Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

“Which is why we’re happy to have caught up with you again,” said Codlin.

“But why? We’re not big criminals.”

“You’re middle-ranking. And the gambling industry has a lot of good friends in this government, thanks to their readiness to grease the right palms. So we’re just telling you: there are stories going round linking a widespread gambling scam to a certain travelling display of ageing wax-works. Get me? And if you or your revered grandfather slips us a ten quid note and renews it every time our paths cross, we’ll keep you informed and tip you the wink when it’s time to move on.”

“Wouldn’t Sir Robert, or his successor, be angry if he found out?”

“Livid – if he found out. But if he wants to stamp out corruption in the nation’s police force he’d better start paying us what we’re worth.” He wagged a finger in my face. “Until then he’ll find that the work never gets done.”

“We’re public guardians bold and daring,” sang Short, in a quavering baritone: “When danger looms we’re never there.”

“But if we see a helpless woman, or little boys who do no harm,” took up Codlin, “we run ‘em in, we run ‘em in – I say, is that your revered Grandaddy I see coming towards us?”

It was, and when he heard what the pair were offering he stumped up. Always good to have friends in high places. We decamped quietly from the waxworks display that evening, taking a quite different route from them, and leaving Mrs Jarley with nowhere to put her hands.

The places we stopped at, on all of which we left our mark, I will not mention in detail, but we rarely stopped long enough to need a warning from Codlin and Short. We were on to a very good thing. Our lives changed, however, when we happened on the village to which the schoolmaster whom we had encountered early on in our travels had moved. Here he was, large as life and just as dispiriting. He was still mourning the bright young pupil he had had years before, and still polishing the young hypocrite’s halo every day of his life. A right little teacher’s pet that limb of Satan must have been! It occurred to us that this was the sort of place we could well settle down in.

Well, as soon as the idea occurred to us, we wrote to Codlin and Short. We explained that there were several towns within walking distance, as well as several lucrative hell-holes. We had made a series of nocturnal excursions after the village was asleep (at about 8.30, in order to save candles), and we really felt the place would answer, at least for a year or two. We heard back from them that they could think of no reason why it shouldn’t, and they would keep us informed as to anything they heard of that could be construed as a threat. And so things went on for three or four months.

Then I got bored.

I suppose we should have expected that. The night excursions still held a charm, but the daytime was terrible – catching up on sleep and enduring shiver-making visits from the schoolteacher or from his equally unappetizing friend The Bachelor – a local notable of similar habits and notions (my impersonation of infantile goodness and sweetness confirmed all his preconceptions about the non-carnal nature of the English female). I was tired of them all. I wanted London, I wanted stir, glamour, rich pickings. I was even nostalgic about Dan Quilp, one of our London friends, who had managed to evict grandfather from the Old Curiosity Shop: beneath his ugly, dwarfish exterior there lurked a diabolical energy, both criminal and sexual. He radiated an indiscriminate hunger and love of wreaking havoc. I understood why women were both repelled and thrilled by him. I wanted to get a share in that electricity, match myself with him. I hadn’t been so excited since those lovely years when I was the only girl member of Fagin’s gang.

I always remember the ending of Codlin and Short’s letter, when we had written to them to broach the problem. It read:

“Why doesn’t she die?”

When we wrote asking them to elaborate on the question, they sketched in the plan which eventually with slight changes we adopted.

“Have dear little Eleanor sicken, slowly, inexorably. Orchestrate a chorus of village concern as she sinks, passing into a better world. Resist the temptation to open the deathbed scene to the general public at a shilling a time. Do it all tastefully. Have her practise short breathing – getting tiny gulps in a way that hardly moves the lungs. When she is ‘dead’ have a simple funeral, though one marked by inconsolable local grief. Take the coffin to the local church and have grandpa mount guard over her all night. Keep a supply of sand in the vestry (NOT rubble, it tends to rattle). Fill (or half fill) the coffin with it. In the morning have the ceremony, bury the sand, and get Nell off to London suitably disguised – as her real self, we would suggest. Hey presto! In the future she can come back to visit her grandad if she wants to – posing as a long-lost cousin.”

It was a wonderful idea! It left grandad free to use his great gifts in the country gaming holes, and it left me in London sampling the high life of Mayfair and the low life of Dan Quilp and his haunts. I liked the idea so much that I fell ill the very day we got the letter.

I didn’t overdo it, of course. I am nothing if not tasteful. At first I was very brave, denying that I was ill at all. When they commented on my pallid complexion (flea powder) I shook my head bravely, then said there was nothing wrong. Then I thought it must be something I had eaten. Then I lost the use of my legs (they all shook their heads gravely at that). Before ten days were out I was permanently confined to bed, offering my visitors sickening platitudes, and sweetly prophesying I would soon be up again and as busy as ever. Tears flowed like cataracts. Behind their hands everyone started making suggestions for the gravestone.

The end was unutterably poignant. We made it semi-public. The schoolmaster and The Bachelor were there, and a couple of rustics who could be relied on to get everything wrong and then rehash their account to the whole village, over and over again. I was visibly failing, and much whiter than the sheets on my bed. When the little knot of witnesses was assembled I began the tearful climax to my short life.

“Grandad,” I said (he was sitting on my bed, and now clutched my hand in his horny one), “I think a change is coming. I think I am getting better. Is the sun shining? How I would love to see the sun again. It is getting light. The whole world is becoming brighter. I feel I am in a new place – better and more lovely than anything I have known before-”

And so on. And on. I managed about ten minutes of this, and then my voice started to fade. Words could be heard – “world”, “bright”, “sun” and others, but nothing together that made sense until I suddenly said “Grandad, give me the sun” and my head fell back on the pillow, and my grandfather let out an anguished howl.

Artistic, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The witnesses clustered round, observing the lifeless corpse and the sobbing frame of that old fraud my grandfather. Then he stood up, still wracked with sobs, and ushered them out of the door.

He drew the heavy curtains, locked the door, and then the pair of us had a good if quiet laugh. After a while grandad slipped out to order a coffin from the village carpenter. He found it was almost ready, as the carpenter with his practised eye had made a note of the likely size and had done most of the work a couple of weeks earlier. We, or he, took delivery that evening.

We made a slight change of plan. The nights were drawing in and the days were nippy. I didn’t fancy (as we had planned) a long day in the staircase leading up the church tower while the funeral went ahead and night fell. We agreed to do the substitution in the cottage. We had a showing of me in the coffin next day, when the whole village and rustic dolts from miles around filed past uttering idiocies like “She do seem at peace” and “Oh what a ‘eavenly hexpression she do ‘ave”. When that collection of human rubble had passed through I jumped out of the coffin. Grandfather and I heaved the sack of sand (purloined by him from a building site) into the coffin and he nailed it down extremely tightly. We heaved it on to a trestle and went to bed in Grandad’s bed. It will not have passed my sharper readers by that, whatever else he was, Grandad was certainly not my grandfather.