Maxwell's Grave (28 page)

‘Man, man,’ Fraser was shaking his head. ‘This is daft.’

‘Now, the Sepulchre Society of Sussex was inspired, but oddly enough, I met a nice lady the other day who didn’t fall for it. She said it was melodramatic nonsense. And so it was. Derek Latymer, Mr Chip-on-the-shoulder, thought it was all made up by Douglas Russell. But it wasn’t, was it, Professor? It was all made up by you. You sent the
threatening
letters to Russell, knowing he was weak, flaky. And you borrowed one of your own skulls, I’ll bet, from the university, to place on your bed. And, if I had my digging hat on, Professor, I’d take it off to you. A BAFTA
performance
at the Quinton if ever I’ve seen one. You really did look terrified. And the twig in the mandible!’ Maxwell applauded in the stillness. ‘Inspired. Hazel Twigg in the frame too.’ He’d stopped smiling now. ‘You don’t care where the shit lands, do you?’

‘I’ve been patient, Maxwell,’ Fraser said. ‘Now I must ask you to leave. You do realize there’s no place for you at the dig after this?’

‘On the dig?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Can’t you see, man, it’s over? Neither of us will be doing any digging again. Professor,’ a sudden thought had occurred to Maxwell.
‘What were you doing with that spade?’

‘“One will suffer agony on the pyre,”’ Fraser quoted, an odd glint in his eye.

‘Jacquie!’ Maxwell was on his feet, brushing past the Scotsman, running through the house. He dashed into the kitchen; nothing. On into the conservatory; empty. Then he looked into the garden, high-walled and secluded, the cedars masking more distant houses and the road. A
blazing
fire crackled and spat in the centre of the lawn, the
tangled
branches crumbling to charcoal in its red hot heart. A woman’s body lay near, her hands tied together, duct tape over her mouth. Maxwell hurled himself at the French
windows
and crashed through the glass, shards slicing through his hands, his forehead, as he streaked across the short grass of summer. He dragged the body from the blaze,
feeling
the heat scorch his battered, bleeding face. He turned her over. It was Alison McCormick. And she was still breathing. He ripped off the tape and she shuddered, breathing in sharply as her eyelids flickered. She was grey and there was foam round her lips and hard, brown caked blood forming a rigid mark on one side of her face.

‘Maxwell!’ the Head of Sixth Form turned. Tam Fraser was standing there, another woman held firmly in his grip. Her wrists were roped in front of her and there was the same tape over her mouth that had recently covered Alison’s. Her shoes were undone and her tights had been removed. Her auburn hair hung lank and cobwebbed round her neck. Jacquie.

She looked at him with sad, trusting, terrified eyes.

‘“One will be spear-slain,”’ Fraser said triumphantly, ‘“hacked down in battle.”’ He nudged the spade-edge into the girl’s bruised neck. ‘I’m sorry it’s not quite a spear. I wasn’t exactly expecting you. A spade’ll do it, though,
don’t you think? After all, I’ve always called a spade a spade.’ He looked at Jacquie. ‘She’s only a wee lass. Bound to have a thin skull. Like that one there.’ He nodded at the fallen woman at Maxwell’s feet. ‘I’ll admit to a wee error here, mind.’ Fraser was smiling. ‘When Toogood talked about his female colleague and how bright she was, I thought it was that little waste of space at your feet. I went to all the lengths to grab her only to find out it was this one here I should have been talking to all along. Find out what she and Toogood had discovered; just how much she knew.’

The Head of Sixth Form surveyed his options. Alison was weak and barely conscious. She couldn’t focus, let alone stand. No help there. There were…what…ten yards between him and Fraser and the madman could hack off Jacquie’s head in that split-second dash. He looked into the grey, clear eyes of the girl he loved and he used his best weapon.

‘Brilliant!’ Maxwell said. He stood up slowly, shaking his head and smiling. ‘Quite brilliant.’ He clapped loudly.

‘Are you talking about me, laddie?’ Fraser asked. In his head, the crowds roared. Men and women of his chosen profession in gowns and mortar boards, stood before him, standing in their ovation.

‘Who else?’ Maxwell beamed. ‘These young
whipper-snappers
!’ he aimed a deft kick at Alison who groaned a
little
and rolled. ‘When will they realize, eh?’

‘Realize what?’ Fraser asked.

‘That they’ll never replace the likes of us. Oh, they call us dinosaurs and dodos – you used the phrase yourself.’

‘I did,’ Fraser nodded.

‘But, man, we are the salt of the earth. Initiatives. Bollocks! Reinventing the wheel.’

‘Exactly,’ Fraser’s spade edge was still pressing on
Jacquie’s neck. ‘Geo-bloody-physics, eh? Give me bosing any day.’

‘I can see it now,’ Maxwell folded his arms. ‘I can see it had to be done. Radley…’

‘Aye,’ Fraser sighed. ‘I felt bad about wee Davey. He was a good lad once. When he was under my tutelage. Don’t get me wrong – I’d have given him all the credit. Posthumously, it has to be said. But it would be done by
my
methods and not his. Notice how I’d closed down Russell’s stupid electronics? The tragedy was, of course, that wee David broke away from me…’

‘Like they do,’ Maxwell nodded solemnly.

‘New-fangled ideas. Scientific hogwash. God, the
arguments
we had. The rows! He wouldn’t listen, Maxwell. Not to a word. Nor Sam Welland, silly little tart. She’s no loss to anybody.’

‘Not at all,’ Maxwell said. ‘Right. Well, can I give you a hand, then? You’re burning this one, yes?’

‘Aye. Good of you to help.’

And Maxwell crouched to roll Alison onto the fire that spat and crackled to welcome her in. Fraser held Jacquie firmly by the hair with his left hand and brought back his right with the spade gleaming in the afternoon sun. There was a dull thud and Maxwell looked up.

Professor Tam Fraser lay on the ground where the
night-stick
had felled him. A large, blond, fresh-faced copper was standing over him, steadying the wobbling Jacquie as he flicked the night-stick back into his pocket.

‘Thank you, Dave,’ Maxwell said. ‘If I’d have known your timing was as crap as that, I’d never have agreed to your coming along.’

Chapter Twenty

Jacquie didn’t let Peter Maxwell go. Ever. She held him as he took the tape off her mouth and the rope from her wrist. As he laid her gently down in Tam Fraser’s grass and kissed away the tears. Dave Garstang was punching buttons on his mobile, checking Alison as she lay whimpering.

And Jacquie was still holding him that night in Petworth hospital, he sat by her bed in the private room that Henry Hall had booked for her. He’d square it with the Chief Constable later. Jacquie’s face, like Maxwell’s, was bruised and puffy. The combination of the duct tape and the
chloroform
had set up a reaction in her skin and she looked like shit.

‘I must look like shit,’ she said to him, her voice cracked and her throat parched from days without enough to drink.

‘Takes one to know one,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that you’re safe.’

‘Max,’ she smiled weakly, reaching out to stroke his cheek. ‘You saved my life.’

‘Me and a night-stick and fifteen stone of pretty hunky copper,’ Maxwell said.

‘What put you onto Fraser?’ she asked.

‘The poem,’ he told her. ‘A Saxon riddle called the
Fortunes of Men
– probably tenth century. Martin was onto it too.’

‘The affairs of men!’ She could still just about click her fingers. ‘On Martin’s computer. I was getting there too.’

‘From the poem?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I leave that to you ancient buffs. No, there’s a way on a computer, Max, to blank out text.’

‘What, some sort of invisible ink?’

‘If you like,’ she nodded. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t
think to check it before, but the day Fraser grabbed me, I went over Martin’s area again. And there it was. He’d changed the text colour to white – sort of guy he was, I suppose: careful, thorough. Didn’t want to give too much away. It just said “Fraser alibi”. The trouble was he had one. We’d checked it. We all assumed he was actually at the London symposium on the day David Radley died because he didn’t ring to cancel. On the attendance list at the
conference
centre, it looked as if he was present. He wasn’t speaking, merely one of the guests. So I made a few phone calls. After the eighth person on the conference list couldn’t remember seeing him there, I decided to follow it up. Only he got to me first. Poor Martin!’

He reached out to enfold her as the tears started again. The darkness would be there whenever she closed her eyes. She wanted light. She wanted air. She wanted the safe, strong arms of Mad Max.

‘There are a lot of casualties in this one, darling,’ he said softly. ‘Martin Toogood, David Radley, the parents of one, the widow of the other. Not to mention Eleanor Fry.’

‘How is Alison?’

‘They say she’ll mend,’ Maxwell said. ‘Fractured skull, dehydration, minor bruising. As for her soul, who knows?’

‘Does she know about John Fry?’

‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘At least, they told her. Her mother’s with her now, along with the baby. That’s what I can’t
handle
, Jacquie. Me and my bloody arrogance. If I hadn’t gone to see him that day with that nonsense about Annette… If I hadn’t made that mistake…’

She soothed the tangle of barbed wire hair, whispering ‘hush’ in his ear and kissing the bruised head. ‘That’s not true, Max,’ she said. ‘darling, darling Max. Eleanor Fry had been suffering from depression all her life. We were onto
that at the nick. She’d attempted suicide twice before. Oh, a
cri de coeur
, maybe. But this time there was no one around to hear it. I don’t think she knew anything about Annette Choker or even Alison McCormick. She was just a deeply unhappy woman. Shit happens and it’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he said, and pulled a buff envelope from his pocket. ‘I cadged this off the casualty desk while you were being x-rayed.’

‘Petty theft, Mr Maxwell?’ she frowned. ‘Tut, tut.’

‘It’s my resignation,’ he said.

‘Your…’ Jacquie sat there, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. ‘Peter Maxwell,’ she sat as upright as she could. ‘Leighford High is your life. You’re not ready to hang up your chalk just yet.’

‘I loused up, Jacquie,’ he said, his sad, dark eyes
brimming
with tears. ‘All these years I’ve been playing Jane bloody Marple, playing fast and loose with people’s
emotions
, people’s lives. What on God’s earth gave me that right?’

She held his face with both hands and kissed him
tenderly
on the lips. ‘I don’t know how many lives you’ve saved,’ she told him, the tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘And how many scores you’ve settled.’ She sniffed savagely. ‘And anyway, you’re Mad Max, for God’s sake. There are twelve hundred kids out there who are looking to you for guidance. Who’s going to take them down the rocky road to the past if you’re not there to do it? You’re the bloody piper, Peter Maxwell. You can’t just stop playing when you feel like it, you know.’

He half smiled.

‘Now,’ she sniffed, frowning at him and feeling the tears salty in her mouth. ‘Are you going to tear that up. Or am I?
Or is Legs Diamond?’

Maxwell chuckled. Nobody called the Headmaster that. Nobody except Mad Max.

‘Mr Maxwell?’ he half turned at the sound of the nurse’s voice.

‘Miss Nightingale?’ he half rose and bowed.

‘I must ask you to leave now, I’m afraid. It’s time for Miss Carpenter’s rest.’

‘Yes, yes of course,’ he said and reached forward to kiss her.

‘Max,’ she whispered, ‘They said…they said the baby’s okay.’

He stood upright as though transfixed, eyes wide. The nurse had gone, chuckling softly to herself. ‘Baby?’ he repeated.

She looked up at him, smiling a little sheepishly. ‘I was going to tell you,’ she said. ‘Honest.’

He looked at her, the love of his life on his pillow. He saw as in a film scene, the dark-haired woman he used to love and the bright-eyed baby on her lap. ‘I have two questions, Woman Policeman,’ he said. ‘Boy or girl?’

‘One of those,’ she said.

He chuckled. ‘And secondly – and think carefully about this one – your place or mine?’

She thought for a second that was barely split of the great black and white beast sprawled on the corpses of his kills; of the 54 millimetre horsemen, saddled and ready to ride into hell in Maxwell’s attic. And a smile spread over her face again. ‘Yours,’ she said.

‘You know it’s ironic,’ Peter Maxwell sat alongside Henry Hall as the DCI drove him back through the darkness of the Leighford night. ‘When I met Martin Toogood he said
to me “I don’t have time for cryptic clues”. And that’s exactly what he had time for. He was nearly there.’

Hall nodded. ‘His funeral is arranged for Monday, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘Will you be there?’

It was Maxwell’s turn to nod. ‘It’ll be my privilege,’ he said.

He bounded up the steps to the mezzanine floor the next morning as Mrs B., the cleaner, was taking charge of her new floor-polisher.

‘’Ere, Mr Maxwell,’ she hailed him. ‘I heard a funny thing the other day. I heard you was going to resign. I told ’em, that’s bollocks, that is. Mr Maxwell, he’s bloody barmy. Wouldn’t catch him resigning. After all, where else would he get all them long holidays?’

‘Did you, Mrs B.?’ he swept on past her in search of Norman, who owed him a fiver. ‘Well, yes, it is. I certainly am. No, you wouldn’t, and where indeed?’