alive.”

  Having stated her intention, she made straight for the door.

  I felt the shudder that ran through the house even before her hand touched the handle; it was a sensation so subtle yet so profound that I thought at first I might be ill.

  Harcourt yelled. His nose was bleeding; the walking stick had come to life again in his hand and seemed determined to beat him to death. He managed to remove it to arm’s length, and struggled to keep it under control. The gargoyle, too, was shuddering back to life, and, from the variety of creaks and groans and fluttering sounds I heard coming from the next room, so were other pieces of the collection.

  “Move,” said Jesperson urgently, propelling me forward. “Get out of the house! Is there anyone else here?” Hearing the shouts, the little maid who’d let us in reappeared, and, although looking utterly bewildered, allowed him to usher her outside as well.

  We met Flora at the front gate and turned back to look at the house.

  “Where’s Harcourt?” Jesperson demanded. “He was right behind me.”

  “He won’t leave his collection,” said Flora. “He’ll have gone back for it. He used to worry aloud about what he should save first, if the house were on fire.”

  “But it’s the collection itself that’s the threat!”

  On my own, I might have left Harcourt to his fate, but when my partner ran back inside, I felt it my duty to follow. Mounting the front steps, I was able to see through the window into the study, and what I saw brought me to a standstill.

  Pale and portly Mr Harcourt was leaping and whirling like a dervish, holding the silver-headed stick away from his body like a magic staff, as he struggled to evade a flurry of small objects bent on striking him. Occasionally in his efforts he unconsciously pulled his arm in closer to his body, allowing the stick to give him a sharp crack on his leg or shoulder, and then he would shriek in pain or anger.

  Books and other things continued to tumble from the shelves. Many simply fell, but others seemed hurled with great force directly at him, and these struck a variety of glancing blows against his body, head, and limbs. A glass-fronted display case shook fiercely, as if caught in an earthquake, until it burst open, releasing everything inside. A great malignant swarm composed of small bottles, jars, needles, pins, razors, and many more things I could not recognize enveloped the man, whose cries turned to a constant, terrified howling as they attacked him.

  Feeling sick, I turned aside and went indoors to my partner, who was throwing himself bodily against the solid oak door of Harcourt’s study, as if he imagined he could force it open. Seeing me, he stopped and rubbed his shoulder, looking a little sheepish.

  I gave him one
of my hairpins, assuming he would know how to use it.

  As he fiddled with the lock, I listened to the horrible sounds that accompanied the violence on the other side: thuds and thumps, shrieks and wails and groans, and then a shocking, liquid hissing, followed by a gurgle, and then the heaviest thud of all, and then silence.

  By the time Jesperson managed to get the door open, it was all over. Harcourt was dead. His bloody, battered corpse lay on the carpet, surrounded by the remnants of his murderous collection. Whatever life had possessed them had expired with his. There was a sharp, acrid stench in the room - I guess from the contents of various broken bottles - but nothing so foul as the atmosphere it replaced.

  “Vitriol,” said Jesperson. “Don’t look.”

  But I had already seen what was left of the face, and it was no more shocking than the sounds had led me to imagine.

  As I went out to give Flora Bellamy the news, and to send the maid to fetch the police, I already knew that this had not turned out to be a case I could write about for publication.

  And, as it developed, it grew worse.

  It was fortunate indeed that Jasper Jesperson had some influential relatives who moved in the circles of power, for otherwise I think the local police would have been pleased to charge him with murder, in the absence of more likely suspects, and if he hadn’t done it, I was their next choice.

  Even though we might argue we had saved his life, our client was so far from pleased with the outcome of our investigations that he refused to pay us anything. It was not Harcourt’s death that bothered him so much as Miss Bellamy’s insistence on releasing him from their engagement. She would give him no better reason for her change of heart than to say that she was reconsidering how she might best spend her life, and that she was inclined to seek some form of employment by which to support herself “like Miss Lane”.

  Flora Bellamy never set foot inside The Pines again. Even though her guardian was dead, she had decided to take no chances, and hired others to empty the house before selling it. In his will, Harcourt left everything to his ward, with only one caveat: although she could decide whether to keep or dispose of “the collection”, she must do so as a whole, and not break it up.

  This stipulation she decided to ignore.

  “Perhaps I’m wrong,” she said to me, the last time I saw her, “but I believe it could be dangerous. Individual objects are only things, but when gathered together, they became something more - first in Mr Harcourt’s imagination, and then in reality.

  “The concept in law of the deodand was that something which had once done evil could be remade into something useful, even holy, by good works. That was not allowed to happen in Mr Harcourt’s collection. His use of those things was opposed to good; it venerated the evil deed.”

  Her way of redemption was to donate everything that remained in the house to a good cause. Being extra-cautious, she chose one so far away that she would not have to fear an accidental encounter with her former possessions, and had everything sent to a leper colony on the other side of the world.

  I took it as a positive sign that she did not feel obliged to sacrifice herself in a similar way.

  She decided to share a flat with her school friend, and embarked on a course of training in bookkeeping and office management.

  Jesperson and I, naturally, discussed the details of this case -which began with one unsolved murder, and concluded with two - at great length when we were alone together, and also with Mrs Jesperson, but we were never able to agree upon how to assign the blame for the killings. We all agreed that both Adcocks and Harcourt were murdered, yet we also agreed that if there were no murderer, murder could not have been done.

  I hope our next case will be less of a curiosity.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  GOD MOVING OVER THE FACE OF THE WATERS

  Steve Mosby

  T

  he night before, I walked the coastline.

  I didn’t set out until after midnight, as I wanted to avoid the search parties. At that time, the sky, the sand and the sea in between were identical shades of black - indistinguishable except for the moonlight that caught the ridges of the waves, and a prickle of stars overhead. The beach was invisible. Pebbles crunched beneath my feet, the sound fading to the steady push of packed, wet sand as I reached the water itself.

  Everyone feels small, facing the sea. It’s the vast, open horizon, I think, and the sensation of how unimportant you are in the grand scheme of things. It’s like standing on the edge of an alien world - or perhaps like staring into the face of God, and suddenly realizing how incomprehensible He actually is. How little He cares about you. If He even deigns to notice you at all.

  The sea noticed me, of course. I felt it in the rush of hiss and retreat, and the sudden waft of ice in the air as it came rolling up the beach at me before pulling back its swift, foaming fingers. The water feathered impotently around my shoes. If I ventured in then it would take me without hesitation, because that is what it does, but right here I was safe.

  I squatted down and flicked at the sea.

  The contempt in my message was clear, and I heard a deep, chained-dog rumble from out towards the horizon: an angry folding of faraway water that longed to reach out and take me but couldn’t.

  A moment later, the smell of coconut filled the air. The contempt in the sea’s reply was equally clear.

  “Fuck you,” I told it.

  Then stood up, hitching my rucksack higher for comfort, and started looking.

  ~ * ~

  The first coffee of the morning curdled.

  I stared down at the tatters and shreds of cream on the surface. The milk was in date, so it was probably something else. Perhaps it was even the rucksack, which rested in the corner of the kitchen now, stinking of fish and rot. Whatever, I tipped the coffee away and made a fresh cup, this time without milk.

  It was a little after 8.20; through the window, the sky was white as mist. I took the coffee out into the cold morning and wandered down the shivering grass of my back garden, opening the gate in the chain-link fence at the bottom. There were a few furrowed boulders out here, a short incline, and then the beach.

  I sat down on one of the boulders, wrapping my hands around the steaming cup for warmth. Beyond the beach, the fluttering, blue-grey sea, gulls wheeling overhead like flies. It was still half-asleep right now, but grumbling to itself. Bruised, but too dozy to remember why.

  I hoped it woke up soon.

  I hoped it saw me up here and knew what I’d done.

  In the meantime, I sipped my coffee and thought about Anna.

  ~ * ~

  People often wonder why I never moved.

  Sometimes they even ask me outright. The place must be so big for you now, they say, and it must contain so many difficult memories - and, surely, it’s painful to wake up every day, after what happened, and see the sea?

  They don’t know anything, these people.

  ~ * ~

  By the time I’d finished my coffee, I’d spotted the helicopter: a tiny orange speck hanging over the vast expanse of sea, the fluttering chop of its propellers sounding dull and insignificant, barely there. Down the beach to my left, a group of indistinct figures was moving steadily along.

  I sloshed the dregs from my cup on to the rocks in front of me.

  The sea had come to life a little by now. It was still groggy, pulling itself slowly up the beach, but I could sense the muscles it had: the tendons below the surface that were clawing this enormous, heavy thing up the sand towards me. It knew what I’d done. Eventually, it would tire and wash itself away again, drained of energy. For now, I enjoyed watching God struggling and crawling before me.

  I’m not afraid of you.

  Despite the disparity in their powers, the group of figures would reach me long before the sea did. Six policemen, with orange jackets over their normal uniforms, feeling their way slowly and uselessly along the br
aille of the coast.

  Hague, of course, was one of them.

  ~ * ~

  Eight months ago, a little boy went missing off the coast here. It was a familiar story. He was on the beach, playing with his older sister, and he went out too far into the waves. You can’t get away with that here. This stretch of coast is notorious for its unforgiving currents, and you’ll find few, if any, locals willing to swim in it. By the time the little girl alerted her parents, the boy had been swept out to sea and was presumed drowned.

  Hague was involved in the search. He walked the coastline with different volunteers for a period of two weeks. He knew the boy was dead, but finding the body was important to him. Not understanding the whims of the sea, the parents held out hope - and would no doubt continue to do so until their son was found. So Hague walked the coast.