Maxwell’s Movie

by M. J. Trow

  The sea crashed along the groynes out beyond the bay. Hysterical children dared each other to rush headlong into the surf and delirious dogs barked and gambolled in the foam. Jacquie Carpenter was trailing along the water’s edge, watching her toes disappear under the EU-approved froth that heralded each rippling wave. The wind blew her hair from her face and she looked at the man beside her.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ Maxwell said. ‘It can’t have been easy.’

  He looked an unlikely tourist did Mad Max, his trousers rolled up like a pair of plus fours, his jacket slung over his shoulder, his hat for once gone and the breeze playing havoc with his hair. He dropped a Hush Puppy and quickly stooped to pick it up before the tide got it.

  ‘Did you think I’d be chained to a wall?’ she asked him.

  ‘After what your Sergeant Hennessey told me. I didn’t know what to think.’

  ‘He’s not my sergeant,’ she said.

  ‘He seems to care for you,’ he told her. ‘We all do.’

  She looked at him, this latter-day Crusader, this bow-tie knight errant. ‘That’s nice,’ she said, barely audible above the roar of the surf. ‘You’re a strange man, Peter Maxwell.’

  He laughed suddenly, turning to her, ‘Now that’s something I’ve never heard before.’

  ‘They’ve found Ronnie,’ she said and winced as he gripped her arm.

  ‘Where?’

  She turned to walk on. ‘I don’t know the details. Since my suspension, I’m rather incommunicado. I gather he was found sleeping rough in Brighton.’

  ‘Couldn’t leave it alone, eh?’

  ‘What?’

  Maxwell sighed, scanning the tufted dunes ahead and the knots of children building their little silicon Kraks des Chevaliers in the wetter sand by the sea. ‘If your boys found him this time, I found him first. Or rather he found me.’

  She stopped in her tracks, her mouth hanging open, her head shaking in disbelief. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her hands were fluttering in the breeze.

  ‘He came to my home’ – Maxwell kept walking, the girl trying to keep pace with his larger strides – ‘he didn’t know where else to go –’

  ‘Why? Why didn’t you tell us?’ She was screaming at him now, above the screams of the children and the blare of the ghetto blasters behind the windbreaks.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the letter?’ He rounded on her and saw her furious gaze fall away. ‘What it said.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Quite,’ and he trudged on along the line of the bay. ‘The boy was terrified, Jacquie, and exhausted. He’d last seen Alice Goode in the Museum of the Moving Image. That had nothing to do with his disappearance.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t it?’ DCI Hall was staring coldly into the nervous, pale face of Ronnie Parsons. The boy looked at the brief the law had called in, a pompous old arsehole in a pinstriped suit. He looked at the men across the desk from him in the Incident Room interview room. The blank expressionlessness of DCI Hall, the almost unremitting smirk of DS Hennessey. He looked at the silently turning tape in the corner, the one ‘they’ couldn’t doctor anymore, the one that would record every nuance, register every jangled nerve end.

  ‘I told you’ – Ronnie was tired – ‘I’d planned to go anyway. The Museum trip seemed the perfect opportunity. Slip away in London and you blokes’d never find me. Kids go missing all the time, round the ’Dilly and that. You never find ’em.’

  ‘Sometimes we do,’ Hall told him. ‘Fished out of the Thames and swollen and black. Others times they’ve got dirty needles sticking out of their arms. Or their underpants are tied tight round their necks. Not a pretty picture, is it, Ronnie? That’s because it’s not a pretty world.’ He leaned back, giving the boy some air, some space. ‘How well did you know Jean Hagger?’

  ‘The letter,’ Jacquie told Maxwell, ‘was a silly, adolescent thing. But it might have hanged him in the good old days.’

  ‘Leave those to me,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘I was there then, remember? What did it say?’

  She threw up her arms in exasperation. ‘I’m under suspension because I talked to you,’ she said.

  ‘In for a penny,’ he told her.

  ‘Were you followed?’

  He turned to look back at the happy grockles cavorting in the sun. ‘Any of those look like Mr Plod?’

  ‘What does it matter now?’ she asked the wind. ‘It’s the end of my career anyway.’

  She felt him grip her shoulders, shaking her gently, ‘Not if I have anything to do with it. But for now, Jacquie, you’re out of it. Who’s going to carry on?’

  She blinked back the tears. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You?’

  ‘Me,’ he nodded and held her close for a moment. ‘But,’ he held her at arm’s length again, ‘I need the answers. All of them you’ve got. Now, what did the letter say?’

  ‘“My Darling Alice”,’ Henry Hall was reading the letter in his hand, ‘“It was wonderful last night. You were wonderful. When I got home I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I think you needed it as much as I did. I can’t wait for tomorrow night. Usual time and I’ll bring the bottle of wine. Will the old bag be out? We don’t want her snooping around, do we? I love you, Ronnie.” Did you write that, Ronnie?’

  The boy shifted in his chair, looking instinctively at the brief, who seemed as intent on hearing his answer as Hall was.

  ‘We can check, you know,’ Hennessey prompted him. ‘Hand-writing samples. I’m sure the school would oblige. And then of course, your prints’d be all over that, wouldn’t they?’ He nodded in the direction of the letter.

  ‘Yeah, I wrote it,’ the boy said.

  The policeman leaned back. ‘But it wasn’t true.’

  ‘You didn’t fancy Miss Goode?’ Hall asked. Ronnie shrugged. ‘I may have done. But I didn’t do nothing about it. Christ. She wouldn’t have looked at me twice.’

  ‘That’s not what the driver says,’ Hennessey told him.

  ‘What driver?’ Ronnie was lost.

  ‘The driver of the coach that took you to the Museum of the Moving Image. When we interviewed him he said you two seemed very close.’

  ‘What does he know?’ Ronnie blurted, becoming more annoyed and defiant by the minute.

  ‘Are you seriously telling me that Alice Goode was having an affair with one of my sixth form?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘This is 1997, Max,’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘It’d be the first time for Ronnie Parsons,’ he said. ‘Although …’ ‘Although …’

  ‘He had the hots when he was younger for an older girl – a sixth former. That’s where he was when he absconded from the Museum. Playing the Wild Rover at Brighton University. Unfortunately for him, she’d graduated to higher things.’

  ‘Nuclear Physics?’

  ‘University lecturers. Always rather big time was Dannie Roth. No, I’m sorry. I just don’t buy it. As you say, a piece of adolescent silliness. Still …’

  ‘Still, it gives him a motive for killing Jean Hagger.’ She kicked the seaweed swirling around her feet. ‘How close were they, her and Alice?’

  ‘Lovers, she told me,’ he said, wandering up from the water’s edge to crash into the dry sand on the slope of the dunes. ‘Wonder why there are always washing-up-liquid bottles on beaches?’

  ‘What if the letter was true?’ Jacquie sat next to him, letting the pale sand drift through her fingers. ‘What if Ronnie and Alice were at it like knives? Jean found out – worse, walked in on them. There was a row. He panicked and hit her.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Maxwell said. ‘Alice was dead before Jean was murdered. At least five days had elapsed.’

  ‘I’m sorry’ – she buried her face in her knees for a moment – ‘I’m not thinking straight. Doc Astley’s given me some tablets.’

  ‘Jean had a message,’ Maxwell said, ‘at school, remember? A man’s voice telling her to go home quickly
. A man’s voice. Her murderer’s voice.’

  ‘Ronnie is eighteen,’ Jacquie said. ‘His voice would pass muster over the phone.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Yes, it would.’

  ‘So you didn’t ring Mrs Hagger at Bishop Billington?’ Hall asked the boy. ‘On the morning she was killed?’

  ‘No,’ Ronnie shouted. ‘Look, I’ve told you all this once.’

  ‘He is right, Chief Inspector,’ the brief broke his silence for the first time that afternoon. ‘And he’s given you his answers.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Hall lifted up the grey holdall onto the interviewing table, ‘about this.’

  ‘It was a grey sports bag,’ Jacquie remembered, ‘Nike, if my memory serves.’

  ‘Empty?’

  ‘No. It had Alice Goode’s clothes in it. The ones she was wearing when she disappeared.’

  ‘Jesus! Where was it found?’

  ‘In Jean Hagger’s living room.’

  ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘If Ronnie had lured Jean Hagger back to her flat, he’d have had to have waited somewhere nearby until she arrived.’

  ‘Presumably’

  Maxwell was in full cry now, chewing his lip, squinting at the sun on the waves. ‘With a grey holdall, which was full of clothes of his last victim. Why would he bring those with him? Did anybody see him there, carrying the bag?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There are just so many unanswered questions.’

  ‘So you left the holdall in the middle of the lounge after you’d battered Mrs Hagger to death?’ Hall leaned back, waiting for the answer.

  ‘No,’ Ronnie said. ‘The last time I saw that bag was at the Museum. I left it in the cloakroom. And it didn’t have Miss Goode’s clothes in. Just my own stuff. Look, can I go now?’

  Hennessey chuckled.

  Hall leaned over the microphone. ‘Interview terminated by DCI Hall at three thirty-one,’ and he clicked off the machine.

  ‘I’ll let you see your parents,’ he said. ‘But as for you going, son … Not till hell freezes over.’

  But Ronnie Parsons didn’t see his parents. He didn’t want to see his parents. Instead, he asked to see Peter Maxwell and that night a large white patrol car purred to a halt outside Number 38 Columbine and the boys in blue asked Peter Maxwell to accompany them to the police station.

  This was not the first time that Leighford and Tottingleigh had seen an Incident Room set-up. The enquiry was into the death of Jean Hagger, coupled with that of her flatmate, Alice Goode. The press, both national and local, were camped outside it in one of those media explosions that surrounds any untoward death these days. The world looked hungrily in on the Meridian bulletins and picked up South Coast Radio. That boy, the one who’d gone missing, they’d found him. The police weren’t saying anything. That meant he did it. You could always tell. Typical, wasn’t it, of kids today? Look at poor Jamie Bulger and that girl they found under the slide in the playground. It wasn’t safe to go out on the streets. And the group most afraid to go out, the elderly, the least likely group to be targeted, locked themselves in and muttered about collapsing society. And the group least afraid, the group most likely to end up on the pavement with a face full of broken glass, the young men, continued to go out. All, that is, except one.

  Ronnie Parsons looked very small and very isolated in the cell where they’d put him. Peter Maxwell was allowed a quick look through the eye-level grille before he was bustled away down the corridor, through the Incident Room with its clutter of VDUs flickering in green and blue, its incessantly clattering keyboards and its clanging telephones. Policemen and women, in shirts and blouses sat at rakish angles, following up this lead, chasing that. They all looked tired. And to Peter Maxwell, they all looked so young.

  Only Henry Hall looked his age – and more. He sat in his office, the phone off the hook, a cup of cold coffee at his elbow. His family smiled at him from a school photograph – just to remind him he still had a family.

  ‘You’ll get my eldest next year,’ he told Maxwell, ‘He likes History. And dancing, but that’s from his mother.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Maxwell. ‘I’ve always said all you need in life is brains and feet. The rest’ll take care of itself

  ‘Coffee, Mr Maxwell?’ Hall asked.

  ‘I’d rather see Ronnie.’

  Hall patted the air with both hands. ‘In time,’ he promised, ‘but first, I’d like a little word.’

  ‘Ah. I wondered why the guided tour.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Hall could be as inscrutable as Maxwell when the chips were down.

  ‘First, I’m taken in by the front door. Very dramatic. Very unnecessary. Right in the glare of the television cameras. I’ll be all over the Leighford Advertiser come Friday, I shouldn’t wonder. “Teacher helps police with their enquiries”.’

  ‘Do you, Mr Maxwell?’ Hall asked. ‘I wonder.’

  ‘Ah, but the magical mystery tour continued, didn’t it? Your affable PC apologized for not knowing the layout of the station. Just drafted in, he said. Odd that I’ve seen him directing traffic by the Town Hall roadworks for the last two months, then, isn’t it? So we went to the cells, had a quick shufty at the condemned man, then through the centre of the hive, where there are nasty photos of dead women all over the place.’

  ‘Welcome to the real world,’ Hall shrugged.

  ‘I understood that Ronnie asked to see me.’

  ‘So he did,’ the Chief Inspector nodded. ‘What I’d like to know is why.’

  ‘I’m his Year Head,’ Maxwell said.

  Hall leaned back, the flicker of what might have been a smile hovering around his lips. ‘You’re not going to give me all that pastoral guff, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘It may be guff to you, Chief Inspector,’ the Head of Sixth Form told him levelly, ‘but to some of us, it matters. What about Ronnie’s parents?’

  Hall shrugged, ‘They’ve been here for the past four hours. He won’t see them. They weren’t, you’ll notice, part of the guided tour.’

  ‘Clearly,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘What’s the boy got against his mum and dad,’ Hall asked. ‘Can you tell me?’

  ‘Common enough, isn’t it, among teenaged boys? Sense of resentment, arrogance. It’s all to do with male domination, deep down. A challenge to the leader of the herd.’

  ‘And in Ronnie’s case?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen his back?’

  Hall shook his head.

  ‘Beatings. His father took his strap to him on more occasions than he cared to remember.’

  ‘You knew about this? At Leighford High, I mean?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘I only found out recently.’

  ‘How?’ the Chief Inspector was a terrier when it came to pinning men in tight corners.

  ‘Look, Chief Inspector, let’s just say I know. Is that OK?’

  When a man like Peter Maxwell was driven to saying ‘OK?’, he was rattled, off his guard. Hall sensed it, not in the man’s words, but in the tension round his eyes. He’d seen it before.

  ‘Tell me about Jacquie Carpenter,’ Hall said.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Maxwell asked.

  The Chief Inspector sighed. ‘Mr Maxwell, I have two women dead, one on my patch, the other from it. I honestly don’t have the time to fence with you all day. There are more pressing matters.’

  ‘All right,’ Maxwell conceded. ‘But first, you must tell me something. How much hot water is Jacquie in?’

  Hall hesitated for a moment. This might be the only lifeline Peter Maxwell was prepared to throw him. ‘She is under suspension currently pending internal enquiries. We would have had to interview you sooner or later anyway. Ronnie asking for you has saved us the bother.’

  ‘Why me?’ Maxwell was at his most obtuse.

  ‘Because DC Carpenter confided information to you that she ought not to have done.’

  ‘Has she?’
<
br />   ‘Mr Maxwell!’ It was the closest Henry Hall had ever come to hitting a member of the public – or the roof, but Maxwell was nearer.

  ‘I won’t be responsible for getting her into trouble,’ Maxwell said flatly.

  ‘She’s already in trouble,’ Hall assured him. ‘You can help get her out of it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By telling the truth.’

  Maxwell sat back, taking in his man and his moment. ‘If I tell you the truth, then you’ll drop charges against her?’

  ‘There aren’t any charges against her – not yet.’

  ‘Now who’s fencing?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Very well,’ Hall nodded, ‘let’s say if I’m satisfied with your answers, I’ll do my level best with internal affairs. The weight of a DCI goes a long way.’

  ‘Does it?’ Maxwell had watched Prime Suspect. He wasn’t so sure. ‘All right. I’ll have to believe you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Jacquie came to me five weeks ago – a bit longer than that, in fact. She was looking into the disappearance – that’s all it was then – of Alice Goode.’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘We’d met before, remember? The murder of Jenny Hyde?’ Hall nodded. He remembered.

  ‘I was a colleague of Alice’s and it was my trip. If I’d been well, she’d never have gone to London in the first place.’

  ‘So you felt guilty?’

  ‘I felt … involved, shall we say?’ Maxwell hadn’t even convinced himself. ‘Oh, all right. Guilty. Yes. Guilty as sin. I should have been there. It’s that simple.’

  ‘And what did Jacquie bring you?’

  ‘A theory. A theory that linked up one murder and one attempted murder.’

  ‘Carly Drinkwater and Georgianna Morris.’

  ‘That’s right. She said she’d told you about them and you didn’t want to know’

  ‘I didn’t see an obvious connection – then. But then, as far as we knew, Alice Goode was still alive.’

  ‘And now do you see a connection?’

  ‘I’m open to any suggestions,’ Hall said.

  ‘Then you’ll follow up on them and lay off the girl?’ Maxwell was on the edge of his seat.

  ‘I told you I’d do what I could. What did you do with the information Jacquie had given you?’