Authors: M. J. Trow
Maxwell’s House
Maxwell’s House
M J Trow
Copyright © 2013 M J Trow
All Rights Reserved
This edition published in 2013 by:
Thistle Publishing
36 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU
The kids called it the Red House; exactly why, none of them could tell you. But then, none of them was asked until that summer. The summer they found her there.
It was only in winter that it was visible, when the oaks were naked and the bracken lay brown and dead at its feet.
It was always a house of secrets. There was a swing there once, under the boughs of the cedar. Someone let the jungle in. The tennis court has gone now; it was down there, where the broken wall lies derelict and forgotten. And in the orchard was the summer house where the young ones flirted in the evening glow and the fireflies flashed. A different world. So long, long ago.
It was always a house of shadows; spiders spinning in the cracks, woodlice crawling through the fallen plaster. The window frames hang black and creaking precariously on long-rusted hinges they cannot trust. All that graces these walls now are the green and black mottlings of mildew and the silver wanderings of the snails. Shutters hanging at tragic angles. The dark grey sludge of a carpet for too long open to the rain and the merciless sky. Pipes and plumbing that bang and rattle when the wind is from the west.
It was summer when they found her. She’d been murdered. But then, this was always a house of death.
Chief Inspector Henry Hall was a copper of the new school. One of those elitist, grammar school educated oiks who had somehow survived the great leveller that was comprehensive education by living in a backward county that refused to abandon the Eleven Plus. His friends had all become chartered accountants or civil engineers or PR men. Funny how he’d lost touch with them all now he’d joined the force. At first there’d been the usual jokes about the pointed head and the flat feet and the planted evidence and the fabricated statement. That was because they never expected him to survive Hendon. When he did, they took bets on how long he’d survive his first beat. Some said the two and a half mile an hour pace would wear him out. Others that he’d be called upon to deliver a baby and would die of embarrassment. When they put him on the cars, they said he’d wrap himself round a bollard, drive the wrong way around the M25. But he found the pace all right. He wasn’t asked to deliver a baby, ever. And he was driving in one direction only – to the top.
As he got out of the car on that wet, blustery evening, he was staring his fortieth birthday in the face. That day he had doubted would ever come. It was a time of frailty. Of doubt. Of second guessing the ego trip that was youth. But now was no time to reflect. Now was all blue flashing lights and cordons fluttering in the wind and lads in uniform with chequered caps keeping sightseers away. Where do they come from, these ghouls? Do they smell blood? Do they rise, primeval, from the swamp? They always look, always sound, always smell the same.
‘Who is it?’
‘Somethin’s up.’
‘Is it an accident?’
‘Is anybody dead?’
All in good time, thought Hall. But there was never much of that, was there? And for the girl upstairs, time had run out.
Faces peered at him through the rain, features hard, inquisitive, wrapped in hoods and cagoules. Where had this bloody weather come from? They jostled as close to the cordon as they could, until the long arm of a motor-cycle policeman stopped them and shepherded them back. Who was he, they were wondering. The bloke in the sharp suit and the gold-rimmed specs. Must be the coroner. Isn’t that what they called them on Quincy? Bit of a kid, though. He ought to be older.
Hall heard his own feet crunch on the gravel of the drive. Jim Astley’s estate lay at a rakish angle near the steps. He noticed the fishing rods in the back. Oh dear. That didn’t bode well. Some uniformed lad on the door saluted. He nodded back. Scenes of crime had brought arc lamps in and the old house glowed with a fierce light it had never known until now, the shadows of men huge and sharp on its walls.
‘Up here, Chief Inspector.’ Hall recognized the voice of DI Johnson on the landing. ‘Watch your step. It’s like a bloody swamp in here.’
Somebody flashed a torch on the stairs and he picked his way up through the debris of bird droppings into the room to his left. It struck him for a second that he had stumbled into that overrated stable in Bethlehem. A posed group crouched around a floodlit something in the middle of the floor, some on one knee, some on two. ‘Joseph’ had a straggly, grey-streaked beard and a tweed cap, a Barbour flung back to give himself space – Dr James Astley, the police surgeon, doubly pissed off because they’d called him from his beloved river bank and because he was staring at the body of a young girl. ‘Mary’ looked up at him, her mouth open, her eyes blinking. DS Jacquie Carpenter, out of ciggies, out of her depth. Hall looked back at her, his eyes blanked in the reflection of his glasses by the arc light.
‘Jacquie,’ he said softly and threw her a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. She caught it and was grateful for the excuse to move away.
‘Somewhere else,’ ‘Joseph’ growled as she fumbled the packet into trembling hands. ‘Light that somewhere else.’ Hall jerked his head to the door.
‘I m all right, sir.’ Her voice was steady.
‘I know you are,’ Hall told her, ‘but there’s a crowd of well-wishers below. I want their names and addresses before we move them on.’
She suddenly felt like crying, bit down hard on her lip and lurched past the ‘three kings’ who looked, in the eerie light, suspiciously like DI Johnson. Hall saw him grin, chuckle, shake his head. Like most of the force, Johnson raised misogyny to a fine art. A tough, tight-lipped career policeman, he’d been too close for too long. And no one could see it, least of all himself.
He joined the Magi at the shrine of death. No boy-child in a manger, in swaddling wrapped, but a girl aged seventeen, staring at the half-ceiling through sightless eyes. Funny, with the rain falling on her like that, that she didn’t blink. Funny, in the arc light, how pale she looked. She was frowning a little, as though she didn’t understand what she was doing here, what all the fuss was about.
‘Jim,’ Hall said softly.
‘No,’ the doctor muttered, knowing what the Chief Inspector would say, ‘it doesn’t matter. They weren’t biting anyway. Too damned wet on the river. I heard a vague rumour this was supposed to be summer. How’s Helen?’
‘Fine.’
‘Kids?’
‘Three – when I counted last.’
‘Ah, it’ll be what they give you in the staff canteen. Do you know who she is?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Hall nodded, ‘I know exactly who she is. She’s Jennifer Antonia Hyde. She was seventeen on 8th March. There’ll be an old scar on her left forearm, where she fell off her trike just after her fourth birthday.’
The doctor lifted up the unoffending limb. Though it was streaked with grime, the scar was clearly visible. ‘A few stitches in that, I shouldn’t wonder,’ he said.
‘How’s Marjorie?’ Hall said. ‘I forgot to ask.’
‘So did I,’ Astley snorted. He looked at his watch. ‘On to her sixth gin by now, but thanks for asking. Sweet of you.’
‘Ready for the photographs yet?’
‘Why not?’ Astley grunted as he got to his feet. ‘I wish these people would die at waist-height. All this clambering about does my sciatica no good at all.’
Hall’s mouth was already open when Astley’s raised hand stopped him. ‘Yes, it looks sexual,’ he said.
It did. Jennifer Antonia Hyde lay on her back, both arms thrown back above her head, her long dark hair splayed out over them. Her school blouse was ripped open and the front catch of her bra had separated to reveal small breasts and dark nipples. Her skirt was rucked up, wet and heavy at her hips, and her legs were spread.
‘Pink underwear,’ Astley said. ‘Is that standard at … where was she at school?’
‘Leighford,’ Hall muttered, ‘Leighford High.’
Leighford High was one of those brave new world buildings some idiot envisaged in the ’60s. The Labour Party occasionally threw up a government or two in those days and among their most levelling concepts was that of the comprehensive ethos. It was known earlier as ‘Jack’s As Good As His Master’ and later as the politics of envy. So milkmen’s sons rubbed shoulders and other things with the daughters of chartered accountants in that great adventure that was adolescence. And to make sure that the pipe dream came true, that scores of Waynes and Shanes went on to read Greats at Balliol, they built schools like Leighford in the image of Harold Wilson. A central tower block, all leaking panels and filthy glass, where the classrooms blazed in the summer and froze in winter, where the central heating was endlessly conking out. To the west lay the squatter wing of the Languages Department, their rooms gutted and regutted as language laboratories and carrels had gone in and out of fashion. To the east, the Science labs, smelling vaguely of gas and rubber tubing and formalin, where unspeakable things floated in liquid as they might have done in Mengele’s study or the cabinet of Dr Caligari. To the south, the newest addition -the Technology block, smelling of new carpets and government money and promising a return to the concept of the Workshop of the World. Except they couldn’t decide, to the south, where exactly they were at. At first there had been woodwork and metalwork where a boy could drive in a nail or use his granny’s tooth till the cows came home. Then they’d changed the rules and the terminology and the initials were born – CDT, Craft, Design and Technology. And the craft disappeared and vacuous design was all and creation was in the cursor of a computer screen. Everybody was doing a Blue Peter, making Blenheim Palace out of toilet rolls. Then, the government had stopped it all, like a latter-day Frankenstein realizing its creation had run amok and had shattered the fetters that bound it. There was nothing so confused as a CDT teacher in the ’90s.
It was to the north that the policemen travelled, rolling gently over their namesakes sleeping beside the bike sheds.
‘There was a bike at the old house,’ Johnson said, peering through the raindrops. ‘At the Red House. A bike.’
‘Was there?’ Hall asked.
‘I’ve got it here.’ Johnson flicked open his notebook. ‘A Mr Arnold was walking his dog night before last and he passed the place. Said there was a push-bike leaning up against the wall.’
‘Did he see anybody?’
‘With the bike, not a soul. It was a man’s bike, though. Crossbar.’
A single car was parked between fading white lines. An Orion. Not exactly state of the art. There was a mobile library van beyond that, straddling the lines, and a contractor’s vehicle or cowboy wagon, ignoring the lines entirely and blasting out, through its open door, the inanities of Steve Wright in the Afternoon – ‘Easy Life’.
Hall and Johnson climbed the low, broad concrete steps, gazing at the glass doors ahead.
‘Six weeks’ bloody holiday,’ Johnson grunted. ‘Bloody teachers. We went into the wrong job.’
Hall liked to see dedication in his men. It kept them loyal, unswerving, professional. The loyal, unswerving, professional Inspector held open the door for his Chief. Ahead of them a handwritten sign told them that the caretaker was in the A Block and a shaky arrow pointed to the right. A more expensive – and permanent – brown and white job showed where reception was. Johnson’s knuckles hit the door first. Nothing. Never one to stand on ceremony, he shoulder-barged his way in.
Here was an inner sanctum, clinical, cold for all it was late July. In the corner, an overfed spider plant threatened to engulf the room, and between its arachnid fingers, a faded, framed certificate boasted that the school had won some Department of Education and Science initiative back in the ’80s, when they still handed out cash, almost without strings. A glass partition slid back and a mousy little woman peered out at them, like something out of
The Tailor of Gloucester
.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’
‘Chief Inspector Hall and Detective Inspector Johnson to see the Headmaster.’
The mousy eyelids flickered for a moment. It wasn’t often detectives arrived at Leighford High. Constable Bob Grenvill, yes, but he was the School Liaison Officer, six foot three of bark, but no bite at all. And anyway, he wore a uniform and the kids raised two fingers at him behind his back. These two were altogether more sinister. The way they just stood there; their eyes boring into you; their lips strangers to smiles.
‘Er … yes, of course. Mr Diamond is expecting you. Will you walk this way?’
She led them back into the foyer where the fuzzy felt of the industrial duty carpet was black with the passage of countless feet, and on down a corridor, darkening as they walked. Old sports notices flapped from the walls, reminding faceless kids that cricket practice was at twelve thirty and that girls’ netball was postponed because of the theatre trip. She turned sharp right into a brighter passageway where artistic creations lined the walls under expensive perspex. Here, Christ dangled on the wire and a rambler’s boot lay incongruously on an upturned packet of Rice Krispies, all in the name of A level Art.
The sign on the door, in regulation county brown and cream, read ‘Mr James Diamond, Headteacher’. All very arty-farty, Johnson thought. His headmaster’s door had had a brass knocker on it and a trio of lights that signalled if he was busy or otherwise. There wasn’t a surname, let alone a Christian name. Johnson had only been there once. To receive the cane. He hadn’t been back.
‘Mr Diamond?’ Hall asked. It was almost like looking into a mirror. Diamond was a shade broader than Hall, a shade older, but the grey suit and the gold-rimmed specs could have been straight off the same rack at Rent-an-Ambition.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Chief Inspector Hall?’
They shook hands in the corridor.
‘This is Detective Inspector Johnson.’
They nodded at each other, the Headmaster and the Inspector. Neither liked the moment. It was suspicion at first sight.
‘Margaret, coffee please. And no calls. Gentlemen?’ Diamond ushered them into his office. Hardly palatial, but at least it didn’t have photographs of a dead girl plastered over its walls. There was another spider plant in the corner. Hall noticed it, and wondered if John Wyndham had been an old boy of the school, long ago. Johnson saw it too, but he didn’t wonder at all.