Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

A century away was a perfect distance of time: distant enough to be strange, near enough to be comprehensible. Anthony had set all of his thrillers in that period, and this was why he would be able to do justice to an Edwardian maverick like Price. Also he spoke the lingo: Anthony knew that the Edwardians called a jacket a coat (a coat in the modern sense was a “top-coat”); a weekend, to the Edwardians, was a “week-end”; and when they were tired they were “all-in”. Anthony aimed always to wear a suit like Edwardian men; he wore boots rather than shoes, wrote with a fountain pen. He would in time become a full, flamboyant Edwardian dandy rather than the muted dandy he was at present.

There were three or four people inside the pub, all turned away from him. A clock ticked. Anthony liked the fact that there was no piped music in The Unicorn, but that clock was loud and couldn’t be turned down. And there was no barman to be seen. Anthony was joined at the bar by one of the silent customers. The pub was all buckled wood, as though the ceiling was too heavy, pressing down. There didn’t seem to be much air.

The man next to him wore a black suit, and it was muddy – mud splashes up the trouser legs. Mud in Mayfair. Anthony nodded at him nonetheless, and he didn’t nod back. His eyes were a very pale blue in the thin red face; his hair was black and pulled back with grease or oil that smelled like lemon, but another smell came off him at the same time: a bitter smell of a small room in which a dozen people have been smoking cigars around the clock. But the man now took cigarettes out of his pocket. He kept them in a tin. Anthony had once thought of doing that, but he’d stopped smoking a year ago. The Unicorn, actually, was a non-smoking pub. The man opened his mouth to put in the cigarette, and it went into a mass of blackness – no teeth.

Anthony didn’t have to put up with this; there were plenty of other pubs in Mayfair. He walked through the open door of The Unicorn, and straight into a new noise: spattering rain in the gathering darkness, and a metallic rumbling and grating. He noticed a countrified smell, which was almost pleasant, until he looked down and saw that he was standing in horse manure. Had the police horse been this way? He looked over the road, and the block of flats was being dismantled. They had started dismantling the block of flats within the past five minutes. No, on the contrary: scaffolding, a tarpaulin sheet, lanterns, a wheelbarrow dangling from a pulley… the block of flats was being built. Anthony both knew, and didn’t know, what was happening, He felt that he was about throw up. He looked up at the sky, searching for an aeroplane – there were always jets above Mayfair – or the helicopter growling away. But the sky was clear, apart from the falling rain, and the drifting smoke. Who was having a fire? On the rooftops all around, chimneys were smoking. Hundreds of chimneys were smoking.

The man from the pub was behind him, and there were two others with him. The man from the pub was talking fast, the blackness coming and going as he opened and closed his mouth. Anthony couldn’t make out the words. Was it English? Anthony thought to himself: I have been caught in a landslide, and removed to another place. The rain fell more softly now, but it seemed to be the same rain; it made him wet in much the same way as before, and even though he knew he was in terrible trouble, Anthony was trying to take comfort from this as one of the men – not Price – approached him and spoke out in a voice of the kind you didn’t hear much any more. He was unquestionably addressing Anthony. “Paul,” he said, “… come here Paul. The governor wants a word.”

Nathan was the one I liked interviewing best. You wanted to believe him, his stories were so engaging. He had this persuasive, upbeat manner, sitting forward and fixing me with his soft blue eyes. Nothing about him suggested violence. “I don’t know why you keep asking me about a murder. I don’t know anything about a murder. I was just popping round to the post. It’s no distance. Ten minutes, maybe. Up Steven Street and then right into Melrose Avenue.”

“Popping round to the post?”

“Listen up, doc. I just told you.”

“Did you have any letters with you at the time?”

“Can’t remember.”

“The reason I ask,” I said, “is that when people go to the post they generally want to post something.”

He smiled. “Good one. Like it.” These memory lapses are a feature of the condition. Nathan didn’t appreciate that if a letter had been posted and delivered it would help corroborate his version of events.

Then he went into what I think of as his storyteller mode, one hand cupping his chin while the other unfolded between us as if he were a conjurer producing a coin. “Do you want to hear what happened?”

I nodded.

“There was I,” he said, “walking up the street.”

“Steven Street?”

“Yes.”

“On the right side or the left?”

“What difference does that make?”

According to Morgan, the detective inspector, number twenty-nine, the murder house, was on the left about a third of the way along. “I’m asking, that’s all.”

“Well, I wouldn’t need to cross, would I?” Nathan said. “So I was on the left, and when I got to Melrose-”

“Hold on,” I said. “We haven’t left Steven Street yet.”

“I have,” he said. “I’m telling you what happened in Melrose.”

“Did you notice anything in Steven Street?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Somebody told me about an incident there.”

“You’re on about that again, are you? I keep telling you I know nothing about a murder.”

“Go on, then.”

“You’ll never guess what I saw when I got to Melrose.”

That was guaranteed. His trips to the post were always impossible to predict. “Tell me, Nathan.”

“Three elephants.”

“In Melrose ?” Melrose Avenue is a small suburban back street. “What were they doing?”

He grinned. “Swinging their trunks. Flapping their ears.”

“I mean, what were they doing in Melrose Avenue?”

He had me on a string now and he was enjoying himself. “What do you think?”

“I’m stumped. Why don’t you tell me?”

“They were walking in a line.”

“What, on their own?”

He gave me a look that suggested I was the one in need of psychotherapy. “They had a keeper with them, obviously.”

“Trained elephants?”

Now he sighed at my ignorance. “Melrose Avenue isn’t the African bush. Some little travelling circus was performing in the park and they were part of the procession.”

“But if it was a circus procession, Nathan, it would go up the High Street where all the shoppers could see it.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Then what were the elephants doing in Melrose?”

“Subsidence.”

I waited for more.

“You know where they laid the cable for the television in the High Street? They didn’t fill it in properly. A crack appeared right across the middle. They didn’t want the elephants making it worse, so they diverted them around Melrose. The rest of the procession wasn’t so heavy – the marching band and the clowns and the bareback rider. They were allowed up the High Street.”

The story had a disarming logic, like so many of Nathan’s. On a previous trip to the post he’d spotted Johnny Depp trimming a privet hedge in somebody’s front garden. Johnny Depp as a jobbing gardener. Nathan had asked some questions and some joker had told him they were rehearsing a scene for a film about English suburban life. He’d suggested I go round there myself and try to get in the film as an extra. I had to tell him I’m content with my career.