Maxwell's Grave

by M. J. Trow

Red mist. Peter Maxwell was not a violent man. He was actually a very gentle one. But the woman he loved had been taken, abducted in broad daylight by a psychopath. The gloves were off. He launched himself at Cahill, grabbing both lapels and hauling him upright.

  ‘You know what this is, you money-grabbing creep,’ he snarled. ‘And I want the original. Now.’

  Cahill’s eyelids flickered. The colour had drained from his face. To his horror, he realised that Maxwell’s kick of the door had locked it and all Security could do was hammer ineffectually on the outside.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr Cahill?’ Maxwell growled. ‘No goons today? No heavies to beat up harmless metal detectives in anoraks?’

  ‘My heart…’ Cahill had gone a very funny colour.

  ‘My arse!’ Maxwell snapped and slapped the man around the face. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In…in the safe.’

  Maxwell relented, then pulled the man from behind his desk. ‘Open it.’ Cahill needed no second bidding. He crouched, fumbling and shaking until the safe door swung back. The knocking on the office woodwork was thunderous. ‘Take it out,’ Maxwell ordered.

  The Managing Director of Cahill and Lieberman, Property Developers slid out a slim, rectangular block of marble, perhaps two feet long. Maxwell looked at it on Cahill’s opulent Axminster.

  ‘Hic jacet Alfredus Rex,’ he read before the marble sheared off and the inscription ran out. He squatted on his haunches, his face inches from Cahill’s. ‘Now, you tell those rather loud gentlemen in Security to go away,’ he said. ‘And leave you and me to have a nice little chat.’

  ‘They’ll have called the police by now,’ Cahill warned.

  ‘Good,’ Maxwell sat back on Cahill’s opulent leather sofa. ‘That’s good, Anthony. It will save me having to tell Henry Hall all about it.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Derek Latymer was in his trench when they came for him. He was furious that there was still no sign of that old idiot Fraser. Today was the day the were supposed to go, at last, into the ash grove, to look for the church. The professor had cleared it with the police and the yellow, fluttering tape had come down. The chain saws were lying idle near the dumper trucks ready to roar into life.

  ‘Oh no,’ Helen Reader’s shoulders sagged at the sight. ‘Not again.’ A large white patrol car prowled along the site fence before rolling to a halt by the gate. Two suits got out. One was a man she’d seen before, talked to, had been interrogated by. That one was DCI Henry Hall. Tall, square, bland, unknowable. The other she didn’t know either, but in the literal sense. They both flashed their warrant cards at all and sundry.

  ‘Mr Latymer,’ Henry Hall ignored the others. ‘This is DC Campbell. Can we have a word?’

  Secretly, they all longed to creep nearer to the main tent, to use their softest brushes rather than their loudest trowels and to rest their tired, sweating heads against the rough canvas. But nobody wanted to be first and so they kept away, trowelling, measuring, recording: Douglas Russell, Robin Edwards, Helen Reader, looking for still more bodies in the noon-day heat. Extreme archaeology.

  Tony Campbell dropped the marble slab heavily down on the dusty table in front of him, the one he and the DCI had taken from Anthony Cahill’s office not an hour ago. The policemen were still standing, the archaeologist sitting down.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us all about this, Mr Latymer,’ Hall said softly.

  Latymer looked up at him, the square, silent, sanctimonious bastard. What did he know about archaeology? About anything, really? He was just a thick copper. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  Hall pulled back the canvas-backed chair and sat down opposite his man. ‘The grave of Alfred the Great,’ he said. ‘Let’s start with that, shall we?’

  Latymer smiled. ‘A scam, of course.’ He raised his knee and cradled it with both hands, rocking back in his chair. ‘And it almost worked, didn’t it? And on more levels than one – that was something of a bonus.’

  ‘From the beginning?’ Hall was patience itself.

  ‘The beginning was David Radley,’ Latymer scowled. ‘The Alpha and Omega of archaeology. Everything the man touched turned to pure gold. Did you know he was the youngest Professor of Archaeology in the world? Broke record after record. He couldn’t fail. Or could he?’

  ‘You were jealous of him?’ Hall said.

  ‘Oh, please, Inspector,’ Latymer said. ‘Don’t belittle it with such a petty, demeaning motive. Radley was so smug, so holier-than-thou. I wasn’t fit to walk in the shadow of the patronising bastard. So…I thought – right. Let’s see, shall we? Let’s test this paragon of brilliance. Let’s see what he knows.’

  ‘You planted the evidence?’ Hall nodded at the marble.

  ‘It was so ludicrously simple,’ Latymer laughed. ‘It worked like a bloody dream. Some local had found some bones, so they set up the site. I was supposed to co-ordinate the dig and then I thought…why not go for it? All my academic life I’ve had David Fucking Radley rammed down my throat. “When you grow up, you’ll realize how good he is”, “It’s such a privilege to work with a man like this”, “He is, of course, a genius.” Christ, it makes you want to puke. So I hit upon a cunning plan,’ – it wasn’t a very good Baldrick, but it had to be said – ‘Let’s test him, I thought. Let’s see how good this genius really is. I got some period marble from my own university and got a local stonemason to inscribe what you see there. It was silly, really. Bit like a typed edition of the Domesday Book or the watch of William the Conqueror. Nobody’d fall for it in a million years. The idea was to discredit Radley, of course. If just one of his minions on the dig – any of those no-hopers outside – found it and got on to the Press, Radley would become a laughing stock. It would be Piltdown all over again.’

  ‘But something went wrong,’ Hall said.

  Latymer nodded. ‘Some Anorak found it.’

  ‘Arthur Wimble,’ Campbell chipped in.

  ‘Whatever,’ Latymer said. ‘And that’s where Cahill got involved.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Hall said. ‘Is that what you meant by succeeding on several levels?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Latymer told him. Maybe this copper wasn’t as thick as he had assumed. ‘I was just amazed. Cahill came to the site one day and I overheard him and Radley talking, here, in this very tent. Not only was Radley himself buying the authenticity of that fake, but you could almost see the pound signs in Cahill’s eyes. That was why the genius wouldn’t let us dig in the ash grove. He was psyching himself up to find the grave of Alfred the Great there. It just goes to show – want something hard enough and you start to believe any old rubbish, even someone with a reputation like his.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Campbell asked. ‘Radley rumbled you and you killed him?’

  Latymer looked horrified. ‘I didn’t kill him, you moron,’ he growled. ‘It was the man’s reputation I wanted, not his head. What do you take me for?’

  Henry Hall leaned to his man until his nose was inches from Latymer’s.

  ‘I’m trying to find the words,’ he said.

  He rang the doorbell a little after four that afternoon, watching the cab purr away on the gravel. There was a rattle of bolts behind him and a rather dishevelled Tam Fraser stood there.

  ‘Gardening, Professor?’ Maxwell asked.

  The Scotsman had a spade in his hand and mud on his green wellies. His lion’s mane of silver hair was speckled with what looked like ash. ‘Maxwell?’ he said. ‘Good God, man. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, Professor,’ the Head of Sixth Form said. ‘Such a cliché. I’d expected more. Don’t mind if I come in?’ and he barged his way into the hall.

  Fraser’s house was, in its own way, as impressive as Sam Welland’s. It was what estate agents used to call a Gothic pile, before ‘pile’ acquired an altogether different connotation. An olive-brown Drizabone hung on a hook in the hall and a broad-brimmed leather hat just above it.

  ‘Van Helsing,’ Maxwell flicked its b
rim.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Fraser was confused.

  ‘Oh, association of ideas,’ Maxwell said. ‘I was talking to that nice Mr Cahill today; you know, of Cahill and Lieberman, Property Developers.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ Fraser was full of disdain. ‘Met him once. Didn’t like him.’

  ‘No, well, I’m with you there. Oh, I say.’ Maxwell had wandered into Fraser’s study, heavy with velvet-flocked wallpaper and piled high with leather-backed tomes and sheaves of paper. ‘Wiggins,’ Maxwell said, holding a single sheet of paper up to the light of Fraser’s tapering, leaded windows. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘ninety gram, I’d say.’

  ‘Look…er…Maxwell…’

  ‘Sorry,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I do ramble, don’t I? It’s my age, I suppose. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Age? Where was I?’ Maxwell threw himself down in a huge armchair. ‘Oh, yes. Mr Cahill. Well, you’re obviously aware that Mr Cahill has two vegetables working for him as Site Security – Dumb and Dumber, better known as George and Julian.’

  ‘So?’ Fraser was still standing, still holding the spade.

  ‘So, in their nightly perambulations recently, George and Julian saw a rather weird character flitting about, phantom-like, from grave to grave. Now, they’re both your down-to-earth, level-headed sort of idiots, not much imagination. But this figure, well, he put the wind up them both, according to Mr Cahill.’

  ‘I don’t see…’

  ‘The figure was wearing a duster coat and a hat not unlike the gear worn by Hugh Jackman in the latest piece of Undead tosh, Van Helsing. Not unlike your hat and coat in the hall out there, Professor.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ Fraser asked.

  Maxwell looked at him. ‘Does the name Hugo Prentiss mean anything to you, Professor Fraser?’

  ‘Sir Hugo Prentiss,’ the archaeologist nodded. ‘Emeritus Professor of History at Cambridge. Yes, indeed. A very great scholar. Dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t an hour ago,’ Maxwell said. ‘When I spoke to him on the phone. Detective Chief Inspector Hall actually let me use his carphone. That was kind of him, wasn’t it? It’s funny, I wasn’t very impressed by Prentiss when I was at Cambridge. You know how it is…’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘Of course you do…the folly of youth. I was a young Turk. He was an old fart. Even then, I supposed he was a hundred. And Saxon England, well, it wasn’t my period. I stood it for a term and then got on to something infinitely more interesting.’

  ‘Maxwell, I’d love to reminisce with you, but I…’

  ‘But, you know,’ Maxwell ignored him. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how the strangest things stay with you. Take, for instance, the affairs of men.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Well, it’s a quotation, of course, from a sport called Shakespeare – Julius Caesar.’

  Fraser laughed. ‘I really think…’

  ‘But a very good friend of mine found it somewhere else. She found it on a colleague’s computer screen…talking of which, that’s a Canon, isn’t it?’ Maxwell pointed to the silent, grey monster on the archaeologist’s desk. ‘I don’t know one from the other, but it says “Canon” on the side. Anyway, this friend of mine’s colleague was a sweet boy. I say “was” because he’s dead now. Somebody cut through his brake cables.’

  ‘That’s dreadful.’ Fraser shook his head.

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell looked up at the man, grim-faced. ‘Yes, it is. Where was I? Ah, this damned age thing, eh? Oh, yes. You see, this boy, this dead colleague, he was a Medieval English buff. And that “affairs of men”…well, it didn’t quite make sense.’

  ‘So?’ Fraser was bored already.

  ‘So, I said to myself – who’ll know? Whose eminence is so great that I’ll be able to source that quotation once and for all? And it came to me; the Michelmas Term in the Granta days and hopeless old Hugo Prentiss. Like you, I thought he was dead. Oh, he’s long retired, of course – now there’s a lesson for us all. I don’t think he could remember who I was, but I soon got over the hurt of that. We got talking, Sir Hugo and I and he, bless him, put it all in context. Just like he did that Michelmas Term all those years ago. You see Martin – that’s the dead boy’s name, by the way, Martin Toogood – he got it just slightly wrong. And that’s what threw me off the scent. He didn’t mean the affairs of men. He meant the fortunes of men. And that’s a whole new ball game.’

  ‘It is?’ Fraser was willing to play along.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘You once accused me of talking like a bloody Saxon riddle and I bet you could have kicked yourself for that, couldn’t you? David Radley knew it vaguely and even quoted from it on occasions. Poor Susan remembered one line – “the wolf, the grey heath-stalker”. Van Helsing, the wolf-coat, prowling around the yawning graves.’

  ‘This…er…the Fortunes of Men thing?’ Fraser began.

  ‘An anonymous Saxon poem, probably written by a cleric with a romantic inclination. But then, you knew that, didn’t you, Professor? You being the author of Saxon Identities and all. It’s really quite good, describing the chance destinies of the sons of mothers. Having talked to Sir Hugo again, I realized I knew it. I’d just forgotten it, that’s all – an age thing, again, I suppose. Let’s see,’ Maxwell risked closing his eyes. ‘“One will drop, wingless, from the high tree in the wood… Then sadly he slumps by the trunk, robbed of life; he falls to earth and his soul flies from him.”’ Maxwell opened his eyes again. ‘That’s David Radley. His body at the foot of the ash trees on Staple Hill. You couldn’t kill him there, Professor, not in the way the poem described, because the ash branches wouldn’t bear his weight. Anyway, how would you have hoisted him up there? Instead, you rang him on that lazy, hazy, crazy afternoon and invited him here. I’ll just bet the fibres Henry Hall’s people found on the dead man’s shoes match your rather frightful carpet in the vestibule.’

  ‘Are you insane?’ Fraser hissed, horror on his face.

  ‘Pots and kettles, I’m afraid,’ Maxwell said. ‘But you were clever, I’ll give you that. Re-dressing the man was pure genius.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, it’s in the poem, in a way – “Often and again, through God’s grace, man and woman usher a child into the world and clothe him in gay colours.” You knew about Douglas Russell and his crush on David Radley, didn’t you? I’d guess because David told you; trusting, naïve soul that he was. And there was a perfect red herring for you. For a few quid and a deliberately careless re-dressing, you could point the finger at a sexual motive, which would keep the police away from you.’

  ‘You know this is nonsense, don’t you?’

  ‘Then, there was Sam Welland. How does the poem have it? “One will swing from the tall gallows, sway in death.” You made a gallows for her, all right. I expect if I scout around here for a bit, I’ll find some of the rope you did it with. She invited herself along to Staple Hill, didn’t she? Expecting to take over the dig, using all Radley’s scientific techniques. And that would never do. The problem, of course, was Toogood. And that very problem meant that you very nearly got away with it. He’d sussed you, hadn’t he? The old English scholar remembered the Fortunes of Men – the fall from a tree, so pat, so poetic. Only he didn’t remember it well enough. But you didn’t know that, did you? How could you? Couldn’t take the chance. Just your luck that the only copper in the county with a degree in Saxon was on your case. Life’s a bummer, isn’t it? Took a lot of nerve, I’ll admit, to fix Toogood’s brakes on police property. Oh, it broke the pattern, of course – nothing about cars and their brakes in the Fortunes of Men. You dressed up as Van Helsing again. Mr Hall has your picture on his CCTV screens. And poor old Sergeant Wilson at the nick. Popped out for a pee, had he, while you doubled back through the nick? Is that why he didn’t see you fleeing the scene of the crime?’

  ‘Man, man,’ Fraser was shaking his head. ‘This is daft.’

  ‘Now, the Sepulchre Society of Sussex was inspired, but oddly enough,
I met a nice lady the other day who didn’t fall for it. She said it was melodramatic nonsense. And so it was. Derek Latymer, Mr Chip-on-the-shoulder, thought it was all made up by Douglas Russell. But it wasn’t, was it, Professor? It was all made up by you. You sent the threatening letters to Russell, knowing he was weak, flaky. And you borrowed one of your own skulls, I’ll bet, from the university, to place on your bed. And, if I had my digging hat on, Professor, I’d take it off to you. A BAFTA performance at the Quinton if ever I’ve seen one. You really did look terrified. And the twig in the mandible!’ Maxwell applauded in the stillness. ‘Inspired. Hazel Twigg in the frame too.’ He’d stopped smiling now. ‘You don’t care where the shit lands, do you?’

  ‘I’ve been patient, Maxwell,’ Fraser said. ‘Now I must ask you to leave. You do realize there’s no place for you at the dig after this?’

  ‘On the dig?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Can’t you see, man, it’s over? Neither of us will be doing any digging again. Professor,’ a sudden thought had occurred to Maxwell. ‘What were you doing with that spade?’

  ‘“One will suffer agony on the pyre,”’ Fraser quoted, an odd glint in his eye.

  ‘Jacquie!’ Maxwell was on his feet, brushing past the Scotsman, running through the house. He dashed into the kitchen; nothing. On into the conservatory; empty. Then he looked into the garden, high-walled and secluded, the cedars masking more distant houses and the road. A blazing fire crackled and spat in the centre of the lawn, the tangled branches crumbling to charcoal in its red hot heart. A woman’s body lay near, her hands tied together, duct tape over her mouth. Maxwell hurled himself at the French windows and crashed through the glass, shards slicing through his hands, his forehead, as he streaked across the short grass of summer. He dragged the body from the blaze, feeling the heat scorch his battered, bleeding face. He turned her over. It was Alison McCormick. And she was still breathing. He ripped off the tape and she shuddered, breathing in sharply as her eyelids flickered. She was grey and there was foam round her lips and hard, brown caked blood forming a rigid mark on one side of her face.