by M. J. Trow
He took a swig. ‘Well, yes, of course it’s bollocks, but I suppose I approve. Of course,’ he wagged a conspiratorial forefinger at Metternich, ‘when Wimble mentioned society, I thought he was talking Sepulchres and Sussex. I tried him out with that. Nothing.’ Maxwell looked almost disappointed. ‘Either he’s up for a BAFTA or he’s never heard of it. Bitch, isn’t it?’
He reached across and poured himself a top-up. Metternich munched something tasty in his left armpit.
‘Anyway, to cut a long story short – yes, this is the shortened version, Count – friend Arthur knows every bit of Leighford and its environs like the back of his metal detector. Sorry, I did fall asleep during the technical stuff about which one he uses and why, I will admit. Anyhoo, one of the sites he was working on back in March was Staple Hill. Oh, you know it, Count, where the dig is. In the good old days, the Leigh used to run that way before Squire Whatsisarse enclosed the place circa 1735. Well, Arthur was up there one night – he couldn’t precisely remember when, but it was a Tuesday, he assured me. He was feeling pretty pleased with himself because he’d just made a find – when he felt cold steel in his neck. Oh, not the cold steel you, Errol Flynn and I know, buckling our swashes through this wicked world, but the muzzle of a twelve-bore.’ He moistened his still-tender lips. ‘Precisely,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘And I’m glad you’re still following all this, Count. At the other end of said twelve-bore was a customer whose description sounds suspiciously like one of Anthony Cahill’s goons; Julian or Sandy or whatever. The men in black. What of it? I hear you cry.’ Maxwell sat up to engage the cat more closely. ‘Because of the different way said goons treated me and Arthur Wimble. I was nosing about at the dig too, if you remember, after dark and minding somebody else’s business. And whereas I was given a load of verbal and dragged before the beak, Mr Cahill himself, Arthur had his kneecaps removed. Well, not literally, but he did roll up his trouser-leg, mason-like, to show me the scars. Quite nasty, actually. They gave him a smacking. The hospital said he’d never walk without a pronounced limp.’ Maxwell looked the black and white beast straight in the smouldering green eye. ‘I set ’em up, you knock ’em down,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think this is a matter for levity, Count. Now,’ Maxwell lolled back again, staring at the ceiling in the warm lamp-glow, ‘why, you may ask, did Arthur get such different treatment from me? Was I just luckier? Julian suffering from a spot of PMT the night he caught Arthur red-handed? No, Count, I think not. You’ll remember, of course, that our metal-detecting friend had found something else not far from the knife-blade? Now, Arthur’s a keen field walker and he knows torc from butter, but his Latin…well, Count, I’m afraid Arthur went to a bog standard Comprehensive school. He doesn’t speaka-da-lingo. All he could do was spell out the letters of his second find that night. And mighty interesting reading they make too. H-I-C-J-A-C-E-T-A-L-F-R-E-D-U-S-R-E-X. Exactly, Count,’ Maxwell winked at the animal. ‘And I’m glad you went to a good school, too. Hic jacet Alfredus Rex. Here lies King Alfred. Now there, companion of my mile, is a motive for murder.’
Freya’s day began with a fierce sun gilding Columbine from a cloudless sky. Great revision weather, Maxwell observed ruefully to himself; Goering’s economic policy in the Third Reich or flat out under the great, fiery ball on a glorious sandy, EU-approved beach? What a facer! He shovelled something brown and crunchy into Metternich’s bowl. The Great Beast never came down to breakfast. The freeloader that he was had several homes, each of them believing the well-nourished stray was theirs. He would stroll in for elevenses later.
Maxwell dressed for the fray – a tatty pair of gardening trousers, a loose shirt, a broad-brimmed straw hat not unlike Tam Fraser’s wideawake and all the other Indiana Jones headgear at the site, but rather more homespun. He grabbed a coffee and a piece of toast. Then he rang Jacquie. No answer. Damn. He must have missed her. He checked his watch and the kitchen clock. Eight thirty. She shouldn’t have left yet. Still, a policewoman’s lot was not a regular one and she was up to her eyes in murder. He’d catch her later.
He pedalled over the rise and turned right, skirting the flyover to the west. The sea was a glittering, shimmering blue and the tiny dots that were sun-worshippers were already taking their positions on the white beach; the Germans were first, of course. Year Thirteen would drift in later, clutching a folder of notes on, appropriately, Bismarck’s foreign policy that would remain unopened, as the combination of sea, sand and sun worked a more alluring magic. Cycle-clips flashing, Maxwell straightened his legs and crouched low over the handlebars, driving every sinew as he took the gradient of Gravel Hill, making for the stand of ash trees.
He hadn’t intended to, but he found himself wheeling in to that sad, ominous gap in the fence where Martin Toogood’s doctored car had left the road. The council had put red ribbon across the gap to warn other motorists and the gorse bushes were ripped and flattened way down the hill. But other motorists had not had their brakes cut and had not fallen foul of a murderer. The twenty-first century’s symbols of public grief lay scattered on the verge – roses curling already in the heat. One in particular caught his eye – ‘Miss you, mate, love, Jacquie.’
Just another score to settle. He pedalled away.
There was the usual litter of paparazzi at the gate. They’d been banned by Tam Fraser, Anthony Cahill and his heavies and, fearful for their cameras, recorders and teeth, were dutifully staying their side of the wire. The police tape still fluttered there and a solitary copper, already sweating in his shirt sleeves and flat cap, wandered the lines of the perimeter. It was an uneasy truce arranged between the Professor and the DCI – one had a dig to finish; the other a murderer to catch. So the tape and the copper stayed, but the digging continued.
The paparazzi were fewer. Nobody is famous for more than fifteen minutes, not even murder victims. David Radley’s obit had already appeared in The Times, whose man was one of those long gone from the perimeter fence in search of stories new. As far as the Press knew, Sam Welland was officially a suicide and although the Mail had speculated on a plausible link between the two deaths, nothing had yet been established. The Mail, after all, had umpteen Spanish villas to give away and there were priorities.
Maxwell waved to them all as he arrived with a flourish of the hat. He hitched Surrey to a post, and because they were journalists, he’d brought his padlock along. ‘Mind my bike,’ he called to them, but no one was old enough to remember the reference, so he let it go.
‘You’re at it early, Helen,’ Maxwell’s feet crunched on the clay, baked hard in the June sun. There was no mistaking that backside, hemispheres of iron.
She turned, wiping the glow from her forehead with a gloved hand. ‘’Morning, Max. Kettle’s just boiled.’
‘Elixir!’ Maxwell ducked into the Social Tent and brewed up, moving aside somebody’s femur to find the tea bags. His head popped out seconds later. ‘Can I get you one?’
‘No thanks. Tannin.’ She pointed to her sizeable frontage. ‘Doesn’t agree with me.’
Maxwell nodded. He knew the feeling well. There were whole days when nobody at Leighford High agreed with him. He perched on the edge of Helen Reader’s trench, sipping the tea as he took in his surroundings. ‘Nobody about today?’
‘Appalling, isn’t it?’ she chuckled. ‘You and I the only amateurs here and the professionals nowhere in sight.’
‘That’s odd, surely.’ Maxwell blew on his tea as someone once told him the working class did.
‘Way of the world, I think you’ll find.’
‘No, I mean, in my – admittedly limited – experience of digs, they’re usually crawling with volunteers, mostly Americans desperate for somebody else’s history on account of how they haven’t got any.’
She laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. But David was adamant. I’d worked with him before, so I had special dispensation. But that was it; there was to be nobody else.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘You don’t ask geniuses lik
e David Radley to justify their decisions, Max. You read his obituary in The Times?’
‘I did.’
‘Mealy-mouthed, I thought. He deserved better.’ She leaned back on her haunches, her bare shoulders already flaking from days under the Sussex sun. ‘Look at this,’ she said, pointing around with her trowel, trying to ignore the policeman, the tape, the paparazzi at the gates of dawn. ‘Difficult to imagine how it all must have been in the Saxon period, isn’t it? A little church, probably, over there by the trees. Graves where we are now. Leighford…what, a cluster of wattle and daub huts where the river shallowed. Do you remember your first dig?’
‘I do,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Warwick. I’d just left school and Bristol University – there wasn’t one at Warwick then – were looking for Medieval post holes along the line of the town hall.’
‘How exciting!’ Helen trilled.
‘Not when you’re eighteen,’ Maxwell corrected her. ‘I was filling in before going up to Cambridge and I think we all expected to find something astonishing. You know – Tutankhamun comes to Mercia or something like that.’
‘And all you found was post holes?’ she asked.
‘More or less,’ he chuckled. ‘Although I was lucky enough to find an unbroken Bellarmine jug. Still don’t know how a Bohemian seventeenth century artefact found its way into somebody’s cellar in little old Warwick, but there you go. No, what I remember most about the dig was guzzling cider and fish and chips in Priory Park. Feeling muscles for the first time. I even grew a beard that summer – just because I could, you know. The weather was just like this – glorious. We were all chaps on the dig as it happened – behaving like idiots taking wheelbarrows of slag up the planks at silly speeds. Girls we vaguely knew would hover by the wire, whistling at our muscles.’
‘Forgive me if this sounds ageist,’ she said. ‘But did girls do that sort of thing in your day?’
‘Ageist?’ Maxwell bridled in mid-slurp. ‘Madam, I’ll have you know that Ladette culture goes a helluva long way back. Back to Boudicca in fact – whose PMT, by the way, was very badly timed for several thousand Romans.’
Helen laughed and got back to her trowelling, scraping away the debris of years.
‘Fast forward a little in time,’ he said to her. ‘What do you know about King Alfred?’
‘The Great?’
‘I would imagine so. It’s not my period.’
‘How often have I heard that!’ She wagged her trowel at him. ‘Well, remember, Max. I’m not a historian…’
He leaned forward to her, patting her gently on her sunburnt shoulders. ‘That doesn’t make you a bad person,’ he said.
‘Well, he was a great hero; that I do know,’ she said, resting back again. ‘Let’s see. Fought against the Danes – that was the Great Army, wasn’t it? Forced Guthrum, their leader, to be baptized and recaptured London. Winchester was his capital of course, as king of Wessex. He’s buried there.’
‘Is he?’
‘Of course. Asser says so; so does the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.’
‘Asser?’ Maxwell repeated.
‘His first biographer, a monk from St David’s in Wales. He wrote the work in 893. Some of it’s pinched from the Chronicle, but he knew the king personally and must have added lots of touches of his own. But Max, you know all this, surely?’
‘Yes,’ the Great Historian said. ‘I find that I do, but you know how it is. That huge mistake the National Curriculum means that all I teach is the modern period. In fact, my putative boss, the Head of History, though a lovely man, thinks that his subject began in 1900. Heigh-ho.’
‘Why your sudden interest in Alfred?’ she asked. ‘He’s got nothing to do with this site, surely?’
‘No, no,’ Maxwell smiled, reaching for his trowel for a good day’s scraping. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Has anybody contacted her?’ Henry Hall was waist-deep in statements already and it was only midday. He’d sent somebody out for a baguette – no slur intended, of course, on the nick canteen – which he’d get round to if he had time. He couldn’t remember what he’d ordered, but it would taste the same, anyway.
‘We’ve tried her home and her mobile,’ DC Steve Holland told him. ‘Nothing.’
‘What about Maxwell?’
‘Guv?’
Hall looked at the lad, assessing the quantity of liquid behind his ears. Holland was the new kid on the block. He didn’t know Peter Maxwell or Jacquie Carpenter’s relationship with him. ‘Boyfriend,’ Hall said. ‘Fiancé, live-in-lover, Svengali – I really don’t know how to classify him in the context of Jacquie. Or any other context, come to think of it.’
‘Got an address on this Maxwell?’ Holland asked.
‘38 Columbine,’ Hall said. It was engraved on his heart. ‘But he won’t be there. I’m reliably informed he’s joined Professor Fraser’s dig on Staple Hill.’
‘Want me to try there? PC Scragg’s on this morning.’
‘No,’ Hall said. ‘There has to be an explanation, a rational one, that is… And if there isn’t, I don’t want Maxwell involved in any shape or form.’
In the rest of the Incident Room it was business as usual. David Radley’s corpse was in a chilled locker in Leighford General’s morgue, his body carved with a ‘Y’ in the macabre graffiti of a pathologist. Dr Jim Astley always took a pride in his suture work and Radley was no exception. Would archaeologists of the future, Astley had wondered briefly, find this man’s body and wonder who he was and why and how he died? Astley shook himself free of it. Romantic cobblers. He was getting old. Conversely, Jim Astley was no further ahead on the forensics of murder. The Incident Room knew that the sterno-cleido-mastoid muscles of Radley’s neck had been badly pulverized by a blow from the left which had broken the skin, caused huge bruising and dislocated his vertebrae. Whoever had killed him was his height, had stood in front of him when the blow was delivered and was right-handed.
Lily Boydell had found fibres on Radley’s clothing and on the soles of Radley’s shoes. The latter came from a carpet that wasn’t Radley’s and the former from the same brown stockman’s coat found on the corpse of Sam Welland. The shoes, like all the clothes on Radley’s body, were new and they didn’t fit too well. They had never trod the Leighford clay. Under the guv’nor’s strict instructions, the official line was still that Sam Welland had taken her own life and Hazel Twigg was asked, in the interests of finding her lover’s killer, to go along with this, at least for the time being.
A unit in the Incident Room was working on Martin Toogood’s car and the CCTV footage of the dark man in the broad-brimmed hat. Jacquie Carpenter was working on Toogood’s notes and his computer area. Except that Jacquie Carpenter had broken off briefly and gone looking for Alison McCormick; and Jacquie Carpenter, by that Friday afternoon, could not be found.
‘This is unbelievable,’ Hall was muttering as he swept through the room, checking on tasks, leads, case status. ‘Listen up, everybody.’ He clapped his hands for quiet. Peter Maxwell would have approved.
The room’s buzz stopped, like closing a window in high summer.
‘Jacquie Carpenter. Anyone seen her?’
Puzzled faces. Question marks. A certain, creeping unease.
‘She should have come on duty three hours ago and we’ve had no word.’ He told them. ‘Tom, duty log.’
The silver-haired sergeant fumbled through his ledger. ‘Went to Alison McCormick’s place yesterday. Signed out at…three twelve. Back by four thirty-eight.’
‘And?’
‘Worked here in the Room, guv,’ Dave Garstang said. ‘Her usual station.’ He waved to the empty desk, the dead VDU screen.
‘Get to her area,’ Hall ordered. ‘Find out what she was working on. What time did she leave yesterday, Tom?’
‘Six fifteen.’ Wilson was tracking the girl’s progress in his ledger.
‘Nearly hit me in the car park,’ somebody called.
It lightened the moment.
‘Was she goi
ng home?’ Hall asked. ‘Anybody know?’
‘Said she had a lead to follow up,’ Garstang said.
Hall turned to face him. This was something he didn’t want to hear just now. ‘Did she say what?’ he asked.
Garstang knew all eyes were on him. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, guv. She said it was probably nothing. I didn’t give it a second thought.’
Hall nodded, hoping that those words would not come back to haunt either of them. Second thoughts were what good policing were all about. That and second sight. ‘Right,’ he said, leaning back against a desk and folding his arms. ‘Where are we on Alison McCormick?’
DCI Henry Hall’s Incident Team were nowhere on Alison McCormick. She’d been sighted last on Tuesday afternoon. That was the day she and Dave Garstang had gone to the Railway Cottages to talk to Michaela Reynolds. Afterwards, the pair had grabbed a quick pasty and pint at The Moorings and got back to the station by two. Like Jacquie Carpenter, the girl had driven out of the nick car park and vanished into space like the girls who had got into Ted Bundy’s yellow beetle, the women who had gone for a chat with that nice Mr Christie at Rillington Place, the harlots who had waved a cheery ‘Hello’ to Jack…
Missing coppers were not the norm, and they posed one hell of a problem. Advertise the fact that they’re missing and it sends a shock wave through the community. One half will laugh themselves sick that the police can’t even trace their own; the other half will panic for the same reason. Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail would go berserk. On the other hand, not to advertise put the missing officer at extraordinary risk. There had been no ransom demand of any kind; no corny letter made up of cut-out newspaper clippings; no weirdo with a heavy-breathing delivery on untraceable phones.