Maxwell’s Ride (17 page)

Maxwell caught sight of the single bright eye looking at him. ‘Well, what was I supposed to do, for God’s sake? Tell the woman her daughters had witnessed a murder and the house where they are staying has been broken into? And her two thousand miles away? Right!’

He ferreted about for a change of clothes. ‘If anyone calls, Count,’ he was wrestling with a sock, ‘just tell them I’ve gone north – tired of Southern Comfort. Well, actually,’ he collapsed on the settee trying to get his shoe on, ‘that’s a lie. I’ll be in London. Gordon Square. And if a man’s tired of Southern Comfort, he’s tired of life. Don’t wait up.’

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, he who had invented the felicific calculus as a sort of clapometer to measure people’s happiness, had built the godless institution in Gower Street. He is there to this day, stuffed, as most philosophers have been, sitting in a glass case at the end of the main corridor. His femurs protrude through the frayed fustian of his breeches and he’s looking rather waxy these days. That’s largely because his head is a copy and the real one, probably quite nasty by now, is in a hat box between his feet. At night, of course, he gets up and wanders around, appalled by the prospect of modular degrees.

Around the corner is Gordon Square, at the heart of the Bloomsbury Academia. Maxwell watched the students as the twilight turned to dusk and the dusk to night, strolling home in twos and threes, debating the philosophical conundrums of their age group – was the beer best at UCL or King’s? And how did the medics spell diarrhoea? A year or two ago, these same graceless oafs would have been sprawling in sixth form common rooms the length and breadth of the country. But they’d come on immeasurably since then; then, they had difficulty spelling shit.

‘Yes?’ a rather suave voice crackled over the intercom at the door of Number 239.

‘Er … Peter Maxwell. May I come in?’

There was a pause. ‘Who are you?’

‘Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High School. I’m looking for Chris Logan.’

There was another pause, then a series of clicks and large, glass-panelled door opened. Maxwell found himself in a large, plush-carpeted hall, with subdued half-sunken lights glowing on the walls. A huge fireplace to one side was a reminder of more gracious days when Gordon Square had housed some of the finest families in the land.

‘Come up,’ a disembodied voice told him. ‘The first floor.’

The stairs spiralled up like those at the Garrick, the brass hand rail smooth and polished. A door opened as he reached the first landing.

‘Mr Maxwell? We’ve met, surely?’

‘Mr LeStrange.’ Maxwell had never admitted to being taken aback in his life. He wasn’t about to start now. ‘What a small world.’

‘Indeed it is,’ LeStrange caught his hand. ‘Can I offer you a sherry?’

‘That’s kind.’

The magician showed the teacher into an opulent flat where top-of-the-bill posters plastered the walls and Anthony LeStrange was shaking hands with the rich and famous in umpteen photographs. Trophies and awards gleamed in glass cases on either side of an Adam fireplace. The whole room screamed fame and fortune.

‘Impressive,’ Maxwell said.

‘Ah,’ LeStrange dismissed it with a gesture. ‘Just baubles,’ he said. ‘Dry?’

‘Thanks,’ Maxwell took the proffered glass.

‘Your very good health.’

‘Cheers.’ They clicked glasses and Maxwell sank into a vast chair. ‘I really must apologize for coming unannounced.’

‘That’s all right,’ LeStrange said. ‘I’m not due at the Club for a while.’

‘The Garrick?’

‘No. The Inner Circle. Shop, I’m afraid.’

Maxwell chuckled. ‘Rather exotic shop, I should imagine.’

‘All in a day’s work, Mr Maxwell. I would imagine some people would find a staff meeting pretty exhilarating.’

‘Really?’ Maxwell’s eyes widened. Was this man taking the piss or what?

Anthony LeStrange was handsome in a cerebral kind of way. On television he looked taller and younger, but Maxwell knew the lies of a camera, when the man was all stars and spangles and dry ice.

‘How can I help?’ he asked the Head of Sixth Form.

‘Yes.’ It was time to come to the point. ‘Chris Logan.’

‘Who?’

‘He’s a reporter on our local paper, the
Leighford Advertiser
.’

‘Yes?’

‘He came to see you yesterday. Or possibly the day before.’

‘He did?’

‘So I’ve been informed.’

‘I think misinformed would be a better word,’ LeStrange said.

‘You haven’t seen him?’

‘Never,’ the magician shrugged.

‘It’s just that your address was in his address book.’

‘My address?’

‘Yes.’

‘How odd. Wait a minute – the
Leighford
…’

‘
Advertiser
.’

‘You’d have to check with my secretary. Obviously I do an awful lot of interviews.’

‘This interview would have been to do with Larry Warner’s death.’

‘Would it? How did this Mr Logan think I could help?’

‘You knew Warner.’

LeStrange chuckled. ‘I know a lot of people, Mr Maxwell. I met Warner, what, two, perhaps three times. Through Charts.’

‘Can you think of any reason why anyone should want to kill him?’

‘No, but the police obviously can.’

‘Oh.’

‘Ah.’ LeStrange crossed to his tantalus to freshen their drinks. ‘You’d have missed dear old Trevor Macdonald, trundling up from the coast as you must have been. Yes, it made the national news. The police have a suspect. The outside broadcast people interviewed a fellow called Hall, if I remember rightly. Same fellow who talked to me a few days ago.’

‘Hall’s got somebody?’ Maxwell was playing dumb for Jacquie’s sake. ‘Did he say who?’

‘Do they ever?’ LeStrange grunted. ‘“A man is helping police with their inquiries”.’

‘I see. So he hasn’t actually been charged, then?’

‘That’s going to happen tomorrow, apparently. Whatever some of us think of our constabularies, Mr Maxwell, they’re not manned by utter buffoons. Hall will have his reasons.’

‘Oh yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’m sure of that.’

Well,’ LeStrange looked at his watch. ‘If there’s nothing else, Mr Maxwell?’

Maxwell knew a hint when he heard one. ‘Quite.’ And he downed his Amontillado. ‘Many thanks for your hospitality,’ and he shook the man’s hand. ‘Should Chris Logan get in touch, ask him to contact me, will you? It’s quite urgent.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. Let me see you out.’

‘Bloody Hell, it’s cold.’ Tom Durrant stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets as he turned the windy corner underneath the Arches. Night beat was a bitch, but at least after dark, at three in the morning you could stick your bloody hands into your bloody pockets and not be afraid of being reported by some toffee-nosed old biddie.

‘You got a rest day coming up?’ WPC Jane Harperhay trudged beside him, the wind raw on her nose and lips.

‘Monday,’ he told her. ‘One long glorious … oh, Christ.’ Tom Durrant had stopped, staring straight ahead at the alleyway off Villiers Street.

Jane Harperhay flashed her torch into the darkness. ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Durrant was rarely wrong and she’d learned to trust him implicitly since their first pairing three years ago. But this was cardboard city, that monument to Thatcher’s England which Blair had done nothing about. Nameless people wrapped in filthy bundles, immune to wind and weather, people with just the strength to croak ‘Got any small change?’ as the busy, unseeing world passed them by. A sleeping bag, once pale blue, lay rolled up against the damp, green bricks of a chill spring night. She saw a cider bottle, its shattered neck like sparkling brown diamonds in the torch-beam. She saw a syringe, two – a third.

‘Junkie,’ she said. A naked foot protruded from the sleeping bag, white in the torchlight.

‘No.’ Durrant was moving forward, arcing in a circle, checking ahead and behind. His hands were out of his pockets and cradling the night stick, ready for anything. He’d been this way before, off work for three months with a broken collar bone. Painful price to pay for a commendation.

Jane Harperhay reached for her night-stick too, watching the bundle, the half-lit expanse of pavement, wet in the driving drizzle. Durrant’s boot touched the white foot, gently at first, then hard. It didn’t move, not even a twitch. He heard his oppo radioing in.

‘Suspected incident at the southern end of Villiers Street, under the Arches.’

He heard the answering crackle of the walkie-talkie and eased back the bedroll with the tip of his stick. She saw him jump, crouching as he was, saw the helmet plate bounce as his hairline shot backwards. For an instant, Tom Durrant was upright again, fighting the urge to vomit. Then she saw him crouch for a second time, doing his job, getting on with it, investigating a death at the scene of a crime. Another reveller who would not see the Millennium.

Jane shone her torch full onto the upturned face of the dead man, his jaw and throat dark with congealed blood and his dark auburn hair matted over his forehead.

‘We’ve got a corpse,’ she spoke softly into the lifeline clipped to her shoulder. ‘Male Caucasian. About thirty. Fully clothed except for shoes.’ She watched as Durrant peeled back the sleeping bag and the body rolled out onto the pavement. He knelt on the wet tarmac and checked the heart for signs of a beat. Nothing. He lifted the cold wrist. No pulse. He could find nothing pumping in the neck because all the dead man’s blood, it seemed, had left him, spreading like an evil over his throat, his chest, his shoulders.

‘What appears to be a gunshot wound to the throat,’ Jane Harperhay was talking to the station. As she said it, they heard the familiar whining siren. The ambulance was on its way, slicing through the minimal traffic in the Strand, swinging left at Charing Cross, bouncing with its lights flashing down the hill. And from nowhere, a squad car screamed around the corner under the bridge in a blaze of lights and sirens to angle itself under the Arches, where the body lay.

Tom Durrant stood up, holding the contents of the dead man’s inside jacket pocket in his hand. ‘Christopher Logan,’ he said to Jane Harperhay. ‘That’s who he was.’

13

‘He wasn’t killed here,’ DCI Ian Gallagher was emphatic about that. He hadn’t shaved that morning, nor the morning before and he was beyond tiredness. Alongside Henry Hall he was a lump of a man, an unmade bed, John Prescott to Hall’s Tony Blair.

‘Ah.’ Gallagher broke the silence as a constable walked in ‘Coffee. Thanks, Des. You people take sugar?’

Jacquie Carpenter shook her head, praying that nobody would say ‘She’s sweet enough.’ Nobody did. They were coppers. The rather dishy uniform put the tray down and swept out.

‘Two, please,’ Frank Bartholomew said and realizing nobody was going to do it for him, helped himself.

‘So … er … Henry,’ Gallagher eased himself into the well-worn plastic of the chair behind the desk at the fourth building in turn to take the name Scotland Yard. ‘Tell me all about Christopher Logan.’

‘We haven’t got much,’ Hall adjusted his glasses and took the folder that Jacquie slipped across to him. ‘Working-class kid made good. Went to the local comprehensive in Leighford. Then to Salford University.’

‘Graduates!’ snarled Gallagher, slurping his coffee. ‘Can’t stick ’em myself.’

Jacquie and Bartholomew looked at Hall, the graduate. He ignored them all and carried on. ‘Worked on the local paper there for a time, then on the
Sun
.’

‘I didn’t know the
Sun
employed graduates,’ Gallagher frowned, reaching for a digestive to dunk. That was the way with Ian Gallagher – you took ’em or left ’em; please yourself.

‘He was there for … what … three years. Then came back to work on the
Leighford Advertiser
.’’

‘Now, then,’ Gallagher leaned back in his chair. He’d been in the business longer than Hall, the last of his breed, a dinosaur. Jacquie reflected for a moment how well he and Maxwell would have got on. ‘Tell me, since I know Jack Shit about the
Advertiser
– is that promotion or demotion, after the
Sun
?’

‘We could ask the editors,’ Bartholomew suggested.

Both DCIs looked at him, but it was Gallagher, playing host at the Yard that wet Thursday morning, who answered him. ‘Never ask an editor of a newspaper anything, son. You tell ’em. And if they ask you anything, well, that’s when you stop telling ’em. Married?’

‘Sorry?’ Hall was losing the thread of this.

‘Christopher Logan. Was he married?’

‘No. We’re trying to contact parents, but they moved away from Leighford some time ago.’

Gallagher was tapping a yet-undunked biscuit on the rim of his cup, narrowing his options, looking for jigsaw pieces in a shattered life. ‘Anything known? Drugs? Sex? Money worries?’

‘We haven’t had much time on this.’ Hall felt the need to defend his team, and himself. ‘It’ll take a while. What about the area?’

‘Where the body was found? It used to be part of the Maryannes’ Mile.’ He leaned forward to Jacquie. ‘For the benefit of you young people, that’s an area frequented by homosexuals.’

Jacquie managed a smile that was only marginally weaker than the coffee.

‘But that’s a long time ago. Sort of thing you’d find on the eighth floor.’

‘The eighth floor?’ Bartholomew didn’t mind making a fool of himself; after all, he’d been doing it for years.

‘Black Museum, son. Hangman’s ropes, death masks. Little mementoes of man’s inhumanity to man. No, it’s Wino’s corner now is the Arches. Shame, really, I bet Flanagan and Allen are turning in their graves.’

Nobody except Gallagher smiled. Jacquie made a mental note to ask Maxwell who they were.

‘There’s a little drug trafficking goes on, but mostly, it’s an extension of cardboard city. Derelicts and vagrants from Christ-knows-where, all of ’em with a hard luck story as long as your nightstick. We’re making inquiries of course, but . .’ His voice tailed away into a shrug. Everyone in the room knew the score. The flotsam and jetsam of a great city, like the debris washed up at low tide. They had no names, no past, no future. Just faces pinched and grey. Hope was a bottle of cider or a dirty needle.