Maxwell’s Ride (14 page)

‘“The love that dare not speak its name”,’ Amy murmured. ‘A shame indeed.’

‘Max, you were insufferable,’ Deirdre Lessing sat down in a flurry of briefcase and chiffon as the eight thirteen rolled out of the station.

‘Really?’ Maxwell looked hurt. ‘And I thought I was at my cutesiest.’

‘Wrong!’ She did her Big Ben impression.

‘Well, they are a pretty weird bunch, Deirdre,’ Maxwell rolled to one side as an enormous woman and her shopping trolley squeezed down the aisle past him. The tannoy announced gobbledegook and the Southern region train jolted forward, ready for its run to the coast.

‘I thought you had a Cambridge degree,’ Deirdre said.

‘So did I,’ yawned Maxwell. After all his years at the chalk face, he wasn’t so sure.

‘Then why are you afraid of intellectuals?’

‘I’m not afraid of them, Deirdre,’ he said calmly, watching the dying sun gilding the tall buildings over Vauxhall. ‘They just get right up my … nose, that’s all. A day’s work would kill them all.’

Now, that’s unfair, Max,’ Deirdre insisted. ‘Archie Godden’s reputation is second to none.’

‘Everybody’s a critic, Deirdre,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Those who can, do and those who can’t whinge about those who can. It’s human nature, I suppose, but that pompous bastard gets paid for it.’

‘He’s also an author and philosopher of some repute.’

That’s right,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Didn’t he come out with the pop-up version of
Mein Kampf
last year?’

‘What about Anthony LeStrange?’ she ignored him. ‘Surely you can’t doubt his ability?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Maxwell shook his head, folded his arms and tried to find a comfortable position. ‘But it’s all so false. All done by mirrors and flashing lights. The whole dream team could be summed up by “Precious R Us”.’

‘Amy Weston seemed very taken with you,’ Deirdre said archly.

‘Really?’ Maxwell yawned again. ‘I didn’t notice.’

‘Liar,’ she said flatly. ‘I should warn you, though, Max. They say poetry is only her second love.’

‘They do?’ His eyes were closing now.

‘Her first is men. She chews them up and spits them out.’

‘Go on!’ Maxwell nudged her in the ribs without opening his eyes, ‘I thought that was you.’ He raised his eyelids long enough to register the fury in her face. ‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

She showed him the thriller’s cover.

‘Oh, that.’ He gave her his best Lee Marvin from
Cat Ballou
, but it was all lost on Deirdre Lessing. ‘The private eye did it,’ he told her. ‘The dead girl was his bit on the side. ()ops, blown it for you. Wake me up at Leighford, will you?’ And he suddenly turned to her, eyes open. ‘And you won’t tell anyone, will you, Deirdre?’

‘What?’ She fell right into it.

‘That I’m about to sleep with a strange woman.’

It was already dark by the time Henry Hall got back to the West Meon Incident Room. The skeleton staff that was Ted Horner was sitting in the back area, almost invisible under the paperwork. Hall grunted at him and clicked on the kettle. As he waited, he let his tired eyes wander around the photo-covered walls. Larry Warner looked back at him in a number of guises. Larry Warner at a party, back in ’82, a photograph that Mrs Pilgrim had found in a sideboard drawer; Larry Warner in a restaurant with three anonymous men; Larry Warner frozen momentarily in his passport mugshot; and Larry Warner frozen for ever by the bullet that killed him, one eye bright and staring – the other closed and dead. The morgue shots sent the same shiver through Henry Hall that they always did, the tangle of black hair pulled up over the cuts of the saw, the bluish signs of lividity at the corners of the mouth. Like an amateur actor, badly made up for Halloween.

His eyes passed to the frantic enjoyment of Magicworld and the polystyrene rocks and plastic reeds of the Wild Water. There were drawings of the yellow car and of Larry Warner’s body lying in it in the position it was found, slumped forward and to the left. Alongside, the names of those who had known Larry Warner – his housekeeper, his secretary, the long, long list of his clients. And a string of anonymous young men, some with only Christian names or nicknames, others so blank that the CID had given them numbers. And the names of those near Warner when he died. And the one that burned into his brain at the end of another long day. The name he knew – Peter Maxwell.

The click of the kettle brought him back to the here, the now.

‘Cup of coffee, Ted?’ he called to the man in the back.

‘No thanks, guv,’ Horner said. ‘It’s coming out my bloody ears as it is.’

‘Ah, Richard,’ Hall had heard the door open. ‘Coffee?’

‘Black, Henry.’ Dr Richard Bartlett looked different with his heavy-framed glasses off. Balder than Larry Warner, the two men might have passed for brothers in the watery neon-paleness of the Incident Room night. ‘Are we going through?’ He slipped his glasses on again.

‘Have a seat,’ Hall said, ‘I’ll be right with you.’

Bartlett sat himself down opposite Hall’s desk in the make-shift space he’d turned into an office. From here, a computer linkup tied him with Leighford nick, HQ at Winchester and the Yard facilities called, rather optimistically, Holmes. There were filing cabinets everywhere, crates of bumf, VDU screens still flickering late into the night.

He took the coffee gratefully. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Schizophrenia.’

‘That’s it?’ Hall sat down.

‘In a nutshell.’ Bartlett took off his glasses and began cleaning them. ‘I won’t bore you with the minutiae. It’ll all be in my report and of course, I’m there for expert testimony in court if you need me.’

‘So Neil Hamlyn, Corporal, SAS is two people.’

Bartlett smiled with the condescension only found in the medical profession. ‘Multiple personality is not so easily explained,’ he said. ‘There’s good and evil, if you like, in all of us.’

‘Is he kosher?’ Hall asked, leaning back and slurping on his still-too-hot coffee.

‘Do you mean did he do it or is he really an SAS sniper?’

‘Either,’ Hall shrugged.

‘As I told you, Henry,’ Bartlett said, ‘I’d already made up my mind yesterday. Today just confirmed it. As you know, I wasn’t going to interview him again, but professionalism got the better of me – you know how it is.’

Hall did.

‘The SAS are trained to infiltrate,’ Bartlett went on. ‘Work close to the ground. That’s what Hamlyn’s good at. That’s what he knows. In Desert Storm, they went into enemy territory, deep and dirty. That’s what he did at Magicworld. He’d have been in disguise. You’ve checked his flat?’

Hall nodded.

‘Let’s see,’ Bartlett conjectured, ‘you found a T-shirt, baseball cap, jeans?’

‘I could find those in any flat,’ Hall played Devil’s Advocate yet again.

‘Yes, but did you find them in Hamlyn’s?’

‘We did,’ Hall had to concede.

‘And something else,’ Bartlett went on. ‘A coat of some kind?’

Hall didn’t know what to make of forensic psychologists. They were either brilliant and indispensable people, who pushed the barriers of crime-solving science further than anyone had a right to hope, or they were bullshitters of the worst water.

‘Possibly,’ he nodded.

‘One he’d have worn on the way to the hit. Let’s say he had it on as he went into the park. Once he’d made the hit, he’d take it off, stuff it in the hold-all and probably the cap too. Now, he’s a different man.’

‘A second personality?’

Bartlett chuckled and sipped his coffee. ‘No, no, you’re not following this at all, Henry. The Neil Hamlyn who went into the park and the one who came out one bullet lighter are the same one – a single, psychotic individual. The other one, the Neil Hamlyn who walked into your police station the other day and scared the shite out of Sergeant Merrill, well, he’s somebody else entirely.’

Hall was still not convinced.

‘Hence the blankness,’ Bartlett said, leaning forward, enthusing. He’d spent his professional life so far winning over sceptical juries in court; a Detective Chief Inspector couldn’t be much more difficult. ‘He can’t really understand what’s happening to him, why he’s done what he’s done. But he knows he’s done it and he knows it’s wrong.’

‘So he’s fit to stand his trial?’ Hall used the old legal jargon.

‘Fit to plead?’ Bartlett leaned back, sipping coffee again. ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll need more time on that. Want to see the second video?’

‘Not just now.’ Hall was tired. He slipped his rimless glasses above his hairline and rubbed his eyes.

‘What did you get today?’ Bartlett asked him.

‘Neil Hamlyn is on the DSS. If he ever was in the SAS, he’s not now. And that’s a whole different set of initials. Or if he is – and the army still won’t tell us – it’s the most complex DSS fraud case I’ve ever come across. He’s showed up regularly for his giro and job seeker every week for nearly two years.’

‘He gets a giro and he owns a Ruger Mini fourteen?’ Bartlett was incredulous.

‘The Queen Mum owns six houses and she can’t make ends meet.’ It was an unusually flippant remark from a man who played things by the book. ‘It’s just possible he has some political affiliations. National Front, British National Party sort of stuff – we’re still working on that. The odd thing is his flat. Can you have a look at that for me?’

‘Sure,’ Bartlett said. ‘Care to give me a clue as to what I might find?’

‘Neatness,’ was Hall’s verdict. ‘Fastidious neatness. There was only one gun listed in his paperwork, which is filed better than anything I’ve ever seen in any nick anywhere. It was kept under the relevant lock and double key.’

“But I thought weapons like that were banned?’

‘Oh, they are,’ Hall said. ‘And perhaps that’s where Mr Hamlyn’s split mind comes in. It’s as if he’s following orders, by the book correctness. But they’re somebody else’s orders and they’re obsolete.’

‘That’s the army for you,’ nodded Bartlett. ‘What did the pathology throw up?’

‘No drugs,’ Hall threw his hands in the air. ‘I’d have put money on it. The slow blinks, the deliberation with his answers. But no. All the blood tests are clear. There’s no sign that Corporal Hamlyn has ever taken so much as a glass of Coca-Cola.’

‘Henry,’ Bartlett leaned forward again, finishing his coffee. ‘You’ve got your man. Trust me on this. I’ve been doing the job a long time.’

Hall let his man get up and watched him go.

‘Motive,’ he called after him. ‘What about a motive, Richard?’

Peter Maxwell lost his balance as he got home. That was because his door was unlocked and slightly ajar and it opened under his weight. He flicked on the hall light. All was quiet. The girls were still at Sylvia’s where he’d left them at the end of the school day, but on a whim, he’d gone home first, straight from Leighford station.

Refusing to be browbeaten, Deirdre Lessing had persevered with her thriller, only to find that Maxwell had been right – how that concept stuck in her throat. It was the private eye and the dead girl was his bit on the side.

‘Thank you so much,’ she hissed at him as they went their different ways in the car park.

‘My every waking moment is filled serving you, dear lady,’ he said, raising his hat. Then he pedalled like the furies into the darkness.

Why he’d turned left instead of right he never knew – away from the sweep of the coast and the coastwise lights, the ancient dynamo on White Surrey flaring as he crested the hill. He should have gone to Sylv’s; she’d had the girls for six hours now, but he’d gone home instead, to Columbine.

Now Peter Maxwell had been burgled before. And Henry Hall had been in on that. The DCI had told him that burglars were usually kids who peed in vases and goldfish bowls and daubed shit over the walls. He took the stairs three at a time. Nothing. No furniture overturned as he switched on the light, no excrement dripping from the lampshades. His heart stopped.
The Light Brigade
. The building shook as he dashed up from the lounge to the bedroom and the bedroom to the attic. No sooner had he pulled the light cord than he started breathing again. All was well. His books, his photographs of the Granta days and above all, his beloved, half-finished Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan waiting impatiently at their head – they were all there. Even Sergeant Albert Mitchell lay at a rakish angle, his left leg in the air, his horse unsaddled on Maxwell’s modelling table. ‘And when,’ the plastic soldier seemed to say, ‘are you going to finish me?’

Maxwell went downstairs again. His bedroom was fine. No more of a tip than when he’d left it. The girls’ room. He ran there, batting aside the door. The beds were okay, the window latch undisturbed. He checked the dressing table, the wardrobe, all their clothes seemed to be there and intact. Outside on the landing, he checked the linen basket, that pervert’s paradise. Only his own Y-fronts looked up at him, accusingly, the pair he’d left there in an otherwise empty basket that morning.

It took him a while. The kitchen had not been touched – toaster, wine rack, tins of soup – all pristine and undisturbed. He heard the cat flap go downstairs and the black and white bastard galloped into view.

‘Who was it, Count?’ Maxwell asked, ‘and what did they want?’

Metternich scented the air.

‘Do you smell strangers,
mon vieux
? he asked him, ‘of the criminal persuasion? Oh, Jesus.’

He might not know who had so carefully wandered through his house, but now he knew what they had taken. The coffee table in front of him was empty. That morning, on its corner, he’d left Jacquie’s police video, the one of Hamlyn’s interview with the police psychiatrist. The video that could lose her her job.

‘Shit a brick!’ He threw a cushion across the room and it landed near the phone, flashing to tell him there was a message. He pressed buttons, throwing off his hat and jacket.

‘Max.’ He heard a geekish voice. ‘It’s Chris. Chris Logan. Look, I think I’m on to something. I’m in London at the moment. It began as a long shot, but there’s been developments. I’ll call you tomorrow, after school. Bye.’ And a double beep told him there were no more messages.

He picked up the phone, panic rising like a tide, stabbing the numbers furiously. ‘Sylv? It’s me. Look, I hate to ask you this, but something’s come up. Keep the girls tonight, will you? And bring them to school in the morning. I’ll explain all then.’