OxCrimes Read online

  OxCrimes

  OxCrimes © 2014 Profile Books

  All individual stories © the authors

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  Set in Garamond Pro, Aleo Light and THE Sans SemiLight

  Page design by Henry Iles

  Author photo credits

  George Pelecanos © Max Hirshfeld; Neil Gaiman © Kimberly Butler; Simon Lewis © Mark Pengelly; Val McDermid © Charlie Hopkinson; Anthony Horowitz © Adam Scourfield; Fred Vargas © Louise Oligny; Stuart Neville © Philip O’Neill; Stella Duffy © Gino Sprio; John Harvey © Molly Boiling; Denise Mina © Neil Donaldson; James Sallis © Karyn Sallis; Maxim Jakubowski; Christopher Fowler © Peter Chapman; Louise Welsh © Steve Lindbridge; Peter Robinson © Pal Hansen; Anne Zouroudi © Wolf Kettler; Martyn Waites © Charlie Hopkinson; Alexander McCall Smith © Chris Watt; Phil Rickman © John Bullough; Mark Billingham © Charlie Hopkinson; John Connolly © Mark Condren; Yrsa Sigurdardóttir © Sigurjon Ragnar.

  First published in 2014 by Profile Books

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street, Exmouth Market

  London EC1R OJH

  464pp

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1781250648

  eISBN 9781847659040

  OxCrimes

  INTRODUCED BY

  IAN RANKIN

  EDITED BY

  MARK ELLINGHAM AND PETER FLORENCE

  About OxCrimes

  OxCrimes – like its predecessors OxTales and OxTravels – is a very simple idea. We asked the best crime writers based in Britain, and a few further afield, for a story. There were no rules. We just wanted compelling stories that we knew their regular readers would have to read … and so would need to buy this book. And why so calculating? That’s simple, too. The purpose of OxCrimes is to entertain and, in doing so, to raise funds for Oxfam’s work. All of the authors have donated their royalties to the charity.

  Crime writers are busy folk, often producing a novel or more each year, so we had feared many of the bestselling cast we approached would have little time to contribute. We needn’t have worried. Twenty-seven leading authors feature in this book, almost all of them with original stories (three or four chose to adapt previously published gems). So here they are: a fabulous collection of chilling stories, together with an introduction from Ian Rankin and an afterword by Oxfam’s own chief inspector, Mark Goldring.

  Mark Ellingham and Peter Florence

  Editors, OxCrimes

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION BY IAN RANKIN

  The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us GEORGE PELECANOS

  The Case of Death and Honey NEIL GAIMAN

  Buy and Bust SIMON LEWIS

  I’ve Seen That Movie Too VAL MCDERMID

  Caught Short ANTHONY HOROWITZ

  The Sin of Dreams WALTER MOSLEY

  Five Francs Each FRED VARGAS

  An Afternoon IAN RANKIN

  Juror 8 STUART NEVILLE

  Face Value STELLA DUFFY

  Not Tommy Johnson JOHN HARVEY

  You’ll Never Forget My Face PETER JAMES

  The Calm Before DENISE MINA

  The Ladder ADRIAN MCKINTY

  Venice Is Sinking Into the Sea JAMES SALLIS

  My Life as a Killer MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

  The Caterpillar Flag CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  Reflections in Unna LOUISE WELSH

  People Just Don’t Listen PETER ROBINSON

  The Honey Trap ANNE ZOUROUDI

  The Spinster ANN CLEEVES

  Diagnosis: Murder MARTYN WAITES

  Trouble at the Institute for the Study of Forgiveness ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  The House of Susan Lulham PHIL RICKMAN

  Underneath the Mistletoe Last Night MARK BILLINGHAM

  The Children of Dr Lyall JOHN CONNOLLY

  Black Sky YRSA SIGURDARDÓTTIR

  AFTERWORD BY MARK GOLDRING, OXFAM

  Introduction

  Ian Rankin

  There’s no mystery.

  No mystery why some of the world’s greatest crime and thriller writers would want to team up with Oxfam.

  Crime fiction worldwide continues to shine a light on the problems at the heart of all societies. A crime novel may revolve around personal greed, corporate wrong-doing, political machinations, social injustice or inequality – because the crime novel has always been predicated on a very basic moral conundrum: why do we human beings continue to do bad things to each other? There are many and varied possible answers to that question, and a range will be offered in the stories you are about to read.

  It is testament to the high regard in which Oxfam is held that so many authors of international repute signed up to OxCrimes. The result is a collection rich in incident, ingenuity and entertainment, one that the aficionado will relish. And who knows, you may find yourself a sudden fan of writers you’d not read before. I can promise that there isn’t one writer represented here who doesn’t deliver in their full-length books with the same power as their shorter fiction.

  The stories themselves range far and wide. They take place on different continents, and are set in the past, present and future. Neil Gaiman, for example, offers a nice take on the later years of Sherlock Holmes, while Walter Mosley – best known for his Easy Rawlins novels set in the America of a few decades back – hurls us forward in time to a world where our very souls are on trial. George Pelecanos meantime offers a stylish and violent vignette of immigrant life in 1930s New York, and John Harvey’s Resnick investigates the blighted underclass of England in another of his masterly dispatches from contemporary hell.

  There are also stories involving hitmen, femmes fatale, professional jealousy, and revenge. Not that the tone is necessarily bleak. There’s always room for laughter in the dark. Alexander McCall Smith, for example, entertains with a typically impish tale of academic skulduggery, and French author Fred Vargas provides an engagingly skewed story of the growing relationship between a good-natured cop and a clochard who witnesses a robbery. Stuart Neville meantime nods in the direction of Twelve Angry Men, and Louise Welsh towards the films of Alfred Hitchcock, while Stella Duffy has a lot of fun with the world of modern art and Anne Zouroudi takes us to the modern-day Aegean for a picturesque game of cat and mouse, played out under azure skies.

  And then there’s Mark Billingham, who reminds us that murder is as likely to happen at Christmas as any other time of year – and not even Santa Claus is safe.

  All this, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. These stories can be read in bite-sized chunks or at one satisfying sitting. They provide a rich diet by creators at the top of their game, and all for a very good cause. Tuck in.

  GEORGE PELECANOS is the author of several highly praised, bestselling novels, including The Cut, What It Was, The Way Home, The Turnaround and The Night Gardener. He is also an independent-film producer, an essayist and the recipient of numerous international writing awards. He was a producer and Emmy-nominated writer for The Wire and currently writes for the HBO series Treme. He was born in Washington DC in 1957.

  The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us

  George Pelecanos

  Someday I’m gonna write all this down. But I don’t write so good in English yet, see? So I’m just gonna think it out loud.

  Last night I had a dream.

  In my dream, I was a kid, back in the village. My friends and family from the chorio, they were there, all of us standing around the square. My father, he had strung a lamb up on a pole. It was making a noise, like a scream, and its eyes were wild and afraid. My father handed me my Italian switch knife, the one he gave me before I came over. I cu
t into the lamb’s throat and opened it up wide. The lamb’s warm blood spilled onto my hands.

  My mother told me once: Every time you dream something, it’s got to be a reason.

  I’m not no kid anymore. I’m twenty-eight years old. It’s early in June, Nineteen Hundred and Thirty Three. The temperature got up to one hundred degrees today. I read in the Tribune, some old people died from the heat.

  Let me try to paint a picture, so you can see in your head the way it is for me right now. I got this little one-room place I rent from some old lady. A Murphy bed and a table, an icebox and a stove. I got a radio I bought for a dollar and ninety-nine. I wash my clothes in a tub, and afterwards I hang the roocha on a cord I stretched across the room. There’s a bunch of clothes, pantalonia and one of my work shirts and my vrakia and socks, on there now. I’m sitting here at the table in my union suit. I’m smoking a Fatima and drinking a cold bottle of Abner Drury beer. I’m looking at my hands. I got blood underneath my fingernails. I washed real good but it was hard to get it all.

  It’s five, five-thirty in the morning. Let me go back some, to show how I got to where I am tonight.

  What’s it been, four years since I came over? The boat ride was a boat ride so I’ll skip that part. I’ll start in America.

  When I got to Ellis Island I came straight down to Washington to stay with my cousin Toula and her husband Aris. Aris had a fruit cart down on Pennsylvania Avenue, around 17th. Toula’s father owed my father some lefta from back in the village, so it was all set up. She offered me a room until I could get on my feet. Aris wasn’t happy about it but I didn’t give a good goddamn what he was happy about. Toula’s father should have paid his debt.

  Toula and Aris had a place in Chinatown. It wasn’t just for Chinese. Italians, Irish, Polacks and Greeks lived there, too. Everyone was poor except the criminals. The Chinamen controlled the gambling, the whores, and the opium. All the business got done in the back of laundries and in the restaurants. The Chinks didn’t bother no one if they didn’t get bothered themselves.

  Toula’s apartment was in a house right on H Street. You had to walk up three floors to get to it. I didn’t mind it. The milkman did it every day and the old Jew who collected the rent managed to do it, too. I figured, so could I.

  My room was small, so small you couldn’t shut the door all the way when the bed was down. There was only one toilet in the place, and they had put a curtain by it, the kind you hang on a shower. You had to close it around you when you wanted to shit. Like I say, it wasn’t a nice place or nothing like it, but it was okay. It was free.

  But nothing’s free, my father always said. Toula’s husband Aris made me pay from the first day I moved in. Never had a good word to say to me, never mentioned me to no one for a job. He was a sonofabitch, that one. Dark, with a hook in his nose, looked like he had some Turkish blood in him. I wouldn’t be surprised if the gamoto was a Turk. I didn’t like the way he talked to my cousin, either, ’specially when he drank. And this malaka drank every night. I’d sit in my room and listen to him raise his voice at her, and then later I could hear him fucking her on their bed. I couldn’t stand it, I’m telling you, and me without a woman myself. I didn’t have no job then so I couldn’t even buy a whore. I thought I was gonna go nuts.

  Then one day I was talking to this guy, Dimitri Karras, lived in the 606 building on H. He told me about a janitor’s job opened up at St Mary’s, the church where his son Panayoti and most of the neighbourhood kids went to Catholic school. I put some Wildroot tonic in my hair, walked over to the church, and talked to the head nun. I don’t know, she musta liked me or something, ’cause I got the job. I had to lie a little about being a handyman. I wasn’t no engineer, but I figured, what the hell, the furnace goes out you light it again, goddamn.

  My deal was simple. I got a room in the basement and a coupla meals a day. Pennies other than that, but I didn’t mind, not then. Hell, it was better than living in some Hoover Hotel. And it got me away from that bastard Aris. Toula cried when I left, so I gave her a hug. I didn’t say nothing to Aris.

  I worked at St Mary’s about two years. The work was never hard. I knew the kids and most of their fathers: Karras, Angelos, Nicodemus, Recevo, Damiano, Carchedi. I watched the boys grow. I didn’t look the nuns in the eyes when I talked to them so they wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Once or twice I treated myself to one of the whores over at the Eastern House. Mostly, down in the basement, I played with my pootso. I put it out of my mind that I was jerking off in church.

  Meanwhile, I tried to make myself better. I took English classes at St Sophia, the Greek Orthodox church on 8th and L. I bought a blue serge suit at Harry Kaufman’s on 7th Street, on sale for eleven dollars and seventy-five. The Jew tailor let me pay for it a little bit at a time. Now when I went to St Sophia for the Sunday service I wouldn’t be ashamed.

  I liked to go to church. Not for religion, nothing like that. Sure, I wear a stavro, but everyone wears a cross. That’s just superstition. I don’t love God, but I’m afraid of him. So I went to church just in case, and also to look at the girls. I liked to see ’em all dressed up.

  There was this one koritsi, not older than sixteen when I first saw her, who was special. I knew just where she was gonna be, with her mother, on the side of the church where the women sat separate from the men. I made sure I got a good view of her on Sundays. Her name was Irene, I asked around. I could tell she was clean. By that I mean she was a virgin. That’s the kind of girl you’re gonna marry. My plan was to wait till I got some money in my pocket before I talked to her, but not too long so she got snatched up. A girl like that is not gonna stay single forever.

  Work and church was for the daytime. At night I went to the coffeehouses down by the Navy Yard in Southeast. One of them was owned by a hardworking guy from the neigh-bourhood, Angelos, lived at the 703 building on 6th. That’s the kafeneion I went to most. You played cards and dice there if that’s what you wanted to do, but mostly you could be yourself. It was all Greeks.

  That’s where I met Nick Stefanos one night, at the Angelos place. Meeting him is what put another change in my life. Stefanos was a Spartan with an easy way, had a scar on his cheek. You knew he was tough but he didn’t have to prove it. I heard he got the scar running protection for a hooch truck in upstate New York. Heard a cheap pistola blew up in his face. It was his business, what happened, none of mine.

  We got to talking that night. He was the head busman down at some fancy hotel on 15th and Penn, but he was leaving to open his own place. His friend Costa, another Spartiati, worked there and he was gonna leave with him. Stefanos asked me if I wanted to take Costa’s place. He said he could set it up. The pay was only a little more than what I was making, a dollar-fifty a week with extras, but a little more was a lot. Hell, I wanted to make better like anyone else. I thanked Nick Stefanos and asked him when I could start.

  I started the next week, soon as I got my room where I am now. You had to pay management for your bus uniform, black pants and a white shirt and short black vest, so I didn’t make nothing for awhile. Some of the waiters tipped the busmen heavy, and some tipped nothing at all. For the ones who tipped nothing you cleared their tables slower, and last. I caught on quick.

  The hotel was pretty fancy and its dining room, up on the top floor, was fancy, too. The china was real, the crystal sang when you flicked a finger at it, and the silver was heavy. It was hard times, but you’d never know it from the way the tables filled up at night. I figured I’d stay there a coupla years, learn the operation, and go out on my own like Stefanos. That was one smart guy.

  The way they had it set up was, Americans had the waiter jobs, and the Greeks and Filipinos bused the tables. The coloureds, they stayed back in the kitchen. Everybody in the restaurant was in the same order that they were out on the street: the whites were up top and the Greeks were in the middle; the mavri were at the bottom. Except if someone was your own kind, you didn’t make much small talk with the other guys unles
s it had something to do with work. I didn’t have nothing against anyone, not even the coloureds. You didn’t talk to them, that’s all. That’s just the way it was.

  The waiters, they thought they were better than the rest of us. But there was this one American, a young guy named John Petersen, who was all right. Petersen had brown eyes and wavy brown hair that he wore kinda long. It was his eyes that you remembered. Smart and serious, but gentle at the same time.

  Petersen was different than the other waiters, who wouldn’t lift a finger to help you even when they weren’t busy. John would pitch in and bus my tables for me when I got in a jam. He’d jump in with the dishes, too, back in the kitchen, when the dining room was running low on silver, and like I say, those were coloureds back there. I even saw him talking with those guys sometimes like they were pals. It was like he came from someplace where that was okay. John was just one of those who made friends easy, I guess. I can’t think of no one who didn’t like him. Well, there musta been one person, at least. I’m gonna come to that later on.

  Me and John went out for a beer one night after work, to a saloon he knew. I wasn’t comfortable because it was all Americans and I didn’t see no one who looked like me. But John made me feel okay and after two beers I forgot. He talked to me about the job and the pennies me and the coloured guys in the kitchen were making, and how it wasn’t right. He talked about some changes that were coming to make it better for us, but he didn’t say what they were.

  ‘I’m happy,’ I said, as I drank off the beer in my mug. ‘I got a job, what the hell.’

  ‘You want to make more money don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’d like to have a day off once in a while, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Goddamn right. But I take off a day, I’m not gonna get paid.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like that, friend.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’