Maxwell’s Curse (9 page)

‘House to house have come up with a gypsy encampment, guv. At least, it’s a mobile squat more than anything. Family named Cruikshank plus assorted dogs and a goat.’

‘Where is this?’ Hall asked.

‘Below the Chanctonbury Ring, mile or two from Wetherton.’

‘They were neighbours?’

‘After a fashion. Seems they’d known – and hated – each other for years. Something of a feud between the Prides and the Cruikshanks going way back. Nobody can remember how it started, but it was centred on the two old women.’

‘Anybody talked to this … Jane, is it?’

‘Jane,’ nodded Stone, ‘granny. Rules her grandsons with a rod of iron by all accounts. And no, sir, nobody has yet. She wasn’t at home when the lads paid a visit. We didn’t get much out of the grandsons, either. I’ve run them both through the computer. Benjamin, the older one’s got form. Theft, spot of GBH. Joseph’s cleaner, but it’s only a matter of time.’

‘Where did the feud story come from?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘Mostly goss from the locals. The Rector especially – a Reverend Darblay. By the way, there’s a bogus reporter out there.’

‘I’m not sure we’ve got time …’

‘I just thought, guv,’ Stone was a copper on the climb, too bright for his own good, ‘anybody who’s posing as a reporter’s got an agenda we ought to know about.’

‘All right,’ Hall nodded after a pause. ‘What do we know?’

‘Kev, you’ve got this one.’ Stone sat down.

Kev had. Kevin Brand was a large florid man with prematurely silver hair combed forward in a way that Caesar would have understood. He swayed to his feet, ‘Reverend Darblay phoned to say a bloke whose name he couldn’t remember called at his church yesterday looking for info on the Elizabeth Pride killing. Nice bloke, apparently. The old boy used the word’ – and he checked his notepad, so unused was he to the concept – ‘“charming”.’

‘How did he know he was bogus?’ Hall asked.

‘Said he was from the
Littlehampton Mercury
,’ Kev told him.

‘And?’

‘Littlehampton hasn’t got a Mercury.’

There were chuckles and rhubarb all round. ‘Does he want a job on the Force, this Vicar?’ somebody asked.

‘We could do with God on our side,’ somebody else chipped in.

DCI Hall raised his hands to calm things down. He knew the signs. Seven days in and the strain beginning to tell. Tonight it was banter, still good-natured, still generous. By tomorrow it would turn bitchy and the cliques would develop. Blokes would get their own coffee and nobody else’s or expect the girls to get it, which would raise feminist hackles and the rot would set in. He’d seen it before. It destroyed a team’s concentration, ground it down and broke it apart so that before long nobody was looking each other in the face.

‘We need to talk to Jane Cruikshank,’ Hall said. ‘Jacquie?’

‘Sir?’ She felt the eyes burning into her, the only female detective in the room.

‘Tomorrow morning. First light. I want you and a team of uniform at this gypsy camp. How many people are there, Martin?’

‘Er … just the two grandsons and the old girl, guv.’

‘Right, Jacquie. See Mr Williams, will you? I want a team of six big blokes behind you and I want Jane Cruikshank in Interview Room One at the nick by nine o’clock. Do you foresee any problems with that?’

‘No, sir,’ she said.

‘Good.’ Hall was on his feet. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a long day. Let’s close it down.’

Jacquie Carpenter didn’t like the mob-handed approach. She appreciated Hall’s need for a woman, but the boot through the door bit was not Jacquie’s style. She saw Inspector Williams that night, on her way home and arranged for the heavies at dawn.

‘Shooters, Jacquie?’ Williams had asked her. He’d tangled with gyppos before. ‘We’re not talking tactical team here, are we?’

‘No, thanks, sir,’ she smiled. ‘Best not upset more people than we have to.’

Tom Williams was a wise old copper. He nodded and let it go.

She swung the Ka into her driveway and sat for a moment looking at the circles of her headlights illuminating the garage door. Then she sighed, switched off the ignition and made for the house. The first thing she saw was a shiver of the ivy, the one her dad had trained to climb the trellis by her front door. Then she saw him, a man in the shadows, moving towards her.

‘Jacquie?’

‘Oh, Jesus, Crispin. What the fuck are you doing, hiding like that?’

‘Sorry,’ his breath snaked out on the raw night. ‘I was waiting for you and it’s sort of parky out here.’

She undid the lock. ‘There are such things as phones, you know.’ Then she saw his face. ‘You’d better come in.’

She led him through the hall and into the lounge, throwing her scarf and coat onto the settee. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘I’d kill for a cocoa,’ he said, trying to get the circulation back into his hands.

‘How did you get here?’ she asked him. ‘I didn’t see a car.’

‘No. I jogged.’

‘Jogged?’ she rummaged in the kitchen, finding a saucepan and ferreting for the milk. ‘Oh, of course. Beauregard’s.’

‘Shame you had to leave the party the other night,’ he leaned on her breakfast bar, ‘just as things were hotting up.’

‘Really?’ she cocked an eyebrow. ‘Don’t tell me – Prissy.’

‘And your friend Maxwell, yes. She took him home.’

‘Oh?’ Jacquie wasn’t very good at indifference.

‘Just thought you ought to know.’

Despite herself, she turned to face him. ‘Did you run all the way from Beauregard’s and risk frostbite just to tell me that the local nympho gave a friend of mine a lift?’

‘I haven’t come from Beauregard’s,’ he said. ‘And I think Mr Maxwell’s got bigger problems than Prissy.’

She put the milk bottle down with a louder thud than she intended. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

Foulkes straightened, then he crossed to the door as if to check they were alone. He crossed back to her. ‘Jacquie, what do you know about Lammas?’

‘About what?’ She was fiddling with the gas.

‘What about Beltane? Samhain?’

She stopped fiddling and looked at him. ‘Crispin, are you all right? I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Jacquie.’ He took her hand, turning off the gas with the other. ‘Look, never mind that. Come and sit down.’ He led her into the lounge and sat her down on the settee, perching beside her, half turned so that he could look her in the face. ‘Tell me what you know about Peter Maxwell.’

‘Max?’ she blinked, ‘Why? What’s all this about, Crispin?’

‘Just humour me,’ he said, but there was no humour in the grey eyes, the serious mouth.

‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘Peter Maxwell is Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High. He’s a widower, but he doesn’t let on about that …’

‘How do you know about it?’ he cut in.

‘Oh, he let it slip one day.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, let’s see. He went to Cambridge, Jesus College, I think. He’s an historian – an MA. He’s got a cat called Metternich.’

‘And he solves murders in his spare time,’ Crispin said.

Jacquie looked at him. ‘He has helped us in the past, yes,’ she nodded.

‘Isn’t that a little … unusual?’

Jacquie laughed. ‘Max is an unusual man,’ she said. ‘You know the kids call him “Mad Max”?’

‘How unusual?’ he wanted to know.

‘How? … Look, Crispin, this is daft. Why do you want to know so much about Maxwell?’

‘When I went to Leighford High …’

‘You’ve been there?’

‘Yes, it’s part of my patch,’ he explained. ‘About a quarter of their kids come from the Barlichway. I expect I’ll be in and out of there like a yoyo. When I was introduced to Maxwell, he had a calendar on his desk.’

‘So?’ Jacquie couldn’t fathom where this was going.

‘It was a shabby calendar, looked old. But it was for last year.’

‘I still don’t …’

‘There were certain dates on it, with rhymes written alongside them.’

‘And?’

‘One was Saint Thomas’s day, December 21, the old Winter Solstice – “Thomas grey, Thomas grey, the longest night and the shortest day”.’

‘He does have something of a poetic streak in him,’ Jacquie nodded.

‘Another date – and I’m working backwards through the year – is Samhain, Shadowfest, Calangaef, the Festival of the Dead

‘You’re talking about Halloween,’ Jacquie realized.

‘When the witches ride,’ Foulkes nodded. ‘Then there’s Beltane. The Germans call it Walpurgisnacht, the night of the May queen and her marriage to the horned god.’

‘Crispin …’ Jacquie’s voice was quiet.

‘Lammas was another date marked, when the ancient sun god Lugh was worshipped. They made kirn babies for him – corn dollies. Though once of course they were real children.’

Jacquie Carpenter was a woman of the here, the now. ‘I don’t see the relevance …’

‘Neither do I,’ said Foulkes. ‘Yet. Jacquie, when did we last meet?’

She moved away, wrapping her arms tightly around her waist. If she hadn’t exactly been dreading this moment, she hadn’t exactly been looking forward to it either. ‘Crispin,’ she said firmly, ‘that was then.’

He stood up too. ‘After we finished,’ he said, ‘I moved to Nottingham. Did you know that?’

She shook her head.

‘I worked on the Broxtowe case, or at least, its aftermath. Do you know about that one?’

‘Satanic abuse, wasn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Black magic?’

‘That’s right. I was in the thick of it. It’s there I picked up all this folklore nonsense. Except, it isn’t nonsense. Not to some people. To some people it’s real and it happens.’

She spun round to face him. ‘What, old crones on broomsticks?’ she jeered. ‘Black cats …’ and the words froze on her lips.

He walked to her, putting his hands on her shoulders, looking steadily into her shining eyes. ‘What colour did you say Maxwell’s cat was?’

She couldn’t remember a lovelier sky. It was the colour the French call
aurore
, the dawn, like bars of distant fire glowing between the fading purple of the night. She looked ahead to where the couple of coppers were taking up position on the grassy banks, white with the magic frost of another winter’s morning. The walkie-talkie crackled to life in her hand.

‘We’re in position, Jacquie. Over.’

‘Copy that, John,’ she answered him. ‘Any sign of life? Over.’

‘I can see a goat. Couple of large dogs. Still wish we’d brought ours. Over.’

‘All right. Simon, are you there?’ she turned to scan the patrol cars parked at crazy angles on the field behind her.

‘Ready, Jacquie. Over.’

‘Right. You know the signal. I’m going in.’

She clicked the radio down and left the car. From each side two oppos with shoulders like wardrobes crunched on the frozen ground.

‘All seems a bit OTT for one old duck,’ one of them muttered.

‘One old duck, and two assorted males, one with a record of smacking,’ she reminded him. ‘The DCI wants no cock-ups.’

‘Yeah,’ the other one muttered. ‘And I want a Lamborghini.’

Jacquie smiled and shook her head. She was scared too.

There was a sudden explosion of barking and the snapping of chains against timbers as the dogs scented strangers and sprang to life.

“That’s far enough!’ it was a growl rather than a shout and all three coppers stopped in their tracks. The dogs fell silent.

‘Shotgun!’ one of the uniforms shouted and they scattered, flinging themselves for cover. Jacquie rolled behind an abandoned mattress, soaking in the frosty grass and smelling to high Heaven. She expected the rip and roar of a twelve bore. She got nothing except a hollow chuckle.

‘Well, well, our brave boys in blue.’

It was a woman’s voice, she realized. ‘Police,’ she said, straining to make out any movement ahead. The gypsy camp was a ramshackle collection of huts clustered around a mobile home that clearly wasn’t mobile any more. The two black and white dogs, mangy, vicious, were standing, ears flat, teeth bared, straining at the chains that held them and snarling at the intruders. The woman’s voice snapped at them and they were silent, both of them dropping to their haunches and looking sideways at the caravan.

‘What do you want?’ the woman’s voice again.

‘We want to talk to Jane Cruikshank,’ Jacquie called back. ‘Just a friendly chat.’

‘Friendly be buggered,’ came the reply. ‘There ain’t no such thing with you buggers.’

Jacquie rolled onto her back, keeping her heels on the ground and her head below the curl of the mattress. She whispered into the walkie talkie, ‘Simon. Keep back. You and Bill split up and join the others on each hill. John, Bucko, do you copy that? Over.’

There was muffled acknowledgement over the airwaves. ‘John, can you see anything? Over.’

‘Shotgun barrel. Left window of caravan. Can’t see who’s holding it. Over.’

‘Are you Jane Cruikshank?’ Jacquie had rolled onto her front again, glancing to each side as the dark blue shapes of Simon and Bucko crept alongside her, out beyond the hedges, skirting the rise to each side. She prayed that whoever was on the other end of that gun couldn’t make them out in the still half light.

‘My boys ain’t done nothing,’ the voice called. ‘They ain’t even here.’

‘It’s not your boys, Mrs Cruikshank,’ Jacquie called. ‘It’s you we came to see.’ She rolled over again, hissing into the plastic. ‘Bucko, John. Can you move in? Over.’

‘I’m there,’ she heard Bucko respond. Then his line went dead.

‘John?’ Jacquie didn’t like the silence. ‘What’s happening? Over.’

There was a pause. ‘Bucko’s coming down. I can see him. Over.’

Jacquie rolled back. She could see him too. A dark shape that circled the camp. She didn’t move, her nose pinched and blue with cold, the water soaking through her clothes from the mattress. Steady, she found herself almost whispering. Bucko had a night stick, one of those American imports that gave the law an edge. But Bucko was packing too much linguini and no copper ever made was a match for the speed of a trigger. She’d only ever seen one shotgun blast – both barrels at close range. She didn’t want to see it again.

‘Jesus!’ all the intercoms crackled into life at once. What the fuck was Jacquie doing? Bucko crashed sideways, ripping his trousers on the gorse. On the far side from him, John dropped to his knees, tumbling over the stiff white tussocks, rolling into a bush to steady himself. The two coppers who had dropped with Jacquie were still there, watching in mute astonishment as the slim girl in the black bomber jacket got up and started walking towards the camp. Towards the woman. Towards the gun.