The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (72 page)

“That’s right.”

“Up until what point?”

“What do you mean?”

“At what point did you realize what was going on?”

“Once you got the gun out and said, ‘Everybody freeze. This is a robbery.’ ”

“Pretty fucking cool, that.”

“No, it wasn’t. You’re not cool. You’ll never be cool. It’s not even a proper fucking gun. You’re retarded.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Thanks, I will.”

“So what’s going to happen now?”

“Dunno. They’ll fetch the police. And they’ll probably come and handcuff us. Lead us off to some pokey room somewhere in a police station and bombard us with questions.”
Trevor paused. “I’m going to tell them the truth.”

“Which is?”

“I was coerced into it.”

“Coerced? Co
fucking
erced? I hate it when you know words I don’t. How do you do that? I’ve never seen you so much as pick up a dictionary.”

“You
forced
me to do it. That better?”

“Suit yourself. Doesn’t bother me what you say.”

“You’ll back me up.”

“I will?”

“Sure. You know it’s the truth.”

“But why should I?”

“Because you don’t want to go to prison.”

“What’s you getting off with it got to do with me going to prison?”

“Everything. Think about it.”

Pause.

“Well?”

Harry said, “I’m thinking.”

“Nothing clicked?”

“If I’m guilty, they’ll send me to prison.”

“Yeah. But if I’m innocent, they can’t send
me
to prison. So how do they arrange that, short of an operation?”

“Ah, I’m with you. Fucking nice.”

A key scraped in the lock. Harry and Trevor got to their feet. Took a well-timed joint effort. A difficult operation, but they’d had lots of practice. They waddled forwards a couple of
steps as the door opened. A young guy in a suit walked in tucking his bleached blonde hair behind his ear.

“Hi,” Harry said. “You’re the manager, right? I’m Harry. This is Trevor. Nice bank you’ve got. Don’t like this room much, though. Smells like a summer
breeze.”

The bank manager ignored Harry, looked at Trevor.

Trevor said, “I’m innocent.”

He nodded. “It’s clear you weren’t a willing participant. I could see you trying to get your brother to put down . . . this.” He held up the gun. “Whatever it
is.”

“I was coerced.” Trevor looked sideways at Harry.

“Don’t you mean co-
arsed
?” Harry said. “Fucking cockjockey.”

“So can I go?”

The bank manager said, “That may be problematic.”

“But I’m innocent.”

“I dare say.” He pulled a face. “You’ll have to wait for the police to decide.”

“I want to go home.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Harry can stay.”

“That’s impossible. Even if I could let you, it’s physically impossible.”

“But you’ve no right to keep me here.”

“You have to stay till the police get here.” The manager tucked his hair behind his ear again. “I have every right to insist on that.”

“You’re fucked,” Harry said. He started laughing. “I robbed your bank. I pulled out my gun and waved it around and threatened people with it and there’s fuck all
you can do because I’m a Siamese twin and my brother’s innocent.”

“I thought,” the bank manager said, “that the correct expression was ‘conjoined twin’.”

“To you,” Harry said, “it is.”

Trevor lashed out with his cane, struck the bank manager on the temple.

“Oh,” Harry said. “Nice fucking shot.”

“Thanks,” Trevor said. The bank manager was sprawled on the floor. He groaned. “After three,” Trevor said.

Together the conjoined twins lurched out of their seat. They bent over and Trevor picked up the gun. “You okay?” he asked the bank manager.

The bank manager opened his eyes, saw the gun in Trevor’s hands, flinched.

“Know what it is?” Trevor said. “Humane killer. Used for killing livestock. Place the weapon to the animal’s forehead like this.” He placed the gun to the bank
manager’s forehead. “And then when you pull the trigger, it fires a steel bolt into the animal’s brain.”

The bank manager said, “No. For God’s sake.”

Trevor shrugged, straightened up. He turned, smiled at Harry. Placed the gun to his brother’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

Harry jolted. A red circle beauty-spotted his brow. Blood began a slow trickle downwards. His eyes closed.

Trevor dropped the gun. “Jesus,” he said.

Harry slumped to the side, dragging Trevor sideways. They fell on the floor, landing on top of the bank manager.

The bank manager cried out. Trevor struggled to get his wind back, then said, “Sorry.”

No point trying to get back to his feet. That was an impossibility now.

The bank manager struggled out from beneath them, sat with his back to the wall, hugging his knees. After a while, he relaxed, gently massaged his temple. He moved forward, slowly, eyes on
Trevor. Then he examined Harry. “You’ve killed him,” he said. He picked up the gun, stared at it.

“Yeah,” Trevor said. “Can you call an ambulance? Tell them they’ll need to perform an emergency separation on a pair of conjoined twins. And they’ll need to do it
now. There’s a number in my back pocket. They’ll need to phone it. It’s the number of a surgeon who can perform the operation.”

“You planned this?”

“Harry would never agree to the op. Too risky.”

“So you did agree to the robbery? You weren’t as innocent as you claimed?”

“I’m admitting to nothing. Just call for an ambulance. And get the surgeon. He’s in Edinburgh at the moment. But he’s on standby.” Trevor paused. “Hurry. I
think I’m going into shock.”

“What if I refuse?”

“No matter.” Trevor was short of breath. “The police’ll bring an ambulance with them. Where are they?”

“Ah, Trevor,” the bank manager said. “You really believe a couple of geriatric Siamese – forgive me –
conjoined
twins having a public argument constitutes a
serious enough threat for us to call the police?”

“But my brother asked for your money.”

“And you told him to be quiet.”

“But he waved his gun around.” Trevor glanced at the humane killer in the bank manager’s hand.

“And you took it off him and gave it to a teller.”

“So, what are you saying? You didn’t call the police?”

“Nope. No police.” He paused. “No ambulance.” He walked towards the door.

“Fuck,” Trevor said. “I won’t survive longer than a couple of hours on my own. Harry’s dead. Don’t you understand what that means?”

The bank manager turned in the doorway, said, “I understand completely.”

“Come on,” Trevor said. “What kind of a sadistic fuck are you?”

“I’m a bank manager.” The door closed.

Reginald Hill

“What I need to make clear and you need to get clear is, any resemblance between me and a real terrorist is purely coincidental.

“We’ve nothing in common, me and those guys. My thing was personal, not ideological. The only common ground was putting the thing together, which did teach me one thing about their
line of business that I’d never realized before.

“The trouble with being a terrorist is that you experience a lot of terror!

“Not perhaps if you’re one of those mad sods who reckon that blowing up a busload of people on their way to work is a first-class ticket to a world full of warm sunshine, sweet
music, soft couches and doe-eyed virgins.

“But for a middle-aged, rationalist, atheist humanist who claims to believe that this life is all you get
-finito –
good night Vienna – this is the end, there is no more
– then sitting in your flat trying to follow the instructions on your laptop that will turn the motley assembly of chemicals, wires, batteries and clock parts strewn across your kitchen table
into a lethal weapon is fraught with terror, believe me.

“You will note I say
claims
to believe.

“It never really goes away, does it, all that religious stuff you get drummed into you when you’re a kid? Mature logic and experience may seem to wash it all out of your mind, but
scrub as hard as you like, if you look carefully under a bright light you can still find the faint outline of an indelible
what if
?

“And a laptop screen showing a DIY bomb recipe casts a very bright light indeed.

“Now this may not be so bad if your
what if
? tunes in images of all that sweet music and doe-eyed virgins stuff. The trouble is no matter how I cut it, the
what if
? my
upbringing has left me with produces pictures of fires that burn but do not consume, grinning devils, souls in paroxysms of pain, eternities of agony.

“Killing people is wrong, my dad used to say. Doesn’t matter who, how, why, when or where, take a life and your soul belongs to Satan.

“Of course being a preacher, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

“Not necessarily, you may think. There are plenty of preachers able to trot out any number of exceptions to the sixth commandment. Where would politicians be without them? But my dad was a
fundamentalist, which was surprising, seeing that he was C of E from a good old traditional Middle England background. When he got up in the pulpit you’d have looked for skeins of soporific
platitude followed by a pre-lunch sherry at the vicarage. Instead he made most Welsh chapel sermons sound like Christopher Robin saying his prayers.

“‘Ten commandments there are!’ he’d thunder. ‘Just ten. Not a lot to remember, not a number to over-tax even the mind of a poor stockbroker wending his weary way
home on the five-fifty-five after a long hard day breaking stock. No! God reviewed his Creation and He thought,
these humans look all right, most of them, even the stockbrokers, but I’ve
got to face it, I did skimp on the brain power. So best keep it simple. Ten fingers they’ve got, so surely they’ll be able to count up to ten?
And that’s how we got the
Decalogue. Ten simple commandments. No riders, no sub-clauses. You do what they say, or else! There’s no Fifth Amendment saying,
honour thy father and thy mother until you become a
teenager, then any thing goes.
There’s no Six-and-a-halfth Commandment that says,
Thou shalt not kill except in the following circumstances.
NO! These are God’s rules!! Break
them, and, believe me, YOU WILL BURN!!!’

“I found that gem in a bundle of his old sermons which had turned up in the Bombay Mission. They’d been moving premises and Dad’s papers would have been burned with all the
other rubbish if Sister Angela, the Mission’s chief administrator, hadn’t spotted them. She always had a soft spot for me and we’ve kept in touch, even though she knows I’ve
strayed a long way from my father’s path since last we met. Possibly she thought that forwarding a small selection of the sermons might nudge me back. Sorry, Angela, no deal, though they
certainly brought Dad back to me, and that early one at least gave me a laugh as I imagined how sentiments like these must have gone down in the rich Surrey parish where he started his ministry! No
wonder it wasn’t long before his bishop suggested his talents might be better employed in a more challenging environment (i.e. one a long way away from Surrey). He probably meant anywhere
north of Watford, but Dad never did things by half and that was how he came to be pastor of the Ecumenical Mission settlement in Mumbai, or Bombay as it still was back in the Seventies.

“So if we look for first causes, it was the dear old bishop who was responsible for putting my father into the predatory path of Uncle Harry. He’s dead too, the bishop, so in the
unlikely event of their mythology proving true, Dad will have eternity to harangue the poor chap for not letting him continue his God-given task of bashing the brokers.

“I suppose by the same token we could say that ultimately it was the bishop’s pusillanimity that led to me setting out on my long bus journey from Battersea this morning, gingerly
clutching an eight by four by two brown paper package on my knee.

“Dad had got it wrong, you see. In my view there definitely is a Six-and-a-halfth Commandment, and what it says is: killing’s OK when the target has enjoyed the rewards of his
villainy for decades and looks like he’s heading for the winning post so far ahead of the Law, he no longer even bothers to glance back over his shoulder.

“Religion, if you’ve got it, might be a comfort here.
Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord
, Dad liked to thunder, meaning don’t worry that there’s no
justice in this world, there’ll be plenty in the next. Well, I’d like to believe that, Dad, but despite those residual
what-ifs
I mentioned earlier, I really don’t.
Meaning, unless I take care of the bastard, no one else will.

“So there I was carrying a bomb through the streets of London to rid the world of the villain who’d destroyed my family.

“Does that make me a terrorist? In the eyes of the Law, I suppose it does. To me, what I was planning to do was an act of justice, but I suppose that’s what all the doe-eyed virgin
boys say too. Though I must confess it did occur to me as I sat on the bus that if I’d got something wrong – an ingredient too volatile, a connection too loose – and we bounced
over a pothole a bit deeper than the norm even on this stretch of the Earls Court Road, none of these innocent people around me would be interested in making fine distinctions.

“I had learned to clasp my package a bit tighter as a stop approached. This driver must have missed the bit on his training course about gradually applying the brakes. By this time I only
had one more stop to go. I was glad to see most of the other passengers had got out. Only a perspiring bald man and his glossily veneered companion remained, and they didn’t look too
innocent.

“I glanced down at my package. It looked good. I never throw anything away and when I decided it would be both convincing and appropriate if the instrument of Uncle Harry’s death
seemed to have come from the site of his infamy, I had dug out the brown paper Sister Angela had wrapped the sermons in. Of course I couldn’t simply reuse it, not with my address all over it
in the Sister’s fine copperplate. But with infinite care I had been able to remove the stamps and enough of the Mumbai post mark to be convincing, and transfer them to my own parcel.