Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

  Maxwell tried to form the words, but his lips obstinately refused to move.

  ‘Would you like to make a statement?’ Hall asked. ‘You are, of course, entitled to have your lawyer present.’

  There was a thump on the door. DI Johnson’s lugubrious face appeared round it. ‘Can I have a word, sir?’

  ‘Not now, Dave,’ Hall hadn’t taken his eyes off Maxwell.

  ‘It is important, guv’nor,’ Johnson persisted.

  Maxwell saw the Chief Inspector’s jaw flex. He snapped off the microphone and stood up, abruptly. ‘I’ll arrange to have some tea sent in, Mr Maxwell,’ he said.

  Outside in the corridor, it was a different story. ‘Your timing is perfect as ever, Dave,’ Hall said, brushing past him into his own office. ‘Well? What’s so important that it couldn’t wait?’

  ‘I’ve been checking up with Maxwell’s neighbour, sir, a Mrs Troubridge. Nice old duck. Fond of her gin, but doesn’t miss much. You’ll never guess what.’

  Hall looked at his Number Two. ‘That Peter Maxwell has been suspended over an alleged incident with Anne Spencer.’

  Johnson was deflated, but he’d rather die than show it. ‘What did he say about it?’ He jerked his head in the direction of the charge room.

  ‘Said it was nonsense,’ Hall told him, throwing himself down heavily into his swivel. His eyes burned with tiredness and he felt like a rag that had been wrung out.

  ‘Well,’ Johnson smirked, ‘to quote Miss Mandy Rice-Davies, “He would, wouldn’t he?” Didn’t mention that he exposed himself to the girl, then?’

  Hall looked up at the Inspector, pushy, arrogant, cocksure. He shook his head.

  ‘That he’d got her knickers off?’

  Hall shook his head again.

  ‘The only thing I can’t understand is why we weren’t called in earlier. It’ll be them bloody teachers,’ Johnson rationalized it, ‘covering up.’

  ‘The conspiracy theory of History.’ Hall was talking to himself.

  ‘What, guv?’

  ‘Nothing. All right, Dave. Give me your report on this Mrs Troubridge. DS Gilbert around?’

  ‘Off duty, guv.’

  ‘Right. Jacquie.’ He pressed the intercom on his desk.

  ‘Sir?’ the voice crackled.

  ‘Two teas, please. One for me and one for Mr Maxwell.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Johnson grinned. ‘I knew we’d find a use for WPCs one day.’ He bent over the intercom. ‘One sugar for the guv’nor and a hefty dose of strychnine for the murdering, raping bastard.’

  Hall’s hand had already cut the link. ‘I think we’ll dispense with the levity, Inspector,’ he said and when Jacquie Carpenter came in, she could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

  The intercom crackled again. ‘’Scuse me, guv,’ the desk man spoke to the Chief Inspector, ‘there’s a Mrs Miller to see you. Alison Miller. Says it’s urgent.’

  ‘That’ll be all, Dave,’ Hall said. ‘Show her in,’ to the machine on the desk. ‘Jacquie, forget the tea. I’ll want you in on this one.’

  Dave Johnson pushed past Alison Miller on his way out without so much as a sideways glance. Chief Inspector Hall towered over her as she waddled into his office. Please God, he thought to himself, don’t let her give birth right now. He’d escaped all that on the beat. What an irony if he had to lend a hand now he’d made it to Chief Inspector.

  Alison Miller avoided his gaze at first, but she was grateful to see the round, smiling face of Jacquie Carpenter.

  ‘I’m DCI Hall,’ he said. ‘I believe we met briefly at Leighford High some weeks ago.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She struggled down on to a chair.

  ‘Are you all right there?’ he asked her. For all his Helen had gone through this palaver three times, he wasn’t at one with pregnant women. He still found the whole thing vaguely embarrassing.

  ‘Can I get you some tea, Mrs Miller?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘No, thanks.’ For a woman on the verge of tears, Alison Miller tried to put on a smile.

  ‘Well, then, Mrs Miller.’ Hall leaned back, his hands clasped over his waistcoat. ‘How may we help you?’

  She bit hard on her lower lip. This was the moment she’d dreaded. Not since three in the morning when it had all come out into the open. Not since five when she’d heard the door slam on a chapter of her life. Not since she’d got the kids up and taken them to her mother’s. This was what she had dreaded for all her married life. For eleven years of doubt and loneliness and fear.

  ‘My husband,’ she said, ‘he’s the man you want. He killed Jenny Hyde.’

  17

  If you follow the coast road that loops along the Shingle; past the house where Janet Foster lived with her dog and her Art; dip down, away from Leighford Cross where they say a gibbet used to stand, clanking and creaking in the wind; down to the dunes and the sea, you’ll come to that spot where they found her that morning towards the end of September.

  It was a Sunday, looking back. That day when millions of Englishmen gave their lawns a final mow before consigning their hovers to their winter quarters, when they washed their cars and their wives caught up with the ironing and their mothers still staggered to church, summoned by bells.

  The Sandersons had meant to go to the beach for weeks. Little Roger had been to see Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in the summer and was hooked for life in his hunt for fossil remains. Well, it was cheaper than video games and safer than girls, so his mum and dad bought him a geologist’s hammer and off they went.

  ‘Keep to the cliff face,’ the guidebook had advised, where the wealden beds showed the meanderings of ancient rivers, uptilted to the sky. Dad said Roger would be lucky if he found an ammonite. It was known that the Germans had come over here in droves in the summer that had gone, intent on ripping everything remotely interesting out of the earth. From Lyme Regis in the west, via the Isle of Wight, to Folkestone in the east, they’d barely left one stone upon another. ‘Bastards’ was Grandad Sanderson’s comment. They’d flattened his East End home in the Blitz, now they were digging under his foundations. Little Roger didn’t believe a word of it, however. At every crevice in the cliff, at every concentration of stones, he expected to find, just lying there, the complete skeleton of a raptor the Germans had unaccountably missed.

  Sarah was totally bored. Why did they always have to do things that Roger wanted to do? She was going through that period in her life when she hated her little brother. He was cute at first, like a doll that moved and cried without having to have his arms and legs twisted into position or his tummy pressed. She’d noticed, though, at two as she was when he was born, that he cried more readily when he had those things done to him. She’d put up with the noise and the rough-housing and his smelly friends who came round and ruined her toys, pulling the tails of her Little Ponies and trying to flush her Barbies down the loo. But this latest nonsense with fossils was just too much. She walked apart from the others, from mum and dad going on and on about granddad and his incontinence and that idiot Roger racing ahead tapping everything with his little hammer.

  She had her hands firmly in her anorak pockets, her head down, her feet splashing through the wet sand at low tide. She wasn’t looking ahead, only at the way her trainers splashed in the shallow puddles the receding sea had left behind. She almost fell over it – whatever it was. It looked like an old rotting sofa the sea had thrown up. She stopped. Looked more closely. It wasn’t a sofa, was it? It was rotting, certainly. And it stank. She felt her freckly nose wrinkle even before she realized what it was. She could still hear mum and dad rabbiting away to her left, Roger’s hammer still tapping somewhere ahead, the surf booming to her right.

  But in front of her, at her feet, was the black, bloated torso of a woman, the eye sockets empty, the jaw hanging open where fish had gnawed the muscle tissue. The hair lay plastered to the skull like matted seaweed and the rib cage protruded through the swollen thorax. There were no legs at all, only strips of skin dang
ling from the smashed pelvis, a livid white under the glare of the sun.

  Sarah’s hands flopped out of her anorak pockets. And she screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

  The sun came out through the Venetian blinds of the incident room in time for Henry Hall to have his lunch. He’d forgotten when he’d last sat down to a Sunday roast with Helen and the kids. Henry Junior had had a story to write at school about mums and dads. Helen couldn’t help mentioning to Henry Senior that it hadn’t mentioned dad at all.

  So he was about to tackle his lead and egg roll, the sort that lay for ever in the pit of your stomach, when Dave Johnson popped his head around the door. ‘Call from DI Groves, guv,’ he said. ‘Got a body washed up in Leighford Bay. Thinks we should take a look.’

  So the lead and egg roll was stashed away for later and Henry Hall downed as much of the coffee as he could manage before the plastic cup burned through his fingers and he grabbed his coat and made for the car-park.

  ‘I’d welcome your views on Alison Miller’s tale,’ he said, clunking and clicking as he did every trip.

  ‘Load of cobblers, guv.’ Johnson checked his rear-view mirror and kicked the engine over.

  ‘That seems a considered and balanced judgement.’ Hall’s cold eyes raked his man.

  ‘You asked me,’ Johnson said. ‘I told you.’

  ‘What do you put it down to, then?’

  ‘Move it!’ Johnson bellowed at the old codger trying to negotiate his way back from church. ‘Plain, old-fashioned vindictiveness,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen it before, guv. We all have. Wife approaches middle age, figure’s gone to shit with multiple childbirth. Old man’s attention wanders – younger, slimmer stuff. Off he goes, chasing skirt. Bible’s full of it.’

  ‘So it’s just a woman scorned, then?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Johnson swung left to make for the coast road. ‘This Keith Miller’s giving his wife the run-around. He’s seen in public with a few tarts and she gets to hear about it. She’s miffed. No, let me amend that, she’s bloody furious. She doesn’t just get mad, though – she gets even. She knows about Jenny Hyde. She’s Deputy Head of Sixth Form at the girl’s school. What a chance to stitch the bastard up. She knows there’s no truth in it. But she hopes we’ll have a word, feel his collar. It’s probably a more satisfying come-uppance than her throwing the saucepan at him.’

  ‘They didn’t have a row, though.’ Hall watched the Shingle come into view and the sun gild the stunted trees that lay above the Red House, ever in its own darkness on the other side of the hill. ‘She just tackled him about it. About the rumours and the innuendo. He admitted it. Just like that, muttering things about a fair cop and he felt better that it was all out in the open. He’d met Jenny Hyde at some Fayre or other at the school. He’d met her again, by accident, in town and taken her for a coffee. He’d asked her out and she’d said yes.’

  ‘Well, there you are.’ Johnson felt vindicated. ‘He got his end away and Mrs got narked. Domestic stuff. Not our problem.’

  ‘An accusation of murder is always our problem,’ Hall reminded him.

  ‘Maxwell,’ Johnson reminded him as the car came to a halt among the police vehicles on the dunes. ‘There’s our boy, guv; you take it from me.’

  Hall couldn’t consciously remember having taken anything from DI Johnson and he didn’t intend to start now.

  DI Groves was pointing out to sea, doing his boyhood of Raleigh bit, when his guv’nor arrived. ‘What have we got, Tom?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Ah, morning, guv,’ Groves nodded. ‘Dave.’ He had a year to go before they put him out to grass. He’d never make DCI now and he knew it. There was a time when he’d resented Hall like buggery, with his university degree and his three-piece suit and his smarter-than-thou attitude. Now, he was tired and looked older than his fifty-five. Colleagues of his had gone ten years younger, but he was still here, in an orange anorak, up to his bollocks in somebody else’s problems.

  ‘Dr Astley’s with the body now. He reckons it’s been in the water about two months.’

  The three men plodded through the dry sand, kicking the spurge and the sea pinks while the gulls screamed and wheeled overhead. Above the roar of the surf, the occasional crackle of police radios and the wind whipping the blue and white tape that cordoned off the scene of death from the civilized world. And just beyond that tape, denizens of the civilized world pressed as close as they could, some with binoculars trained on the little knot of men at the water’s edge. The ghouls looking for blood.

  ‘Get those people away!’ Hall shouted to a couple of uniformed men on the dunes and he felt the wind whip in under his flapping jacket like a knife.

  ‘Did we get you from the river bank again, Jim?’ he asked Astley.

  ‘No, from the squash club,’ the pathologist grunted. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry. Ever played with Bob Gordon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, don’t. He’s sixty-three and he’s got a body like a whip. I’m not ashamed to say I was losing – losing heavily – when your chap’s call came through.’

  ‘God’s teeth!’ Johnson hissed as he witnessed the remains that Astley was kneeling over.

  ‘Welcome to Dead Man’s Cove,’ Astley grinned. ‘You’re getting old, Dave. We’ve been this way before.’

  ‘Two months in the water, Tom says.’ Hall knelt as near to the corpse as his stomach would let him.

  ‘Give or take,’ Astley nodded. ‘It’s a woman. Dark hair. Mature. Look at the teeth. I wouldn’t like to guess an age at this stage.’

  ‘Any unusual bridgework?’ Hall asked. Johnson had already turned away.

  ‘Nothing special,’ Astley told him, ‘but I’ll put out a detailed description later. If she’s local, some dentist might recognize something.’

  ‘What happened to the rest of her?’ Groves asked. It was a question he’d been asking everybody else for the past hour.

  Astley shook his head. ‘It’s my guess the body was caught up in a boat’s propeller or something. Look here,’ he lifted the shattered pelvis with a steel probe, ‘a clean slice to the ileum. Whatever it was virtually cut her in half. Like a circular saw.’

  ‘Bloody hellfire!’ Johnson muttered. He wished he hadn’t grabbed that Vindaloo in the canteen now.

  ‘Did she go in around here?’ Hall asked. ‘Can you tell that?’

  ‘Not my field,’ it hurt Astley to admit.

  ‘Tom,’ Hall squinted up at the DI, ‘this is your turf.’

  ‘My surf too, guv,’ Groves grinned. ‘The tide does funny things around the Bay. She could have gone in … well, if you’re talking two months, almost anywhere along the south coast as far west as Selsey Bill. Of course, if she’s local, and if Dr Astley’s right about the propeller …’

  ‘Which I am,’ Astley insisted.

  ‘… she could have been held down by the bladderlock under Brampton Ledge for weeks.’

  ‘Tom,’ Hall was back on his feet, motioning his colleague aside for a word, ‘why did you send for me on this? You know I’m up to my eyes in the incident room.’

  Groves looked at the boy wonder who’d stolen his job. It was time to face up to a harsh reality. ‘I’ve never handled a murder, guv,’ he said, feeling like a little boy again, staring his first day at school in the face. ‘Not on my own. I’d just welcome your input, that’s all.’

  ‘Who said anything about a murder, Tom?’

  ‘I did.’ Jim Astley was suddenly at his elbow, wiping his hands on the towel he always carried in the car to dry the dog. ‘It may be that the lady fell overboard off Selsey Bill and a ship’s propeller ripped her up. Or that she’s been washing about under the ledge for weeks. But I’m bloody sure she didn’t wrap herself in a black bin liner first. What would be the point?’

  They kept Peter Maxwell for as long as they could. He’d got another eight hours left before they’d have to charge him or let him go. He still hadn’t asked for a solicitor. But he had made a phone call. It was to his f
ellow Old Contemptible Geoffrey Smith, and DC Halsey made a point of listening in on the phone upstairs.

  ‘Oh, shit!’ Maxwell growled as heard the pre-recorded voice of the Head of English. After the long tone, he launched himself. ‘Get back to me, indeed, Geoff,’ he said. Tm at Leighford police station, facing Richard Burton in 1984 … Er … oh, bugger, I hate these things.’

  ‘Hello?’ a voice interrupted his wanderings.

  ‘Hilda?’ Maxwell said. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Max?’ Smith’s other half said. ‘I was in the bath. I thought I recognized your voice. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Well, I’m in a spot of bother, Hilda. At the police station.’

  ‘Oh, my God, Max …’

  ‘No, no, it’s all right. Look, could you ask Mrs Troubridge, you know, my neighbour, to look after Metternich?’

  ‘Of course, but …’

  ‘Give my regards to Geoffrey, will you? Say to him, “I will consider my cat, Geoffrey.” He’ll like that.’

  ‘Never mind the one-liners, Max. You need help. A solicitor …’

  ‘Nah,’ Maxwell sounded like Janice Dodds. ‘The hassle. The expense.’

  ‘Something, then. Shall I send Geoffrey?’

  ‘No. Really. I’m fine. I’ll come and see you and tell you all about it when they let me out … And they’ll have to let me out, you know.’ The sound of his laughter didn’t convince her. And it didn’t convince him. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘we do have laws in this country – habeas corpus and all that. And I haven’t raped anyone.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said.

  ‘Hilda,’ Maxwell had forgotten his manners in the fraughtness of the moment, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t ask. Long time no see. How have you been?’

  ‘Me?’ he heard her say. ‘I’m fine too, Max. Happier than I’ve been in a long, long time.’

  And he rang off.

  The lab excelled itself. Marjorie Astley was taking longer than usual this time to be wrung out and Dr Jim was in an unusually efficient – and obliging – turn of mind. He knew he shouldn’t have shot his mouth off to Smith and Maxwell, and he knew from the casual conversation of a couple of uniformed lads on the beach that the said Maxwell was now in custody helping them with their enquiries. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, what Maxwell had told them. But if he had blabbed to Hall about Astley’s unprofessionalism, the good doctor would have some explaining to do. If he gave Hall the answers he wanted quickly, accurately, without further prompting, perhaps the Chief Inspector would overlook it. For Jim Astley, like Dave Johnson, knew that Henry Hall played everything by the book. The cold, humourless, lacklustre bastard.