Maxwell's Grave by M.J. Trow Read Free Book Online

lifetime sorting through the wreckage of other people’s lives, lent his skin the same parchment colour.
    ‘…Peter Maxwell.’ Astley finished the sentence for him. ‘Yes you did. Uncanny, isn’t it, how that man can smell trouble?’
    It was. Henry Hall and Peter Maxwell were like two buttocks of the same bum, drawn like iron filings to the magnet that was murder. Hall because he had no choice – it went with the territory, Maxwell because…well, justbecause, that’s all.
    ‘What have we got?’ Hall was scanning the table behind his man, the light of the white cloth reflecting back in his lenses. A pile of old bones wasn’t very helpful.
    ‘No, that’s not ours,’ Astley chuckled. He, who had been around death so long, could afford a wry smile now and again. In fact, it was vital. ‘Oh, it’s a murder all right, but I suspect a certain statute of limitations will have kicked in by now. Saxon, apparently. That’s some time ago, now, isn’t it?’ Jim Astley had given up History after O levels.
    Hall believed it was. And he believed there was one man who’d know exactly, with that carbon-14 mind of his, the bastard he’d just seen sauntering away down Staple Hill in the direction of Leighford – the bastard the kids called Mad Max. ‘Over here.’
    Astley let his glasses dangle from the chain round his neck and trudged across the trenches to the little ash grove. SOCO men still crouched here, photographing, measuring , plotting exactly all the calibrations of murder.
    ‘Evening, guv,’ Martin Toogood stood up beside the body in question. ‘Dr David Radley. He was an archaeologist. In charge of this dig.’
    ‘Next of kin been informed?’ Hall asked, looking at the corpse at his feet.
    ‘Not yet, sir. There’s a wife in Brighton.’
    ‘Who’ve we got on that?’
    ‘DS Carpenter,’ Toogood told him.
    ‘No. No, I need Jacquie on something else.’ He glanced across to where his other DS was talking to a rangy, shocked looking man in sandals and a beard. ‘Get the Brighton boys on it.’ He checked his watch. ‘The wife’ll be worried by now.’
    ‘Sir,’ and Toogood was striding back to the four-by-foursand the patrol cars, phone in hand.
    ‘Yes, Jim?’ Hall wanted answers of the pathological kind.
    ‘Neck’s broken,’ Astley wasn’t going to kneel down again, not with his sciatica. ‘So’s his left ankle. I’d say he’s been dropped.’
    ‘Dropped?’ Hall frowned.
    Astley shrugged. ‘Well, a fall, anyway. And not here. If you look up…’
    Hall did, to the tangle of ash limbs breaking the sky overhead .
    ‘…Not enough weight in those branches to carry his body. Anyway, how would anybody get him up there? No, he was brought here. Carefully laid down where you see him now. The question is, why?’
    Hall nodded. That was always the question. But there were so many questions in a murder enquiry, so many pieces of a puzzle to fit together. And somebody had taken away the box with the picture on it.
     
    The lights of Columbine had long gone out by the time Jacquie Carpenter’s Ka purred to the kerb outside number 38. There had been a time when she’d parked discreetly around the corner in the early days when she and Peter Maxwell had first been an item. And when she had a career and he had issues. Now, she still had a career and he still had issues, but somehow, there was light at the end of the tunnel of their lives together. Nobody was moving in with anybody. But they were there, at the end of the phone, at the end of the street, a bike ride away at most. They were comfortable with that.
    ‘Evening, Count.’ She waved her car keys at the black and white brute stretched like one of Landseer’s lions on Maxwell’s front lawn, his white bits bright under the crisphalf moon. He wagged his tail, just the once, and continued to crunch his way through the ex-rodent he’d spent the last hour torturing to death. Bloody soft, these coppers; they let you get away with murder.
    She