by M. J. Trow
‘The most vital thing,’ Diamond said slowly, ‘is to keep this in-house. Eleanor Fry is dead already. We don’t want any more tragedies.’
Maxwell nodded, looking at each of them, making them wait.
‘Well, Max?’ Diamond was the first to break the silence.
‘How about it?’
‘I’ll need access to Annette Choker’s file.’
‘Annette?’ Ryan repeated.
‘She’ll be easier to find than John Fry,’ Maxwell said.
‘What if they’re not together?’ Diamond asked.
‘Then we’ll have to ask ourselves a whole new batch of questions, won’t we?’ Maxwell said. He saw himself out.
They built the Barlichway in the Sixties when the Four were Fab, Harold Wilson was at Number Ten and Peter Maxwell was a struggling undergraduate at Cambridge. It would be fifteen years before the social engineers who plan towns for a living realized that flat roofs, high-rise and miles of concrete created more problems than they solved. And by then, it was too late.
Peter Maxwell wheeled into Pear Court as the sun died below the Leighford gasworks. Some wag had painted letters in front of the title – Despear Court. That was rather good; Maxwell wished he’d thought of that. Come to think of it, he probably had. A knot of hooligans in baseball caps and trainers with undone laces were kicking a can around the gutter, shouting obscenities to each other. It could have been worse, Maxwell reasoned; they could have been kicking the cat.
‘I hope you boys have done your homework,’ he called.
For a moment, they stopped, looking at the old bugger in disbelief. It couldn’t be him? Could it? Same bike. Same stupid hat. Christ, it was an’all. Then they wandered across to him. ‘Mr Maxwell. Gonna buy me a pint?’
‘You can buy me one, Roger, in three years time when you’re old enough.’ Roger had been a geezer in the cradle. He was not of an age, but for all time.
‘Come off it, Mr Maxwell,’ another said. ‘Tit’s been in pubs since he was this big, ain’t you, Tit?’
Roger nodded proudly. Bearing in mind where his mate had raised his hand above the ground, that would have made him an alcoholic at three. Nothing absurd about that when you’re fourteen and your IQ is the same.
‘Mr Maxwell ain’t here for the good of his healf.’ Norman was the Einstein of the Pear Court Mob.
‘Sensitive of you to understand, Norman,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Annette Choker.’
Roger pushed his fingers down his throat.
‘That’s a little unkind, Roger,’ Maxwell frowned.
‘Well, she lives up there,’ Norman said, pointing to a balcony that ran, draped with washing, high above. ‘With her mum.’
‘That’s Number 61?’ Maxwell checked.
‘Yeah, but she’s done a runner,’ Roger said. ‘Gone off with that w… Mr Fry in Business.’
‘You know that for a fact?’ Maxwell asked him.
‘Near as dammit,’ Roger assured him.
‘Common knowledge around Leighford High…’ Norman said.
‘Yeah,’ somebody else chipped in. ‘She was always bragging about it. How he took her out to this restaurant and that nightclub. All a load of bollocks.’
‘So you didn’t believe it?’ Maxwell rounded on the child.
‘Not that spending money stuff, no.’
‘She’s a lightweight, sir,’ Norman assured the Head of Sixth Form. ‘Wouldn’t need to spend much money on her to get her to drop her knickers. You got a feel, didn’t you, Tit, in Year Eight, for a jammy dodger?’
Roger nodded. ‘That’s on account of my sex appeal,’ he said, triumphantly. The others hit him round the head.
‘Any one of you guys ever see Mr Fry around here?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Nah,’ they chorused, collectively. ‘We’d have had his hub caps off if he’d showed his face round here.’
‘Yeah,’ Roger grunted. ‘I hate Business Studies.’
‘Talking of hub caps,’ Maxwell chose his man with care. ‘Norman, want a fiver to mind my bike?’ He held up a crisp one to prove he was a man of his word.
‘Yeah!’ Roger lunged for it. Norman was faster. ‘Not you, Tit,’ and he slapped the lad’s hand away. ‘Just me. Mr M, your bike’s safe with me. ‘Ere, ain’t you got no helmet?’ Moron Norman may have been, but he was a safety-conscious one.
‘Can’t afford it, Norman,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘I keep giving people fivers to mind my bike.’
Predictably, there were babies crying and dogs barking as Peter Maxwell took the concrete stairway that led to the heaven that was the first floor balcony. There were nameless stains in dark corners and nasty smells and a reminder in spray paint to Mr Blair that, despite all his hard work at Number Ten, Rod Rules. He stepped carefully over the toddler straddling a plastic trike outside Number 59 and knocked gingerly on the red-painted, peeling door of 61. A dog barked inside followed by a high-pitched yell and the rattling of dead-bolts.
‘Yes?’ an overweight woman with her hair piled high stood there, squinting at him through the cigarette smoke that curled up past her eyes. She had another toddler in her arms. Mucus dribbled into the child’s mouth and the front of her bib was like Joseph’s coat of many colours.
‘Mrs Choker?’ Maxwell tipped his hat, a gesture the woman had probably never seen before.
‘Who wants to know?’ This bloke looked like a bailiff, but equally he could have been a bloody Jehovah’s Witness. He had a bloody bow tie on. How up himself was that?
‘I’m Peter Maxwell, from Leighford High School.’
‘Oh,’ the hardness vanished from the face and she grinned a gappy smile. ‘You Annette’s teacher?’ The Mrs Chokers of this world were often over-awed by people of Maxwell’s persuasion. It was all part of the race memory of when their great-grandfathers had been caned for breathing too loudly.
‘Not exactly,’ Maxwell said. ‘But I am looking for her.’
‘You and the whole bloody world. Look, um, Mr Maxwell, come in will you? Jenny!’ she shrieked into the flat’s grubby interior. ‘Jenny! Get yer arse out here.’
A girl of about ten, the living spit of the missing Annette, clopped into the hall, balancing on pink fluffy mules. ‘Take her, will you, love? Mr Maxwell and me need a moment.’
‘Oh, Mum!’ the girl whined.
‘Just fucking do it. And shut that bloody dog up!’
She bundled the toddler into Jenny’s skinny arms and pushed them both through a door. Maxwell followed her through a narrow corridor into the room at the far end.
‘Won’t you have a seat, Mr Maxwell?’ She swept some clutter off a chair in the tiny kitchen and Maxwell sat down. Through the pointless nets on the north side of Pear Rise, he could see the Downs rise to the sky, the gorse dark patches on the paler grass of Staple Hill. To the right, he knew, just blocked by the jutting corner of the gasworks, lay the old streambed of the Leigh, and the ash grove where little Robbie Wesson had found Dr David Radley and older graves yawned, naked to the probing of twenty-first century man.
‘Is there any news?’ the woman asked.
Maxwell tried to gauge her age. Early thirties, probably, but it was difficult to tell. A stranger to underwear, Mrs Choker’s breasts lay heavily around her waist, her nipples resting on the formica table top. She’d once been quite attractive, Maxwell realized, but the years and the kids and the Barlichway had all taken their toll.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘When did you see her last, Mrs Choker?’
‘It’s not Mrs Choker,’ the woman said. ‘That’s just the name I gave Annette when she started school. Choker was her dad’s name. I wonder where he is now?’
‘Jenny’s his girl, too?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Yeah.’ The woman who was not Mrs Choker lit up a second fag, having mashed the first into an ashtray on the table in front of her. ‘Do you?’
‘No, thanks,’ he smiled. ‘So what do I call you?’
‘Selina,’ she said.
; ‘Selina,’ he nodded. ‘When did you see Annette last?’
‘Let’s see.’ She screwed up her eyes as the smoke filled her face. ‘Week last Thursday. I told the coppers. We’d had a row.’
‘Really? What about?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! ‘Scuse me, Mr Maxwell,’ and Selina dashed to the door. ‘Shut that fuckin’ dog up, Jennifer. I’ve got company! Sorry about that,’ and the woman resumed her position opposite the teacher from up at the school. ‘She kept going out,’ Selina said, rummaging in the bits and pieces of the table for a coffee mug. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Mr Maxwell, she was a right bloody handful. Oh, I loved her, of course I did. But talk about wilful! Still,’ she snorted, ‘I was just the same at her age, I suppose, looking back. Well, it’s the hormones, ain’t it? That and looking for a better life. Not exactly a bundle of laffs round here. D’you wanna coffee?’
‘No thanks. Had she gone off before, Selina?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Once or twice. Oh, not for long, though.’ Selina laughed. ‘The first time, she was five. She’d heard about Disneyland, seen it on the telly. We’d had an up and downer – she was a little cow, even then. And she packed her bag with a towel and a toy and off she went. I caught up with her at the chip shop. Mr Patel had spotted her and sent his eldest to tell me. I didn’t even know she’d gone.’
‘This time,’ Maxwell brought her back to the here and now, ‘she took a bit more than a towel and a toy?’
‘Yeah,’ Selina grunted, flicking ash off her cigarette. ‘Half her fucking clothes and 40 quid of mine. Why do they have to grow up, eh?’
Some of them don’t, Maxwell thought, but whatever else this woman was, Selina was the girl’s mother. She didn’t need that kind of comment; not now. ‘Is there anywhere she might have gone? Her father…’
Selina shook her head. ‘Annette barely knew him. He was gone by the time she started school. I can’t find him and nor can the Child Support people, so I don’t see how she could. Anyway, she wouldn’t want to. All this bollocks about kids wanting to find their natural fathers – what’s that all about? Especially when their natural fathers bugger off in the first place. You got kids, Mr Maxwell?’
Not for the first time, Peter Maxwell saw the little face he loved, the little face he saw again sometimes in his deepest dreams, his little girl. ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Or twelve hundred of them, depending on how you look at it.’
‘What? Oh, yeah. Right.’
‘What about other relatives?’ he persisted. ‘Aunties? Uncles?’
‘I haven’t spoken to my sister since 1987. She don’t even know I got Annette. My mum’s dead and I never knew who my dad was – that’s history repeating itself, that is. Annette’s got a sister in Halifax. Well, half-sister, actually. I don’t talk to her no more.’
Maxwell smiled. ‘What about friends, then? Did she have a best friend?’
‘Michaela,’ Selina nodded. ‘Michaela Reynolds. Lives out along the railway somewhere. But she ain’t there. And she ain’t in Halifax neither. The coppers have checked. Look, Mr Maxwell, it’s nice of you to go to all this trouble, but if you ain’t Annette’s teacher…’
‘Tell me, Selina, when you and Annette weren’t off hooks, did she ever mention any of her teachers, Mr Fry?’
‘Fry?’ the woman frowned. ‘No. I don’t think so. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Just a long shot.’
Norman had been true to his word and White Surrey still gleamed in his grubby hands as Peter Maxwell repossessed it. He checked his watch. ‘Bedtime, boys,’ he called and listened to their jeers die away as he purred out of Pear Court and navigated his way, via the stars, to the old railway line. ‘And don’t forget that homework!’
Henry Hudson, the railway king, had once walked this way, with his maps and his theodolites and minions flapping in his wake. That was in 1842 before he’d got greedy and started selling spurious lines. The Leighford-Littlehampton line was about the last honest buck Henry Hudson had ever made.
The row of Victorian cottages was still there, built above the line the navvies had laid. And for once, they hadn’t just erected their shanty towns with scraps of wood and iron and dossed down with their dogs and their wives and their barrels of cider. They’d put down roots and they’d stayed. Even so, the cottages were not unlike a shanty town again. Satellite dishes protruded from every angle, half-stripped cars and bikes lay propped on bricks on what were once neat, carefully tended front gardens. The heady aroma of the Taj Mahal Balti House wafted over Hudson’s old track, now a skateboard park where noisy infants defied gravity by hurtling upside down through space.
Peter Maxwell rapped on the door of the end house. More dogs. More crying children. It was nearly dark by now and the rattle and roar of the skateboards was eerier in the stark floodlights that suddenly switched on. It was a surreal scene that George Orwell might have capitalized on had he lived. 2004 he’d have called the novel. And the skateboard park of Railway Cottages would have been his Room 101.
A vest came to the door – the south coast’s answer to Rab C Nesbitt. ‘Yeah?’
‘Mr Reynolds?’
Mr Reynolds could have been anything from twenty five to fifty. His shoulders sported black curling hair and dragon tattoos coiled menacingly over his biceps to snap and roar at his wrists.
He took in the stranger at his door. Stupid hat. Poncy bow tie. Fuck me – they weren’t cycle clips, were they? Shaun Reynolds hadn’t seen those since his granddad died. ‘Might be. Who are you?’
‘Peter Maxwell. Leighford High School.’
‘Yeah?’ It secretly unnerved Shaun Reynolds that them up at the school knew where he lived.
‘Is Michaela home?’
‘I dunno. Michaela!’ The windows rattled.
A dark haired girl whom Maxwell recognized emerged from the bowels of the hall. She looked different out of what passed for her uniform at school. Her navel dripped jewellery and she wore unseasonal boots of beige suede below yards of naked thigh. ‘Some bloke for you,’ Reynolds said and disappeared.
‘Michaela,’ Maxwell smiled at her. ‘I’m looking for Annette.’
‘I ain’t seen her.’ The girl was chasing a wedge of chewing gum around her mouth and, what with negotiating the tongue-stud, this was a major feat of engineering.
‘Annette’s mum seems to think otherwise.’ Maxwell stood his ground. He’d been arguing with Year Eleven girls for years.
‘Well, she’s wrong.’ Michaela stepped back to close the door, but Maxwell was faster and jammed his foot in the way.
‘I don’t think she is, Michaela,’ he said.
‘Dad!’ the girl screamed. Michaela knew Peter Maxwell. He used long words and talked loudly in corridors. She was afraid of him because he was so clearly Mad.
Reynolds was back, a copy of the Daily Sport in one hand, a can of Carlsberg in the other. ‘What the fuck… Is he touching you, Micky?’
‘Yeah,’ the girl blurted. ‘He was trying to grab my breasts.’
Maxwell stepped back this time, hands in the air. What? Me?
‘Is that right, mate?’ Reynolds confronted him, snarling, nose to nose with his man. ‘You trying to touch my girl?’
‘No,’ Maxwell assured him. ‘All I want is some answers.’
‘I know what you want, mate,’ Reynolds hissed, the dark hair bristling on his shoulders. ‘It’s having your bollocks cut off, one by one. How do pervs like you get a job in fucking teaching in the first place?’
‘Pervs like me?’ Maxwell was only prepared to retreat so far. Now he stood his ground, legs locked, arms by his side. In the flight or fight split-second decision scenario, men like Mad Max always chose fight.
‘Yeah. You and that Fry bloke. I read it in the local bloody paper. His wife’s bloody killed herself. Preying on young girls. Now fuck off, off of my property, or I’m calling the police.’
‘There’s just one more thing, Mr Reynolds…’
He
winced as she dabbed his nose. And she winced along with him. ‘Why don’t you keep your nose out of things, Max?’ she asked.
‘My nose,’ he mumbled. ‘That’ll be this big, throbbing thing that’s currently spreading over my face and impeding my vision, will it?’
Jacquie stood up and looked at the man she loved in her bathroom mirror. ‘You’re lucky he didn’t break your teeth. What did he use?’
‘Just his head.’ Maxwell slurred, wondering whether that particular part of Shaun Reynolds’ anatomy had been made of concrete. He was also wondering what had happened to the bit that used to separate his lips from his nostrils, in that he couldn’t see it anymore. ‘The Railway Cuttings version of the Glasgow Kiss, I expect sociologists call it. Still, I don’t suppose he’ll be picking his nose with his left hand for a while.’
‘Why?’ She threw the bloody cotton wool in the bin.
‘He got it caught in the door, I can’t think how that happened. Those Victorian door-frames, you know. So dangerous.’
‘Great,’ she scolded. ‘He’ll probably do you for assault now. What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking I might find Annette Choker,’ he said.
‘Come into the kitchen. I’ll get you some ice for that. We’re onto it, Max.’
‘You’ve found her, then?’ he waddled carefully across her hall and into her kitchen, his head tilted back, plugs up his nostrils.
‘Well, no, but…’
‘You know where she is?’
‘Well, not exactly…’
‘I rest my case.’
She sat him down, lovingly, on a kitchen chair before rummaging in the contents of her freezer. ‘The point I’m trying to make…’
‘…Is that Annette Choker is a police matter. Yes, I know. But, you see, when I passed a vital piece of information concerning the possible involvement of my colleague John Fry in all this, the police didn’t want to know.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jacquie said, a little surprised. ‘Who did you talk to?’ She wrapped the frozen cubes in a cloth and placed the little bundle carefully on her true love’s face.
