Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Except the dream had become a nightmare,’ Maxwell said softly.

  ‘I had to see her one last time. Tell her I had nothing to do with Miles’s death; find out if she had. Oh, God, Max, she must have killed Hannah as well.’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘No, she didn’t kill Miles and she didn’t kill Hannah. The question is, John, who killed her? Now, are you going to go to the police – or am I?’

  15

  Mad Max looked at himself in his shaving mirror next morning and shook his head, ‘Whatever happened to you, Max? Victor Ludorum at fifteen; Victor Meldrew at fifty-three. Jesus!’

  It had been a rough night in Jericho aka Room 105, the Grand Hotel. And a rougher day lay ahead. It started with a phone call that caused Metternich to despair. He rolled over with his back firmly to the world, his face to the wall.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell couldn’t place the voice.

  ‘Mr Maxwell who is the historical adviser to Eight Counties Television?’

  ‘In a way,’ Maxwell sat down slowly on the bed, trying to find his other sock. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Oh, forgive me, Mr Maxwell, my name is Edward Stubbington, I keep Things Ancient and Modern in the High Street – the antique shop.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course, Mr Stubbington,’ Maxwell could picture the man now, centre parting, glasses on a chain, seemed to be having perpetual conflict with his sexuality.

  ‘I’m most dreadfully sorry to bother you at home, particularly so early in the morning, but I was anxious to catch you before you went to work.’

  ‘Very wise,’ Maxwell said. Once lost in the bowels of Leighford High, there was no telling when – or if – he’d come out again.

  ‘I wonder if it would be at all possible for you to call into the shop today? I have something here which … well, I don’t really know what to do with it now.’

  ‘Er … what is it, Mr Stubbington?’ Maxwell was confused.

  ‘It’s a British Army surgeon’s knife, probably 1840s. It’s not Napoleonic, I’m afraid …’

  But he was talking to himself. Maxwell grabbed the half-drunk coffee on the mantelpiece and screamed at the cat, ‘You’ve had my bloody sock, Count, I know you have.’ He rattled out another series of numbers on that white thing again and fumbled at its cord’s full length with his bow tie, wound inextricably around a coat hanger in the wardrobe.

  ‘Thingee!’ he shouted across the wires to the girl on the Leighford High switchboard, ‘You’re there already. Wonderful! Remind me to see Mr Diamond about your promotion.’

  ‘Morning, Mr Maxwell,’ the switchboard girl trilled, ‘Are you coming in today? Only Mr Ryan’s ever so short-staffed.’

  ‘And ever so short-IQed as well, isn’t he?’ Maxwell told her free and gratis. ‘I don’t suppose Paul Moss is in yet?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him, Mr Maxwell.’

  ‘Right, Thingee. When he comes in, tell him I’ll be in by ten. If he can bung on a video for 7A1 … er … Dances With Wolves will keep them busy.’

  ‘Right-o, Mr Maxwell,’ Thingee always sounded as if she had a perpetual cold, ‘I’ll tell him.’ And he hung up on her too.

  ‘Only in teaching, Count,’ Maxwell opted for an odd sock and what the Hell? ‘does one have to arrange one’s day when one isn’t even bloody well there. Take my advice, Count.’ Maxwell threw something fishy onto a plate for the animal, ‘Don’t go into teaching.’

  Metternich sniffed the breakfast goodies. Mackerel, huh? A likely story. What was the silly old sod talking about now?

  Things Ancient and Modern hadn’t actually opened as Maxwell hammered on the glass of the door. Banks and antique shops, he’d noticed in all his years in the world, didn’t play by everybody else’s rules. They didn’t open until at least 9.30 and until recently, probably because Joe Public had sussed them, they were closed by three. What a doddle!

  ‘Ah, Mr Maxwell?’ the door was opened by the fussy cardigan-wearer Maxwell remembered from his earlier sojourns in Victoriana-land.

  ‘Mr Stubbington,’ Maxwell was still in his cycle clips, but the antique dealer said nothing at all about his odd socks. ‘I came as quickly as I could.’

  ‘Well, there was no great hurry,’ Stubbington said. ‘It’s just that I didn’t quite know what to do with the item.’

  ‘May I see it? I’m sorry to call so early, but I won’t be able to make it later in the day.’

  ‘Of course. Come in.’

  He led Maxwell past the faded memories of an earlier era, another time, through his beaded curtain to an inner office. He held up a silver-hilted scalpel, handsomely mounted. ‘This is the best I could do. I know it’s not the correct period. And I’m afraid it’s a hundred and fifty pounds.’

  ‘Is it?’ Maxwell blanched. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Mr Stubbington, but I’ve no idea why you contacted me about this.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Stubbington lifted the chained glasses onto the bridge of his nose and looked at the man, ‘It’s just that the young lady said …’

  ‘Young lady?’

  ‘Yes, the one who called in for the knife the other week. Yours was the one name I knew. Local teacher and so on.’

  ‘A young lady called in for it?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t have one in stock. She said she needed it as a surprise for her husband. He was here with the film crew working at Willow Bay. I said I’d do my best, but it might take a few days. Well, she never called back and here it is. I suppose I should have contacted Eight Counties Television. But, as I say, yours was a name I knew and the Advertiser said you were their historical adviser.’

  ‘This young lady,’ Maxwell said, ‘Did she give a name?’

  ‘No, that was just it. She was staying in the town for a while and would call back.’

  ‘Do you remember, Mr Stubbington, what she looked like?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I do,’ the antique dealer said, ‘Very well. She was very attractive. Jet-black hair. I remember thinking it was the colour of mourning. I have several items of jewellery in the shop … Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Maxwell had crashed through the curtains and was halfway to the door. ‘I must be away. I’m afraid I can’t help with the knife, Mr Stubbington. You see, the lady who asked for it won’t be coming back, ever.’

  7A1 were still entranced by Kevin Costner turning the Indians into the good guys when Maxwell breezed onto the second floor. He waved at Paul Moss and winced at the row emanating from the room where Anthea Edwards was attempting to maintain order with 9C4, Morons ‘R’ Us.

  ‘Thingee,’ he grabbed the History Department’s internal phone, ‘get me the Grand Hotel, will you, there’s a good Communicator?’

  ‘Grand,’ a sable voice purred.

  ‘Wally, is that you? It’s Peter Maxwell.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ the sable voice had vanished, ‘How are you, all right?’ Maxwell’s old pupil sounded more like Barrymore than ever.

  ‘In the pink, thanks, Wally. Room 105 please; Dr Irving.’

  He put his hand over the receiver as a child drifted in to the History Inner Sanctum. ‘You don’t have to knock on the door to be allowed to live, Colin,’ Maxwell growled at him, ‘but it helps. The scissors are there look. No, left. Left. Steel things. Blunted for your own protection. That’s it. Good lad. Hurry back to Mr Moss’s lesson now and try not to fall over. Ah, John.’

  ‘Max,’ Irving’s voice crackled over the ether. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘To cut a long story short, I got a call from a local antique dealer this morning. He tried to sell me a surgeon’s knife.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘He’d put it on hold for a lady who’d ordered one as – and I quote – “a surprise for her husband”. John, the woman had black hair.’

  ‘Babs,’ Irving whispered.

  ‘You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?’ Maxwell checked.

  ‘Babs wants Hannah Morpeth dead,’ Irving talked him thro
ugh it, concentrating, working it out. ‘But how’s she going to do it? She thinks I’ve killed Miles, but that isn’t enough. She wants her revenge on the girl, too.’

  ‘She’s read the script of The Captain’s Fancy. Would you say she had a poetic nature, John? Would the knife have had a delicious irony?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Irving nodded at his end of the line.

  ‘But she couldn’t use the props from Eight Counties because there’d be tight security after Miles Needham. Dan Weston would have died at his post rather than let anybody else have access to anything.’

  ‘Which meant getting a knife from elsewhere,’ Irving realized.

  ‘But that was easier said than done,’ Maxwell went on at full tilt. ‘Then dear old Mr Stubbington had the answer. He didn’t have one himself, but he knew a man who had. Unfortunately, time was running out. She couldn’t wait for him …’

  ‘She must have got another knife from somewhere else. After all, double bladed, x number of inches long, so many millimetres wide, they must be reasonably standard …’

  ‘And of course,’ Maxwell said, ‘Barbara didn’t expect not to be able to collect Stubbington’s knife herself, did she? He’d have had no reason to contact me then.’

  ‘So I was right,’ Irving growled. ‘Not that it gives me any pleasure, Max, Bwana.’

  ‘I’m going to the police with this, John,’ Maxwell said. ‘Tomorrow. There’s one little errand I’ve got to run first. Will I see you there? John?’

  ‘Yes,’ the voice came back, resigned, beaten. ‘Yes, tomorrow.’

  ‘Half four?’ Maxwell asked, his life, as ever, revolving around his school.

  ‘Half four will be fine.’

  She rang the doorbell at the Larches a little before lunch-time. There was no reply. She stepped back into the road, brandishing her warrant card in the air, shouting at the window.

  ‘Helen!’ she yelled, ‘Helen McGregor! I know you’re in there. Now, either you open up or I get a warrant and break down the door. What’s it going to be?’

  The nets twitched in the bedroom window, upstairs right. There was a thunder of feet on the stairs like a distant storm over the mountains and the girl-most-likely-to put her plump, sullen head around the door.

  ‘I’m Detective Constable Carpenter,’ Jacquie showed her card again. ‘I’d like a chat.’

  She held the door open, letting the policewoman in the neat-pleated skirt into the hall and then the kitchen.

  ‘Have you got him?’ Helen asked. ‘That Maxwell?’

  Jacquie was half a head taller than the sixth former, slimmer, older, everything Helen was not. ‘I’m not looking for Mr Maxwell,’ she said, sliding back an upright chair and sitting by the Formica-topped table. ‘I’m looking for the man who attacked you.’

  ‘It was him,’ Helen insisted defiantly. ‘It was Maxwell. I told them other policemen. They believed me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t, Helen,’ Jacquie told her. ‘I happen to know that Peter Maxwell is one of the gentlest men around. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Helen too slid back a chair and sat opposite the policewoman, ‘Sleeping with him, are you?’

  Jacquie hadn’t snapped in a long time, especially with a witness, but she couldn’t help herself that morning. She grabbed the girl’s plump arm and forced it down onto the kitchen table, leaning forward and putting her nose inches from the girl’s. ‘Look, you foul-mouthed little cow. You claimed someone attacked you on the dunes. Now you know and I know it wasn’t Peter Maxwell. So who was it? If you’re telling anything approximating to the truth, you’ve got a duty to any other girls out there. Whoever it is, is still out there, watching, waiting.’

  She let go of the girl’s arm, ‘Who’s going to be next, Helen, because of you?’

  ‘All right!’ The girl’s face wore a mask of pain and the tears were starting as she rubbed her arm. ‘It wasn’t Maxwell. And he didn’t do anything, the bloke. All right? He just scared me, that’s all. It was the same bloke I’d seen before, when I was with Giles. He just scared me.’

  Jacquie sat back in the chair. She’d just broken every rule in the book and she knew it. Now it was time to build bridges, set the record straight.

  ‘Right, Helen,’ the voice was softer, more gentle, ‘now you put the kettle on, yeah? We’ll have a nice cup of tea, you and me, and you can tell me what this bloke really looked like.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Henry Hall looked up from the detective’s warrant card on his desk to the detective herself.

  ‘My resignation, sir,’ Jacquie Carpenter was staring straight ahead.

  Hall leaned back in his chair, weighing the moment. ‘Do you want to tell me why?’ he asked, his face as expressionless as ever.

  ‘I lost my temper this morning, sir,’ Jacquie confessed, ‘while interviewing a witness.’

  ‘Who?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Helen McGregor.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Grabbed her wrist. Told her her fortune.’

  ‘With what result?’

  ‘She now admits that it was not Peter Maxwell who attacked her. More than that, there was no attack at all.’

  ‘This obtained under duress?’ Hall checked.

  ‘You could say that, sir.’ She was still staring straight ahead. ‘That’s why I’m resigning. I went too far.’

  Hall paused, his fingers clasped, his lips pursed. ‘In the calmer light of day,’ he said, ‘does the girl hold to her new story?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Jacquie said. ‘And the description she’s now given is pretty good. PC Bannerman even thinks he knows who it is.’

  Hall leaned forward again in his chair. ‘Close the door on your way out,’ he got back to his paperwork, ‘and take that with you.’

  Fluster crossed Jacquie Carpenter’s face, and she looked at the bland bastard forever doomed to sit in the hot seat. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Call it a cooling off period, Jacquie,’ he said softly. ‘Give it some time before you come to me with that again. If you do, we’ll talk then.’

  She picked it up. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said and choked back the tears.

  ‘Anyway,’ Hall’s voice stopped her at the door, ‘I never accept resignations in the course of a murder inquiry,’ he told her. ‘It’s bad for morale.’

  Mums don’t wait outside High Schools. For a start they don’t need to, their offspring being too big to need collection; and for follow on because said offspring would die of embarrassment if they did.

  So it was odd to find an attractive young woman sitting in a plain, dark car in the space reserved for parents and other school visitors. She’d almost collided with the Head of Media Studies roaring away at the end of another long day. And when she saw the Head of Sixth Form pedalling like a thing possessed through the staff cars, she hung her head out of the window.

  ‘Have you got a licence for that?’

  Maxwell screeched to a halt, his rear wheel spraying dust in all directions. ‘The doctor told me I shouldn’t do wheelies at my age,’ he smiled at her. ‘I might lose the wheel to live.’

  ‘I don’t usually pick up middle-aged men,’ she said as he swung out of the saddle, ‘but there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

  The All Angels Crypt Centre was the place to be if you were nobody in Leighford. It was run by the Reverend Michael Chapman, one of the few genuinely nice people in the Church of England, but everyone just called him Father Mike and he saved his dog collar for Sundays. He was used to visits from the police at all hours of the day and night because the Centre was a temporary home for the flotsam and jetsam of that part of the south coast – the people that time forgot. They felt safe here. There was a bed and an endless supply of tea and coffee, fresh rolls and warming soup. And Father Mike didn’t push it. He preached no gospel, delivered no sermon, took no side.

  ‘Can we have a word with him, Mike?’ Jacquie asked, taking the vicar’s proffered coffee cup. ‘The two of us? This is Peter Maxwell
, by the way. Leighford High.’

  ‘You’re Mad Max!’ Chapman shook his hand.

  ‘Only when I stand in a certain light,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’m secretly delighted you’ve heard of me, of course … if suspicious.’

  Chapman laughed. ‘I run a youth group on Friday nights,’ he said, ‘You are a legend among that lot.’

  Maxwell bowed. ‘They’re lying, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Father Mike winked. ‘He’s on the patio, Jacquie,’ and the vicar vanished.

  In the car, Jacquie Carpenter had said nothing to Peter Maxwell about where they were going or why. She was just happy to be there with him, in the sun of that afternoon. For her, it was one day at a time for the moment. Perhaps it would always be like that.

  The patio was a paved area under the shelter of the churchyard wall on one side and the church on the other. There was a scattering of garden furniture the local B&Q had donated to Mike Chapman’s good cause and a solitary figure sat with his back to Maxwell as he approached. He had dark, wild hair and a scruffy anorak, for all it was flaming June, tied at the waist with string. It was Boo Radley.

  ‘Max,’ Jacquie sat down next to the man, ‘I’d like you to meet Alan Rossiter. Alan, this is Max.’

  Maxwell sat opposite him, staring first at Jacquie, then at Rossiter.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, his voice high and wavering.

  ‘Hello, Alan,’ Maxwell stuck out his hand.

  For a moment it looked as if Rossiter didn’t know what to do with it, then he took Maxwell’s hand in his own, limp and clammy.

  ‘Alan’s been in hospital for a long time,’ Jacquie said, ‘but he used to come to Leighford a lot when he was younger. Didn’t you, Alan?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rossiter said, looking wistfully at the girl. A broken Eccles cake lay on the plate in front of him and a half drunk cup of tea. ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘Remember what you told me earlier today, Alan?’ Jacquie was sitting hunched over, her hands clasped, filling Rossiter’s vision, holding his concentration. ‘About Miles? About Miles Needham? He was your friend, wasn’t he?’