Maxwell's Crossing Read online

  Hall turned back to the house, to find Hector Gold standing right behind him. Jacquie knew how he felt; the man could creep up on you quieter than Metternich. ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir,’ Hall said. ‘That was unprofessional of me.’

  Hector Gold punched him lightly on the arm, an expression of extreme delight, because Hector didn’t go in much for physical contact these days. Camille had pretty much knocked that trait out of him. ‘Don’t mention it, Mr Hall. Don’t even give it a second thought. Umm … I don’t know how to phrase this, but … how long are you planning on keeping him? What’s the rule here? I know you can ask for longer, for example, but longer than what?’

  He was clearly trying to keep the glee out of his voice and Jacquie smiled at him, a smile he returned in his usual dazzling camera-flash style.

  Hall looked at him for a long minute. ‘I’m not sure what our timescale is, Mr Gold,’ he said at last. ‘Enjoy your evening. Please say goodbye to your wife and to Mrs O’Malley for me. Thank you.’ And Henry Hall walked down the drive to his car, parked on the road outside.

  Jacquie turned to Hector. ‘Hector,’ she said. ‘Whatever can I say? Not sorry, obviously, because this must be quite a day for you.’

  ‘Too right, Jacquie. It’ll hit Camille hard.’ He added no other words to describe how he felt about that. ‘Alana is pretty much pickled. I don’t think she’s been properly sober since that day at your house. And she wasn’t what I’d call real sober then. Jeff won’t let her get help, because, of course, he is the reason for her drinking and he doesn’t want to face that.’

  Jacquie was suddenly reminded of Mrs Whatmough and her fear of exposure, although two people less alike than O’Malley and the Headmistress it would be hard to find. ‘Don’t worry, Hector. I’ll ring you when I can with news. Meanwhile, if you need anything, ring home. Max is there, he will be able to help you.’

  ‘I will,’ Gold said, reaching out and giving her shoulder a tentative squeeze. ‘You’re good friends, Jacquie. Thank you.’ Again there was the flash of a smile and he gently closed the door.

  At Leighford Nick, O’Malley was treating the staff to some rough music. Hall had rightly guessed that his behaviour on the journey would earn him some cooling-off time in the cells and so he and Jacquie had not hurried to get ready for the interview. O’Malley had discovered that there were not many opportunities for his usual destructive behaviour in the cell, as there was nothing in there that was not bolted down, so he was making his presence felt by yelling every obscenity he could think of at the top of his not inconsiderable voice. A slight echo of it seemed to reach into even the most distant parts of the building, reverberating through pipes and conduits and making the wax shift in the ears of those close by. In Henry Hall’s office, it was just a distant hum.

  Hall shrugged out of his coat and hung it behind the door.

  ‘Seems like a nice chap,’ he remarked to Jacquie.

  ‘O’Malley?’ She was confused.

  ‘No, no. Mr Gold.’ Another man would have laughed at her mistake, but the man in question was Henry Hall so he just inclined his head slightly, to show his amusement.

  ‘Oh, yes, Hector is a very nice man. He doesn’t deserve his family, I know that.’

  ‘Mrs O’Malley, what do you make of her?’

  ‘Drunk. Defeated.’

  ‘Domestic abuse there, do you think?’ Hall was getting all his ducks in a row. He was determined to get O’Malley for something, anything; he hardly minded at this juncture.

  ‘I would imagine so,’ Jacquie agreed. ‘But not lately. He hardly notices her these days, I think. She’s only here because she would have been more trouble to leave behind. It’s the daughter he dotes on.’

  ‘Just dotes?’

  ‘Hmm … well, just dotes these days. Perhaps not always.’

  ‘It’s a bugger of a family, but it’s grand,’ Hall quoted, unexpectedly.

  ‘Guv!’ Jacquie laughed. ‘I never had you down for a rugby man!’ She had spent many an hour as a teenager glued to the side of a rugger hearty from the posh boys’ school down the road and some of those songs were engraved in her brain. Maxwell often hummed one or two of them as accompaniment to the washing-up.

  ‘Not the game, just some of the songs,’ Hall explained. ‘My DCI when I was a sergeant was a fan.’

  Jacquie realised that she had never thought of Henry Hall as a sergeant. In her mind, he had sprung fully formed as a DCI after a planning meeting somewhere at Hendon. A sudden thought drove the image from her mind.

  ‘Guv, I know this is against the rules, but can I just ring Max about this? He knows most of it anyway, but I need to keep him up to speed, in case Hector rings.’

  Hall flapped a hand at her. He paid lip service to reminding her that she mustn’t tell Maxwell so much as the time of day, but in practice he was more than well aware that that was not how things happened at 38 Columbine. ‘Yes, but keep it to a minimum. I’m sure Mr Gold is quite capable of telling Max all he needs to know.’

  Jacquie went into the corridor and rang the home number, which was engaged. And engaged. And engaged. She went back into Hall’s office. ‘It’s engaged. I think Hector is probably quicker off the mark than we thought. Not to worry – I’m sure you’re right about that. Hector will fill him in.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Have we left him to stew long enough, do you think?’ she asked him.

  Hall cocked an ear towards the door, checking for sounds filtering up the stairwell. ‘He seems to have gone quiet … Oh, no, there he goes.’ He sighed and got up. ‘We’d better go, though. He’ll be asking for the Embassy in a minute if we don’t. Do you want to come in with me? I only ask because you do know him, if only slightly. I don’t want you to feel pressure.’

  ‘That’s a nice thought,’ she said, grimly. ‘My only pressure will be preventing myself from hitting him. He is totally objectionable. Perhaps I had better not come in. I might be prejudicial.’

  ‘After the last hour or so, there’s no one in this nick that isn’t prejudiced. We’ll do it together.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Steve? Oh, sorry, Jim. Yes, could you take Mr O’Malley to Interview Room 3 for me, please? We’re on our way down.’ He listened for a moment. ‘Yes, he is, isn’t he? Thanks.’

  Jacquie smiled. ‘Quick character study from the front desk?’ she asked.

  ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘Quite short words, but very descriptive. Come on, we can’t put it off any longer. After you,’ and he ushered her through the door, carefully switching off the light as they left the room, to preserve polar bears for his grandchildren, as his wife was always telling him.

  Camille Gold was clinging to her husband in a way that she hadn’t done since Vegas. And that was only for the photographs, taken by a rather elderly Elvis, whose hair had left the building.

  ‘It can’t still be engaged,’ she whined as her husband put the receiver back for the umpteenth time.

  ‘Well, it is,’ he said. ‘People do have lives that don’t revolve around you, you know.’

  Camille Gold was outraged. That was not a thought that crossed her mind very often. ‘Daddy is in the precinct station,’ she said, as if they didn’t all know. ‘Mother is passed out in the dining room. The place is a mess, all covered with food.’ Her lip quivered and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Hector was certain he could see her lipstick moving slightly out of synch with the flesh. ‘Somebody has to do something!’

  Hector Gold was hard to move to anger as a rule and in fact he wasn’t really angry now. But he was as near to it as he liked to come. Sharing a continent with Jeff O’Malley had made him more aware than even his domineering mother had made him that uncontrolled anger was not a pretty sight and he tried not to inflict it on people. So he was gentle with Camille as he pushed her away. She, however, reacted as though he had punched her in the face and fell to the ground, weeping uncontrollably. He looked down at her and heard the small snick of the last piece of mortar falling out of the wall that had been his marria
ge. He felt a lightness of heart that made him feel sorry for her and he leant down to help her up, but she flinched from him as if his hand was on fire.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said quietly, and went into the dining room to check on his mother-in-law. She was still passed out in the ruins of the meal of which no one had eaten so much as a mouthful. He shook her gently by the shoulder and spoke softly to her. ‘Alana. Alana, honey. Wake up. It’s Hector.’

  The woman whimpered and frowned in her sleep, but didn’t wake. Hector went back into the hall and stirred his still-weeping wife with his foot.

  ‘Your mother is unconscious. I’ve never seen her this bad before. I think we ought to get her to the hospital.’

  Camille O’Malley Gold, soon to be just O’Malley again, although she didn’t yet know it, looked up from her position on the floor. ‘We can’t leave,’ she whined. ‘The police might bring Daddy back while we’re out. How will he get back in?’

  Hector personally thought this unlikely, but his wife had stopped weeping and this was a plus, so he decided to humour her. ‘Look.’ He squatted by her side. ‘Why don’t you get up, wash up, put your face back on and try and do something about the state of this place while I drive her there myself? That way, if they do bring him back tonight, not only will you be here but Jacquie Maxwell won’t be quite so horrified at the mess. This house belongs to friends of hers, don’t forget. It was immaculate when we got here and your father has wrecked it, like he wrecks everything he touches.’ Camille gathered herself up for a wail. ‘Don’t go there, Camille. I’ve had enough. I like the people here. I want them to be my friends and you and your family are doing your damnedest to prevent it. Now,’ he pressed on his knees and got up, ‘I am going to take your mother to the hospital before she dies. You can do as you like, but I would be grateful if you could move so I don’t have to drag your unconscious mother over you to get to the door.’

  Without another word or backward glance he walked away and she could hear him in the dining room, muttering words of encouragement to her mother as he manoeuvred her into her coat. Then she heard ‘Coming through’ and she scrunched her legs round to the side as her husband and his deadweight burden made for the door. They went out and the door slammed behind them, leaving her alone. She tried crying, but no one was there to hear. She lay there for a moment, inhaling the smell of carpet shampoo which was still just in the ascendant over the smell of her father’s cigarettes and her mother’s despair. Then she gave herself a shake, got up and dusted herself down and went into the lounge to read the paper. There was an article on the newest crackle glaze nail varnish which she wanted to read. Camille and a goldfish had a lot in common, and it wasn’t just a slightly artificial-looking golden tan; in moments she had forgotten all about the drama of the evening and was happy in a world of nails.

  Chapter Eleven

  Henry Hall and Jacquie had just reached the bottom of the stairs when the duty sergeant popped his head round the door from his office and crooked a finger at them. With his voice lower than strictly necessary, he told them that Sarah Gregson’s old man was waiting in the lobby. Henry Hall craned his neck to see, and sure enough, the Reverend Mattley was sitting patiently on one of the hard upright seats, under a poster warning about the perils of sneezing.

  ‘What does he want?’ he asked the sergeant. ‘I’m surprised to see him back here so soon, especially on his busiest day.’

  ‘He says he may not have made himself clear earlier,’ said the sergeant, in the tone of someone who wants to make sure he has the words right. ‘Something he said about his wife. He wants to clarify, he says.’

  Henry Hall thought quickly about the things the vicar had told him and remembered the piece of paper he had thrown in the bin upstairs. Were the demons the demons of gambling, or something else? It wouldn’t take a moment to find out. He turned to Jacquie. ‘Can you hang on a minute, Jacquie?’ he said. ‘I think I know what this may be about.’

  ‘OK, guv,’ Jacquie said. ‘I’ll try Max again while I wait. Can I borrow your phone, Jim?’

  The sergeant nodded and pushed the door open further. He gestured to a phone on a desk at the back. ‘Use that one,’ he said. ‘It’s not the emergency number, so you don’t have to worry about snarling the system up if you use that.’

  ‘Thanks, Jim. I won’t be a minute, anyway.’ She picked up the phone and stabbed out the numbers. The phone rang – thank goodness he was off the phone. Who had it been for such a long call?

  ‘War Office.’ His voice had the slight echo it had when he answered the phone in the attic.

  ‘Max, whoever have you been on the phone to all this time?’ she asked, trying not to sound like a nagging wife.

  ‘Sorry, that was the Count.’

  ‘Max, I love him dearly, but I don’t believe that even Metternich can use the phone.’

  There was a silence. ‘I’m shocked to hear you say it, but in fact on this occasion he wasn’t using the phone. He had knocked the receiver off the one up here and it wasn’t till I came up just now to do a bit of quiet painting that I realised he’d done it. It’s his lack of opposable thumbs that causes the problem. Was it something urgent you wanted?’

  ‘No, not really.’ She looked over her shoulder at the duty sergeant, but he was dealing with a motorist outraged at getting a parking ticket in the car park of the cinema. In vain did the sergeant try to explain that the ticket didn’t come from a council traffic warden but from a private company, but the man would not be placated. The last words Jacquie heard as she turned back to face the wall was that all traffic wardens ought to be castrated and then shot. In that order. Slowly. She dropped her voice nonetheless. ‘We took Jeff O’Malley in for questioning, as we planned,’ she said. ‘It didn’t go very well, as you can imagine. They have virtually trashed Manda’s lovely house, by the way.’

  ‘She’ll go apeshit,’ her husband said, as always getting to the nub of the sentence.

  ‘At least,’ Jacquie said, remembering the saucers used as ashtrays and the cheese on the wall. ‘Alana was absolutely smashed.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yes. And Camille was … well, actually she was quite creepy. Like thingy in that film. Thing. Baby something.’

  ‘Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ It was a perfect Joan Crawford, but Jacquie missed it.

  ‘That’s the one. She is an odd one and no mistake.’

  ‘But did you ring me to tell me about the O’Malley Golds and how odd they are? Because if so, it was a wasted call; I already knew that.’

  ‘No, I rang to say that I told Hector that if he needed any … support, I think I was thinking, really, he was to give you a ring. When you were engaged, I assumed it was him.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t rung. He might have done, because I’ve only just discovered the phone was off the hook.’

  ‘He’ll be fine, I’m sure. It’s just that Alana was really in a state and Camille was off the wall.’

  ‘As I may have said, if not just now then at least in the recent past, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ Maxwell hated speaking French (he hadn’t forgiven them for winning the Hundred Years War) but there were times when the bastards simply had the mot juste.

  ‘Too right. I’ve got to go. Henry was just seeing someone, then we’ve got to tackle O’Malley. Don’t wait up.’

  Maxwell was thoughtful as he put the phone down. So, he was ‘O’Malley’ now, was he? A small but significant difference in nomenclature. He knew his Woman Policeman and he recognised the signs of someone banged to rights. And yet … and yet … how could someone who had only been in the country for a few weeks have established himself as a blackmailer? Was the blackmailer a red herring? Did Mrs Whatmough kill Sarah Gregson and make up the blackmailer? Or did Sarah Gregson in fact throw herself off the top floor of the municipal car park? He turned to Metternich, who was lying in an abandoned posture across the top of the laundry basket, legs out straight and his tail curled mode
stly across his boy’s bits.

  ‘You know, Count. I don’t think he did it.’

  The cat raised an eyebrow at him.

  ‘You’re right.’ Maxwell turned back to the painting task in hand. The buttons on R.S.M. Linkon’s jacket were a bit of a bugger. ‘He’s done something, that’s for sure, so I’m sure that the cosmic karma will all balance out in the end.’ He picked up a small piece of horse and put the paintbrush in his mouth for safe keeping. It felt curiously wet and soft. ‘Bugger.’ So it had happened at last. He had put the wrong end of the paintbrush in his mouth. Was this how senility began, he asked himself? And is cadmium yellow as poisonous as it sounds?

  ‘Reverend Mattley,’ Henry Hall said, crossing the lobby towards the man. ‘Shall we go into an interview room?’

  The vicar stood up and shook his head. ‘It’s just a small point, Mr Hall,’ he said. ‘It came to me tonight, at Evensong. I got rather sidetracked earlier today. I was … upset.’

  ‘You’ve just lost your wife,’ Hall reminded him. ‘Upset is allowed.’

  The man compressed his lips in what may have been meant to be a smile, but the wobble changed it. ‘Yes. Thank you. I said that she had some … I think I said, personal demons.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hall said. ‘I assumed it was the gambling, when I found out about that. But thank you for coming in to clarify.’

  ‘Gambling?’ Giles Mattley was surprised. ‘Sarah didn’t gamble. I meant about her mother.’

  Now it was Hall’s turn to be surprised. ‘Yes, Reverend. I’m afraid Sarah did gamble. Recently, at least. And for quite high stakes. But what was the issue with her mother?’

  The other man was adamant. ‘I’m sure Sarah wouldn’t gamble,’ he said again. ‘We didn’t even have board games in the house.’