Maxwell's Chain

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Jacquie?’ a voice said, rather too close to her ear. She looked up into the unlovely nostrils of Alan Kavanagh, leaning into her personal space, brandishing a file.

  ‘Sorry, Alan,’ she said, backing away out of range of his coffee breath. ‘Miles away. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ve got this file on a missing person. I thought you ought to see it.’ With a conspiratorial wink, he placed it across the pile of paper already on her desk. She could hardly complain. Across the entire acreage of Leighford nick, similar piles of paper stood like so many towers of Babel, all clamouring in urgent tongues and all of them failing to reach heaven.

  Gingerly, she opened the file. She read the first line and, mesmerised by its contents, groped for her mobile phone, hidden in the depths of the bag hanging on the back of the chair. She hit the first speed dial button and got through to an interminable answerphone message, giving her so many options her head swam. ‘To speak to the Premises Manager, press one. To leave details about your child’s absence, press two. To express amazement that anyone can doubt machines have taken over the world, Press a flower.’ She must be catching this technophobe thing from Maxwell, she thought. She always used to be able to cope with stuff like this. But then, she hadn’t always just had news like this.

  ‘Hello? Leighford High School, Reception.’ Finally, a human being.

  ‘Hello, Tansy?’ Trust Jacquie not only to know both Thingees’ names but be able to tell them apart. ‘It’s Jacquie Carpenter here. Can I speak to Mr Maxwell, please?’

  ‘He’s in a meeting at the moment,’ Tansy came through loud and clear. ‘With Nurse Matthews. Can I give him a message?’

  Jacquie knew perfectly well that this was not a meeting per se, more a bitch session, but there again, Maxwell wore his heart on his sleeve and for all his world-weary exterior, if he and Nursie were interviewing some kid, there was a reason for it. ‘Um. It’s very difficult, really,’ said Jacquie, chewing the corner of her thumbnail in her anxiety.

  ‘Oh,’ breathed Tansy sympathetically. ‘Is it something to do with,’ she dropped her voice to the edge of inaudibility. Any lower and only whales could have heard her, ‘your work?’

  ‘In a way,’ Jacquie said. ‘It involves us as neighbours. Our next door one has disappeared.’

  ‘Oooh,’ Tansy was thrilled to be surfing the breaking wave of police news. ‘Do you think she might have been…you know, murdered, or something?’

  ‘Almost certainly something,’ Jacquie said. ‘But could you get Mr Maxwell to ring me as soon as he is out of his meeting?’

  ‘Straight away,’ Tansy said. Even her voice was wide-eyed.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jacquie, but the phone was already halfway down and she was re-reading the front page of the file. It was dated the day before, quite late, and the details were scant. But the name leapt out at her; ‘Troubridge’. The description could not have been more accurate and also more general; there had to be hundreds of small, mousey-haired, slightly infirm but still pretty good for her age ladies in Leighford and its surrounding area. If they put an APB out for her, the nick would be swamped with grannies within hours. She sighed and felt quite melancholy. If only there were other boxes to tick. Accent you could use to engrave titanium. Tick. Attitude that you could strike matches on. Tick. Ability to hold a grudge until hell froze over. A really, really big tick. Those extra things were what made Mrs Troubridge what she was. A cantankerous, miserable, nosy, basically kind at heart but, most of all, missing old lady. Peter Maxwell would already be re-running scenes from The Lady Vanishes. But the absent heroine there was a spy. You don’t think Mrs Troubridge…?

  Jacquie glanced across the room to where Alan Kavanagh was trying to look at her out of the corners of his eyes whilst appearing to study his computer screen. He obviously didn’t know that Jacquie was quite fond of Mrs Troubridge. That the mad old dear was their cat-feeder and plant-waterer in chief. And whenever she could would cuddle little Nolan and slobber over him, regressing his language development by many months with her baby babble. All Kavanagh knew was that the address was just one number different. That it would look to the powers that be that Maxwell had, yet again, managed to get shit on his own doorstep. He would immediately have added, of course, had anyone been privy to his thoughts, that he didn’t wish the old besom any ill. Even so…a sly smile was beginning to twitch the corners of his mouth.

  Jacquie turned the page. Another thinly filled out pro forma was all that remained of the file. There was a photograph pinned to the corner of Mrs Troubridge in a rather unexpected hat, looking a little like Mrs Pankhurst and squinting into the sun. It had clearly been taken some years before and Jacquie thought, irritated, that they almost certainly had a better picture of her at home than this one. It would have also included Nolan at various sizes and Metternich in various attitudes of disgust, but they could always crop it for the paper. She made a mental note to get that sorted.

  Last seen; bus station. Bus station? It was a well known fact that Mrs Troubridge rarely left the confines of Columbine. Some kind soul shopped on line for her, and although Meals on Wheels had made any number of overtures, the old lady had made it plain she wasn’t ready for them yet. You had to be really desperate. She found that all the gossip she could possibly need beat a path to her door. And she did own a telephone. The first tick in the box marked ‘unusual behaviour’. Time of last sighting; 21.30. That let the hoodies off the hook – they were tucked up waiting for processing at the nick by then. But…Jacquie tapped her teeth with her pen, a habit Maxwell hated, except when doing it himself…Why were they so set on the idea that there was only one set of dodgy teenagers in hoods in town? Red herrings swam in more than one shoal, after all. And Maxwell had clearly encountered at least two. Contact name and…her phone rang and she snatched it up.

  ‘Carpenter.’

  ‘Hello, Carpenter. What on earth is going on? I’ve just had Thingee One in here even more incoherent than usual. Something about next door. Is it on fire? Have they saved my summer hat? It’s not Metternich smoking in bed again, is it? If I’ve told him once…Oh, Jesus, not the Light Brigade?’

  ‘Max. Stop a minute and let me tell you. It’s Mrs Troubridge.’

  ‘Mrs Troubridge is on fire?’

  ‘No, Max.’ Jacquie hardened her voice. It was the only way to bring him back on track. ‘She’s missing, actually.’

  The silence on the other end of the phone was thick with embarrassment. ‘Oh. How do you know?’

  ‘I work in a police station, Max, in case you had forgotten.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, but how do you know this small fact? You don’t work on the front desk. You’re working on the murders so surely they wouldn’t give you a misper to deal with.’

  ‘Misper? Max, I’m going to stop you watching television. No, they wouldn’t give me a missing person to deal with, except that for some creepy reason I don’t want to dwell on, Alan Kavanagh knows where I live and put the file on my desk.’

  ‘Do you think it has any connection with the others? The deaths, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t see one. I can’t see one between the first two, let alone between them and a little old lady. I think she may have just gone a bit more doolally than usual and wandered off.’

  ‘She has been a little bit strange lately, you said so the other morning.’

  ‘Max, I said she was off hooks with you and probably Metternich. That is perfectly normal on planet Troubridge. I expect you looked at her funny or Metternich used her cotoneasters as a urinal, that’s all. Even so, I’ll spend a bit of time on it, go the rounds and see if I can find out a bit more. I’ll have to speak to Henry, but I don’t see that it would be a problem. Apart from anything else, we’ve got much better pictures of her at home than this one on the report.’

  ‘Do you need me to help in anything?’

  ‘Not right now. I…I just wanted to tell you straight away. I know you’re quite fond of the old trout in fact.’

&n
bsp; Maxwell chuckled, a quick back projection of his years with Mrs Troubridge playing on the screen in his mind. ‘We go back a way, I must admit. I hope she’s all right. I really wouldn’t want any harm to come to the cantankerous old biddy.’

  ‘Same here,’ said Jacquie. ‘I’ll find her, Max. Don’t worry. Love you,’ and she put the phone down quickly. She knew his lighthearted response masked a real concern over the old dear’s possible plight. She had been there when he first moved to Columbine, his grief over the loss of his first family healed over, but still raw in the long watches of the night and the hours of weekends and school holidays. Sparring with Mrs Troubridge was a hobby that kept the worst of the pain away in those days. Jacquie considered the options. Best case scenario, the old lady had got on a bus to somewhere and was wandering dazed and confused in Devizes or some such place. Worst case, she was about to be washed up on a beach somewhere, with unexplained dents in her head. With fingers crossed, Jacquie tapped on Henry Hall’s door.

  ‘Come.’ God, how she hated that. How much breath did it take to also say ‘in’?

  ‘Guv, I wondered if I…’

  ‘No, sorry Jacquie, you can’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry, perhaps if I could tell you what…’

  Henry Hall looked up at her, two perfect little fluorescent tubes reflected in his lenses. ‘No, you can’t have time off from two murder investigations to look into the disappearance of your neighbour.’

  Jacquie looked crestfallen. ‘Sorry, guv, I didn’t know…’

  ‘No, well,’ his head was down to his paperwork again. ‘I try to keep abreast and I know it can’t be easy for you. But, no, sorry. Perhaps when we have this cracked.’ He almost smiled. That in itself was such a rare occurrence she didn’t know what to make of it. Was it sardonic? Cynical? Wind? Who could say?

  She stepped back out into the communal office and felt at a bit of a loss. Her first thought was to ring Peter Maxwell. He always knew what to do, in or out of a crisis. Then, she thought again and on those second thoughts, what could he do? He couldn’t leave school yet; it was Wednesday – Ten Gee Four. Nobody could manage Ten Gee Four last thing in the afternoon, except Liberty Valance – and Peter Maxwell. And then, they were horribly short-staffed, weren’t they? Perhaps he’d have to do bus queue duty or something. And he knew nothing of the circumstances; better to leave it till they went home. Then perhaps they could do a search of the town themselves, looking for the places only Mrs Troubridge would go. She looked back at Hall’s closed door. What a shit! Someone had to do something.

  Alan Kavanagh’s phone rang and he spoke into the receiver for a moment. Then, he covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Jacquie,’ he called across the office. ‘That murdering toerag Lunt is in reception. D’you want to just tell the guv’nor for me? Save my legs.’

  She looked at him as if he had crawled out from somewhere and turned on her heel. ‘Run your own errands, Alan, there’s a good boy,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I’m off to the canteen. I’ve heard a rumour we get coffee breaks.’ And she went down the back stairs to avoid meeting the Lunts. Sometimes, even nice people take the coward’s way out.

  At Leighford High School, tucked away in the sanctuary of Matron’s office, Maxwell was sitting thoughtfully. Sylvia Matthews knew how fond Maxwell was of his old neighbour, although she herself would not have wee’d on her if she was on fire. You read about these things all the time in the papers, families looking fruitlessly for missing grannies, granddads, more sadly, uncles, aunties, friends of their old dad’s from way back who now had no one. And now, here it was, happening to someone she knew. She avoided platitudes and just waited for him to speak. That was why she was so popular with anyone in trouble. Her advice, when sought, was sensible, well thought out and optional.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell finally said. ‘Whatever was the mad old besom thinking? Going off like that?’

  ‘Who reported her missing?’ Sylvia asked him. ‘She doesn’t speak to the Other Side, does she?’

  Maxwell was confused for a minute. He had no idea that ouija boards and similar were in the armoury of the State Registered Nurse. Then he realised what she meant. ‘No, no, she doesn’t. Ever since their youngest kicked a ball over.’

  ‘I assume it did lots of damage?’

  ‘No, not a bit. But it might have done and so they stopped speaking. Mrs Troubridge is very old school. Children should be seen but not heard. Come to think of it, in her book, they shouldn’t even be seen. Apart from Nolan, of course. He basically can do what he likes!’

  ‘How long ago was that?’ she prompted.

  ‘Ooh, let me see. Their Lucas is ten, now, so it must be…God, twenty years ago. Twenty-five? It was when the houses were pretty new, anyway.’

  Sylvia was puzzled. ‘If their Lucas is ten…how can it be twenty-five years ago?’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t Lucas who kicked the ball. No, it was his dad when he was about ten. She can bear a grudge for England, that woman.’ He lapsed into silence again.

  ‘But, still,’ Sylvia comforted. ‘I’m sure she’ll be OK.’

  Maxwell shook himself and sat up straighter. ‘You’re right, Sylv,’ he said. ‘Anyway, Jacquie’s on it, so it will all be sorted soon.’

  ‘Of course it will,’ Sylvia said. ‘Now, was that all? Only, I’ve got my girls to check on soon.’

  ‘Any girls in particular?’

  ‘The pregnant ones, Max. My usual contingent of about seven.’

  He looked amazed. ‘Seven pregnant girls? In the school? Right now?’

  She laughed and poked him with her pen. ‘How can you have missed them, Max? Jasmin Yelland is due in seven weeks. She can hardly walk about.’

  ‘Jasmin Yelland? But she’s in my History set in Year Eleven.’

  ‘Precisely, Max. That’s why I find it hard to credit you haven’t noticed. Do you take any notice of these kids at all when you’re teaching them?’

  ‘Of course I do. But they tend to hunch down in their desks, you know. They all look the same shape from the front of the room. I was telling them only the other day about pregnant women avoiding the Drop in the eighteenth century by pleading the belly. Jasmine didn’t turn a hair.’

  She ushered him out. ‘Perhaps that’s because she’s not sitting in a condemned cell as we speak. Take a closer look next time you see her. I think you’ll be surprised.’

  ‘I think she will be if I take too close a look. Do they know who the dads are?’

  ‘Sometimes. Jasmin does, but she’s not telling. A few of them are in therapy about it, if you know what I mean. Keeping it in the family. One of them seems to be implying the Angel Gabriel came to her.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘I blame the Da Vinci Code. So, that’s why the list was so long when you asked me if any of these kids are in trouble. It would have been easier to list the ones who aren’t.’

  Maxwell found himself on the other side of her door. He was gobsmacked. He found himself looking at midriffs as he walked through the crowds of students thronging the corridor and had to give himself a mental shake. All that glittering metal was making his eyes go funny. He’d be getting an odd reputation, if he went on like that.

  White Surrey, patched and worn but not beaten, delivered Maxwell home at the end of another eventful day. People had teachers all wrong. They thought they just swanned around with a cup of coffee in one hand and a good book in another, then spent forty-five minutes with their feet up on a desk, drinking one and reading another while thirty dear sweet children quietly absorbed knowledge from impeccably covered text books packed full with up to the minute information perfectly crafted to help them in their courses. The truth was very different, but who would believe it; crap coffee, no books, good or bad, and as for thirty well-behaved children – it was a myth as elusive as the Holy Grail, but apparently there was a school somewhere, up north, the legend went, that did actually have thirty well-behaved children in it. But not all at once, of course. That would be silly.

&nb
sp; But, although the day had been tiring as always and his sleuthing with Sylvia had been less than useful, throwing up as much red herring as a Grimsby trawler in spawning season, he still spared a minute for short reflection outside Mrs Troubridge’s dark home. He hoped that he and Jacquie wouldn’t be the only people to miss her. That would be sad. Then the cold of the late afternoon seeped in a bit too far and he went inside, to be greeted by a lovely disembowelled offering, which Metternich had artistically spread on the rug. That cat is just too generous, if he has a failing, thought Maxwell and shut the door, looking for the dustpan and brush to wipe up after Hannibal Lecter’s nastier brother.

  The grey weather had not let up all day and now it was almost dark. The sun was setting low in the west just to remind everyone it still existed and the sky was pale pink, barred with dark clouds scudding across it in the strengthening wind. February Fill Dyke, February brings the snow; call it what you like, it was bloody cold.

  So Mike Crown had his head tucked well down in his sweatshirt hood as he jogged along the old railway line, derelict since the days of Beeching, his torch ready to light to help him over the last half mile or so until the lights of home shone out to him. You didn’t keep a body like his without a bit of work and jogging relaxed his mind. It also kept him out of the house, away from his mad old dad and his clinging wife. He preferred older women as a rule, always had. A bit of cash, a bit of experience, a bit of gratitude. But perhaps marrying one had been a bit of a mistake. Still, moving on should be easy; there was always another one ready to make him comfy.

  The next older woman he met, though, made him far from comfy. From her less than convenient resting place across his path, she made him fall over, wrench a knee and badly graze his hands. At least she wasn’t clingy or needy. She was just dead.

  Chapter Eleven

  Maxwell had the house nice and warm, lamps low, pie in the oven, table laid, all ready for when Jacquie came in. As a former bachelor of some standing, he was a dab hand at the culinary arts and so opening a box was a piece of cake to him.