Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Becky Evans said stonily, ever the Buster Keaton of Leighford High.

  ‘Heigh ho, Becky, me proud beauty,’ Maxwell leaned back in his chair, catching sight again of the Year Ten coursework that lay like the weight of all the world on his wall shelf. ‘There’s not a lot I can do at this stage. Granny is in loco grandparentis; she’s mentioned the doctor, who won’t tell us anything even if I rang him; and she’s chosen “glandular” which, along with back trouble, is the hardest symptom to refute this side of SAD and Gulf War Syndrome. In short, my dear, we’re buggered.’

  ‘I’ll go and see her, then,’ the girl from the valleys said. ‘Put her on the spot.’

  ‘Your prerogative,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘I’d advise against it, personally.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ the Head of Art spun on her heel, ‘Doesn’t do to get too personal in this job, does it, Max?’ and she was gone.

  Maxwell found himself wandering the shore that night, where the wavelets grew less brave with the tide receding along the margin of Willow Bay. The sunset was golden again in that marvellous summer, the way Maxwell imagined it must have been in 1914 before they heard the guns in Flanders along this shore and fresh-faced boys lied about their ages and buttoned themselves in khaki when their womenfolk said ‘Go!’ When he told Year Nine about it, they all believed he’d been there, one of the doomed youth of 1914, doomed to spend eternity in the chalk-filmed corridors and classrooms of Leighford High.

  A lone fisherman stood at the lapping edge, checking his line, taut in the shallows, swigging from a can of lager to stave off the dryness of the night. Squealing children ran home to the magic glow of their mobile homes where it was all microwaves and telly and sunburn cream. Bob Pickering’s tent stood by itself now, a little apart from the others that had joined it on the ridge over the Bay. The flag of the Voltigeurs still flew there and the odd strain of a marching band wafted on the breeze from Pickering’s portable CD player.

  ‘“Ça Ira”,’ Maxwell popped his head around the flap, ‘From the Greatest Hits of 1791 LP. Sorry to barge in, Bob.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ the re-enactor was polishing his buttons. ‘“Ça Ira” it is. Funny how a tune can get you going, isn’t it? And a bloody French one at that. I always think, when I play this tape how the armies of Europe must have shook when they heard that. The Old Guard, every man of ’em seven foot tall marching with a tread that came straight out of Hell.’

  Maxwell nodded. What a waste. This man had a soul. Why, oh why hadn’t he come into the sixth form all those years ago? Pickering switched off the CD.

  ‘I thought you’d have long gone by now, Bob,’ Maxwell took the proffered bed and sat opposite his Maréchal de Logis, cross legged as he was.

  ‘The law asked me to stay.’

  ‘They did?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘Buggered if I know, really. This was … four days ago now. Mind you, it wasn’t just me. It was all of us. I was all set to go when Martin did.’ He jerked his head to where the other tents had stood. ‘I s’pose I’m the only sap.’

  Maxwell chuckled. ‘It’s the first two who went I want to talk to,’ he said.

  ‘What? Stapleton and Wood?’

  ‘Yes. Unfortunately I haven’t a clue where they live and my usual sources have dried up.’

  ‘Brighton,’ Pickering said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Brighton – little place along the coast.’

  ‘Bob,’ Maxwell was sitting upright. ‘You don’t know where in Brighton?’

  ‘My van’s outside, Mr Maxwell,’ Pickering grinned. ‘We could be there in half an hour.’

  Maxwell thought he knew his Brighton, the AIDS capital of the South. It was no longer the fashionable watering place of Prinnie’s friends, promenading along the Steyne like walking wallpaper. And now that the permissive society had been launched, it wasn’t even the place where ‘Mr Smith’ would take his secretary for a dirty weekend. Even the candy floss and Kiss-Me-Quick hats were a fading memory. After dark, they came out like lepers from a colony, studded and tattooed like the Vandals and Ostrogoths whose descendants they were, bent on destroying the sunlit civilization of the Roman day.

  And it was to these alleyways that Bob Pickering took his car, spinning the van’s wheel through his hands, snarling through the gears as he clipped curbs and cut corners.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ Maxwell gave Pickering his best Victor Meldrew as the van’s handbrake croaked in the darkened cab. They were outside a pub called the Volunteer. ‘They even named a local after you.’

  ‘Good, innit?’ Pickering chuckled. ‘But it’s not my local – it’s theirs.’

  ‘What – Wood and Stapleton? How the hell did you know that?’

  ‘It’s a small world, re-enacting, Mr Maxwell. Everybody knows everybody else.’

  ‘What? They’re re-enactors? You mean, full time?’

  ‘Nah, no more than me.’

  ‘But, when I first met you all and asked for volunteers … oh, shit!’

  ‘Exactly,’ Pickering wound up his window. ‘First rule of pretend soldiery, Mr Maxwell – never volunteer. Just like the real thing. I did five years with the Hampshires – I know.’

  It was Maxwell’s shout. And shout he had to over the din of the DJ; some sad bastard slumped in a corner, wearing a Motorhead T-shirt and shades, slapping on the CDs with one hand, thumping some vague, unpredictable rhythm with the other. Three or four floozies were gyrating in the centre of the floor, on a raised dais, breasts flying in all directions, while men sat around trying to see up their frocks. Try as he might, Maxwell couldn’t see a handbag anywhere.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ Pickering bellowed in his ear. ‘It’s not the stripper tonight.’

  ‘What’ll it be?’ Maxwell asked him, grateful for the smallest of mercies.

  ‘Pint of Boddington’s, please. Aye, aye,’ and he nodded to the far corner. Dave Wood leaned against a flock-papered wall, one raised arm propping up a cigarette machine. Across the table from him was Joe Stapleton, a half-filled glass in front of him, eyeing up the talent.

  ‘Evening, gents,’ Pickering slid back a chair and joined them.

  ‘Fuck me!’ Wood let his arm fall. ‘Hello, Bob. How’s the scrap metal business?’

  ‘OK last time I saw it,’ Pickering nodded, taking Maxwell’s drink, ‘I’m still at Leighford.’

  ‘Fuck me!’ said Wood again. It was obviously his party piece. ‘Ain’t you got no job to go to?’ And he and Stapleton roared and slapped their thighs.

  ‘You’ve met the Reeves and Mortimer of Brighton, Mr Maxwell?’ Pickering re-introduced them.

  ‘Fu …’ Wood was about to say, but Maxwell leaned forward.

  ‘It’s a pleasure,’ he said, shaking the man by the hand.

  ‘Hello, Mr Maxwell,’ Stapleton stretched a languid arm across, ‘is this one piss of a coincidence or what?’

  ‘More of a what, I’d say, Mr Stapleton.’

  ‘Hello,’ Wood slurred, ‘he’s after your body, Joe.’

  Maxwell smiled. ‘It’s more Miles Needham’s body I’m interested in, actually.’

  ‘Ooh.’ It wasn’t a bad Kenneth Williams from Wood, though had Maxwell thought about it, it really had to be Julian Clary, given Wood’s age. ‘There you are, Joseph. Necrophilia. Mr Maxwell’s one of those people your mother warned you about.’

  ‘You left early,’ Maxwell came straight to the point.

  ‘We’ve got fucking jobs, mate,’ Stapleton said. ‘I like a laugh. Bit of telly. Few bob. But you can’t doss around for ever.’

  ‘Not unless you’re self-employed, of course,’ Wood grimaced at Pickering.

  ‘That’s right,’ Stapleton agreed. ‘Still, I’m sorry we came away now. What with that Hannah Morpeth getting hers.’

  ‘Better than a play, is it?’ Maxwell felt his hackles and a certain red mist rising.

  ‘Nah, don’t get Joe wrong, Mr Maxwell,’ Wood defended his friend. ‘It wa
s bloody terrible, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The only bloody terrible thing,’ Stapleton slurred, trying to focus, ‘is that the little fucker who done it is still – what does the filth say? At large.’

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell leaned forward. ‘Who’s your money on, then, Joe?’

  Stapleton looked at the men around the table. Dave, his old mucker – straight as a die and a good bloke. Pickering, bit of a hard nut; even in the pub’s half light, not a bloke you’d tangle with; and Maxwell, mad as a bloody snake, with his poncey hat and bow tie. Christ, what a crew.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ he said, having drained his glass, ‘Who carried her photos in his wallet? Eh?’ He was warming to his theme now, leaning forward, wiping the lager’s froth from his lips. ‘Who said – and I quote – “I could really give her one”? Eh, Dave? You remember?’

  ‘About half the fucking extras at Willow Bay,’ Wood blinked.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but who in particular? Maybe you couldn’t see the look on his face from where you was sitting, but I could. I tell you, if I was her, that Hannah Morpeth, I’d have locked my bloody door, I can tell you. And I’d have had a chastity belt fitted.’

  ‘Who are we talking about, Joe?’ Maxwell wanted to know.

  ‘Time at the bar!’ their host’s voice bellowed above Marilyn Manson.

  Joe Stapleton leaned closer to Maxwell, his face a livid white under the DJ’s spinning stars. ‘That fucker Martin Bairstow, that’s who.’

  It was about that time that Jim Astley was padding his way up the stairs from the morgue. He was getting too long in the tooth for all this. And was he mellowing? In the old days, when he still had all his own hair and doctors were pillars of society, he wouldn’t have done this, not even for Henry Hall; not even for Jacquie Carpenter.

  She was waiting for him on the ground floor, in that polished silence that marks a hospital after hours where only the cleaners clatter about their business and the wards settle down for the night. A sultry night it was, the glass doors thrown back to let a little of the night in, a little of the light out.

  ‘Dr Astley?’

  He stumped past her, barely acknowledging the tired eyes, the drawn face of a young woman caught up body and soul in a murder inquiry. ‘It’s half past eleven,’ he said. ‘Time all good girls were tucked up safely in bed.’

  Fat chance, thought Jacquie; she with still another three hours of her shift to go.

  He paused at the door. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘You’ve got yourself a murder weapon. Six-inch blade, double edged, not as sharp as it might have been. That surgeon’s knife’s it, all right. Tell the DCI he’ll get my report in the morning – if he can bear to wait. And if he can’t – tough ’nanas. Good night, constable. Oh, by the way … would it be impetuous of me to ask whose knife that is?’

  She shouldn’t really have told him what she did. ‘We have reason to believe,’ the words hung on the near-midnight air, ‘one Martin Bairstow.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Astley shrugged. ‘But then, I’d never heard of Fred West once upon a time.’

  10

  ‘Well, I hoped you might do the tannoy again, Max,’ Roger Garrett, Leighford High’s First Deputy, was ever hopeful.

  ‘The Summer Fête Worse than Death?’ Maxwell opened one eye, dozing in his corner of the staffroom, relishing his only free period of the day. ‘I should cocoa.’

  ‘But it’s tradition, Max,’ Garrett wheedled. ‘Schools are built on it, you know that.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Maxwell had closed his eyes again, his hands locked over his chest, his feet up on today’s copy of the TES strewn over the coffee table. ‘In fact, I told you. You realize this will cost you, Roger?’

  ‘Really,’ Garrett sighed. He’d fenced with Mad Max before. The old duffer had a riposte like a razor and a fleche to die for. ‘Like what?’

  Maxwell’s eyes were open now, flashing, piercing. ‘Like I have to be in Basingstoke by four of the clock. Cover?’

  ‘That’s pretty short notice, Max,’ the first deputy hedged.

  ‘I’m sure the Headmaster’s free,’ Maxwell hauled himself to his feet. ‘Or perhaps even your good self. By the way,’ he scooped up the TES and prodded Garrett’s chest with it, ‘great job in there, page eighty-three. Head of Bollocks in a third-rate comprehensive you’ve never heard of. Should suit a go-getter like you.’ And he winked and dropped the paper into Garrett’s hands.

  Without Bob Pickering at his elbow, Peter Maxwell took longer to find his quarry this time. First of all he had to cope with the slow one from Leighford Central and was forced to eavesdrop on the sort of conversation only Alan Bennett usually listened to. It didn’t help either that Basingstoke was a closed book to him. He’d been there once long ago, when he still had a lean and hungry look. He’d been in search of an eating place – anything would do – in the ghastly town centre and had been so busy looking right and left that he’d collided with a brick pillar; one of those pillars of society you hear about. The next few days were a painful blur as his head swam and his cheek throbbed, but he’d never actually forgiven Basingstoke, he realized, as he plodded the length of the interminable Alençon Link in search of Martin Bairstow.

  Against all the odds, the man had a phone according to the Directory in the local library where there were more CDs than books and he lived at 63, Clifton Terrace. Shouldn’t be that difficult to find. By the time Maxwell reached the Eastrop Roundabout, which was a sort of poor man’s Circus Maximus, he’d realized he’d overshot and had had to retrace his steps. Number 63 was an ordinary-enough looking Victorian terrace, quite elegant in its day Maxwell supposed and now subdivided into flats according to the panel of buzzers next to the old brass bell pull. But Maxwell didn’t have a chance to get close enough to see which was which. He veered away as, from nowhere, a white patrol car snarled to the curb outside and three uniformed policemen scrambled out, the fourth staying with the vehicle, resting his arm on the car’s roof and muttering into a crackling radio intercom.

  Maxwell crossed the road as nonchalantly as he could and merged with the knot of onlookers that was gathering. In minutes the officers re-emerged and in their midst, a full head shorter, Martin Bairstow, his shirt undone, his jeans tatty.

  ‘What’s he done?’ somebody shouted at Maxwell’s elbow.

  ‘Yeah. Leave him alone!’ somebody else insisted.

  ‘Bastards!’ It was an old lady with a Sainsbury’s trolley who was shrieking the loudest.

  One of the officers ducked Bairstow’s head in the time-honoured way and shovelled him into the vehicle. The car roared off, the man in custody lost in the press of shoulders inside it.

  ‘Poor sod,’ muttered one of the bystanders. ‘I’m surprised he’s not a black bloke.’

  Dr John Irving sat in his Cambridge study that night, trying to concentrate, trying to get a grip. His publisher was pestering him again, and he had that New York lecture to give next month. But every time, his mind strayed back to the letter, the one he’d got that morning. In the end he snatched the glasses off his nose and threw them down in the pool of light from his lamp.

  He leaned back in the padded swivel chair and rubbed his aching eyes. He slid open the top drawer suddenly and unfolded the paper there, sliding it under the light. Then he picked up the phone and dialled quickly, the number he’d learned by heart.

  ‘Room 34, please,’ he said as it answered, tapping the desk with the annoyance of the wait. A voice answered. ‘It’s me,’ he said, as people do when they are the centre of their own little universe. ‘I’ve had another one. What? Yes. This morning. Basingstoke postmark. Oh, it’s a beauty,’ and he slipped on his glasses again to read the badly cut out letters pasted onto the paper. ‘“Well, you black bastard. He’s not cold and you’re shafting his memory. Don’t turn your back, nigger.” That makes three. Yes. Yes,’ he sighed. ‘All right,’ he listened solemnly, ‘Thursday. Where? Yes, I’ll find it. Ten o’clock.’ And he hung up.

  ‘I k
now,’ DCI Henry Hall was the epitome of patience, ‘But I’d like to hear it again. And slower, please, Mr Bairstow – for the tape.’

  Martin Bairstow could bluster and hustle his way out there with the best of them. But that was out there, in the hurly burly and the noise, where it was lambrettas and re-enactments and piss-ups with the lads. Now all he heard in Interview Room Two at Leighford Police Station was the tick of Henry Hall’s clock and the hum of Henry Hall’s tape and the persistence of Henry Hall’s voice. In a different light, at a different time he might have fancied Jacquie Carpenter, but in the harsh glare of the Interview Room, she looked blank and unfriendly. And anyway, he knew she was a copper.

  ‘All right,’ he sighed, leaning back. He hadn’t made his phone call. Why should he? He hadn’t done anything.

  ‘What made you come to Leighford?’ Hall asked, starting with the basics.

  ‘The ad. The one in the paper. This TV company was asking for extras in this costume thing, re-enacting. Well, I was between jobs, so I thought, why not? A couple of hundred quid, a few pints, a few birds.’

  ‘Any birds in particular?’ Jacquie asked.

  Bairstow leaned forward. ‘You offering?’

  Hall snapped off the tape. ‘Mr Bairstow,’ he said, ‘my team and I are tired. We’ve knocked on a lot of doors, walked a lot of miles, talked to a lot of people. We don’t really have time for the macho man image. And I, for one, won’t have my officers spoken to like that. Do you own an anorak?’

  Bairstow looked at them both. Coppers! ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Some sort of crime, is it?’

  ‘What colour is it?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Yellow. Why?’

  ‘Would you have any objection if an officer from Basingstoke collected it from your flat?’

  ‘You’ve gotta have a search warrant for that … haven’t you?’

  ‘If we don’t get your permission, yes,’ Hall told him. He flicked on the tape again. ‘Let me outline the case against you, Mr Bairstow,’ he said. ‘There are two people dead. Let’s take Miles Needham first. The man was killed with a modern working replica of a flintlock musket.’