The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He recoiled like he’d been spat at. All morning, a rage had smouldered, built from the tinder of grief and loss, fuelled by the shock of finding the device gone and, yes, by the mortification he had suffered in telling his commander. Now it sparked and flared, and he blazed with righteous fire.

  He lurched from his seat to the front. “Stop the bus,” he said.

  The driver didn’t even take his eyes off the road. “It’s not a request service, Paddy, lad.”

  “Oh, good - ‘cos this is not a request.”

  The driver swivelled his head to look at him. “And who d’you think you are?”

  The man took hold of the driver’s seatback and leaned in, allowing his leather jacket to fall open just enough to show the revolver tucked in his belt. “I’m the Angel of Death, son.”

  ~ * ~

  It’s four minutes to three as he heads south-west down Birkenhead Road on the other side of the Mersey. He’d crossed the great wide dock of East Float and crossed it again, tracking over every one of the Four Bridges, lost. Forty-five minutes later, he’d fetched up at the Seacombe Ferry terminal, with just a handrail between him and the muddy waters of the Mersey. He could happily have thrown himself in, had a kindly ferryman not asked him if he was off to the parade, and given him clear directions to Wheatland Lane, where he might stand on the bridge and wave to the Queen. He barrels along, the little car’s engine screaming, past a stretch of blasted landscape. His heart is beating like an Orange Man’s Lambeg. It’s two minutes before the hour. She’ll give her speech on the Liverpool side, then motor through to Wallasey; giving him time to find a spot. He will deliver the message for Father O’Brien. He almost misses the sharp turn westward and wrestles the wheel right. The gun slides in his lap, and he catches it, tucking it firmly in his waistband.

  He’s driving full into the afternoon sun, now; it scorches his face, burning through the windscreen, and he yanks the visor down. A sheet of paper flutters on to the dashboard. His foot hard on the pedal, he picks it up, squints at it as he powers towards the bridge. It’s a note, written on lined paper, in a child’s neat handwriting:

  Dear Mister,

  I came to see you at the hotel but you weren’t there. I wanted to say to your face that I am truly sorry I stole Father O’Brien’s present. My sister says it’s a Mortal Sin to steal from a Priest. I waited for ages, but the manager told me to push off, and he would of got me arrested if I didn’t so I couldn’t stay. My sister said it would be OK if I wrote you a message instead. So I hope you will forgive me and ask Father to forgive me as well. I never opened it or nothing, so I hope it will be OK and that you will forgive me.

  Sorry.

  PS – I put it back esac exacly like I found it.

  His eyes widen. He hits the brakes. The car skids, turning ninety degrees, sliding sideways along the empty road. He reaches for the door, but his fingers seem too big, too clumsy to work the handle, he can’t seem to get a grip of the lever. He can’t seem to—

  The thin, electronic beep of the clock in the bag under his seat sounds a fraction of a second before the flash. Then the windows shatter and the grey bodywork blows apart like a tin can on a bonfire.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  TEA FOR TWO

  Sally Spedding

  T

  he Fuzz and me have never exactly been bosom pals, but for the last four months, I’ve been keeping my nose extra clean. Doing all right with my own space, some cash in the bank from knowing one end of a greyhound from the other, until I spotted an unmarked Escort hanging around my bedsit in Ennis Street by Bethnal Green Tube. Then this Suit got out - all six feet of him - and stared up at my fourth-floor window.

  “I’ve not an earthly why we’re doing this,” I complained to him some five minutes later. “Waste of a good morning if you ask me.”

  “Just need to sort a few things out,” he said, and not a lot since. So I reasoned with myself the sooner we got this over with, the sooner I could go to Walthamstow for the dogs, like I’d planned.

  ~ * ~

  Now it’s just me and this too-tight Suit in “The Box” at the local lockup, staring at a grainy black-and-white photo that’s obviously been enlarged.

  “Take me back to the beginning when you were a kid,” he says. “And no short-cuts.”

  “Why?”

  “Patience, Mr Dwyer. I’m the one asking the questions, remember?”

  I swallow bile that’s crept up my throat. I’m trying to keep calm.

  “There I am, in the distance, walking away from them others,” I say, pointing at the skinniest kid with the whitest legs. “See? D’you need a magnifying glass?”

  “No, Mr Dwyer. Just some answers. Why were you walking away?”

  “Fed up of being called Fatso, Big Ears and the rest. I remember thinking I’d better things to do than hang around taking shit like that.”

  “Just you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think again.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “You had a tip-off?”

  “What about?”

  This is a trick...

  “Nothing.”

  I was brought here hot and sweaty, but not any more. Quite the opposite. I’m looking for my gloves to warm up my fingers, but they’ve gone missing.

  “How about the evening of September the tenth 1950?” he goes on, and I can’t help sneaking a look at his shaved neck. His clean, shiny skin.

  Like I’ve said, I’ve never trusted the Fuzz. Why should I, given my history? But this one, young enough to be my own son, seems kosher enough. Even the brew he’s brought in for me is drinkable. Although his smile is meant to crack my memory that’s hardened like cement, you try recalling stuff that happened that long ago. It’s no joke, ‘specially since there’s been so much water under the bridge - Tower Bridge, to be precise - more my home then than the one I was supposed to go back to every night.

  162, Rosehill Street, Rotherhithe, if you must know. With not a bloody rose or a hill in sight.

  “It’s important you take me through exactly what happened.” The Suit. Slips a new tape into his recorder. Clicks it on. The sound makes me jump, and he notices. “Are you comfortable? Or would you prefer a softer chair?”

  I don’t answer. His tone of voice has changed, making my pulse slow up and a growing shadow fill my mind. “You’re suspecting me of summat, right?” I say. I can’t help myself. It just comes out.

  “And what might that be?” He smiles again; this time showing big white teeth. All his own. Lucky not to have had ‘em out like I did as a kid, to save on dentists. Come to think of it, there’s something about his expression that rings a bell, but for the life of me, I can’t think why. He pushes the photo even closer towards me until it rests in a beam of sunlight from the one barred window. I need to be careful.

  Then I remember that same sun beginning to drop in the late-afternoon sky, making our shadows longer than we were, and that rusty old barge - the May Queen - moored just off the stony beach, glow like the lippy my step-mum wore before her nights out.

  “Freddie’s the one on the right, bending down. Am I correct?” says The Suit.

  “Yessir. Freddie Miles. Smiley for short. He were a right bastard.”

  My inquisitor’s Adam’s apple bobs up and down in his throat. I wonder if I’ve put a foot wrong. My warder in the Scrubs warned me to be deferential with the Fuzz at all times, to the point of actually browning my nose. So here I am, doing like he said.

  “What’s he up to in this photo?”

  “Picking up the biggest stones. Then we’d make a right huge pile...”

  “Why?”

  “Ammo, ‘course. Even though the war was well over, he’d pretend the Boche were still about to come up river, and he’d be Churchill, seeing them off.”

  “Are these other boys doing the same? The Thomas brothers - Geraint and Dafydd - and the Robinson triplets?” The Suit’s
chewed forefinger points at the left-hand side of the photograph where the other five lads are busy obeying orders...

  If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s people who eat their own skin. I wonder if he’s been at it since he was a kid...He’s remembered all the names, mind. Even though I’ve only told him the once.

  “They was his slaves too,” I explain. “His ‘Gatherers’. Nobody took offence at that, ‘cept me and Dafydd. Funny you mention the Thomases. Never saw hide nor hair of them after Guy Fawkes Night. Like they’d never existed...”

  He gets up. Goes over to the bare noticeboard. If this is a ploy to help me remember more, it doesn’t. “One of them vanished sometime before November the fifth. Did you know that, Mr Dwyer? It’s been a cold case since then.”

  I’m trying not to blink. Nor show any emotions. Something else the Scrubs has taught me.

  “Which one’s that?”

  “Dafydd. There he is. The smallest. And after that Christmas, having given up the search for him, the rest of the family emigrated. So we discovered. “

  “Why pick on me? Where’s the rest of ‘em lads?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say. Besides most of the gang have either died or live outside our jurisdiction.” He sits down again and his nose catches the sun while the tape recorder makes a sudden hissing sound. He corrects it. Leans forward towards me with another question on his lips. But I beat him to it. Not to ask what jurisdiction means, but something far more important. “Who took this photo?”

  “That’s not for you to worry about.”

  “Has someone sent it you, after all these years?”

  A nod.

  “I’d like a lawyer to be present.”

  “That’s not appropriate, Mr Dwyer. May I call you Carl? This is just an informal chat...”

  With both chairs and the table between us welded to the floor? With another Fuzz hovering outside the door, and a large glass panel taking up most of the opposite wall? The kind you see on TV cop shows? Come on, mate, pull the other one...

  “Another tea, Carl?” he asks.

  “You’re taking the piss. If you think I had anything to do with... with...”

  “Dafydd’s death?” He switches off his machine. Eyebrows raised. “When you were still in short trousers, but old enough to know better?”

  Death? Jesus Christ...

  “Then I’m using my right to silence.”

  “Up to you.” He stands up for the second time and pockets the neat gadget with my answers still inside. I notice the carotid jumping in his neck. He’s not as calm as he pretends. While the sun goes in, he taps on the door to be let out, then turns towards me. “Remember, from now on we’ll be breathing down your neck, so no moving away, eh? No contacting any of the others, unless you want another sojourn in the Scrubs. Think about it, Carl.”

  And I do. ‘Specially the slopping out...

  ~ * ~

  For seven whole days, I avoided anywhere with fucking CCTV, which didn’t leave me much choice, but now needs must. At Baba’s Internet cafe, the Somalian guy takes my three quid and shows me into a pre-fab extension at the back, where I can work. I’ve done two IT skills courses in the past four years, so the internet’s no problem. But Dafydd Thomas is. Nothing on him at all. Nor any of the others in the gang. More and more, I’m beginning to feel something’s amiss.

  Instinct tells me to try and find where those Taffies, who’d come from Port Talbot, ended up. Then I remember the ‘death’ word. Each death needs a certificate which is open to public scrutiny.

  Rotherhithe Register Office is just a ten-minute bus ride away.

  ~ * ~

  There’s always someone happy to make you feel like a jerk, and the wanker in the reception area proves my point. For a start, he can barely be arsed to look up from his computer.

  “It’s Kew you want,” he says at last, and I notice how his lips are cracked and dry. His skin like a map of red rivers. Quite different from that moisturized Suit who kept me on my own for a further half-hour to “have a rethink”.

  Bollocks.

  “You’ll need some ID. A driving licence, utility bill, etcetera,” the geek goes on. “And it costs...” He then looks up at me and my crap clothes as if to say, “don’t bother”. I have to admit, he’s right. There are too many obstacles. Time for that rethink, to get my memory up and running before it’s too late.

  ~ * ~

  I don’t recognize the place at all. Hell, no. Tarted up with new shingle, and where us kids used to race each other on to it, is a bistro complete with red parasols fluttering in the hot breeze. I hesitate for a moment. It’s not just the temperature sealing my nylon shirt to my back, but being there again.

  “You OK, sir?” A uniform has suddenly materialized alongside me. One of those Community Police Officers. Some jobless git in fluorescent yellow fancy dress. “I can fetch you a drink of water...”

  “I’m pukka, ta very much. Too old for this heat, mind.”

  He wanders off, ducking away from a gull about to dump on his peaked cap. Normally, I’d say “serve him right”, but I’m too busy staring at the May Queen, uglier than ever. Now painted black to match her cabin.

  Yes, the cabin...

  It’s cooler here under one of these parasols and, with a cold Stella in my hand, I feel those intervening years fold away from me like a collapsing pack of cards.

  ~ * ~

  Night-time, and while the other lads have gone to the chippie, Smiley’s dragging me and Dafydd towards the barge, by a rope round our necks. Neither of us can swim, but Smiley can. He can do everything, and I mean everything. Sometimes the Thames’s tarry water fills my lungs, but does he care? Why should he? Me and Dafydd who’d stood up to him when he’d branded us “fucking snitchers” for telling our teacher at Gladebrook Primary how weird he was. Not that we went there much. But she wasn’t frightened of Smiley and his rubbish family...

  Dafydd’s up on deck first. No screaming, not with that rag in his gob, while my heart’s drumming so hard it feels about to burst. No moon or stars. No lights either except those feeble pinpricks along by St Paul’s, and the pong of oil and damp and the shit dribbling down Dafydd’s short trouser legs. Him with the cheeky grin and his Robertson’s golly badge proudly pinned to his home-made jumper, lies tied to the rickety old table. His clothes chucked overboard.

  “I want me mam,” he grunts. “I want to go home...”

  But what can I do?

  Smiley’s living up to his name all right. Smiling. He produces a knife he’s nicked from somewhere and makes the first, bloody cut. “Tastes just like pork, Carl.” He licks his lips as he lowers the fork and its pink morsel of shoulder over the lit stove. “Try some.”

  That’s when I throw up, and as a punishment, I have to watch till he’s eaten his fill.

  ~ * ~

  How could I get any kip after that? ‘Specially after doing three years for breaking and entering and GBH, which I never meant to do. Two hours a night, if I was lucky. Just as well, given the pond life I shared with. And, no, don’t talk to me about ham...

  I make myself a cuppa on my bedsit’s gas ring. Nice and sweet. But why’s my hand shaking? Why do I feel as if that same shite river water’s rolling over my head again, like it did when I made my escape from the May Queen, my numb feet paddling back and forth for Britain? Because I’d just dreamed of teeth with bits of Dafydd trapped between them. The very same smile I’d seen a week ago...

  ~ * ~

  The Suit had changed his name, hadn’t he? Long before he and I first met. The coward. And been on leave from the can since midnight. There’s a young Polish cleaner, Jana so her name tag says. I’d spotted her while he’d led me into The Box under false pretences. Trying to pin things on me. This time she’s collecting her bike from the rack in the full staff car park. Once she’s out of the CCTV’s range, I make my move. Ask her where this Suit lives.

  “54, Darcy Road. Near crick
et ground. Something like that,” she hisses, stuffing my three crisp tenners down her bra. I’m not fussed what she does with ‘em. Worth every penny when you think of it.

  Ten minutes later, I’m in number 54’s whitewashed basement room, home to a half-full wine rack taking up most of one wall. Its owner a bon vivant no less. My, my, ain’t he done well?

  From the room overhead, I can make out a cricket match in progress on the TV. Then comes a wheezy cough. And another. I wasn’t the best second-storey man in Catford for nothing, but if you’re hoping I’ll spill the tricks of my trade to you, you’ll be disappointed.