Authors: M.J. Trow
‘Anybody bear him a grudge?’ Hall let the ripples die away before he posed the question.
‘He put away his fair share of villains, guv,’ Campbell said. ‘But we’re not aware of anybody in particular. No overt threats. Nothing out of the ordinary.’
That wasn’t helpful. But it didn’t surprise the DCI. In his experience, most ‘honest’ crooks didn’t bear grudges. Everybody inside was innocent, of course, framed not so much by bent coppers, but by the bent system; the laws that were framed by the rich for the rich, the them-and-us mentality of Tony Blair’s Britain. And anyway, the
opprobrium
of villains was usually levelled at DIs and above, the heads of investigations whose profiles were high, not the underlings who were clearly, like the Nazis of yesteryear, merely obeying orders.
‘This case, then,’ he said. ‘Who has Martin seen, except for this Professor Fraser, Dr Welland and Radley’s wife?’
‘He interviewed a number of people at the site, guv,’ Jacquie told him, ‘when the body was found.’
‘Who’s got the list?’
‘Guv,’ Tony Campbell passed the sheet of names forward.
‘Four. We’ll need to see all those again. This Douglas Russell; is he running the dig now?’
‘Er…we don’t know, guv,’ somebody said.
‘Right. Back to basics. Jacquie, you and Tony get out there later today. I want each of those four quizzed. And I mean quizzed. I want to know what they’ve all had for breakfast for the past week. Jimmy,’ he glanced at the West Indian, ‘get yourself over to the Quinton, calling at the magistrates’ offices on the way. I want a warrant to search the rooms of any of these diggers staying there. Start with Russell.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Now – anything of note on Martin’s computer?’
‘The affairs of men,’ Jacquie’s voice was a little broken up on her end of the phone.
‘Who’s been talking?’ Peter Maxwell wanted to know,
perched on his office desk at Leighford High, that great centre of academe for the sons and daughters of gentlefolk. ‘Dierdre Lessing and I are merely colleagues. And as for Sally Greenhow, I was just whispering in her mouth,’ his Harpo Marx was a
little
lost without the actions to go with it but if you were a certain age, it was unmistakeable for all that. Had Harpo ever spoken on celluloid, he would, of course, have sounded just like the Groucho Maxwell was doing now.
‘Seriously though, Max,’ she said.
‘Sorry, darling heart. Say on.’
‘It was the last thing Martin Toogood wrote on his
computer
on Monday night. Mean anything to you.’
‘Julius Caesar,’ Maxwell said, dredging it up from the deepest fathoms of his brain, ‘by a little-known playwright called William Shakespeare.’
‘That would make sense,’ Jacquie was scrabbling around her end in the nick for a bit of paper. ‘Say on.’
‘Ooh, it’s been a long time since I wrestled with the Bard of Avon.’ Maxwell screwed up his face in an attempt to remember. ‘Um… “The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound by shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures…”
Or something like that!’
‘You shit!’ she smiled. ‘How did I know you’d know that word for bloody word?’
‘I phoned a friend,’ he explained, giving her his best
Chris Tarrant. He tapped on the window of his office and the snotty urchins up to no good on the ground below him vanished like ice in sunshine. ‘If memory serves – and I think you know it does – it’s dear old Brutus talking to Cassius. They’ve just killed a pretty decent bloke – Caesar – for all the wrong reasons, and they’ve realized their
number’s
probably up. What’s the link?’
‘I wish I knew,’ she sighed. ‘Martin certainly lost his
ventures
, didn’t he?’
‘He did that,’ Maxwell agreed, dropping back into his chair. ‘You didn’t tell me Martin was the poetic sort.’
‘Well, he
did
read English at university.’
‘Yes, I know. History would have been better, of course… Are you all right, Jacquie?’ She’d gone very quiet.
‘Yes,’ she nuzzled her head into the phone, as well as she could in a frantic Incident Room. ‘Yes, I’m fine. See you later.’
The bell was ringing at Leighford High, summoning the faithful and the not-so-faithful to Lesson Five. Perhaps in Faith Schools, they had a peal of the things chiming out Old Tom Oojah; it would certainly make the day go with a swing. Why was it, Peter Maxwell wondered, that three quarters of the way through the academic year, he still had no clear indication of who the hell he was teaching next? He checked the timetable on the wall, that great Behemoth that ruled everyone’s life. God, yes, Thirteen Ay Two – the last lesson before they vanished into that glad goodnight that was Study Leave. How could he have forgotten? Maxwell’s Own. Time for the pep talk, the last words of wisdom. The if-you-can-keep-your-head speech.
Mechanically, he nudged the over-zealous Year Seven kids to the correct side of the corridor and removed the white baseball cap from Jason Pillockface’s head for the
umpteenth time that week – ‘Oh, sir!’ the lad wailed as his civil liberties were taken from him. But these were the actions of a veteran of countless classroom campaigns and Maxwell wasn’t even thinking about them. In his head, Jacquie’s words whirled, the last sentence on Martin Toogood’s computer. ‘The affairs of men.’ Was that it, then? Had the clever, fast-track graduate cracked it? How had Maxwell put it to Jacquie? ‘They’ve just killed a pretty decent bloke – Radley – for all the wrong reasons.’ So, who stood to gain from Radley’s death? It was the first question Henry Hall would have asked himself and his team, Maxwell knew that. Who would inherit the mantle? The Chair at Wessex? And a
conspiracy
? Was that what Toogood meant? The assassination of JFK – the second gunman on the grassy knoll. The murder of RFK – the gloating woman in the polka-dot dress. The moon landing, with the dear old stars and stripes flapping in a wind where there was no wind. Nobody believed that load of old tosh. Or did they, in the face of overwhelming evidence? He turned into Aitch Four as Year Thirteen settled down to be entertained for one last time. He really wanted to put the Radley case before them, get their take on it, use their fresh, young, inquisitive minds. To hit them with Toogood’s enigma. As it was, he had a job to do.
‘The parting of the ways, children,’ he boomed as he closed the door. ‘And the best bit of advice I can give you, as always, is?’
‘Read the question!’ they chorused.
‘Damn right!’ he winked.
‘I want to see the man in charge. I assume it
is
a man?’ the tall Scotsman stood facing Sergeant Wilson that Wednesday afternoon.
‘In charge of what, specifically, sir?’ Tom Wilson had been County Pedantic champion four years running back in the Nineties. You never lost it.
Tam Fraser leaned forward to look the man closely in the face. ‘I haven’t time to piss about, laddie.’ He said. ‘You take those stripes of yours and get me somebody with pips on his shoulder – or is that analogy lost on you?’
‘That’ll be Detective Chief Inspector Hall,’ Wilson said, unperturbed. He’d met belligerent Scotsmen before, albeit usually reeling pissed under the lion rampant shawls of the tartan army a little after the final whistle. ‘Who shall I say…?’
‘Tam Fraser,’ the Scotsman said through Wilson’s
protective
glass. ‘Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, and you haven’t the time for me to list all my publications.’
There is a God, then, thought Wilson and he’d just met him, but he couldn’t say so. The desk man in any nick in the country had to be all things to all men. Lost cats, kids with their thumbs stuck up kettle spouts, Brinks Mat heists, serial murder – he’d seen the lot. A pompous old fart with a degree wasn’t about to faze him.
‘So what do you make of it?’ Fraser asked Henry Hall when the DCI had had time to read the letter the professor had shown him. Wilson had mechanically gone through the motions of ringing through to DCI Hall who had asked him to bring Fraser through. And here they were, in Hall’s office, at the end of another day, each of them trying to cope, in his own way, with murder.
‘Oddballs,’ Hall shrugged, passing the letter back.
‘Undoubtedly,’ Fraser agreed, although he’d expected a rather more penetrating analysis, ‘but don’t you see any implications here?’
‘Implications?’ It had been a long day for Henry Hall. Maybe he wasn’t at his best with the amount of sleep
he’d had.
‘This…organization, pressure group, call them what you will, are threatening my people at the dig.’
‘Hardly threatening,’ Hall reassured him.
Fraser adjusted his pince-nez to focus on the letter. ‘“We find it reprehensible”,’ he read, ‘“that you are defiling the bodies of our ancestors by disturbing their last resting places and we would like to warn you that unless you close the dig down now, we cannot answer for the
consequences
.” Where I come from,’ Fraser folded the letter again, ‘that constitutes a threat.’
Hall looked at him. ‘There’s no address.’
‘No,’ Fraser agreed. ‘Just as whoever killed wee David didn’t leave his business card. I wouldn’t have your job for all the tea in China.’
Hall held out his hand for the note to be passed back. The paper shone white in his lenses. ‘“The Sepulchre Society of Sussex”,’ he read. ‘All very alliterative.’
‘Aye, peachy,’ Fraser agreed. ‘Have you heard of them?’
‘I was about to ask you the same question, Professor.’
‘This particular group, no.’ Fraser sat back, legs crossed at the knee. ‘But I’m familiar with the ethic. Aboriginals in particular get themselves in a snit about it, whiteys come along and desecrate – as they see it – the graves of their forebears. The fact that we’re learning a phenomenal amount about their own ethnic past on their behalf seems to have escaped them. But then, I can’t say I’m surprised. Archaeology is not an option in schools, History’s
disappearing
…’
If only, thought Henry Hall; he was thinking specifically of Peter Maxwell.
‘Colleagues of mine have been roughed up in the Philippines,’ Fraser went on, ‘and there was a particularly
nasty incident in Wyoming eight years back. You’d think the Lakota would be happy enough with Kevin Costner turning them into nice people on the big screen, wouldn’t you? The bottom line, Chief Inspector, is what do you
propose
to do about it?’
Hall put the letter to one side. ‘When did this arrive?’ he asked.
‘This morning.’
‘At the site?’
‘No, of course not, we haven’t got an address there. It was sent to my colleague Douglas Russell, at his hotel.’
‘The Quinton.’
‘If you say so. I’ve only been here since this morning. I’ll have to find somewhere, I suppose.’
‘So you’ve effectively taken over from Dr Radley?’
‘Taken over?’ Fraser chuckled. ‘Good God, no. I’m
sixty-two
, Inspector; my days of grubbing about in the earth are well and truly over – or so I thought. No, I’m just a
caretaker
until Upstairs at the university decide what to do about David’s replacement. In the meantime, our window on the dig is closing rapidly. Golf course! I ask you!’
‘Leave it with me,’ Hall said.
Fraser leaned further back in his seat. ‘I want protection,’ he said. ‘For my people.’
‘Protection?’ Hall frowned. ‘Professor Fraser, I’m
conducting
two murder enquiries simultaneously at the moment. That’s apart from everything else going on, on a day-to-day progress at a station like this one.’
‘Man, you should have been in the Gorbals in the good old days. Ach, that’s another story.’ He narrowed his eyes as he tried, as many had before, to get the measure of the man in front of him. ‘You do know,’ he said with his stately, gravel voice, pointing at the letter, ‘that these people killed
David Radley, don’t you?’
George and Julian prowled their windy ridge again that night, their shaven heads pale under the moon.
‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ Julian hissed,
rummaging
for his ciggies in the pockets of his body warmer.
‘Stop whingeing,’ George told him, taking a swig from his hip flask. ‘Belter?’
‘Nah,’ Julian flexed his shoulders. ‘Got to stay focused.’
‘Ere, I saw that geek today.’
‘Which of the many?’ Julian asked. ‘This is an
archaeological
dig. The whole fucking place is crawling with geeks.’
‘That Arthur Wimble bloke. Remember I caught him helping himself to a bit of tat a few weeks back?’
‘Oh, yeah. Recovered from his smacking, has he?’
‘Conditional rehabilitation, Julian,’ George corrected him. ‘Gotta get with the jargon, y’know.’
Julian’s fag glared briefly as he lit it. ‘What time you got?’
‘Half three,’ George peered at his luminous dial. ‘Hello.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Ten o’clock. By them spoil heaps.’
Both men crouched, making their bulk less conspicuous. George was right. A shadowy figure, dark, furtive, was
flitting
between the gate and the furthest of the heaps, jet against the blackness.
‘Looks like fucking van Helsing,’ Julian said.
‘Who?’
‘Van Helsing. You know, vampire hunter. Bloke in the film. What’s his face? Jackman. Hugh Jackman.’
‘That’s all we fuckin’ need. Vampires.’
‘No, it’s that long coat, that hat. Some bloody weirdo.’
‘Metal detector?’ the men’s voices were at a sub-whisper. There wasn’t a breath of wind below the ridge and they
could hear ‘van Helsing’s’ feet crunch on the gravel.
‘Can’t see one,’ Julian was forcing his eyes to scan the darkness. ‘Don’t suppose it’s a bloody ghoul, do you?’
‘How d’you mean?’ George asked. ‘Ghoul?’
‘Well, there’s bodies, isn’t there? I remember when I was a kid in London. There was the Vampire of Highgate. Somebody was hacking into vaults and stuff.’