by M. J. Trow
‘Ah, no,’ so did he. ‘You have to hand it to the Levington Agency, they’ve got a pretty smooth operation going. It was only because I had the buzz words of Juanita Reyes and Gerald Henderson that I got across the threshold. As it was, I had to give my inside leg…’
‘And five grand!’ Jacquie went cold. ‘Max, you didn’t give them five grand?’
‘The kids think I’m mad, dear heart, but it’s only a cover for being the most boring man in the universe. No, I asked for a cooling off period. Marashkova starts week Thursday.’
‘You…You lying bastard!’ and she hit him with a cushion.
‘Actually,’ he chuckled, defending himself as best he could, ‘Poles, Czechs, and Russians are on special offer this week. They’ll be in touch.’
‘So…let me see if I understand this. Gerald Henderson lashed out five thousand pounds for his own personal hooker.’
‘Fronting as an au pair for his daughter.’
‘And when little…whatserface…Katie…goes to boarding school, the cover won’t work any more.’
‘Something like that,’ Maxwell said. ‘Although a little drive out to Tottingleigh wouldn’t come amiss to confront the widow Henderson with what we know.’
‘Indeed,’ Jacquie’s mind was racing. ‘So Henderson gets rid of her.’
‘Yes, but not via the usual channels. He was supposed to contact the Agency to terminate the transaction, as it were, but instead he chose to advertise locally.’
‘Why?’
‘We can ask Mrs Henderson that when we visit.’
‘What’s this “we”, white man?’ Jacquie came out with the old Lone Ranger joke, though it was long before her time. ‘Henderson could hardly put an ad in the Advertiser “Slapper for Sale, One Careful Owner. Goes Like a Train”.’
‘Exactly,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Her alias was as an au pair, so that’s how he advertised her.’
‘But he couldn’t have gained anything…Do you think it was Juanita’s idea? To hang up her fol-de-rols for good? Turn over a new leaf? Had she seen the light?’
‘Whoa, whoa, Dobbin,’ Maxwell laughed. ‘I’ve no idea. Why don’t we – oops, there I go again – ask her?’
‘Hmm,’ Jacquie was deep in thought. ‘She’s a nice kid, Max. Used her real name, notice. No doubt her parents thought she was going away to be an au pair; they’ll be devastated.’
‘So will Rodrigo Mendoza.’
‘Who?’
‘The boyfriend – if that’s what he is.’
‘But he thinks she’s a tea leaf.’
‘Ah, but does he?’ Maxwell extricated himself from his live-in policewoman, and reached for the bottle of liquid gold posing as Southern Comfort. ‘What if he found out that Juanita was on the game and, with an attack of the goody two-shoes, helped her get away? What’s more shaming to a good Catholic family – that their daughter’s a thief or that their daughter’s a prostitute?’
‘Could go either way,’ Jacquie shrugged.
‘Bearing in mind Juanita’s parents presumably weren’t given either option. She’ll have a perfectly good story for them. Katie Henderson went to boarding school. Nolan Maxwell…I don’t know; she’ll have thought of something.’
Jacquie looked at him in the twilit lamplight of their lounge. ‘I’m still not speaking to you, Peter Maxwell. You’re still a lying shit. By the way,’ she leapt at him, pinning him to the sofa again, stealing a snifter of his drink, ‘what do you know about golf?’
Jacquie was right. The revelations about the Levington agency did shed a new light on the Henderson murder. And new light was something DCI Henry Hall could do with about now. Astley and the lab had run out of forensic information. House-to-house was picking up tiddly squat on Benji Lemon’s movements. Gangland Brighton was being, as usual, tight-lipped about the elimination of Wide Boy Taylor. And, as always, the Press were buzzing around the enquiry like the irritating flies of summer. No news was bad news for a paper, be it national or local, so most of them went for the ‘Are Our Policemen Really So Wonderful?’ line, commenting on the lack of progress, the blandness of press releases, digging up old cases of corruption from Meiklejohn and Druscovitch back in 1877 up to the Stephen Lawrence debacle.
It was all guaranteed to get right up Henry Hall’s nose and he drove out to Tottingleigh that bright, burning morning with Sheila Kindling at his side. It didn’t help, of course, that Jacquie Carpenter had come upon the Levington information by that eternally annoying source Peter Maxwell. Every time Henry Hall called on Maxwell for help – and he had to admit, he’d done it a few times now – there was always Hell to pay. And every time, Hall promised himself he wouldn’t do it again; until the next time. On the other hand, Peter Maxwell was a member of the public. He had every right to go up to London whenever he liked, visit any outwardly respectable institution he chose. He comforted himself with that thought, with the thinly held belief that the interfering old bastard wasn’t really running his own, but parallel, murder enquiry.
‘Mrs Henderson,’ Hall stood in the woman’s doorway, warrant card at the ready. ‘DCI Hall, Leighford CID. This is DC Kindling.’
‘Is there any news?’ Fiona Henderson had been a widow now for fourteen days. She was attending counselling sessions at the Elms in Leighford, but it all seemed pretty pointless, really. Others sitting around in their sad circle had lost husbands, wives, children, but most through illness or old age. One woman’s son had died in a car crash. But no one’s nearest and dearest had been murdered, except hers. Only Fiona Henderson’s husband had had a kitchen knife rammed repeatedly into his chest and had his body dumped unceremoniously under a rhododendron bush. Fiona Henderson was having difficulty coming to terms with that.
‘Pretty girl.’ Hall was handling a photograph of a kid covered in ice cream in the spacious living room. ‘Katie?’
‘Yes,’ Fiona said. ‘Taken with her father some time ago.’
‘How is she coping with all this?’ Sheila Kindling asked.
‘Well.’ Fiona was straightening cushions, busying herself, finding things to do. Sitting face to face with anyone she found difficult; like the sound of silence, it was hard to bear. ‘She was away at school when…it happened. She’s broken up now, of course, staying in the Midlands with my sister. They’ve got a farm, lots of ground, horses. Katie’s happy there.’
‘Was she happy here?’ Sheila asked her.
Fiona looked at her, frowning, puzzled. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’
‘But you weren’t, Mrs Henderson, were you?’ Hall was looking straight at her. He slowly and carefully took the cushion out of her hand. ‘Why did you send Katie away? To boarding school, I mean?’
‘We…Gerald and I…we thought she was ready.’
‘Did you go, when you were a girl? To boarding school?’
‘Me?’ Fiona’s laugh was brittle. ‘No, no, my parents couldn’t afford it.’
‘Gerald?’ Hall persisted. ‘Was he a boarder?’
‘No,’ she flickered. ‘No. It sounds snobby now, but Gerald’s family were working class and proud of it. No snobby school for him.’
‘But you sent your daughter to one?’ Hall checked.
‘I told you,’ Fiona was being as patient as she knew how. ‘We thought it was best.’
‘No, Fiona.’ Hall’s voice was soft, seductive even. And who told him he could call her by her Christian name? ‘No, you thought it was best. And it had nothing to do with Katie’s education, did it? You did it because of Juanita Reyes.’
The widow broke away from his stare, those difficult-to-see eyes behind the blank lenses that she knew must be burning into her soul. She hadn’t met this man before. In all the days of the enquiry, Henry Hall had not come her way once. She’d read his bland words in the papers, seen him giving nothing away in the press conference on the telly. And now he was here, in her house, like some sort of avenging angel. Wasn’t he supposed to be on her side? Just who was the victim here?
‘Did she steal anything from you, Mrs Henderson?’ Sheila Kindling asked.
‘Yes…yes, she did. I didn’t want to make a fuss. I know I should have called the police. It’s silly, I know, but I didn’t want any sort of international incident…’
‘What did she steal?’ Hall asked.
‘What? Er…money. She stole money.’
‘How much?’
‘Um…I don’t know exactly. A thousand, I think. It wasn’t the amount. It was the principle.’
There it was again; the sound of silence that she hated. Hall let it last. He was a connoisseur of the guarded moment, the pregnant pause.
‘Juanita didn’t steal any money, Fiona, did she? She stole your husband.’
‘What are you talking about?’ the woman blurted. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yes, you do, Fiona,’ Hall said.
Sheila Kindling looked at her boss. He could be a heartless bastard at times. Even when it was in a good cause. She knew then she’d never make DCI, glass ceiling or not, because she couldn’t be that heartless.
‘All right,’ Fiona said quietly. ‘I thought perhaps Gerald and Juanita were having a bit of a fling.’
Hall looked at the widow and then at his DC. ‘You found out they were,’ he said. ‘And it didn’t just happen, with two people thrown together by circumstance. She, a lonely kid in a strange land; he, drawn irresistibly by some ill-thought-out middle-aged fling. She was a bought woman, Fiona, and you knew it. Gerald bought her from the London agency, pretending she was an au pair when all the time she was a prostitute.’
‘No!’ Tears were streaming down Fiona Henderson’s cheeks, dripping off her chin.
‘Face it!’ Hall snapped.
‘No.’ Her voice was barely audible now and she sank to the sofa, burying her face in her hands. Instinctively, Sheila Kindling moved forward. She was a woman too and she couldn’t imagine what Fiona Henderson was going through. She’d been kicked around by men for long enough – first her husband, now the DCI. But Hall’s hand snaked out, palm down to signal her to stop. She looked at his face and he was shaking his head. In the years of her career that lay ahead, she would reflect that Henry Hall was right; this precise moment would never come again.
‘When did you find out, Fiona?’ he asked softly. ‘About Juanita, I mean?’
There was a long pause when no one moved. Then Fiona was sitting up, sniffing defiantly. There was no point any more. The man knew. The details were irrelevant. ‘Three months,’ she said. ‘I caught them in bed together. In his den. Through there…’ She jerked her head towards it in contempt. ‘He laughed. I think…I think Juanita was terribly embarrassed. She kept apologising and said she would go away. Gerald was…Gerald was appalling, saying how useless I was in bed and that was why he had hired Juanita. I…just ran. I had to get out of that room. I could hear his mocking voice all the way down the corridor. “Come and join us,” he said. “Come and watch. She’s very good.”’
‘So you decided to kill him,’ Hall said. It was a simple statement. And the silence that followed was so loud it hurt. Sheila Kindling hadn’t even, in the raw emotion of the interview, got her notebook out, still less slipped the biro behind her ear. She just stood there, transfixed.
‘I wanted to,’ the widow said. ‘It hurt like hell. I wanted to kill them both. Except for two things, I would have. I didn’t know how and I didn’t have the bottle.’
‘So what did you do?’ Hall asked her.
Fiona sniffed again. She was calmer now, with that sense of aching relief you get when a pain suddenly stops. ‘I took Katie and went to my sister’s for a few days. She knew, of course, something was wrong and I told her. We worked out what had to be done. If there was anything Gerald loved more than himself, it was money. I knew that if I blew the whistle in the right quarters, told certain people about the Juanita thing, he could kiss vital contracts goodbye. His so-called friends would leave him in droves. Leighford is a small place, Chief Inspector, you know that. Oh, most people would stomach his having an affair with a girl young enough to be his daughter. But this was something altogether more sordid. He’d be bankrupt inside a year.’
‘You confronted him?’
‘Yes. I told him we were sending Katie away to boarding school. I hated doing it, but I knew that without her, he’d have no reason to keep Juanita on. Tongues would wag. And Gerald valued his precious reputation as much as I thought he did. He placed an ad on Juanita’s behalf in the local paper.’
‘But he should have gone back to the Levington Agency,’ Hall said.
‘I wouldn’t allow it. I wanted no truck with that revolting place.’ She looked up at him suddenly. ‘You know about them, obviously. Can’t you close them down?’
Hall looked at his watch. ‘I suspect my colleagues in the Met are doing more or less that now, Mrs Henderson.’ He was all formality and correctness again. ‘I think their books should provide some interesting reading.’
‘I insisted that Gerald went through with removing Juanita. Poor kid. I felt sorry for her that night I caught them together. I felt even sorrier for her afterwards. But the couple who answered the ad, the Maxwells, they seemed very nice.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they are,’ Hall said. He was smiling inside.
‘One thing is certain, Chief Inspector,’ Fiona Henderson said, more at peace with herself than she’d been for months. ‘Whoever killed Gerald, it had nothing to do with Juanita Reyes.’
‘Right,’ Maxwell had finished the washing up, put the baby to bed, read him a story of crushing banality and was just rounding off on the hundred and one things that house-husbands like him do, day after day, without prompting, without complaint. ‘You were asking me about golf.’
Jacquie frowned at him. ‘Was I? Good God, Max, that was nearly twenty-four hours ago. Try to keep up, there’s a good chap.’
‘I must confess,’ he said pompously, hauling off his pink rubber gloves and untying his pinnie, ‘it is not, as you know, my natural game. I’m more of a rugger man. But I’ll give it my best shot.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It probably originated in Holland, although the first records seem to show a game played with a curved stick and a ball in Flanders (that’s more or less Belgium to you) in 1353. Of course, in Gloucester cathedral…’
‘Single Stableton,’ she interrupted, cradling her coffee with both hands.
‘Sorry?’
‘You told me you didn’t know how to use the Net,’ she bridled. ‘I leave you alone for one day and you’re out there on the Information Superhighway.’
‘Bollocks, darling heart,’ he bridled right back at her. ‘I have a book on golf I didn’t know I had stashed away in the attic, along with A Thousand and One Things to Do With a Split Condom and an early venture by Enoch Powell, Send the Black B—s Home. Neither of them made the bestseller list.’
‘So your little book didn’t tell you about a Single Stableton, then?’
‘Must have been in a later volume,’ Maxwell bluffed. ‘What is it?’
‘Well, that’s just the point; it doesn’t exist. I made it up. The actual term is a Single Stableford; a golfer would know that.’
‘As opposed to…’ Maxwell had to admit he’d lost track of the conversation.
‘As opposed to Leighford’s answer to Gardener’s World. Chester Harris, as well as being a flasher, pervert and general purpose weirdo, is not a golfer.’
‘Well,’ Maxwell tutted, finding stirring his own coffee quite a trick after the day he’d had. ‘In a busy life…we can’t all be good at everything.’
‘Yet, he’s a member of a golf club,’ she told him.
‘Well,’ Maxwell said. ‘Perhaps he just goes for the…social life.’
She was nodding smugly.
‘Woman Policeman, you
are nothing short of a genius. Chester Harris spies on courting couples and suggests they join him at a party at the golf club. So this golf club…’
‘Wilbraham,’ she filled in the details, ‘Rather like the Levington Agency…’
‘…is not a golf club at all. Or if it is, it’s a front for something else.’ He kissed her on the nose. ‘Brilliant. And it gets even better.’
‘It does?’
‘It does,’ Maxwell sipped his coffee. ‘Think back. Our little visit to the Hampton School, to see Rodrigo Mendoza.’
‘Hm,’ Jacquie smiled, curling her toes.
‘Stop it!’ he growled. ‘You’re dribbling.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Mendoza said he took Juanita to a party, not at school because English schools are not places you want to have parties. They went to a party at a local golf club. And what’s the betting that’s the Wilbraham?’
‘My God.’
‘And who did Mendoza say got them in because he was a member?’
‘Oh God, Max,’ Jacquie whined. ‘I don’t know.’ She flapped her hands uselessly. She’d been doing so well. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Exactly,’ he beamed, and that’s why I’m a Detective Sergeant and you’re a mere Head of Sixth Form at a bog-standard comprehensive. Oh, no, wait a minute…’
‘Who is it, you shit?’
‘My old sparring partner, Aaron Felton, that’s who.’
In the olden times, Peter Maxwell would have thrown caution to the winds and cycled out to Littlehampton. It was twelve miles from Leighford as the crow flies, but as the A259 went, considerably further. But there was no use deluding himself; he was not a young man any more and Surrey’s saddle seemed to be evolving into some sort of Inquisition torture implement. So, he chickened out and took the train.
There was a lethargy about the Hampton School on this, the last day of term that he knew would be happening over at Leighford High by now too. Just how many times could Seven Gee be shown that episode of the Simpsons where Ned Flanders has a fling with Marge? And how many more Personal Statements could Year 12 write in preparation for their university applications?