by M. J. Trow
‘Shit!’ he hissed. ‘And that’s “To whom did you talk?” by the way.’
‘Big baby!’ She knocked his hand away.
‘Woman Policeman,’ he told her. ‘Slip of a thing. Bit on edge, I thought. Using her dignity like a piles cushion. The sort of attitude that comes with being tiny, female and inadequate.’
‘That’s Alison McCormick, you uncompromising chauvinist bastard!’ resisting the temptation to cuff him, lovingly of course, around the nose. ‘Remind me again why I love you.’
‘Ha ha,’ he chuckled as best he could, ‘let me count the ways. No, I’m on a quest, light of my life.’
She looked at him, dried blood all over his shirt, dark bruises spreading under his bright eyes. A quest. Yes, that would be right. Where there were windmills and dragons, there would be Peter Maxwell, mad as a snake, pen in hand, tilting from the saddle of White Surrey for all he was worth, pursuing whatever grail was shining in his vision. This one was a missing schoolgirl and a possible pervert. She shook her head, her eyes a little damp, her own vision a little misty.
‘Do tell,’ she said.
‘Mr Diamond, no less,’ he told her, feeling the blood trickle from his nose again. ‘My revered Headmaster. “I don’t care what it takes, Max,” he said.’ It was a near-perfect James Diamond, bearing in mind his obvious indisposition. ‘“I want you to find what our woefully inadequate police force cannot. Especially that Carpenter woman. She’s hopeless.”’
‘If you weren’t an incurable cripple already,’ she leaned over him, ‘I’d smack you with your own handbag. You’re staying here tonight.’
‘Darling, I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can,’ she insisted as only half-dressed detectives with long auburn hair can in the long watches of the night. ‘You’d never make it across town with what you’ve got.’
‘Ah, the puncture.’
‘And,’ she insisted again, ‘it’s the spare room for you, my lad.’
Maxwell looked even more hurt than he actually was. ‘All my wounds are before, Woman Policeman. There’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t take me roughly from behind.’
Morning had broken like the first morning by the time Peter Maxwell got up. The sun streamed in through Jacquie’s curtains onto Jacquie’s carpet and onto the note she’d left for him. She had a bitch of a day ahead of her interviewing archaeologists with Henry Hall. There was a lasagne in the fridge, wine in the rack and probably something black, white and celluloid on the TCM channel. On no account was he to go home until she got back, but it could be late.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, darling one,’ he smiled softly and pattered downstairs to mend the puncture in Surrey’s rear tyre. Norman, it seemed, hadn’t been quite the good egg he’d promised to be last evening and Maxwell would have words with him about that. Even though it was half-term, Maxwell’s memory was long. And Norman owed Maxwell a fiver.
The sun was still shining late that morning, as Dr Samantha Welland twirled at the end of the rope that stretched from her dislocated neck, up over the beam in her garage and to its anchorage on the far wall.
One of her shoes had landed on the concrete floor, kicked away from the low chair and her tongue protruded, blue and swollen, from her caked, foam-flecked lips.
‘Sam Welland,’ Jacquie Carpenter said, checking the list in Hall’s office. ‘She’s the only one left to see.’
‘How long has she been at the dig?’ Henry Hall asked.
‘A couple of days,’ his DS told him. ‘Came hard on the heels of Professor Fraser. She wasn’t with the original team. Derek Latymer’s under the impression she came uninvited. Bit of a tease, this one, according to Martin’s notes.’ Martin. There was that name again. He was never very far away.
‘Do we have an address?’ Hall asked.
Jacquie checked. ‘Hove,’ she told him.
Hall checked his watch. All day the two of them had been interviewing the four names on the dig list. Now, only one to go. Questions, questions. Over and over. ‘Can I just go back to…?’ It was endless.
‘Tomorrow,’ Hall said, sliding his pen into his inside pocket. ‘I daresay she’ll keep till then.’
Chapter Nine
‘All right, Jacquie.’ Henry Hall had tilted his seat back as far as the confines of her Ka would let him and he was dozing, his hands clasped across his chest. ‘Let’s recap. Start with that noxious bastard Tam Fraser.’
‘Noxious bastard, sir?’ Henry Hall wasn’t normally given to expletives. ‘Does that give me some clue about the way my summation ought to go?’
‘Not at all.’ Hall shook his head. ‘I want your honest opinion.’ They were driving east, the pair of them, in the warm glow of a Saturday in the dying days of May. It ought to have been idyllic, except that they were both working for the umpteenth day on the trot and the face of a dead colleague haunted them both. To cap it all, it was Whit Saturday, that magic day in the year when the number of cars on any road in the country suddenly doubles and people who haven’t driven for months come out of cold storage, as though from a sleep of years, and pretend they can drive. Rip van Winkle meets Michael Schumacher.
‘Wanker!’ she screamed at one such, an old git who had to be a hundred, actually attempting to drive a Morris Minor.
‘I’m not sure that’s anything the Crown Prosecution Service can get their teeth into,’ Hall had not opened his eyes. ‘Give me a little precision.’
‘Sorry, guv,’ she said. ‘All right. Professor Tam Fraser, semi-retired,’
‘Professor Emeritus,’ Hall corrected her. ‘Wonder if there’s such a thing as DCI Emeritus? I like the sound of that.’ So did Mrs Hall. For years now she’d watched her husband get older and grumpier. He didn’t sleep as well as he used to and all three boys were growing up with only the vaguest notion of who their father was.
‘He’s an arrogant shit, sir, if you’ll pardon the expression. Trying to get a look up my skirt while being appallingly patronizing with the other eye, so to speak. I pity his female students.’
‘But, that apart,’ Hall posited.
‘Seems to have been genuinely fond of David Radley. I think probably under that ghastly, professorial Scotsman exterior, he’s actually quite cut up about the murder.’ Jacquie was shaking her head at the ludicrous antics of the artic drivers, wishing just for a moment she were in a patrol car.
‘Did he have anything to gain from Radley’s death?’ Hall was taking her through the set pieces.
‘Hardly. He already outranked him. Probably…why not indicate? She suddenly screamed at a white van man, ‘…just as much of a whizz kid as Radley in his day. No, the dig’s given him extra work when I don’t suppose he needed it.’
‘Alibi for the time of the murder?’
‘That’s tricky.’
‘Why is it tricky?’ Hall was using his DS as a sounding board, dotting i’s and crossing t’s, making doubly sure he hadn’t missed anything himself.
‘Jim Astley’s lack of time of death.’
‘Jim Astley’s lack of anything,’ Hall mused. ‘Know what’s odd about this case, Jacquie? No obvious motive, no obvious forensics. David Radley seems to be some sort of cross between Mother Teresa and Mother Teresa… Didn’t appear to break wind without permission – and then in writing, in triplicate. Who would want to kill Mr Nice Guy?’
‘Almost anybody,’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘Just to wipe the smile off his face. Oh, please!’
Hall didn’t have to open his eyes. ‘Agricultural vehicle,’ he said.
‘Combine bloody harvester!’ Jacquie confirmed.
‘So, when we assume Radley died, where was Fraser?’
‘At a conference in London. Something or other organized by London University. A symposium on Saxon England.’
‘Is that you yawning or is it me?’ Hall asked. For the first time, he opened his eyes and glanced across at the girl gone dancing, chancing, backing and advancing along the A27. ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot. Mad Max.’
She glanced back at him. ‘I don’t think it’s his period,’ she smiled, never quite knowing how Henry Hall felt on any given day about Peter Maxwell. She wondered how he was, with his swollen lip and squashed nose. God knew where he’d got to by the time she got home last night. His note had just said, ‘Still on the trail. See you soon. Love you, Woman Policeman.’ Now, she hoped, he was still curled up in his bed with that revolting cat for company.
‘All right,’ Hall changed the subject. ‘Talk me through Douglas Russell.’
‘Ah, now him I liked,’ Jacquie said, wincing on her boss’s behalf as she crunched the gears. ‘But he seemed scared.’
‘I picked that up,’ Hall said. ‘Why?’
‘Perhaps he thinks he’s next. Remember the threatening letter.’
‘He had something to gain from Radley’s death.’ Hall mused, playing devil’s advocate and ignoring Jacquie’s red herring.
‘What? Not the dig – Fraser’s stepped in. Not the Chair at Wessex, surely? He’s a geophysicist.’
‘Which means?’
‘I don’t think they’re held in very great esteem, guv,’ Jacquie said. ‘Oh, great. Roadworks!’ and she yanked on the brakes, waiting for the queue to disappear and the lights to turn green. ‘Anyway, he doesn’t strike me as the ambitious type.’
‘No, indeed,’ Hall agreed. ‘But there’s something not quite right about our Mr Russell. What car does he drive?’
‘Um…not sure. His is the Land Rover, I think. Why?’
‘No reason. Alibi for Radley?’
‘Hasn’t got one. Or at least, he was alone in his room at the Quinton, assuming, as Astley does, that Radley died a little before midnight on the Wednesday night.’
‘He didn’t die at the site, we know that. And he didn’t die in his room at the Quinton.’
‘That’s right. So why…oh, come on, for God’s sake!’
Horns were beginning to blare in the morning as the sun climbed higher and began to take its toll on tempers, already frayed by Bank Holiday lunacy.
‘So why go to all the trouble to move him onto the site?’
‘Symbolic,’ Hall said. ‘Some…what? Ritual significance? Man’s an archaeologist, so it’s only fitting he’s found dead, one corpse among many.’
‘But Russell wouldn’t have put him there, surely? Bit like shitting on your own doorstep, isn’t it, guv?’
‘A more distant doorstep than the Quinton,’ Hall commented. ‘Even if Russell didn’t kill him in either of their rooms, there are other possibilities. Basement, dining room; it’s got a billiard room if I remember rightly. And if you’re right about the Land Rover, it’s a damned handy hearse. Large, strong and its tyre tracks wouldn’t be out of place at the dig site because it’s there every day anyway.’
‘Are you putting Russell in the frame, sir?’ Jacquie asked, a little uneasily.
‘No, no,’ Hall fluttered his hands in the air, ‘I could make a reasonable case against my granny if I felt so inclined, Jacquie, you know that. Against you. Against Peter Maxwell.’
She ignored him. ‘Derek Latymer,’ she said.
‘Ah, now there is a young man in a hurry,’ Hall said. ‘Left at the roundabout.’
Jacquie was about to scream ‘how the hell do you know’ since the man’s eyes were shut, but thought better of it. ‘And he didn’t like Fraser.’
‘That makes him all right in your book?’ Hall asked her.
‘You know what I mean, sir,’ she said slowly.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘It struck me that young Mr Latymer didn’t have much time for anybody. Slagging off Fraser as something out of the Dark Ages himself. Ripping into Russell for all sorts of academic shortcomings. He seemed particularly to have it in for Samantha Welland. With colleagues like that, who needs a killer?’
It was a little before ten that the Ka crunched on the gravel of the drive of The Orchards.
‘I had no idea there was so much money in archaeology,’ Jacquie was staring up at the Thirties opulence of the house ahead of her, the sort of place, with its rounded corners and iron-framed windows, they used for the set of Poirot; she half-expected to see David Suchet waddle out of the shrubbery.
‘Jesus!’ Hall sat bolt upright. There was a screaming ambulance siren behind them and a white vehicle, lights blazing, roared across the gravel, sending it flying in all directions. Behind it, a squad car, lights flashing, siren blaring, took part of the gate post with it. ‘That’s going to go on somebody’s record,’ he murmured.
Half a dozen coppers of the West Wessex Constabulary were all over the building immediately. One of them was outside Jacquie’s door; another near Hall’s.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ the lad said once she’d wound down the window. ‘Would you mind telling me what you’re doing here?’
She flashed her card. ‘Same as you, son,’ she said, though she wasn’t much older than he was. ‘But with a little less urgency. What’s going on?’
Hall’s card was all but up the nose of the constable on his side – and it had to be said, he didn’t always have constables on his side. ‘What’s the trouble here?’
Both boys in blue were rather more upright and to attention in the unexpected presence of a DCI. ‘We’ve word of a suicide, sir. In the garage.’
‘Over here!’ a voice called from the steps. ‘This way.’ A woman, smart and fortysomething with a chunky hairdo swayed on the patio above the gravel.
‘Sergeant,’ Hall stopped the senior man on his way across the drive. ‘I’m DCI Hall, Leighford. What’s going on here?’
‘We got a call of a suicide, sir. But there may be complications.’
‘There often are,’ Hall said. ‘Your patch, man. Carry on.’ At least the DCI had a sense of decorum.
‘Sir. Come on, you lads.’
Coppers and ambulance men went about their business, barging through the garage doors, flinging them wide. Hall could see the kicked over chair, the single shoe, the dangling feet.
‘Jacquie,’ he motioned his DS in the direction of the woman still standing, as though frozen, on the steps. ‘Get her inside and get a statement. I need to check this one out.’
The A27 was busier by the time Hall and Jacquie were driving home. They had come to interview the last of the full-time archaeologists working on the Leighford dig and they were too late. Samantha Welland was dead.
‘Scenario one, then?’ Hall was back in his erstwhile position, eyes closed, seat tilted, hands clasped. Jacquie didn’t know how honoured she was. There weren’t many men that trusting.
‘Um…scenario one,’ Jacquie has been chewing it over all day; she was glad, at last, to be able to put it into words. ‘Scenario one is that Samantha Welland killed David Radley and took her own life in remorse.’
‘Points in favour of that,’ Hall wanted to know.
‘Martin Toogood interviewed her.’ Jacquie was piecing it together. ‘She got rattled…’
‘Yes, but backtrack. Murder of Radley.’
‘Broken neck,’ Jacquie switched lanes to avoid the endless artics, even more of them now than on the way out. ‘Caused by a karate blow delivered by Sam Welland. She was a black/brown/green – waddya want belt judo expert, had muscles on her muscles. Could have lifted him too, dumped him in the ash grove.’
‘What did she drive?’
‘Volvo estate. It was in the garage.’
‘Room enough for a body,’ Hall nodded.
‘And that’s why she got in on the dig,’ Jacquie was in full flight now. ‘Get bloody over! She had to establish her tyre tracks at the site. So she invited herself over.’
‘Left it a bit late,’ Hall said. ‘We’ve got ‘em all. SOCO were on the ball this time.’
‘Were they, sir?’ Jacquie had nearly as much experience of the Men in White as Hall had. How many times, in the experience of both of them, had somebody in a lab somewhere fucked up? Guilty men had walked as a result. And in the good old days, some good men died for the same reas
on.
‘Point taken,’ he said, without moving so much as an eyebrow. ‘OK, so Sam Welland hates David Radley. He’s cleverer-than-thou, got more papers published than she’s had hot dinners. Alternatively, he doesn’t approve of his people flopping about on mats shouting Banzai. Or he just looked at her funny, whatever. She’s got a short fuse. Loses it. They row. She kills him.’
His fingers were conducting a little mini orchestra across his chest.
‘Where?’ she asked
‘I thought you were doing the scenario?’
Jacquie smiled. She knew when a buck was being passed. ‘Not Radley’s room at the Quinton.’
‘That still leaves his house – but his wife’s statement would seem to rule that out. Radley was staying in Room 13 at the Quinton for convenience sake; although it’s no drive back to Petworth. Susan hadn’t seen him for days. That leaves Welland’s home. It’s certainly big enough to have a murder room in there somewhere.’ He waved a lazy thumb back over his shoulder. ‘We’ll have to leave that to the Hove team.’
‘They seem competent enough,’ she said.
‘They always do,’ Hall nodded. ‘Scenario one, Sergeant.’
‘Wherever she does it,’ Jacquie’s tyres squealed as she took the roundabout too fast, ‘she bundles him into the Volvo, drives to the dig, presumably after dark on Wednesday night and dumps his body in the ash grove.’
‘Why?’
A silence.
‘Don’t know.’
‘You know what they say about police work, Jacquie. Ninety per cent perspiration, ten per cent speculation. Speculate.’
It was the nearest to a joke you were likely to get from Henry Hall and Jacquie settled for it. ‘Symbolism,’ she said. ‘Aren’t ash groves sacred or something?’
‘Ask Maxwell,’ the DCI said. ‘I’d have put him in a grave.’
‘Seems a little harsh, sir,’ Jacquie smiled, her grey eyes twinkling. ‘Teachers like him are hard to come by.’
