by M. J. Trow
‘Oh, fuckin’ hell,’ he muttered to nobody in particular. Some bastard had dumped a roll of lino under the hedge. That was the problem with having a transport cafe next door. At least it wasn’t used condoms or sanitary towels. Benny had had the lot in his three weeks working there. He glanced back at the French windows of the restaurant behind him.
‘Bollocks!’ he inhaled savagely. There he was, Piers the Bastard, staring out at him. Probably taking a break from counting his money. Piers didn’t smile. He never smiled at anybody who didn’t have a Range Rover or wasn’t a member of Rotary. He just glared at Benny and nodded.
So it was that Benny Pallister stooped to manhandle the roll of lino. Then he stepped back. From the window, Piers Stewart saw the good-for-nothing reeling backwards as though he’d been shot. Worse, he saw him turn towards the green Mercedes and vomit explosively all over his tarmac. ‘Jesus Christ,’ the restaurateur muttered and stubbed his cigar out quickly in the nearest ashtray. That’s what came of letting Wendy hire the casual labour. Say one thing for his wife, she was a fool for anything in a T-shirt. But a man’s biceps did virtually nothing for Piers Stewart. This useless little shit Pallister would have to go. Chucking up all over the car park was just the last straw. He batted aside the French windows, dashed down the steps and crossed to the still-heaving labourer, leaning, pale and sweating against the oak step at the edge of the car park.
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ Piers demanded to know.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Stewart,’ Benny gasped, ‘It’s … it’s a woman.’
‘What?’ Piers looked at the shivering wreck in front of him. ‘What is? What are you talking about?’
‘There,’ Benny wheezed, unable to trust his voice for long, ‘in the lino.’
Piers took a step forward, gingerly kicking the lino with his Gucci toe. It fell back and a face was looking up at him, the colour of an old napkin, the eyes staring sightlessly into his. The tongue was protruding through teeth that were brown with blood and there was a deep purple line around the throat. Unable to look away, Piers let his eyes trail down the naked body. A pale slender arm lay modestly across the girl’s small breasts, and as he looked it slid away to flop noiselessly on the tarmac.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Piers whispered. For a moment he was lost, confused. He didn’t know where he was or what to do. Then the panic subsided and he was a restaurateur again. ‘Get a grip on yourself,’ he ordered. ‘Cover her up for Christ’s sake. We can be seen from the road. I’m going for the police.’
Piers Stewart had no reason to thank whoever it was who left a woman’s body wrapped in lino on his restaurant car park. By mid-morning the whole area was cordoned off by fluttering tape – the thin blue line – and knots of policemen in and out of uniform stood chatting together. Benny Pallister was disappointed. He’s just about got the sight of the dead girl out of his tiny mind and was starting to realize he’d be famous. There’d be press conferences, news programmes; he’d be on Crimewatch for sure and then of course, the Sunday papers would be after his life story as The Man Who Found The Body. In the meantime, though, there were no flashing blue lights, no car chases, no SWAT teams bristling with sidearms and riot gear. Just a single ambulance and two dull-looking blokes wandering in and out of the makeshift tent they’d put over the body.
The one dull-looking bloke was Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall, of Leighford CID, thirty-something having given way to forty-something while his back was turned. His oppo was George Cainer, of the same rank, Surrey Constabulary.
‘Thanks for getting me in on this one, George,’ Hall said, ‘just what I need on a Monday morning.’
‘Sergeant of mine recognized the face,’ Cainer said. ‘That in itself is going to cost me. He already thinks he’s bloody Sherlock Holmes by way of Columbo. You know the sort.’
Hall did. He’d come up the soft way, people said, via university, but you didn’t get to be a DCI these days by hiding in the office. He knew the sort.
‘Right, Alan, give Mr Hall the benefit of your years of wisdom as Scene of Crime Officer.’
Alan was one of those people that look and sound terminally bored with life – a sort of depressed John Peel, though without the added trauma of being Liverpudlian. His white overalls made him look even pastier than he was. ‘I understand you know the young lady, sir?’ he said to Hall.
‘She’s Alice Goode,’ the Chief Inspector said. ‘She’s a teacher at a comprehensive in my manor.’
‘Well, I’d say she’s been dead for two or three days. The lab’ll confirm that, of course. I’d also say the cause of death was strangulation by ligature, although there are some superficial cuts to the forearms.’
‘She didn’t die here?’ Hall asked.
‘No, no. She was dumped in the lino several hours after death. I can’t find any blood on the lino at all. There’s no sign of any clothing.’
‘We know approximately what she was wearing when she went missing.’ Hall looked at the body-bag they’d put her in. ‘Looking for that lot won’t be easy. What are we looking at here? Sex as a motive?’
‘I’d say so,’ Alan nodded, checking his notes. ‘Again, the lab will confirm.’
‘George, do you mind if I have my man look at this one? Seeing that she’s from my turf’
‘Be my guest,’ Cainer shrugged. ‘Frankly, Henry, I’d be delighted. My man’s up to his neck in it at the moment. He won’t shed any tears at losing this one. Who is your man, by the way?’
‘Jim Astley,’ Hall told him, ‘a cantankerous bastard, but he knows his job.’
‘Well,’ winked Cainer, ‘there’s a rarity in the medical profession.’
There was a sign in Dr James Astley’s laboratory that read ‘You Don’t Have To Be Morbid To Work Here But It Helps’. Every time he saw it, Henry Hall was convinced it was true. What genuinely sane person wanted to be rummaging about inside dead people all day? Still, it was a nasty job and somebody had to do it. That somebody in the Leighford/Tottingleigh area was Jim Astley, the police surgeon.
‘Strangulation by ligature.’ He confirmed the initial findings of Cainer’s Scene of Crimes man. ‘Something unusual. Something with a straight edge.’
‘A straight edge?’ Hall didn’t like to stand too close at moments like this.
‘I tell you what it reminds me of,’ – the doctor was quietly going about his business over the corpse of Alice Goode – ‘those things kids use to draw graphs with, those bits of grey plastic; something like that. She put up a fight, though. Classic debris under the fingernails.’
‘Can DNA help us there?’
Astley looked up under the green cap. ‘Leave it out, Henry,’ he chuckled, ‘you’ve been reading Joseph Wambaugh again, haven’t you? We can only check DNA if we get a match. You boys haven’t got your compulsory genetic fingerprinting facility set up yet, have you? What with tapping phones like other people tap their fingers.’
‘I’ll get straight on to the Home Secretary about it,’ Hall said. It was unusually flippant for him.
‘We’ve got some semen that might be more useful, however. Per vagina, as we Latin scholars say.’
‘Was that consensual intercourse, would you say?’
‘I would not,’ Astley peered closer with his magnifying lens, ‘but we’re also talking about several times. Probably after, as well as before, death.’
‘Are we now? What about time of death?’
Astley stood up. His back was in half. ‘Now, you’re rushing me, Henry. You know I refuse to be drawn on these matters. When was the body found?’
‘Yesterday. About seven a.m.’
‘Monday. Hmm. I’d say she died on Wednesday, possibly early Thursday’
‘So her body had been kept somewhere, perhaps for a day’ Hall was talking to himself. ‘I’d give a substantial part of your salary to know where. Nothing out of the ordinary there, I suppose?’
‘What, you mean telltale signs like an abattoir or paint spraying shop? N
o, I’m afraid not. How did the parents take it?’
‘How do you think? The father’s dead, the mother took some finding. The last she knew was that her daughter was at university; the next she’s lying on a slab.’
‘Ah,’ said Astley ruefully, ‘life’s a bitch like that. A little bird told me she was on a school trip when she went missing.’
‘That’s right,’ Hall confirmed. ‘What I want to know is who she met there.’
‘Ah well,’ Astley smiled, ‘the miracles of modern science can provide some of your answers, Chief Inspector. The rest of it’s down to you coppers. Do you mind?’ He was twisting the dead girl’s neck to one side. ‘You’re in my light.’
‘So, Geraldine,’ Peter Maxwell’s hypnotic gaze was searing through the recalcitrant little tart with attitude, ‘let’s see if I’ve got this right. Michael here called you a fat slag. Correct so far?’
‘Yeah,’ Geraldine scowled, glowering under her purple eyelids at her nemesis.
‘Would you agree with that, Michael? Have I conveyed the sense of your remarks?’
‘What?’ You could see the strain in Michael’s eyes.
‘Is that what you said?’ Maxwell made the boy’s life easier for him.
‘Yeah.’
‘Good – if a little heartless, Michael, me ol’ mucker. Geraldine doesn’t have an ounce of fat on her from where I’m standing.’ Where Maxwell was standing was at the front of his class, the indescribable 10D, they who had contributed to the early retirement of at least three members of staff at Leighford High and the incipient nervous breakdown of a fourth.
‘So.’ The class were rapt by the Great Man’s delivery. Moments like these were pure joy. Not so much fun for Geraldine and Michael, however. ‘At that point, Geraldine, suitably disquieted by Michael’s momentary lapse of good manners, you did what any other genteel young lady would do – you fetched him a powerful kick to the bollocks …’
10D convulsed in hysterics.
‘… from which he may never fully recover. What do you have to say for yourself?’
‘He asked for it.’
‘Of course he did,’ Maxwell nodded sympathetically. ‘He said, “Geraldine, please place your rather ugly, but probably fashionable, platform heeled boots into my genital area, as is your right in today’s egalitarian society.” And how could you, loyal colleague that you are, let him down?’
He took a careful hold on the girl’s shoulder and placed her directly in front of him. For that alone, at this pinko-liberal end of the century, Peter Maxwell knew he could be done for assault. Geraldine knew it too, because all children born since 1979, the Year of the Child, had it ingrained in them by their parents that life was all about rights. Responsibilities? Nah, they used to have them in the olden times; not now.
‘Now, Geraldine, in the good old days, I would have put you over my knee and spanked you soundly’
‘You can’t do that!’ the sullen girl blurted out.
‘Indeed not,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Thanks to the Court of Idiot Rights. I would then have taken you, Michael,’ and he placed the boy in front of him too, ‘out behind the bicycle shed and given you the thrashing you both deserve, probably with a rattan cane of fearsome dimensions.’
‘You wouldn’t …’ Lads were less sure of themselves with male teachers than were girls.
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Maxwell reassured him, smiling broadly. ‘No cane. So, instead, I’ll just pop you both in detention, giving you of course the statutory twenty-four hours’ notice. And that nice Mr Garrett, the Deputy Headmaster from hell, will give you a jolly good letting off.’
There was a knock at the door and Thingee, the office junior who was on the switchboard, stood there.
‘Now, sit down,’ Maxwell barked, Mr Nice Guy having disappeared, ‘at opposite ends of the room. And any more of this nonsense and I’ll put my career on the line and knock you two into the middle of next week.’ He leaned and bellowed into the lad’s ear. ‘Got it, Einstein?’
The boy winced and made a dash for his chair. As she saw the Maxwellian lip poise to assault her eardrums too, the girl did the same.
‘Now, Thingee,’ Maxwell turned with a satisfied sigh, ‘while the class continues to practise their GNVQ in joined-up writing for the remaining two minutes, to what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘Oh, Mr Maxwell, I’m sorry to interrupt your lesson.’
‘Not at all,’ the Head of Sixth Form bowed, ‘I am honoured that you should give it the title of lesson. I’d say it was closer to a saloon brawl.’
‘It’s just that there’s an urgent ‘phone call, from a Miss Carpenter. She sounded anxious. I didn’t just want to pop it in your pigeonhole.’
‘Quite right, my dear.’ Maxwell took the slip of paper from the slip of a girl. ‘Remind me to see the Headmaster about promoting you.’
‘Jacquie?’ Maxwell could be as conspiratorial as Cassius when he had a mind. And today was only Tuesday. He still had a mind left in the early part of the week. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you straight away. Thirty little swine eager to catch my pearls. What’s up?’
‘It’s Alice,’ he heard the voice say on a bad line, breaking up, ‘it’s Alice Goode. They’ve found her. Can we meet?’
Theirs was the only car parked on the edge of the park known as The Dam that May night. Other couples hadn’t arrived yet, except for the pair whose respective parents had said they had to be in by ten. They’d been and gone.
Peter Maxwell wasn’t there for adolescent fumblings. He’d been there and done that. In different cars, different times. And for more years than he cared to remember he’d been fumbling at the chalk face with adolescents ever since. Only in the strictly professional sense, of course.
‘I’m only telling you this because it’s going to hit the fan tomorrow anyway. Christ, why do I feel so guilty?’ Jacquie Carpenter looked softer in the moonlight, younger, less harrowed by her world.
‘Where was she?’
‘They found her dumped in the car park of a restaurant – The Devil’s Ladle at the Devil’s Punchbowl, near Hindhead. Do you know it?’
‘I know the Punchbowl,’ he nodded. ‘Not the restaurant.’
‘It’s likely she was dumped in the early hours of Monday morning. Nobody seems to have seen the bundle there before that.’
‘Bundle?’
‘She was wrapped in lino.’
‘Wow!’ Maxwell’s eyes widened.
‘What?’
‘Well, that establishes quite a bit.’
‘Does it? Why?’ She looked at the inscrutable old History Man through narrowed eyes.
‘Well, I thought lino had disappeared along with bags of blue for washing and planes going bang through the sound barrier. It at least proves chummie is an elderly gentleman.’
‘They still make lino,’ Jacquie told him, ‘and anyway, this wasn’t new stuff. It could have come from anywhere.’
Maxwell had been saving the next question up, but he couldn’t save it any longer. ‘How did she die?’ He was looking at the dashboard. When you asked one young girl how another young girl was murdered, you didn’t look her in the face. Not happily. Not if you were Mad Max.
Jacquie Carpenter’s professional life flashed before her. The Pinko-Liberal Brigade never saw it, but there were ethics in her job. The lads knew. The lads who stood by you when you told a mother her son was dead, smashed to pulp by a joyriders’ car; or when you told a weeping father that his little girl had overdosed on E. But Peter Maxwell wasn’t one of them. ‘She was strangled, Max,’ she heard herself saying nevertheless, as though in a nightmare of betrayal. What was she doing here? Why was she telling him all this? ‘Doc Astley seems to think it’s one of those things kids draw graphs with.’
‘A flexicurve. Bit short, isn’t it?’ Maxwell frowned.
‘Not if he pressed down on both sides. That would do it.’
‘Had she been assaulted?’
‘Yes.’
Sh
e couldn’t say any more. Wouldn’t say any more. He didn’t ask her.
They sat for a moment, both of them staring ahead. ‘Max,’ she spoke first, watching the moon dapple on the line of silver birches that ringed the car park, ‘it’ll be a circus at Leighford tomorrow. Mr Hall will be on to your Head first thing in the morning, but you know what the media are like.’
‘I do.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘We’ve been this way before, Jacquie, when Jenny Hyde was found.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Is there news of Ronnie?’ he asked, ‘Any hint?’
Her eyes flickered away from his, ‘No,’ she said, ‘nothing concrete.’
‘Concrete is grey stuff,’ he told her, ‘that they make buildings from. Oops, pardon my preposition. You’re being evasive, Woman Policeman Carpenter.’
She sighed. ‘You know,’ she said, looking at him for the first time, ‘the Gestapo missed a real gem when they didn’t hire you.’
‘Ha ha,’ he chuckled, ‘so Heinrich told me. What is it you’re not telling me?’
Her fingers rapped a furious tattoo on the steering wheel. She was in a corner again. A corner of her own making. And there was no way out. ‘What … what I am telling you is that the boys went round to the Parsons again last night. They specifically asked Ronnie’s mum about his flexicurve. She said he had one, but she didn’t know where it was.’
‘That’s it?’ Maxwell had waited the regulation five seconds for an explanation, ‘I’m not sure I could tell you where my Pink Panther boxer shorts are, either, if you pressed me. But that doesn’t mean I’ve left them draped round the neck of a woman I’ve just strangled.’
‘It’s not just that,’ Jacquie started up the engine which roared into life. ‘I’ve told you this bloody much. I may as well tell you the rest. It’s a letter. They found a bloody letter.’
A letter, Count,’ Maxwell sat with his feet on the pouffe. Metternich raised his aristocratic head, scenting the air, scenting danger. ‘To be exact “a bloody letter”. What bloody letter is that, I hear you ask, cleverly parodying the Bard? I haven’t the faintest idea, since Woman Policeman Carpenter got a fit of the consciences at that point and clammed up. Must be difficult for her, though, involving me like she is. I wonder why she’s doing that? I tried every trick in and out of the Maxwell Book of How To Charm Slightly Unprofessional Policewomen, but she wasn’t having any. Perhaps it’s just as well. I wouldn’t want her to be landed in it. So that means … no, don’t interrupt … Daddy’s thinking. That means that after that bloody interminable staff meeting tomorrow pip emma, White Surrey and I will be nipping round to the Parsonage. After all, they can only slam the door in my face.’
