Maxwell's Point Read online

  ‘I’ve kept you waiting,’ Hall observed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No harm done,’ Maxwell assured him. ‘The posters in your waiting room are quite instructive. I know all about Quarantine Regulations now. Handy when I try and smuggle my cat out. You might be interested in this.’

  He held up the silver lizard. ‘I’m sorry my dabs are all over it. I’ll give myself up now if you like.’ He briefly held out his wrists for the steel bracelets.

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘From those intellectual giants in Year Ten you asked me to interrogate…er…talk to. Pearson and Thomas.’

  Hall looked blanker than ever behind those infuriating glasses. ‘And where did they get it?’

  ‘The scene of the crime,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Dead Man’s Point.’

  ‘I owe you one, Mr Maxwell.’ Hall took the trinket, letting it dazzle in the sunlight.

  ‘Indeed you do, Inspector Hall,’ Maxwell conceded. ‘So, I’ll collect the debt now, if I may. Was it the dead man’s?’

  Hall should have laughed at the Head of Sixth Form’s brass neck; smiled at least. In fact he did neither. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Until the lab checks it out. But we are grateful.’

  ‘You bet your sweet bippie.’ The Sixties satire was wasted on Henry Hall. That teensie bit younger than Maxwell, culture had passed him by. ‘I’ll see myself out, Inspector. Oh,’ he turned with an immaculate George Dixon, ‘Mind ’ow you go,’ and saluted.

  Maxwell was in the nick car park wrestling with his combination lock for Surrey – aptly, it was 1485, if you’re interested – when he saw a face he thought he knew.

  ‘Mr Mendoza,’ he called.

  The good-looking Spaniard spun on a sixpence. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Are you bunking off school too?’

  ‘Bunking…?’ the man looked confused. ‘Ah, yes,’ he smiled as he translated it in his head. ‘Yes, I am.’ Then he was frowning again. ‘Too?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Maxwell wrenched the lock free.

  ‘You said “too”. That implies…’

  ‘That I am also a teacher,’ Maxwell confirmed. ‘Spot on.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘I know,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘When we last met you must have been under the impression that I was a copper. Actually, my partner is. No, we were there because Juanita is our au pair. Is there any news?’

  Mendoza grinned broadly. ‘Si…yes, there is. That is why I have come to your police station. She is home.’

  ‘In Menorca?’

  ‘Sant Lluis, yes. The police, they come to see me again, after your visit. They say they find her car.’

  ‘So I believe,’ Maxwell said. ‘So what’s it all about… Rodrigo? You don’t mind if I call you Rodrigo?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind. You are…?’

  ‘Peter Maxwell.’

  ‘Ah, Pedro, eh?’

  ‘Er…could we make it Max?’

  ‘Max,’ Mendoza shrugged. ‘OK. I was going to call on Juanita’s landlady and you and your wife. To explain.’

  ‘Well, here I am,’ Maxwell said. ‘I can save you the trouble. Mrs Troubridge is rather elderly and easily thrown, so it might be better coming from me. As for Jacquie…well, her grasp is getting better all the time.’

  ‘Max,’ Mendoza was suddenly serious. ‘This is very difficult for me. Juanita’s parents, they know nothing of this. It would break their hearts if they knew…’

  ‘…that Juanita is a thief.’ Maxwell was serious too.

  Mendoza’s face said it all. ‘She stole from you? What was it? Jewellery? Money?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘Nothing has gone. But it’s the story that Carolina Vasquez is putting about.’

  ‘Carolina,’ Mendoza shook his head. ‘She is a silly girl, but her motives, they are right. It is a shameful thing, Max. We foreigners have a reputation with you English. People will say “I told you so”.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Rodrigo. The same thing happens in reverse every time an English football team goes abroad. There must be lots of “I told you so”s echoing around various European cities. What I don’t understand is why Juanita left my baby without so much as a word. Or why she left her car wherever the police found it.’

  ‘She was very frightened,’ Mendoza said. ‘I have talked to her on the telephone. She cries a lot. She needed help.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘I will try to persuade her to write to you,’ the Spaniard promised. ‘You have email address?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘Juanita has it. We’d like to hear. And if we don’t, just tell her can you, Rodrigo, that it’s all right. No harm done. Will you do that?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Mendoza smiled, his perfect teeth dazzling in the sun. ‘But, tell me, Max, if you are not a…copper…what you are doing here?’

  ‘Ah,’ it was Maxwell’s turn to smile. ‘I’m helping the police with their enquiries – a bit like you, but a different case. Our murders here at Leighford.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I read about them. And they were on the television.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Dead Man’s Point looked quite picturesque, didn’t it? Meridian did themselves proud.’

  ‘You know something about those murders?’

  ‘Me?’ Maxwell looked aghast. ‘No, not really. But when you’re all but married to the Force, well, it’s sort of difficult to stand by really.’

  ‘I see,’ Mendoza chuckled. ‘Well, you take care, Max…and have a nice day.’

  ‘Vaya con Dios.’ Maxwell had been brought up on Westerns. Accordingly, he swung into the saddle and drove home his spurs.

  ‘Could this be a first, then, guv?’ Geoff Hare wondered aloud. ‘Guinness Book of Records stuff?’

  Hall looked at him. Looked at all of them in the thick haze of the Incident Room that Friday afternoon. The only designated smoking area in the entire building, it was already bursting at the seams as the bodies multiplied. Even people who didn’t smoke were in there, inhaling desperately as if nicotine aided their deductive reasoning.

  ‘Benjamin Frederick Lemon,’ Hall was reading from his notes. ‘The Matalan barcode in his pocket provided an identity. Occupation: eBay entrepreneur. What are you saying, Geoff? The country’s first eBay victim? That I doubt.’

  ‘So what is he, then?’ Benny Palister had to be the one to ask. ‘Some sort of electronic rag and bone merchant?’

  ‘A cynical way of putting it,’ Hall nodded. ‘But not too wide of the mark. George, what have we got?’

  ‘Benji Lemon was thirty-nine. Lived in a nice pad on the Littlehampton Road. Milkman reported no taking in of milk bottles for three days.’

  ‘Does that make him a neighbour of Gerald Henderson?’ Jacquie Carpenter asked.

  Inside, though never out, of course, Henry Hall was smiling. His people were still thinking, clicking, making connections, worrying the information like terriers after rats. Not a bad analogy, in fact, for detectives.

  ‘Hardly,’ Bronson deflated her. ‘Must be five, six miles away and a lot of other houses in between.’

  ‘Family?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘We haven’t got very far with that yet, guv,’ Bronson told him, between puffs. ‘Neighbours say he moved in with his dad some years back, but the dad died. There are rumours of a wife somewhere.’

  ‘Who’s on that?’

  Sheila Kindling’s hand was in the air.

  ‘eBay were enormously helpful,’ Bronson went on. ‘The figures are still coming through, but Lemon, using the log-on “Zest1967”, was making quite a killing…if you’ll excuse the phrase.’

  Everybody did. It was way past joke time.

  ‘So,’ Hare was in the corner, helping himself to another cup of machine coffee, ‘in terms of motivation, we’ve got a potential few thousand irate customers.’

  ‘Four.’ Benny Palister looked like the cat that got the cream.

  ‘Fou
r thousand?’ Hare checked.

  ‘No, four customers. I had a look at his feedback. He was a Power-seller with a million and a half – or that’s how it seemed to me by the end of this morning – positives. “Brilliant eBayer”, “Excellent packaging”, usual thing. Then these four. Out of the blue. Weird.’

  ‘So, what are we saying?’ Bronson was incredulous. ‘That somebody pushed the poor bastard over a cliff because his parcels weren’t done up right?’

  There were chuckles and cat-calls in equal proportion.

  ‘George,’ Hall held up his hand for quiet. ‘You and I have known people kill because somebody looked at them funny. Ours not to reason why.’

  Peter Maxwell would have approved of the quotation and even though George Bronson didn’t, he knew it made sense. The guv’nor was, as usual, right.

  ‘All right, people. We know who the dead man is. Now we want some more answers. Sheila, you’re on the family. Geoff, take your blokes and turn this eBay thing inside out. Work on the four unhappy clients in particular. What did he specialise in, by the way?’

  ‘Jewellery, guv,’ Hare told him. ‘Silver trinkets.’

  ‘I just can’t believe it,’ Jacquie was saying. She was propped up in bed with Nolan on one arm, a Barbara Vine on the other. One was fast asleep, the other unopened. The little boy had had a bad night. He was hot and teething and although his parents didn’t know it, he’d had a falling out with Pam’s Zoë earlier in the day and they weren’t speaking. It was all part of being nearly a year old and nobody understands you – practice, really, for the Terrible Twos and the Teenage Tantrums and the rest of his life, in fact.

  ‘Juanita?’ Maxwell was propped alongside her, getting the best of the fan whizzing the air around and re-reading von Clausewitz since, clearly, his disappointing son had no interest in it. ‘It is odd, isn’t it? Who did Mendoza see at the nick?’

  ‘Sheila Kindling,’ Jacquie said, easing her back by shifting the baby ever so slightly. ‘She hasn’t stopped talking about him since.’

  ‘So, what happens now?’

  ‘Well, we’ll have to establish just what has been taken,’ she said. ‘Nothing from us. Nothing, allegedly, from Her Next Door, although if little green men from Mars came through her roof in a shaft of light and used her for rectal probings, I doubt she’d notice. Nothing from the Hendersons. After that, we go back to the other links the girl had – Mendoza, of course, the people at that Golf Club in Littlehampton.’

  ‘Golf Club?’

  ‘The party she went to. If she was a compulsive tea-leaf, she might not have been able to stop herself when it came to the bling people wear to parties.’

  ‘Now, it’s funny you should use that word.’ Maxwell gave up on von Clausewitz – the man had nothing on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at all; nor rapid response capability; what was he thinking?

  ‘One “I just can’t believe it” at a time,’ Jacquie scolded. ‘I know what you’re going to say; just wait your turn.’

  Maxwell laughed softly, so as not to wake the fruit of his loins. ‘Go on, then,’ he said.

  ‘And finally, the Agency that introduced her in the first place. If something major has gone, there may well be an insurance claim of pretty whacking proportions. And of course, we’ll have to get the Spanish police to interview Juanita. Interpol seems a bit overkill now we know where she is and that she’s OK. We’ve got to find somebody else, though, Max. We can’t rely on Pam for ever.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘And we’d better check the references a bit more closely next time.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ she said after a suitable pause.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s your “I can’t believe it”?’

  ‘Oh, right, Bling. Danny Pearson and Scott Thomas found a silver item near a body at Dead Man’s Point. The body in question belongs to Wide Boy Taylor, low life of Brighton and all points West. Benji “Zest” Lemon deals in such trinkets for a living. Coincidence, dear heart? Or am I just a suspicious old fart?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’ Jacquie suddenly lifted her son and heir at arm’s length, the Barbara Vine flopping to the floor. ‘Talking of farts, here’s a young one needs dealing with. He’s followed through and it’s your turn.’

  Maxwell took the pink bundle, now grizzly anew, and just about resisted the Homer Simpson remedy of wringing the boy’s neck and screaming ‘Why you…’

  He settled for ‘Coochie coo,’ instead.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was a spur of the moment thing, really. Alan Cole, the Head of Drama…er…Performing Arts was putting on something indescribable by Chekov next term. He was a new broom at Leighford High was Alan and he intended to sweep the place clean of all its myriad cobwebs. Why he thought a play by the bloke who was occasionally given the column in the original Star Trek series would make his name or even a ripple in the cesspit that was Leighford High was beyond Peter Maxwell, but what did he know?

  So it was that Cole held his auditions that Saturday morning. There was much tutting and sighing from the Premises Manager and eyebrow raising from Legs Diamond, but a breath of performing arts air might be just what Ofsted ordered. And everyone knew that Ofsted could not be far away now. It was like Armageddon – inevitable and terrifying in a ‘we’re all going to die’ sort of way. And so it was that the rising stars of Year 11, soon to be Year 12, turned up, among them, Steph Courtney.

  The girl was a little surprised to see Mad Max there. Oh, he’d produced more school shows than she’d had hot dinners, but not recently. He had stepped in last year to do Little Shop of Horrors at a moment’s notice, but Steph hadn’t been involved in that, busy as she was with the banality of coursework. She strutted her stuff in front of Mr Cole, the Simon Cowell of Leighford High, trying to read something into his bored, elsewhere sort of expression. She knew she was better than Jenny Jenkins; there’d be no contest there. Her only problem was going to be Sammi Leicester, apart from the acne and the train tracks, of course.

  While she was waiting for the great man to make up his mind, an even greater man sidled along the rows of chairs put out for assembly on Monday morning.

  ‘Excellent, darling,’ he confided. ‘Best Uncle Vanya I’ve seen in years.’

  ‘I was playing…’ and she caught his wink. ‘Oh, Mr Maxwell!’ She toyed with thwacking him with her handbag, then remembered who he was and stopped short. He was Mad Max, for God’s sake; he’d be her Year Head in a couple of months’ time. What was she thinking?

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he whispered. ‘This murder of yours…’

  ‘Oh,’ she flustered. ‘I’ve been trying not to think about that.’

  ‘I know it’s not very pleasant, Stephanie,’ he said. ‘But it may be important. You didn’t talk to the police about it?’

  ‘No.’ Her response was too loud and a rather pained Head of Performing Arts turned and glared at them. Trust Maxwell to be behind the interruption somewhere. ‘No,’ she whispered softly. ‘I told you, not even Mum and Dad know.’

  ‘Will you do me a favour, then?’ he asked her. ‘Will you show me exactly where it was you saw what you saw…’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now. When the audition’s finished.’

  ‘Only if Emma can come.’ For all Mr Maxwell was a gentleman and a scholar, a Knight of the Road, he was still a man. And all her life, Steph’s mum had told her to be wary of men. The only one you could really trust was your dad. And you had to look at him twice.

  ‘Certainly,’ he hissed. ‘I’d offer to give you both a lift on my bike but a) it would be hideously uncomfortable, b) it would contravene every safety rule in the book and c) people would talk. Good luck, Steph. I’ll wait for you outside.’

  ‘Mr Andrew Carmichael?’ DS Geoff Hare flashed his warrant card for the third time that day. ‘Otherwise known as freaking-a?’

  ‘What if I am?’

  ‘No law against it, Mr Carmichael. We’re just making routine enquiries.’ T
echnically, Hare was out of his jurisdiction. This was Berkshire. If freaking-a got funny, he’d have to go to annoying lengths to get various permissions etcetera and he’d really rather not.

  Andrew Carmichael looked up and down the road. He didn’t see anybody else’s doorknocker getting a pounding. ‘Oh, yeah? What about?’

  ‘May we come in?’

  Andrew Carmichael didn’t like the look of Geoff Hare. He liked the look of Benny Palister even less. ‘S’pose so,’ he shrugged.

  Swirly carpets, leafy wallpaper, spitfire paintings. Get the picture? Nobody ever said Andrew Carmichael had taste. The living room didn’t even reach the dubious standard of the hall – MFI meets Bargain Basement.

  ‘You an eBayer?’ Hare smiled.

  ‘Now, look, I paid that £38.87, no matter what that bastard wilysmiley says.’

  ‘We’re not interested in wilysmiley, sir. We’re interested in zest1967.’

  ‘Zest1967?’ Carmichael looked blank.

  ‘eBay item number 43712918.’ Benny Palister hadn’t exactly got the figures tattooed on his brain, but he had them written down in his book. ‘A silver ring with filigree decoration…’

  ‘Oh, him!’ Realisation dawned. ‘Well, there’s another bastard. I got my money back eventually, but only after threatening the shit with the law. ’Ere,’ Carmichael’s sallow features brightened. ‘Is that it, then? Have you got him? Major fraud, eh? Yeah, I’ll testify. Too bloody right, I will. Makes my blood run cold does that. You know, there are people out there trying to make an honest buck and watch some bastard try and spoil it.’

  ‘Or two bastards,’ Hare smiled.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Zest 1967 and wilysmiley.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, right.’

  ‘Tell me, Mr Carmichael,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Did you threaten zest1967 with a little more than the law?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Palister. It was a well-rehearsed routine.