Maxwell's Chain

by M. J. Trow

  Jacquie looked weary as she climbed the stairs and flopped against him as they both had a little think about Mrs Troubridge. If she was wandering about, she’d be dead by now, thought Jacquie, rather illogically. The night was really cold and was limbering up for the snow that often fell at half term, now tantalisingly near.

  Nolan, delivered by his best friend’s mother from nursery, was bathed and delightful, full of organic lamb and rice, which looked and smelt indescribable, but which he always hoovered up with squeals for more. He and Maxwell had watched a Mr Men DVD, rewinding again and again to hear the late, great Arthur Lowe intone that there was a goose loose in the lane until they nearly split their sides. There had been a brief and manly chat about the day, with obviously a little more detail in Maxwell’s version, and so Jacquie sat at peace, cuddling her little boy and leaning against her big one. Maxwell had covered Hegel’s Dialectic with the boy last week, so today’s mano-a-mano had been very much a post-revisionist thing.

  When Nolan’s eyelids could no longer even pretend to be open, they mentioned Mrs Troubridge out loud for the first time. Nolan was the apple of her eye and she of his, so they didn’t even want to mention her name in case he wanted to see her straight away, as he often did. And spelling the old girl’s name out, à la ‘w-a-l-k-i-e-s’ as people did for the more discerning dog, was an intellectual rigour neither of them was quite up for by that time of a Wednesday.

  ‘I can’t believe it, Max,’ Jacquie said. ‘According to the file, she just disappeared at the bus station.’

  ‘I can’t quite work out why she was…Wait a minute. Do I not remember you saying her sister was coming to stay?’

  ‘Oh, God, you’re right. Or was she going to stay with her? I can’t remember and you know how she goes…’ there was a pause as they both reconsidered the present tense but she let it go, ‘on about things. I tune out.’

  ‘Well, that would explain the bus station. I suppose she had gone to meet her, or check times or something. Perhaps that’s it, perhaps she has just gone to stay with her sister. We’re worrying for nothing.’ Maxwell sighed and sat back, problem solved. It was the Marie Celeste and the Creation of the Universe all rolled into one.

  ‘Then who reported her missing?’ Jacquie’s timing was impeccable. ‘It must be her sister and so she can’t have got there.’

  ‘True,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Damn you, Holmes, I was beginning to feel quite hopeful, there. What else did the file say?’

  ‘Well, that’s it. Nothing. It’s very early days and if it wasn’t for the address, I don’t know whether it would have got to us at all yet. After all, it’s not as if she’s a frantic DIYer and we’ve stopped hearing the Black and Decker through the wall. We have to wait a while before we start working on any missing person.’

  ‘Even someone as old as Mrs T?’

  ‘Yes. I agree, there should be different rules, but there aren’t.’

  ‘So, basically, she went to the bus station and disappeared into thin air.’ As Jacquie had surmised earlier, the cinematic that was Maxwell was indeed conjuring up images of the tweedy Miss Froy, caught up in a world of espionage as dated as it was daft. But then, a grimmer thought struck him. ‘Our hoodies came by bus.’

  ‘Wrong timing.’ Jacquie had got there as well. ‘We already had them in the nick by then.’

  ‘God, yes. Anyway, I shouldn’t think that even that number of them could make someone disappear into thin air.’

  Deep in her bag down the side of the sofa, Jacquie’s phone rang. They looked at each other with resignation. It had to be work, that was what the phone was for, except calls from Maxwell and it clearly wasn’t him.

  ‘I have to answer it,’ Jacquie said. ‘It might be about…you know…’

  ‘Go on, then,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’d rather know.’

  Jacquie rummaged for her phone and got there just as it stopped ringing. Classic. She hit redial and waited. No reply – she looked up at Maxwell in exasperation. ‘They must be leaving me a message, I hate that.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell said, encouragingly. ‘I always hate that.’

  She raised an eyebrow at him. They both knew he thought that messages ought to be brought by a Galloper on a lathered horse from Some Other Part Of The Field. She waited impatiently for the text to tell her she had a message. It seemed like ages. Then it was another æon until the voicemail answered and then another millennium until she got to the newest message.

  Which was from the night sergeant at the nick. ‘DS Carpenter. DCI Hall asks can you give him a ring. It’s…um, it’s not good news, I’m afraid.’

  She rang off and sat down. Her legs had gone all wobbly. She thought she could bear these things, she who had seen bodies, sometimes strewn over a fair distance. She had had to break news far worse than this to more parents, husbands, wives than little Nolan, for instance, had had hot dinners. She always thought of Maxwell when she did so, hearing that worst news of all, all those years ago, when the tyres screamed on the wet tarmac and his world turned upside down. She had to give herself a moment before she rang Henry Hall.

  Maxwell stood up and came and wrapped his arms around her. Thank goodness for those arms. Without them she would have sunk long ago. After soaking up all the love she could, she carefully unwrapped him and picked up the phone. She dialled Henry Hall’s direct number.

  ‘Jacquie. Thanks for getting back.’ Jacquie knew perfectly well that Henry Hall had a house, a wife, kids. Yet somehow he always seemed to be there, in his office, behind his desk, glasses blank, his mind an enigma.

  ‘Guv.’ Jacquie’s throat was dry and her lips felt stuck to her teeth. ‘What’s going on?’

  She heard him sigh at the other end. ‘We’ve just had a call from the Arundel nick. Mike Crown has just tripped over a body.’

  She nearly passed out with relief and put a thumb up to Maxwell. He grinned and silently clapped his encouragement. ‘Mike Crown as in…?’

  ‘Lara Kent, yes. That’s why they rang. If you remember, we asked them if he had any previous before we paid them the visit.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. But…a body. That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it, guv?’

  ‘You know I don’t believe in those, Jacquie. When someone says it’s a coincidence, I always get suspicious. And you’re about the twelfth person to say it. So now I’m very suspicious indeed.’

  ‘My message said it was not good news, guv. I think this sounds pretty good – he’s obviously lying about the tripping over. We wondered about him from the start; he’s a much better bet than Lunt.’ They had and he was. There was a pattern about murder. The old cliché about killers returning to the scene of the crime was just that. But some of them never left it, ‘finding’ the body, offering help, volunteering for searches, being that teensy bit too helpful, too ready to please. ‘So why not good news?’

  ‘Because…I’m sorry, Jacquie, I don’t mean to condescend. Is Maxwell there?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was puzzled now. Henry Hall never wanted to speak to Maxwell at the best of times. And this was in the middle of a break in the middle of a murder inquiry. Hall was usually ready to consign Maxwell to the deepest dungeon about now, the oubliette of the Chateau d’If.

  ‘Can you put him on?’

  Mutely, Jacquie passed the phone to Maxwell.

  ‘Hello, Henry. How can I help you?’ Maxwell was pulling all sorts of interrogative faces at Jacquie who answered with some of her own. Thank God they still hadn’t quite perfected the technology of Phone-o-Vision.

  ‘Sorry…Max.’ The name was dragged out of him with red hot pincers, by the tone of Hall’s voice. ‘I just felt it would be better to tell you. The body that was discovered earlier this evening – Jacquie will doubtless be telling you the circumstances – is described as being of an elderly woman. We are obviously thinking it may be your Mrs Troubridge.’

  ‘God.’ Maxwell was struck as dumb as he ever would be, not because Hall had called her his Mrs Troubridge, but beca
use, after the briefest of hopes, it could be the old lady after all. ‘Where was this, did you say?’

  ‘Arundel. A disused railway line.’

  Maxwell felt hopeful again. ‘That’s not her usual kind of stamping ground, Henry, I have to say. I haven’t known her leave Columbine for years.’

  ‘No. But since when did murder victims behave normally? The only person to behave more oddly than a murderer is usually their victim.’ Maxwell concurred. What was Evelyn Hamilton, the first victim of the war-time blackout killer Gordon Cummins doing sitting in an air-raid shelter when there wasn’t an air-raid on? And why did she have £80 in her handbag, a colossal sum for those days. Always questions; never answers.

  ‘Yes, I accept that. But, Henry, she’s a very old lady.’

  ‘But perfectly hale and hearty, I understand.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Maxwell paused. This wasn’t going anywhere and he needed to tell Jacquie what was going on. ‘All right, Henry. If you need us for anything. Identification, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Thanks. We probably will. According to our records, she just has a sister. A bit younger, but not by much. If you’re sure you won’t find it…’ but Henry Hall knew that was a platitude that didn’t apply to Maxwell. He also knew that he would walk over hot coals rather than let Jacquie do it. ‘Yes, well, thanks again. It’s a different nick, so we may be a day or two. Paperwork, collaboration, you know. We’ll be in touch.’ And he cut the connection.

  ‘That was odd.’ Maxwell turned to Jacquie. ‘He says the body was an elderly woman.’

  Jacquie didn’t answer, just sat there staring at him with eyes like saucers.

  ‘He thinks it may be Mrs Troubridge. But I don’t.’

  She got up and rested on his chest again. ‘That’s sweet, Max, but we must face facts.’

  ‘She was found on a disused railway line, Jacquie. What on earth would Mrs Troubridge be doing on a disused railway line?’

  ‘What was she doing at the bus station?’

  ‘Point taken.’ He moved her away and looked into her eyes. ‘If it’s possible, let’s try not to dwell on this. Henry says it could be a day or two, so we may be worrying unnecessarily. I don’t even know why the police force there got in touch with your blokes. There must be loads of missing people.’

  Jacquie had to think for a moment just how much Maxwell might know. Usually, the answer to that question would be ‘everything’, but probably not on this occasion. She decided to put it in a nutshell. ‘The bloke who found her is the stepfather of the body you and Bill Lunt found on the dunes,’ she said, all in one breath. ‘Henry doesn’t believe in coincidence, so when a name crops up again in any investigation, he gets to sniffing around. It was the finder, not the body that made them ring. Henry just put two and two together.’

  ‘Let’s hope he’s making five,’ Maxwell said. ‘Since the subject has cropped up, how did Bill’s interview go?’

  ‘Something and nothing,’ she said, recognising a change of subject when one bit her on the nose. ‘The phone has rather changed things. They have got the numbers off it and none relate to him. They are mostly pay-as-you-go, non-registered things. They really should stop that; it’s just too easy for anyone a bit crooked. One in particular was there more than others, along with a few saucy texts; nothing David Beckham wouldn’t be proud to send. Bill is almost sorry his fifteen minutes of fame are over. Emma came in with him. She’s like a Rottweiler when she’s riled, isn’t she? I wouldn’t like to cross her. She’ll be in the frame next if she’s not careful.’

  ‘Emma? She wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ Maxwell chuckled; but then, in the context of History lessons at Leighford High, he’d never seen her with her dander up.

  ‘No, but she’d certainly give it a good telling off,’ Jacquie asserted. She had seen Alan Kavanagh actually change colour when he had met them on the stairs as they left the building. And that was when Emma was feeling calmer.

  The baby alarm in the corner burbled and then exploded with a wail. A diversion – that child really did have excellent timing. They tossed a coin, Maxwell’s famous two-headed zloty. All right, he won, but he went with Jacquie anyway.

  At eight a.m. precisely that Thursday a strange thing happened to Peter Maxwell. Well, perhaps not that strange, as his recent professional life had been peppered with suspensions, warnings, sudden and mysterious deaths and other alarums and excursions, but this was definitely a first. Just as he was getting himself together to brave the February weather, choosing the old Jesus tie to complement the old Jesus scarf, the radio whittering in the background, a few words in the whitter attracted his attention.

  ‘Whitter, burble, natter, Leighford High School, natter rhubarb.’ It was almost like S4C’s News programmes, but he had caught the gist now and gave it his fuller attention. ‘…a previously unprecedented move, Leighford High School has been temporarily closed due to the large numbers of staff absent. The Head Teacher, James Diamond, spoke this morning to our reporter, Anne Fallows.’ The grey tones of Legs Diamond filled the kitchen for what Maxwell hoped would be the only time. ‘Yes, Anne.’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘Yes, Anne’ – what a media tart that man was. ‘The staff and students at Leighford High School have been hit by the recent virus that is going round. Due to the large numbers of absences, which my remaining staff have been working tirelessly to cover, I have no option but to close the school for the rest of this week. I would therefore ask parents to not send their children in this morning, or tomorrow. Over the weekend, we will be contacting all families affected by this with detailed plans for the immediate future. We’ll be in touch by phone and email. Supply cover is at breaking point all over the county and it takes time to mobilise the various Agencies.’

  Peter Maxwell knew perfectly well that Legs Diamond couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, much less mobilise anything. It was rather like the Russian army at the start of World War One, but not so well organised.

  ‘But what if a child has already set off?’ Weren’t the media annoying, raising ticklish issues like that?

  ‘Thank you, Anne, that is a very pertinent point’ Maxwell could almost hear Diamond rising on his toes and closing his eyes in that pompous way he had. ‘There will be staff at the school this morning, both to advise pupils who arrive and to plan the next few days. I do stress that this situation is unlikely to last beyond tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Diamond. Back to the studio.’ Maxwell could hear the disappointment in her voice, but then few who spoke to Legs could avoid it. She had wanted juicy gossip. He had provided dry bones. Virus going round, indeed. It was just terminal disenchantment. It was a wonder there was a school in the country open. And if that school happened to be run by Legs Diamond, it was a wonder more people weren’t hurt in the struggle for the main gates.

  Slurping a coffee which no longer had to be on the run, Maxwell ambled into the sitting room and picked up the phone. Before he could start to dial, it rang. He always hated it when that happened; he called it his touch of the David Blains. He had, after all, been walking on water for years. He answered it anyway.

  ‘Hello? War Office.’

  ‘Max, glad I caught you before you set off. Sorry, it’s Bernard Ryan.’

  ‘Hello, Bernard.’ Maxwell was equally sorry it was Bernard Ryan. As Deputy Heads go, Bernard Ryan didn’t and that was the problem. ‘You’re not one of the viralled, then?’

  ‘Er…no, but it seems to me like everyone else is. Are you well?’

  That sounded like a very loaded question to Maxwell. He toyed with doing his urban squalor tuberculosis impression, the one he always did when teaching Year Nine about the 1840s slums, but he couldn’t really be arsed for Bernard. ‘Yes, same as usual. Rude health.’

  ‘Er, good. Glad to hear it. Umm…’

  ‘Come to the point, Bernard, there’s a good Deputy Head. I’m on my way. Saddle-bags packed. Chalk and cane on board. There was no need even to ask.’

  ‘That’s the thing, Max. We…that
is, the SLT, have decided that we’re OK with the staff here already. So…have the day off, why don’t you? You’ve been doing so much cover, you deserve it.’

  You lying bugger, Maxwell thought. There were three things wrong with that sentence. Ryan had used an initialism, which was rapidly destroying the English language. He had employed the ghastly Americanism of OK, thus confirming that the end of civilisation was nigh. And above all, he was being nice. ‘Bernard, you spoil me,’ his mouth said. ‘Now, are you sure?’ He’d never been told to stay home before – except when he’d been suspended, of course.

  ‘Quite sure, Max, thank you,’ Ryan said, relief spilling in gouts through Maxwell’s phone. The Deputy knew of old what a pain in the bum the Head of Sixth Form could be in crisis moments, taking charge, doing everything, making it all work. That was the last thing he wanted.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ Maxwell said, equally gushing, equally insincere. ‘I hope you get it all sorted soon. Don’t be a stranger, now. Bye, then.’ He put the phone down. What were they planning? There were rumours that the Powers That Be wanted to create a faculty system at Leighford High, to build Humanities where it had not existed before. Perhaps they’d bring in some Business Studies lightweight to overlord it all; in which case, as Maxwell had said loudly at a recent staff meeting, such a person would be a crime against humanities. On the other hand, did he care? He decided not and went off to top up his coffee. A whole day free. Like Jacquie, he loved his family. Like her, he relished the odd day without them. Space and time, that old continuum that Bert Einstein was always banging on about. He could go and get Nolan from the child-minder, but it was still a touch cold for the bike. He could go upstairs and do some modelling, anchoring Corporal Morley to his lance-cap, for instance, but he found the muse was just not on him at 8.10 on what should have been a school morning. Anyway, he’d got to the highlights on the horse bit and that took total concentration. He could go into town and do that boring shop for all the non-edible items out of which they had run – he knew Jacquie hated to do that. Forty quid and not a bar of chocolate to be seen. He could do all those things…but what he would do was take a bit of a train ride to Arundel, just to see what was going on. If asked, and he would be asked, he would just point out what a lovely town he found it; antique shops, deli, nice Chinese restaurant for lunch, castle for the afternoon. He knew no one would buy that, especially since the castle would be closed out of season, but he had to have something ready.