The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Read online

  “This is your fault, Hawley,” she said, bitterly. “You should have stayed here to hold him. He punched Otto and ran away.”

  “That proves he was the killer,” declared Helsing, rising to his feet and dabbing at his nose with a handkerchief. “So much for him being too gentle, Cora – the man’s a violent criminal.”

  “He may be a criminal,” said Crippen, calmly, “but he didn’t murder Angus Rennie. I’m certain of it.”

  “Don’t be so obtuse, man. Use your eyes.”

  “My ears proved to be more useful, Otto. When I went into the street just now, there were several people who’d been out there for the past hour. One of them told me he saw a strange man come out of this house and walk up and down for at least fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes,” he emphasized. “It was during that time that someone took Mr Rennie’s life in the coal cellar. Whoever killed him, therefore, it couldn’t possibly have been Henri Landru.”

  Cora was aghast. “Are you saying that it must be one of us?”

  “You’re not a suspect, my dear,” said Crippen, “and neither is Miss Quinn. She and I were in Landru’s room, searching for evidence, when the murder took place.” He looked from Helsing to Mabel then back again. “That leaves only two possibilities.”

  “Don’t you dare accuse me,” blustered Helsing. “I never went near the man. Dotty will vouch for that.”

  “I can only speak for the time we were together,” said Dorothy, quailing under his glare. “We were separated during that last game then Dr Crippen and I went off to look at a French newspaper.”

  “Stand by me, Dotty.”

  “I must tell the truth.”

  “The truth is that I never got close to the fellow.”

  “You didn’t appear to go near the victim,” said Crippen, “but then you’re a master of illusion. You know how to do one thing while seeming to do something quite different. A magician who can make his assistant disappear before our very eyes could easily contrive to kill someone without apparently getting close to him.”

  Helsing folded his arms defiantly. “I won’t say another word.”

  “You won’t have to, Otto, because I know you’re innocent. I go down the cellar every day,” Crippen went on, “so I know how dirty your hands can get when you pick up a piece of coal. You need to wash them thoroughly and the obvious place to do that is in the kitchen.” His eyes flicked to Mabel. “That’s where I found you, pretending to look for oatmeal bread.”

  Mabel gave a hollow laugh. “You surely don’t think that I had anything to do with this?” she said. “Angus was a strong man. How could I possibly have got the better of someone like that?”

  “With a little assistance, I suspect.” Crippen took a small box from his pocket. “This used to contain a dozen grains of hyacin. It’s now empty. You knew where I kept my drugs, Mabel. You also knew the properties of hydrobromide of hyacin. It’s what they use at Royal Bethlehem Hospital to subdue restless patients. It was administered to your own husband before he passed away there.”

  “Stop it!” she begged, burying her face in her hands.

  “I watched Angus Rennie badgering you all evening. He knew that your husband had died in an asylum because I was there when Cora told him. He felt that you were fair game,” continued Crippen. “He hounded you, Mabel. He molested you at some point so you stole the hyacin to slip into his whiskey.”

  “I only meant to calm him down,” she wailed.

  “A couple of grains would have done that. You deliberately gave him a fatal dose, one that would make him delirious at first then very drowsy. You lured him down the cellar,” said Crippen, levelly, “and hit a defenceless man on the head so that it looked as if he’d been battered to death. In fact, it would simply have left him with a very bad headache because you didn’t have the strength to crack his skull.” He held the box high. “This is what killed him, isn’t it? And the beauty of it was that you had an obvious scapegoat in Landru.”

  Cora was staggered by her husband’s skill in working out what had happened. She was also shocked to realize that her close friend had committed a murder and wished that she’d never agreed to have Hogmanay celebrations in the house. She looked at Mabel with a mixture of fear and disgust. Helsing and Dorothy had already backed away from the killer. There was a long silence. It was broken by the rapping of the door knocker. Crippen went out into the hall.

  At the very moment he opened the door, bells rang out in the distance and delighted revellers in the street began to sing a welcome to 1907. The policeman beamed at Crippen.

  “Happy New Year, sir,” he said. “What’s this about a murder?”

  FRUITS

  Steve Mosby

  CAROLINE.

  This place is very different to the home we shared. My small cell is made of bare sandstone. The walls make the floor dusty: I think the breeze from the single, barred window is gradually eroding the surfaces, so that when I pace, my bare feet swipe the slabs, sounding like a broom across dry floorboards. If I shout through the window, my voice disappears across the field and into the trees, sounding like nothing.

  I have a dirty mattress for a bed, and a hole in the floor for a toilet. The door is at the far side. I’ve never seen it open, but every day I wake up to find the man has somehow placed a tray just inside. He brings me a pitcher of water, several thin curls of ham, a chunk of bread, a wedge of cheese, and two bright green apples.

  I focus on the apples. I don’t know why, but I do.

  Today, he left me this pencil and scrap of paper too, presumably because he knows I used to be a writer. I think he expects me to write to him.

  Instead, I’m writing to you. For you. Because I always did.

  If I can, I’ll write more tomorrow.

  John.

  Do you remember the evening I signed the contract, when we had champagne together? I think about that a lot: a pointless tatter of memory. It’s like studying a treasure map for a land I can’t visit anymore. But it keeps me occupied.

  You’d always had faith in my fiction, through all the penniless years, and you forced us to mark the occasion. I wanted sparkling wine; you insisted on champagne. As we drank, I imagined its history: the transformation from the grapes on the sun-drenched vines into the liquid in the bottle before us, fizzing with a different kind of life. I thought about the things that had died to enable our celebration, and I felt guilty. But you were so proud of me, and I couldn’t tell you. Not then.

  I know you’ll never read this, but I want you to know: I’m sorry for what I did; we never had a reason to celebrate that night.

  And I miss you more than I can ever say.

  I had a revelation this morning. I focus on the apples he feeds me because I know they’re not poisoned.

  My window faces out onto a patchy field. Over to the right, there’s a small rose garden, the blood-red flowers nodding lazily in the breeze, and at the far end, before the woods begin, there is a large apple tree. I’ve seen the man down there. He’s fat and pink and simple-faced, like a pig in overalls. I’ve called out to him, but he keeps his back to me and never replies. The only sounds I hear are the birds and the steady, delicate click as he clips apples from the lower branches.

  So I know where they come from. I can turn them over, and check that the skin is clear and unbroken, that the fruit sealed inside is safe to eat.

  But something must be poisoning me. Because how else does he get the tray in without disturbing me? Also, I remember . . . words. Things he must have said. We’re all made of stardust. Or perhaps I sleep too long and dream too much.

  No, he has said that, I’m sure.

  And also: Nothing dies.

  But he knows that’s not true, doesn’t he?

  Another memory.

  I’m in a small tearoom. There are flowers on the wallpaper, wooden beams overhead and tassels on the curtains, and I keep hearing the elegant chink of teaspoons on china. A journalist is sitting opposite me, older and more austere than I’d bee
n expecting. (Many of them were prettier than I told you). But this is Whitrow, Jane Ellis’ hometown, and I have no right to expect a warm welcome. Her name is almost sacred here.

  “Why did you use the roses?” she says.

  Jane Ellis’ body was never found, but a rose was delivered to her husband the year after her disappearance, with a note that said, “She lives forever”. The families of his other victims had similar deliveries.

  This is only one of the details I stole.

  “I found it moving,” I say. “Poignant. It felt true.”

  “Did you ever worry you were exploiting the victims?”

  I think of those grapes again. Arrogantly, I think of the champagne that was made from them.

  “I don’t see it that way,” I tell her. “Something terrible happened to those girls, and I wanted to tell their stories.” I spread my hands. “Carefully. Delicately, even. I hope I did them justice.”

  She looks at me. I suppose she can see through that thin screen of noble intentions to the sales and nationwide tour behind. The expression on her face reminds me of the one you had, although yours was worse because of what it replaced.

  She changes tack. “Nobody was ever caught. Does that concern you?”

  It takes me a second, and then I almost smile. Am I frightened? It’s nothing to do with me. I’ve touched it from a safe distance, skimming the surface so gently my fingers came away clean.

  The idea is absurd, and yet I don’t say I’m not.

  The truth is, I almost like the idea of danger as long as I’m safe.

  She will live forever.

  Last night, I opened my eyes and everything was still pitch-black. I didn’t know what had woken me . . . then I heard it again and my heart caught. A woman – out in the corridor. Sobbing and begging, although the words were incoherent. He had brought someone back and was dragging her past my cell.

  Something thumped against the wall. She screamed.

  The next thing I knew, I was hammering on the door, shouting out your name. Slurring it. Even after they’d moved away, I was still punching the wall. This morning, I came to my senses and found myself hugging my knees in the far corner of the room, the mattress overturned and flung aside.

  On the ground by the door: my apples, my paper.

  I’ve no idea how he got them in here but you can see that this time, at the top, he’s written something himself.

  The controversy fed the attendance at the readings on my tour. I suppose he’ll have been in the audience at one of them. It’s possible he was just curious then, but perhaps he’d already felt a kinship. That seems most likely – that I was part of this from the moment I heard Jane Ellis’ name and noted it down in my pad.

  We’re brothers.

  My body juddered passively, strapped in the back seat of his truck. My mind was swirling, drifting. What had happened? Had someone drugged me? Attacked me? I could remember being in the bar, then outside smoking, then . . . then the fear arrived quickly – absurdly – like I’d fallen into icy water.

  We’re the same. You understand.

  He’s told me those other things since, while I’ve been half-dreaming. Nothing ever dies. He means it just becomes something else, like grapes become wine, and I think that’s why he killed those girls: to change them somehow. That’s why, in his mind, we’re the same: because I did something similar to them with my writing.

  I hope I did them justice.

  I’ve not heard the girl again.

  She will live forever.

  I saw him kill her. I heard the commotion outside, then watched through the bars. I didn’t want to, but it’s what I do, isn’t it?

  The man dragged her across the field to the rose garden. Then he squatted awkwardly above her, reached round . . . and his elbow started sawing the air. I couldn’t see, but I could hear: her sobbing became a horrific, gargling cough for a few seconds, and then she fell shockingly silent. The man stood up and walked away. Her body was still for a moment, then rolled slowly onto its back, and a hand began lazily brushing at a flower. She died in her own time. I watched her blood soaking slowly into the earth beneath the roses, and I thought:

  The next petals will be made of her stardust.

  So she will live forever.

  And then . . . all I could do immediately after what happened next was sit and stare at the apple in my hand. Finally, I understood. I’m eating it now, even though I realize every one of them was poisoned. The fruit sealed inside was exactly the problem. But it’s mine.

  This is what happened.

  An hour later, I saw the man return. I watched him pick up the body carefully and delicately. I watched him take it down to the bottom of the garden. And then I watched him bury it, with all the others, in the ground beneath the apple tree.

  A PLACE FOR VIOLENCE

  Kevin Wignall

  DAN WAS MESMERIZED by the young guy in the pool. He was in his late teens or early twenties and looked about as graceful and athletic in the water as anyone he’d ever seen.

  Of course, he probably wouldn’t have been mesmerized if it hadn’t been for the wheelchair. It had been there when Dan came out, against the metal railing of the steps with a towel on its seat. The kid was the only one in the pool but it had still been a few minutes before Dan had accepted the chair had to be his.

  That’s how long it had taken him to notice that his legs weren’t doing any of the work, that they were thin and undeveloped against the kid’s swimmer’s torso. Even so, he produced the impression of someone who left the handicap on the poolside.

  When the pool boy brought his drink Dan turned his attention to his book, looking up every few minutes, a glance at the kid’s steady soothing progress up and down the pool, a glance to the hotel.

  He’d taken a lounger by the side of the pool. The ones in front of the hotel faced across the pool to the beach and the ocean but he wanted to see the hotel. It wasn’t a bad view anyway, the double-storey main building, the single-storey annex, both with their high thatched roofs. And the pool was fringed on all four sides by gardens and tall palms.

  He’d almost finished his drink when the view deteriorated dramatically. He heard the pool boy first, a cheery, “Good morning, Mr Tully.”

  Mr Tully either didn’t think so or didn’t see why he had to share the sentiment with a pool boy. The guy was in his late thirties, probably only a few years older than Dan but he looked like he’d been living dog years. He was balding, fat, too tanned, yet held himself with a proprietary, walk-on-water confidence. He sullied the place.

  His wife had a conversation with the pool boy, so quiet that Dan didn’t pick out a single word. She was slim in a tired way, blonde, with body language that was desperate to be decorative and inoffensive to her husband – Dan could see it was killing her.

  The two kids were the same. Maybe it wasn’t killing them yet, but it would. They were blonde, a boy and a girl, their builds teetering on the brink, showing they could yet take after either parent. The girl was maybe eight, the boy a year or two older and they both moved with the timid attentiveness of kids who were terrified of their father. Whenever possible, they chose to stand behind their mother.

  Tully had taken his shirt and sunglasses off now and looked about fifteen months pregnant. He walked across to the steps and clicked his fingers at the pool boy. He pointed at the wheelchair.

  “Get this piece of junk out of here.” There was a hint of something in his accent, Boston maybe. “My kids trip and hurt themselves, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  His kids had each arranged themselves on a lounger next to their mother and were showing no childlike desire to get in the water. The pool boy approached and took hold of the wheelchair handles but spoke quietly to Tully, gesturing to the swimmer.

  Tully was having none of it, and said, “So he’s a cripple, that doesn’t give him the right to endanger other people. Move it.”

  Dan wondered if this was possibly the crassest person on the planet.
r />   The pool boy bowed and pushed the chair along the poolside, reluctant to disobey one guest or to inconvenience another. But as if sensing the discomfort of the pool boy, and perhaps having heard some of the exchange, the kid turned on to his back and called, “It’s okay, I’m done.” He was American too.

  He turned in the water and glided over to the side where the pool boy was waiting with the chair. He heaved himself out at the same time as Tully crashed into the water at the other end, not even using the steps after causing such a scene about his access to them.

  The pool boy held the wheelchair steady and the kid pulled himself up. He’d lost all his aquatic grace now, but he didn’t do a bad job of getting into the chair and Dan reckoned there was a residue of movement or sensation in his legs. He knew the kid wouldn’t have thanked him for it, but he couldn’t help thinking to himself, “too bad”.

  The kid didn’t hang around once he was in the chair. He folded the towel over his lap, put another around his shoulders and wheeled back along to the hotel, as cool about it as a kid on a skateboard.

  Tully had been swimming furiously, throwing up a lot of spray, but he stopped to look as the kid wheeled away. He looked smug, but with that victory under his belt, he turned to his family and called out, “Pete, get yourself in here. You too, sugar.”

  The two kids stirred and Dan took that as his cue to leave. Tully saw him getting up and looked over, as if wanting to stare him down or ask what his problem was. Dan ignored him, but as he passed Mrs Tully and the kids he smiled and said, “How’s it going?” They smiled back uncertainly, but didn’t speak.

  Later in the afternoon, Dan found the kid sitting in the terrace bar. He was reading and apart from an elderly couple in the far corner he was there on his own. Dan ordered a Tiger Beer from the bar and strolled over.

  “Hey, mind if I join you?” He saw what the kid was reading, The Stranger by Camus, and wondered if befriending him was a mistake.