Maxwell's Chain (25 page)

‘Madam,’ he said. ‘If Florence Nightingale had worried about little things like viruses, do you think
any
of our brave boys in the Crimea would have come home?’

‘Infection,’ she repeated, the mantra of the NHS.

‘Of course,’ he beamed and squeezed the smelly jelly over his hands. Old boys without number lay
propped in excruciating-looking beds on both sides of the ward, the Catheter Brigade. Dotted among them, younger blokes with splints and plasters and there, at the far end, his quarry, young Nick Campbell emerging from behind a glass partition, about to go.

‘You don’t have to leave on my account,’ Maxwell said, barely faltering at all when, looking round the screen, he saw who was lying on the bed. ‘Gregory,’ his smile was like the silver plate on a coffin, ‘I heard you were laid low.’

Gregory Adair looked like shit, to use correct medical terminology. Maxwell had had pneumonia as a child and he still remembered the delirium it brought. Always, when he relived it in his dreams, he was walking up an endless Escher staircase, around the four walls of his room, on and on, towards a dim light in the distance. And it stayed in the distance, no matter how many stairs he climbed. Rationally, the light had to be his parents’ room and the stairs represented the intolerable loneliness and isolation of his illness, ‘splashed’, as GK Chesterton had once written, ‘with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl’.

Looking at the grey pallor of Gregory Adair, it all came flooding back. The man’s face was drawn, his eyes sunken, a plastic mask over his nose and
mouth. But he recognised Peter Maxwell and
half-extended
a hand. Maxwell caught it, patting it with his other hand. ‘You hang on in there, Greg,’ he said, softly. ‘You can send your cover work in later.’ And he winked.

‘Er…I’ve got to go, Greg,’ Nick Campbell said, checking his watch and sensing the hospital staff massing at the ward entrance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ His hand lingered a little longer than Maxwell expected as the boy took his farewells. Maxwell tactfully turned his back and didn’t see the soft kiss Nick planted on Greg’s forehead. Kismet, Hardy. By the time the pair were rinsing their hands in goo again, under the watchful gaze of Mrs Seacole, tears were filling Nick Campbell’s eyes.

‘He’s not going to make it, Mr Maxwell,’ he trembled. ‘He’s not. I know it.’

Maxwell looked at the boy. He was a wreck. He put his arm around him, like the father he was and led him down the stairs. He was still leading him through the hospital when Jacquie turned a corner into view. Maxwell saw her and shook his head. She nodded, realising the moment and gesticulated that she’d be in the car.

Maxwell took the boy out by the side door, past smokers’ corner where the more addicted hospital staff gathered to indulge their disgusting, sordid
habit, dragging on the ciggies that New Labour now only allowed them to smoke on alternate Fridays if there was an ‘r’ in the month and then only strictly to the south-west of the Town Hall. The night air hit crisp as the pair shambled up the grassy rise to the lily pond. Ducks bedding down for the night looked at them through beady eyes under
beak-enfolding
wings. No, there’d be no bread from these two. Over the years the hospital duck population had learnt to recognise mean buggers when they saw them. One of them quacked in disapproval.

Maxwell sat the boy down on the park bench that had been erected in memory of Arthur and Elsie Hudson who, against all the odds, had loved this spot, Maxwell having the presence of mind to remove the pigeon-poo first. ‘We need to talk, Nick,’ he said softly.

Nick Campbell had heard those words before. The first time he was eleven and it was his very first encounter with Mad Max. He’d been sliding down the banisters at Leighford High, a little prank he’d learnt at junior school and happened to collide with the brick wall that was the Head of Sixth Form. Nick didn’t slide down banisters after that.

‘I’ve caught you at a bad time,’ Maxwell said.

Nick just nodded. ‘It’s just a bug,’ he said, ‘that’s going round. Everybody’s got it.’

Maxwell nodded.

‘Why has it hit Greg so hard? Why him?’

‘That depends on your take on the meaning of life, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Whether you think it’s all part of God’s Great Design or just some pointless, endless round of natural selection. But Greg’s young and tough.’ He patted the boy’s hunched shoulder. ‘He’ll be all right. These things take time.’

He watched as Nick’s head came up and he looked out over the lake, his eyes glistening with tears, his breath on the night air a reminder that spring was not here yet.

‘I didn’t realise that you and he knew each other.’

Nick sniffed. ‘We met last September,’ he said. ‘I’d just left Leighford High and he’d just started. We had that in common and had a laugh about it. Taking the piss, I’m afraid.’

Maxwell smiled. ‘Present company excepted, I hope,’ he said.

Nick did his best to smile too, but it wasn’t altogether successful.

‘I love him, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘Greg. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

Maxwell looked at the boy, his face solemn and almost grey in the half light from the hospital wing. Forty years ago, son; thirty; even twenty in some
circles, they’d have beaten you both to a pulp and your parents would have had to move. Poof, queer, nance. All the uncaring words of hatred of Maxwell’s boyhood echoed through the darkness. But now… well, different days.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course it’s all right.’

‘Mum and dad don’t know, although I think they suspected it with Lobber.’

‘Richard?’

Nick suddenly got up from the bench and paced around. ‘Greg isn’t the first,’ he said. ‘Lobber and I…well, you know…’

‘You were…an item…at school? I didn’t know.’

Nick laughed, a brittle, short sound that echoed in the night. ‘Hardly an item,’ he said. ‘We had sex, that was all. And never at school.’

Maxwell was grateful for that at least. ‘I saw you as a couple,’ he said, ‘but, I must admit, never in that way. You were always surrounded by girls.’

‘Poofs usually are,’ Nick said and the word jarred. ‘We’re not a threat, you see. We can talk make-up and emotions and lend a shoulder to cry on without any real sense of rivalry. Unless we’re after the same bloke, of course.’ He winked at Maxwell. This was better. The boy was coming out of it now, coming to terms with what hovered over that hospital bed. ‘Why did you want to see me?’ he asked.

Maxwell had almost forgotten in the flurry of activity of the last few minutes, but the itch was still there, the need to know. ‘“Chain reaction”,’ he said. ‘Tell me about “Chain reaction”.’

Nick looked confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘It’s a very old pop song,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Diana Ross, although I am reliably informed it’s been done since.’

Nick shrugged. ‘Still don’t get it,’ he said.

‘I heard it only the other day,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s like one of those fleeting memories you get sometimes. You know, a smell, a taste, a sound. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but it takes you back. I’ve been around a lot longer than you, Nick; I have more moments like those than you do. But I do know when I heard it last. It was in the deli the other day, the day you served me. And it was coming from your back pocket. It’s a ringtone, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

Maxwell looked at him. ‘You know it is. Who was ringing you?’

Nick looked vague. ‘It could have been anybody,’ he said. ‘I’ve got lots of people who ring me up.’

‘I believe that person also rang Lara Kent,’ Maxwell said.

‘Who?’

‘Nicholas, Nicholas,’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘You don’t watch the news, do you, dear boy? Lara Kent was the body found on the beach last week.’

‘The
Big Issue
seller,’ Nick said.

‘Precisely. The police have checked her mobile phone. There was one in particular they couldn’t trace in this pay-as-you-go topsy-turvy world of ours. It had been given the ringtone “Chain Reaction”.’

‘Coincidence,’ shrugged Nick.

‘Do you know Detective Chief Inspector Hall?’ Maxwell asked him.

Nick shook his head.

‘My Better Half’s boss,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Doesn’t believe in coincidences. If he had his way, he’d have the word expunged from the dictionary. An unidentified caller calls a girl who was subsequently murdered. That same caller – or at least someone designated the same ringtone – calls you.’ Maxwell got up from the bench and stood in front of the boy. ‘Who was it, Nick?’ he asked.

For a moment, Nick Campbell stood there, the willows dark over the pond behind him and the chill breeze from the east ruffling the waters. Maxwell saw the boy’s eyes bright in the reflected light and saw the muscles in his jaw flex. Then he said, ‘Lobber.’

The word was almost inaudible. Maxwell took the lad’s arm and led him back to the bench. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ he asked.

Like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar, it all came tumbling out. ‘It started with you, Mr Maxwell,’ he said.

‘Me?’

‘Your GCSE History lessons, the last time Lobber and I were in the same class together. You remember, Crime and Punishment?’

OCR 1935; Maxwell remembered it perfectly.

‘There was one case you talked about…Well, it became a bit of an obsession with us. Leopold and Loeb.’

‘Leopold,’ Maxwell repeated as the deluxe list leapt into his mind. ‘N Leopold, of course. You.’

Nick shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, that was just the point. It was all talk, theory, that’s all it was. Didn’t you ever have something like that, with a mate of yours, something you talked about doing, but never did?’

Maxwell smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, yes,’ he said. ‘When I was in the Sixth Form, a group of us read about Borley Rectory, “the most haunted house in England” and even though the place was a ruin, we were determined to spend the night there, camping. We planned it like a military operation, even down
to the sandwich fillings we’d take.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘We didn’t go. It all fell apart because we couldn’t borrow a car. On such chance happenings, Nicholas, empires fall.’

‘But that was Leopold and Loeb’s problem too, wasn’t it? The car. Leopold hired it to pick up their target, using a false name. He hadn’t reckoned on the amount of blood there’d be in the vehicle, though. Didn’t let the chauffeur clean it, giving some guff about the stains being spilt wine.’

‘Chauffeurs? Hire cars? Spilt wine? Doesn’t sound
quite
like Nicholas Campbell and Richard Underdown.’

‘Well, it was only an idea,’ Nick agreed. ‘We researched the case carefully. Leopold and Loeb were spoilt rich kids from Chicago, law students. They looked down their noses on everybody else and decided to choose an inferior to kill, just because they could. Lobber – that’s why he got the nickname, of course; we invented it – Lobber decided we should choose some low-life, a down and out probably.’

‘You know you’re confessing to murder, Nick, don’t you?’ It was the nearest thing Maxwell could give by way of a caution.

Campbell shook his head. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said.
‘It’s no more than crime writers do every day of their lives. I haven’t noticed Val McDermid or Robert Goddard being arrested lately.’

‘But you carried it out, Nick,’ Maxwell said.

‘No, Mr Maxwell, that’s the whole point.
Folie à deux
, isn’t it? That’s what you told us when you talked about the case first. I can remember it, clear as day. It was in Aitch Eight, a Tuesday morning and you said – I can remember your exact words – “
Folie à deux
means the madness of two. Take either individual on their own and they wouldn’t hurt a fly. Put them together and it’s fatal.”’

‘I’m impressed by your instant recall,’ Maxwell smiled, although he knew perfectly well he would actually have said ‘His or her own’.

Nick’s face suddenly darkened. ‘I had a phone call from Lobber last Thursday. He told me he’d done it. He’d killed a girl on the beach, just out beyond Willow Bay and left her body in the sand.’

‘Like Leopold and Loeb left Bobby Franks in the culvert,’ Maxwell nodded.

‘I thought he was joking,’ Nick went on. ‘We’d talked about carrying out a murder for the best part of two years, on and off. We’d refined it in all sorts of ways, hammered out scenarios. Then, and this was after we came back from Nigeria, it all got a bit nasty.’

‘In what way nasty? I got the impression you
were still best of friends when I saw you both in town.’

‘We had only just bumped into each other when we saw you. Since I met Greg…I knew it was the real thing. I had to put some space between me and Lobber. He wasn’t taking it well. He’d always been a bit possessive and we were going our different ways soon. I was off to university and he was working at the Lunts…’

‘The Lunts?’ Maxwell repeated.

‘The photography shop in the High Street.’

‘Of course,’ Maxwell clicked his fingers. It was his version of Homer Simpson’s ‘D’oh’. ‘I
knew
I recognised the voice. I rang the other day to talk to Mrs Lunt and he answered.’

Nick nodded. ‘I bet that put the frighteners on him. Knowing you were on his case.’

‘You flatter me, Nicholas,’ Maxwell said.

‘Anyway, I realised that Lobber meant business. About the murder, I mean. You know, Leopold and Loeb planned to kill their target between them, looping a rope around his neck and each pulling one end.’

‘Except it didn’t happen that way.’

‘No,’ Nick said. ‘Leopold was behind the wheel of the hire car, Loeb in the back with Bobby Franks. It was Loeb who shoved a gag in the kid’s mouth and hit him with a chisel. The rope was never used.’

‘So you’re telling me…?’

‘Lobber,’ Nick said solemnly. ‘Lobber chose the girl at random, followed her, picked her up on the street, took her to the beach – “Just for a walk,” he told her, “No funny business,” and stabbed her to death. Then he walked home, cleaned himself up and rang me.’

‘And what did you do?’

Nick put his head in his hands. ‘That’s the point,’ he said. ‘Nothing. At first, of course, I thought he was joking. You know what he was like at school, nicking door signs, gluing computer keys down. Then I caught the radio. There
was
a girl dead on the beach. And I still did nothing.’