Maxwell's Point Read online

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ Hall had been put through to the Head of Sixth Form’s office by Thingee on reception. ‘Henry Hall. Something’s come up. Could we meet for lunch?’

  Lunch was on Henry Hall. In Maxwell’s case, it was a man-size egg and cress baguette from Mr Indigestion’s in the High Street, washed down with an amusing lime-hinted Diet Coke.

  ‘So, Detective Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell was wiping a veritable meadow of cress from his lips. ‘This bribery is all well and good, but to what do I owe the pleasure?’

  Hall looked at the man through those infuriatingly blank glasses. How often had he and Maxwell done this, gone head to head in the arena of sudden death, like two battle-weary old gladiators? He’d actually lost count. ‘Two children,’ the DCI said, ‘who may have been the first to find the body of David Taylor.’

  ‘Children?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘I thought it was the Downers, a holidaying couple?’

  ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the Advertiser,’ Hall told him. ‘Still less the Daily Mail.’

  Actually, it was what Maxwell’s partner Detective Sergeant Carpenter had told him, but Maxwell wasn’t about to shop her to the rozzers. ‘Say on.’

  ‘Daniel Pearson,’ Hall confided, ‘and Scott Thomas.’

  ‘Well, well,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘The Leopold and Loeb of Year Ten.’

  ‘I take it you know them,’ Hall said. He never beamed.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. Mr Diamond has given the pair of them a damned good letting off on more than one occasion for crimes ranging from spitting on the sidewalk to high treason. You’ve spoken to them?’

  ‘Not personally and not in this context,’ Hall said. ‘But they are known to us, yes.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand…’ Maxwell was at his most arch.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you do, Mr Maxwell.’ The DCI would have smiled at this moment had he been a smiling man. It was Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham all over again, dear old Errol Flynn clashing swords with even dearer old Basil Rathbone. The point was that both of them thought they were Errol. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it,’ Hall said, ‘I feel sure that you can make headway where we cannot. They might talk to you when they won’t talk to us. Get my drift?’

  Maxwell nodded, washing down the baguette with the rare vintage. ‘In the trust stakes, yes, I suppose I do. What do you want to know?’

  Hall weighed up his options, but the truth was he was in blood stepped in so far that to go back now might lose him a murderer. He’d trusted Maxwell before; he’d have to do it again. ‘Anything,’ he said, as cryptic as the late Peter Sellers’ Clouseau, but without the mirth. ‘Everything. We know they found the body before the Downers and they ran. They may, inadvertently, have seen something else. How will you do it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘How will you broach the subject?’

  ‘I’m a historian, Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell bridled. ‘We have a hundred ways. Before Political Correctness, Inclusion and Assessment for Learning, I’d merely have lit matches under the lads’ fingernails and stood well back until they screamed their confessions. Now…well, more subtle measures will have to prevail.’

  Hall raised his hands. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Better I don’t know.’ He checked his watch. ‘Do you have to be somewhere?’ he asked.

  ‘Always,’ Maxwell looked nobly into the middle distance. ‘The chalkface.’

  The chalkface these days was actually the Interactive Whiteboard. Maxwell had fought a long and bitter campaign for the last three years on this front. The rest of his Department, whose total ages added up to twenty-two, had all clamoured for these revolutionary gadgets which created instant lessons, charting progression, regression, made Realms and expanded Trade and Industry. Maxwell’s reply was always the same. He reached out for a board-marker and, with deadly aim, wrote one word on the glossy surface. ‘Bollocks.’ Whiteboards he had accepted. It was a wrench but he’d thrown his chalk away one damp, depressing morning in March and had never looked back. No more white powder all over his hush-puppies and in his trouser turn-ups. He’d given up hashish too. But Interactive? Never. He’d die in a ditch first. Paul Moss, the long-suffering mixed infant who was nominally his boss tried to come the professional. Sue Davenant had wept all over him, as she did most weeks and to little effect. Debbie Mitchell toyed with a quick seduction in the stock cupboard; he was actually quite a dish, was Peter Maxwell, if you liked your men older. All to no avail. Whiteboards and markers and whiskers on kittens – they had become a few of Peter Maxwell’s favourite things and any further, he point-blank refused to go.

  When old Boney was a warrior, facing, as he almost always did, two enemies and a war on two fronts, he adopted the best tactics; take on the nearer or bigger bastard and hit him again and again until he gives in. Then turn on the second one and it’s only a matter of time. Piece of cake.

  ‘So, Danny.’ The master strategist sat behind his desk, his hand tucked into his waistcoat that Wednesday afternoon, as though the field of Marengo lay before him in the blistering heat. ‘How are you doing with Miss Davenant?’

  Now, Danny Pearson had the hots for Miss Davenant. And Peter Maxwell knew he did. Danny was only in Year Ten, but he realised the mad old bastard wasn’t asking about his love life. ‘All right,’ he mumbled. An unprepossessing little toerag was Danny Pearson. He had a partially shaved head and an earring, an impending ASBO and upwards of six syndromes, but his heart was in the right place – something of a rarity in these days of genetic modification.

  ‘You see,’ Maxwell explained, ‘I like to check on my people, when they move on. Remember the fun we had in History lessons in Year Nine?’

  Danny did, but he’d die rather than admit it.

  ‘Now, we’re nearly at the end of Year Ten – over halfway through your GCSE course. Doesn’t time fly, eh?’

  It wasn’t a question Danny had ever been asked before. He didn’t really have an answer for it.

  ‘It’s just that, well, Miss Davenant is very pleased with you.’

  Danny’s cynical young heart missed a beat. Miss was very pleased with him. Maybe she’d go out with him now, ride on the cross bar of his mountain-bike, let him snog her back of the Asda store.

  ‘At least, she was…’ Danny’s fantasy bubble was burst at once by the party pooper that was Peter Maxwell, ‘…until about two weeks ago. Then she noticed it all went downhill.’

  This was news to Danny. He’d been failing to meet his target grade for some time now. In fact, looking back, he wasn’t sure he’d ever met it; much more likely to meet his Maker, in the fullness of time.

  ‘Tell me, did anything happen…anything go wrong about two weeks ago? That would be the end of June.’

  ‘No,’ Danny shrugged.

  Maxwell frowned and leaned back, locking his hands behind his head. ‘You see, Danny, that’s not how Scott tells it.’

  Danny blinked. ‘Scott don’t do History,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed not,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘And I think he’s already beginning to regret that. No, it’s his Maths that’s coming unstuck, isn’t it?’

  Danny didn’t know. The pair of them talked about football. And girls. They still had peeing contests to see whose range was longer. And they’d both discovered that essential teenage accessory – Lynx, or how to clear a classroom in seconds flat. What they never, ever did was talk about school work – it was just too depressing.

  ‘No, Scott thinks it was finding the body like that. It must have been a shock.’

  Maxwell counted silently to five before Danny came back with the predictable, ‘What body?’

  Maxwell laughed. ‘What body?’ he repeated. ‘What dead mouse in Mrs Clitheroe’s English lesson in Year Seven, Danny? What graffiti calling into question Mr Ryan’s parentage in the boys’ loos in Year Eight? What about the fire alarm on Speech Day?’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ Danny blurted. ‘That was…’

  ‘Tall Chlo
e,’ Maxwell said softly. ‘Yes, I know.’

  And there he had it; in that one sentence. Mad Max knew. He knew everything. Even things that Danny Pearson didn’t know he knew, he knew. So Scott had dobbed him in, dobbed in both of them. What a shit. Still, Danny and Scotto went back a long way. He’d have had his reasons. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Yeah. It shakes you up, Mr Maxwell, finding something like that.’

  He checked his son sleeping at the end of another long day. What milestones the lad had passed, what firsts, was impossible to say. As had become the pattern by now, Nolan spent the weekdays with Pam and either Jacquie or Maxwell would fetch him on their way home. Everybody at Leighford High knew which one it was because the contraption would be buckled behind Surrey’s saddle and Norman Westbury would pat it admiringly – ‘a little thing, but mine own’.

  All was well. Maxwell checked his watch. It would be an hour before Jacquie was back from her particular chalkface. Time for a little M and R – modelling and relaxation. Lieutenant Landriani hadn’t really progressed in the last few days. He still only had one arm and the cigar in his mouth, though to scale, was an unlikely white. His horse had no reins and no crupper. How the man was supposed to guide him one and a half miles down the Valley of Death was anyone’s guess.

  ‘It shook them up, Count,’ Maxwell was in his modelling cap, light on, magnifying glass at the ready, pyrogravure heating quietly to his left. ‘Funny how these kids are such hard men until something like this happens, isn’t it? I saw Danny first. I didn’t think he’d crack so easily, but he did. Scott was a piece of cake, as predicted. Poor little bugger was in tears when I’d finished.’

  Metternich was unimpressed. He’d seen it all over the years. His victims cried too – mice with wives and kids, shrews with so much to live for. You couldn’t let it get to you. They all had to go. He was a tom, for God’s sake. There were standards. Oh, all right, the ones he’d felt sorry for, he’d let go under a building somewhere, but there was a strict quota of these. And only on Thursdays. Otherwise, animals might talk.

  ‘They’d been larking about on the coastal path on their bikes. And, yes, it was them who’d trashed Mr Harris’s flower beds and one of them – Danny said it was Scott; Scott said it was Danny – saw something shining in the grass. At the Point, that is, not the Gardens. They went to investigate. This would have been, ooh, half six, seven, I suppose. Yes, I know – the time when they should have been doing their homework. Danny – or was it Scott – picked it up. Only it was stuck, so whoever it was pulled harder. And a hand came up with it. Chewed, Danny said, like it had been eaten. You and I, of course, denizen of the night, know it as rodent infestation. Now, now, no slavering. But it was Danny who went back for the thing, so I can only assume it was Scott who dropped it.’

  He rummaged in his pocket and placed the object under the light and the magnifying glass. ‘What do you think that is, Count?’

  The cat glanced at it, shining in the brightness. Then, he looked away, suddenly far more interested in chomping on his left armpit.

  ‘Well, thank you for that,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s jewellery, certainly. But whose? And what? Part of a…what? Brooch? Medallion? Wide Boy Taylor was the king of bling, apparently, so it’s not too surprising that the boys found it there. Remind me to check with the Mem when she gets home. The lab report would have something on this, surely. A broken piece of jewellery, or place where something has been detached. We shall see.’

  He held the little silver thing up to the light again, his eyes dazzled by the reflections of its scales. ‘It’s a lizard, Count. A little silver lizard. Taylor’s? Or his killer’s? A calling card? Or a deadly mistake that before 1965 would have placed a noose around somebody’s neck?’

  Metternich slithered off his linen-basket perch and sauntered past Maxwell. For a moment, he toyed with taking a chunk out of the old man’s leg, but it would be probably too sinewy to waste good muscle-power on, so he abandoned the project and headed for the stairs.

  ‘Mind ’ow you go, Count,’ Maxwell called, in his best Dixon of Dock Green. It was all, of course, wasted on the cat, who only ever watched Sky.

  As artists go, Geraldine Buck wasn’t hugely successful. But that didn’t really matter in the scheme of things, because Greg, her husband, was something in the City and they could afford to indulge Geraldine’s passion for the sea. She had a studio flat out beyond the Shingle, not very far from Dead Man’s Point, and in the summer months, she’d taken to strolling along the beach beyond Willow Bay, where the pebbles threatened to turn your ankles and the stench of the bladderwrack washed up on them could turn your stomach. It all helped her particular Muse, she said and she liked it best on windy evenings when the surf was a roaring demon, bellowing along the shore, and the gulls cried in panic, wheeling desperately to find land and a safe haven for the night.

  It was calm now, like a millpond, the sea far distant as if it had given up its daily battle with the land and was retreating for ever. The flies were a nuisance on nights like this, maddening around your ears and fluttering in and out of your curls. And they seemed focused on the dark bundle that lay ahead. Geraldine got closer, her sandalled feet slipping as the pebbles gave way beneath her and she muttered as yet another patch of tar held her fast for a second.

  What was that? She found herself frowning as she neared it. The smell was appalling. Those bastards who dumped rubbish from ships. How dare they? There ought to be a law. There was, presumably, a law.

  But this was no ordinary rubbish. This, black and battered by the tide, was a man. Geraldine felt the hairs on her neck crawl as she realised. Then she screamed. Then she vomited. Then she ran.

  What would you do if you found a whale; a whale on the beach that shouldn’t be there?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There was still a crowd beyond the fluttering tape by the time the moon came out. They were mostly holiday-makers, grockles the locals called them, who would have something a bit different to write about on their postcards to granny. ‘It ain’t half hot, Gran, and we all looked at a cadaver today.’

  One who stood there, by the cordon where the police had placed them, was watching events more closely than the rest. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He pulled his hood further over his head as the night on the beach gradually became more chill.

  For the locals, it was becoming business as usual in a grim sort of way. The SOCO team looked like a bad Sci-Fi Doomsday scenario, from a B-movie in the Fifties, wandering the beach in their white, translucent suits, hooded and masked as if an outbreak of Ebola had just occurred.

  ‘Have you any idea, guv, how much evidence there is on this bloody beach?’ It had been welling up inside Geoff Hare for some time. He’d been here nearly three hours, not suited up like the others, but receiving their reports on a minute-by-minute basis. Bottles, cans, nappies, broken bits of this and that were carefully collected, labelled, photographed, stashed in black bags in the back of patrol cars and vans. Cynics might see this as a particularly vicious ploy by some environmentalist group to enforce a carrying out of beach clearance.

  Yes, in answer to Hare’s question, DCI Hall had a very good idea. He’d seen it all being collected too and this was not his first body on a beach. The irony was, he knew deep down that this was all irrelevant. Jim Astley had got it right, as he usually did. Jim Astley had gone home now, muttering about his bedtime and his sciatica, as though the two were somehow linked.

  Hall didn’t answer his sergeant but wandered back into the canvas erected over the corpse. The arc lights were still on, throwing the body into sharp relief. He was a slightly built man; Astley reckoned in his late thirties. His head, or what was left of it, had a shock of tumbling blond hair à la the early Hugh Grant and his eyes were grey. There was a mass of blood matted into the hair across the forehead and there was no doubt in the minds of either the policeman or the pathologist that the man had fallen from a great height. The presumption was that that height was the cliffs toweri
ng above the beach at Dead Man’s Point. It was the fall that killed him, pulverising the left side of his face and driving the jagged stones into his skull.

  Henry Hall nodded to the SOCO boys waiting for orders. ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘Bag this one if you’ve done. That’s tomorrow’s little task for Dr Astley.’

  The only question was, Hall was thinking as he went outside, grateful for the cool air of the beach, did you fall or were you pushed? He looked up to the black eminence of the Point against the paler purple of the night sky. There were stars tumbling above him and the ghostly glimmer of the quartered moon. And he didn’t know why, but the phrase lover’s leap crept into his mind.

  The great thing about the dog-end of a school year – now, promise you won’t tell – is that the timetable tends to implode. Year 13 have gone; so, at least until September, have Year 11. And Year 7 have yet to arrive. So those lazy bastards at the chalkface, who already, be it noted, have thirteen weeks holiday a year, actually have that untold luxury, time off during the day. A bit like: publishers, policemen, retail workers, post office personnel, doctors, dentists and just about everybody else.

  So it was that Thursday morning, as the sun climbed again in the heavens and hose-pipe bans came into force with all the majesty of the law, that Peter Maxwell somersaulted neatly over the barbed wire perimeter fence around Stalagleighford, landed squarely in the saddle of White Surrey and pedalled like an escapee for the Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, his arrival in the car park coincided with that of a coach-party from Grimsby.

  ‘Aye up, chuck. Look at t’prices ’ere.’

  ‘Ee, it don’t bear thinkin’ about, does that.’

  ‘Well, I never.’

  ‘Not like this at ’ome.’