Maxwell's Island

by M. J. Trow

  She signed in and would have liked to leap up the stairs two at a time and burst in on the briefing, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Instead, each step felt as though she was climbing Machu Picchu. She pushed open the door into the ops room. At the far end, Henry Hall had already established a large whiteboard, marked into sections. One for Paul Masters, Izzy Medlicott’s first husband. One for Isabelle Medlicott. And one for Tom Medlicott. It was quite poignant, Jacquie thought, to see Izzy sandwiched between her two husbands, looking rather like a monumental brass Maxwell had shown her one sunny afternoon, long ago. The photo of Izzy was cropped from the one she had given to Hall. Tom’s disembodied arm was over her shoulder and there were still a few fuzzy shapes in the background which she could probably have identified from the school party. Tom’s photo was from the same snap, again peopled with random shapes in the background, his arm disappearing off the edge and just a tiny amount of Izzy’s T-shirt showing. Her ex-husband’s photo was grainy, clearly blown up from something very much smaller, and she suspected a fax. It showed a smiling man, no longer young, perhaps forty-five, and just a threat of someone’s bridal veil blowing in the wind behind his head. It was with a jolt that she realised that the photo was from his wedding to Izzy.

  She heard voices coming along the corridor and suddenly the room was full of chatter, chairs scraping, gradually quietening down as Henry Hall took his place at the front. Jacquie sat at the back, with her notebook open on her knee. Bob Thorogood turned round in his chair and beckoned her nearer.

  ‘Sorry this all happened to spoil your holidays, Jacks,’ he said. She hated people to call her that. It reminded her of Marlon Brando in a subliminal memory of a film she remembered from Saturday morning film club as a kid. Maxwell could certainly have explained why.

  ‘Thanks, Bob,’ she said. The man meant no harm and had probably caught a whiff on the grapevine about her possible promotion and wanted to be in on the ground floor, in the brown-nose club. ‘I certainly wouldn’t recommend it.’

  Henry Hall tapped gently on the board with a marker. Apart from the names and a photo taped to the top of each section, the board was blank. This was the Hall method, to fill in thoughts, facts, ideas as they came, and see if a pattern emerged. Sometimes, the crime was solved virtually before the bums had hit the seats. Sometimes, the boards grew whiskers before a single link was made. ‘Right, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s get started. As you see, we have three murders up on the board. Strictly speaking, only one is ours, this one,’ he tapped on the board behind his left shoulder, ‘Tom Medlicott. The one in the middle is his wife, Isabelle, or Izzy Medlicott. She belongs to Hampshire Police, but there are talks in progress as we speak to let us do most of the legwork on this one, as she comes from here and now we have her dead husband on our hands. We might not end up with this case, of course, but this morning I intend to proceed as if we will. The third case, here,’ he reached across and pointed to the column marked for Paul Masters, ‘has not even been logged by the local police involved as a murder. He was found at the bottom of a ladder and, despite a few strange circumstances, it was put down as unexplained, but most probably accidental.’

  ‘Do we know when that one happened, guv?’ someone asked from the centre of the room.

  ‘Good question,’ Hall said. ‘I’ve left dates off for a reason. I’ll explain. We only know when Tom Medlicott died, of the three. The time of death, given by Dr Lacey …’ He knew his men; he paused for the inevitable response.

  Jacquie was confused. Who was this person? She poked Bob Thorogood in the back and made a querying gesture. He mouthed back that he would tell her later.

  ‘As I say,’ Hall resumed, ‘the time of death, given by Dr Lacey, is between eighteen hundred and twenty-two hundred hours last night. She can be more precise after the post-mortem, which she is conducting as we speak.’

  ‘You mean Donald is conducting, I hope,’ someone offered.

  ‘As you say,’ Hall said, with no emphasis. ‘But all we know in the case of his wife is when she disappeared, and even that could be said to be a little moot. At the moment, we are going with late on Wednesday night, possibly very early Thursday morning. Again, precise details will follow.’ He turned to the board and jotted down the facts so far, under their photos.

  ‘What about the ex, guv?’ Phil Smart was on his second shift with only a few hours’ break, but he had asked to be included, having been in at, as it were, the death. ‘What have we got on him?’

  ‘We know very little,’ said Hall, ‘except that he was found dead, that is as in dead and cold, a week ago yesterday. That means, by and large, that he must have died on the Wednesday before last. We assume he died during the day, in that most people don’t start doing even the simplest DIY in the middle of the night and his death was caused by a fall from a ladder.’

  ‘So he lay in the garden for two days?’ Jacquie asked. She didn’t know what kind of house Izzy’s ex lived in, but she knew that should she or Maxwell fall from a ladder, they would be discovered almost as they hit the ground, if not by the neighbours on either side, then by the ones across the back or absolutely anyone using the rat run footpath at the end of the Columbine gardens.

  ‘Yes,’ Hall said. ‘He lived in a small village, gardens very secluded, apparently. I’ve had a look on Google Earth and I’m surprised he was found at all.’

  ‘Had the local police contacted the dead woman?’ someone asked. ‘Did she know he was dead?’

  ‘She did if she shoved him off the ladder,’ Bob Thorogood suggested.

  ‘True,’ Hall said, ‘but we have no idea whether she did and also no reason to suppose she would want to. We aren’t sure how happy her marriage was to Tom Medlicott, but surely, no matter how unhappy your second marriage is, you don’t kill your first husband. How would that help?’

  ‘More money,’ said Fran Brannon, from the front row. ‘If she was his beneficiary.’

  ‘Again, true,’ Hall said. ‘But we are waiting on that, so we’ll have to just put a question mark on him.’ He turned and did so. Then he turned back to the small but enthusiastic crowd in front of him. ‘I’m sorry to have called you all in with so little to go on. Our task today is to make sure there is something to go on. As reports come in, they will need to be entered on the system, cross-referenced and emailed to me as soon as you see any connection, apart from the obvious. Don’t worry about how many times you contact me. There are no wrong answers here. But I just know,’ and he stopped speaking to rake the rows of faces with his blank stare, ‘I just know there is more to this than meets the eye. There is no such thing as coincidence, don’t forget.’ He turned as though to dismiss them, then seemed to remember something. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘There is one more thing and I will have to give this job to someone specific. Umm …’ he pointed randomly with the board marker and came to rest on Fran Brannon. ‘Fran. I would like you to get in touch with the General and get stats for falls in the past … what shall we say? … the past six weeks. Look for anything out of the ordinary or something you would like to call coincidence, should there, after all, be such a thing.’

  Fran Brannon nodded, but not very enthusiastically. Having cast herself as Wonder Woman, even though it meant wearing her underwear on the outside, she was rather disappointed. But no one got anywhere by grouching, so she got up to go and start her task.

  Hall spoke again, over the sound of scraping chairs. ‘Sorry, everyone. One more thing, and this really is it this time. As some of you may know, Jacquie was on a school trip last week with the Medlicotts. She may have some specialist knowledge that you might find useful. She will be working in the out-of-hours duty office, so that anyone who wants to pick her brain can do so in relative peace. Right. Any questions?’

  Apart from a random mutter in which the word ‘Maxwell’ seemed to surface every now and then like a turd in a swimming pool, as Bob Thorogood later described it, there was nothing and soon everyone was bent to their work.

  Chapter Eightee
n

  The Maxwell family garage was, like most garages not used to house a car, a small microcosm of life upstairs in the house. Being part of the building, not a last-minute addition on the side, it didn’t suffer from the usual garagey smells, like damp and mould with the intriguing top notes of wellies, paraffin, old sump oil, and metal, which could be sold by one of the more avant-garde perfumeries as L’eau d’Garagiste. Instead, it smelt of wood from the shelving, paint quietly drying in inadequately closed tins, optimistically stored on said shelves, mineral oil coating unused tools and, predominantly, newspapers.

  Leighford County Council had a Policy regarding Waste Disposal. This was in a file several inches thick, stored in the Policies Office and available for County Hall staff and members of the public to examine, having given twenty-four hours notice. The person who had constructed it was clearly a reincarnation of a medieval alchemist, steeped in the lore of arcane grimoires. He was certainly no good at turning a simple sentence and had also only scant understanding of the desires re rubbish disposal of the reasonable man on the Clapham, or indeed any other, omnibus. Subsection had piled upon subsection, recycling had its own appendix, long since removed, as is the way of such things, and refiled under another category entirely. Bin colours ruled supreme and days for green waste, kitchen waste, garden waste and, for all anyone knew, the Arctic wastes, were carefully annotated and coded.

  Sadly, the man responsible for this entertaining work had suddenly rushed into the Register Office attached to County Hall one morning, dressed only in his underpants and brandishing a leaf torn from the Council Leader’s cheese plant. The bride and groom had been hushed up with a free honeymoon in Canvey Island and the poor man was never seen again, although there was a rumour that he was sometimes to be seen walking along The Dam, armed only with a stick with a nail in the end.

  So the Maxwells, along with almost everyone else in Leighford, put their ordinary rubbish out on a Wednesday, pretty much confident that it would have gone by Tuesday. Newspapers, destined for recycling one day, were simply allowed to pile up in the garage. It was to this pile that Maxwell now addressed himself. Eat your heart out, Colindale Newspaper Library.

  He had taken the precaution of popping down to the shop first and had supplies on hand. He had a sandwich in a triangular pack, which he knew he probably wouldn’t be able to open, but down in the garage there would at least be some kind of power tool which would no doubt come in handy. He had two four-finger Kit Kats which could cover a double use of snack and something to run down the columns when his eyes got tired. He had a two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola and a thermos of coffee, should his caffeine levels threaten to dip below near-fatal. Ice he had in plenty in the freezer which hummed hypnotically in the corner. Add in a garden chair and a picnic table, a cordless phone, a table lamp pinched from the spare bedroom and his reading glasses and he was all set. He left the door into the hallway open and the front and back doors ajar. This was so that he didn’t suffocate in the enclosed space and also, should he be crushed under a pile of collapsing newsprint, Jacquie would know where to look for him. It also gave access and egress to Metternich, the nosiest cat in the world.

  Peter Maxwell was by heart a researcher. When he had been at Cambridge he had spent hours in the library, finding out small and hitherto undiscovered sidebars to history. He was obviously fascinated by the big picture, but if he could also find out the colour of Hammurabi’s eyes, or what Thomas More’s third daughter had called her pet rabbit, he found that he could remember the main facts all the easier and that he could empathise better with his subject. That his lecturers didn’t always share his enthusiasm for minutiae was sometimes clear from the grades for his essays, but that and a lifetime of teaching Eleven Pea Queue about the causes of the First World War had not diminished his thirst for the tiny bits of history everyone else might miss. And history, as he was constantly telling his Year Seven classes, is happening all the time. It isn’t just hundreds of years ago. It is last week. It is yesterday. It is this morning. It was created just a minute, a second, a millisecond ago. ‘Whoops’, he would tell them. ‘There goes another bit.’ Mostly, they just looked at him open-mouthed. But just occasionally, he saw a familiar gleam in someone’s eye and he knew that he had just brought into being another historian.

  The piles of papers rather reflected this tendency. The Maxwell household didn’t have a regular daily paper; theirs was the most confused paper boy in the world. As a politics teacher when the devil drove, the Head of Sixth Form felt he had to have the opinions of all sorts of writers, from the right-wing ranter to the leftest of left-wing polemicists. This, he could see, was going to be a problem. His piles of newspapers, whilst representing every colour of journalism from red to blue, through purple and the occasional issue of the Fortean Times, were so random that few stories were followed through in their entirety. The best plan would probably be to pile them up in chronological order, not by publication. Then, although the take on an issue might vary, the facts might still emerge. Local papers only were put on one side. He felt much as the miller’s daughter must have felt, destined to spin straw into gold for the evil dwarf Rumpelstiltskin.

  He began to sort the papers and was getting on quite well, the radio burbling away in the background, when a noise in the doorway made him jump. Surely, the dwarf wasn’t back already? He had hardly made any gold yet. But no, it was just the Count, come to check if Maxwell had found the mouse nest. Metternich was using sustainable hunting methods in the garage and it was working quite well so far, though the population had been given a chance to increase in his absence in the previous week. A quick glance told him that Maxwell had some way to go as yet, so he settled down on the nice, soft top of a bag of potting compost, tucked his nose under his tail and went to sleep.

  The sorting went well. Once into a pattern, Maxwell found that what had looked like a dauntingly enormous pile of newsprint was in fact merely huge and as such, very do-able. He made an early decision to cut the papers into months, putting anything older than June to one side, to be looked at if, God forbid, he needed to. July he left as a random, though discrete pile. August was put in sets of weeks. September was put in strict date order. In no time at all the job was done and he sat back and had a celebratory Kit Kat. Usually at this time on a Saturday, the whole family was out shopping and this had to be an improvement, surely. He was dusty, sneezing and ink-smeared, his heart was still beating faster after the unexpected discovery of a mouse nest in a pile of July Radio Times, but generally speaking, he was quite pleased with his progress. Metternich had left in disgust, having seen the disposal into the back garden of his midnight snack bar, and was last seen sprawled out on the roof of next-door’s shed.

  Looking out of the back door, Maxwell was suddenly struck with a pang of regret for the missing Mrs Troubridge. He must nip round later and visit her. He would try and catch Mrs B as well, to ask her how it had gone last night, after he had left. It was an unchanging pattern – and Maxwell liked an unchanging pattern as well as the next man – that as soon as the old woman heard a door open, she would suddenly be working away with clippers or broom in the garden, front or back as required. She didn’t always have anything very fascinating to say, usually it tended towards the complaining end of conversational gambits, but she was fond enough of him in her little stunted way, and Jacquie and Nolan she loved. He hoped the old trout would be all right. He sighed and made his way back into what he had decided to call the Peter Maxwell Archive. It made him feel better than to think he was stuck in the garage wading through a pile of old newspapers, looking for he didn’t know what. His researcher’s spirit was kept buoyant by the unexpected, like the rasher of bacon pressed between The Sunday Telegraph and The Observer of the last weekend in July. He remembered how that had happened, he mused nostalgically. He had been gathering the papers up to take down to the garage whilst eating a bacon sandwich. When he took the last mouthful he had thought it was a bit bready. Now he knew why. The sun ha
d been shining at the time, it was the beginning of the summer holiday and, although he was not embarking on his expected retirement, things were generally pretty good with his world and that of everyone he knew.

  Now, apart from the fact that the sun was shining, everything was different. Whilst his world was still bouncing along quite happily, colleagues were dead and his neighbour was lying in hospital. He would be the first to admit that Tolkien was far from his favourite author, but he suddenly knew how the hobbits must have felt, when the dark wing of Sauron cast a shadow over their world. Leighford wasn’t noticeably like Hobbiton, especially now they had built the new twenty-four-hour superstore on the old football field, but the general idea was the same. He gave a little shudder and another sneeze.

  ‘You wanna put a jumper on, Mr M. You’ll catch your death.’

  Maxwell dropped the handful of papers he had gathered together and clutched his chest. In the doorway, silhouetted against the daylight, was the last person he expected to see. It was as though his thoughts had summoned her. Not Mrs Rumpelstiltskin, come to see why he was slacking; it was Mrs B, fag akimbo, bag of clothes and unguents at her side.

  ‘Good Lord, Mrs B,’ he said. ‘You could have killed me. What are you doing here?’