The Maggie Murders (11 page)

He tried not to look too closely
at the crime scene photos, as they were making his stomach turn and he’d
already had enough problems in that area today.  He took refuge in the bacon
sandwich Jane had deposited on his desk. He was grateful for the unexpected
thoughtfulness of the gesture and was glad he had been able to swing it with
Dent that she was seconded to the investigation. Though he half wondered if the
newly promoted Deputy Chief Constable had really been paying much attention to
what he was asking for, when Dent had swung by the incident room on one of his
self-styled ‘touching base’ visits. The DCC had seemed far more interested in
what he could tell the press than the nitty-gritty of their inquiry.

Forcing his mind back to the
forensics report he reflected that if Baker had been an ordinary man it would
have been bad enough, but killing a disabled man? This was as bad as killing
kiddies or interfering with little girls in his book. The man had already died
once, why on earth make him go through it all over again?

His mind flipped back to what
Jane had been saying about the other murder. ‘Other’ being a fairly apposite
word to describe murders in Exmouth – it may not have been a sleepy town;
however it was certainly fairly tired when it came to homicide. Like most parts
of the UK it had a thriving drugs trade, mainly the importation of cannabis as
far as he could work out, yet much of the second hand violence which attended
it seemed to be missing. Two potentially related murders in five years would be
like The St Valentine’s Day Massacre in this part of the world.

Could someone be knocking off war
heroes? Both men had served as sergeants – one in the army and one in the marines,
but in completely different wars some forty years apart! Yet both had died in
fires, which the report in front of him confirmed had both been started
deliberately. He supposed there could be some sort of political angle to this.
Perhaps it was some bizarre form of anti-war protest? Yet if people were
against killing, surely they weren’t going to start burning to death helpless
victims?

Jez Carberry woke up still
smiling at his good fortune. He wasn’t even surprised to see that she had left
already. She was like that, it was one of her many charms. Part of him sensed
that there was more to her than just her ravishing beauty and passionate
sensuality, yet most of him just wanted to enjoy the amazing way she made him
feel alive and needed. The fact that they mainly met in hotels had alerted him
to the probability she had good reasons for not taking him home, but he was not
going to question too deeply her motives when the last year had been the
happiest of his life. As his father had once told him, when he dared to
question why they were still holidaying in South Africa when the rest of the
world seemed to be boycotting the place ‘The sun shines on those who help
themselves’.

He realised as he lay back on the
luxurious sheets of the king sized bed that his journey from sex starved
adolescent to becoming the lover of an older and more experienced woman was
like something from ‘The Graduate’, though without the cheesy soundtrack. Yet
after years of exaggerating the breadth and depth of his sex life to his
friends in The Wheatsheaf, Jez for once had been playing down this relationship
to them.

After years of trying and
plentiful near misses with girls, he felt he had now cracked it.

There had been that embarrassing
afternoon after his A’ Levels when he’d tried to force himself on to Katy
Bennett’s younger sister Liddy… Well maybe ‘force’ was too strong a verb. It
had been a stifling Sunday and his hangover and hormone levels had both been
raging. He probably would have tried it on with Mrs Bennett if he’d found her
home alone! As it transpired both Liddy’s parents had driven out to Ottery that
day to visit friends and Katy had gone round to a girl friend’s.

Again he thought that was an odd
expression – if you were a bloke you never went round to a boy friend’s –
unless of course you were a bender…

Sure, Liddy was a bit younger
than him, though he was pretty sure she was in Year 11 and she’d certainly
seemed in to him when they’d got off the previous night. Part of his brain felt
that they might have gone a lot further on the beach if some of Katy’s friends
hadn’t started taking the piss out of them. The hormones which powered his bike
trip over to the Bennetts’ house certainly argued that it was worth a chance
and when he discovered that a rather hung-over looking Liddy was by herself he
felt the gods were with him.

Yet in the broad light of day,
Liddy seemed different – if he’d been more attuned to matters feminine he might
have realised she wasn’t wearing the make-up which had added a good few years
to her last night. She was also a lot coyer, it took him quite a bit of
cavilling to get through the front porch of their 30s semi and into the
off-white lounge of the house. He’d had to point out that the absence of her
parents’ Volvo gave the lie to her claim they were in and it had taken several
glasses of cider before she’d even begin to cede as much territory to him as he
had advanced on last night.

They were fooling around on the
sofa, with a good half of a bottle of cooking sherry he’d purloined from the
kitchen emptied when he began to think Liddy’s resistance was at an end. Her
‘Frankie Says’ T-shirt was now draped over the magazine rack and Tears for
Fears on the stereo were doing their best to help him sow his seeds of love. It
was just Liddy’s denim cut offs and a black bra whose support she hardly seemed
to need which were preventing him from making further encroachments on last
night.

He was peeling off his own
T-shirt when his eye was drawn to the photos above the wood effect gas fire. An
even younger Liddy in school uniform looking down at him suddenly caused his
ardour to abate.  The difference of a year can be a big divide in teenage
relationships and that of several years becomes the type of abyss which no-one
would blink at in later life.

Disappearing to the downstairs
toilet on a pretext, he splashed water on his face and resolved to make his
excuses. On his return he was disconcerted to discover that Liddy had not only
drained what was left of the sherry, but had also removed virtually all
remaining obstacles for him. Her pair of white cotton knickers was more a flag
of surrender than a last redoubt.

A flickering flame of desire
rekindled his lust as she drunkenly embraced him, the sherry sweetening Liddy’s
eager if inexperienced kisses.  Yet just as he made his final advance, the
sound of her parents’ car turning onto the gravel drive panicked him into a
most ungallant exit. Leaving Liddy to hurriedly gather her clothes from all
points of the parquet floor, he made a dash for the kitchen door and the back
gate he’d last used when playing hide and seek with Katy back in the 70s.

He never had found out if Liddy
had managed to blag her way out of the situation he left her in; for the next
week he anxiously screened all incoming calls to his parents’ apartment in the
fear that he would face repercussions for that afternoon and even sacrificed a
Friday at the Wheatsheaf in case he ran into Katy or her mates.  Recovering his
racer from the house at dead of night, he’d been sure there was a twitch of
curtain from Katy’s room and yet apart from a distinct sense she was avoiding
him he had managed the remaining weeks between then and leaving for Norwich
with little sense of reciprocity for his actions that day.

Yet UEA had not provided him with
the hedonistic bacchanalian lifestyle he’d begun to associate with the frat
houses presented in the American films Steve had been renting. Freshers’ Week
had, for a moment, seemed to hold out the possibility of recreating the teenage
shenanigans of ‘Animal House’, when he met Barbara from London. A vivacious
Drama student with flame red hair and a nasal piercing, she had captivated him
with her exuberant personality, cracking smile and tight tops which emphasised
her breasts. Breasts which he’d spilt a pint over in the student bar, only to
see her shriek with laughter and remove her top leaving her in just a bra and
leggings with no hint of embarrassment.

For a week they’d been the best
of friends and Barbara’s flirtatious touchy feely personality had made him
expect it was only a matter of time before they became lovers and yet when she
called him over in the library that Wednesday afternoon it was to announce to
him (and whoever else might be listening – Barbara was only ever able to
perform stage whispers) that she had decided to become a lesbian.  She had
chosen a good venue for this announcement, as the basilisk stares of the
librarians soon put an end to his incredulous protestations.

He’d looked on dumbly as she
walked out of the library into the arms of a leggy blonde he’d also had the
hots for in the opening week. The finale to her performance was planting a
long, lingering kiss on the other girl’s gorgeous red lips. Jez hadn’t known
whether to feel jealous or envious. He’d entertained a quixotic hope she might
reconsider; however her T-shirts now told a different story. It seemed a woman
needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle.

The fallout was made doubly
awkward by the fact that he had already signed up for the Drama Soc in
Freshers’ week and owing more to his boyish good looks than any innate talent
for acting had been cast opposite Barbara as her younger lover in Rattigan’s
‘Cause Celebre’. She’d been far too much of a Feminist to let him pull out of
the production and he’d been forced to endure at close quarters her very public
displays of affection with her girlfriend, who just happened to be the ASM on
their production. The negative notices in the student paper had spoken of
‘seeing more chemistry in a Classics lecture than in Rattigan’s doomed lovers’.
His only consolation had been that he had at least been correctly cast as the
adulterous, young chauffeur in terms of his age and looks, whereas Barbara was
completely miscast as the older woman.

His romantic journey moved from
the ridiculous to the sublime during his second year when he fell in love with
Sunita from Birmingham. This beautiful Fresher had just begun her Computer
Science degree and for Jez she was the most exotic girl he had ever met; her
Indian ancestry made her both alluring and sophisticated in his eyes. For once
a friendship with a girl seemed to blossom in a natural rather than forced way.
They’d got talking over cigarettes one break time and for once Jez’s immediate
agenda didn’t end with a picture of the two of them in bed together.

With no non-white students at his
school, Jez was a long way from being immersed in the multi-cultural society
which was said to be sweeping Britain. In Exmouth even the local curry house
had white waiting staff, whereas Sunita seemed to have stepped out of Channel
4’s production of ‘The Far Pavilions’.  It sent Jez on a headlong quest to
immerse himself in Indian culture – this was before he discovered that the almond
eyed, henna haired Sunita had more of a taste for Hollywood than Bollywood and
preferred Indie to Bhangra.  He was even more mortified to find that her
musical tastes were far more avant-garde than his. He’d given her a mixer tape
of songs by the likes of: Paul Young, The Human League, Wham!, Spandau Ballet,
and Culture Club hoping to impress her, only to discover her playlists were
more likely to consist of: The Smiths, The Cure, U2, The Jam and Kate Bush.

They had kissed just the once –
tenderly, but passionately and to his surprise Sunita had initiated it. Sunita
had suggested that they went to see The Sherbet Lemons play the Corn Exchange
in Cambridge and on the way back she’d reached over to him as the others slept
and parted his lips with her tongue. The trace of sweetness left by the Menthol
cigarettes she always smoked remained with him to this day. He still recalled
it as the most romantic moment of his life, being kissed by Sunita on the
return coach to Norwich.

It had been a goodbye kiss, not
that he knew it at the time. Sunita’s family was never going to allow her to
have a serious relationship with someone like him. He’d already known she had
been promised to another; however he had harboured some idea that the two of
them might run off into the sunset together. Yet Sunita had been too pragmatic
for that, given that her family had supported her and had tolerated some of her
‘Western vices’ in the expectation that she would marry the man they’d chosen
for her.  She had liked the man they chosen for her, had no strong objection to
marrying him and would not dishonour her family by losing her virginity before
her wedding. She didn’t love Jez enough to allow something she annoyingly
referred to as ‘a youthful passion’ to direct her life.

It took him a long time to get
over his feelings for Sunita.

His Mrs Robinson moment came on
his gap year after university. Having no interest in his father’s plans for him
to make a career in The City, he’d decided to work for a year in order that he
could afford to take a Masters the following year – Dad’s generous funding had
dried up once Jez had declared he saw no future for himself in futures.  An
accomplished junior tennis player, there had been some talk when he was eleven
that he might even have the potential to go pro, he’d kept it up at uni and had
done enough to convince his former tennis club to employ him as a coach.

Exmouth’s prestigious Crofton
Club allowed the moneyed elite the opportunity to play on its exclusive outdoor
courts, as well as to sip Camparis and Cinzanos at its members’ only bar. It
also possessed a heated, outdoor pool, bowling green and an immaculate croquet
lawn. Some of its junior members had gone on to play at County level and one
girl had even gained a wild card for Wimbledon, going on to stir the nation’s
press to bang on the patriotic drum as she knocked a Czechoslovakian player out
in the first round, before crashing out in straight sets to a French girl in
the second. Still, in the fallow years for British tennis following Virginia Wade’s
centenary triumph in 1977 this was counted as a success.

Jez found he was popular with
many of the women he coached. Most of them were clearly just looking to improve
their game, yet more than a couple made it quite clear to him that they found
their athletic, young coach a tempting proposition. In The Wheatsheaf on a
Friday, Jez would often exaggerate the hints and suggestions he had been given
that week, as well as the attractiveness of his clients. Most were nowhere near
as attractive as Steffi Graf; however one or two had certainly put Jez off his
serve on more than one occasion. Yet when the proposition came it was done with
an alacrity which took him by surprise.

After a session, in which he’d
picked up no signals whatsoever from his newest and most stunningly attractive
client, a tall, lithe women who seemed to require no adjustments to her
excellent technique and perfect poise, she suddenly asked him if he knew where
the Radcliffe Hotel was. He began giving her directions when she stopped him with
a sudden kiss and instructed him to be there by 8.00pm.

He’d spent the rest of the
afternoon wondering if it was a wind up. He kept expecting Jeremy Beadle to
jump out of the shrubbery with a camera crew in tow and embarrass him on live
TV. Quite what his last two clients made of his shaky and distracted coaching
sessions was shown by their decision not to book him again. He showered twice
before departing for the short walk from his seafront apartment block to The
Radcliffe. The evening was cool and the red, green and yellow light bulbs
strung between the lamp posts on the front were only needed for decorative
purposes, as he reached the short flight of steps leading to its portico.

Wondering whether they might be
meeting in the bar, or even going for a meal, he had even taken £50 from his
savings as a contingency, as he didn’t want anything going wrong tonight; the
packet of condoms he’d purchased before going to university nestled alongside
the notes in the front pocket of his stone washed jeans. The girl behind the
small reception desk looked as if she might just have finished her O’ Levels
and he was relieved to feel unthreatened by her. She simply gave him directions
to Room Six. Given the amount of time and effort spent by the hotel on making
its corridors and landings reflect Exmouth’s bygone Regency glories, it was a
pity (if perhaps unsurprising) that Jez noticed very little of his surroundings
on the short walk to her room.