The Best of Sisters in Crime (41 page)

“An ice pick?”
whispered Jimmy Boyle. “He was
stabbed
first?”

“First and only,
I’m afraid,” said Sigrid. “It was hot last night. You said she was trying to
make iced tea when the fight began. A lot of those old refrigerators only make
chunks of ice, not cubes, so it’s logical to assume she had an ice pick in her
hand. Afterwards, she must have remembered your lecture on rifling marks and
pushed that slug into the wound to make it look as if an impossible gun had shot
her husband.”

“And the blow
when she stabbed him with the pick must have made the bruise that bothered
Abramson,” Tillie mused.

She nodded. “Of
course, someone will have to question the boy—make him admit he palmed one of
those demonstration slugs and that his mother had confiscated it. He may have
bragged about it to some of the other children.”

“Sorry, Jimmy,”
Tildon said, awkwardly patting the stunned young patrolman’s shoulder.

Boyle stood up
and he still wore a dazed expression. “Not your fault, Tillie.” Purpose
returned to his face. “I’m still going to call that lawyer the sarge told me
about. If Liz did stab Ray, it’s got to be self-defense, right?”

“Right,” Tillie
answered sturdily; but after his cousin had departed, he turned back to Sigrid.
“What do you think, Lieutenant?”

She shrugged. “The
stabbing might not have been premeditated, but driving the slug into him
definitely was. And didn’t Abramson say Macken didn’t die immediately? The
prosecution’s bound to bring that up.”

Sigrid pulled
the typing stand back in place and scanned the half-completed report Tillie had
interrupted.

He started to
leave, then paused in the doorway. “I didn’t think you knew much about kids.
What made you guess Tommy took that slug?”

“I have cousins,
too,” Sigrid said grimly. “They all have children. And all the children have
sticky little fingers.”

Her own slender
fingers attacked the keyboard in slashing precision and Tillie was careful not
to grin until he’d pulled the door closed behind him.

Back to table of
contents

Sharyn McCrumb, whose
Edgar-winning
Bimbos of the Death Sun
featured Jay Omega, is also the creator of Elizabeth MacPherson, who appears in
eight books, including the Agatha and Anthony nominee
Paying the Piper.
Sharyn is also the author of the “Ballad
Books,” including
If I Ever Return, Pretty
Peggy-0
(Macavity winner, Anthony nominee),
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter
(Agatha and Anthony
nominee),
She Walks These Hills
(Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity winner),
The Rosewood Casket,
and the forthcoming
The Ballad of Frankie Silver.
Her short story
collection,
Foggy Mountain Breakdown,
appeared in 1997.

In “A Predatory Woman,”
Sharyn forsakes Appalachia for England, and a look at the lengths to which some
reporters will go for a good story.

“She looks a proper
murderess, doesn’t
she?” said Ernie Sleaford,
tapping the photo of a bleached blonde. His face bore that derisive grin he
reserved for the “puir doggies,” his term for unattractive women.

With a
self-conscious pat at her own more professionally lightened hair, Jackie Duncan
nodded. Because she was twenty-seven and petite, she had never been the object
of Ernie’s derision. When he shouted at her, it was for more professional
reasons—a missed photo opportunity or a bit of careless reporting. She picked
up the unappealing photograph. “She looks quite tough. One wonders that
children would have trusted her in the first place.”

“What did they
know, poor lambs? We never had a woman like our Erma before, had we?”

Jackie studied
the picture, wondering if the face were truly evil, or if their knowledge of
its possessor had colored the likeness. Whether or not it was a cruel face, it
was certainly a plain one. Erma Bradley had dumpling features with gooseberry
eyes, and that look of sullen defensiveness that plain women often have in
anticipation of slights to come.

Ernie had marked
the photo
Page One.
It was not
the sort of female face that usually appeared in the pages of
Stellar,
a tabloid known for its daily photo of
Princess Diana, and for its bosomy beauties on page three. A beefy woman with a
thatch of badly bleached hair had to earn her way into the tabloids, which Erma
Bradley certainly had. Convicted of four child murders in 1966, she was serving
a life sentence in Holloway Prison in north London.

Gone, but not
forgotten. Because she was Britain’s only female serial killer, the tabloids
kept her memory green with frequent stories about her, all accompanied by that
menacing 1965 photo of the scowling, just-arrested Erma. Most of the recent
articles about her didn’t even attempt to be plausible:
Erma
Bradley: Hitler’s Illegitimate Daughter; Children’s Ghosts Seen Outside Erma’s
Cell
; and, the October favorite,
Is
Erma Bradley a Vampire?
That last one was
perhaps the most apt, because it acknowledged the fact that the public hardly
thought of her as a real person anymore; she was just another addition to the
pantheon of monsters, taking her place alongside Frankenstein, Dracula, and
another overrated criminal, Guy Fawkes. Thinking up new excuses to use the old
Erma picture was Ernie Sleaford’s specialty. Erma’s face was always good for a
sales boost.

Jackie Duncan
had never done an Erma story. Jackie had been four years old at the time of the
infamous trial, and later, with the crimes solved and the killers locked away,
the case had never particularly interested her. “I thought it was her
boyfriend, Sean Hardie, who actually did the killing,” she said, frowning to
remember the details of the case.

Stellar’
s editor sneered at her question. “Hardie? I never thought he had a
patch on Erma for toughness. Look at him now. He’s completely mental, in a
prison hospital, making no more sense than a vegetable marrow. That’s how you
ought
to be with the lives of four kids on your conscience. But not our
Erma! Got her university degree by telly, didn’t she? Learned to talk posh in
the cage? And now a bunch of bloody do-gooders have got her out!”

Jackie, who had
almost tuned out this tirade as she contemplated her new shade of nail varnish,
stared at him with renewed interest. “I hadn’t heard that, Sleaford! Are you
sure it isn’t another of your fairy tales?” She grinned. “
Erma
Bradley, Bride of Prince Edward?
That was my
favorite.”

Ernie had the
grace to blush at the reminder of his last Erma headline, but he remained
solemn. “S’truth, Jackie. I had it on the quiet from a screw in Holloway. She’s
getting out next week.”

“Go on! It would
have been on every news show in Britain by now! Banner headlines in the
Guardian.
Questions asked in the House.”

“The prison
officials are keeping it dark. They don’t want Erma to be pestered by the likes
of us upon her release. She wants to be let alone.” He smirked. “I had to pay
dear for this bit of information, I can tell you.”

Jack smiled. “Poor
mean Ernie! Where do I come into it, then?”

“Can’t you
guess?”

“I think so. You
want Erma’s own story, no matter what.”

“Well, we can
write that ourselves in any case. I have Paul working on that already. What I
really need is a new picture, Jackie. The old cow hasn’t let herself be
photographed in twenty years. Wants her privacy, does our Erma. I think
Stellar’
s readers would like to take a butcher’s
at what Erma Bradley looks like today, don’t you?”

“So they don’t
hire her as the nanny.” Jackie let him finish laughing before she turned the
conversation round to money.

The cell was
beginning to look the way it had when she first arrived. Newly swept and
curtainless, it was a ten-by-six-foot rectangle containing a bed, a cupboard, a
table and a chair, a wooden wash basin, a plastic bowl and jug, and a bucket.
Gone were the posters and the photos of home. Her books were stowed away in a
Marks & Spencers shopping bag.

Ruthie, whose
small, sharp features earned her the nickname Minx, was sitting on the edge of
the bed, watching her pack. “Taking the lot, are you?” she asked cheerfully.

The thin dark
woman stared at the array of items on the table. “I suppose not,” she said,
scowling. She held up a tin of green tooth powder. “Here. D’you want this,
then?”

The Minx
shrugged and reached for it. “Why not? After all, you’re getting out, and I’ve
a few years to go. Will you write to me when you’re on the outside?”

“You know that
isn’t permitted.”

The younger
woman giggled. “As if that ever stopped you.” She reached for another of the
items on the bed. “How about your Christmas soap? You can get more on the
outside, you know.”

She handed it
over. “I shan’t want freesia soap ever again.”

“Taking your
posters, love? Anyone would think you’d be sick of them by now.”

“I am. I’ve
promised them to Senga.” She set the rolled-up posters on the bed beside
Ruthie, and picked up a small framed photograph. “Do you want this, then, Minx?”

The little
blonde’s eyes widened at the sight of the grainy snapshot of a scowling man. “Christ!
It’s Sean, isn’t it? Put it away. I’ll be glad when you’ve taken that out of
here.”

Erma Bradley
smiled and tucked the photograph in among her clothes. “I shall keep this.”

Jackie Duncan
seldom wore her best silk suit when she conducted interviews, but this time she
felt that it would help to look both glamorous and prosperous. Her blond hair,
shingled into a stylish bob, revealed shell-shaped earrings of real gold, and
her calf leather handbag and shoes were an expensive matched set. It wasn’t at
all the way a working
Stellar
reporter usually dressed, but it lent Jackie an air of authority and
professionalism that she needed in order to profit from this interview.

She looked
around the shabby conference room, wondering if Erma Bradley had ever been
there, and, if so, where she had sat. In preparation for the new assignment,
Jackie had read everything she could find on the Bradley case: the melodramatic
book by the BBC journalist; the measured prose of the prosecuting attorney; and
a host of articles from more reliable newspapers than
Stellar.
She had begun to be interested in Erma
Bradley and her deadly lover, Sean Hardie:
the couple who slays
together stays together?
The analyses of the
case had made much of the evidence and horror at the thought of child murder,
but they had been at a loss to provide motive, and they had been reticent about
details of the killings themselves. There was a book in that, and it would earn
a fortune for whoever could get the material to write it. Jackie intended to
find out more than she had uncovered, but first she had to find Erma Bradley.

Her Sloan Ranger
outfit had charmed the old cats in the prison office into letting her in to
pursue the story in the first place. The story they thought she was after. Jackie
glanced at herself in the mirror. Very useful for impressive old sahibs, this
posh outfit. Besides, she thought, why not give the prison birds a bit of a
fashion show?

The six inmates,
dressed in shapeless outfits of polyester, sprawled in their chairs and stared
at her with no apparent interest. One of them was reading a Barbara Cartland
novel.

“Hello, girls!”
said Jackie in her best nursing home voice. She was used to jollying up old
ladies for feature stories, and she decided that this couldn’t be much
different. “Did they tell you what I’m here for?”

More blank
stares, until a heavyset redhead asked, “You ever do it with a woman?”

Jackie ignored
her. “I’m here to do a story about what it’s like in prison. Here’s your chance
to complain, if there are things you want changed.”

Grudgingly then,
they began to talk about the food, and the illogical, unbending rules that
governed every part of their lives. The tension eased as they talked, and she
could tell that they were becoming more willing to confide in her. Jackie
scribbled a few cursory notes to keep them talking. Finally one of them said
that she missed her children: Jackie’s cue.