Maxwell's Revenge (20 page)

‘In the office,’ she said, trying not to breathe, and scurried away, using the special nurse walk that was not really a run, but almost.

He went round behind the nurses’ station, trying not to look at the patient charts displayed across it, and let himself into Louise’s tiny
glass-sided
office. After a few moments, she came in and shut the door.

‘Sorry about that,’ she said with a smile. ‘That’s the trouble with having poison cases. Not only is it a bit …’ she screwed up her nose, ‘… smellier than usual, we also have to keep it, for analysis. We’re running out of shelves. Anyway, Mr Maxwell, how can I help you?’ She foraged in a drawer and brought out an opened packet of ginger nuts. She loosened one with her thumb and proffered it to Maxwell. ‘Biscuit?’

He drew breath to accept and then suddenly changed his mind. Where
had
that thumb been? He shook his head and smiled. ‘No, thanks, Louise. I was just wondering how Mr Ryan is.’

She turned down the corners of her mouth and shook her head. ‘Not too well, Mr Maxwell, actually. I don’t know how the poison he was given worked, but everyone seems to have had different amounts or, at least, different reactions to it. Miss Mackenzie, for example, needn’t be here still, but she seems a little vulnerable and the police are also afraid to let her out. I assume in case the poisoner has another go. I can’t believe she did it, can you? You know, giving herself a minor dose to cover her tracks.’

Maxwell smiled in semi-agreement. He was impressed. Louise was obviously watching a lot of
CSI
. He, for his part, couldn’t help remembering the beautiful Madeleine Smith, poisoner of Glasgow– just a little before Louise’s time. About one hundred and fifty years before; even Maxwell had been only a boy.

‘Then, of course, Mrs Bevell was given another dose and there was hell to pay over that one, I can tell you. Plus, of course, Mr Bevell is threatening to sue.’

‘Of course,’ agreed Maxwell.

‘I’d love it to be him, Mr Maxwell, wouldn’t you?’

‘I certainly would, Louise, but I’ve found it
doesn’t work like that. Professional bastards like him usually walk away scot-free. Or, in his case, a few thousand richer. Anyway, do go on. I seem to remember you had a gift for precis in the Sixth Form.’

‘No, Mr Maxwell,’ she smiled. ‘You said that my essays were always too short by about fifty per cent.’

‘Same thing. Go on.’

‘Yes, Mrs Bevell. She seems to be getting on all right, despite her second dose. But you have probably noticed her robust constitution.’

This time, Maxwell threw hospital whispering to the winds and laughed out loud. The nurse grinned back. ‘I certainly have, Louise. In fact, who could miss it?’

‘Then, there’s Mr Diamond. He’s getting on all right, I suppose, given his age and condition.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’m afraid he’s not very fit, Mr Maxwell. He …’ and here she stopped speaking at all and simply mimed the raising of a glass.

Maxwell was truly amazed. ‘Does he?’ This would be one for the next school newsletter.

‘The liver functions were unmistakeable. Ooh, Mr Maxwell, this is in confidence, isn’t it, only, I’m not supposed to discuss patients?’

‘Of course it is, Louise. Of course it is. Schtum is my middle name. And what about Mr Ryan?’

‘Mr Ryan is probably in renal failure.’

‘Serious,’ Maxwell observed.

‘Well, fatal sometimes. But he’ll probably die of the liver failure. Or something else, because he is in shutdown, basically. He might rally, but we’re not expecting it. Meanwhile, he is compromised immunologically and so we are keeping people out.’

‘And that’s because of some hospital bug, is it?’ Maxwell was doubly glad he hadn’t taken the biscuit.

‘No, no that’s the poison. Yet another reaction to it, you see.’ She looked at Maxwell with her head on one side. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, Mr Maxwell?’

‘What is?’ What, in all of this, could she possibly pin down as particularly odd, he wondered?

‘I don’t get much experience of poisons in general nursing, of course. I suppose the geriatric nurses see more of that, wrong prescribing and so on.’

Maxwell decided to let that one go as a case of sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. That, and Harold Shipman.

‘But it has made us all think, having so many connected cases. The poisoner just isn’t very
good
at it. The dose wasn’t the same in all of the portions. That’s odd. You’d think that he’d have put it in the prawn cocktail sauce, for example, but we think he must have added it later and, well, you know, just put more on one than the
other. And then, he really meant to hurt people, because aconite is a very serious poison to start dishing out. You’re not planning to give someone a gippy tummy when you play with that one.’

‘Yes, Louise, but why is that odd?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, you’d have just thought he would be better at it, wouldn’t you? Go to all that trouble to get the poison, get to where you could doctor the food and then be so … I don’t know, Mr Maxwell, what’s the word I want?
Sloppy
, I suppose.’

Maxwell looked at her with new eyes. ‘My goodness, Louise, you’re right. He did all the difficult stuff and then messed up the simple bit, the dishing it out. And …’ he shook a finger at her to keep her quiet while he gathered his thoughts, ‘and he’s been trying different things since then. Different poisons, but still administered in food that anyone might eat.’

She looked over his shoulder. ‘Oops,’ she said. ‘Consultant on the ward, Mr Maxwell. I’ve got to go. I hope I’ll see you again soon.’

But not in a professional capacity, thought Maxwell, wiggling his fingers at her in farewell. He followed her out of the office, hoping to catch sight of someone of the stature of James Robertson Justice as Sir Lancelot Spratt. Instead it was just a kid in a white coat surrounded by other kids in white coats. Eventually he found his way up to the
orthopaedic ward, where Helen Maitland was making life hell for anything in a uniform. He stuck his head round the door and could hear her in full flight.

He fixed a carefree grin on his face and made his way to where she was trussed up like a chicken on traction.

‘Helen! Dear heart! How the devil are you?’ He bent to give her a kiss.

‘Have you come to ask stupid questions, Max, or have you come to help me scratch my leg?’ she said, twisting this way and that to try and reach her ankle.

‘You scratch my ankle, I’ll scratch yours,’ he said genially, ‘and by the way, we historians call them, in all modesty, nether limbs.’ He extracted a biro from an inside pocket. ‘Now,’ he said, brandishing it, ‘where do you want me to start?’

‘Max, have I ever told you you are a simply wonderful man?’

‘Not lately, but you can start now if you want,’ he said. ‘Now, tell me if this tickles.’ He poked the biro gently underneath her plaster and wiggled it about. She writhed in pleasure. ‘Better?’

‘Perfect,’ she breathed. ‘Just perfect. How long can you stay?’

He glanced round to the end of the ward; the clock above the doors told him the horrible truth. ‘Well, Helen,’ he said. ‘The bad news is that I can
only give you another ten minutes, I’m afraid. I promised Jacquie I would be back in the car park in an hour and she worries if I’m late, for some strange reason.’

Helen laughed and lobbed a grape at him. ‘I’m not surprised, Max. If you were mine, I’d keep you on a stout rope, tethered like a goat in the yard, to some immoveable object. Every time you wander off, you get into some sort of trouble.’

‘Madam,’ he said, drawing himself up, ‘I object. After all, I am doubly your boss at the moment. As Acting Head I can fire you.’

‘I simply don’t know how you have the nerve,’ she said, ignoring his remark completely. ‘After all you’ve put that poor woman through over the years. Still, she must like it or I suppose she wouldn’t have agreed to marry you. But, don’t worry. The evening drinks trolley has just arrived, so I shall be getting outside my nightly Horlicks in a minute anyway.’ She leant forward. ‘Oh, bugger it. I hate it when it’s him.’

‘Who?’ Maxwell screwed round to see better and inadvertently gave her a small stab wound with his pen.

‘Ouch! Max, watch what you’re doing with that.’

He looked round at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said, absently.

‘Max? What is it?’

‘Sorry, Helen, old chap. It’s just that I
recognised the trolley dolly. The wispy hair, the unkempt beard. I hadn’t seen him for a while. Not since Dierdre’s funeral, in fact. And just recently he seems to be everywhere.’

Helen clicked her fingers. ‘Of
course
!’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying to place him. Dierdre’s uncle, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Oliver Lessing, as I live and breathe. First at school, now here. He’s always pushing a trolley; the man’s obsessed. I’ll go out the other end of the ward, Helen, if that’s all right with you. He’s not my favourite person and he hates my guts.’

‘Why?’ Helen genuinely wanted to know. She loved Max dearly and, while he could be bloody annoying, she couldn’t think how anyone could actually hate him.

‘History, I expect.’ He caught her puzzled look. ‘No, no, I don’t mean
History
, as in what I teach. I mean history, as in what happened in our past. He remembers the time when Dierdre and I really didn’t get along and holds it against me. That and a few other things.’

‘Did you ever actually
get
along with Dierdre?’ Helen felt she had to ask. ‘I don’t really remember that.’

‘Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we stopped not getting along.’

‘What other things?’ Helen reminded him. ‘Re Uncle Ollie?’

‘Don’t ask.’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘Water under the bridge. Look, darling, I must fly. I’m late anyway.’ He dashed to the business end of the bed and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. ‘Abyssinia. Don’t take any sweeties from any nasty men.’ He paused and looked thoughtfully at Oliver Lessing, struggling to move the enormous heavy trolley with his puny little legs, which scrabbled against the Flotexed floor before he finally got it moving. ‘In fact, don’t have your Horlicks tonight. Don’t ask me why, I’d just rather you didn’t.’

She followed his glance and chuckled. ‘Max, don’t get carried away. He’s a Hospital Volunteer, not Major Armstrong.’

‘Bless you for knowing the name of a random poisoner, Helen. Now indulge me by settling for your bottled water.’

She looked into his eyes. She’d been his deputy in the Sixth Form now for more years than either of them cared to remember. He had never let her down before. She gave in. ‘Oh, all right. But if I have nightmares, I shall know who to blame.’

‘Nick Ross,’ he called as he vanished into MRSA land.

Jacquie reached her mother’s car, and as she saw the ripped metal in the car park’s lights her heart gave a little jolt as she was reminded of the task still ahead: telling her about the accident. All the memories from childhood came up and piled one on top of the other in her head. She could hear the martyred sigh, the breathy and insincere thankfulness that she, Jacquie, was unharmed and that anyway, what was a car but a chunk of metal? Then would come the head shakes, the disbelief that anyone, let alone her own daughter, could be so thoughtless as to let this happen to a poor lone widow-woman’s pride and joy. The dark cloud in Jacquie’s head grew large and ominous, a thunderhead with no reprieve but to burst.

She got into the car and looked around. If you just sat inside, it looked perfectly all right. She decided on that method and shook herself
to get ready for the rest of the night. It was going to be a long one, she felt it in her water. She turned the radio on low, for company. Something about this case was spooking her. She had always hated poison cases and, in fact, had only personally come across two before. One had been a wife slowly feeding her husband with good old-fashioned rat poison. A sharp-eyed GP had spotted that one early enough and no one had died. The second had been the case of a daughter poisoning her elderly and increasingly demented mother. She could bond with that one, no problem. But the common strand had been that it had all been in the family. In this case, the invisible killer was using a scattergun approach. No one was immune from his deadly hobby. She sighed. She hated the random loony cases. The only light at the end of the tunnel was that, as he was so
very
random and apparently so
very
loony, it could only be a matter of time before he absent-mindedly ate one of his own doctored treats and died.

She turned her mind to the job at hand. Firstly, she checked her own phone again. She made a note in her book of the time of the call Maxwell had attempted but which had definitely not connected. She turned Hall’s phone on and it flashed logos at her until she was on the verge of throwing it away. Finally, the home screen came up and she scrolled through to the call register.
There, on the screen, was a call from an unnamed mobile, timed literally two seconds before the call from her own phone. Next to the number was a small icon which she assumed meant that a message had been left. She indulged in a small Maxwell moment in which she longed for the days when mobile phones were the size of small suitcases and the screens were enormous, green and very, very simple. By jogging dials randomly she found herself in the voicemail menu. Trial and error finally got her to the right place and she put the phone to her ear to listen.

The voice was not one she recognised immediately and it was clearly disguised, she thought, by an electronic voice changer. ‘Hello, Mr Hall,’ it grated metallically. ‘That was a close one, wasn’t it? Better luck for me next time, perhaps. I hope the wife is all right. And the little boy. I said you’d be sorry. And so will all the other hundreds of people who will be tucking into my little specialities tonight. Yum, yum, Mr Hall. Sleep tight.’

Jacquie let the phone drop to her lap. So it
was
a vendetta. And both Hall and Maxwell were right. It
was
aimed at them – both of them. She leant her head on the steering wheel for a moment and took a deep breath. Now she had to decide what to do. Did she go back into the hospital and speak to Henry Hall, thorn removal notwithstanding? Or did she ring the nick? Or
did she go to the nick, leaving Maxwell stranded? Or did she wait for Maxwell? Or …

There was a knock on the window, passenger side. She jumped and turned to see who it was. A dark figure filled the window and blocked out the light. It seemed to be mouthing something. Her hand flew to her chest as her heart leapt and hammered.

‘For goodness’ sake, Jacquie,’ the creature said, its voice muffled by the glass and the pounding of her blood in her ears. ‘Let me in.’

She pinged the central-locking button and Maxwell exploded into the car on a wave of fresh air and disinfectant. He sketched a kiss at her and sat back. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, peering into her face. ‘You’re as white as a sheet.’

Wordlessly, she held out Hall’s phone to him.

‘I’ve been visiting the hospital, sweetness,’ he said. ‘Not having a brain transplant. The call I made to Henry was a complete fluke. You’ll have to explain.’

‘There’s a message,’ she said shortly, and pressed the required buttons and then handed the phone to him again. Unlike Maxwell, Jacquie Carpenter could remember what button did what for more than twenty seconds after the initial discovery.

He listened intently to the call, then gave her the phone back, a grim look on his face. ‘A bit personal,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I thought that. Then he mentioned the “little boy”, Nolan, specifically. I think he must be out to get you both.’ Her lip quivered. ‘This one has really got to me, Max. I can cope with madmen with axes, people trying to run you over, all of that. But this is so … sneaky.’

Maxwell leant closer and put an arm around her shoulders. She leant in, grateful for the normality of the roughness of his tweed jacket, the smell of him, even overlaid as it was by Essence of Leighford General. ‘Of course it’s sneaky, sweetheart,’ he said, kissing the top of her head. ‘You can’t threaten people with poison, the way you can with a knife or a gun.’ He became, briefly, every hard-boiled cop on television or cinema; Kojak meets Dirty Harry who also bumps into Booth out of
Bones
. ‘Look out everybody. He’s got a plant-based poison, an alkaloid by the look of it, and he’s not afraid to use it!’

He felt, rather than heard, her giggle. ‘Point taken,’ she said into his coat. ‘But, even so.’

He moved back upright and looked her in the eye. ‘So, are we going to stop being spooked and go out and catch this sneaky person?’

She nodded and handed him the phones from her lap. She twisted round and put on her seat belt and carefully put the car into reverse. She eased out of the parking space and drove
slowly towards the exit, listening carefully for the sound of scraping metal or dragging rubber which would mean the damage was worse even than it appeared. There was just one rather faint but rhythmic clunking noise from what Jacquie thought of as the front offside and what Maxwell thought of as the driver’s feet part of the car, but when Jacquie applied the brake nothing terrible happened, the noise got no louder and no sparks flew, so she decided it was safe to go, slowly, to Leighford nick and see what they could do about identifying the phone number on Hall’s mobile.

‘How are you going to break this bit of news to your mother?’ Maxwell said, encompassing the car with one expansive gesture.

‘Max, how many times must I tell you,’ she said, poking him smartly in the leg, ‘not to read my mind?’

‘Sorry, heart,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to keep out of your brain, but it’s nice and cosy in there. But you haven’t answered my question.’

She sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It won’t go well, that’s for sure. She’s a bit anal about her cars. I’ll end up feeling guilty, however I play it. I’ve broken her car and she won’t care about the circumstances.’

Maxwell looked thoughtful. ‘Well, she might consider that her karmic balance has been improved by this bump.’

Jacquie laughed shortly. ‘How so?’

‘Well, she nearly broke our son. And I don’t think even your mother would consider a car and a child to have equal value.’

‘I suspect it wouldn’t be as obvious as you and I might think but, yes, in principle, you’re right. I still don’t fancy suggesting that to her, though.’ Broken children and broken cars. Images that had haunted the mind of Peter Maxwell for years. Except that now he had another child. And the loss of his first would never hurt quite so much again.

‘Leave it to me,’ Maxwell said, patting her shoulder. ‘In fact, look, where are we?’ He looked through the windscreen, getting his bearings. ‘Yes, we’re just coming up to the High Street. If you let me out now, I’ll get a cab and get home and explain.’

‘Would you?’ She looked at him with big, grateful eyes. ‘Max, that would be such a weight off my mind.’

‘It will be my pleasure,’ Maxwell said. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to guilt. She has only practised on you. I’ve had a million kids to iron out the glitches on. Off you go now, woman policeman, and save us from the sneaky poisoner.’

She pulled in to the side and he got out, slamming the door hard, only to have it bounce out of its distorted frame and catch him a nasty one on the shin.

‘Bugger and poo!’ You could tell a man with a First from Cambridge by the superior quality of his expletives.

‘Try just pressing it into place,’ she suggested, trying to hide a smirk.

‘Oh, ha,’ he said, tears in his eyes from the pain. ‘We’ll try that again, shall we?’ And he firmly pushed the door home until he heard a click.

‘That’s better,’ she called and drove off to the nick.

He stood there, waving extravagantly, and walked off in the general direction of the taxi rank, watching over his shoulder until she was out of sight. He had had no real plan in mind as he got out of the car, except that this sneaky killer must be out there somewhere. He knew that the Leighford Poisoner, as he was undoubtedly enshrined already in the Sunday papers winging their way to newsagents up and down the land, had not finished. His attempt on Henry Hall in the car park had been opportunistic, of that there was no doubt. His modus operandi was poison, and he still had more to share with the gentlemen (and ladies) of Leighford, now abed.

The town centre was still busy with its usual quota of binge drinkers, most of whom had teaching qualifications and who ducked smartly down side roads or into shop doorways rather than meet Mad Max face-to-face. Maxwell cut a
swathe down the High Street until he smelt the unmistakeable smell that hung like an almost visible pall over the Vine, the worst pub in Leighford, and therefore the one least likely to contain either staff or pupils of Leighford High. He wondered, as he headed towards it, how it managed to still smell of an old ashtray, since no smoking was allowed within its hallowed walls. The dull gleam of terminally low-wattage bulbs just made it through the nicotine-encrusted windows, and the desultory ‘ping’ of the arcade machine was the background music to occasional coughing and the random verbal jottings of Mad Artie, the most local of all locals.

Maxwell pushed open the door and went in. The silence became even more palpable for a few seconds as the batwing doors creaked to a standstill and all eyes were on the dust-caked stranger, poncho slung over his shoulder, big iron on his hip. Then the game player pushed another button and Artie let fly with a particularly inventive invective.

The landlord, polishing a glass with a dirty cloth, greeted him with his own special brand of disdain. ‘Help you?’ he muttered.

Maxwell’s usual rejoinder to that question in a pub was to ask for the best the landlord had to offer, a foaming beaker of perfectly balanced hop and malt or, perchance, a beaker of the warm south, rolled on a handmaiden’s thigh. This time,
he played safe. He could tell by the encrusted sugar on the optic below the Southern Comfort that no one had had one of those since his last visit. And that was in 1843.

‘Southern Comfort, please. A double, I think. It’s been an eventful evening.’

‘Ice?’

No, thank you,’ Maxwell grimaced. ‘It is meant to be comforting, after all.’ A quick whack on the lip by a rock-hard misshapen lump of ice always left a nasty taste. The ice in the Vine quite literally left a nasty taste. Maxwell had always suspected that it was chipped out of gutters during the winter and stored against the day.

‘Slice?’

‘God, no.’ It was getting worse. Had no one yet sussed that all this ice and bits was merely a way of beating Mr Disraeli’s Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875? God alone knew what sweepings lay among the roasted peanuts on the bar. Maxwell paid and took his drink to a corner table, where he could both think and watch the world go by, if anything from the real world would risk the Vine late on a Saturday night, when the slop tray was beginning its fifteenth circuit through the unwary customer.

He knew there would be serious repercussions when he got home. There was no way he could hide this little jolly from Jacquie. She had probably already phoned home to alert her
mother. Her mother, running true to form, would ring her back as soon as Maxwell failed to arrive on time. Egged on by Mrs Troubridge, who loved nothing more than death and disaster, she would be virtually hysterical and the shit would hit the fan at warp speed. He took a steadying sip. He would cross that bridge when he came to it. Meanwhile, he had a poisoner to stalk.

He reached into his inside pocket and brought out a pen and a piece of paper. He looked at the used side and smiled. It was the bottom copy of an order to the County store and he had kept it in that inside pocket since he had sent the top two copies, as per the written instructions, to County Hall. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his administrative staff. He just didn’t want to make them accomplices after the fact. He folded it back up and put it away. He walked over to the bar.

‘Do you have such a thing as a piece of paper I could borrow?’

‘Borrer? Gunna lemme have it back arter?’ It wasn’t a bad Ray Winstone, all things considered.

‘Well, no. I suppose
give
would be a better description. Do you have a piece of paper that you could give me?’

Without looking Maxwell in the eye, the barman slid across a copy of last week’s pub quiz questions. Maxwell was cheered to see that he would have romped home a clear winner, had it
not been for the ten questions on football teams and the twenty-five based on
Eastenders
.

‘Thank you very much,’ he smiled and went back to his table. Mad Artie had sidled a few places nearer but was still far enough away for his random obscenities to be part of the background noise. Maxwell smoothed out the paper and began to make a sketch map of the town centre, marking food shops with a circle. Then, he went back over the map and crossed through the two twenty-four-hour shops; although closed now, on Saturday night, they kept a large security staff and so were likely to be safe. The weigh-it-yourself shops he also crossed off, as being too random even for this particular random killer. Anything added to the enormous bins of loose raisins, currants and similar, might well go to the bottom and not see the light of day again for weeks, months or ever. This left three shops which were possibles. Of those, one faced on to the square and had huge plate glass windows down to the floor. The aisles of goods were at right angles to the glass, so any passer-by could see the whole of the shop. It was useless to consider exposing oneself near the crystallised fruits in there, he thought, concluding that he should perhaps get out more. So, that left two and those odds were fine by him.