Maxwell’s Flame (4 page)

‘Well, there’s no shelter at all,’ Lydia was saying, holding her hair as if the eddying wind might take it off. ‘How are we supposed to construct a shelter if there isn’t any?’

‘You haven’t read your instruction sheet, dear,’ Trant patronised her. ‘It doesn’t say it’ll be easy.’

‘There’s a rubbish tip over here,’ Wynn shouted. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’

‘Oh, please!’ Phyllida wailed, thrusting her hands resolutely into her jeans pockets. ‘I did not enrol on a GNVQ course to catch something from somebody’s old mattress.’

‘Needs must,’ Wynn told her coldly, ‘when the Devil drives. Peter? Will you join me?’

‘If I must,’ sighed Max, ‘and that’s Max, by the way. Not Peter. Max.’

‘All right, Max,’ Wynn grinned. ‘Funny things, nicknames, aren’t they? I knew a bloke at school called Arthur. Arthur Gries. A complete vegetable was Arthur and known to us all as Cret, short, obviously, for Cretin. You’re my vintage, give or take a few years, you know how it is. You don’t consider how cruel kids can be. It was only when I met him years later at some big Rotary thing and I had to call him Arthur. It just didn’t ring true. The man’s name was still Cret really, in that you are of course one for life. Shame we can’t be more honest, isn’t it? Fancy a rummage in the rubbish?’

Gregory Trant, Alan Harper-Bennet and Lydia Farr had wandered off in search of driftwood as a frame for the shelter they had to make. The wind was in the wrong direction for them to hear the shouts of the others and before long, two groups had formed, each out of sight of the other. It was then that the heavens opened, reminding Maxwell of that sudden storm that had appeared from nowhere in the Battle of Evesham, 1265, when Simon de Montfort had been caught napping in that murderous loop of the Avon. Maxwell was reminded of that because he was an historian, first and foremost. Maxwell’s kids thought he knew it because he’d been there at the time.

The rain positively hurt with its big spring drops and the unofficial rubbish heap was a quagmire of sludge over which the foraging party scrambled to the shelter of a clump of stunted cedars.

‘Oh, bloody hell!’ Margot Jenkinson fumed. ‘It takes a downpour to winkle out the little fact that you’ve a hole in your shoe, doesn’t it? Wet tights are a bitch, Mr Maxwell, aren’t they?’

‘They are,’ Maxwell bridled in his best John Inman, ‘and clean on this morning.’ He licked his finger and slicked down his eyebrow with it – not a gesture many single men would have the nerve for.

‘Well,’ Michael Wynn stuck his head out of cover for a moment, ‘looks like the session’s rained off. Shall we wait for a bit or make a dash for the house?’

Alan Harper-Bennet and Lydia Farr had made a dash for the house when it started, followed by Gregory Trant. Except that they were on the wrong side and screened from the main drive by a dense privet hedge. Lydia was even more concerned about what the rain would do to her hair than she had been with the vagaries of wind direction and, seeing a side door, she wrenched it open and dashed in. Harper-Bennet collided with her in trying to close it and was mumbling his apologies when he realized Lydia wasn’t moving. Couldn’t move, in fact. He’d never seen shock before, but he saw it now. Her mouth hung open, her eyes were wide. Every muscle in her body felt like iron.

‘Lydia?’ Harper-Bennet’s voice had a curious sound to it, as though he didn’t trust it in the darkness of the corridor. He followed the woman’s stare ahead of her. There was an open door, apparently into a store room. And there, behind a collapsed pile of buff-wrapped stationery, a woman stared back at the pair. It was an odd moment because the woman’s eyes were dull and half-closed. Her mouth was open too, like Lydia’s, but there was a dark brown something caked around her nose and lips. In the strange light from an aperture in the roof, her hair was plastered to her forehead. And there was no doubt about it. The woman was dead.

Anywhere can become the scene of a crime. In fiction, of course, it’s the west wing or the library of a country vicarage. But that’s just English cosies. In the States, it’s somebody’s swimming pool or a drug-ridden alley in the Bronx. What makes an ordinary, everyday store room into a murder scene is that someone chose to hide a body there. And from that moment, the scene is transformed. From the moment the body is found, it is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born, as Yeats said, except that Yeats wasn’t talking about a corpse.

Father Jordan Gracewell had never seen so many policemen in his life. And he certainly never expected men in white boiler suits and surgical gloves. There was an ambulance and umpteen squad cars, big and white. There were yards of fluttering tape marked continuously with the word ‘police’, but there was no flashing blue light, no scream of tyres. In fact, the Kent Constabulary had excelled themselves in the speed and efficiency of their response. From the time the call had come from Gary Leonard that a suspicious death had occurred at the Carnforth Centre, eight minutes had elapsed until the first officers had arrived. They were both armed, though no one knew it but them, and the scene of crime officer had followed minutes behind.

So it was not until nearly midday that Chief Inspector Miles Warren stood in that darkened corridor in the centre’s sub-basement, surveying somebody’s handiwork. He’d been considered too short for the police at one time, but he either fiddled the measurement somehow or the force was desperate, because here he was, a man in mid-life who had never known a crisis. Or if he had, he never showed it. His lads called him ‘Stony’ because none of them had ever seen him smile.

‘What have we got, John?’

Inspector John MacBride was losing his hair already. It was curly and blond, but it had been steadily deserting him ever since he’d left school. He didn’t really like Stony Warren, if the truth were known, but he knew the man knew his job and that would have to be good enough.

‘Mrs Elizabeth Striker,’ he told his superior. ‘Married. Age thirty-eight. She was on a course here.’

Warren looked behind him. Uniforms. Cameras. No bloody doctor.

‘Do we have a police surgeon in this county?’ he asked anyone who cared to listen.

‘Dr Anderson was telephoned nearly two hours ago, sir,’ someone said. ‘His wife took the message.’

‘Really?’ Warren was unimpressed. ‘That’s about as helpful as somebody taking the piss. John? Care to chance your arm on this one?’

Warren believed in giving his subordinates experience. Anyway, it took him off the spot. Stony only took chances on his own terms. He saw no reason to expose his inadequacies so early on a case.

‘Cause of death is likely to be a fractured skull,’ MacBride conjectured. ‘She was hit from behind, I’d say, though how often I don’t know.’

‘Murder weapon?’

McBride shrugged. ‘Nothing yet. I’ve got men out in the grounds.’

Warren had seen that on the way in. Ragged rows of uniformed coppers on their hands and knees in the shrubbery, like some strange primeval ritual. When a body is found, men in blue suits form lines and crawl forward, like a bizarre Tai Chi.

‘She didn’t die here, then?’ Warren took in the wall behind the dead woman’s head. There was no space in that tiny stock cupboard to crack an egg, let alone someone’s skull.

‘No, sir.’ McBride was sure. ‘Out in the corridor would be my guess. Then she was dragged in here.’

‘Why?’

‘The old problem,’ McBride shrugged. ‘It’s all very well to put somebody’s lights out, but you’ve then got the perennial puzzle of what to do with the body.’

‘So you store it in a store room?’

‘It’s not good, is it?’

‘Not ideal, no,’ Warren nodded. ‘Perhaps just a temporary hiding place, until our man had time to think. Time to arrange something more permanent. You wouldn’t care to hazard a time on any of this, I suppose?’

A smile flitted across McBride’s face. ‘Well, the body’s cold and loose. That means rigor mortis has come and gone. At least forty-eight hours, I’d say.’

Warren nodded again. ‘Allowing for temperature variations, state of the body and so on.’ He glanced around him. ‘That’s odd,’ he said.

‘What, sir?’ McBride hated being upstaged, even by Warren. ‘The door. It opens outwards.’

‘It would have to, wouldn’t it?’ the Inspector asked. ‘Seeing as the store room is so small.’

‘Possibly,’ Warren said, ‘possibly. Bit of bad luck on our man, though.’

‘Sir?’

‘Well, I assume that Mrs Striker was walled in behind those boxes of paper. They must have fallen and their falling forced the door open. If the door had opened inwards, that couldn’t have happened.’

‘Still,’ McBride reasoned, ‘that would only delay the finding of the body for a while.’

‘Possibly,’ Warren said again, narrowing his eyes.

McBride hated it when that happened. He could never read his boss’s mind. And because of that, he would never be one step ahead. Always one behind.

‘Tell me,’ Warren said, ‘have we got everybody still on site? The guests, I mean? Staff?’

McBride nodded. ‘All except a few teachers who are somewhere out on the bay, problem-solving.’

If Warren was a smiling man, he’d have done it then. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when they get back, they can solve a few problems for me. I’d better have a word with the guests. Don’t want any of them doing a bunk. It’ll cost an arm and a leg to track them all down. Oh, John …’ He turned in the corridor. ‘Let me know when Graham Anderson arrives, will you? And when you’ve taken Mrs Striker out, build up that wall again.’

‘Sir?’

“The boxes. The wall of boxes he stashed her behind. Build it up again. I want to see the room as it was before the stationery toppled. OK?’

Maxwell had been this way before. Or nearly so. Two of his own sixth-formers had died in mysterious circumstances, so he was no stranger to police enquiries. Even so, he’d never actually crossed a police cordon before. Now, he had no choice.

‘Good God,’ Phyllida Bowles said, taking in the ambulance, the squad cars, the crowd of holiday-makers parked along the road. ‘They must have found Whatsername’s body.’

‘What?’ Wynn asked.

‘Thing. You know. Your colleague. That funny little vicar chap was pestering everybody about her yesterday.’

‘Mrs Striker,’ Margot Jenkinson remembered. ‘Do you know, Michael, that gin and orange before we left has really affected my swim bladder. I really must take more orange with it.’

It was then that they were stopped by the long arm of the law in the form of a particularly officious WPC who reminded Maxwell of Helen Mirren in that television cop programme – forty but desirable. They each gave their name and it came as no surprise to Maxwell when Margot Jenkinson’s cliché, ‘What is all this about?’, elicited an irrelevant statement from the girl in blue. ‘The Chief Inspector would like a word.’

Miles Warren had his word in the Trevelyan Suite on the first floor, away from the prying eyes of sightseers at the gate, on the little raised dais built for some third-rate jazzman who still haunted England’s south coast every summer. He had done this once, already, to everybody else, guest and staff alike, at the Carnforth. Now he did it again, to the returned rump of problem-solvers.

And as he told them that the body of a woman had been found on the premises and that she had been murdered, he watched each one of them intently. Because Miles Stony Warren knew what every detective knew. That information like this was a two-way process. Tell somebody there’s been a murder and they’ll react. Some gasp. Others scream. Still others cry. Some won’t move at all. There’s just a tightening in the neck, a flick of the fingers, a bat of the eye. And you watch it. You watch it with the two-way mirror that is your trained eye. And you note it. And you remember it. And in the good old days, it was little things like that that sent men to the gallows.

4

‘You can’t actually do this, you know.’

It was a phrase, with variations, that Chief Inspector Warren was to hear a lot in the twenty-four hours that followed the discovery of Elizabeth Striker’s body. But Chief Inspector Warren had a certain way with him. When he spoke to you, he made you feel that his suggestions were so reasonable that it would be unreasonable not to comply.

And anyway, Chief Inspector Warren had the Carnforth Centre’s inmates by their short and curlies.

‘You know why he’s done this, don’t you?’ Alan Harper-Bennet said, cramming his pipe with something dark and gruesome.

‘Do tell.’ Margot Jenkinson was on her second G and T of the evening.

‘He wants to see who runs.’

There were murmurs of agreement in the plastic opulence of the Whittingham Suite.

‘How do you mean?’ It had not been a good day for Lydia Farr. She was still trembling slightly from her experience earlier, and the sedative she’d been given was beginning to wear off.

Harper-Bennet leaned forward, as though talking to an idiot. He was good at that. He’d been teaching now for sixteen years.

‘He’s set up his incident room, or whatever it’s called, here at the centre and he’s asked us all to stay. OK, the staff go home when they’re not on duty, but they’re all local. If we go home, we scatter the length and breadth of the country, and that means expense, co-operation with other forces, et cetera. This way, he’s got us cornered. And if anybody expresses a wish to leave, wham! The full rigour of the law is up his jacksie before he can say GNVQ.’

‘Somebody has.’

All eyes turned to the tall, frizzy-haired woman lounging in the corner, a Carnforth courtesy copy of
Marie-Claire
spread on her lap.

‘Who?’ came the chorus.

‘Who else but my dear old colleague,’ Sally Greenhow shrugged. ‘Who else but Mad Max?’

Mad Max had been in an incident room before and he didn’t cherish the memory. This one of course was different. It was the Trevelyan Suite at the Carnforth Centre. Mucked about with, granted. The plastic opulence had gone, the plants had been removed. From nowhere had come a warehouse full of desks, chairs, filing cabinets, telephones and VDUs. There were black and white photographs of the murder scene plastered over display boards against one wall, and, well out of sight of the window, of the dead woman herself. Somehow, in black and white, they looked even worse than the real thing.

It was in Stony Warren’s ante-room, off the Trevelyan Suite, that Peter Maxwell sat now, watching the evening rain trickle the length of the windows and bounce on the UPVC sills. There was a scrape of the door and the Chief Inspector entered. For a fleeting, nostalgic moment, Maxwell found himself wishing that the guv’nor might wear a trilby hat and trench coat, have an impeccable Oxford accent and very probably the plummy tones of Jack Hawkins. The reality was different. Miles Warren was losing his hair, was of less than average height and had the rather grating whine that characterized the Lea Valley through Hertfordshire to Gravesend. The nearest he’d probably come to Oxford was watching re-runs of
Morse
on the telly.

‘Mr Maxwell?’ He slid back a chair and sat down. ‘Inspector McBride tells me you wish to leave. Is that right?’

‘Let’s say I had no wish to come in the first place.’

‘Oh, really? Why was that?’

Maxwell sighed. ‘You’ve never been in teaching, I take it?’ he asked. Warren shook his head.

‘But I presume that in your job you have come across a certain quantity of what we in education call bullshit?’

A more demonstrative man would have smiled. As it was, Warren just nodded. ‘Cowsheds full,’ he said.

‘This course I am on is a classic example,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Another inspired set of letters that educationalists have been bombarding us with for thirty years. Old wine – new bottle. May I ask how old you are, Chief Inspector?’

‘I’m forty-three,’ Warren said.

Maxwell nodded. ‘So you left school …?’

‘When I was fifteen.’

‘Wise,’ Maxwell commented. ‘Very wise. Got out while the going was good.’

‘I don’t know,’ Warren said. ‘It’s hard on the force these days. So many bright young things coming up at your elbow. Degreed. Pushy. You know the sort.’

Maxwell knew.

‘How well did you know the deceased?’ Warren had suddenly changed tack.

There was a little red light flashing quietly in Maxwell’s head. He had to respond to it. ‘Shouldn’t there be another officer with you?’ he asked. ‘And a tape recorder?’

Warren leaned back, clasping his fingers behind his head. This was one of those times when, on his own terms, in his own way, he was prepared to take a risk; throw caution to the winds. ‘PACE?’ he said, twisting his lips. ‘Done more damage than the Luftwaffe. This is just a little chat, Mr Maxwell – a sort of tête-à-tête. We could have it in the bar, if you’d prefer.’

‘All right.’ Maxwell got to his feet.

‘Except that …’ Warren dropped his relaxed position, his body upright, his head rigid. ‘Except that you might want to tell me things here you wouldn’t want to say in a crowded bar.’

‘Might I?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Such as?’

Warren leaned forward. ‘Such as why you and you alone have asked to go. Such as why you have not answered my questions about Mrs Striker. Things like that.’

‘Am I right in saying’, Maxwell asked, ‘that I don’t have to talk to you at all?’

‘Perfectly right,’ Warren nodded, ‘but that wouldn’t get us anywhere, would it? Now, you’re a reasonable man, Mr Maxwell, I can sense that. I’d hate for us to have got off on the wrong foot. Shall we start again?’

‘Why not?’ Maxwell sat down. ‘I’m sitting comfortably.’

‘Elizabeth Striker,’ Warren persisted. ‘How well did you know her?’

‘Not at all,’ Maxwell said. ‘Never met the woman.’

‘Really?’

‘The first I heard of her was when the padre was wandering around asking everybody if we’d seen her.’

‘By the padre, you mean …?’

‘Jordan Gracewell, Chaplain of St Bede’s.’

‘Ah, yes. A young man who worries a lot, I’d say.’

Maxwell looked at the Chief Inspector. If he read the man aright, here was one who gave nothing away, let nothing slip; whose face was a mask of inscrutability for the world. Miles Warren made Fu Manchu look like an ingénue. Yet he was dropping little gems about Carnforth’s clientele. That must be for Maxwell’s benefit; to see how far he’d go, which way he’d jump.

‘Would you?’ Maxwell had seen all the Fu Manchu films – he’d even read the Sax Romer. Inscrutability was his middle name.

‘Tell me a bit about yourself, Mr Maxwell,’ Warren said, sensing a brick wall.

Here we go again, thought Max. Ice-breaking part two. ‘Little old me? Well, let’s see. I’m fifty-three. Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High School.’

‘Near Chichester?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And what exactly do you do as Head of Sixth Form?’

‘Well, this and that,’ Maxwell hedged. He’d been equally vague writing his own job description some years before. ‘The school prospectus says I am responsible for the academic and pastoral guidance of two hundred sixth-formers. That means I do everything from writing their university references to wiping their bottoms – metaphorically, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Warren’s eyes narrowed. ‘And this course you’re on this week?’

‘Is yet another attempt to weld the disparate worlds of education and industry. To provide some cohesion where actually there is none. The problem is that employers can’t make up their minds what they want. Are you an historian, Chief Inspector?’

Warren sighed, shaking his head. ‘I’ve got too many problems in the present,’ he said, ‘without worrying about the past.’

‘Hmm,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘The reason I ask is that when Britain was at its greatest – the workshop of the world making more goods and more money than anyone else – the education system was a shambles and attendance non-compulsory. Now we’ve got the little buggers chained to desks for thirty-nine weeks of the year, in practice until they’re seventeen, we’re fourteenth-rate, a rather feeble satellite state of Brussels. Ironic, isn’t it?’

‘So you don’t approve of vocational education?’

‘In the right place, of course,’ Maxwell told him, ‘but that place is not the school. We’re about the business of enriching young minds, not telling them how to plonk their fingers down on keyboards and teaching them to spread sheets or base datas.’

‘What about your private life? Are you married?’

‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘Actually, I’m a widower.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you, but it was all a long time ago.’

‘Some wounds never heal,’ Warren observed. ‘You live alone.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Apart from my cat, yes.’

‘Interests? Hobbies?’

‘All human life,’ Maxwell said. ‘I am fascinated by the cinema, by history of course. And I collect model soldiers.’

‘Fascinating,’ Warren said flatly. ‘Tell me, Mr Maxwell, is there anybody on this course that you know? Knew beforehand, I mean?’

‘My colleague, Sally Greenhow.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Warren consulted a typed list on his desk. ‘Anyone else?’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell said, ‘Mrs Rachel King.’

‘Also of St Bede’s,’ Warren said, ‘as was the dead woman.’

‘That’s right,’ Maxwell nodded.

‘May I ask how you know her?’

‘We were … we knew each other many years ago, Chief Inspector. Before I came into teaching.’

‘That’s rather a coincidence, isn’t it?’ Warren asked. He was not a man who believed in coincidences.

‘I suppose it is,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Synchronicity, perhaps. Fate.’

‘Perhaps,’ Warren nodded, searching Maxwell’s honest, open face, boring into the twinkling grey eyes. ‘So, you’d still like to leave, Mr Maxwell?’

‘Well, the course can’t continue now, surely? My Upper Sixth, not to mention my GCSE classes, have exams in a month. I’d like to be back there with them.’

‘Very laudable,’ Warren nodded. ‘But you see my problem, Mr Maxwell. Someone in this building killed Elizabeth Striker, smashed in her skull like balsa wood. That someone might be you, mightn’t it?’

‘It might be,’ Maxwell said, ‘but I hope that isn’t an accusation, Chief Inspector.’

It looked for a moment as though Miles Stony Warren would break the habit of a lifetime and smile, but it was only a trick of the light. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Maxwell. If I accuse you of anything, believe me, you’ll know it. Now, will you stay? Just for a day or two? It would make my job a lot easier.’

Maxwell pondered awhile. Then he stood up. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘just for a day or two. But I’m off on Monday whatever happens.’

‘Absolutely. Thank you for your co-operation.’

And Maxwell left.

Warren pressed the intercom button on his desk and John McBride came in, jacketless, tieless, shirt-sleeves rolled. ‘Well?’ Warren asked.

‘Glib bastard,’ was McBride’s considered opinion.

‘And educationally a dodo,’ Warren agreed. ‘Can we use him?’

‘Sir?’

‘Switch him on. Wind him up. See what he stirs up, among the others, I mean.’

‘I think so,’ McBride nodded. ‘But we’ll have to watch him like hawks … He’s not our man, then?’

‘Good God, John,’ Warren picked up his sheaf of papers, ‘if I had second sight, I’d be the Doris Stokes of the ’90s. I’ve drip fed him a little today – pointing the finger at Gracewell, mentioning cause of death. Let’s see what he does with that first. Tomorrow, bright and early, we’ll start the interviews. Lydia Farr is first – assuming she’s more collected than she was today. And talking of cause of death, nothing from Anderson, I suppose?’

The Inspector shook his head.

‘Right,’ Warren sighed. ‘That’s one for you. I want his report on this desk by nine tomorrow. How you get it is up to you.’

How John McBride got Dr Anderson’s report was to knock the old duffer up at six thirty the next morning. McBride had always known that doctors did all right for themselves, driving TR7s when he rattled around in a clapped-out Montego. He wasn’t quite prepared for the palatial pad of the police surgeon however. In the past, the old boy had always presented his findings at the station in the incident room, but the guv’nor was in a hurry and no one had time to stand on ceremony. A woman was dead. It was time to move.

The torrent of abuse he received from the medico didn’t quite square with the refined-looking gent who opened the door to him in dressing-gown and slippers.

‘Do you realize’, Anderson wanted to know, ‘what the fucking time is?’

‘Six thirty, sir.’ McBride was a young man who was going places. Punctuality was the politeness of policemen.

‘Six fucking thirty!’ Anderson repeated as though he couldn’t believe his ears.

‘Chief Inspector Warren was wondering if your report was ready.’

‘Wondering, was he?’ Anderson snapped. ‘Miles Fucking Warren couldn’t fight his way out of a paper fucking bag on his own. Have you had any breakfast, McBride?’

‘No, sir. My shift doesn’t start for another hour.’

‘Well, you’d better come in, then. Gladys won’t be stirring for hours yet. It’s her bridge night on Fridays and it always takes it out of her. However, my coffee is legendary and I can still toast a mean slice of bread.’

‘That’s kind, sir, thank you,’ and the Inspector went inside.

At the door, Anderson paused to deliver a well-timed kick to the ginger torn mewling at his feet. ‘Why don’t you fuck off out of it?’ he snarled. It seemed a good idea to the cat and he roamed off in search of Anderson’s tabby in order to comply.

Over coffee, MacBride listened while Anderson gave him the gist of his experience, the Inspector rattling off the notes he knew his guv’nor would want to see.

‘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?’