


A Murder to Die For, Page 6
Stevyn Colgan
‘You will stop fighting immediately and disperse!’ he shouted. ‘I repeat. You will stop fighting immediately and disperse!’
No one stopped fighting immediately and no one dispersed.
Savidge had got a good distance clear of his burning van but he hadn’t managed to avoid the irate female impersonator who still seemed intent on his pound of flesh. Having chased his quarry down and rugby tackled him to the ground, the big man was now sitting astride the burger man’s chest, his knees painfully pinning his prisoner’s arms down crucifixion-style and his crotch pushing insistently against his chin. Savidge wriggled violently and howled in frustration.
‘Apologise!’ snarled the drag artist.
‘Get . . . off . . . me . . . you . . . freak!’ shouted Savidge. The drag artist dug his knees deeper into Savidge’s fleshy biceps and watched the man’s anger rise several notches, as did the tone and timbre of his agonised yelps. Starved of blood, Savidge’s hands began to turn a ghastly white.
‘Say you’re sorry first!’
‘Fuck you! Fuck all of you and Agnes fucking Crabbe and her stupid fucking books!’ screamed Savidge. His face was dangerously purple and fat veins stood out at his temples. His nose started to gush with blood and he began to thrash about wildly. The big drag artist rode him like a bucking bronco, bearing down even harder and grabbing his prisoner’s wrists in an effort to keep him under control. Savidge frothed and gurgled, blood spurting from his nostrils like a geyser and somewhere deep inside his brain something went ‘click’. Pinned to the wet grass by eighteen stones of female impersonator and desperately gasping for breath, he glared at the bulging gusset that filled his field of vision and sank his teeth into the man’s plump scrotum. The drag artist screamed and seemed to launch five feet vertically into the air and, in a second, Savidge was up on his feet and running, blind and deaf to the agonised yells of his victim and to everything else except the pounding of hot blood in his ears and his own desperate need to get as far away as possible from people dressed as Millicent Cutter.
As he dodged and weaved between the Millies, his oxygen-starved brain barely registered any details of his surrounding; all he saw was a blur of people all dressed the same. Miss Cutters. Cutters here. Cutters there. Cutter after Cutter after Cutter. A group of them was making its way towards the Empire Hotel and blocked his path. At its centre was a woman he recognised immediately from posters in the pub and from the television. The name Greeley surfaced briefly in his head but then vanished. All he knew for certain was that this was Cutter Prime. The Alpha Cutter. The Queen of the Colony. For a moment their eyes met, but then he swerved to the left, giving her entourage a wide berth, and he ran on, blood still spraying from his nose and spattering the dresses of outraged festival-goers as he passed by them. Tall Cutters, short Cutters, fat, thin and bespectacled Cutters, young sexy Cutters, black, brown and pasty-white Goth Cutters . . . his crazed vision accentuated their features as if he was seeing them through a fisheye lens and his sense of reality began to slip quickly away. His mind conflated the sights before his eyes with every post-apocalypse film he’d ever seen. He ran past the pub and along the Coxeter Road as fast as his legs would carry him.
Shunter had bought himself a bacon butty at the Moore Tea, Vicar? café but had neglected to buy a drink with which to wash it down. Or, to be more accurate, he had elected to take the sandwich away rather than eat in. Mrs Moore knew that he was an ex-police officer and always insisted on sharing the local gossip with him, but he wasn’t in the mood today to hear about Mr Hemerton’s late-night lady visitors or Mr and Mrs Farmery’s penchant for rubber goods. Therefore, he’d bid her a good morning and, despite his best intentions, had found himself being drawn towards the Happy Onion. There was nothing on offer in the festival programme that took his fancy at that particular moment and, while he enjoyed Agnes Crabbe’s books, he had no time for the fawning sycophancy that pervaded most of the live events. The next one that he wanted to see was solicitor Andrew Tremens’s talk at 4 p.m. and so, as he had a few hours to kill, a pint or two of To Die For seemed a reasonably good way to spend them.
From somewhere towards the village centre there suddenly came a curious strangulated wail, like an animal in pain, and Shunter stopped and looked towards the eerie sound. There was a sudden commotion among the crowds of Millies as a bloodied Savidge, plum-faced and screaming ‘Cutters! Cutters!’ at the top of his lungs, barged his way through them. He was moving so fast that he was already out of sight before Shunter had decided whether he should see if the man was okay or not.
Helen Greeley thanked the members of the Festival Committee for their kindness in seeing her to her hotel but insisted that she was fine getting to her room by herself. She had, admittedly, been slightly rattled by the sudden appearance of the bloody man who had been screaming in the High Street, but he had obviously not been interested in her and her anxieties had quickly subsided. She stepped into the lift and waved to the fans that had gathered in the foyer for yet another impromptu signing session. But as the doors slid shut and she was finally alone, her expensive smile faded, she exhaled deeply and her shoulders dropped. It had been a long morning. She felt as if she weighed several tons.
She quickly checked all of the smaller rooms in her suite and then made a more detailed inspection of the bedroom and lounge, checking inside wardrobes, behind curtains and under the bed. Satisfied that she was alone, she kicked off her shoes and made straight for the mini-bar. She was still jetlagged after flying back from a personal appearance at a convention in California two days before, and the opening ceremony, followed by two hours of meets and greets, had left her exhausted. The fact that her breakfast had consisted solely of gin probably hadn’t helped either. The morning had seemed to go on for ever, what with the long queue of fans thrusting DVDs, books and posters under her nose for her to sign, and being asked question after question after question about Agnes Crabbe and Millicent Cutter that she didn’t have the knowledge to answer. The fact that her agent wasn’t on hand to act as a buffer hadn’t helped; Portia Furstinhinde was fiercely protective of her clients and didn’t suffer fools gladly. But she had been selected for jury duty and hadn’t been able to get out of it. The choice, therefore, had been left with Greeley as to whether or not she wanted to attend the festival alone and, despite Portia’s advice to the contrary, she had decided to do so. She didn’t relish the idea but, as demanding as these gigs were, she felt obliged to attend. After all, her fans had made her the star that she was and she was not about to forget that. Besides, she told herself, it would also be good for her to build up her self-reliance. Memories of ‘the incident’, as she chose to call it, were still fresh in her mind and she’d suffered nightmares and panic attacks ever since. Despite her bold outward appearance, the events of the past year had shaken her confidence badly.
She dismissed the collection of tiny bottles in the mini-bar and went to her suitcase, producing a large bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic. She carried them into her bedroom and walked out on to her balcony. It had a lovely view of the hotel’s landscaped gardens and the canal beyond but she had no time for such things. What she needed was sleep. She shut the net curtains but left the French windows open to allow a breeze into the room. She stripped off her Miss Cutter costume and, lying on the comfortable bed in her underwear, she poured herself a very large gin and a very small tonic and finished off the glass in two gulps before reaching over to her bedside table drawer for the bottle of sleeping pills she knew were in there. But then she decided against it. The tablets wouldn’t mix well with the amount of gin she’d drunk in the past few hours, and she had an event to attend at 6.30 p.m. She didn’t want to oversleep or make herself ill. She shut the drawer and reached for her earplugs and sleep mask instead.
Savidge slowed to a trot and caught his breath. His head pounded and his nose was still bleeding profusely. ‘Cutters,’ he panted. ‘Cutters.’
The air seemed to suddenly disappear from his lungs and blac
kness edged his vision. His heart was beating so loudly that the sound drowned out everything else. He felt his legs go weak as nausea washed over him. He was barely conscious as his body slammed into the tarmac of the road and was therefore mercifully oblivious to the pain that the impact would have caused him. His head clonked noisily off a kerbstone and the last thing he saw before he passed out was a crowd of Miss Cutter look-alikes ambling towards him, their gnarled hands outstretched.
‘Cutters . . .’ he gurgled.
In the First Aid Tent, there was some confusion about how to treat the female impersonator’s injury. The volunteers, a huddle of barely pubescent St John Ambulance cadets, were doing little more than giggling among themselves and it was only due to the appearance of one of the village’s oldest residents that anything was being done at all. Ninety-four-year-old Mrs Joan Gawkrodger, who’d popped in to get a sticking plaster after pricking herself on a brooch pin, had been an ambulance driver during the war and a career midwife. She certainly wasn’t shocked by the sight of a bloodied groin.
‘So when was your monthly due, my dear?’ she said as she attempted to pull a pair of surgical gloves over hands made claw-like by osteoarthritis.
‘I’m not a girl. And I’m in agony.’
‘Yes, I used to get frightful cramps myself when I was your age too,’ said Mrs Gawkrodger. ‘And no, you’re not a girl any more. You are a woman now. The Scourge of Eve has—’
‘No, you don’t understand. My name is Baxter Pole, I’m thirty-eight and I’m a man,’ said the patient. ‘And I’m in quite a lot of pain.’
Mrs Gawkrodger groped in her handbag and located her spectacles. She clumsily manoeuvred them on to her nose and the lenses magnified her eyes to alarming proportions. ‘Good grief, so you are. How on earth can you be menstruating then?’
‘I’m not menstruating,’ snapped Pole. ‘And most of the blood is someone else’s.’
‘You mean another woman has—’
‘It’s from a nosebleed.’
‘I don’t know . . . boys turning into girls and girls turning into boys,’ muttered Mrs Gawkrodger, desperately trying to get a grip on the situation. ‘I suppose there are bound to be some side effects. I mean to say, it’s not natural, is it? Removing this and opening that and—’
‘I haven’t had a sex change and I’m not having a period,’ said Pole in exasperation. ‘I’ve been bitten on my . . . down there.’
The cadets giggled some more.
‘Bitten? Bitten by what?’ said Mrs Gawkrodger. ‘A horsefly? A mosquito? Don’t say a dog?’
‘A burger van man, if you must know.’
‘I see,’ said Mrs Gawkrodger, who didn’t. She fell back upon practicalities. ‘Well, I suppose we’d better have a look then. Hitch your skirts up, there’s a brave . . . er . . .’
The damage wasn’t nearly as bad as the amount of blood made it seem. Savidge’s nose had supplied most of it, and his bite had barely broken the skin but, even so, Mrs Gawkrodger found herself wondering how to treat such an injury. A sticking plaster seemed obvious but she wasn’t so far removed from the memory of male genitalia to know that removing said plaster would be painful in the extreme, especially when it involved an unshaved scrotum. She therefore decided upon a gauze pad and began unrolling a length of bandage with which to hold it in place. She left Pole to clean his own testicles with a sterile wipe rather than take on the job herself.
‘How can you have lived in Nasely your whole life and know so little about Agnes Crabbe?’ asked Mrs Handibode with a little too much disdain.
‘She died long before I was even born,’ said Vic defensively. ‘And no one really knew anything about her until her books were published, did they? All we ever heard as kids were daft rumours and gossip.’
‘People can be so unkind,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
Mrs Handibode and Miss Wilderspin had made good time visiting the places on their itinerary and were now half an hour ahead of schedule. Mrs Handibode had therefore suggested that they take a refreshment break in the pub. They found themselves a table and while Miss Wilderspin excitedly soaked up the atmosphere of the bustling bar with its olde worlde charm and Agnes Crabbe memorabilia, Mrs Handibode reproached the landlord.
‘My dad told me that she was a witch and ate babies,’ con-tinued Vic. ‘And my Aunt Meg said she was like that Miss Haversham in Great Expectations.’
‘Miss Haversham wasn’t a cannibal!’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘No, I mean pining away in her cottage, grieving for her lost love.’ Vic pointed to the framed photograph of Daniel Crabbe in his army uniform.
‘What nonsense,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘She was a perfectly happy young woman, if her personal diaries are to be believed. And she’d hardly lie to herself, would she?’
‘Just repeating what I was told,’ said Vic, emptying the glass washer.
‘And anyway, theirs wasn’t some great love affair,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘As was normal back then, her marriage was more to do with her father’s wishes than her own.’
‘But it is true that she never left the house after he died, isn’t it? Which you’ll admit is a bit weird. I mean, she was only in her early twenties. It wasn’t too late for her to start again.’
‘She didn’t want to start again. She craved solitude, as people of genius so often do. In A Writer’s Diary Virginia Woolf wrote that “lonely silence is inseparable from the creative impulse”. Seclusion freed Agnes from the distractions of everyday life and allowed her to write.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t answer my original question,’ Vic persisted. ‘Why write books if you don’t want anyone else to read them?’
‘Actually, she would have loved to see her work in print,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘But Agnes knew that Miss Cutter’s promiscuity would have been seen as scandalous. Her stories were much too racy and she would have felt the sharp point of the critics’ pencil if she’d tried to get them published, mark my words.’
‘That’s why she insisted that they only be submitted to a publisher after her death,’ added Miss Wilderspin.
‘Not quite, Molly,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘Her express instructions were that the suitcase into which she’d placed her writings must not be opened until the first day of the new millennium. I think, like many who lived through the two wars, she maintained a kind of fin de siècle optimism; that the twenty-first century would see the dawn of a new golden age of peace and tolerance. She would be so disappointed in us.’
‘You really do know your Agnes Crabbe, don’t you?’ said Vic.
‘I’ve often said that I could have been her in a previous life,’ said Mrs Handibode proudly.
‘So this talk this afternoon, what’s that all about?’ asked Vic.
‘Andrew Tremens is the grandson of the solicitor with whom Agnes left her manuscripts,’ said Mrs Handibode. ‘He was the person who opened the suitcase and discovered what it contained. And, consequently, in the absence of living family, he is trustee for her corpus of work. He knows almost as much about Agnes Crabbe as I do.’
‘So if he says he has something new and important to tell the world it’ll be something good then?’ said Vic.
‘You can be sure of it.’
‘I do hope the rumours are true,’ said Miss Wilderspin.
‘Now then, we mustn’t fall prey to silly speculation,’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘Rumours?’ asked Vic.
‘Some people are saying that Andrew Tremens’s announcement is about the discovery of a lost manuscript,’ said Miss Wilderspin. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if that were true?’
‘I guess it would be.’
‘It’s very unlikely,’ said Mrs Handibode.
‘But there is a gap in her writing,’ said Miss Wilderspin. ‘She wrote at least one book a year, often two, but there is nothing for 1934 or 1935. And that’s right in the middle of her most productive period.’
‘We shall see,’ said Mrs Handibode.