Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  ‘I didn’t fire the fucker!’ Bairstow blurted.

  ‘Indeed not,’ Hall nodded, his eyes invisible behind the lenses of his spectacles, ‘but you camped less than three hundred yards from the props caravan where the murder weapon was switched for its harmless equivalent. You were there when the murder took place. You’re an experienced re-enactor. Familiar with guns.’

  ‘I didn’t do it!’ Bairstow spread his arms in exasperation. They never listened, did they? Coppers!

  ‘So you say,’ Hall said softly, noting something on his pad. ‘So you say.’

  ‘You were a fan of the late Miss Morpeth,’ Jacquie took up the reins of the interview as if on cue, looking steadily into the man’s eyes.

  ‘Yeah – me and half a million other blokes.’

  ‘We’ve spoken to others who were with you in the re-enactment,’ she said. ‘They all confirm it.’ She flicked open a sheaf of papers – ‘“I’d like to get her on her own for five minutes”, “Gagging for it, she is”, “Over here, darling, I’ve got what you’re looking for”.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Bairstow shouted. ‘I never said that.’

  ‘We have witnesses who will swear on oath that you did, Mr Bairstow,’ Hall assured him.

  ‘And of course,’ Jacquie leaned back, watching her man closely, ‘we’ve got you on video.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘At the Grand Hotel. A man answering your description was seen entering the foyer less than half an hour before Hannah Morpeth died.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ Bairstow shouted, but there was no conviction in his voice. The room seemed to close in on him.

  ‘Tell us about the knife,’ Hall said.

  ‘What knife?’

  ‘The replica surgeon’s knife, the one from the surgeon’s kit you left behind when you left Willow Bay.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before.’

  Hall looked at Jacquie. ‘You know, Mr Bairstow,’ he said, ‘I am not known by my colleagues as a humorous man, but I almost laughed just then. It was found by your scooter, it’s got your fingerprints all over it and you’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘Oh, the kit, yeah. I seen that,’ Bairstow backtracked. ‘But it’s not mine. And I never handled the knife.’

  ‘Whose is it, then?’ Jacquie badgered him. ‘The surgeon’s kit?’

  ‘I dunno. Eight Counties provided the props, didn’t they? Ask them. Look,’ he felt the sweat on his forehead, his upper lip, ‘Look. Miles Needham. Hannah Morpeth. They were television people, right? That’s what all this is about. Something to do with the television. Look,’ he wasn’t making any headway; he knew that by their faces, ‘I only come here for the beer and the birds – any birds, not her. Christ, look at me. The likes of Hannah Morpeth, well, she wouldn’t look at me twice, I know that. This … none of this, has got anything to do with me.’

  ‘You won’t mind giving us a blood sample, Mr Bairstow?’ Hall asked.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Just routine,’ Hall shrugged. ‘Elimination. You know.’

  ‘No, no,’ Bairstow clamped one hand over the other in his lap to stop himself from shaking. ‘Anything to help.’

  ‘Of course,’ Hall turned to switch off the tape, ‘at …’ he checked his watch, ‘seven forty-three, interview over.’ He flicked another switch on his right and the door opened, with a policeman behind it. ‘Constable, Mr Bairstow will be our guest tonight. We’ll need to see him again in the morning. See if Dr Astley’s available to arrange a blood sample, would you?’

  ‘Right, sir,’ the constable said and Bairstow shambled to the door.

  ‘One thing,’ Bairstow said before the uniformed man took him away. ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘What was who doing where?’ Hall turned to face him.

  ‘That historical adviser bloke. That Maxwell. He was there when your blokes came for me.’

  ‘In Basingstoke?’ Hall checked.

  ‘Yeah. What was all that about?’

  Hall looked at Jacquie. ‘I’ve no idea, Mr Bairstow,’ he said. ‘But you may rest assured I’ll find out.’

  Maxwell strode the furrow out across the sloping fields that slanted to the sea. Across those cloudless skies a generation before, Spitfires and Hurricanes darted silver, outgunning and outmanoeuvring an airforce four times their size. They still found wreckage out on Harland Sands when the tide was low and the sea gave up its secrets. The historian in him thought he heard the snarl of their engines and saw their smoking trails. And the Romantic in him would have liked to have seen Farmer Sparrow’s Clydesdales plodding through the plough-lines with their arched necks and feathered feet, proud heads nodding under jingling brass. As it was, all he could see was the clear blue and a 747 like a silver pinhead in the ether; and in the furrows, a clapped out Land-Rover resting at a crazy angle, its door open, its bonnet up.

  ‘Mr Sparrow?’ he extended a hand.

  George Sparrow was a solid, no-nonsense farmer with the Sussex clay on his boots and the Sussex clay in his blood. His face was flat and the colour of leather, a wild grey beard ringing it. Only his eyes shone clear blue, like the sky. ‘Who’s that?’ he stuck his head out from the uptilted bonnet of the Land-Rover.

  ‘Peter Maxwell, Leighford High.’

  Sparrow wiped a grimy hand and gripped Maxwell’s. ‘Morning,’ he grunted.

  ‘What news of Giles?’

  ‘We’ve got a phone, y’know,’ the farmer said. ‘You could’ve rung.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘But I wanted to meet you face to face. I called at the farm. Your wife said you’d be out here.’

  Sparrow squinted to the field gate. ‘You on foot?’

  ‘Bike,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Well, he’s all right,’ Sparrow said. ‘The boy. Well, as all right as you can be in Winchester gaol.’

  ‘Your wife said she hadn’t seen him.’

  Sparrow turned back to his tinkering. ‘I won’t let her go. My Susan’s not a strong woman, Mr Maxwell. I could see what it was doing to her, going every day to see him in that place. I put a stop to it.’

  ‘They’ll have to let him go soon,’ Maxwell encouraged.

  ‘They’ve charged him with murder, Mr Maxwell,’ Sparrow said, straightening up. ‘Glove Farm isn’t what it was. I can’t afford the bail.’

  ‘But there’s legal aid …’ Maxwell suggested.

  ‘That’s charity.’ Sparrow clattered about with spanners, twisting here, wrenching there. ‘My family has had some trouble in the last few years, Mr Maxwell, but we don’t take charity. Never have, never will.’

  ‘I want to help, Mr Sparrow,’ Maxwell looked steadily at him. ‘And I want to know about Tom – the Sparrow who was found drowned back in ’77. Was he your brother? Uncle? What?’

  ‘Know anything about engines?’ the farmer asked, his face suddenly as black as the Land-Rover.

  Maxwell shook his head.

  ‘I thought not,’ Sparrow said. ‘You take my advice, Mr Maxwell. You keep out of what you don’t understand. I wouldn’t come up to the school and tell you how to teach the kiddies – any more than you’d come to the farm and tell me about the spring sowing. It’s the same with this. Sparrow problem. That’s an end to it.’

  And it was.

  Mrs B. hoovered around Peter Maxwell as he sat marking in his office at Leighford High that afternoon. He could always tell when she’d done that because of the trail of fag ash she left in her wake.

  ‘You poor little bleeder,’ she said, ‘All that marking. It’ll send you blind, y’know. Look at this,’ and she held up a condom from the corridor outside, ‘French bleeding letters. I dunno. When I was these kids’ age, I didn’t know what a letter was hardly, let alone a French one. Ain’t you got no home to go to?’

  Maxwell was used to Mrs B.’s strings of inconsequence. She did for him up at the school and, by mutual arrangement, at home too. Without looking up, he answered her mechanically, ‘Yes, I know; good Lord, not used, I
hope; didn’t you?’ He sighed and closed the exercise book, looking at the old girl for the first time. ‘Yes, Mrs B., I believe I have.’

  There were two old girls in Peter Maxwell’s life. One was the chain-smoking cleaner with the heart of gold and the mouth of sewer, Mrs B. The other was Miss Troubridge, of 36 Columbine, a shrewish old duck with just a hint of the actress Mary Merrill about her. Maxwell shouldn’t have been surprised to see her, secateurs in hand that afternoon as he swung out of White Surrey’s saddle. The secateurs meant only one thing. Maxwell had had a visitor and Miss Troubridge wanted to know more.

  ‘It’s that nice policewoman, Mr Maxwell,’ she confided so that most of Columbine caught it, snipping ineffectually at her privet. ‘The one who’s often hanging around. Pretty girl. Light chestnut hair.’

  The pretty girl with light chestnut hair was walking across the grass as she said it.

  ‘Ah, she’s been waiting for you. How nice. Would you care for a cup of tea, my dear?’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Troubridge,’ Maxwell unlocked his front door and shepherded Jacquie Carpenter inside, ‘I think I can run to a quick Tetley’s. Bye.’ And he rested gratefully against the glass. ‘Jacquie, I’ve been trying to reach you.’

  ‘I know, Max,’ she said, looking up the stairs. ‘Shall we? This is official.’

  ‘Ooh, from the tenth floor, huh?’ He broke into his A1 Pacino as Serpico, but it was before Jacquie’s time and anyway she wasn’t, daren’t be, in the mood. He led the way up into the lounge, scooping up film mags various as he went. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ he apologized, ‘I hadn’t expected the Spanish Inquisition.’ But Monty Python was before Jacquie’s time too and he let it drop. ‘Drink?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll come to the point,’ she said.

  Metternich the cat didn’t need to be told. He stretched indolently on the settee, then half raised himself and stared at the detective, his tongue sticking out. In cat years, he was older than either of the humans in the room. In cat years he could remember when detectives wore trench coats and trilby hats and smoked pipes and called villains ‘chummie’. Maxwell could too, but then Maxwell had to throw at least a glance in the direction of political correctness; Metternich had no such compunction. He lashed his tail once and left in search of those little hard brown bits that constituted his evening meal.

  ‘Martin Bairstow,’ Jacquie said, feeling the seat warm where the cat had been.

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell was pouring himself a Southern Comfort.

  ‘You were there, when he was taken into custody.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Don’t do this, Max,’ she warned. ‘Bairstow identified you.’

  He put down the drink and held his wrists out, as though for handcuffs. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s a fair cop. By the way,’ and he launched into his Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura, ‘I was the second gunman on the grassy knoll.’

  She shook her head. Peter Maxwell was the most awkward man she’d ever met. How do you cope with a bloke who’s fifty-three going on four?

  ‘What were you doing there?’ she asked him.

  Maxwell sat down opposite her, staring into her steady, grey eyes. ‘Sleuthing,’ he said.

  ‘Max,’ she shook her head again, ‘this isn’t a game. Two people are dead.’

  ‘I know that, Jacquie.’ He was suddenly as serious as she was. ‘That’s why I was in Basingstoke.’

  ‘Did you talk to Bairstow?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell leaned back in his chair. ‘Your boys got there first. What did you find out?’

  ‘Come off it, Max,’ she said. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘You have in the past,’ he reminded her.

  ‘I know.’ The response was sharp, sudden, then calmer. ‘I know – and I shouldn’t have. What … what is it about you? I can’t …’

  For a moment he thought she was going to cry, but she held herself in check and sat upright. ‘I was sent here by Chief Inspector Hall. He says that if he finds you’ve been interfering in the course of this inquiry again, he’ll arrest you for obstruction.’

  ‘Why did he send you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why you?’ Maxwell crossed one leg nonchalantly over the other. ‘Why didn’t he send Inspector Watkiss, or come himself?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do, Jacquie.’ He leaned forward suddenly, looking deep into her eyes. ‘He sent you because he wants to know what I know. And he thinks I might tell you.’

  ‘What do you know?’ she blinked.

  Maxwell leaned back again, as aloof as his cat. ‘Tiddly squat,’ he said, with open hands.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she told him.

  ‘What is it about you police persons?’ Maxwell shook his head sadly. ‘Is everybody guilty until they prove themselves innocent?’

  ‘That’s not fair, Max,’ she argued.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘And it’s not fair that two people are lying on slabs in morgues and you’ve got the wrong bloke in the frame for it.’

  ‘What do you propose to do about it?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘Whatever you let me do,’ he said urgently. ‘Look, Jacquie, I’m too long in the tooth to be a Special Constable or to retrain at Bramhill now. I haven’t got the computer access and the miles of shoe leather and the forensic capabilities that you people have. All I’ve got is what they still call at the universities an enquiring mind. Oh, and one other thing – a sense of injustice the size of Jeffrey Archer’s bank-balance. I’m not the kind to sit back and read about all this in the Sundays or hear it from Trevor McDonald on News at Ten. If the fray is thick, that’s where you’ll find me.’

  ‘Hall means what he says, Max,’ Jacquie warned. ‘He’ll pull you in.’

  ‘I suppose you realize,’ Maxwell’s Bugs Bunny was legendary, ‘this means war?’

  ‘Why did you want to see Bairstow?’

  ‘Are you asking me as a friend or as a policewoman?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘As a policewoman, for Christ’s sake. It’s what I am.’

  ‘Not a friend?’ Maxwell was probing.

  ‘Max,’ Jacquie leaned forward, holding both his hands in hers, the tears rimming around her eyes. ‘I can’t be both. Don’t you see that? I …’ And he stopped her with a kiss. She wasn’t ready for it, but her lips opened instinctively, and she felt his hands, strong and warm, on her cheeks. She pulled back quickly, blinking away the tears.

  ‘I went to see Bairstow,’ he said softly, ‘because I’d already been to see Stapleton and Wood. The picture they painted of him was of a sex maniac. Or at least a potential one. It didn’t square with Miles Needham, but opened delicious possibilities for Hannah Morpeth.’

  ‘Max …’ she was staring at him, trying to understand what had just happened.

  ‘Now it’s your turn,’ he said. ‘You tell me why you wanted to see Bairstow.’

  ‘The murder weapon,’ she said. It wasn’t her head thinking now, but her heart. There was an iron lump in her throat and she suddenly wanted to be held by this man, not just now, but for ever. This couldn’t be happening. She couldn’t allow it to happen. But how, she thought, as she gazed into those dark eyes, could she stop it?

  ‘What?’ he frowned.

  ‘We have reason to believe,’ she used the time-honoured police phraseology, ‘that Martin Bairstow owns the knife that killed Hannah Morpeth.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he whispered.

  ‘Max …’

  ‘Jacquie,’ he stood up, pulling her up with him, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have kissed you.’

  ‘No,’ she sniffed, the policewoman taking over again from the woman. ‘No, I suppose not. I’d better go.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he nodded, ‘I suppose so. Jacquie …’He caught her hand as she turned from him. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  She felt it all bubbling up again, this stupid schoolgirl well of emotion. She could ha
ve screamed, kicked the furniture, thrown things through the plate-glass windows. As it was, she just kissed Maxwell quickly on the cheek and hurried away down the stairs.

  Metternich the cat sat on his haunches in Maxwell’s kitchen, watching the girl’s departure through the open door. What, he asked himself, was that all about?

  ‘A knife, Bob.’ Maxwell hugged Pickering’s tin mug that Wednesday crouching under canvas as the long June day turned gold and purple into the short June night. ‘Something about Martin Bairstow and a knife.’

  The voltigeur sergeant looked blank for a moment. ‘The surgeon’s kit,’ he said. ‘That would have a knife in it, probably two.’

  ‘What surgeon’s kit?’

  ‘Bairstow’s. He carried it in his gear. Left it behind as a matter of fact when he pulled out. Or at least I assume it was his. Come to think of it, that’s how the law got to know about it. That policewoman Carpenter was here the day he left. She got all interested in the kit and took it away with her.’

  ‘Did she now?’ Maxwell mused. Jacquie Carpenter hadn’t strayed far from his mind since that afternoon. He was too old for this. In the seven ages of man stakes he’d long ago left off sighing like a furnace with woeful ballads.

  Maybe there was still something of the soldier about him – certainly he still had a few strange oaths up his sleeve. But essentially he was the embodiment of justice and no one had wiser saws than Mad Max, even if some of his instances weren’t all that modern. ‘Why would Bairstow have a surgeon’s kit? I hadn’t got him down for a particularly serious re-enactor.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Pickering agreed. ‘Still, you meet a pretty rum lot in the war game. I’ve seen that bloke around again, you know.’

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know whether you remember, but a couple of weeks ago, before Needham was killed, there was a bloke hanging around the camp.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Maxwell clicked. ‘Helen McGregor from my sixth form saw him. Some sort of Peeping Tom, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Probably,’ Pickering said. ‘Only she saw him that time, but she told everybody about him at great length. He’s harmless enough, I should think. But it’s camps like ours that attract them. That and the sea. Chance to see a bit of topless tottie. I’m glad you came along tonight, Mr Maxwell. I’m off home tomorrow.’