by M. J. Trow
It was the jeering he heard first and the laughter that followed. Loud, belligerent, like the SA in some Nazi town, swaggering down the street in the sound archive of his brain. Then he saw them; a knot of hoodies hunched like the camels of the night milling round a smaller figure in their centre. Instinctively, most people would walk away, cross the road, reckon it wasn’t their fight. Instinctively, Peter Maxwell crossed the road too, into the thick of it. He was a Samaritan at heart.
‘Thick indeed,’ Maxwell’s breath snaked out on the night air as he reached the nearest rough, shoving around an old man two-thirds his height and four times his age.
‘You what?’ the hoodie tried to vocalise.
‘Let me see,’ Maxwell peered at him. He didn’t know the face, but he knew the type only too well. ‘Yep. CAT score 74.3. SAT 69.8. Grade A GCSE in Unpleasantness. But I bet you can text on your stolen mobile faster than I can say “Leave the old man alone, you little shit, or you’ll be going home tonight via A & E at Leighford General”.’
The hoodie blinked and the jeering had stopped. Six pairs of eyes were on Maxwell now and the first to flicker were those of the old man. He ducked out of the vicious circle surrounding him and scuttled away into the darkness.
‘Do you wanna kickin’?’ the hoodie asked.
‘Thank you, no,’ Maxwell stood his ground, nose to nose with the moron. ‘I’ve just had one. You know,’ he beamed at them all, ‘I’ve been rash. It was wrong of me to brand you all as low-life garbage just because you were all about to kick the crap out of a defenceless old man. That nice Mr Cameron has said we are supposed to hug people like you. So, whaddya say, guys? Group hug?’ And he held out his arms.
Two of them were all for wading in, fists and boots at the ready, but the chavviest of them crossed in front of them. ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Not this one. It’s Mad Max. Let’s go.’
‘Who?’ one of them asked.
‘What? Him?’ the first hoodie jeered. ‘That’s Mad Max?’
Maxwell closed to him so that hat brim and hood brim touched for a second. ‘Would you like to find out how mad?’ he asked.
And the hoodies were gone, thudding away round the corner before the bravest of them called back, ‘You’re a wanker, Maxwell!’
The height of wit and repartee.
The sound of a discreetly sounded car horn made Maxwell turn.
‘Mr Maxwell?’ Bill Lunt had the loudest whisper Maxwell had ever heard. Even so, the cloak and dagger was a little unnecessary.
‘The cloak and dagger is a little unnecessary, Bill,’ Maxwell said as he climbed into the car. Lunt Photographic was obviously doing all right. Leather seats, unless he missed his guess.
‘Sorry, Mr Ma…Max,’ the photographer said, as he released the handbrake. ‘What was all that about?’
‘Just chillin’ wit me bros,’ Maxwell jived. ‘Talking of which, does this heater work?’ He fiddled with a few dials on the car’s fascia.
‘I wasn’t sure what you had told your wife. About tonight, I mean.’
‘Not wife, Bill, Significant Other. Soulmate. Partner. Divida Anima Mea. Other Half. Detective Sergeant Carpenter. Call her what you want, really.’
Bill Lunt swerved and clipped the kerb. ‘Detective Sergeant? Is this OK, then? I had no idea.’
Maxwell shrugged. ‘I can’t see why not, Bill.’
‘Well, she’s a policeman. Er…policewoman.’
‘She is, she is indeed, Bill.’ Maxwell unwound his scarf to let the ends dangle. ‘And as such, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind two thoughtful citizens investigating a potential crime scene, trampling all over it with their clodhopping feet and obliterating all clues, making the job of the aforementioned police twenty zillion times more difficult.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course not, Bill,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘She’ll be livid, but that’s my problem. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. We’ve rowed about it, I’ve promised never to do it again, we’ve rowed some more. It’s who we are. Don’t worry. Call it a compulsion. Some men gamble. Others drink. Yet others womanise. I investigate murder. Heigh ho. Waddya going to do?’ It was a perfect Homer Simpson.
‘But I do worry, Max. If poking around crime scenes is what you do, worrying is what I do. Emma’s always telling me about it.’
‘Well, don’t worry, Bill. I dare say you’ve already been told it may never happen.’
‘About fifty times a day.’
‘There you are, then. Everyone can’t be wrong.’
‘But there’s so much out there, isn’t there? There’s accidental death, there’s tripping hazards, there’s electricity! There’s bodies of water, there’s ice falling from aeroplanes, there’s killer bees!’ Bill’s grip on the steering wheel was getting harder; his knuckles stood out like quail’s eggs under his skin in the scudding street lights. Maxwell hadn’t realised that the nice, easy-going photographer of Leighford High was such a neurotic. ‘There’s thunder. There’s lightning.
There’s trains, both derailed and carrying nuclear waste.’
‘There’s a huge Tesco lorry.’
‘Yes, true, there’s all sorts of lorries.’
‘No, Bill, I mean, there’s a huge Tesco lorry, over there, coming at us round the roundabout.’
Bill swallowed a scream and screeched to a halt. ‘Oh Max, I’m sorry. That was a close one.’ He sat with both hands frozen to the wheel, staring straight ahead.
‘Yes, Bill.’ Maxwell felt his heart descend slowly from his mouth again. ‘But that’s what it was. A close one. We have close ones all day long, but we negotiate the stairs, we float, we swat the bee. We even,’ and he patted the man’s white knuckles with a smile, ‘miss the lorry. Think of all the things that happen every day to feel lucky about. Not the things that could ruin your life.’
‘It’s OK for you, Mr Maxwell,’ he said peevishly. ‘You’re all right. Lovely wife…er…policewoman. Lovely baby; I’ve seen him on the back of your bike.’
Maxwell snorted softly down his nose and smiled. It’s what he did when his natural reaction would be to let a tear roll softly down his cheek. He waited while the man found his gears again and drove on.
‘Oh, Bill,’ he said, patting the man’s arm and making the car buck wildly across the carriageway for a moment. ‘Bill, I am lucky. I am all right.’ He let a moment pass, while he got his throat ready to speak through again. He looked out of the window, saw in the dark glass the faces of his first wife and baby daughter, torn from him when his life was so very, very all right. Before that day when the wet road had killed them, and the sharp bend and the flying police car, all sirens and flashing lights and macho bravado. He touched a forefinger tip to his ghostly baby’s nose and looked away.
‘Right then, Bill,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Are we there yet?’ All in all, it was a pretty good Bart and Lisa Simpson.
The big car growled down the road that skirted the Shingle and rolled into the car park at the landward side of the dunes. The two men got out and went round to the boot. There was a brief hiatus while Bill thought he had left the torch at home. He then found it under the first-aid box, foil lined blanket and emergency fluorescent triangle without which he refused to go on even the shortest journey. He’d seen a documentary on the telly once about the Donner Party, the wagon train that had left Missouri too late and only survived by cannibalism. Yes, that was the Rockies and 1846, but try telling Bill Lunt that.
Maxwell was a patient man; Bill Lunt’s luck truly was in. Anyone else would have given him a clip round the ear and demanded to be taken home. They were, after all, about to tramp across a rather chilly dunescape towards the incoming tide, looking for something that probably wasn’t there. And the old, haunting refrain crept unbidden into Maxwell’s mind. ‘Last night I dreamt a dreary dream, beyond the isle of Skye. I saw a dead man win a fight. And I think that man was I.’ Having found, or not found, that something, Maxwell was in for a right bollocking when he got ho
me. He mulled over his options as they tramped silently, in Indian file, towards the edge of the sea, the rush in their ears becoming a roar that blotted out all else. The conversation at home was not going to be easy, he decided. If they found a body, Henry Hall was going to go ballistic. The crime scene would be hopelessly compromised and he would at least threaten to bang Maxwell up for ever and throw away the key. He had threatened it often enough, after all. As a teacher, Maxwell knew that eventually you had to do what you threatened or you lost all power, all credence. This time it would be the Oubliette, the Chateau d’If, Devil’s Island. If they didn’t find a body, Jacquie was going to go ballistic. She could read him like a book; something really simple, like a Mr Men book. Mr Nosy. Mr Silly. Mr I-Can’t-Help-Looking-For-Bodies. She would know he was out sleuthing. And he had promised he wouldn’t. Had promised loads of times he wouldn’t…
His reverie was broken by cannoning into the back of Bill Lunt. The photographer was rooted to the spot, stock still up to his ankles in soft sand. Maxwell sighed.
‘What is it, Bill? Litter? A dead seagull?’
Bill’s voice came from deep inside, a tiny, strangled thing that could hardly make it past his chattering teeth, his suddenly dry lips.
‘No, not really,’ he tried to whisper above the boom of the surf. ‘It’s a hand, actually.’
Maxwell looked around their feet, fitfully lit by the wavering torch beam. ‘Where? Where’s a hand?’
Lunt swallowed hard and moved to one side. ‘Here,’ he said, trying to sound like a grown-up, a grown-up photographer who had cleverly detected a crime. ‘Here it is,’ he said bravely. ‘Just by my foot.’ And he fainted dead away, gracefully to one side. Thoughtful, even in sudden unconsciousness.
‘And so,’ Maxwell said to Henry Hall, ‘I looked down and, damn me, but if he wasn’t right. It was a hand, sticking out of the sand, as if it was waving, rather than drowning. Poor old Bill.’ It was nearly eleven now, way past everybody’s bedtime. Peter Maxwell had left his mobile at home, because he always left his mobile at home. He’d done the joke about mobile homes so often Jacquie wasn’t listening any more. Peter Maxwell had tried to revive Bill Lunt, but on second thoughts let him sleep rather than leave him next to human remains or have the indignity of having to carry him back to the car. So he’d hot-footed it back along the sand, through the deserted car park and up onto The Shingle Road. A bit like Vinnie Jones looking for the RAC.
The old girl in Bide-A-Wee was suitably alarmed by the red-faced, out-of-breath apparition hanging on her door frame, but she’d duly called the police and the ambulance service and was eternally grateful to see the apparition vanish. And she slid the bolts shut behind him. You couldn’t be too careful. He could have been a Global Terrorist.
That was then. Now, Maxwell looked back over his shoulder to where the fainting photographer was sitting on the ground, someone else’s metal-lined blanket round his shoulders, sipping water from a plastic bottle. ‘It’s not the same actually finding a body as reading about it or seeing John Nettles finding one on the telly.’
‘And you should know,’ grunted Henry Hall.
‘To hear you talk, Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell said, ‘you’d think I found them all the time. In fact, I have personally discovered surprisingly few.’
‘Surprisingly few?’ Henry Hall exploded. ‘Listen to yourself, man. Most people go a whole lifetime and don’t find any. I know dozens of coppers who’ve never seen a corpse.’ He humphed and turned away. ‘Surprisingly few, indeed!’
Maxwell fell into step with him, the path over the dunes lit brightly now by the SOCOs’ arc lamps. The scene was surreal, as if a B-feature camera crew had descended on Willow Bay to film The Creature That Was Thwarted By Peter Cushing II. Men in white suits measured, photographed, probed, spoke into walkie talkies. Red, white and blue lights rotated across the sand.
‘Well, Henry. You must know what I mean. You’re always saying I get too involved in things. I’m sure my kids at school think I bump into bodies round every corner.’
Henry Hall stopped and pointed, rather theatrically for him, away to his left, landward, away from his crime scene. ‘Mr Maxwell…Max, please go home. I can vouch for the fact that you have a lovely partner. Your son’s smiling face grinning up from his mother’s desk is sometimes the only smile I see all day. Just for once, leave this to us. But, just before you do,’ he closed to his man, ‘what can you tell me about the photographer?’
Maxwell frowned and glanced back at the man. ‘Not very much. Takes a darned good photo. Reliable sort.’
‘How did he react when you stumbled over the remains?’
Maxwell laughed. It was nervous reaction, really. He was always amazed, even after all this time, that everybody didn’t see the world as he did. And he didn’t like the way the conversation was going. ‘Bill? He was clearly horrified when he saw that hand. I thought he was dead.’
Hall shrugged. ‘Good actor.’
‘Bill?’ Gobsmacked again. ‘No, no, he came to me with the photographs, I told you…’
‘Yes, precisely. He took photographs of a crime being committed and didn’t do anything until the next day when he came to you. Is that what you would consider normal?’
It was late. It was cold. And the tide was coming in. No one was at their best.
‘Chief Inspector, are you somehow implying that Bill Lunt…’
‘Would you consider the time-lag normal?’ Hall persisted.
‘Umm…Well, it’s not what everyone would do, perhaps, but understandable enough in its way.’ Maxwell stood head to head with Hall, neither man inclined to give way. ‘He wasn’t even sure what he had photographed until we had a look. It might have been a branch or anything.’
‘I suppose,’ Henry Hall said grudgingly, ‘that at least we have an accurate time of death.’
‘How, accurate?’ Maxwell said. He’d read The Romeo Error and Time of Death. He knew that forensic science was going backwards and the Great Certainties were no more. The days of Simpson and Spilsbury were gone for ever.
Henry Hall smiled condescendingly. ‘You probably don’t know this,’ he said, ‘but digital cameras time and date the images to the second.’
Maxwell smiled back, the smile of a man with a surprise up his sleeve. He’d got a million. ‘Thank you, Henry, for considering me a dinosaur and a very early one, just out of the primeval soup at that. I am in fact a bit of a whiz with the old digital camera. I do have, as you kindly pointed out, a particularly lovely partner and a totally enchanting son, both of whom I record for posterity at every opportunity. Unfortunately, Bill Lunt is not a digital man. He prefers steam, hand-cranked, call it what you will. His camera just about has a shutter and a lens. Apparently, it is what makes photography art.’
‘Oh, fine. Just fine.’ Henry Hall walked away and something in his step warned Maxwell not to follow. He raised his voice slightly, to allow for the rapidly increasing distance between them and the annoying bellow of the surf.
‘I’ll be at home then, Henry, should you need me,’ he called. There was no reply. ‘Bye, then.’ When there was still no reply he turned and made his way back towards the car park. A paramedic was just loading a white and shaking Bill Lunt into the ambulance.
‘Mr Maxwell, Mr Maxwell,’ Bill held out his hand towards him. ‘Please come with me in the ambulance.’
Maxwell considered the options. If this was daytime telly, that nice Dick van Dyke would be waiting for Bill in Community General. If this was modern film noir, the ambulance driver would be psychotic old Nicholas Cage. As it was he saw the answer to a problem that had been dawning. ‘Certainly, Bill,’ he said, hopping aboard. ‘I’ll have to get off halfway, though. Sorry.’ He turned to the paramedic. ‘Columbine, if you would,’ he smiled. ‘No need to drive down the road, it’ll only spook the neighbours. On the corner will be lovely.’ He settled down on the vacant bed. ‘You really don’t look too well, Bill. Not too well at all…’
The silen
ce inside Number 38, Columbine, the little town house that was Chez Maxwell, south of the Flyover, was palpable. It was the silence of two people studiously ignoring a third. Nolan’s little nocturnal whitterings over the baby monitor were like sounds from another planet. Metternich, black, white, feline and neutered, who had been giving himself a thorough grooming, including all his private bits, curled up tight, nose up bum, when he heard Maxwell’s key in the lock. He didn’t like to take sides; this was a human thing – let them fight it out. He’d eat the survivor. Jacquie was knitting. She was concentrating furiously and her needles hissed together like tyres speeding on a wet road. No matter that she was dropping more stitches than she made, it being nearly one in the morning and all. She kept up the momentum, click, hiss, ignore, click, hiss, ignore. Motherhood may have slightly rounded Jacquie Carpenter, but it had made her more beautiful too. The grey eyes, smiling in the symmetry of her face; the lips parted in greeting. Tonight, however, was a little different.
Maxwell tried the jolly approach. ‘Hello, Heart of Darkness,’ he beamed, hurling cap and scarf in all directions. ‘Got home safely, then. Nole in bed, is he? Good show.’
Click. Hiss. Ignore.
‘You’ll never guess what happened to me this evening.’
Jacquie put down her raddled knitting and stared at the man she lived with. ‘Ooh,’ she said, icily. ‘Let me take a stab. You went to the pub with a member of your department and spent the evening lesson planning. No, no, wait a minute. That sounds a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it? Like an episode of Hustle. Let me think, now.’ She tapped her chin with her empty knitting needle. ‘Oh, no, now wait a minute. I’ve got it. You went wandering off over the dunes with some mad photographer and found a body.’ She looked up, hands clasped now under her chin, the picture of an Angela Brazil heroine winning the hockey cup for the third time running. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense,’ she said. ‘Which of those was it?’
‘You’ve heard, then?’ he said, still smiling brightly, wondering whether he should risk a tip-toe to the drinks cabinet. After all, they called his favourite Southern Comfort SOCO these days; singularly apt bearing in mind the company he had recently been keeping.