Maxwell’s Match

by M. J. Trow

  Some kids had found the man floating face down in the lake at the school, his arms trailing ahead of him in the water, his legs slightly below the surface with the sheer weight of liquid in his tracksuit bottoms. The first copper on the scene was a woman, a DS Carpenter, accompanied by a civilian, Peter Maxwell. Together, they’d hauled the man out of the water in case there were still signs of life. There were none. All this was at twelve-forty-eight. The DCI had arrived four minutes later, but Carpenter had already raised the hue and cry and SOCO were on their way inside ten minutes. They’d been delayed by traffic and a newly galvanized gaggle of reporters at the school gates, suddenly aware that something was up but even so they were at the water’s edge by one-thirty-two.

  Firmin had removed the dead man’s clothes, his tracksuit, sports vest, underpants and socks. He carried nothing but a handkerchief in his pocket and a whistle still dangling from a ribbon round his neck. The wreck that was the back of his head told the story eloquently enough. Someone had caved in his skull with a blunt object probably wood and very possibly an oar. He’d lost consciousness and his footing and had gone into the water where the shock of the cold revived him. Bleeding profusely, dazed and confused Tim Robinson had floundered around. He had not gone into shock, the dry drowning of laryngeal spasm and cardiac arrest. Too weak to get himself out of the water and the weed at the lake’s edge – it was trapped between his teeth and clung to his fingers – he’d struggled for perhaps minute before sinking.

  It was text-book stuff, really; a fine white froth coating his drooping moustache, the lungs ballooned to bursting with the contents of the lake. People drown more quickly in fresh water than salt, the water seeping with a frightening speed through the mucous membranes of the lungs by osmotic pressure. Analysis of Robinson’s heart blood had confirmed this, thinned and diluted, with a sharp resultant drop in its chloride concentration.

  The pretty little diatoms which Firmin had found under his microscope slide confirmed that the man had been alive when he hit the water. They floated invisibly in their millions in the waters of an inland lake, gulped into the lungs and passed into the bloodstream and the heart. Firmin’s own heart had sagged when he realized what he’d got. There was no doubt where the body had been found, but what if he’d been killed elsewhere and his corpse dumped into Grimond’s lake? Hall would want to know this for a fact; Firmin already knew the DCI was not a man to go on surmise. And there were over fifteen-thousand species of diatoms to check. Miracles Firmin could do now; that little job he might have to leave until later.

  Time of death was tricky. Robinson’s toes and fingers had not yet thickened and whitened with the immersion of water, so he’d been in the lake for less than twenty-four hours. Police reports confirmed this; Robinson’s movements on Wednesday evening were well catalogued. No one except his killer had seen him after late afternoon, but Firmin was sticking his neck out that the man had died somewhere around four in the morning. The temperature of the water had fluctuated sharply – a cold snap developing during the morning and it played hell with his rectal thermometer readings.

  Quite a waste, really. Firmin had rarely seen a corpse in this condition. Robinson clearly didn’t smoke, drink or abuse substances. It took all the good doctor’s restraint not to type into his report, ‘Must be boring as hell.’

  The Film Society meeting went ahead that night. Tony Graham, as shaken as anyone by Tim Robinson’s death, agonized long and hard and decided it was business as usual. So Peter Maxwell came into his own, courtesy of Tennyson’s leading lights.

  They stood up to a man as he and Graham walked in to the little theatre that doubled as a cinema. The seats were plush, but Maxwell saw no Mighty Wurlitzer and missed the popcorn girl enormously.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ Graham waved to them and to a man they sat down.

  ‘Impressive!’ Maxwell murmured. ‘At Leighford they wouldn’t have noticed anybody’d come in.’

  ‘Oh, now,’ Graham laughed. ‘That may be true generally, but not of you, Max.’

  ‘Would you care for a pint of beer, Mr Maxwell?’ John Selwyn was barman for the evening and Graham caught the raised eyebrow of visiting Head of Sixth.

  ‘The sixth are each allowed one pint per showing,’ he explained. ‘Tradition, isn’t it, John?’

  ‘It is, sir.’

  ‘Then, I’d be delighted.’ Maxwell took the foaming tankard. Nothing as wussy as glass in Tennyson. He noticed the younger lads sitting in their seats, nattering together, but watching intently. ‘No alcohol for the little ones, I assume?’ he asked.

  ‘Cocoa in the dorm later,’ Graham said, ‘about as exciting as it gets, I’m afraid. John, the honours, would you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Selwyn emerged from behind his makeshift bar. He looked even older in his civvies like those gods of yesteryear, the prefects who had terrified Peter Maxwell when he was eleven and Mafeking was mightily relieved. ‘I’d like to introduce you, Mr Maxwell, this is my Sub, Rog Harcross.’

  ‘Known as Ape,’ Graham raised his glass to giant oaf who took Maxwell’s hand. ‘We don’t know why.’

  There were guffaws and whistles all round. ‘And Tennyson’s Secretary, Antonio Splinterino.’

  ‘Splinter,’ the dark eyed boy smiled, sounding about as Italian as a Domino’s pizza.

  ‘Secretary?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘What is it you do, Splinter?’

  ‘Paperwork, sir,’ came the obvious reply. ‘I’m the recorder for the House, letter writer, front man and so on.’

  ‘And you’re all Prefects, I assume?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ape and Splinter nodded.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Graham had reached a desk at the front of the auditorium and called them to order. He chose his words carefully. ‘So soon after the loss of Mr Pardoe,’ he glanced across at young Jenkins, huddled with his mates a couple of rows back, ‘which we all feel so keenly, we are today faced with another tragedy. Most of you will have been taught, albeit briefly, by Mr Robinson. We must mourn him too.’

  A hand was in the air, four or five rows back.

  ‘Andrews.’ Graham pointed at him and the boy was on his feet,

  ‘Sir, what’s going on, sir? We don’t understand this.’

  There were murmurs around the auditorium. All eyes were on Graham. Graham’s eyes were on Maxwell, the Housemaster looking as lost and infused as his charges. ‘I don’t know, Tom,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t know anybody does. But remember Dr Sheffield’s words. And remember this,’ he stilled them with a raised hand. ‘We aren’t just Grimond’s, important though that is; we’re Tennyson. What are we?’

  ‘Tennyson!’ Selwyn shouted back and alongside Maxwell, Ape and Splinter took up the chant, echoed back by row after row of post voices. ‘Tennyson! Tennyson!’

  It was the sportspalatz in Berlin all over again – the mesmerised crowd roaring their adoration of the Fuhrer. This was as far from Leighford High as Pet could imagine being. Then Tony Graham it down with a wave of a hand as expert as Herr Hitler himself.

  ‘Let us stand,’ he said and there was a thud as the spring-loaded seats flipped upwards. ‘And in a moment’s silence, pay our respects - Tennyson’s respects – to Mr Robinson.’

  Maxwell watched them again, as he had in chapel when George Sheffield had the death of Pardoe. Maggie Shaunessy would have been appalled – he was still not bowing his head. Neither were Selwyn, Ape or Splinter, the Captains of the House, they stood ramrod-backed, unflinching, staring at the blank white screen ahead and Tony Graham just in front of it.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Graham broke the silence at last. ‘Are you familiar with this film?’

  ‘I am,’ Maxwell told him.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Graham addressed ‘This is Mr Maxwell. He is an historian and the Head of Sixth Form at a school in West Sussex. Mr Maxwell, would you come on down and introduce it for us? As usual, gentlemen, there will be discussion afterwards. Mr Maxwell?’

  The House erupted into applause as Maxwell reache
d the podium. Maxwell held up his hand. ‘Witchfinder General,’ he said. ‘Known in the States, I believe, as The Conqueror Worm. It stars the late, great Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a particularly nasty piece of work who made a lot of money denouncing witches in East Anglia a few years ago. Directed by a ludicrously young Michael Reeves and based on the novel by Ronald Bassett, it has rightly reached cult status and I am delighted to be among you watching it tonight. By the way, I confess when I saw it first, long before any of you were twinkles in your various fathers’ eyes, I fell madly in love with the leading lady, Hilary Dwyer.’

  There were hoots and whistles from the Sixth Form.

  ‘Sadly,’ Maxwell went on, it was an unrequited love.’

  ‘Aahs’ broke from the back.

  ‘But don’t my personal problems spoil your evening.’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell us, Mr Maxwell,’ Graham winked at him, ‘who was key grip on the picture.’

  ‘Of course,’ Maxwell said. ‘Nigel Benington.’

  Claps and whistles as Graham shook Maxwell’s hand and the men took their seats side by side. They weren’t to know he’d just made that up.

  Peter Maxwell slept alone that night. All in all it had been quite a day. He’d helped the woman he loved drag corpse out of a lake and shooed away a horde of children, at once horrified and fascinated by death. One by one the Grimond’ staff had come hurrying to the scene; Richard Ames, the Head of Games, sprinting appropriately ahead of the rest, Sheffield and Graham in their gowns, Larson in his. Behind them 1ay half-eaten lunches and a forgotten rubber of bridge as the cry had gone up – ‘Master down!’

  Maxwell had followed instructions to the letter as Jacquie had screamed orders at him. She pulled the choking weed from the dead man mouth, closing her lips to his; dry and warm against wet and cold; living to dead. Gulping in lungs-full of air, she bobbed down again and again, then straddled the sodden body a bashed his chest with both fists, hammering on the tracksuit until Maxwell gently and firmly led her away.

  She’d been all right at first, while the last of the kids were shepherded away by staff and prefects and the SOCO team arrived. Then, she’d suddenly lost it and buried her face in Maxwell’s rough tweed.

  ‘We’ll talk,’ DCI Hall said to him at the water’s edge and turned to face the music of yet another scene of crime; more men in alien white suits, more fluttering tape; more Do Not Cross. It would mean a press conference, cries for heads. ‘Get her out of here.’

  They hadn’t talked. Not then. Not later. Maxwell took Jacquie back to her car and she drove, still numb with shock, her coat and jeans still wringing wet, through the Hampshire lanes, back to Barcourt Lodge. He should have driven. But he’d forgotten how. In the dead space of years between now and the death on the road of his own wife, his own child, he’d lost first the will and now the ability. There, in the stillness of her room, they’d lain side by side on the double bed and Jacquie Carpenter had cried and cried.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said once she had no more tears left. ‘I’m not usually so emotional.’

  ‘Sshh,’ he said and cradled her head, holding her to him as he had for the last hour. She pulled away slightly and looked into his steady dark eyes, smiling back at her. She’d give half her salary for those eyes on the cold night, on the lonely road, when her mouth was bricky-dry with fear or wet with salt-tears, as now.

  ‘Have a shower,’ he said. ‘Get out of those wet things.’

  ‘I must get back,’ she said. ‘Hall will need me.’

  He put a finger to her lips. ‘Hall has half of the Hampshire constabulary at his disposal,’ he said. ‘He can manage without you for a while longer.’

  And he made her a strong, black coffee, lacing it with a little brandy from Room Service while she showered. Then she sat on the floor while he combed her long flame hair and kissed her forehead every now and then. She’d fallen asleep in his arms a little before dusk and he’d crept quietly away, leaving her a note and ringing for a taxi. Hall was now no doubt handling the official end of things with his usual taciturn aplomb. But there was no one to speak for Mad Max except Mad Max himself.

  Then he’d watched a grim film in front of a hundred or so boys who were fast becoming men in the face of murder. He’d made his excuses as soon as Hilary Dwyer’s screams died away across the bleak Suffolk landscape and he’d wandered the grounds under the all-seeing silver of moon. He was still crossing and re-crossing silent Grimond’s quad a little before midnight.

  Who goes home?

  8

  Friday, Friday. Hate that day. Every pair of eyes was on DCI Henry Hall in the old village hall at Selborne, doubling as an Incident Room. And the incidents were multiplying. The fourth day of one possible murder enquiry had become the second day of another. It clouded issues, muddied waters, tangled tales.

  ‘Chief Superintendent Mason is holding a press conference this afternoon,’ Hall told his team, ‘in conjunction with Dr Sheffield from Grimond’s. They both want some answers, people. What can we give them?’

  ‘DI Berman, guv,’ a keen looking detective began. He was a solid six-footer with forward-combed hair and the tenacity of a bulldog. ‘My team are working on last movements.’

  Hall nodded, sitting on the corner of his desk in the outer office.

  ‘The deceased was a PE teacher. Had two lessons after the usual school assembly in the chapel.’ He checked his notes. ‘Er … Upper Four Cee and Lower Four Bee. They were both in the gym. Third lesson he had a free.’

  There were murmurs. Half the room would have killed Tim Robinson for his free period alone.

  ‘Where was he then?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘He was seen in the staff room … er … Senior Common Room … by a Jeremy Tubbs, Geography teacher. At that point he seemed to be marking books.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Eleven-thirtyish. He was back in the gym b just after twelve, trampoline coaching.’

  ‘This would be lunchtime?’

  Berman nodded.

  ‘What did he have?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Sandwich,’ the DI told him, ‘er …’

  ‘Tuna,’ somebody else piped up.

  ‘You are … ?’ Hall frowned, trying, in the sea of faces, to locate the voice.

  ‘Sorry, guv. DS Walters.’ A prop-forward type was on his feet, shirt straining across his pecs. ‘I’ve been working on the pathologist’s report.’

  ‘Christ,’ somebody said from the far side of the room. ‘They on overtime?’

  There were guffaws and hubbub. Hall let it go He knew the importance of a joke in a murder enquiry. But this was possibly a double murder perhaps it needed twice the levity. ‘After lunch?’ He pressed Berman again.

  ‘He taught another three lessons, all of them out on the fields. Rugger practice with the Second Fifteen, then Cross Country.’

  ‘Was he on the school premises throughout” Hall crosschecked.

  ‘No, guv. He ran with the boys. Apparently, it was the usual circuit, round trip of a mile and a half. DC Gostelow’s working on a plan of it.’ An anonymous hand waved somewhere at the back. ‘Robinson was back at Grimond’s by three quarter-past,’ Berman went on. ‘Robinson had shower – Richard Ames, his Department Head, will vouch for that.’

  Eyebrows raised here and there, camp looks were exchanged. Sometimes, the only way to stay with their job at all was to be flippant and cynical in equal measure.

  ‘Did Robinson live on site?’ Hall asked.

  ‘No, guv. DS Chapell.’ If Walters was a prop-forward, Chapell was a fly-half, wiry and tough-looking. ‘Checking out the background. I’ve drawn a bit of a blank one way and another.’

  ‘Where does he live?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘Little semi on the edge of Petersfield. Rented. Not been there long.’

  ‘He hasn’t been in the job long,’ Hall confirmed. ‘So, Mr Berman … Sandy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ the DCI flicked over a page in h
is notebook. ‘Robinson left Grimond’s at about five, five-fifteen. Sometimes apparently he eats at the school. Last night he didn’t.’

  Hall eased his rapidly numbing right buttock. ‘Who’s been over the semi?’

  Nothing. There were glances in various directions. Berman found his voice first. ‘Word was we were to leave that alone, guv. That … er … you’d do it.’

  Hall nodded. ‘Good,’ he said and risked the ghost of a smile. ‘Relax, everybody. I’m on secondment, remember. This is all done to see how well you follow orders. Jacquie and I will get out there later.’

  All eyes swivelled to the alien DS sitting alone at the other side of Hall’s desk. She hadn’t slept well and the circles around her grey eyes told their own story.

  ‘SOCO?’ Hall changed the subject.

  ‘DS McGovern, sir,’ a wraith-thin woman stood up, pencil-pleated with straw-coloured hair straight out of a bottle. ‘The body was found by DS Carpenter and Mr Peter Maxwell in the lake at Grimond’s at approximately one-oh-five yesterday. It was floating seven or eight feet out from the bank, the body fully clothed. Forensic reports a blow to the back of the head, probably with an oar …’

  ‘Any weapon found?’ Hall asked.

  ‘No, guv,’ McGovern shook her head, ‘although Forensic are still checking all of them in the boat- house.’

  ‘How many is that?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  Hall never let anyone know how impressed he was with an answer and the DS swept on. ‘There, were dozens of footprints around the bank. Forensic are still eliminating them. Kids, teachers, DS Carpenter, yourself.’

  ‘So there may or may not be an alien set?’ Hall was thinking aloud.

  ‘That’s right, guv.’

  ‘All right. Keep at it, people. We want answers quickly on this one. DS Carpenter and I will …’

  ‘Guv,’ an Essex fly-half called from the corner where the cigarette smoke wreathed thickest.