The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Read online

  “He was at the same jar as Heron, my Lord. He didn’t drink, though. He must have smuggled that tube in just as Heron did, but he never intended to suck through it. He blew.”

  My master’s sharp eyes glittered as he stared at me.

  “That ceremony always turns into a riot. There’s no time for anyone to check whether the tube they’ve got is hollow or not, if they’re lucky enough to be able to lay hands on one at all. So you’ll always get several young men sucking away at each jar, most of them due to be disappointed. The one who poisoned your great nephew knew that and took advantage of it. He stuck close to Heron with a hollow reed full of powdered mushrooms, knowing nobody would think anything of it if he dipped his reed in the same jar. He blew the poison in just as Heron was slurping the stuff up.”

  Lord Feathered in Black looked at the tube with distaste. “Clever,” he conceded. “But if what you say is right, then how do we know which of them it was?”

  “I don’t think we ever will,” I replied carefully. I was sure it had been either Owl or Firstborn Son who had attacked me, but I did not blame him. He must have been terrified when he found out how hard the Chief Minister had taken his prank.

  “Well, at least we know where he got the straw from,” the Chief Minister said.

  “We do?”

  “Two Rabbit. He vanished yesterday, just after you saw him at the prison. Collected a few things from his lodging at the temple and hasn’t been seen since. I don’t suppose he ever will be again, at least not in Mexico.”

  I found Fire Snake looking none the worse for his brief stay in the prison.

  “You did it! Well done, Yaotl – thank you, old friend, thank you! I shan’t forget this . . .”

  “I wish you would,” I said shortly.

  “If there’s ever anything I can do . . .”

  I looked at his eager face, the grin white against the pitch he used to stain it, and felt disgusted. The gods had been affronted, but all that mattered to Fire Snake was that he had got away with it. “Just tell me something,” I said quietly. “How did Two Rabbit know what you and Heron had done?”

  The effusion of words abruptly halted. He hesitated before saying: “But we talked about that. Didn’t he learn it from someone Heron had been bragging to? What about that girl?”

  “Precious Flower didn’t talk. I’ve met them both. She didn’t like what Heron had done but there’s no way she’d betray him. That young fool doesn’t deserve her.”

  “Well, then . . .”

  “In fact,” I went on, “It seems to me there’s only one person who could or would have told him, expecting him to do exactly what he did. His assistant, the one he thought was too ambitious. You knew how this was likely to turn out, didn’t you? When that young man attacked me – I still don’t know who it was, by the way, and I don’t want to – he said he thought the priest had told me what happened. At first I thought he meant you, but he was talking about Two Rabbit. Your chief gave one of Heron’s rivals a tube full of sacred mushrooms, but he only did it because he knew what Heron was going to do. And he can only have learned of that from you.”

  “That’s absurd!” Fire Snake protested, but I could hear the tremor in his voice.

  “No, I think it’s quite clever. You didn’t actually poison young Heron but you found a way to bring it about. The possibility of implicating poor old Two Rabbit must have made it even sweeter for you. Of course it went a bit wrong when you were arrested – you didn’t expect that, I’d guess – but it all turned out well in the end, didn’t it? Will they make you chief priest now, I wonder?”

  He clutched anxiously at the hem of my cloak as I turned away from him, but I did not want to hear any more claims on an old friendship that had never existed.

  As I walked out, though, I called over my shoulder: “But don’t worry. I won’t tell old Black Feathers. I don’t really care who made a fool of his great-nephew, or why. It probably served him right.”

  HISTORY!

  Toby Litt

  THEY MET IN the thickest part of the woods; also, the furthest from the edge. To get there, they had to hack through thick brambles, use compasses, check their synchronized watches and remember the routes of their country girlhoods. Radio silence was maintained, however. It was twilight, clement because late summer. This den within a copse had been their place of recourse, when the adults had made it plain they were becoming too alive to be tolerated – too alive meaning too fast, too loud, too vivid in thought and question.

  All of them, all three, had had both original parents to respond to; since then, all three had lost one or the other. Later, it was speculated that this might have had something to do with their actions. Information was initially hard to come by, and what there was seemed contradictory.

  First to arrive at the meeting point was Margaret – her usual distinguishing feature, an aureole of chestnut ringlets, now squashed beneath a black balaclava. Her eyes, if one had been able to see them, were underlined with brown semi-circles. Margaret had given birth five years previously to triplet boys, two of whom were hyperactive; the third was given to feigning death behind the sofa for no apparent reason. Margaret, who of course herself dies before the night is out, left behind a written statement saying she did what she did for them. The consensus among the villagers was, she was a bad mother, knew it, and took the coward’s way out.

  “Hello,” said a low voice from the cover immediately behind Margaret. “I wondered whether I’d be able to sneak up on you.”

  Margaret had at first given a real jump; the voice interrupted thoughts of whether she could trust the teenage babysitter with John, Jack and James. Her husband had funny business at the Lodge.

  “Well, then, you succeeded,” said Margaret.

  Out from behind the thick trunk of a tree stepped Beatrice, known as Bee, who also dies. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “No one else is going to be out here.”

  “This isn’t a game.”

  “To be entirely serious is to play into their hands,” said Bee, who was theoretically minded in her opposition. “I am maintaining an element of joy.”

  Margaret smiled a sad smile, almost as if she knew they were going to die. “It’s good to see you,” she said, and the two women hugged. Both were aware of the crackling sounds of the woods around them – were they being crept up on?

  “How are the boys?” asked Bee.

  “They are very well,” said Margaret, willing herself not to cry. “It’s still all battles in our house, though. War-war-war.”

  “Any sign of Liz?”

  “Not yet,” replied Margaret.

  The two women sat on the loamy earth of the woods. It was nice for once not to have to worry about dirt – tonight was a time for being deliberately dirty. “She’s late,” said Bee, who had turned thirty the week before.

  “She’ll be here,” said Margaret.

  “What if she doesn’t come?”

  “She’ll come.”

  There was a moment.

  “I like your hair like that,” said Margaret.

  “Thank you,” said Bee.

  Bee’s hair was usually done in a neat black bob, but she had shaved this off earlier in the evening – down to a number one. Some have taken this as a sign that she was all along intending martyrdom. She had been anorexic for years, which was also taken as an explanation – hatred of the self and of the world. But although she probably did not know it, at the time of her death she was three weeks’ pregnant. Despite DNA testing, the father has to this day not been found.

  “Do we go ahead anyway, if she doesn’t come?” Bee asked.

  “I think I hear her now,” said Margaret. If she heard something, it wasn’t Liz; perhaps a fox or a badger. After this, though, they waited in a listening silence.

  Eventually, a quarter of an hour later, Liz crashed out of the undergrowth and fell against them. It took her two minutes to regain her breath – during which time both the others wanted to tell her to keep quiet bu
t didn’t feel it possible.

  “I was followed,” was the first thing she said that they understood.

  “Calm down,” said Margaret, who wasn’t the leader – they didn’t have a leader; hierarchies being part of what they wanted to destroy – but who often was first to introduce ideas into their circle: she had suggested tonight; the others had not been slow to agree. “Tell us whenever you’re ready.”

  Liz – who dies – sat with her head between her legs, gasping less and less. At twenty-nine, she was the youngest of them. (Margaret was thirty-one, Bee – as mentioned before – thirty.) “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said.

  “We have plenty of time,” said Margaret, but checked her watch anyway.

  “Who followed you?” asked Bee.

  “A policeman,” Liz said, her breath a little more even. “He was dressed in civilian clothes, but I could still tell he was a policeman.”

  “How?” asked Margaret.

  “Because I hated him so much,” Liz said, then sniggered. “And he walked as if he’d been taught how to march – you know what I mean.”

  “Do you think they know anything?” Bee asked.

  “No,” said Margaret. “How could they?”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Liz. “He seemed to want to follow me – for no reason.”

  “You managed to lose him, didn’t you?” asked Margaret.

  “Of course,” said Liz, sitting up straight. “Or else I wouldn’t be here.”

  “How?” asked Bee.

  “Well . . .” said Liz, and took a long breath.

  It turned out she had gone to the house of a sympathetic female friend, knocked on the door, been invited inside and then, after a brief explanation (seedy man loitering, fear of rape), had climbed over the back fence and into the concreted area behind the cricket pavilion. From here, she had been able to make her way to the woods without breaking cover more than once – to cross the main road near the stables.

  All three women kept horses there, and this was later the cause of much speculation. Perhaps it was a sign of sexual frustration – unhappiness in marriage. The husbands of Margaret and Liz denied this as libel. Singleton Bee was discovered (by the tabloids) to have been gratifyingly promiscuous. In the end, more than seven men came forward to testify to her total lack of frigidity. “She was very intense,” one of them said. “Almost too intense. I didn’t like it.” Nymphomania became the favoured diagnosis.

  Margaret coughed quietly. “All set?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Liz.

  “Ready,” said Bee.

  They started walking, in single file. All of them were quite fit – Bee did yoga, Margaret did Pilates and Liz did a weekly salsa class – so they made very rapid progress. It took them half an hour to reach their destination: a gamekeeper’s cottage in a small clearing, surrounded by a neatly kept garden – lawn, rockery, fruit trees. By this time, it was starting to get dark. The lights were on inside the cottage, the now infamous “Bower of Bliss”; the flowery curtains of the sitting room had not been drawn. A Mercedes saloon and a Renault Clio were parked on the drive, which had long-ago been done in crazy paving.

  The three women made a quick check of their equipment, particularly their radios. These were small and made of black plastic; across the top of them, the words Action Man were written in bright orange.

  “Fine,” said Margaret. “We follow the plan.”

  She and Bee proceeded to the front door. Liz, keeping low, made her way to the kitchen door – around the other side. She could hear the sound of the television. It was the theme tune to the “Antiques Roadshow”. They were bang on eight o’clock.

  From her rucksack, Liz took out two rolls of camouflage-patterned tape and a chunky pair of childsafe scissors.

  Bee radioed to check Liz was in position.

  “All present and correct,” said Liz, a phrase of her father’s.

  Margaret pushed the front doorbell with the middle finger of her left hand; in her right was a toy gun belonging to one of her sons. It was very realistic, as long as one didn’t get too good a look – which was why she had chosen to use it.

  A man answered the door – fifty-eight, fat, dressed in a green tweedy suit but with leather slippers on. This was Colin Richard son, the Mayor of the village, publican of the Queen’s Head, left-arm orthodox spin.

  “Margaret,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  She pointed the toy gun close up to his forehead, where it would be out of focus.

  “Do exactly what we say,” she replied.

  “Is that real?” Colin asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “And if you don’t get inside, I will demonstrate how real.”

  Colin turned and walked back into the house.

  “Hold your hands up where I can see them,” said Margaret. “I know you keep a shotgun.”

  “Not any more, alas,” said Colin. “I had to hand it in – sop to the council lefties.”

  “I think you’re lying,” said Margaret, as they passed out of the hall and into the TV-loud living room.

  “Numfon,” said Colin. “Be calm. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  A Thai woman in her mid-thirties was sitting on the left of the sofa, holding a glass of Australian Riesling in her hand. The glass was made of cut crystal. Her fingernails were long and had paste jewels on them.

  “Sit down,” said Margaret. “Not next to her.”

  “Hello, Numfon,” said Bee.

  “Bee,” said Numfon.

  “Please come with me, quickly, and fetch Roger,” said Bee.

  The two of them went off through an adjoining door. The name ROGER was spelt out on it with a rhino, an ostrich, a giraffe, an emu and another rhino.

  “What’s this about?” asked Colin. “It’s clearly not the usual parish council business. Is it planning permission?”

  “It’s about everything,” said Margaret. “You’ll find out soon enough. Now, please be quiet.”

  She radioed Liz.

  “Building secured. You may enter.”

  Liz tried the back door. It was unlocked. A moment later, she had joined Margaret in the living room.

  “You, too?” asked Colin.

  “Oh, yes,” said Liz.

  On the television, they were valuing a wig that was said to have belonged to Samuel Johnson.

  Numfon reentered the room, carrying Roger, a five-year-old boy, half-Caucasian, half-Asian. He was still groggy.

  “Sit down,” said Margaret. “If you can keep him quiet, we won’t need to gag him.”

  “Margaret,” said Colin, “the nearest house is half a mile a way – half a mile of thick woodland. You could shoot the lot of us, and no one would hear.”

  “Yes,” said Margaret. “We could. I just don’t want to have any whining bloody kids around. I get enough of that at home.”

  “So, what can I do for you?” asked Colin.

  “You can call the police,” said Margaret. “Tell them you’ve been taken hostage. Tell them we’re serious. And that, when they get here, we can discuss terms.”

  “Anything you say, Margaret.”

  Margaret slapped Colin’s face, with her non-gun hand.

  “Don’t be such a smarmy cunt, Colin. You can die painlessly or very painfully indeed.”

  “Yes,” he said, his hair disarranged.

  “Dial 999,” said Margaret. “Tell them to get here as soon as they can. Tell them we’d like a helicopter.”

  “What, to escape with?”

  “No, just to fly around overhead, so we feel important.”

  Colin picked up the receiver and dialled.

  It took him five minutes to get through to the right person.

  “Yes, they’re very serious indeed, it seems,” Colin said. “No, I don’t know what they want.”

  “Tell them we’ll only speak to an officer specially trained in hostage situations.”

  “Did you hear that?” Colin asked the policeman. Then, to Margaret, “He
heard. He said, that might take some time to arrange.”

  “Tell him we will shoot your wife in one hour,” said Margaret.

  Colin soberly repeated the words.

  “Now give me the phone,” she said.

  Colin obeyed.

  Margaret took the receiver from him. “You can be quick when you want to be,” she said into it, then hung up.

  “Back in there,” Margaret said, and shoved Colin into the living room. She was really enjoying this – more than she had expected.

  On the sofa, Numfon was cowering and Roger was crying.

  “Gag them,” she said. “The police are on their way.”

  Colin slumped into the armchair and sent a brave smile towards Numfon. “Don’t worry, darling,” he said. “We’ll be alright.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Bee. “You’ll never be alright.”

  “You deserve this,” said Margaret.

  Liz handed over one of the rolls of tape to Bee, who started on Numfon. “Lift your hair out of the way,” Bee said.

  “What does that matter?” Liz asked.

  “Don’t hurt my mummy,” wailed Roger, just before Liz sealed his mouth. Snot immediately began to run down the slick surface of the tape. Roger’s eyes were no longer those of a five-year-old.

  Bee taped up Numfon’s hands and feet. Liz left Roger’s hands free, so that he could put them round his mother.

  Then Margaret taped Colin’s feet together, and his hands behind his back. His mouth, she left alone.

  “Tea, anyone?” asked Liz.

  “Yes, please,” said Margaret. “And see if you can find some biscuits. I’m sure they keep some nice ones.”

  On television, they were valuing a Queen Anne table with very fine cabriolet legs.

  Margaret sat down on the sofa with the toy gun in her lap. Bee took the armchair on the left hand side, after removing the antimacassar. She crumpled it up and threw it into the fireplace, where imitation coals sat ready to be gassed.

  Apart from Roger’s sniffles, everyone was quiet until Liz returned with the tea. There were mugs for the three hostage-takers, nothing for the family.