Maxwell's Crossing

by M. J. Trow

  Jacquie went and crouched at the woman’s head. ‘Mrs Hendricks? I’m Detective Inspector Carpenter. Do you remember me?’ Henry noted the dropping of the ‘Maxwell’. The Barlichway was no place for two surnames, unless one was an alias. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions, if that’s OK?’ She paused, but the woman didn’t react at all. Jacquie put out a hand and touched her arm, and the woman flinched and gave a little cry. ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Jacquie said. ‘No one will hurt you.’ It was with an effort that she bit back the ‘now’. ‘Can we get you a cup of tea? Coffee?’ She glanced at the table of drink. It was mostly extra-strong lager and whisky, in a bottle with a plain label which said simply ‘whisky’. There were a few sticky-looking alcopops and some liqueur, but nothing that was appropriate for shock brought on by your husband having his head shot off.

  The woman struggled upright and gave her nose a decisive blow. ‘Got no tea. Jim didn’t like tea, so we never got it in.’ She looked at Jacquie and the DI saw that her eyes were not just swollen with tears, but were blackened with bruises old and new. A tiny ghost of a smile touched the woman’s mouth. ‘I would love a cuppa, though.’

  Jacquie looked up at the policewoman who was standing now the big guns were here. ‘Constable, can you nip next door and borrow a tea bag?’

  ‘I can do better than that, ma’am,’ she said and put her hand in her pocket. She pulled out a tea bag in a little envelope. ‘It’s Twinings Breakfast Tea,’ she said, ‘if that’s OK, Mrs Hendricks?’

  Jacquie was amazed on more than one level: firstly that the woman had a tea bag in her pocket and secondly that she wondered whether it was the right kind. ‘I’m sure that will be fine,’ she said, smiling. She looked down at the new widow. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Ain’t got none. Jim …’

  ‘… didn’t take sugar. But do you?’

  ‘Two.’

  Jacquie looked up at the policewoman and was rewarded by the appearance of two sugar sachets from the same pocket as the tea bag. She was tempted to ask for a rabbit and a tiger to see if she could produce those as well, but this was no time for frivolity. Without taking her eyes from the magic pocket, she said, ‘Milk?’

  ‘Got that,’ the woman said. ‘Jim drank a lot of milk. For the calcium. He was … he was very healthy, Jim. He said his body was a temple.’

  Jacquie nodded to the policewoman who went out towards the kitchen, squeezing past Hall as she did so. He looked on; despite not being old enough, he felt like a proud parent when Jacquie was going through her paces. She could charm the birds out of the trees and get information out of the least promising witness. Having wound her up, he would just let her go.

  ‘Mrs Hendricks … can I call you Linda?’

  The woman looked puzzled, as though she had almost forgotten that that was her name. Jacquie remembered that her husband had routinely referred to her as Bitch, both to her face and when referring to her, even in court.

  ‘S’pose. Yeah,’ the ghost of a smile flitted again, ‘that would be nice. Linda. Yeah.’

  ‘Well, Linda, can you tell us what happened here tonight?’

  ‘We was watching the telly. It was some programme, hundred best something. Christmas telly, you know the sort of thing.’

  Hall and Jacquie exchanged glances. If this call had had just one good thing about it, it was because it was saving them from Christmas telly.

  ‘The bell went. We couldn’t work out who it was, because …’ she dropped her eyes and then flicked a glance at Hall. ‘You know how it’s been, Mr Hall. Eggs and dog shit, all that.’

  Hall had seen the reports, taken down verbatim, the obscene rants from Hendricks on the phone, in person at the station, demanding protection which was, apparently, his right. He knew his own rights, just not those of anyone else. He inclined his head to her and motioned her to go on.

  ‘Well,’ she sniffed and Jacquie offered her a clean tissue, ‘Jim went upstairs and looked down. You can see the front step from the bedroom window. He came back down again and said he couldn’t work out who it was, but he thought he knew them. He just couldn’t remember where from.’

  ‘Did he describe them to you? To see if you knew who it was?’

  Linda Hendricks laughed, a sound more like a bark, as though she had forgotten how to do it and was practising. ‘He wouldn’t expect me to know who it was,’ she said. ‘Anyway, he went to open the door.’ She closed her eyes and leant back. Tears leaked across the yellow and blue of the bruises and she pressed the already sodden tissue to her mouth. Jacquie and Hall waited for her to compose herself and after a minute she lifted her head and went on. ‘I heard him say hello, like a question, you know? Hello? Like that. Then … there was a bang.’ She paused, eyes unfocused, remembering. ‘No, not a bang. Not really loud. More a kind of pop. Like a really big balloon going off, if you know what I mean?’

  Hall and Jacquie made mental notes; something to silence the gun, or a lie.

  ‘Then … Jim didn’t come back in. It was cold with the door open, so after a bit I went to see what had happened.’

  ‘After a bit?’ Hall asked. ‘How long did you wait, Linda?’ He knew Hendricks well enough to know that she would not have done like most wives and simply kicked the door shut with a foot. That would probably have got her a re-blackened eye at the very least. When Matthew, known as Jimi, known as Jim Hendricks left a door open, that door stayed open or he would want to know the reason why.

  The woman shrugged. ‘Five minutes?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Five minutes is a long time to wait.’

  The woman hung her head, then shook it. Tears were dripping off the end of her nose and flew from side to side. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Her voice was a whisper. ‘He didn’t like me to interfere. He said I was too stupid …’ She cleared her throat, and when she went on, her voice was stronger. ‘I went out and at first I couldn’t see anyone. Then, I looked down … I didn’t know what had happened to his head! I knew it was him, from his clothes, but he didn’t have a head! I screamed. People came running …’ She started to scream again, a thin wail that went on and on, not rising or falling except when she drew a ragged breath.

  Jacquie patted her arm and Hall went outside for a paramedic who had arrived with the ambulance. He came in, a green saviour, and rummaged in his bag. Jacquie got to her feet and went outside with Hall.

  He looked down at her. ‘So, did she do it?’ he asked.

  She set her mouth for a moment, to recover from being in the path of that eldritch wail. ‘No, guv,’ she said. ‘No, she didn’t do it.’

  Skirting the tarpaulin stretched over the bloodstained snow, Hall turned and spoke over his shoulder. ‘We’ll look for the person who did, then, shall we? But not today.’

  ‘Not?’ Jacquie was staggered. Henry Hall’s watchword – or one of them at least – was to not let the grass grow under his feet.

  ‘No. It’s Christmas still, you’ve got a home to go to. So have I. So has everyone here. Let’s salvage what we can of the evening and meet tomorrow eight sharp and see what we can do. Have you had a good one, so far?’

  ‘Fabulous, actually; Christmas was never much of a thing when I was a kid, but Max and Nole certainly know how to party. They have single-handedly caused a tinsel shortage in Leighford. We had some awful people round a few days ago; I told you about the exchange teacher, I think, didn’t I?’

  ‘You mentioned it, yes. Some woman.’

  ‘She backed out. It’s a bloke now, seems nice. But the extended family … well, sooner him than me, I say. Nolan was disappointed. The father-in-law is called O’Malley …’

  Hall had sat through The Aristocats far more often than even Jacquie and Maxwell and unexpectedly hummed a bar of the song.

  ‘Yes,’ Jacquie chuckled. ‘Unfortunately, only the name is the same.’

  ‘How’s Mrs Troubridge?’ Hall had a soft spot for the old lady.

  ‘Having a whale of a time now Nole i
s bigger. She adored him from the first, of course, but now they are inseparable, pretty much.’ She stamped her feet in the cold and blew on her hands.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s get off home until tomorrow.’

  ‘I won’t argue with you, Henry,’ she said. ‘I would like to wind Christmas Day up properly. Cold turkey and pickles at midnight, or it isn’t Christmas.’

  Hall almost smiled. ‘Fried Christmas pudding for Boxing Day breakfast in our house. In fact,’ he paused with the door of his car half open, ‘let’s make that nine sharp, shall we?’ He raised his voice so his team could hear. ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow, everyone. Can you make sure everyone knows? Thanks.’ Then, to Jacquie, he said, ‘In answer to your much earlier question, Jacquie, yes, it is a merry Christmas, I believe.’ And he climbed into his car and was gone.

  Chapter Five

  As Jacquie drove down the sweep of Columbine her heart rose a little at the glow of light from behind the curtains of Number 38. Maxwell didn’t always wait up, on her instruction, but on Christmas Day there were certain traditions to be followed and if there was a man in the world who followed tradition, that man was Peter Maxwell.

  She walked up the stairs quietly, not creeping exactly, more a case of moving not loudly, and poked her head around the door of the sitting room. Maxwell was stretched out on the sofa, Metternich lying along him, mirroring his position and both spark out. Taking care not to clink, she poured a gin and tonic even stronger than the earlier aborted one of what must have been the same evening, but felt like years ago. Easing a slice of lime down the edge of the glass so that the splash didn’t wake anyone, she sat down in the chair next to the fire and gazed into the flames. Metternich flicked an ear, which may have been a greeting or something happening in a dream. Otherwise, the room was still, the only sound the faint hiss of the fake flames. She cradled her drink and sank deeper into the chair.

  ‘Matthew Hendricks,’ Maxwell suddenly said, not moving. Metternich extended a warning paw, but otherwise didn’t move either.

  Jacquie sat up as if he had screamed in her ear. ‘What?’ she said, sharply. The words had echoed so precisely what she was thinking that it made her feel a little dizzy.

  ‘Matthew Hendricks,’ Maxwell repeated. ‘Known, inevitably, as Jimi, later shortened to Jim.’ He got up carefully, dislodging Metternich claw by painful claw, and turned, propped on one elbow, to look at her over his shoulder. ‘The dead man, am I right?’

  She gathered herself together. ‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ she said, but her attempt at an Ian Richardson in House of Cards was woefully short of the mark.

  Maxwell flopped back down and brushed off his front, where Metternich had left his scattered black and white calling cards. ‘Thought so,’ he muttered, smugly, and closed his eyes again. Then, he sat back up and turned to her properly, smiling. ‘Where are my manners? You must be hungry. Turkey and pickles?’

  She nodded, still not speaking.

  ‘Just a mo, then. Branston or onions?’

  ‘Both, please.’

  ‘Pig. Cold roasters?’

  ‘What, are you nuts? Of course.’

  ‘Hang on, then.’ He went out and she could hear him across the landing, humming as he assembled their Christmas supper, as if one of his Old Leighford Highenas was not lying dead on Dr Astley’s slab, waiting for his assistant Donald to have a good old rummage in his abdomen and have a go at piecing together his head. Bones had a lot to answer for, one way and another, although a twenty-second-century lab full of beautiful people all flirting with each other and undergoing counselling was as far from Dr Jim Astley’s establishment as you could possibly get. Soon he was back, closing the door behind him with a deft flick of his left bum cheek. He passed her the plate.

  She took a few mouthfuls and then looked across at him. He was sitting on the sofa, spreading piccalilli on a slice of turkey as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. ‘So, how did you know it was Matthew Hendricks, then?’ she asked him.

  ‘It wasn’t that hard, as a matter of fact,’ he said, putting down his fork, so he could count off on his fingers, ‘aside from the fact that I am a genius of rare talent. Firstly, I tried thinking of all the boys I have taught in the past million years who would behave the way this one has, and it came to too many. So, secondly, I thought of all of the above, but who would be aged between, say, twenty and thirty.’

  ‘Why that age range?’

  ‘Well, you said the children were too young to give evidence, so they are under, shall we say, ten. I assumed that the couple in question would probably have had their first child quite young, so I just chose those ages to cut the numbers down.’

  ‘OK, go on.’ Jacquie tried not to let it show that she was impressed. Matthew Hendricks had been twenty-seven.

  ‘That cut the numbers down quite a lot, so that was a helpful device. So then I thought, of all of the ones I was left with, which ones had an abusive parent.’ He held his hand up to stop her speaking. ‘Yes, yes, I know that isn’t always the case, but as I say, I had to cut it down somehow.’ He looked a little crestfallen. ‘As a matter of fact, that cut them all out, so I had to backtrack. This time, I asked myself if any of them had ever been involved in any cases of child abuse outside of the family and, as they say in the Modern Languages Department, voilà! Matthew Hendricks.’

  Jacquie bit down on a pickled onion in a rather threatening manner. ‘Ah ha, Mr Clever. Matthew Hendricks has no record of being involved in child abuse.’

  ‘No indeed, Woman Detective Inspector. But he does … did … have a record of accusing someone of child abuse.’

  ‘Really? We didn’t know that.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have helped, I don’t expect. We dealt with it internally – it was clearly a pack of lies. He accused the whole SLT, male and female, of doing unspeakable things to him when he was in detention. His mother threw a wobbly and came in ranting at Legs and so we had to have an enquiry but it was clear from the start that it wasn’t true. On the other hand, he showed a remarkably accurate knowledge of some rather strange sexual practices which alarmed us. We did send a report to Children’s Services, but I’m afraid at this remove I can’t remember what happened.’

  ‘Well, it must be ten years ago now, surely?’

  Maxwell pursed his lips and did some maths in his head. ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  ‘Sixteen years ago, then.’

  ‘He was eleven?’

  ‘Possibly twelve, but he was certainly in Year Seven, yes.’

  Jacquie slumped back in the chair. ‘Oh, great. If this comes out …’

  ‘Well, no one will hear it from me,’ her husband assured her. ‘So, did the wife do it? Mmmm … Linda, was it? Mousey hair, blobby nose?’

  ‘Yes, Linda. But, how did you know that?’

  ‘Control freaks mate for life, you should know that. We had trouble with them from the start. Linda McGarry she was, then. Inappropriate behaviour in class, that kind of thing. She would do anything he told her to, without question.’

  ‘No change there, then,’ Jacquie muttered, taking a big swig of her drink. ‘Why did we not know this stuff? Isn’t there some kind of procedure?’

  ‘Of course,’ he reassured her. ‘Reams of paper get filled with reams of information every week. Pages and pages of concerns, questions, requests for feedback. But at the end of the line, there has to be a human to deal with them and that’s what we’re short of. It takes a whole load of people to make a perfect world and sadly only one to spoil it again. And after five years we have to bin the lot anyway. So,’ he thought he would try again, ‘did the wife do it?’

  Jacquie thought of confidentiality. She thought of children crying in the night with no one to hear. She thought of Linda Hendricks’s black eyes, one superimposed on another and on another. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘The wife didn’t do it.’

  ‘Got anyone in the frame?’ Maxwell asked her, gathering up the plates a
nd making for the door.

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘It sounds like a mousetrap situation to me,’ Maxwell said from the doorway.

  ‘Mousetrap?’ Jacquie was tired and the evening had taken a very unfestive turn.

  ‘Yes, you know, the mousetrap. The mousetrap. Agatha Christie. The Mousetrap – the policeman did it.’

  Jacquie went pale. Yet again, Maxwell had read her mind.

  Boxing Day was, as Boxing Days tend to be, a bit of an anticlimax. Nolan’s hamster still worked, which was an unexpected relief, and so he and Metternich played happily with it for most of the morning, CBeebies burbling happily along in the background. Jacquie had gone off to work before either of her men were dressed and, in fact, was destined to return while they were in their pyjamas, but again, rather than still.

  While the cat and his boy kept each other amused, Maxwell got his head down in one of the books which Santa had delivered; he had a lot to choose from, he must have been really good that year. Jacquie had long ago given up the unequal struggle of trying to make his presents look interesting by packing rolled-up socks in the same package as a DVD. These days, his presents looked like a mini ziggurat at the bottom of the tree as large and scrummy illustrated books on the Crimea gave way to biographies which gave way to books of silly pictures which in their turn gave way to DVDs and CDs. To some it might be boring; to Maxwell it was heaven.

  But this Boxing Day he couldn’t seem to get last night’s events out of his head. The book – a biography of Cleopatra, enjoyable and readable enough – held his attention for pages at a time, but the mental picture of an eleven-year-old with old, old eyes kept rising in front of him and obscured the text. He tried to remember which staff had been involved in the drama at the time. The Head of Sixth Form had been at the periphery only, as the boy had been in Year Seven, but it had been a trivial incident in one of his lessons which had kicked the whole drama off, so he had been copied in on all that had happened later. He closed his eyes and conjured up a mental picture.