‘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.

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.

Perhaps Harry also came to me because I was a Special Constable. I know it sounds impressive, but it isn’t really. The services were so mixed up that you’d have the police putting out fires, the Home Guard doing police work, and anyone with two arms carrying the stretchers. A Special Constable was simply a part-time policeman, without any real qualifications for the job except his willingness to take it on. The rest of the time I taught what few pupils remained at Silverhill Grammar School.

As it turned out, I was glad that Harry did call on me because it gave me a stake in the matter. The regular police were far more concerned with lighting offences and the black market than they were with their regular duties, and one thing nobody had time to do in the war was investigate the murder of a mad, mysterious, cantankerous old woman.

Nobody except me, that is.

Though my position didn’t grant me any special powers, I pride myself on being an intelligent and perceptive sort of fellow, not to mention nosy, and it wasn’t the first time I’d done a spot of detective work on the side. But first, let me tell you a little about Mad Maggie…

I say old woman, but Maggie was probably only in her mid-forties, about the same age as me, when she was killed. Everyone just called her old; it seemed to go with mad. With a certain kind of woman, it’s not so much a matter of years, anyway, but of demeanour, and Maggie’s demeanour was old.

Take the clothes she wore, for a start: most women were trying to look like one of the popular film stars like Vivien Leigh or Deanna Durbin, with her bolero dresses, but even for a woman of her age, Maggie wore clothes that could best be described as old-fashioned, even antique: high, buttoned boots, long dresses with high collars, groundsweeping cloaks and broad-brimmed hats with feathers.