The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Read online

  So I stuttered, “It’s me,” and began to move forward.

  Then I stopped blinded as a powerful torch beam hit me right in the eyes.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs and a voice I now recognized said, “Tommy! What on earth are you doing here?”

  It was Father Stamp! I was so relieved I rushed forward up the steep steps and flung myself around him and hugged him close with my arms and legs. His arms went around my back and I felt his large strong hands cool against my hot skin. My track suit bottom was always a bit loose, and I think it had slipped down but I didn’t care, I was just so relieved to be safe! I wanted to explain what I’d been doing but when I tried to speak, it came out as sobs, and he lifted me up and held me so close, I could hardly get my breath, and I tried to push myself free.

  My memory of what happened after that is vague and confused. It was like my head was full of colours all forming weird shapes, constantly flying apart and changing into something else. And my body didn’t feel as if it belonged to me, it was like a girl’s rag doll that can be twisted into any shape you want, and I knew I would have fallen away or maybe even flown away if Father Stamp’s strong hands hadn’t been grasping my weak and nerveless flesh.

  And then – I don’t think I heard anything and I certainly didn’t see anything – but I knew there was someone – or something – else on the steps. I just had time to think that maybe Rocky had answered my earlier call when there was an explosion of noise and violent movement, and something crashed into Father Stamp and together we went tumbling down the steep steps.

  That was pretty well the end for me. I must have hit the crypt floor with such a bang that all of the breath and most of the consciousness was knocked out of my body. I had a sense of being embraced again but not in the strong muscular way that Father Stamp had embraced me. Maybe, I thought, this was Rocky. Then I was raised by strong arms and carried up the steps, and my lolling head gave me a view down into the crypt lit by a moving light that I think must have come from Father Stamp’s torch, rolling around where he’d dropped it as we went tumbling down together.

  Finally I was outside in the balmy night air and the sky was full of stars and I didn’t remember anything else for sure till the moment when I opened my eyes and found myself back in my own bedroom with sunlight streaming through the window.

  Four days had passed, four days that I’d spent being very sick, and sweating buckets, and tossing and turning with such violence that Mam sometimes had to hold me down. The doctor said I’d had a particularly extreme dose of Hong Kong flu, not just me but Dad too. He’d come back from the pub in almost as bad a state as me. How I got back to my bed, I don’t know. I had some vague notion that Rocky had carried me there. My waking mind was awash with fantastic images of my visit to the crypt and these turned into really terrible nightmares when I sank into sleep, so no wonder I was tossing and turning so violently. I were poorly for nearly a fortnight, much worse than Dad who was up and about again after a week. And it was another two weeks after I first got out of bed before I really started getting back to something like normal.

  By this time my memories and my nightmares had become so confused I found it impossible to tell the difference between them. Looming large in all of them was Father Stamp. Remembering how Mam always sang his praises as a visitor of the sick, I lived in fear of seeing him by my bedside. Finally, when Mam didn’t mention him, I did.

  “Father Stamp’s gone,” she said shortly.

  “Gone where?” I said.

  “How should I know? Just gone. Not a trace,” she said. “Now are you going to take that medicine or do I have to pour it down you?”

  I couldn’t blame her for being short. Luckily for me and Dad, she’d somehow managed to remain untouched by the flu bug, but she must have been worked off her feet for the past few weeks taking care of the pair of us.

  Also she’d had time to get used to Father Stamp’s disappearance. When I was up and about again, I found out he’d been gone a long time. Exactly when no one was certain. It wasn’t till he didn’t turn up for old Mr Parkin’s funeral on the Wednesday after my adventure in the crypt that folk started to get worried. He wasn’t married and he lived alone in the vicarage, looked after by a local woman who came in every morning to clean the house and take care of his meals. That week she’d been down with the flu too, so there was a lot of vagueness about who’d actually seen him last and when.

  Should I say something? Best not, I decided. When you’re a kid, you learn it’s usually a mistake to volunteer information that might get you in bother! Also once I started sharing my memory-nightmare of that night, it would be hard to stop till I got to the bit where I was carried home by a marble angel with a broken nose, and I knew that sounded really loopy!

  Yet for some reason that was the bit of my memories that I clung on to hardest. Maybe, by clinging to what had to be fantasy, I was shutting out what might be reality. Anyway, soon as I felt well enough, I went back into the graveyard to say thank you to Rocky.

  Young Clem spotted me and came over for a chat.

  “All right, Tommy?” he said, lighting the inevitable fag.

  “Yes thanks,” I said.

  “Me and Dad were dead worried about you,” he said. “Hong Kong flu it was, right?”

  I really didn’t want to talk about it, but I didn’t want to offend Young Clem, especially not after Mam told me he’d called round nearly every day to ask after me when I was ill.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Hong Kong flu.”

  “Aye, it can be right nasty that. My Auntie Mary had it, just about sent her doolally, thought she were the Queen Mother for a bit, we have a grand laugh with her about that now she’s right again. Owt like that happen to you, Tommy?”

  “Just some bad dreams,” I said.

  “But you’re all right now?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Grand!” he said, stubbing out his cigarette on Rocky’s knee. “Everyone has bad dreams. Thing is not to let them bother you when you wake up. See you around, Tommy.”

  “Yes, Clem, see you around.”

  Father Stamp’s disappearance was old news now. It seemed one of the papers had dug up some stuff about him having trouble with his nerves when he was a curate down south, and his bishop moving him north for his health. So most folk reckoned he’d had what they called a nervous breakdown and he’d turn up some day. But he never did.

  After a while St Cyprian’s got a replacement. He was nowhere near as High as Father Stamp, he wanted everyone to call him Jimmy, and he had all kinds of newfangled ideas. Dad and him didn’t get on, and pretty soon there was a big falling out that ended with us leaving Rose Cottage and going to live with Granny Longbottom in Murton till Dad got taken on at Rowntree’s chocolate factory and we found a place right on the edge of York.

  So Mam got her wish and I was brought up breathing good fresh air, and eating a lot of chocolate, and enjoying the sight and smell of trees and grass with never a gravestone in sight. In fact, after leaving St Cyprian’s, Mam seemed to lose all interest in religion, and as I grew up I don’t think I saw the inside of a church again, unless you count a visit to the Minster on a school trip. I’d only been inside a few minutes when I started to feel the whole place crowding in on me and I were glad to get out into the air. After that I didn’t bother.

  That was forty-odd years ago. I still live with my mam. Lot of folk think that’s weird. Let them think. All I know is I never felt the need to get close to anyone else. I never went courting. I did try being naughty with a girl from time to time, and it were all right, I suppose, but I could never get really interested and I don’t think they liked it that much, so in the end I stopped bothering.

  Maybe I should have moved out. I know Dad thought I should. I brought it up one night after he’d gone out to the pub. Mam was sitting in front of the TV, busily knitting away as she always did. That click-click-clicking of the needles is such a familiar accompaniment that it sounds s
trange if ever I watch a programme without it! She smiled up at me when I broached the subject of moving out and said, “This is your home, son. You’ll always be welcome here.”

  Next year, Dad got diagnosed with cancer. After that I think he was glad I was still around to help take some of the strain off Mam. She was the best nurse he could have asked for and she kept him at home far longer than many women would have done. But three years later he was dead, and since then the thought of leaving has never crossed my mind.

  As for Father Stamp and St Cyprian’s, they never got mentioned at home, not even while Dad were still living. Was that good or bad? There’s a lot of folk say everything should be brought out in the open. Well, each to his own. I know what worked for me. That’s not to say I never wondered how different my life might have been if the events of that October night hadn’t occurred. We’re all what our childhood makes us, the kid is father to the man, isn’t that what they say?

  Though I doubt if many people looking at a picture of me back then could see much connection between little Tommy Cresswell at eight and this fifty-year-old, a bit shabby, a bit broken down, unmarried, living at home with his widowed mam.

  There is, though, maybe one traceable link between that kid in the graveyard and this middle-aged man.

  I’m a postman.

  How much that can be tracked back to David Oscar Winstanley and Rocky, the broken-nosed angel, I don’t know. I certainly don’t aspire to anything like his memorial, either in form or in words. In fact I’ve lowered my sights considerably from the fantasies of my boyhood. He looked after his mam, and bothered nobody would do me. I suppose I could rate as a loyal servant to the Post Office, if loyalty means doing your job efficiently. But if it entails devoting yourself wholeheartedly to your employer, then I don’t qualify. I never had any ambition to rise up the career ladder. Delivering the mail’s been enough for me.

  Then the other day, my first on a new round, I knocked on a door to deliver a parcel, and when the door opened I found myself looking at Old Clem.

  Except of course it was Young Clem forty-odd years on.

  “Bugger me,” he said when I introduced myself. “Tommy Cresswell! Come on in and have a beer.”

  “More than my job’s worth, Clem,” I said. “But I’ll have a cup of tea.”

  Sitting in his kitchen, he filled me in on his life. He’d worked most of his life for the Bradford Parks and Gardens Service (though they call it something fancier nowadays), he’d been a widower for five years, and he’d recently retired because of his health. No need for details here. Most of his sentences were punctuated with a racking cough which didn’t stop him from getting through three or four fags as we talked.

  “Me daughter and her two kiddies live here in York,” he said. “She wanted me to move in with them but I knew that ’ud never do. But I wanted to be a bit handier so I got myself this place. How about you, Tommy? You married?”

  “Who’d have me?” I said, making a joke out of it. Then I told him about Dad dying and me living with Mam. And all the time he was sort of studying me through a cloud of smoke in a way that made me feel uneasy. So in the end I looked at my watch and said I ought to be getting on before folk started wondering what had happened to their mail.

  But as I started to rise from my chair, he reached over the table and grasped my wrist and said, “Afore you go, Tommy …” – here he broke off to cough – “… or mebbe I mean, afore I go, there’s something we need to talk …”

  I should just have left. I knew what he was going to tell me, and it had been a long time since Rocky was a barrier against the truth. But I stopped and listened and let him give form and flesh to what for so long I’d been desperate to pretend was nowt but an echo of one of my Hong Kong flu nightmares.

  That night as usual I cleared up after supper and washed the dishes. Mam says it’s no job for a man but she’s been having a lot of trouble with her knees lately. There’s been some talk of a replacement but she says she can’t be bothered with that. So I do all I can to make life easy for her. Most nights after we’ve eaten, we sit together in front of the telly and I’ll maybe watch a football match while she gets on with her knitting. Like I say, doesn’t matter how noisy the crowd is at the game, if that click-click-clicking of her needles stops, I look round to see what she’s doing.

  Tonight when I came in from the kitchen with a mug of coffee for me and cup of tea for her, she was knitting as usual but I didn’t switch the set on.

  I said, “Met an old friend today, Mam. Remember Young Clem? Him and his dad used to dig the graves at St Cyprian’s? Well, he’s living in York now. So he can be close to his daughter and grandkids.”

  “Young Clem?” she said. “So he has grandchildren? That’s nice. Grandchildren are nice.”

  “Aye,” I said. “Sorry I never gave you any, Mam.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, but I never lost you, Tommy, and that’s just as important,” she said, her needles clicking away. “So what was the crack with Young Clem then?”

  She looked at me brightly. Sometimes these days she could be a bit vague about things; others, like now, she was as bright as a button.

  I sipped my coffee slowly while my mind tried to come to terms with what Young Clem had told me.

  My problem had nothing to do with his powers of expression for he’d spoken in blunt Yorkshire terms.

  He’d said, “I’d taken this lass into graveyard, for a bang, tha knows, and we’d just done when I saw this figure moving between the headstones. I nigh on shit meself till I made out it were your mam. She didn’t spot me, but something about the look of her weren’t right, so I told my lass to shove off down the pub and I’d catch up with her there. Well, she weren’t best pleased but I didn’t wait to argue, I went after your mam, and I caught up with her by the church door. She jumped a mile when I spoke to her, then she asked if I’d seen you. Seems she’d been watching the telly and all of a sudden something made her get up and go upstairs. When she found you weren’t in bed, she went out into the yard and saw the back gate into the graveyard standing open and she went through it to look for you.

  “I could tell what a state she were in – she’d nowt on her feet but a pair of fluffy slippers and she were still carrying her knitting with her – so I tried to calm her down, saying that likely you were just larking about with some of your mates. But she’d spotted that the church door were ajar, and nowt would satisfy her but that we went inside to take a look.

  “Well, we didn’t get past the porch. There was a noise like someone sobbing and a bit of a light and it were coming up from the crypt. That was when I recalled what Dad had said to you when you asked where we put the naughty people. I’d told him he shouldn’t joke about such things with you as you were only a lad, but I never thought you’d take it serious enough to do owt like this.

  “I told your mam I’d go first as the steps were bad, and that’s what I did, but she were right behind me and she saw clearly enough what I saw down below.

  “That mucky bastard Stamp were all over you. He’d just about got you bollock naked. I knew straight off what were going on. I’d been there myself, except I was a couple of years older and a lot tougher and more streetwise than you. When he started his tricks on me, I belted him in the belly and I told him I were going to report him, and I would have done, only I weren’t sure anyone would believe me. They’d already marked my card as a bit of a wild boy at school plus I’d been done for shoplifting by the cops. So I said nowt, but when they started talking about giving Dad the boot because of his back, I stood in front of Stamp and I let him know that the day Dad got his papers was the day he’d find himself in the papers. I’d been keeping an eye on him when I saw him getting interested in you, and I thought he’d got the message. But there’s no changing them bastards!

  “Now I were on him in a flash. He must have thought God had hit him with a thunderbolt, and that were no more than he deserved. The pair of you went tumbling down the steps. His torch wen
t flying but it were one of them rubber ones and it didn’t break. He was lying on his back, not moving. You were just about out of it. Your mam gathered you up and it was only then I reckon that it fully hit her what the bastard had been at. She put you into my arms and told me to take you up the steps.

  “I said, ‘What about you missus?’ but she didn’t answer, so I set off back up to the porch with you in my arms. Do you not remember any of this, Tommy? Nay, I see you do.”

  And he was right. I was remembering it now when Mam brought me back to our living room by saying impatiently. “Come on, Tommy. Cat got your tongue? I asked what you and Young Clem found to talk about?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” I said. “I told him about Dad, and he told me that Old Clem had passed on too, about ten years back, heart, it was. And we chatted about the old days at Cyprian’s, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear about Old Clem, though he was a bit of a devil,” said Mam. “Remember that time he had you looking everywhere for his rubber spade? I gave him a piece of my mind for that!”

  A pity you hadn’t been around to give him a piece of your mind when he told me about the crypt, I thought. Maybe life could have been very different for me. Maybe I’d be sitting by my own fireside now with my own family around me. I thought of Young Clem, moving house so he could be handier for his grandchildren. He was clearly made of stronger stuff than me. He dealt with the crises in life by looking them straight in the face and getting on with the life not the crisis. He certainly gave no indication he blamed Old Clem and his daft lie for what happened to me in the crypt. It was just another Yorkshire joke, like sending a kid to look for a rubber spade!

  Any road, the way it turned out, it wasn’t strictly speaking a lie any more. Old Clem had told me that the crypt was where they put the naughty people. And the crypt of St Cyprian’s was where Young Clem had buried Father Stamp’s body.

  It must have taken him a couple of hours or more to dig a grave in that hard-packed earth. I wonder how long the poor lass he’d sent off to the pub waited for him? Maybe she’d forgiven him, maybe she was even the one who’d become his wife. I should have asked.