Maxwell's Grave (15 page)

‘Why?’

A silence.

‘Don’t know.’

‘You know what they say about police work, Jacquie. Ninety per cent perspiration, ten per cent speculation. Speculate.’

It was the nearest to a joke you were likely to get from Henry Hall and Jacquie settled for it. ‘Symbolism,’ she said. ‘Aren’t ash groves sacred or something?’

‘Ask Maxwell,’ the DCI said. ‘I’d have put him in a grave.’

‘Seems a
little
harsh, sir,’ Jacquie smiled, her grey eyes twinkling. ‘Teachers like him are hard to come by.’

Henry Hall never rose to bait of any kind. ‘Now, don’t mix your metaphors,’ he told her in a quip worthy of the Great Man himself. ‘We’re talking about Radley.’

‘In a grave?’

‘Sure. If I remember rightly, they’ve found a dozen or so, haven’t they? Saxon remains or whatever. What could be neater? Somebody’s already done the hard work for you – the six feet under bit.’

‘But he’d be found too soon,’ she realized.

‘Say on.’ He liked the way this was going.

‘That kid from Leighford High didn’t find the body until late afternoon, and if he hadn’t been sticking his nose in where it shouldn’t have been, it would have been later still. Maybe not until the Friday or whenever the team planned to start work on the grove itself.’

‘Right. But, conversely, no attempt to bury him. Radley was fully clothed, was still carrying his wallet, complete with cash and credit cards. It would have been quite easy to flick a few feet of earth over him. Chances are we wouldn’t have found him yet.’ There was a silence while Jacquie negotiated a few roundabouts, slower this time.

‘There again,’ this was the DCI’s PS, ‘somebody had stripped him and re-dressed him. Why?’

Silence

‘Scenario two,’ Hall said.

‘Er…scenario two,’ Jacquie focused, ‘is that Samantha Welland took her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed over issues we know nothing about.’

‘Which brings us to Hazel Twigg.’

Jacquie snorted. ‘Sorry, guv. I mean, I know it’s all very tragic, but I don’t know how I kept a straight face. What kind of people call their daughter Hazel if their surname is Twigg?’

‘What indeed?’ Henry Hall had only smiled three times in his life. He saw no need to extend that record today.

‘What did you make of her?’

‘Mannish lass,’ Jacquie said, remembering their first sight of the woman on the steps of The Orchards. ‘Clearly
lesbian
.’

‘Live-in-lover of Sam Welland. You interviewed her first. What did she tell you?’

‘My notebook’s back there.’

Hall was waving a finger in the air. ‘Uh-huh. Memory, detective sergeant, if you please. You know how much the eminences on the Bench hate little black books.’

Jacquie flashed him a steely glance. Hall felt it, even with his eyes closed, but he wasn’t giving her the satisfaction. ‘Well,’ Jacquie ventured, ‘she was clearly distraught. I calmed her down, made her a cup of tea, the usual drill.’

The usual drill indeed, but Henry Hall knew Jacquie Carpenter. She’d have done it perfectly, as though Hazel Twigg, at that moment, was the only person in the world and that there had never been anyone so special or as
wonderful
as Sam Welland.

‘“I loved her” she kept saying, over and over again. “I loved her”. Almost as if…’

‘Yes?’

‘…Almost as if, somehow, her love had caused what had happened.’

‘Tell me about their relationship.’

‘They’d met ten years ago at the Karate Club…um…’

‘The Campdens.’ As always, the DCI was a step or twelve ahead.

‘The Campdens. Sam was working on a research thesis – an M.Phil. She got Hazel a job in the archaeology office at Petworth.’

‘Not an archaeologist?’

‘No, assistant to the Admissions Tutor; glorified typist, in fact, but she was concerned with undergraduates. She and Sam had similar interests.’

‘Women.’

‘I was going to say Martial Arts,’ Jacquie was brave enough to correct her boss when she didn’t have time to think about it. ‘They dated a few times, realized they could make a go of it and Hazel moved in.’

‘To a very nice
pied-a-terre
indeed. I didn’t know they paid university lecturers so well.’

‘According to them, they don’t,’ Jacquie said. ‘Oh, in your own time!’ she suddenly snarled at some daffy tart in a sun hat. Here she was, up to her armpits in other people’s tragedies and daffy tarts still drove badly in sun hats. It was the way of the world. She reined in her venom; she was beginning to
think
like Mad Max now. ‘No, Ms Welland’s family are loaded. According to Hazel, her parents are divorced and mother was killed in a plane crash – Cessna over the Downs, engine failure. Father didn’t want to know so little Sam was brought up by grandparents. They in turn have shuffled off, leaving Sam with a packet, including the house in Hove.’

‘Is there a will?’ Hall’s mind was wandering in a different
direction now.

‘Doubt it, guv; she was twenty seven.’

‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ Hall said. ‘What were Ms Twigg’s movements over the last twenty-four hours?’

‘Well, she was at the university on Thursday until five. Came home, had supper with Sam and got an early night.’ Picture of wedded bliss, really.

‘They slept together?’

‘Usually, yes. But not when she or Sam had early
mornings
. So as not to disturb each other, they each had a spare room. Sam was up early to get to the dig at Leighford.’

‘This was the day before yesterday?’ Hall checked.

‘That’s right. After that, it all gets a little hazy. What did she tell you?’

The DCI had interviewed the companion after Jacquie. She’d been the Nice Policeman. He was curt, brusque even, by the book. His back was beginning to register that he was, after all, travelling in a Ka. He tried to stretch, but there was little chance of that. ‘She visited friends in London later yesterday,’ he took up the thread, ‘Clerkenwell. Obviously, we’ll need to check this out. The address is in my notebook, but of course,’ he looked blankly at her, ‘I’ve committed it to memory. She stayed over.’

‘Left a message on Sam’s answerphone.’ Jacquie filled in from her own knowledge.

‘Which is still there.’

‘Yes.’

‘I played it,’ they both chorused.

‘So she made an early start from London,’ Hall went on alone. ‘Got to Hove about ten, ten fifteen. And found Sam in the garage. Minutes before we arrived.’

‘What did you make of the forensics, guv? By the time I
got there, SOCO were finishing up.’

‘From the house, you approach the garage from the
utility
room. A flight of steps get you down there. I counted ten. Room for three cars but only Sam’s Volvo was there. Hazel Twigg’s was on the drive, if you remember. Sam would have rigged up the rope from the wall to the left as you look at it, across the overhead beams and into the
position
we found her in. There was a chair under her body, taken from the kitchen. All very tragic.’

Another silence. None of it made much sense to Jacquie, but she was prepared to bow to her oppos’ far greater
experience
. ‘Is that it, then?’ she ventured. ‘Can we say Case Closed and all go home?’

For a fleeting moment, Jacquie thought she saw the hint of a smile hover around Henry Hall’s lips, but on second thoughts, it was probably the afternoon sun reflected back from her bonnet as they took the long rise to the Downs above Leighford, and the run up to Staple Hill.

‘Tut, tut, Detective Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Why kill yourself with a rope you’ve had to buy – Hazel Twigg said there was no rope in the house – when you’ve got a medicine cabinet full of tablets upstairs and a kitchen absolutely chocka with sharp knives? No, no. Young Samantha clearly had no money worries. She seemed very happy with her
companion
of a mile. For all we say Radley was better, she was
successful
in her career. No reason that I can see to kill herself. No, we are looking at scenario three.’

‘We are?’ Jacquie was afraid Henry Hall would say that, but at least this one he was going to expound.

‘Scenario three is that Sam Welland is the third killing in a series, all part of a common plan. David Radley, neck
broken
, found in the ash grove at Leighford. Sam Welland, dangling from a rope in her garage – “suddenly, at home”.’

‘And Martin Toogood?’ Jacquie said. He was never far from any of their thoughts, but neither of them had
mentioned
him all day.

‘And Martin Toogood,’ Hall nodded. ‘And that’s the one that breaks the mould. It doesn’t fit the pattern and it’s bugging me to hell.’ He sat upright and what happened next was pure Peter Maxwell. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ he snapped. And that was pure Bart Simpson.

Sundays in summer. Gorgeous, slim young things
wandering
the white beaches of Leighford, G-strings covering their modesty, barely evident breasts
just
concealed by
halter-neck
tops. Slabs of lard oozing onto the sand, the great beached whales of middle-aged England, listening to raucous music on their portable CD players. Hedged round by a protective barrier of groynes and wind-breaks, an ancient granddad with a straw hat and the bravery to take off his tie in the soaring temperatures. Skinny, spotty lads, mostly Leighford High’s finest, kicking a football in any direction but the improvised goal.

The smells of the season wafted across the beach – instant barbecues, curling black on their foil bases, carried promise of underdone sausages and crisp burgers, tastes to harden our arteries. The slightly sickly odour of sunblock mingled with them, with just a threat of whatever problem Southern Water hadn’t
quite
sorted out in Leighford’s sewage disposal system.

He waited until the coast was clear, until the queue had gone from the ice cream kiosk, then he pounced.

‘I’ll have a 99 please, Michaela.’

She froze in mid-serve. Under a ludicrous straw hat, she barely recognized the Head of Sixth Form from up at the school. He had dark, almost purple circles under his eyes
and his nose seemed to be jointed in the middle. His lips were thicker than usual and were coated, even before he’d bought his ice cream, in something white.

‘Is that with a flake in it?’ Michaela asked, ever the
professional
, regaining her composure. She didn’t look much less of a tart now in the regalia of Mr Scrummy, than she had framed in the doorway of Railway Terrace the previous night.

‘Yes, my dear,’ Maxwell said patiently. ‘That’s what makes it a 99. Otherwise I’d have asked for a cone.’

‘Strawberry sauce?’ She was operating the EU regulated gadgetry, with an efficiency which would have astounded her Science and Design Technology teachers.

‘Thank you, no,’ he said. ‘I’m allergic to pink.’

‘You know, my dad’s really pissed off with you. Hazelnuts?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not best pleased with him.’

‘He says you’ve broken his hand.’

‘I say he’s broken my nose,’ Maxwell countered.

‘One fifty,’ she passed him his 99.

‘Hang on,’ he rummaged in his back pocket. ‘I’ll have to remortgage. Why did you lie to him, Michaela?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come off it!’ he handed her the coins. ‘You accused me of touching you up. I don’t blame your dad. In those
circumstances
, I’d probably have done exactly what he did.’

‘You got kids, then?’

The little girl. The photograph. The memories. The pain. ‘No, Michaela,’ he said softly. ‘You’re missing the point. Look, you’re Annette’s best friend, right?’

‘Maybe,’ she sniffed.

‘Don’t you care what’s happened to her?’

‘Nothing’s happened to her,’ she whined.

Bingo!

‘So you have heard from her?’

Michaela hesitated. This was Mr Maxwell in front of her. He’d taught her back in Year Eight. Some of his lessons were actually quite interesting. And he did look a sorry state at the moment. Perhaps she had been a bit hasty the night before last. ‘Yeah, yeah, I have.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Your 99’s melting,’ she commented.

He slurped his hand, gingerly. Michaela’s white goo was only marginally less painful than Jacquie’s ice pack. ‘Don’t change the subject.’

‘Look, she’s quite safe,’ Michaela said. ‘She just needs a bit of time, that’s all. Her mum’s gonna kill her as it is…’

‘I think her mum could be the least of her troubles, Micky,’ he said.

‘Look…you in the phone book? Got a mobile?’

‘Yes. No, in that order. Well, I have, but I never use it.’ Michaela was incredulous. How
old
must you be not to use a mobile?

‘How about, if she texts me again, I tell her you want to talk to her. Yeah?’

‘I’m in the book,’ Maxwell said, slurping his hand again. ‘Call me, Michaela. I think everybody should be more
worried
about Annette than they are. All right?’

‘Oi, can we get some service around here?’ The queue had formed again behind Peter Maxwell and the great,
tolerant
British public was exercising its bonhomie. All on a Summer’s Day. Nonny Nonny.

Chapter Ten

‘Jesus! Mr Maxwell, what happened to you?’ The waiter hovered by the table, menus in hand, horror etched on his face.

‘Don’t ask, Hop Sing. It’s a very long story,’ Maxwell told him.

‘You brave enough for chopsticks tonight?’ The man looked as if he had enough to worry about as it was.

‘Is the Pope a Buddhist?’ the Great Man felt constrained to ask.

‘That’ll be a no, Kenny,’ Jacquie Carpenter explained. Kenny had been in Britain for many years now, but no one was assimilated enough for Maxwell’s repartee.

The pair sat opposite each other in the Great Wall, Jacquie stuffing prawn crackers, Maxwell trying not to cry when he nibbled his.

‘Tell me again why you call him Hop Sing.’ She sipped her lager. The dragon lanterns threw weirdly coloured
patterns
on the flock wallpaper as the breeze lifted from the sea and slipped in through the sash windows of Leighford’s favourite – and only – Chinese restaurant.

‘Ah, you have to be a certain vintage, darling heart,’ he told her. ‘“We chased lady luck, till we finally struck, Bonanza.” They don’t write Western theme songs like that anymore. “Hoss and Joe and Adam know every rock is high.” There was almost a tune to it. They were the sons of Ben Cartwright, aka the actor Lorne Greene – now there’s a name to conjure with – in a cowboy series in the Fifties and Sixties. Hop Sing was their Chinese cook.’

‘I’m not sure Kenny understands,’ Jacquie whispered.

‘Nonsense. His people invented fireworks and paper money and printing. There’s a profound wisdom in the
Chinese that goes way beyond
gai pad bai gaprow
. Have you noticed, by the way,’ Maxwell leaned towards her and became conspiratorial, ‘how the Thailanders are taking over. Siam and China have about as much in common as us and the Bulgarians, but you can’t tell their dishes apart these days. It’s a sad, sad world, my masters.’

‘And talking of sad worlds…’

‘Ah, yes.’ He reached across to hold her hand. ‘You poor darling. Samantha Welland. You all right?’

‘Who’s having the crab and sweetcorn soup?’ Hop Sing was back.

‘That’ll be me, Hop,’ Maxwell said. ‘Got a particularly enticing Chardonnay in your extensive cellar? I’m trying to make a lady out of my beer-swilling companion here.’

Kenny winked. ‘Got something special, Missy,’ he all but bowed.

‘Will you stop winding him up?’ Jacquie hissed, tackling her crimson-coated ribs.

‘Mine feel a bit like that,’ Maxwell said, pointing at them, ‘And I’ve been on the beach all day.’

‘The beach? That’s not like you, Max.’

‘Michaela Reynolds. Works at the Lilliput Adventure Playground, selling Mr Scrummy icecream. More
E-numbers
than the parson preached about. She knows where Annette Choker is.’

‘She does?’ Jacquie swallowed quickly and dabbed her mouth to catch some, at least of the falling sauce. She grabbed for her mobile. ‘I must get on to Alison McCormick.’

‘It’ll keep.’ He held her hand fast. ‘How long have you been on duty now?’

‘We never sleep, Max,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘OK, Mr Maxwell?’ Hop Sing hovered with the
Chardonnay.

‘Ah, the south side of the vineyard, Hop. Perfect. Thanks.’ And he waited until the waiter had gone. ‘Shit, this is hot.’

‘Anything’s going to seem hot with a lip the size of yours, Max,’ she said.

Why was it that women, even soft, loving women, could be so bloody non-understanding at times? Had there been a Mrs Michelangelo Buonarroti, no doubt she’d have been standing at the base of a column in the Sistine Chapel,
tapping
her foot and screaming, ‘I’ve called you three times already. Are you coming in for your dinner or not?’ He let it go.

‘Henry thinks Sam Welland was murdered.’

Maxwell paused to let his lips recover from the last mouthful. ‘Does he now?’ he raised an eyebrow. ‘And you’d be telling me this, why?’ Could this be a turning-point in their relationship?

She threatened to stick a rib up his nose. ‘I thought you might be interested,’ she said.

‘Oh, Woman Policeman mine,’ he chuckled. ‘How many cases have you and I worked on now – eight? Nine?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘My point is that usually I have to extract information from you with a variety of Inquisition-type instruments of torture. First, I show them to you in the best Torquemada tradition, then I lop off bits of your body, one by one. And here you are, without so much as a turn of the rack,
making
free with what I’m sure are DCI Hall’s most intimate deliberations.’

‘He needs your help,’ Jacquie said, stone-faced.

‘My help?’ Maxwell could frown all right. It was smiling that took its toll.

‘Several times on the way to Hove,’ she remembered. ‘Once there and several times again on the way back, he said something like “Ask Maxwell”.’

‘Figure of speech,’ the Head of Sixth Form shrugged, blowing on a particularly luscious piece of crab on his porcelain spoon.

‘Uh-huh,’ she shook her head, ‘I know Henry Hall. There’s an historical twist to this case, Max, and he knows it. That’s where you come in.’

‘You fed him my views on Martin Toogood’s computer entries?’

‘The
Julius Caesar
? Yes, I did. He’s intrigued,’

‘We all are,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But still, I’m not sure I’m right.’

‘It’s a lead,’ she said. And Leighford nick has precious few of those at the moment.

‘What are you doing after this?’ he asked, ‘when and if I’ve been brave enough to get my mandibles around Hop Sing’s to-die-for banana fritters?’

‘Getting some shut-eye,’ she said. ‘
After
I’ve passed Michaela’s info on Annette onto the nick.’

‘You are the proud owner of a differencing machine, are you not?’ Maxwell was plotting something.

She screwed up her face and rested it in her hand, teasing the last yummy morsel of her ribs into a corner of her mouth. ‘I’m sure you can manage the c-word,’ she said, ‘even if you can’t use one. Yes, I have a computer. I won’t bore you with the make and model.’

‘Brilliant,’ he nodded. ‘I need to look something up on what you young people call the Internet.’ He waved to the waiter. ‘Hop Sing,’ he called to the odd looks of fellow
diners
. ‘A brace of your lovely hot flannels, please. Just the thing to mop my soup up with.’ He leaned forward to
Jacquie and said in a whisper, ‘Don’t think he noticed that I ended that sentence with a preposition, do you?’

‘So, Mr…er…Maxwell?’ Tam Fraser sat in the main tent that Monday morning, surrounded, rather like Dierdre Lessing, with dead men’s bones. ‘Tell me what you know about Saxon cemeteries.’

‘Furnished or unfurnished?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked. He had jettisoned the bandages and cream of the previous day, the ones that had jolted Michaela Reynolds and Kenny Hop Sing and had made Jacquie Carpenter love the man even more; and he was bearing his wounds before for all to see.

Fraser was quietly impressed, but he wasn’t going to show it. He needed another volunteer at the Leighford dig like a hole in the head, but he was two people down now. First, David Radley. Now, Sam Welland. Henry Hall and a couple of uniforms had been to the site earlier to break the news about Sam Welland to the rest of the team. Fraser had insisted on a two minutes’ silence and then it was back to buckets and spades.

‘Unfurnished,’ he said.

‘Usually denotes a Christian burial ground,’ Maxwell said. ‘Bodies in rows in an east-west orientation, heads to the west, to the setting sun. No grave goods, on the grounds that you can’t, in Christian philosophy, take it with you. No cremations either. That little habit didn’t come back until the Victorians got rather windy about
premature
burial. I blame Edgar Allan Poe, myself.’

Fraser chuckled. A bit of light relief was all too missing around here. Perhaps he could do business with this Maxwell after all.

‘They are usually concomitant with a church,’ the Head
of Sixth Form went on, ‘but you haven’t found one here, have you?’

‘Indeed, not,’ Fraser nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘It is unlikely that this site is a continuation of a
furnished
, that is, pagan, burial site. If it were, you’d go down in the annals yourself, wouldn’t you?’

‘Would I? And why is that, pray?’

Maxwell played the
ingénue
. ‘Because there are no recorded examples of that in England.’

‘Very good, laddie,’ Fraser smiled. ‘But you’ve been to the site before, so you tell me. Pick up all this from Dougie Russell, did you?’

‘Emphatically not,’ Maxwell bridled. He’d picked it up from some dot.com site on Jacquie’s PC, but he wasn’t going to tell Fraser that.

‘And of course, you know all about poor David.’

‘I do,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘In a way, that’s why I’m here.’

‘Oh?’

‘You’re short-staffed.’

‘Shorter than you know,’ Fraser said grimly. ‘What a loss to research that man will be. But this is David’s dig. Whatever we find here, my report will carry his name. I’ll have it no other way.’

‘Unfurnished cemeteries have become quite important in recent years.’ Maxwell’s memory, even of the Internet screen, was impressive. ‘Variants in wood and stone
memorials
, grave structure, charcoal burial, supine and erect
bodies
, with arm and leg variations. Of course, at Repton…’

‘Repton’s Viking, laddie,’ Fraser interrupted, testing his man for his ability to think on his feet.

‘A winter camp, yes. But it was a Saxon monastery first, founded, if I’m not mistaken, by Haedda, Abbott of Bredon – a double house for monks and nuns. Quite the
place to be seen dead, too, if you were a Middle Saxon royal. Aethelbald was buried there; Wigstan, of course; not to mention Merewald, King of the Magonsaetan…’

‘Enough, already!’ Fraser’s hands were in the air, as he laughed out loud. ‘You’ve got the job, Mr Maxwell.’ And the great men shook hands. ‘But, first things first. How are you at making the tea?’

Jacquie Carpenter spent what seemed like all of that Monday afternoon of Maxwell’s half-term on the phone to Hove CID. SOCO had, as promised two days earlier, busted a gut to get what information they could to Henry Hall’s people. Their pathologist’s initial findings were that Sam Welland had died by strangulation.

‘Asphyxia due to a constriction of the neck by force applied by ligature,’ were the man’s words over the phone to Leighford nick. Text-book stuff. The rope’s knot was to the left and behind the dead woman’s ear when they found her. The photographs already pinned to an Incident Room in Hove showed Sam Welland as her partner had found her. Her lips and ears were purple, the colour of Peter Maxwell’s nose. There was a film of froth around her lips, livid in the camera’s flash and her tongue protruded, mauve and grotesque like some ghastly gargoyle leaning out from a Medieval buttress to terrify the world.

There was nothing quick and clean about Sam Welland’s death. The macabre science of the judicial executions from James Berry to Albert Pierrepoint allowed for the lightning drop, with Berry’s carefully calculated table, worked out to the weight of a condemned man, his height and the length of the rope needed to kill him. Whoever had killed Sam Welland had reverted to the older method, the bunglers like Calcraft, the young Victoria’s executioner, who left his
victims to writhe at the rope’s end, kicking and struggling, fighting for air.

That was how the archaeologist had died; her fingertips were raw from scrabbling at the rough hemp, until, finally, mercifully, her breath had stopped and her eyes bulged and her hands had fallen to her side, her fingers curling in on themselves like claws. She had wet herself in those last
minutes
, splashes of urine on the kitchen chair and a puddle on the garage floor.

Whoever had killed her had gone into the house freely. There was no sign of forced entry, no broken window, no tell-tale smashing of the lock or door-frame. Ms Welland’s upmarket home had a complex burglar alarm system, but no CCTV camera and none of the neighbours had seen anyone come or go at any time over the weekend. That said, The Orchards was set back from the road, with an eight foot brick wall at the front and a ring of cedars around the perimeter. There could have been a quiet pop festival going on in its grounds and the neighbours would have been none the wiser.

So, Jacquie put the question to her Hove oppo over the phone, did Sam Welland know her killer? Had her visitor been the newspaperman, a Mormon, a prospective
parliamentary
candidate, a four-foot high ‘grey’ from beyond the known world? Anything was possible. All the accounts of the dead woman that Jacquie had were that she was
extrovert
, brash even. She wouldn’t have been cowering behind a curtain somewhere.

Whoever the murderer was, he had brought his rope with him. Jacquie checked her notes again; Hazel Twigg said that there was none in the house, and apart from the length used to hang the dead woman, she was right. Bruising and a cut on the right jaw suggested that the killer had gone for
Sam in the kitchen, where there were slight signs of a
scuffle
– a ruched mat, a wonky window-blind. In fiction, Miss Marple would have been travelling past in the 4.50 from Paddington at the time and would have seen the lot. As it was, nothing. As Western buff Peter Maxwell would have ruminated, she might as well have been riding the 3.10 to Yuma.