Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Where did he go last night, Mrs Grey?’ Jacquie Carpenter asked, still carrying her mug of tea.

  ‘Ooh.’ The woman looked vague. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ she muttered. ‘I think he was going to a teacher’s house.’

  ‘A teacher?’ The policewoman looked at her. ‘Do you remember who?’

  ‘No.’ Mrs Grey shook her head. ‘He didn’t say. Are there any teachers, then, who live on the Dam?’

  ‘The Dam, Mrs Grey?’

  ‘That’s where they found him, isn’t it? My Will said the Inspector had told him that’s where Tim was. Did he suffer, miss?’ she asked suddenly, all in the same breath as her last sentence. ‘Would he have suffered, my Tim? Only I don’t mind him being gone, but I couldn’t have stood it if he’d suffered.’

  Jacquie Carpenter just held the woman’s hand with the one that was free. This time she hadn’t seen the body. Hadn’t been at the scene of the crime. But she knew what her colleagues knew. She knew about the ligature and the dead boy’s throat and the bulging tongue and the mottled skin. People suffered in a death like that. Just how much only two people knew – the victim and his murderer.

  ‘No,’ she lied. ‘No, Mrs Grey, he didn’t suffer.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mrs Grey raised a shaking hand to her lips. Jacquie Carpenter put her mug down quickly, ready to handle the collapse that was near. But Mrs Grey wasn’t collapsing. She was remembering. ‘I’ve got to get a message to someone,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Is it Tim’s granny or someone?’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Grey said. ‘It’s that nice Mr Maxwell from up at the school. He was asking after Tim only this morning.’

  If you haven’t been in a school staff room, the chances are you haven’t been in a police incident room either. Chief Inspector Hall’s at Tottingleigh was the old library. Some decrepit old biddy, whose grandfather was a Major-General or something, had died and left a bob or two to the local library services. It was probably her intention to tart up the old place where she sat hour after hour poring over Barbara Cartland or Catherine Cookson in the rather maudlin way that women will. But the local Cultural Services had different ideas and they built a spanking new library, with electronic anti-theft devices and computers all over the place; about as close to culture as Australia is.

  So it was that the old Tottingleigh Lending Library was currently vacant – and West Sussex CID had moved in. Henry Hall had got the call by midday and his heart leapt as he heard the news. Still, he didn’t believe it until he saw it and when he climbed the well-worn steps that afternoon, he did see it – the hushed room full again, busy and bustling. Manpower? No problem. Cash? Well, put in for overtime and we’ll see what happens. Another kid was dead. Let’s get the bastard who did it.

  Some faces he recognized. Others not. But they all knew him, and by the time the old library clock struck three, the team had come to order and he was faced with fifty-eight coppers, draped on chairs or leaning against filing cabinets, shirt-sleeves rolled and ties loosened. Hall sat alone to one side of the front desk. DI Johnson had the chair.

  ‘Timothy William Grey,’ he began and the light went out and the beam of a carousel hit the screen behind him, cigarette smoke swirling and recoiling in the shaft of light. ‘You’ll have to bear with us on some of these slides – some of ’em are still wet.’ A school photograph flashed in front of the watching detectives of a thin, plain-looking schoolboy of about fourteen. ‘This is an old photograph,’ Johnson told them.

  The same face appeared again. Older. Unsmiling. Dead. ‘This is a new one.’ Johnson had been this way before. ‘Taken at seven thirty hours this morning. His body was found under a clump of bushes at the Dam. For those of you drafted in from the sticks …’ he waited for the snigger to die down, ‘this is a beauty spot a mile and a half from the sea. Open parkland, bushes, trees.’

  ‘There’s talk of a golf course,’ Hall added. The next slide swept the area, but the natural beauty of it was scarred by the blue and white police cordon ribbon fluttering to the left. A closer view showed the bushes and the next eight were devoted to the body from different angles. Everybody respected DS Davis, the photographer. Dedicated. Thorough. No job for the squeamish, police photographer, recording for all time nature’s saddest handiwork. But somebody had to do it. And Davis had.

  ‘He was found on his back,’ Johnson said, ‘knees drawn up and left leg flat on the ground. The cause of death was strangulation. A ligature of some kind drawn and knotted to the left of his Adam’s apple.’

  Davis’s mortuary photographs flicked on to the screen, exactly as Hall had seen the body on Astley’s slab.

  ‘Approximate time of death,’ Johnson checked the sheaf of paper on his clipboard, ‘twenty-thirty to twenty-one hundred hours last night. No witnesses so far.’

  ‘Who found the body, Dave?’ a voice called from the back.

  ‘Kids, Er …’ Johnson flicked through his pages. ‘Two paper boys taking a short-cut on their round. They saw his trainers and feet sticking out from under the bush. Ran back home and the parents rang us.’

  ‘So the dead lad had been there all night?’ Biros slid across notebooks as the team’s specialists selected their information from Johnson and wrote it down.

  ‘All night,’ Johnson nodded. ‘His knuckles were cut and the pathologist thinks he may have got a decent one in on his attacker before he died. Our man may have a loose or missing tooth.’

  ‘Footprints?’ someone asked.

  ‘Ground’s too dry,’ Johnson said to the mass of silhouetted heads in front of him. It didn’t sound likely to him either. Ever since the Jenny Hyde murder it seemed to have done nothing but rain. But the Dam was high above sea level and the short grass left few secrets.

  ‘Tyres?’ somebody else tried.

  ‘You can’t get a vehicle up there,’ the Inspector told them. ‘We had to cart the body by stretcher to the ambulance, what … quarter of a mile. We’ve got some bike tracks though.’

  ‘The paper boys?’ a faceless voice suggested.

  ‘They were on foot,’ Johnson told the team. ‘Even so, it doesn’t help at the moment.’

  ‘Was he actually killed where he was found?’ Jacquie Carpenter’s voice was clear to the right.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Johnson said, still subconsciously wondering what business it was of hers. ‘Soil samples due Friday.’

  There was a series of guffaws and hoots. ‘I thought it was vicars worked a one-day week, not pathologists.’

  ‘All right.’ Johnson felt it was time to keep the lid on things. ‘Sir?’

  The room fell quiet again as Henry Hall took Johnson’s place. It was a quiet not exactly born of respect. Those who knew Hall knew he was a lacklustre bastard. Those who didn’t know him had heard he was. No, it was just the norm. When the guv’nor stood up, you shut up. Because this was an incident room. And this was a murder enquiry. Miss something, however small, however irrelevant and you’d miss your man. Forever.

  ‘Similarities,’ Hall said quietly, his eyes wandering over his team. His suit. His accent. It reeked of university. He spoke fluent graduate. One or two of the younger lads who had followed in his wake from Bramshill were impressed. The older ones were quietly contemptuous. Somebody else lit up. ‘I won’t bore you with the slides again, ladies and gentlemen. The photographs are all around the walls. But for those of you drafted in from …’ he smiled at Johnson sitting beside him, ‘elsewhere …’ no one sniggered this time, ‘I suggest you familiarize yourselves with them and with the details of the Jennifer Hyde case.’

  The fierce light of the projector still dazzled in his face, giving his eyes an eerie white blankness. ‘Could we have that off, Reg?’

  Reg killed the light. ‘Similarity one.’ Hall moved slowly along the front row, like a general reviewing his troops. ‘Both victims died by strangulation. Strangulation caused by a ligature with a knot to the left.’ He let that one sink in before he went on. ‘Similarity two, both vi
ctims were aged seventeen. Similarity three,’ he paused, ‘and I’m not sure similarity is the right word, these victims knew each other. Not only that. They were going out together. For a time,’ he cleared his throat, ‘we had our eye on Timothy Grey for the murder of Jenny Hyde.’

  There was a murmur. ‘Which is still’, he accurately read their minds, ‘a possibility. Grey had no effective alibi for the time of the girl’s murder. And he may have had any one of the usual run of motives.’

  ‘Are we talking about revenge, then, guv?’ a particularly scruffy detective constable asked.

  ‘Mr … er …’

  ‘Halsey.’ The detective instinctively straightened in the chair. ‘George Halsey. Stationed at Chichester.’

  ‘It’s possible, George,’ he said. ‘The girl’s father has a short fuse, we believe, and a powerful build. But we mustn’t let our hypotheses run away with us.’

  For all the silent social revolution of the twentieth century and for all the rigours of modern police examinations, there were still one or two in front of him who wouldn’t know a hypothesis if it got up and bit them. He knew who they were. Their heads were down and they suddenly found their shoelaces absolutely fascinating.

  ‘Jacquie, you’ve been working with the mother. What have we got?’

  The girl stood up and smoothed down her skirt. George Halsey turned his wolf whistle in the nick of time into a click of his teeth. The new boy couldn’t afford to antagonize anybody yet. He’d noticed no ring on the policewoman’s hand. And he liked the curve of her bum. He’d give her a day or two, then chance his arm.

  ‘Mrs Grey is a simple, working-class woman,’ Jacquie said, her voice trembling a little as it always did in moments like these, which she hated, when the guv’nor asked her to hold forth. ‘She’s bearing up quite well, really, everything considered. She left home before her son this morning and assumed he’d already gone to school. She knows he went out last night to see a teacher, but we don’t know who.’

  ‘Dave?’ Hall cut in.

  Johnson jerked back to his feet. ‘Mr Hall and I will be paying another call to Leighford High tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘The bastards do no work after four o’clock.’

  Guffaws and snarls all round. ‘Bit like pathologists,’ somebody sneered. Whistles and applause. Then the team fell silent again.

  ‘We don’t know’, Jacquie Carpenter hated the sudden silence she stood in the centre of, ‘if Tim had any enemies. The mother didn’t know anything about that, but she didn’t seem to know much at all. Bit out of her depth, really.’

  ‘Is there a dad?’ Halsey asked.

  ‘Joe Grierson’s on that now,’ Johnson told him. ‘Bloke works shifts at Leonards. Meek sort of bloke from my conversation with him. Less so, I understand, with the gentlemen of the press. But then I had just told him his only kid was dead. Wonder how we’d react.’

  There were nods and murmurs. These men had kids too. It was hard. Bloody hard. Best not to think about it. But you had to think about it. Divorce it, then, from reality. It’s all pretend. A game. Like that Prime Suspect. Except it wasn’t a game. And it wasn’t raunchy Helen Mirren up there but the sullen, sour face of DI Dave Johnson, a man you didn’t cross.

  Hall was on his feet again. ‘We’ve got to restart,’ he said. ‘Everything. From the beginning. Jenny Hyde. Her friends. Her enemies. Her acquaintances. Everybody she ever talked to. Everybody she bought her sweets from. Everybody she sat by on the school bus. The same for Timothy Grey. She went missing the week before she died. Why? Where was she from the Sunday to the Friday we found her body? What was Grey’s involvement in it all? What was he doing on the Dam last night? And who was this teacher he went to see?’

  Questions. Questions. And not an answer in it. But there was a new urgency in his voice. A new fire down below. The lights came up and the team hauled itself into action, filing cabinets grating open, VDUs flashing on, telephones ringing. An incident room back, like Lazarus, from the dead.

  ‘Jacquie,’ Hall said as he swept into his office, ‘get me the BBC. I want Nick Ross to do a follow-up.’

  George Halsey, the new boy, shook his head. He wasn’t fooled for a minute. For all the clash and hurry, he saw right through it.

  ‘What a lacklustre bastard,’ he muttered.

  And everybody knew he wasn’t talking about Nick Ross.

  They just sat there, Peter Maxwell and Sylvia Matthews, staring disbelieving at the set. Sylvia had called round to see how he was. She’d put it off for two days, not quite knowing what to say, how he’d react. She’d been married for seven years, before her husband got the itch, and she knew the last thing men wanted was sympathy. So she’d stayed away. Then her maternalism had got the better of her and she’d gone round there, all concern and cocoa. She’d just finished patting him, asking him how he was, probing, when they both heard it simultaneously. The Meridian newscaster, whose name neither of them could remember, just sat there, as newscasters will, reading his autocue.

  ‘The body of seventeen-year-old Timothy Grey from Leighford was found this morning on the Dam, a well-known beauty spot in the area. Chief Inspector Henry Hall heading the enquiry said that there may be a link with the so far unsolved killing of teenager Jennifer Hyde who attended Timothy’s school last July.’

  Sylvia was on her feet first. ‘Max,’ she said, blinking as the south’s unemployment figures replaced the smiling school photograph of Tim Grey. ‘Oh, Max.’

  He was beside her, patting her shoulder. She turned to him and he saw the tears start. He cradled her head against his chest, running his fingers through her hair. ‘I don’t know,’ he smiled, ‘you come over to comfort me and I end up comforting you. Women!’ and he tossed his head in mock disgust.

  She pretended to kick him in the shins and ended up laughing into his solid, warm chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sniffed. ‘Carrying on like this. It’s just… well, I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Neither can I.’ Maxwell rummaged in his pocket. ‘Here,’ and he gave her his handkerchief. ‘Now, then, big blow for the Queen.’

  ‘Shan’t.’ She smiled up at him though the tears. ‘Bellowing into someone else’s handkerchief is not very ladylike, Max,’ she said.

  ‘You’re right.’ He held her at arm’s length. ‘Remember the old Hancock sketch? The blood donor? Where he’s walking around singing “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases” to the tune of “Deutschland, Deutschland”? Ah, they don’t make ‘em like that any more.’

  There was a sharp, brittle ring of his door bell. ‘Christ,’ he muttered.

  ‘I’ll go,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ve been crying,’ he told her. ‘Aren’t women supposed to go away and fix there faces or something? Bette Davis always did.’

  She swiped him with his own hanky. ‘You’re a fraud, Peter Maxwell,’ she said. ‘On the surface, you’re a chauvinist git, but deep down you’re just a chauvinist git … Unless you mind me answering the door? It’s not going to ruin your reputation, is it?’

  He sprawled on the settee. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘that little ol’ thing is going through rather a bad patch at the moment, but I suppose I’ll have to live with it.’ And he watched her pad off down the stairs.

  He wasn’t ready for the raised voices. Or the crash of his own front door. And he wasn’t even on his feet by the time two burly strangers stood in his living-room. At least, one was a stranger. The other he’d met before. Once. And he hadn’t enjoyed the experience.

  ‘Peter Maxwell.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Johnson, isn’t it?’ Maxwell stood up slowly.

  ‘This is Detective Constable Halsey.’ The stranger nodded curtly.

  ‘We’d like you to accompany us to Leighford police station.’

  ‘My God,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘you really do say that sort of thing, then, you policemen. Well, well.’

  He wasn’t really ready for what followed either, Johnson squared up to him, his face inches from Maxwell’s. ‘Look, you
fucking shit, I’ve just come from helping a father identify his dead kid. I’ve not had a lot of sleep in the past few weeks and I’ve got a feeling you know something about the cause of that. If you want a coat, get it.’

  ‘You can’t talk to him like that.’ Sylvia Matthews spun the man round.

  ‘Can’t I? Mrs Maxwell, is it?’ Johnson asked, knowing perfectly well it wasn’t, ‘well, let me tell you something about your husband …’

  ‘He’s not my husband,’ she corrected him. ‘Not that that’s any of your business. You don’t have to go, Max. You’ve already told them about the diary …’

  ‘Diary?’ Johnson turned back to his man.

  Maxwell closed his eyes. ‘I’ll get my coat,’ he said.

  ‘Right. You don’t mind if DC Halsey has a look round?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maxwell was level with his man now, his eyes burning into Johnson’s. ‘As a matter of fact I do. And you won’t mind dropping Mrs Matthews off at her home? She came on the bus.’

  ‘No.’ Sylvia said, almost deafened by the thump of her own heart. ‘No, Max, I’m coming with you.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Johnson looked at her coldly.

  ‘No.’ Maxwell held her shoulder gently. ‘No, Sylv, I’ll be all right. After all, Criminal Procedure Act, FACE, the Sheehy Report. The days of people falling downstairs while in police stations are over, aren’t they, Inspector?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Johnson sneered at him. ‘Miss?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Sylvia Matthews snapped. ‘But I’ll catch the bus.’

  12

  They left him alone for a while. Made him sweat. But Peter Maxwell had been a couch potato for longer than he could remember. No Hiding Place, Gideon, The Sweeney. He knew all the moves. He sat as relaxed as he could be on the hard, tubular steel chair, his hands clasped across his chest, his eyes closed, and he recalled to himself as much as he could of Palmerston’s foreign policy.

  He’d just reached the Don Pacifico affair, when the terrible milord had despatched the British fleet to the harbour of Piraeus in defence of one rather dubious Portuguese-Jewish-Englishman, when the door crashed back. Clearly, Detective Inspector Johnson was fond of the grand entrance. The solid, averagely good-looking George Halsey was with him.