by M. J. Trow
Legs Diamond had obviously taken the brunt, as a head teacher always will. Bernard Ryan had not come out of the whole thing with too much dignity intact, but that was Bernard for you. He had been younger then, of course – as had they all – and was still clawing his way up the greasy pole, before it got just too slippery and he settled for Deputy Head at Leighford High School in perpetuity. He tried to remember whether Deirdre Lessing had been there and decided that she had. He tried not to think of her as poor Deirdre; before death had claimed her she had been as vicious and ambitious as anyone he had ever worked with and so sympathy was pretty much wasted. She wore a halo now, but there was a time when live snakes coiled in her hair and she was a creature of a different culture. In fact, thinking harder, he realised that Deirdre had featured in almost all of Matthew Hendricks’s more lurid accusations. They were unfounded but the boy had had no idea at the time, any more than had her colleagues, as to how near to the truth he had inadvertently come. Now … who else? Maxwell whistled softly as he looked at the ceiling, thinking.
‘Dads? Dads!’ Suddenly the present was very present in the shape of his son.
‘Hmm? Sorry, mate,’ he focused on the child in question. ‘What can I do you for?’
‘My hamster has gone under the sofa and the Count has gone after it. He won’t eat it, will he?’ The big eyes were wide with worry. It seemed only yesterday that all Nolan could manage of the cat’s name was Nik, and now he gave him his title. Ah, the miracles of modern education.
‘Are you worried about the Count or the hamster?’ Maxwell asked, playing for time.
The fear flickered and Nolan’s father realised he had made an error. Before, the boy had only been worried about the hamster. Now he was worried about the cat as well. The child’s mouth opened in preparation for a short burst of incoherent crying; this was a rare sound inside 38 Columbine and Maxwell was keen to nip it in the bud.
‘They’ll both be all right, Nole,’ he said, jumping up. ‘I’ll get them out.’ He knew this would probably involve some probing with the walking stick they kept in the kitchen for closing the window without falling out; always a good plan when you are on the first floor. The hamster wouldn’t fight back but Count Metternich was an altogether different proposition and Maxwell had the scars to prove it. ‘Look, why don’t you pop downstairs and see if Mrs Troubridge would like to see you today? It’s a bit lonely for old people at Christmas.’ He didn’t really want Nolan to see him sweeping under the sofa with a stick. The boy was too young to have seen Willard and that was about rats rather than hamsters, but you couldn’t be too careful. Maxwell and Metternich knew there was no harmful intent, but it would damage his credibility at a later date, he knew. His son was like an elephant, not because he was large, grey and wrinkled but because he had forgotten nothing since birth, or so it sometimes felt.
Nolan’s face was a picture of indecision. He had known his father pretty much all his life and knew the old chap inside out. He could spot a bit of misdirection a mile away and sometimes he decided to let it go and sometimes he didn’t. But it was Christmas after all and he was minded to be generous. Not to mention the fact that Mrs Troubridge was truly rubbish at any board game you cared to mention, so he knew that his victories were one hundred per cent genuine. He decided. ‘Yes, I will. She’d like that. Do I need to put my coat on?’
‘I think so, mate. It’s been snowing again. Pop your wellies on as well, but take your slippers. You know how women can be.’
Both the Maxwell men made a clicking noise with their tongue and rolled their eyes. They both loved the women in their lives and respected all the others that came their way, up to and including Mrs Whatmough, but they liked to play the chauvinist when they were together, for the solidarity. Maxwell helped Nolan wrestle his way into the duffle coat Mrs Whatmough’s establishment insisted upon, and after a slight sidetrack involving mittens on a string, he was ready. Maxwell watched from the landing as his boy negotiated the stairs and let himself out.
‘Don’t close the door until Mrs Troubridge answers,’ he called down.
‘No probs, Dads,’ Nolan called and Maxwell could hear him talking to himself as he waited. Then, he heard him say, ‘Merry Boxing Day, Mrs Troubridge. Can I come and visit you so you aren’t lonely?’ Distant twitterings betokened Mrs Troubridge’s pleasure and Nolan called out, ‘It’s OK, Dads. She says I can visit. See you later,’ and with the slam of two doors, he was gone.
Maxwell turned back to the task in hand and advanced, twirling the cane in his best Charlie Chaplin, on the sofa and the cat.
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ he cooed and knelt down to peer under the furniture. Two baleful yellow eyes looked back at him from the dark and Metternich gave him his warning siren, a growl so far back in the throat it was the sound of the sabretooth tiger which lurks in every household moggie. ‘Metternich! Let go of the hamster and come out with your paws in the air. Well, not that, because you wouldn’t be able to walk then – I’m not an unreasonable man. Don’t make me use the stick.’ He brandished it in a firm but unthreatening way. The yellow eyes widened a little but otherwise the cat gave no sign that he was at all put out.
Maxwell decided to try a little reverse psychology. He’d long ago realised the pointlessness of ‘Step away from the settee’ and reading the cat his rights.
‘I think I’ll pop up into the loft for a bit,’ he remarked, to no one in particular. ‘See how the glue is drying on TSM Linkon.’ He genuinely was dying to get cracking on Captain Bob Portal of the 4th Lights, his 54-millimetre present from Jacquie’s mother after a rather hefty hint from her daughter, but he had to be strict with himself. No starting on a new one before he had finished the one before had been his watchword throughout his long years of modelling. The Charge of the Light Brigade or, more correctly, his diorama of the moments before the balloon went up in the battle, was coming along nicely and he was beginning to wonder what he could do when it was finished. There had been dark rumblings about the spare room needing a lick of paint, but it wouldn’t be the same. And if his encyclopaedic knowledge of cavalry charges was anything to go by, wasn’t there a little thing called the Heavy Brigade too? He hadn’t the heart to tell Jacquie they’d have to move to accommodate it. Scarlett and Scarlett’s three hundred may have to wait.
He backed away across the carpet, painfully finding one of the missing Monopoly pieces as he did so; aren’t top hats hard? Muffling an oath and scrambling to his feet, he hummed a little as he walked along the landing and was only on the first step of the next flight of stairs when a black and white streak whizzed past him, mercifully without a piece of mangled orange nylon fur in its jaws. Chuckling, he doubled back and retrieved the hamster and hid it in a drawer in the kitchen, where it could lie in wait to give him a nasty turn the next time he was looking for a teaspoon. Then, because the idea was in his head and Nolan was safely stowed with Mrs Troubridge, he turned and made his way up to the War Office to do a bit of gluing, muttering as he went, ‘“Forward, the Light Brigade. Was there a man dismayed?” You’d better believe it.’
Henry Hall tapped gently on the whiteboard behind him with the marker he had been using to write out the salient points. He glanced over the people gathered in front of him and made a few mental notes. There were a few missing who would have some explaining to do. Some of the messages on his voicemail that morning had actually been quite amusing, and this morning Henry Hall was in the mood to be amused. Pete Spottiswood’s mother-in-law had been taken ill over the Christmas pudding and so he would not be back until New Year. There were several things about this message which would be clear to any policeman, even one without Henry Hall’s many years’ experience. Firstly, what had she been taken ill with that would take exactly a week to recover from and secondly, and perhaps most importantly, Pete Spottiswood’s mother-in-law had been buried with two weeks’ pomp and circumstance only last September. No wonder she wasn’t feeling well. And Bob Thorogood, who had ‘forgotte
n’ that he was on call … well, Bob might well be heading for either Traffic or early retirement. Hall decided he would wait and see on that one; he didn’t want his good mood caused by the removal of a boil on the arse of mankind to sway his judgement. He tapped a little harder on the whiteboard.
‘If I could have your attention? Thank you.’
‘… buggered if I care.’ Bob Thorogood’s voice rang out alone as everyone else stopped talking.
Hall’s mind was made up. Traffic it was, then. Retirement was too good for him. He glanced at Thorogood and gave him a disconcerting half-smile. Henry Hall never smiled. His eyes were unreadable behind his glasses and Bob Thorogood’s blood ran cold.
‘Hopefully you have all read the briefing notes which were left in your pigeonholes for you this morning. If you haven’t had a chance to, then the outline is that Matthew, known as Jim, Hendricks was killed last night by a single gunshot to the head. His wife found the body a few minutes later. There are no witnesses and no suspects.’
‘The wife, surely,’ someone said from the back of the room. The body had been found on the Barlichway. It had to be a domestic.
‘Yes,’ Hall said. ‘We thought that too, but no. No gunshot residue on her hands, and in fact we believe, having spoken to the psychologist who has been treating Mrs Hendricks, that she would be totally incapable of committing this crime. We are looking for a third party.’
‘Family.’ This time the interjection was less certain. It was still the Barlichway.
‘Again, a good idea,’ Hall said. ‘Linda Hendricks had lost all contact with her family on her husband’s instruction.’ His voice, always colourless, was as smooth as glass. ‘We are under the impression that possibly she has been in contact with a sister, but we haven’t been able to confirm that yet. She is in a women’s hostel at the moment, pending possible inpatient psychiatric intervention.’ He forestalled any comments by adding, ‘I don’t think it really matters how truly repellent your husband is, it will still be a shock to find him spreadeagled on the path with no head.’ He looked around the room. ‘Questions, anyone?’
Bob Thorogood, with a head full of cotton wool and unnamed fears, had been trying to think of something intelligent to say ever since Henry Hall had caught his eye. He moistened his lips and diffidently raised his hand.
‘Bob.’ Never had a syllable had less emphasis, less to go on. Thorogood was totally unnerved.
‘Well, guv, as you know, it was actually my shout last night, but for some reason despatch called DI Carpenter …’
There were catcalls and general rhubarb in which the most audible word was ‘pissed’.
‘… and I had worked on the case before,’ Thorogood persisted. ‘We all knew he was good for it, if it hadn’t have been for his missus changing her evidence.’ Thorogood stopped as he heard the next sentence in his head and knew it was probably rubbish. But he had to say something now he had started and so, speaking more quickly to get it over with, he said, ‘I reckon it might be one of us, you know.’ He twisted round in his chair to grimace at his colleagues, to make it sound less like his actual opinion. ‘It sounds daft, and I don’t mean one of us,’ and he took in the room with a sweep of his arm. ‘I mean one of the good guys.’
And to his relief and surprise, no one laughed. Especially not Henry Hall.
In the loft at 38 Columbine all was peace and seasonal goodwill. Troop Sergeant Major John Linkon of the 13th Light Dragoons was coming along nicely and would soon be glued to the saddle of the bay that would be killed in the mad charge the real man had ridden back in the October of 1854, when Peter Maxwell had been limbering up for his O levels. The TSM had gone on after the Charge to be a drill instructor with the Hampshire Yeomanry and then a man from the Pru. Downhill all the way. Had he lived longer, he would probably have become a deputy head.
The snow covering the skylight gave an eerie glow to the room, warmed as the cold light reached the desk by the pool of yellow that lit Maxwell’s endeavours. Metternich was stretched out on the ex-laundry basket, moulded over the years to his increasing girth and as comfortable as a hammock to the great black and white beast. Maxwell and his cat echoed each other in a little sigh of pleasure.
Then, Metternich’s least favourite noise, the ringing of the phone, broke the companionable silence. Maxwell had TSM Linkon in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He dithered for a moment, then clenched the brush between his teeth and picked up the instrument.
‘Or O-i,’ he said, indistinctly.
‘What?’ roared the voice on the other end of the line. ‘Who the hell is that? I want to speak to Mr Peter Maxwell. Put him on.’ It was so loud that Maxwell swore he could feel the hair stir on the non-phone side of his head. Metternich sat bolt upright, ears flat and eyes staring. Maxwell swore that Linkon’s plastic horse whinnied and trotted away. It could only be one person. He removed the brush from his mouth and tried again.
‘Jeff,’ he cried with as much enthusiasm as he could. ‘Sorry about that. I had something in my mouth. How can I help you?’ He raised his eyebrows at the Count, who turned round three times and settled back to sleep, but with his back ostentatiously turned.
‘Well, we’re all here, wondering what the hell there is to do here in Leighford. Nothing’s open, just some hardware stores and a bookshop.’
Maxwell had never heard such contempt in two syllables as Jeff O’Malley managed to get into the word ‘bookshop’. ‘It’s Boxing Day,’ he ventured.
‘Yeah, we heard of that. What does it mean, anyway, Boxing Day? Is there boxing somewhere?’ His voice brightened. ‘I was a useful pair of fists, back in the day.’
‘No one’s quite sure where the name comes from,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s tradition.’ He wasn’t anxious to cast any more detailed pearls of wisdom in the direction of this particular swine.
‘Oh, tradition.’ Maxwell could tell from the tone that O’Malley had turned to his daughter and that they were laughing at the quaint old English ways. Hector Gold had better be a really good teacher to make up for this. And yet, with this family as his choice, what were the odds? ‘Well, I said to Hec, I said, I know old Max will know what’s what. He strikes me as a man who knows how to have a good time.’
Maxwell was briefly speechless wondering how he had managed, standing in his tinsel-laden sitting room, in a cardigan and slippers, in the company of his elderly neighbour, his young wife and small son, to nevertheless give the impression of a man who knew how to have a good time. ‘What kind of good time did you have in mind?’ he eventually asked.
‘A game?’ Jeff asked wistfully.
‘Leighford United might be playing today,’ Maxwell said, doubtfully. He knew football happened, but happily only to other people. He had been a rugger bugger through and through. Rucks, mauls, incomprehensible rules and the last man in the shower’s a cissy.
O’Malley was suspicious. ‘That sounds a hell of a lot like soccer to me,’ he said.
‘Yes, soccer, that’s right. I believe there is sometimes ice hockey at the rink down on the Esplanade.’
‘Ice hockey! Canadian rubbish!’ said O’Malley, the Californian through and through. ‘No baseball? No proper football?’
‘This is Sussex, Jeff,’ Maxwell felt it necessary to tell him. ‘Yea, Sussex by the sea. And it’s Boxing Day.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Have you considered a trip up to London, perhaps? I’m sure there is a lot going on there, even today. Sales, for example. A few bargains to be had, I’m sure. Didn’t one of your fellow countrymen pick up London Bridge for a snip not so long ago?’
‘With your economy, everything is more expensive than back home.’ O’Malley’s mouth shut with a snap.
‘Walk on the beach?’
‘Call that a beach?’
‘Perhaps you can find some American football on the television.’ Maxwell was now clutching at straws, as he knew a smack in the mouth could often offend.
‘Ha!’ O’Malley’s scorn nearly burst Maxwell’s eardr
ums. ‘I can’t find any sport at all. There only seems to be about thirty or so channels. Hasn’t anyone got cable around here?’
‘Cable isn’t so common in England,’ Maxwell said. He thought furiously; surely Paul and Amanda had Sky? A sixth sense told him to think very carefully before his next remark. ‘We have Freeview. That’s where all the channels come from. There are some sports channels on that.’
‘Nothing I’m interested in,’ O’Malley said, dismissing the entire television output of the country in four words. ‘Say, didn’t I see a dish on your house? You got satellite?’
‘Gosh, no,’ Maxwell said. ‘Used to have. Had it taken out. Didn’t get the use out of it. No, no, ha, no, we’ve just got the old Freeview.’
‘Hmm.’ The ex-policeman sounded unconvinced. ‘Little lady in?’
‘Pardon?’ Maxwell was suddenly at a loss. What was the man talking about?
‘Jacquie? Is she in?’
‘No, she’s at work today. A murder last night.’
‘Just the one?’ O’Malley sounded dismissive.
‘As I may have mentioned,’ Maxwell said, somewhere between exhausted and curt, ‘this is Sussex, Jeff. We usually manage with just the one a day. If that.’
‘Call that a murder rate?’ O’Malley said. ‘Well, if you’ve got no ideas, I’ll let you get on with whatever you’re doing.’ There was a pause. ‘What are you doing?’
Maxwell decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘I’m sitting in my attic with my cat, painting a small plastic soldier.’
O’Malley guffawed. ‘Sure you are,’ he said, and at last the phone went down.
‘So he said,’ Maxwell told his wife, curling a lock of her hair round his finger, ‘“Sure you are” and rang off.’ It was a perfect Jeff O’Malley.
Jacquie snorted and turned her head, almost pulling the hair out as she did so. ‘Ow.’ She slapped at his hand and he changed the lock. ‘I don’t believe you.’