Maxwell’s Curse (21 page)

Wednesday afternoons were a godsend to Peter Maxwell. He had a joyous clump of free periods during which, every early Autumn, he lied on the UCAS forms about the hopefuls applying for university and at other times he marked crap. This Wednesday, however, he’d checked with the sadist who arranged cover lessons and told him he’d be out. ‘Peter Maxwell has left the building’ echoed around the corridors of Leighford High as the Great Man bundled into Sylvia Matthews’ car and they did a runner through the school gate.

‘No bike today, Max?’ she asked him.

‘Having an oil change, Sylv,’ he said.

‘So how will you get back? You know I can’t stay.’

‘See this,’ he raised his thumb. ‘Man’s oldest tool. It’s wonderful really and so underrated. You just stick it in the air and cars come screeching to a halt, their drivers falling over each other to be of service, only too pleased to help their fellow man.’

‘Mad,’ she chuckled. ‘Stark raving mad.’

He kissed her goodbye at the lych-gate and watched as the Clio snarled away in a cloud of exhaust. Up here on the Weald, the snow had gone overnight but the hoar frost still gripped the hedgerows and looked set to stay all day. As his feet crunched on the gravel drive, he saw the flowers, still a fresh mass of colour on the unsettled grave of Andrew Darblay. No doubt the old man would secretly have liked to be buried inside, with a fine marble canopy overhead and a three-D likeness of himself in alb and stole; but there was probably some EU directive against it.

He knocked on the door of the rectory and a small, dark-haired woman answered it.

‘Mrs Spooner?’ Maxwell raised his hat.

‘Yes.’

‘My name is Peter Maxwell. I came here a few days ago to talk to Mr Darblay. Bad time though this must be, can I talk to you?’

She hesitated. ‘Are you a reporter?’

‘No,’ he told her. ‘I’m a teacher.’

‘You’d better come in.’

They talked for nearly two hours, the lonely housekeeper and the Head of Sixth Form. At the end of it, he was no further forward. From what she told him, the late rector was Jesus and Mother Teresa rolled into one. He’d put the Nice into Mr Nice Guy. He thanked Mrs Spooner for her time and crossed to the Falcon in happy hour. In the pale sun of the January afternoon, Maxwell watched the local Wetherton mums, with buggies and siblings in tow, gathering at the corner to collect their kids. The big yellow and white school bus, its engine snarling in the cold, coughed and waited in the no-parking zone outside the school gates.

‘You another of them coppers?’ the girl behind the bar asked.

Maxwell tapped the side of his nose. ‘Didn’t know I was that obvious.’

‘Are you blokes supposed to drink on duty?’

‘Surveillance,’ Maxwell confided, sipping his pint. ‘Different rules.’

‘Yeah?’ the girl’s eyes widened. ‘Who are you surveying, then?’

‘Anybody,’ Maxwell’s Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau was lost on the girl. ‘Everybody. Look,’ he was Maxwell again, ‘is this as happy as the hour gets?’ He had already noted the ancient gent dozing in the snug and the two old boys playing shove-ha’penny. Hugger-mugger at the Falcon.

‘I told the boss it wasn’t going to work. Happy hour’s supposed to be early evening – catch the punters. After lunch, it’s like a bloody morgue in here.’

‘Janet, isn’t it?’

‘Trisha,’ she corrected him.

‘Trisha. Right. Can I get you a drink?’

‘All right,’ the girl beamed. Her face took on a radiance when she smiled. Her bright eyes balanced her enormous breasts. ‘I’ll have a vodka and blackcurrant.’

‘Shrewd choice,’ Maxwell smiled.

‘You don’t mind me saying this, do you,’ she poured the drink, ‘but aren’t you a bit … well, old for a copper?’

‘This is my last case,’ Maxwell said. ‘Wanted to go out in style, write my memoirs, grow petunias.’

‘You after the bastard that killed the vicar, yeah?’

‘Rector,’ Maxwell corrected her. ‘And the headmistress.’

‘Now, that’s what I said,’ Trisha warmed to her theme, clinking Maxwell’s glass and sipping away. ‘I said to the boss the same bloke done ’em both. He said bollocks …’

‘What made you think that?’ Maxwell asked.

‘What, that the boss talks bollocks?’

‘The murders.’

‘Stands to reason. All that black magic stuff.’

‘Black magic?’ Maxwell played the ingénue.

Trisha edged closer, her breasts enveloping yet more of the bar, obliterating the cutting edge of Strongbow. ‘Look, I don’t know whether you blokes ever talk to each other, but I told your oppo.’

‘Oh?’ Maxwell was all ears. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Dunno. Some DS or other. Youngish bloke. Stone, was it? Stonewall? Something. Didn’t seem all that interested.’

‘I am,’ Maxwell assured her.

‘Well, I read this book once.’

Maxwell could believe that.

‘About this village where they was all at it?’

‘At it?’

‘Devil worship, you dirty old man.’ Trisha tapped his arm playfully.

There was a sudden series of grunts from the end of the bar and the ancient gent stood there, coins in his hand, making incomprehensible noises.

‘All right, Harold,’ Trisha said loudly. ‘Same again, is it?’ And she poured a frothy pint. ‘Thank you, love.’

Harold threw the coins on the bar and grunted again.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Trisha laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘That’s what I said, but you know him. Load of bollocks. Bon aperitif,’ and she came scurrying back. ‘Yeah,’ her confidential tone returned, ‘the leader was the vicar and everybody else was involved. They all had … whatsname … cloven hooves.’

‘Sort of BSE novel was it?’

‘No, cloven hooves. The devil. He’s got horns and a tail, he has. And of course,’ she giggled, ‘a bloody great willy.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Trisha grinned broadly. ‘There was lots of that going on. Women spread over altars and that. The vicar shagging his way through the congregation. Mind you, try getting any of ’em to buy a bloody raffle ticket …’

‘And that’s how it is in Wetherton?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Trisha pulled a face. ‘Don’t bear thinking about, does it? I mean, that Darblay bloke was a nice old git, but I can’t see the village crumpet lining up for him, know what I mean? Mind you,’ she leaned forward, whispering with a snigger, ‘Old Harold there’d be up for it.’ Maxwell glanced furtively across to where old Harold had clearly gone to sleep over his pint again. ‘Always sniffing round, he is. We had a spate of knicker-nicking last year.’

‘Harold?’ Maxwell was astonished.

‘Gives you the creeps, don’t it?’ Trisha shuddered. ‘Thought of his hands in my underwear. Not even my boyfriend gets his hands in there.’

‘All right,’ Maxwell said. ‘So what did you tell my oppo?’

‘Just this.’ Trisha was serious now, concentrating and staring into Maxwell’s dark eyes. ‘There’s something funny going on. And that Mr Darblay knew something about it.’

‘Funny,’ Maxwell murmured. ‘Mrs Spooner didn’t seem to know anything.’

‘Well, there you are.’ Trisha’s point was made. ‘She’s more his age, ain’t she? Got an old man with a face like a swede. I think he may have been slipping her one.’

‘The rector and the housekeeper?’

‘Unnatural, ain’t it?’ Trisha bridled, adjusting her breasts around the mixed nuts. ‘He didn’t get in here often but he was here, funny enough, a day or two before he died. We got talking.’

‘Go on.’ They both sipped their drinks.

‘He asked me if I’d seen any strangers recently. Anybody like yourself, passing through.’

‘And had you?’

‘Well, of course. Though we don’t get many this time of year. It’s mostly in the summer. Tourists going up to the Ring, you know. I remembered two or three blokes, couple of women. Vicar said he was looking for a man, though, And,’ Trisha winked, ‘that wouldn’t surprise me neither. You hear such stories, don’t you?’

‘Martin, are you all right?’ Jacquie Carpenter was on her way through to the Incident Room.

‘Hmm? Sorry.’ Stone was clipping his pen in his inside pocket. ‘I was miles away. What?’

‘The guv’nor’s back from the Chief Constable’s.’

He was. Henry Hall sat behind the long table that ran the length of the old library’s west wall, a piece of paper in his hand. ‘This,’ he said, once the team had settled down, ‘is my resignation.’

You could have heard a pen drop.

‘The Chief Constable has informed me,’ he went on, unblinking, unemotional, ‘that I have until the end of the month. If, by that time, there is no breakthrough, nothing tangible, this letter will be on his desk.’

‘That’s not on, guv.’ It was Kevin Brand who broke the silence first.

There were hear hears all round and a hubbub of protestation. Hall’s hand was in the air. ‘This is not a topic for discussion, lady and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Neither do I mean to put any more pressure on you than you are already under. I merely thought you ought to know. On February 1
^st
, barring some developments, DCI Knight will be taking over the case.’

More murmurs. More rhubarb. Geoffrey Knight was about as welcome as a dose of clap. Only Martin Stone’s expression hadn’t changed. Martin Stone was elsewhere.

‘Serial killers, Count,’ Maxwell was lying on his settee, a glass of Southern Comfort perched precariously on his chest, his hands behind his head. ‘What do we know about them? According to the best sources, namely the FBI, Federation of Bungling Investigators, seventy-four per cent of them are American – well, yes, they always have more of everything than everybody else, don’t they? Most of them are Caucasian, but then, in Leighford, I’d be surprised to find much else. They’re between twenty and thirty-five, wet their beds until a depressingly advanced age, and had a fascination with fire and animal torture as kids.’ He threw a glance across the room. ‘Especially cats, I understand.’

Metternich snored loudly as if to underline his contempt for the whole notion.

‘One of the genuinely brilliant experts is Joel Norris. He says serial killers have seven phases – starting with aura. Our man retreats into a solitary, strange world fuelled by fantasies. These get stronger and stronger until he is forced to act. Then – and I will be asking questions later, Count – the trawling phase. Chummy – if I may borrow a hackneyed word from the days of Gideon of the Yard – prowls Leighford and the environs looking for a victim; Elizabeth Pride, Andrew Darblay, Albert Walters, Alison Thorn. It’s the wooing phase where he’d have to be at his most charming. Somehow he inveigled himself into Myrtle Cottage, cutting through old lady Pride’s natural suspicions of a stranger. Even allowing for the fact that Darblay caught him up to no good in the church, he’d still have had to gain entry to Albert’s flat on the Barlichway. With Alison Thorn, what did he do – pose as a charity collector or something? Is that the cover he used throughout, selling the Warcry or a time share in Heaven? The capture phase would be easy enough. Three old people, one relatively small woman. Assuming average strength, that wouldn’t be difficult. Only, he doesn’t go in for the full frontal assault, does he? He uses poison. The woman’s weapon? The coward’s weapon?’ Maxwell shrugged and nearly toppled his glass, ‘I don’t know. Then, the totem phase – taking something away to remind him of the glorious moment of killing. Was there anything missing from Myrtle Cottage – apart from the calendar I pinched, of course? The church? The Walters and Thorn flats? I don’t know. But maybe I still know a woman who does.’

He sat upright suddenly, slamming the half-filled glass down on the coffee table. ‘The point is, Count,’ he said as the cat stirred and turned over, ‘Joel Norris is talking about your classic serial sexual murder. Is that it?’ He got up, pacing his lounge like a father waiting in a Maternity Ward ante-room for word of the birth of his child. ‘Is sex the motive? Pride, Walters, Thorn – all naked. Signs of sexual abuse? Nothing in the papers. Nothing from Jacquie or Hall. Then, there’s this black magic nonsense. No,’ he shook his head and picked up a sixth-form essay, ‘it’s all too preposterous, Count. What Joel Norris misses out is the “Let’s Drop Maxwell In It” phase of the serial killer, when a victim lands on my doorstep.’ He read the opening lines of the essay in front of him and his red pen leaped into action.

‘The wooing phase, Count,’ he decided. ‘That’s where the key to this one lies. How he gets people to trust him. Who has right of access to your home? Or who would you trust on your doorstep? Boy scout? Barnardo collector? Property developer? Policeman?’ His mind wandered away and his voice turned dark gravel, like Alec Guinness’s ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy?’

‘War Office?’ Maxwell was always grateful when he’d finished the reins. Those infuriating bits of stuff that modellers Historex provided for harness were fine and dandy in their own way, but my God, they were fiddly.

‘Max. It’s Jacquie.’

‘Darling.’ He put the glue down before it oozed all over his fingers and he spent eternity in close proximity to an MFI desk. ‘How the hell are you?’

‘Worried,’ she said.

‘Worried?’ he pulled off the forage cap, ‘Why?’

There was a sigh.

‘All right,’ he smiled. ‘Why particularly?’

‘It’s Hall,’ she said. ‘His job’s on the line.’

‘Really? Why’s that?’ Maxwell came from a profession where they only ever fired people for two things – fingers in the till or fingers in the knickers.

‘He’s not getting results.’

Maxwell’s blood ran cold. That of course was the government’s agenda. That nice Mr Blunkett was so in touch with education that he wanted to reintroduce payment by results for teachers. That Victorian idea they’d abandoned, along with hanging. Hello starvation. ‘Who’s piling on the pressure?’

‘The Chief Constable. Ever met him?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Professional bastard. I feel sorry for the guv’nor, Max. He’s a decent bloke. Stood by me often enough.’

‘I thought you were off hooks at the moment?’

‘That’s because I’ve been letting him down recently. Martin and I both, as it happens.’

‘Martin?’

‘DS Stone. On the make, but his wife’s just had a baby and he’s not really holding up his end of the job. Look, Max … there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’