Maxwell's Island

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Lovely,’ he said, not looking up.

  She went out of the room, a cold hand clutching at her heart. Somehow, being in on the whole thing from the beginning made her less police, more public. She was getting a taste of life from the other side of the fence and she didn’t really like it much. She realised, perhaps not for the first time, that this was how it happened for Maxwell.

  From a corner of the sofa, Metternich watched events through slitted eyes. Timing was of the essence. Hall continued jotting, checking back a page or two every now and then. Then, Jacquie called from the landing above.

  ‘I’ve got one, guv, if you’d like to come up.’

  That was it. The cat had had enough. First, this geezer had come to mock him in prison. Then, he had given him a poxy mouse to try to make up for it. Now he was going up to where the Boy slept. Never you mind that the Boy wasn’t here. Metternich wasn’t having that kind of behaviour, oh no. With effortless grace he sailed through the air and landed with all eighteen claws hooked into the back of Hall’s leg.

  With commendable forbearance, Hall said nothing to Jacquie as he went into the study on the second floor. He just hoped the blood wouldn’t seep through his trousers and give the game away. Metternich was curled up again on the sofa, chuckling quietly as only a cat can.

  ‘Sorry, guv,’ Jacquie said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Did you call?’

  ‘No, no,’ Hall said. He would rather no one knew about the scream. ‘Just a yawn, you know, one of those loud ones.’ He mimed a stretch.

  Jacquie was confused. A loud yawn just didn’t seem like Henry Hall, but she didn’t like to argue. ‘Well, here she is.’ She pointed to the screen.

  ‘Pretty.’ Hall wasn’t surprised. He had somehow expected someone like this. Groomed. Perfect. Just a little bit ruthless. ‘Can you print this off for me?’

  ‘Of course. Do you want me to email it as well?’

  ‘Good girl. I don’t know how I’ll manage when you’re an inspector.’

  ‘The same way we manage now, guv, I expect,’ Jacquie said. ‘I won’t be going anywhere. Max is … well, not too old, I don’t think, but too not interested to change schools. Mrs Whatmough has Nolan down for his GCSEs already, so we can’t move him.’ She tapped a few keys and the printer churned out a photo of Izzy, cropped but still unable to totally remove Pansy Donaldson, looking cross-eyed, Jim the driver and a motley crew of holidaymakers in the background. She tapped a few more and sent the image on its way as a JPEG to Henry Hall’s in-box. ‘There you are.’ She handed him the picture. ‘All done.’

  Hall looked at the clock on the wall. The numbers seemed to be on backwards and the time looked a bit unusual. ‘Has that clock stopped?’

  She glanced up. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘It says half past three.’

  ‘No. Half past nine.’ She smiled at him. ‘It goes backwards.’

  He patted her on the shoulder. This was the Carpenter-Maxwells’ house after all. ‘Of course it does,’ he said. ‘Of course it does,’ and limped down the stairs.

  ‘Are you all right, guv?’ she asked, anxiously.

  ‘Yes. No problem. Why?’

  ‘You’re limping,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you know. Leg gone to sleep. Nothing to worry about. Anyway, I had better be off. Thanks for the photo. I’ll let you know if anything comes up.’

  ‘Did you have a coat?’ she asked, looking round.

  ‘No,’ he said, hurriedly. In fact his coat was in the sitting room, but he didn’t want to go within leaping distance of Metternich again that evening. He had his car keys and phone; the coat could wait. ‘Oh, one thing. Do the Newport Police have a contact number for you?’

  She blushed. ‘I gave mine, not his. I know I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t think he should … well, you know.’

  Hall looked at her and wished he was a more demonstrative person. She was the nicest person he knew and he could never tell her. He would probably have been amazed to find she knew already. He contented himself with a brusque, ‘Goodnight, then,’ and made for the stairs.

  Jacquie was concerned to see he went down them with some care, using only one leg on the down step, then catching up with the other. She didn’t ask again if he was all right; if it was gout, or arthritis or similar, he probably didn’t want to be reminded of it.

  Back in the sitting room, something purred.

  Maxwell had been in many hospitals, many times, but had never managed to quite get used to the smell. It had changed over the years, from his early childhood days in casualty with various bumps and bruises, when that nice Mr Lister had swept through the echoing wards and the place smelt mainly of Dettol and cabbage, through to this evening, when the smell was of inadequately hoovered carpets and slightly damp plaster casts. He examined the board by the lifts and found Lady Elizabeth Molester tucked away in the opposite wing, on the fourth floor. Just the thing for all those old ladies visiting their comatose friends; a ride in an overcrowded lift followed by a ten-mile route march along slippery corridors. Perhaps Leighford General needed more patients and that was a very good way to get them. And another thing! Who in their right minds would call a ward after a woman whose name, to those not local to Leighford, was Molester? No one further east than Brighton or west than Littlehampton knew that it was pronounced to rhyme with ‘holster’.

  Finally, the lift arrived, full, as usual, with puzzled people who had got on at the second floor and who had pushed ‘4’ to no avail. Maxwell tipped his hat at the surly nurse pushing a wheelchair. It had always been his policy to be nice to medical staff more than twenty years his junior. It would not be good to meet them in the geriatric ward a few years down the line otherwise. He leant across her to press ‘4’ and, despite the tipped hat, got a severe bridling for his pains.

  The tide of visitors was much stronger leaving the ward than arriving. Pausing to wash his hands at the dispenser at the door, Maxwell was brushed aside by a large woman elbowing her way in without benefit of hygiene. Maxwell was no great believer in global pandemics per se, and flu, neither bird nor swine, had not alarmed him particularly. But flesh-eating viruses, now there was something he wanted to avoid. He had seen enough horror films to be able to picture their phlegm-dripping fangs emerging from every orifice and thought that getting one of those would probably be quite unpleasant. So he spent a few minutes cleaning all his important little places before he stepped onto the ward. And stopped dead in his tracks. There, in the third bed on the left, as described in detail by Henry Hall, lay Mrs Troubridge. And, looming over her like some prehistoric carving, was Millie Muswell.

  Peter Maxwell was not a cowardly man. In fact, there were those who said he was particularly brave in willingly facing, as he did every day, rooms full of children who had driven many staff to the brink of insanity. John Christie had been in someone’s class once; so had Ted Bundy, Aileen Wournos and J.T. Ripper. Wonder if their teachers ever had an inkling? But even Maxwell blenched at the sight of Millie, at the thought of sitting opposite her with a comatose Mrs Troubridge between them, making talk which would be small from his direction, incredibly large from hers.

  ‘Pip pip,’ came a voice from behind him. ‘’Scuse me.’

  He scooted out of the way as a trolley manoeuvred its way into the ward, pushed by a figure he recognised. ‘Mrs B?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you worked here.’ Was there an institution south of the Wash that the woman didn’t work in?

  ‘Hello, Mr M. You’ve caught me! I’ve worked here years. It’s a wonder we haven’t bumped into each other before.’ She gave him a wink and a nudge. ‘I just do weekends, as a rule, but Sonia – she’s the weeknights trolley operative – she’s gone off sick. Well, I say sick. She’s just having a bit of a lead-swing, if you ask me. Still, a bit of overtime never comes amiss. Oh, hold on, Mr M.’ She held his arm, not that he could have gone anywhere, as she seemed to have trapped him in a corner with her trolley. ‘Ming Wai?’ she called.

  A nurse sitting
at the station in the middle of the ward looked up. ‘Yes, Edna?’

  ‘Visitor, love. Fiddling with the bedding.’ She pointed and the nurse got up and strode over to the other side of the ward.

  Trapped by the trolley, Maxwell could feel his right leg growing numb. It probably wasn’t a good idea to crash to the ground holding your leg, up here in Lady Elizabeth Molester, so he tried to alleviate it by doing a little subliminal hopping.

  ‘You all right, Mr M? We have to keep an eye, you know, on people bringing in germs. Fiddling with bedding’s not allowed. No need, is there, with these lovely nurses about? You’re here to see Mrs Troubridge, I suppose? Love her, she’s not very well, you know, not well at all.’ She made a screwing motion near her temple and mouthed the next phrase. ‘Gone a bit mental.’ She compressed her lips and folded her arms. ‘Still, she’s in the best place, in’she? Since she’s become institutionalised, she might as well be in one. Must get on, this tea won’t pour itself.’

  Maxwell felt strange, here with Mrs B in such an alien landscape, but old habits die hard and he knew that he would wake up sweating and confused later if he didn’t go through the motions. ‘Yes, fine, thank you. I’m not surprised,’ he said, taking her stream of consciousness one wave at a time. ‘I should say not and they are lovely, aren’t they? Yes, I am. No, she’s not, or so I hear.’ He also dropped his voice for the next one. ‘Bless,’ he mouthed. Then, ‘Yes, she is indeed. No, I don’t expect it will.’

  They smiled at each other, content that the ritual had been played out and that, moonlight though they both might in their various areas of expertise, they were still, and always would be, there for each other.

  ‘Take care, Mr M,’ she said, taking the strain as she eased the trolley away from his legs and got it trundling down the ward. ‘I’ll see you up at the school on Monday. We missed you.’

  ‘And I missed you too, Mrs B,’ Maxwell said, and he meant it. She would have injected a welcome blast of sanity in an otherwise rather surreal week. Nobody would have gone missing if Mrs B had been there. Rubbing a bit of feeling back into his thigh, he took a deep breath and joined Millie Muswell at Mrs Troubridge’s bedside.

  The huge woman looked up as Maxwell sat down opposite. ‘Mr Maxwell,’ she whispered. It was a strange noise, not so much a whisper as a shout, just really, really far away. ‘How nice to see you.’

  ‘I thought you’d gone home,’ Maxwell said, quietly. He was confused. If Millie was still here, why had Henry Hall not met her at the house?

  ‘Oh, no, Mr Maxwell,’ she breathed. ‘I had gone home. Well, not home as such. I had just moved on, for my researches, you know. I think Araminta and I have itchy feet in common, you know. Not like poor Jessica here, content to stay in one place all the time. Anyway, I popped back the other day, just to say hello, you know, as I was in the area. I remembered that you were away and I thought the poor thing might be lonely. So, of course, I found the house empty and asked the neighbours across the way where she might be.’ She indicated the woman in the bed, so frail that she hardly disturbed the bedclothes. ‘And I found her here.’

  They silently contemplated the sleeping Mrs Troubridge. ‘Is Araminta planning to visit?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ Millie said, disapprovingly. ‘You know the story, of course?’

  ‘Well, yes, we do,’ Maxwell said. ‘But what family doesn’t have its little ups and downs?’ His Katharine Hepburn was unmistakeable, even in a hoarse whisper, but Millie Muswell, faux historian though she was, was not really into the Plantagenets and so it was all rather wasted.

  ‘Well, I tried to persuade her, but to no avail. But still, I don’t suppose it would do any good. Apparently, she is hardly ever conscious.’

  Suddenly, Mrs Troubridge’s eyes flew open and her head tossed madly from side to side. She fixed her gaze on Maxwell and then on Millie. She tried to sit up, scrabbling at the bedclothes. ‘Ninety-nine thousand,’ she shouted. ‘One billion. Please don’t. Mr Maxwell, please don’t …’ then she fell back on the pillows, exhausted.

  The nurse leapt to her feet and came at a run. She elbowed Millie out of the way and leant in close to the sick woman, slipping an arm behind her head. ‘It’s all right, lovey,’ she murmured. ‘I’m here. I won’t let anyone hurt you.’

  Mrs Troubridge let her head fall back against the nurse’s arm. She turned her head to Maxwell. ‘I think you’d better both go now,’ she said. ‘She’s very hard to settle when she gets like this.’

  Maxwell was shocked by seeing his old neighbour in such a state. Somehow, he could only picture her lurking outside the door, clipping invisible shoots from the hedge, waiting to gossip or complain. Toothless, with her hair parted to one side in a way she never wore it, in a hospital nightgown, sizes too big and slipping off her shoulder, she seemed like a stranger. But he was very reluctant to leave this fragile little person here on her own. Even so, he felt he had to deal with Millie, who was flailing her enormous hands about and seemed to be trying to manhandle either the nurse or Mrs Troubridge or both to one side.

  ‘Come on, Millie,’ he said. ‘I know it’s upsetting, but the nurses know best.’ He hauled on her sleeve, but nothing seemed to move. It was like trying to shift Mount Rushmore.

  ‘Come on, duck,’ suddenly Mrs B was at her other side. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit. No good staying here, in the way. Go with Mr Maxwell here and I’ll stay with your friend. Mrs Troubridge and I go way back, don’t we, Mr M? I’ll be finished in a minute and Ming Wai won’t mind if I stay, will you, love?’

  Without turning round, the nurse grabbed her chance. ‘That would be great, Edna, if you would.’ Then, mindful of her budget, ‘Off the clock, though?’

  ‘Of course!’ Mrs B was outraged. ‘I’m doing it for a friend.’ She met Maxwell’s eye around the substantial back of Millie Muswell.

  ‘Thanks, Mrs B,’ he said. ‘Come on, Millie. Mrs B will take care of her.’

  A booming noise filled his ears and he shook his head as Metternich did when he had swallowed a fly. He looked around and then realised what it was. Millie Muswell was crying.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Outside the hospital grounds, Maxwell realised he had given himself a bit of a task. He had to get rid of Millie before Jacquie came to fetch him, otherwise he could see them ending up with a house guest. True, the house next door was, by definition, empty, but it seemed rather ghoulish to put her in there. They had just about enough milk in the house for a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal in the morning and something told Maxwell that Millie was probably not a frugal eater.

  ‘Are you staying here tonight?’ he asked her in a casual tone.

  ‘Here?’ She gave an enormous, gulping sob and looked around her. ‘Where?’

  ‘No, not literally here,’ he said. ‘I mean in Leighford, in the area in general.’

  ‘No, no, I have a hotel room in Brighton. I ought to think about getting back. Do you know the train times?’ She looked vaguely around again, as if a departures board might suddenly materialise against the fence.

  Maxwell was not a train user by inclination – he’d never really trusted them since that unfortunate incident with Mr Huskisson and the Rocket’s pistons – and he had no idea when the last train was. But by listening carefully to the whispered plans in his classes, he had gathered that it was possible to go clubbing in Brighton and get back on the last train, which was at midnight, fooling parents and responsible adults in general that the whole evening had been spent playing Scrabble at a friend’s house. So he assumed the last train in the other direction was of that general time. ‘I would imagine eleven-thirty, midnight, that sort of thing. Jacquie is picking me up at the pub at ten. Why don’t you wait there with me and I’m sure she would be delighted to give you a lift to the station?’

  Millie brayed with pleasure. ‘Would she do that? Oh, you are kind, both of you. I must admit, I did wonder how I was going to get back. The hospital is such a walk from the station.�
��

  ‘Well, it was very kind of you to come,’ he said. If the conversation got any more trite, he thought, she would be saying thank you for having me.

  ‘Least I could do,’ Millie said. ‘The family seems to be getting smaller and smaller and we have to watch out for each other. Poor Jessica. Do you think she will be all right?’

  Maxwell was stuck for an answer. It was true that Mrs Troubridge had come through all manner of alarums and excursions in the time they had been neighbours, what with the Incident and everything, but this was Medical. Other people, professional people, were worried about her and somehow that made the outcome less easy to second-guess. ‘I really don’t know, Millie. She certainly seemed to be rather frail.’

  The woman looked at him, faintly surprised. ‘Of course she’s frail,’ she trumpeted. ‘A gust of wind would blow her over. She comes from the slight side of my family. It’s my mother who gives me my strong constitution.’ She slapped him on the back and nearly broke his shoulder. ‘Strong bones. That’s what we have. Wouldn’t snap like a twig just falling down the stairs.’

  ‘That’s very fortunate,’ Maxwell said. ‘But I meant, frailer than usual. The calling-out, that kind of thing.’

  ‘That was very upsetting,’ Millie conceded. She gave Maxwell a sidelong glance. ‘She seemed rather frightened, I thought. Did you think that?’

  ‘Yes, she seemed a little nervous,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘But people, when they are on painkillers, morphine, things like that, they can say very strange things. I made advances to the dentist once, and I’d only gone in for a filling.’

  ‘Really? And did that worry you, at all? Make you wonder about anything …’ she narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice, so that it seemed to arrive in his brain not through his ears, but up his legs from the soles of his feet, ‘subliminal?’