by M. J. Trow
She got into the car and looked around. If you just sat inside, it looked perfectly all right. She decided on that method and shook herself to get ready for the rest of the night. It was going to be a long one, she felt it in her water. She turned the radio on low, for company. Something about this case was spooking her. She had always hated poison cases and, in fact, had only personally come across two before. One had been a wife slowly feeding her husband with good old-fashioned rat poison. A sharp-eyed GP had spotted that one early enough and no one had died. The second had been the case of a daughter poisoning her elderly and increasingly demented mother. She could bond with that one, no problem. But the common strand had been that it had all been in the family. In this case, the invisible killer was using a scattergun approach. No one was immune from his deadly hobby. She sighed. She hated the random loony cases. The only light at the end of the tunnel was that, as he was so very random and apparently so very loony, it could only be a matter of time before he absent-mindedly ate one of his own doctored treats and died.
She turned her mind to the job at hand. Firstly, she checked her own phone again. She made a note in her book of the time of the call Maxwell had attempted but which had definitely not connected. She turned Hall’s phone on and it flashed logos at her until she was on the verge of throwing it away. Finally, the home screen came up and she scrolled through to the call register. There, on the screen, was a call from an unnamed mobile, timed literally two seconds before the call from her own phone. Next to the number was a small icon which she assumed meant that a message had been left. She indulged in a small Maxwell moment in which she longed for the days when mobile phones were the size of small suitcases and the screens were enormous, green and very, very simple. By jogging dials randomly she found herself in the voicemail menu. Trial and error finally got her to the right place and she put the phone to her ear to listen.
The voice was not one she recognised immediately and it was clearly disguised, she thought, by an electronic voice changer. ‘Hello, Mr Hall,’ it grated metallically. ‘That was a close one, wasn’t it? Better luck for me next time, perhaps. I hope the wife is all right. And the little boy. I said you’d be sorry. And so will all the other hundreds of people who will be tucking into my little specialities tonight. Yum, yum, Mr Hall. Sleep tight.’
Jacquie let the phone drop to her lap. So it was a vendetta. And both Hall and Maxwell were right. It was aimed at them – both of them. She leant her head on the steering wheel for a moment and took a deep breath. Now she had to decide what to do. Did she go back into the hospital and speak to Henry Hall, thorn removal notwithstanding? Or did she ring the nick? Or did she go to the nick, leaving Maxwell stranded? Or did she wait for Maxwell? Or …
There was a knock on the window, passenger side. She jumped and turned to see who it was. A dark figure filled the window and blocked out the light. It seemed to be mouthing something. Her hand flew to her chest as her heart leapt and hammered.
‘For goodness’ sake, Jacquie,’ the creature said, its voice muffled by the glass and the pounding of her blood in her ears. ‘Let me in.’
She pinged the central-locking button and Maxwell exploded into the car on a wave of fresh air and disinfectant. He sketched a kiss at her and sat back. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, peering into her face. ‘You’re as white as a sheet.’
Wordlessly, she held out Hall’s phone to him.
‘I’ve been visiting the hospital, sweetness,’ he said. ‘Not having a brain transplant. The call I made to Henry was a complete fluke. You’ll have to explain.’
‘There’s a message,’ she said shortly, and pressed the required buttons and then handed the phone to him again. Unlike Maxwell, Jacquie Carpenter could remember what button did what for more than twenty seconds after the initial discovery.
He listened intently to the call, then gave her the phone back, a grim look on his face. ‘A bit personal,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘I thought that. Then he mentioned the “little boy”, Nolan, specifically. I think he must be out to get you both.’ Her lip quivered. ‘This one has really got to me, Max. I can cope with madmen with axes, people trying to run you over, all of that. But this is so … sneaky.’
Maxwell leant closer and put an arm around her shoulders. She leant in, grateful for the normality of the roughness of his tweed jacket, the smell of him, even overlaid as it was by Essence of Leighford General. ‘Of course it’s sneaky, sweetheart,’ he said, kissing the top of her head. ‘You can’t threaten people with poison, the way you can with a knife or a gun.’ He became, briefly, every hard-boiled cop on television or cinema; Kojak meets Dirty Harry who also bumps into Booth out of Bones. ‘Look out everybody. He’s got a plant-based poison, an alkaloid by the look of it, and he’s not afraid to use it!’
He felt, rather than heard, her giggle. ‘Point taken,’ she said into his coat. ‘But, even so.’
He moved back upright and looked her in the eye. ‘So, are we going to stop being spooked and go out and catch this sneaky person?’
She nodded and handed him the phones from her lap. She twisted round and put on her seat belt and carefully put the car into reverse. She eased out of the parking space and drove slowly towards the exit, listening carefully for the sound of scraping metal or dragging rubber which would mean the damage was worse even than it appeared. There was just one rather faint but rhythmic clunking noise from what Jacquie thought of as the front offside and what Maxwell thought of as the driver’s feet part of the car, but when Jacquie applied the brake nothing terrible happened, the noise got no louder and no sparks flew, so she decided it was safe to go, slowly, to Leighford nick and see what they could do about identifying the phone number on Hall’s mobile.
‘How are you going to break this bit of news to your mother?’ Maxwell said, encompassing the car with one expansive gesture.
‘Max, how many times must I tell you,’ she said, poking him smartly in the leg, ‘not to read my mind?’
‘Sorry, heart,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to keep out of your brain, but it’s nice and cosy in there. But you haven’t answered my question.’
She sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It won’t go well, that’s for sure. She’s a bit anal about her cars. I’ll end up feeling guilty, however I play it. I’ve broken her car and she won’t care about the circumstances.’
Maxwell looked thoughtful. ‘Well, she might consider that her karmic balance has been improved by this bump.’
Jacquie laughed shortly. ‘How so?’
‘Well, she nearly broke our son. And I don’t think even your mother would consider a car and a child to have equal value.’
‘I suspect it wouldn’t be as obvious as you and I might think but, yes, in principle, you’re right. I still don’t fancy suggesting that to her, though.’ Broken children and broken cars. Images that had haunted the mind of Peter Maxwell for years. Except that now he had another child. And the loss of his first would never hurt quite so much again.
‘Leave it to me,’ Maxwell said, patting her shoulder. ‘In fact, look, where are we?’ He looked through the windscreen, getting his bearings. ‘Yes, we’re just coming up to the High Street. If you let me out now, I’ll get a cab and get home and explain.’
‘Would you?’ She looked at him with big, grateful eyes. ‘Max, that would be such a weight off my mind.’
‘It will be my pleasure,’ Maxwell said. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to guilt. She has only practised on you. I’ve had a million kids to iron out the glitches on. Off you go now, woman policeman, and save us from the sneaky poisoner.’
She pulled in to the side and he got out, slamming the door hard, only to have it bounce out of its distorted frame and catch him a nasty one on the shin.
‘Bugger and poo!’ You could tell a man with a First from Cambridge by the superior quality of his expletives.
‘Try just pressing it into place,’ she suggested, trying to hide a smirk.
&n
bsp; ‘Oh, ha,’ he said, tears in his eyes from the pain. ‘We’ll try that again, shall we?’ And he firmly pushed the door home until he heard a click.
‘That’s better,’ she called and drove off to the nick.
He stood there, waving extravagantly, and walked off in the general direction of the taxi rank, watching over his shoulder until she was out of sight. He had had no real plan in mind as he got out of the car, except that this sneaky killer must be out there somewhere. He knew that the Leighford Poisoner, as he was undoubtedly enshrined already in the Sunday papers winging their way to newsagents up and down the land, had not finished. His attempt on Henry Hall in the car park had been opportunistic, of that there was no doubt. His modus operandi was poison, and he still had more to share with the gentlemen (and ladies) of Leighford, now abed.
The town centre was still busy with its usual quota of binge drinkers, most of whom had teaching qualifications and who ducked smartly down side roads or into shop doorways rather than meet Mad Max face-to-face. Maxwell cut a swathe down the High Street until he smelt the unmistakeable smell that hung like an almost visible pall over the Vine, the worst pub in Leighford, and therefore the one least likely to contain either staff or pupils of Leighford High. He wondered, as he headed towards it, how it managed to still smell of an old ashtray, since no smoking was allowed within its hallowed walls. The dull gleam of terminally low-wattage bulbs just made it through the nicotine-encrusted windows, and the desultory ‘ping’ of the arcade machine was the background music to occasional coughing and the random verbal jottings of Mad Artie, the most local of all locals.
Maxwell pushed open the door and went in. The silence became even more palpable for a few seconds as the batwing doors creaked to a standstill and all eyes were on the dust-caked stranger, poncho slung over his shoulder, big iron on his hip. Then the game player pushed another button and Artie let fly with a particularly inventive invective.
The landlord, polishing a glass with a dirty cloth, greeted him with his own special brand of disdain. ‘Help you?’ he muttered.
Maxwell’s usual rejoinder to that question in a pub was to ask for the best the landlord had to offer, a foaming beaker of perfectly balanced hop and malt or, perchance, a beaker of the warm south, rolled on a handmaiden’s thigh. This time, he played safe. He could tell by the encrusted sugar on the optic below the Southern Comfort that no one had had one of those since his last visit. And that was in 1843.
‘Southern Comfort, please. A double, I think. It’s been an eventful evening.’
‘Ice?’
No, thank you,’ Maxwell grimaced. ‘It is meant to be comforting, after all.’ A quick whack on the lip by a rock-hard misshapen lump of ice always left a nasty taste. The ice in the Vine quite literally left a nasty taste. Maxwell had always suspected that it was chipped out of gutters during the winter and stored against the day.
‘Slice?’
‘God, no.’ It was getting worse. Had no one yet sussed that all this ice and bits was merely a way of beating Mr Disraeli’s Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875? God alone knew what sweepings lay among the roasted peanuts on the bar. Maxwell paid and took his drink to a corner table, where he could both think and watch the world go by, if anything from the real world would risk the Vine late on a Saturday night, when the slop tray was beginning its fifteenth circuit through the unwary customer.
He knew there would be serious repercussions when he got home. There was no way he could hide this little jolly from Jacquie. She had probably already phoned home to alert her mother. Her mother, running true to form, would ring her back as soon as Maxwell failed to arrive on time. Egged on by Mrs Troubridge, who loved nothing more than death and disaster, she would be virtually hysterical and the shit would hit the fan at warp speed. He took a steadying sip. He would cross that bridge when he came to it. Meanwhile, he had a poisoner to stalk.
He reached into his inside pocket and brought out a pen and a piece of paper. He looked at the used side and smiled. It was the bottom copy of an order to the County store and he had kept it in that inside pocket since he had sent the top two copies, as per the written instructions, to County Hall. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his administrative staff. He just didn’t want to make them accomplices after the fact. He folded it back up and put it away. He walked over to the bar.
‘Do you have such a thing as a piece of paper I could borrow?’
‘Borrer? Gunna lemme have it back arter?’ It wasn’t a bad Ray Winstone, all things considered.
‘Well, no. I suppose give would be a better description. Do you have a piece of paper that you could give me?’
Without looking Maxwell in the eye, the barman slid across a copy of last week’s pub quiz questions. Maxwell was cheered to see that he would have romped home a clear winner, had it not been for the ten questions on football teams and the twenty-five based on Eastenders.
‘Thank you very much,’ he smiled and went back to his table. Mad Artie had sidled a few places nearer but was still far enough away for his random obscenities to be part of the background noise. Maxwell smoothed out the paper and began to make a sketch map of the town centre, marking food shops with a circle. Then, he went back over the map and crossed through the two twenty-four-hour shops; although closed now, on Saturday night, they kept a large security staff and so were likely to be safe. The weigh-it-yourself shops he also crossed off, as being too random even for this particular random killer. Anything added to the enormous bins of loose raisins, currants and similar, might well go to the bottom and not see the light of day again for weeks, months or ever. This left three shops which were possibles. Of those, one faced on to the square and had huge plate glass windows down to the floor. The aisles of goods were at right angles to the glass, so any passer-by could see the whole of the shop. It was useless to consider exposing oneself near the crystallised fruits in there, he thought, concluding that he should perhaps get out more. So, that left two and those odds were fine by him.
He folded up his paper and put it in his pocket. So intent had he been on his sketch map that he had been unaware of Mad Artie creeping nearer. So his sudden cry of ‘Bugger,’ only inches from his ear, was bound to make the last swig of Southern Comfort go down the wrong way. Who needs a poisoner, thought Maxwell as he staggered coughing and wheezing from the Vine, when you had local colour like that to contend with? Maxwell had crossed words with Mad Artie before. Both of them called Mad and for good reason, but one of them only nor’ by nor’west. Artie was barking in all directions.
Closing time was just past and the town centre was almost empty. A pair of pretend coppers were strolling along Della Street, giving a certain comfort to the populace. Those intent on drinking the night away had already moved on to the clubs on the Sea Front that stayed open virtually round the clock. The thump of an all-night bass reverberated across the square. Late eaters from the few restaurants in the centre were wandering back to their cars or throwing up into waste bins, depending on which establishment they had frequented. Gordon Ramsay would have had a field day.
Maxwell took a seat along the edge of the Councillor MacIllwain Memorial Garden, cool in the moonlight, which made much of the single remaining chrysanthemum not destroyed by the youth of Leighford. The noise from the Sea Front, only a few roads away to the south, filtered through to him as he sat there, taking the night air. The seat was hard and unforgiving, but as the human sounds died away, all he was left with was the sibilance of the sea.
Finally, he was alone. He got to his feet and made his way to the first shop indicated on his map. It was a small satellite of a large chain and, as a consequence, stocked largely items which the average town centre worker might need to stock up on on the way home: drink, mainly. Bread, butter or the many easy-spread equivalents. Cheese. Crisps and cake. Soap powder took up a large section of the retail space and that was good, thought Maxwell. A few more aisles he didn’t have to keep an eye on. He chose a dark corner of the frontage, between the cha
ined-up trolleys and the window. He could see quite a large section of the shop from there and, more importantly, both the front door and the double flaps which led into the storage section. His eyes soon became accustomed to the dark and he felt a distant empathy with Metternich, who spent large portions of any night in question patiently stalking small rodents for fun and profit.
He leant there, feeling the chill of the glass on his forehead. He tuned his ears in so that he could dimly hear the judder of freezers in the shop, switching on and off as their thermostats commanded. But there wasn’t a single moving thing in there, except the slowly swinging signs exhorting him and everyone else to buy one, get one free. Whoever, he asked himself, in the strange planet of marketing, thought that BOGOF was at all inviting? He was vaguely surprised that Mr Bevell hadn’t already sued for distress.
He felt an incipient cramp begin its climb up his left leg and soon could maintain the position no longer. He crept out from his hiding place and, trying to look at once casual and furtive, made his way to the other establishment on his map. This was much smaller, a family-run place not unlike the Barlows’. It was a bit of a long shot, really, but he had worked it all out. The big stores would obviously cause much more widespread panic if Chummy peppered them with his lethal droppings. But they had security, CCTV cameras and even dog patrols. The smaller stores would be less exciting for him, but much easier to break into, and Maxwell had more or less decided that this man, although ruthless and determined, was not actually very good at this crime lark. He was still thinking small.
He was at the side of the shop and pressed in to the window, inches away from the cards advertising everything from a house to a gerbil. He recognised Mrs B’s semi-literate scrawl, leaping out at him from a card around halfway down. ‘Cleener. Reasonabel raits. Good relaible work. Refs avialabel. Phone Leighford 626987.’ Good luck to her, he thought. At least if she wrote in your dust, you’d know who had done it.
