Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  Karen, initially elated with vindication, began to cry. “Make it stop,” she said balling her fists against the side of her head. “Do something.”

  * * * *

  I followed the curve of our street, pausing outside each house, straining to hear a child crying. At the second-last house, I believed that I did. I rang the doorbell. Through the door’s frosted glass I could see a figure move into the hallway, then retreat back into the room from which he had come. I heard something slam. Heard a cry seconds later.

  But the cry was from the wrong direction. Karen was out of our house.

  “I heard it,” she shrieked. “I heard it being killed.” “What?”

  “The baby was crying. I heard a smack and it stopped,” she screamed. “You let it be killed.” She pulled back from me. “You let him be killed,” she repeated, then spat in my face.

  The police officer squeezed into our armchair. “Devlin,” he’d said, by way of introduction.

  “And it couldn’t have been your own child?” Devlin asked after listening to Karen’s story. “No,” she said.

  “Where is your child?” he said, glancing around the room. “He’s Michael,” Karen answered.

  “Can I see him, please?” he asked, putting down his notebook.

  “No,” Karen said.

  “I’d like to see your child, Ma’am.”

  “You can’t, Inspector,” I replied, moving to my wife. “You see we ... we don’t ... we don’t actually have a child.”

  * * * *

  Devlin returned a few moments later, having walked down to the house where I had heard the baby crying. I stood out on our pathway as we spoke, out of earshot of Karen, my hands in my pockets.

  “Anything?” I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “Did you check?”

  He hesitated, glancing towards our doorway to check that Karen wasn’t listening. “I can’t check someone’s house on the word of your wife. I mean no disrespect, but she needs help.”

  “She getting all the help she needs,” I said, defensively.

  “It’s not working,” he replied. He stared at me a moment, as if deciding something. “What happened to her?”

  So I told him about Michael. I told him about how he died at birth. I told him about Karen’s therapy, how she had set up the nursery as if Michael was alive, how she sat with the baby monitor we’d bought, hoping some night to hear her son. I told him everything because he was the first person in five months to ask. Because it’s the woman who’s affected in these things. Not the father. But then, I’m not a father.

  Devlin considered all I said. “Do you know your neighbour up there?” he asked finally.

  I shook my head.

  “I do,” Devlin said. “Trevor Conlon. Collects old clothes for charities.” He fished in his jacket pocket and handed me a folded green flier. “Funnily enough,” he continued, “he also runs a second-hand retro clothes shop. He has no children.” He paused. “None of his own, anyway.”

  * * * *

  The phantom child slept in our bed, with us, alongside our dead son, Michael, whose presence was never more physical than that night, when he filled the space between us.

  At dawn I sat in the kitchen, staring out at the grey pall of rain that hung over the city, misting the windows, clinging to the red brick of the houses opposite. I read the charity flier Devlin had given me. Clothes Wanted. Will collect. No donation too small. What had the policeman said? “He has no children.” Yet I had heard the child crying; it wasn’t just Karen’s imagination. There was a child in that house, looking for someone. Looking to be found.

  I phoned the number on the flier just after nine o’clock. The man who answered sounded groggy. I told him I had a donation to make; suggested he call after eight that evening, gave an address far enough away to keep him out of his house for a good half hour. Long enough for me to search his house myself.

  * * * *

  I watched his van leave at seven forty five, then went down the alley behind our houses, and climbed over his back wall. His house was like my own. A sash window at the back, the clasp so loose a bank card could flick it open. I slid the window up, the blistered paint flaking off on my hands. I stepped down into his sitting room. Black bags lined one wall. The settee was covered with clothes, labelled and priced.

  To my right, the kitchen, dishes piled on the white work top, beer cans, bent doubled on the floor.

  I crept out into the hallway and listened. The house sounded empty.

  The staircase seemed to creak louder the more carefully I trod. The bathroom faced me at the top of the stairs, a toilet roll tube lying on the floor. There were no toys in the bath, no small tooth brushes in the scum-stained glass on the sink.

  The other two rooms were likewise empty - no children, no toys, or clothes. One room was being used as a store. The other was the main bedroom. A duvet lay gathered on the floor, beside it an ashtray spilt butts onto the carpet.

  The next set of stairs led to the attic room, filled with junk. The curtains were drawn, but the windows so dirty, the light from the street lamps made little difference. I scanned the room quickly. It was only when I turned to leave that I heard the soft thumping. It seemed to be coming from the cupboard. My stomach flipped as I approached the door, hand out. Hesitated. Opened the door.

  The child had black hair. His blue eyes were wide, his mouth covered with brown parcel tape, a slit cut in the middle to allow him to breath. He looked up at me in terror. He kicked his foot against the bottom of the cardboard box in which he had been placed. It thumped softly against the inside of the wardrobe. He was the length of my forearm, maybe four or five months old. He reached out his arms to me, his small fists balled as I lifted him.

  At that moment the door downstairs slammed shut, the window in the attic room shuddering with the force. I heard Conlon swearing as his footsteps thudded on the stairs. I tried to crouch down, hide behind the piles of lumber, but the child in my arms was squirming now, kicking to be free. He cried lightly; the sounds stopped below and I heard Conlon come to the stairs leading up to us.

  “Who’s up there?” he shouted. I imagined his foot on the step. I heard thudding and it took me a moment to realize it was someone banging on the front door.

  Conlon didn’t move for a second. More banging at the door, insistent. Finally I heard his footfalls as they retreated down the hallway.

  * * * *

  I listened to the muffled conversation beneath us. Momentarily I heard someone mount the stairs.

  “Just to keep you happy, Trevor,” a voice I recognized said. The policeman - Devlin. His bulk appeared in the doorway for a second.

  “All empty,” he called without looking in.

  Several minutes later I heard them leaving the house.

  * * * *

  Weeks later we were at Sunday Mass. Afterwards, Karen stopped to light a candle for Michael, our stolen child. In the porchway I met Devlin again. He was waiting for us, a plastic bag in his hand.

  “I saw you in there,” he said. “Thought you might be interested. We got a tip off a week or two ago. Saw someone breaking into your neighbour Conlon’s house. When we arrived, we arrested him labelling clothes from charity bags for his shop. He claimed there was someone in his house. When we went back later, we found birth certificates for a number of children. Turns out Trevor’s been smuggling children into Ireland for illegal adoption.”

  Karen and I looked at him. He paused, as if waiting for us to speak, before continuing. “He brought in five children in all. We’ve traced four. One seems to have vanished.”

  I had to swallow several times, before speaking. “What happened to him?”

  “Well, I hope whoever has him will look after him a hell of a lot better than Conlon did. Or than the state would. Maybe he’ll be lucky.”

  Karen placed her hand on my arm. “We need to go.”

  Devlin nodded. “I understand.” He turned to leave, then faced us again. “I
almost forgot,” he said, taking a small teddy bear from the plastic bag he was carrying. “I picked up this for your wee boy. Michael’s his name, isn’t that right?”

  I could not respond. Karen, however, replied in a clear voice. “No. Paul’s his name. After his father.”

  “Of course,” Devlin said, leaning into the pram. He placed the toy beside the sleeping child, rubbed his index finger against the child’s cheek. “You be sure to spoil him, now.” He straightened up, smiled mildly, scrunched the empty plastic bag into a ball which he stuffed into his coat pocket and walked away from us. He did not look back.

  As Karen fixed Paul’s blanket, I dipped my finger into the water font and said a prayer to Michael. I prayed he would not mind our taking our second chance. I prayed he would not resent Paul’s place with us. I promised him that he still owned a piece of my heart that would never stop being his.

  Then I stepped out into the sunlight with the rest of my family.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE PEOPLE IN THE FLAT ACROSS THE ROAD

  Natasha Cooper

  It had been a ghastly day. I’d decided to work at home so I could finish the proposal for our biggest client’s new campaign. The copy was urgent, you see, because they’d pulled back the meeting by three days. My boss and I were due to make the presentation at ten next morning, and the designers were waiting in the office to pretty up my text and sort out all the PowerPoint stuff for us.

  The trouble was, I hadn’t expected the interruptions: far more at home than in any office; and worse because of having no receptionists or secretaries to fend them off.

  First it was the postman. Not my usual bloke but a temp who couldn’t tell the difference between 16 Holly Road, where I live, and 16 Oak Court, Holly Road, which is a flat just opposite. Even so, I shouldn’t have shouted. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t read much; or speak English, either.

  And he wasn’t to know how many hours I’ve wasted over the past year redirecting all the mail I get that obviously isn’t meant for me. Letters and packages with all sorts of names. I never pay much attention to the names once I’ve seen they’re not mine, so I couldn’t tell you what they were now.

  I opened one parcel by mistake, not having read the label before I ripped off the brown packing tape. Wondering why someone was sending me a whole bunch of phone adapters and wires and stuff, I turned the package over and saw it was meant for the flat. That was when I crossed the road and made my third attempt to introduce myself and sort it out. The funny thing was, you see, that in all the months I’d been dealing with their mail I’d never actually seen any of them. Once or twice, there’d been a hand coming through the net curtains to open or shut a window, but that was all.

  As usual, I got no answer, even though all the lights were on and there was a radio or TV blaring. I thought I heard their footsteps this time too, and voices, but I suppose it could have been imagination.

  Anyway, I was so cross they couldn’t be bothered to do their neighbourly bit that I stopped bothering to take their mail across the road. I didn’t even correct the wrongly addressed stuff (some of the senders missed out the Oak Court bit too; it wasn’t only the postmen who got it wrong). Instead I’d scrawl “Not Known Here” or “No one of this name at this address” on the packages and envelopes before stuffing them back into the postbox on my way to work. If the packages were too big, which happened occasionally, I’d stomp round to the post office on Saturday mornings and dump them at the end of the counter. It took much longer than carting them across the road and leaving them on the flat’s doorstep, but it was way more satisfying.

  Which maybe explains—though of course it doesn’t excuse—the way I shouted at the poor stand-in postie this time round. He took three steps backwards and muttered some kind of apology, so of course I had to join in and explain I hadn’t meant to yell.

  Anyway, he was only the first. When it wasn’t people collecting for charity—decent, kind, clean, well-spoken people, who didn’t deserve to be glared at and sent away empty-handed—it was miserable, hopeless-looking young men trying to sell me ludicrously expensive low-grade dusters I didn’t want. Or Jehovah’s Witnesses. How was I supposed to flog my brain into producing light-hearted, witty sales copy with all this going on? I was ripe for murder, I can tell you.

  And then there was the small man in decorator’s overalls who had the cheek to ring my bell and tell me my neighbours had been complaining about my overhanging hedge. He offered to cut it back and take away the debris for some even more ludicrous sum. He got all the insults I’d been choking down all morning, and no apology, and I still think I was justified. Almost. At least I didn’t lay a hand on him.

  When I’d slammed the door in his face, I went back to my copy and re-read the pathetically little I’d managed to write. I had to delete the whole lot. You can imagine how I felt. I bolted some yogurt for lunch and spilled most of it down my T-shirt, so I had to change that and fling it in the washing machine, which wasted yet more time.

  Then it was the end of the school day and there were shrieks from all the little darlings who’d been pent up in their classrooms for too long, and the exasperating heavy slap-slap of a football being kicked up and down the road. And chat from the little darlings’ attending adults, who all seemed to want to stand right outside my front windows, either talking to each other or jabbering into their mobiles.

  When they’d all gone and the street was blessedly quiet once more, the doorbell went again. I shrieked out some filthy word or other (actually, I know quite well what it was, but I don’t want to shock you) and ran to the door, wrenching it open and snarling, only to see my ten-year-old godson, looking absolutely terrified.

  I apologised again, of course, and discovered he’d only come to return the tin in which I’d delivered his birthday cake. He’s great, and on normal days I enjoy his company. He has an interesting, offbeat take on the world, and his talk of school and sports and music often gives me ideas I can use for work when we’re pushing children’s products. So I had to ask him in and offer him some Diet Coke, which was the only suitable thing I had in the house. Still looking scared, he shook his head and scuttled away like Hansel escaping from the wicked witch’s gingerbread house.

  I managed a quiet hour after that, and I had about twenty-five percent of the copy written when the early evening crowd started: the meter readers, more charity-collectors, and then the party canvassers. Apparently we were going to have a by-election the next week. I eventually got down to real work at about eight, which was the time I’d have got back from the office on an ordinary day. I was spitting.

  Still, I got the copy finished in the end—and it had just the right edgy but funny tone for the product. I was pretty sure the clients would like it. But when I saw it was half eleven, I knew the poor designers weren’t going to be happy. I’d kept them hanging on for hours. I hoped they wouldn’t be so angry they screwed up. We needed the presentation to look brilliant as well as sound it.

  So I e-mailed my text to them with a genuine apology, and asked them to get it back to me by eight the next morning with all the pix and whatever stylish tarting-up they could manage. Then I copied everything to my boss, with an e-mail to say I’d meet him at the clients’ at nine forty-five. That would give me plenty of time to have the crucial six hours’ sleep and get my hair sorted and pick the best clothes to say it all: cool; monied; efficient; sexy.

  As you can imagine, I was pretty hyper by this time, so I took a couple of sleeping pills. Only over-the-counter herbal stuff. I think they’re mainly lettuce, and the label on the packet always makes me laugh: “Warning: May Cause Drowsiness.”

  I was calming down a bit. I chased the pills with a glass of wine and a bit of bread and cream cheese with a smear of mango chutney, which reminds me of the sandwiches my mother used to make me when I was ill as a child.

  So, fed, wined, and drugged to the eyeballs with lettuce, I took myself to bed. Just to be sure, I o
pened The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which hardly ever fails to send me to sleep. It did its stuff pretty soon. I ripped off my specs and turned out the light, to find myself in that state where you fall hundreds of feet through the air, while still being plastered to the mattress. Heaven, really.

  Through the lovely muzzy feeling, I thought I heard the phone ring once or twice. I ignored it and it stopped long before the answering machine could’ve cut in.

  The next thing I knew I was floating on twinkling turquoise waves in warm sunlight with dolphins leaping in the distance and a raucous London voice yelling, “Go, Go, Go.” I’d barely got my eyes open when there was this almighty crash downstairs and thundering feet and cracking wood as my bedroom door burst open, spraying splinters and bits of the lock all over the place. I got chips of wood in my hair and all over my face.