Maxwell’s Curse (8 page)

‘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 1
^st
. 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.

‘Froze to death, eh?’ Maxwell nodded, eyes widening.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Astley hedged. Should Maxwell buy the man a third or was his vanity enough to tip him over the edge?

‘No,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘No, you’ve lost me now.’

Astley sighed. The man before him was after all only a teacher. What was it Bernard Shaw had said? Those who can become doctors, those who can’t, teach? Something like that. ‘She was poisoned, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘Death-Cap, if I’m any judge.’

Men like Jim Astley were judge and jury. Thank God British justice didn’t depend entirely on them. ‘Mushrooms?’ Maxwell blinked.

‘The knife was a red herring.’ Astley was leaning forward now, warming to his theme.

‘Knife?’

‘Yes … look, Maxwell, I mean,’ he was suddenly glancing around him, watching walls, ‘you do realize how utterly confidential all this is? I mean, you can’t use this information, you know.’

‘Of course not,’ Maxwell shrugged and folded his arms. ‘No, it’s just for my peace of mind, that’s all. After all, it’s not every night you find a body on your garden path. Tell me about the knife.’

‘Nothing much to tell,’ Astley shrugged. ‘It was double- edged, driven between her vertebrae. A downward thrust.’

‘Poison and a knife? What are we looking for, a schizophrenic?’

‘We aren’t looking for anything,’ Astley told him. He downed his brandy and snatched up the hold-all. ‘Unless of course you’re using the royal “we”, Mr Maxwell. Thanks for the drink.’

‘No problem,’ Maxwell stood up. ‘Perhaps we could have the odd game of squash, some time.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Astley said. ‘I’m not sure we’re in the same class.’

‘Oh, I am,’ Maxwell winked.

He finished his Southern Comfort as the good doctor swept away in a cloud of undiluted superiority. In the corner two tallboys were having a conversation about weight training, each of them in a lurid track suit with white silhouetted figures down the seams. The barman was drying glasses and puffing on a distinctly non-PC fag. Otherwise the place was deserted. Maxwell picked up his coat and made for the door. The corridor was dimly lit and echoed to his footfalls. He turned a corner and strode for the stairs.

Perhaps he wasn’t looking where he was going. Perhaps he was too lost in thought over the forensic facts that Astley had thrown at him. Perhaps he really believed his head was harder than Beauregard’s brickwork.

Perhaps Nostradamus had been right and the blackness that swept over him was indeed the Millennium night – the end of the world.

6

‘How are you feeling?’

The voice was muffled at first, like somebody mumbling down a tube of rolled up carpet. The face too was a blur, a badly focused camera, a shadow of a shadow. It had long hair, he was sure of that, and smelt of a warm tent in the summers of his childhood.

‘Ow!’ Ever the master of wit and repartee was Peter Maxwell.

‘Steady,’ the voice was clearer now. ‘You’ve had a nasty bump on the head. Don’t get up too quickly.’

He found himself sitting upright, his temples feeling as if they’d been squeezed through a mangle. There was a screen in front of him and a table with bloody cotton wool. A rather luscious girl was bending over him with a roll of bandage in her hand.

‘I’m not sure we’ll need this,’ she was saying.

Maxwell felt the back of his cranium and immediately wished he hadn’t. Whatever the opposite of frontal lobotomy was, he’d just had one.

‘Would it be too corny to ask where I am?’ He tried to focus on her.

‘You’re in sick bay at Beauregard’s,’ she told him. ‘A floor down from where we found you. I’m Sophie, by the way. Sophie Clark.’

‘Peter Maxwell. Are you a nurse?’

‘Please,’ the girl snorted. She was the Nordic type, with cascading blonde hair she’d recently unleashed from a braid, a grey top that stretched across a formidable chest and black Lycra cycling shorts that would have had most of Maxwell’s boys drooling. Come to think of it, they had Maxwell drooling. ‘I’m an Aerobics instructor. But I happen to have a First Aid certificate and Prissy and I were the first to find you.’

‘Prissy?’

‘Prissy Crown. She says she knows you.’

‘Not Biblically, I assure you.’

Sophie laughed, rolling up her bandage and tidying things away on a tray. ‘You mustn’t mind Prissy,’ she said. ‘She means well. Just has a thing about men, that’s all.’

Maxwell was quite relieved. At least that was men plural and not any man in particular.

‘What on earth happened to you?’ she asked him.

‘I was hoping you’d tell me.’ Maxwell experimented with turning his neck. ‘The last thing I remember is a blinding pain and I must have passed out. Did I walk into a wall? I did that once in Basingstoke. I remember being so appalled by the architecture of the place, I attempted suicide by running slap into a pillar – not of the community, you understand, a brick one.’

‘Any teeth loose?’ Sophie was pulling his lips about.

‘Not that weren’t loose before.’ He gently prised her fingers away.

‘Sorry,’ she smiled. ‘Follow my finger.’ She held it up and his dark eyes swivelled with it. ‘That’s fine. No, I really don’t know how this happened, Mr Maxwell. You’ve got one helluva lump on the back of your head and the skin’s broken. Not worth a stitch, I don’t think. The bleeding seems to have stopped. I’d have it checked though, if I were you.’

‘Casualty? No thanks, I haven’t got that long to live.’

She stood up, tall and powerful in her workout rig. ‘You weren’t walking backwards, were you?’

‘To Christmas?’ Maxwell’s Neddy Seagoon was inspired, but it was lost on Sophie Clark.

‘Max, for Christ’s sake, I’ve just heard.’ An hysterical-looking Ken Templeton crashed in, towel round his neck and looking positively flushed in a nasty turquoise track suit. ‘Are you all right? Sophie, is he all right?’

‘He’s fine, Ken,’ the girl said softly, calming him down.

How on earth did it happen?’ Ken asked, looking from one to the other.

‘Just me,’ Maxwell made light of it, ‘being a silly bugger. Sorry to be such a nuisance on my first visit.’

‘Max,’ Ken knelt in front of him like a medieval knight offering allegiance to his king. ‘We’ll waive tonight’s entrance fee. I’m sorry you were charged in the first place. It’s on the house, okay? First six months, free. What do you say?’

‘I’d say you were a man nervous of litigation, Ken,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘And don’t worry, I’m not the suing type.’

‘Oh, no,’ Ken blustered. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that, at all,’ but he did seem to Maxwell to be amazingly grateful. ‘Let me at least run you home.’

‘My bike …’ Maxwell began.

‘You can’t possibly ride that,’ Ken insisted. ‘We’ll shove it in the back of my Space Wagon.’

‘Ken …’

‘Not now, Sophie,’ her boss broke in. ‘Can’t you see Mr Maxwell’s all in?’

‘Thank you, Sophie,’ Maxwell eased himself off the couch, wobbling a little at first as his head reconnected with his feet. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

‘That’s all right,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll give your love to Prissy, shall I?’ But she wasn’t looking at Maxwell when she said it. She was looking at Ken.

The lights never burn blue in an Incident Room. When he was a kid, Henry Hall had read novels about Scotland Yard, when the detectives of yesteryear turned down the oil lamps, lit their pipes and pondered the problem, still wearing their trench coats and trilbies, looking for ‘chummy’ before they subdued him with a left hook. The men in front of him didn’t smoke pipes; neither did the women, but it was rumoured that old Jane Cruikshank did.

‘So what have we got, then?’ he asked by way of summation at the end of another long day. Through the haze of ciggie smoke, DS Stone was on his feet. This was the eighth night of the investigation, the new year just eight days old. And still the Stones waited, as the back pains worsened and the twinges continued and the clock ticked.