Maxwell’s Curse (25 page)

‘Hello, Mr Maxwell, it’s Barney. Barney Butler. Look, I think I’ve got something for you. That bloke’ and there was a gap, ‘around. And I think I know what …’ another gap. ‘But the reception round here on the old mobile isn’t … So if you don’t get this message, give me a bell, yeah?’

‘Thank you, Barney,’ Maxwell cancelled the missive, ‘Irish as always. I suppose I should be grateful you didn’t send me an e-mail in that I haven’t got a computer and all.’ He noticed the cat looking at him in the corner. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, Count – you are, after all, a cat of the world; do you think if dear old Herman Melville had been alive today, he’d have started Moby Dick with “Call me e-mail”? No?’

He rang Barney’s mobile. It was switched off. Wasn’t it odd, he thought as he changed into the Drama department’s donkey jacket and his old gardening boots, how in the days of super-efficient communication and a world gone mad with gadgetry, it was actually more difficult to talk to somebody than ever.

He took a cab in the wet Wednesday to the Barlichway and paid his fare at its edge. His boots squelched on the mud of the grassy rise the mountain bikers had made their own and he padded past the estate map that someone had can-sprayed with that immortal battle cry and mission statement rolled into one ‘Fuck off’. It was a far cry from the one Maxwell had painted, by hand, on a bridge near his home when he was a kid – ‘Marples Must Go’. He was never quite sure, at the confused age of thirteen, whether Marples was a particularly unpopular transport minister or an ancient lady detective: he’d just liked the ring of the phrase.

Even in the desultory rain that drove from the west and bitter cold, a couple of sad-eyed skateboarders rattled round the windy corners of the Barlichway. A dog barked and, here and there, babies cried, cold and damp and abandoned, while mums got engrossed in Brookside and dads snored over the Tandoori takeaway they’d picked up on the way home.

The Rat was lively as ever that Wednesday night and the rush of heat was welcome as Maxwell opened the door. At the far end, three of the great unwashed calling themselves Dogbreath were psyching up with a sound check, that utterly unnecessary precursor to live music. Electronic crap hurt Maxwell’s eardrums and he had to yell to make himself heard by the barman.

‘Barney about?’

The barman looked up, froth trickling over his tattooed hand. ‘Barney Butler?’

Maxwell nodded.

‘He’s in hospital, mate.’

‘Hospital?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘What happened?’

‘Dunno. Intensive care is all I heard. Fell out of a fucking window, they say.’

Maxwell was out of the door like a bat out of hell, sprinting through the rain for the edge of the estate where he could hail a cab. Men like Barney Butler had grown up on the Barlichway. Even pissed as a fart they didn’t miss their footing or fall out of windows. He thought of poor sad Junot, Bonaparte’s old buddy, last seen wandering the streets of Madrid stark naked except for sword and epaulettes. He had jumped from a window. But then, Junot was mad. And Berthier, the little Corsican’s chief of staff, who had suffered a similar fate. But he was pushed. Barney Butler was no general. He wasn’t even a friend of Napoleon’s. Yet, he was in intensive care.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ the sister was adamant. ‘You can’t see him now.’ Maxwell looked through into the dimly lit room at Leighford General. Barney lay on his back, his head swathed in bandages, tubes trailing from his body to great, grey machines.

‘What happened to him?’

The sister had had a long day and was already into a longer night. ‘We don’t know. Except that he was found in an alleyway with severe head and internal injuries.’

‘Will he be all right?’

The sister shrugged. ‘Time’s the best healer,’ she said. ‘We’re doing all we can.’

‘He has a … partner,’ Maxwell said, struggling even now to be PC to this cold, starched woman. ‘Has she been to visit yet?’

‘You’re the first one,’ she told him. ‘Shame, isn’t it?’

‘Nurse,’ Maxwell took the woman’s arm. ‘Had he been drinking?’

‘Drinking?’ she frowned. ‘No, I don’t think so. Does that make a difference?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘All the difference in the world.’

‘Who’s there?’ It was an old woman’s voice, weak, hesitant.

‘My name is Peter Maxwell, Mrs Cruikshank. I’d like to talk to you.’

There was a pause and the rattling of bolts. The door opened an inch or two, no more and Maxwell could see a lined old head peering out. ‘What do you want?’

‘Just a chat,’ Maxwell said. ‘About Elizabeth Pride.’

He heard the scrapings of the old girl’s throat and heard her spit.

‘There are some people,’ he said, ‘who say you killed her.’

‘Fuck ’em,’ the old girl growled.

‘Well, yes,’ said Maxwell, ‘that’s one solution. Look, it’s about forty below out here, Mrs Cruikshank. May I come in?’

The door creaked wider until its hinges gave up the ghost and swung open. Maxwell climbed the steps and stood inside the caravan. He was ankle deep in rubbish.

‘Who are you?’ Jane Cruikshank looked ill and old. She huddled by a paraffin stove that gave off the old familiar smell that Maxwell remembered from his childhood, when his bedroom was lit by a solitary lamp. For a moment he was there in that terrifying room, his wardrobe a gigantic shadow, its twin knobs the evil eyes of a monster just waiting for darkness to swallow him whole.

‘Peter Maxwell,’ he told her again. ‘Somebody left Elizabeth Pride’s body on my doorstep.’

The old girl’s eyes widened for a second. ‘My boys’ll be back soon,’ she warned him, suddenly feeling very afraid, very alone. ‘They’re just out walking the dogs.’

Maxwell had expected the Cruikshank boys. The taxi ride from the hospital all this way out here had cost him an arm and a leg and it was after midnight. But he hadn’t been able to wait any longer. People were dying all around him – Liz Pride on his garden path; Andrew Darblay having talked to him; Janet Ruger having sampled his sherry. Somebody had pushed Barney Butler out of a window because he’d talked to and was doing a favour for Peter Maxwell. Mad Max wanted some answers and he wanted them now, tonight.

‘Your grandsons,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Joe and Ben.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘How do you know ’em?’

‘We met at Myrtle Cottage,’ he told her.

‘You got any tobacco?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t smoke. Tell me about the poppet.’

‘The what?’ Jane Cruikshank’s eyes were suddenly sharp, her mind alert. She was looking at the shadows that filled the room.

‘The police have talked to you, haven’t they? About a poppet, a doll used in witchcraft.’

‘’T’ain’t me,’ the old girl mumbled. ‘I told that copper it weren’t me. Have you seen it?’

Maxwell nodded.

‘You haven’t … You haven’t seen another, have you? Another doll?’

‘No,’ Maxwell eased himself down on the edge of the battered old chair nearest the door. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing,’ the old girl looked away quickly. ‘No reason.’ Her voice was thick and rasping and her scrawny chest rose and fell under the shawl she clawed at convulsively. ‘My boys’ll be back soon, Joe and Ben.’

‘Why are they afraid of Myrtle Cottage?’ Maxwell asked. ‘And why is garlic hanging at the front door?’

‘That’s a blind,’ Jane Cruikshank hissed. ‘Beth Pride had the evil eye, she did. Killed my old dog. Drove my lad away and his missus. She’d have got my boys too, if’n I hadn’t stopped her.’

‘Stopped her, Mrs Cruikshank?’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow. ‘How? By killing her?’

‘I didn’t kill her,’ the old girl growled. ‘Oh, I wished her dead often enough, the old besom. We’ve got our ways, us Romanies.’

‘Poppets?’ Maxwell urged. ‘The evil eye?’

‘Binding,’ the old girl croaked. ‘That’s all. Just binding.’

‘By which you mean … ?’

Jane Cruikshank fumbled behind her and produced a piece of grey string with knots along its length. ‘Binding,’ she said. ‘It’s a spell against the wicked. A curse. It stops the mouths of gossips and prevents disasters.’

‘A pity the Reverend Darblay didn’t have one of those,’ Maxwell said.

Jane Cruikshank tried to chuckle. ‘He followed the New Religion, he did. Jumped the wrong way, so to speak. He had no chance.’

‘And who killed him, Mrs Cruikshank? Who battered the rector to death in his own church? And the schoolteacher, Ms Thorn, who killed her? They all lived a few miles away from your caravan here. Tell me, is binding,’ he tapped the string, .is harmless as it gets? Got any other charms?’ He was on his feet, his voice loud, his eyes burning. ‘Any other poppets with their heads bashed in or their throats cut?’

The old girl looked up at him, terrified, her hands like claws shaking on the shawl. ‘I told you,’ she said, ‘I don’t know nothing about no poppets. No spells. No curses. You leave me alone. My boys’ll be back soon.’

Maxwell relented. He was a public schoolboy, for God’s sake. And here he was, haranguing an old lady. He crouched down in front of her as she pulled away, a terrified look on her face. ‘Can I get you anything, Mrs Cruikshank?’ he asked.

‘Tobacco,’ she said, lip trembling. ‘You can get me some tobacco.’

‘Max?’ Jacquie Carpenter was still in her dressing-gown, staring at her morning caller, trying to focus.

‘Jacquie, I’m sorry it’s so early. Can I come in?’

Everything within her screamed no. Her doubts. Her fears. Her utter, total confusion. About who he was. About who she was. Then she saw his face.

‘God, Max, you look like shit.’

‘I haven’t been to bed,’ he told her.

‘You’d better come in. No bike?’

‘Surrey’s rest day. You?’

‘I’m not on ’til lunchtime. Come into the kitchen. I’m cooking you the full English.’

‘Ah, you temptress,’ and he pecked her on the cheek. Part of Jacquie Carpenter wanted to hold him, to fold him in her arms and hear him say it was all right. The other half told her to run. But it was too late to run.

‘What do you know about Barney Butler?’ he asked, grateful for the hot coffee and the warmth of her kitchen- diner.

‘Nothing.’ Jacquie looked blank, rooting around in her fridge. ‘Who he?’

‘He’s an ex-pupil of mine. Fell out of a window on the Barlichway last night.’

‘My God, how awful.’

‘More awful than you think. He was pushed.’

Jacquie cracked three eggs on the edge of a bowl. ‘You saw this?’

‘I saw the results of it. He’s in a coma. The hospital are worried.’

‘Why do you think he was pushed?’

‘Because he was working for me,’ he said.

‘What?’ The next words were out of her mouth before she could help herself. ‘A sort of sorcerer’s apprentice, you mean?’ She bit her lip and turned her back, dealing with the sausages.

‘Something like that.’ Tired as he was, Maxwell had a nose for nuance. Archness wasn’t like Jacquie. That’s what he loved about her. Her honesty. That and Heaven in her face. ‘He was trailing Willoughby and Ken.’

She turned back to him. ‘Why?’ Her eyes were wide.

‘Because they’re up to something. Or at least Willoughby is. I saw him on the Barlichway the night I followed up Albert Walters’s murder.’

‘Max …’

‘I know.’ He raised a hand as if in admission. ‘I shouldn’t be following up murder at all. But you know me, Jacquie. Just can’t keep a mad man down.’

She hoped, no, she prayed, that that was all it was; the intellectual curiosity of a man who had lost his way some time ago. When they’d asked him what he wanted to be, he’d said ‘teacher’ when really he meant ‘copper’. It was an easy slip of the tongue to make.

‘I asked Willoughby about it. He said he was there on business.’ She looked blank. ‘A property developer, Jacquie,’ he spelt it out, ‘on business on a council estate. Pull the other one.’

‘Well, you were there innocently enough,’ Jacquie hoped as she said it. ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’

‘Because he lied about why he was there,’ Maxwell told her. ‘I didn’t. How well do you know the Crowns – and Ken Templeton too, come to that?’

‘Not very,’ she shrugged. ‘Before they opened Beauregard’s, I used to play tennis with Prissy. There was a time, according to Sophie Clark at least, when she and Willoughby were very much in love.’

‘And now?’

Jacquie shrugged as the delicious smell of sizzling bacon wafted across the room. ‘People change,’ she said. ‘You’ve been on the receiving end of Prissy, Max, you know what I’m talking about.’

‘Have I?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘Who’s been talking?’

‘Crispin Foulkes.’ Again, she could have bitten off her tongue.

‘Crispin?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Where does he fit into all this?’

‘He’s another friend of the Crowns. He was at the party, remember?’

‘Of course. What about Templeton?’

‘Ken?’ She took a swig from her coffee as breakfast began to bubble and seethe in the form of scrambled eggs. ‘Bit of a non-event, really. Pleasant enough bloke. Miserable little wife, Josie. I think probably he and Prissy were at it like knives at one time.’

‘Or swords,’ Maxwell said.

‘Max?’ Jacquie sat down while the toast was browning. ‘I hate to ask you this … I mean, it’s not as if … well, what is the state of play between you and Prissy?’

‘The state of play?’ Maxwell asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Well, I can’t quite remember the score before she broke free of her electric cord and tried to cut my gonads off, but I think it was two nil. Just her idea of foreplay, really. Jacquie, I know the difficulty you’re under, but tell me, give me an inkling – do you have anything in your files on Crown or Templeton?’

‘Well,’ she responded to the ping of the toaster, ‘I don’t think so. I’d have to check. But Max, even if there were …’

‘… You couldn’t tell me,’ he finished off the sentence for her. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been walking the Barlichway all night, trying to figure it out. The answer’s there, somewhere. I know it is.’

‘What answer, Max?’ Jacquie was afraid to hear herself say it.

‘No, no,’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘It’s not about answers yet, Jacquie. It’s about questions. Am I asking the right questions? I went to see old Jane Cruikshank too.’

‘You did?’ She was serving out breakfast.