Maxwell’s Curse Page 2

  ‘Oh, ye of little bottle,’ the pathologist said. ‘All right, then, the wussy way. She has a stab wound to the back of the neck. She must have been lying on her front when that was delivered or possibly in a sitting position. The knife you’re looking for is double-edged, the blade at least four inches long.’

  ‘Commando,’ Hall was talking to himself. ‘Special Services. Any survival store or mag sells them. Wait a minute – you said that wasn’t the cause of death?’

  ‘Indeed not. The stab wound was delivered post mortem. No blood. No bruising. Somebody impaled the old girl after she was dead. Now why, I wonder, would they do that?’

  Hall was on his feet, peering at the corpse, despite himself. ‘Frenzy? What kind of wound is it?’

  ‘One sure, powerful thrust. No sign of anything frenzied. In my experience, such an attack would produce several wounds, rained down with speed, blurred by the old red mist. There’s no indication, apart from the lack of clothes, of any sexual motive at all. No, the stab was an afterthought.’

  ‘So what did kill her?’

  ‘Ever heard me talk of Sir Ephraim Wallace?’

  Hall hadn’t.

  ‘Splendid name, isn’t it? Splendid chap, too. My old pathology teacher at Guy’s.’

  Hall thought Astley had graduated from Reading, but he let it pass.

  ‘“The face,” he would always say. “Look at the face. It holds a million secrets.”’

  ‘And what does the face tell you?’ Hall asked.

  ‘The eyes have it,’ Astley told him. ‘Petechiae. Tiny blood pricks in both eyeballs.’

  ‘Suffocation?’ Hall had met this before.

  ‘Possibly. But I don’t think so. Toxicology will confirm it later, but there’s much fatty degeneration of the internal organs. Swelling of the liver, stomach, spleen.’

  ‘Indicating … ?’

  ‘Poison, dear boy. Possibly phallin. If I’m right, the poor old duck would have had chronic vomiting and diarrhoea. She’d have dribbled and her eyes would have watered uncontrollably. She’d have felt dizzy, had the grandmother of all headaches, before slipping into delirium and convulsions. If she was lucky, a coma would have put her out of her misery after eight hours. Could have been as much as thirty, though. Who was she?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Jane Doe at the moment.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Astley turned back to the corpse. ‘Just remember,’ he murmured, ‘a granny isn’t just for Christmas.’

  ‘Thanks, Jim.’ Astley heard the door click open.

  ‘Any forensic on the bags?’ the pathologist asked.

  ‘Clean as a whistle.’ Hall held the door open for Donald returning with the tea, a beam and some biscuits. ‘This one’s a professional, Jim.’

  ‘Ah, thanks, Donald.’ Astley prised off one of his sterile gloves and took the proffered mug. ‘This isn’t happening, by the way, Henry.’ He raised the tea, ‘So unprofessional. I’d be struck off.’

  Hall waved the sight aside.

  ‘Tell me,’ Astley joined him at the door. ‘Is it right the old girl was found on Peter Maxwell’s front doorstep?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What is it about that bloke?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Hall said.

  ‘This is not the first time – oh, Christ, Donald, no bloody sugar, for Christ’s sake,’ and he put the mug down before following Hall into the corridor. ‘Not the first time friend Maxwell’s been caught up in murder. There was that Jenny Hyde business a few years back; and that accountant chappie in the theme park …’

  ‘On second thoughts,’ Hall stopped him, ‘don’t tell me. He’s like a bad penny, turning up when you least expect him.’

  ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,’ Peter Maxwell murmured, looking out of his lounge window at the knot of paparazzi hanging around the open space where his front gate should have been, if only someone hadn’t invented open planning.

  Jacquie Carpenter had had the nous to leave her car streets away and had got in through Maxwell’s back garden. ‘How annoying have they been?’ she asked.

  He broke away, bored with the sight. ‘On a scale of one to ten, eighty-three,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to feel like Fred West at twenty-five Cromwell Street. Should I carry out a box wrapped in black plastic, do you think? Titillate them a bit?’

  ‘Not funny, Max,’ she scolded. That in itself was a landmark in their relationship. A year ago she daren’t have said any such thing. Even now she wasn’t sure how he’d take it.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said and sat himself down below the display of cards and tinsel. ‘God, when’s Twelfth Night?’

  ‘It scared you, didn’t it, Max?’ she sat opposite him, her stone-washed jeaned knees tucked under her chin, her auburn hair, usually worn up according to constabulary regulations, cascading over the shapeless Aran that covered her shoulders. ‘Have you considered counselling?’

  He looked across the room at her. ‘They’ll make a detective of you yet, Jacqueline,’ he said softly. ‘And, yes, it scared the shit out of me. But counselling? No, thanks; I’ve got my cat.’ There was a silence. ‘It’s good of you to come. I know how difficult this must be.’

  She shrugged. ‘Just putting your mind at rest, sir,’ she played the policewoman, ‘as I would with any other member of the public.’

  ‘Oh, thanks a bunch,’ he scowled, teasing the skin from the top of his milky coffee. ‘What’ve you got?’

  ‘Max,’ she growled in warning.

  ‘Oh, come on, now, Jacquie. You can’t do this to me.’ He lapsed into his early Brando. ‘I coulda been a contender.’

  ‘I can’t tell you …’

  ‘This is the only counselling I need – involvement, immersion; the need to know. Who was she? That’s all. Just that one question. No more. I promise.’

  ‘Don’t know …’

  ‘Jacquie!’

  ‘Honestly, Max,’ she laughed. ‘We haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘Handbag? Purse? Clothing labels? Laundry marks?’

  Jacquie Carpenter had been on the force seven years now, woman and girl. She knew the routine, the basics of an inquiry. The irritating thing was, so did Maxwell.

  ‘Nothing,’ she smiled. ‘She was naked … Oh shit!’

  Maxwell smiled. The law, nil; Peter Maxwell, one. ‘Sexual assault?’ he asked.

  ‘Max,’ she was firm. ‘I’ve already said too much.’

  ‘Of course.’ His criminal mind was kicking in. ‘It’s not likely at her age, but then, Albert de Salvo …’

  ‘And she wasn’t strangled … Oh, bloody hell!’

  Maxwell chuckled. ‘Tell me, Jacquie, what was your new year resolution? Tell Old Maxie everything he wants to know? That’s very generous of you.’

  ‘What have you told them?’ She was suddenly on her feet, changing the subject, nodding towards the window, covering her back.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell joined her at the window to wave at the increasingly bedraggled newsmen huddled in the rain, ‘the bloke from the Grauniad and I had a discussion on the role of murder in New Labour’s philosophy. I told the bloke from the Telegraph this would never have happened if William Hague was PM, which seemed to please him. I gave the Mail man a load of bollocks and the Express the total opposite – still bollocks, but different. Oh, and when the News of the World turned up I just got my chopper out – oh, saving your presence, Woman Policeman!’

  She shook her head, smiling. ‘Max, you’re the end,’ she said.

  ‘Omega and Alpha, me,’ sang Maxwell, still vaguely in the Christmas spirit. ‘How long do you think they’ll be out there?’

  She checked her watch. Time to be elsewhere. ‘The DCI’s calling a press conference at six this evening,’ she told him. ‘That’ll satisfy them for a while. Unfortunately, Max, they’re a bit like that film. What is it? Sometimes They Come Back ?’

  Maxwell nodded. He knew it.

  She put down her coffee mug and held him by the shoulders, o
ut of sight of the paparazzi’s prying lenses. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

  ‘Awright.’ He slid into his Barrymore with ease.

  She screwed up her face, never sure of Peter Maxwell. He was Mad Max, not just nor-by-nor’west, but in all directions, to every point of the compass. He’d worn that mask for so long, even she couldn’t see beyond it. She who loved him. She reached out and kissed him. It was enough. For now, it was enough.

  Thanks to the miracle of reprographic technology, photographs of the dead woman were on the streets of Leighford by that afternoon. The house to house had begun. As many uniforms as Henry Hall could spare knocked on doors or rang bells or pushed paper through letterboxes. Everywhere the same story; the same shake of the head. ‘Difficult to say, innit?’ ‘I mean, they all look alike.’ ‘Blimey, is she dead?’ ‘I wouldn’t know my own grannie, mate, never mind somebody else’s.’

  A detective had visited Leighford General, next door to where the dead woman lay, checking records. But this was the National Health Service, the one run by Alan Milburn, not the one created by Nye Bevan and the inquiries drew blank. ‘Ah, no, you see, all the ENT records were lost in the fire. You know, in ’95. If she’d had the operation before that, we’d have no record of it. And I wouldn’t bother asking Mr McGuigan if I were you. Patients to him are just numbers to feed his wife’s Gucci habit – not that you heard that from here, of course.’ Hospitals, especially junior registrars, were helpfulness itself.

  So it was that they set up an Incident Room in the old Tottingleigh library, complete with VDUs and databases, those banks of information that could stem the tide of ignorance. And the Leighford force once again became eagle-eyed, adept under the diced headband at finding needles in the haystacks of unknowing.

  So it was too that DCI Henry Hall held his press conference, giving the gentlemen of the press, the doyens of the fourth estate, just enough to keep them off his back for the couple of days he desperately needed. On his way in, towards the powerful lights to each side of the poking lenses and grey fur of the sound booms, he caught Jacquie Carpenter’s arm.

  ‘A word,’ he said.

  She slipped into the corridor. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Your friend,’ Hall murmured.

  ‘Sir?’

  Hall shifted his feet. ‘Don’t get coy with me, Jacquie. Listen to those bastards in there. Baying for blood and they don’t care whose it is. Maxwell. You’ve talked to him?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The DCI looked into the steady grey eyes of the DC. He didn’t like his people mixing it with Joe Public. But he knew that they were human too, with families and friends. There were bound to be relationships. But with Maxwell, it was different. The man had a knack of turning up in the middle of somebody else’s pile of shit. And the annoying thing was he always came up smelling of roses. ‘What has he told the press?’

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘Jacquie.’ He closed to her, anxious that the paparazzi should get no wind of this. ‘I don’t know how deep you’re in with Maxwell. I don’t want to know. But when you tell me he doesn’t know anything, every alarm in my body starts to ring. Peter Maxwell always knows something. Usually, it’s where the bodies are buried.’ He turned to go, then turned back. ‘And I don’t necessarily mean that figuratively.’

  Then he was gone, into the thick of it, facing the cameras and the music of the media.

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen …’

  Maxwell thought how much smaller Sean Holden looked in the flesh than on the screen. There he was on the local news that night, Meridian’s man at the murder, standing outside 38 Columbine with a microphone in his hand, talking to camera.

  ‘The body of an unidentified woman was found on this path behind me at midnight last night, as the old year turned.’

  ‘Very poetic, Count, don’t you think?’ Maxwell stretched his feet in front of the coal-effect fire. The cat continued the habit of a lifetime and didn’t answer. ‘Still, I must put a lick of paint on that doorframe. Nothing like a murder for outlining one’s need for DIY.’

  ‘Police are regarding the case as one of murder. Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall said at a press conference earlier this evening that the first task was to discover who the dead woman was.’

  The face of a million secrets flashed on to the screen, causing Maxwell to blink for a second.

  ‘Anyone with any information,’ the reporter went on, should contact Leighford Police Station on 825311 or Crime Stoppers on 0800 555 111.’

  ‘Why me?’ Maxwell pressed the button on his remote and Sean Holden disappeared into the ether of the airwaves. And he found himself becoming Humphrey Bogart again. ‘Of all the paths on all the estates in all the world, why did you have to be left on mine?’ He caught the flick of Metternich’s tail out of the corner of his eye. ‘Of course, Count, you’re right,’ he said. ‘That is a much more pertinent question, isn’t it? – Who rang the doorbell?’

  That was the year that Modular A levels were launched onto an unsuspecting world. Leighford High School had hung nervously back from the pilots at the end of the old century, largely at the behest of the educational dinosaur that was its Head of Sixth Form. The school’s headteacher, James Diamond BSc, MEd, had been all for it, embracing the new examination structure rather as an idiot would embrace a boa constrictor. But Peter Maxwell had whispered the two dread words that were guaranteed to make any head teacher blanch and reconsider – ‘league tables’. James Diamond had held off.

  Now, however, there was no choice. The twenty-first century had caught up with Leighford High School and with it, Peter Maxwell. Modular A levels it was. And the first exams were now – January, wet and grey, with the temperature falling and the drizzle driving in from the west over the breeze-block and glass monolith that was Leighford High.

  So it was that the laughingly called Spring Term began and a distinctly damp Head of Sixth Form wheeled in from the north-east, the spray flying off the spokes of White Surrey, his famous bike. Not for Surrey the rusty old bikesheds where the more robust kids chained their Meteors and Road Ragers. Peter Maxwell led the old white charger across the quad and hooked it lovingly against the wall of Food Technology.

  ‘Saddle White Surrey for the field today,’ he parodied Olivier’s Richard III as he hobbled towards the side door. ‘Look that my cycle clips be sound and not too tight. What, is my briefcase easier than it was and all my red pens laid into my desk? Ah, morning, Betty.’ Maxwell was himself again. ‘How are your boilers off for spots?’

  ‘Doc’ Martin’s name wasn’t really Betty. Neither did Maxwell know any guilty secret the man might have, perhaps in the silk underwear department. It was just that Maxwell called him Betty after the old English saying, itself a distortion of the Catholic prayer – ‘All my eye of a yarn and Betty Martin’. No one else on the staff was old enough to remember it. As for Betty, the school caretaker, he was perfectly used to Maxwell talking to himself and quoting some crap or other. He was Mad Max. It was as simple as that.

  ‘Fucked up, as usual,’ he told him. ‘Wouldn’t be the start of term without that, would it?’

  ‘Indeed not, Betty. Oh, Happy New Millennium.’

  Mad, Martin mused. Mad as a March fucking hare.

  Maxwell was down the corridor past T Eight, up the stairs and through the library, dripping rainwater from his army cape as he went. Miss Ratcliffe the librarian looked aghast. She’d been dreading the start of term as she always did, because the kids contrived to make her life a living Hell. To see the apparition she did however was the last straw.

  ‘Morning, Matilda,’ Maxwell boomed, sweeping off his saturated tweed cap. ‘You can be sure,’ he stood for a moment to take in the woman’s narrow, sour face, as though she’d just sucked a lemon, ‘that however ghastly we feel, the ducks are loving all this. I’ll be in to talk libraries to you later, fear not. I just love it when you talk Dewey.’

  Mis
s Ratcliffe had long ago stopped fearing anything from Peter Maxwell, least of all whether he might just, one day, get her name right.

  He splattered along C corridor, where the neon strip was unaccountably flickering on and off. ‘Thank you, Jason,’ he thundered without turning round. ‘I’m sure that when Mr Boston wants a lighting maestro for his next rattling good dramatic production, you’ll be the first he’ll call on. Until then, leave the bloody switch alone, there’s a good pyromaniac.’ Jason flattened himself against the wall until the wake of the Great Man had passed.

  Maxwell crashed into his office and suddenly all eyes were on him. Lon Chaney Jnr stared at the caped crusader from behind his furry makeup as the Wolf Man; Alan Ladd smouldered at him through the smoke of his Gun For Hire; and a very badly drawn Orson Welles scowled at him from the poster of the Scottish Film. The cinema was Maxwell’s second love. The decor of his office screamed Hollywood with just a hint of Ealing and Handmade.

  ‘Thingee,’ Maxwell had dropped his dripping cape and sprawled on his soft plastic chair, County Hall, teachers for the use of, with one of Mr Bell’s telephonic apparati in his hand, ‘Happy Millennium. When’s the staff meeting?’

  Thingee wasn’t Pamela’s real name either, but she did have the sure knowledge that Maxwell knew she was Morning Thingee as opposed to her afternoon oppo who was Thingee Too. And it wasn’t really her place, as part-time receptionist at Leighford High, to know such matters that were printed in the school calendar nearly a year before. But she also knew Mad Max.

  ‘Two minutes ago, Mr Maxwell,’ she said.

  ‘Oops,’ the Head of Sixth Form was on his feet. ‘That’s another New Year Resolution gone breasts up. Begging your pardon, of course, Thingee.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell, I’m glad you rang, really. There’s a policeman to see you.’

  ‘Is there, now?’ Maxwell sat down again. ‘Tell me, Thingee, is he tallish, sandy hair, wears a three piece suit and rimless glasses? Could pass for our own dear Headmaster in a bad light – which, by the way, is the only way in which you can see our dear Headmaster?’

  ‘Er … his name is Chief Inspector Hall,’ Thingee answered. Maxwell nodded.