Maxwell's Chain (7 page)

Jacquie grabbed his jacket hem and pulled him back. ‘Max,’ she said, dropping the veneer of professionalism. ‘I’ve come here because I recognised him.’

‘So, why come here?’ He was rather miffed. When he wanted to be involved in a murder, it took Kung Po Chicken to get the details out of her. Here was one he knew nothing about and he was dragged out of a lesson to be told about it. Women, eh? He threw an exasperated glance at the rookie, but realised at once the lad had no idea what a woman was, so no help there.

She drew nearer. ‘I recognised him because he’s one of yours.’ Maxwell looked stricken. ‘Not a current Yours, I don’t mean. He’s an Old Highena.’

‘My God. Who?’

‘That’s the problem. I only know he came here. I can’t remember when exactly or who he is. He’s one of those who comes up to you in the street and tells you he always liked History and you was his favourite teacher up at the school, honest.’

‘Does he belong to the group who then touch me for the price of a pint?’

‘He might have done. He was found on a park bench.’

‘Well,’ Maxwell sat down heavily in the chair, the coffee offer forgotten and the kettle switching itself off. ‘Where do we go from here?’

‘Max, you know I wouldn’t ask if there was any other way, but I need you to come down and identify him for us.’

‘I’ll get my coat.’ It wasn’t that he was morbidly curious. He had been connected with sudden death often enough to know that what was, to the uninvolved outsider, just a salacious or exciting news item, to the people involved always brought grief and distress, anger and regret. If this body was that of a Leighford Highena, however long ago, it meant that parents were probably still living in the area, mates might be waiting even now for him outside a pub, workmates would be looking at an empty desk, wondering whether to phone home and find out where he might be. It wasn’t just a dead body. It was a dead life.

‘I’m sorry, Max. But the DCI thinks you can really help us on this one.’

Maxwell suppressed a snort. Henry Hall had blown hot and cold on this very theme for years. It was as if he blew on the dandelion clock of crime. ‘He helps me, he helps me not.’ Now, he’d sent a
woman to do a man’s job; worse, the cunning old bastard had sent Jacquie Carpenter.

She touched his lapel by way of goodbye. ‘We can find our own way,’ she told him and she and her rookie companion went back to the car.

Maxwell weighed his options. Leighford Highenas had died before, some of them violently. Some behind the wheel of a car, some in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there was something
personal
about it always. Maxwell had gone to their funerals, on wet hillsides, wearing a pink bowtie once because pink had been the girl’s favourite colour. He had made small talk with relatives and friends, offered commiserations, growled his way through the hymns. ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ indeed. Time after time, and just too often, all things bright and beautiful were snuffed out, destroyed. He hauled on his coat, threw the Jesus scarf around his neck, dumped the shapeless tweed hat on his shapeless hair and made for the light.

‘Thingee, my dear,’ he said when he reached Reception, gesturing for her to come closer. ‘I fear I have been picked up by the fuzz. If you could cover this afternoon for me I would be grateful. For some reason best known to the timetablers I am down for Travel and Tourism today. I have been showing
them holiday-themed DVDs, I am not ashamed to admit. Let’s see, we’ve done
Carry on Camping
. We gave up on
Lost in Translation
, since it clearly was.
Summer Holiday
was last week…who’s free to do this cover?’ He smiled brightly at Thingee One.

She ran her finger down a list, printed on bright orange paper. ‘Umm, let’s see, Mr Maxwell.’ She looked at him and winked conspiratorially. ‘Would you like it to be Ms Lessing?’

‘Oh, Thingee. Most fragrant of women.’ Thingee blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘That would be splendid. I would love it to be Ms Lessing. In that case, write this down.’ He cleared his throat and dictated. ‘Eleven Zed Queue. First lesson, show as much as you can of
Last Tango in Paris
. I gather that the Religious Studies department have a
well-thumbed
copy. Second lesson, questions to the teacher in charge of the cover.’ He smiled. ‘That should do it.’

Maxwell turned on his heel and made for the door, ducking his head and turning his face away as he whisked past Dierdre Lessing’s office window. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her half rise out of her seat, one finger in the air, but he was in the police car and away before she could make it to the door. He’d come back for his bike later.

Jacquie rang the bell in the reception area of Jim Astley’s morgue. Donald answered and was delighted to see her and said so. Maxwell, he was not so pleased to see, but, uncharacteristically, managed to keep that piece of information to himself.

‘Hello, Donald,’ Jacquie said, with a bright smile. ‘We’re here to possibly identify the body brought in this morning.’

Donald, putty in her hands, opened the door on a buzzer and waved her through. He was blissfully unaware that Jacquie had just split an infinitive. Maxwell
was
aware, but let it go. Now was not the time.

‘We’ll do the paperwork in a minute,’ Jacquie said, reading Donald’s mind. ‘If Mr Maxwell doesn’t know the deceased, it would be just as easy not to have his name on the forms. What do you think?’

Donald nodded. Much,
much
easier. Donald and the Work Ethic were only casual acquaintances. And if it could be managed that Jim Astley didn’t know he’d been here, that would be better still. Maxwell was impressed. He knew she was good – she had, after all, managed to get that old grouch Metternich on side in a matter of days, in his experience a unique skill. But he thought that Donald was probably almost as hard a nut to crack as the black and white behemoth.

He showed them into a corridor, dimly lit with strategically placed seats for the collapsing bereaved. He disappeared through a door and a curtain slowly drew aside. It reminded Maxwell macabrely of a cremation in reverse and he wondered how this could soothe a shattered relative.

Beyond the window, a body was laid out, decorously draped in white. The pale face was turned slightly towards the viewer, eyes closed and hair roughly combed into what may have been its usual place. The mouth was slightly open and not even Donald’s nifty placement of a wad of surgical blue paper roll could disguise the lividity on one cheek and the line of the chin. Even so, and even allowing for the stubble and general unwashed appearance, it was clearly Darren Blackwell, erstwhile Leighford non-High-flyer, last taught by Maxwell when he, Darren, was a fresh-faced fourteen-year-old, chirpily deciding to opt for Geography instead of History. He opted for Science in the Sixth Form. He opted for a Modern Apprenticeship instead of university. He then decided to opt for drinking and any pills he could buy under the pier. Cop out after cop out. And now here he was, laid out. Be sure your sins will find you out. Maxwell gripped the edge of the windowsill and nodded to Jacquie.

‘Darren Blackwell,’ he said. ‘Age…umm, let me
work it out. He’ll be…twenty-two, possibly
twenty-three
. His youngest brother is in Year Ten at the moment. His middle brother has just done A levels and is away at…Hull.’

‘How do you do it, Max?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Do you remember everyone you teach?’

‘’Fraid so,’ Maxwell said, with a lopsided grin. ‘It’s not pretty, but someone has to do it.’

‘So, his family are obviously still in town.’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘I can’t remember the address exactly, but I know it’s near the seafront. They keep a chippie, or a kebab shop or something similar. They’ll know at school.’

She gave him a one-armed hug. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you back there.’

He returned the squeeze. ‘Dear me, no,’ he said, to her surprise. ‘Dierdre is covering my lesson for me and I wouldn’t interrupt it for the world. I imagine it is one she’ll remember for quite a while.’

Darren Blackwell’s parents did keep a chip shop – The Plaice To Be – in the High Street in Leighford. They were sitting now in the small living room of the flat above; tastefully furnished, with a flat screen television the size of a blackboard and as much electronic gadgetry as could be packed into one entertainment module, cunningly crafted from mock pine. Henry Hall sat on the chair; Mr and Mrs Blackwell huddled together on the settee. The appalling carpet swirled in reds and greens between them.

‘You say Darren didn’t live here with you?’ he asked either of the pair.

‘No,’ Mr Blackwell answered. ‘Not because we didn’t want him here, mind. All our boys will have a home here, always. But he’d been away to live and, well…do you have a family, Detective Chief Inspector?’

Hall nodded. He did have a family, not that he had seen enough of them as they grew up. They were good boys, never a moment’s trouble, and he never ceased to give thanks for that. Other people’s boys gave him more trouble than his own ever had.

‘Then you’ll know what I mean, I expect. He came home for a bit, didn’t he, love?’ He turned to his wife for support. She nodded over her sodden hankie, balled up in a fist so tight it looked as though it might never open again.

‘But, the other boys were younger then. Alex was only twelve and this flat’s not that big. He and Kevin had to double back up when Darren came home; it made for arguments. He found himself somewhere, didn’t he, Mother? With some mates.’

‘Some mates, yes,’ she whispered.

‘Whereabouts?’ Hall asked gently.

‘We don’t really know,’ Blackwell continued. ‘He left his address as this one. Well, it saved him having to change it, you know, with the bank and that. So, he’d come back for his post and that.’

‘Did you never visit him?’ Hall wanted to know.

‘I wanted to,’ his mother said. ‘Make it a bit homey, you know. I bought him little bits, cushions and things like that. But he said it wasn’t very easy to have visitors. You know, because of his flatmates. They all had to share and it wasn’t easy.’ She looked
at Hall. ‘Well, that’s what he said, wasn’t it?’ she appealed to her husband, who nodded.

They looked so bereft, so lost, their chicks now two, not three. Ordinary people, both overweight, martyrs to sampling the chips they cooked. The fact that Darren had been a bit of a cuckoo didn’t help them in their loss. He had died only a few hundred yards from where they sat now. Hall knew he would do anything to stop them finding out that the ‘flat’ was a series of cardboard boxes and old carpets fashioned into a hideaway in the woods out of town beyond the Dam. That in that hideaway they had found some cushions, dirty and damp; a table lamp, useless in that powerless place, its bubblewrap still in place, each small bubble crushed to flatness by Darren, in the interminable hours between his crawling into his shell and the light of dawn. Most poignant of all, a curled photograph of his parents, with their three boys, standing in a row outside the shop. No, Hall would not let them know about that.

‘Did he ever say he was having trouble with anyone?’ Hall asked. ‘Did he owe money, that kind of thing?’

Darren’s mother sat up sharply, hen defending chick, a tigress standing over her dead cub. ‘No, he didn’t,’ she said sharply. ‘And anyway,’ her eyes filled
up again and her lip quivered, the fight leaking out of her, ‘who kills someone because they owe them money? They’ll never get it then, will they? It makes no sense.’ She burrowed her face into her husband’s shoulder. No, it made no sense. None of it made any sense.

Mr Blackwell looked over his wife’s bowed head at Henry Hall. ‘How did he die?’ he asked.

Hall breathed a sigh of relief. The interview was back on the usual track. That was normally the first question asked and at last it was here.

‘We are investigating at the moment, Mr Blackwell,’ he said, a touch formally. ‘At first sight it looks as though he may have been…’ He hesitated. Stabbed with a narrow blade, Astley would be dictating any time now, leaning over the body before he went to work with his electric saw and took off the dead boy’s cranium and carved the obligatory ‘Y’ into his chest. ‘Why?’ indeed. Hall had known the cause of death from just viewing the body; the shredded clothing, the congealed blood. Surely not exposure as well, although, Heaven knew, the nights were still cold. He settled for the bland, as only he could. ‘He may have been murdered, I’m sorry to say. I don’t know any details yet.’ Cowardly, but kind. Somehow, these two parents, bereft and grieving, had touched the father that lurked deep
inside Henry Hall. ‘As soon as we know, we’ll let
you
know,’ he promised.

‘I suppose you’ll want us to come and identify him?’ Mrs Blackwell said, sniffing.

‘Er, no, there’s no need for that,’ Hall said. ‘Mr Maxwell from Leighford High has already done that.’

They looked at each other, puzzled. ‘You said a jogger found him,’ Mr Blackwell said. ‘Mr Maxwell doesn’t jog, surely?’

Hall blinked as the picture trotted across his mind’s eye. ‘No, but his partner is one of my sergeants. She recognised Darren and thought that Mr Maxwell could help. As it turned out, she was right.’

Mrs Blackwell smiled bleakly, for the first time. ‘Mr Maxwell’s wonderful,’ she shared with Hall, ‘don’t you think? All my boys like him. Mr Maxwell said this, Mr Maxwell said that.’ She waited brightly for a reply.

‘Oh, yes,’ Hall grated out. ‘He certainly is. Wonderful. Yes.’ The things he had to do in this job, he thought, sometimes defied belief. He rose to go. ‘We’ll ring or come round as soon as we know anything more. I’m sorry for your loss.’ The cliché perhaps helped someone, Hall thought, but not him and, looking at the pair in front of him, not the bereaved either. But somehow, it had to be said. ‘Do
you have anyone who could come and be with you, perhaps? Family? A friend?

Darren’s mother nodded. ‘My friend is coming over. We’ve known each other since we were at infant school. Our boys are the same age…’ She dissolved into sobs. Now, only some of their boys were the same age. One of hers was dead and her life would never be the same. He had been living rough, he hadn’t always been what she wanted him to be, but he had been alive. Now he was the blank look in people’s eyes, he was the reason for people crossing the street, changing the subject. If she was heartbroken now, thought Hall, she would look back on this as bearable in the months and years to come.

He shook their hands and said, ‘Good. I’m glad. We’ll be in touch.’ He clattered down the stairs and got in his car. He thumped both hands on the wheel and let out a long-held breath. Things were getting bad. Henry Hall was catching humanity. What he was not catching was a killer.

Peter Maxwell was sitting in his modelling chair at the top of 38, Columbine. This was his War Office. Nolan had been up there, always secure in somebody’s arms. Jacquie occasionally went up and blew dust off things. But only Maxwell and
Metternich had the run of the place.

On the desk in front of him, a white, plastic 54-millimetre soldier lay on his back beside a white, plastic, 54-millimetre horse. In the fullness of time, suitably accoutred and painted, he would take his place in Captain White’s squadron of the 17th Lancers, now forming up to Maxwell’s left to ride into legend. Maxwell had been collecting these figures, courtesy of Messrs Historex, modellers extraordinaire, for years. They drained his bank balance, they took up his time when he should have been marking books or dandling his baby or talking to Jacquie. But hey, they also kept him sane. And they gave him a challenge. Six hundred and
seventy-eight
men had ridden behind Lord Cardigan on that fateful October day back in 1854 – Maxwell was still at school then – and the figure under Maxwell’s modelling lens today was number four hundred and twenty-six.

Actually, as he had had to repeat to Metternich several times now, this one was Corporal Thomas Morley, who had been promoted to sergeant shortly after the Charge and served as a cavalry officer for the Union in the American Civil War – well, somebody had to show the Americans how to ride properly. Morley was a bit of an old grouch himself, not unlike Metternich, in fact, and spent the rest of
his life whingeing because no one would give him the VC.

Maxwell was feeling faintly guilty about his decision not to return to Leighford High earlier, but his brush with murder had, this time, left him feeling a bit shaken. He had found an abandoned corpse only days ago, he had mislaid a suspect, and that was only his recent History. He had had more brushes with death and destruction than any Head of Sixth Form should ever have to bear. But something about Darren Blackwell’s unkempt body had made the father in him rise up and want to howl. That boy, like his, had once sat and gurgled up at his proud parents. That boy, like his, had slept on his father’s chest, dribbling quietly as he did so. Then, that boy had gone wrong somewhere, had taken a turning that had led him to death on a park bench. Maxwell had needed some time out. He would be back at the chalk-face tomorrow, casting pearls before swine, but now he would watch them more carefully, looking for that moment when a wrong word might send them spinning into oblivion. Or at least, he thought ruefully, he would if only he had the time; teaching any one of the classes he had the next day needed more arms than Kali, more eyes than Argus. Then he remembered that plague was in the city; some anonymous bug
was scything classes and staff down. A few less arms then, a few less eyes. But he needed a break, so here he was with the Light Brigade. And then, suddenly, he needed another break, so he put Corporal Morley down, still whingeing, and went downstairs to watch a nice episode of
Diagnosis Murder
. Ah, the bliss of daytime television. That would be followed by the rambunctious return of Nolan from his childminder and a cuddle from Jacquie. He’d be all right.

He was just dropping off to sleep – Dick Van Dyke always had that effect in the end and anyway it was the Chartered Accountant who did it – when the doorbell rang. He wandered muttering down the stairs to the door, trying to look pale and
ague-ridden
in case it was one of the Senior Leadership Team from Leighford High checking up on him and flung it open.

‘Mr Maxwell? Thank God you’re here. There’s been another one. The police are after me.’ Bill Lunt’s machine-gun delivery had not abated while he was on the run. Not a bad imitation of Peter Lorre out of
M
.

‘Bill,’ Maxwell stood aside and extended a welcoming arm. ‘Come in. We’ve been worried about you. Where have you been?’

‘I needed to have a think.’ Lunt was climbing the stairs like a nonagenarian, pressing on each thigh in
turn to make the gradient. ‘I’ve been sleeping in my car.’

‘Just for the one night, though, Bill,’ said Maxwell, not meaning to minimise his pain, but anxious for the facts to be kept straight while that was still possible.

Bill Lunt turned pained eyes to Maxwell. ‘It was cold, though,’ he said plaintively. ‘And dark, in the woods, where I was parked. There were wild animals.’

Maxwell’s eyebrows asked the obvious question. The woods were indeed lovely, dark and deep. But,
wild animals
?

‘Well, foxes at least. And badgers have a nasty bite if you get too close.’

‘And did you?’ They were in the sitting room by now and Lunt had collapsed on the sofa, narrowly missing Metternich, who was stretched out behind a couple of cushions. The animal hissed, merely reaffirming Lunt’s terror of nature, red in tooth and claw. Maxwell walked towards the kitchen. He’d been sitting on Metternich for years
and
had the scars to prove it. ‘Tea?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Get too close to a badger.’

‘Well, of course not.’ Bill Lunt felt that his role as victim was not being taken very seriously. He was
a man on the run. He should be looked after. He felt tears prick his eyelids. No one loved him. He sniffed. ‘They’ve got quite a nasty bite, you know.’

Maxwell sighed and went into the kitchen. He put the kettle on and picked up the phone.

‘One one eight, one one eight, how may I help you?’ asked a voice.

‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell whispered into the receiver. ‘Lunt Photographic, Leighford, please.’

The voice registered distaste. ‘Can you spell that, sir?’ it said, with a smell under its nose; obviously the result of those silly moustaches they all wore.

‘Ell you enn tea, Lunt, Pea aitch…’

‘Oh,
Lunt
Photographic.’ The voice collected itself. ‘Yes, I have that here. Would you like me to put you through?’

‘If you would,’ Maxwell said and started gathering the tea things one-handed as he waited for a reply. Like most men, he’d never managed to do that thing with the phone tucked into his neck. But then, like most men, he couldn’t multi-task either and dropped the thing before retrieving it deftly.

After a few rings the phone was snatched up. ‘Helpyew?’ slurred the answerer. The voice seemed faintly familiar, but Maxwell couldn’t place it.

‘Er…is Mrs Lunt there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘May I speak to her please?’

‘Yeah. Emma?’ The second word nearly exploded Maxwell’s ear drums. Why did people never move the phone from their mouth when they shouted across a busy shop? ‘Emma? ’Sferyew.’ The phone landed with a crash on what he assumed was a counter.

Despite the fact that the voice appeared to be speaking Polish, Maxwell was still certain he recognised it. He waited, listening at second hand to the busy to and fro that was Lunt Photographic.

‘Hello?’ Emma’s altogether more cultured tones came through the earpiece.

‘Oh, Emma,’ whispered Maxwell. ‘I think I have something of yours here. It’s Peter Maxwell, by the way.’ He had suddenly realised he sounded rather dodgy, like those old perverts who claim to be fifteen in chat rooms or have an unrivalled collection of saddles from little girls’ bicycles.

‘Mr Maxwell?’ she said. ‘What can you possibly have of mine?’ She was no fool, thought Maxwell. She’s on to me.

‘Ha ha,’ he tried a light laugh. ‘Well, it’s your husband, in fact. He seems to be on the run.’

‘For goodness’ sake,’ she spat. ‘Of course he’s not on the run. What’s he got to be on the run for?’