After settling Mother at home, against her protests, Calvin decided to drop in at the bar. As he had suspected, the usual crowd was there. Minus Charlie.
‘Calvin,’ said Marge, patting his arm when he sat down beside her. ‘Welcome home. You’ve heard the news?’
Calvin nodded sadly. ‘Heard just before we left for Florida. It’s tragic, isn’t it?’
‘I still can’t believe it,’ said Marge. ‘He always seemed so…’
‘Alive?’ Calvin suggested.
‘Yes. Alive. That’s it. Alive.’
‘Is there any progress?’ he asked the table in general.
‘No,’ Jeff answered. ‘You know the cops. They’ve put it down as a hit and run, asked for the public’s co-operation, and that’s the last you’ll hear of it.’
‘Unless someone comes forward,’ Calvin said.
‘Yes,’ Jeff agreed. ‘Unless someone comes forward. By the way,’ he went on, ‘here’s the final scores on the pool.’ He handed Calvin the sheets of paper.
Kelly, the waitress with the walk out of a forties’ noir movie, finally came over with his drink. Calvin desperately wanted to see the final scores, but he didn’t want to appear too anxious. After all, Charlie was dead. So he sipped some beer, talked a little about his Christmas, and then, casually, glanced down at the sheets.
The first thing that caught his eye was his weekend’s score: 5. That had to be wrong. Calvin had checked the game scores after the cribbage game and found he had nine. He had also won the evening game, the Raiders over the Panthers, and the Monday evening game, when the Titans had creamed the Cowboys. So how could he end up with five? He had eleven.
He turned to the column of picks and noticed scrawled across the line where his should be, the word ‘DAWGS’. Charlie, of course, had got the same. It meant they hadn’t got their picks in on time.
But Calvin had got his picks in; he remembered phoning them. It was late in the afternoon, four-thirty to be precise, but definitely before the five o’clock deadline. So what was going on?
‘Calvin?’
The voice came as if from a long way. ‘Huh? Sorry. What?’
‘Just that you’ve gone pale. Are you OK?’ It was Marge, and her hand was on his arm.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Must be… you know… Charlie… delayed shock.’
Marge nodded. ‘I don’t suppose it seemed real until you got back here, did it?’ she said.
‘Something like that. What’s happening with the pool?’
Marge frowned. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘with Charlie gone and you forgetting to phone in… er… I won.’
‘You?’
Marge laughed nervously. ‘Well, don’t look so surprised, Calvin. I’ve been up there with the best of you all season.’
‘I know. It’s not that…’
‘What, then?’
‘Never mind. Congratulations, Marge.’ Calvin knew he couldn’t complain. Whatever had gone wrong here, however he had gone from eleven to five, there was nothing he could do about it, and getting upset about the result would only look suspicious.
‘Thanks,’ said Marge. ‘I know it must be a disappointment, you being so close and all.’ She managed a weak smile. ‘I only beat you by one, if that means anything at all. It was my best week of the whole season. Twelve.’
Calvin laughed. He couldn’t help himself. ‘So what are you going to do with your winnings?’
Marge looked at the others, then said, ‘I decided – well, we all decided, really – that I’d use the money for a wake, you know, to pay for a wake here. For Charlie. He would have liked that.’
‘Yes,’ said Calvin, still quaking with laughter inside while he tried to keep a straight face. ‘Yes, I think he would.’
When Calvin got home he poured himself a large whisky and tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Five. The DAWGS. It was an insult, a slap in the face.
He cast his mind back to that Wednesday afternoon and remembered first that his hand had been shaking as he dialled. He had, after all, just killed Charlie the previous evening. Could he have misdialled? The first three numbers were all the same, and connected him to the newspaper the administrator worked for. The last four were 4697. It would have been easy, say, to transpose the six and the nine, or even to dial seven first rather than four, given that he was upset at the time. He tried both and got the same message: ‘I’m away from my desk right now. Please leave a message after the beep.’ The only difference was that 7694 was a woman’s voice and 4967 was a man’s. So that was what had happened. In his disturbed state of mind, Calvin had dialled the wrong number. Why had it happened like that? Why hadn’t he listened to the message, noticed the difference in voice and realized what he had done?
Then he remembered. Just as he had got through, Mother had knocked on the bedroom floor for him. He had held the phone at arm’s length and covered the mouthpiece, as you do, and yelled up that he was coming in a minute. He hadn’t heard the administrator’s message, only vaguely recognized it was a man’s voice on the answering machine, heard the usual beep and left his picks with someone else at the paper.
Someone who hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
Calvin held his head in his hands. The wrong number. All for nothing. He drank some more whisky. Well, maybe not all for nothing, he thought after a while. Hadn’t he already decided that, nice as it would have been, he hadn’t killed Charlie only for the money? Wasn’t $2000 a paltry sum to murder for? More than $15, but still… he knew he had had more reason than the money. Winning the pool was a part of it, of course, but that wasn’t to be. So what was left? What could he salvage from this disaster?
‘I’m a killer. That’s what I am.’
The voice seemed to come into his head from nowhere, and slowly as the whisky warmed his insides, understanding dawned on Calvin.
‘I’m a killer. That’s what I am.’
The sound of a heavy stick hammering on the ceiling above broke into his thoughts. He could hear her muffled yelling. ‘Leroy! Leroy! I need my hot milk, Leroy!’
Calvin put his glass down, looked up at the ceiling and got to his feet. ‘Coming, Mother,’ he said softly.
IN FLANDERS FIELDS
I considered it the absolute epitome of irony that, with bombs falling around us, someone went and bludgeoned Mad Maggie to death.
To add insult to injury, she lay undiscovered for several days before Harry Fletcher, the milkman, found her. Because milk was rationed to one or two pints a week, depending on how much the children and expectant mothers needed, he didn’t leave it on her doorstep the way he used to do before the war. Even in a close community like ours, a bottle of milk left unguarded on a doorstep wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
These days, Harry walked around with his float, and people came out to buy. It was convenient, as we were some way from the nearest shops, and we could always be sure we were getting fresh milk. However mad Maggie might have been, it wasn’t like her to miss her milk ration. Thinking she might have slept in, or perhaps have fallen ill with no one to look after her, Harry knocked on her door and called her name. When he heard no answer, he told me, he made a tentative try at the handle and found that the door was unlocked.
There she lay on her living-room floor in a pool of dried blood dotted with flies. Poor Harry lost his breakfast before he could dash outside for air.
Why Harry came straight to me when he found Mad Maggie’s body I can’t say. We were friends of a kind, I suppose, of much the same age, and we occasionally passed a pleasurable evening together playing dominoes and drinking watery beer in the Prince Albert. Other than that, we didn’t have a lot in common: I was a schoolteacher – English and history – and Harry had left school at fourteen; Harry had missed the first war through a heart ailment, whereas I had been gassed at Ypres in 1917; I was a bachelor, and Harry was married with a stepson, Thomas, who had just come back home on convalescent leave after being severely wounded during the Dunkirk evacuation. Thomas also happened to be my godson, which I suppose was the main thing Harry and I had in common.