Maxwell's Grave

by M. J. Trow

  ‘And footprints to match, I suppose?’

  ‘You got it,’ Garstang nodded. ‘I did find out one thing, though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Archaeologists are addicted to chewing gum. SOCO found 68 wrappers around the site.’ A ripple of laughter ran round the room. Good. You really needed that at moments like these.

  ‘Well,’ Hall said softly, ‘I don’t suppose they get out much. Who’s got the site personnel list?’

  Silence.

  ‘Somebody?’

  Martin Toogood cleared his throat, wishing he’d already nipped out on his way to Petworth.

  Hall’s face said it all. ‘Alison.’

  ‘Sir?’ a fresh-faced DC with freckles and no neck looked at him like a rabbit in the headlights.

  ‘That’s one for you, I think.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know where to start, really.’ Sally Greenhow was passing an insipid cup of coffee to Jacquie Carpenter. ‘I don’t think it’s cause for alarm.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jacquie sat in the Special Needs office at Leighford High. It had posters of David Beckham on the wall and assorted truculent-looking bands that Jacquie had never heard of. There were trailing spider plants to reinforce the fact that this was the Jungle Room. And there was patience and endless tolerance. And love, of a sort. ‘I know,’ Jacquie said. ‘It’s difficult to tell how people are going to react, isn’t it?’

  ‘To what?’ Sally asked.

  Jacquie looked at the woman, with her pencil figure and her frizzy, flaxen hair. In Peter Maxwell’s reckoning, this was one of the good guys, a beacon in a naughty world. But he’d never said she was bright. You don’t get to be SENCO by being bright.

  ‘To finding a body,’ the detective said, sensing wires crossing in all directions.

  ‘A body?’ Sally frowned, putting her mug down on the table between them. ‘I’m sorry, can we re-wind on this conversation? I thought you were here about Annette Choker?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, God. No, look,’ Sally Greenhow wasn’t usually fazed by anything, but today was not going well. ‘Why are you here?’

  Jacquie put her mug down on the table, along with her cards. Was nobody talking her language any more? ‘Robert Wesson found a body yesterday afternoon, at the archaeological dig above Leighford. I need to speak to him.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Sally rummaged in the rug-bag hanging on the arm of her chair. ‘Do you?’ she was pulling a cigarette out of a packet.

  Jacquie shook her head. ‘I used to,’ she smiled. ‘Thought better of it.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Sally said, lips clamped round the noxious weed. ‘But there are times…’ and she inhaled gratefully, consigning the match to a litter-bin with an expertise born of years in Special Needs. ‘No, we’re at the most appalling cross-purposes here. We’re hideously short-staffed at the moment. Pregnancies. Nervous breakdowns. You name it; we’ve got the lot. You’re a friend of Max’s – you know the score.’

  ‘Some,’ Jacquie confessed.

  Sally knew that Peter Maxwell got himself into scrapes. She knew he had a penchant for murder. And she knew he loved Jacquie Carpenter.

  ‘So,’ Sally went on, squinting as the smoke drifted up past her eyes, ‘I’m doubling up as Deputy Year Head for Year Eleven at the moment. And one of my little darlings, Annette Choker, has done a runner.’

  ‘You’ve reported it?’

  ‘Of course, that’s why I assumed you were here.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘One thing at a time, I’m afraid. I’m sure somebody will be in touch about this girl. How long has she been gone?’

  ‘Where are we today? Friday. Wednesday – Wednesday afternoon. We let a full day go by, then our Student Services people ring home. Mrs Choker thought Annette was at school. She checked all the usual offices – her friends, a sister in Halifax. Nothing.’

  ‘Year Eleven,’ Jacquie checked. ‘So she’s…what…?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Street-wise?’

  Sally rolled her eyes skywards. ‘You could say that. Lives on the Barlichway Estate. D’you know it?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Jacquie smiled.

  ‘But, Robbie…’ Sally changed tack. ‘He found a body?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What was he doing at the dig?’

  ‘Part of a school trip, evidently.’

  Sally snorted. ‘A school trip? Not Robbie. He only comes to school at all for the free breakfast and lunch. He tends to last an average of eight minutes in lessons.’

  ‘Well, that’s as may be,’ Jacquie said. ‘But he found a body, nonetheless. I need to talk to him. And to see the others on this list.’ She handed the woman a piece of paper.

  ‘Er…no, these are Year Twelve. All of them. That’ll be Max’s domain. You’ll have to see him about them.’

  ‘I will.’ Jacquie finished her coffee. ‘But first things first. Where can I find Robbie Wesson?’ And would her visit coincide with his eight minutes in the building?

  Eleanor Fry slipped off her negligee and looked at her body in the half light of her bedroom. Her breasts were still firm, her thighs still curved in all the right places. Tears rolled silver down her cheeks as she turned to round the corner into the bathroom. She took John’s razor blades from the cabinet in the corner and the bottle of pills from the drawer below it. She wasn’t thinking rationally any more. In fact, she was barely thinking at all.

  Slowly, she sank into the hot water, the bubbles covering her body as she stretched out. How pointless, she thought, as she unscrewed the bottle and tipped the white capsules into her hand; why had she bothered to scent the water? Tonight of all nights. She glanced at the label. ‘Sweet Dreams’ it was called. But she was too tired to smile at the irony. She swallowed one, two, three, four, then lay back so that her head rested on the bath’s rim. She felt the wall behind her and the suds surge around her shoulders and she half closed her eyes against the glare of the sun through the frosted pebbles of the window.

  Then, as if in a dream of her own making, she took the blade and lowered it to her left wrist under the water. She wasn’t groggy yet. She was rational, fully awake, her mind’s balance totally undisturbed. And she felt every nerve scream as the blade sliced through her vein and the froth turned crimson.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Morning. I wasn’t sure I’d find anyone here.’

  ‘I’m just passing through, laddie.’ The muffled voice came from the other side of a cabinet of skulls. ‘Who are you after?’

  ‘I’m DS Toogood,’ the detective flashed his warrant card. ‘Leighford CID.’

  ‘Leighford? You’re a long way from home. Tam Fraser.’ A large man with a mane of silver hair emerged from a stash of boxes in the corner of the room and shook Toogood’s hand, taking in the photo on the card at the same time ‘No, I’m just doing a bit of housekeeping.’

  The accent was Lowland Scots, refined, intelligent. If Peter Maxwell had met the man he’d have been instantly reminded of the actor Finlay Currie. But Martin Toogood was far too young for that.

  ‘Who were you hoping to find of a Saturday?’ Fraser asked him. ‘This is a university, man. We have the longest holidays in the world. After policemen, of course.’

  Toogood ignored the jibe. ‘Anybody,’ he said. ‘I’m making enquiries in connection with the death of Dr Radley.’

  The man’s bonhomie vanished. ‘Aye. David.’ He shook his head. ‘Appalling. Just appalling.’

  ‘You knew him well, of course.’

  ‘Knew him? Man, I made him what he is… Oh, God, isn’t it funny how the most humdrum cliché sounds like a sick joke at times like these. I made him what he was yesterday. I’m Emeritus Professor of Archaeology. David was one of my protégés. Brilliant mind. Simply brilliant. Would you care for a cup of coffee?’

  Toogood would. He sat on a chair Fraser swept clear of a pile of folders in the bowels of the Petworth Department of Archaeology. ‘Masters disserta
tions,’ the Scotsman said, unceremoniously dumping them on the ground. ‘Plagiaristic twaddle you might just as well wipe your arse with. You a university man, Sergeant?’

  ‘Yes,’ Toogood chuckled. ‘Merton, Oxford.’ He hoped that no one had ever done that to his dissertation.

  ‘Really?’ Fraser paused in mid-kettle. ‘That must be rather unusual, in your line of work, I mean. I don’t mean to be offensive, but, well, Mr Plod and so on?’

  ‘Fast-track is the way forward these days,’ the sergeant said, perching on the empty chair, ‘though I must admit there are those in the police who disapprove. Always been a certain fear of an officer class, an elitism. Fraser. Fraser,’ Toogood clicked his fingers. ‘Of course. Saxon Identities. You wrote it.’

  Fraser chuckled. ‘Don’t tell me you’re an archaeologist!’

  ‘No,’ Toogood laughed. ‘I studied Old and Medieval English with just a threat of Norse. Even so, Saxon Identities was de rigueur.’

  ‘As well it might be,’ the Professor smiled, modesty never his strong suit. He was boiling a kettle like an ancient wizard over a cauldron. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No thanks. When did you see Dr Radley last?’

  ‘David? Ooh, let’s see.’ The kettle shrilled to boiling point. ‘Quaint, isn’t it, how they’ve brought these whistling kettles back? If we wait long enough, everything comes round again. Now, you take dowsing…’

  ‘Er…David Radley?’ Toogood was in a hurry. Archaeological tactics would have to wait.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ He passed the policeman his coffee. ‘Where are we today? Saturday. Monday, was it? Tuesday? No, Monday. We both had lectures here at the university. The semester ended yesterday and we were to have had our valedictory bash on the Wednesday night.’

  ‘Valedictory?’ Toogood knew what the word meant, but not the scale of it.

  ‘Oh, just an end of term thing. Few nibbles, a wee dram. Lots of public back-slapping and even more private backstabbing. Personally, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. We all try to make it if we’re not in the field. David wasn’t there.’

  ‘That was unusual?’

  ‘No, not really. He was preoccupied, I suppose, with the dig at Leighford. It happens.’

  ‘And on Monday, when you saw him last, how did he seem?’

  Fraser found a chair from somewhere too and sipped his coffee. ‘Fine. I mean, same as always. With David, what you saw was what you got. He was an honest, straightforward sort of guy.’ A darkness came over the professor’s face. ‘We’re going to miss him.’

  ‘Tell me about the project at Leighford.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite fascinating. It’s a Saxon cemetery essentially, eighth-ninth centuries. David was very excited about it. Inhumations of that calibre don’t come along every day. But there was…something else about this one.’

  ‘Something else?’

  Fraser looked at his man. What was he? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? A young man in a hurry, certainly. But the Emeritus Professor had long ago passed the point where policemen looked younger than he did. ‘All right,’ he said, putting his mug down with some decisiveness. ‘I told you a minute ago that David was straightforward. And that Monday was the same as always. Well, neither of those statements are quite true. I’ve known him since he was an undergraduate, first at Cambridge, then taking his Masters right here at Wessex. He was good. Very good. Even from the first semester, I knew he had quality, the kind of intellectual rigour you come across once in a lifetime. Oh, he had newer ideas than mine, of course, but that’s the way of it. It wouldn’t do for us to stand still. When he got a lectureship, I was delighted – and yes, before you ask, I did put in a word with the Vice-chancellor. It’s the way things work in academe – but I guess you know that.’

  Toogood nodded. It was the way it worked in the police too.

  ‘Even when he got the Chair here on my retirement, he was still the same old David. Oh, a little more circumspect, I suppose, a tad more political. That, too, comes with the territory. But recently…well, he’d changed.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Fraser shrugged. ‘I sensed he was leaving us out of the loop.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘The department. His colleagues.’

  ‘Were these…what? Professional differences?’

  Fraser chuckled. ‘Laddie. You get those every day. Geophysics is about as useful as a balloon with a hole in it, but we have to live with these things. No, David seemed…’

  ‘Yes?’

  The Scotsman sighed, trying to put it into words. ‘It was as if he had a secret.’

  ‘A secret?’ Toogood frowned. ‘What was it?’ Time perhaps to reach for the notepad.

  Fraser gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘I don’t know, laddie,’ he growled. ‘Hence the word secret.’ He briefly wondered how fast-track the lad actually was. And just how useful was Old Norse at Oxford?

  ‘Your best guess, then?’ Toogood knew better than Fraser that secrets sometimes lead to murder.

  ‘Let me ask you something first,’ Fraser said. ‘How did David die?’

  It was a fair enough question, one that hovered like an annoying fly in Toogood’s brain. The paparazzi had asked every copper going in and out of Leighford nick the same question for the last day and a half. It was how to answer it that posed the problem.

  ‘His neck was broken.’ Toogood had cut to the chase.

  ‘God.’ Fraser put down his coffee mug quickly, for fear he might drop it.

  ‘So was his ankle, by the way,’ Toogood clarified. ‘Does any of that have a bearing…on the secrecy, I mean?’

  ‘No, no,’ Fraser sighed. ‘Just a certain ghoulishness on my part, I suppose.’ Yes, that was probably right. It’s the first question anybody asks when faced with sudden death. How? The why of it all comes later.

  ‘No doubt it’ll be all over the papers by tomorrow,’ Toogood said. Henry Hall’s press people, he knew, were lining up a conference as soon as they could.

  ‘No doubt,’ Fraser nodded, as aware as Toogood of the fondness of flies for shit.

  ‘And the secret?’ Toogood was like a terrier with a rat.

  Fraser suddenly stood up. ‘You’ll have to talk to Samantha Welland.’ He finished his mug and lobbed it gingerly into the little sink to his left. ‘If anybody knew David better than I, it was Samantha.’

  ‘Where would I find her?’ Toogood stood up too.

  ‘Saturday,’ Fraser said, looking at his watch. ‘Karate class.’

  The rain was easing off as White Surrey wheezed up the long hill that ran north-west out of Leighford. But the white metal beast with gears with minds of their own wasn’t wheezing half so much as the man in the saddle. Peter Maxwell braced himself against the wind that cut cross-wise over the road as the old viaduct came into view. He toyed for a moment with cutting across country through the lower fields and Berryfold Copse, but it had been raining most of the night and he knew the mud in those dips too well. He stuck to the road, straining his back and driving his legs down to the tarmac.

  Shit. He stopped on the ridge. Above him, in the grey distance, the line of ash trees along Staple Hill formed a wintry screen against the horizon and the grassland below it was a patchwork of holes and ditches, bright red and white markers littering the ground beyond the fluttering police tape in even brighter yellow. There was a police car there, white, gleaming with gadgetry, the logo of the West Wessex Constabulary crisp on its sides. But it wasn’t the presence of the car that bothered him as such; it was the grey-suited man leaning against it, talking over the radio.

  But Peter Maxwell wasn’t the type to slink away. He who had faced the Cambridge History Tripos, sudden death at close hand, Eleven Zed Eight last thing on a Friday afternoon. He’d come this far, hoping to revisit the scene of the crime, and he wasn’t going to turn Surrey round and pedal homeward just yet. A man’s got his pride. Besides, he needed to talk to the man in the grey suit. Birds and stones. He slid out of the saddle at the makeshift gate and wa
s hailed by a constable, cold and wet, who had been there, hopping from foot to foot, since the dawn. His thermos flask was empty and his relief was late. The gatling might as well have been jammed and the colonel dead and the regiment blinded with blood and smoke. Maxwell couldn’t really have consoled him, even had he been bothered, by telling him that Mafeking wasn’t like this, in the good old days.

  ‘Chief Inspector.’

  Henry Hall hadn’t heard the purr of his bike wheels on the heathland, hadn’t caught the conversation at the gate. He’d been touching base with Martin Toogood on his two way radio as he drove into Brighton, and engrossed as he was, the bad penny had caught him unawares.

  ‘Mr Maxwell.’ Henry Hall slipped the receiver back into the car, knowing the voice all too well. ‘This is a pleasant surprise.’

  ‘Mountains and Mohammed,’ Maxwell smiled, leaning Surrey against Hall’s paintwork. ‘I thought I’d save you the cliché of “What are you doing here?” That’s usually the last thing a victim says, isn’t it, before they get theirs in Morse, or Dalziel and Pascoe or Midsomer Murders?’

  ‘Thank you for that.’ Hall had only smiled five times in eighteen years. He wasn’t about to add to the record. ‘I was going to send someone to see you on Monday.’

  ‘Someone, Chief Inspector?’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow. ‘Monday? Tut, tut. I thought at very least I’d merit a DI. And isn’t four days after a murder a little on the leisurely side, bearing in mind result quotients and so on.’

  Hall looked at the man in front of him. Come wind, come wrack, Peter Maxwell always wore the same battered tweed hat. Only on the warmest summer days would he shed his (Jesus, Cambridge) scarf and his bow tie. Only when he was not on the road would the famous cycle clips ping off into a pocket and his turn-ups flap to their furthest extent, eternally collecting fluff, bits of gravel and hayseeds. He’d known the man for years, ever since they’d found the body of one of Maxwell’s own sixth form in the Red House. Funny. Henry Hall couldn’t quite remember where the Red House was now after all this time. He only knew they’d demolished it. Like Ian Huntley’s house at Soham, like Fred and Rosie’s place at Cromwell Street, Gloucester, it had gone under the bulldozers. Lest, in the ever-more-sickening world of the twenty-first century, some lunatic made shrines of them.