The Maggie Murders (2 page)

‘He’s in charge,’ D.S. Jane
Hawkins flashed back, indicating Sobers.

‘Right you are,’ replied the
constable – probably wisely saving his thoughts on the new D.I for the lads
back at the station.

‘Where do you think you’re
going?’

The fireman in charge had emerged
at the head of the dark, uncarpeted wooden staircase and was blocking the
senior detective’s way into the flat above the shop.

‘He’s with us,’ called back the
constable, ‘in charge, apparently!’

Sobers produced his warrant card
and had a feeling this was going to become a regular action in East Devon. The
fireman ceded to the card’s authority and let him pass up the stairs. The
staircase had escaped any substantial structural damage and was at least safe
to use.

The seat of the fire had been at
the foot of the stairs. The firemen had found signs that petrol had been poured
through the back door and set alight. It appeared that George Kellow had died
of smoke inhalation as he slept. Even if the elderly butcher had woken, it
would have been difficult to escape, as iron bars had been fixed to the front
and rear windows of the first floor flat and the fire had blocked the only
escape route down the stairs.

After a cursory examination
Sobers felt the need to clear his lungs of the smoke still cloying the air in
the flat and led his sergeant back outside. He was wondering what the next step
was going to be, when Hawkins informed him of the incident room they’d had set
up in the village hall. Mouthing a silent prayer for her intervention he let
her lead the way. Now all he had to figure out was whether this was a case of
arson in which the butcher had died inadvertently, or whether this really was
the first murder investigation he would be leading?

****

Kicking her shoes off at the end
of the day ranked as one of Jane’s main pleasures in life. Returning even the
most comfortable pair to the shoe rack in their hallway was a daily ritual
which signified her return to family life.

‘So what’s he like?’

‘Black! I always have it black!
You’ve gone and put milk in it!’ protested Jane as she curled up on the sofa
and wondered whether the Artex ceiling needed another coat of paint after all.

‘Sorry, dreadful day, I’m all
over the place, Leo’s got a cold and Jen’s been pestering me to buy her an LP.
Anyway what’s this City Whizz kid like?’

Tim Hawkins emerged from their
open plan kitchen to place a perfunctory kiss on his wife’s cheek and to hand
her a replacement coffee.

‘Which LP?’

‘Something by Duran Duran, she’s
still got that postal order left over from her birthday.’

‘You mean those good looking guys
adorning her bedroom wall?‘ Jane teased as Tim plonked himself down on the end
of the sofa.

‘If you mean those effeminate
looking mother’s boys without a decent tune among them, then yes I suppose I
do, ‘smiled Tim as he pulled off his marigolds and reached for the remote.

‘Hey, don’t you want to talk
about my day honey? And anyway I think a bit of make-up can make a man look
very attractive, ‘she flashed back.

‘Gene Simmons, maybe, but then
those guys can bang out a good tune.’

‘There’s more to music than Heavy
Metal.’

‘Don’t even go there! Now you’re
stepping on sacred ground!’

‘How’s Leo then?’

Jane could see that Tim was at
the limit of his teasing potential and knowing that heavy metal and single malt
whisky were potential domestic mine fields, she wisely centred their
conversation back on Leo. A name she’d been able to persuade Tim she’d chosen
because of their son’s birthday, rather than the influence of her secret crush
on Leo Sayer.

‘Still can’t work out if it’s a
genuine cold, or a way of avoiding rugby?’

‘Did you send him to school?’

‘Yes, but with a note excusing him
from Games.’

Jane shot her husband a quizzical
look, although she moderated it from the full interrogative stare which she
would deliver to a career criminal in an interview room, to one more suited to
the polite questioning of the rich and famous. She had to remember that Tim did
the lion’s share of the parenting duties and she had solemnly promised on more
than one occasion never to tread on his domestic toes.

‘So, how’s work? You seem to be
investing a lot of time in your appearance of late.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Curious.’

‘I’m not going to be running off
with Sobers any time soon, ‘she grinned, ‘anyway I think he’s too cool to run
anywhere.’

‘A slick, sophisticated
metropolitan type then?’ asked Tim as he idly flicked through the four channels
in a bid to find something he was interested in watching.

‘If I switch the object of my
lust from Paul Newman to Sidney Poitier, then you can start worrying.’

‘Well as long as I’m still
allowed my moment with Farah Fawcett when she pops round to borrow some sugar?’

‘That’s a deal, darling,’
answered Jane as the opening titles of Brookside filled the screen.

Littleham had once been a village
in its own right; however like the town’s other former satellites of Withycombe
and Brixington, it had been swallowed up by Exmouth’s urban expansion, as the
fading seaside resort reinvented itself as a dormitory town for Exeter. An
incident room had been set up in the village hall, which stood all alone in a
field just down the hill from the holiday camp sprawled out on the red cliffs
above. A coastal path would have led the more adventurous holiday maker from
the cliffs at one end of Exmouth, along past the caravan park and then onwards
to the resorts of Budleigh Salterton and Sidmouth. The only minor hazards for
the more intrepid tourists were the crumbling cliffs and occasional herd of
cows left to graze the fields.

A few pretty cottages stood
opposite the village hall, flanked by a short terrace of pre-War Council
houses. A newer development of bungalows for retired people had been built in
one of the adjacent fields, just below the ornamental archway signalling entry
to the caravan park. Buses, looking like something an NHS ambulance and a Royal
Mail van might have crossbred, carried these senior citizens through the village,
up to the Cross and then down to Exmouth for their weekly shop.

 What remained of the village
stood in a small dip between the hill leading up to the cliffs and the hill
which led onwards to Littleham Cross. The village’s commercial centre had
shrunk to one shop, one pub and a seasonal tea-room close by the Church; making
it even smaller than its near neighbour The Cross. Nelson’s wife was buried in
the local churchyard, but no-one ever seemed to make a big thing of it. If it
had been Britain’s most famous disabled war hero, or even his mistress, it
might have been seen worthy of some fuss. A small stream and narrow bridge
which might have been thought of as picturesque were in fact perceived by most
tourists as a potential hazard to their paintwork. They were more concerned
about whether their caravans could pass by safely, without scrapes or dents,
than taking time to stop and take a photo. The few businesses in the village
survived on scraps from the holiday camp’s high table – most of those who visited
lived in a self-catered, self-contained world and if they did venture out,
tended to spend their money at places further afield than the ones on their
doorstep.

Sobers was interrupted in his
musings by the arrival of his sergeant.

 ‘He made just £1.87 on his final
day and had under a tenner in the till. Woman at the bakery said he’d pop in
there if he ever needed change. Though she also said he hadn’t done that since
before Christmas. Found his accounts in one of those old ledgers in a tin box
under his bed. Looks like he’d been making a loss for the last decade. So much
for the benefits of joining the Common Market …’

Jane closed her notebook and
waited for her new boss to comment.

‘So money wasn’t an immediate
motive?’

‘He had just over two grand in
the bank - I’ve heard that people have been killed for less.’

‘That’s true,’ Sobers sighed and
rocked back in the old wooden chair he’d found in what appeared to be some type
of props cupboard for local productions at the back of the village hall they’d
been allocated for an incident room. It was at least more comfortable than the
dirty orange plastic chairs which had arrived with the battered desks and extra
telephone lines. As Sobers snagged one of his long fingers on a splinter in the
arm of the chair, he reflected on how these small, rural locations were a world
away from the busy and crowded London he had grown up in. And yet he had to
keep telling himself that he’d wanted to cut himself off from that world when
he’d transferred down here just after New Year.

‘Your first murder case, sir?’

‘Unless we’re ruling out
suicide.’

‘You’re not…’ Jane smiled as she
realised her boss was being deadpan.

‘Time of death?’

‘The forensic boys put it at
between midnight and half past. A good time. Anyone who was up at that time was
most probably watching the results come in.’

‘And are you pleased with the
results?’

‘Well it’s nice to have a woman
in charge for once and I think Mrs Thatcher’s taken the country by the scruff
of its neck and given it a well-deserved shaking up. I know it must have been
hard for you sir…’

‘Hard?’

‘Well you know, the riots, it
can’t have been easy taking sides when your people were, … involved, sir?’

Sobers gave a rare smile –

‘My people, Jane?’

Jane blushed, she had been
telling herself all morning not to make an issue of the race thing and here she
was, size nines firmly planted in her mouth.

‘Go and find out who benefits
from Mr Kellow’s death’.

****

A is for Adultery.

I used to think it was called
that because it was something adults did. Well it is something adults do, but
the word comes from the Latin and means to make impure.

They used to stone adulterers
to death; they were punished more severely than murderers. I wonder how many of
my friends and neighbours would be going to jail if it was a crime today? Quite
a few, I suspect; myself included.

Do these condoms preserve your
purity? They’re trying to make the queers use them. Perhaps you’re still pure
if the fluids don’t mix? The Metaphysical Poets used to think it was the mixing
of the blood which was sexual; the comingling. They termed sex the little
death.

My father used to pore over
the respectable newspapers, salaciously reading aloud the details from the
divorce cases. Those were the days in which adultery had to be proved, if a divorce
was to be granted. People hired private detectives to follow people to hotels.
Even the adulterers wanted to be caught at times, if it made their divorce
possible.

Daddy would assume I was too
young and innocent to follow what he was reading.

I wonder if he ever knew that
mummy’s purity wasn’t all that he thought it was?

I heard her making strange
noises one day when she thought I was asleep in my room. When I peeked around
her bedroom door I saw her ‘in flagrante delicto’ as the newspapers would tactfully
term it; or getting her oats as my best friend liked to say. I was worried that
she might be in pain and wished Daddy was at home to save her, but I then saw
her smiling in a way she never smiled at Daddy and kissing her lover in the way
the film stars did. Not in the polite, formal manner she greeted Daddy with.

I think I was old enough to
understand that this made Mummy happy and that when she was happier it was
better at home. She would always be more affectionate to me afterwards and I’d
be bought ice creams, or taken to the cinema. Daddy was away so often that
Mummy had seemed very sad before these visits began. It was only that summer
she became the Mummy I like to remember. I therefore concluded that getting
your oats was a good thing for Mummies. Lily always said her Mummy seemed
happier when Uncle Robert called and that she got extra pocket money on those
weekends.

My only worry was when the
doctor came to the door and I was there to answer it, but then I realised it
was only Mummy he wanted to see undressed…

****

House to house enquiries had come
up with little information. Most people had simply wanted to know who the black
copper was and what he was doing down here. P.C. Mark Salmons felt bound to
sympathise, how were he and Cheryl going to afford a home of their own if they
gave all the promotions to incomers? Especially if Cheryl got up the duff. Even
the D.S. wasn’t a local; Tony had said she’d been brought in from Plymouth.
Tony also reckoned she was one of those lesbians the Labour Party had wanted
running the force, though to be fair to the D.S., Tony had been calling Kevin
Keegan a poof for the last few years simply on the evidence of his bubble
perm...

Another factor in Hawkins’ favour
was that Salmons quite fancied her and he knew he would never have possessed
the bad taste to fancy a dyke. As far as he was concerned, lezzers wore
dungarees and/or narrow pencil moustaches. From Salmons’ on-going surveillance
of his fellow female officers, he’d give Hawkins a good seven out of ten for her
tits and if you liked arses, then she had to be a close second to shapely Sandy
Clark. Not of course that he’d place his Cheryl on either scale. Even if he had
been known to indulge Tony’s occasional lecherous comments about his fiancée’s
vital statistics, he’d always been chivalrous enough to add the warning that
his Chezza was ‘off limits’.

Such philosophising had at least
made the interminable round of visits to the terraced council houses and old
people’s bungalows bearable for the young policeman.  It had been one of the
last addresses on the estate which Salmons tried that finally gave him a
worthwhile bit of information to report, as well as one of the few lookers to
interview.  Sara Jenkins, as well as giving him a welcome flash of thigh, had seen
something suspicious on the night in question. She’d seen a car; she thought it
might have been some sort of hatchback, leaving the close with all the old
people’s bungalows in it at the bottom of the Cross. Her boyfriend had been
caught short and had needed a slash as they cut through the estate along the
route of the disused railway line. She’d been surprised as it was usually a
fairly quiet spot and if it had been someone with a legitimate reason to be
there, she presumed her boyfriend might have got an ear full for peeing over
the rhododendrons, but the driver had made a pretty nifty exit.

Salmons had taken down her
description of the car, but she’d been unable to recall the registration, or
anything useful about the driver except for the fact the figure was Caucasian.
To Salmons it seemed she’d been watching too many episodes of Hill Street
Blues, though at least he could rule out the DI.  If he’d focused less on the
revelation that the lovely Sara with the bleached denim mini skirt had a
boyfriend, then he might have prompted her to recall more about the driver. As
it was his report to Sobers was met with no more than a perfunctory
acknowledgement that it needed following up. Salmons’ version of this to Tony
and the others in the Lady Nelson that night made it appear he’d found the
smoking gun to solve the case and that the one real prejudice in this world was
against good, honest coppers on the beat.

****

The main object of Salmons’
rancorous remarks discovered that the crime scene was no less desolate the
following Sunday, though it was at least possible for Sobers to see it through
eyes which weren’t watering from the smoke. He felt a twinge of conscience for
working on the Sabbath, yet the fact that there were no promising leads,
alongside the pressure from on high, had made him put his normally deep rooted
principles aside. This ‘high flyer from London’, their words and not his, was
going to have to pull out all the stops. And so he’d given Hawkins the time to
spend with her family whilst he visited the all but closed parade of shops
after a less than peaceful communion in Littleham Village’s medieval church.

Littleham Cross had far less of a
claim to a separate identity than the village from which it took its name.
There was no actual cross there, just a rather ugly, gigantic wooden statue of
a beer drinker outside the Cranford Tavern; a great barn of a pub, which seemed
far too vast and vulgar for its more genteel surroundings. The pub stood on the
junction of the main Exmouth to Budleigh Salterton road and the minor roads
which leant to Brixington on the left and ribboned to Littleham Village on the
right; though this did nothing to boost its flagging trade. The late George
Kellow’s butcher’s shop together with a bakery, a post-office, a fish and chip
shop, two newsagents, a small convenience store and a car parts shop lined the
road which led down to the village.  It was flanked by large detached houses
with rambling gardens, many of which stood on the affluent avenues which ambled
down to the town. The Cross itself had all but given up its identity as
anything more than infill; it was what it had always been, a crossroads on the
way to somewhere else.

Sobers looked around the
butcher’s living room; he found it difficult to think of the man by name.
Perhaps it was because this was his first murder case; well the first he had
been in charge of.  In London, he’d assisted at an investigation into the death
of a night club doorman whose body had been found helping to cultivate the soil
of Epping Forest. His D.I. had been very old school and had no time for modern
theories about getting beneath the skin of the victim. Hunt had just wanted to
nab the bad guys. If that meant threatening to beat the living daylights out of
a local drug dealer to get a name, then so be it. Sobers had admired that
simplicity – he wasn’t sure if all this talk about getting to know the deceased
was a good idea, yet he had drawn his own personal line at forcing information
from people. He couldn’t help but reflect that although a lot of people
probably deserved to be fitted up, there were probably quite a few villains out
there who had benefitted from other people taking their rap out of fear.

Still, as a newly promoted D.I.
he was prepared to learn and who knew what lengths he might have to take to
solve his first murder? Still, as he thought of the victim’s body on the slab,
he found it difficult to care about the case on anything other than an
intellectual level – a puzzle for him to solve. He knew he’d have felt
differently if the body had been that of a kid, or a young mum, yet when he had
stood in the morgue looking down at Kellow’s body he had felt little affinity
with the victim. The butcher had been old, overweight and by all accounts a
modern day Scrooge. Every hair might indeed be counted, yet he still found
himself wishing for a more purposeful life to investigate; however perverse he
knew that desire to be.