Maxwell’s Flame (12 page)

‘I bloody well was not!’ Harper-Bennet was adamant. ‘I sensed she wasn’t too keen, so I let it go.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘Well, of course that’s it.’

‘Why didn’t you go to the police, when the blackmail note appeared, I mean?’

‘I told you. I assumed it was Greg. I didn’t want to get him into trouble. I intended to tackle him about it the next morning. Only the next morning Rachel King was found dead and I forgot all about it.’

‘So what did you do with the note itself?’

‘Put it in the top drawer … where you found it. Now, you answer my questions, Maxwell.’ Harper-Bennet jabbed the Head of Sixth Form in the waistcoat. ‘How did you come by that note?’ And he didn’t give Maxwell time to answer before he’d answered for him. ‘You stole it, that’s how. You broke into my room, stole the note and now you come here accusing me of God-knows-what kind of perversion and murder. Well, you can go to hell, Peter Maxwell.’ Harper-Bennet jabbed his man again. ‘And on your way there, expect a letter from my solicitor.’

And he was gone. Maxwell tucked the lacy panties into his pocket and waved at the trampoline team on the floor below.

A tall kid sat in the steamed-up 2CV in the car-park. ‘Did you find Trant?’ Maxwell jerked open the door.

‘Teaching all day,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded, shaking the surplus water off his panama and closing the door, ‘one of Those Days. Thursday’s mine. Duty day and not a free period in sight. I teach all day and then have my weekly session with the First Deputy – six hours at the chalk face followed by two at the shit face. Oh,’ he glanced in the mirror, ‘and talking of face …’

‘What?’

‘There appears to be egg all over mine.’

‘Why?’ She turned the ignition.

‘Because Alan Harper-Bennet isn’t our man.’

‘Not?’ She frowned at him.

‘Not,’ he smoothed down the more unruly elements in his hair, ‘unless my thirty-one years of psychiatry has let me down.’

‘Shouldn’t that be psychology, Max?’ Sally peered behind to reverse out of the Nurse’s space.

‘Psychiatry is the study of the disordered, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘I suppose, yes,’ she said.

‘Thirty-one years of psychiatry, then,’ he said. ‘No, I just got the impression that Mr Harper-B. is not the weirdo we surmised.’

‘But the pool …?’

‘Well, that was somebody,’ Maxwell said. ‘I agree that panties don’t walk away by themselves. It may even now have been Harper-Bennet, but the note … I don’t think he was the original recipient of it.’

‘Why?’

‘As I told you back at the Carnforth, a murderer wouldn’t leave evidence like that lying around. He’d destroy it. Distance himself from motive. Harper-Bennet said he thought Trant wrote it.’

‘Trant?’ Sally crashed her gears with the ease that years of experience had given her.

‘According to Harper-Bennet, the man’s a practical joker – a sort of Laurel, Hardy, the Marx Brothers and the Keystone Kops all rolled into one.’

‘Struck me as rather a boring old fart,’ Sally said.

‘Me too,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Where are we going, by the way, Sal?’

‘Well, there’s quite a decent pub in Wheathampstead, if I remember rightly. You’re paying.’

‘Oh, goodie!’ Maxwell clapped his hands together.

‘Then we can wander around the countryside for a bit, if the rain lets up, before looking for Verender House.’

‘Verender House?’

‘The home of one Andrew Moreton, PhD,’ Sally beamed triumphantly.

‘How did you …?’

She tapped the side of her nose and the 2CV swerved alarmingly to the right. ‘I went back to make my peace with the ladies of the office,’ she said, ‘and I used my Learning Support skills to read staff addresses upside down on the desk.’

‘Brilliant. Sal,’ Maxwell was suddenly serious, ‘you’re not going to break in, are you? To Moreton’s place, I mean? With your flexible friend? Or the crowbar you habitually carry in that carpet bag of yours?’

‘No need,’ she said, ‘he’s out on bail. We’re all going to have a nice little chat. Now, far more importantly, I think I’ll have the lasagne for lunch.’

Verender House stood well back from the road. It was a rather grand baroque sort of place with the multiplicity of styles the Edwardians loved. There were the spiralling chimneys of Compton Whinyates, the brave arches of George Nash and over it all the measure and reason of Edward Lutyens.

‘You won’t get in,’ a gentleman of the press had assured them, pulling his yellow hood closer around his head. ‘We’ve all tried. Who’re you with?’

‘
Horse and Hound
.’ Maxwell tipped his hat and ran the gamut of puddles in the wobbling wake of Sally Greenhow, for all the world like something out of Challenge Anneka. She pulled the bell-pull, once Maxwell had explained to her what it was. No reply.

‘He’s in there, all right,’ Maxwell said. ‘There wouldn’t be the entire contents of Fleet Street or wherever they make newspapers nowadays ranged around his grounds if the bugger was out. Dr Moreton!’ he bellowed through the letter box. ‘It’s Peter Maxwell. And Sally Greenhow. Might we have a word?’

The two shivered in Moreton’s portico. The weather had turned with a vengeance now and the rain was clearly in for the day. The view wasn’t brilliant. A fishing rod lay discarded against the wall and a pair of green wellies. Beyond the gravel of the drive, the lawns stretched away to a line of oaks and the ring of paparazzi on the ridge, like some hostile army deploying for the fray.

‘Maxwell?’ a muffled voice called from beyond the door. ‘What do you want?’

‘A word,’ Maxwell repeated.

‘I’ve been told to speak to no one,’ the disembodied voice responded.

‘We aren’t anybody,’ Maxwell wheedled, ‘and anyway, we might be your only lifeline.’

There was a pause. Then a bang. And the rattle of bolts. The door swung back and a haggard Head of Science stood there. He didn’t appear to have slept for the last decade.

‘I can’t give you long,’ Moreton told them, scanning the photographers and reporters at the gate. ‘I’ve got my solicitor coming.’ And they ducked inside.

‘Fuck me,’ whistled the gentleman of the press. ‘He’s talking to
Horse and Hound
!’

‘Yeah,’ his nearest colleague spat out his fag. ‘Which of them was the hound, would you say?’

Verender House from the inside was a huge, leaking barn of a place. Moreton, even under suspicion of murder, retained the banalities of all humans, whatever their predicament. He apologized for the mess. His charlady had gone and he wasn’t finding it easy. There was family money but it hadn’t come his way. He’d just been about to put the place on the market when all this had happened. It was far too big for one man, anyway. Mowing the lawn was a major project.

He led them into a dining-room where ancient furniture lay at odd angles. One corner of the settee was supported by a pile of Moreton’s remainders. Though Maxwell didn’t think it the moment to tax him on the subject, Moreton would have been forced to admit that his
The Krebs Cycle and its Place in the Environment
was not exactly a runaway bestseller. But it propped up furniture beautifully.

‘Coffee?’ he offered, rather half-heartedly.

‘Charmed,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘You regretted, Dr Moreton, that you and I hadn’t had the chance to get better acquainted at the Carnforth Centre. I thought I’d offer you that chance now.’

‘I’m not sure now is a good time, Mr Maxwell,’ the Head of Science muttered. Mechanically, in the cold kitchen, he sprinkled Maxwell House into three cups and switched on the kettle. ‘Have seats, won’t you? You said something about a lifeline?’ Moreton was looking at Sally as he said this and she felt suddenly lost, out of her depth. She didn’t know this man; had barely spoken to him, yet she could read all the pain etched on his face like an open book. For a moment, her nerve failed her. And she was a kid again.

‘He did,’ she said, pointing at Maxwell. ‘He said it.’

12

‘So,’ Peter Maxwell lolled back in the exquisitely uncomfortable chair at the Hurlington Motel, ‘it’s about now,’ he checked out of the rain-dashed window, ‘that Norman Bates comes to offer you a sandwich and a glass of milk. And you say, “No thanks, I’d rather be knifed to death in the shower and so star in one of the great cult scenes of all time.”’

‘If that was Janet Leigh,’ Sally said, unwrapping a new twenty-pack, ‘I have to say, Max, it wasn’t very good.’

‘If it had been, you’d have been right. As it happens, it was a perfectly masterly Alfred Hitchcock.’

‘You haven’t given me your verdict on Dr Moreton,’ she reminded him, mechanically flicking through the channels with her black plastic remote. Peter Sissons was being particularly patronizing while reading the news and
Only When I Laugh
hadn’t been particularly side-splitting the first time round, let alone the third. When Clive Anderson grinned broadly at her as a third option she crossed herself and switched off.

‘All right,’ Maxwell crossed his legs on Sally’s bed, ‘what do we know? First of all, he was surprisingly forthcoming, for a man who’d been told to talk to nobody, I mean.’

‘He’s scared, Max.’ Sally flicked into the ashtray. ‘You could see it in his face.’

‘You’re a softie, Sally Greenhow,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘A big girl’s blouse.’

‘Well, he’s on his own, Max. You must know how that feels. His family were obviously something once, great big house and so on. Suddenly, it’s all collapsing around his ears and he’s Head of Science in a fourteenth-rate comprehensive.’

‘But he’s an arrogant sonofabitch with it,’ Maxwell observed. ‘A straight old-fashioned BSc would have done for the job he’s doing. But no, he has to get a PhD.’

‘Jealous?’ Sally twitted him.

‘I turned mine down/Maxwell told her. ‘Just like I sent my OBE back. Bad enough for anyone to buy Jeffrey Archer’s books, but when they made him a lord, well, that was the last straw. What did surprise me, though, about old Jelly Roll was the way he coughed about clocking that woman – oh, sorry, I’ve been watching re-runs of Minder recently; I mean, the way he admitted to hitting the lady who beat him at squash.’

‘Yes,’ Sally mused, ‘that was a little odd, wasn’t it? Even odder for him to leave Basingstoke because of it.’

‘Small-town morality,’ Maxwell said. ‘Whiff of scandal like that. Some people can’t take it.’

‘Nowhere to hide in Basingstoke, eh?’ Sally smiled.

‘Know what I think?’ Maxwell rubbed his chin between the whiskers. ‘I think our Dr Moreton has a yellow streak a mile wide.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s afraid of responsibility. A Doctor of Biology shouldn’t be working at the John Bunyan.’

‘He did go for an interview on the day Liz Striker was murdered. That must say something for the man.’

‘Perhaps,’ Maxwell nodded, ‘though we’ve only got his word for that. But you’ve got the leaving of Basingstoke thing. Couldn’t cope with that situation at all. There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

‘What about that, Max?’ she asked. ‘It gives Moreton a perfect alibi for Liz. He told us he wasn’t there.’

‘Where was he on interview for this World Health job, did he say?’

Sally shook her head. ‘We didn’t think to ask,’ she said.

‘No,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Well, we’re absolute beginners in some respects. A bloody pipe, complete with human hair, is found in Moreton’s bag. He doesn’t know how it got there.’

‘He blamed the police,’ Sally said, ‘for framing him.’

‘Well,’ Maxwell’s eyes narrowed, ‘it’s true every other time.’

‘No, no,’ Sally shook her head, ‘that’s not what you’re thinking. I’ve got used to your devious little face, Max. Where’s your mind going now?’

‘Out of the window,’ Maxwell nodded, curling his lip. ‘Alan Harper-Bennet said the blackmail note was slipped under his door.’

‘Right.’ Sally was with him so far.

‘Andrew Moreton didn’t explain how the murder weapon got into his bag.’

‘Well, presumably,’ Sally reasoned, ‘you can’t slip an iron pipe under a door.’

‘No,’ Maxwell agreed, ‘you break in. Or you put it there while the room’s occupant’s back is turned.’

‘Which brings us back to the bent policeman.’

‘Or the practical joker.’

‘Trant!’

‘Who was teaching all day.’

‘Whose address is 63, Morningside Crescent, Luton.’

‘Sally Greenhow,’ Maxwell said, ‘remind me to put you forward for the New Year’s Honours List. Whoever wrote the blackmail note gave it to Trant. Trant already had the murder weapon stashed in his room somewhere. What a crafty move, what a whizzo wheeze. He passes one to Alan Harper-Bennet, the other to Andrew Moreton. Two birds with two stones. And while the police are questioning them and chasing their own tails, he’s away and laughing.’

‘Except that I intercepted the note, by accident.’

‘Well, if you call rifling Alan Harper-Bennet’s private property an accident, yes, I suppose so. By the way, when his solicitor’s letter arrives, I’m passing it to you, OK?’

‘Not until he’s passed my knickers to me,’ she said.

‘You still think it’s him?’ Maxwell asked.

‘I don’t know/Sally said. ‘I only know I felt a real presence in that pool, Max. Evil. Sheer evil. There’s no other word for it.’

‘Trant,’ Maxwell said softly, ‘Trant is another word for it. Goodnight, Sal. I’ll be next door if you need me. Oh,’ he paused in the doorway, ‘and if a rather wizened old girl in a rocking chair appears, hot foot from the fruit cellar, and calls you Norman, run like hell!’

They divided in order to conquer the next morning, Friday. Liz Striker had been dead for eight days, Rachel King for four. For Malcolm and McBride, established in their new incident room at Ashford, it was early days. They had not yet reached the first plateau that inevitably marked any murder enquiry. But mistakes had been made. Bum-Bum Malcolm was hastening very slowly. He didn’t want any more.

For Sally and Maxwell, there was an aching sense of working in a void. In Maxwell’s case, it was like trying to teach Napoleon without knowing the first thing about the man – rather as Paul Moss must feel most days, Maxwell mused. He didn’t know what the police knew. He was looking for a needle in a haystack. And he was looking in the dark.

And over it all he kept seeing the smiling face of Rachel King. In his mind, she was walking with him on the shingle along the Dungeness coast, the wind in her hair. Or lying in the cool grass of a Cambridge summer, listening to the whisper of the water. Only once did he see her that last day, the day he’d lost her for the first time, the day he told her it was over. It had been raining, it seemed, for ever, but that night of their last May Ball was the loveliest he’d seen and the glittering glass ball flashed firefly light along the Backs. And when he told her it was over she was holding his hand and running his finger around her lips and she bit down hard so that her teeth were bloody. And she’d said in a voice he’d never forget, ‘I hate you, Peter Maxwell.’ And he shook himself free of the memory and went in search of Gregory Trant.

Maxwell and Sally had had words that morning. She wanted to tackle Trant. What possible use could Phyllida Bowles be? Maxwell agreed, probably not a lot, but if Trant was their man, he’d killed two women already. It just wasn’t safe. And Maxwell had made a promise, albeit by proxy, to Alan Greenhow. Gregory Trant was a Second Deputy, a sort of Dan Quayle of the British education system. In some schools, they oversee the pastoral work of the Year or House teams, liaising with outside agencies like welfare and social services. In others, they do the timetable. In others – and the John Bunyan turned out to be one of these – no one knows what the bloody hell they do.

The man’s office was quite difficult to find, up stairs and along corridors, but at least the sun was shining again today and Maxwell was shown up by a monosyllabic youth with a prefect’s badge pinned to his scrawny chest.

‘Gregory!’ Maxwell hailed the man like a long-lost brother. The swivel-eyed git had a swivel chair too and he swung it round to greet the Head of Sixth Form.

‘Max!’ Trant extended a hand. ‘Thank you, George,’ he called after the already retreating prefect. ‘Oh, George?’ The boy turned. ‘Flies,’ and he pointed a finger at the lad’s nether regions. The lad looked down, only to hear Trant chuckle as he closed the door.

‘Gets him every time,’ the Deputy said. ‘Have a seat, Max. Can I offer you an indescribable cup of coffee?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Now, I know why you’re here.’ Trant switched off the computer he was working on. ‘Oh, bugger, just wiped the entire Year 10 records there. Never mind. Those women in the office don’t have enough to do, anyway.’

‘Do you?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Do I what? Have enough to do? God, yes.’

‘No,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I mean, do you know why I’ve come?’

‘Yes. Or at least the gist of it. I had Alan Harper-Bennet bleeding his heart all over my carpet yesterday. Seems you accused him of being a knicker-sniffer, murderer and so on. I haven’t seen him so annoyed since I locked him in the shower last term.’

‘Oh, I think Alan’s over-reacting,’ Maxwell smiled, trying to decide which one of Trant’s roving eyes was actually doing the seeing.

‘I must admit, I do find it a little bizarre,’ Trant said.

‘What?’

‘You asking all these questions.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, it’s the job of the police, isn’t it? You don’t actually have any right.’

‘No,’ Maxwell agreed, ‘no more than somebody had the right to cave in the skulls of Liz Striker and Rachel King.’

‘Oh, quite, but –’

‘You’ll forgive me for saying this,’ Maxwell leaned forward so that the sun was out of his eyes, ‘but you appear to be more … how can I put it? Extrovert than you were at Carnforth.’

‘Really?’ Trant chuckled. ‘Well, I wasn’t well last week. Had a bug or something. It’s doing the rounds here. When I wasn’t actually at lectures or sessions at Carnforth, I was getting my head down. And I don’t mind confessing the sight of poor old Liz Striker in the stock cupboard wasn’t exactly a bundle of laughs.’

‘You were there on the Thursday, when Liz Striker died?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Look, Max –’

‘Humour me, Gregory,’ Maxwell cut in, sensing the man’s reluctance. ‘I hear you have something of a reputation as a humorist.’

‘Well, you know how it is,’ Trant said. ‘“You don’t have to be mad to work here …”’

Maxwell nodded. He was mad and he didn’t work there. ‘So,’ he said quietly, ‘Thursday.’

‘Thursday.’ Trant shut his eyes to remember. ‘We got there in the minibus about eleven. Phyllida was keen to get her photocopying done –’

‘Photocopying?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Yes. We had a presentation to give. As a school with some GNVQ experience. Phyllida’s a nice woman, Max, but she has the organizational abilities of a gerbil. She hadn’t had time to photocopy bits and pieces, so she used Carnforth’s.’

‘What time was that?’

‘I don’t know. Lunchtime? Yes, it must have been, because she was late in to lunch and said that’s where she’d been.’

‘Did you go down to the basement?’

‘No. My end of the presentation was the display boards. We had all those in the bus so I spent the day unloading and setting up. Alan Harper-B. was with me. By about three I’d had enough. I was feeling deathly, so I went to have a lie-down.’

‘In Room number …?’

‘Er … 218, I think. Yes, it was.’

‘Did you know Liz Striker beforehand?’

‘No. In fact, I didn’t ever meet her. Looking back, she must have been the woman I saw talking to Michael Wynn and that vicar bloke – Whatsisface? Gracebrothers?’

‘Gracewell.’

‘That’s right,’ Trant clicked his fingers. ‘That was when we arrived.’

‘Does this look familiar?’ Maxwell rummaged in his jacket pocket and handed Trant a letter, the second of his photocopies. The Second Deputy read it. ‘No,’ he frowned. ‘Should it?’

‘That’s a copy, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘The original was found in Alan Harper-Bennet’s room on the night after Rachel King died.’

‘Really? Well, well, well. What is it?’

‘Quite obviously a blackmail note, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Ho, ho, ho. Well, I don’t want to be a bitch, Max, but I can quite see why Alan was so miffed. You thought he was being blackmailed.’

‘It did occur,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘So you locked Alan in the shower last term?’

‘Eh? Oh, yes, yes.’ Trant was still looking at the letter.

‘Make a habit of this sort of thing, do you?’

‘Well, it passes the time.’

‘Like embarrassing boy George there a minute ago?’

‘Oh, he’s used to it. No harm meant.’

‘Bit different with murder though, isn’t it?’ Maxwell asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ Trant said, ‘I don’t follow.’

‘Alan says that someone slipped it under his door.’

‘Well,’ Trant giggled, ‘he would, wouldn’t he?’

Maxwell had heard better Mandy Rice-Davieses.

‘I also talked to Dr Moreton yesterday.’

‘Andrew? How is the poor old bastard? I heard he was out. Why did the police hold him?’

‘Oh, come now, Greg, me ol’ mucker, you and I both know you know the answer to that one.’

‘Come again?’ Trant frowned.

‘The iron pipe with the bloody tape wrapped round it. A conventional piece of scaffolding, such as you have on your science block out there, for instance,’ Maxwell pointed to the building work in progress through Trant’s window, ‘adorned, for a better grip, no doubt, by the sort of gaffer tape you doubtless use in your school shows’ electrical set-up. What did you do this year?’

‘Er … Oliver.’

‘Yes/Maxwell nodded, ‘I somehow knew it would be.’

‘What are you saying, exactly?’

‘My, my,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘we are obtuse today. Must be why you’re only a Second Deputy, Greg.’

‘Now, look –’ The renowned humorist appeared to have lost his sense of humour.

‘The bottom line, Greg,’ Maxwell wasn’t smiling either, ‘is that someone caved in the head of Liz Striker because he thought she was blackmailing him. Why, I don’t know. When he realized his mistake, he demolished Rachel King’s skull likewise –’