Maxwell’s Flame Read online

  ‘There were three blows,’ the doctor said, spreading his marmalade with a sure hand. ‘The first was delivered from behind and to the right, horizontally, while the victim was still standing. I would say the killer is right-handed and a little taller than the late Mrs Striker, but I can’t be sure on that point. This first blow would have caused a radial fracture of the parietal area of the skull and almost certainly extensive haemorrhaging. She was probably still standing when the second blow fell.’ Anderson slurped his coffee. ‘Bugger, that’s hot. Marmalade?’

  ‘No thanks, sir,’ McBride declined.

  ‘The second blow was like unto the first, but from a different angle, probably because the victim was falling to her left. This one wasn’t quite as powerful, but it struck the top of her head, the occipital. Mrs Striker must have been nearing unconsciousness now and probably kneeling when the final blow was delivered. This one was the most powerful of all, probably two-handed, and it came from directly above, shattering the top of the skull. There was a hole about two centimetres in diameter. I couldn’t reassemble the bits, they’re too fragmented, scattered in the hair. That clinched, it, of course. You don’t get up again after a smack like that.’

  ‘Would there have been a lot of blood?’

  ‘Oh yes. The head bleeds like buggery, of course. Our man would be fairly covered in it.’

  ‘And the attack didn’t happen in the store cupboard where she was found?’

  ‘Lord, no.’ Anderson blew again on his coffee. ‘No room. I’d say she was battered in the corridor and dragged there. Your boys will be able to pinpoint that forensically.’

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s not easy.’ Anderson rose to attend to the toast slowly smouldering in his toaster. ‘Fucking thing!’ he snapped and hit it to retrieve his burnt offering. ‘Laymen think a thermometer up the bum says it all. It doesn’t. My guess – and that’s all it is at this stage – is that she died sometime during Thursday afternoon. I can’t be more accurate than that.’

  ‘That’ll do me,’ McBride said, swigging back the last of his coffee. ‘Thank you, doctor.’

  ‘Going so soon?’ Anderson had sat back to wrestle with another pack of butter. ‘You’ve only just got here.’

  ‘Needs must,’ McBride winked, ‘when Mr Warren drives.’

  Anderson snorted. ‘Man’s got a fucking clock for a heart,’ he said. ‘Can you find your own way?’

  ‘Of course. Thank you, sir. I appreciate your time.’

  Anderson scowled. ‘Time, young man, is my least precious commodity. Years of experience, pearls of wisdom, keenness of eye, steadiness of hand – these things I’m paid for and you should be grateful for. Now, off you fuck. I’ve got to try to spread this fucking butter.’

  Breakfast at the Carnforth Centre took place a little later than it had at Dr Anderson’s. Maxwell got there a fraction after eight and felt his eyebrows singeing as he leaned over to point to a particularly delicious-looking fried egg. The floozy behind the brightly lit counter then ruined it all by slapping it down on the fried bread and breaking the yolk. The sausages looked palatable, but even Maxwell’s constitution rebelled at the black pudding and he wandered with his tray into the Hadleigh Suite.

  There was an edge to the hubbub he hadn’t noticed yesterday. But that was then. Before they’d found her body. Now, between the enforced bonhomie, there were little darting glances; small, almost imperceptible swivels of the eye. And when there was a lull, it seemed to Maxwell to be full of sound – the sound of everybody watching everybody else. So much for the team-building exercises planned for later. If anybody intended to ruin a conference like this, a murder was the best way to do it. For a moment, Maxwell thought he might have killed Liz Striker himself.

  An arm was waving to him from the window side of the room. Rachel King sat with Michael Wynn, drinking coffee. Maxwell nodded and shuffled his way past the knot of plain-clothes policemen who sat apart at a table of their own, apparently eating breakfast; actually observing the Carnforth clientele.

  ‘Morning,’ Maxwell said, sitting opposite the pair from St Bede’s. ‘Doesn’t this remind you of an old George Raft movie? With the guards over there and us cons in our striped suits. It’s about now that some ox tips his slop over somebody, and in the confusion, Raft slips Cagney a file. Then somebody says, “Give me a break, warden,” and the young Elisha Cook goes over the top in all sorts of ways.’

  ‘Good morning, Max,’ Rachel said, leaning forward and smiling at him over her coffee.

  He paused in mid-raconte. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘was I rambling?’

  ‘Just a threat,’ she nodded.

  ‘Bit on edge, I suppose.’

  ‘We all are,’ Wynn sighed. ‘I just can’t get over this.’

  ‘Are you leaving today, Max?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘No,’ he told her, sugaring his coffee. ‘I told Warren I’d stay till Monday.’

  ‘You know they’re going on with the course, don’t you?’ Wynn asked, passing Maxwell the salt.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I’m a Deputy Principal,’ Wynn winked. ‘We’re always serious.’

  Maxwell guffawed. It was a little out of place perhaps and he had the grace to grimace to the top table. An inscrutable-looking WPC glowered back at him.

  ‘Been at St Bede’s long?’ Maxwell asked Wynn.

  ‘Ten years,’ Wynn told him, ‘though in the silent watches of the night it sometimes seems for ever.’

  Maxwell knew that feeling.

  ‘I was Head of Geography before that.’

  Maxwell didn’t know that feeling at all. To Maxwell, being Head of Geography must be rather akin to being a leper. The news certainly killed that conversation outright.

  ‘Been at the budgie seed again, Rachel?’ he asked his old flame, peering into her nearly empty bowl.

  ‘That’s muesli,’ she said. ‘I just wasn’t very hungry.’

  ‘I never remember you eating that in the ’60s.’ He tackled his bacon manfully.

  ‘I’m not sure it was around in the ’60s. Besides, I wore jeans then – and I had a beehive hairdo.’

  ‘Da Doo Ron Ron!’ Maxwell winked at her.

  ‘Of course,’ Wynn said, leaning over his coffee, ‘you two go back a way, don’t you? Rachel said something about it yesterday.’

  ‘Ah,’ she smiled at Maxwell. ‘Dear dead days.’

  He looked at her and nodded. Why on earth did that still happen? Why did he have that churning feeling inside? That catch in the pit of his stomach? That flutter of the heart? He was fifty-three years old, for God’s sake, crustier than a Coburg. But it did still happen and he couldn’t help it.

  ‘What sort of woman was she?’ he asked Wynn.

  ‘Who?’ The Deputy Principal of St Bede’s seemed oddly inattentive. But then, Maxwell remembered, he had been Head of Geography.

  ‘Elizabeth Striker.’ Maxwell realized he’d better explain.

  ‘Liz? Oh, salt of the earth,’ Wynn said. ‘She was Head of Family Studies.’

  ‘Is that cooking?’ Maxwell looked to Rachel for help. He caught the light in Michael Wynn’s eyes. It was one he’d seen before. Often. The light of a member of the establishment being appalled by Maxwell’s political incorrectness.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Wynn said. ‘Liz was very keen to establish GNVQ. She’s done all the spade work herself.’

  ‘Known her long?’

  ‘All the time I’ve been at St Bede’s.’

  ‘Part of the furniture, was Liz,’ Rachel nodded, gazing into the middle distance. ‘We’ll miss her terribly.’

  Wynn nodded. ‘That we will,’ he said. ‘It’s Jordan I’m most worried about.’

  ‘Jordan?’ Maxwell echoed him.

  ‘I passed him in the corridor last night. He didn’t seem to see me at all. I said hello …’

  ‘As you do,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘As you do,’ Wynn agreed, ‘and it was as though he d
idn’t hear me either. I felt like a bloody ghost.’

  ‘He was the one who was looking for Liz,’ Maxwell said. ‘He asked me.’

  ‘He asked us all,’ Rachel remembered.

  ‘Were they close?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I think they were,’ Rachel said. ‘You’d certainly see them in the corner of the staff room locked in some deep, meaningful conversation.’

  ‘Jordan had his problems,’ Wynn said, ‘when he first joined us, I mean. Couldn’t cope with Class 3B – that sort of thing. Liz – and I don’t think this is too strong a word – Liz saved him. Or saved his sanity at any rate.’

  ‘He’s all right now?’ Maxwell said.

  Wynn raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, it’s all relative, Max, isn’t it? Let’s say he can teach the Catechism like a good ’un. There’ve been fewer complaints, let’s put it that way.’

  ‘Is there a Mr Striker?’

  ‘Leonard, yes,’ Rachel said. ‘Works for a computer firm. Such a nice bloke. He’ll be devastated.’

  Leonard Striker held his wife’s hand for one last time. She was covered in a green sheet and there was another one over the top of her head. Only her right hand trailed beneath the cover. Only her face lay pale, so pale on the mortuary pillow. Her eyes were closed, but puffy and purple with the bruising. They’d cleaned her up for him, of course. So that he couldn’t see the shattered cranium or the work of Anderson’s disc saws.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in a voice stronger than he’d hoped, ‘yes, it’s her.’ Somehow he couldn’t bear to say her name. Because saying it would have sent him over the edge. And he would have cried. Broken down. And it wasn’t in Leonard Striker’s nature to do that. Least of all in front of strangers. And for the first time in his life he was grateful for the fact that he and Liz had not been able to have kids after all.

  He turned away. Out into the corridor where a balding police detective shook his hand, muttering something to the effect that he would get him, however long it took. Out into the car-park where the rain was already falling on the tarmac and forming puddles on the uneven surface. Out into the rest of his life.

  ‘What a bloody miserable world,’ McBride muttered, watching him go.

  ‘It’s a formality.’ Warren watched him too. ‘That’s all. Just one more little step in the right direction.’

  McBride threw a sideways glance at his guv’nor. There were times when he didn’t want to be a Chief Inspector at all.

  5

  Lupine was how Peter Maxwell described Lydia Farr. Not to her face, of course. Nor indeed to anyone else’s. It was one of those inner pronouncements that crusty old bachelors make to themselves and stick with because there is no one to qualify, no one to contradict. She wasn’t lupine in character; on the contrary, Maxwell wasn’t aware of her until he’d heard she’d fainted at the sight of Liz Striker’s corpse. It was just her face and her weird, yellow eyes. When she smiled, Lydia reminded Maxwell of ‘Mad Jack’ Nicholson, just before his axe came crashing through the door in The Shining. She had that aura of insanity about her, that mask of mania.

  In fact, Lydia Farr was a tangle of emotions and she always had been. The fat kid had been laughed at and teased by the boys and even when the puppy fat left her and puberty raised its ugly head, they laughed at her acne. There was no Mr Farr. Yet Lydia had not given up. Now in her thirty-somethingth year, she still joined karate classes and went to singles bars because that was where you found men. And habitually, she took herself down off the shelf of celibacy and dusted herself and put on her bravest face for the world.

  It was a long, pointed face, with a long, pointed nose. It didn’t remind John McBride of a wolf. It reminded him of the witch in the book that was now compulsory bedtime reading for little Sam. For little Sam McBride wouldn’t go to sleep until his dad had read to him the bit about the witch and how she had lured the hapless Hansel and Gretel to her gingerbread house in the woods. But this witch had been crying. She held a handkerchief in her bony hands and sat as still as she could facing the two detectives.

  A cold WPC sat at her elbow, compulsory under the new police code of practice, but as much use as a colander in a shipwreck.

  ‘We don’t want to distress you,’ McBride told her, ‘but we need to establish a few things.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Tell us about the finding of the body,’ he said softly. John McBride was nearly thirty. He’d done well to get to Detective Inspector, one of those pushy, degreed types his guv’nor had quietly complained to Maxwell about. What was left of his curly blond hair was wreathed in Lydia Farr’s cigarette smoke and his eyes were clear and patient.

  ‘I told him,’ Lydia said, pointing to Stony Warren beside McBride with a quick jerk of her finger.

  ‘I know,’ the Inspector said, ‘but you’d be surprised how, if you repeat something, some little fact emerges; something you hadn’t mentioned before. It probably won’t help, but it might be something vital.’

  ‘All right.’ She drew herself up as though facing a walk to the gallows and closed her eyes. Only the cigarette twitched in her endlessly fidgeting fingers. McBride looked at Warren. The tape was running.

  ‘We were on a problem-solving exercise. We had to erect a shelter, a sort of survival hut thing, on the beach, from any bits and pieces we could find. It was to test the ingenuity of the group, I think. Anyway, it came on to rain and Alan and I –’

  ‘Alan?’ McBride interrupted, for the benefit of the tape.

  ‘Alan Harper-Bennet. We decided to run back to the centre. It seemed the obvious place. Gregory Trant was there too, although some distance behind.’

  ‘What made you take the side door?’ Warren spoke for the first time.

  ‘Er …’ His interruption threw Lydia for a moment, but she quickly regained her composure. ‘I don’t know. The rain, I suppose. It was bucketing down. It was the first door I saw.’

  ‘It’s down some steps, isn’t it?’ McBride asked.

  ‘That’s right. I half expected it to be locked.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’

  ‘No. No. I opened it.’ Lydia’s concentration showed now in her face. If she were walking in her mind those deadly paces to the gallows, it was now she saw the noose for the first time. She blinked several times, her throat tightening. The WPC beside her saw the handkerchief tighten in the woman’s fist. ‘The door ahead of me was open.’ Lydia could see it clearly, her head cocked to one side, a quizzical expression on her face. ‘I remember … I remember there was water in my eyes. Rain. It stung. There was a pile of paper, still wrapped in ream boxes. And beyond them was … beyond them …’

  She felt the touch of a hand on hers. It was Stony Warren’s; and no one was more surprised than he that it was.

  ‘I … don’t really remember the rest. I do remember being taken past … it … along the corridor. Presumably Alan was leading me away. I think I screamed …’

  ‘… the bloody place down,’ Alan Harper-Bennet concurred. Miles Warren slouched in his chair, his own cigarette quietly burning in the ashtray in front of him. The blinds were down. The lights were on. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock in the morning and already it felt like midnight. Harper-Bennet was a solid, square-faced rugger player with sandy hair. He reminded Maxwell of the young Bill Travers before he had grown a beard, gone grey and got funny about lions. He didn’t remind Chief Inspector Warren of anybody, except of course a potential killer. The man certainly had the brawn. Shoulders like sideboards in fact. Games and Sociology loomed large on Harper-Bennet’s CV, probably in that order.

  ‘Tell me,’ MacBride said, ‘do you work out, Mr Bennet?’

  ‘I do,’ the teacher said, ‘and that’s Harper-Bennet, by the way.’

  McBride wrote something down and just sat there.

  ‘Why did you tell Miss Farr not to go that way?’ Warren asked. He hadn’t moved from his almost recumbent position, his eyes half closed in the artificial light.

  ‘What?’ Harper-Benn
et shifted those massive shoulders.

  ‘When you and Miss Farr were running for shelter, when it started to rain, she was making for the side door, the one to the ground floor, and you said …’ For effect, Warren shuffled Lydia Farr’s notes. He didn’t really have to. He knew exactly what she’d said. ‘You said, “Not down there.” Why did you say that? Mr Bennet?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t the way in. Not the main entrance, I mean. And the name is still Harper-Bennet, by the way.’

  ‘But she ignored you?’

  ‘Yes,’ the games master had to concede. ‘But I’m not sure she heard me, what with the rain and our feet on the gravel.’

  ‘But clearly she did, Mr … Harper-Bennet, because I’ve just told you what she said you said.’

  ‘Yes, well, clearly.’ Harper-Bennet cleared his throat. He didn’t like to be made a fool of. And Chief Inspector Warren was doing a very good job of that.

  ‘Have you seen a dead body before, Mr Harper-Bennet?’ McBride asked.

  ‘No. Well, my grandfather, but that hardly counts.’

  ‘All human life counts, sir,’ McBride told him.

  ‘Of course,’ Harper-Bennet blustered. ‘I didn’t mean … What I mean is …’

  ‘What did you think had happened?’ Warren cut his man up. ‘To Mrs Striker, I mean?’

  For a moment, Harper-Bennet just sat there, his mouth opening and closing. ‘I don’t really know,’ was the eventual outcome. ‘Some terrible accident, I suppose. I could see the blood.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the woman’s head.’ Harper-Bennet was holding his hand in front of his own, unsure in his recollection of it if mere words were enough.

  ‘You didn’t touch the body?’ McBride asked.

  ‘No. No. I got Lydia – Miss Farr – out of there. She was hysterical. Trant didn’t look too chipper, either. He’d joined us by this time.’

  ‘You weren’t hysterical?’ Warren asked.

  ‘Me? No,’ Harper-Bennet shrugged. ‘No, no. I was fine. Well, you know. I’m a Territorial. I’ve been around. She was out of it, you know. Screaming blue murder … Oh … I mean …’