Maxwell's Chain

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Henry rang,’ she breezed, still in brittle, Jolly Hockeysticks mode, ‘I’d just set off home, and I’d already done enough overtime for a decade, so I’m joining the team tomorrow.’ Her icy resolve broke. ‘Max, how could you?’ She suddenly sounded like a furious mix of Margaret Meldrew and Barbara Good. ‘You nearly died not ten months ago.’

  ‘I’m allowed an accident, surely,’ he muttered, taking the chance and pouring himself a drink.

  ‘Yes, an accident. Anyone is allowed one of those. But someone was trying to kill you, Max. Because you were snooping about.’

  They had been indeed. And they’d got to old White Surrey’s brakes just to make a point. Maxwell could be flippant about it now, although he still had the headaches from time to time.

  ‘Yes, but Bill…’

  ‘Bill being?’

  ‘Bill Lunt. The mad photographer?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Lunt. Chief suspect, according to Henry.’

  Maxwell turned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I sensed a bit of a niggle there. What is Henry’s problem?’ he asked, exasperated. ‘He’d have his doubts about Padre Pio.’ A bad call perhaps – a lot of people had their doubts about Padre Pio. Except that Jacquie didn’t know who he was.

  ‘He led you straight to the body,’ she reminded him. ‘Apparently the footprints don’t diverge from the path to it by even an inch.’

  ‘Well, he knew where he had taken his picture from,’ Maxwell played photographer’s advocate. ‘So he just followed his eyeline.’

  ‘What was his landmark, then?’ She leant forward, as someone laying the final trump card.

  He leant back on the sofa opposite her, as someone with an ace up his sleeve. ‘The moon, in actual fact,’ he said, smugly. ‘He was taking photographs of the moon for the Leighford Photographer of the Year competition and the murder took place while he was doing it. Coincidentally, I mean. The murderer wasn’t posing for him or anything.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. So we’ve got some slavering werewolf out there, have we? Bad moon rising and all?’

  Maxwell ignored her. ‘So, when we got to the dunes, it was about the same time and so the moon was the same…Do you think Henry will realise that?’

  ‘What, that the moon is the same?’

  ‘Well, he wanted time of death. The moon in the picture will help him there, won’t it? I mean, I expect there’s a website or something, is there? About the moon?’

  Jacquie sat up straight and looked at her man. Then she got up and went across to sit by him. She stroked his hair and gave him a kiss. ‘I learn a bit more about you every day, Peter Maxwell,’ she said, softly. ‘You always chunter when you’re feeling a bit fragile. And, by the way, the latest police think tank says that there is a link between the moon and psychotic behaviour.’

  ‘Several million werewolves can’t be wrong,’ he nodded. ‘It’s like anthropy, only different. And, by the way, my money’s still on Ollie Reed.’

  He smiled at her and leant in to her fondling hand. ‘It was a bit of a shock, you know,’ he conceded. ‘A hand, just by his foot. That meant, just by mine. I was right behind him.’ He sighed. ‘It was young.’

  ‘Ah, sweetie,’ she said, frowning and smoothing his cheek. ‘It wasn’t one of Yours, you know.’

  He looked up at her. ‘I hope not,’ he said. He swirled the Southern Comfort in his glass. ‘It was dirty. Young and dirty.’

  ‘Well, it would be, Max,’ she said, trying to be a bit businesslike. ‘It had been buried in the sand.’

  ‘No, not just sandy. Really dirty. Ground-in dirt, broken fingernails. Uncared for and unwashed.’

  ‘What, you mean, someone living rough?’

  ‘That kind of thing, yes.’

  ‘That’s not terribly common in Leighford,’ she said. ‘That’s more of a big city thing. Big town, at least. Brighton. Portsmouth.’

  ‘I haven’t seen any kids like that around, I admit,’ Maxwell said. He saw more from the saddle of his bike than most coppers saw in a month of Sundays from their patrol cars. ‘I usually notice their dogs first, in fact. They’ve always got great big dogs, haven’t they?’ Metternich stirred in his sleep. His antennae had registered a warming of the atmosphere, but even so, when he had had a few more minutes’ shuteye, he thought he might go and sleep outside His Boy’s room. You couldn’t be too careful. Now the subject had turned to d**s, he thought the time was ripe. He got up, stretched extravagantly and sauntered up the stairs. They watched him go and smiled at each other.

  ‘Who’d have thought the old chap would go soft like that?’ Jacquie said. ‘You can set your watch by him these nights.’

  Maxwell, who, from the quiet of the War Office, his night-time attic, often heard the last squeak of some poor rodent as Metternich did his nightly rounds, smiled at the thought of the great black and white beast going soft. Even so, he was glad he and the baby got on. It would have been a shame if they had had to get rid of one of them. He’d got quite fond of little Nolan.

  Chapter Three

  The breeze off the sea got colder as the night wore on. The SOCO team shivered as the sweat cooled inside their plastic suits, but they had to carry on. Despite the fact that the body was buried above the tide line, the sand of the dune was notoriously unstable; a windy night could destroy even more than Maxwell and Bill Lunt had already. So, they worked on, in the harsh light of the arc lamps, the fine sand stinging their eyes, searching for the tiny piece of evidence that might nail a killer.

  Slowly, the body belonging to the hand emerged. They had expected someone young – Maxwell’s estimate was correct; it was young. About twenty, as far as the SOCOs could judge, though with dead eyes obscured by the sand stuck to the once damp corneas and the frantic mouth filled with a silent scream of soft dune, it was at first difficult to tell. The sex could go either way, too; the chopped hair could belong to both. Then as their brushes revealed more, it became clear – their body was female, thin and unkempt, wearing the obligatory anorak, sweatshirt with a barely discernible logo, and jeans, worn away to strings at the hem, all stained now with blood from the stab wounds in the abdomen. On her feet, a pair of trainers two sizes too big. Across her shoulder, a bag of Big Issues; the current copy, wet and mangled like old blotting paper only the oldest member of the team remembered from his childhood. Also in the bag, in a side pocket, was a stash of coins, clearly the takings of the day. The other stash, of some rolling tobacco and a small bag of cannabis, was irrelevant now. But it did show that this wasn’t a random mugging. The clothes didn’t look interfered with, so they started playing with the assumption that sex wasn’t the motive either. In fact, as one shrouded figure remarked to another, there was no reason at all for her to be here, buried and dead, on the dunes outside Leighford, beyond the sweep of Willow Bay. The one thing missing was her Big Issue ID. Then, even that wasn’t missing any more as the probing fingers of Brian Meredith found it, a tatty piece of laminated card, tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. He turned it to the light and squinted to read it.

  ‘Lara Kent,’ he read. ‘No address, though.’

  ‘I don’t expect she’s got one, has she?’ Henry Hall loomed behind the man, bending forward from the waist to see the card. ‘She was selling the Big Issue, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘Yes, guv, but that’s no reason to suppose she’s got no address. If she’s selling the Issue, she’s trying to help herself at least.’

  ‘Don’t lecture me, Brian,’ said Hall. Sometimes, he felt as old as the hills and as right wing as Genghis Khan. And he was always surrounded by Pinko-Liberals, the new policemen of the new generation. ‘Is there a number or something on that card?’

  Meredith turned it over. ‘Yes, on the back, look.’ He held it up.

  ‘Right,’ said Hall. ‘As soon as you can raise someone, find out as much as possible about her. Meanwhile, get a copy of that ID photo. It’s probably the best picture we’ll get of her, at least for a while. If we can’t scare up some relatives or friends,
we may have to go door to door.’

  A horrified gasp grabbed their attention. Alyson Sheridan, one of the team working off to the right of the burial site, nearer the sea, had jumped to her feet and was standing, staring at the ground, the back of her hand to her mouth. They all waded through the sliding dune to cluster behind her. There, emerging from the sand, was the body of a dog. Indeterminate of breed, it was, as Maxwell had foretold, a great big dog, thin as its mistress, with a matted coat and studded collar. It too had been stabbed repeatedly and the blood was caked around its flanks.

  Hall nodded to Alyson, steadying her by the shoulders before letting her stumble off up the dune, looking for fresh air when she was, in fact, surrounded by it. ‘Isn’t it odd,’ he remarked to no one in particular, ‘how a human body just makes us pick up our brushes and cameras. A dead dog makes us feel sick.’ Maxwell would have agreed and he would have reminded all and sundry that they set up the RSPCA forty years before the NSPCC. The moral? A dog is not just for Christmas; it’ll get you life.

  ‘I put it down to Old Yeller,’ said Meredith. The film was being endlessly reshown on the Movies for Wimps channel.

  ‘I put it down to not being professional,’ Hall said, looking up the hill to where Alyson was being comforted by a WPC in uniform. He never watched any movie channels. ‘Could someone make sure that whoever the fainting violet is is taken off live duty and sent for a bit of retraining.’

  ‘Oh, come on, guv…’ the SOCO leader began, and stopped as the blank glasses turned to him. To hide his confusion, Meredith bent to the dog’s body. ‘That’s weird,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Hall hunkered down beside him.

  ‘There’s blood on his mouth, as well.’

  ‘He bit someone, do you think? Or is it from the lungs?’

  ‘Bit someone, let’s hope.’ He swabbed the dog’s canine tooth and capped and labelled the swab. ‘And…hang on…look, just there. It’s hard to tell in this light, but is that a thread, caught in his teeth?’

  Hall peered closer, but couldn’t be sure. He’d been on the dunes now for nearly five hours, feeling like something out of Bloody Omaha. Life’s a beach and then you die. ‘Somebody bag this dog’s head,’ he called. ‘It’s priority. Take the body to the morgue with the girl.’

  ‘Jim Astley’s going to go ballistic,’ Meredith said.

  ‘So, what’s new?’ said Hall, letting the cold and lateness of the hour strip him of his usual professionalism. ‘He goes ballistic if you wish him happy birthday. It’s how he knows he’s still alive. Stuck in there with bodies and Donald. It’s enough to drive anybody nuts.’

  One by one, the team withdrew from the murder site, leaving just some fluttering police tape to tell the world that they had been there in the first grey light of another winter dawn. The depressions that had held the bodies slowly filled up with shifting sand, as the dune healed itself. No one was there this time, to take pictures of nothing happening. Even a camera wouldn’t have seen the mobile phone, two dunes away, sink with infinitesimal slowness, deeper into the sand, its battery dying, its messages hidden forever in the oblivion of its grave.

  Jim Astley did indeed go ballistic. People in the corridors of power had expected him to move on, move up, move out years ago, but the old curmudgeon was still there, seeing himself as a latter-day Simpson or Spilsbury. Unlike them, however, he didn’t get the headlines, but like medical men the world over he had delusions of grandeur and it was his arrogance, more than anything else, that kept him in post. True, he couldn’t crouch in awkward crime scenes any more and recently his glasses had fallen into a few too many patients, but, by definition, they tended not to complain very much. Now he had been dragged out of his nice warm house, away from a nice full English. His lab at Leighford Mortuary was full of sand and the smell of wet, slightly decaying, dead dog. The girl he could deal with later, Hall had said, which was damned good of him, really. The dog was the one holding the clues.

  ‘I think he bit someone, Jim,’ Hall said from his end of the lab. He wasn’t squeamish, as DCIs went, but he knew better than anyone the need to give Astley room to work – not possible elbow to elbow. ‘There’s thread caught in his teeth. We need to source that. And DNA the blood from round his mouth. We’ve swabbed that. We also need to get a breed, if we can. Add it to the door to door. People remember dogs.’

  The door of the laboratory squeaked open and swung shut. Another smell vied with that of dog. It was Donald, Astley’s assistant, borne in on a waft of McDonald’s All-in All-day Breakfast Special. Donald had something of the Incredible Bulk about him these days, except that he wasn’t green and nobody liked him anyway, whether he was angry or not.

  ‘Donald,’ Astley said waspishly, glancing at the lab clock. ‘Glad you could make it.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Donald, licking his fingers and doing up his gown in a complicated movement made possible only through long practice. ‘I was in the area anyway. Morning, Mr Hall.’

  Hall could never work out whether Donald was extremely bright or extremely stupid. It may have been that even Donald didn’t know.

  Astley turned to his assistant. ‘We have here two bodies, one, over there,’ he tossed his head in the girl’s direction, ‘and the other, apparently more urgent, here.’ He gestured at the dog.

  Donald looked closely. ‘Greyhound cross,’ he said. ‘Hmm, I’d say probably with something like an Airedale, something like that. About two hundred pounds worth of dog there, I’d guess.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Hall and Astley said together. Then Hall went solo.

  ‘Do you mean people pay for mongrels like that?’

  ‘Well,’ Donald said. ‘Not a mongrel specifically, you see. It’s a cross-breed, but we know what breeds. A greyhound,’ he traced the line of the dog’s back and tail, ‘and an…mmm, I still think Airedale.’ He held up the dog’s matted head, showing the tell-tale square jaw and alert ears. ‘People buy them for the temperament, both placid and loyal, in this case. Other crosses are bred for viciousness – Staffordshire and, well almost anything. Or for working; any of the terriers and say a cocker. They can be a bit nasty-tempered, but good for ratting, say.’

  ‘And you’re an expert in this how, exactly?’ Astley spat. Not only did his lab smell like the aftermath of Crufts, but now Donald was effortlessly holding the floor. It was not a situation with which Astley was particularly familiar.

  ‘Oh, my granddad has a farm, just outside Lewes,’ he said. ‘He has a few cross-breeds and I got interested.’

  Hall interrupted. ‘So, you could trace the breeder?’ he asked.

  ‘Not likely,’ Donald said. ‘You could trace the owner, though.’

  Astley rolled his eyes. ‘That’s what we’re trying to do, Donald,’ he said, condescendingly.

  Hall was less sceptical. He was impressed by the big man’s knowledge, so carelessly shared. ‘How?’

  ‘Well,’ Donald said, moving away towards the sink, to wash the dog off his fingers. Even he had limits. ‘He’s chipped, isn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ asked Hall. ‘Is he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Donald. ‘Most vets do it free these days and I think I could feel it, little tiny thing, there, on his neck.’ He waved chubby fingers in the direction of the animal.

  ‘And what does this chip tell us?’ asked Hall. He had no pets. They required emotional attachment and he only had just enough to go round his family.

  ‘Well, the chip doesn’t tell us anything. But it tells us the chip company it’s registered with and they can tell you the address, all that stuff, if only the owner has kept it up to date.’ Donald smiled through the last, slick traces of his All-day Breakfast. ‘It’s a start, though, isn’t it?’

  Hall almost smiled, as much at Astley’s discomfiture as at the progress he was suddenly making. But the DCI had a reputation and he checked himself. ‘It certainly is, Donald. It certainly is. What do you do to read this chip?’

  ‘Get a vet in. They’ve got a sca
nner that reads the information.’

  Astley threw up his hands. ‘Not content with a dog, Henry, you’re now filling my lab with vets. What next? A stripper?’

  Hall walked into the lobby and made for the lift. The sight of Donald’s face brightening at the thought of a stripper would stay with him for days. As would the tongue-lashing Astley was giving Donald as Henry Hall left the building.

  The nice thing about a Friday was that the next day was always Saturday. And this week proved to be no exception. Jacquie being on duty, hard at work at the crime face, unravelling the skein that Maxwell and Bill had uncovered, Maxwell was on shopping and amusing Nolan duty. With the boy strapped securely into his buggy, only his eyes visible in the Laplander cap his dad had fitted, they meandered round the town centre. Leighford in the middle of winter was a little like Byzantium just before it fell to the Turks or Magdeburg after Wallenstein (or was it Tilley?) sacked it. The rock shops were closed for the duration, as were those that sold T-shirts, which would not now be printed-while-you-wait until late May at the earliest. Mr L’s Baguettes had gone to that great bakery in the sky. And three more charity shops were under new management. Yep, just like Byzantium.

  None of this mattered to Nolan, who had been given the shopping list to look after, and for some reason he had eaten it, just loving that old biro taste. Because of this, Maxwell now had in his shopping bag a bottle of Southern Comfort (without which no self-respecting Head of Sixth Form could be), a bag of doughnuts (which were on special offer) and a cuddly toy version of Nolan’s latest TV addiction – ‘collect the set’ (the financial death knell of parents everywhere). This would all have serious repercussions later, as the list had been for a small brown loaf, half a dozen free-range eggs and a chicken, although Jacquie didn’t specify which came first. Never mind, thought Maxwell. Close enough.