Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11 Page 6

  Slowly Henderson turned the key and they all stood willing it to activate the tumblers in the lock and release the catch.

  McCusker stepped up to the door, taking first place in the four-man queue. Henderson didn’t object.

  As McCusker opened the door, he was hit immediately by the trademark metallic smell of blood.

  It seemed to the detective that actual particles of blood as well as the smell were making their way into his nostrils.

  He gingerly pushed the door open further.

  Inside, the folly was in darkness, apart from the daylight coming in from behind them and the unnatural amazing white glow from the glass swan, which had been positioned on a large circular table in the centre of the folly. McCusker checked all around him. This time there was no enhancing ultraviolet light, yet still Finn McCool’s White Swan glowed.

  Once McCusker’s eyes familiarized themselves to the internal lack of light, he thought he saw something move on the other side of the table.

  Instinctively he drew the door back towards him so now he was the only one able to see inside.

  The next time McCusker refocused his eyes, the shadow, or whatever it was he had seen, had disappeared. He tuned into the eerie silence in the room. Then he thought he heard footsteps again on the wooden floor. He reckoned they were too light to be Reid’s footsteps. They were more like the nimble pitter-patter of a large dog.

  “Does Mr Reid have a dog?” McCusker asked, surprising himself that the question came out in a whisper.

  “He can’t abide them, won’t let them near the house,” Harrison whispered back.

  The sound of footsteps had now completely disappeared. After a few moments of silence, McCusker opened the door again. This time he opened it fully and, aided by the daylight, they could all see clearly, in the beam of red-dusty light, a body lying face down in front of the table.

  It was the comatose body of Harry Reid.

  Henderson ran over to his boss and knelt beside him. W. J. Barr and McCusker followed quickly to see if they could be of any assistance.

  Harry Reid lay in an ocean of his own blood and solid matter.

  Barr slowly turned him over.

  Henderson was physically sick on the spot.

  DS Barr was somewhat more discreet; he rushed to the fresh air provided by the open door.

  The last time McCusker had witnessed such carnage on a human being was as a result of a bomb.

  He was convinced he could hear the sound again of someone, or something, in the folly.

  A shiver ran up his spine.

  He un-hunkered from beside the remains of Reid and walked slowly, carefully, closer to the brilliant white swan.

  Then he saw the reason for the noise.

  It wasn’t the large dog he’d imagined he’d heard.

  No, there before him was a deer, pacing proudly backwards and forwards on the other side of the table bearing the hallowed swan.

  The deer looked up at McCusker.

  Its giant eyes challenged the detective.

  McCusker noticed blood generously, not to mention messily, splattered all around the deer’s mouth.

  Just before the deer darted past McCusker into freedom and daylight, she licked her lips.

  McCusker reckoned it wasn’t the lick of hunger or satisfaction of a hunger.

  No, if McCusker had to describe the look in human terms, he would have said it was more the look of a woman desperate only to end the search for her man.

  Darkling

  Val McDermid

  When the phone rings at seven minutes past two in the morning, I know I have to behave as if it’s just woken me. That’s what humans do. Because they sleep. “Whassup?” I grunt.

  The voice on the other end is familiar. “It’s DCI Scott. Sorry to wake you, doc. But I know how you like a fresh crime scene.”

  He’s right, of course. The fresher the crime scene, the easier it is for me to backtrack to the moment of the crime. That’s how I come up with the information that will help DCI Scott and his team to nail the killer. I’m a criminal profiler, you see. Once I realized my physical body was stuck in this place and time, it seemed like an occupation that would be interesting as well as being socially useful. It has the added advantage of having slightly vague qualifications and antecedents. And as long as I do the business, nobody enquires too closely about where I went to school.

  I tell him I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I could make it a lot sooner, not least because I’m already dressed. But the last thing I want is to be too astonishing. I need to survive until I can resolve my situation. And that means not arousing suspicion.

  When I arrive, the usual crime scene slo-mo bustle is under way. Forensic rituals round the back of an out-of-town strip mall. Tonight, for one night only, it’s a theatre of the macabre.

  The body’s a pitifully young male, barely out of his twenties I’d guess. He’s dressed in black, Goth hair to match. Silver in his ears and on his fingers. He’s pale as paper and it takes me a moment to realize that’s not make-up. It’s because he’s bled out from the two puncture marks on his neck.

  “Vampires don’t exist, right?” Scott says gruffly. “That’s what I keep telling my girls. All that Twilight garbage.”

  “This isn’t the first?”

  “The third this year. We’ve kept the lid on it so far, but that’s not going to last forever.”

  That’s when I notice the writing on the wall. It’s scrawled almost at ground level, but I can tell instantly it’s written in blood. It’ll take the technicians longer to confirm it, but I know I’m right. I crouch down for a closer look, earning a grumpy mutter from the photographer I displace. “Darkling,” it says.

  I step back, shocked. “Is this a first?” I point to the tiny scribble. “Was there something like that at the other scenes?”

  “Nobody spotted it,” Scott says. “I’ll get someone to go over the crime scene pics.”

  I don’t need them to do that. I know already it’ll be there. I know because it’s a message for me. Darkling is where I am, where I’ve been since I found myself trapped in this place, this time, this body. Darkling. In the dark. A creature of the dark. But now I’ve had a message from my own side.

  And now I understand how to fight my enemy. I need to erase this darkling existence. If I can wipe the word from human consciousness, I’ll be free again. Free to move through time and space in my full grace and glory, not the pale shadow existence I’ve had since I was jailed in this form. The murders will stop too. The three that have already happened will be undone, their victims back in their proper place in the world. That’s an unintended consequence, but a good one nevertheless.

  I say something, I don’t know what, to get myself off the hook with Scott and melt into the night. I’m home in an instant, computer on, fingers flying over the keys. First recorded instance . . . Shakespeare. I can’t help but smile in spite of the seriousness of my plight. Shakespeare. How bloody predictable is that? I take a deep breath, spread my fingers against the side of my head and will the transference.

  The room is small, lit by a trio of tapers. In the flutter of light, I see a man in his late thirties hunched over a small wooden table. There’s a stack of thick paper to one side of him. His sharpened quill is poised above the ink pot, his dark eyes on the middle distance, a frown line between the fine arches of his brows. His lips are moving.

  “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,

  That it’s had its head bit off by its young.

  So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling,” he mutters.

  If I was in my pomp, it would be no problem. Being physically present would offer all sorts of options for change and deletion. In extremis, I could kill. But I can only manifest as a voice. He’ll think it’s his own interior voice or he’ll think he’s going mad. Either way should serve.

  “Not darkling,” I say. “Sans light. It’s the Fool speaking. Sans light, that’s what he’d say.”

&n
bsp; He pauses, uncertain. “We were left sans light?” he says.

  “Sans light,” I say. “Sans light.”

  He twists his mouth to one side. “Not darkling. I cannot make a poet of the Fool. Sans light.”

  He dips the quill and scratches out the word and I dissolve back into my body. I’m amazed. Who knew it would be so easy to edit the great bard of Avon?

  Next up, John Milton and Paradise Lost. My consciousness emerges in a sunlit garden where the great man is declaiming. There’s no other word for it. But the poet is not alone. Of course he’s not alone. He’s blind. Somebody else has to write it down for him. There’s a younger man scrawling as he speaks. I need to move fast. We’re coming up to the line. Yes, here we go.

  “As the wakeful bird sings darkling.” Milton gives himself a congratulatory smile.

  “Birds don’t sing in the dark,” I say. The scribe looks around wildly, wondering if he’s just spoken out loud.

  “Darkling,” Milton says, a stubborn set to his mouth.

  “They sing at dusk or at dawn. Not darkling. Do you really want people thinking you’re an ignoramus? Think how it undermines the burden of your poem if the details are inaccurate. At dusk or at dawn, surely?”

  “A correction,” he says. “As the wakeful bird sings at dusk.”

  Two for two! I dissolve back into my body. These shifts out of body are exhausting. But now I’ve started I can’t stop. The promise of being myself again is too powerful. And so I continue. Keats and his nightingale – “Darkling, I listen” becomes, “Obscured, I listen.” Matthew Arnold’s darkling plain becomes “a twilight plain” and Hardy’s darkling thrush becomes “dark-bound thrush”. Star Trek Voyager now has an episode called “Gloaming”.

  It’s almost dawn and I’m almost drained. Darkling, I only have one more to go. Dr Samuel Johnson, the great wordsmith, the dictionary man. If I can remove the word from his dictionary, it will disappear for good.

  I generate my final focus and emerge by the side of a fat man with a cat and a pile of manuscript paper by his side. I can read the words he has written. “Darkling a participle, as it seems, from darkle which yet I have never found; or perhaps a kind of diminutive from dark, as young, youngling. Being in the dark. Being without light. A word, merely poetical.”

  Then his eyes fix on where I would be if I was corporeal. “I’ve been expecting you,” he says in his sonorous growly voice.

  “You can see me?”

  He laughs. “I was the doctor long before you aspired to the mantle, sirrah. And I will be the doctor again. You’re trapped in a human life and when that body dies, so will you. I have fashioned darkling to hold you.”

  But as he speaks, the ink on the page starts to fade. The word and its definition are disappearing before our eyes. “Not for much longer. There are no citations. It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  He glances at the page. I expect fear or rage, but I get a great guffaw of laughter. “But darkle does. The back-formation comes into being in the next century. Already, other poets have formed darkling and employed it in their verse. There is no escape from the power of the word. Did you really think it would be so easy? Darkling has taken you, boy. You are darkling forever.”

  The World’s End

  Paul Johnston

  The footsteps behind me increased in speed. The man with the empty eyes and the knife was coming. I was limping, panting, desperately trying to get to the main road, but it was at least fifty metres away and I wasn’t going to make it . . .

  I was abroad for most of my thirties, the blood and spirit leaching out of me in the worst marriage since Charles Bovary’s. I escaped by getting funding to do a master’s in applied linguistics at Edinburgh University. I was born and raised in the city so it felt like I was going home, even though my parents had long moved away and I had to rent an attic room from the elderly sister of a family friend. I’d been teaching English as a Foreign Language for years and thought I’d improve my employment prospects by getting a degree in the subject. It turned out that the Edinburgh take on applied linguistics was much wider than language teaching, which I disliked intensely. I was able to study more challenging subjects such as literary stylistics, second language acquisition, bilingualism and psycholinguistics – the latter being just the thing for a budding crime writer.

  It was June 1996 and we’d finished the taught part of the course – nine months of lectures, seminars, projects and exams. I was knackered because I’d also been rewriting my first crime novel since a positive meeting with an editor before Christmas, though no deal had been offered. The MSc was finished apart from the dissertation. I was pissed off because I’d missed a distinction on the course work by one mark. Still, I went out boozing with some of my fellow students – four Brits (two called Mark), a couple of Greeks, a Russian, a Japanese and a Hungarian; the male/female ratio was about equal, but I might be wrong. I only had eyes for beer.

  We went to various student haunts, where we stuck out as we were a lot older than the other denizens. We ended up in the World’s End at the lower end of the High Street (you won’t get me calling it the Royal Mile), probably at my instigation. The place had become notorious not long after I’d left school because of the murders that had inaccurately assumed its name: Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both seventeen, were seen leaving the World’s End after a Saturday-night pub crawl on 15 October 1977. They were found miles away in separate locations in East Lothian, both having been stripped, beaten, gagged, tied up, raped and strangled. Despite a huge investigation by Lothian and Borders Police – more than 13,000 statements were taken – their killers were never found. It was suspected that more than one murderer was involved as a witness had seen the teenagers talking to two men near the pub.

  The World’s End was built over the eastern extent of the so-called Flodden Wall, raised after Scotland’s finest had been slaughtered at the battle of that name. Natives of Edinburgh back then were exclusive, as they still are; anything beyond the city walls was not of their world. For a local of my age the murders of the two girls still held a deep fascination. I wouldn’t say that they made me a crime writer – underage viewings of The Godfather, The Getaway, Dirty Harry and The Dirty Dozen and repeated readings of the Sherlock Holmes stories were more inspirational – but they were part of my mental make-up. Things are hazy, but I imagine I held forth to the gathered company about the murders, doubtless to the disgust of the bar staff.

  My memory started functioning the second a man brushed past me, grabbing my leather shoulder bag on the way to the door. It was a sign of my drunken idiocy that I’d put it on a stool at the outer side of our table, in clear view. The thing was, the bag was one of my most prized possessions, probably because no one else in Edinburgh had one like it. I bought it on a Greek island and it had slowly changed colour from pale yellow to deep brown. The leather was soft and the thick strap spread the weight comfortably across my left shoulder. I wasn’t giving it up easily.

  Although I hadn’t run much in recent years, I was a lot lighter than I am now. I’d also been captain of the school athletics team, my events being the 100 metres, 200 metres and long jump. Pride was at stake, even twenty years after the last time I’d pulled on the vest. I was out of the pub about five metres behind the thief. He took his life in his hands by running across the junction of the High Street and St Mary’s Street without looking. I did the same. My blood was up. The guy was piling down Jeffrey Street, the northern continuation of St Mary’s Street, heading towards Waverley Station. And, worst of all, he was going away from me.

  Three of my mates, the Marks and a Russian called Sasha, were behind me. My legs gave way and I tripped over the kerb, landing in an ignominious heap.

  “Get him!” I gasped. “Get the bastard!”

  They tried, but he was way ahead now.

  Then something extraordinary happened.

  The offside door of a parked car suddenly opened, forcing the thief to slow down, though he still hit it. By the
time he got to his feet, he was held tightly from behind.

  I stumbled after my friends, the skin from one of my knees having gone missing in action.

  The guy holding the sprinter identified himself as an off-duty police officer.

  “This is Jimmy Burns,” he said. “He’s well known to us.”

  I was still panting.

  “He works out,” the cop said, arms under Burns’s oxters (armpits if you’re not a Scot) and crossed over his chest St Andrew style.

  “So do you,” one of my mates said.

  “Right, let’s get to the bottom of this. I’m guessing the bag’s the issue.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s mine.”

  “It isnae,” said the thief. “It’s ma gurlfriend’s.”

  “Is that right?” said his captor. “So tell me what’s in it.”

  “Em, a purse, some make-up and a Mars bar.”

  The cop turned to me.

  “House keys, an empty water bottle, a file of notes and . . .” My memory returned in its full glory. “. . . a copy of Bilingualism by Suzanne Romaine.”

  “Oh aye? Let’s have a look then.” The bag was still in the thief’s clutch. The cop undid the strap and looked inside. “What are you saying now, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy was saying nothing.

  “Do you want to press charges?” my saviour asked.

  “Nah, forget it,” I said, feeling nearer the top of the world than I should have. “Let the bampot go.”

  The thief glared at me, mortally offended that I’d failed to recognize him as a player.

  “Right then, on your way, Jimmy,” said the cop. “Next time you’re for the high jump, mind.”

  “Thanks very much,” I said.

  “Not a problem, only doing my job. Get off home with you now. Burns is one to hold a grudge.”

  “No problem,” I said, and danced back up Jeffrey Street with Sasha.

  We’d been in the World’s End for five minutes with a new round when the two Marks came in. They took me to one side.