Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  ‘That’s why Mrs Hyde joined the class?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘It’s possible.’ Janet, while still defending her viewpoint, had retreated a few miles. ‘She’s a very attractive woman. More so than Jenny, wouldn’t you say?’

  Maxwell could barely remember the woman. He’d met her perhaps three times in his life, always across a cramped table during the melee of parents’ evenings. Both the Hydes had radiated arrogance. Jennifer, it seemed, had decided against Oxbridge. Snobbery wasn’t her forte. Wait until you’re asked, Jennifer, Maxwell had thought. Not a single member of staff had mentioned the girl to Maxwell as somebody with a fighting chance at either of the country’s oldest universities. The spires would not dream in the Hyde household. Perhaps sensing this, Jenny herself had turned them down, denying the world of academe the keen thrust of her biological mind. What a waste to natural science. And what a waste of Geoffrey Smith’s time, too, when, in accordance with Mr and Mrs Hyde’s wishes, he’d given up his own time to polish her English in readiness for the entrance exam. Even had her round to his house from time to time. As for snobbery not being her forte, that had a ring of truth. At Leighford, she was Jenny, ordinary, popular, gregarious. At home she was Jennifer, blue-stocking extraordinary. It was not the first time that Maxwell noted two utterly different kids – one at school, the other at home. Literally, in this instance, Jekyll and Hyde.

  ‘Anyway,’ Janet was cradling her cocoa in both hands. ‘Marianne – that’s Mrs Hyde to you – came up to me afterwards. She made small-talk for a while, then asked me if I’d noticed anything … odd … about Jenny.’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently, just recently, two days or so before this, she’d become quiet, moody.’

  ‘Had you noticed that?’

  ‘No, I can’t say that I had. Course, it’s difficult when you don’t actually teach them. And you can’t count the tutorial period.’

  That blissless state when every tutor at Leighford High spent fifty minutes a week in the company of twenty-five strangers, attempting to discuss the Great Issues of Life. No, Maxwell agreed, nodding; you can’t count the tutorial period.

  ‘It all came out in the wash that Jenny had asked to stay with Anne Spencer for that last week of term. They were working on some biology assignment or other and as Anne’s house is out on the Shingle, it made some sense. They were doing something on seaweed or whatever. I happened to mention that I hadn’t seen Jenny that week and Mrs H. turned quite pale.’

  ‘She wasn’t at Anne’s?’

  ‘Well, the next day I spoke to Anne in the corridor. No, Jenny wasn’t with her. She’d never actually stayed with her, not overnight.’

  ‘Didn’t Mrs Hyde check with the Spencers?’

  ‘She might have done after she talked to me. I don’t know. The point was, though, that no one knew where Jenny was.’

  He got up and wandered to the window. From here, he could see the headland called the Shingle, a black dragon lying prone in a silver sea, wrapped now in autumn’s mist.

  ‘Look, Max,’ she followed him, ‘I should have told you all this. I can’t think why I didn’t.’

  He turned to her. ‘Mrs Hyde asked you not to, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ Janet said. ‘That evening at the pottery class she said – and I’ll never forget her words – she said, “Please don’t tell anyone, especially Mr Maxwell.”’

  Mr Maxwell shrugged. ‘Don’t worry. It happens all the time,’ he reassured her. ‘Remember that Atkins girl a couple of years ago? I didn’t know where she was living from one day to the next. She might have been on the game in Soho for all I knew. Did the Hydes call the police?’

  ‘Well, I rang Marianne from school that morning. To tell her what she probably already knew, that Jenny wasn’t at the Spencers’. Of course, two days later, they found her body at the Red House. Do you know the Red House, Max?’

  ‘Not really,’ he shrugged.

  ‘We used to take kids sketching there.’ She looked at their reflections in the window. ‘It’s hindsight, I suppose,’ she shuddered a little at the memory of it, ‘but I never felt quite at ease there.’

  ‘Hindsight?’ He leapt back in mock amazement. ‘Look, do you mind? Leave that sort of language to us historians, please, young lady. I don’t go around spouting nonsense about chiaroscuro, do I?’

  It was her turn to swipe him round the shoulder. ‘Oh, bollocks, Max,’ she laughed. ‘You’d pinch anybody’s jargon without a second thought.’

  He laughed with her and put his cup down on the draining board. ‘I’d wash it up,’ he winced, holding his head, ‘but my old trouble’s playing up again.’

  But Janet was staring out at the Shingle too and at the line of the headland that led to the Red House. ‘What happened, Max?’ she murmured, not looking at him. ‘What happened to Jenny?’

  He crossed to her, hesitated, then put his strong hands on her narrow shoulders. ‘She died, Janet,’ he said softly. ‘She just died.’

  Perhaps that wasn’t the best time to do it, but he couldn’t sleep anyway. Maxwell made his excuses to Janet Foster and pedalled for the Shingle, crossing the road that winds uphill all the way. Now that it was autumn, the fudge-coloured ponies were locked away in warm, sickly-smelling stables and the riding school lay black and bleak under a fitful moon.

  At the gate of St Asaph’s, he swung from the saddle and parked White Surrey against the old tree that the storm of ’87 had failed to uproot. There was a short-cut, he vaguely remembered, from the churchyard across the fields to the Red House, but the clouds were thickening from the west and the going would be rough in the dark. So he stuck to the road, that ribbon of moonlight that formed the sunken lane. In the shelter of the bushes here was a stillness he found eerie. You’d never think the sea was just over that hill. Or that the M27 thundered east and west only three miles away, juggernauts roaring through the night.

  It was a steep climb by the road, but he made it and picked his way through the barbed wire some thoughtful soul had tangled round the old, rusted railings. He hadn’t got a torch, but he could make out the sign that said ‘Keep Out. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ Or strangled, he thought to himself.

  The Red House was half a house, derelict, silent. The wind of early evening had dropped now, giving no explanation to the curiously stunted trees that slanted to the north, like something out of a Tolkien landscape. He knew enough about police procedure to know there would have been a blue and white tape stretched across here when they’d found her body. It was not there now, only tyre tracks of Range Rovers cut deep into what was once the croquet lawn. He ducked under the wild rhododendrons, free now to spread where they would without the cramping confines of human taste.

  ‘Hello, hello, hello.’

  The voice froze Maxwell’s heart in the darkness. He felt his throat tighten and his skin crawl. And he spun round.

  ‘I’d know that scarf anywhere. Returning to the scene of the crime, Maxie, me ol’ mucker?’

  There could only be one head that bald in the moonlight.

  ‘Geoffrey, you total arsehole. I could have died.’

  Smith laughed. ‘Not you, Maxie, you’re immortal. Shouldn’t we exchange clichés about now? Like “What are you doing here?”?’

  ‘All right.’ Maxwell was still fighting the urge to throw up. ‘I was about to ask the same of you.’

  ‘“We’ll ask the questions if you don’t mind.”’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Maxwell had tired of the game already. ‘That’s enough of that.’

  ‘“That’s enough of that.” No,’ Smith confessed, ‘I don’t recognize that one. Unless it’s dear old Jack Warner, is it? The Blue Lamp?’

  ‘I’ve stopped doing it now, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell said, as though to a village idiot. ‘It’s not funny any more.’

  ‘“Last night,”’ Smith was giving his best Joan Fontaine, ‘“I dreamed I went to Manderley again …”’

  ‘I said,’ Maxwell grew loud
er, ‘“I’ve stopped doing it now.”’ He paused. ‘Anyway, that’s nothing like Laurence Olivier.’

  ‘Ooh, you bitch. Nip?’

  Smith had one of those walking sticks with a glass tot-carrier in the top. Reproduction, of course. ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Good God, Maxim. Aren’t you well?’

  ‘Not as well as I was,’ Maxwell confided, fumbling at his wrist, ‘it’s nearly midnight. What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought you’d stopped all that,’ Smith observed, ‘I could say I was walking the dog, but for one thing …’

  ‘No dog.’ Maxwell’s finger pirouetted into the air.

  Smith clicked his. ‘It’s easy to see how you became a senior teacher in a third-rate comprehensive no one’s ever heard of. You, presumably, are out looking for your cat, Tiddles.’

  ‘My cat is called Metternich,’ Maxwell reminded him. ‘And don’t call me Tiddles.’

  ‘Airplane.’ Smith jabbed the sky at him. ‘One of Leslie Neilson’s lines. Why is your cat called Metternich, Maxie? I’ve often wondered.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Maxwell’s feet crunched on the gravel, ‘if you’d followed a cultured discipline like History instead of wasting your time on English literature and similar crap, you’d know that Metternich was the Austrian Big Enchilada back at the Congress of Vienna.’

  ‘Sort of Douglas Hurd?’

  ‘Yes, but with presence and a brain.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He was a manipulator par excellence. Known as “the Coachman of Europe”.’

  ‘I knew that,’ Smith told him.

  ‘Well, then. If you’ve ever seen my Metternich playing with a mouse, you wouldn’t have to ask.’

  ‘I’m here,’ Smith was suddenly serious, ‘for exactly the same reason you are, Max. Because I couldn’t keep away.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Thank Christ,’ he said. ‘I thought it was just me slowly going mad with this Jenny Hyde thing. Shall we?’

  They did. Two grown men behaving like a percentage of the Famous Five. Or was it the Secret Seven?

  ‘You didn’t think to bring a torch, I suppose?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Sorry. Shit!’ Smith’s shin collided with something. ‘Spur of the moment thing, really. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Hilda?’ Maxwell suddenly remembered the rather crabby little woman his old mate had inexplicably married years before.

  ‘At her mother’s. Tending to Godzilla.’

  ‘I thought she was dead.’

  ‘Wishful thinking,’ Smith laughed.

  ‘So you’re a grass widower, then?’

  ‘After a fashion. Where did they find her, exactly?’

  Maxwell shrugged. They stood in the vestibule. High above them the sky broke bright through the shattered roof where the rafters jutted against the clouds. ‘The Advertiser didn’t say,’ he said.

  ‘Who uses this place, Max?’ Smith batted aside the damp cobwebs.

  ‘Winos, by the look of it.’ His feet crunched on glass. He crouched for as long as his knee would let him. ‘Strongbow.’ He peered at the faded label.

  ‘Not even well-heeled winos, then?’ Smith commented.

  ‘What did you expect?’ Maxwell was at his elbow again. ‘Moet et Chandon?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. The nationals said this place was a favourite with local lovers.’ He tapped a broken pipe that jutted through the wall. ‘Must be pretty desperate.’

  Maxwell tested the first stair. ‘My guess is they found her up there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  ‘Maybe it’s lighter up there. You know, this must have been quite a place in its day. I seem to remember when Hilda and I first moved here it was still lived in. Not that you ever saw anyone coming or going, but I remember it looked a sad place.’

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘Yes.’ Smith reached for a banister that wasn’t there as the stairs spiralled up to the left. ‘Its windows looked like eyes, big with tears.’

  Maxwell paused on the turn. ‘Dylan Thomas?’

  He felt his oppo’s stick tap the back of his leg sharply. ‘Geoffrey Smith, you bastard. And by the way, Maxie, this is me – Geoffrey. You don’t have to come that cynical bit with me, you know.’

  Maxwell smiled, anonymously and unobserved in the darkness. ‘It’s a mask I’ve worn for so long,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I’d know how to drop it, now. Even with you. Here.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Did I ever tell you I was psychic, Mr Smith?’

  ‘No, Mr Maxwell, you didn’t.’

  ‘That’s ’cos I’m not. But even so …’

  ‘What?’

  The Head of Sixth Form crossed the slippery boards of the floor until Smith saw him silhouetted against the bay of the window. For an instant he looked like a still from the only film that had ever really frightened him – where the Devil rears up in shafts of light over the little girl’s bed in The Exorcist. Then he shook himself free of it.

  ‘Even so?’ he said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You said you weren’t psychic, but even so.’

  ‘Even so, I think it was in this room.’

  ‘That she died?’

  Maxwell nodded. He turned into the room. The moon had come out and it threw shadows across the floor and to the far wall. Smith’s skin was a patchy grey under the clouds, his eyes and the handle of his stick flashing in their brightness. Maxwell knelt down again. ‘Jesus, I’ve got to stop this sleuthing bit. I hadn’t realized that kneeling was a job requirement for the fuzz. What do you make of this, Watson?’

  Smith knelt opposite him, delivering his best Nigel Bruce. ‘It’s a floor, Holmes,’ he said.

  ‘Capital, my dear fellow.’ Maxwell’s Rathbone flared his nostrils. ‘But I’m talking about this discoloration.’

  ‘Discoloration? Oh, yes.’ Nigel Bruce had vanished. Geoffrey Smith was back. ‘It’s a square shape. No. A rectangle. Bed?’

  ‘Thanks for the offer,’ Maxwell muttered, ‘but it’s just ’cos Hilda’s away and you’re a funny age. Not a bed, but a mattress.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So who used it? Jenny?’

  Smith looked up at him. ‘Was she that sort?’

  Maxwell leaned back on his heels. ‘She was a woman, Geoffrey, albeit a young one. What do I know about hormones? Sexual urges. I was never seventeen, let alone a woman. What made her run away?’

  ‘She ran away?’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘I’m glad I’m not the only one not to have known these things. She’d been gone for at least five days. She left home at some time between the Friday and the Monday. She told her parents she was staying with Anne Spencer, which she wasn’t. The Hydes realized it on the Wednesday and they probably notified the police that day.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘That’s what I’d do if I had a seventeen-year-old who’d done a runner. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’ve got two boys, remember, Maxie; one in Australia, one in Canada, bringing a civilizing influence to the colonies. I realized the impossibility of having a daughter.’

  ‘You may have a point,’ Maxwell said, suddenly elsewhere; another time; another place. ‘They found her Friday night.’

  ‘Hall,’ Smith remembered. ‘Chief Inspector Hall.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve met.’

  ‘Oh, you’re honoured.’

  ‘Am I? Help me up Geoff, will you?’ Maxwell was stuck.

  ‘“Can’t feel your legs, Douglas?”’ Smith’s Kenneth More as Douglas Bader needed work, but Maxwell was too good a friend to say so. He just groaned as the pins and needles ran riot up and down his calves.

  ‘God, interview leg,’ he hissed, hopping around.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I must have told you. When I went for that Deputy job in Chichester. I was leaning so hard on my left leg, trying to be casual and in control, that when I stood up I fell over. I didn�
�t get the job.’

  ‘Well, of course not. There are enough dypsomaniacs in Chichester as it is, without you adding to their problems.’

  Maxwell turned to the window. In the early hours of Wednesday morning under the coldness of the moon he saw the lawns fall away to the sea and the huddle of houses on the far hill where Janet Foster had put her lights out and would be sleeping now, with Dirk at the foot of her bed. Was this, he wondered, Jenny’s last view?

  ‘Who’s got the mattress now, Geoff?’ he asked.

  ‘The law.’ Smith was beside him. ‘If you’re right about a mattress in the first place. If she was lying on it, they’d take it away for forensics. God, Max, don’t you watch any television?’

  ‘Too busy marking.’ Maxwell stared out to sea. ‘That’s it, then.’ He turned to his old comrade of the chalk face. ‘I’ve got to go to the police.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It may have escaped your attention, dear boy,’ Smith folded his arms, suddenly cold now at this hour, in front of these glassless windows, ‘but there’s a juvenile crime wave going on out there.’

  ‘Cobblers,’ Maxwell growled. ‘The only crime wave is the rate at which those doom and gloom merchants in the media churn out scaremongering stories.’

  ‘And who do people blame for the juvenile crime wave?’ Smith ignored him. ‘The police. And who do the police blame?’

  ‘Juveniles?’ Maxwell decided to humour him.

  ‘Too simple,’ Smith chuckled. ‘Where’s your psychology, man? The police blame the people who create the delinquents. “The Lord, he lays it on Martha’s sons.”’

  ‘Ah, the parents.’

  ‘Oh, ye of little faith.’ Smith clicked his tongue and shook his head. ‘Us, dear boy. The teachers. Oh, yes, we don’t get ’em till they’re eleven and we see ’em for seven hours out of twenty-four, but it’s bound to be our fault.’

  ‘I’m game for the odd diatribe,’ Maxwell told him, ‘even at …’ he checked his watch, ‘nearly one in the morning. But what is your point? That the police won’t be very helpful?’

  ‘I knew you weren’t listening to the clichés when we got here.’ Smith turned to peer down into the shadows of the garden, where the nettles jostled each other to reach the sky. ‘They ask the questions; they don’t answer them. You don’t want to end up as a suspect, do you?’