Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Excuse me.’ The promising conversation was interrupted by a big-shouldered intruder who filled the doorway. ‘Could you leave us? I’d like a private word with Mr Maxwell.’

  ‘Well, pardon me,’ snorted Mrs B., never a respecter of persons, and she clattered out into the corridor with the maximum of fuss, crooning loudly, ‘The minute I walked in the joint, boom, boom …’ and waggled her overalled bum at the visitor.

  ‘Esmerelda.’ Maxwell launched into his Charles Laughton impression, twisting his lips and nose and dragging his left leg. The woman before him didn’t react. Didn’t move. Her face remained cold. Impassive. ‘Oh.’ Maxwell straightened up. Even then he was barely level with her nose. ‘Not a social call, then, Deirdre?’

  Deirdre Lessing had invented power-dressing. She swept past the Head of Sixth Form and sat down, uninvited. ‘It’s about Anne Spencer,’ she said.

  Maxwell looked at the pearl-grey suit, the padded shoulders, the upswept hair. Was she really, he wondered again, an ash-blonde? Rumour had it that there were several men along the south coast who could answer that one and none of them was her hairdresser. And Mr Lessing? Rumour had it that he had died of shame years ago, what with his wife wearing the pants and removing everybody else’s. But that was only speculation.

  ‘Anne Spencer.’ Maxwell sat opposite her. ‘You do surprise me.’

  ‘Do I, Max?’ Her grey eyes burned into his, her voice like a razor’s edge. ‘Let’s be quite clear on this, shall we? You’ve always resented me, haven’t you?’

  Maxwell smiled. ‘Resentment is too strong for it, Deirdre,’ he said.

  She pursed her lips. ‘What word did you have in mind?’

  He scanned his mind and his bookshelves for an answer. ‘Ooh, I don’t know,’ he said, stroking his chin. ‘Indifference, perhaps.’

  For a moment it seemed as though Deirdre Lessing was going to hit Peter Maxwell. In the event, she crossed her formidable thighs and took several deep breaths, any one of them blouse-threatening. ‘I am Senior Mistress,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Indeed.’ Maxwell’s smile could be as inscrutable as a Ming Emperor’s when he wanted it to be. ‘Whose?’ was the question that sprang to mind, but he was too much of a gentleman to ask it. He remembered suddenly that his old oppo Geoffrey Smith referred to the lady as ‘The Senior Mattress’ and prophesied, when he’d had a few, that she was likely to be buried in a Y-shaped coffin.

  ‘I am in charge of girls’ welfare,’ Deirdre went on, mercifully ignorant of the depth of Maxwell’s scorn. ‘Anne Spencer came to me very upset.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maxwell. ‘That’s how she left me.’

  ‘Well, can you wonder at it?’ Deirdre asked.

  ‘Look, Deirdre.’ Maxwell leaned across to her. ‘One of my sixth form – one of your girls, come to that – was murdered a few weeks ago. Nobody seems to give a tinker’s damn about that.’

  ‘Rubbish, Max,’ she snorted. ‘We all do. You’re taking this far too personally. Jenny Hyde was, as you say, one of my girls too. She belonged to all of us. You can’t go around bullying people. What do you hope to achieve?’

  ‘Answers,’ he told her.

  ‘But the police …’

  ‘Deirdre, Deirdre.’ He found himself chuckling at her naivety. ‘Did I ever tell you I taught in Bermondsey?’

  ‘No,’ she confessed, ‘you never did.’

  ‘Well, it’s not something I bandy about generally, but I did.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So until I went there, I believed in the police. Something to do with asking the time and trusting the boys in blue and hearing dear old Jack Warner reminding me to look after dear old mum and so on.’

  ‘And Bermondsey changed all that?’

  irrevocably,’ Maxwell said. ‘Because I met parents – honest, hardworking parents – who had information on the police. I saw it myself one night. There was an old girl loitering in a doorway. I was on my way home from one of those interminable moderation meetings we used to have in those days. All right, the old girl was giving the law a hard time. She was drunk. She was shouting, cursing them up hill and down dale. Then they started hitting her. One of them kept thumping her in the stomach until she went down.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Deirdre asked.

  ‘Got off my bike and went up to them.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And – if I remember the words aright – the constable told me to piss off. It was, he said, none of my effing business. They bundled the old girl into a Maria.’

  ‘Disgraceful!’

  ‘I’ve never quite felt the same about the upholders of the law since then.’

  ‘That was a one-off incident, Max.’ Deirdre had rationalized it. ‘One division of one police force. You can’t generalize and you don’t know what sort of provocation …’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He raised his hands in agreement. ‘But people do generalize, Deirdre, you know that. Rightly or wrongly, dear old Jack Warner became Mr Nasty Guy. Nobody talks to the police because they don’t trust them. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps Anne Spencer wouldn’t have talked to them. Just because they’re the police. And perhaps, I thought, just perhaps, she might talk to me.’

  ‘Well, you were wrong,’ Deirdre told him. ‘Anne doesn’t think you have a right to probe and neither do I.’

  ‘Good God, Deirdre, we only exchanged half a dozen words. I think Anne knows something. Something she hasn’t told the police. Something she hasn’t told anyone.’

  Deirdre Lessing stood up. ‘I think you’re clutching at straws, Max. This isn’t an Agatha Christie, this is reality.’

  Maxwell stood up with her. ‘I’m not trying to be Jane Marple,’ he told her. ‘I’m fifty-two years old, Deirdre, and I’ve never known someone I know be murdered before. Some people might shut their eyes. Shudder. Go back to sleep. Get on with their lives. I can’t do that. I’ve got to be out there, pitching.’

  She turned on her way to the door. ‘Well, take my advice,’ she told him coldly. ‘Pitch somewhere else, because I’ve got a feeling about this business. I think you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble, one way or another.’

  And she left.

  Peter Maxwell put his head around the door and looked down the corridor to where Mrs B. was raking the discarded cigarette ends out of the crack between the wall and the floor of the boys’ loos. ‘Who’s your money on again?’ he called.

  ‘That Guthrum,’ she said. ‘’E done it.’

  Maxwell reached for his hat and scarf.

  ‘And if ’e didn’t,’ he heard Mrs B. bellow as he made for the stairs, ‘she did.’

  And he didn’t have to see Mrs B. scowling out of the window at the briskly departing figure of the Senior Mistress, to know whom she meant.

  Jack London, the journalist, had called them the People of the Abyss. That was ninety years ago, but they were still there. And over those ninety years, others had joined them – the Great Unwashed of the ’60s, the New Age Travellers of the ’80s. But these were groups who had an identity, a label. They made statements about themselves and however much retired colonels of Tunbridge Wells might thunder ‘layabout’ as a blanket term of contempt, they were deliberate choosers of the

  Alternative Society. Strangers to soap and work and law, they brought litter and fear to the heartlands of the rich and the inherited. Their smell was indescribable.

  But it wasn’t one of these that Peter Maxwell was looking for. It was raining as his feet crunched on the shingle that Sunday, the first weekend of the autumn term. He knew Dan Guthrie by sight. Everybody did. He could have been anything between thirty and sixty, with a pepper-and-salt beard and straggly hair and a mouth full of brown, uneven teeth. Dan Guthrie made no statement about himself. Unless it was to ask in his thick Scots accent for the price o’ a cuppa tea.

  Margaret Thatcher’s England seemed to have increased the number of Dan Guthries wandering the country’s green and pleasant land. They haunted the university towns
where the young and the hopeful still felt sorry for them and dug into their frozen grants to give them their small change. Brighton was their capital, on the coast at least. When dusk fell on the Sodom of the south, they crept from their holes, squatting in doorways and cadging fags, menacing tourists with their shaved heads and Doc Martens. The men were just as bad.

  Somebody said the best time to find Dan Guthrie was Sunday morning as the bells told the faithful to get out the Morris Minors and head for church. They were on their way as Peter Maxwell swung out of the saddle of White Surrey in the dunes before the sand forced him to stop, and he watched them staggering into St Asaph’s, their Sunday-best umbrellas aloft. The weather was a bitch as he left the shelter of the sand and tufts of coarse sea-pinks. He held on to his hat and put his shoulder to the wind, hearing his feet crunch and feeling his ankles at risk from the slippery stones.

  Along the line of black, tar-coated seaweed that marked the upper reaches of the tide, he saw a huddled something in the lee of a breakwater – Dan Guthrie under canvas.

  ‘Mr Guthrie?’

  However old the down-and-out was, today he looked all of sixty, perhaps more. He squinted up at Maxwell under the tarpaulin sheet that was his only roof. ‘Who are you, mister? Are you the police?’

  Maxwell recognized the inflection of the word – Glasgow. He’d watched too many Taggarts for it to be anywhere else.

  ‘I’m Peter Maxwell,’ he said, extending a hand and kneeling on his heels. ‘No, I’m not from the police.’

  Guthrie hesitated for a moment, then reached out with a swarthy, leather-brown hand and caught Maxwell’s. Powerful grip, the Head of Sixth Form thought. Powerful enough, perhaps, to strangle a girl of seventeen years and four months.

  ‘Ye got the price of a cuppa tea?’ It was the first question Dan Guthrie usually asked anybody. In fact it was the only question he usually asked. But when a crusty old gent comes up to you unannounced, when you’re having a lie-in of a Sunday morning, there are more pressing things to ascertain.

  ‘I think so.’ Maxwell threw dignity to the wind and sat next to his man. ‘Mind if I share your tent?’

  ‘It’s a free country,’ Guthrie observed without much recourse to the facts.

  Maxwell fumbled in his pocket, resisting the urge to throw up at the smell from Guthrie’s mobile home. He pressed a warm, brass coin into the man’s hand.

  ‘Ta.’ Guthrie pocketed it. Maxwell was vaguely surprised he hadn’t bitten it first, just in case.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you, Mr Guthrie,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, aye?’

  ‘Do you mind if I call you Dan?’

  Guthrie shrugged. ‘That’s up to you,’ he said. ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘The murder.’ Maxwell got straight to the point. ‘Jenny Hyde.’

  Guthrie looked out to sea where the grey breakers swelled under the autumn rain and a solitary herring gull circled over them. ‘I dinna know nothing,’ he said.

  There were always rumours about men like Dan Guthrie. Anyone odd, anyone who didn’t conform to society’s norms, was always likely to generate speculation. Some said he was a millionaire who’d turned his back on his millions, exchanged the country seat for a doss house or a doorway. Others that he was a professor of languages who’d had a nervous breakdown and fled Oxford for the freedom of the roads. Suddenly, Maxwell knew that neither of these was true.

  ‘That’s more than I know,’ he said. ‘I was her Year Head, Mr Guthrie – Jenny’s teacher. I want to know why she died.’

  There was a long pause. Guthrie stared at the sea, silent, enigmatic,. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I dinna know nothing.’

  Maxwell stared at the grey rollers too. ‘I saw you on television,’ he said.

  ‘Television?’ Guthrie turned to him, squinting out of one eye, the other almost closed.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll have seen the programme,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s called Crimewatch – Nick Ross and Sue Cook are the presenters.’

  ‘Oh aye.’ Guthrie turned away again. ‘I wouldnae speak to them.’

  ‘Why not?’ Maxwell asked.

  Guthrie spat copiously at the already wet stones. ‘No bloody point,’ he said. ‘They’ll never catch him.’

  ‘Who?’ Maxwell was quick to ask. Was this a chink in the drop-out’s armour?

  Guthrie turned to him. ‘Whoever killed the wee girl,’ he said.

  Why did Maxwell get the impression that he’d spent the last week talking to himself? All he got was an echo. Hollow. Empty. Hopeless. ‘Well, when I say I saw you on television,’ Maxwell corrected himself, ‘that’s not exactly true. Nick Ross mentioned you. Said you’d found the body …’

  Guthrie blinked, glancing furtively left and right. ‘Not me, mister,’ he said, fixing his gaze out to sea again. It wasna me.’

  ‘What were you doing at the Red House, Mr Guthrie?’ Maxwell badgered his man now, sensing that he was rattled.

  ‘It was raining,’ the tramp told him. I needed somewhere to stay. Somewhere to go.’

  ‘It’s raining now,’ Maxwell said. ‘Yet here you are on an open beach.’

  ‘I was in the neighbourhood.’ Guthrie was louder now, standing his ground.

  ‘And what did you see, Mr Guthrie? At the Red House? Did you see her? Jenny? Was she alive or dead? Come on, man! I need some answers!’ Maxwell was screaming above the wind.

  ‘A car!’ Guthrie shouted back, his lips curled, the gaps visible in his teeth. ‘I saw a car.’

  Maxwell subsided. There was talk in the staff room of a car. That the police were looking for one. ‘What sort of car?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Man, I dinna ken.’ Guthrie shook his head. ‘They’re all the bloody same to me.’

  Maxwell nodded. He knew how Guthrie felt. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘what colour was it?’

  ‘I dinna remember,’ the man mumbled.

  ‘Think!’ Maxwell was sharp again, but he felt the drop-out flinch and he subsided. ‘Think back, Mr Guthrie. It was a Friday, wasn’t it?’

  The days were all the same to Dan Guthrie. It didn’t help. ‘It was evening,’ Maxwell prompted him. ‘Raining.’

  ‘Aye.’ Guthrie’s face twisted with the effort of remembering. ‘It was dark. Fearful dark for July. Man, the skies opened. I was caught oot in it. I remember … I remember runnin’ to the hoose. The Red Hoose. An …’ He looked at Maxwell. ‘Y’ken, it’s been a while since I ate.’

  ‘What?’ Maxwell had lost the man’s drift. ‘Oh. Oh, right,’ and he caught it again, hauling a tenner out of his wallet.

  Guthrie snatched it and stuffed it away eagerly. Exactly where, Maxwell didn’t care to enquire too closely.

  ‘You were making for the Red House,’ he reminded him.

  ‘Aye, the Red Hoose. That’s right. There was a car. Away doon the lane. I could see its lights in the rain. It was awful dark overhead.’

  ‘What time was this?’ Even as he said it, Maxwell realized the futility of the question. Men of Dan Guthrie’s lifestyle don’t exactly live by their Rolex. The tramp just shrugged at the irrelevance of it. He knew the seasons. He had a reasonable grasp of the months. Beyond that it was all just night and day. And they were all the same.

  ‘It was a light-coloured car,’ Guthrie said.

  ‘Could you see the driver?’ Maxwell asked.

  The drop-out shook his head. ‘I went in,’ he said. ‘That place has got more holes than a bloody sieve but I found a dry spot.’

  ‘On the ground floor?’

  ‘Aye. It stopped raining after a bit and I was going up to Barlichway to sleep.’

  ‘Barlichway?’

  ‘That vicar bloke. Young, he is. Not oot o’ nappies. But he runs this sort o’ shelter for us travellers. Ye can get a bowl o’ soup and a crust o’ bread too. Not a bad bloke. He’s aboot the only one I wouldn’t piss in his font, anyhow.’

  That at least was gratifying.

  ‘This bloody dog came in.’


  ‘To the church.’

  Guthrie looked oddly at him. ‘To the Red Hoose,’ he explained, as though to the village idiot.

  ‘Mr Arnold’s,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘Bloody thing came sniffin’ round me. I kicked it. And it buggered off.’

  ‘Then you left.’

  ‘Aye. The bloody dog went upstairs.’

  ‘Did the police talk to you, Mr Guthrie?’

  The man spat again, if anything more volubly than before. ‘Bastards,’ he grunted.

  ‘Who did you talk to?’

  Guthrie shrugged. ‘I dinna ken. They’re all bastards. Always movin’ ye on.’

  ‘You don’t like the police, do you, Mr Guthrie?’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘If one was afire, I wouldn’t piss on him to put it oot,’ the tramp said. ‘But …’ and for the first time Maxwell saw him smile, ‘they do a pretty mean cuppa tea, for coppers, I mean. And ye get to look up a woman policeman’s skirt. So it’s no’ all bad.’

  8

  He’d put it off once before. Five days ago. When it was raining. It was still raining. But he wouldn’t put it off any longer. Maxwell had grabbed a bite at the Nag; something they’d chalked up on a board as Navarin of Lamb, but it could have been anything. Still, they drew a decent pint at the Nag and it gave him time to marshal his thoughts.

  The truth of it was, of course, he told himself as he buried his upper lip in froth, that when it came to murder, Peter Maxwell was an amateur. Like most people, his knowledge of crime lay with the odd flight of fantasy. Well, then. How did it happen in English cosies, the thrillers he’d been brought up on? There was a body in the library or a death at the vicarage and some incredibly unlikely old fusspot, who was terminally ga-ga but had a mind like a laser, sorted it all out, muttering things like, ‘Of course, how preternaturally stupid of me.’ Joan Hickson was no doubt more immaculate as Jane Marple, but dear old Margaret Rutherford was infinitely more fun. All right. What about the Americans? The hard-boiled school of pulp? In all those, the hero had a seedy down-town office with badly fitting blinds and a perfectly dreadful taste in fedoras and trenchcoats. Some broad always came in, looking sultry or like Veronica Lake, whichever came first, and the rest was all knuckle sandwiches and lead poisoning. At least that was how they did it in the ’50s and he found it so depressing, as an attempt at literature, he hadn’t read anything hard-boiled since. Save it for eggs, he thought to himself.