Maxwell's Point Page 21

  ‘That’s what they pay me for, Max,’ she said. ‘It goes with the territory. Only usually there are canvas tents and blokes in white suits and Jim Bloody Astley with his wisecracks.’

  None of that was here now. The tents, the SOCO men, even the fluttering ‘Do Not Cross’ tape had gone. And since Mayor Ledbetter had not yet had time to put up his ‘This Way To The Corpse’ sign, complete with entry fee, no one would ever know that a man had hurtled out of the sky to land in a bloody pulp more or less where Nolan’s buggy stood now.

  ‘Max, what’s going to happen?’ Jacquie asked. When she’d come home, exhausted, clammy with the humidity and heartily pissed off with all her colleagues, but George Bronson in particular, she’d held her man like she’d never let go. She hadn’t wanted to let go. But Maxwell had been to collect Nolan from Pam’s and the smaller of her men had held out his arms to her, gurgling with that sweet impish grin of his. Part of her wanted to say ‘Not now, darling. Now your daddy needs me.’ But she was a mother too. And so she held them both.

  ‘You’re going to solve the case,’ he said. ‘Oh, you may need a little help from Henry Hall, but you’re getting there.’

  ‘I’m not talking about that,’ she said. ‘All right, it’s a horrible thing to say, I know, but that’s somebody else’s problem; somebody else’s tragedy. This is us. You. What’s going to happen about these complaints?’

  He looked at her. He could hold her, smooth her hair, pat her cheek, kiss away her fears. But she was a detective sergeant, for God’s sake, used to facts and hard evidence. She’d prefer the rational.

  ‘For a start,’ he said, wheeling the buggy around and making his way back along the lapping water’s edge, ‘it’s a complaint, singular. The next thing I want to find out is who sent the letter.’

  ‘You can’t possibly think it was Dierdre Lessing,’ Jacquie was walking with him.

  ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘She hates my guts but she doesn’t have the imagination for this. Anyway, it’ll be all right. Only part of it is true.’

  ‘Which part?’ Jacquie asked.

  He looked at her in mock horror. ‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ he scolded. ‘The part about my hands in the girls’ knickers, of course. Everything else is made up.’

  ‘Max,’ she stopped him. ‘Don’t joke about this. You remember Oscar Wilde?’

  ‘Not personally,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘But if you mean his flippant, smart-arsed arrogance in court at his libel trial, yes, I do.’

  ‘“I am a lover of youth,”’ Jacquie quoted. ‘And that landed him in a helluva lot of trouble.’

  ‘Poor Oscar,’ Maxwell was looking out to sea where the ocean liners passed each other, lit by the gold of the evening sun like a Maxfield Parrish painting. ‘He was his own worst enemy.’

  ‘And so are you, Max.’ She was standing there shivering slightly, for all it was still July and Leighford still in the middle of a heatwave. ‘I don’t know what you said to that tribunal this morning, but I’ll lay you any odds you like you got right up their collective noses. You just can’t help yourself. Oh, darling,’ she suddenly hugged him. ‘Please be careful.’

  ‘Let’s teach it to them before they teach it to us,’ he growled in his best Hill Street Blues take off. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You went to The Dam with those girls,’ Jacquie said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Are you being a prosecuting counsel now?’ he asked her.

  She shook her head, walking on with him. ‘I’m just trying to find out what happened.’

  ‘All right. No, technically I didn’t go with the girls. I met them there. I didn’t even acknowledge that much for the tribunal, by the way.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Who were they?’

  ‘Steph Courtney and Emma Austen.’

  ‘Do you teach either of them?’

  ‘Not now,’ he told her. ‘I used to in Year Nine. Emma does History, I think, in Paul Moss’s set. Steph doesn’t. Media, I believe, after the school of one Michael Mouse Esquire. Technically, of course, no one teaches them. They’ve left.’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘That might work in your favour,’ she said. ‘You can’t be charged with interfering with your students if they’re not your students.’

  ‘Jacquie.’ Maxwell stopped the buggy again, Nolan turning over in his sleep. ‘I didn’t interfere with anybody. Except you, of course,’ he smiled, ‘and I seem to remember that was your idea.’

  But Jacquie wasn’t laughing and Maxwell’s attempt to lift the mood of the moment wasn’t exactly a success.

  ‘How old are they?’ she asked. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly,’ he said. ‘Steph may be sixteen. Emma, I don’t think so. I’d have to look up their files.’

  ‘Great. So at least one of them is under age. Why did you meet them on The Dam?’

  ‘You know why,’ Maxwell said. ‘Steph saw a murder. Or what she took to be a murder. I wanted to know the precise place.’

  ‘But you’d been there before.’

  ‘Yes, I had, but I couldn’t be sure if I was in the right position. Turns out I was a couple of hundred yards out.’

  ‘Does it make a difference?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Maxwell pondered. ‘It all depends on exactly what Steph actually saw.’

  ‘Max, you’re rambling.’ Jacquie was at her wits’ end.

  ‘No, I’m not. Look, you’ve been to police college, forensics lectures. Tell me about rigor.’

  ‘Rigor mortis?’ she frowned.

  ‘With that spelling, is there any other kind?’

  ‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘Someone once poetically put it as “a sure indication of the hopelessness of any attempts at resuscitation”. Technically, it’s the contraction of voluntary and involuntary muscles that stiffen the limbs. It’s all caused by coagulation of protein in muscles.’

  ‘Talk me through it,’ Maxwell said, checking that Nolan was still happily in the land of nod. It may all be ‘zicker zicker’ to him, but one of the first words Maxwell senior had learned to say was ‘bugger, bugger, bugger’ as he chased up the road in exasperation after a cousin who was older and faster than he was. You couldn’t be too careful.

  ‘It starts with the lower jaw and eyelids,’ she told him. ‘About five hours after death.’

  ‘Five hours?’

  ‘Give or take. It’s not an exact science, Max. It depends on room temperature, body being inside or outside, time of year.’

  ‘Car,’ Maxwell said. ‘June.’

  ‘This June?’ she asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘The stiffening spreads to the neck, shoulders, arms, trunk and legs. In “normal” conditions I’d expect the deceased to be as stiff as a board from head to foot after twelve hours.’

  ‘Twelve hours,’ he repeated.

  ‘Max, what is this about?’

  ‘Humour me,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The body usually stays stiff for another twelve hours,’ she said. ‘Then the whole process goes into a kind of reverse, except the head loosens first and so on down to the feet.’

  ‘David Taylor was killed by strangulation.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she nodded. ‘What point are you making?’

  ‘There’d have been a struggle?’

  ‘Almost certainly. The marks on the neck and fingernails proved that. There were no drugs found in the body, so he’d have been fit enough to put up a fight, certainly.’

  ‘And does that have any effect on rigor mortis?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Exertion speeds up the process. You’d have to ask Jim Astley by how much.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Maxwell murmured. ‘I think I’ll leave that stone unturned, thank you very much. So it’s not possible, then.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘Hold your arm out.’

  ‘What?’ Jacquie was chuckling now.

  ‘Your right arm. Hold it out.’

  She did, oblivious to the knots of holiday-makers plodding back ac
ross the pebbles.

  He tapped her arm lightly with his hand. It wavered. ‘Ow!’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to pick you up.’

  ‘You dirty old man!’ she scolded. ‘I’m virtually a married woman.’ And she shrieked as he lifted her bodily off the ground. ‘No, no,’ he shouted. ‘Keep your right arm up, rigid.’

  ‘Max, for God’s sake. This is ludicrous.’

  There was a sharp cry from Nolan, disturbed by the mock violence around him. ‘It’s all right, little one,’ his father said. ‘Just Mummy and Daddy playing silly…beggars. Did you notice, though, how Mummy’s legs were dangling down, all floppy, as was Mummy’s left arm? That’s because she’s alive. Hey ho!’

  Jacquie swept the startled infant out of the buggy, throwing him in the air and catching him expertly. ‘It’s all right, darling. Your father’s mad.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ Maxwell said. ‘But we’ve established one thing that’s quite important. Whatever Steph Courtney witnessed at The Dam the other week, it wasn’t a m-u-r-d-e-r.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It rained in the night. In Quetta and all points south they’d have been singing like Gene Kelly, splashing in the puddles and thanking whichever God they worshipped. In Leighford, it was all very quiet and all very British. Mrs Troubridge put all her cutlery away and draped towels over the mirrors – lightning was so unpredictable, wasn’t it?

  The youngest member of the Geography department at Leighford High went out along the Front as the wind rose and bounced the coloured lights roped between the street lamps. He spent an hour or two standing like Ben Franklin, trying to capture sheet lightning on his digital camera. There had been a time when Peter Maxwell had done mad things for the sake of his kids – though never, it was true, quite as mad as that. But he’d been a young man, then, at a different school in a different place. And now he had no job at all.

  Jacquie unplugged the modem and sat with Maxwell under the skylight, listening to the rumbles of thunder as they died away to the west and watching the world suddenly illuminated by the flash. Nolan, of course, slept through the lot. As did Metternich, the seasoned hunter. When he was awake, the flashes were quite useful, in fact, lighting up as they did the trajectory of some hapless creature hoping to make it home tolerably dry and tolerably alive. Uh uh; wrong on both counts.

  So no one saw the gaunt young man with straw-coloured hair under his hoodie standing along Columbine in the rain. He was staring hard at Maxwell’s house, committing it to memory, getting his bearings from the road. Then, as silently as Metternich, he crossed into the darkness of Maxwell’s side gate and was inside before the next flash of lightning hit. He wasn’t in Maxwell’s garden for long; just long enough.

  It was still wet, warm and like treacle when Peter Maxwell on Surrey purred into the car park at Leighford’s B&Q. The rain had all but stopped now, but the humidity was frightening. Even so, this was an English summer and Maxwell never ceased to be amazed at the astonishing number of people who seemed to have time off. He wanted to shout at them ‘I know why I’m here. I’ve been suspended from my job on suspicion of gross indecency with minors and I’m following up a murder enquiry, like you do. What’s your excuse?’

  But somehow, he felt, as his eyes lighted on an old girl who appeared to be Methuselah’s elder sister, he wasn’t likely to get much of a response. Jacquie was clearly worried about him, had dropped Nolan off at Pam’s herself and told the silly old bugger to stay home. True, Maxwell had another white, plastic, unmade-up soldier kit in 54 millimetre waiting for him when he’d finished Landriani. Why didn’t he indulge himself, Jacquie has suggested, and start work on the next? But Peter Maxwell was no fool; he recognised therapy when it was suggested to him. Busy, busy, busy. But there were other things on Maxwell’s mind today. He had a murderer to catch and he couldn’t help thinking this little misunderstanding at Leighford High was something or other to do with it.

  ‘Got any seven eighths Whitworths?’ he asked the lad in the overalls halfway up a ladder. They were the screws Noah had used to build the Ark.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I…oh, Mr Maxwell. It’s you.’

  It certainly was when Maxwell looked last; now, he wasn’t so sure. ‘Have you got a minute, John?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure.’ The lad clattered down.

  ‘Look,’ Maxwell looked into the boy’s face, earnest as always, eager to please. ‘Have you got a coffee break due or something? It’s rather personal; I don’t want to talk about it in…’ he looked about him, ‘Plumbing.’

  John Mason smiled. He’d always liked Maxwell. Never found him mad at all. That was only stupid idiots who didn’t know him, couldn’t see the decent man under the scarf and the cycle clips and the outer shell of bravado. He’d actually noticed once, when Maxwell had left his wallet open in his office at school, a battered photo of a woman and a baby. And he’d always wondered who they were. ‘Out back,’ he said. ‘Smokers’ Corner. Don’t worry, it’s too wet for them today.’

  Actually, John Mason was wrong. A scrawny employee with designer acne lurked there, his fingers curling around his roll-up.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Alf. Give us a minute, can you, mate?’

  Alf was a reasonable sort of bloke. The old bastard with the silly hat and the barbed-wire hair was probably the kid’s dad. He had a dad like that. Well, not like that, exactly, ’cos his dad had no hat. And, come to think of it, no hair. But he kept turning up at inopportune moments too. Alf winked and sloped off, to Smokers’ Corner Two, round the back of the Creosote store.

  ‘Can’t offer you a seat, I’m afraid, Mr Maxwell.’ University had done wonders for John Mason. He’d always been bright, clever, quick on the uptake. But now he was what headteachers the world over liked to call ‘a rounded individual’, whatever that meant. In the case of John Mason, it meant he was a bloody nice fella.

  ‘John, I spoke to Louise a few days ago…’

  ‘I know,’ Mason nodded, his face suddenly serious. ‘She told me.’

  ‘I think I upset her.’

  He nodded again. ‘I think you did,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure you didn’t mean it. You had your reasons.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maxwell. ‘Yes, I did. You see, Louise wasn’t quite honest with me, was she?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the lad said.

  ‘Yes, you do, John. Let me tell you something about teaching. Oh, it’s nothing you learn on PGCE courses, although you might just come across it in some of the more down-to-earth Child Psychology books. Kids lie. Yup! An unpalatable truth, but a truth nonetheless. They don’t at first, of course. It’s not an original sin. But like everything else, they learn it from their elders, if not betters. They realise that by telling porkies, they get away with things, don’t get told off. If they’re really good at it, they can get somebody else into trouble. But often, little things give them away. Like looking to the left when they’re telling those lies. Like Louise did when I spoke to her in the café – like you’re doing now, John.’

  ‘No, I…’

  ‘John!’ The old Maxwell bark still had the power to make the lad jump. For all he was Mr Sophisticate these days, the rounded individual, right now he was back in Year Seven again with a big scary man trying to teach him some history. ‘Three men are dead, son,’ his old Head of Sixth Form was talking more softly now. ‘I think your Louise knows something about that.’

  ‘No, Mr Maxwell.’ The lad was horrified. ‘No, you don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Maxwell said. ‘Suppose you enlighten me.’

  ‘On the game?’ Jacquie sounded incredulous at the other end of the phone.

  ‘No, not actually.’ Maxwell had just kicked off his soaking wet hush-puppies. The rain may have stopped, but the spray over the Flyover was something else and he was wringing wet. He grabbed a towel and began attacking his hair while juggling the cordless. Metternich wasn’t in to see this meaningless ritual; he’d seen it before and it had embarrassed the hell o
ut of him. He was in a hayloft somewhere, listening to his next meal rustling away to his left, gnaw gnaw west. ‘But someone made her an offer she felt bound to refuse.’

  ‘Say on,’ Jacquie told him. ‘If I see any more cross references on this bloody computer, I’m going to throw it out of the window. And what were you doing in B&Q, by the by?’

  ‘Oh ye of no faith at all!’ Maxwell sighed, stumbling out of his trousers and landing gratefully on the bed. ‘I needed more gravure for my pyro if you must get all the dirt. We modellers never sleep, you know.’

  ‘Bollocks, Max,’ she grunted. ‘Cut to the chase.’

  ‘All right. The Gardens were a favourite trysting place of Louise Bedford and John Mason.’

  ‘Yes, we know that.’

  ‘But what you don’t know, because neither of them told you, is that in going back there on the night they found Gerald Henderson, they were actually exorcising a ghost of sorts.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘They’d had a bad experience there the previous week.’

  ‘Oh? What?’

  Maxwell was trying to disentangle himself from the damp wrinkles of his shirt. And that wasn’t easy with one hand. There was, of course, a speaker button on the cordless, but such niceties had never occurred to the dodo who was Peter Maxwell. ‘A gentleman of certain years had been watching them from the bushes. The bushes were shaking. Are you getting the point, or shall I start breathing heavily?’

  ‘All too clearly, thanks,’ Jacquie told him. ‘By the way, this call is being recorded for training purposes. Your liberty is at risk if you look at us funny. Catch my drift?’

  Maxwell did. ‘The gentleman emerged from the bushes brandishing a huge…wallet. And he offered both of them, but Louise especially, a rather sizable amount of spondulicks if she’d care to go to a party with him.’

  ‘A party, eh?’ Jacquie had been around. She’d heard this sort of offer before. In fact, unknown to Maxwell, she’d once been on the receiving end of one. ‘Where?’

  ‘Littlehampton.’

  ‘Littlehampton?’ Jacquie repeated.