The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9 Part 39

"When did you meet?" I was curious for most young men those who had survived had recently returned from the war.

"I first met Betty when I called here regarding a life a.s.surance policy." He edged closer to me and I could smell some kind of cloying scent, his hair oil perhaps. It made me feel a little sick. "They'll let Betty out soon, won't they? I mean she couldn't have done what they say."

"I couldn't possibly say, Mr Winslow. The police think she is the only one who had the opportunity to poison her mama."

Winslow looked worried as he shut the tea caddy he was holding and replaced it on the shelf.

"If they find her guilty she will hang."

His body tensed and for the first time I felt I was witnessing true emotion. "She can't. She's innocent."

"How can you be so sure, Mr Winslow?"

When he didn't answer I experienced a sudden feeling of dread. I was alone with this man and I only had his word that the story of his a.s.sociation with Betty Bevan was true.

I decided to enquire further. "You served in the war, Mr Winslow?"

"Naturally. I was at Wipers and Pa.s.schendaele. Why? You didn't think I was a conshy, did you? I wouldn't have got far with Betty if I had been. She could never stand cowards."

"You were fortunate, then."

"How do you mean?"

"To have got back alive. My brother, Jack, died in the last days of the war. He was, er ... wounded in 1916 and he came home. But after a year he said he felt a little better and he insisted on going back. He didn't have to because he still wasn't right but ... He felt ... he felt obliged." I could feel my hands shaking and my eyes were stinging with unshed tears. I knew that I had been foolish to bare my soul to this man. But feelings long suppressed can bubble to the surface when one least expects it.

I saw Winslow shuffle his feet as though my raw outburst had embarra.s.sed him. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I understand, I really do. I saw things over in France that ..." His face clouded. Then he straightened his shoulders and gave a cheerless smile. "But you have to keep your spirits up, don't you ... think of the future. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile and all that."

I took a deep breath. Some things were best dealt with by stoicism and a cheerful att.i.tude. Other ways might lead to madness. And there was a question I had to ask.

"The life a.s.surance policy you mentioned ... was it for Mrs Bevan?"

His pale-blue eyes widened in alarm for a second then he composed his features. "That information's confidential, I'm afraid, Miss."

"You might have to tell the police. If Betty stands to gain from her mother's death ..."

"I know what you're hinting at and it's nonsense," he said, taking another step towards me.

"Why did you really come here, Mr Winslow?" I felt I had to know the truth.

"If you must know I came to find something to prove Betty's innocent."

"And have you found it?"

He paused and I knew he was making a decision. After a few moments he spoke. "I might as well tell you. If she's charged it'll all come out anyway. Three weeks ago she insured her mother's life for a hundred pounds and I fear that she might have ..."

"Poisoned her own mother?"

He nodded and, unexpectedly, I found myself feeling sorry for him.

It was a week after my encounter with Albert Winslow that we received the news that Betty Bevan was to stand trial for murder at the a.s.sizes. Little was said of the matter in our house. It was done and it was over and soon she'd be dead ... just as my brother Jack was dead. I had never had any liking for her or her murdered mother and it would have been hypocritical in the extreme to start feigning grief now. I saved my tears for those who deserved them.

The following Monday Mother, Rose and I began our normal washday routine, setting the copper boiling in the washhouse ready to receive our soiled linen. When I heard a loud knocking on our front door I wondered who would come calling on a Monday morning, a time when we never expected to receive visitors. I answered the door in my ap.r.o.n with my hair pinned untidily off my face and I was surprised to see Albert Winslow standing on the freshly scrubbed doorstep.

As he raised his hat I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I looked like a washer woman, hardly the sort an insurance clerk would take into his confidence, but he seemed not to notice the state of my apparel. In his right hand he held a small tin box as though it was something fragile and precious and his well-polished shoe hovered on the threshold.

"May I come in?" he said. The arrogance I had detected at our first meeting had vanished and he reminded me now not so much of a rat, but of a puzzled child.

I stood aside to admit him then I led him into the parlour, for I knew that this was a matter between ourselves. I had no wish for our conversation to be interrupted by my mother or my sister.

I invited him to sit and he placed the box on the small table beside the armchair. Suddenly self-conscious I took off my ap.r.o.n and sat up straight on the hard dining chair, my rough, reddened hands resting in my lap.

I waited for him to begin for I felt it was up to him to explain the purpose of his visit. Eventually he cleared his throat and spoke.

"When we parted the other day, I made a further search of the house next door."

I tilted my head politely. "And did you find anything of interest?"

"I'm not sure."

"You told the police about the insurance policy?"

"Not yet. I wanted to see Betty before I ..."

"Haven't you seen her?"

He shook his head. "They won't let me speak to her but I feel I must. I need to ask her what it means."

"What what means?"

He picked up the box as though it was hot to the touch. "I found this."

He handed the box to me and I opened it. Inside were five white feathers and a piece of paper.

"It's a list," he said quietly. "Your surname is Burton, is it not?"

I nodded, fearing what was coming next.

"The list includes the name Jack Burton. You mentioned your brother Jack died in the last days of the war." He paused. "This is a list of men Betty or her mother describe as cowards."

"My brother was no coward," I snapped. "He fought for his King and country and he lost his life. My brother was a hero."

"Yes, of course. But his name is on the list in this box."

"Mrs Bevan and Betty were always too ready to judge others. Perhaps they put Jack's name on their nasty little list before he signed up for the army, and omitted to remove it."

A look of relief appeared on Albert Winslow's face. "Of course."

I looked him in the eye. "There might be another reason. At one time Betty was rather sweet on Jack but another girl caught his eye. I think Betty was displeased with him and she might have included his name on her list out of spite."

"You think that Betty is a spiteful girl?" He sounded as if his disappointment was deep and bitter. His G.o.ddess had feet of rough and dirty clay.

"She was spiteful and sinful and if I were you I'd forget all about her, Mr Winslow. It is likely she will hang, especially if you tell the police what you know about the insurance. I think you should go along to the police station and tell them now. Justice must be done."

Albert Winslow nodded slowly and stood up. "We must do our duty ... do the right thing."

I touched his hand. It was softer than mine. "Chin up, Albert. Think how you'd feel if you said nothing and she went and did it again. Because they say when you've killed once it's easier next time."

He knew I was right. I watched him disappear down the road, slowly with his head bowed like an old man.

Betty Bevan was hanged at the end of May. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and warm.

That morning I walked in the park and listened to the sound of the birds, glad it was over.

As I rested on the bench, enjoying the sun on my face, I held a conversation with Jack in my head. I often talked to him, told him things. If he'd been alive, I'm not sure how he would have taken the news but I felt I couldn't keep it from him. I was his loving sister after all. And everything I'd done had been for him. I'm sure sin isn't really sin when it's in a good cause.

Sitting there in the warmth of the May sun, I spotted something on the ground and my heart skipped a beat. It was a feather, shed by some pa.s.sing bird. A white feather. I bent to pick it up then I held it for a while, turning it in my fingers before throwing it back onto the ground and grinding it into the gra.s.s with my heel. Such small things can have such catastrophic consequences.

Jack had been sent home from France, unfit to fight. Every loud sound had made his body shake and he had woken each night, crying out at the unseen horrors that tormented his brain. He'd wander, half crazed, from room to room, staring with frightened, unseeing eyes until one of us would guide him gently back to his own bed. How Mother cried in that year to see her only son, a boy who had always been so cheerful and good-natured, with his mind blasted into insanity by war. Sometimes I wished he could have been maimed some other way; even losing an arm or a leg wouldn't have been as bad as the way he suffered. But his body had been intact ... then.

It was when Jack had been home almost a year that Betty Bevan and her stupid mother began their campaign. All men not at the front, they said in their loud, braying voices, were cowards. They collected white feathers and distributed them to the men they accused, haranguing them with insults as they did so. Their tongues were spiteful and wicked. How I wished I could have had them sent to the front to see how they liked crawling through mud and corpses to certain death.

Jack had always been a proud man and the accusation of cowardice caused him such shame. Mother, Rose and I tried to tell him that he was sick but he didn't understand. He saw only his strong body and his intact limbs and he swore that he was fit to return to France to fight. Nothing we said would dissuade him from contacting his regiment to say that he was recovered and ready. But his regiment had not heard his screams of terror as he dodged those phantom sh.e.l.ls and bullets each night and they hadn't seen the empty fear and bewilderment in his eyes.

The Bevans must have known how he was. His cries through those thin walls must have kept them awake as they did us. But those two women ignored my mother's pleas and explanations and a month after Jack left for France, we received the telegram to tell us that he had died a hero.

The Bevans showed our family no mercy. And I showed them no mercy in return. It was a simple matter to soak fly papers and add the a.r.s.enic they produced to the soup Mother took to Mrs Bevan each day. It had suited my purpose well for Betty to get the blame when the police found the powder I had placed in their scullery. And now the law had punished her albeit for the wrong crime for she killed my dearest brother as surely as if she had rammed a knife into his heart.

I suppose the death of Betty Bevan had been my second murder and it had been so easy, just as second murders are reputed to be. A third, I suppose, would be easier still. All sins, I imagine, improve with practice.

I examined the little watch pinned to the front of my dress. It was nearly time for my appointment with Albert Winslow. He said that on our marriage, he will insure his life for a large sum of money so that, should the worst happen, I would be very well provided for.

How I look forward to our wedding day.

THE DECEIVERS.

Christopher Fowler.

THIS IS A police statement, but they said I could tell it in my own way. So I'm not writing it down, I'm dictating it into the desk sergeant's laptop, like he even knows how to operate it. He sticks Post-It notes on the lid, the keys are filthy and there's software on it from before I was born.

I'm not worried. I'm going to get out of here because there's someone coming who can prove what really happened.

They want me to put everything down, so first I have to explain about the hill.

The boundary line between Devon and Cornwall is dotted with small villages that pretend they're towns, but they're not. For a start, everyone who lives in them is either really old, over forty at least, and has lived there all their lives, or they're from London and only come down at the weekends. The locals all hate them, although my Dad says we should smile as we charge them double, like the French do. There's no one of my age to hang out with here, and nowhere to go if you do find someone. If you travel to one of the bigger towns with your mates, there's a good chance you'll get beaten up just because you're from somewhere else.

My folks are obsessed with getting fresh air. "Let's go for a walk and get some fresh air", like there's ever anything else to do. "Let's go up to the hill." We live in a village called Trethorton Hill. It consists of a short high street, about a hundred and twenty houses, two pubs and a hill. That's it. There's nothing even remotely interesting about the hill, it's just a huge pimple of gra.s.s and scrub with a single white rock set in the top, not even a proper standing stone, and when they get up there hikers say things like "You can see all the way to Dartmoor from here", as if that's a good thing. I hate hikers, with their billycans and red knees and woollen hats, and their rulebooks and guidebooks and hard little eyes. But that's what everyone around here does every Sunday. On Sat.u.r.days they go to Liskeard for their shopping, and on Sundays they go up the hill. I used to think that was boring until I realized that people actually come here from other towns to go up the hill, and what does that make their villages, if it's more interesting here than staying where they are?

The locals think they're cool and that they've been around, but they haven't. I heard some old guy in the supermarket telling the cashier that he'd just been up North, and she was reacting in amazement, like he'd just told her he'd been to Alpha Centauri. Then he added, "Yes, I went all the way to Tintagel", and I realized he meant North Cornwall. Jesus.

I have an older sister, and she got out while she could. I say "got out", what she did was get pregnant by some docker who'd gone to work on container ships out of Liverpool, so now she's stuck in Swansea with two bulldog-faced kids, in a h.e.l.l of her own making.

Not for me. Once I get a job offer you won't see me for dust. I'm smart, I'm awake, I've got a mind. But it doesn't pay to be too clever in a village. People get suspicious of you. Best to keep your mouth shut and stay indoors mucking about on the internet, talking to smart people on the other side of the world. Someone asked me if we had Wi-Fi, and I had to explain we don't even get decent mobile phone reception here. The internet stops you from getting too lonely, because there are people in places with exotic sounding names, and they're just as bored as you are, so it makes you feel better.

I made one friend but he's not my friend any more, a kid called Daniel who came from the next village. I met him at IT club, and then at the Trethorton Charity Climb we weren't taking part, we were just hanging around and I thought, "We're alike. He's awake too." Daniel lives in a damp shadowy dell called Crayshaw. It's a village which loses its sunlight before lunchtime even at the height of summer. Daniel's parents are rich his old man had invented rubberized flooring for factories and had sold it all around the world. So Daniel got an amazing allowance but had no one to share it with, because he had a gimp leg which meant he couldn't play football, and the flybrains at school treated him like dirt because he was from the wrong village and couldn't do sports. He never told them he had money, but he told me after I stuck up for him in a fight.

Daniel got excused from double games on Fridays (he only did the midweek swimming) and I didn't go because I hated it. I once forged a doctor's letter to Mr Phelps the gym teacher saying I had a defective heart valve and couldn't do contact sports, and the moron never even bothered to check it out with my folks. So every Friday afternoon we kicked around Trethorton Hill looking for ways to annoy the hikers. Once we tied fishing wire over the gra.s.s and filmed them, all falling over, on our phones.

Although Daniel had money he couldn't really spend it. He was only allowed to catch the bus as far as Liskeard because of his leg, so it wasn't like we were going to whip off to Ibiza for the weekend, but we bought stuff online, and for a while we had a lot of fun hanging out together.

My old man says when things go wrong there's always a woman involved, and in this case it was a girl called Tara Mellor. She was in our year and had been suspended twice for wearing incorrect school uniform. She was tall and thin with cropped blonde hair, and I was nuts about her, but for some incredible reason she seemed to prefer Daniel. But at the start the three of us hung out together a lot.

The lardy desk sergeant just came by, saw what I was writing and said could I get to the point. I wanted to say, "Could you get to the gym?" but he'd already waddled off.

I think the problem was that Daniel and I kept trying to impress Tara. To his credit, he never flashed his cash at her he was too cool for that and besides, she wasn't interested in money. She wasn't like the other girls we knew from school, who spent all their spare time planning shopping trips to town on Sat.u.r.days. She read a lot, and was interested in ancient history. The trouble started on the day she dragged us to Liskeard's "Man, Myth & Magic" Museum. The locals wanted to get rid of the word "man" because they said it was s.e.xist, and rename it "The Liskeard Early Civilization Centre". We wrote in to the Liskeard Gazette with a suggestion of our own, but I guess they worked out that the acronym we suggested would be p.r.o.nounced "Dogs' c.o.c.ks" and they didn't run our letter.

We were in the museum and there was a section on local legends, the usual guff about ghosts, human sacrifices, phantom hounds and highwaymen, and Tara said there was no proof that any of the stories were true, they were just made up by drunk old publicans, and she pointed out that Trethorton Hill didn't even have any decent legends attached to it, that's how lame the place was, and that's when we decided to make one up.

We decided it had to be a believable legend, something with evidence to back it up. It also had to be something that could scare the hikers off the hill. So Daniel said how about aliens, and I said no because crop circles had been discredited years ago, all you needed was a couple of dopeheads armed with a piece of rope and a plank. We needed something more sophisticated. I thought we should create a plausible unsolved mystery, so we decided on a desperate sailor who had come ash.o.r.e after murdering his violent captain in a mutiny, and who for some unknown reason dragged a local girl up the hill and cut her throat. Then we added a supernatural element that would provide proof of the legend, a ghostly wailing you could hear on certain nights when the air was still.

PC Porky just came by again and asked me if I was writing a novel, and I told him if I was I'd let him know so he could hire someone to read it to him.

Daniel knew quite a lot about sound technology, and figured we could rig outdoor speakers around the hill, running from two synced-up MP3 players. We decided to record the ghost crying and phase the sound so that it appeared to circle the hill, and preset the time so that we wouldn't have to be there when it happened. I didn't involve Tara in this because I wanted to surprise her, to show I was interested in myths and stuff. We ordered the components we needed on Daniel's Paypal account, and when they arrived we tested everything in the fields beyond Trethorton, down near the river.

Next, we needed to record the sound of the crying woman, and Daniel said he had a bit of software that could replicate the human voice but also distort it. We aimed for something between a child in pain and a fox at night. It had to be haunting and other-worldly, and after a weekend of experimentation we had mixed it to perfection. The effect was so spooky it made the hairs on my arms stand up.

Then it was time for the trial run.

Late one night we loaded the equipment into our backpacks and set off for the hill. It took over three hours to set up the sound parameters because we hadn't allowed for the wind noise up there, but we eventually got it so that the crying echoed from one speaker to the next. The effect was subtle, so that you weren't aware you were being directed between the speakers. And Daniel had recorded it a dozen times, switching the equalizer settings so that you never heard the same sound arrangement twice. He was also able to vary the start times, so we set the switch-on at different hours between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. We figured the battery charge on the MP3 players would hold for a long time because they were only being used for a few minutes at a time. Then we sealed the players in plastic bags and buried them. The four speakers were more of a problem because we needed them to be above ground. We put one deep inside a hawthorn bush and another in a wet ditch, after first making sure that the connections were all covered. The other two we hid in clumps of gra.s.s, hoping that no one would stumble across them.

Then we went home to write the letters. We targeted both of the local papers, the Gazette and the Chronicle, and used false names. We a.s.sumed different ident.i.ties, becoming hikers and pensioners, fathers and kids, and varied the content of the letters. One said he'd heard a sound like a trapped animal on the hill, another said it sounded like a woman being tortured, and so on. Daniel thought there was a risk the paper might check the senders' addresses, but I said why would they? Two weeks after the first letter appeared, we hooked our first outsider some old guy had been walking his dog and heard the sound for himself, and wrote in to the Gazette.

After another two weeks had pa.s.sed and a handful of letters had been published, describing the eerie sounds on the hill, we hit them with Phase Two the legend. This letter appeared to have been sent from a retired schoolmistress, now living in Wales (I got my sister to post it, but I didn't let her read the contents). The schoolmistress explained the source of the strange sounds on Trethorton Hill. She repeated the bare bones of our legend about the sailor and the girl, and the Chronicle published it as their star letter of the week.

I know what you're thinking. How bored did we have to be to do this? Pretty d.a.m.n bored, I guess, but it was fun winding up the locals. Soon, the hiking club members were taking turns to check out the ghost of Trethorton Hill, and created a chart detailing exactly when and where the ghost could be heard, according to which direction the wind was coming from. They put it up in the village hall and asked others to add to it with different coloured marker pens. Hikers like stuff like that.