Maxwell's Curse by M. J. Trow

Author:M. J. Trow [Trow, M. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781835265307
Amazon: B0CW1F8FY8
Goodreads: 212178799
Publisher: Joffe Books
Published: 2024-04-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Alison Thorn went to school in Salisbury, in the shadow of the tallest spire in England. She was a creative child, who loved painting and music. She got ten O levels, one of almost the last generation in the country to do so. She took Music, Art and Media Studies at A level and then went on to the West Sussex Institute for a B Ed degree. She started teaching in Hove, where the infants loved her and moved on to become deputy at Wetherton four years later. When Mrs Appleton retired the following year, Alison Thorn was a natural to replace her.

Then, in the cold middle January of Maxwell’s Millennium, somebody killed her.

Martin Stone stood with Jacquie Carpenter in the first-floor flat where her body was found, looking out of the window that looked out over the park. It was Monday and a leaden sky threatened the outskirts of Leighford, promising snow. SOCO had been all over the place, checking in their meticulous way every inch of the geography of a person’s life. The walls, the door handles, the furniture, every bit of it was dusted for prints. They had marked out the place where the dead woman had been found, lying on the floor between the bed and the dressing table.

Stone hadn’t been there to see her, but Jacquie had and she turned cold again at the memory of it. Alison Thorn frozen in the hideous stiffness of rigor mortis. Alison Thorn naked. Alison Thorn with her throat cut. Her mouth was slightly parted, with a dribble of blood down her chin and onto her neck. Her stare accused the ceiling, her sightless eyes sunken and dull. Jacquie had watched as Jim Astley had worked his scientific magic, probing with his white-gloved fingers every private place the woman had. Must it always come to this, she wondered, a glittering career cut short by some mad bastard and the results of a rectal temperature?

‘Out of my light, dear girl,’ Astley had boomed, never one to suffer WDCs gladly. She’d meekly complied.

‘Hello, Alison,’ Martin Stone had pressed the answerphone button again, now that SOCO had taken their prints and the detectives listened to the disembodied voice. ‘Evelyn here. Are you all right? Only, we didn’t get a call or a fax or anything. Give us a ring, can you? April’s fine for today.’

‘That’s the school,’ Stone said, grim-faced, ‘wondering where she is. We only spoke to her last Thursday.’

‘What was that about?’ Jacquie asked.

‘A loose end, really,’ Stone sighed. There were no more messages on the machine. ‘Albert Walters lived in Wetherton as a kid, went to the local school.’

‘So?’

‘So, it was my guess that Elizabeth Pride did too. And of course, Jane Cruikshank.’

‘Did they?’

Stone shrugged, leafing through Alison Thorn’s copies of Cosmopolitan and Red, piled loosely on her coffee table. ‘Kevin Brand drew the short straw and talked to Ms Thorn. I have to confess I had a zizz in the car. Pride of course wasn’t the old girl’s maiden name, neither was Cruikshank.

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