The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 23

BEASTLY PLEASURES.

Ann Cleeves.

WHEN I FAILED my A levels my parents weren't sure what to do with me. But then they've never been quite sure what to do with me. I emerged into the world yelling, fighting to make my presence felt, an alien creature to them, and so I've remained. They are gentle souls, considerate and unworldly, and they consider me a monster. I tell myself that it isn't entirely my fault: my parents were older than most when I was conceived and I am an only child, carrying the weight of their expectations. In a different family, in a freer, less ordered household, I might have been respected, even admired. As it is they regard me with dismay and anxiety. How could someone so unconventional, so physically lovely, belong to them? I am the dark-eyed, shapely cuckoo in their nest.

Of course I set out to fail the exams. It was a challenge: to complete the paper and still achieve so few marks that I'd fail. Almost impossible these days. And harder, I might say, than getting the four As for which the dears had been hoping. All my life I've been bored. I have only survived by playing games. I don't intend to hurt people.

But of course I had hurt them. We sat in the garden discussing my future. They looked grey and disappointed and for a very brief moment I wished I'd pa.s.sed the b.l.o.o.d.y things so that for once they'd have something to celebrate in me. It was very hot. There was a smell of cut gra.s.s and melted tar. In the distance the sound of a hosepipe running and a wood pigeon calling.

"You do realize," I said, "that I could have pa.s.sed them if I'd wanted."

"Of course." My father looked at me over his gla.s.ses. He was a senior social worker and thought he should understand me.

"You've always been a bright girl." My mother wore floral print dresses, which might have been fashionable when she was a student in the seventies. She ill.u.s.trated children's books cats were her speciality, though I'd never been allowed pets because she was allergic to their fur.

"We've decided," she said, "that you should go and work for Uncle George."

George wasn't a real uncle, but a distant cousin of my father's. I'd only met him once at my grandmother's funeral and remember him as a rather glamorous figure, with the look of a thirties movie star. During the service he shot several admiring glances in my direction, but even then I was used to men staring at my body and I took no notice. Vanessa, his wife, was pale, draped in purple chiffon. My parents spoke of the couple occasionally but in no detail. George was a businessman and of course they disapproved of that; I had been brought up to believe that money was grubby and something to be ignored. George and Vanessa lived in London and that alone gave me a frisson of excitement. In the big city there would surely be scope for new adventures and I'd find a way to keep boredom at bay.

It seemed anyway that I would have no say in the matter. With an uncharacteristic decisiveness my parents told me that everything had been arranged. I would leave by train the following morning. I would become Uncle George's a.s.sistant and return at the end of the year to re-sit my A levels. Working for a living might give me a sense of responsibility. The next day they took me to the station. They stood on the platform waving me off, looking at once sad, guilty and very relieved.

Uncle George had a house in Camden, between King's Cross and Regent's Ca.n.a.l. He was waiting for me at Paddington and in the cab he talked, not expecting any reply.

"Our neck of the woods has certainly gone up in the world. One time you'd only find wh.o.r.es and bag ladies here. Now we live next door to the Guardian and a major publishing house."

I said nothing. I was aware of him sitting beside me. He smelled of sandalwood and something else I couldn't recognize: a chemical, almost medical scent. It occurred to me that for the first time in my life I was nervous. We stopped in a street that seemed industrial rather than domestic in character. George took my hand to help me out and held it for a little longer than necessary. I recognized him as a kindred spirit then, someone for whom the normal boundaries, the conventional rules of everyday life had no meaning.

He pushed open arched double doors in a high brick wall and I followed him into a cobbled courtyard. The rest of the neighbourhood might have been gentrified but this felt like stepping into a scene from d.i.c.kens. There was an L-shaped warehouse or workshop, with grimy barred windows. On the nearest door a sign said "Show Room" though from outside there was nothing to indicate what was being shown. I was suddenly curious about what George's "business" might be. My parents had never discussed it, even when they told me I was to be his a.s.sistant.

To our left was a tall, narrow house, Victorian Gothic, with stone steps leading to another arched door. George took a bra.s.s key from his pocket and unlocked it. It was late afternoon, gloomy for midsummer, with the threat of thunder. I could see nothing of the room inside and paused for a moment on the threshold. George switched on a light and suddenly we were in a different continent. Or even in a different dimension of being. Organic rather than concrete. It was as if we'd been swallowed by a whale or sucked into the belly of a huge beast.

It was an entrance hall with a grand staircase leading away from the centre. But there were no hard edges. The walls were covered with animal skins zebra and different kinds of deer. On the floor were fur rugs, the fur deep brown in colour, dense and very soft. So many that there were only glimpses of polished wood. I stood in astonishment then couldn't help reaching out to stroke the nearest wall. The skin was smooth and surprisingly cool to my touch. George nodded approvingly.

"You obviously have a feel for the work," he said. He set my rucksack next to an umbrella stand made from an elephant's foot and led me on to meet Aunt Vanessa.

He explained more about the business over dinner. We ate steak, very rare as I like it, and drank strong red wine. My parents are practically vegetarians, so the meal alone made me feel I'd moved into quite a different world.

"My great-grandfather founded the company," George said. "He was a big-game hunter and saw the opportunity. All the expat British wanted trophies, a record of the things that they'd shot. And it reminded them of Africa when they came home. A memory of the glories of Empire." He gave a little sigh.

"But surely that sort of thing is outlawed now. Do people shoot game any more? I thought all animals were protected." My parents were members of the Green Party.

"The business is certainly different." He sighed again. "Taxidermy isn't what it was. We have to work with museums now. But I still have private clients, at home and abroad. Of course discretion is essential." He gave a sudden wolfish grin. "Occasionally we operate on the very edge of the law." And I saw that was how he liked to operate. He was a game-player too. A risk-taker.

Throughout this conversation Vanessa was almost silent. Her skin was the colour of a white b.u.t.terfly's wing. How could she eat red meat and drink red wine and stay so pale?

Over the next few weeks I learned more about the business. Only two other people worked in the echoing workshop. All the rooms in the attic were unused, though once there'd been several dozen employees. A serious young man called Harry prepared skins for museums. These were all birds and animals that had died of natural causes or had been killed accidentally. When I first met him he was stuffing a pine marten that had been knocked down on a road in the Highlands. He'd constructed a wire frame and wrapped it with wood wool, before stretching the skin of the animal over it. The marten was a rare and beautiful creature, he said, and most people would never have the opportunity to see it living. He was evangelical about his craft and explained that his exhibits had brought an understanding of natural history to visitors to the museums.

The other employee was Arthur, an elderly man, who'd been in the place since George's father's day. He worked with vats of chemicals and very sharp knives in his own room in the bas.e.m.e.nt. He dealt with the specimens imported from overseas. Only George was made welcome there. Arthur regarded me with suspicion and seldom spoke. Vanessa looked after the show room but few customers turned up by chance. Most of George's personal clients slipped into his office unannounced. I never saw the victims of their slaughter arrive but the completed objects polished ivory tusks on bra.s.s plaques or mounted wildebeest heads were returned to them in an anonymous transit van. I had no moral problem about these transactions. The extinction of a great African mammal would have no real impact on me, and I'd always considered that laws were for breaking. Besides, it was clear that most of George's income came from these illegal commissions. Harry of course would have been horrified, but Harry was engrossed in preparing his museum exhibits and never quite understood what was going on.

As I got to grips with the process of preserving skins, de-scaling tusks and preparing heads for mounting, my relationship with George developed in an unexpected and tantalizing way. I had a.s.sumed that he would want s.e.x with me. All men did. Harry certainly blushed every time I came within yards of him and even the elderly Arthur watched my legs through narrowed eyes as I walked away from him and breathed more heavily when I approached. George, however, seemed impervious to my charms. There would have been no sport in seducing Harry, but George became a challenge. I wore more provocative clothes, allowed my breast to brush against his bare arm when we worked together. Still there was no response. The more that he ignored me, and the longer he made me wait, the more I wanted him. He became an obsession. I dreamed about him at night and woke up thinking about him. He was a married middle-aged man who smelled of sandalwood and borax, but still I wanted him more than I had wanted anything in my life.

It happened quite suddenly when I was least expecting it. By now it was October, damp and misty, with sodden leaves on the ca.n.a.l path and in the Bloomsbury squares where occasionally I wandered when I felt the need to spend some time away from the business. There were no wild London adventures. I spent my evenings with George and Vanessa or alone in my room. I had begun to study for my exams. I wanted to cause a sensation, to jump from the lowest A level marks the school had ever known to the highest, and realized that even for me that would take some effort.

Harry and Arthur had just gone home and Vanessa had closed the showroom and walked over the courtyard into the house to prepare dinner. George put his hand on my shoulder, startling me. Since that first day in the taxi he hadn't touched me.

"We've had a new acquisition," he said. "Would you like to see it?"

Of course I said I would. I'd have agreed to anything he asked at that time. He took my hand and led me upstairs to the empty rooms at the top of the building. There was no corridor one cavernous s.p.a.ce led directly into another. Each was lit by a bare bulb. In the shadows were piles of sacking, the occasional moth-eaten skin, odd tools the function of which I could only guess. As we moved further into the attic, I felt my heart rate increase. I was almost faint. At last we arrived at the furthest door. George asked me to close my eyes. I did as he asked immediately. He stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders and walked forwards with me. I felt his body against my spine and my b.u.t.tocks. With my eyes tight shut I lost all sense of balance and would have stumbled if he hadn't been holding me.

"Now! Open them!'His voice was unsteady with excitement.

It was a tiger. The animal had been skinned where it had been killed in India and the soft tissue of the head, the eyes and the brain removed. That was standard procedure. George had unrolled it and laid it out on the dusty floor for my inspection. In the small, dimly lit room the colours glowed like fire.

"Well?" he demanded.

I thought he'd set this up for me. He'd acquired the tiger just for this moment. It was a token of his admiration. Then he added: "Do you know how much money this will make me? The risk I'm taking by having it here?" And I saw I wasn't the object of his excitement at all.

"It's magnificent." But I couldn't take my eyes from the holes where once the eyes had been. I imagined the skin covering muscle and bone.

"So are you," he said. "You're magnificent too." And now all his attention was focused on me and I pushed away my doubts. He made me wait a little longer while he looked at me at arm's length. He ran his fingers over my head and across my shoulders then lightly over my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, exploring me as I had touched the skins on his wall on my arrival at the house. He undressed me and laid me on the tiger skin and that was where we made love.

He must have realized that we might be interrupted. Perhaps for him that added to the thrill of the encounter. If I'd thought about it I'd probably have been excited by the possibility of discovery too. George had turned no locks. In fact Vanessa must have seen us as soon as she arrived at the top of the stairs, through the string of open doors across the empty rooms to the small chamber where George had laid out the tiger.

We weren't aware of her until it was all over. She could have been watching for some time because she was in the next room when we saw her, motionless and silent. I still don't know if she'd guessed what would take place or if she'd come looking for us with an innocent message about dinner or a phone call. Her face was still white except for two perfectly round red patches on her cheeks. In her hand was a knife she must have s.n.a.t.c.hed from the pile of tools on her way through the attic. George pulled on his trousers and stood up, his hands upturned in supplication.

"Vanessa. I'm sorry."

I saw that he had a small paunch, like a young mother's bulge in the early months of pregnancy. It hung slightly over his belt.

Her face became suffused with red and she lunged at him with the knife, hit him at the top of the paunch and pushed it home. I heard the sound of shattering bone and soft flesh. Then the knife was in the air, spattering blood over the tiger skin. She stabbed him again and again until she was sure he was dead. I slid away from her, holding my clothes to my body.

At last she stood still. "I don't blame you," she said, looking down at me, her face still flushed. She looked more human than I'd ever known her; it was as if someone had blown life back into a ghost. "You're not the first of his playthings."

"What will you do now?" I struggled into my clothes.

"I suppose I should phone the police."

"No!" I was horrified at the thought. Perhaps I was more conventional than I'd believed. The idea of this story becoming public knowledge, of my parents reading about it in the Sunday newspapers, was more than I could bear. And it was clear that I'd meant very little to George. Rather than acquiring the tiger as a gift for me, he'd used me to make his experience of the beast more intense.

"What then?" Vanessa turned to me now as if I were a co-conspirator, as if we'd planned this murder between us.

"In this place there must be a way to dispose of a human body."

"Oh, I don't really know. I've never been involved in that part of the business." We caught each other's eyes and began to laugh. There was something deliciously ludicrous about the whole conversation.

"I know," I said. "I know what to do."

We rolled George's body in the tiger skin and carried him down to Arthur's bas.e.m.e.nt. I've always been a quick learner. The skinning was less complex than I'd expected I'd watched Harry working often enough and it wasn't as if we needed a perfect specimen for the purposes of taxidermy. We weren't planning to preserve Uncle George. That would have been macabre. The bones and pieces of attached flesh went into the bin with the other biological waste for disposal by Camden Council and the skin dissolved very quickly in one of Arthur's buckets. The tiger skin, spattered with blood, was a trickier problem. It had already been rubbed with borax and was partly preserved. In the end we cleaned it as best we could and hung it on the wall in a small room at the back of the house. The stains hardly showed in the dim light and there were other skins of endangered species there. If challenged, Vanessa would say that it was ancient. The man who had shot it could hardly go to the police to make a complaint.

I left London by the last train home, having told my parents that I felt uncomfortable in the presence of Uncle George, implying that he'd made unwelcome advances. They weren't surprised; he must have had that sort of reputation and they seemed almost pleased that I'd decided to return to them. Vanessa drove me to Paddington and we made plans on the way. She was quite a different woman now, full-blooded and decisive. She said she'd tell the staff that George and I had run away together. And then she'd sell the house and the workshop. Even in this climate, the area had changed so dramatically that there'd be a market for all that land, so close to St Pancras and the Eurostar terminal.

A few weeks later I re-sat my exams and achieved marks that brought tears of joy to my parents' eyes. "We always knew you were a good girl," my mother said. I had decided to read politics at university. I thought I had all the necessary qualities to be an effective politician.

I moved into my little room in Oxford almost a year after Vanessa had stabbed her husband. From my suitcase I took a small wooden box. Inside was a perfectly preserved part of George's anatomy. A memento of those months in London, as potent for me as the tiger had been for him. The exhibit was surprisingly small. In the end, that day, I hadn't resisted the temptation to practise my skills at taxidermy. In more than one sense I had stuffed Uncle George.

THE WALLS.

Mark Billingham.

IT WAS PROBABLY not the nicest hotel in Huntsville, but I had a good idea that it wasn't the worst either, so I didn't have a lot to complain about. Truth was, I'd booked the Palms over the Internet, so I didn't know too much about anything until I checked in. Besides which, I'd stayed in places that made this one seem like the d.a.m.n Ritz or whatever, so I was happy enough with a bed I could sleep in and food that didn't come back to haunt me.

That was when I first saw her, in the restaurant at the Huntsville Palms Hotel.

It was seven o'clock or somewhere around there and the place was pretty packed and she was sitting at a big table just across from my small one. She and everyone else at the table with her were talking in hushed voices, which made a nice change from the loudmouth pair behind me who talked about the cost of bedroom furniture for an hour or more, like they were saving the planet or some s.h.i.t. I turned around to stare at one point. I was hoping they'd see that they were putting me right off my chicken-fried steak, but it didn't do any good. I really don't know how either of them had the time to eat anything with all that jabbering, but they clearly did because they both looked like Mack trucks with heads.

I'd seen a lot of people that size since I'd arrived in Texas.

From where I was sitting I didn't have a great view of her, but what I could see looked pretty good, so I kept glancing over and eventually she turned to try and catch the eye of the waitress. There wasn't really a moment between us, nothing like that. But there was maybe a half-smile or something before she got the waitress's attention and turned away. I just kept on eating and flicking through the local paper, happy enough to make up the rest of it in my head, the way men do sometimes.

She presses something into my hand when I run into her on the way out of the men's room. Her room number scrawled on a napkin.

She says, "Let's not bother with names," when we get together later on, while she's looking me straight in the eye and taking off her shirt. "Let's just enjoy each other," she whispers. "Get out of our heads and go crazy for one night ..."

There was plenty of strong drink on her table, bottles of beer and red wine. It looked like some sort of family party, even though n.o.body looked too excited to be there or smiled a whole lot. Looking back, it's not hard to understand why, but at the time I didn't think a great deal of it. There weren't a whole lot of parties in what pa.s.ses for my family, so it's not like I'm any great expert or anything. They were putting it away, is all I'm saying, her as much as anyone, reaching for those bottles to fill in the silences. That time she tried to find a waitress? That was so she could order another couple of beers.

"You like what you see?" she says, when she's finally naked, and I think it's pretty obvious that I do, because I'm naked too by then. She finishes the beer she's drinking and puts the empty bottle down. I say something that makes her laugh and she reaches out for me, pulls me down on to the bed then moans as she rolls on top.

I had the two older women at the table marked down as the mother and maybe an aunt and I figured that the young guy with the shaved head was her brother. He had the same eyes and the features were pretty similar. He was probably a couple of years younger than me, while she was around the same age I was. I couldn't be sure, because I hadn't got a good look at her close up.

The bedroom-furniture couple had squeezed out from behind their table and gone, which made hanging around easier.

I ordered pecan pie with whipped cream.

I watched the cars pulling in and out of the lot outside.

I spent a few minutes looking at the crossword then gave up.

I wasn't drinking, myself. It's been a good few years since I did any of that, so I sat there with coffee once I'd done eating, trying to make the newspaper last. There was plenty of stuff about what would be going down at the Walls the following day, but I skipped all that and lingered instead over the local news and the crazy cla.s.sifieds. I've always loved that stuff.

The s.h.i.t that people try to sell, the lonely hearts, the adult services.

For a small town with only one major industry and a good percentage of its population behind bars, there were plenty of ma.s.sage parlours and the like. Escort agencies and strip joints and saunas. I knew the women in the pictures were not the ones anyone was likely to get if they showed up, but I'm not a monk or anything and they were nice enough to look at for a while. I turned the paper over when the waitress came to the table with a refill, then sat and drank sweet black coffee for another ten minutes, while the day dimmed outside and the restaurant started to empty.

Just sipping coffee and watching the girl across the top of the mug. Staring through the steam at the chain around her ankle and the hand she laid on one of the old women's arms. At the back of her neck, where the fine blonde hairs ran down beneath the collar of her blouse.

I'd been thinking about trying to catch a movie or something, but in the end I just drove around for a while, trying to find a station that wasn't playing cowboy music. I took the car on to I-45, south-west into Walker County, and after a while I picked up signs to Huntsville State Park. I parked in the picnic area next to a gathering of RVs and camper vans and got talking to a guy who was cooking sausages and pork chops on one of those cheap barbecue sets you can pick up at gas stations. He seemed decent and we chatted about nothing in particular for ten minutes or so, then I walked down to the lake. The moon was like a dinner plate. You could see clear across the water to where the pines were thick and black on the other side, but after a while it started to get cold and I only had a thin jacket on, so I walked back through the trees to the car and drove back to the hotel.

I swear I was thinking about nothing but television, but when I walked towards the stairs, I caught sight of her sitting at the small bar in a room just off the reception area. She had her back to me, but I knew it was her. She was on her own, dipping nachos into a bowl of salsa and talking to the woman who ran the place, and I decided there probably wouldn't be anything much worth watching on TV anyway.

I sat a couple of seats away and ordered a c.o.ke and, when I'd got it, I asked if she wouldn't mind sliding the nachos along. I know it sounds like a line, but the truth was, those chops and sausages had made me hungry again. She pa.s.sed the bowl and moved into the chair next to mine, said she was glad someone was taking the d.a.m.n nachos away, because otherwise she might have eaten every single one.

"I love these things," I said, grabbing a handful and thinking that she hadn't got any need to worry about a few extra pounds.

"I'd ask if you wanted to have a drink with me." She nodded towards my gla.s.s. "But that's not the sort of drink I had in mind."

"Sorry."

"I'm sorry too."

She had that great accent, you know? All those long, flat vowels, but not syrupy and stupid like some. Musical more than anything, and definitely sounding good on her.

"Can't you just pretend it's got rum in it?" I asked.

"I like rum and c.o.ke," she said. "I might have one myself when this is finished." She raised her beer bottle and I leaned over and touched my gla.s.s to it.

"Happy to keep you company though," I said.

She was probably a couple of years older than me, but the light wasn't too good in the place and I wasn't bothered either way. Her hair was dirty-blonde, a bob growing out, and though her eyes were already starting to glaze over just a little, they were big and green enough. She wore a dark blouse and skirt and when she leaned towards the bar I could just see a thin, white bra-strap and the gap between flesh and material a little lower down.

"How long are you in town for?" she asked.

"I'm heading home tomorrow."

"Where's home?"

"It keeps changing," I said.

"Originally, then."

"Wisconsin."