The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Read online

  My father talked to a small, thin woman in a long black dress. My grandmother was in her late seventies then, the same sort of age that my own mother, who favours jeans and T-shirts, is now. I had only once seen my grandmother’s hair not piled up on top of her head. One morning we turned up early and she had just got out of bed. Her hair, which was as grey as an afternoon in November, reached all the way down to her feet. But this time it was in a bun and, as usual, held up with pins made of silver and onyx and jet. She spoke to my father in low, angry tones, the long silver chains around her neck and wrists jangling as she did so.

  I was looking at the many framed photographs of my ancestors that sat on the mantelpiece above the range when my grandfather came in and said, “You all right are you, my love?”

  One of the photos had been laid down on its face. I said, “Granddad, one of the pictures is down.”

  He looked up and frowned. My grandfather was a big man. Tall and broad and completely different in build from my skinny father. A dock worker by trade, he was also a veteran of the First World War, a conflict that I knew, even then, haunted him always. He opened the door of the range and threw the coal on with the shovel. He stood up with difficulty and then looked at the mantelpiece and said, “Your grandmother was cleaning. It must’ve fallen down.” He ruffled my long, mousy hair with his coaly fingers and then stood the picture up again. I knew it well. It was a portrait of his brother Harold. He had died long, long ago during a battle called the Battle of Mons. Uncle Harold had been my grandfather’s only male sibling and his memory was sacred not just because of who he had been but also because he had died so young and in service to his country. This portrait, of a young, thin and unsmiling man who was really little more than a boy, sat alongside others depicting my grandfather’s many sisters, his parents and my grandmother’s mother and her three brothers, David, John and Patrick. In between all of these photographs were scattered plaster images of the Virgin Mary, the suffering Christ and the saints. This proximity to the divine told us all, had we not already known it, that everyone depicted had sadly passed away.

  I sat down to wait for the cup of tea and plate of bread and jam that always accompanied any visit to the grandparents’ house. My grandfather put the kettle on the range and then, although I do remember wanting to ask him about what Mo had said about the dead body in the yard, I know that I didn’t do so. My father and grandmother went out into the yard, which was not what usually happened, because neither of them had gone out there to go to the toilet. My grandfather just smiled and I asked if I could please play with my Box of Things. The Box of Things was in fact an old carpetbag. It contained all sorts of “treasures” that were played with by my grandparents’ many grandchildren. We all loved it. There were wooden camels which had once belonged to my great-great-uncle Sidney who had been in the army in Palestine, shells from a beach somewhere in the West Country, model cats made out of Bakelite, old bits of broken costume jewellery, a tiny New Testament, dolls and small religious statues and two photograph albums. These two brown, heavily stuffed books were my favourites. Full of small black and white photographs, some dating back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. They showed me my forebears in funny clothes and doing things like picking hops in Kent that I had never seen and would never do. Involved in the Box, I recall nothing more from that day except a snatch of conversation between my parents when I got home.

  My mother said to my dad, “So do the police know who he is, this man your father found?”

  “No,” my dad replied. “No one seems to know anything about him.”

  * * *

  The following Saturday my father and I made our usual trip to see my grandparents in West Ham. This time we didn’t go in the car because the police had apparently taken it off my father and were currently looking for my Uncle Brian. Although he had promised never, ever to sell or give my father any dodgy goods ever, Uncle Brian just hadn’t been able to resist the Vauxhall Victor.

  We arrived in the afternoon which, in November, meant that it was dark and as we walked into the parlour the gas lamps hissed and hummed in time to the boiling kettle. I smiled at my granddad who was in his usual position, in his chair by the side of the range. He and my grandmother were not, however, alone. Sitting on the far side of the large dining table that was wedged into the square bay window was a policeman. He looked to be about my dad’s age and he was in uniform, his helmet placed before him on the table. The adults began to talk and I remember my grandmother, who was sitting next to the policeman, asked, “So he doesn’t have any family then? Not come forward to claim his body?”

  “No,” the policeman answered. “No, nothing.”

  Then I said, “Is this about the man who was murdered in the back yard?”

  No one spoke at first. They all looked at me and then it was the policeman who began to smile. “Well,” he said as he bent down in order to speak to me across the table, “what do you know about …”

  “It was our neighbour, Mo, who said the word ‘murder’,” my grandmother said grumpily. “He’s a cripple and a drunk and he dramatizes everything. She heard him and picked up on it.”

  “Oh, I know old Mo,” the policeman said and then he looked at me again. “The poor man in your Gran’s yard just died, sweetheart,” he said. “No one killed him.”

  “It was his time. God took him,” my grandmother added.

  “Sod God,” my grandfather, who had absolutely no time for religion, muttered over by the fire.

  “Can I have my Box, please?” I asked then. Kids move on very quickly and I was already bored by the notion of murder, by God and by my grandfather’s routine blasphemy.

  My father went and got the Box and when he returned I spread all of the treasures out across the table and then began looking through the photo albums. The adults talked and I clearly remember my grandmother going on about a possible funeral or cremation. Not that that was anything unusual. Funerals and how ornate or religiously observant they were formed frequent topics of her conversation. Of course, what I didn’t know then, was that all of the ceremonies she spoke about had taken place in the fifties at the very latest. My grandparents did not, after all, go out.

  When I opened up my albums I was sitting beside my father with my grandmother and the policeman sitting across the table opposite. I knew that after a little while my grandmother was watching me more intently than usual, but I just smiled at her and then went back to what I was doing. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever about what I was looking at in the album when my grandmother ripped it and the other book away from me and put them back in the old carpetbag. I do remember that I started to cry but that the look on my grandmother’s face was such that I felt compelled to swallow my tears and hold my peace. She looked fierce – she could do that, like an old, old toothless cheetah.

  No one asked my grandmother why some of my treasures had been suddenly denied to me. But I do remember my father looking angry and I can recall how he very obviously picked up the carpetbag and then began to flick through the album himself. Sitting next to me, he knew exactly what I had been looking at when my grandmother had ripped the album from my hands. By this time the policeman was getting up to leave and so all of us got up from the table and bade him very politely “Goodbye”. Once he had gone, my grandfather, who was about as good with authority as he was with God, muttered, “Fascist!” and then promptly went to sleep in his chair.

  I think I was given my albums back then. I really don’t know. I do recall a feeling of discomfort afterwards, however, although at the time I didn’t know why. Things were never quite right between my grandparents and my father from then on. My grandmother and my father talked frequently alone and in furious whispers.

  * * *

  My grandfather died in 1970 at the age of eighty-three and my grandmother five years later at eighty-five. The contents of the flat were distributed between my father and his two brothers with Dad inheriting most of the photographs. Until I was
well into my twenties I would, from time to time, take out the old albums and the photographs that had once stood on the mantelpiece and look at them. But when I moved away to Yorkshire, in 1982, I forgot about the photographs and, to a large extent, about my grandparents too. Only when my father and his brothers got together to reminisce, if I was around at the time, did I think of them and smile.

  Dad and my uncles Geoff and Eric always referred to the old house in West Ham as The Time Machine. My grandparents had chosen to stop their personal clock around about 1929 when my father had been born, or so my Uncle Eric always said.

  “Even in the Blitz mother always wore long skirts and put her hair up like old Queen Mary,” he said at one reunion back in the eighties. “Frightened of electricity they were, the both of them, frightened rigid.”

  Not that their eccentric lifestyle stopped with lack of electricity. They had no bathroom and were accustomed to washing daily in the kitchen sink. When a proper hot soak was needed they brought in the old tin bath which hung on the side of the wooden shed that was the outside toilet. God knows how many kettles they had to boil on the old range to get enough water to bathe in. They didn’t have a washing machine, had no television or transistor radio, and their bedstead was made of brass which was very unfashionable back in the sixties. Now that bed, not to mention the big, black range in the parlour, would send the type of middle-class people my grandparents never met into raptures.

  It was generally agreed amongst my relatives that my grandparents’ strange aversion to change and modernity had a lot to do with the First World War. Granddad in particular had come from a fairly easy-going working class family who actively embraced innovations. But he’d had a bad time in the trenches. He had been gassed and wounded and had returned to London and his wife with a profoundly pessimistic take on life. Why my grandmother had seemed to follow him along this course was not known, except perhaps that women did always do what their men told them to back in those days. But both my uncles, Geoff and Eric, were born during the 1914–18 conflict, presumably conceived when granddad was at home on leave.

  That said, along with Uncle Geoff, it was my belief that the death of Granddad’s brother Harold possibly held the key. Blown up at the Battle of Mons, he had only been seventeen at the time. They’d been in the same battalion and Granddad always said that he’d seen Harold die. One minute he’d been by his side and the next he’d disappeared into a great ball of fire and metal and ash. There hadn’t been a single trace left of him to bury, Granddad had said. Not a trace. How a person could get over such a thing was inconceivable to me. In the light of that it was no wonder that he had been so very weird.

  Life moved on and the family photographs entered what would probably, under normal circumstances, have been their final resting place in a box in my parents’ attic. I had two children by this time and my many cousins had reproduced also. It was the generation before ours that was diminishing. Both my father’s brothers died in the mid-eighties and their wives followed on after them, one just before, and one just after, the year 2000. My sons were taking their A levels when I was called by my mother to say I had to return to London immediately.

  “Your dad was taken bad two days ago,” she said. She didn’t cry or even sound that much upset. “He’s in hospital. The doctor, whoever he is, says he’s got lung cancer.”

  I drove from Wakefield to London in four straight hours and, when I got to my parents’ house, my mother was still calmly in shock. “They say he’s going to die,” she said. “How can that be?”

  We didn’t say anything at all about my father’s lifetime smoking habit. We just sat in silence in my mum’s living room and lit up cigarettes of our own. Suddenly, or so it seemed to me, I had blinked just once and my childhood and my youth had disappeared into a hole in the ground.

  * * *

  My father was conscious. Hooked up to machines and drips, he looked small and was yellow and the sight of him made me choke with a mixture of utter grief and total horror. Because he was on the Intensive Therapy ward I had to wear a plastic apron and gloves whenever I was near him. As I put the gloves on, I began to cry. Unfortunately Dad saw me, but he smiled anyway and said, “Got a fag, have you, kiddo?”

  He hadn’t called me that since I was a child. It took me back to Uncle Brian (long dead himself by then) and his stolen cars, to England winning the World Cup in 1966, to West Ham and Mum’s mini-skirts and to Grandma and Granddad and the Time Machine. But then that, of course, was his intention. He and I, we had to go back there, because back there was something my father felt I needed to know.

  “The doctors say I’m going to snuff it,” he said as I leaned over and kissed his forehead and then sat down beside his bed.

  I didn’t even try to contradict him. My father had always been a pragmatic man. To tell him he was going to be fine would have insulted him.

  “So now I’ve got to tell you something,” he continued. He wasn’t gasping for breath as I had imagined that he would. But then Mum had said the doctors had told her that lung cancer didn’t always do that to people, at least not until the very end.

  “Do you remember when your granddad found that dead body in their back yard?” Dad asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. In the old chicken coop. The police never identified him, did they?”

  Some time after the policeman had visited the house when Dad and I had been there, another officer had turned up and told them that apparently the unknown man had been buried in a pauper’s grave.

  “No, they didn’t,” Dad said.

  “I expect they would have done these days,” I said. “What with DNA and everything.”

  “It’s possible,” Dad said. And then he took one of my weird purple-gloved hands in one of his equally weird yellow mitts and he smiled. “But I know who he was,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Because your grandma told me,” he replied. “It was a long time afterwards. Your granddad was dead. But I knew she’d known something, without knowing quite what, for years.” He coughed. “Do you remember when that copper came round the house and your grandma took those old photo albums off you?”

  That had always been indelibly printed on my memory, mainly because Grandma had never done that before or after that occasion. Also it was in the wake of that incident that things between Grandma and Dad appeared, to me, to cool.

  “She did that,” Dad said, “because as you turned the page there was a picture of the man who’d died in the yard staring up at her. An old picture admittedly, but she was frightened that that copper would recognize the corpse from it and start asking questions.”

  Shocked, firstly, to see my always so vital father in such a state, I was now almost beyond further reaction. I said nothing.

  “I never made the exact connection at the time. Not surprising given what it was,” Dad said. “But that said, I had a bad feeling about it all from then on, and one day when Grandma was in one of her moods to talk I asked her about it. She said she’d tell me provided I never told Geoff or Eric and as long as I promised never to breathe a word to the police.”

  “The police?”

  Dad smiled again. He had such a big smile for a very thin man. “Don’t worry, kiddo,” he said. “You can tell them if you want to. I won’t hold you to anything. Everyone’s dead now anyway. I’m almost dead …”

  I began to cry then and for a while we had to break off because Mum came in and talked to Dad about how well their garden was doing and other stuff to “take his mind off it all”. But then she left – she couldn’t bear more than a few minutes by his side, it was all far too distressing for her to take – and Dad continued his story.

  “Your granddad was a regular soldier when the First World War started,” he said. “He was in his thirties and had just got married. He had, as you know, a lot of sisters and a brother who was very much younger than he was.”

  “Uncle Harold.”

  “Harold was seventeen. Sweet, he was, loved
by everyone. Your granddad had a notion that the war was going to be long and vicious and bloody and he told his brother to keep as far away from recruiting officers and the like as he could. But of course he didn’t listen. Thought himself patriotic like most lads then. So not only did Harold join up, he went into the self-same regiment as your granddad.”

  “Yes, but what …”

  “It’ll all become clear,” Dad said and then he coughed and coughed until his face changed colour and, although one of the nurses told him it might be better if I left for a while, he clung on to me and wouldn’t let go. He had, he said, to get out what he needed to say, no matter what.

  As soon as he could speak easily again, he said, “On the twenty-third of August 1914, your granddad’s regiment, the Middlesex, went into battle at Mons. They fought and many of them died and your granddad was wounded in the leg and was briefly shipped back home to recover. He got a lot of sympathy because of his wound and of course because his brother Harold had been killed. Or so everyone thought.”

  I frowned. Uncle Harold’s heroic and untimely death had always been a cornerstone of our family’s mythology.

  “Uncle Harold deserted,” my father said simply.

  I was stunned. Even though the legend of Uncle Harold was no longer at the forefront of my thoughts it was something I had been brought up with, like a half-resented, half-loved religion.

  “I was just as shocked as you are,” Dad said. He took my hand again.

  “Did they shoot him?” I asked. Deserters were routinely shot during the First World War. Some of them were tortured too. Granddad used to mutter about “lads left tied naked in full sun to gun carriages”, men slowly dehydrating and going mad.

  My father shook his head. “No. Harold got away,” he said. “He was a young silly kid, but your grandfather was a man and he made sure that Harold got out of there.”