Authors: M. J. Trow
‘What do you know?’ Maxwell asked the younger man.
Hennessey chuckled coldly. ‘Uh-uh,’ he shook his head. ‘No doubt you’d say it’s a cliché, but I’ll ask the questions.’
All right,’ Maxwell said, ‘I went on a sleuthing spree at the end of last month. It was such basic detective work, that I expected you boys to have been there before me. I wanted to know something about Alice’s past. Something that might have explained her disappearance and her murder.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘Porn. When she was a student, she did modelling for a company in Soho. That’s where I got my beating.’
‘Why didn’t you tell the Met that?’
‘I didn’t think it was any of their business. How is Jacquie?’
Hennessey shook his head, reaching for another cigarette. ‘I don’t know. The police doctor’s given her something to make her sleep. There’ll have to be an enquiry’
‘Into what?’
‘Into what she told you.’
Maxwell saw a loophole yawning before him, a light at the end of the tunnel. ‘What did she tell me?’
‘Don’t muck me about, Mr Maxwell. I need to know’
‘What if I told you she didn’t tell me anything?’
Hennessey blinked. ‘We know she came to see you,’ he said. ‘We know you rang her up at home.’
‘Aren’t policewomen allowed to have a social life?’ Maxwell asked.
Hennessey felt the tables turning, ever so slightly. ‘You mean …’
‘I mean that Jacquie Carpenter is a very attractive girl. Unattached, I believe. I may not be in her league in the attractiveness stakes – it’s hardly for me to say – but they don’t come any more unattached, believe me.’
‘So … Carly Drinkwater? Georgianna Morris?’
Maxwell frowned, a smile playing over his lips. ‘Who?’ he asked.
It was Hennessey’s turn to smile, ‘You’ve never heard of them, I suppose.’
Maxwell shrugged. ‘You hear a lot of names in my profession, sergeant. I shudder to think how many have passed through my hands at one stage or another.’
Hennessey stood up, ‘If what you’re telling me is true …’ he began.
‘Then Jacquie Carpenter’s in the clear, isn’t she? Not very well, perhaps, in need of a rest, certainly, but her job’s not in jeopardy, is it?’ Maxwell stood up too.
‘No,’ Hennessey smiled. ‘No, I wouldn’t think it was.’
There was a jarring electronic clanging in the corridor outside. ‘Ah, la damn bell sans merci,’ he said, ‘Now, unless you want to hear Thomas Jefferson lying through his teeth in the Declaration of Independence with Year 12, I’m going to have to love you and leave you. Well,’ he smiled broadly, ‘leave you, anyway.’
Maxwell’s confirmation came through the next day. The Travellers, the Conservative, the Cavalry, Boodles – one by one they’d blackballed him, but the Leighford film club’s doors were open wide. For a mere £200 p.a. he could attend their monthly meetings on Thursday evenings in that pokey little place in Henshaw Street behind the bus station.
‘There’s an old piano,’ he found himself crooning to Metternich, ‘and they play it hot behind the green door. Frankie Vaughan, Count, a singing star of my youth, when you weren’t even a twinkle in your great-grandfather’s eye.’
‘Wass all this, then?’ Mrs B. had a devastating line in originality italicized all the more by the thud of her size nines on Maxwell’s stairs. She was holding up a fairly revolting T-shirt with the words ‘Pearl Jam’ scrawled all over it. A boy’s T-shirt. Ronnie Parsons’.
‘Where did you find that, Mrs B?’ Maxwell’s grin was frozen as a Tesco chicken.
‘Stuffed down behind the bed in your spare room,’ she told him, waving it about.
‘What the devil was it doing there?’ Maxwell wondered aloud.
‘Is it yours, Mr Maxwell?’ The cleaning-lady had her doubts.
‘Please, Mrs B.,’ the Head of Sixth Form frowned, ‘if it were mine it would have “Perry Como” on the front. No, I found it at school the other day and, without thinking, popped it in my briefcase. I keep meaning to take it to Lost Property.’
‘But there’s blood all over it.’
‘Blood?’ Maxwell crossed the living room to her. The old girl was right. On the left sleeve and in short, sharp dashes across the chest, brown stains. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ve seen enough in my time,’ she said. ‘Mr B. used to play for Leighford Rovers. ‘’E was always comin’ ’ome with blood on ’isself. Looked just like that. What are these kids doing up at the school, Mr Maxwell? Killin’ each other?’
Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall didn’t like working Saturdays. Perhaps it was only rabbis who did. He didn’t like it even more when things didn’t add up. And that particular Saturday in the middle of May, he was like a man with no batteries in his calculator, no beads on his abacus. And the sour face of Dick Hennessey didn’t help.
‘Will this take long?’ he asked.
‘Hope not, guv,’ Hennessey said. ‘I was just wondering about Jacquie.’
Hall looked at his man. ‘No comment, Dick,’ he said.
‘The boys … well, no, I was wondering what the score was.’
‘The score is that she discussed confidential matters with a member of the public. That’s the subject of an internal enquiry. Until that takes place, she’s under suspension.’
‘Can I go and see her?’
‘I wouldn’t, Dick,’ Hall advised. He’d seen men go this way before. The contamination of corruption. It was like a computer virus, but more deadly and more difficult to stamp out. ‘Keep your nose clean. Let internal affairs handle it.’
‘But she’s not well, guv …’
Henry Hall wasn’t given to outbursts of any kind. He hadn’t shown an emotion since he was six and he was damned if he was going to start now. But he took off his rimless glasses and threw them down on his desk, the desk cluttered with the paperwork of two murders. ‘Off the record,’ he said, ‘I know perfectly well she isn’t well. But which came first, Dick? The chicken or the egg? Did she blab to Joe Public and is she shamming to cover her tracks? Or is she genuine and did she blab out of confusion or whatever private Hell she may be in? Am I qualified to judge that? Are you?’
Hennessey took a chance. ‘What about Peter Maxwell?’ he asked.
‘Who?’ Hall took up his glasses again.
‘It’s common knowledge, guv,’ Hennessey said. ‘Everybody in the nick knows it was him she talked to.’
‘Do they now?’ Hall doubted it. He had talked to Jacquie Carpenter, on her own. It was his distinct impression that she’d told no one else. ‘Well, we know Mr Maxwell of old, don’t we? The Sherlock Holmes of Leighford High. He can’t help himself
‘What if he says Jacquie didn’t talk to him?’ Hennessey was looking for a way out, the same one that Maxwell had taken. A lifebelt to throw to Jacquie, floundering in life’s seas as she was.
‘If Mr Maxwell says the Queen of England is Elizabeth II, I’d like to check it first,’ Hall said. ‘I’m afraid our Mr Maxwell has the right end in sight, but his ways and means bother me.’
‘He’s a liar?’ Hennessey didn’t know the man as well as Hall did.
‘Let’s say he’s capable of bending the truth,’ Hall nodded.
The phone rang for the umpteenth time that morning.
‘Hall. What? Where? Good. No. Incident Room. Number Two. Do his parents know? Good. Keep it that way for now’ He hung up. ‘The missing link, Dick.’ The sergeant thought he saw his DCI smile, but it was obviously a trick of the light. ‘We’ve found Ronnie Parsons.’ And he grabbed his jacket and made for the door.
The missing link. Dick Hennessey knew that story. If DCI Hall was talking about the Piltdown skull, the missing link between ape and man, then that was a hoax. This missing link was a lie.
The sea crashed along the groynes out beyond the bay. Hysterical children dared each other to rush headlong into the surf and delirious dogs barked and gambolled in the foam. Jacquie Carpenter was trailing along the water’s edge, watching her toes disappear under the EU-approved froth that heralded each rippling wave. The wind blew her hair from her face and she looked at the man beside her.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ Maxwell said. ‘It can’t have been easy.’
He looked an unlikely tourist did Mad Max, his trousers rolled up like a pair of plus fours, his jacket slung over his shoulder, his hat for once gone and the breeze playing havoc with his hair. He dropped a Hush Puppy and quickly stooped to pick it up before the tide got it.
‘Did you think I’d be chained to a wall?’ she asked him.
‘After what your Sergeant Hennessey told me. I didn’t know what to think.’
‘He’s not my sergeant,’ she said.
‘He seems to care for you,’ he told her. ‘We all do.’
She looked at him, this latter-day Crusader, this bow-tie knight errant. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, barely audible above the roar of the surf. ‘You’re a strange man, Peter Maxwell.’
He laughed suddenly, turning to her, ‘Now that’s something I’ve never heard before.’
‘They’ve found Ronnie,’ she said and winced as he gripped her arm.
‘Where?’
She turned to walk on. ‘I don’t know the details. Since my suspension, I’m rather incommunicado. I gather he was found sleeping rough in Brighton.’
‘Couldn’t leave it alone, eh?’
‘What?’
Maxwell sighed, scanning the tufted dunes ahead and the knots of children building their little silicon Kraks des Chevaliers in the wetter sand by the sea. ‘If your boys found him this time, I found him first. Or rather he found me.’
She stopped in her tracks, her mouth hanging open, her head shaking in disbelief. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her hands were fluttering in the breeze.
‘He came to my home’ – Maxwell kept walking, the girl trying to keep pace with his larger strides – ‘he didn’t know where else to go –’
‘Why? Why didn’t you tell us?’ She was screaming at him now, above the screams of the children and the blare of the ghetto blasters behind the windbreaks.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the letter?’ He rounded on her and saw her furious gaze fall away. ‘What it said.’
‘I couldn’t,’ she said.
‘Quite,’ and he trudged on along the line of the bay. ‘The boy was terrified, Jacquie, and exhausted. He’d last seen Alice Goode in the Museum of the Moving Image. That had nothing to do with his disappearance.’
‘Oh, didn’t it?’ DCI Hall was staring coldly into the nervous, pale face of Ronnie Parsons. The boy looked at the brief the law had called in, a pompous old arsehole in a pinstriped suit. He looked at the men across the desk from him in the Incident Room interview room. The blank expressionlessness of DCI Hall, the almost unremitting smirk of DS Hennessey. He looked at the silently turning tape in the corner, the one ‘they’ couldn’t doctor anymore, the one that would record every nuance, register every jangled nerve end.
‘I told you’ – Ronnie was tired – ‘I’d planned to go anyway. The Museum trip seemed the perfect opportunity. Slip away in London and you blokes’d never find me. Kids go missing all the time, round the ’Dilly and that. You never find ’em.’
‘Sometimes we do,’ Hall told him. ‘Fished out of the Thames and swollen and black. Others times they’ve got dirty needles sticking out of their arms. Or their underpants are tied tight round their necks. Not a pretty picture, is it, Ronnie? That’s because it’s not a pretty world.’ He leaned back, giving the boy some air, some space. ‘How well did you know Jean Hagger?’
‘The letter,’ Jacquie told Maxwell, ‘was a silly, adolescent thing. But it might have hanged him in the good old days.’
‘Leave those to me,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘I was there then, remember? What did it say?’
She threw up her arms in exasperation. ‘I’m under suspension because I talked to you,’ she said.
‘In for a penny,’ he told her.
‘Were you followed?’
He turned to look back at the happy grockles cavorting in the sun. ‘Any of those look like Mr Plod?’
‘What does it matter now?’ she asked the wind. ‘It’s the end of my career anyway.’
She felt him grip her shoulders, shaking her gently, ‘Not if I have anything to do with it. But for now, Jacquie, you’re out of it. Who’s going to carry on?’
She blinked back the tears. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You?’
‘Me,’ he nodded and held her close for a moment. ‘But,’ he held her at arm’s length again, ‘I need the answers. All of them you’ve got. Now, what did the letter say?’
‘“My Darling Alice”,’ Henry Hall was reading the letter in his hand, ‘“It was wonderful last night. You were wonderful. When I got home I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I think you needed it as much as I did. I can’t wait for tomorrow night. Usual time and I’ll bring the bottle of wine. Will the old bag be out? We don’t want her snooping around, do we? I love you, Ronnie.” Did you write that, Ronnie?’
The boy shifted in his chair, looking instinctively at the brief, who seemed as intent on hearing his answer as Hall was.
‘We can check, you know,’ Hennessey prompted him. ‘Hand-writing samples. I’m sure the school would oblige. And then of course, your prints’d be all over that, wouldn’t they?’ He nodded in the direction of the letter.
‘Yeah, I wrote it,’ the boy said.
The policeman leaned back. ‘But it wasn’t true.’
‘You didn’t fancy Miss Goode?’ Hall asked. Ronnie shrugged. ‘I may have done. But I didn’t do nothing about it. Christ. She wouldn’t have looked at me twice.’
‘That’s not what the driver says,’ Hennessey told him.
‘What driver?’ Ronnie was lost.
‘The driver of the coach that took you to the Museum of the Moving Image. When we interviewed him he said you two seemed very close.’
‘What does he know?’ Ronnie blurted, becoming more annoyed and defiant by the minute.
‘Are you seriously telling me that Alice Goode was having an affair with one of my sixth form?’ Maxwell asked.
‘This is 1997, Max,’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘It’d be the first time for Ronnie Parsons,’ he said. ‘Although …’ ‘Although …’
‘He had the hots when he was younger for an older girl – a sixth former. That’s where he was when he absconded from the Museum. Playing the Wild Rover at Brighton University. Unfortunately for him, she’d graduated to higher things.’
‘Nuclear Physics?’
‘University lecturers. Always rather big time was Dannie Roth. No, I’m sorry. I just don’t buy it. As you say, a piece of adolescent silliness. Still …’
‘Still, it gives him a motive for killing Jean Hagger.’ She kicked the seaweed swirling around her feet. ‘How close were they, her and Alice?’
‘Lovers, she told me,’ he said, wandering up from the water’s edge to crash into the dry sand on the slope of the dunes. ‘Wonder why there are always washing-up-liquid bottles on beaches?’
‘What if the letter was true?’ Jacquie sat next to him, letting the pale sand drift through her fingers. ‘What if Ronnie and Alice were at it like knives? Jean found out – worse, walked in on them. There was a row. He panicked and hit her.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Maxwell said. ‘Alice was dead before Jean was murdered. At least five days had elapsed.’
‘I’m sorry’ – she buried her face in her knees for a moment – ‘I’m not thinking straight. Doc Astley’s given me some tablets.’
‘Jean had a message,’ Maxwell said, ‘at school, remember? A man’s voice telling her to go home quickly. A man’s voice. Her murderer’s voice.’
‘Ronnie is eighteen,’ Jacquie said. ‘His voice would pass muster over the phone.’
‘Yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Yes, it would.’
‘So you didn’t ring Mrs Hagger at Bishop Billington?’ Hall asked the boy. ‘On the morning she was killed?’
‘No,’ Ronnie shouted. ‘Look, I’ve told you all this once.’
‘He is right, Chief Inspector,’ the brief broke his silence for the first time that afternoon. ‘And he’s given you his answers.’
‘Tell me,’ Hall lifted up the grey holdall onto the interviewing table, ‘about this.’
‘It was a grey sports bag,’ Jacquie remembered, ‘Nike, if my memory serves.’
‘Empty?’
‘No. It had Alice Goode’s clothes in it. The ones she was wearing when she disappeared.’
‘Jesus! Where was it found?’
‘In Jean Hagger’s living room.’
‘That’s odd.’
‘What is?’
‘If Ronnie had lured Jean Hagger back to her flat, he’d have had to have waited somewhere nearby until she arrived.’
‘Presumably’
Maxwell was in full cry now, chewing his lip, squinting at the sun on the waves. ‘With a grey holdall, which was full of clothes of his last victim. Why would he bring those with him? Did anybody see him there, carrying the bag?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There are just so many unanswered questions.’
‘So you left the holdall in the middle of the lounge after you’d battered Mrs Hagger to death?’ Hall leaned back, waiting for the answer.
‘No,’ Ronnie said. ‘The last time I saw that bag was at the Museum. I left it in the cloakroom. And it didn’t have Miss Goode’s clothes in. Just my own stuff. Look, can I go now?’