by M. J. Trow
He sighed and ran his hands through his hair, so it stood up in tufts. She couldn’t square this distraught man with the controlling box-ticker she had met just a week ago. Could it be that there was more than one side to Tom Medlicott? Including a wife murderer?
She tapped her pen on her pad. ‘So there’s no one she would have gone to?’ No, she wasn’t turning into Maxwell. Look at that preposition at the end of the sentence.
‘No. It’s just us.’ He broke down again.
She stood up and walked round the table, bending down to put her arm round his shoulder and lean her cheek on the top of his tousled head. There was probably not more than six months between them, but she comforted him as though he were Nolan. ‘Come on, Tom. Let’s put you to bed. I’ve got some herbal sleeping tablets in my bag. They’re not miracle workers, but they’ll take the edge off, let you get a few minutes, perhaps.’
‘You take sleeping pills?’
‘I’m a policewoman. My husband lost his first family in a car crash, plus, he’s a teacher who wants to look after the whole world. It’s a wonder we don’t use a sledgehammer.’ She gave him a squeeze. ‘Come on, you’ll feel better after a nap.’
‘If I hadn’t been sleeping so soundly, perhaps—’
‘“Perhaps” is silly. And anyway, she’ll be back before you wake up, I bet.’ This would mean a lot to some people, Jacquie knew. A bet was almost a guarantee. But Jacquie never played so much as Snap for money. She didn’t play the Lottery. The National had never struck her as being particularly Grand. But it perked him up and she was soon tiptoeing out of his room, having tucked him under the covers like a child. She closed the door with exaggerated care and went downstairs to question Thingie Three.
But this got her nowhere. People could come and go almost invisibly; well, they could go. Coming back in tended to draw more attention. The CCTV cameras were for show only. They weren’t linked to anywhere and there was no hard drive. Maxwell would have said there was no glass negative installed, had he ever given CCTV more than a cursory thought. There were some on the Esplanade, but only in one direction, where the pubs were. Turning left out of the hotel, onto the cliff path, could be done completely invisibly. Why was it that Joe Public was photographed clearly three hundred times a day going about his boring, innocent business? Dick Dastardly never was. The most heinous of crimes was always carried out by a pixelly blob. The doors stood open until midnight and anyone could enter or leave. After all, as Thingie Three said, it was a hotel, not a prison. Jacquie forbore to point out that it was a prison, beg pardon, hotel, full of children. She knew the point would go right over the girl’s head. But, to cut a short story even shorter, no one had seen the woman after her husband closed his eyes the night before. And Jacquie hoped that this was literally true. Because, if it was, there was a chance that she was sitting up on the cliff path, nursing a sore ankle and swearing because no one went to look for her. Even, in a worst-case scenario, she might be sitting on a ledge halfway down the cliff, waiting to be spotted by a windsurfer. Because if someone else had seen her after Tom had kissed her goodnight, they might be looking at another outcome altogether. One that she felt like iced water, trickling slowly down her spine.
Jacquie Carpenter-Maxwell turned slowly from the reception desk and walked to where she had parked the car, along a bit from the hotel. She wanted a drive, on her own, with some music blasting out so loud it drove the trickling ice away. Meat Loaf would be nice. Bat Out of Hell. She foraged in the glove compartment and sighed. Nolan had prepared well for the journey, tossing out her music CDs to make way for Charlotte’s Web, Flat Stanley, and finally, and so very appropriate, a complete set of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Somehow, nothing really appealed, so she just got in and drove in silence, broken only by the occasional confused musings of a strictly mainland-oriented satnav having its own nervous breakdown, accompanied by the unwelcome thoughts jangling round in her head.
Chapter Nine
Last-night hysteria had touched Year Seven and getting them to bed that night was a job for the A-Team, the Watchmen and the Untouchables rolled into one. And even then, they would have had a hard time. It seemed to the Leighford staff, minus, naturally, Tom Medlicott who was palely loitering in his room, that no sooner had they got one sector covered, than someone would make a break for it further down the corridor. It was like trying to catch a fart in a colander, as Barton Joseph so colourfully put it. Doing a headcount was impossible; it was always at least ten per cent out and, on one memorable occasion, they came up with double the required number. Pansy, whose drinking time was being seriously cut into by these shenanigans, tried to persuade Maxwell that too many was good enough, but wiser words prevailed and the count began again. Also, she had been pestering Maxwell for a while now on the need to inform the Senior Leadership Team at Leighford High of the disappearance of Izzy Medlicott. Maxwell ripped off Sean Connery’s great line from Indiana Jones by telling her she might as well contact the Marx Brothers.
Eventually, everyone was in bed and, if not exactly tied down with actual ropes, they had taken Maxwell’s threats seriously enough to behave as if they were. Soon all was peaceful, save for the weak-wailing threnody of the girls who had somehow forgotten that they would all be seeing each other again in school on Monday.
Jacquie was intrigued. ‘Why are they crying like that?’
‘Oh,’ Sylvia dismissed it as she sipped her drink gratefully, ‘ignore it. They’re always the same. Last day before the holidays from school, first day back, birthdays, exams; the girls all cry and the boys go around punching each other. It’s a puberty thing. Just you wait.’
Jacquie was still waiting for Nolan to go through all of the dread phases of toddlerhood; the Terrible Twos, the Thoughtless Threes, the Foul Fours and so on. Like his father, Nolan didn’t ever do what was expected. He was probably limbering up for a biggie in the Nauseating Nines or something. She also sipped her drink. She felt the presence of Izzy Medlicott as clearly as if she had been sitting at her elbow. And yet, here they all were, making small talk. Someone had to bring her absence up, but who?
Maxwell, returning from the last round-up, flung himself into his chair and said, ‘So, what’s the next move on the Medlicott situation?’
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The elephant had left the room, leaving only minimal damage and a pile of steaming poo behind.
‘We’ll be able to go to the police tomorrow, surely?’ Guy Minter suggested. ‘They said twenty-four hours, didn’t they?’ Everyone looked at Jacquie, as the resident expert on police procedure.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘That’s true. Twenty-four hours is the standard, but a lot depends on the circumstances. Izzy is a healthy woman with adequate funds at her disposal. She and her husband have not been married long and she has a broken marriage behind her already.’ A chorus of prurient muttering broke out at this point and she hurriedly tried to repair her indiscretion. ‘Please don’t let Tom know that I have told you any of this,’ she begged them. ‘While I wasn’t told it exactly in confidence, it was while I was taking notes, possibly for a police investigation, so it isn’t really for publication.’ They all nodded furiously, except for Pansy, who was beginning to feel the need to hold her head on. ‘What I mean by this is that the police will not be ready to mobilise air-sea rescue for this case. Not until we have established that Izzy has not simply gone home, for example, or back to her ex-husband. Stranger things have happened.’
‘And often on school trips,’ Maxwell added darkly. ‘They bring out the bizarre in people.’
‘Indeed. So, I think it would be quite helpful if we all just had a bit of a think overnight and perhaps jotted down anything that springs to mind. Tom and I will obviously stay and follow in the car when we’ve seen the police. They may want him to stay, but I’ll try to discourage him. He can’t do anything here, and she might have gone home for some reason. But tomorrow is an early start, for you at least, I expect.’ Jacquie was planning ahead.
‘Early start?’ Pansy cried weakly, putting down her gin sloppily, perilously near the table’s edge. ‘How early?’
‘Well,’ Maxwell said, a gleam as near to vicious as he ever came in his eye, ‘it’s breakfast at seven. Assemble at the coach at eight-thirty. Ferry at ten.’
‘Home by half past five in the afternoon,’ Guy put in in an undertone. Although James had ended up, in the absence of his Auntie Whatever, staying in the hotel, his hob had not nobbed with the staff. He was usually drinking his orange juice quietly at a pub down the road. Despite his obvious deficiencies, no one wanted to hurt his feelings, and anyway, it was never a good idea to piss off the man who was going to drive you home.
Maxwell chuckled. ‘Hopefully, home by one-thirty. At any rate, that’s when the parents come to get their little darlings.’
‘Except The One,’ Sylvia added.
Maxwell inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘Except The One.’
‘The One?’ Guy asked.
Sylvia turned to her husband. ‘In any school trip, there is always one kid whose parents don’t turn up, usually for about two hours. They claim to have written it down wrong on the calendar, got caught up in traffic, at a meeting, something like that. But usually, they just can’t bear to have their kid back after a lovely week without them.’
‘Which reminds me,’ Maxwell said. ‘We haven’t done the sweep.’
‘How true,’ Sylvia said. Before Guy could ask, she explained. ‘We all choose someone to be The One. If everyone is wrong, the money goes to charity. The winner gets it, if there is a winner, obviously. Right, me first … fiver, is it?’ She looked round; everyone nodded. ‘Right, I choose Jazmyn.’
‘Oh,’ Barton Joseph complained. ‘I was going to have her. In the nicest possible sense of the term, of course.’
‘You’re very trusting, Barton,’ Jacquie said. ‘If you win, we might fib and keep the money.’
‘You all seem quite honest to me,’ Barton said, loftily. ‘And don’t forget, I’ll be on your case till I get paid for this week.’
‘True,’ Maxwell said, sombrely. He still had that interview with Bernard Ryan to come and it wasn’t going to be pretty. Still, he’d left the man’s balls on the mat often enough for it to be a near-formality.
‘Choose another,’ Sylvia encouraged him.
‘Whatsisname, you know, the kid with the wall eye.’
‘Che,’ said Maxwell, delighted by the man’s lack of political correctness. He could see a lot of himself in Barton Joseph.
‘Yes. Him.’
‘Right,’ Sylvia said. ‘Jacquie? Guy?’
They both had their own bêtes noires and chose them. Pansy had gone to sleep, head back and drooling in what was probably the best Homer Simpson impersonation the group had ever seen, so they chose for her; the nicest-natured child in the party, who had been phoned regularly by her mother every night at exactly six-fifteen. It was generally agreed that the doting parent was probably pacing Leighford High’s car park already, in anticipation.
‘Max?’
There was no contest. ‘I’ll have that ginger kid.’
There was a silence. Two names were missing from the sweep, but no one wanted to approach Tom with such a frivolous thing, and who knew who Izzy, wherever she might be, might have chosen. Five-pound notes were handed over to Sylvia’s safe keeping, including the one extracted with frightening stealth from Pansy’s purse by Barton. Well, if you couldn’t trust a member of the Royal College of Nursing …
‘Were you trained by Fagin?’ Jacquie asked, watching the expert removal.
Barton laughed. ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘After all, you don’t know anything about me, really, do you? I could be a master criminal, for all you know.’
‘You have a CRB,’ Sylvia said, with a slightly nervous laugh.
‘That only means I’ve never been caught,’ the local man said. ‘And anyway, Max just shoved it in his pocket. It could have been a CRB on Mickey Mouse for all he knows.’ He looked at their stricken faces and laughed again, poking Guy in the ribs. ‘Just joking. I’m as clean as the proverbial whistle. I just happen to be very good with my hands.’ He waggled his fingers in the air, as if in proof.
Although he had meant well, and everyone believed him to be just what he said, clean as a whistle, it somehow cast a pall on the party and, heaving Pansy reluctantly to her feet, they all rose to make their way to their rooms. Barton Joseph hugged the women and then, after a slight pause, the men. He took the opportunity to make sure that Maxwell had all of his bank account details, for the payment.
Slowly, and for the last time, the staff of the Leighford High School Year Seven Getting To Know You School Trip wended their way up to their rooms, Maxwell in the rear, shepherding them like a rather grizzled sheepdog. He wasn’t exactly snapping at heels or worrying anybody, but he carried on making encouraging noises from the bottom stair until they had turned the corner of the stairs. He made his way quietly to the bar, bought himself a Southern Comfort and Jacquie a gin and tonic. He went back to their table outside and waited.
‘You might have let me know what you were planning,’ Jacquie complained as she plonked into the chair next to him. ‘I was in my ’jamas before it dawned on me.’
‘Good heavens, Woman Policeman Carpenter-Maxwell, you’re slipping,’ he said calmly.
She looked into her glass. ‘My ice has all melted,’ she complained.
He stretched luxuriously in his chair and collapsed back, smiling. ‘Yes, it is a warm night.’
‘I’m going to get a fresh drink,’ she said, getting up and marching off.
He waited patiently until she returned and sat down again, with a rather perkier drink in her hand.
He raised his glass to her. ‘Cheers, my favourite woman,’ he said.
‘And cheers to you, my favourite man.’ She chinked her glass against his.
They sipped thoughtfully. ‘Penny for them,’ he said.
‘They’re not even worth a penny,’ she replied. ‘You know what they are.’
‘Yes,’ he said, quietly, ‘I’m afraid I do. But shall I tell you anyway?’
‘Why not?’ she said, adding a tad more tonic. The hotel measures erred on the side of generosity, as Pansy had failed to realise, despite the events of the week.
‘Well, I think, and you’ll have to excuse me here, because I usually chat things over with the Count, and he sometimes needs me to explain things. So don’t be offended, Granny, if I seem to be teaching you to suck eggs.’
‘OK, Granddad, but just be warned that a smack round the head often offends.’ Jacquie had often overheard Maxwell’s musings with Metternich, and had frequently learnt quite a lot about a current case by her gentle eavesdropping. Even if there was nothing to be learnt, there was something quite special between the man and his cat; more correctly described as the cat and his man.
‘Right. I won’t be offering you a cat treat, or anything,’ Maxwell reassured her.
‘That will be because you don’t have any,’ she said, wryly.
‘Au contraire, Blackadder,’ he said, in his best Lord Melchett. With a flourish, he extracted a pack of sardine-flavoured treats from his pocket. ‘I am never without them. I may need to calm an infuriated feline at any moment.’ From the other pocket, he drew a bag of fruit pastilles, for calming infuriated children. He had only got them mixed up once and Metternich had taken some time to forgive him for the lapse.
‘Off you go, then,’ Jacquie said, settling back in her chair, nursing her drink.
‘I think that we can take it as read that Izzy Medlicott has definitely disappeared,’ he began. ‘What we have to discover is whether it is by foul play or just a decision on her part to fly the coop. Oh, perhaps at this point, I should explain that if Metternich has anything to add, he attracts my attention by licking his bum. You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. You can just cough, or raise a finger in the air, something of tha
t nature.’
‘You’re so good to me and I do appreciate it,’ said Jacquie. ‘But what’s good enough for the cat is good enough for me.’
‘As long as you’re sure,’ he said. ‘Where was I?’
‘Foul or coop,’ she precised.
Maxwell found this confusing for a second and then was back on track. ‘The next question applies to either situation. Did she go with someone from the trip?’
Jacquie made a slurping noise and half-heartedly lifted a leg.
‘That’s not going to do it, Miss Pfeiffer. Catwoman, you ain’t. Shall we take it as read?’
‘Please,’ Jacquie said. Her admiration for cats had gone up a notch. ‘No one else on the trip has disappeared.’
‘No, not yet. But what if they do later?’
‘Oh, I see. You mean, they have been planning it and this is the first phase.’ She thought for a moment. ‘That won’t work, Max. There’s no one she knows; the Medlicotts have only been in Leighford five minutes. And anyway, there aren’t enough men to choose from. There’s only you and Guy.’
‘Both of us fine examples of our sex, if you don’t mind my mentioning it.’
She smiled at him and was quiet for a moment, trying to imagine either of them playing away from home. ‘You’re both lovely,’ she conceded, perhaps a little too slowly for Maxwell’s liking, ‘but out of the frame for more reasons than I can possibly give, in the time available.’
‘I’ll overlook your obvious cynicism there, Mrs Maxwell. But you’re wrong about the numbers. What about Jim? Or Barton Joseph?’
