Maxwell's Grave (4 page)

A host of sixth formers clustered inside one, around Mr Moss, their Head of History, that old bastard Mad Max and an odd-looking tall bloke with a ragged beard and sandals. They were all looking at a dead man, his bones splayed out on the table under the shade of the tent’s roof. He looked like a construction kit, with his body parts exploded prior
to cementing.

‘If you look here,’ the bearded man lifted up the
grey-brown
skull, ‘you’ll see what killed him. A single blow has shattered the cranial area. Probably an axe.’

Cecily Jenkins pulled a face. She’d never liked
hittie-hittie
things and often had to leave Mr Moss’s or Mr Maxwell’s lessons when the history got a bit rough.

‘Is this a battlefield, Mr Russell?’ Paul Moss wanted to know. He’d only been a historian for nine years. He was still wet behind the ears.

‘No evidence of that,’ Douglas Russell told him. ‘No, we’re investigating a Saxon cemetery. But this body was found much further up the slope, outside the perimeter trench. We’ve no idea why it was separate. Some sort of taboo, perhaps. We know that in the ninth century…’

It all blurred into gobbledegook in the brain pan of Robbie Wesson. This was a punishment trip. Whereas the sixth form, those privileged wankers in Year Twelve and Thirteen who were allowed to wear their own clothes were here for their edification and delight, Robbie was a pressed man. Mr Moss, his History teacher, had told him that in the olden days people were sent out to crack rocks as a punishment, chained together. They were black people, Robbie knew, and sometimes they were on a ship, picking cotton or something. So it didn’t come as
too
much of a surprise to Robbie that Mr Moss had turned his detention into this boring visit. He looked at the bloke with a beard. He knew words were coming out of his mouth and he understood about one in four. Okay, so there was a dead bloke. That was mildly interesting, but when he’d picked up a bone, Mr Moss had screamed at him. There were
computers
in the tent, but they were all showing really boring stuff and he wasn’t sure he’d get away with accessing his
BMX sites.

So Robbie went on a wander. He often did it, dawdling between lessons, taking twenty minutes to go to the lav, inventing urgent embassies on behalf of Miss So-and-so or Mr Whatsisface. The fact that Robbie couldn’t remember half his teachers’ names spoke volumes. He found himself outside the tent. Robbie could slip out of places for England. Shit! He’d left his fags in his locker, back at Leighford. What a plonker. Never mind, perhaps he could cadge one off of one of the people up to their waists in
various
holes on the hillside.

‘What you doing?’ Even in misfits like Robbie Wesson, the flame of intellectual curiosity burned bright
occasionally
.

‘Digging.’ The woman didn’t look up. She was wearing gardening gloves and her bare shoulders were pink and blotchy under the afternoon sun. She had a really silly straw hat, like one Robbie’s gran had. She looked like that woman with big tits on the gardening programme on the telly, that Charlie Buttock.

‘What for?’

Charlie Buttock rested back on her heels, wiping the sweat from her forehead under the hat brim. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, instantly suspicious of anyone who didn’t reach her waist.

‘I’m Robbie.’

‘Are you with the school party?’

Robbie hadn’t been asked to a party since he was eight. The old girl was clearly as daft as a brush. And she had to be forty if she was a day.

‘Shouldn’t you be with the others?’ Charlie Buttock felt a vague sense of unease.

‘Yeah.’ This was Robbie’s way in. ‘But Mr Moss sent me
to get his ciggies.’ Robbie’s razor logic told him that this woman wouldn’t know that Mr Moss had never knowingly had a ciggie in his life. ‘Only, the van’s locked. You haven’t got one, have you?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Charlie Buttock told him. ‘Now, please go away. I’m busy.’ And she got on with her trowelling again, hoping the ground would swallow the child up like the mountain behind the Pied Piper.

Robbie wandered away, muttering. He turned again, briefly, to stare with disbelief at the size of the woman’s arse in her tight jeans. Not even Marcia Wapham had an arse that size and all Year Eight agreed that Marcia Wapham was
huge
. What was it that lured little Robbie towards the copse? The cool of the trees, perhaps, in the unseasonable heat of the May day sun. It would be minutes before they noticed he’d gone. And anyway, he was busting for a pee. He ducked past the dumper truck and balanced
dangerously
on the planking that led to the myriad spoil heaps, scattering a couple of mud-caked buckets in his wake. For a recidivist offender, Robbie was bloody loud. Then, he was in the shadows of the trees. This would do. He wasn’t
normally
so coy. Usually he’d point percy at any old porcelain, from church walls to Old Peoples’ Homes but he didn’t want the old cow digging to see him in case she thought he was flashing her. And
that
would be just too gross to
contemplate
.

He was just in mid-rip, watering the ash tree roots, when he saw it. It looked like a bundle of rags at first, dark against the tangle of vegetation, except…except there was a hand sticking out of it, the fingers curled towards him, beckoning. He clenched his muscles, stopping with
difficulty
in mid-pee. He whipped up his flies and peered closer, his heart thumping, his mouth dry. He’d never seen a dead
body before, not one that still had flesh on it. And the skeleton in the tent didn’t look real anyway. He kicked the bundle with his trainer. Nothing. Maybe it was a wino, like that old bloke who lived on and off the Barlichway, near Robbie’s home, the one they threw lighted matches at to make him jump. A flap of blanket flopped aside and a face stared up at him, dark eyes sunken in the head, mouth half open as though in mid-sentence. The neck was at a weird angle, the head to one side, like somebody’d stuck it on funny. And there was dark brown stuff all around the
collar
.

‘Fuckin’ ’ell,’ Robbie hissed and crashed back through the undergrowth. ‘Mr Moss, Mr Moss! There’s a dead bloke!’

Chapter Three

‘What’s that stupid boy shouting about?’ Charlie Buttock wanted to know. She was kneeling up in her trench,
glowing
a little, as Maxwell would have put it, with the exertions of the day.

Paul Moss was probably still the right side of thirty-five. He was out of the main tent like a bat out of hell and
haring
across the site, mixing metaphors as he went, leaping trenches and kicking trowels like a man born to it. ‘Robbie!’ he screamed. ‘Have you touched anything?’

Robbie was stumbling back out of the clutch of trees, his trainer-laces flapping, his hands flapping, the baseball cap that was the mark of the stupid person from George W. down, lying discarded in the dust. Moss put his career on the line by grabbing the boy’s elbow and steadying him.

‘Robbie,’ he shook him. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘It’s a body,’ Robbie was shouting, pointing to the trees. ‘Over there.’

‘We haven’t excavated over there yet,’ Charlie Buttock was explaining. ‘There can’t possibly…’

But Peter Maxwell was creeping over the ash tree roots, feeling his way in semi-darkness, trying to force his eyes to focus after the sharp light of the sun. He couldn’t make out anything at first, then his foot hit something, soft but solid.

‘Jesus!’

‘What is it, Mr Maxwell?’ Douglas Russell, their
archaeologist
guide, was standing with the Leighford sixth
formers
at his elbow.

‘Nothing,’ Maxwell turned to face them. ‘Paul, get the kids in the minibus, will you?’ In such moments, even Peter Maxwell was apt to denigrate his own sixth form, but in the
face of death, the sophisticates of Year Twelve were
children
indeed.

‘What?’ Moss frowned, but he’d worked man and boy with Peter Maxwell for years now, almost all his working life. Mad the man may have been, but he was only mad nor’ by nor’west. And when Mad Max told you to do
something
, he had his reasons. And you did it. ‘Oh, right. Come on, people. Home-time.’

‘But sir…’ Robbie couldn’t believe what was happening.

‘Yes, Robbie. Tell me all about it later.’

The Year Twelve students, in jeans and t-shirts, had been grateful enough to take a break from the rigours of their AS revision slog to look at a few artefacts, but this was
different
, frightening, urgent. Had Robbie Wesson been
literally
burning, not one of them would have pissed on him to put him out, but there was something wrong. They all sensed it. Mad Max’s face was odd, serious and suddenly grey. His voice was hard, his words deliberate, and in such moments, you didn’t cross him. You just kept your head down and you moved. A couple of girls put their arms around Robbie’s skinny little shoulders and instantly turned into their mothers, leading the bewildered boy back to the minibus.

Douglas Russell was in the undergrowth now, squatting with those muscles that archaeologists the world over develop in their years at the soil-face. ‘My God,’ he hissed, staring at what Peter Maxwell was staring at.

‘That is…
was
…David Radley?’ Maxwell needed
confirmation
. He’d only met the man once and the light was poor in the ash-tree thicket.

Russell was nodding. ‘God in Heaven…’ and his hand instinctively went forward.

‘No!’ Maxwell was faster, snatching the man’s wrist and
holding it firm. ‘Evidence,’ he said more softly. ‘You, of all people…’

‘Yes,’ Russell visibly pulled himself together, ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. An eleven-hundred-year-old body I can cope with. But this…’ He realized he was shaking. He was going to throw up.

‘Do you have a mobile phone?’ Maxwell asked, as much to give the man something to do as anything else.

‘Er…yes…I…I don’t know…’ He slapped his pockets uselessly. It would be in his jacket, in the tent, in the
four-by-four,
at the hotel. At that precise moment, he didn’t really know.

The Head of Sixth Form stood up, lifting the shaken archaeologist with him. He led the man into the sunlight. Charlie Buttock stood there, one or two other diggers alongside her, watching the scene unfold as if in a film. Somebody else’s screenplay, somebody else’s set.

‘Paul,’ Maxwell called to his oppo, standing by the bus. All the kids were inside, peering intently out of the
window
. All except the two girls playing mummies to Robbie Wesson. And Robbie Wesson, owner of more syndromes than China, was trying very hard not to cry.

The Head of Sixth Form waited until the Head of History was alongside him. ‘Call the police,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a murder.’

And he bent down and picked up the fallen headgear of Robbie Wesson, as though it was Richard III’s crown in the bush at Bosworth.

If he’d been asked, Peter Maxwell couldn’t have told you when the blue and white police tape stretched around a murder scene had been replaced by American Yellow. Any more than he could have told you when British policemen
took to wearing body armour or carrying night-sticks. Something to do with global terrorism, was it? Nine eleven? Al Qaeda? Nor could he say when policemen began to look younger than he did. No, that wasn’t true.
That
he did remember. He’d been 31 when a spotty kid had come to tell him, with a faltering voice and unsteady gaze, that his wife and child were dead.

‘DS Toogood,’ another spotty kid stood in front of him now, ears damp, tail bushy. ‘You are…?’

Gagging for something alcoholic, Maxwell wanted to say, but this was hardly the time to be flippant. ‘Peter Maxwell.’

To be fair to Martin Toogood, he wasn’t spotty at all. He was dark and good-looking in a Massimo Serrato kind of way.

‘You found the body, I understand?’

‘Not exactly.’

Maxwell had stayed on the edge of the trees since Paul Moss had made his phone call. He knew the need to keep out of crime scenes and he knew that he and Russell and
little
Robbie Wesson at least had been crashing about all over the place. He kept the natural nosiness of the other diggers at bay, with gently raised hands and soothing words. They’d all known Radley – his friends and colleagues. He’d insisted that the Leighford kids go home and had got them all away before the law arrived. That had taken eighteen minutes; not bad perhaps in these days of hi-tech gadgetry. Even so, Maxwell wondered whether or not in his day, an old copper on his bike couldn’t have done it in ten.

‘I’ve got a dead man here, Mr Maxwell,’ Toogood snapped shut his warrant card holder. ‘I don’t have time for cryptic clues.’

‘Indeed not, no.’ The last thing Peter Maxwell wanted to do was to hinder the police in their enquiries. ‘The body
was found by a student from Leighford High School – Robert Wesson. Special Needs kid in Year Eight.’

‘Where is he?’ Toogood was scanning the site, oddly golden now in the early evening sun.

‘At home,’ Maxwell said. ‘I sent the Leighford party away.’

‘
You
did?’

‘Murder sites aren’t the place for children, Sergeant. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘If I had the leisure for it, sir,’ Toogood told him. ‘What were you all doing here?’

Maxwell wandered with him down the slope of Staple Hill, past strange men in white coats and hoods, who had arrived in myriad police vehicles, sirens blaring, lights flashing, trampling without respect over the archaeological site, interested only in gathering evidence of an altogether more recent tragedy.

‘Dr Radley invited us,’ Maxwell told him. ‘He was keen to attract students to his department.’

‘The dead man?’ Toogood stopped and turned.

Maxwell nodded.

‘When did you see him last? Alive, I mean.’

‘Er…’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Let’s see. Today’s Thursday. Yesterday. Yesterday afternoon. At Leighford High. We set up this visit then.’

‘What time was this?’ Toogood was jotting it all down, in true text book fashion in his notepad.

‘Quarter past, half past four? After my teaching day,
certainly
.’

‘And what is it you teach, Mr Maxwell?’

‘History,’ the Great Man said. ‘I’m Head of Sixth Form.’

‘English was always my thing,’ Toogood said, his face suddenly softer. ‘History came a pretty close second.’

‘I find it often does,’ Maxwell smiled.

‘Martin,’ a female voice made them both turn and an auburn-haired woman stood there, picking her way over the rubble of ages in incongruous office shoes. ‘SOCO want a word. In the main tent.’

Toogood nodded, slipping the book away. ‘Any sign of the governor yet?’

The woman shook her head.

‘We’ll talk again, Mr Maxwell,’ the sergeant said and was gone, up the hill and into the tent with its white-coated men.

She flashed her warrant-card at him. ‘DS Carpenter,’ she said.

‘We can’t go on meeting like this,’ he muttered, wanting to catch her hand, to kiss her. ‘Your place or mine? Oh, and can I put my hand down your blouse, please?’

The briefest of smiles flew across her face and her grey eyes flashed in the gold of the sun’s rays. ‘You,’ she closed to him, ‘are just a dirty old man.’

‘Tsk, tsk,’ he shook his head. ‘And I thought you bought all that guff about how much I loved you.’

‘I bet you say that to all the police officers who come to investigate a murder. Henry’s going to be furious – that you’re here, I mean – you know that, don’t you?’

‘Henry? How is the old sleuth?’

‘Same old, same old,’ she shrugged. ‘Infuriating.’

They were talking about DS Carpenter’s boss, DCI Henry Hall, who had locked horns with Peter Maxwell on more than one occasion. Maxwell could picture him now, in his battleship grey suit, with his solid jaw and his
impenetrable
eyes, vacant behind dead lenses. Where
did
he buy those glasses? Mr Inscrutable.

‘What’s this all about, Max?’ Jacquie Carpenter may have
been Maxwell’s lover, but now, today, on this hillside, she was a copper first.

‘The dead man, as you know, is David Radley. He’s
professor
of archaeology at Wessex. Paul Moss and I bought a few kids over, at his request, to see the dig. All part of Radley’s personal recruitment drive.’

‘Kids?’ She couldn’t see any.

‘I sent them home. Who’s this Toogood?’

DS Carpenter smiled, glancing back to the main tent where her colleagues were congregating. ‘He’s quite cute, isn’t he? New kid on the block. From the West Country somewhere.’

‘Ah, Tottingleigh,’ Maxwell nodded, thinking no further than the next village along. ‘Says he’s an English specialist.’

‘Got a degree in it,’ the policewoman said. ‘Don’t ask me what a Medieval literature buff is doing in a blue suit. Takes all sorts, I suppose. What do you know about Radley?’

‘What do you know about how he died?’ he countered.

‘Uh-huh.’ It had started already, as she knew it would. She looked out from the headland to the sea beyond, gilded now in the dying sun. Vast purple bars of cloud were
sliding
into place along the horizon, closing down the day, bringing in the night. ‘You know the rules. I cannot divulge…’

‘Bollocks, heart of my heart.’ It was his turn to smile. ‘We go too far back, Woman Policeman Carpenter. Now, talk, kid.’ It was, as always, the best Bogart she’d ever heard. She looked at the man she loved under his pointless tweed hat, his curls iron grey under its rim. She wanted, as always, to reach out and smooth that cheek with its furrows, those lips with that smile. She wanted, as always, to feel his arms around her and to bury her face into the soft hair of his chest.

‘You’d better get out of here before Henry arrives,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk later. It’ll have to be official, of course – at the station, I mean.’

‘And unofficially?’ He fluttered his eyelashes at her, Svengali to her Trilby.

She wrinkled her face. ‘Same old, same old,’ she
muttered
. ‘Your place. Tonight. But it’ll be late. You don’t want to know the paperwork this little lot’ll generate.’

‘I’ll be up,’ he winked at her. ‘And don’t talk to me about paperwork, Woman Policeman. I am a teacher.’

‘How’ll you get home?’ she asked, glancing round. ‘I don’t see Surrey.’

‘I came in the minibus, remember? No, the walk will do me good. Abyssinia, Woman Policeman.’ And he ducked under the tape and was gone.

‘Ah, Henry, nice of you to call.’ Dr Jim Astley was putting away his bag of tricks. In the confines of the main tent, he looked a strange, ancient, jaundiced creature, worn out by years of forensic medicine, golf and an alcoholic wife. Almost alone among the scattering of aliens in white coats, he was in civvies.

‘I thought I saw…’ DCI Henry Hall’s wife didn’t drink and he didn’t play golf. Even so, the eerie light in the tent and a lifetime sorting through the wreckage of other
people’s
lives, lent his skin the same parchment colour.

‘…Peter Maxwell.’ Astley finished the sentence for him. ‘Yes you did. Uncanny, isn’t it, how that man can smell trouble?’

It was. Henry Hall and Peter Maxwell were like two
buttocks
of the same bum, drawn like iron filings to the
magnet
that was murder. Hall because he had no choice – it went with the territory, Maxwell because…well, just
because, that’s all.