Maxwell’s Ride

  Maxwell’s Ride

  M J Trow

  Text copyright © 2013 M J Trow

  All Rights Reserved

  First published by Hodder

  This edition first published in 2013 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  1

  The blue Lincoln was moving too slowly as it turned tight onto Houston. The girl saw the crowd’s faces reflected in the polished bodywork now that the sun had come out again after the rain. The colours of that day flashed onto the screen, the snapping red, white and blue of the flags, the sharp, shiny grey suits, the hideous pink of the First Lady’s suit. No, she’s not lovely, the girl thought – her eyes arc too wide apart, her mouth too big. And what about him? Wasn’t he supposed to be the youngest ever President of the United States? He was ancient – easily as old as Bill Clinton. What was all the fuss about?

  The buildings blurred by in the background, flying past the motorcycle cops with the sun dazzling on their white helmets, their black leather. The sound had been slowed down, distorted, the roaring crowd blending now with the purr of the motorcade’s engines.

  ‘Mr President,’ the voice-over was gravel, ‘you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you.’ Love you. Love you. They’d just left Love Field. But the faces of the crowd didn’t show any love. Now that the camera was slowed down, she could see them, the silent watching crowd. There were no smiles now just rows of sullen faces. Middle-aged men in fedoras, women in dark glasses and headscarves. And their eyes. Their eyes were empty, dead. They’d all turned out to cheer their president. But they weren’t cheering. They were watching. And waiting.

  The First Lady turned to beam at the camera, then turned back as a gust of wind threatened to take off her pink hat. She didn’t see the man opening and closing his umbrella along Elm Street. Nor the man having a fit at the corner of Houston and Elm. She certainly didn’t see a rifle in a sixth-floor window of the Schoolbook Depository.

  Frank Zapruder’s fuzzy film filled the screen now, the Lincoln with its radiator grille ablaze with sunlight, the stars and stripes on its wing barely stirring in the breeze. The girl had seen this before and had time to take it all in – Will Greer with his hands firmly on the Lincoln’s wheel, the Secret Service agent whose name she didn’t know beside him, out of condition, relaxed, switched off. There was talk they’d been partying the night before. Behind them, the waving Governor John Connolly, waving his white hat and looking tense, trying to grin, hoping to convince the President of what he’d just said – that Dallas loved him. Next to him, his wife, annoyed, the girl bet, that the First Lady had upstaged her – younger, better hairdo, better suit.

  An animated clock appeared in the screen’s left top corner. There was the crash of a rifle shot. What idiot had put that road sign there? The girl had thought that before, the first time she’d seen this film. Now she was furious. Her subconscious had expected somebody to move it.

  The film blurred as the cameraman jumped. Zapruder should have stuck to dressmaking. The President wasn’t waving now, but drowning in his own blood. His head faced forward, both hands came up, in the inevitability of slow motion, to grab at the hole in his throat, just to the left of his tie knot. She saw John Connolly half turn, first to his right, then to his left. Then his shoulder went down and his face contorted in the pain, his jacket billowing with the impact of the bullet.

  The President’s hands were still in mid air as he wrestled with death and the First Lady leaned towards him. The animated clock had recorded six seconds and she had heard the ricochet of four shots. Will Greer had still not put his foot down. What was the idiot doing? The girl was tapping her Biro on her desk, irritated, unbelieving. Was the man blind, deaf? The President was dying and the car had nearly stopped.

  The girl couldn’t feel the tension in the classroom for the tension in her own brain. She could barely hear the television for the thudding of her own heart. The President was slumped to his left, the First Lady steadying him, watching the blood pump over her sleeve.

  Then the girl’s Biro snapped with a crack louder than anything in Dealey Plaza. There was an explosion of glistening red, bright corpuscles in the November sun as the President’s head lurched backwards and down. An actress’s voice-over was screaming ‘Oh, no, no, no. Oh my God, they’ve shot him. They’ve shot my husband.’ Then quieter, as agent Clint Mill sprinted across the gleaming space between his car and the President’s, ‘I love you, Jack.’

  The girl was still half out of her seat as she saw the First Lady scramble back over the Lincoln’s boot, scrabbling for the safe hands of Clint Hill, scrabbling for the piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown away and had bounced onto the limousine’s bodywork. She would hold that jagged piece of skull in her hand all the way to the Parkland Hospital, as her husband’s brain seeped into her lap.

  The clanging of the bell shattered the moment. Miss Montague, of the pleated skirt and lace-up brogues, switched off the television and clapped her hands to bring her class to the here, the now. Thirty-six years, a million words, a thousand theories later.

  Who would know, the girl asked herself as she trailed the gloomy corridor towards the Biology labs. It came to her as a light in the darkness, as a flash of inspiration in the murk of ignorance. There was one man who would know. One man in all the world. And that night, when her mother was on the phone to him, she gestured to her to pass the receiver and she asked him outright.

  ‘Uncle Max?’

  ‘Niece Tiffany?’

  ‘Where were you the day they shot Kennedy?’

  On the day they shot Kennedy, Peter Maxwell was sitting in the Blue Boar, in the market town of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, sipping a pint. He couldn’t yet afford the tipple that would become his favourite. Five Southern Comforts a term and he’d blow his grant entirely. He had more hair in those days, much of it around his chin. People who reckoned him and wanted to borrow money, likened it to ‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln; those who didn’t saw a pale reflection of Manfred Mann. He was in hot debate over the recent Viking finds in the good ol’ US of A, debunking forever the glory that was Columbus. It was nearly half past seven and the landlord had quietened everybody down in the rowdy front bar and turned up the radio. It crackled distortion across the stilled room as Ed Morrow struggled with the words – ‘I can confirm that the President is dead. John Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today.’ Some people looked at their watches; others at each other. In the far corner, a girl with a bee-hive hairdo burst into tears. Camelot had crumbled; and men in darkness muttered ‘Arthur is gone …’

  That was a long time ago. A lot of water, a lot of bridges. Peter Maxwell wasn’t a student any more, idling away his Granta days, punting on the Cam, wandering through the golden fields that stretched towards Haslingfield and Coton. He was a teacher now, a Head of Sixth Form. More than that, he was Mad Max, with heart of gold and lungs of bronze. He did his fair share of shouting and banging and roaring and bawling, but he no longer sailed in amply billowing gown. The damn thing got too covered in chalk and caught on too many door knobs. Now it hung in his wardrobe like a neglected bat.


  Ile looked across at his niece. It had been three weeks now since her mother’s call. It was a crisis, Maxie. When, with Sandie, was it not? Kenneth had been sent suddenly to Beirut. Not exactly her idea of bliss, nor his. But that was the Diplomatic Service for you, kicking you from one bloody pillar to another bloody post. And it wasn’t for long, really. Three weeks at the most. Just a holding exercise, until the new man arrived. But of course, they couldn’t take the girls. Tiffany could have boarded, but not little Lucy. She was sensitive, going through a difficult time, coming up in thirteen. Great. Just what Maxwell needed, a neurotic delinquent at home to outweigh the three hundred or so he habitually clashed with at school.

  ‘Well, that’s Miss Montague’s theory anyway,’ Tiffany was saying, sweeping her long blonde hair away from her face and lucking her bare feet under her bum on Maxwell’s settee.

  ‘Miss Montague,’ Maxwell was rubbing a lazy finger around his glass rim, feeling mellow as the Southern Comfort warmed his cockles, ‘Head of History?’

  Tiffany nodded. ‘The Gauleiter from Hell.’

  Her uncle nodded too. When Maxwell had last visited his sister and her family, he’d seen the school photograph, one of those long ones where, the urban myth had it, it was possible to appear at one end and trot round the back to appear at the other. Miss Montague was a mannish lass, steel-rimmed specs over her steel-rimmed eyes, darling of the Dachau guards’ quoits team.

  ‘She’s a lesbian.’ It was Lucy’s contribution to the debate.

  Tiffany’s eyes rolled with all the bored sophistication of a fifteen-year-old, ‘When you find out what that means,’ she said, waving a fluffy-ended Biro in the air, ‘we might just pay some attention.’

  ‘I know what it means,’ Lucy didn’t look up from her copy of Nineteen, ‘Samantha Cosgrove in Upper Four B is one.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Tiffany yawned, ‘with train-tracks like hers, she’s never going to have any choice.’

  ‘No, honestly,’ Lucy persisted, ‘she told Janet Stallybrass she couldn’t stand boys and that she’d do anything for her.’

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ Maxwell found himself playing Solomon – and not for the first time since the girls’ arrival.

  ‘What?’ Lucy frowned at him. ‘Doing anything for Janet Stallybrass?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell got up and stretched. ‘Not standing boys.’

  Tiffany gave him an old fashioned look.

  ‘Now, I promised your dear Mama – blessings and peace be upon her – that I’d get you two to bed by ten every single night. It’s now – Jesus – half past twelve.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy was just kidding, Uncle Maxie,’ Lucy trilled, flashing her slightly outsize teeth at him.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t,’ he growled. ‘Tiff, we’ll go over the JFK thing tomorrow, all right? But just for the record, it wasn’t me. And if you give me a few months, I may be able to find a pub-full of people who’ll vouch for that. Now, hit the hay, you two. I’ll be round to check on you later. In the meantime, I want a fair bedtime – no gouging, no kneeing, no bitching. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Maxie,’ they chorused. Even after two days, the silly old duffer had got into an appallingly boring routine.

  A sort of peace descended on Number 38, Columbine as Maxwell’s clock chimed the witching hour plus one. He sprawled on the settee watching the glow of the lamplight on the ceiling and heard the familiar thud and patter as his lodger hurtled through the cat flap downstairs and took the lounge by storm. Metternich’s tail was like a loo brush and his ears were flat on his head as he noticed Maxwell looking at him. He huffed on his claws and hopped onto the pouffé.

  ‘Gentlemen fight their duels at dawn,’ His Master’s Voice reminded him, ‘not at one o three.’

  Metternich didn’t frankly give a damn. He was named after the Chancellor of Austria, the coachman of Europe. Revolutions could topple him, but names could not. He’d taken jibes from the old bastard before; his back was broad. Besides, Maxwell had his place. He bought the food and paid the vet’s bills, so, hey? The cat raised his head, scenting the air.

  ‘CK, Count,’ Maxwell answered the unspoken question. ‘Calvin Klein. Although personally, from the smell of it, he ought to have stuck to acting. And yes, your deductions are perfectly sound. The girls are still here and they will be for a little while yet. And why am I here, I hear you ask? Easy – I live here. It’s half term; Mr Diamond, the Headmaster, is in his office and all’s well with the world.’

  Maxwell kicked off his slippers and shuffled for the stairs that went up to the next level. ‘Tomorrow, Count, I am taking your teenaged cousins on a visit to a Theme Park, whatever that is. We’ll be out of your fur for most of the day, so just be grateful.’

  He paused on the stairs and turned back to the coiled black and white bastard on his pouffé. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s that comedian I feel sorry for – that Eddie Izzard. He thinks you cats are human.’

  2

  ‘It was the French who invented the queue,’ Maxwell told his nieces, plus anyone else who cared to listen in the long, tortuous line that wound its way through the leafy glade, ‘although if you’ve been to that benighted country, you’ll find that hard to believe.’

  ‘We used to live there, Uncle Maxie,’ Lucy reminded him. ‘When Daddy was based in Paris.’

  ‘Of course.’ Maxwell smiled at the memory of his brother-in-law. ‘Hitler’s occupation, wasn’t it?’

  The girls ignored him. Uncle Max was as mad as a snake. They both knew that. Still, he had brought them here, shelling out the coach fare and the entrance money. True, he’d gone pale both times, but they attributed that to his age.

  This was what Whitsun was all about, the little lull in the academic year of a teacher, that meant you hear the birds singing before the bombardment of the exams begins. That little time fragment when English teachers realize they’ve been teaching the wrong texts for the last two years. What Whitsun was not about was what Maxwell saw before him now, a giant rocket blinding white in the late May sunshine, dark doors at its business end thrown scarily back. And into the darkness, a steady stream of chattering people wound its way, following some demonic piper of the park.

  He’d already forced down the indescribable elevenses at the Burgermaster fast food outlet where an acne-smothered teenage counter-operative had waited patiently while Tiffany translated the menu for Maxwell. There were no seats, not even a space to lodge your elbows. This was food on the hoof, grub to queue by.

  Behind them, a large lady from the West Midlands was doing admirable Jasper Carrott impressions, which were quite droll for the first half an hour. When Maxwell read the sign that told him he still had twenty minutes to wait from this point, he lost the will to live. Lucy’s face was buried in candyfloss, the only thing Maxwell vaguely recognized from his own childhood. Whatever sophistication the little madam affected on a daily basis had vanished at Magicworld. She was a kid again, laughing, joking, splashing in the fountains and pulling faces at her uncle. All that surprised her was that he was pulling them back.

  ‘Jesus!’ Maxwell felt the iron bars slide down over his shoulders. Several signs had already warned him that anyone with a heart condition shouldn’t really be doing this. He felt his chest thump as the car shuddered into motion. He glanced to left and right. Lucy and Tiffany on one side were nattering together, the woman from the West Midlands was demolishing a toffee apple. Ahead, in the pitch dark, silver points of light were hurtling like small supernovae on a projection screen. Maxwell knew his feet were dangling over the dark void and as the stars burst bigger and louder, the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of his fellow cosmonauts increased.

  ‘Are you holding on, Uncle Max?’ Lucy wanted to know.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ Maxwell patted her arm. ‘No need to worry about your … Christ!’

  The ship shook and juddered as if hit by a broadside. A siren was pounding in his ears, the whole capsule pulsing red. A gaping hole was torn in the rocket’s nose and Ma
xwell found himself lurching forward, his feet flying up so that his heels hit the seat. A toffee apple flew past his vision and hysteria filled his ears. He was a public schoolboy. Shouldn’t he be taking charge or something? His stomach came up to hit him at the same time that the West Midlands woman perforated his eardrum with a scream. He daren’t let go to protect himself and he knew his knuckles were white on the lion frame.

  Lucy and Tiffany were screaming too, their hair flying back in the slipstream. Maxwell couldn’t hear them above the noise he was making and he tried to focus on the neon electronic figures whipping past on his left. It registered, at terrifying speed, the thousands of miles they were falling through the earth s atmosphere, out of space. He tried to clear his mind, to catch his breath, to shut out the suffocating pain in his throat. Films, his first love. Think of that. But all Maxwell could think of was David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Not much comfort, really. Lights were flashing all around him, hells ringing. A robotic voice screaming ‘Impact! Impact!’

  Then it stopped. Ahead the scene was a peaceful, sunbathed earth, the sea silver and safe. He knew his body was the right way up again and that the girls were still there, laughing with the relief of it all. Rigor mortis had set in on the face of the West Midlands woman, her lips peeled back over her teeth. Maxwell was wiping toffee apple off his shirt.

  ‘Bloody Hell!’ He’d barely glanced ahead again when the rocket ploughed into the sea and a spray of freezing water hit him full in the face.

  ‘So how come you’re both bone dry?’ Maxwell wanted to know as they tagged onto the end of yet another twisting, chattering, excited line.

  ‘We’ve done this before, Uncle, dear,’ Tiffany winked at him. ‘Feel up to The Cauldron, then?’

  It looked innocuous enough. Walt Disney stuff, really. They were wending their way into a vast black cooking pot resting on massive concrete logs. A green concrete slime was oozing from its rim and Maxwell couldn’t help reciting the mantra ‘Hubble bubble’. Tiffany clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes.