Maxwell’s Flame

by M. J. Trow

  This time Maxwell crouched in front of him, wrenching the hands from the Chaplain’s face. ‘What?’ he bellowed.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Gracewell shouted back. ‘No one knew about me. No one. Not until you. Now. Today. The police came here. To ask me more questions. But they didn’t have a warrant. They didn’t even look round. No one was blackmailing me, Mr Maxwell. I swear to God.’

  Maxwell blinked, his face and eyes stinging. ‘It’s a bit late to invoke the Almighty, isn’t it, Gracewell?’ he snarled. ‘You’ve got the blood of two women on your conscience. Not to mention your rather feeble attempt to frame two men.’

  ‘No.’ Gracewell was whimpering, shaking his head slowly, backwards and forwards. ‘No, I haven’t. I couldn’t kill anybody.’

  Maxwell stood up sharply. He suddenly remembered a ’60s film noir. Crusty old policeman Sean Connery is interrogating slimy shit Ian Bannen whom he suspects of child murder. Crusty old Sean beats slimy Ian to death because he can’t crack him and because he’s frustrated and, well, just because. And that’s how Maxwell felt. He wanted to demolish Gracewell’s skull just as Gracewell had demolished Rachel’s and Liz’s. But that wasn’t how civilized men did things. And in this world gone mad, where people kill people for their trainers, or a packet of white powder or a cause, Maxwell liked to think that he at least was still civilized. Perhaps, indeed, the last bastion of civilization.

  He took a deep breath and turned his back. ‘Don’t make any plans to leave the country,’ he told Gracewell. Shit! In the tussle, Gracewell’s phone had gone down with him and was making a duff noise. Maxwell had seen a call box on the corner. He’d phone from there.

  He took the stairs again, two at a time, past the door of Mrs Verlander who thought he looked like the Boston Strangler, Albert de Salvo. ‘Wrong again, lady,’ Maxwell mumbled his best Bronx as he reached the front path. ‘Albert de Salvo’s upstairs.’

  He glanced up at Gracewell’s window, glanced down at the call box. He was fumbling in his pockets for change, deliberating whether he should be really gung-ho and ring 999. Then he remembered something. That film noir, the one where Sean Connery kills suspect Ian Bannen. Ian didn’t do it, did he? Sean had got it wrong, just like Mrs Verlander. Just like Peter Maxwell.

  And he was still working all this out in his head when the sky came down to hit him and the grass rolled away at his feet and his life came to a full stop.

  16

  ‘Would you like a corned beef sandwich, lover?’

  That was the first sensible thing anyone had said to Peter Maxwell in a long time. Try as he might, he couldn’t actually remember the nonsensical things they’d said in his vivid, turning dreams, but he knew they were nonsense.

  ‘No thanks.’ He shook his head and his vision reeled for a moment, like the depths of flu when your eyes and brain can’t quite catch up with reality or a slow motion death in a Sam Peckinpah film.

  ‘What about a cuppa, then?’

  Maxwell focused as well as he could. His quiz inquisitor was a middle-aged black woman, in the starched greenness of a nursing auxiliary. She was leaning on a trolley of fairly unappetizing goodies and Maxwell knew he was in an NHS ward of a Trust hospital. That or hell.

  ‘That would be nice,’ he said. He could actually move his head freely and there was no box over his bed, so unlike Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky he hadn’t lost his legs. Both arms seemed to be attached, and he had to assume his body still held all the offending limbs together.

  ‘There,’ the nursing auxiliary propped him up a bit, ‘that’s nice. You look like a two-sugar man to me, lover,’ she said, ‘so that’s what I’ve given you.’

  ‘Spot on, Nurse …?’

  ‘Janice,’ she said, smoothing down his pillow, ‘just Janice.’

  ‘Thank you, just Janice,’ Maxwell croaked. His mouth felt full of tongue, but his teeth seemed to be OK.

  ‘You stopped worrying about that phone call yet?’ she asked him.

  ‘Phone call?’ he frowned.

  ‘Yeah. When they brought you in last night you were rambling on about making a phone call and did I have any change. You wanna get one of them phonecards, lover. Useful, they are.’

  There was a commotion from somewhere behind Janice and she turned to bellow something that sounded like pure Barbados by way of Brixton at an old fogey in the next bed. Then she tutted as she turned back to Maxwell. ‘Geriatric ward, eh? Never quiet a bloody moment. Still, you either love ’em or hate ’em. Most of the time I hate ’em.’

  ‘Geriatric ward?’ Maxwell was confused.

  ‘Yeah.’ She ticked something off on a clipboard. ‘Wrinklies, lover, you know. Senior bleeding citizens. I don’t know why they don’t call it Paediatrics Part Two and have done.’

  ‘Why am I in a geriatric ward?’ Maxwell wanted to know. He may have been unconscious for a time, but he had his pride. ‘How many years have I been out for?’

  Janice trilled her ululating laugh. ‘Nah, lover. It’s just overcrowding, that’s all. You’ve only got bruising and suspected concussion, so they put you in here. Quite convenient really. Just as they brought you in, old Mr Binks died, so there was a bed. Well, he’d had a good life, so he couldn’t really complain. Anyway, talking of complaining, I’d better get the tea round or there might be a lynching. See ya later. All right, Albert,’ and she wheeled off down the ward, ‘keep yer bleeding wig on. Corned beef sandwich, lover?’

  Maxwell was just sampling his hot, sweet tea and taking in the bunches of flowers on the tables ahead of him when he was aware of two nurses, younger and whiter than Janice, whisking screens around him. Oh God, his brain screamed, not a blanket bath! Worse. The next face he saw was that of Inspector John McBride.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ The Inspector pulled up one of those steel-framed plastic seats they keep under the beds.

  ‘I’ve been better,’ Maxwell said, watching WPC O’Halloran and a man perch themselves on his other side. ‘What, no grapes?’

  ‘This is DS Jervis,’ McBride introduced the man, ‘West Sussex CID.’

  Jervis nodded.

  ‘You know WPC O’Halloran, I believe, from the Carnforth Centre.’

  Maxwell nodded too. Mavis O’Halloran flashed him the briefest of smiles.

  ‘Well, Mr Maxwell/McBride said, ‘we nearly didn’t get to you at all.’

  ‘I think’, Maxwell said, after a pause, ‘it’s about now I’m supposed to say, “What am I doing here?” Or even, on a more B feature level, “Where am I?”’

  ‘You’re in Bournemouth General.’ DS Jervis had his notebook poised, like a rather unlikely-looking personal secretary. He even had one knee cocked coyly over the other. The short-thighed Peter Maxwell was always quietly jealous of people who could do that.

  ‘As to what you’re doing here,’ McBride took up the tale, ‘you’re recovering from what might have been a fatal accident. We think you were hit by a car.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Maxwell groaned, trying to put his cup and saucer on the bedside thingy. ‘From where I’m lying, I can assure you it was at the very least a twenty-ton truck.’

  ‘You walked away from whatever it was with a slight concussion and severe bruising,’ McBride told him. ‘We’re actually more interested, not in where you are now, but where you were when the accident happened. Or rather, where you’d been.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Maxwell said.

  McBride leaned back, smiling at his colleagues. ‘Selective amnesia,’ he said. ‘Very common among those with something to hide.’

  Maxwell took in the pale green screens that shielded him from the outside world of the geriatric ward. On McBride’s instructions, no doubt, they’d turned Maxwell’s bed and its environs into an instant incident room. But there was no solicitor, no tape recorder, no single phone call. And that could work in his favour.

  ‘And isn’t it about now,’ he asked them, ‘that I yell very loudly,’ and he raised his voice, the one that
had sent generations of schoolkids – not to mention colleagues – scurrying for cover. ‘What are you doing with that rubber truncheon? No, please, no! Don’t hit me again!’

  As if on cue, a white-capped nurse poked her head around the screen. ‘What’s going on here?’ she wanted to know. The police persons hadn’t left their seats, but Maxwell was cowering under the covers.

  ‘Just testing, nurse,’ the impatient patient beamed. ‘Reaction time – six seconds. Well done. I shall never believe them again when they say the NHS is on its last legs. And by the way, I’ve always thought our nurses are wonderful.’

  Her face said it all. ‘Any more nonsense and I’ll have to fetch Sister,’ and she snapped the curtains closed again.

  ‘There you are,’ Maxwell said, widening his eyes. ‘Sister,’ and he mouthed the words almost noiselessly.

  ‘This whole thing is a game to you, Mr Maxwell, isn’t it?’ McBride sneered.

  Mad Max sat upright as well as the dizziness would allow and looked the blue-eyed Inspector full in the face. ‘Don’t let this bon viveur exterior fool you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘A woman I once loved had her head caved in last week. I’m trying to do something about that.’

  ‘I know you are,’ McBride said, ‘and I tried to warn you off it, didn’t I? It’s not your job, Mr Maxwell. People get hurt. You’ve been hurt. You should have left it to us.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Maybe it’s just the vigilante in all of us. Charles Bronson hasn’t got a monopoly on that, you know.’

  ‘We’ll sort it out,’ McBride assured him.

  ‘No doubt you will,’ Maxwell said. ‘But the difference between you and me, Mr McBride, is that to you, it’s just a job. Oh, I have no doubt you’re a thorough-going professional, what in Jack Warner’s day was called a good copper. And no doubt, you’re under pressure from on high to get a result and close the book. But I knew Rachel King. I once loved Rachel King. If … if things had turned out differently, I’d have spent two-thirds of my life with Rachel King. And when she died, well, it became personal.’

  ‘All right,’ McBride said quietly, ‘let’s start with this, shall we?’ and he produced a piece of paper from his inside pocket. ‘The blackmail note.’

  ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.

  ‘From your jacket pocket,’ the Inspector told him, ‘along with a wallet, a few credit cards, a house key and fourteen pounds thirty-eight pence in change. That’s how we knew you were here.’

  ‘Inter-force co-operation,’ Jervis said. ‘We got a wire through the telex that the Kent boys were looking for you. When you turned up on a stretcher here at the General, their search was over.’

  ‘Does that mean I’m under arrest?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘That all depends’, McBride said, ‘on your answers to my questions. Now, once again – the blackmail note.’

  ‘You might as well tell us,’ Mavis O’Halloran said. ‘Mrs Greenhow has talked to us already.’

  Now Maxwell knew the ploy. Divide and conquer. Nice policeman. Nasty policeman. One offers tea and ciggies, the other electrodes on the testicles. But they both imply they know more than they do, that another villain has already coughed. That’s how they got the Krays. In this case, however, Maxwell knew it was true. Alan Greenhow had told him so over the phone.

  ‘Sally found it in Alan Harper-Bennet’s room at the Carnforth Centre,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘And what did she do with it?’

  ‘Took it,’ Maxwell said. ‘I took it from her.’

  ‘With or without her knowledge?’

  ‘With,’ Maxwell came clean. ‘I had copies made.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted to confront certain people with it. I didn’t want the original destroyed.’

  ‘Very enterprising,’ McBride nodded. ‘Who did you want to confront?’

  ‘Alan Harper-Bennet, since it was his room the note was found in.’

  Jervis and O’Halloran were scribbling away as though Peter Maxwell were some latter-day Sam Johnson and they a couple of Boswells.

  ‘And what did he say?’ McBride asked.

  ‘Denied it was his,’ Maxwell shrugged.

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said, as though the realization had just come to him. ‘Yes, I did. He said it was slipped under his door. He thought by Gregory Trant.’

  ‘Trant?’

  ‘Yes. Contrary to his behaviour at Carnforth, Trant has a reputation as a joker. It was the sort of thing he’d do, apparently.’

  ‘So you talked to Trant?’

  ‘That’s right. He denied it too. But you know this already. You’ve talked to Sally.’

  McBride smiled. ‘We like to have things verified,’ he said. ‘Things in duplicate appeal to the police mentality, I suppose. Do you know who wrote the note?’

  Maxwell paused and despite himself, sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was Rachel King.’

  McBride looked at his colleagues. This was something Sally Greenhow hadn’t told them. She’d spilt a few theories, but they were about as useful as her views on the disappearance of the dinosaurs would have been. ‘You seem pretty sure,’ the Inspector said.

  ‘You haven’t been to her house recently, then?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘No,’ McBride said. ‘Have you?’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘I posed as a policeman,’ he volunteered, ‘and that nice old boy next door let me in. Pop round there yourself. Compare that note with the one Rachel wrote on the memo board in her kitchen. The block capitals are identical.’

  ‘So that let Trant off the hook, did it?’ McBride asked.

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘Did you know he’d once had an affair with Rachel?’

  Maxwell knew the answer to that one by the look on the face of his interrogator. He smiled. ‘Well, he did,’ he said. ‘And you’re seriously asking me why I didn’t leave all this to you?’ Maxwell would have laughed out loud, but the prospect of the pain was too much.

  ‘Doesn’t that put Gregory Trant in the frame?’ McBride asked.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Maxwell said. ‘But I didn’t, in the end, buy that bit about Liz Striker being killed by accident.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t that dark in the basement at Carnforth. Even at night-time with the light off. Whoever the murderer was, he’d be able to distinguish Liz Striker from Rachel King. Physically, they weren’t alike at all.’

  ‘From which you conclude?’ McBride asked.

  ‘That whoever the murderer was made a mistake with Liz Striker, yes. But it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. Whoever killed Liz Striker believed that she was the blackmailer. That note convinced him otherwise.’

  ‘I still don’t see why Trant is off the hook.’

  ‘To be blackmailed by someone, you have to know them,’ Maxwell reasoned, ‘or at very least, they have to know you. Now Trant was perfectly willing to admit his affair with Rachel – and the potentially damning fact that he didn’t like her. But he didn’t admit to knowing Liz Striker at all. Whoever killed those women had to know them both.’

  ‘And that meant St Bede’s?’ McBride asked.

  Maxwell nodded. ‘More particularly, it meant Father Jordan Gracewell.’

  ‘It was Gracewell who telephoned us,’ DS Jervis said, ‘from a call box on the corner. Apparently, his own phone was busted.’

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Did he see what happened?’

  ‘No. But he heard the thud.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell tried to remember. ‘I think I did, too.’

  ‘I think you ought to know’, Inspector McBride said, ‘that Jordan Gracewell has confessed.’

  ‘Ah.’ Maxwell let his head fall back on the pillow for the first time since the law had arrived. ‘So there is a God.’

  ‘He’s confessed to obtaining pornographic material through the post and the theft of a large quantity of ladies’ underwear. He hasn’t said any
thing about any murders.’

  Maxwell’s head came up again. ‘It’s not for me to tell you your job, Inspector,’ he said, ‘but can I suggest you talk to him again? It may be he’s a tougher nut than I thought. Probably used to the ways of the Spanish Inquisition. You’ll have to go some if that’s the case.’

  Jervis and O’Halloran closed their notebooks at a nod from McBride.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ the Inspector said, ‘I’m delighted that you’re looking so chipper after your experiences. I always like to see a man standing alone and unaided at the magistrates’ court when we charge him with withholding evidence, impersonating a police officer – oh, and I understand from Father Gracewell, breaking and entering.’ McBride smiled. ‘Don’t get up. We’ll be in touch.’

  All day, Peter Maxwell lay in his bed and contemplated his navel. The NHS pyjamas they’d given him were comfy wincey and the shepherds’ pie was almost as good as a school meal back in the Olden Times, when they were meat and veg and cost a bob. The conversation however was something else. Old Mr Merriweather on one side of him had a hiatus hernia that had come to dominate his life and even older Mr Howard was determined to prove he’d arrived in Shakespeare’s seventh age of man by being sans everything except a really boring string of reminiscences about his years with the Southern Water Authority.

  The sight of a girder quietly rusting therefore at visiting time would have been an exquisite relief for Peter Maxwell. But even the dark glasses couldn’t disguise the fact that the rusting girder was in reality Sally Greenhow. She swept to the seat by Maxwell’s bed and crouched there, fiddling with her shades.

  ‘Subtle as always, Sal,’ he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  Mr Howard was nattering to the newly arrived Mrs Howard about his years with the Southern Water Authority.

  ‘Max, you shit. Are you all right?’ And Sally was glad he couldn’t see her eyes full of tears behind the tinted glasses.

  ‘I was about to ask you the same thing.’

  ‘It’s taken me two days to find you. I went to St Bede’s. I tried hotels, bed and breakfast places. I even toyed with going to the police station.’