The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (76 page)

His heart was pounding with excitement as he made the short walk to the home paddock, the carving knife now stuck down the belt of his jeans. He had decided to kill a sheep and bring the head to
Jane. Then she would show him her body. Then he would see what would happen next. He quickened up his pace.

He found the herd easily, a grey moving shape in the dark. He walked slowly up to them, but they heard him coming and moved away. He tried running at them but they ran away, faster than
he’d thought they could be. He stopped to catch his breath. He tried again. They ran away.

It took him ten minutes to finally catch one, and he was so angry and frustrated he just plunged the knife straight into the sheep’s chest. It seemed to have little effect, so he stabbed
it in the neck and then stabbed it again. Eventually the bleating animal was still.

Woody sat on the grass next to it, catching his breath. Sweat was pouring off him and he was covered in blood. He looked at the sheep and immediately felt guilty. Why was he doing this? Taking
away a life just so he could see Jane naked? He felt the same revulsion he’d felt last night. He felt his supper starting to come into his throat. He moved away from the sheep and sat down
again. Then he lay on the grass and looked at the stars. He waited until he’d cooled down. There was no way he could cut off the sheep’s head. He would just make his way home and forget
the whole thing. He would have to throw his blood-stained clothes away.

He left the sheep where it lay. When Harold found it tomorrow maybe he would think a wolf had done it. Woody left the paddock and made the walk home, the knife stuck down into the belt of his
jeans once again.

He approached his room from the privy side, where no one could see him. He walked on the path where Skunk was tied up, but as he approached Skunk began to growl.

“It’s only me, Skunk,” Woody said softly.

But then Skunk barked loudly and ran straight for him, his chain rattling as it took up the strain. Woody took a step backwards and then Skunk made another charge. This time, to Woody’s
horror, the chain broke and Skunk was on top of him. He wrestled with the dog as it went for his throat. Skunk was going berserk and Woody didn’t know why. Then he thought that maybe it was
the smell of the sheep’s blood. Then he remembered the knife in his belt. He managed to get it free and he slammed it into Skunk’s side. The dog whimpered and fell off him on to the
dirt. Then Woody passed out.

When he came to, Woody didn’t know where he was. He was lying on his back on something hard and he didn’t recognize the ceiling. He turned his head and looked
around. A sofa and some armchairs. A chest of drawers. A cabinet for plates and cutlery. He was in Harold’s living room.

He was lying on a table. He had an incredible pain in his left arm. He looked down and wondered if he was imagining things. He looked down again. His left arm was covered in a white bandage but
it was much shorter than it used to be. He tried to wriggle his fingers but he didn’t seem to have any. His hand just wasn’t there any more.

Feeling a panic sweep over him he rolled off the table and put his feet on the floor. He held his two arms out in front of him but the left one was nearly a foot shorter.

“NO!” he screamed, and staggered out of the room.

He was in his own room now. Sedated.

He stayed there for a week while the pain in his arm lessened and his neck healed. But he wasn’t too worried about his neck, he was worried about his missing hand. How was he going to get
work now? No one would employ a one-armed man. Maybe Harold would be kind and keep him on. He would have to have a talk with him real soon.

Molly brought him his meals. He hadn’t seen Jane at all. He tried talking to Molly as she fed him, but all she would say was that his hand had been mangled by Skunk. Skunk was dead, of
course. She didn’t mention the dead sheep.

Another week passed before Harold came to his room. Woody was sitting up in bed and Harold pulled up a chair and sat down.

“How’s it going, Woody?” he asked.

“Not too good,” Woody said. “What happened to my hand?”

Harold looked down at the floor and didn’t meet his eyes. “Skunk got a hold of it. Chewed it all up. The doc said he couldn’t save it.”

“Are you sure?”

Harold looked up. “Sure about what?”

“Sure that he couldn’t save it.”

“Sure I’m sure. I saw it myself. It’s just bad luck, that’s all.”

“Shit,” Woody said. “I don’t even remember Skunk attacking my hand. All I remember is him going for my throat.”

“Well, it probably happened too quickly for you to remember. You probably passed out before he did it.”

“Maybe,” Woody said.

They were silent for a minute and then Harold cleared his throat. “I’m going to have to let you go, Woody.”

Woody had suspected as much. He nodded.

“After all,” Harold continued. “You won’t be able to do much with one hand.”

“I know,” Woody said. “I’m no use to anybody now.”

They were silent again.

“Sorry,” Harold said, and then he stood up and reached for the door.

The day before he left Woody asked Harold for just one thing. He asked him for a pistol with just one bullet in it.

Harold said okay, but asked him why just one bullet?

Woody said, “Eventually I’ll probably have to shoot myself because I won’t be able to get any work. When I do it though, I want to be sure that I’m doing the right thing.
If I have six bullets I’m likely to do it when I’m drunk. If I only have one bullet I won’t know which chamber it’s in when I’m drunk and the feeling will pass. If I
kill myself I want to be sober, just so I’m sure that’s really what I want to do.”

Harold had looked at him with a little respect in his eyes. “That’s a good idea Woody, a good idea.”

Woody walked down the road away from the farm, his few belongings in a bag over his shoulder. From the front veranda Harold and Molly watched.

“Do you think he’ll be okay?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know,” Harold said. “I really don’t know.”

“He was a nice boy,” Molly said. “I wish you hadn’t cut off his hand.”

Harold didn’t look at her. “He shouldn’t have killed that sheep. I can’t afford to have sheep killed for nothin’.”

“Oh, I think you know very well it wasn’t for nothin’.”

Harold looked at her. “In some countries they cut off your hand if you steal something, you know. He killed a sheep. I don’t see what the difference is.”

Molly gave him a scornful look. “In some countries. But we’re not in those countries. We don’t have to do things those ways.”

“The real problem,” Harold said, “is that daughter of yours. That makes three we’ve had to get rid of because of her. This can’t go on forever. We’re gonna
have to talk to her again.”

And then he walked back inside the kitchen.

Christopher Fowler

“Mr Bryant is so old that most of his lifetime subscriptions have run out.” Leslie Faraday, the Home Office crime liaison officer, poked about on his biscuit tray
looking for a Custard Cream. “He’s far beyond the statutory working age limit, but no one has the heart to broach the matter with him.”

“Sentimentality can’t be allowed to stand in the way of modern policing procedures,” replied Oskar Kasavian, peering from the window into the tiled Whitehall courtyard. Faraday
took a quick peek to see if the new supervisor in charge of Internal Security cast a shadow, as his cadaverous pale form created office rumours of supernatural lineage. “We’re not here
to provide the inefficient with a living.”

This last remark confused Faraday, who believed that this was precisely the purpose for which Whitehall had been created. “Quite,” he replied, “but surely we must take into
account his long and illustrious career working with the Peculiar Crimes Unit. He and his partner pioneered research in the field. One doesn’t force admirals into retirement simply because
they no longer go to sea. We benefit from their experience.”

“Old generals are the cause of military disasters,” said Kasavian, drumming long fingers on the window pane. “The elderly are weak precisely because they live in the
past.” He released a long, desperate sigh. “However, in this situation I see no other recourse than to put them on the case.”

So it was that the Home Office called Arthur Bryant of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, and Bryant visited a crime scene in King’s Cross, and then called his partner, John May, with instructions
to meet him at 10:15 a.m. beside a bus stop in Marble Arch. It was a muggy wet morning, and May resented being summoned from his bed.

“Ah, there you are.” The elderly detective hailed his partner with a wild whip of his walking stick, and nearly pruned a passing tourist. Bryant had misbuttoned his shapeless brown
cardigan and dragged his moth-eaten Harris tweed coat over the top of it. He looked more like a tramp than a detective. “I got here early and had a potter through Hyde Park.”

“You had your mobile with you?” asked May, surprised. Arthur was three years his senior, but two decades behind the rest of the world when it came to technology.

“I did have, yes,” Bryant admitted, tugging his battered brown trilby further onto his head. “Here’s our bus.” He indicated the open-topped Routemaster that was
just pulling up.

May was suspicious. “Then where is it now?”

“I think I dropped it in the Princess Diana Memorial Drain. Don’t worry, it’ll just keep going round. I’ll get it when I come back. You’re probably wondering what
this is all about.”

“And why we’re boarding a sightseeing bus, yes,” said May, helping his partner inside the idling vehicle. The portly driver stared at them through his windscreen.

“There was a rather sad little murder in King’s Cross during the night. A 54-year-old cleaning lady named Joan March was strangled to death in her third floor flat in Hastings
Street. The HO felt the case warranted our involvement.”

“But this bus doesn’t go anywhere near King’s Cross.” May checked the route, noting that it tacked through central London in a loop.

“Oh, we’re not going to the murder site. I’ve already been there.” Bryant seated himself on the arrow-patterned seat at the front of the bus, next to a gingery young man
who was standing in the aisle with a microphone. His badge read;
Hi! I’m Martin!
“I wanted you here so that we could apprehend the murderer.”

The Routemaster pulled away from the stop at Speaker’s Corner, heading into Oxford Street. “My Uncle Jack used to get up on his soapbox over there, just after the war,” said
Bryant, tapping the rain-spattered window. “Less passion, less protein, ban licentious theatre, shoot the Welsh; he’d rant about anything so long as it involved getting rid of
something. I suppose the preachers of Speaker’s Corner still do.”

“Now, does anyone know the name of the bi-i-i-g department store on our right?” Martin the tour guide was as wide-eyed as a first-time father, and as patronizing. There were no
takers. “Anyone?”

Bryant raised his hand. “Selfridges, opened in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge. He coined the phrase ‘The customer is always right’, and was the first salesman to put products
out on display.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Martin.

“But I do,” Bryant countered.

“We’re catching a murderer on a bus?” asked May in disbelief.

“We are now heading toward Oxford Circus, which was once described by Noel Coward as the Hub of the Universe,” announced the tour guide.

“This boy’s a dunderhead.” Bryant jerked a wrinkled thumb at Martin, who overheard him. “That was John Wyndham’s reference to Piccadilly Circus.” Bryant had
recently given up working as a London guide in his spare time, after picking too many arguments with the tourists. He forgot most things, but never the facts he had painstakingly gathered about his
city.

“I don’t understand,” May persisted. “Why did we get the case?” Bryant and May’s division, the Peculiar Crimes Unit, only handled investigations the Home
Office found detrimental to government policy. Arthur loved working with his partner John May, and revelled in the fact that they performed a service no one else in the city could offer. No one had
their arcane depth of knowledge, or was able to use it in the cause of crime prevention. Across the decades they had closed the cases few could understand, let alone solve.

“There are three oddities.” Bryant ticked his fingers. “One, after strangling Mrs March, the murderer ordered two pizzas, calmly eating both of them. B, he slept overnight in
the apartment. And three, his victim killed someone after he left.”

May considered the matter as the bus turned into Regent Street. “I’m sorry, Arthur, you’ve utterly lost me.”

“Do try to pay attention. The murderer left the flat at 6:15 this morning, not realizing that his victim was still alive. Mrs March struggled to the window to raise the alarm, but the
effort of opening it was too much for her. She lost consciousness and fell out into the street, landing on a gentleman called Sir Ian Lowry—”

“The MOD bigwig?”

“The very same, who was apparently just leaving a call-girl’s flat, where he had presumably stayed the night. Mrs March broke her neck and his leg. And that’s why the HO called
us in. Obviously, it’s a serious security breach, because Sir Ian is privy to all kinds of military secrets. The call-girl has already been brought in, and all that’s left is the
apprehension of her killer.”

“So I’m here to help you identify him,” said May, still a little confused.

“Oh, I know who the murderer is.” Bryant cheerily flashed his oversized false teeth. “You were complaining about getting old the other day, so I thought this would be a chance
for you to test your fading faculties.”

The Routemaster stopped outside Hamley’s toy store to allow a single Japanese tourist on board. There were eight passengers seated downstairs. The heavily falling rain prevented anyone
from sitting on the open deck. It was now 10:44am.

“You already know the murderer’s identity?”

“Better than that”, said Bryant smugly. “I can tell you the precise time he’ll be arrested.” He checked his ancient Timex. “At 11:26 a.m.”