Maxwell’s Curse

by M. J. Trow

  They buried Andrew Darblay with appropriate pomp and circumstance that Thursday. In accordance with the fancy of an age yearning to find a grander culture than its own, they’d brought back the grim black stallions that Rudyard Kipling wrote about, with their mane unhogged and flowing and their curious way of going. People who worried about misuse of church funds pointed out loudly under their Sunday hats that it was hardly necessary to hire an expensive horse-drawn hearse to carry a body approximately forty-eight yards. But the Reverend Darblay had not come, cold-foot from his own front door at the rectory, but from the mortuary at Leighford General, where Jim Astley had gone to work on him, via the Swansdown Funeral Home in Tottingleigh.

  The great and the good of the diocese of Winchester were there, clergy in their long, black cloaks, the bishop himself, a nice old boy in Imperial purple and, a little way from the rest, two policemen in dark suits and overcoats in the shadow of the darker, towering yews.

  ‘For man that is born of woman,’ the priest intoned on the wind that snapped the folds of his surplice, ‘hath but a short time to live …’ The waiting horses snorted and champed their steel bits, the black synthetic ostrich feathers nodding as they tossed their heads.

  ‘See anybody you recognize, Kevin?’ Stone asked, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets to keep out the cold. The sun of mid-January had no warmth in it, for all it flashed on the chrome of the mourning cars and the harness and the hearse.

  DC Brand was scanning the crowd of mourners, under the plumed hats. They were mostly over sixty years of age, Darblay’s own congregation come to pay their last respects before tucking into Mrs Spooner’s baked meats. There wasn’t a wet eye in the house, except for Mrs Spooner herself, red-rimmed behind her glasses, blowing her nose copiously into a large, clerical handkerchief.

  ‘Such a one,’ the priest’s words came in gusts of wind across the sleepers under their slabs, ‘was this our brother …’

  ‘Church of England,’ Brand snorted. ‘Any one of them would slit your throat for a penny.’ He caught the DS’s quizzical glance. ‘Baptist, my lot,’ he explained. ‘Course, that was a long time ago.’

  Stone nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Fancy a trip back in time yourself, Kev? The village school?’

  The village school was once an institution in its own right. When Wetherton School was built in safe, strong Victorian red brick, Mr Disraeli was at Number Ten and Lord Sandon was passing an Act of Parliament to ensure that children not only went to school but stayed there. The Headmaster, with mortarboard and stinging cane and Piccadilly Weepers was a pillar of the community. He stood four square with the Parson and the Squire, Tories to a man and believers in muscular Christianity.

  Now, the Headteacher was Alison Thorn, a bubbly thirtysomething who drove in from Leighford and wore stretch pants and trainers. Her dark hair was bobbed in such a way that someone of Peter Maxwell’s generation might mistake her for Christopher Robin. She was certainly as flat-chested, but people like Kevin Brand noticed things like that anyway and made too much of them.

  ‘The school log books?’ Ms Thorn’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’ Brand was standing head and shoulders and indeed his entire upper body above a wriggling sea of heads.

  ‘No, no,’ she smiled broadly. ‘It’s just that we’re a First School now – little ones. All of our current details are on computer.’

  ‘It’s the old ones I’m looking for, madam,’ Brand said. ‘Going back to the 1930s, perhaps ’twenties.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Ms Thorn was still grinning. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Children!’ And she clapped her hands. The hubbub hardly subsided at all. ‘Mr Brand is a policeman. Say “Good afternoon, Mr Brand”.’

  Thirty plus little mouths intoned the response.

  ‘Er … good afternoon, children,’ Brand felt decidedly uncomfortable. He wasn’t a family man and regarded other people’s children with the same dread he might show to an outbreak of E coli.

  ‘Mr Brand is going to tell you all about being a policeman while I go and find some books for him. Now, Mrs Whitemoor is just next door. You’ll be good, won’t you? Matthew,’ she held her hand out to the obvious school psycho in the corner, ‘you’d better come with me.’ In six or seven years time, a suggestion like that from a teacher would probably result in ABH and a wired jaw. For the moment, however, Matthew was happy to obey.

  ‘Where’s your helmet?’ a wall-eyed little waif wanted to know.

  ‘He’s a detective, stupid,’ the class know-all rounded on him. ‘They don’t wear helmets.’

  ‘No,’ said another, smearing the contents of his left nostril all over his cheek, ‘they stitch people up.’

  ‘Mr Policeman,’ a third piped up, clutching his genitals convulsively, ‘I want to go to the toilet.’

  No wonder, Brand realized, that society was going to the bloody dogs. He’d wandered into Broadmoor and the loonies were running the asylum.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Willoughby Crown turned to follow Ken Templeton’ s gaze. The two men were sitting on the balcony at Beauregard’s, staring down at Peter Maxwell who had just come in.

  ‘That bastard’s everywhere,’ Willoughby hissed.

  ‘No,’ muttered Ken, ‘just here. I wish I knew who the fuck recommended him. I can’t remember who it was.’

  ‘You could have said no.’ They watched the Head of Sixth Form engage Sophie Clark in conversation on the floor below them.

  ‘He couldn’t be a problem, could he?’ Ken asked, swigging from his Evian bottle.

  ‘I don’t know … I think he saw me on the estate the other night.’

  ‘What?’ Ken checked himself in mid-swig. ‘You stupid bastard. What was he doing there?’

  Willoughby wiped a flabby hand over his dry lips. ‘Don’t know. He had two boys with him.’

  ‘Boys? You mean children?’

  ‘That’s right, Kenneth,’ Willoughby patronized. ‘Mind like a rapier again. Some local joined them.’

  ‘What were they doing?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know. Oh shit, he’s seen us.’ Willoughby tried to dive into his mineral glass, as though the bubbles would hide him.

  Ken was on his feet, towel around his neck, leaning briefly over the heavier man. ‘What do you mean “us”, white man?’ he hissed and was gone, sprinting along the corridor.

  ‘Was it something I said?’ Maxwell’s scarf billowed in Ken’s slipstream.

  ‘Ah, Mr Maxwell,’ Willoughby did his best to radiate all the normal signals.

  ‘Max, please,’ Maxwell shook the man’s hand. ‘Can I get you a drink? Something a little stronger than whatever that is. Sophie said I’d probably find you here.’

  ‘Did she? Well, actually, I’ve got to be getting along.’

  ‘Oh, really? Time for a snorter, surely?’ Maxwell clicked his fingers and a spotty youth shambled over.

  ‘Well,’ Willoughby was clearly uncomfortable. ‘Just one for the road, then.’

  ‘A Southern Comfort, please,’ Maxwell beamed at the lad, ‘and whatever Mr Crown is having.’

  ‘Oh, Willoughby, please,’ Willoughby’s bonhomie was rather less than bon by this stage of a Thursday evening. ‘I’ll have a g and t, thanks.’

  ‘You know,’ Maxwell leaned back in his chair against the rail that ran the length of the balcony, ‘I never had a chance to thank you for the party.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no need,’ Willoughby’s grin was painful. ‘My wife’s affair.’

  Maxwell raised an eyebrow. Affairs and Prissy Crown seemed to go hand in hand. ‘Quite a little mover, your wife,’ he winked.

  Willoughby’s grin vanished. ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘On the piste,’ Maxwell beamed, waving in the direction of the gym. ‘I had the pleasure to cross swords with her the other night. And talking of the other night …’

  ‘That’ll be three pounds sixty please,’ the spotty youth had returned with a tray of drinks.


  Maxwell rummaged for his wallet. ‘The other night. Didn’t I see you on the Barlichway Estate? Keep the change,’ he smiled at the lad.

  ‘No,’ Willoughby said, a shade too quickly. ‘Barlichway? Where’s that?’

  ‘You know, over the flyover, Tottingleigh way. Can’t miss it. I’m sure it was you.’

  ‘Oh, the Barlichway,’ Willoughby snapped his fingers as though forgetfulness was his middle name. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I was checking the place out.’

  ‘Checking it out?’ Maxwell sipped the amber nectar. ‘What for?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t Prissy tell you? I’m a property developer. Always on the lookout on behalf of clients. You know how it is.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘Er … and you … um … Max. What were you doing there?’

  ‘Oh, you know how it is, Willoughby,’ Maxwell raised his drink so that the man’s fixed features wobbled and rolled in the glass’s distortion. ‘I was solving a murder.’

  11

  Alison Thorn went to school in Salisbury, in the shadow of the tallest spire in England. She was a creative child, who loved painting and music. She got ten O levels, one of almost the last generation in the country to do so. She took Music, Art and Media Studies at A level and then went on to the West Sussex Institute for a B Ed degree. She started teaching in Hove, where the infants loved her and moved on to become deputy at Wetherton four years later. When Mrs Appleton retired the following year, Alison Thorn was a natural to replace her.

  Then, in the cold middle January of Maxwell’s Millennium, somebody killed her.

  Martin Stone stood with Jacquie Carpenter in the first-floor flat where her body was found, looking out of the window that looked out over the park. It was Monday and a leaden sky threatened the outskirts of Leighford, promising snow. SOCO had been all over the place, checking in their meticulous way every inch of the geography of a person’s life. The walls, the door handles, the furniture, every bit of it was dusted for prints. They had marked out the place where the dead woman had been found, lying on the floor between the bed and the dressing table.

  Stone hadn’t been there to see her, but Jacquie had and she turned cold again at the memory of it. Alison Thorn frozen in the hideous stiffness of rigor mortis. Alison Thorn naked. Alison Thorn with her throat cut. Her mouth was slightly parted, with a dribble of blood down her chin and onto her neck. Her stare accused the ceiling, her sightless eyes sunken and dull. Jacquie had watched as Jim Astley had worked his scientific magic, probing with his white-gloved fingers every private place the woman had. Must it always come to this, she wondered, a glittering career cut short by some mad bastard and the results of a rectal temperature?

  ‘Out of my light, dear girl,’ Astley had boomed, never one to suffer WDCs gladly. She’d meekly complied.

  ‘Hello, Alison,’ Martin Stone had pressed the answerphone button again, now that SOCO had taken their prints and the detectives listened to the disembodied voice. ‘Evelyn here. Are you all right? Only, we didn’t get a call or a fax or anything. Give us a ring, can you? April’s fine for today.’

  ‘That’s the school,’ Stone said, grim-faced, ‘wondering where she is. We only spoke to her last Thursday.’

  ‘What was that about?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘A loose end, really,’ Stone sighed. There were no more messages on the machine. ‘Albert Walters lived in Wetherton as a kid, went to the local school.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, it was my guess that Elizabeth Pride did too. And of course, Jane Cruikshank.’

  ‘Did they?’

  Stone shrugged, leafing through Alison Thorn’s copies of Cosmopolitan and Red, piled loosely on her coffee table. ‘Kevin Brand drew the short straw and talked to Ms Thorn. I have to confess I had a zizz in the car. Pride of course wasn’t the old girl’s maiden name, neither was Cruikshank. And Elizabeth and Jane are about as common as you can get in the Christian name stakes back in the ’thirties. Walters was there though; that’s definite.’

  ‘How does that help?’

  ‘It doesn’t – at the moment. But think of it, Jacquie. Two people from the same village are dead – the rector and the headteacher, two others born in the place are also dead. It doesn’t take a DCI to work out the connection.’

  ‘The village,’ she nodded.

  ‘The village. Come on,’ he sat down on the dead woman’s settee. ‘We’ve got papers to sort. Let’s see if we can find a reason in this lot why anybody should want to see Alison Thorn dead.’

  ‘Lovely girl,’ Jim Astley was feeling unusually poetic for a Monday. ‘Puts me in mind of that TV presenter – what’s her name?’

  Donald peered over his boss’s shoulder. ‘Carol Vordermann.’

  ‘No.’

  Donald peered again. ‘Anneka Rice.’

  Astley looked at him. ‘For Christ’s sake, Donald. I can’t think of two women less alike than those two.’

  Donald had a third look, snapping his fingers. ‘Charlie Dimmock,’ he said triumphantly.

  ‘Anne Diamond,’ Astley growled. ‘Just stick to the cocoa, will you?’

  Donald pulled a bitch face behind the good doctor’s green-gowned back and slid the microscope aside to make room for the coffee tray. ‘What’s up, doc?’ he lapsed into his perennially irritating Bugs Bunny.

  ‘What indeed?’ Astley was scooping out the stomach contents on a side table. ‘My guess at this stage – and we’ll have to wait for confirmation of the tests – is that we are looking at an organic poison, specifically a vegetable irritant as cause of death. Lividity, evidence of convulsions, they all point in that direction. So, what have we, Donald, in your common hedgerow, that’s lethal?’

  ‘Aside from old car tyres and used condoms?’ Donald queried. ‘You’ve got me there, doctor.’

  ‘I suspected I would have, Donald.’ Astley was rummaging in a petri dish. ‘We are a different generation, you and I. While you were busy in your formative years discovering how the Starship Enterprise was powered, I was steeped in Nature Study and the lore of the countryside. Which one of us has benefited more, I wonder?’

  Bearing in mind that Donald’s G-reg Fiesta was parked in the lee of Astley’s spanking new state-of-the-art Galaxy, he was forced to concede the good doctor’s point.

  ‘Of course, Mr Plod will need to check the Wetherton hedgerows specifically, but it could be yew, white bryony, fool’s parsley, laburnum, either of the hemlocks. Time and science will tell us, Donald. Got any digestives?’

  Peter Maxwell was facing the last class of his day, the shell-shocked Year 12, still reeling from their first modular exam, they that rode so well, back from the jaws of death, back from the mouth of hell …

  ‘You haven’t convinced me, Gary,’ Maxwell was saying. ‘If William Pitt was simply, as the Whigs complained, a king’s friend, why did he trim the civil list, whittle away the Court and Treasury party, officially recognize America? All these things were the eighteenth-century equivalent of kicking George III in the nuts.’

  Silence. It was the end of another marathon, in which Mad Max was again doing the impossible, forcing children to think. There was an electronic shattering of the moment.

  ‘Saved, as the boxing metaphor has it, by the bell. Go away, 12B and ponder long and hard the nature of the relationship between the patriot minister and the patriot king. And,’ he held up his hand as they started to move, ‘when do I want this done by?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ they chorused dutifully and trudged out to their waiting buses or the parked cars of their slightly older mates, the hell drivers of Year 13.

  Maxwell put his books away in the dingy little cupboard in H4 and sauntered into his office next door. He wasn’t quite ready for the visitor who sat there.

  ‘Mr Hall,’ he said, closing the door. ‘This is becoming something of a habit.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Hall said, ‘and to arrive unannounced. I wanted a word.’

  ‘Coffee?’ At the
end of a long Monday, it was always Maxwell’s first thought.

  Hall shook his head. There was a tap on the door and Mrs B. stood there, a halo of ciggie smoke around her head. ‘Gawd, it’s Monday already, ain’t it? Oh, you’re busy. I’ll call back, shall I? Do that old cow Lessing first. That’d be best.’

  ‘It is indeed, Mrs B.,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I am, rather. Please do. Yes, I’m sure Deirdre’s bovine needs are greater than mine. It would, I feel certain.’ And he closed the door again. ‘Heart of gold,’ he told Hall. ‘Nothing quite like a school cleaner, is there? A breed apart, that’s what they are. Oh, you don’t mind if I do?’ Maxwell waved a coffee cup at him.

  Hall shook his head. The DCI was being particularly tight-lipped this afternoon. Maxwell busied himself with the coffee. A gaggle of hysterical sixth formers tottered past his door. He yanked it open. ‘Home!’ he bellowed and the hysteria stopped. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure, Mr Hall?’

  ‘Did you know Alison Thorn, head teacher at Wetherton primary school?’

  Maxwell looked blank and sat on the spare chair opposite his visitor, who still dutifully wore the stick-on label given to him by Thingee Too in reception.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Not really,’ Hall said.

  ‘What’s Wetherton, four, live miles from here? Not a village I know well.’

  ‘It’s three and a half miles as the crow flies,’ Hall told him.

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘Let me explain something to you about teachers, Mr Hall. A primary teacher and a secondary teacher – well, we’re chalk-face and cheese, really. One wipes the bastards’ bums and mops floors and encourages free expression. The other tells the by-now-much-bigger-bastards to shut up and write this down. We both get results of a sort. But the methods … ah, well, the devil’s in the detail.’