Maxwell’s Curse Read online

  ‘Close enough,’ he said. ‘Show him up, would you?’

  3

  ‘Happy Millennium,’ Peter Maxwell shook the DCI’s hand. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ It had been a while since Henry Hall had stood in the office of the Head of Sixth Form. His youngest, Jeremy, was at Leighford now, in Year Nine, that luckless bunch of no-hopers picked on by all and sundry but mostly by the staff. He’d settled in surprisingly well, but he’d got to that age when he didn’t want people to know his dad was a copper and he’d declined Hall’s offer to drive him in that morning – ‘No, I’ll catch the bus, Dad; it’s okay.’

  ‘I understand you had something of a shock on New Year’s Eve,’ Hall took the proffered seat, easing the pile of exercise hooks to one side.

  ‘You might say that,’ Maxwell was brewing coffee on the low table near his desk.

  ‘We’ve found out who she was.’

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell sat down opposite his man. He’d crossed Henry Hall before. He was a bland bastard. If he’d been Chinese he’d have been inscrutable, hiding as he did behind the blank lenses of his rimless specs. Men like Peter Maxwell wore their hearts on their sleeves. Men like Henry Hall probably didn’t have a heart at all.

  ‘Elizabeth Pride. Mean anything to you?’

  Maxwell scowled, shaking his head. ‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘Should it?’

  Hall raised his eyebrows. It was the gesture he used in lieu of a smile. ‘I can’t help wondering why anyone would dump a body on your doorstep, Mr Maxwell,’ he said.

  Maxwell smiled. ‘The thought had occurred to me, Mr Hall,’ he said. ‘What do you know about this Elizabeth Pride?’

  ‘I don’t answer questions, Mr Maxwell,’ Hall said. ‘I just ask them.’

  It was his best shot at avoiding cliché, but Maxwell wasn’t having any. ‘Humour me,’ he said.

  Hall hesitated. This was why he had come. He knew of old that Maxwell had his ways, his means of getting answers when the police could not. Against every rule in the book though it was, Maxwell had his uses. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the press will have it all by tomorrow anyway, so why not? Elizabeth Pride was seventy-four. She lived alone near the Chanctonbury Ring – Myrtle Cottage.’

  ‘On the Downs?’

  Hall nodded. ‘She was a recluse. Lived with her cats and whatever memories she had. No known next of kin.’

  ‘A spinster lady?’

  ‘Widow, apparently. Husband died in the ’seventies. No children.’

  ‘And nobody missed her, I suppose.’

  ‘Exactly. She shopped in the local village, but had nothing delivered. Seems she was prone to wandering off from time to time anyway.’

  ‘Flotsam,’ Maxwell murmured.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Flotsam. The floating debris of this great country of ours. Nobody noticed she’d gone. We’re a long way from Jane Marple, Mr Hall.’

  ‘Local postmistress identified her. Jesus, what’s that?’

  Maxwell laughed over the wailing siren. ‘Well, it could be that ex-Comrade Putin has launched his nuclear strike, but I’d be prepared to bet it’s the start of Lesson One. Ten C Eight. Oh, joy. Today, we’re doing joined-up writing. You wouldn’t care to swap jobs, I suppose?’

  Hall was on his feet. ‘Oh, no, Mr Maxwell. After all, you do mine anyway, don’t you?’

  The look on Maxwell’s face said it all.

  It was the moment that teachers the world o’er savour – the magic hour of four of the clock, when the tide of battle in school corridors recedes and the barbarian hordes drift away to lick their wounds and plan tomorrow’s campaign. A few might do some homework.

  ‘Knock, knock!’ A curly head appeared around Maxwell’s office door.

  ‘Sylv!’ the Head of Sixth Form was on his feet, and he took his visitor in his arms. Sylvia Matthews was Leighford’s school nurse, the lady without the lamp. Six months ago, a hug and a kiss from Mad Max would have left her with weak knees and an iron lump in her throat caused by that age old medical condition, the rising of her heart. Sylvia Matthews had loved Peter Maxwell for years. She still did. But she wasn’t in love with him any more. She knew how hopeless it all was. And she knew about Jacquie Carpenter. And besides, Guy Morley filled her waking moments now. True, he was only, in Maxwell’s sneering phrase, a supply teacher, but whatever Sylvia Matthews needed, Guy Morley could supply it.

  ‘How was Christmas?’ Maxwell asked, ushering her to a seat. ‘The Millennium? The First Day?’

  ‘Ah,’ Sylvia’s smile vanished. ‘Trust you to wipe out a girl’s dreams. I’m never ready for this one, Max, are you?’

  ‘The psychological wrench of getting back to the Front?’ he asked. ‘No. “I will go back tomorrow, from Imbros over the sea. Stand in the trench, Achilles, flame-capp’d and shout for me.”’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Sylvia smiled, as usual blissfully unaware of what Maxwell was talking about. ‘Just for the record, Hannah Knightley isn’t pregnant, Greg Smith’s dad is inside again – GBH – and Mary McGee seems to have impetigo. I haven’t seen a case in years. Sent her home.’

  ‘Gentian violet,’ Maxwell remembered. ‘When I was at school, every other kid had purple splodges all over his face.’

  ‘Ah, but then, they had red crosses on the doors when you were at school, didn’t they?’

  ‘Oh, ha,’ he grimaced. ‘Coffee, Sylv?’

  ‘Scrummy. God – is that the state of your tea towel already? On the First Day?’

  ‘Don’t come the public healthier than thou, Sylv, please. As my old granddad used to say “You got to eat a peck of dirt”. Mind you, he was dead at thirty-three.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Max,’ Sylvia suddenly blurted.

  ‘What?’ he queried in mock ignorance, looking for mugs.

  ‘I saw the local news last night. I’d know thirty-eight Columbine anywhere. They found a body on your doorstep.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Max!’ She could bellow with the best of them, could Sylvia Matthews – a skill she’d acquired along with BCG testing.

  ‘Oh, all right. Inspector Hall came a-calling this morning. After-sales care or something. Apparently, they’ve found out who she is. Elizabeth Pride – an old girl who lived up near Chanctonbury Ring.’

  ‘Do they know who killed her?’

  ‘Aha,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘Slowly, slowly catchee monkey, I think is the order of the day.’

  ‘Max,’ Sylvia took his hand as he rummaged with the kettle, ‘it must have been awful for you. I mean, finding her like that.’

  ‘I’m all right, Sylv,’ he smiled. ‘But thanks for caring. Actually … what are you doing this evening?’

  Sylvia raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you asking me out for a date, Mr Maxwell?’

  He tapped her wrist. ‘You don’t want to be so forward, young lady. No, it’s just that I have a mind to watch the sunset over somewhere ancient and romantic – say, Chanctonbury Ring. And you have a car.’

  ‘Max,’ she tutted, smiling despite herself. ‘You utter shit!’

  ‘I hope I’m not interruptin’.’ It was Mrs B., Leighford’s Mrs Mopp, on her daily rounds. She could have been any age really – timeless, like Cleopatra. But she had the legs of Nora Batty. ‘Ooh, them bleedin’ kids don’t get no better, do they? Don’t Christmas seem a bloody age ago, eh? My Bert went on Boxing Day, y’know – still, it was a blessed release, really.’

  Maxwell was well used to Mrs B.’s tirades. She ‘did’ for him at home as well as cleaning up behind the scattering classes at Leighford High. ‘They don’t, Mrs B.,’ he answered her in question order. ‘It certainly does. I’m so sorry about Bert. Was he a great age?’

  ‘Well, only about three years for us, but to a budgie it’s probably bloody Methuselah. Waddya think this is, Nurse?’

  And Maxwell turned his head before something improper on Mrs B.’s person popped into view.

  ‘Could be anything, Mrs B.,’ he heard Sylvia say. ‘Let’s pop to my
office, shall we? Max – half an hour?’

  ‘Half an hour it is, Matron mine.’

  ‘Got any ciggies, dear?’ Mrs B. was asking. ‘Only, some bloody kid’s pinched mine. I won’t be long, Mr Maxwell. Get your hooverin’ done in a jiff. ’Ere, what about that poor old duck, eh? Dumped outside your house like that. It’s a bleedin’ shame, that’s what it is. I blame that Tony Blair, y’know.’ And she was gone with Sylvia in a cloud of Sanilav.

  ‘Well, thanks for that, Mrs B.,’ Maxwell poured a cup of coffee for himself. ‘I’ll get right on to Leighford CID and give that nice Mr Hall the benefit of your wisdom, shall I? They’ll feel Mr Blair’s collar in no time, don’t you worry.’

  They took the coast road to Sompting, then north on the A24, past golf courses without number to the high ground of the South Downs Way. As Sylvia’s Clio snarled on the gravel of the English Heritage car park, they could see the Victorian splendour of Worthing along the coast and the pier at Brighton a grey spur jutting out into a greyer sea.

  ‘So much for the sunset,’ Sylvia switched off the engine. ‘Is that it?’

  She was looking across the headland, away from the sea at the tree encrusted slopes, on a horizon of blackness to her left.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ Maxwell unclipped his seat belt, ‘’til you’ve tried it.’ And he got out. She locked the car with the flourish her remote gave her and did her level best to keep up with his stride. Mad Max wore a tweed jacket and his old college scarf looped around his neck. The cycle cape he’d discarded in the bowels of the Clio and he’d lowered the shapeless tweed cap firmly against the biting wind.

  ‘Bit brass monkeys up here, Sylv,’ he commented, ever a faithful barometer. ‘Right, here we are,’ he stood with his feet planted either side of a grassy ridge, the blades blown flat with the wind of the centuries. Above him the tree-topped ramparts were dark and ageless in the gathering night. ‘It’s cold in there even on a sunny day, believe me,’ he told her.

  ‘What is it, Max?’ Sylvia couldn’t make out the shape.

  ‘The prosaic, historical answer is that it’s an Iron Age hill fort. Perhaps it housed a hundred or so people. People like you and me, without our veneer of sophistication. Perhaps they watched Caesar’s legions rolling from the east like an unstoppable tide. Listen.’

  Sylvia did.

  ‘Hear that?’

  ‘Only the wind,’ she frowned.

  ‘Exactly. They say the birds don’t sing here.’

  ‘Birds don’t sing at dusk anyway,’ she comforted herself out loud. ‘Not at this time of the year at least.’

  ‘How are you at running backwards?’ Maxwell asked her.

  ‘What is this?’ she snapped, getting frightened now as the night drew on.

  He leaned towards her. ‘They do say,’ he growled, ‘that if you run seven times backwards around these trees, the devil will appear for your soul.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ she snorted, clinging on to her sense of the here, the now. She was a child of the twentieth century and a woman of the twenty-first. She knew from long, deep talks with Mad Max it was only education that was running backwards.

  ‘Quite right,’ he chuckled. ‘That can only happen at midnight on Midsummer Eve. Mind you,’ his voice grew cold again, ‘they say if you hear the beat of a horse’s feet and the swish of a skirt in the dew …’

  ‘Max! For God’s sake, shut up, will you?’

  ‘Nothing like a spot of Kipling between friends. Come on, Sylv. Got your torch? Myrtle Cottage must be down this way.’ And he was gone, striding down the leeward slope away from the winds of the sea, away from the ghosts of Chanctonbury.

  ‘How do you know?’ she was running now, anxious to stay by his elbow.

  ‘Know what? About Chanctonbury? Years of experience, my dear. Oh, and a brain the size of the Great Plains.’

  ‘I mean,’ she clutched her shoulder bag to help her balance on the uneven tufts of the slope, ‘the whereabouts of Myrtle Cottage.’

  ‘Well, while you were doing what women will, filling the car with petrol, changing your tyres or reboring the engine or whatever, I popped into the shop and asked directions.’

  ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ she asked him.

  ‘You will, Oscar,’ he patronized. ‘You will. Aha, Eureka.’

  Myrtle Cottage was particularly unprepossessing in the half light. There was clearly an unmade road to it from the east, but God alone knew where that came out and in any case, Maxwell had his bearings from the direction of the Ring.

  ‘Victorian,’ he said, looking at the dull red brick and the little windows. ‘Possibly a little earlier.’

  Sylvia fumbled in her bag for the torch and trained it on the front door. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  Maxwell couldn’t tell her at first. A bunch of herbs swung under the little porch, at the mercy of the breeze that was lifting from the west.

  ‘It’s garlic.’ Sylvia answered her own question as soon as her nose got close enough. ‘Who hangs garlic over their front door?’

  ‘Elizabeth Pride, evidently,’ Maxwell said. ‘Shine that thing on the lock, will you, Sylv?’

  ‘Max,’ she did as she was told. ‘You’re not going in there?’

  ‘I haven’t dragged you all this way to marvel at the architecture of the place,’ he said.

  ‘Why have you dragged me all this way?’ It was perhaps a question she should have asked before.

  ‘It was a little gem dropped in my lap by the Chief Inspector.’ He was rattling the iron knocker, testing the door. ‘Myrtle Cottage, Elizabeth Pride’s address.’

  ‘Wasn’t that a little careless of him?’ she asked, looking around at the house’s dark windows.

  ‘No,’ he leaned his shoulder against the wood, ‘Nothing that Henry Hall does is careless. He wants me in on this …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘“Ours not to reason why”, Miss Nightingale. Ready for a spot of b and e?’

  B and Q Sylvia had heard of. ‘What?’ she asked.

  His answer was a sudden charge of the right shoulder and the front door crashed back. ‘Shit! That hurt!’

  ‘Max!’ she sounded half strangled in the dark. ‘You’ve broken in.’

  ‘That’s what I like about you, Sylv.’ He took the torch from her and let its beam wander the room. ‘Your grasp of essentials. Mr Hall’s generosity did not extend to him letting the door key fall out of his pocket onto my office furniture, so if we’re to make headway … Needs must, when the devil drives.’

  ‘We’re to make headway?’ she repeated.

  ‘Sylv,’ he found a switch, but it didn’t work. He turned to face her, holding the torch so that he could see her, those shining eyes, that trusting face. ‘Sylv,’ softer now. ‘Nobody dumps a body on my doorstep and says “That’s Africa”. I want answers.’

  ‘Leave it to the police, Max.’

  ‘The police,’ he took her hand, ‘seem happy enough to leave it – or at least part of it – to me.’

  ‘What about Jacquie?’

  ‘Who?’

  Sylvia knew when to leave it alone. Max wasn’t in the talking vein tonight.

  There was a hiss and a scream and a cupboard door flew open above Sylvia’s head.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ She felt her heart thump and was glad of Maxwell’s arm around her. His torch beam picked up the cause of the commotion immediately as a grey cat, old and frightened, crouched on a table, hissing at them, teeth bared, ears flat.

  ‘Mrs Pride had cats,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Do tell,’ Sylvia was slowly returning to some sort of cardiac norm. ‘Max, this place. It’s like a time warp.’

  It was. If it had ever had electricity, it wasn’t working now. The cupboards with their glass doors were pure ’fifties. There was a single table with a plastic cloth, and two chairs. Rusted taps leaned over a stone sink of the type Kensington Sloanes paid a fortune for. There were still dishes in it, grubby with old food, partially licked clean by the raspin
g tongues of the cats.

  ‘Pantry,’ Maxwell wandered into it, a tiny lean-to off the living room. He was conscious of padding on ancient lino, worn smooth to the contours of the flagstones beneath. He flashed the torch around the room again, lingering in corners, letting the light creep along the cobwebbed ceiling. ‘No one’s lived here for a while,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Sylv?’

  She tried the taps. Nothing. Not the merest of drips. ‘Gives me the creeps.’ The smell itself was enough – dank, derelict, dead.

  Maxwell was rummaging in the cupboards. There were plates, cups, tins of cat food. A box of fairly ancient Weetabix he didn’t want to investigate. The whole place reeked of tom.

  ‘Have the police been here?’ Sylvia asked him.

  ‘Presumably,’ he nodded. ‘If so, they’ll have taken anything relevant away. Do you fancy upstairs?’

  ‘No, Max.’ He could rarely remember her voice so firm.

  ‘Just a thought,’ he cleared his throat, ‘Hello, what’s this?’ The torch beam fell on a calendar, dusty and stained, pinned to the wall with a rusty drawing pin. The page was opened at December and someone had written for the 21st the words ‘Thomas grey’ twice. And on the 20th, in an unsteady hand, ‘Good St Thomas, do me right and let my true-love come tonight. That I may see him in the face and in my arms may him embrace.’

  ‘What is it. Max? Is that writing?’ Sylvia couldn’t make it out in the wobbling circles of the torchbeam.

  ‘Elizabeth Pride’s last will and testament,’ he said.

  ‘Max,’ he felt her arms snuggle into his and her head on his shoulder. ‘Can we go now? I don’t like this place much.’

  Peter Maxwell looked up the name Grey. There was Edward, Viscount of Falloden who rolled up the maps in 1914 and never saw a lamp for the rest of his life. There was Jane, briefly England’s queen until Bloody Mary took exception to her; and there was Zane, who wrote cowboy stories. With the alternative spelling of ‘Gray’ Chambers edition in Leighford High’s library the next day gave him the poet who wrote Odes at a distance from Eton and was positively elegiac (for reasons best known to himself) about the churchyard of Stoke Poges.