Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  And what about reality? Christie, Chandler, other exponents of the murder genre cheated. They dreamed up their crime, their victim, their killer, then worked back with lesser or greater degrees of logic. But real life wasn’t like that. Real life was a seventeen-year-old girl lying dead in a wet, old house and no one knew who or why. What did he have? He lolled back in the snug while two old boys in the corner played shove ha’penny with a deadly accuracy and discussed Maggie Thatcher’s memoirs.

  Medically, he had a girl who’d been strangled, probably with a pair of tights. Hers? Somebody else’s? She’d been assaulted, but she hadn’t been assaulted. Why? Did someone want to make it look that way? To give the appearance of a maniac on the loose? Did that mean he wasn’t a maniac? That his purpose was all the more rational, controlled? But who but a maniac kills a young girl anyway? And was there anything rational about murder? Whichever way he looked, he had nothing but questions. And hardly an answer in the world.

  The Range Rover wasn’t there. Were they out? A Sunday afternoon, in early September. Piddling down with rain. The season was all but over. There’d be the final flutter of the factory fortnight. The amusement arcades would thump out their glitzy resonance one more time before the whole place died again for the winter, and a plastic chimp covered in fur fabric would, for one more time, laugh electronically and promise the punters a prize every time. He swung out of White Surrey’s saddle and wheeled it up the gravel path. His tyres hissed softly on the crazy paving and he leaned the bike against the wall, under the rain-beaten hanging basket which no one had tended since July.

  He didn’t know what to expect when he rang the bell. Perhaps they were out. He half hoped they were – that way he’d be able to stop the pounding in his chest. God, he felt dreadful. What do you say to a mother whose girl is dead? Left like a broken doll on a filthy mattress, naked to the world? Then he saw a ragged silhouette behind the frosted glass and it was too late to run.

  ‘Mrs Hyde?’ Maxwell tipped his hat. ‘I wonder if I might have a word?’

  She looked younger than Maxwell remembered her and, without make-up, ill and tired. There was no shine in her eyes, no warmth in her face.

  ‘If it’s not convenient …’ Maxwell looked desperately for a way out.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s all right. You’d better come in. You’re soaking.’

  He was. He dripped in her hallway, uncomfortable, embarrassed. For once in his life, Peter Maxwell couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she said, helping him off with his hat, his scarf, his coat.

  ‘Have you?’

  She hung up the wet things in the cupboard under the stairs. A girl’s coat hung here too. Jenny’s.

  ‘You’ll want to see her room,’ Marianne Hyde said, as though she was an estate agent or a landlady whose heart wasn’t really in her job.

  ‘No, I …’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was brittle, sharp. Then softer. ‘Yes, it helps me to talk about her. ‘You have come to talk about her?’

  Maxwell nodded.

  She led him up the stairs, past the rather awful Picasso prints, and turned left on the landing. There was a pile of towels on the floor, holding open the door of the airing cupboard.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I always wash on a Sunday.’

  He smiled awkwardly and still managed to stumble over the towels. Then she walked into Jenny’s room. They stood, both of them, looking at the bed with its grey duvet cover; the posters, culled from 19 magazine and whatever else young girls read these days, of blond young men in T-shirts and state-of-the-art acne. The room was stifling with memories. On the top of the bookcase a fluffy clutter of cuddly toys, some old and grubby, others new, in lurid pinks and yellows. Draped over the chair was a school blazer, the badge of Leighford High emblazoned on the pocket.

  ‘She still kept it,’ Marianne Hyde said as she saw Maxwell’s eyes find it, ‘even though it wasn’t the uniform in the sixth form. I like uniform, Mr Maxwell. Even for the sixth form. I think it’s important.’

  ‘About Jenny …’ he said.

  She sat on the bed, folding and refolding her daughter’s school scarf. Maxwell remembered the girl wearing that last winter, no school uniform in the sixth form or not.

  ‘May I?’ Maxwell gestured towards the chair. He hated touching it, moving it. This bedroom was a shrine to the murdered girl. He felt as if he was demolishing the Wailing Wall, stone by stone; as if he’d barged his way into Peking’s Forbidden City.

  She just nodded and he perched there, wetly. ‘Mrs Hyde,’ he said, ‘I should explain.’

  She wasn’t helping him now. So far she’d led, controlled. Now he was in the driving seat. Maxwell was a leader of men. That was where he usually was. Liked to be. But at that moment, he’d rather be anywhere else.

  ‘I want to help,’ he said. ‘I want to find whoever is responsible.’

  She looked at him curiously and he recognized the old hostility he’d seen in her before, at parents’ evenings. ‘Do you have any qualifications for that?’

  ‘None,’ he admitted, realizing the futility of a master’s degree in the real world. ‘Except …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Except I’m not a policeman.’

  ‘Does that help?’

  ‘It might.’ Maxwell was warming to it now, thinking on his feet. ‘People might talk to me where they wouldn’t talk to the police.’

  She nodded. She could see that. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘No.’ he looked at her levelly. ‘I’m not as distant as the police and I’m not as close as you and your husband.’

  She paused, frowning. ‘You’re a sort of go-between.’

  He nodded. ‘The happy hunting-ground in the middle,’ he said. ‘Although there’s actually nothing happy about it.’

  ‘My husband and I talked about hiring a private detective – when Jennifer went missing, I mean.’

  ‘Mrs Hyde,’ Maxwell leaned forward, as close to her as he dared. ‘I don’t have the right to intrude. Jenny was your daughter.’

  ‘Do you have children, Mr Maxwell?’ she asked him.

  He jerked back suddenly, as though she’d slapped him. For a second a wet road blurred across his vision. There was a roar and a scream in his ears. A shattering of glass. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Do you think you can help?’ She leaned forward to him. ‘You see, I want this man dead. People say … I’ve read magazines, when parents lose children, they just feel numb. Dead. They don’t blame. Don’t want revenge.’ She stood up abruptly, crossing to the window, winding and rewinding the scarf until it was a knot in her cold, white hands. ‘But I do. It’s not that I’m a vindictive person, I’m not. But if the police find him …’ She turned to look at him. ‘If you find him, I’ll kill him. I don’t know how. I don’t understand these things. But I promise you, I’ll kill him.’

  Maxwell felt his hair crawl. It wasn’t what the woman was saying that frightened him. It was the way that she said it. Cold. Passionless. Her emotions drained and wrung out like the scarf in her hands. As tight in her fist as the ligature around Jenny’s neck. He broke the silence for them both, like a spring snapping. ‘There are things I need to know,’ he said.

  She sat down again, composing herself, arranging the chaos that had been her mind since that day in July, that day when her only child had walked out of her life.

  ‘I didn’t notice it at first,’ she told Maxwell. ‘How Jennifer had changed. She was … I don’t know … distant, withdrawn.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘It was on the Saturday. I suppose, looking back, I’d been aware of a strangeness for two or three days. No more. On the Sunday I tackled her about it. It was over breakfast. Clive lost his temper with her. It’s sad, really, I don’t think he’s ever forgiven himself. Oh, they’d patched it up by that night, but even so …’

  ‘Jenny was supposed to be staying with Anne? With Anne Spencer?’r />
  ‘That’s right. Jennifer rang her that Sunday morning. I’d got nowhere with her over breakfast and when she’d got off the phone, she said that Mrs Spencer had asked her over for a couple of nights, so that they could work together on some project.’ Marianne Hyde looked at the Head of Sixth Form. ‘She was a clever girl, my Jennifer, Mr Maxwell, but you know that.’

  He nodded. ‘What did you think of this idea?’ he asked her. ‘Had Jenny stayed at the Spencers’ before?’

  ‘Not for a while. Not since her GCSE year, in fact. And never overnight. But they were closer then. To be honest,’ she crossed to the window again, looking backwards and forwards across the front lawn, as though she half expected Jenny to appear any minute, swinging her school bag on her way from the bus, ‘I didn’t care too much for Anne Spencer. We began to hear things.’

  ‘Things?’ Maxwell’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Yes.’ Marianne Hyde was staring at the lowering Sunday sky and the vague reflection of herself in the double glazing. ‘Oh, I don’t know how much faith you put in these things, Mr Maxwell. Let’s just say that Anne … slept around. There was talk of married men.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘The world is full of them, of course.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how true it is, but some girls … well, I just didn’t like my Jennifer mixing in those circles.’

  ‘So you said she couldn’t go?’

  ‘No.’ She turned to face him. ‘No, I didn’t. My daughter was a headstrong girl, Mr Maxwell. I won’t say wilful. She wasn’t that. But she had a mind of her own. We’d already had words over her sullenness, at breakfast. I didn’t want it all again, so I said she could go. She threw a few things into an overnight bag and that was it.’

  He saw her eyes fill with tears, her lip tremble, just for an instant. ‘I never saw her again,’ she said. ‘Not until … not until the police found her. And then, when Clive and I saw her, on that slab I mean, it wasn’t her. Not any more. It wasn’t our Jennifer.’

  ‘Did you notice, Mrs Hyde,’ Maxwell asked, ‘if Jenny took her school uniform with her?’

  ‘She took what she wore for school, yes.’

  ‘Did she take a pair of tights?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘And her books?’

  ‘I assume so. The police … haven’t found her school bag. I’ve looked high and low here. There’s no sign of it.’

  ‘What time did she leave on Sunday night?’

  ‘Just before seven.’

  Maxwell scanned her face before he asked the next question. ‘Did she say anything? Before she left, did she say anything … important?’

  Marianne Hyde walked back to the bed, careful to keep her back to Peter Maxwell. ‘It was all important,’ she said to him. ‘When they’re the last words you hear your child say, every one of them becomes etched on your memory. She said, “It’s all right, mum. I know exactly what I’m doing.” And then she kissed me.’

  ‘Did you know what she meant?’

  The woman shook her head, ‘Not then,’ she said. ‘Not now. I presumed it had something to do with her strangeness, but …’ and he heard her sigh, ‘I’ll never know now.’

  He let a moment go. ‘When did you first realize she wasn’t at the Spencers’?’

  She curled up on the bed, her knees under her chin, her hands clasped round her ankles and her ankles wrapped in Jenny’s scarf.

  ‘Janet Foster told me,’ she said. ‘I attend her pottery classes up at the college. She asked me – it must have been the Tuesday. Jennifer should have been back that same evening, but I assumed we’d missed each other. I told Janet that she was at home as far as I knew.’

  ‘But she wasn’t?’

  ‘No. When I got back, Clive was pacing up and down. He’d rung the Spencers. They hadn’t seen Jennifer at all.’

  ‘So she never got there?’

  Marianne shook her head. ‘Mrs Spencer knew nothing about it. I rang her straight away.’ She looked at Maxwell. ‘On reflection, I think that hurt Clive. Somehow it meant that I didn’t trust him. But I wasn’t reflecting then. Wasn’t thinking. It’s a sort of blind panic, Mr Maxwell. You can’t know. You haven’t got children. You can’t know. I remember once, ooh, a long time ago when Jennifer was small. I left her in her pram. Outside the library, it was, before they built the ramp. I’d only returned a book and when I came out, she’d gone, pram and all. It was all right, of course. Some old dear had noticed that Jennifer was in the sun and had moved her into the shade. She was still there, billing and cooing, when I came tearing along. I was all set to fell the old trout with my holdall, but … well, you can’t, can you? For that second, though, that second before I saw her … It’s not a feeling I can really put into words. Your heart just thumps as if … as if it’s going to explode. Your hands feel heavy, really heavy; your wrists … Well, that’s how I felt when I phoned Mrs Spencer. I don’t really remember what she said exactly. Except that Jennifer wasn’t there. She hadn’t seen her for weeks. I asked to speak to Anne. She wasn’t in.’

  ‘What then?’ Maxwell didn’t really have to cut in. Marianne Hyde was there now, reliving it like some ghastly action replay on the telly.

  ‘Clive went round there. I stayed by the phone. I rang my sister in Orpington. A cousin in Wakefield. Friends. Anyone I could think of. Jenny had been gone for forty-eight hours and I hadn’t got a clue where she was. When Clive came back, we called the police.’

  ‘Helpful?’

  ‘They were very quick. I was surprised by that. A plainclothes officer and a WPC. She was pretty, I think. We never saw her after that first night. Do you know, it’s funny,’ but neither of them laughed, ‘I’d never talked to a detective before. He was calm, solemn even. He asked if we’d had a row. If we had a recent photo. I hadn’t got one that recent, but they said they’d take it all the same. It might help. Might jog someone’s memory. The WPC made us all a cup of tea. I couldn’t have found the kitchen that night, never mind the kettle. The detective asked if Jennifer had been in trouble. Clive got … difficult then and asked him what he meant. It was all so silly. We were all on the same side, after all, weren’t we?’

  Maxwell nodded.

  ‘“Boys,” the detective said. “Drugs.” I thought Clive was going to go through the roof.’

  ‘Boys,’ Maxwell repeated, assuming the policeman’s role.

  ‘There’s Tim,’ Marianne told him. ‘Tim Grey.’

  ‘I couldn’t think of a nicer boy,’ Maxwell assured her.

  ‘I don’t think that’s what the detective meant.’ Marianne looked up at him, her chin between her knees. ‘He meant sex. Was Jennifer mixed up in sex?’

  ‘And drugs?’

  For a moment it looked as though Marianne Hyde almost smiled, but it must have been a trick of the leaden September light. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not our Jennifer. She was a good girl, Mr Maxwell. Sensible. We’d always discussed things. She knew how dangerous drugs were. Clive has a thing about them.’

  ‘What else did the police ask?’

  ‘They insisted on seeing this room.’ She looked around, at the ceiling, the walls, trying to imagine the impact they would have on strangers seeing them for the first time. ‘They stood near the door while I went through her things. It was then I realized that her money had gone.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘She had … well, here it is, a piggy bank.’ She passed him one of those porcelain pigs that the Nat West had been promoting a few years back. It had a porcelain nappy on, held in place by a porcelain pin. ‘We gave her an allowance, Mr Maxwell, once she turned sixteen.’

  ‘Do you know how much money she had?’

  ‘In her actual bank account, a little under a hundred pounds. The police told me the next day that she’d drawn almost all of it out. Just left in the nominal pound to keep it open. In the room here, she had … I don’t know, perhaps ten. I kept asking the police what had happened. I expected answers. They must have done this before, I remem
ber thinking. Talked to parents in similar situations. They must have some answers. But they didn’t. They just said it was a good sign. It was a good sign that she’d taken clothes and money because that meant she’d just run away.’

  ‘They couldn’t tell you why?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘They had all kinds of statistics. I couldn’t take them in. Couldn’t think. Neither of us slept that first night. Nor the second. The WPC had told us not to worry. That’s like saying, “Don’t breathe.” We just sat, each side of the phone. Clive’s not a very responsive person, but we held hands, all night. Both nights. Like kids on our first date. Another WPC came back the second morning. They’d tried various avenues, apparently, various contacts. This woman was harder than the first, not as caring. Well, I thought so, at least. She said that legally Jennifer could leave home whenever she liked; she didn’t have to ask our permission to go nor to tell us where she’d gone. She kept patting my hand saying, “She’ll be back. She’ll be back. It’ll be some boy. You’ll see. Girls of today …” She was only a slip of a thing herself. How can they become so ingrained?’ She frowned at him, perhaps even hoping for an answer. She didn’t get one.

  ‘I suppose they see so much of it.’

  She shrugged. Marianne Hyde was an intelligent woman. She’d worked that out for herself. ‘Then came the sighting.’

  ‘Sighting?’

  ‘Three, in fact. All at once. Or that’s how it seemed. A car towards Hincham way spotted a girl who could have been Jennifer. It wasn’t. An elderly couple gave a lift to a hitchhiker answering her description on the A27. And someone saw her talking to a boy on the Dam.’

  ‘That was on Crimewatch.’

  ‘Was it?’ Marianne nodded. ‘I don’t know. We couldn’t watch it. After they … after they found her, we just … well, I don’t know. It’s all rather a blur. I don’t really remember. I remember walking up to the Cross, where she used to get off the bus. I did that every day until the Friday. On the Friday night, they told us she was dead.’ Her eyes were clear now, her face cold, blank. ‘The WPC was there again, the second one. But it was a different detective. A Chief Inspector Hall. I hit him.’