Maxwell's Point Read online

  ‘Your husband?’ Harris stopped and looked at the phone, then put it back to his ear. ‘Who is this?’ he asked.

  ‘I told you,’ the exasperated voice exploded. ‘I’m DS Jacquie Carpenter. My husband is’…but she’d gone.

  ‘Shit!’ Jacquie had lost contact. She threw the mobile onto the driving seat and hauled the Ka’s wheel over. All afternoon, she’d been trying to find a way to be with Maxwell on that insane bloody rendezvous with death. She’d known, even if he hadn’t, that he wasn’t going to the Point to meet sweet, innocent Juanita Reyes. He was going to meet a killer face to face. And that unutterable shit Henry Hall was letting him do it.

  And that same shit had given her some pointless dead end lead to follow up in Brighton. She couldn’t even find Annie Taylor as was, never mind talk to her, and the traffic on the A259 had been impossible. She’d refused to go at first, but Henry had come the heavy and threatened her with suspension if she didn’t. ‘Go on, then,’ she’d screamed at him. ‘Suspend me.’ If it was good enough for Peter Maxwell, it was good enough for her. But a little voice in her head told her to stop being so silly and to do as you’re told. When she realised the little voice was Peter Maxwell’s, she went quietly.

  She went quietly because she thought she’d be back before this. Thought she’d be up at the Point with her love. What was he thinking? He wasn’t well, had just gone through a plate-glass window and he was a bloody amateur, for God’s sake. She was the professional. She had the bloody badge. ‘Get out of the fucking way!’ she screeched at a pensioner risking his life on a pedestrian crossing.

  ‘Women drivers!’ He shook his stick at her.

  Her brain wave of contacting Harris had disintegrated on the rock of bad reception. He was a shaky hope, certainly. The Leighford police were in the process of compiling a dossier on the man that might put him in the slammer and of course there was an outside chance that he was the Point killer himself. But Jacquie was desperate. And outside chances were all she had. Now, thanks to what Maxwell had always railed against, the uselessness of technology, she had no chance at all. Her foot was to the floor as she snarled over the Flyover, bouncing on her horn like a thing possessed. And the Point was still ten minutes away.

  Chester Harris flicked the phone back into his pocket. For a moment he hesitated, unsure what to do. The cheek of it! Leighford police phoning him – and on his mobile – asking for help. They who had rousted him only days before. And come to think of it, that woman’s voice sounded familiar. Hadn’t she been the very one who had accused him of… Yes, he was sure it was. Then she’d come out with some guff about her husband. What sort of crank call was this?

  By this time, however, Chester Harris was well along the path. A sensible man would have turned back, but Chester Harris was anything but a sensible man. He enjoyed the limelight, the adulation, the cut and thrust of defending his particular ecological stance. And as for his little sideline, well, that offered a certain frisson too. He suddenly stopped short and instinctively crouched in the corn. His little sideline had taught him to be swift and silent. Peeping Toms did time.

  But the pair before him were nothing like the usual couples he spied on. He couldn’t see them terribly clearly because they were silhouetted against the sun, but they were obviously two men and that had never been Chester Harris’s thing. Then, as his eyes became acclimatised, he realised who they were, and he stood up, turning slowly and edging his way back towards his Gardens. One of them was that man after his own heart, DI Manton from West Sussex CID. Harris found himself chuckling at the fool the man had made of himself last night. Anybody too pissed to get it off with Sadie really was a no-hoper. He glanced back, just once. That other bloke had been at the party too. Spaniard, wasn’t he?

  ‘Rodrigo,’ Maxwell had only just recovered his balance after dealing with Lessing. ‘I hoped it wouldn’t be you. Thank you for your email.’

  The Spaniard bowed.

  ‘I assume Juanita is all right? I mean, you haven’t buried her out here somewhere?’

  ‘She is fine, Max,’ he said. ‘I told you, she is back home in Sant Lluis. When that silly goose Carolina thought I had gone missing, I had to invent the stomach bug so that my colleagues would not suspect. In fact, I went to visit Juanita, just to make sure all was well.’

  ‘Yes, you told me she was back home. You also told me she was a thief and that she had nothing to do with these killings.’

  ‘I lied,’ Mendoza shrugged. ‘But as I told you, I have been to confession about that.’

  ‘And have you been to confession about the murders?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ Mendoza told him. ‘I will.’

  ‘That will put your priest in an impossible position.’

  The Spaniard nodded. ‘It goes, as you say, with the territory.’

  ‘What now?’ Maxwell asked. Rodrigo Mendoza was thirty years his junior and he hadn’t just gone through a plate glass window. He didn’t really have to ask the question.

  ‘Now I have to add one more confession for the priest,’ he told him. ‘But first, how did you know it was me?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘Not at first. It was your excellent English that gave you away.’

  ‘My English?’ Mendoza laughed.

  ‘It was a conversation we had,’ Maxwell told him. ‘You, with your careful use of tenses. You said Juanita needed help. Not needs. Past tense.’

  ‘So?’ the Spaniard shrugged.

  ‘So you gave her help, didn’t you? You found out she was a whore and you were horrified. You see, I am a historian, Rodrigo. And the name of Mendoza is an old and proud one in Spain, is it not? You are descended from one of the oldest families in Castile y Leon. Captain Juan de Lopez Mendoza went down with his ship, didn’t he…’ Maxwell pointed, ‘somewhere out there in the Armada, under the storms of the Channel or the guns of Howard of Effingham, I don’t suppose it matters which.’

  ‘It matters,’ Rodrigo grunted. ‘Juan de Lopez Mendoza was the finest gunner in King Philip’s navy. But even he could not defeat the winds of God.’

  ‘You see, that’s what I missed,’ Maxwell admitted. ‘And I should be drummed out of the Historians’ Union for it. The Point has special meaning for you, doesn’t it?’

  Mendoza nodded. ‘There was a beacon up here, at the time of the Armada. When Juanita came to me with her problem, crying so desperately because she was being abused by these men, I knew there was only one solution. They had to die. And what better place than here, where you arrogant English have let the world believe you beat the great Armada. You did not. Only God!’

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘That’s all right, then. We all know that God is an Englishman.’

  Mendoza spat on the coarse grass. ‘The most despicable thing is that you, too, soiled Juanita. All of you – Taylor, Henderson, Lemon and Maxwell – passing her round like a cigarette or a pint.’

  ‘Not me, Rodrigo,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘There is no point in denying it now,’ Mendoza hissed. He was undoing his Cordovan leather belt. ‘It will not save you.’

  ‘That was what the party was all about. The one last night. I needed to join that happy band of perverts to find out how it all worked. Juanita was there, wasn’t she, at just such a party, with you? You probably didn’t know it at the time, but Taylor, Henderson, Lemon, they were all there too. That was how it worked, am I right? Henderson bought Juanita in the first place from the Levington Agency, then passed her round, for a suitable fee, to his amigos? Our friends in the police knew there was a link between Henderson and Taylor, but they couldn’t match Lemon up. That’s because none of them was actually a member of the Wilbraham Club, only casual visitors.’

  ‘You are very clever, Max,’ Rodrigo said. ‘Juanita said you were.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell realised that the Spaniard was making him turn and moving backwards, especially to his left at the moment, was not a good idea. ‘Now, help me out here, will you? You and Juanita
planned Taylor’s murder together? Am I right?’

  Mendoza checked the path. Still all clear. Still no one in sight. This was the optimum time, he knew. The time he had brought Henderson to the Gardens, the time he had pushed Lemon over. No one walked the path at this hour and he still had the daylight to see what he was doing. ‘That is right,’ he said.

  Maxwell wanted to keep his man talking, playing for time, trying to decide what to do. His left arm was all but useless and his head throbbed like buggery. ‘You practised,’ he was saying, ‘with a mannequin. A shop dummy. At The Dam.’

  Mendoza nodded. ‘How did you know that?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s just say a little bird told me,’ Maxwell said. ‘A bird being watched but she didn’t know it. That would have been what, a week before the Taylor murder?’

  ‘Ten days,’ Mendoza corrected him.

  ‘Then Juanita got cold feet.’

  ‘Got…’

  ‘Became frightened.’

  Mendoza nodded. ‘I could not blame her,’ he said. ‘And to be honest, it was better with her out of the way. This Taylor, he never locked his car. So I waited for my moment and hid in the back passenger seat.’

  ‘Strangling him from behind?’

  ‘It was easier than I thought it would be. But I had to pay the whore he was with to get out and lose herself.’

  ‘That was a risk,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘A risk worth taking,’ Mendoza spread his arms. ‘To this day, she has said nothing.’

  ‘Henderson?’

  ‘He was the biggest pig of all. A whore-monger. He would violate Juanita in the rhododendron bushes when his wife was out. I paid him a visit one day pretending I wanted some building work done. I killed him in my own house with my own bread knife. Placing him near rhododendron bushes in the Botanic Gardens had a certain…poetry, don’t you think.’

  Maxwell did.

  ‘And Lemon?’

  ‘He was a fool. Obsessed with this…eBay thing. I met him in a pub and said I had lots of Spanish silver if he was interested. Sixteenth century coins. He was so stupid that he agreed to meet me up here. The rest was easy. I told him they were hidden in the sandstone, just behind you. Now, enough talk. You tell me, did you defile Juanita?’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘I told you, Rodrigo,’ he said softly. ‘No. I merely said that to get you here. To flush you out as we say.’

  ‘So honour is not a thing confined to Spain?’ Mendoza asked.

  ‘No, Señor,’ Maxwell said. ‘It is not.’

  ‘Because of that,’ Mendoza suddenly threw up his hand, ‘I give you a choice, Don Quixote de la Mancha de Inglaterra. Slowly, by strangulation with the belt? Or quickly, like Señor Lemon, over the cliff?’

  ‘Hold it there, you bastard.’

  Mendoza stopped in his tracks. Maxwell spun round to the voice behind him and instantly regretted it.

  ‘Who are you?’ the Spaniard asked.

  A pale young man stood there, in the embers of the dying sun, his pale blue hood thrown back, his fierce grey eyes burning out of his pallid face. He was standing with his legs planted firmly apart and his arms outstretched in front of him, firmly holding a gun.

  ‘I’m Jack Taylor, you mad bastard,’ the boy hissed, ‘and you killed my dad.’

  There was a crash as the gun went off and Mendoza hurtled backwards, his head exploding and a spray of blood spattering over Maxwell’s face. The Spaniard staggered back one more pace, two and disappeared over the edge of Dead Man’s Point.

  Suddenly, there were men everywhere. Dark in SWAT flak jackets, they swarmed out of the bushes and broke cover from the oaks. Two of them stood upright in the corn; weapons gleaming like the Guards at Waterloo. Only Maxwell, the Historian, heard the echoing cry of the Duke of Wellington, ‘Now, Maitland, now’s your time’.

  ‘Drop it, son.’ It was Henry Hall’s voice, calmer than Wellington’s and very much of the here and now. Taylor stood there, the semi-automatic still smoking in his hand, but the stare had gone and he slowly lowered his arms, two men snatching the gun from him and pinning him to the ground.

  ‘You all right, Mr Maxwell?’ Hall asked.

  Maxwell was swaying a little, bearing in mind how close he’d come to death, but in essence, yes; he was fine.

  ‘That little trinket, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘The silver lizard.’

  ‘What of it?’ Hall asked as his team led Taylor away and others began to detach themselves to recover Mendoza’s body.

  ‘It wasn’t Wide Boy Taylor’s. It must have been dropped by Mendoza.’

  ‘Why do you assume that?’

  ‘Look it up for yourself,’ Maxwell told him. ‘In a little old travel guide by Compton Mackenzie you’ll find in the back room of Leighford Library. The lizard is a motif of the Island of Menorca.’

  He hobbled towards the cliff’s edge, Hall nearby, and he leaned over. He could see Mendoza’s body lying at the water’s rim, being buffeted by the ceaseless surge of the tide. And as he heard a scream from an hysterical woman rushing from the car park, he hummed to himself a snatch of a tune he’d been hearing at home on the radio all day – ‘A whale on the beach that shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘Max!’

  And he groaned in agony as Jacquie threw herself at him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘Thanks, guv,’ Jacquie Carpenter held out her right hand, her arm straight, her head high. ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Hall asked.

  The pair of them were standing in Hall’s office the next morning as the sun filtered in through the slats of the blinds, the particles of dust swirling in the atmosphere.

  ‘It was either going to be a handshake or a smack in the mouth,’ she said. ‘I must confess I was ready to give you the latter last night. You sent me on that wild goose chase to Brighton to get me out of the way, didn’t you?’

  ‘Tsk, tsk,’ the DCI shook his head. ‘Know what you can get for striking a police officer? And yes, of course I did.’

  She smiled at him. ‘For striking a police officer, I can get a lot of satisfaction, guv,’ she said.

  He almost smiled back. But then, he was Henry Hall, so that wasn’t going to happen this side of Hell freezing over.

  ‘If it’s any consolation to you and Max,’ he said. ‘Jack Taylor’s been singing like a canary all night. He’s not the brightest apple in the barrel is our Jack, and for some reason he got fixated on the fact that Maxwell was involved in his dad’s murder. Got a little confused at the offices of the Advertiser apparently – well, which of us hasn’t? He overheard a couple of journalists talking about the Taylor case and, as you’d expect, they happened to mention Peter Maxwell as somebody who might know something. Jack jumped to the wrong conclusions and so he fixed Maxwell’s bike – but not in a good way.’

  ‘Well, thanks for that,’ Jacquie said. ‘I think he had somebody else in the frame for that one. What’s going to happen to Juanita, guv?’

  ‘According to what we heard from Mendoza,’ Hall said, ‘she’s an accessory before the fact. We’ll have to inform the Spanish authorities and then it’s over to them.’

  ‘Rather ironic, really,’ Jacquie said. ‘Rodrigo Mendoza goes to all those lengths to hush the whole thing up, and it’s all going to hit the fan anyway.’

  Hall nodded. ‘That’s Africa,’ he said. But he probably meant Spain.

  Surrey was on the mend. He would forever be rather like the very axe that took off the head of Charles I, with a replacement blade and a replacement haft, in that his frame was new and his wheels had been resoldered and the tyres were hot off the press. At least Maxwell took some comfort from the fact that the agonising old saddle was still the same; that and the fact that it would be a while before he was in it again.

  So it was on that Saturday morning, with Nolan ensconced with Pam and talking once more to little Zoë – zicker, zicker – and Jacquie getting back into harness after the scare of her life the night before, Peter M
axwell embarked on a journey he never thought he’d make.

  ‘Well, well, Dierdre,’ he could actually beam by this time, ‘what a lovely house. And to think, all these years we’ve been colleagues, I’ve never once been invited over the threshold.’

  ‘Max,’ the Medusa’s face appeared to have turned to stone. ‘What…’

  ‘…time is it?’ Maxwell finished the sentence for her. ‘Day is it? Are you doing here? The fuck? Which of those questions would you like me to answer first, Senior Mistress?’

  Dierdre Lessing hadn’t been called that in a long time. It was no longer her role, but little things like educational exactitude never fazed Mad Max for long. ‘I was going to ask what happened to you?’ she said.

  ‘May I come in, Dierdre? I have a few things to say that I am prepared to bet your neighbours won’t want to hear. Or perhaps they will, depending on the precise nature of your relationship.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said, gushing more than a little. ‘Max, be my guest.’

  ‘Joy,’ growled Maxwell and entered her portals. He didn’t stumble over too many corpses in the hallway, though he was in the Lair of the White Worm.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew where I lived,’ she said. ‘What—?’

  ‘Questions, questions,’ Maxwell cut her short. ‘Let me ask you one, Dierdre. One I put to you, in fact, only days ago when I was still marginally employed by Leighford High School. How did the concerned member of the public who wrote that charming letter that maligned my character and libelled me know that Stephanie Courtney was in Year 11? I have added a few words there, because, as I’m sure you know by now, Dierdre, the little plan has been blown out of the water.’

  She was staring at him open-mouthed.

  ‘Let me add a few more words for you, just for clarity – how did Oliver Lessing, who wrote that charming letter etcetera, etcetera…’ again, the immaculate Yul Brynner from The King and I; again, as so often in the past, wasted on Dierdre Lessing. ‘Now, talk me through this one, Senior Mistress mine, because, you see, it’s the similarity of the surname that has me fooled.’