The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Best move all round, Davie, ah says tae masel. Best move, aye, aye ...

  Ah pulls open the phone box door in a oner. Goat the handle thing in ma haun as Barry steps intae Scotbet.

  Eh, polis, please ... I want tae report a robbery in progress.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  WILKOLAK

  Nina Allan

  K

  ip knew the man was the monster as soon as he saw him. He was coming out of the convenience store attached to the garage at the bottom end of Lee High Road, his shopping in an old Tesco bag. Kip uncapped the Nikon and took his picture; the click of the shutter release sounded loud to him, even above the noise of the passing traffic. Kip lowered the camera, suddenly afraid the man might turn and see him, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the man crossed the garage forecourt, ignoring the cars parked at the pumps and heading off up the road in the direction of Lewisham. He was of medium height, but skinny, with gangling limbs and a jutting Adam’s apple, and reminded Kip of Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He wore tatty old Levis, and an army surplus jacket that was too big for him around the shoulders. He seemed lost in thought, cocooned in it, shut off from his surroundings, from Kip, from everything.

  Kip raised the Nikon again and took half a dozen more shots in quick succession. Later, at home in his room, he downloaded the images to his hard drive, storing them in a file he tagged as monster. A fortnight ago an eight-year-old girl from Marischal Road had gone missing on her way home from school. The girl’s name was Rebecca Riding. Her body was discovered a week later in a disused mobile home on the Isle of Sheppey. She had been raped and then suffocated. The police issued a photo fit of a man they wanted to question, a man with thinning hair and a scrawny build, and teachery little wire-framed glasses. The police said he was probably in his early forties, and living in the Lewisham area. Kip thought the man in the photo fit looked like a school nerd gone bad. He also looked exactly like the bloke he had seen coming out of the garage on Lee High Road. Kip remembered the man’s walk, slightly knock-kneed, the Tesco bag bumping against his thigh as he moved along.

  The tabloids had already dubbed him the Manor Park Monster.

  Kip selected one of the photos and printed it out, the best one, showing the man’s face in profile like the double agent in a spy movie. It was the kind of photo you could imagine flashing up on the TV news, or on the front page of the next day’s papers. Rebecca Riding had been all over the news, always the same photo, a blonde kid with a demon smile and one of her top front teeth missing. Rebecca Riding had gone missing just before the start of the holidays and at school her name quickly became that summer’s catchphrase: What do you get if you cross Rebecca Riding with a rubber glove? What did Rebecca Riding’s dad say when the cops asked him why his trousers were at the cleaner’s? The jokes were disgusting but you couldn’t help laughing at them. One dork had laughed so hard Kip thought he was going to piss himself. Kip didn’t want to think about the murder. It was the photograph of the murderer that interested him, some loser with a plastic carrier bag crossing the street. The image might seem ordinary but Kip knew it wasn’t, that the very act of framing the man in his viewfinder and then choosing to release the shutter made the picture significant. The main point of a photograph was to invite you to look, to concentrate on the world around you a little harder. The photographer recreated the world in the way he saw it, and in this, Kip supposed, he was the master of his universe. A guy who worked for the Star and who had once come to the school to give a talk on photojournalism said that all photographers were grubby-handed alchemists, pier-end magicians - words that stuck in Kip’s mind like splinters of glass. Now that he had the photograph in front of him Kip found he didn’t really care whether the man was the monster or not. The point seemed to be that he could be. He could just as easily be a hero. If you mounted a photo on a nice ground and gave it an interesting title then anybody could be anything.

  He shut down his computer and went downstairs. The television was on in the back room, his mother slumped at the end of the sofa watching The Weakest Link. She was folding and unfolding a tea towel, one of the souvenirs she had brought back from their holiday in Tenby three years before. It had the Welsh dragon on it, in red.

  “Your father won’t be home for supper,” she said. “He has work to finish.”

  “OK,” Kip said. He sat down beside her, his eyes on the screen, careful not to look at her directly. This was a game they played together all the time now. She would tell him his father was working late at the site, and he would pretend to believe her and not care less. He would ignore the bunched, grasping look of her hands, her puffy eyes, and concentrate on Anne Robinson torturing a bank clerk from Cleethorpes over the identity of the currency of Argentina.

  The thing he was not supposed to know but had known for six months was that his father was having an affair; that on at least three evenings a week Andrzej Kiplas would knock off work early and drive over to Streatham, where he would spend an unspecified number of hours with a woman named Grace Hemingway. Kip didn’t know who she was or how his father had met her. Sometimes he imagined her as one of the peroxide Pirelli blondes on the calendar in the site Portakabin; at other times he saw her as a mousy little librarian with a flat full of dusty books, like the women in films by Wajda or Kieslowski.

  Andy Kiplas sometimes didn’t return until ten, eleven o’clock. On the nights when this happened, Kip would slope off to his room as soon as he heard his father’s key in the lock. There would be a short interval without much happening, then his mother would start crying or his father shouting or both. This usually went on for about an hour. Then everything would go quiet, and later he would hear the headboard banging against the wall in his parents’ bedroom.

  Andy Kiplas was almost fifty, but his body was still lean and hard from his work on the site. Kip’s mother Lynn was like an overblown rose. When she smiled and if the lighting was right she could still be beautiful, her heaviness transformed into a pink softness that put him in mind of strawberries, candyfloss, September sunsets. But when she was unhappy she turned pallid as lard.

  Kip itched to photograph her. With her inflamed eyelids and the ragged cloth in her hands she looked like a war victim, one of the refugee women in the immigrant camps outside Calais. Sometimes on evenings like this Kip would stay downstairs and play cards with her, or backgammon. At some point during the game Lynn would get up from her seat and pour them both a vodka, a double Zubrowka straight from the freezer. The fumes rose up in a smoky cloud as she unscrewed the cap.

  “One little nip can’t hurt you,” she would say. She had been saying that since he was thirteen. “Don’t you go telling your teachers.” She would laugh then, a raucous, ribald sound, the same laugh she used with her friends on the phone and that Kip loved to hear. She would knock back her vodka in one, and two bright tears would appear, squeezing like liquid crystal from the corners of her eyes.

  They sparkled there, jewel-bright, on the rims of her cheeks. Kip wondered what he would do if she cried for real. No matter how much he loved her he still hated her need of him, the way her fingers twisted together when she told him the pointless lies about his father.

  The only thing to do was pretend not to notice. Once the truth was out in the open it would be impossible for either of them to put it back.

  They ate supper off a tray, watching the news.

  “I’m going out later,” Kip said.

  “Where to?” Lynn said. She glanced up from her plate. Her food was still mostly untouched. “I don’t want you roaming the streets half the night, not with that man on the loose.”

  “I’m only going to Sonia’s. I won’t be late.”

  “Well, make sure you catch the bus coming home.” She took her plate through to the kitchen and Kip heard her scraping her supper into the waste bin. It was the first time she had mentioned the monster, at least to him. He thought it was probably her
way of trying to stop him from going out and leaving her by herself.

  ~ * ~

  “I don’t know,” Sonia said. “It could be him, I suppose.” She held the photograph in both hands, tilting it against the light. “They all look the same though, those photo fits. Just think how awful it would be for this man if you got it wrong.”

  They were sitting on the grass behind the garage in Sonia’s garden. Sonia’s hair was drawn back off her face in a ponytail. Loose strands glimmered at the nape of her neck like copper wire.

  “I suppose,” Kip said. There was a number you could ring, a police hotline. On the way over to Sonia’s he had tried to imagine what would happen if he called it and told the cop at the other end that he had seen the monster. They would ask for his name and address, that would be the first thing, and later on they would make him hand over the photograph. He supposed it was evidence of a kind, evidence that linked him with the monster. The idea was disturbing, not so much because the link existed as because it might become known. Sonia’s uncertainty about the photograph was a relief because it seemed to free him from the obligation of having to do anything.

  He leaned in over her shoulder, pretending to look at the photo but in reality just wanting to get closer to her. She smelled of the coarse-grained pine soap the Vardens had in their upstairs bathroom. He imagined her at the sink, her bare feet on the coconut matting. The Vardens’ house was like that, all polished wood and cream-coloured walls. Sonia went to Forest Hill Girls’ School. Sonia’s father Timothy had a good job in the City.

  “I really like this photo though,” Sonia was saying. “Can I keep it?”

  “‘Course you can,” Kip said. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Nothing.” She laughed. “I just like it, that’s all. He looks lonely, don’t you think? The kind of man who’s always alone.” She was still studying the picture, as if she had come upon it by chance in a magazine and was trying to decide whether she should cut it out or not. The way she looked at the photograph made him feel strange, weightless, as in the moments before an orgasm. There was part of himself that wished he had not shown it to her, that felt convinced it was dangerous. And yet the idea that she would want to keep something he had made, that she could like it that much, made his insides hurt.

  He began to count the freckles on the back of her neck, concentrating hard to stop himself getting an erection. The freckles were red, like her hair, the glinting vermilion of the jagged patches of rust on the disused water tank around the back of the school toilets.

  He’d had sex with Sonia twice, once up in Oxleas Woods, and once in her bedroom, when her parents were out for the day at some barbecue or other. The thought of being with her in her parents’ house had made him almost sick with excitement, but it turned out not to be such a good idea. Every time a car went by on the street outside he thought it was the Vardens, returning home early. The time in the woods had been better. Sonia held his cock, clasping it in her fist and moving her hand cautiously up and down, as if she was afraid she might hurt him. He came too soon of course, but at least he managed to get inside her. He thought it would be embarrassing afterwards, trying to think of things to say, but it had been fine. Better than fine, in fact. They put their clothes back on and lay in the grass, watching planes soar in low overhead on their approach to Heathrow and talking about TV shows they had liked when they were younger. By the end of the afternoon he felt comfortable around Sonia in a way that went far beyond just wanting to fuck her.

  He couldn’t imagine what had driven the monster to fuck an eight-year-old. Almost the best part of sex with Sonia was knowing that she wanted it too, and that she liked him enough to want to spend time with him afterwards.

  The rape of Rebecca Riding was something he was ashamed to think about, as if thinking about it somehow made him a part of what had happened. Had the monster killed the girl in the end because he wanted to cover his tracks, or because he could no longer stand the sound of her screaming? To erase what he had done, like pulling the wings off a fly and then crushing it beneath your thumb to put it out of its misery.

  A crime like the monster’s was so bad it had its own thumbprint, its own identity. If Kip thought about it hard enough he could feel it beginning to infect his imagination, cell by cell, like mildew creeping and spreading on a damp wall.

  His stomach turned over at the thought, the same way it did when you went to pour milk in your tea and found it had gone off. He remembered seeing some kids once, larking around on a building site, using a broken-off branch to fish a dead rat out of a rain puddle. They had flicked the rat up in the air, then run away screaming as it plopped down again in the water. The memories repelled him and yet they persisted. You couldn’t not watch them playing with the rat, couldn’t not smell the curdled milk in its plastic container, even though it would make your guts heave and you knew that perfectly well before you started.

  So long as you weren’t forced to drink the milk or pick up the rat in your bare hands, it was okay. It was interesting even. The rat he remembered especially, because he had been back to the building site later to photograph it.

  He leaned forward and kissed Sonia’s neck. A strand of her loose hair tickled his lips, and a wisp of his own breath came back at him, rebounding off her skin in a puff of warm air.

  She turned in his arms and kissed him. Her saliva tasted faintly of orange juice.

  “I’ll have to go in, in a minute. I’m supposed to be writing an essay on nuclear power.”

  “That’s OK,” Kip said. “I’ll text you later.” He stood up from the grass. He wondered when he would next get to have sex with her, then wondered if that was how it was for his father with Grace Hemingway. The idea of his father thinking about sex unsettled him even more than the thought of the rat.

  “Thanks for the photo,” said Sonia. “I’ll buy a clip frame for it tomorrow.”

  “Be careful,” Kip said, and then wondered what the hell he was on about. It was just a stupid photograph, nothing to be careful of there. He hurried away, leaving via the side gate without turning back, not wanting her to see that he was blushing.

  He caught the bus from outside the old Capitol cinema on the London Road. He climbed up to the top deck, where he sat alone apart from a gaunt and elderly black man reading a Metro. It was just about beginning to get dark. Kip looked out at the amethyst sky, the latticework of interlinked streets, shop fronts and garage forecourts, the chequered fabric of gardens and railway lines. He saw London as a labyrinth, with no way out. Even if you fled to the edge, to the boundary posts at Morden or Edgware, there would still be more roads, more alleyways, more cemeteries. It was the kingdom of the Manor Park Monster. Kip wondered where in his kingdom the monster was hiding at that moment.

  The streetlights were coming on all over town, and soon it would be dark for real. He got off the bus opposite the garage. Lee High Road smelled of diesel fumes and dying hydrangeas. When he got home he discovered his father had arrived there before him. The back door was standing open into the garden. Lynn and Andy Kiplas sat together at the kitchen table with their elbows touching. Lynn was laughing, small creases at the corners of her eyes. Kip looked at his father, not speaking. Andy Kiplas glanced quickly away, then asked Kip if he would like a beer.

  Kip saw the monster again three days later in Manor Park Gardens. Some people thought that this was where Rebecca Riding had gone missing, but it wasn’t so. Manor Park Gardens was a landscaped park with a lake and ornamental waterfowl, popular with families and joggers. As a kidnapping site it was close to useless. Kip reckoned the only time you could get yourself kidnapped from the gardens would be first thing in the morning before it got busy, but even then there were the groundsmen and the dog walkers, commuters using the park as a cut-through to Lee station.

  Rebecca Riding had been abducted at around 3.30 in the afternoon, not from Manor Park Gardens but from Manor Park itself. Manor Park was a rough triangle of land sa
ndwiched between Weardale Road and Manor Lane, hemmed in on one side by a swampy and narrow section of the River Quaggy. Sometimes you would see rubbish floating in the water and once there had been a child’s tricycle but Kip liked Manor Park because it was quiet, the tall terraces of Manor Lane backing directly on to the tussocky grass and stands of nettles like the last, abandoned houses in a zombie movie. Kip liked to photograph these houses, even though someone in one of the flats there had once leaned out of the window and called him a Peeping Tom.

  This was the first time he had been back to Manor Park since Rebecca Riding’s abduction. He had wondered if the place were still being treated as a crime scene but if there had ever been police tape or anything else of that kind it was gone now. To Kip the park seemed unnaturally quiet, expectant, but he knew he was probably imagining it. He took some photos of the park railings and the children’s play area, hoping that no one would see him doing it and wishing he knew exactly where the abduction had taken place. He knew his interest in the monster was growing. He disliked this feeling, distrusted it, but was unable to let it go. He would have liked to discuss it with Sonia but was afraid she might start to think he was weird, one of the lonely serial-killer types who bought true-crime magazines and hung around Cromwell Road and the corner of the modern housing estate that had once been Rillington Place. The day after he gave her the photograph of the monster, Sonia told him an obscure theory some crime writer had concocted about how a famous English painter was really Jack the Ripper. The theory was connected with art, though, so it seemed it was all right to talk about it.