Maxwell’s Reunion (23 page)

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.

In the morning, they went to the police station.

‘Would you like to tell us,’ DCI Henry Hall looked at the sandy-haired man with the silver beard across the desk from him, ‘where you were on the day Anthony Bingham was killed?’

‘How is my client supposed to know that?’ the grey-suited brief wanted to know.

‘Let’s get one thing straight, Chief Inspector.’ Andrew Muir ignored his lawyer. ‘Whatever my wife says, I know nothing at all about the death of Bingham, or for that matter George Quentin.’

‘Do you know the Leighford area, sir?’ Hall asked.

‘The first time I came to this godforsaken part of the world was when your boys in blue came to collect me from Haslemere nick. I would not, ordinarily, pass water over a seaside town in England, in or out of season.’

Hall looked at DS Rackham to his right. ‘I see,’ he said.

They were, all four of them, sitting in Interview Room 2 at Leighford police station. It was Tuesday morning, Day Fifteen of a murder enquiry.

‘Chief Inspector,’ the brief tried again.

‘Clifford, will you please shut up?’ Muir snapped. ‘The sole reason I have you here is so that I say nothing that may incriminate me.’

‘Andrew …’ Clifford didn’t like the way this was going.

‘Do you have reason to believe you may incriminate yourself, Mr Muir?’ Hall had seen the loophole and leaped through it.

‘Look …’ Muir spread his hands on the interview-room desk like a man at the end of his tether. ‘For reasons best known to herself, my wife has put me in the frame for murder. Well, she’s like that.’

‘You mean she does it habitually, sir?’ Rackham asked.

‘Of course not!’ Muir thundered. ‘It’s hardly every day one’s old buddies shuffle off the mortal coil. What I mean is that Janet takes a delight in watching me squirm; she’s not a nice woman, Chief Inspector.’

‘She says you have no alibi for the night of George Quentin’s death,’ Hall told him.

Muir sighed, leaning back in his chair. ‘Well, in the words of the great Mandy Rice-Davies, she would, wouldn’t she?’

‘Are you saying she’s lying?’ Hall queried.

‘Lying and my wife, Chief Inspector, are the greatest double act since Laurel and Hardy. If you are asking me can I prove that I spent all night in my hotel room at the Graveney, sleeping like a baby, feet away from the Blood Beast I married, I would have to answer “No”. If she is saying I wasn’t there, then the troublemaking bitch is lying through her teeth. Have I made myself clear, Chief Inspector?’

‘Clear, Mr Muir.’ Hall nodded solemnly. ‘But not, I regret, in the clear.’

‘So, Mr Wensley.’ DCI Nadine Tyler looked up at the man from the notes on him that lay strewn across her desk. ‘You didn’t kill George Quentin?’

The Preacher shook his head.

‘You didn’t go to Halliards school that night, having arranged to meet him there? You didn’t half demolish his skull and then finish the job by attaching him to the bell rope?’

‘My client has already denied this.’ A tired David Vincent sighed, tapping the table with his pen-top. ‘On several occasions.’

Nadine Tyler ignored him. ‘You didn’t arrange to meet Anthony Bingham on Ryker Hill, stove in his head and stash the body under an old settee?’

‘Oh, come on, Chief Inspector.’ Vincent sat up, bored rigid by the whole endless experience. ‘We’ve been through this with you. We’ve been through this with DCI Hall in Leighford. My client has rights, you know. I think he’s been through enough.’

‘He’s been through mental institutions,’ the DCI continued, turning on Vincent for the first time, ‘for murdering his own parents. And he’ll keep going through whatever I choose to put him through until I get some answers.’

‘You mean until you get a result?’ Vincent was shouting back.

‘People, people.’ Wensley’s hands were in the air, his voice calm, his smile almost serene. ‘I didn’t kill anybody. Yes, I was at Halliards on the night Quent died, but I couldn’t get into the building. I didn’t have a key.’

‘And while you were at the school, while … in the grounds, what did you see?’

‘A rat, in the swimming pool,’ Wensley remembered. ‘It was scurrying over the debris. It caught my eye.’

‘What else?’

‘A car. Parked under the bushes, near the front gate.’

‘What sort of car?’

Vincent had had enough. ‘Chief Inspector, my client has answered these questions repeatedly. He doesn’t know one car from another. Can I suggest the Warwickshire CID get cracking on tyre tracks in the area? Can I also suggest that your time for holding my client is up. Are you going to charge him or release him?’

Tyler twisted the simple gold band on her middle finger. It was displacement activity. Really, she wanted to hit the interfering little shit, but if she did that, she could kiss her career goodbye.

‘Why did you hit Peter Maxwell over the head?’ she asked.

Wensley faltered, for the first time in this interview. Nadine Tyler hadn’t seen that before. Not even when she and Hall had asked about the killing of his parents. The Preacher’s face had stayed calm, emotionless. Now the jawline was a hard ridge and she saw him swallow. ‘I didn’t,’ he said.

‘Who did, then?’ The DCI was a shark, smelling blood.

‘That file,’ Vincent cut in, like Richard Dreyfus to the rescue. ‘Where did you get it?’

Nadine Tyler’s eyes flickered across to him. ‘Leighford CID. Why?’

‘And where did they get it?’

Nothing.

‘John?’ Vincent turned to his client.

‘The file was kept at the lodge.’

‘Under lock and key?’

‘In an open filing cabinet.’

Vincent’s face said it all. He was crowing, delighting in the moment. ‘Under what precise circumstances did Leighford CID come by this file, DCI Tyler?’

‘It’s not a secret …’ Wensley began, but Vincent stepped in.

‘Was it obtained legally, with an authorized warrant?’ The brief was in full flight. ‘If so, I want the name of the applying office and the magistrate who issued the warrant. If not,’ he leaned forward, staring into Nadine Tyler’s eyes, ‘I want the balls of the bastard in blue who took it nailed to the wall by lunch-time.’ He stood up sharply, scraping back his chair, checking his watch. ‘John Wensley and his counsel leaving the interview room – assuming, of course, there are no objections – at ten-forty-two.’

Vincent led Wensley out. Neither of them heard the expletives that followed, but then neither of them would have believed they’d come from the lips of DCI Nadine Tyler. The tape was already switched off.

‘John Wensley’s lawyer, David Vincent, wants your balls nailed to a wall, DC Carpenter.’ Hall was standing looking out of his incident room window, a cup of rapidly cooling coffee in his hand. ‘What do I tell him? Sorry, I can’t oblige. The officer in question is suffering from penis envy!’

‘Sir?’ Jacquie was frowning as the DCI turned to face her.

‘Did you help yourself to the file on Wensley?’ Hall asked.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Jacquie said. ‘You were pleased a couple of days ago. “Well done,” you said. “Good work.”’

‘I don’t need the action replay,’ Hall said coldly. The only way you knew that Henry Hall was angry was that he turned a whiter shade of pale. ‘Two days is a long time in a murder enquiry. That was then. Wensley’s walked because you obtained evidence illegally. He might be some airhead who doesn’t know what time of day it is, but his lawyer is the pushy type – wants to make a name for himself. And if he can do that at the cost of the odd copper’s career, then believe me, he will. Where’s Maxwell?’

‘Maxwell?’ Jacquie faltered.

Hall’s face said it all. ‘Jacquie, I am not going to repeat every word and phrase to give you time to think. Where is he?’

‘Do you want my resignation, sir?’ Jacquie felt her heart thumping. This wasn’t the first time she’d walked this line. It was a lonely one.

Hall sighed. ‘No, Jacquie,’ he said quietly. ‘This murder enquiry is two weeks old. I want some results. Now, for the last time, where’s Maxwell?’

‘At the Alphedges’,’ she told him. ‘Richard Alphedge is missing.’

Hall sat down quickly, his eyes locked on hers. ‘When?’

‘Sunday, lunch-time. Vanished at his golf club. Cissie Alphedge and Maxwell have reported it to the police.’

‘Right. Get up there. Find out what’s happening. Find out what Maxwell knows. We may well be looking for a third body.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Oh, and Jacquie …’ Hall stopped her as she reached the door. ‘Next time you offer to resign, I might just take you up on it.’

They put out fliers on Richard Alphedge later that day. Passers-by were asked if they had seen this man. Most of them hadn’t. As the rain set in from the west by early evening, disheartened PCs in dripping helmets and capes gave up the door-to-door. One old dear felt sure she’d seen him in Coriolanus at Chichester recently. Yet another remembered him from Crossroads the first time around. But no one had seen the real Richard Alphedge, not on the street, not anywhere.

His car was in the double garage, his shotgun prop still resting in the hall. That night, Jacquie and Maxwell sat in Cissie’s lounge in the Lutyens house, while Cissie curled up with a sedative and a good book. She couldn’t read a line and sobbed quietly to herself, turning fitfully on the damp pillow until the sleeping tablet kicked in and darkness overtook her.

‘This is so bizarre, Max.’ Jacquie was curled up on Maxwell’s lap, cradled by his arms. ‘I don’t get it at all.’

‘We’re not talking about kidnapping.’ Maxwell was trying to make sense of the thing. ‘Are we? I mean, wouldn’t we have heard by now?’

Jacquie nodded. ‘Usually,’ she said. ‘It’s been three days. Having said that, there’s no rhyme or reason. Some kidnappers make contact straight away. Others after up to a week.’

‘God,’ Maxwell moaned. ‘I don’t know how Cissie will hold up under that.’

‘She’s strong,’ Jacquie said. ‘Women are, you know. It’s the survival thing.’

‘Isn’t it also true that in most kidnappings the victim’s already dead by the time the call comes through?’

Jacquie was quiet for a moment. ‘There is that pattern, too,’ she said. ‘There’s a much more likely scenario, Max.’

‘Go on.’ He looked down at her clear grey eyes gazing up at him.

‘Alphedge’s fears were correct. He was next, after all. Whether you were meant to be the third and it went pear shaped, I don’t know. But if Alphedge was the fourth, then that’s it. The killer met him on the golf course and either killed him there or took him away and did it somewhere else.’