by M. J. Trow
It was an ashen-faced Henry Hall who called the nick to order that Tuesday morning. The call had just come through. He waited until the fidgeting had stopped, until ciggies descended from mouths, coffees were placed on desks, faces turned away from computer screens and eyes were on him.
‘I’ve got some bad news, people,’ he said. ‘Martin Toogood was found dead an hour ago. His car came off the road on Gravel Hill. If it’s any consolation, he couldn’t have known what hit him.’
The silence that followed was almost painful. Mouths hung open, or lips trembled. No one, for a moment, could look at anyone else.
‘I’m going to sort it,’ Hall said, glad to be moving, glad to be leaving the building. He heard someone crying as he swept past. It could have been anyone, but it happened to be Alison McCormick.
He’d been baulked of his prey once and he wouldn’t be again. Peter Maxwell had abandoned the tell-tale Jesus scarf and the trademark tweed cap. He wore a scruffy green anorak, the one he did the garden in, and he oiled Surrey carefully, before he made for the Downs and the slope of Staple Hill.
Metternich watched him go from his lair in the privet where he was dining al fresco on rack of vole. Where was the old bastard off to, this time of night? Still, what the hey! He didn’t get out enough, when all was said and done.
Maxwell crested the hill a little after midnight, the half moon still bright on the sea and the lights twinkling out on the Shingle. He noticed a gap in the gorse bushes to his left where some idiot had come off the road – and recently too; this hadn’t been there yesterday. Motorists! Hate ’em or hate ’em. He dismounted at the old gate that led to the dig site. The police tape still floated there, but there was no fresh-faced copper freezing his walkie-talkie off and certainly no police car with an all-too-awkward Henry Hall in it. That was already two points up on his last visit.
The downside was that it was night and Peter Maxwell would have to resort to a torch. He wondered how conspicuous that would be, darting like a latter-day firefly against the black backdrop of Staple Hill. It was also six days after little Robbie Whatsisface had found the corpse of David Radley and the trail was getting colder. He ducked under the Do Not Cross warning and reconnoitred the site. A series of trenches to his right, leading over the brow of the hill to what had once been the river bed of the Leigh told him that this was the edge of the Saxon cemetery. They’d found nine graves so far, Douglas Russell had told Maxwell’s Year Twelve, all facing east-west, all wrapped in linen shrouds. Four women, three men, two children. People who had walked the Wessex of Alfred and Edgar, who had known this land long ago, when it was dark and tangled wild forest; when it was deep and silent wild marsh. Russell was looking for a church. Experience suggested there had to be one, somewhere beyond the ash grove. But would they find it before their contract came to an end and the golf course developers moved in? Could that, Maxwell wondered, be what all this was about? Did someone kill David Radley not to allow the dig to go ahead; to halt progress and put a stop to this?
He stepped gingerly across the duckboards and the planking. He didn’t want to risk his torch just yet – the moon was help enough out here. Then he was in the dark tangle of the ash copse and trying to get his bearing. He flicked on the torch beam. What was the point of this, he wondered, as he knelt painfully on the tree roots? Henry Hall’s experts had been all over them with their gismos and their thingummies. What did he hope to see that they’d missed, with his feeble little torch and his historian’s nose? He was still looking up at the branches above him, at the black criss-cross of the ash boughs against the pale purple of the night sky, when he felt something round and cold against his neck and heard a chilling click. Instinctively, he opened his arms wide, trying to swivel his eyes to the left.
‘Would I be right in assuming that is a shotgun in my neck, or are you pleased to see me?’
‘Spot on, squire,’ an Essex man replied. ‘Now – two questions. Who the fuck are you? And what the fuck are you doing here?’
Henry Hall took the loss of a man personally. Tom Wilson, on duty at the front desk, had seen Martin Toogood go at a little before twelve and had signed him out. There seemed nothing unusual, Wilson assured the DCI. Yes, the DS had been on duty for nearly fourteen hours, but that wasn’t unusual in this business. Yes, Wilson had seen him drive out. And no, there had been nothing amiss.
Hall had stood earlier that day on the grassy ridge by the roadside on Gravel Hill, where the wind blew the stunted bushes flat as the weather roared in from the Channel. Policemen in yellow jackets had directed traffic, shooing away morbidly curious rubberneckers. A section of the road had been cordoned off where Toogood’s car had smashed through the flimsy wooden rail and gone over the edge. The DCI had waited while they brought the car up by crane, a slow, agonizing job. He had listened, impassive, to the grinding of steel and the tinkling of shattered glass and the rip as the car’s mangled shell tore free of the shrubbery. He had supervised the sending of bits of twisted metal to the police lab, loaded like a giant armadillo on the flat-bed, plates bent and broken. Then he had gone to the morgue.
If truth be told, Henry Hall had a thing about morgues. It wasn’t a cliché, like dear old Christopher Timothy in the long-forgotten Flaxborough series on the telly. It wasn’t bodies he objected to; it was the buildings they put them in. Cold, green, with that scrubbed and rescrubbed steel, that sense of the slaughter-house.
Martin Toogood’s chest was crushed beyond hope, his ribs driven into his lungs. Both arms were broken and his pelvis smashed. Only his face remained unmarked and the boy lay on the slab as though he were asleep.
‘It’s a death trap, Gravel Hill,’ Jim Astley was scrubbing up, ready to go to work. ‘Time you people did something about it. And it’s my day off.’
‘Sorry, Jim,’ Henry Hall was looking down at his DS, at the wreck of a life.
He felt the doctor’s hand on his elbow, still wet from the ritual. He’d have to scrub again now. ‘One of your own, wasn’t he?’ he said softly. ‘It’s no trouble.’ Jim Astley could be a bit of a bastard. In fact, he was most of the time. But just occasionally he cracked and proved he was human after all. It wrong-footed Henry Hall every time.
In the brightly lit neon corridor outside, in those areas of Leighford General where members of the public were permitted to see their loved ones for the last time, an elderly couple sat on upright NHS chairs. They’d both been crying, both trying in their own ways to come to terms with the news a uniformed copper had given them.
‘Mr and Mrs Toogood?’ They both stood up, she clutching her handbag, he holding tightly onto her. ‘I’m DCI Henry Hall…’ and it didn’t happen very often, but he found himself holding a frail old lady as she sobbed into his neck.
‘Mr Maxwell, is it?’ The questioner was a corporate type, all suit and attitude, with what appeared to be a very expensive squirrel sitting on his head.
‘It is,’ the Head of Sixth Form answered, smug in the knowledge that he would never need the services of a rug.
‘Do you mind telling me what you were doing at the dig tonight? Other than trespassing, I mean.’
‘Do you mind telling me why you’re asking?’ Maxwell countered. All in all, it had been an unpleasant hour or two. He’d had a shotgun jabbed into his neck, then his back, and had been unceremoniously bundled into a four-by-four by two fully paid up members of Rent-a-Yob. Now he was in somebody’s office, facing a large, well-suited man in a huge leather chair. The place was opulent, with designer glass smouldering against a giant single-pane window and tasteful coffee tables with suede tops. The carpet alone was worth Peter Maxwell’s lump sum, should he ever live to collect it.
‘Because I own the land on which you were trespassing.’
‘Fair enough,’ Maxwell nodded, quietly impressed by anyone who handled a sentence’s syntax like that. ‘I’ll be apologizing, then.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ the suit said. ‘Quite the in-thing, these days, isn’t it, for cri
minals to have to apologize to their victims. All part of our blame culture society, I believe.’
‘Victims?’ Maxwell chuckled, looking at the heavies in the black suits, their knuckles trailing the skirting boards, still waiting in the darkened office corner. ‘Is that how you see yourself? As a victim, Mr…er..?’
‘Anthony Cahill. Of Cahill and Lieberman.’
‘Ah, I see. You’re the golfing people.’ Maxwell was nearly up to putting two and two together.
‘No, Mr Maxwell, we’re the property people,’ Cahill corrected him. ‘This particular site is a golfing enterprise, yes. But we could just as easily be talking condominium, retail outlets, marinas. We specialize in diversity.’
‘And soundbites,’ Maxwell nodded. Teaching has a jargon all its own, with its visions, its inclusion policies, its differentiated outcomes. But the world of business could leave it standing every time.
‘This could be a police matter.’ Cahill’s smile was wearing a little thin.
‘Oh, it already is,’ Maxwell told him. ‘What with the body and all.’
‘Yes,’ Cahill’s face darkened a little, as he looked at his heavies. ‘That was unfortunate.’
‘Then, there’s the matter of the shotgun and the abduction by your two rottweilers here.’
The heavies moved forward like automata, fists flexing, lips curling – signs of aggression they’d learned long ago from the football terraces and British Party get-to-maim-you conferences.
Cahill clicked his fingers and the rottweilers stayed to heel. ‘George and Julian were only carrying out my instructions, Mr Maxwell. George does have a permit for the Purdey and as for abduction…well, that’s putting it a little strongly, don’t you think? No, I thought you might appreciate a lift back. Your bicycle is strapped to the roof and I know you’ll take it in the right spirit when I say you are a tad on the elderly side for physical rigour of this type.’
‘Thoughtful, I’m sure. Are you always so zealous in guarding your investments?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Cahill was deadly earnest. ‘Make no mistake, Mr Maxwell, property is a dangerous business. No one is in it for what I believe the working class call “laffs”. Now,’ he leaned forward across his large, expensive desk, ‘what assurances do I have that you will not again stray onto the dig?’
‘None,’ Maxwell said flatly. ‘Mr Cahill, let me try to explain something to you. Six – nearly seven – days ago now, a boy I know found the body of a man I knew – right up there, on your little patch of land.’
‘And that’s your business?’ Cahill asked.
‘My boy,’ Maxwell held out his left hand. ‘My man,’ he held out his right. ‘There’s a certain ghastly symmetry to it, don’t you think?’
‘It’s a police problem,’ Cahill said.
‘So I’ve been told,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I don’t know if you’ve been following the case on the telly, the radio, the papers? Well, I have and you know what’s missing? An arrest. Or even, in fact, a suspect.’
‘Ah, I see,’ Cahill smiled, cradling his hands and leaning backwards. ‘So you’re some sort of Hercule Poirot meets Jane Marple, are you? I thought people like you only existed in fiction.’
‘No, no,’ Maxwell assured him. ‘We’re real enough. Helping police with their enquiries. You know, like Leerdammer does.’
‘You mean, you work with the police?’ Cahill frowned.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Not a flicker betrayed the nonsense Maxwell was spouting. ‘Tell me, in that context, George…Julian – who else have you boys shooed off the site? Who else’s neck have you jabbed a shotgun into? Who else’s bike have you manhandled onto your roof?’
Cahill snapped his fingers again and whatever George was about to say never reached his vocal cords. Synaptic reactions like his took longer. ‘My operatives and I are quite prepared to answer police questions,’ Cahill said. ‘Indeed, we have already. But until then, Mr Maxwell, let me give you a piece of advice. If you persist in straying onto any property of mine in the future, then, rest assured, it won’t be a cosy little chat we’ll be having.’
‘That sounds a little like a threat,’ Maxwell observed, wrinkling his nose at the man.
‘Got it in one,’ Cahill smiled, ‘as our golfing clients might say. Now you can play cops and robbers all you like, but if my lads catch you at the site again, they’ll be playing castanets with your knee-caps. Julian, unship Mr Maxwell’s bicycle, will you? I’m sure he can find his own way from here.’
It was early Wednesday morning by the time Peter Maxwell got home. Oddly, both his tyres had punctures and he’d had to wheel Surrey noisily from the flyover, clanking and squeaking as he went. As he reached the dark of the privet hedge outside 38 Columbine, a figure hurtled from a parked car and threw itself at Maxwell. Surrey clattered to the tarmac as Maxwell caught her in his arms and held her tight.
‘Jacquie,’ he tried to say through the muffle of her sleeve. He held her at arm’s length. ‘Jacquie, what’s the matter?’
By the street light he could see the crumpled lip and runny nose and the silver-streaked cheeks.
‘It’s Martin,’ she gulped, letting the tears fall now that she’d held in all day. ‘Martin Toogood. He’s dead.’
It was nearly half-past two before Jacquie Carpenter had calmed down sufficiently to talk rationally about things. She’d been talking rationally all day, to her colleagues at the nick, to nurses and doctors at the hospital, to Martin’s sweet, heartbroken parents, all of them trying to understand what had happened and why.
Jacquie and Maxwell had got outside a few Southern Comforts by now and they lay snuggled on his settee in the warm lamp glow of his lounge, his arms wrapped around her as he breathed in the scent of her hair.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Once more from the top.’
She took a deep breath. How well he played the game, the old police ploy. Make them go over it again – and again – until the whole thing emerged. People in shock remember titbits, fragments, snatches, at random and in the wrong order. No way to solve a case; no way to get at the truth. He was her Nice Policeman and she loved him for it.
‘Martin left the nick shortly before twelve. Tom Wilson signed him out at eleven fifty-six.’
‘That’s usual practice?’ Maxwell checked.
‘Technically, no. Martin should have done it himself, but we all do it. The desk man’s vital in any nick in the country; knows all our comings and goings – he clocks us all in and out, man and boy.’
‘Chauvinistically said,’ he smiled and squeezed her.
‘He drove out almost immediately.’
‘Almost?’ Maxwell was right – leave no stone unturned, no second unaccounted for.
‘Long enough, Wilson said, for him to get into the car and get to the gate.’
‘All right. What’s that? Two minutes? One? Then what?’
‘He turned right out of the station.’
‘Along the High Street?’
‘Yes. Nothing then until he…until Gravel Hill.’
‘What was he driving?’
‘Mondeo.’
‘You’re the expert, Jacquie. How long would it take him to get to Gravel Hill?’
‘That time of night, there’d be virtually no traffic, not once he’d left the town centre; twelve, fifteen minutes, tops.’
‘So the accident happened at…twelve fifteen?’
‘Close enough. Henry said Astley’s time of death was between twelve and one.’
‘From what I know of Jim Astley, he seems to be pulling out all the stops on this one.’ Maxwell and Astley went nearly as far back as Maxwell and Hall. They sounded like a Vaudeville act and just as jolly!
She half-turned to him. ‘He was doing it for Henry, he said – a personal favour.’
Maxwell nodded. Perhaps he’d misjudged the old pathologist. ‘Tell me about Toogood. Drink? Drugs?’
Jacquie was already shaking her head. ‘Astley found nothing in his system at all. I worked with the m
an for over a year, Max. In a profession notorious for driving you to one or the other, I never saw him hit more than a Stella. And nobody does drugs in our line – we see too much of what they can do.’
‘So he was sober as a judge?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘Obviously, it was the first thing Astley looked for.’
‘Road conditions?’ Maxwell was covering all the angles. ‘Weather?’ He knew all there was to know about people he loved dying on roads. None of it made any sense.
‘The road was dry. It had been a fine day and there was no sign of any grease or obstacle at the point where the car left the road.’
‘So,’ Maxwell brushed Jacquie’s hair back from her face and planted tender little kisses on her temple. ‘Tell me about the car.’
Jacquie took a deep breath again. ‘That news came through only this evening,’ she said and caught the time of Maxwell’s digital clock. ‘Sorry, last evening. The police lab had been all over Martin’s Mondeo. There was no doubt about it. Somebody had cut through his brake cables.’
‘Are you quite sure about this, Sylvia?’ James Diamond BSc, MEd was wiping his glasses already and it was only nine thirty-two.
‘I still have friends at Leighford General,’ the school nurse said, looking down at Diamond in his office and realizing again what a small man he was. ‘Eleanor Fry was brought in by the police at 11.30 yesterday morning. She was pronounced dead. The post mortem has been delayed until tomorrow, but my contacts tell me we’re talking about suicide.’
‘Dear God,’ Diamond threw his glasses onto the pile of reports on his desk. At moments like these, the target levels of Nine See Eight seemed particularly irrelevant. ‘Thank you, Sylvia. I know I can rely on you to be discreet about this.’
She looked at the man with contempt. County Hall’s poodle, the Secretary of State’s lapdog, the whipping boy of the Chairman of Governors; why didn’t he stand up to people?