Maxwell's Point Page 14

  ‘Years at the PACE Face will do that to you,’ Jacquie scowled. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what’s to know? She’s Juanita’s age. From Barcelona. Sweet enough kid. McConnell seems to rate her.’

  ‘Come on, Max,’ Jacquie said. ‘You invented body language, remember? You’ve sussed nearly as many murderers as I have. Was she telling the truth?’

  ‘She was upset…’ Maxwell began, knowing at once his mistake.

  Jacquie laughed. ‘So that’s it. Pretty little Spanish teacher comes all little girlie, squeezes out a few tears and you fall for it. Max, you’ve got a heart like the great outdoors, but you’ll never learn, will you?’

  ‘So you don’t buy it, then?’

  ‘We need to put out an All Points for Juanita,’ Jacquie sniffed, serious now. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t like the smell of it. You going to eat that last pickled onion?’

  ‘We’ve met, surely?’ Mrs Henderson sat in her living room. The newly bereaved didn’t talk in hushed tones any more, wearing black and sitting in the ghostly silence of a curtained room, trying to converse with the dead. True, it wasn’t exactly party time at the Henderson’s, but the dead man’s relict knew that, somehow, life had to go on.

  ‘We have,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘The last time we met we were talking about your au pair, who subsequently became ours.’

  ‘Of course.’ Fiona Henderson clicked her fingers. ‘I’d forgotten you were with the police. Has Juanita turned up?’

  ‘No,’ Jacquie told her. ‘That’s really why I’m here.’

  ‘I thought it would be to do with Gerald,’ the widow said. She crossed the lounge, pausing briefly by the photographs on the mantelpiece before standing to gaze out of the window at the summerhouse in a bower of rhododendrons. ‘He loved that place,’ she said softly. ‘Spent hours there. Not about Gerald?’ She’d turned suddenly to Jacquie, snapping out of whatever memories held her.

  ‘No, Mrs Henderson – Fiona – we can’t possibly know how you feel at the moment. The Incident Team is doing all it can, but the sad reality is there are other problems which are ongoing. I take it you haven’t seen or heard from Juanita?’

  Fiona Henderson shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Your husband asked me the same thing.’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘Since then, however, we’ve had further information. Look, I hate to bring this up at a time like this. You’ve got plenty on your plate as it is, but…why did you let Juanita go?’

  The widow of Tottingleigh crossed to her late husband’s drinks cabinet. She poured herself a straight gin and didn’t offer one to Jacquie. ‘I told your husband,’ she said levelly. ‘Katie was growing up. We thought boarding school would be best.’

  Jacquie chose her moment. ‘It wasn’t because she was light-fingered, was it, Fiona? Juanita, I mean. I mean, did anything go missing?’

  ‘Missing?’ Mrs Henderson had an odd look on her face, as if something had occurred to her for the first time. ‘No, nothing was missing. I never had any reason to doubt Juanita’s honesty. What makes you think there was?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘A lot of our time is taken up by gossip-mongering, rumour, innuendo. Nine times out of ten it’s malicious or just plain wrong.’

  ‘Has the girl stolen anything from you?’ Fiona asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jacquie had to admit. ‘That’s what’s so odd about it. Some people seem to think she’s a thief.’

  ‘If there…if there should be any news of Gerald’s murderer,’ Fiona was staring at Jacquie, her blue eyes burning into her brain, ‘I’d be so grateful to hear.’

  Jacquie stood up, reaching out to touch the woman’s arm. Fiona Henderson was rigid, like a broomstick wearing clothes. She didn’t smile. Didn’t move. Jacquie’s hand fell away. ‘You will,’ she told her. ‘I promise you, you will.’

  As she made her way alone over the gravel drive, her shoes crunching on the loose stones, she glanced back at the huge house with its stone animals and leaded panes and Lichtenstein-sized conservatory. But Jacquie Carpenter had made promises before; promises she had every intention of keeping, but somehow never had. Mothers waiting for their children to come home; children who had gone forever. Wives waiting for their husbands; only to see them again pale and waxen in the morgue. The police tried to solve them all, all the cases that came their way, but some refused to break and tired men and women hit brick wall after brick wall and in the end, the promises they made were broken. And clear-up rates became depressing statistics in the Sunday papers. ‘You will,’ she heard the voice re-echo in her head. ‘I promise you, you will.’

  Only a tiny handful – the select – know what happens in Senior Management Team meetings. An unholy trinity sat in the less-than-palatial office of James Diamond that Monday afternoon. Diamond himself, of course, three-piece suited, rimless specs, with a higher degree in Crisis Management. In front of him, two-piece suited, a graduate of the School of Incompetence, sat Bernard Ryan, who was so often the head’s mouthpiece. And across the room, casting no shadow whatsoever in the bright July sun, Dierdre Lessing, Leighford’s own Cruella de Ville, sat writhing on the husked corpses of the men whose blood she had sucked.

  There was only one topic of conversation on the agenda – the removal of Peter Maxwell.

  ‘Appalling,’ Dierdre Lessing was saying. ‘Always has been, ever since I’ve known him. A law unto himself. It doesn’t matter what initiative you bring in, James, he ignores it. The man’s a dodo.’

  ‘He’s a very good Head of Sixth Form, Dierdre,’ James Diamond had to concede. ‘And he certainly knows his history.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ growled Dierdre. ‘That’s because he was there at the time. You mark my words, James. Get rid of him and Leighford will be a better school overnight.’

  ‘Bernard?’ Diamond looked at his deputy. ‘You’re very quiet.’

  ‘I have to share Dierdre’s viewpoint on this one, James,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve all basked in this man’s shadow for long enough. Surely, he’s past retiring age.’

  Diamond shrugged. ‘Not unless he’s sneaked into County Hall and doctored his records. And you both know as well as I do there are very precise rules covering dismissal. Maxwell would have to be a lot madder than the students claim to go down that road.’

  ‘Would he?’ Dierdre raised an eyebrow. ‘Would he indeed? You know, sometimes, James, there is only one road to take. In Maxwell’s case, it’s the Via Dolorosa, the road of tears. Perhaps he ought to be ready to shed them now.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  What was it that drew Peter Maxwell back to Dead Man’s Point? The weather was still idyllic, recalling the summer of ’76, the little rivulets that ran into the Leigh long ago dried up and not a little smelly as the July days roasted on. He could smell the tar burning on Ringer’s Hill as he straightened in Surrey’s saddle to take the rise. The horizon shimmered in the heat, even though it was past four o’clock, and Surrey’s handlebars were a blur of sizzling chrome.

  Perfect time for an ice cream, really, so Maxwell hurtled right, oblivious to on-coming traffic, and swung out of the saddle, Marion Morrison style, before parking the snorting, hissing beast in the shelter of the oaks. It was crowded up here today, the sun dazzling on car windscreens and everybody vying with everybody else with the extensive dead insect collection stuck to their bonnets and bumpers. Children – who should have been at school, by the way – laughed and frolicked in the yellowed grass behind the cars, but Peter Maxwell only had eyes for Luigi.

  ‘A Ninety Nine, my man, if you please.’ Maxwell swept off his hat and wiped the sweat from his eyes. Time to loosen the bow tie, perhaps.

  The tall figure in the shadow of the ice cream van pressed buttons and pulled levers. ‘Two quid, mate.’

  Maxwell resisted the urge to faint or remonstrate or both; he needed this man’s cooperation. ‘You’re Luigi, aren’t you?’ He slurped the ice cream before it trickled all over his hand.

/>   ‘That’s what it says on the van, mate.’

  ‘You’re the one who found the body, then,’ Maxwell beamed, breathing in awe in the presence of a famous person.

  ‘Sort of,’ Luigi leaned forward on his elbows, a smear of strawberry Goodacre all over his apron.

  ‘That must have been…amazing.’ Maxwell shook his head in incomprehension. ‘I read about it in the paper.’

  ‘What, the Advertiser?’ Luigi snorted, reaching over for a flask of tea. ‘You don’t want to believe anything you read in that load of bollocks, mate.’

  ‘So what they said you said you didn’t say, then?’

  ‘What?’ Luigi looked perplexed. Sentences like that threw him, as they would most people. ‘Well, some of it, yeah. But I notice they didn’t print my theory, did they?’

  Maxwell tucked the flake in the corner of his mouth. Was it his imagination or were they smaller than they used to be? ‘You’ve got a theory?’ He was agog. ‘Oh well, of course you have. Having found the body and everything.’

  ‘Well, of course, I don’t know.’

  ‘No, no,’ Maxwell was licking like a thing possessed to beat the effect of the sun’s rays on his Ninety Nine. ‘Of course not, I realise that.’

  ‘So what’s your interest?’ Luigi asked.

  ‘I’m just morbidly curious,’ Maxwell beamed.

  Luigi looked at him. ‘Oh, right. You local?’

  ‘Ish,’ Maxwell shrugged.

  Luigi leaned even further out of his van, checking from left to right. A potential Twister-buyer was making his way from his car, so he had to make this snappy. ‘There’s this bloke, right. Don’t know his name. He’s a pervert. Wears a vest and skimpy shorts.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen him around,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘He’s always up here. Courting couples, see. Of an evening. I mean, I don’t care. As long as they buy the odd choc ice, I don’t give a flying Magnum what else they’re doing. But him, well – he’s a watcher.’

  ‘A watcher?’

  Luigi looked at the man over his shades. How much more explicit could he be? ‘Flasher, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘You’ve seen this?’ Maxwell checked. ‘Flashing, I mean.’

  ‘Leave it out, mate,’ Luigi said. ‘I’m happily married. I don’t have no time for weirdos like that. Afternoon, sir? Twister?’ Luigi prided himself on his retail typology.

  ‘No, I’ll have a Solero, please.’

  Maxwell was actually grateful for the interruption. It gave him time while the customer was being served to demolish his Ninety Nine with what remained of his dignity, ice cream dribbling down his wrist as it was.

  ‘But he was up here, was he?’ Maxwell asked when the Solero-buyer had gone. ‘On the day in question?’

  ‘No, mate, look,’ Luigi had watched Silent Witness; he knew his onions. ‘You haven’t got the hang of this at all. When they…I…found the body, it had been in the grave for…ooh, about two weeks. Now, this bloke, this weirdo – he wouldn’t be up here when I found it, would he? No, he’d have been up here two weeks earlier when he buried him.’

  ‘And he was?’

  ‘Sure,’ Luigi sipped his lukewarm tea. ‘Off and on all over June.’

  ‘Did he buy an ice cream?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did he buy from you? Talk to you?’

  ‘From time to time,’ Luigi nodded, building up his part. ‘He’s a bit of a regular of mine, in fact.’

  ‘And you don’t know his name?’

  ‘Ah, well, no, not in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Did you report him to the police?’

  Luigi snorted. ‘The boys in blue?’ he snarled. ‘I’ve had the odd run-in with those bastards meself in my time – licensing issues, you understand. You might as well talk Swahili to those blokes. ’Course,’ Luigi became all confidential again. ‘They had me in the frame for a while, you know.’

  ‘Never!’ Maxwell had been lolling against the van, but now he stood upright with the knocked-on sense of outrage. ‘Why?’

  ‘Procedure, apparently.’ The ice cream man put his cup down and rested on his hands on the counter. ‘The sad, stupid bastards think that because you find a body, you must have put it there. As if I’d be that stupid!’

  ‘As if!’ Maxwell guffawed along with the man. ‘But I thought it was a couple who found the deceased.’

  ‘A couple?’ Luigi straightened. ‘Cobblers! Couple of low lifes trying to gain some notoriety, that’s who they were.’

  ‘Can you see it from here?’ Maxwell asked. ‘The murder scene?’

  ‘Nah,’ Luigi shook his head. ‘It’s back there, past them trees. Where some stupid bastard’s left his bike.’

  ‘Hmm,’ nodded Maxwell. ‘Tell me, Luigi, this flasher of yours…’

  ‘Now, let me stop you there, mate,’ the ice cream man said firmly. ‘I told you – he’s not my flasher. I’m a happily married man. Got two kids. I can’t stand blokes like that. Gives us all a bad name, don’t it?’

  ‘All right,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Figure of speech. Have you seen him since? Since you found the body, I mean?’

  ‘Nah,’ Luigi shook his head. ‘Nah, he’s done a runner. You mark my words. He’ll be long gone by now.’

  ‘What about the second body?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘The one in the Botanical Gardens?’

  ‘I don’t know nothing about that one, mate. I don’t work that patch.’

  ‘But they must be linked, surely?’ Maxwell played the ingénue to perfection. ‘I mean, it stands to reason. Two middle-aged blokes found murdered within days and a mile of each other. Did the flasher kill him too?’

  ‘Could of,’ Luigi shrugged. A man like him could only really handle one murder at a time.

  ‘So, come on then,’ Maxwell egged him on. ‘You’re the theory man. What’s the motive? You’ve got the bloke – it’s the weirdo flasher. Why did he do it?’

  ‘Well,’ Luigi was leaning on his elbows again. On the one hand he could do with a bit more trade. On the other, he was giving this matey the benefit of his gigantic brain, so…‘It’s like this.’

  ‘Either,’ Maxwell’s Luigi was impressive and Jacquie sat giggling at him over their evening drinkie. ‘Either, the flasher is a queer who gets his rocks off by killing his victims. Or,’ his second index finger had joined the first, ‘they were his willing partners in sordid disgusting sex until his depraved, unnatural demands got too much for them. Or…’ Maxwell, like Luigi, had run out of hands, ‘they’d both caught him flashing at their wives or girlfriends and in trying to give him a smacking, he’d sort of turned the tables and given them one instead.’

  Jacquie shook her head laughing. ‘And all you wanted was a Ninety Nine,’ she said.

  ‘I presume he didn’t burden your colleagues with those incisive stabs of logic?’

  ‘I think I seem to remember Benny Palister drawing the short straw on that one. Conspiracy Theories Are Us. Needless to say, the lad didn’t actually write much down.’

  ‘Well, we were just about to explore the likelihood of alien abduction, anal probes and animal mutilation when the Undecided Family from Kent arrived and it was clear that darkness was going to fall before they placed an order. I took the opportunity to grab Surrey and do a runner. Or should I say a pedaller?’

  ‘Well, now you know how we feel,’ Jacquie was smug, sipping her Southern Comfort. She joined Maxwell in his favourite tipple when there was a ‘y’ in the day. ‘For every villain we get who won’t tell you his name, we get a dozen oddballs prepared to shop their granny if it gets their name in the papers.’

  ‘The odd thing is,’ Maxwell said, lolling back on the settee and staring at the lampglow on the ceiling, ‘I think I know the weirdo in question.’

  ‘What?’ Jacquie frowned. ‘Do you mean he’s real?’

  ‘Nolan and I were out at The Dam the other day – improving the boy’s navigational and
cycling skills – when a gentleman faintly answering Luigi’s description came out of nowhere in the bracken.’

  ‘Max, you don’t think there’s anything in this, do you?’

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell laughed. ‘If he is one and the same, we can rule out Luigi’s final theory. The bloke I saw was nine stone wringing wet. He’s not likely to have been able to take out not one, but two heavyweights and cart their bodies to out-of-the-way places.’

  ‘Even so,’ Jacquie said. ‘I’m going to get young Benny on to that tomorrow. Time we blew some dust off the local sex offenders file.’

  Dorset Police found Juanita Reyes’ Hyundai that Wednesday morning. It was parked in a farmer’s gateway, completely hidden from the road, just off the A35 out of Bournemouth. It contained the usual detritus that people collect in their vehicles – old Tesco receipts, a ticket to see War of the Worlds, an empty Shloer bottle. There was some lipstick in the glove compartment along with a log book, maintenance manual and a box of antihistamine tablets.

  The coppers who found it phoned it in, stuck the Police Aware sticker on the windows, back and front, and left it where it was until they could get a tow truck. And all the way back to the station, they were arguing over whether or not that car was a scene of crime.

  Henry Hall hated himself at moments like these. Moments plural because he’d done this before. He was sitting in his air-conditioned Lexus on the broad sweep of the Downs overlooking Leighford. His patch. His manor. His town. Up here, the cloudless sky was an impossible blue, like the postcards they sold down the Sea Front. The scene was silent, except for the occasional whine of a speedboat, slicing silver through the sea, and the faint coming and going of the dated Muzak from the fairground.

  Next to him sat that most unlikely passenger, Peter Maxwell. And Maxwell, too, had been here before. He knew all the signs. When he, Maxwell, was in the way, treading on toes, making a thorough-going nuisance of himself, then it was ‘Hands off’ via Hall’s underlings; gentle persuasion from Jacquie; the cold shoulder from everyone else. When Hall needed help, it was different. The DCI was too much of a professional – and a gentleman – to send Jacquie Carpenter to do a senior detective’s work, so he’d go himself to the mountain that was Peter Maxwell.