Maxwell’s Flame

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Ooh,’ Maxwell sucked his teeth, ‘dangerous. What brought you here?’

  ‘The local news. I stayed at a hotel last night and caught South Today. There you were. Mr Peter Maxwell, victim of a hit and run. Some thick CID bloke was appealing for witnesses. I didn’t find him very appealing.’

  ‘Sally,’ Maxwell’s hand was suddenly stroking her cheek, ‘I’ve got you into a lot of bother, one way or another. And I’m sorry.’

  She bit her lip to stop the tears and gripped his hand. ‘It’s not your fault, Max,’ she told him. ‘I walked into this with my eyes open.’

  ‘Does Alan know where you are?’ he asked.

  ‘He knows I’m following you,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  Maxwell raised himself up on his good elbow. ‘Go back home, Sal,’ he said. ‘You’ve been through enough.’

  She shook her head quickly, unable, with the iron-hard lump in her throat, to answer him.

  ‘Think of me,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘If you stay any longer, your husband will come and punch my lights out.’

  She flung her arms around him, burying her face in the rick of his neck. He held her close for a moment, stroking the frizzy blonde hair, nuzzling her cheek. Then he uncoiled her arms and held her away from him.

  ‘Does this mean you’re not going home?’ he asked her in his best transatlantic.

  ‘That’s right,’ she sniffed. ‘Whaddya goin’ to do about it?’

  ‘Well,’ he passed her, slowly and painfully, a box of tissues from the top of his bedside thingy, ‘the moment you’ve blown your nose and turned your back for decency’s sake, I’m going to hop sprightly out of bed, nip into my outdoor togs and you and I are going to catch a murderer.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Sally asked, the tissue poised in her right hand. ‘You absolute bastard. You told Alan on the phone that you knew, but you didn’t say who. That’s one major reason why I’ve put my marriage on the line to be here.’

  ‘Your marriage?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Are you serious?’

  Sally shrugged and blew her nose. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘All I know is that I’ve never seen Alan so angry.’

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell said, ‘if you get any acid from Alan, you tell me and I’ll go round there and punch his lights out.’ But the left hook he gave the air wasn’t particularly impressive. ‘Though perhaps not today, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You’re changing the subject,’ Sally scolded. ‘Who is it, Max? For Christ’s sake, tell me!’

  She heard her own voice rise above the hubbub of conversation in the ward. For a moment, Mr Howard’s water torture stopped and Mr Merriweather’s hernia descended. Sally ducked her head and whispered again. ‘I’ve got to know,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell checked that the coast was relatively clear, ‘if you’d asked me that question yesterday – or even early this morning – I’d have said, without much hesitation, Jordan Gracewell.’

  ‘Gracewell?’

  ‘He’s got your knickers. Not to mention everybody else’s. The sickest thing is that he was even trying to get a few of Rachel’s.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I went to Rachel’s the day before yesterday. The neighbour let me in. And while I was looking for … God knows what, who should come a-calling but Jordan Gracewell.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me that. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t ask. I went to see him yesterday. Or rather I broke into his flat.’

  ‘Max …’ Sally’s eyes widened behind the shades.

  ‘I know,’ he waved a hand in slow motion, ‘I know. Breaking and entering. Anyway, I found a collection of video nasties that would make your hair curl and enough lingerie to open a shop.’

  ‘My God!’

  ‘That’s more or less what Jordan said when he came back from a hard day at the chalk face. I was too busy accusing him of murder to ask him specifically why he’d returned to Rachel’s. He was a frequent visitor, apparently, while she was alive.’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ Sally was confused and waggled her fingers in the air trying to rationalize it all. ‘You said, if I’d asked you that question – i.e. who killed Liz and Rachel – yesterday or even this morning … Does that mean you’ve changed your mind?’

  ‘That’s the wonderful thing about our hospitals,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘they wake you up so bloody early, you have time to think. No, Jordan Gracewell’s a wanker, knicker-nicker and voyeur, but I know now he’s not a murderer too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘That depends on one answer to a very simple question I must put to an old lady. Did you see any fuzz around? Outside the ward or downstairs?’

  ‘Nobody in uniform,’ Sally said. ‘I must admit, ever since I talked to Malcolm, I’ve been watching out for them. Talk about Big Brother

  ‘Malcolm who?’ Maxwell was lost.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Sally realized, ‘you don’t know. Not Malcolm Who, Who Malcolm. Superintendent Malcolm is now in charge of the Carnforth case.’

  ‘Where’s Warren?’

  ‘Gone to ground. I don’t understand how police hierarchy works, Max. All I know is Malcolm puts the wind up me something chronic. If I’d spent much longer with him, I’d have confessed to being Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘All right, Jack,’ Maxwell winked at her, ‘say your goodbyes like a dutiful visitor – in fact by usual standards, you’ve already been here ten minutes longer than anybody else – and I’ll see you by the lift.’ A ghastly thought suddenly struck Peter Maxwell. ‘There is a lift, isn’t there, please God?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sally nodded. ‘I came up in it. But Max, you can’t just walk out of here. You’ve been hit by a car, for God’s sake. You need rest.’

  ‘No,’ he told her, his face serious, ‘what I need is answers. Off you toddle.’

  Severe bruising was a euphemism for sheer bloody agony. They made a lot of cars from glass fibre these days, didn’t they, Maxwell asked himself as he struggled into his day clothes and tottered down the ward in earnest conversation with Mrs Howard, who had had more than enough of her old man’s reminiscences and was beating a hasty retreat. If that was so, he continued his inner conversation as he joined the waiting Sally by the lift doors, why did they bloody well hurt so much?

  She linked arms with him carefully and steadied him as the machine jolted and clicked its way to the ground floor.

  ‘Max,’ she hissed, ‘you’ve still got your jimmies on under your trousers.’

  ‘Of course I have,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t draw the screens without drawing attention to myself and I certainly had no intention of dropping my breeks in a public ward. Mrs Howard was giving me some pretty lascivious looks as it was.’

  Mrs Howard had taken the stairs. Not because she didn’t trust herself to keep her hands off Maxwell’s body, but because she didn’t trust lifts.

  Somehow Sally got Maxwell past the posters that asked people if they’d like to save the NHS and out into the evening air. She parked him against a bollard while she found her car and drove round to pick him up.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, once she’d winched him in. ‘To the scene of the crime,’ he told her. ‘Chocks away, Biffo. I’ll navigate.’

  17

  Peter Maxwell cricked his neck even further that evening, as the rain drifted in from the west, trying to keep a look-out for tailing policemen. The point was, of course, that he hadn’t a clue what he was looking for. They weren’t likely to follow Sally Greenhow’s 2CV bumper to bumper with lights flashing and sirens screaming. So he looked for the unmarked car, three or four cars back, preferably with two grim-looking blokes in it. And he’d expect there to be more than one such vehicle, as the first realized he’d sussed them, to be replaced by a second.

  He even tried tuning his way through the wavelengths on Sally’s car radio to try and pick up police messages. The most outlandish he got was a very fragmented jingle from the Isle of Wight.

  ‘Left here,’ he
told Sally and she screeched into the close. Maxwell recognized the telephone kiosk, the block of flats. He looked up at the top floor as Sally coasted to a halt at the kerb. Gracewell’s lounge was in darkness. The perverted padre was elsewhere; out visiting launderettes perhaps or still helping police with their enquiries.

  ‘I shan’t be long,’ he told the girl and eased himself out of the car. He listed a little to starboard as he crossed the grass. He saw the tyre tracks still rutted diagonally and the black rubber stains on the roadway. He couldn’t bend down to see if the tread was clear enough for the police to have been able to identify the vehicle.

  He pressed his finger against the bell of Flat 1. Why did his finger ache, for God’s sake? An old lady poked her head around the door.

  ‘Mrs Verlander.’ Maxwell had no panama to tip. It hadn’t been in his bedside thingy at the General, along with the rest of his clothes.

  ‘Mr Mawhinney!’ The old girl’s eyes and her door opened simultaneously. ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you’re walking about. I telephoned an ambulance as soon as I saw what had happened. Are you all right? You must have been thrown several feet in the air.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell tried to smile, ‘I must have.’

  ‘I must say, I admire your persistence.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Coming back after the tumble you took, to see Mr Gracewell. Your firm must be very proud. You don’t get that kind of loyalty these days.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ Maxwell nodded earnestly, ‘but … well, that’s just the kind of bloke I am. Tell me, did I hear you correctly a moment ago when you said you saw what happened?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the old girl told him.

  ‘And you told the police, presumably?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mrs Verlander frowned, ‘I haven’t spoken to a policeman since they hanged poor Derek Bentley. When was that now? 1953, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I believe so,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But presumably, you don’t mind telling me?’

  ‘No, of course not. In fact, I’d say, of all people, you have the biggest right to know. It was odd, really, because I hadn’t expected to see you going that way. I mean, I’m rather a nosy old trout, I suppose, and I hadn’t seen you on your way up to Father Gracewell’s – only on the way down. You seemed in such a tearing hurry and rummaging in your pockets. Then I saw a vehicle start up from down that way, towards the end of the road. It didn’t have its lights on and that struck me as odd because it was getting quite dark by then. Suddenly, it veered to the left. There was a screech of tyres, or whatever screeches on a car, and it mounted the pavement. Then the grass. I think I banged on the window and shouted out, but of course you couldn’t hear. That’s the pity of double glazing, isn’t it? Everything happened in slow motion, then. They say these things happen in an instant, but they don’t. It seemed ages before you somersaulted over the bonnet.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember what sort of car it was?’ Maxwell hoped vaguely. ‘The colour or anything?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Verlander said, ‘now I’m not very good on these things. And my eyes aren’t what they were. I couldn’t see very much. It was dark, you see. I couldn’t see a number plate or anything like that.’

  ‘I see,’ Maxwell said. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Verlander. I’m grateful for your help,’ and he turned to go. He’d pinned his hopes on this, naively, stupidly. What kind of idiot was he to rely on the chance that an old lady had even been standing at her window at the crucial time, let alone that she’d be compos enough to remember what she’d seen.

  ‘But …’ her voice stopped him at the end of the path, ‘I’m pretty sure the driver was a man and the car was one of those Range Rover things. Bottle green.’

  The bottle green Range Rover stood on the gravel in front of the Thirties Cute house, the one with the hint of Toby Twirl.

  ‘Where are we now?’ Sally Greenhow had turned off her engine and her lights and was wiping the condensation off the windscreen.

  ‘Journey’s end,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Really depressing play, that. Did they ever film it? I must consult my Arthur Halliwell. He’d know.’

  ‘Whose house is this, Max?’ Sally looked at her ancient colleague in the darkness.

  ‘Down!’ Maxwell bit his lip to avoid screaming as he ducked below the dashboard. Sally did likewise and caught her forehead a nasty one on the steering wheel.

  ‘Oh, shit!’ she hissed. For a second, the interior of the 2CV was awash with light, then it was dark again.

  ‘He’s going out. Follow him, Sal.’

  She kicked the ignition into action. ‘For Christ’s sake, Max, who am I following?’

  ‘“Behold,”’ Maxwell was belting himself in again, ‘“a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.” Only in this case, for pale horse, read dark Range Rover.’

  Sally curled her lip and crashed her gears, snarling for the road. ‘OK,’ she shouted, ‘I should have realized it. We’re following Clint Eastwood. He killed Liz Striker and Rachel King. What a dolt I’ve been all along not to have guessed it.’

  ‘Bear with me, Sal,’ Maxwell asked. ‘I’ve been all kinds of arse-hole in my time, but I can’t afford to be wrong about this. Keep back. I don’t want him to know he’s being followed.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ she asked him. ‘It’s all I can do to keep his tail lights in sight. All right, if you’re not going to tell me who it is, at least tell me where he’s going.’

  ‘Parkhurst?’ Maxwell guessed. ‘The Scrubs? Long Lartin? I don’t know, but I hope it’s for bloody ever.’

  They drove through the night, the wipers of the 2CV desperately trying to cope with the lashing rain. At Ringwood, the Range Rover swung north on the A338 to Fordingbridge and on to the Salisbury road, before turning due west to Combe Bissett and the little lanes that twisted like molten silver through the sleeping Wiltshire countryside to Fifield Bavant. Here, at last, the Range Rover turned sharp right and jolted to a halt under the spreading branches of a horse chestnut.

  Sally Greenhow pulled up a little way down the road. She heard the car door slam, then the house door; and lights appeared, first in the hallway and then in the lounge.

  ‘Max?’ She gripped the man’s sleeve as he prepared to bundle himself out of the door.

  ‘We’ve got to get into that house, Sal,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a feeling what happened at Carnforth has its roots there.’

  ‘Whoa!’ she shouted, snatching her keys from the ignition. ‘You’re not going in there alone.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For a start,’ she locked the car, ‘it’s half-past twelve at night, or in the morning, I should say. And secondly, you discharged yourself from hospital earlier this evening. There’s probably whatever our police call an APB out on you already.’

  ‘“Just the facts, ma’am,”’ Maxwell drawled in his best Dragnet. ‘All right – but, Sally …’ He stopped her with a gentle hand on her left breast. ‘Oops, sorry.’ He dropped his hand. ‘Sally, I want you to promise me something.’

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘If the going gets rough in there, I want you to promise me you’ll get out. Call the police. Drive for help. Anything. But just get out. It might be dangerous.’

  ‘Max,’ she leaned her forehead against his, ‘so is standing in the middle of the road. Shall we?’ And she led him up the garden path.

  The rain had stopped now, but everywhere the darling buds of May were drooping heavy with water, dripping on to the drive and the crazy paving. On a night as dark as this one, Maxwell couldn’t make out the architecture of the house. Around its glowing windows, it just looked black and detached. There was a garage to the left, a greenhouse to the right and a high larch-lap fence beyond that.

  ‘What do we do?’ Sally hissed.

  ‘Pray,’ Maxwell said and rang the door bell.

  For a moment, there was nothing. Maxwell rang again.

  ‘Who is it?’ a female voice called. ‘Who’s th
ere?’

  Maxwell nudged Sally in the ribs. More chance of a positive response to a female voice, at this hour, in the darkness.

  ‘Er … we … I’ve broken down. My car’s overheated. Can I scrounge a jug of water?’ It didn’t sound very plausible to Sally, let alone to whoever was beyond the door. But the bolts slid back and the door creaked open.

  ‘Mrs Wynn?’ Maxwell peered into the light.

  ‘Yes, but …’

  Maxwell didn’t give the woman any more time to ponder the matter. He pushed the door open as far as his aching body would allow and stood damply in the hall, Sally at his elbow.

  ‘Who is it, Jane?’ A large, bearded man with the merest hint of a Geordie accent bustled out of the lounge and stopped dead. ‘Well, well,’ said Michael Wynn.

  ‘Mike?’ The woman crossed to him and stared up into his face. ‘Mike? Who are these people?’

  ‘My name is Peter Maxwell,’ Maxwell said. ‘This is Sally Greenhow.’

  ‘Well, what do you want?’ the woman asked. ‘What is going on here?’

  ‘You tell us,’ Maxwell said. ‘I did hear you right a moment ago? You are Mrs Wynn?’

  ‘Yes, of course I … Oh, God,’ and Mrs Wynn seemed to shrink back into the corner.

  ‘It’s all right, Janie,’ Wynn said. ‘Max, the boys are asleep upstairs. We don’t need to wake them, do we? Come into the lounge, both of you.’

  The odd couples sat down on the settees that faced each other across a coffee table. Maxwell was staring at Michael Wynn. Sally felt as she imagined people must feel when they’ve arranged a bit of wife-swapping in a contact mag, wondering who would be first to break the ice. Except she didn’t fancy Max. And Michael Wynn suddenly frightened her.

  ‘When did you find out?’ Wynn hadn’t taken his eyes off Maxwell for a moment.

  Maxwell looked at his watch. ‘About two minutes ago,’ he said.

  ‘Shit!’ Wynn hissed. Jane gripped his arm. He patted her hand. ‘In other words,’ he said, ‘you actually know fuck all.’

  ‘I know about Edouard Locard,’ Maxwell told him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Edouard Locard, the great French criminologist. One of the great guys of all time. He established the contact trace theory – “every contact leaves a trace” – I won’t confuse you by giving you the original French.’