Maxwell’s House (8 page)

‘Good God, Deirdre, we only exchanged half a dozen words. I think Anne knows something. Something she hasn’t told the police. Something she hasn’t told anyone.’

Deirdre Lessing stood up. ‘I think you’re clutching at straws, Max. This isn’t an Agatha Christie, this is reality.’

Maxwell stood up with her. ‘I’m not trying to be Jane Marple,’ he told her. ‘I’m fifty-two years old, Deirdre, and I’ve never known someone I know be murdered before. Some people might shut their eyes. Shudder. Go back to sleep. Get on with their lives. I can’t do that. I’ve got to be out there, pitching.’

She turned on her way to the door. ‘Well, take my advice,’ she told him coldly. ‘Pitch somewhere else, because I’ve got a feeling about this business. I think you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble, one way or another.’

And she left.

Peter Maxwell put his head around the door and looked down the corridor to where Mrs B. was raking the discarded cigarette ends out of the crack between the wall and the floor of the boys’ loos. ‘Who’s your money on again?’ he called.

‘That Guthrum,’ she said. ‘’E done it.’

Maxwell reached for his hat and scarf.

‘And if ’e didn’t,’ he heard Mrs B. bellow as he made for the stairs, ‘she did.’

And he didn’t have to see Mrs B. scowling out of the window at the briskly departing figure of the Senior Mistress, to know whom she meant.

Jack London, the journalist, had called them the People of the Abyss. That was ninety years ago, but they were still there. And over those ninety years, others had joined them – the Great Unwashed of the ’60s, the New Age Travellers of the ’80s. But these were groups who had an identity, a label. They made statements about themselves and however much retired colonels of Tunbridge Wells might thunder ‘layabout’ as a blanket term of contempt, they were deliberate choosers of the

Alternative Society. Strangers to soap and work and law, they brought litter and fear to the heartlands of the rich and the inherited. Their smell was indescribable.

But it wasn’t one of these that Peter Maxwell was looking for. It was raining as his feet crunched on the shingle that Sunday, the first weekend of the autumn term. He knew Dan Guthrie by sight. Everybody did. He could have been anything between thirty and sixty, with a pepper-and-salt beard and straggly hair and a mouth full of brown, uneven teeth. Dan Guthrie made no statement about himself. Unless it was to ask in his thick Scots accent for the price o’ a cuppa tea.

Margaret Thatcher’s England seemed to have increased the number of Dan Guthries wandering the country’s green and pleasant land. They haunted the university towns where the young and the hopeful still felt sorry for them and dug into their frozen grants to give them their small change. Brighton was their capital, on the coast at least. When dusk fell on the Sodom of the south, they crept from their holes, squatting in doorways and cadging fags, menacing tourists with their shaved heads and Doc Martens. The men were just as bad.

Somebody said the best time to find Dan Guthrie was Sunday morning as the bells told the faithful to get out the Morris Minors and head for church. They were on their way as Peter Maxwell swung out of the saddle of White Surrey in the dunes before the sand forced him to stop, and he watched them staggering into St Asaph’s, their Sunday-best umbrellas aloft. The weather was a bitch as he left the shelter of the sand and tufts of coarse sea-pinks. He held on to his hat and put his shoulder to the wind, hearing his feet crunch and feeling his ankles at risk from the slippery stones.

Along the line of black, tar-coated seaweed that marked the upper reaches of the tide, he saw a huddled something in the lee of a breakwater – Dan Guthrie under canvas.

‘Mr Guthrie?’

However old the down-and-out was, today he looked all of sixty, perhaps more. He squinted up at Maxwell under the tarpaulin sheet that was his only roof. ‘Who are you, mister? Are you the police?’

Maxwell recognized the inflection of the word – Glasgow. He’d watched too many Taggarts for it to be anywhere else.

‘I’m Peter Maxwell,’ he said, extending a hand and kneeling on his heels. ‘No, I’m not from the police.’

Guthrie hesitated for a moment, then reached out with a swarthy, leather-brown hand and caught Maxwell’s. Powerful grip, the Head of Sixth Form thought. Powerful enough, perhaps, to strangle a girl of seventeen years and four months.

‘Ye got the price of a cuppa tea?’ It was the first question Dan Guthrie usually asked anybody. In fact it was the only question he usually asked. But when a crusty old gent comes up to you unannounced, when you’re having a lie-in of a Sunday morning, there are more pressing things to ascertain.

‘I think so.’ Maxwell threw dignity to the wind and sat next to his man. ‘Mind if I share your tent?’

‘It’s a free country,’ Guthrie observed without much recourse to the facts.

Maxwell fumbled in his pocket, resisting the urge to throw up at the smell from Guthrie’s mobile home. He pressed a warm, brass coin into the man’s hand.

‘Ta.’ Guthrie pocketed it. Maxwell was vaguely surprised he hadn’t bitten it first, just in case.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Mr Guthrie,’ he said.

‘Oh, aye?’

‘Do you mind if I call you Dan?’

Guthrie shrugged. ‘That’s up to you,’ he said. ‘What is it you want?’

‘The murder.’ Maxwell got straight to the point. ‘Jenny Hyde.’

Guthrie looked out to sea where the grey breakers swelled under the autumn rain and a solitary herring gull circled over them. ‘I dinna know nothing,’ he said.

There were always rumours about men like Dan Guthrie. Anyone odd, anyone who didn’t conform to society’s norms, was always likely to generate speculation. Some said he was a millionaire who’d turned his back on his millions, exchanged the country seat for a doss house or a doorway. Others that he was a professor of languages who’d had a nervous breakdown and fled Oxford for the freedom of the roads. Suddenly, Maxwell knew that neither of these was true.

‘That’s more than I know,’ he said. ‘I was her Year Head, Mr Guthrie – Jenny’s teacher. I want to know why she died.’

There was a long pause. Guthrie stared at the sea, silent, enigmatic,. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I dinna know nothing.’

Maxwell stared at the grey rollers too. ‘I saw you on television,’ he said.

‘Television?’ Guthrie turned to him, squinting out of one eye, the other almost closed.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll have seen the programme,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s called
Crimewatch
– Nick Ross and Sue Cook are the presenters.’

‘Oh aye.’ Guthrie turned away again. ‘I wouldnae speak to them.’

‘Why not?’ Maxwell asked.

Guthrie spat copiously at the already wet stones. ‘No bloody point,’ he said. ‘They’ll never catch him.’

‘Who?’ Maxwell was quick to ask. Was this a chink in the drop-out’s armour?

Guthrie turned to him. ‘Whoever killed the wee girl,’ he said.

Why did Maxwell get the impression that he’d spent the last week talking to himself? All he got was an echo. Hollow. Empty. Hopeless. ‘Well, when I say I saw you on television,’ Maxwell corrected himself, ‘that’s not exactly true. Nick Ross mentioned you. Said you’d found the body …’

Guthrie blinked, glancing furtively left and right. ‘Not me, mister,’ he said, fixing his gaze out to sea again. It wasna me.’

‘What were you doing at the Red House, Mr Guthrie?’ Maxwell badgered his man now, sensing that he was rattled.

‘It was raining,’ the tramp told him. I needed somewhere to stay. Somewhere to go.’

‘It’s raining now,’ Maxwell said. ‘Yet here you are on an open beach.’

‘I was in the neighbourhood.’ Guthrie was louder now, standing his ground.

‘And what did you see, Mr Guthrie? At the Red House? Did you see her? Jenny? Was she alive or dead? Come on, man! I need some answers!’ Maxwell was screaming above the wind.

‘A car!’ Guthrie shouted back, his lips curled, the gaps visible in his teeth. ‘I saw a car.’

Maxwell subsided. There was talk in the staff room of a car. That the police were looking for one. ‘What sort of car?’ he asked softly.

‘Man, I dinna ken.’ Guthrie shook his head. ‘They’re all the bloody same to me.’

Maxwell nodded. He knew how Guthrie felt. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘what colour was it?’

‘I dinna remember,’ the man mumbled.

‘Think!’ Maxwell was sharp again, but he felt the drop-out flinch and he subsided. ‘Think back, Mr Guthrie. It was a Friday, wasn’t it?’

The days were all the same to Dan Guthrie. It didn’t help. ‘It was evening,’ Maxwell prompted him. ‘Raining.’

‘Aye.’ Guthrie’s face twisted with the effort of remembering. ‘It was dark. Fearful dark for July. Man, the skies opened. I was caught oot in it. I remember … I remember runnin’ to the hoose. The Red Hoose. An …’ He looked at Maxwell. ‘Y’ken, it’s been a while since I ate.’

‘What?’ Maxwell had lost the man’s drift. ‘Oh. Oh, right,’ and he caught it again, hauling a tenner out of his wallet.

Guthrie snatched it and stuffed it away eagerly. Exactly where, Maxwell didn’t care to enquire too closely.

‘You were making for the Red House,’ he reminded him.

‘Aye, the Red Hoose. That’s right. There was a car. Away doon the lane. I could see its lights in the rain. It was awful dark overhead.’

‘What time was this?’ Even as he said it, Maxwell realized the futility of the question. Men of Dan Guthrie’s lifestyle don’t exactly live by their Rolex. The tramp just shrugged at the irrelevance of it. He knew the seasons. He had a reasonable grasp of the months. Beyond that it was all just night and day. And they were all the same.

‘It was a light-coloured car,’ Guthrie said.

‘Could you see the driver?’ Maxwell asked.

The drop-out shook his head. ‘I went in,’ he said. ‘That place has got more holes than a bloody sieve but I found a dry spot.’

‘On the ground floor?’

‘Aye. It stopped raining after a bit and I was going up to Barlichway to sleep.’

‘Barlichway?’

‘That vicar bloke. Young, he is. Not oot o’ nappies. But he runs this sort o’ shelter for us travellers. Ye can get a bowl o’ soup and a crust o’ bread too. Not a bad bloke. He’s aboot the only one I wouldn’t piss in his font, anyhow.’

That at least was gratifying.

‘This bloody dog came in.’

‘To the church.’

Guthrie looked oddly at him. ‘To the Red Hoose,’ he explained, as though to the village idiot.

‘Mr Arnold’s,’ Maxwell nodded.

‘Bloody thing came sniffin’ round me. I kicked it. And it buggered off.’

‘Then you left.’

‘Aye. The bloody dog went upstairs.’

‘Did the police talk to you, Mr Guthrie?’

The man spat again, if anything more volubly than before. ‘Bastards,’ he grunted.

‘Who did you talk to?’

Guthrie shrugged. ‘I dinna ken. They’re all bastards. Always movin’ ye on.’

‘You don’t like the police, do you, Mr Guthrie?’ Maxwell smiled.

‘If one was afire, I wouldn’t piss on him to put it oot,’ the tramp said. ‘But …’ and for the first time Maxwell saw him smile, ‘they do a pretty mean cuppa tea, for coppers, I mean. And ye get to look up a woman policeman’s skirt. So it’s no’ all bad.’

8

He’d put it off once before. Five days ago. When it was raining. It was still raining. But he wouldn’t put it off any longer. Maxwell had grabbed a bite at the Nag; something they’d chalked up on a board as Navarin of Lamb, but it could have been anything. Still, they drew a decent pint at the Nag and it gave him time to marshal his thoughts.

The truth of it was, of course, he told himself as he buried his upper lip in froth, that when it came to murder, Peter Maxwell was an amateur. Like most people, his knowledge of crime lay with the odd flight of fantasy. Well, then. How did it happen in English cosies, the thrillers he’d been brought up on? There was a body in the library or a death at the vicarage and some incredibly unlikely old fusspot, who was terminally ga-ga but had a mind like a laser, sorted it all out, muttering things like, ‘Of course, how preternaturally stupid of me.’ Joan Hickson was no doubt more immaculate as Jane Marple, but dear old Margaret Rutherford was infinitely more fun. All right. What about the Americans? The hard-boiled school of pulp? In all those, the hero had a seedy down-town office with badly fitting blinds and a perfectly dreadful taste in fedoras and trenchcoats. Some broad always came in, looking sultry or like Veronica Lake, whichever came first, and the rest was all knuckle sandwiches and lead poisoning. At least that was how they did it in the ’50s and he found it so depressing, as an attempt at literature, he hadn’t read anything hard-boiled since. Save it for eggs, he thought to himself.

And what about reality? Christie, Chandler, other exponents of the murder genre cheated. They dreamed up their crime, their victim, their killer, then worked back with lesser or greater degrees of logic. But real life wasn’t like that. Real life was a seventeen-year-old girl lying dead in a wet, old house and no one knew who or why. What did he have? He lolled back in the snug while two old boys in the corner played shove ha’penny with a deadly accuracy and discussed Maggie Thatcher’s memoirs.

Medically, he had a girl who’d been strangled, probably with a pair of tights. Hers? Somebody else’s? She’d been assaulted, but she hadn’t been assaulted. Why? Did someone want to make it look that way? To give the appearance of a maniac on the loose? Did that mean he wasn’t a maniac? That his purpose was all the more rational, controlled? But who but a maniac kills a young girl anyway? And was there anything rational about murder? Whichever way he looked, he had nothing but questions. And hardly an answer in the world.

The Range Rover wasn’t there. Were they out? A Sunday afternoon, in early September. Piddling down with rain. The season was all but over. There’d be the final flutter of the factory fortnight. The amusement arcades would thump out their glitzy resonance one more time before the whole place died again for the winter, and a plastic chimp covered in fur fabric would, for one more time, laugh electronically and promise the punters a prize every time. He swung out of White Surrey’s saddle and wheeled it up the gravel path. His tyres hissed softly on the crazy paving and he leaned the bike against the wall, under the rain-beaten hanging basket which no one had tended since July.

He didn’t know what to expect when he rang the bell. Perhaps they were out. He half hoped they were – that way he’d be able to stop the pounding in his chest. God, he felt dreadful. What do you say to a mother whose girl is dead? Left like a broken doll on a filthy mattress, naked to the world? Then he saw a ragged silhouette behind the frosted glass and it was too late to run.

‘Mrs Hyde?’ Maxwell tipped his hat. ‘I wonder if I might have a word?’

She looked younger than Maxwell remembered her and, without make-up, ill and tired. There was no shine in her eyes, no warmth in her face.

‘If it’s not convenient …’ Maxwell looked desperately for a way out.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s all right. You’d better come in. You’re soaking.’

He was. He dripped in her hallway, uncomfortable, embarrassed. For once in his life, Peter Maxwell couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she said, helping him off with his hat, his scarf, his coat.

‘Have you?’

She hung up the wet things in the cupboard under the stairs. A girl’s coat hung here too. Jenny’s.

‘You’ll want to see her room,’ Marianne Hyde said, as though she was an estate agent or a landlady whose heart wasn’t really in her job.

‘No, I …’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was brittle, sharp. Then softer. ‘Yes, it helps me to talk about her. ‘You have come to talk about her?’

Maxwell nodded.

She led him up the stairs, past the rather awful Picasso prints, and turned left on the landing. There was a pile of towels on the floor, holding open the door of the airing cupboard.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I always wash on a Sunday.’

He smiled awkwardly and still managed to stumble over the towels. Then she walked into Jenny’s room. They stood, both of them, looking at the bed with its grey duvet cover; the posters, culled from
19
magazine and whatever else young girls read these days, of blond young men in T-shirts and state-of-the-art acne. The room was stifling with memories. On the top of the bookcase a fluffy clutter of cuddly toys, some old and grubby, others new, in lurid pinks and yellows. Draped over the chair was a school blazer, the badge of Leighford High emblazoned on the pocket.

‘She still kept it,’ Marianne Hyde said as she saw Maxwell’s eyes find it, ‘even though it wasn’t the uniform in the sixth form. I like uniform, Mr Maxwell. Even for the sixth form. I think it’s important.’

‘About Jenny …’ he said.

She sat on the bed, folding and refolding her daughter’s school scarf. Maxwell remembered the girl wearing that last winter, no school uniform in the sixth form or not.

‘May I?’ Maxwell gestured towards the chair. He hated touching it, moving it. This bedroom was a shrine to the murdered girl. He felt as if he was demolishing the Wailing Wall, stone by stone; as if he’d barged his way into Peking’s Forbidden City.

She just nodded and he perched there, wetly. ‘Mrs Hyde,’ he said, ‘I should explain.’

She wasn’t helping him now. So far she’d led, controlled. Now he was in the driving seat. Maxwell was a leader of men. That was where he usually was. Liked to be. But at that moment, he’d rather be anywhere else.

‘I want to help,’ he said. ‘I want to find whoever is responsible.’

She looked at him curiously and he recognized the old hostility he’d seen in her before, at parents’ evenings. ‘Do you have any qualifications for that?’

‘None,’ he admitted, realizing the futility of a master’s degree in the real world. ‘Except …’

‘Yes?’

‘Except I’m not a policeman.’

‘Does that help?’

‘It might.’ Maxwell was warming to it now, thinking on his feet. ‘People might talk to me where they wouldn’t talk to the police.’

She nodded. She could see that. ‘Is that it?’

‘No.’ he looked at her levelly. ‘I’m not as distant as the police and I’m not as close as you and your husband.’

She paused, frowning. ‘You’re a sort of go-between.’

He nodded. ‘The happy hunting-ground in the middle,’ he said. ‘Although there’s actually nothing happy about it.’

‘My husband and I talked about hiring a private detective – when Jennifer went missing, I mean.’

‘Mrs Hyde,’ Maxwell leaned forward, as close to her as he dared. ‘I don’t have the right to intrude. Jenny was your daughter.’

‘Do you have children, Mr Maxwell?’ she asked him.

He jerked back suddenly, as though she’d slapped him. For a second a wet road blurred across his vision. There was a roar and a scream in his ears. A shattering of glass. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Do you think you can help?’ She leaned forward to him. ‘You see, I want this man dead. People say … I’ve read magazines, when parents lose children, they just feel numb. Dead. They don’t blame. Don’t want revenge.’ She stood up abruptly, crossing to the window, winding and rewinding the scarf until it was a knot in her cold, white hands. ‘But I do. It’s not that I’m a vindictive person, I’m not. But if the police find him …’ She turned to look at him. ‘If you find him, I’ll kill him. I don’t know how. I don’t understand these things. But I promise you, I’ll kill him.’

Maxwell felt his hair crawl. It wasn’t what the woman was saying that frightened him. It was the way that she said it. Cold. Passionless. Her emotions drained and wrung out like the scarf in her hands. As tight in her fist as the ligature around Jenny’s neck. He broke the silence for them both, like a spring snapping. ‘There are things I need to know,’ he said.

She sat down again, composing herself, arranging the chaos that had been her mind since that day in July, that day when her only child had walked out of her life.

‘I didn’t notice it at first,’ she told Maxwell. ‘How Jennifer had changed. She was … I don’t know … distant, withdrawn.’

‘When was this?’

‘It was on the Saturday. I suppose, looking back, I’d been aware of a strangeness for two or three days. No more. On the Sunday I tackled her about it. It was over breakfast. Clive lost his temper with her. It’s sad, really, I don’t think he’s ever forgiven himself. Oh, they’d patched it up by that night, but even so …’

‘Jenny was supposed to be staying with Anne? With Anne Spencer?’

‘That’s right. Jennifer rang her that Sunday morning. I’d got nowhere with her over breakfast and when she’d got off the phone, she said that Mrs Spencer had asked her over for a couple of nights, so that they could work together on some project.’ Marianne Hyde looked at the Head of Sixth Form. ‘She was a clever girl, my Jennifer, Mr Maxwell, but you know that.’

He nodded. ‘What did you think of this idea?’ he asked her. ‘Had Jenny stayed at the Spencers’ before?’

‘Not for a while. Not since her GCSE year, in fact. And never overnight. But they were closer then. To be honest,’ she crossed to the window again, looking backwards and forwards across the front lawn, as though she half expected Jenny to appear any minute, swinging her school bag on her way from the bus, ‘I didn’t care too much for Anne Spencer. We began to hear things.’

‘Things?’ Maxwell’s eyes narrowed.

‘Yes.’ Marianne Hyde was staring at the lowering Sunday sky and the vague reflection of herself in the double glazing. ‘Oh, I don’t know how much faith you put in these things, Mr Maxwell. Let’s just say that Anne … slept around. There was talk of married men.’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘The world is full of them, of course.’

‘Well, I don’t know how true it is, but some girls … well, I just didn’t like my Jennifer mixing in those circles.’

‘So you said she couldn’t go?’

‘No.’ She turned to face him. ‘No, I didn’t. My daughter was a headstrong girl, Mr Maxwell. I won’t say wilful. She wasn’t that. But she had a mind of her own. We’d already had words over her sullenness, at breakfast. I didn’t want it all again, so I said she could go. She threw a few things into an overnight bag and that was it.’

He saw her eyes fill with tears, her lip tremble, just for an instant. ‘I never saw her again,’ she said. ‘Not until … not until the police found her. And then, when Clive and I saw her, on that slab I mean, it wasn’t her. Not any more. It wasn’t our Jennifer.’

‘Did you notice, Mrs Hyde,’ Maxwell asked, ‘if Jenny took her school uniform with her?’

‘She took what she wore for school, yes.’

‘Did she take a pair of tights?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘And her books?’

‘I assume so. The police … haven’t found her school bag. I’ve looked high and low here. There’s no sign of it.’

‘What time did she leave on Sunday night?’

‘Just before seven.’

Maxwell scanned her face before he asked the next question. ‘Did she say anything? Before she left, did she say anything … important?’

Marianne Hyde walked back to the bed, careful to keep her back to Peter Maxwell. ‘It was all important,’ she said to him. ‘When they’re the last words you hear your child say, every one of them becomes etched on your memory. She said, “It’s all right, mum. I know exactly what I’m doing.” And then she kissed me.’

‘Did you know what she meant?’

The woman shook her head, ‘Not then,’ she said. ‘Not now. I presumed it had something to do with her strangeness, but …’ and he heard her sigh, ‘I’ll never know now.’

He let a moment go. ‘When did you first realize she wasn’t at the Spencers’?’

She curled up on the bed, her knees under her chin, her hands clasped round her ankles and her ankles wrapped in Jenny’s scarf.

‘Janet Foster told me,’ she said. ‘I attend her pottery classes up at the college. She asked me – it must have been the Tuesday. Jennifer should have been back that same evening, but I assumed we’d missed each other. I told Janet that she was at home as far as I knew.’

‘But she wasn’t?’

‘No. When I got back, Clive was pacing up and down. He’d rung the Spencers. They hadn’t seen Jennifer at all.’

‘So she never got there?’

Marianne shook her head. ‘Mrs Spencer knew nothing about it. I rang her straight away.’ She looked at Maxwell. ‘On reflection, I think that hurt Clive. Somehow it meant that I didn’t trust him. But I wasn’t reflecting then. Wasn’t thinking. It’s a sort of blind panic, Mr Maxwell. You can’t know. You haven’t got children. You can’t know. I remember once, ooh, a long time ago when Jennifer was small. I left her in her pram. Outside the library, it was, before they built the ramp. I’d only returned a book and when I came out, she’d gone, pram and all. It was all right, of course. Some old dear had noticed that Jennifer was in the sun and had moved her into the shade. She was still there, billing and cooing, when I came tearing along. I was all set to fell the old trout with my holdall, but … well, you can’t, can you? For that second, though, that second before I saw her … It’s not a feeling I can really put into words. Your heart just thumps as if … as if it’s going to explode. Your hands feel heavy, really heavy; your wrists … Well, that’s how I felt when I phoned Mrs Spencer. I don’t really remember what she said exactly. Except that Jennifer wasn’t there. She hadn’t seen her for weeks. I asked to speak to Anne. She wasn’t in.’