Maxwell's Zoom by BLKDOG Publishing

Author:BLKDOG Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BLKDOG Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

T

im Cathcart wasn’t a vindictive man – well, all right, he was, but he didn’t hold grudges for as long as some. Here he was, nights after the Ancaster murders, sitting in an unmarked car along Broadgate Avenue. He’d seen both the Stakeout films back in the day and in terms of boredom, they didn’t come close. They didn’t touch the endless cloying monotony of it. Especially, they didn’t question the point of it all. What were the bloody CID thinking? All that crap about killers returning to the scene of the crime went out with Arthur Conan Doyle and it had never been a proven fact.

Cathcart shouldn’t have left the car, but his left buttock was numb as buggery already and he’d only just come on duty. He got out, trying to make his leg work and wandered along the path next to next door’s hedge. The smell of privet was nauseating, close up and personal like this as the leaves gave off the lingering heat of the day, but it was activity beyond it that held his attention. The outside lights were on at Number 65 to take the edge off the encroaching dusk and that vicious old biddy Bencher was kneeling over a bed of potentillas, dead-heading ruthlessly and weeding where soil dared show in the mass of groundcover. Cathcart hadn’t been privy to any of the CID reports in circulation; the graveyard gig meant that he spent his days in bed, blissfully unaware of the Covid regulation hell that normal people had to go through. He didn’t know that the Bencher woman had been abandoned by her husband and that she barely had a good word to say about anybody, except, perhaps, the Ancasters.

He peered through the privet. The old girl wasn’t as old as all that and still cut quite a figure in her jeans and sweater. Cathcart wasn’t a film buff like Peter Maxwell. Had he been, Amelia Bencher would have vaguely reminded him of Ava Gardner before the bags got in the way. The letters MILF crept unbidden into his mind but he dismissed them – what would his Mary say? Mrs Bencher was humming to herself, having, apparently, lost all sense of time. she was throwing weeds into a bucket, the hum accentuated by every thrust of her trowel, every clip of her secateurs. Cathcart checked his watch. Only another nine hours, thirty seven minutes to go.

Back in the car, he checked the radio. Usual banal bollocks along with the static. Bit of an argy-bargy at the Cock-a-Hoop on the seafront, which was serving drinks to take away only. A couple of the regulars had tried to barge in and sit in their usual seats and it had taken four uniforms to dislodge them. Some octogenarians could be unusually strong, or so it seemed. Report of a break-in at Fortescue’s, the jewellers in Albemarle Street. Most of that would keep until the morning, but Cathcart would give his eye teeth about now for some action.

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