Maxwell's Grave (22 page)

‘Elixir!’ Maxwell ducked into the Social Tent and brewed up, moving aside somebody’s femur to find the tea bags. His head popped out seconds later. ‘Can I get you one?’

‘No thanks. Tannin.’ She pointed to her sizeable frontage. ‘Doesn’t agree with me.’

Maxwell nodded. He knew the feeling well. There were whole days when nobody at Leighford High agreed with him. He perched on the edge of Helen Reader’s trench, sipping the tea as he took in his surroundings. ‘Nobody about today?’

‘Appalling, isn’t it?’ she chuckled. ‘You and I the only amateurs here and the professionals nowhere in sight.’

‘That’s odd, surely.’ Maxwell blew on his tea as someone
once told him the working class did.

‘Way of the world, I think you’ll find.’

‘No, I mean, in my – admittedly limited – experience of digs, they’re usually crawling with volunteers, mostly Americans desperate for somebody else’s history on account of how they haven’t got any.’

She laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. But David was adamant. I’d worked with him before, so I had special dispensation. But that was it; there was to be nobody else.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘You don’t ask geniuses like David Radley to justify their decisions, Max. You read his obituary in
The Times
?’

‘I did.’

‘Mealy-mouthed, I thought. He deserved better.’ She leaned back on her haunches, her bare shoulders already flaking from days under the Sussex sun. ‘Look at this,’ she said, pointing around with her trowel, trying to ignore the policeman, the tape, the paparazzi at the gates of dawn. ‘Difficult to imagine how it all must have been in the Saxon period, isn’t it? A little church, probably, over there by the trees. Graves where we are now. Leighford…what, a cluster of wattle and daub huts where the river shallowed. Do you remember your first dig?’

‘I do,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Warwick. I’d just left school and Bristol University – there wasn’t one at Warwick then – were looking for Medieval post holes along the line of the town hall.’

‘How exciting!’ Helen trilled.

‘Not when you’re eighteen,’ Maxwell corrected her. ‘I was filling in before going up to Cambridge and I think we all expected to find something astonishing. You know – Tutankhamun comes to Mercia or something like that.’

‘And all you found was post holes?’ she asked.

‘More or less,’ he chuckled. ‘Although I was lucky enough to find an unbroken Bellarmine jug. Still don’t know how a Bohemian seventeenth century artefact found its way into somebody’s cellar in little old Warwick, but there you go. No, what I remember most about the dig was guzzling cider and fish and chips in Priory Park. Feeling muscles for the first time. I even grew a beard that summer – just because I could, you know. The weather was just like this – glorious. We were all chaps on the dig as it happened – behaving like idiots taking wheelbarrows of slag up the planks at silly speeds. Girls we vaguely knew would hover by the wire, whistling at our muscles.’

‘Forgive me if this sounds ageist,’ she said. ‘But did girls do that sort of thing in your day?’

‘Ageist?’ Maxwell bridled in mid-slurp. ‘Madam, I’ll have you know that Ladette culture goes a helluva long way back. Back to Boudicca in fact – whose PMT, by the way, was very badly timed for several thousand Romans.’

Helen laughed and got back to her trowelling, scraping away the debris of years.

‘Fast forward a little in time,’ he said to her. ‘What do you know about King Alfred?’

‘The Great?’

‘I would imagine so. It’s not my period.’

‘How often have I heard that!’ She wagged her trowel at him. ‘Well, remember, Max. I’m not a historian…’

He leaned forward to her, patting her gently on her
sunburnt
shoulders. ‘That doesn’t make you a bad person,’ he said.

‘Well, he was a great hero; that I do know,’ she said,
resting
back again. ‘Let’s see. Fought against the Danes – that was the Great Army, wasn’t it? Forced Guthrum, their leader, to be baptized and recaptured London. Winchester
was his capital of course, as king of Wessex. He’s buried there.’

‘Is he?’

‘Of course. Asser says so; so does the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
.’

‘Asser?’ Maxwell repeated.

‘His first biographer, a monk from St David’s in Wales. He wrote the work in 893. Some of it’s pinched from the
Chronicle
, but he knew the king personally and must have added lots of touches of his own. But Max, you know all this, surely?’

‘Yes,’ the Great Historian said. ‘I find that I do, but you know how it is. That huge mistake the National Curriculum means that all I teach is the modern period. In fact, my putative boss, the Head of History, though a lovely man, thinks that his subject began in 1900.
Heigh-ho
.’

‘Why your sudden interest in Alfred?’ she asked. ‘He’s got nothing to do with this site, surely?’

‘No, no,’ Maxwell smiled, reaching for his trowel for a good day’s scraping. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Has anybody contacted her?’ Henry Hall was waist-deep in statements already and it was only midday. He’d sent somebody out for a baguette – no slur intended, of course, on the nick canteen – which he’d get round to if he had time. He couldn’t remember what he’d ordered, but it would taste the same, anyway.

‘We’ve tried her home and her mobile,’ DC Steve Holland told him. ‘Nothing.’

‘What about Maxwell?’

‘Guv?’

Hall looked at the lad, assessing the quantity of liquid
behind his ears. Holland was the new kid on the block. He didn’t know Peter Maxwell or Jacquie Carpenter’s
relationship
with him. ‘Boyfriend,’ Hall said. ‘Fiancé, live-in-lover, Svengali – I really don’t know how to classify him in the context of Jacquie. Or any other context, come to think of it.’

‘Got an address on this Maxwell?’ Holland asked.

‘38 Columbine,’ Hall said. It was engraved on his heart. ‘But he won’t be there. I’m reliably informed he’s joined Professor Fraser’s dig on Staple Hill.’

‘Want me to try there? PC Scragg’s on this morning.’

‘No,’ Hall said. ‘There has to be an explanation, a rational one, that is… And if there isn’t, I don’t want Maxwell involved in any shape or form.’

In the rest of the Incident Room it was business as usual. David Radley’s corpse was in a chilled locker in Leighford General’s morgue, his body carved with a ‘Y’ in the macabre graffiti of a pathologist. Dr Jim Astley always took a pride in his suture work and Radley was no
exception
. Would archaeologists of the future, Astley had
wondered
briefly, find this man’s body and wonder who he was and why and how he died? Astley shook himself free of it. Romantic cobblers. He was getting old. Conversely, Jim Astley was no further ahead on the forensics of murder. The Incident Room knew that the sterno-cleido-mastoid muscles of Radley’s neck had been badly pulverized by a blow from the left which had broken the skin, caused huge bruising and dislocated his vertebrae. Whoever had killed him was his height, had stood in front of him when the blow was delivered and was right-handed.

Lily Boydell had found fibres on Radley’s clothing and on the soles of Radley’s shoes. The latter came from a
carpet
that wasn’t Radley’s and the former from the same brown stockman’s coat found on the corpse of Sam Welland. The shoes, like all the clothes on Radley’s body, were new and they didn’t fit too well. They had never trod the Leighford clay. Under the guv’nor’s strict instructions, the official line was still that Sam Welland had taken her own life and Hazel Twigg was asked, in the interests of finding her lover’s killer, to go along with this, at least for the time being.

A unit in the Incident Room was working on Martin Toogood’s car and the CCTV footage of the dark man in the broad-brimmed hat. Jacquie Carpenter was working on Toogood’s notes and his computer area. Except that Jacquie Carpenter had broken off briefly and gone looking for Alison McCormick; and Jacquie Carpenter, by that Friday afternoon, could not be found.

‘This is unbelievable,’ Hall was muttering as he swept through the room, checking on tasks, leads, case status. ‘Listen up, everybody.’ He clapped his hands for quiet. Peter Maxwell would have approved.

The room’s buzz stopped, like closing a window in high summer.

‘Jacquie Carpenter. Anyone seen her?’

Puzzled faces. Question marks. A certain, creeping unease.

‘She should have come on duty three hours ago and we’ve had no word.’ He told them. ‘Tom, duty log.’

The silver-haired sergeant fumbled through his ledger. ‘Went to Alison McCormick’s place yesterday. Signed out at…three twelve. Back by four thirty-eight.’

‘And?’

‘Worked here in the Room, guv,’ Dave Garstang said. ‘Her usual station.’ He waved to the empty desk, the dead
VDU screen.

‘Get to her area,’ Hall ordered. ‘Find out what she was working on. What time did she leave yesterday, Tom?’

‘Six fifteen.’ Wilson was tracking the girl’s progress in his ledger.

‘Nearly hit me in the car park,’ somebody called.

It lightened the moment.

‘Was she going home?’ Hall asked. ‘Anybody know?’

‘Said she had a lead to follow up,’ Garstang said.

Hall turned to face him. This was something he didn’t want to hear just now. ‘Did she say what?’ he asked.

Garstang knew all eyes were on him. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, guv. She said it was probably nothing. I didn’t give it a second thought.’

Hall nodded, hoping that those words would not come back to haunt either of them. Second thoughts were what good policing were all about. That and second sight. ‘Right,’ he said, leaning back against a desk and folding his arms. ‘Where are we on Alison McCormick?’

DCI Henry Hall’s Incident Team were nowhere on Alison McCormick. She’d been sighted last on Tuesday afternoon. That was the day she and Dave Garstang had gone to the Railway Cottages to talk to Michaela Reynolds. Afterwards, the pair had grabbed a quick pasty and pint at The Moorings and got back to the station by two. Like Jacquie Carpenter, the girl had driven out of the nick car park and vanished into space like the girls who had got into Ted Bundy’s yellow beetle, the women who had gone for a chat with that nice Mr Christie at Rillington Place, the
harlots
who had waved a cheery ‘Hello’ to Jack…

Missing coppers were not the norm, and they posed one hell of a problem. Advertise the fact that they’re missing
and it sends a shock wave through the community. One half will laugh themselves sick that the police can’t even trace their own; the other half will panic for the same
reason
. Peter Hitchens in the
Daily Mail
would go berserk. On the other hand,
not
to advertise put the missing officer at extraordinary risk. There had been no ransom demand of any kind; no corny letter made up of cut-out newspaper clippings; no weirdo with a heavy-breathing delivery on untraceable phones.

Alison McCormick had a mother somewhere near Basingstoke. Someone from Leighford had been to see her; assuring, calming, softly softly. No cause for alarm at all, but her daughter had gone missing. Janet McCormick didn’t scream or get hysterical. She carried on with her washing, glancing out occasionally to the garden, where a pram was parked. Alison was always doing this. She’d always done it, ever since she was a kid. She’d be back, when her cash ran out or she got bored. This wasn’t
quite
the same, the somebody from Leighford pointed out. Alison wasn’t a kid anymore. She was a policewoman,
missing
from her post. That seemed to cut no ice with Janet McCormick. The girl would be back. Whatever she was up to, she’d be back.

She sat up suddenly, a horrible smell in her nostrils and over her face. She recognized it at once. Chloroform. And she felt the pain again as she tried to move her jaw. The pain of a rough hand over her mouth, the pressure of a cloth pad over her nose. But she couldn’t open her mouth. It was taped shut and she could feel saliva dribbling down her chin.

Her hands were roped together, in front of her, as though in prayer. She couldn’t move her legs either, because they
were anchored via a chain to something – a wall, was it? She couldn’t see in the blackness.

She tried to think, to rationalize what had happened to her. She remembered driving out of the station, turning left along the High Street. She remembered what was playing on the radio – Jeff Wayne’s
War of the Worlds
. The red weed had still been on her mind as she got home. She had backed into the garage, had closed and locked the door. Then it had happened. She was just thinking she ought to ring him, touch base with this new information when the hard hand had slapped around her lower face, a powerful arm
wrenching
hers behind her back. She’d seen the clouds scurry for a moment, then reel and twist. She’d felt her lungs tighten as she fought against the pad, trying not to inhale. But the pain was too much and the grip too strong and darkness had come to her.

And in the darkness she still was, chained to a wall, her clothes damp and clammy. It was June, she told herself. In the middle of a heat-wave. But here, it was like being below ground. She groped forward, as far as the ropes and the chains would allow. She felt wetness on her fingertips, a slime that was cold and dead.

Her whole body shuddered as she realized it. Jacquie Carpenter was lying in a grave.

Chapter Fifteen

It was lunchtime before Douglas Russell turned up at the dig, Maxwell’s sandwiches wilting in the midday heat. He mused to himself that he really should have brought them up from Surrey’s pannier a little sooner, but it had given him the chance to chat to Julian the Heavy.

‘Not packing today, Julian?’ he had asked cheerily, well within earshot of the patrolling policeman and the
remnants
of the paparazzi, smoking and sipping Pimms like spectators at a summer event.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Julian had shrugged, his eyes black behind the dark glasses, beads of perspiration standing out on his shaven head, a mad dog and an Englishman, all in one, in the midday sun.

Maxwell had gone through the motions for him, a little over-the-top perhaps, of pumping a pump action rifle and blasting the air in front of him. Julian had looked on amazed. He didn’t own a pump-action and the shotgun he did own he only carried at night, so what was all the
pantomime
about? George had thought temporarily about putting one on the cheeky bastard, but it
was
a little open for that.

‘Heard of one Arthur Wimble, Douglas?’ Maxwell was lying against a spoil heap, his straw hat down over his eyes in best Randolph Scott tradition, out on the studio prairies, with his saddle for a pillow.

‘Wimble?’ Russell was getting outside a can of lager. ‘No, I can’t say I have.’

‘What about the Metal Detectives’ Society?’

‘Oh, them,’ the geophysicist chuckled. We were back with the mutant ants again. ‘Yes, them I do know.’

‘In what context?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Well, in many ways,’ Russell told him, ‘they’re the best of a bad bunch. God knows how much important material has been destroyed over the years by these vandals with metal detectors. As a geophysicist, you can imagine I don’t see them as anything but rank outsiders. Well, about ten years ago, a sort of truce was called. Rather than these
herberts
creeping about at night wiping evidence and us
having
to lock, bolt and otherwise protect our gear, we invited them on board. They would have the thrill of the chase, plus the cut of the particular Treasure Trove and we would reap the benefits of their searches. The deal is that at the first series of whee-whees on the old electro-magnetic device, they’re on the phone to their nearest university or field office. It actually works quite well. Don’t tell me they’ve got to you?’

‘Got to me?’

‘As soon as we moved in here, they were pestering David, wanting to volunteer their services. He sent them packing.’

‘He did?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Why?’

‘Well,’ Russell said, ‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but…’

‘Douglas!’ Tam Fraser announced his arrival. It wasn’t quite a fanfare or a hundred gun salute, but it didn’t need to be when you had a voice like Tam Fraser’s. ‘After lunch, can we go over those reports of yours? I’m finding
anomalies
all over the place.’

‘Of course, Professor.’ Russell finished his drink. ‘If there are anomalies…’

‘Oh, there’s no “if”, laddie.’ He sat down with his feet in Maxwell’s trench and fanned his fiery face with the wideawake.

‘Then I’d better go and re-check them.’ Russell saw his opening and left.

‘Aye, do that, dear boy.’ Fraser called after him. ‘That man,’ he turned to Maxwell with a broad smile, ‘hates my guts.’

The Head of Sixth Form lifted the hat from his face. ‘I’m sure not.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Fraser sighed. ‘He’s new school, y’see. He’s all amino acid racenization and uranium series disequilibrium. Me? I call a spade a spade,’ and he winked at his man. ‘There aren’t many of us left, are there, Maxwell?’

‘Us?’ Maxwell repeated, not sure if Tam Fraser would appreciate the old
kemo sabe
joke.

‘Dinosaurs, man; dodos, whatever vanished analogy you’d care to use. The point at issue is that our standards, our ways, were certainties. They were absolutes. Do you not sense that?’

‘Perhaps our walks of life are different,’ Maxwell tilted back the hat and sat up. ‘In my profession there are always a load of initiatives with different acronyms. They all boil down to re-inventing the wheel. I must admit, I am
beginning
to sound like an old 78 – “We did that in 1982”; “it didn’t work then and it won’t work now”; “that’s all right in the private sector”; “fine, if we had the money”. Sound familiar?’

‘Indeed it does,’ Fraser laughed.

‘But in archaeology, surely, it’s different. New techniques really
are
new techniques, taking us forward to a new understanding.’

‘Ach, that’s symposium twaddle, laddie. I’d hoped for better from you. No, take my word for it – it’s all just a reinvention of the wheel.’

At the end of a long day, Peter Maxwell threw his warm plastic lunchbox into the pannier of White Surrey and
sauntered out of the gate. The paparazzi had gone now. Tam Fraser had given them their quote of the day – which wasn’t actually quotable in a family newspaper – and the on duty PCs had done their respective impressions of statues in not responding to them. George had replaced Julian on the late afternoon shift and they’d lap each other again in the wee, small hours. Did those men, Maxwell wondered, ever sleep?

‘Arthur sends his regards,’ Maxwell told him, buckling down the panniers.

‘Who?’ George remained rock solid, legs planted firmly apart, incongruous in his black suit and black shades. Maxwell’s hot, tired form reflected back at the Great Man in each of the lenses. Maxwell cloned? Now, there was a prospect.

‘Arthur Wimble. You know, metal detective here one night back in March. You or Julian or both dented his kneecaps, probably with the shotgun butt you keep tucked down your tights.’

He saw George’s lip curl. ‘I’d be very careful if I were you, Maxwell.’

‘Oh, I will,’ the Head of Sixth Form said. ‘Which is why we’re having this little conversation in broad daylight with a boy in blue standing over there. Incidentally, I think I’d fancy his night-stick against your shotgun butt any day. They’re really dinky things. Ever seen one in action?’

‘No,’ George scowled.

‘Pray you don’t,’ Maxwell scowled back. ‘Where is it, by the way?’

‘Where’s what?’

‘The object you took from Mr Wimble.’

‘What’d that be, then?’ George asked.

‘Don’t play dumb with me, George. There were two
things actually. One was a Saxon dagger, four inch blade, bone handle – although I believe most of that had gone. And I know where that is – it’s in a packing case in Leighford Museum; I washed it myself a few days ago and labelled it up. So, presumably, you kindly returned that to Dr Radley at some point. No, the other thing is a piece of stone or marble, Mr Wimble couldn’t remember which. It had a Latin inscription. How’s your Latin, George?’

‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Fuck off out of it.’

‘You see,
that
was quite an important find.’ Maxwell was wiping dust off Surrey’s saddle.

‘Well, it wasn’t his,’ George growled. ‘It was on private property and he was trespassing.’

‘Indeed, but it wasn’t yours either, was it? Or Mr Cahill’s. It’s the job of a coroner to decide ownership of finds like that. So you think seriously about handing it in, all right? And I just might forget you and your oppo jammed a gun barrel into my neck the other night.’

‘We’re entitled to protect Mr Cahill’s property.’

‘Oh, sure, and you’re just obeying orders, eh, a bit like fifty million Nazis. You disappoint me, George. This is the twenty-first century – I thought you might have something more original to say by now. Oh, by the way,’ he swung his leg over Surrey’s crossbar. ‘No point in trying to put the frighteners on Arthur Wimble again. He’s not in the
bungalow
any more. I had the devil’s own job to find him. You have a nice evening now, y’hear?’

Peter Maxwell cycled over the flyover and headed north. This was not the way home, but he wasn’t going home. He was going to Jacquie Carpenter’s to find out where the hell she was.

‘Peter Maxwell!’

‘Jesus!’ The Head of Sixth Form hadn’t turned that fast in a long time. His back jarred and his pulse raced. He’d just left Surrey champing at the bit against Jacquie’s wall and had dutifully rung her bell. Nothing. No familiar shape beyond the frosted glass, no call of ‘Hang on. Won’t be a tick.’ ‘Henry Hall,’ he said, collecting himself. ‘Not
conducting
at Ally Pally tonight then?’ The DCI had been here a little while, lurking in the privet, testing the alertness of Neighbourhood Watch and finding it singularly lacking. Then it hit Maxwell. ‘Where’s Jacquie?’

‘It’s your key in the lock,’ Hall reminded him.

‘So it is,’ Maxwell said and turned it. The door swung wide. ‘Jacquie? Jacquie darling. It’s Max.’

He found himself pushed gently back against the door by the DCI. ‘Better let me go first,’ he said. ‘I get paid to do this.’

Maxwell had seen it done countless times on the telly. Good cop and bad cop; rookie and old hand; black man, white man, Clint Eastwood, Tyne Daly. The Magnums came out and one went high while the other went low, arms locked ahead, gun cocked, nerves like tensile steel. Maybe Henry Hall didn’t watch shows like that. He just sauntered into the lounge and looked around, then he sauntered into the kitchen, felt the kettle and cooker and doubled back to the stairs, halting Maxwell in mid-step.

‘I don’t make a habit of this,’ he said and was gone up the curve of the staircase, out of sight onto the landing. ‘Mr Maxwell, you’d better come up here.’

Peter Maxwell didn’t remember, in the years he had left, how he got to the top of those stairs, how he flew into the main bedroom, two at a time. On a wing and a prayer? Who knew? All he knew was that he found himself standing
alongside Henry Hall, both of them staring down at an envelope on the double bed.

‘She didn’t have time to make this,’ Hall nudged aside a pillow with his pen. Then he tucked the biro end neatly into the space at the top of the envelope and handled the thing with his fingertips. ‘Fan mail,’ he said to Maxwell. Both of them could see it was addressed to him.

‘Mr Maxwell,’ Hall said softly. ‘I want you to go into all the other rooms. I want you to check carefully in drawers, wardrobes and cupboards. I want you to touch as little as possible and I want you to give me the roughest of ideas of anything that’s missing. Can you do that?’

‘Yes.’

Hall looked at his man. He knew Peter Maxwell of old. He knew him to be a maverick, a madman even, given to strange whims and doubtful tilts at windmills. But he also knew him to be one of the strongest men he’d ever met. But this…this was different. This was Jacquie Carpenter. And one man’s DS is another man’s life.

‘But what’s that?’ Maxwell hadn’t moved, but was
pointing
to the envelope in Hall’s hand.

‘That,’ the DCI reminded him softly, ‘is addressed to me.’

Maxwell spun on his heel.

The other rooms were as empty as the downstairs. Jacquie’s clothes were still in the wardrobe. Winter coat, scarves, gloves, boots. Lacy bras and knickers lay neatly in one drawer; more of them tumbled untidily out of laundry basket in the bathroom. Various lotions graced the shelves; her toothbrush dangled on its rack. Maxwell checked the airing cupboard. The immersion heater was off and Jacquie was a stickler for that. In more petulant moments she’d berate him for never turning his off and what a waste it
was. An open pack of sanitary towels lay half-hidden under a pile of sheets.

‘She didn’t go of her own accord.’ He’d returned to Hall.

‘I know,’ the DCI said. He’d torn open the envelope and, still with fingertip precision, read the letter it contained.

‘“We have your policewoman. Stop the dig or she dies.”’

‘The Sepulchre Society of Sussex,’ said Maxwell. He didn’t have to look at the letterhead.

‘The same,’ nodded Hall grimly.

Time for a council of war.

The lights burned blue at Leighford nick that night. As the wind rose, moaning through the ash trees on Staple Hill and chiselled moon-silver ridges out to sea, a tired group of men and women sat hunched in the Incident Room, blinds drawn, emotions ragged.

‘What’ve we got SOCO-wise on Jacquie’s flat?’ Hall asked. Everybody knew it was not, technically, a scene of crime. Nothing had been disturbed. But Henry Hall had an officer down and two others missing; one, at least, an apparent kidnap victim. He’d drafted in new people, closed other cases, put yet more on hold. He needed officers out there, knocking on doors, asking questions. He’d square the cost with the Chief Constable later.

‘No sign of forced entry,’ Dave Garstang spoke for the mysterious Men in White who had spent hours going over the woman’s life. ‘We’re working on prints now, but apart from hers and Peter Maxwell’s, there aren’t any more to go on; one set’s fairly apparent, which we’re assuming is mother or cleaning lady – unless, of course, they’re the same.’

Levity wasn’t working this time. To lose one
policewoman
might be carelessness, but to lose two…and this
one was Jacquie Carpenter. Could any of them, they’d secretly asked themselves all day, learn to cope with losing
her
?