The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Fletcher gave the drawer a shove with his foot and it slid back into the freezer. He waited a moment or two and then rolled Hood out again.

  “About this lodger of yours, Danny.”

  Hood’s teeth chattered when he spoke through clenched jaws. “I already told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’ll remember soon enough, Danny,” Fletcher said, and he repeated the treatment, wheeling Hood in and out of the freezer, leaving him in the icebox just a little bit longer each time. The hard man’s lips were turning blue, but his eyes remained expressionless.

  “See, the way we reckon it, Danny, you’ve had your pound of flesh out of old Bernie. Now it’s our turn. So how about it?”

  “Get stuffed, copper,” Hood replied flatly.

  The interrogation followed the same pattern for a while longer with the drawer carrying Hood in and out of the freezer, and finally, when he could no longer feel his extremities, the hard man began to relent.

  “This cock and bull story of yours, Mr Fletcher, just supposing it was true... I’d be daft to admit it without some safeguards, wouldn’t I?”

  “We’re not interested in you, Danny,” Fletcher reassured him. “You know our motto, always save something tasty for another day. You’re not due yet.”

  “So what’s in it for me?”

  “Insurance, Danny.”

  “Come again?”

  “You play ball with us and we won’t tell Bernie’s firm what a diabolical stroke you’ve been pulling with their main man. Because if we did...” Fletcher took the body tag off his finger and tied it to Hood’s big toe “...we might have to make you a permanent reservation.”

  “Who put the bubble in?”

  “Be your age, Danny.”

  Hood breathed a sigh. “All right, you’ve got me cold.”

  Mark Fletcher smiled down at him. “More like on ice,” he said.

  ~ * ~

  The crime squad hit the Desert Island mob-handed at four in the morning and lifted Bernie Goodman with the dew still on him. It was a textbook operation.

  “You should’ve seen the poor bugger, guv,” Fletcher told his DI when they returned to the station. “Squatting there in his underpants and blubbering like a baby. A few more days of that kind of treatment and I reckon he would’ve been a goner.”

  “You got a good snout on that one all right, Mark,” the DI told him admiringly, “do you a bit of good too.”

  Fletcher shrugged. “Good intelligence,” he replied, “could have happened to anyone.”

  “Pull the other one,” the DI said, “the guv’nor’s delighted with you, a real feather in your cap. You could be going places on the strength.”

  Basking in the glory of the moment, Mark Fletcher went back to his flat to freshen up. The phone was ringing.

  “Quite the little hero, eh?” It was Helen’s voice, sharp and brittle.

  “Helen,” Fletcher exclaimed. “I was going to call you...it worked like a charm...I’m just off to the Yard for a briefing so I’ve got to dash...”

  “You bastard...you bastard, Mark!” Her cry cut through him like a knife. “You rotten lousy selfish bastard.” Her voice started to break as pent-up emotions boiled over. “I had a call from St Thomas’s A and E. They just brought Carol in, hit and run. She didn’t stand a chance, dead on arrival.”

  Fletcher gripped the phone. “Helen,” he said, “listen...I didn’t...”

  “You really take the prize, Mark.” She was crying now. “You know that. You killed her as sure as if you’d done it yourself. You signed her death warrant, you bastard. You’d stiff your own mother for a pat on the head.”

  “Helen, listen to me...”

  “And you know what? She was carrying a note in her pocket saying to call me in case of an accident. How’s that for a laugh!”

  “Hey, Helen, you don’t think I had anything to do with that?” Fletcher protested desperately. “I never even mentioned her name, or yours either. I kept you both out of it, you’ve got to believe that. Helen...Helen...” But he was talking to the dialling tone.

  Fletcher stared at the phone for a moment, his mind in turmoil. It must have been a coincidence, a quirk of fate. He thought of calling the traffic officers to get details of the accident that had killed Carol Dunne, contemplating going immediately to Helen and somehow convincing her that he hadn’t broken his word. He looked at his watch. He was expected at the Yard. There just wasn’t time.

  ~ * ~

  So Mark Fletcher seized his chance with both hands and was whisked off to NSY to join the elite brotherhood of the legendary Flying Squad. It was the sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that any ambitious detective would have happily cut off an arm for. Helen Ritchie was expendable.

  Now, sitting in his makeshift study, reflecting upon a glass of whiskey with the benefit of hindsight, Mark Fletcher knew it had all been a charade and that his early promise had burned out like a shooting star. Had the guilt that gnawed within him for turning his back on Helen’s tragic outburst eventually eaten him away? Was that the answer? At moments like this he would concede the possibility. At moments like this he would sacrifice his home life, career, everything, for the chance to roll back the years and somehow make Helen Ritchie understand that he’d had no hand in her friend’s death.

  His wife was calling from downstairs and it was time to cap the bottle and put aside such maudlin thoughts. He couldn’t change the past. Never look back, that was the hard lesson of reality. In the morning he would call Dennis Jewel and tell him to forget it.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  TURNING THE TABLES

  Judith Cutler

  W

  as Griff dying? What if it was only those flashing and blinking machines that were keeping him alive? I didn’t dare count the number of wires and tubes that greeted me when I was summoned to his hospital bed.

  Oh, Griff.

  I kneeled beside the bed, and gently clasped the hand that wasn’t bandaged, pressing it to my lips. Griff, my rock, my stay, my dearest friend - how dare you leave me like this? My tears dripped on to the mottled old flesh.

  “I’m sure someone could find you a chair, Lina dearest, even in this benighted hole,” he said querulously.

  It wasn’t just machines then - it was Griff’s willpower that stopped him dying.

  “I look a lot worse than I am, dear heart,” he continued. “I always did bruise easily, you know. Now, if you keep crying, your eyes will be puffy and bloodshot and you won’t look your best for this darling young registrar who’s keeping watch over me. I thought he was my guardian angel at first. Then he bent over me and I found that he smokes. A doctor, too. I told him off, believe me.”

  “And what did he say to that?” I asked, diverted as he knew I would be.

  “Told me to save my breath to cool my porridge. Dr Rankin. A fine young man, though his hair is more ginger than gold.” The hand I was holding shook mine gently. “Your mascara’s run, sweet one. Quickly - he wants to speak to you about me as my next of kin.”

  Next of kin? As far as I knew Griff had no living relatives, but he often introduced me as his granddaughter. We both wished I could be, but in legal fact I wasn’t, since I was the natural daughter of some crazy Pot Noodle-eating lord. But I wasn’t about to tell a medic that, was I?

  “What about?” I asked, my throat closing again. They didn’t want to harvest Griff’s organs, did they? I wanted him back, alive and kicking, not switched off so that others might live.

  “Oh, you know...” He waved vaguely and fell asleep. Or so he would have me believe. If I knew Griff, he’d be watching and listening for every nuance of my encounter with the smoking quack.

  Tough.

  Perhaps Dr Rankin was on to him and his eavesdropping ways, or perhaps it was medical etiquette that prevented doctors talking across the patient as if he were already dead. Whatever it was, I was summoned by a swee
t-faced Filipina nurse to a little room decorated so tastefully it would have made Griff scream with rage.

  It was empty. I had to wait another seventeen minutes before Dr Rankin arrived, seventeen minutes I could have spent with Griff. And the damned peach and magnolia room wasn’t even big enough to pace.

  Just when I’d got fed up waiting for one man, blow me if two didn’t arrive, practically getting jammed in the door. Both in their late-twenties, both tallish and trim - as if they both worked out. The first - Dr Rankin, I presume - was wearing not a white coat and a serious suit but a set of hospital scrubs. The other wore a washable polyester suit as if it were a uniform, and had a short haircut and big feet. Medicine, the law - all it wanted was the hospital chaplain to make the set.

  They looked like two men after the same parking space.

  “Ms Townend,” they began together. And stopped and glared. At each other. One fingered his stethoscope, the other waved his ID.

  Despite not having had a drop for several days - Griff thought we should respect Lent and I was in favour of anything that cut back his drinking - I was decidedly tired and highly emotional.

  At least the policeman should recognize a stop signal, so I held up my hand in his direction and pointed at the doctor. “You first. Before you say anything, I am not prepared to have Griff switched off.” I turned to the cop. “You’ll bear witness to that, won’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s this about switching off Mr Tripp?” Rankin demanded.

  “For his organs.” To show I wasn’t against the idea in principle, I flashed my donor card.

  Rankin snorted. “Mr Tripp’s? We want fresh not pickled ones, Ms Townend. And we do in general prefer to wait until the patient dies. And - despite his poor hobnailed old liver - that could be for many years yet. I wanted to talk to you about taking him home, that’s all.”

  It took a doctor to do that? My eyes narrowed in disbelief.

  “Not so much home, perhaps, as somewhere he can get a moderate degree of care, with medical back-up if need be. “

  “And won’t bed-block the dear old NHS,” I observed.

  “Or,” put in the policeman, “be so likely to catch MRSA.”

  I began to warm to him. “One of Griff’s friends,” I began - for friend read long-term partner - “might fund him a few days in a nursing home.” A very upmarket one, if I knew Aidan and his bank balance.

  “Just the ticket. Let the ward clerk have details and she can set it up.” His bleeper went before he could frame any tender words, let alone say them, but I had the feeling that he was as little interested in me as I was in him; Griff’s perennial matchmaking had been inspired by his desire to get me safely married off (oh, yes, properly, in a long white dress in church) before he shuffled off, as he always put it, this mortal coil. One day I’d get round to looking up the quotation, but not yet, just in case it brought bad luck.

  So now it was PC Plod’s turn - actually Detective Sergeant Will Barnes, according to his ID. “I understand Mr—”

  “Griff. Do call him Griff. Everyone does. And in the circumstances, calling him Mr Tripp seems a bit too appropriate.”

  “Except that he didn’t, Ms Townend. Trip, that is. He was pushed, very hard. And kicked, according to the medics. All after he’d been dragged from his van. And we’d like to know why.” His tone was decidedly less friendly; I’d no idea why.

  “Have you asked him?”

  “He says he’d been to a house sale.’

  I nodded. “Yes, at Forley Towers, that ugly Victorian pile. It belonged to some recluse, and now her executors are selling everything up.”

  “And you were—?”

  “Not with him, obviously.” Or his attacker might not have lived to tell the tale. “I’ve been at our shop all day, repairing some Regency china.” The customer who’d asked me to restore the lovely Worcester chocolate cup wanted it done urgently, or I would never have let Griff go on his own. “What’s this all about, Sergeant? You’re not thinking that I might beat Griff up like that? Me? I’d die for him... if he’d let me, that is.”

  He shuffled his feet, but coughed pompously. “Our information is—”

  “That I have a criminal record. Well, check out how long ago it was, and see how long I’ve been a decent hard-working member of society. I’ve been with Griff through thick and thin for six years now. He’d have adopted me if he could.” He was a much better parent than my own father had ever been. “Why should I want to hurt the person I love most in the whole world?” My voice only went and cracked, didn’t it? Now I sounded more tearful than outraged - but perhaps, in the circumstances, that’s what I actually was. I grabbed a handful of tissues from a convenient little box someone had left on the arm of an easy chair for slightly different circumstances and scrubbed my eyes. For good measure I sat down heavily. And nearly disappeared in the squidgy upholstery.

  Barnes fidgeted with embarrassment. “Has he any enemies? Do you know any reason why anyone else should attack him?”

  “No enemies that I know of. You don’t need enemies to be robbed of something precious, do you? Just an opportunist thief or two. Someone who wanted what Griff had bought. And if Griff isn’t well enough to tell you, the auctioneers would know more about that than I do. All I had was this call saying Griff was here and I came straight over.” Though not without setting all the state-of-the-art alarms and locks that Griff insisted on, I have to admit. Even as he knocked on Heaven’s Gate he’d have wanted our precious stock protected - everything from Jacobean stumpwork to Victorian filigree. “I’d like to go back to Griff now.”

  My attempts to get out of the chair made him drop his grim professional glare. Smothering a laugh, he even went so far as to help me lever myself out. He had nice firm hands, with a grip that you could rely on. And he let go the instant he ought.

  So I said, “If he’s awake, I could ask what he bought. Otherwise, as I said, you’ll have to ask the auctioneer - only,” I added, looking at my watch for the first time since I’d arrived at the hospital, “it’s a bit late, isn’t it?” It was. It was nearly eleven at night.

  “Can I offer you a lift home?”

  I shook my head. Nothing short of an earthquake would get me more than ten yards from Griff’s side. I’d sleep on the floor beside his bed if necessary.

  ~ * ~

  Griff looked much better the next morning, but was inclined to be tetchy, hardly surprising since there was nowhere this side of his hospital gown that wasn’t purple or red. Goodness knew what else his poor old body had suffered. I think he was relieved to hear that on receiving my phone call Aidan had booked him in for a week’s R & R at an exclusive nursing home to which a private ambulance would convey him.

  “But it will be such a long way for you to come and see me, my loved one,” Griff observed wistfully. “And you know I don’t like you driving after dark.”

  “If it makes you happier, I shall take up Aidan’s offer to stay overnight with him as long as you’re away from our cottage.” There! Griff would know the extent of my self-sacrifice, and possibly of Aidan’s - we’d never hit it off, maintaining an armed truce for Griff’s sake. “Now,” I said briskly, to cover any emotion, “it’d help the police if you told them what you’d bought at yesterday’s sale. It was obviously something that someone else couldn’t keep their hands off,” I joked.

  “They could have had it and welcome. You know Mrs Davenport was asking for a games table to replace the one she had stolen? Well, I found one - pretty cheap, as it happens. A Victorian affair, with goodness knows how many drawers and curves wherever nature wanted a straight line. Rather vulgar, if you ask me, but then so was Mrs Davenport’s original. You might tell her I did my best, if she should happen to call. Lina, there’ll be a picture of it in the catalogue, won’t there? And I’m sure I left that in the glovebox.”

  “You hadn’t been trying to carry the table on your own, had you?” I demanded, arms ak
imbo.

  “What, when there were a couple of gorgeous well-muscled lads to put it straight into the van for me?” His poor swollen mouth headed for winsome, but didn’t quite reach it.

  “So when was it stolen?”

  He went to scratch his head but evidently thought better of it. “I can’t... yes, I remember! My mobile phone rang, and I pulled into a layby to answer it.” He flashed an almost impish smile - how many times had I had to shout at him when he’d tried to use his mobile when he was driving? “Someone opened the driver’s door - and Bob’s your aunt.”

  “How did they know the number?” I asked, looking for a conspiracy.

  “Because it’s painted on the side of the van, of course! Oh, Lina - it’s I, not you, who had the bang on the head.”