The Maggie Murders

by J P Lomas

  ‘Does an Andrew Sullivan live here?’

  She turned and called into the house ‘Andy, it’s for you.’

  He was relieved to see that Tina was at least wearing a pair of neon pink knickers as her waif like figure disappeared up a flight of uncarpeted stairs leading to the cottage’s upper storey, leaving Spilsbury to let himself into an untidy sitting room. The whole room was dimly lit, with little natural light coming through the two narrow and un-curtained windows. Empty beer tins, an overfilled ashtray and a pile of ‘Just 17’ magazines made uneasy bedfellows on the glass topped coffee table. A mismatched two-seater sofa and armchair, both covered in matching wraps to give an appearance of uniformity surrounded the table. A portable TV was hooked up to a video recorder, which in turn was balanced on an upturned packing crate. A selection of hired video cassettes on the floor included: ‘Porky’s’, ‘Bolero’ and ‘Rambo.’

  To the left of an open fire place (which in fact contained a portable two bar electric fire) two roughly fashioned shelves contained a selection of more highbrow literature. As well as a selection of books which included titles by the likes of: D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and J.G. Ballard there were also well thumbed paperbacks by European writers like: Camus, Kundera and Nabokov. A poster advertising Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ had been framed and hung over the fireplace.

  He was investigating the knick-knacks on the mantelpiece as likely stashes for cannabis when Sullivan came in. A tall, haughty looking man, he was dressed in a Depeche Mode tour T-shirt and a pair of football shorts. His handsome figure did nothing to dampen Spilsbury’s feelings of revulsion.

  ‘How may I help you officer?’ drawled Sullivan in public school accented English, sprawling on the sofa and gesturing Spilsbury towards the chair.

  ‘Fallen on hard times?’ enquired Spilsbury, trying to keep his voice even and preferring to keep himself upright.

  ‘I’d offer you a coffee, but we’re out. Beer?’ answered Sullivan ignoring the question and finding to his evident delight a still full tin of Carlsberg under the sofa.

  ‘Seen your wife lately?’

  ‘Should I have done? Anyway, she’ll be my ex as soon as my solicitor can pull his finger out.’

  ‘Hoping to get the house back?’

  ‘Just hoping to get what’s owed me.’

  ‘So why did you marry her, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Feel free; we all make mistakes. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. Believe it or not, I was quite attracted to her. She had a certain innocence which appealed to me. And believe you me, I wasn’t getting any of that without going down the aisle with her first. Fucking Catholics… ’ he added with no apparent irony.

  ‘Rather an extreme solution.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I may not look it, but in a few years I’ll be pushing forty. I can’t be single forever, and I wouldn’t want people thinking I was a bender!’ he laughed at his own joke, ‘whilst taking girls like Tina along to dinner parties would get me disapproving, if envious looks methinks!’

  Spilsbury could not believe how smug Sullivan looked. Upstairs he could hear Tina drawing a bath.

  ‘Though even with Katie I got one or two funny looks as she always looked younger than her years; dressed in the right way she could pass for 16 – not that I could often persuade her to dress that way if you get my drift…’

  ‘How did she take your decision to leave her?’

  He smiled.

  ‘She finally showed some spirit. If she’d been a bit more like that in the bedroom I might have missed her a bit more.’

  ‘Has she threatened you or made contact lately?’

  ‘Never. We only communicate nowadays through solicitors, a very expensive way to communicate.’

  ‘And Constance Baker?’

  ‘Connie?’ he sipped at his beer meditatively, ‘not since I left Exmouth. Bit long in the tooth for me now.’

  ‘What about the affair?’

  ‘It was her idea. Catherine after getting pregnant wasn’t interested in sex and Connie was offering it up on a platter.’

  ‘She doesn’t look like your usual type.’

  ‘You’d be surprised what Connie would get up to in the bedroom, Inspector. You might think my tastes are a little esoteric, yet what she might have lacked in girlish looks she more than made up for in imagination. When she slipped on her gym slip she certainly got my dander up!’

  Spilsbury’s look must have convinced Sullivan he was making no converts.

  ‘Look Inspector, Connie and I had both found ourselves with partners who couldn’t meet our needs and so for the sake of our marriages we met our mutual extra-marital needs elsewhere.’

  Spilsbury gave a quizzical look.

  ‘Even St Augustine said prostitutes were a necessary evil. They were the cess pits which the city had to put up with in order to function. Connie and I just adapted that philosophy by taking lovers.’

  It took a few seconds for Spilsbury to process Sullivan’s answer. Though not a conventionally religious man, he had a strong moral sense and in another century might easily have been swayed by the West Country’s Methodist traditions. Thirty years in the force had given him a plentiful experience of liars and cheats, but at least he had a sense that these people knew they were villains; the complacent man in front of him, who in all likelihood was screwing the child who had answered the door, seemed to lack even a basic sense of right and wrong.

  ‘Her husband had been crippled in The Falklands and your wife was pregnant with your child! Did you have no scruples about what you were doing?’

  ‘As I said, neither of us was getting much sex at the time. Would it have been better for me to abandon Catherine at the time? Should Connie have been another victim of that war by having her sexuality neutered?’

  The pleased look which Sullivan gave Spilsbury convinced the detective that the man believed his own twisted logic.

  ‘And the young girl upstairs?’

  ‘Tina,’ he smiled, ‘she’s lovely. And she’s sixteen before you ask – perfectly legal.’

  His tone had become more defensive as Spilsbury had narrowed the distance between them. Sullivan swivelled his legs from the sofa to the floor and sat facing his interrogator. Spilsbury in turn lowered himself down into the chair, it gave far much more than it should have done, even under his not inconsiderable eighteen stone. He rose to his feet, not caring to test it any further; at least now he had the height advantage over his opponent.

  ‘You like them young don’t you?’

  The permanent sneer on Sullivan’s well sculptured face didn’t waver.

  ‘Yes, if you must know. There’s something rather delicious about being their first.’

  ‘You can square that with your teaching, can you?’

  ‘It’s why I teach primary, ‘he shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly, ‘and I’m not a paedophile if that’s what you’re thinking. I like them adolescent and not pre-pubescent. That’s why I chose to avoid secondary teaching – too much potential jailbait in that line of work. With the juniors there’s no such temptation. I do like them with a few hairs on their fannies you know!’

  Spilsbury’s meaty fist smashed into Sullivan’s nose sending a satisfactory amount of blood arcing through the room. Having never committed a crime in his life until today, Spilsbury had now committed two in a few hours.

  ‘I’ll make sure you’re finished for that!’ yowled Sullivan, holding his broken nose in one hand and using a cushion to try and staunch the flow of blood with the other.

  ‘I’m finished already, ‘announced Spilsbury preparing to leave, ‘I’m retiring next year.’

  ‘I’ll get you, you bastard!’ swore Sullivan struggling to stand up.

  Pushing him back down onto the sofa Spilsbury walked to the door.

  ‘Unless you want me following this investigation up with your new employers, or getting the local boys to take an interest in what you’re getting
up to in here, not to mention Social Services, I’d just remember how you smacked your face on the low beam over there.’

  Spilsbury walked out into the sunlight.

  Chapter 17

  Jane had decided to walk up Albion Hill to Catherine Sullivan’s house. The steep hill led from the new shopping precinct at the bottom to Exmouth Hospital at the top. The police station which had been partially reopened for the investigation was just off the bottom of the hill and so the walk to the top took her less than ten minutes. She could have found an easier route, but having eaten one too many takeaways that week she decided scaling the hill was probably appropriate penance for last night’s pizza.

  Taking a breather at the top she looked back over the town. A pale blue gasometer stood in the immediate foreground to her left, whilst further down her gaze fell on the heart of Exmouth beating gently in the morning sunlight. There was the newly built Magnolia Centre with the Strand Gardens and their war memorial beyond it and then the new railway station on her right.

  The whole scene was enhanced by the beauty of the seascape. The blueness of the estuary tinged the town’s borders with golden sand. It ran from the docks at one end, before continuing past the faded splendour of the sprawling Imperial Hotel and then past the church of Holy Trinity, it then turned past the Manor Gardens and Pavilion to the Beacon, as it edged past the hotels and flats high up on the old cliff line, continued on past the Maer and sand dunes, until it finally reached the high red cliffs of Orcombe Point which brought an end to the long miles of strand which it lapped.

  From the crest of the hill she turned left towards the Withycombe end of the town. Terraced houses flanked either side of Marple Hill as she walked down in the direction of the sinister sounding Phear Park and the town’s only secondary school, Exmouth Community College. When she’d been first posted here the local secondaries had all been bog standard comprehensives; however they’d now been rebranded. Not that she thought it would make much of a difference to the students they crammed in. With over two and a half thousand students from both the town and its outlying villages, this school was even bigger than the one they sent Jen and Leo to in Exeter, and four times as big as the girls’ grammar school she’d attended in Newton Abbot. Sprawled across two vast campuses, it was more the size of school you’d associate with Britain’s bigger cities and not one you’d expect to find in a small seaside town.

  Phear Park had nothing more fearful in it than a miniature golf course and a couple of shelters dotted between its trees and pathways where small groups of students were either smoking or canoodling. Jane wondered why she’d used such an old fashioned word as canoodling to describe the scene she could see in the distance of a young teenage girl being pressed up against a tree by a boy who seemed to have been given considerable help in his romantic endeavours by the tightly rolled up skirt the girl was wearing. She had a feeling it was in the hope that her own daughter wasn’t getting up to the same extra-curricular activities at her school in Exeter…

  She’d been fortunate on Monday that she’d been present for a family breakfast and had been able to stop Jen going to school in a black bra under her white school shirt – though neither daughter nor husband had seemed to understand why she was making such a fuss. It was only later she found out that the bra Jen had taken had been one of hers. She tried to get her mind back on the case and forget what she had been getting up to at her daughter’s age in the so-called ‘Summer of Love’. A time when anything had seemed possible and the future seemed infinite, yet in retrospect it had been one of her last free summers before Jen was born.

  Catherine Sullivan’s house lay on the other side of the park towards the bottom of the hill, a dark brick terraced house, which was located in a cul de sac on the left. New double glazed PVC windows had replaced the original single glazed ones and the satellite dish affixed to the front of the house was one of an increasing crop sprouting up all over Britain. Jane was just glad Tim had little time for TV and that Jen and Leo had seemed content with the wonders of video rental.

  No-one answered Jane’s knock and so she placed her card through the letterbox and walked back to the station. At least she felt the walk had earned her a glass of Chardonnay that evening. She could accept the idea that she was now a size 12, yet the idea that she might creep up to a 14 had made her decide to take as much exercise as she could when the opportunity presented itself. Jen might laugh at her if she ever got up early enough to catch her Mum in leotard and leggings, working out in front of her Green Goddess exercise video some mornings, but her daughter still had youth on her side, if not the attendant good taste in clothes and wisdom which maturity sometimes brought with it. She’d rather take exercise when the chance presented itself, than follow the faddish crash diets her friends were always failing to complete.

  ****

  At the Crofton Club the sun shone palely on the outdoor courts. One or two people had braved the waters of the inadequately heated swimming pool; however most of the members were indoors in the club room. The less than clement weather provided a perfect excuse for a few sundowners, even if the sun hadn’t crossed the yardarm yet. The sepia photographs on the nicotine stained walls served as a reminder for the club’s more senior members of the days when the weather in former colonial outposts might be more relied on to hit the higher bars on the thermometer.

  Jez Carberry still had one client booked for 6pm, but other than that he was free to lie on one of the loungers on the terrace, his cricket sweater proof against the chill and anticipate tonight’s liaison. He felt he’d literally grown since their meeting and now it seemed that anything was possible. Even marriage. Though he might be jumping the gun a bit there. Even so given how frequent their meetings had become and the endless gifts and presents she showered on him, he felt sure this was not an impossible obstacle.

  In fact his whole future had been shaped by her. Before they’d met he assumed after this year he would go on to take a Master’s and put off real life for even longer, yet now he felt no need to delay adult life. He now had plans to set up his own software company and given that the banks were ever more willing to venture capital he knew that his business plan would be sure to receive a healthy injection of capital and set him on the path to being the big shot entrepreneur entitled to wed such a woman.

  The world was changing and he was determined to be at the vanguard of the technological revolution sweeping Britain. He could just about remember being shown the pictures of the Moon Landing when he was a child and he was sure they were in colour, as his father had always ensured the Carberrys were at the cutting edge when it came to gadgetry. In his teens the first home computer games had arrived; he could still remember the envious looks on his friends’ faces when they’d come around to play ‘Pong’ on the big wooden TV in their lounge. Compared to what was to come, the game was rubbish, being an electronic form of table tennis with the most basic graphics imaginable and yet in the mid-70s it had been the only game on the market and had made him the most popular boy in his class.

  As a teenager he’d moved onto the next generation of computer gaming when his parents had bought him the far superior Atari console which had turned their TV into the near equivalent of the machines he and Steve filled with their pocket money down at the front. They’d also been among the first families to own a video recorder – he could still recall his frustration when their Betamax player had lost out in the format wars to the VHS ones. It had been one of the few times at school that he hadn’t had the most desirable stuff.

  It was on his sixteenth birthday that his life had changed – his father had managed to acquire one of the BBC Home computers for him. Given their school only owned four of the machines, this was a coup which returned to him his undisputed bragging rights. Initially he’d only used it for playing games, but in a moment of boredom he’d started to explore what else it could offer him and this had led to his first attempts at writing his own computer programs.

  His early attempts at
learning BASIC were almost as embarrassing for him now as his early adventures in love. Having found he possessed a talent though, he had mastered far more complex machine codes with a far greater confidence and alacrity than his early attempts at cracking the coded signals employed by girls.

  In moments of self-doubt he had sometimes wondered whether his more intuitive understandings of computers had been because he was less good with people, although he had never conformed to the stereotype of the speccy geek. He’d always been popular, had friends and enjoyed the company of girls. There were just things about computers which made more sense for him; they conformed to a logical and more understandable pattern of life.

  He was now hoping to apply logic to try and make some sense of all the emotions which had surfaced in his life with the intensity of a drowning man coming up for air. Logically, he was having an affair with a married woman – that could no longer be ignored. He didn’t have any ethical qualms about this – he may have been baptised an Anglican, but religion had been tolerated by the boys at his school as just another annoying aspect of school life. He’d happily sing Christmas Carols after a few pints; even so he no more believed in a supreme deity than he believed in Santa Claus. Speculating about the affair rationally, he knew he should be content with it, yet logic didn’t seem to explain why something was getting under his skin about the whole business.

  Women like her seemed to want the company of powerful men. Admittedly much of his research into what women wanted was based on programmes like ‘Dallas’ and ‘Howards Way’, yet they had to be based on a truth didn’t they? Therefore he needed to have more going for him than the position of part time tennis coach and full time stud if she was to leave her husband for him. Jez liked to imagine her husband as some older, dull and passionless banker who spent his days checking his balance sheets and hoarding his assets. She was clearly married to some old fool who couldn’t satisfy her. He felt that she needed a man like him, a man with vision and creativity who would one day provide her with the champagne lifestyle that she was currently providing him with.