Maxwell’s Curse

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Stopped her, Mrs Cruikshank?’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow. ‘How? By killing her?’

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ the old girl growled. ‘Oh, I wished her dead often enough, the old besom. We’ve got our ways, us Romanies.’

  ‘Poppets?’ Maxwell urged. ‘The evil eye?’

  ‘Binding,’ the old girl croaked. ‘That’s all. Just binding.’

  ‘By which you mean … ?’

  Jane Cruikshank fumbled behind her and produced a piece of grey string with knots along its length. ‘Binding,’ she said. ‘It’s a spell against the wicked. A curse. It stops the mouths of gossips and prevents disasters.’

  ‘A pity the Reverend Darblay didn’t have one of those,’ Maxwell said.

  Jane Cruikshank tried to chuckle. ‘He followed the New Religion, he did. Jumped the wrong way, so to speak. He had no chance.’

  ‘And who killed him, Mrs Cruikshank? Who battered the rector to death in his own church? And the schoolteacher, Ms Thorn, who killed her? They all lived a few miles away from your caravan here. Tell me, is binding,’ he tapped the string, .is harmless as it gets? Got any other charms?’ He was on his feet, his voice loud, his eyes burning. ‘Any other poppets with their heads bashed in or their throats cut?’

  The old girl looked up at him, terrified, her hands like claws shaking on the shawl. ‘I told you,’ she said, ‘I don’t know nothing about no poppets. No spells. No curses. You leave me alone. My boys’ll be back soon.’

  Maxwell relented. He was a public schoolboy, for God’s sake. And here he was, haranguing an old lady. He crouched down in front of her as she pulled away, a terrified look on her face. ‘Can I get you anything, Mrs Cruikshank?’ he asked.

  ‘Tobacco,’ she said, lip trembling. ‘You can get me some tobacco.’

  ‘Max?’ Jacquie Carpenter was still in her dressing-gown, staring at her morning caller, trying to focus.

  ‘Jacquie, I’m sorry it’s so early. Can I come in?’

  Everything within her screamed no. Her doubts. Her fears. Her utter, total confusion. About who he was. About who she was. Then she saw his face.

  ‘God, Max, you look like shit.’

  ‘I haven’t been to bed,’ he told her.

  ‘You’d better come in. No bike?’

  ‘Surrey’s rest day. You?’

  ‘I’m not on ’til lunchtime. Come into the kitchen. I’m cooking you the full English.’

  ‘Ah, you temptress,’ and he pecked her on the cheek. Part of Jacquie Carpenter wanted to hold him, to fold him in her arms and hear him say it was all right. The other half told her to run. But it was too late to run.

  ‘What do you know about Barney Butler?’ he asked, grateful for the hot coffee and the warmth of her kitchen- diner.

  ‘Nothing.’ Jacquie looked blank, rooting around in her fridge. ‘Who he?’

  ‘He’s an ex-pupil of mine. Fell out of a window on the Barlichway last night.’

  ‘My God, how awful.’

  ‘More awful than you think. He was pushed.’

  Jacquie cracked three eggs on the edge of a bowl. ‘You saw this?’

  ‘I saw the results of it. He’s in a coma. The hospital are worried.’

  ‘Why do you think he was pushed?’

  ‘Because he was working for me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ The next words were out of her mouth before she could help herself. ‘A sort of sorcerer’s apprentice, you mean?’ She bit her lip and turned her back, dealing with the sausages.

  ‘Something like that.’ Tired as he was, Maxwell had a nose for nuance. Archness wasn’t like Jacquie. That’s what he loved about her. Her honesty. That and Heaven in her face. ‘He was trailing Willoughby and Ken.’

  She turned back to him. ‘Why?’ Her eyes were wide.

  ‘Because they’re up to something. Or at least Willoughby is. I saw him on the Barlichway the night I followed up Albert Walters’s murder.’

  ‘Max …’

  ‘I know.’ He raised a hand as if in admission. ‘I shouldn’t be following up murder at all. But you know me, Jacquie. Just can’t keep a mad man down.’

  She hoped, no, she prayed, that that was all it was; the intellectual curiosity of a man who had lost his way some time ago. When they’d asked him what he wanted to be, he’d said ‘teacher’ when really he meant ‘copper’. It was an easy slip of the tongue to make.

  ‘I asked Willoughby about it. He said he was there on business.’ She looked blank. ‘A property developer, Jacquie,’ he spelt it out, ‘on business on a council estate. Pull the other one.’

  ‘Well, you were there innocently enough,’ Jacquie hoped as she said it. ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’

  ‘Because he lied about why he was there,’ Maxwell told her. ‘I didn’t. How well do you know the Crowns – and Ken Templeton too, come to that?’

  ‘Not very,’ she shrugged. ‘Before they opened Beauregard’s, I used to play tennis with Prissy. There was a time, according to Sophie Clark at least, when she and Willoughby were very much in love.’

  ‘And now?’

  Jacquie shrugged as the delicious smell of sizzling bacon wafted across the room. ‘People change,’ she said. ‘You’ve been on the receiving end of Prissy, Max, you know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Have I?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘Who’s been talking?’

  ‘Crispin Foulkes.’ Again, she could have bitten off her tongue.

  ‘Crispin?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Where does he fit into all this?’

  ‘He’s another friend of the Crowns. He was at the party, remember?’

  ‘Of course. What about Templeton?’

  ‘Ken?’ She took a swig from her coffee as breakfast began to bubble and seethe in the form of scrambled eggs. ‘Bit of a non-event, really. Pleasant enough bloke. Miserable little wife, Josie. I think probably he and Prissy were at it like knives at one time.’

  ‘Or swords,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Max?’ Jacquie sat down while the toast was browning. ‘I hate to ask you this … I mean, it’s not as if … well, what is the state of play between you and Prissy?’

  ‘The state of play?’ Maxwell asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Well, I can’t quite remember the score before she broke free of her electric cord and tried to cut my gonads off, but I think it was two nil. Just her idea of foreplay, really. Jacquie, I know the difficulty you’re under, but tell me, give me an inkling – do you have anything in your files on Crown or Templeton?’

  ‘Well,’ she responded to the ping of the toaster, ‘I don’t think so. I’d have to check. But Max, even if there were …’

  ‘… You couldn’t tell me,’ he finished off the sentence for her. ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been walking the Barlichway all night, trying to figure it out. The answer’s there, somewhere. I know it is.’

  ‘What answer, Max?’ Jacquie was afraid to hear herself say it.

  ‘No, no,’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘It’s not about answers yet, Jacquie. It’s about questions. Am I asking the right questions? I went to see old Jane Cruikshank too.’

  ‘You did?’ She was serving out breakfast.

  ‘What with her and poor old Barney, I had to remortgage for the taxi fare, but hey? How did she strike you? When you interviewed her, I mean?’

  ‘Martin Stone did most of that, but she’s hard as nails,’ Jacquie remembered, handing Maxwell his plate. ‘Pointed a shotgun at us.’

  ‘A shotgun?’ Maxwell was appalled. ‘Jesus, Jacquie, you didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘There’s a lot I haven’t told you, Max,’ she said softly. ‘Can’t tell you. Ever.’

  He looked into her eyes and nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. Then he sprinkled salt over his meal and got stuck in. ‘Mmm, full English to die for.’

  ‘Cholesterolly speaking,’ she said, ‘very likely.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he looked at her empty plate. ‘You’re going to do the whole guilt trip by eating budgie food?’

  ‘Ryvita,’ she told him.

>   ‘That’s what I said,’ he said.

  ‘What did Jane Cruikshank tell you? Anything?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Maxwell, between sausages. ‘She’s not the same Jane Cruikshank spitting fire and brimstone over you boys. She’s a sick, tired old lady. And she’s very afraid.’

  ‘Of what?’ Jacquie asked.

  “The witchfinder,’ Maxwell said. ‘The witchfinder.’

  16

  ‘Who are you?’ the elderly woman with the battleship-grey hair wanted to know.

  ‘I’m Constable Haswell, madam. Can I help …’

  She looked him up and down, what was visible of him above the counter at the entrance to Leighford nick. ‘I doubt it. Who’s in charge?’

  ‘In charge, madam? May I ask what it’s in connection with?’ Jock Haswell had seen the lot in his years on the force. This was one of those ‘go to the top’ people, don’t bother with the hoi-polloi beneath.

  ‘It’s in connection with Detective Sergeant Stone.’

  ‘Really?’ alarm bells were sounding in the desk man’s ears. ‘And why … ?’

  ‘You!’ The old lady was clearly tired of the monkey and bounded across as well as her arthritic hip would allow to try the organ grinder.

  ‘Yes?’ Jacquie Carpenter had drawn the short straw again. It was her bad luck to be on her way to the car park just then.

  ‘Possibly in these enlightened times, you do more than make the tea around here.’

  Jacquie caught Haswell’s eye. How many more madwomen would she be called upon to handle? ‘Yes,’ she leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms, ‘I am a detective constable.’

  ‘Hm,’ the old lady snorted. ‘Well, that’s one up from that, anyway,’ she was pointing at Jock Haswell. ‘Do you have a private room where we can talk?’

  ‘Madam,’ Jacquie said, ‘I’m afraid I’m rather busy. Perhaps Constable Haswell … ?’

  Jock was flapping his arms wildly in the background.

  ‘It’s about Martin Stone,’ she said. ‘I am his mother-in-law and he has kidnapped my daughter and grandchild.’

  Jacquie’s arms unfolded and she found herself standing upright. ‘Interview Room Three, Jock,’ she said. ‘Get a message to the Incident Room I’ll be a few minutes late, would you?’

  Veronica Saunders didn’t look like a madwoman. She didn’t sound like one either. It was what she said that made Jacquie Carpenter sit up and take notice.

  ‘This has happened before,’ the old woman said. ‘When Janey was born. It’s as if he can’t bear the competition.’

  ‘The competition?’ Jacquie was trying to be sympathetic. Her own world had turned upside down and the bodies lay head to toe in Jim Astley’s morgue in some insane danse macabre. Normally, Jacquie wouldn’t have given Veronica Saunders the time of day. But she was talking about her immediate boss, a man Jacquie had shared murder with. You didn’t just walk away from colleagues like that. Or colleagues’ mothers-in-law.

  ‘He’s a child, you see. I saw it from day one. Alex’s father was just the same. They have to come first. Anthony once told me, “I’m the only child in this house.” He was never quite the same after Alex was born.’

  ‘Alex is an only child, Mrs Saunders?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the woman said. ‘She took enough of a toll on Anthony’s fragile mind. A second would have tipped him over the edge. Now I’m not enough of a psychologist to know whether Alex chose Martin because he reminded her deep down of her father – that’s all rather Freudian, isn’t it? I do know that when Janey was born, he took her away.’

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘Yes. I had this distraught phone call from Alex to say the little one had gone – been taken from her cot. This time, it’s both of them.’

  ‘Both?’ Jacquie was confused. ‘Where’s Janey?’

  ‘With Dorothy, Martin’s mother, in Littlehampton. I can just about see the sense of that. In fact, I offered to have the little mite myself, just until Alex gets fully back on her feet, you know.’

  ‘Have you talked to Martin about this?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘Please, my dear,’ Veronica growled. ‘Give me some credit. That was how I found out they’d gone in the first place. When Alex didn’t ring at the usual time I went round there. He’d been evasive on the phone, telling me she was out, at his mother’s, anywhere. I didn’t believe it. When I rang Dorothy, sure enough, she hadn’t seen either of them for days. In the end I rang the police.’

  ‘Which station?’

  ‘This one. That was two days ago. Got some idiot, I suspect that ancient chappie on the desk out there. He assured me every avenue was being explored. I didn’t believe that either.’

  ‘Mrs Saunders,’ Jacquie reached out and patted the old woman’s veiny hands, ‘I don’t want you to worry. We are exploring every avenue, believe me. I’m going to send a WPC in now to take a written statement from you. I expect you could do with a cuppa, too, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I could do with some action, my dear,’ Veronica said.

  Jacquie stood up. ‘You’ll get it,’ she said and the smile hadn’t left her face before she’d left the room.

  ‘Jock,’ Jacquie stood head to head with the man, even though she only reached his tie-knot. ‘I want to see all the calls logged on that machine within the last forty-eight hours – no, make that seventy-two.’

  ‘Seventy two hours?’ Haswell chuckled. ‘Come on, Jacquie.’

  ‘And while I’m checking that, get Brenda into Room Three. You make that woman a cup of tea, but don’t you dare take it in yourself. She’ll have your throat out. And do you know, I might just lend her the razor to do it with.’

  Peter Maxwell remembered Nicole Green. She’d been slimmer then, with too much make-up, hanging round the bike sheds with the boys. Now she was pale, sitting in the long watches of the night holding the hand of the man she loved. She looked at him under his bandages, at the trailing tubes and the thumping green lines on the screen that told her he was still alive. She couldn’t take this in, not any of it. She just felt cold and numb, not even embarrassed by her old History teacher who sat across the bed from her, leaning forward, as if he was willing the young man in the bed to get up, to stir, something.

  ‘This is my fault, Nicole,’ she heard him say. ‘All of it.’

  ‘How’s that, Mr Maxwell?’ Her eyes never left Barney’s.

  ‘He was doing some work for me.’

  ‘What, DIY you mean?’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘No. Snooping. On the Barlichway. I asked him to keep an eye out for two blokes.’

  ‘Everybody knows Barney on the Barlichway, Mr Maxwell. And he knows everybody. Nobody would do this to him.’

  ‘Do you think he fell?’ Maxwell asked.

  Beyond the glass partition, nurses in green and white dresses came and went, Milburn’s angels flitting around the antiseptic corridors like moths in the half light.

  ‘Nicole,’ Maxwell reached out and took the girl’s hand. ‘Do you think he fell?’

  She turned to face him, her cheeks running with tears, her nose and eyes red. She was shaking her head. ‘No, Mr Maxwell, I don’t.’ Without any warning, she got up and ran to him, he who’d put her in detention for not doing her homework, who’d warned her mum that work had to come before boys. She ran to him and as he stood up, she threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in his scarf. She smelt of cigarette smoke and the interior of the Rat, but her cheek was wet against his.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Mr Maxwell, won’t he? My Barney – he’ll be all right?’

  He stroked the long, damp hair and snuggled briefly against her. Five years ago he’d have been struck off for doing this. Now he was her dad, her best mate, the last lonely raft in a sea of pain and fear and despair. ‘Of course he will, darling,’ he said, softly. ‘He’ll be fine.’ Then he held her limp body at arm’s length, his hands strong, his smile firm. ‘In all the years you’ve known him,’ he said, ‘did Mad Max eve
r tell you a lie?’

  She smiled back through the tears. ‘Yeah,’ she sniffed. ‘Just once. You told me I could get Grade C GCSE History,’ and they laughed together in the silence of Barney’s room.

  The spotty youth on the desk was just about to go off duty when Maxwell arrived at Beauregard’s. It was late and the place would close in an hour. He was grateful not to be on the graveyard shift itself. The place was getting him down.

  ‘Mr Crown in tonight?’ Maxwell called through the Perspex.

  ‘In the pool, I think,’ the spotty youth said. ‘Er … did I ask you about your veruccas?’

  ‘They’re coming on a treat,’ Maxwell called back, striding clown the atrium. ‘John Innes Number Two is the answer. I’m exhibiting them come spring.’

  He cut through the side door and crossed the corridor, following the signs to the pool. To his left the changing rooms echoed to the sounds of the last punters spraying their armpits prior to going home. A solitary figure stood on the high diving board at the far end of the pool. Sophie Clark looked positively mouthwatering in her black bikini as she soared skyward before jack-knifing and twisting in midair to hit the water like an arrow.

  Maxwell was impressed. The last time he’d done that, the water had slapped him so hard he’d nearly passed out and carried the red reminder of it for days.

  ‘Well, well,’ a cold voice echoed as Sophie’s ripples died away. ‘Maxwell.’

  He hadn’t seen her there before, but lolling at the water’s edge, in a fittingly scarlet swimsuit which left little to the imagination, sat Prissy Crown. She wasn’t smiling. In that get-up, she didn’t have to.

  Sophie bobbed to the surface and swam to her.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Maxwell in return. ‘The ladies who lunge.’

  ‘That’s Prissy,’ Sophie said, reaching the side and running both hands back through her long, blonde hair. ‘I dive.’

  ‘And plunge. Very sporty, both of you.’ Maxwell crouched above her. He gave Prissy his best John Wayne. ‘I’ve come for my bike.’