Free Murder Is My Racquet by Otto Penzler

Alicia—Alicia, that’s her name—when I was fifteen. Fifteen years and ten months. The year before I’d been runner-up in the National Under-Sixteens at Hove. I was on the fringes of the County team. I thought if I can get through to the last eight of the Junior Championships this next Wimbledon, I’m on my way. And then there was this lump that wouldn’t go away.”
    She paused to judge the effect of what she’d just said.
    Costain placed a tumbler of still mineral water in her hand and then retreated back across the room.
    “Why didn’t you have an abortion?” Kiley asked.
    She looked back at him evenly. “I’d already made one bad mistake.”
    “So you asked your sister—that is your sister, isn’t it? In the photo?” Victoria bobbed her head. “You asked your sister to look after her… No, more than that. To say that she was hers; bring her up as her own.”
    “Yes.” In the wide, high-ceilinged room, Victoria’s voice was suddenly very small.
    “And she didn’t mind?”
    A shadow passed across Victoria’s eyes. “You have to understand. Catherine, that’s my sister, I mean, she’s wonderful, she’s lovely with Alicia, really, but she just isn’t… Well, we’re different, chalk and cheese, she isn’t like me at all, she doesn’t…” Victoria drank from her glass and went back to balancing it on her knee. “All she’s ever wanted was to settle down, have kids, a place of her own. She didn’t want to…” Victoria sighed. “… do anything. She and Trevor, they’d been going steady since she was fourteen; they were saving up to getmarried anyway. Mum chipped in, helped them get started. Trevor, he was bringing in good money by then, Fords at Dagenham. Of course, now I can I pay toward whatever Alicia needs; I do.”
    “A good percentage of her disposable income,” Costain interrupted. “First-class holiday in Florida last year for the three of them, four weeks.”
    “Catherine and Trevor,” Kiley said, “they haven’t had children of their own?”
    Victoria lifted her gaze from Kiley’s face toward the window, where a fly was buzzing haphazardly against the glass. “She can’t. I mean, I suppose she could try IVF. But, no, she can’t have children of her own.”
    Kiley let the moment settle. “And Alicia?”
    Victoria’s lower lip slid over the upper and the water glass tipped from hand and knee onto the floor. “She thinks I’m her auntie, of course. What else?”
    Adrian reached out for her as she ran but she swerved around him and slammed the bedroom door.
    “What do you think?” he said.
    “I think,” said Kiley, “I need a drink.”
    • • •
    V ictoria had been seeing Paul Broughton ever since her fifteenth birthday. Broughton, twenty-three years old, a butcher boy in Leytonstone by day, by night the drummer in a band that might have been the Verve if the Verve hadn’t already existed. A nice East London line on post-Industrial grime and angst. With heavily amplified guitars. After a gig at Waltham-stow Assembly Rooms, he and Victoria got careless—either that, or Broughton’s timing was off.
    “For fuck’s sake!” he said when Victoria told him. “What d’you think you’re gonna do? Get rid of it, of course.”
    She didn’t waste words on him again. She talked to her mum and her mum, who had some experience in these things, told her not to worry, they’d find a way. Which of them first had the idea about asking Catherine, they could never be sure. Nor how Catherine persuaded Trevor. But there was big sister, half-nine to half-five in the greetings card shop and hating every minute. Victoria wore looser clothes, avoided public showers; her sister padded herself out, chucked in her job, practiced walking with splayed legs and pain in the lower back. They chose the name together from a book. After the birth—like shelling peas, the midwife said—Victoria held the baby, kissed her close, and handed her across, a smear of blood and mucus on her