Maxwell’s Flame

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Ah,’ his eyes lit up, ‘Chateau Carnforth. A ’43 by its label, not too presumptuous in its precociousness.’

  ‘It’s actually bottled for Tesco,’ she said, yanking out the cork with her Special Needs Department bottle-opener, ‘and if it’s older than last Christmas, I’ll vote Conservative.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘now, there’s a rash statement. Found your knickers?’

  ‘No.’ She poured for them both. ‘I don’t think there’s much point in letting this breathe – it looks as if it’s been on an iron lung for weeks. Cheers.’

  ‘Here’s looking at you, kid!’ and he took a gulp. It didn’t mix well with Southern Comfort, but he wasn’t enough of a cad to say so. ‘Here’s to crime.’

  ‘What did McBride want?’

  ‘To warn me off, basically,’ Maxwell told her, loosening his bow-tie.

  ‘Off what?’

  ‘Aren’t they the water authorities watchdog?’

  ‘Maxwell,’ Sally growled. All in all, she felt she’d gone through enough today.

  ‘Sorry.’ He beamed his most endearing beam. ‘The case, dear heart. He warned me off the case. Called me Miss Marple at one point.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Sally said, lolling on the bed. ‘You must be twice Joan Hickson’s age.’

  ‘Thank you, seat of my desires,’ he grinned acidly. ‘But to more important matters. The Luton lot.’

  ‘Ah, yes …’ Sally jerked her bum forward and reached for the Former Yugoslavian red again. ‘Well, “lot” is a rather, shall we say, plural way of putting it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I began with Alan Harper-Bennet.’

  ‘And?’

  Sally wasn’t inclined to tell Maxwell about Valerie Marks knowing Rachel. Anyway, it was rather a long shot. It wasn’t likely to be the same woman. And she wasn’t sure how Maxwell would react to the news. Better let sleeping Heads of Sixth Form lie. ‘I got no further. I sat by him at breakfast, intending to sneak in a few searching questions and go on to someone else, Dr Moreton, perhaps. Or Phyllida Bowles. Anyway, Mr Harper-Bennet had other ideas.’

  ‘Fancied you, did he?’

  ‘In an oblique sort of way, yes. It’s never happened to you, Max, so you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’ Maxwell looked hurt and outraged at the same time. ‘That’s not altogether true, you know. I’ve had my flings, sown my oats and other metaphors.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that.’ She hunted for her ciggies. ‘I mean… well, it wasn’t me Harper-Bennet fancied, but my body.’

  Maxwell looked blank. ‘I thought the two were inseparable,’ he said. ‘He’s not likely to fancy your mind, is he?’

  It was Sally’s turn to look hurt.

  ‘No,’ Maxwell knew a raw nerve when he saw one, ‘I didn’t mean that disparagingly. God, I’d kill for an MEd.’

  ‘Liar!’ she threw at him. ‘What I meant was that men like Harper-Bennet treat you as a sex object. I got the impression he’d be equally happy with my … Oh, God …’

  ‘Panties?’ Maxwell was way ahead of her.

  Sally nodded. ‘It had to be,’ she said. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ and she fumbled to light her cigarette. ‘The thought of that pallid bastard sneaking into the pool changing-rooms …’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Maxwell could be an insensitive bastard at times. This was one of them, dismissing the girl’s sense of outrage with a double positive and a swig of wine. ‘Now, let’s share a few facts. How did the Luton lot get here?’

  ‘Moreton, Phyllida Bowles and Gregory Trant came in the school minibus. Apparently, they’ve got another one for school teams and so on. And they needed it to bring all their presentation equipment, not realizing that they had all the hardware here at Carnforth anyway.’

  ‘And Harper-Bennet?’

  ‘Brought his car.’

  Maxwell flicked aside the curtains again to view the line of vehicles parked under the artificial light. ‘Do we know what he drives?’

  ‘No.’ Sally blew smoke to the ceiling. ‘But I’ll lay you odds he’s got my knickers in his boot.’

  ‘What time did they arrive on the Thursday?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Harper-Bennet was here first. The others hit a lot of traffic on the M25.’

  ‘As you do,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘What did Harper-Bennet do?’

  ‘Found his room.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Sally nodded, nostrils flaring to cope with the smoke, ‘he made damn sure I knew that. 58 – on the first floor.’

  ‘What were his movements after that?’

  ‘It got a bit difficult then, Max,’ Sally said. ‘For a start, we were supposed to be initiating change in our respective establishments and had to persuade recalcitrant old bastards like you of the need for GNVQ, and secondly, Harper-Bennet was doing his best to look at my tits.’

  ‘Is there a Mrs Harper-Bennet?’ Maxwell asked, out of curiosity.

  ‘There is not. Who’d have him?’

  ‘Who indeed?’ Maxwell was elsewhere.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Sally said slowly, ‘a look of inscrutability has appeared on your otherwise benign features. What’s going on in that febrile brain?’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘if only we could answer that. Try this for size. Alan Harper-Bennet is a weirdo. Into ladies’ undies in a mammoth way. Perhaps he has a collection at home in Luton – well, I don’t suppose there’s much else to do there, really. He makes a habit of adding to the collection whenever he can. He probably got yours today. Did he try to get Liz Striker’s last Thursday? Did she object? Put up a struggle? Did he panic and kill her?’

  ‘It’s a bit thin, Max,’ Sally said. ‘Surely, if that’s the case, she’d have died in her room, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Maxwell said. ‘You see, I can’t help thinking that Liz died because she knew something.’

  ‘What?’

  I said –’

  ‘No.’ Sally shook her head in irritation. ‘I mean, what did she know?’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell’s finger was in the air, ‘the sixty-four thousand dollar question. If we knew that, we’d have chummy in the frame.’

  ‘How did you make out – no, let me rephrase that – what did you learn from Rachel?’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ Maxwell looked at his watch and gulped down his wine. ‘Not a lot, really. Listen, we’ll do a swap tomorrow. I’ll tackle Phyllida Bowles. You have a go at Michael Wynn.’

  ‘Max,’ Sally stood up with him, ‘I want to go home tomorrow. Remember?’

  He looked at the frightened face under the pink towel, slightly flushed with the wine. He patted her cheek. ‘Sally,’ he said, ‘the day before yesterday you were all set for me to solve this thing. I can’t do that if I’m not here.’

  ‘That was then,’ she said, ‘before …’

  ‘Before Alan Harper-Bennet swiped your knickers.’

  ‘Quite.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ he said. ‘I can catch a train, you know, if you want to go. Let’s see what the morning brings, shall we?’

  And he left her to lock the door firmly behind him.

  It was late. Hustling past the rubber plant at the top of the stairs, he crashed as quietly as he could through the fire-doors and down to the next floor. He caught himself a nasty one on the fire extinguisher on the corner, and then, he was there. Outside Room 215. He knocked once. Twice. God alone knew what emotions ran through Peter Maxwell’s mind as he waited there. He felt like a fumbling student again, in those pre-permissive days of the early ’60s, when it was all Elvis and John Leyton and strawberries at Grantchester and the plop of punt poles on the Cam. Her face hadn’t changed. Her laugh. The easy way she had with her. But she was older. Christ, he was older. There’d been no grey hair then, no side-whiskers. He’d still been trim from seven years of rugger and cricket. He’d only recently discovered Southern Comfort. What was he doing here? It could be a
disaster. But he knocked again, his heart thumping.

  No answer. Maxwell checked his watch in the stillness of the corridor. It was nearly half-past twelve, for God’s sake. Earlier, they’d made their tryst for midnight. But Maxwell had let this wretched Liz Striker business intervene. He’d put it first. But it wasn’t the case, was it? Not really. It was his own inflated ego, that was all. Well, he was paying for it now. Rachel was obviously asleep.

  Maxwell quietly drove his forehead silently against the door frame. What an idiot! Still, he’d see her at breakfast and apologize. There was always tomorrow.

  Tomorrow was Tuesday. Maxwell thought, as he shaved in the innermost recesses of Room 101, that he’d normally be having 10CS this morning. Some poor bastard of a supply teacher would be taking them instead. Donna would be putting her lipstick on, Stacey would be doing her hair – or Carla’s as the mood took her. Ronnie would be tackling his sandwiches about now. And in front of this hidden curriculum, they were supposed to be discussing the Bay of Pigs. Well, well. Perhaps GNVQ at Carnforth had its attractions after all. One of them was lying in. Maxwell had been doggo after his shower and it was only the sound of cars on the gravel under his window that woke him up.

  He chose the spotted tie this morning – the one he told everybody had been given to him by Sir Robin Day in exchange for a few interviewing tips – and padded down in his brothel-creepers to face the world. But there was no one in the Hadleigh Suite. A few scattered pieces of toast and half-finished coffees gave it an aura of the Marie Celeste. Even the red-faced woman who doled out the scrambled eggs had vanished. Maxwell nearly looked out of the window to see if the lifeboats had gone.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ A female voice made him turn. It was WPC O’Halloran, grim-faced, tired-looking.

  ‘Good morning, my dear,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Everybody’s in the Whittingham Suite. Shall we?’

  ‘By all means,’ Maxwell said and a difficult few seconds of protocol followed, during which she eventually let him go first.

  Everybody was indeed in the Whittingham Suite. They all seemed to be gabbling at once, like the elect crowd invited to the BAFTA award ceremonies they persisted in showing every year on the telly – loads of luvvies congratulating each other while secretly hating everybody’s guts. The only one Maxwell couldn’t see was Rachel. Perhaps she’d slept in. A rather ashen-faced Inspector McBride stood on the dais at the front, flanked by assorted heavies in and out of uniform. For all it was a Tuesday morning, clearly in shift hours, McBride wore neither tie nor jacket. Something, as Sherlock Holmes might have said, was clearly afoot.

  Maxwell sat at the back. He had no hope of reaching Sally Greenhow, flanked as she was by Alan Harper-Bennet on one side and Valerie Marks on the other. Margot Jenkinson moved her bag for him.

  ‘Have I missed the main feature?’ Maxwell whispered to her.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she said. ‘We were all summoned from breakfast. I’d kill for a bit of toast. Camel?’ She poked a cigarette packet under Maxwell’s nose.

  ‘No thanks.’ He waved them aside, unsure whether to smoke them or ride them.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ McBride cleared his throat. ‘I apologize for calling you together like this.’

  Maxwell noticed that there were Carnforth staff members in the audience too. Tracey was there, the counter and reception manned in her absence by God-knew-who; Antonio, the chef for the week, in a less than reputable off-white shirt; and the ever-up Gary Leonard, groomed, as always, to within an inch of his life. The red-faced woman peered over his shoulder.

  ‘I am sorry to have to be the one to tell you that there has been another incident here at the centre. The body of Mrs Rachel King was found a little over half an hour ago.’

  Peter Maxwell sat under one of the cedars that had stood by the road for years. Far, far longer ago than the building of the Carnforth Centre, there had been a house on this site. Three cedars had been planted then. The storm of ’87 had claimed one and the branches of the second had been lopped by the council, because they drooped too low over the road.

  He saw her coming, a green and stonewashed speck in the strong sunlight that still gilded the centre. He sat in the evening shadows, a little chill in his shirt-sleeves, because the heat of the day was not yet that great, his arms outstretched, resting on his knees, like a model for a Maxfield Parrish.

  ‘I’ve looked everywhere for you,’ Sally said, looking down at him. She sat on the grass by his elbow. ‘Max, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what she meant to you; not really. But all the same …’

  ‘That’s the irony of it,’ he said, staring ahead at the uniformed policemen standing in knots in the front drive, and the big, white cars, ‘neither do I. Oh, once … Once she was everything. I couldn’t open a book or turn a corner without seeing her there – her face, her hair. That musical laugh she had.’

  ‘Max,’ Sally played with the grass, afraid to look her old colleague in the face, ‘it’s none of my business, I know, but …’

  ‘I left her,’ he smiled. He looked at the frizzy-haired girl who in turn found the courage to look at him. ‘Was that what you were wondering?’

  Sally shook her head. ‘I’ve no right to ask,’ she said.

  ‘No, no.’ He patted her hand, and gave her his Bob Hoskins. ‘No, it’s good to talk. It helps. I’ve been on my own all day, walking the shingle, the dunes. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the gulls cry so lonely before. Not even when Jenny …’

  ‘Your wife?’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘No, Jenny was taken from me’, he said, ‘by the chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. With Rachel, it was different. It was a conscious decision. I let her go.’

  ‘Why?’ Sally asked.

  Maxwell chuckled. ‘I’m damned if I know now. Then, when I was twenty-one and my whole life was before me … Well, it all seemed so different. I hadn’t lived alone for twenty years then. Hadn’t sent myself a big, red, indiarubber ball for Christmas. Maybe if I had … Then, I felt trapped. How does the Bard put it? “Cabined, cribbed, confined.” I felt I was being smothered, Sally. And I needed to breathe.’

  ‘How did she take it?’

  ‘Badly,’ he remembered, watching John McBride emerge into the sunlight a hundred yards away beyond the sloping lawns. ‘We’d gone for a walk along the river, by the Backs. It was an evening like this, the May Ball – which, Cambridge being Cambridge, is always held in June, of course. I’d paid a bomb for the tickets, hired a dinner jacket – I wasn’t used to a bow-tie then; the damned thing was killing me. Rachel looked lovely. She’d hired a ball gown, powder blue with sparkly bits. We danced. We sang. We drank. Probably not in that order. I hadn’t planned to tell her, to spoil the evening. It was magic. I could see it in her eyes. But along the Backs, just passing King’s, it all came out. My pathetic sermonizing. Cliches about not being right for each other, not working out. She cried. I cried. I offered to take her home … well, back to her digs, I mean. She wouldn’t. The last I saw of her she was standing on that little bridge at King’s, still lovely, still adorable …’ His voice tailed away until Sally gripped his arm again.

  ‘She sent me a letter,’ Maxwell went on, staring ahead again. ‘It was vitriolic, Sal. In all my fifty-odd years, I’ve still never read anything like it. She said cruel things, untrue things. Hurtful … I couldn’t blame her.’

  ‘Perhaps you had a lucky escape, Maxie,’ she said softly.

  ‘Oh, now,’ he smiled, squeezing the hand that held his arm, ‘you’re not going all dewy-eyed on me, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Sally choked back the tears, ‘no, you old bastard, you don’t deserve it.’

  ‘I thought you were going home today,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sally sniffed, ‘I thought I was too.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell.’ The voice made them both look up. It was a uniformed constable neither of them recognized.
‘Mr Warren would like to see you. In the incident room.’

  Chief Inspector Warren had been missing for two days. No one at Carnforth had seen him on the Monday. And now it was Tuesday evening, it seemed he’d turned up for the first time.

  Maxwell was ushered into the pool of light in the incident room. He noticed what looked like the stub of one of Margot Jenkinson’s Camels in the ashtray. Warren, sitting opposite him and next to John McBride, looked older. Years older.

  ‘I don’t have long, Mr Maxwell,’ the Chief Inspector said, looking at his watch. ‘John.’

  McBride flicked the switch. ‘Interview commenced nineteen eighteen between Chief Inspector Warren and Mr Peter Maxwell; Inspector McBride in attendance.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Warren began, ‘you know of course that Mrs King is dead.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was the nature of your relationship with her?’

  ‘We were … old friends.’

  ‘Friends?’ Warren checked, letting a pencil stub slide through his fingers.

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘How old?’ McBride jabbed in.

  ‘Until this week, I hadn’t seen Mrs King for nearly thirty years.’

  ‘That’s a long time,’ Warren nodded, narrowing his eyes. ‘Where did you know her?’

  ‘At Cambridge,’ Maxwell said. ‘I was at Jesus, reading History. She was at Homerton, down the road.’

  ‘That’s a college of education?’ Warren asked.

  ‘It was then,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I believe it’s part of the University now, affiliated in some way.’

  ‘Did you know that Mrs King was going to be here? On this course?’ McBride asked.

  ‘No. She was Rachel Cameron when I knew her. And in any case, we weren’t sent lists of personnel in advance. It wasn’t until we were having coffee on the first morning that I realized who she was. Tell me, Chief Inspector, how did Rachel … how did Mrs King die?’

  Warren flashed a glance at McBride. ‘She was beaten to death,’ he said flatly, with no emotion at all. ‘Just like Liz Striker.’