Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  Maxwell paused by the film poster of James Stewart in Rear Window and took the man off perfectly. ‘Well, Jim, what would you do, huh?’ he croaked. ‘Huh? Put your binoculars back and say “Murder? What murder? I didn’t witness any murder. No siree Bob.”’ He paused and was himself again, ‘Of course you wouldn’t. You’d get out there and sort it, wouldn’t you? Broken leg or no. There again,’ a disquieting thought had struck Maxwell, ‘you also, in your day, talked to six-foot invisible rabbits, didn’t you?’ He became James Stewart again as he reached for the phone. ‘Aw shucks, what the Hell?’ and he was still being James Stewart when the girl on Leighford’s switchboard answered.

  ‘Pennsylvania six five thousand?’ he drawled.

  ‘What?’ the girl on the switchboard was about sixty years too young to make any sense of that.

  ‘Sorry, Thingee,’ Maxwell’s own voice bellowed in her headphones. ‘Wrong number. Get me the Grand Hotel, will you? I can’t find my telephone directory.’

  6

  The more Peter Maxwell thought about it, the more it annoyed him that the Grand hadn’t got its own bike shed. Still, he didn’t want to make a fuss today, of all days, so he propped White Surrey against a wall and made for the lounge.

  Angela Badham was waiting for him as he’d arranged. She’d aged ten years in the last five days and looked as if she hadn’t slept for a month.

  ‘Angela,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘it’s good to see you. You must be all in.’

  ‘Actually,’ she climbed off her bar stool, ‘I’m glad to have somebody to talk to – somebody outside Eight Counties, I mean. It’s all a bit fraught at the moment.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Just coffee, please.’

  Maxwell waved to the lad behind the bar. Neil Somebody-or-other, did Art A level at Leighford High a few years back. Had a perfectly horrible mother. ‘Two coffees, Neil.’

  ‘Coming right up, Mr Maxwell.’

  He led her into the cosiest corner, deserted now before the influx of families for tea and they sat down on the mock velvet plush. ‘I understand you’re about to get a new director.’

  ‘Grant Prothero,’ she nodded, reaching into her huge portmanteau for her umpteenth ciggie that day. ‘Do you mind?’

  He waved it aside. ‘When does shooting restart – oh, sorry, that was a little tactless.’

  ‘What? Oh, sorry.’ Mots, however bons, tended to pass Angela Badham by these days. ‘Er … Saturday, we’d hoped. The trouble is, of course, we’re well into the tourist season now and keeping nosy bastards away will be a full-time job. Especially after the police press conference. Every ghoul in the county will be on that beach. My mobile hasn’t stopped today.’ She slammed it down on the table, fiddling with her lighter, trying to get it to work.

  ‘Nasty things, mobiles.’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘I’d rather carry round my own telephone box. Angela …’

  ‘Two coffees, Mr Maxwell.’ The chirpy ex-Art student was at his elbow.

  ‘Thanks, Neil.’ And he waited until the boy had gone. ‘Angela, you knew Miles Needham. Who’d want him dead?’

  Angela snorted smoke. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Look, Max, I know you feel involved, because of the Sparrow boy,’ she leaned slightly towards him, ‘but take my advice – keep out of it.’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘I can’t, Angela,’ he told her. ‘You see, it was on my command that Miles Needham died. It may have been Giles Sparrow’s finger on the trigger, but I told him to fire.’

  ‘Oh, that’s silly,’ she sucked desperately at the cigarette. ‘You weren’t to know …’

  ‘… That somebody switched guns? No, neither did Giles Sparrow.’

  ‘But the police …’

  ‘Have done the logical, obvious thing,’ he finished the sentence for her, leaning back, languidly stirring his coffee, ‘They’ve followed forensics, swallowed science. Very narrow road, science,’ he was talking to himself, really. ‘That’s why I never took it up. Too claustrophobic, myopic, whatever metaphor you want to use. I prefer a road with turnings, options, partings of the way. The only problem with that is, which one to choose.’

  ‘Max, I can’t help you.’

  ‘Oh, yes you can, Angela.’ The gravel in his voice caught her off guard and she found herself staring into the darkness of his eyes. ‘I’d go further and say you must. You’re the signpost, my dear; whether you know it or not. Now,’ he reached out and patted her hand, ‘tell me all you know about Miles Needham.’

  All that Angela Badham knew about Miles Needham could have filled the twenty-six unindexed volumes of the Warren Commission. As far as Angela was concerned, he’d put the ‘ph’ into ‘philanderer’. It was nothing as naive as the casting couch, but a whole succession of young, nubile wannabees had duly displayed their bedroom skills along with their screen tests. Angela hadn’t wanted to get too particular in terms of detail, but she understood that oral sex was very much the dead man’s penchant and she said it with all the distaste of a Victorian school ma’am; so much so that Maxwell was expecting Angela to be talking about sheep sooner or later. Needham had been married three times and the odd thing was the total silence so far, of Barbara, his current wife. Angela assumed the police had spoken to her, but that was conjecture. The current Mrs Needham never came on set with her husband. They had a large house in Berkshire and Barbara Needham seemed to have a private life all her own. No one at Eight Counties knew much about her, but it was widely believed that she knew Miles played, as well as worked, away from home. As far as Angela knew, Barbara had not been in touch.

  Enemies? Well, yes, there was a list longer than Schindler’s. There were the actresses to whom he’d promised screen immortality as they clamped their lips around his manhood. Given the knives-outness of the film industry today, there were the mothers of all those actresses. There was possibly Barbara Needham herself. It was a rare kind of woman, Angela observed with a certain profundity, who sat meekly by while her lawful husband screwed his way through the female edition of Footlights. And then there were the men whom Needham had screwed – in the professional sense, of course – the producers, actors, cameramen, editors. The list of tea boys he’d offended would probably stretch from here to eternity. At least Maxwell could rule them out – they surely would have used poison. But, suggested Angela, if Maxwell was really determined to get his head kicked in, there was no finer place to start than with Marc Lamont.

  Marc Lamont didn’t want to talk to Peter Maxwell, but Peter Maxwell was ‘Mad Max’, not merely nor’ by nor’west, but any direction you cared to name. And the lights were already dimmed on the last of the evening’s diners at the Grand when he tracked him down.

  ‘That seat’s taken,’ Lamont paused with the coffee cup inches from his mouth.

  ‘Correct,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘by me. Tell me, Mr Lamont – you don’t mind if I call you Mr Lamont, do you? It seems so much more apposite than Marc in the circumstances. And certainly, it’s streets ahead of your real name, Fluck – I can see your problem there.’

  ‘Was there a purpose to all this?’ Lamont leaned back from the debris of his pears Hélène, ‘If you’re trying to get me not to sue the arse off you …’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Maxwell waved it aside, ‘that should come home to roost at about the same time your Race Relations Board case hits the headlines for referring to a Cambridge lecturer as a nigger. But both of those will be long after the Sun’s headlines, “Fifty-three-year-old bloke, unfit, out of condition, flattens thirtysomething heart-throb Marc Lamont with the gentlest of pushes”. Actually,’ Maxwell started playing with a napkin, ‘some of those words are rather long for the Sun, aren’t they? And anyway, we’ve got more important problems.’

  ‘We have?’ For the life of him, Lamont didn’t know why he just didn’t get up and walk away.

  ‘Miles Needham,’ Maxwell’s eyes had never left his man.

  ‘I’ve talked to the filth already.�
� The actor sipped his brandy eloquently enough. ‘I don’t see why I should talk to you.’

  ‘Humour an old man.’ Maxwell winked at him and immediately launched into Father Ted’s Mrs Doyle: ‘Ah, go on, go on, go on,’ he shrilled.

  ‘I think you’re a fucking idiot, Maxwell,’ Lamont murmured.

  Maxwell leaned towards him and murmured in the same tone, ‘And I think you’re a fucking murderer.’

  ‘Prove it!’

  ‘Oh, now.’ Maxwell lolled back in his chair, chuckling. ‘You’ll be calling me a lump of poo next. Let’s both try to be grown up, shall we? You give me a challenge like that, Mr Lamont, and I may have to take you up on it.’

  ‘Well, I’m pissing myself,’ Lamont hissed.

  ‘Oh,’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow, ‘now that’s something I hadn’t heard about you. Which of the many things I have was Needham holding over you?’

  For a moment, Lamont looked about to turn and run; or burst into tears or all three. In the event he just sat there.

  ‘Look,’ Maxwell sighed, ‘it’s no secret that Miles Needham was the director from Hell …’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Lamont growled, finishing his brandy. ‘Vicious was his middle name. I’ve lost count of the people – good people, talented, hardworking – whose careers that bastard has ruined. But you were there, Maxwell. If I remember rightly, you’d just assaulted me and I tripped and fell

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘It’s all coming back to me now.’

  ‘I had my back to Needham. Inches to the right or left and it might have been my head all over the sand.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘If somebody had wanted you dead, Mr Lamont, you’d be in a refrigerator now with a suitcase label around your big toe.’

  ‘So you admit that little shit intended to kill Needham, then?’

  ‘Giles Sparrow? Good God, the kid is seventeen. He didn’t know the man. What possible motive could he have?’

  ‘The police are holding him, aren’t they?’ Lamont asked, ‘They must know something you don’t.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell nodded, staring into the flickering flame of the table candle, ‘yes, that’s the trouble. They probably know a great deal more than I do.’

  ‘Why don’t you pester Dan Weston?’ the actor suddenly said.

  ‘Weston? Who’s he?’

  ‘Props man for Eight Counties. He’d have been in charge of the guns. Haven’t you met him?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell shrugged.

  There was a commotion behind him. Three Leighford High girls, barely recognizable in make-up and skirts the length of belts, were standing in a corner, giggling with a waiter and trying to writhe past him to get to Marc Lamont, autograph books waving in their scrawny little hands.

  ‘Well, your groupies have arrived.’ Maxwell stood up. ‘By the way,’ he leaned over the blond curls of his man, ‘the one on the left has recurring impetigo and see that hot, nubile one, nipples like chapel hat pegs?’

  Lamont found himself nodding.

  ‘Bedwetter.’ And Mad Max was gone.

  In the cut-throat hierarchy that was Eight Counties television, not everyone stayed at the Grand. Needham’s entourage and the leads, plus suits without number were there, but the hoi polloi, who pointed cameras and edited film and brewed the tea, they all stayed in assorted guesthouses in the town. And it was Maxwell’s bad luck that Dan Weston, the props man, was staying at the Belvedere.

  To be fair it didn’t look much like the late Duke of Windsor’s rather austere Art Deco pad in Berkshire, but then, Mrs Oldcastle, the landlady, looked more like a man than ever Wallis Simpson did.

  ‘Look, if you’re a bleeding reporter …’

  ‘No, no, dear lady,’ Maxwell tipped his hat with an old-world charm they hadn’t seen in Brunswick Street since Ivor Novello visited, ‘I work with Eight Counties Television. I need to see Dan Weston.’

  ‘Weston?’ She was spitting profusely, trying to remove a shred of tobacco from her lower lip. ‘Oh, yeah. Miserable sod. Room Four. But,’ and an iron bicep lay like a girder across her doorway, ‘How do I know you’re kosher?’

  Maxwell pulled back and adjusted his bow tie. ‘Madam, would you have me drop my trousers here, in Brunswick Street?’

  ‘What?’ The point was lost on Mrs Oldcastle; as was Mr Oldcastle, who got lost fifteen years ago on his way back from buying two chump chops from the Asda store down the road. To be fair, Mrs Oldcastle hadn’t tried very hard to find him. ‘Look, do you know what the bleedin’ time is?’

  ‘It’s half past eleven,’ Maxwell leaned out so that the light of the street lamp caught his watch dial, ‘And it is urgent.’

  For a moment, Mrs Oldcastle stood like Horatius defending his bridge, then she relented and proud Tarquin inched past her matronly bosoms (and they had to be plural) and knocked on the door of number four.

  Dan Weston looked different in dingy lamplight. Maxwell recognized him from the beach at Willow Bay, but in the sunshine, the man habitually wore a hat. Now he was bare-headed and the lamplight gleamed on his bald, freckled head.

  ‘It’s late,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’m sorry to come so late.’

  Weston was peering over his shoulder at the redoubtable Mrs O. who hovered there like something unpleasant out of The Dark Crystal. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said, and closed the door purposefully on the stereotype in the back passage. ‘Bitch,’ he hissed.

  Maxwell had been in rooms like this before, on education conferences without number where crap was on the agenda and all sorts of hot air were generated by it.

  ‘I’d offer you a choice of seats,’ Weston said, ‘but it looks like the Lloyd Loom or nothing.’ The chair looked more like Lloyd Webber, but Maxwell sat in it anyway.

  ‘It’s good of you to see me,’ he said.

  ‘You’re Maxwell, aren’t you?’ Weston checked, uncorking a bottle of Scotch deftly, with one hand. ‘Snorter?’

  Maxwell declined.

  ‘Sort of second unit director?’

  Maxwell laughed. ‘If that makes me the Yakima Canutt of Leighford, I’m flattered,’ he said. ‘But no, I was just helping out an old friend.’

  ‘Dr Irving,’ Weston nodded. ‘Nice bloke. Not as stuck up as you’d imagine. No chip, what with being black and all.’

  ‘No chip,’ Maxwell agreed.

  ‘You’ve come about the musket,’ Weston said and took a huge gulp from the bottle. For a moment, his vision swam and the Scotch stung a tongue already raw from days of drinking – how many, he couldn’t remember. Maxwell sensed it too, the man’s despair. But Dan Weston was rock steady on his feet. Only his head shook a little. Only his eyes gave away the disintegration of his soul.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ the props man looked steadily at the teacher, ‘I don’t know you. You don’t know me. You’ve never been in my situation, so you can’t know. It’s like … Well, I can’t describe it.’

  ‘Let me help you,’ Maxwell reached across and gently took the bottle. Keeping his eyes firmly on Weston’s, he swigged heartily and swallowed deep. Then he put the bottle down, ‘Twenty-two years ago … and four months and a little less than a week, I wanted to watch a rugger match on the tele. It was the Five Nations. The Welsh were all the rage then – John Bevan, Barry John, names of gold. We English had our hands full. And I wanted to watch that match. Cardiff Arms Park. I can hear the roars to this day – “Cwm Rhondda” belted out of twenty thousand throats

  ‘I don’t see …’ Weston had lost the thread.

  ‘Please, let me finish. My little girl, Jenny, was two and a half. She had a party to go to. Her mother put her into her best frock, tied her bow and brushed her hair. It was my turn to do the party run. I hated it. Standing there like a lemon making small talk while twenty screaming little maniacs ran around.’ He smiled. ‘The kids were just as bad. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to watch that match, that bloody, pathetic match. So my wife took her instead. She didn’t mind, she said. She’d be bac
k later.’ Peter Maxwell’s face darkened in Weston’s nasty little guest room. ‘But she wasn’t back later. A police car, of all things, ploughed into her car on a wet road. They were chasing tearaways, she was going to a party. I was crashed out on the settee as Barry John did it to us all over again. Aptly enough, they were playing injury time when the doorbell rang. A pasty-faced copper, not much older than some of the kids I teach. There’d been an accident. Would I come to the hospital?’

  His voice trailed away, then he passed the bottle firmly to Weston, and cleared his throat. ‘I’ve never driven a car since,’ he said, holding his head high, ‘or watched a game of rugger. And if ever, just once, somebody asked me to take their little girl to a party …’ He forced down the iron lump that lay like dead memories in his throat, his heart, his soul. ‘So, you see, Mr Weston, I know how you feel. Nobody’s blaming you. Nobody except the worst critic you’ve got – yourself.’

  Weston nodded, taking the bottle from him slowly. Maxwell held on to it, gripping it in the electric air between them. ‘And that,’ Maxwell told him, ‘is not the answer. Believe me.’

  Weston nodded again, putting the thing down on the table alongside the script of The Captain’s Fancy, ‘I checked the guns every day,’ he said, trying to clear his head, sort his life, ‘and the bayonets and the swords. Each musket was a blank-firer. It’s not possible that one of them could have been used to kill anybody.’

  ‘Who else had access to them?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘The police asked me that,’ Weston remembered. ‘Over and over again.’ He rested his gleaming head in his hands and leaned back quickly in the chair, trying to keep Maxwell steady in his vision. ‘I don’t know. Anybody, I suppose.’

  ‘Anybody?’ Maxwell hoped the net wouldn’t be that wide.

  ‘My Number Two, Mario, was off sick that day. I was on my own. I was getting the sabres ready for the Yeomanry shoot. I had my hands full.’

  ‘And the muskets were kept where, exactly?’

  ‘In the props caravan. Up on the level near the road.’