Maxwell's Chain Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hall exploded. ‘Listen to yourself, man. Most people go a whole lifetime and don’t find any. I know dozens of coppers who’ve never seen a corpse.’ He humphed and turned away. ‘Surprisingly few, indeed!’
    Maxwell fell into step with him, the path over the dunes lit brightly now by the SOCOs’ arc lamps. The scene was surreal, as if a B-feature camera crew had descended on Willow Bay to film The Creature That Was Thwarted By Peter Cushing II . Men in white suits measured, photographed, probed, spoke into walkie talkies. Red, white and blue lights rotated across the sand.
    ‘Well, Henry. You must know what I mean. You’re always saying I get too involved in things.I’m sure my kids at school think I bump into bodies round every corner.’
    Henry Hall stopped and pointed, rather theatrically for him, away to his left, landward, away from his crime scene. ‘Mr Maxwell…Max, please go home. I can vouch for the fact that you have a lovely partner. Your son’s smiling face grinning up from his mother’s desk is sometimes the only smile I see all day. Just for once, leave this to us. But, just before you do,’ he closed to his man, ‘what can you tell me about the photographer?’
    Maxwell frowned and glanced back at the man. ‘Not very much. Takes a darned good photo. Reliable sort.’
    ‘How did he react when you stumbled over the remains?’
    Maxwell laughed. It was nervous reaction, really. He was always amazed, even after all this time, that everybody didn’t see the world as he did. And he didn’t like the way the conversation was going. ‘Bill? He was clearly horrified when he saw that hand. I thought he was dead.’
    Hall shrugged. ‘Good actor.’
    ‘Bill?’ Gobsmacked again. ‘No, no, he came to me with the photographs, I told you…’
    ‘Yes, precisely. He took photographs of a crime being committed and didn’t do anything until thenext day when he came to you. Is that what you would consider normal?’
    It was late. It was cold. And the tide was coming in. No one was at their best.
    ‘Chief Inspector, are you somehow implying that Bill Lunt…’
    ‘Would you consider the time-lag normal?’ Hall persisted.
    ‘Umm…Well, it’s not what everyone would do, perhaps, but understandable enough in its way.’ Maxwell stood head to head with Hall, neither man inclined to give way. ‘He wasn’t even sure what he had photographed until we had a look. It might have been a branch or anything.’
    ‘I suppose,’ Henry Hall said grudgingly, ‘that at least we have an accurate time of death.’
    ‘How, accurate?’ Maxwell said. He’d read The Romeo Error and Time of Death . He knew that forensic science was going backwards and the Great Certainties were no more. The days of Simpson and Spilsbury were gone for ever.
    Henry Hall smiled condescendingly. ‘You probably don’t know this,’ he said, ‘but digital cameras time and date the images to the second.’
    Maxwell smiled back, the smile of a man with a surprise up his sleeve. He’d got a million. ‘Thank you, Henry, for considering me a dinosaur anda very early one, just out of the primeval soup at that. I am in fact a bit of a whiz with the old digital camera. I do have, as you kindly pointed out, a particularly lovely partner and a totally enchanting son, both of whom I record for posterity at every opportunity. Unfortunately, Bill Lunt is not a digital man. He prefers steam, hand-cranked, call it what you will. His camera just about has a shutter and a lens. Apparently, it is what makes photography art.’
    ‘Oh, fine. Just fine.’ Henry Hall walked away and something in his step warned Maxwell not to follow. He raised his voice slightly, to allow for the rapidly increasing distance between them and the annoying bellow of the surf.
    ‘I’ll be at home then, Henry, should you need me,’ he called. There was no reply. ‘Bye, then.’ When there was still no reply he turned and made his way back towards the car park. A