by M. J. Trow
‘He’s dead!’ Elliot’s eyes were still swivelling all over the place.
‘Who is?’ Maxwell asked, still looking him in the face, forcing him to focus.
‘The old guy. The Colonel. Looks like the dogs got him.’
‘Show me,’ Maxwell said.
‘You can go to Hell,’ Elliot snapped. ‘No way I’m going back there.’ And he dashed off towards the house.
Maxwell retraced the American’s steps. The barking was dying down now and a sort of peace descended. He turned a corner to see the wire mesh of the kennel yard. Half a dozen lurchers prowled here, their ears pricked, padding around the concrete square. Whatever story they had to tell, they weren’t talking. The first three cages were padlocked, but the fourth was open, with no lock at all. And it was empty. Maxwell saw the water-bowls – two of them – and what looked like a child’s toy in one corner, a rag doll, dirty and chewed; some mutt’s comfort blanket. He walked on, turning another corner where the grass fell away towards a line of elms that had once marked the boundary of the Home Farm.
Then he saw him. Another rag doll, but larger than the first. A body lay against the kennel wall, completely out of sight of the house. It was wearing a velvet smoking jacket over a pair of expensive pyjamas and the cloth was dark crimson with blood. Maxwell had seen corpses before, but never quite like this. He was faced with the dilemma of anyone in this situation. Instinctively, you want to know if the victim is still alive, to see if you can do something to keep him that way. And if he is dead, you want to know who it is. But this, however that turns out, was a crime scene and Jacquie, among many others, would never forgive him if his size nines were found all over the place. For a fleeting moment, Maxwell envisaged the scene. SOCO would be here soon, all plastic suits and masks, convinced they were looking for a maniac with bare feet.
He stepped carefully. The grass felt wet underfoot, the survival of early morning. He glanced back at the sun just clearing the cupola of the house; it couldn’t be more than six o’clock. He crouched over the body, not wanting to contaminate the area by kneeling down. Damn, he thought, as his knees creaked; he was too old for this. There was a reason most coppers retired at forty-five. Or was it sixty-eight nowadays? He didn’t envy them at all. Gingerly, he touched the dead man’s shoulder, just enough to turn the body slightly so that he could see the face. Elliot was right; it was the Colonel.
Roddy Hale-ffinch’s eyes were wide and staring, as if he’d seen a ghost. His mouth was open too, but it was difficult to see that because an even larger hole gaped beneath his chin, where his throat had once been. Congealed blood had formed clots that had spattered down his chest and up around the jawline and had sprayed across his cheeks. Maxwell didn’t want to do it, but he touched the man’s face, careful to avoid the blood. What was the word? Tepid? He could just hear the dialogue from any episode of Midsomer Murders you’d care to name.
‘Time of death?’ asked Barnaby.
‘I’ll know more when I get him on the slab,’ the pathologist told him, every episode, either dear old George or that pretty blonde girl whose name Maxwell couldn’t remember.
‘Dear God!’
Another voice made Maxwell stand up, grateful for the chance to do so. It was Jack, the ancient retainer who doubled as security in this most insecure of institutions.
‘If it hasn’t happened already,’ Maxwell said, ‘call an ambulance and the police. You may have to consider not opening today.’
By the time Jacquie arrived with an excited little boy in the seat next to her, Haledown House looked like a film set. There was an ambulance, three marked police cars and one unmarked. But this wasn’t a film. There were no sirens now, no flashing lights and the blue and white tape was out of sight of the main house and Nolan’s stables.
‘I got the call on the way over,’ Jacquie was still sitting in her car with the window wound down. ‘Too late to turn back then. What’s the score?’
‘Hi, fellah.’ Maxwell waved to his son, craning his neck in all directions to see what was going on. ‘Mums and I need a little chat, all right? You just stay put and watch the pretty valley.’ Precocious as he was, quotations from Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade were, as yet, lost on little Nolan. He was annoyed, if anybody had asked him. Here he was, all geared up with boots and hard hat. He could almost smell the horse-shit from here. But Mums and Dads – what were they all about?
Jacquie got out and wandered a short distance away with the other man in her life.
‘Roddy Hale-ffinch,’ he told her. ‘Throat torn out. It’s nasty.’
‘You’ve seen it?
Maxwell nodded. He felt her hand on his arm. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Top hole’ Maxwell smiled. ‘What makes you doubt it?’
‘Well, you’re in your pyjamas with nothing on your feet and you’ve found a mutilated body. Just saying.’
He chuckled, which suddenly sounded irreverent in the context. ‘Thank you, darling heart,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. And I’ll get dressed before I have to talk to any boys in blue. Unless, of course, that’s you, in which case, we could make this a pyjama day.’
‘Don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘I picked up the call on the all-points radio. You know I’m up to my eyes on the County Lines thing. Henry’ll allocate personnel later. In the meantime ...’ She glanced back at Nolan.
‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘This is no country for little boys.’
‘I’ll take him to Plockers’. There’ll be tears, of course, but it can’t be helped. You’re sure you’re all right?’
‘Never been righter,’ he said.
Detective Sergeant Neil Gamage didn’t want to be here. Never exactly a people person, there’d been some argy-bargy involving him in the Wiltshire Constabulary so here he was, CIDing with the best of them in West Sussex. He had more chips on his shoulders than Harry Ramsden. And to add to his woes, he didn’t like toffee-nosed owners of stately homes. And he didn’t like teachers. Apart from that, he was a bang-up sort of bloke.
‘Live here, do you?’ Gamage had taken over the library until the top brass arrived.
Maxwell had taken the opportunity to get some clothes on by this time and sat opposite the man on an excruciatingly uncomfortable Chesterfield. ‘Temporarily,’ he said. ‘I give lectures to the guests.’
Gamage had a list of these on the desk in front of him.
‘Tell me what happened.’ the sergeant said.
‘I’d just got up ...’
‘What time was this?’
A dumpy little policewoman Maxwell vaguely recognised was sitting alongside her boss, taking notes.
‘Er ... I don’t know. Shortly before six, I think.’
‘Early.’ Gamage sniffed. He suspected anyone who got up more than ten minutes before they had to.
‘Strange bed, you know how it is.’ Maxwell could tell already that this was going to be a long haul.
‘Not really.’ Gamage straightened his tie with the air of a man who had never slept in a strange bed in his life. The dumpy policewoman blushed and hoped no one had noticed. ‘And?’
‘I suddenly heard dogs barking, as if something was up.’
‘Something?’ Gamage queried, as if he’d never heard the word before. ‘Up?’
Maxwell smiled. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘if that was a little too colloquial for you. I heard the dogs barking as if an event had occurred which had upset them.’
The look on Gamage’s face said it all. That was all he needed. He’d had the mother of all rows with his girlfriend the night before and she’d stormed out. It had barely been light when he got the ‘Na-na’ call. And now he had a smartarse in front of him. The WPC looked at him, wondering exactly what she should write down. Gamage waved it aside.
‘Then what?’
‘I saw one of our guests ...’
‘Who?’
Maxwell had already realised that DS Gamage was the king of the interruption; he didn’t miss a beat. ‘Elliot
... um, I’m afraid I don’t know his surname. He’s of the colonial persuasion.’
‘American,’ Gamage translated for the benefit of the policewoman.
‘Something was clearly amiss ...’ Maxwell paused, waiting for Gamage’s interlocution, but interlocution came there none.
‘... So I went down. He told me the Colonel was dead. ...’
‘The Colonel?’ Gamage was back on track.
There we go, Maxwell thought; he felt better now, as if the other shoe had dropped. ‘Colonel Roderick Hale-ffinch.’ He glanced down at the WPC’s notebook. ‘That’s two effs.’ He smiled. ‘Lower case.’ She stared at him. ‘I know,’ he shrugged. ‘That’s the upper classes for you; rules of grammar don’t apply to them.’
‘What happened next?’
‘Elliot went back to the house, I assume to call you people. I went around the kennel block.’
‘And?’
‘I found the body.’
‘Did you touch anything?’
‘The deceased’s right shoulder,’ Maxwell remembered. ‘And his right cheek.’
‘Cheek?’ Gamage frowned. ‘Why would you touch his cheek?’
‘He was clearly dead. I wondered if I could work out for approximately how long.’
Gamage looked at him. ‘That’s a rather precise science,’ he said, flatly. ‘Not a job for a civilian.’
‘Well, colour me chastened,’ Maxwell said.
Gamage’s face seemed to narrow and his eyes became hooded, flinty. ‘You’re Peter Maxwell, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘I think you’ll find that’s what it says there,’ he pointed to the WPC’s notepad, ‘what I told you less than ...’ he checked his watch ‘... five minutes ago.’
‘Oh, you’re famous at the nick,’ Gamage said. ‘One of the people I was told to watch out for. One of those interfering busybodies who always wants to get involved. A sort of Jane fucking Marple without the knitting.’
‘Oh, I’ve been known to drop the odd pearl or two,’ Maxwell smiled. He was too much of a gentleman to tell the sergeant whose husband he was.
‘And I know perfectly well who you’re married to,’ Gamage said. Maxwell was impressed; the man could read minds. ‘And let me tell you, granddad, that doesn’t cut any mustard with me. DI Carpenter-Maxwell’s not my line manager and since you’re involved, she never will be, not as far as this case goes. So there’s not going to be any English cosy about all this. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a suspect, just like everybody else in this bloody mausoleum.’ He gestured to the WPC, who closed her notebook and followed him out of the room, leaving Maxwell still sitting on the other side of the desk.
‘Well,’ Maxwell put on his best children’s TV presenter voice, ‘He wasn’t very nice, was he, boys and girls?’
Elliot was in the drawing room later that morning. He’d skipped breakfast on account of the fact that he couldn’t guarantee to keep his kedgeree down on account, in turn, of what he’d stumbled upon earlier. He had a large balloon of brandy in his hand and Maxwell wondered how far down the decanter he had got since half past nine.
‘Rye?’ the American’s concept of drinks was all over the place, but at least now he’d put some proper clothes on.
‘I’m a Southern Comfort man myself,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Also, it’s a bit early for me.’
Elliot was impressed by his good taste, less so with his sense of what was the right time to drink. ‘It’s good to see some civilization’s come across the Pond. Here’s looking at ya.’ He took a swig.
All in all, it wasn’t a great Humphrey Bogart, but then, what was?
‘How are you feeling now?’ Maxwell asked, moving a copy of Tatler that the management had tastefully placed on a settee.
‘Right as rain,’ Elliot said, topping up his glass before he sank into the oblivion of a softly stuffed armchair. ‘Where I come from, this sort a’thing’s all in a day’s work.’
‘Have the police had a word?’ Maxwell probed, sensing that Elliot, stiffened by alcohol, was trying to resume his crime-witness of the world persona.
‘Yeah, some fresh-faced kid. Didn’t catch his name.’
‘Gamage,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Not, I don’t think, one of nature’s gentlefolk.’
‘I filled him in right away. Good that I was first there, in fact. Anybody else would have missed stuff.’
‘I’m sure the sergeant was very grateful,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘What stuff didn’t you miss?’
Elliot eased himself back in the chair, swirling his brandy like a bad advertisement. ‘One of the gates was open, of the kennels, I mean.’
‘Yes.’ Maxwell nodded. He’d seen that too. ‘From which you deduce?’
Elliot blinked at him. Why didn’t these goddamned Limeys speak their own language? ‘What’s that crazy book? Flo’s always quoting from it – The Strange Case of the Dog in the Night Time?’
‘Conan Doyle originally,’ Maxwell said, ‘although I don’t think the good doctor of Southsea knew very much about dogs, one way or another.’
‘Well, the goddamn dog did it,’ Elliot shouted, talking yet another swig.
‘Do you know that for a fact, or ...?’
The American leaned forward. He hadn’t shelled out the federal debt of Louisiana to be trampled on by British coppers and patronized by ... he didn’t even have a word for what Maxwell was. ‘Listen, fellah. All I know is that back home, there’d be miles o’ yellow tape all over this place. The cops’d have a man in custody by now and Miranda or no Miranda, he’d be singing like a goddamned canary.’
Maxwell waited until the furore had passed and Elliot had sagged back into the cushions of his chair, all passion spent. Just for a moment, he heard the ticking of the grandmother in the corner. ‘We’re a bit slower over here,’ he said, softly, lulling the man and boosting his national ego at the same time.
‘Damn straight,’ Elliot echoed that and reached for the decanter. He’d already paid for it, so he was having something.
‘I find it helps,’ Maxwell said, in the tone he had honed on many an out-of-control Year Nine over the years, ‘to go over things again in situations like this.’
Elliot stared at him. How many ‘situations like this’ had Maxwell been through, he wondered. ‘Sure,’ the American said. ‘Mano a mano, you betchya.’
‘For instance,’ Maxwell rested his arms along the settee’s back as if the two were discussing the America’s Cup rather than a grisly murder on their doorstep. ‘What were you doing out that early?’
‘My constitutional,’ Elliot said. Maxwell had never met an American who wasn’t obsessed with the constitution, a document lifted almost entirely from John Locke and added to continually because the Founding Fathers had forgotten things, a bit like compiling a shopping list while in the bath; but whereas then you tended to forget the instant coffee, the Founding Fathers had forgotten the right to bear arms, the right to say nothing in court if you were guilty as hell ... the list just went on and on. ‘Back home, I cover a couple of miles a day before breakfast.’
‘Balancing your humours,’ Maxwell smiled.
‘Whatever. Flo was dead to the world – no pun intended – so I thought I’d get a little jog in. Next thing I know, there’s the Colonel dead as a possum, only for real. Well, I checked the place over, you know, for footprints and DNA and stuff.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing,’ Elliot shrugged. ‘I figured I couldn’t do more, so I decided to call the cops. That’s when you showed up.’
Maxwell didn’t remember it quite like that, but Elliot was clearly not a man to dwell on past hysterics, so he had moved on to an altogether more acceptable scenario in which he was centre stage, with the total recall of a Carrie Wells and the pistol-drawing speed of a Rayland Givens.
‘There was one thing, though,’ Elliot suddenly remembered, ‘and I don’t think I told the cops this. I saw ...’
‘There you are!’ A voice made both men turn, in Elliot’s case accom
panied by a wild stab at focussing. Ariana Hale-ffinch was a woman in a hurry, as she always was. ‘You poor man, you must have been terrified!’
Maxwell, product of fine breeding and good schools as he was, stood up, leaving Elliot slumped in his colonial ignorance in the armchair. The chatelaine of Haledown House patted the American’s shoulder, which was about as demonstrative as they got at Haledown and he rather enjoyed the attention, turning puppy-dog eyes up to meet hers. ‘It’s nothing,’ he drawled, the cool man of action again. He wished he had some sunglasses to remove slowly like Horatio Caine always had in CSI Miami. He and Flo never missed, if it came up on reruns. Flo would go weak at the knees every time. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, by the way.’ He’d heard it in all the cop shows and felt he ought to say it, with exactly the same lack of sincerity they all did. Jethro Gibbs would have been so proud.
‘Thank you,’ she said, solemnly. ‘Uncle Roddy ... well, it has been rather a shock.’
‘It seems a little rude to offer you your own drink, Mrs Hale-ffinch,’ Maxwell said, keeping it formal as he held up the decanter, ‘but ...?’
‘No, Max, thank you,’ she smiled. ‘I’ve only just finished with the police and they may need me again later. I just wanted to say, Elliot ... Max ... how truly sorry I am for all this. You’ll understand me when I say that things like this just don’t happen in West Sussex!’
‘No, indeed,’ Elliot said. West Virginia, now; that was another matter.
Chapter Eight
‘H
ave you found the missing dog yet?’ Maxwell perched on the hard edge of the Chesterfield again.
‘Dogs, plural,’ the DCI told him, ‘and, cliché though it is, shouldn’t I be asking the questions?’
Henry Hall and Peter Maxwell went back a long way, ever since young Jenny, one of Maxwell’s Own, was found dead at the Red House and the Head of Sixth Form himself had been in the frame for her murder. The years had been kind to Henry Hall. The waist was a little broader, the eyes rather more tired, but, all in all, the ’30s band-leader turned detective had worn well. Better than Maxwell, anyway, who, whenever he caught sight of himself in a mirror, began humming the old number, ‘Methus’lah lived 900 years, Methus’lah lived 900 years; but who calls that livin’, when no gal will give in, to no man what’s 900 years?’ Ah, they didn’t write them like that any more!
