Maxwell's Point (14 page)

Maxwell was in the nick car park wrestling with his combination lock for Surrey – aptly, it was 1485, if you’re interested – when he saw a face he thought he knew.

‘Mr Mendoza,’ he called.

The good-looking Spaniard spun on a sixpence. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good morning.’

‘Are you bunking off school too?’

‘Bunking…?’ the man looked confused. ‘Ah, yes,’ he smiled as he translated it in his head. ‘Yes, I am.’ Then he was frowning again. ‘Too?’

‘Sorry?’ Maxwell wrenched the lock free.

‘You said “too”. That implies…’

‘That I am also a teacher,’ Maxwell confirmed. ‘Spot on.’

‘But I thought…’

‘I know,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘When we last met you must have been under the impression that I was a copper. Actually, my partner is. No, we were there because Juanita
is our au pair. Is there any news?’

Mendoza grinned broadly. ‘
Si
…yes, there is. That is why I have come to your police station. She is home.’

‘In Menorca?’

‘Sant Lluis, yes. The police, they come to see me again, after your visit. They say they find her car.’

‘So I believe,’ Maxwell said. ‘So what’s it all about… Rodrigo? You don’t mind if I call you Rodrigo?’

‘No, I don’t mind. You are…?’

‘Peter Maxwell.’

‘Ah, Pedro, eh?’

‘Er…could we make it Max?’

‘Max,’ Mendoza shrugged. ‘OK. I was going to call on Juanita’s landlady and you and your wife. To explain.’

‘Well, here I am,’ Maxwell said. ‘I can save you the trouble. Mrs Troubridge is rather elderly and easily thrown, so it might be better coming from me. As for Jacquie…well, her grasp is getting better all the time.’

‘Max,’ Mendoza was suddenly serious. ‘This is very difficult for me. Juanita’s parents, they know nothing of this. It would break their hearts if they knew…’

‘…that Juanita is a thief.’ Maxwell was serious too.

Mendoza’s face said it all. ‘She stole from you? What was it? Jewellery? Money?’

‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘Nothing has gone. But it’s the story that Carolina Vasquez is putting about.’

‘Carolina,’ Mendoza shook his head. ‘She is a silly girl, but her motives, they are right. It is a shameful thing, Max. We foreigners have a reputation with you English. People will say “I told you so”.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Rodrigo. The same thing happens in reverse every time an English football team goes abroad. There must be lots of “I told you so”s echoing around various European cities. What I don’t understand is why Juanita left my baby without so much as a word. Or why she left her car wherever the police found it.’

‘She was very frightened,’ Mendoza said. ‘I have talked to her on the telephone. She cries a lot. She needed help.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘I will try to persuade her to write to you,’ the Spaniard promised. ‘You have email address?’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘Juanita has it. We’d like to hear. And if we don’t, just tell her can you, Rodrigo, that it’s all right. No harm done. Will you do that?’

‘Of course I will,’ Mendoza smiled, his perfect teeth dazzling in the sun. ‘But, tell me, Max, if you are not a…copper…what you are doing here?’

‘Ah,’ it was Maxwell’s turn to smile. ‘I’m helping the police with their enquiries – a bit like you, but a different case. Our murders here at Leighford.’

‘Ah, yes, I read about them. And they were on the television.’

‘Indeed,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Dead Man’s Point looked quite picturesque, didn’t it? Meridian did themselves proud.’

‘You know something about those murders?’

‘Me?’ Maxwell looked aghast. ‘No, not really. But when you’re all but married to the Force, well, it’s sort of difficult to stand by really.’

‘I see,’ Mendoza chuckled. ‘Well, you take care, Max…and have a nice day.’

‘
Vaya con Dios
.’ Maxwell had been brought up on Westerns. Accordingly, he swung into the saddle and drove home his spurs.

‘Could this be a first, then, guv?’ Geoff Hare wondered aloud. ‘Guinness Book of Records stuff?’

Hall looked at him. Looked at all of them in the thick haze of the Incident Room that Friday afternoon. The only designated smoking area in the entire building, it was already bursting at the seams as the bodies multiplied. Even people who didn’t smoke were in there, inhaling desperately as if nicotine aided their deductive reasoning.

‘Benjamin Frederick Lemon,’ Hall was reading from his notes. ‘The Matalan barcode in his pocket provided an identity. Occupation: eBay entrepreneur. What are you saying, Geoff? The country’s first eBay victim? That I doubt.’

‘So what is he, then?’ Benny Palister had to be the one to ask. ‘Some sort of electronic rag and bone merchant?’

‘A cynical way of putting it,’ Hall nodded. ‘But not too wide of the mark. George, what have we got?’

‘Benji Lemon was thirty-nine. Lived in a nice pad on the Littlehampton Road. Milkman reported no taking in of milk bottles for three days.’

‘Does that make him a neighbour of Gerald Henderson?’ Jacquie Carpenter asked.

Inside, though never out, of course, Henry Hall was smiling. His people were still thinking, clicking, making connections, worrying the information like terriers after rats. Not a bad analogy, in fact, for detectives.

‘Hardly,’ Bronson deflated her. ‘Must be five, six miles
away and a lot of other houses in between.’

‘Family?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘We haven’t got very far with that yet, guv,’ Bronson told him, between puffs. ‘Neighbours say he moved in with his dad some years back, but the dad died. There are rumours of a wife somewhere.’

‘Who’s on that?’

Sheila Kindling’s hand was in the air.

‘eBay were enormously helpful,’ Bronson went on. ‘The figures are still coming through, but Lemon, using the log-on “Zest1967”, was making quite a killing…if you’ll excuse the phrase.’

Everybody did. It was way past joke time.

‘So,’ Hare was in the corner, helping himself to another cup of machine coffee, ‘in terms of motivation, we’ve got a potential few thousand irate customers.’

‘Four.’ Benny Palister looked like the cat that got the cream.

‘Four thousand?’ Hare checked.

‘No, four customers. I had a look at his feedback. He was a Power-seller with a million and a half – or that’s how it seemed to me by the end of this morning – positives. “Brilliant eBayer”, “Excellent packaging”, usual thing. Then these four. Out of the blue. Weird.’

‘So, what are we saying?’ Bronson was incredulous. ‘That somebody pushed the poor bastard over a cliff because his parcels weren’t done up right?’

There were chuckles and cat-calls in equal proportion.

‘George,’ Hall held up his hand for quiet. ‘You and I have known people kill because somebody looked at them funny. Ours not to reason why.’

Peter Maxwell would have approved of the quotation and even though George Bronson didn’t, he knew it made sense. The guv’nor was, as usual, right.

‘All right, people. We know who the dead man is. Now we want some more answers. Sheila, you’re on the family. Geoff, take your blokes and turn this eBay thing inside out. Work on the four unhappy clients in particular. What did he specialise in, by the way?’

‘Jewellery, guv,’ Hare told him. ‘Silver trinkets.’

‘I just can’t believe it,’ Jacquie was saying. She was propped up in bed with Nolan on one arm, a Barbara Vine on the other. One was fast asleep, the other unopened. The little boy had had a bad night. He was hot and teething and although his parents didn’t know it, he’d had a falling out with Pam’s Zoë earlier in the day and they weren’t speaking. It was all part of being nearly a year old and nobody understands you – practice, really, for the Terrible Twos and the Teenage Tantrums and the rest of his life, in fact.

‘Juanita?’ Maxwell was propped alongside her, getting the best of the fan whizzing the air around and re-reading von Clausewitz since, clearly, his disappointing son had no interest in it. ‘It is odd, isn’t it? Who did Mendoza see at the nick?’

‘Sheila Kindling,’ Jacquie said, easing her back by shifting the baby ever so slightly. ‘She hasn’t stopped talking about him since.’

‘So, what happens now?’

‘Well, we’ll have to establish just what has been taken,’ she said. ‘Nothing from us. Nothing, allegedly, from Her Next Door, although if little green men from Mars came through
her roof in a shaft of light and used her for rectal probings, I doubt she’d notice. Nothing from the Hendersons. After that, we go back to the other links the girl had – Mendoza, of course, the people at that Golf Club in Littlehampton.’

‘Golf Club?’

‘The party she went to. If she was a compulsive tea-leaf, she might not have been able to stop herself when it came to the bling people wear to parties.’

‘Now, it’s funny you should use that word.’ Maxwell gave up on von Clausewitz – the man had nothing on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at all; nor rapid response capability; what
was
he thinking?

‘One “I just can’t believe it” at a time,’ Jacquie scolded. ‘I know what you’re going to say; just wait your turn.’

Maxwell laughed softly, so as not to wake the fruit of his loins. ‘Go on, then,’ he said.

‘And finally, the Agency that introduced her in the first place. If something major has gone, there may well be an insurance claim of pretty whacking proportions. And of course, we’ll have to get the Spanish police to interview Juanita. Interpol seems a bit overkill now we know where she is and that she’s OK. We’ve got to find somebody else, though, Max. We can’t rely on Pam for ever.’

‘No, you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘And we’d better check the references a bit more closely next time.’

‘Go on, then,’ she said after a suitable pause.

‘What?’

‘What’s your “I can’t believe it”?’

‘Oh, right, Bling. Danny Pearson and Scott Thomas found a silver item near a body at Dead Man’s Point. The body in
question belongs to Wide Boy Taylor, low life of Brighton and all points West. Benji “Zest” Lemon deals in such trinkets for a living. Coincidence, dear heart? Or am I just a suspicious old fart?’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Jacquie suddenly lifted her son and heir at arm’s length, the Barbara Vine flopping to the floor. ‘Talking of farts, here’s a young one needs dealing with. He’s followed through and it’s your turn.’

Maxwell took the pink bundle, now grizzly anew, and just about resisted the Homer Simpson remedy of wringing the boy’s neck and screaming ‘Why you…’

He settled for ‘Coochie coo,’ instead.

It was a spur of the moment thing, really. Alan Cole, the Head of Drama…er…Performing Arts was putting on something indescribable by Chekov next term. He was a new broom at Leighford High was Alan and he intended to sweep the place clean of all its myriad cobwebs. Why he thought a play by the bloke who was occasionally given the column in the original
Star Trek
series would make his name or even a ripple in the cesspit that was Leighford High was beyond Peter Maxwell, but what did he know?

So it was that Cole held his auditions that Saturday morning. There was much tutting and sighing from the Premises Manager and eyebrow raising from Legs Diamond, but a breath of performing arts air might be just what Ofsted ordered. And everyone knew that Ofsted could not be far away now. It was like Armageddon – inevitable and terrifying in a ‘we’re all going to die’ sort of way. And so it was that the rising stars of Year 11, soon to be Year 12, turned up, among them, Steph Courtney.

The girl was a
little
surprised to see Mad Max there. Oh, he’d produced more school shows than she’d had hot dinners, but not recently. He
had
stepped in last year to do
Little Shop of Horrors
at a moment’s notice, but Steph hadn’t been
involved in that, busy as she was with the banality of coursework. She strutted her stuff in front of Mr Cole, the Simon Cowell of Leighford High, trying to read something into his bored, elsewhere sort of expression. She knew she was better than Jenny Jenkins; there’d be no contest there. Her only problem was going to be Sammi Leicester, apart from the acne and the train tracks, of course.

While she was waiting for the great man to make up his mind, an even greater man sidled along the rows of chairs put out for assembly on Monday morning.

‘Excellent, darling,’ he confided. ‘Best Uncle Vanya I’ve seen in years.’

‘I was playing…’ and she caught his wink. ‘Oh, Mr Maxwell!’ She toyed with thwacking him with her handbag, then remembered who he was and stopped short. He was Mad Max, for God’s sake; he’d be her Year Head in a couple of months’ time. What was she thinking?

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he whispered. ‘This murder of yours…’

‘Oh,’ she flustered. ‘I’ve been trying not to think about that.’

‘I know it’s not very pleasant, Stephanie,’ he said. ‘But it may be important. You didn’t talk to the police about it?’

‘No.’ Her response was too loud and a rather pained Head of Performing Arts turned and glared at them. Trust Maxwell to be behind the interruption somewhere. ‘No,’ she whispered softly. ‘I told you, not even Mum and Dad know.’

‘Will you do me a favour, then?’ he asked her. ‘Will you show me exactly where it was you saw what you saw…’

‘When?’

‘Now. When the audition’s finished.’

‘Only if Emma can come.’ For all Mr Maxwell was a gentleman and a scholar, a Knight of the Road, he was still a man. And all her life, Steph’s mum had told her to be wary of men. The only one you could really trust was your dad. And you had to look at him twice.

‘Certainly,’ he hissed. ‘I’d offer to give you both a lift on my bike but a) it would be hideously uncomfortable, b) it would contravene every safety rule in the book and c) people would talk. Good luck, Steph. I’ll wait for you outside.’

‘Mr Andrew Carmichael?’ DS Geoff Hare flashed his warrant card for the third time that day. ‘Otherwise known as freaking-a?’

‘What if I am?’

‘No law against it, Mr Carmichael. We’re just making routine enquiries.’ Technically, Hare was out of his jurisdiction. This was Berkshire. If freaking-a got funny, he’d have to go to annoying lengths to get various permissions etcetera and he’d really rather not.

Andrew Carmichael looked up and down the road. He didn’t see anybody else’s doorknocker getting a pounding. ‘Oh, yeah? What about?’

‘May we come in?’

Andrew Carmichael didn’t like the look of Geoff Hare. He liked the look of Benny Palister even less. ‘S’pose so,’ he shrugged.

Swirly carpets, leafy wallpaper, spitfire paintings. Get the picture? Nobody ever said Andrew Carmichael had taste. The living room didn’t even reach the dubious standard of the hall – MFI meets Bargain Basement.

‘You an eBayer?’ Hare smiled.

‘Now, look, I paid that £38.87, no matter what that bastard wilysmiley says.’

‘We’re not interested in wilysmiley, sir. We’re interested in zest1967.’

‘Zest1967?’ Carmichael looked blank.

‘eBay item number 43712918.’ Benny Palister hadn’t exactly got the figures tattooed on his brain, but he had them written down in his book. ‘A silver ring with filigree decoration…’

‘Oh, him!’ Realisation dawned. ‘Well, there’s another bastard. I got my money back eventually, but only after threatening the shit with the law. ’Ere,’ Carmichael’s sallow features brightened. ‘Is that it, then? Have you got him? Major fraud, eh? Yeah, I’ll testify. Too bloody right, I will. Makes my blood run cold does that. You know, there are people out there trying to make an honest buck and watch some bastard try and spoil it.’

‘Or two bastards,’ Hare smiled.

‘You what?’

‘Zest 1967 and wilysmiley.’

‘Oh, yeah, right.’

‘Tell me, Mr Carmichael,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Did you threaten zest1967 with a little more than the law?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Palister. It was a well-rehearsed routine.

‘Freakin’ A,’ hissed Carmichael appropriately.

‘Do you want to talk us through it, Mr Carmichael, blow by blow, so to speak?’

All the way back from Reading, Hare and Palister pieced it together. It turned out that Andrew Carmichael didn’t like confined spaces, which was odd, bearing in mind the glorified rabbit hutch he lived in. So any mention of jug, chokey, stir, porridge, in short serving any time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, filled him with dread. Turned out he’d had one or two minor brushes with the law – cautions, that sort of thing – so he wasn’t anxious to renew old acquaintanceships. So Hare and Palister made sure they mentioned the Ultimate Punishment a lot. And Andrew Carmichael was soon singing like a choirboy. Yes, he’d threatened to do more than have the law on zest in his first Feedback, but Marlene had seen it and made him change it before it was sent. Marlene was what the whole venture was about. She was freaking-a’s girl and she had this thing for silver, so he’d sent for the ring. It hadn’t come and so he’d got sniffy with the seller, zest1967. The ring never turned up at all.

And that was where they’d had to leave it. A disgruntled on-line auction buyer, that was all. Do people kill for that? Perhaps. But both Hare and Palister would stake their reputations that Andrew Carmichael wouldn’t.

The sun was a ball of fire by the time Peter Maxwell reached The Dam. Surrey’s handlebars and saddle were like the red hot irons of medieval ordeals and his wickerwork drooped in the heat. The bracken leaves, so fresh and dripping in the autumn wet, were hard and brittle now, curling back from their stems and a pale silver-green under the sun’s rays.

You couldn’t see the sea from here, nor smell it. And the wide-open spaces of the southern end of the wild area, where
the breeze blew and the swallows swooped, were gone, focused into the silent, heavy glade of the once quarry. The shade was a godsend and Maxwell parked Surrey and squatted by the trunk of an ancient oak. It was like that brilliant scene in Kurosawa’s
Seven Samurai
where the ace swordsman is sitting cross-legged and is disturbed by three bandits. In the blink of an eye his sword is free, slicing them all down so that by the time the first hits the ground, the third is dead. Maxwell toyed briefly with doing much the same to the two girls who crashed through the bracken towards him now, but people would only talk and misunderstand. And anyway, he’d left his Katana at home and the pair of them had never done him any harm.

Emma Austen (what
were
her parents thinking nearly sixteen years ago when they were trawling the lists for suitable names?) was a pudding of a girl relative to the petite Stephanie, but she was a loyal friend and in the spin-off boy stakes, it helped if your friend was petite and Stephanie. Perhaps the bottle-bottom glasses were a mistake. Steph was wearing shades.

‘You made it, then?’ Good at the obvious ice breakers, was Peter Maxwell.

‘I had to collect Emma first,’ Steph explained. ‘And text Mum so she didn’t worry.’

‘Did you get the part?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Steph shrugged. ‘Mr Cole said he’d tell us on Monday.’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘He’s got no heart, that man. Now, Steph, is this the right place? Where you saw the car, the couple, the body?’

The girl frowned, pulling off the shades and walking from side to side, knee-deep in the ferns at the edge of the glade. Below, the nettles were neck-height, but there were plenty of tyre tracks and ruts worn smooth in the dry-baked mud. ‘It’s more overgrown now,’ she said. ‘But I think so. More this way. Toto was chasing something or other in that direction.’

She led the pair to her right, beyond the clump of oaks onto lower ground. Maxwell had got it wrong. When he’d come this way before, he’d stood higher.

‘Hello again.’ A voice made all three of them turn. Crossing the floor of the glade, swinging a stick as he came and hauling the haversack higher on his shoulder, was the old man Maxwell had met here on his last visit. It was as though, if you walked a certain way and stood on a certain leaf, the old boy would appear, perhaps barring the way to the rickety bridge.

‘Hello, my dears.’ Was it the sun glinting in the red-rimmed eyes behind the glasses or was it something altogether less of the day?

Steph instinctively put her shades back on, so that the old boy couldn’t tell she was staring at him. Emma put on a defiant glare, complete with pout. But he didn’t seem to be looking at their faces at all.

‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you two before. Live locally, do you?’

‘My daughters,’ Maxwell lied. He didn’t like the way this conversation was going. If this was the same old man Luigi the ice cream vendor was talking about, he had every reason to be on his guard. And Steph and Emma didn’t like the old man either. His scrawny chest had white, wispy hairs bristling
from a faded blue vest and his legs were like a chicken’s, pale and crusty, criss-crossed with thread veins in the midday sun.

‘Charming,’ the old boy leered with a wink. ‘And so like you. How old are you, my dear?’ He closed to Steph who instinctively hid behind Emma. She blotted her out fairly well, but who was Emma going to hide behind? Turned out it was Peter Maxwell.

‘Forgive her,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I’ve always taught my girls not to talk to strange men.’

‘Strange… Oh, I see,’ and the old man broke into an odd, wheezy laugh. ‘The get up.’ He looked himself up and down. ‘I’m an ornithologist, dears,’ he said. ‘Your…daddy…will tell you that’s a bird watcher. I do like watching, you see. And you have to do it carefully. And quietly. For instance, I’ve been watching you for the last five minutes. Ever since you arrived, in fact. But you didn’t see me, did you?’

Steph shook her head. She didn’t want to talk to this man because he frightened her. There was something about his tone, the over-familiarity in his voice. It was as though he was looking through her clothes to the curved, honey-gold body beneath. And the last thing she wanted to do was to let him hear her voice. It was as though that would let the old pervert into her world. And if she did that, her world would never be the same again.

‘Time to go, children.’ Maxwell’s voice was strong and safe and good. He shepherded them firmly to one side, away from the old man and they began marching away from him, from the dark of the glade, to the cool uplands and the cloudless blue. Steph almost ran, but she wanted to keep Maxwell with her. And she didn’t want to leave Emma behind. And when
they got to the edge of The Dam and the old man and his stick and his bag and his revolting old body had gone, she wanted to hug her soon-to-be Head of Sixth Form. Just for being Mad Max. But Emma was there and nobody would understand. Not even, quite possibly, Mad Max.

‘I’m sorry about that, ladies,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just a harmless old man. Have you seen him before, either of you? Steph, when you walk your dog?’

The girls shook their heads.

‘All right,’ he said, collecting Surrey from where he’d parked him. ‘I’ll walk you home.’

‘It’s OK,’ Emma said. ‘We’ll catch the bus.’

‘No,’ Maxwell was firm, his eyes level, his voice gravel. ‘I’ll walk you home.’

And he did.

Henry Hall had been here before. Not in the master bedroom of Ingleneuk along the Littlehampton Road out of Tottingleigh precisely, but in the position of trying to build a dead man’s life from his furniture.

Ingleneuk wasn’t a very apt name for the Mock Tudor sprawl Hall’s team were all over that Sunday morning. Back home, he knew, Margaret would be putting the roasters in about now as the church bells of Leighford called the faithful to prayer. And in about an hour, she’d resign herself to the inevitable and eat her lunch alone, having plated Henry’s up for the microwave and for later.

Piles of Benji Lemon’s clothes lay strewn more or less at random around the room, filling his kingsize bed, the top of the dressing table and a chest of drawers. The doors of his
wardrobe were thrown back, his pillows and mattress lying at odd angles the searchers had left them. Not much point in being tidy with this one. There was no family member to grieve and get shirty in the same breath; no loving wife distraught that her husband’s shrine was already being desecrated, even before it had been made holy.

‘Guv,’ Benny Palister had just won himself a gold star. ‘I think you ought to see this.’

Henry Hall looked down. A pair of police handcuffs. And they weren’t Benny Palister’s.

‘Well, well,’ murmured the DCI. ‘Who’d have thought that zest1967 was a Special.’

‘Special?’ Beryl Johnson was incredulous. ‘You mean Special Constable?’