Maxwell's Retirement (14 page)

Maxwell came in behind the boy and shooed him off upstairs, via the kitchen for a drink and a biscuit. He had had a faintly acrimonious exchange at the front door with Spencer’s mother, who had a zero tolerance to smoking. Since Maxwell had a zero tolerance to women who ranted first and asked questions later, Jacquie would have a lot of bridge-building to do. ‘How’s Spencer?’ Maxwell asked as he and the boy raided the cupboard.

‘Hnh,’ Nolan said, all the derision in the world in that one sound. ‘We’re not really friends just now, Dads. He’s a bit childish sometimes.’

Maxwell gave him a kiss, not just for being a great kid, if sometimes rather middle-aged, but because he had got his dad off the hook with both Spencer’s and his own mother. ‘Kit Kat?’ He waved it tantalisingly.

‘Yes, please!’

‘Only if you can promise me you won’t get it on your bedclothes, clothes, curtains or Metternich.’

‘’S OK. The Count just licks it off.’

Maxwell lifted the child down from the work surface where he had been sitting like a small, skinny, bruised Buddha. The cat and he had a private life of which Maxwell knew nothing; he felt faintly jealous. ‘Off you go then, mate. I’ll give you a shout when Mrs B is going. You can come down and say bye-bye, we’ll have rubbish for supper and then a game or twelve.’

‘Uh huh. ’Sinya.’ And the little chip off the old block was off up the stairs like a rat up a pipe.

‘Abyssinia, toots,’ Maxwell muttered and watched as his son’s heels disappeared round the corner into his bedroom. There were distant sounds of a large black and white cat putting up with a hug from a small and already chocolaty boy. Maxwell wasn’t sure he believed in God. He wasn’t even sure he believed in atheists. But there had to be someone nice up there somewhere, if such small things could make an old curmudgeonly teacher so happy.

Back in the sitting room, Mrs B was making up for the stubbed-out fag with a new, fresh one. Maxwell sat opposite her. ‘Where were we?’ he asked. ‘Sorry for the interruption.’

‘Oh, no, he’s a lovely little chap,’ she said.
‘He reminds me of our Shawn a bit, when he was little.’

‘Shawn? I don’t think I—’

‘No, you wouldn’t know him. He lives abroad.’

‘How lovely. Do you visit?’

‘Nah. He’s on the Costa. Too hot for me.’

Maxwell suddenly saw the world through her eyes. Family everywhere but here. In prison, on the run, on the Costa. No quiet evenings chewing the fat for her; just checking the text on the television to make sure no one she knew had been caught or escaped or, he tidied up the thought, escaped and been caught. He forced a smile. ‘Don’t worry about Colin, Mrs B,’ he said. ‘He’s probably just gone to a friend or something. He’ll turn up.’

‘He ain’t got no friends. He’s only got his mum and me.’

‘Might he have gone to, well, Shawn, for example?’

‘They don’t get on.’ The statement was not for discussion.

‘Well, even so, I’m sure he’ll turn up.’

She finally got to the point. ‘Can you ask Mrs Maxwell to find out if there’s any news? They don’t tell us, in case he’s in touch.’

‘I don’t know whether—’

‘I know she shouldn’t tell you anything, but I know she does. Everybody knows that you can
get anything out of anybody. Tha’s well known.’

He needed her to feel better. He needed her to be gone in enough time for him to open a window and air the house before Jacquie got home. He needed to think. Computers seemed to be coming at him from all sides. But before she went, she could do him a favour. ‘Mrs B? Could you just do me a favour? I need to send an attachment later in an email. Could you just remind me how to do it?’

She struggled to her feet from the embrace of Maxwell’s favourite chair. ‘Have you got your laptop?’

‘No, I came away from school a bit suddenly today.’

‘I heard. We’ll have to use your PC, then.’

He nodded and ushered her up the stairs to the study, where she was soon sitting at the desk, waiting for Maxwell’s aged computer to wake up.

‘It’s slow, innit?’ she remarked.

‘It is a bit thoughtful,’ he said. He found himself becoming rather defensive on its behalf. ‘It will be ready hourtarily.’ Finally, it proved him right and the wallpaper appeared, a baby photo of Nolan. Desktop icons reluctantly populated the screen and it was as ready as it would ever be.

‘Do you want to bring your emails up?’ Mrs B asked, bringing all sorts of images into Maxwell’s head.

‘No, you do it,’ he said. ‘It’s just click on that
there.’ He pointed to the icon and she politely decided not to comment. The pane came up on the screen, followed by the familiar page.

‘You’ve got messages,’ she said, trying not to read anything.

‘I’ll read those later,’ he said. ‘Can you just show me how to attach something?’

‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘Look, you click “Create” and the box comes up. See.’ And sure enough, there it was. ‘You put the address in, see, there, for who you want it to go to – see, it says “To”.’ It was Maxwell’s turn to be polite now; this much, he could do. ‘Then, when you’ve written the email, and you want to attach something, you click on this paper clip, here.’ She suited the action to the words. ‘Then, you can choose from the documents, look, or pictures, whatever you’ve got there, and click open and you’ve done it.’

‘That looks easy.’ And he was right – it did
look
very easy.

‘Well, Mr M, it
is
easy. Do you want to try it while I’m still here?’

‘No, Mrs B. I’m sure I will manage. If not, Nole can probably help me.’

Mrs B gave a throaty chuckle and smacked him on the shoulder. ‘He could as well. He’s bright, that lad.’

‘I’ll just tell him you’re going,’ said Maxwell. ‘Nole!’ he raised his voice. ‘Mrs B is off now, darling.’

Mrs B gave vent to a mental tchah! Calling the boy ‘darling’ – he’d grow into a right girl’s blouse if they weren’t careful. Telly and some nice videos, that’s what he needed. The boy came whizzing out of his bedroom in full Spiderman costume and gave the old woman a hug.

‘Night, night, Mrs B.’ He dashed back into his room and, by listening carefully, the adults could just hear a very private rendition of a boy, armed only with his superhuman powers, saving the world.

They went down the stairs in silence, pausing only to pick up her coat, bag, fags and umbrella, without which she felt inadequately dressed. At the bottom, she turned to him.

‘You will talk to Jacquie … I mean, Mrs Maxwell, won’t you?’ She lifted her face to him and he saw the vulnerability, the naked trust in her eyes. He needed to get her back on an even keel, back to her machine-gun delivery, her impartial hatred of the world in general. He wanted to turn the world right-side up.

So he agreed. ‘Yes, I’ll talk to her. But I can’t promise anything.’

‘Thank you, Mr M. I knew you’d help me if you could.’

‘I can’t help you on this, Mrs B, but are you all right to get home? Do you want me to call a taxi or anything?’

‘No, I’ll call our Jean’s eldest from the top
of the road.’ She patted her pocket to check if her mobile was in place. ‘He’ll pick me up. Bye, then, and thanks.’ She beetled off up Columbine, her cares lightened slightly by sharing them with the mad old bugger. She studiously avoided the lurking shade of Mrs Troubridge. In Mrs B’s opinion, she ought to keep her old nose out of other people’s business, old besom. As she got to the end of the road, she looked back. The old trout was knocking on the door, now. Nosy old so-and-so.

Maxwell had just toiled up the two flights to Nolan’s bedroom and was giving him the
all-clear
when he heard the soft tap at the door. Only Mrs Troubridge knocked rather than rang. It reminded him of Edgar Allen Poe and the raven, someone gently rapping, rapping at his chamber door. Unfortunately he had found, over the years, that it was never the lovely Lenore, but always the ghastly, grim and ancient Troubridge, wandering from the nightly shore. He decided to ignore it.

He and Nolan decided to plump for pizza. It was quick. It was round. It claimed to be food and, followed by ice cream, did them both very well. Bath time was slightly cursory, but Nolan was still a little fractious about washing, with his sore chin, and didn’t really mind its foreshortening. When he was tucked up in nice
loose-around-the-chin pyjamas, Maxwell craved his indulgence.

‘I’ve got to do some work tonight, old mate,’ he said. ‘Ma is running late, trouble down in Dodge City.’ Nolan chortled at his perfect Gary Cooper. ‘I’ll just be in the study. You can watch a DVD. Guns, knives, clubs, all the same to me.’ Maxwell had morphed into Lee Marvin out of
Cat Ballou
. ‘All right with you?’

Nolan offered a silent high five and went over to his shelf to choose a DVD. He finally settled for a cartoon. Maxwell started it for him and left him curled up in bed, sucking the fingers of one hand and absent-mindedly twirling the fingers of the other in Metternich’s coat. The cat responded by laying an admonitory paw on his leg, as if to say, ‘Watch it. Too many liberties, my lad, and it’s not just the chin that will have stitches.’ But for now, all was peaceful and Maxwell retired to the study.

The email inbox page was still up, obscured by floating bubbles. He would happily have sat and watched them for hours, but he was against the clock, really. He should have sent this email ages ago. He opened a new document and typed a short and succinct résumé of the text: when he got it, what had happened just before and just after, what it said. He managed to avoid mentioning things he was not supposed to know. He saved it as text.doc and then thought that Henry Hall might ignore it if it was called something so
innocuous. He renamed it importanttext.doc and saved it somewhere. He was quite good at starting tasks on the computer; it was finishing them that gave him trouble. He opened a new message in his email. He even remembered where he had written down Henry’s email address. He copied it meticulously into the relevant place. Things were going well so far. He chose a nice, middle-of-
the-road
subject for the email. ‘Text received today by Peter Maxwell.’ He wrote a friendly but short note for Hall and then, tentatively, clicked on the paper clip. Calooh, callay, he chortled in his joy. He couldn’t have been happier if he had indeed slain the Jabberwock. There was the self-same page that had popped up so obediently for Mrs B. Now, where had he saved that document?

A mere half an hour later, he had tracked it down. He clicked ‘open’ and, to his amazement, the title of the document appeared in the right place on his email. He was delighted and horrified at himself for being so pleased. This was
technology
, for goodness’ sake! He clicked ‘send’ and his blood, sweat and tears disappeared, hopefully to wing its unintercepted, crashed or otherwise filtered way to Henry Hall’s Inbox.

He turned his attention to his received emails. One was from Helen Maitland and was marked ‘urgent’. He opened it and scanned it quickly. She had thoughtfully forwarded an email from Legs – news of a team-building exercise, dated
some weeks ago. Why on earth …? Oh, because it was taking place the next day, which was a development day, no kids, just disgruntled staff. Paintballing? Maxwell was about to claim a bone in his leg when he reconsidered. Guns. Diamond. Ryan. Oh, joy – Pansy! This could be just what the doctor ordered.

The next one was from eBay, telling him his watched item was finishing shortly. He had another five minutes by this time to decide whether he really wanted another forage cap – his modelling one was getting a little painty round the edges and, anyway, it was only a matter of time before Nolan would need one. But he’d let it pass, this time. The bid was already up to eight times his salary.

The third one made his eyes open wide, then wider. Without taking his eyes from the screen, he groped for the phone and pressed speed dial.

‘Leighford Police. How may I help you?’

Things were not going well at Leighford Police Station. Jacquie had walked into the foyer to be met with a scene from Dante’s Inferno. People were yelling, people were crying. There was a lot of posturing, strutting, arm throwing and general alpha male behaviour. She waited for a moment in the doorway and then resorted to response 7.1.1.a in the latest manual on Crowd Control.

‘Oy!’ A simple enough sound, but at enough decibels it seemed to reach into the hind brain of most humans and shut them up, if only for a short while. Everyone turned to face her and she felt like telling them to line up in an orderly fashion, lines of policemen, Julie’s family, Leah’s family, all separately and not talking until the bell went. Instead, she used technique 7.1.1.b, which was to lower her voice so that they all had to keep quiet as they strained to hear.

‘I am Detective Sergeant Carpenter,’ she said.
‘I am working on a case I think may be connected with the disappearance of these two girls. I think it would be best for everyone if we all calmed down and then I can assign rooms to the families and we can go from there.’

There were mutters of agreement, although not whole-hearted, and Jacquie turned to the desk sergeant. ‘Do we have anyone available at the moment? I know DCI Hall is out.’

‘DS Carter is available,’ the desk sergeant said, with barely disguised contempt in his voice. Jacquie remembered the kipper and forgave the man. ‘Would you like me to call him down?’

‘If you would,’ Jacquie said. ‘Are the interview rooms free?’

Before the desk man could reply, a man pushed forward and stood in front of Jacquie. ‘I am Gregory Melkins,’ he said, as if that explained everything.

‘Are you?’ Jacquie asked mildly. She turned back to the desk again.

‘I don’t think I want my wife to be shut up in an interview room. She is in a very fragile state and extremely worried about her daughter.’

‘I’m sure she is, sir,’ said Jacquie. ‘But I think that you have misunderstood the interview room situation. We’re not on the set of
Waking the Dead
. Trevor Eve is not going to come in and shout at anyone. There is no two-way mirror. Our interview rooms are light, clean and well
furnished. We need to speak to you in private. I don’t expect you want your family business conducted in the foyer of a police station, do you?’

The man looked at her as if she was something on his shoe, but his wife, hanging on his arm and with her face swollen with tears, curtailed his behaviour into something approaching acceptable. ‘What I want is that you should speak to my wife about her daughter at our home. We have younger children who shouldn’t be left.’

Jacquie didn’t miss the use of the terms ‘hers’ and ‘ours’. This was Julie’s stepfather, then. ‘If you would like to wait at home for one of our officers to come and interview your wife, Mr Melkins, then by all means that is what we will do. Let me see, today is Thursday. I think we should be able to free someone up by …’ She turned to the man behind the desk and raised an eyebrow. He slowly turned and consulted a calendar, then bent to his computer and tapped a few keys. She smiled a tiny smile. Steve was a good lad and could understand subliminal messages with the best.

‘Tuesday,’ he said.

‘That’s outrageous,’ the man exploded. ‘Tuesday? Tuesday? With a girl missing.’

‘Sorry, sir, my mistake,’ the officer said. ‘That’s Tuesday week.’

‘And that’s two girls missing.’ Another man had joined the circus. ‘My Leah is missing as well
as your kid. I won’t get pushed around by the likes of you, you can bet on that.’ He turned to Jacquie. ‘You can interview me when you like, but I don’t know if I will be much help. Leah lives with her mum and her sister. I live … somewhere else.’

Melkins snorted and turned away. Jacquie spoke to Leah’s father quietly. ‘I understand your younger daughter reported her sister missing. Where is their mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She’s not … well, she’s not very reliable.’

‘A tart, that’s what my Julie says,’ the weeping woman burst out. ‘My Julie wouldn’t have gone off without your daughter encouraging her.’

Leah’s father turned on her and the whole bear garden started to reassert its dominance. Jacquie opened the doors to the interview rooms and pushed the crowd through as though they were one animal. Somehow, she managed to sort the families into different rooms and, when this was done, she realised that, in fact, the crowd had not been so big after all; they were just incredibly noisy and awkward.

Julie’s mother and her stepfather sat side by side but not communicating. There was no sign of her father. Jacquie watched for a moment through the window in the door. The mother was an attractive woman trying perhaps a little too hard. She had not had an easy life in her first marriage
and was now living in the lap of luxury. She didn’t intend to let that go; her body was testament to hours in the gym, her face was blank and smooth and full of bacterial toxins. Her lips were just the right side of trout. He could have been used in a pictorial dictionary to define ‘prosperous’. Or ‘pompous’. Jacquie heard Maxwell in her head remind her of other ‘P’ words. ‘Prat’ was the one that came immediately to mind. ‘Pillock’, that was a good one.

She moved to look through the other window. Leah’s father and her stepmother sat close together, foreheads touching. A carrycot with a small baby in it was at their feet. Occasionally, a chubby arm waved in the air and they automatically turned their heads and one of them would reach in to touch the child, as if for reassurance. Of Leah’s mother, there was no sign. She assumed the younger sister was with the neighbour who had helped her to raise the alarm. She turned from the window with a sigh. Families, eh?

As she turned she found herself pressed into the blue serge front of Steve from the front desk. After some muttered apologies and scuffling, they managed to get her hair unentangled from his buttons and dignity was almost restored. He stepped back.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

She doubted it. She was thinking,
What an oaf
to come creeping up behind a person like that
. ‘I don’t know. I was thinking how odd that they have kicked up a stink so quickly when two girls have been missing for a matter of a few hours and in broad daylight.’

‘That’s more or less it,’ he agreed. ‘Except that I am also thinking, where are the other parents in this? The father of one and the mother of the other. And – and you can probably help me on this one, Sergeant – why are we taking it so seriously, also at this early stage? Hmm?’

‘Steve, we’ll have to get you out of that uniform and upstairs. You’ve got me.’

‘Well?’

‘I said you’ve got me. Not that I’m going to tell you. I’m sure a bright guy like you can sort it out for yourself. Now, then, I think we’ll wait until DCI Hall gets back before we tackle the Melkins family. I have a feeling he is the kind of bloke who takes no notice of women as a species.’

The desk sergeant looked through the window and whistled under his breath. ‘He was taking notice when he picked that one,’ he said.

‘Trophy,’ Jacquie said. ‘Not a brain in her head and it shows. I expect he ditched the wife he had had all through the hard times. I have him pegged, Steve. He took on Julie because his new wife wanted her. I expect he fought the father for her through every court he could so easily afford. Now, as I understand it, they have two new kids
and Julie is probably surplus to requirements. But now her father doesn’t want her either and they’re stuck with her.’

The sergeant looked at her with awe in his eyes. ‘Blimey,’ he said. He looked in through the window again but couldn’t see any of that. ‘How did you work all that out just by looking at them?’

She realised that she had dropped a possible clanger. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive. Maxwell would have also added to her poetic maunderings that none by sabre or by shot, fell half as flat as Walter Scott. Her deception skills certainly would take more practice. ‘It’s just a sixth sense, Steve. It comes from being a detective.’ Before she let out any other random pieces of unofficial information, she fled into the other interview room.

The couple looked up as they heard the door click.

‘Mr and Mrs Booker?’

The man stood up. ‘Yes. I’m Mark Booker. This is my wife, Meriel. She’s … er … she’s not Leah’s mother. That’s our baby, there. Apple.’

Ah, a Coldplay fan, Jacquie mused. And, at a top age of twenty-two, not likely to be Leah’s mother. You didn’t have to have specially honed detective skills to tell that. But she just said, ‘Hello,’ and nodded at the girl, who stayed sitting.
Jacquie gestured her husband back into his seat and took one opposite.

‘Firstly, let me reassure you that your daughter has not been missing for long enough to spark off a full police inquiry under normal circumstances. I appreciate that her behaviour is out of character and that normally she would be at home to look after her little sister.’

‘She never misses,’ Mark Booker burst in. ‘She has always looked after Anneliese. Since I left, really.’

Jacquie took in the age of the baby and did a small calculation. ‘So that would be about two years ago?’ she asked.

‘More than that. I didn’t leave my first wife for Meriel.’ He cast her a loving glance and put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Leah’s mother, Pam, had been …’ He swallowed and dipped his head. This was obviously still raw for him. His wife patted his leg and he carried on. ‘She had been playing the field for some time before I left. I had to go while I still could. I had even thought of suicide. I’m not even sure that Anneliese is mine, although I always treat her the same. I begged Leah to come with me, but she wouldn’t. Pam said she would fight me in the courts for Anneliese, and Leah wouldn’t come without her.’

Jacquie could see a horrible and infinitely sad pattern emerging. ‘She didn’t want Leah?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. She loves her, I’m sure. It’s
just that, well, having a daughter that age stops her from lying about hers. She was only twenty-three when Leah was born. That doesn’t leave her much wiggle room when her men friends find out about Leah. Also, of course, Leah is what she thinks of as competition.’

Meriel Booker snorted and spoke for the first time. ‘I don’t think Leah would go for the rough stuff that Pam brings home, do you, hon?’ she said, addressing the remark to her husband. Then, to Jacquie, ‘She’s a lovely girl, Sergeant, and I would love to have her live with us, I really would. But she won’t hear of it and her mother has more or less poisoned her against us. Mark pays Pam far more than he needs to, but the kids don’t see much of it, I’m thinking. Clubbing and trying to take fifteen years off your age doesn’t come cheap.’

Julie had told Jacquie all about Leah’s rich dad on the drive home and this was another side to the story.

‘I’m not complaining,’ Booker added, as though reading Jacquie’s mind. ‘I can afford it. But I wish …’ He buried his face in his hands.

‘Has Leah spoken to you lately?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Perhaps about some problems she has been having with nasty texts on her phone? Possibly emails?’

Meriel spoke for her husband, who had just shaken his head without looking up. ‘She
hasn’t. But she should’ve. Mark owns a software company. He has just started a sideline in mobile Internet devices. It’s going well. He could have helped her.’

‘
Can
help her,’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Can help her, when she turns up.’

‘Ssshh,’ his wife stroked his back as though he were a baby. ‘Sshh, listen, you’re upsetting Apple.’ And the baby had indeed started a thin wail which, even after the almost five years since Nolan had made that same noise, went straight to the nerve in the pit of Jacquie’s stomach that prepared her for fighting off a sabre-toothed tiger. It was a noise from prehistory, pre-speech and it had a hotline to the hindbrain.

‘Pick her up and soothe her,’ Jacquie said, making for the door. ‘I’ll get someone in to take a statement, just contact details really, in the circumstances, and then you can take Apple home.’

They smiled their thanks and bent over the carrycot.

Jacquie paused outside the door of the other interview room and peeped in. The two were now in the throes of a vicious argument, he was leaning over her and she could almost see the light glinting off his bared teeth. She was apparently giving as good as she got, but it was hard to tell from the outside, because her smooth face gave nothing away and her words were
indistinct. Jacquie gave a shudder and, bottling out, made for the stairs. From her office, she rang the desk and asked for someone to go and take the statement from the Bookers; it could be a civilian. She almost asked for Mr Peters, the stenographer, because she could certainly do with him here now, but didn’t, in the cause of not looking like an idiot. She asked that Henry Hall should be told where the Melkins were and that they were waiting for him. She felt like a worm, but a relieved worm, which had managed to offload its responsibilities and wasn’t feeling that bad about it, really. After all, she had had Daisy to contend with.

She was quietly getting on with some more paperwork, getting ready to link the cases, and was almost finished when the door opened and Henry Hall’s bland face looked in.

‘Oh, hello, guv,’ she said. ‘How did the interview go?’ He’d been quick, she gave him that.

‘Oh, well, you know, quite well. They’re great kids. How was yours?’

Wires crossed, she thought, or were they? Henry could be very devious, but with the light on those damned glasses, how could anyone tell? ‘Not so great, but the girl is coming in tomorrow to chat without the mother.’

‘Yvonne’s computer should be with the boffins tomorrow.’ He rubbed his hands together in a simulacrum of enthusiasm. ‘Well, see you
tomorrow. Sorry, Jacquie,’ and with an unusual turn of speed, he was gone.

Jacquie was hampered by being behind a desk and also the fact that she was sitting in a chair which fell in half every time she got up from it. By the time she had made it to the stairs, all that could be seen of Henry Hall was a clean pair of heels.