by M. J. Trow
‘Oh, but it does,’ Maxwell disagreed. ‘It took two to lift Quent on to that balustrade.’
‘Taken a good look at the Preacher’s biceps recently? I’d say he could do it by himself. And anyway, I’ve no aversion to putting Veronica in the frame.’
Maxwell looked at her. ‘Didn’t exactly gel, you two, did you?’
‘Not exactly,’ Jacquie said, with that way women have of letting you know how much they loathe other women; it’s a nostril thing. ‘We know Wensley had the opportunity. If it was Quentin who was bullying him at school, we have the motive. The other bullies in his life were his parents; he killed them back in ’63. For the next thirty-five years, he’s in a secure unit, going through God knows what sort of private hell. Then he gets out, having found religion – it’s a surprisingly common pattern – and plans his chance to finish the job. Muir’s invitation comes like a gift from God. And it’s so poetic. George Quentin hanging from the bell rope of his old school, the old place that must have had some traumatic memories for Wensley.’
‘All right.’ Maxwell had a ‘q’ but no ‘u’. ‘You’ve established opportunity and motive. What about the murder weapon?’
Jacquie shrugged. ‘He ditched it. My guess is a baseball bat. Courtesy of the Church of God’s Children.’
‘They’re not made of willow, surely?’ Maxwell frowned as far as his bandages would allow. ‘What news of Stenhouse’s cricket bat, by the way?’
‘Clean as a whistle. We don’t know why he mended it recently or why it broke, but the lab’s established it wasn’t against anybody’s head, least of all Quentin’s, Bingham’s or yours.’
‘Joy,’ muttered Maxwell. ‘Got a “b”?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Jacquie shook her head. ‘We’re not swapping this late in the game. Especially as you’re …’ She read the score upside down – it was a little trick detectives picked up with time. ‘… nearly a hundred points ahead, you bastard!’
‘So all this points us back to the Preacher, does it?’
‘Face it, Max. I’ve been trying to keep an open mind all day, but I’ve seen the man in the interview room. He’s odd, strung out. There are things he’s not telling us yet. He’s off to Leamington tomorrow where the whole thing starts all over again. The CID there have managed to slap a holding order on the developers at Halliards. They’re giving the place another once-over. Tell me about Paulo.’
‘Indeed.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I thought you’d never raise it. Paulo Escobar is … sorry, was … the live-in wifey of George Quentin. It’s funny, you don’t realize at the time that you’re at school with Jeffery Dahmer and Lizzie Borden. You dashed off the other night, you infuriating hoyden, without filling me in.’
‘This Escobar …’ Jacquie was looking up the list of two- letter words, a sure sign among Scrabble players that the writing is on the wall. ‘You met him, right?’
Maxwell nodded. ‘Quent’s boss at Vandeleur Negus put me on to him.’
‘Describe him.’
‘Er, let’s see … about thirty, perhaps a little younger. Dark, curly hair, quite handsome in a Latino sort of way. Your type, I suppose?’
Jacquie pulled a face. ‘Let’s say I like them a tad more one way.’ She smiled. ‘He was with John Wensley at the Lodge.’
‘What?’ Maxwell sat upright. ‘When was this?’
‘The night I was there. The night I broke in – but don’t you dare let that little morsel anywhere near the DCI. They were going somewhere, by car. They came into the office looking for keys.’
Maxwell couldn’t get his head, broken as it was, around this. ‘So, Escobar, if it was Escobar, was with the Preacher. And he was also with Quent. Is he in the file?’
‘No.’ Jacquie shook her head. ‘Which is why I couldn’t ask Wensley any questions along those lines. Graham Rackham’s off tomorrow grilling the staff at the Lodge – it’s my guess Paulo Escobar won’t be among them.’
‘Mine too. The Preacher moved to Spain and killed his parents before Escobar was born. They let him out five years ago and he went to the States. And that’s just a tad longer than Escobar told me he’d been with Quent – four years. What’s the tie-up?’ Maxwell was talking to himself as much as to Jacquie.
‘Quentin and Escobar are lovers.’ The professional detective was joining thought processes with the amateur. ‘Does that also go for Escobar and the Preacher?’
The Scrabble-players shrugged at each other.
‘I wonder,’ Maxwell said after claiming yet another score. ‘That’s all my letters gone there – fifty points plus thirty-one – eighty-one, please, Policewoman; I wonder if we aren’t talking about the two stranglers of Rillington Place?’
‘Sorry,’ Jacquie said. ‘You smug bastard, by the way – you’ve lost me there.’
‘Before your time, my dear.’ That was a common enough phrase from Peter Maxwell, God knew. ‘John Reginald Halliday Christie, known to his old school chums as “Reggie No-Dick,” killed a Mrs Beryl Evans, among others, in the house at Ten Rillington Place. This was back in the fifties, when I was in short trousers and everybody still stood up in the pictures for the National Anthem. Guilty as hell though he clearly was of the other murders, Christie always vehemently denied murdering Beryl’s little baby, claiming that the kid’s father, Timothy, did it. Since Timothy Evans had given conflicting testimony and was subsequently already hanged for the murder of his wife and daughter, he could hardly refute it, could he? Everybody assumed that Evans’s fourth statement – “Christie done it” – was correct. But was it? There was a niggling doubt in some people’s minds – perhaps Christie and Evans were killers.’
‘So …’ Jacquie was confused. ‘You’re saying Wensley and Escobar …’
‘That’s a possible combination.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Or Wensley and A.N.Other.’
‘You’re talking about Muir, Asheton, Alphedge?’
‘Or the Man in the Moon.’ Maxwell sighed, and put down ‘quisling’ on the Scrabble board with such a flourish that Jacquie rolled over on the carpet, screaming and beating the floor. ‘How very King John of you,’ Maxwell felt constrained to comment.
Monday, Monday. Hate that day. The staffroom, that inner sanctum that no child shall enter, was more of a buzz than usual. Was it because there was talk of strike action led by Joe ‘Lenin’ Hackleton, the NUT rep? Was it the impending snoop-swoop of the Ofsted inspectors? No, it was the speculation as to why Mad Max appeared to have an igloo on his head.
‘Obvious,’ whispered Ben Holton, the Head of Science. ‘Frontal lobotomy gone wrong.’
‘I expect he shot his mouth off with his own prejudiced political incorrectness in the wrong place,’ said Deirdre Lessing, the Senior Mistress, in a rather shriller tone, designed for Maxwell to hear.
‘Stuck it too far up somebody’s arse,’ Bernard Ryan, the Deputy Head, muttered. He was a man with more chips on his shoulder than Harry Ramsden’s.
In the corridors without power, as Maxwell made his way creakingly to his office, the kids had, as always, a tighter grip on reality.
‘Fuckin’ ’ell, somebody’s bashed Mad Max over the ’ead.’
Eagle-ears Maxwell heard that one. ‘There’s a Chair at Oxford waiting for you, Sanjit, with logic like that. Don’t you let me down, now.’
For the rest of the day, Sanjit wondered why he’d have to go all the way to Oxford, wherever that was, to sit down.
‘God, Max.’ Helen Maitland held out the cup that cheered. ‘Are you sure you should be here?’
‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Helen dearest,’ Maxwell collapsed into the soft chair he’d long ago half-inched from the Sixth Form Common Room, ‘it may fall on thee.’
‘Sorry I mentioned it.’ Maxwell’s number two smiled.
He caught her retreating hand. ‘Bless you for caring, Helen,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. How was your half-term?’
‘Banal,’ she told him. ‘Roger and I decorated the bathroom.’
> ‘Crackerjack,’ Maxwell enthused.
The phone shattered the moment. Helen Maitland leaned around the door to shoo away a couple of GNVQ students strangely reluctant to get to lessons. Maxwell handled the receiver quite deftly for a man who was, whatever he’d told his light o’ love, seeing everything in the plural. ‘Stringfellows.’
‘Mr Maxwell?’ the girl on the switchboard was nonplussed every time.
‘Thingee.’ Maxwell leaned his aching head back. ‘How wonderful to hear your voice. How can we help, Mrs Maitland and I?’
‘I have a Mrs Alphedge on the phone. She sounds rather upset.’
Maxwell was sitting up. ‘Put her on.’
‘Max, is that you?’
‘Cissie, what’s the matter?’
‘Have you seen Richard?’
‘Alphie? No, not since I called last week. What’s happened?’
‘He’s gone.’ Cissie Alphedge was fighting back tears, trying to keep her hysteria under whatever control she had left.
‘When?’ Maxwell was used to being an oasis of calm in a wilderness of panic. He knew that repeating the word was pointless and would add to Cissie’s terror.
‘Er … yesterday. I dropped him off at the golf club just before lunch. He said he was tired of being a prisoner in his own house. Said he needed space. Fresh air. He had his mobile in case of emergencies. We’d arranged to meet at one-thirty. I was to pick him up at the club.’ There was a pause as Cissie struggled to find the words. ‘Only he wasn’t at the club. No one had seen him. His clubs were in an outhouse; one of the staff found them there. Max, I’m so worried. This isn’t like Richard, is it?’
Maxwell wanted to answer that, but found he didn’t have the first clue as to whether it was like Richard or not. He had known the boy, but he didn’t know the man. But that wasn’t what Cissie wanted to hear.
‘No,’ he told her, trying to let his voice reach out across the ether. ‘But I’m equally sure there’s a rational explanation.’
‘I’m not feeling very rational just at the moment,’ she told him.
‘Of course not. Cissie, have you called the police?’
‘No. No, I thought … Well, I thought he’d be home. I waited up. Rang friends. His sister in Wisbech. Nothing. No one’s seen him. Oh, Max, I … I hate to ask you. I know you’re teaching and so on, but can you help? Can you find him?’
‘Cissie.’ Maxwell felt helpless. ‘I’m a squad of one. You need a team on this. The police …’
‘No, Max. Richard’s been … well, odd the last couple of days. I mean, you saw what he was like. When your Jacquie called, he hid upstairs. Actually hid. I told her he was resting, but that wasn’t actually true. He’s falling apart, Max. This business at Halliards, Bingham, it’s all got the better of him. The irony is he’d be perfect to play Lear now. Too young, but perfect.’
‘What can I do, Cissie?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Come down, Max, please. I just need … another brain on this, a fresh outlook. If then you think we need the police, well, all right
Maxwell checked his watch. ‘I’ve got to disentangle myself from the chalkface,’ he said, mixing his metaphors with the best of them. ‘Then I’m on the next train.’
‘Bless you, Peter Maxwell,’ Cissie said. ‘You’re a brick.’
‘I must be,’ said the Head of Sixth Form when he’d put the receiver down.
‘Crisis, Max?’ Helen Maitland was stirring her coffee with her pen, reading the signs on her boss’s face.
‘No, no, Helen.’ He beamed beneath the bandages. ‘Just a catastrophe. Do I look shite enough to have to go home?’
‘Does the Pope shit in the woods?’ was Helen’s rejoinder. It was a question that dissenting churchmen had asked since the Reformation. And it was good enough for Peter Maxwell.
The previous night had been one of those nights at Haslemere police station. The stockbroker belt slipped from time to time and that Sunday had been no exception. There’d been a break-in at Gerard’s warehouse on the edge of town and a gang of yobbos had decided to steam through the bus station, relieving startled passengers of their valuables. To cap it all, amid all the mopping-up operations on Monday, a lady named Mrs Janet Muir insisted on seeing the most senior CID officer available.
That was Derek Bishop, a martyr to dyspepsia and a grumbling ulcer that growled like Vesuvius whenever the pressure got to him. It was getting to him now. He was drowning in paperwork and it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet.
‘How can I help you, madam?’ he asked, already aware from his desk sergeant that Janet Muir was related in some way to Godzilla.
Janet Muir took the rather used seat across the desk from the man, slumped as he was in front of a computer screen. ‘You can arrest my husband,’ she said tartly.
‘Oh, really?’ Bishop had been caught in the crossfire of domestics before. ‘On what grounds, may I ask?’
‘First-degree murder,’ Janet Muir said. ‘Of George Quentin and Anthony Bingham. I shall be your witness for the prosecution.’
14
It was a little after two when Maxwell got to the Alphedges’. A grey-haired woman with crying-red eyes answered the door and threw her arms around him. It wasn’t a luvvie hug, all hypocrisy and kisses to the air; Cissie Alphedge was terrified and she was letting Maxwell know it.
He held her gently at arms’ length. ‘You’ve checked the house?’ he asked.
Cissie nodded. ‘Three times. It’s rambling, Max, but not as rambling as all that. It’s so silly. It’s like looking for a Jaffa cake one half ate once and put down somewhere. I expect to turn a corridor and see Richard there, smiling or working on his lines. Oh, it’s so preposterous.’
Maxwell took charge. ‘Relax. First things first. A cup of tea, I think.’
‘Tea?’ Cissie looked appalled. ‘Max, Richard might be …’
He held up his hand, the one that stilled whole assemblies on the blast. Sure enough, it silenced this hysterical woman now. ‘I need you,’ he helped her through the kitchen, feeling how cold her hands were where he held them, ‘to be calm, to be clear and to talk me through the sequence of events again.’
Cissie was nodding. He was right, of course. Calm and sensible and soothing. Only then did she notice the bandage under Maxwell’s hat. Ordinarily he’d have swept it off in a lady’s presence, but he didn’t want to alarm her more than she was already alarmed at that moment.
‘Max, you look like the last scene of Cyrano de Bergerac.’
‘Funny you should say that.’ He smiled, resting the hat and scarf on a chair-back. ‘I seem to have put my panache down somewhere, and can I find it?’
She ran her fingers lightly over the crepe folds, wincing for him, sitting him down. She was Mummy again, taking over, fussing, getting things right. ‘What happened?’ she asked, and sat down at the table next to him.
‘The silliest thing.’ He chuckled. ‘I tripped over the cat. He’s been trying to get me for years, has the Count, lying in wait on the stairs. A couple of days ago, he got lucky.’
‘You didn’t go to work like this?’ Cissie was horrified.
‘Madam …’ Maxwell sat up to his full height. ‘Over the years I have gone to work as the Invisible Man, Clint Eastwood, the Mikado, Lord Cardigan and Goldfinger – all for charity, of course. The kids are used to seeing me as a headcase.’
She squeezed his hands. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said. And with great difficulty, he winked at her.
Peter Maxwell removed the bandages, feeling increasingly like Boris Karloff. His head ached like buggery, but his thatch of hair disguised the stitches and the bruising was confined to his eyes. He began to think, as he checked in the mirror, that whoever had had a go at him at the Lodge had used a mangle.
‘Jacquie?’ He was keeping his voice low, prowling the bedroom.
‘Max, where are you?’
‘The Alphedges’, on Cissie’s cordless.’
‘The Alphedges’? Why’
‘
Promise you won’t tell?’ Maxwell gurgled.
‘For God’s sake, Max,’ Jacquie said, ‘you are so bloody infuriating. What’s happening?’
‘Alphie’s gone walkabout.’
‘What?’
‘Missing – since yesterday lunch-time.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘Do you guys bother for the first twenty-four hours – when it’s an adult, I mean?’
‘Not usually,’ Jacquie conceded. ‘But it’s been longer than that now. When did Cissie see him last?’
‘At the golf club, Sunday, about eleven-thirty. They’d arranged for her to pick him up two hours later. Except he wasn’t there. She’s racked with guilt, of course. Her fault and so on.’
‘Did she call you?’
‘Yes. I haven’t been much help, I’m afraid. We drove to the club and asked around, but Cissie’s torn between making a complete idiot of her husband and finding out what happened. Nobody I spoke to had seen him at all, but of course the Monday crowd aren’t necessarily the Sunday crowd and vice versa. Cissie did find his golf clubs, though.’
‘Oh? Where were they?’
‘In an outhouse. She showed me where.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Here. Why?’
‘Don’t touch them, Max. There may be forensics.’
‘That’s a cheery thought, Woman Policeman Carpenter.’
‘We’ve got to face facts, Max,’ Jacquie told him. ‘Two members of a circle of friends are dead, a third is hit over the head, and a fourth vanishes. It’s all getting pretty weird. How’s Cissie coping?’
‘Asked me to stay over,’ Maxwell said. ‘Can’t stand the waiting and so on. I can understand that. They’ve got plenty of space here. What’s your view on the local law, Jacquie?’
‘Call them in,’ was the expert advice. ‘Given the circumstances, you’ve waited long enough, Max.’
He sat out the night. For an hour or so, he wrestled with it. Should he tell Cissie that Jacquie advised calling in the police now? Should he tell her that Jacquie thought that her husband was probably dead? Not that Jacquie had said so; it was just that Maxwell knew her so well. After that, he’d dozed fitfully. At one point, he thought he heard Cissie’s voice on her mobile, shrilly shouting, as she had at John Thaw when he’d arrested her on the telly a few weeks back. But the Alphedges’ house was big and it may have been the television; Cissie, unable to sleep, catching some domestic programme they relegated to the small hours – crap for insomniacs.
