by M. J. Trow
‘It’s Helen McGregor, isn’t it?’ Maxwell asked.
‘You what?’
‘The girl who made the allegations – Helen McGregor.’
‘It might be,’ Firth hedged.
‘You know bloody well who it is.’ Watkiss wanted to hurry things up now, get a confession, go home. He could barely remember where that was. ‘Too crafty to shit on your own doorstep, of course. Couldn’t touch her up at school. That would be asking for trouble. But wearing a derelict’s get-up, using darkness as a cover. Did you seriously think she wouldn’t recognize you?’
‘My God!’ Maxwell sat back, blinking at Watkiss. Here it comes, the Inspector thought. He’s going to cough. Could it be that easy? ‘If this were crime fiction, I’d say something like “Say that again, Inspector”. And you would – the wrong phrase, of course – and I’d say “No, not that bit” …’
‘What the bloody Hell are you talking about?’ Watkiss shouted, his tether-end in full view.
‘Your man was a derelict, yes? That was the word you used?’
‘What of it?’ Watkiss asked.
‘Are you going to charge me, Inspector?’ Maxwell wanted to know.
The Inspector looked at the detective next to him. He’d been shat on by Peter Maxwell twice in forty-eight hours, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could hold him on. He knew it. Maxwell knew it. It was just the girl’s word against his. The word of a girl, a school refuser as the educational establishment called them, who had already reported a Peeping Tom whom nobody else had seen. Dr Astley had examined her thoroughly. There wasn’t a mark on her. She was no virgin, but that had nothing to do with what may or may not have happened last night.
‘Or,’ Maxwell was waiting for Watkiss’s answer, ‘are you going to let me go?’
The Inspector switched off the tape. ‘If you go within half a mile of that girl,’ he growled, ‘I’ll fucking lock you up for ever. Got it?’
Maxwell nodded and stood up. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. It’s been … an education. I expect the County Council will be sending you a bill for my supply cover this afternoon. And by the way,’ he paused at the Interview Room door, ‘I don’t expect to be followed when I leave here. That would constitute police harassment, wouldn’t it?’ Maxwell smiled. ‘And you wouldn’t want to set the lad here a bad example, would you, Inspector? Please don’t get up – I’ll see myself out.’
He found himself going back to it again, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Maxwell sat in the offices of the Advertiser during his lunch hour the next day. At school, Jason had seen that Mr Maxwell was back, so he reckoned he must have paid the Bill wads of money. James Diamond had seen he was back too, but when he asked Maxwell about the visit of the two officers, Maxwell had muttered something about an overdue library book. You didn’t push a man like Mad Max. Not even if you were a Headmaster; and James Diamond, BSc, MEd was very far from that.
The microfiche article flickered on the screen. ‘Thomas Sparrow … well known in the gay community …’ There was Astley, the tight-lipped bastard who wouldn’t talk; some coroner who was probably dead; the journalist, Bill Donlan, who’d already told Maxwell all he could remember. And that left … the police – Maxwell’s favourite people.
He flicked forward onto new reels. Going back to March of this year, he combed the columns for news of a vagrant, a down and out; things going missing from washing lines; anybody being moved on along the beach. Nothing. Whoever Helen McGregor’s attacker was, he hadn’t made the local headlines. There were those who might dismiss the whole McGregor statement as the meanderings of a warped, obsessive juvenile mind – that there’d been no exposure, no assault. But Maxwell wasn’t one of them. He’d been around hormonal girls, pre and post the thing called puberty for years – it was what they paid him for. And he knew a lie when he heard one. Somebody had flashed at Helen McGregor; somebody had watched her coupling with Giles Sparrow. And something, some sixth sense perhaps, told him that that somebody had to do with all this – the blood that seeped through Leighford’s sands that summer.
‘Jacquie, can we talk?’
The girl jumped at her desk. Around her the Incident Room hummed with activity. Her pizza slice lay discarded on the pile of papers by her coffee and her VDU.
‘Max,’ she cupped the receiver with her hand, aware that all calls to the Incident Room were logged. ‘Where are you calling me from?’
‘Call box,’ he told her, ‘corner of …’
‘Don’t tell me,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘No more pratting about, Jacquie.’ She heard an edge to his voice she hadn’t heard before. ‘A straight trade. I’ve got information you want. You’ve got information I need. Swap yer!’
She glanced left and right. Paul Garrity was deep in a phone conversation himself; Jerry Manton was typing up reports and his return key was giving him grief. Everybody else seemed busy.
‘What? she whispered. ‘What have you got?’
‘Hannah Morpeth had a stalker.’
‘What?’ the girl’s eyes widened and she tried to control her volume. ‘Why didn’t you …’
‘Ask Buster Rothwell. I’ll see you tonight. Your place. Twelve. I want you to pull a file, Jacquie, can you do that?’
‘What?’ Her voice was even louder this time and Jerry Manton glanced up. ‘No, that’s not possible.’ She swung her chair so that its high back was between her and her colleagues.
‘It’ll be on record somewhere,’ Maxwell was saying. ‘June 1977. Here in Leighford. The death of one Thomas Sparrow. Thanks, Jacquie. See you tonight.’
She promised herself she wouldn’t. Not again. The last time she’d helped Mad Max, she’d almost lost her job, her sanity. And Hall, Watkiss, probably Garrity and Manton – they all knew. But that was then. Now Mad Max was different. She was different. They were different. He was old enough to be her father, for Christ’s sake. And she kept telling herself that as she went to records and found the file on Tom Sparrow. And all the way home through the leafy suburbs of a sleepy seaside town. So why was it then she saw his face in the steam of her bath that night? Heard his voice in the purr of her hairdryer? Why was she putting on that dress, of all dresses? In fact, she was just about to take it off again when she heard the rattle of her back door. She checked her watch – ten twenty-four. Couldn’t be Maxwell. He’d said twelve. Who was that at this time of night?
‘The postman always rattles twice,’ Maxwell’s beam lit her kitchen. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him in, clawing down the blind behind him.
‘For fuck’s sake, Max. I don’t believe you’re here. I don’t believe you called me today. You know, don’t you, that Hall knows? He knows everything.’
‘Does he?’ Maxwell took the girl’s hand and held it, then he kissed her softly, on the cheek. She closed her eyes. She wanted to sink her face into the rough tweed of his jacket, soak up the warm male scent of his neck and hair. Instead she pulled away.
‘Max,’ she wasn’t looking at him, ‘I’m falling in love with you.’ As she said it, she felt fifteen again.
‘Jacquie …’ And for once the master of wit and repartee was lost for words.
She held up both her hands and turned away. ‘The file you want is there – on the table. I haven’t opened it. I don’t know why you want it. It’s a photocopy of course. The original is still back at Leighford nick.’ She looked at him for the first time. ‘Max, if any of this gets out. If you’ve been seen on your way here tonight, I’m finished … I think I am, anyway.’
‘Buster Rothwell,’ Maxwell said. ‘Did you talk to him?’
‘I managed to persuade Jerry Manton it was his idea that he should.’
‘And?’
‘You were right. Hannah had a stalker who was sending her threatening letters. We’re having them analysed at the lab now. And Rothwell’s likely to face charges of withholding. Which is exactly what I could charge you with, Max.’
The Head of Sixth Form nodded. �
�You’d be within your rights,’ he said. And he took up the file on Tom Sparrow.
‘I hope it helps,’ he said, ‘the stalker information. Thanks for this.’ He reached the kitchen door and turned to face her. ‘Don’t fall in love with me, Jacquie,’ he said. ‘I’m too old, too clapped out, too set in my ways. I’m going now. And when I do, you won’t see me again. Unless it’s to pass me on my zimmer frame one day and you’ll say “There’s that boring old fart Mad Max. We used to like each other, you know.’”
‘No, Max,’ tears were trickling down her cheeks, splashing onto the black velvet of her dress. ‘No, I couldn’t bear not to see you again.’
‘Well, then,’ his throat felt iron-hard. ‘If you need me,’ he covered the moment with his best Bacall, ‘just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow.’ And her whole body shook as she heard his footsteps padding away across the grass.
Peter Maxwell sprawled in his lounge that night, his bow tie discarded, his slippers on, his third or fourth Southern Comfort firmly in his grasp. He’d read and re-read the police report on the death of Tom Sparrow. His body had been found along the shoreline at Willow Bay – the names of the two fishermen who’d found him were recorded. Dr James Astley, the newly appointed police surgeon back in 1977, diagnosed death by drowning. Excessive froth at the mouth, sea water in the lungs, blue finger nails – all the classic symptoms. The body was fully clothed except for the shoes and the weight of his saturated anorak had probably contributed to the death. There was no alcohol in the body, so it was unlikely he’d fallen in drunk. He could have slipped, the investigating officer speculated, but where and how was a mystery.
A number of witnesses were interviewed, as people who knew the deceased. One was George Sparrow, the dead man’s nephew, who lived out at Glove Farm and had reluctantly identified the body. He had nothing to do with his uncle, whom he found an embarrassment because of his proclivities. And none of his family did either. Another was Miles Needham, a young man from near Bournemouth working in television in some unspecified capacity. The police had visited him at his girlfriend’s parents’ home. He said he’d known the deceased as a child, but hadn’t clapped eyes on him for years. His drinking buddy Alan Rossiter said much the same.
But it wasn’t so much these names that intrigued Peter Maxwell. And it wasn’t these names that led him to pour his fourth or fifth Southern Comfort so smartly on the heels of the last one. It was another name altogether. Metternich the cat sensed the black mood at 38 Columbine and elected for a night on the tiles – it was safer.
He tried finishing Lieutenant Henry Berkeley Fitzhardinge Maxse, but horses’ reins are tricky blighters when you’re stone cold sober and Maxwell was far from that. He slammed the whole thing down in his attic workshop so that the ADC to Lord Cardigan lost his head completely along with his left arm.
He stumped downstairs to his bedroom and took up where he’d left off on The Jew of Linz; but he wasn’t up to Hitler, never mind Wittgenstein at that hour of the morning. He was pacing his lounge on the floor below that, contemplating suicide or renewing his membership of the Conservative Party, when his eye lighted on something he’d forgotten about completely in the last murderous fortnight – the script of The Captain’s Fancy lay abandoned on his magazine rack. He realized he’d never finished it and had no idea how it ended. He threw himself down heavily on the settee and flicked through its tatty pages. He could imagine the unimaginable Erika Marriner weeping buckets because her creation had been so hacked about by those dreadful television people. He couldn’t wait to read her next opus on the ’45.
He reached the part where Captain Fitzgerald aka that shit Marc Lamont got his in a hail of musket balls in the battle on the beach. Jemima Vawr, his light o’ love, found his body after the marauding French had been repulsed and wandered the deserted camp, more or less wringing her hands. There, in one of the tents she found … Jesus Christ! Maxwell was sitting up sharply, his head spinning, his heart racing. He checked his watch. Quarter past three.
‘Saddle White Surrey for the field tomorrow!’ He gave himself – since he was on his own – his best Larry Olivier as Richard III and fumbled under the settee for his shoes. ‘Look that my cycle clips be sound and not so tight. Come, come, caparison my bike. The foe …’ And he looked down at the vital pieces of evidence he needed, The Captain’s Fancy and the file on Tom Sparrow lying side by side on the settee. ‘The foe vaunts in the field.’
He caught sight of his reflection in the darkling mirror and whispered to it, ‘Conscience avaunt. Maxwell’s himself again.’
14
‘Guv?’ Paul Garrity was mumbling into his walkie-talkie.
‘This had better be essential, Paul,’ he heard a tired Henry Hall mutter.
‘Peter Maxwell’s just gone into the Grand.’
‘Great!’ he heard his guv’nor mutter before he put the receiver down with a click that hurt his eardrums.
‘At least you’re at home in bloody bed!’ Garrity spoke to the dead mobile.
The hotel’s video security picked up Peter Maxwell where Garrity’s vigilance left off. There was a florid-faced kid at reception, amazingly not one Maxwell remembered teaching.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ the lad asked.
‘Dr John Irving, please.’
‘Is the gentleman expecting you, sir?’
‘I don’t suppose so for a moment,’ Maxwell told him. ‘It’s half past three in the morning. Just ring his room, will you? Which one is it, by the way?’
‘Er … I’m afraid we don’t give out … sir? Sir?’ But Peter Maxwell had that knack, vital to an amateur detective, of reading upside down. John Irving was staying in Room 105 according to the open register. He’d find it himself.
It was a bleary-eyed Fellow of Gonville and Caius who opened the door to Peter Maxwell. ‘Christ, Bwana, the lad on the reception desk was all for having you arrested. Luckily for you I calmed him down.’
‘Ah, it’s not true what they say about you black chappies, then?’
‘Hmm?’
Maxwell glanced knowingly down at Irving’s bath robe and Irving instinctively closed it. ‘Just joking,’ he winked. ‘Tell me,’ he swept past his old oppo, ‘does your room have one of those dear little … ah, it does. Do you mind?’
‘Feel free.’
Maxwell helped himself to a Southern Comfort miniature from the drinks cabinet. ‘Hair of the dog,’ he said and threw himself down on Irving’s twin bed. ‘Tell me about The Captain’s Fancy,’’ he said.
‘What about it?’ Irving sat in the bedside chair. ‘Max, has it actually registered with you what time it is?’
‘How does it end, John? Ms Marriner’s load of tosh. What happens to the girl, Jemima Nicholas aka Vawr?’
‘Er … well, she dies. Commits suicide, I think. Why?’
‘How? How does she do it?’
‘Er … Oh, Christ. She stabs herself.’
‘With what?’
‘With … a surgeon’s knife.’
‘A surgeon’s knife,’ Maxwell nodded.
‘Is that what killed Hannah Morpeth? The papers just said a knife.’
‘The police aren’t giving all they’ve got to the papers, John, they never do.’
‘So where did you get it from?’ Irving wanted to know.
‘Someone on the inside,’ Maxwell tapped the side of his nose. ‘And as always, my sources are impeccable.’
‘But, Bwana, I don’t see …’
‘Had you filmed that bit? The suicide? You said you’d done most of the indoor shots. It was the battle you still had to do.’
‘Yes. No, we hadn’t. Jemima is heart-broken at the Captain’s death and she sees the surgeon’s knife lying in a tent. I think the television people count that as an outside shot. Anyway, I’m pretty sure we hadn’t done it.’
‘Good. There’s a bloke on the front door, John – a detective.’
‘I know. Not the subtles
t of surveillance, one way or another.’
‘Between us, you and I have a total IQ measurement off the scale. Do you think we can put all that colossal brainpower to some use for a change and lose him come the morning?’
‘I expect so. Why?’
‘Because you and I have to take a little drive to Basingstoke.’
‘Basingstoke?’
‘I’ve heard better Roderic Murgatroyds,’ Maxwell commented. ‘That’s where they keep Eight Counties Television.’
The sun was scarcely over the sound boom when Peter Maxwell bustled out to talk to Paul Garrity.
‘Morning, detective,’ he smiled breezily, tapping on the car window. Garrity’s mouth felt like the bottom of a budgie’s cage and he had a crick in his neck the size of the national debt. He’d spent nights in more interesting places than a hotel car park, it had to be said. ‘Dr Irving and I are just about to have breakfast. I’ve ordered the full cholesterol and English. He’s having the rather more debonair but probably no healthier croissant. Well, he always was rather cosmopolitan for obvious reasons. Would you like to join us or shall I send you out a doggy bag?’
Maxwell didn’t wait for Garrity’s reply, but he could read lips fairly well through the closed car window. He’d already seen, and Garrity hadn’t, John Irving nip out of the side door and take his car round the back to the kitchen entrance. From the foyer, it was a simple matter to wander into the dining room, waving gaily to the disgruntled detective and reach nonchalantly for the orange juice. He then chose a table as far from the front car park as he could. And ducked past it into the kitchens.
‘Can I help you?’ a flustered waitress asked.
Maxwell looked at her closely. ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said and walked on. At the back door, a waiter almost collided with him. ‘Just offering my compliments to the chef,’ Maxwell beamed and then he was in John Irving’s Audi purring north to Basingstoke.
Eight Counties Television had its main studios to the south-west of the town where the old house of Basing had been besieged during the Civil War. It was a great, glass monolith, eloquent testimony to the advertisers’ money that had built it.