Maxwell's Crossing (18 page)

‘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.

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 up 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.'

Gold grinned. He waited for the multi-choice papers to be given out like back home, but it didn't happen. Instead, Maxwell placed two fingers in his mouth and his whistle almost shattered the glasses of a ginger child now in Group Three.

‘Let me take you back,' the Head of Sixth Form said. ‘It is 1785. Who is the king, George?'

All eyes turned to the luckless lad in Group Four. He didn't know.

‘Tell him, everybody,' Maxwell commanded.

‘George!' most of them chorused. He overlooked the solitary voice which said ‘Victoria'.

‘George the what?' Maxwell was a stickler for accuracy.

‘The Third,' two or three voices said. The others were too fly to embarrass themselves as the ‘Victoria' girl had done.

‘Correct,' Maxwell nodded. ‘You four groups are businessmen – and women, of course, Cassandra – and you are what they used to call ‘joint stock companies'. Your job,' he lapsed into
Mission Impossible
in spite of himself, ‘is to set yourself up in business. You've got to decide what you want to make, how you want to make it. Remember …' he held up his fingers for the slower learners, ‘you'll need to sort out where the money's coming from, where you'll make whatever it is you're making,
how you'll transport the stuff and where you'll sell it. Now, we talked about all this last lesson, but that was a while ago, so you'll find some reminders on the sheets on the desks. I want one of you to be a scribe, to write ideas down, and one of you to be the spokesperson, because later on, Mr Gold and I will want to hear your ideas.'

The groups fell to with a will. Henry Barnard wanted to be scribe
and
spokesperson for his group and Gold spent several minutes trying to sort that one out. Nobody in Group Two wanted to be the scribe so Anna Dove was going to have to speak off the top of her head. No change there, then.

‘Yes, wigs are good,' Maxwell told Group Four, peering over a shoulder at their jottings. ‘What'll you make them out of?'

‘Um … hair?' Jonathan Armstrong had a City & Guilds in Obvious.

‘Certainly,' Maxwell said.

‘Yeuch!' Cassandra was never comfortable outside her own century.

‘But that will cost and you may not have enough money. Think about what else you could use.' And he passed on. He was just reminding Jack Twelvetrees in Group One that ‘Terms and Conditions Apply' appeared nowhere in eighteenth-century-speak when the balloon went up.

‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?'

The silence was deafening. No one used language like that in Mad Max's classroom, least of all other teachers. Hector Gold was almost purple in the face. ‘Cell phones
in 1785?' he screeched. ‘You have got to be shitting me!'

‘Keep it real, Alan,' Maxwell advised the offending child. ‘The best you can do communication-wise in 1785 is a letter – or perhaps a loudhailer for short distances. Er … Mr Gold. A word?'

He shepherded Gold into the doorway and glanced back to find all four groups buzzing. He was fully aware that they were not galvanised by eighteenth-century joint stock ventures, but were busy analysing what had just happened.

‘What just happened?' Maxwell asked. It wasn't his favourite film, but then he had no idea that Hector Gold had Tourette's either.

‘Sorry, Max,' Gold grinned sheepishly. ‘It's all a bit of a strain, I guess.'

‘Eight Eff Three?' Maxwell checked. This was bad news. Gold would be facing Ten Aitch Six later.

‘No, it's not the kids,' Gold told him. ‘It's me. Well, us. Oh, hell. Look, I'll just get along to the staffroom.'

‘No, you won't,' Maxwell told him. ‘You'll go back in there, with me, and we'll carry on. Just act normally.'

‘Er … there won't be letters or anything, will there? To the Principal, I mean.'

‘Legs Diamond wouldn't know a principle if it got up and bit him,' Maxwell assured him. ‘If it should arise, I'll just plead communication problems. As I always say,' and he patted the man's arm, ‘America is a foreign country where they just happen to speak English. Some of the time.'

Angus sat disconsolately at his desk and looked at the motley collection of detritus that had just arrived from Leighford by motorcycle courier. The main roads had stayed open throughout the snow. It was just the side-jobbies that remained treacherous. Angus wanted sometimes to just take the idiots from SOCO and knock their heads together. Angus wanted hairs, he wanted swabs, he wanted the esoteric and the arcane. What he appeared to have was a selection of office rubbish that had missed the bin. There was a chocolate wrapper, heavily bloodstained; a half-page of newspaper which could only be the
Leighford Advertiser
, judging by the typographical errors and the content, stained with something which was presumably a by-product of disembowelling; some photographs on a memory stick of various bloody footprints and one very smudged thumbprint (also sent as a lifted-off print in a bag); a pair of girl's shoes, size 5, and a paper clip.

Where was the single flake of cigarette ash, from a cigarette handmade to order by a bespoke tobacconist in Guatemala? Where was the wisp of fabric, caught on a protruding nail, that came from a couturier gown made for a crowned head? A paper clip! A chocolate wrapper! Who did they think he was? Some kind of miracle worker? At least there was no cuddly toy.

But of course, Angus
was
some kind of miracle worker. He squared what could only be called his shoulders, although they were not much wider than his head, buttoned up his white coat and set to work. The lifted bloody thumbprint was obviously in the
dead man's blood, but where there was a thumb there was sweat, in Angus's experience, and so the swab went off for DNA testing down the corridor. Angus was in two minds about DNA; finding little bits of people's dandruff and spittle might look easy on the telly, but in fact there were so many bits of so many people in any room it was still looking for a needle in a haystack, except they could now put a label on the needle. Finding out who the needle belonged to was still a job for the cops. Angus just gave them the information, they had to work with it.

Right. Next were the shoes. Quite handy, these. He could lift some DNA so he could exclude the secretary from his results. Few quick swabs, done and done. The newspaper was so fouled with intestinal contents that it was almost unreadable. He put it aside, gently smoothed out, to dry out a bit more and then he might be able to establish exactly what issue it came from and also what it might have on it. It was certainly cut, not torn from the main page, so was almost certainly a valid clue.

So, what did that leave him? He stood looking down at the paper clip and the chocolate bar wrapper. He remembered he was hungry. Starving, in fact; he shrugged off his white coat and meandered into the corridor and stood looking aimlessly at the machine full of snacks of all kinds, crisps, flavoured maize curly things and a whole load of chocolate, both with and without nuts and various other inclusions. Angus's mind was a strange place to be and even Angus wasn't sure he liked it there. It was a mixture of very sensible and logical
and very weird indeed. He preferred weird, but he had to admit that sensible and logical was the way he was born and the way he would end up one day, looking at his wife and one point nine children. Angus liked to keep abreast of current statistics and being accurate was the nearest he came to religion, if you didn't count that summer he was a Druid.

So, a thought came surfing along the shallows of Angus's mind and sent him, snackless, back to his bench. He smoothed out the chocolate wrapper and swabbed off the blood, carefully numbering and storing each swab as he saturated it. Soon, he could read the name on the wrapper and he was right; there was nothing like it in the machine out in the corridor. He quickly went online and found that in fact there was nothing like it in any shop near Leighford or anywhere else in England either.

This was exciting. It gave him an excuse to ring Jacquie Carpenter – Angus had no truck with the Maxwell bit of her name or life – to tell her his exciting news. As he waited for her to answer the phone, he fiddled with the paper clip, as everyone does at their desk, except that he was fiddling with it through an evidence bag. Just a common or garden central stores-issue paper clip, just like a million others in his drawer. Honestly, what were those SOCOs like?

‘DI Carpenter Maxwell.'

‘Hello.' Angus fought against his usual
tongue-tied
state when talking to Jacquie. ‘It's Angus. From Chichester.'

‘Hello, Angus. Have you got news for us already? That was quick. I haven't been back in the office long. Aren't you a marvel? What is it?'

She thought he was a marvel! How much better could a day get? ‘It's the chocolate wrapper that SOCO picked up at the scene.'

‘You're one up on me there, Angus. I didn't even know there was a chocolate wrapper.'

‘It was found … hold on, let me check …' Angus turned over the evidence bag that had held the wrapper. ‘Down the side of the deceased's office chair.'

‘He was quite a big chap, Angus. Probably ate chocolate while he worked.'

Angus was a little crestfallen, but ploughed ahead anyway. ‘It was a bit unusual, so I thought I would let you know about it.'

‘Good idea. Thank you.' Jacquie could hear a crest falling at a thousand paces, even down the phone.

‘It's a Wonka Exceptionals Scrumdiddlyumptious chocolate bar wrapper.'

Jacquie paused before she spoke next. That Angus was a bit of a pothead was common knowledge and had he been less amazing at his job his collar would have been well and truly felt years before. But surely even he knew that Willie Wonka wasn't real. Before she could frame the sentence, he was talking again.

‘I do know that Willie Wonka isn't real, before you ask me. But I have looked up this particular bar and you can't get it here.'