Maxwell's Island (14 page)

‘I agree,' Maxwell said, slapping the desk and making the scummy cocoa, undrunk in their cups, jump inside its skin. ‘So …' He got up. ‘What next?'

‘Next,' said Hall, not moving, ‘is that I say thank you for your time and you go home. How did you get here? Would you like a car back to the house?'

There was so much more to be said, so many words and ideas massing in Maxwell's head that, for a moment, he just sat there. There must be
something that would whet Henry Hall's appetite. To fill some time, he said, ‘Wouldn't you like to know why I needed to get in touch with Jacquie?'

‘I'm sure that's your business.' Hall's tone was wintry. Maxwell had heard it before. It was the tone usually employed by people who suddenly realised that they had told Peter Maxwell far more than they should. Most of them needn't have worried. Maxwell didn't waste his time in idle gossip, so if, as was usually the case, the things they told him had no bearing on anything important, they may just as well have whispered the words into a hole in the ground, safe in the knowledge that the world would never know that, like King Midas, they had ass's ears. But some of them, as in the current case, had told him something important, something he would worry at and dissect until the last useful bit of substance had been found and applied to the problem at hand, sometimes to their own disadvantage.

Maxwell soldiered on. ‘I had found something out about our missing person,' he said, and paused, trying to read Hall's face. He might as well have been trying to read
Ulysses
translated into Sanskrit, for all the help that blank collection of features gave him. ‘One of our kids saw her in the street on the night before her husband found her missing.'

Hall leant forward. His voice was quiet. ‘You questioned a child?' he asked, incredulous.
‘Without parental permission?' This wasn't the worst sin, on a scale of one to ten, but it was certainly ranked quite high. In the course of things, however, it was what Peter Maxwell did every day. How else can you gauge the little buggers' grasp of historical knowledge?

‘Of course not!' Maxwell was careful to keep his indignation down to a dull roar. Hall could recognise too much protestation at a hundred yards and the distance today was just a couple of feet. ‘He had a homework notebook and I happened to glance at it.'

‘Useful,' Hall remarked, drily. ‘Do the other kids' notebooks contain anything useful?'

Maxwell realised he was in the trap just as the door clanged shut. ‘No,' he tried a chuckle, but it sounded hollow. ‘Gervaise was the only one who was keeping a diary.'

‘Hmm.' Hall was impressed. ‘Keen student, is he, this …?'

‘Gervaise pronounced “Jarvis”,' Maxwell realised that Hall already knew this. ‘I mean Jarvis, spelt “Gervaise”, Potter. Very keen student, yes. Ginger.' The last word popped out without Maxwell's permission.

Hall knew his Maxwell. ‘I see. Having fun with the ginger kid, Mr Maxwell? Jacquie has mentioned your hobby.'

‘Painting model soldiers?' Maxwell asked, hopefully.

‘No.' Hall inclined his head slightly, his version of a friendly smile. ‘It's people with mullets, for me. It's becoming quite difficult, though, as they get rarer. Makes it more fun.' Maxwell was struck at how Hall seemed to have difficulty with the word. ‘However, it still sounds to me that you may have compromised evidence.'

Maxwell chewed his lip briefly, then said, ‘It doesn't need to be evidence as such, though, does it? Isn't it more in the way of being a clue? You know, to help us pinpoint when she disappeared. What she was wearing, that sort of thing.'

Hall agreed and said so; that was one of his most endearing traits, as Jacquie never tired of telling Maxwell. One of his least endearing was that he then minimised its impact. ‘We won't need clues, though, will we, when her husband gets home and finds her there?'

Maxwell's heart did a little flutter. ‘You've checked? She's home? Why on earth …?'

Hall silenced him with a flapped hand. ‘No, no, we haven't checked. I'm just outlining the most likely scenario. More missing people turn up safely than stay missing.'

Still Maxwell stayed sitting. ‘I really have a bad feeling about this one, though, Henry.'

Hall changed the subject, although only slightly. ‘Has Jacquie told you about her promotion prospects?'

‘Umm … yes,' Maxwell knew where this was
going and didn't like the view from the bridge.

‘Good,' Hall said, getting up. ‘That's very good. So, I think we're done in that case, Max, aren't we?' He advanced on Maxwell in a kind of one-man pincer movement and had his man at the door in commendably few moves. Maxwell was impressed. He used the same technique himself, daily, and knew a master of the art when he saw one.

‘But, Henry …' Maxwell found himself talking to the door. Gathering his dignity about him and hoping that it had become a cloak of invisibility, he swept down the corridor, down the stairs and out into the car park, where Guy Minter was sitting, faithful as an elephant. And he hadn't even been in the room.

In his office, Henry Hall sat pensively for a moment behind his desk. Then, he seemed to come to a decision and picked up the phone. ‘Bob? DCI Hall. Are you busy?'

‘Well, guv, I—'

‘Good. Could you just go to the file and bring me the incoming faxes and emails on national suspicious deaths for the last … let's say, month. Don't worry about weeding out the ones they solve later. I want everything, as they were sent out.'

‘That's huge, guv! I'm in the middle—'

‘Bring a trolley, then,' Hall said shortly. ‘Don't want you to hurt that back again, do we? And don't forget your glasses.'

Sergeant Bob Thorogood sighed and went to do his master's bidding. The sooner Jacquie Carpenter got back the better. This job was too much like hard work without her to do the guvnor's little bits and pieces. And what was he up to now, anyway? Surely not anything to do with the visit from Maxwell, the Copper's Curse? He reached up and paused, hoping for a twinge from his dodgy disc, but nothing doing. Piling the files onto a trolley he announced to the world in general that he was off to do some special work with DCI Hall.

‘Good luck with that,' muttered a PC, up to her armpits in paperwork, having been unlucky enough to be the nearest beat officer when some underage drinkers had kicked off in the shopping centre. Roll on promotion, she thought. There was still paperwork, but it had to be more interesting than this.

‘Good Lord, Bob,' Hall said as the sergeant rolled his trolley into the office. ‘How many files have you got there?'

The sergeant ran his finger along the spines. ‘About twenty, I should say. I brought this month and all of August, to be sure.' Thorogood was about to add another ‘to be sure' but could never remember where Hall stood on Irish jokes, although it was a reasonable assumption that it was in the same place as his position on jokes in general. As far away as possible.

‘Hmm.' Hall was casting his mind back, using visual clues, as taught by Derren Brown, Hall's secret vice. ‘I don't think we'll need the ones from the first two weeks of August and I don't think we'll … no, I know we won't need last week's. So that gives us the very first week in September and, let's say the last two in August.' He stood up and came round the desk. Henry Hall was always prepared to muck in, especially when the files were newish and not too dusty. ‘Which are they?'

Thorogood bent down and turned his head sideways. The bottom ones, of course. Weren't they always? He lifted the top ones and Hall slid out the files he wanted. There were five of them.

‘Is there anyone at a loose end in the ops room?' Hall asked the sergeant.

‘No one is ever at a loose end, exactly,' Thorogood replied. ‘There's always something to do.' He sounded like a weird fusion of Job and Confucius. He also wanted to remind the guv'nor what it was like back on the ground.

Hall glanced up at him and Thorogood was treated to a rare view of his eyes, over the top of his glasses. They were cold as ice and almost the same colour.

‘But I'll go and check, shall I, guv?'

‘Good idea,' Hall congratulated him, sitting back down behind his desk with the file in front of him. ‘When you get back, I'll tell you what I'm looking for, shall I?' Hall looked steadily at him
until he was out of the room. Only then did the DCI mutter, ‘At least, I would if I knew what it was.'

Before Henry Hall had really had time to gather his thoughts, Thorogood was back with the WPC who had been wrestling with boring paperwork. He had told her that she was being redeployed to do boring paperwork, but she couldn't believe that it could be as boring as the stuff she was doing already.

‘Hello, Fran,' Hall said, for him, very cordially. ‘Thanks for the offer of help. Now, if you take this file and sit over there if you can clear a space and you, Bob, if you can use the top of the trolley? Just pull up a chair. Is that the right height for your back?'

Bob Thorogood's back was the running nick joke. It threw itself out for the European Grand Prix, the Six Nations final weekend and Wimbledon. Now that the football season was well under way, it needed extra tender care. It wasn't that keen on cricket. He grimaced at his boss. ‘Fine, guv, yes. Thanks.' He opened his file.

‘Now we're all comfortable,' Hall said, ‘I'll tell you what we're looking for.' There was a very long pause. ‘The short answer is, I don't know. But something is niggling me and it needs to be found. I'll tell you what has set it off and perhaps that will help us. If you find anything that seems to fit, just sing out and we'll discuss it.'

Fran Brannon was agog. She really didn't see how Thorogood could find this boring. This was
detecting
. A future in plain clothes stretched enticingly in front of her. She'd be up there with Jane Tennison and that woman in
Wire in the Blood.
And the other one in
Trial & Retribution.
She was, after all, blonde and that seemed to be their only qualification. Then she realised that DCI Hall was still speaking.

‘So, I'll just recap.'

Thank goodness, Fran thought. Wouldn't do to go out in the first round. Could be Community Liaison for ever.

‘Falls down stairs. That's the first thing to watch for. Old ladies, I suppose, though that might be too big a group. We'll see. Mispers, but not youngsters, I don't think. We're not talking fed-up teenagers here. And …' he tapped his teeth with his pencil, ‘I know this sounds silly, but … teachers. Either working or retired. Supply as well, I suppose.'

Bob Thorogood snorted. ‘Maxwell,' he breathed. At last, he might be sussed.

‘No, Bob,' Hall said stiffly. ‘Not Mr Maxwell. Just teachers in general. Not necessarily the victim or suspect, just any involvement. Right? Let's go,' and he suited the action to the words and scanned down his first document, running his pencil down the margin. ‘Oh,' he added. ‘Perhaps if we mark a document we've checked, just a small tick in the top right-hand corner. Then, if any of us should suddenly
die or go sick or something,' he glanced here at Thorogood, his face impassive, ‘the replacement won't have to duplicate any effort.' He bent his head again and the two others did likewise.

For quite some time the only sound in the room was the distant hum from the rest of the building, going about its business and, overlaid on it, the soft susurration of turning paper, the occasional ‘da daaa', quiet and on the edge of hearing, that signalled another tick on another useless page. Sometimes, Bob Thorogood forgot to close his mouth and the click of his drying tongue grew in volume until he remembered, closed his mouth, licked his lips and started the whole cycle off again.

Fran Brannon was the first to find something. ‘What about this, DCI Hall?' She wasn't quite in the ‘guv' clan yet. She snapped the file open, extracted a page and passed it to him. He took it from her and speed-read it to the bottom.

‘Hmm. Old lady. Stairs. Dead at the bottom, so not much else … no bruising. No visible injuries, just the usual broken hip.' He passed it back. ‘Dehydration and exposure. The usual suspects. Not quite there, but well done.' He looked at the files in front of his staff. At least the left-hand pages now numbered more than the right. But was that a good thing or not, bearing in mind that no one had found anything yet?

Then, suddenly, Thorogood shouted, ‘Yes!' and punched the air.

Hall, not given to such gestures, merely looked up and said, quietly, ‘Yes?'

Thorogood didn't bother with the niceties of opening the file. He just tore the page out and handed it over. He stood, quivering in front of Hall's desk like a gun dog which has unaccountably found a hippopotamus in the undergrowth.

Again, Hall scanned the page. ‘Bob,' he said, ‘I think this is it.' Fran Brannon's shoulders slumped. Community Liaison it was. Hall ran his eye down the page again. ‘Yes. Death from a fall. Teacher.' He thumped the desk. ‘
Art
teacher! That was it!' He looked up at them and any other man would have given Thorogood a high five. Instead, he decided to share information. ‘Do either of you remember my mentioning the missing person on the Leighford High School trip?'

Fran nodded enthusiastically. Thorogood shrugged and gave a single nod.

‘Well, Jacquie Carpenter rang me because she wasn't getting anywhere with the local boys, and fair enough, I suppose – the woman was only discovered to be missing yesterday morning, but other circumstances … anyway, she was in touch. Something Jacquie said touched a nerve and I couldn't put my finger on it. But what it was, was that the husband is an art teacher.' He splayed his fingers on the desk and pushed back till the chair was against the wall. The other two looked amazingly underwhelmed and the room filled with
a silence you could have cut with an axolotl.