Maxwell's Grave (25 page)

‘Ssh!’ was all he’d said in the darkness and she was so grateful to be able to breathe properly again that she did as she was told. He left her a plate of food and a tumbler of water. It smelt like cottage pie and tasted like nothing on earth. Her hands were still pinned in front of her, bound 
together and she had to eat with her fingers. But it was food and she had to eat.

The water she gulped down; then, realizing it would have to last her for hours until his next visit, she saved the rest, nudging it carefully against the damp, plastered wall so that she didn’t spill it.

She reckoned it was seven hours between his visits. She assumed it was a man, but she couldn’t be sure. He was strong, that she knew. Wore trousers and smelt odd. But the whole place smelt odd, dank, dead.

And despite herself, she felt the tears trickle the length of her cheeks and drip and splash onto her neck. Was it night? Was it day? Up there, above the ground, traffic roared, birds sang. People went about their daily business, unaware of her. But two men, at least, would know. And they’d be looking. One was a bland bastard with badly developed smiling muscles and blank glasses, a copper’s copper. The other was an infuriating, loveable wreck of a man, an unmade bed with the strength of ten. ‘Mixing metaphors again, Woman Policeman?’ she heard him say and she sobbed out loud.

‘Oh, Max,’ she mumbled under the tape. ‘Where are you?’

Chapter Seventeen

The lights in the main tent threw lurid shadows out onto the graves on Staple Hill. They were in sharp relief now, with the new security lights installed by Cahill and Lieberman blinding Peter Maxwell as he parked White Surrey and clambered over the gate.

From somewhere in the woods a barn owl swept silent and ghostly over the slope that arced, black and lonely, down to the valley of the Leigh and the sea beyond it. For a moment, Maxwell stood there, looking out at the silvered ridges of the Channel. He saw, with his historian’s
imagination
, the wrecks of two Viking ships washed up on the Shingle, their dragon prows high in the water, their timbers and splintered oars scattered like matchwood at the water’s edge. And on the ridge where he stood, arms folded, cloaked and helmeted, the king himself, Alfred of Wessex. ‘One day,’ he imagined Alfred saying to his thegns at his elbow, ‘One day, bury me here. In that little ash grove. Build me a church on this ridge. Away from the cares of state. Away from the clash and the slaughters. Here, within a walk of the sea.’

‘Evening, Douglas.’

‘Jesus!’ the geophysicist was half out of his seat as Maxwell popped his head around the tent flap. ‘God, Max. I didn’t hear you arrive.’

‘So much for the high-tech surveillance gear, then.’ Maxwell pulled off his cap and found a seat somewhere among the debris, ‘that’s what a bike’ll do for you every time.’

‘Oh, that’s the professor’s idea of saving our lives. You’ve just proved him wrong.’

‘Indeed,’ Maxwell said. ‘If I’d been a fully paid-up
member of the Sepulchre Society of Sussex…’

‘Quite. Any news?’

‘I was hoping you’d have some.’

‘Well, for the last day, all this gear’s been put in with
contractors
coming out of our ears, but the professor told us today we’ve been given our notice to quit. Week Saturday.’

‘Can you finish in that time?’

‘If he lets us tackle the ash grove tomorrow, yes, I think so.’

‘You think he won’t?’

Russell shrugged. ‘David didn’t.’

‘Tell me about David,’ Maxwell said, settling himself down.

‘I already have,’ the geophysicist said.

‘Tell me again,’ Maxwell said. ‘You can’t have said it all.’

‘I told you,’ Russell explained. ‘I didn’t know him well.’

‘But you didn’t like him.’ It was not a question; it was a statement.

Russell looked at the man, blinking in the lamp light. ‘Who told you that?’

‘You did,’ Maxwell said. ‘By your body language.’

‘Body language?’ Russell scoffed.

‘Don’t knock it,’ Maxwell warned. ‘You use it all the time. I never saw you in Radley’s company; not while Radley was alive, anyway. So I don’t know how you behaved then. But I know how you behave now. Whenever I mention him, whenever
anyone
does, your back
straightens
, your eyes dip, always to the left…’

‘Are you saying I killed him?’ Russell was staring at the man.

‘Not at all,’ Maxwell assured him, hands spread on the table in front of him. ‘Are you saying
you
did?’

‘Of course not,’ Russell shouted.

‘But you didn’t like him.’

‘All right,’ Russell snapped. ‘No, I didn’t like him. Happy now?’

‘I merely wondered why,’ Maxwell said, ‘when everybody else did.’

Russell looked at his man, ‘It’s none of your damned business,’ he growled.

‘Oh, I think it is,’ Maxwell closed to him. ‘You see, the woman I love has been kidnapped by whoever killed David Radley. That sort of makes it my business, don’t you think?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Russell’s tone softened. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you did,’ Maxwell said. ‘Women aren’t really your thing, are they, Douglas?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When I asked you who knew you were staying at the Quinton, you said only a few people – the University. Your mother. How old are you, Douglas?’

‘I’m forty-two,’ Russell told him. ‘What of it?’

‘Forty-two.’ Maxwell nodded softly. ‘Telling Mummy where you are and – I quote “Miss Right hasn’t come along”. Am I making an assumption too far?’

‘All right!’ Russell snapped. ‘I’m gay. All right. That hasn’t been a crime for a long time now, Maxwell, whatever cheap capital you want to make out of it.’

‘I’m not here to make capital out of anything, you prat!’ It was Maxwell’s turn to snap. ‘You can have sex with your pet hamster for all I care. But if I think any of this gives you a motive for murder, than believe me, you’re going down for ever. And if you’ve got Jacquie, then I’m not inclined to bother with the expense and effort of that judge and jury bollocks! I’ll hang you myself.’

Russell’s face was frozen in a half smile. ‘You can’t scare
me, Maxwell,’ he shouted. ‘You’re a teacher, for God’s sake. Civilized…’

‘Oh, don’t let this benign old exterior fool you, Douglas. You wouldn’t, for example, like me when I’m angry.’

Russell was lost for words. There was something in the man’s dark, smouldering, purple-rimmed eyes he didn’t like. ‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ he said.

Maxwell thumped the table and several bones jumped, along with Douglas Russell. ‘How about the truth?’ he growled, his nose inches from that of the geophysicist.

Silence.

Maxwell leaned back. He’d got Russell in his headlights now and he wanted to keep him there. ‘Did you know that David Radley had been stripped?’

‘Stripped?’ Russell blinked.

‘Somebody either killed him bollock naked or removed his clothes post mortem, as the pathologists have it. Now, why do you suppose they did that, Douglas?’

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do,’ Maxwell wheedled. ‘Picture the scene. David Radley is not as other archaeologists. He gets his kicks off Route 66. And I bet his poor, distraught wifey knows nothing about it. So, there’s David, dreeing his weird with someone of a similar persuasion – let’s call him Douglas Russell – when suddenly, there’s a row; tiff; call it what you will. That someone – oh, we’re calling him Douglas, aren’t we? Douglas loses his cool over something, a lovers’ spat. But it turns ugly and Douglas smashes
something
,’ Maxwell picked up a grey femur lying on the dusty table in front of him, ‘into the side of David’s neck, killing him instantly. But now,’ Maxwell’s left index finger was in the air, ‘Douglas has a problem. And it’s the perennial one of murderers the wide world o’er: how to get rid of a body.
Now, of course, all this depends on where David and Douglas were mutually engaged, doesn’t it? His place or his place. Either way, you can’t leave a body there. It raises too many awkward questions. No, the body has to be moved. And you can’t just dump him naked, because that raises questions of a different sort. And that might point the finger at Douglas. So, what does Douglas do? He
redresses
the corpse, scattering a whole shoal of red herrings in his wake…’

‘Shut up!’ Russell suddenly roared, descending into great sobs that shook his shoulders. ‘For God’s sake, shut up.’

Maxwell relented. He’d got him now, as if he’d broken him on the rack. ‘That wasn’t how it was, was it, Douglas?’ he said.

Eventually, the geophysicist shook his head and looked up at his inquisitor, sniffing. ‘I’ve never been the predatory type, Max,’ he said. ‘All right, so the law has changed. Big deal! People’s attitudes haven’t. Not really. I was always brought up to believe that
that
sort of behaviour, as my mother called it, was worse than revolting. Well, we can’t help how we’re made.’

‘You fancied David Radley?’

Russell nodded. ‘It was awful,’ he whispered. ‘For three months, working with the man day after day, wanting to… I persuaded him to move into the Quinton. That way, I’d be able to see more of him. Oh, I knew he was married, of course. But he didn’t wear a ring and he hardly ever talked about his wife. One night…’

‘You tried it on,’ Maxwell was ahead of him.

Russell half turned away. ‘We’d both been drinking, I thought…well, to cut a long and not very pleasant story short, he turned me down. Oh, he was kind, considerate, but absolutely adamant. Yes, Max.’ Russell turned back to
look the man in the face. ‘David Radley was what everybody said he was – a nice guy. I didn’t hate him. In the last weeks of his life, I may even have loved him, just a little. But not in the way you mean.’

Maxwell sat back, reading the man as well as he could in the eerie light of the tent, with bits of dead men for
company
. ‘It’s still a motive for murder, Douglas,’ he said softly. He stood up, sliding the chair back. ‘But not in my book.’

He sat with the forage cap tilted on his head, too many Southern Comforts inside him for what he’d got – a teacher’s salary. Private Ryan of the Eighth Hussars was all but finished, sitting his bay with all the calm he could muster on that cold, grey October afternoon, his pipe in his free hand, his eyes watching the Fedioukine Heights for the tell-tale thunder of the guns and the wisps of battery smoke.

‘Your master wasn’t very pleasant to a nice man tonight, Count,’ Maxwell said, not looking at the behemoth in the corner. ‘Not something I’d want to repeat. But it had to be sorted.’ He slammed down the uniform book he was
consulting
and Ryan and his horse jumped imperceptibly. ‘Where is she, Count?’ he whispered, fear suddenly tearing like hot iron through his chest. ‘Where is she?’

DCI Henry Hall sat in his office long after midnight,
staring
at his own reflection in the window. He’d rung home to say he might be camping out here. Margaret Hall was used to it. She sighed and hung up. A DCI’s got to do what a DCI’s got to do. He’d be home when the time was right and she’d know by his tread on the gravel how it had gone.

Hall’s people were in the business of overturning stones. Two policewomen were missing. No ransom notes. No ransom call. Nothing electronic. Missing, presumed dead?
It had been days in both cases; Alison McCormick, Jacquie Carpenter. Even so, presumed dead – it was too early for that. You had to remain optimistic. You had to keep focused. And all day, Henry Hall had been telling himself that.

His boys and girls in blue had been out in the flame that was June all day, knocking on doors, asking questions. They’d taken the dogs to Alison’s flat and to Jacquie’s house, to give their keen, wet noses some scent to follow, some trail. The coppers had bashed their way through woodland, flattening ferns and grinding grass, walking in rows like the infantry Peter Maxwell knew all about. They’d opened lock-ups, crawled through sewer pipes, gone back to Professor Fraser’s dig twice, checking his graves, his spoil heaps, the dark tangle of the ash grove.

And, like all coppers with a seaside beat, they’d combed the beaches, sifting the seaweed and the driftwood, coping as best they could with the appalling smell at low tide. And always, they watched the tide, as it ebbed and flowed along the coastline of King Alfred’s Wessex.

Peter Maxwell had rung in sick the next day. Tuesdays could get along without him at Leighford High. Temporarily, his beloved Sixth Form had ceased to exist, melted away into that Great Absence that was Study Leave. He had assured Thingee on the school’s switchboard that Paul Moss could cope without him for a day or two and Paul Moss had little option but to try to prove him right. The reason? Ah, the Great Man’s old trouble; his bad back. Dierdre Lessing fumed; Bernard Ryan was not surprised. Only Sylvia Matthews understood. And, as always when it came to Peter Maxwell, Sylvia Matthews wasn’t talking.

‘Maxwell!’ Tam Fraser was prowling his trenches, clipboard in one hand, dowsing stick in the other. ‘We missed you. Back at the chalk face, I assume?’

‘Sort of, professor,’ Maxwell said. ‘And sort of not.’

‘There you go again,’ the archaeologist said. ‘Those damned riddles of yours. You’re not dressed for the chase.’

Indeed he wasn’t. He was dressed in his work clothes, the tweed hat and jacket slung across Surrey’s panniers, but the poncy bow tie firmly in place no matter how sticky the
season
. ‘I’m off to the station,’ he said. ‘Well, two, actually. Police, then railway. But I wanted a word first.’

‘With me?’

‘Please.’

Fraser looked at his man. Maxwell seemed to have lost some of his sang-froid since they’d last met. At least his face seemed to be returning to what Tam Fraser presumed to be its former self.

‘Come away in, then.’ He led the way into the main tent, where Helen Reader sat with artefacts various and a
toothbrush
. ‘Oh, Helen, could you give us a minute?’

‘Of course.’ The woman was on her feet. ‘How are you, Max?’

‘I’m well, Helen, thanks,’ he nodded, giving her the broadest smile he could manage. The woman I love has been kidnapped, may be dead and I’m treading water in three murders, but hey, that’s Africa. No – he couldn’t say any of that.

‘Tell me, professor,’ she paused at the tent flap. ‘Are we going into the ash grove tomorrow?’

‘Possibly, dear lady,’ he said. ‘Possibly.’