Maxwell's Point (8 page)

‘I’m surprised Jacquie and I didn’t have to go through all that,’ Maxwell said.

‘How long has she been with you now? Three months?’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Something like that.’

‘These people are like the Inland Revenue,’ she laughed. ‘I’m sure they’ll catch up with you sooner or later. Gerald will have passed on your details to them, I’m sure.’

‘So, was there a problem?’ Maxwell asked. ‘With Katie, I mean.’

‘Well, I have to admit, Mr Maxwell, my daughter is not the most…shall we say…reasonable of children. Oh, Juanita never complained, but Gerald and I talked it over. Better to send her to boarding school. She needed company of her own. A little discipline. It didn’t do me any harm and Gerald…well,’ she pursed her lips, ‘Gerald was always overfond. Given that situation, Juanita was a tad redundant.’

‘So you placed the ad in the paper?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘She lived in with you?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Yes; as you see, we have plenty of room here.’

‘Tell me, Mrs Henderson, were there any men friends?’

Was it the light from the pool or did Fiona Henderson’s face
darken imperceptibly? ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ she said.

‘No one, for example, by the name of Rodrigo Mendoza?’

‘I said,’ she repeated, ‘There was no one.’

‘And Juanita didn’t leave anything behind?’

‘Of course not,’ she told him. ‘Why should she?’

‘No reason,’ he shrugged. ‘So, that Spanish address?’

‘Right,’ she stood up and left her drink on the table. ‘I shan’t be a moment.’

Maxwell let his head loll back on the soft cushion. If only he’d taken that left turn at Albuquerque as Bugs Bunny used to say, all this could have been his. Oh, not the naff fixtures and fittings. But the size, the scope. Instead of this silly pool, his Light Brigade could be laid out here almost to scale, the half a league stretching beyond the palm trees to the nasty little bar that Gerald Henderson had had plumbed in at the far end. Maxwell could really cope with the Wall lounging here. But then, presumably, if he lived in a house this size, there’d be no need for the Wall, because he wouldn’t be working. No Leighford High, no Wall. No nervous breakdown, no chalkface. No…

‘Sant Lluis.’ Fiona Henderson broke the reverie.

‘Sorry?’ Maxwell was on his feet; he’d been to a good school.

‘Juanita’s home town. On Menorca. Sant Lluis. Here,’ she passed him a computer printout. ‘I can’t pronounce the road name, if that’s what it is.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Henderson.’ Maxwell finished his drink. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Tell me,’ he paused beyond the pool. ‘How long was Juanita with you?’

‘About six months,’ she told him. ‘Why?’

Maxwell shrugged. ‘No reason,’ he said. ‘I just wondered if
she was the sort of girl who did a runner every now and again, just for jolly?’

‘She was always here when we employed her, Mr Maxwell.’ It sounded like a reproach and perhaps it was. Had Maxwell been over-casual in that he had lost a girl in his employ? He merely smiled and went on his way, thanking Fiona Henderson again and unhooking Surrey from the neck of a wild boar.

‘Interview commencing 9.21 a.m. Wednesday 5
^th
July. DI Bronson and DCI Hall in the presence of James Doolan and solicitor.’

‘Walter Harriot,’ the solicitor added for the record.

The four men were sitting in Interview Room Number Two at Leighford police station, shielded from the morning sun by the venetian blinds. This place had a history of its own; things had been said here that it were better the outside world knew nothing about.

‘Mr Doolan,’ Henry Hall opened the batting. ‘Can you tell us your relationship with David Taylor?’

‘Relationship?’ Jimmy the Snail had a charming Irish lilt, County Mayo via West Sussex. ‘I don’t think I follow.’

Hall was more simplistic. The bland bastard could play this game all day. ‘Did you know David Taylor?’

‘I did,’ Doolan conceded.

‘In what capacity?’

‘We were business partners.’

‘What sort of business?’ George Bronson was cutting to the chase. He had a shorter fuse than his boss and low-life like Doolan irked him.

‘Er… I don’t think my client is under any obligation to
answer that.’ Harriot was starting to earn his crust.

‘It’s a harmless question,’ Hall corrected him. ‘Unless, of course, Mr Doolan’s business is of an illegal nature.’

‘Is that an accusation, Chief Inspector?’ Everything about Walter Harriot irritated George Bronson – his dapper tie and highly polished lace-up brogues, his expensive designer haircut and his smarmy I-know-the-law approach.

‘Oh, we’ll leave the accusations till later,’ Henry Hall said.

Doolan looked at his man. The bloke with the ginger hair he could ignore. Oh, he was stocky enough, but he’d have learned all his strong-arm stuff at Hendon or wherever the fuck they trained coppers these days. Jimmy the Snail had men who could take him out, even if Jimmy himself was getting a bit long in the tooth these days. No, if he had a problem at all, it was going to come from the other fella, hiding behind his blank glasses. He was quiet, careful. Doolan couldn’t see the bastard’s eyes, but he knew he was watching every move. He’d have to tread warily here.

‘You and Mr Taylor were business partners in Brighton?’ Bronson went on.

‘We were,’ Doolan nodded.

‘That’s past tense?’ Hall took him up on it.

For a moment, Walter Harriot leaned across to advise his client, but Jimmy the Snail had been here before. He could handle this.

‘It is indeed, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘And I just knew you’d been to a good school.’

‘When did you last see your partner?’ Bronson asked. Peter Maxwell would have recognised something like it as an old painting.

‘Ooh,’ Doolan leaned back, running a careless finger round the glass rim of the ashtray on the table in front of him. ‘Now you’ve asked me. Let’s see. It would have been the New Year, I believe. We met at a party.’

‘Did you part on good terms?’ Hall asked.

‘I must advise my client…’ Harriot began.

‘No, no, Walter, it’s OK, I’m fine. I
always
part on good terms with people, Chief Inspector. Even you and the boy here.’

‘Do you know Leighford, Mr Doolan?’ A change of tack here. Not only had Hall asked two in a row, but he was off on the friendly policeman kick. In the good old days, Bronson would have flipped a polythene bag over Doolan’s head by now and invited him to kiss his arse goodbye. Ah, God be praised for PACE, the EU and Political Correctness.

‘I think I came here as a kid,’ Doolan beamed. ‘Tell me, was there a Freak Show on the Promenade? This would be about 1970?’

‘A little before my time,’ Hall said. ‘Do you know Dead Man’s Point?’

Doolan looked blank. ‘What an emotive name,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘Could you show me on a map? Only, I’m a very visual learner, apparently. Have to see things written down.’

‘So,’ Bronson saw his opening. ‘The plans of the Nat West Bank in Hove 1997. You must have seen that on a regular basis – to get the layout of the building, I mean?’

‘Oh, get real, Inspector,’ Harriot chuckled. ‘What sort of question is that?’

‘All right,’ it was Bronson’s turn to change tack. ‘What was
your relationship with a Mr Edward Hallop?’

‘Don’t know him,’ Doolan shrugged.

‘Ben Tilman?’

Ditto.

‘Anastas Doropoulos?’

‘Inspector,’ Harriot adopted a pained expression. ‘Are you just ambling through the phone book or is there some point to these names?

Bronson looked at Hall for the go ahead. The DCI nodded.

‘We have reason to believe that whatever your client’s business is or has been over the years, it involved lending money to the gentlemen whose names I have mentioned. Edward Hallop has been in a wheelchair since 1993. He says your client put him there.’

‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ the brief said.

‘My dad told me there was a Father Christmas, too,’ Doolan said. ‘It took me years to get over that one. A terrible thing, isn’t it, to discover your father’s a liar? But then,’ he winked at Bronson, ‘you see, I knew who my father was.’

Hall felt his oppo tense and raised his hand to the level, just below table height. Doolan saw it and smiled.

‘Do go on,’ Harriot smarmed.

Hall noticed the ridge in Bronson’s jaw jumping as he spoke, reading the rap sheet in front of him. ‘Ben Tilman disappeared in the early March of 1998. He was last seen drinking in your client’s company, in a pub in Brighton.’

‘Tilman!’ Doolan clicked his fingers. Suddenly, he was all helpfulness. ‘
That
was his name. Yes, I must come clean on this one, Walter,’ he smiled to the man beside him. ‘I was introduced to him by a mutual acquaintance. We played a few
hands of poker. That was at the Hanging Oak, right?’

Bronson nodded. This Irish bastard had played this game before.

‘Anastas Doropoulos,’ the Inspector said levelly.

‘I expect he’d be a Greek gentleman,’ Doolan smiled.

‘A Greek gentleman whose dinghy capsized somewhere off Peacehaven in August 2004.’

Doolan shook his head. ‘Well, there you go,’ he said. ‘Those waters are surprisingly treacherous, aren’t they? Bit like the Irish Sea on its day off.’

‘Are we done here?’ Walter Harriot wanted to know.

‘We haven’t started yet,’ Bronson assured him.

‘My client came here of his own volition,’ the solicitor reminded everybody, for the sake of the tape, ‘and it’s a rather tedious drive back.’

‘And we’re very grateful,’ Hall said. ‘Inspector.’ He glanced at the tape.

Reluctantly, Bronson switched it off.

‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ Harriot said.

Doolan extended his right hand. ‘It’s been a real pleasure, Chief Inspector,’ he said.

‘Hasn’t it though?’ Hall looked at him straight faced (how else?) but he drew the line at shaking the man’s hand. He knew all too well where it had been.

The sun had already set that evening over Dead Man’s Point. John Mason had borrowed his dad’s car and driven out beyond the Shingle as another long July day came to an end. Next to him was Louise Bedford, an absolute little cracker who lived three doors down from the Mason’s along
Shillingworth Road. John and Louise had known each other for years and had gone all through Junior School and the abyss that was Leighford High, thumping each other, sitting apart and making ‘disgusted of Sussex’ noises when they’d had to pass each other in the corridor.

Then, suddenly last summer, the daft pair had realised that they’d actually loved each other all along, in that squabbly way that kids do, and now they were off to different universities. John had gone north to London, where he languished in the flesh pots of Camberwell, learning to be a doctor at King’s College Hospital. Louise had gone west, to be crammed into the concrete excrescence at Duryard Halls near Heart Attack Hill on the Exeter Campus.

So the last nine months had been an endless flurry of texting and phone calls, mobile to mobile and heart to heart, while the Masons and the Bedfords kept footing the bill and praying that common sense would prevail. But it hadn’t. John and Louise were still very much Love’s Young Dream as they wandered hand-in-hand along the coastal path that leads from the Point. They watched the dying embers of the sun much as Jacquie and Maxwell had only twenty-four hours before. They faced each other and kissed, slowly, deeply and held each other as if there’d be no tomorrow.

And, for the man in the gardens some yards behind them, there wasn’t.

‘I never thought I’d be here in a professional capacity.’ Jim Astley was still just about able to kneel despite the passage of the years and his variety of medical problems. He was poised over the body of a man, half-hidden under a gigantic rhododendron that stood huge and black against the purple of the night sky.

Around him SOCO were just setting out their wares, with the usual panoply of cameras, measuring devices and grids. They all knew the score, ever since that smug old bastard Edward Locard had come out with the dazzling ‘Every contact leaves a trace’. Leo Henshaw, the Ridley Scott of Leighford CID, was treading warily with his camcorder strapped to his shoulder. Everybody was treading warily, come to think of it, in latex suits and shoes, armed with Magnabrushes, tweezers, see-through plastic bags and gummy labels.

Nobody thought they’d be here in a professional capacity. Least of all DCI Henry Hall. It was way past his bedtime and he was getting too long in the tooth for calls in the wee small hours. There was a time when Margaret had got up with him, put the kettle on, made some toast. A time when he’d gone into the kids’ room, to check on them, and remind himself
that despite the horror he was likely to see,
this
was the real world, his world. But now the kids had gone and Margaret had been through all this once too often; she just turned over in her sleep and he didn’t even pause at the top of the stairs.

So here he was, at another scene of somebody else’s horror that would become his own. Less fond of the grape than Jim Astley and several years his junior, Henry Hall could still squat. ‘Do the gardens often, do you, Jim?’

‘Used to,’ Astley muttered. ‘When Marjorie could still walk upright and was able to tell one flower from another. I always used to find it quite soporific wandering through the Australian garden and the Jungle Room. Gave me an extra frisson, I suppose, that there was a hospital on the site.’

‘Ah, yes. Chest, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Bracing south sea air. The wards all had balconies and they all faced this way. Over there, where the gravel path starts. The South Coast used to be full of ’em. If you were consumptive or asthmatic and couldn’t afford Switzerland, you came here. Or they sent you to Ventnor, but that must have been like going to Van Diemen’s Land.’

‘So what’s all this about?’

The SOCO’s arc lights were throwing lurid shadows across Leighford Botanical Gardens, the giant cedars echoed in shade in all directions – three trunks where there had been one; a hundred branches where fifty would suffice. The evening wind had dropped and there was a hush here despite the traipsings of the law. Nothing but the rustle of plastic, the click of cameras and the sibilance of the sea.

‘This,’ Jim Astley had to shift to get some feeling back into his right leg, ‘is murder, Henry. But then, you knew that
already.’ Astley was probing with his torch, flicking it this way and that. He’d known more difficult, out-of-the-way murder sites, but half-crawling under the rhododendrons hadn’t done him much good. ‘Middle-aged male. Well nourished. Large amounts of blood around the chest area. I’d say he’s been stabbed, maybe four or five times. The heart was the target, but he’d have bled to death quickly. The lungs have been punctured; at least the left one. Know who he is?’

Hall waited until Astley’s torch framed the corpse’s face. The eyes were open. So was the mouth. A look of horror. And of incomprehension. ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘You?’

‘Never seen him before. This was quite an attack. Frenzied. There’s a lot of anger here, Henry.’ Astley looked out across the gloom where men in white coats moved like ghosts across the carefully manicured lawns. ‘How far are we from Dead Man’s Point?’

‘About half a mile as the crow flies.’ Hall stood up. ‘And, yes, I had made the connection. Thank you, Jim.’

‘I’ll send you my bill in the morning,’ Astley chuckled and got back to work.

The DCI crossed the gravel path that led to the foundations of the old hospital. A metal plaque still marked the spot –
The Leighford and District Hospital for Pulmonary Diseases, Opened January 21
^st
1883 by Sir William Anstruther M D.
Different days, Henry Hall guessed. Different days, Peter Maxwell knew.

Three people huddled around a Polo Golf parked beyond the azalea beds. One was a lad about twenty, dark-haired, good-looking in an ovine sort of way. He was cuddling a girl about the same age. She was freckly; even the darkness
couldn’t hide that, and she’d been crying, her pretty face streaked with tears and her mascara all over the place. The third was Jacquie Carpenter.

‘Sir, this is John Mason and Louise Bedford.’

‘You find the body?’

‘Er…yes,’ Mason told him, numbed as he was, still a little taken aback by the DCI’s brusqueness. ‘Yes, we did.’

‘What time was this?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘Um…’

‘It was half past nine,’ Louise sniffed, glad after so much waiting around to be
doing
something, moving it all on. John Mason wondered why police people always asked the same questions over and over again. In the hope you’d suddenly remember something? In the hope they’d catch you out?

‘Which way were you going?’ Hall asked.

‘We were taking the coastal path,’ Mason said. ‘From the Point.’

‘Dead Man’s Point?’ Hall checked.

‘That’s right.’

‘You didn’t notice the police cordon? The tape?’

‘Of course. But we’d parked by then. At the Point car park. We didn’t cross the cordon, if that’s what you think.’

‘This is your car?’ Hall asked.

‘Um…my dad’s.’

‘How did it get here?’

‘I thought it advisable to go with them to get it, guv,’ Jacquie said. ‘Bring it round here for somewhere to sit and keep warm. I sensed it would be a long night.’

Hall nodded. He’d been a little tough on the lad, on the girl. You don’t expect to have your romantic evening walk
punctuated by stumbling over a dead man. Or to be asked questions several times over by people who seemed to believe you’ve done it. ‘Does somebody know where you are?’ he asked. ‘Your dad?’

‘Yes,’ Mason told him. ‘I rang him earlier. Louise rang her mum.’

‘Good. Can you give us a minute, please? I shall need you to accompany one of my officers to the station, to make statements. Is that all right?’

The pair nodded.

‘Jacquie,’ a nod was as good as a wink to DS Carpenter and she followed her guv’nor into the gloom. ‘What do you make of them?’

‘Straight, guv,’ she said. ‘Wrong place, wrong time, that’s all.’

‘Yes,’ Hall nodded, watching as the SOCO tent went up over the body and the incongruous sound of sawing began as half the rhododendrons were torn away. ‘Yes, we’ve had rather a lot of that in the last few days. When Jim’s finished, we’ll need to get that lot to the lab; try and establish an ID.’

‘No need, guv,’ Jacquie told him. ‘I know who it is.’

Hall looked her in the eyes. Grey, clear, even in the short July night. ‘Who, for God’s sake?’

‘He’s a builder from Tottingleigh. His name’s Gerald Henderson.’

‘Gerald Henderson?’

Maxwell had waited up, even though she had told him not to. He wasn’t wearing his curlers, tapping his foot and cradling his trusty rolling pin in time-honoured tradition. He knew better. Before they’d become one, Jacquie Carpenter
would call him in the wee small hours, her voice tired, her nerves shredded; and he’d known. Or, there’d be a ring at the doorbell at 38 Columbine. And a small, frightened girl would stand there, in the wind, in the snow, in the rain. And she’d thrown her arms around his neck. And he’d known. She’d said nothing. She didn’t have to. Murder does that to you. Words? Well, what use are they?

This time it was a little different. The man in the gardens wasn’t a stranger, Mr Nobody without a life in every sense of the word. This time they both knew him. He was the man they’d got their au pair from and Peter Maxwell had been talking to his wife not ten hours ago.

‘Stabbed, Doc Astley thinks.’

‘In the gardens?’

Jacquie shook her head, cradling the cocoa between her hands. Even though it was nearly the shortest, warmest night of the year she felt cold, chilled to the bone as she always was when she walked in on sudden death. ‘No, Astley thinks he was dragged there and dumped.’

‘When was this?’ Maxwell sat opposite her in the
kitchen-diner
, a fluffy clown perched next to his elbow, grinning at them both.

Jacquie managed a chuckle. ‘You’ve obviously never worked with Jim Astley,’ she said. ‘“Miracles,” he is wont to say, “take a little longer.”’ It wasn’t a bad take-off.

‘Hmm,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Ever the man of cliché was our Jim. Was he prepared to guess? Isn’t that, after all, what most forensic science is?’

‘Don’t get me started on that one,’ Jacquie shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t be drawn, but stands to reason it was after dark.’
‘Or the body would have been found earlier?’ Maxwell was thinking aloud. ‘What time do the gardens close?’

‘Well, that’s just the point,’ she said. ‘The glasshouses, shop, café, etcetera close at six in the summer months, but of course the gardens themselves actually never do. They’re wide open all along the coastal path. There’s a fence of sorts, but it keeps getting broken down and they’ve stopped replacing it. Uniform are for ever moving on winos, glue-sniffers and fornicating couples.’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell made light of it. ‘What would you boys do for a living without Leighford High School?’

‘Which means,’ Jacquie ignored him. ‘Henderson was dumped, if that’s what happened, between six and nine-thirty when the body was found.’

‘But it was still pretty light at nine-thirty last night. Astley’s being logical, but not accurate. Whoever our boy is, he dumped him in daylight. He’s taking a hell of a chance.’

‘Perhaps that’s it,’ Jacquie looked up at him suddenly. ‘A thrill killer. He’s testing us, taunting us even. He’s saying “Look, I can kill where I want, how I want and leave my work in broad daylight. What are you going to do about it?”’

‘“Catch me when you can, Mr Lusk,”’ Maxwell said, his mind suddenly far away.

‘What?’

‘The Ripper,’ he reminded her. ‘One of the crackpot letters purporting to be from the Whitechapel Murderer back in the Autumn of Terror. Serial killers?’ he asked her. ‘“Funny little games”?’ He was quoting again.

‘There must be a link,’ Jacquie said. She was on her feet now, rinsing out the cocoa cup,
doing
stuff. Her brain had got
over the initial numbness; she was back on the case. ‘David Taylor and Gerald Henderson.’

‘Brainstorm?’ he asked her.

She checked the kitchen clock. Nolan would be awake in half an hour and he did hate his breakfast goodies to be spoiled by the ‘zicker zicker’ of criminal conversation. The other problem was that Peter Maxwell’s brain was bigger than hers. But she consoled herself that her reflexes were faster.

‘Heads or tails?’ she whipped a coin from her pocket and tossed it. He caught it and slapped it down between his hands, ‘Not
that
coin,’ he said. ‘I choose tails.’ He opened his hands again.

‘Tails it is,’ she told him in wide-eyed innocence. ‘Who do you want to be?’ She was practising for when he was finally in the Home for Retired Teachers.

‘Henderson.’

‘You go first.’

‘Haunted house,’ he quipped. He and Jacquie had played this game before. ‘Gerald Henderson. Rich as Croesus. Money comes from the building trade. Lives in Tottingleigh in a house about five hundred times the size of this one. Has a pool like an inland sea.’

‘Wife?’ Jacquie had flicked the kettle on. Then was cocoa time. Now it was coffee. Keep awake. Move it all on. Push the boundaries.

‘Fiona. Attractive woman.’

‘Oh?’ She arched an eyebrow, in a jealous housewife sort of way.

‘…if you like that sort of thing. Daughter, Katie, at boarding school.’

‘No longer has an au pair,’ Jacquie added.

‘Indeed,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But then, who has?’

‘Kind of bloke?’ she prompted him, sensing Maxwell going off the point.

‘Based on half an hour’s meeting, Christ knows. Er…full of himself. Self-made man. Decision-maker.’

‘Taurus,’ Jacquie commented.

‘Bollocks!’ the great man snorted. ‘We’re not talking about the Zodiac killer here, Jacqueline. Stay with the plot.’

‘All right. My man.

‘David Taylor.’

‘Known as Wide Boy. Petty crook.’

‘Domicile?’ Maxwell checked.

‘Wherever he hung his hat, basically, but most recently, Brighton.’

‘Not exactly Graham Greene, though, was he?’

Jacquie wasn’t quite sure who Graham Greene was, so she let it go. ‘He’s got more previous than History, an ex who hates his guts and a kid who worships him.’

‘Does he have a link with Leighford? With Dead Man’s Point?’

‘None known at the moment,’ she told him. ‘But I bet he came here as a kid.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Everybody did. Either Leighford or the Isle of Wight. Take your pick. The Island might have dinosaurs and Blackgang Chine, but they couldn’t compete with Willow Bay, the Shingle, the Little Folks’ Castle. And now, Leighford could add another attraction to the Tourist Board’s glossy literature – the murder scenes at Dead Man’s Point. ‘So our first boy’s a bit of a lad, eh?’

‘The Brighton boys have had reason to invite him to the station for a good smacking a few times,’ she concluded. ‘Some of them see the light, eventually write their memoirs, do charitable work in the East End.’

‘Yes, but we’re not talking about coppers now,’ Maxwell said. ‘Perhaps that was Taylor’s intention,’ he reasoned. ‘To grass somebody up big time. Perhaps he had seen the light – a born-again type. Perhaps he was just a man who knew too much.’

‘We’re working on that,’ Jacquie said. ‘Pursuing, as we persist in saying, our enquiries. Nothing yet.’

There was a sudden cry over the baby alarm, followed by a gurgle as Nolan Carpenter-Maxwell rediscovered his toes all over again and found them fascinating. Maxwell was on his feet.

‘No,’ she held his arm. ‘I’ll go.’

He smiled and patted her hand, kissing her on the nose. He understood. She needed to smell his neck again, to nuzzle into that beautiful fairies’ knitting hair and to watch his face light up as he saw her for the first time all over again. He understood.