In a story I posted earlier in the year – ‘Life at Tethers End’ – I had my main character as a writer of racy stories. I’ve had a chat with Adam, and he has allowed me to post the first four stories as listed in that one. They are heavily edited to cut out the more explicit sexual details. This is the first story. They run to a total of 19 chapters and are sequential.
Marianne

Body Of Water – A Max Force Story
Chapter 1

My name is Maxine Fawcett and I had been, not long ago, a policewoman. I had done well throughout my training at Hendon, as well as my rookie days on the force. I had two redeeming qualities. One was a female intuition which I pretended was my power of deduction. The other was my personality, that attracted men to me like moths to a flame. I called that one my power of seduction.

It was the second power that had led to my enforced retirement from the police. So, I set about using my first power. I had studied the laws regarding setting up as a Private Investigator, had sat an examination to show that I was a fit person to take on that job, paid the fees and got my license to investigate.

I had created my own website as the way to attract customers. I had called my business ‘Max Force’ as a tip of the hat to my name. It just said, ‘Max Force – whatever it is, we can move it for you.’ I had originally meant it to mean obstacles but had some calls asking me my rates to shift furniture around the country. I added ‘Obstacles to your happy future a speciality.’ That’s when I started getting calls asking me my price to carry out hits.

In the end, the website had ‘Max Force – whatever it is, we can move it for you. You have a problem; I make it go away. You need help, I can get it for you. You need protection, I can keep you safe.’ That’s when I had emailed a link to all the boys and girls on my old phone, before I traded it in on a newer one. You never knew what would arise from old friendships.

I kept my old phone number, then waited for it to come alive with queries about my taking on other people’s problems. Of course, nothing happened, so I put up posters around Islington, where I had a flat in a block of dozens. I had been able to save enough to keep a roof over my head for six months, with a small amount left over for food and petrol for my battered Cortina.

I started to get queries about lost dogs, lost children, lost keys, lost husbands. It seemed like my clients had always lost something. I didn’t lose my own way, however, and tracked down as many lost items as I could. The best paying ones was finding lost husbands, usually so that someone else could give them legal papers regarding a divorce or maintenance payments.

I started to earn enough to keep the flat and run the Cortina, as well as eating reasonably well. That’s when I got a call from a girl that had been to school with me. Her name was Susan Brinkford, and her nickname had been ‘Ovens’ because she was so hot. She had been the queen bee of every year, with her long blonde hair and statuesque figure, even from an early age. I had often wondered about that, until I saw a shop that sold accessories that added shape to a young girl’s body.

By the time we had left school, she didn’t need the accessories any longer, and had been believed to become a Super Model and earn squillions before she retired at thirty, with a handsome husband and a bank balance to die for. I, on the other hand, had earned the nickname of ‘Flatback Fawcett’ by being found behind the cycle sheds with the captain of the soccer team taking my virginity. After that, I was expected to end up on the street, wearing very little and caring even less.

Needless to say, I didn’t bother keeping in touch with those I had left behind when I signed up to be in the police. None of them would have understood my reasons. My father had been a detective, years before, and had been stabbed by a murderer as they were making the arrest. He had been given a proper police funeral. Which didn’t really help my mother and the four-year-old me at the time. I had admired my father.

I didn’t admire my mother, although she kept me fed and dressed while I was at school. She was a Social Worker, and I had read enough about what they would do. I really don’t know if she had taken children from crying mothers and put them in institutions, but there were enough stories circulating in school to make me wonder. She had a no-nonsense character that reinforced my thoughts, but we got on reasonably well, until the day I told her I had joined the force.

“No daughter of mine is going in the police. You know what happened to your father! The best thing they did for him was his funeral. If you enter the force, you can exit the home!”

So, I did. I had some money that my grandmother had left me, which I could receive at eighteen, and I had some money I had saved from my summer job of the last three years, working as a check-out chick in a local supermarket. I had enough for the bond on the flat and enough to feed me until I started to get paid.

A boyfriend with a van helped me move. It was odd to be using the van for what it had been designed for, rather than our usual twice a week lay. We just had to push the old mattress to one side to get my bed and side-table in. The flat already had a fridge and a washing machine, both small but big enough for me. We christened my bed in its new home, but he went cold when I told him I was joining the police. I think that he thought I might grass on his little greenhouse in an allotment where he grew weed.

For a while, I remained aloof and chaste as I studied hard and exercised more than I had ever done before. By the end of the course, I had done well enough to be sent to a good station. I don’t know how much my odd nights with a few of the lecturers helped in that. I learned everyday policing with some good coppers and was doing well until my fall from grace. It was such a simple thing, but bad enough to be asked to leave.

Which leads me back to Susan. I was cordial and she sounded worried. She asked me what I charged, and I told her it was two hundred a day for old friends. She told me that she would pay me for ten days, minimum, if I could come up to her home in Norfolk. I could stay at her house while I was there and that she would tell me her problem when I arrived. The directions were easy to follow, head out of London, through Chelmsford and Colchester and get to Lowestoft. She lived on a farm on Hall Lane, which was a turn left off the Millenium Way. I made notes and told her that I would be there the next day, about lunch time.

I looked for her home on Google Maps and saw that it was a farm, near Oulton Broad. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place that I had expected her to be living in. If she had achieved a fraction of her potential, she should have been living in a country manor with her titled husband.

The next morning, I had breakfast and dressed in my usual Max Force outfit. Black boots with black leather jeans, with a black satin top over black underwear. With my raven hair, I thought of myself as a Gorgeous Goth, but used normal deep red lipstick and nail polish, rather than black. I packed a bag for ten days away, made sure I had my phone and charger, the laptop and charger, and locked up.

It would be interesting to be out in the countryside, as I was essentially a city girl. Tina, my old Cortina, performed well on the open road. It hummed along quite well once I got over fifty miles an hour. The trip was uneventful, and I arrived in her driveway just before twelve. There was an older farmhouse to my right and a newbuild directly in front. When I got out of the car, she came out of the newbuild and gave me a big hug.

“Maxine, honey. It’s so good to see you, come on in and I’ll put the kettle on. We can catch up first and then you can bring in your things. I’ll tell you what my problem is over a cuppa.”

I followed her into a rather nice house, if a little too unkempt for my taste. She had worn well and still had her model looks. The peasant dress and slippers were not something I would have thought I’d ever see her in. We went through the house to the kitchen where she pointed to a chair. As she fussed with the kettle, she started to talk.

“You know, Maxine, I was jealous of you at high school. There I was, the best dressed and classiest girl in school, and there you were, being a proper woman and getting laid. I had made myself too good for any of the boys but yearned to have the experiences that you were obviously enjoying. That’s what led me to this backwater dump!”

“What about the modelling?”

“Hah! When I told my parents that I wanted to model, they told me in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t what a good Catholic girl did. My mother had won a beauty contest at a holiday camp in the sixties, and that’s why she insisted that I look my best in school. It became my normal to be well dressed, well made-up and wear enhancing attachments to look like a film star. She would inspect me before I left home every morning and when I got home every night. If I had a hair out of place she would growl and tell me that I was letting the family name down.”

“That must have been tough?”

“You bet it was tough. The thing was, although I didn’t know it, I was slated to work for my father at the farm products store in Ipswich. My parents didn’t run the stores themselves but had managers. There were three stores, Chelmsford, Ipswich, and Norwich, at that time. We had a flat in Ipswich for me to stay in, so it wasn’t too hard to go there. The thing was that it was the first time I had been free of my parents, and I got slightly crazy with that freedom.”

“Understandable. In my case, when I moved into my flat, I found out that I had to do my own cooking and housework.”

“That was something I never managed to master, hence the dust around this place. Anyway, I met a nice boy who took my virginity and I found that I liked it. Then Clement came into the store. He was a couple of years older than me, very handsome in an aristocratic way, and was the son of a big landowner. Part of that land is where this place is built. Clement made me flutter inside, and we went out a few times before we ended up in a hotel room where we rutted like rabbits on more than one occasion. I was employed and I was now the woman I wanted to be.”

“Something happened?”

“Shit, yes. I fell pregnant. My mother had never told me about birth control, expecting me to remain a virgin until I was married to a nice Catholic boy. The shitstorm that it created was truly frightening. My parents insisted that we get married, his parents wanted him to settle down, so we ended up walking down the aisle when I was in my third month. We had a short honeymoon, with him getting angrier with every passing day.”

“Bit of a player, was he?”

“You bet. I had stifled his playboy days, I had been stupid enough to get pregnant, I was holding him back from his true potential. No matter what was wrong, it was always my fault. His parents were very nice to me, as I had stopped him from being beaten up by angry fathers around this town. They gave us the place next door to live in. What a dump that was. I was getting sadder and sadder and then I had a miscarriage in my sixth month. He was happy, we could get a divorce and he could revert to his old ways.”

“But you’re Catholic.”

“Exactly! We were bound together until death do us part. Anyway, his family had owned about a thousand acres around this farm, and they lived down the road. They had sold off most of it to other farmers as they aged, and the only properties left was where they lived and the place where we lived, when he was home, that is. By that time, we had separate bedrooms. His folks sold their home to a company that turned the place into a hotel and allowed the farm buildings to decay. They moved into an old folks home a little way to the north.”

She put the tea in front of me and sat down with one, herself.

“That’s when they gave me the money to build this place, which I gratefully accepted. All the contracts were in my name alone, and it became my home. He still lives next door, when he is there, but we live totally separate lives. I have my own car and do my own shopping, and he does whatever he wants.”

“Do you have wills?”

“Yes. We wrote wills when we married, leaving our worldly goods to each other. I have since changed mine, leaving everything to my young brother. He was still in primary when we were at school. I see him, now and then, and we get along quite well. He’s at our old school now, and close to graduating. He, unlike me, will be able to go to university, something that my father thought was not a career path for a mere girl.”

“I expect that he was too lazy to change his will?”

“Yes, it’s in the drawer with my new one. Why I’ve asked you up here is because my husband hasn’t been around for three weeks, and I’m wondering what’s become of him. Can you track him down for me?”

“I can try. Have you been to the police or checked the hospitals?”

“I’ve done nothing. It took a while for me to be worried and I think that I would be suspect by waiting so long to declare him missing.”

“It will be all right. He has a history of not coming home. I will check the police first and then talk to the main hospitals. What was he driving?”

“It changed. He had a friend with a car yard and would drive a car for a week or two to give him some room on his yard. The last one I saw him in was a white Range Rover.”

“Before we go any further. Can you tell me how you make ends meet? If he has the money, what is your position?”

“My in-laws have been very good. As I said, this house has everything in my name. The only land they own is this block and the acreage behind it. They transferred four hundred thousand to my account to build the house and it was a standard build that cost just over two fifty. I used the remainder to level the five acres behind us and put poly over it, planting strawberries. There are a few casuals who come in at picking time to pick and pack. They get picked up by a wholesaler and they pay me for them.”

“What happens when your in-laws die?”

“They have both made wills to leave their estate to each other, with Clement and I sharing remainder after they’ve both gone. He doesn’t know that the money they put in for the house didn’t include any legal ownership other than mine. I’ll get enough to buy the land, with that payment being split in two with half coming back, so I get to own the lot for less than sixty percent of its value. When that happens, I plan to demolish the old place and put up a modern shed.”

“You do realise that it gives you a good motive for seeing him dead. The police will think that you may even have him six feet under the back yard. That’s if you don’t report him missing and someone else does, like his car yard friend. He must have others that he sees regularly.”

“I’ve no idea, that’s what has held me up. Look, I’ll show you your room and then you can get your things in. If you want, I’ll go to the police and report him missing.”

“Tomorrow is the time for that. What I want you to do, while I bring my things in, is to sit here and write me a list of everybody who he knows, and every place you know he goes to, from schooldays on. Then, I want to see his room, you said he lived next door?”

“I’ll give you the keys when you’ve freshened up.”

She showed me the room I would use. It was obviously a guest room and had some things in the wardrobe.

“My grandmother sometimes comes to see how I’m going.”

I got my things in and locked the car. Then I went into the ensuite to have a pee. It took ten minutes with some damp toilet paper before I was happy about sitting down. When I went back to the kitchen, she was still writing. She gave me a ring with a couple of keys on it.

“One’s for the front and the other’s for the back. I haven’t been in there for months, not since this place was liveable.”

I went out the front door and walked to the front door of the old farmhouse, pulling on my gloves. Opening up, I went inside. Thankfully there wasn’t any smell of decomposing human, but a faint whiff of old vegetables, which got worse when I found the kitchen.

Except for the rotting veggies, the place was immaculate, although there was some dust of a few weeks being neglected. Our Clement must be a neatness freak, no wonder he had trouble living with a slob like Susan. Before I did anything else, I put the veggies in a bin, along with the contents of the fridge that had gone off as well. I left the fridge door open to air it out and took the bin bag out the back door and put it in the rubbish bin, after I had a look in that to see if there was anything interesting that he had tossed out.

Back in the house, I found the door that hid the stairs and went up. It didn’t take long to look around as he had obviously not used the upstairs since he lived here on his own. By the state of it, I wouldn’t have used it either. There were no footprints in the thick dust.

Back downstairs, I looked at where he had spent his time. On one side of the front door was a lounge room with a good TV fixed to the wall and a very comfy chair. Along one wall was an office desk and two filing cabinets. Not unusual if he had been managing a large farm, but not what you would expect a fun-loving playboy to have.

I left those for a moment and went to the other side of the front door. He had turned the old dining room into his bedroom. By the single bed, I expect that he never brought his girls home, so I would be looking for his name in hotel registers, unless he had a flat that Susan didn’t know about.

I took my time searching as I had no idea what the guy was like, other than being a sleaze bag. Nothing slipped into the made-up bed. Nothing under the mattress. Two suitcases under the bed, where a lot of people store them. They don’t keep several hundred cigarettes in them though, with packets without the UK warnings. So, he had been involved in smuggling, unless he was a very heavy smoker. The other case contained money, lots of it in pounds, Euros, and Swiss francs. I left it as I found it and moved to the drawers and the wardrobe.

He had been a snappy dresser, with a range of good labels on his things. The odd item was a set of fisherman’s waders. I went back into the lounge room and started on the desk and filing cabinets.

The desk was one of those flatpack things with just two drawers. There was a lead to a power board that ran a lamp and a printer. There was another lead for powering a laptop, which was not evident. I looked in the drawers. The top one had all the usual office accessories, and the bottom one had the handbooks for the printer and an HP laptop.

The two filing cabinets were chalk and cheese. On contained paperwork from way back in the running of the farm when it was in its heyday. I wondered if he showed these to his young girls to prove that he was a man of means. It also had his personal papers, from his birth certificate on. There was the marriage certificate for Susan, and another eight months later, for another woman in Italy. I took a picture of that one and left the original where I found it.

He had no less than three passports, all looking genuine. There was his UK one, and also a French and Italian one. All had the usual stamps in them to show that he had used them all on a regular basis. They were all in the name of Clement Andrew Cornwall. The other cabinet was a wealth of information for the Customs and Excise branch.

It had notes about pick-up of smuggled goods, usually cigarettes and spirits. There were a few which included designer clothing, mainly originating in Italy. On top of that, he had also dabbled in drugs coming in from the Netherlands. There was a map of the offshore wind farms with some marked; no doubt where the shipments were left for later pick-up.

I went back to the drawer with his personal papers and pulled out the certificates and passports. I needed to get some idea of the timeline. When I looked at the passports, I found that he would leave Britain on his English one, and arrive in France or Italy on those passports, then leaving those countries and arriving back in Britain using the English passport to enter. This left no trail of where he had been.

I looked at the Italian certificate and checked the date against the Italian passport. He had been out of the country for three weeks, with the marriage taking place two days after he had arrived in Naples. It had taken place in the Chiesa della Santissima Trinità degli Spagnoli. The wife was Silvana Guiliano, daughter of Salvatore Guiliano, a businessman.

I had a feeling of dread when I checked the surname on my phone. The Guiliano clan had been a prominent member of the Camorra, the Mafia clans that controlled Naples. Salvatore was a son of Pio, the leader of the clan until the seventies. It had been taken over by the eldest son, Luigi, until the turn of the century, when the leadership passed to his sister. Erminia was picked because she was the most level-headed one not in prison, which was rectified when she was arrested less than a year later. It was said that when she was young, and bored, she would announce, “I have to shoot someone!”

Silvana was named after her aunt, one of Erminia’s sisters. I looked at Pio and the main business was cigarette smuggling in the early days. If Clement had unwittingly crossed this family, it was unlikely that we would find his body.

Marianne Gregory © 2024