by M. J. Trow
Josh took over. ‘It’s the birthday paradox,’ he said. ‘The murdered bit is immaterial. The chances are the same as they would be for any two other people and that is fifty fifty.’
‘But ...’ Jacquie didn’t like coincidences. She wanted to think there was something more important than sheer chance at work here. There was no point in going back to Henry Hall with a coincidence as part of her thinking. There was something about the word that made him go deaf. But if statistically it wasn’t unusual, what else could it be? She decided to change the subject. ‘Anything in the rest of the house?’ she asked.
‘Nothing downstairs,’ Josh said. ‘The kitchen is freakishly tidy. Either the deceased was a complete nutter when it comes to tidiness and was also on the verge of an almighty top-up shop or this family lives on takeaways and frozen ready meals. The cupboard is bare.’ Josh fancied himself as a bit of a gourmet chef, modelling himself on an amalgam of Rick Stein and Jamie Oliver, whilst managing to look a lot more like Marguerite Patten.
‘Upstairs the same,’ Robert agreed. ‘Socks colour coded. Two bedrooms, guv. His and hers. Girls’ bedrooms like operating theatres, just a few drawers messed, but they left in a hurry. We won't find anything here. I did find this, though,’ he brandished a pigskin manicure set, ‘in the old man’s bedroom. I’ve bagged it for the lab.’
With a sigh, Jacquie snapped off her gloves. ‘Tell them to get back to me asap with whatever they find – MacBride’s DNA won't be much help as evidence though, will it? Never mind, well done for finding it. Was it hidden?’
Silent Robert, reverting to his nickname, shook his head.
‘We’ll get IT over here for this phone,’ she said. ‘Without knowing a bit more about it, I don’t know whether the message will travel or if it is linked to the line. Otherwise, that’s it, boys. Onwards and upwards; it’s the Morley house next.’
‘Well, it’s not on the syllabus, Idris, but did I ever tell you about the Defenestration of Prague?’
Idris nearly died of fright. It wasn’t his real name, of course. No one east of Offa’s Dyke is ever called Idris. But he was big and black and laconic and the girls of Ten Zed Ex Oh who drooled over Mr Elba couldn’t resist giving him the nickname.
Maxwell swept past the boy and shut the window. ‘Prague, anybody?’
They were all, suddenly, in their seats now, models of scholarly rectitude. Thirty one blank faces. ‘Remind me to have a word with that nice Mr Cutter in the Geography Department,’ he went on. ‘If asked, he would tell you that Prague is the capital city of the Czech Republic, once called Czechoslovakia, but should really be called Bohemia. This glass and metal thing behind me, Idris, the thing you were just leaning out of, despite the inclemency of the weather – what do we call that?’
‘A window, sir.’
‘Spot on, my boy,’ Maxwell said, prowling the class. ‘It’s Baliol for you or my name’s not Steen Steensen Bilcher. Know what the Romans called such a gizmo, Idris?’
The Baliol scholar was stumped.
‘Anybody?’
Anybody was stumped too.
‘Fenestra,’ Maxwell told them. ‘First declension, if memory serves.’ There had never been a Classics Department at Leighford High School, so there was no nice teacher there to talk to. ‘So, you see, defenestration means jumping, or falling, or being pushed out of a window. There, now, who says History isn’t fascinating?’
Thirty one people were trying to fathom what all this had to do with Women in Nazi Germany, which the Lesson That Maxwell Forgot was supposed to be about.
‘What has this, I hear you all cry, to do with Women in Nazi Germany? Absolutely nothing. Unless ...’ he quietly confiscated Jade’s mobile phone, ‘you follow the notion that it was just such an enforced defenestration which led directly to the Thirty Years War, which led to the rise of a powerful Prussia which became a United Germany in which the Nazi Party proliferated. Cause and effect, eh? So, for that delicious piece of historicity, we all have to thank Idris. All together, now ...’
And Mad Max’s fingers twirled in the air as they chorused, ‘Thank you, Idris.’
Mrs B was no longer hunched like something at lunch on the Serengeti when Maxwell finally returned to his office. She was leaning back in his chair, chin tucked in, nursing another cup of tea in lieu of a much-overdue cigarette.
‘Any luck?’ Master of body language though he was, Maxwell couldn’t quite work out whether her look was one of complacent success or complete dejected failure.
‘Nah.’ She didn’t look at him, just at the screen. ‘Tried everything. She didn’t exist before the end of January this year.’
‘But ...’
‘Don’t you but me, Mr M. I’m stumped. I never seen this before, I really haven’t. I’ll have a word with my sister’s lad, well, grandson I suppose you’d say ...’
Mrs B’s family relationships were so byzantine it was probably well not to enquire too closely.
‘... see if he has any ideas, but I think we’ll have to agree that she’s got us beat.’ Suddenly springing up, she slammed the mug on the table and swept up her tablet, slipping it back into her bag. ‘I’ll go and see if the lying cow is back in the building. If not ...’ she looked around the office, drinking in the detail as she did so, ‘I reckon this place can go about two days before it sinks under the weight of its own rubbish and filth. No offence. Then see where she is then.’
‘The trouble is, Mrs B,’ Maxwell said sadly, ‘I think that Mrs Braymarr may be one of those honoured mortals to whom shit does not stick.’
‘Hah!’ The woman’s derision was palpable. ‘I don’t reckon she’s even mortal, Mr M, since you mention it. Still, I’ll still see you at yours, won't I? From time to time?’
‘Yes,’ he said, answering her first question. ‘Oftener than you think,’ in answer to the second.
She was hardly out of the door when Helen Maitland took her place. ‘Coffee?’ She waggled the kettle at him.
‘Yes, please. While we can.’
Helen had read the memo. All extraneous means of making beverages were now not allowed, following academy protocol. All snacks brought in by staff must comply with rules dictating the contents of students’ snack boxes, viz and to wit, they had to be healthy and no chocolate was the law of the jungle from now on. Helen wasn’t sure whether she had ever gone, waking or sleeping, for longer than three hours without chocolate and was already feeling the pinch, though her secret stashes remained, for now, secret. But she knew it was only a matter of time.
Helen set the coffee down on the table between them and sat, looking moodily into the grey-beige depths of her mug. Instant coffee wasn’t good for her, it made her stomach acid and rebellious even without the stress they were all under, but even so it worked on her like a drug. How she was going to get through the day without it, she couldn’t imagine. A vending machine somehow wasn’t going to cut the mustard, even ignoring the fact that there was no possible way that it could cater for the disgruntled staff of what had once been a happy school. She lost herself in watching the milk form a greasy slick on the surface of her drink and so when Maxwell spoke, she jumped and slopped it all down her front.
‘For God’s sake, Max!’ she screamed. ‘Look what you made me do!’ She dabbed at the stain with a tissue from her pocket, already disintegrating from an inadvertent turn in the tumble drier. It left gouts of fluff on her jumper and she burst into tears, pointing at the mess incoherently.
Maxwell, public schoolboy to the core, leapt up to close the door and draw the blind. He handed her the cleanest of the tea towels to hand and sat down again to wait for her to calm down. Years of Helen Maitland, calm and imperturbable in the worst crisis, had not trained him for this; centuries of hormonal girls of all sizes had. Waiting was the only game in town. Finally, his strategy bore fruit. She blew her nose on the tea towel and then looked at it in horror, holding it out to him as the man who could sort it out. He took it and dropped it on the floor. That was for
later.
‘Better?’ he asked and she nodded, with a final sniff. ‘It was time you had a good bawl,’ he said. ‘You’ve been taking this on the chin and it’s no way to run a railroad, is it?’
She shook her head. ‘I feel dreadful, really. I don’t have half the problems some of the staff here have. I still have my job, for one thing. And even if I didn’t, we wouldn’t starve. But ...’ the tears welled up again.
He leaned forward and patted her hand. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s been like being hit by a truck. I can't believe this method has ever worked. I’ve had Mrs B on the case.’
Helen looked at him through tear-clotted lashes. ‘Mrs B? What’s she going to do, hoover her to death?’
Maxwell reflected how quickly Fiona Braymarr had become ‘her’ – speak of the devil and she’s bound to appear. ‘No, although that is a plan, I suppose ...’ he appeared to give it sober reflection, imagining the woman’s head, Tarantino-style, whizzing around with the fluff in the vacuum cleaner’s innards. ‘No, Mrs B is my secret IT weapon. She is a whizz on computers of all kinds and like a truffle hound if you need something found out.’
‘There’s a rumour that ... she ... isn’t on Google,’ Helen sniffed.
‘Not a rumour, in fact. She really isn’t, and that’s why I have Mrs B on the case. She’s already done some digging this morning, now she’s off to find her sister’s grandson ...’
‘Her great nephew, then.’ Helen was doing Mendelian genetics with her Year Eleven and was in a bit of a groove.
‘In any other family, almost certainly,’ Maxwell agreed with a smile. He gave Helen’s hand a final pat and sat up straight. The old back wasn’t up to long-term care giving these days. ‘Suffice to say, she’ll find anything that’s there to be found. And meanwhile, we’ll all just have to sit tight and try to ride the whirlwind.’ He looked up, lips moving, then added, ‘If that’s even possible, of course. Perhaps if you could grab hold of something as it whirls past ...’
Helen laughed and took a swig from what remained of her cooling coffee. ‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto,’ she said.
Anyone less like a Munchkin than Helen Maitland it was hard to imagine, but Maxwell grinned at her. ‘As long as we can get rid of the Wicked Witch of the West with no bones broken, we can be anywhere we like, can’t we?’
Helen Maitland was an expert at Maxwell-reading and now she changed the subject, right on cue. ‘Any news about Tommy Morley? Or the MacBride girls, come to that?’
‘I went to see Tommy yesterday, as you know ... was I missed at the meeting last night, by the way?’
Helen looked down and took another sip of her coffee. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Was anyone?’
She chuckled deep in her throat. ‘I don’t know that either. It’s hard to find anyone qualified to ask.’
‘Dearie me,’ he smiled. ‘Poor Mrs Braymarr, all on her lonesome.’
‘Well, no. Some people went. Just not people I talk too. Brown noses are so unattractive.’
‘Indeed. Well, yes, Tommy; in the end, I didn’t see him. His dad ...’
‘Man, thirty-three ... is he really thirty-three? He looks ...’
‘Fifty, yes, I know. He arrived as I did and gave himself up.’
‘That’s that one, then.’
‘I don’t think so. I still think this case will run and run. But I can't say more, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Helen could have shaken him – there was nothing worse than someone with the need to gossip all but flashing in a neon sign on their heads who nevertheless was keeping schtum.
‘The MacBride girls ... that one is complicated, but the short answer is they’re with their granny somewhere. I must say that Ten Zed Ex Oh were a little more subdued than normal without Dee.’
‘I teach the younger one. Not quite so obnoxious but with those two, you always have to remember who their dad is.’
‘That’s true. I understand he’s a bit ...’ Although Maxwell was no byword when political correctness was being discussed, he searched for an acceptable word to describe Geoff MacBride with some care. With so much of his information coming covertly from Jacquie, he had to remember who knew what about who.
‘Oh, God, yes!’ Helen cast her eyes heavenward. ‘Anything with a pulse, flirting, you know, just to keep his hand in. But when it comes to ...’ she blushed a little, ‘the full monty, as it were, his women are in two categories. Powerful or airheads. He usually runs one of each, as I understand it.’
‘Really?’ Maxwell nodded, ruminatively. ‘That’s interesting. I wonder who fills which niche at the moment?’
Helen leaned forward and dropped her voice. ‘It very much depends on who you listen to,’ she said and wriggled into a more comfortable position. Maxwell loved this woman, but even so was horribly reminded of Les Dawson swapping goss with Roy Barraclough. ‘I know for a fact he was having it away with that woman, you know, thingie, leader of the council a while back.’
‘Yes, I remember her,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘So that accounts for the airhead. What about the powerful woman?’
Helen leaned back, laughing. ‘Point taken,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though. He’ll never crack Fiona Braymarr. She wouldn’t give him a second glance.’
Maxwell chewed his lip. She was probably right; and he wouldn’t want to be in Geoff MacBride’s shoes when she turned him down. She was a whole new breed of spider, one who ate her mates before the deed was done, rather than after. Not a good long-term survival strategy, perhaps, but it didn’t seem to be doing her much harm thus far.
‘Are you going to today’s meeting?’ she said, a propos of nothing in particular.
‘Is there one? After yesterday?’
‘That’s a good point. If I were ... her ... I wouldn’t demean myself. But who knows what she’s thinking?’
‘I may be needed at the nick, of course. Tommy ... well, you know the drill.’
She looked at him, eyes narrowed. ‘What about Man, Thirty-three?’
‘Ah, that’s true. But Woman, Don’t Ask Her Age If You Value Your Life has let slip that she doesn’t really have him seriously in the frame.’
Helen was intrigued. ‘So it is Tommy, then, after all?’
‘Well, Man, One Thousand, doesn’t think so,’ Maxwell said.
‘Max, you are a softie really,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry – I’ll make sure the kids don’t find out.’
‘No, no, nothing to do with being soft hearted. He used the magic words.’
‘Which are ...?’
‘In this case, “It was all my fault”.’
Helen Maitland hadn’t been in the business quite as long as Maxwell, but she knew the code. ‘That clinches it, then,’ she said. ‘He didn’t do it. Know who did?’
He pulled a rueful face. ‘Not as yet.’ Then he brightened. ‘But I will.’
Chapter Ten
T
he Morley house could hardly have been more different from the MacBride one. It was tidy, with a minute brick-laid area in front neatly swept and with a small pot of crocuses in the porch, but everything about it was a little sad, a little mean as though whoever lived there was going through the motions for the sake of what the neighbours might say. Along the fence were ranged a few cellophane wrapped bunches of flowers and, unaccountably, a teddy bear, already rather bedraggled. Jacquie and the SOCO team drew up in echelon outside and she led the way round to the back door, the only one for which she had the key.
‘Did either of you attend the scene?’ she asked, over her shoulder.
Both men shook their heads, with a rustle of their paper suits.
‘She had fallen against the front door, more or less. Her husband had difficulty getting in, or so he says.’
‘Or difficulty getting out,’ Josh added.
‘Indeed. Well, lads, I don’t have to tell you your jobs. Usual thing. Upstairs, check for who sleeps where. I would
like you to check the boy’s room carefully, though. I have ... well, a little inside info which makes me wonder about abuse. I’ll check down here.’
She had no real hopes of finding such gold on the answering machine and in fact it was even more disappointing than she expected; there was no answering machine. 1571 just informed her that there were no new messages. The few bits of post on the mat were catalogues and offers of cheap life insurance, which in the circumstances were rather redundant. The Morleys seemed to live in a vacuum of their own misery, with no real friends or even acquaintances, the flowers and teddy outside notwithstanding. Jacquie looked around downstairs, touching nothing, but apart from the dried pool of blood on the hall carpet, there was nothing that said anything about what had happened. The fingerprint powder from the first SOCO sweep was still evident, but with a quick wipe and a blast of Mr Muscle, the house was good to go.
Time to speak to Hetty.
Jacquie went to the bottom of the stairs and called up. ‘Josh? Are you there?’
There was a muffled response and a bump then he appeared, hanging over the bannister. ‘Yes, guv. Found anything? I was under the kid’s bed.’
‘Oh, sorry. No, nothing down here. I’m popping next door. Apparently, the neighbours called in possible child abuse a while ago.’
‘Really?’ Josh’s eyebrows disappeared under the hood of his suit. ‘That’s interesting. So the kid did do it, then?’
‘Let’s not rush to judgement, Josh,’ Jacquie told him. ‘The CYP report said there was nothing amiss.’
Muffled though it was through the mask he wore, Josh’s response was unmistakeable.
Ignoring it, Jacquie said, ‘The neighbour just happens to be DCI Hall’s sister, so we do have a bit more fore-knowledge than usual. At least we know it isn’t a mad old biddy with a grudge and a glass to the wall.’
‘True. Shall we leave the door when we go, if you’re not back?’