Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

Then he remembered. Just as he had got through, Mother had knocked on the bedroom floor for him. He had held the phone at arm’s length and covered the mouthpiece, as you do, and yelled up that he was coming in a minute. He hadn’t heard the administrator’s message, only vaguely recognized it was a man’s voice on the answering machine, heard the usual beep and left his picks with someone else at the paper.

Someone who hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

Calvin held his head in his hands. The wrong number . All for nothing. He drank some more whisky. Well, maybe not all for nothing, he thought after a while. Hadn’t he already decided that, nice as it would have been, he hadn’t killed Charlie only for the money? Wasn’t $2000 a paltry sum to murder for? More than $15, but still… he knew he had had more reason than the money. Winning the pool was a part of it, of course, but that wasn’t to be. So what was left? What could he salvage from this disaster?

‘I’m a killer. That’s what I am.’

The voice seemed to come into his head from nowhere, and slowly as the whisky warmed his insides, understanding dawned on Calvin.

‘I’m a killer. That’s what I am.’

The sound of a heavy stick hammering on the ceiling above broke into his thoughts. He could hear her muffled yelling. ‘Leroy! Leroy! I need my hot milk, Leroy!’

Calvin put his glass down, looked up at the ceiling and got to his feet. ‘Coming, Mother,’ he said softly.

I considered itthe absolute epitome of irony that, with bombs falling around us, someone went and bludgeoned Mad Maggie to death.

To add insult to injury, she lay undiscovered for several days before Harry Fletcher, the milkman, found her. Because milk was rationed to one or two pints a week, depending on how much the children and expectant mothers needed, he didn’t leave it on her doorstep the way he used to do before the war. Even in a close community like ours, a bottle of milk left unguarded on a doorstep wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

These days, Harry walked around with his float, and people came out to buy. It was convenient, as we were some way from the nearest shops, and we could always be sure we were getting fresh milk. However mad Maggie might have been, it wasn’t like her to miss her milk ration. Thinking she might have slept in, or perhaps have fallen ill with no one to look after her, Harry knocked on her door and called her name. When he heard no answer, he told me, he made a tentative try at the handle and found that the door was unlocked.

There she lay on her living-room floor in a pool of dried blood dotted with flies. Poor Harry lost his breakfast before he could dash outside for air.

Why Harry came straight to me when he found Mad Maggie’s body I can’t say. We were friends of a kind, I suppose, of much the same age, and we occasionally passed a pleasurable evening together playing dominoes and drinking watery beer in the Prince Albert. Other than that, we didn’t have a lot in common: I was a schoolteacher – English and history – and Harry had left school at fourteen; Harry had missed the first war through a heart ailment, whereas I had been gassed at Ypres in 1917; I was a bachelor, and Harry was married with a stepson, Thomas, who had just come back home on convalescent leave after being severely wounded during the Dunkirk evacuation. Thomas also happened to be my godson, which I suppose was the main thing Harry and I had in common.

Perhaps Harry also came to me because I was a Special Constable. I know it sounds impressive, but it isn’t really. The services were so mixed up that you’d have the police putting out fires, the Home Guard doing police work, and anyone with two arms carrying the stretchers. A Special Constable was simply a part-time policeman, without any real qualifications for the job except his willingness to take it on. The rest of the time I taught what few pupils remained at Silverhill Grammar School.

As it turned out, I was glad that Harry did call on me because it gave me a stake in the matter. The regular police were far more concerned with lighting offences and the black market than they were with their regular duties, and one thing nobody had time to do in the war was investigate the murder of a mad, mysterious, cantankerous old woman.

Nobody except me, that is.

Though my position didn’t grant me any special powers, I pride myself on being an intelligent and perceptive sort of fellow, not to mention nosy, and it wasn’t the first time I’d done a spot of detective work on the side. But first, let me tell you a little about Mad Maggie…

I say old woman, but Maggie was probably only in her mid-forties, about the same age as me, when she was killed. Everyone just called her old ; it seemed to go with mad . With a certain kind of woman, it’s not so much a matter of years, anyway, but of demeanour, and Maggie’s demeanour was old.

Take the clothes she wore, for a start: most women were trying to look like one of the popular film stars like Vivien Leigh or Deanna Durbin, with her bolero dresses, but even for a woman of her age, Maggie wore clothes that could best be described as old-fashioned, even antique: high, buttoned boots, long dresses with high collars, groundsweeping cloaks and broad-brimmed hats with feathers.

Needless to say, the local kids – at least those whose parents hadn’t packed them off to the countryside already – used to follow her down the street in gangs and chant, ‘Mad Maggie, Mad Maggie, she’s so mad, her brain’s all claggy…’ Children can be so cruel. Most of the time she ignored them, or seemed oblivious to their taunts, but once in a while she wheeled on them, eyes blazing, and started waving her arms around and yelling curses, usually in French. The children would squeal with exaggerated horror, then turn tail and run away.

Maggie never had any visitors; none of us had ever been inside her house; nobody in the community even knew what her real name was, where she had come from, or how she had got to be the way she was. We simply accepted her. There were rumours of course. Some gossip-mongers had it that she was an heiress cut off by her family because she went mad; others said she had never recovered from a tragic love affair; still others said she was a rich eccentric and kept thousands of pounds stuffed in her mattress.

Whoever and whatever Mad Maggie was, she managed to take care of life’s minutiae somehow; she paid her rent, she bought newspapers, and she handled her ration coupons just like the rest of us. She also kept herself clean, despite the restriction to only five inches of bath water. Perhaps her eccentricity was just an act, then, calculated to put people off befriending her for some reason? Perhaps she was shy or antisocial? All in all, she was known as Mad Maggie only because she never talked to anyone except herself, because of the old clothes she wore, because of her strange outbursts in French and because, as everyone knew, she never went to the shelters during air-raids, but would either stay indoors alone or walk the blacked-out streets muttering and arguing with herself, waving her arms at the skies as if inviting the bombs to come and get her.

When Harry called that Monday morning, I was lying in bed grappling with one of my frequent bouts of insomnia, waiting for the birds to sing me back to sleep. I couldn’t even tell if it was daylight or not because of the heavy blackout curtains. I had been dreaming, I remembered, and had woken at about half-past four, gasping for air, from my recurring nightmare about being sucked down into a quicksand.

I heard Harry banging at my door and calling my name, so I threw on some clothes and hurried downstairs. I thought at first that it might be something to do with Tommy, but when I saw his pale face, his wide eyes and the thin trickle of vomit at the corner of his mouth, I worried that he was having the heart attack he had been expecting daily for over twenty years.