by M. J. Trow
Maxwell watched her go from the sitting room window. It was funny, he thought to himself, how those kids never changed; though she was less like Doris Day than she used to be. She hadn’t had much of a sense of humour when she had been at school, either. Although, as he remembered it, she had needed one when her exam results came out.
He turned to face the other men of the family, both staring at him balefully. The news about Granny’s visit was out now, and he knew there would be tears before bedtime. Metternich already had secret plans to lie across staircases in the dark.
In the shop on the corner, the lights flashed twice to warn lingering shoppers that the late of ‘Eight till Late’ had come. The till girls slid down from their stools and flexed their arms, reaching for their coats on the hooks behind them. The owner stood in the doorway that separated one little kingdom from the other. He was probably the last retailer in the Western world to live over the shop. He liked to get upstairs on the stroke of nine, to tuck up his children and eat a civilised meal with his wife before coming back down to check the till rolls against the actual contents and make up the newspaper boys’ bags, as far as he could, with magazines which he could take from stock. He was a conscientious, if unimaginative man, the sort of bloke who, along with the rest of the nation, had beaten Napoleon.
So it would have surprised him very much had he found the man, dressed in black like a ninja and with a balaclava pulled down over his face, who was crouching in the space between the wall and the freezer where he usually stored the toilet rolls.
The ninja heard the front door close behind the women as they gabbled out into freedom and then the lights went out and stayed out. It wasn’t totally dark, but it was dark enough for what he needed to do. He crept out from his hiding place, and stood rubbing his knee where it had seized up in the cramped space. Then, he reached into his pocket and brought out a small bottle with a rubber bulb on the stopper. Keeping low and taking pains to be quiet, he moved slowly around the little store, placing a drop here, a drop there from his bottle, on bread, on cakes, in milk and orange juice. This was a cut-price store; anyone finding a seal broken or top loosened would put it down to yet another corner being cut, nothing more sinister than careless packaging. Finally, his bottle was empty. Now, all he had to do was wait. He settled back down in his hiding place and savoured an undoctored doughnut he had selected. Then he dozed off.
He was woken by the shopkeeper coming down the stairs and into the shop, snapping on the lights, suddenly bright and neon-strip. He knew that he had very few minutes now, as a window of opportunity. He massaged his dodgy knee in readiness for what had to be a quick manoeuvre. He heard the man open the door and grunt appreciatively. The early editions of the various local papers had been delivered outside. Now came the clever bit.
The man had propped open the door to make carrying in the piles of papers easier. He had picked up a huge stack of the Leighford Advertiser and was carrying it, legs splayed with the effort, to the back of the shop where the newspaper boys’ bags were waiting. While he was struggling to get round a teetering tower of cut-price tins without bringing the whole edifice crashing down, the ninja slipped from his hidey-hole and broke into a crouching run, round the bread counter and off into the night. He didn’t stop running until he was round several corners. He was both out of breath and safe.
Back in the shop, the owner counted out the papers and magazines. The till rolls and the contents matched to the penny. A happy man, he chose two nice-looking Eccles cakes from the display on the counter and made his way upstairs.
Chapter Eleven
Maxwell dug Jacquie in the ribs. ‘Phone,’ he muttered, half asleep.
‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Who d’ya want me to phone?’ She snuggled back into the pillow and pulled the duvet over her head.
‘No, no.’ He shook her. ‘It is the phone. Ringing.’
‘Answer it, then,’ she said, indistinctly. ‘It might be for you.’
‘Don’t be a twerp, dear heart. I’m a teacher. We only work thirty-nine weeks in the year, the conscientious ones, that is,’ he said, acerbically. ‘It’s bound to be for you. You’re a police person. 24/7.’
‘You’re a Headmaster,’ she reminded him.
‘It’s Saturday,’ muttered Mister Answer-For-Everything.
‘Only just.’
She reached out and grabbed the shrilling thing and jammed it to her ear. ‘Yes. Carpenter.’
‘Is it the walrus?’ Maxwell asked facetiously, turning his back. She kicked him as she sat bolt upright.
‘Where?’ She scrabbled for the pad habitually on her bedside table for times like these. ‘What, both of them? Did you mention children? Is someone …? Oh, a neighbour. Is that OK? I’ll be right there. Thanks for calling, Josh. Yes, thanks. Bye.’
‘Was it for me?’ Maxwell muttered.
‘It was for me,’ she said, so seriously that he unwound from the covers and looked her in the face by the faint light from her reading lamp.
‘What was it?’ he asked.
‘There’s been another poisoning. Like Paul Moss, instant vomiting, no collapse as such, but both the victims are very ill.’
‘Any connection to Leighford High?’
‘Well, in a way. The eldest two kids from the family go there.’ She was hopping round the bedroom, trying to avoid getting both legs down one leg hole in her knickers. ‘It’s a couple from a shop down near the Sea Front. A sort of corner thing, open all hours. Apparently,’ she pulled a brush through her hair, ‘he usually takes a treat up after they close, for their supper, you know. Obviously, they waited until bedtime, a couple of Eccles cakes to eat with their cocoa. One bite was enough. We have the remainder, on its way to the lab, now. The couple are in hospital.’ She leant over and gave him a kiss. ‘Name of Barlow.’
Maxwell knew the girl. She was in his top set Year Nine History, a sweet little thing, all eyes and braces. ‘How bad are they?’
‘Just in for observation, really. But, even so, our poisoner seems to have widened his net. These were not wrapped items, not from the same wholesaler. It seems he’s on the loose.’
‘I wish I could come with you,’ he said. ‘I was there at the beginning of all this, don’t forget.’
‘I would gladly take you with me, Sherlock.’ Fully dressed now, she looked down at him as he sat up in bed. ‘But there’s a little matter of Nolan to consider.’
‘True. Although …’ he brightened.
She raised a hand. ‘No, Max. I know he sleeps like a log. I know he is terribly interested in crime. But he’s not coming, and that’s flat. What’s he going to do? You go high, I go low, we use Nole to batter the door down?’
He sagged and looked pathetic, despite the idea having merit.
‘Don’t do that, Max. My decision is final. However,’ she patted his cheek, ‘once Mother is here, you’ll be able to hop in the car with me and come and annoy the police again. Just like the old days.’
‘Good Lord,’ Maxwell said, in frank amazement. ‘You’ve found the silver lining in the cloud.’
‘There always is one, beloved,’ she said. ‘Just like round every fly you’ll find ointment. Night, night. See you in the morning.’ And she snapped out the light and was gone.
Maxwell lay awake and listened as her Ka accelerated over the hill away from Columbine, making for the Flyover in the still watches of the night. He was fully awake now and his brain was whirring. He tossed and turned and finally got up and crept along the landing and up the stairs to his attic.
He patted the gold-laced pillbox on the top of his hair and switched on his modeller’s lamp, sticking and painting, for the use of. Mentally awake he may have been, but his eyes were light years behind his little grey cells and anyway, horse furniture for the 4th Lights was a bitch without real daylight. The lambswool effect alone could take years. Cornet Fiennes Martin would have to wait until after tomorrow’s – oops, today’s – shopping expedition up the Asda Limpopo.
At least the stars twinkling in the heavens beyond his skylight gave him the incentive to ponder the nature of the universe. Random nibbles had made sure that Maxwell was in his own heaven, yet all was not quite right with the world.
He crossed his legs on the modelling table, careful to avoid the Cornet’s not-yet-shakoed head and rested his own on the cradle of his hands. What had he got? Poison. He rummaged in the database of his historian’s brain. William Palmer, Neill Cream. Doctors to a man. Graham Young, the St Albans poisoner, who had used the all-but-untraceable thallium. HH Crippen who had signed his own name and address for the hyoscine that killed his wife. A dentist. Herbert Armstrong, slaughtering wife and attempting to slaughter rival in the sleepy little town of Hay-on-Wye long before it became one huge bookshop. Solicitor. But they were all men. Traditionally, Maxwell told himself, poison was a woman’s weapon; it had that at-a-distance thing about it, that sense of dispassion and remoteness. Adelaide Bartlett, Florences Bravo and Maybrick – with wives like that, who needed enemies?
Judging from the varying symptoms, he couldn’t help thinking that there were two sorts of poison in use in Leighford. Why? Doesn’t a poisoner find one that works and stick to it? Was there a supply problem? And where does it come from? Aconite. Aconite. He had a book on it somewhere. It was folkloric, one of those ancient remedies the cunning women used to kill or cure before they invented the NHS. They called it monkshood in some parts of the country, elsewhere blue rocket or wolfsbane. Old Doc Lamson had used it to kill his brother-in-law in 1881 (Maxwell remembered the case well) – the poor lad took five hours to die in agony. Lamson’s wife got the £1500 inheritance. Cherchez la femme after all.
‘Then,’ Maxwell found himself talking to the cat, although Metternich was on his third vole of the night, by now somewhere beyond the shrubbery of Number 16, ‘we have the administration thereof. We have produce from a County store. We have pre-packed: the sausage roll. We have “freshly made” – note the use of the speech marks. We have stuff open to the elements on a shelf: viz and to wit the prawn comestibles. And now, we have something nasty in the corner shop – details to follow.
‘And then, and this is the bitch of course, we have the Leighford High Connection. The first outbreak hits the school like the St Valentine’s Day massacre without machine guns and the second is like unto it, only smaller: dear old Paul Moss.’
Maxwell could almost see in the lamplight the grizzled head of his old black and white sparring partner lift at that point, catching his drift before he did. ‘A kid?’ Maxwell asked the silent Light Brigade. Not a man answered, too preoccupied as they were with the ride of horrors they were about to undergo. ‘A kid has it in for Legs Diamond and Bernard Ryan? Of course. Who hasn’t? But the candidates for the job? Was that it? Some general pedagogodium– hatred of teachers? Far-fetched even by the standards of the misfits who lurk in the very corner of Leighford High? And who, in their right mind, would have it in for sweet Paul Moss?’ A coldness spread over Maxwell like a clammy morning. ‘But we’re not talking about right minds here, are we, children?’
Maxwell uncrossed his legs, old crusader that he was. Such operations took longer than they used to and he didn’t want to risk waking Nolan by crashing back inelegantly on the boy’s ceiling. Sylvia, of course, had bumped into Chummy. Or at least, a potential Chummy. Not a kid, she said, but old. Frail. Creaking. Some geriatric wanderer of the night, but out and about in broad daylight. He reminded himself that the school’s Site Manager had told all and sundry that the CCTV was on the blink at the moment; all they could hope for was endless reruns of July 28th. Very like Sky TV, really, Maxwell mused.
What about Bevell? Silly name that reminded Maxwell of a screwdriver or something else with a similar edge. What if the other poisonings were mere red herrings? That Mrs Bevell was the actual target? Why go to the lengths of waiting until she got to the interview, chancing his arm in a hostile environment? All right, so he didn’t want to shit on his own doorstep; understandable. But shitting on somebody else’s was equally fraught with mild peril. If he was determined, if he was lucky, he had the opportunity. If he brought the poison with him, he had the means. But the motive? Is it really worth going down for life to get a few thousand quid in compensation? Perhaps it is; people kill for mobiles, trainers, laffs. It is, after all, Maxwell told himself, a mad world, my masters.
And talking of motivation … blackmail? Agenda? Mother of God, great circles of logic or lack of it were beginning to rotate slowly over Maxwell’s head. It was more than time to go back to bed.
As he switched off the light, he heard a distant cat flap bang. He silently counted the seconds as the great beast slid, like fluid night, up the stairs. A slight pause outside His Boy’s room to check that all was well. Then the pounce and the bounce as he landed on the end of Maxwell’s bed. With a questioning chirrup he nudged his master’s knee.
‘Forget it,’ muttered Maxwell. ‘If you think I’m going over it all again, you’re much mistaken.’ And he turned over and went to sleep.
There seemed to be someone banging. Maxwell craned his neck to see the time on the bedside clock. Seven-thirty. Why was someone banging at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning? Surely, Mrs Troubridge had given up the DIY after all the trouble with the Gas Board that time. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and fumbled with one foot for a missing slipper. Nolan had started a counterpoint to the banging, a half-furious, half-frightened wail. Get used to it, kid. It’s good training for University Halls of Residence, circa 2022. Maxwell went to his bedroom first and scooped him up from his bed. Nolan was very proud of being in a bed and had not yet sussed that in fact it was his cot with the sides off. But random banging which woke him up was still not on his list of acceptable stuff, so he was red-faced and tear-streaked. Maxwell kissed a hot, wet cheek and tucked him under one arm. He ticked the boxes off in his head. Box one: get Boy. Box two: avoid cat sleeping on top stair. ‘Nice try, Count, me old Bucko,’ he hissed. Box three: find out who was making that appalling din.
The banging was reaching a crescendo as he flung open the door. He and Nolan both gave the same involuntary start as they faced Jacquie’s mother, in glorious Technicolor, standing there on the doorstep alongside the most enormous suitcase either of them had ever seen.
‘Hello, Granny’s little man,’ she crooned, kissing Nolan’s by now hot, wet and snotty cheek. ‘Don’t be upset, poppet. Granny’s here.’ She fixed Maxwell with the gimlet eye. ‘Really, Peter, do you not know better than to let him cry himself into this state? Too busy with your books, I suppose.’ She stood on the step. ‘Are you going to bring in my cases?’
Maxwell looked frantically this way and that. ‘Cases?’ No, it was no good; he could only see the one.
‘The others are in the boot of the car.’
‘The others. Well, yes, I’d be delighted. May I get dressed, first?’
She looked him up and down and then scanned the road outside. ‘It’s not very busy, Peter, and it’s a lovely morning. I’m sure you’ll be all right in your pyjamas.’
‘Will you take Nolan, then, so I can carry them? Otherwise …’ But she was gone, up the stairs and into the kitchen, from where the Maxwell men could hear appalled clucking. They looked at each other. ‘OK, my little bloke,’ Maxwell said to his son. ‘If you pick up the cases, I can carry you and we’ll cut out the middleman. What do you say?’
Nolan’s wide eyes and the thumb quietly inching its way into his mouth were answer enough. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Maxwell knew the symptoms well. You didn’t need the Gulf War. You just needed to meet Jacquie’s mother of a morning.
‘Enough said, fella. I’ll take you upstairs and then come back for the cases. Since she is happy that the road is empty, then we’ll assume there are no hidden burglars, shall we?’ He hitched the boy up his side a bit more and toiled up the stairs. ‘I’m just popping Nole back in bed for a minute,’ he called into the kitchen. ‘Then I’ll bring your cases in.’
She sipped her tea and nodded approvingly. ‘Nice cup of tea, Peter,’ she said.
‘I wish you’d call me Max,’ he said. ‘I hardly know who you are talking to when you call me Peter. Even my own mother only used it when she was cross with me.’
‘What did she call you, then?’
‘A variety of endearments, probably too embarrassing to discuss now. But I’ve been Max to everyone for so many years that I hardly answer to anything else.’
‘Well, I’ll try,’ she said. ‘After all,’ and she tried to keep the incredulity from creeping into her voice, ‘you are marrying my daughter.’
‘Indeed I am,’ Maxwell said. ‘And very lucky I am, too.’
‘Where is she, by the way?’ Jacquie’s mother looked aimlessly around, as if hoping to spot her daughter lurking somewhere. ‘I didn’t see her car.’ She’d caught sight of the ghastly paintwork, however. Corn in morning. Uggh.
‘No, she was called out in the night. It’s this poisoning case she’s working on. There was another incident and she had to dash off.’ Maxwell looked more closely at her. She had stopped sipping her tea and was looking at it in horror. ‘Not everything is poisoned, Mrs Carpenter. Certainly not this tea. The bags have been on the shelf for weeks and the poisoning only started the day before yesterday.’ Even as he said it, Maxwell could hardly believe his ears. So much had happened in just two days, it seemed like months.
