Maxwell’s Curse Read online

  It was only when he reached the cottage’s rusting gate that he realized he was not alone.

  ‘Hello,’ a voice called. Standing in the lee of the cottage was a man, perhaps thirty, perhaps not, with a sleeveless sheepskin jacket and a scruffy flat cap. His dark face was hidden in the shadows and he was smoking a roll-up between pinched lips.

  ‘Morning,’ Maxwell switched to cheery mode.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Peter Maxwell,’ the Head of Sixth Form was through the gate and on the broken bricks of the path. ‘Littlehampton Mercury. Is this Elizabeth Pride’s house?’

  ‘Was,’ the man said. He was still leaning on the cold brickwork, like Shane when the Ryker boys came threatening Van Heflin.

  ‘Yes, terrible, isn’t it? Mr … er … ?’

  Now the man straightened. ‘Whaddya want to know my name for? Your bloody paper?’

  ‘Just doing a piece on the murder,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Did you know the old girl?’

  ‘I might of.’

  Maxwell knew kids like this. Chips on their shoulders Harry Ramsden’s would be proud of. He flipped out his wallet, watching the man’s reaction and reminded himself of Sir Robert Walpole’s wisdom – ‘every man has his price.’

  A crisp tenner stood stark in his fist. ‘How well?’

  ‘Well enough,’ and the man had snatched it.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’

  ‘No.’ The answer was sharp, sudden, emphatic.

  ‘All right,’ Maxwell smiled and rested himself on the low wall that circled the garden, ‘but I’ll need a bit more than “well enough” for a tenner.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like your name for a start.’

  ‘You’ll only use it.’

  ‘No, no,’ Maxwell assured him. ‘It’s the paper’s policy not to print anything which is unattributable. It’s also the paper’s policy not to print names if we’re asked not to.’

  ‘Cruikshank,’ growled the man after some hesitation. ‘I live yonder.’

  ‘Yonder?’ Maxwell wondered if he’d stumbled into a time-warp, if the old continuum had come round and smacked him in the face.

  ‘Who’s this, Joe?’ another voice made both men turn.

  ‘Some reporter bloke,’ Joe said, dragging on the stub.

  ‘What’s he want?’ The newcomer was a broader version of the first, a shapeless willy cap pulled down over his ears.

  ‘Information about Elizabeth Pride,’ Maxwell told him.

  ‘Bitch, she were,’ the newcomer snarled, squatting on the dead woman’s wall along from Maxwell, shading his eyes from the watery sun.

  ‘Indeed, Mr … er …’

  ‘Cruikshank.’ He grinned a gappy smile. ‘Same as him.’

  ‘I thought I detected a likeness,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘I’m not surprised she’s dead.’

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Had it coming, didn’t she?’ Joe said, throwing his fag into the weeds.

  ‘Killed our dog,’ muttered the other one.

  ‘Killed? Really?’

  ‘You’re like a fuckin’ stuck record, mate.’

  ‘Easy on, Ben,’ Joe said. ‘Bloke’s only doing his job.’

  ‘Have the police talked to you yet?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘The police don’t talk to us, mate. And we don’t talk to them.’

  ‘See, we’re travelling people,’ Joe volunteered. ‘Romanies. Rubbish, we are. Vermin. We steal and vandalize and rape, don’t we, Ben?’

  Ben sniggered. ‘Every chance we can get,’ he said. ‘Look, we don’t steal horses and sell pegs and lucky lavender any more and we ain’t got one of them fancy sod-off gyppo vans neither, so why don’t you stick your poncy nose into somebody else’s business?’

  ‘If you’re hanging around Elizabeth Pride’s house,’ Maxwell said, ‘I think you are my business.’

  ‘Do you?’ Ben had shambled to his feet.

  ‘My brother told you.’ Joe was closing along the path. ‘The old cow killed our dog.’

  ‘Why?’ Maxwell asked.

  Both brothers grunted. ‘Why not?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Because she fuckin’ could,’ Ben growled.

  ‘What we don’t know is how,’ Joe went on. ‘One morning it was right as rain. Next day she looked at it. Just bloody looked, mind. Nothing else. Dropped dead right in front of us.’

  ‘So you killed her?’ Maxwell was chancing his arm.

  ‘That’s right, mate,’ Ben said softly. ‘With this.’ Suddenly there was a knife in his hand, glinting in the sunlight. Maxwell hadn’t moved. ‘Now, why don’t you fuck off?’

  ‘While you still can,’ Joe underscored the situation for his brother.

  For a moment Maxwell hesitated. Either of the brothers could just about pass for his sons. They were leaner, tougher, nastier, more armed. Time enough for valour on some other field.

  ‘Well, that’s settled then,’ he smiled. ‘I’ll just have a look round.’

  ‘No you won’t, mate.’ It was Joe who blocked his path.

  ‘You don’t wanna go in there, son,’ Ben assured him.

  ‘Really? Why not?’

  ‘Look,’ he pointed to the door. ‘Know what that is?’

  ‘Garlic.’ Maxwell basked in Sylvia Matthews’ reflected glory. He didn’t know one plant from another, though the smell would have given it away in time.

  ‘Precisely,’ Ben snarled. ‘Now, you take heed of that, mate. And off you fuck.’

  Maxwell smiled. ‘It’s been … an education,’ he said, tipped his hat and retraced his steps up the rise to the Ring.

  The dead man lay cold in the North Transept, his hands clasped on his chest, his sword at his side. Somebody, be it Cromwellian soldier or souvenir hunter had taken his legs away. No wonder he was frowning under the rim of the bascinet.

  ‘Sir John Viney,’ a voice called from behind him. ‘Commanded the left wing at Crecy.’

  ‘Three leaves azure on a field argent,’ Maxwell said, his voice ringing slightly in the vaults of the church, ‘Viney. The old canting ploy. A pun on the owner’s name.’

  ‘Ah, a student of heraldry,’ the voice said. ‘I’m impressed.’

  So was Maxwell. It had been a long time since he’d translated cross-hatching from a sepulchral brass. The owner of the voice padded into view, a tall, white-haired spectre of a man who wore his tell-tale collar back to front. ‘Would you care to hazard a date?’

  Maxwell took in the jupon with its folds and the extent of plate armour. The knight’s likeness glinted dully in the afternoon light and the stained glass threw blues and golds onto the stone canopy on which he lay. ‘Thirteen seventy, thirteen eighty,’ he guessed.

  ‘Thirteen seventy-two,’ the vicar beamed. ‘Now I really am impressed. Andrew Darblay,’ he extended a sinewy hand.

  ‘Vicar?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Rector,’ the old man smiled. ‘But who’s counting?’

  ‘Peter Maxwell.’ Maxwell shook the man’s hand.

  ‘Just visiting our lovely old church?’ Darblay asked. ‘Or are you early for Evensong?’

  ‘Either or,’ Maxwell said. ‘You’ve a fine collection of tombs.’

  ‘The Vineys built this place,’ the rector told him. ‘Sir John’s father endowed it. His great grandson built the Lady Chapel and his great-great-great-grandnephew put in what laughingly passes for central heating. Are you an historian, Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Of sorts,’ Maxwell confessed, ‘but I’m actually here on less pleasant matters.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The murder of Elizabeth Pride.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I understand she shopped here in the village.’

  ‘May I ask your interest?’ Darblay tried to get the measure of his man. College scarf. Too much hair for his strict Anglican tastes, vaguely resembled a greying hippy.

  ‘Littlehampton Mercury,’’ Maxwell explained on the grounds that
if you’re going to lie, be consistent about it. ‘I’m writing a piece.’

  ‘Oh,’ Darblay smiled wryly. ‘So you’re a paparazzi, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell shook his head, smiling too. ‘I am a reporter.’

  The old man took him by the arm and led him down the transept, turning briefly to bob before the altar. They turned into the nave. ‘In my less charitable moments I sometimes think that when the Good Book tells of “tax gatherers and others” it refers to journalists. Then my sense of Old Testament history takes over and I know better.’

  ‘Good to hear it,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘Would you care for a small sherry?’ Darblay asked him.

  ‘A small sherry would be delightful.’

  The Rectory at Wetherton was one of those unpretentious fourteen bedroomed jobbies that really miffed people and had turned the Victorian deferential tenant into the Marxist yobbo of the twentieth century consumed by the politics of envy. Darblay pointed out his magnificent rhododendron bushes, the superiority of his wisteria and showed Maxwell the lake where the herons dipped of a summer’s evening.

  38 Columbine would have fitted quite snugly into Darblay’s hall and his study could easily have swamped Leighford High’s gym. Still, Maxwell said nothing, preferring to wallow in his own hyperbole. The old cleric’s sherry was particularly old peculiar to a palette corroded and destroyed by the delicious bite of Southern Comfort, but it hit the spot well enough on a freezing Sunday afternoon.

  ‘I’m not sure I can be that helpful,’ Darblay stretched before the open fire. ‘Old Mrs Pride wasn’t one of my parishioners in the fullest sense.’

  ‘She was married in the church?’

  ‘You’d have to consult the registers. We’re not allowed to keep them any more, alas. They’ve all been consigned to Winchester and, what is worse, placed on microfiche.’

  Maxwell tutted. That annoyed him too.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Darblay went on, rubbing a cadaverous finger around the rim of his glass, ‘but it’s only done for the convenience of the Americans. You’d be amazed how many of them we get in the summer, trying to find their roots.’

  ‘Hairdressers’ nightmare,’ Maxwell nodded solemnly. ‘You didn’t visit her, I suppose?’

  ‘Mrs Pride? No, I’m afraid not. Oh, I did make one house call, so to speak. A long time ago, when I first got the parish. Sticks in my mind, though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Don’t you people tape record interviews?’ Darblay asked, ‘Or at least take notes?’

  ‘No need,’ Maxwell tapped his temple. ‘Photographic memory.’

  ‘How fascinating!’ Darblay put his glass down and leaned forward. ‘I have a theory …’

  ‘Er … Mrs Pride?’ Maxwell wanted the man back on track.

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Well, I went up to her house, the one near the Ring. No one answered for what seemed ages. I was just about to go when she appeared. It was odd, really. A sizzling hot day – August 1, I remember – and I didn’t hear a thing. Not a rustle of clothes, not the padding of feet. She was just … there. At my elbow. I confess, Mr Maxwell, I was startled. I was even more startled when we got talking.’

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘Well, I introduced myself and said I hoped we’d see her at church. Do you know what she did? She spat.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘As God is my witness. Spat, then and there, quite volubly, on the garden path. Then she asked me if I knew what day it was – that’s how I remember it so well. I said “Yes. It’s August 1st.” “Lammas,” she said. “It’s Lammastide.”’

  ‘Lammas,’ Maxwell repeated.

  ‘Loaf Mass,’ Darblay explained. ‘Symbolic of the beginning of the harvest. I said to Mrs Pride “Are you a farming family, then?” She just laughed.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Maxwell, it was. I never went back. Not to Myrtle Cottage. I’m not ashamed to admit old Mrs Pride frightened me. There was something … unreal about her. It’s impossible to describe. Oh, I’ve met people who are anti-clerical before and since. Humanists, atheists, don’t-give-a-damners – they go with the territory; and my back, like my church, is broad. But there was something different about Elizabeth Pride – and I’m not being melodramatic when I say … she was pure evil.’

  ‘“Pure Evil”, Count,’ Maxwell sipped his Southern Comfort, his bum on his sofa, his feet on the coffee table. ‘You had to be there, really, corny as it sounds.’

  The cat was unimpressed. It was the concept of church mice that interested him most in Maxwell’s story.

  ‘There we were, tucked up in his study, only a little smaller than the Bodleian, toasting our toes – in his case lissom, clerical, printless; and we were talking about a poor old soul as if she was Beelzebub. But the thing of it is, Count, this calendar.’ He shook it at the animal, for all the good that did, ‘Elizabeth Pride … listen to me when I’m talking to you – I’ll be asking questions later … Elizabeth Pride made a big thing about Lammas tide, August 1st. And here, it’s one of the few dates she’s circled on her calendar, the one I lifted from the cottage.’ He read from the tattered paper, ‘Fly over moor and fly over mead, Fly over living and fly over dead, Fly ye east or fly ye west, fly to her that loves me best. Not exactly Manic Street Preachers, is it?’

  Metternich yawned. What was the old duffer on about? He was always the same when he sloshed that amber stuff down his throat. Why didn’t he stick to pond water and the odd slurp of gold top?

  ‘You’d have liked the Reverend Darblay,’ Maxwell assured his companion of an inch. ‘Like something out of Trollope, he was – and I mean that in the nicest possible way …’ Then the A-level essays caught his eye, sitting, like the sword of Damocles, dangling over the edge of his coffee table. ‘Oh, all right!’ he shouted at them.

  Metternich saw his moment and slunk away. Once the old bastard picked up papers that was it – an hour or two of effing and blinding, all in the cause of scholarship, all for the sake of an A-level grade. And he heard him humming as he reached the cat flap, ‘One man went to mow, went to mow a module …’ The rest was silence and the nightly slaughter on Columbine Avenue.

  Beauregard’s was a little out of town, on the curve of East Hill beyond the station. Maxwell recognized it at once as the Leighford Institute, a solid block of Victoriana with a mock marble facade – built in the days of self-help as a library for the working man. That nice old picker-up of prostitutes, Mr Gladstone, was at Number Ten and beer was tuppence ha’penny a pint.

  It had changed somewhat now and a rather spotty youth peered at Maxwell from the Perspex anonymity of an entrance booth just inside the front door.

  ‘You a member?’ the youth asked with all the charm of a pit bull.

  ‘No,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I’m just sampling the place.’

  ‘That’ll be six pound fifty.’

  ‘No, no,’ Maxwell smiled at the lad. ‘Sampling the club, not buying the premises.’

  Either the spotty lad had heard them all before or he was a stranger to levity. ‘Six pound fifty, please,’ he said.

  Ah, the magic word. Maxwell was a sucker for Old World niceties and he coughed up. ‘What do I do?’ he asked.

  ‘Turn left through there,’ the lad pointed to the end of the corridor. ‘You’ll see what’s available on the wall. You’re not going swimming, are you?’

  ‘Er … I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘No, it’s just that I gotta ask about verrucas and that; whether you got any.’

  ‘Well, I did have one an old aunt left me. Took it to the Antiques Roadshow a while back. But I put the damn thing down a while ago and can I find it?’ he winked at the lad. ‘You have a nice evening, now.’

  Maxwell perused the hearty things on offer on the huge notice-board at the bottom of the stairs. From beyond the double doors he heard the tell-tale squeal of trainers on polished floors and the erratic high-pitched thud of squash balls on walls. The odd ‘Fuck!’
reminded him of the appalling agony as that malevolent bit of rubber hit his own flesh for the first time years before, when the Cantab sports clubs beckoned. He turned left, past lockers without number where flab fighters hung their day clothes before doing battle with their chocolate addiction.

  ‘Well, well,’ he heard the voice before he saw the silhouette ahead of him, a towel round its neck. ‘Tripped over any good bodies lately?’

  ‘Dr Astley. It’s been a while.’

  ‘It has.’ The police surgeon sauntered into the light, considerably more crimson than when Maxwell had seen him last. ‘I didn’t know you were a member.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Just heard about the place and was idly curious. You?’

  ‘Oh, a spot of squash. My club’s having a bit of a face lift at the moment, so I thought I’d give this place a whirl. Rather inferior, I think you’ll find.’ His deferential whisper rang down the corridor.

  ‘Is there a bar here?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I should bloody well hope so,’ Astley chuckled.

  ‘Well, lifting a tincture is about all my right arm can take this evening. Time for a drink?’

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Astley’s eyes narrowed behind his specs, ‘the last time we met, you thoroughly spoiled a little private evening I was having with a few friends.’

  ‘Did I?’ Maxwell was all innocence. ‘I’m most dreadfully sorry. Let me make amends by getting the first round.’

  ‘You were quizzing me then about a murder, I seem to remember.’

  ‘Was I?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘How history repeats itself. This way?’

  Peter Maxwell knew Jim Astley of old. The pair had never liked each other, but that was the way of it. Armed with Disraeli’s famous dictum about royalty and flattery and a trowel, Maxwell went to work with all the gung-ho of Alan Titchmarsh.

  ‘But what I can’t understand,’ he leaned forward, frowning, twisting his lips, the lost student at the knee of the master, ‘is why the old girl was frozen.’

  ‘She’d been kept in a deep-freeze, old boy,’ Astley was lolling back in Beauregard’s bar, the brandy swilling around the base of his glass. This was his second. Sleuthing was costing Peter Maxwell a fortune.