by M. J. Trow
Maxwell slammed the desk with the flat of his hand.
‘That was an interjection by Mr Maxwell,’ Watkiss said calmly, ‘timed at … eleven twenty-one. I withdraw the slur, if that’s what it was. Do you know the Shingle, Dr Irving?’
‘No. The constables who brought me from Cambridge told me it’s where Mrs Needham’s body was found. And I do read the papers. But know it? No, I don’t.’ Irving was looking resolutely at Watkiss again, anything rather than meet the gaze of his old oppo sitting beside him.
‘Do you have any idea what Mrs Needham would be doing up on the Shingle late at night?’
Irving shrugged. ‘Taking a walk? As I say, Inspector, I don’t know the woman. I can hardly account for her movements.’
‘And where did you say you were, sir,’ Firth threw in his six pen’orth, ‘the night before last?’
‘At home, in Cambridge.’
‘You live alone?’
‘Yes. I have a housekeeper, but Thursday is her night off.’
‘Now, how did I guess it would be?’ Watkiss asked, wide-eyed.
For a moment all four men sat in silence, then Maxwell broke it. ‘Will that be all, gentlemen?’ he asked. ‘We could make up a four at bridge if you like.’
Watkiss snapped off the tape-recorder. ‘I’ll rearrange your fucking face for you one of these days, Maxwell,’ he growled.
Maxwell forced his fingers up so that the microphone was activated again. ‘The blip you just heard, timed at … eleven thirty-two … was Detective Inspector Watkiss offering to rearrange my face. I won’t embarrass the Bench with the Saxon adjective that punctuated his kind offer.’
Watkiss was on his feet, the colour drained from his face completely. ‘Inspector Watkiss is standing up,’ Maxwell said calmly, ‘in a most threatening manner at … eleven thirty-three.’
The tug from Firth on Watkiss’s sleeve broke the flood of red mist that was threatening to engulf the Detective Inspector. Somehow he controlled himself and sat down, clearing his throat, loosening his collar. It had been a long, hot day and nobody’s temper was over-long.
‘Did you know,’ Watkiss had found his composure again, ‘that Barbara Needham was pregnant?’
Irving and Maxwell looked at him. Watkiss leaned forward, his nose inches from the coloured man’s. ‘And did you know,’ his teeth were clenched, ‘that the foetus we found in her battered body was that of a black man?’
There was no doubt about it. The long arm of the law didn’t want to let John Irving go. But Maxwell gave sureties. Irving didn’t have his car; he’d been brought south by the courtesy and petrol of the West Sussex CID. He wasn’t carrying his passport either and he promised to stay at Peter Maxwell’s that night and the Grand from then on, because DI Watkiss felt pretty sure they’d want to talk to him again. A spotty police driver took them to Columbine at an hour of the morning when even the all-seeing, all-sneering Mrs Troubridge had hung up her trusty secateurs and gone to bed.
In the lamplight of his lounge, Maxwell checked through the slats of the blinds. Yes, there was an unmarked car down the road, a way back from the houses. There’d probably be another one, funds permitting, though he couldn’t see it from the house, at the back, where his garden abutted the allotments and the corner of the park.
‘What’s this, for God’s sake?’ Irving’s eyes widened at the size of the Southern Comfort Maxwell had poured for him.
‘It’s a tongue loosener,’ Maxwell was gazing fiercely into his friend’s eyes. ‘Now it’s that or the thumb screws or I knock seven kinds of shit out of you, John, but before dawn through yonder window breaks, I want the bloody truth out of you. All of it.’ He was shouting now, throwing himself down on the settee. ‘I sat in that stinking police interview room with Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan and listened to you lie through every orifice you’ve got. Now this time, this time,’ and he skewered the air with his index finger, ‘I kept shtumm. But you’re a whisker, Johnnie my boy, from me picking up the phone and telling Inspector Watkiss you didn’t really mean it. Now,’ he subsided, his point made, ‘do I get some answers?’
John Irving had never been on the receiving end of a full barrage from Mad Max before. The walls were still reverberating and beyond them, Mrs Troubridge had not only woken up, but was rummaging about in the kitchen, looking for a suitable tumbler to place between her ear and Maxwell’s adjoining wall.
‘All right, Bwana.’ Irving’s sophisticated tones were all the more dulcet in comparison with the maelstrom that had gone before. ‘I owe you that, at least.’
Maxwell was sitting comfortably. And John Irving began.
13
Babs Needham and I met three years ago,’ John Irving said, ‘at the Open University summer school I told you about. I said I didn’t remember her – well, that was a lie. We went out a few times. She was bright, vivacious. We fell in love that summer. Stayed in love, I suppose until …’
‘Until?’ Maxwell didn’t want to miss any of this. Like the Light Brigade assembling in his loft, Peter Maxwell had policemen to right of him, policemen to left of him. And a third had been practically up his nose all night.
‘She changed, Bwana. People do, don’t they? I didn’t know why it was. She had her own life, separate from Miles, I mean. Oh, they appeared the loving couple on BAFTA and charity nights, but they hardly saw each other apart from that.’
‘She rang you?’
‘Yes. That was another thing. She’d stopped being discreet. It was easy for her to come to Cambridge. There’s a little motel I know nearby. Like you, Max, I’ve been a bachelor too long. You’ve got a cleaner, neighbours – how much do they miss, huh? Believe me, there’s nothing snoopier than a Cambridge college – but I don’t have to tell you.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Maxwell remembered.
‘Sometimes I’d go to her place in Berkshire. Whenever Miles was away filming and I had a few days … er … research.’
‘And the baby, John?’ Maxwell was grimly serious.
‘As God is my witness, Max, Bwana, I didn’t know anything about that.’
‘It is yours?’
Irving shrugged. ‘I think we must assume it has to be,’ the historian in him was weighing his words. ‘That bastard Watkiss tried to plant the silver Audi sighting – thanks for bailing me out there, by the way – but I don’t think even he’d go so far as to invent the baby.’
‘No, I agree,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Is that what Barbara wanted to see you about? On the Shingle? The reason for those phone calls?’
‘I don’t know, Max,’ Irving shook his head. ‘If only I’d got there just a few minutes earlier.’
It was Maxwell’s turn to shake his head. ‘It wasn’t to be, John,’ he said. ‘If you’d been on time, if she’d been late, if she wasn’t pregnant …’ And his mind wandered away to other ‘ifs’ all those years ago – if he hadn’t stayed in to watch that match, if his little girl hadn’t gone to a party, if the roads hadn’t been wet …
‘It’s funny,’ Irving’s voice brought him back to the here and now. ‘It was about the time I told her I’d be working with Miles that she changed.’
‘How did she change, John?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Colder. More distant. I’m not exactly the super stud type, Bwana. I hadn’t had a relationship like that for years, perhaps never quite like that. It was … exhilarating. I’d find myself walking along the Backs grinning, going for beers with my students. Christ, I even gave one lad an A+.’
‘Desperate!’ whistled Maxwell. ‘You’d got it bad, John.’
‘I had. And so had she. Or so I thought. Did you ever have a woman like that, Bwana?’
‘Hmm? Oh, yes.’ Maxwell was far, far away, wreathed in the smiles of a girl who died, taking his daughter to a party. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘And then it was over,’ he toyed with his drink, ‘I behaved badly, I suppose. Rang her. Pestered her …’
‘Wait a minute!’ Maxwell’s fingers clicked. ‘I’ve just r
emembered it. The day you left the Grand. We were still filming and you said you had to get back to Cambridge. You almost knocked Barbara Needham over in the revolving door. I caught her on the ricochet, so to speak.’
‘I know,’ Irving grimaced. ‘That was pathetic, wasn’t it? Puerile. I saw her walking across the car park and I suddenly couldn’t handle it – the introductions, the politeness, the strain. Worse – what if she blanked me, cut me dead? I just couldn’t face her. I ran. Bloody silly.’
‘Well, we’ve all done it.’ Maxwell understood.
‘Not you, Max Bwana,’ Irving doubted. ‘I don’t believe you’ve run away from anything in your life.’
Maxwell chose to ignore the terminally dull Dr Nicholson. His old oppo didn’t need to know anything about that. ‘Well, there’s always a first time.’
‘Thanks, Bwana.’ Irving held out his hand.
‘What for?’ Maxwell took it.
‘Covering for me at the police station. I’ve never been in one of those places before. I didn’t like it, Max. And thanks for, well, just being there.’
‘Terrible film,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘the late, usually great, Peter Sellers being self-indulgent. Bed!’ he suddenly ordered. ‘You look peaky, John,’ he winked. ‘Quite pale, in fact. What do you want? Sofa or floor?’
‘Floor, please. You know me, Bwana,’ Irving smiled. ‘Pegged out on the deck of a ship for months on end. Nothing my people like better.’
And they chorused together, ‘Oh, Lordy, Lordy!’ in the half light.
Boo Radley came out again that summer. No one had really believed Helen McGregor with her tale of a prowler on the cliffs. The rookie constable who’d investigated filed a report and then got sidetracked into the murder of Miles Needham. A Peeping Tom didn’t fit that MO at all. The only other person who might have seen him was Giles Sparrow and Giles Sparrow had disappeared from the world like the Princes in the Tower, kept there by the wicked uncle they call Her Majesty’s Government.
When they asked her, Helen McGregor couldn’t say why she’d gone out at twilight on her own, wandering the place where it all happened. She couldn’t say because she wouldn’t say. It would have sounded so silly – she was walking where he had walked, reliving the sight of him in his scarlet and lace. She’d written to Marc Lamont at his Fan Club address, telling him all about herself, how she’d watched him on the beach and seen what a bastard that Maxwell had been to him. Never mind, she’d written; there’d be a time for revenge. She stood on the path that led to the Shingle and looked down on the beach and the rolling surf of Willow Bay. The gulls were far out to sea and the little kiddies had put their buckets and spades away and gone home.
In her imagination, she saw the thin blue and white line of Maxwell’s Marauders fluttering like a police cordon in the breeze, then standing to attention with the glaring sun dazzling on their bayonet points and buttons. She saw that bastard Maxwell standing facing her beloved Marc, shouting something at him, pushing him over. She felt the hatred rise again as she trudged the ridge of the dunes. Bob Pickering’s tent, the last one in the line, had gone now and a glossy new camper was parked in its place. She was still seething at the insult to her true love as she disappeared from view into a hollow of the dunes. Funny he hadn’t written back, thanking her, saying ‘Hi!’
Then she saw him, towering above her on the ridge. An unkempt mess of a man in tattered anorak, tied around his waist with string. His dark hair clung to his face where the wind blew it and his smile was a sneer of lust to the seventeen-year-old who saw it. She screamed. She ran, tumbling backwards with the depth and pull of the sand, rolling over in the sticky black debris an unusually high tide had thrown up. Hysterical, she looked over her shoulder as she scrambled to her knees. He was coming for her, his hair flying wild as he hurtled down the slope, spraying sand as he came, his voice harsh and guttural.
In the quiet confines of Leighford Police Station Incident Room later that night, she remembered it all a little differently. Her attacker’s features had changed quite a bit. He had a shapeless tweed hat and a bow tie. And she knew his name – Peter Maxwell.
They came for him at lunch-time the next day, just as he was introducing order into the chaos that was the dinner queue at Leighford High. Police uniforms were not an unusual sight in comprehensive schools the length and breadth of the country. Shop-lifting was endemic with Year 10 girls in the Boots make-up department and white and brown substances changed hands with frightening rapidity in the amusement arcade along the Front.
Even so, no one expected the two burly policemen to march up to Mad Max and ask him to come quietly.
‘Is there any other way?’ he asked them once they had shown him some ID.
‘What’s he done?’ was the question that ran in Chinese whispers down the ragged dinner line.
‘To the back, Jason!’ Bernard Ryan was desperately trying to stem the flow.
‘Oh, I only wanted to see what happened to Mr Maxwell, sir,’ Jason complained.
‘What do you reckon?’ Jez Harrap was in for the second part of his Physics exam that afternoon as the great man swept past him, past the lockers, ‘Porn on the Internet would be my guess.’
‘Nah,’ his oppo said. ‘He wouldn’t know how to switch it on.’
‘Max?’ James Diamond was coming back on site after an excruciating budget meeting at County Hall. If he’d been anything other than a boring bastard, he’d have shot himself during it.
‘Could you ask Roger or Bernard to cover me this afternoon, Headmaster?’ Maxwell beamed at him. ‘I’m afraid I’m helping these gentlemen with their inquiries.’
‘Right!’ Helen McGregor’s allegations were the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Except that this particular maiden was Detective Inspector Dave Watkiss and he was loving every minute of it. They were back in the Interview Room again. Same room. Different shit. ‘We’ve established for the benefit of the tape that you are Peter Maxwell. Now tell us where you were last night.’
‘What time?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Assuming you are going to be as reticent about the reasons for my being here as were the two gorillas you sent to collect me.’
‘Dusk. Let’s say nine thirty.’
‘At home. No – I tell a lie …’
Watkiss didn’t doubt it. He looked meaningfully at DC Firth.
‘I was parched and popped out for a pint.’
‘Where?’
‘The Longshoreman.’
Watkiss leaned back, taking his time. ‘Out on the Shingle,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Maxwell smiled broadly.
‘That’s over a mile from your home as the crow flies.’
‘Nearly two the way I go,’ Maxwell corrected him.
‘How’s that?’ Firth asked.
‘Bike. You’re too young to remember the old road safety ad “Think Bike”, Constable. But that’s what I always do.’
‘So what made you choose the Longshoreman, Mr Maxwell?’ Watkiss wanted to know.
‘Morbid curiosity,’ Maxwell disarmed the man. ‘I’m afraid I visited Barbara Needham’s murder site.’
‘I understood,’ Watkiss relished, ‘that we had made it clear you were not to get involved in this.’
‘This? Oh, I’m sorry, Inspector. I understood that when Policewoman Carpenter spoke to me, it was to warn me off the cases of Miles Needham and Hannah Morpeth. I had no idea she was referring to a murder that hadn’t even happened. Anyway, I’m not sure there is a law forbidding me from wandering on the Shingle, is there? Unless there’s an obscure statute of Edward I I may have missed.’
‘How did you get to the Shingle?’ Watkiss ignored the man. ‘The exact route, I mean.’
‘Pratchett Street out of Columbine. West to the Flyover, then cut down Derwent Avenue and along the Front. It’s the quickest way I know.’
‘And from the Front,’ Watkiss was trying to trace the route in his mind, ‘you’d have skirted the dunes and the caravan park.’
‘That�
��s right.’
‘Did you see anyone there?’
Maxwell had to think for a minute. ‘A couple of kids from school,’ he said. ‘A few holiday makers. You wouldn’t expect that many people there. It was getting dark.’
‘Go there often, do you, as it’s getting dark?’ Firth asked.
A happily married man himself, he was deeply, truly, madly suspicious of middle-aged bachelors.
‘No, I told you. I wanted to see the spot where Barbara Needham died.’
‘And what’s that to you?’ Watkiss put it to him.
‘I told you, I’m morbidly curious.’
There was a long silence while the Inspector changed tack. ‘Tell me, Mr Maxwell, do you own an anorak?’
‘No,’ Maxwell said.
‘A Barbour, then? How about that?’
‘I have a Barbour, yes. Is this relevant?’
‘You asked me earlier why you’d been brought here, Mr Maxwell.’ The Inspector had chosen his moment carefully. ‘An allegation has been made against you.’
‘Really?’ Maxwell looked the man in the face. ‘Of what? By whom?’
‘The allegation is that you exposed yourself on the dunes at approximately nine thirty last night.’ Watkiss opened a slim file on the desk in front of him. ‘This is from the statement made by the young lady in question. “He stood on the top of the dune and undid his trousers. As I tried to get up he grabbed me but I pulled away. He was still masturbating as I got out of the hollow and he did not pursue me any further.” Note the use of the word “grabbed”, Mr Maxwell; that doesn’t just make it indecent exposure, that makes it assault.’
‘That makes it nonsense,’ Maxwell looked levelly at his man, ‘a sublime piece of nonsense.’
‘Why? Because you’re some sort of pillar of the local community? I’ve thrown away more keys than you’ve had hot dinners on men who were pillars of communities. They were also perverts and weirdoes. Scout leaders, vicars, children’s home carers, teachers. Don’t think you’re anything special, Maxwell. You’re just one of a happy little band of brothers, you are. Perverts ‘R’ Us.’