Maxwell’s Curse

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Part of the Oxford Tripos whatsit, isn’t it?’ There were sniggers all round.

  Henry Hall sensed the change of mood. Before they’d found Darblay, the air crackled with suppressed tension. No leads on old lady Pride, brick walls, tight lips. Now, with the dead rector, there was expectation in the wind. A different body, in a different place at a different time. He let the ribaldry subside. Men and women with laughter on their lips were at ease with themselves. They got on with their work, even, in a curious sort of way, enjoyed it.

  ‘We spoke to his housekeeper,’ Stone went on, ‘a Mrs Spooner. She doted on the man and is very upset by it all. Said he hadn’t an enemy in the world.’

  ‘She would, wouldn’t she?’ somebody asked.

  ‘Nothing in the parish council?’ Hall prodded. ‘Often a centre of intrigue in my book.’

  Stone wondered what book it was that his guv’nor was using. ‘We haven’t seen everybody yet, sir,’ he said. ‘It may be something will crawl out of the woodwork.’

  ‘What do we know about his last movements?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘Jacquie?’ Stone took a chair and watched the girl take centre stage.

  ‘Mrs Spooner usually arrives at seven thirty to cook breakfast,’ she told the team. ‘Mr Darblay was always up by the time she got there and the house was unlocked. He was usually in his study working on his sermons and they’d have a cup of coffee together.’

  ‘And on the morning in question?’ Even fast-track graduates like Hall lapsed into policespeak every so often.

  ‘She couldn’t find him,’ Jacquie said. ‘That didn’t bother Mrs Spooner. The deal was if he wasn’t in the house, she’d brew the coffee and leave it in the filter machine. He was either in the church or out walking. That happened on average a couple of times a month.’

  ‘That morning he was in the church?’ Hall asked.

  Jacquie nodded. ‘Dr Astley gives the time of death as between six and eight. The local bobby says the church was never locked …’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit unusual?’ Hall queried.

  ‘Darblay insisted on it,’ Stone piped up. ‘Said – and I quote Mrs Spooner “God’s house should always be open”. We’re assuming at the moment that he went to the church, perhaps to get something from the vestry, and disturbed somebody already there.’

  ‘Which brings us to the desecration,’ Hall nodded. ‘Who’s got anything on that?’

  ‘I’ve been doing a bit of digging, guv.’ Kevin Brand was on his feet. ‘Mind you, the Net’s a bit dodgy on all this.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Black candles on the altar is not your standard C of E, but you can buy ’em, mind, almost anywhere these days. It’s very Goth, apparently, whatever that means.’

  ‘Mrs Spooner had never heard of Darblay owning any black candles,’ Jacquie filled in.

  ‘The heart on the altar was that of a sheep …’

  There was a ripple of suppressed laughter, while Brand kept going. ‘Wetherton’s a rural area, farming community. Any one of a thousand people had access to a sheep carcass.’

  ‘What’s the fingerprint score?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Hundreds, guv,’ Brand shrugged. ‘The lab are doing their best, but there’s choirboys, servers, cleaners, the women that do the flowers. The candles are clean, though. Our boy was careful with that. I’m working on the graffiti as we speak.’

  ‘How far have you got?’ the DCI leaned forward.

  Brand sighed, waiting for the sniggers. ‘It’s what they call a Pentagram. It’s usually drawn in the air with an athame …’

  ‘Whatname?’ somebody called.

  Laughter.

  ‘It’s a sword,’ Brand kept going.

  ‘The thing on the altar was done with a sword?’

  ‘No, a finger. The Pentagram’s called a Witches’ Star and sometimes a Goblin’s Cross. Its point faces downwards – that means black magic, devil worship.’

  Hall quietened down the whistles and cat calls.

  ‘You’ve been watching too many Blair Witch Projects, Kev, me old mucker!’ It was the last bit of nonsense Hall was going to tolerate. ‘Jacquie, Martin, any history of this sort of thing at Wetherton?’

  ‘None reported, guv,’ Stone said. ‘It’s bloody weird, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hall mused. ‘I’m beginning to think it is.’

  ‘I’m glad we stayed in,’ Jacquie raised her glass to Maxwell. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for Sleepy Hollow again – too many heads.’

  ‘Darblay,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I wondered if you wanted to talk.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, then quicker, ‘no.’

  He caught her gaze.

  ‘Damn you, Max. Is this what it’s always going to be? One compromising situation after another?’

  ‘Always?’ he arched an eyebrow. ‘Now, that’s a long time, Woman Policeman. The Twelfth of Never. Is either of us talking always?’

  She looked at him, across the polished pine of her dining- room table, his lasagne gone, his wine half drunk, his eyes bright and kindly in the candlelight. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘Are we?’

  He smiled. ‘Darblay,’ he said again.

  She leaned back in her chair, ‘I’ve got cheese and biscuits or bananas and custard.’

  ‘Temptress!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll make a start on the cheese and bickies, please. The rector seemed a decent enough bloke.’

  ‘What?’

  He was being domestic, collecting up the dishes, humming ‘One man went to mow, went to mow a modem …’ Not that he had the first idea what a modem was.

  ‘Max!’ She was at his elbow, racing him into the kitchen. ‘Are you telling me you knew Andrew Darblay?’

  ‘I met him, yes.’

  ‘What? Some time ago?’

  ‘Ah,’ he was illuminated by the fridge-light, ‘Stilton.’ It was an excellent Homer Simpson. ‘Last Sunday.’

  ‘You shite!’ She spun him round. ‘Never mind the Stilton. Talk to me.’

  ‘Aha,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘“But it’s saviour of ’is country when the guns begin to shoot”.’ Kipling was a little lost on Jacquie Carpenter and she continued to face her man down. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You put the coffee on. I’ll crumble the cheese. And we’ll talk about the dear, dead days.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Jacquie relaxed her grip from his shoulders. ‘You were talking to Darblay about his beautiful church.’

  ‘Yes, I was actually.’

  She fussed with the filter. ‘It didn’t look so beautiful smeared with his blood.’

  Maxwell stopped in mid-crumble. ‘God, Jacquie, I’m so sorry.’ He put the crackers down and took her face in his hands, kissing her softly. ‘Here I am being a cryptic bastard and you’re up to your elbows in somebody else’s blood. Was it terrible?’

  She shrugged. She always felt like a little girl in Maxwell’s arms. She held his hands, warm and strong and safe. She felt like crying. It had been a tough three days. ‘You’ve seen your corpse too,’ she said.

  He sighed. ‘It’s the season,’ he said. ‘Winter. Isn’t this the deadly month – January?’

  ‘We’re not talking about the weather, Max,’ she shook her head.

  He looked at his girl, quiet, sensible, solid Jacquie, the face of an angel and the heart of a man. ‘Swap you, then,’ he challenged her. ‘Over coffee. Over cheese and bickies. Here and now,’ he swung his hips coyly, lapsing into his deep South. ‘Ah’ll show you mine if’n you show me yours.’

  She laughed despite herself. Despite the dead face of Andrew Darblay that grinned at her from every fold in her curtains, every knot in her pine. ‘All right,’ she said, clipping him on the chin. ‘But you first.’

  ‘Done,’ he said and instantly became Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura. ‘I was the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.’ Then he was Maxwell. ‘Mr Hall, for reasons best known to himself, dropped me Elizabeth Pride’s address. It was only a short step from there to Wetherton and the local man of
the cloth.’

  She clicked her fingers. ‘Littlehampton Mercury,’’ she said. ‘I might have known.’

  ‘It’s not an alias I often use,’ he told her. ‘Bit suspect?’

  ‘No such paper. DS Stone took me all the way to Wetherton to check on you. Darblay reported a bogus newspaperman to the blokes at the Incident Room. Rang in specially.’

  Maxwell chuckled. ‘Pretty astute clergyman there. How did he die?’

  ‘Not just yet.’ The coffee gurgled in the corner. ‘What did Darblay tell you?’

  ‘Ooh, let me see.’ Maxwell scraped back a chair and buttered a cracker. ‘That Elizabeth Pride was pure evil.’

  ‘Evil?’ Jacquie frowned. ‘That’s rather an old-fashioned word.’

  ‘Andrew Darblay was an old-fashioned man,’ he said. ‘Housekeeper, rectory, in tune with his tombs and his ogee work. Reminded me of Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets – the Reverend d’Ascoyne, I mean, not all his siblings. Clearly, Mrs Pride was no churchgoer. Your turn.’

  She poured the coffee for them both. ‘He was battered to death.’

  ‘So the radio said this morning,’ he nodded. ‘I was hoping for a little more.’

  She put the cups down in front of them. ‘Max, what I’m about to tell you mustn’t go any further. Do you promise?’

  ‘Is the Pope Polish?’ he asked her.

  ‘Promise me, Max,’ and she reached for his hand.

  ‘I promise,’ he said, his voice steady as a church and as deep as her love for him.

  ‘We found him laid out in the nave. I don’t mean sprawled on the floor, I mean laid out, arms across his chest.’

  ‘Like Elizabeth Pride,’ Maxwell said, the hairs on his neck beginning to crawl like they do when a haunting tune hits home.

  Jacquie nodded. ‘He was holding a crucifix upside down in his hands.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he murmured. ‘The Templars were accused of that, spitting on the cross, worshipping it upside down.’

  ‘Templars?’

  ‘Monk knights – or knight monks – take your pick. They were an enormously rich and powerful cult until the fourteenth century when they looked funny at the king of France one day and he axed them all – or, more literally, burned them at the stake. They were supposed to worship the severed head of a horned god called Baphomet.’

  ‘A horned god … ?’

  ‘The male beast,’ Maxwell explained, ‘monarch of the glen. It was all to do with ancient fertility rites – the first of Spring and so on. Maypole, dances and kissing the Devil’s arse. Most of it was nonsense, dreamed up by frustrated Catholics in hair shirts – not that it’s my period, you understand.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, well used to his encyclopaedic ways.

  ‘Today, most Catholics are quite content to watch Mass of the Day on telly, but in the good old days …’

  ‘There were … things on the altar.’

  ‘What things?’ He looked up from his coffee.

  ‘Black candles. A five pointed star in a circle. A sheep’s heart …’

  ‘… and a cuddly toy,’ Maxwell finished the list for her, but neither of them was laughing. ‘Are we talking Satanism?’ he asked, ‘Jacquie, are we talking about black magic? I mean, this is the twenty-first century.’

  ‘I never thought I’d hear you say that,’ she tutted. ‘I was hoping you’d say something rational, make some sense out of all this.’

  ‘Sorry. Like I said, it’s not my period. What about Crispin Foulkes?’

  ‘Crispin?’ She sat up. The name still caught her attention, even after all these years. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He knows a bit about Satanic abuse. Met it before in his social work. He seemed to think I knew something about it too, what with the calendar and all.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the calendar. He did happen to mention that to me.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re a fair cop. I helped myself to it and I shouldn’t have done. I’ll hand it over to you or put it back if you like.’ And he put his wrists out ready for the bracelets.

  ‘Put it back? Max, where did it come from?’

  He blinked at her. ‘Well, from Myrtle Cottage, of course, from Elizabeth Pride’s place. But you knew that …’

  ‘Max.’ She was staring at him now, worried, frightened even. ‘When did you go to Myrtle Cottage?’

  ‘God, I don’t know. Er … nine, ten days ago? Why?’

  ‘That would be the day after we went over the place with a fine tooth comb.’

  ‘So?’ He didn’t follow.

  ‘So, there was no calendar there, then, Max, no calendar at all. Unless …’

  ‘Unless?’

  She shook her head, rapidly, like a terrier shaking a rat. She was shaking herself free of a sudden thought she couldn’t face. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just forget it. Your coffee’s getting cold.’

  9

  ‘Come on, give us a fuckin’ fag.’

  ‘I ain’t got one.’

  ‘Yes you have, you shit. Cough up!’

  Wayne and Darren went back a long way, to the buggies their mothers had wheeled them in down Asda aisles through the nursery years when Danger Mouse was still on the telly and Kurt and Courtney were love’s young dream. They’d always been there for each other, when Wayne had pinched his first packet of Pickled Onion Flavour Monster Munch and when Darren had had his stomach pumped to get rid of his dad’s vodka. It was a case of mi casa su casa where they found Wayne’s dad’s stack of tasty videos and they’d taken turns keeping watch while the other one went on a rummage of discovery in Jade O’Brien’s knickers; it was a well-worn path.

  Tonight was Sunday. Skateboarding in the Barlichway. They lived on the edge of the huge sprawling estate that threatened to dwarf sleepy Leighford. It was like Birkenau to Auschwitz and just as grim. No birds sang here, around its wet, windy corners. They just huddled in the angles of the high rise and dropped their contempt on the buggers below.

  The rain was driving in from the west, spattering on the graffiti-daubed boarded-up windows that had been the Raj Tandoori Takeaway before certain racial differences had driven its owners away. Darren fumbled in his jeans and passed a Sovereign to his mate. Out came the cheap lighter that had replaced the one confiscated by that old fart Maxwell on Friday and the boys’ hard, cold faces lit up for seconds in the dark.

  Wayne inhaled deeply, resting against the wall, his trainered feet expertly rocking the skateboard on the pavement. ‘What about that new bit, then?’ He was always asking Darren’s opinion, especially when it came to women. Darren, the sophisticate, the roué, belched noisily and swigged from his Carling, pondering the matter before giving his days- younger protégé the benefit of his wisdom.

  ‘Great rack,’ he nodded.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Wayne conceded. ‘Does she go, though?’

  Darren shrugged. ‘You can never tell with Pakis, can you?’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  Darren pulled his fleece higher under his chin. ‘Don’t you listen to nothin’ in old bag Byfield’s SRS lessons? It’s your comparative religions, innit? They’re all supposed to be virgins before they get married.’

  ‘Get on!’ Wayne guffawed. ‘That’s only in Pakiland, though, innit? All them mosques and Islams.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Darren wiped the lager froth from his mouth. ‘What about Roxanne, you two-timing git?’

  ‘Nah,’ Wayne half-turned. He had loved Roxanne for most of his teenaged life, all fourteen months of it. He’d scratched her name on the underside of his desk in Maths – well, there wasn’t much else to do in Maths of a wet January. And last year, he’d broken into his mum’s purse and sent the object of his affections a Valentine card – ‘Violets are red, Roses are blue, what colour are yours?’ it had said. But he already knew the answer to that. They were a virginal while. It had become his favourite colour. He and Darren went back a long way, but he
wasn’t going to tell him any of this.

  ‘Nah,’ he said again, bending to pick up the skateboard. ‘Not my type.’

  ‘Right!’ chuckled Darren, ‘I’ve seen you …’ and his voice trailed away in the darkness.

  ‘What?’ Wayne followed his friend’s gaze. Darren was staring transfixed at something lying huddled in the far corner, next to the battered supermarket trolley. ‘What’s up?’

  Darren was fumbling with the lighter again. Out of the yellow light of the street lamp, that particular corner of the estate was deepest black. The boys made their way forward as an empty beer can rolled noisily across the tarmac. In the flickering light they saw a sight that neither of them would ever forget. It was an old man, sitting in the refuse of a derelict doorway, his white hair plastered to his forehead by the rain, his knees tucked up as though he was sitting by a roaring camp fire. They didn’t take in the fact that he was naked, that his white flesh hung like an old wrinkled sheet from his bones. All they saw was his face, looking at them, grinning at them. And he was dead. They, who had never seen death before. They who knew that when you died, pumped full of bullets by Wesley Snipes or John Travolta, you just somersaulted backwards in slow motion and rolled in the dust. Things to do in Barlichway when you’re dead.

  Jim Astley had seen death before. Too much of it. Too often. He looked oddly incongruous in his dazzling white hooded suit in the Barlichway night. Coppers in luminous striped coats came and went all around him and the SOCOs were busy erecting a makeshift tent over Astley and a dead man.

  The Barlichway crowd had gathered, track-suited, anoraked, a walking ad for Nike and Adidas huddled together in the rain beyond the police cordon stretched across the quadrangle, muttering and jostling. They who never saw a field event.

  ‘This’d never happen if you blokes did your job,’ someone called.

  ‘I ain’t seen a copper on this estate for years.’

  ‘Who is it? What the fuck’s going on?’

  Each jeer, each question was echoed by the crowd’s dark rhubarb, like some predictable Greek chorus lamenting a hero’s woes.

  Henry Hall crouched with the police surgeon under the glare of the arc lights. Jacquie Carpenter was behind him, trying not to look at the hideous grin on the dead man’s face.