Maxwell's Island (29 page)

Hall watched her carefully. Her mood was very brittle and he didn't think he ought to shatter it. So he kept to himself the fact that a nice English policeman had already rung the consulate, very, very early. He was searching for an old lady, the same old lady, and was coming out to bring her some bad news. The consulate had laid on a car. Henry Hall had been rather terse with the very nice consulate official, but had been unable, when push came to shove, to prove over the phone that he and not the other very nice, very well-spoken
policeman, was the real policeman in this case. So, Peter Maxwell would be swept, in consular splendour, to the doors of Araminta Troubridge's rented villa. So he said, ‘I'd like to see his face when he gets there after a three-hour journey on a busload of goats to find us sitting there drinking a nice cold drink with Miss Araminta Troubridge in handcuffs.'

‘Oh,' Jacquie said. ‘It isn't Araminta we're going to catch, guv.'

‘It isn't?' he said.

‘No. Don't you remember what I said? Araminta is Mrs Troubridge's twin, you know, the tiny little thing. She couldn't push Nolan downstairs. No, the person we're after is someone else altogether. I'll show you a photo if you like. Let me know when you have it sussed.' She reached into her handbag and got out the photo of the trip which Maxwell had put under her passport. She smiled to see Hall examine it closely, ticking off the people on his fingers and leant back in her chair and, rather to her own surprise, dropped off to sleep.

The heat, as he stepped off the plane, hit Peter Maxwell like a wall. He had not really stopped to consider the weather and so was wearing what he had taken off, very briefly, the night before. He had lain in bed for long enough for Jacquie to go to sleep and had then slipped out of the room and away in the waiting taxi. He was wondering
now whether he should have left her the clues and where he would be, but surely, the budget of West Sussex Police wouldn't run to tickets to Rhodes. It wasn't a huge amount, as his credit card had been delighted to discover, but he remembered the fuss last spring when someone had claimed for a parking ticket which he only got because he was pinned down by some loony with a gun in the Botanical Gardens. It had gone to three tribunals.

He looked around, but mostly at the blazing sky, the blue so deep it was almost cobalt. He could check; he still had a fleck of the paint under his thumbnail from painting Private Olley's jacket. He wasn't a fearful man, but he had a bad feeling about this showdown he was about to have. He knew that the murderer had killed at least three people, almost certainly four, and had tried to kill five. And these were just the ones he knew about. With luck, he would prevent the sixth. With a following wind, he would not become the seventh. He took off his jacket as he left the terminal building. It was at least fifteen degrees hotter than it had been at home, and the sun was still climbing. He hoped this car they were sending would be air-conditioned.

‘DCI Maxwell?' A uniformed driver was standing in front of him. He almost sidestepped him, not having expected the rank, but realised in time.

‘Yes, yes, that's me.' He suddenly was aware how little he knew of police procedure. Was he
supposed to salute? Was this man a policeman, or just amazingly well turned out? If truth were told, Mad Max had impersonated policemen before. He'd flashed his NUT card, split his infinitives and hoped for the best, but that was at home, on his own turf, where he could bluff his way out of anything, more or less. This was different. ‘Abroad was a bloody place' as some long-dead Englishman had said. Interpol. There would at least be forms to fill in, probably in triplicate.

‘You wish to go to the Villa Arcati?' the man asked.

With the dear, dead shades of Rex Harrison and Margaret Rutherford for company, Maxwell nodded and climbed in to the back of the car and went off to meet his own Colossus of Rhodes.

‘We will have to go the pretty way, Chief Inspector,' the driver said.

‘I'm sure it will be lovely,' Maxwell beamed. ‘I am in your hands.'

‘Yes,' the driver shoved a wad of paper at him, almost as thick as the Yellow Pages used to be before it went online, ‘and these are in yours.'

‘Thank you,' Maxwell was still beaming. ‘What are they?'

‘Authorisation papers,' the driver said. ‘You must read and initial each page before I can let you out of the car. You have done this before?'

‘Oh, of course,' Maxwell bluffed, ‘Anything new since 2004?'

‘Page 6, Clause 38b might amuse you,' the driver said. He wasn't smiling and behind his shades he was as inscrutable as Henry Hall.

‘And do I have to sign these in triplicate?' Maxwell asked him.

‘No. Just three times,' the driver said.

The drive was beautiful, and he tried to drink it all in, to tell Jacquie and Nole about it later. He concentrated on the later, it was the best way. In the meantime, he thought he'd better actually read the paperwork. It wouldn't do to have the driver become suspicious.

He had rehearsed what he would say when he got there, over and over on the plane, to the irritation of the man in the seat next to him. He had watched the film to try and relax, but as the credits rolled he realised he had absolutely no idea what he had just watched. It might have had Matt Damon in it. At least that would mean he could watch it again, with Jacquie when he got home. He began to feel a little like Dorothy in Oz; he wasn't sure where he was just now, but he sure as hell wasn't in Kansas anymore. The dreamlike state continued when the driver pulled up at the end of a long, pot-holed drive. The entrance was marked by two tumbledown posts, which had once been stately Grecian columns, but were now so weathered and worn that only shallow grooves running down the more sheltered of the two gave any clue to their past glory.

‘Here we are, DCI Maxwell,' the driver said. ‘I am afraid I cannot take the car up the driveway. It is, as you see, too small, too rough. But I will wait there,' he pointed down the road to where a rough-tiled roof was just visible, ‘where I can get something to eat and drink. If you need me until tonight, I will be there.'

That settled that question, then. He was a policeman. On overtime. ‘Thank you,' Maxwell said.

‘And the papers?'

‘Of course,' smiled Maxwell, handing them over, ‘every eye dotted, every tee crossed. It's been a pleasure.'

‘Παρακαλώ,' the man said. ‘You're welcome.' He got back into the car and it purred away. Maxwell threw his jacket over his shoulder and looked up the drive, as it snaked away up the hill. He checked his watch. To his amazement, they had left the airport nearly an hour ago. He took a deep breath and took his first step. Then the next. Then the next. It was the only way to tackle the incline and prevent his legs from carrying him down the road to the rough-roofed inn and telling the driver it had all been a horrible mistake and please take him home.

With every turning, he thought the villa must certainly appear and just as he thought it never would, there, suddenly, it was in front of him; low, white with green shutters closed against the heat of the day. The door was of thick, grey olive wood
and looked as if it had grown to fill the space of the doorway. It was as hard as iron and the hinges had sunk into it, with years of shrinking in the heat and swelling in the rain. He knocked on it and the sound of his knuckles seemed to be soaked up into the fabric. He tried again, but thought that if Miss Troubridge was anything like her sister, she would be lurking somewhere, having been aware of his approach for the last three twists in the path, secateurs gripped in her bony fingers.

He set off round the side of the house, pushing past stunted olive trees until he reached an open space at the back. The door on this side of the house was open and the inside beckoned, cool and black against the heat outside. Calling, ‘Miss Troubridge? Araminta?' he walked into what appeared to be the kitchen of the villa. There was a huge wood-burning stove which was, unbelievably in this temperature, belching out heat. A pan of something was mumbling away to itself on the top and he could smell the aroma of lamb and garlic. He realised how hungry he was and sniffed appreciatively. On the table was a glass of lemonade. He felt rather like Goldilocks.

Above the soft bubble and pop of the stew, he thought he could hear another noise, a faint mewing, like a distant seagull. He remembered Metternich had made the same noise when he was a kitten, missing his mother. He pushed open a door on the other side of the room and the sound
grew louder. Another door and he was in the room from where the noise came. Sitting in a chair by the mercifully empty fireplace, her eyes like marbles, sat Araminta Troubridge. Across her mouth was a piece of sticking plaster. Behind her, like an enormous temple deity, toying lightly with the old woman's fluffy white hair, stood Millie Muswell.

‘Mr Maxwell,' the huge woman rumbled. ‘What a totally delightful surprise. How is Mrs Maxwell? And your lovely son? And of course, dear Jessica?'

‘All well, Millie, thanks for asking.' Maxwell was amazed that his voice was working so well. He was thirsty and hungry and scared out of his wits. He knew now that she hadn't just murdered three people. She had murdered as many people as had crossed her in her entire life. It was the Millie Muswell Way. ‘Fancy bumping into you, all the way out here.'

‘I could say the same,' Millie said. ‘Come to chat about Jessica and her broken hip, have you? About how she is as mad as a hatter. Not got long, so I hear.'

‘Actually,' Maxwell said and knew he sounded both desperate and pompous. ‘She is much better. I showed her Araminta's postcard and it perked her up no end. I also showed her the picture someone had taken of you on our school trip. You were often in the background, but rather stupidly I didn't really look closely. I just saw a large person in the shot and assumed it was a colleague. And
then I saw you both in one photo and it began to click into place.'

‘Ah, yes, the drunk,' Millie laughed and the windows shook. ‘She came in very handy. I'm a bit cross with myself, though, for ending up in one picture with her. I was very careful. Digital cameras, I suppose. Panoramic shot, was it?' She laughed again, unpleasantly.

‘Then I started thinking. You mentioned baby sloths being sweet. But the sloth was only out in public for the first time when we were there, and unless you had seen one somewhere else, and they are not exactly ten a penny in England, then you must have seen it then. Then, Gervaise saw Izzy talking to someone outside the hotel, and I think it was you.'

‘Well done, Mr Maxwell. You really have done splendidly. Little woman know all this, does she? Right behind you with the handcuffs?' Millie looked behind him, miming extreme concentration and shading her eyes with a hand like a small suitcase. ‘No. I don't see her. Any other clever clues, Mr Maxwell?'

‘Yes, as a matter of fact. Mrs Troubridge, bless her, cried out quite a lot when she was on a morphine drip and after, in her sleep. She kept going on about a wardrobe, which, unflattering as you might find it, Millie, is what you had become to her in her delirium. She kept counting as well, but I only worked that out last night.' It came to
him with a sudden shock how recently he had been in his own house and how far he had come, so quickly. He lost his thread.

‘I made a bit of a bosh shot with Jessica,' Millie mused. ‘Of all of them, I thought I could snap her like a twig. Ironic.'

‘We thought you had gone home,' Maxwell said.

‘I had,' the woman said. ‘I know you all thought I got about by train, but for heaven's sake, how can anyone do that these days? Online timetables? Ha!' So she and Maxwell had that at least in common. ‘I kept my car parked in the station car park, so I could come and go as I liked. I had already palmed your keys from the cupboard in the kitchen, so I got into your house, used the keys you so cleverly hide …' she paused to snort, ‘in your garage and let myself back in. Jessica had no idea I was there and came whiffling along the landing like a little shrew. I went for her neck but she beat me by fainting and I only got a glancing blow. I put the keys …' she looked at Maxwell. ‘I put them in the wrong place, didn't I?'

He nodded.

‘Drat. I remember now. That's where
Mirabell
kept his keys.' She looked at him and smiled. ‘It gets confusing, you know, Mr Maxwell, after a while. Never mind. Where was I?'

‘The keys,' said Maxwell, trying to be helpful.

‘Yes. The keys. I put them … down, went to
the front door. Put on one of her slippers, so it looked as if she had fallen down the stairs, and went out, slamming the door behind me. Then I went back into your house and hung the keys back up. Simple. I can't work out why she was found so soon, though. A while longer and she'd have been dead for certain, with the gap under the door.'

‘It was my cat,' Maxwell said, proudly. ‘He was calling outside her door.'

‘Damned animal,' she said, pulling Araminta's hair in her annoyance. The little woman winced and put her hand up to her head, only to have it slapped down.

‘Also, you started one of Jacquie's police colleagues thinking by putting the slipper on the wrong foot. You obviously don't know your own strength.' As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew it was a mistake.

Millamant Muswell pulled on Araminta Troubridge's hair until the woman was on her feet. Then she pulled some more, making her scream behind her plaster. The old woman's eyes were full of tears and she reached up to try and stop the pain. The murderess held both of her wrists together in one hand and yanked on those as well. ‘So, Mr Maxwell, why don't you come and watch me throw Araminta here over the edge of the cliff? It's not high, not that much higher than, say, an upstairs window, but she's old, and quite frightened now, I think.' She turned her round and
poked her in the chest, holding her face nose to nose. ‘Is the old heart beating a bit faster, dear?' she asked. ‘Dearie me, I might not have to chuck you off the cliff, after all.'