Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Clear as a bell, guv.’ Paul Garrity was a young copper of the old school. He’d watched Minder as a kid. Engage him in conversation for long and he’d start talking about getting on the blower, getting the wheels out and watching out for shooters. He’d been a stranger to the Queen’s English for years.

  ‘Jacquie,’ Hall turned to the girl on his left, ‘I want you to get to know Hannah Morpeth like your twin sister. Men, money, career, the lot. I want to know who she played tig with at school and who gave her her first break.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘Enemies, ladies and gentlemen.’ Hall waved to Reg to kill the pictures of the dead. ‘That’s what we had in the death of Miles Needham. And that’s what we’ve got in the death of Hannah Morpeth.’

  ‘What about the kid?’ somebody asked. ‘What about Giles Sparrow?’

  ‘What indeed? I did put that question to Chief Inspector Hall,’ Malcolm Sailer, the solicitor, was sipping the sherry Peter Maxwell had brought him in the snug of the Head of Sixth Form’s local, which he had rechristened the Alcoholics’ Arms.

  ‘And?’ It was Maxwell’s second Southern Comfort of the day. Things were not going well.

  ‘You must realize how the law works, Mr Maxwell,’ Malcolm Sailer wasn’t so much a legal eagle as a booby. ‘There may well be a connection between Hannah Morpeth’s death and Miles Needham’s, but the fact that young Sparrow couldn’t possibly have killed the girl doesn’t mean he didn’t kill the director either.’

  ‘But, logically …’

  Sailer’s smile stopped him.

  ‘What?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘You’re an historian, aren’t you, Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Of sorts,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘And if I remember my old A-level course to any extent at all, it’s all about human nature, isn’t it? People don’t behave logically. They never have. Murderers don’t. And neither, for all they’d disagree, do the police. Anyway, any amount of philosophy about it isn’t going to change things. Henry Hall isn’t about to let the boy go. He wants more answers first.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell swirled the burning liquid around his tonsils, ‘so do I.’

  Hannah Morpeth’s agent was used to giving out publicity information on her. But this was different. The chit of a girl with the warrant card sitting opposite him was asking all the wrong questions. No, Hannah had not been to RADA. She’d been to Rose Bruford. Where was that? Sidcup, when the agent last looked. Men? That wasn’t the agent’s province. Enemies? Well, naturally, sugar. Every other woman in the industry. Was that any help at all?

  Peter Maxwell was marking books and on his fourteenth version of the thoughts of 10B1 as to why people supported the Nazi Party in 1920s Germany when the doorbell rang at 38, Columbine. To be honest, he was grateful. It’s a depressing business when it’s confirmed over time that a whole generation of kids doesn’t know an apostrophe from their elbows and half of them think that the late Fuhrer’s name was Hilter.

  The mountain, so it seemed, had come to Mohammed. And the mountain, beyond the distorted reed-glass of Maxwell’s front door, was DI Dave Watkiss, flashing his warrant card by way of introduction.

  ‘I believe you know DC Carpenter,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the girl next to him.

  ‘I have had that pleasure,’ Maxwell said, trying to read in Jacquie’s face how he was supposed to play this one.

  ‘May we come in?’ Watkiss asked. His guv’nor had briefed him about Peter Maxwell, new to the manor as Watkiss was. Here was a tricky bastard, liked tilting at other people’s windmills; saw himself as the Miss Marple of Leighford High School.

  ‘Mi casa, su casa,’ Maxwell bowed. ‘It’s up the stairs. Lounge off. Is this a social call, Jacquie?’

  She flashed her clear grey eyes at him. A flash that said, For fuck’s sake, shut up, Max. A nod was as good as a wink to Peter Maxwell.

  ‘You left a message on DC Carpenter’s answerphone,’ Watkiss said. ‘What was that all about?’ Watkiss had flopped down in Maxwell’s chair. The black and white cat, Metternich, couldn’t decide whether he should leap onto his lap, claws akimbo or just fart and walk out. For the moment, he’d skulk under the coffee table, with his metronome of a tail, and see how it went.

  ‘So,’ Maxwell sat opposite the Inspector on the settee, ‘George Orwell was right, then.’

  ‘Heh, heh,’ Metternich sniggered. He had no idea what his master had just said, but he knew body language like the back of his paw. Maxwell was preening himself; Watkiss squirming. Mad Max, one; Sussex Police, nil. Still, it was early days.

  ‘Meaning?’ Watkiss was a man unafraid to show his ignorance.

  ‘Big Brother,’ Maxwell enlightened him. ‘1984. Of course, George got his dates wrong, but, hey,’ and he’d lapsed into his legendary Tony Blair, ‘who doesn’t? Tell me, Inspector,’ he was himself again, ‘do you steam open DC Carpenter’s mail and check her undies drawer?’

  ‘Now, look …’ A vein throbbed in DI Watkiss’s temple. He almost caught the smirk on Jacquie Carpenter’s face, but not quite. Then he relented. Hall had warned him there’d be moments like this. ‘Don’t rise to it,’ the DCI had advised, ‘He’s clever and he uses words like a sniper uses bullets. Keep your head down. Keep digging. Sooner or later … if you’re lucky …’

  ‘You said on the answerphone,’ Watkiss persisted, ‘That you’d talked to Hannah Morpeth.’

  ‘I think if you play the tape again,’ Maxwell said softly, ‘Which is no doubt logged as Exhibit 453B, just in case, that I said “I tried to talk to her.”’

  ‘Are you denying you talked to her?’ Watkiss’s head was dangerously above the parapet again.

  ‘No,’ Maxwell shrugged, ‘just being pedantic, really.’

  ‘So you did talk to her?’

  ‘There were an awful lot of television technicians and paparazzi on the beach who have no doubt already confirmed to you that I did.’

  ‘What time was this?’ Watkiss asked. Jacquie Carpenter was making notes.

  ‘Sunset,’ Maxwell remembered, ‘I don’t know. Nine thirty. Nine forty-five?’

  ‘She died three hours later,’ Watkiss volunteered. ‘You were one of the last people to see her alive.’

  ‘I suppose I was.’

  ‘And you see,’ Watkiss was leaning forward, that vein throbbing again, ‘I was one of the first people to see her dead.’

  Maxwell sat back, shaking his head. ‘And that’s the bitch of it,’ he said, gazing steadily into Watkiss’s eyes. ‘What we’re both looking for is the man who fits both criteria – the one who was the very last to see her alive and the very first to see her dead.’

  ‘What we’re both looking for?’ Watkiss didn’t like the sound of that.

  ‘You’ve got one of my lads in choky, Inspector, one of my sixth form. “Trelawney he’s in keep and hold, Trelawney he may die, Here’s twenty thousand Cornish bold will know the reason why.”’

  He’d done it again. Watkiss had inched himself above that parapet and his ego lay spattered all over Maxwell’s living-room like the head of Miles Needham all over Willow Bay.

  ‘I can’t leave it there,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s not in my nature. Hannah Morpeth was … shall we say, unhelpful? She seemed out of it, on something, I think the Young People say. Well, it isn’t surprising. God knows what sort of life it must be when you can’t scratch your bum without some magazine buying the exclusive rights. And she was standing nearer to Miles Needham than I was. My God,’ Maxwell was sitting up, staring first at Watkiss, then at Jacquie, ‘is that it? Is that why she died? Did she see something on that beach because of where she was standing? You must have talked to her as well. What did she say?’

  At a signal from Watkiss, Jacquie Carpenter snapped shut her notebook and the police persons stood up. The interview, Watkiss informed him, was over – for now.

  There was suddenly an atrocious, if fleeting, smell. Metternich had made up his mind.

  The
Grand had more ways in than the Maze prison – and a corresponding number of ways out. Hannah Morpeth’s room, still sealed off that Tuesday with SOCO coloured tape, was on the fourth floor. There were two lifts for guests and a third for hotel staff. And at each end of her corridor, a stairway linked to the three floors below and the two above. Almost the entire floor had been booked for a fortnight by Eight Counties Television and everyone had been interviewed at least twice by Henry Hall’s band of coppers over the death of Miles Needham. Now they were interviewed again. The same questions, tapes and ticking clocks; all the paraphernalia of an Incident Room mobbed by the morbidly curious hoping to catch sight of the fleetingly famous.

  The Eight Counties Newsroom was disappearing up its own arsehole with the hysteria of it all. Death on its own doorstep, murder in the media, killings on the cutting-room floor. It was a three-ring circus – the Mail carried four pages on the shy little girl who had been a superstar – hardly any of it sounded familiar to Jacquie Carpenter; the Express concentrated on Miles Needham; the Independent got an exclusive from Sir David Puttnam, lamenting on the talent lost to the British cinema.

  ‘Anybody, guv?’ Paul Garrity was dog-tired, but tried not to let it show in the presence of his DCI. The detective-sergeant hadn’t had much sleep in the last twenty-four hours and dawn, twilight and the summer sun had come to have little meaning for him. ‘Video cameras only operate on the ground floor. Everything else is a dummy.’

  ‘Pointless!’ Hall threw his pencil onto his desk. It didn’t clatter, because wherever it had landed, it would have hit paper. He seemed to remember leaving a wife and three kids somewhere. No doubt when something surfaced, he’d remember where. ‘Why can’t these people spend a bit of money where it matters? More security and a little less wall-to-wall walnut burr wouldn’t come amiss. You’ve seen the tapes?’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ Garrity opened a black-bound file. ‘We’ve counted forty-one different people entering or leaving the Grand’s front door between the time Hannah Morpeth returned from her day’s filming and the time of death. We can account for thirty-eight of them – all hotel staff or guests. Sixteen are Eight Counties people. Here are the stills of the three we can’t identify.’

  He slid the photographs across the piles of paper. Hall shook his head. Each one had the same camera angle, looking down on the reception desk.

  ‘That’s the night porter on duty,’ Garrity pointed to the blond blur behind the counter. ‘This one here is his assistant. In this first shot, you’ve got what appears to be a woman entering at … what, ten forty-three, according to the timer.’

  Hall nodded. ‘Tall,’ he said. ‘Middle-aged. What’s she carrying, Paul? An umbrella?’

  ‘Looks like,’ Garrity said and caught the look on his boss’s face. ‘Yeah, I know. It hasn’t rained since 1957 and she’s carrying an umbrella.’

  ‘I’d give my eye teeth for a look at that umbrella’s tip,’ Hall was talking to himself.

  ‘The second one is eight minutes later,’ Garrity pointed to the next photograph. By this time, the night porter’s assistant had gone and his back was turned as a vague figure crossed the corner of the surveillance screen. ‘We think it’s a man. But that hat …’

  ‘Disguises like that went out with Sherlock Holmes,’ Hall frowned. ‘Damn. We need more frames on this. Any record of these people leaving?’

  ‘None,’ Garrity shook his head. ‘We’ve run these tapes so often we’re in danger of wearing them out. The third one’s the most infuriating of all. Look.’

  Hall did. It was eleven twenty-three. ‘That’s Buster Rothwell, Miss Morpeth’s minder, going off duty. He’s about to bump – literally – into this bloke.’

  Hall tried to make out the anoraked figure sauntering across the foyer. ‘Youngish,’ was as far as he could get.

  ‘That’s what Rothwell reckoned,’ Garrity confirmed. ‘He doesn’t remember too clearly. It was a fleeting moment. But he thought curly hair under a hat and he didn’t know him.’

  ‘That anorak? Looks pale.’

  ‘Yellow. Traffic wardens, council workers. Yachties. They’re as common as buggery. No mileage there, I’m afraid.’

  Hall screwed up his face, thinking, analysing, trying to dredge from somewhere some sort of organization out of the chaos of his case. ‘And none of these were seen coming out?’

  Garrity shook his head. ‘Not so far. We’ve run the tapes up to lunchtime the following day. No one resembling any of these appears again.’

  ‘What about the porter? What does he remember?’

  ‘Woman A,’ Garrity pointed to Umbrella Woman, ‘Wanted to see a Miss Kenrick.’

  ‘Guest?’

  ‘Yes. Room 86. Third floor.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The night porter rang through. Miss Kenrick wasn’t answering. Woman A disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared, Paul?’

  ‘I know, guv,’ Garrity had voiced all the uncertainties to himself long before he’d gone in to the guv’nor. ‘The night porter remembers she stayed in the lobby for a bit, thumbing through the “Places to Visit” stuff. When he looked next, she’d gone.’

  ‘But not out of the front door?’ Hall checked.

  ‘No. But that’s the bugger of it, guv. There’s no working camera on the back or side entrances, nor the kitchen access. She could have slipped out of any of those. And more’s to the point, anyone could have slipped in.’

  ‘Figure B?’ Hall took his man further on.

  ‘Night porter didn’t see him.’ Garrity shook his head. ‘He was doing his returns.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hall knew the feeling, ‘it’s all about paperwork in the end, isn’t it?’

  ‘He seems to be heading for the lifts,’ Garrity went on. ‘But that way, he could have veered into the Huntsman’s Bar, the Kiddies Room or the West stairs.’

  ‘And assuming no one saw him combing Barbie’s hair in the Wendy House, we’re none the wiser?’

  ‘No, guv.’ It was a lame response from Paul Garrity, but then, he’d just witnessed a moment unique in his dealings with Henry Hall. His DCI had just cracked a joke. It was precisely because of responses like this that Henry Hall didn’t crack them very often.

  ‘The anorak in Frame C. Would Roth well know this man again?’

  ‘Well, he says there was something familiar about him, but he couldn’t say what. Not on the company’s roll, he’s sure of that.’

  Hall sighed. ‘All right, Paul. You’ve done well. We’ll just have to hope that SOCO come up with something from the murder room. Keep on to these three. They may be complete red herrings, but I don’t like loose ends.’ He metaphorically kicked himself, thinking how Peter Maxwell would have grimaced at the mixed metaphors there. Now why, Henry Hall wondered, as Paul Garrity saw himself out, should he be thinking of Peter Maxwell?

  ‘Well, I can’t understand it, Max.’ Becky Evans was in full flight in the Great Man’s office, the girl from the valleys with a voice like a circular saw. ‘She was such a little mouse. What the Hell is the matter with her?’

  ‘Love, Rebecca,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All right, then,’ the Head of Sixth Form conceded, ‘You’re under forty – lerv. Better?’

  Becky Evans was the Head of Art at Leighford High. Maxwell reminded her on every conceivable occasion that there weren’t any great female artists. But as he was a public schoolboy himself, he said it so politely. A few years back, he’d said the same thing to the Head of Domestic Science, that there weren’t any great female chefs either. He couldn’t say it any more because the old battleaxe had retired and anyway, so had Domestic Science. It was called Food Technology now, whatever that meant. Maxwell was waiting for the day when they introduced History Technology into schools. That day he would quietly take a rope from the gym and hang himself from the Leighford High flagpole, the one where the Head hoped the Investors in People flag would fly one day soon.

  Becky Evans was indeed under forty
, but not by that much. And she stood in Maxwell’s office that morning wearing her pastoral hat as Helen McGregor’s Form Tutor.

  ‘I haven’t seen her for days. I followed the oracle, sent out the three-day absence letter, heard nothing. Then I rang. No reply.’

  ‘Mum works,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Dad was some surfer back in the summer of ’79 – they took the Year of the Child very literally. Helen and Mum live with Gran, I think.’

  ‘Well, it’s obviously a man she needs,’ Becky Evans wasn’t one to stand on female chauvinist ceremony.

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Marc Lamont.’

  ‘What, the actor?’

  ‘Helen is seriously smitten, Rebecca,’ the oracle explained.

  ‘Well, I’d heard she was working with the television people, but I didn’t believe it. Such a mouse. No acting ability at all, has she?’

  ‘Not that I know,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Mind you, she looks the part of a homicidal Welsh fishwife running screaming along Willow Bay – oh, begging your pardon, of course.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ Becky Evans was used to slurs against the Welsh – they usually involved sheep. ‘She ought to have been here.’

  ‘But I’m sure I saw her in the corridor this morning.’

  ‘Oh, you did,’ Becky was striding across his County Hall carpet, waving her register to stave off the hot flush she felt creeping insidiously up from both breasts, ‘That would have been just before she called me a fat slag and told me to fuck off – I’m toning it down, of course, Max, to save your blushes. I’d only asked her where she’d been.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘God knows. Flounced out of the Art Room like she was bloody Greta Garbo.’

  ‘Well, that’s perfectly understandable, Rebecca,’ Maxwell said softly. ‘She wants to be alone.’

  Helen McGregor was still alone when Maxwell found her. The girl was sitting with her back to one of the old oaks that ringed Leighford’s playing fields, like a child in a Maxfield Parrish poster. It was the end of another glorious day and children called to each other and laughed as they scattered and wandered home over the golden grass. Maxwell checked his watch as the roar of a TR7 made him turn. Four o three. Right on time, the Head of Media Studies was out of there, with the bats from Hell flapping in the debris of his exhaust. Maxwell had seen Helen from the window of the Science lab where he’d been covering for that silent non-event who taught Physics.