The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “It’s our Alanby,” stuttered Craig.

  “What?” I said. My mother was giving him a sympathetic look, which was grating on me. There were another twenty minutes of Callan left.

  “Why not sit down, luvvie?” said my mother. “I’ll make you a cup of sweet tea and you can tell us all about it.”

  She pushed Craig down into Dad’s armchair and went into the kitchen. I turned my attention to the TV until the adverts came on.

  Mam gave Craig his tea in a Seatown FC mug and he took sips, making annoying slurping noises.

  The story that tumbled out of Craig, in fits and starts, was that Alanby had been released from jail after ten years inside. And he’d come home with a bride, Trish, a Scottish prostitute he’d met two days after getting out.

  Craig’s parents were none too pleased and had kicked them out of their home shortly after they arrived. So, Alanby and Trish moved into a flat above one of the betting shops. Short of cash, and with a big heroin habit, Alanby had put Trish back on the game.

  That night, she’d picked up a Dutch sailor down at the docks and sold him her wedding ring in the Ship Inn. Alanby had turned up at the pub in a drunken rage and sliced Trish to pieces. He’d then turned up at his parents’ home covered in blood and wanting a change of clothes. Craig had opened the door to the blood-splattered Alanby and had freaked out.

  He spent the next few nights staying at my house, working his way through my mam’s Reader’s Digests, and the Ferrys got into the habit of packing him off to stay with me whenever they wanted him out of the way.

  Well, at least these days they paid.

  ~ * ~

  SIX

  I’d never set much stock on all that heredity cobblers. Bad blood and the like. I was more of a nurture over nature man. Though it did seem to me that the Ferry family were all born under a bad star.

  Except Beverly, that is. Beverly was the only girl among the Ferry siblings. She was a qualified accountant who did the firm’s books and worked in the local civic centre. And her business acumen was a real boon to the family, especially when their enterprises became more and more legit. And she was the one who had decided to hire me to keep a bleary eye on Craig.

  Beverly was in her late-thirties. She was well read. She was good-looking. She was fun to be with. And I had been arse over tit in love with her for as long as I could remember. And, of course, she was married. To a local Councillor, to boot.

  I’d managed to manoeuvre Craig in and out of the taxi and through the front door of his flat but was having trouble getting him up the stairs. I was still aching from all that digging I’d done and was considering giving up the ghost, and leaving Craig where he lay, when his mobile started to ring.

  I took it out of his pocket and looked at the display. It was Beverly. I switched off the Bonanza theme and spoke.

  “Craig’s phone, Peter Ord speaking.”

  “Oh, God, is he trashed again, Peter?”

  “Either that or he’s rehearsing for his Stars In Their Eyes appearance as Oliver Reed.”

  A chuckle.

  “All right, I suppose I’ll see him tomorrow,” she said. “It was just that he had a delivery job to do earlier and I wanted to make sure it had gone well. Know anything about it?”

  “Er ... yeah, I think ...”

  “Shit, he bolloxed it up, didn’t he?”

  “Well ...”

  “Peter, I can tell when you’re telling pork pies. I’ll be there in bit.”

  ~ * ~

  SEVEN

  Bev was looking very business-like in a sharp black suit and high heels, her blonde hair tied back. And she looked more than somewhat pissed off.

  “So, who was the idiot with the Luger?” she said. She had to raise her voice slightly as Craig’s snores were now echoing through the living room. We’d managed to get him on the sofa and left him there. We moved into the cramped kitchen and I took a can of Foster’s from the fridge.

  “Fancy one?”

  Bev shook her head.

  “So, the Shogun Assassin?”

  “Dunno who he was. Craig said that the bloke pissed off on a motorbike before he could get his hands on him. Was dressed head to foot in black, like a ninja, apparently.”

  “Yeah, well, our Craig has always been blessed with an overripe imagination.”

  “True, true.”

  “A ninja with a Luger sounds like something from one of those comics you two used to read. Was he on anything?”

  “Yeah, a motorbike,” I said.

  “Not the ninja, you plonker, Craig!”

  “Ah, well...”

  “Jesus. I thought you were supposed to keep an eye on him?”

  “Hey, he was already as high as Sly by the time I met him.”

  The story was this: one of the Ferry family’s occasional entrepreneurial activities was importing unusual animals through the docks and selling them to collectors of exotic pets. One such collector was Bobby Bowles, the former football superstar, who had a private zoo just outside Seatown.

  Craig’s job was to deliver a kangaroo to Bobby in exchange for a wad of dosh. However, on his way to Bowles’s place, Craig’s van was stopped by a ninja with a gun who shot the kangaroo and scarpered on a Harley Davidson. Craig phoned me to help him get rid of Skippy’s body, of course, hence my fun day at the graveyard.

  “This is a very bloody important time for the family business,” said Bev. “Dad’s very ill, Alanby is never going to get out of Wakefield nick since he spiked that warden’s tea with ecstasy, and Dafydd is, well, Dafydd...”

  Dafydd had, for many years, been so far in the closet he was in Narnia, but when he eventually came out he shocked the family by moving down south to open up a scuba diving club with an Australian. This was blamed for causing Glyn Ferry’s first heart attack. The moving down south.

  “So, Craig is being groomed to take over as head of the family business?” I said.

  Bev raised her eyebrows.

  “Supposedly,” she said.

  “Oh, dear,” I said.

  “Oh, dear, indeed,” said Bev.

  ~ * ~

  EIGHT

  We were in Velvette’s Gentlemen’s Club, staring behind the bar at a stained-glass recreation of the famed poster of the female tennis player scratching her arse that many a teenage boy had on their wall in the seventies.

  “Lesbians?” I said. I finished my pint of Stella. I was well and truly off the wagon now.

  “Yep,” said Craig.

  “I’ve never heard that one before.”

  “Aye. Good With Colours is a euphemism for gay men, and Tennis Fans is for lesbians.”

  “Well, as always, Craig, you are an education.”

  “Well, you should read more, shouldn’t you? Might learn something.”

  I finished my drink and went over to the bar. The dancers were starting to arrive at Velvette’s. It was a couple of hours before opening time but Jack Martin, the owner, usually gave them a little booze-up on a Saturday night to get them in the mood. Jack was more of your benevolent kind of gangster.

  “But I think you’re avoiding the issue, Craig,” I said, as I sat back down. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Well, I’ll see if Jack needs anyone for a bit of occasional strong-arm work. Him and Dad are on good terms. For the moment, anyway.”

  “But Bev’s the family gaffer now?”

  “Yep, pretty much. Head of the family. The Godsister. Dad’s said he can’t trust me after ‘The Kangaroo Incident’, as he calls it.”

  “You ever find out who shot Skippy? Or why?”

  “Not a clue. And Bev doesn’t seem too bothered about finding them, either. Thinks they were from out of town. Albania or somewhere. She thinks we might have been encroaching on their territory.”

  “Oh, can’t go around encroaching. Well out of order, that.”

  As the girls hovered around the bar there was a cacophony
of foreign accents. It was nice. A welcome change.

  Seatown had a population of less than one hundred thousand. It was on the north-east coast of England and its location meant that you couldn’t really end up there by accident. All the main roads bypassed the place. People rarely left the town and not too many outsiders decided to settle here, either.

  Contact with foreigners was once, in fact, such a rarity that, legend had it, during the Napoleonic wars, the people of Seatown hanged a monkey because they thought it was a French spy. Not an unreasonable mistake, in many people’s minds. So, I suppose you could say that there was a track record of exotic animals coming to an unfortunate end in Seatown.

  It was also very hard to keep a secret here.

  Which was why I knew all about Bev’s new Harley Davidson, even if the rest of her family didn’t. And why I wasn’t particularly shocked when she’d mentioned Craig’s attacker using a Luger, even though I hadn’t mentioned it to her before.

  I did consider sharing this information with Craig, of course. Well, for all of five minutes, I did.

  After all, it was pretty clear that the Ferry family were in safe hands with Bev ruling the roost. And it was a lot safer for me to have her on my side than against me.

  After all, despite what Craig might have thought, it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  INHERITANCE

  Jane Casey

  F

  rom the road, you couldn’t see there was a house there at all. The granite gateposts still stood but the gates themselves were long gone, and the lodge beside them was dark and shuttered, derelict.

  But there was a house, and Anthony Gallagher knew it. He knew a lot about it, in fact. He had done his research. And he had chosen a moonless night, a night when the rain was relentless - a night when you wouldn’t turn a dog away from the door, no matter who you were - to make his move. He stood just inside the gate, tapping his fingers against his thighs like a footballer preparing to take a penalty. This was the worst bit. It was always the same. Once he got started, he’d be all right. But before, the nerves got to him. Every time.

  The rain fell steadily, collecting in the potholes that pitted the gravel drive. He flipped up the collar on his jacket and started walking. A good half-mile in the dark, on a surface that promised a broken ankle or worse with one false step. He was swearing blue murder before he’d gone halfway, wishing he had his torch handy, but it was somewhere at the bottom of his bag. Besides, it would look suspicious to turn up with a torch. It wasn’t the sort of thing a casual traveller would carry, probably, and he wanted to look like nothing more than a casual traveller.

  The bag kept knocking against his legs no matter which hand he carried it in. It was light enough. Just a change of shirt, a toothbrush, a razor and shaving foam, the torch and some odds and ends for later on. He needed to be presentable. Part of the game was looking smart. It was all about setting them at their ease. Making them trust him. Gaining their confidence.

  Taking advantage.

  There was a light on, he was glad to see as he rounded the last corner of the drive. It wasn’t late, he knew. Half-past eight. Too late to send him away, not so late that the occupant would refuse to answer the door on principle. But there was always the danger they would have gone to bed early. Old people did. Especially in houses where central heating was an unfamiliar concept.

  Framed between two straggling yew trees, the house looked grander than he had expected. It was a foursquare Georgian box, grey stone like the gateposts. Five windows ran across the upper storey. On the ground floor, soft golden lamplight shone through the two windows to the left of the porch. He moved towards the rectangle of brightness nearest him, careful to stay in the shadows, treading softly on the loose gravel that gave under him with every step. A lovely room: small, but elegant, with grey silk-covered walls, a marble fireplace carved with sleek, well-fed figures and Doric columns, and a ceiling ornate with swags and garlands of plasterwork. On the walls, landscapes and portraits and miniatures and hunting scenes hung three and four deep, as if there weren’t enough wall for all of them, and pairs of gold-framed mirrors with dim old glass in them softened the room’s reflection to a dream. And the furniture. He didn’t know a lot about it - small items were his bag - but he’d spent enough time looking in windows on Francis Street to recognize the living glow of top-quality mahogany and the arrogant, springing sweep of an Irish Georgian table-leg. A fine breakfront bookcase filled most of one wall, and a pair of brassbound peat buckets flanked the fire. He was looking at wealth, generations of it, there for the taking by anyone who chose to walk up the dark drive.

  She was alone anyway. There was a decent fire alight and she had a chair pulled up to it, a sagging armchair that looked comfortable. Her back was to the window, but he could see her head was bent over something. A book maybe or some sewing, he thought, stretching his imagination to the utmost. He had very little idea what an elderly woman might do on a winter’s evening to entertain herself. No TV that he could see. No music playing. She wasn’t asleep; he could see her head turning as she concentrated on whatever it was. A movement by the door set his heart thumping but it was nothing, it was just a dog walking over to her, a black yoke that looked like four bits of different dogs stuck together. The great lantern jaw belonged on a mastiff; the body was fat and barrel-shaped, like a Labrador succumbing to middle-age spread. Short little legs and a flailing tail that threatened to knock over the table beside her completed the picture. At a word from her it collapsed to the ground as if shot, the two stumpy legs that were uppermost paddling the air beseechingly until she leaned over and rubbed its stomach.

  It wasn’t much of a dog, he thought, but a dog nonetheless. It might hear him, or smell him. Better to knock on the door before he was discovered lurking outside. Peering in through the window would be hard to explain. He moved away. Trust was the key, he’d often thought. Establish that and they’re yours. And they want to like you. He pressed the bell by the front door, hearing it jangle deep in the house. They want you to be nice and honest and decent. They want you to be like they are themselves. He took a couple of paces back so as not to crowd her when she opened the door. It had the effect of taking him out of the shelter of the portico, exposing him to the rain, flattening his hair to his head. The light went on in the hall. He assumed a doubtful expression, a wistful look that had worked like a charm many times before. The door opened - not wide, but enough.

  “You’ll have to forgive me for knocking on your door at this late hour,” he began. Word perfect. Practised. All the consonants where they should be. A little too mannered to be credible, did he but know it, but a fair attempt at sounding well spoken. “My car broke down, I’m afraid. Just down the road. There isn’t anywhere else around here - I was hoping I might get some shelter for the night.”

  “How unfortunate.” Her voice was unexpectedly deep for such an elderly lady, such a slight frame. She had her back to the light and he couldn’t see the expression on her face. “Have you no mobile telephone?”

  “Out of battery,” he improvised. “I would have asked to use your phone, but I don’t know who to call at this time of night.”

  “A garage would seem to be the obvious choice.”

  He tried a laugh, spluttering a little on the rain running down his face. Jesus, he was getting drenched. “You’re right there. But there’s none of them at work at this hour.”

  ‘There is always the Automobile Association.”

  It took him a second. “Oh - the AA. I’m not a member. I should be, but I’m not.” He sniffed. Time to turn it up a notch. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble. If there is a barn, or an outbuilding of some kind ...”

  “This isn’t Bethlehem, young man.” A gravelly note of amusement in the throaty voice. “You may come in. But you must take the place as you find it. I can’t promise you comfort.”

  “A roof ove
r my head is all I ask.”

  “Well, I have one of those. Of a sort.”

  She stepped back, holding the door open, and he ducked his head as he passed her in an awkward kind of bow. He took up a position a few paces away from her on the stone-flagged floor, trying to appear unthreatening, but his mind was working at top speed. The air in the hall was freezing and damp, a damp that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with a couple of centuries of decline. Overhead, a brass hall lantern was blazing, shining brightly enough that he could see the wavering cracks in the floor, the worn treads of the carpet on the stairs, his breath misting in front of his face. Indoors. Jesus.