Maxwell's Crossing

by M. J. Trow

  ‘I have spoken with him … did you hear that? I mean, spoken to him.’ Maxwell toyed with putting a bullet through his brain then and there, because he had just kissed goodbye to all that was sacred, civilised and grammatical. ‘He doesn’t know anything specific, but thought that Jeff was keener to come with them to England than he would have expected, so he may have known it was a possibility at least. He doesn’t know the details of how he came to leave the police, because it was before his time, but it is odd that he hasn’t had some cushy security number; most ex-cops do. The studios lap them up, apparently.’

  ‘What about money? Does he know anything about O’Malley’s finances?’

  ‘Again, only that they are a tad ropey. Camille’s nail bar does very well, not that Hector sees much of the proceeds. He thinks she bails her father out from time to time, but on the few occasions he has mentioned it to her, she has flown off the handle and said that her father put the money up in the first place, so it’s only right.’

  ‘That is fair enough, I suppose, if he was the original investor. It may be money laundering, though. Hmm … well, thank you for that. Have you given any more thought to Mrs Whatmough?’

  ‘I try not to, on general principles. General “principals”, get it? Never mind. I digress. Oh, hang on, there’s la damn bell sans mercy. I can’t hear you.’

  Jacquie could hear the electronic jangle and beneath it Maxwell singing a little song to fill the time. It was the stereotypical, but already unseasonal ‘Jingle Bells’. Then he was back.

  ‘Sorry about that. I’m sure the bells are getting louder as I get older.’

  ‘That’s good news. At least you aren’t going deaf. Oh, hang on. Now it’s me getting a noise. There’s a call on the other line. Hold on.’

  She put the phone down on the desk and stretched across to pick up the one on Hall’s desk. He could only hear her faintly, but it sounded important, whatever it was. Then, suddenly, her voice was back in his ear.

  ‘Sorry, Max. I’ve got to go. Bit of a scramble. There’s been another one.’

  ‘Another one? So this is a series, then?’

  ‘Sorry, Max. Got to go.’ And his ear was full of buzzing.

  The screaming had stopped by the time the police got there, but it had been going on for so long that it seemed to have left an imprint on the air. The girl who had been screaming could feel another in her throat and was only keeping it at bay with extreme concentration, so that she had to bend over, hugging herself, to keep the hysteria in. First, no one had come. Then, finally, the old man who kept the jeweller’s downstairs had come toiling up the stairs to the office. Then, suddenly, from just him coming in, the world seemed piled into the tiny room and the scream got nearer and nearer her mouth.

  Jacquie got there just in time to prevent another outburst. As luck would have it, she was the first woman on the scene and the girl ran and clung to her as if she was the last lifeboat off the Titanic. Jacquie just patted her for a moment, and gradually the secretary started to relax.

  Jacquie looked over her head at one of the SOCOs. ‘Is there another room we can use?’

  ‘Wouldn’t recommend it,’ he said, dryly. ‘There’s only the office and I don’t think she’ll be up for going back in there, somehow.’

  ‘You can come downstairs and use my back room, if you want.’ No one had noticed the jeweller was still there, but Jacquie was glad he was. He was an inoffensive little man you’d pass a hundred times a day and never notice. The room was oppressive and the smell that attends any violent death was beginning to ooze out of the inner office and overwhelm the other smells of wet humanity rising like steam from the professionals on the case.

  ‘Thank you. That would be useful,’ Jacquie said.

  ‘Oops, hold on,’ said the SOCO. ‘I’ll have to have those shoes, I think.’ He pointed with his felt pen that he had been using to label possible clues. ‘Blood. DNA.’

  Jacquie could have felled him for being so crass. The girl had come in to work and had walked into the inner office to find the very thoroughly disembowelled corpse of Jacob Shears, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths – in short, her boss – sitting at his desk as if to start the day like any other. She didn’t need it pointing out that she had blood, at the very least, on her shoes. She started to tremble and Jacquie squeezed her tight.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the jeweller. ‘My flat is above this office. All we need do is go out onto the landing and up a flight of stairs. No shoes needed.’

  Jacquie helped the secretary slip her shoes off and ushered her through the door, with a sharp look at the forensics guy, already off on another chase, this time a paper clip that could be really significant. As she left, he was bagging it carefully and labelling it. No wonder Angus smokes things, she thought. All this stupidity must really do your head in after a while.

  The jeweller – ‘Call me Michael, my dear’ – led them up a narrow stair hidden behind a piece of false panel into a scrupulously neat little flat. Manda Moss would have definitely approved. There was a stunning view from the big window which spanned almost all of one wall, over a snow-speckled Leighford and over the dunes to the sea, sparkling in the distance in the frosty air. Despite the circumstances, both women were drawn to the view.

  ‘It is lovely, isn’t it?’ the jeweller said. ‘These last few days when people have been kept in by the weather have been a real bonus for me. I just shut up shop and come up here and enjoy the view. Just sit yourselves down there and I’ll make us all a nice cup of tea. Would you like that, Tia?’

  The girl nodded. ‘Can I have a tissue, please?’ she whispered. ‘This one’s all …’ She opened her hand and showed a shredded bloody tissue. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I felt a bit faint. I touched the desk. It was all sticky …’ Her eyes rolled up into her head and Jacquie just caught her as she pitched forward.

  ‘Put your head between your knees, Tia,’ she said. ‘Come on. Deep breaths, now. You’ll be fine.’ She crouched there, with her hand on the girl’s shoulder while she took a little time out in merciful oblivion, down there between her own knees. When the tea arrived, she motioned the man into the third seat in front of the window. When she felt the secretary trying to get back up, she stood back, watched her for a minute and then sat back down. ‘OK now?’

  ‘Sorry,’ the girl said again. ‘Just a bit woozy.’

  Jacquie reached into her bag and brought out some antiseptic wipes and passed them over.

  ‘Do I need to give this … this tissue in downstairs?’ Tia asked.

  ‘No, they’ve got enough things to keep them busy,’ Jacquie said. ‘I’ll flush it, if Michael can just point me the way?’

  He gestured behind him, and through a door Jacquie found a miniature hall, with two doors off, the first of which was the bathroom. She flushed the tissue and washed her hands. She was trying to get her bearings of how this flat meshed with the one below.

  Back in the lounge, the two were sitting in companionable silence, as the old and the young often do. Jacquie had become aware that they knew each other quite well, and of course, why not, when they worked in the same building? She decided it needed to get on to a less informal footing and sat down, taking out her notebook from her bag as she did so.

  ‘Are you Mr Maxwell’s wife?’ the girl asked suddenly.

  ‘Yes, I am. Were you taught by him?’

  ‘I was in the Sixth Form. I didn’t do History. He’s lovely, Mr Maxwell is.’ The girl looked at the old man as she spoke, wanting to share the warmth. ‘He often told us about you. And Nolan. And Metternich. That’s the cat,’ she added to the man. ‘And their little boy.’

  ‘I assume that Metternich is the cat, rather than the boy,’ he smiled at Jacquie.

  ‘Yes, but it was touch and go for a moment, there,’ she said, clicking her pen. ‘Now then, if I can get some names?’

  ‘Tia Preese,’ the girl said. ‘Do you want my address?’

  ‘Later, if that’s OK.’ She looked
at the man, pen raised.

  ‘Michael. Melling, as in the name of the shop downstairs. And this is my address, as you can see.’

  ‘Did you hear anything last night?’ Jacquie asked him. ‘You must be directly above the office here, surely?’

  ‘In fact, no. The turn on the stairs has confused you, as it has others. This is in fact a flying freehold over the building next door. It is the same all down the street. The third floor is above the second floor of next door, almost like dominoes threatening to fall over. If you want to check about noise, you will have to ask next door, that way.’ He pointed to his left.

  ‘Is that a flat as well, or just storage?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘No, it’s a flat. Students, though, from the Art College in Brighton, so they may not be back yet for the start of term. I don’t hear them, because my bedroom is next to the stairwell of the other side and that is just storage. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.’

  ‘Not to worry, Mr Melling. If you can come down to the station later today to give a brief statement, I would be grateful. Now, Tia. Was it normal for your boss to come in on a Sunday?’

  The girl gave a huge sniff. ‘He worked all sorts of hours, really. He didn’t have a partner in the business, so if there was something urgent, or if someone rang him at home, he would come in whenever, really. He had the office phone on divert, so that if anyone rang out of hours, he wouldn’t miss the call.’

  ‘What kind of practice did Mr Shears have?’

  The girl looked blank.

  ‘Did he do a lot of criminal cases? Conveyancing? Divorce?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘All of them. He didn’t specialise. Sometimes, he’d ask a friend for advice, you know, if a case was quite difficult. And he didn’t do the court work, although they can now, if they like, solicitors. He didn’t do that, though. He said he wasn’t Perry Mason … whoever that is.’

  Jacquie felt her age as the theme song went through her head, the thumping arrangement by Dick DeBenedictus. ‘Was he doing anything difficult at the moment?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He had a few of those “no win, no fee” ones, people slipping up on the ice, that kind of thing. But nothing lately that he has had to bring anyone else in on, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No enemies, then?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’ The girl furrowed her brow. ‘No. I can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt him.’ Her lip quivered again. ‘He was such a nice man.’

  ‘How old was he?’ As soon as she asked the question, Jacquie knew it was useless. Tia chewed her lip and tried to come up with a number that sounded reasonable. Michael Melling answered for her.

  ‘Mid-forties, I would say. Divorced.’ He gave a significant look across to Tia. ‘His last secretary but one, I gather. Bit of a scandal. Wife came in. There was a client in the office. All very unprofessional. I had to call the police in the end.’

  Jacquie made a note. ‘That will be on our system, then.’ She closed her notebook. ‘There’s not a great deal more I can do, until we know more from forensics, that kind of thing. So, if you would pop in later, sir, and you, Tia, unless you would rather we came to see you at home?’

  ‘No,’ she said, hopelessly. ‘I’ll come in. But I’ve got no shoes …’

  ‘I’ll go and get you some. There’s Shoe Express two doors down. What size are you?’ Michael Melling was on his feet and reaching for his coat.

  ‘Five,’ Tia said. ‘Trainers will do. Thank you ever so much, Mr Melling.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘Just you wait here and finish your tea. I won’t be long. I’ll just make sure that the detective inspector makes it down my rickety stairs all right.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jacquie said, following him out. ‘I thought my husband was the last gentleman left standing.’

  ‘Oh, there are still a few of us around,’ he said, leaving her on the middle landing. ‘I’ll see you later, perhaps.’

  She watched him go down the stairs, carefully but clearly well practised on their steep treads. She turned to see Pete Spottiswood standing behind her. ‘What a nice man,’ she said.

  ‘Old paedo if you ask me,’ Spottiswood said. ‘All over that girl like a rash. Probably did for matey in there as well. You can’t trust his sort.’

  ‘What? Nice people?’ Jacquie was by definition much less naive than the average person, but found Spottiswood’s constant jaundiced view very wearing.

  ‘Nice. Yeah, right. Fred West – nice.’ He went back into the room and peered through to where the body had been. Fortunately, they had removed it while Tia had been upstairs and that bore out Melling’s assertion that you couldn’t hear anything from the office in his flat. They would have certainly heard that, even if only Jacquie would have recognised the sound.

  ‘Do we know what happened?’ she asked him. In fact, she didn’t want to talk to him at all, but everyone else seemed to have gone home, except a few lingering SOCOs.

  ‘Stabbed.’ Spottiswood was always monosyllabic, except when concocting complex sickie excuses, when he could become quite lyrical.

  ‘Not just stabbed, surely?’ Jacquie said, teasing out the information.

  ‘Disembowelled,’ he said with relish. ‘All the guts on the desk and in the drawers, as neat as you like. But they didn’t just fall out. Somebody took them out. They cut all the ligaments, split the mesentery, really did the business.’

  ‘My word, Pete. You’re very informed about anatomy.’

  ‘Well, I was a nurse, wasn’t I? When I left school.’

  If he had suddenly started to fly round the room, Jacquie could not have been more surprised. ‘A nurse? You?’

  ‘What? Why not? I’m a caring sort of bloke, I reckon. I was doing all right, but then I had to do this stupid test, one of those psychological things, and they suggested I might be happier doing something else. I was gutted. Bit like matey! Ha!’

  ‘I expect it was your sense of humour that they couldn’t handle, Pete. A bit too sensitive, I expect.’ Shaking her head, Jacquie Carpenter Maxwell left the building.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The phone was still in Maxwell’s hand when Hector Gold popped his head around the door. The bell had gone, but bells to Maxwell these days were a serving suggestion. He always told GTP students to be there ahead of classes, laptop on, PowerPoint ready, interaction all over the place, the eight-phase lesson oozing from every pore. None of that applied to him, of course. Three hundred years at the chalkface had given him an edge that made all that unnecessary.

  ‘Team teaching, Max?’ Hector reminded him. ‘Eight Eff Three.’

  ‘Team teaching it is,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘The high spot of anyone’s day. Isn’t this what we all came into the profession for?’ And he led the way.

  Eight Eff Three weren’t a bad bunch as psychotics went. Jamie in the corner had more neuroses than brain cells but he meant well. Only behind closed doors and in hushed tones did Maxwell refer to him as Daft Jamie, the last victim of the Resurrection Men Burke and Hare. Kylie had a make-up obsession but Maxwell’s promise to rip her nails out had had the desired effect and now she saved the full makeover for Double Science.

  The general babble ceased as the two men entered the room. For once, all eyes were not on Mad Max, the Monster of the Mezzanine, but on the small balding bloke with him.

  ‘Everybody,’ Maxwell said. ‘This is Mr Gold. He is from the Colonies. And no, Jemma, he doesn’t know Brad Pitt or his granddad, Justin Bieber, so don’t pester him. Mr Gold is a historian, like me and, for the next forty-five minutes, like you. He’s going to walk among you now – don’t be alarmed – and he will give you a number.’

  Hector smiled a rather weak ‘Hi!’ to the twenty-nine twelve-year-olds (actually twenty-eight, because no one but Children’s Services and the Ed Psych had ever seen Angel Hargreaves, although her name was still on the books) and wandered around the room, numbering them all off. Jemma grinned u
p at him hopefully, just in case Mr Maxwell was wrong about Justin Bieber. But then, her case was hopeless. Mr Maxwell was never wrong.

  Mr Maxwell was mentally miles away from the job in hand. Two murders in a sleepy seaside town out of season was bizarre, but three bordered on the unbelievable. Maxwell knew his serial killers. Sociopaths of that calling were driven by phases, mood swings that took everybody by surprise. They withdrew into themselves, seemed distant, elsewhere. They were fighting the lust to kill but they couldn’t fight it. So the search began, like some mad treasure hunt in which the prize was a human life. But there was something odd here, something that didn’t fit. Serial killers adopted a pattern, used an MO that worked for them and they stuck to it. They might embellish and perfect as their deadly toll mounted, but essentially it was same old, same old – which gave the good guys some kind of chance of catching them. Peter Sutcliffe used a screwdriver and a ball-pein hammer; Aileen Wuornos a handgun; Vacher and Jack the Ripper were into strangulation followed by mutilation with a blade. But the Chummy who was stalking the streets of Leighford had used a gun and a push. Had he run out of bullets? Left his Peacemaker at home? And the old Fifties song refrained in his brain. ‘Don’t take your guns to town, son. Leave your guns at home, Bill. Don’t take your guns to town.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ Hector Gold brought him back to reality.

  ‘Right!’ Maxwell clapped his hands, astounded at the American’s ability to count so fast.

  ‘All the Number Ones over here in the corner.’

  There was pandemonium as the chosen ones scraped back their chairs and made for the door corner.

  ‘Number Twos,’ (it wasn’t a joke to anyone over four) ‘back of the room.’ More chaos.

  ‘Threes this corner,’ he pointed to his bookshelves where the projector was gathering mould.

  ‘And Fours – last but by no means least – front and centre.’

  The noise was indescribable. ‘Which is why,’ Maxwell screamed in Gold’s ear, ‘I don’t do team teaching unless we have a visiting celebrity.’