Maxwell's Crossing (15 page)

‘Five hundred, I lost. Could you lose that much and not get mad?'

‘It's not something I have ever had to consider,' Hall said. ‘I suppose if I couldn't afford it, I might be angry, yes. But I suppose no one should gamble if they can't afford it.'

‘Ooh, wise words,' O'Malley mocked. ‘What are you, some goddamn Bible-puncher? If you can afford it, where's the buzz? But, as it happens, I could afford it. Not so sure about the other three, though, and I know damn well Sarah couldn't afford it.'

‘How could you possibly know that?' Hall was repelled and intrigued by the man.

‘Just the look in her eye. You get to know the signs.'

Hall decided to ignore that. ‘But you could afford it?'

‘Yeah. I've been on a bit of a winning streak, y'know. And I don't have many expenses. Old Hec, he picks up the bills and Camille, her business is doing fine back home, so she has plenty. I've got my … pension, so we do OK.'

Hall flicked a glance at Jacquie to see if she had noticed the tiny pause in front of the word ‘pension' and from her notes he could see she had. ‘And the others. You say you don't think they could afford it, either. Why did they play, then, for such high stakes?'

O'Malley leant forward and rubbed his thumbs and forefingers together. ‘The buzz.'

Hall looked back at him, face blank. He waited for a half-minute, leaving O'Malley to lean back and stop the gesture, looking awkward to be left with no response.

Like many people when faced with a silence, he felt compelled to fill it. ‘So, if you're looking for somebody to pin this on, it sure ain't me. One of those others. I reckon the woman. What's her name? Sandra? Yeah, Sandra. Probably her.'

‘We have spoken to Detective Constable Bolton, thank you, Mr O'Malley. But we will note your comments, of course. Do you have any views on the others?'

‘Policewoman, huh? I never had her pegged for that. Well, it could still be her. Wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last. How about the guys, then? That Tim, built like a shithouse. He could toss her over a little low parapet like that, no problem.'

‘You are familiar with the top of the municipal car park, Mr O'Malley?' Jacquie asked him.

He decided it was time to bring the little lady into the conversation, seeing as how they would be discussing girly matters. ‘I drove Camille in to town the other day. She needed her nails done and she didn't want to drive in all the snow. We don't get this weather at home; she's no experience. I parked at the top. That people thing that the Mosses drive, it's a bit big to park in those itty-bitty spaces further down.'

Hall was surprised. It wasn't what he would have expected from Jeff O'Malley, to admit that he couldn't park a car.

‘I mean to say, call that a car park? You could only park those silly little town cars in there. My SUV wouldn't fit in two of them spaces. And as for the Winnebago, don't go there.'

‘You have a Winnebago?' Hall asked. ‘My word, Mr O'Malley, American police pensions are more generous than here. I'm in the wrong country.'

O'Malley shrugged. ‘We do OK,' he said.

Jacquie made a note and underlined it with several heavy lines. O'Malley craned over to see, but she turned the paper over, with a smile.

‘You were talking about the other people at the card game,' Hall reminded him.

‘Yeah. Tim. Don't know his other name. Real big guy. Works somewhere, some gym or other? I don't know. He seemed to know Sandra anyways. I gave him a lift home one time. He'd walked in, jogged maybe? It came on to snow, so I dropped him home. He only lives down the road from where we're staying. Same kinda house; ticky-tacky. He didn't seem to worry too much the first few games, then he got … don't know what you'd call it … edgy. Come to the end of his savings, I guess. Wife leaning on him probably. If she knew. Most don't.'

‘Does yours?' Jacquie asked him.

His eyebrows shot up towards the remains of his sandy hair. ‘Alana?' He snorted. ‘You've both met Alana. She doesn't know where she is or when, let alone how much I win or lose. It's no business of hers, neither. She has all she needs. Vodka's dearer here than at home, but still she's cheap to keep.'

Hall decided to keep the momentum going. ‘And the last member of your card school. Who is he?'

‘I know a bit more about him, seeing as he's single, so he has more time after the game. We've had a few drinks
together. Mark – don't know his other name, though. He's something to do with the police, well, not the police as such. Security. Something like that. He lives in town, in an apartment over a shop. No. That's wrong. An apartment over a taxi firm, something like that. I went there, must have been after the second game, and I could hear the radio, you know, that “over and out” thing you get. With cells nowadays I don't know why they do it, but I guess they're all geared up and don't see the need for change.'

‘Cells?' Hall was confused.

‘Cells. Phones. Oh, Jeez, I forgot. Mobiles.'

‘Ah. So, you don't know Mark's surname, but you know where he lives.'

‘Hell, no. I just went there. I don't know where it is. I couldn't find the house where I'm living unless someone takes me there. This town is not built right. The roads are all over the place. Where's the grid? The common sense? Take where you live, now,' he threw out a hand in Jacquie's direction. ‘What the hell is going on there? It's a new estate, right? So why aren't the roads in straight lines? I can see why roads are all over in somewhere old like Stratford,' he pronounced it with the emphasis on the second syllable, ‘but why here? We've got older places at home, and it's not often a Californian gets to say that.' He slammed his hand down on the table and roared with laughter. Jeff O'Malley had decided they could all be cops together.

Henry Hall had not decided that and made a few cryptic notes on his piece of paper before looking up at
O'Malley. ‘Well, Mr O'Malley,' he said at length. ‘You have been very frank and I thank you very much for that. But until we speak to the remaining members of the group from last night, I'm afraid we'll have to ask you to wait here. I'll arrange some coffee and sandwiches if you like. I seem to remember we interrupted your supper when we called on you at home.'

O'Malley's brow darkened and he rose to his feet, like a mountain out of the sea. ‘I don't have to take this—' he began.

‘Yes,' Hall said, calmly but with a snap to the word. ‘I rather think you do. Constable Davis here will get you anything you want. Good evening.' And he gathered up his papers and left the room.

Jacquie closed the meeting on the recording and followed her boss out into the hall.

‘Damn,' he said. ‘I was sure it was him.'

‘Isn't it?' Jacquie said, but hope had died for her about halfway through the interview.

‘Jacquie, you know it isn't him. He's just not right for it. He'd have got the money off her, for starters. He didn't know she'd handed her winnings back, except what she got from him. He would have thought there would be two and a half thousand pounds in her bag. His greed would have got the better of him. No,' he sighed as he turned for the stairs. ‘Back to the drawing board. But not tonight. I'll see you in the morning.'

‘What about …?' Jacquie gestured towards O'Malley's interview room.

‘We've got another … twenty-one hours to go,' Hall
said. ‘Let's not waste them. I'm sure the sandwiches will be delicious and we can see him again tomorrow. Now go home!'

‘You too, guv,' Jacquie said. ‘Perhaps Margaret has saved you some cauliflower surprise.'

Hall gave her an old-fashioned look and went up the stairs, feeling suddenly old and tired. This case had a taste to it which he was not liking so far; he would even go so far as to say it was worse than cauliflower surprise.

Peter Maxwell was used to odd hours. He was married to a detective inspector, for a start, which meant that odd hours were not odd at all to them, but more the norm. And before he had started sharing his home with someone of the police persuasion, he had had no one to please but himself, so if he wanted to stay up all night, painting and gluing, reading or sleuthing, or even – heaven forfend – marking, then he could. He was therefore wide awake and as chipper as could be when the doorbell rang at nearly midnight. Jacquie was out for the count beside him, having got back home exhausted and monosyllabic not many minutes before. He knew better than to probe when she was like this. He knew that Jeff O'Malley was not the guy, as Monk would have it, and that was it. It could wait.

He wriggled into his dressing gown and padded downstairs, feeling every tread in advance for lurking
felines or – worse – the little gifts of mice and similar that the feline may have deposited there. The snow had curbed Metternich a bit, but Maxwell was afraid that, like Francis Bacon, he had discovered the secret of freezing food for later using snow. He and Jacquie were expecting a vole glut around St Valentine's Day.

Maxwell's front door had a peephole in it but he had never used it until today. The thought that Jeff O'Malley may be rampaging through Leighford was almost too much to bear, but the thought of him rampaging through his house was much, much worse. So he checked and found that his gut reaction had been partially right. The distorted face on the other side of his door lens belonged to Hector Gold and the semi-conscious shape he was supporting just had to be Alana O'Malley.

He opened the door and prepared to catch the woman as she fell forward. ‘Hector,' he said. ‘You're very welcome, of course, dear boy, but what the hell are you doing on my doorstep at midnight? Some quaint Minnesotan custom?'

‘I'm sorry, Max,' the historian said, hefting Alana into a more comfortable carrying position before attempting the stairs. ‘You'll have heard about what happened, I suppose?'

‘Some,' Maxwell told him, guardedly.

‘Well, after Jacquie and Mr Hall took Jeff away, Camille went into meltdown and Alana just passed out. By the time I had Camille on a bit more of an even keel, I went to check on Alana and she was still out for the count. So I took her to the hospital, and
they took a look at her. There wasn't any immediate danger, well no more than she has always been in; liver's like a piece of shoe leather, has been for years. They did a blood alcohol level and they nearly passed out. But I showed them her usual level and they said in fact she wasn't quite so bad as usual. It's just she's not eating and her liver really is on the fritz, and the stress and everything … well, I couldn't take her back to Paul's house. If Jeff is out …' There was a question in the sentence.

‘He's not,' Maxwell reassured him.

‘Well, if Jeff
isn't
out, Camille is going to be going nuts. She has decided that her father's behaviour is all her mother's fault. That if she was more of a woman – and can't you just hear the quotes and where it comes from – if she was more of a woman, Jeff wouldn't stray and all the rest. So I was stuck. I can't afford a hotel, the money just goes nowhere over here, and so …' They had reached the top of the first flight and he stopped for breath. He straightened up and looked Maxwell in the eye. ‘I'm sorry, Max,' he said. ‘This is a mistake. You've got Nolan and all. You don't need this.'

‘Hec. Don't be silly. Jacquie is in bed, but she would say the same. Come through into the sitting room. If I can work it out, the sofa turns into a bed. You can have that and we can put Alana to bed in the spare room. Actually, belay that. There's another flight of stairs up to the spare room. You can have that, and we'll pop her on the sofa.'

‘Don't worry about the spare room, Max. I don't want to leave her. She might … well, I don't know. Choke, or something.'

‘Do you want to ring Camille to tell her where you are?'

‘No. She'll have taken her tablet and we won't get anything out of her until ten tomorrow. If I could just borrow a comb tomorrow and perhaps a quick squirt of deodorant …'

‘Of course. We probably have some new toothbrushes somewhere. Jacquie is very organised on the personal-hygiene front. Well,' Maxwell looked at them, the semi-conscious woman and the slight, slightly dishevelled man. ‘She's lucky to have you for a son-in-law,' he said.

‘I hope she makes the most of it while it lasts, then,' Hector said. ‘Goodnight, Max. Thank you.'

‘Goodnight,' he said, and closed the door gently behind him. It wasn't until later that he realised what the exchange teacher had said and wondered how Camille the Cougar would take it. ‘Gentlemen of Leighford, now abed,' he muttered to himself, paraphrasing as he went, ‘shall think themselves accursed that she is here. And hold their manhoods cheap …'

Jacquie turned over. ‘Max?' she muttered. ‘What's going on? Is someone here?'

He leant over and in the dark kissed what turned out to be an eyebrow. ‘I'll tell you in the morning. Sleep tight, sweetheart. Sleep tight.'

‘Hope the bugs don't bite,' she said, adding a little
yelp as he put his cold feet on the backs of her nice warm thighs.

And with a sigh, the Maxwells were asleep.

Someone was singing. Not totally in tune, although that was just a guess, as it appeared to be no tune known to man. It was something very modern, with a contrapuntal harmony in the tenor. Jacquie was impressed, even as she slept. ‘Contrapuntal' was not a word she used too often when she was awake. As soon as she realised she was dreaming, it disappeared like a soap bubble in the sun and she was awake.

She poked Maxwell in the ribs.

‘Max, Max, wake up,' she hissed. ‘There's somebody in the house.'

‘Just us chickens, chicken,' he murmured, pulling the quilt over his head.

‘Someone's singing. Listen.'

He uncovered an ear and did as he was told. She was right. Someone was singing. Unless he missed his guess, it was ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow', but sung very, very slowly and rather flat. Someone was talking as well. It sounded like a very small gospel choir being led by a very hesitant and rather secular minister. Then the previous evening came back to him and he rolled over to face his wife, her eyes shining in the faint light of the clock numbers which glowed from his side of the bed. He knew his face would be in deep shadow and so all he had to control was his tone of voice. He opted for lightly jocular.

‘Not exactly Judy Garland, is she?'

‘No.' The reply was very flat. ‘But if not Judy Garland, then who?'

‘Alana.'

Jacquie was bolt upright with the light on in seconds. ‘
Alana?
What on earth is Alana doing here? And where is she?' She looked wildly round as though the woman might suddenly pop out from behind the wardrobe, shouting ‘Banzai!'.

‘She's in the sitting room, on the settee. Don't worry, Hector is with her.'

‘So, let me get this straight. A woman, the wife of a man currently helping the police – that would be me, by the way – is sleeping with her son-in-law in my sitting room.'

Maxwell mulled it over. ‘Quite correct. Except that when you say “sleeping with” that is more in the way of being watched over by her son-in-law to prevent her choking on her own vomit. Not,' he raised his hand quickly, ‘that she is vomiting as such, but these things happen. He had to take her to the hospital and they said she is on a knife-edge, essentially. He couldn't bear to take her home to Camille, so he came here.' He paused and looked searchingly at her. ‘Quite sweet, I thought. That he came here. Isn't it? Quite sweet?'

Jacquie snapped her light off and lay back with a sharp exhalation. ‘Peter Maxwell, if I live to be a hundred you will never stop surprising me.'

After a suitable pause, he asked, ‘But that's a good thing, isn't it?'

He sounded so like Nolan in the dark she couldn't stay even mildly annoyed. She reached out and stroked his cheek. ‘A very good thing,' she said softly. Then, a littler sharper, ‘What's the time? No, don't rear up like that, I'm trying to see the clock. Oh, damn and drat. Half past three. I hate it when it's half past three.'

‘It's when most people die, or so they say.'

‘Always a mine of curious and uplifting facts. Thank you, dear.'

‘No problem. Any time. At least we know Alana isn't dead.'

‘That's true,' she agreed. ‘She's on “Candle in the Wind” now. We've just got “My Way” to go and then she will have treated us to all the karaoke favourites.'

‘At least she sings them slowly. Let's pretend they're lullabies.'

She turned over and nestled back into his body, already in the spoon position to receive her. He kissed her shoulder and they let the lullabies claim them for the last few hours of the night.

Jim Astley should have retired years ago. He already played golf, so you'd think, wouldn't you, that he'd want to spend still more time on the links. That's what Donald thought, certainly, but Donald had failed to factor in the Marjorie Dilemma. Marjorie was Jim Astley's wife, survivor (somehow) of too many lost weekends. She had a season ticket to rehab and a wagon parked behind the house off which she'd fallen more times than Jim Astley had carried out post-mortems. So, all in all, Astley had
elected to overlook the creaking hips and tired eyes that the years had bequeathed him and continue to spend time with the dead, as opposed to the not-very-quick.

Alison Orchard was a different kettle of fish. Dr Astley wasn't sure he really approved of women in mortuaries and knew that between them
Silent Witness
and
Bones
had a lot to answer for. For her part, Alison saw herself as a budding Emilia Fox but nobody else did. She was a head shorter, with dark frizzy hair (which Astley insisted she tie back) and a rather irritating falsetto laugh. Not even Donald fancied her, and bearing in mind his usual proclivity for anything with a pulse, that didn't say an awful lot for Alison Orchard. Still, her mummy loved her and her daddy and all the other little Orchards, so there probably was a God.

That morning, God was gowned up but taking something of a back seat watching Alison go through her paces over the last mortal remains of Sarah Gregson. Pinned to the wall to Astley's left were the police photographs of the crime scene: the body
in
situ
, looking like a discarded shop window dummy; the blood which had pooled beneath the head and started to run into the gutter before the frost had seized it; and white tents with dates and times that marked the hour, should Henry Hall be sharp enough to get this one to court.

Astley listened impassively as Alison spoke into the microphone hanging down from its fixture on the ceiling. Sarah Gregson had been measured, weighed and photographed. Her clothes had gone to the lab for
checking, where Angus would do what Angus did best – search for telltale fingerprints, fibres, alien saliva, sweat or blood;
anything
that would underline yet again the famous dictum of the great Edmond Locard – ‘Every contact leaves a trace'. The removal of the organs would come later – Astley would do that, it was beyond the remit of the student in front of him. She was focusing, rightly, on the head, shattered as it was where Sarah Gregson and the pavement had met at a terrifying gravitational speed.

‘Cut to the chase, my dear,' Astley advised. He could patronise for England and time, as always, was of the essence. Sarah Gregson wasn't going anywhere but everyone else connected with the case was. And her murderer, if there was one, might have gone altogether. ‘Cause of death?'

‘Er … massive trauma to the occipital—'

‘Yes, yes.' Astley cut the girl short. ‘She went off the roof face forward. Whether she jumped or was pushed, she'd have turned once before she hit the deck. A longer drop would give more turning time, but this is … what … three storeys. Donald?'

The big man was used to carrying all of Astley's knowledge inside his own head. He thought of himself as a kind of external hard drive, where all the important stuff was stored in case the mainframe went down. ‘Thirty-seven feet, four and a half inches.' Donald knew his man – Astley had never really embraced metric.

‘So,' Astley continued, ‘in a nutshell,
Ms
Orchard, did she fall, did she jump or was she pushed?'

‘Urm …' It wasn't Alison's day, but in a macabre sort of way, it was Sarah's.

Astley got up and peered closely at the measurements in the photographs. He smiled and tapped the one taken from the south, in line with the kerb, that showed the position of the body in relation to the building.

‘Learn,' he said to the girl without turning to face her, ‘and prepare to be amazed. If the deceased had fallen from the balcony up here,' he waved in the general direction of the third storey, ‘she'd have landed not more than ten feet six inches from the building.'

Alison did a lightning calculation in her head to translate the distance into modern-speak; three point two metres.

‘If she had jumped, the distance would have been fourteen feet.'

Four point two metres, Alison calculated silently.

‘But if the SOCO boys have got it right, and I'm sure they have because I believe that Donald himself was on tape measure duty yesterday, then this young lady landed head first, sixteen feet from the building. That makes it murder.'

Alison Orchard was so impressed that she didn't even bother to calculate the distance in metres.

‘Now, if young Angus does us the courtesy of finding a fingerprint or two, we can all go home and yet again Henry Hall will get his collar at our expense. The drinks that man owes me.' He tutted and laughed at the same time.