The Maggie Murders

by J P Lomas

  They’d always been an odd couple to look at he considered, as three sea gulls on the low wall of the esplanade fought over the remains of an abandoned burger. His brother had called them the Laurel and Hardy of Epping Forest, though it had been more than just their respective sizes which marked them out. Whereas he had set himself out as a typical working class London lad, with a loud personality and a frame he was always trying to grow into, she’d been a refugee from Czechoslovakia. The tiny, dark haired, delicate girl he’d first seen on his rounds as a bobby after the War, had been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

  She’d clearly known a better life. From what he had gleaned over the years, her family had been well to do in Prague and up until the age of eight she’d lived in a big house with servants. Given that his mum had been in domestic service, he could appreciate the social gulf in their pre-war lives. Even if it hadn’t been for the sense of refinement and good breeding she possessed, he was impressed by her intelligence and quiet determination.

  Most of his career had been propelled by her. She had been the one to push him into taking his Sergeant’s exam and then she was the one to encourage him to join the CID. In his initial rush of love for her he had even talked about converting, this was not out of any strong religious conviction, more a way of proving himself to her. Having heard the reports on the wireless of what had happened in the camps and seen the newsreel footage of them being liberated, like many of his generation he could not come to terms with what had happened.

  Felicity though had wanted to forget; she had wanted to lose herself in her newly acquired Englishness and so they rarely talked about her past. She became determined to be more English than the English and had acquired an accent which soon had the majority of his relatives thinking he’d married a snob. And yet he hadn’t, he just couldn’t explain to them how important it was for Felicity to feel that she belonged. She had chosen Felicity as her new name after the War, she said it had been either that or Hope. To her Felicity had sounded more English. She was simply trying to find with him and her children the safety and home life snatched away from her when she was a little girl.

  She’d been the one to ensure that both Alan and Susan got doused with holy water at their local church, despite his own lukewarm feelings about the religion he’d been born into. Still at least the C of E let you keep your knob intact.

  In a few years it would be their Ruby Wedding and he wasn’t going to let down the beating heart at the centre of his life by mucking it up now.

  He paid no heed to the light rain beginning to fall as he sat on a bench, dedicated to a Frederick Arthur Higgins who had managed an impressive innings (from 1895 – 1979) and looked out at the near empty beach. The grey skies and restless sea made it feel a world away from the picture postcards of Exmouth displayed on the gift shops’ card carousels, which now seemed perilously close to toppling over with every fresh gust of wind.

  The sand banks in the estuary were becoming increasingly exposed as Hawkins sat down beside him, sans ice cream, but with two polystyrene cups of coffee from the nearby cafe. He was also pleased to note she’d bought him a chocolate.

  ‘Dent wants me to charge Connie Baker with her husband’s murder.‘

  ‘And is Dent now running our case, sir?’ asked Jane as she handed him the coffee and chocolate.

  ‘No, but he wants to make Chief Constable. A result in this case would help him no end. Thank you,’ he said waving the confectionery in acknowledgement.

  The seagulls which had lost the battle over the burger flew away, something about the manner in which Spilsbury set about the chocolate suggested that there would be no spoils left over from the shiny wrapper’s contents.

  Jane’s mind was reeling as she tried to come to terms with this unexpected development. If Spilsbury had called this meeting to tell her the case was going nowhere she would have been less surprised. She’d never been one for office politics and had naively assumed policing was above that type of thing. Trying to make sense of the shifting sands in her mind, she asked the first question which made any sense to her.

  ‘What about the link with the Kellow case?’

  ‘Dent thinks it’s a coincidence.’

  ‘Two suspicious deaths by fire, which just happened to occur in the same town, on the eve of successive General Election victories for Maggie?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘But unlikely.’

  ‘Maybe she killed Kellow in ’83 as a dry run for bumping off her husband this year?’

  ‘Do we have anything to link her to Kellow’s murder?’

  ‘No. We can dig around, but unless she confesses to it we’re just going to have to go along with charging her with her husband’s murder.’

  Jane blew on her coffee and drew herself in to fend off the increasing speed and weight of the droplets now falling.

  ‘What about the calls saying it was political?’

  Even Jane knew that this was a forlorn hope – a dozen or so calls from telephone kiosks had ranged from the ‘Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!’ style rants to fragments of incoherent political manifestos about Zionist cabals being at the heart of government. Some of the more colourful calls had been clearly influenced by the Book of Revelations and had been traced to an alcoholic, former RE teacher who was let off with a warning for wasting police time.

  ‘Cranks or students.’

  Jane’s gaze rested on a distant sailing boat, struggling to make headway against the prevailing wind.

  ‘Do you think she did it?’

  This was Spilsbury’s sixty-four thousand dollar question to her.

  She had the grace to at least give it some serious consideration, before answering ‘No.’

  ‘Circumstances suggest otherwise. She was playing away from home and had the expense and stress of trying to care for her husband.’

  ‘Cheating on your husband, even if he is disabled is not a crime, sir.’

  ‘She has no alibi for the night in question.’

  ‘We can’t place her at the scene either.’

  ‘There’s the taxi driver.’

  There was a pause as they both digested what had been said. After Nigel Byrne’s interview Jane had dismissed his evidence as that of a lying toe rag who was just hoping to cop a lighter sentence for the charges he was facing. Spilsbury had agreed with her at the time.

  ‘Is this all down to Dent, Sir?’ Jane could not believe her boss was choosing to take this line.

  ‘Byrne’s statement places Connie Baker at, or around the scene at the time of the murder,‘ came Spilsbury’s flat reply.

  ‘Or are you angry at Connie for sleeping around? I thought you were better than that!’

  ‘The jury will find her innocent if he is lying,’ retorted Spilsbury in a less than convincing tone.

  ‘Or they’ll send her down for life, because like you they think she’s a lying whore who didn’t deserve to have a husband like that!’

  Spilsbury watched Jane’s back as she stormed off down the deserted sea-front with the rain now falling heavily around them.

  She was right, but she had another twenty or more years left on the force and a life time ahead of her. As much as he admired her, she was a woman he could bear to let down. He no more believed the cabbie than she did, but he had found the circumstantial evidence against Connie both credible and compelling.

  Also there was the lifestyle she and her husband had shared; it revolted him, whereas he had a woman at home who had supported him for nearly his whole adult life and so he wasn’t going to let one mistake at the end of a long career ruin their remaining time together. If Dent wanted a trial he would get one – let the jurors decide on whether they found Connie Baker guilty or innocent.

  He was going to charge her with murder.

  Part 3

  1989

  ‘How many miles is it to Babylon?’

  Traditional nursery rhyme.

  Chapter 20

  The criticisms
which had threatened to spell an early end to Mrs Thatcher’s premiership at the beginning of the decade returned to bite her at the end of it. Ever since the Falklands she had seemed impervious to criticism and all external threats to her power had been swept aside, as she became the longest serving Prime Minister of the Twentieth Century. Ronald Reagan, her great friend and ally in the cause of championing the Free Market and standing up to the Soviet Union, had been limited to two terms in office by the terms of the American Constitution, but no such statutes limited British leaders. It seemed that she would go on forever.

  Yet the world was changing, even Exmouth with its satellite dishes and fax machines was beginning to feel more connected to events in the wider world. As the world approached the Millennium, a growing feeling that this was the end of the old ways, if not the End of Days, descended. A world polarised by left versus right; Capitalism versus Communism and East versus West was coming to an end. The Eighties would end with a bang and not a whimper.

  In that fateful autumn of 1989, events in Eastern Europe had reached a crisis point with thousands of refugees trying to flee the repressive regimes of the Soviet Bloc in a bid to escape to the land of wealth and capital beamed to them on their satellite dishes. If a few hundred people storming the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1917 had become the image which defined the beginning of Communism in Europe, so the hundreds who surged across the Berlin Wall in November 1989 defined its end. Whatever was the cause of the muddled orders given in East Berlin that night, they couldn’t be undone. East Germany’s dictatorial leadership received no support when it turned to Moscow and by that time the Berlin Wall had already fallen. Already pieces of it were being sold as souvenirs; the Free Market had come to East Berlin.

  In London, Mrs Thatcher faced rebellion not from without, but from within. Members of her party had grown tired of her leadership style, which some felt to be belittling, bullying or both. Whilst the Prime Minister was gaining plaudits for the pressure she had placed on Mr Gorbachev to end autocratic governments in the Eastern Bloc, there were those at home who had grown tired of her own dictatorial style.

  Whispers and plots in the corridors of power were whispers and plots no more. Open rebellion came in the form of a leadership challenge. No-one who stood a credible chance of winning the contest had dared to make a move. Yet a stalking horse had been found in the guise of the back-bencher Sir Anthony Meyer. Having commanded a tank after the Normandy Landings, this Old Etonian and pro-European was one of the few people with the audacity to stand up to the Iron Lady.

  In football terms it was like Liverpool versus Exmouth Town, with Mrs Thatcher standing for the Merseyside team who would go on to win an astonishing eighteenth League title as the eighties came to an end. Not that many people would associate Mrs T with the decade’s most successful football team given that they played in Socialist red and that the Prime Minister’s popularity in that northern fastness was somewhere on the scale between that of their arch rivals in the neighbouring metropolis of Manchester and Adolf Hitler. Given that Maggie had considered arming the Merseyside police during the Toxteth riots of ’81, it was reasonable to assume the antipathy was mutual.

  Sir Anthony was the equivalent of Exmouth’s non-league team who played in front of a few dozen spectators on a ground open on four sides and with only a tiny breeze block stand for those who didn’t want to stand in the rain. Even Liverpool reserves would have been able to thrash the amateurs of Exmouth Town within an inch of their lives.

  Yet the fact that Sir Anthony had even dared to stand against Mrs Thatcher was a sign of things to come.

  ****

  H is for Hat-trick.

  I can’t believe they’re actually going to hold an election for the leadership of her Party. A hat-trick of election triumphs and they want to throw it all away by replacing the country’s only true visionary with another grey suited non-entity!

  They used to reward success in this country, not resent it. When a Victorian cricketer took three wickets in consecutive balls then they’d buy him a hat to commemorate such an outstanding achievement. Well Maggie’s the first prime minister to win three consecutive elections since the reign of Queen Victoria’s uncle and yet it’s still not good enough for some of the Wets in her party.

  Well, she will win again, just like I will win again.

  She will crush those who are weak and unworthy of her vision. They would have been nothing without her. She’s had the courage to pick this country up by its bootstraps and all they do is betray their saviour. We’d have been led by some puppet of Moscow, ransomed by the Unions or in hock to Europe if it hadn’t been for Maggie.

  Conversely, the timing is good. It brings forward my timescale and that is an advantage. Having to wait for another two, or three years to complete my own hat-trick would have been bearable, yet this gives me the opportunity to cash in early.

  I think Maggie would approve; she has always been good at seizing the moment and making the most of her opportunities. Like her I’ve learnt to be flexible and to amend my planning according to circumstances.

  The very fact that I’ve been able to camouflage the original plan under the triumph of her successes has been an unintended dividend. I’d only decided to use the ‘83 election to divert media coverage of the murder. Any other time and it would have been front page news in Exmouth and the lead story on Spotlight. When it became apparent she would keep on winning it became a very useful smokescreen. Initially, I had never intended for the link to be the Maggie Murders, but the fortuitous way in which the newspapers attributed this title to me proved to be no bad thing, as it helped to muddy the waters further.

  I’d waited patiently for the next election, knowing she might need the full five years. I still had the success of the butcher’s death to replay in my head and I knew it would make me careless if I became too reckless. If you’re going to make a killing these days, you have to invest time and energy into making sure you know the market. There are a lot of benefits to playing a long game; pleasure delayed can be as gratifying as pleasure gained. Like my share portfolios, a lot of the excitement was generated in anticipating both the potential profits and the attendant risks. But the greater the risk, the higher the profit; Gilts not guilt has become my mantra for living!

  When she called the next one a year early in ‘87 I felt elated. My pent up feelings were ready to be released and I still had a month to fine tune the second death. Like sex the second time is always better. You’re more prepared, know what to expect and are ready to ride that frisson of pleasure and danger as you gain more experience of enjoying the moment.

  With the sergeant’s death I had originally intended to signal my intentions to the world. Yet the press decided to run with the Maggie Murders angle and I was content to let them. The fact that the grieving widow was arrested was an unexpected dividend; I’d only intended to plant the finger of suspicion on her.

  Well this leadership election should help to clear things up for the media. Sir Anthony is not going to be the only one feeling very foolish in the morning. And as for me, I think I know the very hat to choose as my reward for such a satisfying feat of ingenuity.

  ****

  The Crescent in St. Leonard’s certainly lived up to its reputation as one of Exeter’s most prestigious addresses. As Jane Hawkins’ car swept down the drive, she regarded the white fronted Georgian houses with a mixture of envy and indifference. These were properties she’d never afford, even if she made Chief Super. She could envision her family clustered around a Christmas tree behind the large windows on the first floor of one of these villas, yet at the same time she had a feeling that this was just a dream they were being sold. After all, hadn’t Jane Austen hated the Georgian splendour of Bath? Tim and the children were all perfectly happy in the three bedroom new build they’d bought in Alphington last year. Best not to let the advertisers tell you what you wanted.

  When Jane had heard about the fire in Exeter, she’d been half expecting it. Tr
ue, it hadn’t been a General Election; however another election contested by Thatcher had immediately seemed ominous. Even so it still had taken a mammoth effort on her behalf to get the powers that be to send her along as part of the initial investigation.

  When the investigation into Calum Baker’s death had been scaled down, she’d been transferred to domestic violence. It had felt like it was meant to feel; a demotion. After nearly a decade as a sergeant, she still hadn’t made it to the rank of Detective Inspector - so much for greater opportunities for women in the service. She’d put it down to her failure to help crack the case, even though she hadn’t led either investigation she at least felt guilty by association. In her heart of hearts, she also knew her third maternity leave hadn’t helped her progress to the level of D.I.

  Max’s arrival had been quite a surprise to her. At nearly 40, she hadn’t been planning on adding to her children, both of whom would soon be ready to fly the nest. Tim had been delighted, he’d begun to make reluctant noises about looking for a job now that the children were nearly grown up, yet Max’s unplanned entrance into their lives had given him the chance to showcase the superb parenting skills he’d left a dead end job to acquire. As part of a sales force Tim had been at best nondescript, as a house husband he’d been Superman. Now he had another Tim junior to try and convert into a love of heavy metal and Test Cricket, given that Leo’s desire to emulate Slash had been another passing fad and her older son’s tastes had taken a surprising turn to the dance music mania now sweeping Britain. At least Leo was more sensible than Jen though; finding a stash of cannabis in her daughter’s bedroom had not led to one of her finer moments of motherhood.