Maxwell’s House Read online

  True, there was no mention of the incongruous college scarf. Or the fact that his coat hung off his shoulder or that he walked like a dead man or that his face was one spreading bruise. But it was Peter Maxwell for all that. And Bravo Delta Tango picked up speed and slid past before cutting in sharply.

  Maxwell brought his head up to the level, feeling that he knew what Joseph Meyrick, the elephant man, had gone through for all those years. It must have been bad enough for John Hurt wearing pounds of plastic padding. A boy in blue looking all of fourteen stood in front of him, pasty, thin, apparently in desperate need of a square meal.

  ‘Peter Maxwell?’ he asked.

  Mad Max nodded as best he could.

  ‘Would you come with us, sir?’ Another uniformed kid had joined the first.

  ‘Why?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Because I’ve asked you to, sir,’ the lad said.

  ‘Tell me,’ Maxwell tried to smile, but ended up dribbling, ‘have you ever thought of becoming a teacher? I like your style.’

  And he’d never been so grateful to sit down in his life.

  16

  This time they didn’t keep Peter Maxwell waiting. Instead he was taken to hospital, whizzed on a stretcher through those ghastly yellowish-see-through plastic doors and into Casualty.

  ‘What’s this one done?’ the big black Casualty nurse wanted to know.

  ‘Nothing,’ Maxwell growled at her, ‘I assure you, madam.’

  ‘I was talkin’ to the policeman.’ She flashed her eyes at him.

  ‘Oh, he’s innocent, Bella,’ the constable grinned. ‘At least he is until we prove him guilty,’ and he winked at her.

  ‘Of what exactly? Oh, Jesus!’

  ‘Is that tender?’ the nurse asked, pressing her none too subtle fingers into his left side.

  ‘Just a threat,’ he gasped, feeling not a little as though he was about to have an out-of-body experience.

  ‘Well, we’ll get you on to a bed. Come on, get this shirt off. The doctor will be along in a little while.’

  The doctor made the boyish policeman look like Methuselah. It was all very depressing for Maxwell, founder member of the Over the Hill Mob as he was.

  ‘Broken ribs,’ the boy wonder diagnosed after a cursory prod. ‘X-rays will confirm.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Mengele,’ Maxwell scowled up at him.

  The doctor coiled away his stethoscope and hooked his head around the screen that separated Maxwell from the outside world. ‘What’s this one done?’ he asked the waiting constable.

  Before he had a chance to answer, Maxwell shouted, ‘I’m in here for my own protection. I might get beaten up by a policeman.’

  ‘Miss Troubridge?’ The ubiquitous DI Johnson had hammered on her door.

  ‘Yes.’ She was a whiskery old trout to whom the years had been less than kind. What was well preserved about her had been accomplished by liberal applications of neat gin.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Johnson, West Sussex CID.’ He flashed his warrant card. ‘May I come in?’

  ‘Very well,’ she said, checking behind him that none of her neighbours along Columbine Avenue had seen him arrive.

  ‘I’m making enquiries into an alleged incident,’ he said, ‘that took place next door during the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘Next door?’ she frowned. ‘Do you mean Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘I do, madam.’

  ‘Good heavens. I feel the need for a drinky coming on. Can I corrupt you, Inspector?’

  Looking at her, Johnson doubted it. ‘It is a little early for me, madam,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘it’s a little late for me.’ She caught a brief glimpse of her reflection in the cheval. ‘Wouldn’t think I was Miss Tottingleigh of 1940, would you? Still there was a war on, I suppose.’ She poured herself rather a stiff one. ‘Oh dear,’ she tittered, ‘there I go again. Overfilled the damn thing. Never mind.’ She raised her glass. ‘A bloody war and a sickly season!’ she toasted. Her father, Colonel Troubridge, was an old Indian officer pre-war. Promotion was hard in his day and the toast had stuck with the family ever since.

  ‘Er … may I sit down, Miss Troubridge?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She threw a pile of newspapers unceremoniously on the floor. ‘And that’s Mrs, by the way. I must be one of the very few women who didn’t change her name on her wedding day. Charles was my cousin, so I stayed a Troubridge.’

  ‘Fascinating. How well do you know Peter Maxwell?’

  ‘We have the odd drinky,’ she beamed. ‘I feed his cat when he’s away.’

  ‘Well, I suggest you get the old tin opener out.’ Johnson was smugger than he had any right to be. ‘Mr Maxwell’s going to be away for some time.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ the old girl frowned. ‘Not in any trouble, is he? Only I noticed he hadn’t been going into school recently.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Johnson sat up. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since he was suspended on full pay last Tuesday.’

  Johnson was incredulous. ‘He was what?’

  ‘Oh well.’ Mrs Troubridge held up her spare hand. ‘Now, all this is strictly hearsay, Inspector. But I got it from Nellie Barnstaple whose word is invariably her bond in these matters; and she got it from Jocasta Phillips, whose youngest is on the Board of Governors at Leighford High.’

  ‘So you reckon it’s kosher, then?’

  ‘As a bagel,’ she nodded solemnly.

  ‘And do your sources tell you why Maxwell was suspended?’

  ‘Ah, now,’ she trilled, the triple gin already playing merry hell with her delivery, ‘that would be tittle tattle and I’ll have no truck with that. Mr Maxwell is a friend. A good friend.’

  Dave Johnson leaned over and topped up the old girl’s glass. ‘I appreciate your loyalty, Mrs Troubridge … er … Jessica, isn’t it?’

  She fluttered her eyelashes at him. ‘It is, Inspector, but I’m not sure I should allow you to use it.’

  ‘Well, Jessica,’ Johnson leered, ‘it would be a personal favour to me. And, do you know, I think I’ll break the habit of a lifetime and join you in a little snort … if you don’t mind, of course.’

  ‘Oh no.’ She positively giggled, ferreting in a settee-side cabinet for a glass. ‘Delighted. Delighted. Well,’ she half filled the glass she found there, ‘this is only what I’ve heard, you understand. And you understand, I was told it in the strictest of confidence.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Johnson nodded solemnly. This was going to be a piece of piss.

  ‘He was, I’m afraid, caught in flagrante, so to speak.’

  ‘In … what way?’ Johnson probed.

  ‘Well,’ she nodded closer, lest her walls had ears, ‘I wasn’t brought up to be too graphic, Inspector, but I believe he had this young girl pinned to a wall in his office. There was even talk of her being spreadeagled over a pile of mats in the gym, but that’s nonsense. You see, Mr Maxwell is not now, nor has he ever been, a PT instructor. No, I think the office has a ring of truth, don’t you?’

  ‘When you say “pinned” …’ Johnson wanted more.

  ‘Well, let’s just say that his clothing was disarranged and so was hers.’ She fanned her crimson face with her hand.

  ‘I see.’ Johnson sat back. ‘And do your sources give you the girl’s name?’

  ‘Spencer, I believe.’ She sat frowning. ‘Yes, that was it. Anne Spencer. Now, Inspector, what was this incident of last night to which you referred?’

  But Johnson was already on his feet. ‘More of the same, I’m afraid, Jessica. Thanks for the gin. I’ll see myself out.’

  ‘Where is Mr Maxwell now?’ She suddenly asked him. ‘I saw him go out at lunchtime. He didn’t look at all well.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Johnson couldn’t resist a smirk. ‘You weren’t brought up to be too graphic, Jessica, I know, but he’s in deep shit; that’s where he is.’

  They kept Peter Maxwell in overnight, just to be sure. There’s something about hospitals, isn�
��t there? That indefinable smell, cabbage and cold comfort, wafting over the wards. Bad enough that the wards pre-dated Aneurin Bevan, that saviour of poorly pillocks to whom consultant surgeons raised two fingers every day of their working lives. In the case of Leighford General though, the oldest wing pre-dated Lord Salisbury and that, down among the dead men, is where they put Peter Maxwell.

  What with geriatric snoring on one side and the whimpering of a twisted testicle on the other, Maxwell spent a second sleepless night. He was wearing somebody else’s pyjamas and somebody else’s pyjama cord bound itself around his productivity area more than once. Lying on his left side was out, on account of the pain, so he was forced to lie on his right and watch the toothless lips of the old boy in the next bed rise, flubber and fall on each outing of breath.

  After that and what the NHS laughingly called breakfast, he’d settle for the solitude of a police cell any day.

  ‘What’s the damage?’ Chief Inpector Hall sat before him across the spartan table, the tape recorder running.

  ‘What’s the charge?’ Maxwell was in no mood to play games.

  ‘No charge,’ Hall assured him. ‘I just wanted another little chat.’ He riffled through some papers on the table. ‘Two cracked ribs. Oedema to left side and forehead.’

  ‘If you know these things,’ Maxwell said, ‘why do you have to ask?’

  ‘Because, Mr Maxwell,’ Hall was patience itself for a man whose feet had been firmly in the clay of an aimless murder enquiry for the best part of two months, ‘it’s all about corroboration. I know some things. You know some things. Let’s put all our cards on the table, shall we?’

  ‘All right,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Why did you go to Little Willie’s night before last?’

  ‘I was looking for Maz.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Maz. The tall, spotty kid seen talking to Jenny Hyde on the Dam the day she died. I’ve been told his name is Maz.’

  ‘His nickname, certainly. His name is actually Malcolm. Malcolm Sadler. He’s twenty-two years old and he lives in a squat on the edge of the Barlichway estate. Is that why you also went to the Barlichway estate?’

  ‘You … you know about Maz?’

  ‘Of course,’ Hall shrugged.. ‘Oh, I grant you we didn’t when we contacted the BBC to make Crimewatch. Then he was just a nameless witness. But our enquiries turned him up the following week.’

  ‘I don’t remember that in the papers.’ He’d started reading them ever since Tim Grey died.

  ‘We are not in the habit of confiding every little twist and turn to the media, Mr Maxwell. For a start most of it is deadly dull – doesn’t make for good copy, as they say. And secondly, I suspect that both you and I know it would be carte blanche for them to speculate wildly in the wrong direction. We’ve interviewed Sadler and I’m convinced he had nothing to do with Jenny Hyde’s murder.’

  ‘What was he asking her to do,’ Maxwell wanted to know, ‘when that woman saw them arguing and Jenny was saying “No”? What was that about?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, really, Mr Maxwell,’ Hall told him. ‘What matters at the moment is what happened at Little Willie’s. Perhaps you’d care to enlighten us?’

  Was this the royal plural, Maxwell wondered? Cops R Us? Hall was the only policeman in the room, Maxwell the only suspect.

  ‘In detail, please,’ Hall urged him. ‘Loud and clear for the tape.’

  Maxwell leaned back, gingerly resting against the chair. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll really have to forgive me, Chief Inspector, while the irony of all this sinks in. I appear to have received a bloody nose for no reason at all.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I went to Little Willie’s because that’s where I understood I’d be able to find this Maz.’

  ‘But he wasn’t there?’

  ‘No. I asked around for him, had a few drinks and was about to leave when …’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I ran into … an old friend, shall we say.’

  ‘Janice Dodds.’

  Maxwell smiled. At least that hurt him less than it had yesterday. ‘No, I wouldn’t exactly put Janice in that category. No, I was referring to her gentleman friend.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Hall nodded. ‘He took umbrage at your pestering Janice?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell said, ‘he took umbrage at my asking about Jenny Hyde.’

  ‘Jenny … Who is this man, Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Tsk, tsk, Mr Hall,’ Maxwell wagged a finger at his interrogator, ‘and you so knowledgeable on the Jenny Hyde case. The man in question,’ and he leaned forward with the air of a conspirator, ‘is Keith Miller, Alison’s husband.’

  ‘I see,’ Hall said, in such a way that made it perfectly obvious he didn’t.

  ‘Keith is known as Kay,’ Maxwell explained. ‘The diary. Jenny’s diary.’

  ‘The one that so mysteriously went missing from your house.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t remember its contents.’ Hall narrowed his eyes at his man.

  ‘All of them, no,’ Maxwell confessed. ‘Some of them came back to me later.’

  ‘How convenient. What else did the diary say? The bit of it that “came back to you later”?’

  ‘Do you mind if I walk about a bit?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Sitting still gives me quite a bit of gyp.’

  ‘Be my guest.’ Hall waved his hand.

  ‘It’s obvious from what I remember of the diary,’ Maxwell paced the floor, ‘that Jenny was having an affair with someone. A married man.’

  ‘Keith Miller?’

  ‘She used the initial K.; that was all. But as soon as Janice Dodds introduced him as Kay, alarm bells began to go off in my head.’

  ‘And what did he tell you? About Jenny, I mean?’

  ‘Nothing. He proceeded to try to kick my head off. If Janice hadn’t been there, he would have done.’

  ‘Why should Keith Miller know Jenny Hyde at all?’ Hall asked him.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to be the one to put anybody in the frame, Chief Inspector. Alison’s a nice kid. Oh, she takes her pregnancies a bit seriously. Overdoes the fainting wallflower bit, but as someone who’s never actually likely to be in her position, maybe I’m being a bit harsh. The tragedy is that her husband is a shit. The Victorians called them cads, the new Georgians lounge lizards or gigolos. His motto is “If it wears a skirt, get inside its knickers.” It was common staff-room gossip at Leighford High. What I didn’t realize was that it extended to kids.’

  ‘Not exactly a kid, was she?’ Hall said, the face, as always a mask of blankness. ‘Seventeen. Perhaps she’d been around.’

  ‘Perhaps a lot of things.’ Maxwell looked at the opaque glass in the solitary window. ‘Perhaps the moon’s made of green cheese.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t really know any more.’

  ‘So Keith Miller didn’t admit to any sort of relationship with Jenny?’

  ‘No.’ Maxwell shook his head, jerked out of his own thoughts. ‘No, for all I know I was barking up the wrong tree entirely. But he clearly resented my asking. Over-reacted, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hall said, ‘I wasn’t there.’ The fact that two of his officers were would remain his little secret for the moment.

  Maxwell was thinking aloud. ‘All right, so I’d caught him out with a bimbo. All he need have done was come the jack-the-lad bit; nudge me in the ribs,’ and he blanched at the thought of it. ‘Said “Don’t tell the missus” and passed the whole thing off as a joke.’

  ‘Instead of which?’

  ‘Instead of which, he actually pulled Janice out of the club and made a run for it. I caught up with him at the car and things got a little rough. Bloody silly, really. I suppose I should be grateful he wasn’t carrying a knife.’

  ‘What happened afterwards?’ Hall had left the table with its attendant microphone and joined Maxwell, silhouetted by the window.

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ Maxwell said. ‘I only r
eally came to at home. Apparently Janice had got me into a cab, found my wallet to pay for it and got me upstairs. Enterprising, I call that.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘Wearing?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘God, I don’t know. I’m not very good with clothes.’ Hall could tell that just by looking at him. ‘Er … some kind of jacket, I think. Black. It had silver studs and black fringes. Sort of Western thing, you know. God, I can remember when they first became fashionable; back in the ’60’s, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Er … black leather skirt.’

  ‘Short?’ Hall checked.

  ‘Up to her bum …’ Maxwell’s eyes flickered. There was a strange look on the face of Chief Inspector Henry Hall. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’ he asked.

  Hall returned to the table and gestured for Maxwell to do the same. He did and when they were sitting comfortably, he began. ‘Mr Maxwell, I have to tell you that a very serious allegation has been made against you.’

  Maxwell snorted. ‘If I could stand it,’ he said, ‘I’d laugh out loud. I understood that that would be a civil matter.’

  ‘A civil matter?’ Hall was lost. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to pass that one by me again.’

  ‘Anne Spencer,’ Maxwell explained. ‘That nonsense about my suspension.’

  Maxwell had never seen Hall smile before. It was altogether an unnerving experience – rather like Daniel O’Connell’s description of the smile of Robert Peel, ‘like the silver plate on a coffin.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ he said, ‘you really are full of surprises this morning.’

  Maxwell sat back, confused. He felt a little shiver run up his bandaged spine. ‘Shall I come in again?’ he asked. ‘You’re not talking about Anne Spencer, are you? You didn’t know about it. Not a damn thing.’

  ‘But I do now,’ Hall told him. ‘No, the serious allegation, Mr Maxwell, has been made against you by Miss Janice Dodds. She says you raped her.’