Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018
- Автор: Ловси Питер, Зельцерман Дэйв
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018». Краткое содержание книги:
She shut up. They were on their backs now, him under and her on top, as if fused together. The young one in the hat lunged forward and threw himself at her, attempting to remove her jeans. She lashed out with her knees. He slapped her. The fat one pressed the knife.
“Nice and easy, yeah?”
They seemed to know what they were doing — the method was clearly tested and their individual roles set: one held, while the other... and then, surely, the reverse.
When she saw her own legs appear, naked and white, she despaired, and began to wail. Nothing and nobody could save her from the worst. Why? she asked herself. What did I do wrong?
The younger one got up to kick off his pants more easily. She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t see. She felt him kneeling between her legs, forcing her open. She screamed again and a few more millimeters of knife dug into her throat.
“Shut up, bitch!”
The door of the shed opened and Miss Sykes entered. She froze for an instant, unable to believe the sight that greeted her. Once she understood that it was real, she went into action, and she was unstoppable. She seized the coal shovel, drew up behind the rapist, raised high the metal tool and smashed it down on his head. There was a sickening noise of splintered bone. The man, who had half stood up, fell to all fours under the impact. She kicked him in his bony and preposterous bare buttocks and hit him a second time, then a third, then again and again, always on the head, hurling curses at him, of which the gentlest was “you son of a bitch.”
The fat one had let go of Angelique, and was cowering in the corner of the shed, pointing his pathetic knife at the avenging fury that used to be Miss Sykes.
“Stop!” he cried. “Christ, you’re killing ’im!”
But he was too much of a coward to rescue his friend and when she turned her wrath on him he charged for the door. She caught him in flight and stove in his hand with a swing of her shovel. The knife went flying. Despite the pain, the man took the time to pick it up with his other hand, swore, and fled, clutching his wrist. Miss Sykes chased him as far as the yard, hurling the shovel into his back. Then she came back into the shed.
Angelique had stood up and pulled her jeans back on, but her legs were shaking so violently she could hardly stand.
“ ’Twas a close shave, love!” said Miss Sykes, gathering her into her arms.
In all her years of study, Angelique had been taught that the best way to memorize an idiom in a foreign language was to hear it used in a real-life context. And the more emotional charge this situation carried, the more solidly the idiom would stick. “Ф’Twas a close shave, love!” C’est passé près, ma chérie! She would remember it all her life.
For a long time she sobbed into the muscular chest of her landlady, who all the while whispered, “It’s all right... it’s all over... you’re safe, dear.”
Then they had to consider the man at their feet.
He was lying on his side, his pants around his thighs, grotesque. Even under his hat his skull looked dented and the black hair that stuck out was viscous with blood. The open eyes expressed a kind of astonishment, but mainly their message was: “I am dead.” Miss Sykes knelt and passed her hand over the eyes to close them.
“He has my money,” Angelique remembered, and collected her envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, trying not to look at his face.
Miss Sykes took a tarp off the shelf and threw it over the body, then shepherded Angelique out of the shed.
The two women would spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen. Angelique, in shock, thought they should call the police. Miss Sykes could only see the dangers.
“I killed him, do you see?”
“Yes, but you were defending me.”
“To defend yourself you hit once or twice. I bashed this lad’s brains out. How’m I to explain that in front of a judge?”
She wasn’t wrong. But then what should they do?
“And there is the other,” Angelique argued. “He saw everything.”
“That one knew what they were about to do. He won’t talk.”
So be it, then.
“At that,” Miss Sykes asked, “he didn’t have the chance to...”
“No, he did not do anything to me. You were in time. Thank you. Thank you.”
As she was repeating “thank you” the tears began again.
“Go take a bath. Put on your favorite music, nice and loud, and we’ll deal with the rest tonight.”
Much later that night, Miss Sykes knocked on Angelique’s door.
“I figured you weren’t sleeping. D’you want to help? Not saying you have to.”
“I’m coming.”
“As you like.”
Miss Sykes called it her garden, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a grassy rectangle, stuck between the back of her house and her neighbors’ property. A waning moon washed it all with a pallid light.
It was there that the two women undertook to bury the man in the shed. Miss Sykes had measured him and traced with the tip of her spade the dimensions of the hole they had to dig: the very size and shape of a coffin. They set to work, one at each end. Angelique, who was more accustomed to manipulating the present perfect than the handle of a shovel, soon found her hands mushrooming with blisters.
“Leave it,” Miss Sykes told her, already shining with sweat, “and go get me some beers.”
They spoke in whispers, out of prudence, and the sound of the shovel sinking into the loamy soil — this was England, after all — wasn’t likely to wake anyone. Angelique came back with three cold beers and a bottle opener.
“Maybe the hole is deep enough now?” she suggested, as her landlady cracked open her second lager.
“I don’t fancy finding this bloke’s big toe in the basket of my lawn-mower next spring,” she replied, and redoubled her efforts.
She dug so well that soon they were ready to get to the business that Angelique had been dreading. Yet she could not abandon Miss Sykes.
“Come on, then,” she said, putting down her shovel.
There was no light in the shed. They groped around in the dark to find the body, and then gripped him by the arms and hauled him outside. Even as she was dragging him thus to his final resting place, Angelique had the sudden thought that what she was doing didn’t feel all that extraordinary. Since being attacked in the shed, she felt as if she had tumbled into a different world, with its own internal logic. More than that, she realized, she felt happy to be doing something.
They laid the man in his plot of earth. Miss Sykes covered his face with a hand towel.
“What was his name?” she asked, taking up her shovel once more.
“I don’t know. How could I know?”
“Maybe you heard the other one call him by his name?”
“No, I can’t remember.”
“Right then. We’ll call him Bob. Work for you?”
“Yes.”
She gathered herself for a few seconds over the remains, then said, “Sorry, Bob. Rest in peace.”
She started shoveling dirt back into the hole. Angelique armed herself with the second spade and joined in. When it was finished, they stamped the earth as flat as they could, and scattered any residual dirt all around the rest of the garden.
“Let’s go home,” said Miss Sykes. “It’s done.”
In the kitchen both drank two brandies, standing, without speaking to one another. Finally Angelique wanted to go upstairs and try to get some sleep.
“Goodnight, Miss Sykes,” she said.
“I really think we can drop the ‘Miss Sykes,’Ф” said the landlady. “It doesn’t suit. Call me Pam.”
“Good night, Pam,” Angelique corrected herself.
“Good night, love.”