Maxwell's Point

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Murder,’ he repeated. He chose the Margaret Rutherford version of the dotty old biddy from St Mary Mead. ‘She said she’d seen a murder.’

  Steph Courtney was a pretty little thing with large blue eyes and a shock of blonde curls. She’d sung in the choir when she was younger and her parents had put her through the usual gamut of girlie things – piano lessons, tap, a little light gymkhanering. She’d sat in Maxwell’s office earlier that day with her best friend Emma and told Mr Maxwell all she knew. She’d been out with the improbably named Toto, her dachshund, on the rolling common land called The Dam, not far from her home. Unlike the coastal path, this was a Lovers’ Lane. Worse, it was dogging country and that had nothing to do with little Toto. Steph wasn’t remotely aware of it, thank God, but various text numbers on telephones and in the smuttier newspapers gave sites all over the country where people of a certain persuasion could watch people, of a slightly different persuasion, having sex. Steph, of course, had not mentioned anything of this to Maxwell, but Maxwell had friends in low places and Merv ‘the Perv’ O’Brien, in the Media Department, kept everybody abreast of the places not to be. Everyone – except Merv – was suitably horrified or disappointed or both. Merv felt a certain local pride that there was such a place in his area. He’d probably been Dutch or Swedish in a previous incarnation.

  Steph had been walking Toto on the high ground. The sea was far away to her right. In fact, Maxwell realised, she could have seen Dead Man’s Point briefly until Toto took her down below the line of trees into the glade. There was a car there, Steph had told him. And a couple in it. Or rather, not in it. They were each side of the vehicle, one by each of the rear doors and they occasionally leaned in. It was a man. And a woman. Steph hadn’t seen them before. And it was getting dark by this time. In fact, she was late heading home because Toto had scared up a rabbit earlier and whereas his three-inch legs meant he didn’t have a hope in Hell of catching it, ever the optimist, he’d had a damned good try. So, dusk as it was, Steph couldn’t get a clear view of what was going on.

  It was all very confusing, she’d said. First the woman got into the car. Then the man. But they were never in it together. Both of them seemed to be checking the time and keeping watch too. Instinctively, Steph had crouched down and hauled in Toto’s lead, keeping him close by her and stroking him to keep him quiet. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. The man emerged again, this time carrying what appeared to be a body. It was very pale and didn’t appear to have any clothes on. Steph couldn’t be sure whether it was a man or a woman. The couple were both outside the car now and seemed to be arranging the body, placing the feet side by side and the arms across the chest. One arm kept pointing oddly, as though up in the air.

  Steph hadn’t had the chance to see any more because that was the moment that Toto had barked and Steph wasn’t hanging around to face any repercussions. Bearing in mind she’d run for West Sussex Under Thirteens not too long ago, she snatched up the dog, aware that his little legs wouldn’t cope, and crashed away through the waist-high bracken as best she could.

  ‘So, Policewoman mine,’ Maxwell eased his little boy to one side to try to get the feeling back into his left arm. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Dogging country,’ Jacquie said.

  ‘I know.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’ She took him up on it, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I teach with Merv “the Perv” O’Brien.’

  ‘And how does he know?’

  ‘I’ve never asked him,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘To me, a dogger is a Bank somewhere or other – the scene of an almost-war between us and Japan, if memory serves, in 1904.’

  ‘It scares me when those kids are out there,’ Jacquie said. ‘From what you say, this Steph seems to be a thorough-going virgin.’

  ‘That would be my take on it. Can’t you people close the site down?’

  ‘The Dam? It’s open parkland. As to dogging, unless we get a complaint, we can’t lift so much as a finger. You know that, Max. You know the law.’

  ‘I know how many beans make five too, Heart Of Midlothian, but it doesn’t help. What do you think Steph saw?’

  Jacquie thought for a moment, frowning in the soft lamplight. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said, ‘Assuming the girl is telling the truth. It was dusk, of course. What’s her eyesight like?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask Sylvia Matthews,’ he told her. ‘Or the girl’s doctor.’

  ‘When did all this happen, Max?’ she asked him.

  ‘Three, four weeks ago. She wasn’t quite sure whether it was the night before her Maths or Science GCSE. She’d gone out with the dog to get some air, clear her head before whichever cognitive onslaught it was.’

  ‘So she doesn’t remember the day?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’ Jacquie asked. ‘What did you advise her to do?’

  ‘To talk to the boys in blue,’ he said. ‘I may have mentioned your name.’

  ‘Has she told her parents?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s an intelligent girl, Jacks, but you don’t know what exactly runs through their heads, do you? I think she was more intrigued at first; you know, not quite sure what she’d seen. Then she got scared. Even so, she confided in her friend Emma, not Mum and Dad. Otherwise, they’d have been in touch with the nick, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no,’ Jacquie shrugged.

  Nolan stirred on his daddy’s chest, sighing and blowing a little bubble from his mouth.

  ‘So this Emma didn’t say anything?’

  ‘No. She just came along to hold Steph’s hand. Girlies do that. If one of them’s sent to get a bit of paper in school, she takes her friend along. They link arms just crossing the quad.’

  ‘I’m not surprised if one of your colleagues is called the Perv,’ Jacquie observed.

  ‘I’m sure stories of his debauchery are grossly exaggerated, Dear Heart,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘He just happens to have an unfortunately rhyming name, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you think she will come to us?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Steph, I mean?’

  Maxwell shrugged, in a one-armed, I’ve-got-a-baby-on-my-chest sort of way. ‘I hope so,’ he said.

  ‘Were they clothed?’ Jacquie asked. ‘The couple with the car, I mean?’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘I didn’t pursue that one,’ he told her. ‘Though I had Matron in on this interview, there are limits to what a teacher can ask a student. I thought that might be an interview too far.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘You’re probably right. Well,’ she sighed, getting up. ‘We certainly can’t do much tonight. Come on, little man, let’s get you to bed. It’s way past your bedtime.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Maxwell yawned.

  ‘Not you,’ Jacquie said. ‘Somebody else.’ And she took Nolan up in her arms. ‘By the by,’ she stopped at the foot of the stairs. ‘Any news on our au pair?’

  The Incident Room was open for business the next morning, bright and early. Benny Palister had been to a stag night the night before and was off to a wedding later that day, if the DCI and the corpse at the Point could spare him, of course. His head felt like a kicked bucket and he’d driven in to the Nick very carefully, realising that he was still appreciably over the limit and some of his colleagues were nauseatingly honest in the follow-up-to-breathalyser stakes on the grounds that a copper should know better etcetera, etcetera.

  ‘We’ve got a make on the dead man’s shirt, Benny.’ Geoff Hare had not been to a stag night the night before.

  ‘Great, sarge,’ Palister muttered, desperately trying to remember how to operate the coffee machine. Black. No sugar.

  ‘Something of a toff, by all accounts,’ Hare was reading the lab report. ‘Not your run-of-the-mill Top Man. Lord Everard, Brighton. Know it?’

  Benny Palister squinted up at the man as he bent to collect his paper cup. ‘Lord Everard?’ he repeated. ‘Sounds like Sixties Carnaby S
treet meets Larry Grayson – and both those images, by the way, come to me via my granddad.’

  ‘I can’t help the unfortunate choice of name,’ Hare shrugged. ‘Lord Everard is a small chain. Well, more a couple of links, really. One in Brighton. The other in Clitheroe.’

  Palister’s face said it all, but whether it was the after-effects of the night before, the taste of the coffee or the ghastly concept of Clitheroe, no one could be sure. He thought he’d been on a school trip there once, or maybe his granddad took him; it was all a Northern blur.

  ‘So, unless you want to spend all day on the phone to the Yorkshire people…’

  ‘I’ll ring Brighton,’ Palister volunteered.

  ‘Great,’ Hare smiled. ‘Jacquie.’

  She looked up from her VDU. She’d left her men in bed before day or battle broke, promising to be home by lunchtime. Nolan was beginning to wonder who this strange woman was who swept in and out of his life, kissed him on the cheek and vanished until the next time. Working Mums – tell Jacquie Carpenter about them. How the lad felt about the missing au pair was anyone’s guess. Jacquie and Maxwell might have to wait several years to find out.

  ‘Morning, Geoff,’ Jacquie answered.

  ‘Any headway on the dead man’s crucifix?’

  ‘It’s silver,’ Jacquie was only now getting to grips with the lab report, DI Bronson’s late Friday afternoon chivvy having worked wonders. ‘Hallmarked Birmingham, 1924. And yes, it’s very definitely the murder weapon.’

  ‘Astley came through,’ Hare beamed. Things were moving at a cracking pace for a sleepy seaside town as the temperatures climbed again to Mediterranean levels.

  ‘Just got an email from his secretary.’ She read aloud. ‘“Cause of death is asphyxiation consonant with death by ligature strangulation, in this case, the heavy crucifix chain worn around the victim’s neck.”’

  ‘Does he give us a date?’ Hare was looking over her shoulder.

  ‘This is Jim Astley, Geoff,’ Jacquie reminded him. ‘Mister Circumspection. “I can only hazard some time between the first and second week in June. The state of mild decomposition, the very small amount of adipocere tissue, the early growth rate of blowfly larvae…” It all got a bit technical after that.’

  ‘And we haven’t long had breakfast,’ Hare nodded. ‘Slowly, this is coming together. He hadn’t been in the ground long.’

  ‘Is it?’ She swivelled in her chair to face him. ‘Coming together, I mean? Geoff, we’ve got no idea who our victim is, why he was killed or how the body got there. We’ve no clue as to why he should have been buried where he was or precisely how long he’d been there. And that’s before I get onto the sixty-four thousand dollar question – who put him in the ground? Now that, in forensic terms and police parlance, adds up to Diddly Squat.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Hare shrugged. ‘It’s a start.’

  He strapped Nolan into the little gadget Norman Westbury had made for the lad. Norman Westbury was one of the old school of Craft teachers, before the educational establishment had invented the term Design Technology and made keyboard skills an essential ingredient. As Norman Westbury put it so eloquently in a staff meeting one Warts-and-All Development Day a few years back, ‘If I’d have wanted to have keyboard skills, I’d have become a concert pianist.’ Told it like it was, did Norm. No, Norm was a tenon man, a hinge and bracket, Black and Decker sort of guy. If you couldn’t use your spokeshave on it or groove it with your Granny’s Tooth, it wasn’t worth doing. So Peter Maxwell, very much of an age and a like mind, went to see Norman Westbury with his proposal and for a modest fee – the cost of materials and a couple of pints at the Vine (mercifully, the live music was off, Afterbirth’s lead singer having pulled a g-string) – the Great Engineer had built a contraption. It fitted snugly over the rear wheel-arch of White Surrey and buckled with suitably padded straps around little Nolan’s legs, waist and back with an upright support for his head. On top of that, a rather smart pennant with the words, ‘My father’s a Cambridge graduate and all I got is this lousy flag’ emblazoned on it nodded above little Nolan’s curls.

  ‘All set, old man?’ Maxwell asked as he tucked the boy in.

  Nolan gurgled at him, not quite sure of the level of response required and gasped as the G force hit him and his dad pedalled away from chez sont like the maniac he so clearly was.

  ‘We’re going to The Dam, dear boy,’ Maxwell called over his shoulder. ‘No, I know it’s not totally suitable for you, but at this time of the morning, we should be all right. Think of it as your first nature ramble. Well,’ he glanced quickly behind him, ‘the alternative is an hour or two in the cadaverous clutches of Mrs Troubridge; get my drift? And as for Juanita,’ he checked the traffic at the intersection, head whizzing from left to right, ‘Well, we just don’t know, do we?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  No one knew why they called it The Dam. At least, Peter Maxwell didn’t and if Peter Maxwell didn’t, nobody did. It stood at the end of civilization, where Leighford stopped and the Downs began, a rolling, plunging piece of common land that had clearly once been gouged for quarrying. Tall nettles, higher than a man, nodded with the foxgloves in the sudden dips and the morning sun gilded the topsides of the bracken leaves, a knee-high carpet on The Dam’s ridges and slopes.

  At one end, where Maxwell’s White Surrey cut shallow grooves in the sand, were dunes that told the traveller the sea was not far away. Nearest to Leighford, where Mortimer Road trailed across the heathland, it gave way to oaks and those elms that refused to die back in the Seventies, threatened by the Dutch or not.

  ‘You all right there, little fella?’ Maxwell was wheeling Surrey now, checking Nolan under the brim of his large, sun-stopping hat. The little bugger had reached the Irritating Stage, which Maxwell knew would last for the next eighteen years or so, where anything in his hand or on his head would be tossed casually to the ground. It was a good game, keeping parents amused for hours and keeping them fit, too, what with bending on average six times a minute. This morning, however, Nolan had either tired of the game, or he felt sorry for his dad, or he actually welcomed the shade; because the hat stayed on.

  ‘Zicker, zicker,’ muttered Nolan. It was his version of grown-up speak.

  ‘You got that right,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Now, you watch the pretty valley, while I…’

  The World’s Oldest Daddy got his eye in. From Steph Courtney’s description, he was standing where she had been a month ago, walking little Schickelgruber or whatever the Hell the dog was called. He was gazing down on what had once been a quarry floor, but one that was wide and level-bottomed, with access, he guessed, for half a dozen cars. The grass was flattened by countless tyre tracks and there was the usual evidence of foul play – lager cans, tissues, even a solitary condom swinging from a bush. The very prospect made Maxwell’s eyes water. What was that? Some sort of trophy? The old watcher of B-feature Westerns knew that the Comanche hung up similar warning signs at Twin Buttes and Lost Dutchman Mesa to keep the cavalry away. And of course, there was the ubiquitous Asda trolley, sideways and rusting in its nettle bed. One day, Maxwell promised himself, he’d conduct an in-depth survey on the incidence of supermarket trolleys in weird places; the nearest Asda had to be nearly two miles away on the other side of town. But then, somebody had probably already done that and got a PhD in Sociology out of it.

  He didn’t really know why he’d come, to be honest. He felt particularly daft in the bright light of day, four weeks after the event, with a baby in tow and trying to make sense of the ramblings of a post-pubescent girl. But Maxwell knew his post-pubescent girls; he’d been trying to cram some history into them now for decades and he knew a liar and a fantasist when he saw one – come to think of it, that covered most of the Senior Management team at Leighford High. No, Steph Courtney was straight as a die. She definitely saw something odd, but what?

  ‘Zicker,’ commented Nolan, and Maxwell half-turned.

  ‘Good morning, little baby!’
>
  Nolan was lost for words now, frowning up at the apparition standing next to White Surrey.

  ‘Good morning,’ Maxwell answered. ‘Er…I have to answer for him – his teeth are rather new.’

  ‘Glorious weather!’

  It was and the newcomer was dressed for it. He seemed to be Maxwell’s age or, astonishingly, a little older. But whereas Maxwell had accepted anno domini a long time ago and no longer wore shorts to frighten the horses, this man seemed to have gone in the opposite direction. His tawny skin hung like a dead lion’s over his white shorts and a pair of spindly legs protruded below them. Maxwell couldn’t see his feet for the ferns, but he just knew the old boy had sandals over white socks; he was not to be disappointed.

  ‘Haven’t seen you here before,’ he said, hauling a canvas haversack off his shoulder.

  ‘Haven’t been here before,’ Maxwell explained. ‘At least, not for a time.’

  ‘Giving the grandson an outing? Why not?’

  All sorts of reasons, thought Maxwell, but he’d already spent all of Nolan’s lifetime explaining he’d just experienced a senile pregnancy and he wasn’t about to do it again.

  ‘Ramble here regularly, do you?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Ramble?’ the old boy looked a little vacant. ‘Er…yes. Oh, yes. Charming spot. Particularly after dark.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, it all depends what you’re looking for, doesn’t it?’ the non-rambler asked, then he hauled his sack onto his other shoulder and tramped off through the bracken. ‘See you!’ he called.

  Now Peter Maxwell had encountered Naturists before. Odd people who insisted on going skyclad even when the weather would freeze the bollocks off a brass monkey. Had he just met one now? Or perhaps he was a bird watcher? An orchid fancier? Perhaps something altogether darker. There was a light in the old boy’s eye that Maxwell didn’t altogether like.