Maxwell's Retirement (12 page)

‘Oh, I am,’ Daisy gushed. ‘Only the other day—’

The Bum of the Flightlebee
rang out in the airless room.

‘Excuse me,’ said Jacquie, smiling. ‘It’s the station. I must answer it. DS Carpenter,’ she said into the phone in her hand. She stood up and then stiffened. ‘What?’ She looked at Maxwell, who pocketed his notepad and stood up obediently. ‘On my way.’ She rang off and turned to Daisy Wilkins. ‘I’m afraid there is rather an emergency at the station, Mrs Wilkins. We’ll have to go.
Thank you for your time and please thank Maisie for me when you see her.’

‘Oh,’ carolled Daisy. ‘She’ll be in shortly.’ She dropped her voice and wrinkled her nose at Maxwell. ‘It’s our night for washing our hair.’

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Girls’ night in.’

She patted his arm. What a wonderful man. She loved tweed on a bicep; so manly. Her pat became a stroke. Jacquie grabbed his other arm and pulled.

‘Well, Mr Peters,’ she said. ‘We must be away. Goodbye, Mrs Wilkins.’

They forced themselves to walk, not trot, down the drive. Only Maxwell looked back. Daisy Wilkins was standing in the doorway, wiggling her fingers at them, a brave smile on her face. It was enough to break your heart.

‘Good work there, Juliet Bravo,’ he said. ‘That trick with the phone.’ He snapped his seat belt on. ‘Now, let me tell you about my—’

‘Yes, a good trick,’ she muttered, interrupting him, turning the ignition. ‘Only it wasn’t a trick. That was the nick. Leah’s little sister has just knocked on their neighbour’s door.’

His throat seemed to have just gone very dry. ‘Why?’

‘Leah hasn’t come home from school. She seems to have disappeared.’

The drive back to the station was quiet, as they both wrestled with their thoughts. Maxwell had taken Julie’s ‘disappearance’ lightly. If he had a quid for every girl whose parents had thought she was missing, only to have her turn up, crestfallen or dishevelled according to the reason for her absence, he would almost be able to buy himself an ice-cream on the Front in high season. Jacquie was tuned to a slightly different level. Her experience had taught her that the length of disappearance had no bearing on its severity. If someone had been abducted, they were missing from the second they were snatched and that could be within a minute of their being last seen. If someone wanted to disappear, they could mask their departure by means of messages, phone calls and false trails until they had time to burrow into whatever parallel world they had chosen as preferable to the one they were leaving. But when
two girls, friends, sharing the same trouble, went missing on the same day, then the alarm bells rang. She didn’t know whether they had been taken, or if they were in hiding. What she knew for certain was that she was about to be immersed in the world of crying mothers, shouting fathers, press and tension.

She also had to get rid of Maxwell as soon as possible. When they had set off to interview the Wilkins pair, the plan had been that Jacquie could drop Maxwell off at home, or very nearly, and then go on to finish her day. And although that was still theoretically possible, she didn’t want to waste even those few minutes.

Maxwell had also been thinking and along very similar lines. He cleared his throat. ‘I haven’t told you about my text,’ he said.

‘Max,’ she said, a little testily, as she took a bend rather too wide for anyone’s comfort. ‘I’m glad you’ve mastered the phone, but really, I can hear about this later, at home.’

‘Two things, heart,’ he said. ‘The first is that I can’t see you getting home any time soon today and you know how I need my beauty sleep.’

She glanced at him and gave a small laugh. He was the only person she had ever met who could get by on the same few seconds a night that she could. ‘If you say so. And the second thing?’

‘I thought you understood about my text. I told you in the message and I’ve been trying to
tell you since. I’ve had a message like the girls’. Threatening and rather disturbing.’

‘Max!’ He didn’t know whether this came out as a scream because she was angry or because a lorry was bearing down on them from the right. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’

‘I did try,’ he said mildly.

There was a pause as she reran the last hour or so. ‘Hmm, all right. Perhaps you did.’

He silently mouthed, ‘Yes, I did,’ but her eyes were on the road and she didn’t see.

‘But …’ She looked at him. ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t concentrating on what you were saying. Tell me now.’

‘It said “The ancient work will be accomplished, and from the roof evil ruin will fall on the great man. The girls will get it now, Maxwell.”’

‘Like that? No text speak?’

‘No. Everything was spelt out in full. They even included punctuation.’

‘That’s odd. Most people don’t bother. But what the hell does it mean?’

‘There’s something about it that’s familiar and I can’t put my finger on it. The great man’s me, of course – who else?’

‘Yes, dear, of course it is. I rather thought it was referring to Sherlock Holmes and it’s obviously someone who knows you because you don’t text, or use abbreviations.’ She thought for a moment, drumming her fingers on the wheel as
she waited for a traffic light to change. ‘So are we back to kids?’

‘No, I still don’t think that. And that’s not just because the kids who would find this funny wouldn’t be up to the grammar or the emailing and what must be a quotation. A kid who
could
do this,
wouldn’t
do this, if you see what I mean.’

‘I do see,’ Jacquie said. ‘But I think that perhaps you and I have a different view of kids.’

‘Perhaps,’ he turned and smiled at her. ‘Perhaps we had better agree to differ.’ Then, as if he had read her mind, ‘What do you want me to do when we get to the nick?’ This was a timely question, as she had just turned into the car park.

‘I was going to go back to the first plan of the afternoon, before you talked yourself into being a stenographer.’ He ignored the obvious injustice of this – he had been perfectly content to stay in the car. ‘You should get yourself home and I’ll see you later. But now …’ She turned off the ignition and the car clicked quietly as the engine started to cool. ‘I think you ought to come in and give a statement.’

He looked dubious. ‘To anyone in particular?’

Jacquie ran through the list of people who Maxwell hadn’t annoyed at the nick. It was very short and only one was on duty. ‘I suppose it will have to be Henry,’ she said.

‘Isn’t he out?’

‘Oh, damn. Yes, he is. Or at least, was. It might
just be that he’s back. We’ll go in and see, anyway.’ She unbuckled her belt and got out of the car. She turned and faced him over the car roof. ‘We could do with a holiday, you know,’ she said.

‘Half-term, now, I suppose,’ he said. ‘No last minutes for the Easter holidays left, I shouldn’t think.’

‘When you retire,’ she said, ‘we can go away whenever we want.’

‘True,’ he agreed. ‘As long as it only costs fourpence three farthings.’

She laughed and clicked the key. The car warbled back at her and flashed its lights in a friendly fashion. Falling into step, they walked up the back steps of the nick.

Henry Hall drove to Yvonne Thomas’s house, following her. She was at the end of her shift and he saw no reason to make her come back in just to get her car. As a father himself, he knew she would have a difficult evening ahead of her. As they walked to their cars, he had chatted to her of this and that, mainly trying to find out a bit about her home life. He liked to think he kept his ear to the ground, but there was a limit; not even he could remember everything about everyone. He realised that he perhaps should have known that her husband was a desk sergeant at another station, but he just chalked that one up as a failure. He would be home before they got there.

He got out of his car, which he had parked at the kerb over the end of the traffic cop’s drive. At least he knew he was probably safe from a ticket there. She was waiting for him by her vehicle and set off down the drive to the front door as soon as he had locked his doors.

It was a nice house, Henry thought. Well kept, a basketball hoop on the door frame of the garage, a cat flap in the panel beside the double-glazed front door. The door knocker was a tiny truncheon, in brass. Someone had a sense of humour at least.

The door opened and Yvonne’s husband stood there, framed from behind by sunlight filtering through from the kitchen. The house sounded too quiet to have two teenagers in it, especially the two that Hall remembered: forces of nature, red-haired, freckled kids, always throwing a ball or catching a Frisbee. They were always the ones who played the funny jokes, not the cruel ones. They went to school out of Leighford, going in every morning with their dad, coming home on the school bus. Nice kids, from a nice home.

Their parents spoke together.

‘Kids home?’ their mother said.

‘They’re upstairs,’ came from their father. Then he added, ‘They wanted to go out but I said they had to wait for you.’ He looked past her to Henry. ‘DCI Hall,’ he extended his hand for him to shake, ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’ The subtext
said – you’re a bit high-profile. What’s going on?

‘Don’t worry, Pete,’ Yvonne said, thus relieving Henry of the problem of not knowing the guy’s name. ‘It’s just that DCI Hall was free and the DS who is running the case had an appointment. I’m sure it will all be something and nothing.’

‘I’m sure it will,’ Hall said. He turned to the husband. ‘It’s just that Amanda and Josh might be able to give us a unique insight into the issue that we’re dealing with: nasty texts and emails.’

‘We’re getting them as well, over at Littlehampton,’ Pete said. ‘We’ve had about five complaints.’

‘Get ready for more,’ Henry said darkly. ‘Ours seem to be increasing on a ridiculous scale.’ He knew there was a word for it, but couldn’t bring it to mind.

‘Exponential,’ a voice came from over his head.

Yes, that was it.

‘It means that the more there is of something, the faster the amount increases.’ The voice was coming nearer, in time with soft footfalls on the stairs.

‘Meet my son, Josh,’ Yvonne said. ‘He’s something of a mathematician.’

Henry Hall’s spirits rose. Maths went with computers, as often as not, in his experience.

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ the lad said, reading his mind, it seemed. He stopped on the bottommost stair. ‘It’s Maths and Music with
me. Maths and Dance with Mand. It’s a bit of a rhythm thing.’ He rocked his hips and clicked his fingers.

Hall nodded. ‘Hello, Josh. I assume you know why I’m here, then?’

‘We guessed, me and Mand. It was only a matter of time, you know, with the pezzers being Old Bill and that.’

There was a sound of a door closing quietly on the landing and the same soft footfalls came round the corner of the stairs. Suddenly Josh had a shadow, slighter, paler, with longer hair, but otherwise they made Hall feel as though the focus had slipped, like it used to on the old-fashioned TVs of years ago. He had never seen twins of different sexes look so alike.

Yvonne saw his expression and gave a small laugh. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does that to people. It’s just a family thing, though. Plus the red hair; the face, the freckles, the slight build seems to go with it.’

‘Yeah,’ Amanda said, pushing past her brother and standing one step below him on the hall floor. ‘You’ll see our type all over. We would have been exposed on a hillside years ago, wouldn’t we, bro?’ She tossed her flaming curls and turned to look up at her brother. ‘They’d have called us changelings.’

Their father called the meeting to order. ‘Shall we go into the dining room?’ he said, pushing open a door.

‘Family conference?’ the girl said. ‘Wassup?’

‘Come on, Mand,’ her brother said. ‘You know what’s up. They,’ he indicated his parents with a toss of the head, ‘aren’t stupid. And we’ve been behaving like a pair of total spazzes. They were bound to cotton on sooner or later.’

She tried to keep up the pretence. ‘Cotton on? What to?’

He gave her a gentle push in the small of the back. ‘Just get in there. Sooner it’s done, sooner it’s done.’

Yvonne gave Hall a small smile. ‘He’s the eldest,’ she said, by way of explanation.

‘How much by?’ Hall asked.

‘Two minutes, but it’s important to them.’ She stood aside and let Hall go into the dining room first.

This was not a room out of any of the home-improvement shows on the television. There was no rather self-conscious flower arrangement in the middle of a highly polished and barely used table, no throws over the backs of the chairs. This was a room where a family ate, played games and, yes, used the computer. It sat, not exactly state of the art, in a corner on a small desk. A shelf of CD-ROMs was attached rather haphazardly on the wall above it. Hall leant over to read the titles: garden planners, Scrabble, Sudoku; not even a shoot-em-up game in the little collection. He turned back to the family and saw they were smiling.

‘Sorry, DCI Hall,’ Pete Thomas said. ‘We are really boring parents when it comes to our kids and computers. No shooting here. We’ve both seen enough in real life.’

Hall thought – but didn’t say it – in Traffic? Things must be wilder on the streets than he remembered. His face, though as stone-like as ever, must have shown it, because Yvonne looked at her husband before she spoke.

‘We haven’t always lived here, DCI Hall. We used to live in Nottingham.’

Hall understood. The drive-by shooting capital of Britain. And he also understood why these parents were taking this problem, which might not be a problem, so seriously. ‘I see.’ He sat down and looked round the table at them. ‘I’ll just give a quick recap, mainly for the sake of Amanda and Josh,’ he began.

‘No need,’ Josh said. ‘We know why you’re here. Mand has been receiving texts and emails which scare her.’ He looked over at his mother and, reaching out, covered her hand with his. ‘Don’t worry, Ma. She hasn’t been meeting paedophiles behind the bike sheds. No one has touched her. They mostly suggest that she has done something wrong that the person on the other end knows about. That they will tell if she tells, that sort of thing. Usual sort of thing.’ The last statement was on the edge of being a question, and it was directed at Hall, who nodded.

‘I was scared,’ the girl said. ‘I had to tell Josh, he always knows when something is wrong anyway, so there was no point in hiding it from him.’

‘How long have these messages been arriving?’ Hall asked.

The twins looked at each other and pursed their lips, thinking. Amanda answered. ‘Since just after Christmas, I think,’ she said. ‘Yes, that would be about right. Still in the holidays, but after all the Christmassy bits, you know. Say around the fourth of January, that kind of time.’

‘Not that long, then,’ said Hall. ‘How many have you had? Ten? Fifteen?’

Josh gave a harsh laugh. ‘Make that ten or fifteen a day,’ he said. ‘And that’s on a quiet day. Sometimes it’s far more.’

His parents stared in horror. No wonder their children had become rather quiet. Yvonne looked ready to speak, but Hall held up his hand and she shut her mouth again.

‘Was it that many from the start?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘At first it was just the odd one or two. In fact, I thought it was a friend messing about. Because it was the school holidays, you know? I had had a new phone for Christmas and I thought it was because of that.’

‘So it was a new number,’ Hall said thoughtfully.

‘Of course not,’ Josh said, with the laugh that teenagers reserve to reward a cute old fogey
who knows nothing. ‘She kept the number. Can you imagine the chaos if she had to change her number?’ He snorted. ‘It would take, like, weeks to let everyone know.’

‘I’m sorry to hear you say that,’ Hall said. ‘Because that’s exactly what I want you to do. I want you to change your number. Get this one suspended temporarily so that whoever this person is knows you are not getting the texts. Then, get a new one,’ he glanced across at the parents. Pete nodded. ‘Don’t let anyone have the new number, except your parents and Josh. Then, if you get more texts, let me know.’ He didn’t say as much, but his plan, as far as it was formulated, was to find out where the information was coming from. Did the texter have some way of finding out telephone numbers other than from friends and general calling circles? This would be the way to find out.