The World's Finest Mystery Part 26

They waited about five minutes, and then Pete appeared again, having to come almost all the way back to the car before he could catch their attention. In that time, a couple of cruising cabs had gone by on the wider cross-streets ahead and behind, but nothing at all had moved on this block.

"Here's Pete now," O'Hara said, and they got out of the car and followed him back down to the parking area's gates, which were kept locked at night, except for now. Along the way, speaking in a gray murmur, O'Hara asked, "Any trouble?"

"Easy," Pete murmured back. "Not as easy as if I could bust things up, but easy."

Pete had not, in fact, busted anything up. The gates looked as solidly locked as ever, completely untampered with, but when Pete gave a small push they swung right out of the way. The trio stepped through, Pete closed the gates again and here they were.

Dortmunder looked around, and at night, with n.o.body here, this parking area surrounded by shut shops looked just like Three Finger's paintings. Even the security lights in the stores were a little strange, a little too white or a little too pink. It was spooky.

They'd agreed that Dortmunder, as the one who'd caught on to the scam, had his choice of jobs here tonight, and he'd picked the art gallery. It would be more work than the other stuff, more delicate, but it would also be more personal and therefore more satisfying. So the three split up, and Dortmunder approached the gallery, first putting on a pair of thin rubber gloves, then taking a roll of keys from his pocket. The other two, meantime, who were also now gloved, were taking pry bars and chisels from their pockets as they neared a pair of other shops.

Dortmunder worked slowly and painstakingly. He wasn't worried about the locks or the alarm system; they were nothing to get into a sweat over. But the point here was to do the job without leaving any traces, the way Pete had done the gate.

The other two didn't have such problems. Breaking into stores, the only thing they had to be careful about was making too much noise, since there were apartments on the upper floors here, among the chiropractors and psychic readers. But within that limitation, they made no attempt at all to be neat or discreet. Every shop door was mangled. Inside the shops, they peeled the faces off safes, they gouged open cash register tills and they left interior doors sagging from their hinges.

Every shop in the compound was. .h.i.t, the costume jewelry store and the souvenir shop and the movie memorabilia place and both antique shops and the fine-leather store and both cafes and the other art gallery. They didn't get a lot from any one of these places, but they got something from each.

Dortmunder meanwhile had gained access to the Waspail Gallery. Taking the stainless-steel girl's chair from the cherrywood table, he carried it over to the grid in the wall concealing the security camera, climbed up on the chair and carefully unscrewed the grid, being sure not to leave any scratches. The grid was hinged at the bottom; he lowered it to the wall, looked inside, and the camera looked back at him. A motion sensor machine, it had sensed motion and was now humming quietly to itself as it took Dortmunder's picture.

That's OK, Dortmunder thought, enjoy yourself. While you can.

The s.p.a.ce was a small oblong box built into the wall, larger than a s...o...b..x but smaller than a liquor store carton. An electric outlet was built into its right side, with the camera plugged into it. Dortmunder reached past the lens, pulled the plug and the camera stopped humming. Then he figured out how to move this widget forward on the right side of the mounting- tick- and the camera lifted right off.

He brought the camera down and placed it on the floor, then climbed back up on the chair to put the grid in its original place. Certain he'd left no marks on it, he climbed down, put the chair where it belonged and wiped its seat with his sleeve.

Next, the tapes. There would be tapes from this camera, probably two a day. Where would they be?

The cherrywood table's drawer was locked, and that took a while, leaving no marks, and then the tapes weren't there. A closet was also locked and also took a little while, and turned out to be full of brooms and toilet paper and a bunch of things like that. A storeroom was locked, which by now Dortmunder found irritating, and inside it were some folding chairs and a folding table and general party supplies and a ladder, and stuff like that, and a tall metal locker, and that was locked.

All right, all right, it's all good practice. And inside the metal locker were 12 tapes. At last. Dortmunder brought out from one of his many jacket pockets a plastic bag from the supermarket, into which went the tapes. Then he locked his way back out of the locker and the storeroom, and added the camera to the plastic bag. Then he locked his way out of the gallery, and there were O'Hara and Pete, in a pool of shadow, carrying their own full plastic bags, waiting for him.

"Took you a while," O'Hara said.

Dortmunder didn't like to be criticized. "I had to find the tapes," he said.

"As the fella says, time well spent," Pete a.s.sured him.

Dortmunder's faithful companion, May, came home from her cas.h.i.+er's job at the supermarket the next evening to say, "That fellow you told me about, that Martin Gillie, he's in the newspaper." By which, of course, she meant the Daily News.

"That's called ink," Dortmunder informed her.

"I don't think so," she said, and handed him the paper. "This time, I think it's called felony arrest."

Dortmunder smiled at the glowering face of Three Finger Gillie on page five of the News. He didn't have to read the story, he knew what it had to say.

May watched him. "John? Did you have something to do with that?"

"A little," he said. "See, May, when he told me that all he wanted was publicity, it was the truth. It was a stretch for Three Finger to tell the truth, but he pulled it off. But his idea was, every day he talks another ex-con into walking through that gallery, looking it over for maybe a burglary. He's going to do that every day until one of those guys actually robs the place. Then he's going to show what a reformed character he is by volunteering to look at the surveillance tapes. 'Oh, there's a guy I used to know!' he'll say, feigning surprise. 'And there's another one. They must of all been in it together.' Then the cops roust us all, and one of us actually does have the stolen paintings, so we're all accomplices, so we all go upstate forever, and there's steady publicity for Three Finger, all through the trials and the appeals, and he's this poster boy for rehabilitation, and he's got ink, he's on television day and night, he's famous, he's successful, and we probably deserved to go upstate anyway."

"What a rat," May said.

"You know it," Dortmunder agreed. "So we couldn't just walk away, because we're on those tapes, and we don't know when somebody else is gonna pull the job. So if we have to go in, get the tapes, we might as well make some profit out of it. And give a little zing to Three Finger while we're at it."

"They decided it was him pretty fast," she said.

"His place was the only one not hit," Dortmunder pointed out to May. "So it looks like the rehabilitation didn't take after all, that he just couldn't resist temptation."

"I suppose," she said.

"Also," he said, "you remember that little postcard with his painting that I showed you but I wouldn't let you touch?"

"Sure. So?"

"Myself," Dortmunder said, "I only held it by the edges, just in case. The last thing we did last night, I dropped that postcard on the floor in front of the cash register in the leather store. With his fingerprints all over it. His calling card, he said it was."

Peter Crowther.

The Allotment.

PETER CROWTHER didn't begin writing until he was into his forties. Since then, his work- novels, short stories, television plays- has been seen and appreciated around the world. He is a quiet writer of great range and skill, at home in the darkest suspense as well as mainstream crime fiction. "The Allotment," which first appeared in the June issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, shows him to be at the top of his form.

The Allotment.

Peter Crowther.

Perhaps the only person in Luddersedge who hadn't known that Maureen Walker was fed up to the back teeth of her husband Stanley was Stan himself. But then there were many things that life, in its infinite and capricious wisdom, blew past Stan's eyes and even right under his nose... just like the tick-tock, tell-the-time dandelion seeds forever airborne around the hummocks and holes of Stan's beloved allotment.

It wouldn't be fair to say that Stan didn't care for Maureen, although to suggest that he actually loved her possibly stretched the truth a jot. He cared for her in his very own special way, even though she wasn't the be-all and end-all of his life (she did turn out to be one of those, but that's jumping the gun a little).

The truth was that the two things which probably came closest to earning Stan Walker's affection- aside from his allotment- were (a) watching football on the TV and (b) the Black Sheep brewery up in Masham, to whose continued financial success and security Stan had contributed more than his share over the years.

Stan's only other weakness was a seemingly endless stream of ideas for how he and Maureen could get rich quick, such as the specialist sweet shop in Tod-morden or the mobile dating agency he set up in Rochdale: Stan was always promising his wife that the next one would be The Big One- that once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity to make money- but each scheme had come and gone with little to show for its pa.s.sing but another hole in their meagre savings.

All of these were thorns in Maureen's side but, in aggravation terms, it was the allotment that took the biscuit.

The allotment- one of six in a stand-alone patch of land on Honeydew Lane, edging onto the lane itself as well as onto Smithfield Road, Carholme Place, and Carholme Drive- was an eighty-square-yards rectangle of vegetable-festooned soil interspersed with narrow gra.s.sy "tending" paths. The allotment's main border, Honeydew Lane, one of the town's primary vehicular arteries and site of the notorious Bentley's Tannery, was an area blighted by such permanently pungent fumes that, or so local legend had it, the infamous Hounds of Luddersedge- an itinerant canine pack of all shapes and sizes (though mostly of a common variety: Heinz 57) given to defecating on the pavements of the town- were drawn to the locality, frequently depositing t.u.r.ds of varying consistency in and around the carefully and even lovingly cultivated plants and produce.

It was here that Stan spent increasing amounts of his time. Since his retirement (aged 52, now some four years ago) from the buses (a mobile and carefree life wandering the lanes between Rochdale and Burnley and Halifax), he had spent the hours and days and weeks (not to mention months, seasons, and years) dreaming of The Big One- the idea that would make them, their millions (or at least a few thousands) -and tending his prided potato crop.

There had been a time, in the late fifties, when the streets of Luddersedge had been an olfactory grotto of the smells of Yorks.h.i.+re-pudding mix and quietly cooking joints of meat and pans of vegetables on a Sunday morning, and the allotments had been well tended and picturesque. The young Stan had gone there to help his father every week. But those were the old days. Now, two of the other five allotments had gone to weed and a third one, Maureen had noticed one day when she walked down to the shops, was already showing signs of neglect. Stan would regularly come home looking glum because he'd found half-squashed empty beer cans jammed in amongst his sweetpeas... and, on one occasion, a used condom beside a flattened section of potato plants.

"Some folk'll do it anywhere," Stan announced on his return from that particular Sunday visit to the allotment, wafting straight to the sports pages of The News of the World as he sat waiting for his dinner. "I don't know what's happening to the world, I really don't."

Serving the mashed potatoes out onto her best blue-flowered plates using an ice cream scoop bought for her at the ma.s.sive Ikea warehouse on an all-too-infrequent outing to Leeds by Stan for her birthday, Maureen quietly but fervently wished that her husband might introduce a similar element of adventure and spontaneity into their own love life. At fifty-three, and still in the prime of her life (as she delighted in telling anyone who would listen), Maureen Walker craved some excitement. The truth was, she craved anything at all that would break the humdrum of the life she had somehow drifted into without even seeing it coming towards her. But such was not to be the case.

Stan Walker was not an adventurous man. Nor was he spontaneous, affectionate, interesting, learned, amusing, successful, or even (much as Maureen didn't even like to think it) handsome. And while her husband had probably never been any of these things even when he was running around the streets and lanes of Luddersedge in his short trousers, playing hide-and-seek or looking for conkers in the cool autumns of the Calder Valley, Maureen firmly placed the blame for her current situation at but one door: the allotment.

As far as Maureen Walker was concerned, it was the allotment that was the villain of the piece... and so it was, on one of those lonely, empty summer mornings when Stan had already left the house, that the arrival of an official-looking letter from the local council provided her with what she considered to be a neat solution to her problem.

In those days when the pair used to go out together of an evening- usually down to the Conservative Club on Eldershot Road but more often to The Three Pennies public house on Penny-pot Drive, where Stan could get his fix of Black Sheep- Maureen used to joke, though somewhat without humour even then, that Stan's "other woman" was a piece of ground filled with cabbages and carrot tops. It used to get a laugh for a time, from whoever might be sitting with them... and even from Maureen herself, though Stan would never respond. He would simply throw an occasional nod into the conversation, a distant half-smile on his face that suggested he had been drugged or was pulling out of a long coma into a world that he neither recognized nor cherished. And all the while he would repeatedly lift the ever-present pint gla.s.s of Masham's finest for a series of life-renewing slurps.

Unable to get much out of her husband, Maureen took to laying it on the line as far as her home life went with anyone who would take the time to listen- and as far as Luddersedge went, that was a lot of people.

Maureen would bemoan her lot to Joan Cardew and Miriam Barrett- of numbers 10 and 14 respectively- over the rickety fence that separated her and Stan's house from Joan's and Eddie's and the shock of privet that formed an unkempt but effective barrier with the widowed Mrs. Barrett's threadbare patch of gra.s.s.

With clothes hung freshly out to dry in the wind blowing through the Calder valley- predominantly Stan's voluminous Y-fronts and Maureen's no-longer-very-lacy bras and panties from Marks and Sparks- Maureen would, at one time, in the early days, tell either Joan or Miriam that she was nearing the end of her tether. That if he didn't leave her then she would take the bull by the horns and leave him.

She would tell the same thing to lisping Bert Green at the greengrocer's on the High Street, as Bert watched her pressing the sides of his avocados with undisguised annoyance; and to young Kylie Bickershaw with the bitten-down fingernails who worked the checkout at the Netto's behind the station car park and seemed to make a habit of shortchanging everyone; and even to Billy Roberts, the quiffed and always-tanned would-be gigolo who carved a mean rack of chops in his father's butcher's shop at the corner of Lemon Road and Coronation Drive.

Sometimes, when Maureen was watching young Billy- some thirty years her junior- carve a joint or pound beefsteak, it was all she could do to keep from openly drooling... watching those biceps work, and those thighs balloon out to fill his tight black trousers. One time, when he caught her and saw the naked desire on her face, Billy said, "Looks to me you could pop it into your mouth right here, Mrs. Walker," and Maureen readily agreed, blus.h.i.+ng faintly at the idea that Billy might well have read her thoughts... not one of which had anything to do with meat (at least, none of the stuff being turned around on Billy's slab). Needless to say, Billy knew that just as well as Maureen did.

And so it was that word spread around Luddersedge the way it will spread around any small town, sometimes reaching the far end before the person who set it off even gets there. Not that Maureen actually wanted everyone to know her business- she didn't.

It was simply a release valve and, anyway, subconsciously, she considered service people and neighbours to be the souls of discretion- but, of course, things don't always work out the way we intend them. And when a release valve becomes blocked, the pressure has to escape somewhere.

"I hear things aren't so good with you and your Stan," Mary Connaught said to Maureen one day, groaning with relief as she switched the straining net carrier bag from her welt-disfigured left hand into the right. "Is it that you're getting sick of waiting for The Big One?"

Maureen decided to ignore the remark about Stan's schemes- "treat it with the contemp it dizzerbs," her mother would have said in her characteristic pidgin-English dialect. "Whoever told you that?" she asked, feigning surprise and even a dose of healthy indignation, one hand lifted to fiddle with the cameo brooch that Maureen's Auntie Lillian had bequeathed to her the previous year and the other laid spread-fingered on her hip.

Mary Connaught shrugged. "A little bird," she said.

The confidant in question was neither a bird nor was it little. It was, in fact, Jim Fairclough, with whom Mary had been having something of a hot-and-sweaty flirtation since the departure of Mary's husband Thomas- Thomas having fled the family nest not only with the contents of his and Mary's joint account at the building society over in Hebden Bridge (amounting to some 16,000 when interest had been added) but with the cas.h.i.+er who served him to boot. The pair were said to be now living in Ibiza- where Thomas and Mary had spent their summer holidays for their entire married life of eight-getting-on-nine years ("...adding insult to injury," was how Miriam Barrett had summed it up... an opinion undoubtedly echoed by Mary) -and, for a time, Mary had considered trying to track them down. But then she started the relations.h.i.+p with Jim and all other things just kind of got pushed to the back of her mind.

Jim Fairclough's brother, Martin, was a regular feature wherever Billy Roberts appeared- there were some about town who said the two of them were like one person and that person's shadow, though who was which was a debatable point- and so Mary had heard all about Maureen's looks and the perspiration that always appeared on her top lip while Billy was pounding his meat. She heard about them on Jim's now frequent visits to her house- always under cover of darkness... though that did not matter a jot to Harriet Williams, the eagle-eyed sentinel of number 41 (Mary's house was number 43) who, in turn, was spreading the news to any who would stop and listen.

The conversation drifted to other things- a move started with Maureen's wide-eyed and innocent enquiry as to whether Mary had heard anything from her errant husband- and then pulled to a close with both women suddenly remembering other places they had arranged to be.

As Maureen watched Mary Connaught walk purposefully across the road, pausing only to give a wave to Pete d.i.c.kinson in his customised Cortina (Pete was the mechanic at Tony Manderson's garage over on Eldershot Road), she realised just how incestuous Luddersedge really was. It shouldn't really have taken her so long: After all, Miriam Barrett had said once that you couldn't break wind in Luddersedge without folks stopping you in the street to ask if you were having tummy problems. But you rarely saw the whole picture when you were only one of the characters painted into the scene.

However, there were other things that the momentous encounter with Mary Connaught brought to the fore: The main one of these was that Maureen could go on no longer talking behind Stan's back. She frowned at this thought. And why is that? a small voice enquired from the deep recesses of her head.

Yes, why was that?

Maureen looked up at the stone buildings that hemmed her in, imagining the roads that lay beyond them- roads that led to other towns, other cities, even other countries- and she suddenly yearned for them and for the freedom to travel them, with the wind in her hair and not a care on her shoulders.

Mary Connaught reached the pavement at the other side of the road and looked determinedly in the Oxfam shop window.

And why couldn't she do that? Maureen wondered to herself- fully knowing the answer even before it came. Why couldn't she drift along the great Highway of Life with carefree abandon? Just one reason: Stan.

Exactly! said the small voice.

So why did she need to keep her own counsel after so many years of simply telling things the way they were?

Because, the small voice whispered (with Maureen suddenly realising that it was her own innermost thoughts given a kind of vocal substance), if she were going to get rid of him, she needed to appear in harmony with her husband in order to avoid attracting undue attention.

She was momentarily shocked. And then, slowly, a smile pulled at her mouth. The phrase "get rid of" was somehow exciting... as if Stan was no more than a troublesome rash that needed only a spot of Clearasil to banish forever- and Maureen nodded to herself, watching Mary Connaught reach the double frontage of Luddersedge Bakery and turn to give her a glance. Maureen waved, gave a big smile, and turned around, her back feeling straighter than it had done for some time.

A decision had been made... or, more accurately, acknowledged: It had actually been made a thousand trips to the allotment ago; a million snores ago; and a hundred unexciting and demeaning sessions of her husband's clammy and clumsy explorations of her body ago.

The truth was, indeed, out there: Stanley had to go.

And if he wasn't going to go of his own accord- which he clearly wasn't- well... then she would have to give him a helping han d.

Deciding to kill her husband after years of unconscious vacillation was like the sudden arrival last autumn at a decision to s.h.i.+ft the sofa from against the back wall of the drawing room- where it had languished for as long as she could remember- over to beneath the window.

Complacency and a lack of adventure were the prime offenders and, just like it had been with the sofa, Maureen now saw lots of reasons why this was the obvious thing to do. More than that, it provided her with a frisson of excitement that had been missing from her life more or less since she and Stan had married in 1967.

The newspapers had called it the "summer of love" -either that year or the one before or after: Maureen couldn't exactly recall which- but for the newlywed Walkers it had been the year of "business pretty much as usual." In other words, the spectacle of the panting, groaning figure of her husband (slimmer then, it had to be said, but still carrying a stone or so too much flesh) climbing on board the good s.h.i.+p Maureen for a quick launch before rolling over into a sleep promoted by Black Sheep and interspersed with raucous snoring.

The snoring had sometimes grown so loud that Maureen had taken to pinching her husband's b.u.t.tocks between her fingernails to interrupt his slumber. It proved to be highly effective and- Maureen now realised in the flush of her decision to do away with her resident market-gardener (who now carried some four stones more than was ideal for his age and height) -it was strangely enjoyable in a kind of s.a.d.i.s.tic way.

So, there was the snoring: that would end; and there were the monosyllabic conversations in the Conservative Club or The Three Pennies- those would stop. And all the half-baked get-rich-quick schemes and the long-promised Big One that would keep them in clothes-pegs and manure for the rest of their empty lives. Not to mention, of course, the daily intake of Black Sheep, the constant loamy smell of earth and outdoors that Stan wafted in front of her when he deigned to return home for his food, and- worst of all, she now realised- Stanley's occasional need to remove his striped pyjama bottoms and claim his conjugal rights while Maureen stared over his thrusting shoulders at the bedroom curtain blowing in the breeze from the open window... imagining, lying there with her legs spread wide, she was Tinkerbell in the Peter Pan story, preparing to fly off into the night and over the spires and sooty roofs of Luddersedge into a new and distant morning somewhere far away. Somewhere better.

Yes, it would be just like moving the sofa.

But how to do it was the question.

Eventually, having discounted garroting and knifing (she didn't have a gun, so shooting was a nonstarter), Maureen had almost lost hope- already starting to convince herself that the whole thing had been a pipe dream... the naive whimsy of a bored housewife, like something out of a macabre version of Mills & Boon- when BBC2 ran a film about a hit man hired to murder the wife of a wealthy industrialist.

The film was complex- all the more so because Stan spent the entire duration of it slouched in the easy chair by her side snoring so loudly that she kept missing pieces of dialogue- but it was the basic principle that attracted her. For the first time in a long time, she felt randy- really randy: not the dull ache she got watching Billy Roberts but something almost primal... accentuated by the fact that Stan was right by her side, oblivious to the drama unfolding before his closed eyes.

"I'm going to do this to you," Maureen whispered, nodding toward the TV, her face bathed in the flickering glow of the screen on which a man stealthily crept around the outside of a house that, in Luddersedge, would have been a stately home. "I'm going to hire a hit man. What do you say to that?"

Stan snuffled and moved his head to one side before resuming his cacophonous drone.

The following day, with Stan already gone for a full session at the allotment, his pack-up of tuna-and-mayonnaise sandwiches in his little Tupperware container, Maureen did the dishes while she stared out of the window and wondered where she should go to hire someone to kill her husband.

Somehow, the prospect seemed daunting.

What went on in America- a fabled land that Maureen had never visited- seemed hard to translate in English terms. And even harder to translate in terms of Luddersedge.

It was like pop music, she mused, placing her favourite floral-designed plate lovingly in the back of the draining rack beside the sink. Like "Twenty-four Hours From Tulsa" (she had always loved Gene Pitney) -you could never imagine it being "Twenty-Four Hours From...": from where? Tottenham? It had to begin with a "T" to preserve the alliteration (that wasn't how she thought of it, not knowing alliteration from an adverb, but she did recognise the need for a tuh sound to balance the one in "tuhwenty-four"). Torquay?

She sang the first line over the sound of Terry Wogan, while he rambled on about the DG in Auntie Beeb. "Own-lee twenty-four hours from Tor-quay... own-lee one day away from your harms..." She chuckled and dropped cereal spoons and a b.u.t.ter knife into the holder, trailing suds across the crockery already drying.