Maxwell's War

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Doddle,’ he snarled at the hapless Year 12 students who fell to his charge, ‘A-level Physics. Doddle. Latent heat of fusion of ice; coefficient of linear expansion – what could be simpler? And you can take all kinds of aides-memoire into the exams with you. A-level Physics? Don’t make me laugh.’

  She didn’t run when she saw him; didn’t move at all. Only her face darkened. Only her knuckles whitened.

  ‘Hello, Helen,’ the Head of Sixth Form sat down beside her and plucked a shoot of wild barley from the grass by the hedge. He champed on one end of it and lay back, gazing up at the high mares’ tails through the spreading branches of the oak. ‘Filming over?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Now that it’s all over.’ He rested on one arm beside her, ‘It’s been a very long time since I trod the boards, but I still remember the feeling when the curtain came down at the end of a run. Empty. Desolate, sometimes. There’s a hole in your life.’

  ‘You pushed him,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  She turned to face the man for the first time. He was vulnerable, lying alongside her like an old friend – or a lover. Maxwell knew that. He and Count Metternich had invented body language. He could have done this in his office, he behind his desk, she on the carpet. But that wasn’t his way. At least, not today it wasn’t.

  ‘Marc,’ her face was like thunder. ‘You went for him. And pushed him over.’

  ‘Helen …’ Maxwell was searching for the right words.

  ‘Why?’ she snapped. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘He wasn’t very nice to a friend of mine.’ Maxwell put it in terms the girl could understand. It was the language of the playground and some people never left it behind.

  ‘So?’

  ‘The friend was too nice to say anything. I decided I should.’

  ‘You didn’t have to push him, did you?’ The tears were very near.

  ‘No.’ Maxwell was sitting up, both hands in the air, seeking for a reconciliation that would get this girl back on the straight, the narrow. ‘No, that was wrong.’

  ‘But what I don’t understand,’ she was on her feet now, her lips quivering, her shoulders tensed, ‘is why you had to kill that Miles Needham too.’

  Then she ran. And he was too old, or too tired, or too world-weary to give chase. He watched her until she’d run beyond the hedge that led to the road. He’d catch up with her tomorrow, ask her what she was talking about, sort it all out. Then he turned in the afternoon sun back to the gilded grot that was Leighford High, that place of tomorrows.

  8

  Martin Bairstow sat shivering on the edge of the dunes, his anorak hood pulled up, his teeth chattering. Where had this bloody weather come from suddenly?

  ‘Time to pull up stumps then, Bob?’ he called to the man along the lines from him.

  Bob Pickering straightened by his tent flap and sniffed the wind. He’d got a little workshop back home. Work piled up to buggery, he shouldn’t wonder. The unplanned extra days may have taken their toll already.

  ‘Reckon you’re right, Martin,’ he nodded and was just about to start hauling his Voltigeur gear with its burnished buttons and buckles when a police car snarled to a halt on the road above him.

  ‘Oh, fuckin’ ’ell,’ Bairstow grumbled every bit as realistically as one of the Emperor’s grognards, famous for grumbling all the way to the Neva and back again, ‘’Ere we go again.’

  The raindrops started as the slim figure of Jacquie Carpenter dropped below the headland. They were large and almost hurt after the long, dry days.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she flashed her warrant card, ‘can I have a word?’

  ‘In here,’ Pickering said as the wind drove in from the sea in one of those freak storms which make the great British summer what it is. ‘More room in here.’ He made some space on the camp bed and stashed his gear on the waterproof floor. ‘Cup of tea?’ he asked the girl.

  ‘No thanks,’ she smiled. ‘You’ll be thinking of pulling out, then?’

  ‘Bloody right.’ Bairstow wrestled with the flap as the rain bounced on the sheltering canvas. It wasn’t six in the evening yet, but the black clouds that rolled out to sea had brought the night with them.

  ‘I can’t force you to stay,’ she said, ‘but if you can, it would help. Mr Hall’s inquiries haven’t finished yet.’

  Bairstow looked at Pickering. ‘Look, luv,’ he said, sliding back the yellow hood for the first time, ‘You must be even more aware of this than we are, but two people have been killed in the last week. Shot, stabbed. Fuckin’ hell! It’s like Friday the bloody Thirteenth out ’ere. And we’re cut off out ’ere, you know. Weird bloody place, Bob, ain’t it, at night? Out ’ere. Now, I’m not normally funny about places, and that. But I don’t like this bit o’ beach. I sensed it when I come ’ere, didn’t I, Bob? I told you, didn’t I? Sort of … I don’t know, sounds and that.’ He looked at their faces in the dim light of the tent. ‘Well, I dunno,’ he rubbed his chin, screwed up his face, ‘Nah. I gave that detective blokey my address. You know where I live,’ and he laughed, nudging Jacquie in the ribs. ‘Nah, I’m outa it. See you, then. I’ve got a scooter to load up.’

  And, like Captain Oates, the intrepid Sergeant Bairstow vanished into the weather.

  ‘What about you, Mr Pickering?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Will you stay?’

  ‘Filming’s over,’ the ex-Maréchal de Logis said. ‘Nothing to stay for now, is there?’

  ‘Except a little thing called murder.’

  He looked into her grey, bright eyes. Quite a little cracker, this policewoman. Streets ahead of that DI Watkiss who had interviewed him earlier. ‘Are you getting anywhere with that?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘We’re doing what we can,’ she said. ‘It’ll be quicker if everybody co-operates.’

  He smiled. ‘I’ve got a business,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but it’s bread and butter. You know, gotta keep the old wolf from the door.’

  ‘How well do you know Martin?’ she asked, peering out of the tent flap where she saw him wrestling with his ropes.

  ‘I don’t,’ Pickering told her. ‘Are you sure about that tea?’

  ‘No, really,’ she smiled.

  ‘No, I only met him when we both arrived. He’s a re-enactor too, like me, only between us his heart’s not in it. You’ve got to love it. The sound of it all. The bugles, the thud of the drum, the rattle of the muskets.’ He caught the look on the girl’s face. ‘All right,’ he chuckled, ‘I suppose I come across as a bit of a weirdo to you, right?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she smiled. ‘It takes all sorts. I know a man whose loft is full of little plastic soldiers. He’s spent a quarter of his life making and painting them. And he’s one of the finest, most fascinating men I know.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Pickering nodded.

  ‘You know about his collection?’

  ‘He used to teach me – oh, longer ago than I care to remember now, to be honest. I expect he’s forgotten all about it, but I haven’t. Do you know, I was there when he bought his first one.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Pickering sniggered at the memory of it. ‘He took us on a jolly to Brighton. Showed us all the historical sights. And there used to be this model soldier shop and he bought this kit. That was Captain Nolan, who, Mr Maxwell told us, carried the fatal order that led to the Light Brigade’s rather nasty end. Fancy that. Do you know, I’d forgotten all about that until just now. Isn’t it funny what memory’ll do?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ she told him.

  ‘Do you think that kid killed Needham?’

  ‘Mr Hall …’

  ‘No, no.’ He waved a finger to stop her. ‘Never mind him. Do you think Giles Sparrow did it?’

  Jacquie Carpenter was used to being put on the spot. Usually by Peter Maxw
ell. This was a little different. There was something safe about Bob Pickering, something sure. His large, strong hands, his steady grey eyes, she felt somehow at home. Even in that freezing, wind-whipped tent. ‘No,’ she said, gazing into his open face, ‘no, I don’t. But I need all the help in the world to prove it.’

  There was a cough and a rattle as Bairstow’s Lambretta struggled for life and he purred away, across the soaking grass and past Jacquie’s car.

  Well,’ she said, the noise having shattered the moment, ‘I’d better be going. We’ve got your address.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He saw her out. The rain drove steadily from the west now, stinging the sand and Jacquie’s face alike. For a moment, she looked at him, then turned to go. She’d nearly reached the car when she felt his hand on her shoulder. She started with the suddenness of it and the cold.

  ‘Have you got Martin’s address?’ he shouted above the wind.

  ‘Yes, of course. Why?’

  ‘He left this behind,’ Pickering was holding a canvas bag in his hand. ‘Can you send it to him? He’ll need that for his next re-enactment.’

  ‘What is it?’ she shouted back, trying vainly to keep her hair in place.

  ‘Dunno,’ he yelled. ‘It looks like an old-fashioned surgeon’s kit.’

  ‘Clean as a fucking whistle.’ Jerry Manton plonked the coffee in its plastic cup by Paul Garrity’s elbow.

  ‘What is?’ Garrity’s eyes were glued to the flickering screen in front of him.

  ‘Eight Counties. I can’t find a decimal point in the wrong place.’

  ‘You can’t have looked then.’ Garrity broke off from his vigil to scald his tongue on the cup’s contents.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Manton lolled back in the chair, tired, cold. Incident Rooms when the team had gone home were desolate, loveless places. Only Manton and Garrity were still there under the harshness of the strip lights. ‘But if the guv’nor wants all the i’s dotted and the tees crossed, he’s going to have to call in the Fraud Squad. If anyone was on the fiddle at Eight Counties, I haven’t sussed it. What have you got, Paul?’

  ‘No bloody sugar, that’s for sure.’ Garrity’s screwed-up face said it all. ‘Apart from the three wise monkeys we can’t identify on the video tapes, zip. Course, there’s absolutely no way of knowing when Hannah Morpeth’s killer got into the hotel. It could in theory have been hours before, maybe even the previous day. This is weird, though.’

  He ran the tapes so that people scurried backwards and forwards across the lobby like an old Mac Sennet take. ‘Here.’ He pointed to the frame as he froze it. ‘Who’s this?’

  Manton peered closer. Hours of spreadsheets had seared themselves on his eyeballs and he wasn’t focusing. ‘Elvis?’ he speculated.

  ‘John Irving, the historical adviser bloke working on the shoot.’

  ‘Seems in a hurry,’ Manton observed now that the frames were moving at the right speed.

  ‘Correct. He goes through that revolving door like a bat out of Hell and nearly knocks over this woman.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. What was that film where they all get stuck in a door like that?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Garrity wasn’t a film buff and if he had been, the last twenty-four hours staring at this footage would have cured him of that. ‘And this. This is Peter Maxwell, that smart alec from up at the school, the one the DI warned us about.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Manton remembered watching the celluloid Maxwell jerking his way towards the door, steadying the woman and leaving the frame. ‘Didn’t like him, did he?’

  ‘He did not,’ Garrity sharpened the focus on the woman crossing to the reception counter. ‘Unlike Mrs Fabulous.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jacquie Tightarse Carpenter.’

  ‘Oh?’ Manton was a sucker for gossip and he sniffed it now in the air of the Incident Room. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘What have you heard?’ Garrity was a cautious man.

  ‘DCI wouldn’t mind slipping her one,’ Manton observed, ‘unless my encyclopaedic knowledge of human nature is missing a few pages.’

  Garrity nodded. ‘Well, he’s not alone there.’ He lowered his voice lest Incident Room walls have ears. ‘They say she’s got the hots for Maxwell.’

  ‘Never!’ Manton didn’t buy it, sitting upright again. ‘He’s old enough to be her father.’

  ‘I didn’t realize incest was on the menu,’ Garrity sniggered. ‘No, apparently, he rings her up. Goes round her place.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘Has your CD got stuck, mate?’ Garrity asked, risking his tonsils again with the coffee.

  ‘Well, bugger me sideways. Who’s that woman, by the way? On the hotel video? The one Maxwell caught.’

  ‘Ah,’ Garrity tapped the reverse button, ‘that,’ he almost pressed his nose to the screen, ‘is Mrs Barbara Needham, wife of the deceased.’

  ‘What’s weird then?’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘What’s weird? You said “This is weird, though.” What is?’

  Garrity rewound the tape again. ‘John Irving. Who interviewed him?’

  ‘The DI, I think. Why?’

  ‘Refined sort of bloke? Gentle?’

  ‘The DI? Do me a favour!’

  ‘Irving,’ Garrity was fiddling, running the tape forwards and back, trying to find the exact spot, ‘cultivated sort of cove. Cambridge professor and all that.’

  ‘So?’ Manton was lost.

  ‘So,’ Garrity pointed triumphantly at the screen, slowing the motion down, ‘Look what he does. He hares across the foyer as if his arse is alight. Swerves. See – looks as if he’s about to go another way. Then carries straight on and hits the door. There!’ Garrity’s finger hit the freeze-frame.

  ‘What?’ Manton was looking at Barbara Needham, hurtling towards Maxwell’s open arms.

  ‘He’s looking back.’

  Garrity was right. At the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, John Irving had half-turned, looking back into the foyer.

  ‘See, he’s looking back. He knows he’s hit her and yet,’ he clicked the frame on again, ‘he keeps on going.’

  Manton shrugged. ‘He’s in a hurry,’ he said, ‘that would explain it.’

  ‘Yes, it would,’ Garrity agreed. ‘He also knows Maxwell’s there to catch her. Even so …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A cultivated, nice bloke like him. Wouldn’t you think he’d play the white man, so to speak? Nip back, see if she’s all right?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Manton slid his chair back. ‘Maybe not. Come on, Paul, call it a day, old son. You’ll be spotting suspicious-looking cockroaches next.’

  The summer came back to Leighford the next week. Hordes of holidaymakers who’d done EuroDisney and couldn’t afford the Algarve swarmed south in search of sun, sea and sand. Leighford was like comfort food – steamed pudding, spotted dick, tapioca – all the smells and tastes of yesteryear. There was the inevitable Chinese in the High Street, the de rigeur Doner Kebab down the Front and the trail of litter which led inexorably to KFC. Dear dead old Colonel Sanders wasn’t boasting about his famous eleven secret spices any more, probably because the place was staffed exclusively by Old Leighford Highenas who couldn’t count that far.

  The morbidly curious vied with each other to plant their deck chairs and windbreaks on the Very Spot where Miles Needham had died. Those who were rich as well as morbidly curious and could afford the Grand’s inflated prices padded past Hannah Morpeth’s room whispering to each other as at a shrine. ‘It happened in there, you know.’ And the management of the Grand were not reletting that room that season, hoping it would all go away, resisting pressure from the local crime writers’ circle to open it up for tours.

  The morbidly curious Peter Maxwell found himself on the floor above Hannah’s, staring into the fish eye lens that he knew was staring back at him.

  ‘Yes,’ a disembodied voice called.

  ‘Mrs Needham? My name is Maxwell. I’d like to talk to you about your late hu
sband.’

  Silence.

  ‘Mrs Needham?’

  ‘Are you a reporter?’

  ‘No, I’m a teacher. I was historical adviser of sorts on The Captain’s Fancy. May I come in?’

  Another silence. The door was cardboard and ply by the look of it, but it might as well have been solid steel. Peter Maxwell had no warrant card to get him into places, no statutory right of entry. Nor had nature given him the brass neck acquired by journalists, nor the enormous feet to block the closing of a door.

  It opened. Sesame. Maxwell took off his hat. ‘Mrs Needham, Peter Maxwell.’

  Her handshake was firm and her eyes were dry. Mourning became Barbara Needham like it became Electra, the black dress lacily echoing her raven hair. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We met a couple of days ago in the foyer. You were kind enough to pick me up.’

  ‘Indeed we did,’ Maxwell remembered. ‘And I want you to know I don’t make a habit of that.’

  ‘You’d better come in.’

  Barbara Needham’s room was the most en suite he’d ever seen and the sun twinkled on the sea through the open windows. With that fickleness of the British seasons, the cold snap had gone and the gold and the blue of summer was back. She led him out there onto a balcony. ‘Would you like some coffee, Mr Maxwell? I was about to have my elevenses.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and sat down on the warm wrought iron work. ‘Mrs Needham, may I say …’

  She held up her hand, dazzling gold in the morning sun. ‘Mr Maxwell, you can spare me the platitudes. My husband was a shit. I suppose I knew that when I married him. It’s funny,’ she sat down and poured coffee for them both, ‘Loveless marriages are supposed to be a Victorian thing, aren’t they? Dynastic arrangements. Well, let me tell you they aren’t. You see, for all his arrogance, Miles was something of a rough diamond. A local boy, I believe.’