Maxwell's Return (5 page)

‘I have no idea,’ Donald said with a shrug that set his fat layers wobbling. ‘I got the call. I came in. That’s what we do, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes, of course we do. But…’ Astley looked down at the girl on his stainless steel table and shook his head. ‘What is it they say? If you don’t have the murderer within forty eight hours, you’ll never have him? This girl has been dead for weeks.’ He was beginning to sound like the stuck records of his own misspent youth.

‘They’re still working it out,’ Donald said, looking down at his crib sheet, ‘but they are estimating three weeks, just shy of, because of when she was reported missing.’

Astley looked over his glasses again. ‘They’ve been looking for this
girl? They need to look harder next time.’

‘She went missing in Brighton,’ Donald explained. ‘She was on the database, but… well, I suppose the police have more things to do than look in piles of driftwood for missing persons from along the coast.’ Donald had almost said ‘better things’ but he knew his Jim Astley and he knew what phrases set him off. That was one of them. Others included ‘he only killed his wife’ and ‘he’s had a good innings’.

‘Hmm, Brighton. Will they be wanting her back?’ Astley sounded hopeful. He hated bodies that had been in the water. He hated the adipocere, he hated the gooseskin, he hated in particular the nibbles that crabs took out of their fingers and ears. He looked closer at the face and could see no signs of long immersion at this stage, although there was definite nibbling.

Again, Donald looked at his sheet. ‘It’s a bit up in the air at the moment,’ he said. ‘She was a Brighton resident, lived with her… oh, that’s unusual, with her sister, the one who called her in as missing, as far as I can see. Well, yes, she lived there, but they can’t find her on any CCTV on the Night in Question and according to all of her friends, she wasn’t out with them.’

‘So she may have gone out for a night on the tiles here, instead. Tell me, Donald, you probably have more of a nightlife than I do, would anyone come to Leighford for fun if they could go to Brighton?’

Donald chose to ignore the ‘probably’.
Everyone
had a better
nightlife than Jim Astley, whose drunken wife kept him on tenterhooks every time they went anywhere. Since the debacle at the last Christmas party, they didn’t go out much any more. And then, there had been that business at the Golf Club. So he answered the question in the spirit in which it had been posed. ‘I would only come here rather than stay there, if you follow, if I didn’t want to meet anyone I knew. This child lived with her sister, so sister might go out to clubs and they might bump into each other. Not so likely with a mum or dad. But a sister… that’s different. I often bump into my sister, for example, my mum not so much. Mind you, she’s dead, so…’

‘Thank you, Donald. You said “child”.’

‘Fourteen.’

Astley lifted the sheet that covered the girl from neck to ankle and looked. He shook his head, sadly. ‘I had no idea, Donald. This is just a little girl.’

‘Yes,’ Donald said. He and his boss shared little, but they still could share sadness for a young life wasted and lying cold on their slab. ‘Her clothes are over there. She was dressed to party, I must say.’

Astley looked over his shoulder at the pathetically small bundles containing boob tube, tiny skirt, tinier panties. The shoes with almost unbelievable heels were perched on top, each one separately bagged. He gripped the side of his table and leaned forward, head hanging. ‘I hate these, Donald. More and more each day, I hate them.’

The big man put out a tentative hand and rested it on his boss’s shoulder. After a second or two, he gave him just one pat and then withdrew it. After another second, Astley blew out a breath and lifted his head again.

‘Right, Donald,’ he said. ‘Let’s do this thing.’

Not quite time to hang up the microscope yet.

‘Jacquie?’

‘Guv?’

‘Have we got the PM report on Mollie Adamson yet?’

‘It’s come through as an email – you should have it somewhere.’ She looked at Henry Hall, bland and imperturbable and wondered why she had ended up with two of the three men in her life hating emails.

‘Can you give me the gist?’

‘It was hard for them to be precise. She had eaten with her sister just before she went out and the stomach contents imply that she had died within about four hours of that meal. She didn’t drown, they are sure of that, so she didn’t fall in or get thrown in while she was alive. She didn’t die exactly where she was found, but not far away – she had lain on her side for perhaps half an hour before being moved. There were signs of sexual activity but not rape – there was no bruising or other signs so we
have to assume it was consensual. As far as could be told, she was sexually active and had been for some while…’

‘She was fourteen, yes?’

Jacquie turned from the screen and looked at the man. Father of boys as he was, he still saw fourteen year old girls playing with Barbies, the triumph of hope over experience. ‘Yes,’ she said, shortly.

He sighed. ‘But no cause of death?’

‘They think manual strangulation. It’s hard to tell for sure because there are no fingermarks. The hyoid is broken, that’s about all they have to go on. They think the killer muffled his hand with a scarf or something.’

Hall slammed his hand on his desk. ‘These television programmes, they go into all the details of how to escape detection. Soon there won’t be a forensic test they can’t avoid. The silent witnesses are getting more silent every day. DNA?’

‘There was semen, but it is degraded and they doubt they’ll be able to get much. Anyway…’

‘. . . we need the killer first. I know. So,’ he decided to try another avenue, ‘does she have any links with Josie Blakemore? School? Friends?’

‘Nothing yet. Brighton police are at the school as we speak.’

‘How are we handling this? Is it theirs or ours?’

She gave a rueful smile. ‘Ours, I guess. With a lot of help from
them, hopefully. They will deal with the preliminary interviews, we’ll deal with the forensics. It would be nice to think
su casa, mi casa
but there are, after all, still forty two separate police forces in this great country of ours. After that, who knows?’

Hall was mentally counting heads – now Jacquie was back he at least had someone he could lean on; he had missed her more than he had expected. He had had three long relationships with women in his life – with his mother, his wife and Jacquie. And sometimes he wondered which one he had spent most time with. ‘Let’s hope there isn’t an after that,’ he said, shuffling papers on his desk. ‘Let’s hope they call soon and say that someone has coughed.’

‘Coughed? Have you been watching reruns of the
Sweeney
again?’ she asked, smiling.

‘Just to pick up some tips.’ He didn’t smile, but she knew he was smiling on the inside. Peter Maxwell would have launched into an entire dialogue between Carter and Regan.

‘Well, let’s hope, then,’ she said. ‘Apparently, the sister wants to identify the body. Jim Astley isn’t happy – it’s not pretty.’

‘Surely, we’ve done fingerprints…’ Hall’s voice died away as he remembered there were no fingertips to speak of. ‘DNA? Clothes?’

‘She’s adamant. She says the clothes aren’t her sister’s and it’s all a horrible mistake.’

‘Denial. I see. Well, make sure you take her, Jacquie. Jason isn’t…’

‘I know, guv. I know. I’m meeting her at the hospital in an hour.’

He looked down at the papers on his desk. ‘Thank you, Jacquie,’ he said, formally. The meeting was over. Then, as she was halfway through the door, ‘I’ve missed you.’

She turned to look at him, but he was busy with papers. ‘Right back atchya,’ she whispered, then closed the door and was gone.

Nolan and his father were rebonding with Leighford. Nolan had had a whale of a time in Los Angeles and in the first three weeks had gone up two grades at school. Not so much due to his innate genius as to the fact that anyone who had been taught even for ten minutes by Mrs Whatmough and her staff had to be streets ahead of any Californian child. Or indeed, any child in the world. Mrs Whatmough took no prisoners so any four year old who couldn’t recite the twelve times table backwards in his sleep was soon out on his ear. Nolan should have had seven bells knocked out of him in the school yard every day but he was not his father’s child for nothing and he soon had all the eleven-year old girls in the palm of his hand and there is not a seven year old boy in the land stupid enough to take on a gaggle of girls, so he survived. He soon had an American accent, was a handy pitcher in Little League and considered no
day had begun properly without blueberry pancakes and a pile of bacon a mile high. Maxwell was working to remove the accent, wouldn’t know a baseball rule if it got up and bit him on the leg but was up there in the queue when the pancakes were being handed out, so it would all come right in the end. Meanwhile, they were enjoying the park, the sweetshop and the beach in more or less that order.

‘Dads?’

‘Nole?’

‘Will we be going back to America?’

‘I hope so, mate. We’ve got enough invitations to last us years.’

‘What, to live?’ Young though he was, Nolan Maxwell was good at keeping his voice level. His father sometimes thought that there was a residual DNA insert from Henry Hall in there somewhere – like people got to look like their pets.

‘Would you like to go there to live?’

‘Hmm, no, not really. Their sea isn’t right. And it’s a bit hot. I liked the food, though.’

‘We can do the food, I suppose…’

‘Plocker liked the American sweets.’

‘Plocker likes all sweets. That’s why he’s always at the dentist.’

‘And he is quite fat.’

‘Pleasantly portly,’ Maxwell said, smiling.

Nolan jumped by his side, chanting. ‘Pleasantly Portly Plocker.’

‘Don’t tell him I said so,’ Maxwell said, hurriedly.

‘He’s called Fatty at school.’

‘Does Mrs Whatmough allow that?’ Maxwell was surprised.

‘No, not really. We have to whisper it.’

Maxwell forebore to tell his only child that Mrs Whatmough could hear a pin drop in another county; let him find that out for himself. Meanwhile, a dad and his boy could kick along the edge of the tide until they disappeared over the horizon.

Jacquie Carpenter-Maxwell loved her job but there were parts of it she hated and the task she now faced was one of them. Mollie Adamson’s sister was already waiting for her when she got to Leighford General and she had to walk the length of the corridor towards her with a suitable expression locked onto her face. She held out her hand and introduced herself when she was within earshot and the woman stood and took a step towards her. Her hand was cool and dry and she gripped firmly.

‘Caroline Morton,’ she said. ‘Mollie’s sister.’

‘Hello.’ At this point in every cop show she’d watched in the States, someone would say ‘We’re sorry for your loss’ with that impossibly flat delivery. Better to say nothing at all. Jacquie made a few mental notes. Married. That was a surprise. Somehow, she had expected the two sisters
to be closer in age. She had imagined a rather Mills and Boon scenario of a recently dead mother, sister who had just left school giving up her future to care for her younger sibling. This didn’t seem to be the case. This woman was in her late twenties at the youngest. She could be much more.

‘Half sister, perhaps I should say,’ Caroline Morton explained. ‘We had the same father, different mothers.’

‘I see,’ Jacquie said. ‘I didn’t know…’

‘I told Brighton police all this at the time,’ the woman said, rather coldly.

‘I do understand,’ Jacquie said, feeling as if she was on her back foot. ‘We are still synchronizing notes. Our main concern was to find out cause of death, that kind of thing. Time has already been lost and I’m sure you are aware…’

‘That the first forty eight hours are vital, yes. That ship has sailed, though, hasn’t it?’

Detective Inspector Jacquie Carpenter-Maxwell smiled tightly at the woman in front of her and refocused her expectations. This would not be a tear-filled experience, with a sobbing, sodden woman sipping machine-made tea in an anteroom. This was not what she was expecting at all and she silently beat herself over the head for not having read the file completely. Never assume, she told herself – she was definitely the ass here. ‘We have made strides as far as forensics go,’ she said tersely. ‘Would you like to have a chat with me first or go and see your sister’s
body?’

‘If it is my sister,’ the woman riposted.

‘You doubt it?’

‘Well, they certainly weren’t her clothes,’ she said. ‘I told the police, she had gone out in a sweatshirt and jeans, espadrilles. The clothes they showed me pictures of yesterday… well, Mollie didn’t own any clothes like that.’

‘Perhaps a friend…?’

‘Nor her friends. Mollie wasn’t that kind of girl.’

‘So, you’d like to see… the girl… first?’

‘Of course.’ The woman looked down her nose at Jacquie. ‘Because when it turns out not to be Mollie, you won’t need to talk to me, will you?’

‘Er… no. No, I won’t. Would you just excuse me for a moment. I’ll just go and alert the assistant to…’

‘I rang ahead,’ the woman said. ‘They’re ready for us.’

Jacquie looked askance at her. This woman couldn’t be this cold, surely. What was her job, for God’s sake? ‘How did you get the number, may I ask?’ she said.

‘I see you are very unprepared, DI… it is DI, is it? . . . DI Carpenter-Maxwell. I am a solicitor. Partner in Morton and Morton in Brighton. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?’

‘No.’

‘We specialise in criminal cases. I’m surprised we have never crossed paths before. However, that is by the way. Shall we go and see this body?’

Jacquie fell into step alongside the woman and thought she had rarely wanted quite so much to poke someone in the eye. Caroline Morton was almost a head taller than Jacquie and could walk in killer heels faster than most women could manage in trainers, but Jacquie refused to scuttle along trying to keep up. So they arrived at the viewing window a few seconds apart. Jacquie rang the bell and Donald appeared like a genii from a bottle.