Maxwell’s Ride, page 2
part #6 of Peter Maxwell Series
‘Macbeth,’ Lucy chirped, ever delighted at her sister’s discomfort. ‘The Scottish play. Tiffs doing it for GCSE.’
‘Not Miss Montague?’ Maxwell checked.
Tiffany had dropped her hands. ‘Do pay attention, Uncle Maxie. Monty’s history. It’s worse,’ she moaned. ‘Ms Frensham.’
‘Ah, Ms.’ Maxwell’s face fell ominously. ‘That says it all, my dear. On the shelf and hideously embarrassed by the fact.’
‘She’s a lesbian,’ Lucy contributed to the conversation.
‘Oh course,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Oh, God.’
The savage sun had gone and they stood on the edge of Hell. Fires flared here and there and their ears were assailed with groans and cries. He shepherded the girls into a car and moulded restraints slid down over their shoulders. The woman from the West Midlands had gone, probably with the men in white coats, and she’d been replaced on his left by a rather dismal looking man with weasel eyes. He didn’t seem to be with anyone and looked utterly bored by the whole experience. What struck Maxwell as being particularly odd was that the man was wearing a three-piece suit.
‘Now, I’m not going to get wet this time, am I?’ Maxwell checked with the gormless girl who was ushering them into their seats.
‘Not unless somebody chucks up on yer,’ came the reply. She’d obviously graduated from the Liam Gallagher Charm School. An impossibly deep electronic laugh sent shivers up Lucy’s spine. At sub-Paul Robeson levels, it even brought tears to Maxwell’s eyes.
‘Is it me?’ he whispered in the sudden pitch darkness, ‘or are we spiralling upwards?’
Weird howlings and rattlings of chains filled their ears now, and writhing things coiled from the shadows to leer at them, snarling and slavering like demon wolves. Lucy’s eyes were wide in the dim, misty red light and Tiffany, for all her sang froid was leaning as close as she could to her uncle.
Something cold and clammy parted Maxwell’s hair. By the screams, it was happening to other people too. At least, he could still feel his feet on a hard surface this time. Nothing to this one. A little sub-Exorcist head rotation, a few things going bump in the night. Piece, as Maxwell’s 11C would have it, of piss.
It may have been Lucy who screamed first. It may have been Tiffany. Come to think of it, it was Maxwell. The car had stopped, dangling it seemed by the slenderest of spider threads over a yawning precipice. Far, far below, the flames of Hell crackled and roared and sharp-fanged monsters rose from the abyss, snapping at their heels, swinging now over the sheer drop.
‘Oh my …’ But Maxwell hadn’t time to finish his sentence. His head tilted forward, his knees came up, his stomach had an out of body experience. The noise was deafening, the rush of terror in his ears as the car plunged vertically down into the hellfire. None of them would ever be the same again.
It didn’t help that Maxwell could remember when this place was still the home of the Duke of Somebodyorother. It had a great house, now demolished and graceful follies where the said Duke played bezique with his friends and dallied with the maidservants. A boating lake was as racy as it got when Maxwell first moved to Leighford. But Leighford Hall was ruin and the then Duke had death duties and an expensive wife and sons at Harrow. So he’d thrown open his gates to the public and sold hot dogs and burgers and things on sticks. He’d had the Doctor Who exhibition with the BBC corridor faithfully reproduced in the Orangery, the sleek racing cars of yesteryear Brooklands on show in the Old Stables. At least then there’d been a semblance of Old World Charm.
Now it was Magicworld, a cacophony of piped music, shrieks and screams, the smells of the Subcontinent. Maxwell made for the only familiar sight in the whole boiling, a sow roasting on a spit, reminding him of Merrie England by way of Errol Flynn. Pig on the bone. Grand.
Tiff and Lucy of course had other ideas. Clutching their multi-coloured purses, they tottered on their fashionable heels to join the line for the doner kebab house. The grey glistening thing twirling under the striped awning had more to do, Maxwell thought, with the Donner party, but it wasn’t his place to say so. He settled for an appalling coffee apparently made with meths and looked wistfully at the way out.
‘Montezuma’s Revenge, Uncle Maxie!’ Lucy tugged at his sleeve, pointing with all the glee of a five-year-old to the huge, concrete gaping mouth of a particularly vengeful- looking Aztec.
‘Been there,’ Maxwell was drawing a metaphorical line in the sand, ‘done that. Something restful now, I think. Something redolent of Cambridge summers and Grantchester and strawberries and cream. “Stands the church clock at ten to three?’”
Lucy was looking around. ‘I can’t see it, Uncle Maxie,’ she said. ‘I make it half past one.’
His look said it all. ‘Wild Water,’ he said. ‘It may not exactly be punting, but it can’t be as wild as all that.’ He missed the knowing glance between his nieces, failed to catch their momentary smirks. All he saw was the black rubber ring of the car, like a large version of what old men with piles sit on. It had high plastic yellow sides to it to make the public think they were getting value for money. That solitary weasel-eyed man was ahead of them, getting into one all by himself. Lucy slid past the barrier.
No,’ the man said, reaching out to stop her. ‘Get the one behind, will you?’
Lucy frowned, surprised by the request. Tiffany was standing next to her now, both of them staring at him.
‘What’s the trouble?’ Maxwell asked.
The weasel-eyed man was steadying himself against the jetty, clinging on to Lucy’s arm for a moment, ‘No trouble,’ he said and pushed himself off the planking so that his car swept away on the eddying ripples, Number Four gleaming in silver on its sides.
I le obviously wants to be alone,’ Maxwell shrugged, his Greta Garbo utterly lost on the girls. Ah, the callowness of youth. Their bums hit the soft rubber seating simultaneously and the car swirled to the right, spinning away from the slippery planking in its carefully controlled current. They glided around, the craft sliding effortlessly past polystyrene rocks and mock cacti, chaparrals surprisingly high for Hampshire. In the crags concrete cougars crouched for attack, granite grizzlies growled. Maxwell leaned back, his arms spread over the cool black shoulders of the car. In the distance, screams told them that Montezuma’s Revenge had claimed another set of victims, hanging upside down like pupae about to hatch. This was more like it, Maxwell mused. Tranquillity, just him and the girls and the coolness of the water.
He was just leaning forward to say something inconsequential to Tiffany when the first buffet hit. He lurched across the car, missing the girl’s lap by inches.
‘I wouldn’t move about, Uncle Maxie,’ she suggested. ‘It is called Wild Water, you know.’
Maxwell knew. But he’d seen Deliverance, not once but several times. If Jon Voight could do it, he could do it. Besides, his legs were longer than Burt Reynolds’s. And he still had his own hair. The car spun in a sudden vortex, the rocks hurtling past in a blur of grey. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Maxwell felt his face whipped by an instant wind, the G force flattening his features as he did his best to grin reassuringly at Lucy. She was laughing, throwing her head back as the car bucked and jolted, sliding downstream now at an impossible speed. Maxwell grabbed at the craft. There was nothing to grab. Nothing to grip. He slid sideways, crushing Tiffany again and rolling backwards.
Everybody was screaming, laughing, trying to catch their breath, trying to be nonchalant. Only Tiffany was staring ahead, watching the car in front, the end of the ride. Maxwell’s knuckles were white again, rather like his face and his knees came up for the umpteenth time as he tried to steady himself. Water was buffeting the car, soaking him for the second time that day and no one was more delighted than he was as the car slowed to a crawl.
There was pandemonium in front. Maxwell glanced backward to the car behind, where a party of underprivileged schoolchildren were still sliding and shrieking, making life unnecessarily hellish for the poor bastard of a teacher who had given up his holiday, like Maxwell, to do his duty. Faithful unto death.
‘Uncle Max, what’s happening?’ Lucy asked.
‘It’s just the end of the ride, darling,’ Maxwell told her, wondering at the naïveté of the question. But it wasn’t. From nowhere, under the shadow of the jetty, uniformed Magicworld staff were scurrying backwards and forwards, ashen-faced. Maxwell saw one of them turn away quickly and vomit over the side, her heaving shoulders held by the friend who steadied her.
They were converging on the car in front where the weasel-eyed man had been sitting. But the car seemed empty. Maxwell’s craft hit it amidships and bounced away, sending an arm flailing over the side. Then the screaming started. First Tiffany, then Lucy, then several of the park staff.
‘Get out,’ a pale-faced boy in a company coat was jabbering to Maxwell. ‘There’s been an accident. We have to stop the ride. Get out. Please.’
Maxwell hauled his nieces upright and got them onto the water-splashed planking. It was cool here and dark after the May sunshine. He screened the girls from the car in front and the old Toyota advert filled his brain – ‘the car in front is a coffin’. He half turned to see the weasel-eyed man slumped in the watery bottom of his craft, his mouth open, his eyes staring at the rubber seat, as though in disbelief.
‘Shut it down,’ he heard a voice hiss over a walkie-talkie. ‘For fuck’s sake. We’ve got a dead bloke down here.’
‘Uncle Maxie …’ Terror was etched on Lucy’s face.
‘Sshh,’ he hushed her, encircling them both with his strong, safe arms. ‘It’s all right. Everything’s all right.’ And he led them away, glancing backwards over his shoulder. Staff were shepherding away the underprivileged children, away from the car. Away from the corpse. Dead man floating.
3
Credit cards. AA membership. A cheque book. A set of keys to the dark green Peugeot left in Car Zone C at the end of another day at Magicworld. The contents of a dead man’s pockets. The contents of a dead man’s life. DC Jacquie Carpenter catalogued them before popping them back into the polythene bag. Around her, the incident room was coming to life, officers carrying files, VDUs, rainforests of paper, display boards. In deference to the proprietors of Magicworld, Leighford CID had set up its Incident Room off site, in the community centre at West Meon. The Chief Constable himself had been contacted. No fuss, please. No bother. Magicworld was a family institution. Uniforms all over the place would do it no good at all. Besides, the owner of the park played golf with the Chief Constable.
The community centre had been the village school in the days when Thomas Lord, he of the cricket ground, had lived there. Jacquie had come in that morning under the lintel that still bore the carefully chiselled ‘Boys’ to remind the world of the days of Political Incorrectness and sexual segregation. Well, why not? Jacquie had the vote, for God’s sake. She even smoked on and off, from time to time. And sure as Hell, she was doing a man’s job.
She felt his eyes boring into her back; metaphorically, he was twanging her bra straps. She turned to face him. DS Frank Bartholomew, who thought he looked like Laurence Dallaglio, stood there, smirking.
‘What’ve we got, then, Jacquie?’ he sat on the chair across the desk from her, letting his eyes rove over the cleavage under the pale peach blouse. Jacquie Carpenter was probably twenty-eight. Her eyes were pale and grey and they sparkled as she spoke. Her chestnut hair was swept up on each side and there, Bartholomew pondered, was a mouth he’d like to get closer to.
‘Larry Warner,’ she told him, her eyes as cold as her voice. ‘He was forty-eight. A chartered accountant. Lived in Portsmouth.’
‘Well, I suppose somebody has to. Have we got an address?’
‘Twenty-four Cadbury House. On the way out to Southsea.’
‘Governor got somebody on that?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Bartholomew, as I’ve only just come on duty.’
‘Frank.’ He leaned towards her as though over a candlelit dinner for two. ‘I’ve told you to call me Frank.’
She managed a smile that would freeze Hell over. ‘I’d rather keep it professional, if you don’t mind.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Bartholomew winked, leaning back in his chair. ‘Where is the guv’nor?’
‘Morgue.’
‘What’s this?’ Bartholomew’s roving eye had found the computer print-out on Jacquie’s desk.
‘It’s a witness list,’ she told him. ‘Everybody on or near the ride at the time of Warner’s death.’
He flicked down the dot matrix. ‘Right, then. That’s our morning mapped out. You ready?’
She nodded. When it came to working with Frank Bartholomew, short straws were the order of the day. And she always drew them.
Who’s first, then?’ he frowned at the list. ‘Peter Maxwell, thirty eight, Columbine. Right.’
She paused by the coffee machine. ‘I think we should start with the park staff,’ she said. ‘They’re the ones in the know.’
Bartholomew gave her an odd look. ‘I’m sure they are,’ he said. ‘But you see, Jacquie, this list is not as new to me as I made out. I had sight of it last night and I did a little cross checking. This Mr Maxwell is on file. At the station. Not form, exactly. But I found his name under ‘P’. That stands for Pain in the Arse. I’ll drive.’
Like West Meon village school, they’d built Leighford Mortuary in the nineteenth century too. It was dwarfed now by Leighford General, a monolith of concrete and steel built over the old cottage hospital. A grim place where old ladies lay on trolleys in the corridors waiting patiently for new hips, and regretting having voted for Frank Dobson at the last election.
Chief Inspector Henry Hall had never liked mortuaries. There was that indefinable smell, one that had never left him since DC, that antiseptic abattoir aroma that coated his nostrils and permeated the clothes. It was cold and metallic and sweet and sickly all at the same time. And there wasn’t a chrysanthemum in sight. Henry Hall was a graduate, a fast-track promotion candidate who’d done only six months on the beat rather than the customary two years, plodding at the time-honoured two and a half miles an hour. That changeable May morning he was in his thirty-sixth year. He’d done well; collars and commendations to his credit. The Chief Constable liked him, even the Lord Lieutenant knew who he was – and after the fifty-odd years of alcohol abuse that man had suffered, that was quite an accolade. But Hall wasn’t what you’d call a happy man. There were too many knives in his back, too many old timers on whom it grated to call him ‘sir’. Then there was his family. A wife and three kids, when he’d last looked. The eldest would be starting at Leighford High in September. Where had the years gone?
At that moment, he was following the information given to him by Jim Astley, police surgeon, pathologist and professional bastard. Hall had been in this position before, his back to the morgue wall as the good doctor went about his business. Astley was, what, fifty-four, fifty-five, old enough, just, to be Hall’s father. Except that Hall’s father was a retired civil servant growing dahlias in the West Country. The doctor was dressed up all in green, ho, ho, bending over what used to be a person and occasionally he’d reach over to adjust his microphone or stretch to alleviate the constant pain in his back. In his weaker moments, when his wife had gone to bed with her Gordon’s and a Catherine Cookson, he sprawled on the sofa alongside the red setter and knew he was too old for all this. A dead man was reflected in his glasses.
‘A well nourished male,’ he was saying, for the benefit of Hall, the court and criminal posterity. ‘Caucasian, as we pathologists are obliged to say these days, mid-forties. Not overly endowed with hair.’ His eyes ran the length of the body. ‘Come to think of it, not overly endowed. Slight bruising to the arms, right and left. Forearms and upper. Large yellowing bruise on left shin. An old scar, probably a childhood injury, on the left side of the torso.’ He fumbled with his tape. ‘Nearly two centimetres long. In the thoracic region.’ Hall stood upright, waiting for the rest, like that moment in the Chancellor s Budget speech when he stops burbling bollocks and gets on to the relevant bit about screwing Joe Public with road tax, petrol, alcohol and cigarettes. ‘A large bullet exit wound, er … three centimetres left of the sternum mid-line, measuring two centimetres by … one and a half. Donald.’
His assistant reached over and the two of them rolled the corpse onto its side and then onto its front. ‘Still showing signs of lividity,’ Astley noted, slapping the dead man’s buttocks with a fine disregard, ‘which I would expect at this stage. No signs of bruising anywhere. A bullet entry wound to the left side of the midline by … four and a half centimetres, nine centimetres below the nape of the neck.’
Astley stood upright. ‘Take him, Donald, would you?’ He straightened, pinging off his rubber gloves and turning to Hall. ‘How are we, Henry?’
‘Marginally better than that poor sod.’ Hall watched as the assistant rolled his man back and slid him onto the steel trolley ready for his drawer. He was appalled to note once again that they really did tie luggage tags around cadavers’ big toes, like something in Jeffrey Dahmer’s bargain basement.
‘You’ve got a marksman on your hands.’ Hall followed Astley into his office as the doctor busied himself hauling off lie. mask and cap and scrubbing down, instinctively using his elbows on the specially adapted taps. ‘What’s the score?’
‘I’ve got a Press Conference later this morning. Chief Constable insisted on it. I don’t remember a killing as public as this.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Larry Warner. A chartered accountant.’
‘Ah, well, there you are.’
‘Sorry?’ Hall lowered himself into Astley’s spare chair, leaning his head against the wall.
‘Chartered accountants. Parasites, all of ’em. They’re in the Bible, you know.’
‘Are they?’ It had been a long time since Henry Hall had dipped into the gospels. He was a different generation from Jim Astley. Hall had got comparative religions at O level, Islam and Buddhism, with a hint of Ba’hai. Astley was of the Old School and the New Testament; he could have retraced Si Paul’s missionary journeys in his sleep.
