Maxwell’s Ride (19 page)

‘Why did you go there?’

‘He’d left two messages on my answerphone,’ Maxwell told her, ‘saying he was on to something.’

None of this was in the Bartholomew statement. Jacquie sat straighter. This wasn’t like Maxwell. He wasn’t fencing with her, dummying, whatever sporting analogy came to mind. You were more likely to get an apology from the Japanese for the Burma Railroad than you were a straight answer from Peter Maxwell.

‘What did that mean?’

Maxwell looked at the girl. She was wearing her official face.

‘It means,’ he said numbly, ‘that I cost that boy his life.’

The one side of her brain rang warning bells. It was all about notebooks and cautions and closing cases with commendations. The other side, the one that held her heart, was all for crossing the room to him and cradling his head and kissing away the hurt. And she heard a voice, her own voice as it was all those years ago, ‘Mummy mend it.’ But she couldn’t mend Maxwell. Not unless he let her.

‘You’ll have to explain that,’ she said.

He sat back in the mock-leather chair, staring into her face. ‘Chris and I were working on the Larry Warner thing.’

‘I knew
you
were …’ she began.

‘I needed his expertise. His journalist’s knack of finding things quickly. Internet, car – all those little help-mates on life’s Information Superhighway about which I know extremely little.’

‘And?’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ And she saw him bury his face for an instant in his hands. ‘What kind of bastard do I sound when I say he wasn’t very good? He told me he’d worked on the
Sun
, but at heart he was provincial stuff; flower shows, summer fetes, that sort of thing. I got him in over his head, Jacquie. Whoever you’ve got in the frame, I pulled that trigger.’

‘That’s just it,’ she shrugged. ‘We haven’t got anyone in the frame.’

Maxwell blinked. ‘Hamlyn?’ he asked.

‘Still in custody,’ she told him. ‘He may have killed Warner, but there’s no way he could have killed Logan.’

‘Have you talked to LeStrange?’

‘Who?’

‘Ah.’ Maxwell got up and crossed to the window. He could see, beyond the town, the whitecaps on the choppy sea under a churning, restless sky. ‘I showed your video to Chris.’

‘What?’ Her eyes were wide with disbelief. ‘Max, tell me that’s not true.’

‘When it went missing after my break-in, I assumed that perhaps he’d taken it. Then he left the messages and I couldn’t reach him. I went round there and found his flat had been done too. Why? Did he help himself to my video and did someone else want it from him?’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ she frowned. ‘Why didn’t he just borrow it?’

He turned to face her. ‘I said he couldn’t. I didn’t want to run the risk of it leaving my place. I didn’t want to implicate you.’

She tried to smile at him, but it wasn’t easy. He’d probably wrecked her career for ever this time.

‘I did some snooping at the
Advertiser
. He had Anthony LeStrange’s phone number in his book.’

‘The television magic guy?’

Maxwell nodded.

‘Somebody’s at the
Advertiser
now,’ Jacquie told him. ‘They’ll pick that up. Max,’ she was standing next to him. ‘Max, I’ll do what I can – to keep you out of it, I mean. But well, it’s difficult. The DCI sent me here this morning. Wants to know what you know about Chris Logan.’

Maxwell hadn’t turned from the window. ‘Nothing, Jacquie,’ he said to his faint, blurred reflection in the glass. ‘Not a goddam thing.’

It swept over her about then. The one side of her brain saw, for a fleeting instant, a little boy again, lost in a world he didn’t understand, playing, out of his depth, with the grown-ups. She couldn’t help herself …

‘Oi, did you see that?’ Jason of Year 10 was jogging around the athletics track, yards behind the rest of the field and was staring across at the Sixth Form Block, wondering where he’d left his fags.

‘What?’ Kent was looking the other way, wondering how long before that Fascist bastard who was head of PE noticed they were trailing behind the crowd.

‘Some bird just kissed Mad Max.’

‘Never!’ Kent and Jason both stopped in their tracks, focusing on the windows of the office of the Head of Sixth Form.

‘Straight up!’ Jason was adamant.

‘What? A snog, you mean?’

‘Looked like it to me.’

‘Can’t be.’ Kent didn’t buy it. ‘For a start he’s as mad as all get out. Bee, he’s about a million. And third, he’s gay, y’know.’

‘Get away!’

‘As I live and breathe. Course, he’s past it now, but he used to hang around the boys’ showers, y’know.’

‘He didn’t!’

‘He fucking did. I thought everybody knew that.’

‘Who’s the girl, then?’

‘Bet it’s that Mrs Lessing,’ Kent suggested.

‘Nah,’ Jason wouldn’t have it. ‘She’s a fucking lesbian.’

‘Ovett! Coe!’ roared the head of PE (who was rather long in the tooth and remembered names of famous athletes these lads had never heard of) – ‘Any chance of you two finishing the lap, I wonder?’

And Kent and Jason jogged on.

14

‘I remember a time when Saturday afternoons were sacrosanct,’ Jim Astley muttered, turning the typed pages of the report in front of him. ‘First when I was young enough to play wing three quarter for my college, more recently for a round of golf.’ He looked over his glasses at Henry Hall. ‘Important thing, golf, Henry. It settles the nerves, tones the buttocks and above all,’ he smiled, lolling lurk in his chair, ‘sorts the men from the boys. Now this boy,’ he tapped the photograph of Chris Logan on page six of the report, ‘was shot to death.’

Hall had said nothing for some minutes. He didn’t want to be here either, sitting in a stuffy hospital office at Leighford General, discussing how a young man had died. It was his Youngest’s birthday. Jeremy was thirteen. Bike or Playstation? Millennium Dad’s dilemma. ‘Bike?’ Helen Hall had been incredulous. ‘Whose thirteenth birthday are we talking about, Henry, his or yours?’ So a Playstation it was.

‘Tell me something, Henry,’ Astley took off his glasses and sucked one end, his cognitive nipple, ‘they do have the basics these days, don’t they, in Her Majesty’s constabularies?’

‘I don’t follow,’ Hall said.

‘Reading skills for example. I mean, you have read this or had it read to you?’

Levity didn’t sit well on Henry Hall. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But what’s left of Christopher Logan is on a slab at the Yard morgue. In the absence of an actual body, Jim, I’d value your expertise. Basically, have the Yard got it right?’

‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ Astley chuckled. ‘Well, I’m no gunshot expert, but I’ll have a go. Look, here.’ His stubby un-doctor-like fingers jabbed into the grey photographs of the dead man’s throat. ‘This is an entry wound, millimetres right of the sternum. The elasticity of the skin has closed over it to an extent. There’s bruising here with the impact and a grease ring. Otherwise clean as a whistle. Note the hole is oval.’

Hall did.

‘Oblique entry. Mr Logan was shot from the front, but at a slight angle. Whoever killed him was facing him, but to his right. There’d be very little blood.’

Hall frowned. ‘But the photographs I saw showed him covered in the stuff.’

‘Ah, that’s because he was moved.’

‘Go on.’

‘The blood ran down his shirt because at some point he was carried, head downwards, probably parallel to the floor and facing it. Was he washed at the crime scene?’

‘Pass.’

‘Should have been. Still, that’s the Met for you. Now, the exit wound.’ Astley flicked several pages further on. ‘Here we are.’

‘My God.’ Hall hadn’t seen that one before. And he didn’t really want to see it again.

‘No, he hasn’t been clubbed and stabbed as well. It’s what we in the business call cavitation. Gun expert or not, I’d say you’re looking for a high-velocity bullet fired from some sort of hunting rifle. See here, several wounds to the back. Looks like blunt instrument work, doesn’t it? Actually, what happened was that the bullet shattered his vertebrae and blew the bone out through the back. The only consolation is that death would have been virtually instantaneous.’

‘Wouldn’t have known what hit him, you mean?’

Ah.’ Astley waved a warning finger. ‘Don’t put words into my mouth, now, Chief Inspector. A high-velocity bullet sets up high-pressure waves when it hits the soft tissue of a body. Your classic is the head wound, like Kennedy.’

‘JFK?’

Astley nodded. ‘I don’t suppose you’d cut your first tooth, but I was looking at my first murder victim, in fact. Friday, November 22nd 1963. Rather ironic, really. Oh, we’d seen cadavers before – stiffs aplenty – but never one who’d met a violent end. Cadaveric spasm he had. Hands like claws. And five thousand miles away, in Dealey Plaza – pow! For some people, life’s a bitch and then somebody kills you.’

‘Anything else on the bullet?’

Astley blew outwards, thinking. ‘Tail-wagging possibly. A rifled gun will send a bullet spinning at two or three thousand revolutions a second. At the end of the trajectory though, it becomes unstable. Not too much sign of that.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Range was … and I’m really sticking my neck out here, Henry; it’s not something I’d repeat in court … something like sixty metres. I’d say he was standing up. From the blood on the shirt and jacket he was fully clothed; oh … and this is interesting.’ He’d flicked ahead to the closing pages. ‘He was killed indoors. Wooden splinters in the back of the cranium, limited into the hair and skin.’

‘Parquet floor?’

‘God knows. I’m a police surgeon for my sins with a bit of pathology on the side. Interior designer, I ain’t.’

‘You’ve been helpfulness itself, Jim,’ Hall said, collecting the file from Astley’s desk.

‘Tell them on the thirteenth hole,’ the doctor growled.

Peter Maxwell didn’t normally read the
Advertiser
. Sewage disposal along the south coast and what to do about the West Pier hardly engaged an intellect as mighty as his. He read it that Saturday though, the tribute to Chris Logan, the lad’s geekish smile radiating from the front page. Maxwell was downing a last gulp of his breakfast coffee, in no mood to notice the weekend that was dawning. He stood in his sunkissed kitchen, a towel round his neck and his shirt dangling off one arm. He threw the paper down, but it landed wrong way up on the breakfast bar, Logan’s face, boyish and fresh, still staring at him.

‘All right, Chris,’ he said quietly, ‘I owe you that at least,’ and he rang Sylvia to cancel his lunch date with the girls and pedalled for the station.

From his spot in the sun, Metternich tilted his head, sighing. So, the old bugger was off again. Shit. That meant hunting tonight and Metternich just wasn’t in the mood for hunting. Still, better that than the endless cooing of that old bat next door, whose vocabulary consisted of something that sounded ludicrously like ‘diddums’. Perhaps he’d misheard.

There were essential line repairs at Guildford and huge blokes with shoulders like wardrobes wandered the gravel and sleepers, with ‘Highways’ blazoned across their chests and ‘Byways’ across their backs. Maxwell had toyed with the crossword, opened the Stephen King he’d unaccountably bought on the platform at Leighford, closed it again and sat staring at the hurtling hedgerows, once the temporary halt was over. He had the Arches on his mind.

It was there, Logan’s miserable bastard of an editor had written, dewy-eyed now that the boy was dead, that they’d found the body. Maxwell found himself walking across Waterloo Bridge in the late morning sun, passing the chattering Japanese tourists, all taking frantic photos of the Mother of Parliaments along the river. He needed to clear his head, make some sense of it all, find some answers.

‘I’m on to something, Max.’ He’d played Logan’s answerphone message over so many times that it had played in his head all the way up on the train. ‘What?’ he’d shouted, much to the terror of the teenaged girl opposite, who’d slowly got up and walked away. They were letting them out into the community now. Mad as arseholes.

He cut down the concrete stairs by Somerset House, where not so long ago he could have got a copy of his birth certificate for half a crown, search fee a bob, all for a penny stamp. But it wasn’t the good old days he’d come for. He moved south-west on the Embankment, following the sparkling brown of the river in the summer sun. The sun didn’t shine under the Arches and he felt a chill as he crossed into the shadows. He hated it, really, laying flowers on a bare pavement. When Diana died, he’d read some of the cards they’d left at Leighford Town Hall and around the War Memorial, words of goodbye from people she’d never met. And the little mounds of flowers that always appeared where a car had left the road. Like his car. All those years ago, before flowers were fashionable and when upper lips were stiffer. Yet there it was, a single rose lying against the grey-damp curve of the Victorian brick and a card that read in a large round hand ‘And we that knew the best down wonderful hours grew happier yet. I sang at heart, and talked and ate, and lived from laugh to laugh, I too, when you were there, and you, and you.’

‘Nice innit?’ Maxwell wasn’t ready for the voice, rapt as he was in the card’s message. Something stirred to his right, lifting out of a rolled mattress. It was a girl, not much older than the one on the train, than the ones he taught every day. Her eyes were cold and dead and her nose around the stud cracked and crimson.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is.’

‘Did you know the bloke?’ she asked. He couldn’t place the accent. Walsall? West Bromwich?

‘Yes,’ he said, then turned, still squatting, to face her. ‘Did you?’

She recoiled at that, watching him, guessing his worth. Natty jacket, bow-fucking-tie. Should be good for something. ‘Got any small change?’ she asked him.

‘What’s your name?’ he sat down on the cold of the pavement, where they’d washed the debris of Chris Logan into the gutter.

‘No names,’ she said, pulling back further. He noticed that her jeans were tied at the ankle with rags. He couldn’t see her feet.

‘Did you see who left this rose?’ he asked.

Nothing.

He fumbled for his wallet. Her eyes lit up for the first time. There was a tenner in his hand. ‘If I give you this,’ he said, ‘what’ll you spend it on?’