Maxwell’s Reunion (19 page)

‘Veronica?’

‘Jacquie? I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you with wet hair. Come in, you’re soaked.’

It was the huge nude which Jacquie saw first above the glow of the artificial coals. Uplighters added a dreamy sensuousness to the pastels of the walls and a gentle mood music flooded the apartment. Beyond the rainy tears on the picture window, the lights of west London twinkled in their neon orangeness.

‘Get those off.’ Veronica handed her a soft white towel. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

‘No, I’m fine,’ Jacquie said. ‘Can I just drape my coat somewhere?’

‘Sure.’ Veronica took the jacket and disappeared. When she came back, there were Martinis in her hands. ‘Hair of the dog?’

Jacquie could actually have done with a cocoa, but from what she remembered of Veronica at Halliards, and looking at her now, she wasn’t sure she knew how to make it. She took the glass and sat on the vast cream settee next to the fire. ‘I’m looking for Max,’ she said.

‘Max?’ Veronica sipped her drink.

‘Has he been here?’

‘Yes … er … day before yesterday.’

‘Wednesday?’

‘That’s right. He wanted to talk to Ash, but Ash wasn’t here.’

‘What time was this?’

‘He called into the shop in the morning. I brought him back here for lunch.’

‘And what time did he leave?’

‘Oh, now you’re asking. Ten, eleven perhaps.’

‘That night?’

Veronica looked confused. ‘No, no, the next morning. Yesterday. Oh dear, this is awkward.’

‘What is?’ It was Jacquie’s turn to be confused.

‘Well, Max said you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Mind what?’

Veronica smiled and managed a short, brittle laugh. ‘Oh dear …’ and she glided away.

Jacquie was still turning round when the dark-haired girl came back into the room, carrying a small picture.

‘What do you think of this?’ Veronica asked.

At first, Jacquie wasn’t sure which way up it was. Then it dawned. Two naked women were entwined around each other, padlocks through their genitals and bandages around their eyes.

‘It’s the latest acquisition for the shop,’ Veronica told her. ‘A Michele Dennison. Paint on gouache. Isn’t it exquisite?’

‘I can think of a few of my colleagues who would call it filth,’ Jacquie said.

‘Men!’ Veronica snorted. ‘Oh, they have their place in the scheme of things. But there are times, Jacquie, when only another woman understands.’ She ran a long index finger around the curve of Jacquie’s cheek, sliding it down her neck towards the damp collar of her blouse. ‘Don’t you agree?’

Jacquie kept to the point. ‘I am looking for Max.’

Veronica let the painting fall on to the settee, opened her bathrobe and straddled the girl with her naked thighs. ‘Have you ever made love to another girl, Jacquie?’

Jacquie had moved faster in her life, but she couldn’t really remember when. She threw the taller girl aside and stood on the fur rug, quivering with fury. ‘No, I haven’t. And I don’t intend to start now. Where was Max going when he left here?’

Veronica smiled, closing her bathrobe. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ she purred. ‘Max found it … shall we say … congenial.’

Jacquie looked hard at the siren on the settee. ‘You’re saying you slept with Max?’

Veronica nodded. ‘Slept with implies a bed, doesn’t it? Well then, yes, I slept with him, in the king-size next door. We had our first fuck, though, in my Audi in the carpark.’

‘Give it up, Veronica.’

Both girls started at the sound of a male voice. David Asheton stood on the raised area that led to the bedrooms, wearing a towelling robe identical to Veronica’s.

‘Ah.’ Veronica recovered her Martini from the coffee table. ‘The green-eyed, limp-dicked monster.’

Asheton stormed across the lounge and poured himself a drink. ‘What are you doing here, Jacquie?’

‘Looking for Max,’ she told him, wondering when it would be his turn to open the robe.

‘He’s not here.’

‘Clearly. Where did he go?’

‘To see the Preacher, I think. Why?’

‘He hasn’t been in touch. Where’s my coat?’

Asheton glanced across at the lovely girl on the settee. Then he glanced at Jacquie. ‘You don’t need to go yet, surely?’

Jacquie looked at them both, the sad old lecher and his weird mistress. ‘There’s nothing to keep me here,’ she said.

‘Oh, but there is.’ Veronica got to her feet and sauntered across to the drinks cabinet, hips swaying provocatively as she moved. ‘Something you ought to know about the Preacher.’

‘What about him?’

‘He came to my room.’ She glanced at Asheton. ‘Our room, at the Graveney, that Friday night.’

‘What for?’ Jacquie asked.

Veronica arched an eyebrow, as though to have to say it was beneath contempt.

‘Is this relevant?’ Jacquie was looking around for signs of her coat.

‘We went to Halliards.’

Jacquie’s attention was fixed on Veronica now. ‘Why?’

Veronica took a sip of the freshened Martini. ‘He said he hated the place. He’d always loathed his schooldays. Ash, Bingham, Alphedge, Max – he hated them all. Especially Max. He particularly despised Max. He didn’t say why. He told me he wanted to make out – such a quaint, colonial expression that, isn’t it? He wanted to make out on the chapel altar. Something to do with showing his disgust at the hypocrisy of the place.’

‘Ash.’ Jacquie looked at him. ‘Is this true?’

Asheton shrugged. ‘Am I my concubine’s keeper?’ he asked. ‘I’d had a skinful that night and I sleep the sleep of the dead. It’s possible.’

‘Possible! You dickweed!’ Veronica snarled at him, then crossed to Jacquie. ‘Max was good,’ she smiled at the girl, ‘but the Preacher was better. It gave me the creeps at first, breaking into that place at night. Later on, though, when the Preacher got going, I didn’t give it a second thought. I went to a snobby school too. It gave us both a kick to do it there. Almost as if … all the old gels from Roedean and the old boys from Halliards were watching us.’ She laughed. ‘You should try it some time.’

‘You broke into the chapel?’ Jacquie asked her.

Veronica nodded. ‘Mm-hmm.’

‘That’s odd,’ Jacquie said. ‘When I passed that way the next morning, when I got Max’s call about finding the body, the chapel door was padlocked. I don’t remember any sign of a break-in.’

Veronica shrugged. ‘Figure of speech. Obviously the Preacher had a key.’

Jacquie stormed across the carpet and turned the corner that led to the stairs. Her coat hung there, still wet, on a hook.

‘Jacquie, you can’t leave yet,’ Asheton was saying. ‘It’s a filthy night out there.’

Jacquie looked at them both, her Puritan hackles suddenly rising. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But it’s not as filthy as the lies in here.’

12

The rain had set in by the time Jacquie Carpenter had reached the Lodge. It had taken her the best part of an hour to find it – a large, rambling building set back from the road and guarded by ancient rhododendrons whose dark leaves dripped silver droplets in the dark.

She’d asked directions at an all-night service station and had used the opportunity to try Maxwell again. Nothing. Just his warm, comforting voice and the ever-growing number of electronic bleeps.

She stood now on the porch, grateful for the overhang of the gable above her, but not exactly ecstatic about the blinding glare of the security light that bathed her.

‘Yes?’ a disembodied voice punctuated the steady hiss and drip of the night.

‘Police.’ Jacquie held up her warrant card to the lens of the security camera.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ The voice was female. American.

Jacquie tried the Pinkerton approach. ‘We never sleep.’ It was worthy of Maxwell himself.

There was a whirr and a click and the front door swung wide. Jacquie didn’t like dark places. She’d seen too many corpses lying in them for that. But the feeling was older; something in her childhood she couldn’t quite remember, like the moon through curtains and the shining lights of Christmas; indefinable, unfathomable, lurking with a menace of its own. Her eyes acclimatized to take in a sweeping staircase ahead of her and the polished parquet of a large hall with lights, scarlet and gold, twisting slowly in the floor’s centre, like moving stained glass.

‘It’s late.’ The female voice came from a black apparition in a scarlet kaftan, floating down the spiral sweep of the staircase.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jacquie said.

‘You gotta name, child?’ The black woman was huge, with sparkling eyes and an Afro haircut that had gone out before Jacquie was born.

‘DC Carpenter, Leighford CID.’

‘Leighford? Hell, honey, where’s that?’

‘Sussex,’ Jacquie told her. ‘The South Coast.’

‘Well, sugar,’ the black woman placed an arm around her damp shoulders, ‘I’d love to talk geography with you all night, but it is one in the mornin’.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jacquie said. ‘I need to talk to John Wensley.’

‘Reverend John? Why, honey, he’s sleeping now.’

Jacquie looked at her hostess. The woman sounded like Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, and looked like something out of
Green Pastures
. ‘Then you’ll just have to wake him up,’ she said.

‘You gotta warrant?’ The arm had fallen away and there was an altogether harder tone to the voice.

‘I don’t need one to talk to somebody,’ Jacquie explained. ‘You gotta work permit?’

‘It’s all right, Angel.’

Both women turned. John Wensley came out of the shadows as the Devil might step from Hell. There was no roar of fire, no flash of sulphur, just a tall, lean man with long hair and a long, grey robe. On the other hand, depending on your point of view, he could have been Jesus.

‘Jacquie?’ Wensley took her hand. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Max,’ she told him. ‘I’m looking for Max.’

‘Angel, bring us … Jacquie, what would you like? Coffee? Tea? We’ve no liquor here, I’m afraid.’

‘Coffee, please.’

‘Angel?’

The black lady spun on her heel, muttering.

‘Seventh child of a seventh child,’ Wensley said by way of explanation. ‘She’s a bit difficult sometimes. Your clothes are wet. Take them off in here. I’ll get you a robe.’

‘No thanks.’ Jacquie’s refusal was perhaps a little too prompt, but she was still seething from Veronica’s attempts to seduce her. And anyway, if she put on one of John Wensley’s robes wouldn’t she be one of his, a Child of God?

‘We are all children of God,’ the Preacher intoned. Jacquie’s pulse quickened. Was he reading her mind? Then, as Wensley led her into a small anteroom, she realized it was some sort of mantra. There was an altar at one end and a single row of chairs – hard, wooden, upright. A solitary flame burned from a sconce on the wall.

‘You’re looking for Max?’ He was sitting beside her, peering earnestly into her eyes.

‘That’s right. Have you seen him?’

‘Yes.’ Wensley nodded. ‘Yes, I have. He was asking questions too.’

‘When was this?’

‘Er … Wednesday, I think. Two days ago. But, as it’s already Saturday morning, three.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Evening. We hadn’t long had supper. I … oh, Angel.’

The large black woman had arrived carrying a tray with two mugs. ‘DC Carpenter is looking for Mr Maxwell, Angel. You remember – you let him in, didn’t you?’

‘No, Reverend John. That was Gilda. She told me ’bout him, though. Old friend of yours, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s right,’ Wensley said. ‘Jacquie, I don’t understand this. Where is Max?’

‘If I knew that,’ Jacquie took the coffee mug, ‘I wouldn’t be here. No one’s seen him since Wednesday, Mr Wensley. Not since he came here, in fact.’

‘Thank you, Angel.’ Wensley smiled at the woman. ‘That’ll be fine. You get some sleep now. Rough day tomorrow.’

‘Yessuh. Good night, Reverend John,’ and she was gone.

Wensley smiled. ‘She worries about me.’

‘When did you see Max last?’ Jacquie was persistent. ‘And where, exactly?’

‘Come with me.’ He took her across the dimly lit hall into another anteroom. This one had no altar and was lined with books. It had the air of an interview room. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘This is where I left him.’

‘You left him?’

‘I had things to do. I am a guest here, Jacquie, but I have my duties. Think of the Lodge as a sort of youth hostel, if you will.’

‘So you don’t know that he actually left?’

‘Yes, of course. I heard the door go. It’s electronic. Buzzes upstairs when it opens and when it closes. I heard it buzz as it closed.’

Jacquie got her bearings from the anteroom, looking across the hall to the front door and the mirror alongside it. ‘So he was outside.’

‘Jacquie.’ Wensley blocked her view. He looked smaller without the broad-brimmed hat and the duster coat. ‘You think Max is dead, don’t you?’

She looked at him, shaking inside and wanting to cry. Nobody had said that yet. Nobody but her. And she had said it only once, in the tiniest of voices, inside her head. ‘He could be the third victim.’ Her real voice was stronger than she’d hoped. ‘After Quentin and Bingham.’

‘God.’ The Preacher sat down.

‘That leaves Alphedge, Asheton and you in the frame,’

‘That’s what Max said,’ Wensley told her.

‘What?’ She sat down with him, her coffee discarded, her hand hovering near the can of mace in her bag.

‘He said the police had me in the frame.’

‘Why?’ Jacquie was feeling her way with care. Everything about the Preacher unnerved her. His steel-hard stare, his strained voice; above all his unreadable face.

‘Because I went to Halliards on the night Quent was killed.’

Jacquie nodded. ‘I know. With Veronica.’

‘Veronica?’ The Preacher blinked at her.

‘You went into the chapel,’ Jacquie said. ‘Had sex with her there. On the altar.’

Wensley was on his feet. ‘Get out!’ he said.

Jacquie got up too. ‘Is it true?’

‘You ask that?’ She saw that the ridge in Wensley’s jaw was pulsing. ‘Of me? Here? In this house? Get out!’ And he pushed her roughly so that her head cracked against the door frame.

‘Don’t do that!’ she warned him, trying to stay calm, trying not to retaliate.

‘For your own sake,’ Wensley growled, ‘don’t stay here any longer, Jacquie. There are things you don’t understand. Don’t know. It wouldn’t be wise to stay longer.’