The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Read online

  That’s when I saw the police tape at the bus shelter. The one purple and white trainer was still on the roof. At that point no one knew it was Jamie’s. So I still thought I had my whole life ahead of me, whereas I’d already lost it hours ago. So had Ben, although most folk round here would say he didn’t lose it, he chucked it all away and got what he deserved.

  “What happened here?” the bus driver asked when I got on.

  “Search me,” I said. “Kids?”

  “Someone got knifed,” a woman said. She works part time. I see her on the bus three mornings out of five.

  “Not round here,” I said. “They’re good kids round here.”

  “I heard it on local radio,” she said. And we all turned to look at the crazy crack on the plastic shelter as the bus pulled away.

  Later, this same woman went round telling everyone that I was playing the innocent but she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was lying. Do doubts have shadows? I think they must do. My whole life has been about doubts and shadows ever since.

  That morning I went straight from the office block to Moby’s Café where I worked during the day. I did the food preparation, waitressing and cleaning up.

  Mr Moby was there when the school rang to say that Ben was with the Law. He looked daggers at me because I wasn’t supposed to take personal calls while I was at work.

  “It’s a mistake,” I kept saying. “Ben’s never been in any trouble.” But I had to go to the police station to find out what was wrong and Mr Moby said he’d dock my wages. He’d been on my case since that time I slapped his face in the mop cupboard.

  On the other hand he spoke up for me to the Law. He said I was a hard worker and as far as he knew I was honest. But he also told them I wasn’t very bright. Then he fired me because of the boycott the Friends of Jamie Cooke people organized.

  The Friends made Kath and Ed Majors at the Saracen’s Head fire me too. But Pauline Greenberg said I could go on cleaning offices because I wasn’t working with members of the public. She said nobody cared who cleaned for them as long as they didn’t have to see me. She also gave me more hours on the nightshift, so I can keep up with the rent.

  I remember Pauline from school. She was a couple of years older than me but she was famous for beating up two boys and Roseen Hardesty when they called her dad a dirty Jew. She did well for herself. She employs twenty women – but never Roseen Hardesty.

  She likes us to be on time so I walked quickly through the estate to Kennington Road to catch the number 3. There was no one at the bus stop but me and a gang of screaming urban seagulls. They’d torn a rubbish bag open and made a mess of the pavement. At first I thought they were fighting over a chicken carcass, but then I saw they were plucking the eyes out of a dead pigeon and stabbing their cruel beaks into its throat and breast. Seagulls have such clean white heads. Their beaks are a beautiful fresh yellow. You wouldn’t think, would you, that something so clean and fresh lived on city garbage and carrion.

  I just waited for my bus and minded my own business. I didn’t try to shoo the gulls away because they never take a blind bit of notice, and, truth to tell, I’m a little bit scared of them. They eat, fight and shriek, and if anyone gets in their way they attack – a bit like …

  I didn’t know Ben was in a gang. I just thought he had mates. He’d known the Sharp twins and Rocky since they were in Juniors together. When it all came out, he told me he’d only joined to stop the others picking on him. Jamal said the same thing too. The Law believed Jamal because Jamal’s mum forced him to talk. But they didn’t believe Ben. They took away his mobile phone and said they could prove that the gang members had been talking to each other non-stop all night.

  But Ben is quite small; he hasn’t had his growth spurt like the others. His skin is still fresh and peachy without spots and open pores. His voice hasn’t broken, but he tucks his chin in and talks as low in his throat as he can. I think he was telling the truth – maybe the bigger kids would have picked on him for being not manly enough. The Law said that was probably why he wanted to prove himself and that’s why he turned on Jamie.

  But how can such a beautiful boy do ugly things to a poor gay ginger lamb? He can’t, I know he can’t. He’s too innocent to be guilty.

  He’s sensitive. He cried when his dad forgot his thirteenth birthday and didn’t even send him a card from Hull or wherever he and his new family are living now. I can’t believe a boy who cried about his own father would do anything so cruel to Jamie Cooke. But the Law never saw him cry so they said he was guilty and “showed no remorse”.

  A white van pulled up to the bus stop and a man leant over to open the passenger door. It was Ron Tidey who lives on the estate. He drank regularly at the Saracen’s Head, and he drank a lot. But he said, “I saw you waiting all by yourself. Hop in. I’ll give you a ride to work.”

  I don’t much like Ron Tidey but I got in because no one had spoken to me for weeks.

  He said, “I don’t care what they’re all saying. It isn’t your fault. It’d be even more unnatural if a mother didn’t stand up for her boy.”

  “He didn’t do it, Ron,” I said, feeling suddenly so tired I could’ve lain down then and there and slept for a hundred years. The cab was warm and smoky.

  “You aren’t doing yourself any favours, Cherry. You should just shut up about it and keep your head down.”

  “I am doing,” I said. “I’m always shut up ’cos there’s no one to talk to.”

  “Tell you what, Cherry, why don’t you and me go out for a drink later? Somewhere no one knows you. It’ll take you out of yourself. You’re still a young woman, more or less, and you got your whole life …”

  “Don’t say it, Ron,” I interrupted. But I agreed to meet him. I was that lonely.

  I suppose you could say that loneliness was always my downfall. Ben’s father wasn’t much of a catch. But I did get Ben out of it, and I thought, if I had a baby, there’d always be someone for me to love who’d love me back. But I suppose just loving a child isn’t a whole love. I wasn’t living a whole life, according to Roseen Hardesty. “Get yourself a man,” she said. “At least, get yourself a shag. A grown woman can’t go without for long, Cherry, or she’ll turn sour and grow rust on it.”

  “Use it or lose it,” Mary Sharp agreed.

  “Mary Sharp’s in no danger of losing it,” Roseen said later. “Her problem might be overuse.”

  “Meow!” I said, because I wasn’t taking anything they had to say seriously. They both had new boyfriends every week as far as I could see, while their kids had holes in their shoes. Yes, I was a bit snooty back then. Now, when we meet sometimes outside the Young Offenders Unit on visiting days, we hardly exchange a word.

  Tomorrow they’re moving Ben to some place in darkest Wales and I don’t have a car. I can still send him sweets and toothpaste but I won’t hardly see him, train fares costing what they do.

  “Cheer up,” said Ron Tidey later that night at the Elephant and Castle. “Have another voddy and talk about something else. You’re like a broken record.”

  So I had some more vodka and then some more after that, and at about midnight when we were in the back of Ron’s van and I couldn’t find my underwear Ron said, “There, you’re more relaxed now, ain’t ya? Don’t never say Ron Tidey can’t show a lonely woman a bit of sympathy.” He was busy spraying himself with deodorant and chewing peppermints so’s his wife wouldn’t rumble him.

  I felt like crying, but I didn’t because Ron has a van and if he thinks I’m a miserable cow he won’t want to see me again or maybe even give me a lift up to Wales.

  Also, last time I did anything like this I got Ben. Maybe I’ll get a whole other life out of Ron, and if I do maybe this time it’ll be a girl. They say girls are better company than boys. I hope it’s a girl.

  A FAIR DEAL

  L. C. Tyler

  * * *

  WHERE TO BEGIN this story? Perhaps by stating that Mr Sparrow did not defraud the old and infir
m without good cause. We should always try to be fair, even to Mr Sparrow. And on this occasion he had cause to feel that he was owed something.

  “Sorry,” said the white-haired gentleman with an apologetic smile. “We gave the job to the other firm. They’ll be clearing the house next week. I did leave a message on your mobile, saying not to come round.”

  “Or on somebody else’s mobile,” said the white-haired lady, with the knowledge of husbands that forty years of marriage bestows. “He’s hopeless with technology. I’m sorry he’s caused you a wasted trip.”

  “And everything is going?” asked Mr Sparrow, viewing as much of the Davenports’ hallway as he could from his vantage point on the wrong side of the half-opened front door. It looked like good stuff – antique or first-class modern reproduction. The other firm (whoever they were) would make a bob or two on this house clearance.

  “The new flat is so much smaller than this,” said the gentleman regretfully. “Apart from one or two things we’re taking with us, yes, it’s all spoken for.”

  “Except his ‘Canaletto’,” said the lady. The word caught Mr Sparrow’s attention, hidden though it was in inverted commas.

  “Canaletto?”

  “He wanted an extra thousand for it. They wouldn’t pay.”

  “Sounds good value for a Canaletto, Mrs Davenport.”

  “Oh, it’s not the real thing,” said the lady.

  “It certainly is,” said the gentleman.

  “Your father paid a fiver for it in Petticoat Lane.”

  “A tenner,” said the gentleman. “You couldn’t get a Canaletto for a fiver, even then.”

  “Him and his ‘Canaletto’,” snorted the lady, replacing the picture in its dubious quotation marks.

  “Mind if I take a glance anyway, Mrs Davenport?”

  The white-haired gentleman and his wife looked at each other.

  “Happy to see the back of it,” she said.

  Left alone in front of the picture, Mr Sparrow scanned it carefully. To be fair to Mr Sparrow, and we should always try to be fair, he did know a bit about art. The picture was badly hung in an obscure corner – not properly lit even. But everything about it told him it was the genuine article. He’d expected an oil painting of the Grand Canal, with cracked glaze, gondolas and masked gallants, but this was a small chalk and brown-ink drawing of a domed church with men at work in front of it. Not the sort of thing you’d fake if you were hoping to fool the unwary. It had to be worth fifty, sixty thousand?

  “It’s wasted on them,” he muttered under his breath.

  “What do you think?” asked a voice behind him. “My old dad always used to say it was worth a few hundred, so I won’t take less than a thousand.”

  “It’s probably a fake,” said Mr Sparrow. “If I had a fiver for every fake old master I’ve been offered, I’d be a rich man.”

  “My father checked it out at Christie’s – that would have been forty or fifty years ago, of course. It’s real. But my wife has always found it a bit dull, and it’s only his oil paintings that go for big money. It’s yours for a grand. Cash.”

  To be fair, Mr Sparrow had a conscience, though he was not always sure where he had left it. For the shortest of moments he was tempted to advise the gentleman to go straight back to Christie’s. But – and this was one of Mr Sparrow’s favourite maxims, quoted after work in the bar of the Feathers or at home in front of the television – he couldn’t help it if other people were stupid, could he? “We’ll have the police round here one day if you’re not careful,” his wife would observe, whenever he chose to say it in front of the television. “I’m always careful,” he’d reply.

  “My wife,” said Mr Sparrow, “tells me I’m far too trusting for this line of work. But you have an honest face, Mr Davenport.”

  He handed over the money in twenties.

  “Do you want to count it, Mr Davenport?”

  “I’m very trusting too,” said the gentleman.

  If Mr Sparrow had any remaining doubts, they were largely dispelled by a painting in the hallway.

  “Isn’t that a Howard Hodgkin?” he asked.

  “Another of dad’s bargains,” said the gentleman. “He had an eye for it.”

  “We think we’ll take that one with us,” said the lady.

  “Definitely,” said the gentleman.

  Where to end this story? Not, I think, with Mr Sparrow, driving home with a carefully wrapped bundle on the passenger seat of the van, wondering if he really knew as much about Canaletto as he thought. Nor should we end with him walking confidently, a couple of days later, up Bond Street to a well-known auctioneer to obtain an estimate of the value of his recent purchase, though his face fifteen minutes later … would you mind terribly if I described it as “a picture’? “Not a fake,” said the auctioneer. “But regrettably, it is stolen. Of course, on the plus side, its real owners will be very pleased to see it returned. I don’t think there’s any reward, I’m afraid.”

  No, let’s end the story with the Davenports, the real Davenports, returning from holiday to discover that the lovely old couple who had been minding their house – a couple who came with such excellent references and to whom they had unfortunately already issued another excellent reference – had been selling stolen goods from their home. The couple’s contact address proved to be an ingenious work of fiction.

  When their own Howard Hodgkin was stolen a few weeks later, by a thief apparently using forged keys and with a good knowledge of their burglar alarm, the Davenports put it down to one of those strange coincidences that occur from time to time. And, to be fair, it may have been just that.

  DEATH IN THE TIME MACHINE

  Barbara Nadel

  * * *

  MY GRANDFATHER SAID he found the body in the back yard on the Wednesday night when he went to the outside toilet. It was by the fence in the old pen where the chickens used to live. But because my grandparents didn’t have a telephone, my father didn’t get to know about it until he went round with their shopping the following Saturday. My grandparents never went out.

  This all happened over forty years ago, but I can still remember that day very well. We drove over in Dad’s latest acquisition from his dodgy brother-in-law Brian, a 1950 Vauxhall Victor. Grandma and Granddad lived almost opposite Upton Park, West Ham United’s home ground. So the streets were full of football fans all dressed in the team’s colours of claret and blue. We’d picked up the shopping at the grocers near our own house in East Ham and just had to stop at a hardware shop on the Barking Road to pick up some gas mantles. Although this was 1967 my grandparents, unlike most people even in the impoverished East End of London, didn’t have electricity. Year after year they hung on to the gas lamps that had been in their house on Green Street since they’d first moved in back in the 1900s. Every so often these lamps needed the mantles, the bit that contains the gas and converts it into an incandescent light, replaced. And so we stopped at the one hardware shop that still sold the things, bought the mantles and then, inevitably, my father’s car broke down.

  I was only six years old and short for my age but I had to drag my share of bags down the Barking Road, into Green Street and up my grandparents’ garden path. My father, furious about “bloody Brian and his bleeding old wrecks”, carried everything else, a limp roll-up cigarette hanging from his lips as he muttered his anger. When we got to the house, which was a battered Edwardian terrace with an overgrown front garden, Dad was further infuriated by the fact that someone had broken the door knocker. “Sodding hell!” he exploded. And then he looked up at the window that was above the door and yelled out, “Mo! Mo, you up there? Get down here and open this door for Christ’s sake!”

  Grandma and Granddad didn’t rent the whole house. They’d always been too poor for that. They lived downstairs while upstairs was occupied by a man with a wooden leg called Mo. Unlike my grandparents, Mo did go out from time to time and it was nearly always he who answered the door. But Mo liked a drink and sometimes h
e would range about his flat in a drunken stupor, falling over and breaking things. When he left the building he could get into fights, he’d broken parts of the front door down in the past and the poor old knocker was always fair game. Eventually Mo, red-eyed and, as he put it, “as stiff as a board” with arthritis, came down the stairs and opened up.

  My grandfather was in the hall with a shovel in his hand. The entrance to the coal cellar was underneath the stairs and he’d left what they called the parlour to go and get some coal.

  “Hello,” he said. “Cold out, is it?”

  My father ignored him and said, “Car’s buggered. Me and kiddo had to walk from the hardware shop.”

  Granddad began to shovel coal, when Mo, halfway up the stairs, called down, “Here George, tell them about the murder.”

  “The murder?”

  My father’s already white face blanched. My grandfather looked away.

  “Some bloke. In the back yard,” Mo said to my father. “Your dad found him. Dead.”

  Whether my grandfather would ever have told my father about the body in the yard, had Mo not said what he did, is something I still ponder on occasionally, even now. From what I remember of that day and others that proved significant afterwards, I think that he probably wouldn’t.

  All he said as he shovelled coal was “Your mother didn’t want you bothered with it.”

  “Bothered with it!”

  Dad went out of the hall, into the parlour and through to the scullery where my grandmother was washing up dishes. I followed, fascinated as I always was by the way in which the passage from the dingy hall into the darkness of the parlour plunged one into a world of browns and blacks. No outside sounds of football revelry or chatter of local shoppers entered here. Only the crackle of coal as it burnt inside the range, the hiss of the gas lamps and, sometimes, the whistle of steam as it escaped from the big metal kettle.