The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (70 page)

It helps that there’s been trouble with a couple of Neo-Nazi crackpots in the city on TV recently, even with the NSRUS pulling out of Ireland. Nazis make the best bad guys. Ask Indiana
Jones. And I see a twitch of fear or homophobia in Michael’s eyes.

“I’ll do it,” I tell him. “And you know what’ll happen then . . .”

Of course, his mind fills in the blank with its own worst fears. He promises to be good.

And over the next few weeks, he is. And I trot out the same threat to other lunatics I have to deal with. And they don’t see me as a punisher. Iron Kurt is the punisher. I’m just the
messenger. So they don’t even resent me for it.

My fellow
gardai
find the whole thing fucking funny. Some of them start using Kurt themselves. And Dublin sleeps safer at night. Kurt’s out there, watching over the city. A spectre
in the fog blowing in off the harbour, creeping upriver. A paper tiger keeping evil at bay.

One afternoon, I see William, one of our deranged, sitting in the doorway of a boarded-up shop with an Iron Cross badge pinned proudly to his battered old blue Leinster rugby top. Next to him is
a scratched metal strongbox.

“Hey, William.”

“It’s . . . you’re gonna beat me.”

“Leave it alone, William. What’s in the box?”

“They’re mine, see.”

“Fine. But show me what you’ve got.”

“It’s private. Mine.”

“Last time we had this conversation, you had a petrol bomb on you. I just want to make sure you don’t have another one. Anything else, you can keep.”

He thinks, pops open the box. Inside, an untidy pile of black fur.

“Why are you carrying a bunch of dead rats around?” I ask.

“They pay me. It’s my deal. Not yours.”

“I’ve got no ambitions of being a ratcatcher. Who pays?”

“The big red building down Castleforbes Road. Food warehouse. To set traps. Ten cents a rat.”

“And you get them from somewhere else, and they pay for them.”

“Yeah. It’s a good job.”

“Good for you. What’s with the Iron Cross?” I point at his chest.

“It’s protection, is what. Keith saw Iron Kurt.”

I try not to smile. “Yeah?”

“And he said, you wear stuff like this and you’ll be OK.”

“Unless you’ve been posted on his website.”

“Well, yeah.”

“While we’re on the subject, you’re keeping away from that playground, right?”

He nods vigorously. “Yeah. Never meant to do anything.”

“Did Keith say what Iron Kurt looked like?”

“Yeah. A big guy, tall, built like a brick shithouse. Bald. With a beard. Tattoos all over.”

The real Curt is 5’5” and built for comfort, not speed. Again, I stifle a smile. “Yeah, that sounds right. You’d better stay out of trouble, huh?”

Not long after, I see Keith himself. The shopping trolley that holds his worldly possessions has a bunch of plastic German soldiers on string looped all the way around it like
fairy lights. Now I’m looking for it, I start to notice similar items on most of the other nutcases in my patch.

A belt buckle like an Iron Cross around the neck. A pencil-drawn swastika. An SS-style shoulder patch. In one house in Clontarf, a guy named Terry has a toy soldier shrine in a foil-lined
cardboard box.

Votive offerings. Symbols of fear, not worship, not support. Warding off Kurt and his unholy wrath.

I shouldn’t be surprised. They all gather together in Duff Alley off East Wall Road to drink Tennant’s Super until someone passes out or pisses themselves. And they talk, and share
stories. Chinese whispers. Some believe them, some don’t. But they all listen.

They say Kurt’s the son of an SS officer. They say he’s raped and killed more than two hundred men. They say his website has more than a thousand followers, all over the world, who
take perverse delight in making each victim last as long as possible. They say – and when I tell Curt this he practically wets himself laughing – that he has a fourteen-inch dick and
that most of his victims die from blood poisoning caused by massive anal tearing.

Iron Kurt.

My creation. My Frankenstein. My cartoon monster.

And then Keith disappears. One day, gone. No one knows where. No one’s seen him. They find his trolley round the corner from a soup kitchen on North Quay, but he never
comes back for it. Shit happens, these people move on.

William stops picking up pay for his rats and vanishes from the hostel he’s been staying at. Someone tells me he’d been beaten up and his badge taken a couple of days before.

I stop seeing Terry. When I go to his house, his toy soldier shrine is still there, but he’s gone. The neighbour says the last they saw of him, he was going to get a pint of milk. A couple
of the others disappear too.

Duff Alley gets very empty, and the conversation there becomes very muted. They get drunk, huddle together, and after dark they whisper that Iron Kurt has come for them. And now I’m

shit

scared.

Another trip to the piss-stained steps outside Michael’s flat. He’s almost the only one left, and I need to know what he knows. To find out if he can reassure me.
Keith left for Cork. William found a winning lottery ticket in the street and moved to the Caribbean. Some other
gardai
told the Duff Alley crazies to get out, so they’re meeting
somewhere else now.

When I knock on the door, I hear a wet thudding noise from inside. When I try the handle, it’s unlocked. When I should turn and run away, I push it open and walk in.

The sickly-sweet smell of blood on the air. The acrid spike of human waste. The cloying taste of someone else’s sweat. Michael lies in a crimson-splashed, naked tangle in the middle of his
living room floor. The carpet around him soaked black with blood. Legs splayed at an unnatural angle, and pink-yellow ribbons of intestines running from the torn and tattered gash that yawns
between them.

He twitches, and I realize he’s still alive.

“Michael? Can you hear me?”

Whimper. Twitch. One eye creaks open and fixes me with a stare of utter agony and shock.

“Who did this? What the fuck’s going on?”

“
It . . . Kurt . . . didn’t . . .
”

“Kurt? You’re sure? Christ.”

“Said . . . name . . . site . . . to punish . . . I didn’t . . .
”

I should be calling an ambulance. I should be calling my colleagues. “Where is he now?”

Michael’s eye looks down. Pleading. Betrayed. “
You said . . . wouldn’t . . . website . . . I . . . good . . .
”

He thinks I did it. “I didn’t tell him,” I say. “Jesus, Michael, I wouldn’t even know how. I swear to you.”

“He . . . told .
. .” Michael smacks his lips. Dry mouth. Lost too much fluid already. Bleeding out. Dying.

“What did he tell you?”

“
No . . . he asked . . . who . . . gave my name . . .
” Smack. Smack. “
I . . . told him . . . you . . .
”

As Michael’s head drops to the carpet, something thumps out in the stairwell and my heart jumps into my mouth. Again I think about running, but I don’t. Again I think about calling
the station, but to tell them what? That some kind of phantom is stalking lunatics on my beat?

I step outside, check the stairs with shaky steps and trembling hands. And there’s nothing there.

When I come back down to Michael’s flat, the body is gone. So is the blood that soaked the carpet a moment ago. Is the smell gone as well? I can’t tell. But there’s no sign
that Michael was ever here. And was he – could I be imagining it? Could all this be in my head, a product of my own fear?

Fuck. Fuck.

When I search the flat, I can’t see any of the protective trinkets the others had. He was an unbeliever.

I’m not. Not now.

When I walk away from Michael’s, I see the tall figure of a bald man watching me from the trees on the far side of the park across the street. He’s massive, and bare-chested. The
dark outlines of tattoos that litter his skin flicker and swirl like flames. He points at me, long and hard, then slides back into the undergrowth.

So now it’s been four days since then, since I called in sick. Since I barricaded myself into my flat to wait for the end. In the yellow glare of the 40-watt bulb, in the
air that reeks of stale sweat and fear, I’m protected by a butcher’s knife and an Iron Cross. A spray paint swastika on every wall. A replica of one of those Nazi imperial eagles
they’d carry everywhere in those films. Terry’s foil-lined box with his tableau of half a dozen toy German WWII soldiers.

Maybe they’ll help me. I certainly won’t step beyond their protective radius.

Because Kurt is coming to kill me. His creator. To close the circle. I’m the last one he’s looking for here. And he won’t let me go. I know it.

Soon I’ll hear his footsteps on the stairs. Slow, heavy, deliberate.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Natasha Cooper

It all started with the broken window. That was what was so infuriating. If those wretched children hadn’t found the brick next door’s cowboy builders had left in
the front garden and thought it would be fun to smash a big bit of clean glass, none of it would have happened. We’d still have been OK; not in seventh heaven or anything extravagant like
that, but OK.

The randomness of it still makes me swear. It needn’t have happened; none of it. That’s what gets to me when I let myself think about it.

There I was peacefully sitting on a beanbag on the floor (we’d sanded the boards by then but not varnished them and they looked a bit splintery; but they were clean, which was something
after the state we’d found them in when we tore up the old lino) reading short stories for a prize. They were all about spouses killing each other, of course: short stories for prizes nearly
always are. And I’d been congratulating myself rather because however livid I’d been with John, I’d never, even in my wildest, most secret fantasies, wanted to kill him. Stiffen
him, maybe; tell him not to be such a baby and to get on out there and do his bit of the bargain, like I’d always done mine. I mean, I’d given up my job when it was clear that he needed
more input than I’d been able to give him while I was working so hard.

It wasn’t only the comfort and the listening and the putting-up with stress-induced sulks, you see; he’d needed a lot more practical help with all sorts of things, and meals suddenly
became important to him in a way they’d never been before. We’d always just picked for supper whenever we both got back from work, but suddenly he wanted three courses with both of us
sitting down at the table, whenever he got back. And my publishing salary just wasn’t up to paying a housekeeper, not after tax and all the things I’d had to pay for, you know, decent
clothes and that sort of thing. So I’d given up. I’d always done a bit of freelance, luckily as it turned out. So when John cracked up, I still had all my contacts in place.

Anyway, where was I? Being on my own all day means that I do get very short of chat, which is why I can’t stop talking when there’s any opportunity. Sorry about that. I’ve lost
my drift. Oh, yes, the brick. Well, you see, there I was, sitting by the window, thinking that at least this titchy little South London cottage was a bit lighter than our Kensington house, when
this bloody brick crashed through the window and landed by my feet. It must have been in next door’s garden for a while because it was coated with mud and had woodlice clinging to it. You
know, those prehistoric-looking horrid little black things.

They were all over the house when we bought it, but once we’d sorted the damp we got rid of most of them. They crunch under your bare feet. In a way that was nearly the worst thing,
getting out of bed that first morning in the new house and hearing the crunch under my feet. I could have hit John then. I wouldn’t have, honestly, and I never told him that’s how I
felt, but it was the last straw.

He was lying there with most of the pillow over his head, not getting up, hating the potty little job that was all he’d managed to get. I know he was feeling awful. And I did sympathize. I
really did. You couldn’t not if you loved him, and I did. But I wished he’d just pull himself together a bit. I mean, the rest of us had to.

Anyway, the brick. Well, it wasn’t so much the brick as the bits of glass. One of the bigger splinters sliced through my forearm, you know, the one bit of one that stays looking reasonably
firm even when the rest begins to go scraggy. It was such a shock. I was still reeling from the noise. You can’t imagine how much noise one of those plate-glass windows makes when it’s
broken. And then there was a kind of stinging down my arm; that’s all it seemed to be at the beginning, a sting. And I looked down and there was this great long red line, getting redder and
wider all the time. Spreading. It was about six inches long, I think, and the lips of it opened as I looked, like a cut in a bit of steak.

Anyway, for a while I just sat and looked at it. Then when the blood started dripping down onto the beanbag – it was natural canvas, so it showed – and the planks we’d spent so
long sanding, I knew I’d have to do something. It was hurting by then, too. And I felt like a child. Perhaps that was why I let her in. I felt wobbly and pathetic, nothing like
Penny-who’s-such-a-brick, Penny who’s always kept everything going even when her husband cracked up like that and both the children went so peculiar.

She rang the bell just as I’d got to the hall, gripping the sides of the cut with my other hand. Well, it would have to be the other hand, wouldn’t it? Honestly, sometimes I forget
I’ve ever been a copy-editor. Where was I? I know, trying not to think too much about her. She’d have said I was in denial and she’d have been right. I sort of thought it must be
whoever’d chucked the brick through the window who was ringing the bell and I wasn’t going to answer. I was leaning against the hall wall – we hadn’t painted that yet, just
stripped off the awful old spriggy paper we’d found when we came – and feeling faint, really. Anyone would have. And then she called out: