Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  Yesterday the Marauders couldn’t manage single time, but galvanized by the extraordinary scene between their drillmaster and Lamont, they rose to it. The beach re-echoed to the thud of their hob-nailed boots and the shouts of Pickering and Maxwell over the staccato tattoo of Steve’s drum, keeping the line taut, the going fast.

  ‘Watch your dressing,’ Maxwell called. ‘Steady, steady the Twenty-Fifth.’

  Everyone was watching now. The crowds on the dunes, the ragged, red-shawled fishwives, the knots of technicians and Miles Needham, under his parasol.

  ‘They’re looking pretty good,’ he muttered to someone next to him.

  ‘Right wheel!’ Pickering roared and the ranks swung on a sixpence to face the solitary scarlet-coated officer who stood unarmed before them. But Lamont was not going to budge. He was supposed to fall, mortally wounded in a skirmish, according to the script but after what had just happened, no way would he go to the sand again. He planted his legs apart and rested his hands on his hips.

  ‘Twenty-Fifth!’ Maxwell roared as Pickering whirled his spontoon to full height in both hands and darted to the right flank, ‘on my command. Load!’

  There was a fumbling of cartridges as teeth clamped down on paper and musket butts hit the sand. The ramrods came out almost as one and the muzzles came up to the level. Marc Lamont found himself swallowing hard. He was staring down the business end of forty-three muskets and every one was aiming directly at him.

  ‘Fire!’ Maxwell thundered and his voice was drowned by the crash of the guns. The crowd cheered wildly, the extras throwing their caps in the air, Helen McGregor among them. As the smoke filtered away across the levels of the Bay, Marc Lamont still stood there, his ears numbed, his jaw flexing. Helen McGregor breathed a sigh of relief.

  In the silence that followed the fusillade, a single scream rose from the throat of Angela Badham. She was kneeling on the sand next to the fallen parasol. And she was cradling in her hands the bloody, shattered head of Miles Needham. Yards away, near the fluttering papers of Angela’s clipboard, lay a piece of his skull and the lead ball that had killed him.

  Sylvia Matthews had loved ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell for as long as she’d been the Matron at Leighford High. Whether he knew it or not, she couldn’t tell. But she was always there, patching egos along with elbows, the Agony Aunt par excellence to the shattered generation who were the children of the Flower Children. Perhaps the years and the need to haul fainters around school corridors had put a little weight on her, but her face was still attractive and her heart was still pure and good and she wore it on her sleeve for Peter Maxwell.

  They sat facing the television screen in Maxwell’s lounge in Columbine Avenue.

  ‘There was a tragic accident here today during the filming of an historical mini-series,’ the link man was saying against the backdrop of the dunes and the Shingle that ran far out to sea. ‘Mr Miles Needham, director of the award-winning Purple Skies at the Cannes Film Festival last year, was shot dead when a piece of action went wrong. Mr Needham, forty-five, was rushed to Leighford General Hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival. Tributes have been coming in from around the world. This is Nicholas Witchell for the BBC at Willow Bay, West Sussex.’

  The television screen filled with the solemn face of Michael Buerke. ‘Miles Needham’s career began twenty years ago with the BBC,’ he read from the autocue. ‘Live from Hollywood, we have someone who knew him well. Sir Anthony Hopkins

  Maxwell made the Welshman vanish with a simple flick of the remote. ‘Accident be buggered,’ he muttered.

  ‘Max,’ Sylvia sat on the sofa next to him, ‘are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘It can’t happen, Sylv.’ He threw his arms wide, then ran a hand through the thatch of his barbed wire hair. ‘Yes, people have been killed by blank-firing guns – Brandon Lee a few years back – but that has to be at close range. Needham must have been … what … seventy, seventy-five yards away from the firing line. Nothing could have hit him at that range, not even a paper pellet.’

  ‘I’m sure the police …’

  He held up his hand. ‘Let me stop you there, Matron mine,’ he said. ‘The police …’ and he raised an eyebrow.

  ‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘We’ve both had bad experiences of them. But some of them are all right, aren’t they?’

  Maxwell pondered for a moment, then he swigged the last of his Southern Comfort. ‘One of them,’ he said.

  The police are good at keeping their private houses private. If they weren’t, you’d be able to tell a copper’s house by the shattered windows and shit-daubed doors. For all Home Secretary Jack Straw supported the barrel, he also wanted to weed out the rotten apples. And a lot of people were prepared to believe the whole keg was contaminated. Roaring towards the Millennium, the boys in blue were nearly as unpopular as teachers.

  The face behind the frosted glass was pretty, the eyes grey and clear, the hair a light chestnut. There was a tiredness around the mouth as she opened the door, but it vanished when she saw Maxwell.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ she murmured.

  ‘Woman Policeman Carpenter,’ he bowed low, doffing his cap.

  She glanced at the bike leaning at a rakish angle against her wall. ‘Have you got a licence for that?’

  ‘How’ve you been, Jacquie?’ he asked her, the dark eyes suddenly serious.

  She smiled. ‘I’ve been fine, Max. You were at the beach today. Willow Bay.’ She held the door open for him.

  ‘Bad news travels fast, as they used to say in the Westerns.’

  ‘Lounge,’ she pointed. ‘First on the right.’

  ‘Look,’ he padded across her carpet, ‘I’m sorry about this. I’ve really no right

  ‘You look all in,’ she ignored him. ‘Drink?’

  ‘That would be civilized,’ he said and took the weight off his feet by courtesy of her settee. It was a homely enough fiat, nothing out of place except for a copy of Marie-Claire abandoned in the corner and a pile of tatty police reports she was reading for her sergeant’s exams.

  She crossed to her drinks cabinet and poured for them both. Jacquie Carpenter was probably nudging thirty, her long, curly hair tied up in what Maxwell still called a pony-tail, her hips swaying slightly in her stone-washed jeans.

  ‘It’s not Southern Comfort, I’m afraid,’ she turned to him, smiling.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, taking the glass, ‘I’m flattered you remembered. What do you know?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She sat opposite him, shaking a finger. She and Maxwell had faced cases before, kept the watches of the night. She knew him of old and had twice put her career on the line because of it. Mad Max was mad, mad and dangerous to know.

  ‘Let me rephrase that,’ he chuckled. ‘What do I know? On my command, forty-three blokes let rip with their replica Brown Besses this lunchtime – and a man died. How is that possible, Policewoman?’

  She shook her head. ‘I did the usual three days firearms training at Hendon,’ she told him. ‘I can only just remember one end of a gun from another.’

  ‘The odd thing was …’ Maxwell was suddenly kneeling on her floor, grabbing things off her coffee table. ‘May I? The odd thing was, they all missed the bugger they were aiming at.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Marc Lamont.’

  ‘He’s dishy,’ she squealed, the woman suddenly peeping out from the policewoman.

  ‘He’s a shit,’ Maxwell corrected her. ‘But that’s another story. Here’s Lamont,’ he placed a fig in the middle of a carpet swirl. ‘Here …’ he stretched out a line of nuts, ‘my Marauders.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘Soldiers. Re-enactors. Fine band of chaps. Not the sort John Mills or Noel Coward would have approved of, but there you are. Different war; different time. Over here …’ he plonked an orange near the coffee table leg, ‘Miles Needham. So …’

  ‘So,’ Jacquie squatted over the scene of the accident, ‘they missed Lamont and hit Need
ham. Well, fair enough. He is in a straight line. Anybody behind the line of your men?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A sniper?’

  ‘Ah, you’ve been watching too much Sharpe, Woman Policeman. Maybe one of Sean Bean’s chosen men could have put a ball in Needham’s brain at over a hundred paces, but he’d need a Baker Rifle and … look, what am I talking about? These are toys. They’re all just replicas. Their firing mechanisms don’t work. All you get is a flash in the pan, from the saying of the same name. You’ve got to shake the ball out later.’

  ‘It must have been a hell of a thing to witness,’ Jacquie said softly.

  ‘I didn’t actually see it,’ Maxwell told her. ‘It was Angela Badham’s scream that alerted me in the first place. All that gunfire is deafening when you’re standing next to it. By the time I’d got the smoke out of my eyes, Needham was lying on the ground. Mind you, the blood …’

  ‘Head shot,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘It’s always like that. I’ve only ever seen one.’ She shuddered at the memory of it. ‘Not nice,’ she whispered. ‘Not nice.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Maxwell said. ‘That’s exactly what John Irving said about Miles Needham.’

  5

  Jim Astley hauled off the rubber gloves and threw them into the bin. He was tired and his back ached and perhaps he’d dissected one body too many. In his darker days, he felt like a butcher, hacking and sawing his way through the shells of what once had been people. The growl and shudder of the circular saw as it sheared through bone, the rip of the zip that closed the body bags, the unutterable silence of the mortuary – sometimes the sounds came back to him in the cold watches of the night when things seemed distorted and warped and mountainous. Then he’d shake himself and his old snobbery would reassert itself. He was one of the chosen, the elite, a man with the skill of God. He looked at his own hands as he ran them under the hot tap, flexed the fingers, stretched the knuckles. Good hands. Safe hands. And he looked up into the mirror, wondering for a moment whose face stared back at him.

  ‘Jim,’ there was another face in the mirror, out of focus with his own until he peered closer and the closing of the door brought him out of himself.

  ‘Henry,’ the police surgeon nodded, and snatched a handful of paper towels from the dispenser before turning to his man.

  Henry Hall was a Detective Chief Inspector, one of those legendary band they still write novels about. He’d put on a little weight had Henry over the years that he and Astley had known each other. But he was a distant bastard was Henry Hall. Had the warmth of a refrigerator. The strip lighting reflected back at Astley in the man’s glasses. His eyes were invisible. There were times when people only recognized Henry Hall by his three-piece suit. It was rumoured that rookies on his manor called him the Ice Man, but that was just a rumour – Henry Hall wasn’t colourful enough for that.

  ‘I was going to ring you. Want to buy me a cup of coffee?’

  ‘My pleasure,’ Hall nodded, a man who’d never had any pleasure in his life; and Astley crashed the door back in his own mortuary on his way up to the upper levels and the light.

  Leighford General’s staff canteen was like hospital staff canteens the wide world over – the coffee was lousy and the tea was worse. You had to press all the buttons yourself and it was of course pot luck whether there was jam in your doughnut or not. The All Day Breakfast oozed cholesterol and every corner seemed to belong to the smokers in a profession that buried thousands of cancer victims every year. Rhyme? Reason? Not in Frank Dobson’s National Health Service.

  Hall and Astley sat opposite each other by the window, the one that looked out on the building site that was earmarked for Leighford’s Millennium project.

  ‘Sugar?’ Hall handed Astley a sachet.

  ‘Never touch it,’ the good doctor said and slipped a few drops from his hip flask into his coffee before consigning the thing back to the bowels of his white coat.

  ‘So …’ Hall stirred his tea carefully. ‘What can you tell me about the late Mr Needham?’

  Astley leaned back in his plastic chair, ‘A well nourished male in his mid-forties,’ he said. ‘Certain evidence of the use of narcotics, but not a problem.’

  ‘Not a junky?’

  Astley shook his head. ‘Social user,’ he said. ‘I would think it’s de rigeur in television producers, isn’t it?’

  ‘I understand he was a director,’ Hall said.

  Astley shrugged, ‘Director, producer. Who gives a shit, Henry? They all die, you know.’

  ‘How exactly?’ the DCI asked.

  ‘Gunshot to the head,’ the doctor answered. ‘Quite unusual, though.’ He rummaged in his pocket. ‘You’ll need this.’

  Hall took the lead ball. It felt cold and heavy in his hand.

  ‘It’s distorted by the impact with the skull,’ Astley told him. ‘It would have been totally spherical when it left the gun. It hit Needham here,’ he pointed to his own head, ‘just to the left of the midline, shattering what dear old Henry Gray – he of the Anatomy – calls the frontal eminence. So we have a circular hole at the entrance wound with cracks radiating outward, like a pebble hitting a window, if you can picture that. The ball went straight through Needham’s brain – I won’t bore you with the various lobes – and exited here,’ he pointed to the back of his head where the hair got thinner, year by year. ‘The exit wound was massive. Your boys handed me two pieces of skull – and I found three others. I can’t reconstruct the occipital totally. There must be tiny fragments in the sand, at the Bay. You’ll never find those.’

  ‘So this is an early bullet, then?’

  Astley shrugged. ‘You’ll have to talk to Hendon about that. A conoidal bullet would have done more damage, especially from a high-velocity rifle.’

  ‘Either way, Needham would have been dead?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Astley nodded. ‘As a dodo. Who’s in the frame?’

  It was Hall’s turn to lean back. ‘That’s just it, Jim. Except for the Kennedy killing – and maybe Anwar Sadat – I can’t think of a more public murder. Or was it execution?’

  ‘That’s good,’ Astley grinned his humourless grin.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Murder. Your Inspector Whatsisface kept talking about an accident.’

  ‘That’s the official line at the moment,’ Hall said. ‘We’re keeping all our options open.’

  ‘Have you got a murder weapon?’

  ‘Forty-three of them,’ Hall told him. ‘But that’s being narrowed down as we speak. I haven’t even got to go to Hendon. Hendon has come to us.’

  The smoke curled up from a dozen half-smoked cigarettes across the flickering shadows of the slide projector. This was the Incident Room at Tottingleigh, the little village now absorbed into suburbia by Leighford’s eastward sprawl. It was a series of prefabs, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer; cheerless all year round. DC Jacquie Carpenter hadn’t felt much like lunch before she saw the photographs of Miles Needham’s head. Now, she’d positively gone off the whole idea of eating – perhaps Thursday, when the memory of the shattered, bloody skull had lessened. DI Whatsisface – Dave Watkiss to everybody but Jim Astley – was on his feet with pointer in hand. Henry Hall knew how he’d be spending his lunch hour. The wolf pack with the slavering jowls known as the country’s media were howling so loudly he’d relented and called a press conference. When a man as high profile as Miles Needham died, discreet inquiries were out of the question. ‘The right to know,’ the media shrieked. ‘In the public interest,’ the newshounds bayed. Softly softly went out of the window.

  ‘The gun that killed Needham,’ Watkiss was saying, ‘was a ringer.’ He held up the Brown Bess in the dim light of the incident room for the benefit of his shirt-sleeved audience. ‘Light, George, please.’

  There was a popping of neon strips and the fan of the projector died. Everybody moved, as instinctively you do when the light of your environment changes and they all looked at the gun.

  ‘This is a r
eplica flintlock musket. Film companies and re-enactors use them all the time. They’re designed to fire blanks. Except this one,’ he clicked back the serpentine, the barrel presented, across this chest. ‘This one is for real. Except,’ he eased the hammer forwards again, ‘it’s even better than that. Hendon have been over all the forty-three firearms used on the day in question. Forty-two of them were harmless. Oh, you could knock somebody’s brains out with the butt, like a club. But the most you’d get from the mechanism is a black face or a nasty one if your finger got in the way of the gubbins. But this one, Hendon tells us, has a rifled barrel. For the uninitiated out there, that means the shot will fire further and straighter. Whoever used this gun wasn’t play acting. He was for real.’

  ‘Who is it, then?’ a voice called from the corner, ‘Whose gun was that?’

  DI Watkiss loomed sideways, the Brown Bess balanced nonchalantly in one hand, and flicked on the projector switch. The fan whirred again and the lights went out. Then, all of them, from DCI to the newest rookie, hot and sweaty off the beat, stared into the vacant, boyish face of a murderer.

  James Diamond, BSc, MEd was in some ways a clone of Henry Hall. Both university men, of an age, they had come up the soft way, via management consultancy training. Diamond had read Biology at Salford – a slim volume, men like Maxwell knew. And for some reason best known to Diamond, the man had a streak of ambition in him. Or perhaps he wanted to escape from the science lab benches, the roar of the bunsen burners, the smell of formaldehyde. Anyway, he was a Deputy Head, albeit in Wolverhampton, at thirty-one. He made Head at thirty-four, but that was only because the governors of Leighford High belonged in a home and the Chief Education Officer had recently escaped from one.

  Maxwell commented loudly in the staffroom on the day the new Head arrived, misquoting General LaSalle – ‘a headmaster who isn’t dead by thirty is a blackguard.’ Maxwell himself was Head of Department at twenty-six; Head of Sixth Form by thirty; a living legend by half past two. He’d christened Diamond ‘Legs’ after the ’20s gangster of the same name in the hope that it would give the man some colour. It didn’t.