Maxwell's Chain

by M. J. Trow

  ‘I must ask him if he got a message, although it probably isn’t any of my business. I promised Jacquie I’d keep out of this one, Count.’

  Metternich cocked a disbelieving eyebrow at him. If he had a rat cutlet for every time he’d heard that one.

  ‘No, I did.’ Maxwell sensed the cat’s disbelief. ‘I really am going to leave it alone.’

  Metternich settled down for a bit more kip, paws over nose, nose up bum. Usual thing – the contortionist’s dream, the sort of thing Louis Wain used to see without even going off on one.

  Nolan burbled in his sleep and replaced his sucking fingers in his mouth.

  The central heating pinged as a distant pipe cooled.

  ‘Oh, dammit, Count. Of course I’m not. Who am I kidding?’ Maxwell stabbed the numbers into the phone and paused with it to his ear.

  Why did they do that? Metternich wondered for the millionth time. He’ll start talking in a minute. Yep, there he goes.

  ‘Bill? Bill, it’s Max.’

  The thing by his ear squawked and he wandered into the kitchen. There were some things a man didn’t want his son or his cat to hear.

  ‘Calm down, Bill.’ It was a damn-near perfect Michael Winner. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that. Oh, is it? Why has she gone back to her mother? Surely her mother only lives in Leighford, so she hasn’t gone far.’ Maxwell listened, with the phone slightly away from his ear, then sighed. ‘I do understand, Bill. Look,’ he crossed his fingers to counteract the lie that was on its way. ‘I’m sure Jacquie would love to have you for a few days. Come on round. Yes, no, really. I’ll see you shortly.’

  He rang off and walked back into the sitting room. Two pairs of big round eyes, brown and golden, were looking at him in what he assumed was horror.

  ‘All right, all right. There’s no need to look at me like that, either of you. I’m sure she’ll be fine about it.’ But it was a worried man who sat down again on the sofa. He dialled once more and sat while the call connected. He looked down and found he hadn’t yet uncrossed his fingers. Probably just as well.

  They swept around that brave curve by the river, where the road ran on to Angmering and Littlehampton, driving over the bridge with the Howards’ great castle staring down at them. Jacquie glanced to her right, to the stretch of river that followed the riverbank and remembered a night long, long ago when she’d wandered there with a boy. And he’d kissed her in the sunset’s flare on the water. And she felt her heart leap again. Just a little. Just for a moment. Whatever happened to Johnny Depp? She caught sight of the gently snoring DCI beside her and it jolted her back to reality. Johnny Depp was another fantasy altogether. The lad’s name was actually Tommy Gluck and he had a speech impediment. No doubt by now he had eight kids, a nagging mother-in-law and hairs were starting to grow out of his ears. Ah, the dream of young love.

  She parked the Ka with a bit of a bounce, hoping it would wake Hall up. The DCI had been out of it since Leighford. She didn’t want the job of having to shake him awake. He sat upright with a jerk (no reflection on Jacquie of course), straightening his glasses in a reflex movement. He cleared his throat and shrugged his jacket straight.

  ‘Do you have such a thing as a mint?’ he asked Jacquie. ‘My mouth feels horrible.’

  Jacquie foraged in her bag looking for one of those breath Things That Stick To The Roof Of Your Mouth and brought out a pack of Haribo Jelly Bears. She always carried some about her person; they were Maxwell’s favourite, after Southern Comfort, a rarish steak, coq au vin, prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau; well, he was a child of the sixties. She proffered the bag.

  ‘Hmm, no thanks,’ Henry Hall felt he had lost enough gravitas on this journey. This was not the time to admit he only ate the black ones. There’d be all kinds of ethnic questions over that.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jacquie said, trying to restore some dignity into the proceedings. ‘Do we know who lives here? Parents? Just one parent?’

  ‘I believe that we will be meeting a Mrs Marianne Crown, previously Mrs Kent, Lara’s mother, and her husband, Lara’s stepfather.’

  ‘I see. Do we know how long ago the girl left home?’

  ‘Well, the dog was not very old, according to the vet. Two or thereabouts. She had him microchipped, probably around about eighteen, twenty months ago at the most. So, we’re looking at any time since summer before last up to last week.’

  ‘Right.’ They walked across the drive of the thirties house. Average. Everyday. Trim without opulence. Nothing out of the ordinary. Hardly the house of a murder victim. Yet Hall and Jacquie knew that was nonsense. It could be any house. Anywhere. Anytime. Jacquie knocked on the door. While she waited for it to open, she turned quickly to Hall. ‘Just one last thing, guv. Do they know how she was living?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, then, quickly, ‘Here we go.’

  A shadow had appeared across the reeded glass of the door and it was eased open on a chain. One eye and a balding head partly filled the gap.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello, Mr Crown,’ Jacquie began. ‘We are from…’

  ‘Not today, thank you,’ the man said and firmly shut the door.

  ‘No, no,’ Jacquie lowered her mouth to the letterbox. ‘We are from Leighford Police. We rang…’

  The sound of genteelly raised voices from behind the door, followed by a scuffle, preceded the opening of the door. A pretty woman, about forty-five but not looking it, stood there. Her eyes were red, but otherwise her make-up and hair were immaculate.

  ‘I do apologise,’ she said, ushering them in. ‘I try to get to the door first, but he does so love to answer it and I’m not always quick enough. Come in, come in.’ She pointed to her left. ‘We’re through there.’

  They squeezed past her into a room dominated by an enormous cream leather sofa, complete with footstools and matching cushions. Already sitting sulkily at one end was the owner of the eye and bald head. He didn’t look inclined to introduce himself, so Jacquie and Henry Hall took the initiative.

  ‘Mr Crown,’ Jacquie said, ‘I am Detective Sergeant Carpenter from Leighford.’

  He ignored her.

  ‘I am DCI Henry Hall,’ said Hall, in the slightly wheedling tone which even he adopted when faced with the recalcitrant elderly.

  Lara’s mother came in behind them. ‘Take no notice of him,’ she said. ‘He can be very rude sometimes.’ She ushered them into chairs crammed into opposite corners of the room, completely overwhelmed by the sofa. She took a seat at the opposite end of the monstrous thing to the sulky old man. She looked expectantly at them.

  Henry Hall began. ‘Mrs Crown, I am not sure quite what you have been told, but we are afraid that we have some bad news for you. A body was found last night in Leighford and it was carrying identification which leads us to suspect it is your daughter, Lara.’

  The woman nodded, appearing to be calm, but Jacquie noticed the clenched fist in her lap. Sudden death took people in different ways. And it changed from day to day.

  Henry Hall continued. ‘Do you have a picture of Lara? Something recent?’

  The woman got up and fetched a picture from the windowsill. It was crowded with pictures, but there was only the one with Lara in it. ‘It’s not particularly new,’ she apologised. ‘It’s from when she was my bridesmaid.’

  ‘When was this?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘August, year before last.’

  Henry Hall allowed himself a little mental tick in that box.

  ‘Nothing more recent?’

  ‘No. She left home a few weeks after this was taken. She didn’t take to my husband much.’

  Looking at the miserable old creature hunched grumpily on the end of the sofa, Jacquie could quite see why.

  ‘She had a place at university anyway – Bath Spa – so she would have been going, but…’ the woman’s face crumpled and she couldn’t speak for a moment. There was no move of affection from Crown, no urge to comfort her. ‘But, I expected her back, you know, from
time to time. Vacations. Bringing friends back. We’d have made them welcome.’ The last sentence was a wail, a cry for understanding. ‘But we never saw her again. She never came back, not even for Christmas. We rang the university, but she had never even signed in there. She’d just disappeared.’

  Hall was struck, and not for the first time, by the distance of families. Two of his three had gone to university and he and Margaret had driven them both there, saw their rooms, got the feel of the place.

  ‘Did you report her missing?’ Jacquie asked.

  The woman looked confused. ‘No. Why should we?’

  The policepersons looked at each other, bemused. ‘Well,’ said Hall, ‘she was missing, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Well, yes…but…’

  ‘You’d had a row,’ Hall completed her sentence. ‘You knew she had left home on purpose.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s it,’ she said. A slightly unpleasant smirk came over her tear-stained face. ‘And I was newly married. I was, well, you know, otherwise engaged.’

  There was a joke in there somewhere and Jacquie could hardly prevent herself from laughing out loud. And the thought that the miserable old sod caught in the grip of that huge sofa could keep anyone engaged was unbelievable. Maybe he was a multimillionaire with only three months to live. While everyone searched for the next, non-embarrassing, thing to say, there was the sound of a key in the front door. The door into the lounge opened and a man walked in. He was around twenty-seven or so, dressed in fitness clothes, gym bag in his hand. Jacquie had to admit it; he was frankly gorgeous. Henry Hall was not as instantly smitten as Jacquie. He stood and held out his hand.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I am DCI Henry Hall. And you are?’

  ‘Mike Crown,’ the hunk replied. He turned to Lara’s mother. ‘Are you all right, darling?’ He planted a kiss on her cheek. ‘I am so sorry to be late, but we went to another set.’ He looked at the old geezer. ‘Dad behaving himself?’

  ‘Not really,’ his wife said, gazing adoringly at him. ‘Sit down, darling. I’m afraid it is bad news.’

  ‘Oh, sweetie,’ he said, without a trace of emotion and turned to Hall and Jacquie. ‘It’s her, then. Been dead long? Since she went, I mean?’

  Henry Hall could not keep the ice out of his voice. Now that the family entanglements had been sorted out, it ought to have been better; in fact, it was slightly worse. ‘No, Mr Crown,’ he all but spat. ‘She has not. She has been dead just over two days. In the months between, we believe she has been living rough or in squats, with her dog. She has recently been selling the Big Issue in Leighford.’

  Crown seemed oblivious to his tone. He may be better looking than his dad, Jacquie thought to herself, but he takes ‘horrible’ to new depths.

  ‘Oh, right. We wondered where she’d gone, didn’t we, darl?’

  Marianne Crown had lost all semblance of distress. Her daughter may be dead, but her gorgeous young husband was still here and that was, after all, what counted. ‘Well, she’d just gone off, honey, hadn’t she?’ she fluttered at him. ‘We hardly missed her, after a bit. They grow away from you, don’t they, in the end?’

  Do they? Jacquie wondered. Would that little pink thing she had at home, cuddling into her neck when he was tired and twining his fingers into her hair, ever grow away? And what would it do to her if he did? Jesus, she realised, she’d become Marianne Crown.

  ‘He missed her, I reckon,’ came a growl from the end of the sofa. They had all forgotten Mr Crown Senior.

  His son jumped up and bundled him from the room. ‘Now, then, Dad,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go and do some gardening or something?’ They could still hear him muttering as he made his way down the hall. ‘Mum died a few months ago,’ Crown said. ‘Dad came to stay for a bit and he’s proving a little difficult to dislodge. But Marianne’s a wonder with him, aren’t you, darl?’

  She simpered. But the police pair had noted his comment and it clarified a lot of things for them. It’s all very well marrying an older wife with her own home. But it’s even better if she has a pretty daughter on the premises to remind you you’re still young.

  Neither Jacquie nor Henry Hall had much stomach for continuing the interview once Superman arrived. They took the photograph with them, carefully removed from its silver frame by Crown before he handed it over. They paid lip service to their condolences, walked silently down the path and got into the car, faces frozen in blank expressions until they were safely up the road. Only then did they turn to face each other.

  ‘What a wanker,’ Jacquie exploded.

  ‘Now, now,’ said Henry Hall, awake now, driving and in control. ‘That’s such a nasty, judgemental word. We never use that at home.’

  Jacquie looked crestfallen.

  ‘No, for people like Crown, we always prefer “tosser”.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘But I left a message,’ Maxwell was placatory. He knew he was looking his best; a bathed, changed, fed and smiley baby in one hand, a gin and tonic, ice and lemon, in the other.

  ‘True.’ Jacquie took the baby and the gin from him, not necessarily in that order. A kiss and a sip and things might look better. She tried both. No, no good, it still sounded rubbish. And it was all made worse by the fact that they were carrying on this conversation at a low hum, through the clenched teeth of secrecy. ‘I don’t understand why you invited a suspect in my latest murder case to stay with us.’

  ‘I’m not sure I invited him, as such.’ Maxwell, relieved of son and gin, flopped down in his chair. ‘He had left about a million messages and Emma has left him and…well, I knew you wouldn’t really mind. You can’t seriously think he is a suspect. I mean, go and look at him. He just doesn’t look like a murderer.’

  ‘Neither did Crippen. Nor do I, but I may well become one in a minute. I don’t want to ask this, but where would I go, were I wishing to look at him?’

  ‘Ermm…in the spare room?’

  ‘What? My spare room, I mean, our spare room? Here? In this house?’

  ‘Well, yes, woman policeman. Where else do we have spare rooms?’

  ‘At my mother’s fortunately. Because I think that’s where I’ll have to go if he stays here.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It isn’t that serious.’ To Maxwell, for anyone to consider seriously living with Jacquie’s mother, there would have had to have been a nuclear holocaust.

  ‘Yes, Max, it is that serious.’ Nolan sensed the mood of the moment. His Mummy was upset. His Daddy was a prat. What’s a boy to do? He put his fingers on Jacquie’s lips as if to say ‘Hush, now’. But she wasn’t having any of it and gently turned her head away. ‘William Lunt is a suspect in the murder of Lara Kent. Not a very suspect suspect, I grant you, but he is on file in the police station where I work! Max, this is extreme, even for you.’

  Maxwell got up and made for the door. ‘You’re right. I was stupid. But he is just so…pathetic, somehow. I just know he didn’t do it. Why should he? He didn’t know her or anything.’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t? I’ve got the stats somewhere of the number of murderers who “find” their victims. They can’t bear the wait for somebody else to happen on it and they try to control the proceedings. You only see Lunt once a year for the annual photo. Just because he is married to an Old Leighford Highena doesn’t make him automatically innocent, you know.’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m sorry. Metternich told me I was doing a stupid thing, but if I didn’t ignore him sometimes, he’d be unbearable.’ He moved onto the landing and started up the stairs. ‘I will get him to leave. I don’t think he’ll mind. The shop certainly does well enough for him to afford a hotel if he can’t bear it at home.’

  She blew him a kiss. ‘Thank you, Max. You know it makes sense.’ She settled down to play aimlessly with Nolan’s toes. She didn’t know whether he liked it or not, but it certainly calmed her down. ‘Piggy,’ he gurgled, which she hoped referred to the game and not his mother’s profession. She had only got as far as the
porcine who had roast beef before Maxwell was back.

  ‘Problem solved,’ he said, his brow furrowed.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He appears to have gone.’

  ‘Gone? You mean, out? Or gone, as in taken all his things?’

  ‘Gone. Left. Vamoosed.’

  Jacquie immediately felt bad. ‘Oh, Max, do you think he heard us? I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.’ Jacquie’s stomach somersaulted in the way it does for all of us at moments like these. The rational bit – that Bill Lunt had overheard their whispered conversation, taken umbrage and packed his bags, creeping noiselessly past their open door; and all in a few minutes, never entered her head.

  ‘Does a suspect have feelings?’ he asked her, one eyebrow raised. Maxwell was not one of those blokes Julius Caesar would have wanted with him on the Ides of March, that’s for sure.

  ‘Oh, please. I feel awful.’

  He crossed the room and gave her an absentminded hug. ‘Where’s he gone, though?’

  ‘I expect he’s gone home,’ she said. ‘At least, I hope he has. I would imagine when they released him without charge, they asked him not to leave the immediate area.’

  ‘Yes, I expect you’re right, heart,’ he said. ‘He will have gone home. I mean, as you so rightly say, there was no reason for him not to be at home.’ They sat in silence for a while. ‘I wonder if he’s had time to get back yet?’ Maxwell added.

  ‘It all depends when he left, I suppose,’ Jacquie said, shifting Nolan onto the other arm. She suddenly got up and went to the phone. ‘For goodness’ sake, Max. Why don’t we behave like adults? What’s his number?’

  ‘Battle of Barnet,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ Jacquie tapped in 1471. ‘Has no one phoned since him, then?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell said, fighting down the urge to hug her. He’d make an historian of her yet, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to let her know how proud he was. On the other hand, Nolan didn’t seem to have any grasp of dates at all, and he was fifteen months old next Thursday.