The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The line went quiet, and for long awful seconds Kip felt certain she knew he was lying, that he was telling her only a small part of the truth. He pressed the phone hard to his ear, but all he could hear was his own breathing. When Sonia spoke again the sound was unnaturally loud.

  “Can I tell you something, Eddie? Promise you won’t laugh?”

  “‘Course I won’t, Son. Just tell me, all right?” He wondered if she was about to dump him, although it didn’t sound like that from her voice. If you touch her I’ll kill you, he thought. You rat-faced bastard.

  “He reminds me of someone. The guy.”

  “Someone you know, you mean?”

  “Not really.” She hesitated. “I think I saw him in a dream once. Only he wasn’t really a man, he was some kind of monster. He could kill people, just by looking at them. I had problems sleeping after that, for a while. My mum thought it was all to do with my periods starting.” She giggled, a light, tight sound that was not really like her. “It was ages ago now. I’d forgotten all about it until I saw the photo.”

  “A monster?” He could hear his voice rising in pitch, and he knew he sounded as if he was about to explode with laughter, only it wasn’t that, it was the opposite. He felt like breaking down and telling her everything.

  “Yes. You promised you wouldn’t laugh.”

  “I’m not. So you reckon the guy in the photo is the guy from your dream?”

  “Of course not. How could he be? They look the same, that’s all. Something about the cheekbones. And those glasses.”

  “Like a rat.”

  “That’s a strange way of describing it but I know what you mean.” She paused. “I put the photo away in a drawer. Do you mind?”

  “Of course I don’t mind. I wish you’d chuck it out, though, get rid of it.”

  “I’m not binning your work over a stupid dream I had five years ago! The guy in the picture is just some guy anyway, he’s no one. I was just a bit freaked, that’s all.”

  “You’ll keep the photo in the drawer, though, won’t you?”

  “If that’s what you want. Are you sure everything’s okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. Do you want me to come over tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow was Saturday. Croft had said he would be busy over the weekend. Busy with what exactly? Kip found he didn’t want to think about it.

  “You’d better, or I might kill you. We can go to the woods, if you want.”

  Kip guessed what she meant, and felt himself blushing. “I’ll bring my camera,” he said absently. He remembered how she had looked the last time, afterwards, the yellow leaves in her red hair. If you could capture a moment like that then you were some kind of genius.

  “Go home now,” said Sonia. “It’s getting late.”

  “How did you know I was out?”

  “I can hear the road, silly.”

  “You’re magic, Son,” he said, and ended the call. On Lee High Road the buses sailed by like pirate ships, and from the gardens in Brandram Road there came a faint scent of honeysuckle. He realized it was night, real night, the bottomless tract of hours between dusk and morning. In his grandmother’s stories this had always been the time of the wilkolak.

  ~ * ~

  He met Sonia off the 122 bus at the bottom end of Lee High Road, then they walked up Lee Park to Blackheath Village, where they caught the number 89 to Shooter’s Hill. Sonia had made a picnic: cheese sandwiches and flapjacks and orange juice. She had also brought a canvas holdall with a blanket in it. They spread the blanket under some trees and had sex again. It was better than the last time, different somehow, as if both of them had grown older overnight.

  Neither of them mentioned the monster. Sonia talked about what might happen when they went away to college, and Kip supposed her need to make plans for them might have scared some people but it didn’t worry him. He found he liked it. He closed his eyes and drifted. A sweet breeze played with the leaves, and Kip found himself thinking that they were safe here, that Croft wouldn’t come to the forest, he was a city rat.

  He was awakened by Sonia kissing him. She kissed him full on the mouth, pressing her lips carefully against his as if she meant to leave an imprint there, the way girls did with soldiers’ handkerchiefs in the old war movies.

  “I want you to know that whatever happens, today was real,” she said. “That all of this really happened.” Her top half was still naked. Her hair trailed in the grass, like runners of flame about to start a brush fire.

  “What do you mean?” Kip said. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “Nothing,” Sonia said. “I’m just saying.”

  He took some photos of her, just head shots. Her eyes were closed, her eyelashes cast spider-leg shadows on the curves of her cheeks.

  Kip knew that someone would have had to photograph Rebecca Riding; that if he were serious about forensic photography he might soon be having to photograph dead girls all the time.

  ~ * ~

  When he arrived home that evening he found his parents were going to dinner at the Toklins’. His mother had put on a dress Kip knew his father liked to see her in: cream-coloured silk cut low at the front and covered in large pink roses. She seemed nervously excited, as if she and Andy had only just met, and her nervousness made her beautiful. She was perched on the edge of the sofa, painting her nails with gold varnish and watching the news.

  “Where’s Dad?” Kip said.

  “At the off-licence, I hope. He’s supposed to be buying a bottle of that Bulgarian Merlot Toke likes. Be quiet for a moment, Eddie, I want to listen.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “It looks like they’ve caught that maniac.”

  Kip stared at the television. The photo fit of the monster was filling the screen. A man had been arrested and charged with the rape and murder of Rebecca Riding. The man’s name was Steven Jepsom and he was from Brownhill Road, Catford.

  “Thank God for that,” Lynn said. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

  “We don’t know it’s him yet,” said Kip. “Not until he’s been convicted.”

  He wished they would show a picture of Jepsom but Kip guessed it was illegal to put someone’s photo all over the news while there was still a chance they were innocent. He knew he should feel relieved but he somehow didn’t. He wanted to know if Jepsom looked like Croft. It occurred to him that Steven Jepsom might be Dennis Croft’s real name.

  His mother glanced at him, her lips tightening.

  “Aren’t you pleased? At least it’s some comfort for the family, knowing he’s behind bars at last.”

  “I’m just saying,” Kip said. “I hope they got the right bloke, that’s all.”

  Lynn frowned, and looked as if she were about to say something else, but at that moment Andy Kiplas returned from the off-licence. He had the bottle of wine under one arm, wrapped in a sheet of green tissue paper. The ends of the paper had been twisted into a fan shape.

  “Hurry up,” Andy said. “I’ve got us a taxi.”

  Lynn’s cheeks coloured to match the roses on her dress. “A taxi? What’s all this in aid of?”

  Kip’s father was standing holding the door open like a butler in a television murder mystery. As Lynn got up from the sofa he bowed and began humming a tune from one of the opera CDs he sometimes listened to in the car. His mother laughed, and a look passed between her and his father that made Kip feel stupid and in the way, as if all his worrying about her had been for nothing. He wished they would keep their business to themselves.

  He waited for them to leave, then turned off the television. He fetched the Nikon from his room and began to photograph the back room and the hallway, pretending that the house was the scene of a crime. He did a series of close-ups of the glass tumbler his mother had been drinking from. The tumbler was still half full of tonic water, and there was a fingerprint clearly visible near the brim. Lynn had changed her mind about her shoes at the last min
ute, and one of the discarded ones, a high-heeled pink sandal, lay on its side in the doorway. If you looked at things a certain way the dirty glass and the fallen shoe looked suspicious, as if someone had left the room in a terrible hurry.

  He became so absorbed in the details that there were moments when he forgot he was in his own home. Eventually he laid the camera aside on the sofa and went through to the kitchen. There was potato salad in the fridge, some Polish salami, the remains of his parents’ lunch. He piled it into a bowl and was about to put it all in the microwave when his phone rang. It was Sonia. He picked up at once.

  “Did you hear?” she said. “They got him.”

  “Yes,” Kip said. “I saw it on the news earlier.”

  “Do you reckon it’s him? The guy in the photo, I mean?”

  “I doubt it. I’d forgotten all about him, really.” He was caught off guard by a memory of her, leaning against a tree as she pulled on her jeans. Her back was long, with a very slight curvature of the spine. There were exercises she was meant to do to stop it getting stiff but she was always forgetting. The skin over her vertebrae was taut and pearly white, the row of smooth bumps reminding him always of a saying of his mother’s: rare as hens’ teeth, they are. Quite suddenly the last thing he wanted to talk about was Dennis Croft.

  “Can you call me back on the landline?” Sonia said. “They’re showing Donnie Darko on Channel 4 in a moment. We could sit and watch it together, if you like?”

  “What about your parents?” Kip said.

  “They’re out. With some people from Deutsche Bank. They won’t be back for hours.”

  He finished microwaving the food then took the hall phone upstairs to his room. He dialled Sonia’s home number and she picked up almost before it had a chance to ring. Halfway through the film Kip got undressed and lay down on his bed, clutching the phone between his neck and his shoulder to stop it slipping.

  “You’re taking your clothes off,” said Sonia. “I can hear you doing it.”

  “I am not.”

  “Liar!”

  “Shut up, I’m missing the film.”

  He closed his eyes and thought of Sonia lying on top of him. The fact that she was both far away and close made him feel breathless with excitement. He began to rub himself, focusing on the sound of her breathing and trying not to make any noise.

  “Kip?” she said some time later. “You okay?”

  “You’re rare as hens’ teeth, you are.” A single tear ran diagonally across his face. “Watch the film.”

  When the film was over they said goodnight and ended the call. Kip pulled up the duvet and lay in the dark, watching the television with the sound turned down. Eventually he fell asleep. He woke briefly just after two. There was a light on downstairs and the sound of voices. For a moment Kip felt frightened. He remembered the dirty tumbler and the discarded shoe and thought something awful had happened. Then he realized it was just his parents coming home from the Toklins’. They spoke in loud whispers like miscreant school kids. He could tell from the way they were moving that they were both drunk.

  He began to drift off again almost at once. His father was humming the Toreador Song out of Carmen. His mother stumbled against the box of newspapers in the hall, swore loudly and then stifled a laugh.

  The box shouldn’t even have been there. His father was supposed to take it out on Fridays for recycling.

  Just before he fell asleep, Kip decided he would not go to Croft’s house on the Tuesday, after all.

  ~ * ~

  Croft’s house was on Belmont Hill, the Lewisham end, one of a long Victorian terrace, the tall, gabled houses running away down the steep gradient like toppling dominoes. Kip photographed the house from both sides of the road, wondering if Croft were watching him from behind the curtains. He doubted it. He had already made up his mind on the way over that Croft would not be in when he called, that the address on the piece of paper was not even his. He told himself the only reason he was going there was to prove the whole thing was a fake. He pressed the bell, trying to work out what he would say if the door were opened by a complete stranger, a large woman in a flowered bathrobe say, or an old man in a saggy green cardigan with the elbows worn through.

  Excuse me, but does Mr Gaumont live here? I promised my uncle I’d change his library books for him.

  Kip liked the sound of Mr Gaumont. The idea of him was so convincing that when the door opened and Croft appeared, Kip had to think who he was. It seemed for a moment that Croft was the fantasy, not Gaumont, old Gaumont who was so harmless and so plausible. It crossed his mind that Croft had done away with Gaumont, just as he had done away with Rebecca Riding.

  “Hi there,” Croft said. “Come in.”

  He took a step back from the door. As Kip entered the house it occurred to him that nobody in the world knew where he was. He found himself wishing he had left a note in his room, or that he had texted Sonia. He wondered how often bad things happened to people because they were afraid of looking stupid, and supposed it was often, more often than you might think anyway.

  “Excuse the mess,” Croft said. “This was my dad’s place. He left it in a bit of a state. It’s taking me a while to get things straight.”

  There were some black bin bags at the foot of the stairs but other than that there was no mess that Kip could see. The hallway of the house was dark, made darker by the varnished wood panelling and dull red carpet. There was a smell of mothballs and furniture polish, reminding him of the Toklins’ house, which was owned by Lyonel Toklin’s ninety-year-old mother, Violet. Lynn Kiplas always joked that Violet Toklin was so stingy she hadn’t had the place decorated since VE Day, and Kip felt half-inclined to believe her. Croft led the way through to a room at the back, home to an enormous buttonback sofa and a boiler on a tiled hearth protected by a square metal cage. There were piles of books everywhere. Kip noticed a stack of Photography Now and some issues of another magazine that he knew you could only get on subscription from America.

  “Can I get you anything?” Croft said. “A drink maybe?”

  Kip shook his head, then asked for a glass of water. It seemed safer to ask for something than nothing at all. He perched himself on the edge of the sofa and fiddled with the strap of the Nikon. He was desperate to photograph this room, with its stacks of old magazines and blacked floorboards, the sofa itself, leathery and vast as a beached whale. Leviathan, he thought, savouring the sound of it, a word that seemed to open its jaws and admit the world.

  Croft disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with two glasses on a tray and two cans of Coke. He sat down next to Kip on the sofa, placing the tray on a low stool that stood close by.

  “You can have water instead if that’s what you want,” he said. “But I thought you might like one of these. They’re straight from the fridge.”

  “No, this is great,” Kip said. “Thanks.” He popped the seal on the can and poured the frothing liquid into the glass. He thought how typical it was of Croft, that he would drink Coke from a glass instead of straight from the can. It went with his old Minolta, his Oxfam clothes... and the thought that he could still predict Croft this way, that he could read him, made Kip feel calmer. He had come here of his own free will, after all. If he wanted to he could just get up and leave.

  “Well?” Croft said. He took a sip of his Coke then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Did you bring anything to show me?”

  “You can have a look at these if you want. They’re my most recent.” Kip hesitated. “I didn’t print them out. I don’t think they’re good enough.” He handed Croft the Nikon. He had cleared its memory of everything except the pictures he had taken on the Saturday night, the mock scene-of-crime photos of his own living room. He wondered if Croft would have any difficulty operating the camera but he handled it as if he had been using digital cameras for years, and Kip supposed he probably had. He wondered if all the spouting about film was just guff, a pose that C
roft had affected to impress him.

  Croft scrolled quickly through the series of images and then worked his way backwards more slowly, taking time to examine each frame.

  “These are good,” he said. “Interesting. Did you take them at home?”

  Kip nodded. “I was trying to look at the room in a different way, as if there’d been a murder there or something. It made me wonder what things might be important, you know, if you were photographing a real crime scene. I never thought about working for the police before but I think I might like it. It’s interesting.”

  “Do you think you’d be able to handle seeing the bad stuff?”

  Kip looked down at his hands. “It’d be my job to handle it, wouldn’t it? I’d have to get used to it.”

  “Well, that’s something you’d have to find out for yourself.” Croft put his glass down on the floor and stood up. He leaned over, resting a hand briefly on Kip’s shoulder and reaching behind the sofa. He drew out a large portfolio, black leather with a long brass zip. The zip gleamed in the black like a row of bared teeth. “I’ve got some shots here you can look at. Some of them are quite strong. I’d probably get into trouble actually, if anyone knew I’d been showing you these without your parents’ permission,” He caught Kip’s eye and winked, though whether to show he was joking or trying to implicate Kip in his guilt Kip didn’t know. Croft retook his seat on the couch, so close beside him now that Kip could feel his warmth through his jeans, Croft’s leg resting against his own with a slight outward pressure. Croft smelled of the house, as if his clothes were not quite fresh. Kip unzipped the portfolio. It was crammed with images, photographic prints mainly though there were some newspaper clippings and photocopies, everything jumbled together like an insane montage. On top of the pile lay an enlarged shot of what had once been someone’s living room, only now it was mostly reduced to a heap of ash. On the picture’s right-hand margin stood a humped black thing about the size of a wheelie bin which Kip guessed had probably been an armchair. In front of this object was a single plate-sized patch of carpet that had somehow escaped being burned. Its colours were still bright, an interlocking pattern of blue and red diamonds. Kip thought there was something naked about the colours, something horrible. Underneath the photo of the burned-out living room there was a picture of a bicycle wheel, bent almost in half by the force of some impact. Its spokes jutted in all directions like shattered ribs.