Maxwell's Crossing (12 page)

A muffled sob implied that the Whatmough drive was always snow-free.

‘In that case, why don't you come over here and tell us about it? Jacquie – Mrs Maxwell – will probably be able to advise you better than I. Do you know … yes, I'm sorry, of course you do. We'll see you shortly, then, shall we?' He rang off and stood there for a second or two, tapping the phone against his chin. Then he went through into the sitting room. ‘Tidy away that child,' he ordered. ‘Mrs Whatmough is coming over.'

‘Mrs Whatmough?' Jacquie hissed. ‘What, are you nuts?'

‘She was crying,' he told her, simply.

She looked at him for a long minute, then scooped the sleeping Nolan up in her arms. ‘I'll just tidy away this child,' she said, making for the door, then turned. ‘But you owe me, big time.'

Sandra Bolton eventually stopped crying, blew her nose, took a huge gulp of something which may have been coffee and looked at Henry Hall. ‘Are you going to ask me questions, or shall I just tell you stuff?' she said.

‘Let's try a mixture, shall we?' Hall suggested. ‘Start by how you met Sarah Gregson.'

‘That's easy,' the WPC said. ‘We met at Zumba classes, at the council health club. She was working for
the council at the time and my other half works for them as well, so I have a family membership …'

‘Let's try and keep the details to what we need, shall we, Sandra?' Hall said, in a slightly frosty tone.

‘Sorry, guv. Well, we met and afterwards we would have a drink or something. Zumba is very exhausting, you lose a lot of fluid and …' she caught the look in Hall's eye and stopped.

‘When was this?' he asked, to get it all back on track.

‘About a year ago, maybe a little less. She was a social worker and she was finding it all a bit stressful, so when she asked me if I did any other clubs or anything apart from the Zumba, I told her about poker.'

Zumba, Hall had heard of. His wife had briefly toyed with it as a way of losing weight, but the constant Latin music coming from the spare room had finally led to a frank exchange of views and she had switched her allegiance to the rather quieter option of fat-reduced meals from Marks & Spencer to help her battle of the bulge. For a moment he wondered what Poka was then realised what she was talking about. ‘Poker? You mean, as in … poker? Cards?'

‘Yes, guv. Well, not always poker, actually. Not then. Depending on who turned up, we sometimes played canasta or cribbage. We had a room we used above the Red Lion off the High Street. Someone who used to play cards knew the landlord, ages ago, and it had just carried on.'

‘For money?' Hall could not believe his ears. This woman, this
girl
who was hoping to make a career in
the police, was playing cards for money in a room over a pub.

‘Well, not much, guv. Just enough to make it interesting, you know. Penny a point, that kind of thing.'

Hall leant over his desk and she instinctively drew back. ‘Sandra. You do know that Sarah Gregson had one thousand pounds in her bag at the time of her death?'

Sandra Bolton nodded miserably.

‘And she won that playing cards, did she?'

Again, the nod.

‘At a penny a point?'

This time there was no nod, or shake, just another storm of tears. Henry Hall pushed the box of tissues across the table and waited; and eventually, she resumed her story.

‘A few weeks ago, we had a new chap join us. I'm not sure who introduced him, he just seemed to appear from nowhere. An American chap he was, said he was over here for a while and was looking for some action. I … I'm not sure how it happened, but by the second Wednesday, he had us agreeing to no table limit. We put our foot down,' she paused a moment, wondering why that didn't sound right, then carried on anyway, ‘and said we would have to have a limit of some kind. We agreed at five hundred pounds.'

Henry Hall had never been one of those policemen who complained about how much he earned, or rather how little. Even so, he would have been hard-pressed to take five hundred pounds to a poker game once a
month, let alone more often, as this seemed to be. He asked, ‘How often did you play?'

Sandra Bolton sniffed loudly and wiped her nose. ‘Twice a week, but I think that sometimes Jeff got another game going in between.'

‘Twice a
week?
' Hall's famous imperturbability was being stretched to the limit. ‘So, how many times have you played with this kind of stake money?'

She rolled her eyes up and appeared to be calculating. ‘Last night was the fifth, I think. Or sixth. I can't remember.'

‘So, let me get this right,' Hall said. ‘Sarah Gregson had played at least five times since Christmas, with a five-hundred-pound stake. Was she lucky at cards?'

‘Not usually,' the WPC said. ‘Jeff usually won, and sometimes Mark ended up about even. The rest of us lost, as a rule.'

Hall was aghast. ‘You've lost two and a half thousand pounds in less than a month? How could you afford that?' His reply was a storm of crying. ‘Oh, I see. You couldn't afford that.' He pushed himself back from the table and walked across the room to look out onto the snowy car park. Winter Wonderland was not the first phrase that entered your head as you gazed over the rooftops of Leighford. ‘What happened last night?' he asked quietly.

‘Well,' she said, pulling herself together, ‘there were only five of us last night. There had been as many as eight, but the others had dropped out when the money got too much. Sarah won the pot and Jeff stormed out.'

She blew her nose with a finality that made Hall hope that it really
was
the last time in this exchange. ‘He isn't a very nice man, guv. He is a real bully and doesn't like to lose. He drinks a bit as well … not to be roaring drunk, you know, but just a bit more than the rest of us. Anyway, he lost. We all did, except Sarah. Jeff overturned the table and the money went everywhere. Then he left.'

The scratch of the shorthand minute-taker's pen was all that could be heard for a while, then Hall spoke, carefully, gently so as to not upset the woman. ‘I'm not a card player myself, Sandra,' he began, sitting back down behind his desk. ‘Just the odd hand of hearts or newmarket at Christmas, perhaps, so I don't really understand this but, if everyone but Sarah lost and the limit was five hundred pounds … why did she not have two and a half thousand pounds in her bag?'

‘She gave us ours back,' Sandra Bolton told him. ‘Mark, Tim and me, she gave it back.'

‘But not …' he paused, ‘do we have a surname for this Jeff?'

‘No. The rest of us all knew each other in various ways. For example, Tim works at the health club, Mark is with Highways in some capacity. He's always chasing some kind of promotion, always talking about it but I don't know what he actually does these days.'

‘Yes, I see. So how did this American chap come into the picture?'

‘I don't know. He must have known someone, perhaps one of the ones who has dropped out.'

Hall was thoughtful for a moment. ‘You were telling me about her giving the money back.'

‘Yes. She insisted. She knew we couldn't really afford to lose that much and she gave it back. She said she wouldn't come any more either, and that we shouldn't. I wasn't going to go back. I wouldn't have been comfortable without Sarah.'

‘What about the others?'

‘I'm not sure. When she gave us the money back, we all went home. We … we left her to clear up and we all went home.'

‘Had Jeff left the premises?'

‘He may have been in the pub, but there isn't anywhere else he could have been. The room doesn't connect with the pub, there's just the room and the stairs and he wasn't on the stairs. We heard the door slam when he went out and he wasn't outside when we left. The door doesn't open from the outside once we're there. The landlord lets us in and then that's it.'

‘It all sounds a bit hole-and-corner, Sandra, for a card school at a penny a point.'

She smiled wanly. ‘I know. I think the boys liked it. It was a bit James Bond.'

Hall conjured up a picture of the Red Lion in his mind. If the room upstairs had anything in common with the actual pub, James Bond was not the first thing that came to mind. More toothless old men playing dominoes still whingeing about that Margaret Thatcher and how she was ruining the country. ‘So he had gone, then, had he? You're sure?'

Sandra Bolton went white. ‘Do you mean that it was Jeff? Who killed Sarah?'

‘No ideas yet, Sandra.' He looked at her for the longest minute of her life. ‘Go home. I am suspending you from duty as of now, but I will have to ratify that with HR tomorrow. Please don't leave Leighford, we'll be needing to chat. Meanwhile, have you no contact details for any of the other three?'

‘I know where Mark and Tim work. I don't know Mark's surname and I'm not sure of Tim's. My partner will know that. I don't know Jeff's surname or where he lives.'

‘Not to worry,' Hall said. He had a look of a man whose internal filing system had just come up trumps. ‘I think I may know a woman who does. Off you go now, Sandra. We'll probably need you tomorrow, but I'll send a car.' He looked down at his tidy desk and the minute taker got up and left. Sandra Bolton knew when she had had a lucky escape and was through the door before it had closed behind the woman.

Hall sat there in silence for a moment and then reached into his pocket and took out the piece of paper. ‘Demons?' he read, then screwed it up and threw it into the bin. ‘Well, that answers that question.' He pulled the phone towards him and punched in the Maxwells' landline number. After ten rings it went to the answer phone and he replaced the receiver. He could try her mobile, but this was one that would wait. If the man he was looking for was who he thought he was, he was going to need a long time with the Maxwells to
find out all he could first and he needed all the calm he could muster before involving Mad Max in this one. Another New Year resolution had already bitten the dust and the year was scarcely two weeks old. He decided to break another and headed for the chocolate machine in the rest room. May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Betty Carpenter had always kept a tidy house and one of the things that she had instilled into her daughter was that, as long as the sofa cushions were straight and there was no fluff on the carpet, you could make any room fit for visitors in less than five minutes. With the kitchen door closed on the
toast-crumb
/tomato-covered plates and a quick squirt of something down the loo, the house was
Whatmough-ready
in no time.

And in what seemed no time at all, there was a brisk ring at the bell, followed by two sharp raps.

Maxwell, who had hardly been relaxing in his chair anyway, leapt to his feet and dashed down to open the door. Unlike most of the audience of the old Monty Python sketch, he
always
expected the Spanish Inquisition. On the step, Mrs Whatmough had recovered her composure and nodded her head
graciously to Maxwell, as if she were the householder and he the importunate visitor.

‘Mr Maxwell,' she remarked, with no inflection.

Maxwell decided to be a good host. ‘Mrs Whatmough! Come on in out of the cold.' He stepped aside to let her pass and she went up the stairs without a backward glance. He heard Jacquie greet the woman on the landing and he took three deep breaths before going up to join them.

As he went into the sitting room, Jacquie was helping Mrs Whatmough out of her coat, which she handed to Maxwell without a word. He disposed of it tidily across the back of a chair and ushered the woman to a seat by the fire. They all sat round for a moment or so, with the Headmistress surveying the room, now de-tinselled but still bearing the signs of a recent Christmas, with board games still out and a by now slightly mangled ginger battery-driven hamster on the mantelpiece. She smiled as far as she ever did.

‘What a pleasant room this is,' she told them.

‘Thank you,' Jacquie said and sat waiting patiently for the point of the visit to be broached. Then, when nothing else seemed forthcoming, she added, ‘We like it.'

‘Is Nolan not here?' Mrs Whatmough asked.

‘Having a nap,' Maxwell said. ‘We've had rather a busy afternoon.'

‘Oh, yes. Tobogganing,' she said. ‘Although we always called it sledging when I was a child. I hope he will be fully rested for school tomorrow.'

Jacquie gave Maxwell a small triumphant smile. The sledging-versus-tobogganing question had been settled by the best possible authority. ‘He'll be up shortly,' she said. ‘Then it will be supper, bath and bed. He likes his routine.'

‘Routine is the key,' Mrs Whatmough said, but without much enthusiasm. Unspoken sentences hung in the air of the room like smoke.

Maxwell was never one to hang about when a murder investigation was pending. He had not been able to get any details out of Jacquie all afternoon, not even by attaching questions to casual remarks or placing lighted matches under her fingernails. His best attempt had been ‘Just look at those two fly down that hill, was she pushed do you think or did she fall?' He was agog to know what Mrs Whatmough had to do with the whole thing but had been too polite to ask her on the doorstep. But enough was enough. Even so, he wrapped it up a little.

‘I'm sure that, like us, you don't want Nolan to hear this conversation, Mrs Whatmough. Would you like to ask anything? Tell us something, perhaps?'

This was the opening they had all been waiting for. Taking a deep breath, the Headmistress began.

‘I received a telephone call from the estranged husband of one of my staff this afternoon, a Reverend Mattley.'

‘May I interrupt, Mrs Whatmough?' Jacquie said.

‘Do, please, call me Rosemary.'

‘Er … Rosemary …'

‘Only in this context, of course. Not in school.'

Jacquie knew the rules. ‘Of course not. Where was I?' she appealed to Maxwell.

‘Interrupting.'

‘Yes. The dead woman's name was not Mattley. I wonder if we are at cross purposes.'

‘No, her name was Gregson. She and her husband had separated just before she came to work at my school,' Maxwell would have sworn he could hear capital letters on those two words, ‘and I must say I was uncomfortable about having a woman in such a situation as a teacher, but as we all know these days, marriages don't always last.' She blushed faintly under the uncompromising layer of powder and carried on. ‘I received a call from him, and it was to tell me that his wife was dead. I think he was just trying to do the right thing, to let me know she wouldn't be in on Monday.' She stopped speaking and swallowed hard, as if the situation had just hit her. Telling the staff. Telling the children. It was not a task she relished, if only because of its unfortunate effect on discipline and routine. She coughed and continued. ‘Of course, I was shocked; she was only a young woman. When he told me the circumstances I was … well, Mr Maxwell, Mrs Maxwell, I was rather upset.' Again, the small cough. ‘I had had some … personal contact with Sarah Gregson on Thursday and the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that I should speak to someone. But—'

Maxwell cut in. ‘But you didn't want to go to the police and you thought that we might be the next best thing.'

‘Not really,' she retorted. ‘I know I will have to speak to the police. But I doubt they will be doing much about this death, which I assume they will assign in the final analysis to suicide. I don't think it was, Mr Maxwell, and I had heard that you …'

‘Interest myself,' Maxwell offered.

‘Pokes his nose in,' muttered Jacquie, then, louder, ‘You don't have to worry, Rosemary. We have decided that this is murder. Officially.'

Maxwell looked at his wife out of the corner of his eye. She had obviously made the decision to share in the interests of finding something out. With luck, she would end up the better for it.

Rosemary Whatmough let her guard slip, even if only for a moment. ‘You agree? But why?'

‘There were various things at the scene which have made us lean towards conducting a murder enquiry,' Jacquie said. ‘But, Rosemary, I would be interested to know why—' Her head snapped up. ‘I'm sorry, can you wait while I go and see Nolan? I can hear him on the move. Unless …' She looked meaningfully at Maxwell, who smiled and shook his head.

‘A boy needs his mother,' he said, smugly.

‘Indeed,' Mrs Whatmough agreed.

Jacquie shot Maxwell a venomous glance and left the room.

Maxwell waited until he heard her talking to Nolan along the landing and then turned to Rosemary Whatmough. ‘So,' he said, ‘as Jacquie was about to ask, why do you think it was murder?'

The Headmistress flicked a glance to the door. ‘Well, Mr Maxwell, I … To be quite frank with you, I thought that I would be at loggerheads with the police, but now that I find that they also suspect murder …'

Maxwell decided to go out on a limb. He affected a hurt expression and said, ‘As they suspect murder, you don't need my amateur bumbling.'

‘No, no, good heavens, no. I just mean that I should share my knowledge with Mrs Maxwell, as a senior police officer, rather than …' She glanced up, met his eyes and made a decision. She folded her hands in her lap and leant forward. ‘On Thursday, Sarah Gregson came to me in great distress and asked for an advance on her salary.'

Maxwell smiled. ‘Christmas is always an expensive time, Rosemary.' He knew exactly how far teachers' salaries went.

‘Of course,' the woman agreed. Her small capon had been ridiculously overpriced, but had kept her and Yan Woo in leftovers for some days, to be fair to Messrs Waitrose. ‘But this seemed more than that. She was desperate and clearly didn't have anywhere else to turn.' She raised an unexpectedly self-aware eyebrow. ‘I can hardly imagine any of my staff would come to me with such a request unless they were quite, quite desperate, Mr Maxwell.'

This was clearly a rhetorical remark, and he let it go without reply. ‘How much did she say she needed?' he asked, instead.

‘She
asked
for two hundred and fifty, but I lent her five hundred pounds.'

Maxwell's jaw dropped. He indulged in a moment's imagining that he would be lent five hundred pounds by Legs Diamond and somehow the picture refused to take shape. Only the usual squadron of pigs roared and squealed their way across the sky, vapour trails entwined. ‘That was … incredibly generous of you, Rosemary.'

‘I happened to have it on me. I wouldn't have, as a rule. I assumed she was being blackmailed.'

‘That's a very unusual conclusion to which to jump,' he said, wondering again what sort of people had been unleashed to teach his son. ‘And also, if I may say so, would that not, were it true, be a very good reason for suicide?'

Rosemary Whatmough looked at the man before her, at his trousers, slightly baggy at the knees and still bearing a faint trace of bicycle clip creases at the cuffs; at his jumper, pulled at random places by Metternich's rare expressions of affection; at his barbed wire hair, his side whiskers, newly trimmed for a new term; at the questioning half-smile. But most of all, she looked into his kind knowing eyes and found herself to be in floods of tears.

Maxwell was immediately on his feet. He passed her a box of tissues from the coffee table and stood by her side, a hand hovering over her shoulder, which he finally decided to risk patting. The contact seemed to pull her together and she recoiled slightly, leaving him to return to his chair, hostly duties performed to perfection.

She blew her nose. ‘I apologise,' she said. ‘I have been through a rather worrying time lately.'

‘It hasn't shown,' Maxwell said. He knew that he could bestow no greater compliment.

She heaved a huge sigh. ‘Thank you,' she said. ‘I'm glad. My school means everything to me and I have been worried that … well, it means everything to me.'

The light went on in Maxwell's head. ‘Rosemary,' he said gently. ‘Are
you
being blackmailed?'

‘Ha.' The attempt at a laugh was mirthless. ‘Whatever would anyone be able to blackmail me about?'

‘Well, I have no idea,' Maxwell told her. ‘I assume it is a secret, or how would you be being blackmailed?' It seemed pretty obvious to him.

‘You are a very intelligent man, aren't you, Mr Maxwell?' she said. ‘Not just intelligent, but you know how to put two and two together.'

‘Maths is probably my weakest area,' Maxwell said, ‘but following the analogy, I do indeed know how many beans make five. Would you like to tell me about it?'

She blew her nose again, in a ladylike fashion. ‘Not really, Mr Maxwell.' She leant down and picked up her handbag and started to get up. ‘This was a mistake. I should go, really. Please give my apologies to your wife.'

The door opened and Jacquie walked in. ‘Apologies?' she asked, taking in the woman's tear-stained face. ‘What for?'

The Headmistress stood up and went towards her
coat. ‘I made a mistake. I must go home. Please don't speak of this, Mr Maxwell. I assure you that as far as I am concerned it is forgotten already.'

‘But, Mrs Whatmough. Rosemary,' Maxwell said, touching her arm. ‘Jacquie can help you, I'm sure.'

‘No. Please. I must go.' She struggled into her coat and was through the door and off before either of them could stop her. The door at the bottom of the stairs slammed behind her, and in the ringing silence, Jacquie turned to her husband.

‘Was it something I said?'

‘No, and it wasn't something I said, either. My gob is, however, metaphorically smacked. Is Nole getting up?'

‘No. He's decided to stay in bed and watch a DVD with a bowl of Coco Pops. I keep meaning to ask you, as a bit of an expert on children; are they all this easy?'

Maxwell thought briefly of his last experience of fatherhood, but knew that wasn't why she asked the question. ‘By the time they get to me, they have passed through so many hands it's hard to tell. Half of them are degenerates, a quarter sociopaths and I don't even want to think about the other forty per cent. But Nole certainly seems to be little trouble, I'll give him that. What's he watching?'

‘He was trying to decide between
Despicable
Me
and
Howl's Moving Castle.
Nightmares either way, but the way he is about choosing, he'll be asleep before he watches either. Anyway, that's enough prevarication. What was Rosemary's problem? What did you say to her?'

‘Well, I began with asking her why she thought it was murder.'

‘And why did she?'

‘It all took a bit of a funny turn from then on. She, Rosemary, suspected that she, Sarah, was being blackmailed.'

‘That's grounds for suicide, surely.'

‘As a rule. But Rosemary Whatmough has her own set of rules. And if she hasn't committed suicide because of blackmail, she doesn't really see why anyone else would. I think that was the gist.'

Jacquie leant forward, her mouth open. ‘Mrs Whatmough's being
blackmailed?
'

‘She didn't say so, but … yes.'

‘You do know that I'll have to follow this up? I can't ignore it.'

‘Yes, I know you can't ignore it, but can I follow it up? Pretty please.'

‘Max—' The phone shrilled and they both looked round wildly trying to locate the handset. Jacquie remembered first and dashed into the kitchen. Maxwell heard her say, ‘Oh, hello, guv.' There was a pause and then, ‘We were out on the Dam, sledging. We've not been back long.' Maxwell noted with pleasure that she didn't mention Rosemary Whatmough. ‘Well, of course,' he heard her say. ‘We'll be here. Bye.'

She came back into the room, the phone still in her hand. ‘Henry's coming over,' she told him. ‘Apparently, he thinks we might know the murderer personally and he wants to have a chat.'

Their eyes locked and their minds echoed each other with the same phrase. ‘Surely not Mrs Whatmough?'