Maxwell's Chain (12 page)

‘Well, they were out of hand, Mr Maxwell. I didn’t want your…your…’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell helped him out, smiling. ‘I have that trouble too. I hate the whole ‘partner’ thing myself. A partner is somebody you’re in business with. Girlfriend seems a little silly at my age. The mother of my child seems a touch formal. And she’s not my wife.’

‘Oh.’ Nick was taken aback. The old devil! It was the old generation-gap thing. Nobody over thirty could possibly have a live-in-lover.

‘Thanks, anyway. You didn’t want my Significant Other to be hurt. I appreciate that.’ A tinny tune rang out from among the boy’s clothing. To Maxwell’s amazement, he recognised it. ‘I didn’t have you down for a Diana Ross fan,’ he said, as the lad foraged in amongst his chef’s whites and scarlets, bought for twenty-stone Terry and looking a little voluminous on eleven-stone Nicholas.

‘What?’ he said to Maxwell, then to the phone, ‘Yeah? No. I’ve closed up. Bit of trouble. Yeah, the usual. I’m with Mr Maxwell at the moment. Yeah, OK. Later.’ He stowed the phone away and smiled at Maxwell. ‘Lobber sends his,’ he said. ‘He’ll be round in a bit, to pick me up now we’ve shut for the night.’

‘You’ve closed? Just because of a few spotty
hoodies? What will your boss say?’

‘He’s on holiday, that’s why I’m in charge.’

‘So the old guy in the kitchen with you wasn’t Terry?’ Maxwell had noticed the man hovering as the police effectively emptied the place of customers.

‘Him!’ Nicholas laughed. ‘No, that’s Alf. He’s my sous-chef! No, Terry won’t mind – he only needs to sell about twenty burgers to cover the staff.’

‘How many have you sold?’

‘What did you have?’

‘A couple of Everything-on-its.’

‘Two of those, then.’ He spread his arms. ‘We are not an eaterie where gourmets gather. It’s the chucking out trade we rely on and there’s a late shift for that, comes on in about an hour and a half. They’ll open up.’

‘Do you have much trouble like we’ve just had?’

‘Not as a rule. Certainly not when Terry’s here. He’s built like a brick shithouse and just wades in. That lot though – I didn’t recognise them. They must be from out of town.’

‘That’s what I thought. Not Leighford High. I’ve seen a few groups around lately. I even broke up a bit of a mugging the other day. As I’m sure you are already aware, I do tend to look at faces, sort out trouble-makers, give them a bit of a hard time the next day.’

Nick had just seen how hard and Maxwell hadn’t even waited for the next day. He pressed his hands on the table and pushed himself back, the chair squeaking on the greasy floor. ‘Oh, yes, Mr Maxwell,’ he laughed. ‘We
all
knew that. It’s in the unofficial
Guide To Surviving Leighford High
.’

‘As it should be,’ Maxwell grinned, wondering where he could buy a copy. He got up. ‘I’ll leave you to finish up. Its way past my bedtime.’ He went to stand by the door. The Dandruff Kid shot the bolts for him, careful to keep at arm’s length, and he sauntered off up the road. The night was still now, apart from the odd car whose tyres hissed across the standing water of half a day of rain. The truth was, he didn’t really want to meet the unlovely Lobber, Nick’s oppo. He had always been a menace at school and just because he was now in the world at large, he wasn’t much better. Maxwell just hoped he didn’t sell anything expensive, like houses or cars, in his High Street employment. He personally wouldn’t buy a stamp from him; it was bound to have been booby trapped in some hilarious way that only Lobber found amusing. He had no idea why the two of them were friends, except that presumably opposites attract. He was just glad they were soon going their separate ways.

As he rounded the corner, he saw a furtive figure
slip into a doorway. Most men would have gone home to their cosy firesides, thanked the babysitter profusely, slipped her an extra fiver and hunkered down with a large SoCo to await the arrival of the Mem, all hot and handcuffed from a hard evening at the nick. But this was Mad Max and something about the profile made him follow the shadow and as he made the same turn, he realised he was following Gregory Adair up a narrow alley. Maxwell and the NQT were not alone; there was another figure sidling along between them, past the skips and piles of rubbish and, suddenly, Maxwell didn’t really want to know. He had spent the evening in the most sordid setting; nothing new for him, as it happened, but he had had enough. Perhaps he wasn’t as Mad as all that and suddenly wanted to be back in his nice warm house, paying off a nice babysitter and doing a little modelling in his attic until his nice warm…he didn’t even know what to call her in the privacy of his head. He would really have to work on this one. Anyway, he was going home. That’s it, as Billy Crystal was wont to say, when not throwing Momma from the train, and that’s all.

The babysitter was long gone, the modelling drying nicely now that blue-jacketed Corporal Morley could sit his horse, the glass of warming SoCo drained
and the cocoa mixed and ready to zap when Jacquie finally got home. Processing a load of unhelpful yobs was not her idea of a good evening out, but she was sure that Henry Hall would be satisfied. Quotas. Lists. Results. A little heavy community policing. Now they could all be lined up for David Cameron to hug. They couldn’t all have alibis for the Night in Question and it was now only a matter of time before the two cases were wrapped up and Leighford could slumber again for a while. It would be something like that, the stupid, sad bastards egging each other on, looking for trouble and finding it. Yes, Leighford could slumber at least until the season began and holiday-makers arrived, with their fights on the promenade, fatal divings from the pier, light-hearted stabbings under it, drug deals in the Little Tots’ Playground. She threw her keys on the table and collapsed on the sofa.

‘Well, that was a short bit of sleuthing,’ she said, as she eased off her shoes without untying them, to Maxwell’s irritation. She caught his expression. ‘What?’

‘Do you never untie your laces?’

She looked down. ‘No, not really. I untie them when I put them back on, you Old Peculiar. Just as I don’t undo my pyjama buttons or my blouse. Waddya going to do about it? Anyway, as I said, that
was quick. We finally got them all processed and I reckon we’ve got our man. Men. Boys. Whatever they count as, their ages are pretty varied. That was a pretty slick back flip by the way, down at Terry’s. Bearing in mind the Leighford rumour machine, by morning you’ll have sliced him in half with the roller blades attached to your knee caps.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘They should see me when I really get Mad. So,’ Maxwell steepled his fingers. Now
that
really irritated
her
, along with people who say ‘In the final analysis’ and ‘At this moment in time’. ‘You think you’ve got the perp, do you?’

‘Haven’t we?’ Jacquie raised her eyebrows. When Peter Maxwell used a phrase like ‘perp’ he was probably sniffing something.

‘Hmm, can’t be sure. Haven’t asked the cat yet – he’s usually pretty sound. But I don’t think so, no.’

‘Go on then, Sherlock,’ she said. ‘I’m all ears.’

‘You’ll have to bear with me,’ he said, stirring his cocoa with a biro, ‘because I don’t have a single scrap of evidence here, but it’s just a train of thought. Sort of thing old AJP Taylor used to come out with. You say their ages are pretty varied. Between what?’

‘Between fourteen and…um, seventeen, I think. You’d have to ask the desk sergeant.’

‘Right. Are they local?’

‘As Henry Hall suspected and you confirmed, they are from out of town. One from Tottingleigh, the rest from Littlehampton. And I don’t reckon they’re the ones you had an earlier run in with the other night, the night you and Bill did your Resurrection Men bit. You said one of them knew you.’

‘Called me a wanker,’ Maxwell remembered.

‘Must have known you pretty well, then’ Jacquie smiled.

‘So this lot tonight got here, how? In cars?’

‘Oddly enough, we don’t have a joy riding pack here, though I thought we might. They came on the bus, bizarrely enough. A couple even had Rover Tickets.’

‘How frugal,’ he smiled. ‘So, why did they make their way to lovely Leighford?’

‘They’ve all got ASBOs or restraining orders of some kind, stopping them from creating any kind of havoc where they live. A couple of them are tagged. They’re a lovely bunch.’

‘Tagged
and
bus-passed,’ Maxwell tutted, shaking his head. ‘Says it all about our schizoid society. Still, I expect their mothers love them.’ But even as he said it, he doubted it.

‘I expect they do, except the one put in hospital by her little boy last August. That was the one who
squared up to me. The one you threw across Terry’s. I understand his mother’s sending you a medal.’

‘Issues with women in authority,’ Maxwell said gravely. ‘I expect he was once spoken to harshly by a cinema usherette. So, they came on the bus. From where?’

‘The Littlehampton Cruiser Service, apparently.’

‘Do we know their bus timetable?’

‘Um…not as such.’

‘Which means not at all, I assume.’

‘Well, I expect they know it down at the nick. I don’t know it off by heart, sitting here wrapped round some cocoa – which is excellent, by the way – no, sorry. I last knowingly caught a bus in 1992.’

‘Ah, you motorists, you’re all the same. Encyclopaedic as my knowledge is, I don’t know bus timetables either, but I can soon find out.’ He got up and went along the landing to the study, little used as they both preferred to work within smiling distance of each other. She could hear distant clicking as she switched on the telly, rummaging through the channels.
Cold Case. New Tricks
.
Taggart
(again) Plus One. Why was it always shop? He was soon back. ‘I Googled Leighford buses and, amazingly, got their timetables.’

‘Why amazingly?’

‘Well, I usually get an offer to buy Leighford on
eBay, or sell me three new and used Leighfords from Amazon. And then, of course, Luscious Lesley from Leighford has a camcorder and is dying to chat to me. But I’m getting the hang of the thing, I think. Anyway, it’s on the screen.’

‘Couldn’t you have printed it out?’

Maxwell looked horrified. ‘Print it out? Of course not. My skills begin and end with Googling. Apart from Google Earth. That makes no sense at all. I have people to print things for me, up at the school.’

Jacquie sighed and put down her cocoa. She pointed at it. ‘That had better not have a skin on it when I get back,’ she said. ‘And before you ask, there’s nothing on.
A Matter of Life and Death. The Magnificent Seven. Citizen Kane.
And
Metropolis.
Same old tut every night.’ She came back in moments, without a printout and picked up the mug. She poked the surface of the drink tentatively. ‘Hmm, you’re very lucky,’ she said, sitting back down, ‘It’s touch and go.’

‘Well?’ He hadn’t fallen for her lure. Besides, he knew every word of the
Metropolis
screenplay.

‘You’re right. They could have done the first one, but not the second. Assuming they travelled by bus, of course. We have sightings that the bench was empty till well after midnight. Their last bus goes at
10.12.’ Despite the seriousness of the moment, she couldn’t help a little giggle. ‘For goodness’ sake, a gang that travels by bus. They’re a bit pathetic, aren’t they?’

‘They wear thin hooded sweatshirts in the middle of winter. They talk like New York street gangs although most of them have never been further west than Bournemouth. They have ASBOs because they have wee’d in the street. Of course they travel by bus. But they haven’t murdered anyone. I’m afraid I am going to add – yet.’ Maxwell sipped his drink. ‘Back to the sleuthing, is it?’

Jacquie shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so, actually. I think the whole “sighting” thing is a bit of a red herring. They stand out, don’t they? If someone asked you who you had seen at a particular time of night, in a particular place, then you wouldn’t mention the quiet bloke with a carrier bag, the two women walking fast because the night is cold, the little granny-type with her shitszu. You mention the gang of hoodies.’

‘True. Very true.’ They both stared into their mugs and let their minds wander. Dr Crippen could have been the man with the carrier bag, just before he cut off his wife’s head; what
did
he do that with, by the way? The two women walking fast were the Lapin sisters, on their way to gouging
out the eyeballs of the women they worked for. And as for the little granny with her shitszu…Then Maxwell added, ‘What does Henry think?’

‘We didn’t get him in. He’s really been working all hours and the gossip is he was ready to strangle the late-night guy in the lab this evening when he messed him about over this phone thing.’

‘Ah, Angus,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘So there was a phone, then? I wondered. Is it any help?’

‘How do you know Angus?’ Jacquie asked. ‘He works in Chichester.’

‘Indeed,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But he lives in Tottingleigh and once attended a series of WEA lectures I ran on the Role of the Nutter in History. He fitted right in. The phone?’

‘Hmmm, not much use,’ Jacquie shook her head. ‘We’re assuming it belongs to Lara Kent. If so, we will be able to trace calls made, calls received, texts, that sort of thing. But these pay-as-you-go phones, you know, they’re ten a penny. You don’t have to tell the truth when you register them. In fact, most of them you don’t have to fill anything in at all. You just top them up with the card that comes with them. If you do it with cash, that’s it. Untraceable.’

‘Why would she want an untraceable phone?’

‘No, no, not
her
. Her murderer.’

Maxwell sat up sharply. ‘Are you suggesting that
she knew her murderer? That Darren knew his murderer?’ He looked at her in the lamplight. ‘This is probably stupid, but I thought these killings were random.’

‘Why did you assume that?’

‘Well, she was from out of town, living…what, in a squat or something? He was local, living much rougher than squatting. She was trying to make a go of things,
Big Issue
, that kind of thing. He just seemed to have given up. Even street people have a hierarchy, a pecking order, don’t they? I just don’t imagine they would move in the same circles.’