Authors: M.J. Trow
‘What have we got?’ Hall was scanning the table behind his man, the light of the white cloth reflecting back in his lenses. A pile of old bones wasn’t very helpful.
‘No, that’s not ours,’ Astley chuckled. He, who had been around death so long, could afford a wry smile now and again. In fact, it was vital. ‘Oh, it’s a murder all right, but I suspect a certain statute of limitations will have kicked in by now. Saxon, apparently. That’s some time ago, now, isn’t it?’ Jim Astley had given up History after O levels.
Hall believed it was. And he believed there was one man who’d know exactly, with that carbon-14 mind of his, the bastard he’d just seen sauntering away down Staple Hill in the direction of Leighford – the bastard the kids called Mad Max. ‘Over here.’
Astley let his glasses dangle from the chain round his neck and trudged across the trenches to the little ash grove. SOCO men still crouched here, photographing,
measuring
, plotting exactly all the calibrations of murder.
‘Evening, guv,’ Martin Toogood stood up beside the body in question. ‘Dr David Radley. He was an archaeologist. In charge of this dig.’
‘Next of kin been informed?’ Hall asked, looking at the corpse at his feet.
‘Not yet, sir. There’s a wife in Brighton.’
‘Who’ve we got on that?’
‘DS Carpenter,’ Toogood told him.
‘No. No, I need Jacquie on something else.’ He glanced across to where his other DS was talking to a rangy, shocked looking man in sandals and a beard. ‘Get the Brighton boys on it.’ He checked his watch. ‘The wife’ll be worried by now.’
‘Sir,’ and Toogood was striding back to the four-by-fours
and the patrol cars, phone in hand.
‘Yes, Jim?’ Hall wanted answers of the pathological kind.
‘Neck’s broken,’ Astley wasn’t going to kneel down again, not with his sciatica. ‘So’s his left ankle. I’d say he’s been dropped.’
‘Dropped?’ Hall frowned.
Astley shrugged. ‘Well, a fall, anyway. And not here. If you look up…’
Hall did, to the tangle of ash limbs breaking the sky
overhead
.
‘…Not enough weight in those branches to carry his body. Anyway, how would anybody get him up there? No, he was brought here. Carefully laid down where you see him now. The question is, why?’
Hall nodded. That was always the question. But there were so many questions in a murder enquiry, so many pieces of a puzzle to fit together. And somebody had taken away the box with the picture on it.
The lights of Columbine had long gone out by the time Jacquie Carpenter’s Ka purred to the kerb outside number 38. There had been a time when she’d parked discreetly around the corner in the early days when she and Peter Maxwell had first been an item. And when she had a career and he had issues. Now, she still had a career and he still had issues, but somehow, there was light at the end of the tunnel of their lives together. Nobody was moving in with anybody. But they were there, at the end of the phone, at the end of the street, a bike ride away at most. They were comfortable with that.
‘Evening, Count.’ She waved her car keys at the black and white brute stretched like one of Landseer’s lions on Maxwell’s front lawn, his white bits bright under the crisp
half moon. He wagged his tail, just the once, and continued to crunch his way through the ex-rodent he’d spent the last hour torturing to death. Bloody soft, these coppers; they let you get away with murder.
She rang the doorbell even though she had a key
somewhere
and an apparition appeared in the frosty glass of the front door.
‘Yes?’ she said to him, their favourite old joke from Messrs Kenny Everett and Billy Connolly.
‘Two pints please, milkman.’ He kissed her on the nose. ‘God, my mouth feels like a badger’s arse.’
‘Scrummy.’ She swept past him and dragged herself up the stairs, to his lounge. ‘I wouldn’t know. And stop
looking
at my bum.’
‘My dear,’ he informed her. ‘It’s half-past five in the morning. I can’t focus on anything as small as a bum until at least quarter to nine. And then,’ he gloated, rubbing his hands together, ‘I have a huge selection to choose from.’
‘You say the sweetest things,’ she laughed and hurled her handbag at the settee in the living room. Maxwell hadn’t opened the curtains yet and the place had that weird light that lamp-lit early morning brings. ‘Coffee in the usual place?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘Where you left it yesterday.’
She walked through to the kitchen and busied herself with the kettle.
‘Fancy a full English?’ he asked, vaguely trying to tie up the cords of his dressing gown, and wondering what the hell he had in the fridge.
‘No thanks, Max,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, rummaging in the cupboard for cups.
‘Well, this is sort of official,’ she turned to him.
‘Ah,’ he slid his arms round her waist. The girl was just young enough to be his daughter. What
was
she doing in the wee small hours wasting time with this mad old
bastard
? ‘That has all the hallmarks of dear Henry, if you’ll excuse the rather weak pun.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘You might have known,’ she said. ‘He saw you light-footing it off the dig site.’
‘I know he did. I even waved to him.’
‘Nothing like being subtle.’ She rubbed her nose against his.
‘It was only a matter of time,’ he said and his sentence died away as she kissed him.
‘Oh, no you don’t,’ he laughed, hauling her off. ‘You can’t talk with your mouth full and you’ve got a lot of
talking
to do. If I’ve got the summons, as I assume I have, I need to be briefed.’
‘Max,’ she shouted. ‘You do this every time. You know I can’t…’
‘…divulge,’ he smiled. ‘Yes, I know. Now, let me pour you a coffee and drive these lighted matches under your fingernails.’
Henry Hall would have liked to have set up his Incident Room on the slope of the Downs, on Staple Hill near to Dr Radley’s dig, but that would have involved Portakabins and major upheavals and permissions that would take weeks to get. The Chief Constable, no less, said no. So, that Friday morning saw Hall and his team back at Leighford nick, but with the new found purpose and urgency that always came with a murder enquiry. His team sat in front of him, ready and waiting.
‘Victim,’ Hall was standing in front of a screen with a blown-up image of the dead man. Radley’s eyes were half
open, his neck purple with a wound. His lips were parted too, as though in mid-sentence. Nobody commented, but one or two of the younger coppers felt unnerved by it. It was Hall’s way of keeping them focused. ‘What do we know?’
‘I’ve got that, guv.’ Martin Toogood waved a notepad in the air as the coffee mugs clicked and the smoke wreathed the stacks of paper in the paperless office and the VDUs flickered with a life of their own. ‘David Radley was
thirty-two
. Married to…Susan.’
‘Has she been contacted?’ Hall asked.
‘Brighton CID.,’ Toogood confirmed. ‘She’s taken it badly, apparently.’
No surprises there. This was a room of hard-bitten police people. There was not one who had not seen it all before – the tears, the hysterics, the stunned silence. And each time they’d been there, talking to distraught parents,
comforting
forlorn spouses, holding the hands of
uncomprehending
children; each time, they thought to themselves, ‘What if it was me?’ And nothing was more calculated to keep cynicism at bay.
‘Radley was an Oxford graduate. Pretty high-powered, apparently.’
‘Enemies?’ Hall asked.
‘Sir?’ Toogood was a little wrong-footed.
‘Man was thirty-two,’ Hall reasoned, as much to himself as to his team. ‘He was a go-getter. What if somebody resented that? Where did he lecture? Wessex?’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Right, Martin. Get on it. Get over to the campus at Petworth. Talk to Radley’s people. I want chapter and verse. Anything from the scene, Dave?’
DC Dave Garstang was a walking shit-house of a man,
but he’d made a pretty smooth transition from crowd
control
at football matches to SOCO liaison and most people admired him for it.
‘Body was found by a kid…er…Robert Wesson, in Year Eight at Leighford High.’
‘Anybody on that?’ Hall checked.
‘Jacquie Carpenter, guv,’ Toogood told him.
Hall gave the man an old-fashioned look. Jacquie Carpenter and Leighford High. That meant Jacquie Carpenter and Peter Maxwell – a marriage made in hell if ever there was one in public relations terms. Henry Hall found himself, for that split second, grudgingly admitting that when it came to catching killers, it might
just
be a
marriage
made in Heaven.
‘What else, Dave?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got more tyre marks than the parson preached about, guv,’ Garstang said, sifting through his papers. ‘Archaeologists, farmers, metal detectors, nosey-parkers, site security people. Plus one school minibus.’
‘And footprints to match, I suppose?’
‘You got it,’ Garstang nodded. ‘I did find out one thing, though.’
‘Oh?’
‘Archaeologists are addicted to chewing gum. SOCO found 68 wrappers around the site.’ A ripple of laughter ran round the room. Good. You really needed that at moments like these.
‘Well,’ Hall said softly, ‘I don’t suppose they get out much. Who’s got the site personnel list?’
Silence.
‘Somebody?’
Martin Toogood cleared his throat, wishing he’d already nipped out on his way to Petworth.
Hall’s face said it all. ‘Alison.’
‘Sir?’ a fresh-faced DC with freckles and no neck looked at him like a rabbit in the headlights.
‘That’s one for you, I think.’
‘Well, I don’t know where to start, really.’ Sally Greenhow was passing an insipid cup of coffee to Jacquie Carpenter. ‘I don’t think it’s cause for alarm.’
‘Thanks,’ Jacquie sat in the Special Needs office at Leighford High. It had posters of David Beckham on the wall and assorted truculent-looking bands that Jacquie had never heard of. There were trailing spider plants to
reinforce
the fact that this was the Jungle Room. And there was patience and endless tolerance. And love, of a sort. ‘I know,’ Jacquie said. ‘It’s difficult to tell how people are going to react, isn’t it?’
‘To what?’ Sally asked.
Jacquie looked at the woman, with her pencil figure and her frizzy, flaxen hair. In Peter Maxwell’s reckoning, this was one of the good guys, a beacon in a naughty world. But he’d never said she was
bright
. You don’t get to be SENCO by being bright.
‘To finding a body,’ the detective said, sensing wires crossing in all directions.
‘A body?’ Sally frowned, putting her mug down on the table between them. ‘I’m sorry, can we re-wind on this
conversation
? I thought you were here about Annette Choker?’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, God. No, look,’ Sally Greenhow wasn’t usually fazed by anything, but today was not going well. ‘Why are you here?’
Jacquie put her mug down on the table, along with her
cards. Was nobody talking her language any more? ‘Robert Wesson found a body yesterday afternoon, at the
archaeological
dig above Leighford. I need to speak to him.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Sally rummaged in the rug-bag hanging on the arm of her chair. ‘Do you?’ she was pulling a cigarette out of a packet.
Jacquie shook her head. ‘I used to,’ she smiled. ‘Thought better of it.’
‘Quite right,’ Sally said, lips clamped round the noxious weed. ‘But there are times…’ and she inhaled gratefully, consigning the match to a litter-bin with an expertise born of years in Special Needs. ‘No, we’re at the most appalling cross-purposes here. We’re hideously short-staffed at the moment. Pregnancies. Nervous breakdowns. You name it; we’ve got the lot. You’re a friend of Max’s – you know the score.’
‘Some,’ Jacquie confessed.
Sally knew that Peter Maxwell got himself into scrapes. She knew he had a penchant for murder. And she knew he loved Jacquie Carpenter.
‘So,’ Sally went on, squinting as the smoke drifted up past her eyes, ‘I’m doubling up as Deputy Year Head for Year Eleven at the moment. And one of my little darlings, Annette Choker, has done a runner.’
‘You’ve reported it?’
‘Of course, that’s why I assumed you were here.’
‘Sorry.’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘One thing at a time, I’m afraid. I’m sure somebody will be in touch about this girl. How long has she been gone?’
‘Where are we today? Friday. Wednesday – Wednesday afternoon. We let a full day go by, then our Student Services people ring home. Mrs Choker thought Annette was at school. She checked all the usual offices – her friends, a
sister in Halifax. Nothing.’
‘Year Eleven,’ Jacquie checked. ‘So she’s…what…?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Street-wise?’
Sally rolled her eyes skywards. ‘You could say that. Lives on the Barlichway Estate. D’you know it?’
‘You could say that,’ Jacquie smiled.
‘But, Robbie…’ Sally changed tack. ‘He found a
body
?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What was he doing at the dig?’
‘Part of a school trip, evidently.’
Sally snorted. ‘A school trip? Not Robbie. He only comes to school at all for the free breakfast and lunch. He tends to last an average of eight minutes in lessons.’
‘Well, that’s as may be,’ Jacquie said. ‘But he found a body, nonetheless. I need to talk to him. And to see the others on this list.’ She handed the woman a piece of paper.
‘Er…no, these are Year Twelve. All of them. That’ll be Max’s domain. You’ll have to see him about them.’
‘I will.’ Jacquie finished her coffee. ‘But first things first. Where can I find Robbie Wesson?’ And would her visit coincide with his eight minutes in the building?
Eleanor Fry slipped off her negligee and looked at her body in the half light of her bedroom. Her breasts were still firm, her thighs still curved in all the right places. Tears rolled
silver
down her cheeks as she turned to round the corner into the bathroom. She took John’s razor blades from the
cabinet
in the corner and the bottle of pills from the drawer below it. She wasn’t thinking rationally any more. In fact, she was barely thinking at all.