Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

They found nothing. The dogs were called off and the police moved away to talk to people at railway stations and motorway cafes. I waited until they were all gone then, on the fourth day after Janey disappeared, I took an old milk can from the pantry, broke a stick off a tree and went out.

I’d heard enough of the talking to be able to reconstruct Janey’s route and I walked it, throwing scarlet rosehips into my can as an excuse and looking for her body. I knew she must be dead. Janey would never have run away – not when she could spite mam more by staying at home. But I wanted to see her body, to be certain. After all, if Janey was dead, baiting mam was all up to me, wasn’t it?

I found the body after a few hours. She’d gone into a wood, probably to get at a particularly heavily-laden rosebush; she must have tried to snag it with the hook of her stick then overbalanced. What she didn’t know was that the bush overhung an old quarry, used hundreds of years ago to build that ruined farmhouse. I spotted a broken branch, or thought I did, and parted the foliage to see the crumpled body below. God knows why the police dogs hadn’t found her.

I looked long and hard so I’d not forget any detail of it, then I went home.

The police came back, to question mam again, and I told them she’d been so annoyed by their last visit she’d hit me and knocked me over. I had a scrape on my knee to prove it. I don’t know whether they believed me, but they kept coming back.

They never found Janey, and after a while the whole thing was dropped. Except for the neighbours. Neighbours don’t allow anything to drop. They kept nipping in to “make sure I was all right”; they’d murmur careless questions about Janey and mam, and I’d tell innocent stories which made them look significantly at each other. Mam got madder and madder, and I made her worse by musing aloud on what had happened to Janey. I’ve often wondered why she didn’t hit me, but I suppose she didn’t dare – the neighbours would have called the police at the first sign of bruises. Then she said she couldn’t stand it any more so we went off to a town half a country away, where I got laughed at in school for my accent and added that to the list of things I hated mam for. That, and the day I came home and found she’d skipped out.

I had to go and live with a friend, which was all right, but I made sure they all knew how mam hated me. I said I looked just like my dad and hinted that there was something odd about his accident which there was. If only the vicar had told me, if only I’d had real evidence.

I hunted her down and bombarded her with pitiful letters pleading for her to come home. She kept moving. I kept finding her.

Then someone called to say that she was in hospital with cancer. I went to see her and found her surrounded by businesslike nurses. I let drop the fact that my dad had been killed in a freak accident when I was two years old and told them that Janey had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, that she and mam had “never got on”. On her last day, Mam tried to win the day by confiding her fear that one of the knives had gone missing the day Janey had disappeared. The nurse soothed her and murmured the word “delirious” but I was left with an odd sense of anti-climax. She even contrived to die when I was out of the room.

I’ve never really recovered from that feeling of dissatisfaction. Now mam’s dead, I can’t quite get interested in anything any more. I feel aimless. I wanted another glimpse of the old excitement Janey and I felt when we taunted mam. So I came back, thirty years to the day Janey died. I climbed the fell again, on a chill day that seemed to mock that long hot summer and found the wood, though the quarry was harder to discover. The trees had spread and covered the ruined farmhouse, clawing at its walls with thick roots; branches trailed across old paths. In the end, I stumbled into the quarry from below and crashed through shrubs and bushes to where I thought Janey must have fallen. A tangle of wild roses, just going over, marked the place; they must have sprung from the hips in her can when she fell.

The first thing I found was the can, crushed and half-buried in humus. Then a hint of bone – I drew my fingers through the soil and found the long outline of it. Then-

My fingers brushed something metal.

I dug into the chill soil, heart beating faster, wondering suddenly what I’d missed, all those years ago. Having a premonition of what it must be, knowing that I ought to have come down here to Janey’s body, thirty years ago. I would have seen it then, sticking from her back, maybe.

A knife. An old, ivory-handled knife.

I remembered tea that day. Mam spreading blackcurrant jam on white bread with one of a set of knives. Wedding presents cast haphazardly into a drawer in a whole range of different sizes and shapes. One would not have been missed.

Sitting back on my haunches, I tried to reconstruct that afternoon. I’d been in my room doing homework and stopped to watch Janey from my window with dad’s binoculars. I’d heard mam below in the kitchen. Hadn’t I?

If only I’d kept watching Janey, instead of going back to my homework. If I’d watched all the time I might have seen mam. I might have seen her kill Janey. All those years, I’d been satisfied with hints and innuendos. And she must have been laughing all the time, knowing I could have had evidence, but didn’t.

Crouching there, holding the dirt-encrusted knife in my hand, fuming at my impotence, I knew one thing.

Mam had won and there was nothing I could do about it.

… A series of unexplained deaths rippling across a city paralysed by overly-ambitious copycat serial killers, bi-curious junkies, homeless Santas… 197 exchange students killed in simultaneous unrelated coffee table incidents… a travelling salesman mutilated in his bed surrounded by obscene cuddly toys… art critics butchered amidst some of the countries most innovative new buildings… a motivational dog-trainer garrotted in her car by a 5-inch child’s lariat… several hundred random business journalists killed by lethal injection… the city a vast amoral jungle of blue-haired gamblers and punk rock scholars… out on the Sheik-infested streets a thousand tragically sassy beauticians, Rembrandt scholars who don’t like Rembrandt, religious activists sexually haranguing timid agnostics… the atmosphere of each day eerily in keeping with the vapid production values of the entire Sussudio period… Q surrounded by photographs, articles, graphs detailing these sly, wittily constructed deaths: dismembered ex-girlfriends, decapitated nuns, disembowelled cardiologists, violently violated violinists… Q pondering the dark methodologies at work, regularly raising both eyebrows simultaneously…

… unshaven in blue underpants, organic cotton, knitted stripes – no logo of any description – Q squinting at cold black newsprint, reading about the death of a former chess champion. Several witnesses saw him fall “almost cheerfully” – after straightening his bowtie, tossing himself from the roof of the building… an ever-increasing grin widening across his face… on impact he was “practically having sex up against a tree for five to ten seconds.”

Q circles the paragraph in bright red ink.

In some advanced technological epoch – Q thinks to himself -perhaps people will wonder why we bothered to circle such articles in bright red ink. Q filing away the latest of the latest unexpected demises … a light-bulb salesman ripped apart by a gaggle of lions… renegade schoolgirls exploding into young pieces, their charred remains evenly distributed across the piazza…