by M. J. Trow
‘What happened?’ Maxwell asked.
Fraser was still looking transfixed at the macabre object on the table, while one of the hotel staff was comforting the old girl with the knitting needles.
‘Perhaps you’d better cover that up,’ Maxwell suggested.
The professor whipped off his jacket and draped it over the grey cranium. ‘Good idea.’ He was calmer now and he sat down. ‘Sorry, Maxwell. I don’t mind telling you, this business has got me jumping at shadows.’
‘From the top, then,’ Maxwell said softly.
‘From the top,’ Jacquie sprawled in Maxwell’s bed, wrapped in Maxwell’s arms. ‘Fraser had been working late at the Museum – we’ve yet to confirm that, of course – and got back to the Quinton about half-eight. He checked his mail. Nothing. Went straight up to his room.’
‘That’s on the second floor.’ Maxwell was filling in what the professor had told him.
‘And the door was slightly ajar.’
‘Forced entry.’
‘Jemmy,’ Jacquie nodded, nuzzling her hair softly against her man’s chest and adding her professional precision. ‘Clumsy, too. Amateur job.’
‘He went in…’
‘He went in and found the skull on the bed, the lower jaw locked open with a twig.’
‘As though the skull was laughing at him,’ Maxwell noted.
‘Or screaming.’ Jacquie’s imagination was running in a different direction.
‘What did he do?’
‘Seems to have panicked. Came hurtling through the hotel like a banshee, waving the skull around.’
‘How is the old girl with the knitting needles?’
‘Still in casualty last I heard. Heavy sedation.’
Maxwell nodded. He’d never had much faith in the curative properties of Babycham. ‘I’d never have pegged Fraser for a panicker,’ he said, risking pain by kissing the girl’s sweet-smelling hair.
‘You can never tell,’ she smiled up at him in the half light, ‘what people will do until they’re faced with something like this. The call to the station said somebody had been decapitated. You were lucky I was on my own, or you’d have had the heavy mob, SOCO, Jim Astley, the works. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw you sitting there.’
‘Ah,’ he smiled. ‘The bacon sandwich at a Jewish wedding.’
‘Asking for a lift was a bit cheeky,’ she tapped his chest. ‘Policewoman on duty and all that.’
‘Well, I did toy with taking you roughly on the conservatory floor then and there,’ he confessed. ‘But no, no. Public schoolboy and all that. I waited.’
‘Not for long though.’ She tweaked his nipple between her forefinger and thumb.
‘Ow. Shite. You always told me you enjoyed being groped in hotel lobbies. Tell me about the skull. You’ve seen more of them than I have.’
‘Well, it’s a real one,’ she started. ‘There’s so much around these days for Occult weirdoes and snuff movie oddballs.’
‘Must be a woman; the mouth’s open.’ It was pure Harry Secombe as Neddy Seagoon.
She craned her neck to look at him, never ceasing to be amazed at the evidence she was collecting to have him put away.
‘The Goons, dear girl,’ he explained. ‘A Fifties comedy show of monumental social importance.’
‘Before my time,’ she purred smugly.
‘And mine,’ he purred back.
‘Liar!’ she laughed. ‘The skull wasn’t from the site. Or so Fraser said. It’s not Saxon, apparently; although, seen one skull, you’ve seen ’em all, I should think.’
‘You’ll be checking that?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she yawned. ‘Come sun-up.’
‘Right, then,’ Maxwell nudged her. ‘Your best case scenario.’ He was beginning to sound like Henry Hall.
‘Person or persons unknown brings the skull to the hotel.’
‘Chummy,’ Maxwell smiled as well as he could. ‘Let’s call him “Chummy”.’
‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘Chummy.’ Having reminded Maxwell that he was a child of the Fifties, she now had to suffer that decade’s terminology. ‘Chummy comes into the hotel.’
‘Is he a guest?’
‘Could be.’
‘Who’s on the desk?’ Maxwell was closing his eyes, picturing the scene.
‘Two spotty youths. Terminal halitosis meets eternal sniff.’
‘Castor and Pollux,’ Maxwell said. ‘Let’s call them “Castor” and “Pollux”.’
Her eyes rolled heavenward. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Those were their names, spookily enough. Not ex-yours, are they?’
‘Mercifully, no,’ he chuckled. ‘It’s quite a treat to find an institution in this town that’s not run by old Leighford Hyenas.’ It was. Seaside havens like Leighford relied on the cheap labour of kids. And Peter Maxwell had been around for so long that generations of waiters, chambermaids, Adventure Playground operators and Dotto train drivers had passed through his hands. ‘Say on, Woman Policeman. You have me in thrall.’
‘The youths…Castor and Pollux…keep a note of new customers, obviously, because they sign in. Other than that, security is, to say the least, lax.’
‘No CCTV of course.’
‘Of course,’ Jacquie confirmed. ‘This is the Quinton. They only installed a lift three years ago.’
‘I remember,’ said Maxwell. ‘It instantly became one of Leighford’s main attractions. Is Chummy a handyman?’
‘Doubtful.’ Jacquie shook her head. ‘The only handyman who turned up was the bloke to measure for the new lobby carpet. Castor knew him. Been before.’
‘You’ll check the company, of course.’
‘Look,’ she finally snapped. ‘It’s like being in bed with a DCI.’
‘So,’ he flung her from him by a few inches. ‘You’ve been to bed with the DCI.’
‘No,’ she scowled. ‘And he’s not a public schoolboy. Anyway, I distinctly said a DCI, cloth-ears.’
‘Oh,’ sobbed Maxwell, ‘“teach not thy lip such scorn, lady”.’ It was an immaculate Olivier as Richard III.
‘I’ll be onto Caring Carpets as soon as I’ve checked with the Museum,’ she said. ‘Bloody good Ian McKellen, by the way.’
‘Bitch!’ he hissed, wrapping her auburn hair round her neck and pretending to pull tightly. ‘Right, so we’re back to Chummy. Whether he’s a carpet bagger or a grock, he’s a member of the Sepulchre Society.’
‘Seems that way,’ Jacquie said.
‘But we’ve got no description?’
‘None. A jemmy or whatever he used on Fraser’s door isn’t difficult to conceal.’
‘As in “is that a jemmy in your trouser pocket or are you pleased to see me?”’
‘Quite. It’s a conventional burglar’s tool. Designed to be unobtrusive.’
‘All right.’ Maxwell was ignoring her disinterested slur and thinking aloud. ‘So Chummy sends a second threatening letter to Douglas Russell and the next day leaves a calling card of an altogether more sinister kind for Tam Fraser. The net’s widening.’
‘Are we actually talking about the same guy?’ Jacquie asked. ‘I mean, why post a threat one day, and deliver a threat personally the next, to the same address?’
‘Don’t know,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘But it sounds like overkill.’ That word again. ‘Before you came to Leighford we had a lot of brouhaha about the flyover. A petition against it was handed in to the Town Hall. Contained over 5000 names. Except that all of them were written by a Magnus Potter using both hands, often simultaneously and various colours and types of ink. He was a one-man pressure group.’
‘So they built the flyover anyway?’
‘Sure,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Rumour had it that Magnus Potter is part of the cement footings on the west side. It’s how he’d have wanted to go. As it happened, Potter was not a psychopath – just a guy with a mission.’
‘This Sepulchre Society, Max.’ Jacquie was frowning, ‘Are they for real?’
‘Thr
ee dead bodies, two threatening letters and a skull, dear heart? No, they’re a figment of somebody’s imagination. Just a nebulous concept.’
Jacquie Carpenter left the love of her life sleeping the next morning. He still didn’t look well in the half-light of his bedroom, the sun shaft shining in through the window of 38 Columbine. She gingerly lifted her bra and knickers from the chair before taking the rest of her clothes and tiptoeing down the stairs.
The great Behemoth that was Metternich sat in the archway to the kitchen, crouched on his haunches, tail thrashing slowly. Mother of God, what was this? In place of a crusty old fart waddling about in dressing gown and slippers, a slip of a thing with strange wobbly bits at the front ran past him, making for the lower stairs, climbing into her clothes as she ran.
‘I’m late, Count,’ she told him. ‘Your Master will be up later. He’ll sort you out.’ She was, no doubt, talking breakfast.
Metternich rose to his full one foot two and turned tail. His Master had sorted him out years ago, with a quick and terrifying trip to that place we mustn’t mention, the one with the men in white coats and rows of cages; the hell where youth and testicles go. Thanks, but no thanks. He’d rip seven kinds of shit out of a rodent instead. The brown, crusty stuff in the packet he’d have for lunch.
‘No, Jacquie,’ Sergeant Wilson was saying. ‘Jack Shit, I’m afraid.’
‘Thanks, Tom.’ She snapped her mobile shut, swinging the Ka left along the sea front as a seaside town came to life. The flags of the new season fluttered in the breeze stirring from the west and the Biffa lorry trundled its way along Wendover Street, pausing to collect the black bags as it went, its operatives, with their sign proclaiming they were working in its rear, roaring the odds to each other with all the panache of people who think they’re free and powerful, not slaves of a post-modernist society. Someone was watering the pretty hanging baskets outside the Royal and awnings were coming down against another scorching day, to cloak their shopfronts mercifully with the cool of shade.
She jammed on her anchors outside the Piece of Cod Fish ‘n’ Chip Bar. ‘Jerry!’
The town’s most hated man was only ever spoken to by police officers and people about to hit him. But somebody had to be a traffic warden.
‘What-ho, Jacquie!’ he waved back, more Fifties than Peter Maxwell. He was a little man, who only sported a moustache on his first day in the job because somebody said he looked like Hitler.
‘Have you seen Alison McCormick this morning?’
‘No, I haven’t.’ Jerry was a martyr to ill-fitting dentures, his own teeth having disappeared under a barrage of motorists’ right crosses and left hooks over the years.
‘Yesterday?’
‘No.’ The warden frowned. ‘No, come to think of it, I haven’t. Off sick, is she? Rest day? Something?’
‘Yes, that’ll be it,’ she said and drove off.
But Alison McCormick wasn’t off sick. And it wasn’t a rest day. It was something all right, but what? She should have been prowling this area of the town that Jacquie was driving through now. And yesterday afternoon, she should have been at the nick organizing the search for Annette Choker. But she hadn’t been there either. Jacquie hadn’t mentioned it to Peter Maxwell because other events had taken a certain priority. But the cold light of dawn brought it all back. Alison McCormick had just vanished.
One more time. Just in case. Jacquie parked the Ka, flicking her police sign in the window. Just let Jerry slip a ticket on that and it was no more Miss Nice Policewoman. You could add her name to the list of people who wouldn’t have pissed on him had he been set alight. Alison McCormick lived on the second floor. And Jacquie Carpenter was far too young to remember the Cliff Richard song – Alison doesn’t live here any more.
Kids go missing. They fight with Mum or Dad or both. They row with boyfriend/girlfriend. They get in over their heads with drugs or shoplifting. One or two of them, both sexes, go on the game. They vanish. Then, they’re found, skulking in a friend’s house, trying to rough it in the wild. Now and again, they’re found dead. One too many needles; from mainline to flatline. Hitching a ride with the wrong driver whose wife didn’t understand him and who just wanted some company.
Adults go missing. They row with the wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend. They get in over their heads with drugs or embezzlement. One or two of them are already on the game, both sexes. They vanish, then they’re found, in Rio or Warsaw or Nairobi, on the run, out of luck. Now and again, they’re found dead, killed for their trainers, their mobile phones. Hitching a ride with the wrong driver…
Police personnel do not go missing. Not unless…
Jacquie was still rationalizing that fact as she used her pass key to get into Alison’s flat. Alison, the policewoman who had gone missing. She’d been here yesterday, had the detective sergeant. And now she was back again, just in case she’d missed something, returning to what she hoped this wasn’t – the scene of crime. She’d caught sight of herself in Alison’s hall mirror. Christ, what a mess. Yesterday’s clothes, her hair a tawny tangle piled high on her head. She should have gone home first, for a shower and a change. She could have showered at Maxwell’s, but she’d been running late. And anyway, she found herself smiling, she still smelt of him, his warmth, his love, so that was okay. Slight bulge round the middle? Nah. Trick of the light.
She stood in Alison’s lounge. What had she missed? A note on the coffee table? “Just popped out.” “Help – abducted by fairies.” If only it were that simple. There was nothing Marie Celeste about this place. No half-eaten meal, no half-drunk cups of coffee, no telly still playing in the corner. Everything was neat. Disgustingly so. Jacquie cringed a little remembering her own place and how it would look this morning. Okay, so she’d meant to do the washing up last night, but then she’d got the station call about the hoo-ha at the Quinton and she’d gone running. And there was Mad Max, looking at her with those sad, purple-rimmed eyes and how could she go home after that? But that was real life – the peck of dirt her granddad had always told her, a little bizarrely and for what reason she could never understand, you had to eat. This was scrubbed, sanitized as though the House Doctor had whirled through the place with a mop, a bucket and a tin of mauve emulsion.
She checked the kitchen. Spotless. Dishrack empty. Cupboards full. Cups hanging on hooks. A toaster and no crumbs. Weird. She turned right up the little stairway that led to Alison’s bedroom. Sheets turned down like an army exercise. Books neatly stacked on a bedside shelf, Danielle Steele. Robert Ludlum. The usual suspects. The wardrobe contained the woman’s police uniform, hanging immaculately on a hanger. How many civilian clothes had gone, Jacquie didn’t know. Some, certainly. Shoes, probably. Maybe jeans, a couple of blouses. A shirt or two. Undies were unknowable. Some women had hundreds; others made do on far less. Had Alison McCormick just taken some with her. Or was some pervert adding to his collection?
The detective wandered back into the lounge. A beaming Alison looked at her from a gilt frame, flanked by loving parents, Mrs McCormick the pod from which the pea had sprung. Jacquie hadn’t contacted them yet. She’d only been gone…what was it? Twenty-six hours now. But she couldn’t put it off much longer. Perhaps they knew. Or knew a man who did.
‘What did she say, Dave?’ Jacquie was going over her conversation of the previous day with DC Garstang, in her mind.
‘She had to follow up some leads,’ he’d told her. ‘Didn’t specify. I didn’t ask.’
Jacquie couldn’t blame him. How many cases had they both seen like this? When the last words one person says to another are crucial. Yet they seem so ordinary. Seem so ordinary because you don’t know they are the last words and by the time you do, it’s too late.
She turned back into the hall. And that’s when she saw it, sticking out from under the airing cupboard door. The something she’d missed yesterday. She clicked the door open. Snugglers.
A stiffish breeze had come from nowhere, blowing Douglas Russell’s pa
pers all over the tent. Peter Maxwell had graduated by that Wednesday to trowelling. He was grateful that the heavy stage of the dig was already over, with the serious tools slicing the clay and carting it away, to form the tell-tale spoil heaps that littered Staple Hill like the work of giant moles. The only down side was that he couldn’t do his relief of mattocking joke – perhaps it was just as well.
Robin Edwards, with his 2:1 from Lancaster University, knelt beside the Great Man, his face dark under the broad-brimmed hat. It made a change – most people knelt in front of Peter Maxwell.
‘What’ve we got here then, Robin?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked.
Both of them were crouched, looking at the reddish-brown slabs emerging from the centuries of soil that had covered them until now. Edwards’ trowel scraped them clean.
‘Difficult to say,’ the archaeologist said, ‘but it could be the curve of an apse. I want to get those trees cleared and start work over there.’ He was pointing his trowel at the tangle of ash trees. ‘If I’m right, that’s where the nave will be.’
‘No chance, I’m afraid,’ Maxwell said.
‘Oh,’ Edwards bridled. ‘Expert in late Saxon ecclesiastical architecture, are you?’
‘I know my transept from my triforium,’ Maxwell was proud to admit, ‘but that’s not the point. The ash grove is a murder site. You won’t be able to dig there until Detective Chief Inspector Hall says you can.’
‘Look…er…Mr Maxwell,’ the archaeologist leaned back on his heels, his climbing boots a dull yellow with the Leighford clay. ‘You’re not a sort of spy, are you? Undercover cop? Only, I think that’s called entrapment.’
‘Heaven forfend,’ Maxwell leaned back too, but thought better of it as a vicious cramp in his buttocks forced him forward on all fours again. ‘But I do have a nose for murder.’ He thought of tapping it, but it was too soon. In the pain stakes, he just wasn’t ready. ‘What do you think’s going on, Robin?’
