The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 29

  For two hours Calum worked in silent concentration, the shadow of the other kids staining his back like perspiration. And the following night he was there again. Blake was impressed with his dedication and the sense of Calumness that he brought to the character of the mural, little touches that added a much-needed sense of humour – a man in an open window shaving the hair on the top of his ears, a woman in a tracksuit watching aerobics on TV with a cigarette in her mouth. At the completion, both Blake and the kids were pleased with how it had turned out. Not quite as it had been planned, but perhaps all the better for that.

  As the kids were cleaning up, or rather sneaking off and leaving Blake to do the cleaning up, a tall black man in a crumpled suit named Johnson approached the scene. He stood and stared at the mural, smiling, tilting his head from side to side, and then after a couple of minutes looked across at Blake.

  “That’s some piece of work,” he said.

  “The kids did a great job,” agreed Blake.

  “I like the little comic touches the best.”

  “You mean the figures in the windows,” said Blake, pointing.

  “Yeah, those,” said Johnson.

  “Yeah, I like those too,” agreed Blake, stuffing tins of paint into a canvas holdall. “A touch of original thinking.”

  “It wasn’t part of the plan, then,” said Johnson.

  “That was one of the kids,” admitted Blake, not too proud to give credit where due. “Nothing to do with me, I’m afraid.”

  “I think it was the kid with the fat lip,” said Johnson, smiling and pointing at his own mouth.

  “You mean Calum,” replied Blake, reflecting the smile.

  “And he lives here on the estate,” said Johnson.

  “In one of the blocks near Castle Street,” said Blake.

  “You think he’d be interested in a solo project – that’s if it’s all right with you, I mean,” said Johnson.

  “Depends what you have in mind, I suppose.”

  “You know Carlo’s, the café on Kentish Town Road?

  “I’ve been there a few times,” said Blake. “Nice homemade fish-cakes if I remember right.”

  “The wife makes them,” said Johnson, and then fell silent, regarding the mural once more. “It could be a nice place, a better place, but the trouble is I have a metal shutter that’s forever covered in graffiti. If I clean it, then it’s covered again the following night. I think the people who walk past at night and see the graffiti must think it’s a bad place and decide never to go and eat there. You must understand what I mean. I’ve been thinking about what to do about it . . . You think . . . You think Calum would be interested in helping me out?”

  Blake thought about Calum and what he had brought to the project. “He’s got some strong ideas of his own.”

  “But that’s what I’m looking for,” said Johnson. “I wouldn’t know where to start if we had to do it ourselves. As long as I have some idea of what he’s going to do beforehand. Perhaps if he had one or two ideas I could choose from . . .”

  “And he’d be paid for the work, of course,” said Blake.

  “Whatever’s the going rate,” replied Johnson.

  “All right, I’ll ask him,” said Blake.

  For his shutter on Kentish Town Road, Johnson chose a cartoon version of his café with cartoon customers looking out at the real people passing on the street outside. At the rear of the cartoon café were caricatures of Posh and Becks tucking into large plates of pie and mash, fat bellies pushing at their cheap clothing and raw cigarettes burning in a saucer in the centre of the table. Most of the café’s trade was during the week and so Johnson shut the café for the weekend to allow Calum to complete the mural in time for opening the following week.

  Just like he had learned from Blake, Calum started with painting the shutter in a coat of white emulsion and then sketching the basic shapes of the characters and the furniture with a piece of charcoal. Working hard, he had the outline of the design laid out in full ten minutes short of noon and so decided to have some lunch before starting with the paint. He walked to the newsagent’s on the corner and bought a can of Coke and a cheese bagel in cling-film, but the woman behind the counter rebuffed his offer of coins, telling him that she was pleased that Johnson was at last doing something to brighten up the area and that she was thinking of following his lead. She just wanted to see how it turned out first. Calum thanked her and told her to keep him in mind. Popping the top of the Coke he stepped out onto the street and bumped straight into Match and Tusk.

  “We’ve been wondering where you’d got to,” said Match.

  “Thought you might be avoiding us, like,” added Tusk.

  Calum ignored them and strolled back to the café. He sat on the step and unwrapped his bagel, started to eat. The other two followed him and stood on the edge of the kerb facing him, holding onto a lamp post and swinging their feet in the gutter.

  “You coming out with us tonight?” asked Tusk. “Finish off what we started the other night.”

  Calum presumed he was referring to the humiliating episode at the rear of the off-licence in Dartmouth Park, but he had no desire for a repeat performance and, besides, he had something else to keep him occupied now. He took another bite and continued to ignore them, looking off down the street towards Camden Town.

  “What’s the matter, can’t you hear us or something?” asked Tusk.

  “He must think he’s too good for us now,” said Match, his head poking out of his dark hood like a poison tortoise.

  Still Calum ignored them, drinking from the Coke.

  “I reckon the police must’ve put the frighteners on him or something,” said Tusk.

  “Turned him back into a child,” agreed Match.

  “Won’t be the first time. Still, it’s like riding a bike. He wants to get back in the saddle, it shouldn’t be too hard . . .”

  “If he leaves it much longer he’s going to need those whatchamacallits, those little wheels on the back . . .”

  “Stabilizers,” said Tusk. “Kiddie wheels.”

  “If he leaves it much longer he’s going to need stabilizers . . .”

  Calum listened to the barrage of jibes in silence. On the one hand it hurt him, his friends attacking him like that, but on the other he just wanted them to leave so that he could get on with the mural. He finished the bagel, drained the Coke, and then put the scrunched-up cling-film into the open mouth of the can. He stood and walked across to the kerb, and stuffed the can into one of the bulging black bin liners piled there like boulders.

  “You coming with us, then?” asked Match. “Finish what we started the other night . . . You can hold the knife . . .”

  “I have to finish the mural,” said Calum, uncomfortable.

  “That’s all right, we can wait,” said Tusk.

  “It might be a while . . .”

  “We have to wait until it gets dark, anyway,” said Tusk.

  “I don’t know . . . Perhaps some other time,” said Calum.

  “Come on,” said Tusk, a note of pleading in his voice.

  “Oh, forget him,” snapped Match, stamping his foot. “He’s not going to come with us. He’s just pissing us about. He’s gone over to the other side. Painting, for Christ’s sake . . . I bet he’s not even getting paid for it . . .”

  “That’s not the point . . .” started Calum, frowning.

  “Child,” Match shouted him down, rattling his fist at the shutter. “Pissing about with a big fat colouring book . . .”

  A smirk creased Tusk’s face.

  “What do we care?” said Match. “You know if we get caught we’re going to say that you were with us anyway.”

  This time DS Marnie Stone came to the flat herself. She said hello to Calum and his mother, accepted the offer of coffee, and then asked Calum where he had been the night before.

  “I was here,” muttered Calum, looking at the floor.

  “You were here all night?”

  “I finished
working on the mural when it started to get dark and then I came straight back here.”

  “And what time would that have been?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Calum, shrugging. “I suppose it must’ve been about nine or so. Quarter past . . . I don’t know.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Half past, then,” said Calum. “I don’t have a watch but I’m sure it was no later than about half past nine . . .”

  “You stop and talk to anyone on the way home . . .”

  Calum shook his head.

  “. . . or call in at any of the shops?”

  Calum shook his head again.

  “All right, let’s come at it from another direction,” said Marnie, looking out across the estate for a moment. “You know the old ironmonger’s on Kentish Town Road? It’s about two or three doors down from the café you’ve been working on . . .”

  “Yeah, I know it,” said Calum.

  “You ever been in there?”

  “I suppose I must’ve been at some point. Getting new locks and stuff after we’ve been broken into . . .”

  “So you’ll be familiar with the layout of the place?”

  “I suppose so,” shrugged Calum.

  “Does that include the office in the back?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The place was broken into last night, Calum,” said Marnie, leaning forward in her chair. “A large amount of cash was stolen from the office. Cash and a lot of other stuff.”

  Calum kept quiet, averted his eyes.

  “You know anything about that?”

  Calum shook his head. “No.”

  “You’re positive about that?”

  “Sure I’m positive,” muttered Calum.

  “All right, then, what about Match and Tusk?”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re your friends, Calum, your comrades in arms. You must know if they had anything to do with it . . .”

  “I haven’t seen them in a couple of days,” said Calum.

  “You didn’t talk to them last night?”

  Calum shook his head again, glanced hard at Marnie in confirmation.

  “All right,” said Marnie, sighing. “Let’s look at what we’ve got, shall we: A known thief starts working on a mural in a café down on Kentish Town Road and just a few hours later an ironmonger’s shop a couple of doors down from there gets broken into – so that’s just a coincidence, is it, Calum?”

  “Suppose it must be,” said Calum, shrugging.

  “We like Match and Tusk for this one,” said Marnie. “You case the place for them, Calum? You tell them how to get in?”

  Calum kept silent, his attention focused on the floor.

  Marnie shook her head and looked out of the window across the estate. “All right, I’ll leave it there for now,” she said after a short time, getting up to leave. “But just so you know . . . I don’t think you were there last night, Calum, but I do think that your two friends were, and it’s just a matter of time before I find the proof. If you don’t want to help me then that’s your decision. But when we do nail them, don’t kid yourself that they’ll think we figured it all out by ourselves . . .”

  Although he was at first pleased with himself for not telling the police that Match and Tusk had been around earlier the afternoon before, the following morning Calum awoke to find it troubling him like a burgeoning toothache. On the one hand he still felt a little proud that he had not offered up Match and Tusk to DS Stone – a solid feature of his culture, he knew – but on the other he knew that it was just a matter of time before she arrested them and that when she did so it was almost inevitable that he would be lumped into the gang as the third man. And although he did not like to think about what that might mean, at best he knew that he would not be allowed to continue with the murals.

  The dilemma continued to trouble him long after he returned to school, but a couple of weeks later he saw his chance to get out of the situation on what he saw as his own terms.

  On the strength of his work at the café, word spread and he was soon offered another commission, this time to paint a large mural on the side of a car wash at the foot of Camden Road. The wall faced the traffic coming down the hill, a huge area, and after agreeing the design he set to work on it one weekend.

  But just as Calum might have predicted, Match and Tusk turned up late on the third night that he was there. He had just completed the background and was about to start on the figures in the cars he had painted – the mural was on a side wall of the car wash and Calum had created a full-scale cartoon version of it as if the wall were made of glass: in the centre of the wall he had drawn a giant foam and rain machine with a grime-streaked car going in one end and a bright clean car coming out of the other – and the sight of his friends made his heart sink in his chest. But Match and Tusk seemed to have lost some of their fire, poking Calum with sullen and blunt jibes as if taunting him had become a bore, and it did not take him long to get rid of them. Watching them walk across Camden Road, Calum felt a smile touch his face.

  But it was a brief success: the following morning Detective Sergeant Stone was on his doorstep once more, the electrical store two doors down from the car wash having been burgled the night before. She went at him harder this time, refusing to believe that he had had nothing to do with it. And the harder she went at him, the more Calum dug in his heels. But even as he did so he felt something stirring deep inside, something far deeper than a cultural mistrust of the police and a refusal to grass. This time he knew that it was nothing less than fight or flight.

  Ten minutes after Stone left the flat, Calum returned to the car wash to complete the details in the mural.

  A little before two o’clock the following morning, chasing up on a call that had come into the station, DS Marnie Stone pulled up in front of the mural with anger and sadness in her heart. Someone had made a good attempt at defacing it, scratching and rubbing different colours of paint across the artwork, but from what she could still make out, the mural looked to be of a police car chasing another car through the car wash. And after taking in some of the finer details the message was made clear to her: Calum was giving her the people she was looking for. In the front car were two clear characters, their features a little smudged but still recognizable: a match with human features and another face with one huge tusk curling out of its mouth. But Calum had not been clever enough, and after his old friends had seen his latest artistic efforts they had meted out their own retribution. Calum had been nailed to the wall where he had painted the chasing police car. His feet were hanging in the air about three feet from the ground and his head rested on his chest in a thick splash of blood. For a moment Marnie had the horrific thought that perhaps his tongue had been cut out, but when she climbed out of the car for a closer look she was relieved to see that he was still breathing and that he had in fact been silenced with a cork rammed in between his bloodied and swollen lips.

  PROS AND CONS

  Donna Moore

  Barry Sheehan looked at the sparkling diamonds around the wrinkled throat of the woman in front of him and surreptitiously adjusted his Y-fronts. Wealth always gave him a hard-on and these two auld bitches were dripping with it. It wasn’t so much the wealth itself, as the idea of separating it from its rightful owners. In this case La Contessa Letitzia di Ponzo and her sister Signora Teodora Grisiola.

  Sheehan smiled at the two frail old dears in front of him and thought how easy this was going to be. He considered his smile to be the deal-clincher. He’d practised it in front of the bathroom mirror, and convinced himself he looked like Cary Grant, when in reality he looked more like a constipated ferret.

  “Well, Mr Sheehan,” the Contessa adjusted the diamond necklace with a liver-spotted hand, “I think you will do very well as our chauffeur.” Her Italian accent was light and soft. It reminded Sheehan of some actress in an old black and white film he’d seen on video when he was last in Mountjoy Prison. �
��If you would like to come back tomorrow in the morning, we will have ready a uniform for you and you can drive us out to Fairyhouse Racecourse to meet some of our potential clients.”

  Sheehan’s interest was piqued. “You ladies are interested in horseracing?” He patted the crumpled Racing Post in his pocket. Things were looking better and better. The chance to drive a Daimler, a shot at stealing some rather fine diamonds, and a day at the track.

  “Gambling? No.” The Contessa made a moue of distaste and her silent sister looked shocked at the thought, raising a jeweled hand to her throat as if to cross herself. “But we have an interest in fine thoroughbreds, yes. Now, Mr Sheehan. I will see you out. I apologize for the lack of etiquette, but we haven’t yet got around to hiring a butler.” She picked an almost invisible speck of dust off her suit – Hardy Amies, dress designer to the Queen – and Sheehan stood up. He’d been dismissed. Fighting the dual temptations of bowing to them and nutting them, he allowed the Contessa to usher him to the door of the Georgian townhouse that she and her sister were currently calling casa.

  Back in the Drawing Room, the Contessa stood at the window and watched Sheehan strolling up Lower Leeson Street towards St Stephens Green. Her sister looked at her curiously. “Well, Letty, will he do?”

  “He’s a dodgy, rat-faced, little wanker who wouldn’t know the word ‘honesty’ if it gave him a lap dance and bit him on the arse. He’s perfect.” Her accent was now more Isle of Dogs than Island of Venice. “Didn’t he remind you of that punter you had in the 60s, Dora? The politician who liked you to dress up as a milkmaid and squeeze his udders? Assistant to the Assistant of the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Foods wasn’t he?”

  Dora giggled. “Old Marigold? Yes, but I do hope Mr Sheehan doesn’t want me to slap him on the buttocks and hit him with a fly switch. I’m getting too old for that sort of thing.”

  Letty removed the diamond necklace and threw it down on the table, rubbing her neck. “That cheap tat is giving me a rash. Did you see Sheehan fixing his beadies on it?” She pulled a packet of Rizlas and a pouch of tobacco out of her fake Chanel handbag and expertly rolled a cigarette one-handed, lighting it with a Zippo displaying a Hell’s Angels emblem and the motto “Live Fast, Die Young.” She groped under the chintz cushion of the settee for the bottle of tequila she had planked there earlier, and opened the Racing Post which, just a couple of minutes ago, had been in Sheehan’s pocket. She still had all the old skills.