Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  An intercom crackled alongside an automatic barrier as Irving’s car pulled up.

  ‘Dr John Irving to see Daniel Weston,’ he said through the Audi’s open window.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘John Irving to see Daniel Weston – props department,’ the good doctor repeated.

  ‘Come to the main car park, turn left. You’ll see a blue door facing you. Go straight ahead to reception.’ And the electronic arm whirred upwards to allow them access.

  Reception was vast, with lifts jockeying for space with palm trees in gravel beds. An enormous fountain played silver in the centre, its tinkling reverberations a nightmare for the incontinent.

  ‘Dr John Irving and Mr Peter Maxwell to see Daniel Weston,’ Irving said at the counter.

  ‘Hello, I’m Sharon,’ the blonde bubbled at them through several strata of make-up. ‘Is Dan expecting you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell butted in. ‘We’re the historical advisers on The Captain’s Fancy. One or two loose ends to tie up.’

  ‘I’ll just see if he’s free.’ Sharon pressed lots of buttons under her side of the desk. Behind her, vying with the piped muzak that filled the atrium, four screens, all showing Gloria Hunniford from different angles, flashed and bobbed as the cameras went to work on her.

  ‘He’s on his way down,’ Sharon grinned. ‘Can I get you a coffee while you’re waiting?’

  ‘No …’ Irving began.

  ‘That would be delicious,’ said Maxwell, smiling at the girl.

  She simpered and turned away to push buttons various. ‘Black?’ she called to Irving.

  It had to be said that Dan Weston looked a little better than the last time Maxwell had seen him. Even under the unrelenting sun that filtered through Eight Counties’ glass roof, it was obvious his colour had returned, he was upright and he was sober. Even so, the guilt of the Brown Bess had never left Dan Weston and he didn’t need the faces of Maxwell and Irving to remind him.

  ‘Dan,’ Maxwell shook the man’s hand, ‘can we have a word?’

  Dan Weston lived in a perpetual Aladdin’s cave of goodies. He led them through labyrinths of uniforms and dresses, lace and froth without end as they took the short cut through Costumes and into Props proper.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘This is the historical section. Most of the stuff we used on The Captain’s Fancy is here. If this is about guns again …’

  ‘No, no,’ Maxwell assured him, ‘I seem to remember, Dan, that the script called for Jemima to kill herself with a surgeon’s knife. What did you use?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t,’ Weston told him. ‘We still had odds and sods to film when Hannah was murdered. What with that and now both the Needhams, Upstairs have decided we ought to shelve the programme, at least for a while. Bad taste and all. As far as Hannah’s role goes, we could probably get away with a few back shots, arty lighting, maybe a double if we’ve got one. It’ll work.’

  ‘Well, what had you planned to use, then?’ Maxwell persisted. ‘Let me put it that way.’

  ‘Oh, let’s see,’ Weston consulted a clipboard with endless typed and annotated lists. ‘Here. D18.’ He slid out a vast, shallow drawer from a rack in the corner. ‘This,’ he said.

  In the middle of a welter of gloves, fans and lorgnettes enough to furnish the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of Waterloo, lay a canvas bag tied with cords.

  ‘May I?’ Maxwell asked. He untied the cords and rolled out the contents. ‘Three pairs of forceps,’ he listed them mechanically, ‘tourniquet. Good, good. Chisel – Jesus. Needles, various. Ah, that’s authentic – anti-gonorrhoea gadget. And … three knives.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Max?’ Irving asked, ‘What did you expect to find?’ He read the disappointment in his friend’s face.’

  ‘I hoped to find one missing,’ Maxwell confessed. ‘You see these loops here, John? Three of them. There were only ever three knives with this kit. Nothing’s not here, if you see what I mean. Dan, was there a spare set? Another one like this?’

  Weston checked his lists again. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Only this one.’

  ‘Right. Well, thanks, Dan. We appreciate your help. Look, I’d say we’d see ourselves out, but I’m not sure we’d make it.’

  Weston got them back to the sunlit atrium again, where the four faces of Gloria Hunniford had been replaced by a quartet of identical gardening programmes and they said their goodbyes.

  ‘Max? Mr Maxwell!’ Both men turned.

  ‘Angela!’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘You too,’ Angela Badham shook their hands. ‘What brings you to Eight Counties?’

  ‘A wild-goose chase, Angela, as it turns out.’

  She looked as harassed and agitated as ever – a walking billboard for Valium if ever there was one. ‘Can I buy you both a coffee?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  The staff canteen at Eight Counties beat the staffroom at Leighford High into a Napoleonic cocked hat. For a start, there were no piles of old TES in the corner and nobody’s games kit abandoned across the photocopier. Maxwell wasn’t privileged to peek inside the fridge, but he was prepared to bet it didn’t contain last week’s yoghurt or last term’s milk suppurating at the bottom. John Irving, of course, was less impressed. Eight Counties, for all its state of the art and wall-to-wall extravagance, didn’t have the Gothic grandeur of Gonville and Caius; not an oak panel in sight.

  ‘Dan Weston tells us you’ve shelved The Captain’s Fancy,’ Maxwell munched through his Danish.

  ‘We had to, really.’ Angela fumbled with her ciggies from the huge portmanteau on her lap. ‘I mean, I know Barbara Needham wasn’t actually part of the show, but the powers-that-be decided hers was a death too far. What were you asking Dan about?’

  ‘A surgeon’s knife,’ Maxwell said. ‘The one that killed Hannah Morpeth.’

  ‘You thought Dan might have it?’ Angela blew smoke to the ceiling.

  ‘To my shame,’ Maxwell mopped his chin with his paper napkin. ‘I hadn’t actually finished reading the script. I’ll wager the law hadn’t read any of it. Why should they? I thought it rather poetic that Hannah should die by the very weapon that she was to have killed herself with on screen.’

  ‘How can Dan help you?’ Angela was confused.

  ‘The actual murder weapon was found by the police at Leighford. They’ve still got it, no doubt bound up in plastic as Exhibit A, m’lud. If the kit Dan Weston showed me had had just such a knife missing, I could have pointed Chief Inspector Hall in the direction of Eight Counties Television.’

  ‘You still think someone from here is involved?’ she asked.

  Maxwell sucked his teeth. ‘There’s something about Hannah Morpeth’s death I can’t figure,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t fit.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’ Irving asked.

  He looked at them both, did Peter Maxwell and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m pretty sure I know who killed Miles and Barbara Needham and I’m pretty sure I know why.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Irving after a moment’s stunned silence.

  ‘All in good time,’ Maxwell waved a hand at him. ‘I could be wrong.’

  ‘Why is Hannah different?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Motive,’ Maxwell said. ‘I know why – correction, I think I know why the Needhams died. I haven’t a clue why Hannah was killed.’

  Another silence.

  ‘For God’s sake, Max, you’ve got to tell us,’ Irving insisted. ‘You can’t leave us dangling like this, not after all I’ve been through.’

  Angela looked at him. ‘You poor man,’ she said. ‘Dr Irving, I haven’t had a chance to see you since that dreadful day on the beach when dear Miles was killed. That dreadful Marc Lamont calling you … what he did. And Barbara. I was so very sorry to hear about Barbara.’

  Irving nodded. ‘These things happen,’ he said. It was limp enough, but he didn’t know what else to say. ‘Max, Bwana, are you going to the police with what you kn
ow?’

  ‘Hah!’ Maxwell guffawed. ‘With what I know? Johnnie, Johnnie, you could barely fill a thimble with what I know. Come on, we’d better get back. Leighford High will be wondering where their star teacher is and that nice detective’s replacement at the Grand will be looking out for us. Angela.’ Maxwell stood up and stooped briskly to kiss her hand. ‘Thanks for the coffee. It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘And you, Max,’ she smiled, ‘Dr Irving.’ And they made their farewells.

  It had been a long time since Peter Maxwell had been back to Cambridge. He was a Jesus man himself, attracted by that prettiest of colleges along Jesus Lane. Coleridge the poet had gone there before him (they’d never met) and its port and claret were legendary.

  The town had changed a little, but the colleges were the same, the tourists just as annoying, if slightly more Japanese, and there seemed to be fewer bikes around than he remembered. But what with the summer term having ended and most students having gone down, not to mention the fact that many of them had cars these days, that was hardly surprising.

  But it wasn’t Jesus Maxwell had come to visit. It was Gonville and Caius.

  That Wednesday was a Heaven-sent day for Peter Maxwell. It was Open Day in which hordes of palpitating sixth formers from all over the country chattered together in groups with their proud, overweening parents, many of whom had bought hats fit for Ascot. It was swelteringly hot in the old court as a bowler-hatted official in civil-service black was giving the conducted tour.

  ‘The college was founded in 1348 by the priest Edmund Gonville and well endowed later by Dr John Caius, physician in ordinary to King Edward VI and his sisters Bloody Mary and Elizabeth. The court in which you are standing has an eighteenth-century facade built over the original medieval and Tudor buildings … er … can I help you, sir?’

  Maxwell was making rather a spectacle of himself, edging towards a stairway off the grassy area to his right.

  ‘Er …’

  ‘Are you a parent, sir?’ the bowler hatted man was patience itself.

  ‘Er, no, no,’ Maxwell beamed as the crowd of parents and their appallingly precocious offspring looked on. ‘Student. Intending.’

  ‘Mature student, sir?’ the bowler-hatted gent was having some difficulty with the intensity of the sun in his eyes.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ Maxwell gushed, giving the man his Forrest Gump.

  ‘For that you need Wolfson College, sir. Turn right out of College and look for Barton Road.’

  ‘No, no, History here at Caius. I was told to look up a Doctor Irving.’

  ‘Well, that wouldn’t be today, sir,’ the bowler-hatted man’s crowd were growing a little restless. ‘You’ll need to come back another time.’

  ‘Could we see a student’s room?’ a loud woman, probably from Leeds, wanted to know.

  ‘Of course,’ said the bowler-hatted gent, ‘Now, if you’d all care to step this way …’

  That wasn’t the way Maxwell cared to step at all. He hung back for as long as he could, carefully inspecting the wisteria, then nipped up the staircase and along a shadowed corridor. A blonde girl cradling a pile of books met him halfway, which is more than most people were prepared to do.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Maxwell tipped his hat, ‘I’m looking for Dr Irving’s rooms.’

  ‘Just along there,’ the girl jerked her head behind her, ‘but I’m not sure he’s here at the moment.’

  ‘Many thanks.’

  John Irving’s study door contrasted quite favourably with Maxwell’s at Leighford High. For a start, it was made of wood. The Gothic panelling was streets ahead of the County hall woodstain that Maxwell met every morning. The Head of Sixth Form fished in his pockets. No jemmy. No switchblade. And the credit-card thing in the lock-jamb would hardly work on Gothic – not that Peter Maxwell knew how to do the credit-card thing. All he had was his house key. It seemed sacrilege, but needs must when the devil drives and he slotted the key into the door jamb, twisting this way and that. Through the little oriel window behind him, he could see the visiting group crossing the inner court, perhaps coming his way. He’d have to move quickly.

  ‘Shit!’ the door opened as Maxwell leaned on it in desperation, and he was inside.

  Around the walls of Irving’s study were wall-to-wall academe. Maxwell found himself wandering them, shaking his head every so often at titles he’d long forgotten, titles he’d never read.

  ‘I bought you that one, you ungrateful shit,’ he whispered into the silence. But he hadn’t come to ogle and he hadn’t come to reminisce. He’d come to snoop. And he set to work on Irving’s drawers with the key …

  ‘Peter Maxwell’s just gone into the Grand,’ Paul Garrity was talking to the mobile again, his second night of surveillance of John Irving.

  ‘When did you last see Irving, Paul?’ It was DI Watkiss at the other end of the line.

  ‘Not since … last evening. He strolled in the grounds.’

  ‘You sure he’s there now?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Garrity nodded. ‘No probs.’

  There had been probs earlier in the day. After that idiot Maxwell had come out to offer him breakfast, Garrity noticed that Irving’s silver Audi had gone. But it wasn’t in Paul Garrity’s nature to panic and it wasn’t in Paul Garrity’s nature to tell his bosses anything they didn’t need to know. He told his replacement that Irving’s car was round the back, valet parked and didn’t have a hope in hell of getting out. Well, what was a little fibbette between friends?

  All the more confusing then, when Irving’s silver Audi had purred back into the car park a little after lunch-time and the coloured gentleman had strolled in for a late bite to eat.

  ‘Say nothing,’ was Garrity’s advice to his shift partner. The partner shrugged. He’d heard it all before.

  John Irving wasn’t prepared for the sight that met him as he opened his hotel room door to Peter Maxwell. He found himself staring at a bundle of letters covered in messages stuck on from crude cuttings from newspapers, clutched in the hand of a Head of Sixth Form whose tether-end had been reached.

  ‘Where did you get those?’ he asked.

  ‘Would you like me to tell the whole fifth floor?’ Maxwell asked him.

  Irving let him in.

  ‘I got these,’ Maxwell threw them down on Irving’s bed, ‘as you very well know, from your rooms at college.’

  ‘Max … Bwana, how could you?’

  Maxwell’s jabbing finger was threatening the other man’s nose, ‘Don’t come that Bwana, holier-than-thou stuff with me, John. You lied to me. You’ve been lying to me from the start.’

  ‘Now, Max, I …’

  ‘Something didn’t ring quite true – about Barbara Needham, I mean. I’ve been around people a long time, John. I know when they’re lying. Why didn’t you tell the police about the meeting? About finding her body?’

  ‘What would it look like?’ Irving shouted. ‘It all points to me.’

  ‘It does indeed, John,’ Maxwell threw himself down in Irving’s chair. ‘You know, I’m tired. Dog tired. After you dropped me at home this lunch-time, I toyed with going in to my place of work. Then I thought … stuff it. And I like teaching, John. For all people whinge about education today and the youth thereof, there are still some of us who get a kick out of what we do. So I actually resented not going in. And I resented having to catch the train to Cambridge and lying my teeth off in the college grounds. And I resented most of all breaking into your study desk – send me the bill for the damage, by the way.’

  ‘Nobody asked you to …’

  ‘You asked me to, John!’ Maxwell thumped both arms of the chair with his hands. ‘You asked me to help you on the Eight Counties location and since then three people have died. Now, either you tell me what this is all about – all of it now, without the bullshit – or I’m going to tell that nice and equally hoodwinked detective in the car park out there everything I know about who found Barbara Needham’s body.’

  For a mom
ent, the silence deafened. Then John Irving sat down on his bed, sifting the four letters Maxwell had stolen to make a point.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I owe you this, Max, Bwana. Most of it you know. I’ve no idea where they came from, but Babs was receiving them too. They accused us of betraying Miles, carrying on behind his back. Hers were more specific than mine. More vile and polluted. What kind of sick mind …? Anyway, we couldn’t trace them ourselves. And I couldn’t go to the police, although she suggested we should. My college position. I had to think of that.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘You had to think of that.’

  ‘And anyway, as I told you, Babs was changing.’

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘Yes,’ Irving looked at him, ‘but I didn’t tell you why. She knew Miles was unfaithful and she claimed not to care. Perhaps when they were younger, she didn’t. But she was getting older – and the bits on the side were getting younger; Hannah Morpeth was the last straw.’

  ‘I don’t see …’

  ‘She wanted me to kill him,’ Irving said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Babs wanted me to kill Miles. I know, it’s preposterous. I’m hardly the hit man type. But that was a side to Babs I’d never seen before. She was a bitter, twisted woman, Bwana. I got cold feet.’

  ‘You wanted to end it?’

  ‘Yes. I told her so. When I saw her here at the Grand that day I left in such a hurry, I knew she’d come to sort things out. At first I assumed she’d think I’d done it – killed Miles just as she wanted me to. But she did it, Max. It was Babs. God knows how – I don’t want to know how. It had to be her.’

  ‘Except you weren’t the only ones getting letters like that,’ Maxwell told him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hannah Morpeth got them as well, from someone her minder calls her stalker.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘If you were getting cold feet, why did you come to meet Barbara on the Shingle?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I’d got another letter – that one,’ Irving waved to it. ‘I knew I couldn’t leave things as they were. Nothing resolved. As far as Babs was concerned, we were in the clear. Miles was dead. So, for that matter, was Hannah Morpeth. It could be me and her, love’s middle-aged dream.’