Maxwell's Point (15 page)

Jacquie Carpenter did. About now, back home, Peter Maxwell would be putting on the roasters, wagging a warning finger at Metternich, as the cat started his Sunday lunchtime slaver as he paced the kitchen. Maxwell would be hurtling past little Nolan on his bouncy doorway thingy, pretending to steal his nose each time he did. If that kid didn’t grow up with a complex bigger than Canary Wharf, she’d eat her sandwiches.

‘Not when I knew him.’

And that was exactly what Jacquie Carpenter and Sheila Kindling wanted to know all about. When Beryl Johnson was still Beryl Lemon and a dead man was still alive. They were sitting in the woman’s comfortable flat in downtown Bournemouth, within a walk of the sea. She’d been born on the South Coast and seaside people rarely left it if they could
help it. Beryl Johnson was an attractive woman with
short-cropped
blonde hair and good bones. Her ex-husband’s bones were less impressive these days and still lying on a slab in a cold drawer in Jim Astley’s morgue.

‘Oh, we were happy enough at first,’ she remembered. She looked at them both, the suited women in front of her. Was either of them married, she wondered? She couldn’t see a ring. ‘It’s about now, if this was a
Frost
or a
Midsomer Murders
I’d get out the wedding photos and go all dewy-eyed, isn’t it?’

Neither of the policewomen commented. There weren’t any policewomen in
Midsomer Murders
and
Frost
was always so patronising to the ones on his show. Anyway, that was fiction; this was real. ‘You don’t have any?’ Jacquie asked.

‘No,’ Beryl said coldly, lighting another cigarette, though she’d just put out the first. ‘No, I burned them.
And
my wedding dress. My hair was longer then. He used to like me wearing it in bunches – you know, schoolgirl style.’

‘Was that his thing?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Schoolgirls?’

Beryl laughed. ‘Who knew what Benji’s thing was? Yes, I suppose it was schoolgirls at first, then it gravitated to harder stuff.’

‘Bondage?’

Beryl nodded, drawing hard on the cigarette. ‘Stupid word,’ she said. ‘Stupid idea. We used to laugh at it when I was a choirgirl – Christ, that seems a long time ago now. Whenever the text was from the Old Testament, about the people of Israel and Moses freeing themselves from bondage, we used to giggle like buggery. There’s nothing funnier, is there, than a situation when you can’t laugh out loud?’

She got up and walked to the window, watching the sea
shimmer in the noon-day heat. ‘Of course, we had no idea what we were laughing at. Stupid word, stupid idea. And it certainly wasn’t funny when it became reality. Oh, it was mild enough at first. Benji would tie my wrists to the bedposts, then my ankles. Then the hitting began.’

The pain showed in the woman’s face even now; the pain that would never quite go away.

‘So, he used the handcuffs on you?’

‘What?’ Beryl sniffed, fighting back the tears. ‘Um…no. No, he didn’t. I didn’t know he had any.’

‘So, what are we talking here?’ Sheila Kindling was quietly writing it all down in her notebook. ‘Ligatures of some kind? Rope?’

Beryl nodded. ‘I was a choirgirl. Benji was a boy scout. He knew all about knots. Funny, isn’t it, how such innocent and good things can go so horribly wrong?’

‘You divorced?’ Jacquie wanted the record straight.

‘Yes. When the beatings became so bad I had to be hospitalised.’

‘We couldn’t find anything on file,’ Jacquie said. ‘You were living just outside Tottingleigh at the time. All this ought to be there.’

Beryl turned back from the window. ‘It’s not, because I didn’t make a complaint.’

‘You didn’t?’ Sheila and Jacquie looked at each other.

‘Call me a coward if you like. I couldn’t go through all that again in a court of law. I even thought he’d contest a divorce, but by that time I’d met Mark and he persuaded me to go through with it. The hardest thing was keeping Mark from wringing the bastard’s neck.’

‘Or pushing him over a cliff,’ Sheila said.

‘Is that what happened?’ Beryl asked. ‘Benji.’

Jacquie nodded. ‘It’s likely to make the nationals tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Our third killing in three weeks. You’d better be prepared. If we found you, it’s odds on the paparazzi will. When did the divorce go through?’

‘Three years ago. Mark and I married last Christmas. I haven’t seen Benji from that day to this.’

‘He came to your wedding?’ Jacquie was incredulous.

‘He wasn’t invited,’ Beryl told them. ‘Obviously. How he found out the where and the when I still don’t know.’

‘What happened?’ Sheila asked.

Beryl snorted a laugh. ‘Well, that was the peculiar thing. We’d just finished the service – it was at St Blasius, you know, the little church by the river?’ Jacquie and Sheila did. ‘We were walking down the aisle, my people, Mark’s people, all smiling and the organ crashing and he just stood there in the church doorway. I thought Mark was going to fell him. He pushed me gently to one side and squared up to him.’

‘A punch-up on your wedding day,’ murmured Sheila. ‘That must have been a moment to remember.’

‘But that’s just it,’ Beryl said. ‘There wasn’t one. Benji ignored Mark and just said to me, “I’m sorry. I hope you’ll be happy from now on.” And he walked away.’

‘And have you been?’ Jacquie asked her. ‘Have you been happy from that moment on?’

Beryl’s gaze fell on a photo of her and Mark, laughing together along Bournemouth sea front. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I have.’

‘So you don’t buy it, then?’ Sheila was fixing her face in the Ka’s vanity mirror as Jacquie drove them home. It was still a dazzling day, with windows down and Sheila wrestling with her hair, the sounds of snarling summer all around.

‘That Mark Johnson waited six months since the wedding and three years since he took up with Beryl to get his own back on Benji? No, I don’t.’

‘What if he was waiting for the perfect opportunity?’ Sheila reasoned, playing devil’s advocate. ‘He could hardly deck him in the church. It would look bad, spoil Beryl’s day and there were probably a hundred or so witnesses looking on.’

‘OK.’ Jacquie went along with it. ‘So Mark’s a brooder. He worried it, teased it, finally decided. Then what?’

‘Come again?’

‘Does he go round to Benji’s pad out of Tottingleigh? Take a crowbar to the rather expensive stained glass at Ingleneuk? No. Does he fix his car one night? No. Does he take him out round the back of a nightclub with a baseball bat? No. He rather wussily pushes him off a cliff.’

‘It’s easier,’ Sheila offered a bit lamely.

‘So it is, but is it Mark’s style? Did you get a look at his photo?’

‘Er…not closely, no.’

‘Beryl’s what…five eight? Five nine? Mark’s got to be six foot five of anybody’s measurement with something of the air of a brick wall about him.’

‘It’s still easier.’ Sheila clung to her theory. ‘And if you’re right and you’re pushed by Mark Johnson, you stay pushed.’

‘Agreed,’ Jacquie said. ‘Watch it, you geriatric bastard,’ and she blasted the Ka’s horn, annoyed as she was every time she
used it by its reedy tinniness. ‘So what does he do? Follow Benji around until he goes for a stroll up on Dead Man’s Point, then pushes him over? Bearing in mind the two men know each other and Mark doesn’t exactly blend with the background?’

‘What, then?’ Sheila was being reminded all over again why she was a DC and Jacquie was a DS.

‘Uh-uh,’ Jacquie laughed. ‘This is your scenario, Constable. You carry on with it.’

‘What if…’ Sheila Kindling came from a long line of optimistic die-hards. ‘What if Mark
invited
Benji to meet him, up at the Point, I mean.’

‘What, sort of…“You won’t remember me, but I’m the nice bloke who married the woman you used to knock about. Please come to Dead Man’s Point on Wednesday 12 July at about half past six so we can talk over old times.” Right.’

‘No,’ Sheila shook her head. ‘Obviously, he’d use an alias and he’d have a reason.’

Jacquie had stopped laughing now. ‘An alias and a reason,’ she repeated. ‘Now, that, Sheila honey, is the first sensible thing you’ve said today.’ She caught sight of her Number Two mascaraing her eyelashes. ‘Who’s the lucky man, by the way?’

Sheila fluttered at her. ‘Don’t know yet.’

Lieutenant Landriani was all but ready. He sat his roan under Maxwell’s spotlight, cigar smoking quietly – all right, imagination
does
play a part in model soldiery – checking his left stirrup. Peter Maxwell lifted him gently and placed him to the left of Cardigan, near Fitzhardinge Maxse and in front of
Captain White’s squadron of the 17
^th
. Louis Nolan had just galloped across his front and all Hell was about to break loose in a 54 millimetre sort of way.

‘Do you approve, Count?’ Maxwell’s dark eyes flickered up to the laundry basket where the Cat With No Scruples sat watching him in the half-light. A welcome breeze was wafting into the Inner Sanctum through the open skylight and the starry weekend was drawing to a close.

‘Good,’ Maxwell pulled off the gold-laced forage cap and sat back in his swivel chair. ‘Now the serious work’s done, let’s get down to that little sideline of ours, the gentle art of murder. We have a third victim, Count, did you know that?’

Metternich
sort
of suspected it, but he’d been out foraging while Maxwell, Jacquie and Nolan had tea and, to be honest, he was as mystified by the adults’ zicker zickering as the little pink kid was. Then, of course, it was the Sunday evening hunt and
whatever
the Labour Party said, there were just some traditions it was impossible to destroy, so that had gone ahead as planned. So…third victim? Say on.

‘One Benjamin Lemon,’ Maxwell was pouring himself an unseemly large Southern Comfort. ‘Known to his friends as Benji and the world of online auctioneering as zest1967. What was I doing in that year, I hear you ask?’ He caught the cat’s smouldering eye. ‘Better you don’t ask. Friend Lemon was in to kinky sex, Count. Well, you and I are men of the world, so I can talk to you. I’ll be in a home before Nolan and I can have this sort of conversation. Bondage they used to call it down Egypt way a long long time ago. Shackles, manacles, training helmets. Apparently, young Benji was into all that, but his ex-wife wasn’t, and, much more to the point,
Count, who else wasn’t, hmm? Who else did the late Lemon offend by posing a position too far? Because you see,’ he took a swig of the amber nectar, ‘whoever it was probably pushed the noxious bastard off a cliff. I wonder how he liked them apples.’

Monday. A day like any other. Maxwell, along with another seventy-plus staff and not a few kids, was counting down the days. A week to go before the hols were here and they’d all throw their satchels and blazers and caps into the Leigh and go skinny-dipping. Oh, but that was then, the dear, dead days of pooh sticks and candyfloss. The kids knew perfectly well that these days teachers just climbed into cupboards and waited there until September.

But this wasn’t a day like any other. It was the day that Peter Maxwell’s world fell in. And it fell in further because this was not the first time. A tribunal awaited him in the Head’s office shortly after Lesson Three. Maxwell knew tribunals like this; he’d faced them historically all his life. Oliver Cromwell, all warts and piety, asking a little boy on a stool when he’d last seen his father. Sweaty, drunken revolutionaries in striped trousers and cockades spitting at the aristos who had lorded it over them for centuries. Some Commissar in an outsize peaked cap presiding over one of dear old Uncle Joe’s show trials. And, once before, he’d faced it for real…

‘There’s no easy way to say this, Max.’ James Diamond had been here before too. Same bloke, same potential reason, but
this time, there was a crucial, yawning difference. ‘A complaint has been made against you by a member of the public.’

When this happens to teachers, a thousand images flash through their brains. The
Mail on Sunday
and the
News of the World
are full of such stories every week – a dedicated man’s/woman’s life wrecked by a malicious child who cannot be named for legal reasons; or ‘Filthy Pervert Touched My Princess’; you’d think the
Mail
could write more sophisticated headlines by now. So what was this one? Tall Chloe being asked to surrender her mobile phone? Jack ‘Sam Peckinpah’ Loach being restrained from hurling a bantamweight friend through the window? Ranjit Singh being told that the Nana Sahib who massacred white women and children in the house at Cawnpore wasn’t a very nice man? No doubt, the Headmaster would explain, at which point Maxwell would defend himself with the Clarence Darrowesque style for which he was famous and wipe the self-satisfied smirk off Bernard Ryan’s face for ever.

‘Oh?’ It was as good a response as any other.

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, Max,’ Diamond was clearly having difficulty with this. ‘You have been seen behaving in an inappropriate manner with two students in Year 11.’

‘I have?’ Maxwell was incredulous. All right, he came clean in his own mind, he
had
put a headlock on Jack Loach, but he probably saved a child’s life as a result. But when he’d looked last, Jack Loach was
one
Year 11 student, not two. Unless of course, the schizophrenia was getting worse…

‘Mr Maxwell.’ The Chair of Governors was less of a shit than his predecessor, but pomposity was his middle name. He
was a large man, was Martin Inkester, with thick glasses and a blotchy forehead in the nearly midday heat. James Diamond had switched off the fan in his office and, for obvious reasons, his windows were closed. No point in letting half Year Eight know the state of play. ‘Mr Maxwell, do you understand the severity of the charges?’

‘If you could be a little more precise as to the nature of the charges, Mr Inkester, I may be able to assess their severity.’

Inkester shuffled the papers in front of him. ‘I note that you were suspended some years ago.’

‘I was,’ Maxwell said. ‘On trumped-up charges that should never have seen the light of day. If I may make the comment, Headmaster, you were a little premature then and you are, no doubt, equally premature now.’ He glowered at Diamond. ‘I was going to say do you learn nothing from history? But of course you don’t; you’re a biologist.’

‘However trumped up those charges may have been,’ Inkester’s line remained firm, ‘these seem of a different nature.’ He held up a letter. ‘With your permission, Head.’

Diamond nodded. Maxwell hadn’t seen the man look this drained in months, not since the last Ofsted, in fact; although the unexpected arrival of the Auditor out of the blue pulled him up with something of a jolt.

‘“I was walking on the patch of Common known as The Dam yesterday,”’ Inkester quoted the letter, ‘“when I noticed a middle-aged man in conversation with two girls. Call me old-fashioned if you like, but these days you read such stories so I thought I should investigate. As I got closer, I realised that he had his hand up both girls’ skirts and had exposed himself. When I attempted to protect the girls by remonstrating with
him, he told me not to interfere, claiming they were his daughters and he could do what he liked with them. I happen to know who this man is as I have seen his face in photographs in the local paper. I believe him to be a Mr Maxwell, a teacher at your school. The girls were enormously grateful to me and took the opportunity of my intervention to get away. I am sorry to have to burden you with such a sordid revelation, but felt that you, as a person of responsibility in the local community, should take the necessary action against this sad and possibly highly dangerous man. Yours sincerely…” Is that precise enough for you, Mr Maxwell?’

‘No,’ the Head of Sixth Form answered. ‘I’d like the name, please.’ He leaned forward to Inkester. ‘You see, I tend to doubt the man’s sincerity.’

‘Max,’ Diamond intervened, ‘Where were you on Saturday?’

‘At home,’ Maxwell said. ‘And here…and at The Dam.’

Diamond and Inkester exchanged looks.

‘What were you doing here, Mr Maxwell?’ the Chair of Governors asked.

‘Watching the auditions for the forthcoming production.’

‘Why?’ Bernard Ryan spoke for the first time.

‘Why not, Bernard?’ Maxwell smiled sweetly. ‘I take an interest in all that goes on at Leighford. If you’d looked closely, you’d have seen me cheering on the soccer team last season; in April, God help me, I even went with Year Seven to Chessington World of Adventures. I don’t think I saw you on any of those occasions.’

‘Was there any other reason, Max?’ Diamond asked.

A rock. And a hard place. That was where Maxwell was
now. That was where he’d been all his working life. ‘I wanted to talk to Stephanie Courtney,’ he said.

Another exchange of glances.

‘Why, Max?’ Diamond was at his most obsequious. He was turning, with astonishing speed, into Uriah Heep.

Maxwell straightened in his chair. If he was going to die like Edith Cavell, he could sit upright like her too. ‘I can’t tell you that, Headmaster.’

‘Why not?’ Ryan went straight for the jugular.

Maxwell’s look was one of utter contempt. ‘I’d be betraying a confidence,’ he said levelly.

‘You went with this girl…this Stephanie Courtney…to The Dam.’ Inkester wanted to establish a few facts. After all, it wasn’t looking too good for Maxwell at the moment.

‘No.’

‘No?’ The tribunal were confused, heads turning in all directions. ‘But you said…’

‘I said
I
was at The Dam,’ Maxwell corrected the Chair of Governors – not for the first time in the career of either of them. ‘I didn’t say Stephanie was.’

‘You deny it then?’ Inkester shook the incriminating letter at Maxwell.

‘Absolutely,’ he said.

‘You were not there with the girl?’

‘I was there with the girl.’

‘For God’s sake, Max,’ Diamond exploded. ‘Stop playing your bloody silly games. We’re not just looking at the end of your career here, we’re looking at a custodial sentence. And I’m sure you know better than I do what happens to child molesters in prison.’

‘And where swallows go in the winter; yes, Headmaster, I do.’

‘So,
please
,’ Diamond begged. ‘Tell us what happened.’

‘I don’t think I should say anything more until I see my solicitor.’

‘Do you have a solicitor?’ Inkester asked. ‘Do you need one?’

‘Two very different questions, Chair,’ Maxwell said. ‘Let me answer them with the same answer. Do bears shit in the woods?’

Peter Maxwell saw himself out, not just of James Diamond’s office, but of Leighford High School. He only had one more lesson to teach, so Thingee who does the cover was told to sort it out for him. He was on full pay until this wretched business could be resolved. But he was warned it might take days or weeks or even months depending on whether the parents of the girls in question chose to press charges.

‘Look after Tarantula for me,’ he asked Helen Maitland, spraying his bedraggled spider plant one last time.

‘Max…’ The woman looked numbed.

‘Not now, Helen,’ he sighed. ‘And don’t worry. I’ll be back.’ It was a perfect Arnie Schwarzenegger.

He toyed, as he walked along the corridor towards the bike sheds, with calling in on Sylvia Matthews at the school’s MRSA centre, but he thought better of it. It was Sylvia who had borne the brunt of things the last time he’d handed in his gun and shield; she didn’t need that again.

‘Bad luck, Max,’ he heard as he reached the front steps. He didn’t need to turn because he knew the acid tone, even before he heard the hissing of the snakes coiling in her hair. He,
who’d just handed in his shield to Legs Diamond. Then, an odd thought occurred to him.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘How did the concerned member of the public who wrote that charming letter know that Stephanie Courtney was in Year 11?’

Dierdre Lessing stood tall and angular at the top of the steps, like Boudicca without a cause, like some ghastly remake of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
. ‘Odd how these things happen, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It’s been a real pleasure working with you.’

‘Max, are you all right?’ Jacquie’s voice came and went on her mobile. ‘I’m coming home.’

‘No, no.’ Maxwell was in his lounge, his feet up, his cycle clips, bow tie and porkpie hat lying across the carpet as though washed up by a tsunami. ‘No, darling, I’m fine, really. Bit of a sense of freedom, actually. I can get things done.’

‘What things?’ Jacquie Carpenter hadn’t really known Peter Maxwell the last time he’d been in this situation. But she’d known a teacher in Worthing who’d been accused of grossly inappropriate behaviour. And he’d hanged himself shortly before his hearing was due. Not of course, that Peter Maxwell would even consider anything like that… But even so.

‘Oh, this and that,’ he told her. ‘That bloody lawnmower for a start. And, hey, how about a lick of paint in the kitchen?’

‘Wild orchid,’ she reminded him. At least with her man up a ladder, she’d know where he was.

‘Machiavelli Mauve,’ he insisted.

‘There’s no such colour,’ he heard her say, on the edge of her mobile range as she was now.

‘That’s what I’ll do, then,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ll invent it. Make a fortune. I’ve had enough of teaching, anyway. Ninety-five years – it’s enough for anybody.’

‘Max,’ Jacquie said, serious now after the brittle laughter. ‘You could collect Nolan from Pam’s.’

Silence.

Then, ‘Yes. Yes, I could.’

A new murder throws up new hope. At first, it’s ‘God, not another one’, and cries of ineptitude on the part of the police; what are people paying their taxes for? Then it’s the more sobering prospects – and this gives new ammunition, a fresh start; and every time chummy carries out another one, it increases the chances of his being caught.

‘Benji Lemon.’ Henry Hall was in his shirtsleeves this sticky end of Monday, not in his usual position of out front, his whole team before him, but sitting with them, watching intently as the now familiar faces flashed onto the screen from the PowerPoint. ‘Links to the other two victims?’

‘None known, guv,’ Geoff Hare said. ‘We’ve established that Henderson did a building job for Taylor, but that doesn’t tell us why Taylor was found in Leighford.’

‘Did either Henderson or Taylor buy anything from Lemon?’ Hall asked. ‘On eBay?’

‘We’re still looking into that, guv,’ Benji Palister told everybody. ‘He’s been trading since the thing began so there’s a lot of clients to get through. Nothing so far, though.’

‘Right,’ Hall got up and found his coffee. ‘Lights, Tom.’

The flashing neon positively hurt after the darkness of the PowerPoint. Jacquie Carpenter felt like an old yak. Her blouse
was clinging to her like rubber and she didn’t want to know where her tights top had risen to, inextricably linked with her other bits and pieces as it was. The fans had long ago failed to move the warm air anywhere and Hall was secretly regretting permitting smoking – each fag-end seemed to exude a few thousand joules.

‘What do we know about Benji Lemon, apart from his auction habit, I mean?’

‘Kinky sex, guv,’ Geoff Hare volunteered.

‘Is that an offer, Geoffrey?’ George Bronson sniggered. ‘Shall we leave you boys alone together?’ There was tired laughter all round.

‘Relationships?’ Hall ignored it.

‘None that we know of,’ Jacquie came in. ‘Sheila and I talked to his ex. Nice woman, glad to be rid of him.’

‘Could the neighbours shed any light?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘Didn’t seem to be anyone long term,’ Bronson checked his notes. ‘But Ingleneuk is a big place, set back from the road and mostly surrounded by a high wall. It’s not likely anyone would be seen if Lemon didn’t want them to be.’

‘No complaints?’ Hall asked. ‘From outraged girlfriends? Hookers? Anybody expecting a night of torrid romance that turned into something else?’

‘Nothing reported, guv,’ someone called from the inner recesses among the VDUs at the back of the room.

‘So he’s either behaving himself or he’s found someone
like-minded
or he’s not getting any,’ Hall mused. ‘Dead end.’

‘What about the lizard, guv?’ Jacquie asked. ‘The one the boys found at the Point? Any link with Lemon?’

‘In case any of you missed this on the bulletin board or at briefings,’ Hall thought it best to fill everybody in. ‘A lizard pendant was found by two lads near the body of David Taylor. The lab have confirmed that it did not belong to the dead man – or at least, did not form part of his own jewellery collection. Of course, there’s nothing definite to tell us it was linked to the crime at all. It could have been dropped by anyone at about the same time. Not, in itself, helpful.’