Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  ‘No. I found two of our boys in blue who were kind enough to escort me to the police station.’

  ‘So have they felt Keith’s collar?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. I didn’t press any charges.’

  ‘Max. On the phone to Hilda, you said – and I think I’m quoting correctly here – “I didn’t rape anyone.” She didn’t know what you were talking about any more than I do.’

  ‘Janice Dodds’, Maxwell said, ‘took it into her head to accuse me of raping her.’

  ‘Christ! Why?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s her idea of the ultimate shakedown. Some women would rifle your wallet. Perhaps she gets a vicarious kick out of crying wolf. Damn near worked.’

  ‘But it didn’t?’

  ‘Is the Pope a Seventh Day Adventist? It was all very odd, actually. Hall gave me a grilling in his own politically correct way and told me I’d be kept until the morning, at which time I’d be charged.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But … I’d barely got my head down when the cell door opened and it was Hall. He told me I could go. That all charges had been dropped. Naturally, I thanked him for his hospitality and buggered off into the night. And lo, who should be waiting there, but Geoffrey, the landlord’s daughter, plaiting a dark red love-knot into his non-existent hair. How long had you been waiting?’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Max; I’d only just arrived. I’d gone to the Odeon. Then Hilda had dropped off and didn’t give me the message for ages. Sorry, old man.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At the Odeon.’

  ‘Oh, The Fugitive. Harrison Ford. Not at all bad. Not a patch on his dad, John, of course.’

  ‘Can’t make cars like his granddad, Henry, either, I understand,’ Maxwell winked. ‘How does it compare with the telly series?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Smith mused. ‘My ol’ mum used to tell me about it.’

  ‘Cobblers,’ Maxwell growled.

  ‘No,’ Smith chuckled. ‘Nobody mumbles like David Jansen, do they? Looked as if he carried the sins of the world on his shoulders.’

  Maxwell smiled, nodding. ‘Geoff,’ he said, ‘you’re good to look after me like this …’

  ‘I know I am,’ Smith nodded, waiting for the next bit.

  ‘You couldn’t run me down to Barlichway, could you? I think I know where to find Maz now.’

  ‘Time was,’ Smith reminded him, ‘you’d rather die than travel in a car with me.’

  ‘Geoffrey!’ Maxwell was outraged. ‘How can you think it? I’m not sure I’ve got the balls to mount White Surrey tonight. Anyway, my dynamo’s on the blink.’

  Smith downed the last of his drink. ‘Don’t ask me why I’m doing this,’ he said. ‘Dying man’s last wish, I suppose. Come on.’

  DCI Hall didn’t wait for DI Johnson and DC Halsey to come on duty. He sent for them. Two separate cars were despatched from the station. Tight-lipped uniformed men banged on their respective doors – Johnson at home; Halsey at the station house.

  They stood in front of Hall in his office in the incident room.

  ‘Put your warrant cards on the desk.’ He looked up at them.

  ‘You what?’ Halsey grinned.

  ‘Don’t ask me to repeat myself, Detective Constable. As of now you … gentlemen … have no powers of arrest or detention. You will go to your homes – you, Halsey, to your own division. You will talk to no one, on the force or off it. You will not discuss this matter with your families or friends. You will report on Wednesday morning at nine sharp; you, Detective Inspector, at Leighford; you, Detective Constable, at Chichester.’

  ‘Report?’ Halsey frowned. ‘Who to?’

  ‘Internal Affairs,’ Hall said levelly. ‘You are suspended until further notice.’

  Halsey’s grin faded. He threw his warrant card down and turned on his heel. At the door, he turned. ‘You lacklustre bastard,’ he sneered.

  ‘Guv …’ Johnson’s rigidity melted and he rested his hands on Hall’s desk.

  The Chief Inspector’s raised finger stopped him. ‘Not a word, Dave,’ he warned him, the eyes narrow, the jaw grim.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ Johnson held his hands out. Hall was already crossing the floor past him. He spun to his man. ‘I’ll tell you what it’s about Dave. It’s about a copper. A good copper. A man I knew once. He was tough. He was cynical. But he was straight. The sort of bloke you’d want at your back if things got rough out there.’ He jabbed a finger to the blackness of the window. ‘Then something happened,’ he whispered. ‘Something snapped. What was it? The pressure of the job? Some government-inspired bollocks about the quota of arrests? The need to get results? I don’t know. But it made this copper, this tough, straight copper, bend like a fucking horseshoe. He got a man in his sights for a murder. A cantankerous old bastard, I’ll grant you, but just a man for all that. And when the evidence didn’t quite come together, do you know what this tough, straight copper did? He just made it up. He and his zombie worked over a working girl and made her cry “Rape”; just, presumably, until something better came along.’

  Hall’s face was pressed close to Johnson’s now. ‘That’s what it’s about, Dave. Got it now?’

  Johnson blinked. He felt cold. Dead. For a moment, Hall thought he might burst into tears.

  ‘Now, get out.’ Hall’s voice was gravel in an open wound. ‘Before I forget I once knew that tough, honest copper at all.’

  In the corridor, DC Jacquie Carpenter saw Dave Johnson go. Alone into that limbo where bent coppers go. Where they put those men who have crossed the line. The line that is thin and blue.

  How long the two of them waited there was anybody’s guess. The clock on Hilda’s 2CV had stopped long ago and neither Smith nor Maxwell had a watch. All they knew was that it was damnably cold and, what with Maxwell’s breathing problems, they both felt like John Mills feigning death in the snows of Pinewood Studios.

  ‘Great God!’ Smith stirred. ‘Look at that sunrise.’

  ‘I didn’t know they made a time like this,’ Maxwell murmured. Only his eyes were visible between his scarf and his shapeless hat. ‘Jesus, Geoff, Hilda’ll be worried.’

  Smith shook his head. ‘She won’t be stirring for hours yet,’ he said, ‘but neither, I suspect, will your boy … Well, I’ll be buggered.’

  ‘Is that a quote from Edward II?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Look.’ Smith nodded towards his window to where a lanky, fair-haired young man with a pitted face and cold, grey eyes emerged from the dilapidated Edwardian house on the rise.

  ‘Maz,’ Maxwell breathed. ‘Wipe your window, Geoff, I can’t make him out.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ The Head of English daubed the condensation with a cloth.

  ‘Talk to him. Can you get me out of this corrugated pram? My knees have seized up.’

  Smith was gone into the pinky gold of the morning with a rush of cold air. He lifted the bulk of Peter Maxwell out on to the pavement and the two of them ambled across the road and on up the path that skirted the still-sleeping Barlichway Estate and twisted through the parkland that further on became the Dam.

  ‘Maz!’ Maxwell called. He was in no state after all he’d been through to hobble after the younger man for long.

  The lad half turned, eyes narrowed against the glow of the sky. Two old men. Not filth, certainly. Press? No. No cameras. Dads, then? No. No shotguns. Pushers? Possible. Maybe here was a deal. He toyed with running. But they’d seen where he’d come from. Could always find him again. He stood his ground, hugging a huge coat round him, his lank, blond hair hanging thickly over his collar.

  Maxwell saw him again, as he’d seen his stand-in on the television screen, shaking little Jenny by the shoulders, and he heard her shout ‘No’ over and over again.

  ‘Are you Maz?’ he asked, his breath snaking out on the morning.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ The voice was cultured, quiet.

  ‘I
’m Peter Maxwell,’ Maxwell told him, standing on the gravel of the path. ‘This is Geoffrey Smith.’ The taller man nodded.

  ‘So?’ Maz was unimpressed.

  ‘We’re teachers.’ Maxwell waved his hand between them as though that would hold his quarry rooted to the spot.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Maz sneered, ‘I’m sure you’ll have long and happy careers,’ and he turned to go.

  ‘We’re Jenny Hyde’s teachers,’ Smith said.

  They saw Maz’s head come up to the level, his shoulders straighten.

  Maxwell loped over to him, clutching his side, and he looked the boy in the face. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I have dreams about you.’

  Maz just looked at him, then laughed. It was brittle, uncomfortable. ‘You’re a funny age, granddad,’ he said.

  ‘So was Jenny,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘And she’s dead.’

  The smile faded from the boy’s face. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘well that’s how it is. Life’s a bitch. Then you die. What do you two want with me?’

  ‘You knew her,’ Maxwell said. ‘You were seen talking to her the day she died.’

  ‘Was I?’ He was smiling again.

  Maxwell could feel his hackles rising again. ‘We need some answers,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Maz smirked.

  It was the smirk that did it. Peter Maxwell was thirty years older. Light years slower. But he’d had it for one day. He’d been accused of murder, shoved around, questioned, accused of rape, and had his head and body caved in by a boot.

  ‘I don’t need this,’ he growled and his good arm came up suddenly, thumping into the pit of the boy’s stomach. Maz jack-knifed and Smith caught him, wrenching him backwards and across the grass where his scrabbling feet left two tell-tale tracks in the dew.

  ‘Jesus,’ the lad hissed, but he was weighted down by twenty-six stone of teacher and he couldn’t reach his pockets. Maxwell could – and did. First he hauled out a silver foil packet.

  ‘Well, well,’ he grunted, resting his full weight on the lad’s chest. ‘Talcum, Malcolm?’

  Maz twisted to his right but Smith’s elbow was pressing on his throat and he gave up. Maxwell was ferreting in the lad’s coat again. ‘Aha.’ His eyes lit up. ‘What have we here?’

  ‘It looks like a razor, Maxie,’ Smith answered him.

  ‘It does, Geoffrey.’ Maxwell gave his best Zippy impression from the old children’s programme. ‘An interesting offensive weapon. I should think Mr Plod would be very interested in the contents of these pockets, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I should think he would, Maxie, yes.’

  ‘Come on, you bastards,’ Maz gasped.

  Maxwell checked to see that the peculiar trio were out of sight of the road before he tried his next trick. He flicked open the razor and held it glinting in the dawn’s light.

  ‘All right, you little shit. I don’t suppose a visit to your friendly neighbourhood magistrate holds many terrors for you, does it? So let’s see what it’ll take to soften you up. Everybody tells me what a wow you are with the girls. What do they go for, I wonder, your pretty little face?’ He pressed the cold curved steel against the boy’s cheek and read the fear in his eyes. ‘Or perhaps you’re hung like a bloody donkey.’ And he suddenly slashed the razor down, carving a jagged line across the lad’s shirt, ripping the material just above the belt buckle.

  ‘Jesus!’ The voice was so falsetto Smith had to do a double take.

  ‘Max,’ he cried out.

  ‘Tell me about Jenny Hyde.’ Maxwell ignored him.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Maz was gabbling. ‘All right. You mad bastard. Just… just put the razor down.’

  ‘Down where?’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow.

  ‘She used to hang around the Dam from time to time,’ Maz said, the fear still etched on his pallid face. ‘Stuck-up bitch. Bit of a smell under her nose.’

  ‘Ah, but that didn’t impress you, did it, sonny Jim?’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Not with your accent and designer viciousness. What are you? An old boy of Eton? Harrow?’

  ‘Winchester,’ Maz confessed.

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘The fons et origo of public schools. Daddy owns Berkshire, does he? And you couldn’t stand the pressure of it all so you dropped out? Left home to shack up with kids?’

  ‘Max …’ Smith said.

  ‘Shut up, Geoff. This bastard knows who killed Jenny Hyde and he’s damned well going to tell us.’

  ‘No,’ Maz said, ‘no, I don’t. She came to me. On the Sunday … the Sunday before she died. She’d left home. She was scared.’

  ‘Of what? Her old man?’ Maxwell was chasing his man now, crowding him, the open razor still firm in his fist. He could still remember the look on Clive Hyde’s face that day he’d talked to Marianne. The hatred in the eyes. The sense of loss.

  ‘No, not the family. School. Leighford High.’ He looked from one pair of burning eyes to the other. ‘You … you’re teachers … you work there.’

  ‘Perhaps “work” is a bit strong in the case of Mr Smith,’ Maxwell hissed. ‘What was Jenny scared of? At Leighford High? What?’ He shook the boy like a rag doll.

  ‘I don’t know!’ Maz shouted. ‘She … she would only say that she’d seen something. Something that frightened her. And she didn’t know what to do about it.’

  ‘Where did she go? In that last week of her life?’

  ‘With me,’ Maz muttered. ‘Over there. In the squat. There are a few of us. They come and go. She just joined in. Except she didn’t.’ He scowled at the memory of it. ‘Stuck-up bitch. She came to me a virgin and she stayed that way.’

  ‘What were you arguing about?’ Maxwell wanted to know. ‘That Friday – the day she died. A woman saw you on the Dam and Jenny was saying “No”. What were you asking her to do, you sick little bastard?’

  Maz began to laugh, a brittle, hysterical laugh, born of terror, ‘I was asking her,’ he said, shivering with the damp grass and the situation he was lying in, ‘I was asking her to go to the police. That’s rich, isn’t it? Me, asking her to go to the filth? She said “No”, she couldn’t. No one would believe her, she said. She’d tried to tell her parents, but couldn’t find the words. There was one guy,’ he suddenly remembered. ‘Some old sod who was Head of the Sixth Form. She thought he might understand. And then she said no, of all people she couldn’t tell him.’ Maz shook his head. ‘She was one mixed-up kid. I’ve never known anyone straight so out of her tree.’

  Maxwell looked at Smith. He looked at the razor gleaming in his hand. Then he threw it away and heard it land in the bushes. He hauled himself upright with Smith’s help and the two of them looked down at the bedraggled, panting boy.

  ‘Lucky he was wearing brown trousers, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell said.

  Smith nodded. ‘Let’s go, Max. Before I throw up.’

  Neither of them spoke in the car on the way back to Columbine Avenue. Not until they got there. Geoffrey Smith switched off the ignition. ‘Best Reggie Kray I ever saw, Maxim,’ he said softly. ‘And I didn’t like it.’

  Maxwell looked across at his old oppo. ‘I’m not exactly proud of myself, Geoff,’ he said, ‘but it’s gone way past that now. Look.’ He pointed to the bus on the main road beyond the huddle of new houses he called his country estate. ‘It’s the 18A taking a whole load of our pupils to Leighford High. Drive like the maniac you are and you’ll make it by nine o’clock.’

  ‘Tell me, Max,’ Smith said, ‘what did that achieve? That histrionic bit with the razor? Anything? Did it have any point at all?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘It confirmed what I’d always thought. That Jenny Hyde was killed because of something to do with school. Now I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  Maxwell nodded, it was all in Jenny’s diary,’ he said, it could only have been one of two people. I thought at first it was K. – Keith Miller. But when Maz said that Jenny had seen something at school, something that frightened her, then it had to be P. – “Why do I alw
ays fancy the married ones?’”

  ‘But … who’s P?’ Smith asked.

  Maxwell clicked open the door and let his left foot fall to the pavement. ‘You’re going to see him in a minute or two, Geoff,’ he said. ‘Better you don’t know.’

  ‘Maxwell!’ Smith leaned across, grabbing the man’s coat. ‘This is me, Geoffrey. Your fellow Old Contemptible. I think I’ve a right to know.’

  Maxwell leaned on the car, his head heavy, his eyes tired of the world. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid Jenny wasn’t very cryptic after all. K. turned out to be Keith Miller. And P. … well, P. is Paul Moss.’

  He watched Smith’s jaw drop. ‘Have a nice day, Geoffrey.’

  He winked at him and clicked his thumb as though firing a pistol.

  Jessica Troubridge, pruning her rose bushes in the garden next to Maxwell’s, thought it all highly peculiar and tottered off for a little drinky.

  One way or another, Geoffrey Smith had had a bit of a day. First his mad old mate had rung to tell him he was on rape charges in the local nick, while being suspected of murder on the side. Then he’d spent all night in a freezing car deciding whether or not to tackle some young weirdo Maxwell had told him the police had already eliminated from their enquiries. He’d been forced to lean on said weirdo, in broad daylight, while said mad old mate brandished a cut-throat razor, apparently with every intention of using it. And all day, apart from the normal day terrors that attend every teacher, he’d been catching sight of the murderer, Paul Moss. He thought how cheerful the Head of History looked, blissfully ignorant of the noose that was tightening round his neck.

  And as the last of the little dears fled the building that was the bane of their lives, lighting up on street corners, rough-housing outside the Happy Shopper and throwing bangers from the top of double-decker buses, Geoffrey Smith crashed into the shambles that was the Drama office.

  ‘Bloody hell, Max!’ He steadied himself against the door. Then he remembered the situation and shut it quickly. ‘I thought excommunication – even pending excommunication – such as yours resulted in removal of the right hand if you returned. Is it wise to be on the premises?’

  ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit, Margaret Rutherford thou never wert. And I’ve never done anything wise in my life, Geoff,’ Maxwell said. ‘But you know what I did today?’