Maxwell’s House Read Free Page A

which proclaimed the marriage made in heaven of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
    ‘Thank you, Margaret. Sugar, gentlemen?’
    They shook their heads. Johnson knew he was sweet enough as he was. Hall had flipped open the file again. And was looking at the toothy grin of a little girl whose hair was lighter in the years behind. Whose eyes were bright. Whose hope was gone.
    They couldn’t find Peter Maxwell. His house, yes. And the old girl who fed his cat. They even saw a glimpse of his white bike parked in his back passage. But for the rest … silence. They’d have to wait until 19th August. He’d keep until then. And in the mean time, there was a murder enquiry under way.
    The jangling, fierce signature tune gave way to flashing blue lights and screaming vehicles. Then it was the studio with slightly embarrassed-looking men and women sitting by phones and VDUs. The camera panned back to the friendly, comfortable face of Nick Ross.
    He was only half listening to the special edition of
Crimewatch
they’d put on in the holiday month of August and, in that endless struggle with nature in which most men wrestled with needle and thread, he wasn’t watching the screen at all. Just darning his walking socks. It came to him as though in a dream. A series of names. Images. Coincidences. Then he looked up and could not look away. The socks were a tangled heap on the floor.
    ‘It was 23rd July,’ Ross was saying from the television screen, ‘the last day of the school term. A tramp found Jennifer’s body here, in this old house at the end of Kissing Tree Lane. She had been strangled.’
    He watched Ross cross the studio floor and a different camera took him up. ‘Jenny was a bright, clever girl, in the first year of her sixth form at Leighford High School.’
    A rather flattering library picture of the school’s frontage appeared on the screen. He fancied it had been taken when the school was the focus of all that industrial action back in ’86. Or was it ’87? Hard to remember now.
    ‘Friends describe her as a friendly, outgoing girl. She was last seen alive at three thirty that afternoon. School had broken up at two o’clock and Jenny had gone with her boyfriend to a cafe in the town. At two forty-five he left her here, at the corner of Grassington Street and Rodwell Avenue. Did you see where she went after that?’
    A lookalike was on the screen now, crossing Rodwell Avenue, plodding on towards the golf course.
    He shook his head. ‘Too heavy,’ he said. ‘That’s all wrong.’
    But Ross couldn’t hear him. ‘Jenny was wearing her school uniform. Black skirt. White blouse. Black shoes. She was carrying a school bag, like this one …’ He paused by a table and held up a grey Samsonite. ‘Her own has not yet been found. At about three thirty, a woman on her way home from work saw a girl who may have been Jenny talking to a young man here, on the edge of the Dam, an area well known by courting couples. She remembers they seemed to be arguing and she heard her say “No” several times.’
    The lookalike and a tall bit-player duly went through the motions, then she turned and followed the line of the old railway towards Moorfields and the sea.
    ‘It’s not known what Jenny did for the next half an hour, but at just after eight o’clock this man, David Arnold, was walking his dog along Kissing Tree Lane. After a fine day, it had started raining and Mr Arnold put his anorak hood up. His dog wouldn’t come when he called and Mr Arnold had to enter the grounds of a ruined house, known locally as the Red House, in search of him.’
    The Red House filled the screen, the room, his mind. Mr Arnold was suddenly sitting in an indescribably awful living-room, reminiscing. He had thick, bottle-bottom glasses and a shapeless cardigan. The wayward dog sat at his feet, its tongue lolling under the studio lights.
    ‘I remember seeing a bike, like,’ Arnold told his viewers, ‘sort of leaning up against the Red House. I