Maxwell’s Curse (30 page)

‘No, I …’

‘I haven’t got to put up with this,’ Stone snapped. ‘Least of all now.’ He grabbed Maxwell by the lapels and hauled him upright. ‘Get the fuck out of my house!’

Maxwell forced the man’s wrists away and stood nose to nose with him. ‘Stone,’ he growled. ‘The way I see it, you’ve got one chance to get out of the mess you’re in and that’s to listen to me.’

Jacquie watched them, the man she loved and the man she worked with, head to head, toe to toe. Stone’s jaw was flexing and he was blinking, angry, bewildered, confused. Maxwell was immobile. He’d been facing down dangerous young men for years. It was in his blood. She saw Stone’s concentration break, his shoulders relax. He spun away from Maxwell and threw himself heavily into a chair.

Maxwell sat down again, slowly. ‘Let’s get to cases,’ he said. ‘You killed Liz Pride on December 21 – some ritual significance of the Winter Solstice. For some reason you didn’t want her body found then, so you stashed the old duck in your freezer,’ he half turned to the kitchen, ‘through there, I would guess and waited ’til the next half-baked Wicca date – for auld lang syne, you might say. You dumped her on my doorstep – thanks for that, by the way – and then made sure it was you who was first on the scene. Stop me, if I’m losing the plot, by the way.’

‘You’re talking bollocks, Maxwell,’ Stone said, trying to keep his temper.

‘But then you loused up big time at Myrtle Cottage.’

Jacquie sat down, mesmerized by the story that Maxwell was unfolding.

‘You missed the calendar – the one with all the key dates, the one that threw one helluva spotlight on what you were up to. What was the matter? Liz Pride going to kiss and tell, was she?’

‘This is unbelievable.’ Stone was shaking his head.

‘Then, of course, you overplayed your hand, didn’t you? Desecrating Wetherton church. Darblay caught you. So there was no time for all that eye of newt and toe of frog bollocks you’d used on Liz Pride. You just smacked the poor old rector a few times and walked away with the proverbial blunt instrument in your pocket. What could be simpler? Then you went back to the church with Jacquie on some pretext, so what would be more natural than your fingerprints and boot prints being all over the place? Perfect.’

‘Crap,’ Stone muttered. ‘Utter bloody crap.’

‘You had more time with Albert Walters, didn’t you? Time to poison the old bugger and time to put him on display like some demented tailor’s dummy in a shop window. What was he? Another whistle blower? You realized though that he and Liz Pride had been at school together – and in the interests of leaving no stone (no pun intended) unturned, you went to check the records at Wetherton School. Alison Thorn sussed you, didn’t she? That’s why she had to be silenced – all of course, in time-honoured ritual manner; naked, with her legs open, like a sexual sacrifice on the altar of your own psychosis.’

‘If this wasn’t so bloody disgusting, it’d be laughable,’ Stone commented. Jacquie just sat staring, open-mouthed.

‘It’s my bet you weren’t ready for Janet Ruger, though. She was a crafty old bird, knowledgeable and streetwise. She was on to you, wasn’t she? And here, of course, you made the biggest mistake of all – you left your sacrificial knife in the woman’s throat. What a giveaway.’

Stone was staring straight ahead, not looking at Maxwell, not saying anything now.

‘You’ve got two little girls, Stone,’ the Head of Sixth Form said. The DS turned to him slowly, the look on his face sending a shiver down Jacquie’s spine. ‘And, ironically, it was a little girl who put me onto you. One of Alison Thorn’s little girls – talking about a nasty policeman killing babies. Is that what you’ve done, Stone?’ The silence was audible. ‘Have you killed your own baby?’

Jacquie wasn’t ready for what followed. Martin Stone threw himself across the space between himself and Maxwell, the Head of Sixth Form and his chair crashing backwards. The sergeant’s hands were around Maxwell’s throat and he was squeezing with his thumbs. In desperation. Maxwell brought both feet up and smashed his ankles against Stone’s ears. The copper jack-knifed in pain and fell away, rolling backwards as Jacquie jumped between them, a spray can in her hand.

‘Martin!’ she screamed at him. Stone took one look at the mace and subsided, his head throbbing, his blood thumping. He knelt on his rug, glowering at Maxwell, who rolled from behind the upturned chair, freeing his jaw from the lock it was in.

‘All right,’ the Head of Sixth Form rasped, his throat bruised and closing down. ‘Now, you tell us, Martin; you tell us where they are.’

‘I don’t know,’ Stone mumbled. ‘As God is my witness, I don’t know. Alex gets terrible post-natal depression. She was the same with Janey. She went off for days the week after she was born. She came back again, of course, but I was scared shitless. And she made me promise, made me swear, not to tell anyone about it. Not even her mother.’

Maxwell crouched down in front of him, nodding. ‘You loused up at Myrtle Cottage,’ he said, ‘because you didn’t do your job. When you checked for chemists that had had strychnine stolen, you missed one, in Littlehampton. When Trisha, the barmaid at the Falcon in Wetherton told you about devil worship, you didn’t seem interested. For a while I thought it was because you were guilty as Hell. Then I realized it was just because your mind was elsewhere, wasn’t it? First the baby was late, delaying the inevitable. Then came the inevitable. Your family vanished.’

Stone nodded. ‘That’s why I told Jock Haswell to ignore Alex’s mother. I didn’t think it would get tangled up in all this other mess.’

‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘I don’t suppose you did.’ And he stood up. ‘Mr Stone,’ Maxwell looked down at the man, the upset chair, the rucked mat. ‘Promise me that when your wife does return, you’ll get her the help she needs.’

Stone nodded. And Jacquie and Maxwell saw themselves out.

They sat in the Ka. She looked at him. Then she reached out and stroked his cheek. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

He returned her gaze and smiled. ‘I’m fine, Jacquie,’ he said. She took in the face, with the gash over the forehead, the bruising around the jaw.

‘It was probably that scarf of yours that saved you. Max, what possessed you to do that? To accuse Martin of all those terrible things? I know him. He couldn’t possibly do anything like that. Kill his own kid?’

‘Henry Hall wasn’t so sure,’ Maxwell told her.

‘What?’

‘I spent the latter part of the afternoon with your boss today, Jacquie. He let his hair down a little, for Hall, I mean.’

‘What did he tell you?’ She was wide-eyed.

‘The reason he sent me to Myrtle Cottage in the first place.’

‘Which was?’

‘There was someone on his team he couldn’t trust. He’d felt it intuitively. An insider, somebody who knew the score. That’s why he wasn’t getting anywhere, wasn’t making progress.’

‘Stone,’ she said.

Maxwell nodded. ‘It all fitted. Except that Hall, increasingly paranoid and at sea, misread incompetence for guilt. Stone’s mind just wasn’t sufficiently on the job.’

‘Max,’ Jacquie said. ‘I can’t believe Hall told you this.’

Maxwell sighed and shrugged. ‘You’re right, Jacquie. He’s not well. But it’s not flu. It’s something else. Has he cracked?’ He tried to answer his own question. ‘Well, if he hasn’t, he’s that close.’

‘What happens now, Max?’ she asked him. ‘No more surprises, surely?’

‘Just one,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But first, we’ve got a little tail to lose.’ He was looking in her wing mirror.

‘Oh, shit!’ Jacquie murmured. Behind her the paparazzi were mounting up. They’d stayed back when the pair had come out of Stone’s house, but now they wanted answers. It was Diana and Dodi all over again. ‘Got your seat belt on, Max?’

He nodded. ‘Be gentle with me.’

And she slammed into gear, screaming away from the kerb and snarling down the road, rubber burning in her wake. At Tinker’s Rise, they left the ground and came to earth again with a thud that jarred Maxwell’s spine. It was
Bullitt
, it was
Hell-Drivers
, it was
Speed
all rolled into one. But then, he was Mad Max. He bit the bullet, shut his eyes, grabbed the dashboard and prayed.

They lost them on the flyover, Jacquie breaking every rule in the book, undertaking whether it was safe or not, cutting up the sluggish evening traffic on the coast road. All the time the thought was roaring through her head with the snarl of the engine – this was how Maxwell’s family had died, all those years ago; his wife and child. She couldn’t look at him, knowing what he was going through. And she was praying too. Then she was out beyond Tottingleigh, swinging west on the slip roads of her mind. Suddenly she knew where she was going. She knew and it frightened her.

She switched off the engine outside the gates of the large Victorian house. He unhooked his seat belt and saw her face. ‘You can sit this one out if you like.’

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. I’ll be all right.’ And they crossed the gravel where the dark Peugeot was parked.

‘Maxwell? Jacquie? This is an unexpected pleasure.’ Crispin Foulkes was standing at the front door of his flat.

‘Crispin.’ Maxwell was looking furtively from side to side in the well-lit porch. ‘Can we come in? I think we’ve got him.’

‘Who?’ Foulkes asked.

‘The murderer,’ Maxwell said. ‘The mad bastard who’s been going round killing people. You see, Zarina was right.’

‘She was?’

Maxwell closed to him. ‘Naughty policeman,’ he whispered.

Foulkes looked at them both, his forehead frowning under the lion’s mane of hair. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

He led them through a passageway and on up a half flight of stairs, past a study crammed with paper. Then, they were in his lounge under a large mirror over an even larger fireplace. It seemed an eternity since the two men had munched their way through a Chinese takeaway when Foulkes’s life was all plastic bags and packing cases.

‘This has come on no end,’ Maxwell nodded, looking around.

‘It was rather a tip when you came last. Max, do you mind if I say you look dreadful?’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell took the proffered seat next to Jacquie. ‘Fortunes of war. We needed to pick your brains, Crispin.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well,’ Maxwell settled himself down. ‘At first my money was on Willoughby and Ken.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Sorry,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’m racing ahead again. The murders. You’ll agree they’re all about Satanic worship – ritual sacrifice?’

‘Very much so,’ Foulkes nodded.

‘Well, I thought we were all looking for a coven. Thirteen people with a secret.’

‘And a common faith.’

‘Indeed,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Prissy Crown put me on to it.’

‘Prissy?’ Foulkes looked at Jacquie. ‘How?’

‘She told me something was going on at Beauregard’s. “Something sinister”, she said.’

‘I see.’

‘And that Willoughby was involved. And Ken. And Sophie. Well, that was three. If you include the possibility of Prissy herself, that was four. I even began to tot up the people I’d seen at the Club – the spotty lad who takes your money; Dr Astley, the pathologist; those two huge blokes in the bar; the bar lad himself; whoever hit me over the head. But then I knew that was ridiculous.’

‘You did?’

‘Of course. I mean that only made ten. And it only made eleven if I included you. Preposterous!’

‘Exactly!’ laughed Foulkes.

‘Anyway, Prissy eventually explained the whole thing. Seems Willoughby and Ken take it in turns – or perhaps not, bearing in mind an old Crown family custom – to shaft a tart on the Barlichway. When I thought Willoughby was there administering strychnine to Albert Walters, he was just having a bit of rough – reprehensible of course, but human.’

‘Of course,’ Foulkes agreed.

‘Various descriptions of men on the Barlichway – solid build, dark wavy hair – they fitted Willoughby like a glove. Ken was obviously more elusive.’

‘I see.’

‘So the … and this is where it gets interesting, Crispin,’ Maxwell leaned towards him, ‘Zarina dropped her bombshell – about the naughty policeman, I mean.’

‘You know who it is?’ Foulkes asked, eyes wide.

‘I had DS Stone in the frame,’ Maxwell leaned back. ‘All very plausible, all very pat. But no.’

‘No?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘Not clever enough. It had to be someone quite brilliant to plan the way our man did and get away with it.’

‘So, who … ?’

‘Then,’ Maxwell was folding his fingers across his chest, ‘I thought Zarina.’

‘Zarina?’ Foulkes exploded. ‘Oh, come on, Max.’

‘You’re right. Without wishing to be ungallant, the good doctor is a tad on the gargantuan side, isn’t she? Even allowing for a certain dumbing down on the clothes front and a possible ability to sublimate her accent, she’s, and I’m quoting someone here, “pretty in your face”.’

Jacquie smiled despite herself.

‘Someone would have seen her. In Wetherton church, on the Barlichway, outside Alison Thorn’s flat, somewhere. Nobody did. In any case, she was in California, the good ol’ sunshine state, when Liz Pride died, so it can’t have been her.’

‘Exactly,’ Foulkes said.

‘Unless, of course,’ Maxwell was wrestling with it, ‘she had an accomplice. And that brings me inexorably to you, Crispin.’

‘Me?’ Foulkes laughed. ‘Max, you never cease to amaze me. What are you going to do, run through all the inhabitants of Leighford until somebody confesses?’

‘Oh, there’s no need for that, is there? You know old Bob Cameron?’

‘The educational psychologist? Of course.’

‘Good bloke, Bob. He and I go back a long way.’

‘Happy for you,’ said Foulkes.

‘Thank you. I got old Bob to call in a few favours earlier today. Make a few phone calls.’

‘Really? Look, Max, I don’t see …’

‘He made one to Erdington. It was Erdington where you said you worked, wasn’t it?’

‘I may have done,’ Foulkes said.

‘Well, you didn’t. Not in social services, anyway. So I got Bob to make a few more phone calls. And one came up trumps.’

Foulkes said nothing. He was looking at Jacquie. And she was looking at Maxwell.