Maxwell’s Ride (23 page)

‘Why?’

‘Just do it!’ he heard himself shouting, then calmer, ‘Park around the corner, in Celandine, all right? Come in the back way, over the fence at the back. I’ll be waiting.’ And he rang off.

‘Jacquie Carpenter?’ Sylvia checked, trying to control her breathing, fighting off the panic welling like a floodtide inside her.

‘Yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘She’s good. She’ll know what to do.’

‘Oh. Max,’ and she got up and ran to him, throwing her arms round his neck. ‘Don’t you know what to do?’

‘I’ve seen it a thousand times, Sylv,’ he told her. ‘Up there, on the big screen. Jimmy Stewart, Michael Caine, Mel Gibson, they’ve all been through it. But that’s a script, it’s a story. It’s got its own built-in safety net. This? This is real, Sylv. It’s happening. And I daren’t look down. I daren’t look down because I know there’s no safety net down there, just a black hole where they’ve buried Tiffany.’ And he felt her body shake with sobs all over again.

‘She’s asleep now.’ Sylvia looked pale in the lamplight. ‘I gave her something. We won’t see her before morning.’

‘What time is it?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Four thirty,’ Jacquie said, still holding the empty coffee cup. ‘How are you feeling, Sylvia?’

The nurse shrugged, pushing her hair away from her face. Even now, with all this, she resented Jacquie Carpenter. The way she held her head, and filled her jeans and most of all the way she sat too close to Peter Maxwell.

‘I’m okay,’ she said.

‘Try it again, Max,’ Jacquie suggested. ‘Play the tape.’

‘It’s no good, Jacquie,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know the voice.’

‘South Yorkshire, I’d say,’ the detective was thinking out loud. ‘I’m no expert, but I’d say South Yorkshire. We can’t trace the call, unless it’s on a digital exchange. He’d have dialled 141 of course. If he calls again … I can get a team …’

‘He said he would,’ Maxwell reminded her.

She nodded, not wanting to say what she said next. ‘I know, Max. But,’ and she reached out and held his hand, ‘they don’t always do what they say. They might intend to, but something goes wrong and they panic.’

Her voice was steady, low, kind, but matter-of-fact.

‘Who are they, for Christ’s sake?’ Sylvia blurted. This silly bitch was just sitting there, making eyes at the man she loved, holding his hand, talking bollocks.

Jacquie sat up again, turning to the other woman. ‘He hasn’t mentioned money,’ she said, ‘so we must assume this is a pervert, a weirdo.’ She saw Sylvia’s lip quiver, the glint of new tears in her eyes. ‘Max, did Tiffany mention anybody else apart from this Mark Irwin? A boy? A man?’

Maxwell had been racking his brains on that one. He couldn’t help. ‘What about a girlfriend? Sylvia, she’d been staying with you. Did she talk about anybody? At Leighford High? Elsewhere?’

Sylvia shook her head, the one that was spinning, still trying to take in the enormity of what had happened, to put the impossible into some sort of framework she could understand.

‘She’s at school in London,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Roxburgh Hall. She’s certainly had no calls from there as far as I know. Sylv?’

‘No, no, I don’t think so.’

‘We can check incomings,’ Jacquie said.

‘No,’ Maxwell’s command was curt and clear. ‘No police, Jacquie. No team, no electronic gadgets. I’m not playing with Tiffany’s life.’

She looked from one to the other of them, frightened, guilty, desperate people looking for a ray of hope in a darkened world where the lights had suddenly gone out. Sylvia who had stupidly agreed to let the girl go out in the first place. And Max, who had stupidly passed the buck before that. ‘Max,’ she said softly, ‘I am what I am. We can put a trace on the next call that he makes, analyse the tape you’ve got, get a fix on that accent, identify background noise in aircraft, train, clock, something.’

‘No,’ he told her again. For a moment, she was a little girl again and her teacher had told her off.

‘Then you’ve lost her,’ Jacquie said. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

Maxwell didn’t want to leave his phone, but Jacquie persuaded him he had to. Business as usual. Take Lucy to school, occupy her time in the normal way – Sylvia’s too. Lucy would plough through double German as though the bastards had won the war and Sylvia would talk acne to Year 9 and show the Year 10 girls how to roll a condom onto a cucumber – just one of the little life skills necessary for the twenty-first century. Maxwell held an Assembly, bawled out a child who had dared to drop some litter by his feet; and talked the Year 12 historians through Louis XVI’s foreign policy as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Al half past ten, he was in his office, pacing the floor, his mind whirling with the events of the night. His telephone rang and Thingee was there for him. ‘A call for you, Mr Maxwell.’

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Maxwell?’ It was South Yorkshire Man, smooth, sophisticated, slimy. ‘How are you feeling today?’

‘Who is this?’ he asked.

‘Oh, come now, Mr Maxwell,’ the voice chuckled. ‘Let’s let that be my little secret, shall we? I promised I’d be in touch.’

‘Where’s Tiffany?’

‘Safe,’ the voice said, ‘for the present.’

Maxwell sat down at his desk. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I want you out of my life, Mr Maxwell,’ the telephone told him. ‘Out of the Larry Warner business. I said as much to Chris Logan before I killed him.’

‘I want to talk to Tiffany.’

‘You’re not listening to me, Mr Maxwell,’ the voice sounded calm, assured. ‘You’ll never talk to Tiffany again unless we can come to an arrangement.’

‘An arrangement?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Meaning what?’

‘I’ve heard about you, Mr Maxwell. You’ve got a reputation for snooping. You’re a latter-day Don Quixote, aren’t you? Tilting at other people’s windmills. Well, take care, Mr Maxwell. Remember what happened to the old knight? He got his lance caught up in the windmill’s sails, didn’t he? Fetched himself a nasty one. And, if you want to take the analogy further, I’ve got Sancho Panza.’

‘I wouldn’t think that analogy works too well,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Wasn’t he a fat little squire?’

‘And not at all like Tiffany, quite. No, she’s rather your Nordic type, isn’t she? Not at all your greasy Dago. Tell me – I haven’t looked yet – is she a natural blonde?’

‘You bastard …’ Maxwell was on his feet, his knuckles white around the phone.

‘Uh-huh-uh, Mr Maxwell,’ the Head of Sixth Form could practically see the bastard wagging a warning finger. ‘You upset me and I could make life very miserable for you. What, for instance, are you going to tell Tiffany’s mother about all this? Sorry your daughter’s dead, only I was rude to her kidnapper. That would never do, would it?’

‘How much do you want?’

There was a chilling chuckle at the other end of the phone. ‘I’ve told you my terms, Mr Maxwell. Please don’t insult me further by mentioning money. You’ve already cast doubt on my parentage as it is.’ And with a click, the line went dead.

He couldn’t concentrate on his marking – those fumbling efforts of Year 10 to explain exactly how the Big Three had got it wrong at Versailles. His Number Two in the Sixth Form, known to generations as The Fridge because of her bulk and her preference for white, recognized the symptoms and left well alone. When Mad Max looked preoccupied, with a glint in his eye and an iron ridge in his jaw, you stepped aside, walked away.

‘Max,’ Sylvia popped her head around the door as the bell that tolls the knell of parting day rang and the Leighford herds made their way slowly o’er the car park. ‘Any news?’

He waved her to a seat and closed the door. ‘Another call,’ he said. ‘He wants me off the Larry Warner thing.’

‘What about Tiffany?’

‘He’s got her. Knows about Sandie, knows she’s blonde. That’s enough for me. It’s genuine all right.’

‘Max, you’ve got to get back to Jacquie.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Sylv, I can’t take the chance.’

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Sit down and have some of this.’

‘What is it?’ He hadn’t seen her slip something out of her pocket.

‘Brandy.’

He held his fingers in the sign of the cross, as he usually did when he sighted Deirdre Lessing.

‘It won’t kill you,’ she said. ‘It’ll calm you down.’

‘Where’s Lucy?’ He took a reluctant swig while she clattered about with his kettle and coffee mugs.

‘Drama Club. I checked.’ She caught his look. ‘It’s all right, Max. She’s with the others. David’s there.’

‘Oh, good,’ he snarled. Somehow, the information didn’t reassure him. He didn’t trust his own shadow at the moment.

‘Would it help,’ she asked him, ‘if we talked it through, twist by twist?’

He looked at his watch. ‘Mrs B. will be here in ten minutes, sprinkling more fag ash than she hoovers up. Have we got time?’

‘Of course,’ Sylvia Matthews should have been a public schoolboy. In the shipwreck that was Maxwell’s life at the moment, she was indispensable. ‘Here,’ she passed him a mug, designed to cheer. ‘That’ll take away the horrid taste of the brandy.’ It comforted him that he was still able to smile.

He leaned back on his soft, black, plastic chair, the one that came with the Sixth Form territory, provided by County. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Larry Warner, shot dead at an indeterminable distance – let’s say three hundred yards – by a high-powered hunting rifle, to whit, a Ruger KM 77 Vt Mark II. The question is, why?’

‘A professional hit?’ Sylvia was thinking aloud. ‘Is there such a thing? It all sounds a bit far-fetched.’

‘Some murders are,’ Maxwell nodded, his face wreathed in the coffee steam.

‘But it’s fiction, isn’t it? Hit men aren’t real, surely, not in Britain?’

‘Neil Hamlyn?’ Maxwell reminded her.

‘But Jacquie said he couldn’t have done it. He was in custody when Chris Logan was killed.’

‘And she also told us he was killed with the same gun. Right. But Chris was an afterthought. The Yorkshire tyke said so – or hinted at it. Chris, bless him, got too close. Found out something he shouldn’t. The Yorkshireman killed him as a result.’

‘And where did Chris go?’

‘To see Anthony LeStrange, who denies seeing him. And who has an alibi for the time Chris was murdered.’

Sylvia shook her head, cradling her coffee mug. ‘I’m not a very clever person, Max,’ she said, ‘Give me a sprained ankle and period pains, I’m fine. But this … everywhere you turn, there’s a brick wall.’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘Brick walls. That’s what DCI Hall said.’

‘When?’

‘Yesterday. I had lunch with him. He was buying.’

‘You didn’t tell me that.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘What with one thing and another, it slipped my mind. He gave me a rather curious option brick walls or loose ends. Then he started talking about the White Knights.’

‘Who?’

‘Quite. They’re a racist group, a little to the right of the old National Front, I believe. Genghis Khan is their patron saint.’

‘What’s the connection?’

‘Neil Hamlyn is a member.’

Sylvia was lost. ‘You mean Warner was killed for racial motives? What was he? Jewish?’

Maxwell shrugged. ‘But Hamlyn didn’t do it. We’ve established that. Warner was a homosexual and our friends on the Right don’t usually go a bundle on them either. Remember the London bombings? Bangladeshis in Brick Lane, Afro-Caribbeans in Brixton, gays in Soho. There’s a pattern of a kind, warped as it is.’

‘Where does that take us?’

‘It takes us,’ Maxwell was sitting up now, the germ of an idea in his head, ‘to a brick wall that I believe has a chink in it. O sweet and lovely wall. Show my thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne. Sylv, I need to be out of here for a day, perhaps two.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ll tell you when I get there. If anybody asks, I’ve got flu. I’m not telling a soul about the real reason. Not Diamond, not his idiot deputies, not that sadist who does the supply cover. Sylv,’ he picked her up and held her shoulders, ‘Sylv, are you going to be all right with Lucy? At my place?’

‘Your place?’

He nodded. ‘They took Tiffany from outside yours …’

‘I don’t need reminding, Max,’ she said.

‘Here are the keys,’ he passed them to her. ‘For what it’s worth, I had a new lock fitted. How do you buy a moveable telephone machine?’

The door crashed open and Mrs B. stood there, half a mile of fag ash dribbling down her chin. ‘Bleedin’ kids. You’d think they’d get tired of chuckin’ their cheese and tomato sandwiches down the bleedin’ staircase, wouldn’t you? Course, I blame the government, you know. It’s that bleedin’ blind bloke. Might as well let his dog do the job.’

17

‘Lucy, darling, how goes it? God, how do you young things cope with these?’ Maxwell was talking into Sylvia’s mobile, shaking it, rattling it. No point in buying one of the damned things when one’s School Nurse has one.

‘I’m fine, Uncle Maxie, but I wish you were here.’

The kid sounded like an ancient seaside postcard with two fat ladies and a tiny bloke, but Maxwell wanted to hug her. How many little girls can one man lose in a lifetime? ‘I won’t be long, sweetheart, I promise. Put Sylvia on, will you?’

‘Love you, Uncle Maxie.’ And she was gone.

‘Love you, darling.’

‘Max,’ Sylvia was there. ‘You say the nicest things. Where are you?’

‘On a train, somewhere north of Guildford.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the Library for some answers. Sorry to be so cryptic, Sylv, but it’s better you don’t know. Has he called again, the Yorkshireman?’

‘No, but an Irishman has.’

What?’ There was a horrible crackling and an intermittence down his ear. ‘You’re breaking up, Sylv. What are you talking about?’

‘An Irishman, Max. Don’t ask me which part. North, I think. Ulster. Sounded like Ian Paisley. Max, I’m scared. I’m trying not to let Lucy know, but where is he? Where’s he calling from? Where are you? Oh, God, this is hopeless.’

‘Sylv? I can’t hear you. Did you say Irishman?’ Maxwell was shouting so that the whole carriage heard. ‘Get Jacquie. Nothing official. But you need protection. If the bastard rings again, give him this number. I need to talk to him myself. Sylv? Are you there?’

But Sylvia wasn’t there. She was stabbing out Jacquie Carpenter’s private number, the one Maxwell had scrawled on the cover of the phone book aeons ago. Before his world had turned upside down.