The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

THE LONG BLACK VEIL by Val McDermid

Jess turned fourteen today. With every passing year, she looks more like her mother. And it pierces me to the heart. When I stopped by her room this evening, I asked if her birthday awakened memories of her mother. She shook her head, leaning forward so her long blonde hair curtained her face, cutting us off from each other. “Ruth, you’re the one I think of when people say ‘mother’ to me,” she mumbled.

She couldn’t have known that her words opened an even deeper wound inside me and I was careful to keep my heart’s response hidden from my face. Even after ten years, I’ve never stopped being careful. “She was a good woman, your mother,” I managed to say without my voice shaking.

Jess raised her head to meet my eyes then swiftly dropped it again, taking refuge behind the hair. “She killed my father,” she said mutinously. “Where exactly does ‘good’ come into it?”

I want to tell her the truth. There’s part of me thinks she’s old enough now to know. But then the sensible part of me kicks in. There are worse things to be in small town America than the daughter of a murderess. So I hold my tongue and settle for silence.

Seems like I’ve been settling for silence all my adult life.

It’s easy to point to where things end but it’s a lot harder to be sure where they start. Everybody here in Marriott knows where and when Kenny Sheldon died, and most of them think they know why. They reckon they know exactly where his journey to the grave started.

They’re wrong, of course. But I’m not going to be the one to set them right. As far as Marriott is concerned, Kenny’s first step on the road to hell started when he began dating Billy Jean Ferguson. Rich boys mixing with poor girls is pretty much a conventional road to ruin in these parts.

Me and Billy Jean, we were still in high school, but Kenny had a job. Not just any old job, but one that came slathered with a certain glamour. Somehow, he’d persuaded the local radio station to take him on staff. He was only a gofer, but Kenny being Kenny, he managed to parlay that into being a crucial element in the station’s existence. In his eyes, he was on the fast track to being a star. But while he was waiting for that big break, Kenny was content to play the small town big shot.

He’d always had an eye for Billy Jean, but she’d fended him off in the past. We’d neither of us been that keen on dating. Other girls in our grade had been hanging out with boyfriends for a couple of years by then, but to me and Billy Jean it had felt like a straitjacket. It was one of the things that made it possible for us to be best friends. We preferred to hang out at Helmer’s drugstore in a group of like-minded teens, among them Billy Jean’s distant cousin Jeff.

Their mothers were cousins, and by some strange quirk of genetics, they’d turned out looking like two peas in a pod. Hair the colour of butter, eyes the same shade as the hyacinths our mothers would force for Christmas. The same small, hawk-curved nose and cupid’s bow lips. You could take their features one by one and see the correspondence. The funny thing was that you would never have mistaken Billy Jean for a boy or Jeff for a girl. Maybe it was nothing more than their haircuts. Billy Jean’s hair was the long blonde swatch that I see now in Jess, whereas Jeff favoured a crew-cut. Still does, for that matter, though the blond is starting to silver round the temples now.

Anyhow, as time slipped by, the group we hung with thinned out into couples and sometimes there were just the three of us drinking Cokes and picking at cold fries. Kenny, who had taken to drifting into Helmer’s when we were there, picked his moment and started insinuating himself into our company. He’d park himself next to Jeff, stretching his legs to stake out the whole side of the table. If either of us girls wanted to go to the bathroom, we had to go through a whole rigmarole of getting Kenny to move his damn boots. He’d lay an arm across the back of the booth proprietorially, a Marlboro dangling from the other hand, and tell us all about his important life at the radio station.

One night, he turned up with free tickets for a Del Shannon concert fifty miles down the interstate. We were impressed. Marriott had never seen live rock and roll, unless you counted the open mike night at the Tavern in the Town. As far as we were concerned, only the truly cool had ever seen live bands. It took no persuading whatsoever for us to accompany Kenny to the show.

What we hadn’t really bargained for was Kenny treating it like a double date right from the start when he installed Billy Jean up front next to him in the car and relegated me and Jeff to the back seat. He carried on as he started, draping his arm over her shoulders at every opportunity. But we all were fired up with the excitement of seeing a singer who had actually had a number-one single, so we all went along with it. Truth to tell, it turned out to be just the nudge Jeff and I needed to slip from friendship into courting. We’d been heading that way, but I reckon we’d both been reluctant to take any step that might make Billy Jean feel shut out. If Billy Jean was happy to be seen as Kenny’s girlfriend – and at first, it seemed that way, since she showed no sign of objecting to the arm-draping or the subsequent hand-holding – then we were freed up to follow our hearts.

That first double date was a night to remember. The buzz from the audience as we filed into the arena was beyond anything we small-town kids had ever experienced. I felt like a little kid again, but in a good way. I slid my hand into Jeff’s for security and we followed Kenny and Billy Jean to our seats right at the front. When the support act took to the stage, I was rapt. Around us, people seemed to be paying no attention to the unknown quartet on the stage, but I was determined to miss nothing.

After Del Shannon’s set, my ears were ringing from the music and the applause, my eyes dazzled by the spotlights glinting on the chrome and polish of the instruments. The air was thick with smoke and sweat and stale perfume. I was stunned by it all. I scarcely felt my feet touch the ground as we walked back to Kenny’s car, the chorus of “Runaway” ringing inside my head. But I was still alert enough to see that Kenny still had his arm round Billy Jean and she was leaning into him. I wasn’t crazy about Kenny, but I was selfish. I wanted to be with Jeff, so I wasn’t going to try to talk Billy Jean out of Kenny.

Kenny dropped Jeff and me off outside my house, and as his tail lights disappeared, I said, “You think she’ll be OK?”

Jeff grinned. “I’ve got a feeling Kenny just bit off more than he can chew. Billy Jean will be fine. Now, come here, missy, I’ve got something for you.” Then he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. I didn’t give Billy Jean another thought that night.

Next day when we met up, we compared notes. I was still floating from Jeff’s kisses and I didn’t really grasp that Billy Jean was less enamoured of Kenny’s attempts to push her well beyond a goodnight kiss. What I did take in was that she appeared genuinely pleased for Jeff and me. My fears that she’d feel shut out seemed to have been groundless, and she talked cheerfully about more double-dating. I didn’t understand that was her way of keeping herself safe from Kenny’s advances. I just thought that we were both contentedly coupled up after that one double date.

All that spring, we went out as a foursome. Kenny seemed to be able to get tickets to all sorts of venues and we went to a lot of gigs. Some were good, most were pretty terrible and none matched the excitement of that first live concert. I didn’t really care. All that mattered to me was the shift from being Jeff’s friend to being his girlfriend. I was in love, no doubting it, and in love as only a teenage girl can be. I walked through the world starry-eyed and oblivious to anything that wasn’t directly connected to me and my guy.

That’s why I paid no attention to the whispers linking Kenny’s name to a couple of other girls. Someone said he’d been seen with Janine, who tended bar at the Tavern in the Town. I dismissed that out of hand. According to local legend, a procession of men had graced Janine’s trailer. Why would Kenny lower himself when he had someone as special as Billy Jean for a girlfriend? Oh yes, I was quite the little innocent back in the day.

Someone else claimed to have seen him with another girl at a blues night in the next county. I pointed out to her that he worked in the music business. It wasn’t surprising if he had to meet with colleagues at music events. And that it shouldn’t surprise her if some of those colleagues happened to be women. And that it was a sad day when women were so sexist.

I didn’t say anything to Billy Jean, even though we were closer than sisters. I’d like to think it was because I didn’t want to cause her pain, but the truth is that their stories probably slipped my mind, being much less important than my own emotional life.

By the time spring had slipped into summer, Jeff and I were lovers. I’m bound to say it was something of a disappointment. I suspect it is for a lot of women. Not that Jeff wasn’t considerate or generous or gentle. He was all of those and more. But even after we’d been doing it a while and we’d had the chance to get better at it, I still had that Peggy Lee “Is that all there is?” feeling.

I suppose that made it easier for me to support Billy Jean in her continued refusal to let Kenny go all the way. When we were alone together, she was adamant that she didn’t care for him nearly enough to let him be the one to take her virginity. For my part, I told her she should hold out for somebody who made her dizzy with desire because frankly that feeling was the only thing that made it all worth it.

The weekend after I said that to her, Billy Jean told Kenny she wasn’t in love with him and she didn’t want to go out with him any more. Of course, he went around telling anybody who would listen that he was the one to call time on their relationship, but I suspect that most people read that for the bluster it was. “How did he take it?” I asked her at recess on the Monday afterwards. “Was he upset?”

“Upset, like broken-hearted? No way.” Billy Jean gave a little “I could give a shit” shrug. “He was really pissed at me,” she said. “I got the impression he’s the only one who gets to decide when it’s over.”

“You know, I’ve been wanting to say this for the longest time, but he really is kind of an asshole,” I said.

We both giggled, bumping our shoulders into each other like big kids. “I only started going out with him so you and Jeff would finally get it together,” Billy Jean said in between giggles. “I knew as long as I was single you two would be too loyal to do anything about it. Now I can just go back to having you both as my best friends again.”

And so it played out over the next few weeks. Billy Jean and I hung out together doing girl things; Billy Jean and Jeff went fishing out on the lake once a week and spent Sunday mornings fixing up the old clunker her dad had bought for her birthday; we’d all go for a pizza together on Friday nights; and the rest of the time she’d leave us to our own devices. It seemed like one chapter had closed and another had opened.

Jess turned fourteen today. Seems like yesterday she came into our home. It wasn’t how we expected it to be, me and Ruthie. We thought we’d have a brood of our own, not end up raising my cousin’s kid. But some things just aren’t meant to be and I’m old enough now to know there are sometimes damn good reasons for that.

I remember the morning after Jess was conceived. When Billy Jean told Ruthie and me what Kenny Sheldon had done, I didn’t think it was possible to feel more angry and betrayed. I was wrong about that too, but that’s another story.

It happened the night before, when Ruthie and I were parked up by the lake in my car and Billy Jean was on her lonesome, nursing a Coke in one of the booths at Helmer’s. According to her, when Kenny walked in, he didn’t hesitate. He came straight over to her booth and plonked himself down opposite her. He gave her the full charm offensive, apologizing for being mean to her when she’d thrown him over.

He claimed he’d missed her and he wanted her back but if he couldn’t be her boyfriend he wanted to be her friend, like me. He pitched it just right for Billy Jean and she believed he meant what he said. That’s the kind of girl she was back then – honest and open and unable to see that other people might not be worthy of her trust. So she didn’t think twice when he offered her a ride home.

She called me first thing Sunday morning. We were supposed to be going fishing as usual but she wanted Ruthie to come along too. I could tell from her voice something terrible had happened even though she wouldn’t tell me what it was, so I called Ruthie and got her to make some excuse to get out of church.

When we picked her up, she was pale and withdrawn. She wouldn’t say a word till we were out at the lake, sitting on the jetty with rods on the water like it was any other Sunday morning. When she did speak, it was right to the point. Billy Jean was never one for beating about the bush, but this was bald, even for her.

“Kenny Sheldon raped me last night,” she said. She told us about the meeting at Helmer’s and how she’d agreed to let him drive her home. Only, before they got to her house, Kenny had driven down an overgrown track out of sight of the street. Then he’d pinned her down and forced her to have sex with him.

We didn’t know what to do. Fourteen years ago, date rape wasn’t on the criminal agenda. Not in towns like Marriott. And the Sheldons were a prominent family. Kenny’s dad owned the funeral home and had been a councilman. And his mom ran the flower arranging circle at the church. Whereas the Fergusons were barely one step up from white trash. Nobody was going to take the word of Billy Jean Ferguson against Kenny Sheldon.

I wanted to call Kenny Sheldon out and beat him to within an inch of his life. I wanted him to beg for mercy the way I knew Billy Jean had begged him the night before.

But Ruthie and Billy Jean stopped me. “Don’t stoop so low,” Billy Jean said.

“That’s right,” Ruthie said. “There’s other ways to get back at scum like him.”

And by that afternoon, I had started the rumour that Janine from the Tavern in the Town had stopped sleeping with Kenny because she’d found out he had a venereal disease. I don’t know how long it took to get back to the shitheel himself, but I do know he’d had quite the struggle to get anyone to sit next to him in Helmer’s, never mind hang out at gigs with him. That cheered us up some, and Ruthie said Billy Jean was starting to talk about getting over it. That was so like her – she wasn’t the kind to let anybody take her life away from her. She was always determined to control her own destiny.

But all her good intentions went to shit about six weeks after the rape. I’d been helping my dad finish off some work in the top pasture and both girls were sitting on the front porch when I got back to the house. We all piled into my truck and headed out to the lake. We hadn’t gone but half a mile when Ruthie blurted out, “She’s pregnant. That bastard Kenny got her pregnant.”

I only had to glance at Billy Jean to know it was true and the knowledge made me boiling mad. I swung the truck around at the next intersection and headed for the Sheldon house, paying no mind to the girls shouting at me to stop. When we got there, I jumped out and marched straight up to the house. I hammered on the door and Kenny himself opened it.

I know that violence isn’t supposed to solve things, but in my experience, it definitely has its plus points. I grabbed Kenny by the shirt front, yanked him out the door and slammed him against the wall. I swear the whole damn house shook. “You bastard,” I yelled at him. “First you rape her, then you get her pregnant.”

I drew my hand back to smack him in the middle of his dumbfounded face, but Billy Jean caught my arm. She was always strong for a girl and she had me at an awkward angle. “Leave him,” she said. “I don’t want anything to do with him.”

“You say that now, but you’re going to need his money,” I snarled. “Babies don’t come cheap and he has to pay for what he’s done.”

Before anybody could say anything more, Mrs Sheldon appeared in the doorway. She looked shocked to see her golden boy pinned up against the wall and demanded to know what was going on.

My dander was up, and I wasn’t about to back off. “Ma’am, “ I said, “I’m sorry to cause a scene, but your son here raped my cousin Billy Jean and now she is expecting his baby.”

Mrs Sheldon reared back like a horse spooked by a snake. “How dare you,” she hissed. “My son is a gentleman, which is more than I can say about you or your kin.” She made a kind of snorting noise in the back of her throat. “The very idea of any Ferguson woman being able to name the father of her children with any certainty is absurd. Now get off my property before I call the police. And take your slut of a cousin with you.”

It was my turn to grab Billy Jean. I thought she was fixing to rip Mrs Sheldon’s face off. “ You evil witch,” she screamed as I pulled her away.

Ruthie stared Mrs Sheldon down. When she spoke her voice was cold and sharp. I know I hoped she’d never use that tone of voice to me. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, turning on her heel and walking back to the truck, head high. I never knew to this day whether she meant Kenny or his mother or both of them.

What happened that evening must have had some effect, though. A week later, Kenny was gone.

Back in the early Sixties, being an unwed mother was still about the biggest disgrace around and most girls who got into trouble ended up disowned and despised. But Billy Jean was lucky in her parents. The Fergusons never had much money but they had love aplenty. When she told them she was pregnant and how it had happened, they’d been shocked, but they hadn’t been angry with her. Her father went round to see old man Sheldon. He never told anybody what passed between them, not even Mrs Ferguson, but he came back with a cashier’s check for ten thousand dollars.

Nobody knew where Kenny was. His mother told her church crowd that he’d landed a big important radio job out on the coast, but nobody believed her. Truth to tell, I don’t think anybody much cared. We certainly didn’t.

Jeff and I were married three months later. I guess we were both kind of fired up by Billy Jean being pregnant. We wanted to start a family of our own. We moved into a little house on Jeff’s daddy’s farm and Jeff started working as a trainee sales representative for an agricultural machinery firm.

Half a mile down the track from us there was an old double-wide trailer that had seen better days. Jeff’s dad used to rent it out to seasonal workers. We persuaded him to let Billy Jean have it for next to nothing in return for doing it up. We knew there wasn’t enough room in her parents’ house for Billy Jean and a growing kid and I wanted her to be close at hand so we could bring up our children together.

Jeff and I spent most of our spare time knocking that trailer into shape. Billy Jean helped as much as she could, and by the time Jess was born, we’d turned it into a proper little home for the two of them. They moved in when Jess was six weeks old, and Billy Jean looked relaxed for the first time since Kenny had raped her. “I can never thank the two of you enough,” she said so many times I told her she should just make a tape of it and give us each a copy.

“It was Ruthie’s idea,” Jeff said, acting like it was nothing to do with him.

“I know,” Billy Jean said. “But I also know you did more than your fair share to make it happen.”

We settled into a pretty easy routine. I worked mornings on the farm, helping Jeff’s mother with the specialty yogurt business she was building up. Afternoons, I’d hang out with Billy Jean and Jess. Then I’d cook dinner for Jeff, we’d either watch some TV or walk down to have a beer and a few hands of cards with Billy Jean. Most people might have thought our lives pretty dull, but it seemed fine enough to us.

There was one thing, I thought, that stopped it being perfect. A year had gone by since Jeff and I had married, but still I wasn’t pregnant. It wasn’t for want of trying, but I began to wonder whether my lack of enthusiasm for sex was somehow preventing it. I knew this was crazy, but it nagged away at me.

Finally, I managed to talk to Billy Jean about it. It was a hot summer afternoon and Jess was over at her grandma’s house. Billy Jean and I were lying on her bed with the only a/c in the trailer cranked up high. “I love him,” I said. “But when we make love, it’s not like it says in the books and magazines. It doesn’t feel like it looks in the movies. I just don’t feel that whole swept away thing.”

Billy Jean rolled over on to her back and yawned. “I’m not the best person to ask, Ruth. I only ever had sex the once and that sure wasn’t what you would call a good experience. I don’t guess it’s the kind of thing you can talk to Jeff about either.”

I made a face. “He’d be mortified. He thinks I think he’s the greatest lover on the planet.” Billy Jean giggled. “Well, you have to make them feel like that.”

Billy Jean yawned again. “I’m sorry, Ruth. I don’t mean you to feel like I’m dismissing you, but I am so damn tired. I was up three times with Jess last night. She’s teething.”

“Why don’t you just have a nap?” I said. But she was already drifting away. I made myself more comfortable and before I knew it, I’d nodded off too.

I woke because someone was kissing me. An arm was heavy across my chest and shoulder, a leg was thrown between mine and soft lips were pressing on mine, a tongue flicking between my lips. I opened my eyes and the mouth pulled back from mine. A face that was familiar and yet completely strange hovered above mine. Jeff with long hair, I thought stupidly for a moment before the truth dawned.

Billy Jean put a finger to my lips… “Ssh,” she said “Let’s see if we can figure out what Jeff’s doing wrong.”

By the end of the afternoon, I understood that it wasn’t what Jeff did that was wrong. It was who he was.

Kenny came back a couple of weeks before Jess’s fourth birthday. It turned out his mother hadn’t been lying to the church group. He had landed a job working for a radio station in Los Angeles. He was doing pretty well. Had his own show and everything. He rolled back into town in a muscle car with a beautiful blonde on his arm. His fiancee, apparently.

All of that would have been just fine if he had left the past alone. But no. He wanted to impress the fiancee with his credentials as a family man. The first thing we knew about it was when Billy Jean got a letter from Kenny’s lawyer saying he planned to file suit for shared custody. Kenny wanted Jess for one week a month until she started school, then he wanted her for half the school vacations. If he’d been the standard absent father as opposed to one who had never even seen his kid, it might have sounded reasonable. And we had a sneaking feeling that the court might see things Kenny’s way.

Justice in Marriott comes courtesy of His Honour Judge Wellesley Benton. Who is an old buddy of Kenny Sheldon’s daddy and a man who’s put a fair few of Billy Jean’s relatives behind bars. We were, to say the least, apprehensive.

The day after the letter came, Billy Jean happened to be walking down Main Street when Kenny strolled out of the Coffee Bean Scene with the future Mrs. Sheldon. I heard all about it from Mom, who saw it all from the vantage point of the quilting store porch.

Billy Jean just lit into him. Called him all the names under the sun from rapist to deadbeat dad. Kenny looked shocked at first, then when he saw his fiancee wasn’t turning a hair, he started to laugh. That just drove Billy Jean even crazier. She was practically hysterical. Mom came over from the quilt shop and grabbed her by the shoulders, trying to get her away. Then Kenny said, “I’ll see you in court,” and walked his fiancee to the car. Billy Jean was fit to be tied.

Well, everybody thinks they know what happened next. That night, Kenny was due at a dinner in the Town Hall. As he approached, a figure stepped out of the shadows. Long blonde hair, jeans and a Western shirt, just like Billy Jean always liked to wear. And a couple of witnesses who were a ways off but who knew Billy Jean well enough to recognize her when she raised the shotgun and blew Kenny Sheldon into the next world.

That was the end of her as much as it was the end of him.

I knew Billy Jean was innocent. Not out of some crazy misplaced belief, but because at the very moment Kenny Sheldon was meeting his maker, I was in her bed, moaning at her touch. That first afternoon had not been a one-off. It had been an awakening that had led us both into a deeper happiness than we’d ever known before.

If I’d been married to anyone other than Jeff, I’d have left in a New York minute. But I cared about him. More importantly, so did Billy Jean. “You’re both my best friend,” she said as we lay in a tangle of sheets. “Until this afternoon, I couldn’t have put one of you above the other. You gotta stay with him, Ruth. You gotta go on being his wife because I couldn’t live with myself if you didn’t.”

And so I did. It might seem strange to most folks, but in a funny kind of way, it worked out just fine for us. Except of course that I still couldn’t get pregnant. I began to think of that as the price I had to pay for my other contentments – Jeff, Billy Jean, Jess.

Then Kenny came back.

They came for Billy Jean soon after midnight. A deputy we’d all been at school with knocked on our door at one in the morning, carrying Jess in a swaddle of bedclothes. He looked mortified as he explained what had happened and asked us to take care of the child till morning when things could be sorted out more formally.

Jess had often stayed with us, so she settled pretty easy. That morning, I drove into town, leaving Jess with her grandma, and demanded to see Billy Jean. She was white and drawn, her eyes heavy and haunted. “They can’t prove it,” she said. “You have to promise me you will never tell. Don’t sacrifice yourself trying to save me. They won’t believe you anyway and you’ll have shamed yourself in their eyes for nothing. Just have faith. We both know I’m innocent. Judge Benton isn’t a fool. He won’t let them get away with it.”

And so I kept my mouth shut. Partly for Billy Jean and partly for Jess. We’d already made arrangements with Billy Jean and her parents for me and Jeff to take care of Jess till after the court case, and I wasn’t about to do anything that would jeopardize that child’s future. I sat through that terrible trial day after day. I listened to witnesses swearing they had seen Billy Jean kill Kenny Sheldon and I said not a word.

Nor did Billy Jean. She said she was somewhere else, but refused to say where or with whom. Judge Benton offered her the way out. “Woman, what is your alibi?” he thundered. “If you were somewhere else that night, then you won’t have to die. If you’re telling the truth, give up your alibi.” But she wouldn’t budge. And so I couldn’t. It nearly killed me.

But I never truly thought he would have her hanged.

I never truly thought he would have her hanged. I thought they’d argue she was temporarily insane because of the threat to her child and that she’d do a few years in jail, nothing more. And I was selfish enough to think of how much my Ruthie would love bringing up Jess for as long as Billy Jean was behind bars.

Sure, I wanted to make her suffer. But I didn’t want her to die. She was my best friend, after all. A friend like no other. I swear, I always believed we would lay down our lives for each other if it came to it. And I guess I was right, in a way. She laid down her life rather than destroy my marriage.

When the sentence came down, it hit me like a physical blow. I swear I doubled over in pain as I realized the full horror of what I’d done. But it was too late. The sacrifices were made, the chips down once and for all.

I saw the way she looked at me in court. A mixture of pity and blame. As soon as she heard those witnesses, recognized the conviction in their voices, I think she knew the truth. With a long blonde wig and the right clothes, I could easily be mistaken for her.

There was an excuse for the witnesses. They were a way off from Kenny and his killer. But there’s no excuse for Ruthie. She was no distance at all from Billy Jean that afternoon I saw them by the lake shore. She could not have been mistaken.

Why didn’t I confront her? Why didn’t I walk away? I guess because I loved them both so much. I didn’t want to lose the life we had. I just wanted Billy Jean to suffer for a while, that was all. I never truly thought he would have her hanged.

Jess turned fourteen today. She’s not old enough for the truth. Maybe she’ll never be that old. But there’s one thing she is old enough for.

Tonight, there will be two of us standing over Billy Jean’s grave, our long black veils drifting in the wind, our tears sparkling like diamonds in the moonlight.