by M. J. Trow
Hall and Jacquie went on into the sitting room and sat side by side on the sofa. Maxwell’s chair awaited the great man’s entrance, which he effected with a tray of coffee.
‘Henry, Sweetness; sugar on the tray, milk in the ...’ he looked down at the tray, left the room, came back in with the jug, ‘... jug.’ He sat down and crossed his legs. ‘So, Henry, how can I help you?’
‘I don’t think I have specific questions, to ask you just like that,’ Hall said. ‘It’s more a mulling things over, really. Jacquie knows how I hate coincidences ...’
‘To the extent of not believing in them at all, I should say,’ Jacquie said.
Hall nodded his agreement. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That. But this case seems full of them. Everyone seems linked to everyone else. It isn’t possible that the only night in the history of this police force when two people are murdered within a couple of hours of each other should involve two women who seem to have links with each other ... but, there it is. Can't be ignored.’
‘Which would you prefer?’ Maxwell asked. ‘That there is a link, or that it is just coincidence?’
‘They can't both be victims of one killer,’ Hall said. ‘We have narrowed down the times of death and it wouldn’t be possible, just logistically.’
‘Strangers on a Train,’ Maxwell remarked.
‘Don’t start the Hitchcock nonsense with me,’ Hall said. ‘This is real life, not a film.’
‘True,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘But I bet there isn’t anyone alive who hasn’t thought how brilliant it would be if someone would kill their wife, mother, boss ... no offence intended, to either of you,’ he added, hurriedly.
‘What about the children?’ Hall asked. ‘Are they friends, at all?’
‘Hmm.’ Maxwell had to think of ways to describe Dee MacBride without resorting to hyperbole. ‘Tommy Morley is a nice child, I think, but hampered rather by being not very attractive and also being a bit ... cowed. This makes him stroppy with his peers, because they are the only ones he can lash out at. The girls completely faze him, and when we come to Dee MacBride that’s fair enough. She fazes most people. She’s stroppy, too, but with everyone. She wants to hit out at men, due to her father’s behaviour, I would imagine, but raging hormones are making her see that they have their uses. We need Sylv for this, really.’
‘That was pretty good,’ Hall said, impressed.
‘What about the younger one,’ Jacquie asked. ‘She seems to have rather been forgotten.’
‘And she is,’ Maxwell said. ‘Speak to any member of staff at Leighford about her and they are hard pressed to remember her name. Dee takes all the attention. Paula is the prettier one, but she plasters makeup all over her face, almost like a mask.’
Jacquie tutted. ‘Are you sure that’s not just your inner old git talking there, Max?’ She turned to Henry. ‘He hates too much makeup,’ she explained.
‘I hate makeup full stop on a girl her age,’ Maxwell argued. ‘She’ll never have such nice skin again; why cover it up?’
The two police persons looked at him as if they had never seen him before.
‘Well, they won't.’ He looked at them. ‘What? I’ve spent the last ten lifetimes, if memory serves, in the company of adolescent girls and, occasional spot notwithstanding, they are all better off with no makeup. How did we get here, anyway?’
‘Paula MacBride,’ Hall prompted.
‘Yes. Sorry. Paula is the brighter of the two as well, I would say her mother’s child, if you believe in the favourites theory.’
‘So ... you don’t think she could have killed her mother.’ Hall sounded disappointed.
‘What?’ Jacquie was staggered. ‘Where did that come from?’
Hall shrugged. ‘Desperation?’ he suggested.
‘I should think so, too. I don’t think it could have been done by a child at all.’
‘Any particular reason why not?’ Maxwell was not one to underestimate what a child could do; his millennia at the chalk face had taught him that if nothing else.
‘Physical, mainly. The fingernails were cleaned after death, Jim Astley has confirmed; there were tears under the nails following quite a rough job, but no healing or inflammation, suggesting it was before she died. There are absolutely no signs on the balcony that this happened up there; and, believe me, we have done a fine toothcomb search. So ...’
‘... it had to be done elsewhere and she was then carried to the balcony,’ Maxwell finished her sentence. ‘Unless ...’
‘Unless?’ Hall didn’t mind how bonkers the ideas were. They were bound to be better than nothing.
‘Ignore me. I was wondering if she could have been ... thrown?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Max,’ Jacquie said. ‘Anyway, we know she came from the balcony. There are scuffs up there which would account for it.’
‘In that case,’ Maxwell said, swigging the last of his coffee and getting up in search of glasses and the Southern Comfort bottle, ‘I got nothing!’
Henry Hall shook his head at the proffered bottle and got up with a sigh. ‘Well, thank you very much for the dinner,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Jacquie.’ He leaned forward and shook Maxwell’s hand. ‘Max. Thanks for your ... input.’
‘I’ll get your coat for you, guv,’ Jacquie said. ‘Sorry if we didn’t have the answer for you.’
‘No, no,’ Hall said. ‘It’s been ...’ and Maxwell didn’t hear the rest, as he went off down the stairs.
Maxwell was back in his chair, nursing a glass when Jacquie came back. A gin and tonic was sparkling on the table by her normal seat at the end of the sofa. She raised it to him and drank.
‘So,’ Maxwell said, thoughtfully. ‘The coincidence is just that the kids go to Leighford High, is it?’
‘No,’ Jacquie said. ‘Of course not. There are other ... links.’
‘I thought there must be,’ he said. ‘If the kids going to Leighford is all there is, then most crimes will be linked. What are the other coincidences? And why didn’t Henry mention them?’
‘Cold feet? You know how he hates to tell you anything.’
‘What are they?’ Maxwell was nothing if not persistent.
‘We have reason to believe ...’ she began.
Maxwell raised an eyebrow and took a miniscule sip of his drink.
‘There seems to be a link between Mrs MacBride and Thomas Morley. We don’t quite know what it is, yet. He had left a short message on her answerphone which he won't discuss. When he heard she was dead, he was very upset. But then again, he was told by Rick Shopley, so that might be why. He isn’t exactly Mr Compassion.’
‘But he must have said something. Not just that he was upset.’
‘He said it was confidential.’
Maxwell’s eyebrows shot up. ‘What an odd thing to say. Now she’s dead, it all seems ...’
‘A bit by the way, exactly.’ Jacquie had been mulling it over all afternoon. ‘And on top of that, Mrs MacBride also had what almost amounts to a threatening call, earlier in the evening than Morley’s. It was from what I learned to call in LA a ‘burner’, a mobile phone with no registered owner and no way of being tracked. If it is still being used, we can’t find where or by whom.’
Maxwell watched TV. More specifically, he watched CSI. ‘But can’t you ...’ he waved his arms in the air, ‘something to do with towers, isn’t it?’
Jacquie smiled. She knew what towers were in his mind; the topless towers of Ilium at the very least. ‘No. We can't.’
‘Oh.’ He looked hopefully at her over the rim of his glass. ‘Voice recognition?’
‘Tell me whose voice it is, we’ll recognise it,’ she said, letting him down gently. ‘Until then ... no.’
‘What about Mrs Morley? Did she have an answerphone?’
‘Not so you’d notice. She did have a nice little side-line, though.’
‘Oh, really. Don’t tell me – she was Mrs MacBride’s cleaner.’
‘Nope.’
‘Hairdres
ser?’
‘Wrong again.’
‘Ah!’ he sat up, spilling his drink. ‘Manicurist!’
‘Nice thought. But no. She was by way of being what Henry delightfully calls “a talented amateur”.’
‘A what?’
Jacquie waited for the penny to drop.
‘Oh!’ Maxwell cast his mind back to see if he could remember what the woman looked like but came up blank. ‘Oh, I see. That does explain a lot. But, surely, not with Tommy in the house?’
‘No. This was strictly a daytime business opportunity,’ Jacquie told him.
‘Did the husband tell you that?’
‘No. I went to see Hetty. You remember, Henry’s sister.’
‘Of course. Who lives next door. Wait a minute! Is her name really Henrietta?’
‘Now, wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘Oh, come on. Tell me,’ he wheedled. ‘I’ll tell you what. If you tell me Hetty’s name, I’ll tell you who your murderer is.’
‘Good deal,’ she said, lying back on the sofa and closing her eyes, ‘you first.’
‘But ...’
She opened one eye. ‘When you can show me yours, I’ll show you mine. But until then, no dice.’
‘Why the scarf, Count, I don’t hear you ask?’ Maxwell’s right eye loomed huge through the magnifying glass. ‘Well, it must have been a little embarrassing for Sergeant Williams, not to mention painful, but he had a boil on the end of his nose and he rode the Charge with a scarf over it. Can’t look unsightly in the face of the enemy. That was in Army Regulations.’
The cat yawned. What was the old duffer whittering on about now? This was their special place, Man and Cat, the attic at 32 Columbine which Maxwell called the War office. Jacquie only ventured up here twice a year, to pick up the Christmas decorations in December and to put them away again in January. Nolan was allowed, but he understood from a very early age that Dads’ soldiers were out of bounds.
They sat, all 403 of them, perfectly painted, perfectly plastic in their 54mm finery, as they would have looked that chill October morning back in 1854. They’d had no breakfast and the damned Ruskies were already on the move. They were Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade and Sergeant Richard Williams, he of the boil, was about to take his place on the flanks of the 17th Lancers, a boy looking for glory.
Metternich knew better than to touch the Brigade, too. He was content to bask in the warm lamp glow, to sniff the glue and the paint and to try to work out why a man of Maxwell’s vast brain should ruin his eyesight by fiddling with bits so small and so pointless. Metternich was used to handling little bits too, but at least they had a purpose; and they tasted just delicious. In his case, the fiddly bits had once belonged to a field mouse, but the distinction was immaterial.
There was a companionable silence for a while, broken from time to time when the Count forgot himself enough to purr and when Maxwell stifled an oath when he dropped something small, plastic and essential onto a pile of other small plastic bits. Metternich found himself growing tense as the silence lengthened. Normally, the mad old bugger had started asking him things by now. He did his best to answer, he really did, but it sometimes seemed to him that the old fool wasn’t really quite firing on all cylinders. He certainly didn’t take all of his comments on board, that was for sure.
Maxwell put down his magnifying glass and Sergeant Williams’ arm. Metternich looked up expectantly, tongue still out from having a darned good forage amongst what remained of his personal bits. Thank goodness for that; here it comes.
‘What would be confidential, Count, do you think?’ he mused. ‘If they were having a thing, that would be personal, but not confidential, wouldn’t it? And don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t blame them if they were; his wife it appears was no better than should be by all accounts and her husband is known from one end of the town to the other as a total arse, pardon my French. But ... confidential? What a strange word to use ...’
The cat carefully cleaned between his toes, his leg stuck out at an improbable angle. Other than that, he kept his counsel.
‘Doctors, solicitors, priests – I know about all those, though I have to say I find it a bit pointless when a person is dead. But that’s by the way. Thomas Morley, a very nice man though he may be, is nevertheless not any of the above. He schedules buses. And I know what you’re going to say, Count. That the inner workings of the Leighford bus timetable is as confidential and impossible to access as any legal document; to some it may appear as Holy Writ. But I still don’t see how that can be relevant.’
He fixed the black and white monster with a baleful eye.
‘Have you put on a little weight, Count?’ He gestured vaguely to his own midriff. ‘Around the middle?’
The cat bridled and curled up. His middle was his own affair – well, possibly his and Mrs B’s.
‘Where else do people get to know each other?’ Maxwell continued. ‘Weightwatchers?’ He gave the Count another steely glare, but it got him nowhere. ‘Hardly that. I never knew the late Mrs MacBride except as a dim background to her husband on the occasions he trotted her out, but she was certainly average, if not slim. And Thomas Morley is about three stone wringing wet. So, no. Hospital appointments of some kind? Unlikely, because unless it is something like the fracture clinic, where everyone is busy writing on each other’s plaster casts, everyone is quite buttoned up in waiting rooms. Doctor, ditto. Dentist ... what’s confidential about the dentist?’
The cat yawned extravagantly, showing his perfect teeth, needle sharp and glinting in the lamplight.
‘No need to show off. What else is there?’ Maxwell tapped his paintbrush against his chin, remembering, for once, to use the dry end. Suddenly, his eyes lit up and he swivelled in his chair, bending down so he was nose to nose with the cat. ‘I’ve got it!’ he said. ‘AA. Gambling anonymous. One of those things! I must tell the Mem!’ And, pausing only to switch off the lamp, he dashed down the stairs, leaving the cat to his beauty sleep and, like Abou Ben Adhem, deep dreams of peace. Hell would freeze over before Sergeant Williams could get himself along to the regimental surgeon.
Jacquie wasn’t asleep anyway, but she pointed out to Maxwell that his impersonation of a herd of stampeding rhino would have woken her if she had been.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘sorry for the rhino thing. It’s just that ...’
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, turning on her side in anticipation of a long explanation, ‘Metternich has cracked the case?’
Maxwell smiled fondly. ‘He is good, isn’t he?’ he said. ‘But in this case, no; it’s all me. We talked it through, the Count and I and I came up with ... counselling! I bet they both go to counselling. I know I would, if I lived half the lives they did.’
Jacquie looked thoughtful. ‘You may be right,’ she said.
‘Am right,’ he muttered, getting into bed and switching off the light. He often thought better in the dark.
‘But isn’t counselling usually quite solitary?’ Jacquie asked. ‘I haven’t ever had counselling, although sometimes I wonder why not – the job,’ she hastily added, ‘just because of the job. But I have been to a few offices and I think they all have an in and an out, so patients don’t meet. So ...’
‘Hmm, point taken.’ He was lying on his back now, looking for answers on the ceiling in the gentle glow of the nightlight from the landing. ‘But I’m sure I’m right ... we just need to fill in the gaps in the argument. Couldn’t you just ask Thomas Morley if he has counselling?’
‘He’ll just say confidential again.’
‘Yes, you’re right. You need to be more specific. If he thinks you know, he may come clean.’
‘Yes, but I have to be right first time. I can't just throw all the different counselling options at him until he puts up his hands and calls it a fair cop!’
He threw her a kiss. ‘A fairer cop never drew breath, heart,’ he said. ‘Let’s think this through. Perhaps they didn’t go to individual counselling. Perhaps they went t
o some kind of group. Battered spouses, something like that?’
‘That would easily apply to Thomas Morley, but not to Denise MacBride. There was no record of any abuse and although they weren’t exactly love’s young dream, they seemed to be civil, in the main. Just a bit gripey, you know, how married couples are sometimes.’ Jacquie thought it was safe to share one little snippet, though. ‘Even before they married, Denise MacBride did have a history of suicidal ideation.’
‘Speak English, boy,’ Maxwell drawled. It was an immaculate Foghorn Leghorn; Mel Blanc himself could have done no better.
‘Sorry, but you know what I mean. She had made a few very half-hearted attempts, spoke of suicide, or perhaps threatened is more the word from time to time, though was much better later, according to her mother. She was in a difficult relationship, all the usual teenage stuff. Her GP had changed her tablets and they seemed to suit her.’
‘Tablets. So, drugs, possibly?’
‘I think not. She was on some pretty hard-core antidepressants, but nothing like that. And I doubt Thomas Morley would be able to get away with so much as an aspirin without his wife putting a stop to it. No one in that house got to enjoy themselves but her.’
‘Drink?’
‘Same thing. She couldn’t drink because of the tablets, he just couldn’t drink.’
‘Hmm. But you don’t have to actually be drinking still to go to AA, do you? You hear of people who haven’t had a drink for decades who still go to AA.’
‘Fair point. But I still say no.’
‘Gambling?’
‘Again, I don’t see how they would have the opportunity. He didn’t ever have any money of his own, for one thing. And she ... well, the picture I have is of a haunted, sad woman but not one with a big secret.’
Maxwell was so quiet for so long, his wife thought he was asleep and turned over herself to join him.
‘Ah!’ he suddenly said and she jumped a mile.
‘For God’s sake, Max! Do you have to do that? I was just dropping off, there.’
