Maxwell's Return Read Free Page B

pastoral, especially the girls, so he was at somewhat of a loss. She was adamant that she didn’t want the police involved, in fact she said if he called the police, she would deny it and accuse him if any medical examination should show that she had had sex.’
    Maxwell looked serious. ‘Don’t tell me he called the police and she … how old is she, by the way?’
    ‘She was fourteen.’
    ‘Was?’
    ‘I’m jumping ahead in my story. He calmed her down and said she could stay the night as long as she told her parents where she was. She wouldn’t do that, but she did agree that she would let them know she was safe, but not tell them where. He settled for that, because he could see that otherwise she would just run and he preferred that she was somewhere safe, not wandering the streets.’
    ‘How do you know so much?’
    ‘Again, Max, story, in order, telling of.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘He had to go out, a long-standing arrangement, or so it seems, that he couldn’t break. When he got back, in the wee small hours, she wasgone.’
    ‘Note?’
    ‘Nothing. He assumed she had gone home, had second thoughts, whatever happens in the heads of fourteen year old girls. He had worried that … well, perhaps she had designs on him. You know what they can be like.’
    ‘Bernard?’ Maxwell’s eyebrow disappeared under his hair.
    ‘You don’t use the same eyes as a teenager, Max. Bernard is not unattractive in a … well, he is attractive to some, I’m sure.’ She raised her hands and let them fall. ‘I’ve lost my thread again.’
    ‘She had gone.’
    ‘Yes. Right. The next morning, he came to see me about it. To ask me what he should do. I advised that he should ring the parents, find out if she was all right, and do it now. He rang from my office.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘And Henry Hall answered the phone. The girl, whose name was Josie Blakemore, by the way, had been found dead on the beach that morning, by the rather clichéd man walking his dog. Bernard tried to bluff it out, but of course, DCI Hall couldn’t help but wonder why he was ringing and so it all came out. At least, I assume it did, because I haven’t seen Bernard since the police came to pick him up from school.’
    ‘My God!’ Maxwell was aghast. It all sounded like an episode of
Law & Order
. ‘Is he in custody?’
    ‘No. They questioned him under caution, or so I understand. But they couldn’t arrest him; there was no forensic evidence to connect him with the murder, although of course his DNA was on her clothes and hers was at his house. He’s on gardening leave until … well, I don’t know for how long. I can hardly think that they seriously suspect him, but it was a rather strange story that he had to tell …’
    And a voice from behind her added, ‘And worse than that, he has no alibi.’

CHAPTER THREE
    High tide on the beach at Willow Bay lapped the roots of the trees which the previous winter’s storms had brought tumbling down the cliffs to make a giant’s log-pile on the sand. Too new to be driftwood, too sodden to be firewood, the branches and roots tangled together just a little more with each incoming wave and made a Gordian knot of huge proportions. Sometimes completely submerged, at Spring tides and in storm conditions, the trunks had not become home to the usual beach-dwelling creatures such as rats and foxes, searching for new habitats as houses took over their normal ones. But something was moving in there, swaying in the water as it ebbed and flowed. It looked at first sight like an exotic flower, an orchid perhaps, as it waved, languid and pale, among the roots. It seemed to be beckoning, then dismissing the crabs that scuttled along the roots and burrowed under the trunks driven deep into the sand by the trees’ fall from the sunshine on the cliff above. One crab, braver perhaps than the rest, approached the white thing and, scenting food, began to carefully pick delicate morsels from it, feeding itself with deft