Maxwell's Summer

by M. J. Trow

  Gamage stood up and folded his notebook ostentatiously and put it in his pocket.

  Hall looked up. ‘Still here?’ he said, blandly, the light from the window blanking out his glasses.

  Gamage left, his staccato steps drumming as he stomped out like a toddler. He closed the door with such elaborate care that it was worse than a slam.

  Henry Hall shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked, as he took out his pen to do his own notes. ‘Six months?’

  ‘At the most,’ Maxwell said. ‘Not one of nature’s gentlefolk, as I may have observed before.’

  ‘No.’ Hall looked up and Maxwell settled down for a chinwag about the latest atrocity. ‘What time did you find the body?’

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell said ... ‘it must have been about ...’

  In his pocket, Hall’s phone began to ring. He fished it out and grunted. ‘It’s your wife,’ he said, then, into the phone, ‘Jacquie.’

  Maxwell could just hear his wife’s voice on the other end – he would know the cadence of her speech anywhere, the rises and falls, the pattern of her words – but not what she was saying.

  Hall let her finish and said, ‘Is it worth searching, do you think?’

  The answer was short and simple.

  ‘I’ll see if there’s anything in plain sight, otherwise we’ll need a warrant. Anything else?’

  Another answer, a little longer.

  ‘Have they? I’ll tell the Hale-ffinches. I’m sure they must be worried. Pets, that kind of thing.’ Hall bobbed his head at Maxwell. He wasn’t a pet man himself, but he knew all about Maxwell and his cat. ‘Anything ...? Okay. I’ll see you later. Oh, by the way, can you just put it out, on the quiet, that if any patrol sees Gamage walking to Leighford, they’re not to pick him up.’

  This time, Maxwell could work out the question. ‘Not to?’

  ‘That’s right. Not to. I’ll tell you later. Max is here. Any message?’

  The answer again was short.

  ‘Just the usual. Will do. Bye.’ Hall put the phone back in his pocket. ‘I suppose you know what the usual is,’ he said, picking up his pen again.

  ‘Depends on the circumstances,’ Maxwell said. ‘But I get the gist. I gather they’ve found the dogs?’

  ‘At the RSPCA in Leighford. They were found wandering on the beach.’

  ‘Covered in blood?’

  ‘No. No blood. Not too surprising, as ...’

  ‘... the dogs didn’t do it,’ Maxwell interrupted. ‘I didn’t think so. It just seemed so ... so out of character. People like Roddy Hale-ffinch don’t go tiddling about with lurchers before dawn. In fact, people like Roddy Hale-ffinch don’t do anything without an audience, so it was strange even to find him alone out there. He was definitely posed.’ Maxwell looked at Hall with a wry smile. ‘But we’re here about Elliot Schwarzenegger, aren’t we? But before we do, what else was Jacquie telling you? What should you be searching for?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I be asking the questions?’ Hall said, not for the first time.

  ‘Of course,’ Maxwell said, sitting back and locking his fingers together. ‘Fire away. Here to help. You know me.’

  Hall sighed. He did. He certainly did.

  Peter Maxwell didn’t want to be there. Neither, as it turned out, did his audience, but they’d turned up anyway. Harry had insisted, explaining to Maxwell that what was needed now was a hint of normalcy. It was a mark of his distraction that he hadn’t even bothered to remind her that that wasn’t even a word.

  ‘This afternoon,’ he said, standing by the lectern in the library, ‘I thought we’d take a look at Haledown in 1944. D-Day. The place was commandeered as a US base ...’

  ‘A guy is dead,’ somebody called out.

  Maxwell identified the heckler, with all his years of instant recognition of trouble-makers. He was heavy-built, stubby; almost certainly a Trump supporter. He was even wearing an IQ-reducing baseball cap.

  ‘Indeed,’ Maxwell said, ‘which, sadly, was the fate of many men who camped out in the fields around here seventy-six years ago.’

  ‘You found the body, right?’ The Trump supporter wasn’t letting go.

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ Maxwell conceded.

  ‘As a matter of fact, you found both bodies, didn’t you?’ The Trump supporter had an ally now, but he had more of a Joe Biden look about him.

  ‘No,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I found Elliot. Elliot found the first body.’

  There were murmurs in the ranks. Maxwell scanned their faces. Flo and here sisters weren’t there, for which he was very grateful, but generally, there was an air of mutiny. It was like the Sons of Liberty in Boston Harbour or Eleven Cee Three on a Friday afternoon, whichever analogy you preferred.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid you might be next?’ That was an English voice. Maxwell picked out the face; clearly, the woman was no Empire Loyalist.

  ‘“Clear your conscience while you may”,’ Maxwell quoted from an old gravestone he had seen once in a country churchyard, ‘“For no man knows his dying day”.’

  ‘Amen, brother!’ A Rastafarian, dreads swinging, called out. Unless you knew, he was an odd addition to the guests’ ranks. Those who knew he was a Professor of Particle Physics at MIT were less surprised.

  ‘No disrespect, Mr Maxwell,’ somebody else said, ‘but ... well, we all find this situation quite alarming. Can't you tell us anything?’

  ‘No, he can’t.’

  All eyes swivelled to the right and Henry Hall stood there, flanked by three uniforms. ‘I am Detective Chief Inspector Hall,’ he said. ‘I have talked to some of you already in connection with the death of Colonel Hale-ffinch. I shall be in charge of these on-going investigations as well as the situation involving Mr Elliot Schwarzenegger. I’m afraid that no one will be able to leave the premises until I decide that the time is right.’

  There were mutterings and the Trump supporter put his hand in the air, which Henry Hall roundly ignored.

  ‘I was hoping, of course, to release the crime scene limits today, but this new death has changed things. I am sure that any financial considerations can be worked out with Mrs Hale-ffinch.’

  ‘Finance’s got nothing to do with it, fellah.’ The Trump supporter, tired of being ignored, was on his feet. ‘You can’t keep us here. I’m ringing the embassy.’

  ‘Grosvenor Square!’ Maxwell saw his window of opportunity and took it. ‘I remember it well. The place was a battlefield in the summer of ’68 – I know; I was there.’

  ‘I was at Woodstock,’ somebody chimed in, with the glow of nostalgia on his face, ‘the year before.’

  ‘And what about Bobby Dylan on the Isle of Wight, huh?’ Somebody else was in full Memory Lane mode. ‘Sixty-nine, wasn’t it?’

  And soon, the whole room was humming with the sounds of the Sixties. Hall closed to Maxwell. ‘How the hell do you do that, Max?’ he asked.

  ‘Do what?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked.

  ‘Deflect an angry mob like that.’

  ‘Don’t flatter me, Henry,’ Maxwell hissed out of the corner of his mouth. ‘I can’t keep it up for ever. Get some answers, for my sake.’

  Hall nodded and half-turned. Then he turned back. ‘You weren’t really there, were you?’ he asked quietly. ‘Grosvenor Square, I mean. You’d have to be ... what ... at least seventy-one.’

  ‘Never been near the place,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Now, go away before I’m forced to take my teeth out.’

  But it wouldn’t really have mattered if he had, because Mr Jada was leading the community hymn-singing with a soulful rendition of Scott McKenzie’s Are You Going To San Francisco? And suddenly, in that chilled, confused, frightened library in an old house overlooking the South Downs, they all were.

  Maxwell had told Harry that he’d rather not stay for dinner that night. The Head of Sixth Form, raconteur extraordinaire, Double First from Cambridge (all right, he made that one up), debater par excellence, could hold his own with anybody, but he didn
’t really fancy fending off nosy questions from fascinated Americans who had stumbled into a real-life murder mystery weekend. And as he chewed over his own status in his mind, he wondered anew why all the over-the-top descriptions of himself were in French? He blamed Voltaire, but then, he blamed Voltaire for everything.

  He reached the waiting car on the stroke of six thirty-ish and was surprised to find that his chauffeur had taken on a rather older and more aristocratic mien (and he couldn’t blame Voltaire for that).

  ‘Hello, Max.’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Sit in front, would you? I hate craning my neck and it increases the likelihood of an accident.’

  ‘Encouraging,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘No James this afternoon?’

  ‘Family research duties,’ Hale-ffinch reversed to swing the car in line with the gate.

  ‘You’ve lost me.’ Maxwell didn’t know why, but he made doubly sure that his seatbelt was securely fastened.

  ‘Sorry. James is driving Miss Daisy. One of our guests, a Mrs Bellingham, in fact, has come over specially to find her roots.’ He caught Maxwell’s eye. ‘Well, they certainly seem to be a different colour from the rest of her hair.’

  Maxwell guffawed, then straightened his face. ‘I think that’s appallingly disrespectful to a well-meaning body of colonist,’ he said, but he knew exactly who Hale-ffinch was talking about. Mrs Bellingham was a brassy Virginian, who looked nothing like James Drury in the old television series, except in certain lights.

  ‘The Bellinghams went over with the Mayflower, apparently.’ Hale-ffinch nodded to the copper standing outside the gate.

  ‘Didn’t they all?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Would that be Killsin Bellingham, the Papist-burning zealot, or dear old Uncle Bellingham, the child-molester?’

  It was Hale-ffinch’s turn to guffaw. ‘I gathered from Harry you’re not over-fond of our American cousins,’ he said.

  ‘Well, at the moment, they’re putting food on my table, so I shouldn’t knock it. Any minute now, though, I’ll start stressing about Yorktown and how they were late to both world wars.’

  The pair travelled in silence as they followed the long drive past the elms. With the police presence behind them and no sign of the marquees they’d erected over the supposed murder scenes of the two men, it could have been an ordinary summer’s day, the sun dappling through the leaves and the heat beginning to die away to simply stifling, from the almost unbearable of earlier on.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve had the chance to offer my condolences, Tom,’ Maxwell said. ‘Roddy, I mean.’

  Hale-ffinch sighed. He was not a demonstrative man. Any cuddles he had once got from his parents ceased the day he went to boarding school at seven. Ever since then, he had learned to keep things buttoned up. Nobody wanted a cry-baby in the dorm. That precept had stayed with him into adult life and just as well; Harry wasn’t a great one for blubbers, either. ‘Thanks, Max. I must admit, I do miss the old boy. Oh, I know he could bullshit for England, but his heart was in the right place.’

  ‘I only met him the once,’ Maxwell said, ‘over dinner on the night before he died. Tell me, did you notice any change in him earlier; days before, weeks before?’

  ‘You could never tell with Roddy,’ he said. ‘I know he never quite forgave me for not following him into the army and he had started to be a little ... shall we say, irritable ... with people – me, Harry. I put it down to Anno Domini.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘It’ll get us all in the end,’ he said. ‘Was he working on anything? His memoirs, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, Roddy was always working on something. He’d spend hours rooting around in the family archives – we’ve got quite a bit in the library. And when he wasn’t there, he was in the Record Office in Chichester.’

  Maxwell knew it well. Like all Record Offices, it was full of doddery old gits poring over pipe rolls and parish maps. There were more of them in the winter because ‘vital research’ saved on the fuel bills at home. He knew the archivist, too, a non-people person with a permanent smell under his nose. No wonder nobody under forty studied local history any more.

  ‘Er ... where are we going, by the way?’ Hale-ffinch asked. Maxwell was at least grateful that he was still on the road.

  ‘Exactly,’ he smiled. ‘Where are any of us going?’

  ‘Bad time?’ Henry Hall had never quite learned to read Peter Maxwell, which was not a good sign, bearing in mind the man’s calling.

  ‘No, no.’ The Head of Sixth Form held the door of Number 38 wide. ‘It’s the Mem’s turn to administer the sleeping tablet to the sprog tonight, so all is well. Can I offer you a snifter, Henry?’

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ the Chief Inspector said, collapsing gratefully onto the settee. ‘But ... a little Scotch?’

  Maxwell briefly thought of Harry Lauder, then dismissed it. ‘Straight?’ He waggled the decanter in his hand.

  ‘Damn,’ Hall nodded.

  ‘Hugely welcome though you are, Henry,’ Maxwell said, ‘it isn’t often that we’re blessed with your presence this side of the Leighford tracks. What’s afoot?’

  The Chief Inspector wasn’t going to give Maxwell the pleasure of rising to that one. He took the glass as his host poured himself a Southern Comfort. ‘I was hoping for an overview.’

  ‘Overview?’

  ‘The menagerie at Haledown. And I’m not talking about the dogs and horses.’

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell sat opposite his man, ‘I’m not exactly an expert,’ he said. ‘I’ve not been there a week, yet.’ He sipped his drink. ‘Though I confess it feels longer.’

  ‘Even so,’ Hall nodded, ‘you see them from a different perspective. And they you. When I talk to them, or, God forbid, Gamage, there’s a barrier. It’s instinctive. They can’t all be serial killers, people traffickers or drug lords, but everybody has something to hide. They clam up. Whereas, with you ...’

  Maxwell laughed. ‘I’m not exactly their father confessor,’ he said.

  ‘Now, Max,’ Hall said, solemnly, though he was grinning inside, the only place he ever did. ‘You’ve been wheedling things out of the kids of Leighford now for donkeys’ years. And their mums and dads. And their ...’

  ‘Careful, Henry.’ Maxwell wagged a finger. ‘Ageism is a hate crime these days – and if it isn’t, it ought to be.’

  ‘You take my point, though.’

  ‘All right.’ Maxwell cradled his drink and leaned back. ‘The head honcho at Haledown, the big enchilada, has to be Ariana. Harry to those she reckons, as, for instance, me.’

  ‘Ariana.’ Hall was making sure that the two were on the same page of the hymn sheet.

  ‘Indeed. A Hale-ffinch by marriage, but also a distant relation through umpteen removeds and all the other stuff these families keep track of. She does wear the pants as though to the manor born. She controls the weather, hires and fires, eats people – whatever it takes to keep Haledown House running smoothly and profitably. She comes across as a bit of a tartar, you know, galloping across the Steppes on her sturdy, sure-footed pony ...’

  Hall didn’t appreciate the historical allusion.

  ‘Seemed fond enough of the old boy – Roddy, I mean. Though speaking for myself, you would have to be related to him if you wanted to prevent stoving in his head with a spade. Irritating old git. But you know all that. I suppose she had just got used to him.’

  ‘What about Elliot Schwarzenegger?’

  ‘Elliot Baines Schwarzenegger, don’t forget. That says a lot about his parents’ view of the world, to name him after one of the shiftiest presidents the US of A has ever played host to. But that may not be his fault, I suppose.’ Maxwell looked into his drink thoughtfully, swirling it around the bottom of the glass.

  ‘Would she – Ariana – have known him? How much do the staff interact with the guests, in fact?’

  ‘Cannon fodder,’ Maxwell said, decidedly. ‘There to pay the bills and make hay while the sun shines. I don’t know how the Hale-ffinches, or any of their staff, come to
that, regard the paying guests. Love-hate, I’d say, if I had to put it in a nutshell. They change every eight days or so, though some stay to go round twice, as it were. Fortunately for them, their conversationalist,’ he bowed as best he could in his chair, ‘doesn’t have to repeat himself. Except after broad beans.’

  ‘What about the husband?’ Hall shook his head at Maxwell’s mimed refill.

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell said. ‘The enigma that is Tom, Harry’s pleasant but rather ineffectual other half. He’s the paterfamilias, of course, but he doesn’t come across like that. He’s old blood, public school, every inch the gent, all that, but I’d say he’s rather shy, diffident. Perfectly happy to let Harry run the family business. He’s also a shite driver, by the way, but we can’t hold that against him. If we discount the three kids – which we must, because as Nole says, two are girls and one is a really little boy – there aren’t any full-blooded Hale-ffinches any more now that Roddy’s gone. Not in situ, as it were. When Jim Astley lets the body go and they have a funeral, I expect they’ll crawl out from the woodwork. There’ll be Cousin It who runs a sheep farm in Wagga Wagga; Auntie Establishment who’s a missionary in Brixton, that sort of thing.’

  ‘But, as you say,’ Hall nodded, ‘Not in situ, so they’re unlikely to be involved. What about the staff?’

  ‘Well, let me say at once,’ and Maxwell was serious, ‘we can rule out the stable girls.’

  ‘Maxwell’s Own?’ Hall raised an eyebrow.

  ‘They aren’t all Highenas,’ Maxwell laughed, ‘though a good few of them are. Think about it, Henry – I assume you believe that whoever killed Roddy killed Elliot too?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘The muscle and sheer balls to slash somebody’s throat and the ability to administer poison? That takes a certain kind of person – an adult kind of person.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Well, I’d automatically look at security. You could say they’ve been negligent at least – two deaths under their noses. The Cee Cee Tee Vee doesn’t work and we know from their handling of Mrs Getty that they’re not very efficient.’

  ‘Agreed again,’ Hall said, ‘but sloppiness is a long way from premeditated murder, Max.’