“Yeah, well, prove it, dumb-ass.” But the fight had gone out of Jean-Paul as the struggle of trying to keep afloat began to tell.
“You smothered her with her own pillows, then tried to make it look like natural causes, and because she was old and because you convinced the doctor that she had a bad heart, you thought you’d got away with it.”
“All right, all right, I killed the old bitch, so what? She was like a bloody succubus, Can you fetch this, I forgot that, Would you mind giving me a hand to the table. I lost my temper that night and rammed the pillow over her face, all right? She was sick and old. I was doing her a favour — oh God, help—”
The water glugged and gurgled as it covered his head. Georges felt his stomach turning somersaults.
“Please,” Jean-Paul said, bobbing up at last, and Georges could tell that he was crying. “Help me—”
“You didn’t lose your temper. You planned to kill her long before you left Paris.”
“I swear to God, it was the heat of the moment. For God’s sake, don’t let me die! I’ll give you anything. The car. Take the car...”
“You brought the medication with you. That’s premeditated murder.”
“Whatever you want, name it, it’s yours.”
“A confession,” Georges said. “I just want to hear you admit it.”
“All right, all right.” Jean-Paul was spluttering words and water in equal amounts now. “I thought she was rolling, I bought heart pills from a chemist’s in Paris, I held the pillow over her face and—”
“Did she struggle?”
“Yes, of course she bloody struggled! I had to wake her up to get her to unlock the door, spinning some cock-and-bull story about needing to talk, put her back to bed, and guess what? No pillows.”
“She used to pile them on the floor.”
“I know that now, but at the time I had to search for them, so yes, the old bitch put up a fight — oh, Christ.”
His head went underwater, and once more, it took forever before it surfaced. Even Jean-Paul, who couldn’t swim, knew the third time was his last.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he screamed. “Do this, do that—”
“You wanted her money, you just didn’t want to earn it.”
“I’m young! I’m not cut out for fishing false teeth out of glasses, just because the stupid bitch forgot to put them in before going down to dinner! I killed her, and the only thing I’m sorry about is that she didn’t have the money. Satisfied?”
“We certainly are,” boomed a voice from nowhere, and suddenly the night was filled with blinding sunshine. It took Jean-Paul a few seconds to realise they were searchlights from other boats.
“Help,” he spluttered, and it didn’t matter the water was swarming with police uniforms. He was saved. “Help me, I’m drowning!”
“No, you’re not,” Georges said. “If you put your feet down, you could walk to the island.”
Autumn came, and the leaves on the trees turned the colour of her hair, fluttering across the ground like the freckles on her skin. Out on the lake, grebes dived, the last of the swallows fattened up on flies, and in a rowboat a young couple talked of wedding rings and babies.
Irene was already converting the old barn into a cottage.
“I’m so proud of you,” Sandrine said, dabbling her fingers in the water. “The way you went to the police, told them the only way to prove Madame Morreau had been murdered was by a confession by her killer, and then offering them a way that they could get it.”
She hadn’t cut her hair like Farrah Fawcett, why would she? Not when a big man with a broad smile loved to run his fingers through it, telling her it shone like fire and smelled of lollipops and roses.
“I may have thought up the competition, but you gave it substance by saying your father was sponsoring it.” He’d had to lie, telling Sandrine that Madame Morreau confided in him on their walks. But this would be the last lie he ever told, he promised himself. “Without you to hold my hand, I’d never have plucked up the courage to walk into the commissariat.”
“In that case, come over here and show your appreciation properly,” she giggled.
“I’d rather do it improperly,” he grinned back, “but first.”
He prised the master key from his ring and, with great solemnity, consigned it to the lake. As it sank, a breeze sprang up, rippling across the open water and ruffling his hair. Georges swore it smelled of aniseed.
The Shipbreaker
by Mike Wiecek
After his graduation from college, Mike Wiecek spent a good part of ten years in Asia, mostly in Japan, where he began by teaching English and eventually found work in a publishing house where he was the only Westerner. His travels took him to many other parts of Asia, which may explain his comfort in employing a setting such as that of the following story. He is a Shamus and multiple Derringer award winner for his fiction, and someone to watch on the mystery scene.
At dawn, the monsoon rains eased, and the long shantytown of Bhatiary grumbled to life. Low voices in the hostels, feet slopping through mud, occasional clanks from teapots on firebrick, all subdued in the damp, heavy air. Trucks groaned along the frontage road. Later the clanging and shouting and commerce would raise a constant roar along the beach, overcome only by the heaviest lashings of rain. But for now, a certain peace.
Mohit Kadir walked lightly, cheerfully. He smiled at the murky sunrise; glanced affectionately at poisonously bright chemicals in the runoff ditches. A day or two longer as a gang laborer, and then he was out, advancing to apprentice cutter — a promotion so difficult and so rare that strangers had come up and murmured their envious congratulations. Today, Mohit felt like he could haul a ton of steel singlehanded and go back for more.
The foreman, Syed Abdul Farid, yawned at his door.
“As-salaamu alaykum, Mohit.” He had gray hair and the solid build of a more-than-adequate diet. “You appear happy this morning.”
“Yes, saheb.” Mohit felt himself grinning. “A fine day.”
They walked through the slum, collecting other members of the crew. Most lived together, six or seven men in scavenged huts. All came from the same town, Ghorarchar, in the far north of Bangladesh, a region of famine and desperate poverty. Mohit nodded greetings.
“Kamon achhen?”
“Bhalo achhi.”
The men wore similar lungis and cheap shirts, the thin garments uniformly tattered and stained, little more than rags. Their faces were gaunt, their arms thin to emaciation despite the appallingly heavy labor of their days. And they knew they were the lucky ones, the chosen. Ghorarchar offered nothing but slow starvation. Here on the long, trampled beach of Chittagong, they could earn sixty takas a day breaking ships, and be glad for it.
The ships! Five years since Mohit first saw them, colossal hulks of rust and steel, driven onto the strand and looming like mountains overhead. Half-dismembered, in the mist and rain of the monsoons, the dead ships seemed too massive, too huge to have ever been built by men. But now they were scrap, worth nothing but their metal, and other men were slowly taking them apart. For ten kilometers up and down the beach they sat one by the next, thirty at a time, slowly cut down with hand torches and carried away by barefoot gangs.
“How do you feel, Mohit?” Farid said as they crossed the frontage road, a brief pleasure of asphalt before their feet sank back into endless mud.