Maxwell’s Flame

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Your ghastly little brother? Yes, I do.’

  ‘He was, wasn’t he?’ she admitted. ‘Ghastly is the only word for him. He grew up into a rather fine man, really, something incredibly big in Anglo-American geology.’

  ‘What? That little shit who wouldn’t go away even when I’d slipped him the odd half-crown?’

  ‘That’s the one. Well, Timmy went to university in ’70, when it was all flower power and beads and barefoot in the park. His girlfriends had daisies between their toes.’

  ‘And grass between their ears,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Yes, I remember. I was in my first teaching post, not all that much older than some of the sixth form.’

  ‘Well, they invented the word “student”, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘Us, well, we were just big schoolboys and girls – or young men and women – depending which side of the fence you were on.’

  ‘Ah, the pre-permissive society,’ Maxwell boomed, eyebrows akimbo. ‘Good days.’

  ‘Strange days,’ she mused, ‘looking back.’

  ‘Looking back,’ he told her, ‘days always are.’

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled at him, ‘I suppose they are.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Shouldn’t we be getting back? Supper at eight, didn’t they say?’

  ‘Supper at eight,’ he said and helped her up. ‘May I have the pleasure?’ and he bent his arm for her.

  She slapped it with her cardigan sleeve. ‘Possibly, you filthy old man, but first you can lead me in to dinner.’

  Sally Greenhow stared up at the Artexed ceiling. For some reason her feet were killing her. She hadn’t learned much from the good Doctor’s introductory lecture on the Entitlement Curriculum, but that was to be expected. You didn’t get to be a Professor of Education by being witty, avant-garde or even relevant. In fact, she’d noticed that 90 per cent of the courses she’d attended over the last five years were, to say the least, tangential.

  Where was that book she’d bought? Oh, God, yes. Page thirty-one. She opened it, refreshed her memory on the last paragraph she’d read and closed it again.

  ‘Anthea Westinghouse,’ she said aloud, ‘with the antique pistol because George had foully abused her daughter.’

  The room was a witness now to her brave stab of logic at solving the murder puzzle in the book. It watched, breathless, while she rummaged. Where the hell was it? A frown darkened her pretty, kiddy’s face and she threw the thing down. ‘Well,’ was all she was prepared to tell the room, ‘one out of three ain’t bad.’

  Her sentence was punctuated by a knock at the door. That would be that noxious little turd Gary with some organizational/administration bollocks for the morning. Only it wasn’t, she realized as she opened it. It was that noxious little turd Jordan, God’s vicar on earth.

  ‘Er … hello,’ he said, ‘Sally, may I … er … may I have a word?’

  He’d had several words over dinner. It was one of those unfortunate things. Margot Whoever – Sally hadn’t caught her name in the ice-breaking session, but she remembered she was an Art teacher from Maidstone – looked like fun, but she’d been buttonholed by Michael Wynn. Maxwell was off mooning with his lost love like something out of Lochinvar and that lesbian dwarf Valerie Marks was making a beeline for her, probably to discuss the vagaries of needlepoint. So she’d ducked down a table to find herself wedged between a stand of artificial flowers and Jordan Gracewell.

  ‘Well,’ Sally’s arm crossed her portico diagonally with a rigidity of its own, ‘it is a little late, Jordan,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes. I know. Only, it’s Liz. Liz Striker. I still can’t find her.’

  This was the B side of Gracewell’s record of life. The A side was the altogether more gripping theme of the place of incense in the modern Catholic Church.

  ‘You’ve tried her room again?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s directly above this one, funnily enough. I know because there’s a strange little kink out here in the corridor.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Sally, stone-faced, but the bon mot was lost on the young chaplain of St Bede’s.

  ‘It’s identical with the one upstairs,’ he told her.

  Sally was on the point of expressing amazement that Jordan had a twin, but suddenly thought better of it and dropped her arm. ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘you’d better come in, then.’

  He almost ducked under her flat chest in an effort to avoid touching it as he swept past her. No, swept was too strong a word for it. Crawled would be better. How did this man survive in a girls’ school?

  ‘Oh, it’s rather like mine,’ he said, surveying the bed, the wardrobe, the en suite.

  ‘Fascinating,’ and she snatched up the discarded knickers she’d worn earlier, throwing them into a drawer. ‘Er … can I offer you some coffee?’ Ever regretted anything instantly? Like putting your foot on a garden rake? That was how Sally Greenhow felt at that moment as the padre parked himself like a coiled spring on the arm of her chair. ‘Oh, please,’ he said.

  ‘Let me guess.’ She looked at him. ‘White. Two sugars.’

  ‘No, no, indeed.’ He fluttered his hands around. ‘One.’

  ‘Oh, you gay dog!’ she chortled, regretting that instantly too, and busied herself with the kettle.

  ‘It’s just that … well, I don’t want you to think I’m paranoid or anything

  Sally raised her eyebrows. It was as well perhaps that he couldn’t see her face.

  ‘… but not only have I not seen Liz since yesterday, but no one else has either.’

  ‘Thursday?’ Sally checked. ‘But I thought the course started today, Friday?’

  ‘Yes, it did,’ Gracewell explained, ‘but a group of us got here the previous day to set up our presentation. We’re on second. Tomorrow afternoon. And we knew we’d have no time today, what with the ice-breaking and Professor Brownwood. Brilliant, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Dazzling,’ lied Sally. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’

  He took the cup from her, one of a fairly nasty set that had Carnforth Conference Centre written on it, to make absolutely sure that it had no resale value whatsoever to a would-be nicker of other people’s crockery. ‘Thank you, Sally,’ he said, as though he’d just uttered the dirtiest word in the English language.

  ‘So what’s your presentation on, specifically?’ she asked him.

  ‘Well, the others are doing theirs first; that lot from Luton.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the Adolf Eichmann Comprehensive. Didn’t they strike you that way, a little? That Head of Science with the scowl and the attitude. God, I thought my colleague was to the right of Genghis Khan.’

  ‘That’s Mr Maxwell, isn’t it?’ Gracewell said. ‘He seems very attached to Rachel King.’

  ‘Yes, doesn’t he?’ Sally threw herself down on the bed, her head resting against the wall. ‘Is there a Mr King?’

  ‘Oh, no. Well, there was, but they say there was mental and physical cruelty. The rumour is she just packed her bags and her daughter one day and left him.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Sally nodded, ‘that’s men for you,’ and she grinned cheesily at him.

  ‘No, I enquired at the desk about Liz – Liz Striker. They hadn’t seen her go out. Or come back in. I even asked Gary to unlock her room for me. I don’t think her bed had been slept in.’

  ‘Really?’ That struck Sally as rather odd, too. ‘Well, there’s bound to be a logical explanation. She’s not … er … she’s not having a little flingette with some bloke on your staff, is she?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Gracewell seemed horrified.

  ‘Well, I just meant, you know – two head shapes on the pillow, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I think I shall have to be going,’ Gracewell said, standing up sharply. ‘Thank you for the coffee.’

  ‘Look,’ she took the cup from him, ‘if I’ve said anything out of turn, Jordan …’

  ‘No,’ he said, but he didn’t glance back as he made, rather decisively she thought, for the door. ‘No, you haven’t. I expect I’ll get to the botto
m of it somehow. Good-night, Sally.’

  And he was gone, moving off down the dimly lit corridor on silent brothel-creepers, his coffee barely touched in Sally’s hand.

  It’s always the same with courses. After the ice-breaking session comes the problem-solving session. Maxwell’s first problem was how to swap groups. They’d been picked at random by Gary Leonard, the course co-ordinator, and Maxwell was reasonably miffed, though not surprised, to find that he and Rachel were in different groups. He was in A and she was in D. He was still wondering whether a simple crossing out and rewriting or grovelling to a stranger to agree to a swap would be better when breakfast was over in the Hadleigh Suite and the intrepid little bands moved off.

  ‘Catch up with you at lunch,’ was all Rachel King had time to say. She winked at him and vanished into her team and the persona she wore for the world.

  On their way to the beach, Maxwell took in his team. In a weak and wandering moment, they might have been the A team, although their similarity to the Dream team was rather more striking. And if Maxwell was Hannibal Smith, it was most unlikely that any of their plans would come together, whether he loved it or not. They were a pretty ericaceous mixture, one way or another. Leader-designate was Gregory Trant, a rather reptilian creature whose eyes positively refused to travel in the same direction. He seemed a lacklustre bastard, but teaching in Luton probably does that to people. Should he go down fighting, Michael Wynn, the bearded darling of St Bede’s, was in post as Number Two. Then there was Lydia Farr, who taught Textiles in Tenterden and who appeared to have been the model for the Skexis in The Dark Crystal; Alan Harper-Bennet, who got Maxwell’s prize for daring to have a double-barrelled name and still teach in a comprehensive; Phyllida Bowles, a wall-coloured woman who was a positive martyr to hay fever; Margot Jenkinson, whose main loves were ceramics and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber; and of course Maxwell himself, the only normal one. They took to the heather just before the weather changed and trudged over the slippery shingle with the sweep of the bay to their left.

  ‘Well, there’s no shelter at all,’ Lydia was saying, holding her hair as if the eddying wind might take it off. ‘How are we supposed to construct a shelter if there isn’t any?’

  ‘You haven’t read your instruction sheet, dear,’ Trant patronised her. ‘It doesn’t say it’ll be easy.’

  ‘There’s a rubbish tip over here,’ Wynn shouted. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ Phyllida wailed, thrusting her hands resolutely into her jeans pockets. ‘I did not enrol on a GNVQ course to catch something from somebody’s old mattress.’

  ‘Needs must,’ Wynn told her coldly, ‘when the Devil drives. Peter? Will you join me?’

  ‘If I must,’ sighed Max, ‘and that’s Max, by the way. Not Peter. Max.’

  ‘All right, Max,’ Wynn grinned. ‘Funny things, nicknames, aren’t they? I knew a bloke at school called Arthur. Arthur Gries. A complete vegetable was Arthur and known to us all as Cret, short, obviously, for Cretin. You’re my vintage, give or take a few years, you know how it is. You don’t consider how cruel kids can be. It was only when I met him years later at some big Rotary thing and I had to call him Arthur. It just didn’t ring true. The man’s name was still Cret really, in that you are of course one for life. Shame we can’t be more honest, isn’t it? Fancy a rummage in the rubbish?’

  Gregory Trant, Alan Harper-Bennet and Lydia Farr had wandered off in search of driftwood as a frame for the shelter they had to make. The wind was in the wrong direction for them to hear the shouts of the others and before long, two groups had formed, each out of sight of the other. It was then that the heavens opened, reminding Maxwell of that sudden storm that had appeared from nowhere in the Battle of Evesham, 1265, when Simon de Montfort had been caught napping in that murderous loop of the Avon. Maxwell was reminded of that because he was an historian, first and foremost. Maxwell’s kids thought he knew it because he’d been there at the time.

  The rain positively hurt with its big spring drops and the unofficial rubbish heap was a quagmire of sludge over which the foraging party scrambled to the shelter of a clump of stunted cedars.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell!’ Margot Jenkinson fumed. ‘It takes a downpour to winkle out the little fact that you’ve a hole in your shoe, doesn’t it? Wet tights are a bitch, Mr Maxwell, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are,’ Maxwell bridled in his best John Inman, ‘and clean on this morning.’ He licked his finger and slicked down his eyebrow with it – not a gesture many single men would have the nerve for.

  ‘Well,’ Michael Wynn stuck his head out of cover for a moment, ‘looks like the session’s rained off. Shall we wait for a bit or make a dash for the house?’

  Alan Harper-Bennet and Lydia Farr had made a dash for the house when it started, followed by Gregory Trant. Except that they were on the wrong side and screened from the main drive by a dense privet hedge. Lydia was even more concerned about what the rain would do to her hair than she had been with the vagaries of wind direction and, seeing a side door, she wrenched it open and dashed in. Harper-Bennet collided with her in trying to close it and was mumbling his apologies when he realized Lydia wasn’t moving. Couldn’t move, in fact. He’d never seen shock before, but he saw it now. Her mouth hung open, her eyes were wide. Every muscle in her body felt like iron.

  ‘Lydia?’ Harper-Bennet’s voice had a curious sound to it, as though he didn’t trust it in the darkness of the corridor. He followed the woman’s stare ahead of her. There was an open door, apparently into a store room. And there, behind a collapsed pile of buff-wrapped stationery, a woman stared back at the pair. It was an odd moment because the woman’s eyes were dull and half-closed. Her mouth was open too, like Lydia’s, but there was a dark brown something caked around her nose and lips. In the strange light from an aperture in the roof, her hair was plastered to her forehead. And there was no doubt about it. The woman was dead.

  Anywhere can become the scene of a crime. In fiction, of course, it’s the west wing or the library of a country vicarage. But that’s just English cosies. In the States, it’s somebody’s swimming pool or a drug-ridden alley in the Bronx. What makes an ordinary, everyday store room into a murder scene is that someone chose to hide a body there. And from that moment, the scene is transformed. From the moment the body is found, it is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born, as Yeats said, except that Yeats wasn’t talking about a corpse.

  Father Jordan Gracewell had never seen so many policemen in his life. And he certainly never expected men in white boiler suits and surgical gloves. There was an ambulance and umpteen squad cars, big and white. There were yards of fluttering tape marked continuously with the word ‘police’, but there was no flashing blue light, no scream of tyres. In fact, the Kent Constabulary had excelled themselves in the speed and efficiency of their response. From the time the call had come from Gary Leonard that a suspicious death had occurred at the Carnforth Centre, eight minutes had elapsed until the first officers had arrived. They were both armed, though no one knew it but them, and the scene of crime officer had followed minutes behind.

  So it was not until nearly midday that Chief Inspector Miles Warren stood in that darkened corridor in the centre’s sub-basement, surveying somebody’s handiwork. He’d been considered too short for the police at one time, but he either fiddled the measurement somehow or the force was desperate, because here he was, a man in mid-life who had never known a crisis. Or if he had, he never showed it. His lads called him ‘Stony’ because none of them had ever seen him smile.

  ‘What have we got, John?’

  Inspector John MacBride was losing his hair already. It was curly and blond, but it had been steadily deserting him ever since he’d left school. He didn’t really like Stony Warren, if the truth were known, but he knew the man knew his job and that would have to be good enough.

  ‘Mrs Elizabeth Striker,’ he told his superior. ‘Married. Age thirty-eight. She was on a course here.’


  Warren looked behind him. Uniforms. Cameras. No bloody doctor.

  ‘Do we have a police surgeon in this county?’ he asked anyone who cared to listen.

  ‘Dr Anderson was telephoned nearly two hours ago, sir,’ someone said. ‘His wife took the message.’

  ‘Really?’ Warren was unimpressed. ‘That’s about as helpful as somebody taking the piss. John? Care to chance your arm on this one?’

  Warren believed in giving his subordinates experience. Anyway, it took him off the spot. Stony only took chances on his own terms. He saw no reason to expose his inadequacies so early on a case.

  ‘Cause of death is likely to be a fractured skull,’ MacBride conjectured. ‘She was hit from behind, I’d say, though how often I don’t know.’

  ‘Murder weapon?’

  McBride shrugged. ‘Nothing yet. I’ve got men out in the grounds.’

  Warren had seen that on the way in. Ragged rows of uniformed coppers on their hands and knees in the shrubbery, like some strange primeval ritual. When a body is found, men in blue suits form lines and crawl forward, like a bizarre Tai Chi.

  ‘She didn’t die here, then?’ Warren took in the wall behind the dead woman’s head. There was no space in that tiny stock cupboard to crack an egg, let alone someone’s skull.

  ‘No, sir.’ McBride was sure. ‘Out in the corridor would be my guess. Then she was dragged in here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The old problem,’ McBride shrugged. ‘It’s all very well to put somebody’s lights out, but you’ve then got the perennial puzzle of what to do with the body.’

  ‘So you store it in a store room?’

  ‘It’s not good, is it?’

  ‘Not ideal, no,’ Warren nodded. ‘Perhaps just a temporary hiding place, until our man had time to think. Time to arrange something more permanent. You wouldn’t care to hazard a time on any of this, I suppose?’

  A smile flitted across McBride’s face. ‘Well, the body’s cold and loose. That means rigor mortis has come and gone. At least forty-eight hours, I’d say.’

  Warren nodded again. ‘Allowing for temperature variations, state of the body and so on.’ He glanced around him. ‘That’s odd,’ he said.