Maxwell's Retirement (13 page)

‘What about the emails?’ It was a fair question.

‘Yes, well, I need to see those. Have you kept them?’

‘No. Of course not,’ the girl said. ‘I wouldn’t open them, only he sends them from different addresses all the time, so I don’t always know it is one. There’ll probably be one now, though. I haven’t logged on for a while.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Yvonne chipped in before Hall could stop her. ‘What’s with changing your password, my girl?’

‘I don’t know how you could even ask,’ Josh spat. ‘She didn’t want you to know.’

‘But you always tell us everything,’ their mother wailed, and burst into tears.

Hall had been through this learning curve, as every parent did. It made it no easier to watch someone climb its slopes. He glanced at Pete Thomas, who looked stricken; he didn’t know which way to jump. Hall decided to save them from themselves. ‘Yvonne,’ he said. ‘You know that’s not true. You know kids have secrets from the time they can talk. Before, probably. They didn’t do it to hurt you, you know that.’

‘I’ll tell you what, though,’ Amanda said, stroking her mother’s arm, ‘it’s amazing you only found out today. That means you haven’t been checking. That means a lot to Josh and me.’ The boy nodded. Their mother blew her nose and wiped her eyes. The smiles they exchanged made even Henry Hall’s cynical heart lurch a little.

To break the somewhat schmaltzy mood, Hall cleared his throat and said, ‘Can you get logged on, Amanda, and we’ll see what our friend has for us?’

‘This will take a while,’ Amanda said ruefully. ‘This computer is old and a bit cranky.’

‘It does for us,’ Pete Thomas said, rather defensively. ‘You don’t need state of the art for what we use it for.’

‘State of the ark, this is,’ Josh said, and
Hall had to admit that, as jokes went, and as circumstances went, it wasn’t bad.

‘Excuse me,’ Hall said to the Thomas family in general. He had felt the preliminary stirrings of his mobile phone and almost at once, they all heard the growing tones of a very simple, basic ring. Not for Henry Hall the merry Rimsky-Korsakov extravaganza of the Maxwells. He didn’t even like the more restrained and very popular Mozart tune. He just liked a nice, simple, regular ringing phone noise. The fact that it drove his wife mad and that every bird in his garden had the sound off to a tee didn’t matter – he knew what he liked and what he liked was,
ring, ring. Ring, ring. Ring, ring
… He looked at the screen and pushed a button. ‘Yes?’ He turned his back on the assembled family and sidled out of the door. They heard him say, ‘Yes. I see. Can you cope at the moment?’ Then the door closed behind him and they couldn’t hear any more.

Josh grimaced at his mother. ‘Is he always like this?’ he whispered.

‘God, no,’ she said. ‘Usually he’s a lot more strait-laced than this. He’s trying to relax a bit, you know, being in our house and all. He likes to make people feel at ease.’

‘Blimey!’ her husband said. ‘I wouldn’t like to see him when he was being a bit po-faced, then. I’d heard the rumours, but I can’t believe they are actually true.’

Yvonne elbowed him in the ribs. The door was slowly opening and Henry Hall was coming back in. ‘Sorry,’ he said, looking round. ‘Something has come up and I’ll have to go back to the station. Thank you all for your time. Yvonne, I wonder if I could ask you to just jot down anything that Josh and Amanda can remember about form of words, general content and the rest.’ He turned to the twins. ‘If you can remember any of the email addresses the mails came from, I would be very grateful.’

‘Well, we can look now,’ said Amanda. She pointed to the computer. ‘Look, the poor old girl is up and running at last.’

‘Ah, yes, that. Well,’ Hall turned to Pete, ‘I would be very glad if you would turn that off now and sign a piece of tape across the keys with time and date. There will be someone along later to pick up the whole thing. I hope that isn’t too much of an inconvenience – homework, that sort of thing.’ He looked round and they all nodded or shook their heads. They weren’t quite sure what the answer was. ‘I’m sorry to dash off,’ he said. ‘It’s a good job you’re the job,’ he said to the parents, standing there one behind each child’s chair, hands on their shoulders. ‘Otherwise I’d have to get someone in. As it is, we’re going to be a bit short of personnel.’

‘What’s happened?’ Yvonne couldn’t help herself.

‘One of the girls we had already worked briefly with,’ Henry crossed his fingers behind his back, for now he was counting Maxwell in the magic ‘we’, ‘seems to have disappeared. She hasn’t been gone long and I’m sure it’s going to turn out to be a misunderstanding, but, as I’m sure you both know, you can’t be too careful.’ He turned to go, then spoke over his shoulder. ‘If I could have that report, Yvonne, as soon as possible.’ He looked at the computer. ‘Longhand will be fine.’ And with that, he was gone.

In the silence that was left when the front door slam had echoed its way to nothing, Josh asked the inevitable question. ‘So that was po-faced?’

‘No, no,’ his mother said. ‘Of course not. That last bit was a joke.’ She looked around and saw that no one was laughing. ‘He does take a bit of getting used to,’ she said.

‘You’ve got that right,’ her husband said, going off to the garage for a piece of masking tape to take his own computer into protective custody. ‘It’s a shame I can’t tell this story tomorrow at work.’

‘Well, you can’t,’ said Yvonne. There was a pause. ‘But I can. It can go in the Book of Henry.’

‘What’s that?’ Amanda asked, although she thought she knew the answer.

‘
The Wit and Wisdom of Henry Hall
.’

‘And how many pages does it have?’ Josh was a loving son and liked to feed his mother her lines.

‘Just the one,’ she said. She looked around her
family, bent but not broken. The computer was out of bounds and she didn’t feel like letting her kids out of her sight. ‘Scrabble, anybody?’

‘Not really, Ma, to be honest,’ said Josh.

‘Scrabble, followed by takeaway …’ there was still not too much enthusiasm, ‘followed by a DVD.’

The twins looked at each other, then at their mother. ‘It’s a deal,’ they said, and each kissed a cheek. The weight on their minds had lifted and if it took Henry Hall to do it, then, they considered, he was a Good Thing.

The Good Thing sat in his car outside the Thomas house. It could have gone many ways, but in the end it was all right. Now, he was going to have to face parents who had lost their child. Hopefully, she was just temporarily mislaid. But Henry Hall couldn’t help wondering when they had lost her. When they found she was missing today? Or at the moment when, with one click, she had received her first text? Before too long, Henry Hall intended to find out.

Maxwell was waiting patiently for Henry Hall in Jacquie’s only slightly kipper-smelling office. He had read all the paperwork on her desk and arranged it into alphabetical order. He had twirled round in the chair until its twirl stopped working and was trying to mend it when his wife stuck her head round the door.

‘Henry’s back, Max,’ she said, ‘but he’s got a bit ravelled up with another case.’ She winked to tell him she thought she might be overheard and he winked back, in a friendly enough fashion.

‘I’ll wait,’ he said, settling back gingerly in the chair.

‘Have you broken my chair?’ she asked. ‘You have, haven’t you?’

‘Not broken, as such,’ he said hurriedly, avoiding the obvious observation – why was he mending it? He changed the subject. ‘So, Henry’s busy. What next, then?’

‘I don’t want you to freak out now,’ she said. ‘Henry has asked that you send a copy of the text of the … um, text, to him as an email. Don’t forget to put the time you got it, that kind of thing. As he says, that’s all the statement needs, really, and it would be a shame to keep you longer.’ She was nodding her head slightly as she spoke, encouraging him to agree. Maxwell noted with a smile that it was how she spoke to Nolan when getting him to eat Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and vegetables of that kidney.

‘I’ll certainly try,’ he said, non-boat rocking being the order of this rather busy day. ‘I assume his email address is at home somewhere?’

‘It’s in the address book,’ she said.

‘The one with the Degas on the front or the one that Nolan chewed that time?’

‘The one in the Windows Mail … oh, right.
It’s – have you got a pen? Of course you have. Right, this is all lower case with no spaces. Hall aitch at,’ she sketched the @ sign in the air, ‘leighfordpolice dot gov dot you kay. Got that?’

‘Yes. I’ll give it my best shot.’ He got up and the chair fell into two halves. He looked at the destruction. ‘It was probably that kipper. It rotted something, I expect.’ He walked past his wife and risked a small kiss on her nose. ‘What about Nole?’

‘Darling, I’m sorry.’ She tore her eyes away from her ex-chair and tapped her forehead. ‘I’ll forget my head next. Spencer’s mum will drop him off in about half an hour at home.’

‘I can’t get back home that quickly.’

‘Cinders, you shall go to the ball.’ Jacquie waved an invisible magic wand. ‘There’s a car outside for you. Don’t say we don’t spoil you.’

‘I would never say that,’ he said, and meant it. ‘I’ll see you when I see you, then?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Night night, then.’ They were in the corridor by this time and he reduced their leave-taking to a pat on the shoulder. ‘Abbyssinia.’

‘Love to Nole,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

They walked down the stairs together and parted on the landing, he to carry on to the foyer, she to enter the mad world of a new situation, which might go so many ways.

The police driver was suffering from the virtually epidemic Curmudgeon Disease and after a few conversational sallies had been drowned at birth, Maxwell sat back and let the drive wash over him. He was aware that being brought home in a squad car would probably turn heads in quiet Columbine, but he was used to the curtains twitching whenever he came home. Despite its genteel veneer, the whole road was a hotbed of seething underground vice, according to Mrs Troubridge, who was an expert on such things. For example, her at number 35, across the road and down a few, spent her entire day drinking cheap sherry. She then buried the bottles in the garden before her husband came home. Since Maxwell happened to know that the woman was a freelance upholsterer who, when not out measuring up sofas, spent her time with a mouthful of tacks and a staple gun in one hand,
he had tried to put the record straight. This had made things rather worse, as Mrs Troubridge added the interesting fact to the mix that she wandered around armed, and so he had stayed out of it after that.

But Mrs Troubridge came into her own when telling the entire street of the goings-on chez Maxwell. She was disappointed that he didn’t seem to be a wife-beater, but everything else was grist to her mill. Jacquie often told Maxwell that he should be grateful that Mrs Troubridge was so fond of him; had that not been the case, he would have been on the front page of every Sunday rag for sure – M
Y
N
EIGHBOUR
, T
HE
M
ARTIAN
, A
TE
F
REDDY
S
TARR’S
H
AMSTER
… or something like that. As it was, she just kept it local and everyone knew to take things with at least a small pinch of salt. But, they all said to each other over their respective back fences, there was rarely smoke without fire. Except when him at 16 had one of his bloody bonfires – there should be laws or something.

Maxwell was used to seeing a little old lady crouching behind a hedge as he approached his house. She seemed to have a preternatural ability to anticipate his arrival. He had never considered the truth; that she spent almost all of the afternoon lurking by the front door, ready to leap, or at least lurch, out at him when he came down the path. The usual picture was the same but somehow
different this particular afternoon. As the squad car turned into Columbine, Maxwell could, by craning round slightly, see Mrs Troubridge ‘weeding’ her flower bed, waiting to collar him. But he could also see an unexpected little old lady sitting on his doorstep, like a down-and-out in Victorian Whitechapel, sleeping rough. That little old lady was Mrs B. And she appeared to be crying.

He could hardly wait for the car to stop and he leapt out and slammed the door without his customary courtesy.

‘Ignorant bastard,’ muttered the driver as he sped away in a squeal of rubber. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a gent.’

Maxwell was kneeling at Mrs B’s side before the car was out of sight. ‘Mrs B. Whatever is the matter? And why didn’t you let yourself in, for goodness’ sake?’ If only to keep that nosy old trout next door from seeing this, he felt like adding, but didn’t.

Mrs B gave a colossal sniff which almost lifted Maxwell’s hat off his head. ‘I din’t like to,’ she said. ‘It’s not my day or anything.’ Mrs B did for the Maxwells once a week and did them proud. She didn’t just move the dust around, she actually removed it, which was against her principles usually. Only the attic was off-limits to her.

‘Let’s get inside,’ Maxwell said, leaning heavily on the woman as he got to his feet. ‘Have a cup of tea.’

‘That’d be nice,’ she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Maxwell made a mental note of which hand she used, should patting be the order of the day later on.

Mrs Troubridge bobbed up just as Maxwell was shutting the door. He saw her open her mouth to speak but a man has to know his limitations. One old dear behaving funny was enough for anyone, even on a fine spring afternoon.

‘Up you go,’ he said to Mrs B as they stood at the bottom of the stairs, in the gloom of the hall. This early in the year it could strike a bit cold, but in the summer, it was bliss to walk in out of the heat and glare and wait just a few seconds to let the cool wash over hot eyes and itchy skin. There were usually at least three days like that every year. ‘Make yourself comfy in the sitting room.’ He glanced at the doormat; no post. This didn’t necessarily mean that they had no letters. It could be because Mrs Troubridge had coerced the postman again. Time would tell. Their mangled correspondence would arrive by nightfall, if she had managed to divert it.

Mrs B went ahead of him and he noticed for perhaps the first time that she was getting old. She pressed on her thigh with each ascending step, as if to lever herself up the stairs. With the other hand, she grasped the banister as if pulling herself out of Great Grimpen Mire. Her breath came in short gasps, interspersed with racking
sobs. Whatever could have got her into this state? Time, obviously, accounted for the aching limbs and varicosed legs. Forty roll-ups a day since kindergarten. But the crying? This was not the real Mrs B at all. Maxwell couldn’t help but wonder how many other layers there could be in this matryoshka whom he had thought he knew.

He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. He had probably made her tea before, but he couldn’t remember when or how she took it. He stuck his head round the sitting room door. She was sitting on the very edge of one of the chairs, feet together. Her hands were screwing a handkerchief to death in her lap and he set aside the rules of the house without a second thought. ‘Do have a cigarette, Mrs B, if you’d like one.’

‘Oh, no, Mr M. I couldn’t, really. Not with the little one.’ She looked around. ‘Not back from school, yet?’ She thought it was cruel that the poor little chap seemed to spend so much time away from home. The place for little ones was in front of their own telly, in her opinion.

‘Due any minute,’ said Maxwell, mentally adding another layer to his multi-tasking. ‘But one cigarette won’t hurt him and I imagine you could do with one. I’ll see if I can find you an ashtray.’

‘Kitchen, last drawer on the left as you go in,’ she came back immediately with the information. ‘It’s a Queen’s Silver Jubilee one. I expect it was a present, wass-nit? I can’t see you goin’ out and
buyin’ one of those.’ She gave a hoarse chuckle, but it was a shadow of her usual bonhomie.

‘Thanks.’ He had no idea he possessed such a thing. Or that she knew he was broadly of the Republican persuasion. ‘How do you like your tea?’

‘With a drop of whisky in it, if it’s all the same,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t usually keep it, but there’s still a drop left from Christmas. Back of the cupboard one along from the cooker,
right-hand
side.’

Maxwell withdrew back into the kitchen, where the kettle was beginning a rumbling boil. It must be like this to actually meet your stalker, he thought (he allowed himself the luxury of a split infinitive every now and again, but only in his darkest thoughts).

Her voice floated through from the other room. ‘No sugar and just a splash of milk, if that’s awright.’

He raised his voice to carry over the noise of the kettle. ‘Message received and understood. Over and out.’ He put the mug, milk jug, whisky bottle and ashtray on a tray and made a precarious entrance into the sitting room. He put the whole lot down on the coffee table and let her make her beverage as she liked it: a whole lot of whisky, about a teaspoon of milk. She sucked about half the mugful down in one go and topped it up with whisky.

‘I’m not much of a drinker as a rule, Mr M,’ she assured him. ‘But I’m that upset.’ A cigarette had appeared by magic in her mouth and she lit it and inhaled appreciatively between sentences. ‘I’ve had my sister on the phone. My nephew, you know the one I told you about, the one what’s so good on computers? Our Colin?’

‘Ford Open Prison?’ Maxwell offered the only fact he could recall.

‘That’s the one. Well, he’s been reported missing.’

‘Missing? From prison? That’s a bit major, isn’t it? Why wasn’t it on the news?’

She cackled into her tea. ‘Bless, Mr M,’ she said. ‘If they reported every con what goes missing, there’d be no time for other news.’

Maxwell had the feeling that he was about to wade into uncharted waters. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise,’ was all he said.

‘Well, it’s not as if our Colin is a dangerous lunatic, nor nothing,’ she said. ‘I don’t see why they make such a fuss over the white-collar stuff. It’s only money.’

Again, Maxwell forbore from comment. It may be only money, but it was someone else’s money; a concept obviously foreign to young Colin and his ilk.

‘Well, it wasn’t even money, in the end,’ she sniffed and inhaled together, a clever trick only mastered by a few really dedicated smokers. ‘He
was gathering some venture capital together. They got most of it back.’

‘Venture capital, Mrs B?’ He was totally unused to tackling only one of Mrs B’s startling remarks at once. He realised he had never actually sat down and had a conversation with the woman before. It was rather unsettling.

She looked a little uneasy as making an admission didn’t really suit her. ‘I can’t say as I understand it, Mr M,’ she said. ‘It was all about networking or summat. They didn’t have nothing to sell, it was just … It’s no good me trying to tell you. I’d get it wrong.’

Maxwell had heard of these computer scams, without understanding a thing about them. The apple of Mrs B’s eye had probably set up some sort of spurious website, www.colin.con or something similar. ‘So, when you said you were looking after his interests …’ Maxwell remembered her computer skills from the previous day and wondered how she was using them.

‘Oh, I just make sure his money goes to the right place …’ Her face suddenly shut up like a clam that had sucked a lemon. ‘I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more.’

‘That’s quite all right, Mrs B.’ Maxwell patted her hand and hoped he had chosen the right one. ‘Tell me about his disappearance.’

‘He just din’t come back from work. They did the roll-call and he wasn’t there. It was the
driver’s fault, o’ course. He should have noticed when he din’t get on the coach, but I s’pose he wasn’t concentratin’, or something. Anyway, they done the roll, he ain’t there. He keeps a bit to himself, our Colin. So nobody really could say when they’d seen him last.’

Maxwell finally managed to get a word in. ‘Work?’

‘Well, that’s the plan, innit? They lock them up but only at night. Later on, he’ll be having weekends at home.’ She paused and the tears came back to her eyes. ‘Well, he would’ve. Not now.’ She leant forward and clutched Maxwell’s arm. ‘He would’ve come to me, Mr M. Or his mum. He wouldn’t just go off. He was just doing his time.’

Maxwell looked at her. She was clearly distraught and, after years of seeing her unmoved, except by a knee-jerk cynical response, by the most devastating upheavals, he found it cataclysmic. It was as though the Isle of Wight, just visible from The Dam, mistily distant over to the right, had suddenly lifted its skirts and moved to Aberdeen. ‘I assume they have been in touch with his employers?’

‘First thing next morning,’ she said. ‘They didn’t answer the phone till nine o’clock.’

‘Not straight away?’ He found it incredible that a firm employing a prisoner, albeit from an open prison, albeit a nice boy, fond of his family
and guilty only of a bit of light fraud, should not be contactable out of hours.

‘Administrative error,’ she said. ‘Well … more a case of— This won’t go any further, will it, Mr M?’

He shook his head. He hoped Jacquie would forgive him.

‘Our Colin had hacked into the computer at the prison. Easy as falling off a log, he says. They should be ashamed. He only did it for a laugh, though, Mr M. He changed all the out-of-hours contact numbers.’

‘For a laugh?’ Maxwell raised one eyebrow.

She looked embarrassed. ‘He’s not very …’ She was stuck for the word. She wanted to say that Colin was a nice boy, not the brightest apple in the barrel, not really a people person, just happy with his computers. Not simple, you understand, just not very …

‘Sophisticated?’ Maxwell helped her out of her linguistic hole.

‘That’s right. If somebody asked him to do it, he’d just do it. He was always like it, from a little ’un. Always did what the bigger boys told him.’ She gave a phlegmy chuckle, which seemed to remind her to light another cigarette. She held it up with a querying expression. He nodded and she drew on it hard. ‘He jumped off a roof, once, ’cos they said to. Broke his leg.’

‘Boys, eh?’ Maxwell laughed. The doorbell
rang, breaking into the conversation. ‘And talking of boys, that’s mine, I think. Will you excuse me a minute, Mrs B?’

‘Aah, love him.’ Mrs B went into dote mode instantly. ‘I’ll just say hello to him, Mr Maxwell, and then I’ll get along. I feel a lot better.’

‘Nonsense, Mrs B,’ Maxwell said from the doorway. ‘Nole can always go and watch the telly in another room. He’ll be fine for a while.’ He clattered downstairs and the woman could hear cries of welcome in the hallway below. These were followed by the scamper of little feet up the stairs.

‘Mrs B?’ called Nolan. ‘Where are you?’

‘In here, ducks,’ she said, hurriedly stubbing out her cigarette and moving the ashtray out of range.

He ran into the room and flung himself into her lap. He gave her a fierce hug and stood back. ‘Dads says you’re a bit sad,’ he said, gazing into her eyes with his big brown ones. ‘Do you need hugs, or do you need to ’scuss it, because if you do, I can go to my room.’

Poor little mite, she thought. It was no wonder he sounded as though he’d swallowed a bleedin’ dictionary, always on his own, reading books, no doubt. She put an arm round him and gave him a squeeze. ‘I just want to talk to your daddy a minute. Then you can come in here and watch the telly. All right?’

‘I don’t watch much TV in the evenings,’ he announced.

Her heart bled for him. She couldn’t begin to picture a typical evening in the Maxwell household, with Nolan playing games with either or preferably both parents; the bedtime stories which sometimes took so long the bedtime was theirs, not his, by the time they were complete. As Jacquie often said to Maxwell, if they had wanted to spend all the time watching a cute infant, they should have got a kitten. But of course, she had to whisper, in case Metternich was in earshot.