The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 16

  “I’m no journalist.” Relaxed after the drink, Toby explained about his new show, the one that would finally reveal the truth, and now he thought he knew it. He didn’t tell her what he’d worked out, but she didn’t take it well, all the same.

  She listened to him in silence and, when he finished, announced pleasantly: “You do that, dear, and you’ll land up in the river with them.”

  “I’m back, omi.” Toby burst through the front door next day, full of excitement.

  Sam put down his newspaper. “How did it go, son?”

  “I know how it was done and why.”

  “Tell me, omi.”

  “I can do better than that. I’ll give you my new show. That’ll tell you who did it.” Toby was highly pleased with his efforts. Not a bad day for his first time with the swazzle. That was a mere rehearsal for the show he’d decided he’d better confine to the limited audience of his parents for the moment. It was going to knock ’em cold.

  “Right, son. There’s nothing decent on telly. Why not?”

  Toby didn’t mind being laughed at. He was sure of his ground, if somewhat nervous. He’d decided there was no need for Ned’s services with a small cast and no bottling required.

  He set up the puppets while Dad went to call Mum to watch. She couldn’t miss this one, he heard Sam say to her. Not Toby’s first show, and in she came, apron on, and teacloth in hand. Toby nipped round to the front of the booth to give a welcoming roll on the drum, then dived into the back again. He was keyed up, but still remembered to use the indoors swazzle Dad had given him, not yesterday’s outdoors caller for Punch’s voice. He was so het up he nearly choked on it at first, as he screeched, “Hallo folks” and popped Punch up to join the rest of the cast lined up to greet the audience. Then he came out front again: “Right, omi, Mr Punch plays the wicked husband as usual, Judy plays his wife Fay, Scaramouche, Punch’s neighbour, is Handsome Dan, and the crocodile is his wife Serena. We’ve a few other players: Joey of course, the policeman, the ghost, the buffer, the baby – even the publican.”

  “That’s a surprise, son.” Sam was impressed. “Haven’t heard of a couple of those for years.”

  “You’ll have a few more surprises coming, I reckon,” Toby said complacently, and went back inside the booth again.

  “Come on then, let’s be having you,” Sam shouted. “Where’s old Judy?”

  “Change of routine, Dad,” came Toby’s muffled voice. “Back to the old Piccini script.” In this famous eighteenth-century version, the neighbour had come on first. Sam nodded, surprised, but he couldn’t fault that. After a burst of song, “Where are my sausages, Scaramouche?” Punch chased after him, then disappeared while Scaramouche and Judy sang a duet, in Toby’s falsetto voice, one of the old Darling Dan hits, their version of “The Gypsy’s Warning”.

  “Do not trust him, gentle maiden . . .” Toby boomed as Judy.

  “I’ll truss him like a chicken; I’m not scared of him,” squealed Scaramouche.

  “Oh ho. What’s all this? Not content with wanting my sausages, you’re after my wife, too. I’ll show you.” Punch hit Scaramouche with his stick, who promptly lay down and died, then popped up again to berate Judy who was by now nursing the baby. He took it from her and flung it over the edge. “Ha, ha, no babies for you. That’s the way to do it.”

  “Oh, Punch, how can you be so cruel?” sobbed Judy.

  “Easy! I’ll show you how!” squawked Punch in triumph, turning to whack her. But by now not only Joey the Clown was on the scene, but Jack Ketch the hangman, and Punch hastily changed his mind. “My wife,” he squawked. “Isn’t she lovely?” As soon as their backs were turned, he swiped at Judy again, but this time Joey the Clown appeared and pulled her away, leaving a string of sausages in her place for Punch to thump. The crocodile swallowed them up, and quickly pretended to be dead when he saw Punch. Jack Ketch appeared to hang Punch, but the publican saved him by handing him a large bottle of whisky, and Jack Ketch joined the row of bodies lying at Punch’s feet.

  “What’s he playing at?” Ada whispered. “I don’t understand. It’s daft. This isn’t a proper Punch and Judy.”

  “Give the lad time, mozzy,” Sam said quietly.

  “Let me see now, how many have I killed?” Punch began the body-counting routine, confused this time not only by Joey the clown but by the ghost who kept lying down to complicate matters.

  Finally the policeman loomed over him. “Mr Punch, I’ve a warrant to cart you off for killing your wife.”

  “But I didn’t,” squealed Punch. “Honest. She warrant there.”

  “Oh.” The policeman threw the warrant away, and just as Punch was chuckling with relief, popped up again: “Never mind. I’ll have you anyway.”

  He called the publican back on – and the curtains closed.

  “What did you think of it, Dad?” Toby strolled out.

  His father cleared his throat. “Very neat, son. I take it you’re saying Mr Punch was innocent of killing Judy, but he killed Scaramouche, but escaped the law, although he got his comeuppance in the end. That right?”

  “Yes, omi,” Toby said. “I think Fay engineered the row beforehand, when she was yelling ‘What have you done?’ so that everyone would think Pete was mad enough to kill her. By the time he got back in the boathouse, she had already vanished – slipped into the river, round the corner, and landed where she gave out that terrible shriek – which brought Pete into the boathouse right on cue.”

  “And what had he done, omi?” Sam asked.

  “Murdered Dan. Fay knew it, but didn’t know where the body was – so she couldn’t prove it. She wanted revenge, and how better to get it than to have people think Pete had murdered her?”

  “What did she do after she climbed onto the bank then?” Even his mother was getting interested now. “She still had to escape.”

  “No Dan to help her, was there?” Sam pointed out. “Scaramouche was dead, and his ghost couldn’t help.”

  “No, but Joey the clown could.”

  There was a split-second silence, then Toby said quietly to his father: “That’s the way you did it, omi.”

  A split second silence, broken by Sam’s loud laugh. “How’s that, then?”

  “I think you helped her, Dad. Fay was friendly with you, and she came to you for help when you arrived the evening before. She told you that she knew Pete had killed Dan, and that she would never be free of him if she tried to get away, so she had to disappear for good. You helped her. You lent her the outdoor swazzle for that scream. When you led the chase over the hillock to look for her body, no one noticed that there was one extra person coming back. Why should they? It was only your bottler. Not Ned, though, he was making himself scarce in the bar. That’s what put me on to it. He insisted he’d been at the boathouse with you, but there’s no way he could have left you there to go back to the bar, and that’s where he met Serena Smith. I think Fay wore a hat and blazer over a pair of her own trousers and a shirt. The hat hid her short hair, and no one’s going to look at the face of a bottler; mentally they only see the hat. She stayed dressed like that till you went home.”

  “And what happened to her then, son?”

  “I don’t know, but you probably do. Maybe she’s still singing her heart out somewhere in the world. After all, it doesn’t take much in disguise when folks aren’t expecting to see you any longer. Bit of hair-dye, and different hair-do, change of name and no one would recognize her now. Do you know, Dad? Have you ever seen her again?”

  “Oh yes, son.”

  “So where is she?”

  “Right here, omi. She’s your ma.”

  THE LONG BLACK VEIL

  Val McDermid

  Jess turned fourteen today. With every passing year, she looks more like her mother. And it pierces me to the heart. When I stopped by her room this evening, I asked if her birthday awakened memories of her mother. She shook her head, leaning forward so her long blonde hair curtained her face, cutting us off fro
m each other. “Ruth, you’re the one I think of when people say ‘mother’ to me,” she mumbled.

  She couldn’t have known that her words opened an even deeper wound inside me and I was careful to keep my heart’s response hidden from my face. Even after ten years, I’ve never stopped being careful. “She was a good woman, your mother,” I managed to say without my voice shaking.

  Jess raised her head to meet my eyes then swiftly dropped it again, taking refuge behind the hair. “She killed my father,” she said mutinously. “Where exactly does ‘good’ come into it?”

  I want to tell her the truth. There’s part of me thinks she’s old enough now to know. But then the sensible part of me kicks in. There are worse things to be in small town America than the daughter of a murderess. So I hold my tongue and settle for silence.

  Seems like I’ve been settling for silence all my adult life.

  It’s easy to point to where things end but it’s a lot harder to be sure where they start. Everybody here in Marriott knows where and when Kenny Sheldon died, and most of them think they know why. They reckon they know exactly where his journey to the grave started.

  They’re wrong, of course. But I’m not going to be the one to set them right. As far as Marriott is concerned, Kenny’s first step on the road to hell started when he began dating Billy Jean Ferguson. Rich boys mixing with poor girls is pretty much a conventional road to ruin in these parts.

  Me and Billy Jean, we were still in high school, but Kenny had a job. Not just any old job, but one that came slathered with a certain glamour. Somehow, he’d persuaded the local radio station to take him on staff. He was only a gofer, but Kenny being Kenny, he managed to parlay that into being a crucial element in the station’s existence. In his eyes, he was on the fast track to being a star. But while he was waiting for that big break, Kenny was content to play the small town big shot.

  He’d always had an eye for Billy Jean, but she’d fended him off in the past. We’d neither of us been that keen on dating. Other girls in our grade had been hanging out with boyfriends for a couple of years by then, but to me and Billy Jean it had felt like a straitjacket. It was one of the things that made it possible for us to be best friends. We preferred to hang out at Helmer’s drugstore in a group of like-minded teens, among them Billy Jean’s distant cousin Jeff.

  Their mothers were cousins, and by some strange quirk of genetics, they’d turned out looking like two peas in a pod. Hair the colour of butter, eyes the same shade as the hyacinths our mothers would force for Christmas. The same small, hawk-curved nose and cupid’s bow lips. You could take their features one by one and see the correspondence. The funny thing was that you would never have mistaken Billy Jean for a boy or Jeff for a girl. Maybe it was nothing more than their haircuts. Billy Jean’s hair was the long blonde swatch that I see now in Jess, whereas Jeff favoured a crew-cut. Still does, for that matter, though the blond is starting to silver round the temples now.

  Anyhow, as time slipped by, the group we hung with thinned out into couples and sometimes there were just the three of us drinking Cokes and picking at cold fries. Kenny, who had taken to drifting into Helmer’s when we were there, picked his moment and started insinuating himself into our company. He’d park himself next to Jeff, stretching his legs to stake out the whole side of the table. If either of us girls wanted to go to the bathroom, we had to go through a whole rigmarole of getting Kenny to move his damn boots. He’d lay an arm across the back of the booth proprietorially, a Marlboro dangling from the other hand, and tell us all about his important life at the radio station.

  One night, he turned up with free tickets for a Del Shannon concert fifty miles down the interstate. We were impressed. Marriott had never seen live rock and roll, unless you counted the open mike night at the Tavern in the Town. As far as we were concerned, only the truly cool had ever seen live bands. It took no persuading whatsoever for us to accompany Kenny to the show.

  What we hadn’t really bargained for was Kenny treating it like a double date right from the start when he installed Billy Jean up front next to him in the car and relegated me and Jeff to the back seat. He carried on as he started, draping his arm over her shoulders at every opportunity. But we all were fired up with the excitement of seeing a singer who had actually had a number-one single, so we all went along with it. Truth to tell, it turned out to be just the nudge Jeff and I needed to slip from friendship into courting. We’d been heading that way, but I reckon we’d both been reluctant to take any step that might make Billy Jean feel shut out. If Billy Jean was happy to be seen as Kenny’s girlfriend – and at first, it seemed that way, since she showed no sign of objecting to the arm-draping or the subsequent hand-holding – then we were freed up to follow our hearts.

  That first double date was a night to remember. The buzz from the audience as we filed into the arena was beyond anything we small-town kids had ever experienced. I felt like a little kid again, but in a good way. I slid my hand into Jeff’s for security and we followed Kenny and Billy Jean to our seats right at the front. When the support act took to the stage, I was rapt. Around us, people seemed to be paying no attention to the unknown quartet on the stage, but I was determined to miss nothing.

  After Del Shannon’s set, my ears were ringing from the music and the applause, my eyes dazzled by the spotlights glinting on the chrome and polish of the instruments. The air was thick with smoke and sweat and stale perfume. I was stunned by it all. I scarcely felt my feet touch the ground as we walked back to Kenny’s car, the chorus of “Runaway” ringing inside my head. But I was still alert enough to see that Kenny still had his arm round Billy Jean and she was leaning into him. I wasn’t crazy about Kenny, but I was selfish. I wanted to be with Jeff, so I wasn’t going to try to talk Billy Jean out of Kenny.

  Kenny dropped Jeff and me off outside my house, and as his tail lights disappeared, I said, “You think she’ll be OK?”

  Jeff grinned. “I’ve got a feeling Kenny just bit off more than he can chew. Billy Jean will be fine. Now, come here, missy, I’ve got something for you.” Then he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. I didn’t give Billy Jean another thought that night.

  Next day when we met up, we compared notes. I was still floating from Jeff’s kisses and I didn’t really grasp that Billy Jean was less enamoured of Kenny’s attempts to push her well beyond a goodnight kiss. What I did take in was that she appeared genuinely pleased for Jeff and me. My fears that she’d feel shut out seemed to have been groundless, and she talked cheerfully about more double-dating. I didn’t understand that was her way of keeping herself safe from Kenny’s advances. I just thought that we were both contentedly coupled up after that one double date.

  All that spring, we went out as a foursome. Kenny seemed to be able to get tickets to all sorts of venues and we went to a lot of gigs. Some were good, most were pretty terrible and none matched the excitement of that first live concert. I didn’t really care. All that mattered to me was the shift from being Jeff’s friend to being his girlfriend. I was in love, no doubting it, and in love as only a teenage girl can be. I walked through the world starry-eyed and oblivious to anything that wasn’t directly connected to me and my guy.

  That’s why I paid no attention to the whispers linking Kenny’s name to a couple of other girls. Someone said he’d been seen with Janine, who tended bar at the Tavern in the Town. I dismissed that out of hand. According to local legend, a procession of men had graced Janine’s trailer. Why would Kenny lower himself when he had someone as special as Billy Jean for a girlfriend? Oh yes, I was quite the little innocent back in the day.

  Someone else claimed to have seen him with another girl at a blues night in the next county. I pointed out to her that he worked in the music business. It wasn’t surprising if he had to meet with colleagues at music events. And that it shouldn’t surprise her if some of those colleagues happened to be women. And that it was a sad day when women were so sexist.

  I didn’t say anything to Billy
Jean, even though we were closer than sisters. I’d like to think it was because I didn’t want to cause her pain, but the truth is that their stories probably slipped my mind, being much less important than my own emotional life.

  By the time spring had slipped into summer, Jeff and I were lovers. I’m bound to say it was something of a disappointment. I suspect it is for a lot of women. Not that Jeff wasn’t considerate or generous or gentle. He was all of those and more. But even after we’d been doing it a while and we’d had the chance to get better at it, I still had that Peggy Lee “Is that all there is?” feeling.

  I suppose that made it easier for me to support Billy Jean in her continued refusal to let Kenny go all the way. When we were alone together, she was adamant that she didn’t care for him nearly enough to let him be the one to take her virginity. For my part, I told her she should hold out for somebody who made her dizzy with desire because frankly that feeling was the only thing that made it all worth it.

  The weekend after I said that to her, Billy Jean told Kenny she wasn’t in love with him and she didn’t want to go out with him any more. Of course, he went around telling anybody who would listen that he was the one to call time on their relationship, but I suspect that most people read that for the bluster it was. “How did he take it?” I asked her at recess on the Monday afterwards. “Was he upset?”