Maxwell's War Read online

  ‘Local?’ Maxwell asked in mid sugar cube. ‘To Leighford?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ the widow told him. ‘Bournemouth. But I knew he came out this way often as a young tearaway.’

  ‘You’ve known him long?’

  ‘Most of my life, it seems. We married in ’90. Before that there was, in reverse order, Cynthia, a ham actress who screwed her way into his affections. Perfectly ghastly. And before her, Elaine, I believe. They met at university.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Perhaps university is a misnomer.’ Barbara Needham, needless to say, took her coffee black. ‘Kingston Polytechnic.’

  ‘How old was Miles?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Forty-six,’ his widow said, ‘though he was already starting to shed a few years. Marie-Claire had him down to thirty-five I noticed a couple of months ago. And he certainly wouldn’t be the one to correct them. Tell me, Mr Maxwell, why are you so anxious to know about my husband?’

  ‘I was there when he died, Mrs Needham,’ Maxwell said, looking into the woman’s bright, dark eyes. ‘And one of my boys is accused of killing him.’

  ‘Your boys? Do you mean your sons?’ she frowned.

  ‘No,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘My students. My sixth form. I told you – I’m a teacher.’

  ‘Oh, yes. The Sparrow boy. Did he have any reason to kill Miles?’

  ‘Not that I can see,’ Maxwell sighed, watching the grockle children squealing at the water’s edge and the windsurfers soaring further out. ‘Giles Sparrow is an ordinary seventeen-year-old; none too bright. But murderous? I don’t think so. Then there’s Hannah Morpeth.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Barbara Needham looked as if she’d just swallowed a lemon. ‘My part of our domestic alliance was that I gave Miles refinement, taught him which knife and fork to use. Bedroom antics were never really part of it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell, I married Miles Needham for his money. I have an addiction for it. The price I had to pay was his infidelity. While I was cutting a swathe through New Bond Street with his plastic, he was getting sucked off by anything in a skirt. It wasn’t much of a price, really. And now I’ve got it all.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘My husband had his faults, Mr Maxwell. He was arrogant, offensive, deeply homophobic and occasionally racist, but he was, even I must agree, bloody good at his job. He made, if you’ll excuse the less than bon mot, a killing every time he went to work.’

  ‘So you won’t miss him, then?’

  Barbara Needham looked out to the horizon where the line of sea and sky was shrouded in the June haze. ‘Him, no. His money, no, because he left it all to me in some fit of conventionality. There are things I’ll miss … but I’ll get over it. Or perhaps I won’t have to. We’ll have to see.’

  ‘Will you be in Leighford long?’ Maxwell asked.

  She gave him an old-fashioned look as a gang of lager louts sang and bawled their way along the beach far below them, ‘’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go.’

  ‘No longer than I have to be,’ she smiled. ‘I’m waiting for them to release my husband’s body for burial.’

  Maxwell glanced out at the yobboes kicking a can to each other. ‘Football,’ he muttered. ‘The Sport of Things. Mrs Needham,’ he turned to her again, ‘if anything occurs to you – any reason you can think of why anyone would want to see your husband dead – will you contact me?’ and he passed her his address and phone number on the back of an old Leighford High report form.

  She looked at him, the shambling, yet somehow attractive teacher sitting opposite her. ‘Yes, Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘Yes, I will.’

  There is a story concerning the late Duke of Wellington. Stormed at with shot and shell from Assaye to Waterloo, the great Duke never turned and fled in the face of the enemy in his life – except once. He was an old man, nearing the end of his life and he was visiting the Great Exhibition, wandering its upper corridors as gobsmacked as everyone else. A group of working-class gits recognized him – ‘Oi, it’s ’Is Grace the Dook o’ Wellin’ton’ they said, and they gave chase. The old man’s nerve broke. Fearing they would snatch hairs from his head as souvenirs, he turned tail and fled the gallery, the gits floundering in his wake.

  In the life of Peter Maxwell, the gits had lessened to one – hardly a git at all, but a rather refined old boy called Dr Nicholson, who had been a teacher himself when they still called such people schoolmasters. Dr Nicholson meant well – as did Wellington’s admirers at the Exhibition – but he bored Maxwell rigid because he was old and retired and his day lasted at least twenty-four hours longer than Maxwell’s. So it was that Peter Maxwell met his Waterloo – or rather, ran from it – that Monday. He urgently had to see the school matron while Paul Moss, the Head of History, coped with and glazed over in front of Dr Nicholson.

  ‘So there it is, Sylv,’ Maxwell rested his back against the paper-thin wall that divided matron’s sick-bay from her office; coffee, pep talks and morning-after pills in one; the dying room in the other. ‘Barbara Needham obviously couldn’t care less. But then, Angela Badham said as much. I shouldn’t be surprised really. It’s just that I’m an old-fashioned sort of cove. When a man gets his head blown off by person unknown, I expect just a little bitty tear from the wife. Or am I out of touch?’

  ‘The “person unknown” bit, Max.’ Sylvia Matthews was refilling her coffee machine. ‘Any news of Giles?’

  ‘Not a dickie bird. Glove Farm is like something out of Mervyn Peake meets Miss Haversham – all cobwebs and off-the-wall people. Sailer the solicitor is seriously out of his depth as he himself admits and the boys in blue are their usual mind-your-own-business selves.’

  ‘What about Jacquie?’

  Now, Peter Maxwell was usually very good at nuances. Thirty years at the Chalk Face had taught him a few dodges. He recognized the arched eyebrow, the sideways glance, even the edge in the voice. But with Sylvia Matthews it was as if all this passed him by. It wasn’t that Sylvia hated Jacquie Carpenter – though when she was nine she might have done – it was that she loved Peter Maxwell. And Peter Maxwell seemed to be spending more and more time with the girl he called Woman Policeman Carpenter.

  ‘Funny you should mention her,’ Maxwell stretched out with both feet on the desk. ‘As soon as the damn bell sans merci goes, I’m outa here, as our American cousins have it and I’m pedalling round to the dear girl’s lock-up. I want to know more about those two Marauders who left.’

  ‘But they’ve all gone now, haven’t they? The television people pulled up stumps ages ago.’

  ‘All except Bob Pickering,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I noticed his tent is still up on the Shingle. The Voltigeur flag’s still flying.’

  ‘Why hasn’t he gone?’

  ‘Bob?’ Maxwell mused. ‘I don’t know, really. I think in a way, he feels a bit like me, really – responsible.’

  ‘That’s silly, Max,’ Sylvia scolded as the coffee machine bubbled and hissed at her elbow, ‘for both of you. All right, so you were supervising the battle sequences. He was … what … a sergeant, or something?’

  Maxwell nodded.

  ‘Well, you’ve done nothing to reproach yourselves for, either of you. You know who I blame for all this?’

  ‘You’ve got a suspect, Sylv?’ Maxwell brightened immediately. ‘Say on, Miss Nightingale.’

  ‘John Irving.’

  ‘John … Oh, come on, Sylv. Really!’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean I think he did it. But he did get you into this in the first place.’

  ‘And I could have said no at any time and he did warn me about Eight Counties. He actually said … Oh, God

  ‘Max? What’s the matter? You’ve gone a funny colour. Put your head between your knees.’

  ‘No, no, I’m all right. He actually said at one point – “It’s going to be murder”.’

  The door burst open and Tracy Wilmot stood there, in non-regulation trainers and unseasonal black tights, ‘Mis
s Matthews,’ she wailed through the wodge of chewing gum.

  ‘Oh dear, Trace,’ the Matron sighed. ‘Who was it this time?’

  ‘I’d rather not say, Miss. Nobody you know.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell, would you excuse us? It’s a girl thing.’

  Maxwell was on his feet. ‘You know, the more I think about it, Matron, the more I think you could be right. Know what the best oral contraceptive in the world is, Tracey?’ he asked the girl as he reached the door. From the vacant look on her face it was clear she didn’t. ‘The word “No”,’ Maxwell enlightened her. Or at least, he’d like to think he had.

  ‘Has he gone, Paul?’ a terror-struck Peter Maxwell stuck his head around the Head of History’s door.

  ‘No, I buried the old bastard under the floorboards,’ Moss beamed in mid-marking. ‘You owe me one, Max.’

  ‘Oh, ambience gris,’ Maxwell salaamed to the younger man, ‘I owe you thousands. You did tell him if he was seen on site again, he’d be shot, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Moss played along, ‘But unaccountably, it came out rather like “See you again, Dr Nicholson. Thank you so much.”’

  ‘Curses!’ Maxwell rummaged through the filing cabinet for the past papers he needed to terrify 12C with. ‘And what did you have occasion to thank him for this time?’

  ‘Items for the school museum. You know, the one we haven’t got.’

  ‘Ah, that one.’ Maxwell knew it well.

  ‘Pile of shit – over there,’ Moss pointed to old newspapers and other ephemera neatly stashed on the corner of his table. ‘Actually, I shouldn’t knock it. Old Doc Nicholson just comes from a different world, that’s all. I thought it was your world, Max?’

  ‘What, you mean the one where kids had shining faces and brushed hair and blazers – and they actually wanted to learn? That one?’

  ‘That’s it,’ Moss winked.

  ‘That’s the land of Never-Never, my boy,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘and it’s getting more pie-in-the-sky with every day that passes. Bugger me!’ He was running his eyes down one of the newspapers.

  ‘Not now, Max,’ Moss hadn’t looked up from 9C4’s solutions to the Irish question which he’d promised to submit to Mo Mowlam at the next conceivable opportunity, Good Friday Agreement notwithstanding. ‘I’ve got my hands full.’

  ‘Listen to this, Paul,’ Maxwell sat in the only vacant chair. ‘“A body was discovered at Willow Bay last Thursday by local fishermen. The coroner, Mr Malcolm Davis, has been called in and newly appointed police surgeon Dr James Astley expressed his opinion that the body had been in the water for at least thirty-six hours. Police sources have revealed that the body is that of Mr Thomas Sparrow, sixty-one, who was well known in the local gay community.”’

  ‘Local gay community?’ Moss echoed, leaning back and putting down his red pen with relief. ‘I didn’t know we had one.’

  ‘Neither did I.’ Maxwell turned the paper over. ‘But this is the Clarion, the Advertiser’s forerunner. Dated … June 1977. That was the summer before I started at Leighford. Ever heard of Tom Sparrow, Paul?’

  ‘Christ, Max,’ the Head of History clasped his hands behind his head, ‘And with respect, of course, I was nine, living in Suffolk and having a passionate affair with my mountain bike. I didn’t know what a community was, much less a gay one. Presumably though, he’s related to Giles, this dead poof.’

  Maxwell clicked his teeth, smiling. ‘Ah, such a way with words,’ he said.

  Moss’s face suddenly darkened. ‘Now, Max, you’re not off on one of your crusades again?’

  Maxwell tucked the folded paper under his arm, ‘When I am, Paulie, my boy,’ he winked, ‘rest assured, you’ll be the last to know.’

  The Leighford Advertiser had taken over the old Temperance Hall in the early ’80s, back of the bus station. That Monday afternoon, the sun of summer still high over the newsdesk, White Surrey rested against the yellowed brick wall, its owner inside and making a nuisance of himself. He who had put the ‘f in technophobia, in that he always prefixed it with an ‘f’ word, now sat at the microfiche desk, his tired old eyes whizzing along the faint lines of somebody else’s deathless prose from yesteryear.

  ‘Bill Donlan,’ a plumpish woman put a card down next to him. ‘As far as I can tell, he worked on the paper then and was its principal reporter. That was his address five years ago. Course, he could be dead.’

  Bill Donlan wasn’t dead. But he lay as if he was, on a hammock between two pear trees in the shade of his evening garden. Delicious smells of something tandoori wafted from the open kitchen door, where Mrs Donlan was being creative with the leftovers of the Sunday joint. Thank God for the Raj, Maxwell thought to himself.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Donlan was less comatose when his mouth moved, ‘I remember it very well. Twenty-one years ago? Is it really? Bloody Hell, I’d never have said that. Now then – can I get you a lemonade, Mr Maxwell? The wife does a lovely lemonade.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Maxwell sat upright in the excruciating cane chair under the tree’s shade. His jacket and hat lay slung on White Surrey’s handlebars around which the Donlan’s dog sniffed and ferreted. ‘Tom Sparrow.’

  ‘Yes, Sparrow.’ Donlan creaked on his taut housings as the wind ruffled what was left of his hair. ‘They found him on a Thursday, I think, washed up on Willow Bay. Not a pretty sight. Not that we were allowed beyond the cordon of course. Dave May got a sneaky photo before Mr Plod took his camera away. Course, they were different days, Mr Maxwell. No body bags then – a rather nasty American idea, if I remember rightly. They just put the corpse on a stretcher under a blanket. And no FACE, no police PR in those days. We hated them and they couldn’t stand us. Dave May certainly couldn’t when they trod on his camera.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘Course not. It was deliberate. Oh, I see – Sparrow; well – open verdict, according to the coroner. But I had my doubts.’

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell was all ears. ‘Why?’

  Bill Donlan looked at Maxwell through slitted eyes. ‘I followed up on Tom Sparrow. Nobody knew much about him. We assumed he was related to the Sparrows of Glove Farm, but they had nothing whatever to do with him as far as I could tell. He used to hang around the loos in the Square and around Tottingleigh – a bit of a lavatory cowboy. Even so, he was harmless enough. Not a paedophile or anything like that. He lived alone in a basement flat in Gracechurch Street. Nobody seemed to know what he did for a living, but he always paid his rent. You’d often see him sitting on the old sea wall before they did the reinforcements, talking to people. Always had a little group of kids with him.’

  ‘But I thought you said …’

  ‘That he wasn’t a paedophile. No, he wasn’t. At least, there were never any complaints. When I say kids, I mean teenagers, really. Mind you, the world wasn’t as mad as it is today. It’s this computer rubbish, this Internet. Porn at the push of a button, interactive sex sessions and Christ knows what. No such things as paedophile rings in those days, Mr Maxwell.’

  Mad Max leaned back as far as the rickety old chair would let him. ‘So you think Tom Sparrow was pushed?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s just say he was a victim waiting for a murder to happen,’ Donlan sucked his dentures as he ruminated. ‘People’s paranoia, Mr Maxwell, that’s what it’s all about. Don’t trust a black – he’s different, so he’s trouble. And a poof? Well, you don’t want to turn your back on one of those, do you, for all sorts of reasons. We’ve had black candles and white cockerels in Rochdale council estates and social workers and psychiatrists bleating along with all the rest. Whatever happened to the good old sense of fair play we British used to be so proud of, eh?’

  ‘Out with the bath water, like the baby, Mr Donlan,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Was there anything physical – forensic evidence, I mean – which added fuel to your murder theory?’

  ‘For that,’ Donlan propped himself up on one elbow, ‘you’d have t
o ask Jim Astley, the police surgeon. He was a new bug then, fresh out of being a police surgeon somewhere else. I could never cotton to him. Sanctimonious old bastard, even when he was a young bastard. But, he’s got one weakness, I think you’ll find. Press the right button and he’ll shoot his mouth off. Indiscretion is his middle name.’

  Dr Jim Astley’s middle name was actually Neville, but Indiscretion suited him better. His wife, a long-suffering woman who had long ago climbed inside a gin bottle to escape the world, told the tweed-hatted cyclist who appeared at her doorway as dusk fell, that he was in the pub. He was, holding forth at the bar on medical ethics to a group of florid faced gentlemen only marginally more pissed than he was.

  ‘Dr Astley?’

  ‘Yes,’ the medic turned to face the same cyclist his wife had met.

  ‘I’m Peter Maxwell.’

  Astley’s bonhomie had vanished. ‘Yes,’ he almost growled, ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Might I have a word?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘An old case I’m anxious to clear up.’

  ‘I don’t do urogenital stuff,’ Astley mused, swilling down the last of his Scotch, ‘and I am off duty.’

  ‘And your glass is empty. Let me freshen it for you,’ and Maxwell caught the eye of the barman and placed an order. He led Astley, still protesting, into a darkened corner, as far away from the rowdies in the main bar as he could get.

  ‘Your wife told me I’d find you here,’ Maxwell placed the Scotch down on Astley’s beer mat.

  ‘Really?’ He took a sip, ‘I’m surprised she remembered. Well, Mr Maxwell, it’s been a while.’

  ‘Nearly four years,’ Maxwell nodded, savouring the fragrance of his Southern Comfort. ‘Nearly four years since Jenny Hyde died. Since you found her at the Red House.’

  Astley remembered the Red House too, and the girl, another of Maxwell’s Own, found strangled there. Her face, like all his dead, lay among his souvenirs.