Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

She asked her next question with studied calm. “You know what you’re saying, Phil? You’re admitting to the murder of your baby.”

“I admit that I gave peace to Alice, Hannah, but I didn’t murder her. To murder, you have to take life and Alice never had any. No power on Earth was ever going give her that.”

Sam said sarcastically, “Another doctor playing God.”

“Another father having to do something terrible for the greater good.”

“Who’s good? Yours?”

“No,” contradicted Reed. “Kate’s.”

“You’re kidding! You did it for yourself. You’ve admitted to being jealous of your own child.”

“You don’t understand, Sergeant, and perhaps you never will. Just pray tonight that you’re never in a similar position.”

“I know that I won’t commit murder, and I know that I won’t destroy my wife’s life.”

“Do you think that I enjoyed what I did? That I took some sort of pleasure in seeing Kate’s distress? Yet all the while I knew also that what I had done hadn’t caused it; what I had done had only brought it forward, and at the same time I had ended Alice’s awful life.”

“You needn’t have told us, you know.”

“All these years I have wanted to confess to Kate, but never dared. What would have been the point? As she lay there and died, I nearly said something maybe half a dozen times, but held back. I wanted her last hours on Earth to be as happy as possible.” He suddenly straightened up in his chair, assumed some dignity. “And I think that I would have continued the silence had I not seen the blood drop into the water, had I not seen it swirl down into nothingness. Dr. Mandelbrot has a lot to answer for, you know.”

Hannah sounded almost depressed as she said, “We’ll almost certainly have to charge you with murder.”

“You think I care about that? You think I care about anything anymore?”

She shook her head. Sam just stared at Reed, who in turn had his head bowed. She said in a formal tone, “Interview terminated at ten thirty-six.”

Then she stood up, Sam following her lead. “I’ll pray for you, Phil, but they’ll roast you alive. They’ll chew you up, spit you out, and then smear you into the pavement.”

And all Reed said was, “Do me a favor, Hannah.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t pray for me. Pray that there’s no afterlife, that after death, there’s nothing.”

“Why?”

“Because if there is something that follows life, if by the slightest of chances there is a heaven or hell or something like that, then Kate’s there now. She’s there even as we speak, and she knows.” He suddenly shivered, as if a cold wind had blown past him, as perhaps it had. “She knows, Hannah. She knows what I did. I can’t cope with that thought.”

“Don’t count on me in that quarter, Phil. I’m sorry.”

She walked to the door, then turned. “We’ll be back shortly.”

As they walked back to Hannah’s office, Sam said quietly, “He deserves everything he’s going to get.”

“Probably.”

He was surprised by the doubt in her voice. “Probably?”

They were on the stairs before she spoke again. “Do you love me as much as that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you love me enough to do what he did?”

He couldn’t see what she was talking about. “He murdered two people. You want me to copy him?”

She halted, turned to him. “Sam, he threw away his soul-and not just his soul, his whole earthly being, as well-for the woman he loved. Would you do that for me?”

“Don’t be stupid, Hannah. He just did what he did for himself.”

“You think so?”

“How else can you explain it? You surely don’t believe that crap he fed us about loving her.”

“Hatred’s not the only reason for killing… in fact, it’s quite a rare one. Love’s a far commoner motive.”

“I’d never kill for love.”

She looked at him long and hard, then continued walking up the stairs. There was a small smile on her face.

“No,” she said. “I can see that you wouldn’t.”

It started as a challenge, the unforeseen outcome of an absurd conversation at a writers’ festival in Western Australia. There was the usual panel on stage, and an audience made up of the sort of people who frequent crime panels-predominantly women with a sprinkling of men, highly educated, highly literate, and highly imaginative. They were a group bound together by a fascination with the gory details of behaviours in which they themselves would never engage. These people would never commit murder, not in their wildest dreams. Nor would they mix with people who did such things, no matter how fascinating they might find their company on the page. But they loved to read about murder, about the sudden, violent termination of human life, and of how it was done.

The panel was discussing realism in crime fiction. Two practitioners of the art, writers of well-received Policières, had been pitted against the literary critic of a local paper. The critic, who read very little of such fiction expressed the view that there was a surfeit of realistic gore in the contemporary mystery.

“Look at the average crime novel these days,” he pointed out, stabbing at the air with an accusing finger. “Look at the body count. Look at the compulsory autopsy scenes. Some actually start with the autopsy, would you believe it! The autopsy room, so familiar, so comforting! Organs are extracted and weighed, wounds examined for angle-of-entry, and it’s all so… well, it’s all so graphic.” He paused. From the audience came a brief outbreak of laughter. It could not be graphic enough for them.

The critic warmed to his theme. “But there are crimes other than murder, aren’t there? There’s fraud and theft and extortion. There’s tax evasion, for heaven’s sake! And yet all we read about in books of this genre is murder. Murder, murder, murder.” He paused, then looked accusingly at the two authors beside him. “Why not write about more mundane offences? Why not write about things that actually happen? Murder’s very rare, you know. Not that one would think so to read your books.”

One of the authors grinned at the audience. “Weak stomach,” he said, gesturing to the critic. “Can’t take it.”

The audience laughed. They had no difficulty taking it.

“Seriously, though,” said the critic. “How about it? How about a realistic crime novel dealing with something day-to-day, some commonplace low-level offence.”

“Such as?” asked one of the authors.

The critic waved a hand in the air. “Oh, anything,” he said lightly. “Parking violations, perhaps. Those happen all the time.

Everybody joined in the laughter, even the critic. “Go on,” he said to the authors. “Why don’t one of you people do something like that? Give up murder. Get real. Start a new genre.”

One of the authors, George Harris, a successful crime writer from Perth, stared at him. He had been laughing, but now he looked thoughtful.

George shared a small bungalow with his girlfriend, Frizzie, who ran a tie-and-dye tee-shirt store in Fremantle. They had lived together for five years now, in a narrow house near Cottesloe Beach. George liked to surf and Cottesloe was a good place for it, as the Indian Ocean broke directly on the broad expanse of sand there, hindered only by the tiny sliver of Rocknest Island.

Whenever he went surfing nowadays, thoughts of what might be in the water beneath him were always on his mind, nagging fears, repressed but still there, somewhere below the surface. Eight months earlier somebody whom he knew, although only vaguely, had been taken by a great white within a stone’s throw of the edge of the beach. The incident had brought home to him the fact that surfing in Australia had its perils-one was in their habitat, after all-and it had also given him an idea for his next book. The plot would involve rivalry amongst surfers-something having to do with a lover or a motorbike-which would lead to one surfer planning to dispose of another. And what better way to do so than to fake a shark attack? The killing strike would be administered from below the waves by a large knife which the murderer had specially made in his garage. The knife would have a number of serrations along the edge, each carefully honed to the shape of a shark’s tooth, in order to leave just the right wounds for the coroner to come to the inevitable conclusion-death by shark attack. It would be carried out at a time when nobody else was about and certainly nobody would see the diver down below, with his knife glinting in the water like a silver fish. It was a good plot, even if it would not make comfortable reading for surfers, or comfortable writing, for that matter, for a crime novelist who also happened to be a surfer.