Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  And the colourless James Diamond sat pale-faced in his office that Monday morning after the Whitsun break as elsewhere in the building, sixteen quivering wrecks shambled into the Hall to face the baptism of fire that was their first written A-level paper. Maxwell would have liked to have been with them. He always had been, at the start of every A-level paper in every subject for a quarter of a century. Just a calming word, a merry quip. It slowed the heart rate, mopped the brow, gave hope to the hopeless. But not today. Today, there was something more serious.

  ‘The police here have arrested Giles Sparrow, Max,’ Diamond said.

  The Head of Sixth Form sat upright on the Head’s excruciating office settee. ‘Say again,’ he blinked.

  Diamond licked his thin lips. He couldn’t stand it if Maxwell was going deaf; the man was enough of a handful as he was. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I got the call a few minutes ago.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘Inspector Hall at Leighford Police Station.’

  ‘Is that where they’re holding Giles?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Right.’ Maxwell was on his feet.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Diamond had to ask.

  ‘What’s he been arrested for?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked.

  ‘Murder,’ Diamond still couldn’t believe it, even as he said the word.

  Maxwell was at the door. ‘Where are you going, Max? What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to Leighford Police Station, Headmaster,’ he told him. ‘Just passing by long enough to pick up the gelignite,’ he lapsed into his Liam Neeson as Michael Collins, ‘then I’m getting Giles Sparrow out.’

  Diamond was on his feet, his mouth open. Maxwell paused in the open doorway. ‘Wanna hold the match?’ he asked.

  Diamond could only shake his head. He’d never known how to respond to Mad Max Maxwell.

  ‘No,’ Maxwell smiled grimly. ‘I didn’t think so.’

  Peter Maxwell had been to Leighford Police Station before, not once, but several times. It was unprepossessing red-brick Victorian, with no trace of Gothic. They’d even taken the blue lamp away and Maxwell couldn’t do his Jack Warner any more. Trouble followed Maxwell like flies on a dung heap and he knew his way around. Even so, there was protocol and everyone had to go through the desk sergeant. In this case, on that Monday morning, the desk sergeant had the shoulders and the intellect of a brick wall and nothing was going to get past him.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ a voice interrupted the pair whose tempers were rising with the June heat.

  ‘Yes,’ the Head of Sixth Form turned. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Malcolm Sailer. ‘I’m Giles Sparrow’s solicitor.’

  ‘How do you know me?’

  ‘Aha,’ Sailer raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re a legend in your own lunch-time, Mr Maxwell. Shall we?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell threw a withering glance at the desk man. ‘I think we’d better. I could use some fresh air.’

  Sailer had probably had hair once, but it had long since vanished with the worry of conveyancing and he flicked one of those annoying remotes that bleeped to tell his car that its master had returned. ‘Pig ignorant, the police, aren’t they?’ Sailer commented as he sank into his plush upholstery.

  ‘I always thought they were pretty wonderful, actually,’ Maxwell beamed.

  Sailer couldn’t read his man any more than Diamond could and he let the comment go. ‘Giles suggested I come and see you. This has saved me a journey. Can I drop you somewhere?’

  ‘You can take me to the murder scene, if you will,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’ll pick up my bike later.’

  The solicitor rammed the automatic into drive.

  ‘They’ve charged the boy with murder?’

  ‘They have.’ Sailer swung left out of the station car park. ‘Late last night. I got a call from George Sparrow in the early hours.’

  ‘You’re the family solicitor?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ Sailer nodded. ‘You know George is a farmer?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I handle the usual bits and pieces of the farm, sales of land, that sort of thing. I don’t mind telling you, I’m a bit out of my depth on this one. Susan’s distraught of course, as you’d expect from a mother.’

  ‘How’s Giles?’

  ‘Holding up. Between you and me, Mr Maxwell, he’s not very bright, so it may be he doesn’t fully grasp the implications … but you must know that.’

  ‘I don’t actually teach the boy,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I don’t think I ever have. But he’s one of my sixth form – that happy band they call Maxwell’s Own. That’s enough.’

  ‘DCI Hall wouldn’t give me any leeway of course – not that I’d expect that with a murder charge. They’ll be moving him to Winchester tomorrow. Giles said you were there.’

  ‘On the beach? Yes, I was. Standing right next to Giles, as it happens.’ Maxwell watched the cars whip past, grockles on their way to fun and festivities, taking their kids out of school ‘cos it was their right. ‘I’ve never seen a man die before,’ he said.

  ‘Not very pretty, I don’t suppose,’ Sailer nodded. ‘Here we are.’ He hauled the wheel over and the Megane purred down the slipway that led to the beach. A young constable stopped him there. Beyond the lad a police cordon fluttered in blue and white to keep the curious away from Willow Bay. It all looked different now. While Sailer explained to the officer his reason for being there, Maxwell stood by the car, resting on the open door. The tides had washed away the bootprints of the Marauders, but Bob Pickering’s flag of the Ninth Voltigeurs still flapped defiantly on his tent ropes above the dunes. Needham’s parasol and chair had gone with Needham’s body and the pegs that SOCO had placed to mark the spot had long ago been lifted. Only a knot of paparazzi stood on the Shingle, smoking and chatting, waiting for any news. Only the gulls, high in the cloudless weather, cried for Miles Needham.

  ‘To whom have you talked?’ Maxwell asked Sailer.

  ‘Only Giles and his parents at the moment,’ the solicitor told him.

  ‘The re-enactors,’ Maxwell pointed to the lines of canvas, ‘they were all there. Let’s have a word.’ And he trudged across the sand. ‘Why Giles?’ he asked.

  ‘His gun, apparently,’ Sailer said, looking oddly out of place on a summer’s beach, on a summer’s day, in a dark, pinstriped solicitor’s suit. ‘Ballistics have confirmed it. There’s no mistake. It was Giles’s gun that killed the director. And I must presume that it was Giles’s finger on the trigger.’

  ‘It was,’ Maxwell nodded grimly. ‘And he was standing as close to me as you are.’

  Sailer stopped. ‘Haven’t the police talked to you?’ he asked.

  Maxwell chuckled. ‘If I know Henry Hall,’ he said, ‘he’ll choose his time and place.’

  The re-enactors weren’t helpful. It wasn’t that they didn’t mean to be. It was just that they hadn’t seen anything. Hadn’t heard anything. And now, they weren’t saying much either. Two or three of them, Maxwell had seen hanging around the hostelries of Leighford. Two or three more were old Leighford Highenas, who in their former existence had been seen hanging around the corridors of the school. But no one had seen Giles Sparrow anywhere near the props caravan or tinkering with the guns or checking wind speed and velocity or issuing death threats to Miles Needham. But, as Maxwell and Sailer both knew, because the re-enactors hadn’t seen any of this didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

  They had made a policy decision at Eight Counties. The show must go on. Miles would have wanted that. They owed it to his memory. Some faceless suit of an accountant from the corridors of power was working on the BAFTA speech already. They were toying with bringing in Dickie Attenborough to cry for them.

  So the Marauders stayed, except for the two whose jobs demanded they be elsewhere. Except for Giles Sparrow who was taken in a large police van with high slit windows to Winchester, to await what the Americans call due process and we call th
e full majesty of the law. The paparazzi were there, running alongside the van, pointing their cameras pointlessly in the slits, popping away for no purpose.

  The wind was getting up, blowing stinging sand through the whipping lines as Peter Maxwell went back there. The starry lights on the Shingle twinkled and blinked as he tethered White Surrey to a guy rope and pinged off his cycle clips – nothing sleek and Lycra for Peter Maxwell.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Bob Pickering was sitting beside his storm lantern, patiently rolling his own. ‘Any news of the boy?’

  ‘He’s in Winchester gaol by now,’ Maxwell eased himself down on Pickering’s proffered bed.

  ‘We’ve had Mr Plod around again. Cuppa tea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no, Bob, thanks. Who was it?’

  ‘Inspector somebody – Watface, was it? I can’t remember. They shove these bits of plastic under your nose, don’t they? He had a girl with him – Carpenter her name was. Now I do remember that!’ and they both chuckled.

  Pickering was clattering about with his primus, rummaging in his baggage for cups. Above the open tent-flap the flag of the Ninth Voltigeurs snapped on its ropes every now and then. The last of the camp’s children were being called in by their parents from the caravans across the grass.

  ‘He’s one of your lads, isn’t he, Mr Maxwell?’ Pickering asked.

  Maxwell nodded. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said. ‘Nobody takes one of my boys away and throws away the key. Nobody.’

  ‘But it must have been an accident.’ Pickering’s mournful face flared briefly in the matchlight.

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘How do you account for it, then, Bob? You’re a re-enactor. Ever heard of a blank firer ripping off half somebody’s head?’

  Pickering shook out the match as the gas jet roared into blue-flamed life. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I haven’t. Pity we didn’t leave young Giles with the drum,’ he mused. ‘He couldn’t have done much harm with that.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘What’s happening with the production?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve been told to stay put,’ Pickering told him. ‘They’re bringing in a new director blokey tomorrow. Are you still on?’

  ‘Not before four o’clock, I’m afraid,’ Maxwell said. ‘That’s when the day job ends.’

  Pickering looked out to the sea with the moon shining cold on its silver ridges. ‘I hope they hurry up and get this over with,’ he muttered. ‘The heart’s gone out of it now. Talking to the lads, all of them, we feel … well, lost in a way. It certainly hasn’t worked out like I thought it would.’

  ‘No indeed.’ Maxwell stared at the same sea. ‘No, you’re right there, Bob.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Pickering sorted out his re-enactors’ tin mugs, the sort they used to serve grog in in the good old days. ‘We haven’t got much of a choice. Mr Plod told us to stay put until certain inquiries have been completed. The two blokes who’ve buggered off were only let go after a lot of hassle. And of course, the police …’

  ‘Know where they live,’ Maxwell chimed in.

  ‘Joseph Stapleton and David Wood,’ Maxwell sat back in the large loft of his house at 38, Columbine. He looked up at the stars winking at him through his skylight and he placed the plastic soldier carefully in his saddle for the first time. He looked across at Metternich the cat, curled up on the basket lid in which Maxwell kept his socks and underpants. The black and white bastard was pretending to be asleep, but Maxwell knew better – the twitch of ears and whiskers, the occasional lash of the tail. Either the neutered torn with attitude was dreaming of demolishing a rodent, ripping through bone and sinew or he was perfectly wide awake and listening very carefully to Maxwell all the time.

  ‘Stapleton and Wood. Wood and Stapleton,’ Maxwell was musing, rocking back in his modelling chair and tilting the army forage cap he always wore when modelling forward over his eyes, ‘Those were the two who left the Marauders, Count. Now, the question arises, is that coincidence? Or does one of them know something the rest of us don’t? I remember Stapleton. Bit of a surly bastard, between you and me, Count.’

  Maxwell lifted the white plastic rider on his white plastic charger. ‘Who is this one, Count, I hear you ask. This is – or will be when I’ve painted him – Lieutenant Henry Fitzhardinge Berkeley Maxse – no relation. He had the misfortune to be Lord Cardigan’s ADC – that’s aide-de-camp to you, Count, a sort of military arse-licker. He’d dobbed about a bit had old Maxse: Grenadier Guards, Thirteenth Lights, Twenty-First Foot. He took up his position to Cardigan’s left rear, in front of the Seventeenth. In the Charge he was wounded in the foot. Went on to become Governor of Newfoundland.’

  And he crossed the room to place the 54-millimetre figure a little behind the Brigadier from Hell, sitting patiently on the plastic charger, Ronald, ready for the plastic Captain Nolan to deliver the fatal order from Lord Raglan – ‘Lord Raglan wishes the Cavalry to advance’ … For more years than he cared to remember, Peter Maxwell had been making his diorama of the Light Brigade, all 678 of them mounted and waiting for the charge into that terrible cul-de-sac of fire. He wondered if he’d finish it before the Great Modeller in the Sky told him to put away his glue and his brushes for the last time and call it a day.

  Maxwell caught his reflection in the angled skylight and looked out to the black headland where he knew the Shingle lay and the dunes and the blood-red beach where Miles Needham had died.

  ‘The police know where they live,’ Maxwell reminded Metternich, ‘Wood and Stapleton. I think I’ll have a little wordette with Jacquie.’

  Metternich suddenly raised his head. Maxwell caught the move. ‘Well, who asked you?’ he growled.

  ‘What a gift!’ Maxwell beamed, having opened the A-level Physics paper. Hardly a single word of it made any sense to him, but he knew the value of psychology. You could feel the tangible relief as the fourteen Physicists in the Hall in front of him relaxed and hearts descended again from mouths.

  ‘Right, Ms Greenhow is here to hold your hands,’ he smiled at his colleague of the frizzy hair – ‘and that was hands by the way, Harrap’ – a ripple of guffaws spread through the examinees as they turned to look at the sex god, Mr Testosterone, who bowed in his chair. That’s it, Sally thought, make ’em laugh, Max, you old bastard. What are we going to do if you ever retire?

  ‘It’s 9.15 by this clock,’ Maxwell announced. ‘Three hours of total incomprehension. Off you go and may victory sit on your helms.’

  He winked at Sally who sat down in the time-honoured tradition of invigilators and used the Exam-board-given time to do some marking.

  They were waiting for him in the grim corridor outside, Hall and Watkiss. In the dim light, they could have passed for undertakers.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Hall said, holding up his warrant card.

  Maxwell placed an urgent finger on his lips. ‘Physics exam,’ he mouthed and led the police away. ‘My office, I think.’

  Hall had been in this office before. Three years ago one of Maxwell’s Own had been found dead and for a while the Head of Sixth Form had been in the frame. It seemed to be a habit of Maxwell’s, turning up like shit on your shoes, always in the wrong place, always at the wrong time.

  ‘This is DI Watkiss,’ Hall introduced him.

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Gentlemen,’ he offered them seats, while he perched on the corner of his desk. This wasn’t the Incident Room or Leighford Nick. This was Maxwell’s manor. He called the shots. He spoke the body language. He looked down on them both. ‘I thought you’d have called for this before now.’ He passed the slim file on Giles Sparrow across the desk.

  Hall took it, opened it, skimmed it briefly.

  ‘Exactly,’ Maxwell said, ‘it doesn’t say in the Interests section “Killing people with replica guns”. Bit odd, that, isn’t it?’

  ‘They tell me you’re a military historian, Mr Maxwell,’ Watkiss was watching his man carefully.

  ‘I have my moments,’ the Head of Sixth Form told him.

  ‘I ass
umed that was why you were working on this film. We’ve talked to Dr Irving.’

  ‘Have you?’ Maxwell took back the returned file, knowing as well as Hall how useless it was in a murder inquiry. It carried Giles Sparrow’s NFER score, the GNVQ Modules he’d completed, his allergy to eggs. Beyond that it could have fitted half a million other seventeen-year-olds, almost anywhere in the supposedly civilized world.

  ‘Yes,’ Watkiss told him. ‘He was very helpful. Said you were very knowledgeable about guns.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Hall took over, for the moment playing the nice policeman. ‘Did you know Miles Needham before last week?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell shook his head.

  ‘And what opinion did you form of him?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘I got the impression he wasn’t the most popular of men. Seemed to have his arse in his hand most of the time. But I suppose these people are under a lot of pressure.’

  ‘According to our information,’ Watkiss said, ‘you were standing on the left of the line, next to Giles Sparrow.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Had you handled any of the guns yourself?’

  ‘Not that day,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Although I had earlier, to instruct the others.’

  ‘And which gun was that?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘As far as I’m concerned, when you’ve seen one Brown Bess, you’ve seen them all. Tell me, is there a Mrs Needham?’

  Hall and Watkiss exchanged glances. ‘Why do you ask?’ the DCI wanted to know.

  ‘Standard procedure, isn’t it?’ Maxwell beamed his gappy smile. ‘Isn’t that what you blokeys go for? Next of kin become automatic prime suspect? It all seems a bit trite to me, but then, what do I know? I’m not a policeman.’

  Henry Hall got up, followed by his Number Two. ‘No, Mr Maxwell,’ he said, standing opposite his man. Maxwell stood up too so that they were head to head. ‘You are not a policeman. I’d like you to remember that.’ He strolled to the door, Watkiss trailing in his wake. ‘And as for what you know – that’s always something of a sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? We’ll see ourselves out.’