Maxwell's Chain

by M. J. Trow

  Maxwell nodded.

  ‘Why has it hit Greg so hard? Why him?’

  ‘That depends on your take on the meaning of life, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Whether you think it’s all part of God’s Great Design or just some pointless, endless round of natural selection. But Greg’s young and tough.’ He patted the boy’s hunched shoulder. ‘He’ll be all right. These things take time.’

  He watched as Nick’s head came up and he looked out over the lake, his eyes glistening with tears, his breath on the night air a reminder that spring was not here yet.

  ‘I didn’t realise that you and he knew each other.’

  Nick sniffed. ‘We met last September,’ he said. ‘I’d just left Leighford High and he’d just started. We had that in common and had a laugh about it. Taking the piss, I’m afraid.’

  Maxwell smiled. ‘Present company excepted, I hope,’ he said.

  Nick did his best to smile too, but it wasn’t altogether successful.

  ‘I love him, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘Greg. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  Maxwell looked at the boy, his face solemn and almost grey in the half light from the hospital wing. Forty years ago, son; thirty; even twenty in some circles, they’d have beaten you both to a pulp and your parents would have had to move. Poof, queer, nance. All the uncaring words of hatred of Maxwell’s boyhood echoed through the darkness. But now… well, different days.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s all right.’

  ‘Mum and dad don’t know, although I think they suspected it with Lobber.’

  ‘Richard?’

  Nick suddenly got up from the bench and paced around. ‘Greg isn’t the first,’ he said. ‘Lobber and I…well, you know…’

  ‘You were…an item…at school? I didn’t know.’

  Nick laughed, a brittle, short sound that echoed in the night. ‘Hardly an item,’ he said. ‘We had sex, that was all. And never at school.’

  Maxwell was grateful for that at least. ‘I saw you as a couple,’ he said, ‘but, I must admit, never in that way. You were always surrounded by girls.’

  ‘Poofs usually are,’ Nick said and the word jarred. ‘We’re not a threat, you see. We can talk make-up and emotions and lend a shoulder to cry on without any real sense of rivalry. Unless we’re after the same bloke, of course.’ He winked at Maxwell. This was better. The boy was coming out of it now, coming to terms with what hovered over that hospital bed. ‘Why did you want to see me?’ he asked.

  Maxwell had almost forgotten in the flurry of activity of the last few minutes, but the itch was still there, the need to know. ‘“Chain reaction”,’ he said. ‘Tell me about “Chain reaction”.’

  Nick looked confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a very old pop song,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Diana Ross, although I am reliably informed it’s been done since.’

  Nick shrugged. ‘Still don’t get it,’ he said.

  ‘I heard it only the other day,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s like one of those fleeting memories you get sometimes. You know, a smell, a taste, a sound. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but it takes you back. I’ve been around a lot longer than you, Nick; I have more moments like those than you do. But I do know when I heard it last. It was in the deli the other day, the day you served me. And it was coming from your back pocket. It’s a ringtone, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  Maxwell looked at him. ‘You know it is. Who was ringing you?’

  Nick looked vague. ‘It could have been anybody,’ he said. ‘I’ve got lots of people who ring me up.’

  ‘I believe that person also rang Lara Kent,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Nicholas, Nicholas,’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘You don’t watch the news, do you, dear boy? Lara Kent was the body found on the beach last week.’

  ‘The Big Issue seller,’ Nick said.

  ‘Precisely. The police have checked her mobile phone. There was one in particular they couldn’t trace in this pay-as-you-go topsy-turvy world of ours. It had been given the ringtone “Chain Reaction”.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ shrugged Nick.

  ‘Do you know Detective Chief Inspector Hall?’ Maxwell asked him.

  Nick shook his head.

  ‘My Better Half’s boss,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Doesn’t believe in coincidences. If he had his way, he’d have the word expunged from the dictionary. An unidentified caller calls a girl who was subsequently murdered. That same caller – or at least someone designated the same ringtone – calls you.’ Maxwell got up from the bench and stood in front of the boy. ‘Who was it, Nick?’ he asked.

  For a moment, Nick Campbell stood there, the willows dark over the pond behind him and the chill breeze from the east ruffling the waters. Maxwell saw the boy’s eyes bright in the reflected light and saw the muscles in his jaw flex. Then he said, ‘Lobber.’

  The word was almost inaudible. Maxwell took the lad’s arm and led him back to the bench. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ he asked.

  Like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar, it all came tumbling out. ‘It started with you, Mr Maxwell,’ he said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Your GCSE History lessons, the last time Lobber and I were in the same class together. You remember, Crime and Punishment?’

  OCR 1935; Maxwell remembered it perfectly.

  ‘There was one case you talked about…Well, it became a bit of an obsession with us. Leopold and Loeb.’

  ‘Leopold,’ Maxwell repeated as the deluxe list leapt into his mind. ‘N Leopold, of course. You.’

  Nick shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, that was just the point. It was all talk, theory, that’s all it was. Didn’t you ever have something like that, with a mate of yours, something you talked about doing, but never did?’

  Maxwell smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ he said. ‘When I was in the Sixth Form, a group of us read about Borley Rectory, “the most haunted house in England” and even though the place was a ruin, we were determined to spend the night there, camping. We planned it like a military operation, even down to the sandwich fillings we’d take.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘We didn’t go. It all fell apart because we couldn’t borrow a car. On such chance happenings, Nicholas, empires fall.’

  ‘But that was Leopold and Loeb’s problem too, wasn’t it? The car. Leopold hired it to pick up their target, using a false name. He hadn’t reckoned on the amount of blood there’d be in the vehicle, though. Didn’t let the chauffeur clean it, giving some guff about the stains being spilt wine.’

  ‘Chauffeurs? Hire cars? Spilt wine? Doesn’t sound quite like Nicholas Campbell and Richard Underdown.’

  ‘Well, it was only an idea,’ Nick agreed. ‘We researched the case carefully. Leopold and Loeb were spoilt rich kids from Chicago, law students. They looked down their noses on everybody else and decided to choose an inferior to kill, just because they could. Lobber – that’s why he got the nickname, of course; we invented it – Lobber decided we should choose some low-life, a down and out probably.’

  ‘You know you’re confessing to murder, Nick, don’t you?’ It was the nearest thing Maxwell could give by way of a caution.

  Campbell shook his head. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘It’s no more than crime writers do every day of their lives. I haven’t noticed Val McDermid or Robert Goddard being arrested lately.’

  ‘But you carried it out, Nick,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘No, Mr Maxwell, that’s the whole point. Folie à deux, isn’t it? That’s what you told us when you talked about the case first. I can remember it, clear as day. It was in Aitch Eight, a Tuesday morning and you said – I can remember your exact words – “Folie à deux means the madness of two. Take either individual on their own and they wouldn’t hurt a fly. Put them together and it’s fatal.”’

  ‘I’m impressed by your instant recall,’ Maxwell sm
iled, although he knew perfectly well he would actually have said ‘His or her own’.

  Nick’s face suddenly darkened. ‘I had a phone call from Lobber last Thursday. He told me he’d done it. He’d killed a girl on the beach, just out beyond Willow Bay and left her body in the sand.’

  ‘Like Leopold and Loeb left Bobby Franks in the culvert,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘I thought he was joking,’ Nick went on. ‘We’d talked about carrying out a murder for the best part of two years, on and off. We’d refined it in all sorts of ways, hammered out scenarios. Then, and this was after we came back from Nigeria, it all got a bit nasty.’

  ‘In what way nasty? I got the impression you were still best of friends when I saw you both in town.’

  ‘We had only just bumped into each other when we saw you. Since I met Greg…I knew it was the real thing. I had to put some space between me and Lobber. He wasn’t taking it well. He’d always been a bit possessive and we were going our different ways soon. I was off to university and he was working at the Lunts…’

  ‘The Lunts?’ Maxwell repeated.

  ‘The photography shop in the High Street.’

  ‘Of course,’ Maxwell clicked his fingers. It was his version of Homer Simpson’s ‘D’oh’. ‘I knew I recognised the voice. I rang the other day to talk to Mrs Lunt and he answered.’

  Nick nodded. ‘I bet that put the frighteners on him. Knowing you were on his case.’

  ‘You flatter me, Nicholas,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Anyway, I realised that Lobber meant business. About the murder, I mean. You know, Leopold and Loeb planned to kill their target between them, looping a rope around his neck and each pulling one end.’

  ‘Except it didn’t happen that way.’

  ‘No,’ Nick said. ‘Leopold was behind the wheel of the hire car, Loeb in the back with Bobby Franks. It was Loeb who shoved a gag in the kid’s mouth and hit him with a chisel. The rope was never used.’

  ‘So you’re telling me…?’

  ‘Lobber,’ Nick said solemnly. ‘Lobber chose the girl at random, followed her, picked her up on the street, took her to the beach – “Just for a walk,” he told her, “No funny business,” and stabbed her to death. Then he walked home, cleaned himself up and rang me.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  Nick put his head in his hands. ‘That’s the point,’ he said. ‘Nothing. At first, of course, I thought he was joking. You know what he was like at school, nicking door signs, gluing computer keys down. Then I caught the radio. There was a girl dead on the beach. And I still did nothing.’

  ‘You are an accessory after the fact, Nick,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘I know. I went to see Lobber. We had this screaming row. It all got very personal. He didn’t know about Greg, of course, and it all came out. He said it was my turn to carry out the next one.’ Nick looked at his old Head of Sixth Form. ‘This wasn’t part of the deal, Mr Maxwell. Leopold and Loeb killed once. Lobber went on doing it. When I asked him why, he said “Because I can” and accused me of being all kinds of shit for letting him down. Life’s funny, isn’t it; Leopold and Loeb were eighteen and nineteen, exactly our ages today.’

  ‘And still you didn’t go to the police?’

  ‘I was on my way,’ the boy said. ‘I was psyching myself up to do it, when I found Greg…I went to see him, tell him about it, ask what I should do. I found him semi-conscious at his flat and rang for an ambulance. Mr Maxwell,’ he held the man’s sleeve, ‘Lobber’s mad. I don’t understand what he’s doing now. After he’d killed Darren Blackwell, he went after Ms Lessing. Of all people. He picked her up in his car, with some ludicrous story about her boyfriend, what’s his name, that Crown bloke? He needed to see her, Lobber said, urgently. How the woman fell for that I don’t know, but it’s my guess she got into the car and bang, he walloped her. Then he took her body out to those woods at Arundel and dumped her on the old railway line. He knew Crown jogged there – and when – so it was likely he’d find the corpse first.’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘I had no idea Richard Underdown was such a devious bastard,’ he said. ‘Is this what schoolboy pranks lead to?’

  ‘What happens now?’ Nick asked.

  Maxwell looked at him. All in all it had been quite a week for the boy. He looked drained and old beyond his years.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you go home, Nick. You can leave this to the grown-ups now.’

  The grown-ups were having a slightly bizarre conversation of their own as Maxwell reached Jacquie’s car. She waved to him to be quiet as she talked into her mobile. It reminded Maxwell of an old Bob Newhart record.

  ‘I see, Alan,’ she was saying. ‘And what happened then? You went into the house. Without a warrant card. Without back-up. Hmm. And then what?’ She waited. ‘Mr and Mrs Lunt were in the bedroom. Decorating, were they, Alan? With the lights off? Huh-huh.’ She pulled a pained expression at Maxwell, belting up beside her. ‘Well, of course they might,’ she said. ‘No, I’m afraid Mr Hall will have to know, Alan. Me? Well, I’d have rung the front doorbell; but that’s me for you.’ And she rang off before collapsing with laughter.

  ‘It’s not Emma Lunt,’ she said when she could, between sniggers. ‘She’s at home, enjoying a quiet moment with her husband, just before they sue the arse off Alan Kavanagh for conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace.’

  Maxwell hit the dashboard, growling to himself.

  Jacquie looked at him. ‘I didn’t know Alan meant so much to you,’ she said.

  ‘If Emma Lunt isn’t our next victim,’ he said, ‘then, frankly, my dear, I’m stumped.’

  ‘How do we know there’s going to be another one?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I feel it in my water. There’s a smell of unfinished business in the air. And Lobber Underdown doesn’t know when enough is enough.’

  ‘Lobber Underdown?’ she looked at him. ‘Who the hell is Lobber Underdown?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Maxwell said. ‘But after what Nick just told me, he’s our man. We need to ring Henry.’

  Jacquie checked her watch, always more reliable than the car’s clock. ‘It’s late,’ she said. ‘And it’s Friday. I’ll try the nick, but it’s more likely he’s at home or spooning and sparring with Helen Marshall.’

  ‘Who?’ Maxwell sat bolt upright.

  ‘Don’t start,’ she warned him, stabbing buttons on her mobile. ‘We’ve had this conversation.’

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ he said. ‘Ring off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me DCI Marshall’s name was Helen?’

  ‘Er…’ Jacquie ran through all the options in her head. ‘I thought I did? I didn’t know it myself? I know how you hate the H word? Max, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Ambigrams, Jacquie. Ambigrams. The thing that links our victims in Lobber’s deranged mind. Nick told me he thought Lobber is choosing victims at random, but we know he isn’t. The links in the chain are all about ambigrams. That which is first shall be last. And we haven’t come across a better example yet than Helen.’

  ‘Who is Lobber?’ she screamed at him, exasperated.

  ‘Richard Underdown,’ he told her, solemnly, ‘was one of My Own, not the pleasantest of people I’ve met, though I wouldn’t have had him down as a serial killer. He and Nick Campbell were fantasising about an action replay of Leopold and Loeb.’

  ‘Leopold,’ she said, ‘the name at the deluxe.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said testily, having been there himself only ten minutes before, ‘and Loeb-Lobber, get it? But folie à deux became folie à un and whereas for Nick it was a harmless, if macabre, topic of conversation, Lobber meant it. It’s his ringtone on Lara Kent’s phone – “Chain Reaction”. And that’s what this is all about. A chain reaction of individuals linked by a chain ambigram. Not only did I miss the signs of psycho in Lobber, I missed his apparent intellectual thrust as well. What the hell’s he doing working in a photographers? That’s where we’
re going now.’

  ‘Where?’ Jacquie kicked the Ka into action.

  ‘The Lunts. Good God, is that the time?’ In a heart-stopping moment he realised that they had left Nolan with the Tweedle Twins. ‘Nole!’ he cried.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, as she pulled slowly away from her parking place. ‘My time waiting for you wasn’t wasted. I rang them and asked if they would sleep over if we were late.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I put the phone down on their delighted twittering.’

  ‘Going into a tunnel?’ he asked, suggesting the favourite excuse of mobile users.

  ‘Battery,’ she answered. ‘Off to the Lunts, then. I’ll phone for back-up.’ She fumbled in her pocket for her phone.

  ‘Back-up?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘What are you talking about? We haven’t got time.’

  ‘You may be right,’ she said. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’

  The Ka raced through the sleeping town, Jacquie noting the Paddy Wagon bundling in the drunks along the High Street. She took the short cut through the town square and along Cadogan Street before cutting down the one-way system the wrong way, wishing she had, after all, one of those flashing light jobbies she could stick onto the car roof and they screeched to a halt outside the house in Windermere Avenue.

  ‘Front or back?’ he asked her.

  She laughed. ‘You stay with me,’ she said. ‘We’re doing this by the book; or at least partially by the book in that you shouldn’t be with me at all.’

  They crossed the lawn and she rang the doorbell. As Kavanagh had found it, the house was in total darkness and it took a while for a rather dishevelled-looking Bill Lunt to shamble to the door in his dressing-gown.

  ‘Bill,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Sorry it’s so late. We’re not interrupting anything, are we?’

  Jacquie glared at him. ‘Mr Lunt, I am DS Jacquie Carpenter, Leighford CID.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lunt, confused. ‘I know who you are. I was staying in your house, briefly.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We have to do this formally. I need some information, Mr Lunt.’