Maxwell's Summer

by M. J. Trow

  There was a ghastly silence, then Frank burst out laughing. ‘That’s one of the best Steppin Fetchit’s I ever heard,’ he said. ‘Look, Max, can I buy you a drink? A real one, I mean? Not this soda pop? This Goddamned wig’s killing me.’

  The wig was excellent. The ex-slave who had written Up From Slavery had been a striking-looking man, with a shock of white hair by middle age. Frank looked the part to perfection, but Maxwell felt his sudden loss of pain as he swept it off as the pair reached the bar.

  ‘What’ll it be, Max?’ Frank asked.

  ‘I’ll have a Southern Comfort, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Right as rain,’ Frank said. ‘Make that two,’ he grinned at the barman. ‘Now, where did a dyed-in-the-wool Limey like you learn to drink real liquor?’

  ‘Misspent youth,’ Maxwell laughed. ‘Tell me, Frank, with the obvious problems aside, have you enjoyed Haledown?’

  ‘Yes,’ the American said. ‘Yes, I have.’ The drinks arrived. ‘Here’s looking atchya,’ and they chinked glasses.

  ‘And what a coincidence, you meeting up with Elliot.’

  The smile disappeared from Frank’s face. ‘Who told you that?’

  Nobody feigned innocence like Peter Maxwell. ‘I believe it was Flo. I had the pleasure of her company earlier.’

  ‘Flo should’ve kept her mouth shut.’ Frank had become sullen, morose even and his earlier bonhomie had disappeared along with the Frederick Douglass persona.

  ‘I’m sure she meant nothing untoward,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Untoward?’ Frank snapped. ‘Untoward? What kind of Goddamned Limey claptrap is that?’

  ‘What indeed?’ Maxwell smiled. ‘It’s one of those silly little terms that have survived the passing of time – like gorm and feck and what the hoo. Let me put it another way – I’m sure that Flo meant no harm.’

  Frank softened a little. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’m sorry, Max, it’s just ... well, when I saw Schwarzenegger standing in the hall, over there on the first day, in his stupid Hawaiian shirt and Babe Ruth cap, I just couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Not a pal, huh?’ Maxwell probed.

  ‘The man was a bunko artist, as my granddad used to call such people.’

  ‘A con man.’ Maxwell could translate for England.

  ‘Exactly. He was a friend of a friend sort of guy and he dabbled in property. Mind you, I’ll give him this – he was organized. He sold me a condo apartment in Malibu which looked the business. Jada and I were both taken in by it. Had everything we needed, even if the price was a bit steep. We were cash buyers, so everybody was happy – except us, as it turned out. We turned up in the Winnebago to find a couple already in the apartment. They’d bought the place from Elliot too, although he’d got the paperwork so neatly tied up, nobody could possibly prove anything. I tracked the sonofabitch through every court in the land – even put a PI on it, but he’d covered all the angles. We lost every penny and then some.’

  ‘So, you killed him?’

  Frank paused with the Southern Comfort halfway to his lips. ‘You sure know how to end conversations, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank.’ Maxwell summoned the barman for a refill. ‘But somebody tried to kill me two days ago, not fifty yards from this very spot. It’s got me a bit more than slightly interested, as you can probably imagine.’

  ‘I heard about that. Jada doesn’t miss much. You really believe I’m behind it all?’

  Maxwell sighed and threw his arms wide. ‘Buggered if I know,’ he said. ‘Like Inspector Clouseau ...’ and he lapsed into a perfect Peter Sellers, ‘... I suspect everyone and no-one. Ever had an attempt made on your life?’

  Frank laughed. ‘Not since my MIT days as a quarterback.’

  ‘Well, take it from me, it’s not much fun. Are you and Jada going home tomorrow?’

  ‘Couple of days, I guess,’ Frank said. ‘We’re spending a week in London, then I’ve got a symposium in Zurich.’

  ‘You get around,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘Goes with the territory, I guess,’ Frank said. ‘Bores Jada rigid, but she can shop or find some guy to entertain her.’

  ‘Does a lot of “entertaining”, does she, your wife?’

  It was Frank’s turn to smile. ‘Maybe it’s not the British way,’ he said, ‘ but for us, well, it works out just fine. We both “entertain” whenever we like, no strings. Her current squeeze is the lord of the manor; not her usual type, I grant you, but we don’t get many of those our side of the Pond. But to get back to Elliot; no, I wasn’t sorry the bastard got his. Kind of karma, huh? But did I kill him? Uh-huh. By the way,’ Frank became confidential, ‘Your wife ... Jacquie, is it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Cop, huh?’

  ‘Of that persuasion, certainly,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘She sure looks fetching in that Marie Antoinette outfit.’

  ‘Lucrezia Borgia,’ Maxwell corrected him, ‘by way of Henrietta Maria. And no,’ he downed the last of his drink, ‘she doesn’t “entertain” at all.’

  Frank laughed. ‘Well, hey, I had to try,’ he said.

  Maxwell stood in the doorway which led through to the kitchens after about half a mile of corridor and watched the crowd, dwindling now the witching hour had come and gone. He suspected that their hybrid, expertly valet parked in the stable yard, had turned into a pumpkin, a suitably green alternative, when all was said and done. The more doddery of the guests were being marshalled by an unflagging Sally, resplendent in bombazine with a hint of a bustle. It suited her; Mrs Danvers, but with sex appeal. Harry Hale-ffinch was standing near the exit to the guest staircase, as unflappable and exquisite as she had been in the first moments of the ball. If Ariana Hale had stepped down from her portrait, she could not have looked more perfect. Maxwell looked around with mild eyes, glanced at his watch and launched himself off the door jamb where he had been lounging. It was a little after one and time to unleash Hell – he did something he rarely did without shuddering and quoted a little Gladiator to himself. As long as it was only in his head, he reasoned, it was probably all right.

  Maxwell strolled across the room to where Jacquie was standing with Frank and Tom, an unlikely pairing in the scheme of things. He reached out and grabbed her wrist. ‘Come on,’ he said, sharply. ‘We’re leaving!’

  ‘Max?’ She almost dropped her glass. ‘What the Hell?’

  ‘Now!’ He stood in front of her, his dark eyes burning into hers.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked, her voice rising. ‘I was just ...’

  ‘I know what you were “just”,’ he snapped, his voice like thunder. ‘You’ve been sniffing around men all night, like a bitch on heat. It’s got to stop!’

  Nobody saw it coming. Her right hand, the one with the glass, came up and threw champagne all over the resident conversationalist. Then the left snaked out and slapped him around the head. She stood for a moment, quivering and pale, then she spun on her heel and made for the door. Enright, the faux butler, only just got there in time to open it for her.

  ‘And don’t bother coming home, you sad excuse for a man!’ she screamed from the doorway.

  The two men with Maxwell winced as the door slammed behind her and Enright leapt aside to avoid the sting of the handles. It was a moment before anyone spoke.

  ‘Well,’ Tom Hale-ffinch said, wistfully. ‘What family doesn’t have its little ups and downs?’

  Maxwell scowled at him. ‘The Lion in Winter,’ he said, recognizing the quotation, ‘and that’s probably the worst Katherine Hepburn I ever heard.’

  Hale-ffinch clicked his fingers and a maid arrived with a tray. ‘Here,’ he said to Maxwell, passing him a glass. ‘You need a drink.’

  Concern from the Hale-ffinches Maxwell could do without, but that didn’t deter Harry who swept towards him, leading him aside to a Chesterfield in the corner, still warm from the bum of a guest who had decided to call it a night.

  ‘Are you all right, M
ax?’ she asked.

  ‘Never better,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘And I’m sorry about the little domestic back there.’

  ‘Happen a lot, does it, chez Maxwell?’

  ‘You know that cliché,’ he said, ‘about my wife not understanding me?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, that doesn’t come close. Changing the subject just a tad, this was a helluva party, Harry.’

  She half-bowed. ‘Why, thank you, kind sir. We do this every fortnight, of course, and some are better than others. I think, by and large, that this one went well. It all depends on the mix of guests – some combinations can kill a party before it takes its first breath. Others can make it go on till dawn.’

  ‘By the bye,’ he said, ‘and I meant to tell you earlier. DCI Hall was filling me in on the latest forensic advances. Apparently, Joe Law can now lift fingerprints from even the roughest surfaces.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘So, when the labs finally get their acts together, we should know who pushed the gargoyle. Apparently, they can also get usable DNA from fingerprints now. What they do is, they swab the grooves with minute cotton buds and the sweat ...’

  ‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘That’s really good. Oh-ho, the Merry Widow is about to make her exit by the look of it. I still feel dreadful about the whole wretched business.’

  Maxwell stood up with her. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Harry,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing you could have done.’

  She smiled at him. ‘You’ll be staying here tonight, I suppose, what with one thing and another?’

  ‘Without a shadow of a doubt,’ he said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  T

  he old Fifties number crept into his mind unbidden. ‘It’s quarter to three; there’s no one in the place except the faux butler, the geriatric combo, maids and flunkeys various, the squire and Sally Baker.’ All in all, the lyrics needed work. Maxwell passed through the hall, watched, as always by generations of Hale-ffinches long dead. Having found the quickest way to his bedroom in the West Wing, he took it, meandering through corridors smelling of cabbage, damp and – as all such places smelt these days – Bold Camomile and Lavender Two in One. The shades of washerwomen down the ages sighed enviously – you just couldn’t get the seven-day freshness by spreading your linen out over a bush. In the depths of the house, all was activity. Tomorrow was changeover day, all the bedrooms had to be stripped and made up again, whilst giving the impression that nothing was happening; not an easy feat and yet one which was carried off every two weeks without a hitch. If a week with two murders and one attempt could be filed under ‘without a hitch’.

  He crept up the winding stair to the first floor and padded along the carpeted corridor, unwinding his Goldfinger disguise as he went. He closed the door, drew the curtains, hauled off his still faintly damp clothes and reached for his pyjamas. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t bother, but he expected company tonight and there were standards; after all, he had gone to a good school.

  He didn’t know how long he lay there. There was no clock in his room and he couldn’t see his watch in the darkness. He listened as the great house went to sleep around him, as even the hum of dryers in far off laundries ceased. The clicks and wheezes of old wood relaxing from the cares of the day became more infrequent until eventually, all was still. The house was asleep; there was a timelessness about it.

  But there was nothing timeless about the click of his own door, nor the silhouette that glided in. The door swung shut and there was a rustling of clothes.

  ‘Hello, Harry,’ Maxwell said and he switched on the bedside lamp.

  She looked down at him on his bed, still wearing her finery, though minus the hat of the Lady Ariana. ‘When did you know?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t.’ He eased himself up so that the headboard and pillow were squarely against his back. ‘Not for sure. I should point out, however, as your resident historian, that that gun hardly goes with the costume. I was expecting a flintlock or at the very least a Webley Mark IV.’

  ‘It’s a Glock 9mm,’ she said, coldly, ‘a gift from a grateful American guest a couple of years back. I’m sorry it’s not family, too, but it does work, I assure you.’

  ‘So, what happens now?’

  ‘Now, Mr Bond,’ she said, in a passable Gert Frobe, ‘I expect you to die. Oh, it’ll be another one for Mr Plod to be confused by, Henry Mr Boring Hall and your daffy, bloody-minded wife, but they won’t get anywhere. They’ll never find the gun and my prints are so naturally all over the place, they’ll have literally nothing to go on. It was a lie, wasn’t it, about the prints on the gargoyle?’

  ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘It depends on whether what they tell us on CSI Miami is true or not. But it rattled you, anyway. That was the purpose of the exercise.’

  Maxwell was playing for time. This woman had cut the throat of her uncle by marriage. Not only that, she had then maimed the body more, to blame her dogs. A slash in anger; one thing. But most people – and Maxwell had met some pretty nasty people in his time – would baulk at that. She had slipped poison into the drink of a guest. She had pushed a gargoyle off her own roof. It remained to be seen how steady she was with a pistol and how sure her aim. Then again, Maxwell was only feet away from her and the lighting was good. ‘Can I talk you through it?’ he asked, ‘as very probably the last intellectual exercise I’ll undertake?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ she said, resting her back against the door.

  ‘Faux butlers,’ Maxwell said, ‘Phantom coachmen, Cleopatras and Lucretia Borgias, Frederick Douglasses and Robert Peels. All of them pretend, make-believe, just people dressing up.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ she asked, flatly.

  ‘My point is that the fakest of all tonight, Harry, was you. Because you’re not really a Hale-ffinch at all, are you? All the second cousin twice-removed crap. You’re just a nobody who married in. Yet you wanted to be, you so wanted to be of blue blood. That’s how you hooked Tom in the first place. Funny, he doesn’t come across as a snob, but you sure as hell are.’

  ‘What gave me away?’

  ‘Uncle Roddy’s latter-day obsession with the family tree vibe. You were helping him with all that, the online stuff, weren’t you? Then you stopped. Or he stopped you, I’m not sure which. Why? Because he discovered – or, ironically, you did by clicking an unwise key – that you were not a Hale-ffinch as you claimed. He even wrote it down, just a jotting really, which was preserved on the blotting pad in his study. “Not a co”. That threw me at first. Then, I realized, it wasn’t not a company, which I had assumed. It was not a cousin. And you merely confirmed it, twice. When I asked you to point out where you were on the family tree printout I used for my lecture ...’

  ‘Conversation.’ Harry couldn’t help herself, even when pointing a gun at the conversationalist, to make sure he got it right.

  ‘... conversation, then, you fudged it, pointing vaguely in the wrong place. When I got it home, I looked and looked at the area where you had stuck your finger, and there wasn’t a single person who could have been you. It was the wrong generation, for one thing, too distant for another. Then, when I mentioned DNA this evening – another slight fib, by the way; as far as I know, fingerprints don’t contain noticeable amounts of DNA unless you have just been picking your nose or similar. But as soon as I mentioned it, you suddenly changed the subject, saying you had to go and talk to Flo. And you know, there is no need to worry about the DNA thing anyway – they wouldn’t be checking whether you were a Hale-ffinch, just whether you are a cold hearted killer.’

  Harry Hale-ffinch gritted her teeth and stared along the barrel of the gun. ‘The old bastard was blackmailing me,’ she hissed. ‘Bleeding me dry. He got more than enough pocket money out of me. He didn’t have to spend a penny to live here and he still got more than I pay proper working staff. He had wanted the conversationalist’s gig – it says a lot for you that he was even civil to you – but from the way everyone learned to edge away within half
an hour of arrival, that would never do. Anyway, I couldn’t let Tom know. It was all too important. He is very ... honourable, you know. If he thought I had got to know him by false pretences ... well, I don’t know what he would do. Roddy knew that. He’d brought him up, more or less, the soldier’s code, all that guff. Ironically, I hadn’t meant to kill him; not like that, at least. I was out by the kennels with a billhook that morning, ready for some serious pruning. We’ve got groundsmen, of course, but we can’t afford as many as we need to keep things perfect. And I do like things perfect ...’

  Maxwell nodded his head. Perfection wasn’t a motive for murder he would have thought of on his own, but it made a great deal of sense, one way and another.

  ‘I was just about to start, when he strolled along, in his dressing gown, like he owned the place. I had told him time and again to show some decorum, to respect the guests and the business, but he was an arrogant shit and did it to upset me. I’d had complaints ... anyhow, there he was and I just lost it. I hit him. And do you know what, Max? It felt so good! I let the dogs out and butchered the wound to throw the police off the scent. I tried to make them bite the old bugger, but they wouldn’t, so I did it with the tip of the billhook. Then that stupid fuck Elliot saw me leaving the scene. He didn’t realize it at first, but when he did, he came to see me with ... I’ll call it an offer, just so you don’t vomit. I can see why Flo is so much happier these days. The man was an animal. So, long story short, he had to go.’

  ‘Surely, you could have ... I don’t know. Talked to him rationally. Explained? I don’t condone what you did to Roddy. No one deserves to die for being a boring old fart, but ... Elliot was just an idiot. You could have told him anything, he would have backed down.’

  Harry Hale-ffinch looked at Maxwell in amazement. ‘I thought you were clever,’ she said. ‘Even Elliot would understand what a billhook dripping blood meant. I could hardly pass it off as an Olde Englishe Custome, could I? Anyhow, I knew there was some rat poison in the stables, some dodgy foreign stuff one of the gardeners got online. I wouldn’t let him use it in case one of the horses or kids got at it. But it served its turn. I took his water bottle from his room and filled it with water laced with Ratbegone, then I met him on his run ... stumble, more likely ... telling him I’d found it. He was so grateful that he didn’t stop to think that it wasn’t too likely that the woman he had seen leaving the scene of a gruesome murder and who he had asked to ... well, never mind what ... would be giving him a drink for the good of his health. So he took a good slug and died. I didn’t stay to watch; apparently, it’s quite unpleasant.’