Maxwell's Point Read online

  ‘Freakin’ A,’ hissed Carmichael appropriately.

  ‘Do you want to talk us through it, Mr Carmichael, blow by blow, so to speak?’

  All the way back from Reading, Hare and Palister pieced it together. It turned out that Andrew Carmichael didn’t like confined spaces, which was odd, bearing in mind the glorified rabbit hutch he lived in. So any mention of jug, chokey, stir, porridge, in short serving any time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, filled him with dread. Turned out he’d had one or two minor brushes with the law – cautions, that sort of thing – so he wasn’t anxious to renew old acquaintanceships. So Hare and Palister made sure they mentioned the Ultimate Punishment a lot. And Andrew Carmichael was soon singing like a choirboy. Yes, he’d threatened to do more than have the law on zest in his first Feedback, but Marlene had seen it and made him change it before it was sent. Marlene was what the whole venture was about. She was freaking-a’s girl and she had this thing for silver, so he’d sent for the ring. It hadn’t come and so he’d got sniffy with the seller, zest1967. The ring never turned up at all.

  And that was where they’d had to leave it. A disgruntled on-line auction buyer, that was all. Do people kill for that? Perhaps. But both Hare and Palister would stake their reputations that Andrew Carmichael wouldn’t.

  The sun was a ball of fire by the time Peter Maxwell reached The Dam. Surrey’s handlebars and saddle were like the red hot irons of medieval ordeals and his wickerwork drooped in the heat. The bracken leaves, so fresh and dripping in the autumn wet, were hard and brittle now, curling back from their stems and a pale silver-green under the sun’s rays.

  You couldn’t see the sea from here, nor smell it. And the wide-open spaces of the southern end of the wild area, where the breeze blew and the swallows swooped, were gone, focused into the silent, heavy glade of the once quarry. The shade was a godsend and Maxwell parked Surrey and squatted by the trunk of an ancient oak. It was like that brilliant scene in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai where the ace swordsman is sitting cross-legged and is disturbed by three bandits. In the blink of an eye his sword is free, slicing them all down so that by the time the first hits the ground, the third is dead. Maxwell toyed briefly with doing much the same to the two girls who crashed through the bracken towards him now, but people would only talk and misunderstand. And anyway, he’d left his Katana at home and the pair of them had never done him any harm.

  Emma Austen (what were her parents thinking nearly sixteen years ago when they were trawling the lists for suitable names?) was a pudding of a girl relative to the petite Stephanie, but she was a loyal friend and in the spin-off boy stakes, it helped if your friend was petite and Stephanie. Perhaps the bottle-bottom glasses were a mistake. Steph was wearing shades.

  ‘You made it, then?’ Good at the obvious ice breakers, was Peter Maxwell.

  ‘I had to collect Emma first,’ Steph explained. ‘And text Mum so she didn’t worry.’

  ‘Did you get the part?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Steph shrugged. ‘Mr Cole said he’d tell us on Monday.’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘He’s got no heart, that man. Now, Steph, is this the right place? Where you saw the car, the couple, the body?’

  The girl frowned, pulling off the shades and walking from side to side, knee-deep in the ferns at the edge of the glade. Below, the nettles were neck-height, but there were plenty of tyre tracks and ruts worn smooth in the dry-baked mud. ‘It’s more overgrown now,’ she said. ‘But I think so. More this way. Toto was chasing something or other in that direction.’

  She led the pair to her right, beyond the clump of oaks onto lower ground. Maxwell had got it wrong. When he’d come this way before, he’d stood higher.

  ‘Hello again.’ A voice made all three of them turn. Crossing the floor of the glade, swinging a stick as he came and hauling the haversack higher on his shoulder, was the old man Maxwell had met here on his last visit. It was as though, if you walked a certain way and stood on a certain leaf, the old boy would appear, perhaps barring the way to the rickety bridge.

  ‘Hello, my dears.’ Was it the sun glinting in the red-rimmed eyes behind the glasses or was it something altogether less of the day?

  Steph instinctively put her shades back on, so that the old boy couldn’t tell she was staring at him. Emma put on a defiant glare, complete with pout. But he didn’t seem to be looking at their faces at all.

  ‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you two before. Live locally, do you?’

  ‘My daughters,’ Maxwell lied. He didn’t like the way this conversation was going. If this was the same old man Luigi the ice cream vendor was talking about, he had every reason to be on his guard. And Steph and Emma didn’t like the old man either. His scrawny chest had white, wispy hairs bristling from a faded blue vest and his legs were like a chicken’s, pale and crusty, criss-crossed with thread veins in the midday sun.

  ‘Charming,’ the old boy leered with a wink. ‘And so like you. How old are you, my dear?’ He closed to Steph who instinctively hid behind Emma. She blotted her out fairly well, but who was Emma going to hide behind? Turned out it was Peter Maxwell.

  ‘Forgive her,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I’ve always taught my girls not to talk to strange men.’

  ‘Strange… Oh, I see,’ and the old man broke into an odd, wheezy laugh. ‘The get up.’ He looked himself up and down. ‘I’m an ornithologist, dears,’ he said. ‘Your…daddy…will tell you that’s a bird watcher. I do like watching, you see. And you have to do it carefully. And quietly. For instance, I’ve been watching you for the last five minutes. Ever since you arrived, in fact. But you didn’t see me, did you?’

  Steph shook her head. She didn’t want to talk to this man because he frightened her. There was something about his tone, the over-familiarity in his voice. It was as though he was looking through her clothes to the curved, honey-gold body beneath. And the last thing she wanted to do was to let him hear her voice. It was as though that would let the old pervert into her world. And if she did that, her world would never be the same again.

  ‘Time to go, children.’ Maxwell’s voice was strong and safe and good. He shepherded them firmly to one side, away from the old man and they began marching away from him, from the dark of the glade, to the cool uplands and the cloudless blue. Steph almost ran, but she wanted to keep Maxwell with her. And she didn’t want to leave Emma behind. And when they got to the edge of The Dam and the old man and his stick and his bag and his revolting old body had gone, she wanted to hug her soon-to-be Head of Sixth Form. Just for being Mad Max. But Emma was there and nobody would understand. Not even, quite possibly, Mad Max.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, ladies,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just a harmless old man. Have you seen him before, either of you? Steph, when you walk your dog?’

  The girls shook their heads.

  ‘All right,’ he said, collecting Surrey from where he’d parked him. ‘I’ll walk you home.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Emma said. ‘We’ll catch the bus.’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell was firm, his eyes level, his voice gravel. ‘I’ll walk you home.’

  And he did.

  Henry Hall had been here before. Not in the master bedroom of Ingleneuk along the Littlehampton Road out of Tottingleigh precisely, but in the position of trying to build a dead man’s life from his furniture.

  Ingleneuk wasn’t a very apt name for the Mock Tudor sprawl Hall’s team were all over that Sunday morning. Back home, he knew, Margaret would be putting the roasters in about now as the church bells of Leighford called the faithful to prayer. And in about an hour, she’d resign herself to the inevitable and eat her lunch alone, having plated Henry’s up for the microwave and for later.

  Piles of Benji Lemon’s clothes lay strewn more or less at random around the room, filling his kingsize bed, the top of the dressing table and a chest of drawers. The doors of his wardrobe were thrown back, his pillows and mattress lying at odd angles the sear
chers had left them. Not much point in being tidy with this one. There was no family member to grieve and get shirty in the same breath; no loving wife distraught that her husband’s shrine was already being desecrated, even before it had been made holy.

  ‘Guv,’ Benny Palister had just won himself a gold star. ‘I think you ought to see this.’

  Henry Hall looked down. A pair of police handcuffs. And they weren’t Benny Palister’s.

  ‘Well, well,’ murmured the DCI. ‘Who’d have thought that zest1967 was a Special.’

  ‘Special?’ Beryl Johnson was incredulous. ‘You mean Special Constable?’

  Jacquie Carpenter did. About now, back home, Peter Maxwell would be putting on the roasters, wagging a warning finger at Metternich, as the cat started his Sunday lunchtime slaver as he paced the kitchen. Maxwell would be hurtling past little Nolan on his bouncy doorway thingy, pretending to steal his nose each time he did. If that kid didn’t grow up with a complex bigger than Canary Wharf, she’d eat her sandwiches.

  ‘Not when I knew him.’

  And that was exactly what Jacquie Carpenter and Sheila Kindling wanted to know all about. When Beryl Johnson was still Beryl Lemon and a dead man was still alive. They were sitting in the woman’s comfortable flat in downtown Bournemouth, within a walk of the sea. She’d been born on the South Coast and seaside people rarely left it if they could help it. Beryl Johnson was an attractive woman with short-cropped blonde hair and good bones. Her ex-husband’s bones were less impressive these days and still lying on a slab in a cold drawer in Jim Astley’s morgue.

  ‘Oh, we were happy enough at first,’ she remembered. She looked at them both, the suited women in front of her. Was either of them married, she wondered? She couldn’t see a ring. ‘It’s about now, if this was a Frost or a Midsomer Murders I’d get out the wedding photos and go all dewy-eyed, isn’t it?’

  Neither of the policewomen commented. There weren’t any policewomen in Midsomer Murders and Frost was always so patronising to the ones on his show. Anyway, that was fiction; this was real. ‘You don’t have any?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘No,’ Beryl said coldly, lighting another cigarette, though she’d just put out the first. ‘No, I burned them. And my wedding dress. My hair was longer then. He used to like me wearing it in bunches – you know, schoolgirl style.’

  ‘Was that his thing?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Schoolgirls?’

  Beryl laughed. ‘Who knew what Benji’s thing was? Yes, I suppose it was schoolgirls at first, then it gravitated to harder stuff.’

  ‘Bondage?’

  Beryl nodded, drawing hard on the cigarette. ‘Stupid word,’ she said. ‘Stupid idea. We used to laugh at it when I was a choirgirl – Christ, that seems a long time ago now. Whenever the text was from the Old Testament, about the people of Israel and Moses freeing themselves from bondage, we used to giggle like buggery. There’s nothing funnier, is there, than a situation when you can’t laugh out loud?’

  She got up and walked to the window, watching the sea shimmer in the noon-day heat. ‘Of course, we had no idea what we were laughing at. Stupid word, stupid idea. And it certainly wasn’t funny when it became reality. Oh, it was mild enough at first. Benji would tie my wrists to the bedposts, then my ankles. Then the hitting began.’

  The pain showed in the woman’s face even now; the pain that would never quite go away.

  ‘So, he used the handcuffs on you?’

  ‘What?’ Beryl sniffed, fighting back the tears. ‘Um…no. No, he didn’t. I didn’t know he had any.’

  ‘So, what are we talking here?’ Sheila Kindling was quietly writing it all down in her notebook. ‘Ligatures of some kind? Rope?’

  Beryl nodded. ‘I was a choirgirl. Benji was a boy scout. He knew all about knots. Funny, isn’t it, how such innocent and good things can go so horribly wrong?’

  ‘You divorced?’ Jacquie wanted the record straight.

  ‘Yes. When the beatings became so bad I had to be hospitalised.’

  ‘We couldn’t find anything on file,’ Jacquie said. ‘You were living just outside Tottingleigh at the time. All this ought to be there.’

  Beryl turned back from the window. ‘It’s not, because I didn’t make a complaint.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ Sheila and Jacquie looked at each other.

  ‘Call me a coward if you like. I couldn’t go through all that again in a court of law. I even thought he’d contest a divorce, but by that time I’d met Mark and he persuaded me to go through with it. The hardest thing was keeping Mark from wringing the bastard’s neck.’

  ‘Or pushing him over a cliff,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Is that what happened?’ Beryl asked. ‘Benji.’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘It’s likely to make the nationals tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Our third killing in three weeks. You’d better be prepared. If we found you, it’s odds on the paparazzi will. When did the divorce go through?’

  ‘Three years ago. Mark and I married last Christmas. I haven’t seen Benji from that day to this.’

  ‘He came to your wedding?’ Jacquie was incredulous.

  ‘He wasn’t invited,’ Beryl told them. ‘Obviously. How he found out the where and the when I still don’t know.’

  ‘What happened?’ Sheila asked.

  Beryl snorted a laugh. ‘Well, that was the peculiar thing. We’d just finished the service – it was at St Blasius, you know, the little church by the river?’ Jacquie and Sheila did. ‘We were walking down the aisle, my people, Mark’s people, all smiling and the organ crashing and he just stood there in the church doorway. I thought Mark was going to fell him. He pushed me gently to one side and squared up to him.’

  ‘A punch-up on your wedding day,’ murmured Sheila. ‘That must have been a moment to remember.’

  ‘But that’s just it,’ Beryl said. ‘There wasn’t one. Benji ignored Mark and just said to me, “I’m sorry. I hope you’ll be happy from now on.” And he walked away.’

  ‘And have you been?’ Jacquie asked her. ‘Have you been happy from that moment on?’

  Beryl’s gaze fell on a photo of her and Mark, laughing together along Bournemouth sea front. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘So you don’t buy it, then?’ Sheila was fixing her face in the Ka’s vanity mirror as Jacquie drove them home. It was still a dazzling day, with windows down and Sheila wrestling with her hair, the sounds of snarling summer all around.

  ‘That Mark Johnson waited six months since the wedding and three years since he took up with Beryl to get his own back on Benji? No, I don’t.’

  ‘What if he was waiting for the perfect opportunity?’ Sheila reasoned, playing devil’s advocate. ‘He could hardly deck him in the church. It would look bad, spoil Beryl’s day and there were probably a hundred or so witnesses looking on.’

  ‘OK.’ Jacquie went along with it. ‘So Mark’s a brooder. He worried it, teased it, finally decided. Then what?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Does he go round to Benji’s pad out of Tottingleigh? Take a crowbar to the rather expensive stained glass at Ingleneuk? No. Does he fix his car one night? No. Does he take him out round the back of a nightclub with a baseball bat? No. He rather wussily pushes him off a cliff.’

  ‘It’s easier,’ Sheila offered a bit lamely.

  ‘So it is, but is it Mark’s style? Did you get a look at his photo?’

  ‘Er…not closely, no.’

  ‘Beryl’s what…five eight? Five nine? Mark’s got to be six foot five of anybody’s measurement with something of the air of a brick wall about him.’

  ‘It’s still easier.’ Sheila clung to her theory. ‘And if you’re right and you’re pushed by Mark Johnson, you stay pushed.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Jacquie said. ‘Watch it, you geriatric bastard,’ and she blasted the Ka’s horn, annoyed as she was every time she used it by its reedy tinniness. ‘So what does he do? Follow Benji around until he goes for a stroll up on Dead Man’s Point, then pushes him over? Bearing i
n mind the two men know each other and Mark doesn’t exactly blend with the background?’

  ‘What, then?’ Sheila was being reminded all over again why she was a DC and Jacquie was a DS.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ Jacquie laughed. ‘This is your scenario, Constable. You carry on with it.’

  ‘What if…’ Sheila Kindling came from a long line of optimistic die-hards. ‘What if Mark invited Benji to meet him, up at the Point, I mean.’

  ‘What, sort of…“You won’t remember me, but I’m the nice bloke who married the woman you used to knock about. Please come to Dead Man’s Point on Wednesday 12 July at about half past six so we can talk over old times.” Right.’

  ‘No,’ Sheila shook her head. ‘Obviously, he’d use an alias and he’d have a reason.’

  Jacquie had stopped laughing now. ‘An alias and a reason,’ she repeated. ‘Now, that, Sheila honey, is the first sensible thing you’ve said today.’ She caught sight of her Number Two mascaraing her eyelashes. ‘Who’s the lucky man, by the way?’

  Sheila fluttered at her. ‘Don’t know yet.’

  Lieutenant Landriani was all but ready. He sat his roan under Maxwell’s spotlight, cigar smoking quietly – all right, imagination does play a part in model soldiery – checking his left stirrup. Peter Maxwell lifted him gently and placed him to the left of Cardigan, near Fitzhardinge Maxse and in front of Captain White’s squadron of the 17th. Louis Nolan had just galloped across his front and all Hell was about to break loose in a 54 millimetre sort of way.

  ‘Do you approve, Count?’ Maxwell’s dark eyes flickered up to the laundry basket where the Cat With No Scruples sat watching him in the half-light. A welcome breeze was wafting into the Inner Sanctum through the open skylight and the starry weekend was drawing to a close.

  ‘Good,’ Maxwell pulled off the gold-laced forage cap and sat back in his swivel chair. ‘Now the serious work’s done, let’s get down to that little sideline of ours, the gentle art of murder. We have a third victim, Count, did you know that?’