The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Aye,” nodded Dougie.

  “Where in Scotland?”

  “Edinburgh.”

  “Vol’s it like in Edinburgh?”

  A warning voice in Dougie’s head told him not to even give her that much. This story she had spun for him, it sounded too much like a fairytale. She was probably some down-on-her-luck Balkans hooker looking for a sugar daddy. No one could have had the lifestyle she described. It was too far-fetched, too mental.

  The touch of her finger stayed on the end of his nose. Her green eyes glittered under the optics. Before Dougie knew what he was doing, words were coming out of his mouth.

  She had given him the germ of an idea. The rest he filled in for himself.

  The Venus In Furs was not run by an established firm, even by Soho standards. Its ostensible owners were a bunch of chancy Jamaican wide boys whose speciality was taking over moody drinking dens by scaring the incumbents into thinking that they were Yardies. Dougie doubted that that was the case. They could have been minor players, vaguely connected somehow, but Yardie lands were South of the river. Triads and Micks ran Soho. He doubted these fellas would last long in the scheme of things anyway, so he decided to help Lola out and give fate a hand.

  Trying to help her, or trying to impress her?

  It helped that her shifts were regular. Six nights a week, six till twelve. Plenty of time to observe who came and went on a routine basis. Maybe her old man really was KGB ‘cos she’d already worked out the day that the Suit came in would be the significant one.

  There was this office, behind the bar, where they did all their business. Three guys worked the club in a rota, always two of them there at the same time. Lynton, Neville and Little Stevie. They had a fondness for Lola, her being blood, so it was usually her they asked to bring drinks through when they had someone to impress in there. She said the room had been painted out with palm trees and a sunset, like one big Hawaiian scene.

  Like everyone, Dougie thought, playing at gangsters – they were playing Scarface.

  Once a week, a bald white guy in a dowdy brown suit came in with an attache case. Whichever of the Brothers Grim were in at the time would make themselves scarce while he busied himself in the office for half an hour. One of them would hang at the bar, the other find himself a dark corner with one of the girls. Then the bald man would come out, speak to no one and make his own way out of the club.

  Every Thursday, 8 p.m., punctual as clockwork he came.

  That proved it to Dougie. The lairy Jamaicans were a front to terrify the public. The bald man collected the money for their unseen, offshore master. With his crappy suit and unassuming exterior, he was deliberately done up like a mark to blend in with the rest of the clientele.

  Dougie had a couple of guys that owed him favours. They weren’t known faces, and it would be difficult to trace them back to him, their paths crossed infrequently and they moved in different worlds. On two successive Thursdays, he gave them some folding and sent them in as marks. Both confirmed Lola’s story, and gave him more interesting back-up on the Brothers Grim. Both weeks, it was the same pair, Little Stevie and Neville, little and large. Large Neville, a tall skinny guy with swinging dreads and shades who was always chewing on a toothpick, sat behind the bar when the bald man showed up. He practised dealing cards, played patience, drank beer and feigned indifference to the world around him, nodding all the while as if a different, slow skanking soundtrack was playing in his head to the cheesy Europop that was on the club’s PA.

  Little Stevie, by comparison, always grabbed himself a girl and a bottle and made his way over to the corner booth. While Neville looked like a classic stoner, Little Stevie was mean. He wore a black suit and a white shirt with thick gold chains around his bulldog neck. A pork pie hat and thick black shades totally obscured his eyes. Ocassionally, like when the girl slipped underneath the table, he would grin a dazzling display of gold and diamond dental work. Stevie always drank proper Champagne – not the pear fizz served to the punters as such – and both Dougie’s contacts copped the telltale bulge in his pocket.

  Stevie’s booth was the one from which the whole room could be surveyed and, even while receiving special favours, he never took his eye off the game. The minute the office door clicked open and the bald man slipped away he would knee his girl off him, adjust his balls and whatever else was down there, and swagger his way back over to the office all puffed up and bristling, Neville following at his heels.

  Yeah, Stevie, they all agreed, was the one to watch.

  While they were in there playing punters, Dougie was watching the door.

  The Venus was based in a handy spot, in a dingy alley between Rupert Street and Wardour Street. There was a market in Rupert Street and all he had to do was pretend to be examining the tourist tat on the corner stall. The bald man went the other way. Straight to a waiting cab on Wardour Street. Each time the same.

  On the night it all happened, Dougie felt a rush in his blood that he hadn’t felt since Edinburgh, like every platelet was singing to him the old songs, high and wild as the wind.

  God, he used to love that feeling, used to let it guide him in the days when he was Dougie the Cat, the greatest burglar in that magical city of turrets and towers.

  But now he was Dougie Mackingtosh Investigates, the Private Eye for the sort of people who couldn’t go to the police. He had changed sides on purpose after that first prison jolt, never wanting to be in close proximity to such fucking filth ever again. If you couldn’t be a gentleman thief these days, he reckoned, then why not be a Bad Guy’s PI? His methods may have differed from those used by the Old Bill, but Dougie had kept his nose clean for eighteen years, built up his reputation by word of mouth and made a good living from sorting out shit without causing any fuss. Filled a proper gap in the market, he had.

  His blood had never sung to him in all that time. He supposed it must have awakened in him that first night he met Lola, grown strong that night she’d finally allowed him back to her dingy flat above a bookie’s in Balham, where she had so studiously drawn out the map of the Venus’ interior before unzipping his trousers and taking him to a place that seemed very close to Heaven.

  Bless her, he didn’t need her map. He didn’t even need to know what Neville and Stevie got up to, only that they were good little gangsters and stayed where they were, in that little palace of their imagination where they could be Tony Montana every day.

  He wasn’t going to take them on.

  All he needed was the thirty seconds between the Venus’ door and Wardour Street. And the curve in the alley that meant the taxi driver wouldn’t be able to see. All he needed was the strength of his arm and the fleetness of his feet and the confusion of bodies packed into a Soho night.

  At the end of the alley he slipped a balaclava over his head, put the blue hood over the top of that and began to run.

  He was at full sprint as the bald man came out of the door, fast enough to send him flying when he bowled into his shoulder. The man’s arms spread out and he dropped his precious cargo to the floor. Dougie was just quick enough to catch the look of astonishment in the pale, watery eyes, before he coshed him hard on the top of his head and they rolled up into whites. He had another second to stoop and retrieve the case before he was off again, out of the alley, across Wardour Street, where the taxi was waiting, its engine running, the driver staring straight ahead.

  Dougie was already in the downstairs bogs of the Spice of Life before the cabbie was checking his watch to make sure he hadn’t turned up early. Had pulled out his sports bag from the cistern where he’d stashed it and bust the lock on the attache case by the time the cabbie turned the engine off and stepped out of the car to take a look around. Dougie’s deftness of touch was undiminished by his years on the other side. He counted the bundles of cash roughly as he transferred them into his sports bag, eyebrows raising as he did. It was quite a haul for a weekly skim off a clip joint. He briefly wondered what else they had going on down there,
then chased the thought away as excess trouble he didn’t need to know.

  By the time the cabbie was standing over the crumpled heap in the alleyway, he had put the attache case in the cistern and taken off the blue hood, rolling it into a ball as he nipped out of the side door of the pub. He junked it in a bin as he came out onto Charing Cross Road and hailed himself a ride up to King’s Cross.

  Dougie looked up from his racing pages. As if struck by electrodes, he knew Lola was in the room. She walked towards him, green eyes dancing, clocking amusedly his stupid cap and the bag that lay between his feet. Sat down in front of him and breathed: “Is it enough?”

  “Aye,” nodded Dougie. “It’s enough.”

  He hadn’t wanted there to be any way in which Lola could be implicated in all this. He’d had her phone in sick for two days running, told her just to spend her time packing only the essentials she needed and gave her the money for two singles up to Edinburgh.

  The night train back to the magic city, not even the Toon Army could ruin that pleasure for him.

  “You ready?” he asked her.

  Her grin stretched languidly across her perfect face.

  “Yes,” she purred. “I’m ready.”

  Dougie gripped the Adidas bag, left his floppy fries where they lay. As they stepped out onto the road, St Pancras was lit up like a fairytale castle in front of them. “See that,” he nudged her shoulder, “that’s bollocks compared to where we’re going.”

  His heart and his soul sung along with his blood. He was leaving the Big Smoke, leaving his life of shadows, stepping into a better world with the woman he loved by his side. He took her hand and strode towards the crossing, towards the mouth of Kings Cross Station.

  Then Lola said: “Oooh, hang on a minute. I have to get my bag.”

  “You what?” Dougie was confused. “Don’t you have it with you?”

  She laughed, a low, tinkling sound. “No honey, I left it just around the corner. My friend, you know, she runs a bar there and I didn’t want to lug it around with me all day. She’s kept it safe for me, behind the bar. Don’t vorry, it von’t take a minute.”

  Dougie was puzzled. He hadn’t heard about this friend or this bar before. But, in his limited experience of women, this was typical. Just when you thought you had a plan, they’d make some little amendment. He guessed that was just the way their minds worked. She leaned to kiss his cheek and whispered in his ear: “Ve still have half an hour before the train goes.”

  The pub was, literally, round the corner. One of those horrible, bland chain brewery joints heaving with overweight office workers trying to get lucky with their sniggering secretaries in the last, desperate minutes before Closing Time.

  He lingered by the door as Lola hailed a bored-looking blonde behind the bar. Watched her take a small blue suitcase from behind the bar, kiss the barmaid on each cheek and come smilingly back towards him.

  A few seconds before she reached him, her smile turned to a mask of fear.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, grabbing hold of his arm and dragging him away from the doorway. “It’s fucking Steve.”

  “What?”

  “This vay,” she had his arm firmly in her grasp now, was propelling him through to the other side of the bar, towards the door marked TOILETS, cursing and talking a million miles an hour under her breath.

  “Steve was standing right outside the door. I svear to God it was him. I told you, he is bad luck that one, he’s voodoo, got a sixth sense – my Mama told me about sheiit like him. We can’t let him see us! I’m supposed to be off sick the night he gets ripped off – he’s gonna know! He’s gonna kill me if he sees me.”

  “Hen, you’re seeing things,” Dougie tried to protest as she pushed him through the door, down some steps into a dingy basement which smelt of piss and stale vomit.

  “I’m not, it vos him, it vos him!” she looked like she was about to turn hysterical, her eyes were flashing wildly and her nails were digging into his flesh. He tried to use his free hand to extricate himself from her iron grip, but that only served to make her cling on harder.

  “Hen, calm down, you’re hurting me . . .” Dougie began.

  “There’s someone coming!” she screamed and suddenly began to kiss him passionately, smothering him in her arms, grinding her teeth against his lips so that he tasted blood.

  And then he heard a noise right behind him.

  And the room went black.

  “Fucking Hell,” Lola looked down on Dougie’s prone body. “That took long enough.”

  “I told you he was good,” her companion pouted, brushing his hands on his trousers. “But I thought you’d enjoy using all your skills on him.”

  “Hmm,” Lola bent down and prised Dougie’s fingers away from the Adidas bag. “I knew this would be the hardest part. Getting money out of a tight fucking Jock.”

  That slinky Russian accent had disappeared like a puff of smoke. She sounded more like the petulant queen she was now.

  “Come on.” She stepped over her would-be Romeo and the pile of shattered ashtray glass he lay in. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The car was parked nearby. As Lola got into the passenger seat, she pulled the honey-gold Afro wig off her head and ran her fingers through the short black fuzz underneath.

  “I am soooo tired of that bitch,” she said, tossing it into the backseat.

  Her companion started the car with a chuckle.

  “He fucking believed everything, didn’t he?” he shook his head as he pulled out.

  “Yeah . . . and you said he was a private detective. Well, let me tell you honey, you wouldn’t believe what I suckered that dick with. My dad was a Russian gangster. My mother was a Somalian princess. I was on the run from Swiss finishing school. Can you believe it?”

  Lola hooted with derision. “Almost like the fairytales I used to make up for myself,” she added. “You know, I thought he might fucking twig when I told him I was named after a character in Raymond Chandler. But I couldn’t resist it.”

  “Well,” her companion smiled at her fondly. “You certainly made up for the loss of that Queen Anne silver. We’ve got enough to keep us going for months now. So where do you fancy?”

  “Not back to Soho,” Lola sniffed, as the car pulled into the slipstream of Marylebone Road. “I’ve fucking had it with those posing thugs. I know. I fancy some sea air. How does Brighton sound to you?”

  “The perfect place,” her companion agreed, “for a couple of actors.”

  Dougie came around with his face stuck to a cold stone floor with his own blood. Shards of glass covered him. He could smell the acrid stench of piss in his nostrils, and from the pub above, he could hear a tune, sounding like it was coming from out of a long tunnel of memory. He could just make out the lyrics: “I met her in a club down in old Soho/Where you drink Champagne and it tastes like cherry cola . . .”

  In loving memory of Lee Hazlewood 1929–2007, who had all the best stories and all the best songs.

  GREEN TARTS

  Deryn Lake

  God grant me grace, but I am getting on in years. I looked in the mirror this very morning and an old man stared back at me. I gazed at him in horror, hardly believing that I had come to this. But sooner or later we all have intimations of mortality. Thus I will do as my conscience dictates and set down a record of those times, so long ago, when a man met his death in the Tower and the part that I played in it all. As far as I can recall, if memory serves correctly, it all started with a bed.

  It arrived in pieces, as was customary, and was carried up to the master bedroom by a team of servants, then handed over to the craftsmen to assemble. Watching them work, its new owner thought it a beautiful thing that grew beneath their hands; richly carved and sumptuously adorned. In fact he could hardly wait for them to finish that he might stretch out on it and measure his length on the silk cover, letting his eyes take in the marquetry panels on the headboard, created by German craftsmen, a number of whom now lived in Southwark. Hi
s gaze wandered over the elaborate carvings, one of which was a grinning satyr to represent fertility. It seemed to smile at him in a devilish manner. All in all, he thought to himself, this new bed summed up his status, his standing, his enviable position as the best-loved favourite of that most malleable of monarchs, James I.

  Robert Carr, Viscount Rochford, took a step forward and touched the gorgeous draperies, presently being hung beneath the intricately carved oak tester. The workman responsible looked up.

  “All right, my lord?”

  “Splendid. I think this bed is going to be quite wonderful.”

  “It will indeed, my lord.”

  And tonight, thought Robert, I shall show it, totally complete, to my closest friend, Thomas Overbury. He gave a quiet sigh, thinking of the pleasures ahead, and turning, left the room.

  As he went downstairs, Robert glanced admiringly at himself in a mirror. He was a handsome man, some twenty-four years of age, with long straight limbs and broad shoulders. He had a head of thick fair hair which he wore tightly frizzed as fashion dictated, meanwhile dressing himself to the inch in fine clothes and jewels, including a sparkling earring worn in his left ear. Unfortunately all this frippery made him appear effeminate, a feature which, no doubt, pleased his royal master enormously. For there could be no doubt that the King worshipped Robert – leaning on his arm, pinching his cheek, kissing him quite openly in full public gaze – a fact which the self-seeking young man positively encouraged, responding with melting looks and suggestive gestures. Yet, despite the love of King James, Robert had formed another liaison with Thomas Overbury, a bright young Englishman with literary pretensions. In fact the couple were devoted and it was Thomas who was to visit this very night.

  In order to pass the time, Robert decided to have a bath, thus causing an army of servants to plod up and down stairs with pails of boiling water. After being towelled dry, he oiled himself then dressed in stockings and doublet, executed in silks and gold and silver thread. On his feet he put on a pair of low-heeled shoes, decorated with an enormous frill of black and yellow. Then, having shaved closely, a feature much admired by the King, he awaited Thomas’s arrival. Quarter of an hour later, a thunderous knock announced his presence. Robert immediately assumed a negligent pose, his fingers idly toying with a book, the other hand supporting his chin. He looked up as his friend was announced.