‘Paternity leave, Max?’ Legs Diamond swept off his specs in the manner of great headmasters throughout time. Except that Diamond wasn’t a great headmaster; come to think of it, he wasn’t even a headmaster, on the grounds that he’d never mastered anything.
‘I’m shocked you haven’t heard of the concept, Headmaster.’ Maxwell’s eyebrows had nearly reached his hairline. ‘You being of the post-modernist persuasion and all.’
‘Well, yes,’ Diamond flustered. ‘Of course I’ve heard of it. It’s just that, well…you?’
Maxwell took in the plastic, grey-suited idiot sitting in his plastic, grey office. ‘I don’t know which aspersion you are casting in my direction, Headmaster; whether I lack the physical capability of fathering a child or whether I am so appallingly insensitive and chauvinist that I would not contemplate even launching such a request.’
‘No, no, Max.’ Diamond was well and truly wrapped up, as usual. ‘I didn’t mean either, I assure you.’
‘So it’s settled, then.’ Maxwell was already on his feet. ‘I’ll see Paul Moss about my cover on my way out.’
‘No, that’s not how it works,’ Diamond called. ‘It’s like maternity leave, Max. From date A to date B.’
‘Ah, that’s maternity leave, Headmaster,’ Maxwell patronised. ‘Paternity leave may be like it, but it is not it. Physiological differences demand different considerations.’
‘So what do you need?’ Diamond was confused, as he often was, in fact, in the presence of his Head of Sixth Form.
‘A couple of days should do it,’ Maxwell smiled.
‘A couple of days?’ Diamond blinked.
‘Starting this afternoon.’ He stopped in the doorway. ‘Did anyone ever tell you what a brick you are, Headmaster? It just isn’t true what the others say.’ And he was gone.
Maxwell was still pedalling home when Jacquie came back from shopping. From the bushes beside the front door of 38 Columbine, a yellow-eyed killer watched her every move, his nostrils quivering, his ears pricked. He saw her struggle out from that appalling machine, the one with the roar and the smell, though it had a nice warm bit he liked stretching on in the cold weather. She was carrying those white plastic things again, the ones he knew carried food. This was a good sign. Chicken, perhaps? Or steak? Metternich was a surf ’n’ turf man as any self-respecting maritime feline should be. He yawned and stretched, easing the claws from their hoods. A startled sparrow screeched, flapping skyward from the ground yards away. Still got it, Metternich, old boy.
‘Hello, dear.’ The unmistakable chirrup of Mrs Troubridge caught Jacquie as she reached her front door. The little square by Mrs Troubridge’s vestibule had to be the most gardened four inches in Tony Blair’s Britain.
‘Hello,’ the policewoman smiled. ‘How are you?’
‘No, no.’ The old girl appeared through the gap in the privet, the one carefully crafted by years of nosiness. ‘That’s what I should be asking you.’ She pointed with her trowel to Jacquie’s bump. Jacquie had never seen Mrs Troubridge without a gardening implement in her hand.
‘I’m fine,’ Jacquie told her, grateful to rest the shopping bags against each other on Maxwell’s step. ‘Over that ghastly morning sickness, thank God.’
‘Oh, good, my dear.’ Mrs Troubridge nodded. ‘Dreadful. Dreadful. Those men don’t know what they put us through, do they? Do they know who killed that appalling Winchcombe woman yet?’
Jacquie was expecting a little more balance in the question, perhaps, a little more getting round to things gradually, but Mrs Troubridge was a gardener, used to calling a spade a spade, and she’d clearly dispensed with the small talk. ‘Er…I don’t know,’ she said.
‘But you’re in the police, my dear.’
‘Not at the moment,’ Jacquie reminded her, patting her excuse.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Troubridge shrilled. ‘But you can’t plead the belly for ever, you know. Besides, your rather bossy friend, what’s her name? Jane? She keeps you…what do you young people say? Up to pace, hmm?’
‘You are very well informed, Mrs Troubridge,’ Jacquie said, narrowing her eyes at the old girl and making a mental note to watch her like a hawk in future.
The neighbour poked her gently with her trowel, gripped in a pink rubber hand. ‘My dear,’ she smiled softly. ‘I’m an old woman. I’ve lost my husband and God didn’t bless us with children. I don’t have any family and most of my friends have shuffled off this mortal coil. What I do have is an insatiable interest in what goes on around me.’ She closed to the younger woman. ‘Did you know, for instance, that that snooty bitch at number 30 is on the game?’
‘Really?’ Jacquie’s eyes were wide.
Mrs Troubridge leaned even closer. Her nose was now nearly in Jacquie’s cleavage. ‘And Mrs Wickens, in that ghastly mock-Tudor monstrosity on the corner, used to be Charles Williams, a steel fabricator of Hove?’
Jacquie’s speechless response said it all.
‘Exactly.’ The old girl tapped the side of her nose. ‘No, I knew no good would come of Martita Winchcombe. I could have predicted she’d meet a sticky end ever since she fell pregnant.’
‘Hardly that terrible,’ Jacquie smiled, having fallen pretty far herself.
‘Oh, my dear,’ Mrs Troubridge chuckled. ‘How times have changed. You and Mr Maxwell make a delightful couple, for all you’re living in sin and he’s old enough to be your father. But I’m talking about the Forties. Yes, I know, there was a war on and we all thought we’d be blown to bits any minute and those ghastly Americans were over-paid, over-sexed and over here, but some of us retained our principles. I happen to know Mr Troubridge was a virgin when we wed and him in the navy for five years. No, in some places, back then, they still put girls…like that…into institutions, you know?’
‘Did they?’
‘The news was all over Leighford. We didn’t have abortions on the NHS in those days. In fact, we didn’t have an NHS. Martita passed out one morning at my very feet. We all knew why.’ Mrs Troubridge bridled quietly. ‘She had to go away – to have the baby, I mean. When she came back, well, no one said anything of course. She’d been on a scheme, as the Canadians called it then. Had the little bastard adopted.’
‘You seem to know an awful lot about it, Mrs Troubridge,’ Jacquie commented.
The old girl chortled. ‘I have to confess my insatiable interest in what goes on around me is not something that developed with maturity. I’ve always had it. Little boy, apparently. Brought up in Cheltenham, so the story went, by very respectable people. Martita never set her cap at anyone after that.’
‘Whereas…before?’ Jacquie ventured.
A shadow came over her neighbour’s face and Mrs Troubridge turned back to her gardening. ‘I told Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘Venetian blinds. You’ll forgive me, my dear, if I don’t elucidate.’
Henry Hall was slumped in his office back at the nick. A less professional man would have run out of the Incident Room screaming long before that wild, wet Wednesday night. The rain hit his window like machine-gun bullets, the wind hammering in vicious gusts from the north. He was still swilling the dregs of his coffee around the bottom of the plastic cup in his hand, poring over the paperwork that comes with murder. His computer was switched resolutely off, as his back and his eyes and his mouse finger told him he’d done enough of the superhighway for one day. He toyed for a while with jacking in his police career and making a fortune by inventing computer pop-ups that said ‘Tiredness Kills. Take a Break’. But there was probably a copyright clause somewhere, so it was back to sleuthing.
Everybody was on his back on this one. The Fourth Estate, those gallant, sensitive and helpful gentlemen and ladies of the Press, had done little but ridicule Hall and his entire investigation ever since the leak about psychic detection. At least they did not have the name of Magda Lupescu – yet. But it could only be a matter of time. Fiona Elliot may have been trusting of messages from the Other Side, but she seemed particularly keen that the terrestrial police from This Side solve her late aunt’s murder and pdq. And the grating Carole Bartlett was almost a daily visitor, demanding to know what had happened to the missing copy of the Sheridan play and how long it would be before her husband’s entangled finances were sorted out.
Jane Blaisedell was flaky. Jacquie Carpenter was better. But that was another odd thing for Henry Hall: not that Jacquie had agreed to act as Jane’s stand-in – he knew instinctively that she would – but that Peter Maxwell hadn’t gone ape-shit about it; he knew instinctively he’d do that too. In the silence and the solitude, Henry Hall allowed himself the teensiest of smiles. Peter Maxwell would go ape-shit, all right; it was just that, with Peter Maxwell, you could never be sure exactly when. And many was the kid, and the colleague and the copper, who had rued the experience.
Christ Church meadow lay wreathed in the October mist as Jacquie’s Ka purred past, grateful to be off the A338 and gliding past the Thames.
‘Isis,’ said Maxwell, apparently dozing beside her, slumped in the passenger seat with his tweed hat over his face.
‘Hmm?’
‘The Thames becomes the Isis when it goes past Oxford. Christ knows why. Pure snobbery, of course.’
‘You don’t like this town, do you?’ she smiled, vaguely aware that the number of cyclists whizzing around her had trebled in the last few minutes.
‘Oh, it’s all right.’ He stretched. ‘Nobody lives here now, of course, after all those serial killings in the Morse series. Entire population’s been wiped out. It’s a ghost town. Rumour has it there’s a university here somewhere.’
‘Which college did you say you wanted?’
‘Corpus Christi,’ he told her, straightening up and pulling the cap off his face. ‘That’s body of Christ to you non-Classicists.’
‘Bollocks!’ she snorted and hung a right. They were in the High now – Oxford students for generations apparently being congenitally unable to pronounce the word ‘street’.
‘Founded in the year of Our Lord 1517.’ Maxwell was giving Jacquie the guided tour. ‘The same year in which Fr Luther upset everybody in Christendom with his ninety-five theses pinned to the door of Wittenberg cathedral. God, I had trouble just doing one. There are twenty-seven sundials in Front Quad, topped with a pelican pecking out its own heart; like you do. Corpus is the only college to have its original founder’s plate. All the others gave theirs to Charles I for his war effort. So…’
‘So?’ It had been a long time since Jacquie Carpenter had done the Tudors and Stuarts.
‘So either the college was tight as a gnat’s chuff or they were secret parliamentarians. Like I said, they’re a dodgy lot in Oxford. Next right.’
‘How do you know?’ She jammed on the brakes to avoid yet another cyclist. ‘All these buildings look alike.’
‘I have a nose for academe.’ Maxwell duly tapped it. ‘That’s Merton, with the oldest library in England – after mine – built in the 1370s. Didn’t start out too well, mind. Even Geoffrey Chaucer had more books than they did and he was a bloody customs officer. Here we are.’
She stopped the Ka. ‘There’s nowhere to park.’
He smiled. ‘Welcome to Oxford.’
On his way up the stairs, Peter Maxwell tossed a coin.
‘Heads,’ Jacquie said, steadying herself on the banisters. She’d been here before, not Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but wheeling and dealing with Mad Max.
‘Sorry, heart,’ he consoled her. ‘It’s tails. My way, then.’ His Sinatra was perfect. Flat and heartless.
‘Thank you, Frank,’ she grinned. ‘I just hope it works.’
As they reached the door, he leaned to her. ‘Trust me, lady, I’m a Cambridge man.’
In the lobby, a grey-haired woman in a starched white blouse appeared to be a leftover from the days of Gibson girls, with an upswept bun of a hairdo and a pearl-clasped choker, longing for the day when they invented brassieres and gave girls like her the vote.
‘Good morning.’ Maxwell swept off his hat and beamed. ‘I wonder, is Professor Usherwood in?’
The Gibson girl looked over her pince-nez, sizing up the pair. Effete, over-the-top gent with his pregnant daughter. She looked a little long in the tooth for someone hoping for a place, but the Gibson girl had known stranger attempts to get into Oxford, circumventing little things like A-levels and university-applications procedures. Usually it was fathers and pushy mothers who claimed they’d gone to the college in their day and surely, there was some obscure little bursary…
Rather churlish riposte, Maxwell thought, the sort of comeback he’d expect on Leighford sea front of a Saturday night, but it merely confirmed what he’d always maintained about Oxford. ‘I am Peter Maxwell,’ he told her. ‘This is Ms Jacquie Carpenter. An old pupil of mine suggested if ever I were in Oxford, to look up the Professor.’
‘Really?’ The Gibson girl rose and crossed to the counter on which Maxwell lolled. ‘And who may this pupil be?’
‘Deena Harrison,’ Maxwell said.
The Gibson girl looked vacant. ‘Don’t know her,’ she said.
‘How long have you been at Corpus, Mrs…?’
‘For two years,’ she said. ‘And that’s Miss.’
‘Yes, of course it is,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Well, Deena came down this summer – the one that’s just gone, I mean. She was reading Drama.’
‘As I said,’ the Gibson girl was standing her ground. ‘I have never heard of her. You must have the wrong college.’
Maxwell was about to launch into Plan B when a warrant card flashed into the air inches from his nose.
‘Detective Sergeant Carpenter, West Sussex CID,’ Jacquie said, looking the woman straight in the eye. ‘You are?’
‘Helen Burden,’ the Gibson girl blinked, taken off guard. This was an unheard of way to get into Oxford.
‘Is Professor Usherwood in?’ Jacquie was in work mode. The ground shook.
‘Yes, yes of course. I’ll tell him you’re here.’
‘Thank you.’
The secretary hurried to her intercom and pressed it. ‘Professor, there are some police officers to see you.’ A pause. ‘Do go through. First door on the left.’
‘Looks like I should have won the toss after all,’ Jacquie whispered out of the corner of her mouth. ‘We wasted three or four minutes there.’
‘I’ve got to get one of those.’ Maxwell pointed to the warrant card disappearing into Jacquie’s handbag and did a double take at the door. ‘Oh.’
Professor Paul Usherwood sat in his oak-panelled study, decorated with wall-to-wall leather volumes that Laurence Llewellyn Bowen would not have remotely understood. He was seventy if he was a day and he was sitting in a wheelchair.
‘Police,’ the man was beaming. ‘How very exciting. Do, please, have seats.’ He pressed a button on his intercom. ‘Coffee, please, Helen. Now, how may I help?’
It had taken Gavin Henslow nearly three weeks to sequester the bank records of the late Daniel Bartlett. The Nat West had been forthcoming; so, astonishingly, had Lloyds TSB. Jowetts were a little more obstructive, muttering pompously about client confidentiality. How tin-pot little firms like these had survived the Bank Charter Act of 1844 men like Peter Maxwell didn’t know. Men like Gavin Henslow, for all his fast-track insidery, had never heard of the Bank Charter Act of 1844. The Swiss banks, all of them allegedly run by gnomes, were silence itself, until the oddly quick-witted Henslow breathed the word ‘Interpol’ in his phone conversation, and then they thought they might just be able to find a way to cooperate.
‘He’s skint, guv,’ was the financial whizz-kid’s summation of his inquiries. ‘Next time his wife comes in asking who’s nicked that bloody Sheridan copy, the answer is likely to be nobody. He hocked it himself.’
Henry Hall nodded, trying in his own mind to see how this related to anything. ‘So what’s he spent it on?’ he thought aloud.
‘If you mean the paltry sum he paid me in alimony, yes, I suppose it was enough, just.’ Carole Bartlett had indeed called in again, late that afternoon, to check on how Hall’s team were pursuing their inquiries. She was sitting in Hall’s Interview Room Number One. And she hadn’t even mentioned the Sheridan when the DCI was asking questions of his own. ‘But don’t let the amount fool you,’ she snarled. ‘The bastard owed me every penny for the mental cruelty he put me through.’
‘You took him to the cleaners,’ Hall observed.
Carole Bartlett was, momentarily, stuck for an answer. ‘I hope that’s not some sort of chauvinist rallying of the ranks,’ she said eventually. ‘The financial arrangements I had with my husband are no one’s business but our own.’
‘Normally, I would agree with you,’ Hall said. ‘But murder has a habit of publicising a lot of things that would ordinarily remain private.’
‘I see.’ Carole Bartlett was needled, pursing her lips and flashing daggers at Hall and the squat figure of Jane Blaisedell who sat beside him. ‘So having made no progress at all on this case, you are now falling back on the tired old nonsense about spouses being the most likely killers of their husbands, hmm? Tiresome and hardly progress.’
‘The statistics lean that way,’ Hall nodded. Such things were his bread and butter.
‘I would hardly kill the golden goose, would I?’ the woman snapped.
‘That’s just the point,’ Hall said. ‘Your husband wasn’t golden anymore, was he? There are other motives for murder.’
Carole Bartlett was on her feet, the tape still whirring in the corner. ‘Are you sitting there, in your bare-faced incompetence, and accusing me of murdering my husband?’
‘No, no.’ Hall shook his head. ‘There is a form of words for that, Mrs Bartlett, and rest assured, had I intended to charge you, I would already have used them.’
‘That’s outrageous!’ she blurted. ‘You will be hearing from my solicitor.’
‘Can’t wait,’ said Hall. ‘Could you see yourself out?’
‘Floosies.’ Carole Bartlett stopped in mid-fume. ‘The many little trollops who have crowded, inexplicably, into my husband’s bed. That’s where his money has gone. You mark my words.’
As they heard her heels clatter away down the Leighford nick corridor, Henry Hall turned to Jane Blaisedell. ‘Have we marked her words?’
Jane was getting back to something approaching normal now. She still had nightmares when the night came cold and gusting from the north. And she still didn’t like flat, dimly lit areas because they reminded her of the stage where Gordon Goodacre died. And soft, padded carpets scorched black that marked the end of Dan Bartlett and the old-lady smell of the house of Martita Winchcombe. But worst of all she didn’t like the bad breath of middle-aged men and their sweaty fingers…
‘Jane?’ Hall noticed, and not for the first time, the faraway look in the girl’s eyes.
‘Sorry, guv,’ she flustered. ‘What was the question?’
‘Floosies.’ Hall repeated the widow’s words. ‘How many of Dan Bartlett’s little trollops have we found to date?’