The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Part 13

I had a revelation this morning. I focus on the apples he feeds me because I know they're not poisoned.

My window faces out onto a patchy field. Over to the right, there's a small rose garden, the blood-red flowers nodding lazily in the breeze, and at the far end, before the woods begin, there is a large apple tree. I've seen the man down there. He's fat and pink and simple-faced, like a pig in overalls. I've called out to him, but he keeps his back to me and never replies. The only sounds I hear are the birds and the steady, delicate click as he clips apples from the lower branches.

So I know where they come from. I can turn them over, and check that the skin is clear and unbroken, that the fruit sealed inside is safe to eat.

But something must be poisoning me. Because how else does he get the tray in without disturbing me? Also, I remember . . . words. Things he must have said. We're all made of stardust. Or perhaps I sleep too long and dream too much.

No, he has said that, I'm sure.

And also: Nothing dies.

But he knows that's not true, doesn't he?

Another memory.

I'm in a small tearoom. There are flowers on the wallpaper, wooden beams overhead and ta.s.sels on the curtains, and I keep hearing the elegant c.h.i.n.k of teaspoons on china. A journalist is sitting opposite me, older and more austere than I'd been expecting. (Many of them were prettier than I told you). But this is Whitrow, Jane Ellis' hometown, and I have no right to expect a warm welcome. Her name is almost sacred here.

"Why did you use the roses?" she says.

Jane Ellis' body was never found, but a rose was delivered to her husband the year after her disappearance, with a note that said, "She lives forever". The families of his other victims had similar deliveries.

This is only one of the details I stole.

"I found it moving," I say. "Poignant. It felt true."

"Did you ever worry you were exploiting the victims?"

I think of those grapes again. Arrogantly, I think of the champagne that was made from them.

"I don't see it that way," I tell her. "Something terrible happened to those girls, and I wanted to tell their stories." I spread my hands. "Carefully. Delicately, even. I hope I did them justice."

She looks at me. I suppose she can see through that thin screen of n.o.ble intentions to the sales and nationwide tour behind. The expression on her face reminds me of the one you had, although yours was worse because of what it replaced.

She changes tack. "n.o.body was ever caught. Does that concern you?"

It takes me a second, and then I almost smile. Am I frightened? It's nothing to do with me. I've touched it from a safe distance, skimming the surface so gently my fingers came away clean.

The idea is absurd, and yet I don't say I'm not.

The truth is, I almost like the idea of danger as long as I'm safe.

She will live forever.

Last night, I opened my eyes and everything was still pitch-black. I didn't know what had woken me . . . then I heard it again and my heart caught. A woman out in the corridor. Sobbing and begging, although the words were incoherent. He had brought someone back and was dragging her past my cell.

Something thumped against the wall. She screamed.

The next thing I knew, I was hammering on the door, shouting out your name. Slurring it. Even after they'd moved away, I was still punching the wall. This morning, I came to my senses and found myself hugging my knees in the far corner of the room, the mattress overturned and flung aside.

On the ground by the door: my apples, my paper.

I've no idea how he got them in here but you can see that this time, at the top, he's written something himself.

The controversy fed the attendance at the readings on my tour. I suppose he'll have been in the audience at one of them. It's possible he was just curious then, but perhaps he'd already felt a kinship. That seems most likely that I was part of this from the moment I heard Jane Ellis' name and noted it down in my pad.

We're brothers.

My body juddered pa.s.sively, strapped in the back seat of his truck. My mind was swirling, drifting. What had happened? Had someone drugged me? Attacked me? I could remember being in the bar, then outside smoking, then . . . then the fear arrived quickly absurdly like I'd fallen into icy water.

We're the same. You understand.

He's told me those other things since, while I've been half-dreaming. Nothing ever dies. He means it just becomes something else, like grapes become wine, and I think that's why he killed those girls: to change them somehow. That's why, in his mind, we're the same: because I did something similar to them with my writing.

I hope I did them justice.

I've not heard the girl again.

She will live forever.

I saw him kill her. I heard the commotion outside, then watched through the bars. I didn't want to, but it's what I do, isn't it?

The man dragged her across the field to the rose garden. Then he squatted awkwardly above her, reached round . . . and his elbow started sawing the air. I couldn't see, but I could hear: her sobbing became a horrific, gargling cough for a few seconds, and then she fell shockingly silent. The man stood up and walked away. Her body was still for a moment, then rolled slowly onto its back, and a hand began lazily brushing at a flower. She died in her own time. I watched her blood soaking slowly into the earth beneath the roses, and I thought: The next petals will be made of her stardust.

So she will live forever.

And then . . . all I could do immediately after what happened next was sit and stare at the apple in my hand. Finally, I understood. I'm eating it now, even though I realize every one of them was poisoned. The fruit sealed inside was exactly the problem. But it's mine.

This is what happened.

An hour later, I saw the man return. I watched him pick up the body carefully and delicately. I watched him take it down to the bottom of the garden. And then I watched him bury it, with all the others, in the ground beneath the apple tree.

A PLACE FOR VIOLENCE.

Kevin Wignall.

DAN WAS MESMERIZED by the young guy in the pool. He was in his late teens or early twenties and looked about as graceful and athletic in the water as anyone he'd ever seen.

Of course, he probably wouldn't have been mesmerized if it hadn't been for the wheelchair. It had been there when Dan came out, against the metal railing of the steps with a towel on its seat. The kid was the only one in the pool but it had still been a few minutes before Dan had accepted the chair had to be his.

That's how long it had taken him to notice that his legs weren't doing any of the work, that they were thin and undeveloped against the kid's swimmer's torso. Even so, he produced the impression of someone who left the handicap on the poolside.

When the pool boy brought his drink Dan turned his attention to his book, looking up every few minutes, a glance at the kid's steady soothing progress up and down the pool, a glance to the hotel.

He'd taken a lounger by the side of the pool. The ones in front of the hotel faced across the pool to the beach and the ocean but he wanted to see the hotel. It wasn't a bad view anyway, the double-storey main building, the single-storey annex, both with their high thatched roofs. And the pool was fringed on all four sides by gardens and tall palms.

He'd almost finished his drink when the view deteriorated dramatically. He heard the pool boy first, a cheery, "Good morning, Mr Tully."

Mr Tully either didn't think so or didn't see why he had to share the sentiment with a pool boy. The guy was in his late thirties, probably only a few years older than Dan but he looked like he'd been living dog years. He was balding, fat, too tanned, yet held himself with a proprietary, walk-on-water confidence. He sullied the place.

His wife had a conversation with the pool boy, so quiet that Dan didn't pick out a single word. She was slim in a tired way, blonde, with body language that was desperate to be decorative and inoffensive to her husband Dan could see it was killing her.

The two kids were the same. Maybe it wasn't killing them yet, but it would. They were blonde, a boy and a girl, their builds teetering on the brink, showing they could yet take after either parent. The girl was maybe eight, the boy a year or two older and they both moved with the timid attentiveness of kids who were terrified of their father. Whenever possible, they chose to stand behind their mother.

Tully had taken his shirt and sungla.s.ses off now and looked about fifteen months pregnant. He walked across to the steps and clicked his fingers at the pool boy. He pointed at the wheelchair.

"Get this piece of junk out of here." There was a hint of something in his accent, Boston maybe. "My kids trip and hurt themselves, there'll be h.e.l.l to pay."

His kids had each arranged themselves on a lounger next to their mother and were showing no childlike desire to get in the water. The pool boy approached and took hold of the wheelchair handles but spoke quietly to Tully, gesturing to the swimmer.

Tully was having none of it, and said, "So he's a cripple, that doesn't give him the right to endanger other people. Move it."

Dan wondered if this was possibly the cra.s.sest person on the planet.

The pool boy bowed and pushed the chair along the poolside, reluctant to disobey one guest or to inconvenience another. But as if sensing the discomfort of the pool boy, and perhaps having heard some of the exchange, the kid turned on to his back and called, "It's okay, I'm done." He was American too.

He turned in the water and glided over to the side where the pool boy was waiting with the chair. He heaved himself out at the same time as Tully crashed into the water at the other end, not even using the steps after causing such a scene about his access to them.

The pool boy held the wheelchair steady and the kid pulled himself up. He'd lost all his aquatic grace now, but he didn't do a bad job of getting into the chair and Dan reckoned there was a residue of movement or sensation in his legs. He knew the kid wouldn't have thanked him for it, but he couldn't help thinking to himself, "too bad".

The kid didn't hang around once he was in the chair. He folded the towel over his lap, put another around his shoulders and wheeled back along to the hotel, as cool about it as a kid on a skateboard.

Tully had been swimming furiously, throwing up a lot of spray, but he stopped to look as the kid wheeled away. He looked smug, but with that victory under his belt, he turned to his family and called out, "Pete, get yourself in here. You too, sugar."

The two kids stirred and Dan took that as his cue to leave. Tully saw him getting up and looked over, as if wanting to stare him down or ask what his problem was. Dan ignored him, but as he pa.s.sed Mrs Tully and the kids he smiled and said, "How's it going?" They smiled back uncertainly, but didn't speak.

Later in the afternoon, Dan found the kid sitting in the terrace bar. He was reading and apart from an elderly couple in the far corner he was there on his own. Dan ordered a Tiger Beer from the bar and strolled over.

"Hey, mind if I join you?" He saw what the kid was reading, The Stranger by Camus, and wondered if befriending him was a mistake.

But the kid smiled and said, "Sure I'm struggling with this book anyway."

Dan held up his Murakami doorstop as he sat down and said, "Me too." He put out his hand and said, "Dan Borowski."

They shook hands.

"Luke Williams."

The waiter came with Dan's beer but once they were on their own again, he said, "So what brings you here, Luke?"

"Just a vacation, you know." Dan swigged from the beer and nodded. Luke laughed then and said, "I'm going to college next year, Harvard . . ."

"Good on ya."

"Thanks. Anyway, I wanted to get away on my own, you know, like travelling, but I've never done it before so this is my first big adventure."

"Enjoying it?"

Luke smiled and said, "Not really. The spa treatments are good."

He shrugged and said, "What about you, why are you here?"

"Mate, I'm Australian, Bali's where we come to relax." He watched a trickle of condensation making a run down the side of the beer bottle, then said, "Truth is, I was meant to meet an ex-girlfriend out here but she had to cancel at the last minute. Thought I might as well come anyway."

That was half true, at least. He was meeting Juliet the following week, but in Sydney, and she was an old girlfriend, not an ex an important difference when it came to reunions. There was no need for Luke to know all that, nor that he lived in London and was probably the only Australian who'd never been to Bali before.

Luke didn't seem to know how to respond and said, "What do you do?"

"Security a.n.a.lyst." That killed that line of conversation. "How d'you end up in the chair?"

Luke shrugged and said, "Three years ago, riding home from a friend's house, some guy doing around sixty knocked me off my bike. They didn't think I'd pull through, then they said my legs were finished, but I got a little bit back. I can walk a little way with a frame."

He reeled it all off with the speed of someone who knew it like a mantra Dan guessed the question always got asked sooner or later.

"The guy go to prison?"

There had been no bitterness in the description of the accident or the injury, but the wound was still raw when it came to the guy who'd done it.

Luke sipped at his drink and Dan noticed the muscle under his left eye twitching as he said, "The d.i.c.k had been drinking hard, but him and his wife swapped seats. She claimed I'd come speeding off the sidewalk and into their path. I knew what I saw, but there were no other witnesses. The pair of them walked. I still see the guy around, still drives like a jerk."

"That can't be easy, seeing him all the time, knowing he got off with it."

"You have to live with it, I guess. I mean, what can you do about it?"

"You could kill him." Dan waited a beat to let the shock sink in, then laughed and said, "The world's full of jerks. Look at that guy this morning out by the pool."

"Brian Tully," said Luke with a mixture of contempt and grudging respect.

Dan looked askance and said, "You know the guy?"

"Give it a couple days, you'll know him too. He's the kind of guy who makes himself known. I heard him telling someone in the restaurant the other night, he's like a mobster from Vegas."

So Tully really was a jerk. Probably liked to act the tough guy but it was undoubtedly nine parts swagger, one part bullying.

"Luke, I'll guarantee he's from Vegas, but any guy who brags about being a mobster has gotta be way down the pecking order." He swigged at his beer and added, "Probably still not a guy you'd wanna cross."

Luke nodded, but Dan could see he had a lot of pluck, that the presence of Tully and his insults was a big part of why he wasn't enjoying this vacation, and that he'd give anything to be able to get out of his chair and give the guy a smack. It was almost certainly better for him that he couldn't.

Luke visibly let the thought go and became brighter as he said, "What are you doing for dinner tonight?"

"I reckon we could eat here in the hotel, maybe eight o'clock, pick up some girls, steal a boat how about it?"

Luke laughed and said, "I could manage the dinner part of it."