Maxwell’s Curse (29 page)

‘Prissy!’ Maxwell shouted, gripping the woman’s shoulders. ‘Stop it, will you? Stop the lying. Willoughby’s car wasn’t stolen. He drove it to the Barlichway himself. I saw him do it. And I found the car. What was he posing as last Friday? A Barnardo’s collector?’

‘This is crap.’ She tried to break away, but Maxwell was stronger.

‘You were afraid of it yourself,’ he yelled, shaking her. ‘Willoughby and Ken and Sophie. They were involved, you said, in something sinister. Well, you were right. One of them, two of them, all three, killed Liz Pride and dumped her on my doorstep. Then they vandalized Andrew Darblay’s church with their sick paraphernalia. When he caught them in the act, they killed him, smashing his skull. Albert Walters, Alison Thorn, Janet Ruger – sacrifices to the Lord of Darkness.’

‘No,’ said Prissy, shaking her head.

‘Yes, you were right, Prissy. No, Willoughby isn’t at the Barlichway. He’s at Leighford nick, helping the boys in blue with their inquiries. You know he’ll get life, don’t you?’

‘That’s not true!’ she blurted.

‘Prissy, face it,’ Maxwell shouted, still holding her fast.

Your husband’s up to his property-dealing bollocks in devil worship. Ritual Satanic abuse. There’s no law against witchcraft, of course; not any more. But there sure as Hell is against murder.’

‘He’s fucking a slapper on the Barlichway!’ Prissy screamed.

‘What?’ Maxwell asked quietly.

‘Her name is Natasha Jones. She’s sixteen and she lives in Coniston Court. He and Ken, they’re both inadequates. Can’t function with a real woman.’ She held herself erect, the Scotch defiant in her hand. ‘They have to run to some little tart barely out of gym knickers. Makes them feel like studs again, I suppose. It’s their dirty little secret.’

‘And Sophie?’

Prissy shook her head. ‘She’s got nothing to do with it,’ she said, her lips trembling and the tears trickling down her cheeks.

‘So it was all bullshit?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Just so much hot air?’

She looked at him, her lips curled with crying. ‘I made it up. I … I wanted you. To keep you interested. I knew the only way was to keep you on a hook, concoct some intrigue, some daft bloody story. Why should that little bitch Jacquie Carpenter have you?’

Maxwell let the woman go. ‘Because, Prissy,’ he said softly, ‘she asked me nicely.’

He spun on his heel.

‘Wait,’ she shouted, on the verge of hysteria. ‘Is it true? Are the police interviewing Willoughby?’

‘The police,’ he told her, ‘are chasing their own shadows.’ He turned and became instantly, darkly, Jack Nicholson. ‘Hocus, pocus,’ he growled.

18

The days were noticeably lengthening by that Tuesday. Helen Hall sat at the wheel of her husband’s Volvo, listening to something banal on South Coast Radio. In fact, she wasn’t really listening at all; she was thinking about Henry, mooning around at home. She was worried about him desperately worried, although she didn’t want either him or the boys to know.

He’d come home on the Friday with news of the Barlichway. There had been rioting, petrol bombs, the whole bit. The lads had gone out, riot gear, CS gas at the ready, horses imported from Brighton along the coast. And after the smoke of battle had cleared, Henry Hall retired hurt. Geoff Knight was the new DCI at Tottingleigh now, the new man on the ritual case. Helen had expected Henry to fume, to rail at the man’s incompetence. He hadn’t. He just sat in the new conservatory, reading the paper. Most of Saturday, he’d stayed in bed, feeling low with the flu. On Sunday, he’d pottered in the shed for a while, but he was no gardener and on Monday he’d rung in sick to say he couldn’t start in Records for a couple of days.

She was worrying, tapping the steering wheel to the mindless bubblegum music, watching the doors across the school car park for the first surge at the end of another long day. It came soon enough, but before it did, she saw Jeremy, her youngest, marching smartly along the path by the Science labs, his back pack trailing, his anorak undone. Alongside him, a grey-haired teacher with a college scarf flapping in the wind. For a moment, her heart missed a beat. They didn’t seem to be in idle conversation, master and pupil. She was not a classical woman or she might have been reminded of Aristotle and Alexander, wandering the plains of ancient Greece in search of education.

Suddenly Aristotle was at her passenger door, tapping on the glass, as Jeremy bundled himself into the back.

‘Mum …’he began, but Aristotle was faster as Helen Hall lowered her electric windows. ‘Mrs Hall, I’m Peter Maxwell. I’d like to talk to your husband.’

Helen Hall’s husband sat in the conservatory. His slippered feet were up on a pouffé, his bum ensconced on the cushions that hideous conservatory furniture makes de rigeur. His eyes were closed, his glasses on top of the novel that lay unread on the table beside him.

‘Henry.’ He opened his eyes at the sound of his wife’s voice. They opened still wider when he saw Maxwell.

‘God,’ he muttered.

‘Now, that’s someone we could use about now,’ Maxwell said. ‘And if he doesn’t exist, we shall have to invent him. How are you, Henry?’

‘Mr Maxwell … I don’t understand.’

‘Your wife tells me you aren’t well,’ Maxwell took the police papers off another chair and sat down, plonking his tweed hat on a rubber plant and draping his scarf around its branches.

‘Just a touch of flu,’ Hall said. ‘There’s a lot of it about.’

‘There’s a lot of murder about, too.’

‘Mr Maxwell, I really don’t think …’

‘You’re out of a job, Mr Hall,’ Maxwell reverted to formalities, realizing that cosiness wasn’t getting him anywhere. ‘On the scrapheap at … what … forty? What a waste.’

Hall was sitting up now, putting his glasses back on, trying to be professional, trying not to fall apart. ‘Perhaps you could tell me why you’re here,’ he said.

‘DCI Knight,’ Maxwell replied. ‘Any good?’

Hall was taken aback. ‘Mr Maxwell, you can’t seriously expect me …’

‘Is he any good?’ Maxwell shouted.

In the kitchen, Helen Hall caught the look on Jeremy’s face. She bit her lip and clashed about with the dishwasher, glancing whenever she thought Jeremy wasn’t looking to the conservatory.

‘No,’ Hall shouted back. ‘He’s average to useless.’

Maxwell smiled. At last, some honesty from this man. It was a breakthrough. ‘You know,’ the Head of Sixth Form stretched out. ‘I’ve got used to our sparring over the last couple of years. It wouldn’t be the same with somebody else. How about if we get your job back?’

Hall laughed in spite of himself. ‘That’s not quite how it works,’ he said.

‘That’s because you’ve played by the rules,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Well, in these days of FACE and PC and the McPherson report, you have to, don’t you? But me? Well, I’ve got an altogether freer hand.’

‘Mr Maxwell …’ Hall was shaking his head. ‘You don’t have any jurisdiction.’

‘Oh, but I do,’ Maxwell told him. ‘In the good old days, it was called the Hue and Cry. Now it’s called citizen’s arrest. It’s the same thing.’

‘Too risky.’ Hall was still shaking his head.

‘Yes, it’s risky,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘In the good old days, chummy might reach a church and plead sanctuary – though I can’t exactly see the man we’re after doing that, can you?’

‘I’m talking about suing for wrongful arrest. I’m talking about you getting hurt. Whatever you think you’ve got, Mr Maxwell, you can’t go it alone.’

‘Oh, I don’t intend to. I intend to get by with a little help from my friends. And I intend to start with you. Now, do you think your good lady could be persuaded to put the kettle on and make us a nice cup of tea?’

DCI Geoff Knight had spent his first two days on the case closeted away with the officers who had worked the ground. The flu had devastated Hall’s unit and the draftees from elsewhere to the Incident Room had to learn the ropes anew, rather as Knight was learning them now. He had photographs, depositions, witness statements, SOCO reports, forensic analyses cluttering his filing cabinets and coming out of his ears. He couldn’t see his desk.

The phone was ringing non-stop. Demands from the press and Joe Public alike. What happened on the Barlichway? Why was nothing being done? Where was the paedophile ring responsible? And in the middle of it all, Zarina Leibowitz and Crispin Foulkes were issuing press releases, answering questions. Much to Maxwell’s amusement that night, the American bitch was quoting him, with no acknowledgement or apology to Arthur Miller – ‘The devil’s loose on the Barlichway.’

And Knight knew the score. As long as it turned on his own men, the ugliness, it was containable. Riot shields, brick bats, petrol bombs, a few bloody noses and torched cars. Bad, but containable. Even, in a sad sort of way, predictable. But if it turned out on itself, looking for individual targets; if once the mob, fanned by hysteria, decided to turn vigilante, then no one was safe. DCI Knight knew the score and in the instant he knew it, he knew, too, that he was out of his depth.

It was the Meridian Newsdesk that got hold of it first, but it was networked at once and the solemn-toned Michael Buerk told a waiting world at nine o’clock that a baby had been abducted from Leighford, only a stone’s throw from the scene of rioting last Friday night.

‘Mrs Alexandra Stone,’ Buerk read from the autocue, ‘and her baby Samantha, went missing last Wednesday or Thursday from their home in Leighford. Mrs Stone’s mother, Mrs Veronica Saunders, is worried there is some connection with the Satanic abuse allegedly going on in the notorious Barlichway estate. John Pienaar reports.’

Mrs Stone’s mother duly appeared on the screen, like a latter-day Mary Whitehouse. ‘What concerns me most is that the police are doing nothing about this. My granddaughter is only weeks old and someone has abducted her.’

John Pienaar faced the camera from a corner Maxwell knew well. ‘Behind me is the Barlichway estate, the scene last Friday of the worst violence Leighford has ever known. Little Samantha Stone and her mother Alexandra were last seen in the garden of their house two miles west of here twelve days ago. Alexandra’s husband is a serving police officer with Leighford CID and has refused to give us an interview. A police spokesman says that everything is being done to find Mrs Stone and there is no cause for alarm. Given the allegations of Satanic abuse made by American expert Dr Zarina Leibowitz yesterday, that will not calm the fears of the local community who are said to be expecting more rioting. This is John Pienaar, for the BBC News, Leighford, West Sussex.’

The Ka skirted the rise and disappeared briefly in the dip by the park. Then it swung left and purred to a halt close to the waiting cluster of paparazzi cars and vans.

As one, the waiting newsmen scented the arrival and swept, like a shock of sharks along the pavement, jabbering and chattering, poking their microphones and soundbooms at the couple who stood before them.

‘Who are you?’ was the general consensus question.

‘I am Tom Cruise,’ Peter Maxwell lied with great aplomb, sweeping off his hat as though to accentuate the point. ‘And this is Nicole Kidman.’ His accent was impeccable. ‘We’re here to offer Mr Stone the rights for his story. I shall of course be playing the detective sergeant and Nicole here, will be my wife. We haven’t signed the kid yet, but there’s probably a very young Barrymore around somewhere. Y’all come back now, y’hear?’ And he and Jacquie were gone down the dark path alongside the house.

The paparazzi broke up, looking at each other.

‘Well, it did sound like him,’ one of them said.

Martin Stone wasn’t in the mood for visitors. It had been a helluva day, closeted with Knight at Tottingleigh. And now this.

‘My fucking mother-in-law shooting her fucking mouth off to the fucking media!’ He threw a glass at the fireplace. Maxwell was a little surprised at the old Cossack tradition, but let it pass. The sentiment surprised him rather less. ‘What’s he doing here?’

Jacquie wished she knew. All she did know was that Peter Maxwell had rung her out of the blue hard on the heels of the
Nine O’Clock News
. In fact, John Prescott was just explaining his latest transport fiasco when the phone rang.

‘Stone,’ was all Maxwell had said. ‘If you want to see your DCI back on the job,’ he’d lapsed into his underworld croak, ‘come round to my place. No cops. No funny business. Or the DCI gets it. Savvy?’

Jacquie was all in too. She wasn’t in the mood for Maxwell’s humour tonight. But she’d caught the news as well. It had hit her like a bombshell and she was still reeling from the blast when his call came through. Too numb to understand and too tired to fight it, she’d got the car out and driven over to Columbine. And here they were.

‘Once upon a time,’ said Maxwell, hands on hips facing Martin Stone, ‘there was an ambitious young copper. He was new on the patch and he wanted to impress. He was good at his job, but there was a problem, you see,’ Maxwell looked around for a chair, found one and filled it. ‘This young copper – let’s call him Stone, shall we? He was a Satanist, one of those perverted sickoes who worships the devil and sacrifices people.’

Stone and Jacquie looked at each other.

‘And of course,’ Maxwell was in full flight, ‘it was perfect for him, wasn’t it? A man on the inside. All he had to do was to cover his tracks. He knew all about forensics anyway, so there was no fingerprint problem. As a copper, he had a statutory right of entry to people’s houses, so even nasty old besoms like Liz Pride let him in. And if he’d missed anything when committing the crime, well, that didn’t matter; all he had to do was go round removing the evidence.’

‘What the fuck,’ Stone faced him, ‘are you talking about?’

‘Tell him, Jacquie.’ Maxwell waved a hand nonchalantly in the air.

‘I …’ But Jacquie was as gobsmacked as Stone.

‘You found Andrew Darblay, the pair of you, didn’t you? He was very good, Jacquie, wasn’t he? His description of what happened, his blow by blow account. And why was he so good? Because he was there. He did it.’

The police officers just stared at each other, open-mouthed.

‘I’ve read the reports,’ Maxwell said.

Stone looked at Jacquie, who shook her head violently.