Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Well, there’s no point in staying, really, is there? The law don’t seem to be doing much. It’s just another summer holiday come to an end.’

  ‘They’ve arrested Martin Bairstow,’ Maxwell told him.

  ‘Have they now?’ Pickering drained his cocoa mug. ‘And all on account of that knife. Funny, I never had Martin down for the murderous sort. Anyhow, I’ve got a business to run.’ He stood up. ‘Mr Maxwell,’ he held out his hand, ‘It’s been great meeting you again.’

  ‘You too, Bob,’ Maxwell shook it. ‘Here’s to the next campaign.’

  Pickering laughed. ‘I don’t think you’ve finished this one, yet, have you?’

  ‘No, Bob,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘I don’t think I have.’

  Thursday morning was Sixth Form Assembly. Nearly a hundred and forty scruffy collections of hormones sat in the hall at Leighford High waiting to catch the pearls of wisdom scattered liberally by their Year Head, Mad Max. He stood before them on that hot, sticky day, reminding them that no matter how glorious the weather, no one was to sunbathe on the fields during private study and that young ladies should on no account expose their midriffs – or any other part of their riffs – lest it enflame the passions of the young gentlemen.

  That over, Maxwell resisted the urge to lead them all in community hymn singing and stumped off to his first lesson. On his way he collided with Becky Evans hurtling to Art.

  ‘Morning, Rebecca. No news of Miss McGregor, I take it?’

  ‘None,’ she told him as Maxwell took a child by the shoulders and planted it on the correct side of the corridor.

  ‘You know the Headmaster’s edict, Liam, as well as I do. Gentlemen dress to the left, especially in the main corridor.’

  Liam looked a little sheepish and wandered off to start the rest of his life.

  ‘I’m afraid I chickened out of calling round there,’ Becky confessed.

  ‘You were wise,’ Maxwell sighed, ‘I’ll pay her a visit. She’s had long enough.’

  ‘What about the EWO?’ the Head of Art suggested.

  ‘Endlessly Whingeing Officer?’ Maxwell looked dubious. ‘Nah. Malcolm’s a nice bloke, but he’s also the softest touch south of Salisbury. Of course, Education Welfare Officers used to be kid catchers in my day but don’t get me started on that or we’ll be here ’til Christmas.’

  He swept regally into Room H4 where a ragbag of intellectuals in Year 8 were whiling away the time flicking soggy bits of paper at each other.

  ‘Strappado!’ Maxwell roared. ‘A method of torture much favoured by the late, great Monsignor Torquemada – he of the Spanish Inquisition. It consists of being hung up by your thumbs, toes or other extremities from the ceiling. You, Jason, will be my first victim of the morning. Off with your shoes! Now, there’s a brave command.’ And he fell back from the hapless Jason, gagging uncontrollably.

  The eighth version of how Appeasement led to World War Two drove Peter Maxwell into a state of terminal depression. And by the ninth, penned by the almost unreadable Sabrina Marshall, he’d lost the will to live and had fallen asleep. For a moment, he was lost in a dark world of murder, and the ghost of Miles Needham, with shattered head, came wandering along the water’s edge to talk to him. He heard the serpentines click back and the muskets thunder. And Hannah Morpeth, riddled with a thousand cuts smiled at him from police photographs he’d never seen. The bell was ringing madly, out of context with his dream. Like Pavlov’s dog, he sat bolt upright, reaching for his chalk. Another day. Another lesson.

  But it wasn’t day. It was nearly one in the morning and the curtain by his open window shivered in the night breezes. And he wasn’t at school, that Hell where youth and laughter go. He was at home, the febrile outpourings of futile minds scattered like confetti across his lap.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he called to himself. Metternich the cat was out on the prowl, adding more corpses to his terrifying tally as the most prolific serial killer on the south coast. Maxwell shambled downstairs in his stockinged feet, trying to focus on the dark shape distorted by the reeded glass of his front door. ‘Bwana!’

  ‘Christ, John,’ Maxwell opened the door wide, ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘No.’ Irving was trembling, clammy, cold. ‘Just a corpse. Can I come in?’

  11

  It was several Southern Comforts later that Peter Maxwell got any rational sense out of John Irving. He talked him through it, step by step, turn by turn. And dawn was already aglow over Leighford’s gasworks and the new multi-storey Sainsbury’s when Maxwell was ready to recap.

  ‘Right, John.’ His old oppo of the Granta days sat with a steaming coffee mug in his hand. Even he, used to the deceptive smoothness of the drink from the banks of the good ol’ Mississippi, was beginning to see the world a little cock-eyed. Time to add a little calming caffeine to the equilibrium equation. ‘From the top.’

  The man didn’t look much like a Cambridge don in the early hours, huddled on Maxwell’s settee. His shirt looked as if it had been slept in and his jeans were dusty above the boots. ‘From the top,’ Irving said, running his fingers through the tight, jet curls and closing his eyes. ‘I got this letter from Barbara Needham, out of the blue.’

  ‘Addressed to you at college?’

  ‘At Caius, yes. She asked to meet me as a matter of some urgency, tonight. Sorry, last night.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A place called the Shingle.’

  ‘Out beyond Willow Bay,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘It’s a headland. Well known trysting place for lovers.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Irving asked.

  ‘Because it is, John,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Far enough off the beaten track after dark. Headily romantic, I should think, with the moon over the sea.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Irving dismissed it.

  ‘Neither would I. There never was a Mrs Irving, was there?’

  The Cambridge man shook his head. ‘There never seemed to be the time. Oh, Christ.’ He buried his head in his hands.

  ‘Take it easy, old man,’ Maxwell said softly, holding his friend’s arm. ‘We’ll get through this.’

  Irving looked up at him. ‘We, white man?’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Maxwell laughed. ‘All right, so you got the letter. Do you still have it?’

  ‘No. I binned it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Irving flustered. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I’m just putting myself in the place of Mr Plod, John,’ Maxwell explained. ‘I’ve had quite a bit of experience one way or another.’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’

  ‘John,’ Maxwell looked at him. ‘A woman is dead.’

  ‘Two women,’ Irving reminded him.

  ‘One at a time.’ Maxwell held up his hand. ‘Take me through last night. You got here how? Car?’

  Irving nodded. ‘The arrangement was to meet on the Shingle at ten o’clock.’

  ‘Why the Shingle? Why not the hotel?’

  ‘What?’

  Maxwell was talking to himself really, but Irving would do as a sounding board. ‘Barbara Needham was staying at the Grand. You’d stayed there too.’

  ‘What’s the significance?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘Damned if I know,’ he said. ‘All right, for reasons we can only guess at, she arranged to meet at a local trysting place, after dark, a man she didn’t know.’

  ‘She knew me in a way,’ Irving said.

  ‘She did?’

  Irving nodded. ‘When I first met Miles Needham that was almost the first thing he said to me. “My wife’s a fan.’”

  ‘A fan?’ Maxwell blinked. ‘You dark horse, John. I had no idea the slave economy of Hispaniola had such pulling power.’

  Irving ignored him. ‘The name didn’t connect at first,’ he said. ‘I ran an Open University course three years ago. Barbara Needham was on my books.’

  ‘So you’d met her?’
<
br />   ‘At the summer camp, probably,’ Irving said. ‘Though I can’t say I remember her. The college was in the throes of all kinds of reorganization that year. My mind was on other things anyway.’

  ‘All right. So she was a fan. But she hadn’t seen you for three years, had presumably not been in touch in the meantime?’

  Irving shook his head.

  ‘So what did she want? Out of the blue, as you say.’

  Irving was still shaking his head. ‘The letter didn’t say.’

  Maxwell took him through it. ‘What time did you get to Leighford?’

  ‘Eight. Eight thirty,’ Irving remembered. ‘I’d stopped at Guildford for a bite to eat.’

  ‘How did you find the Shingle?’

  ‘That street plan thing, the one by the bus station.’

  Maxwell knew it and nodded.

  ‘I was too early of course, so I just drove around for a while.’

  ‘How did she get there?’ Maxwell mused. ‘To the Shingle, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Irving said. ‘I didn’t see a car.’

  ‘I don’t know whether she came in one,’ said Maxwell, ‘to Leighford, that is. So you found the Shingle?’

  ‘Yes. I drove out past that pub.’

  ‘The Longshoreman.’

  Irving nodded.

  ‘Not a bad pint,’ Maxwell informed him for the record. ‘Crisps are a bit salty though, if you’ll excuse the pun.’

  ‘There were cars there,’ Irving told him. ‘Perhaps one of those was Barbara’s.’

  ‘It was dark by now?’

  ‘Near as damn it,’ Irving told him. ‘I drove to the end of the road. It peters out about half a mile further on.’

  ‘And there’s a path that leads to the right.’ Maxwell could see it in his mind’s eye.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It actually forms a loop, but I doubt you’d have seen the left fork, especially in the dark. The land falls away quite sharply.’

  ‘You seem to know the place damn well,’ Irving observed.

  ‘Ah, misspent youth,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Besides, when you get to my age, a spot of mac opening in front of copulating couples has its attractions.’

  Irving ignored him again. ‘I couldn’t see anyone at first. I took the seaward side of the headland.’

  ‘Willow Bay would have been to your right,’ Maxwell was helping the man retain his bearings.

  ‘There was no one there,’ Irving’s face was a mask of concentration as he tried to focus on the nightmarish details in his head. ‘I’d begun to wonder what sort of wild-goose chase I’d come on. Then I saw her …’

  ‘John,’ Maxwell broke the ensuing silence as softly as he could, ‘John, I’ve got to know.’

  Irving looked up at him through his pain, his isolation.

  ‘You came to me, remember?’ Maxwell said. There was no going back now.

  ‘It was Barbara all right.’

  ‘Even in the dark, after three years, you knew her?’

  Irving nodded. ‘It was her. She was lying on her stomach, but her face was turned towards me. I don’t know why, but I looked at my watch.’

  ‘What time was it?’

  ‘Ten eighteen. It was almost as if … as if she was looking at me with reproach for being late. I didn’t … see the blood at first.’

  ‘John,’ Maxwell’s steady voice reached across the man’s terror like oil on water, ‘are you absolutely sure she was dead?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Irving muttered. ‘I felt her pulse. There wasn’t one.’

  ‘John, I have to ask this – was she still warm?’

  Irving nodded, shuddering at the same time. ‘I don’t think she’d been … interfered with, but I couldn’t really tell. I … ran, Max, Bwana. I just ran and left her there

  Maxwell’s hand was on his friend’s drooping head. ‘It’s all right, John,’ he reassured him. ‘Which of us wouldn’t have done the same? The police will understand.’

  ‘The police?’ Irving’s voice was stronger now and he was sitting upright, staring hard at Maxwell. ‘You wouldn’t go to the police with this, Bwana?’

  Maxwell blinked. ‘No, John, I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But you must.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Irving was on his feet. ‘No. Look, Max, I’m grateful to you. I didn’t know where else to turn. I panicked, so I came here. But I’m not involved, not in any way.’ He was pacing the room like a man possessed. ‘Someone else will have found her by morning. It’s not my problem. Now I’ve got to get back home to Cambridge. I’m not involved.’

  ‘John,’ Maxwell was on his feet too, gripping the man’s shoulders. ‘John, you can’t just walk away from this. What if you were seen up there on the Shingle? This isn’t exactly the black market at midnight. You’ll forgive my political incorrectness if I point out that you are a tad conspicuous? At last count, Leighford’s ex-Nigerian population was somewhat in the minority.’

  ‘I’ll take that chance,’ Irving nodded grimly. He put his coffee mug down on Maxwell’s table. ‘I’m sorry Max,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t have involved you.’

  ‘Involved is my middle name, John,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘I’ll see you around.’

  Quite a crowd had gathered on the Shingle below the fluttering blue and white cordon. Mine host at the Longshoreman, ever an enterprising chap, was doing a roaring trade, dipping in and out of conversations as he pulled pints and microwaved bar food. But the topic in the conversations was all the same. Whose was the body carried into the ambulance at the end of the Shingle road? And how had it got there in the first place?

  The man with the answers, but only some of them that Friday morning, stood on the sunlit headland as Peter Maxwell was cycling to school nearly two miles away. Jim Astley was unimpressed by Home Office directives to gown up in white as though for a nuclear explosion and wore his tweed jacket and flat cap. Henry Hall was of course in his suit, the return-of-the-three-piece that marked the new breed of managerial detective they were spawning these days.

  ‘Early days, Henry,’ Astley muttered to the man’s unspoken question, ‘but I’d say a heavy object, probably metal, driven diagonally across the back of the skull.’

  ‘One blow?’

  ‘Maybe two.’ Both men watched as the body in question was zipped up and lifted silently into the waiting ambulance by young coppers who would never get used to doing this. ‘She’s been dead for about nine, maybe ten hours.’

  ‘Late last night,’ Hall gazed out to the turquoise sea. It would be another scorcher, another day of ice-cream and hot dogs and sun-block. Not that he’d see any of that. ‘Any sign of sexual assault?’

  ‘Nothing obvious,’ Astley said. ‘I’ll know more by tea-time. You do have tea, do you, Henry? And dinner and things?’

  ‘It has been known,’ Hall said, straight faced.

  ‘Well,’ Astley grunted, fishing for his pipe now that SOCO had done their grass-combing and all the photographs had been taken. ‘I haven’t had my breakfast yet this morning. Come to think of it, I haven’t even had my morning shit. Plays merry hell with my bowels, Henry, murder.’ And he crossed to his car. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why mention of the word shit should remind me, but I meant to tell you next time we met, which is now; that teacher blokey, Maxwell

  ‘What about him?’ Hall asked. Peter Maxwell was just what he didn’t need right now.

  ‘He’s been poking his nose in again. Buttonholed me the other night at my own bloody hostelry, fishing about Hannah Morpeth’s death. Isn’t there something you can do about that?’

  ‘There is,’ Hall nodded. ‘Leave it with me, Jim.’

  Astley grunted.

  ‘Love to Marjorie,’ the Chief Inspector muttered. He’d only met Dr Astley’s wife once and he hadn’t, if push came to shove, much enjoyed the experience. But wishing each other’s wives compliments had become routine for these men at murder sites and he didn’t have to hear Astley’s words as he mumbled them over the roar of
his ignition. ‘My best to Helen.’

  The SOCO boys had excelled themselves. By Astley’s much vaunted tea-time, the slides had been processed and were flickering on and off the grubby screen in Tottingleigh Incident Room. Outside, the paparazzi, who had never really gone away, were back in even greater numbers. There would have to be another press conference. The Chief Constable, who was disturbed when Miles Needham died, and gravely worried at the death of Hannah Morpeth, was apoplectic come the end of this gruelling week and the steady rise of the body count to three.

  ‘Public confidence,’ he stressed to Henry Hall. That was the key. Without that, everything would fall apart. ‘Catch him, Henry,’ the Chief Constable had said, ‘and do it quickly.’

  For the time being however, Henry Hall would ignore all that and confine himself to the matter in hand, briefing his men and women.

  ‘Barbara Jayne Needham, lady and gentlemen,’ he had centre stage under the slides of the dead woman lying on the short, windswept grass of the Shingle where the gorse bush roots were home to the rabbits. ‘Widow of Miles Needham who needs no introduction here. She was forty-four, living with her husband-as-was near Windsor. For the last fortnight less a day, she’d been staying at the Grand. Paul!’

  Paul Garrity took over the limelight. He knew the hotel better than his own house by now. ‘Mrs Needham had Room 34 on the fourth floor. She generally dined alone, and was away from the hotel on the nights of the thirteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth. The manager says she left all her things in the room. There was no suggestion she wouldn’t be back.’

  ‘And last night, Paul?’

  Garrity checked his notes. ‘Last night she had dinner at seven thirty. Stayed in the coffee lounge reading until a little after nine.’

  ‘She ate alone?’

  ‘As far as the waiters remember, yes. You’ve got to remember, everybody, she’d been there for two weeks; becoming a little bit part of the furniture. That makes our job more difficult. Some people had got so used to seeing her around they couldn’t tell you whether she was there or not. Other people started talking to her – “good morning”, “good evening”, pleasantries like that. Any one of them could have been her killer.’