Maxwell’s House Read online

  ‘You went to the law, I presume, about Paul?’ Smith found the other chair under a pile of exam papers.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I went to Kew.’

  ‘Kew?’ Smith blinked. ‘Maxie,’ he chuckled, ‘it’s not even lilac time.’

  ‘No.’ Maxwell looked at the little unfinished model of the set that lay on the desk beside him. The set for The Merchant of Venice. ‘But perhaps it’s time for the final curtain on the story of Jenny Hyde. And of Tim Grey. And of Hilda Smith.’

  ‘What?’ Smith blinked again, ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you do, Geoff,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘And just three little mistakes gave you away. When you stole the diary – Jenny’s diary – from my place, you were too damned nice. Oh, you forced the lock, yes. But you didn’t so much as scratch the paintwork. And you left my Light Brigade totally intact. Bless you for that.’

  ‘Max,’ Smith chuckled, ‘it must be that blow to the head

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell warned, his face hard and cold. ‘Hall thought I’d rigged the break-in myself, got Sylvia Matthews to steal the diary so that I couldn’t be implicated.’

  ‘All right,’ Smith humoured him, ‘I’ll play along. What was my second mistake?’

  ‘Not being a cat owner,’ Maxwell said, watching his old friend drowning in front of him. ‘You see, they don’t react like dogs. But they don’t forget, either. When you brought me home last night, Metternich turned his tail on you. He’d seen you trash my place and it frightened him. He couldn’t work out why you’d behave like that, not even the Coachman of Europe.’

  Smith threw his head back, chuckling. ‘I’m not sure DCI Hall would be terribly impressed by your logic, Holmes.’ He was Nigel Bruce again. ‘Circumstantial at best. Downright cranky at worst.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell slipped inexorably into his Basil Rathbone, ‘but that’s because I have not yet postulated your third mistake, my dear fellow.’

  Bruce had vanished, but Smith was still smiling. ‘Go on, then,’ he said, ‘I like a laugh. Somehow makes the marking all the more bearable.’

  ‘Your third mistake was the clincher,’ Maxwell said, ‘and I don’t think DCI Hall will have any trouble with this one. You said that Hilda was away looking after her mother. “Tending to Godzilla,” I think, was your immortal phrase. And I said …’

  ‘“I thought she was dead”,’ Smith remembered.

  ‘And you said, “Wishful thinking.” But it wasn’t, Geoff, was it? It was deadly accurate. And suddenly, it all fell into place. If this wretched business had done nothing else, it’s taught me the importance of reading newspapers. Ever since Tim Grey died, I’ve followed them avidly. And guess what the Advertiser came up with a couple of days ago. A by-line from that arsehole Tony Young, of all people. A body. The body of a woman. Washed up in Leighford Bay. It was Hilda, wasn’t it, Geoffrey?’

  Peter Maxwell had never heard Geoffrey Smith laugh like that before. It made the hair crawl on the back of his scalp and he suddenly felt very cold.

  ‘Hilda’s at home,’ Smith said. ‘You talked to her on the phone only last night.’

  Maxwell shook his head, answering in the way he always answered Mrs B., the cleaner. ‘She isn’t and I didn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I normally enjoy research, Geoff,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Nothing I like better than rooting around up to my bollocks in archives, you know that.’

  Smith didn’t respond; he just sat there, staring at Maxwell.

  ‘Well, I didn’t enjoy it today. Those damned microfiches at Kew. It’s all bloody computerized.’

  ‘Get to the point, Max,’ Smith was curt. ‘I’ve a lot to do tonight …’

  ‘The point’, Maxwell cut in, ‘is that Mrs Phyllis Dixon, Godzilla, Hilda’s mum – who I remember very well, by the way – died on 8th June 1984; that’s nine years ago, Geoff. So why should Hilda be visiting a corpse? Unless, of course, she’d become one herself. It’s been a bit of a rush, of course, today. I’m not a hundred per cent, as you can imagine, but I got a cab from the station to your place. You will leave your back door open, Geoff,’ he scolded him. ‘You’re the bane of Neighbourhood Watch, aren’t you? So I went in. “He won’t mind,” I thought, “not my Old Contemptible.” Well,’ Maxwell’s bonhomie vanished, ‘contemptible’s the word, Geoff, isn’t it? Because there’s nothing of Hilda Smith nee Dixon left, is there? Not a dress, not a bra, not a Barbara Cartland. You’ve wiped her from your life like a bit of software, I think the Young People call it. Okay,’ he shrugged as far as he was able, ‘so she’s left you and you’re too macho to admit it, even to me. But then,’ he leaned forward, ‘there’s that phone call, isn’t there, Geoff? I remembered you’ve got one of those answerphones where the caller can be heard. You knew it was me because you were here, at home, with the thing switched on. And you thought, what a chance to persuade poor, stupid old Maxie that Hilda was still around.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Geoff,’ he said. ‘Your impressions are legendary, but that one … I take my hat off to you.’

  ‘Poor, stupid Maxie.’ It was Smith’s turn to shake his head. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he sneered.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell was politeness itself, ‘why don’t you tell me, then?’

  ‘All right,’ Smith snapped, sitting upright. ‘All right, I will. That bitch Hilda has made my life hell for years. Carping. Sniping. Nothing I did was right. Since the boys left home, she’d become unbearable. I always planned to kill her. Had a whole scheme worked out. Some poetic nonsense about pouring poison into her ear, a la Hamlet. All fantasy of course. Until one night … it was the week before the end of term. Hilda was worse than ever, that rat-trap mouth of hers, that whine, that sour, sour look. I don’t remember exactly the details – before it happened, I mean. I only know I hit her. With one of those brass candlesticks her mother left. She’d turned away, about to flounce out of the room, and I hit her. Again and again. I don’t know how many times. When I stopped, I looked up. And there, looking at me through the window, was Jenny Hyde.’

  Smith looked into Maxwell’s eyes as he’d looked into the dead girl’s. ‘I was what she’d seen. I was the thing that had frightened her. The thing that Maz didn’t know because she wouldn’t tell him.’

  ‘And couldn’t tell me,’ Maxwell nodded sadly, ‘because I was your friend. And Jenny knew that.’

  ‘She was still chasing the Oxbridge notion then,’ Smith said. ‘Remember, she used to come to my house sometimes? I’d arranged for her to come that night. I’d forgotten all about it. Then there was the row with Hilda and … well, there it was.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What could I do?’ Smith shrugged. ‘Jenny’d gone in a second. My only hope was to clean up and hide the body as fast as I could. I wrapped Hilda in a couple of bin liners, roped her up and dumped her in the boot of the Honda. Then I washed the blood as best I could and drove to the sea. It was dark by then. She weighed a bloody ton, but somehow I got her on to the Shingle and threw her over. I didn’t bother with gloves or anything. I fully expected the police to be there when I got back. They weren’t. I couldn’t understand it. I knew Jenny had seen me. Why hadn’t she told the law? Her parents? Somebody? That was the longest weekend of my life. Believe me, Max, Ray Milland was a teetotaller compared with the amount I put away. But Monday morning, Christ, that was something else. How I got up the front steps to the door of this building, I’ll never know. But she wasn’t there. I checked Janet Foster’s register. Absent. And the next day. And the next. And still nothing from the police. I thought I’d go mad. “Down, down, thou climbing sorrow. Hysterica Passio.”’

  ‘Lear.’ Maxwell recognized it. ‘I didn’t like your Paul Schofield.’ There wasn’t a trace of mirth in his voice, in his face.

  ‘That was my Philip Schofield,’ Smith said sadly. It was like a dream. Here was Smith. Here was Maxie. The Old Contemptibles sitting together w
ith their buffs’ conversation and their one-liners. But they were going through the motions. The love had gone. The heart had gone. And between them lay the ghost of Jenny Hyde. And of Tim Grey. And of Hilda Smith.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ Smith said, his head suddenly in his hands. ‘I toyed with making a dash to the Continent, doing a Lord Lucan. I don’t know. Then I saw her, on Friday, on the last day of term; you’d gone to catch your coach for Cornwall. And I was driving the other side of the Dam. It was broad daylight, but I couldn’t let her go. Don’t you see, Max, she’d seen everything. I couldn’t just let her walk away. I stopped, bundled her into the car. Told her I’d got a knife. The poor kid didn’t say anything. Just sat there, sobbing and shaking. I took her to the Red House. I knew it like you knew it, because the kids talk about it. It’s haunted. It’s a great place for a grope. Whatever … I took her upstairs and I strangled her.’

  Maxwell saw the Head of English turn a deathly pale. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘No.’ Smith shook his head. ‘No. Not just like that, you bastard. Do you think any of it was easy? She was just a child. I have children, Maxie. What the hell do you know about it?’

  ‘Me?’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Nothing, Geoff. Nothing at all.’

  ‘But I was so far steeped in blood,’ Smith muttered.

  ‘Macbeth.’ Maxwell recognized that too. ‘She didn’t struggle much. I was amazed really how easy it was.’

  ‘Then you rearranged her clothes, to make it look like rape.’

  Smith nodded. ‘It’s like a disease, Maxim,’ he whispered. ‘Survival. That’s all you think of. The eleventh commandment – “Thou shalt not get caught.” Anything; everything must be sacrificed to that. It makes you cunning beyond imagination.’

  ‘And Tim Grey?’ Maxwell had to know.

  ‘I read every paper,’ Smith sighed, ‘heard every radio broad-cast, saw every TV programme. I could have cried when the Hydes appeared. They obviously knew nothing. That idiot Hall was chasing Maz and at that stage he couldn’t find him. But there were two problems.’

  ‘Tim Grey and Anne Spencer.’ Maxwell provided them both.

  ‘Exactly. My own boys are never in touch any more. Apart from you I don’t have any friends. And in this cold-shoulder society of ours, Christ alone knows who my neighbours are. Nobody in the world would miss Hilda. I got rid of all her things at an Oxfam shop in Portsmouth, somewhere where I was sure I wouldn’t be recognized. I was getting round to selling her car, somewhere else of course, somewhere where it wouldn’t be known. Then, when the time was right, I’d let it leak that she’d left me. Common enough, God knows. What is it, one in three marriages bite the dust, don’t they? But I didn’t know who Jenny might have spoken to.’

  ‘Dan Guthrie saw your car at the Red House,’ Maxwell reminded him.

  ‘That bloke Arnold saw a bike too. The police thought it was yours.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I wrote the diary.’

  ‘What?’ Maxwell gasped.

  ‘Oxbridge essays,’ Smith said, ‘I had plenty of examples of Jenny’s essays – and her handwriting. An old exercise book, a fountain pen and a few not very cryptic comments. I was rather proud of that. Move over, Hitler and Jack the Ripper. I could have sold that exercise book to the Sunday Times or whoever ten times over.’

  ‘Why?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Why did you do that?’

  Smith looked at him, for the first time a little shame-faced. ‘To get you in, Maxie,’ he said. ‘To get you hooked. I knew all about Keith Miller. We all did. Only I’d heard the rumour – and obviously you hadn’t – that he was knocking off Jenny Hyde.’

  ‘Maz said she was a virgin,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Figure of speech,’ Smith grunted. ‘So I wrote the “K.” comments. And for good measure, I threw in “P.” as well. I hoped all along you’d plump for Paul Moss; stupid, arrogant little shit that he is. But you didn’t get there until today. I overestimated you, Maxie.’

  ‘And I you, Geoffrey,’ he said. ‘Thanks, by the way, for the line about having a go at Jenny over deadlines. I didn’t. It made me suspicious.’

  ‘I know,’ Smith told him, ‘but it got you in even deeper, didn’t it?’

  ‘But why did you steal it back?’ Maxwell was lost.

  ‘Because I’d underestimated the police,’ Smith said. ‘You thought it was Jenny’s handwriting, accidently found by Bob Martin where I’d oh, so carefully stashed it, but the experts would discover it wasn’t. I didn’t want them on my back. Besides, by stealing it, it implicated you still further.’

  ‘Thanks, mon vieux.’

  ‘As I said, Maxie,’ Smith nodded, ‘survival. You can’t help yourself. I guessed I was on pretty safe ground with Anne Spencer. The word was that she fancied Maz too and when she found out that Jenny had been staying in his squat, well, the shit hit the fan and I knew she wouldn’t lift a finger to find the girl’s murderer. Anyway, it transpired she didn’t know anything.’

  ‘Which left Tim,’ Maxwell said. ‘The irony was, Geoffrey, he didn’t know anything either. The most he could do was to point me in the direction of Maz.’

  ‘I couldn’t take that chance,’ Smith said, ‘I’m afraid I took your name in vain again, Maxie. I rang Tim doing my best Mad Max impression the night before he died. You had to talk to him urgently. Even if he told his dismally dim parents where he was going, he’d name you and I’d be in the clear. Of course, it was trickier this time. It was open air, albeit dark and the little bastard was quite strong, for all he looked a weed.’ He felt his jaw. ‘Caught me a nasty one before he went down for the last time. Loosened a tooth, in fact,’ and he wobbled it at Maxwell. ‘When you told me you’d been there on the Dam that night … Well, Maxie, it was the answer to a maiden’s prayer. What with that and the diary and the Anne Spencer thing, I just didn’t see how you could get out of it.’

  ‘But I did, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell said softly, ‘I did.’

  There was a silence between them. They heard the hum of a floor polisher somewhere beyond the Drama Department door.

  ‘What happens now?’ Smith asked.

  Maxwell looked at his Old Contemptible for a long time, then he put his fingers together on his lips and said, ‘Now I ring the police, Geoff. It’s ironic, really. If Hilda’s body hadn’t bobbed up when it did, I might never have gone to the Record Office today.’

  ‘Maxim,’ Smith’s eyes were pleading, ‘twenty-four hours. That’s all I ask. Just let me get to the Channel. Please, mon vieux – for old lang syne?’

  Maxwell looked at the man before him. ‘I’ll give you an hour, Geoff,’ he said, ‘for auld lang syne. And that’s the worst Finlay Currie I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘Max,’ and Smith stood up sharply, extending a hand.

  ‘The meter’s running, Geoff,’ Maxwell said. He couldn’t bear to touch the man. Or even to look him in the face.

  And at five thirty-two precisely, when the cleaners had gone and the building was silent, ready for Betty Martin to come along with his vicious mongrel and lock it up, Peter Maxwell reached for the phone and he rang the incident room at Tottingleigh.

  The news came through by mid-evening. And no one ever knew why. Geoffrey Smith was a bad driver, certainly. The roads were wet, too, and greasy on the Shingle. And that bend had been an accident black spot for years. But the Council had done bugger all about it. Whatever the reason, the pale green Honda had slewed across the road above St Asaph’s Church and had ploughed down the sheer drop that overlooked the Red House. And in the gathering dusk, the engine had exploded and the flames had shot skyward to illuminate the cedars to remind a waiting world that Bonfire Night would not be long away now.

  There was no next of kin to identify Geoffrey Smith. So his old friend Peter Maxwell did it, leaning a little shakily on the arm of Nurse Sylvia Matthews. And she was there too when he made his statement to DCI Henry Hall, who then found, of all things, the diary of Jenny Hyde in a trunk in Smith’s house,
along with a heavy brass candlestick and a roll of black plastic bin liners.

  But he never found a dead girl’s Samsonite bag. Or the pair of tights belonging to Hilda Smith. They both lay in an Oxfam shop in Portsmouth. And the ghouls who always come out of the woodwork for a murder still pass by them every day.

  Anne Spencer dropped her accusations against Peter Maxwell. And despite protestations from the Chairman of the Governors, the Head of Sixth Form resumed his duties. It was with a certain déjà vu that Maxwell sat in his office at the end of another long day, casting pearls before swine. A craggy head appeared round the door, it’s only me.’

  ‘Mrs B.,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Well, you poor old bleeder, it’s nice to ’ave you back. I heard such stories about you. But I told ’em, I said, ’e’s no bleedin’ murderer, I said, nor no bleedin’ rapist. ’E’s just mad, that’s all.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs B.,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘You don’t know how good it is to hear you say that.’