"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

Creggan, very relieved, tried not to show it. He had done enough reconnoitring on his own, surveying possible sites. Lush, soft, spongy ground. All he needed was the help of four strong paws and a muzzle that could pick up the right scent.

Max Cormack and Creggan's dog moved into White Oak Farm on the same day. Millington accorded them both a similar welcome - not effusive. He didn't like dogs but the kennels and cattery were a source of income, badly needed. As for having Bradshaw's successor as a paying guest, he would rather have had someone else, had anyone else wanted to come. But there wasn't anyone -and Maybridge had recommended him. If he refused to have him he'd upset Maybridge, and that might not be wise. Maybridge had sensed his reluctance and made a feeble joke about the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury being pally these days. An accusation of bigotry he resented. He was a staunch Nonconformist, but having an Irish Catholic in his home didn't worry him. He didn't have to go to his church any more than he had to go to the local C. of E. where his wife played the organ. He just didn't like Cormack's job. He had heard he was working on a wino who had fallen into the docks and drowned. Not that Cormack had said he was a wino, one just assumed it. It could have been suicide, of course. He imagined a white whale-like body on a slab with flippers for fingers. How could it be fingerprinted if the skin had all come off? Would Cormack have to rely on the teeth for identification? What if the corpse was toothless and the dentures lost?
On a more personal level, would this young doctor resent a question about the hernia operation that his G.P. had recommended and had gone wrong? Or did he only deal with the dead?
Millington put Cormack's suitcase down in the large, white painted, sun filled bedroom on the top floor and told him that he wore a truss. Cormack, delighted with the bedroom, said he was sorry to hear it. He had offered to carry the case himself but the wiry little farmer, ruddy cheeked like a garden gnome, had insisted on taking it from him. He asked him, unwisely, why a truss in these enlightened days, and Millington told him - at length. Cormack mumbled something appropriate about mishaps not always being avoidable.
"They're mishaps when they happen to other people," Millington stated bitterly. "How would you like it to happen to you?"
Not an auspicious start in new digs. Cormack wondered if he had been unwise leaving the old ones. But this room looked out over acres of spring-green countryside, and the house itself was superb. Old, creaky, bulging, uneven walls, beams, probably damp, but glorious for all that. Packed full of history. Bradshaw's place, as yet seen only from the outside, couldn't be more
different. Modern. Functional. But, of the two, Josie would probably prefer it. He would be glad when she came back to Britain. He wanted to settle down. Have kids.
He changed the subject by asking Millington if he had any family. Millington said he had a brother farming in France and wouldn't mind selling up and joining him. "What good has the E.E.C. done the farmers over here, tell me that? At least he makes a living over there. My wife wouldn't go, though, that's the trouble. Likes being here, she says. Born in Macklestone. Has put down roots. You have to be born in a place to put down roots. You're not accepted otherwise. You're tolerated, that's all. I've been here twenty years and I'm tolerated. Nothing more".
Cormack saw it as a back-handed compliment to the villagers. A very tolerant lot, obviously - Millington amused him, but in small doses only. Macklestone, like all villages, might have barren soil here and there, and if you want to put down roots you have to nourish it to some extent. Like being sociable. He invited him to have a drink with him in the local when he'd unpacked.
Millington declined. He had to be around, he explained bitterly, to give a key to the kennels to a man called Creggan who went on night walks with a dog. And that was the fault of the Common Agricultural Policy, too. In the old days you weren't so skint that you had to pander to lunatics.
Cormack raised his eyebrows and waited for more.
Millington wasn't forthcoming. His wife would have supper on the table by seven, he told him. In about half an hour. The dining-room was to the left of the front door, across the hall from the sitting-room. The sitting-room was for him to use any time he wanted to. There weren't any other paying guests at the moment. He could go in there and read. Or play the harmonium, if he wanted to, but not late at night. Cormack thanked him, said he wasn't musical but liked to read, and would be down shortly. He clenched his jaws against laughter until Millington had gone.
Mrs Millington's Christian name was Dawn and she urged Cormack to use it. He found it extremely difficult. She was too old to be called Dawn, the golden flush of youth long gone. She was in her late forties, he guessed, a heavily built woman with dark brown eyes, greying hair worn in an old-fashioned chignon, and thick strong farming hands. Hands, he was to discover, that could play the harmonium with great tenderness and skill. She spent an hour every Saturday evening practising she chose a time when Cormack was out. It was by chance that he returned early from a visit to the Maybridges and heard her, and asked if he might sit and listen. Rather flustered, she agreed. She favoured Bach, she told him, and the Lutheran hymns, but nothing lugubrious. The vicar's choice of hymns, especially for funerals, was the. pits. Really dreadful. She had told him so when he had given her the list for the Bradshaws' funeral, but he hadn't listened. She had been sorry in her heart for their son.
That her sorrow was confined to the son and was in no way extended to his parents became obvious to Cormack in subsequent conversations. To be sorry for the dead, in Cormack's view, was a waste of emotion, but to regret their demise was surely a normal charitable reaction. Her silence on this was surprising. "A dreadful tragedy," he had said, and meant it. Had she responded with something trite about God's will she wouldn't have aroused his curiosity; instead she had smiled enigmatically and asked him what he would like for his evening meal - casseroled steak, or cold chicken as the evening was warm?
It was through Mrs Millington that Cormack met Sergeant Radwell socially. He sang in the church choir and had come to borrow some sheet music so that he could photocopy it, he told Cormack. "I've had to skip a few practices, due to police work, and need to catch up. Dawn understands, luckily."
No trouble about calling her Dawn, Cormack noticed. The young sergeant, monosyllabic when in the company of his superiors, even with the easy-going Maybridge, seemed very relaxed here at the farm. Off duty, he had dressed in a navy blue sweat-shirt and jeans, which managed not to look too incongruous in the beautiful little sitting-room which had been made less beautiful by a too-large cherry-coloured three piece suite. The harmonium, the only true antique in the place, glowed softly in the low rays of the setting sun.
"Nice instrument," Radwell said.
Cormack agreed. He listened, rather bored, while Mrs Millington and Radwell had a discussion about one of the arias in the St Matthew Passion. Radwell, to make his point, played a few notes on the harmonium with his right hand. Dawn, disagreeing with whatever it was, played it a great deal better with both hands.
Later, when Radwell had left the room to go down to the kennels to have a look at Creggan's dog, Mrs Millington told Cormack about his background. "Graham wanted to be a priest, but hadn't the right temperament. I can't imagine why he became a policeman, he hasn't the right temperament for that, either. Did you know that he was the first to find Susan Martin's body, just two miles across the fields from here? It was a Sunday evening and I'd just got in from church. I shall always remember him running across the yard - well, stumbling - and he could hardly get the words out. I thought he was ill. And then he began to cry ..." Her voice was without emotion. In the distance someone whistled and a dog barked. She put the lid of the harmonium down very gently. "He needed to use our phone to inform Maybridge, but it was some while before he could dial the number, his hand was shaking so much. When he did get through he kept on saying he was sorry, as if it was all his fault. He's not your cool professional policeman. Never will be."
Susan Martin, Cormack remembered, was Rapunzel Number Five. The only prostitute who hadn't been murdered in the environs of a city. It surprised him that Craxton Copse was so close to Macklestone. The name had meant nothing to him when he had read Bradshaw's notes. He wondered if Hixon had been preaching in one of the hamlets nearby. Or had he met the girl in Bristol and enticed her into his car? Bradshaw's notes on all five cases had dealt mainly with inceptive, corroborative and indicative evidence, but had only lightly touched on the non-forensic aspects of direct and circumstantial evidence. As far as Cormack could remember, there had been very little direct evidence. Hixon had been seen in the areas where the murders had been committed, but then so had a great many other suspects. Maybridge and his team had focused on Hixon in the early days of the investigation mainly because Hixon's unstable personality had almost invited them to. The whore of Babylon was a recurring theme in his sermons and he wrote a couple of letters to the Bristol Evening News extolling the Liberal statesman, Gladstone, for his mission of mercy in the red light districts of nineteenth-century London. Gladstone, he declared, raised fallen women with the hand of love. Glory hallelujah! As prostitutes were being felled, rather than raised, it was an unwise comment at that particular time. But it takes more than unwisdom to nail a murderer. Love in Hixon's case had been carnal lust and the hand lethal. Seminal fluid and human hair eventually obtained and scientifically analysed had put him inside. End of five serial murders. Accolades to Bradshaw. Case closed.
"The body was covered with leaves," Mrs Millington said. "It had been buried a long time. Poor Graham walked over it before he realised what it was. He disturbed the evidence, or whatever his colleagues called it. It makes you wonder how many other bodies might have been disposed of in the same way."
Cormack, imagining Bradshaw's reaction to Radwell's perfidy - for God's sake, walking over a cadaver! - looked at her blankly.
Dawn Millington picked up the sheet music from the top of the harmonium and put it in the music stool. "He called himself the Reverend Hixon," she went on, "and that's what he wanted to be, of course, a pillar of the church. Sad, isn't it?"
Sad? Cormack suppressed an expletive. People were extraordinary. A man commits five murders, is thwarted in his ecclesiastical ambitions, and is put away for life. And this middle-aged, otherwise reasonable woman, who can draw tender music out of an organ and can train people to sing, feels some sympathy for him. How was he supposed to react to that? Politely and non-aggressively seemed the best bet. He told her that he felt he could do with a little fresh air and would take a stroll outside.

Sergeant Radwell liked dogs and it bothered him to see them incarcerated in kennels. Millington's kennels were six wooden sheds, fairly large, erected on concreted areas surrounded with wire netting where the animals could exercise in the open air. The set-up reminded Radwell of a prison yard, but was marginally worse. Cons could mooch around together. These dogs just looked at each other, barked, wagged their tails, let their tails droop, whined, before finally giving up and going to sleep. They were usually there for a holiday period while their owners were away. Today, Creggan's dog was the only occupant and might be there for some time. It looked unutterably sad.
"It isn't right," he said to Cormack, who had joined him. "There's plenty of room at The Mount. It should be there, or Doctor Donaldson should have refused to let Creggan have it." Millington had explained the situation to him. Apparently he had given Creggan a spare key to the kennels so that he could take the dog out whenever he wanted to. Radwell hoped it would be often. Cormack listened sympathetically, more interested in what Radwell had to tell him about The Mount generally than in the doleful little animal.
Private psychiatric hospitals, mostly for short stay patients, were doing a booming business, he'd read somewhere. Over thirty had been built in recent years and took some of the pressure off the N.H.S. The Mount, he guessed, would be limited to about fifty patients. Were all allowed to roam free, he wondered, or was Creggan having preferential treatment? When he had told Maybridge that he would like temporary accommodation in Macklestone, with a view perhaps to buying a property here, he hadn't envisaged anything quite like this. Bradshaw had been working on a murder practically on his doorstep. There was an uncomfortable feeling here of unfinished business. He glanced at the young sergeant's shoes, shabby suede brogues. The corpse of the girl would have been in an advanced state of decomposition. Whatever shoes, boots, green wellies, or worse, from Radwell's sensitive viewpoint, canvas trainers, he'd worn, they would have squelched deeply into human tissue. Had he worn them when he'd run back to the farm, or discarded them in horror by the corpse? They would have been subjected to analysis like everything else at the scene of crime. It couldn't have been an easy case for Bradshaw, but his careful professionalism would have linked the murder with Hixon despite the passage of time and Radwell's unfortunate feet. In this case, identification had taken some while and followed a photograph of the girl after her features had been built up. The forensic expert who had worked on the facial reconstruction had done the best he could with a face that had been savaged, probably by a fox, so that the bone structure was damaged to some extent. The sergeant's feet, a minor irritation or Bradshaw would have mentioned them in his notes, couldn't have done much harm. The girl's name, Susan Martin, could have been her working name; there had been no family to come forward to lay claim to her. Not unusual. Girls took off, assumed a different identity and disappeared. Acquaintances, clients, hadn't been too eager to come forward, either. But someone had. Hixon's third victim had used an alias for her job, too. According to Maybridge she was a twenty-three-year-old woman who worked under the name of Magda, later identified by her shocked and highly respectable family as Gina Gailymore. She had worked for a ponce in the Bath area, wore her long red hair in a plait and smelt strongly of scent.
Maybridge, when imparting information about the dead, was always politely respectful as if they were around, listening. Cormack had responded flippantly about Magda the Magdalene being a more apt description than Rapunzel. Long tresses and pungent perfume.
Maybridge had looked at him coldly. "No sobriquet is apt," he'd said quietly. "The Press dreamed up the Rapunzel one. They might have dreamed up something worse. We've gone along with it." Cormack, chastened, had apologised. He tended to forget that Maybridge dealt with both the living and the dead - the transition from one state to the other must quite often have appalled him. Or, at the very least, saddened. Cormack had long stopped thinking of cadavers as people. A reprehensible admission, but necessary for survival in the job. You couldn't pick away at pieces of tissue and wonder if the defunct owner had played bowls on Saturday afternoons, gone in for painting watercolours or beating his wife. Though, of course, if it were necessary to discover if anything like that applied, you channelled your research in that direction. An interesting puzzle.
He asked Radwell if he had worked on all the Rapunzel cases.
Radwell had, with the exception of Jean Storrer, a twenty-eight-year-old unmarried mother found dead near Exeter cathedral. She had worked on her own account. No ponce. And had made enough money to send her five-year-old daughter to a private school. Radwell found it quite easy to be objective about her. "A good-looking woman," he told Cormack. "I saw several photos of her." The other murders he could hardly speak about at all. He had seen them in the flesh and didn't want to remember them. Hixon hadn't been as vehement in his denial of the murder of Jean Storrer as he had been with the others, though he hadn't confessed to it. He had blabbed at some length about the innocent fruit of sinful loins and sent a cheque for twenty pounds to Storrer's child. "Tainted money," Radwell said. "I expect the cheque was torn up."
Cormack tried a little tactful probing about Susan Martin, but got nowhere. Radwell's lips tightened as if he were being offered hemlock and Cormack hastily changed the subject. What had Macklestone to offer in the way of relaxation, he asked, apart from the local pub?
"Professor Bradshaw played golf," Radwell said frostily.
"With you?"
Radwell thawed a little. The Irishman obviously hadn't a clue about the local class system. "No. With Chief Inspector Maybridge, Superintendent Claxby, and with the Chief Constable. And now," he went on bitterly, "presumably he plays with God."
Cormack looked at him, astonished. Strange irony from a failed priest. Bradshaw must have given him hell.

9.

Sometime during the night after Simon's visit to The Mount someone slashed all four tyres of his car. The green Lotus Eclat sprawled on the tarmac drive like a huge wounded insect. Simon, scarcely believing what he saw, walked around it, touching the dew-wet metal here and there, before finally and therapeutically losing his temper and kicking it.
Shit, oh shit!
He'd had enough. This and everything else. He'd had a phone call on the bedroom extension just after nine o'clock from Kester-Evans, who wanted to know why he hadn't used the rail ticket the young lady at the church had given him. Muzzy with sleep, Simon had asked what young lady and Kester-Evans had described someone rather like Rhoda. But it couldn't have been Rhoda because Rhoda hadn't given him anything apart from a lot of aggro and pain by going away. He still nursed her nightdress every night though it smelt of washing powder now and not of her. The telephone receiver, on the pillow beside him, had yapped away in his ear. "Simon, are you still there? Are you listening to me?" He'd mumbled that he was. "You're not still in bed, are you?" "No - been up hours." He'd moved a little away from the receiver while Kester-Evans had launched into a long and boring homily about coping in a manly way with his tragic loss, accepting what had to be accepted, and walking wisely into the future as his parents would have wished. "You're a man now, Simon, take on the mantle of a man. When you spoke to me at the time of the funeral about having doubts about your future in medicine, you were in an irrational state. You were grieving. I took little notice of it. Perhaps I should have listened more. Believe me, my dear boy, it is better that you should return for the last few weeks of term. I have been expecting you every day. It is better that you should be here with your peers. If you have problems we will address them together ..." And so on. Politeness is ingrained, in Simon's case not deeply, but deeply enough not to replace the receiver on the , bedside table while Kester-Evans was in full spate. When he had paused for breath Simon had slipped in a "Thank you very much", which was meaningless but the best he could be bothered to do, followed by, "Sorry, there's someone at the door. Must go."
The phone had rung again a couple of times while he was making himself some toast, but he had ignored it. The toast had burnt and he had run out of butter. He would have to do some shopping at the local store, where he would meet people who would be kind and say nice things about his parents and he would smile stiffly back and say thank you very much as he had to Kester-Evans, and tell them that he was managing, and that everything really was quite okay, and he didn't need anyone to come and clean the place for him, or to cook, or perform any other charitable action that probably made them feel awfully good, though of course he wouldn't say that, just smile or sigh as the occasion demanded. The only little glow of light on his horizon was the prospect of taking Sally out for a drive.
And now the car was vandalised.
Vandalism, a twentieth-century British disease.
He wondered if he ought to report it to Maybridge. Probably not. It was a minor crime, the sort the police didn't bother about. Nothing personal about it - no pig's trotter tied to the steering wheel. No threat. Just some yobs who'd got pissed. If he went to see the Maybridges they'd carry on where Kester-Evans left off. Especially Meg. He was tired of the old refrain: You are grieving, Simon. Not rational. He hadn't grieved when Rhoda was here. She would be here still if Meg hadn't upset her.
And he wasn't grieving now. Just bloody furious.
Simon went indoors to phone the garage.