Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  For a moment, Rossiter smiled. ‘Miles,’ he said, ‘yes, he was my friend. I haven’t seen him in a long time. But I saw him the other day.’

  ‘Where was that, Alan?’ Jacquie coaxed. ‘Was that on the beach? Was that at Willow Bay?’

  Rossiter’s face had darkened. He wasn’t there any more, on the Crypt Centre patio with the sun burning onto his bald head. He was back, back in the mists of time he’d never really left.

  ‘He wasn’t a bad man,’ he told Jacquie, suddenly holding her hand.

  ‘No,’ Jacquie smiled. ‘We know that.’

  ‘Miles shouldn’t have done it,’ Rossiter shook his head sadly. ‘He shouldn’t have pushed him, because he wasn’t a bad man. He couldn’t swim, you know.’

  ‘We know,’ Jacquie said. ‘What was his name, Alan? The man Miles pushed? Do you remember his name?’

  Rossiter frowned. God alone knew what jumble of thoughts cascaded in that man’s mind. Then he smiled, ‘Tom,’ he said. ‘The man’s name was Tom.’

  The A27 snaked before them in the evening sun, Jacquie rattling up through the gears as she drove east, east, ever turning as the road took her.

  ‘Is it me?’ Maxwell broke the silence, ‘or have you achieved a minor miracle today, Woman Policeman Carpenter?’

  ‘I got lucky, Max,’ she said. ‘That’s all. I had a peek at that bloody file you got me to lift for you. That’s where I found the name Alan Rossiter. He was a witness called in when Tom Sparrow’s body was found. A friend of Miles Needham’s. Both of them were interviewed, held for a while on suspicion. But there was nothing to go on. Nothing that would stick.’

  ‘How did you find him?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘That’s where luck comes in,’ Jacquie said, slowing a little as a sleek white patrol car purred past. ‘First I talked to your friend Helen McGregor. I didn’t know she’d made an allegation against you until I saw the reports yesterday. What a little madam!’

  ‘Oh, she means well!’ Maxwell gave Jacquie his best Mrs Hetherington.

  ‘The fuck she does!’

  Maxwell was horrified. ‘All right, so she’s a deeply disturbed psychotic nymphomaniac. What’s new?’

  ‘What’s new is that with a little … shall we say help … from me, she admitted she’d made the whole thing up. I expect DI Watkiss is at your door as we speak, with a grovelling apology and a year’s supply of Southern Comfort.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Maxwell chuckled.

  ‘Not only had you not attacked her, but no one had.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ he gave her his best Cilia.

  ‘One useful thing did emerge, however, from my chat with Helen – one approximation of the truth. She gave me what I hoped was an accurate description of the man she’d reported seeing, twice, on the dunes. He was a derelict.’

  ‘There’s that word again,’ Maxwell murmured.

  ‘And I thought “Where’s the place to look for someone like that?” Answer? All Angels Crypt Centre! And I was right. Father Mike has had him here for the past few weeks. He just turned up out of the blue. No one seemed to know who he was or anything about him. And, needless to say, Rossiter himself wasn’t very forthcoming. Now Father Mike doesn’t pry, but this one seemed so … well, forlorn, I think was the word he used … he made an exception.’

  ‘Not snooped, surely?’ Maxwell was aghast.

  Jacquie gave him the most old-fashioned of looks. ‘Mental hospitals will tell vicars things they won’t tell the likes of you and me, Max. Whatever Alan witnessed back in ’77 affected him so badly, he had a nervous breakdown. He was a local Middleton boy with an Oxford degree and a glittering career in television ahead of him, but all that crashed in the late summer of ’77.’

  ‘So he saw Needham kill Tom Sparrow?’

  ‘You heard him,’ Jacquie shrugged.

  ‘Would he make a good witness, do you think, when this comes to court?’

  Jacquie shook her head. ‘Shambolic,’ she said. ‘You’d have so-called expert witnesses outsmarting each other as to his competence to testify. And assuming they let him, he’d be crucified by some bastard of a silk. Have you ever been in court, Max?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell told her. ‘One of my keenest regrets. I’ve always fancied doing the Twelve Angry Men bit.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she warned him. ‘A clever lawyer will drive you into a corner and there’s no way out. I know. I’ve been there and done that.’

  Maxwell looked at the girl beside him, the wind whipping through her chestnut hair. ‘Children dear,’ he said softly, ‘was it yesterday, that I said you wouldn’t see me again.’

  She glanced at him, as much as the traffic flow would allow. ‘I can’t see you, now, Max,’ she smiled. ‘As far as my bosses go – Hall, Watkiss, all of them – you’re the invisible man.’

  Maxwell smiled too. Sitting next to him was a different girl from the stop-go dilemma he’d known for the last two years. There was a kind of maverick restlessness he recognized; recognized because it was like looking into a mirror.

  ‘Jacquie,’ he said after a mile or so, ‘it’s very good of you to show me Alan Rossiter and to confirm what I thought I knew, but isn’t this rather a long way round to get to Columbine Avenue?’

  She looked straight ahead. ‘We’re not going to Columbine Avenue, Max,’ she said. ‘We’re going where you would have gone, I guess, by train, if I hadn’t turned up at Leighford High. We’re going to Brighton.’

  But he wasn’t where Jacquie Carpenter thought he’d be, the man they’d come to see.

  ‘Down the pier, love,’ the aproned neighbour called, leaning out of her upstairs window and twisting a curler into her thick ringlets. ‘Can’t miss it.’

  They couldn’t. Brighton pier stretched like a beached whale in the dying sun, its ribs black with the dangling weed that had enfolded for a while the passing body of Tom Sparrow all those years before. The surf roared along the shingle ridges, the incessant plaintive backing to the music of tonight, blaring from the PA systems and a thousand throbbing speakers.

  Lights and laughter. The sun was a ball of fire sinking silently into the sea as Maxwell and his policewoman reached the pier’s entrance. Here, Joe Melia had switched on the coloured light bulbs that welcomed a generation to World War One in Oh, What A Lovely War! Here, proud Brighton citizens had called it ‘the finest pier in the world’ when they opened it in 1899, one thousand seven hundred and sixty feet of promenade deck with ornate wrought-iron ridged domes and sun verandas with magical coloured glass. The paint was peeling now, behind the flying ice-cream signs that offered 99s without number, and the glass was cracked and dusty in that already tired summer. The waft of hot dogs and doner kebabs, the smells of Old England, filled Maxwell’s nostrils as he crossed the glass threshold. The management, the posters told him, reserved the right to refuse admittance and he looked down to make sure he was wearing shoes.

  He felt Jacquie grab his arm, ‘Too many people here, Max,’ she said, ‘If he feels threatened, there could be trouble. A pier is a cul-de-sac. He’ll feel cornered, trapped …’

  ‘With your powers of arrest and my legendary public-school right hook, policewoman, we’re invincible.’

  ‘Max, listen to me,’ Jacquie was facing him in the carpeted vestibule where determined grannies with blue rinses and specs on chains were milking the fruit machines. ‘This is wrong. In his flat, okay, but not here. You shouldn’t be here. I was wrong.’

  ‘Jacquie,’ he grabbed her shoulders, shaking her gently, ‘you said it – I’d have come by train anyway. Now, let’s do this.’

  ‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘We need back-up. You wait here, Max. You don’t go any further. Not until I’ve found a copper.’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘There’s never one around,’ he said. But Jacquie had gone, running through the milling holiday makers, jabbing the buttons on her walkie talkie.

  ‘Wait there!’ she shouted.

  Maxwell half turned. A whiskered old timer on
the fuzzy screen of the shoot-out game was beckoning to him. ‘Howdy, stranger,’ he croaked. ‘We’ve got some trouble here. Mad Dog McGee’s in town. D’you reckon you can take him?’

  ‘There’s one way to find out,’ Maxwell drawled in his best Randolph Scott.

  An intrigued eight-year-old who should have been home hours ago stood by him. ‘That won’t work, mister,’ he said, ‘You ain’t supposed to talk to him. You gotta put a quid in the slot and shoot the baddie.’

  Maxwell looked down on him, along with Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. ‘I don’t think it’ll come to that,’ he said. ‘Here,’ he tossed the kid a coin. ‘Why don’t you do it for me?’

  The boy caught the pound expertly and drew a bead on the video madman who had taken over the video town. Maxwell was gone past the screaming skulls that came at him from the House of the Dead, beyond the hurtling road of the Mille Milia. A Street Fighter swung at him, grunting, growling. Kids. Everywhere he looked. Thirteen-year-old tarts with naked arms, legs and bellies, flaunting their nubile bodies in stolen makeup and navel jewellery, tottering on outsize fuck-me shoes. Young thugs who saw themselves as the street fighters, twelve if they were a day, swaggering and swearing, lighting up from each other’s ciggies, spitting obscenities at the girls, who ignored them or cackled at them, depending on their level of sophistication.

  Beyond the thump and flash of the amusement arcade, the night air hit Maxwell like a sledgehammer. From nowhere, the long June day had turned dark and bleak and cold. The sun was only a glimmer now, faint on the sea and the summer seemed to die there, on that Brighton night.

  He passed the popcorn and the silly ’30s postcard hoardings with the cut out faces. Behind him, the video games screamed their message of death and destruction and the naked bulbs fluttered on their wind-blown cables overhead like stars in some mad, meteoric night.

  Then he heard it. Above the crescendo of the Spice Girls and the All Saints, the false girl power that was the rage of that insane summer, the quaint, out of time tune that Napoleon’s Old Guard had made their own – that ‘Ça Ira’ which would strike terror in the hearts of all the enemies of France.

  ‘Step this way, Mr Maxwell,’ a familiar voice called. ‘See if you can shoot the hat off old Wellington.’

  There he stood, upright behind the counter of his shooting gallery, resplendent in the blue, red and white of the Ninth Voltigeurs, the black-braided hair dangling on the white cross-belts and the shining brass buttons – Maxwell’s Maréchal de Logis, Bob Pickering.

  ‘What brings you here, Mr Maxwell? Haven’t you got enough amusements in Leighford?’

  ‘Ah, it’s the quality, Bob,’ Maxwell said. ‘Where else, other than Brighton, could you find a gallery like this, eh?’

  ‘Only a quid for five shots,’ Pickering presented the musket across his chest. ‘But to you,’ he threw the gun at Maxwell, ‘it’s on the house.’

  Maxwell looked at the musket. ‘This is clever, Bob,’ he smiled. ‘Did you adapt this mechanism yourself?’

  ‘It’s not that difficult,’ Pickering told him, ‘what with the workshop. I’ve got all the gear.’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ Maxwell dropped the first pellet into the breech. ‘Tell me, Bob, does this one have any peculiarities I should know about? Does it kick to the right – or high, perhaps? I always had the impression the shot that killed Miles Needham was a bit high

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, Mr Maxwell,’ Pickering’s smile had frozen. ‘You just aim for the centre of old Hooky’s nose. That’ll do it. Roll up! Roll up!’ he called in time-honoured tradition for the benefit of the milling crowds.

  Maxwell slid the butt against his shoulder, taking the weight of the gun on his left elbow. He closed one eye.

  ‘Tut, tut, Mr Maxwell. That’s not how it’s done, is it? You keep both eyes open in the shooting business.’

  Maxwell jerked off a shot, but it pinged into the metal backdrop above Wellington’s cocked hat.

  ‘Ooh, so close,’ Pickering smiled. ‘Have another go.’

  Maxwell straightened and dropped the second pellet into its niche.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, settling back into the firing position. ‘Miles Needham had it coming, didn’t he?’

  ‘They say nobody liked him,’ Pickering commented. ‘That’s it, shoulder up just a little, get that nose in the centre of your sights.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s not just that, is it?’ Maxwell eased back the serpentine so that it clicked and stayed. ‘It’s got more to do with what he did to Tom Sparrow.’ He squeezed the trigger and Pickering jumped as the pellet hit Wellington’s nose dead centre and his plumed hat sprung off to land in the sand tray below. ‘Bull’s eye.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Maxwell,’ Pickering said as the man straightened. ‘One more like that and you get the prize.’

  ‘One more like that,’ Maxwell loaded up for the third time. ‘Well,’ he said, smoothing down the barrel, ‘the first one was for Miles Needham. Stop me if I go wrong, Bob. You knew Tom Sparrow when you were a kid. You liked him, hung around on street corners with him – that would be the year before I came to Leighford. You must have liked him, to ignore the stories. You must have heard them. Tom Sparrow was well known in the gay community. But not everybody liked him, did they? Miles Needham for one. Alan Rossiter for another. What happened, Bob? Did they take Tom for a car ride one dark night? Probably more to frighten him, that was all.’ Maxwell eased back the serpentine, ‘But it all went horribly wrong, didn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Maxwell,’ Pickering’s laugh was brittle, ‘you’ve lost me.’

  ‘No, I haven’t, Bob,’ Maxwell looked at him. ‘You see, your name is on a police report from the time. The fourteen-year-old Robert Leonard Pickering interviewed by such and such on such and such a date. Needham and Rossiter picked up Sparrow in Needham’s car while you were chatting to him. They drove west, out of town. It’s all in the report.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pickering said. ‘I remember that. But it was all a long time ago.’

  ‘Oh, it was,’ Maxwell agreed, ‘but you were a kid, Bob. And it hurt, didn’t it? When they took that sweet old man away? And there was nothing you could do. So Needham had got away with it. The perfect murder, in fact. And you lived with that for … what? Twenty-one years.’

  ‘A soldier’s lifetime,’ Pickering nodded.

  He was right.

  ‘Then you saw him, when you signed on with the Eight Counties production team, on the beach at Willow Bay, the very place they’d found Tom Sparrow’s body. And it all came back, didn’t it? The hurt. The pain. You had the gun all along, the real one you used for target practice. All you had to do was put it in somebody else’s hands, somebody who could use it. Somebody you knew, because you found out no doubt in chatting to him, was a crack shot and wouldn’t miss. Especially when you placed him where you did, front rank, left flank. And there’d be other chances. If Giles Sparrow missed the first time, if he aimed for something else, there’d be other opportunities. You must have been delighted when it worked first time.’

  ‘Oh, I was,’ Pickering’s voice had changed. Maxwell was still in the firing position, crouching with the rifle in his hands. He felt something cold against his temple. And he knew he couldn’t move. ‘But I didn’t want to pin it on Giles. He’s a nice kid. I had no choice.’

  ‘Ironic,’ Maxwell said carefully, ‘that it should be that family, of all families. Quite poetic, really.’

  ‘Over here, policewoman!’ Pickering shouted. ‘Or your friend’s head will be all over Brighton pier.’

  There was a scream. Women and children scattered, men moved away. Out of the corner of his eye, Maxwell could see Jacquie Carpenter standing with a crowd behind her. One uniform. Two. He didn’t know how many coppers she’d found, but she’d been right, of course. He should have waited. He saw her edge forward.

  ‘Closer,’ Pickering called. ‘Mr Maxwell here was just telling me how I arranged Miles Needham�
�s death.’

  ‘I want you to put that gun down, Mr Pickering,’ Jacquie was saying, her hands clenched by her side.

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ Pickering nodded, ‘But if I did that, your boys in blue over there would kick the shit out of me, wouldn’t they? By the way, Mr Maxwell, you can’t see it from where you are, can you? But this is a replica New Land pistol, and as you know, like all my replicas, this one kills.’

  ‘1802 pattern, I hope,’ Maxwell’s finger was still on his trigger, as was Pickering’s. ‘I’d like to see that some time.’

  ‘I’m sure you would, Mr Maxwell,’ Pickering said. ‘But if you or your lady friend here move just one fraction, you’ll certainly see what it can do.’

  ‘Bob …’ Jacquie began.

  ‘That’s Mr Pickering to you, cow,’ he snarled, the pistol jamming into Maxwell’s temple.

  ‘It’s all right, Jacquie,’ Maxwell’s spare hand flapped to his left, urging the girl back. ‘Bob here was just going to tell us why he killed Barbara Needham, weren’t you, Bob? I can’t believe she was in on Tom Sparrow’s murder.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Pickering said, ‘but she knew about it. The longer the law probed, the more chance there was of finding the Sparrow case in their files. If they talked to her about it – I remember them cruising the seafront together at Leighford, laughing at Tom, calling him names – it’d all come out. I had to keep her quiet.’

  ‘So you followed her?’

  Pickering nodded. ‘She went out to the Shingle at night. Took a taxi from the hotel. Going to meet somebody, I suppose. I put a musket butt through her skull. Perhaps it was that one you’re holding there, Mr Maxwell.’

  ‘But you missed your chance with Alan Rossiter, didn’t you?’ Maxwell said, his right arm tingling with numbness, his eyes burning in his head as he stared straight at Bonaparte’s nose, his next target.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The weirdo on the dunes. The one that frightened Helen McGregor. It was him.’

  ‘Never!’ Maxwell felt the pistol muzzle waver a fraction. ‘Stand still, I said!’ Pickering was screaming at Jacquie. She froze. How much longer could the man keep that same pressure on the trigger?