Maxwell’s Curse (13 page)

‘Not as glad as I am,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

‘Actually, Max, I won’t. Not here. I wanted to have a chat, but I can’t hear a blasted thing above this row. Look, my flat’s not far away. Fancy a Chinese?’

‘Do you know, I do,’ Maxwell said. ‘Must be all this wrestling I’ve been doing.’

Maxwell fished around for the last bit of crispy duck and pushed the carton away. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I shall want another in a minute.’

Both men laughed. Foulkes’ flat was in a wing of a Victorian house, still redolent of spring sunshine with new emulsion and furniture wrapped in polythene bags. Only the essentials were out and working – cooker, freezer, telly, computer. The social worker had apologized for the mess. He’d only been here since December and his caseload was already so huge, his social life was on hold.

‘So you thought I was some sort of warlock,’ Maxwell said, sipping the cold beer Foulkes had poured him.

The social worker raised both his hands, laughing. ‘I’m sorry, Max,’ he said. ‘Idiotic of me, I know, but after the things I saw in Broxtowe … Well, you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘I thought that was all tosh,’ Maxwell said. ‘Satanic abuse and so on.’

Foulkes shook his head. ‘I have to keep an open mind. It’s like child pornography on the Net. Perverts say it’s harmless – just computer images. But they’re not, Max, they’re real children. And they’re being abused somewhere in the world every day of the week. Then there was all that business in North Wales last year.’

‘But I don’t see how my calendar …’

‘Midwinter Solstice, Beltane, Lammas, Samhain, four of the eight major Sabbats of Wicca, the Old Religion. I suppose I’m paranoid now, looking for the links wherever I go.’

‘But it’s not my calendar.’

‘Not?’ Foulkes looked up from his remaining noodles.

‘Look, Crispin,’ the Head of Sixth Form sat upright, facing his man. ‘If I tell you something, can you assure me it’ll go no further? It could get someone I know into a lot of trouble – not to mention me.’

‘Confidentiality goes with my territory, Max,’ Foulkes said. ‘Like the confessional and the Official Secrets Act all rolled into one.’

Maxwell nodded. ‘I half-inched the calendar from the house of the old woman I found on my doorstep on New Year’s Eve.’

‘Yes, I read about that. Elizabeth … what’s her name … Prior?’

‘Pride.’

‘What were you doing there? At her house, I mean?’

‘That’s a long story,’ Maxwell said, ‘and I can’t go into it now. Does that make any difference? I mean the fact that the calendar was hers not mine?’

‘It might,’ Foulkes said, deep in thought. ‘You seem very well informed about this business, Max. Would I be chancing my arm to suggest that the friend you want to protect is Jacquie Carpenter?’

Maxwell raised a hand. ‘Now, come on, Crispin,’ he said. ‘Play the white man. And I didn’t say the person I know is a friend, did I?’

‘Touché!’ Foulkes laughed, acceding to the cryptic old bastard’s point.

‘Don’t,’ Maxwell shuddered. ‘Too many painful memories.’

They’d told Martin and Alex Stone that if nothing had transpired by Monday, they’d have to induce. With little Janey it had been easy – like shelling peas as the midwife had put it. But this one was different, a big bugger with a bone idle streak. Martin Stone was picturing the moving scan in his mind when he heard his name echoing down the long corridor of relevance.

‘Martin?’

‘Guv?’

The DCI was looking at him, inscrutable as ever. Damn! That was a few demerits in anybody’s book. Stone was on his feet, telling himself to concentrate. He hadn’t taken in Simon Reilly’s photographs of the laid-out corpse of the Reverend Darblay, nor the nastier ones that closed in with chilling full frontal morbidity on the shattered head. Perhaps it was just as well. He’d had the nightmares before and he didn’t want all that in Alex’s lap. She had enough to contend with.

He reached the front of the Incident Room as someone snapped off the carousel’s smoky beam and the neon strips restored mock daylight.

‘Andrew Darblay?’ Hall reminded the man of his mission.

‘Yes, guv, thank you. The Reverend Darblay was sixty- three. He’d been rector of Wetherton for nearly twenty years.’

‘Family?’ somebody asked.

‘A wife, Dorothy, died of leukaemia a while back. No kids. He was well-liked by the churchgoers, a dwindling band of course these days. One or two we’ve spoken to found him a bit of a fuddy duddy …’

‘Goes with the territory, doesn’t it?’ somebody asked.

‘Part of the Oxford Tripos whatsit, isn’t it?’ There were sniggers all round.

Henry Hall sensed the change of mood. Before they’d found Darblay, the air crackled with suppressed tension. No leads on old lady Pride, brick walls, tight lips. Now, with the dead rector, there was expectation in the wind. A different body, in a different place at a different time. He let the ribaldry subside. Men and women with laughter on their lips were at ease with themselves. They got on with their work, even, in a curious sort of way, enjoyed it.

‘We spoke to his housekeeper,’ Stone went on, ‘a Mrs Spooner. She doted on the man and is very upset by it all. Said he hadn’t an enemy in the world.’

‘She would, wouldn’t she?’ somebody asked.

‘Nothing in the parish council?’ Hall prodded. ‘Often a centre of intrigue in my book.’

Stone wondered what book it was that his guv’nor was using. ‘We haven’t seen everybody yet, sir,’ he said. ‘It may be something will crawl out of the woodwork.’

‘What do we know about his last movements?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘Jacquie?’ Stone took a chair and watched the girl take centre stage.

‘Mrs Spooner usually arrives at seven thirty to cook breakfast,’ she told the team. ‘Mr Darblay was always up by the time she got there and the house was unlocked. He was usually in his study working on his sermons and they’d have a cup of coffee together.’

‘And on the morning in question?’ Even fast-track graduates like Hall lapsed into policespeak every so often.

‘She couldn’t find him,’ Jacquie said. ‘That didn’t bother Mrs Spooner. The deal was if he wasn’t in the house, she’d brew the coffee and leave it in the filter machine. He was either in the church or out walking. That happened on average a couple of times a month.’

‘That morning he was in the church?’ Hall asked.

Jacquie nodded. ‘Dr Astley gives the time of death as between six and eight. The local bobby says the church was never locked …’

‘Isn’t that a bit unusual?’ Hall queried.

‘Darblay insisted on it,’ Stone piped up. ‘Said – and I quote Mrs Spooner “God’s house should always be open”. We’re assuming at the moment that he went to the church, perhaps to get something from the vestry, and disturbed somebody already there.’

‘Which brings us to the desecration,’ Hall nodded. ‘Who’s got anything on that?’

‘I’ve been doing a bit of digging, guv.’ Kevin Brand was on his feet. ‘Mind you, the Net’s a bit dodgy on all this.’

‘Go on.’

‘Black candles on the altar is not your standard C of E, but you can buy ’em, mind, almost anywhere these days. It’s very Goth, apparently, whatever that means.’

‘Mrs Spooner had never heard of Darblay owning any black candles,’ Jacquie filled in.

‘The heart on the altar was that of a sheep …’

There was a ripple of suppressed laughter, while Brand kept going. ‘Wetherton’s a rural area, farming community. Any one of a thousand people had access to a sheep carcass.’

‘What’s the fingerprint score?’ Hall asked.

‘Hundreds, guv,’ Brand shrugged. ‘The lab are doing their best, but there’s choirboys, servers, cleaners, the women that do the flowers. The candles are clean, though. Our boy was careful with that. I’m working on the graffiti as we speak.’

‘How far have you got?’ the DCI leaned forward.

Brand sighed, waiting for the sniggers. ‘It’s what they call a Pentagram. It’s usually drawn in the air with an athame …’

‘Whatname?’ somebody called.

Laughter.

‘It’s a sword,’ Brand kept going.

‘The thing on the altar was done with a sword?’

‘No, a finger. The Pentagram’s called a Witches’ Star and sometimes a Goblin’s Cross. Its point faces downwards – that means black magic, devil worship.’

Hall quietened down the whistles and cat calls.

‘You’ve been watching too many Blair Witch Projects, Kev, me old mucker!’ It was the last bit of nonsense Hall was going to tolerate. ‘Jacquie, Martin, any history of this sort of thing at Wetherton?’

‘None reported, guv,’ Stone said. ‘It’s bloody weird, though.’

‘Yes,’ Hall mused. ‘I’m beginning to think it is.’

‘I’m glad we stayed in,’ Jacquie raised her glass to Maxwell. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for
Sleepy Hollow
again – too many heads.’

‘Darblay,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I wondered if you wanted to talk.’

‘Yes,’ she said, then quicker, ‘no.’

He caught her gaze.

‘Damn you, Max. Is this what it’s always going to be? One compromising situation after another?’

‘Always?’ he arched an eyebrow. ‘Now, that’s a long time, Woman Policeman. The Twelfth of Never. Is either of us talking always?’

She looked at him, across the polished pine of her dining- room table, his lasagne gone, his wine half drunk, his eyes bright and kindly in the candlelight. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘Are we?’

He smiled. ‘Darblay,’ he said again.

She leaned back in her chair, ‘I’ve got cheese and biscuits or bananas and custard.’

‘Temptress!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll make a start on the cheese and bickies, please. The rector seemed a decent enough bloke.’

‘What?’

He was being domestic, collecting up the dishes, humming ‘One man went to mow, went to mow a modem …’ Not that he had the first idea what a modem was.

‘Max!’ She was at his elbow, racing him into the kitchen. ‘Are you telling me you knew Andrew Darblay?’

‘I met him, yes.’

‘What? Some time ago?’

‘Ah,’ he was illuminated by the fridge-light, ‘Stilton.’ It was an excellent Homer Simpson. ‘Last Sunday.’

‘You shite!’ She spun him round. ‘Never mind the Stilton. Talk to me.’

‘Aha,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘“But it’s saviour of ’is country when the guns begin to shoot”.’ Kipling was a little lost on Jacquie Carpenter and she continued to face her man down. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You put the coffee on. I’ll crumble the cheese. And we’ll talk about the dear, dead days.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Jacquie relaxed her grip from his shoulders. ‘You were talking to Darblay about his beautiful church.’

‘Yes, I was actually.’

She fussed with the filter. ‘It didn’t look so beautiful smeared with his blood.’

Maxwell stopped in mid-crumble. ‘God, Jacquie, I’m so sorry.’ He put the crackers down and took her face in his hands, kissing her softly. ‘Here I am being a cryptic bastard and you’re up to your elbows in somebody else’s blood. Was it terrible?’

She shrugged. She always felt like a little girl in Maxwell’s arms. She held his hands, warm and strong and safe. She felt like crying. It had been a tough three days. ‘You’ve seen your corpse too,’ she said.

He sighed. ‘It’s the season,’ he said. ‘Winter. Isn’t this the deadly month – January?’

‘We’re not talking about the weather, Max,’ she shook her head.

He looked at his girl, quiet, sensible, solid Jacquie, the face of an angel and the heart of a man. ‘Swap you, then,’ he challenged her. ‘Over coffee. Over cheese and bickies. Here and now,’ he swung his hips coyly, lapsing into his deep South. ‘Ah’ll show you mine if’n you show me yours.’

She laughed despite herself. Despite the dead face of Andrew Darblay that grinned at her from every fold in her curtains, every knot in her pine. ‘All right,’ she said, clipping him on the chin. ‘But you first.’

‘Done,’ he said and instantly became Jim Carrey as
Ace Ventura
. ‘I was the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.’ Then he was Maxwell. ‘Mr Hall, for reasons best known to himself, dropped me Elizabeth Pride’s address. It was only a short step from there to Wetherton and the local man of the cloth.’

She clicked her fingers. ‘
Littlehampton Mercury
,’’ she said. ‘I might have known.’

‘It’s not an alias I often use,’ he told her. ‘Bit suspect?’

‘No such paper. DS Stone took me all the way to Wetherton to check on you. Darblay reported a bogus newspaperman to the blokes at the Incident Room. Rang in specially.’

Maxwell chuckled. ‘Pretty astute clergyman there. How did he die?’

‘Not just yet.’ The coffee gurgled in the corner. ‘What did Darblay tell you?’

‘Ooh, let me see.’ Maxwell scraped back a chair and buttered a cracker. ‘That Elizabeth Pride was pure evil.’

‘Evil?’ Jacquie frowned. ‘That’s rather an old-fashioned word.’

‘Andrew Darblay was an old-fashioned man,’ he said. ‘Housekeeper, rectory, in tune with his tombs and his ogee work. Reminded me of Alec Guinness in
Kind Hearts and Coronets
– the Reverend d’Ascoyne, I mean, not all his siblings. Clearly, Mrs Pride was no churchgoer. Your turn.’

She poured the coffee for them both. ‘He was battered to death.’

‘So the radio said this morning,’ he nodded. ‘I was hoping for a little more.’

She put the cups down in front of them. ‘Max, what I’m about to tell you mustn’t go any further. Do you promise?’

‘Is the Pope Polish?’ he asked her.

‘Promise me, Max,’ and she reached for his hand.

‘I promise,’ he said, his voice steady as a church and as deep as her love for him.

‘We found him laid out in the nave. I don’t mean sprawled on the floor, I mean laid out, arms across his chest.’

‘Like Elizabeth Pride,’ Maxwell said, the hairs on his neck beginning to crawl like they do when a haunting tune hits home.

Jacquie nodded. ‘He was holding a crucifix upside down in his hands.’

‘Really?’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he murmured. ‘The Templars were accused of that, spitting on the cross, worshipping it upside down.’

‘Templars?’

‘Monk knights – or knight monks – take your pick. They were an enormously rich and powerful cult until the fourteenth century when they looked funny at the king of France one day and he axed them all – or, more literally, burned them at the stake. They were supposed to worship the severed head of a horned god called Baphomet.’