Maxwell’s Curse Read online

Why, the Head of Sixth Form mused as he stirred his umpteenth coffee that day, should an old recluse make a big deal about a dead poet whose name she couldn’t even spell?

  ‘Jessica,’ he growled to the tarty girl deep in conversation at the back of his classroom, ‘I’m not sure Mr Diamond half a mile away in his office quite caught that last bit, covering last night’s fumblings down the Front. Where were Lee’s hands, exactly? Would you like to show us?’

  Jessica looked outraged. You couldn’t even have a private chat these days without some old perv wanting to know more. She looked at Maxwell. Still, poor old bugger. He probably wasn’t getting any. You had to feel sorry.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ It was Helen Maitland, his loyal Number Two, at his elbow, the vast and good woman the sixth form called The Fridge on account of her bulk and her tendency to wear white.

  ‘Mrs Maitland,’ public schoolboy that he was, he was already on his feet, bowing low. Jessica continued her blow by blow-job account of last night.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Max, especially with Ten C Three, but can I introduce Crispin Foulkes? Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Crispin Foulkes was probably thirty-three, with a mane of golden hair and a serious set to his mouth, ‘delighted to meet you,’ and the men shook hands.

  ‘Crispin’s the new social worker in the area,’ Helen explained. ‘I’m introducing him to all the Year Heads.’

  ‘Bad time?’ Foulkes nodded in the direction of the class.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘Two thirds of this lot will be on your couch by sunset anyway. Are you based at the Barlichway?’

  ‘For my sins, yes. It seems to have its fair share of problems.’

  That was an understatement. The Barlichway Estate was a disaster area. For a while in the mid-’eighties, when Toxteth burned and Broadwater bled, the Barlichway was a no go area. Its bleak windy terraces and ’sixties concrete were daubed with the anarchic art of the spraygun – and bad spraygun at that – and murky men sold powdered death in its empty shadows.

  ‘Where were you before?’

  ‘Erdington.’

  ‘God,’ Maxwell scowled.

  ‘Quite,’ Foulkes laughed. ‘At least here you get sea glimpses.’

  ‘Oh, we do that.’ There was an electronic shattering of the moment. ‘Ah, the bells, the bells.’ Maxwell launched into his Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo. 10 C 3 had seen it before. They ignored him.

  ‘Homework!’ he thundered at them. Now they listened, moaning as is the wont of fifteen-year-olds. ‘Have a look at the question on page fifty-eight. I want at least three sides of exercise book and when do I want it?’

  ‘Yesterday!’ came the shouted answer and the stampede for the door began.

  ‘See you, sir,’ called the last kid.

  ‘They like you,’ nodded Foulkes.

  ‘They hate my guts,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘But it gives them something to kick against and I’ll get them through GCSE History or die in the attempt – the old motto of the Foreign Legion. Join us for a coffee?’ He held up the mug he’d pinched from Special Needs last term.

  ‘Eight A Four, Max,’ Helen was making her excuses, already blocking the corridor on her way to D Block. ‘See you again, Crispin.’

  ‘Sure.’ He waved.

  ‘Salt of the earth, that woman,’ Maxwell said. ‘In here,’ and he led the man next door into his office.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Ah, one of my little hobbies.’ Maxwell waved to the film posters.

  ‘One of them?’

  ‘The other one’s teaching History,’ the Head of Sixth Form winked. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Foulkes took the soft, low seat. ‘I’m sweet enough.’

  Maxwell was used to clichés. ‘So what made you become a social worker?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s very good,’ Foulkes beamed.

  ‘What is?’ Maxwell was boiling his kettle.

  ‘The way you said “social worker” without the merest hint of contempt.’

  Maxwell looked at his man for a moment, then exploded with laughter. ‘Just because you’re paranoid,’ he said, ‘doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t hate you.’ It was his turn for cliché.

  ‘I’m used to it,’ Foulkes said. ‘Let me answer you by throwing the question back – why did you become a teacher?’

  Maxwell thought for a moment while pouring Foulkes’s coffee, then he became all of the Magnificent Seven rolled into one. ‘After a while,’ it was pure Steve McQueen, ‘you can call EWOs and Ed. Psychs by their first name – maybe two hundred of ‘em. Daytrips you’ve been on – five hundred. School dinners you’ve had – a thousand. Home, none. Wife …’ his pause was longer than in the film, ‘none. Kids – millions of ‘em. Prospects, zero.’

  ‘I …’

  But Maxwell hadn’t finished. It was Yul Brynner talking now, ‘Places you’re tied down to: one. Kids you step aside for: none.’ Now it was Robert Vaughan. ‘Insults swallowed: none. Enemies: none,’ and he caught Foulkes’s astonished gaze and smiled, ‘alive.’

  ‘You’re having me on, Mr Maxwell,’ said Foulkes.

  ‘I am,’ Maxwell laughed, handing Foulkes his coffee. ‘And that’s Max, by the way. But being a teacher is a little like being a gunfighter in a way. It’s you and your six slugs of knowledge against a whole mean town of ignorance and indifference. Sorry,’ he raised his mug. ‘It’s Thursday. I get a little poetic on Thursdays. Talking of poetry, what does a social worker know about Thomas Gray?’

  ‘Thomas Gray?’ Foulkes repeated. ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Why do you ask?’

  Maxwell crossed to his desk. ‘Thomas grey, Thomas grey.’ He twisted the dog-eared calendar on his desk around so that it faced Foulkes.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a student of folklore, Max,’ the social worker perched on the edge of his chair to get a closer look.

  ‘Neither did I,’ Maxwell said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, here. The rhyme’s not quite right. It should be Saint Thomas grey, Saint Thomas grey, the longest night and the shortest day. Saint Thomas was the patron of stone cutters and carpenters.’

  ‘Doubting Thomas?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘So you are a student of folklore, if not a professor, Mr Foulkes?’

  Foulkes laughed. ‘Oh, not even a student, I’m afraid. And that’s Crispin, by the way. Look, you’ve got it here, on the 20th – “Good St Thomas, do me right …” St Thomas’s Eve, a night to foretell the future, but to be wary of ghosts.’

  ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘What is this, Max? Somebody’s heirloom?’

  ‘The calendar? I wish I knew. Let’s just say it came into my possession and I’m trying to make some sense out of it.’

  ‘Can I have a look?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Foulkes flicked through the tattered pages with their strange, fusty smell. ‘Max, where did you get this?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘It’s not important,’ Maxwell said, then he caught the look on the man’s face, ‘Is it?’

  ‘Er … no,’ Foulkes said. ‘No, not at all.’

  There was a knock on Maxwell’s door and a pale bespectacled youth stood there.

  ‘Right, Nigel,’ the Head of Sixth Form said, ‘give me a minute, would you?’

  ‘No,’ Foulkes was on his feet. ‘I’ve got to be going. Thanks for the coffee, Max. I’ve got an appointment with your deputy head … Mr Ryan, is it?’

  ‘Oh, bad luck,’ Maxwell sympathized. ‘One of the worst things Spielberg ever did, saving Mr Ryan. Turn left, then right, then follow the snail trail. Can’t miss it.’

  And Foulkes shook his hand. ‘See you again.’

  ‘Depend on it,’ said Maxwell and turned to the geek bearing no gifts. ‘All right, Nigel, now before I ring the Admissions Tutor at Peterhouse and reduce the man to a quivering wreck, tell me again why they’ve rejected you.’

  4

  Henry Hall sat behind his de
sk in his office at Leighford nick. Opposite him sat Martin Stone, his new sergeant, whose eyes strayed when they could to his watch and whose mind, intermittently, was with the woman he loved, waddling round the semi in Chalgrove Park waiting for the contractions to start for real. Opposite him too sat Jacquie Carpenter, altogether more focused, altogether more together.

  ‘Astley, then, Martin,’ Hall opened the file in front of him.

  ‘You didn’t tell me he was a miserable old sod, guv,’ Stone began.

  ‘Some things detective sergeants have to learn for themselves.’ It was the nearest the DCI was ever likely to get in the direction of humour.

  Stone checked his notes. This was his first case with Hall. He didn’t want to put a foot wrong at this delicate stage. ‘The toxicology report confirmed Dr Astley’s suspicions,’ he said. ‘He was most particular about that – that he’d been right.’

  Jacquie smiled. That was the comforting thing about Jim Astley – there was absolutely no possibility of his being wrong.

  ‘Organic poisoning had been administered to the dead woman a minimum of eight hours before she died. Agaricus phalloides is the scientific name apparently – phallin to the likes of you and me. Mushrooms.’

  ‘Does he know how it was administered?’ Hall asked.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Poisonous fungi are usually bitter to the taste and you can smell them three rooms away. Most of them are highly coloured too.’

  ‘There was nothing like that at Myrtle Cottage,’ Jacquie remembered. ‘No food at all, in fact.’

  ‘Except?’ Hall looked at her over the rim of his glasses, like a professor gently prompting his student.

  ‘Except … oh, my God.’

  Stone looked from one to the other. ‘You can’t be serious. You mean Elizabeth Pride ate cat food?’

  ‘Why not?’ Hall shrugged. ‘It’s full of nutrition if you believe the manufacturers’ hype.’

  ‘And it’s got flavours – mackerel, chicken, turkey.’ Jacquie was suddenly aware that both men were staring at her.

  ‘Cat lover, are you, Jacquie?’ Stone asked. It was an innocent question.

  ‘No,’ she said, and omitted the cliché ‘but I know a man who is.’

  ‘Did Jim Astley stick his neck out and say what type of mushroom?’

  Stone shifted in his seat. ‘That’s why I was late getting here,’ he said. ‘I had the whole lecture, the full monty. Apparently – and I quote – there are nearly two thousand larger fungi in the UK, of which two hundred are edible and ten are poisonous. Astley’s problem is that he doesn’t know – nobody does – the time lag between the old girl taking the stuff and the first symptoms. If they were late onset, say upwards of eighteen hours, he’d go for Amanita phalloides – Death-Cap.’

  ‘Looks and peels like a common mushroom,’ Jacquie said.

  ‘Thanks for the woman’s touch,’ Hall murmured. ‘Relevance?’

  ‘The old girl could have eaten them by accident, sir.’

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ Hall was leaning back, his hands behind his head, ‘but she didn’t then stab herself in the back of the neck, climb into a package of binliners and deposit herself on Peter Maxwell’s doorstep, having carefully rung his doorbell first.’

  There was no real answer to that and Jacquie didn’t give one.

  ‘No one thought to take any food samples, I suppose, from Myrtle Cottage?’ Hall checked. ‘The cat food? Whatever was on those plates in the sink?’

  ‘Er … I was just going to get on it, guv,’ Stone grinned.

  ‘The first time, Martin,’ Hall said softly. ‘When you know me better, you’ll learn I like things like that done the first time.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry. But there’s no real harm done, is there? I mean, nobody will have been snooping? We didn’t give the old girl’s address.’

  It was Hall’s turn to shift in his chair. ‘No,’ he said, ‘indeed we didn’t. Jacquie, how’s the Incident Room getting on with next of kin?’

  ‘It’s early days, sir,’ she told him.

  ‘That’s right,’ an unflappable bastard was Henry Hall, ‘but we both know, Jacquie, about cold trails. It’s been four days.’

  ‘There was a husband – er … She checked her notes. ‘Edward. Died in ’79.’

  ‘Did he live at Myrtle Cottage?’

  ‘We don’t have any other address at the moment,’ she said. ‘Uniform have talked to the locals at Wetherton where the old girl occasionally did her shopping.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nobody really liked her. One or two felt a bit sorry, but she wasn’t easy. Help her across the road and she’d bite your head off – you know the sort of thing.’

  Hall did.

  ‘Had something of a reputation, though.’

  ‘Reputation?’ Stone asked. ‘As what?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Jacquie chuckled. ‘As a witch.’

  The truly great thing about Friday is that it marks the end of the working week. Peter Maxwell wrapped his scarf around his neck, snapped his cycle clips into position and pedalled hell-for-leather over the darkening fields heading for the flyover and home.

  ‘Those things’ll kill you!’ he roared as he rattled around Smokers’ Corner at the far end of the Sports Hall. Three consumptives sprang apart, dawdling as they had been on their way home in order to light up. ‘That’s in the long term. In the short term all three of you are in detention next Thursday. Have a nice day!’ and he’d gone, whistling down the wind.

  Now, Peter Maxwell had a vice. Well, actually, he had several. But that evening, he sat in the lamplit attic at 38 Columbine and indulged in his favourite. Before him on his desk lay a white plastic man beside a white plastic horse, 54mm high and correct in every detail. This was the three hundred and eighty-ninth figure to join the great diorama he was creating in the centre of the room. Beneath the roof’s apex, three hundred and eighty two such plastic men sat painted and ready to ride into the Valley of Death. It was an expensive and time-consuming hobby, but it filled the dead hours of Maxwell’s life. And one day, all six hundred and seventy-eight of Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade would be saddled and waiting. By then, Maxwell computed, he would be retired and too broke to buy any more. At the moment however, though he’d rather Mr Blunkett never found out, he had the paint, he had the glue, he had the money too.

  ‘Couldn’t borrow your lesson plans for Year Thirteen, could I, Max?’ his green Head of Department, Paul Moss, had once had the temerity to ask.

  ‘Lesson plans, Paul?’ Maxwell’s basilisk stare had frozen more sensitive men. ‘What they?’

  No, Peter Maxwell had far more interesting things to fill his time with than something as trivial as education.

  ‘Yes, of course he rides a grey, Count,’ Maxwell was talking to his cat again. ‘Have I taught you nothing about the Light Cavalry in all these years?’

  Evidently not. Metternich twitched an ear and yawned ostentatiously. ‘Trumpeter Hugh Crawford, Number 1296 4th Light Dragoons. All trumpeters of the cavalry rode grey horses for ease of identification, except in the Scots Greys, of course, where it would cause a little confusion. There the trumpeter rode a black or a bay.’

  As if to show his passionate fascination, Metternich rolled a little way and placed his right leg behind his right ear, before pedantically licking his bum. ‘Kama Sutra, page 194,’ Maxwell murmured, unimpressed by the beast’s agility. He had after all seen it all before. It was only the fact that he’d been to a good school that prevented him from doing the same.

  ‘Crawford was Canadian actually, born at Fort George. He was taken prisoner in the Charge, but Sam Parkes of his regiment saved his life. Left his wife behind at the depot at Brighton,’ he carefully rested the plastic trumpet across the soldier’s shoulder, concentrating hard with the glue stick in his other hand, ‘which, as you know, is just up the … Shit!’

  The phone’s harsh ring shattered the moment and Metternich was gone like a cat out of hell, down the attic s
tairs.

  ‘War Office,’ Maxwell reached the receiver seconds later.

  ‘Hello?’ a rather startled voice said from the other end.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know me. I’m Ken.’

  ‘Ken,’ Maxwell lolled back in his swivel chair, ‘how’s Barbie?’

  ‘Er,’ there was an attempt at a giggle. But Ken Templeton had heard that one before. ‘I was wondering if I might …’

  ‘Double glazing? Got it. Treble, in fact. Car? Don’t drive. Medical insurance? I’ll take my chances with AIDS, TB, swamp fever …’

  ‘No, no. I’m ringing on behalf of Beauregard’s.’

  ‘Beauregard’s?’

  ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

  ‘It does indeed. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was one of the gentlemen of the South from West Point. Rather an ace general, as it happens. Took part in that little spat the Americans had among themselves a few years back.’

  There was a pause. ‘Oh, really? Well, no, this has nothing to do with him. We’re a new fitness club recently opened in Leighford.’

  ‘Ken,’ Maxwell interrupted. ‘It must be a very depressing business trawling through the phone book …’

  ‘No, no, Mr Maxwell. You were recommended. This isn’t a cold sell, I can assure you.’

  ‘St Benedict himself couldn’t have had one colder, Ken, I can assure you.’ And he put the phone down, desperately scrabbling on hands and knees for the tiny trumpet that had fallen God knew where.

  ‘Recommended?’ He suddenly knelt up and fetched himself a smart one on the corner of his desk. ‘Who the hell would recommend me for a fitness club? I, who put the potato into couch. Dear God in heaven, is this what the twenty-first century is going to be like?’

  Peter Maxwell wasn’t exactly a party animal. It was commonly believed in the staffroom at Leighford High that the last one he’d been to was the night they relieved Lady Smith. In fact the old duck had more right to be relieved than anybody at Leighford knew – Maxwell had been busy that night.

  But it was Saturday. And Jacquie had asked him. And she did know a few vital Ju-jitsu holds that were guaranteed to make a man’s eyes water, should he refuse. Besides, he wanted to talk to her.