The Maggie Murders (10 page)

He leafed through the battered
copy of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ he’d taken to posing with. It was going to be
yet another book he was going to fail to finish reading, he might as well have
followed Steve’s advice and taken a copy of Kafka or Camus to Kim’s New Year’s
Eve party. Reading Orwell still made him look like a bit of a geek – it was too
sci-fi to impress girls with and was now beginning to sound well past its sell
by date. Clocks striking thirteen indeed, the author had clearly never heard of
the digital age.

Throwing it into the dunes, he
went in search of his friends. At least the pubs would be open in a couple more
hours…

Over in Brixington, former
Sergeant Calum Baker mechanically raised and lowered the dumb bells to
strengthen his remaining limbs. The optimistic spirit, with which he had tried
to meet his first post Falklands New Year, had been replaced by a grim
determination when meeting his second. He still hadn’t become used to his
disability; however he was not going to allow it to rule his life.

Catherine Sullivan wouldn’t have
been able to tell anyone if it was 1983, 1984 or 1999. The prescription
strength tranquilisers had made the last few weeks pass by in a comatose blur.
A dull pain she couldn’t shake meant even the vodka she washed them down with
couldn’t take away her sense of loss.  She reached an arm out from under her
duvet to locate her tumbler and hardly noticed the strength of the liquor
passing her cracked and dried lips.

In contrast, Gerald Mallowan’s
appreciative sips of the single malt his wife had given him for Christmas were
those of a connoisseur.  Leafing through the details of local properties, he
contentedly considered his next step up the property ladder. He’d become a
millionaire well before sixty at the rate he was going.  Smiling to himself he
drank a silent toast to Maggie.

In the Manor Gardens, Nigel Byrne
drained the last dregs of cider from the bottle, as he waited for Dave to pass
him the joint. Mandy was going to kill him for wasting his giro on dope, but at
least she had a roof over her head now that she’d moved back in with her mum.
Taking a toke on the proffered roll-up he considered that it hadn’t been his
choice to get her pregnant – he’d never wanted a sprog in the first place.

It was all Maggie’s fault anyway.
If it wasn’t for her, he’d still have a proper job and a flat. A few days here
and there, filling in at Cedar Cabs for Abel, was not exactly lucrative. Next
time he’d make sure he voted and he wasn’t going to be choosing her, even if
the only alternative was that Welsh pillock.

****

Jane and Derek sat holding hands
on the shingle. Sobers having explained as candidly as possible his reasons for
deciding to leave the force - for once he was unconcerned by the possible
damage to his bespoke trousers.  He wanted her to know his side, before gossip
and rumour (which would inevitably be circling) told her first. It had felt
good to unburden himself and to outline why he couldn’t go back to policing. He
had tried exile and now he needed to return and confront his demons.

 She’d listened patiently as he
adumbrated his love for Ronnie and how it had clashed with his beliefs and
those of his family.  She was a good copper, because she did listen and a
better friend because she knew when not to give counsel.  The gentle lapping of
the outgoing tide lulled against the shingle, providing a gentle counterpoint
to the rich Caribbean inflexion of his story. As she leant into the elegant man
beside her and felt him return her hug, she smiled wryly as she thought of
Tim’s reaction to this scene. His face would run the gamut of jealous anger to
shock and then hopefully sympathy as her future explanations laid bare Derek’s
suffering.

 Her own sorrow would have to be
put on hold, as she was still too upset by the shock of his departure from her
life to take it in. For now Derek needed the empathy that no-one else had given
him.

Sobers was grateful for Jane’s
intuitive understanding and for her ability to withhold questions she must have
wanted to ask. From his time working with her, he had rated her as one of the
best detectives he’d ever been fortunate enough to know. As he looked at the
horizon which the young Raleigh must once have gazed on, he decided it could
have been worse. He had never risen to the heroic heights of that renowned
explorer, but more pertinently he had never sunk so low either.

He watched as the waves danced
quickly up the beach on their inward sweep falling  just a little further back
from their previous reach, each time leaving just a little more of the beach
uncovered as they slowly retreated from the land.

Holding Jane’s warm hand, Sobers
counted his blessings. He had failed to solve a murder, been exposed as a
homosexual and resigned his job; Raleigh had fallen from favour, been locked up
in the Tower and then been decapitated.  At least he still had his head and a
chance for redemption.

Part 2

1987

Making a Killing

Britain was booming. Mrs Thatcher
could afford to call the next General Election a year earlier than she needed;
the current economic climate ensured a hat trick of victories was already in
the bag. The Labour Party might have chosen a more telegenic leader in Neil
Kinnock; however their attempts to gain the moderate centre ground of British
politics had not convinced the voters they were free of their militant
extremists.

Through privatisation the
Government had been enthusiastically selling off state assets: everything from
utility companies to council houses had found a price tag. Shares in the under
construction Channel Tunnel had also added to a sense of easy wealth being made
available to all who could afford it. Satellite dishes had sprung up on homes
all over the country, accompanied by CCTV cameras guarding commercial premises
– Orwell’s vision of a future society may have been a few years late in
arriving, yet the late eighties seemed to suggest his only mistake was
suggesting Big Brother was in charge, whereas Big Business seemed to be running
Britain in the Eighties.

Mrs Thatcher herself seemed
beyond satire. Attempts by the Spitting Image puppets to lampoon her as a mad
old battle-axe just seemed to reinforce her Teflon toughness. Having survived
an attempt by the IRA to murder her in the Brighton Bombing, she had retaliated
with a shoot to kill policy in Northern Ireland. When Ronald Reagan wished to
avenge the murder of American marines in West Berlin, she had allowed his
bombers to take off from British airbases in an attempt to assassinate the
Libyan renegade and IRA financier, Colonel Gadaffi.  At home, her most likely
rival for power in the party, Michael Heseltine, had come a cropper in the
Westland Helicopter scandal. The Iron Lady had become adamant.

She boasted a near impregnable
majority in the House from the last election and not even a rejuvenated Labour
Party looked like challenging it. All the opposition could realistically hope
for was to cut her majority in order to give them a fighting chance in five
years’ time. The ’87 Election was not about Maggie winning a third term, it was
about her ability to secure a fourth.

****

One emergency services’ vehicle
on the St Mary Mead’s development might not have raised eyebrows, but seven
most certainly did. The fire engines, panda cars and ambulance parked outside
the executive-style three bedroom houses on St Mary’s Avenue may have provided
an element of drama in the normally sedate lives of the neighbourhood, but they
didn’t bode well for property prices.

The new development on the
Brixington side of Exmouth captured the economic confidence which had propelled
Thatcher’s third successive election victory and which saw her gain her biggest
majority yet. The mock Georgian semi, with smoke still billowing out of the
patio doors at the back was in marked counterpoint to the previous night’s
sense of optimism and jubilation in the neighbourhood.

D.S. Jane Hawkins had been hoping
all morning that this was an accident, yet the fire-fighters soon confirmed her
fears. An accelerant had been used to start the fire and now she was likely to
be assisting in her second murder investigation.

‘Time to lose your virginity,
Sergeant?’

‘It’s not my first time, guv.’

‘I thought this was Snoozeville,
Tennessee,’ joked D.C.I. Brian Spilsbury.

‘We’ve had one before, just like
this.’

Spilsbury was no longer smiling,
impressed by the note of anxiety in the D.S’s voice.

‘A local butcher, killed in a
fire the night after the last election.’

‘Shit.’

Spilsbury hadn’t been expecting
much more on his posting to Exeter than a few domestics, or a couple of drug
busts. Just one, or two undemanding cases as he worked his way through to sixty
and early retirement.  A career in the Met and then in Essex had given him his
fill of violent crime. This morning’s call sounded like it could have been an
accident or domestic, one of those nasty, but easily tied up cases. It was only
when that attractive, but rather pushy D.S. had gained the Super’s permission
to go along with him that morning, that he had begun to get an inkling that
there might be more to this.

‘Check out what happened after
the election in ’79.’

‘Already have, guv. No deaths
suspicious or otherwise in Exmouth, or East Devon on that date. One old woman
died of natural causes in a nursing home in Sidmouth and another geriatric died
at home in Lympstone. There was no report of anything amiss about his death –
old age being the layman’s way of expressing it. I also checked both elections
in ’74 and the one in 1970; a total of five deaths, but none in a fire. Do you
want me to go back to the sixties?’

D.S. Hawkins certainly knew her
stuff, he reflected. He just hoped she wasn’t seeing connections for the sake
of it. It wouldn’t be the first time a keen copper had been desperate to reopen
an old case.

‘No, but get on to HOLMES and see
if any other forces have reported suspicious deaths by fire on the night of the
’79 election.’

****

D is for Death.

A word with Anglo-Saxon
origins and not foreign ones, which I find most apposite as the English are
very good at death. Kill a fellow countryman and it’s counted as murder, but
kill a black or a paddy and that’s Empire Building! We must have killed
millions this century alone in trying to hang on to the pink bits of the globe
and then we let even more die when we pulled out of those places. From Ireland
to India we left Death trailing in our wake.

I wonder how many Argentineans
the good sergeant would have killed if they hadn’t got him first? We certainly
gave their boys a bloody good pasting in the Falklands. Boys being the
operative word. They died in their hundreds at the hands of our men. Even our
young soldiers were far superior to theirs as we hail from a warrior race. They
were mainly conscripts, whilst we are very professional when it comes to death.
We’ve got death in our blood.

When Election Night came Death
was my gift to the cripple. He could not wait for death, so I kindly came for
him; as the poet might have put it. I became an angel of mercy for a man who
should have died in San Carlos Water. I was sorry that I had to wait so long to
take him, but Maggie calls the shots. In many ways he was lucky; she could have
waited until 1988 before calling it.

 It felt good to do it again.
Okay, not good, that’s a silly word to describe a killing, but thrilling and
exciting – the frisson from the first time had returned.

It was a relief to get the
waiting out of the way. When she called the election it felt like a release. A
part of me which had been in standby mode was reawakened. My victim had been
chosen well in advance and his death was endlessly refined in my head. Having just
a month until polling day to make the final adjustments, was like one long
dress rehearsal before the opening night. Everything suddenly felt more intense
again; it’s strange how arousing the thought of death can be. Well maybe it’s
not strange; opposites attract as they say.

I could have stopped. I’d got
away with murder. No-one cared any longer about that old poof I’d put down in
Littleham and that case would never be solved. By carrying out my second
visitation, I knew I was more than doubling the risk – connections would
inevitably be made and the old case reopened, but what’s life without a degree
of risk?

Besides I’d been getting
impatient. I was glad that Thatcher had not waited for another year before
calling it – like her I wanted to seize the opportunity to assert my power. The
country had changed; we were no longer crippled by the old ways of undue
deference and impotent politeness. The free for all of the free market rewarded
those who had the desire to make something of their lives.

This was the right time to
make a killing.

****

Gerald Mallowan found the
paperwork in front of him one of the most arousing things he had ever seen.  It
was even more exciting than his burgeoning shares portfolio, for this piece of
paper was his final step in acquiring the rights to develop the site of Exmouth
Docks. He loosened his waistband and breathed a contented sigh of relief. This
was the biggest slice of the cake he’d ever got. His previous projects had
centred on acquiring small pieces of land and developing them into blocks of
flats, or converting Victorian and Edwardian family homes into smaller units, but
the ambition of this latest venture exceeded all of his previous ones and would
propel him into the big league!

He chewed on an indigestion
tablet as he slurped his coffee. He was going to have to stop drinking quite so
much, although last night’s election victory had required that quite a few
celebratory toasts were drunk at the club! And anyway, he was never going to be
a part of the mineral water and salad brigade. The yuppies might like all that
Yank influence, but his was a generation that liked their business lunches
served with something proper to drink.

The spreadsheet on his home
computer made very happy reading. This project might be the one which enabled
him to retire as a millionaire. Thanks be to Maggie! The way she had encouraged
entrepreneurs had enabled him to change career path from that of a moderately
successful yacht broker to that of a highly successful property developer. With
the booming housing market he was raking it in hand over fist and might even
have enough to retire early, seeing as he was still only just in his early 50s
and well on his way to his first million.

Even his wife’s shops were making
a profit. At first he’d invested in them as a loss leader, what they failed to
make on the balance sheet he was sure to make up in the bedroom and yet the
shop he’d backed as no more than a bit of pin money for her had done so well
that it had been worth his while opening other branches. In fact most of the
money he’d put into the shops had come from a government start up loan. Britain
truly was open for business; he’d build the houses and she’d sell them all the
expensive tat to decorate them. It was a marriage made if not in heaven, then
certainly in a concession stand situated conveniently close to the celestial
gates.

His latest acquisition was surely
his Falklands moment. The redevelopment of the docks into an upmarket marina
would make him millions. As he and his partners had acquired the ailing
business for a song, coupled with the fact that the banks were lending money
like there was no tomorrow, they’d soon be able to replace the derelict
warehouses and empty silos with Executive style waterfront apartments and then
sell them on for six figure sums! Anyone who was anybody needed a second home
and whilst some of his former clients in the yacht brokerage business had
turned to overseas investments, he knew that the South-West ports were still
prime real estate for those on City salaries who fancied themselves as weekend
sailors.

****

In the hurriedly assembled
incident room, located in a wing of Exmouth Police station which had been taken
out of moth balls to cope with the demands of this high profile case, Spilsbury
turned to the preliminary findings on his desk.

The forensics reports made
grimmer reading than usual. Spilsbury had seen some nasty, vindictive stuff in
his time, but this killing bore the hallmark of the twisted psychos you read
about in American crime fiction rather than the casual brutality he’d witnessed
on the fringes of London. Pain in his experience was used to teach a lesson, or
send out a warning, not to screw with the mind of the victim. Well not when the
victims were men and certainly not when they were war heroes; especially when
they were disabled war heroes.

It was the findings of the
post-mortem which had nearly made Spilsbury bring up his Full English. The
victim had been set on fire; traces of an accelerant had been found both on his
face and body. The horrific third degree burns Sgt Baker had survived in the
Falklands had been out done by the ones he received in his own bed.

His body had been found on the
other side of the lounge door. The killer had thoughtfully propped his wheel
chair under the handle on the other side to prevent him opening it. The room in
which he died had been designed as a dining room, but had been converted into a
ground floor bedroom. Sgt Baker had managed to crawl as far as the lounge door,
pulling himself forward like a baby with his outsized arms, as he had lost both
his legs at Bluff Cove when one of HMS Fearless’ landing crafts had been sunk
by Argentinean Skyhawks.

Baker had taken, or been given a
sedative shortly before his death, though it would not have been strong enough to
have meant he could have slept through his grim fate.

Spilsbury tried to imagine his
last moments. The man must have thought he was reliving his worst nightmare:
waking to find his bed on fire, to feel his skin melting and to find he was
trapped with no way out. The D.C.I. had no experience of active service, but he
could still recall the horrific pictures released after the war of the fleet
auxiliaries Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram burning at anchor in Bluff Cove.

Another victim of that raid had
been Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston, whose badly burnt face had been
reconstructed by plastic surgeons. Pictures of Weston’s injuries had become the
iconic images of the conflict for those who had opposed it. Spilsbury had been
all for it to be fair. It had been one of the many things he liked about Maggie
– her sense of resolve and her determination to stand up to bullies like
General Galtieri. And to be fair, Bluff Cove had been one of the few disasters
in a fairly easy victory. The image of the Union Jack being raised victoriously
over Port Stanley was his preferred memory of the Falklands.