The Maggie Murders (17 page)

‘How may I help you officer?’
drawled Sullivan in public school accented English, sprawling on the sofa and
gesturing Spilsbury towards the chair.

‘Fallen on hard times?’ enquired
Spilsbury, trying to keep his voice even and preferring to keep himself
upright.

‘I’d offer you a coffee, but
we’re out. Beer?’ answered Sullivan ignoring the question and finding to his
evident delight a still full tin of Carlsberg under the sofa.

‘Seen your wife lately?’

‘Should I have done? Anyway,
she’ll be my ex as soon as my solicitor can pull his finger out.’

‘Hoping to get the house back?’

‘Just hoping to get what’s owed
me.’

‘So why did you marry her, if you
don’t mind me asking?’

‘Feel free; we all make mistakes.
It seemed the right thing to do at the time. Believe it or not, I was quite
attracted to her. She had a certain innocence which appealed to me. And believe
you me, I wasn’t getting any of that without going down the aisle with her
first.  Fucking Catholics… ’ he added with no apparent irony.

‘Rather an extreme solution.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I may not look
it, but in a few years I’ll be pushing forty. I can’t be single forever, and I
wouldn’t want people thinking I was a bender!’ he laughed at his own joke, ‘whilst
taking girls like Tina along to dinner parties would get me disapproving, if
envious looks methinks!’

Spilsbury could not believe how
smug Sullivan looked. Upstairs he could hear Tina drawing a bath.

‘Though even with Katie I got one
or two funny looks as she always looked younger than her years; dressed in the
right way she could pass for 16 – not that I could often persuade her to dress
that way if you get my drift…’

‘How did she take your decision
to leave her?’

He smiled.

‘She finally showed some spirit.
If she’d been a bit more like that in the bedroom I might have missed her a bit
more.’

‘Has she threatened you or made
contact lately?’

‘Never. We only communicate
nowadays through solicitors, a very expensive way to communicate.’

‘And Constance Baker?’

‘Connie?’ he sipped at his beer
meditatively, ‘not since I left Exmouth. Bit long in the tooth for me now.’

‘What about the affair?’

‘It was her idea. Catherine after
getting pregnant wasn’t interested in sex and Connie was offering it up on a
platter.’

‘She doesn’t look like your usual
type.’

‘You’d be surprised what Connie
would get up to in the bedroom, Inspector. You might think my tastes are a
little esoteric, yet what she might have lacked in girlish looks she more than
made up for in imagination. When she slipped on her gym slip she certainly got
my dander up!’

Spilsbury’s look must have
convinced Sullivan he was making no converts.

‘Look Inspector, Connie and I had
both found ourselves with partners who couldn’t meet our needs and so for the
sake of our marriages we met our mutual extra-marital needs elsewhere.’

Spilsbury gave a quizzical look.

‘Even St Augustine said
prostitutes were a necessary evil. They were the cess pits which the city had
to put up with in order to function. Connie and I just adapted that philosophy
by taking lovers.’

It took a few seconds for
Spilsbury to process Sullivan’s answer. Though not a conventionally religious
man, he had a strong moral sense and in another century might easily have been
swayed by the West Country’s Methodist traditions. Thirty years in the force
had given him a plentiful experience of liars and cheats, but at least he had a
sense that these people knew they were villains; the complacent man in front of
him, who in all likelihood was screwing the child who had answered the door,
seemed to lack even a basic sense of right and wrong.

‘Her husband had been crippled in
The Falklands and your wife was pregnant with your child! Did you have no
scruples about what you were doing?’

‘As I said, neither of us was
getting much sex at the time. Would it have been better for me to abandon
Catherine at the time? Should Connie have been another victim of that war by
having her sexuality neutered?’

The pleased look which Sullivan
gave Spilsbury convinced the detective that the man believed his own twisted
logic.

 ‘And the young girl upstairs?’

‘Tina,’ he smiled, ‘she’s lovely.
And she’s sixteen before you ask – perfectly legal.’

His tone had become more
defensive as Spilsbury had narrowed the distance between them. Sullivan
swivelled his legs from the sofa to the floor and sat facing his interrogator.
Spilsbury in turn lowered himself down into the chair, it gave far much more
than it should have done, even under his not inconsiderable eighteen stone. He
rose to his feet, not caring to test it any further; at least now he had the
height advantage over his opponent.

‘You like them young don’t you?’

The permanent sneer on Sullivan’s
well sculptured face didn’t waver.

‘Yes, if you must know. There’s
something rather delicious about being their first.’

‘You can square that with your
teaching, can you?’

‘It’s why I teach primary, ‘he
shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly, ‘and I’m not a paedophile if that’s what
you’re thinking. I like them adolescent and not pre-pubescent. That’s why I
chose to avoid secondary teaching – too much potential jailbait in that line of
work. With the juniors there’s no such temptation. I do like them with a few
hairs on their fannies you know!’

Spilsbury’s meaty fist smashed
into Sullivan’s nose sending a satisfactory amount of blood arcing through the
room. Having never committed a crime in his life until today, Spilsbury had now
committed two in a few hours.

‘I’ll make sure you’re finished
for that!’ yowled Sullivan, holding his broken nose in one hand and using a
cushion to try and staunch the flow of blood with the other.

‘I’m finished already, ‘announced
Spilsbury preparing to leave, ‘I’m retiring next year.’

 ‘I’ll get you, you bastard!’
swore Sullivan struggling to stand up.

Pushing him back down onto the
sofa Spilsbury walked to the door.

‘Unless you want me following
this investigation up with your new employers, or getting the local boys to 
take an interest in what you’re getting up to in here, not to mention Social
Services, I’d just remember how you smacked your face on the low beam over
there.’

Spilsbury walked out into the
sunlight.

Jane had decided to walk up
Albion Hill to Catherine Sullivan’s house. The steep hill led from the new
shopping precinct at the bottom to Exmouth Hospital at the top. The police
station which had been partially reopened for the investigation was just off
the bottom of the hill and so the walk to the top took her less than ten
minutes. She could have found an easier route, but having eaten one too many
takeaways that week she decided scaling the hill was probably appropriate
penance for last night’s pizza.

Taking a breather at the top she
looked back over the town. A pale blue gasometer stood in the immediate
foreground to her left, whilst further down her gaze fell on the heart of
Exmouth beating gently in the morning sunlight. There was the newly built
Magnolia Centre with the Strand Gardens and their war memorial beyond it and
then the new railway station on her right.

The whole scene was enhanced by
the beauty of the seascape. The blueness of the estuary tinged the town’s
borders with golden sand. It ran from the docks at one end, before continuing
past the faded splendour of the sprawling Imperial Hotel and then past the
church of Holy Trinity, it then turned past the Manor Gardens and Pavilion to
the Beacon, as it edged past the hotels and flats high up on the old cliff
line, continued on past the Maer and sand dunes, until it finally reached the
high red cliffs of Orcombe Point which brought an end to the long miles of
strand which it lapped.

From the crest of the hill she
turned left towards the Withycombe end of the town. Terraced houses flanked
either side of Marple Hill as she walked down in the direction of the sinister
sounding Phear Park and the town’s only secondary school, Exmouth Community
College. When she’d been first posted here the local secondaries had all been
bog standard comprehensives; however they’d now been rebranded. Not that she
thought it would make much of a difference to the students they crammed in.
With over two and a half thousand students from both the town and its outlying
villages, this school was even bigger than the one they sent Jen and Leo to in
Exeter, and four times as big as the girls’ grammar school she’d attended in
Newton Abbot. Sprawled across two vast campuses, it was more the size of school
you’d associate with Britain’s bigger cities and not one you’d expect to find
in a small seaside town.

Phear Park had nothing more
fearful in it than a miniature golf course and a couple of shelters dotted
between its trees and pathways where small groups of students were either
smoking or canoodling. Jane wondered why she’d used such an old fashioned word
as canoodling to describe the scene she could see in the distance of a young
teenage girl being pressed up against a tree by a boy who seemed to have been
given considerable help in his romantic endeavours by the tightly rolled up
skirt the girl was wearing. She had a feeling it was in the hope that her own
daughter wasn’t getting up to the same extra-curricular activities at her
school in Exeter…

She’d been fortunate on Monday
that she’d been present for a family breakfast and had been able to stop Jen
going to school in a black bra under her white school shirt – though neither
daughter nor husband had seemed to understand why she was making such a fuss.
It was only later she found out that the bra Jen had taken had been one of
hers. She tried to get her mind back on the case and forget what she had been
getting up to at her daughter’s age in the so-called ‘Summer of Love’.  A time
when anything had seemed possible and the future seemed infinite, yet in
retrospect it had been one of her last free summers before Jen was born.

Catherine Sullivan’s house lay on
the other side of the park towards the bottom of the hill, a dark brick
terraced house, which was located in a cul de sac on the left. New double
glazed PVC windows had replaced the original single glazed ones and the
satellite dish affixed to the front of the house was one of an increasing crop
sprouting up all over Britain. Jane was just glad Tim had little time for TV
and that Jen and Leo had seemed content with the wonders of video rental.

No-one answered Jane’s knock and
so she placed her card through the letterbox and walked back to the station. At
least she felt the walk had earned her a glass of Chardonnay that evening. She
could accept the idea that she was now a size 12, yet the idea that she might creep
up to a 14 had made her decide to take as much exercise as she could when the
opportunity presented itself. Jen might laugh at her if she ever got up early
enough to catch her Mum in leotard and leggings, working out in front of her
Green Goddess exercise video some mornings, but her daughter still had youth on
her side, if not the attendant good taste in clothes and wisdom which maturity
sometimes brought with it. She’d rather take exercise when the chance presented
itself, than follow the faddish crash diets her friends were always failing to
complete.

****

At the Crofton Club the sun shone
palely on the outdoor courts. One or two people had braved the waters of the
inadequately heated swimming pool; however most of the members were indoors in
the club room. The less than clement weather provided a perfect excuse for a
few sundowners, even if the sun hadn’t crossed the yardarm yet. The sepia
photographs on the nicotine stained walls served as a reminder for the club’s
more senior members of the days when the weather in former colonial outposts
might be more relied on to hit the higher bars on the thermometer.

Jez Carberry still had one client
booked for 6pm, but other than that he was free to lie on one of the loungers
on the terrace, his cricket sweater proof against the chill and anticipate
tonight’s liaison. He felt he’d literally grown since their meeting and now it
seemed that anything was possible. Even marriage. Though he might be jumping
the gun a bit there. Even so given how frequent their meetings had become and
the endless gifts and presents she showered on him, he felt sure this was not
an impossible obstacle.

In fact his whole future had been
shaped by her. Before they’d met he assumed after this year he would go on to
take a Master’s and put off real life for even longer, yet now he felt no need
to delay adult life. He now had plans to set up his own software company and
given that the banks were ever more willing to venture capital he knew that his
business plan would be sure to receive a healthy injection of capital and set
him on the path to being the big shot entrepreneur entitled to wed such a
woman.

The world was changing and he was
determined to be at the vanguard of the technological revolution sweeping
Britain. He could just about remember being shown the pictures of the Moon
Landing when he was a child and he was sure they were in colour, as his father
had always ensured the Carberrys were at the cutting edge when it came to
gadgetry. In his teens the first home computer games had arrived; he could
still remember the envious looks on his friends’ faces when they’d come around
to play ‘Pong’ on the big wooden TV in their lounge. Compared to what was to
come, the game was rubbish, being an electronic form of table tennis with the
most basic graphics imaginable and yet in the mid-70s it had been the only game
on the market and had made him the most popular boy in his class.

As a teenager he’d moved onto the
next generation of computer gaming when his parents had bought him the far
superior Atari console which had turned their TV into the near equivalent of
the machines he and Steve filled with their pocket money down at the front.
They’d also been among the first families to own a video recorder – he could
still recall his frustration when their Betamax player had lost out in the
format wars to the VHS ones.  It had been one of the few times at school that
he hadn’t had the most desirable stuff.

It was on his sixteenth birthday
that his life had changed – his father had managed to acquire one of the BBC
Home computers for him. Given their school only owned four of the machines,
this was a coup which returned to him his undisputed bragging rights. Initially
he’d only used it for playing games, but in a moment of boredom he’d started to
explore what else it could offer him and this had led to his first attempts at
writing his own computer programs.

His early attempts at learning
BASIC were almost as embarrassing for him now as his early adventures in love.
Having found he possessed a talent though, he had mastered far more complex
machine codes with a far greater confidence and alacrity than his early
attempts at cracking the coded signals employed by girls.

In moments of self-doubt he had
sometimes wondered whether his more intuitive understandings of computers had
been because he was less good with people, although he had never conformed to
the stereotype of the speccy geek. He’d always been popular, had friends and
enjoyed the company of girls. There were just things about computers which made
more sense for him; they conformed to a logical and more understandable pattern
of life.

He was now hoping to apply logic
to try and make some sense of all the emotions which had surfaced in his life
with the intensity of a drowning man coming up for air. Logically, he was
having an affair with a married woman – that could no longer be ignored. He
didn’t have any ethical qualms about this – he may have been baptised an
Anglican, but religion had been tolerated by the boys at his school as just
another annoying aspect of school life. He’d happily sing Christmas Carols
after a few pints; even so he no more believed in a supreme deity than he
believed in Santa Claus. Speculating about the affair rationally, he knew he
should be content with it, yet logic didn’t seem to explain why something was
getting under his skin about the whole business.

Women like her seemed to want the
company of powerful men. Admittedly much of his research into what women wanted
was based on programmes like ‘Dallas’ and ‘Howards Way’, yet they had to be
based on a truth didn’t they? Therefore he needed to have more going for him
than the position of part time tennis coach and full time stud if she was to
leave her husband for him. Jez liked to imagine her husband as some older, dull
and passionless banker who spent his days checking his balance sheets and
hoarding his assets. She was clearly married to some old fool who couldn’t
satisfy her.  He felt that she needed a man like him, a man with vision and
creativity who would one day provide her with the champagne lifestyle that she
was currently providing him with.

Fortunes were being made so fast
these days, that Jez’s dream of being a millionaire by the time he was thirty
didn’t strike him as absurd. Computers were just going to get more and more
powerful and the games that could be played on them were already several
generations away from his adolescent attempts at controlling one paddle on a
crudely pixelated screen, as he tried to return a ball to Player 2. Nowadays,
gamers could already play everything and anything in colour, from platform
games like ‘Donkey Kong’ to more strategic games like ‘Elite.’ If you hit on
the idea for a good game, you could make a fortune and Jez had a very good idea
indeed.

****

Having failed to find Catherine
Sullivan the previous day, Jane made sure Colonel Redfern would be available
for her meeting at the Royal Marines’ base in Lympstone. This time she would
have to drive, as the Commando Training Centre was a good few miles away from
Exmouth and whilst the Marines might be expected to yomp such distances, Jane’s
new found exercise regime did not extend to such extremes. The base lay behind
barbed wire fences and guard posts on the outskirts of a pretty village
clinging to the banks of the Exe. She found the security at the main gate
rather more intimidating than on her last visit, as armed marines carefully
checked her credentials before letting her through, but then she reminded
herself that they’d just had another IRA scare up at the camp and so they had a
very good reason to be on a higher state of alert than usual.

She gazed on the impressive
assault course which her son had been so in awe of when they’d gone there for
an open day a few years ago.  The very name ‘Death Slide’ had made the ten year
old Leo rethink his plans to be a pilot and for a while all he could talk about
was joining the Marines – he’d been very specific in his ambitions.  If friends
and family had naively quizzed him about army life, he had very sombrely
explained how the Royal Marines were not part of the Army and were affiliated
to the Royal Navy. Even when Leo had found out that marines were expected to
run 30 miles in full kit over the difficult terrain of Dartmoor in under 8
hours, he hadn’t been put off. If it hadn’t been for his rapidly developing
interest in music and his new aim of becoming a rock guitarist, he would
probably still be getting up for a two mile run every morning in preparation
for winning the coveted  beret.

A platoon of young recruits
scrambled over cargo nets as a green bereted NCO barked orders at them. She
turned round as Colonel Redfern emerged from an administration building by the
car park. They’d met briefly once before when she’d been investigating an
incident in which a local youth had claimed to have been glassed by one of the
marines in a pub fight.

The Royal Victoria had become
notorious for local youths trying to bait the new squaddies on Friday nights. 
Close to Exmouth’s largest discotheque it attracted trouble like wasps to a
picnic. As far as she could see, it was no more than too much testosterone and
lager being squeezed into too small a pub. The elite reputation and close
cropped hair of marines on a weekend pass from the camp made them a tempting
target for whichever local hooligans fancied mixing trouble with their beer.
The fact that the locals knew the marines weren’t meant to respond to their
taunts made for a perfect scenario for whichever local wide boy fancied a
chance of impressing his mates by goading the troops.