Maxwell’s Curse Read Online Free

Baying for blood and they don’t care whose it is. Maxwell. You’ve talked to him?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    The DCI looked into the steady grey eyes of the DC. He didn’t like his people mixing it with Joe Public. But he knew that they were human too, with families and friends. There were bound to be relationships. But with Maxwell, it was different. The man had a knack of turning up in the middle of somebody else’s pile of shit. And the annoying thing was he always came up smelling of roses. ‘What has he told the press?’
    ‘Nothing, sir,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’
    ‘Jacquie.’ He closed to her, anxious that the paparazzi should get no wind of this. ‘I don’t know how deep you’re in with Maxwell. I don’t want to know. But when you tell me he doesn’t know anything, every alarm in my body starts to ring. Peter Maxwell always knows something. Usually, it’s where the bodies are buried.’ He turned to go, then turned back. ‘And I don’t necessarily mean that figuratively.’
    Then he was gone, into the thick of it, facing the cameras and the music of the media.
    ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen …’
    Maxwell thought how much smaller Sean Holden looked in the flesh than on the screen. There he was on the local news that night, Meridian’s man at the murder, standing outside 38 Columbine with a microphone in his hand, talking to camera.
    ‘The body of an unidentified woman was found on this path behind me at midnight last night, as the old year turned.’
    ‘Very poetic, Count, don’t you think?’ Maxwell stretched his feet in front of the coal-effect fire. The cat continued the habit of a lifetime and didn’t answer. ‘Still, I must put a lick of paint on that doorframe. Nothing like a murder for outlining one’s need for DIY.’
    ‘Police are regarding the case as one of murder. Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall said at a press conference earlier this evening that the first task was to discover who the dead woman was.’
    The face of a million secrets flashed on to the screen, causing Maxwell to blink for a second.
    ‘Anyone with any information,’ the reporter went on, should contact Leighford Police Station on 825311 or Crime Stoppers on 0800 555 111.’
    ‘Why me?’ Maxwell pressed the button on his remote and Sean Holden disappeared into the ether of the airwaves. And he found himself becoming Humphrey Bogart again. ‘Of all the paths on all the estates in all the world, why did you have to be left on mine?’ He caught the flick of Metternich’s tail out of the corner of his eye. ‘Of course, Count, you’re right,’ he said. ‘That is a much more pertinent question, isn’t it? – Who rang the doorbell?’
    That was the year that Modular A levels were launched onto an unsuspecting world. Leighford High School had hung nervously back from the pilots at the end of the old century, largely at the behest of the educational dinosaur that was its Head of Sixth Form. The school’s headteacher, James Diamond BSc, MEd, had been all for it, embracing the new examination structure rather as an idiot would embrace a boa constrictor. But Peter Maxwell had whispered the two dread words that were guaranteed to make any head teacher blanch and reconsider – ‘league tables’. James Diamond had held off.
    Now, however, there was no choice. The twenty-first century had caught up with Leighford High School and with it, Peter Maxwell. Modular A levels it was. And the first exams were now – January, wet and grey, with the temperature falling and the drizzle driving in from the west over the breeze-block and glass monolith that was Leighford High.
    So it was that the laughingly called Spring Term began and a distinctly damp Head of Sixth Form wheeled in from the north-east, the spray flying off the spokes of White Surrey, his famous bike. Not for Surrey the rusty old bikesheds where the more robust kids chained their Meteors and Road Ragers. Peter Maxwell led the old