Maxwell’s Ride (3 page)

‘Shut it down,’ he heard a voice hiss over a walkie-talkie. ‘For fuck’s sake. We’ve got a dead bloke down here.’

‘Uncle Maxie …’ Terror was etched on Lucy’s face.

‘Sshh,’ he hushed her, encircling them both with his strong, safe arms. ‘It’s all right. Everything’s all right.’ And he led them away, glancing backwards over his shoulder. Staff were shepherding away the underprivileged children, away from the car. Away from the corpse. Dead man floating.

3

Credit cards. AA membership. A cheque book. A set of keys to the dark green Peugeot left in Car Zone C at the end of another day at Magicworld. The contents of a dead man’s pockets. The contents of a dead man’s life. DC Jacquie Carpenter catalogued them before popping them back into the polythene bag. Around her, the incident room was coming to life, officers carrying files, VDUs, rainforests of paper, display boards. In deference to the proprietors of Magicworld, Leighford CID had set up its Incident Room off site, in the community centre at West Meon. The Chief Constable himself had been contacted. No fuss, please. No bother. Magicworld was a family institution. Uniforms all over the place would do it no good at all. Besides, the owner of the park played golf with the Chief Constable.

The community centre had been the village school in the days when Thomas Lord, he of the cricket ground, had lived there. Jacquie had come in that morning under the lintel that still bore the carefully chiselled ‘Boys’ to remind the world of the days of Political Incorrectness and sexual segregation. Well, why not? Jacquie had the vote, for God’s sake. She even smoked on and off, from time to time. And sure as Hell, she was doing a man’s job.

She felt his eyes boring into her back; metaphorically, he was twanging her bra straps. She turned to face him. DS Frank Bartholomew, who thought he looked like Laurence Dallaglio, stood there, smirking.

‘What’ve we got, then, Jacquie?’ he sat on the chair across the desk from her, letting his eyes rove over the cleavage under the pale peach blouse. Jacquie Carpenter was probably twenty-eight. Her eyes were pale and grey and they sparkled as she spoke. Her chestnut hair was swept up on each side and there, Bartholomew pondered, was a mouth he’d like to get closer to.

‘Larry Warner,’ she told him, her eyes as cold as her voice. ‘He was forty-eight. A chartered accountant. Lived in Portsmouth.’

‘Well, I suppose somebody has to. Have we got an address?’

‘Twenty-four Cadbury House. On the way out to Southsea.’

‘Governor got somebody on that?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Bartholomew, as I’ve only just come on duty.’

‘Frank.’ He leaned towards her as though over a candlelit dinner for two. ‘I’ve told you to call me Frank.’

She managed a smile that would freeze Hell over. ‘I’d rather keep it professional, if you don’t mind.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Bartholomew winked, leaning back in his chair. ‘Where is the guv’nor?’

‘Morgue.’

‘What’s this?’ Bartholomew’s roving eye had found the computer print-out on Jacquie’s desk.

‘It’s a witness list,’ she told him. ‘Everybody on or near the ride at the time of Warner’s death.’

He flicked down the dot matrix. ‘Right, then. That’s our morning mapped out. You ready?’

She nodded. When it came to working with Frank Bartholomew, short straws were the order of the day. And she always drew them.

Who’s first, then?’ he frowned at the list. ‘Peter Maxwell, thirty eight, Columbine. Right.’

She paused by the coffee machine. ‘I think we should start with the park staff,’ she said. ‘They’re the ones in the know.’

Bartholomew gave her an odd look. ‘I’m sure they are,’ he said. ‘But you see, Jacquie, this list is not as new to me as I made out. I had sight of it last night and I did a little cross checking. This Mr Maxwell is on file. At the station. Not form, exactly. But I found his name under ‘P’. That stands for Pain in the Arse. I’ll drive.’

Like West Meon village school, they’d built Leighford Mortuary in the nineteenth century too. It was dwarfed now by Leighford General, a monolith of concrete and steel built over the old cottage hospital. A grim place where old ladies lay on trolleys in the corridors waiting patiently for new hips, and regretting having voted for Frank Dobson at the last election.

Chief Inspector Henry Hall had never liked mortuaries. There was that indefinable smell, one that had never left him since DC, that antiseptic abattoir aroma that coated his nostrils and permeated the clothes. It was cold and metallic and sweet and sickly all at the same time. And there wasn’t a chrysanthemum in sight. Henry Hall was a graduate, a fast-track promotion candidate who’d done only six months on the beat rather than the customary two years, plodding at the time-honoured two and a half miles an hour. That changeable May morning he was in his thirty-sixth year. He’d done well; collars and commendations to his credit. The Chief Constable liked him, even the Lord Lieutenant knew who he was – and after the fifty-odd years of alcohol abuse that man had suffered, that was quite an accolade. But Hall wasn’t what you’d call a happy man. There were too many knives in his back, too many old timers on whom it grated to call him ‘sir’. Then there was his family. A wife and three kids, when he’d last looked. The eldest would be starting at Leighford High in September. Where had the years gone?

At that moment, he was following the information given to him by Jim Astley, police surgeon, pathologist and professional bastard. Hall had been in this position before, his back to the morgue wall as the good doctor went about his business. Astley was, what, fifty-four, fifty-five, old enough, just, to be Hall’s father. Except that Hall’s father was a retired civil servant growing dahlias in the West Country. The doctor was dressed up all in green, ho, ho, bending over what used to be a person and occasionally he’d reach over to adjust his microphone or stretch to alleviate the constant pain in his back. In his weaker moments, when his wife had gone to bed with her Gordon’s and a Catherine Cookson, he sprawled on the sofa alongside the red setter and knew he was too old for all this. A dead man was reflected in his glasses.

‘A well nourished male,’ he was saying, for the benefit of Hall, the court and criminal posterity. ‘Caucasian, as we pathologists are obliged to say these days, mid-forties. Not overly endowed with hair.’ His eyes ran the length of the body. ‘Come to think of it, not overly endowed. Slight bruising to the arms, right and left. Forearms and upper. Large yellowing bruise on left shin. An old scar, probably a childhood injury, on the left side of the torso.’ He fumbled with his tape. ‘Nearly two centimetres long. In the thoracic region.’ Hall stood upright, waiting for the rest, like that moment in the Chancellor s Budget speech when he stops burbling bollocks and gets on to the relevant bit about screwing Joe Public with road tax, petrol, alcohol and cigarettes. ‘A large bullet exit wound, er … three centimetres left of the sternum mid-line, measuring two centimetres by … one and a half. Donald.’

His assistant reached over and the two of them rolled the corpse onto its side and then onto its front. ‘Still showing signs of lividity,’ Astley noted, slapping the dead man’s buttocks with a fine disregard, ‘which I would expect at this stage. No signs of bruising anywhere. A bullet entry wound to the left side of the midline by … four and a half centimetres, nine centimetres below the nape of the neck.’

Astley stood upright. ‘Take him, Donald, would you?’ He straightened, pinging off his rubber gloves and turning to Hall. ‘How are we, Henry?’

‘Marginally better than that poor sod.’ Hall watched as the assistant rolled his man back and slid him onto the steel trolley ready for his drawer. He was appalled to note once again that they really did tie luggage tags around cadavers’ big toes, like something in Jeffrey Dahmer’s bargain basement.

‘You’ve got a marksman on your hands.’ Hall followed Astley into his office as the doctor busied himself hauling off lie. mask and cap and scrubbing down, instinctively using his elbows on the specially adapted taps. ‘What’s the score?’

‘I’ve got a Press Conference later this morning. Chief Constable insisted on it. I don’t remember a killing as public as this.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Larry Warner. A chartered accountant.’

‘Ah, well, there you are.’

‘Sorry?’ Hall lowered himself into Astley’s spare chair, leaning his head against the wall.

‘Chartered accountants. Parasites, all of ’em. They’re in the Bible, you know.’

‘Are they?’ It had been a long time since Henry Hall had dipped into the gospels. He was a different generation from Jim Astley. Hall had got comparative religions at O level, Islam and Buddhism, with a hint of Ba’hai. Astley was of the Old School and the New Testament; he could have retraced Si Paul’s missionary journeys in his sleep.

‘“Tax gatherers and others”,’ Astley quoted smugly, wrenching paper towels from the dispenser.

‘I thought that meant prostitutes,’ Hall frowned.

‘Oh ye of little faith,’ Astley shook his head. ‘Nothing wrong with a little healthy prostitution. Madame Sin of Golden Calf Road, Damascus. No, no, the unmentionable in society. The lot the Jews cleared out of the Temple. The profession – and I use the word guardedly – that dare not speak its name. You mark my words, Henry, for this one you’ll have a list of suspects as long as your arm. It’s the root of all evil, it makes the world go around. And I’d be prepared to bet it put a bullet through Mr Larry Warner, who probably had it coming.’

‘What kind of bullet?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘Oh, now you’re being picky!’ Astley scolded. ‘Robert Churchill the gun expert I’m not. Still, you buy me a cup of coffee upstairs in what we still laughingly call a hospital and I’ll give you the benefit of my years of speculatory wisdom.’

The rain set in mid-morning, sending those who thought spring had sprung scurrying for cover, forcing them to spend a few minutes extra in the Leighford Asda or, God forbid, the Leighford library.

Peter Maxwell was lolling back in his modeller’s chair at the top of his town house, his gold-laced Crimean forage cap at a jaunty angle on his head, a paintbrush at a jaunty angle between his teeth. Before him on his desk, under the glare of the lamp, was scattered plastic arms and legs, 54 millimetres of careful reconstruction. Bored with watching the rain, the Master Modeller leaned forward again and took up the white head.

‘What did you really look like, Albert Mitchell, Private, 13th Light Dragoons?’ he asked it, focusing on the standard plastic features under the magnifying glass. ‘Any ideas, Count?’

The menfolk at 38 Columbine had, it must be admitted, retreated upstairs to Maxwell’s Inner Sanctum. The people he allowed this far into his private world were few indeed. And every one of them had gazed in awe at the plastic horses and their riders on the huge diorama under the skylight and the triangular roof. Three hundred and forty-eight Light Cavalrymen ready to ride into the Jaws of Death, the Mouth of Hell. Albert Mitchell would be the three hundred and forty-ninth.

‘Count?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you.’

The cat called Metternich flicked an ear. It was the nearest in acknowledgement that Maxwell was likely to get. ‘Ginger, you think? Well, it is possible, I suppose. Bit of a bugger, though, paint-mixing wise. But no, you’re right. I’ve done too many with saddle-brown hair. It is a bit of a cop-out.’

Downstairs, Maxwell’s nieces were working their way through his vast video collection. It was just as well for Will Smith that
Independence Day
’s president of the United States just happened to be an ex-USAAF pilot, or the world would already have come to an end. Maxwell had calmed them down after the bizarre events at Magic world, dried Lucy’s tears, taken them all out for something repulsive at the local Thai restaurant. Escapism now. That was the order of the day. He’d do them some soup for lunch, then hit them with
Babe
. No nightmares there.

And in the meantime, there was a little male bonding and plastic bonding to do.

‘Mitchell sailed for the Crimea on board the
Culloden
, Count.’ Maxwell had ditched his paintbrush and was smearing the soldier’s neck with glue. ‘Had a horse killed in the Charge. Bay, do you think? OK. He reached sergeant eventually – Mitchell, that is, not the horse.’

Metternich ignored him. There was a time he used to listen to his master’s interminable ramblings. But not now. Too much verbiage under the bridge. Too many thermometers up his bum.

‘Ended up a copper of all things, Instructing Constable to the Kent Force. 1885, if my extraordinary, computer-like memory serves. Oh, bugger!’

The doorbell shattered the solitude of the late morning. Metternich raised an ear as if to accuse Maxwell. What haven’t you paid now,
untermensch
? If he had his way, it wouldn’t be just Maxwell’s water he’d cut off. In his more wistful moments, the cat wondered whether Maxwell knew what it felt like to be a neutered torn, blank-firing.

It was Tiffany’s voice at the bottom of the stairs, ‘Uncle Max, it’s the police.’

It was. A broad-shouldered, dark-haired attitude, who eyed Maxwell as if he were Dr Crippen, was standing in his living-room.

‘Hello, Jacquie.’ Maxwell ignored him and took the police-woman by the hand.

‘Oh,’ the attitude said. ‘You two know each other.’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘a detective. Constable … er . . ?’

‘Sergeant,’ he corrected him, flicking out the warrant card. ‘DS Frank Bartholomew. I clearly don’t need to introduce DC Carpenter.’

‘Clearly not,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Jacquie, it’s been a while.’

It had. They trod a line, did Jacquie and Maxwell, always fine, often a hair’s breadth. It was a line each of them knew they couldn’t cross, wouldn’t cross. Could they? Would they?

‘I’d offer you both a drink,’ Maxwell said, ‘but I fear you’re on duty.’

‘That’s right,’ Bartholomew said, finding a chair. That meant that Jacquie would have to take the settee, with its Maxwell-shaped space next to her. In the event, he stood with his back to the dead electric fire.

‘You’re … let’s see … Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High School. Am I right?’