Maxwell’s Curse Page 17

  ‘That’s Bull,’ Barney said. ‘His wife left him today. He’s a bit upset.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Maxwell, dropping his tweed hat onto Bull’s head. ‘I can see he is. Ever read any Conan Doyle, Barney?’ he asked his man, suddenly unable to remember whether Barney could read at all.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Nah,’ Barney drew heavily on a wizened rollup. ‘I seen the films, though.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Dear old Basil and even dearer old Nigel Bruce. So you know what a Baker Street irregular is then?’

  ‘No,’ Barney looked blank. ‘An occasional shit?’

  Rather than give his man time to suggest any more possibilities, Maxwell said, ‘People employed by the world’s greatest detective to watch the streets, finger the undesirables, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t think I follow,’ Barney muttered.

  Maxwell dug into the inside pocket of his coat. ‘Seen this bloke before?’ he asked.

  Barney tried to focus on the photograph. He’d had a few. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Should I?’

  Maxwell dug deeper and found his wallet. ‘Here’s a brand spanking new twenty spot, Barney, keep you in ciggies for a day or two. There’s another thirty if you spot this man.’

  Barney looked at the photograph again, the dark wavy hair, the limp grin. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’ Bull stirred and muttered from his position of oblivion on the table. ‘If you see this guy on the Barlichway, I want you to follow him. No contact. Just eyeballing. Watch where he goes, what he does. This bloke,’ he pulled out a second photograph, ‘might be with him.’

  ‘Fair enough, Mr Maxwell.’

  Yardley arrived with the drinks tray.

  ‘And Barney,’ Maxwell tapped the side of his nose, ‘this is our little secret, okay?’ And as Yardley stood there, looking down at them in a puzzled sort of way, Maxwell and Barney looked up at him and chorused, ‘Yeah?’

  Martin Stone slammed the door of his Peugeot. It sounded oddly muffled in the night. He wasn’t a poetic man, but he paused briefly as he reached his front door and looked at the pavement, a powdery Cartland pink under the street light. The heaviness of the snow-clouds had gone and the stars were sharp as diamonds overhead, so close you could reach out and touch them.

  He put his key in the lock and went into the darkened hall. There was no sound, other than the soft padding of the old spaniel that snuffled out to meet him. Deaf or gaga or too old to care, the animal had not barked at his master’s footfalls in the drive or the sound of the lock’s rattle. He sniffed and whined as Stone patted him briefly.

  ‘What’s the matter, boy? Everybody gone to bed and left you?’ He went into the kitchen, switching on lights as he went. He looked in the huge chest freezer, toying with an Indian. Then he looked in the fridge, throwing his coat onto a chair. He pulled out a carton of milk, then thought twice. ‘Ah, stuff it,’ he said and mechanically put it back, checking that the back door was locked and the central heating set right. He clicked off the light and climbed the stairs.

  There was a glow from the nursery and he popped his head round the door. Janey’s cot was empty, the little half moon mobile twirling above it glowing luminous in the dim light. His eldest little bundle of joy was with his mother in Littlehampton. He wondered briefly how much grief she was giving her. Little Sam’s cot was empty too. Alex had obviously put the baby in with her. He nipped into the bathroom, too tired to wash or clean his teeth. Another bitch of a day. He looked in the mirror before deciding on a pee. That business with Jacquie Carpenter had rattled him. He’d thought he was all right with Jacquie; that she was no threat to him. But now he wasn’t so sure. Now he’d have to watch his back.

  He switched off the light and fumbled into his own room. The second cot in there was empty and more importantly, so was the bed. He reached the lamp and its light flooded the room. No one had slept here recently. The bed was made and cold. There was no indentation on the pillow. Alex’s photo smiled at him from the bookcase.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, no,’ he whispered. ‘Not again.’

  12a

  ‘Good Morning, Count,’ Maxwell drifted through from the kitchen, still wearing his dressing-gown. ‘Yes, I know,’ he could read the feline’s astonished whisker movement a hundred yards away, ‘it’s only half past six and your master is already upright, adopting that unnatural position to which your lot could never hope to aspire. But don’t get me on the iniquities of evolution or we’ll be here all day.’

  Metternich had no intention of talking evolution or anything else philosophical. He intended to lick his armpits and that’s precisely what he did.

  ‘The village,’ Maxwell had a pad of file paper open on the coffee table and a pen in his hand. ‘Not the place where they imprisoned poor old Patrick McGoohan in the good old days of television, but Wetherton. The Saxon scholar in you, Count, realizes the derivation of the place name – the ton or settlement of Wether, some local Wessex warlord, I suspect.’

  Metternich slurped loudly on some clump of fur – ‘Hunnermuhorkpork.’

  ‘But, to more pressing matters. Here,’ he sketched as he spoke, ‘is the church. Here, the school. If I remember aright, the hostelry is over this way. There’s a post office, I think. Cluster of houses. A green, with or without maypole … and that’s it. That’s all I can remember. Population? Yes, good question, Count. Two less with the rapid departure of the rector and the headmistress; although, strictly speaking, Ms Thorn didn’t live in Wetherton. So, where do we start?’ Maxwell tapped his teeth with his Biro. ‘Indeed. Mrs Spooner.’

  Wednesday afternoons were a godsend to Peter Maxwell. He had a joyous clump of free periods during which, every early Autumn, he lied on the UCAS forms about the hopefuls applying for university and at other times he marked crap. This Wednesday, however, he’d checked with the sadist who arranged cover lessons and told him he’d be out. ‘Peter Maxwell has left the building’ echoed around the corridors of Leighford High as the Great Man bundled into Sylvia Matthews’ car and they did a runner through the school gate.

  ‘No bike today, Max?’ she asked him.

  ‘Having an oil change, Sylv,’ he said.

  ‘So how will you get back? You know I can’t stay.’

  ‘See this,’ he raised his thumb. ‘Man’s oldest tool. It’s wonderful really and so underrated. You just stick it in the air and cars come screeching to a halt, their drivers falling over each other to be of service, only too pleased to help their fellow man.’

  ‘Mad,’ she chuckled. ‘Stark raving mad.’

  He kissed her goodbye at the lych-gate and watched as the Clio snarled away in a cloud of exhaust. Up here on the Weald, the snow had gone overnight but the hoar frost still gripped the hedgerows and looked set to stay all day. As his feet crunched on the gravel drive, he saw the flowers, still a fresh mass of colour on the unsettled grave of Andrew Darblay. No doubt the old man would secretly have liked to be buried inside, with a fine marble canopy overhead and a three-D likeness of himself in alb and stole; but there was probably some EU directive against it.

  He knocked on the door of the rectory and a small, dark-haired woman answered it.

  ‘Mrs Spooner?’ Maxwell raised his hat.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Peter Maxwell. I came here a few days ago to talk to Mr Darblay. Bad time though this must be, can I talk to you?’

  She hesitated. ‘Are you a reporter?’

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘I’m a teacher.’

  ‘You’d better come in.’

  They talked for nearly two hours, the lonely housekeeper and the Head of Sixth Form. At the end of it, he was no further forward. From what she told him, the late rector was Jesus and Mother Teresa rolled into one. He’d put the Nice into Mr Nice Guy. He thanked Mrs Spooner for her time and crossed to the Falcon in happy hour. In the pale sun of the January afternoon, Maxwell watched the local Wetherton mums, with buggies a
nd siblings in tow, gathering at the corner to collect their kids. The big yellow and white school bus, its engine snarling in the cold, coughed and waited in the no-parking zone outside the school gates.

  ‘You another of them coppers?’ the girl behind the bar asked.

  Maxwell tapped the side of his nose. ‘Didn’t know I was that obvious.’

  ‘Are you blokes supposed to drink on duty?’

  ‘Surveillance,’ Maxwell confided, sipping his pint. ‘Different rules.’

  ‘Yeah?’ the girl’s eyes widened. ‘Who are you surveying, then?’

  ‘Anybody,’ Maxwell’s Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau was lost on the girl. ‘Everybody. Look,’ he was Maxwell again, ‘is this as happy as the hour gets?’ He had already noted the ancient gent dozing in the snug and the two old boys playing shove-ha’penny. Hugger-mugger at the Falcon.

  ‘I told the boss it wasn’t going to work. Happy hour’s supposed to be early evening – catch the punters. After lunch, it’s like a bloody morgue in here.’

  ‘Janet, isn’t it?’

  ‘Trisha,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Trisha. Right. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘All right,’ the girl beamed. Her face took on a radiance when she smiled. Her bright eyes balanced her enormous breasts. ‘I’ll have a vodka and blackcurrant.’

  ‘Shrewd choice,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘You don’t mind me saying this, do you,’ she poured the drink, ‘but aren’t you a bit … well, old for a copper?’

  ‘This is my last case,’ Maxwell said. ‘Wanted to go out in style, write my memoirs, grow petunias.’

  ‘You after the bastard that killed the vicar, yeah?’

  ‘Rector,’ Maxwell corrected her. ‘And the headmistress.’

  ‘Now, that’s what I said,’ Trisha warmed to her theme, clinking Maxwell’s glass and sipping away. ‘I said to the boss the same bloke done ’em both. He said bollocks …’

  ‘What made you think that?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘What, that the boss talks bollocks?’

  ‘The murders.’

  ‘Stands to reason. All that black magic stuff.’

  ‘Black magic?’ Maxwell played the ingénue.

  Trisha edged closer, her breasts enveloping yet more of the bar, obliterating the cutting edge of Strongbow. ‘Look, I don’t know whether you blokes ever talk to each other, but I told your oppo.’

  ‘Oh?’ Maxwell was all ears. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Dunno. Some DS or other. Youngish bloke. Stone, was it? Stonewall? Something. Didn’t seem all that interested.’

  ‘I am,’ Maxwell assured her.

  ‘Well, I read this book once.’

  Maxwell could believe that.

  ‘About this village where they was all at it?’

  ‘At it?’

  ‘Devil worship, you dirty old man.’ Trisha tapped his arm playfully.

  There was a sudden series of grunts from the end of the bar and the ancient gent stood there, coins in his hand, making incomprehensible noises.

  ‘All right, Harold,’ Trisha said loudly. ‘Same again, is it?’ And she poured a frothy pint. ‘Thank you, love.’

  Harold threw the coins on the bar and grunted again.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Trisha laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘That’s what I said, but you know him. Load of bollocks. Bon aperitif,’ and she came scurrying back. ‘Yeah,’ her confidential tone returned, ‘the leader was the vicar and everybody else was involved. They all had … whatsname … cloven hooves.’

  ‘Sort of BSE novel was it?’

  ‘No, cloven hooves. The devil. He’s got horns and a tail, he has. And of course,’ she giggled, ‘a bloody great willy.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Trisha grinned broadly. ‘There was lots of that going on. Women spread over altars and that. The vicar shagging his way through the congregation. Mind you, try getting any of ’em to buy a bloody raffle ticket …’

  ‘And that’s how it is in Wetherton?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Trisha pulled a face. ‘Don’t bear thinking about, does it? I mean, that Darblay bloke was a nice old git, but I can’t see the village crumpet lining up for him, know what I mean? Mind you,’ she leaned forward, whispering with a snigger, ‘Old Harold there’d be up for it.’ Maxwell glanced furtively across to where old Harold had clearly gone to sleep over his pint again. ‘Always sniffing round, he is. We had a spate of knicker-nicking last year.’

  ‘Harold?’ Maxwell was astonished.

  ‘Gives you the creeps, don’t it?’ Trisha shuddered. ‘Thought of his hands in my underwear. Not even my boyfriend gets his hands in there.’

  ‘All right,’ Maxwell said. ‘So what did you tell my oppo?’

  ‘Just this.’ Trisha was serious now, concentrating and staring into Maxwell’s dark eyes. ‘There’s something funny going on. And that Mr Darblay knew something about it.’

  ‘Funny,’ Maxwell murmured. ‘Mrs Spooner didn’t seem to know anything.’

  ‘Well, there you are.’ Trisha’s point was made. ‘She’s more his age, ain’t she? Got an old man with a face like a swede. I think he may have been slipping her one.’

  ‘The rector and the housekeeper?’

  ‘Unnatural, ain’t it?’ Trisha bridled, adjusting her breasts around the mixed nuts. ‘He didn’t get in here often but he was here, funny enough, a day or two before he died. We got talking.’

  ‘Go on.’ They both sipped their drinks.

  ‘He asked me if I’d seen any strangers recently. Anybody like yourself, passing through.’

  ‘And had you?’

  ‘Well, of course. Though we don’t get many this time of year. It’s mostly in the summer. Tourists going up to the Ring, you know. I remembered two or three blokes, couple of women. Vicar said he was looking for a man, though, And,’ Trisha winked, ‘that wouldn’t surprise me neither. You hear such stories, don’t you?’

  ‘Martin, are you all right?’ Jacquie Carpenter was on her way through to the Incident Room.

  ‘Hmm? Sorry.’ Stone was clipping his pen in his inside pocket. ‘I was miles away. What?’

  ‘The guv’nor’s back from the Chief Constable’s.’

  He was. Henry Hall sat behind the long table that ran the length of the old library’s west wall, a piece of paper in his hand. ‘This,’ he said, once the team had settled down, ‘is my resignation.’

  You could have heard a pen drop.

  ‘The Chief Constable has informed me,’ he went on, unblinking, unemotional, ‘that I have until the end of the month. If, by that time, there is no breakthrough, nothing tangible, this letter will be on his desk.’

  ‘That’s not on, guv.’ It was Kevin Brand who broke the silence first.

  There were hear hears all round and a hubbub of protestation. Hall’s hand was in the air. ‘This is not a topic for discussion, lady and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Neither do I mean to put any more pressure on you than you are already under. I merely thought you ought to know. On February 1st, barring some developments, DCI Knight will be taking over the case.’

  More murmurs. More rhubarb. Geoffrey Knight was about as welcome as a dose of clap. Only Martin Stone’s expression hadn’t changed. Martin Stone was elsewhere.

  ‘Serial killers, Count,’ Maxwell was lying on his settee, a glass of Southern Comfort perched precariously on his chest, his hands behind his head. ‘What do we know about them? According to the best sources, namely the FBI, Federation of Bungling Investigators, seventy-four per cent of them are American – well, yes, they always have more of everything than everybody else, don’t they? Most of them are Caucasian, but then, in Leighford, I’d be surprised to find much else. They’re between twenty and thirty-five, wet their beds until a depressingly advanced age, and had a fascination with fire and animal torture as kids.’ He threw a glance across the room. ‘Especially cats, I understand.’

  Metternich snored loudly as if to underline his
contempt for the whole notion.

  ‘One of the genuinely brilliant experts is Joel Norris. He says serial killers have seven phases – starting with aura. Our man retreats into a solitary, strange world fuelled by fantasies. These get stronger and stronger until he is forced to act. Then – and I will be asking questions later, Count – the trawling phase. Chummy – if I may borrow a hackneyed word from the days of Gideon of the Yard – prowls Leighford and the environs looking for a victim; Elizabeth Pride, Andrew Darblay, Albert Walters, Alison Thorn. It’s the wooing phase where he’d have to be at his most charming. Somehow he inveigled himself into Myrtle Cottage, cutting through old lady Pride’s natural suspicions of a stranger. Even allowing for the fact that Darblay caught him up to no good in the church, he’d still have had to gain entry to Albert’s flat on the Barlichway. With Alison Thorn, what did he do – pose as a charity collector or something? Is that the cover he used throughout, selling the Warcry or a time share in Heaven? The capture phase would be easy enough. Three old people, one relatively small woman. Assuming average strength, that wouldn’t be difficult. Only, he doesn’t go in for the full frontal assault, does he? He uses poison. The woman’s weapon? The coward’s weapon?’ Maxwell shrugged and nearly toppled his glass, ‘I don’t know. Then, the totem phase – taking something away to remind him of the glorious moment of killing. Was there anything missing from Myrtle Cottage – apart from the calendar I pinched, of course? The church? The Walters and Thorn flats? I don’t know. But maybe I still know a woman who does.’

  He sat upright suddenly, slamming the half-filled glass down on the coffee table. ‘The point is, Count,’ he said as the cat stirred and turned over, ‘Joel Norris is talking about your classic serial sexual murder. Is that it?’ He got up, pacing his lounge like a father waiting in a Maternity Ward ante-room for word of the birth of his child. ‘Is sex the motive? Pride, Walters, Thorn – all naked. Signs of sexual abuse? Nothing in the papers. Nothing from Jacquie or Hall. Then, there’s this black magic nonsense. No,’ he shook his head and picked up a sixth-form essay, ‘it’s all too preposterous, Count. What Joel Norris misses out is the “Let’s Drop Maxwell In It” phase of the serial killer, when a victim lands on my doorstep.’ He read the opening lines of the essay in front of him and his red pen leaped into action.