The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (53 page)

“I don’t get it.”

She laughed, said,

“The next whore sits on your face, ask her.”

He leaned fast across the table, slapped her mouth, hard, and Foley went,

“Jesus, Al.”

His fingers left an outline on her cheek and she smiled. The week after, when Al asked his regular hooker for a translation, she told him,

“Please don’t kiss me.”

Foley wound back the tape, couldn’t have the slap on there, then asked,

“So what brought you back to Houston?”

She shrugged, said,

“A guy, what else.”

Foley looked at his notes, double-checked, then,

“That’d be the deceased, one Charles Newton?”

She lit up the cigarette she’d been toying with, blew a cloud of smoke at Al, said,

“Charlie, yeah, he promised me he’d marry me, and he was into me for Five Gs.”

Al gave a nasty chuckle, more a cackle, asked,

“The matter with you broads, you give your dollars to any lowlife that says he’ll marry you?”

She looked away, near whispered,

“He had a voice like Johnny Cash.”

Al spread his hands in the universal gesture of
the fuck does that mean?
Charlene was thinking of her third day in Houston: one of those sudden rainstorms hit and she ducked into a
building. Turned out it was a library and she looked to see if maybe they had a book on Johnny. Passing a Literature section, she saw a title . . .
To Have and Have Not.

For some reason, she read it as
To Have and To Hold
and was about to open it when the librarian approached, a spinster in her severe fifties, demanded,

“Are you a member,
Miss?”

A hiss riding point on the
Miss.
Charlene knew the type – the dried-up bitter fruit of TV dinners and vicious cats. Charlene dropped the book, said,

“If you have anything to
do with it, I’m so fucking out of here.”

And was gone.

She’d have asked Foley about the book if Al wasn’t there, but she shut it down. Charlie was the usual loser she’d always attracted, but he had an apartment near Rice University
and she was running out of time, looks and patience. When she caught him going through her purse, she’d finally figured,

“What the hell?”

And knifed the bastard, in the neck. Then it felt so good, she stuck him a few more times . . . twenty five in all, or so they said. What, they counted? She was still holding the blade when the
cops showed up and it was, as they say, a slam-dunk.

Foley said,

“You turned down the offer to have an attorney present.”

She gave him what amounted to a tender smile, said,

“They’d assign some guy, and you know what? I’m sick to my gut of men.”

Al was unrolling a stick of Juicy Fruit, popped it in his mouth, made some loud sucking noises, said,

“You’re a lesbian, that it? Hate all men?”

She let out a breath, said,

“If I sign this, can I get some sleep, some chow?”

Foley passed over a pen, said,

“Have you some ribs, right away.”

She signed and Al said,

“Now the bad news darlin’. Ol’ Charles, he was the son of a real prominent shaker right here in Houston. Bet he didn’t tell you that. You’re
going away for a long time.”

She stretched, asked,

“And what makes you think I give a fuck?”

She got fifteen years. As she was being led down, Al leaned over, said,

“Come sundown, a bull dyke’s gonna make you think of Johnny Cash in a whole new
light.”

She spat in his face.

Six months later, Foley went to see her. He didn’t tell Al. When they brought her into the interview room, he was shocked by her appearance. Her frame had shrunk into itself and her eyes
were hollow, but she managed a weak smile, said,

“Detective, what brings you out to see the gals?”

He was nervous, his hands awash with sweat, and he blamed the humidity, asked,

“They treating you okay?”

She laughed, said,

“Like one of their own.”

He produced a pack of Kools and a book of matches. She looked at him, said,

“I quit.”

He felt foolish, tried,

“You can use them for barter, maybe?”

She had a far away expression in her eyes, near whispered,

“They got nothing I want.”

He had a hundred questions he wanted to ask, but couldn’t think how to frame them and stared at the table. She reached over, touched his hand, said,

“Johnny was on TV last week, did
a song called
Hurt
, he sang that for me.”

Then she changed tack, said,

“You ever get to El Paso and want to cross the border, take the number 10 green trolley to the Santa Fe Bridge. Don’t take the Border Jumper Trolley
– it’s, like, real expensive. Walk to the right side of the Stanton Bridge and it’s twenty-five cents to cross and in El Paso, you want some action, go to the Far West Rodeo, on
Airways Boulevard. They sometimes got live rodeo, and hey, get a few brews in, you might even try the mechanical bull, that’s a riot.”

Relieved to have something to talk about, he asked,

“You went there a lot?”

“Never, not one time. But I heard, you know?”

He looked at his watch and she said,

“Y’all better be getting on, I got to write me a letter to Johnny, let him know where I’m at.”

Foley was standing and said,

“Charlene, he’s dead. He died last week.”

For a moment, she was stock still, then she emitted a howl of anguish that brought the guards running. She wailed,

“You fucking liar – he’s not dead. He’ll never be dead
to me – how do you think I get through this hell?”

As he hurried down the cellblock, he could still hear her screams, his sweat rolling in rivulets, creasing his cheap suit even further.

As he got his car in “drive,” he reached in his jacket, took out the packaged CD of Johnny’s Greatest Hits . . . slung it out the window, the disc rolling along the desert for
a brief second, then coming to a stop near some sagebrush.

A rodent tearing at the paper exposed Cash’s craggy face, and, viewed in a certain light, you’d think he was looking towards the prison.

Impossible to read his expression.

Peter Crowther

Luddersedge’s Regal Hotel lived up to its grand name in only one way.

The building was forbidding rather than imposing, a towering grey edifice of soot-ingrained stone and stained, greasy windows that squatted alongside the traffic lights on the corner of
Smithfield Road and Albert Street. The somewhat less-than-impressive facade looked more like an old mill building – examples of which could still be seen dotted around the Calder Valley
landscape, all the way from Halifax to Burnley and points even further west – than like a supposedly luxurious establishment catering for visiting gentry. But then, it was highly unlikely
that any gentry taking advantage of the Regal’s dubious hospitality would actually be visiting Luddersedge itself. Rather, such occasional tenants would more realistically be those whose
misfortune was so dire that their mode of transportation between departure and arrival points had chosen Luddersedge to give up the vehicular ghost . . . and at a time to render impossible any
solution other than booking into the Regal.

On the top of the five-storey building, amongst the aerials and the blackened windows, pigeons and starlings roosted noisily beside the quieter permanent residents, a troupe of bizarre gargoyles
intermittently positioned amidst the stone balustrades and fashioned by Cecil Blenkinsop at the turn of the century. These monolithic decorations – whose artistic merit was questionable at
the very least – were presented by Blenkinsop to the hotel in a rare demonstration of generosity.

However, the smart money around the older citizens of the town had it that the “gift” was actually a means to eradicate the excessive gambling debts run up by the gruff
mill-owner’s son-cum-sculptor in the hotel’s extensive gambling casino, a huge two floor area in the belly of the hotel that had since been refashioned and refurbished after the Great
War into a ballroom.

To say that hotels in Luddersedge were thin on the ground was an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Although there were countless guest houses, particularly along Honey dew Lane beside
the notorious Bentley’s Tannery – whose ever-present noxious fumes seemed to be unnoticed by the guests – usually truck drivers, who stayed there as a mid-way point on the long
haul from Glasgow to the South Coast, parking their rigs on the spare ground between Carholme Place and Car-holme Drive – the Regal was the only full-blown hotel, and the only building other
than the old town hall to stretch above the slate roofs of Luddersedge and scratch a sky oblivious to, and entirely disinterested in, its or even the town’s existence.

The corridors of the Regal were lined with threadbare carpets, hemmed in by walls bearing a testimonial trinity of mildew, graffiti and spilled alcohol, and topped by ceilings whose anaglypta
was peeling at the corners and whose streaky paint-covering had been long ago dimmed by cigarette smoke.

The rooms themselves boasted little in the way of the creature comforts offered by the Regal’s big-town contemporaries in Halifax and Burnley.

Only the Albert, Calder and Bickerdyke suites on the fourth floor featured tea – and coffee-making facilities, not to mention sufficient room to swing a cat . . . should such an activity
be desired (though deplorable TV reception and the absence of satellite or cable-fed hotel movies imbued even the most unusual in-room entertainment with dizzily heightened credibility and
attraction).

The truth, however, was that the Regal’s guests brought their own entertainment in the form of a partner whose intimate attentions they might enjoy amidst the carbolic soap-smelling bed
linen rather than propped against the building walls surrounding the club district of the metropolis of Halifax or parked up in one of the pull-ins overlooking Todmorden, testing the suspension and
upholstery of old cars whose MOTs had been just a little too readily granted by Pete Dickinson or Tony Manderson at Tony’s garage over on Eldershot Road.

Such activities were entirely safe inasmuch that, while the Regal’s facilities were often found lacking, the discretion of the staff was legendary . . . and with room rates being so
modest, even with breakfast added on, an additional gratuity in the form of a folded fiver jammed into the hand of the appropriately named manager Sidney Poke or one of his team was a small price
to pay for uninterrupted passion in the relative comfort and complete anonymity accorded by the Regal.

For most of the year, the Regal’s register – if such a thing were ever to be filled in, which it rarely was . . . at least accurately – boasted only couples by the name of
Smith or Jones, and the catering staff had little to prepare in the form of sustenance other than the fabled Full English Breakfast, truly the most obscenely mountainous start-of-the-day plate of
food outside of Dublin. Indeed, questions were frequently asked in bread shop or bus stop queues and around the beer-slopped pub tables at the Working Men’s Club as to exactly how the Regal
kept going.

But there were far too many other things to occupy the attention and interest of Luddersedge’s townsfolk and, anyway, most of them recognized the important social part played by the Regal
in the lives of their not-so-distant cousins living in the towns a few miles down the road in either direction . . . just as they recognized the equally important part played for themselves by
similar establishments in those same towns. There were far too many scarf-bedecked Juliets and blue-collar Romeos – some young and some not so young – who had taken advantage of such
no-questions-asked solitude . . . some long ago, when their flesh seemed more artistically arranged, and some only a day or two earlier, when they had supposedly been visiting relatives in far-off
Leeds or Manchester or delivering a van-load of unpronounceable grommet-type things down to Birmingham or up to Newcastle: after all, it didn’t do to defecate on one’s own doorstep, and
the status quo could only ever be maintained by not asking awkward questions.

Not that awkward questions were not asked about other situations in which the Regal played a key role, one of which came to pass on a Saturday night in early December on the occasion of the
Conservative Club’s Christmas Party . . . and which involved the one hotel feature that was truly magnificent – the Gentlemen’s toilet situated in the basement beneath the ballroom.

To call such a sprawling display of elegance and creative indulgence a loo or a bog – or even a john or a head, to use the slang vernacular popular with the occasional Americans who
visited the Calder Valley in the 1950s, the heyday of Luddersedge’s long-forgotten twinning with the mid west town of Forest Plains – was tantamount to heresy.

Listen to this:

A row of shoulder-height marble urinals – complete with side panels that effectively rendered invisible anyone of modest height who happened to be availing themselves of their facility – was completed by a series of carefully angled glass panel splashguards set in aluminium side grips and a standing area inlaid with a mosaic of tiny slate and Yorkshire stone squares and
rectangles of a multitude of colours. It was an area worn smooth by generations of men temporarily intent on emptying bladders filled with an excess of John Smith’s, Old Peculiar and Black
Sheep bitter ales served in the bars above.

Two wide steps down from the urinals, set back and mounted on ornate embellishments of curlicued brass fashioned to resemble a confusion of vines interlinked with snakes, a row of generously
sized washbasins nested beneath individual facing panels split one half mirror and the other reinforced glass. The glass halves looked through onto an identical set of basins on the other side of
the partition and behind them stood the WCs.

It was these wood-panelled floor-to-ceiling enclosed retreats – with their individual light switches, oak toilet seats and covers and matching tissue dispensers, and stained glass backings behind the pipe leading from the overhead cistern –
that were, perhaps, the room’s crowning glory, being even more impressive than the worn leather sofas and wing-backed chairs situated on their own dais at the far end of the toilet, bookended
by towering aspidistras and serviced by standing silver ashtrays and glass-topped tables bearing the latest issues of popular men’s magazines.