The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 6

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 s.h.a.g. 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 infirm 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-cla.s.s 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 'Ca.n.a.letto'," said the lady. The word caught Mr Sparrow's attention, hidden though it was in inverted commas.

"Ca.n.a.letto?"

"He wanted an extra thousand for it. They wouldn't pay."

"Sounds good value for a Ca.n.a.letto, 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 Ca.n.a.letto for a fiver, even then."

"Him and his 'Ca.n.a.letto'," 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 pa.s.senger seat of the van, wondering if he really knew as much about Ca.n.a.letto 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 "b.l.o.o.d.y 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 h.e.l.l!" 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 he 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.

"h.e.l.lo," he said. "Cold out, is it?"

My father ignored him and said, "Car's b.u.g.g.e.red. 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 was.h.i.+ng up dishes. I followed, fascinated as I always was by the way in which the pa.s.sage 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.

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-s.h.i.+rts, 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 pa.s.sed 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, sh.e.l.ls 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 alb.u.ms. 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 Sat.u.r.day 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. G.o.d took him," my grandmother added.

"Sod G.o.d," 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 G.o.d 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 alb.u.ms. 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 alb.u.ms 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 alb.u.m 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 alb.u.m himself. Sitting next to me, he knew exactly what I had been looking at when my grandmother had ripped the alb.u.m 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 G.o.d, muttered, "Fascist!" and then promptly went to sleep in his chair.