Maxwell's Point (5 page)

No one knew why they called it The Dam. At least, Peter Maxwell didn’t and if Peter Maxwell didn’t, nobody did. It stood at the end of civilization, where Leighford stopped and the Downs began, a rolling, plunging piece of common land that had clearly once been gouged for quarrying. Tall nettles, higher than a man, nodded with the foxgloves in the sudden dips and the morning sun gilded the topsides of the bracken leaves, a knee-high carpet on The Dam’s ridges and slopes.

At one end, where Maxwell’s White Surrey cut shallow grooves in the sand, were dunes that told the traveller the sea was not far away. Nearest to Leighford, where Mortimer Road trailed across the heathland, it gave way to oaks and those elms that refused to die back in the Seventies, threatened by the Dutch or not.

‘You all right there, little fella?’ Maxwell was wheeling Surrey now, checking Nolan under the brim of his large,
sun-stopping
hat. The little bugger had reached the Irritating Stage, which Maxwell knew would last for the next eighteen years or so, where anything in his hand or on his head would be tossed casually to the ground. It was a good game, keeping parents amused for hours and keeping them fit, too, what with bending on average six times a minute. This morning,
however, Nolan had either tired of the game, or he felt sorry for his dad, or he actually welcomed the shade; because the hat stayed on.

‘Zicker, zicker,’ muttered Nolan. It was his version of grown-up speak.

‘You got that right,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Now, you watch the pretty valley, while I…’

The World’s Oldest Daddy got his eye in. From Steph Courtney’s description, he was standing where she had been a month ago, walking little Schickelgruber or whatever the Hell the dog was called. He was gazing down on what had once been a quarry floor, but one that was wide and
level-bottomed
, with access, he guessed, for half a dozen cars. The grass was flattened by countless tyre tracks and there was the usual evidence of foul play – lager cans, tissues, even a solitary condom swinging from a bush. The very prospect made Maxwell’s eyes water. What was that? Some sort of trophy? The old watcher of B-feature Westerns knew that the Comanche hung up similar warning signs at Twin Buttes and Lost Dutchman Mesa to keep the cavalry away. And of course, there was the ubiquitous Asda trolley, sideways and rusting in its nettle bed. One day, Maxwell promised himself, he’d conduct an in-depth survey on the incidence of supermarket trolleys in weird places; the nearest Asda had to be nearly two miles away on the other side of town. But then, somebody had probably already done that and got a PhD in Sociology out of it.

He didn’t really know why he’d come, to be honest. He felt particularly daft in the bright light of day, four weeks after the event, with a baby in tow and trying to make sense of the
ramblings of a post-pubescent girl. But Maxwell knew his post-pubescent girls; he’d been trying to cram some history into them now for decades and he knew a liar and a fantasist when he saw one – come to think of it, that covered most of the Senior Management team at Leighford High. No, Steph Courtney was straight as a die. She definitely saw something odd, but what?

‘Zicker,’ commented Nolan, and Maxwell half-turned.

‘Good morning, little baby!’

Nolan was lost for words now, frowning up at the apparition standing next to White Surrey.

‘Good morning,’ Maxwell answered. ‘Er…I have to answer for him – his teeth are rather new.’

‘Glorious weather!’

It was and the newcomer was dressed for it. He seemed to be Maxwell’s age or, astonishingly, a little older. But whereas Maxwell had accepted
anno domini
a long time ago and no longer wore shorts to frighten the horses, this man seemed to have gone in the opposite direction. His tawny skin hung like a dead lion’s over his white shorts and a pair of spindly legs protruded below them. Maxwell couldn’t see his feet for the ferns, but he just knew the old boy had sandals over white socks; he was not to be disappointed.

‘Haven’t seen you here before,’ he said, hauling a canvas haversack off his shoulder.

‘Haven’t been here before,’ Maxwell explained. ‘At least, not for a time.’

‘Giving the grandson an outing? Why not?’

All sorts of reasons, thought Maxwell, but he’d already spent all of Nolan’s lifetime explaining he’d just experienced a
senile pregnancy and he wasn’t about to do it again.

‘Ramble here regularly, do you?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Ramble?’ the old boy looked a little vacant. ‘Er…yes. Oh, yes. Charming spot. Particularly after dark.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, it all depends what you’re looking for, doesn’t it?’ the non-rambler asked, then he hauled his sack onto his other shoulder and tramped off through the bracken. ‘See you!’ he called.

Now Peter Maxwell had encountered Naturists before. Odd people who insisted on going skyclad even when the weather would freeze the bollocks off a brass monkey. Had he just met one now? Or perhaps he was a bird watcher? An orchid fancier? Perhaps something altogether darker. There was a light in the old boy’s eye that Maxwell didn’t altogether like.

But Nolan was grizzly. It was fiendishly hot despite the overspreading boughs of the oak and he certainly hadn’t liked the grizzled old man that had just loomed over him from nowhere. He was tired and thirsty and he missed his Mummy and he missed his Juanita. He and Maxwell pedalled home, pausing just long enough for Nolan to smear himself liberally with ice cream and cherry sauce.

‘And remember,’ Maxwell tapped the side of his nose, ‘Not a word to your mother. You know how “healthy living” she gets at moments like these.’

‘Where?’ Maxwell was sitting like Confucius in his back garden, tinkering with his lawnmower. Why was it, he wondered at moments like these, that the bloody green stuff grew every time you turned your back? Confucius never had
this trouble. Confucius probably had people for chores like this.

‘Brighton, Max,’ Jacquie was arranging the parasol over Nolan’s pram. The little boy lay in nothing but a nappy, sunblocked to buggery and with a string of bright plastic things across his line of vision. Maxwell had optimistically placed a copy of von Clausewitz’s
On War
in there, but Nolan had thrown it out of the pram – overrated in his opinion. ‘You must have heard of it. Along the coast a bit. Pier. Candy floss. Kiss Me Quick hats. Bit like Leighford with knobs on.’

‘The AIDS capital of the South,’ Maxwell nodded.

She looked at him. ‘That dates you,’ she said.

He remembered the Black Death too, but he wasn’t going to admit to that.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Day of Rest, Woman Policeman,’ he reminded her.

‘Tell me about it.’ Jacquie bent down to plant a kiss on the curly forehead of her little boy. ‘It’s only shopping.’

‘Shopping?’ Maxwell nearly cut his thumb on that plastic orange thing that passes for a spanner in the world of gardeners.

‘Well, it’s a working shop, if you know what I mean. Of course, I can’t tell you anything about it.’

‘And I can’t prevent myself from throwing this lawnmower at you if you don’t,’ he smiled in a matter-of-fact way.

She laughed, tucking herself up on the steamer chair. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Just this once…’

And they laughed together.

There was a single cry from Nolan. One that said, ‘for God’s sake, you two, stop enjoying yourselves’.

As he waited for her to get ready, he saw in that bewildering place that was his imagination, the Minutemen crouching in their buckskins in the long grass, priming their flintlocks and fowling pieces. He saw the lines of red, heard the flags snapping in the stiffening breeze, the muffled rattle of the drums. An ambush – how typical. One day the Americans would come to know what it was like to be sniped at by people who refused to play by the rules of warfare. But that was another 4
^th
July, long, long ago. And a bunch of
self-important
and self-interested lawyers had written a document that tried to excuse their treachery and self-interest. Put your John Hancock on that.

This 4
^th
July was altogether more peaceful, but it was all one when you were a historian. And mad.

They kissed under the sycamore that shaded the open-plan patch of lawn at the front of 38 Columbine, yellow now with the lack of rain. ‘You take care now, Woman Policeman,’ he told her. ‘And don’t talk to any strange men.’

‘It’s OK, Benny,’ Jacquie leaned into the DC’s car, parked at the kerb. ‘No need to take it personally.’ She turned once more. ‘Are you going to be all right,’ she asked, ‘my boys?’ This was the first time Jacquie had gone away from Columbine since they’d brought Nolan home. It was just one of those tiny, sad little milestones in a mother’s life; there’d be more, she knew.

‘We’ll cope,’ Maxwell stroked her cheek. ‘You ring the girls, Nole,’ he called up the stairs. ‘I’ll get the champers on ice.’

He’d wanted to get the boy downstairs for the fond
farewell, but the little chap had been up since four and was now spark out dreaming of a white Christmas or whatever it was almost one-year-olds dream about. Had they done any research on that?

Benny Palister put the plastic to the metal and they were gone, snarling out of Columbine and making for the Flyover and all points East.

‘Bloody peculiar, isn’t it, sarge?’

‘What’s that, Constable?’ She did the girlie thing for a moment and checked her make-up in the mirror. This was marginally safer than when she usually did it, driving.

‘Songs,’ Benny said. ‘Some of them, for no reason, you just can’t get out of your head.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she remembered. ‘How was the wedding?’

‘Oh, that.’ The lad’s face fell. ‘Bloody awful, thanks. Remind me never to go through it myself.’

‘Wait ’til you’re asked,’ she told him.

‘No, it wasn’t the wedding,’ he said, crunching through the gears on his way to the A259. ‘It’s a track on the radio. I keep hearing it and it sort of sums up this case – the man at the Point.’

‘Really?’ she asked. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s called
Whale on the Beach
by Danny Goodburn.’

Jacquie shrugged. ‘Don’t know it.’

‘Oh, you will,’ Benny said. ‘Goodburn’s going places. Got a band called The Denvers. No, it’s just the lyrics…’ He broke into song – ‘“What would you do if you found a whale, a whale on a beach, gasping for air. What would you do, would you something, something, a whale on the beach, that
shouldn’t be there. How would it know that it moved you…something. The whale on the beach with nobody there. The look in its eye to the la, la, la, la, la, just out of reach in the dark down there. A whale on a beach, gasping for air. A whale on the beach, gasping for air.” What was he doing there? The man at the Point?’

Jacquie resisted the obvious answer – ‘quietly rotting’. It wasn’t worthy of her and anyway, Benny Palister was a curious mixture of Goldilocks and Don Quixote. And Jacquie Carpenter knew all about Don Quixote – she was living with him and had recently given birth to his son.

‘That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question,’ she conceded. ‘I didn’t know you could sing – presumably, Mr Goodburn actually can?’ She flicked a coin out of her handbag, tossing it expertly in the air. ‘Heads or tails?’

‘Er…tails,’ he opted.

‘Bad luck, it’s heads.’ The coin was already back in her bag. ‘Divide and conquer, Benny, my boy. I’ll do the shirts. You do the teeth.’

Jacquie wasn’t really shopping. True, Lord Everard was only three doors down from Hell’s Kitchen, her favourite shop in the world, but, as she told Benny Palister all the way back along the coast road, she honestly hadn’t known that when they set out. As it was, an all-singing, all-dancing Moulinex just happened to land in her shopping basket, which she felt obliged to buy pending her next pay rise or when Hell froze over, whichever was the sooner. As for her enquiries, they hadn’t been too helpful, but then, neither she nor Henry Hall thought they would be. The dead man’s shirt was beginning to
decompose, hanging around the purple-blue of his body, but it had definitely been a bright orange when new. Lord Everard’s Assistant Under-Manager (Weekends) thought they’d stopped that particular line about eighteen months before. It was part of the Proud To Be Loud promotion and had never really worked. Yes, they had records at Head Office (Clitheroe), but they would only tell you how many orange Louds had been sold, not to whom. Peter Maxwell would have remembered a time when tailors kept details of their customers, if only so the stingy buggers would pay up. Now it was all plastic and online shopping, nothing left the store/van without being paid for. And no one, the Assistant
Under-Manager
was sure, had gone for the online option, presumably on the grounds that men who bought orange shirts didn’t want anyone to know where they lived.

Benny Palister hit paydirt as the Forty Niners used to say way back in ’49; but he hit an awful lot of enamel walls and plain aggro first. There probably isn’t a profession in the world more ghastly than that of dentistry. Alone of the torturers employed by the Inquisition, they seemed to have survived in the job that time forgot.
Danish Dentist on the Job
was not, as film buff Peter Maxwell could have told you, a piece of badly dubbed porn; it was a horror film focusing on oral sadism of the most depraved kind. Remember
Marathon Man
and the particularly nasty Laurence Olivier drilling seven kinds of shit out of Dustin Hoffman’s molars? So true to life. Benny couldn’t believe it – one of the dentists asked to give up his Sunday morning round of golf to make his records available actually trotted out the cliché – ‘I pay your wages, sonny’. It was true in an indirect sort of way, but it was
negative and unhelpful and Benny made a quiet mental note to pass the guy’s car registration on to the next Traffic Warden he saw.

Dentist Number Four, however, was not only polite, but came up with a match. Jim Astley’s X-rays of the dead man’s gnashers found a
doppelgänger
in downtown Brighton. Bingo.