Maxwell’s Curse

by M. J. Trow

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a Press pass. Just for half an hour on Monday, you can be a member of the fourth estate.’

  ‘Goody!’ he smiled. ‘Will you be there?’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ she said. ‘And then, Max, we’ll talk again.’

  Now Paul Moss owed Maxwell a favour or five. He was a curly-headed lad with a broad smiling face and boundless optimism. One of those Thatcher’s children who was actually far too nice to teach. He’d bought himself a pair of heavy-rimmed specs to help his gravitas and some incompetent – actually James Diamond BSc, MEd – had appointed him Head of History. It was Maxwell who’d written out his schemes of work, explained to him the complexities of the Corn Laws and had a quiet word in the ear of Quentin Shovell, the one-time school psychopath who’d temporarily had it in for Mr Moss. After that Quentin risked the howling opprobrium of his peers by carrying Mr Moss’s books for him.

  So Maxwell had no qualms at all about shunting 7C4 in with Moss’s 7A2 for a quiet hour of Kevin Costner running rings around Alan Rickman (or was it the other way around?) in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Still bikeless, he’d hot-footed it through the morning shoppers and the January sunshine to the great, grey edifice of civic pride that was Leighford Town Hall.

  There were people everywhere, milling paparazzi with reassuringly expensive cameras, lung cancer and attitude, wallowing in cynicism and waiting for the pubs to open. Maxwell flashed his card and as though it was a blank cheque, he was in, carried on the tide of journalese.

  He found a seat near the back and beyond the mass of craning heads and arching sound booms saw Crispin Foulkes and a senior policeman flashing silver from every orifice thanking a huge, opulent-looking woman in a headscarf.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the top brass copper opened the ball right on cue. ‘I am Chief Constable Leonard Dickinson and this is Mr Crispin Foulkes of Leighford Social Services. We’ve called you here today in view of the series of related deaths in the area and to introduce Dr Zarina Liebowitz who is an international expert in the field of psychotherapy.’

  The large woman smiled, turning first in one direction, then another as the cameras popped and flashed.

  ‘Dr Liebowitz,’ the Chief Constable announced. It was a while before the hubbub died down. Maxwell was impressed. Like Hitler, the good doctor was waiting, arms folded, for the kiddies to behave themselves. Psychotherapy at its best.

  ‘When your social services contacted me,’ she said, the accent thick and pure LA, ‘I’d already picked up some vibes on the Internet. Clearly, I’m an outsider here. I don’t know Leighford and I’ve yet to involve myself fully in the case, but this much I will say. What you have here – and sadly, those of us in social services have seen this before – is clear evidence of multi-generational incest and institutionalized sadism. Physical and sexual abuse is manifest. And, given the evidence as it stands, I would not rule out the sacrificial element of satanic abuse also.’

  There was a roar from the paparazzi. Maxwell recognized it at once. It was the sound of locusts rubbing their legs together before the off. Questions were being hurled at the trio on the top table, but especially directed towards our American cousin, who calmly and cryptically fielded the lot. Newsmen came and went, ears glued to mobile phones, pens in hand, camcorders whirring. The circus of sound bites went on until Maxwell caught sight of Jacquie Carpenter and fought his way to her.

  ‘Jacquie,’ he caught her arm and yelled above the row. ‘What are you doing in this madhouse? Is this Hall’s idea?’

  She shook her head. ‘That silly bastard Dickinson,’ she told him. ‘This is the last straw, Max.’ He could see tears in her eyes. ‘Four bloody corpses on our hands and now this. It’s as if he wants us to foul up. We won’t be able to move for this lot now. He’s finished us, you mark my words. But why are you here?’

  ‘I was invited,’ he shouted. ‘By a journalist, Janet Ruger? Do you know her? Is she here?’

  Janet Ruger wasn’t there. The way the chambermaid at the Brougham told it to DCI Hall that afternoon, she was lying naked in Room 22, her arms trailing each side of the narrow bed, her legs spread wide and an ugly knife buried up to the hilt in her throat. Her mouth gaped open, as it would for ever in the chambermaid’s dreams and her eyes were wide with terror.

  Someone had dabbled his or her fingers in the journalist’s blood and written above the head the single word ‘Maleficarum’ Her epitaph. Her obituary.

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘Jock.’ DS Stone didn’t look up from his paperwork. The word had come in from the Brougham that a body had been found there, but there were no details yet and the DCI was on his way. He’d told Stone to stay put. He and DC Brand could handle things and a call was put out to Dr Astley.

  ‘Look, er … can I have a word?’

  ‘Sure.’ Stone was still lost in concentration, trying to make sense of eyewitness reports of Albert Walters’ last known movements on the Barlichway.

  ‘Look, I should have said something first thing this morning, but, well, it’s a bit difficult …’ Haswell stood in the doorway of the DI’s office, its owner still down with the flu that had decimated Leighford CID since Christmas. The old git should never have joined the police. Not unless he could have been granted a posting to Dock Green along with dear old Jack Warner.

  ‘What is it, Jock?’ Stone sighed, looking up for the first time.

  ‘I had this phone call,’ he said. ‘Last Thursday night, late.’

  ‘You on the double shift?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Haswell grumbled. ‘A woman called to report her daughter missing. Something about a baby. I should have told you sooner, but I was off at the weekend. Touch of flu.’

  Stone’s expression didn’t change. ‘This woman have a name?’ he asked.

  ‘Saunders,’ Haswell told him. ‘Veronica Saunders.’

  Stone’s nose wrinkled, his jaw flexed for the briefest of seconds. ‘The mother-in-law,’ he said, straight faced. ‘Mad as a snake.’

  ‘Really? She sounded all right.’

  ‘I have no doubt, Jock,’ Stone said, putting his pen away, ‘that when we catch this ghoul who’s going around poisoning people, he’ll sound all right, too. Did she give any details?’

  ‘Just the basics, address and so on. She said somebody had to do something. She’s waiting for my call.’

  Stone turned a page and got back to his reading. ‘Forget it,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Haswell frowned. ‘No, look, Martin, it’s a logged call …’

  ‘Jock,’ Stone leaned back, placing a pencil horizontally on the page to remind him where he’d got to, ‘She told you Alex had gone, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Haswell nodded.

  ‘And taken Sam with her?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did she mention my eldest? Janey?’

  ‘Er … no, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Right, then.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Alzheimer’s, Jock,’ Stone said patiently. ‘We’ve been here before. She did exactly the same when Janey was born. Then – as now – they’re staying with my mother. Veronica knows that. Except she can’t remember it. She’s forgotten about Janey completely. You know Alex had a rough time, with the baby being late and everything?’

  Haswell did.

  ‘Well, we thought it made sense for someone to look after them all. I’m up to my bollocks in these murders and we’re still short-staffed despite the Incident Room set-up. I don’t have the time at the moment. You haven’t sent anybody out on this, have you?’

  ‘No, not yet. I wanted to talk to you first.’

  ‘Quite right, Jock.’ Stone nodded. ‘Look, I’ll sort it, all right? When she rings again – and chances are she will just play along, okay? Usual thing. Posters have gone up. Patrols out. Door to door. You know the drill.’

  ‘Sure, Martin, sure,’ Haswell said. ‘Anything you say.’


  ‘Who’s this one, then?’ Donald wanted to know for the record.

  ‘Well, it’s not bloody Anneka Rice or bloody Charlie Dimmock,’ Jim Astley assured him. ‘According to her NUJ card, she was Janet Desiree Ruger.’

  ‘Desiree? That’s a potato, isn’t it?’

  Jim Astley approved of gallows humour. Sometimes it was all that kept you sane in this business, of trying to glean lost secrets from dead souls. But gallows humour at Donald’s level he could do without. He looked up at his rotund assistant with a basilisk stare that would have shrivelled a more sensitive man. ‘You should get out more,’ he said softly and bent to work.

  Janet Ruger was a martyr to the menopause. Her once pert breasts sagged now and the tonnes of Oil of Olay her erratically inflated salary sometimes afforded her were to no avail. She lay without her face on on Astley’s steel draining board, her short brown hair resembling the mode à la guillotine that French aristos wore in the tumbrills on their last trip to the Place de Grève. Her eyes, that had sparkled in Peter Maxwell’s sitting-room the night before, were sunken and dull and dead. Her lips, deprived of their carmine coating, were thin and pale, peeled back from her large, regular teeth.

  Astley jabbed a metal spatula against her tongue. She did not say ‘ah’. Then he got to the nitty-gritty, speaking, for the record, into the microphone he’d lowered from the ceiling. ‘The throat wound is approximately,’ and he felt, first with a gloved finger, then with a probe, ‘five inches deep, breaking the skin at the nape of the neck. Lividity indicates that she haemorrhaged internally. I expect to find the lungs awash. There was, I remember, a great deal of blood soaked into the mattress. Massive damage to throat tissues. It’s likely the epiglottis is smashed and the trachea split. Cause of death was a single, very violent blow to the throat, the knife slicing through the spinal cord between the second and third vertebrae.’ He angled the neck. ‘Smartly done.’

  His eyes wandered through the powerful lens strapped to his forehead. ‘Considerable bruising to the forearms and stomach. The woman protested too much, methinks and tried to fight her attacker off. He may well be bruised too, but,’ he checked the fingernails carefully, ‘no obvious signs of debris here. I shall take scrapings later. Donald, time for the gingernuts, I think.’

  Jacquie Carpenter sat that night in a corner of the Incident Room. The DCI’s door was shut, his blinds drawn. Martin Stone had long gone and most of the others. Kevin Brand was still there, dosing himself with Lemsip in an attempt to shake off the flu he felt creeping up his spine.

  ‘Penny for them?’ he said to Jacquie.

  She came to with a start. She’d been miles away, remembering the first time she’d met Peter Maxwell, the first time he’d kissed her. How warm and strong and safe she’d felt, ready to take on the world. Now, she didn’t know. A man she’d loved once had put doubt in her mind. Doubt about the man she loved now. Thought she loved now. She felt frightened and lonely and ashamed all at the same time, desolation in a converted library where a team of people were trying to catch a madman.

  She looked at Brand, square, solid, dependable. Nothing much got to Kevin Brand. At the end of his shift he’d put on his coat and go home to his wife and have a beer and watch some telly. She envied him. ‘Talk me through the Brougham, Kev,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ he shrugged and rolled his swivel chair closer. ‘Not your state of the art south coast hotel.’

  ‘No CCTV.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He blew copiously into his handkerchief. ‘And that’s the bugger of it. If this Ms Ruger had been staying at the Grand, we’d have all her visitors on video loop. At the Brougham, you’ve got a desk girl who, if you ask me, is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.’

  ‘Astley gives an approximate time of death at twelve to half one Sunday night/Monday morning.’

  ‘That covers the entire shift of Miss Dozy. Didn’t see a bloody thing.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit unusual,’ Jacquie was wondering aloud, ‘having a woman on night duty?’

  ‘She wasn’t alone. There was a male oppo having a kip in the inner office. In an emergency, she could wake him.’

  ‘Like a murder in the hotel, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah,’ chuckled Brand. ‘The guv’nor said something along those lines.’

  ‘What time did Janet Ruger get back to the hotel?’ she asked, crossing to pour herself one last cup of stewed coffee.

  Brand checked his notes. ‘Nearly eight thirty. She had a night cap in the bar. They closed at eleven and the barman remembers saying goodnight to her. She drank … er … two Martinis on the rocks and smoked maybe half the state of Virginia. Seemed, the barman said, to be waiting for somebody.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Kept looking at her watch. The barman noticed because he was doing the same, hoping she’d go to bed.’

  ‘So, her room was on the first floor?’

  ‘That’s right. From the bar, she’d have had to go through the lobby and up two sets of stairs. There’s a sort of landing halfway up.’

  ‘This room of hers,’ Jacquie was looking at the plan on the wall that the police artist had compiled, ‘looks Standard.’

  ‘It is,’ Brand said. ‘One bed, two chairs, wardrobes, sideboards various. Usual tea and coffee facilities. Hospitality bar – she’d made inroads into that, by the way.’

  ‘What had gone?’

  ‘A couple of Scotches.’

  Jacquie shrugged. ‘So she liked a drink.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘And the body?’

  ‘Spreadeagled on the bed. I tell you, Jacquie,’ Brand’s solid face said it all, ‘I’ve seen some sights in my time, but Jesus Christ. Know what it reminded me of? The Sharon Tate murder.’

  ‘Charles Manson?’ she frowned. ‘Bit before my time, Kev.’

  ‘Yeah, but the blood on the wall. Manson’s family wrote “Kill the pigs”. Our boy wrote “Maleficarum”, whatever that is. There was a fuck of a lot of blood.’

  ‘And that’s not like him,’ Jacquie nodded.

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘The others – Pride, Walters, Thorn. All the wounds have been post mortem. No blood. But Darblay and Ruger,’ she shuddered inside at the memory of the red-daubed church, ‘enough to drown in. Why is that?’

  ‘Jacquie,’ Brand shifted uneasily, looking at the photograph of the dead journalist’s face, ‘you don’t think we’re talking about two killers, do you? What do the shrinks call it – folie a deux?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kev.’ She shook her head. But she knew a man who might.

  The man who might slumped in a darkened corner of his classroom. He’d been listening to the collective wisdom of Year 13, attempting a seminar on Disraeli’s New Imperialism. About half past three he’d contemplated throwing himself through the window. At least the social ramifications of the defenestration of Maxwell would make a change from Dizzy. For the umpteenth time he pronounced the name Bartle Frere for the verbally challenged and then the bell saved his life.

  He packed up his encyclopaedic historical knowledge and stumbled next door to his office. A young man sat there, with dark wavy hair and an earnest expression, made more so by the bruise on his jaw.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Stone,’ the Head of Sixth Form said. It was only then he noticed the second man half hidden by the door.

  ‘This is Detective Constable Grimshaw.’ The second man flashed his warrant card.

  Maxwell nodded briefly to him and took his seat behind his desk. ‘If you’re going to snoop into a man’s private life, sergeant,’ he said with a smile, ‘at least have the wit, if not the grace, to put his desk diary back straight.’ Stone’s jaw flexed and his eyes narrowed. He’d heard rumours about Maxwell. Down the nick he was legendary; for a pain in the arse, that is. Rumour had it he was slipping Jacquie Carpenter one, that he’d got something on the guv’nor, that he was an ex-Yard man put out to grass.

  The question now was – wa
s he the Devil himself?

  ‘I’d like to ask you about Janet Ruger,’ Stone said.

  ‘Journalist,’ said Maxwell. ‘Writes for the Telegraph. Sorry … wrote.’

  ‘You know what’s happened, then?’

  Maxwell got up to close the door and noticed the constable scribbling in his notepad. ‘At four o six,’ he said, ‘Mr Maxwell rose and closed his office door, not as an admission of guilt, but simply because a conversation about a murder is hardly a suitable one for young ears. This is a school,’ he sat back down again. ‘Children everywhere!’

  ‘How did you find out about Ms Ruger’s death?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Meridian News,’ Maxwell told him. ‘That nice Sally Taylor. It did, I confess, come as a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Really?’ Stone crossed one leg casually over the other. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I’d only talked to her the other night.’

  ‘Friday?’

  ‘That’s right. She came to my house at about nine, nine thirty.’

  ‘Oh?’ Stone’s expression hadn’t changed. ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘She wanted to pump me,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Find out what I know.’

  ‘And what do you know?’

  ‘In general terms?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Or specifically?’

  Stone uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. ‘Specifically, Mr Maxwell, we’re getting jerked around by people like you. In case quantitative history isn’t your particular bag, five people have died in and around Leighford in the last month. And before you come out with Joe Public’s usual cry “What are you blokes doing about it?” the answer is pratting around with people like you. There is such a thing as wasting police time, you know.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘And you’re doing most of it, Mr Stone. Impressive, though, about quantitative history. What board did you do?’

  ‘Cambridge …’ Stone was caught off guard by that one. ‘That’s hardly the point,’ he went on. ‘Specifically what did this Ruger woman want?’

  ‘She wanted to pick my brains,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I couldn’t help.’