Maxwell's Retirement (11 page)

But she had turned a corner into a small
cul-de-sac
. ‘
Et voilà
,’ she said. ‘Without the help of a satnav of any description, either digital or human, here we are at Daisy and Maisie’s house.’ She looked at the small bungalow at the end of a short drive. ‘Oh, good heavens above. Will you please look at that.’

Maxwell craned round to see and his eyes popped. He had never seen so many gnomes in one place in all his life. They all but outnumbered the blades of grass in the lawn. In amongst them, as if their happy, apple-cheeked faces weren’t nauseating enough, were wishing wells, windmills, large daisies with smiling faces and unlikely eyelashes and one rather beleaguered-looking
rabbit, twice the size of the largest windmill. ‘Oh.’ He had never been so very lost for words.

‘“Oh” is right. She sounded a bit … twee, but I never expected this.’

‘No wonder young Maisie is kicking over the traces.’

‘How do you know she’s kicking over the traces?’ Jacquie wondered if she had accidentally said more than she had meant to.

‘I’m just hoping she is, I think. Can any sixteen-year-old girl feel she can fit in to this little grotto? Do I mean grotto?’ he mused. ‘Anyway, heart. Knock yourself out. I’ll just wait out here for you. Mwah.’ He pulled his hat over his eyes and settled back, flicking the station to Radio Four.

‘Oh, no, sunshine.’ Jacquie was getting out of the car and coming round to his side. She wrenched open the door. ‘Out you get.’

‘Precious, surely I can’t barge into a police investigation?’

‘Get out of the car, Maxwell,’ she said between her teeth. ‘I don’t think I can manage Snow White on my own. I need a sane – well, the nearest to sane I can get at this late notice – person with me in case I drown in Golden Syrup. If she asks, you are my … stenographer.’

He looked down at his mildly disreputable trousers and his tweed jacket which was older than many of the children he taught daily. His
bow tie had once been bow-tie-shaped, now it tended to look a bit more like a piece of fat string. Everything was clean, but that was about all that could be said for it. Added to which, he had to admit, he was a bit long in the tooth to be a police stenographer. ‘Do you think she’ll buy that story?’ To be fair, David Jason had got away with posing as a policeman for years.

She tugged his shirt collar a bit straighter and resisted the urge to lick her hankie and polish up his chin. ‘I’ve never seen anyone look more convincing,’ she said. ‘Do you have a pen?’ He whipped open his coat and showed the veritable arsenal of every colour ballpoint Staples could provide. ‘Pad?’ The other side of the jacket, flung open, revealed a spiral-bound notebook. ‘No wonder your coat is such a peculiar shape,’ she told him. ‘I thought it was your old trouble. Right. You’re armed and not terribly dangerous. Let’s go.’

They walked up the drive in line abreast and Jacquie pushed the bell button. It didn’t come as too much of a surprise when it dutifully played the tune of ‘April Showers’ in a tinkling cascade.

When the door was opened, Maxwell thought for a moment that perhaps the woman was in rehearsal for an amateur production of
Little Shop of Horrors
, for there, surely, stood Audrey. From her back-combed, bottle-blonde hair to her white stilettos, she was femininity through a
distorting mirror. ‘Hello,’ she trilled. ‘Detective Sergeant Carpenter? And this is …?’ She literally batted her eyelashes at Maxwell. He fancied he could feel the draught.

‘Yes,’ Jacquie said, stepping inside, hoping her warrant card would do for them both. ‘This is Mr Peters. He is a civilian stenographer. Community Police Service. Here to take notes,’ she added, when the woman appeared to have passed out on her feet, for all the reaction she showed.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘I thought you had tape recorders.’

‘Data protection act,’ Maxwell chimed in quickly. ‘Some people don’t like their voices being recorded.’ He smiled at her and Jacquie turned to him gratefully. ‘They think they steal their souls. Ow.’ He dutifully reacted to the dull ache resulting from Jacquie’s heel pressing down on his toe.

The woman looked at him and it was possible that her expression changed slightly, but it was hard to tell. She stood aside and extended an arm. ‘Do come in,’ she said and led the way into what at first Maxwell took to be a frill factory. It turned out to be the lounge and, after a little searching, Maxwell found a chair and perched on the edge. He extracted a pen and the pad and sat in an attitude of extreme alertness, eyebrows raised, pen poised, ready to jot down every phrase that fell from Daisy Wilkins’ glossy lips.

‘Mrs Wilkins,’ Jacquie said, sitting down on
what she hoped was a sofa, despite the fact that it looked like a random pile of cuddly toys. ‘Is Maisie at home?’

‘Please, call me Daisy.’ She simpered at Maxwell. ‘Everyone does.’

Maxwell raised one eyebrow a fraction further at his wife. He knew he would be in trouble later when he noticed the nerve jump at the edge of her jaw, which always meant she was about to laugh in an inappropriate situation.

‘Thank you, Mrs Wilkins … erm, Daisy. Is Maisie at home?’

The woman raised her eyes to the ceiling and pointed. Despite themselves, Maxwell and Jacquie both looked up, as though the girl might be actually there, suckered to the stucco like a huge gecko. She lowered her voice to below the threshold of any normal ears. ‘In her room,’ her lips said.

‘Wonderful,’ said Jacquie. ‘Can you get her to come down?’

‘She’s just changing,’ her mother said. ‘She finds school uniform very demeaning. She prefers her own clothes.’

Jacquie and Maxwell could imagine the vision that they would be honoured with when the girl came down. A clone of her mother, down to the American Tan stockings and the small pearl clip-on earrings. Maxwell also expected her to be mildly overweight. His experience over the
millennia had taught him that doting mothers tended to dote with chocolate as well as other less fattening things like clothes, computers and syndromes needing years of therapy. He had also noticed they didn’t tend to dote with books. His mind wandered; he was looking forward to his dotage. He would like the doting to take the shape of more plastic models for his diorama, Southern Comfort, and banana sandwiches. He was brought back to earth by the sound of a door slamming overhead and galloping feet on the stairs. Daisy smiled indulgently in the direction of the door. The Princess was at hand.

Maxwell just had time to wonder why the girl sounded so heavy on her feet when the door crashed back and a vision in black stood there, feet in purple Doc Martens planted aggressively apart, black-nailed fingers curled into loose fists resting on the well-padded vinyl-clad hips. There probably was room for more piercing on the face, but Maxwell was hard-pressed to identify it. The eyes were ringed with kohl, which had the disturbing effect of making them appear even closer together than they actually were. The hair was dyed, certainly, but in many shades from pale magenta to midnight blue. The vision spoke in a nasal whine.

‘Quickenoughforya?’

Daisy sprang to her feet and hurried over to give the girl a hug. ‘Thank you for hurrying
up, sweetie,’ she cooed in her ear. She turned to Jacquie but mainly to Maxwell. ‘She’d do anything for her mummy, wouldn’t you, baby?’ She reached up and, finding a non-metallic area of cheek, kissed the girl. ‘She usually takes a long time to get ready, but she has cut a few corners for us, haven’t you, love?’ She tugged the girl’s arm to bring her into the room. It was as if a sparrow had suddenly decided to drag the cat in through the cat flap, instead of the other way round. The girl’s dark bulk remained stationary and so the mother gave up and went and sat back down, settling her skirts around her calves in a modest and yet unsettlingly provocative way.

‘Hello, Maisie,’ Jacquie said brightly. ‘I don’t know how much you know about my visit, but I gather you’ve been having some upsetting texts and emails.’

‘Notupsettin,’ muttered the girl. ‘Anythintoeat?’ she suddenly demanded of her mother, who immediately leapt to her feet.

‘Sandwich, poppet?’ she asked. ‘Cake? Crisps?’

‘Yeah,’ the girl nodded and came into the room, flinging herself onto a chair, scattering cushions and frills left and right. Jacquie caught Maxwell’s eye and knew that he, like her, was remarking to himself that now he knew why they were called that.

Daisy turned to Jacquie and smiled. ‘She can
get so cranky when she’s peckish, can’t you, sweetheart? Do you have children, Sergeant?’

Maxwell almost answered for her but remembered in time that he was Mr Peters, police stenographer.

Jacquie smiled and said that yes, she had one small son, but before she could go into any detail, hoping to bond with the woman in shared parenthood, Daisy had closed her eyes in horror and one small, exquisitely manicured hand was pressed to her chest to still her beating heart.

‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ she breathed. ‘Never mind,’ and her eyes flew open, sparkling with hope for the future, ‘next time it might be a girl.’ And with that, she trotted off to the kitchen to prepare a small banquet for her little chick.

The room seemed emptier after she had gone by more than the sum of her parts. Maxwell was reminded of the strange silence that follows a firework display. The air was almost fizzing with the ghosts of her relentless sparkle.

Jacquie thought they had better get this show on the road. Nolan was staying, until she fetched him, with his best friend in the whole world this week, Spencer, and she had learnt that there was a sell-by date on these after-school get-togethers that could be scarily short. ‘Maisie,’ she said, ‘I know you just said that your texts and emails weren’t upsetting. Did you just say that because your mum was here?’

Maisie turned her cavernous eyes on Jacquie. It was as though Mount Rushmore had suddenly decided to make eye contact. ‘No,’ she said, perfectly clearly. ‘Why should I do that?’

Maxwell wished he could pat his own back these days. He certainly deserved it, for having pigeon-holed this girl so well. Schizophrenia of parental embarrassment, he called it. He saw it all the time.

Jacquie did a double take. ‘Well, she did say you two were … extremely close, and I just wondered …’ she said, her voice tailing away.

‘Close?’ The Goth girl looked both amazed and amused. ‘Do you think we look close?’

‘Well, no,’ Jacquie conceded. ‘But appearances can be deceptive.’

‘Not this time,’ Maisie said. ‘I can’t really be arsed to get out the baby pictures, but she’s got them all around if you can see them through all this frilly crap. Take a look. You’ll see.’

Jacquie got up and wandered round the room. There were indeed photos everywhere, of Maisie at every age from newly born to yesterday. And in each and every one, she looked like the cuckoo in the nest that she so clearly was. Dark spiky hair adorned the head of the cross-looking baby in Barbie doll’s arms, a truculent toddler with fat thighs making her feet splay out was
half-throttling
a patient-looking cat, an eleven-year-old in a Black Sabbath T-shirt was holding a repelling
hand out to the camera. On and on through the years, Maisie was definitely not a chip off Daisy’s block. Looking at her now, she seemed poised to sack Rome.

It was difficult to coo and it was clear that Maisie would not have relished it. She was revelling in her difference to the general public; perhaps it was all she had. Maxwell knew he shouldn’t ask questions, as a humble stenographer, but couldn’t resist it. ‘Is your dad in any of these?’

‘No,’ the girl replied. ‘Mum pretends he left us when I was small, but to tell the truth, he was never here. I don’t know whether she was with him for long before I was born, but he was gone before I was a month old.’ She saw the surprise on Jacquie’s face. Daisy didn’t seem the kind of mother to tell her daughter that. ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t the Fairy Liquid Mum who told me that. It was my gran. Her mum. She knows how to call a spade a spade.’

Maxwell was relieved that someone in the family had that simple skill, as well as poor Maisie.

‘So,’ Jacquie said, as the sounds from the kitchen started to sound a bit final, ‘how did your mum come to find out about your texts and emails if you didn’t pour your heart out to her whilst painting each other’s nails?’

Maisie threw her a look of pure gratitude. It was obvious she wasn’t used to being understood.
‘She goes through my pockets. She goes through my drawers. I lock things when I can, but when I put a password on my computer and a PIN on my phone she threatened to kill herself.’

‘Pardon?’ Jacquie’s eyes were wide.

‘Yeah.’ Maisie was laconic. ‘She’s a bit melodramatic.’

The sounds of a trolley were heard in the hall. Maxwell just knew it would be highly varnished wood with a faux brass gallery round the top level.

Jacquie knew she must be quick and gave the girl her card. ‘Can I see you tomorrow at the nick?’ she hissed. ‘Will you be at school?’

‘School?’ she laughed. ‘I haven’t been there in months. I’ll come to the nick, sure.’

‘Do you know where it is?’ Jacquie asked, and immediately knew she was wasting her breath when Maisie gave a short bark of laughter.

The trolley was pushed triumphantly into the lounge and it was exactly as Maxwell had suspected. It was laden with cakes, home-made jam in little Wemyss pots, scones, kettle-chips of umpteen different varieties in bowls printed with pictures of crisps. It was enough food for twenty, but Daisy put it pointedly alongside her daughter. This was love food and not for strangers.

‘Have you been having a nice chat, poppet?’ she asked her daughter, trying to tuck a wiry wisp of hair behind a much-pierced ear.

The girl tossed her head and squirmed away. ‘Goinout,’ she muttered and slouched out.

Daisy gave a small, regretful shrug and then smiled up at Jacquie and Maxwell as though nothing had happened. ‘Was she any help?’ she asked.

‘Loads,’ Jacquie said brightly. ‘What a lovely girl. You must be very proud.’

Maxwell was proud as well … of his lovely, caring wife. He thought of what she could have said, the calls to social services she could be making; but no – she knew they were both interdependent, no matter how it looked and she would leave well enough alone. But she also knew that Maisie could be a deep mine of information, if tapped the right way. Now, how to get away from Daisy? He looked forward to seeing how she accomplished that.