Maxwell’s Curse

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Froze to death, eh?’ Maxwell nodded, eyes widening.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Astley hedged. Should Maxwell buy the man a third or was his vanity enough to tip him over the edge?

  ‘No,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘No, you’ve lost me now.’

  Astley sighed. The man before him was after all only a teacher. What was it Bernard Shaw had said? Those who can become doctors, those who can’t, teach? Something like that. ‘She was poisoned, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘Death-Cap, if I’m any judge.’

  Men like Jim Astley were judge and jury. Thank God British justice didn’t depend entirely on them. ‘Mushrooms?’ Maxwell blinked.

  ‘The knife was a red herring.’ Astley was leaning forward now, warming to his theme.

  ‘Knife?’

  ‘Yes … look, Maxwell, I mean,’ he was suddenly glancing around him, watching walls, ‘you do realize how utterly confidential all this is? I mean, you can’t use this information, you know.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Maxwell shrugged and folded his arms. ‘No, it’s just for my peace of mind, that’s all. After all, it’s not every night you find a body on your garden path. Tell me about the knife.’

  ‘Nothing much to tell,’ Astley shrugged. ‘It was double- edged, driven between her vertebrae. A downward thrust.’

  ‘Poison and a knife? What are we looking for, a schizophrenic?’

  ‘We aren’t looking for anything,’ Astley told him. He downed his brandy and snatched up the hold-all. ‘Unless of course you’re using the royal “we”, Mr Maxwell. Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘No problem,’ Maxwell stood up. ‘Perhaps we could have the odd game of squash, some time.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Astley said. ‘I’m not sure we’re in the same class.’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ Maxwell winked.

  He finished his Southern Comfort as the good doctor swept away in a cloud of undiluted superiority. In the corner two tallboys were having a conversation about weight training, each of them in a lurid track suit with white silhouetted figures down the seams. The barman was drying glasses and puffing on a distinctly non-PC fag. Otherwise the place was deserted. Maxwell picked up his coat and made for the door. The corridor was dimly lit and echoed to his footfalls. He turned a corner and strode for the stairs.

  Perhaps he wasn’t looking where he was going. Perhaps he was too lost in thought over the forensic facts that Astley had thrown at him. Perhaps he really believed his head was harder than Beauregard’s brickwork.

  Perhaps Nostradamus had been right and the blackness that swept over him was indeed the Millennium night – the end of the world.

  6

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  The voice was muffled at first, like somebody mumbling down a tube of rolled up carpet. The face too was a blur, a badly focused camera, a shadow of a shadow. It had long hair, he was sure of that, and smelt of a warm tent in the summers of his childhood.

  ‘Ow!’ Ever the master of wit and repartee was Peter Maxwell.

  ‘Steady,’ the voice was clearer now. ‘You’ve had a nasty bump on the head. Don’t get up too quickly.’

  He found himself sitting upright, his temples feeling as if they’d been squeezed through a mangle. There was a screen in front of him and a table with bloody cotton wool. A rather luscious girl was bending over him with a roll of bandage in her hand.

  ‘I’m not sure we’ll need this,’ she was saying.

  Maxwell felt the back of his cranium and immediately wished he hadn’t. Whatever the opposite of frontal lobotomy was, he’d just had one.

  ‘Would it be too corny to ask where I am?’ He tried to focus on her.

  ‘You’re in sick bay at Beauregard’s,’ she told him. ‘A floor down from where we found you. I’m Sophie, by the way. Sophie Clark.’

  ‘Peter Maxwell. Are you a nurse?’

  ‘Please,’ the girl snorted. She was the Nordic type, with cascading blonde hair she’d recently unleashed from a braid, a grey top that stretched across a formidable chest and black Lycra cycling shorts that would have had most of Maxwell’s boys drooling. Come to think of it, they had Maxwell drooling. ‘I’m an Aerobics instructor. But I happen to have a First Aid certificate and Prissy and I were the first to find you.’

  ‘Prissy?’

  ‘Prissy Crown. She says she knows you.’

  ‘Not Biblically, I assure you.’

  Sophie laughed, rolling up her bandage and tidying things away on a tray. ‘You mustn’t mind Prissy,’ she said. ‘She means well. Just has a thing about men, that’s all.’

  Maxwell was quite relieved. At least that was men plural and not any man in particular.

  ‘What on earth happened to you?’ she asked him.

  ‘I was hoping you’d tell me.’ Maxwell experimented with turning his neck. ‘The last thing I remember is a blinding pain and I must have passed out. Did I walk into a wall? I did that once in Basingstoke. I remember being so appalled by the architecture of the place, I attempted suicide by running slap into a pillar – not of the community, you understand, a brick one.’

  ‘Any teeth loose?’ Sophie was pulling his lips about.

  ‘Not that weren’t loose before.’ He gently prised her fingers away.

  ‘Sorry,’ she smiled. ‘Follow my finger.’ She held it up and his dark eyes swivelled with it. ‘That’s fine. No, I really don’t know how this happened, Mr Maxwell. You’ve got one helluva lump on the back of your head and the skin’s broken. Not worth a stitch, I don’t think. The bleeding seems to have stopped. I’d have it checked though, if I were you.’

  ‘Casualty? No thanks, I haven’t got that long to live.’

  She stood up, tall and powerful in her workout rig. ‘You weren’t walking backwards, were you?’

  ‘To Christmas?’ Maxwell’s Neddy Seagoon was inspired, but it was lost on Sophie Clark.

  ‘Max, for Christ’s sake, I’ve just heard.’ An hysterical-looking Ken Templeton crashed in, towel round his neck and looking positively flushed in a nasty turquoise track suit. ‘Are you all right? Sophie, is he all right?’

  ‘He’s fine, Ken,’ the girl said softly, calming him down.

  How on earth did it happen?’ Ken asked, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Just me,’ Maxwell made light of it, ‘being a silly bugger. Sorry to be such a nuisance on my first visit.’

  ‘Max,’ Ken knelt in front of him like a medieval knight offering allegiance to his king. ‘We’ll waive tonight’s entrance fee. I’m sorry you were charged in the first place. It’s on the house, okay? First six months, free. What do you say?’

  ‘I’d say you were a man nervous of litigation, Ken,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘And don’t worry, I’m not the suing type.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Ken blustered. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that, at all,’ but he did seem to Maxwell to be amazingly grateful. ‘Let me at least run you home.’

  ‘My bike …’ Maxwell began.

  ‘You can’t possibly ride that,’ Ken insisted. ‘We’ll shove it in the back of my Space Wagon.’

  ‘Ken …’

  ‘Not now, Sophie,’ her boss broke in. ‘Can’t you see Mr Maxwell’s all in?’

  ‘Thank you, Sophie,’ Maxwell eased himself off the couch, wobbling a little at first as his head reconnected with his feet. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll give your love to Prissy, shall I?’ But she wasn’t looking at Maxwell when she said it. She was looking at Ken.

  The lights never burn blue in an Incident Room. When he was a kid, Henry Hall had read novels about Scotland Yard, when the detectives of yesteryear turned down the oil lamps, lit their pipes and pondered the problem, still wearing their trench coats and trilbies, looking for ‘chummy’ before they subdued him with a left hook. The men in front of him didn’t smoke pipes; neither did the women, but it was rumoured that old Jane Cruikshank did.

  ‘So what have we got, then?’ he asked by way of summatio
n at the end of another long day. Through the haze of ciggie smoke, DS Stone was on his feet. This was the eighth night of the investigation, the new year just eight days old. And still the Stones waited, as the back pains worsened and the twinges continued and the clock ticked.

  ‘House to house have come up with a gypsy encampment, guv. At least, it’s a mobile squat more than anything. Family named Cruikshank plus assorted dogs and a goat.’

  ‘Where is this?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Below the Chanctonbury Ring, mile or two from Wetherton.’

  ‘They were neighbours?’

  ‘After a fashion. Seems they’d known – and hated – each other for years. Something of a feud between the Prides and the Cruikshanks going way back. Nobody can remember how it started, but it was centred on the two old women.’

  ‘Anybody talked to this … Jane, is it?’

  ‘Jane,’ nodded Stone, ‘granny. Rules her grandsons with a rod of iron by all accounts. And no, sir, nobody has yet. She wasn’t at home when the lads paid a visit. We didn’t get much out of the grandsons, either. I’ve run them both through the computer. Benjamin, the older one’s got form. Theft, spot of GBH. Joseph’s cleaner, but it’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Where did the feud story come from?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘Mostly goss from the locals. The Rector especially – a Reverend Darblay. By the way, there’s a bogus reporter out there.’

  ‘I’m not sure we’ve got time …’

  ‘I just thought, guv,’ Stone was a copper on the climb, too bright for his own good, ‘anybody who’s posing as a reporter’s got an agenda we ought to know about.’

  ‘All right,’ Hall nodded after a pause. ‘What do we know?’

  ‘Kev, you’ve got this one.’ Stone sat down.

  Kev had. Kevin Brand was a large florid man with prematurely silver hair combed forward in a way that Caesar would have understood. He swayed to his feet, ‘Reverend Darblay phoned to say a bloke whose name he couldn’t remember called at his church yesterday looking for info on the Elizabeth Pride killing. Nice bloke, apparently. The old boy used the word’ – and he checked his notepad, so unused was he to the concept – ‘“charming”.’

  ‘How did he know he was bogus?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Said he was from the Littlehampton Mercury,’ Kev told him.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Littlehampton hasn’t got a Mercury.’

  There were chuckles and rhubarb all round. ‘Does he want a job on the Force, this Vicar?’ somebody asked.

  ‘We could do with God on our side,’ somebody else chipped in.

  DCI Hall raised his hands to calm things down. He knew the signs. Seven days in and the strain beginning to tell. Tonight it was banter, still good-natured, still generous. By tomorrow it would turn bitchy and the cliques would develop. Blokes would get their own coffee and nobody else’s or expect the girls to get it, which would raise feminist hackles and the rot would set in. He’d seen it before. It destroyed a team’s concentration, ground it down and broke it apart so that before long nobody was looking each other in the face.

  ‘We need to talk to Jane Cruikshank,’ Hall said. ‘Jacquie?’

  ‘Sir?’ She felt the eyes burning into her, the only female detective in the room.

  ‘Tomorrow morning. First light. I want you and a team of uniform at this gypsy camp. How many people are there, Martin?’

  ‘Er … just the two grandsons and the old girl, guv.’

  ‘Right, Jacquie. See Mr Williams, will you? I want a team of six big blokes behind you and I want Jane Cruikshank in Interview Room One at the nick by nine o’clock. Do you foresee any problems with that?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’ Hall was on his feet. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a long day. Let’s close it down.’

  Jacquie Carpenter didn’t like the mob-handed approach. She appreciated Hall’s need for a woman, but the boot through the door bit was not Jacquie’s style. She saw Inspector Williams that night, on her way home and arranged for the heavies at dawn.

  ‘Shooters, Jacquie?’ Williams had asked her. He’d tangled with gyppos before. ‘We’re not talking tactical team here, are we?’

  ‘No, thanks, sir,’ she smiled. ‘Best not upset more people than we have to.’

  Tom Williams was a wise old copper. He nodded and let it go.

  She swung the Ka into her driveway and sat for a moment looking at the circles of her headlights illuminating the garage door. Then she sighed, switched off the ignition and made for the house. The first thing she saw was a shiver of the ivy, the one her dad had trained to climb the trellis by her front door. Then she saw him, a man in the shadows, moving towards her.

  ‘Jacquie?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Crispin. What the fuck are you doing, hiding like that?’

  ‘Sorry,’ his breath snaked out on the raw night. ‘I was waiting for you and it’s sort of parky out here.’

  She undid the lock. ‘There are such things as phones, you know.’ Then she saw his face. ‘You’d better come in.’

  She led him through the hall and into the lounge, throwing her scarf and coat onto the settee. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘I’d kill for a cocoa,’ he said, trying to get the circulation back into his hands.

  ‘How did you get here?’ she asked him. ‘I didn’t see a car.’

  ‘No. I jogged.’

  ‘Jogged?’ she rummaged in the kitchen, finding a saucepan and ferreting for the milk. ‘Oh, of course. Beauregard’s.’

  ‘Shame you had to leave the party the other night,’ he leaned on her breakfast bar, ‘just as things were hotting up.’

  ‘Really?’ she cocked an eyebrow. ‘Don’t tell me – Prissy.’

  ‘And your friend Maxwell, yes. She took him home.’

  ‘Oh?’ Jacquie wasn’t very good at indifference.

  ‘Just thought you ought to know.’

  Despite herself, she turned to face him. ‘Did you run all the way from Beauregard’s and risk frostbite just to tell me that the local nympho gave a friend of mine a lift?’

  ‘I haven’t come from Beauregard’s,’ he said. ‘And I think Mr Maxwell’s got bigger problems than Prissy.’

  She put the milk bottle down with a louder thud than she intended. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  Foulkes straightened, then he crossed to the door as if to check they were alone. He crossed back to her. ‘Jacquie, what do you know about Lammas?’

  ‘About what?’ She was fiddling with the gas.

  ‘What about Beltane? Samhain?’

  She stopped fiddling and looked at him. ‘Crispin, are you all right? I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Jacquie.’ He took her hand, turning off the gas with the other. ‘Look, never mind that. Come and sit down.’ He led her into the lounge and sat her down on the settee, perching beside her, half turned so that he could look her in the face. ‘Tell me what you know about Peter Maxwell.’

  ‘Max?’ she blinked, ‘Why? What’s all this about, Crispin?’

  ‘Just humour me,’ he said, but there was no humour in the grey eyes, the serious mouth.

  ‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘Peter Maxwell is Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High. He’s a widower, but he doesn’t let on about that …’

  ‘How do you know about it?’ he cut in.

  ‘Oh, he let it slip one day.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, let’s see. He went to Cambridge, Jesus College, I think. He’s an historian – an MA. He’s got a cat called Metternich.’

  ‘And he solves murders in his spare time,’ Crispin said.

  Jacquie looked at him. ‘He has helped us in the past, yes,’ she nodded.

  ‘Isn’t that a little … unusual?’

  Jacquie laughed. ‘Max is an unusual man,’ she said. ‘You know the kids call him “Mad Max”?’

  ‘How unusual?’ he wanted to know.

/>   ‘How? … Look, Crispin, this is daft. Why do you want to know so much about Maxwell?’

  ‘When I went to Leighford High …’

  ‘You’ve been there?’

  ‘Yes, it’s part of my patch,’ he explained. ‘About a quarter of their kids come from the Barlichway. I expect I’ll be in and out of there like a yoyo. When I was introduced to Maxwell, he had a calendar on his desk.’

  ‘So?’ Jacquie couldn’t fathom where this was going.

  ‘It was a shabby calendar, looked old. But it was for last year.’

  ‘I still don’t …’

  ‘There were certain dates on it, with rhymes written alongside them.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘One was Saint Thomas’s day, December 21, the old Winter Solstice – “Thomas grey, Thomas grey, the longest night and the shortest day”.’

  ‘He does have something of a poetic streak in him,’ Jacquie nodded.

  ‘Another date – and I’m working backwards through the year – is Samhain, Shadowfest, Calangaef, the Festival of the Dead

  ‘You’re talking about Halloween,’ Jacquie realized.

  ‘When the witches ride,’ Foulkes nodded. ‘Then there’s Beltane. The Germans call it Walpurgisnacht, the night of the May queen and her marriage to the horned god.’

  ‘Crispin …’ Jacquie’s voice was quiet.

  ‘Lammas was another date marked, when the ancient sun god Lugh was worshipped. They made kirn babies for him – corn dollies. Though once of course they were real children.’

  Jacquie Carpenter was a woman of the here, the now. ‘I don’t see the relevance …’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Foulkes. ‘Yet. Jacquie, when did we last meet?’

  She moved away, wrapping her arms tightly around her waist. If she hadn’t exactly been dreading this moment, she hadn’t exactly been looking forward to it either. ‘Crispin,’ she said firmly, ‘that was then.’

  He stood up too. ‘After we finished,’ he said, ‘I moved to Nottingham. Did you know that?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I worked on the Broxtowe case, or at least, its aftermath. Do you know about that one?’