Maxwell's Point (12 page)

‘I’m sorry?’

‘How will you broach the subject?’

‘I’m a historian, Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell bridled. ‘We have a hundred ways. Before Political Correctness, Inclusion and Assessment for Learning, I’d merely have lit matches under the lads’ fingernails and stood well back until they screamed their confessions. Now…well, more subtle measures will have to prevail.’

Hall raised his hands. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Better I don’t know.’ He checked his watch. ‘Do you have to be
somewhere
?’ he asked.

‘Always,’ Maxwell looked nobly into the middle distance. ‘The chalkface.’

The chalkface these days was actually the Interactive Whiteboard. Maxwell had fought a long and bitter campaign for the last three years on this front. The rest of his Department, whose total ages added up to twenty-two, had all clamoured for these revolutionary gadgets which created instant lessons, charting progression, regression, made Realms and expanded
Trade and Industry. Maxwell’s reply was always the same. He reached out for a board-marker and, with deadly aim, wrote one word on the glossy surface. ‘Bollocks.’ Whiteboards he had accepted. It was a wrench but he’d thrown his chalk away one damp, depressing morning in March and had never looked back. No more white powder all over his hush-puppies and in his trouser turn-ups. He’d given up hashish too. But Interactive? Never. He’d die in a ditch first. Paul Moss, the long-suffering mixed infant who was nominally his boss tried to come the professional. Sue Davenant had wept all over him, as she did most weeks and to little effect. Debbie Mitchell toyed with a quick seduction in the stock cupboard; he was actually quite a dish, was Peter Maxwell, if you liked your men older. All to no avail. Whiteboards and markers and whiskers on kittens – they had become a few of Peter Maxwell’s favourite things and any further, he point-blank refused to go.

When old Boney was a warrior, facing, as he almost always did, two enemies and a war on two fronts, he adopted the best tactics; take on the nearer or bigger bastard and hit him again and again until he gives in. Then turn on the second one and it’s only a matter of time. Piece of cake.

‘So, Danny.’ The master strategist sat behind his desk, his hand tucked into his waistcoat that Wednesday afternoon, as though the field of Marengo lay before him in the blistering heat. ‘How are you doing with Miss Davenant?’

Now, Danny Pearson had the hots for Miss Davenant. And Peter Maxwell knew he did. Danny was only in Year Ten, but he realised the mad old bastard wasn’t asking about his love life. ‘All right,’ he mumbled. An unprepossessing little toerag was Danny Pearson. He had a partially shaved head and an
earring, an impending ASBO and upwards of six syndromes, but his heart was in the right place – something of a rarity in these days of genetic modification.

‘You see,’ Maxwell explained, ‘I like to check on my people, when they move on. Remember the fun we had in History lessons in Year Nine?’

Danny did, but he’d die rather than admit it.

‘Now, we’re nearly at the end of Year Ten – over halfway through your GCSE course. Doesn’t time fly, eh?’

It wasn’t a question Danny had ever been asked before. He didn’t really have an answer for it.

‘It’s just that, well, Miss Davenant is very pleased with you.’

Danny’s cynical young heart missed a beat. Miss was very pleased with him. Maybe she’d go out with him now, ride on the cross bar of his mountain-bike, let him snog her back of the Asda store.

‘At least, she was…’ Danny’s fantasy bubble was burst at once by the party pooper that was Peter Maxwell, ‘…until about two weeks ago. Then she noticed it all went downhill.’

This was news to Danny. He’d been failing to meet his target grade for some time now. In fact, looking back, he wasn’t sure he’d ever met it; much more likely to meet his Maker, in the fullness of time.

‘Tell me, did anything happen…anything go wrong about two weeks ago? That would be the end of June.’

‘No,’ Danny shrugged.

Maxwell frowned and leaned back, locking his hands behind his head. ‘You see, Danny, that’s not how Scott tells it.’

Danny blinked. ‘Scott don’t do History,’ he said.

‘Indeed not,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘And I think he’s already
beginning to regret that. No, it’s his Maths that’s coming unstuck, isn’t it?’

Danny didn’t know. The pair of them talked about football. And girls. They still had peeing contests to see whose range was longer. And they’d both discovered that essential teenage accessory – Lynx, or how to clear a classroom in seconds flat. What they never, ever did was talk about school work – it was just too depressing.

‘No, Scott thinks it was finding the body like that. It must have been a shock.’

Maxwell counted silently to five before Danny came back with the predictable, ‘What body?’

Maxwell laughed. ‘What body?’ he repeated. ‘What dead mouse in Mrs Clitheroe’s English lesson in Year Seven, Danny? What graffiti calling into question Mr Ryan’s parentage in the boys’ loos in Year Eight? What about the fire alarm on Speech Day?’

‘That wasn’t me,’ Danny blurted. ‘That was…’

‘Tall Chloe,’ Maxwell said softly. ‘Yes, I know.’

And there he had it; in that one sentence. Mad Max
knew
. He knew everything. Even things that Danny Pearson didn’t know he knew, he knew. So Scott had dobbed him in, dobbed in both of them. What a shit. Still, Danny and Scotto went back a long way. He’d have had his reasons. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Yeah. It shakes you up, Mr Maxwell, finding something like that.’

He checked his son sleeping at the end of another long day. What milestones the lad had passed, what firsts, was impossible to say. As had become the pattern by now, Nolan spent the weekdays with Pam and either Jacquie or Maxwell
would fetch him on their way home. Everybody at Leighford High knew which one it was because the contraption would be buckled behind Surrey’s saddle and Norman Westbury would pat it admiringly – ‘a little thing, but mine own’.

All was well. Maxwell checked his watch. It would be an hour before Jacquie was back from her particular chalkface. Time for a little M and R – modelling and relaxation. Lieutenant Landriani hadn’t really progressed in the last few days. He still only had one arm and the cigar in his mouth, though to scale, was an unlikely white. His horse had no reins and no crupper. How the man was supposed to guide him one and a half miles down the Valley of Death was anyone’s guess.

‘It shook them up, Count,’ Maxwell was in his modelling cap, light on, magnifying glass at the ready, pyrogravure heating quietly to his left. ‘Funny how these kids are such hard men until something like this happens, isn’t it? I saw Danny first. I didn’t think he’d crack so easily, but he did. Scott was a piece of cake, as predicted. Poor little bugger was in tears when I’d finished.’

Metternich was unimpressed. He’d seen it all over the years.
His
victims cried too – mice with wives and kids, shrews with so much to live for. You couldn’t let it get to you. They all had to go. He was a tom, for God’s sake. There were standards. Oh, all right, the ones he’d felt sorry for, he’d let go under a building somewhere, but there was a strict quota of these. And only on Thursdays. Otherwise, animals might talk.

‘They’d been larking about on the coastal path on their bikes. And, yes, it was them who’d trashed Mr Harris’s flower beds and one of them – Danny said it was Scott; Scott said it was Danny – saw something shining in the grass. At the Point,
that is, not the Gardens. They went to investigate. This would have been, ooh, half six, seven, I suppose. Yes, I know – the time when they should have been doing their homework. Danny – or was it Scott – picked it up. Only it was stuck, so whoever it was pulled harder. And a hand came up with it. Chewed, Danny said, like it had been eaten. You and I, of course, denizen of the night, know it as rodent infestation. Now, now, no slavering. But it was Danny who went back for the thing, so I can only assume it was Scott who dropped it.’

He rummaged in his pocket and placed the object under the light and the magnifying glass. ‘What do you think that is, Count?’

The cat glanced at it, shining in the brightness. Then, he looked away, suddenly far more interested in chomping on his left armpit.

‘Well, thank you for that,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s jewellery, certainly. But whose? And what? Part of a…what? Brooch? Medallion? Wide Boy Taylor was the king of bling, apparently, so it’s not too surprising that the boys found it there. Remind me to check with the Mem when she gets home. The lab report would have
something
on this, surely. A broken piece of jewellery, or place where something has been detached. We shall see.’

He held the little silver thing up to the light again, his eyes dazzled by the reflections of its scales. ‘It’s a lizard, Count. A little silver lizard. Taylor’s? Or his killer’s? A calling card? Or a deadly mistake that before 1965 would have placed a noose around somebody’s neck?’

Metternich slithered off his linen-basket perch and sauntered past Maxwell. For a moment, he toyed with taking
a chunk out of the old man’s leg, but it would be probably too sinewy to waste good muscle-power on, so he abandoned the project and headed for the stairs.

‘Mind ’ow you go, Count,’ Maxwell called, in his best Dixon of Dock Green. It was all, of course, wasted on the cat, who only ever watched Sky.

As artists go, Geraldine Buck wasn’t hugely successful. But that didn’t really matter in the scheme of things, because Greg, her husband, was something in the City and they could afford to indulge Geraldine’s passion for the sea. She had a studio flat out beyond the Shingle, not very far from Dead Man’s Point, and in the summer months, she’d taken to strolling along the beach beyond Willow Bay, where the pebbles threatened to turn your ankles and the stench of the bladderwrack washed up on them could turn your stomach. It all helped her particular Muse, she said and she liked it best on windy evenings when the surf was a roaring demon, bellowing along the shore, and the gulls cried in panic, wheeling desperately to find land and a safe haven for the night.

It was calm now, like a millpond, the sea far distant as if it had given up its daily battle with the land and was retreating for ever. The flies were a nuisance on nights like this, maddening around your ears and fluttering in and out of your curls. And they seemed focused on the dark bundle that lay ahead. Geraldine got closer, her sandalled feet slipping as the pebbles gave way beneath her and she muttered as yet another patch of tar held her fast for a second.

What
was
that? She found herself frowning as she neared it.
The smell was appalling. Those bastards who dumped rubbish from ships. How dare they? There ought to be a law. There
was
, presumably, a law.

But this was no ordinary rubbish. This, black and battered by the tide, was a man. Geraldine felt the hairs on her neck crawl as she realised. Then she screamed. Then she vomited. Then she ran.

What would you do if you found a whale; a whale on the beach that shouldn’t be there?

There was still a crowd beyond the fluttering tape by the time the moon came out. They were mostly holiday-makers, grockles the locals called them, who would have something a bit different to write about on their postcards to granny. ‘It ain’t half hot, Gran, and we all looked at a cadaver today.’

One who stood there, by the cordon where the police had placed them, was watching events more closely than the rest. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He pulled his hood further over his head as the night on the beach gradually became more chill.

For the locals, it was becoming business as usual in a grim sort of way. The SOCO team looked like a bad Sci-Fi Doomsday scenario, from a B-movie in the Fifties, wandering the beach in their white, translucent suits, hooded and masked as if an outbreak of Ebola had just occurred.

‘Have you any idea, guv, how much evidence there is on this bloody beach?’ It had been welling up inside Geoff Hare for some time. He’d been here nearly three hours, not suited up like the others, but receiving their reports on a
minute-by
-minute basis. Bottles, cans, nappies, broken bits of this and that were carefully collected, labelled, photographed,
stashed in black bags in the back of patrol cars and vans. Cynics might see this as a particularly vicious ploy by some environmentalist group to enforce a carrying out of beach clearance.

Yes, in answer to Hare’s question, DCI Hall had a very good idea. He’d seen it all being collected too and this was not his first body on a beach. The irony was, he knew deep down that this was all irrelevant. Jim Astley had got it right, as he usually did. Jim Astley had gone home now, muttering about his bedtime and his sciatica, as though the two were somehow linked.

Hall didn’t answer his sergeant but wandered back into the canvas erected over the corpse. The arc lights were still on, throwing the body into sharp relief. He was a slightly built man; Astley reckoned in his late thirties. His head, or what was left of it, had a shock of tumbling blond hair à la the early Hugh Grant and his eyes were grey. There was a mass of blood matted into the hair across the forehead and there was no doubt in the minds of either the policeman or the pathologist that the man had fallen from a great height. The presumption was that that height was the cliffs towering above the beach at Dead Man’s Point. It was the fall that killed him, pulverising the left side of his face and driving the jagged stones into his skull.

Henry Hall nodded to the SOCO boys waiting for orders. ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘Bag this one if you’ve done. That’s tomorrow’s little task for Dr Astley.’

The only question was, Hall was thinking as he went outside, grateful for the cool air of the beach, did you fall or were you pushed? He looked up to the black eminence of the
Point against the paler purple of the night sky. There were stars tumbling above him and the ghostly glimmer of the quartered moon. And he didn’t know why, but the phrase lover’s leap crept into his mind.

The great thing about the dog-end of a school year – now, promise you won’t tell – is that the timetable tends to implode. Year 13 have gone; so, at least until September, have Year 11. And Year 7 have yet to arrive. So those lazy bastards at the chalkface, who already, be it noted, have thirteen weeks holiday a year, actually have that untold luxury, time off during the day. A bit like: publishers, policemen, retail workers, post office personnel, doctors, dentists and just about everybody else.

So it was that Thursday morning, as the sun climbed again in the heavens and hose-pipe bans came into force with all the majesty of the law, that Peter Maxwell somersaulted neatly over the barbed wire perimeter fence around Stalagleighford, landed squarely in the saddle of White Surrey and pedalled like an escapee for the Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, his arrival in the car park coincided with that of a coach-party from Grimsby.

‘Aye up, chuck. Look at t’prices ’ere.’

‘Ee, it don’t bear thinkin’ about, does that.’

‘Well, I never.’

‘Not like this at ’ome.’

‘’Appen not, our Doris.’

And Maxwell remembered anew why he’d once taken a vow to lock himself securely in Columbine from May to September, just to let this particular breed of locusts past.

‘Mr Harris in?’ he asked the cow-faced girl on the counter, and silently shared the view of the Blue Rinse from Grimsby about the prices. ‘And is there somewhere I can park my bike?’

He was and there wasn’t, so Maxwell locked Surrey to an abeliophyllum distichum in case one of the Grimsby trawlers was of the light-fingered persuasion. Then he crunched his way over the forest bark in search of his quarry.

Chester Harris was a bearded man in his late forties. He was a botanist, horticulturalist, conservationist and all round pain in the arse, given to writing long and loud letters to the
Advertiser
on the perils of global warming and how we all ignore the unpredictable movements of plate tectonics at our peril. From time to time, Maxwell had considered writing an abuttal on the dangers of historical inevitability and the dire consequences of misjudging epistemic distance, but something more demanding always came along, like wiping Nolan’s bottom or watching paint dry. Now, here was the man himself, all golden tan from the great outdoors, with a bandana round his neck and fringed denim shorts around his thighs.

‘Mr Harris?’ Maxwell was crouching, looking intelligently at the alchemilla mollis.

‘That’s me.’ Chester Harris was always ready with an article for
Groundsman’s Weekly
or
Mr Rotivator Magazine.

‘Peter Manton, West Sussex CID.’

The constant gardener shook his hand, ‘Morning.’

‘Can we talk?’ Maxwell asked.

‘What about?’ Chester Harris was less than fond of the police.

Maxwell frowned. Was the man so totally caught up in his heliotropes that he’d missed stumbling over two bodies on his doorstep? ‘The murders,’ he mumbled.

‘Look…can I see some ID?’ Clearly Harris wasn’t quite the idiot savant his PR team had made him out to be. People from Grimsby wandering past were giving them both rather odd looks.

Maxwell looked startled. He gently led the man away into a shady bower. The looks from Grimsby were even odder now. ‘You mean, no one’s been in touch?’ Maxwell asked him.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oh, Jesus. Look, Mr Harris, I’m really sorry. There seems to have been some John Prescott-sized cock up on the communications front. Leighford were supposed to have briefed you. I can’t do this without your permission.’

‘Do what, for God’s sake?’

‘Go undercover here at the Gardens.’

‘Undercover?’ Harris frowned. The man was hardly dressed for a day on the flower beds.

‘This really is the end. I’m from Hove, you see. Unknown face and all, but Leighford are supposed to have cleared it. Um…a DCI Hall?’

Harris snorted. ‘Uh, that idiot!’

‘Really?’ Maxwell was enjoying this.

‘Not wishing to be disrespectful to your profession, Mr…’

‘Manton,’ Maxwell said. ‘DI Manton.’

Harris thought policemen retired at fifty-five, but perhaps there were exceptions. After all, nobody seemed to be telling David Jason to move on. ‘No, the whole of the local constabulary is a joke, I’m afraid.’ He was wiping his soily
hands on a rag. ‘I mean, take these murders…’

That was exactly what Maxwell had done and, like the ice cream man earlier who wasn’t Luigi, the botanist was opening up nicely. ‘Mr Henderson.’

‘Was that the name? Chappie found here in the Gardens.’

‘That’s him. Local builder, I understand.’

‘Is that all you understand?’ Harris asked, looking his man squarely in the face.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Look. Do you want to see the murder scene? I assume, in that you’re trying to work with Leighford, but are from outside, you haven’t seen it already? That kind of incompetence seems par for the course.’

‘Not a sausage.’ Maxwell shook his head. God, the rubbish he had to work with.

The horticulturalist emerged from the nook with the undercover policeman in tow, brushing bits out of his hair. The people from Grimsby were rather more down to earth; they were looking for grass stains on his back. Harris passed a trowel to a spotty youth all but passing out in a green boiler suit. Maxwell breathed a sigh of relief – he didn’t recognise the lad, so he should be all ri—

‘’Ello, Mr Maxwell.’ The lad’s face broke into a broad grin.

‘Maxwell?’ Harris half-turned as he strode towards the Australian Garden.

The undercover teacher tapped the side of his nose. ‘I didn’t say I hadn’t worked in Leighford before,’ he said.

Harris was not convinced. ‘But Tommy’s only seventeen,’ he argued. ‘Only been here a few weeks.’

‘Look, er… Mr Harris. I can’t discuss cases, all right?’

‘Oh, no, no, of course not.’

‘Let’s just say “chasing the dragon”. Know what I mean?’

‘Chasing…? Oh, drugs.’

Maxwell started, looking furtively around.

‘Sorry,’ Harris hissed. ‘None of my business.’

‘That’s all right,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Maxwell was a long time ago now.’

They’d taken the tape away from the rhododendron bushes at Harris’s insistence. He’d spent all the previous day closeted away with the
éminences grises
who ran Leighford Trust, who owned the gardens. Mayor Ledbetter was all for putting up signs saying ‘Roll Up! Roll Up! See the ’Orrible Murder Site. Get your choc ices here.’ He was even prepared to put on the fishnet stockings himself, but that was a side of his nature that the voters of Leighford had yet to be introduced to, so the matter was dropped.

‘You’ve seen the photographs, I suppose?’ Harris checked. He’d caught the milder ones at the Press Conference.

‘Yes, of course,’ Maxwell bluffed. ‘But there’s no substitute for the real thing.’

‘Here we are.’ Harris squatted at the base of a huge rhododendron cluster, whose dark leaves and dying flowers rose to the cloudless south coast blue. ‘Head under the bush. Feet out to…’ he paced it, ‘…here.’

‘You didn’t find him?’ Maxwell checked.

‘No, a couple of kids did. And that’s another thing. Courting bloody couples at it all over the park. What are these bloody parents doing, eh? I tell you, I wouldn’t let a daughter of mine go out dressed like that.’

‘Like what, Mr Harris?’

‘Like these girls do.’

‘There are girls in your garden?’

‘Look there.’ He pointed to a flimsy gate, complete with stile. ‘That’s all the security we have. A blind cripple in a wheelchair can get over that.’

‘Any trouble here before?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Violence, I mean?’

‘Few drunks from time to time,’ Harris shrugged. ‘Bit of glue-sniffing when it was all the rage a few years back. Needless to say, I’ve been on to the local nick. Nothing ever gets done. Plants are sensitive creatures, Inspector. They need warmth and light and water, sure, but they need quiet and a safe environment too. Young tearaways from the local sink estate won’t give them that. And as for the schools…’

‘Bad?’ Maxwell checked.

‘Appalling!’ Harris groaned. ‘Leighford, The Hampton; there’s not much to choose between them to be honest. Even the junior schools suck.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Tell me, did you know the dead man?’

‘Henderson? No.’ Harris shook his head. ‘Oh, I’ve seen him around, here and there. The odd council bash, you know. And of course, his company’s signs are all over the place.’

‘He never did any work for you, either at home or here at the Gardens?’

‘No. He’s a bit small fry, I think, for a project this size. We only deal with the big boys. Henderson specialised in executive homes, I understand.’

‘And he wasn’t a regular here?’

‘Here?’ Harris chuckled. ‘No, no. I don’t think there’d be
much to interest his sort here. I have, of course, already told your Leighford people all this.’

‘I knew you would have,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Like we used to say when we had a rail service, you’re only as good as your station master. And if you’re right about this bloke Hall…’

‘Oh, trust me,’ Harris said. ‘I am.’

‘So…’ Maxwell was looking backwards and forwards, trying to get his bearings. ‘If the body was dragged from the car park back there…’

‘It would have been too bloody obvious, surely?’ Harris had had time, as had Leighford CID, to ponder these things. ‘It’s nearly half a mile to the car park, down some pretty steep steps or very much in the open down the disabled ramp. No, if he didn’t die in situ, he had to be brought that way.’

‘From the coastal path?’

Harris nodded.

‘Look, Mr Harris. Something’s gone horribly wrong this morning. I’m going to have to go back to Leighford CID and sort it all out. You up for me starting work here, say…Monday? Even Leighford clearance can’t take longer than that. I promise I won’t dig up any allium sphaerocephalon. Not unless you tell me to.’

‘I don’t understand this.’ Harris was frowning. ‘I was at the Press Conference the other night. Nobody from the Force approached me at all. All I got was the usual verbals from the paparazzi.’

‘Huh,’ Maxwell snorted. ‘Don’t get me started on them. I’m going to take a wander along the path a little way. Where does it come out?’

‘The nearest landmark is Dead Man’s Point,’ Harris told
him. ‘There’s a car park there and it links up with the road on Ringer’s Hill. Beyond that, you’ve got the Rare Breeds and Willow Bay. It’s about three, three and a half miles all told.’

‘Fine. Oh, Mr Harris,’ Maxwell closed to his man, confidential in the dappled sunlight. ‘The lad weeding the flowerbeds.’

‘Tommy?’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Don’t mention me, all right? Could be a bit difficult. Know what I mean? If he raises the subject, he’ll probably tell you I’m a teacher. Just play along, all right?’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Harris said. ‘Not a word. You take care now, for all it’s a lovely day, that path can be murder. You know they’ve found another body, down on the beach?’

‘Henry? Jim Astley.’

The police surgeon-cum-pathologist was the last of his breed. Everywhere else, his job was being done by three people. It was killing him slowly, but like the alcoholic drowning himself in a vat of wine, he still had to get out three times to go to the loo. It was still Thursday, as it tended to be once a week for twenty-four hours or so, and they were open.