The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Just first thing when he arrived. He must have passed the office when he went out to lunch and I always have my door open but I didn’t notice him. I’m snowed under at the moment and I only left my desk to go to the ladies or to pour myself a coffee.”

  “And then you found him, Sebastian.”

  The poet gave a slow, cat-like smile. “I went down to start work and there he was, just as you saw him. It was a shock, of course, and rather horrible even though I’ve felt like killing him myself a few times.”

  “You don’t seem very shocked!” At last Zoë’s tears stopped and now she was angry. “I don’t know how you can sit there and make a joke of it.”

  “Not a very good joke, sweetie. And you all know I couldn’t stand the man. It would be stupid to pretend otherwise just for the inspector.”

  “Why didn’t you like him?” For the first time Vera seemed mildly interested.

  “He was creepy,” Sebastian said. “And self-serving. All this work with the archives was about making a name for himself, not raising funds for the library.”

  They sat for a moment in silence. They heard the insect buzzing of the central heating system in the background. Joe waited for Vera to comment but again she seemed preoccupied. “Is the only access to the Silence Room through here?” he asked. Again he felt the need to move things on. The library was very warm and he found the dark wood and the high shelves oppressive. It was as if they were imprisoned by all the words.

  “Yes,” Cath said. “The doors downstairs are locked from our side when the music exams are taking place.”

  “So the murderer must be one of you,” Vera said.

  She looked slowly round the table. Joe thought again that it was as if she were playing a parlour game, though there was nothing playful in her expression. Usually at the beginning of an investigation she was full of energy and imagination. Now she only seemed sad. It occurred to Joe that the victim would have been just ten years older than her. Perhaps she’d had a teenage crush on him when he’d led her on the field trip to the Roman wall. Perhaps the earlier flippancy had been her way of hiding her grief. Vera continued to speak.

  “You’d better tell me now what happened. As I said before, it’s unnatural having a murderer on the loose. Let’s set the world to rights, eh?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Then I’ll tell you a story of my own,” she said. “I’ll make my own confession.” She leaned forward so her elbows were on the table. “I was about twelve,” she said. “An awkward age and I was an awkward child. Not as big as I am now, but lumpy and clumsy with large feet and a talent for speaking out of turn. My mother died when I was very small and I was brought up by my father, Hector. His passion was collecting: birds’ eggs, raptors. Illegal, of course, but he always thought he was above the law. Had a fit when I applied to the police...” Her voice trailed away and she flashed a smile at them. “But that was much later and perhaps Gilbert had something to do with that too.

  “Gilbert was kind to me. The first adult to take me seriously. He was a PhD student at the university. A geek, I suppose we’d call him now. Passionate about his history. Alec was quite right about that. He listened to me and asked my opinion, more comfortable with a bright kid than with other grown-ups maybe. He bought me little presents.” She looked at Zoë. “Some things don’t change it seems.”

  Vera shifted in her seat. Joe saw that they were all engrossed in her story and that they were all waiting for her to continue.

  “These days we’d call it grooming,” she said. “Then we were more innocent. Hector saw nothing wrong with entrusting me to the care of a virtual stranger for days at a time while we scrambled around bits of Roman wall. He couldn’t believe, I suppose, that anyone could find me sexually attractive. And, to be fair, he assumed that other kids would be there too. At first I revelled in it. The attention. Gilbert had a car and, sitting beside him, I felt like a princess. He brought a picnic. Cider. My first taste of alcohol. And the arm around my shoulder, the hand on my knee, what harm could there be in that?”

  She came to a stop again.

  “He sexually assaulted me.” Her voice was suddenly bright and brittle. “One afternoon in May. Full sunshine and birds singing fit to bust. Skylarks arid curlew. We’d climbed on to the moors beyond the wall, to get a proper view of the scale of it, he said. There was nobody about for miles. He spread out a blanket and pulled me down with him. There was a smell of warm grass and sheep shit. I fought back, but he was stronger than me. In the end there was nothing I could do but let him get on with it. Afterwards he cried.”

  She looked up at them. “I didn’t cry. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.”

  For a moment Joe was tempted to reach out and touch her hand, but that of course would have been impossible.

  “I never told anyone,” Vera said. “Who would I tell? Hector? A teacher? How could I? I refused to go out with Gilbert again and Hector called me moody and ungrateful. But I should have told. I should have gone to the police. Because the man had committed a crime and the law is all we have to hold things together.”

  Vera stood up.

  “I don’t believe he’s changed,” she said. “He wasn’t stopped, you see. He got away with it. My responsibility. We’ll find images of children on his computer, no doubt about that.” She turned to Sebastian Charles. “You were right. He was a creepy man.”

  She paused for a moment. “So who killed him?” Her voice became gentle; at least, as gentle as a hippo’s could be. “You look like a twelve-year-old, Zoë. Did he try it on with you?”

  “No!” The woman was horrified.

  “Of course not. It wasn’t a child’s body he wanted as much as a child’s mind. The need to control and to teach.”

  Vera turned again, this time to the middle-aged librarian, who was sitting next to her. “Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

  Cath was very upright in her chair. She stared ahead of her. For a moment Ashworth thought she would refuse to speak. But the words came at last, carefully chosen and telling.

  “He befriended Evie, my elder daughter. When my husband left last year she was the person most affected by our separation. She’s always been a shy child and she became uncommunicative and withdrawn. Gilbert had been part of our lives since I first took over here. I invited him to family parties and to Sunday lunch. I suppose I felt sorry for him. And I thought it would be good for Evie to have some male influence once Nicholas left. He made history come alive for her with his stories of Roman soldiers and the wild border reivers. On the last day of the October half-term he took her out. Like your father, I assumed other children would be present. That was certainly the impression he gave. Like your father, it never occurred to me that she could come to harm with him.”

  “He assaulted her,” Vera said.

  “She won’t tell me exactly what happened. He threatened her, I think. Made her promise to keep secrets. But something happened that afternoon. It’s as if she’s frozen, a shell of the child she once was. The innocence sucked out of her. I should be grateful, I suppose, that she’s alive and that he brought her home to me.” Cath looked at Vera. “The only thing she did say was that he cried.”

  “So you killed him?”

  “I went to the Silence Room to talk to him. I knew he was alone there. Zoë was busy on the phone and didn’t notice that I left the office. I asked him what he’d done to Evie. He put his finger to his lips. ‘I think you of all people should respect the tradition of the Silence Room,’ he said in a pompous whisper, barely loud enough for me to hear. I shouted then: ‘What did you to my child?”‘ Telling the story, Cath raised her voice so she was shouting again.

  She caught her breath for a moment and then she continued: “Gilbert set down his pen. ‘Nothing that she didn’t want me to do,’ he said. ‘And nothing that you’ll be able to prove.’ He was still whispering. Then he started work again. That was when I picked up the book he was readin
g. That was when I killed him. I left the Silence Room, collected a mug of coffee at the top of the stairs and returned to my office.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Oh, pet,” Vera said. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “What would you have done, Vera? Dragged Evie through the courts, forced her to give evidence, to be examined? Don’t you think she’s been through enough?”

  “And now?” Vera cried. “What will happen to her now?”

  Joe sat as still as the rest of them but thoughts were spinning round his mind. What would he have done? I wouldn’t have let my daughter out with a pervert in the first place. I’ll never leave my wife. But he knew that however hard he tried, he could never protect his children from all the dangers of the world. And that he’d probably have killed the bastard too. He stood up.

  “Catherine Richardson, I’m arresting you for the murder of Gilbert Wood.” It was Vera, pre-empting him. Taking responsibility. Putting the world to rights.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE UNKNOWN CRIME

  Sarah Rayne

  I

  ‘ve never been a high-profile thief. I’d better make that clear at the start. But I’m moderately prosperous and over I the years I’ve developed my own line in small, rare antiques. An elegant chased silver chalice from some obscure museum, perhaps, or a Georgian sugar sifter.

  But I’ve always had a yen to commit a crime that would create international headlines. The removal of the Koh-i-noor or St Edward’s Crown or a Chaucer first folio. You’re probably smiling smugly, but there are people who will pay huge sums of money for such objects. (I’d be lying if I said the money didn’t interest me.)

  And then my grandfather died, leaving me all his belongings and the dream of a theft that would echo round the world and down the years suddenly came within my grasp.

  He lived in Hampstead, my grandfather, and the solicitors sent me the keys to the house. I didn’t go out there immediately; I was absorbed in a delicate operation involving the removal of a Venetian glass tazza from a private collection - very nice, too. A saucer-shaped dish on a stem, beautifully engraved. So between tazzas and fences (yes, they do still exist as a breed and I have several charming friends among the fraternity), it was a good ten days before I went out to Hampstead. And the minute I stepped through the door I had the feeling of something waiting for me. Something that could give me that elusive, longed-for crime.

  I was right. I found it - at least the start of it - in a box of old letters and cards in the attic. I know that sounds hackneyed, but attics really are places where secrets are stored and Rembrandts found. And, as my grandfather used to say, if you can’t find a Rembrandt to flog, paint one yourself. My father specialized in stealing jewellery, but my grandfather was a very good forger. He was just as good at replacing the real thing with his fakes. If you’ve ever been in the National Gallery and stood in front of a certain portrait . . . Let’s just say he fooled a great many people.

  At first look the attic wasn’t very promising. But there was a box of papers which appeared to have been my great-grandfather’s. He was a bit of a mystery, my great-grandfather, but there’s a family legend that he was involved in the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels in 1907. My father used to say he had never been nearer the Irish Crown Jewels than the pub down the road, but I always hoped the legend was true. And it has to be said the Irish Crown Jewels never were recovered.

  It wasn’t the Irish Crown Jewels I found in that house, though. It was something far more intriguing.

  Most of the box’s contents were of no interest. Accounts for tailoring (the old boy sounded as if he had been quite a natty dresser), and faded postcards and receipts. But at the very bottom of the box was a sheaf of yellowing notes in writing so faded it was nearly indecipherable.

  How my grandfather missed those papers I can’t imagine. Perhaps he never went up to the attics, or perhaps he couldn’t be bothered to decipher the writing. If your work is forging fine art and Elizabethan manuscripts, it’d be a bit of a busman’s holiday to pore over faded spider-scrawls that will most likely turn out to be somebody’s mislaid laundry list or a recipe for Scotch broth.

  But the papers were neither of those things.

  They were an account of great-grandfather’s extraordinary activities during the autumn of 1918.

  ~ * ~

  October, 1918

  I’ve been living in an underground shelter with German shells raining down at regular intervals for what feels like years, although I believe it’s actually only three weeks. But whether it’s three weeks or three days, it’s absolute hell and I’d trade my virtue (ha!) to be back in England.

  You’d expect a battlefield to be cut off from the rest of the world, but we get some news here: how the Germans have withdrawn on the Western Front, how the Kaiser’s going to abdicate, even how a peace treaty is being hammered out. It’s difficult to know what’s true and what’s propaganda, though. And then last night I was detailed to deliver a message a couple of miles along the line.

  I’m not a coward, but I’m not a hero either and it doesn’t take a genius to know that a lone soldier, scurrying along in the dark, is a lot more vulnerable than if he’s in a properly-dug trench, near a gun-post. But orders are orders and I delivered the message, then returned by a different route. That’s supposed to fool the enemy, although I should think the enemy’s up to most of the tricks we play, just as we‘re up to most of theirs.

  I was halfway back when I saw the chateau. The chimes of midnight were striking in the south and there was the occasional burst of gunfire somewhere to the north. It was bitterly cold and I dare say I was temporarily mad or even suffering from what’s called shell shock. But I stood there for almost an hour, staring at that chateau. It called out to me - it beckoned like Avalon or Valhalla or the Elysian Fields.

  I was no longer conscious of the stench of death and cordite and the chloride of lime that’s used to sluice out the trenches. I could smell wealth: paintings, silver, tapestries . . .

  But I can’t drag a Bayeux tapestry or a brace of French Impressionists across acres of freezing mud. Whatever I take will have to be small. And sellable. There’s no point in taking stuff that hasn’t got a market. I remember the disastrous affair of the Irish Crown Jewels . . .

  ~ * ~

  That’s as far as I read that first day. The light was going and the electricity was off, and it’s not easy to decipher a hundred-year-old scrawl in an attic in semi-darkness. Also, I had to complete the sale of the tazza. That went smoothly, of course. I never visualized otherwise. I’m very good at what I do. That night I celebrated with a couple of friends. I have no intention of including in these pages what somebody once called the interesting revelations of the bedchamber; I’ll just say when I woke up I was in a strange bed and I wasn’t alone. And since one can’t just get up and go home after breakfast in that situation, (very ungentlemanly), it was a couple of days before I returned to great-grandfather’s papers.

  ~ * ~

  November, 1918

  For two weeks I thought I wouldn’t be able to return to the chateau. You can’t just climb out of the trenches and stroll across the landscape at will.

  Then last night I was chosen to act as driver for several of the high-ranking officers travelling to Compiegne, and I thought - that’s it! For once the British army, God bless it, has played right into my hands. I’ll deposit my officers in Compiegne, then I’ll sneak a couple of hours on my own.

  We set off early this morning - it’s 10 November, if anyone reading this likes details.

  Later

  I have no idea where we are, except that it’s in Picardie. I’ve been driving for almost an hour and it’s slow progress. We’ve stopped at an inn for a meal; the officers are muttering to one another and glancing round as if to make sure no one’s listening.

  I’m in the garden, supposedly taking a breath of air, but actually I’m starin
g across at the chateau and writing this. I can see the place clearly, and it’s a beautiful sight.

  ~ * ~

  I was interrupted by the phone ringing. A furtive voice asked if it had the right number and, on being assured it had, enquired if I would be interested in discussing a jewelled egg recently brought out of Russia. Yes, it was believed to be Faberge. No, it was not exactly for sale, simply considered surplus to requirements. A kindness, really, to remove it.

  ‘Considered surplus by whom?’

  ‘A gentleman prepared to pay very handsomely. He could see you in an hour.’

  I hesitated. On the one hand I had great-grandfather’s exploits. On the other was the lure of a Faberge egg.

  Fabergé won. Thieves have to eat and pay bills like anyone and I had recently bought a very snazzy dockside apartment.

  I rather enjoyed that job. There were electronic sensors in the floor, so I used a simple block and tackle arrangement, which I slid along by means of a suspended pulley-wheel. I scooped the egg from its velvet bed, stashed it in the zipped pocket of my anorak, then wound the pulley back and hopped out through the window.