by M. J. Trow
Maxwell thought for a moment. ‘Is stabbing loud, as a rule?’
‘Not the stabbing, no. The screaming, that can be quite loud, I’m told. There hadn’t been a struggle by the looks of things, but there could easily have been screaming.’
‘So he probably knew the person, do you think?’
‘He was in the office on a Sunday, so we are assuming that it was a specific appointment. Remind me, why am I telling you this?’ Jacquie looked at him with a severe expression.
Maxwell had secretly been wondering himself why she was being so forthcoming. Could it be because this was merely the tiniest layer of frost on the tip of the iceberg, and in fact she was keeping most of it quiet after all? ‘I can’t imagine, but do go on.’ He still had the prostitution to find out about. ‘Could he have been crept up on?’
‘Yes. But that still begs the question why was he there in the first place? With all the bad weather he might have missed the odd day and wanted to catch up, but honestly I don’t think he was that busy.’
Maxwell decided to bite the bullet. ‘You mentioned prostitution.’
‘Did I?’ She tried to look innocent.
‘Definitely. “Prostituting herself”, you said, someone in your team.’
‘Oh, probably I meant that silly girl who is moonlighting at Domino’s Pizza. Silly way to behave.’
‘Hmm. You seem to be blushing.’
‘It’s the gin. Anyway, you’ll get no more out of me. We’re done here.’
‘My word. That sounded a bit American. Something you picked up from Harry, perhaps?’
‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough Americans to last me a lifetime. I’m off to bed.’ Swinging her legs off the sofa, she went to the door. ‘Cocoa, sir?’ She wasn’t wearing a duffle coat, but otherwise she was any petty officer in any war film you cared to name. It was her way of telling him that police secrets were told for tonight, the madness of being a Maxwell was back on the menu.
‘Good man, Number One. Make that two sugars.’ It was Jack Hawkins to a T.
After she had gone across to the kitchen, he sprawled for another minute, thinking. Everything told him this trio of deaths was connected. But try as he might, he couldn’t join even a single dot.
* * *
Breakfast was breakfast at 38 Columbine, no matter what the day was likely to bring. Metternich was still convinced that he might like Coco Pops this time and so was in his normal position below Nolan’s chair and in the way as much as possible. Jacquie was dressed in full detective inspector fig and eating a slice of toast standing up. Maxwell was buttering toast for general consumption and occasionally managing to eat a slice, but was at least sitting down, to give the Boy a good example. Hector Gold was the only unusual feature, sitting at the end of the table, bandbox fresh and tidy, as though his family had not just imploded and his father-in-law was, if only technically, on the run.
‘Have you heard from Camille this morning?’ Jacquie asked, for something to say.
‘I rang her last night,’ Hector answered. ‘After the … excitement. I asked her to let me know when her father got back. I haven’t heard. But that means nothing, to an O’Malley.’
Jacquie made a polite question mark with an eyebrow.
‘The O’Malleys are secretive to an almost pathological degree,’ he said. ‘I know Jeff does the big bluff Californian thing, what you see is what you get, but in fact he’s real deep. Camille thinks she knows him, but she doesn’t. She never stops to wonder why her nail bar does so well, in a street of nail bars all the same.’
‘And why does it?’ said Maxwell, almost afraid to hear the answer.
‘Because all the wives, girlfriends, their sisters, their cousins and their aunts of Jeff’s customers all get their nails done and pay over the odds and tip real well. That’s how they pay Jeff without it being dirty.’
Maxwell was impressed that the man could quote from Gilbert & Sullivan whilst talking about money laundering in the same sentence. Class!
‘You know that for a fact?’ Jacquie asked, swallowing a big bit of toast.
‘How much do you pay for a set of acrylics over here?’ He looked at their puzzled faces and then at Jacquie’s nails. ‘OK, stupid question. At home, I guess it averages at about sixty, possibly seventy-five dollars. Well, Camille charges a hundred seventy-five. When I asked her how she got so much, she said it was because she was simply the best. I think just “simple” describes her. Jeff set the prices. Some of these women come in for maintenance once a day and pay for a full set.’
‘Aren’t the staff suspicious?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Like I say, these ladies are heavy tippers.’ He glanced up at the clock. ‘Had we better be going?’ he asked. ‘Are we dropping Nolan off, or are you doing that, Jacquie?’
‘I want to go with Dads and Hector,’ Nolan said at once, jumping down and running round his mother.
Jacquie was not used to not being chauffeuse. ‘That would be wonderful, Hector, if you don’t mind. Nolan, go and get your reading book and your coat.’ She turned to Hector. ‘Do you mind being called Hector by Nolan?’ she asked. ‘He should be calling you Mr Gold.’
‘Mr Gold’s my dad,’ the American said with a grin. ‘I prefer Hec, but Hector’s fine with me.’
‘As long as you’re sure. Max, don’t forget it’s Bob Thorogood’s leaving do tonight.’
Maxwell looked bright but ignorant, hoping for more information.
‘Tonight. After work. Bob Thorogood’s leaving do.’
‘Am I coming to it?’ he asked, plaintively. If there was one thing he hated more than his own colleagues’ leaving do’s, it was someone else’s colleagues’ leaving do’s.
‘You certainly are,’ she said. ‘If you think I’m spending an evening with a whole load of policemen while you are at home in the warm, you’ve got another think coming.’
‘I thought that was what they paid you for,’ seemed a little harsh in the circumstances, so Maxwell held his counsel.
‘Can I watch Nolan for you?’ Hector asked.
‘Thanks,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s Troubridge Tuesday, but he might be home before we are. How long is this bunfight likely to last, heart?’
‘Not long,’ she said. ‘In and out, I hope. I’ll pick you up from school if you can amuse yourself till about five. Thanks, Hector, if you don’t mind being here by about six, that would be great. Mrs Troubridge has a key. Now, you boys had better be off if you don’t want to be late. Pearls before swine, and all that.’
She lined them up to see them off and felt like Snow White sending the dwarves off to the mine – in diminishing order of size, Grumpy, Skinny and Cutie. They thundered down the stairs and she wondered how these mothers of a dozen kids managed it. Three was ample. She poured a second cup of coffee as a treat and flipped open her laptop, logging on to the secure remote server. Now, let’s see what Magnum had to say for himself.
Compared with the day before, Tuesday was a veritable breeze. Hector Gold managed to get through his lessons with no more profanity and of course had the complete attention of any class he taught, simply because they didn’t want to miss a single golden four-letter word should it fall from his lips. But Hector’s explosion of Monday morning seemed to have sufficed and so they listened – as they considered it – in vain, although had they but known it, they absorbed some excellent history.
Mad Max had another crooked finger from Pansy Donaldson as he tried to sneak past her office. She wanted to know if he had replied to Mr Moss’s email or not. Obviously, the answer was ‘not’ as he hadn’t got any further along the road to sorting it out and also because he really didn’t care to embark on sending emails halfway round the world. Down the corridor was not always a guaranteed success. He managed to schmooze her into sending a generic reply to show he cared and that he would be in touch soon.
Nolan was not destined to have a good day. Sarah Gregson had been what passed for a librarian in Mrs Whatmough’s establish
ment, and although everyone had been shocked to hear of her death, those children who were ripping through the book list were already missing her more than most. Magnus Powermouse having come to its hilarious conclusion, Nolan had gone to change it in the lunchtime and had come up against the implacable rock that was the Mighty Whatmough. He had heard a rumour that she had actually been in his house while he was asleep and this made him nervous. When Nolan was nervous he became rather smart-arsed. Mrs Whatmough didn’t like smart-arses and this was the only thing, by and large, that she had in common with the rest of humanity. Nolan ended up with his first ever lunchtime detention and spent the afternoon planning how to kill Mrs Whatmough and yet escape detection; you didn’t have parents like his for nothing. It was for this reason that he missed the secrets of long division, laying the foundation for what would become a lifelong hatred of maths.
Jacquie Carpenter Maxwell was late for work. The email from Harry Schmidt had been long and complicated and she had become quite enravelled in its toils. Essentially, whatever they arrested Jeff O’Malley for, it would only be because he had it coming. Taking and offering bribes, graft, extortion, illegal betting, a tad of pimping when times were hard, money laundering – well, she knew about that – and a lot of other things with numbers instead of words which she had heard on telly but would have to look up to be sure about. About the only thing he didn’t have what Harry called a ‘rap sheet’ for was murder. The final paragraph was perhaps the most interesting.
‘This is off the record, Jacquie,’ Harry Schmidt had written, ‘because it’s kind of a personal opinion and I’ve got no proof. I was only a rookie when I met Jeff O’Malley first, and he took me under his wing. He did that with the rookies, got them on his side so they wouldn’t rat on him if they saw him doing a deal, things like that. I’d find a little stash of weed in my lunchbox, something Jeff saw as a favour. When I said I didn’t do weed, he said no problem, what did I want? He didn’t seem to get it that some people didn’t want drugs. Anyway, one night we were out on patrol. He didn’t have to come, he just liked being out with the rookies – better if they were girls, but he didn’t mind. He said he liked being out on the streets, gave him an edge. So you never forgot where the bad guys were. We saw a guy we’d picked up the week before – pimp, violent – but he got off on a technicality.’ Jacquie felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. ‘Jeff got out of the car, told me to wait and he followed the guy. They weren’t difficult to spot, the guy was wearing real bright colours. Jeff was bigger then than he is now, I reckon. I trailed them, kerb-crawling at a distance, and when the pimp took a left down an alley, Jeff went in after him. I can’t tell you what happened, because I wasn’t there, but I heard later the guy was in hospital for three weeks. I don’t know what you can make of that, but I heard later that wasn’t the first time he’d made sure someone didn’t really get away. I guess he doesn’t like to lose – so watch yourselves and Alana. He’s a loose cannon, Jacquie. Best, Harry.’
When she had finished reading, she sat for a moment, thinking. Then, glancing up at the clock, she chugged back her cold coffee and slammed the laptop shut. So much for having more time this morning! And now she had to somehow make sense of this email and share it with Henry. Damn Jeff O’Malley.
Henry Hall was, as always, totally organised. He put the statements from the remaining two card school members on Jacquie’s desk. She wasn’t in yet, but if she was late it was always for a reason. He had a quick staff meeting and went to his office to read the post-mortem report and the witness statements on the Jacob Shears case. I must be getting old, he thought to himself. Some of these names sound as familiar as my own. Have I now met everyone in this town? Is Margaret right? Is it time to retire and move somewhere else and grow vegetable marrows, like Hercule Poirot?
But of all of the people who were having less than perfect days, the one whose day had gone most pear-shaped had to be Jeff O’Malley. He was cold. He was hungry. He was pretty much lost. But most of all, he was really, really angry.
Chapter Seventeen
Maxwell was doing some marking in his office waiting for Jacquie when he heard footsteps coming along the corridor. They were accompanied by an uneven trundling, as though a very heavy supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel was being dragged by someone with a gammy leg over cobbles. If it wasn’t that, it simply had to be Mrs B, redoubtable cleaner and redistributor of dust for Leighford High, 38 Columbine and any institution not fast enough to say no when she applied for a job. Maxwell hunkered down in the chair and hoped that a cursory glance from the woman would make her assume the room to be empty. This would almost certainly make her miss it out; she only cleaned for an audience and an empty room was a cleaned room, as far as Mrs B was concerned. Opening the door moved the dust around, for heaven’s sake, and that was ample. Maxwell held his breath.
The door opened and he could almost hear the eyes raking over the room. This must have been how the first mammals felt, lurking beneath a hollow log as Tyrannosaurus Rex stalked the land, snuffling and sniffing for the taste of warmer blood than his own. The door closed and he exhaled.
‘Hello, Mr M,’ a voice said, almost in his ear. He thought for a moment that his heart had stopped for good, but it sped up again after a small hiccup. ‘Didn’t see you there. It’s bad for your back, you know, slouching down like that. Doing a bit of marking? That’s nice. That Metternich brought in something ’orrible last week I had to clean up. He needs a talking to. That DVD of Nolan at Christmas, ain’t it lovely? Mrs Troubridge ain’t half proud.’ Shortage of breath stopped her and gave Maxwell his entrée. He stood up, public schoolboy as he was at heart.
‘Mrs B. Hello!’ He limbered up for his serial replies to her monologue. This took concentration and it had been a long day. ‘Didn’t you? Is it? Yes, I am. I don’t really think so. Did he? He certainly does. It certainly is. She is indeed and who can blame her?’
The woman beamed. The world was spinning correctly when she and Mr Maxwell communicated on this special level. No one else bothered like him. He was a gentleman, Mr Maxwell was, of the old school. He might be an old git, but he was her old git and she had missed him over the Christmas holidays, when cleaning at 38 Columbine would have been not only pointless but impossible. Normal service had resumed the previous week, not that there was any way to tell, except the three crisp tenners had disappeared from the hall table and the kettle was warm when he got home.
‘Innit cold?’
Maxwell waited. There had to be more.
Mrs B flicked a duster with a crack. ‘Innit cold, Mr Maxwell? In the school?’
‘Oh, sorry, Mrs B. I wasn’t ready. Yes, it is cold. I’m sure it’s barely legal. Temperatures in the workplace, duty of care, things of that nature.’
‘Too right, Mr M. I had to put my coat on yesterday I was that cold. That’s not right, indoors when you’re working. What are you doing here still, in the cold?’
‘I’m waiting for Jacquie. We’re going to someone’s leaving do.’
Mrs B was all ears. ‘Somebody from here, is it? Going? Is it that Mrs Donaldson? Her what drinks? No better than she should be, that one.’
‘No, Mrs B. It’s someone Jacquie worked with. She should be here shortly. We won’t be staying long.’
‘Want to be back for little Nolan, I expect,’ Mrs B told him. She didn’t hold with children being babysat for, unless she was doing the babysitting. She and Mrs Troubridge waged a silent war on the care of Nolan.
‘Well, yes, but Mr Gold is going to be there when he gets in from Mrs Troubridge. He goes there on a Tuesday, as you know.’ In the whole exchange, Mrs B had not raised a duster and the vacuum cleaner was in the corridor where she considered it belonged. ‘Have you met Mr Gold?’
Mrs B sniffed. Her xenophobia was more bred in the bone than Maxwell’s and she was not one to forgive. Her mother had made dark remarks about the behaviour of Yanks Over Here in the war and her mother never lied, as everyone knew. Mrs B had been
born in 1944 when her dear old dad had been fighting his way through Italy, so it wasn’t fair that the Yanks had been over here, safe and sound, while he was laying his life on the line. Yanks! Her sniff said it all.
‘He’s a nice chap. You’d like him, I’m sure. He’s staying with us for a bit.’
The sniff was more resounding this time. ‘I understood he was married. That wife of his went in our Beyonce’s nail bar last week and created something rotten because her acrylics weren’t the right length. Our Beyonce told her, she only stocks the mediums, there’s no call for the longs in Leighford. People don’t want them, there’s just no call.’
‘How did Beyonce know it was Mrs Gold?’ Maxwell knew that Americans were fairly rare in Leighford, but surely the Golds weren’t unique.
‘Made the appointment, didn’t she? Said her name and where she was living. Mr Moss’s wife, she has her eyebrows threaded at our Beyonce’s and she’d told her all about it. She’s very meticulous, Mrs Moss.’
Maxwell was wondering what eyebrow threading could possibly be and decided it sounded painful. He tried to move the subject on. ‘There has been a bit of a problem at home,’ he said, settling for the vague option. ‘Mrs O’Malley is with Mrs Troubridge, Mr Gold is with us.’
Mrs B’s eyes gleamed. She could hardly wait for her next session at Columbine, where she would wheedle details out of Mrs Troubridge, as she gave her a ‘quick whizz’, as she termed it, before cleaning next door.
Then, just as she had Maxwell on the ropes and about to tell all, they both heard Jacquie’s heels tapping along the landing of the Mezzanine. She stuck her head round the door.
‘Hello, Mrs B,’ she said. ‘I thought that was probably your Charles outside.’ Catching Maxwell’s puzzled expression, she clarified. ‘Hoover,’ she said. Mrs B drew breath to make some opening gambit that would get more detail about Hector Gold, but Jacquie was too quick for her. ‘Must go,’ she said with a smile. ‘Leaving do. We’re not staying long, so we’d better not be too late. Ready, sweetheart?’ The last remark was to Maxwell, who was adding scarf, gloves and hat to the coat he had had on all the time.