The Detection Collection Page 5

‘Okay. Yours after all. Found in your house. In that mug. Yours, if it isn’t someone else’s.’

  Snatching the gleaming white object, Henry turned for the door.

  ‘No,’ Tom Pepper said. ‘No, can’t let you go like that.’

  He looked about him as if for help, even giving a glance to the glowing but blank screen beside him.

  Henry had his hand on the door-knob. Once again it was clammy with sudden sweat. He twisted and slid and twisted again.

  ‘Look,’ Tom Pepper said, ‘you’re afloat on a dangerous sea, my lad. You’ve no idea how dangerous. Believe this all-alive-o Tom Pepper right in front of you, he’s not lying.’

  Henry got the door open.

  He saw that in his left hand he was still clutching the white toothbrush, The Aristocrat. It seemed to be – if this could be so – glowing with evil alien energy.

  He turned and ran down the narrow stairs, out into bustling Queensway, faintly hearing Tom Pepper still calling, ‘Oh, come back, come back. There’s more.’

  At home, alien toothbrush eventually shoved into inner pocket, Henry was greeted by Alice, demure in pale yellow cardigan.

  ‘Darling, that’s nice. I thought you wouldn’t be back for ages.’

  Again Henry heard Old Five Wives’ neighing voice. It goes either way, you know.

  The wandering-eye syndrome.

  And then, though he had vowed and vowed that he never would, he yanked the alien toothbrush from his pocket and thrust it under Alice’s pretty, upturned nose.

  ‘Tell me what this is,’ he shouted. ‘Tell me how it got to be in our toothmug, in our bathroom.’

  The colour left Alice’s cheeks, as if it had never been there.

  ‘In our bathroom?’ she said, voice barely audible. ‘You found it there?’

  ‘I did. And I strongly suspect you knew it was there all the time.’

  ‘No.’ She swallowed fiercely. ‘Darling, I never had any idea it was there. He— He must have … While I was at the concert, The Sixth’s come-back one. He must have come over from America for that. He was their manager originally. So it must have been him who put that ticket through the letter-box. I thought it was one of the girls at work. I told them once my schoolgirl dream about The Sixth.’

  ‘But you went? Went to that concert?’ he said, almost snarled.

  ‘Well, yes, I did. I did. You were up in Bedford, and I thought suddenly I’d like to see them, see if they were the same. And they weren’t. They were awful. But while I was out of the house he must have … But how did he know that I lived …? No, he must have just seen me in the street. Perhaps on Saturday, the big shop.’

  She came to a choked halt. Then, trembling, she began again.

  ‘Oh, Henry, I never could tell you about – about – about the terrible thing he did to me, when I’d only just finished school. That summer. Why he suddenly had to leave for America.’

  Henry found then that his anger and his suspicions had gone. Alice’s utter distress had swept them away. A swirl of dust before a blast of clean wind.

  ‘No, darling,’ he said. ‘You didn’t tell—’

  Then he realised that behind him the telephone had been ringing and ringing.

  It could be Tom Pepper, he thought, though he could not have said why he felt it.

  He snatched up the receiver.

  ‘Hello, hello?’

  ‘Well now, if that ain’t the hubby,’ said a treacly voice, strongly American-accented. ‘Okay, you can give little Alice a message. From Curtiss Boyer. Just say, I left my toothbrush while she was at the concert, and when you’re away on one of your Tuesday trips, Mr Hubby – I’ve researched you, old buddy – I’ll drop by and collect.’

  Swindon was next on Henry’s Tuesday list. He left to go there, deciding he would not relay that message from Curtiss Boyer, even though Alice had told him how that summer long ago, in the absence from home of her parents, he had bullied her into letting him stay. But, having gone to the point of actually catching a Swindon train, in case he was being kept under observation, he got off as soon as he could – the train, unfortunately, was nonstop to Chippenham – and hurryingly returned.

  At home he told Alice why he was there. Tearfully, she thanked him.

  ‘But – but if he comes, what are you going to do?’ she said. ‘You’d have to have a gun to stop that brute.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare use a gun, even if I did have one. I wouldn’t actually properly know how.’

  ‘But then, darling …?’

  ‘No, we’ll just have to wait and see. He may not come, you know. He may have just wanted to scare you by leaving one of those toothbrushes of his.’

  ‘I suppose so, but …’

  ‘Well, we’ll see. At least I’m here with you.’

  So they waited. They were too tense when it came to supper time even to think of eating anything.

  Darkness fell, and they sat on, where they were in their usual armchairs, one on either side of the mute telly.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll even have the News,’ Henry said at last, dry-mouthed.

  ‘No. No, we must be ready to hear the least sound.’

  That least sound came a little later. A slight but unmistakable noise from the front door. Henry knew at once exactly what it was.

  I must have read about it somewhere, he thought. It’s the faint scratching made by a thin plastic card being forced into the crack between door and jamb and worked up and down to push back the tongue of the lock. But why ever didn’t I think of putting the snib down? Because, I suppose, we never do that. We never have. That must be how, before, he …

  ‘It’s him,’ Alice breathed, taut with anxiety.

  It was.

  He was there just beyond the door, plain to see in the light of the hall. Slab-faced, bulkily tall, a somehow American buff-coloured raincoat hanging from his shoulders. He glared into the darkened room. Then gave a little jerk back.

  ‘Hey, it’s Mr Hubby. Life’s full of surprises, I guess.’

  But, beyond that, he did not seem in any way put out. He took an idle step forward towards Alice, crammed against the back of her chair as if she was pasted to it.

  ‘You wanna watch, Mr Hubby?’

  Henry found he had risen up from his chair, even while he still felt he was fixed as fast into it as Alice was into hers.

  He took three quaking strides and put himself between her and the menacing intruder.

  Who moved both his arms towards him in a scooping gesture, as if he intended to lift this air-light object out of the way. But Henry’s hand dived into his inner pocket, and brought out that big, white, spatula-like toothbrush.

  ‘Yours, I believe,’ he said, however creakingly. ‘Kindly take it and go.’

  Curtiss Boyer laughed. A wide, mouth-open guffaw.

  And Henry struck.

  He sent the alien toothbrush shooting forward straight into that softly red, yawning crater.

  With a howl of rage and pain, Curtiss Boyer staggered back.

  But he was not quelled for long.

  His eyes widened in fury. Or perhaps in delight.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Little man, you’ve asked for it.’

  One lunging step forwards.

  And from behind came an authoritative voice.

  ‘Stop just where you are. You’re under arrest. Citizen’s arrest.’

  A burly, brown-suited figure stepped quickly in, took an elbow in a holdfast grip.

  ‘Caught up with you on the Net,’ he said. ‘Policeman’s Friend. Not that I’m a proper copper any more. Still, mate of mine from those days is on his way. DI now. Make everything regular. Oh, and, Henry, you’d better put that toothbrush somewhere safe. Be needed in evidence.’

  THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE STARS

  John Harvey

  Eileen had done everything she could to change his mind. ‘Michael,’ she’d said, ‘anywhere else, okay? Anywhere but there.’ Michael Sandler, not his real name, not even close. But in the end she
’d caved in, just as he’d known she would.

  Thirty-three by not so many months and going nowhere; thirty-three, though she was still only owning up to twenty-nine.

  When he’d met her she’d been a receptionist in a car showroom south of Sheffield, something she’d blagged her way into and held down for the best part of a year; fine until the head of sales had somehow got a whiff of her past employment, some potential customer who’d seen her stripping somewhere most likely, and tried wedging his podgy fingers up inside her skirt one evening late. Eileen had kneed him in the balls, then hit him with a solid glass ashtray high across the face, close to taking out an eye. She hadn’t bothered waiting for her cards. She’d been managing a sauna, close to the city centre, when Michael had found her. In at seven, check the towels, make sure the plastic had been wiped down, bottles of massage oil topped up, the come washed from the walls; once the girls arrived, first shift, ready to catch the early punters on their way to work, she’d examine their hands, ensure they’d trimmed their nails; uniforms they took home and washed, brought back next day clean as new or she’d want the reason why.

  ‘Come on,’ Michael had said, ‘fifty minutes down the motorway. It’s not as if I’m asking you to fucking emigrate.’ Emigration might have been easier. She had memories of Nottingham and none of them good. But then, looking round at the tatty travel posters and old centrefolds from Playboy on the walls, he’d added, ‘What? Worried a move might be bad for your career?’

  It hadn’t taken her long to pack her bags, turn over the keys. Fifty minutes on the motorway. A house like a barn, a palace, real paintings on the walls.

  When he came home earlier than usual one afternoon and found her sitting in the kitchen, polishing the silver while she watched Richard and Judy on the small TV, he snatched the cloth from her hands. ‘There’s people paid for that, not you.’

  ‘It’s something to do.’

  His nostrils flared. ‘You want something to do, go down the gym. Go shopping. Read a fucking book.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked him later that night, turning towards him in their bed.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  He didn’t look at her. ‘Because I’m tired of living on my own.’

  He was sitting propped up against pillows, bare-chested, thumbing through the pages of a climbing magazine. Eileen couldn’t imagine why: anything more than two flights of stairs and he took the lift.

  The light from the lamp on his bedside table shone a filter of washed-out blue across the patterned quilt and the curtains stirred in the breeze from the opened window. One thing he insisted on, one of many, sleeping with at least one of the windows open.

  ‘That’s not enough,’ Eileen said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Enough of a reason for me being here. You being tired of living alone.’

  After a long moment, he put down his magazine. ‘It’s not the reason, you know that.’

  ‘Do I?’ She leaned back as he turned towards her, his fingers touching her arm.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ he said. ‘Snapping at you like that. It was stupid. Unnecessary.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  His face was close to hers, too close for her to focus; there was a faint smell of brandy on his breath.

  After they’d made love he lay on his side, watching her, watching her breathe.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t stare. I hate it when you stare.’ It reminded her of Terry, her ex, the way his eyes had followed her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking; right up until the night he’d slipped the gun out from beneath the pillow and, just when she’d been certain he was going to take her life, had shot himself in the head.

  ‘What else am I supposed to do?’ Michael said.

  ‘Go to sleep? Take a shower?’ Her face relaxed into a smile. ‘Read a fucking book?’

  Michael grinned and reached across and kissed her. ‘You want to know how much I love you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mocking.

  After a little searching, he found a ball point in the bedside table drawer. Reaching for a magazine, he flicked through it till he came to a picture of the Matterhorn, outlined against the sky. ‘Here,’ he said, and quickly drew a hasty, childlike approximation of the sun, moon and stars around the summit. ‘That’s how much.’

  Smiling, Eileen closed her eyes.

  Resnick had spent the nub end of the evening in a pub off the A632 between Bolsover and Arkwright Town. Peter Waites and himself. From the outside it looked as if the place had been closed down months before and the interior was not a lot different. Resnick paced himself, supping halves, aware of having to drive back down, while Waites worked his way assiduously from pint to pint, much as he had when he’d been in his pomp and working at the coal face, twenty years before. Whenever it came to Waites’ round, Resnick was careful to keep his wallet and his tongue well zipped, the man’s pride buckled enough. He had lost his job in the wake of the miners’ strike and not worked steady since.

  ‘Not yet forty when they tossed me on the fuckin’ scrap heap, Charlie. Me and a lot of others like me. Nigh on a thousand when that pit were closed and them pantywaist civil bloody servants chucking their hands up in the air on account they’ve found sixty new jobs. Bloody disgrace.’ He snapped the filter from the end of his cigarette before lighting up.

  ‘Lungs buggered enough already, Charlie. This’ll not make ha’porth of difference, no matter what anyone says. Besides, long as I live long enough to see the last of that bloody woman and dance on her bloody grave, I don’t give a sod.’

  That bloody woman: Margaret Hilda Thatcher. In that company especially, no need to speak her name.

  When they stepped outside the air bit cold. Over the carefully sculpted slag heap, now slick with grass, the moon hung bright and full. Of the twenty terraced houses in Peter Waites’ street, fourteen were now boarded up.

  ‘You’ll not come in, Charlie?’

  ‘Some other time.’

  ‘Aye.’ The two men shook hands.

  ‘Look after yourself, Peter.’

  ‘You, too.’

  Resnick had first met the ex-miner when his son had joined the Notts force as a young PC and been stationed for a while at Canning Circus, under Resnick’s wing. Now the boy was in Australia, married with kids, something in IT, and Resnick and Waites still kept in touch, the occasional pint, an odd Saturday at Bramhall Lane or down in Nottingham at the County ground, a friendship based on mutual respect and a sense of regret for days gone past.

  Eileen would never be sure what woke her. The flap of the curtain as the window opened wider; the soft tread on the carpeted floor. Either way, when she opened her eyes there they were, two shrouded shapes beyond the foot of the bed. Beside her, Michael was already awake, pushing up on one elbow, hand reaching out towards the light.

  ‘Leave it,’ said a voice. The shapes beginning to flesh out, take on detail.

  ‘We don’t need the fucking light,’ the shorter one said. A voice Eileen didn’t recognise: one she would never forget.

  Michael switched on the light and they shot him, the tall one first and then the other, the impact hurling Michael back against the headboard, skewing him round until his face finished somehow pressed up against the wall.

  Moving closer, the shorter of the two wrenched the wire from the socket and the room went dark. Too late to prevent Eileen from seeing what she had seen: the taller man bare-headed, more than bare, shaven, bald, a child’s mask, Mickey Mouse, covering the centre of his face; his companion had a woollen hat pulled low, a red scarf wrapped high around his neck and jaw. Some of Michael’s blood ran, slow and warm, between Eileen’s arm and her breast. The rest was pooling between his legs, spreading dark across the sheets. The sound she hadn’t recognised was her own choked sobbing, caught like a hairball in her throat. She knew they would kill her or r
ape her or both.

  ‘You want it?’ the shorter one said, gesturing towards the bed.

  The tall one made a sound like someone about to throw up and the shorter one laughed.

  Eileen closed her eyes and when she opened them again they had gone.

  Welcoming the rare chance of an early night, Lynn Kellogg had been in bed for a good hour by the time Resnick returned home. Through several layers of sleep she registered the Saab slowing into the drive outside, the front door closing firmly in its frame, feet slow but heavy on the stairs; sounds from the bathroom and then his weight on the mattress as he lowered himself down.

  More than two years now and she still sometimes felt it strange, this man beside her in her bed. His bed, to be more precise.

  ‘God, Charlie,’ she said, shifting her legs. ‘Your feet are like blocks of ice. And you stink of beer.’ His mumbled apology seemed to merge with his first snore. His feet might be cold, but the rest of him seemed to radiate warmth. Lynn moved close against him and within not so many minutes she was asleep again herself.

  Short of four, the phone woke them both.

  ‘Yours or mine?’ Resnick said, pushing back the covers.

  ‘Mine.’

  She was already on her feet, starting to pull on clothes. ‘Shooting,’ she said, when she’d put the phone back down. ‘Tattershall Drive.’

  ‘You want me to come?’

  Lynn shook her head. ‘No need. Go back to sleep.’

  When they’d started living together, Lynn had transferred from Resnick’s squad into Major Crime; less messy that way. Her coat, a hooded black anorak, windproof and waterproof, was on a hook in the hall. Despite the hour, it was surprisingly light outside, not so far off a full moon.

  The body had not yet been moved. Scene of Crime were taking photographs, measuring, assiduously taking samples from the floor. The pathologist was still on his way. It didn’t need an expert, Lynn thought, to see how he’d died.

  Anil Khan stood beside her in the doorway. He had been the first officer from the Major Crime unit to arrive.

  ‘Two of them, so she says.’ His voice was light, barely accented.

  ‘She?’

  ‘Wife, mistress, whatever. She’s downstairs.’