Maxwell's Point (21 page)

And he was gone.

Chester Harris only heard snatches of this bizarre conversation as he made his way from the Botanic Gardens. Partly because he was some distance away and the wind did weird things with the sound up here. And partly because he was trying to have his own bizarre conversation on his mobile.

‘I still don’t know how you got my mobile number,’ he was saying, striding out along the path where the corn was waist high. The sun was blazing off his blond hair and beard and he couldn’t see very far ahead because the bloody thing was dazzling.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ the voice said. ‘Can you see anything, ahead on the coastal path? Where are you?’

‘Look, I don’t know why the hell I’m doing this. First you people let murders take place in my Gardens, then you accuse me of indecency. Why the hell should I help you?’

The voice on the other end of the phone was trying to stay as calm as possible. ‘Because if you don’t, Mr Harris,’ she said, ‘A man is going to die. There’ll be another murder at the Point. And the man is my husband.’

‘Your husband?’ Harris stopped and looked at the phone, then put it back to his ear. ‘Who is this?’ he asked.

‘I told you,’ the exasperated voice exploded. ‘I’m DS Jacquie Carpenter. My husband is’…but she’d gone.

‘Shit!’ Jacquie had lost contact. She threw the mobile onto the driving seat and hauled the Ka’s wheel over. All afternoon, she’d been trying to find a way to be with Maxwell on that insane bloody rendezvous with death. She’d known, even if he hadn’t, that he wasn’t going to the Point to meet sweet, innocent Juanita Reyes. He was going to meet a killer face to face. And that unutterable shit Henry Hall was letting him do it.

And that same shit had given her some pointless dead end lead to follow up in Brighton. She couldn’t even find Annie Taylor as was, never mind talk to her, and the traffic on the A259 had been impossible. She’d refused to go at first, but Henry had come the heavy and threatened her with suspension if she didn’t. ‘Go on, then,’ she’d screamed at him. ‘Suspend me.’ If it was good enough for Peter Maxwell, it was good enough for her. But a little voice in her head told her to stop being so silly and to do as you’re told. When she realised the little voice was Peter Maxwell’s, she went quietly.

She went quietly because she thought she’d be back before this. Thought she’d be up at the Point with her love. What was he thinking? He wasn’t well, had just gone through a
plate-glass
window and he was a bloody amateur, for God’s sake.
She
was the professional.
She
had the bloody badge. ‘Get out of the fucking way!’ she screeched at a pensioner risking his life on a pedestrian crossing.

‘Women drivers!’ He shook his stick at her.

Her brain wave of contacting Harris had disintegrated on the rock of bad reception. He was a shaky hope, certainly. The
Leighford police were in the process of compiling a dossier on the man that might put him in the slammer and of course there was an outside chance that he was the Point killer himself. But Jacquie was desperate. And outside chances were all she had. Now, thanks to what Maxwell had always railed against, the uselessness of technology, she had no chance at all. Her foot was to the floor as she snarled over the Flyover, bouncing on her horn like a thing possessed. And the Point was still ten minutes away.

Chester Harris flicked the phone back into his pocket. For a moment he hesitated, unsure what to do. The cheek of it! Leighford police phoning him – and on his mobile – asking for help. They who had rousted him only days before. And come to think of it, that woman’s voice sounded familiar. Hadn’t she been the very one who had accused him of… Yes, he was sure it was. Then she’d come out with some guff about her husband. What sort of crank call was this?

By this time, however, Chester Harris was well along the path. A sensible man would have turned back, but Chester Harris was anything but a sensible man. He enjoyed the limelight, the adulation, the cut and thrust of defending his particular ecological stance. And as for his little sideline, well, that offered a certain frisson too. He suddenly stopped short and instinctively crouched in the corn. His little sideline had taught him to be swift and silent. Peeping Toms did time.

But the pair before him were nothing like the usual couples he spied on. He couldn’t see them terribly clearly because they were silhouetted against the sun, but they were obviously two men and that had never been Chester Harris’s thing. Then, as
his eyes became acclimatised, he realised who they were, and he stood up, turning slowly and edging his way back towards his Gardens. One of them was that man after his own heart, DI Manton from West Sussex CID. Harris found himself chuckling at the fool the man had made of himself last night. Anybody too pissed to get it off with Sadie really was a no-hoper. He glanced back, just once. That other bloke had been at the party too. Spaniard, wasn’t he?

‘Rodrigo,’ Maxwell had only just recovered his balance after dealing with Lessing. ‘I hoped it wouldn’t be you. Thank you for your email.’

The Spaniard bowed.

‘I assume Juanita
is
all right? I mean, you haven’t buried her out here somewhere?’

‘She is fine, Max,’ he said. ‘I told you, she is back home in Sant Lluis. When that silly goose Carolina thought I had gone missing, I had to invent the stomach bug so that my colleagues would not suspect. In fact, I went to visit Juanita, just to make sure all was well.’

‘Yes, you told me she was back home. You also told me she was a thief and that she had nothing to do with these killings.’

‘I lied,’ Mendoza shrugged. ‘But as I told you, I have been to confession about that.’

‘And have you been to confession about the murders?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Not yet,’ Mendoza told him. ‘I will.’

‘That will put your priest in an impossible position.’

The Spaniard nodded. ‘It goes, as you say, with the territory.’

‘What now?’ Maxwell asked. Rodrigo Mendoza was thirty years his junior and he hadn’t just gone through a plate glass window. He didn’t really have to ask the question.

‘Now I have to add one more confession for the priest,’ he told him. ‘But first, how did you know it was me?’

‘I didn’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘Not at first. It was your excellent English that gave you away.’

‘My English?’ Mendoza laughed.

‘It was a conversation we had,’ Maxwell told him. ‘You, with your careful use of tenses. You said Juanita need
ed
help. Not needs. Past tense.’

‘So?’ the Spaniard shrugged.

‘So you gave her help, didn’t you? You found out she was a whore and you were horrified. You see, I am a historian, Rodrigo. And the name of Mendoza is an old and proud one in Spain, is it not? You are descended from one of the oldest families in Castile y Leon. Captain Juan de Lopez Mendoza went down with his ship, didn’t he…’ Maxwell pointed, ‘somewhere out there in the Armada, under the storms of the Channel or the guns of Howard of Effingham, I don’t suppose it matters which.’

‘It matters,’ Rodrigo grunted. ‘Juan de Lopez Mendoza was the finest gunner in King Philip’s navy. But even he could not defeat the winds of God.’

‘You see, that’s what I missed,’ Maxwell admitted. ‘And I should be drummed out of the Historians’ Union for it. The Point has special meaning for you, doesn’t it?’

Mendoza nodded. ‘There was a beacon up here, at the time of the Armada. When Juanita came to me with her problem, crying so desperately because she was being abused by these
men, I knew there was only one solution. They had to die. And what better place than here, where you arrogant English have let the world believe you beat the great Armada. You did not. Only God!’

‘Well,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘That’s all right, then. We all know that God is an Englishman.’

Mendoza spat on the coarse grass. ‘The most despicable thing is that you, too, soiled Juanita. All of you – Taylor, Henderson, Lemon and Maxwell – passing her round like a cigarette or a pint.’

‘Not me, Rodrigo,’ Maxwell said.

‘There is no point in denying it now,’ Mendoza hissed. He was undoing his Cordovan leather belt. ‘It will not save you.’

‘That was what the party was all about. The one last night. I needed to join that happy band of perverts to find out how it all worked. Juanita was there, wasn’t she, at just such a party, with you? You probably didn’t know it at the time, but Taylor, Henderson, Lemon, they were all there too. That was how it worked, am I right? Henderson bought Juanita in the first place from the Levington Agency, then passed her round, for a suitable fee, to his
amigos
? Our friends in the police knew there was a link between Henderson and Taylor, but they couldn’t match Lemon up. That’s because none of them was actually a member of the Wilbraham Club, only casual visitors.’

‘You are very clever, Max,’ Rodrigo said. ‘Juanita said you were.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell realised that the Spaniard was making him turn and moving backwards, especially to his left at the moment, was not a good idea. ‘Now, help me out here, will
you? You and Juanita planned Taylor’s murder together? Am I right?’

Mendoza checked the path. Still all clear. Still no one in sight. This was the optimum time, he knew. The time he had brought Henderson to the Gardens, the time he had pushed Lemon over. No one walked the path at this hour and he still had the daylight to see what he was doing. ‘That is right,’ he said.

Maxwell wanted to keep his man talking, playing for time, trying to decide what to do. His left arm was all but useless and his head throbbed like buggery. ‘You practised,’ he was saying, ‘with a mannequin. A shop dummy. At The Dam.’

Mendoza nodded. ‘How did you know that?’ he asked.

‘Let’s just say a little bird told me,’ Maxwell said. ‘A bird being watched but she didn’t know it. That would have been what, a week before the Taylor murder?’

‘Ten days,’ Mendoza corrected him.

‘Then Juanita got cold feet.’

‘Got…’

‘Became frightened.’

Mendoza nodded. ‘I could not blame her,’ he said. ‘And to be honest, it was better with her out of the way. This Taylor, he never locked his car. So I waited for my moment and hid in the back passenger seat.’

‘Strangling him from behind?’

‘It was easier than I thought it would be. But I had to pay the whore he was with to get out and lose herself.’

‘That was a risk,’ Maxwell said.

‘A risk worth taking,’ Mendoza spread his arms. ‘To this day, she has said nothing.’

‘Henderson?’

‘He was the biggest pig of all. A whore-monger. He would violate Juanita in the rhododendron bushes when his wife was out. I paid him a visit one day pretending I wanted some building work done. I killed him in my own house with my own bread knife. Placing him near rhododendron bushes in the Botanic Gardens had a certain…poetry, don’t you think.’

Maxwell did.

‘And Lemon?’

‘He was a fool. Obsessed with this…eBay thing. I met him in a pub and said I had lots of Spanish silver if he was interested. Sixteenth century coins. He was so stupid that he agreed to meet me up here. The rest was easy. I told him they were hidden in the sandstone, just behind you. Now, enough talk. You tell me, did you defile Juanita?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘I told you, Rodrigo,’ he said softly. ‘No. I merely said that to get you here. To flush you out as we say.’

‘So honour is not a thing confined to Spain?’ Mendoza asked.

‘No,
Señor
,’ Maxwell said. ‘It is not.’

‘Because of that,’ Mendoza suddenly threw up his hand, ‘I give you a choice,
Don Quixote de la Mancha de Inglaterra
. Slowly, by strangulation with the belt? Or quickly, like
Señor
Lemon, over the cliff?’

‘Hold it there, you bastard.’

Mendoza stopped in his tracks. Maxwell spun round to the voice behind him and instantly regretted it.

‘Who are you?’ the Spaniard asked.

A pale young man stood there, in the embers of the dying
sun, his pale blue hood thrown back, his fierce grey eyes burning out of his pallid face. He was standing with his legs planted firmly apart and his arms outstretched in front of him, firmly holding a gun.

‘I’m Jack Taylor, you mad bastard,’ the boy hissed, ‘and you killed my dad.’

There was a crash as the gun went off and Mendoza hurtled backwards, his head exploding and a spray of blood spattering over Maxwell’s face. The Spaniard staggered back one more pace, two and disappeared over the edge of Dead Man’s Point.

Suddenly, there were men everywhere. Dark in SWAT flak jackets, they swarmed out of the bushes and broke cover from the oaks. Two of them stood upright in the corn; weapons gleaming like the Guards at Waterloo. Only Maxwell, the Historian, heard the echoing cry of the Duke of Wellington, ‘Now, Maitland, now’s your time’.

‘Drop it, son.’ It was Henry Hall’s voice, calmer than Wellington’s and very much of the here and now. Taylor stood there, the semi-automatic still smoking in his hand, but the stare had gone and he slowly lowered his arms, two men snatching the gun from him and pinning him to the ground.

‘You all right, Mr Maxwell?’ Hall asked.

Maxwell was swaying a little, bearing in mind how close he’d come to death, but in essence, yes; he was fine.

‘That little trinket, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘The silver lizard.’

‘What of it?’ Hall asked as his team led Taylor away and others began to detach themselves to recover Mendoza’s body.

‘It wasn’t Wide Boy Taylor’s. It must have been dropped by Mendoza.’

‘Why do you assume that?’

‘Look it up for yourself,’ Maxwell told him. ‘In a little old travel guide by Compton Mackenzie you’ll find in the back room of Leighford Library. The lizard is a motif of the Island of Menorca.’

He hobbled towards the cliff’s edge, Hall nearby, and he leaned over. He could see Mendoza’s body lying at the water’s rim, being buffeted by the ceaseless surge of the tide. And as he heard a scream from an hysterical woman rushing from the car park, he hummed to himself a snatch of a tune he’d been hearing at home on the radio all day – ‘A whale on the beach that shouldn’t be there.’