Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

No more than any other guilt-ridden Catholic Irish guy, I’m not superstitious. But I tell you, the omens, they’re…like…there. You just gotta be open to them.

Listen to this: A while ago, there was a horse running at the Curragh. I’m not a gambler but read the sports pages, read them first to show I’m not gay. At 15/1, there was one, Coney Island Red. How could I not? Put a bundle on him, on the nose.

He lost.

See the omen? Maria wouldn’t want me gambling, lest I blow the kids’ college fund. Over the years, if I was asked about girlfriends, I’d say my girl was nursing in America, and came to believe it. She was caring and ideal for that. ‘Course, when the kids arrive, she’ll have to give up her career – I wouldn’t want my wife working, it’s the man’s place to do the graft – I know they’ll appreciate those old values in Brooklyn.

Sean came to see me about the new plan. He was wearing one of those long coats favoured by shoplifters or rock stars. The collar turned up to give him some edge. I made coffee and he said, ‘Nice place you got here.’ I sat opposite him and he launched: ‘We’re going to do the main post office.’

I didn’t like the sound of that, said, ‘Don’t like the sound of that.’

He gave the grin, no relation to warmth or humour, and said, ‘It’s not about what you like or don’t like, money is needed and a lot of it. This Thursday, there is going to be a massive sum there, something to do with the payment of pensions and the bonus due for Social Benefit. It’s rare for them to handle such a large amount so we have to act now.’

I went along with it, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice, he wasn’t asking me, he was delivering orders.

We went in hard and it was playing out as usual, when I took my eye off the crowd, distracted for one second, and that’s when the guy came at me, grabbed my gun, and it went off, taking half his face. Then we were out of there, running like demented things, got in the stolen car, then changed vehicles at Tuam and drove back into town, the exact opposite of what would be anticipated. Sean was breathing hard, said, ‘You fucked up.’

‘Hey, he came at me, it was an accident.’

He gritted his teeth, a raw sound like a nail on glass, said, ‘This is going south.’

He was right. The dead man was a cop, in plain clothes, and the heat was on. Sean called me that evening, went, ‘You wasted a fucking policeman, there’s going to be serious repercussions. I’ve a meet with my superiors and I’ll let you know what’s going to happen.’

He slammed down the phone. So I waited, checking my travel arrangements. I’d fly from Shannon to New York and, hell, splurge a little, grab a cab all the way to Brighton Beach, because I liked the sound of it. Then I’d find Maria.

I’d already packed and was trying to decide what movies to bring, when Sean called. ‘It’s bad.’

‘Tell me.’

‘We can’t have a cop-killer on our hands, the pressure is enormous.’

I took a deep breath, said, ‘You’ve given me up.’

For the first time, he sounded nervous, then, ‘I’m giving you a chance, I wasn’t even supposed to call you.’

‘You’re all heart, Sean. So what’s the bottom line?’

Deep breath, then, ‘They’re sending two guys to pick you up, they’ll be there in twenty minutes, so get the fuck out and run like hell.’

Curious, I asked, ‘And these guys, they’re not bringing me to the authorities, are they?’

‘You’re wasting time, get moving.’

Click.

I’ve poured a Bush, opened a beer, and am going to have a boilermaker. The Sig is in my lap and I have that song playing, here comes my favourite riff: ‘ Fade…’

Perhaps it was the glory of England returning after the grim days of the Great War. Or perhaps it would prove, after all, to be something quite otherwise. It was the day of the first post-war Eton and Harrow match, that annual event, more social than sporting, which in the years up to 1914 had brought together in one place, Lord’s cricket ground, almost all the Upper Ten Thousand. There, on the excuse of watching the next generation bat and bowl, as many of them had themselves in past years generation after generation, they had come once more to parade themselves in the sunshine, to assert their status once again. And in the Pavilion and in beflagged tents, dark blue and light, to have luncheon.

Now at the beginning of a new decade all seemed to be as it once had been. Yet before a single ball had been bowled after the lunch interval, murder was to splatter an ugly blot on the fair surface of the day.

At the time that it took place none of the nine or ten thousand spectators, in whose ranks the late conflict had cut such a swathe, knew, of course, that it had happened. It was only in the days succeeding the match that the news of it came to dominate every conversation. During the interval they had, as was the custom in ‘the old days’, strolled about on the grass in front of the Pavilion, the gentlemen in tall shining silk hats, their womenfolk twirling bright parasols in dresses and hats as elaborate and striking as money could buy, if here and there could be seen a skirt that allowed stockinged calves to be fully in view.

‘I had hoped,’ the Bishop of Cirencester, the Right Reverend Dr Pelham Rossiter, remarked, catching sight of one young lady so dressed, ‘that no such indication of the dreadful decline in the country’s morality would be seen here today of all days. But it was, I fear, a hope destined to perish.’

‘My dear bishop,’ his companion, Wilfred Boultbee, the well-known City solicitor, replied, ‘I can see the day when ladies without even hats will be admitted at Lord’s, and heaven knows what depravities will go along with that.’ His full grey moustache sank to an even lower angle than habitually.

The two of them wandered on, gently digesting their shares of the lobsters and pigeon pies, the salmon mayonnaise and tender lamb that had been provided after the long years of wartime deprivation in all the abundance of the milk-and-honey days of yore. The last bubbles of champagne gently eructated behind their firmly closed lips.

Just a few yards away a rather less elevated conversation was taking place between two other people soon to be caught up in the murder.

‘God, what a fearful bore a day like this is,’ Julia Hogsnorton, daughter of the Earl, exclaimed to the Hon. Peter Flaxman, immaculate in beautifully brushed tall hat, tailcoat fitted to the twentieth of an inch over broad shoulders, pale spats just visible at the ends of black-and-white striped trousers, thin dark moustache trimmed to a nicety. ‘I can’t imagine how you can stand it.’

‘My dear girl, I stood it for four years before the war, and even enjoyed it then, in a way. Nice to show one is one of the world, you know. So I don’t find it impossible to enjoy it all again today. Since the fools with money are prepared to lay it on for me, and those Jewish Scotsmen are prepared to provide me with some cash, I’m happy to take advantage of their kindness. It’s better than Flanders fields.’

‘Not that you spent much time slogging through the mud there, flinging yourself down in it each time a shell landed. Or not if what you told me one drunken evening was true. An ADC somewhere well behind the lines, wasn’t it?’

‘Fortunes of war, old girl. Fortunes of war. But, talking of drunken evenings shall we go back to the tent? I seem to remember unopened bottles lurking somewhere in the background.’

‘Oh, all right. But it can’t go on for ever, you know, this relying on the gods and the moneylenders. A lady begins sometimes to feel uncomfortable in circumstances like that.’