Maxwell’s Flame (13 page)

‘Because she was the blackmailer?’

‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell said, ‘I really don’t know. But however that turns out, our friend had a blackmail note and a murder weapon on his hands. He also had policemen swarming all over the Carnforth Centre. If he ran, they’d have him. My guess is that if he so much as left the building, he’d be followed – I was. So he couldn’t bury the bits of pipe anywhere. Then an idea occurred to him. Why not muddy the waters a bit? Why not slip the blackmail note into somebody else’s room – say Alan Harper-Bennet’s – and hide the pipe? The police would be bound to carry out a search sooner or later. And bingo! Two prime suspects.’

‘Are you saying I did that?’ Trant was astonished. ‘I framed Alan and Andrew? There are laws of slander in this country, Maxwell.’

‘Sod the laws of slander,’ Maxwell growled. ‘A woman I once loved is lying on a slab somewhere because of this, Trant. And I’m going to get to the bottom of it.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’ Trant was on his feet, the muscles in his jaw rigid. ‘I barely knew Rachel King …’

Maxwell sat back in the chair. From his left the morning sun flickered across his view of Gregory Trant. Then the Second Deputy slumped into his own chair and sat staring at the floor – and the wall.

‘That’s one little gem I bet you didn’t tell the police,’ Maxwell said.

‘It’s not important,’ Trant said.

‘You’ll forgive me if I decide that.’ Maxwell clasped his fingers across his chest.

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ Trant snapped, blinking.

‘You know how it is,’ Maxwell said. ‘No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.’

I don’t have to talk to you at all,’ Trant bellowed.

‘It’s me or the police,’ Maxwell told him. He reached for the phone. ‘Press 9, do I, for an outside line?’

‘All right,’ Trant took the receiver from him, ‘all right, you’ve made your point. What do you want to know?’

‘Your relationship with Rachel,’ Maxwell said.

‘Relationship is hardly the word for it,’ Trant said. ‘I worked with her husband, Jeremy.’

‘In teaching?’

‘No. I came late to the profession.’

Maxwell raised an eyebrow of derision. He at least had the excuse that he was young and naive when he started teaching. Going into the profession when you’re mature and with both eyes open – well, that was inexcusable.

‘Before that I was in insurance. No money in it, but somebody said the hours were good. Jeremy was my boss.’

‘And you met Rachel socially?’

‘Yes. We – my wife Gail and I – had the Kings round for dinner. We were still in Bournemouth then. I don’t want to talk ill of the dead, Maxwell, especially of someone you say you were fond of, but … well, not to put too fine a point on it, Rachel King was a bitch.’

‘Really?’ Maxwell could feel his knuckles whiten.

‘She was a first-class flirt. Gave me the come-on from that evening.’

‘The come-on?’

‘Do I have to spell this out?’ Trant grunted. ‘She got me into bed with her. Oh, it took a while. What was it? Two weeks? Three? Gail knew nothing, of course. I felt rotten about it.’

‘How very
Brief Encounter
of you.’

‘Look, Maxwell,’ Trant snarled, ‘I am, in my own warped and rather belated way, trying to help you. Now, this may not be what you wanted to hear –’

‘I want to hear the truth, for Christ’s sake,’ Maxwell shouted.

A bell punctuated the silence that fell between them and they heard that familiar sound that haunts all schools – the rumble of an army on the move, of hell on the march as children went from one lesson to the next.

‘All right,’ Trant said, ‘the truth is what you’ll get. I fancied her. Of course I did. I was twenty-three then. Gail was pregnant with Harry. The bedroom was a tad boring. Well, if you loved her, you must remember what she was like. The older woman, but a body like … Well, anyway, we’d meet whenever we could. Jeremy was often away on various financial conferences and so on. I could come and go without Gail suspecting. It worked, in a cheap sort of way. I even – and this is the daft bit – I even found myself falling in love with Rachel. One day – I seem to remember it was a Friday, like today – I went to see her, unannounced. I knew Jeremy wouldn’t be there. What I didn’t know was that Phil was.’

‘Phil?’ Maxwell frowned.

‘I think that was his name. He was wearing one of Jeremy’s bathrobes and she was in the shower. There was the most almighty scene. I managed to get her on her own and told her how I felt. Do you know what she did, Maxwell? She laughed at me. Like I was a little boy. I could have killed her.’

‘Could you?’ Maxwell asked.

Trant caught the look on his interrogator’s face. ‘That was then,’ he said quietly. ‘What? Ten, eleven years ago. I’m not talking about last week.’

‘What did you think?’ Maxwell asked after a while. ‘What did you think when you saw her again, at the Carnforth Centre?’

‘I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t seen her from that day, when we had our row. For months I kept expecting her to drop me in it, to tell Gail. In the end I left the job.’

‘Because of Rachel?’ Maxwell frowned.

‘Oh, not totally,’ Trant sighed. ‘Insurance wasn’t for me, anyway, I’d realized. Rachel King was just the icing on the cake. What did I think? I thought, “You bitch.” She was making eyes at Moreton, Harper-Bennet, had that snivelling snotnose chaplain dribbling over her. You were joined to her by the hip. When we came face to face she looked right through me. It was as if I didn’t exist. OK, so I didn’t feel on top form anyway; the flu, Liz Striker. But seeing her again, that was why I was so low last week.’

‘And now she doesn’t exist,’ Maxwell said softly.

‘You knew her before, obviously,’ Trant said.

‘Oh, yes. She was Rachel Cameron then. We were students together at Cambridge. It’s as if … as if she were a different person.’

‘Perhaps she was,’ Trant said. ‘Perhaps something made her change.’

‘Yes.’ Peter Maxwell stood up. ‘And I think that something was me.’

It was one of those sunsets that evening. One of those moments of pure magic when everything is gilded and you want it to last for ever.

‘Thank God it’s Friday,’ Sally said, watching the rooks flap homewards against the purple lines of cloud. ‘Here’s looking at you, Max.’

He raised his glass automatically and for a second it flashed in the dying sun. ‘Home tomorrow, Max?’ she asked.

He looked at her, this girl who hadn’t wanted to come. She’d phoned in sick to Leighford High the day before. All she’d wanted was her home, her husband, the comfortable routines of whining, whinging kids with attitude problems. She hadn’t wanted lies and tears and blood. But that’s what she’d got. That’s what they’d both got.

‘Home tonight if you like,’ he said.

‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘it’s getting on. And I don’t actually like driving in the dark. Look …’ She moved closer to him, shuffling forward and nudging his knuckles with hers. ‘You mustn’t read anything into what Gregory Trant said. About Rachel changing, I mean. If she sent that note to whoever she sent it to, that was her business. She had her reasons. And she’d have done it anyway, whether she’d ever met you or not.’

‘Would she, Sal?’ He looked at her. The Great Cynic was suddenly small, vulnerable. Sally Greenhow wanted to put her arms round him, hold him, tell him it was all right. ‘Would she? We’ll never know now, will we?’

And he swigged back the last of his travelling bottle of Southern Comfort.

‘You didn’t tell me,’ he said, feeling the amber nectar sting his tastebuds. ‘Phyllida Bowles. What did the fair Phyllida confide?’

‘The fair Phyllida’s taken it rather badly. Apparently she’d given up smoking,’ Sally flicked her ash vaguely in the direction of the litter bin and missed, ‘before all this. What happened at the Carnforth Centre tipped her over the edge and she’s back on thirty a day.’

‘So, between puffs and coughs, you didn’t learn very much.’

‘Well, I strolled in the grounds with her, you know, away from the kids.’

‘Always therapeutic,’ Maxwell nodded.

‘I got her talking about our colleagues on the course.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’m paraphrasing here, of course …’

‘Safer than paragliding, I’ve always found,’ Maxwell said.

‘Well, she’s always thought Andrew Moreton was unstable. You only have to hear him bawling out kids apparently – makes Attila the Hun look like the Dalai Lama.’

As an historian, Maxwell had often noted the physical similarity, but it would have spoiled Sally’s analogy had he pointed it out, so he shut up instead.

‘She’d got Trant pegged for an idiot. False fire drills and false noses aren’t her idea of professionalism apparently. Infantile was her final verdict. She felt uncomfortable in the presence of Valerie Marks – but then, any woman would. Except that I happen to know Valerie’s happily ensconced with some frilly type; has been for years.’

‘Sort of Nanette Newman in
The Stepford Wives
? Baking, preening and robotic?’

‘If you say so,’ Sally nodded, not always sure what Mad Max was on about.

‘How does Phyllie rate Alan Harper-Bennet?’

‘Impotent,’ Sally beamed.

‘She’s good at the one-word put-downs, isn’t she? Perhaps I can get her a job at Leighford High,’ and he rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

‘I think …’ It was Sally Greenhow’s turn to get a funny look in her eye.

‘Yes?’ Maxwell put on his best Frazier Crane.

‘I think Phyllida developed a bit of a crush for Michael Wynn.’

‘Really?’ Maxwell was all ears.

‘She mentioned him a lot. “Michael said this” or “Michael did that”.’

‘Did he reciprocate?’

‘If you’re going to talk dirty, Max,’ Sally winked, ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Fine,’ the Head of Sixth Form said, ‘but this is your room and you haven’t answered the question.’

‘Apparently not. He just showed her photographs of his wife and the boys.’

‘That’s what Rachel said,’ Maxwell suddenly remembered.

‘What is?’

‘That Michael was very much the family man.’

‘Except that he was sweetly shy about it.’

‘Sweetly shy?’ Maxwell frowned.

‘Her words. He’d only show her the photos when they were alone.’

‘They were alone?’ Maxwell mouthed.

‘Apparently,’ Sally grinned. ‘I didn’t like to pry too deeply.’

‘Phyllida is a Miss, isn’t she?’

‘By a mile,’ Sally said. ‘Oops, there’s another sexist gaffe. Shot myself in the foot again.’

‘Did she say any of them could, in her opinion, be guilty of murder?’ Maxwell asked.

‘She’s afraid, Max,’ Sally told him. ‘Even here, back on the old treadmill, she can’t get it out of her mind. She told me she can’t sleep and when she does, she has dreams of those corridors at Carnforth. She’s done no photocopying since she’s been back.’

‘I wonder,’ Maxwell said softly, turning to the red-gold of the sky, ‘I wonder if any of us can forget it. Ever. Anyway, she needn’t have worried about Michael Wynn. He was making eyes at Tracey the receptionist.’

‘Was he now?’

‘So Margot Jenkinson told me. But then, we must assume that Margot’s vision is a threat impaired by the little pink elephants. You know what I found odd about Phyllida Bowles?’

Sally shook her head. It was late and she felt desperately tired.

‘What she said when we got back from the beach on the problem-solving day. She saw the cop cars and said, “They must have found Liz Striker.” Prophetic soul, isn’t she, our Phyllie?’

13

That Saturday, Inspector John McBride went to Luton. And the first person he went to see was Phyllida Bowles. WPC O’Halloran was with him and a motley crew of kids were playing unseasonal football in the park, spurred on by the forthcoming World Cup in America.

Phyllida Bowles was a wall-coloured woman, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair and glasses frames that matched her pallid skin. It wasn’t impossible for Mr Right to have come along, but the fact was that he hadn’t in all her thirty-nine years and in that time she’d become over-fussy, pedantic to the point of neurosis. And on Saturday morning, she walked in the park, come hell or high water, with the repulsive little Chihuahua which minced at her ankles.

McBride hadn’t objected to the stroll. It was pleasant wandering under the acacias and the silver birch and he found himself wondering, as he often did in those situations, what passers-by thought of the threesome and if they knew what he and O’Halloran did for a living and that the woman who walked between them was a suspect in a murder enquiry.

‘What sort of opinion did you form of Rachel King?’ he asked Phyllida.

‘Opinion?’ She tugged the scampering Chihuahua to heel. ‘Well, actually, I didn’t like her.’

‘Really?’ McBride said. ‘Why was that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Phyllida pushed the glasses back up the bridge of her nose, another of the little habits she’d acquired in twenty years of solitude. ‘It’s difficult to quantify it.’ Phyllida was a Maths teacher at heart. ‘Something to do with men, I suppose.’

‘Men?’ Being allowed to wear plain clothes had clearly given Mavis O’Halloran ideas above her station. She was asking the questions now. ‘In what way?’

Phyllida didn’t like having to twist her neck in two directions. Still, the walk had been at her insistence, so she could hardly complain. She hadn’t liked the idea of the police in her house, invading her privacy. ‘She was a man’s woman,’ she said, frowning as if to concentrate on Rachel and her memories of her. ‘A flirt, if you like. She was one of those annoying people who don’t seem to be paying attention all that much. Oh, they say “yes” and “no” in the right places, but their eyes are always wandering. Always looking over your shoulder. It’s very disconcerting.’

‘And who was Rachel looking at during these conversations?’ McBride asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Just men in general, I think. I can’t recall anyone in particular, except …’

‘Yes?’ the police persons chorused.

‘Peter Maxwell was here yesterday. At school, I mean.’

McBride had stopped walking. So had O’Halloran. ‘Was he?’ the Inspector asked.

‘And Sally Greenhow. I didn’t actually speak to Mr Maxwell, but Sally and I went for a walk.’

‘What did you talk about?’ McBride resumed the two and a half miles an hour stroll he’d learned at Bramshill.

‘Oh, people on the course mostly. At Carnforth. What I thought of them. Pretty well what you’re asking now.’

‘I see. While you were talking to Mrs Greenhow, where was Mr Maxwell?’

‘I don’t know,’ Phyllida shrugged, reaching in her handbag for her cigarettes. ‘But I know he talked to Gregory.’

‘Gregory Trant?’

‘Yes. And to Dr Moreton too, I understand.’

‘Well, well,’ McBride threw a glance at the WPC, ‘he has been a busy little bee, hasn’t he?’ And all three of them knew that ‘bee’ stood for bastard.

‘Pull him in,’ was Superintendent Malcolm’s order over the car phone. ‘Pull both of them in. If they’re going to play Nick and Nora Charles all over the place, they must expect to have their collars felt. You’ve got their addresses?’

McBride had their addresses. He and O’Halloran left Phyllida Bowles by the tennis courts and drove south. The M25 was the sluggish bitch it always was and, infuriating though it was, this was not an enquiry that merited blue flashing lights and screaming sirens, so the unmarked police car idled along with all the other Saturday strollers, belching fumes into the ozone over Surrey.

It was nearly three before they reached Leighford and neither of them had eaten. At a service station they grabbed a Ginsters and a packet of Salt ‘n’ Shake each and washed it all down with something diet in a can. Then they drove for Maxwell’s home in Columbine Avenue.

Like all the houses in Columbine, number 38 was a town house, built in the heady ’80s before the recession bit hard and builders went out of business, leaving scaffolding and rain-filled holes in the ground where dreams and profits lay together in the mud. McBride had driven all the way from Luton. O’Halloran could have the honour of ringing Maxwell’s chimes.

‘He’s not in, you know.’ The rather plummy elderly voice came from nowhere. McBride peered through the privet bush to his left. A rather plummy elderly lady stood there, in gardening gloves, inspecting her roses.

‘We’re looking for Mr Maxwell,’ the Inspector said, walking round the bush to look the old bat full in the face.

‘Yes, I know you are,’ she said, looking at the callers over her pince-nez. ‘I’ve told you. He’s not in.’

‘Do you know where he’s gone, Miss …?’

‘Mrs,’ the elderly lady insisted quietly. McBride narrowed his eyes at her. It could be possible. ‘I’m afraid before I can tell you that, I shall need to know who you are and what your business is with Mr Maxwell. I am a member of the Neighbourhood Watch Committee, you know.’

‘Of course you are,’ McBride smiled, and he flashed his warrant card. ‘I am Detective Inspector McBride of the Kent CID and this is WPC O’Halloran.’

‘Hello, my dear,’ the old girl smiled. ‘My name is Jessica Troubridge. I’m Mr Maxwell’s next-door neighbour.’

‘Hello,’ WPC O’Halloran smiled back.

‘WPC,’ Mrs Troubridge tutted, ‘that’s about as unattractive as those awful hats they make you wear. What’s your real name, dear?’

‘Er … Mavis,’ the WPC confessed.

‘Oh dear.’ The old lady’s face fell. ‘Still, there it is. Damage’s been done now, I suppose.’

‘You were about to tell us where Mr Maxwell is.’ McBride thought it time to intervene.

‘Was I?’ Mrs Troubridge frowned. ‘Oh no, I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t?’ It was McBride’s turn to frown. Any minute now the old girl would probably start painting the roses red.

‘Well, how can I?’ She spread her scrawny arms. ‘You see, I don’t know where he is.’

‘Has he just popped out for a minute, Mrs Troubridge?’ O’Halloran asked. She had a granny about the old girl’s age. You had to give them a bit of help. ‘Gone down Tesco’s?’

‘Please don’t patronize me, Policewoman O’Halloran. With a first name like yours, you can’t afford to. Mr Maxwell wouldn’t be seen dead “down Tesco’s”, as you put it. He has an account at Rohan’s, a delicatessen and vintners in the High Street. And if he’s popped anywhere, it’s a long pop.’

‘Er … in what sense, Mrs Troubridge?’ McBride knew a venomous old besom when he saw one.

‘Why do you people, out of your jurisdiction, I may add, want to talk to him? That business at Leighford High was cleared up.’

‘We aren’t concerned with anything at Leighford High, madam,’ McBride said, ‘and neither are we out of our jurisdiction. This isn’t America, you know.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’ She stood her ground.

‘We are pursuing a murder enquiry,’ McBride told her.

‘Good heavens.’ Jessica Troubridge gripped her pruning shears. ‘Perhaps this is America. I’m sure Mr Maxwell is in the clear. He has a degree, you know.’

‘Where has he gone, madam?’ McBride could sense his hackles rising uncontrollably.

‘I’ve told you. I don’t know.’ She stood nose to chest with him. ‘All I know is that he has gone for the weekend. I have instructions to feed his cat.’

‘And he didn’t say where he was going?’

‘He did not.’ Mrs Troubridge was adamant. ‘Am I my neighbour’s keeper?’

‘No, madam.’ McBride turned to the road. ‘And I bet you’re glad about that.’ He glanced at Mavis O’Halloran. ‘I know I would be.’

There weren’t many state boarding schools in the ’90s. Most of them began life as institutions for forces kids, in the days when Britain still had a Commonwealth of sorts and the Army of the Rhine was there in case the Germans misbehaved themselves for a third time in the century. St Bede’s School, Bournemouth was doubly unusual to the point of being unique. It was a Catholic state boarding school.

Maxwell knew this already of course – that St Bede’s was Catholic, that is. What he wasn’t prepared for was the boarding bit. He’d taken the train that Saturday morning and rattled west. There were rumours of an impending rail strike, but Jimmy Knapp couldn’t be that much of a dinosaur, could he? To take his union into a running fight with Mr Major and the forces of progress? Maxwell had staggered back to his seat from buying his tea and his limp bacon and egg roll, fully aware as he caught his groin for the umpteenth time on a seat corner why it was called the buffet car.

The Head of Sixth Form knew Bournemouth tolerably well. In keeping with Sally Greenhow’s view that he could town-bore for England, Maxwell was aware that Squire Lewis Tregonwell had transformed the bare Dorset heathland as far back as 1811 when he’d built a summer house where now stands the Royal Exeter Hotel. He was also aware that Sir George Taps-Gervis built on the site twenty-six years later. A jetty, a pier and an arcade followed as inevitably as trouble followed Peter Maxwell.

He followed the Bourne as it wound down to the sea through the pine-scented Upper Gardens. It was an oddly geometric town, Bournemouth, with the Square, which he crossed, and the Triangle off to the west. He took the Old Christchurch Road past the Railway Museum and on to Madeira Road and the police station. The traffic was heavy. It was the hard court tennis championships that week and the hotels were bustling as the town enjoyed an early boost to the season. It all made Leighford look like a graveyard.

Off Holdenhurst Road, he reached it, a cluster of ’30s buildings surrounded by ’60s high-rise, already swathed in scaffolding. The only thing that made the school look different from any other was the wrought-iron monstrosity welded to the wall; the Venereal Bede, monk and scholar, fifteen foot high in gilded metal.

Peter Maxwell didn’t really know why he’d come. He only knew he wasn’t happy with the answers he’d got from the Luton lot. And that he didn’t want Sally with him. He knew that if he’d breathed a word to her yesterday, about his intention to make this journey too, she’d have been there, outside number 38, Columbine, engine ticking over, tapping ash into her ashtray and listening to something indescribable on FM. And that wouldn’t have been fair. Sally had been through enough.

Sally sat with her back to the wall watching Superintendent Terry Malcolm. She’d wanted Alan to be with her, but Superintendent Malcolm had pointed out that he wasn’t a solicitor and that his presence would only complicate things. Did she have a solicitor? Only some office junior who’d stung the Greenhows pretty sharply when they’d bought their house. And the little shit had had trouble conveyancing. She knew he’d be totally out of his depth with this. So Sally was alone. And Alan sat in a bleak waiting-room where posters pointed out the fairly obvious fact that there was a thief about. Others urged him to lock his car. An earnest-looking desk man had offered him a cup of tea, but Alan didn’t drink tea and they didn’t do coffee. So he sat and he looked at his watch and he waited.

Sally watched Malcolm and she watched the tape recorder spool turning.

‘Tell me again,’ the Superintendent said, ‘just for the record.’

Sally hadn’t caught the name of the Sergeant from West Sussex CID sitting next to the great man; but she didn’t like him. The WPC over by the cold radiator had an irritating sniff and, for a moment, Sally wondered if this was part of the routine – a sort of nasal Chinese torture designed to make her crack. If that was so, it was damn close to working.

‘We went to investigate,’ she told the Superintendent, ‘Mr Maxwell and I. We knew the police … you … had detained Dr Moreton. We wanted to know why.’

Malcolm smiled. ‘Tell me, Mrs Greenhow,’ he said, ‘if you had a toothache, would you do your own root canal work?’

‘No.’ She blinked at the stupidity of the question.

‘Or deliver your own baby?’

‘Probably not.’ Sally felt her throat mottling. Who did this objectionable bastard think he was, probing in this highly personal way?

‘Then why do you presume to carry out enquiries which are properly the business of the police?’

‘I felt … I just felt …’ Sally had been too long in Special Needs. The cut and thrust of intellectual debate was not her daily fare. When you’re dealing, day in, day out, with kids with room temperature IQs, you don’t have to be Einstein.

‘You just felt you had to support Peter Maxwell,’ Malcolm finished the sentence for her.

‘No. I … Well …’

‘Sally,’ Malcolm said softly, ‘we know. We know he knew Rachel King before. We know he was personally involved.’

‘You can’t possibly think he killed her,’ she said, staring the man in the face. She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t let him rattle her. She wouldn’t let him rattle her and she wouldn’t shop Max. She owed him more than that.

‘I don’t know who killed Rachel King,’ Malcolm said, ‘but it’s only a matter of time until I do. Or it would be if we didn’t have amateurs tripping over each other in the middle of it.’

‘It was Maxwell’s idea, though, wasn’t it?’ the dislikeable Sergeant asked.

Sally’s eyes flickered across to him. His face was flat, cold, expressionless. Alongside the elegant Malcolm, he looked like a squashed bug. ‘I drove him,’ she said. ‘Max doesn’t drive.’

‘That’s odd,’ the Sergeant said. ‘In a bloke, I mean.’

Sally just scowled at him. The remark was so predictable, so sexist, she wouldn’t give it the satisfaction of a reply.

‘All right,’ Malcolm said. ‘So you spoke to whom?’

‘Er … Phyllida Bowles, Gregory Trant, Alan Harper-Bennet, Andrew Moreton.’

‘The whole gamut,’ Malcolm nodded.

‘We wanted some answers,’ Sally told him. ‘Look, can I have a cigarette?’ She fumbled in her bag.

‘They’re bad for you,’ the Sergeant said with a smirk.