by M. J. Trow
‘Paul,’ Maxwell called to his oppo, standing by the bus. All the kids were inside, peering intently out of the window. All except the two girls playing mummies to Robbie Wesson. And Robbie Wesson, owner of more syndromes than China, was trying very hard not to cry.
The Head of Sixth Form waited until the Head of History was alongside him. ‘Call the police,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a murder.’
And he bent down and picked up the fallen headgear of Robbie Wesson, as though it was Richard III’s crown in the bush at Bosworth.
If he’d been asked, Peter Maxwell couldn’t have told you when the blue and white police tape stretched around a murder scene had been replaced by American Yellow. Any more than he could have told you when British policemen took to wearing body armour or carrying night-sticks. Something to do with global terrorism, was it? Nine eleven? Al Qaeda? Nor could he say when policemen began to look younger than he did. No, that wasn’t true. That he did remember. He’d been 31 when a spotty kid had come to tell him, with a faltering voice and unsteady gaze, that his wife and child were dead.
‘DS Toogood,’ another spotty kid stood in front of him now, ears damp, tail bushy. ‘You are…?’
Gagging for something alcoholic, Maxwell wanted to say, but this was hardly the time to be flippant. ‘Peter Maxwell.’
To be fair to Martin Toogood, he wasn’t spotty at all. He was dark and good-looking in a Massimo Serrato kind of way.
‘You found the body, I understand?’
‘Not exactly.’
Maxwell had stayed on the edge of the trees since Paul Moss had made his phone call. He knew the need to keep out of crime scenes and he knew that he and Russell and little Robbie Wesson at least had been crashing about all over the place. He kept the natural nosiness of the other diggers at bay, with gently raised hands and soothing words. They’d all known Radley – his friends and colleagues. He’d insisted that the Leighford kids go home and had got them all away before the law arrived. That had taken eighteen minutes; not bad perhaps in these days of hi-tech gadgetry. Even so, Maxwell wondered whether or not in his day, an old copper on his bike couldn’t have done it in ten.
‘I’ve got a dead man here, Mr Maxwell,’ Toogood snapped shut his warrant card holder. ‘I don’t have time for cryptic clues.’
‘Indeed not, no.’ The last thing Peter Maxwell wanted to do was to hinder the police in their enquiries. ‘The body was found by a student from Leighford High School – Robert Wesson. Special Needs kid in Year Eight.’
‘Where is he?’ Toogood was scanning the site, oddly golden now in the early evening sun.
‘At home,’ Maxwell said. ‘I sent the Leighford party away.’
‘You did?’
‘Murder sites aren’t the place for children, Sergeant. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘If I had the leisure for it, sir,’ Toogood told him. ‘What were you all doing here?’
Maxwell wandered with him down the slope of Staple Hill, past strange men in white coats and hoods, who had arrived in myriad police vehicles, sirens blaring, lights flashing, trampling without respect over the archaeological site, interested only in gathering evidence of an altogether more recent tragedy.
‘Dr Radley invited us,’ Maxwell told him. ‘He was keen to attract students to his department.’
‘The dead man?’ Toogood stopped and turned.
Maxwell nodded.
‘When did you see him last? Alive, I mean.’
‘Er…’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Let’s see. Today’s Thursday. Yesterday. Yesterday afternoon. At Leighford High. We set up this visit then.’
‘What time was this?’ Toogood was jotting it all down, in true text book fashion in his notepad.
‘Quarter past, half past four? After my teaching day, certainly.’
‘And what is it you teach, Mr Maxwell?’
‘History,’ the Great Man said. ‘I’m Head of Sixth Form.’
‘English was always my thing,’ Toogood said, his face suddenly softer. ‘History came a pretty close second.’
‘I find it often does,’ Maxwell smiled.
‘Martin,’ a female voice made them both turn and an auburn-haired woman stood there, picking her way over the rubble of ages in incongruous office shoes. ‘SOCO want a word. In the main tent.’
Toogood nodded, slipping the book away. ‘Any sign of the governor yet?’
The woman shook her head.
‘We’ll talk again, Mr Maxwell,’ the sergeant said and was gone, up the hill and into the tent with its white-coated men.
She flashed her warrant-card at him. ‘DS Carpenter,’ she said.
‘We can’t go on meeting like this,’ he muttered, wanting to catch her hand, to kiss her. ‘Your place or mine? Oh, and can I put my hand down your blouse, please?’
The briefest of smiles flew across her face and her grey eyes flashed in the gold of the sun’s rays. ‘You,’ she closed to him, ‘are just a dirty old man.’
‘Tsk, tsk,’ he shook his head. ‘And I thought you bought all that guff about how much I loved you.’
‘I bet you say that to all the police officers who come to investigate a murder. Henry’s going to be furious – that you’re here, I mean – you know that, don’t you?’
‘Henry? How is the old sleuth?’
‘Same old, same old,’ she shrugged. ‘Infuriating.’
They were talking about DS Carpenter’s boss, DCI Henry Hall, who had locked horns with Peter Maxwell on more than one occasion. Maxwell could picture him now, in his battleship grey suit, with his solid jaw and his impenetrable eyes, vacant behind dead lenses. Where did he buy those glasses? Mr Inscrutable.
‘What’s this all about, Max?’ Jacquie Carpenter may have been Maxwell’s lover, but now, today, on this hillside, she was a copper first.
‘The dead man, as you know, is David Radley. He’s professor of archaeology at Wessex. Paul Moss and I bought a few kids over, at his request, to see the dig. All part of Radley’s personal recruitment drive.’
‘Kids?’ She couldn’t see any.
‘I sent them home. Who’s this Toogood?’
DS Carpenter smiled, glancing back to the main tent where her colleagues were congregating. ‘He’s quite cute, isn’t he? New kid on the block. From the West Country somewhere.’
‘Ah, Tottingleigh,’ Maxwell nodded, thinking no further than the next village along. ‘Says he’s an English specialist.’
‘Got a degree in it,’ the policewoman said. ‘Don’t ask me what a Medieval literature buff is doing in a blue suit. Takes all sorts, I suppose. What do you know about Radley?’
‘What do you know about how he died?’ he countered.
‘Uh-huh.’ It had started already, as she knew it would. She looked out from the headland to the sea beyond, gilded now in the dying sun. Vast purple bars of cloud were sliding into place along the horizon, closing down the day, bringing in the night. ‘You know the rules. I cannot divulge…’
‘Bollocks, heart of my heart.’ It was his turn to smile. ‘We go too far back, Woman Policeman Carpenter. Now, talk, kid.’ It was, as always, the best Bogart she’d ever heard. She looked at the man she loved under his pointless tweed hat, his curls iron grey under its rim. She wanted, as always, to reach out and smooth that cheek with its furrows, those lips with that smile. She wanted, as always, to feel his arms around her and to bury her face into the soft hair of his chest.
‘You’d better get out of here before Henry arrives,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk later. It’ll have to be official, of course – at the station, I mean.’
‘And unofficially?’ He fluttered his eyelashes at her, Svengali to her Trilby.
She wrinkled her face. ‘Same old, same old,’ she muttered. ‘Your place. Tonight. But it’ll be late. You don’t want to know the paperwork this little lot’ll generate.’
‘I’ll be up,’ he winked at her. ‘And don’t talk to me about paperwork, Woman Policeman. I am a teacher.’
‘How’l
l you get home?’ she asked, glancing round. ‘I don’t see Surrey.’
‘I came in the minibus, remember? No, the walk will do me good. Abyssinia, Woman Policeman.’ And he ducked under the tape and was gone.
‘Ah, Henry, nice of you to call.’ Dr Jim Astley was putting away his bag of tricks. In the confines of the main tent, he looked a strange, ancient, jaundiced creature, worn out by years of forensic medicine, golf and an alcoholic wife. Almost alone among the scattering of aliens in white coats, he was in civvies.
‘I thought I saw…’ DCI Henry Hall’s wife didn’t drink and he didn’t play golf. Even so, the eerie light in the tent and a lifetime sorting through the wreckage of other people’s lives, lent his skin the same parchment colour.
‘…Peter Maxwell.’ Astley finished the sentence for him. ‘Yes you did. Uncanny, isn’t it, how that man can smell trouble?’
It was. Henry Hall and Peter Maxwell were like two buttocks of the same bum, drawn like iron filings to the magnet that was murder. Hall because he had no choice – it went with the territory, Maxwell because…well, just because, that’s all.
‘What have we got?’ Hall was scanning the table behind his man, the light of the white cloth reflecting back in his lenses. A pile of old bones wasn’t very helpful.
‘No, that’s not ours,’ Astley chuckled. He, who had been around death so long, could afford a wry smile now and again. In fact, it was vital. ‘Oh, it’s a murder all right, but I suspect a certain statute of limitations will have kicked in by now. Saxon, apparently. That’s some time ago, now, isn’t it?’ Jim Astley had given up History after O levels.
Hall believed it was. And he believed there was one man who’d know exactly, with that carbon-14 mind of his, the bastard he’d just seen sauntering away down Staple Hill in the direction of Leighford – the bastard the kids called Mad Max. ‘Over here.’
Astley let his glasses dangle from the chain round his neck and trudged across the trenches to the little ash grove. SOCO men still crouched here, photographing, measuring, plotting exactly all the calibrations of murder.
‘Evening, guv,’ Martin Toogood stood up beside the body in question. ‘Dr David Radley. He was an archaeologist. In charge of this dig.’
‘Next of kin been informed?’ Hall asked, looking at the corpse at his feet.
‘Not yet, sir. There’s a wife in Brighton.’
‘Who’ve we got on that?’
‘DS Carpenter,’ Toogood told him.
‘No. No, I need Jacquie on something else.’ He glanced across to where his other DS was talking to a rangy, shocked looking man in sandals and a beard. ‘Get the Brighton boys on it.’ He checked his watch. ‘The wife’ll be worried by now.’
‘Sir,’ and Toogood was striding back to the four-by-fours and the patrol cars, phone in hand.
‘Yes, Jim?’ Hall wanted answers of the pathological kind.
‘Neck’s broken,’ Astley wasn’t going to kneel down again, not with his sciatica. ‘So’s his left ankle. I’d say he’s been dropped.’
‘Dropped?’ Hall frowned.
Astley shrugged. ‘Well, a fall, anyway. And not here. If you look up…’
Hall did, to the tangle of ash limbs breaking the sky overhead.
‘…Not enough weight in those branches to carry his body. Anyway, how would anybody get him up there? No, he was brought here. Carefully laid down where you see him now. The question is, why?’
Hall nodded. That was always the question. But there were so many questions in a murder enquiry, so many pieces of a puzzle to fit together. And somebody had taken away the box with the picture on it.
The lights of Columbine had long gone out by the time Jacquie Carpenter’s Ka purred to the kerb outside number 38. There had been a time when she’d parked discreetly around the corner in the early days when she and Peter Maxwell had first been an item. And when she had a career and he had issues. Now, she still had a career and he still had issues, but somehow, there was light at the end of the tunnel of their lives together. Nobody was moving in with anybody. But they were there, at the end of the phone, at the end of the street, a bike ride away at most. They were comfortable with that.
‘Evening, Count.’ She waved her car keys at the black and white brute stretched like one of Landseer’s lions on Maxwell’s front lawn, his white bits bright under the crisp half moon. He wagged his tail, just the once, and continued to crunch his way through the ex-rodent he’d spent the last hour torturing to death. Bloody soft, these coppers; they let you get away with murder.
She rang the doorbell even though she had a key somewhere and an apparition appeared in the frosty glass of the front door.
‘Yes?’ she said to him, their favourite old joke from Messrs Kenny Everett and Billy Connolly.
‘Two pints please, milkman.’ He kissed her on the nose. ‘God, my mouth feels like a badger’s arse.’
‘Scrummy.’ She swept past him and dragged herself up the stairs, to his lounge. ‘I wouldn’t know. And stop looking at my bum.’
‘My dear,’ he informed her. ‘It’s half-past five in the morning. I can’t focus on anything as small as a bum until at least quarter to nine. And then,’ he gloated, rubbing his hands together, ‘I have a huge selection to choose from.’
‘You say the sweetest things,’ she laughed and hurled her handbag at the settee in the living room. Maxwell hadn’t opened the curtains yet and the place had that weird light that lamp-lit early morning brings. ‘Coffee in the usual place?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘Where you left it yesterday.’
She walked through to the kitchen and busied herself with the kettle.
‘Fancy a full English?’ he asked, vaguely trying to tie up the cords of his dressing gown, and wondering what the hell he had in the fridge.
‘No thanks, Max,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, rummaging in the cupboard for cups.
‘Well, this is sort of official,’ she turned to him.
‘Ah,’ he slid his arms round her waist. The girl was just young enough to be his daughter. What was she doing in the wee small hours wasting time with this mad old bastard? ‘That has all the hallmarks of dear Henry, if you’ll excuse the rather weak pun.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘You might have known,’ she said. ‘He saw you light-footing it off the dig site.’
‘I know he did. I even waved to him.’
‘Nothing like being subtle.’ She rubbed her nose against his.
‘It was only a matter of time,’ he said and his sentence died away as she kissed him.
‘Oh, no you don’t,’ he laughed, hauling her off. ‘You can’t talk with your mouth full and you’ve got a lot of talking to do. If I’ve got the summons, as I assume I have, I need to be briefed.’
‘Max,’ she shouted. ‘You do this every time. You know I can’t…’
‘…divulge,’ he smiled. ‘Yes, I know. Now, let me pour you a coffee and drive these lighted matches under your fingernails.’
Henry Hall would have liked to have set up his Incident Room on the slope of the Downs, on Staple Hill near to Dr Radley’s dig, but that would have involved Portakabins and major upheavals and permissions that would take weeks to get. The Chief Constable, no less, said no. So, that Friday morning saw Hall and his team back at Leighford nick, but with the new found purpose and urgency that always came with a murder enquiry. His team sat in front of him, ready and waiting.
‘Victim,’ Hall was standing in front of a screen with a blown-up image of the dead man. Radley’s eyes were half open, his neck purple with a wound. His lips were parted too, as though in mid-sentence. Nobody commented, but one or two of the younger coppers felt unnerved by it. It was Hall’s way of keeping them focused. ‘What do we know?’
‘I’ve got that, guv.’ Martin Toogood waved a notepad in the air as the coffee mugs clicked and the smoke wreathed the stacks of paper in the paperless office and the VDUs flick
ered with a life of their own. ‘David Radley was thirty-two. Married to…Susan.’
‘Has she been contacted?’ Hall asked.
‘Brighton CID.,’ Toogood confirmed. ‘She’s taken it badly, apparently.’
No surprises there. This was a room of hard-bitten police people. There was not one who had not seen it all before – the tears, the hysterics, the stunned silence. And each time they’d been there, talking to distraught parents, comforting forlorn spouses, holding the hands of uncomprehending children; each time, they thought to themselves, ‘What if it was me?’ And nothing was more calculated to keep cynicism at bay.
‘Radley was an Oxford graduate. Pretty high-powered, apparently.’
‘Enemies?’ Hall asked.
‘Sir?’ Toogood was a little wrong-footed.
‘Man was thirty-two,’ Hall reasoned, as much to himself as to his team. ‘He was a go-getter. What if somebody resented that? Where did he lecture? Wessex?’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Right, Martin. Get on it. Get over to the campus at Petworth. Talk to Radley’s people. I want chapter and verse. Anything from the scene, Dave?’
DC Dave Garstang was a walking shit-house of a man, but he’d made a pretty smooth transition from crowd control at football matches to SOCO liaison and most people admired him for it.
‘Body was found by a kid…er…Robert Wesson, in Year Eight at Leighford High.’
‘Anybody on that?’ Hall checked.
‘Jacquie Carpenter, guv,’ Toogood told him.
Hall gave the man an old-fashioned look. Jacquie Carpenter and Leighford High. That meant Jacquie Carpenter and Peter Maxwell – a marriage made in hell if ever there was one in public relations terms. Henry Hall found himself, for that split second, grudgingly admitting that when it came to catching killers, it might just be a marriage made in Heaven.
‘What else, Dave?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got more tyre marks than the parson preached about, guv,’ Garstang said, sifting through his papers. ‘Archaeologists, farmers, metal detectors, nosey-parkers, site security people. Plus one school minibus.’