Maxwell's Grave

by M. J. Trow

  ‘It’s a lead,’ she said. And Leighford nick has precious few of those at the moment.

  ‘What are you doing after this?’ he asked, ‘when and if I’ve been brave enough to get my mandibles around Hop Sing’s to-die-for banana fritters?’

  ‘Getting some shut-eye,’ she said. ‘After I’ve passed Michaela’s info on Annette onto the nick.’

  ‘You are the proud owner of a differencing machine, are you not?’ Maxwell was plotting something.

  She screwed up her face and rested it in her hand, teasing the last yummy morsel of her ribs into a corner of her mouth. ‘I’m sure you can manage the c-word,’ she said, ‘even if you can’t use one. Yes, I have a computer. I won’t bore you with the make and model.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ he nodded. ‘I need to look something up on what you young people call the Internet.’ He waved to the waiter. ‘Hop Sing,’ he called to the odd looks of fellow diners. ‘A brace of your lovely hot flannels, please. Just the thing to mop my soup up with.’ He leaned forward to Jacquie and said in a whisper, ‘Don’t think he noticed that I ended that sentence with a preposition, do you?’

  ‘So, Mr…er…Maxwell?’ Tam Fraser sat in the main tent that Monday morning, surrounded, rather like Dierdre Lessing, with dead men’s bones. ‘Tell me what you know about Saxon cemeteries.’

  ‘Furnished or unfurnished?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked. He had jettisoned the bandages and cream of the previous day, the ones that had jolted Michaela Reynolds and Kenny Hop Sing and had made Jacquie Carpenter love the man even more; and he was bearing his wounds before for all to see.

  Fraser was quietly impressed, but he wasn’t going to show it. He needed another volunteer at the Leighford dig like a hole in the head, but he was two people down now. First, David Radley. Now, Sam Welland. Henry Hall and a couple of uniforms had been to the site earlier to break the news about Sam Welland to the rest of the team. Fraser had insisted on a two minutes’ silence and then it was back to buckets and spades.

  ‘Unfurnished,’ he said.

  ‘Usually denotes a Christian burial ground,’ Maxwell said. ‘Bodies in rows in an east-west orientation, heads to the west, to the setting sun. No grave goods, on the grounds that you can’t, in Christian philosophy, take it with you. No cremations either. That little habit didn’t come back until the Victorians got rather windy about premature burial. I blame Edgar Allan Poe, myself.’

  Fraser chuckled. A bit of light relief was all too missing around here. Perhaps he could do business with this Maxwell after all.

  ‘They are usually concomitant with a church,’ the Head of Sixth Form went on, ‘but you haven’t found one here, have you?’

  ‘Indeed, not,’ Fraser nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It is unlikely that this site is a continuation of a furnished, that is, pagan, burial site. If it were, you’d go down in the annals yourself, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Would I? And why is that, pray?’

  Maxwell played the ingénue. ‘Because there are no recorded examples of that in England.’

  ‘Very good, laddie,’ Fraser smiled. ‘But you’ve been to the site before, so you tell me. Pick up all this from Dougie Russell, did you?’

  ‘Emphatically not,’ Maxwell bridled. He’d picked it up from some dot.com site on Jacquie’s PC, but he wasn’t going to tell Fraser that.

  ‘And of course, you know all about poor David.’

  ‘I do,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘In a way, that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You’re short-staffed.’

  ‘Shorter than you know,’ Fraser said grimly. ‘What a loss to research that man will be. But this is David’s dig. Whatever we find here, my report will carry his name. I’ll have it no other way.’

  ‘Unfurnished cemeteries have become quite important in recent years.’ Maxwell’s memory, even of the Internet screen, was impressive. ‘Variants in wood and stone memorials, grave structure, charcoal burial, supine and erect bodies, with arm and leg variations. Of course, at Repton…’

  ‘Repton’s Viking, laddie,’ Fraser interrupted, testing his man for his ability to think on his feet.

  ‘A winter camp, yes. But it was a Saxon monastery first, founded, if I’m not mistaken, by Haedda, Abbott of Bredon – a double house for monks and nuns. Quite the place to be seen dead, too, if you were a Middle Saxon royal. Aethelbald was buried there; Wigstan, of course; not to mention Merewald, King of the Magonsaetan…’

  ‘Enough, already!’ Fraser’s hands were in the air, as he laughed out loud. ‘You’ve got the job, Mr Maxwell.’ And the great men shook hands. ‘But, first things first. How are you at making the tea?’

  Jacquie Carpenter spent what seemed like all of that Monday afternoon of Maxwell’s half-term on the phone to Hove CID. SOCO had, as promised two days earlier, busted a gut to get what information they could to Henry Hall’s people. Their pathologist’s initial findings were that Sam Welland had died by strangulation.

  ‘Asphyxia due to a constriction of the neck by force applied by ligature,’ were the man’s words over the phone to Leighford nick. Text-book stuff. The rope’s knot was to the left and behind the dead woman’s ear when they found her. The photographs already pinned to an Incident Room in Hove showed Sam Welland as her partner had found her. Her lips and ears were purple, the colour of Peter Maxwell’s nose. There was a film of froth around her lips, livid in the camera’s flash and her tongue protruded, mauve and grotesque like some ghastly gargoyle leaning out from a Medieval buttress to terrify the world.

  There was nothing quick and clean about Sam Welland’s death. The macabre science of the judicial executions from James Berry to Albert Pierrepoint allowed for the lightning drop, with Berry’s carefully calculated table, worked out to the weight of a condemned man, his height and the length of the rope needed to kill him. Whoever had killed Sam Welland had reverted to the older method, the bunglers like Calcraft, the young Victoria’s executioner, who left his victims to writhe at the rope’s end, kicking and struggling, fighting for air.

  That was how the archaeologist had died; her fingertips were raw from scrabbling at the rough hemp, until, finally, mercifully, her breath had stopped and her eyes bulged and her hands had fallen to her side, her fingers curling in on themselves like claws. She had wet herself in those last minutes, splashes of urine on the kitchen chair and a puddle on the garage floor.

  Whoever had killed her had gone into the house freely. There was no sign of forced entry, no broken window, no tell-tale smashing of the lock or door-frame. Ms Welland’s upmarket home had a complex burglar alarm system, but no CCTV camera and none of the neighbours had seen anyone come or go at any time over the weekend. That said, The Orchards was set back from the road, with an eight foot brick wall at the front and a ring of cedars around the perimeter. There could have been a quiet pop festival going on in its grounds and the neighbours would have been none the wiser.

  So, Jacquie put the question to her Hove oppo over the phone, did Sam Welland know her killer? Had her visitor been the newspaperman, a Mormon, a prospective parliamentary candidate, a four-foot high ‘grey’ from beyond the known world? Anything was possible. All the accounts of the dead woman that Jacquie had were that she was extrovert, brash even. She wouldn’t have been cowering behind a curtain somewhere.

  Whoever the murderer was, he had brought his rope with him. Jacquie checked her notes again; Hazel Twigg said that there was none in the house, and apart from the length used to hang the dead woman, she was right. Bruising and a cut on the right jaw suggested that the killer had gone for Sam in the kitchen, where there were slight signs of a scuffle – a ruched mat, a wonky window-blind. In fiction, Miss Marple would have been travelling past in the 4.50 from Paddington at the time and would have seen the lot. As it was, nothing. As Western buff Peter Maxwell would have ruminated, she might as well have been riding the 3.10 to Yuma.

  He had lifted her down the stairs from the utility room and laid her down near h
er car. That meant bodily strength. Sam Welland was muscular and powerful herself. Two tiny blood droplets from her mouth marked the place and one of her earrings had bounced off under the Volvo where her head had hit the concrete. As the pathologist sheared off her thick, blonde hair, he found the bruising, puffy and soft over the parietal bone. The Saturday visitor had strung up the rope from the hook on the wall and passed it, using the chair, across the beams. The height didn’t help Jacquie at all. Only a particularly impressive member of the Harlem Globetrotters could have achieved that by standing on the floor. The noose was good and strong. Then he hoisted the unconscious woman’s body onto the chair and hauled her upright, securing the loose end of the rope onto its housing, watching her squirm as the pressure on her neck brought her to; and the cold and the terror of imminent death would have made every nerve jangle.

  Someone strong, Jacquie doodled on her note pad. Two people? What was it Maxwell had said about Martin Toogood’s on-screen doodling? A quote from Julius Caesar. That play was all about conspiracy, wasn’t it? Not one man, but several, had murdered the dictator. Was that what she was looking at here? Had two or more people conspired to break the neck of David Radley and drop him off at Leighford, among the already long dead? Had one or more of them hoisted Sam Welland to eternity? And how many murderers does it take to fix the brake-lines of a nice guy’s car? That wasn’t a joke and Jacquie Carpenter wasn’t laughing.

  Peter Maxwell was a fast learner. By four o’clock, when the sun was still a demon, he’d graduated from making tea to washing pots, well, bones, actually. His de rigueur archaeologist’s straw hat was tilted back on his hair and he tried not to keep his head down too much for fear it would start the bleeding again. His back ached and he felt such a prat in the pink washing-up gloves Tam Fraser insisted he wore.

  ‘My body is a temple,’ he groaned as Derek Latymer brought him another sieve of goodies.

  ‘Long day, Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Is it always like this, in archaeology, I mean?’

  ‘Ooh, no,’ Latymer grinned, wiping the sweat from his forehead and parking his Indiana Jones hat on the corner of a chair. ‘Sometimes you get to squat for hours under the blazing sun, getting blisters all over your back and shoulders. That’s when you’re not knee deep in freezing water, of course, with the rain coming onto your anorak like a fucking waterfall. You’re new at this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Ssh!’ Maxwell winked, putting his finger somewhere where he thought his lips ought to be. ‘Don’t tell the boss. He thinks I’m a whizzo-wheeze at Saxon cemeteries.’

  ‘I try not to tell him anything,’ Latymer said, flopping down into a canvas chair and crossing his booted legs on the table. He whipped out a hip flask from his shorts. ‘Hair of the dog?’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘I thought you people were all Friends of the Earth,’ he said, ‘not spraying your armpits and so on, so that the world can be saved.’

  Latymer snorted. ‘You’re mixing me up with the sort of enviro-archaeologist who gives a fuck.’ He took a swig.

  ‘Did you know David Radley well?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I knew him,’ Latymer said, brushing caked mud off his forearms. ‘He was a bloody good archaeologist. I was privileged, briefly, to work with him.’

  ‘How did you get the job?’

  ‘Oh, I asked for it,’ Latymer said. ‘Radley was a legend in archaeology – in the same way old Fraser used to be 200 years ago. I suppose I saw it as a step on the ladder. Still is, in fact. But there’s something odd about this site.’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, Saxon cemeteries aren’t my field, but, I mean, what’s it doing here? You’re a local man, aren’t you? Historian and all that?’

  ‘Of sorts,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well,’ Latymer leaned forward, resting his trowelling arm on his knee. ‘I know the Romans came to Fishbourne, but did the Saxons come to Leighford?’

  ‘Funny you should ask that,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s not at all documented.’ Maxwell had, in his weaker moments, dabbled in the local museum, smiling at the unsavoury chaps and brash, ancestor-seeking Americans who clogged the microfiche in the Leighford Records Office every summer.

  ‘And there’s something else.’ Latymer was into his stride now, as the Scotch warmed his cockles. ‘The ash grove.’

  Maxwell peered out through the open tent flap. He could see it in the sharp shadows against the sunlit spoil heaps, the stand of grey-barked trees where they’d found David Radley. ‘What about it?’

  ‘We dug a slit trench there on the first day. Geophys were going shit-nuts about it. But David wouldn’t let us do any follow up. Said that could wait. Seemed to me that’s where we should have started. If this is a church site, that’s where the building was likely to be.’

  ‘Have you talked to Fraser about it?’

  ‘The mad professor? He won’t have his precious wee David questioned for a moment. Says we’ll get to it eventually. But as I understand it, we’ve only got a week before the bulldozers move in for the golf course and that’ll effectively shut us down.’

  ‘Archaeological differences, eh?’ Maxwell clicked his tongue.

  Latymer got to his feet, pocketing the flask and plonking his hat back on his head. ‘Take my advice,’ he said. ‘You stick to washing bones, mate. At least the buggers can’t bite back.’

  ‘Tea?’ Peter Maxwell handed a mug that cheered to Helen Reader.

  ‘Oh, you darling man.’ She was rubbing her heels, sitting on the tail gate of her estate, trying to get some feeling back into her feet.

  ‘Hometime, eh?’ he smiled at her.

  ‘Thank God. I thought David Radley was a hard taskmaster, but Scotland’s Gauleiter over there…’

  Tam Fraser was ordering people about in all directions, hands on hips, silver-haired chest sprouting out from the crisp white shirt he wore. All he needed was the whip and the boots and he’d have been D.W. Griffith on the Intolerance set.

  ‘What are your thoughts, Helen?’ Maxwell asked. ‘The murders, I mean?’

  She sighed. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Aren’t you…afraid?’

  ‘Afraid? Good God, no. Why should I be afraid?’

  Why indeed? Maxwell looked at the woman. She had biceps that would put many a man to shame and her thighs looked as though they could crack walnuts. ‘Two of the team are dead,’ Maxwell reminded her.

  ‘Mr Maxwell, I’m what you might call an archaeological groupie. I don’t have an official qualification to my name. Ooh, you make a decent drop of tea.’

  He bowed low.

  ‘But I’ve been on more digs than you’ve written school reports.’

  Maxwell doubted that particular piece of hyperbole.

  ‘And when you’ve been around dead bodies for so long, this sort of thing doesn’t faze you. I don’t flatter myself that I’m much of a target. Who’d want to kill me?’

  ‘I suspect that David Radley and Samantha Welland would have said something similar,’ he said.

  ‘Sam’s lifestyle,’ the Groupie said, ‘not healthy.’ She tucked an errant lock of hair back under her headscarf. ‘I don’t want to sound too forty years ago,’ she said, ‘but not everyone is as tolerant of these things as we would like.’

  ‘Are you talking about the fact that Ms Welland was a lesbian?’

  Helen Reader bridled at the word, looking rapidly about her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I ought to be comfortable with it and I’m not. Not terribly PC at the moment, I know, to be homophobic, but there it is. We can’t help the way we’re made.’

  ‘Surely,’ Maxwell reasoned, ‘that goes for Sam too.’

  ‘It’s not for me to say.’ She finished her tea with a giant swig for mankind. ‘As you said, Mr Maxwell. Hometime.’

  ‘Maxwell!’ It was Tam Fraser. ‘You got a minute?’

  The two Great Men sat in the snug of the Kettle that night, Maxwell getting outside a large
Southern Comfort, Fraser tackling a double Scotch. The Englishman was paying.

  ‘How well do you know Detective Chief Inspector Hall?’ Fraser had shed his director’s gear of the day and was back in a tweed jacket again, his lion’s mane of silver hair back-combed, his cravat crisp against his white shirt.

  ‘Not as well as I’d like and better than I need to,’ came the answer.

  Fraser sat upright, frowning. ‘Sounds like a bloody Saxon riddle, man,’ he laughed. ‘Pass it by me again.’

  ‘I’ve had some dealings with the chief inspector,’ he explained. ‘The girl I love works for him.

  ‘Does she now? Well, that’s handy.’

  ‘It can be,’ Maxwell said.

  A roar went up from the domino crowd in the corner. ‘This the place to be, is it?’ Fraser asked. ‘In downtown Leighford?’

  ‘You wanted somewhere where we wouldn’t be disturbed,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘This is the only pub the grocks don’t know about.’

  ‘Grocks?’

  ‘Grockles,’ he explained. ‘Tourists. It’s a rather charming, onomatopoeic South Coast term for the chattering noise the annoying bastards make. As one of the few people in Leighford who doesn’t make my living off them, I can afford a little contempt. Of course, Leighford Cemetery’s quieter – mine, that is, not yours. Why do you want to know about Hall?’

  ‘I think the man’s grossly incompetent.’

  ‘Ah, now, I fear I’d have to disagree with you there. Henry and I have had our minor run-ins over the years, but he knows his job.’

  ‘So how come he’s not taking me seriously?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  Fraser looked around him. The domino gang were engrossed in their game in one corner, two old bags were putting the world to rights in another, probably comparing that nice Mr Chamberlain with that unpleasant, war-mongering bastard, Churchill. The barman looked as if he’d died years ago. ‘The Sepulchre Society of Sussex,’ he said.