Free Maxwell's Point by M.J. Trow

of the Proud To Be Loud promotion and had never really worked. Yes, they had records at Head Office (Clitheroe), but they would only tell you how many orange Louds had been sold, not to whom. Peter Maxwell would have remembered a time when tailors kept details of their customers, if only so the stingy buggers would pay up. Now it was all plastic and online shopping, nothing left the store/van without being paid for. And no one, the Assistant Under-Manager was sure, had gone for the online option, presumably on the grounds that men who bought orange shirts didn’t want anyone to know where they lived.
    Benny Palister hit paydirt as the Forty Niners used to say way back in ’49; but he hit an awful lot of enamel walls and plain aggro first. There probably isn’t a profession in the world more ghastly than that of dentistry. Alone of the torturers employed by the Inquisition, they seemed to have survived in the job that time forgot.
Danish Dentist on the Job
was not, as film buff Peter Maxwell could have told you, a piece of badly dubbed porn; it was a horror film focusing on oral sadism of the most depraved kind. Remember
Marathon Man
and the particularly nasty Laurence Olivier drilling seven kinds of shit out of Dustin Hoffman’s molars? So true to life. Benny couldn’t believe it – one of the dentists asked to give up his Sunday morning round of golf to make his records available actually trotted out the cliché – ‘I pay your wages, sonny’. It was true in an indirect sort of way, but it wasnegative and unhelpful and Benny made a quiet mental note to pass the guy’s car registration on to the next Traffic Warden he saw.
    Dentist Number Four, however, was not only polite, but came up with a match. Jim Astley’s X-rays of the dead man’s gnashers found a
doppelgänger
in downtown Brighton. Bingo.
    ‘David Taylor,’ the detective said, sinking back into the driving seat.
    ‘The man at the Point?’ Jacquie checked.
    Benny beamed.
    She patted him on the back. ‘You little genius, you,’ she said. ‘My line of enquiry was always going to be more of a gamble.’ It was a defensive remark, designed to cover her back.
    Benny shot a glance at the Moulinex filling the back seat and said nothing.
    ‘Details?’ Jacquie asked.
    Benny consulted his notebook in time-honoured tradition. ‘David Taylor, aged forty-two. Lives – sorry –
lived
at Flat B, 219 Marston Road.’
    ‘Know it?’
    Benny shook his head. There was no reason why he should.
    ‘Let’s reconnoitre,’ his sergeant said. ‘Perhaps now we can solve your riddle for you – find the reason why there was a whale on the beach.’
     
    ‘Yes?’ a disembodied voice crackled over the intercom.
    ‘Mrs Taylor?’ Benny asked, peering instinctively into the tannoy by the front door. They both knew they were on CCTV.
    ‘Who wants to know?’
    Sunday. Jehovah’s Witness Time. Mormon Moments. You couldn’t be too careful.
    ‘Police.’ Jacquie held her warrant card up to the camera.
    There was a click and a whirr and the pair were inside, climbing a blank staircase in a dank, fish-smelling interior. No mint sauce and lamb of a traditional Sunday here. And certainly no roast beef of Olde England.
    The woman at the door of Flat B had hair like straw and was dragging heavily on a fag as Jacquie and Benny arrived. ‘What’s he done now?’ she asked, eying them both suspiciously.
    ‘Who?’ Jacquie countered.
    ‘Come on,’ she growled, with a voice like a Brillo pad. ‘Don’t piss me about. Jack. I was only up at the Probation with him last week.’
    ‘May we come in, Mrs Taylor?’ Benny asked.
    ‘All right.’ She dropped her scrawny arm from the doorframe. ‘But it’s not Mrs Taylor, all right? That was another bloody lifetime.’
    ‘Who’s Jack?’ Jacquie asked. The lounge was spartan, an Oxfam coffee table in the centre, all-but-buried under copies of the
Daily Express
and
Heat
. Days old, half-drunk cups of coffee jostled with empty