The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Read online

  “How are you getting on, Grace?” asked a brisk voice from behind her. Grace turned to see one of the Detective Constables who’d just arrived on scene. She bent and snapped her bag closed, then straightened.

  “I’m about done,” she said.

  “Will you get anything useful from her, do you think?”

  Grace glanced back.

  The girl lay on the damp steps, arms wrapped across her body, in the position they’d first found her. Her eyes were open and glassy, her lips tinged with blue. The marks of the stranglehold that had killed her showed dark and ugly around her throat.

  “I think so,” Grace murmured. “The dead always talk to me in the end.”

  COLOUR ME BLOOD

  Jerry Sykes

  The side of the building had been painted in a thin coat of white emulsion, but the solid colours of more than a decade’s worth of graffiti still showed through the paint like blood vessels under pale Irish skin. In front of the wall, a tall scruff of a man with thick knots of dark hair was making shapes in the emulsion with a piece of charcoal. His name was Rob Blake, a local artist, and he had been commissioned by the local residents’ association to create a mural on the side of the Community Centre.

  Surrounding him in a loose arc, all ADD head jerks and hot feet, was a group of around ten children aged between twelve and fourteen holding in their hands face masks and cans of spray paint in a rainbow of colours. The idea was that once the artist had laid out the basic outline of the mural on the wall, the kids would then fill in the larger shapes to create the solid cast of the image, leaving the artist to add the final details later.

  Across the street from the Community Centre, Detective Sergeant Marnie Stone sat and watched from the open window of her old blue Saab. In the centre of the group surrounding the artist, little more than a short head taller than the children, she could see Kate Phillips, one of the hardier members of Camden’s Social Services department and an old friend. After a couple of minutes, Marnie called out her name and stuck her hand in the air, but, like the children, Kate seemed fascinated with the workings of the artist, the fluid motion of his hand, the beats of creation, and appeared not to have heard. Marnie could not see much of what was happening through the forest of shuffling limbs, just the occasional glimpse of the hand leaking sinuous lines of soft carbon, and so she had no choice but to sit back and wait.

  Marnie had read about the project in the local paper and was curious to see if it would lead to a reduction in crime on the estate, as had been promised in the tenants’ association’s pitch to the police and the council. There were a couple of faces that she knew for a fact were responsible for a string of robberies and muggings in the area – she had just not been able to gather sufficient evidence, and so at least a couple of old people would be able to walk home in peace tonight. But she would be fooling herself if she thought it would go further than that.

  A few minutes later, the artist stood up to stretch his back and the spell he held over his audience was broken. Kate glanced around and saw Marnie watching them. She stooped and said something to one of the kids nearest her, and then walked over to the Saab. The closer she came, Marnie noticed, the deeper the lines that bracketed her mouth became. But then it had never surprised Marnie that social workers appeared to age faster than the rest of the world, including police officers.

  “Hello, Marnie, what are you doing out here?” asked Kate, smiling. “You’re not going to arrest Rob, are you?”

  “You mean that vandal trying to make the estate a better place to live?” replied Marnie, reflecting the smile. “Sure, I just wanted to see who his accomplices were first . . .”

  “Ooh, don’t be cruel,” replied Kate, resting her hand on the lip of the door.

  “What’s it going to be, anyway?” asked Marnie, pointing towards the Community Centre.

  “A warning about the perils of drink and drugs,” said Kate. “There’s going to be the usual logo, Keep it Clean, and then a street scene with kids and families and stuff like that. I don’t know, I think I also heard Rob say something about a large bin with needles and guns sticking out of it or something . . .”

  “And here’s me thinking Walt Disney was dead,” said Marnie.

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” Kate chastised her. “If it gives these kids some stake in the estate then it’ll be worth it.”

  “Yeah, I know,” agreed Marnie, glancing away. She still had her doubts, but she also knew that she would never be able to win an argument with Kate. She started the engine and put the car in gear. “Anyway, I better be getting back to the station. I just thought I’d drop by and see how you were getting on . . .”

  “Much better than I thought,” said Kate, nodding. “There are far more kids here than I thought there would be . . . Including one or two I never expected to see in a million years.”

  “Yeah, I know who you mean,” said Marnie. “So just remember to count all the paint cans at the end of the night.

  Kate gave her a look of mock admonishment, and then broke into a smile. “Go and chase some real villains,” she said.

  The children had been filling in shapes for a little more than ten minutes when the first argument started. Calum Breen, a short kid with dark hair and a pronounced lower lip that made him look like he was sulking all the time, a mask that suited his character to the ground, had been assigned a couple of letters at the end of the slogan, but what he wanted to do was something a bit more artistic, or something a bit more real, as he put it.

  “Why can’t I do one of the people, or even some of the background?” he asked, a sneer pushing his lip out further.

  “Because that’s just the way it worked out,” replied Blake, wishing that Kate was still there with him. Five minutes earlier she had told him that she had to go and see a client on the estate but would be back in an hour. He was not used to dealing with a bunch of kids on his own and, although he was loath to admit it to himself, having her there made him feel safer.

  “But I don’t want to do the letters,” replied Calum.

  “Well, how about you just do one of the letters and then we move everyone around,” said Blake. “That way everyone’ll get to do a figure and a letter, or a bit of background, or whatever . . .”

  “He’s just scared of getting it wrong because he can’t read,” called out a kid in the centre of the group.

  “There’s no need for that,” said Blake.

  “Yeah, piss off,” said Calum.

  “Come on, let’s not fight about it,” said Blake. He could feel the group starting to slip out of his grasp, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.

  The two kids shuffled around in the pack for a brief moment, alternating between hiding behind their colleagues and stepping out into makeshift clearings, before squaring up to one another. Blake waited until the last moment, fearful of wounding their pride, perhaps, and then stepped between them with his palms raised. And just stood there, still and silent, waiting for them to return to the growing spread of colour on the wall. Long minutes later, egos satisfied, the pair traded final insults and then broke up and returned to the task at hand. Blake folded his arms and waited to make certain that it was indeed all over, and then stepped over to watch Calum work. It did not take him long to realize that behind the brash tongue the kid had a natural talent and that perhaps he should give him a break and let him have a bit more input to the project. Trouble was he would have to do it without looking like he was cutting out the other kids.

  But fifteen minutes later, two minutes after the kids had traded shapes, Calum had another complaint.

  “How come we’re just doing a picture of the estate, anyway? It’s pretty boring, don’t you think? I mean, we live here all the time. Why can’t we do something a bit more interesting?”

  Blake sighed. “I thought we talked about this.”

  “What about a beach with horses running through the surf?” suggested Calum. “I don’t know, just something different . . .”
r />   “I thought we agreed to do a mural of what we wanted the estate to look like,” said Blake.

  “Calum wants it to look like a building site with sand and shit,” piped up a small kid from the centre of the group.

  “I never said that,” replied Calum, looking for the source.

  “Clubbers sleeping off their highs from the night before,” said another kid, his idea of a beach.

  “No, that’s not the kind of beach I mean,” protested Calum, still looking for the source of the first voice.

  “Grannies pumping coins into slot machines,” suggested another, stretching the beach connection to breaking point.

  “What the hell is wrong with you people?” squealed Calum. “You’ve got the chance to bring a bit of colour into your lives and what do you do? Paint a cartoon version of what you’ve already got. Jesus, give it some imagination, won’t you?”

  “Imagine this,” said one of the kids, giving him a finger.

  “This is for all of us, not just for you,” said another.

  “Yeah, piss off and find your own wall,” said yet another.

  With faceless jibes coming at him from all directions, Calum felt a sickness rise in his throat. He took a deep breath and tried to shake it loose, dampen the tension, but it just seemed to make things worse. Seconds later, past frustration, he turned and pointed his can at the wall, pressed down on the button and held it there, as if that could relieve the pressure within himself. Dark blue paint bubbled and frothed on the wall and a thin trail soon snaked down through the white emulsion.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Calum,” said Blake.

  “I knew he’d turn it all to shit,” said one of the kids.

  Calum continued to press down on the button.

  “Give me the can,” said Blake, his long fingers beckoning. But Calum just ignored him, and after one more polite request, Blake stepped forward and slammed the can out of his hand.

  Calum snarled at him and watched the can as it bounced and rattled on the ground, and then stormed off across the estate.

  Blake watched him go, and then ran forward a couple of steps and kicked the can into the wall as hard as he could.

  Calum was still feeling a little out of sorts a few hours later. Sitting on the back of a bench in the centre of the estate with a couple of his friends who had not been part of the mural project: Match, like the name suggested – kids are nothing if not literal – tall and thin and with a shock of red hair, and Tusk, a regular-looking kid with a left canine tooth that poked out from between his lips even when his mouth was closed. The pair had been messing with his head ever since he had joined them on the bench after supper. Word had travelled fast, and he was starting to get dark and pissed off, to believe that there was nowhere left to run. At one point, Match had accused him of losing his balls, and as the night had progressed and the more he had brooded on it, the more he had started to believe that Match might in fact be right. A couple of solutions had passed through his head – for an instant he had considered damaging the mural, but then he knew that he would be the main suspect – but nothing had made itself clear. Approaching midnight, he knew that he had to act soon to distance himself from the project and therefore restore his ego.

  Taking a final drag on his cigarette, Calum flicked it out into the air and climbed down from the bench. He set off across the estate, breathing hard through his nose like a minotaur.

  “Yo, what’s happenin’, man?” Match called out, standing up and following him. “What’s going on, Calum?”

  “Yo, wait up,” cried Tusk, setting off after them.

  Match and Tusk fell into step beside Calum, and the three of them headed up through Kentish Town before cutting a right into Dartmouth Park. Here the streets were quieter, darker, and there were less people about, less traffic. Calum led them through a labyrinth of backstreets and alleys, streetlights sending shadows to track them, making no attempt to hide themselves, confident in their solid presence. Fifteen minutes after leaving the comfort of the estate, he led them behind a dark parade of shops that represented another kind of comfort.

  The off-licence sat in the middle of the parade between a vet’s surgery and a greengrocer’s, and was well known to all the kids in the area as a cheap target. Calum himself had broken into it at least three times – three that he could remember – and almost every other kid he knew had burgled it at least once. It was like a training ground for them, a rites of passage kind of place.

  Match had been following Calum in glum silence, but as soon as he figured out where Calum was going, a broad grin had spread across his face as he knew his friend was coming back to them. It had been a bad time, with Calum either buried in paint and a social conscience or in despair. Match leaned into Tusk and told him the news, watched the other kid respond in the same manner.

  “You going to hit the cashpoint,” said Match, his nickname for the off-licence.

  “Time I felt the muscle working again,” replied Calum, clenching a fist in front of his heart.

  “Yo, back in the world,” said Tusk.

  “Oh, right, let’s get it on,” said Calum. He led them down the back of the buildings, their feet creating scuffles and echoes in the trash that carpeted the ground. At the back of the off-licence, he held out his right hand and gestured to Match with his left. Match lifted his jacket aside, pulled out a short-bladed knife from the deep thigh pocket in his cargo pants, and handed it to Calum. As Calum lifted the knife to jam it into the gap between the door and the frame, he noticed the line of dried blood at the base of the blade and an icicle threaded his spine. The blood was from where Match had stabbed some kid in the hand the week before when he had been too slow in handing over his mobile phone. Calum had seen the attack and, although he had been witness to unprovoked violence before, the cold action of his friend had shaken him more than he cared to admit. It had been an insight too far into the mental state of their situation.

  The uncomfortable thought stilled him, and when the door creaked and opened a fraction, he thought for a moment that he must have popped it open himself without realizing it and looked at the knife for a second in disbelief. And when it creaked again and opened a little further, a slice of light falling across the ground, he was still none the wiser, even when a look of keen surprise appeared on Match’s face and his friend turned on his heel and fled. Understanding what was happening, Tusk too was soon up and off on his jaundiced feet into the darkness.

  Stuck in that awkward space between thought and action, it was just when the manager’s scared face appeared around the door that the truth of the situation hit Calum. Shaking the indecision from his limbs, he took off after his friends, but not before the manager had caught a clear glimpse of his startled face.

  At nine o’clock the following morning, Rob Blake, the artist, and Kate Phillips, the social worker, were sitting on a threadbare sofa in the living room of the flat Calum Breen shared with his mother. DS Marnie Stone had been on the phone to Kate first thing: the owner of the off-licence had recognized Calum at once but because he had not committed an actual offence she was reluctant to speak to him. Could Kate go round there and have a quiet word? “Sounds like I don’t have much choice,” Kate had replied, but here she was with Rob at her side for moral support.

  Calum’s mother was sitting in a matching chair, a cup of hot coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She looked like she had a hangover, bloodshot pupils and red skin.

  “So who else was there last night, Calum?” asked Kate. “The manager said he saw two other kids running off.”

  Calum twisted in his seat and said nothing.

  “It was almost midnight,” continued Kate. “Somehow I just don’t think that you’d have been out there on your own at that time of night. Do you want to tell me who you were with, Calum?”

  Again Calum said nothing.

  “Was it Match and Tusk?”

  At the mention of the names Match and Tusk, Blake glanced at Kate, a little surprise
d, and then turned to Calum.

  “I thought you said you’d left those two behind when you signed on for the mural,” said Blake, feeling a little hurt.

  “Yeah, well, maybe if I’d been allowed to put something of my own in it . . .”

  “Is that what all this is about?” said Kate, pressing her hands between her knees. “A cry for attention?”

  “You mean you jeopardized your freedom just because you didn’t get your own way,” interjected Blake, incredulous.

  Kate rested her hand on his forearm and tried to ease him back, but he pushed on regardless.

  “If it really means that much to you then I’m sure we could work something out,” said Blake, feeling the soft touch of the hand on his arm fade. “It’s one thing being a tortured artist, but there’s no need for you to go and get into trouble over it.”

  “You’ve torn yourself away from those bad influences before,” said Kate. “It’ll be easier the second time around.”

  “I’ll think about it,” muttered Calum, and Kate knew then that that was as much as they were going to get from him for now.

  Kate touched Blake on the arm again, and this time he knew that it meant something different.

  “It’ll be good to see you again,” he said, rising to leave.

  Under normal circumstances, stubborn pride would have kept Calum from the mural for at least another afternoon, but knowing that it would take no more than three sessions to complete, he understood he had no choice but to swallow that pride and return to the site that afternoon if he wanted to be a real part of it.

  And so four o’clock found him walking across the estate with the other kids, together but apart. Without having to ask, the other kids intuited what had happened. Most of them had been witness to his original strop, and also knew his street reputation, and so knew better than to irritate him further. When the group arrived in front of the mural, Blake also tuned into the common mood and just handed Calum a can of paint with a smile and motioned for him to do as he pleased.