Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

When she got back to the yard, Constable Price was there, sitting on a wall in the sun. His bicycle was upside down and her father was doing something to its chain with pliers. He was looking at a magazine, open at an advertisement for the Austin 20. He stood up when he saw her.

‘Hello, Miss Davitt. Will you stay and talk to me?’

Molly didn’t want to talk to anyone. She wanted to rush around shouting that Sonny had telephoned, was dropping in. But you couldn’t, of course. She sat down on the wall and Constable Price sat back down beside her.

‘Nice roomy cars, Austin 20s. Space for a good big trunk at the back.’

She nodded, still not concentrating on what he was saying.

‘There was a good big trunk on the one the man was driving, the one who filled up with petrol here. Remember? Tick noticed it wasn’t properly fastened when the man drove out, only he was in too much of a hurry to stop.’

She said nothing, but he felt something change in the air round her, as if it had suddenly gone brittle. ‘Stop now,’ he said to himself. But something was throbbing in his brain, like a motor engine with the brake on.

‘I suppose nobody happened to open the trunk while he was getting his petrol?’

‘You wouldn’t.’ She said it to the sparrows pecking in the dust. ‘Not to put in petrol.’

He noticed it wasn’t an answer, felt the brake in his mind slipping.

‘So if there’d been anything in the trunk, you couldn’t have known?’

She shook her head, still looking down.

‘Did he go anywhere near his trunk while you were putting in the petrol?’

She murmured, ‘No’.

‘Or did anybody else?’

She raised her head and looked at him. Such a look of desperation he’d only seen before in the eyes of a dog run over by a cart that he had to put out of its misery. He pulled on the mental brake, told his brain it couldn’t go along the road. If he persisted, she’d break down, tell him something he couldn’t ignore. She was a good girl, didn’t deserve trouble. He stood up.

‘Looks like your dad’s finished with my bicycle.’

He waved to her over his shoulder as he pedalled away.

Sonny came next day, in the Rover. He asked Davy if he’d be kind enough to have a look at the electrical starter, something not quite right about it. While he was working on it, Sonny and Molly strolled together in the sunshine on the common.

‘A promise I made Uncle Enoch,’ He told her. ‘I’d never say a word to anybody, long as I lived, just one exception. If there was a girl I liked, I might have to tell her. If I could trust her, that is.’

‘You can trust me.’

‘I know. The Rooster matters to Enoch more than all the world. Anything threatening him, he goes mad. And it was my fault, partly. If I’d done what he told me and not let the Rooster out of my sight, they wouldn’t have had their chance. When he came back to the parlour and I told him the Rooster was down at the little house on his own he rushed straight down there, just in time. A second later and the Rooster would have walked right into it. The wickedness of it.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we couldn’t let the Rooster know. It would have unsettled him. But we couldn’t leave the body there in the bushes because it might have caused trouble for you and your dad. So when I saw the other one driving into your yard, bold as brass, it came to me that if we put it in his trunk it would serve both of them right. And you played up to me. Without a word. Just trusted me.’

‘Yes.’

As they walked, the back of his hand brushed lightly against hers.

‘Only it went wrong, you see? He must have noticed the trunk strap flapping just after he drove out of your yard. So when he looked in there and saw what he saw, all he could do was dump it in the phone kiosk. Only it happened to be you that found him. I’m sorry about that.’

Their hands met palm to palm and stayed together.

‘It’s all right,’ she said.

Later, when they’d been married for some time and Sonny was doing well in London as a boxing promoter, she had a telephone in her own home and talked to her friends on it nearly every day. Sonny was driving a Daimler by then with plenty of room at the back for the children and they sometimes used it to pop down to Tadley Gate, where her father had put up a proper garage sign and often filled up as many as half a dozen cars a day on summer weekends. Sometime between one visit and the next the Post Office took away Kiosk One and replaced it with a more imposing model, all bright red paint and glass panels. They gave it a glance as they drove past.

So many things could have been different.

An almost infinite number of them: the flight of the ball; the angle of the bat; the movement of his feet as he skipped down the pitch. The weather, the time, the day of the week, the whatever…

The smallest variance in any one of these things, or in the way that each connected to the other at the crucial moment, and nothing would have happened as it did. An inch another way, or a second, or a step and it would have been a very different story.

Of course, it’s always a different story; but it isn’t always a story with bodies…

He wasn’t even a good batsman – a tail-ender for heaven’s sake – but this once, he got everything right. The footwork and the swing were spot on. The ball flew from the meat of the bat, high above the heads of the fielders into the long grass at the edge of the woodland that fringed the pitch on two sides.

Alan and another player had been looking for a minute or so, using hands and feet to move aside the long grass at the base of an oak tree, when she stepped from behind it as if she’d been waiting for them.

‘Don’t you have any spare ones?’

Alan looked at her for a few, long seconds before answering. She was tall, five seven or eight, with short dark hair. Her legs were bare beneath a cream-coloured skirt and her breasts looked a good size under a sleeveless top. She looked Mediterranean, Alan thought. Sophisticated.

‘I suppose we must have, somewhere,’ he said.

‘So why waste time looking? Are they expensive?’

Alan laughed. ‘We’re only a bunch of medics. It costs a small fortune just to hire the pitch.’

‘You’re a doctor?’

‘A neurologist. A consultant neurologist.’

She didn’t look as impressed as he’d hoped.

‘Got it.’

Alan turned to see his team-mate brandishing the ball, heard the cheers from those on the pitch as it was thrown across.

He turned back. The woman’s arms were folded and she held a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.

‘Will you be here long?’ Alan said. She looked hesitant. He pointed back towards the pitch. ‘We’ve only got a couple of wickets left to take.’

She dropped her hand, smiled without looking at him. ‘You’d better get on with it then…’

‘Listen, we usually go and have a couple of drinks afterwards, in the Woodman up by the tube. D’you fancy coming along? Just for one maybe?’

She looked at her watch. Too quickly, Alan thought, to have even seen what time it read.

‘I don’t have a lot of time.’

He nodded, stepping backwards towards the pitch. ‘Well, you know where we are…’

The Woodman was only a small place, and the dozen or so players – some from either team – took up most of the back room.

‘I’m Rachel by the way,’ she said.

‘Alan.’

‘Did you win, Alan?’

‘Yes, but no thanks to me. The other team weren’t very good.’

‘You’re all doctors, right?’

He nodded. ‘Doctors, student doctors, friends of doctors. Anybody who’s available if we’re short. It’s as much a social thing as anything else.’