Maxwell’s Flame Read online

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Wynn confessed.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘You’re just practising the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth routine for a little later on tonight when Messrs McBride and Malcolm have a little chat with you in their incident room. “Guilty? Moil” This’, he pointed to his arm, ‘may seem like an ordinary jacket sleeve. And so it is. But I’d be prepared to guess that there’s a forensic scientist tucked up somewhere in his little truckle bed now in the next county who, at sparrow-fart tomorrow, will be able to match microscopic bits of green paint buried in these jacket fibres with that dent I noticed on the offside corner of your bottle green Range Rover. You had a damn good go at killing me the other evening, Michael George Wynn. Now, I don’t know the exact form of words, but I’m effecting a citizen’s arrest on you for that. I suppose “You’re nicked” has assumed a certain cache these days, hasn’t it?’

  ‘You’re mad!’ Wynn sneered. He crossed to the sideboard and poured himself a large Scotch. ‘Anybody else?’ He raised the decanter.

  Sally shook her head quickly. She hated this. And was about to hate it more. Jane Wynn hadn’t moved at all.

  ‘I’d rather drink prussic acid.’ Maxwell smiled at his host.

  ‘Oh, come, now, Max,’ Wynn said, ‘that’s a little Victorian of you, isn’t it? You’ll be calling me a cad, next.’

  ‘Not Victorian,’ Maxwell argued. ‘I’m a Southern Comfort man myself. Not all that fond of Scotch. But, talking of cads, Mrs Wynn, I assume you know about the other Mrs Wynn, do you? The second Mrs Tanqueray?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘Of course she does.’ Michael Wynn had returned to her side, resting a timely hand on her shoulder. ‘Now look, Max, I’ll have to come clean about the other night. I’d had a few, I’m afraid, and lost control of the Range Rover. Next thing I knew it was up the kerb and I’d hit something. Christ, man, I didn’t even realize it was a person, still less that it was you. All right, I should have stopped. I should have got out. I didn’t and I daresay I’ll be done for dangerous driving.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Maxwell chuckled, though the bravado cost him dearly, ‘you’ll be done for murder, Michael me boy.’

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mike, give it up!’ Jane wailed, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Can’t you see it’s over?’

  For a moment, Michael Wynn stayed perched on the arm of the settee, grinning down at his wife and his accusers who sat opposite. He took a slow, deliberate swig from his glass, then threw the rest into Peter Maxwell’s face. He followed this up with an open-handed slap round the head, then a knee in the groin as Maxwell tried to stand. The big man brought both hands down on the back of Maxwell’s neck, poleaxing him to the ground. Sally launched herself at Wynn, but the Deputy Principal of St Bede’s merely batted her aside.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he shouted to Jane. ‘Keep your bloody mouth shut!’ and he was gone, leaving Maxwell groaning on the floor and Sally cradling his whisky-soaked head.

  ‘Another minute there,’ Maxwell mumbled, ‘and I’d have had him.’

  They were suddenly aware that Jane Wynn had gone. They heard the scream of the Range Rover’s tyres on the gravel and saw the flash of headlights as Michael Wynn roared away into the fugitive night.

  Then they heard the calm voice of Jane Wynn in the hall. ‘Hello, police? Yes. I’d like to report a murder please. No, not here. At the Carnforth Centre, Kent. Last week. You’ll find the man you’re looking for at Greenbank, Hawthorn Road, Bournemouth. His name is Michael George Wynn. My name? Oh yes, my name is Jane Wynn.’ And they heard the click as the receiver went down.

  She looked up to see Sally and Maxwell in the lounge doorway. They parted as she walked between them. ‘I don’t think I was on long enough for them to have traced that call, do you? I must admit I don’t really understand about these things. Still, Mike’s name is in the phone book. It won’t take them long.’

  ‘Mrs Wynn,’ Sally said, ‘did you … did you know about all this?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The woman looked at them both as though they’d asked her the time. ‘Do sit down. It’ll be a few minutes, I expect, before the police arrive. I might as well tell you what I know.’

  As though in a dream, Sally and Maxwell returned to their settee. Maxwell’s head throbbed with the pummelling Wynn had given it, but that didn’t matter now. He was on the edge of his seat and nothing mattered now. Nothing except Jane Wynn sitting across the coffee table from him.

  ‘Mike and I met sixteen years ago. We married a year later. He was Head of Geography at a local comprehensive in Salisbury. I’d never worked, not really, so money was tight. It was hard, but we managed. We have two lovely boys.’ She smiled, reaching across for their photos. Two grinning kids with duck-like hair. ‘Stephen’s twelve and William’s eight.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Sally said, at a loss to know what to say.

  ‘They’re good boys,’ Jane assured her. ‘But Mike … well, he was restless, ambitious, greedy even. He tried one or two business ventures, bought shares and so on, but it didn’t really work out. Then came the day.’

  ‘The day?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘March 18th, 1984. Michael’s interview at St Bede’s. He got the job. Imagine! Deputy Principal. It wasn’t a vast salary increase, but it was enough. That night we talked about it – the move and so on. And Mike said we weren’t coming with him, me and Stephen. Will wasn’t born then, of course.’

  ‘He was … leaving you?’ Sally asked. She worked in Special Needs. She saw this kind of heartbreak every day. It invariably resulted in kids on the skids.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Jane said. ‘At least, only temporarily. It was the most extraordinary thing, Mike said. The interview was held over two days and he put up at a hotel overnight. He was having dinner at a restaurant when he met someone. A woman.’

  A light of realization dawned in Maxwell’s eyes. ‘Gwendoline Josephine,’ he said. ‘Little Jo.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jane nodded. ‘Mike said she was a very strange woman. She’d just shared his table because the place was full, but the wine or her loneliness made her blurt out her life story. She’d had a kid – a boy – by a previous marriage and she was dying. She had motor neurone disease. It wouldn’t kill her today. Or tomorrow. But she knew she didn’t have long. And she was a very, very wealthy woman. Family money. Mike had a plan. He’d pretend he was single. If he got the job, of course.’ She chuckled. Neither Peter Maxwell nor Sally Greenhow shared the joke, Jane Wynn saw that. ‘Well, if he hadn’t got the job, the whole thing was impractical,’ she said, ‘but he did get the job. Oh, we argued about it, but he’s a forceful man, Mr Maxwell, is my Mike. In the end, I agreed. You read about it all the time, don’t you? A man with two families. He gave Jo a daughter – Belinda. She’s a pretty girl; I’ve seen the pictures. But he did it for us, you know,’ she sounded for all the world like a woman trying to convince herself, ‘because he loved us, me and the boys. So I said yes. I told Stephen – that daddy had a job that took him away on business for a long time. That’s what I’ll have to say now, isn’t it?’ A faraway look came into the eyes of Jane Wynn. ‘Now that Mike’s going to prison, I mean.’

  Sally had to look away. For a moment she hated Michael and Jane Wynn. And she hated Peter Maxwell. But most of all she hated herself.

  ‘Mike told Jo that he liked sea fishing, especially at night. He actually does. He even took her once or twice to prove his point. He knew it bored her rigid, so she wouldn’t pester him to come along. Anyway, what with the children and her worsening illness, there wasn’t much of a chance of that. He’d spend the night or the weekend or bits of the holidays here with us and buy some fish in Bournemouth on his way home, so that the catch looked convincing. Recently, though, Mike thought that Jo was getting suspicious. She seemed to be watching him, asking him questions. One day he caught her checking his fishing tackle, to see if it had been used.’

  ‘And somebody else was suspicio
us too, weren’t they?’ Maxwell asked her.

  Jane nodded. ‘Mike thought it was Liz Striker. I’ve never met my husband’s colleagues, Mr Maxwell. I didn’t know any of them. All I had was Mike’s version. Somehow, he thought she’d found out about me and the boys. And he had too much to lose. Not only the job – a Catholic girls’ school can be very particular about bigamy – but the money too. The inheritance he intended to get from Jo. Once it was public knowledge that I was Mrs Wynn, then Mike’s marriage to Jo was obviously illegal. He’d lose everything.’

  ‘So he paid the blackmail?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘He paid five thousand pounds in six months,’ Jane said. ‘All of it came from Jo, of course. He told her it was for a business venture. She has no head for figures, the other Mrs Wynn, so she believed everything he told her – at least as far as money was concerned. He put the cash into an envelope and hid it behind some lockers at St Bede’s. He saw Liz Striker hovering around there an hour or so later and put two and two together. Unfortunately for her, his maths wasn’t so hot that day.’

  ‘But he couldn’t kill her at St Bede’s, could he?’ Maxwell reasoned.

  ‘No,’ Jane shook her head, ‘but he had to do something. We talked about it. We always talked about problems like that. He was in charge of INSET at St Bede’s, of arranging courses. He persuaded Liz to go to the Carnforth Centre. It was perfect. Except that Rachel King volunteered.’

  ‘So,’ Sally was confused, ‘Mike just got blackmail notes from someone. Someone he presumed was Liz?’

  ‘Yes. Always typed or word-processed or something. On St Bede’s letterheads. He showed me the first one. It was horrible. All about letting “Little Jo” know, if they couldn’t come to some arrangement. He took some scaffolding from St Bede’s and killed Liz Striker on the first day they were there, at the Carnforth Centre. He’d checked the basement beforehand. It was little used, dark and quiet. He hoped it would be assumed that she’d gone home ill or something and that by the time she was found, the conference would be over. He put her body in a store cupboard.’

  ‘What did he do with his clothes?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘His clothes?’ Jane repeated.

  ‘They must have been bloodstained.’

  ‘No, not really,’ Jane said. ‘There was quite a bit on the floor apparently, but he wiped that up. I believe he had some on his shirt cuff, but he washed that in the centre launderette and it came out.’

  ‘Then he got the note from Rachel King?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘He couldn’t believe it. When he told me afterwards, he was still quite gobsmacked by it, totally incredulous. Of course, the problem was still there. But it was so much riskier now. They’d found Liz Striker. And there were police everywhere. Everybody was suspicious. He didn’t know at first of course who the note was from. She went to see him in his room, laughed at him, threatened him. She was a nasty piece of work, that one. He asked her to give him time to get the cash. Then that night he went to her room. But he wasn’t carrying the money in the jiffy bag, he was carrying the iron pipe he’d used on Liz Striker. He killed Rachel too.’

  ‘So his problems were over?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Just beginning,’ Jane said. ‘He was stuck with a blackmail note and a murder weapon. He’d been careful not to leave prints anywhere. And when he was being interviewed, as you all were, by the police, he’d heard they were about to issue warrants. So he took his chance. He slipped the note under the door of a man called Harper-Bennet and smuggled the pipe into the room of a Dr Moreton. To do that, of course, he had to lift the master key to the rooms. A bit of chatting up of the receptionist, I gather, achieved that. He’s a clever man, my husband, Mr Maxwell, whatever you may think of him. He did all this under the noses of the police and he walked away scot free.’ Her face suddenly darkened. ‘Until now, that is.’

  ‘Why did you ring the police, Mrs Wynn?’ Sally asked, looking the woman full in the face. ‘You know they’ll throw away the key, don’t you?’

  Jane Wynn nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know. It’s all got out of hand, Mrs Greenhow. I can’t live like this any more. It’s ruined so many lives – Liz’s, Rachel’s, their families; Jo and her children; Michael and our boys, me. Does murder always do that, I wonder?’

  ‘I should think so,’ Maxwell said. ‘Always.’

  There was a silence, then Jane Wynn stood up. ‘Mr Maxwell,’ she said, ‘how did you know it was my husband?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Maxwell confessed.

  ‘He thought you were on to him. When Jo told him you’d been to visit. And Father Brendan likewise. That’s why he went after you, in the Range Rover. He said Jo’s Maestro wouldn’t necessarily do the job.’

  ‘There were a couple of things,’ Maxwell said. ‘Things that didn’t quite add up. Everybody told me that Michael Wynn was such a family man. Except that when I visited his family, they said they hardly saw him. And when he showed a picture of his family to someone on the course, he talked about his boys. I didn’t see the photo myself, but I’d be prepared to bet that was you, Mrs Wynn. You and your boys.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Jane smiled, ‘I know he loves us. That’s what all this has been about.’

  They heard the snarl of tyres on gravel, saw the headlights fill the hall beyond the open lounge door. The law had arrived.

  ‘Why did you become involved in the first place?’ Jane Wynn wanted to know.

  Maxwell’s gaze had rested on the mock embers that in the harsher winter months would have been glowing, warm and friendly. ‘An old flame,’ he said. ‘An old flame who died a long time ago.’

  The Wiltshire police were waiting for Michael Wynn as he drove into the large sweep of the drive at his second home in Bournemouth. He’d gone there to grab some cash, some clothes and do a Lord Lucan, driving for the coast. He’d contact Jane and the boys later, from South America or somewhere, when the trail had gone suitably cold. St Bede’s would have to advertise for another Deputy Principal, of course.

  Instead, he felt the cold eyes of the constabulary and someone holding down his head as they tucked him into the back of a squad car. Briefly, he saw the little dying woman he’d married ten years ago, standing in the hallway, crying.

  It was raining the day they buried Rachel King. Sally Greenhow was back in the forgiving, grateful arms of her Alan again and all was nearly right with the world.

  After they’d lowered all that was left of Rachel King to the flowers, the little contingent from St Bede’s wandered off leaving Maxwell, in his dripping panama, the one the police had found and returned to him, by the graveside. ‘Mr Maxwell?’

  He looked up from the new flowers, the mock-grass tarpaulin and the ropes. A young woman stood looking at him. He’d seen her briefly in church, but hadn’t known her.

  ‘Yes.’

  She held out a gloved hand. Tm Helen Gadsden. I believe you knew my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  The girl nodded at the fresh grave.

  ‘Oh.’ Maxwell suddenly felt uncomfortable. ‘Helen King as was.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m … really very sorry,’ he said, taking off the panama.

  She was shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no need to be. I came half-way round the world out of … what? Duty, I suppose. I didn’t think anyone else would be here. Oh, the St Bede’s people, I suppose. But children are so naive, aren’t they? They didn’t know my mother. You did. You know what a bitch she was, but you still came. Why was that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell said. ‘To put out an old flame perhaps.’

  Helen Gadsden smiled. ‘Thank you for what you did in bringing her murderer to book. That was kind.’

  ‘No,’ sighed Maxwell, ‘that was justice. You know, you don’t look anything like her.’

  She smiled again. ‘I’m very glad of that, Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘She did her best to ruin my father’s life, mine, even Michael Wynn’s, the police have tol
d me. If she was an old flame of yours, your fingers must have been burnt too.’

  He looked at his bruised hand, still swollen from its encounter with Michael Wynn’s Range Rover. ‘Perhaps,’ he said softly. ‘Just a little.’

  Under the trees, two or three hundred yards from the grave of Rachel King, Superintendent Malcolm and Inspector McBride sheltered from the worst of the rain.

  ‘Do we move in on him now?’ McBride asked.

  ‘No,’ Malcolm shook his head. ‘Let him go.’

  ‘Let him go?’ McBride was appalled. ‘Breaking and entering, impersonating a police officer, withholding evidence? You’ll excuse me for asking this, Mr Malcolm, but are you fucking mad?’

  Malcolm smiled. ‘No, John,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your man. It’ll be a cold day in hell before they let Michael Wynn go – I feel it in my water. And it was Peter Maxwell who gave him to you on a plate. All right, he didn’t play by the rules, but then he doesn’t have to, does he? That’s our little lot in life; the little cross we have to bear. And don’t forget, John, our complicity in this.’

  ‘Our complicity?’ McBride was lost.

  ‘Miles Warren wound him up. You tightened the key. I pointed him in the right direction. It got a result in the end.’

  ‘But I also warned him off,’ McBride defended himself, ‘and you gave me orders to pull him in.’

  Malcolm laughed out loud. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘but neither of us meant it, did we, John? Come on, you can buy me a cuppa tea. And an egg and cress sandwich.’

  Peter Maxwell watched the daughter of his old flame wander away in the rain. She could, he reflected for a moment, have been his under slightly different circumstances. He looked down for one last time at the carnations and the ribbons, bedraggled in the rain. Then he looked up to the sky. Somewhere, in the miles beyond those trees, was the rest of his life and Leighford High.

  ‘Well, Hectorina,’ he said to himself, ‘you’ve had plenty of time in my absence. Now, tell me all about Napoleon’s domestic policy. I don’t want to frighten you all, but A levels are now only thirteen contact days away.’