Maxwell's Summer

by M. J. Trow

  The women looked around and two of them suddenly laughed and pointed, having seen their seat partners in the other group. Even as the cry went up, Maxwell knew who it was.

  ‘Flo.’

  Maxwell knew from centuries of running school trips that if you show fear, you will start a stampede which will never be contained. So he ushered his flock into a nearby quad and corralled them so they couldn’t wander. The four extra tourists had come along for the ride. They had already found out far more about Oxford from this guy than from their ruinously expensive city guide and it looked as if it might kick off any minute, which would be something to tell the folks back home.

  First things first; Maxwell separated the newcomers from the group and asked them, politely, to make their way to the exit and then, please, if they wouldn’t mind, bugger off.

  They took it in good part, with a little whispering. Before they turned to go, the eldest of the group, who was dressed in the ubiquitous uniform of large, pressed shorts and enormous, bright white trainers, turned with a question.

  ‘Sorry to bother you when you’re trying to find your client,’ he said, ‘but we have something needs clearing up.’ His accent was hard to define, but Maxwell, who couldn’t be bothered to ask, assumed Dutch, Swedish, something of that nature. Somewhere where they spoke better English than in England, anyway.

  ‘If you can be quick,’ he said, heading off Jada from the exit with a hard look.

  ‘We are not sure, but something our guide told us didn’t sound right. He showed us the bricked up windows in the old houses.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said, his eyes still on his group, watching for signs of restive behaviour. They were very quiet. Perhaps two murders in as many days had had a sedative effect after all. ‘Window tax.’

  The four twittered and nudged each other, nodding with sudden understanding.

  Maxwell knew he didn’t have time for this, but he had to know. ‘What did he say they were?’ There didn’t seem to be many obvious options.

  ‘He said,’ the spokesman told him, ‘that there used to be a tax on bricks and so rich people bricked up their windows to show their neighbours how much money they had.’

  Maxwell had been marking Year Nine exams for more years than he cared to count and schoolboy howlers were an interest of his, but this was something new. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I would go out into the town, find your guide and ask for your money back, with something on top for emotional distress. Now, I must ask you to leave, if that’s okay.’ Anyone who knew Maxwell well would be able to see the level of his stress; he had used the o word.

  The tourists left without a murmur and the others gathered round.

  ‘Does anyone remember her saying anything?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Did she seem tired? Ill? Would she have gone back to the coach?’

  Heads shook, shoulders shrugged. Once the novelty had worn off, Flo wasn’t anyone’s first choice of companion.

  ‘Did she get off the coach, even?’

  The response was the same, with the addition of a few mutters.

  Maxwell didn’t like being indecisive and as if by arrangement, Great Tom broke his stalemate by tolling midday, his deep tones rolling over the city.

  ‘Lands sake,’ Bo said, looking up. ‘That darned bell has been driving me nuts all morning. You’d think people’d complain.’

  Maxwell sighed. This wasn’t the time to tell her that many tours were designed so that they could be in Tom Quad when the bell struck. But it did help him out. Lunch was planned for just gone twelve, at a pub just along the High from where they stood. He could settle them in and then go and find Flo. If Jacquie was on time, she would be waiting there and they could split the command.

  He lined up his people in a shameless crocodile formation. Taking the head, umbrella at the slant, he called over his shoulder, ‘Lunch, people. Follow me.’

  And, Flo forgotten, as she was doomed to always be, they set off in a babbling line.

  Maxwell tried a few opening lines to the police presence as they walked. Although they all sounded acceptable enough in the quiet of his head, he knew that they would sound more hollow than Great Tom when he tried them out loud.

  But he never had to find out. As they turned into the beer garden behind the pub and headed towards the batch of tables designated HH on the reservation plan, he saw two people sitting together, heads down, one with her arm around the other’s shoulders. Mustering all his sang froid, Maxwell strolled up to them.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Flo. Fancy meeting you here.’

  Jacquie looked up and signalled with the secret Maxwell look that said, with the flick of an eyelash, go away.

  Turning on an invisible sixpence, Maxwell ushered his tribe to the furthest tables and turned to the important task of ordering. Soon, as far as the Haledown lot (as the waitresses were soon calling them) were concerned, Flo and Mr Maxwell’s little wifey, might as well have been on Mars.

  When everyone had finished eating, Flo was looking stronger. She linked arms with Jacquie on their way back to the coach. She didn’t feel strong enough for the Pitt Rivers. Not only was it a fair old step from where they had had lunch but, Bo had told her and Bo was a whizz on computers, it was just full of dusty old junk some guy had collected years ago, so it wasn’t worth the bother. Flo had her book to read and she could sit quiet in the coach, with her thoughts. And because she was a bit miserable to be with, the Sisterhood were happy to let her; just because her husband had been poisoned, there was no need to be such a wet blanket, after all.

  So Maxwell, officially minus one but plus a Police Presence, led them off to his favourite museum in all the world, after the Fitzwilliam, of course, for an afternoon of dusty old junk. Heaven!

  Chapter Thirteen

  T

  he road home was quiet. Just like all trips, everyone fell asleep almost before the coach had pulled out into the evening traffic, Flo among them. Maxwell and Jacquie sat in the teachers’ seats at the front and whispered to each other. As Maxwell felt her hair tickle his cheek, he was almost overwhelmed with amazement that she came home to him every day. He hadn’t noticed doing it, but he must have done something pretty amazing in a past life to deserve this.

  ‘So, Flo?’

  ‘What?’

  Maxwell realised that what with the hum of the coach and the snores of the fat guy from Illinois right behind them, he was going to have to be more precise, give her more clues.

  ‘Flo. What did you talk about?’

  ‘Oh, right. Mostly about Elliot. She came out with that crap about loving him to bits but not actually liking him. I’ve never really subscribed to that.’

  ‘Apart from that. Surely, she couldn’t have only been saying that, right through lunch?’

  ‘And before. Don’t forget before.’

  Maxwell grimaced. ‘Sorry. I don’t know how I came to lose her.’

  ‘She peeled off on purpose, she admitted as much. I found her snivelling on a bench under some trees in University Park. I was cutting through to see if I could catch you up.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I forgot. Any luck with Uncle Roddy’s letter?’

  Jacquie patted her bag and nodded. ‘Possibly. Later. I think it had all suddenly swept over Flo. She’d spent yesterday evening packing up Elliot’s things. She found that quite hard, I think. He was on quite a lot of medication, that made her quite sad. The discovery of the Viagra which she had never benefitted from just made her mad. The skid-marked undershorts, as she called them, she binned. To quote briefly, she didn’t see why she should haul his shit back all that way.’

  Maxwell nodded. That seemed only fair.

  ‘But what melted her down was finding his water bottle. Apparently, they had had a big row about it the night before he died.’

  ‘A row about a water bottle? Tricky, even for Elliot, I should have thought.’

  ‘Apparently, it was Flo’s job – that’s how she put it – to get his water bottle filled up and stored in t
he fridge before they went to bed, so he would have it for his run. But she couldn’t find it.’ Jacquie drew a little nearer, so her breath tickled his ear. ‘That does help in a way with our enquiries. We wondered how he got the poison and thought he would have a bottle of some kind. We couldn’t work out how it could have been laced. But of course, he didn’t have it, as it turns out.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Well, that was just it. It was in the suitcase, under the bed. Flo was cross, because he must have put it there; if she had, she would have known and prevented a fight. I think a lot of Flo’s life has been spent doing that.’

  ‘He was a bit of a domineering ...’ Maxwell searched for the right word and had to give in to one he usually avoided, ‘... asshole.’

  ‘I would have liked to get the bottle fingerprinted, but it’s too late now. She’s been cuddling it ever since she found it, more or less. You can’t part her from it. It’s become a sort of surrogate Elliot, but one who, and again, I am quoting, and I must ask you not to laugh, you’ll wake the driver.’

  Maxwell held his mouth still with both hands. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘One who doesn’t piss off everyone and jack off in the shower rather than give his wife a seeing to.’

  ‘Flo said that?’ Maxwell was a tad startled.

  ‘She did. It isn’t just her hair she’s changed. Now, I suppose I ought to tell Henry how today has gone, including the bottle thing. I am a Police Presence, after all.’ She gave him a kiss and patted his knee. ‘Have a kip, now. Everyone else is.’

  ‘Including the driver,’ said a voice near her knee. The Maxwells were never sure whether that was a joke or not.

  At first, Maxwell considered a follow-up to the Oxford trip for his next conversation. It wasn’t that simple, however. He refused to give the university the credit it probably deserved, so all he was left with was the fact that the town had been the king’s headquarters during the Civil War; and he’d done that already. He didn’t really want another dialogue that compared ‘our’ civil war with ‘theirs’, along the lines of ‘Marston Moor, huh? Call that a battle? Why, at Antietam ...’ Maxwell could almost have written the dialogue himself.

  Then, a moment of inspiration, as if some old Greek bloke, still dripping wet from the bath, shouted ‘Eureka!’ at him. For most of the previous evening, Maxwell and Jacquie had sat on the settee looking at the Hale-ffinch family tree, spread out in all its A2 glory on the carpet. The tree was about as accurate as the late Roddy’s reminiscences, at least in the distant past. Maxwell had half-expected to find a direct descent from Brutus, the Trojan who had wandered across to the island off Europe and named it, self-deprecatingly, after himself (not).

  Jacquie was looking at it from the point of view of a police person. ‘Sorry, Max,’ she said, after a couple of G&Ts had fortified her resolve. ‘I can’t see that this has any relevance.’

  Maxwell nodded. He had to agree. The print was small and crowded, digitised from some hand-written original. Some entries had been cut and pasted from an online genealogy source. Side issues sprang off at rakish angles and there were more question marks than belong on any single sheet of paper, A2 or no. Maxwell shrugged and reached for another Southern Comfort. The empty envelope was one almighty red herring swimming in the murky waters of a murder enquiry.

  But today, as he faced the cocktail hour hordes, he had his vis aid with him – the old-school sort.

  ‘All right,’ he admitted, ‘it’s not vellum – that’s calfskin to you, ladies and gentlemen.’ He waited for the ‘eeuuww’ that he always got from his regular listeners at the mention of calves. They, seals and, more recently, sloths, were bound to elicit cries of cuteness from his girlies (and, he noted with horror, an increasing number of boys, part-time vegans all) and utter outrage at the abuse of such animals in the past (or even present). Nothing. Clearly, his audience today were more hard-bitten or perhaps they thought of calves as the back of the leg.

  ‘Gather round, boys and girls,’ he said. ‘Let me show you how a family tree works.’

  And gather round they did. It all worked surprisingly well, especially among those who spent untold hours online researching the very thing that lay before them now, for their own pedigrees. The whole process overran and Maxwell was embroiled in the explanation for the bend sinister in heraldry, denoting bastardy, when Harry walked in. The stopwatch that was Ariana Hale-ffinch had a clipboard in her hand and she called out, ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Max, but ...’ she tapped her wristwatch, ‘pre-dinner snacks await and I’m sure these lovely people would all like to freshen up first.’

  Nobody had heard the gong in the hall, so enrapt were they in somebody else’s history.

  ‘Harry,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘Sorry about that. My fault entirely, but can you just show us all where you are? I can’t seem to find you. You’re here as married to Tom, of course, but they haven’t been able to match you up with your birth entry, because the page is just too complicated, I expect. Quite a few Arianas here, as you might expect.’

  She frowned and crossed the room, squeezing in between the guests who were finding the history far more interesting than nibbles or dressing for dinner.

  ‘Your family tree,’ Maxwell told her. ‘Minus the heraldry, of course. This is a computer printout.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Madam,’ Maxwell laid a hand on his chest, the fingers histrionically spread, ‘I am an historian. We have our methods.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘Trade secret,’ he winked.

  ‘So, where are ya, Harry?’ Jada followed up on Maxwell’s question.

  ‘Umm ...’ Harry scanned the sheets with its names and rows and dots, ‘here,’ she said, tapping the paper. ‘That’s me. Now, people, please. Cook’s been slaving away as usual.’

  And they melted away, muttering amongst themselves, to face the dry cheese and soggy peppers (or, as the menu had it, pecorino and peperoncini sott’olio) and cheap Spanish plonk.

  ‘Staying tonight, Max?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I am,’ he said, ‘if that’s all right.’

  ‘I gather Oxford went well.’

  ‘I think they appreciated it,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘They still have a million questions, which is why I thought I’d stay. And of course, it scored a straight ten on any teacher’s card for a trip.’

  ‘Ten? What do you need to do to score a ten?’

  ‘Not lose anybody.’

  The chatelaine laughed and held out her arm. ‘Well, that’s a blessing,’ she said. ‘Shall we?’

  Maxwell smiled. The May Ball at Cambridge with all its courtesy and old school charm was a long time ago. But Harry was old family; nice to see a glimmer of civility of ages past still there. ‘Delighted,’ he said, and linked his arm with hers.

  Dinner was always something of a lottery. After the first night, when seating places had been allocated, it became something of a free for all, cliques developing, shoulders cooling, gaps in the ranks. Flo’s sisterhood usually huddled with her like the circled wagons in the centre of a Lakota attack, but tonight, the gang had splintered. Jada was sitting next to Maxwell and she had ordered champagne for them both.

  ‘No chance of you coming over to the States, I suppose?’ she fluttered at him. Jada Harper was undoubtedly a lovely woman, her tightly-braided hair shimmering in the light from the Hale-ffinch chandeliers.

  ‘Er ... what for?’ he asked her, wrestling with the beef in front of him.

  ‘Well,’ she purred, ‘I just happen to be chairwoman of the Boston Women’s Association.’

  ‘Really,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Is that anything like Stepford wives?’

  She lowered her eyelids and twisted her lips. ‘Do I look like a Stepford wife?’ she asked. Her words implied ‘no’ but her nails and hair extensions screamed ‘yes’. Even so, Maxwell knew what his response was supposed to be.

  ‘No, indeed,’ he said. ‘Forget I spoke. But ... Boston ... I suppose you have some famous people living there, don’
t you?’ He had found this a fairly safe topic so far when making small talk. Everywhere, it seemed to him, had a famous person in the locality, even when he had heard of neither the person nor the place in his life before.

  ‘Well, we have a few,’ she said. ‘Ted Danson, he’s a nice guy.’ She caught Maxwell’s eye, ‘although I like my men a little younger.’

  Maxwell searched the room for Mr Jada. The man was engrossed in deep conversation with a tree-hugger from somewhere south of Memphis and they seemed to be getting on famously, laughing and clinking glasses.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell tried to steer the conversation away from the potentially awkward, ‘what would I do for the ladies of Boston?’

  Jada’s eyes flashed. Maxwell had never really seen himself as a superstud, unaware as he was of just how many teenaged hearts he had broken over the years.

  ‘Why, history of course,’ Jada smiled. ‘The WA’s just crawling with culture vultures like me. They’d soak it up.’

  Maxwell could believe that. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘I have commitments. My students get their exam results in a couple of weeks and then it’s back to the chalk face.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘School,’ he explained. ‘You know I’m a teacher.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Jada patted his knee, ‘and a very good one, too. That’s why I’m making you the offer.’

  ‘That’s very kind, Jada,’ Maxwell edged his knee away. ‘But I’ll have to decline. It just can’t be done.’

  ‘Well,’ she smiled, raising her sparkling glass to his, ‘we’ve got a few days to go yet. Don’t mind if I work on ya?’

  ‘Work on me?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘What would your husband say about that?’

  ‘Frank?’ Her smile vanished. ‘He won't give a flying fuck, excuse my language. Look at him, he’s virtually got his hand in that bitch’s pants as it is.’