Maxwell’s Reunion (24 page)

‘So we’re looking for a body?’ Maxwell was essentially a man who liked his ‘t’s crossed and his ‘i’s dotted.

Jacquie pulled his arms more tightly around her. ‘I don’t like being so matter-of-fact when Cissie’s upstairs,’ she said, her voice imperceptibly lower. ‘But yes.’

Maxwell sighed. ‘Well, at least that rules out John Wensley. He was in police custody at the time.’

Jacquie nodded. ‘He was. But there’s one name I haven’t been able to throw into the equation yet,’ she said.

‘Indeed,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Paulo Escobar, spinster of this parish. Tomorrow, young lady, how about you and I find the Don?’

Jacquie frowned up at him. Old sherry adverts like that were before her time.

They drove first to George Quentin’s place in up-and-coming, down-and-going Acton. Jacquie’s mobile was switched on and she’d written the number down clearly for Cissie. Any news, anything at all, and the actress was to ring. ‘We’re not far,’ Jacquie had said, ‘just at the end of a phone line.’

But George Quentin’s place was locked and barred. Peering in through the windows, Maxwell could see that the place was devoid of furniture, Escobar’s packing cases gone, dust where the Persian carpets used to be. Junk mail addressed to ‘the occupier’ lay scattered over the hall floor like the random fall of the Tarot pack and the Hanged Man.

So they drove to the Lodge.

A black, shiny face peered around the door, the pearly smile fading as its owner realized who’d arrived.

‘Hello, Angel,’ said Maxwell. ‘Remember me? I was the guest who nobody wanted to leave a few days ago.’ He pushed past her into the hall, looking around the airy space.

‘The Reverend John ain’t here,’ she told them.

‘We’re not looking for the Reverend John, Angel,’ Jacquie said. ‘We’re looking for Paulo. Where is he?’

‘Paulo?’ A look of confusion crossed the woman’s face; or was it panic?

‘You don’t want us to ransack the place, do you?’ Maxwell asked. Just being in the Lodge, with its sanctimonious smell, brought back the headaches.

‘You ain’t got no rights,’ Angel asserted.

‘Angel’ – Jacquie turned to face her, flashing her warrant card for the first time – ‘this is a murder enquiry. Two men, perhaps three, are dead. We want … we need some answers.’

‘I don’t know nothin’.’ Angel was waddling away.

‘Is that what Jesus would say?’ Maxwell stopped her in her tracks. The black woman turned to face him.

‘You takin’ the Lord’s name in vain, mister?’ she growled.

Maxwell crossed the parquet floor to her. ‘What did Jesus say about murder, Angel?’ He looked down at her. ‘What did the Lord say?’

‘Thou shalt not kill,’ Angel intoned.

Maxwell nodded. ‘Well, somebody has, Angel,’ he said quietly. ‘Somebody has killed twice.’

‘You sayin’ it was the Reverend John?’ Angel was swaying, her eyes fixed on Maxwell’s.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘It’s not John. Any more than it was John who hit me over the head. Why did you do that, Angel? Why did you hit me over the head?’

Jacquie’s eyes flashed from one to the other. What was Max talking about? Was this trauma, some sort of delayed shock?

‘You was goin’ to take the Reverend John away,’ Angel snarled, scowling at her man. ‘You think he’s a killer. Well, he ain’t. No, suh. I couldn’t let you take him away. The Reverend John, he’s a good man.’

‘Max …’ Jacquie began, but the Head of Sixth Form raised his hand. He was on a roll.

‘Yes, he is, Angel,’ he said. ‘He’s a very good man. But Paulo, now, he’s not, is he? We think Paulo is a bad man, Angel. And we need to talk to him.’

A door creaked behind the two and they all jumped a mile. At the top of the stairs, a dark-haired young man in designer jeans stood, one hand resting lightly on the rail, the other slowly tossing and catching a clasp knife.

‘I used to have one of those.’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Made in Saragossa. Mine had a beautiful tortoiseshell handle. Of course, they’re illegal now in this country.’ He’d reached the foot of the curving steps.

‘You wanna see?’ the young man said in his fractured English. ‘You wanna see the tortoiseshell up close, uh? Uh?’ He darted forward, the blade out, slicing through air.

‘Max!’ Jacquie was at his elbow.

Maxwell held out his right arm to keep the girl back. He knew she wasn’t armed, and for all her police training she would be no match for the knife-wielding Spaniard.

‘Do you know
The Gun
?’ Maxwell was climbing the stairs, riser by riser. ‘It’s an excellent little tale from the pen of the late C.S.Forester. All about this huge cannon lumbering across Spain in the Napoleonic Wars. There’s a first-rate knife fight in that.’

‘What the fuck you say?’ the Spaniard asked.

‘
The Gun
, Paulo,’ Maxwell explained, his arms outspread by way of explanation. ‘Do try and keep up.’

Below him, Jacquie was on the first stair, her heart in her mouth.

‘They made it into a film called
The Pride and the Passion
. Dear Ol’ Blue Eyes, ol’ Francis Sinatra, was a guerrilla leader, pretty handy with one of those. Then, of course, there was Paul Newman in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
.’ He was sufficiently close to his man now that if Escobar lunged he’d reach his target. ‘Where good ol’ Paul explains the rules of a knife fight.’

Jacquie’s hand was already in her bag, fumbling for the mace can, when it happened. Maxwell’s left foot came up and caught the Spaniard hard between the legs, thudding into his groin. His eyes widened and his blade dipped just long enough for Maxwell to grab his arm and throw him sideways, sending him bouncing off the wall and rolling down the stairs until he curled in a broken heap at the bottom.

‘Haven’t seen that one either?’ Maxwell asked, brushing himself down and steadying his spinning head. ‘Well, probably just as well.’

15

DCI Hall was getting nowhere. It didn’t help that he had to liaise with his oppos the length and breadth of the Home Counties. If ever there was a case for a national police force, this was it.

‘What did Holmes throw up?’ Hall and Rackham were both of the computer generation, although both had kids who could do it better, faster, more instinctively.

‘Bugger all, guv, if you’ll pardon my French.’

It was a Thursday, wet and wild, with the wind whirling rubbish on the street corners of Leighford. DCI Hall wasn’t in much of a mood to pardon anything. He watched the rain bounce on his window; beyond, a sea of umbrellas ebbed and swelled along the High Street, swarming shoppers doing battle with the elements.

‘Sorry I’m late, guv.’ Jacquie Carpenter crashed in, looking like a drowned rat.

Hall turned to face her. ‘I’ve just come from the incident room,’ he told the pair. ‘A lot of people working and working hard. But nothing’s breaking. Nothing at all. So …’ He loosened his tie and took his glasses off to wipe them. Jacquie thought he looked tired, tetchy. ‘Graham, talk me through Anthony Bingham. Where exactly are we on that one?’

The DS riffled through his notes. ‘SOCO turned up a lot of stuff,’ he said. ‘Tissues, condoms. Most of it you’d need to carry at arm’s length at the end of a pair of tongs. Old copy of Meccano World, so there’s obviously some real perverts out there.’

Hall’s frozen scowl said it all. If ever Graham Rackham had thought of going into the stand-up comic business, this morning was not a good time to start.

‘Nothing concrete on tyre tracks. We’ve identified thirty-eight different vehicles from the mud at the bottom of the hill where the body was found. Apart from dog-walkers and courting couples, it’s used as a turning place for people who’ve overshot the A280. Even using Holmes, they reckon it’ll be three to four weeks before we get matches on even half of these.’

‘Jesus.’ Hall sucked air through his teeth. ‘And we’re no further forward on how Bingham got there?’

Rackham shook his head. ‘By train paying cash is still the best guess, guv. He’d have come to Leighford from Waterloo; that’s all we can say. There’s no record of a credit card and his car is still in his garage.’

‘What about the chauffeur? As a judge he presumably had one?’

‘The Met have interviewed him,’ the DS said. ‘He’d had flu at the time of the killing and was home in bed. That’s watertight.’

‘But he wasn’t killed here, was he?’ Jacquie spoke up for the first time.

‘No.’ Hall sighed, wiping his hand on his face. ‘Not according to Dr Astley. Jim reckons Bingham’s body was dumped in the woods. There is a slight glimmer there.’ Hall put his glasses back on and rummaged through the paperwork on his desk. ‘Here we are. Fibres. Astley’s report mentions fibres on the clothing. Bingham was wearing a suit when he died. There are pale blue fibres matted into the material at the front.’

‘Which means …’ Jacquie was frowning, working out the angles.

‘Which means he was hit from behind, and fell forward. Astley also found carpet burns on his left cheek and nose.’

Rackham joined in. ‘Head wound, guv. There must have been a lot of blood.’

Hall nodded. ‘And brain tissue. Who do we know who’s bought a new carpet recently?’ He closed Astley’s file. ‘All right, Jacquie, what’s Mr Maxwell up to?’

She looked at the clock. ‘I would think it’s Oliver Cromwell by now, sir – 8 C 4.’

Hall looked at her. Rackham wanted to snigger, but he also wanted promotion, so he thought better of it.

Jacquie cleared her throat. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I accompanied Mr Maxwell to the Lodge yesterday. We now know who hit him over the head and locked him in the basement.’

‘Oh?’ Hall looked at her over his glasses. ‘Who?’

‘Angel Kesteven.’

Hall and Rackham looked blank.

‘She’s a receptionist at the Lodge,’ Jacquie explained. ‘Fully paid-up member of the Church of God’s Children. She is also barking.’

‘Go on,’ said Hall.

‘It’s a long story, sir,’ she said.

Hall leaned back in his chair, cradling his head in his locked hands. ‘DS Rackham and I have nothing better to do, have we, Graham?’

‘Well, er …’

‘Does it get us any closer to who killed Quentin and Bingham, Jacquie?’ Hall had asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

‘It might,’ she said. ‘By a process of elimination.’

‘Then go,’ Hall said.

‘You know Maxwell didn’t believe his kidnapping was Wensley’s work?’

Hall did.

‘At the Lodge, he asked Angel outright why she’d done it.’

‘And?’

‘Well the conversation was sort of … interrupted.’

‘By what?’

‘Paulo Escobar.’

‘Escobar?’ Hall frowned, riffling through his papers. ‘Isn’t that … ?’

‘The lover of George Quentin. Yes.’

‘He was at the Lodge?’

‘Not another bloody Jesus freak?’ Graham enquired.

‘We were talking to Angel when Escobar appeared, pulled a knife.’

‘Jacquie.’ Hall looked at his DC. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I am, sir,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t tackle him. Maxwell did.’

‘Did he, now?’

‘Did you talk to Escobar, sir?’ Jacquie asked. ‘When you were following up on George Quentin?’

‘No, not personally. After that nonsensical mix-up at Vandeleur Negus …’ He was looking straight at Jacquie.

‘Mix-up, guv?’ Rackham wasn’t one to let his boss’s discomfiture disappear so easily.

‘When someone impersonated me,’ Hall said slowly, patiently, looking his man in the face.

‘Oh, yeah.’ Rackham’s reply was ingenuous. ‘I’d forgotten that.’

‘Quentin’s MD told me about Escobar, and I went to the house, but there was no one there. As I was on a tight schedule, the Met followed it up.’

‘Well,’ Jacquie went on, ‘we’re talking about one nasty piece of work.’

‘And Maxwell coped with that?’ Hall asked. He’d always taken the man for a couch potato.

‘Straight out of the manual, sir,’ Jacquie said. ‘Well, the judo throw over his shoulder was. I’m not sure about the boot in the balls first.’

Rackham guffawed and clapped. ‘Nice one.’

‘Mr Escobar fell down the stairs, guv,’ Jacquie said. It wasn’t an unusual line to hear from a police officer. ‘When he came round, he wasn’t talking much. I arrested him for causing an affray and he’s now in the local nick. Godalming. Surrey CID are on to it.’

Hall shook his head. ‘Another constabulary.’ He sighed.

‘It was bound to happen, guv,’ Rackham told him. ‘If there was going to be any activity at the Lodge, I mean.’

‘Before the local law arrived, though,’ Jacquie said, ‘Wensley turned up.’

‘Wensley?’ Rackham started.

Hall nodded. ‘Warwickshire CID let him go. I had a call from Nadine Tyler. Something to do with illegal acquisition of evidence.’ He was looking at Jacquie.

‘It’s as well he arrived when he did.’ Jacquie ignored the jibe. ‘At last I think we had the truth from the Reverend Wensley.’

‘Oh?’ Hall shifted in his chair. ‘That’s nice.’

‘He and Escobar go way back. To the institution in Bilbao. Escobar was just a kid when he was sent there, for knifing a teacher, funnily enough.’ Jacquie could be casual about it now; when she’d heard it first, she’d clung to Maxwell for dear life. ‘Wensley took him under his wing, looked after the lad, taught him to cope. Wensley, of course, was an old hand. An old lag, doing porridge.’

‘It was a hospital,’ Hall corrected her.

‘That’s not how Wensley and Escobar see it, sir. Oh, the Preacher still didn’t tell us everything. There are some wounds that run too deep. But he can rationalize it now, handle his own past. They had a long time to talk, Escobar and Wensley. The Preacher told him all about England and his old friends – one in particular, George Quentin. What Wensley didn’t know, or so he said, was that Quentin was queer as a wagonload of monkeys. The hospital let Escobar out six years ago – a year before Wensley – and he came over here with a work permit. Still don’t know how he got that.’

‘Bloody asylum-seeker.’ Rackham grunted. ‘We give away British citizenship with litres of petrol. Didn’t you know?’

‘Escobar found Quentin,’ Jacquie went on, ‘told him about Wensley, struck up a relationship and moved in.’

‘And this Angel Kesteven,’ Hall said. ‘Why did she clobber Maxwell?’