Maxwell's Chain

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Oh, crumbs,’ Sylvia attempted a William Brown take-off, not altogether successfully in that she’d never read a Richmal Crompton book in her life. Even so, Maxwell beamed at her fondly, just for trying. He’d read them all. ‘That will scare him.’

  ‘I know Paul isn’t exactly Attila the Hun,’ Maxwell agreed, glancing out of his window to where Paul Moss, the Head of History, was still trying to get Year Nine back into his classroom after the photograph, ‘but we have to be seen to go through all the stages. Paul is his Line Manager, so it’s his call. I might take young Gregory out for a drinkie, though, and see if I can wheedle whatever the problem is out of him.’

  Sylvia snorted. ‘Looking at him, I think the offer of a drink with you will probably be one drink too many. Wearing my nursing hat, I think he manages drinking quite well on his own.’

  ‘Oh? I hadn’t picked up on that.’ Maxwell knew that Sylvia had a gold in Gossip from the 1984 Olympics. She was worth cultivating.

  ‘Well, that’s why I wear this rather fetching uniform and you wear…whatever it is you wear.’ She forgot the horrors of a moment ago and sipped again. ‘Oh, yuk, Max. Tip this away, will you, before I accidentally poison myself. I must go, anyway. I expect the girlies will be queuing up with frostbite or something, threatening to sue that nice Mr Diamond for making them stand outside for a few minutes. Anything to get off games. Family all well, by the by?’

  ‘Shipshape and Bristol fashion.’ It was unusual for Peter Maxwell to go all nautical and as he said it he didn’t think his Jacquie would go a bundle on the analogy.

  As Sylvia reached the door it opened, and Bill Lunt came in, carrying a stiff brown envelope.

  ‘Oh, hello, Bill. Do you know Sylvia Matthews?’

  ‘Only by sight,’ Bill chuckled. ‘Through my lens, as it were.’ He shook her hand.

  ‘I’m sure she enhances any picture,’ said Maxwell, in full gallant mode. She gave him an old-fashioned look and he waved as she left and ushered Bill in, all in one Head-of-Sixth-Formly sweep of the arm. ‘How can I help, Bill? It can’t be gestures by Year Twelve. You haven’t developed the picture yet.’

  ‘Not today’s picture, no. But there’s something else I’d like you to have a butchers at, if you would.’

  ‘All right. What’s this? Oh, you wouldn’t like a coffee, would you? I’d poured this for Sylvia, but she has to answer her calling.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Lunt smiled. What did he know that Maxwell didn’t?

  Maxwell hauled his pince-nez out of his jacket pocket, the pair he’d half-inched from that nice Mr Pickwick a while back.

  ‘I was out last night and took some pictures. Moon over the sea. Very atmospheric. I’m going for the Leighford Photographer of the Year again this year. I might even send them up to the Daily Mail.’

  ‘Hmm. Gosh.’ Maxwell remained noncommittal. He assumed that sending them to the Daily Mail was a good thing, but wasn’t a hundred per cent sure.

  ‘I developed them this morning. It would normally have been last night, but Emma…well, you know how women are.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Maxwell was happily cohabiting with Jacquie and parenting their little boy, Nolan, in a by-and-large-argument-free environment, but he could see that that probably didn’t apply globally. ‘How is Emma, by the way?’ Maxwell remembered Emma Watson as a bubbly little girl with buck teeth who developed into something of a cracker come AS level age. She’d developed a feistiness, too, that Maxwell rather liked. Never rude, just assertive – sort of woman who might demand the vote sometime in the future.

  ‘Oh, she’s very well. Manages the shop. But she doesn’t always see why I need to develop things straight away. We photographers do get a bit obsessive, I’m afraid. So, I got up early this morning and did these. I’ve enlarged them, so you can see what I mean. You might still need a lens, though.’

  ‘I may not be twenty-twenty any more, Bill, but…’

  ‘No, no. I didn’t mean that. I just mean the image I want you to look at is very small and a bit grainy at this enlargement. No offence meant, Mr Maxwell.’

  ‘And none taken, Bill, I assure you. Anyway, let’s have a look-see. Do you have a lens with you?’

  Bill Lunt whipped out a magnifying glass from his pocket, like a poor man’s Basil Rathbone. It still had a ‘Lunt Photographic’ price label on it. He spread out the photos on Maxwell’s desk and stood back. Maxwell leant over them, magnifying glass in one hand, pince-nez in the other. He looked closely at each one, then straightened up.

  ‘Very nice, Bill. Very atmospheric. Very Daily Mail.’

  Bill Lunt looked crestfallen. ‘Can’t you see it?’

  ‘Ummm…I think perhaps not. Sorry.’ Maxwell leant in again, anxious to please the man. Had the photographer caught the face of Mother Theresa in a sandy hillock? The second gunman on the Grassy Knoll?

  ‘Oh, come here. Let me show you.’ The photographer took the lens from Maxwell and put the pictures in a neat pile. ‘Number one.’ He pointed to an area in the bottom left. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Dune.’ Ever the film buff.

  ‘Right. Number two. Same place.’

  Maxwell bent closer and screwed up his eyes. ‘Oh. I see…What is that?’

  ‘I think it’s an upraised arm.’

  Maxwell looked at him. Then back at the photo.

  ‘All right. I think I can see that.’ It could just as well have been the Loch Ness Monster, but he sensed that Bill Lunt was a sensitive soul, especially when it came to his photos, so he trod warily.

  ‘And the next?’

  Maxwell peered. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Right. And the next?’

  Maxwell was warming to this. One more lucky guess and he’d get an A Level in Photography, sending Leighford’s ALPS ratings through the roof. ‘Oh, I see. The arm again. Wait, so what we are seeing is…’

  Bill Lunt straightened up triumphantly. ‘What we are seeing is someone stabbing a body behind the dune. In stop motion.’

  Maxwell bent to the pictures again and flipped through them quickly. ‘You could be right. In fact, in this one,’ he pointed to one in the middle of the sequence, ‘I think you can just see another arm as well, reaching up.’

  The photographer looked closer. ‘I think you’re right.’ He stepped back from the desk, slowly, rubbing his eyes. ‘What are we going to do, Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Well, Bill.’ Maxwell straightened up the pictures and replaced them in the envelope. ‘You could send them to the Daily Mail, I suppose. They’re very atmospheric, as you say. Did I ever tell you about the case of the World’s Oldest Photograph?’

  ‘But…but, Mr Maxwell. What about the arm?’ Bill Lunt was aghast. ‘We can’t just leave it. There’s been a murder.’

  ‘Come on, Bill.’ Maxwell was looking a little distant, thinking hard as he was. ‘You sound like a Sassenach version of Taggart.’ Bill Lunt’s wasn’t the best impression of Blythe Duff he’d ever heard. And after all, Peter Maxwell had sat through, not once but twice, that appalling load of tosh Blow Up, in which a photographer had unwittingly captured a murder. Or had he? He’d sat through it twice in order to understand the plot, not, he hastened to tell everyone, just to see as much as possible of Vanessa Redgrave.

  ‘Can’t we at least go and look?’

  Maxwell pursed his lips. ‘We, white man?’ he said to himself in memory of the old Lone Ranger/Tonto joke. He closed his eyes and pictured the evening spent in his warm and cosy lounge with Jacquie and Nolan. Metternich the cat would be stretched out in front of the fire in all his black and white, battle-scarred glory, quietly, and against all the odds, protecting His Baby from all-comers including, quite often, the child’s parents. He also pictured the chilly breeze off the sea, the lining up to get the exact spot, the trudging over the damp sand carrying a spade. No contest, really.

  ‘Pick me up at the end of Columbine at half seven,’ he told the photographer. ‘Bring a spade. And a torch. Oh, and a camera.’

  Bill Lunt
chuckled and rubbed his hands together. ‘All right!’ he said, grinning broadly. ‘Sleuthing with Mr Maxwell! You know you’ve got a bit of a reputation for this, don’t you? Wait till I tell Emma. Or, wait a minute. Do you think I should tell Emma?’

  ‘It’s not for me to say, Bill. But let’s just say I will be telling Jacquie I am off for a quiet drink with someone from work.’

  ‘Point taken, Mr Maxwell…’ He patted the side of his nose, that grand gesture of the conspirator throughout time.

  ‘Bill, if we are to be digging together, could you call me something else?’

  ‘Mr M?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s as though you’ve forgotten my name. What about Max?’

  Bill Lunt was ecstatic. ‘OK…Max. See you at nineteen thirty.’

  ‘When?’ The Head of Sixth Form was aghast.

  ‘Erm…half past seven?’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Oh, perhaps I’d better have your mobile number.’

  ‘All of my numbers are mobile, Bill, if they choose to be. But if you should be talking about the number of a mobile telephone, then I’m afraid I must quote my wife here.’

  Bill waited and nothing happened. ‘What would your wife say, Max?’

  Maxwell snorted and tossed his head, such an immaculate take-off of his pretty young wife that it made Bill Lunt’s head spin, and he felt the warm glow of being with a fellow Luddite grow.

  ‘Oh, I see. Seven-thirty it is, then.’

  ‘Seven-thirty it is, Bill. Wrap up warm. Wear a scarf, or something. Not really bucket and spade weather, is it?’

  Maxwell shook his head as Bill Lunt went down the stairs two at a time. The thing on the dunes would turn out to be a branch caught in the wind, or similar; an Asda trolley somehow washed up from Dar-es-Salaam. Except that – he cast his mind back – it was particularly calm last night. No raging storm, no writhing swell. Well, he pondered further as he picked up a pile of exercise books, it would be some seaweed or something. A sea bird. A weather balloon reflecting the moon. Part of a wrecked spacecraft from Roswell. Or, of course, just possibly, an arm, stabbing someone to death.

  He opened the door to his office just as a hooded figure ran past.

  ‘Jones. Take that stupid hood off. Stand up straight. Don’t run. And why aren’t you teaching Nine Zed?’ He tutted. Maths teachers might be hard to find, but really! There was surely a limit. And, whistling quietly, he was off, to teach some kids, as if they needed teaching, some more about Man’s inhumanity to Man.

  Chapter Two

  As things turned out, Peter Maxwell didn’t have to be economical with the truth over his up-coming spot of sleuthing. Yes, he did have a reputation for these things and as luck would have it, Jacquie had been poached by DCI Henry Hall to collate age statistics on local ASBO holders; woman policeman meets number cruncher. He had already done the adding up, and had made the average age ninety-seven. He had done it again – three this time. Even allowing for the granny on the Barlichway who had perfected the art, to everyone’s horrified amazement, of peeing through letterboxes, and also allowing for the tot who had bitten and spat his way through every playgroup in town, he knew his maths was dodgy somewhere. He was banging his calculator on his desk and was about to follow it with his head when Jacquie had wandered past and taken pity on him. All right, so Hall, all bland and unreadable behind the rimless specs, was a fast-track graduate of the new school, but electronics were nearly as alien to him as those new-fangled Belisha beacons were to Peter Maxwell.

  Nolan was with the child-minder, according to Jacquie’s phone message. He would be fine there until she could pick him up. The wind was a bit keen for a ride on the back of Daddy’s bike, no matter how well wrapped. And the velocipede that was White Surrey was not the most comfortable ride in the world. That honour, if the graffiti behind the Sports Hall were to be believed, belonged to Jemma Davidson of Year Eleven. There was a stew in the fridge, if he fancied that. Or she would bring chips. Let her know.

  Maxwell rang back and left a message with Ken Wertham, the rather curmudgeonly desk sergeant; Dixon of Dock Green, thou shouldst be living at this hour. What with 999 and 101 and practically every number in between, the last few months before retirement were hanging heavily on the desk man’s hands. He toyed with not passing the message on, just to spite the stuck-up sod. What was he doing, old as Methuselah and no better than he should be, with a nice bit of tottie like Jacquie Carpenter? Then he remembered what had happened the last time he had ‘forgotten’ to pass on the message. His ears still rang in cold weather. He picked up the phone.

  ‘Jacquie Carpenter.’

  ‘Desk here, Sergeant. Your…Mr Maxwell has just rung. Says thanks for the stew, but he thinks perhaps it’s had all its useful life and even Metternich doesn’t want it.’

  ‘Cheeky.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s lovely. He says don’t worry about the chips, he is going out with a colleague. Something about lesson planning.’

  ‘Really?’ Jacquie was amazed. ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’ Jacquie knew Maxwell hadn’t planned a lesson since Mafeking was relieved. ‘Lesson planning.’ She repeated it because she wasn’t sure she’d ever said those words before, not in that configuration anyway.

  ‘Yes. I wrote it down.’ Wertham sounded peeved and not a little apprehensive.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure you did. Well, thanks for letting me know.’

  Jacquie put the phone down and tapped a pencil against her front teeth pensively.

  Alerted by the cessation of the tapping of calculator keys, Hall looked up through his open doorway.

  ‘Everything all right, Jacquie?’ he called.

  Jacquie Carpenter had been DCI Henry Hall’s favourite detective for more years than he cared to acknowledge. She’d been a slip of a thing in uniform when they’d first met and he could still remember her, ciggie shaking in her pale hand as she stood outside her first murder scene at the ruin the kids called the Red House all those years ago. She’d long since given up the smoking and the shaking, but murder scenes? Well, some things never changed. Motherhood had rounded Jacquie Carpenter. She was an inch fuller everywhere in the literal sense, more careful perhaps with her own life, slower to judge, but quicker to leap to the defence of woman or child.

  ‘Hmm?’ She looked up and met his frown. ‘Oh, yes, no worries. Umm, sir?’

  Hall came over. ‘What is it?’ Henry Hall was a three-piece-suit man, in an age when no one wore three pieces any more. Without noticing it, the fast-track whiz kid with all the smart answers had become a middle-aged man. Promotion had passed him by because he wanted it to. Above his rank was all political correctness, quotas, community policing, ethnic understanding and glorified social work, hobnobbing with magistrates and chief constables over rounds of golf and dry Martinis. Here it was still the cops and the robbers, ho ho. And when Jacquie called him ‘guv’ he listened; when she called him ‘sir’ he came over.

  ‘Are there any new unexplaineds at the moment?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he shrugged. ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing concrete,’ she said. ‘It’s just that Max has rung and said he’s going out with a colleague.’

  Like Jacquie and Hall, Hall and Maxwell went way back. It was the Red House case, funnily enough, where they had met too. It was Hall’s case, but people in Leighford with long memories still called it Maxwell’s House and they didn’t mean the coffee. The two men walked wide of each other most of the time, a nod, a grim smile, a small wave, even a microwave, from a car or the saddle of a bike respectively. But somehow, in Hall’s inquiries and in Hall’s cases, Peter Maxwell was always there, like Banquo at the feast.

  Hall turned to go back into his office. ‘For goodness’ sake, Jacquie. Why not just marry the man and make the cliché complete?’

  ‘No, no, guv, don’t get me wrong. He can do what he likes. Does, in fact, do what he likes. It’s just the rest of the message that has me wo
rried.’

  ‘What else did he say, then?’ Hall’s blank glasses turned back to her, his face somewhere behind them.

  ‘He said they would be lesson planning.’

  ‘I still don’t quite see…’ Hall knew Maxwell was a loose cannon, but teaching was a foreign country; they did things differently there.

  ‘Guv, Max hasn’t planned a lesson in his life. He has told Nolan on many an occasion to shoot him if he ever found him writing a lesson plan.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s been told to. Perhaps there’s another Ofsted inspection – although after last time, let’s hope not.’ The last time, Hall remembered, people had died. You didn’t mess with Ofsted in Tony Blair’s Britain. ‘Perhaps…’ Hall brightened, with his finger in the air. ‘Perhaps it’s a new directive from County Hall and he’s…’ Hall stopped. ‘You’re right. That is odd. I’m sure there’s nothing pending, though.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Jacquie picked up her calculator again. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

  And she was talking to herself really as she started tapping in numbers and Hall returned to his desk. He sat for a moment, then made a note on a post-it and stuck it to the edge of his monitor screen. Just in case.

  Maxwell stood on the corner of Columbine with his shoulders drawn up and his chin drawn down into the shelter of his colourful scarf. His habitual hat was in place, pork pie with the brim down, but it was a comfort thing; like a blanket, but infinitely less stylish. It gave very little warmth. He couldn’t feel his ears at all. The sunny February day, a sure sign of global warming or a sure sign of an impending mini-ice age, depending on which ranting scientist was in the ascendancy, had begun to cool with the dark and as far as Maxwell was concerned, Bill Lunt and his nice warm car couldn’t get there quickly enough. The cold was beginning to creep up his legs and heaven only knew what might happen when it got to the top.