Maxwell's Point

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Is there a problem?’ DI Bronson thought it was time to intrude and he was standing at Jacquie’s elbow.

  ‘Three men dead inside a week in an area the size of a kingsize duvet?’ Maxwell asked. ‘I’d say so, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘You are…?’ Bronson looked at him with contempt.

  ‘Wondering what we pay our rates and taxes for.’ Maxwell winked at Jacquie.

  ‘I’d like your name…sir,’ Bronson stood full square across the path, blocking Maxwell’s advance.

  ‘Peter Maxwell,’ he said. ‘And yours?’

  ‘Oh.’ Bronson’s eyes flickered across to Jacquie who toyed briefly with jumping off the cliff behind her. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Bronson,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got a horrible feeling you’re impeding a police enquiry.’

  There was a muffled buzzing behind them, as of a large gaggle of Grimsby elderfolk, the sun dazzling off their bald heads or blue rinses, approached the yellow tape to a rising chorus of ‘Ee’s and ‘Aye’s.

  ‘I think you’re about to learn the meaning of impeding, Inspector,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘And don’t threaten them. They’ve got this thing about being charged over the odds.’ He tipped his hat. ‘Later, Policewoman Carpenter.’

  The last knots of reluctant Year Tens were creeping across the fields at Leighford High as White Surrey threatened to mow them down. Dale was going to yell, ‘You’re not supposed to ride your bike on the school site’ when he realised who the cyclist was and changed his mind. He valued his nuts too much and had his whole reproductive life ahead of him.

  High in her eyrie, Dierdre Lessing saw her bête noire gliding noiselessly over the paper-strewn field, like that mad old bastard Don Quixote tilting at windmills again. ‘Today would be good, James,’ she said, without turning. The winnowed husk that was James Diamond, Headteacher, got up from the soft chair in her office and followed her steely gaze through the second floor window. Maxwell disappeared behind the Sixth Form Block in a blur of white and chrome and wickerwork.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.

  And as the door clicked behind him, Dierdre Lessing uncoiled with a clink of claws and a rattle of dead men’s bones. ‘Pathetic,’ she murmured.

  ‘Max.’ Diamond hailed his Head of Sixth Form in the corridor on the ground floor. ‘Could I have a word?’

  Maxwell checked his watch before unpinging his cycle clips. ‘Nearly half one, Headmaster,’ he beamed. ‘Goering’s Economic Policy waits for no one, I fear; least of all Year Twelve.’

  ‘This is important, Max,’ Diamond persisted.

  ‘Very well.’ Maxwell ushered the man into his office. If truth were told, James ‘Legs’ Diamond didn’t go into Mad Max’s office much, and that was because he didn’t like it. There were movie posters everywhere, as if the man were some sort of buff. Men like Legs Diamond didn’t have a life outside Leighford High School and he didn’t really see why anyone else should have one either.

  Maxwell invited him to sit. Now, the Great Man had invented body language and he’d just played a masterstroke. He sat at his desk, in the Siege Perilous, the seat of power, his arms outstretched, hands flat on the desk like Julius Caesar receiving the surrender of Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix, on the other hand, sat awkwardly on a corner of Maxwell’s cheap and nasty L-shaped county furniture, outmanoeuvred and outfought before he even opened his mouth.

  ‘Exit strategies, Max,’ Diamond said weakly.

  Maxwell blinked. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Exit strategies. How long have you got to go now?’

  Maxwell looked at his watch again. ‘Two and a half hours, Headmaster,’ he said, solemnly. ‘I assume you’ve cancelled the Year Heads Meeting due to lack of interest?’

  ‘Er…no, I haven’t. And I didn’t mean that. I mean, how long till you retire?’

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell leaned back in his chair, watching the worm before him squirm. ‘The Prime Minister, God bless him, keeps upping the ante in that respect, doesn’t he? First it’s sixty-five, then it’s sixty-eight. I think pretty soon teachers will be like the Pope and we’ll die on the job – if that isn’t a too politically incorrect or nauseating a concept.’

  ‘No, no, Max,’ Diamond chortled. ‘That edict doesn’t come into effect until 2008. And anyway, you’re over fifty.’

  ‘I certainly am, Headmaster.’ He was on his feet. ‘And believe me, when that great day comes, when I hang up my chalk – oops, board-marker – for the last time, rest assured, you’ll be among the first to know. Especially,’ he closed to the man and winked, ‘since I expect a sodding great present from you and the Senior Management Team. Now – really must fly,’ he said, ‘as Reichsmarshall Goering was prone to say. Can you see yourself out?’

  Dierdre Lessing wasn’t bad at body language either. She happened to be passing as Maxwell skipped to his Year Twelve Class, flinging open the door and yelling, in a very plausible Maximilian Schell, ‘Vell, my children, vot is it to be? Guns or butter?’

  James Diamond on the other hand, skulked out of Maxwell’s office as if he’d just been caned.

  She didn’t have to seek confirmation of how the meeting had gone. A cruel smile creased her thin lips and she muttered to herself, ‘Plan B’.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They lay side by side on their steamer chairs that night, the ones B&Q were selling off cheap. The ones up the road were dearer but that was because they had the legend ‘Titanic’ stencilled on the back. The Hendersons had bought some of those.

  Moths were flitting around the candle flames on the patio like men, allegedly, used to flit around Marlene Dietrich and the flames burnt upright and pure in the absence of wind. All afternoon, Peter Maxwell had been stirring it, suggesting to all and sundry that there was an upper limit for working temperatures in schools. The Premises Manager was soon screaming at Legs Diamond about Health and Safety issues – apart from the lack of beard and the Scots accent, she was very like Groundskeeper Willie in the Simpsons. About two-thirty, Sylvia Matthews assumed a very similar position and tried to persuade the Head that common sense ought to prevail and at least let the kids go home half an hour early. Year Ten were all for marching in a body – a very sticky, tetchy, Lynx-infested body – on the Headteacher’s office, to drag him out and kill him if he got difficult. They’d been to see their own Year Head who advised against it, but Mad Max had said they had right on their side. It was something called Diffidatio, he’d said, and it was a twelfth century thing where if your liege lord (that’s a kind of headmaster, he’d said) was not fulfilling his feudal obligations (like keeping the place cool enough) you had the right to overthrow him. Mad Max knew his onions and if Mad Max said something, you just knew it was right. Anyway, they were still psyching themselves up when the bell went and the Great Leighford Rising never took place. Never mind; better luck tomorrow.

  It was certainly cooler under the stars; Nolan lying in his cot under the fairy lights; Mrs Troubridge snoring like an elephant seal next door in one of her rare moments of sleep; and a black and white killing machine sitting with smouldering eyes, still guarding Nolan’s pram even though Nolan was not in it. The boy’s parents still couldn’t decide whether Metternich regarded the lad as something to be defended or something for a snack if times got lean.

  ‘But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln,’ Maxwell was saying, ‘how did you enjoy the show?’

  ‘You really are a bastard, Max.’ Jacquie was smiling, her face glowing partly from the reflection of the conservatory lights, partly from the red wine she was sipping softly. ‘One more crack about the tax payers and the DI would have had you.’

  ‘He certainly seems to be the unacceptable face of Mr Blair’s England.’ Maxwell was looking at the candle-flames dancing in the distortion of his cut glass of Southern Comfort. ‘So, after I left you, did you manage to sort anything out?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ she said, wide eyed. ‘We dithered a lot and wrung our hands and tore our clothes crying in despair “What shall we do no
w, without Peter Maxwell?” Then we got down to some old-fashioned police work.’

  ‘You ingrates,’ Maxwell tutted. ‘You’ll be sorry when I solve this one for you.’

  ‘No one will be sorry if anyone solves it, Max. It’s all looking a bit grim for the DCI.’

  Maxwell sat up and topped up her glass. ‘Henry’s back is broad,’ he shrugged. ‘He’s been here before.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Jacquie said. ‘We’ve got three bodies in eighteen days and, as you so tactfully reminded the DI, all within an area the size of a duvet – that’s not quite accurate, by the way. The links between Wide Boy Taylor and Gerald Henderson are minimal and we don’t even know who the bloke on the beach is.’

  ‘Just another washed up whale, eh?’

  She looked at him. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘Whale on a beach. It’s a song by Danny Goodburn. It’s never off the radio at the moment. One of Benny Palister’s favourites. I like it too. Sort of…sad and sinister, all in one.’

  ‘Well,’ he confided in her, ‘my cat’s whisker – oh, begging your pardon, Count – isn’t what it was. All I seem to get on it is Alvar Liddell and the news that Crete’s fallen. Bit of a bugger, really. Did the Man With No Name go over the edge where you guys were standing this morning?’

  ‘We’re pretty certain,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘The lab are still checking his footprints. As you can imagine, there are quite a few up there on the path – including yours.’

  ‘And yours!’ he bridled in the perfect whine of a four year old. Then, serious, ‘And a killer’s.’

  Jacquie sighed. ‘That’s exactly right. But it’s such a mess up there, forensically. You realise we’re actually getting less in terms of clues each time this bastard strikes.’

  ‘So Henry’s assuming it is the same man?’ Maxwell checked.

  ‘You know Henry,’ Jacquie threw her hands in the air, careful not to spill her drink.

  ‘Plays his cards close to his chest, that man,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘What are we talking, then? Copycat?’

  Jacquie put down her glass. ‘I’d better not have any more of this if you want a sensible conversation. MO?’

  ‘MO.’ Maxwell didn’t put his drink down, except to top it up.

  ‘David Taylor, strangled by ligature.’

  ‘His own crucifix.’ Maxwell narrowed it down.

  ‘Chummy must be relatively strong, strong-stomached and determined.’

  ‘Takes at least four minutes to kill a man that way,’ Maxwell remembered. ‘Like boiling an egg. Gerald Henderson, stabbed from the front.’

  ‘Conventional household knife. Attack pretty frenzied.’ Jacquie finished the sentence for him. ‘Yesterday’s man, fell – or – pushed from a great height.’

  ‘Yesterday’s man,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I like that, my dear. Is there some sort of award for being a police person and a poetess?’

  She ignored him.

  ‘So how did he get up there? On the Point like that?’

  ‘And when?’ Jacquie was ahead of him. ‘His body was found on the beach by Geraldine Buck, local artist, at eight-fifty according to the log-in time. Give her a chance to pull herself together, stop throwing up and ring the nick…let’s say, some time after eight-thirty.’

  ‘Still light,’ Maxwell was with her. ‘But nobody saw him land; so nobody saw him go over.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Jacquie said. ‘But it’s early days and we’ve got to be optimistic. We’ve still got a few clues to check out on Jack the Ripper.’

  They laughed together in the candlelight.

  ‘So,’ Maxwell brought them back to the here and now. ‘The Man With No Name is casually walking along the coastal path, minding his own business at some time before eight-thirty last night. He meets Chummy who gives him the bum’s rush over the edge. There were still people on the beach at that time?’

  ‘Very likely, but no one we’ve found yet.’

  ‘And of course, he’s mute.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Man With No Name. I pushed you off a log last year…what was that…a foot off the ground? You damn near burst my eardrums with your screaming.’

  ‘I’m a girl,’ she said by way of explanation.

  ‘That’s very true, Jacqueline,’ Maxwell said in his best professional tone. ‘But if somebody threw me off Dead Man’s Point, I think I’d scream blue murder. So either he’s mute or he’s just one of those stoical guys who accepts his lot in life. And death. Perhaps he was one of those optimists who thinks all the way down “OK so far”.’

  ‘Not likely, is it?’ she refused to crack a smile at that one.

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s not conclusive, though, Max. I can cite you dozens of cases where eyewitnesses see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. They’re not covering up, they’re just not observant.’

  ‘Even so, Jacquie…’

  She held up her hand. ‘You see what you expect to see,’ she said. ‘You don’t expect to see a man falling from a cliff, so you don’t see it.’

  ‘Come on…’

  She was adamant. ‘You hear a shout, a scream, perhaps even an altercation on the coastal path. You’re down by the sea, so the sound’s distorted. It bounces off the rocks, the cliffs. You don’t know which direction it’s coming from. And then, of course, if you’re typical Joe Public, you don’t want to know.’

  Maxwell knew how that worked. He who never turned his back, never walked away; he’d seen how that worked in others. ‘Which leaves us where?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Up shit creek for now,’ she said. ‘But in the case of the Man With No Name, as I said, it’s early days.’

  ‘Time for the Heavy Cavalry, then.’ Maxwell jerked something small and shiny out of his pocket.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That, dear heart, is a clue.’

  ‘Max?’ Jacquie was frowning at him. ‘Where did you get it?’

  He placed the little silver lizard in the palm of her hand. ‘From a kid at school,’ he said. ‘I swapped him all my cigarette cards of the 1951 All Blacks Touring Team. I’m not sure I got much of a deal, to be honest.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ It was a question she’d often longed to ask him.

  ‘Henry didn’t tell you?’

  There were times in her life when Jacquie Carpenter had felt the floor open beneath her, when the rules didn’t apply any more, when the world turned upside down. Those times usually involved Henry Hall, her boss; and Peter Maxwell, her lover. ‘No,’ she said, slowly. ‘Not a dickie bird.’

  ‘Picture the scenario,’ Maxwell said as Jacquie peered at the lizard in her hand. ‘Henry Hall has two unidentified kids wandering a crime scene, the one that belonged to David Taylor. People who saw them thought they were teenagers. That makes them likely Leighford Highenas – unless they’re grockles, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Some excellent probing by your very own Incident Team throws up two names. Names, and I blush to report it, “known to the authorities”, viz and to wit Danny “The Flash” Pearson and Scott “Knob End” Thomas. Henry quite rightly believed he’d get nothing out of those two hardened criminals except their ranks, serial numbers and a lot of aggro from their mums and the Bleeding Hearts Lobby. So he had a word with me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this, Max?’ Jacquie was outraged.

  ‘Sworn to secrecy, dear heart,’ he shrugged. ‘Why didn’t Henry?’

  ‘So why are you telling me now?’

  ‘Mummy told me it was wicked to swear,’ the little boy who was Peter Maxwell lisped.

  ‘You idiot!’ and she hit him with a tea towel.

  ‘You can take it to the Boss Man tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘And betray your confidence?’ she asked him. ‘Don’t involve me in your skulduggery. Honestly, I don’t know which of you is the biggest arsehole.’

  ‘Er… Henry,’ Maxwell decided after the bri
efest of minutes. ‘And that’s bigger, by the way.’

  ‘Bollocks.’ She poured the dregs of her wine over his head, getting up and laughing. ‘Last one in the bathroom’s a cissy!’

  Jacquie was right. Better she be kept in the virtual dark about the strange and shifting relationship between her guv’nor and the other man in her life and, on that basis, Peter Maxwell took advantage of his late start that Friday and pedalled across the forecourt of Leighford nick. The early sea mist had vanished to leave another demonic day of heat; Maxwell could hear Year Ten sharpening their scythes in Norman Westbury’s department in readiness for Day Two of their Revolution. Simon Schama would be along any minute, making notes and deciding which walk to adopt across Leighford’s playing fields for the forthcoming documentary – ‘Leighford: the School That Died of Heat’.

  Sergeant Den Morrisey didn’t like the heat either, but he didn’t like Peter Maxwell even more. The nasty rash that assailed his neck and jawline was giving him particular gyp this morning and he wasn’t sure whether the culprit was the sun or Maxwell.

  ‘Is DCI Hall available?’ Maxwell asked, Surrey securely clamped to a drainpipe (this was a police station, by definition full of undesirables; you couldn’t be too careful).

  ‘Who wants to know?’ Morrisey knew the answer already.

  Maxwell leaned on the man’s counter and smiled at him. ‘Who wants to know, sir,’ he said.

  Morrisey straightened. Would it be worth his pension to fulfil many a copper’s pipe dream and put one on this irritating shit?

  ‘It’s Peter Maxwell,’ Peter Maxwell said. ‘And it is quite urgent.’

  They made him wait in the spartan outer office for over an hour. He carried no mobile, of course, and he thought he ought to save his one phone call from the landline in case he had need of a solicitor. So, come the time for Lesson Two back at Leighford High, his long-suffering Head of Department, Paul Moss, would just have to mug up like lightning on Elizabethan Vagrancy and teach it his bloody self (as most of Year Seven would have put it). Morrisey would have kept the self-righteous bastard longer, but the guv’nor intervened and Maxwell found himself whisked through corridors measureless to man into the Limited Smoking Area of the Incident Room out back.