Maxwell’s Reunion (14 page)

‘Having had time to think,’ he said, ‘is there any addition or alteration you wish to make to those statements?’

‘No.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘Is that the witness bit over?’

‘More or less.’ He nodded and grimaced as he sampled the coffee again. ‘Now, to the suspect bit. Did you kill George Quentin?’

Jacquie was aware that there were eyes on her back. She half turned and the heads went down, everybody in the room suddenly intent on their own little piece of the Bingham enquiry. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I did not.’

Thomas leaned forward. ‘Do you know a man who did?’ he asked.

‘I might,’ she told him. ‘The problem is, I don’t know who it is.’

‘What is your relationship with Peter Maxwell?’

She felt the eyes again. ‘Is that relevant?’ she asked.

‘It might be,’ Thomas told her. ‘You see, it took two to lift a dying man on to a balustrade and drop him over at the end of a rope. Now, at school, maths was never really my thing, but even I know that two and two make a killer.’

‘Folie a deux?’ Jacquie snorted. ‘Who do you imagine Maxwell and I are, Bonnie and Clyde?’

She suddenly realized she’d been shouting, and now there was someone alongside her, a steadying hand on her shoulder.

‘Sir …’ She half formed the words and half rose. ‘This is DI Thomas, Warwickshire CID.’

The inspector was on his feet, his hand held out. It was not taken. ‘DCI Hall,’ Hall said, looking hard into the man’s face. ‘The next time you wish to talk to one of my officers, on any topic whatsoever, you will contact me personally with such a request in advance and it will be in writing. Do we understand each other, Inspector?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Thomas said, looking decidedly sheepish for a moment.

‘Good. Now, come into my office. There are some things we need to clear up. Jacquie, got a minute? I could use your input on this.’

‘I didn’t think you were a mobile person.’ She lay in the bath that night, cucumber where her face used to be.

‘Jacquie, you sound odd,’ he told her.

‘I’ve been talking non-stop today,’ she said. ‘My jaw’s aching.’

‘Ah, what an honest confession from a woman. And I’m not a mobile person. You gave it to me, remember? Saying it was time I was dragged screaming into the twenty-first century.’

She did, but not for one moment did she believe Peter Maxwell would ever use the thing. ‘Are you still in Sussex Gardens?’

‘Yep.’ He yawned. ‘Heartbreak Hotel. What news on the Rialto?’ He’d kicked off his shoes and was lying on the bed, his feet up the wall, more or less where he was going with boredom.

‘We’re in the frame, Max, you and I,’ she told him.

‘What? Prime suspects, you mean?’

‘I had the misfortune to be grilled by DI Thomas today. You remember Smiler?’

‘Indeed I do.’ Maxwell had slid his feet down to assume a more conventional position. ‘Say on, o fount of info.’

‘Warwickshire CID are obviously doing follow-ups on all of us there that weekend. I got the short straw.’

‘You poor darling. He’s obviously got the hots for you.’

‘Scrummy.’ She edged a sponge aside with her toe, luxuriating in the warmth of the suds. ‘I thought it was you he fancied.’

‘Ah, I should be so lucky. Did he give anything away?’

‘Not until the DCI turned up. Then he was sweetness and light. Mind you, the DCI was the firmest I’ve known him.’

‘Well, well.’ Maxwell clicked his tongue. ‘Old Henry’s just gone up in my estimation.’

‘He had a hard weekend,’ Jacquie told him. ‘Following up the Quentin thing in the City. Seems he was pipped to the post by someone passing themselves off as him.’

‘No!’ Maxwell was outraged. ‘Must be very difficult to play Henry Hall. Not the most animated of people.’

‘Max, you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’

He feigned ignorance and hurt. ‘I, dear heart? I am cut to the quick. No, I’ve been trying to get hold of Stenhouse and his missus. No luck yet. I’ll give it another shot tomorrow and then I’ll try Alphie. This place is beginning to get me down.’

‘Do you want to know the common ground?’ she asked him. ‘Quentin and Bingham?’

He paused. ‘Jacquie?’ He was sitting up. ‘A few days ago you told me I was on my own. Something about your pretty little neck.’

He heard her snort some bubbles. ‘A few days ago I wasn’t top of some thick shit’s murder suspect list. Suddenly I see things in a rather different light.’

He chuckled. ‘Come on now, Jacquie. Come off the fence. What do you really think of DI Thomas?’

She laughed with him. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Similarities. Both Quentin and Bingham were battered over the head with a blunt, wooden instrument, made of willow.’

‘Cricket bat,’ Maxwell said.

There was a silence. ‘Do you know that?’

‘Not for a fact, no,’ he told her. ‘But neither of them died by random selection. Whatever this is all about, Halliards is at the heart of it. A cricket bat would be poetic, don’t you think?’

‘Who was the poet in the Magnificent Seven?’ she asked.

‘That would be me,’ he told her. ‘Similarity on.’

‘Both attacks came from behind.’

‘Of course. Quent was no slouch. He used to be fast and strong. There are not many people would be able to get one over on him face to face. Did you know he was gay?’

‘The DCI interviewed his lover, um … Paulo somebody.’

‘Escobar,’ Maxwell told her. ‘That’s just a lucky guess, by the way.’

She blew bubbles again. ‘Max, was he that way at school?’

‘Quent? Never! Well … God, I don’t know.’

‘Would you have known?’

‘Not necessarily. Oh, it went on, of course. It does in all single-sex places. There were stories about the Preacher and the school cat. Not to mention the chaplain …’

‘The chaplain?’

‘I said,’ he shouted, ‘you weren’t to mention the chaplain! Ah, the old ones are the best.’

‘And there,’ she said, ‘the similarities end. A dark-coloured car was seen in or near the Halliards grounds on Friday night, Thomas told us.’

‘When all of us were whooping it up at the Graveney.’

‘All except George Quentin,’ she reminded him.

‘And the Preacher, who was late.’

‘Even so,’ she was staring at the swirling patterns of the steam, ‘that doesn’t tally. The pathologist estimated Quentin’s time of death at about two, two-thirty Saturday morning. Where were you then?’

‘Policewoman Carpenter,’ he said, appalled. ‘Are you interrogating me?’

She laughed. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. Just because you’re paranoid, Max, it doesn’t mean everyone’s not after you.’

‘How right you are,’ he said.

‘There are actually more differences in the two killings than similarities.’ She was talking to herself really. ‘Quentin found indoors, hanged. Bingham in the open, bludgeoned. There was a clumsy attempt to cover that up.’

‘How?’

‘He was hidden under an old settee.’

‘That’s because,’ Maxwell was thinking aloud too, ‘the deaths served different purposes.’

‘How?’ she asked.

‘Quent was deliberate, public, a set piece, based on the legend.’

‘Legend?’ She sat up and a couple of her cucumber slices fell off. ‘What legend?’

‘Well, the hanged boy … oh, for Christ’s sake, Jacquie, didn’t I tell you about that? Yes, I did.’

‘No you bloody didn’t, Peter Maxwell,’ and she was out of the bath, cucumber slices flying in all directions. She grabbed a towel and padded along the landing, rummaging furiously in her bedroom for a notepad. ‘What, tell me, what?’

‘Well, it’s nothing, really,’ he told her. ‘Just one of those silly old school stories the boarders used to scare themselves shitless with in the dorm after lights out. I will confess, I had forgotten about it entirely. Even seeing poor Quent dangling there didn’t jog my memory.’

‘Go on, go on. Oh, shit!’ She couldn’t find a pen that worked and her towel refused to stay up.

‘The legend of Halliards is that a lad hanged himself. He was supposed to be so miserable at the place – and God knows I can understand that – that he hanged himself from the bell rope one night. That was back in, oh, God knows, 1840 something. All schools over a century old have stories like that.’

‘And who’d have known about that?’ she asked.

‘Any of us,’ Maxwell said. ‘All of us.’

‘And who’d have known more than anyone else, Max?’ she asked, already knowing the answer. ‘Who was the historian of the Magnificent Seven?’

‘Um, that would be me too,’ he said.

9

The cab dropped him at the gate and he walked the rest of the way. The sun threw short, sharp shadows through the gaps in the privet and the dew was still bubbling on the grass. Kept an immaculate lawn, did Richard Alphedge. Maxwell rounded the pampas, rather past its best now that winter was coming on, and he was quietly impressed. If the house wasn’t Lutyens, it was his smarter younger brother, with the unmistakable mock-Tudor elegance of those pre-Great War years, before life got so drab and grubby.

He rang the bell, an elaborate, ornate, wrought-iron thing that appeared to have genuine verdigris, not the type you can buy by the yard in Past Times. He heard the echo dying away in the hall beyond the heavy studded oak of the door. A gargoyle letterbox yawned at him from the frame.

‘Who is it?’ a disembodied voice, like something out of Oz, called out to him.

Maxwell stepped back, trying to find life, perhaps in an upstairs window. ‘I’m looking for Richard Alphedge,’ he said. ‘The actor.’

There was a click to his left and he spun round to stare down the double barrels of a shotgun. A decidedly nervous Richard Alphedge stood at the other end, one eye shut, with Maxwell in his sights.

‘For Christ’s sake, Alphie. Is that thing loaded?’

‘Max!’ Alphedge lowered the barrels. ‘You scared me to death.’

‘
I
scared
you
?’ Maxwell crossed to him. ‘I’m just glad I’m wearing my brown trousers. Have you got a licence for that?’

‘What? Oh, no, don’t need one. Sorry, Max, it’s a film prop. The most I could have done was nip your fingers in the firing mechanism. What are you doing here?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I should have called first.’

‘No, no, don’t be daft. It’s good to see a friendly face. Come in, will you? Cissie won’t be long.’

He showed his old oppo into a low vaulted entrance hall that led into a sitting room with glowing oak floors and sheepskin rugs. Alphedge propped the shotgun in the corner and threw back the doors of his drinks cabinet. ‘You’ll have a snorter?’ the actor asked.

‘Well …’ Maxwell sank into the coach-hide furniture. ‘It’s a little early for me.’

‘Nonsense. Scotch?’

‘You haven’t got a Southern Comfort, I suppose?’

‘Er … no, sorry.’

‘Scotch it is, then.’

Alphedge poured for them both. Maxwell noticed how unsteady the man’s hands were, how he jumped at every sound, every rustle of the leaves on the windowpane.

‘Well …’ The actor sat down opposite Maxwell and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to who’s left of us.’

Maxwell drank with him. ‘You know about Cret, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Alphedge swallowed hard. ‘It’s all over the bloody papers. On the telly. Funny how everybody takes it seriously, because he was a High Court bloody judge. The likes of you and me …’

‘Come off it, Alphie. We’re not in the same category, you and I.’ Maxwell waved at the trophies around the room and the photographs that plastered the wall. ‘Look at that lot – you and John Gielgud, you and Larry Olivier, you and Michael Caine … well, look at you and Gielgud and Olivier anyway. My walls are covered in group photos of 7F at Chessington World of Adventure.’

Alphedge chuckled. ‘And I can’t help thinking you’re better off for it. Right now, I’d trade all this in for a bit of peace. It’s not much fun being high profile when there’s a maniac on the loose. Have the police been to see you?’

‘They tried, apparently,’ Maxwell said. ‘I wasn’t there. Half-term.’

‘Oh, of course.’

‘You?’

Alphedge nodded, taking another swig to steady himself. ‘Some pushy sergeant called Vernon. He brought a WPC with him, for Cissie presumably. She was fine, of course; played more cop shows than I’ve had walk-on parts. I don’t know what I’d do without Cissie; a tower of strength, an absolute tower.’

‘They want to see if our stories are still the same,’ Maxwell said. ‘Whether we’ve remembered anything.’

‘Have you?’

Maxwell sighed. ‘I wish I could. Alphie, had you met up with any of the Seven – recently, I mean?’

‘Recently? God, no. You know how it is. I thought some of them would be dead. Oh, Christ, now they are. The awful thing is not knowing who’ll be next.’

‘You really think there’ll be a next?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘That depends.’

‘Don’t be such a cryptic bastard, Max; what are you talking about?’

‘Whether all of us have pissed the murderer off to the extent that he wants to kill us all or whether there’s something else I haven’t got my head round yet. What did you do after Halliards? RADA, wasn’t it?’

Alphedge nodded. ‘Then a spot of rep. I got my first West End break in ’68 – Hadrian VII. I understudied Alan Bennett in
Forty Years On
. My first film was
Where Eagles Dare
… for fuck’s sake, Max, what do you want my CV for?’

‘Clutching at straws, I suppose,’ Maxwell said. ‘Think back, Alphie. At any time, did any of us try to contact you? After all, you’re undoubtedly the most famous of us.’

‘Jesus, Max, I don’t know. In my line you get fan mail, groupies, people writing to you asking for parts, auditions. I could fill a bloody pantechnicon with the mail I’ve received. Can I put my hand on my heart and say one of those letters wasn’t from Stenhouse or Cret or Ash or you? No, I can’t. Ash came to see me once in the West End – I think I told you; but that was years ago. What does your policewoman make of all this?’

‘My policewoman?’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Well, it’s difficult for her, Alphie. Professional ethics and all that.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Alphedge nodded, staring into the bottomless amber of his glass. ‘The sanctity of the confessional or whatever. Talking of which … the Preacher.’