Maxwell's Grave

by M. J. Trow

  ‘So you’ve come to snoop?’

  Maxwell looked at the man in front of him. Henry Hall was a master of blandness. Whatever emotions he possessed were locked behind that firm jaw, that grey suit, those blank glasses. If Hall’s wife and three sons were to be machine-gunned in front of him, Maxwell swore the man would just adjust his tie and get on with solving the crime. But he would solve it. And that, in the maelstrom of murder, was common ground for them both.

  ‘Saxon cemetery,’ said Maxwell, jerking a thumb at the spoil heaps and trenches behind him. ‘Can you imagine how exciting that is for us old-stuff buffs? You know what Domesday says about Leighford? Of course you do. Like me, you know it by heart – “Hugh holds Ley Ford of William of Warenne. In the time of King Edward, there was land for twenty ploughs, in demesne…”’

  ‘Get to the point.’ Ancient history had never been Henry Hall’s suit and he did have a murderer to catch.

  ‘The point is that Leighford before 1066 is a closed book. So, Saxon bodies here present a wonderful opportunity to…’

  ‘Ah,’ Hall cut in, wagging an upright finger at the man. ‘But it’s not Saxon bodies that you’re interested in, is it, Mr Maxwell? You want to know all about Dr David Radley.’

  ‘As do you,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘It’s my job.’ Hall stood his ground.

  Maxwell could have fenced with this man all day; the cut and thrust of involvement in murder was bread-and-butter to him. But time, even if Henry Hall didn’t seem to think so, was pressing. ‘I spoke to this man on Wednesday, in my own office at Leighford High,’ he said. ‘A little over 24 hours later, he was dead, and his body lying yards from where I was standing. That makes it sort of personal.’

  ‘That makes it a job for the police.’ It was not the first time that Hall and Maxwell had had this conversation. Would it, one day, Hall wondered, be the last? ‘What were you hoping to find?’

  You not here, Maxwell thought to himself, but he was too much of a gentleman to say so. ‘Vibes,’ he said.

  ‘Vibes?’ Hall repeated, disbelievingly.

  ‘Yes, I hate the phrase too. “A sense of the past”, if you will,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Real or imaginary. Ancient or modern.’

  ‘So little things like forensics are a no-go area to you, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I like to think I have an open mind. And of course, any titbits that your SOCO people and Dr Astley want to pass my way…’

  Hall clicked open the car door. ‘I should hold onto your bike, Mr Maxwell,’ he said, ‘in case it falls over as I drive away.’

  ‘So what are you doing here, Mr Hall?’ Maxwell asked him, resorting, after all, to the cliché of the television crime dramas, ‘if you don’t believe in vibes, if you don’t find answers blowing in the wind, what price this visit?’

  ‘Checking on the lad on the gate,’ Hall said, nodding in his direction. ‘Keeping away nosy parkers like you. By the way, you do have lights on that thing?’ He pointed to Surrey.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘For when I sneak back here after dark, you mean? Don’t worry about me, Chief Inspector. I’ll be fine.’

  Hall lowered his glasses slightly, letting Maxwell see the grey of his eyes. ‘All right,’ he sighed, postponing his leaving, bowing to the inevitable. Perhaps, if he just gave Maxwell a tiny window on the case, he’d feel sufficiently self-important and go away. Henry Hall was not an historian; otherwise he would have known the futility of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement and the pointlessness of the Danegeld of Aethelred Unraed, the badly advised. ‘My understanding is that Dr Radley approached you to bring a group out to the dig.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you arrived at what time?’

  ‘Four-thirty, five, something like that. You’d have to ask my boss, Paul Moss.’ That Maxwell had a boss at all came as something of a surprise to Henry Hall.

  ‘Did you expect to meet Radley?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Maxwell told him. ‘His Number Two, Douglas Russell, said he hadn’t seen him all day.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘Why, Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell was as wide-eyed as he was bushy-tailed. ‘Don’t tell me Mr Russell is a suspect.’

  Hall opened the door wide. ‘Everybody’s a suspect, Mr Maxwell,’ he said softly, trying not to sound too much like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. ‘Even you. Shall I give you a lift or tell that constable to arrest you for deliberate contamination of a scene of crime? You see, that “Do Not Cross” tape is not just a serving suggestion.’

  Maxwell raised his hat and hauled Surrey’s handlebars upright. ‘Point taken, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘A vertical movement of the head is as good as a rapid closure of an eyelid to an equine quadruped that is visually impaired,’ and he pedalled away across Radley’s planking, gravel and mud flying in his wake.

  She advanced on him, hands in the air, circling slowly. A powerful, peroxide blonde, nudging thirty-five. He grabbed one wrist, but she was faster, spinning him sideways with his arm locked straight. There was a hiss of breath from the little audience, white robed, green belted, against the mirrored wall. Then she brought her leg forward and yanked him backwards to thud painfully on the mat. To a ripple of applause, he staggered to his feet, and the pair bowed to each other. Slowly, her mask of sheer power melted into something softer.

  ‘Next time,’ he muttered as his head came up.

  ‘Next time I’ll break your arm,’ she smiled sweetly.

  ‘Miss Welland?’

  She turned at the sound of her name. A good-looking dark-haired man was standing in the doorway of the gym, with what looked like a warrant card in his hand.

  ‘DS Toogood, Leighford CID.’

  ‘Yes,’ she reached for a towel from the wall bars, and hung it round her neck. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Professor Fraser said I might find you here.’

  ‘Tam? How is the old bastard? I’m flattered he knows what I do on my days off.’

  ‘He’s concerned,’ Toogood said.

  ‘About what?’ She ran the towel over her hair and straightened her top, cleavage threatening in the bright neon strip lights of the gym.

  ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ Toogood asked. People shrieking ‘banzai’ and flinging each other all over the floor wasn’t exactly conducive to a quiet chat.

  ‘I need a shower,’ she told him. ‘But I don’t suppose you want to join me in there?’

  ‘Perhaps some other time,’ Toogood said. University lecturers hadn’t looked like her in his day. There had been nothing alluring about Sir Anthony Fischer at all, but then he was 72 with a glass eye.

  ‘All right,’ she smiled, sensing his discomfort as she jutted her breasts at him. ‘Buy me a mineral water. Last one in the refectory’s a wuss.’

  The café at The Camdens Fitness and Leisure Centre was hardly state of the art. Hard aluminium chairs littered the room with equally hard aluminium tables, topped in garish blue and orange tiles. Decidedly unathletic people served an astonishingly limited range of goodies behind the counter and the whole place, from its breezeblock walls to its metal stairs had the odour of the jock-strap and the dodgy trainer. Famous athletes grinned down from photos on the walls, biceps bulging, quadriceps quivering.

  ‘Look, it’s just awful about David,’ Sam Welland was saying, ‘but life has to go on. How’s Susan taking it?’

  ‘Susan?’

  ‘His wife.’ The karate star took a hefty swig from her water bottle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Toogood told her, trying valiantly to open his sugar sachet. ‘That’s my next port of call.’

  ‘Well, it’s a silly question, really. She must be devastated. You know that stuff will kill you, don’t you?’

  Toogood grinned sheepishly.

  ‘Oh, let me do that. For goodness sake. Men!’ and she ripped open his sachet before hurling its contents into his coffee.

  ‘Professo
r Fraser,’ he said, just about able to stir it for himself, ‘was concerned that Dr Radley had secrets.’

  ‘Secrets?’ she frowned in the middle of another swig. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I hoped you might know. How well did you know Radley?’

  ‘We were colleagues,’ she said. ‘Well, technically, he was my boss, but that wasn’t his style.’

  ‘You worked together?’

  ‘Only in the sense that we were in the same department. Tam actually appointed me.’

  ‘He seems to have appointed a lot of people.’

  ‘That’s what being an éminence grise is all about,’ she laughed, mopping her cleavage with the towel. ‘Tam knows everybody and everything. Oh, he’s a little out of touch now, I suppose. It’ll happen to us all.’

  ‘Was Radley secretive?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ she shrugged. ‘Always struck me as being very pleasant. Up front, in fact.’

  ‘So, you didn’t know him all that well?’

  ‘Recently? No.’

  Toogood paused slightly in mid-stir. His years in the business had taught him to catch the odd nuances, the eyelash flutter, the change of tone. ‘Recently?’ He took her up on it. ‘You mean, there was a time when you knew each other better?’

  She put her bottle down. ‘What are you implying, Sergeant?’ she asked, an edge in her voice he hadn’t heard before.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Toogood hedged. ‘I just wondered how close you two were.’

  ‘I told you.’ She stood up, hanging the towel around her neck again. ‘We were colleagues. Nothing more.’

  Toogood scraped back his chair. ‘When did you see him last?’

  ‘Monday,’ she said quickly. ‘He had a lecture in the morning. I had some reports to write in the department. We had coffee.’

  ‘Did you go to the Valedictory bash?’

  She looked at him in an old-fashioned way. ‘That endless round of bitchiness? I did not.’

  ‘And on the Monday, he didn’t seem in any way…odd? Different?’

  ‘No,’ she shrugged. ‘Should he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I’m just trying to put together a picture of the man’s last days. It’s not easy.’

  She turned to go. Then she turned back. ‘Do you work out?’ she asked him.

  ‘Er, no, not really. Oh, a few minutes in the gym, when I can find the time. Why?’

  ‘Oh, no reason,’ she smiled, flicking him with the end of her towel. ‘Only I wouldn’t mind getting you on the mat sometime.’

  Now there was an offer Martin Toogood may have to refuse.

  Everybody knew the Quinton. Not because everybody had stayed there, but because it was typical of a certain brand of hotel you’d find anywhere in the country. The building was Victorian because Leighford was essentially a Victorian seaside town. The prints on the walls were sub-Constable, when they were not early Jorrocks, as though the sight of the English aristocracy thundering in pursuit of the uneatable was what every holiday-maker aspired to during their annual fortnight by the sea.

  The view wasn’t brilliant either. It had been, before they built the new Leighs Shopping Centre and the high rise of New Look and Waterstones and HMV that had cut the Quinton off from the sea. But it was the sort of place that visiting archaeologists stayed while digging in the area and it was here that Peter Maxwell found himself, in a corner of the bar, swapping pints and sob stories with Douglas Russell.

  ‘It’s good of you to come to see me,’ the archaeologist said. He sat hunched on the monks’ bench, looking far shorter than his six feet three.

  ‘I have to confess,’ said Maxwell, wiping froth from his upper lip, ‘to a certain ulterior motive.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Had you worked with Dr Radley long?’

  ‘Never met him before last month. No, that’s not quite true. Our paths had crossed on a weekend conference in Cambridge – that would have been…ooh…eighteen months ago.’

  ‘So, you’re not in his department at Wessex?’

  ‘Lord, no. I’m a geophysicist from Birmingham. We go all over the place. Have resistive equipment, will travel. I was on the Volga last year, looking for Viking settlement evidence.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Some. But this one is really exciting.’

  ‘Leighford? Why?’ To Peter Maxwell, the most exciting thing about Leighford was the road that led out of it.

  ‘Well, to begin with, no one had a clue about the Saxon cemetery. The records are peculiarly sparse for this part of Wessex.’

  Maxwell knew that.

  ‘With Winchester being so close, it sort of steals the show. The cathedral, the castle, Nunnaminster, Old and New Minsters.’

  Maxwell knew that too.

  ‘If it weren’t for the golf course…’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Maxwell nodded, wanting to know more about this; he had never knowingly hit a golf ball in his life. ‘So this is rescue archaeology, then? Three days to solve the riddle of the universe before the bunkers and club-house go in. And I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Tony Robinson.’

  ‘It’s never as desperate as that,’ Russell told him. ‘That’s all made up for the telly.’

  ‘A sort of “I’m a Botanoarchaeologist – Get Me Out Of Here”?’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Maxwell.’ Russell wasn’t smiling with him. ‘I’m finding it a little difficult to come to terms with all this.’

  ‘Of course,’ the Head of Sixth Form nodded. ‘I’m sorry. It must have been a huge shock. When did you see Dr Radley last – alive, I mean?’

  ‘Um, the day before…Wednesday. He had a phone call.’

  ‘At the site?’

  ‘Yes, on his mobile. Said he had to see someone.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Ooh, let me see. Mid-afternoon, I suppose. Said it wouldn’t take long and he’d be back here by evening.’

  ‘He was staying here too?’

  ‘Yes, Room 13, macabrely enough.’

  ‘But he didn’t show?’

  Russell leaned back, his pint barely touched on the table in front of him. ‘No. I assumed whatever had called him away had been more complicated than he thought.’

  ‘Did he have any enemies? Radley, I mean?’

  Russell was shaking his head. ‘Everybody had the highest regard for him. He’ll be a serious loss to archaeology. God knows who’ll get his chair at Wessex.’

  ‘So there you are, Count.’ Peter Maxwell was lolling back on the settee, the pile of exercise books lying beside him screaming in an unholy unison ‘Mark us! Mark us!’, but Peter Maxwell’s mind was on altogether higher things. ‘Is that what this is all about?’

  The black and white beast was stretching on the pouffe opposite, his claws reaching out tantalizingly to threaten yet more furniture. He let his legs sag, displaying his lamentable lack of bollocks as a reminder to his Lord and Master of the appalling mutilation the man had subjected him to all those cat-years before. To let him know he wasn’t just going to roll over and take it.

  ‘Is it just professional jealousy?’ the Great Castrator was burbling on in the dim light of the lounge, a glass of Southern Comfort in his fist, the lamp’s rays sparkling on the crystal. ‘When they announce Radley’s successor to his chair at the university, will we have our man – or indeed woman? Yes, I know, Count,’ he caught the nuance of the ear-twitch, ‘but they have had the vote for rather a long time now and there has been a woman – allegedly – at Number Ten. It can’t be too long before they’re allowed university chairs too.’ He sipped the amber nectar. ‘I went to his room, you know; Radley’s, I mean. Number 13 – fancy that; what are the odds, eh? When I’d left Russell at the bar I pulled the old one about being a CID officer left out in the cold again. Left hand, right hand. Nobody-tells me-anything speech – you know the one.’

  Count Metternich did, but he wasn’t about to let the old duffer know that. He rolled over and licked his forearm i
ntently.

  ‘Anyway, it worked and I got a shufti. Of course, Mr Hall’s ladies and gentlemen had been all over it anyway, but it never hurts to have a second opinion. Well, it’s not really impersonating a police officer. I mean, I didn’t show anybody a warrant card or anything. And I’m not sure I used the d-word at all. The floozy behind the bar just assumed I was CID. I can’t be responsible.’

  Metternich was aware of that after all these years.

  ‘But I have to concede the local boys had done a good job. Place was empty. No suitcase. No briefcase. No official secrets, no love letters, no compromising photos. All in all, it’s like David Radley never existed. Right!’ Maxwell sat upright and replenished his glass. ‘Just for your benefit, I’ll go over it again, because somewhere, I’m missing something. Now, listen carefully, because I just might be asking questions later. David Radley is a bright young thing, mentioned in archaeological despatches from here to Vladivostok. Monographs and papers up to his armpits. Simon Schama calls him “Sir” – you know the sort of thing. He’s a nice bloke with no known hang-ups who’s keen to show the world what archaeology is all about. Hence the invitation to me and my people to the dig. He gets a phone call on Wednesday from person unknown and goes off to see him/her. He doesn’t come back. So,’ Maxwell was on his feet now, prowling the room in a passable pastiche of the feline draped currently on his furniture, ‘between fourish, when Russell said he left the site on Wednesday and four-ish Thursday when little Robbie Wesson stumbled over him, he was done to death. Cause, I hear you ask? Broken neck. Oh, and broken ankle, but that’s a minor consideration. Where? Don’t know. When? Don’t know that either. By whom? Ah, the 64,000 dollar question. What I need, Count, is a time of death.’

  ‘One day,’ mused Metternich. ‘One day,’ and he turned over again and licked his bum. It’s a messy job, but somebody’s got to do it.