Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

He folds his paper neatly and places it on the seat beside him. The train slows and the recorded announcement tells them they are approaching Cressington. Thank God -her stop.

“That’s us, Boz.” The youngest boy has appeared suddenly by the door. He sounds troubled, unhappy.

The man stands in a smooth, easy movement. He’s taller than they expected, more athletic, and the boy says again, the tremor in his voice accentuated by the rattle of the train, “Our stop, man.”

Boz keeps his eyes on Carol, but she notices the tension in his shoulders, the bunching of his fists. He gives her one last disparaging look. “What-did you think it was grab-a-granny night?” He jabs a thumb towards the youngest boy, standing anxiously in the doorway. “I wouldn’t even touch you with his dick.”

The doors open and they’re off, onto the platform, whooping and laughing, making barking noises at her. They swarm up the steep stone steps; she hears their footsteps echoing all the way through the Victorian station house. She looks at the man and he raises a shoulder, a slight smile on his face-embarrassment or amusement? She can’t tell. Doesn’t care.

Her stop. She steps out onto the platform. Seized by dread certainty, she stares wide-eyed at the stairwell. What if they’re waiting for her outside the station? The narrow muddy shortcut she usually takes to Broughton Drive is dark and poorly lit, and even on the roadway there are places they might hide: behind skips outside the house refurbs, in the shop doorways on the main road. To hell with it, she’ll go on to Garston, get a taxi home.

The warning buzzer sounds that the doors are about to close. She wheels round as they begin sliding shut, jumps back on the train. One of the doors slams into her shoulder and she is caught off-balance. She grabs the handrail and steadies herself. The man in the suit is watching her.

He sighs and smiles in resignation and welcome. He smells the fear on her. Exciting, raw, unrestrained. It smells of warmth. Of woman. Of pain. Of sex.

‘It was a young woman who found him,’ the village constable said. ‘Molly Davitt, the blacksmith’s daughter. She thought he was having a conversation on the telephone. After a while when he didn’t move she decided something might be wrong.’

‘After how long, exactly?’ the inspector asked. He was a city man and disliked vagueness.

‘Half an hour or so, Molly says. Could be longer.’

‘You mean to tell me this young woman stood watching a man in a telephone box for half an hour or more?’

‘There’s not much happens round here. And the fact is, Molly’s been fascinated with that telephone box from the time they put it up.’

It was the spring of 1924 when they came to install the telephone box in Tadley Gate. Nobody was quite sure why. The men from the Post Office travelled from Hereford, seventeen miles away as the pigeon flew and half as much again by winding country road. All they knew was that they’d been instructed to erect the standard model Kiosk One, designed to be especially suitable for rural areas, on the edge of the common, in between the old pump and the new war memorial. It was made of reinforced concrete slabs with a red painted wooden door and large windows in the door and sides. In a touch of Post Office swagger, a decorative curlicue of wrought iron crowned it, finishing in a spike that some people assumed was an essential part of the mechanism. Nobody in Tadley Gate (pop. 227) had asked for a telephone kiosk and very few had ever used a telephone. Still, they were pleased. The coming of the kiosk was an event at least, which made two events in eighteen months, counting back to the other new arrival, the petrol pump. The petrol pump belonged to Davy Davitt, Molly’s father. A third-generation blacksmith by trade, he’d had more than enough of horses and fallen in love with cars. The sign over his workshop said ‘Blacksmith and Farrier’ in the curly old-fashioned letters that had been good enough for his grandfather. Underneath he’d painted, stark and white, ‘Motor Vehicle Repairs Undertaken’. The fact that the parish included thirty-three horses and ponies and only one motor car limited his scope but he was a resourceful man. Long negotiations with a distant petrol company ended with the arrival of a tank and a pump. The pump was red like the phone kiosk door, topped by a globe of frosted glass with a cockleshell and ‘Sealed Shell’ on it in black letters. The tank below it held 500 gallons of petrol, delivered by motor tanker. In the first year Davy’s only sales were five gallons every other week to the colonel from the big house who drove a Hillman Peace model very cautiously, so at that rate it would be nearly four years before the tanker needed to come with another delivery. But as Davey told anybody who’d listen in the Duke of Wellington, that was only the start. He was looking ahead to the arrival of the motor tourer. It stood to reason that as more people bought cars and the cars became more reliable, they’d drive for the pleasure far away from cities and into the countryside. It didn’t matter the only motor tourist Tadley Gate had ever seen was somebody who’d got badly confused on the way to Shrewsbury and didn’t want to be there.

Davy believed in the petrol pump the way an Indian believed in his totem pole. He was even inclined to credit it with attracting the telephone kiosk to the village. He reasoned that now, properly equipped with both telephone and petrol pump, Tadley Gate was ready to unglue itself from the mud and enter the age of speed. Only the age of speed seemed to be taking its time about getting there.

Molly had no strong feelings about the petrol pump. She didn’t like the smell much, but petrol was no worse than the throat-grabbing whiff of burning horn when her father fitted red-hot shoes to horses’ hooves. On the other hand, the phone-box enchanted her from the day it arrived. She was twenty then and single, having just broken her engagement to a local farmer’s son. The second broken engagement, as it happened, and more than enough to get her a reputation as a jilt. She honestly regretted that. She’d quite liked the farmer’s son, as she’d quite liked the young grain merchant before him, but shied away from marriage because they were both of them firmly tied by work and family to the country around Tadley Gate. If she married either of them she’d have had to stay there for life and she knew – with the instinct that tells a buried bulb which way is upwards – that staying at Tadley Gate wasn’t the way things were meant to be. She’d been away from the village once, for a family wedding in Birmingham where she’d been a bridesmaid. In the days before and after the ceremony she’d gone with her cousins to the cinema, bought underwear in a department store, read the Daily Mail and seen advertisements in magazines of sleek women poised on diving boards, leaning against the bonnets of cars, dancing quick-time foxtrot in little pointed shoes with men in evening dress. At the end of the visit, she’d gone quietly back to Tadley Gate with a new shorter hairstyle that nobody commented on, an unused lipstick tucked into her skirt pocket and a conviction as deep as her father’s belief in his petrol pump that the world must somehow find itself her way. The men who came to set up the telephone kiosk, pleased to find an unexpectedly beautiful girl in such an out of the way place, had been only too pleased as they worked to answer the questions she put to them in her soft local accent.

‘So who can you talk to from here?’ (She had the idea that a telephone had a predetermined number of lines, each one to a different and single other telephone.)