Maxwell's Point (9 page)

‘You know, Donald,’ Jim Astley said. ‘It only seems the other day we were doing this very same thing.’

Donald grunted. He’d got his NVQ in swabbing down mortuary slabs, but he was, after several years of it, beginning to wonder wistfully what people meant when they talked of job satisfaction. He’d wanted to be an undertaker really, but his Careers Teacher had recoiled in disgust and few people talked to him after that without a sideways
glance. Besides, these days they didn’t make black suits big enough.

‘Tell the nice man what we’ve found.’

The nice man was DCI Henry Hall, sitting behind Jim Astley in the corner of the morgue, a discreet distance from the mortal remains of Gerald Henderson. He wasn’t exactly squeamish, was Henry, but he didn’t have the gung-ho, viscera-and-all attitude of some of his colleagues, up to their elbows in somebody else’s body cavity.

‘We have a middle-aged Caucasian male,’ Donald said, consulting the clipboard and its bloodstained contents. ‘Certain signs of high blood pressure, cholesterol…’

‘Cut to the chase, Donald, dear boy.’ Astley switched off the light strapped to his forehead and gratefully pulled the contraption off. He sank down on a stool, going head-to-toe with his sciatica at the moment. Unfortunately, the sciatica was winning. ‘Mr Hall will be retiring in forty years or so.’

‘Mr Henderson was killed in a knife attack.’ The fat man flicked over the page. ‘Six cuts to the torso, the deepest of them twelve point five centimetres. Judging from the pattern, our man is right handed, pretty strong.’ He looked up at Hall. ‘And pretty annoyed.’

‘
Crime passionelle
?’ Hall asked.

Donald thought you found those in a box of Black Magic, but he didn’t want to commit himself.

‘It’s likely.’ Astley prised off his bloodied rubber gloves and consigned them to the pedal bin. ‘Is there something you’re not telling us, Henry? Was Gerald Henderson not as other south coast builders?’

‘I’m not telling you anything, Jim,’ Hall said, shrugging.
‘Because at this precise moment, I don’t know anything. What about the murder weapon?’

‘Single-edged blade,’ Donald was sure. ‘About two point five centimetres, but tapering.’

‘Typical cook’s knife,’ Astley added. ‘My money’s on Anthony Worrall Thompson.’

Wasn’t everybody’s?

‘The second strike killed him,’ Donald told them. ‘Severed the aorta. He bled to death.’

‘But not in Leighford Botanical Gardens?’ Hall checked.

‘No.’ Astley was certain. ‘Not enough blood. No, somebody killed him elsewhere, I’d say indoors, and carried him to the rhododendron bushes.’

Hall nodded. ‘The question is why.’

‘And the question is how,’ Donald blurted, enthused until the cold eyes of his seniors knocked some of the stuffing out of him. ‘I mean, he weighed fifteen stone.’ That was nothing to Donald, but he secretly knew he didn’t envy anyone trying to carry
his
corpse across open country.

‘Where’s the nearest access point, Henry?’ Astley asked. ‘For a car, I mean?’

‘To where we found him?’ Hall was reconstructing the Gardens in his mind. ‘The official car park is on the high ground, inland from the coastal path by half a mile. Whoever brought him there would have to have carried him down the steps, across the beds and up the slope. Must be half a mile.’

‘And if he kept to the paths, more.’ Donald was in keen mode again, showing his superiors how wasted he was swabbing down and making notes for Dr Astley.

‘If he hadn’t kept to the paths, Donald,’ Astley sighed, ‘Mr
Hall’s eagle-eyed boys in blue would have noticed. Bloody great hoofprints all over the mesembryanthemums, a trail of blood across the chrysanthemums. Am I right, Henry? Or is my gargantuan grasp of all this flora passing you by?’

Hall nodded, conceding to the first question, not the second. ‘We’re combing the Gardens now. Chester Harris is not best pleased.’

‘Harris?’

‘Head Botanist.’

‘God, yes. The David Bellamy of Leighford. He’s mad as a tree, isn’t he?’

‘Doesn’t suffer fools gladly, certainly, but then, when push comes to shove, which of us does?’ It was perhaps coincidence that both men chose that moment to look at Donald.

‘Well, good luck with that one,’ Astley said. ‘What if the body was brought the other way, from the Point?’

‘Further,’ Hall told him. ‘But easier going with a weight like that. Except for a hundred yards or so where the ground is uneven. It depends how far it was brought. The Star Rock stretch is tricky, but someone with determination…’

‘Both so exposed though, aren’t they? Whichever way the body was carried it had to be in virtually broad daylight. What’ve we got on time of death, Donald?’

Donald was secretly seething. He’d been the butt-end of many a vicious lecture from his boss on this very theme. Whole books had been written about it. And science seemed to be walking backwards. And here was the crafty old bastard tossing it out as if it was the simplest call in the world. And the call was Donald’s. ‘Um…probably about twenty-four hours, give or take.’

Henry Hall had been giving and taking Jim Astley’s times of death now for more years than he cared to remember. He knew as well as the other two that Donald had been stitched up and he wasn’t going to rise to the bait. ‘Wednesday afternoon,’ the DCI took it all at face value, a science becoming more impressive as time itself went on. ‘The question then remains,’ he said. ‘Where was Gerald Henderson on Wednesday afternoon?’

‘Can you tell us, Chief Inspector, where the deceased was on Wednesday afternoon, which you’ve pinpointed as the time of death?’

Henry Hall was used to the popping cameras, the barrage of unanswerable questions, the microphones jabbed under his nose. But the Chief Constable of West Sussex, a man for whom no photo shoot was too little or too large, had insisted, so here they were, in Leighford Town Hall, courtesy of the Mayor.

Mayor Godfrey Ledbetter was there in person, mercifully without his chain of office, far less useful in police terms than a chain of evidence. He was a large figure in the mould of Donald, the Morgue Man, but he had his eye to the main chance and could afford decent suits. And he dithered now between a look of suitably abject shock and horror and wondering how he could cash in on behalf of his town. ‘This way to the Murderers’ Walk.’ ‘See the Dead Man at Dead Man’s Point.’ It was a licence to print money. Forget Ian Huntley, Fred and Rose West. Once the law had got this nutter behind bars, Ledbetter would be able to slap a Grade II listing on his house. My God, how the money would roll in!

‘My officers are pursuing every enquiry,’ Hall gave the stock, bland response.

‘What I want to know, Chief Inspector,’ a loud voice came from the far corner, ‘is what you’re going to do by way of compensation for my Gardens.’

There were howls and cat calls. ‘Shut up, Harris,’ somebody bellowed.

‘Now is not the time, Mr Harris,’ the Chief Constable, all brushed tunic and flashing silver braid replied.

‘It never is,’ Harris shouted back. ‘Funny that.’

‘Get some perspective,’ somebody else shouted. ‘Two people are dead here. Who gives a damn about your flowers?’

‘Who said that?’ Chester Harris wanted to know. He suspected the paparazzo from the
Sun
, and was making a beeline for him when two of Henry Hall’s men intercepted him and bundled him out of the room, like an old geranium.

‘Two people,’ another journalist barked at Hall. ‘Do we have a serial killer on our hands, Chief Inspector? Who’s at risk?’

Hall resisted the temptation to lean forward to the
middle-aged
man and say ‘Middle-Aged Men’. Besides, his attention was drawn to an altogether younger man who was standing near the far door. He didn’t appear to be a journalist, though he had a visitor’s pass pinned to his rather incongruous hoodie. He was slim and fair-haired. And his fierce, close-set eyes had been burning into Henry Hall all night.

‘We are unable to speculate at this time,’ Hall said. And by the time he’d finished the sentence, the young man had gone. The Chief Inspector passed to his boss, the Chief Constable, to wind things up with the usual platitudes. After that, it
would be up to Ledbetter to undo all their good calming work and whip up the sort of hysteria that sold hotel rooms and cream teas. He was, after all, a child of the Thatcher years and he had Private Enterprise written all over him. But by then, the Chief Constable would have left to put his expensive uniform back into moth balls and the Chief Inspector would have left to do his best to catch a killer. It was as well that everybody knew their place.

The little boy’s head lay soft on the pillow, the stars of his night-light twirling silently across the ceiling of his room. His dad bent down to kiss him and the boy murmured, his lips opening with a little bubble.

He left the boy, he left the cot, he took three paces through the room. Across the landing, the woman he loved was sleeping too. With a bit of luck, it would be years before she’d start snoring, but she’d never lose that look, the one that said, ‘I’m safe here with you; and I’m glad I’m here with you,’ and she smiled in her sleep. He tip-toed up the stairs to his Inner Sanctum, gently closing the trap door of the War Office before he switched on the modeller’s lamp. He hauled the ornate, gold-laced pillbox cap from its peg and popped it on at a jaunty Crimean angle on his head. He couldn’t remember, after all these years, where he’d bought it. Probably fetch a few bob at Bosley’s when he finally fell on the hard, old times of retirement. He looked down at Lieutenant Landriani under his magnifying glass. Give the man a cigar, surely? He’d be sitting his plastic charger a long way from Colonel Shewell of the 8
^th
, who didn’t approve of such things. And anyway, Landriani was in a different army, from a different country.
He was there in the Valley of Death that long-ago October as an observer, for God’s sake. The usual rules didn’t apply to him.

A great black and white beast stirred in the half-light.

‘Sorry, Count,’ Maxwell muttered, reaching for his craft scalpel. ‘Didn’t see you there.’

Like hell you didn’t; Metternich stretched out a leg and licked his inner thigh, just because he knew Maxwell couldn’t – however much he might long to.

‘I talked to a widow yesterday, Count,’ Maxwell went on, whittling the plastic as he did so. ‘Except she didn’t know she was a widow. Or did she?’ He placed the plastic against the soldier’s lips. Relatively, it was the size of a torpedo. Just a
little
off that. ‘What do you think of them apples, Count? Could a woman who had just stabbed her husband to death sit casually by her swimming pool with me and engage in small talk about a Spanish lady?’

Maxwell looked up at the cold, unblinking, smouldering eyes. ‘Well, don’t rush to judgement just now, will you?’ he said. ‘Of course,’ he offered up the cigar again. Better – it was more like a baguette now. ‘It is just possible that the late Gerald Henderson was lying, saturated in his own blood – now don’t look at me like that. You positively revel in the stuff – you’re the Green River Killer of Leighford. Lying in his own blood in the master bedroom, feet from where I was sitting. But for that to be the scenario, Fiona Henderson would have to have gone berserk, done the heinous deed, stabbing the poor bugger however many times, then hosed herself down, because she would have been pretty well spattered I would think, chatted to me in her polite, slightly Essex-girl sort of
way, then tossed the husband formerly known as Gerald into her Lexus Estate or whatever, driven like a bat out of Hell to the Botanical Gardens, hoisted the dead weight for a second time and stuffed it under the rhododendron bushes. Perfect!’

And they both knew that Peter Maxwell was talking about the relative size of the plastic cigar rather than his likely case scenario. That needed more work.

George Bronson had never got used to it; perhaps he never would. He was sitting bolt upright in the palatial lounge built by the late Gerald Henderson, looking into the clear blue eyes of the late Gerald Henderson’s wife.

‘It must have been Wednesday morning that I saw him last.’ She was taking her time to answer the DI’s question because she wanted to get it right. Part of her said, ‘What was the point? He was dead anyway.’ She knew that. She’d been to identify him in the morgue. She’d looked at his face, how curiously pale it was, how still. Somebody had covered the body right up to the neck and placed a lily on the pillow beside his head. She didn’t know it was all done to cover up the gruesome stitching of Jim Astley; the Y-shaped incision and big, clumsy stitches vying with the six tell-tale wounds that had punctured his body. Peter Maxwell knew that in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day people believed a dead man’s wounds bled anew in the presence of his murderer. Fiona Henderson didn’t know that. And she wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

‘Was that here, at home?’ Bronson was taking her through it, slowly, methodically. Sheila Kindling was sitting alongside him, noting down both her boss’s questions and the answers he was getting.

‘Yes. He’d come in late the night before and had slept in the East Wing. He has…had a sort of den there. We had breakfast. He said he had to be at Danton’s.’

‘Danton’s?’ Bronson knew the name, but he needed confirmation.

‘Suppliers to the trade. In the High Street. Smaller than Jewson’s, but Gerald and Will Danton go back a long way.’

‘Do you know what time this was, Mrs Henderson?’ Sheila asked. ‘The meeting with Mr Danton?’

‘Er…eleven, eleven-thirty. I can’t really remember. Look, Inspector, I need to know – who could do this to Gerald? It’s all so unreal.’

Fiona Henderson turned to Bronson because he was a man. It was the way she’d been brought up. Ever a daddy’s girl, she simply accepted that men had the answers. That was why she’d never gone to university when she had the chance. What was the point? She’d marry some rich man and he’d take care of her – it was the natural order of things. But the rich man had gone now. Now what would she do?

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mrs Henderson.’ Bronson hated this, every sickening twist of it; talking to a woman whose husband had been butchered as if they were discussing the price of tea. ‘Tell me, is there anyone who didn’t get on with your husband? A disgruntled employee, perhaps? Business rival?’

Fiona Henderson shrugged. She was already staring at the photo of the two of them together. When was that? Five years ago already? Katie was only three. There she was in the silver frame, laughing hysterically as her daddy tickled her, her face a mass of ice cream. Then, darker thoughts prevailed. ‘I don’t
know,’ she said. ‘I think Gerald could be a hard man. He didn’t take prisoners. I don’t pretend to understand the business world, but I do know it’s dog eat dog. Gerald had enemies, certainly, in a commercial sense. Perhaps one or two of his developments were a little…shall we say, controversial? But to be killed?’ She suddenly sat bolt upright, breathing in sharply, ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

By Friday lunchtime, Henry Hall’s team had been given permission to poke their noses into Gerald Henderson’s financial affairs. The bank wasn’t very forthcoming and the deceased’s accounting firm seemed at one time to have worked for Al Capone. Even so, it was a foot in the door, a start. Who knew where it would lead?

Coppers were pounding pavements by two o’clock, drafted in from elsewhere in the county. Any old hands watching them work would have tutted and shaken their heads in disbelief. They were in shirtsleeves, for God’s sake and there were
women
with them. All walkie-talkies and political correctness and community policing. Bloody get on with it. Ask your questions. Look them in the face and get some answers. Don’t faff about on a computer – write it down in your black book and type up the bloody report later. Jesus! How hard can it be?

‘Have you seen this man?’ echoed and re-echoed around the scorching streets of Leighford. Fiona Henderson had lent George Bronson a recent photograph of Gerald. It was not the one with the ice cream, but a rather po-faced affair of him getting some award or other from the Chamber of Commerce. She’d never really liked that suit. Or the fact that the
nauseating creep Godfrey Ledbetter was hovering in the background.

And so the questions multiplied. The knocks on the doors. The rings on the bells. Here a dog barked. A baby cried. ‘Who is it?’ the old dear in sheltered accommodation wanted to know. And the coppers weren’t sure whether she meant them or the man in the photograph.

‘Louise?’ She turned at the sound of her name. ‘Louise Bedford!’

Ocean’s Eleven had been everything in its time – a bank, a trendy wine bar. Kelly’s Directory for 1851 had hinted it might be a bordello in that rooms were to be had, usually by the hour; probably hired by foreigners on their way to the Great Exhibition. Now, it was a café, bright and breezy with aluminium furniture, nasty coffee and more varieties of ice cream than the parson preached about.

‘Mr Maxwell.’ The girl behind the counter beamed broadly. She’d always liked Mad Max, ever since she’d first set eyes on him when she was eleven and he was ninety-four. It was crush at first sight. He was so funny, so clever and looked a bit like her mum’s favourite pin-up, Tom Conti. But she’d really fallen for him when he’d saved her from a couple of bullies in Year Eleven that time. She never did find out what he actually did, but both lads vanished behind the Sports Hall one day and when she saw them next they were pale and shaking. They never bothered her again. And they’d never bothered Peter Maxwell in the first place. Was he bothered?

‘Don’t tell me that university of yours has let you out already? What am I paying my taxes for?’

‘’Fraid so,’ she trilled. ‘What can I get you?’

He perused the list above the girl’s head. It was longer than Schindler’s. ‘I could just go a Chocolate Nut Sundae,’ he beamed, as about the only item he vaguely recognised. ‘Seeing as how it’s Friday and I’ve just done a runner from the Establishment.’

‘Are you still there?’ she asked, fiddling about with impossible-looking machinery that clicked and whirred and squirted.

Maxwell wondered why all Old Leighford Highenas asked that. The girl had only been gone for less than a year, but in that weird timewarp that is being nineteen/twenty, it might have been decades.

‘’Fraid so,’ he winked at her. And he didn’t go on to add that James ‘Legs’ Diamond was still Mr Ineffectual as the Headmaster; Bernard Ryan was still the Grima Wormtongue of the staffroom; and Dierdre Lessing’s hair still coiled like venomous serpents as she floated like a ghoul, hovering in the foul air between the Dining Hall and the Girls’ Changing Rooms.

Maxwell looked around. Surprisingly empty for a Friday afternoon in the middle of the season. ‘Have you got a minute?’ he asked.

‘A minute?’ She looked surprised.

‘Join me in the old Chocolate Nut?’

She leaned towards him, more confident, more of a woman than he remembered. ‘It’s not allowed,’ she said with a bass voice that surprised both of them. ‘I’ll be drummed out of the Ice Cream Makers’ Union.’

‘Well,’ he smiled. ‘Just a coffee, then.’

‘OK.’ She smiled back and went about her business, chatting briefly to the incurably spotty lad who was her oppo behind the counter.

Maxwell led her to a quiet corner. This was, of course, as much of a chance meeting as Hitler’s invasion of Poland. He wanted answers and this was just the Old Girl who might provide them. ‘Course going well?’ he asked, not for the life of him able to remember what the kid was reading or where.

‘Great, thanks.’ She sipped her coffee, and as if reading his mind, added, ‘Social Sciences, Exeter.’

‘Any exams or anything?’

Her face contorted. ‘Oh, yes. They were OK, though.’

Peter Maxwell had spent the best part of seven years persuading Louise Bedford not to say ‘OK’. After all, it was American. And hadn’t that very same Peter Maxwell made it perfectly clear that we had fought a war with the Colonies so that we’d never have to hear – or use – that kind of language again? Was it all for nothing? What kind of education were they getting at university these days?

‘I hate to mention the subject,’ he said, ‘but John…’

‘Yes,’ her face lit up at the mention of his name. ‘We’re still together and he’s lovely.’

‘Good for you.’ Maxwell was genuinely pleased. He still remembered his first year of teaching, when Mr Gladstone was Prime Minister and Boy Scouts still helped old ladies across roads – whether they wanted to go or not – he’d raised just the same question with a couple who had been an item for years. ‘Going to the same place, are you?’ the callow youth had asked. The lad had shaken his head and the girl had run out of the room crying. He hadn’t risked it since, but sensed
he was on safer ground with John and Louise.

‘I understand the pair of you had a rather unpleasant experience last night.’

Louise’s face fell. The eyes, shining with happiness, glanced down to her coffee cup. ‘Who told you?’ she asked.

‘A little bird.’ He licked the chocolate sauce off his spoon.

Her eyes were on him again. ‘We…we found a body,’ she said softly. She’d never been able to lie to Mad Max. Not when she hadn’t done her homework in Year Ten; not when she and John had been found canoodling in the Textiles Stock Cupboard.

‘Louise,’ Maxwell reached out and brushed her hand. ‘Look, you and I go back a long while, yes?’

She nodded.

‘I owe you this much,’ he said. ‘I didn’t just happen to be here this afternoon.’

A flicker passed across her face. She suddenly didn’t understand. There was something about her Mr Maxwell now. An intensity she hadn’t seen before. And it scared her, just a little.

‘My narks in Year 13 told me you worked here. I wanted a chat.’

‘About the body?’

He nodded.

Louise looked alarmed, her eyes flicking left and right. When she was an adolescent with a crush on ‘sir’, she’d have given anything to have him hold her hand as he was now. Now, she wished he’d go away. Leave her alone.

‘The Gardens,’ Maxwell said. ‘Do you go there often? You and John?’

‘We used to,’ she said. ‘It’s sort of…our place. Do you know what I mean?’

Maxwell did.

‘Do you know who the man was?’ he asked. ‘The dead man?’

A family came in at that moment, all whining children and buckets and spades.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she told him. ‘I’ve got to serve people.’

‘“To serve them all my days”,’ Maxwell quoted. ‘Louise, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to frighten you. And I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable. But two men have died in Leighford in the last week.’

‘I’ve talked to the police,’ she said, half out of her seat.

‘I know,’ he nodded. ‘But sometimes the police aren’t the people who listen best. Sometimes, they don’t hear things. Do you understand?’

Louise was on her feet now, ‘No, Mr Maxwell,’ she shook her head. ‘No, I don’t understand. And I don’t know anything. Now, please, I must get back to work.’

And she’d gone, crashing through the swing doors into the kitchen. And Peter Maxwell knew by the heaving of her shoulders that he’d made the girl cry.

‘To whom am I talking?’

‘Aaron Felton, Deputy Head.’

‘Aaron, you old bastard. Peter Maxwell.’

‘Max. How’s it hanging?’

Maxwell resisted the old Jim Carrey joke from
Liar! Liar!
and offered an alternative. ‘Fine, thanks.’ Yes, all right – it needed work. ‘I’ve been hearing odd things about your Rodrigo Mendoza.’

Time for Aaron Felton to resist jokes and he did it manfully. ‘Oh?’

‘I understand he’s gone missing.’

‘Missing? Who told you that?’

‘A little bird.’

‘Well…come to think of it,’ Hampton’s Deputy said, ‘he did go walkabout for a couple of days. Went down, appropriately enough, with Montezuma’s Revenge. Apparently, he was talking on the big white telephone for several hours at a time.’

‘Canteen food?’ Maxwell guessed.

‘What else? That’s the great thing about Healthy Schools. We haven’t all got to suffer Jamie Bloody Oliver. Do you know Rodrigo, then?’

‘We’ve met,’ Maxwell said. ‘In the line of duty.’

‘I’m not sure he’s on site at the moment. Let’s see…’ There was a rustling of paper as the man tried to relocate his desk top. ‘No, you’ve missed him. He’s gone with a trip to Chessington – a special thank you to Year Nine for their Recycling efforts. Was it always like this, Max? When you were a teacher?’

‘You cheeky bugger,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘No, it was stand up straight and put your hands down your trousers in my day. Recycling was going home from school. I don’t envy you young people with another thirty-odd years to go in the business.’

‘Oh, God,’ Felton groaned weakly and hung up.

Maxwell was already striding purposefully towards the Modern Languages Block.

A pall of smoke hung over Henry Hall’s Incident Room. At the moment he was merely using the Nick, but many more enquiries and he’d either have to have an extension built or move out, commandeering schools and libraries and cinemas and youth clubs as he had in the past.

This was Day Eight of the Taylor murder and Day Three of the Henderson case. There was that rise in tension, that indefinable
something
that teetered on panic. For now, everybody was calm, in check, going about their business. But the smoking had increased, spilling over into areas strictly beyond the agreed limits of the Incident Room. The black coffee drinking almost doubled. There was less patience with computers – you could tell that by the noise of rattle on the keys; fingers stabbing harder and the greater incidence of sucked-in breath and the immortal words ‘For shit’s sake!’ And people were getting snappier with each other; never a good sign. One murder gave you headaches. Two doubled the chance of finding the killer, if the killer was singular; but it also doubled the stress. The Press were already breathing down the guv’nor’s neck. The beady eye of the Chief Constable was fully on the Incident Room at Leighford Nick.