Maxwell’s Curse (4 page)

‘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 rasping 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 21
^st
the words ‘Thomas grey’ twice. And on the 20
^th
, 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.

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.