by M. J. Trow
‘Yes. In normal circumstances. But these circumstances are a bit out of the ordinary.’
‘How so?’ The Maxwells were edging up the stairs, so that the DI could get dressed and they wouldn’t have to whisper.
‘It’s the wife of what the newspapers like to call “a prominent citizen”.’
‘How exciting.’ Maxwell couldn’t disguise the gleam in his eyes. ‘Who?’
Jacquie shrugged out of her pyjamas and dressed with practiced ease, slipping a jumper over tee and jeans to be the epitome of efficient policedom. ‘Don’t ask, Max, and I won’t have to refuse to tell you,’ she said. ‘It will be in the papers soon enough.’
‘I told you mine,’ he wheedled.
‘I’m a detective inspector, Max,’ she said, bending to Velcro up her trainers. ‘I get to know everything. You, not so much.’
He chuckled.
‘Well, yes, you do get to know everything. But not necessarily first. Be patient.’
Down below, the bell pealed.
‘That’s for you,’ she said. ‘Are they sending her out with a driver?’
‘I believe that’s the plan.’
‘In that case, don’t keep them waiting. I can show her where everything is before I go.’
‘What about if we’re not here when Nole wakes up?’
‘I’ll get her to get Mrs T in for breakfast. You know she’s always up at sparrowfart. Now, go.’
And the appropriate adult scooted off, making for the stairs.
Peter Maxwell had been in Leighford Nick at almost every hour of the day or night over the years, but night time always struck him as the worst. It was now he believed the doubtless apocryphal story that more people died at three a.m. than at any other single hour of the day or night. There was a feeling that the air had been breathed in and out too many times, that the clocks were running on special, extra-slow ticks, that the doors had healed up and there would be no way out of the flickering, neon-lit hell they were all trapped in. He was met in the foyer by the social worker. She was tiny, perhaps not even five feet tall, but there was steel in her eye that was hard to miss. Her fluffy hair framed a heart shaped face and Maxwell could see that she was an iron fist in a little, curly glove; the scariest kind.
‘Mr Maxwell?’ She stepped forward, arm extended. ‘Hello. I’m Marilyn. Thank you so much for coming. Poor Tommy, he is in such a state, as you can probably imagine ... well, no, of course you can’t. How can anyone imagine what it’s like to have killed your mother?’
Maxwell thought back to his own mother, dead and gone for far too long. To the gentle woman with the kindly eyes, who would kiss him to sleep every night, then wake him with another kiss every morning. Nasty thoughts may sometimes have entered her head, but none that he would know about. He and his sister had been loved unconditionally and he still missed her, even after all the years since she had died. He gave a shorthand agreement with a shake of the head.
‘He’s through here,’ the social worker said. ‘We haven’t put him in an interview room; he’s in the family suite.’
The room was self-consciously decorated in child friendly colours, bright and breezy but managing somehow to still be thoroughly institution – the cream and green of the twenty teens. A couch was pushed against one wall and some bean bags were scattered around. A box of rather grubby soft toys were in one corner, a box of Lego in another. Curled up against one arm of the couch was Tommy Morley, looking somehow smaller in this alien room. He looked up with enormous, tear-reddened eyes as the door opened. He stiffened as he saw Maxwell and Marilyn Fairbrother. Maxwell knew that he had to play this one right or they might not get another chance.
‘Tommy,’ he said, as though they were meeting casually in a corridor. ‘How’re you doing?’ Normally, such grammar would make Maxwell’s soft palate curdle, but he was prepared to bend the rules a little, circumstances being what they were.
‘Mr Maxwell,’ Tommy said. ‘I killed my mum.’
‘I don’t think we want to be saying that kind of thing, Tommy,’ the social worker said. ‘Not until the duty solicitor gets here.’
‘I did, though,’ the boy said. ‘It’s all my fault.’
Maxwell saw the loophole and spoke quietly in the woman’s ear. ‘Can we have a word?’
She pinned on a bright smile and said, ‘I’m just going to have a chat with Mr Maxwell, Tommy. He’ll be right back.’
Outside, she said, testily, ‘We can’t keep dodging in and out, Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘The boy is not in a good place.’
She could say that again – the family suite was definitely well down there in the circles of Hell. But Maxwell had other things on his mind and couldn’t take up the subject of family suites and their décor. ‘I didn’t think I would hear the magic words so soon, Miss Fairbrother,’ he said.
‘That’s Ms,’ she inevitably corrected him. ‘And what magic words would they be?’
‘“It’s all my fault”,’ he told her. ‘When you are trying to find out who dunnit, as opposed to who is taking the fall for it, you listen out for those words. They mean that the person feels culpable, but they rarely mean they actually wielded the spade, or whatever the murder weapon of choice might have been.’
‘Have many cases of murder in Leighford High School, do you, Mr Maxwell?’
The voice came from behind him and had hostility written all over it.
‘You’d be surprised,’ Maxwell said, without turning round.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ the voice agreed, coming closer and coalescing into the unattractive exterior of Rick Shopley. The newest sergeant on the block had not endeared himself to Jacquie or indeed to anyone else in Leighford, but the good news was he was on secondment and would soon be gone. ‘I have heard about you and your little hobby. Sleuths R Us.’ He turned to the social worker. ‘Why is he here?’
‘Appropriate adult,’ she said. ‘Requested by Tommy. He has that right, you know.’
‘Is he on the list?’
‘He doesn’t have to be. He has enhanced CRB and that’s all it needs. And he knows Tommy; the poor boy needs a friendly face.’
‘Yeah, well, he should have thought of that before he stabbed his mother with the bread knife, don’t you think?’ the sergeant sneered.
‘When did this happen?’ Maxwell asked mildly. ‘I only ask because, well, I have reason to believe that Tommy is usually packed off upstairs by eight o’clock at the outside and it would be unusual to say the least if he had a bread knife in the bed with him.’
The sergeant looked at him with contempt. ‘The stairs aren’t landmined, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘Just being sent to bed doesn’t mean he had to stay there.’
‘But it does,’ Maxwell said. ‘Tommy was completely dominated by his mother. He would never go against her orders.’
‘All the more reason for him to snap. I’ve looked at the CYPR,’ he said, speaking now to the social worker. ‘It’s marked NFA.’ It was clearly his intention to exclude Maxwell by using initials for everything, but Heads of Sixth Form were as up on children’s services jargon as the next man, except that perhaps he had a different set of words for NFA.
‘So, as I was saying,’ Maxwell also concentrated on the social worker, ‘It’s all my fault means something very different from “I did it”. Where is Tommy’s dad, by the way?’
‘He wasn’t there,’ she said. ‘Tommy doesn’t seem to know where he is.’
‘Away on business, we heard,’ the sergeant said.
‘Heard? From whom?’
The sergeant curled his lip. ‘“From whom”?’ he mimicked. ‘From Tommy.’
‘Really?’ Marilyn Fairbrother was beginning to take sides and she certainly wasn’t aligned with the sergeant. She flicked open the file she had been clutching to her chest. ‘It says here that he works for the bus company as a route planner.’
‘And?’
‘And so I don’t see how he can be away on business. Even the most dedicated route planner
wouldn’t be out planning routes in the middle of the night, would he?’
Shopley looked uncomfortable. ‘He could be on a course,’ he blustered.
Ms Fairbrother pulled herself up to her full height and stared him straight in the tie-knot. ‘I think before we question Tommy any more, we find his father, don’t you? I believe, as does Mr Maxwell, that Tommy feels responsible, but that doesn’t mean he did it. In my capacity as the representative of the child protection department of Leighford, I must insist that you postpone any further interviews until every effort has been made to find Mr Morley.’
It was a little like being faced off by a hamster, but Rick Shopley knew when he was beaten. He slouched off down the corridor and slammed through the double doors at the end, leaving them swinging like a larger version of Metternich’s cat flap, and with much the same acrid scent of threat wafting in his wake.
‘Can we get some lights on in here?’ Jacquie called, her voice echoing slightly in the saleroom. She could picture Maxwell’s sense of disappointment. As an avid watcher of the CSI Franchise, he expected policemen (who also appeared to be SOCO to save on the expense of paying extra extras) to bob around corners at crime scenes, a powerful torch balanced on the rigid wrists of their gun hands, just in case the perp was still there.
There was a loud clunk and the neon popped into light. Jacquie was aware of the PR problem immediately. ‘Close those blinds, somebody. We’ll have half of Leighford gawping in.’
‘Jacquie.’ She heard the DCI murmur her name. ‘What have we got?’
Henry Hall looked like shit. He was in the grip of his annual cold and nobody could deny he put the ‘Man’ into Man Flu. He had been feeling sorry for himself before he left home, but there was nothing like sudden death for jolting him out of that.
‘It’s Denise MacBride,’ she told him, edging round the gleaming pale blue Megane to the front of the shop. ‘Wife of the owner.’ It was not the most pure form of police procedure but the rookie constable who had responded to Arthur Innes’ phone call had moved the dead woman. It was all too horrific to leave her where she was. They had carried her to the back of the car where there was space and laid her flat on her back. Her face was a mask of blood and two of her teeth had shattered with the impact of the fall.
‘Your best guess?’ Hall asked his favourite inspector. Jacquie knew that Hall didn’t do guesses. Later he’d want t’s crossed and i’s dotted but for now the big picture would do.
Jacquie squatted alongside the Megane, then looked up at the showroom roof.
‘I think she fell from there,’ she said. ‘The gallery.’
The gallery was where Geoff MacBride took his special clients, those with more money than sense. He showed them glossy brochures here, flipped on his laptop with all the specifications. He knew his business. Traditionally, the men were fascinated by woofers and tweeters, overhead camshafts, sat-nav capabilities and smart parking. It was the women who stressed over the shade of the interior and where the vanity mirror was. While he was explaining this, MacBride was popping a champagne cork (special deal from Asda in the High Street) and relieving the unsuspecting clients of a substantial amount of money.
Hall crouched beside the car. Behind him, SOCO had arrived with their Outbreak suits, as though Ebola had come to Leighford. They were not best pleased to see Hall and Jacquie already contaminating their precious crime scene, but they knew that those two knew their business and would tread as lightly as possible.
‘We had an unusually observant paramedic on duty,’ Jacquie told Hall. ‘Everybody assumed suicide at first. Nasty fall – the steps up there are a bit of a challenge; the main access is from the office which is still locked, so she must have taken the emergency stairs and there’s only a very low rail. Then, he saw this,’ she stepped backwards and crouched beside the dead woman, carefully lifting up one hand with gloved fingers. ‘Broken nails.’
‘A fight,’ Hall nodded grimly. He stood up. Henry Hall was ageing well, but hours of crouching alongside bodies he could do without. ‘A fight started up there ...’ He looked down again. ‘There could be debris under those nails. She was pushed or thrown and ended up here. She must have bounced off the Megane,’ and he ran his gloved hands over the roof, feeling the dent, ‘and gravity brought her down between it and the glass.’
They looked at the corpse again. The dead woman was fully clothed, in jeans and a jumper. Her face was too much of a mess to see individual wounds and the blood had smeared over her shoulder and left breast. Her hair, dark and curly, was matted with blood.
All in all, it was not the most positive advertisement for MacBride’s Motors, the Best on the South Coast.
Back in the Nick, Tommy Morley was not saying anything and this was only partially because he was curled up asleep on the sofa in the Family Suite. Maxwell and Marilyn Fairbrother were sitting in the two armchairs, watching him. In a dim light, they could have passed for doting parents watching their only chick, even though he was more goose than swan. There was no clock in the suite, but Maxwell’s inner timer knew it was not far short of five o’clock, or possibly even worse. They had talked to Tommy, asked over and over where his father was, but the only answer was ‘away’, or variations on that theme. Then he had suddenly curled up and gone to sleep, as only children can; even children with the weight of the world on their shoulders.
Maxwell leaned over and touched the social worker lightly on her arm. She jumped and confirmed his suspicion that she had been asleep for almost as long as Tommy. She blinked at him and licked her lips, mouthing, ‘Sorry.’ She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair and pointed to the door. They crept out into the corridor, propping the door open with a cushion.
‘I think I’ll get off home now, Marilyn, if you don’t mind,’ Maxwell said, just above a whisper.
‘What if he wakes up?’ she asked.
‘Do you have children, Marilyn?’
‘Well ... no, not as yet.’
‘As the owner of one,’ Maxwell said, offering up a silent apology to Nolan, who had been owned by no man since he first opened his eyes, ‘I can assure you that that child won’t be awake for hours. In fact, if you can arrange it, let him sleep. I don’t think he has slept properly for years.’
‘We don’t have a file on him,’ she complained. ‘Not until today, that is.’
‘No.’ Maxwell patted her arm. ‘There is no blame to be laid here, Marilyn, unless it is at the feet of a dead woman. And then, it could belong at her mother’s feet, or hers ... who knows where these things begin? We just need to make sure that Tommy comes out of this as unscathed as possible. When he wakes up, if he still wants me, I’ll come. But meanwhile, I have a boy who needs not to wake up and find both his parents have done a runner. Fair?’
She looked up at him. She had wondered why Tommy had asked for this man, who she had heard tended to be a bit of a loose cannon. But now she knew. She nodded, and slid back round the door, kicking the cushion aside and holding down the handle so there was no click. Maxwell watched her go, then turned for the foyer, and then the exit.
Chapter Seven
J
im Astley should have retired. Almost every joint in his body ached these days, it didn’t matter how early he went to bed, he still woke up exhausted every morning. When he had decided, long aeons ago, to opt for pathology instead of the nuisance of working with the living, he had never thought he would be doing it for so long. He had never reached the heights of fame of Keith Simpson and Francis Camps and now he knew he never would; he was doomed to spend the rest of his life – and many mornings he hoped that would be measured in hours – cutting up the deceased of Leighford, checking for the incompetence of his peers. Donald, his assistant, had over the years taken much of the basic work off his hands and in fact had become a damn fine post mortem practitioner, but it would stick in Astley’s throat to tell him as much. It came as no surprise therefore on that Tuesday morning to find that the day’s customer was already prepped on
the table and Donald was standing, gowned, masked and gloved, ready to begin when Astley was still in his overcoat.
The pathologist peered at the woman, laid out with her bagged hands by her side. ‘Violent death, Donald?’ he asked. ‘Why was I not called?’
‘It was dealt with on call, Dr A,’ Donald said, breezily. Best not to let the old geezer know that they were watching his back these days. There had been a few howlers in his reports just lately and a middle of the night call wasn’t going to make him any more accurate. But then, even the great Bernard Spilsbury had gone the same way. Sometimes, Donald wondered if there was such a thing as second-hand drinking; if so, Astley’s home life would make him a prime candidate.
‘Is there an identification yet?’ Astley was trying to regain the upper hand.
‘It’s Denise MacBride,’ Donald said, as though that should mean something.
It didn’t, but Astley waited a moment before asking. Donald didn’t offer any further information – it was all part of the game that made up their working day.
Astley sighed. ‘Denise MacBride,’ he said. ‘Should I know her? It does sound faintly familiar.’
‘MacBride’s Motors. In town. You know, the big Renault dealership.’
‘Ah, yes.’ It was all starting to fall into place. ‘Isn’t her old man a JP or something.’
‘A JP, exactly,’ Donald said. ‘Also he is on the Council, though not leader, much to his annoyance. He is also Chair of Governors at Leighford High School and a number of junior ones as well; basically, with Geoff MacBride, if there is a chair, he likes to have his arse in it. Rumour is, he wants to be our next MP.’
‘Yes.’ Astley had him now. Superficially good looking, though going over a bit. Had to take care these days which direction the photos were taken from. Slimy, snake oil salesman type. Had been a bit of a pain in the neck when Mrs Astley had been picked up one night drunk and disorderly in charge of a pushbike. It wasn’t the drunk and disorderly that was a problem so much as the fact that she thought the bike was a buggy and she had lost the baby out of it. Hushing up had been the order of the day, but MacBride had been a hard nut to crack – he wore his JP hat rather literally. ‘So, what happened? Hit and run?’