Maxwell’s Curse

by M. J. Trow

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he didn’t call on them. Only on Alison Thorn.’

  ‘There are … what … four more flats in Alison’s block. How do we know he didn’t visit them all?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘Nobody else in that afternoon, guv,’ Jacquie told the DCI. ‘As far as we know, she was alone in the block.’

  ‘The intercom’s not working,’ Stone said. ‘If she wanted to find out who was ringing her bell, she’d need to get down to the front door.’

  ‘Did anybody see this?’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘A Mr Ottway, lives at 34 Whitesmith. He was building a new fence at the time.’

  ‘What’s his description of the Barnardo’s caller?’

  Jacquie’s face said it all. ‘Not helpful, I’m afraid, guv. Mr Ottway suffers from myopia – short sight. He knew it was male, because he heard the voice. Nothing specific. Sounded quite posh, to quote him.’

  ‘Colour hair? Height? Anything?’ Hall was hoping.

  Jacquie shook her head. ‘Sorry, guv. I hoped Mrs Billings might be more useful. Lives at number twenty-six.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But she didn’t get a good look either. Male, certainly, maybe thirty, maybe fifty. She’s not – and I quote – good on ages.’

  Hall slammed down the coffee cup. This man had the luck of the devil. Like a will o’ the wisp no one saw him come, no one saw him go. The only way you knew he’d been there was the body he left in his wake.

  ‘He’d have stayed,’ Hall was talking to himself really, tapping his lips with his fingers as though in prayer, ‘to wait ’til the poison took effect. For two reasons,’ he watched the faces of his team, the trustful eyes that showed less trust by the day. He watched the slipping of faith. It was as visible as the nose on your face. ‘First, he couldn’t take the chance of calling back. Charity collections are a good reason, but twice the number of visits is twice the risk of being caught, remember.’

  ‘What’s the other reason, guv?’ Brand asked.

  ‘Because,’ Hall’s face, like his voice, was ice-cold, ‘he enjoys it. How long did Astley give the dead woman from the time the poison was administered? An hour? Two? The sadistic bastard sat in a chair somewhere, perhaps the one in her bedroom and he watched her go into convulsions, then a coma, then death.’

  ‘Then he stripped her naked,’ Stone went on, taking up his guv’nor’s torch, ‘carefully arranging her on her back with her arms by her sides and he calmly cut her throat.’

  ‘One mean son of a bitch,’ Kevin Brand grunted. Of all of them in that room, he had been the one to talk to Alison Thorn, to see the sparkling eyes now dull, the radiant smile now gone.

  ‘Her legs were open,’ Stone remembered. ‘What did Astley make of that, guv?’

  Hall sighed, leaning back in his chair, a pencil tapping softly at the end of his fingers to an incessant rhythm that thudded in his brain. ‘Nothing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘This was no sex attack. No sign of rape or assault, no bruising to thighs, vagina, anus. No semen. But the throat cutting has a significance. Anybody?’

  He felt he was back at Bramshill again, with mock scenarios and a class of fast-track climbers, vying with each other to offer the perfect answer. It was like being in school with hands in the air and hissed voices all straining, ‘Sir, sir!’

  But no one was saying that today. There were no hands in the air. Just a sea of faces, all tired, all nonplussed, all facing the same brick wall. Then he realized they were all looking at him, expecting him to know, to do something. He, who had no answers at all.

  ‘All right,’ he slid back his chair. ‘Ritual killing.’ He crossed to the display boards spread around the old Tottingleigh library, commandeered now as command headquarters in his people’s attempt to catch a madman. ‘That’s what all this is about.’ He tapped an index finger on the dead, shrivelled face of Elizabeth Pride. ‘Fungal poisoning,’ he said, watching the faces in front of him, ‘and a wound in the nape of the neck inflicted after death. Ritual. And this,’ he paused longer at the shocked, bloodless face of Alison Thorn, her dull eyes wide, the gash in her throat like a second mouth, slightly open like the first. ‘An organic poison, perhaps hemlock. The cut throat. Post mortem. Ritual.’ Hall walked back along the line, arms locked behind his back like some general reviewing his troops.

  ‘Let’s assume,’ he said, ‘that Darblay was not premeditated. A spur of the moment thing.’

  ‘Somebody was desecrating his church,’ Stone cut in, ‘and he caught them.’

  ‘Hence the candles and the sheep’s heart and the pentagram,’ Brand piped up.

  ‘Hence,’ Hall rounded the circle, ‘no poison. All the others,’ he pointed back at the photographs, ‘naked. All the others with post mortem wounds.’

  ‘But why, guv?’ Brand was frowning, shaking his head. ‘Why not kill them that way? A cut throat, stabs through the spinal cord, they’re pretty effective methods in their own right. Why the poisoning first?’

  ‘We’ve checked every chemist on the south coast,’ Stone said. ‘No one’s reported a break-in of any kind in the last three months and there’ve been no unusual requests on any of their poisons registers.’

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ Hall thought aloud, ‘except in the case of the strychnine for Albert Walters. Death-Cap mushrooms and hemlock can be found in any stretch of woodland in the south. It just takes someone with the knowhow.’

  ‘Witchcraft, guv?’ Jacquie Carpenter spoke for the first time. She felt the eyes in the room swivel to look at her. Even the eyes of the dead were turned, it seemed, her way.

  ‘Go on, Jacquie.’ Hall sat down, resting his head on one hand, the elbow on the table.

  ‘Elizabeth Pride had a reputation as a witch. Threatened the Cruikshanks on more than one occasion. And there was a poppet in Jane Cruikshank’s caravan, the sort of doll witches used to use. And the calendar in Myrtle Cottage …’ Her words hung like icicles in the artificial heat of the room. She would have given her life to have retracted them, but they were there, as tangible as if someone had written them on the wall in a victim’s blood. One by one puzzled heads came up. Frowns creased foreheads. Blank looks were exchanged.

  Hall’s hand fell away and his head angled to the level. ‘Jacquie, Martin, my office.’

  They waited until he was sitting comfortably – the work of a second. Then he was looking up at them, the eyes hard and cold behind the neon-lit lenses. ‘Calendar?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s from Myrtle Cottage, sir,’ Jacquie said, staring straight ahead. Her own voice was barely audible for the blood rushing in her ears and the blood thudding in her heart.

  ‘Yes, Jacquie,’ Hall was nodding, ‘you said. Martin,’ he turned his chill gaze to his sergeant. ‘You fouled up at Myrtle Cottage.’

  DS Stone cleared his throat. This was not going to be a comfortable ride. ‘Yes, sir,’ he thought it best to admit.

  ‘Look at me, dammit!’ Jacquie had never seen Hall explode before. It was all the more unnerving for that.

  ‘I went back there, sir,’ Stone assured him. ‘It’s in the file.’

  ‘Just tell me, Martin,’ Hall said softly. He sounded like a man on the edge.

  ‘I went back with DC Brand the next day; after we’d discussed the matter. I took samples of cat food and had them analysed. Nothing, sir. Well, I mean, nothing toxic. Just cat food.’

  ‘And the calendar?’

  Stone looked uneasy. ‘I’m sorry, guv, I don’t understand all this about a calendar. I don’t remember any calendar at Myrtle Cottage. Not the twice I went there. What’s its significance?’ He was looking as much at Jacquie now as he was at Hall.

  ‘All right,’ the DCI relaxed, leaning back. ‘Poisons, Martin. Get back on it. Every chemist, every farm, every outlet you can think of. Again. Do it all again.’

  Stone heard the weariness in Hall’s voice. The DCI knew the size of the task all too well. He was asking the impossible. And what was worse, he was asking
the impossible for a second time.

  ‘Yes sir,’ and DS Stone was gone.

  ‘Sit down, Jacquie.’ Hall took off his glasses and rubbed his aching eyes. He waited until she had. ‘What calendar?’ he leaned forward. She’d seen him do that a hundred times in interview rooms without number. But always before, she’d been sitting behind or alongside him, never in front. Now she had an inkling how a suspect felt, watching the large, square, expressionless face as relentless as the tide. She wished it was Peter Maxwell’s, dark, smiling, the eyes bright with what she always hoped was love.

  To her left was a rock. To her right, a hard place. She felt the walls closing in, the ceiling coming down. She wanted to scream. She, who had never fainted in her life, felt like fainting. What was it then that made her open her mouth?

  ‘Peter Maxwell found it, sir, at Myrtle Cottage.’

  Hall leaned back, slowly, the solid face receding, a quizzical expression coming over it. They both knew, in that moment, that Jacquie had been withholding evidence that could be vital. They both knew her job was on the line.

  ‘Tell me,’ Hall said.

  Jacquie shook her head, feeling oddly better now all this was out in the open. ‘Peter Maxwell went there,’ she said, ‘and found it. It’s just an ordinary calendar, nothing special. It’s what’s written on it that’s odd.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Certain dates, ringed, marked. Cryptic rhymes.’ She fished in her bag. ‘I’ve written them down.’

  Hall took the piece of paper. ‘Candlemas Day, plant beans in the clay,’ he read for February 2nd. ‘Put candles and candlesticks all away.’

  ‘Andrew Darblay,’ Jacquie said. ‘We haven’t found the murder weapon yet, but it seems likely that’s what smashed his skull – a brass candlestick.’

  Hall read on. ‘He shall be a liar and unsteadfast of courage and will take vengeance on his enemies. The Spring Equinox. 1st March.’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘When the day and night are of equal length. It’s the festival of Eostre, the bringer of the light of the day.’

  Hall blinked at the girl sitting in front of him. He was entering a strange world which had no relevance to his own time and Jacquie Carpenter was taking him by the hand and leading him through it.

  ‘A fair maid who,’ Hall read, ‘the first of May

  ‘Goes to the fields at break of day

  ‘And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree

  ‘Will ever after handsome be.’

  ‘Beltane,’ Jacquie said, ‘the beginning of summer. But it’s more than that, sir. It’s Alison Thorn, isn’t it? Hawthorn, I’ll grant you, but it’s close. Looking at her in her flat – all right, it’s not the fields either – looking at her photograph; wouldn’t you say she was handsome for ever? She’s not going to age and wither like the rest of us, is she?’

  ‘June 21st’ Hall was reading after a pause. ‘The Midsummer Solstice, “and the Gentleman grew lean and pale with the Frights”.’

  ‘Albert Walters,’ Jacquie said, leaning forward now. ‘If ever a man looked as if he was scared to death by what he’d seen, it was him.’

  The DCI had to agree. ‘Lammas Day,’ he’d found August 1st. ‘Fly over moor and fly over mead, Fly over living and fly over dead …’

  ‘Witches flew,’ Jacquie told him. ‘On broomsticks or the backs of their familiars. Or they believed they did.’

  But Hall was racing ahead, spellbound by the paper’s magic. ‘Oh weans, oh weans! The morn’s the Fair, Ye may not eat the berries more. This night the Devil goes over them all, To touch them with his poisoned paw.’

  ‘Poison, guv,’ Jacquie leaned back again in her chair. ‘Death-Cap, strychnine, hemlock. It’s all part of the craft …’

  ‘Jacquie!’ Hall stopped the girl in her tracks. ‘That’s enough. This is the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake.’

  She blinked, suddenly afraid at the turn her life was taking. ‘Christ has nothing to do with this case, sir. Nothing in this world.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Satanic abuse,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘It’s so fucking obvious and you can’t see it! Why did you send Peter Maxwell to Myrtle Cottage?’

  ‘Why didn’t you find the calendar when you went there?’

  ‘It wasn’t there!’ she was shouting louder than he was, her eyes flashing, her knuckles white as she gripped the chair.

  Hall leaned back, relenting, letting the calendar details slip from his grasp onto the desk. He was himself again. ‘Then we only have his word that was where he found it,’ he said.

  It was Jacquie’s turn to calm down. ‘It’s a word I trust,’ she said.

  ‘Is it, Jacquie?’ Hall asked her. ‘I hope you’re right.’

  The snow came to Leighford that night, a sudden blizzard blowing from the west. John Hammond had missed it on the Met. Office roof, but then the Met. Office roof was not on the south coast of England. By the time Maxwell poked his head out of Beauregard’s, the town lay silent under a carpet of white and the wind had gone. Tomorrow the kids would destroy the sparkling beauty by building snowmen and trying to kill each other with snowballs. The cars would prowl the roads and turn the silent silver to sludge, dirty and brown. Tonight, though, as the old clock of All Saints’ struck eleven, it was pure magic.

  ‘You can’t cycle home in this.’ It was Prissy Crown leaning out of the window of her Shogun, her breath like dry ice on the night air. Maxwell had already unshackled White Surrey and was wheeling into the darkness.

  ‘No problem,’ he called.

  ‘Look,’ Prissy hauled on the hand-brake and killed the engine. ‘I’m sorry I missed you inside, Maxwell. You’re snooping, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Maxwell could be extraordinarily stupid if need be.

  ‘You’re on the case, aren’t you?’ She lowered her head, ‘For little old me.’ Maxwell couldn’t believe the woman was actually fluttering her eyelashes at him, like some latter day Miss Piggy.

  ‘Case, Prissy?’

  ‘Don’t be coy, big boy,’ she purred. ‘You think there’s something going on, too, don’t you? Ken, Sophie and Willoughby, I mean. You’re on to something.’

  He got as close to her as he dared while still being out of tongue range. ‘As a matter of fact, I think I am …’

  ‘Tell me,’ she’d grabbed his lapel with a lightning thrust born of years on the piste.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, gently releasing her fingers. ‘Not yet. Tell you what. Do you think White Surrey would hang on the back?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bike.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, jumping out to secure it for him. ‘Your place or mine? Willoughby’s out.’

  ‘The Barlichway,’ he replied, hauling the cold metal into position behind the Shogun. In response to her puzzled expression he said, ‘Prissy. There is something going on – you’re right. There’s something I need to check on.’

  ‘On that disgusting council estate?’

  ‘The same,’ Maxwell nodded, feeling as he always did around horsy-setters like Prissy, a little to the Left of Lenin. ‘Will you take me? I suspect the roads will be rather treacherous.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, feeling his muscles under his coat, ‘By the way, seen much of Jacquie C. lately?’ She smiled, licking her lips. ‘Because, you see, if you’re not,’ and she waited until he’d fixed the straps on the bike before taking his hand and plunging it into her blouse. Her nipple was hard, like an acorn, which was hardly surprising bearing in mind the ambient temperature of Maxwell’s fingers.

  The Head of Sixth Form laughed. ‘Prissy, please,’ he said. ‘Accepting a lift from you like this, I feel enough of a tit as it is.’

  The journey was spent in silence, Prissy’s face a mask of fury in the green light of the dashboard. As they reached the High Street, Maxwell began a running commentary of Smalltalk but he may as well have been talking to Harpo Marx. The Shogun screamed to a halt on the edge of the Barlichwa
y as Pussy slammed its gears into reverse.

  ‘This is as far as I go,’ she said.

  Maxwell was glad to hear it. He leaned across. ‘You know, Prissy,’ he said, ‘if you didn’t try so damned hard, I could get quite fond of you.’

  She turned to look at him. ‘Fuck you,’ she snarled and as he stepped down from the Shogun she screamed away into the night, White Surrey still firmly strapped to her back.

  ‘A bike, a bike,’ muttered Maxwell into the Barlichway night, ‘my kingdom for a bike,’ and he trudged, hands in pockets and nose in collar, along the road to the Rat.

  Gentrification had not reached this far into the abyss. The Rat was a concrete watering-hole in a concrete desert, the badly painted rodent crouching on its haunches on a piece of Edam – or was it Gruyere? The pub’s paintwork was peeling badly and its windows, crisp with the night frost and driven snow, looked dark and dead.

  Maxwell tapped on a side door, but it wasn’t Bess the landlord’s daughter who answered, but the landlord himself.

  ‘We’re closed, mate. Blimey, it’s been snowing.’

  Here was an intellectual, Maxwell realized. ‘Barney about?’ he asked.

  ‘Barney who?’

  ‘Barney Butler.’ Maxwell’s crisp fiver spoke more eloquently than a hundred surnames.

  The landlord checked right and left, though whether for a police patrol car or a snowplough, Maxwell never knew. All he knew was that the crisp fiver vanished from his grip in less time than it took to say ‘Come in.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Barney was lounging in a corner of the snug, an old mate sprawled unconscious on the table next to him.

  ‘Evening, Barney. One for the road?’

  ‘We’re closed, mate,’ the landlord reminded him.

  ‘Fuck off, Yardley,’ Barney shouted. ‘I’ll have a Smith’s and my ol’ teacher’ll have … ?’

  ‘A Southern Comfort please, Yardley. And a small one for yourself.’

  Yardley surlied his way around the bar. ‘If the filth arrive, you got this ten minutes ago, right?’

  ‘I getcha,’ grunted Maxwell as one of Harry Enfield’s characters and prodded the snoring lump lying face down across Barney’s table.