by M. J. Trow
They sat together in the light of the mock coals, Maxwell and his Jacquie. Metternich the cat had been as concerned as anybody about his master’s disappearance, but he wasn’t going to show it.
He just brushed past Maxwell’s one good leg and on out into the night – it was a cat thing.
Jacquie looked up at him, her head on his lap, her arms on his arms, warm and soft and safe. She still hadn’t slept and it was nearly Sunday morning, the rain pattering down on the dark windows of 38 Columbine.
‘You ought to be in hospital,’ she told him again as he reached across her for his Southern Comfort. ‘You can’t fool around with concussion.’
‘Concussion, conshmussion,’ he murmured. ‘And that goes for both of you.’
‘Max?’ She sat up suddenly. ‘Are you still seeing double?’
‘No,’ he growled, to reassure her. ‘Just one and a half.’
She tutted. ‘Men!’
He chuckled. ‘Now, don’t start on that. We’ll be here all night.’
She put her arms around his neck, looking at the dark eyes under the white of the bandage. ‘I’m just glad it’s all over … Max?’ There was an unusual edge to Jacquie’s voice. ‘I know that look. Tell me. What?’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘It isn’t over, is it?’
‘What does Hall say?’
‘I don’t know. He seemed pretty convinced by Wensley’s file. But then he was also convinced Wensley would run. Wonder why he didn’t.’
‘All right,’ Maxwell said, easing his aching head back gingerly, ‘let’s put it all together, shall we? I go to the Lodge to talk to the Preacher. He’s even curter than usual. Refuses to talk. I leave … and wallop. When I wake up, it’s in some cellar or other and apparently three days later. I’d lost track of the time – well, you do when you’re enjoying yourself, don’t you – and assumed it was only one.’
‘Which is precisely why you should be in hospital,’ she told him again.
He ignored her. ‘I managed to get out, don’t ask me how, and end up with my attacker blubbering all over me.’
‘Max, you haven’t read the file. He’s a very strange man.’
‘Right.’ Maxwell tried to focus on the wall lamps around the room. ‘Talk me through the file again.’
‘When Wensley left school, his family moved, to Spain. Something to do with his father’s business.’
‘That’s right,’ Maxwell recalled. ‘His old man was in import-export. Sherries. Wines. Something like that.’
‘Do you remember him? The old man, I mean?’
Maxwell’s cheeks puffed out. ‘Yes, I do, actually. I only met him a couple of times, of course. We didn’t do the sleepover thing like kids do today. He was a bastard, though, that I do remember. The Preacher was terrified of him.’
‘That’s right.’ Jacquie nodded. ‘As he was of somebody at school.’
‘Halliards?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Who?’
Jacquie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. The file doesn’t say. But he was being bullied simultaneously by kid X at school and by his old man at home.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Maxwell said. ‘He used to be such a worm, did the Preacher.’
‘Well, on 24 September 1963, the worm turned. The file says he loaded up his dad’s shotgun early that morning – they were living in Jerez at the time – and blasted both his parents while they were sleeping.’
‘Jesus.’ Maxwell whistled. He hadn’t believed it the first time Jacquie had told him. It seemed no less incredible now.
‘There was a lot of extradition talk, wrangling backwards and forwards. In the end, the boy faced trial in Spain, or would have done if the doctors hadn’t found him unfit to plead.’
‘Why didn’t I know about this?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Christ, Jacquie, he was one of us, one of the Seven.’
‘Was he, Max?’ she asked. ‘You said yourself he never really belonged, never fitted the bill. Who was he afraid of? At Halliards, I mean.’
Maxwell shook his head. ‘Quentin?’ he guessed. ‘Bingham? Me? I don’t know, Jacquie. Maybe … well, kids are cruel, aren’t they? We all went through it, stupid initiation rites, scaring each other with daft pranks – the hanged boy and so on. It was just part of growing up, just being a kid in the fifties and sixties. But what if it was more than that? What if something was to the rest of us a game and to the Preacher deadly serious? How long was he inside?’
‘He was in a secure hospital in Bilbao until five years ago. Then a panel of experts decided it was safe to let him out and he went to the States. Joined the Church of God’s Children in Santa Monica in ’98. According to the file, he’s an ordained minister with powers to baptise, marry and carry out the last rites. It looks as though he took the last bit seriously enough.’
Maxwell was shaking his head. ‘Then why am I still alive, Jacquie? Hmm? Tell me that. The Preacher may be a madman, but if he’s our boy, he organized Quent’s killing like a dream. No forensics other than the bat. No murder weapon linked to him. You tell me Veronica even gave him an alibi, albeit a dodgy one, for the time in question. Bingham wasn’t as spectacular, but Bingham had done some homework – probably found the same info you got from the file and was coming to me with it. Even so, the Preacher got there first and stopped him. Again, no forensics. All this action, all this planning, and then he louses up with me. He’s got all the time in the world and he messes up.’
‘He has given you concussion,’ she reminded him.
‘Yes, but that’s well short of “Goodnight, Vienna”, isn’t it? No, Jacquie, something doesn’t add up here.’
She kissed the end of his nose and got up. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, draining her glass. ‘The DCI will want a statement from you tomorrow. Hall’s sending a car at ten – is that okay?’
‘Sure.’ He struggled to get to his feet.
‘No.’ She held him back, planting her soft lips on his. ‘No, you stay there. Now you’re not even thinking about school on Monday, are you?’
‘What? Staff briefing from the Headmaster and possible news of the Ofsted visit? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
‘You stay here,’ Jacquie insisted. ‘And while you do, I want you to bend that gigantic brain of yours around a name I think you’ve heard before – Paulo. Adios, caro mio.’
13
It’s what God made Sunday afternoons for. While some men give their October lawns one last mow before the winter frosts set in and others run up and down football pitches shouting ‘Over ’ere, son, on me ’ead’, senior policemen sit in darkened interview rooms trying to get some sense out of madmen.
Henry Hall had waited until Nadine Tyler had got to Leighford. He had phoned her during the breakfasting hour and she had hit the road. She’d even toyed with chartering a police chopper, but the Chief Constable was a relative of the Wandering Jew and she knew she’d be wasting her time or the taxpayers’ money. Let John Wensley stew for a bit, sweat it out. Hall had e-mailed her the vital passages from the accused’s file and she’d used the time while her driver burned rubber to familiarize herself with the information. She didn’t know who this sharp-eyed DC was who’d stumbled on it, but Nadine Tyler was secretly pleased that it was a woman and would recommend instant promotion to Henry Hall.
‘Tell us about the file.’ Hall was slowly turning the pages as the tape whirred like a whisper to his right.
‘It’s routine.’ Wensley looked pale and old, the five-day designer stubble more salt than pepper in the lamplight of the windowless room. ‘There’s one on every member of the Church of God’s Children.’
‘Really?’ Tyler queried.
‘Really.’ The Preacher leaned back in his chair. ‘It’s sent ahead wherever we go. We always inform the local headquarters that we’re in their area.’
‘And that was the Lodge?’ Hall checked.
Wensley nodded. ‘Why am I being kept here?’
Nadine Tyler tapped her cigarette on the box before sliding it between her lips. ‘Didn’t your b
rief tell you?’
The young man next to Wensley was like something out of a John Grisham novel, all attitude and testosterone. ‘My client’s brief,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘is a Legal Aid representative. My name, by the way, since no one’s asked, is David Vincent. I have had no time with my client at all, which is unacceptable. As is,’ he waited until the DCI had lit up, ‘your smoking.’
She looked at him through hooded eyes, then glanced at Hall. She didn’t know the man well enough to be sure there’d be no reaction there. ‘At the request of Mr Wensley’s legal counsel,’ she said, ‘DCI Tyler putting out her cigarette at …’ She glanced at the clock. ‘… sixteen-eighteen.’ The tape duly logged it all, even to the soft thud as the tobacco hit the ashtray.
‘You are being held,’ Hall explained, ‘on charges of grievous bodily harm and kidnapping of Mr Peter Maxwell.’
The Preacher shook his head.
‘Tell us about the murders.’ Nadine Tyler was even more likely to go for the jugular now she had been deprived of a smoke.
‘Murders?’ Vincent looked suitably confused. ‘I understood my client was charged with assault and kidnapping.’
‘The two are connected,’ the Warwickshire woman told him.
‘Which murders?’ Wensley wanted to know.
‘Oh, yes.’ Nadine Tyler leaned back in her chair. ‘I forgot. You have a choice, don’t you? Let’s start with your mother and father.’
Wensley’s eyes flickered for a moment. The brief looked at him. It wasn’t every day a young man new to the job got himself a real live serial killer, especially one who wore a dog-collar.
‘It was all a long time ago,’ Wensley said.
‘Humour us.’ Hall leaned forward. The brief could pick up no rhythm here – it seemed to be nasty policeman and nasty policeman; not the most winning of partnerships.
‘I killed them,’ Wensley said quietly, ‘with a shotgun.’
‘Why?’ Hall asked. ‘Er … you don’t mind talking about this?’
Wensley shrugged. ‘No. I’ve had a long time to adjust. More counselling than you’ve had hot dinners. And the Church of God’s Children is with me, always. Where would you like me to start?’
‘Jerez,’ Hall said. ‘The summer of 1963.’
‘I’d just left school. Perhaps alone of my peers at Halliards, I’d made no plans. I’d toyed with theology at university, but it didn’t happen. Father’s move had been on the cards for some months. Bingham was off to Oxford, Alphedge to RADA, Maxwell to Cambridge – I don’t remember the others. Father was in the wine trade. He imported sherries for his company. They don’t exist any more, I understand; went belly-up in the seventies, I believe.’
‘But of course you weren’t there,’ Nadine Tyler said. ‘Not in the big wide world, anyway.’
‘You know I wasn’t,’ Wensley said. The woman’s archness was enough to test the patience of a saint. ‘I suppose it had been building for years. My father was a self-made man, but he set great store by education – he and Mother scrimped to send me to Halliards. I was a fee-payer, you see. Bright types like Max passed their eleven-plus. It broke Father’s heart, Mother’s too, when I didn’t apply to university – I would have been the first of the family to go. The nit-picking started early on.’ Wensley lowered his chin on to his chest; the memory still hurt. ‘Both of them needling, criticizing. I had no friends in Spain and Father wouldn’t let me join the business, start helping him. I tried to apply to the firm direct, but Father blocked it. I drifted into drink, drugs – that scene was just opening up in Spain then. Father found out and made my life hell. So did Mother. One day I just cracked.’
‘Premeditated murder,’ Nadine Tyler said.
‘If you say so.’ Wensley sighed. ‘I don’t actually remember it at all. From the day before until three or four days afterwards, nothing. Short-term memory loss, the psychiatrist called it, brought on by shock. At the trial, they said …’
‘What trial?’ Hall cut in, flicking through the file. ‘You didn’t stand trial.’
‘Mr Hall.’ Wensley was shaking his head slowly. ‘I’ve stood trial a thousand times in here.’ And he tapped his temple. ‘And each time, the verdict comes out the same: guilty. The judge with his wig and black cap. The hanged boy swinging gently in the wind at the end of his rope. Oh, yes, I’ve stood trial all right.’
‘You’re not what?’ Hall’s face was a mask of disbelief.
‘I’m not pressing charges,’ Maxwell told him.
It was nearly nine o’clock, that time on a Sunday when teachers and kids alike are thinking to themselves, Christ, no! Monday already. Where did that half-term go? Again!
Henry Hall sat down a little more heavily than he intended on the swivel chair in his office. ‘This morning, you …’
‘This morning I gave a statement to your Sergeant Rackham about what happened. That’s all I did.’
‘Mr Maxwell,’ Hall leaned forward, clasping his hands, making his supplication, ‘we have every reason to believe that John Wensley did his best to murder you four days ago. At the very least …’
‘That’s what worries me about your job,’ Maxwell interrupted, his eyes dark circles where the bruising to his head was coming out. ‘It’s largely based on circumstantial evidence, isn’t it? On a series of likelihoods and probabilities and calculated risks.’
‘I don’t follow.’ Hall sat back.
‘Somebody hit me over the head at the Lodge, and somebody locked me in a basement room, but for all I know that somebody was Spring-heeled Jack. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head, Chief Inspector. I don’t know who did it.’
‘We have reason to believe …’ Hall checked himself, staying calm, staying collected. ‘From what we know of Mr Wensley, there is every possibility …’
‘Uh-huh.’ Maxwell wagged an index finger. ‘Now what did I just say about that?’ Mad Max could patronize for England; he’d been doing it for years. He got to his feet, gingerly, but he did it. ‘When you people start dealing in certainties,’ he said, ‘in absolutes, well, you’ll have my full co-operation. Until then,’ he winked at the DCI, ‘you let the Preacher go, now. Y’hear?’ It was a very convincing Clint Eastwood, but it left Hall curiously unmoved.
‘You do realize,’ Jacquie Carpenter was rummaging in the green Scrabble bag, ‘I can’t tell you anything, don’t you, Max?’
Maxwell looked aghast. ‘Have I ever, Woman Policeman Carpenter, asked you to compromise your position on my behalf?’
There was a silence, then they both burst out with snorts of laughter.
‘Maxwell, you’re a shithouse.’ She wanted to throw the board at him, but she feared for his still-fragile head.
‘That’s not how you spell liaison,’ he told her.
‘But it’s a triple!’ she squealed.
‘I don’t care.’ He shook his head as heartily as he could. ‘That’s not how you spell it. There are two “i”s.’
‘Bugger.’ She tutted. ‘I’ve got three now,’ and she slipped the superfluous letter back. ‘So you’re saying I can’t have that?’
Maxwell thought for a moment. ‘This is the deal,’ he said. ‘You fill me in on Wensley and I’ll turn a blind “i” to your lamentable spelling skills. Done?’ He held out his hand.
‘Done.’ She laughed and shook it. ‘Just remember – you didn’t hear any of this from me. Got it?’
He was going to wink, but the movement in Hall’s office earlier that evening had cost him dear and he thought better of it.
‘Hall’s sure he’s got his man,’ Jacquie said. ‘You’re not exactly flavour of the month by dropping charges.’
‘He’ll hold him anyway, presumably?’
‘He and Miss Iron Pants …’
‘Who?’ Maxwell’s eyes widened as he detected a side to Jacquie Carpenter he hadn’t noticed before.
‘Nadine Tyler to you,’ Jacquie explained.
‘Never let a little thing like professional jealousy cloud your j
udgment, I always say.’
‘Hall and Tyler can keep bouncing him backwards and forwards between their patches for a few days yet. He’s got a pretty sharp brief, though. He won’t let them get away with much for long.’
‘So what have they got on the Preacher? What did he say?’
‘He doesn’t remember anything about killing his parents. All the details have been filled in by other people, so he thinks he’s actually remembered it. He even thinks he’s stood trial for it. He’s spent years in a mental institution, so he’s got all kinds of hang-ups. Whenever he enters a room, he recites a stock phrase; “We’re all God’s Children”.’
‘That’s funny.’ Maxwell’s half-smile was not one of humour, however.
‘What?’
‘That’s what Alphie said at the Graveney, do you remember? When the Preacher arrived and told us about his church, Alphie camped it up with his Al Jolson rendition.’
‘Pissed the Preacher off, do you think?’
Maxwell put down his letters. ‘Zircon,’ he said blandly. ‘God, I’ll need a calculator to tot that little score up. It’s possible; but if so, why didn’t the Preacher kill Alphie?’
‘Perhaps he intended to.’ Jacquie was working out how to capitalise on the ‘z’. ‘Perhaps, in his strange world, there was an order to it all. It had to be Quentin first, then Bingham, then you …’ She caught his gaze. ‘Yes, I know you don’t believe it, Max, but look at the facts. On his own admission, Wensley went to Halliards in the small hours of the morning, the time when Quentin died. Whether he was there with Veronica or not doesn’t matter.’
