Maxwell's Point Read online

  But Nolan was grizzly. It was fiendishly hot despite the overspreading boughs of the oak and he certainly hadn’t liked the grizzled old man that had just loomed over him from nowhere. He was tired and thirsty and he missed his Mummy and he missed his Juanita. He and Maxwell pedalled home, pausing just long enough for Nolan to smear himself liberally with ice cream and cherry sauce.

  ‘And remember,’ Maxwell tapped the side of his nose, ‘Not a word to your mother. You know how “healthy living” she gets at moments like these.’

  ‘Where?’ Maxwell was sitting like Confucius in his back garden, tinkering with his lawnmower. Why was it, he wondered at moments like these, that the bloody green stuff grew every time you turned your back? Confucius never had this trouble. Confucius probably had people for chores like this.

  ‘Brighton, Max,’ Jacquie was arranging the parasol over Nolan’s pram. The little boy lay in nothing but a nappy, sunblocked to buggery and with a string of bright plastic things across his line of vision. Maxwell had optimistically placed a copy of von Clausewitz’s On War in there, but Nolan had thrown it out of the pram – overrated in his opinion. ‘You must have heard of it. Along the coast a bit. Pier. Candy floss. Kiss Me Quick hats. Bit like Leighford with knobs on.’

  ‘The AIDS capital of the South,’ Maxwell nodded.

  She looked at him. ‘That dates you,’ she said.

  He remembered the Black Death too, but he wasn’t going to admit to that.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Day of Rest, Woman Policeman,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Jacquie bent down to plant a kiss on the curly forehead of her little boy. ‘It’s only shopping.’

  ‘Shopping?’ Maxwell nearly cut his thumb on that plastic orange thing that passes for a spanner in the world of gardeners.

  ‘Well, it’s a working shop, if you know what I mean. Of course, I can’t tell you anything about it.’

  ‘And I can’t prevent myself from throwing this lawnmower at you if you don’t,’ he smiled in a matter-of-fact way.

  She laughed, tucking herself up on the steamer chair. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Just this once…’

  And they laughed together.

  There was a single cry from Nolan. One that said, ‘for God’s sake, you two, stop enjoying yourselves’.

  As he waited for her to get ready, he saw in that bewildering place that was his imagination, the Minutemen crouching in their buckskins in the long grass, priming their flintlocks and fowling pieces. He saw the lines of red, heard the flags snapping in the stiffening breeze, the muffled rattle of the drums. An ambush – how typical. One day the Americans would come to know what it was like to be sniped at by people who refused to play by the rules of warfare. But that was another 4th July, long, long ago. And a bunch of self-important and self-interested lawyers had written a document that tried to excuse their treachery and self-interest. Put your John Hancock on that.

  This 4th July was altogether more peaceful, but it was all one when you were a historian. And mad.

  They kissed under the sycamore that shaded the open-plan patch of lawn at the front of 38 Columbine, yellow now with the lack of rain. ‘You take care now, Woman Policeman,’ he told her. ‘And don’t talk to any strange men.’

  ‘It’s OK, Benny,’ Jacquie leaned into the DC’s car, parked at the kerb. ‘No need to take it personally.’ She turned once more. ‘Are you going to be all right,’ she asked, ‘my boys?’ This was the first time Jacquie had gone away from Columbine since they’d brought Nolan home. It was just one of those tiny, sad little milestones in a mother’s life; there’d be more, she knew.

  ‘We’ll cope,’ Maxwell stroked her cheek. ‘You ring the girls, Nole,’ he called up the stairs. ‘I’ll get the champers on ice.’

  He’d wanted to get the boy downstairs for the fond farewell, but the little chap had been up since four and was now spark out dreaming of a white Christmas or whatever it was almost one-year-olds dream about. Had they done any research on that?

  Benny Palister put the plastic to the metal and they were gone, snarling out of Columbine and making for the Flyover and all points East.

  ‘Bloody peculiar, isn’t it, sarge?’

  ‘What’s that, Constable?’ She did the girlie thing for a moment and checked her make-up in the mirror. This was marginally safer than when she usually did it, driving.

  ‘Songs,’ Benny said. ‘Some of them, for no reason, you just can’t get out of your head.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she remembered. ‘How was the wedding?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ The lad’s face fell. ‘Bloody awful, thanks. Remind me never to go through it myself.’

  ‘Wait ’til you’re asked,’ she told him.

  ‘No, it wasn’t the wedding,’ he said, crunching through the gears on his way to the A259. ‘It’s a track on the radio. I keep hearing it and it sort of sums up this case – the man at the Point.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s called Whale on the Beach by Danny Goodburn.’

  Jacquie shrugged. ‘Don’t know it.’

  ‘Oh, you will,’ Benny said. ‘Goodburn’s going places. Got a band called The Denvers. No, it’s just the lyrics…’ He broke into song – ‘“What would you do if you found a whale, a whale on a beach, gasping for air. What would you do, would you something, something, a whale on the beach, that shouldn’t be there. How would it know that it moved you…something. The whale on the beach with nobody there. The look in its eye to the la, la, la, la, la, just out of reach in the dark down there. A whale on a beach, gasping for air. A whale on the beach, gasping for air.” What was he doing there? The man at the Point?’

  Jacquie resisted the obvious answer – ‘quietly rotting’. It wasn’t worthy of her and anyway, Benny Palister was a curious mixture of Goldilocks and Don Quixote. And Jacquie Carpenter knew all about Don Quixote – she was living with him and had recently given birth to his son.

  ‘That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question,’ she conceded. ‘I didn’t know you could sing – presumably, Mr Goodburn actually can?’ She flicked a coin out of her handbag, tossing it expertly in the air. ‘Heads or tails?’

  ‘Er…tails,’ he opted.

  ‘Bad luck, it’s heads.’ The coin was already back in her bag. ‘Divide and conquer, Benny, my boy. I’ll do the shirts. You do the teeth.’

  Jacquie wasn’t really shopping. True, Lord Everard was only three doors down from Hell’s Kitchen, her favourite shop in the world, but, as she told Benny Palister all the way back along the coast road, she honestly hadn’t known that when they set out. As it was, an all-singing, all-dancing Moulinex just happened to land in her shopping basket, which she felt obliged to buy pending her next pay rise or when Hell froze over, whichever was the sooner. As for her enquiries, they hadn’t been too helpful, but then, neither she nor Henry Hall thought they would be. The dead man’s shirt was beginning to decompose, hanging around the purple-blue of his body, but it had definitely been a bright orange when new. Lord Everard’s Assistant Under-Manager (Weekends) thought they’d stopped that particular line about eighteen months before. It was part of the Proud To Be Loud promotion and had never really worked. Yes, they had records at Head Office (Clitheroe), but they would only tell you how many orange Louds had been sold, not to whom. Peter Maxwell would have remembered a time when tailors kept details of their customers, if only so the stingy buggers would pay up. Now it was all plastic and online shopping, nothing left the store/van without being paid for. And no one, the Assistant Under-Manager was sure, had gone for the online option, presumably on the grounds that men who bought orange shirts didn’t want anyone to know where they lived.

  Benny Palister hit paydirt as the Forty Niners used to say way back in ’49; but he hit an awful lot of enamel walls and plain aggro first. There probably isn’t a profession in the world more ghastly than that of dentistry. Alone of the torturers employed by the
Inquisition, they seemed to have survived in the job that time forgot. Danish Dentist on the Job was not, as film buff Peter Maxwell could have told you, a piece of badly dubbed porn; it was a horror film focusing on oral sadism of the most depraved kind. Remember Marathon Man and the particularly nasty Laurence Olivier drilling seven kinds of shit out of Dustin Hoffman’s molars? So true to life. Benny couldn’t believe it – one of the dentists asked to give up his Sunday morning round of golf to make his records available actually trotted out the cliché – ‘I pay your wages, sonny’. It was true in an indirect sort of way, but it was negative and unhelpful and Benny made a quiet mental note to pass the guy’s car registration on to the next Traffic Warden he saw.

  Dentist Number Four, however, was not only polite, but came up with a match. Jim Astley’s X-rays of the dead man’s gnashers found a doppelgänger in downtown Brighton. Bingo.

  ‘David Taylor,’ the detective said, sinking back into the driving seat.

  ‘The man at the Point?’ Jacquie checked.

  Benny beamed.

  She patted him on the back. ‘You little genius, you,’ she said. ‘My line of enquiry was always going to be more of a gamble.’ It was a defensive remark, designed to cover her back.

  Benny shot a glance at the Moulinex filling the back seat and said nothing.

  ‘Details?’ Jacquie asked.

  Benny consulted his notebook in time-honoured tradition. ‘David Taylor, aged forty-two. Lives – sorry – lived at Flat B, 219 Marston Road.’

  ‘Know it?’

  Benny shook his head. There was no reason why he should.

  ‘Let’s reconnoitre,’ his sergeant said. ‘Perhaps now we can solve your riddle for you – find the reason why there was a whale on the beach.’

  ‘Yes?’ a disembodied voice crackled over the intercom.

  ‘Mrs Taylor?’ Benny asked, peering instinctively into the tannoy by the front door. They both knew they were on CCTV.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Sunday. Jehovah’s Witness Time. Mormon Moments. You couldn’t be too careful.

  ‘Police.’ Jacquie held her warrant card up to the camera.

  There was a click and a whirr and the pair were inside, climbing a blank staircase in a dank, fish-smelling interior. No mint sauce and lamb of a traditional Sunday here. And certainly no roast beef of Olde England.

  The woman at the door of Flat B had hair like straw and was dragging heavily on a fag as Jacquie and Benny arrived. ‘What’s he done now?’ she asked, eying them both suspiciously.

  ‘Who?’ Jacquie countered.

  ‘Come on,’ she growled, with a voice like a Brillo pad. ‘Don’t piss me about. Jack. I was only up at the Probation with him last week.’

  ‘May we come in, Mrs Taylor?’ Benny asked.

  ‘All right.’ She dropped her scrawny arm from the doorframe. ‘But it’s not Mrs Taylor, all right? That was another bloody lifetime.’

  ‘Who’s Jack?’ Jacquie asked. The lounge was spartan, an Oxfam coffee table in the centre, all-but-buried under copies of the Daily Express and Heat. Days old, half-drunk cups of coffee jostled with empty Buddies on most conceivable surfaces.

  ‘Are you winding me up?’ the woman wanted to know. She was half a head shorter than Jacquie and far below Benny. A social historian like Peter Maxwell would have assessed she was suffering from rickets. ‘Are you from Winchester Road nick or what?’

  ‘Leighford,’ Jacquie told her. ‘Leighford CID.’

  ‘Leighford?’ the straw-haired woman blinked, frowning. ‘What the fuck’s he been up to there?’ She looked at the boyish freckles on Benny Palister. ‘’Scuse my French, darlin’, won’tcher?’

  ‘We’re making enquiries about Mr David Taylor,’ Jacquie explained, looking out of the window at high-rise Brighton where there had been no sign of the sea since 1958.

  ‘Dave?’ she repeated (almost). ‘He’s nothing to do with me no more.’

  ‘But he was?’ Jacquie turned back to her. ‘Your husband.’

  ‘Ex,’ she spat. ‘Wiv a capital X.’

  ‘I take it you and Mr Taylor are divorced?’ Benny asked.

  She looked him up and down. ‘You’re quick, ain’tcha? No,’ she stubbed out her ciggie before reaching for another. It was as well neither of the coppers smoked, because she wasn’t offering any. ‘No, technically, we’re just separated. Well, there’s no point. Dave is such a bastard he wasn’t going to support us, no way. I’d had enough. I told him to clear off, fuck off out of it and don’t come back. And he hasn’t.’

  Jacquie looked at Benny. Indeed he hadn’t, and now he never would. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Annie,’ the woman told her. ‘Look, what’s this all about? Whatever he’s been telling yer about me, it ain’t true.’

  ‘He told us nothing, Annie,’ Jacquie said. ‘That’s just the point. Look, um…perhaps you should sit down.’

  Chance would be a fine thing, thought Benny. Every chair was a pile of debris, from flung clothes to Indian takeaway cartons. ‘Oh, yeah,’ Annie muttered, the ciggie wobbling between her lips as she talked. ‘Yeah. Sorry. It’s the maid’s day off.’

  She swept the settee contents onto the floor and Jacquie gingerly sat down next to her, vowing to shower and visit the dry cleaner before she clapped eyes on Nolan again. She chose her moment. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, Annie,’ she said softly. ‘I’m afraid David is dead.’

  Jacquie Carpenter had done this before. So, once, had Benny Palister. There was no easy way to do it. And no telling what the reaction would be. Some relative strangers had cried and screamed and ranted. Some nearest and dearest had shrugged and thanked them. No rhyme. No reason. Shock. Disbelief. Bewilderment. Denial. Anger. The whole melting pot of emotions that comes with sudden death. Why her? Why him? Why me? In the end, it often came down to that. Why me?

  ‘How do you know?’ Annie, once-Taylor, asked.

  ‘We were able to identify him from dental records,’ Benny said.

  ‘Jesus!’ Annie hissed, shaking her head. ‘Where was this?’

  ‘We found his body on a headland above Leighford,’ Jacquie said; giving the name of the place seemed a little tactless in the circumstances.

  ‘How…?’

  ‘We don’t have any answers, yet, Annie,’ Jacquie forestalled the question. ‘That’s why we’re here. Can you tell us when you saw David last?’

  Annie blew smoke across the room, searching the middle distance for an answer. ‘Six, seven months. I dunno. About Christmas time, I think.’

  ‘When you separated?’ Benny checked.

  ‘Christ, mate, we’ve been separated bloody dozens of times. The last time I seen him was Christmas – or it may have been New Year.’

  ‘That was here?’ Jacquie was trying to focus on the nitty-gritty, the devil that was in the detail of murder enquiries.

  ‘God, no. I wouldn’t have him here. Lowering the tone all over the place. No, this was a party. It must have been New Year, come to think of it.’ She put on her posh voice. ‘It was up at the golf club, don’tchya know,’ it wasn’t a very good Joanna Lumley. ‘He was pawing some tart, as usual. I threw my drink in his face.’

  ‘One for the ladies, was he?’ Benny asked.

  ‘You show me a man who isn’t,’ Annie scowled, looking Benny up and down. ‘Unless they’re poofs, of course. Well, that was why we split in the first place. He couldn’t keep his hands to hisself. Turns out, he gave my bridesmaid one on our bloody wedding day. Well, the joke’s on him now, ain’t it?’

  Perhaps; but nobody was laughing.

  ‘Tell me, Annie,’ Jacquie leaned towards her. ‘Did David own a crucifix? A silver necklace thing?’

  ‘Not when we was together, no. But he was always into bling. Like a fucking magpie.’

  ‘So…’ Jacquie was choosing her words. ‘If we asked you to think of anybody who’d want to see David dead…?’

  Annie looked at her. ‘You’re sure it was murder?’
she asked. Jacquie hadn’t actually said the word, but she nodded anyway.

  ‘Well,’ the ex-wife inhaled sharply, ‘me, for starters. I’d have cheerfully strangled the bastard.’

  For one of those instants, time stood still. Even Annie’s smoke seemed to hang in the air. Jacquie stole a sideways glance at Benny. ‘I didn’t tell you how he died, Annie,’ she said.

  The straw-haired woman looked at her, sitting up suddenly. ‘Is that it?’ she laughed, brittle and with realisation dawning of what was going on. ‘Is that how he died? Somebody strangled him?’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘It looks that way,’ she said. ‘Annie. We’ll need to take a statement from you.’

  ‘I’m not coming to Leighford,’ Annie snapped.

  ‘No need,’ Jacquie said. ‘We can do it here. Now, if you’ve got a minute. Is there anybody else?’ she asked. ‘Anybody else who had a grudge against David?’

  Annie thought for a moment, fingers twitching around her cigarette. ‘Dave was into all sorts. Got a record as long as your bloody arm. There was a few blokes he pissed off now and then, in the line of booty, you might say – and that’s not one of mine, by the way, but one of his. Always thought he was a clever bastard, did our David. Any one of them might have given him the smacking he so richly deserved. Your oppos down Winchester Road Nick might have a line on that. And when you find out who,’ she looked Jacquie straight in the eye, ‘you might give the bugger a medal.’

  ‘What about Jack?’ Benny asked.

  Jacquie was quietly impressed. The boy was coming on, like a terrier with a bone. In twenty or thirty years he might make sergeant.

  Annie smiled; bitter, secret. ‘Jack ought to be top of the list,’ she growled, ‘the life he had with Dave. But Jack,’ she sat upright, sighing, ‘Jack is Dave’s son. Oh, he’s mine too, but he was always Dave’s first. The bastard would come home with some tart or he’d be pissed and give me a going over, but Jack couldn’t see it. Oh, no, it must have been my fault. I didn’t understand him, didn’t know the stress he was under. Well, it was me who wiped the kid’s nose and arse and went up to the school when he got into trouble. I was with him in court when he went down. I visited him in prison. And Dave? Well, Dave gave him toys that fell off the back of lorries. And took him down the football and to the boozer. And Jack thinks the sun shines out of his arse. There’s gratitude for you. He’s going to go ape-shit about this.’