Maxwell's Summer

by M. J. Trow

  Maxwell nodded slowly. ‘Apparently so, yes. And the rat poison?’

  ‘I just put it at the back of a shelf in the pantry, behind a whole load of vegan sausage mix – something we rarely use, thank the Lord – until I could get rid of it. Recycled carefully, of course.’

  ‘So why me?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I’d seen you with Elliot. Knew he was telling you ... God knows what. I couldn’t take the chance. Again, you were quite spontaneous. I’d already done the slash and the strychnine, two totally different methods I knew would confuse the police. A gargoyle was yet another variant and your little assignation in the stables gave me an opportunity.’

  ‘That was a nice touch,’ Maxwell said, noting with some trepidation that the Glock had not wavered once in Harry’s strong, capable hand.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The gargoyle. In heraldry, only female gryphons have wings – as did the one you aimed at me. And that’s just what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? Looking out for Haledown all these years, like the gryphon. And it was all so unnecessary.’

  ‘Unnecessary?’

  ‘Yes, of course. What did it matter that you weren’t born a Hale-ffinch? You’re twice the lord of the manor that Tom will ever be. You’ve set up a fine business here, with a very healthy turnover. You’ve saved the family and the home from the horrors ...’ and he crossed himself, ‘... of the National Trust. You did that. You, Harry whatever your real name is, not Ariana Hale-ffinch, who probably didn’t know one end of an estate from another.’

  ‘Well,’ she pursed her lips and her trigger finger twitched, ‘it might seem unnecessary to you, but it was everything to me.’

  ‘Now!’ Maxwell shouted and the door crashed open, throwing Harry forward as the Glock erupted and the shot went wide, the bullet biting into the flock wallpaper above Maxwell’s head. In an instant, Jacquie Carpenter-Maxwell was kneeling over the struggling Harry, knocking the gun away and hauling the woman’s wrists behind her back.

  ‘Good timing, policewoman mine.’ Maxwell felt himself breathing for the first time since Harry had arrived.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she said, ‘the “bitch on heat” comment.’

  ‘Nor I,’ he said archly, helping her to pull Harry upright, ‘that “sad excuse for a man” snidery.’

  And, despite the tension of the moment, or because of it perhaps, they both laughed.

  Jacquie looked Harry in the face. ‘You’re not the only one who can play a role,’ she said. ‘Max and I? Well, we’re quite a double act.’

  Maxwell stood on the sweeping carriage drive with Tom Hale-ffinch and Sally Baker, waving off a coach-full of departing guests. The machine which Harry had built, oiled and set going, was working as smoothly without her as with. Maxwell knew that soon, a bit of grit – probably Maureen-shaped – would soon get in the works and there would be a judder and a screech of cogs out of whack, but hopefully, by then, Sally Baker would have risen to the top of the Haledown soup, as scum and cream always will. This morning, a mere eight hours since Neil Gamage and his myrmidons had hauled Harry away to Leighford nick, she was dressed in a crisp white shirt under a cashmere sweater, with pressed denim encasing her thighs. Soon, she would have morphed enough into Harry to pass in a dim light; Maxwell stepped back and turned to creep up the steps, pick up his bits and be on his way. He was just about to reach the top, when Tom Hale-ffinch hailed him.

  ‘Max? A word?’

  Maxwell turned, reluctantly. What could even a silver-tongued expert like him say to a man whose wife has been hauled off to chokey, having killed two and tried twice to kill another?

  ‘Tom. What can I say ...?’

  ‘Nothing, Max.’ Hale-ffinch loped up the steps with long strides. Could it be imagination, or was his jaw a little firmer, his eyes a little more focussed? ‘Let’s say nothing. A new intake will be coming down that drive in about ten minutes. I am having a staff meeting shortly, explaining the ... er ... the circumstances. There will have to be changes, of course. Sally is stepping up and will be my hostess for the rest of the season.’

  Maxwell gave himself a metaphorical pat on the back. It was good to be right.

  ‘The rest of the staff know their jobs well enough to keep going on their own, more or less. But I would be so grateful if you could stay. James is taking over Sally’s duties; he’s a personable chap and as you probably know, a bit over-qualified to be a driver.’

  A bit over-qualified for meet and greet too, Maxwell couldn’t help thinking, but kept his thoughts to himself.

  ‘The case will be in the papers, of course. It won’t do us any harm, would you think?’

  ‘If I know the public,’ Maxwell said, ‘and I do, your bookings will rocket.’

  ‘I feared as much,’ Hale-ffinch said. ‘But I suppose I’ll need the money. Legal fees and so on ... lawyers don’t come cheap.’

  ‘First,’ Maxwell said, ‘kill all the lawyers. Sorry – that was tasteless ...’

  Tom Hale-ffinch shrugged. ‘What’s tasteless here? My wife – who totally refuses to give her real name, by the way – killed my uncle, poisoned a guest and tried twice to kill you. The first attempt was in the planning stages while I was in the stable with a guest ...’ His voice died away.

  ‘Let’s take that as read, shall we?’ Maxwell said, helpfully.

  ‘Please. Anyway, what I was trying to say is, we’re a bit of a rum lot, but please stay. The guests love your talks and I know that the children will be pleased to see Nolan again. And he must have missed his riding – he’s a natural, the girls tell me.’

  ‘The children are coming home?’

  ‘They don’t really understand what’s going on, but they should be here. I can explain better face to face. And, anyway, they deserve better than Aberdeen.’

  Maxwell walked to the edge of the terrace that topped the flight of stairs and leant on the rail. It seemed five minutes since he had watched his son pretend to race Mrs Troubridge to the top. Across to his right, the petting zoo was limbering up to face the hordes of children. To the left, the riding stables rang with the whinnies of horses and the clang of feed buckets. From inside the house, he could feel the cool of the breeze blowing from below stairs, bringing the smells of age and fabric conditioner. He turned.

  ‘All right, Tom.’ The sound of a coach driver changing down for the turn from the main road came to them on the breeze. Maxwell smiled. ‘Let’s do this!’

  There was a piece of paper on Maxwell’s plate that morning at breakfast. It was folded, not quite in half, and had a smear of chocolate on it, inexpertly wiped off. On one face, in careful capitals, was written ‘Mr P. Maxwell’. Below it, the word ‘Confidenshul’.

  Maxwell looked around him but there was no one to be seen. The house was silent – and at breakfast time chez Maxwell, that was almost unheard of. The Count’s breakfast bowl was empty, the cat himself nowhere to be seen. The discreet twitterings and scratchings through the wall that betokened Mrs Troubridge being washed, dressed and approximately brushed by Mrs B were the only sounds to be heard.

  He unfolded the paper and read, aloud, just in case anyone should be listening.

  ‘To whome it may concern,’ it said. ‘I, Meternick, the cat, do herebye say that it is orl rite if Nolan Maxwell gets a kiten. I will not hert it, and Nolan Maxwell says he will make shore it behaeves. Singed, Meternich (the cat).’

  Maxwell folded the paper and put it by his plate, then got up and made himself a slice of toast and a coffee. He was buttering the former when his son, wife and, unexpectedly, the cat made their appearance.

  Nolan slid into his place and poured out his Coco Pops. Jacquie went round behind her husband to the coffee machine, not neglecting to kiss the top of his head. No one spoke. After a few minutes of crunching of toast and popping of Pops, Metternich spoke, in a polite meow. Nolan leapt down and gave him an extra helping of biscuit, not neglecting to briefly massage his enormous shoulders.

  Nolan broke first.
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  ‘Can we, Dads?’ he wheedled. ‘Can the Count and I have a kitten?’

  ‘You’ve just fed the Count. He doesn’t need a kitten. He’s full.’

  ‘Oh, Dads ...’ Nolan, dramatic to his finger-ends, crashed his head down on the table in abject despair.

  Jacquie sat down opposite Maxwell and did complicated things with her eyebrows. Maxwell looked at the two of them and listened to the distant crunching of the third love of his life and sighed.

  ‘On one condition,’ he said, and Nolan’s head snapped up as though on wires. Jacquie motioned the child to sit quiet and listen.

  ‘Actually, make that three. One, if Metternich doesn’t like him, the kitten goes.’

  ‘Check,’ Nolan beamed, holding up a thumb.

  ‘Two, if I don’t like him, the kitten goes.’

  Nods.

  ‘And three – he has to be called Bismarck.’

  Nolan screwed up his face. ‘Plocker’s auntie has been calling him Fluffy,’ he complained.

  ‘Bismarck, or no dice.’

  Nolan looked at his father, and a smile crept over this face. ‘Fluffy’s a silly name, anyway, Dads,’ he said. ‘Bismarck it is. Bizzy for short.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Now, it’s the second Thursday in August and we all know what that means.’

  Nolan shrugged.

  ‘It’ll come, mate,’ Maxwell said, getting up and squeezing past his son’s chair on his way to the door. ‘It’ll come. Oh, by the way, fourth condition.’

  ‘Dads!’

  Maxwell fished in his pocket and a tenner floated down onto the table. ‘Get as many fluffy toys as this will buy. I seem to remember that the Prussian Iron Chancellor after whom this kitten is to be named loved nothing better in his spare time than disembowelling catnip mice.’ He kissed the top of his boy’s head and wiggled his fingers at his wife. ‘Love you lots,’ and he was gone.

  Down in the garage below the house, he saddled White Surrey and huffed on his cycle clips until they gleamed, then pedalled like a maniac down Columbine, up over the rise by the Leighford golf course and on past the Dam. The season was still at its height, with bunting fluttering in the sun and the drone of the speedboats out to sea. Above him, the gulls wheeled and dipped, crying their laments for those poor lost souls whose results were not as hoped for.

  Every year there were casualties. Every year there were surprises, good and bad and Mad Max Maxwell was there every time, to commiserate, to cajole, to congratulate, whatever the appropriate need. He parked White Surrey and waved to the groundskeepers, council operatives all, who rode their tractor-lawnmowers like knights errant, scything down the grass.

  In Leighford High’s hall, squeaky clean after the annual scrub and polish, a row of desks and chairs stood facing the entrance, backs to the stage. On each desk, there was a box and in that box, a wodge of envelopes that told the fate of this year’s hopefuls. To college or not to college – that was the question.

  One by one, Maxwell’s sixth form tutors trooped in, their holidays scarcely half over but still feeling the fin de siècle gloom of the dread day of reckoning, not helped by the knowledge of another, almost as dread, the following week. It was all rather like Einstein’s definition of insanity. They all exchanged greetings, with each other, with themselves, nattering about what they’d done and where they’d been. None of them, Maxwell assumed, had solved a murder, but he’d never been one to brag.

  ‘Love the hair, Janet,’ he called. ‘Is it your own?’

  ‘Up you, Peter Maxwell,’ she laughed, then stifled it as the first of the damned crept into the hall, tentative, alone, afraid.

  ‘Cheer up, Alan,’ Maxwell called to him. ‘If your surname is still Bartlett, the Bs are over there.’

  He glanced around at his other colleagues, massing to one side, and muttered to himself, ‘Come to think of it, the Bs are everywhere.’ He could afford to be smug, of course; Maxwell had nipped in the day before when the results had arrived, courtesy of these new-fangled computer gadgets he’d vaguely heard about. He’d studied them, learnt them after a fashion and could offer instant comfort to those in need. Alan Bartlett was not one of these; he was off to Cambridge to read History – a chip off the old block. Helen Hammond looked delighted when she opened her envelope and Maxwell couldn’t imagine why – for the next three years, the poor kid would be studying Business at Leeds Metro, and nobody deserved that.

  The hall came alive with whoops of delight and laughter as the dam of waiting broke. Maxwell had never heard so many OMGs in his life, but he couldn’t help laughing along with them. When there was a large number there, including the girls from the Haledown stable who would have some tales to tell in the pub tonight, he clapped his hands and waited, Hitler-like, for silence.

  ‘People,’ he said. ‘To those of you disappointed by the pieces of paper in your hands, remember this; it’s only a piece of paper. You can throw it away or wipe your arse with it ...’ Whoops of support ‘... and you can always try again. As that great Englishman Jeremy Clarkson reminds us all on the telly every year, he loused up his A Levels and look where he is today. On second thoughts ...’ More laughter ‘... to those of you who are going on to what is laughingly called further education, you have my condolences. You are about to become snowflakes, pampered nonentities with no-platforming powers, safe spaces to hide from the hitty-hitty things in life. But before that,’ he held up his hand, ‘just for today, you are still Maxwell’s Own.’ He looked at his watch. ‘The Leighford Arms is open. And I’m buying. First round only, of course. I didn’t go into teaching for the money, after all. Get fell in.’

  And the noise threatened to tear off the roof, as it did every year for Mad Max, a legend in his own lunchtime.

  Other titles by BLKDOG Publishing for your consideration:

  Maxwell’s History of the World in 366 Lessons

  By M. J. Trow

  PETER MAXWELL IS THE History teacher you wish you’d had. If you meet anyone (and you will) who says ‘I hate History. It’s boring,’ they weren’t taught by Mad Max.

  Many of you will know him as the crime-solving sleuth (along with his police-person wife, Jacquie) in the Maxwell series by M.J. Trow (along with his non-policeperson wife, Carol, aka Maryanne Coleman – uncredited!) but what he is paid to do is teach History. And to that end has brought – and continues to bring – culture to thousands.

  In his ‘blog’ (Dinosaur Maxwell doesn’t really know what that is) written in 2012, the year in which the world was supposed to end, but mysteriously didn’t, you will find all sorts of fascinating factoids about the only important subject on the school curriculum. So, if you weren’t lucky enough to be taught by Max, or you’ve forgotten all the History you ever knew, here is your chance to play catch-up. The ‘blog’ has been edited by Maxwell’s friend, the crime writer M.J. Trow, who writes almost as though he knows what the Great Man was thinking.

  Goblin Market

  By Maryanne Coleman

  HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED what happened to the faeries you used to believe in? They lived at the bottom of the garden and left rings in the grass and sparkling glamour in the air to remind you where they were. But that was then – now you might find them in places you might not think to look. They might be stacking shelves, delivering milk or weighing babies at the clinic. Open your eyes and keep your wits about you and you might see them.

  But no one is looking any more and that is hard for a Faerie Queen to bear and Titania has had enough. When Titania stamps her foot, everyone in Faerieland jumps; publicity is what they need. Television, magazines. But that sort of thing is much more the remit of the bad boys of the Unseelie Court, the ones who weave a new kind of magic; the World Wide Web. Here is Puck re-learning how to fly; Leanne the agent who really is a vampire; Oberon’s Boys playing cards behind the wainscoting; Black Annis, the bag-lady from Hainault, all gathered in a Restoration comedy that is strictly twenty-first century.

  Prester Joh
n: Africa’s Lost King

  By Richard Denham

  HE SITS ON HIS JEWELLED throne on the Horn of Africa in the maps of the sixteenth century. He can see his whole empire reflected in a mirror outside his palace. He carries three crosses into battle and each cross is guarded by one hundred thousand men. He was with St Thomas in the third century when he set up a Christian church in India. He came like a thunderbolt out of the far East eight centuries later, to rescue the crusaders clinging on to Jerusalem. And he was still there when Portuguese explorers went looking for him in the fifteenth century.

  He went by different names. The priest who was also a king was Ong Khan; he was Genghis Khan; he was Lebna Dengel. Above all, he was a Christian king who ruled a vast empire full of magical wonders: men with faces in their chests; men with huge, backward-facing feet; rivers and seas made of sand. His lands lay next to the earthly Paradise which had once been the Garden of Eden. He wrote letters to popes and princes. He promised salvation and hope to generations.

  But it was noticeable that as men looked outward, exploring more of the natural world; as science replaced superstition and the age of miracles faded, Prester John was always elsewhere. He was beyond the Mountains of the Moon, at the edge of the earth, near the mouth of Hell.

  Was he real? Did he ever exist? This book will take you on a journey of a lifetime, to worlds that might have been, but never were. It will take you, if you are brave enough, into the world of Prester John.