Maxwell's Island

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Perhaps he’s dropped back off to sleep, guv,’ Smart said, hopefully. ‘He had a sedative, got up and switched the lights on and then just went back to sleep.’ It had sounded lame enough in his head; out loud it fooled nobody. He didn’t say the next thoughts at all – that he could well be hiding behind the door with a hatchet. Or lying in the bath in a pool of cooling, watery blood.

  ‘Go round the back, Phil,’ Hall suggested. ‘The door might be open.’

  The sergeant squeezed through the bushes at the side of the house. How they had the nerve to call these houses ‘detached’, he had no idea. You couldn’t swing a cat in the gap. A sudden stench reminded him that cats could do a lot more than swing. When he got to the lawned area in the back, he spent a while cleaning off his shoe before going round the conservatory to the kitchen door, which was locked firmly.

  Squeezing round the other side, by the garage, he rejoined Hall on the drive. Hall wrinkled his nose and moved away an inch or two. ‘Sorry, guv,’ the sergeant said, scraping his foot against the side of the bricks edging the garden. ‘Cat shit.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hall said. ‘So I noticed. No open door, though?’

  ‘No. Locked tight.’

  ‘One last try at something before you break in. There’s a phone number in that file. We’ll give that a go.’ Hall watched as the man made his way back to the car, surreptitiously scraping the side of his foot every few steps. He reached in and pulled out the file. Leaning on the car he got out his phone and dialled a number, following it a few digits at a time from the page. Inside the house, a phone began to ring. Smart let it go on until the answerphone kicked in. A woman’s voice said, ‘Hi. You’ve reached Izzy and Tom. Sorry we’re out, but we’d love to talk to you later. Leave a message with the beep, not forgetting your number, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.’ Then a man’s voice joined hers. ‘Byeeeee,’ they sang out in unison. He broke the connection before the beep. There was something heartless about leaving a message for a dead woman, and although Phil Smart wasn’t the most sensitive tooth in the denture, he just couldn’t do it.

  ‘No reply, guv,’ he said, raising his voice enough for Hall to hear, but not enough to attract the neighbours outside.

  ‘Right then, Phil.’ Hall stepped back. ‘Break in. But, can I suggest that before we go in, you take your shoes off?’

  ‘Yes, guv. Sorry.’ Phil Smart hated cats. Dogs only pooed where you could see it and scoop it. They didn’t hide it in the undergrowth. He stepped into the open porch and slipped off his shoes. Then, he used the non-cat-shit one to tap the glass near the handle. The faux-stained unit crazed but didn’t break at first, but a few more taps did the job and the whole thing fell out onto the hall floor. It also fell onto the head of Tom Medlicott, as he lay there at a rakish angle, his legs up the stairs. But he didn’t mind. He was quite, quite dead.

  Chapter Seventeen

  If Phil Smart had managed not to disturb the neighbours earlier, then they were certainly disturbed now. Some twitched their curtains aside and stood concealed in the darkness of their bedrooms. Some came blatantly out into their drives and watched, their dressing gowns clutched tightly round them against the first autumnal chill on the September air. The sirens had been cut and the blue lights doused, but police were not a common occurrence in Craftcarn Avenue and everyone wanted to be in on the act. There might even be cameras!

  Henry Hall and Phil Smart had called Leighford nick and the desk sergeant there had done the rest. From all quarters, police and SOCO had descended on the quiet suburbia of Craftcarn Avenue and had choked the road with vehicles and surrounded number 6 with yellow tape. Already, the local moaners were in full cry. Seated at computers or writing desks as their techno-knowledge dictated, they were shooting off letters to the local paper, the Chief Constable and the Prime Minister, by way of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Jeremy Kyle, to protest at the high-handed churning up of lawns, the scaring of children and small dogs and the interruption of their viewing pleasure. The fact that someone who they knew, a neighbour, was dead was something that they chose not to address.

  First on the scene had been police backup, to keep the neighbours at bay. Then had come the SOCO team, in a white van. They had jumped out, dressed all in white, and had frightened an overimaginative and three-parts-drunk housewife at number 11 into hysterics. It was unfortunate that she had just finished watching District 9 and was now on constant alert for the Men in White to come and purge the ghetto of Craftcarn Avenue. They erected a tent against the front of number 6 to shield their comings and goings from the nosy neighbours. Last came Donald and his discreet van. He parked back up the road. He jumped out of the driver’s seat and rushed round to the passenger side to help down a woman of such exquisite beauty and apparent frailty that she made him look like something she had run up that afternoon out of spare parts. He guided her to the house and introduced her to the SOCO team, to whom she smiled and nodded. Angus, dressed in pristine white but carrying with him the aura of an old, abandoned squat, nodded at her and shook her hand in both of his gloved ones. His mouth wasn’t visible behind his mask but the woman, whose name was Dr Lacey, knew he was leering horribly. She was beginning to tire of Donald’s rather overwhelming care and longed to get up to her elbows in a really gory cadaver, without losing her supper, just to show him she was equal to anything that Leighford could throw at her.

  She wasn’t disappointed exactly when she saw Tom Medlicott, lying upside down on his own stairs, with scarcely a hair out of place, but she sensed that she wouldn’t be setting the world on fire at this particular crime scene. She stayed in the doorway, waiting to be invited in. This confused the SOCO team, who were used to Jim Astley barging in, whingeing about being called away from his golf and shedding whatever outside detritus he happened to have clinging to his clothes onto any surface that presented itself. If sentences were to be passed on forensic evidence alone, he would be slogging through an indeterminate sentence, with a tariff of around nine million years rather than sailing round the Peloponnese. A white suit was found which she struggled into, turning back the legs and sleeves so that she could walk and use her hands. Donald stood back admiringly, smiling and nudging everyone. Anyone would think he had invented her.

  ‘Donald?’

  The fat man jumped to attention, making the ornaments on the hall table dance and rattle.

  ‘Have you got my bag?’ Her Birmingham accent was a disappointment. It shouldn’t have been able to survive in the delicate setting of her size-six body; lips so perfect should not have been able to frame the sound. To Donald, it sounded like the sweetest birdsong.

  He thrust it forward. He didn’t say much when Dr Lacey was around. He seemed to get sweaty teeth and words tended to come out at random, sometimes with no vowels in them, so, rather than risk being sectioned, he kept quiet.

  ‘Thank you.’ She rummaged for a rectal thermometer and most of the men looked away.

  All over the house, white-clad men and women were puffing powder at light switches and flat surfaces. Their general demeanour was truculent; it was clear to everyone except Henry Hall that the bloke had thrown himself down the stairs because he had killed his missus. A small nagging thought at the back of every head, which tried to tell the head’s owner that, for a grown man in decent health, throwing yourself down twelve stairs onto a roomy and thickly carpeted floor was more likely to result in a bruise at best, was brutally suppressed. The house was full of means of death, pointed out the thought. Knives, ropes, electrical equipment; all the means of slaughter we all possess. Why entrust your suicide to such a dodgy method?

  And slowly, one by one, the SOCO team came to see Henry Hall as he stood immobile, waiting for results, in the tent at the front of the house. And one by one, they told him what he already knew. That almost the only fingerprints in the house belonged to Tom or Isabelle Medlicott. There were one or two in the kitchen belonging to Sergeant Carpenter-Maxwell. But not one of them was to be found on a lig
ht switch, since all of them had been wiped clean.

  His final visitor, in his halogen-lit domain, was Dr Lacey. ‘DCI Hall?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Hall said. ‘Dr Lacey, I assume. Thank you for coming out. Is Donald looking after you?’ From anyone else, it would have carried a trace of irony and, had she been there, Jacquie, who knew her boss inside out, would have been able to identify it – just. But to Dr Lacey, it seemed like a serious question.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, brightly. ‘Yes, very well. Hmm, yes …’ Her voice lost its natural enthusiasm. ‘Very well. Anyway,’ she perked up again, ‘first thoughts. The deceased has been …’ she had already painted herself into a linguistic corner, ‘… um, deceased for about four hours. He has no obvious injuries, although the post-mortem will tell us more on that, except the one that killed him, of course, which is a broken neck, to put it simply.’

  ‘Would you have expected that after such a shallow fall?’ Hall asked, leaning forward, his glasses blank in the spotlight’s glare.

  ‘I have seen broken necks when someone falls from a sofa, DCI Hall,’ she admonished.

  ‘Have you?’ He straightened up, astonished. ‘Where?’

  She spluttered a little. ‘Well, not me personally, as such,’ she said. ‘There are examples in textbooks, though.’

  ‘Ah, textbooks. There you are, then.’ Hall turned to Phil Smart, who was making notes in a corner. ‘In textbooks, Phil,’ he said. Then he turned back to the pathologist. ‘No, Dr Lacey. You see, this is the real world, and in there is a real body. What I want to know, Dr Lacey, and make it quick because I have been up for a long time and I’m really tired, is this. Would you have expected a broken neck after such a shallow fall?’

  She looked at him for what seemed like a week. His expression didn’t change. Then, she said, ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Well then, that’s good,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t expect one, either. Can you just pop back in there and see if there are any signs of his having received a blow of any kind to the neck. Any unusual bruising at all.’

  She turned on her heel and went back in to the hall, tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She just wasn’t being taken seriously. He wouldn’t have sent Jim Astley back in like that. She said so to Angus. And although Angus thought she was a bit of all right, he felt he had to tell her. Jim Astley would have noticed the bruise, which was about as plain as the nose on his face. Then, Angus made a mental note to ignore any excess sodium in the facial swabs he would receive later in his lab. It would just be from the tears. But that was fine; it just made her more vulnerable.

  Henry Hall didn’t go back to the station. He knew that if he did, he would fall asleep at his desk and be found, all gritty-eyed and sweaty, by the Saturday shift when they came on duty, in not many hours time. He went home and poured himself a glass of milk, to fill in the gaps his long-ago Chinese meal had left, and took himself upstairs. He had a wash and stepped out of his clothes, leaving them like a shed skin in a trail from the bathroom door to the bed. Although he had no reason to suppose that any of the fatal falls dogging him this week had been accidental, nevertheless he took each tread very carefully indeed. He drank the milk as though it were medicine, switched off his bedside light and turned on his side, to have a think while he was still just about awake enough.

  Tom Medlicott wasn’t going to go anywhere where Donald didn’t take him. The job of identifying Izzy Medlicott would have to go to someone else. Hall would check through the house on Saturday and see if he could find any addresses. He might need to get the IT boys on to the laptop if necessary. He was annoyed at the silly little pathologist. She was no Jim Astley; usually something he would consider a bit of a bonus, but in this case, when so many other threads were spreading out from Tom Medlicott’s body, he couldn’t leave anything to chance. He would send Bob Thorogood out first thing to have a word with Donald, who was the real brains in Leighford General morgue, to make sure he helped her find the right things. He was pretty sure the tox screen would come back negative, except for the couple of sedatives the police surgeon had prescribed. This killer was not subtle enough to use poison. This was hit-and-run, the blitz attack.

  The man in the clown suit ran past him, heading for the stairs. He tried to call out to him to stop, that he might fall, what with the big, floppy shoes, and the cat and all those seagulls. He climbed up a ladder to see more clearly, but there were too many noodles on the rungs and he couldn’t make the light go out, no matter how much he tried, because Peter Maxwell was in the way and … Henry Hall was finally asleep.

  There was a strange noise in Peter Maxwell’s dream. He seemed to be in an auditorium, full of ginger-headed children, all of whom were scribbling furiously. On the stage, an enormous woman was playing the violin, the instrument dwarfed in her enormous hands, which were the size of oven-ready turkeys. The tune she was playing seemed familiar, but he just couldn’t quite place it. Someone was talking as well, but he couldn’t quite make it out. Now it was becoming clearer. But it still didn’t make much sense.

  ‘Sorry, guv,’ the voice was saying. ‘He’s dead? Since when? I mean, when did he die? How?’

  Maxwell sprang fully awake and seemed to be standing by the side of the bed with no memory of getting there. He reached over and grabbed his wife’s shoulder. Common sense told him it wasn’t Nolan or Metternich she was talking about, but, even so; it wasn’t every day, not even at 38 Columbine, when you woke up to hear your wife asking how long someone had been dead. She turned and flapped her free hand, both to shut him up and reassure.

  ‘No,’ she was saying now. ‘He’s with Sylvia for the weekend, possibly till tomorrow afternoon. We left it a bit loose, you know, what with … Oh,’ she turned and grimaced at Maxwell, ‘he’s got marking to do, something like that, I expect.’ She listened for a moment. ‘No, guv. Not a word. I do understand. See you in about an hour, then.’ She pressed the disconnect button on her phone and turned slowly to face him.

  ‘Tom Medlicott’s dead,’ she said. ‘That was Henry.’

  ‘I thought it must be,’ Maxwell said, absently. ‘But … Tom? That’s awful. I suppose he …’ It was hard to comprehend, let alone put into words. He had hardly known either of them, but the intensity of the trip, and then her disappearance, had made them seem much more part of their lives than they really were. It struck him that, had things been different, they would have come back to Leighford from the Isle of Wight, shown a few photos to colleagues and then never spoken to each other again, except in passing in the corridor, or if Tom had a particular beef with one of the Sixth Form. And now, Izzy Medlicott had been found dead at the bottom of a cliff and her husband had, Maxwell assumed, killed himself out of grief.

  ‘I didn’t get that impression,’ Jacquie said. Before her husband could draw breath to ask the next question she held up her hand and continued hurriedly. ‘Look, hon. Can you fend for yourself today? There’s absolutely no food in the house, except for the Count’s stuff; there’s loads of that, because of his enforced absence.’

  ‘I’m supposed to eat cat food?’ Could this morning get more confusing?

  She gave him a cuff round the head. ‘No, twerp. I’m meaning you don’t have to lug moggie fodder back from the shop. Just something for your lunch and something for us for tonight. Don’t know what time I’ll be back, though, so get something that will wait for me.’ Not for the first time, she wished he could drive. But she knew he never would; she could tell sometimes, on long, dark drives, that he was reliving the loss of his first wife and child in a car accident and she drove more carefully than was natural to her as a result. What he could fit in Surrey’s basket would be fine.

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Although it does give you a very glossy coat, apparently.’

  ‘So I believe,’ she said, making for the bathroom. ‘And how else did you think I got so good at licking my own bum?’

  He sat back down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his eyes. What time was
it, for goodness sake? He felt as if he had only been asleep about five minutes. After a good stretch he went downstairs to make coffee, tread on some mouse giblets and check the text on the telly – once upon a time the acme of technology in the house. He brought up the local page – nothing. He would have to wait patiently until Jacquie came home and then winkle it out of her. It was going to be a long, long day. Then he remembered; he was going to go through all of the newspapers down in the garage, to look for clues. He sighed. He had been wrong before. It was going to be a long, long, long day.

  Jacquie couldn’t believe she was walking in through the door of the nick again already. She had banked on the weekend between coming back from the school trip and starting back at work to detox and dekid herself and it had been ripped from her; the fact that it concerned someone she knew just made it worse. The week on the Isle of Wight had seemed somehow other-worldly as it was. The weather had been unseasonably hot, and there had been a strange air of being in an episode of The Prisoner about the whole venture. Maxwell had the boxed DVD set and every now and then, as he cycled off to the hell where youth and laughter go, she would hear him shout to the world in general, ‘I am not a number; I am a free man!’ Throw in abandoned towns, theme parks gently sliding into the sea, fossils thickly scattered underfoot and Pansy pissed as an owl every night and you hardly had to have a missing person to make it seem like a dream.

  And now she was awake, it was only getting worse. There was a guideline buried somewhere deep in the operating policy of Leighford Police Station which precluded anyone working on a case involving someone they knew, no matter how vaguely, and in general terms Jacquie found that reasonable enough. But in practice, that was difficult. Not only was Leighford a small and closely knit town, but most of the personnel were married to or lived with civilians who worked with other civilians and so it went on, like the fleas having little fleas to bite ’em. She came off worse as Maxwell had a built-in contact list of over a thousand kids at any one time, plus parents and the inevitable steps. Then there were staff. So, before she broke into a sweat, there were close to four thousand people who she knew just a little too much about. And then, of course, in her case, there was Maxwell himself. If Henry Hall had had his way, she would never have had anything to do with anything; but since she was the best sergeant he had, what was a man to do?