Maxwell's Grave

by M. J. Trow

  The man became conspiratorial, glancing around him as he spoke. ‘Russell,’ he whispered.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Douglas Russell.’ It was his turn to tap his nose. ‘Not all he seems.’

  ‘What does he seem?’ Maxwell could play the ingénue to perfection.

  ‘Gauche geophysicist with a rather grating Brummy accent. I live for my work type. Great unwashed. I mean,’ he pointed to his sodden shirt, ‘we all get a bit pongy in this line, but have you stood downwind of him lately? He always wears the same ghastly jumper. Reminds me of my bloody Art teacher at school.’

  ‘All right,’ Maxwell nodded, tapping listlessly at a rocky outcrop. ‘So that’s what he seems. What is he?’

  Edwards leaned forward again, so that his head was near Maxwell’s. ‘This Sepulchre Society nonsense. The stuff Fraser told us about.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘How do you know it exists?’

  ‘Er…is this a philosophical one? Like “how do you know you’re really there?” Sound of trees falling in forests. Black polar bears. That sort of thing?’

  ‘No,’ Edwards scowled. ‘I mean, we only have Russell’s word. That the letter is genuine, I mean. I asked him about it yesterday. He was vague; in fact, he was downright evasive. Fraser made his usual over-the-top announcement – never one not to make a drama out of a crisis – but it was Russell who got the letter.’

  ‘And Fraser who got the head.’

  ‘What?’ Edwards stopped in mid-trowel.

  ‘A skull – human, of course, to maximise impact. Somebody left it on his bed yesterday.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘I suppose the half horse in The Godfather was more dramatic, but it does rather leave your theory…’

  ‘All right,’ the archaeologist shrugged. ‘So Fraser’s a target too. But I’m still betting on Russell.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He hated Radley.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him,’ the lad said. ‘Pass me that brush, will you? Got some debris here.’

  Maxwell had been reading nuances all his life. The lad’s tone had changed, the timbre in his voice. The two of them were not alone. He glanced up to see the elegant brogues of Professor Tam Fraser.

  ‘Any joy, Maxwell?’ he asked, his fluster of the previous night having left him.

  The Head of Sixth Form-turned-rookie-archaeologist knelt up in the gravel pit. ‘Not yet,’ he smiled at the wild-haired man silhouetted against the sun. ‘But I’m getting there.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Henry Hall had been in his office before day or battle broke. He’d discarded his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and slogged through old cases. He’d had these brought up from Records in the bowels of the earth, where spiders crept silently over the paper remains of people’s lives. On the desk in front of him sat all the work Martin Toogood had undertaken in his eighteen months with the West Sussex CID.

  A Detective Chief Inspector would normally leave minutiae like this to his underlings. But this was different. This was DS Toogood, one of Hall’s own. This one was personal. All day, he’d been shifting papers, checking reports, cross-referencing cases. He’d interviewed anybody who had worked with the dead man, looking for a pattern. Something. Anything. Anybody bear Toogood a grudge? No one special, it seemed. Any copper was a target for people he’d put away; it went with the territory. But no one stood out. There’d been no threats, explicit or implicit. No one had dramatically stood up in the dock screaming ‘I’ll get you, copper!’ What about ex-colleagues? Colleagues, even? Hall was on difficult ground here and he knew it. One by one they trooped before him, the men and women who knew him best, the ones who’d watched with him in the waking hours, on surveillance teams, the house-to-house enquiries. People who had stood by his elbow as he uncovered the bodies of dead children and later as he told the parents of those children what had happened to them. Nobody in that company bore him a grudge. Nobody had a bad word to say. Would no one speak ill of the dead?

  ‘What about girlfriends?’ Hall was doing the part of the job he hated most. In front of him, by the evening, as the shadows lengthened and one by one, the lights came on along the flyover, sat Bob and Jane Toogood, close together, their fingers clasped, their faces blank, trying to come to terms with why their only son wasn’t here any more.

  ‘No one serious,’ his father said. ‘Not for some time.’

  ‘He was engaged,’ his mother said. ‘She was a lovely girl, Angie. But she broke it off.’

  ‘She broke it off?’ Hall checked, still looking for a motive.

  ‘That’s what he told us,’ Bob shrugged. ‘It was a few years ago now.’

  ‘He was still at university.’ Jane told Hall. ‘At Oxford. She was studying Medieval English too. I never quite found out why it didn’t work between them. We liked her, didn’t we, Bob?’

  The father nodded. Then he leaned forward to stare into the reflecting lenses of Hall’s glasses. ‘You will find some reason, won’t you, Chief Inspector?’ he asked, squeezing his wife’s hand harder. ‘We’re not vindictive people. Honest, we aren’t. We don’t need a person necessarily. Just a reason. There has to be a reason.’

  ‘Still here, guv?’ Jacquie Carpenter dumped her handbag onto a spare chair.

  Henry Hall had long ago abandoned the stifling confines of his office. He’d interviewed Toogood’s parents, given them what tiny crumbs of comfort he could and he had seen them out, watched them drive off along the road their boy had taken days before on his last journey. No, he couldn’t show them a killer. No, he couldn’t offer them a reason. And no, he couldn’t let them have their son’s body for burial. Not just yet. All he could give them was his condolences and his No-stone-unturned speech. And it didn’t matter a damn to them that, this time, he meant it. For the last two hours, he’d been glued to a video screen, CCTV footage of the nick car park on the last day of Martin Toogood’s life. No, that wasn’t quite true; for the last hour he’d been staring at a wall.

  ‘Look at this, Jacquie.’ He rewound with the remote, as he’d done dozens of times already. ‘Camera Three, angled to the north-east corner of this building. Got your bearings?’

  ‘Yes.’ She grabbed a bottle of water and found a chair next to her boss.

  ‘There’s Martin’s car. The Mondeo. Next to the van.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Right. Here he comes now. Look at the time. Eleven forty-nine.’

  She watched the fuzzy figure going through its paces on the screen.

  ‘He gets into his car.’ He did. ‘Drives away.’

  ‘Okay,’

  ‘Now,’ he rewound again. ‘Look at this.’ The screen exploded with a flurry of time-lapse activity, vehicles darting in and out, figures bustling across the concourse. ‘There. It’s nine thirteen.’ He froze the frame. ‘What’s that?’

  Henry Hall was pointing to a shadowy figure moving furtively east to west across the tarmac, following the line of trees that ringed the nick.

  ‘Looks like…a bloke in…what? Drizabone – one of those Aussie stockman things? Big hat?’

  ‘Drizabone and big hat,’ Hall nodded. ‘That’s what I see too. What I can’t fathom is why nobody’s seen him before. The footage was checked, presumably?’

  ‘Don’t know, guv,’ Jacquie said. Of all the times when Hall’s team was falling down on the job, it had to be now, when they were all looking for the killer of one of their own.

  ‘He’s going to the van,’ Hall was forwarding the picture, still by still. ‘He’s about to get in, into the driver’s seat. Then…there,’ he froze the moment in time. ‘He disappears. Where’s he gone?’

  Jacquie squinted. In the shadows of the twilight trees as he was, the night visitor had vanished.

  ‘He’s gone,’ was all she could say.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Hall corrected her. ‘He’s under Martin’s car with a jewel saw in h
is hand, working on his brake cables.’

  Jacquie got nearer. ‘Do we see him leave?’

  ‘We do not. At least, not by the front or side entrances.’ He switched the remote to freeze frame. ‘I’ve checked this footage and Camera Two’s.’

  ‘Side door?’

  ‘Right. Nothing. The world and his wife were calling in that day, but there’s nobody, at the relevant time or not, that remotely resembles our man in the duster coat.’

  ‘Which means…’

  Hall was nodding. ‘Which means he actually went back into the building.’

  ‘Through the bloody nick.’ Jacquie was incredulous.

  ‘And out of the back door.’

  ‘Camera One…oh, shit.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Hall was ahead of her. ‘The one we wipe daily because we all regard the back door as home territory. No need to monitor that one too closely. Only we use it. Well, that stops, as of now. I want a tape there tomorrow morning, first thing. Tom Wilson still around?’

  She checked her watch, ‘Went off half an hour ago.’

  ‘I want him here. Eight sharp. Unless I miss my guess, Martin Toogood’s murderer walked right past our Sergeant Wilson without so much, no doubt, as a “by your leave”. I want to know why.’ Hall was rewinding and stopping time to focus on the killer’s shadowy form. ‘What is he? Height-wise, I mean?’

  ‘He’s always stooped over, guv.’ Jacquie’s eyes were better than Hall’s. ‘Could be anything from five six to well over six feet.’

  ‘Could be the invisible man,’ nodded the DCI.

  Time to call it a day.

  It rained that night, giant drops bouncing like tears off Peter Maxwell’s rooflight. He sat hunched over the fallen body of Private Ryan of the Eighth Hussars, his face lit eerily by his modelling lamp, his cheeks still purple and puffy, his nose with its distinctive crimson line.

  ‘You know, I keep thinking about that cryptic message of Martin Toogood’s, Count, the one he left on his computer screen. “The affairs of men.” Mean anything to you?’

  Metternich had been caught in the downpour. You’d think, wouldn’t you, with all his cunning and experience, he’d have sensed it, read the twitching in his whiskers aright and got the hell in through the cat flap before the heavens opened? But no, he’d waited, full of bravado, as the clouds rolled and the stair-rods descended. Why did he have to show off to all the females? After all, whether they were on heat or not was of little consequence to him; he could not deliver. So, here he was, on Maxwell’s pouffe, in Maxwell’s attic, steaming quietly as he dried. “Affairs of men”? What had he to do with any of those?

  ‘Who had Toogood interviewed by the time he died?’ Maxwell was gluing Ryan’s little plastic pouch into the small of Ryan’s little plastic back. ‘He’d talked to all the archaeologists – that’s Douglas Russell, Derek Latymer, Robin Edwards, Helen Reader. He’d been to interview Tam Fraser, Samantha Welland, Susan Radley. So what do we know about the marital status of any of them? Good question, Count. Eight out of ten. Level Six.’ He looked up at the feline. ‘Your CAT score.’

  Metternich wasn’t laughing.

  ‘Well, the first question is, did Toogood literally mean affairs and did he literally mean men?’

  Metternich yawned.

  ‘No, no,’ Maxwell wagged his paintbrush at him. ‘Stick with the plot. I shall be asking questions later. Let’s say “yes” to both questions. Douglas Russell – is he married? No. “Miss Right,” and I quote rather cornily, “hasn’t come along.” Derek Latymer. Don’t know. Robin Edwards… Yes, all right.’ He threw the paintbrush down. ‘I don’t know. In fact, the only relationship we know about, thanks to darling Jacquie, is Sam Welland. She was not as other archaeologists, Count. There,’ he sat back, tilting the gold-laced pill-box forward over his eyes. ‘Now I’ve shocked you. Or at least, she shocked Helen Reader. Shocked her enough to make her take a rope to her, I wonder? Lived with a woman named, unbelievably, Hazel Twigg… Count!’ Maxwell hurled the cap into the air and caught it expertly on the way down, ‘Your master is some kind of idiot.’

  So, what’s new? Metternich was reaming his bum.

  ‘No Maxwell this morning?’ Tam Fraser was doing the rounds of the dig as usual, hair flashing silver in the sun.

  ‘Haven’t seen him, Professor,’ Helen Reader said, the glow already trickling into her eyes. ‘God, that rain last night barely touched the sides. It’s like soup this morning.’

  It was. Humidity had reached an all time high at Leighford and while holiday-makers lolled on the beach a mile away, on the scraped and scarred hillside of the dig, the work was unbearable.

  ‘You should try this in Egypt!’ Fraser laughed and waved his wide awake hat in an ingratiating gesture.

  ‘He’s a patronising old bastard,’ Derek Latymer muttered when the old bastard was well out of earshot. ‘Somebody’s going to put one on him one of these days.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure it’s a breakthrough, Chief Inspector.’ Lily Boydell always looked swamped in her white coat and that Thursday morning was no exception. The pair were standing in the police lab in Littlehampton, a new, redbrick monstrosity of the kind that made the Prince of Wales despair of modern architecture. The ghastly Venetian blinds, in regulation pale green, were closed against the fierce heat of the day.

  ‘You’re looking at a man clutching at straws, Ms Boydell,’ Hall told her. And she was. Whenever a crime was getting the better of him, Henry Hall was banished by his long-suffering wife to the spare room. Here, he could pace and prowl about all night long if he liked, instead of complaining that she kept him awake with her snoring. And that’s where he’d been since he’d said his farewells to Jacquie Carpenter in the early hours. He looked like shit, but Lily Boydell was too polite to say so. She was one of those unfortunate people with a cheerful, even bubbly personality buried by a face that looked like a smacked arse. ‘About now, I’d settle for anything.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Have a look.’

  Henry fiddled with the microscope’s focus. He wasn’t exactly au fait with these, and Lily Boydell had eyes so close together they practically overlapped.

  ‘Fibres?’ He looked up at her hopefully, but wouldn’t have been surprised to be told they were spirochetes.

  ‘Rayon,’ she said. ‘Mid-tan, dull brown colour. Waxed.’

  ‘Where did you find these?’

  ‘On Dr Radley’s left sleeve. And they took some finding, I can tell you.’

  ‘What’s your diagnosis?’

  The pair stood facing each other now on either side of the lab stools, she in her boffin’s coat, he in his grey two-piece; both of them, in their different ways, trying to catch a killer.

  ‘Well,’ she screwed her face up more than Mother Nature had, ‘I don’t like sticking my neck out. But,’ she winked at him, ‘just for you… My guess is that our perpetrator killed Radley indoors. There’s no sign of soil, clay or any other Staple Hill debris on his shoes. He wrapped him a black plastic bag or bags, some sort of sheeting anyway and bundled him into a vehicle. I’m guessing the last bit. How much did Radley weigh?’

  ‘Er… Jim Astley says thirteen stone.’

  ‘Right. You don’t lug that sort of dead weight around the countryside for laughs, do you? But while he was bagging him up, he brushed Radley’s sleeve against his coat.’

  ‘A Drizabone,’ Hall nodded.

  ‘Could be,’ Lily agreed. ‘But I can’t guarantee it.’

  ‘What about the change of clothes?’

  ‘Yes, that’s odd, isn’t it? Jim Astley’s quite right on this one, though it sticks in my craw to say so. Unless David Radley was the sloppiest dresser in the world…or marginally, in a tearing hurry, someone dressed the body.’

  ‘Which could mean he was naked beforehand.’ Hall was thinking aloud. ‘Is this a sex thing, then?’

  Lily Boydell looked at him wide-eyed. She didn’t get many offers. ‘If it was,’ she switched off the microscope, �
��why re-clothe him?’

  ‘To put us off the scent,’ Hall told her. ‘If we’d found Radley’s body naked, that would automatically take the investigation in a certain direction, wouldn’t it? As it is, well, we’re looking for other motives.’

  The boffin flicked through the rather dog-eared sheaf of paper on the counter-top. ‘There’s nothing in Jim’s report about sexual activity,’ she said. ‘There again,’ she pulled off her owl-like glasses, ‘there’s Edgar Allan Poe.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The American Gothic horror writer. He was found dead in a Baltimore street in October 1849, if memory serves, wearing somebody else’s clothes.’

  ‘Was he now?’

  ‘He was. And there’s something else. Did you notice?’

  Hall was getting old; what was she talking about now?

  ‘All the clothes were brand new.’

  ‘Have another look in that magic ball of yours,’ Hall waved to the microscope. ‘You don’t see a tall, dark man in a duster coat, do you? And he doesn’t happen to have an address?’

  Small knots of students wandered the campus that sunny morning. Most of them had gone down, or up, or sideways, whichever direction students went these days. Only a few remained, the overseas people whose visa situation was far from clear and those neurotics taking their Masters and trying to look cheerful through it all.

  The man bestriding their narrow world like a colossus looked rather old to be a student. He could have been a lecturer, but there was something of a presence about him which no lecturer had possessed since they’d allowed women into the universities. Then there was the spread nose with the purple centre and the swollen lips. Not yer everyday Don, with or without a luminous nose.

  ‘Could you tell me where I might find Ms Hazel Twigg, please?’ he asked at Admissions.

  ‘I am Hazel Twigg.’ A stumpy, unprepossessing woman with glasses and a thatch of silver-grey hair ending in a severe fringe looked up from her desk.