Maxwell’s Flame

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Was he now?’

  ‘So Margot Jenkinson told me. But then, we must assume that Margot’s vision is a threat impaired by the little pink elephants. You know what I found odd about Phyllida Bowles?’

  Sally shook her head. It was late and she felt desperately tired.

  ‘What she said when we got back from the beach on the problem-solving day. She saw the cop cars and said, “They must have found Liz Striker.” Prophetic soul, isn’t she, our Phyllie?’

  13

  That Saturday, Inspector John McBride went to Luton. And the first person he went to see was Phyllida Bowles. WPC O’Halloran was with him and a motley crew of kids were playing unseasonal football in the park, spurred on by the forthcoming World Cup in America.

  Phyllida Bowles was a wall-coloured woman, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair and glasses frames that matched her pallid skin. It wasn’t impossible for Mr Right to have come along, but the fact was that he hadn’t in all her thirty-nine years and in that time she’d become over-fussy, pedantic to the point of neurosis. And on Saturday morning, she walked in the park, come hell or high water, with the repulsive little Chihuahua which minced at her ankles.

  McBride hadn’t objected to the stroll. It was pleasant wandering under the acacias and the silver birch and he found himself wondering, as he often did in those situations, what passers-by thought of the threesome and if they knew what he and O’Halloran did for a living and that the woman who walked between them was a suspect in a murder enquiry.

  ‘What sort of opinion did you form of Rachel King?’ he asked Phyllida.

  ‘Opinion?’ She tugged the scampering Chihuahua to heel. ‘Well, actually, I didn’t like her.’

  ‘Really?’ McBride said. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Phyllida pushed the glasses back up the bridge of her nose, another of the little habits she’d acquired in twenty years of solitude. ‘It’s difficult to quantify it.’ Phyllida was a Maths teacher at heart. ‘Something to do with men, I suppose.’

  ‘Men?’ Being allowed to wear plain clothes had clearly given Mavis O’Halloran ideas above her station. She was asking the questions now. ‘In what way?’

  Phyllida didn’t like having to twist her neck in two directions. Still, the walk had been at her insistence, so she could hardly complain. She hadn’t liked the idea of the police in her house, invading her privacy. ‘She was a man’s woman,’ she said, frowning as if to concentrate on Rachel and her memories of her. ‘A flirt, if you like. She was one of those annoying people who don’t seem to be paying attention all that much. Oh, they say “yes” and “no” in the right places, but their eyes are always wandering. Always looking over your shoulder. It’s very disconcerting.’

  ‘And who was Rachel looking at during these conversations?’ McBride asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Just men in general, I think. I can’t recall anyone in particular, except …’

  ‘Yes?’ the police persons chorused.

  ‘Peter Maxwell was here yesterday. At school, I mean.’

  McBride had stopped walking. So had O’Halloran. ‘Was he?’ the Inspector asked.

  ‘And Sally Greenhow. I didn’t actually speak to Mr Maxwell, but Sally and I went for a walk.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’ McBride resumed the two and a half miles an hour stroll he’d learned at Bramshill.

  ‘Oh, people on the course mostly. At Carnforth. What I thought of them. Pretty well what you’re asking now.’

  ‘I see. While you were talking to Mrs Greenhow, where was Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Phyllida shrugged, reaching in her handbag for her cigarettes. ‘But I know he talked to Gregory.’

  ‘Gregory Trant?’

  ‘Yes. And to Dr Moreton too, I understand.’

  ‘Well, well,’ McBride threw a glance at the WPC, ‘he has been a busy little bee, hasn’t he?’ And all three of them knew that ‘bee’ stood for bastard.

  ‘Pull him in,’ was Superintendent Malcolm’s order over the car phone. ‘Pull both of them in. If they’re going to play Nick and Nora Charles all over the place, they must expect to have their collars felt. You’ve got their addresses?’

  McBride had their addresses. He and O’Halloran left Phyllida Bowles by the tennis courts and drove south. The M25 was the sluggish bitch it always was and, infuriating though it was, this was not an enquiry that merited blue flashing lights and screaming sirens, so the unmarked police car idled along with all the other Saturday strollers, belching fumes into the ozone over Surrey.

  It was nearly three before they reached Leighford and neither of them had eaten. At a service station they grabbed a Ginsters and a packet of Salt ‘n’ Shake each and washed it all down with something diet in a can. Then they drove for Maxwell’s home in Columbine Avenue.

  Like all the houses in Columbine, number 38 was a town house, built in the heady ’80s before the recession bit hard and builders went out of business, leaving scaffolding and rain-filled holes in the ground where dreams and profits lay together in the mud. McBride had driven all the way from Luton. O’Halloran could have the honour of ringing Maxwell’s chimes.

  ‘He’s not in, you know.’ The rather plummy elderly voice came from nowhere. McBride peered through the privet bush to his left. A rather plummy elderly lady stood there, in gardening gloves, inspecting her roses.

  ‘We’re looking for Mr Maxwell,’ the Inspector said, walking round the bush to look the old bat full in the face.

  ‘Yes, I know you are,’ she said, looking at the callers over her pince-nez. ‘I’ve told you. He’s not in.’

  ‘Do you know where he’s gone, Miss …?’

  ‘Mrs,’ the elderly lady insisted quietly. McBride narrowed his eyes at her. It could be possible. ‘I’m afraid before I can tell you that, I shall need to know who you are and what your business is with Mr Maxwell. I am a member of the Neighbourhood Watch Committee, you know.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ McBride smiled, and he flashed his warrant card. ‘I am Detective Inspector McBride of the Kent CID and this is WPC O’Halloran.’

  ‘Hello, my dear,’ the old girl smiled. ‘My name is Jessica Troubridge. I’m Mr Maxwell’s next-door neighbour.’

  ‘Hello,’ WPC O’Halloran smiled back.

  ‘WPC,’ Mrs Troubridge tutted, ‘that’s about as unattractive as those awful hats they make you wear. What’s your real name, dear?’

  ‘Er … Mavis,’ the WPC confessed.

  ‘Oh dear.’ The old lady’s face fell. ‘Still, there it is. Damage’s been done now, I suppose.’

  ‘You were about to tell us where Mr Maxwell is.’ McBride thought it time to intervene.

  ‘Was I?’ Mrs Troubridge frowned. ‘Oh no, I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t?’ It was McBride’s turn to frown. Any minute now the old girl would probably start painting the roses red.

  ‘Well, how can I?’ She spread her scrawny arms. ‘You see, I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Has he just popped out for a minute, Mrs Troubridge?’ O’Halloran asked. She had a granny about the old girl’s age. You had to give them a bit of help. ‘Gone down Tesco’s?’

  ‘Please don’t patronize me, Policewoman O’Halloran. With a first name like yours, you can’t afford to. Mr Maxwell wouldn’t be seen dead “down Tesco’s”, as you put it. He has an account at Rohan’s, a delicatessen and vintners in the High Street. And if he’s popped anywhere, it’s a long pop.’

  ‘Er … in what sense, Mrs Troubridge?’ McBride knew a venomous old besom when he saw one.

  ‘Why do you people, out of your jurisdiction, I may add, want to talk to him? That business at Leighford High was cleared up.’

  ‘We aren’t concerned with anything at Leighford High, madam,’ McBride said, ‘and neither are we out of our jurisdiction. This isn’t America, you know.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She stood her ground.

  ‘We are pursuing a mu
rder enquiry,’ McBride told her.

  ‘Good heavens.’ Jessica Troubridge gripped her pruning shears. ‘Perhaps this is America. I’m sure Mr Maxwell is in the clear. He has a degree, you know.’

  ‘Where has he gone, madam?’ McBride could sense his hackles rising uncontrollably.

  ‘I’ve told you. I don’t know.’ She stood nose to chest with him. ‘All I know is that he has gone for the weekend. I have instructions to feed his cat.’

  ‘And he didn’t say where he was going?’

  ‘He did not.’ Mrs Troubridge was adamant. ‘Am I my neighbour’s keeper?’

  ‘No, madam.’ McBride turned to the road. ‘And I bet you’re glad about that.’ He glanced at Mavis O’Halloran. ‘I know I would be.’

  There weren’t many state boarding schools in the ’90s. Most of them began life as institutions for forces kids, in the days when Britain still had a Commonwealth of sorts and the Army of the Rhine was there in case the Germans misbehaved themselves for a third time in the century. St Bede’s School, Bournemouth was doubly unusual to the point of being unique. It was a Catholic state boarding school.

  Maxwell knew this already of course – that St Bede’s was Catholic, that is. What he wasn’t prepared for was the boarding bit. He’d taken the train that Saturday morning and rattled west. There were rumours of an impending rail strike, but Jimmy Knapp couldn’t be that much of a dinosaur, could he? To take his union into a running fight with Mr Major and the forces of progress? Maxwell had staggered back to his seat from buying his tea and his limp bacon and egg roll, fully aware as he caught his groin for the umpteenth time on a seat corner why it was called the buffet car.

  The Head of Sixth Form knew Bournemouth tolerably well. In keeping with Sally Greenhow’s view that he could town-bore for England, Maxwell was aware that Squire Lewis Tregonwell had transformed the bare Dorset heathland as far back as 1811 when he’d built a summer house where now stands the Royal Exeter Hotel. He was also aware that Sir George Taps-Gervis built on the site twenty-six years later. A jetty, a pier and an arcade followed as inevitably as trouble followed Peter Maxwell.

  He followed the Bourne as it wound down to the sea through the pine-scented Upper Gardens. It was an oddly geometric town, Bournemouth, with the Square, which he crossed, and the Triangle off to the west. He took the Old Christchurch Road past the Railway Museum and on to Madeira Road and the police station. The traffic was heavy. It was the hard court tennis championships that week and the hotels were bustling as the town enjoyed an early boost to the season. It all made Leighford look like a graveyard.

  Off Holdenhurst Road, he reached it, a cluster of ’30s buildings surrounded by ’60s high-rise, already swathed in scaffolding. The only thing that made the school look different from any other was the wrought-iron monstrosity welded to the wall; the Venereal Bede, monk and scholar, fifteen foot high in gilded metal.

  Peter Maxwell didn’t really know why he’d come. He only knew he wasn’t happy with the answers he’d got from the Luton lot. And that he didn’t want Sally with him. He knew that if he’d breathed a word to her yesterday, about his intention to make this journey too, she’d have been there, outside number 38, Columbine, engine ticking over, tapping ash into her ashtray and listening to something indescribable on FM. And that wouldn’t have been fair. Sally had been through enough.

  Sally sat with her back to the wall watching Superintendent Terry Malcolm. She’d wanted Alan to be with her, but Superintendent Malcolm had pointed out that he wasn’t a solicitor and that his presence would only complicate things. Did she have a solicitor? Only some office junior who’d stung the Greenhows pretty sharply when they’d bought their house. And the little shit had had trouble conveyancing. She knew he’d be totally out of his depth with this. So Sally was alone. And Alan sat in a bleak waiting-room where posters pointed out the fairly obvious fact that there was a thief about. Others urged him to lock his car. An earnest-looking desk man had offered him a cup of tea, but Alan didn’t drink tea and they didn’t do coffee. So he sat and he looked at his watch and he waited.

  Sally watched Malcolm and she watched the tape recorder spool turning.

  ‘Tell me again,’ the Superintendent said, ‘just for the record.’

  Sally hadn’t caught the name of the Sergeant from West Sussex CID sitting next to the great man; but she didn’t like him. The WPC over by the cold radiator had an irritating sniff and, for a moment, Sally wondered if this was part of the routine – a sort of nasal Chinese torture designed to make her crack. If that was so, it was damn close to working.

  ‘We went to investigate,’ she told the Superintendent, ‘Mr Maxwell and I. We knew the police … you … had detained Dr Moreton. We wanted to know why.’

  Malcolm smiled. ‘Tell me, Mrs Greenhow,’ he said, ‘if you had a toothache, would you do your own root canal work?’

  ‘No.’ She blinked at the stupidity of the question.

  ‘Or deliver your own baby?’

  ‘Probably not.’ Sally felt her throat mottling. Who did this objectionable bastard think he was, probing in this highly personal way?

  ‘Then why do you presume to carry out enquiries which are properly the business of the police?’

  ‘I felt … I just felt …’ Sally had been too long in Special Needs. The cut and thrust of intellectual debate was not her daily fare. When you’re dealing, day in, day out, with kids with room temperature IQs, you don’t have to be Einstein.

  ‘You just felt you had to support Peter Maxwell,’ Malcolm finished the sentence for her.

  ‘No. I … Well …’

  ‘Sally,’ Malcolm said softly, ‘we know. We know he knew Rachel King before. We know he was personally involved.’

  ‘You can’t possibly think he killed her,’ she said, staring the man in the face. She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t let him rattle her. She wouldn’t let him rattle her and she wouldn’t shop Max. She owed him more than that.

  ‘I don’t know who killed Rachel King,’ Malcolm said, ‘but it’s only a matter of time until I do. Or it would be if we didn’t have amateurs tripping over each other in the middle of it.’

  ‘It was Maxwell’s idea, though, wasn’t it?’ the dislikeable Sergeant asked.

  Sally’s eyes flickered across to him. His face was flat, cold, expressionless. Alongside the elegant Malcolm, he looked like a squashed bug. ‘I drove him,’ she said. ‘Max doesn’t drive.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ the Sergeant said. ‘In a bloke, I mean.’

  Sally just scowled at him. The remark was so predictable, so sexist, she wouldn’t give it the satisfaction of a reply.

  ‘All right,’ Malcolm said. ‘So you spoke to whom?’

  ‘Er … Phyllida Bowles, Gregory Trant, Alan Harper-Bennet, Andrew Moreton.’

  ‘The whole gamut,’ Malcolm nodded.

  ‘We wanted some answers,’ Sally told him. ‘Look, can I have a cigarette?’ She fumbled in her bag.

  ‘They’re bad for you,’ the Sergeant said with a smirk.

  ‘Of course,’ Malcolm interrupted and flicked out a lighter. Smooth bastard, thought Sally, but she let him light the ciggie for her. Her own hand was shaking and she couldn’t trust herself. The Superintendent put the lighter away and leaned back. ‘Inspector McBride had paid a visit to Mr Maxwell before he called on you,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, Mr Maxwell wasn’t in. A couple of boys from the Sussex force have kindly consented to sit all night in a cold, cramped car, just in case he returns. You wouldn’t care to save them the trouble, would you? By telling us where he is, I mean?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is. The last I saw of him was early this morning. I dropped him at home and that was it.’

  ‘You’d driven straight from Luton?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What time did you get to Leighford?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nine thirty? Ten? We left early from the motel.’

  ‘Share a room, did you?’ The Sergeant still had the sa
me smirk on his face.

  Sally leaned to the microphone. ‘No, you smutty little bastard, I did not share a room with Peter Maxwell. The man is a colleague of mine. Nothing more. I don’t have to be here at all, still less listening to your infantile innuendo.’

  The WPC against the radiator felt like clapping, but she was not a brave soul and her whole upbringing had conspired to persuade her it was a man’s world. In the event, she simply sat.

  ‘I’m afraid you do have to be here,’ Malcolm said, his smile gone. ‘Interfering in a police enquiry is a criminal offence.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call asking some questions interfering,’ Sally said, trying to keep her voice in check. She got a bit shrill when she was annoyed and she felt her larynx tightening for the big one.

  Malcolm jerked his head at the Sergeant who glared at Sally, then scraped back his chair and made for the door. The Superintendent quickly adjusted the volume control as the slam shook the room.

  ‘You know, Sally,’ he said quietly, ‘you’ve made life a bit difficult for us.’

  ‘Have I?’ She fidgeted with her cigarette, then sat back and crossed her knees. ‘How?’

  ‘We’ve had rather a bad press recently,’ he told her. ‘Miscarriages of justice, calls to arm us, longer night sticks and so on. It all smacks to people of a police state.’

  ‘Is this relevant?’ She was summoning up her reserves of defiance and he knew it.

  ‘Bear with me,’ he smiled. ‘We are surrounded by the yob culture, Sally. Depending on whose figures you believe, we’re either drowning or we’ve been at the bottom for years and fishes gnaw our bones. Our job is not made any easier by the cognoscenti like you, the great middle class we were created to protect. You’re intelligent enough to realize that we’re actually on the same side, you and I.’

  Sally knew that Mad Max would have had an answer to that, but Mad Max wasn’t there. And she was. She felt like a little girl again, that time her kid brother had smashed a window and she was left to take the rap.