The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Part 39

"Oh, ick."

"Quite," said the Governor. "You must understand, our prisoners are not here to reform, or repent. Only the very worst individuals ever end up here, and they stay here till they die. However long that takes. No reprieves, and no time off for good behaviour."

"How did you get this job?" said Ms Fate.

"I think I must have done something really bad in a previous existence," the Governor said grandly. "Cosmic payback can be such a b.i.t.c.h."

"You got this job because you got caught," I said.

The Governor scowled. "Yes, well . . . It's not that I did anything really bad . . ."

"Ms Fate," I said, "Allow me to introduce to you Charles Peace, villain from a long line of villains. Burglar, thief, and snapper up of anything valuable not actually nailed down. Safes opened while you wait."

"That was my downfall," the Governor admitted. "I opened Walker's safe, you see; just for the challenge of it. And I saw something I really shouldn't have seen. Something no one was ever supposed to see. I ran, of course, but the Detective tracked me down and brought me back, and Walker gave me a choice. On the spot execution, or serve here as governor until what I know becomes obsolete, and doesn't matter any more. That was seventeen years ago, and there isn't a day goes by where I don't wonder whether I made the right decision."

"Seventeen years?" said Ms Fate. She always did have a soft spot for a hard luck story.

"Seventeen years, four months and three days," said the Governor. "Not that I obsess about it, you understand."

"Is Shock Headed Peter still here?" I said bluntly. "There's no chance he could have got out?"

"Of course not! I did the rounds only an hour ago, and his cell is still sealed. Come on, Detective; if Shock Headed Peter was on the loose in the Nightside again, we'd all know about it."

"Who else have you got down here?" said Ms Fate. "Anyone . . . famous?"

"Oh, quite a few; certainly some names you'd recognize. Let's see; we have the Murder Masques, Sweet Annie Abattoir, Max Maxwell the Voodoo Apostate, Maggie Malign . . . But they're all quite secure, too, I can a.s.sure you."

"I just needed to be sure this place is as secure as it's supposed to be," said Ms Fate. "You'd better prepare a new cell, governor, because I've brought you a new prisoner."

And she looked at me.

I rose to my feet, and so did she. We stood looking at each other for a long moment.

"I'm sorry, Sam," she said. "But it's you. You're the murderer."

"Have you gone mad?" I said.

"You gave yourself away, Sam," she said, meeting my gaze squarely with her own. "That's why I had you bring me here to Shadow Deep, where you belong. Where even you can't get away."

"What makes you think it was me?" I said.

"You knew things you shouldn't have known. Things only the killer could have known. First, at the library. That anthropology text was a dry, stuffy and very academic text. Very difficult for a layman to read and understand. But you just skimmed through it and then neatly summed up the whole concept. The only way you could have done that, was if you'd known it in advance. That raised my suspicions, but I didn't say anything. I wanted to be wrong about you.

"But you did it again, at the autopsy. First, you knew that the heart had been removed before the liver. Dr West hadn't worked that out yet, because the body's insides were such a mess. Second, when I asked you to name the victims in order, you named them all, including the werewolf. Who hasn't been identified yet. Dr West still had him down as a John Doe.

"So, it had to be you. Why, Sam? Why?"

"Because they were going to make me retire," I said. It was actually a relief, to be able to tell it to someone. "Take away my job, my reason for living, just because I'm not as young as I used to be. All my experience, all my years of service, all the things I've done for them, and the authorities were going to give me a gold watch and throw me on the sc.r.a.p heap. Now, when things are worse than they've ever been. When I'm needed more than ever. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

"So I decided I would just take what I needed, to make myself the greatest detective that ever was. With my new abilities, I would be unstoppable. I would go private, like John Taylor and Larry Oblivion and show those wet-behind-the-ears newcomers how it's done . . . I would become rich and famous, and if I looked a little younger, well. . . this is the Nightside, after all.

"Shed no tears for my victims. They were all criminals, though I could never prove it. That's why there was no paperwork on them. But I knew. Trust me; they all deserved to die. They were all sc.u.m.

"I'd actually finished, you know. The werewolf would have been my last victim. I had all I needed. I teleported in and out of the library, which is why no one saw me come and go. But then . . . you had to turn up, the second-best detective in the Nightside, and spoil everything. I never should have agreed to train you . . . but I saw in you a pa.s.sion for justice that matched my own. You could have been my partner, my successor. The things we could have done . . . But now I'm going to have to kill you, and the governor. I can't let you tell. Can't let you stop me, not after everything I've done. The Nightside needs me.

"You'll just be two more victims of the unknown serial killer."

I surged forward with a werewolf's supernatural speed, and grabbed the front of Ms Fate's black leather costume with a G.o.dling's strength. I closed my hand on her chest and ripped her left breast away. And then I stopped, dumbstruck. The breast was in my hand, but under the torn open leather there was no wound, no spouting blood. Only a very flat, very masculine chest. Ms Fate smiled coldly.

"And that's why you'd never have guessed my secret ident.i.ty, Sam. Who would ever have suspected that a man would dress up as a super-heroine, to fight crime? But then, this is the Nightside, and like you said; we all have our secrets."

And while I stood there, listening with an open mouth, she palmed a nausea gas capsule from her belt and threw it in my face. I hit the stone floor on my hands and knees, vomiting so hard I couldn't concentrate enough to use any of my abilities. The governor called for two of his golems, and they came and dragged me away. They threw me into a cell, and then nailed the door shut, and sealed it forever.

No need for a trial. Ms Fate would have a word with Walker, and that would be that. That's how I always did it.

So here I am, in Shadow Deep, in the dark that never ends. Guess whose cell they put me next to. Just guess.

One of these days they'll open this cell, and find nothing here but my clothes.

THE OTHER HALF.

Mick Herron.

WHEN SHE'D FINISHED with the computer she returned to the bathroom, set the boiler's timer to constant, and collected the shirt: a black silk collarless affair evidently saved for special occasions. She carried this downstairs, turning the thermostat up as high as it would go as she pa.s.sed, then hung it on the kitchen door while she sorted out her remaining tasks. The clock on the wall read Nearly Time To Go, but she didn't need telling; her body already sending out signals pinp.r.i.c.ks at the back of the neck, a fizziness in the blood; the on-the-edge messages the primal self transmits at useful moments. She'd promised herself ten minutes, max, and they were almost up. Kitchen jobs done, she retrieved the shirt and let herself out the back door, locking it behind her with the key from the hook next to the cooker. For a moment she stood fixed to the spot, gauging the quality of the neighbourhood noise. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She released the breath she'd been holding, then placed the key on the windowledge, before looking down at the shirt in her hand. "Now, what are we going to do with you?" she asked; though if the truth were told, she already knew.

"Reformatted," Joe repeated.

"The hard drive, yes."

"Which is bad," he ventured.

"You don't get computers, do you, Joe?"

Joe Silvermann shook his head regretfully. While he didn't mind that he didn't get computers, he hated disappointing people.

Tom Parker said, "Basically, Tessa wiped it. Erased all the work stored in the machine plus all the software loaded on it, which, trust me, comes to an expensive piece of damage on its own. Even without her other party pieces."

"Such as the heating."

"I was only away two days. Imagine if I'd been gone all week? Or a fortnight?"

"Or a long cruise," Joe suggested. "Four weeks, sometimes six. Two months, even. I've seen adverts."

"It doesn't bear thinking about," Tom said. "House was like a heatwave as it was. The bill'll be ruinous. Then there were the kitchen j.a.pes. Fridge and freezer doors swinging open, oven on full blast. And the phone, she'd left the phone off the hook. After dialling one of those premium rate chatlines. Jesus!"

"It's not good," Joe agreed, shaking his head. "Not good at all."

"And what she did with my shirt . . . "

He'd been steadily growing redder through this recital, and Joe was worried Tom Parker might accidentally have a seizure or something; perhaps a mild apoplectic episode requiring medical intervention. He was a youngish man, so this wasn't desperately likely, but as Joe's first-aid expertise stopped at dialling 999, he thought it best to steer conversation away from the shirt. "You'll forgive my saying so, I know," he said. "Not only because we are friends, but because you're a fair man. But you keep saying Tessa did this. Did she perhaps leave a note? Or some other declaration of some description?"

"Of course she didn't, Joe. We're talking criminal damage here."

"She seemed a nice young woman," he mourned.

"Well," Tom Parker said, "don't they all? To start with."

He'd first met Tom Parker three months previously, at a French market in Gloucester Green, where they'd fallen into conversation over the relative merits of the olives on offer. Tom had been with Tessa Tessa Greenlaw and Joe, in the way of such meetings, had a.s.sumed them an established couple. He himself had been with Zoe at the time, and for all he knew, Tom and Tessa made the same a.s.sumption about them. Not that Zoe had been on the spot when the conversation started, of course she had a way of bringing such encounters to an early close but by the time she returned from a nearby wine stall, Joe was already ushering his new friends in the direction of a coffee bar.

"You'll never stop collecting strays, will you?" she'd said later.

"Hardly strays. He runs a language school? She is an NHS, what are they calling them now? Managers? Hardly strays, Zoe."

"It's the kind of thing old people do."

Joe would never get to be old, but neither of them knew that yet. Besides, as he said, the pair weren't strays: Tom Parker was mid-thirties, with a relaxed, confident way which expressed itself in his clothing, his smile, and the direct expression he wore when he shook Joe's hand. "Joe," he'd said. "Good to meet you. This is Tessa." Tessa was a few years younger: a sweet-faced blonde woman whose small, squarish, black-framed spectacles gave the impression that she was trying to look less attractive than she was, though to Joe's mind they made her look rather s.e.xy. While waiting for coffee, the group swapped life details.

"I've never met a private detective," Tom had said.

Joe shrugged modestly.

"Well, now you've met two," Zoe told him.

"Do you solve many crimes?"

"That depends on what you mean by 'solve'," Joe said carefully. "And also 'crimes'."

"It sounds fascinating," Tessa said. She had a rather breathy voice, to Joe's ear.

"It sounds fascinating," Zoe echoed sarcastically as they made their way home later.

"She was trying to show an interest, that's all. I thought they were a nice couple."

Though as it turned out, they were no longer a couple by the time Joe next encountered Tom.

This had been in a bar in the city centre, where Joe had been watering a police contact of his, one Bob Poland, who had no useful information on a young runaway case Joe was working on, but managed to drag it out to five large scotches anyway. Joe himself had been nursing a beer, because there was no point getting compet.i.tive with a thirsty cop. He was only halfway through it when Bob had to leave his shift was up so was unfolding his newspaper when Tom Parker walked through the door. His language school, Joe remembered as he raised a hand in greeting, was just round the corner. "You remember me?"

"Of course Joe, isn't it?"

"Silvermann."

"From the olive stall."

"Well-"

"The private eye don't worry, I remember."

He often dropped in here for a drink once the working day was done, he told Joe. The pair settled at a table by the window.

"And Tessa, how is she?"

"Oh, I'm not seeing her any more."

"Tom! No! What happened?"

"Well, nothing. Christ, Joe, it's not the death of romance or anything. We dated for a while and now we're not. Simple as that." Something in his expression, though, suggested it wasn't that simple.

"But . . ."

"But what?"

But nothing, Joe had to admit. Nothing he wanted to say out loud. That they had seemed a nice couple, and that nice couples ought to stick together, if only to set an example to everyone else. "Should I would you like another drink?" When all else failed, offer hospitality. "Should I go to the bar?"

"Joe, they have table service." Tom raised a hand for the waitress. "Why do it yourself when you can pay someone else to do it? How about you, you want the other half?"

"Perhaps I will."

Tom ordered their drinks, then went on, "Besides, she's unstable. Was right from the start."

"Unstable?"

"I used to get phonecalls from her in the middle of the night. Checking up. That I was alone, and where I ought to be."

Joe clucked his tongue, shook his head. "Late night phonecalls. Zoe and I, we had a spate a while back. They get tired, they give up. You're sure this was Tessa?"

"Sometimes she'd arrive on my doorstep unexpectedly, or be waiting when I left work. You ever been stalked, Joe?"

"Is it stalking, this? Not just . . ."

"Just what?"

Joe shrugged. "Perhaps she just wants to be with you."

"Feels like stalking to me, mate." He shook his head. "It's a h.e.l.l of a world, Joe, I'm telling you. And most of its problems caused by women."

Well, maybe half, Joe conceded. If you ignored war and famine and stuff.

They fell to talking about other things. The next Joe heard about Tessa, Tom was in his office, outlining the damage.

He had taken a cigarette from a pocket but didn't light it; just held it between finger and thumb as he spoke. "Those phone calls? They never stopped. Oh, she wouldn't speak, but it was her. Middle of the night, and I'm getting woken up to be given the silent treatment. Or not woken up, if you know what I mean."

"Sometimes you're already awake," Joe guessed.