by M. J. Trow
Maxwell swept him up out of the cot in a deft movement and winced as the little tyke carried out his favourite parlour trick. It was called ‘Swinging from Daddy’s Sideburns.’ And it hurt like hell.
‘Where’s Juanita, fella? Hmm?’
Nolan gurgled his nearly toothless grin, not being terribly helpful.
‘Phew!’ Maxwell’s nose wrinkled. ‘Not been here for a while by the look of it.’ He gingerly removed his hand from Nolan’s nappy area. ‘What a squelcher. Come on, old son.’ He laid the baby down. ‘Assume the position.’
In moments like these, it all came flooding back. The memories of long, long ago, when his first child had been gurgling in her daddy’s arms. Maxwell had been a young teacher then, just starting out. And the smell of his little girl’s neck was just like Nolan’s today. He found himself smiling. Then the other memories started, the ones he couldn’t control, couldn’t separate from the sunshine and the laughter. The wet roads, the screaming tyres, the crystal hardness of broken glass that had shattered his heart and had seen his first family swept away. He shook himself free of it and pressed the boy’s new nappy into place.
‘Ah, Velcro.’ He rubbed his nose against Nolan’s. ‘Where would we be without it, eh? Come on, let’s you and me look for dragons.’
He knew exactly where to find one and he didn’t have to cross a river either. He swept up Nolan’s white hat from the kitchen and plonked it on his soft, fair curls. The little hands came up as he carried him through the house.
‘Oh, no,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘That stays on. We’re going out into the sun now, dear boy. It’s still quite scorching out there and your mother would have a fit if I took you out without it.’ Their eyes met. ‘Women, eh? Cha!’ and Maxwell swept the lad downstairs. ‘And I’m not even going to mention mad dogs and Englishmen.’
The dragon was coiled in her scaly steelness on a special offer steamer-chair from B&Q, a large sun-stopping hat on her tousled old head and a little drinkie in her hand.
‘Mrs Troubridge.’ Maxwell announced himself these days, ever since he’d crept up on the old next-door neighbour with unintentioned stealth and she’d nearly decapitated him with her garden rake in her surprise.
‘Oooh, hello.’ The dragon uncoiled, laying her drink down on the patio table, and began poking baby Nolan with her talons, smiling inanely and cooing baby-babble, as incomprehensible to Maxwell as it must have been to his son.
‘Have you seen Juanita?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Who, dear?’ the old girl’s attention span wasn’t what it was and she was currently in baby-mode. Alternatively, she had been out in the sun for a while.
‘Juanita,’ Maxwell repeated with what patience he could. ‘Spanish girl. Looks after Nolan here. Lives with you.’
Mrs Troubridge blinked at him under the raffia of her chapeau like a startled iguana. ‘Isn’t she with you?’
‘No.’ Maxwell was still just about smiling, though he’d never got beyond NVQ level in Tolerance.
‘Well, that is odd.’ The old girl was still wrestling with Nolan’s fingers, grinning inanely. ‘What time is it?’
‘Sun’s over the yard arm,’ Maxwell told her, peering up into the great orb briefly. ‘Fiveish.’
‘Only, they do have their siestas, don’t they, these foreign people? Perhaps she’s snoozing.’
‘Perhaps,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But I’d have thought while she was in charge of my child she’d have the courtesy to snooze reasonably close to him. At least in the same house.’
‘Shall I check her room?’ Mrs Troubridge offered.
‘Shall we both check?’ Maxwell countered.
‘Well, I…oh, of course, Mr Maxwell. As it’s you. Ever the perfect gentleman. Could you manage the stairs by yourself? My hip’s playing up a little today, I’m afraid. It’s the sun, you know. Leave the little one with me. I’ll look after him.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Troubridge,’ Maxwell smiled, wrinkling his nose at her in what he hoped wasn’t too patronising a way, ‘but he’s a little fractious at the moment. I’ll just tuck him under my arm. So. We’ll be fine.’ And he was gone, striding across the garden of Number 40 Columbine, Nolan bouncing on his hip. Maxwell hissed at him, ‘Look fractious, dammit, unless you want to be dribbled on by Black Annis back there.’
Nolan just grinned at him, then shoved an obliging fist in his mouth. Angst, baby-style. Nice to see the Method School still going strong.
Maxwell knew where Juanita Reyes’ room was. Mrs Troubridge’s house was, of course, a mirror-image of his own. He padded through her chintzy lounge on his Eighties brothel creepers and on up her stairs to the landing. A rather disconcerting photo of the late Mr Troubridge leered at him from a silvered frame on a wall-side whatnot and Maxwell remained glad he had never had the pleasure. He clicked open the door of the Spanish au pair’s room. The bed was a tip, like one of those exquisite entries for the Turner Prize (although anything, it had to be said, was better than an original Turner). Clothes were strewn about, including the unmentionables that Mrs Troubridge hadn’t mentioned, but were clearly foremost in her mind when she momentarily dithered about letting Maxwell go up there. There was a half-read Wendy Holden beside the bed (which didn’t surprise Maxwell at all) and a bra slung over it that looked as though it was designed to hold two pigeon’s eggs. A Spanish newspaper, days old, had been tossed into a corner. Franco was dead.
Maxwell checked the wardrobe. The drawers. Difficult to tell if anything was missing. If you don’t know how many skimpy tops a girl has to begin with, how can you do the calculations now?
‘Hello!’ He heard the dulcet tones of his neighbour waft up from two floors below. ‘Is everything all right, Mr Maxwell?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Maxwell called, muttering to Nolan, ‘Except for the fact that the woman employed to look after you, sonny Jim, appears to have gone walkabout. The curious incident of the girl in the daytime, hum? That’s an allusion to…’ He looked at his little boy, who was reaching out for the girl’s bra in a half-hearted way. ‘Oh, never mind. We’ll talk later.’ And he whisked him downstairs again.
‘You didn’t see Juanita go out, did you, Mrs Troubridge? I mean, her car’s not there.’
‘Isn’t it?’ the old girl frowned. ‘Well, how terribly queer. No, I’ve been at the back here for most of the afternoon. Even had my lunch on the patio. It’s such a glorious day, isn’t it?’
‘It certainly is,’ Maxwell beamed at her. ‘Getting more glorious by the moment. Well, thank you, Mrs Troubridge. Er…when Juanita gets back, could you ask her to pop round? Nothing vital, just a little matter of dereliction of duty, neglecting a minor, abandoning a helpless child, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh, Mr Maxwell. Juanita is a lovely girl. I’m sure she meant no harm.’
Maxwell nodded, intrigued by the old biddy’s relaxed take on it all. ‘Yes, so am I,’ he told her. ‘But all the same…’
‘Yes, of course. It is rather short-sighted, I can see that. Shall I hold baby while you conduct a fingertip search?’
Maxwell frowned. The old girl had been watching re-runs of Frost again. ‘Thank you, no. It’s time for his tea. I’ll see myself out.’
Peter Maxwell swore he’d never do what he was doing now. He’d placed Nolan in his bouncy thing and let him watch day-time television. True, it was gone six and technically evening television, but that wasn’t the point. And to be fair to Maxwell, he did have an urgent call to make. And Nolan seemed quite enthralled by the way Jessica Fletcher was clearing up the unsolved murder rate in Cabot Cove. What a woman! Everybody’s favourite granny. Jane Marple without the senility.
‘Jacquie Carpenter, please.’ He spoke into that weird plastic thing that Metternich had never understood, the one all these humans, except the little one, pressed to the side of their faces.
‘Can I ask who’s calling?’ the disembodied voice asked in the ether and the magic of late nineteenth-century technology.
‘Peter Maxwell.’
>
There was a pause. They all knew who Peter Maxwell was down at Leighford Nick. First, because he was Jacquie’s partner and second, because he was an interfering pain in the arse. If he wasn’t real, you’d have to make him up.
‘Sorry, Mr Maxwell. I’m afraid she’s been called away.’
‘Away?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘But it’s home time. She should have put her chair up on her desk and said her prayers by now.’
The desk man was Den Morrisey and he’d never really cottoned on to Maxwell and his off-the-wall take on life. He wasn’t going to let the chance pass. ‘Well, you see, unlike you teachers, we police persons don’t keep regular hours. No doubt she’ll be in touch when she can.’ Click. Brrr.
Bitch.
What Jacquie Carpenter was in touch with that bright, impossibly sunny July day, as afternoon turned to evening and the shadows lengthened over Dead Man’s Point, was all the ghastly reality of sudden death. She’d been here before, too many times if truth be told, and each time she wondered how much more she could take. They’d tied a yellow ribbon round the old oak trees that ringed the sandy slopes of the dunes. They were high here, higher than the herring gulls that glided below them on the air currents, shearing the sandstone face of the cliffs. The sea pinks nodded in the stiffening breeze and it felt suddenly chill.
Jacquie watched the surreal scene emerge as she had so often before. The men in white coats might yet come to take her away, but at the moment, they were taking photographs inside the hurriedly erected tent, measuring angles, microscopically checking broken twig-ends and teasing loose fibres into carefully labelled plastic bags. She was an attractive woman, thirty-something, with large grey eyes and a wave of auburn hair. Not far away as the gulls flew, the men in her life were doing their best to cope without her. Priorities. Always priorities. Putting her life on hold.
Silent, upon a peak near Leighford, stood Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall, gazing, like his favourite sergeant, out to sea. The gulls cried to each other, bickering as they circled, annoyed by the intrusion into their world. Beyond it all was the sibilant, rolling hiss of the surf, booming far below, and the line of wake that trailed behind a cross-channel ferry breaking the haze of the skyline.
‘Dead Man’s Point, Jacquie,’ Hall didn’t turn to her. ‘How corny is that?’
CHAPTER TWO
There is something about a Scene of Crime. What earlier today was a beauty spot, just part of a coastal path walk that echoed to the thud of ramblers’ boots and rang with the patter of tiny tourists was now a no-go area, taped off and guarded, crackling with radio contact and surveilled by the staccato thunder of a helicopter, its searchlight throwing lurid shadows along the line of the cliffs.
Inside the tent, throwing weird Jakartan puppet-shapes onto the canvas, Dr Jim Astley was summing up what he had. What he had was a long and rather undistinguished career. He’d been tipped for the top once, but…well, the breaks just hadn’t come his way. So here he was, police-surgeon-cum-pathologist attached to the West Sussex CID. He met more dead people than live ones. And such was the case that night as the last purple bars of the sunlit clouds built from the south-west and put out the summer light.
‘Male, Henry,’ Astley was peering at the corpse now. ‘Age is a bit trickier. Forties, fifties.’ He prised open the mouth. ‘Still got all his own teeth, which is more than can be said for some of us.’
‘How long in the ground, Doctor?’ Henry Hall was sitting slightly in front of the body, on a fold-up canvas chair. He needed some answers, sooner rather than later.
Astley carefully forced the black and swollen tongue behind the lips. One of the dead man’s eyes stared up at him, dull and blank and still. Henry Hall had never got used to that, even if Jim Astley had – bright eyes no longer bright, blindness where there should have been sight. The other eye had all but gone, lost in a mass of blackish-purple tissue. ‘I’ll have to check for the blow-fly larvae,’ Astley said, ‘back in the lab. Text book stuff, but you’ll have to wait for it. My guess would be two weeks, perhaps three.’
‘Early to mid-June,’ Hall was mentally back-tracking.
Jim Astley looked at him, the arc lights shining off the rimless specs, hiding as always, the eyes and the soul of Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall. ‘What were you doing on the night in question?’ It was an unusual moment of levity from the Chief Inspector.
Astley smiled. ‘I couldn’t vouch for yesterday, never mind three weeks ago. I don’t know how you blokes do it.’
‘Policemen do it on the job,’ Hall reminded him.
The men, except the dead one, looked up as the tent flap moved.
‘Jacquie,’ Hall eased himself upright. He’d been sitting watching Astley at work now with his tweezers and his gloved hands for well over an hour and his bum was as numb as his legs. He was grateful for the opportunity to move. ‘Anything?’
Jacquie Carpenter hadn’t been home yet. Nobody had. She’d briefly rung Maxwell to let him know she wouldn’t be back for a while and he was to go to bed. She’d got the answerphone because Max was up in the attic, (Nolan was asleep on the floor below), trying to make sense out of Lieutenant Landriani’s uniform and waiting for the AWOL Juanita to give him some sort of explanation for her odd behaviour. He’d hurtled downstairs to reach the phone but Jacquie had already left her message and gone.
‘Sorry, darlings,’ he heard her voice say. ‘Something quite nasty’s come up at Dead Man’s Point. Don’t wait up. Love you both.’ Goodbye, that’s all she said.
Now, she was back on the coastal path, her Ka wedged between the police vehicles in the car park where they’d asked Luigi’s Ices to move on hours ago. Two uniforms had to stay with the vehicles at all times to keep away Nosy Joe Public. Nothing like the finding of a body to bring out the morbidly curious.
‘Right.’ Jacquie’s notebook was out of her handbag faster than you could say foul play. ‘Couldn’t get much out of the couple who found the body, guv.’
‘You got something, though?’ Hall motioned his sergeant outside. He’d never been at one with cadavers, and rummaging about in them all – Astley’s domain – had never really been Henry Hall’s thing.
Jacquie nodded, secretly as glad as her boss to be out in the cool, sweet air of the headland. ‘A Mr and Mrs Philip Downer from Carshalton. They’ve got a caravan at Willow Bay. Regulars, apparently.’
‘So they know the area?’
‘Patches does.’
‘Patches?’ Hall’s eyes narrowed. Not that Jacquie could see that behind the frosted lenses – only the faint reflection of the pale moon rising over the sea; twice.
‘Their dog. Border collie.’
Hall knew when Jacquie was trying to lighten the moment. She was the best DS he’d had in years. Anybody else would have smiled. But then, Henry Hall wasn’t anybody else. He was the Buster Keaton of Leighford CID and he had a reputation to maintain.
‘The Downers were naturally upset,’ Jacquie told him.
‘Naturally.’
‘Mr thought that Patches had found a rabbit or something. The place is riddled with them. By the time he got close, he realised it was an arm.’
‘Then what?’
‘Mrs Downer had the ab-dabs and had to be calmed down big time. She started screaming apparently to such an extent, volume and duration that Dave Conklin had to intervene to find out what was going on.’
‘Conklin?’
‘Luigi,’ Jacquie told him. ‘Has the ice cream franchise in the Dead Man’s car park over there.’
‘Indeed,’ Hall remembered. ‘Does a mean Ninety-Nine if memory serves.’
‘Well, he left his float to investigate, thinking something was going on.’
‘Good of him to get involved,’ Hall observed. ‘Many people these days wouldn’t.’
‘Said it was his civic duty. Anyway, trade was a bit slack by then.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Three, three-thirty. He couldn’t be sure.’
‘Couple of kids, the Downers remembered. Probably locals. Teenagers, certainly.’
‘From Leighford High?’ Hall had stopped and looked down at her. In the right light, Henry Hall could blot out the sun. Or by this time, the moon. She knew the reason for the question. She recognised the weight in the voice. Leighford High meant Peter Maxwell, their Head of Sixth Form, Jacquie’s partner in crime. Peter Maxwell meant trouble. Not perhaps, but definitely. Not now and again, but always.
‘Possibly,’ Jacquie was a past mistress at missing the point and she looked at her boss with as much wide-eyed innocence as she could muster. Hall was not impressed. He had, after all, known Jacquie and Maxwell for a while now.
‘Skivers, at that time of day?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Jacquie explained with the inside knowledge of a woman who lives with a teacher. ‘And I believe the phrase is ‘bunkers’ these days, guv. Could be Year Eleven or Year Thirteen after exams. They all finished a couple of days ago.’
‘All right.’ Henry Hall’s kids had grown up and flown the coop. He’d forgotten, as parents do, all the nitty-gritty of things like that. ‘Anybody else?’
‘Well, the world and his wife eventually. Word got round the car park. People coming from the Littlehampton direction. Apparently Dave Conklin’s got a lot of contacts and his mobile phone was red hot by the time he’d finished. I’m just amazed we haven’t had the Advertiser up here yet.’
‘We have,’ Hall nodded. ‘While you were back at the Shop talking to the Downers, the editor himself no less waddled up, demanding exclusives like they’re going out of fashion.’
They both knew the two-edged sword that was the Fourth Estate. Handled well, the paparazzi could be your finest ally in the fight against crime. Handled badly, get them pissed off, and they’re about as useful as a sieve in a shipwreck.