Maxwell’s Curse (19 page)

A grey-haired woman was wandering the room, straightening pictures and sticking Blu-Tack onto pieces of paper.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘I’m Peter Maxwell,’ he said, ‘from Leighford High.’ He’d thought of a dozen aliases on his way over, as the leaden sky prepared for night and the sidelights became headlights on the curve of the A25. Face to face with this woman, he’d abandoned them all. An uncomprehending desolation was etched into every line of her features.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you a colleague of Alison Thorn’s?’

The woman blinked. ‘She’s dead.’

‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said softly.

‘Did you know Alison? Are you a relative or something?’

‘No,’ he told her, ‘to both questions. Mrs … er … ?’

‘Mrs Whitemoor,’ she said. ‘Look, if you’re from the press, I really …’

‘No, Mrs Whitemoor. Look, your day’s over. I’m sure you want to get home, but could I have just five minutes of your time?’

Mrs Whitemoor looked at the man. He was a stranger, barging into her classroom and her life, at a time when she needed it least. But his eyes were kind and his face seemed as sad as her own.

‘All day,’ she told him, ‘all day I’ve been trying to tell the children where she is, where she’s gone. I lied, Mr Maxwell. I told them she was in Heaven, not on a slab somewhere with her throat cut.’

Maxwell blinked. ‘Her throat was cut?’

Mrs Whitemoor turned away, suddenly unable to bear the probing questions. ‘The police told me she was poisoned, that someone cut her throat afterwards.’ She turned back to face him, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘She was a lovely person, Mr Maxwell and a great teacher. What kind of monster does that to a person like Alison? To any person?’

‘That’s what I’d like to find out,’ he reached out and squeezed her arm gently.

‘Are you … a private detective?’

‘Unofficial,’ he said. ‘You see, on New Year’s Eve somebody left a body on my doorstep – literally.’

‘Good Heavens!’

‘I think whoever killed your lady also killed mine. Did you know Elizabeth Pride?

‘I’ve heard the name,’ Mrs Whitemoor nodded, ‘and I read about the case. I don’t live locally, you see. I live in Littlehampton.’

In other circumstances, Maxwell would have offered his condolences for that, but now didn’t seem the time. ‘When did you see Alison last?’

Mrs Whitemoor continued sticking her Blu-Tack to her pieces of paper, desperate to keep busy, afraid to sit down. ‘On Friday. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing all week, except for the visit from the police. That would have been Thursday, I believe.’

‘The police?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘They came on Thursday? Why?’

‘They wanted to look at some old school records. Amazingly, we’ve still got the logbooks from Victorian times.’

‘What were they looking for?’

‘Some people who were children here in the ’twenties. One, Alison said, was Albert Walters – he was the man found dead on the Barlichway Estate last week. Where a lot of our children come from.’

‘They do?’

‘Yes. It’s the only reason the school’s still open. We ship them in from Leighford every day.’

Maxwell nodded. Somewhere, somehow, he heard the ring of a dropping penny. ‘And the others were Elizabeth Pride and Jane Cruikshank. I’m sure the boys in blue will have checked their maiden names by now and made the connection. Do you remember the name of the police officer?’

‘Er … Brand, I think. Alison got him to tell the children all about police work.’ Her smile at the memory turned to tears again. ‘None of us thought there’d be real police work to be done … on Alison herself.’

She began to cry, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders heaving.

Instinctively, he held her to him, stroking her hair, rocking gently with her. Nobody had cried for Elizabeth Pride or for Albert Walters. Only Mrs Spooner had cried for Andrew Darblay. Now, with Alison Thorn it was different. He hadn’t known the woman, yet he felt an iron lump in his throat. He felt the world would cry for Alison Thorn.

12

‘Martin,’ DCI Hall was cradling a coffee cup. The lights in the Tottingleigh Incident Room weren’t burning blue, but they were radiating into another long, dark winter’s night. ‘Alison Thorn’s flat.’

‘We’ve found twelve sets of prints, guv,’ Stone told the waiting team as part of the day’s recap. ‘Hers, of course, a friend from the floor below, a Mrs Whitemoor who was a colleague – others we’re still checking.’

‘Men friends?’

‘None known. At least, not recently. Her address book has six assorted males other than her father. We’re checking them all out.’

‘How are the parents taking it?’ Hall asked.

Stone shrugged. ‘Old man’s pretty solid, considering. Mother’s a basket case, on sedatives.’

‘It’s not every day someone poisons your daughter, then slits her throat.’

‘That’s a post mortem injury, guv,’ Kevin Brand said, leaning forward in the hideously uncomfortable seat that had numbed his bum all day.

Hall nodded.

‘So, what are we saying?’

‘We’re saying that whoever administered the poison either stuck around to watch it take effect or came back later. Why, I don’t know. Who’s got anything on the neighbours?’

Jacquie Carpenter had. ‘There was somebody calling door to door on the day in question. Bears some looking at.’

‘Any specific reason?’ Hall asked.

‘Well, according to the two neighbours who saw him, he had a collecting box in hand – Barnardo’s, they thought.’

‘So?’

‘So he didn’t call on them. Only on Alison Thorn.’

‘There are … what … four more flats in Alison’s block. How do we know he didn’t visit them all?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘Nobody else in that afternoon, guv,’ Jacquie told the DCI. ‘As far as we know, she was alone in the block.’

‘The intercom’s not working,’ Stone said. ‘If she wanted to find out who was ringing her bell, she’d need to get down to the front door.’

‘Did anybody see this?’

Jacquie nodded. ‘A Mr Ottway, lives at 34 Whitesmith. He was building a new fence at the time.’

‘What’s his description of the Barnardo’s caller?’

Jacquie’s face said it all. ‘Not helpful, I’m afraid, guv. Mr Ottway suffers from myopia – short sight. He knew it was male, because he heard the voice. Nothing specific. Sounded quite posh, to quote him.’

‘Colour hair? Height? Anything?’ Hall was hoping.

Jacquie shook her head. ‘Sorry, guv. I hoped Mrs Billings might be more useful. Lives at number twenty-six.’

‘But?’

‘But she didn’t get a good look either. Male, certainly, maybe thirty, maybe fifty. She’s not – and I quote – good on ages.’

Hall slammed down the coffee cup. This man had the luck of the devil. Like a will o’ the wisp no one saw him come, no one saw him go. The only way you knew he’d been there was the body he left in his wake.

‘He’d have stayed,’ Hall was talking to himself really, tapping his lips with his fingers as though in prayer, ‘to wait ’til the poison took effect. For two reasons,’ he watched the faces of his team, the trustful eyes that showed less trust by the day. He watched the slipping of faith. It was as visible as the nose on your face. ‘First, he couldn’t take the chance of calling back. Charity collections are a good reason, but twice the number of visits is twice the risk of being caught, remember.’

‘What’s the other reason, guv?’ Brand asked.

‘Because,’ Hall’s face, like his voice, was ice-cold, ‘he enjoys it. How long did Astley give the dead woman from the time the poison was administered? An hour? Two? The sadistic bastard sat in a chair somewhere, perhaps the one in her bedroom and he watched her go into convulsions, then a coma, then death.’

‘Then he stripped her naked,’ Stone went on, taking up his guv’nor’s torch, ‘carefully arranging her on her back with her arms by her sides and he calmly cut her throat.’

‘One mean son of a bitch,’ Kevin Brand grunted. Of all of them in that room, he had been the one to talk to Alison Thorn, to see the sparkling eyes now dull, the radiant smile now gone.

‘Her legs were open,’ Stone remembered. ‘What did Astley make of that, guv?’

Hall sighed, leaning back in his chair, a pencil tapping softly at the end of his fingers to an incessant rhythm that thudded in his brain. ‘Nothing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘This was no sex attack. No sign of rape or assault, no bruising to thighs, vagina, anus. No semen. But the throat cutting has a significance. Anybody?’

He felt he was back at Bramshill again, with mock scenarios and a class of fast-track climbers, vying with each other to offer the perfect answer. It was like being in school with hands in the air and hissed voices all straining, ‘Sir, sir!’

But no one was saying that today. There were no hands in the air. Just a sea of faces, all tired, all nonplussed, all facing the same brick wall. Then he realized they were all looking at him, expecting him to know, to do something. He, who had no answers at all.

‘All right,’ he slid back his chair. ‘Ritual killing.’ He crossed to the display boards spread around the old Tottingleigh library, commandeered now as command headquarters in his people’s attempt to catch a madman. ‘That’s what all this is about.’ He tapped an index finger on the dead, shrivelled face of Elizabeth Pride. ‘Fungal poisoning,’ he said, watching the faces in front of him, ‘and a wound in the nape of the neck inflicted after death. Ritual. And this,’ he paused longer at the shocked, bloodless face of Alison Thorn, her dull eyes wide, the gash in her throat like a second mouth, slightly open like the first. ‘An organic poison, perhaps hemlock. The cut throat. Post mortem. Ritual.’ Hall walked back along the line, arms locked behind his back like some general reviewing his troops.

‘Let’s assume,’ he said, ‘that Darblay was not premeditated. A spur of the moment thing.’

‘Somebody was desecrating his church,’ Stone cut in, ‘and he caught them.’

‘Hence the candles and the sheep’s heart and the pentagram,’ Brand piped up.

‘Hence,’ Hall rounded the circle, ‘no poison. All the others,’ he pointed back at the photographs, ‘naked. All the others with post mortem wounds.’

‘But why, guv?’ Brand was frowning, shaking his head. ‘Why not kill them that way? A cut throat, stabs through the spinal cord, they’re pretty effective methods in their own right. Why the poisoning first?’

‘We’ve checked every chemist on the south coast,’ Stone said. ‘No one’s reported a break-in of any kind in the last three months and there’ve been no unusual requests on any of their poisons registers.’

‘That’s not necessary,’ Hall thought aloud, ‘except in the case of the strychnine for Albert Walters. Death-Cap mushrooms and hemlock can be found in any stretch of woodland in the south. It just takes someone with the knowhow.’

‘Witchcraft, guv?’ Jacquie Carpenter spoke for the first time. She felt the eyes in the room swivel to look at her. Even the eyes of the dead were turned, it seemed, her way.

‘Go on, Jacquie.’ Hall sat down, resting his head on one hand, the elbow on the table.

‘Elizabeth Pride had a reputation as a witch. Threatened the Cruikshanks on more than one occasion. And there was a poppet in Jane Cruikshank’s caravan, the sort of doll witches used to use. And the calendar in Myrtle Cottage …’ Her words hung like icicles in the artificial heat of the room. She would have given her life to have retracted them, but they were there, as tangible as if someone had written them on the wall in a victim’s blood. One by one puzzled heads came up. Frowns creased foreheads. Blank looks were exchanged.

Hall’s hand fell away and his head angled to the level. ‘Jacquie, Martin, my office.’

They waited until he was sitting comfortably – the work of a second. Then he was looking up at them, the eyes hard and cold behind the neon-lit lenses. ‘Calendar?’ he asked.

‘It’s from Myrtle Cottage, sir,’ Jacquie said, staring straight ahead. Her own voice was barely audible for the blood rushing in her ears and the blood thudding in her heart.

‘Yes, Jacquie,’ Hall was nodding, ‘you said. Martin,’ he turned his chill gaze to his sergeant. ‘You fouled up at Myrtle Cottage.’

DS Stone cleared his throat. This was not going to be a comfortable ride. ‘Yes, sir,’ he thought it best to admit.

‘Look at me, dammit!’ Jacquie had never seen Hall explode before. It was all the more unnerving for that.

‘I went back there, sir,’ Stone assured him. ‘It’s in the file.’

‘Just tell me, Martin,’ Hall said softly. He sounded like a man on the edge.

‘I went back with DC Brand the next day; after we’d discussed the matter. I took samples of cat food and had them analysed. Nothing, sir. Well, I mean, nothing toxic. Just cat food.’

‘And the calendar?’

Stone looked uneasy. ‘I’m sorry, guv, I don’t understand all this about a calendar. I don’t remember any calendar at Myrtle Cottage. Not the twice I went there. What’s its significance?’ He was looking as much at Jacquie now as he was at Hall.

‘All right,’ the DCI relaxed, leaning back. ‘Poisons, Martin. Get back on it. Every chemist, every farm, every outlet you can think of. Again. Do it all again.’

Stone heard the weariness in Hall’s voice. The DCI knew the size of the task all too well. He was asking the impossible. And what was worse, he was asking the impossible for a second time.

‘Yes sir,’ and DS Stone was gone.

‘Sit down, Jacquie.’ Hall took off his glasses and rubbed his aching eyes. He waited until she had. ‘What calendar?’ he leaned forward. She’d seen him do that a hundred times in interview rooms without number. But always before, she’d been sitting behind or alongside him, never in front. Now she had an inkling how a suspect felt, watching the large, square, expressionless face as relentless as the tide. She wished it was Peter Maxwell’s, dark, smiling, the eyes bright with what she always hoped was love.

To her left was a rock. To her right, a hard place. She felt the walls closing in, the ceiling coming down. She wanted to scream. She, who had never fainted in her life, felt like fainting. What was it then that made her open her mouth?

‘Peter Maxwell found it, sir, at Myrtle Cottage.’

Hall leaned back, slowly, the solid face receding, a quizzical expression coming over it. They both knew, in that moment, that Jacquie had been withholding evidence that could be vital. They both knew her job was on the line.