Maxwell's Point (4 page)

‘Father-figure,’ Maxwell posited. ‘Impossibly handsome, a brain the size of the great outdoors. But that’s enough about me.’

It went very quiet.

‘I’m sorry,’ he guffawed, then settled himself as Nolan stirred, his little fingers twitching in his dream-sleep. ‘I’m sorry,’ softer now, ‘I assumed that was what
you
saw in me, too.’

‘What I saw in you,’ she twisted up her face and wrinkled her nose, ‘was a mad old bastard who needed to be taken into care. So here I am. My role in life, my cross to bear.’ And they laughed together.

‘It’s probably…’ he began.

‘Yes?’ she waited.

‘It’s probably that from time to time I get caught up in the odd bit of skulduggery. Have you ever noticed?’

Had she ever noticed? For years, ever since Jacquie Carpenter had known Peter Maxwell, he’d been there at her elbow, usually, in fact, in
front
of her elbow, digging, ferreting with that razor mind, teasing murder enquiries, worrying evidence along with the sheep, tramping crime scenes without
number. Ever since the early days, when one of Maxwell’s Own was found strangled in the haunted ruin they called the Red House. It had never gone away since then. And Jacquie’s life and Jacquie’s career had been shared with this man – the career she’d nearly lost because of him; the life she still had because of him. It wasn’t a bad trade, really.

‘Tell me about it,’ she purred, chuckling. ‘All right, so you’re the Miss Marple of Leighford High School and you trust Steph Courtney. Tell me again what she said.’

‘Murder,’ he repeated. He chose the Margaret Rutherford version of the dotty old biddy from St Mary Mead. ‘She said she’d seen a murder.’

Steph Courtney was a pretty little thing with large blue eyes and a shock of blonde curls. She’d sung in the choir when she was younger and her parents had put her through the usual gamut of girlie things – piano lessons, tap, a little light gymkhanering. She’d sat in Maxwell’s office earlier that day with her best friend Emma and told Mr Maxwell all she knew. She’d been out with the improbably named Toto, her dachshund, on the rolling common land called The Dam, not far from her home. Unlike the coastal path, this
was
a Lovers’ Lane. Worse, it was dogging country and that had nothing to do with little Toto. Steph wasn’t remotely aware of it, thank God, but various text numbers on telephones and in the smuttier newspapers gave sites all over the country where people of a certain persuasion could watch people, of a slightly different persuasion, having sex. Steph, of course, had not mentioned anything of this to Maxwell, but Maxwell had friends in low places and Merv ‘the Perv’ O’Brien, in the
Media Department, kept everybody abreast of the places not to be. Everyone – except Merv – was suitably horrified or disappointed or both. Merv felt a certain local pride that there was such a place in his area. He’d probably been Dutch or Swedish in a previous incarnation.

Steph had been walking Toto on the high ground. The sea was far away to her right. In fact, Maxwell realised, she could have seen Dead Man’s Point briefly until Toto took her down below the line of trees into the glade. There was a car there, Steph had told him. And a couple in it. Or rather, not in it. They were each side of the vehicle, one by each of the rear doors and they occasionally leaned in. It was a man. And a woman. Steph hadn’t seen them before. And it was getting dark by this time. In fact, she was late heading home because Toto had scared up a rabbit earlier and whereas his three-inch legs meant he didn’t have a hope in Hell of catching it, ever the optimist, he’d had a damned good try. So, dusk as it was, Steph couldn’t get a clear view of what was going on.

It was all very confusing, she’d said. First the woman got into the car. Then the man. But they were never in it together. Both of them seemed to be checking the time and keeping watch too. Instinctively, Steph had crouched down and hauled in Toto’s lead, keeping him close by her and stroking him to keep him quiet. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. The man emerged again, this time carrying what appeared to be a body. It was very pale and didn’t appear to have any clothes on. Steph couldn’t be sure whether it was a man or a woman. The couple were both outside the car now and seemed to be arranging the body, placing the feet side by side
and the arms across the chest. One arm kept pointing oddly, as though up in the air.

Steph hadn’t had the chance to see any more because that was the moment that Toto had barked and Steph wasn’t hanging around to face any repercussions. Bearing in mind she’d run for West Sussex Under Thirteens not too long ago, she snatched up the dog, aware that his little legs wouldn’t cope, and crashed away through the waist-high bracken as best she could.

‘So, Policewoman mine,’ Maxwell eased his little boy to one side to try to get the feeling back into his left arm. ‘What do you think?’

‘Dogging country,’ Jacquie said.

‘I know.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’ She took him up on it, ‘How do you know?’

‘I teach with Merv “the Perv” O’Brien.’

‘And how does he know?’

‘I’ve never asked him,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘To me, a dogger is a Bank somewhere or other – the scene of an almost-war between us and Japan, if memory serves, in 1904.’

‘It scares me when those kids are out there,’ Jacquie said. ‘From what you say, this Steph seems to be a thorough-going virgin.’

‘That would be my take on it. Can’t you people close the site down?’

‘The Dam? It’s open parkland. As to dogging, unless we get a complaint, we can’t lift so much as a finger. You know that, Max. You know the law.’

‘I know how many beans make five too, Heart Of
Midlothian, but it doesn’t help. What do you think Steph saw?’

Jacquie thought for a moment, frowning in the soft lamplight. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said, ‘Assuming the girl is telling the truth. It
was
dusk, of course. What’s her eyesight like?’

Maxwell shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask Sylvia Matthews,’ he told her. ‘Or the girl’s doctor.’

‘When did all this happen, Max?’ she asked him.

‘Three, four weeks ago. She wasn’t quite sure whether it was the night before her Maths or Science GCSE. She’d gone out with the dog to get some air, clear her head before whichever cognitive onslaught it was.’

‘So she doesn’t remember the day?’

‘No.’

‘What did you tell her?’ Jacquie asked. ‘What did you advise her to do?’

‘To talk to the boys in blue,’ he said. ‘I may have mentioned your name.’

‘Has she told her parents?’

‘I don’t think so. She’s an intelligent girl, Jacks, but you don’t know what exactly runs through their heads, do you? I think she was more intrigued at first; you know, not quite sure what she’d seen. Then she got scared. Even so, she confided in her friend Emma, not Mum and Dad. Otherwise, they’d have been in touch with the nick, wouldn’t they?’

‘Maybe yes, maybe no,’ Jacquie shrugged.

Nolan stirred on his daddy’s chest, sighing and blowing a little bubble from his mouth.

‘So this Emma didn’t say anything?’

‘No. She just came along to hold Steph’s hand. Girlies do that. If one of them’s sent to get a bit of paper in school, she takes her friend along. They link arms just crossing the quad.’

‘I’m not surprised if one of your colleagues is called the Perv,’ Jacquie observed.

‘I’m sure stories of his debauchery are grossly exaggerated, Dear Heart,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘He just happens to have an unfortunately rhyming name, that’s all.’

‘Do you think she will come to us?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Steph, I mean?’

Maxwell shrugged, in a one-armed, I’ve-got-a-baby-on-
my-chest
sort of way. ‘I hope so,’ he said.

‘Were they clothed?’ Jacquie asked. ‘The couple with the car, I mean?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘I didn’t pursue that one,’ he told her. ‘Though I had Matron in on this interview, there are limits to what a teacher can ask a student. I thought that might be an interview too far.’

‘Hmm,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘You’re probably right. Well,’ she sighed, getting up. ‘We certainly can’t do much tonight. Come on, little man, let’s get you to bed. It’s way past your bedtime.’

‘It certainly is,’ Maxwell yawned.

‘Not you,’ Jacquie said. ‘Somebody else.’ And she took Nolan up in her arms. ‘By the by,’ she stopped at the foot of the stairs. ‘Any news on our au pair?’

The Incident Room was open for business the next morning, bright and early. Benny Palister had been to a stag night the night before and was off to a wedding later that day, if the DCI and the corpse at the Point could spare him, of course.
His head felt like a kicked bucket and he’d driven in to the Nick very carefully, realising that he was still appreciably over the limit and some of his colleagues were nauseatingly honest in the follow-up-to-breathalyser stakes on the grounds that a copper should know better etcetera, etcetera.

‘We’ve got a make on the dead man’s shirt, Benny.’ Geoff Hare had not been to a stag night the night before.

‘Great, sarge,’ Palister muttered, desperately trying to remember how to operate the coffee machine. Black. No sugar.

‘Something of a toff, by all accounts,’ Hare was reading the lab report. ‘Not your run-of-the-mill Top Man. Lord Everard, Brighton. Know it?’

Benny Palister squinted up at the man as he bent to collect his paper cup. ‘Lord Everard?’ he repeated. ‘Sounds like Sixties Carnaby Street meets Larry Grayson – and both those images, by the way, come to me via my granddad.’

‘I can’t help the unfortunate choice of name,’ Hare shrugged. ‘Lord Everard is a small chain. Well, more a couple of links, really. One in Brighton. The other in Clitheroe.’

Palister’s face said it all, but whether it was the after-effects of the night before, the taste of the coffee or the ghastly concept of Clitheroe, no one could be sure. He thought he’d been on a school trip there once, or maybe his granddad took him; it was all a Northern blur.

‘So, unless you want to spend all day on the phone to the Yorkshire people…’

‘I’ll ring Brighton,’ Palister volunteered.

‘Great,’ Hare smiled. ‘Jacquie.’

She looked up from her VDU. She’d left her men in bed
before day or battle broke, promising to be home by lunchtime. Nolan was beginning to wonder who this strange woman was who swept in and out of his life, kissed him on the cheek and vanished until the next time. Working Mums – tell Jacquie Carpenter about them. How the lad felt about the missing au pair was anyone’s guess. Jacquie and Maxwell might have to wait several years to find out.

‘Morning, Geoff,’ Jacquie answered.

‘Any headway on the dead man’s crucifix?’

‘It’s silver,’ Jacquie was only now getting to grips with the lab report, DI Bronson’s late Friday afternoon chivvy having worked wonders. ‘Hallmarked Birmingham, 1924. And yes, it’s very definitely the murder weapon.’

‘Astley came through,’ Hare beamed. Things were moving at a cracking pace for a sleepy seaside town as the temperatures climbed again to Mediterranean levels.

‘Just got an email from his secretary.’ She read aloud. ‘“Cause of death is asphyxiation consonant with death by ligature strangulation, in this case, the heavy crucifix chain worn around the victim’s neck.”’

‘Does he give us a date?’ Hare was looking over her shoulder.

‘This is Jim Astley, Geoff,’ Jacquie reminded him. ‘Mister Circumspection. “I can only hazard some time between the first and second week in June. The state of mild decomposition, the very small amount of adipocere tissue, the early growth rate of blowfly larvae…” It all got a bit technical after that.’

‘And we haven’t long had breakfast,’ Hare nodded. ‘Slowly, this is coming together. He hadn’t been in the ground long.’

‘Is it?’ She swivelled in her chair to face him. ‘Coming together, I mean? Geoff, we’ve got no idea who our victim is, why he was killed or how the body got there. We’ve no clue as to why he should have been buried where he was or precisely how long he’d been there. And that’s before I get onto the sixty-four thousand dollar question – who put him in the ground? Now that, in forensic terms and police parlance, adds up to Diddly Squat.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Hare shrugged. ‘It’s a start.’

He strapped Nolan into the little gadget Norman Westbury had made for the lad. Norman Westbury was one of the old school of Craft teachers, before the educational establishment had invented the term Design Technology and made keyboard skills an essential ingredient. As Norman Westbury put it so eloquently in a staff meeting one Warts-and-All Development Day a few years back, ‘If I’d have wanted to have keyboard skills, I’d have become a concert pianist.’ Told it like it was, did Norm. No, Norm was a tenon man, a hinge and bracket, Black and Decker sort of guy. If you couldn’t use your
spokeshave
on it or groove it with your Granny’s Tooth, it wasn’t worth doing. So Peter Maxwell, very much of an age and a like mind, went to see Norman Westbury with his proposal and for a modest fee – the cost of materials and a couple of pints at the Vine (mercifully, the live music was off, Afterbirth’s lead singer having pulled a g-string) – the Great Engineer had built a contraption. It fitted snugly over the rear wheel-arch of White Surrey and buckled with suitably padded straps around little Nolan’s legs, waist and back with an upright support for his head. On top of that, a rather smart
pennant with the words, ‘My father’s a Cambridge graduate and all I got is this lousy flag’ emblazoned on it nodded above little Nolan’s curls.

‘All set, old man?’ Maxwell asked as he tucked the boy in.

Nolan gurgled at him, not
quite
sure of the level of response required and gasped as the G force hit him and his dad pedalled away from
chez sont
like the maniac he so clearly was.

‘We’re going to The Dam, dear boy,’ Maxwell called over his shoulder. ‘No, I know it’s not totally suitable for you, but at this time of the morning, we should be all right. Think of it as your first nature ramble. Well,’ he glanced quickly behind him, ‘the alternative is an hour or two in the cadaverous clutches of Mrs Troubridge; get my drift? And as for Juanita,’ he checked the traffic at the intersection, head whizzing from left to right, ‘Well, we just don’t know, do we?’