Maxwell's Chain (2 page)

‘Why do we do these things in February?’ Sylvia asked the Great Man.

Sylvia Matthews had been the School Nurse at Leighford for ever. To be fair, she didn’t look all of her eighty-six years, but she sure as hell felt it on days like this. She’d long since stopped being annoyed by Peter Maxwell or the colourful displays on his walls. In the far corner, William Powell was kissing a rather unlikely looking mermaid in the curvy form of Ann Blyth. Above the radiator Burt Lancaster, all hair and teeth, was dragging Audrey Hepburn over the sand in
The Unforgiven
. And behind the spider plant, a squadron of Japanese Migs was bombing the hell out of the Pearl Harbor fleet in
Tora! Tora! Tora!
There’d be tears before VJ Day.

‘Warmest Feb on record, apparently,’ Maxwell said, encouragingly, removing his hat and Jesus scarf and flinging them onto the top of a filing cabinet, their natural habitat when not about his person.

‘Still February though, warmest or not,’ she muttered, rubbing her hands together and praying he had some coffee on the go.

‘Bill Lunt explained that it is because the winter
uniform is more photogenic,’ Maxwell explained kindly, reading her mind and switching on the kettle. Sylvia and Mad Max had been an item once, or so the kids whispered. It was a marriage of true minds in a way, but there had been impediments.

‘Winter…?’ Sylvia was bemused.

‘Yes, yes, I know. I said that. Not very noticing for a photographer, is he? I think Bill is just remembering his training at the rather shaky hands of old Whatsisface, you know, old Thing, used to do the pictures with that pinhole camera way back when.’

Sylvia puckered her brow. ‘Hmmm…yes, I remember him.’ She chuckled. ‘It didn’t matter whether the kids were pulling faces or not; everything was so blurred you couldn’t tell one from another, let alone what their expressions were doing.’

He laughed and turned away to make the coffee. ‘Browning!’ It had come to him at last. Maxwell the Historian hated not to remember the names of the dead. The living, now, were a different matter.

‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘Every picture was the Browning version,’ he said, as he handed her her mug of brown liquid. ‘Bit like this gravy.’

She took a sip. ‘Oh God, Max. This coffee is bad, even for you.’

‘Sorry.’ He took a sip too and shuddered. Crap
wasn’t the word. ‘It’s the NQT lad’s turn to get the goodies in this month and I think he’s on a bit of an economy drive. Short of readies.’

‘Well, who isn’t, after Christmas?’ Sylvia nodded, knowing how appallingly newly qualified teachers were paid, ‘but surely there’s no need to buy this muck?’

Maxwell nodded. ‘To be honest, Sylv, we’re a bit worried about Gregory. A few too many car boot sales and too few essays marked, at the moment. You just can’t get the staff any more. He’s got till half term to sort his act out and then I think Paul is planning a word.’

‘Oh, crumbs,’ Sylvia attempted a William Brown take-off, not altogether successfully in that she’d never read a Richmal Crompton book in her life. Even so, Maxwell beamed at her fondly, just for trying. He’d read them all. ‘That will scare him.’

‘I know Paul isn’t exactly Attila the Hun,’ Maxwell agreed, glancing out of his window to where Paul Moss, the Head of History, was still trying to get Year Nine back into his classroom after the photograph, ‘but we have to be seen to go through all the stages. Paul is his Line Manager, so it’s his call. I might take young Gregory out for a drinkie, though, and see if I can wheedle whatever the problem is out of him.’

Sylvia snorted. ‘Looking at him, I think the offer of a drink with you will probably be one drink too
many. Wearing my nursing hat, I think he manages drinking quite well on his own.’

‘Oh? I hadn’t picked up on that.’ Maxwell knew that Sylvia had a gold in Gossip from the 1984 Olympics. She was worth cultivating.

‘Well, that’s why I wear this rather fetching uniform and you wear…whatever it is you wear.’ She forgot the horrors of a moment ago and sipped again. ‘Oh, yuk, Max. Tip this away, will you, before I accidentally poison myself. I must go, anyway. I expect the girlies will be queuing up with frostbite or something, threatening to sue that nice Mr Diamond for making them stand outside for a few minutes. Anything to get off games. Family all well, by the by?’

‘Shipshape and Bristol fashion.’ It was unusual for Peter Maxwell to go all nautical and as he said it he didn’t think his Jacquie would go a bundle on the analogy.

As Sylvia reached the door it opened, and Bill Lunt came in, carrying a stiff brown envelope.

‘Oh, hello, Bill. Do you know Sylvia Matthews?’

‘Only by sight,’ Bill chuckled. ‘Through my lens, as it were.’ He shook her hand.

‘I’m sure she enhances any picture,’ said Maxwell, in full gallant mode. She gave him an old-fashioned look and he waved as she left and ushered Bill in,
all in one Head-of-Sixth-Formly sweep of the arm. ‘How can I help, Bill? It can’t be gestures by Year Twelve. You haven’t developed the picture yet.’

‘Not today’s picture, no. But there’s something else I’d like you to have a butchers at, if you would.’

‘All right. What’s this? Oh, you wouldn’t like a coffee, would you? I’d poured this for Sylvia, but she has to answer her calling.’

‘No, thanks,’ Lunt smiled. What did he know that Maxwell didn’t?

Maxwell hauled his pince-nez out of his jacket pocket, the pair he’d half-inched from that nice Mr Pickwick a while back.

‘I was out last night and took some pictures. Moon over the sea. Very atmospheric. I’m going for the Leighford Photographer of the Year again this year. I might even send them up to the
Daily Mail
.’

‘Hmm. Gosh.’ Maxwell remained noncommittal. He assumed that sending them to the
Daily Mail
was a good thing, but wasn’t a hundred per cent sure.

‘I developed them this morning. It would normally have been last night, but Emma…well, you know how women are.’

‘Indeed.’ Maxwell was happily cohabiting with Jacquie and parenting their little boy, Nolan, in a
by-and
-large-argument-free environment, but he could
see that that probably didn’t apply globally. ‘How is Emma, by the way?’ Maxwell remembered Emma Watson as a bubbly little girl with buck teeth who developed into something of a cracker come AS level age. She’d developed a feistiness, too, that Maxwell rather liked. Never rude, just assertive – sort of woman who might demand the vote sometime in the future.

‘Oh, she’s very well. Manages the shop. But she doesn’t always see why I need to develop things straight away. We photographers do get a bit obsessive, I’m afraid. So, I got up early this morning and did these. I’ve enlarged them, so you can see what I mean. You might still need a lens, though.’

‘I may not be twenty-twenty any more, Bill, but…’

‘No, no. I didn’t mean that. I just mean the image I want you to look at is very small and a bit grainy at this enlargement. No offence meant, Mr Maxwell.’

‘And none taken, Bill, I assure you. Anyway, let’s have a look-see. Do you have a lens with you?’

Bill Lunt whipped out a magnifying glass from his pocket, like a poor man’s Basil Rathbone. It still had a ‘Lunt Photographic’ price label on it. He spread out the photos on Maxwell’s desk and stood back. Maxwell leant over them, magnifying glass in one hand, pince-nez in the other. He looked closely
at each one, then straightened up.

‘Very nice, Bill. Very atmospheric. Very
Daily Mail
.’

Bill Lunt looked crestfallen. ‘Can’t you see it?’

‘Ummm…I think perhaps not. Sorry.’ Maxwell leant in again, anxious to please the man. Had the photographer caught the face of Mother Theresa in a sandy hillock? The second gunman on the Grassy Knoll?

‘Oh, come here. Let me show you.’ The photographer took the lens from Maxwell and put the pictures in a neat pile. ‘Number one.’ He pointed to an area in the bottom left. ‘What do you see?’

‘Dune.’ Ever the film buff.

‘Right. Number two. Same place.’

Maxwell bent closer and screwed up his eyes. ‘Oh. I see…What is that?’

‘I think it’s an upraised arm.’

Maxwell looked at him. Then back at the photo.

‘All right. I think I can see that.’ It could just as well have been the Loch Ness Monster, but he sensed that Bill Lunt was a sensitive soul, especially when it came to his photos, so he trod warily.

‘And the next?’

Maxwell peered. ‘Nothing?’

‘Right. And the next?’

Maxwell was warming to this. One more lucky guess and he’d get an A Level in Photography, sending Leighford’s ALPS ratings through the roof. ‘Oh, I see. The arm again. Wait, so what we are seeing is…’

Bill Lunt straightened up triumphantly. ‘What we are seeing is someone stabbing a body behind the dune. In stop motion.’

Maxwell bent to the pictures again and flipped through them quickly. ‘You could be right. In fact, in this one,’ he pointed to one in the middle of the sequence, ‘I think you can just see another arm as well, reaching up.’

The photographer looked closer. ‘I think you’re right.’ He stepped back from the desk, slowly, rubbing his eyes. ‘What are we going to do, Mr Maxwell?’

‘Well, Bill.’ Maxwell straightened up the pictures and replaced them in the envelope. ‘You could send them to the Daily Mail, I suppose. They’re very atmospheric, as you say. Did I ever tell you about the case of the World’s Oldest Photograph?’

‘But…but, Mr Maxwell. What about the arm?’ Bill Lunt was aghast. ‘We can’t just leave it. There’s been a murder.’

‘Come on, Bill.’ Maxwell was looking a little distant, thinking hard as he was. ‘You sound like a Sassenach version of Taggart.’ Bill Lunt’s wasn’t the
best impression of Blythe Duff he’d ever heard. And after all, Peter Maxwell had sat through, not once but twice, that appalling load of tosh
Blow Up
, in which a photographer had unwittingly captured a murder. Or had he? He’d sat through it twice in order to understand the plot,
not
, he hastened to tell everyone,
just
to see as much as possible of Vanessa Redgrave.

‘Can’t we at least go and look?’

Maxwell pursed his lips. ‘We, white man?’ he said to himself in memory of the old Lone Ranger/Tonto joke. He closed his eyes and pictured the evening spent in his warm and cosy lounge with Jacquie and Nolan. Metternich the cat would be stretched out in front of the fire in all his black and white, battle-scarred glory, quietly, and against all the odds, protecting His Baby from all-comers including, quite often, the child’s parents. He also pictured the chilly breeze off the sea, the lining up to get the exact spot, the trudging over the damp sand carrying a spade. No contest, really.

‘Pick me up at the end of Columbine at half seven,’ he told the photographer. ‘Bring a spade. And a torch. Oh, and a camera.’

Bill Lunt chuckled and rubbed his hands together. ‘All right!’ he said, grinning broadly. ‘Sleuthing with Mr Maxwell! You know you’ve got a bit of a reputation for this, don’t you? Wait till I tell Emma.
Or, wait a minute. Do you think I should tell Emma?’

‘It’s not for me to say, Bill. But let’s just say I will be telling Jacquie I am off for a quiet drink with someone from work.’

‘Point taken, Mr Maxwell…’ He patted the side of his nose, that grand gesture of the conspirator throughout time.

‘Bill, if we are to be digging together, could you call me something else?’

‘Mr M?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s as though you’ve forgotten my name. What about Max?’

Bill Lunt was ecstatic. ‘OK…Max. See you at nineteen thirty.’

‘When?’ The Head of Sixth Form was aghast.

‘Erm…half past seven?’

‘Excellent.’

‘Oh, perhaps I’d better have your mobile number.’

‘All of my numbers are mobile, Bill, if they choose to be. But if you should be talking about the number of a mobile telephone, then I’m afraid I must quote my wife here.’

Bill waited and nothing happened. ‘What would your wife say, Max?’

Maxwell snorted and tossed his head, such an
immaculate take-off of his pretty young wife that it made Bill Lunt’s head spin, and he felt the warm glow of being with a fellow Luddite grow.

‘Oh, I see. Seven-thirty it is, then.’

‘Seven-thirty it is, Bill. Wrap up warm. Wear a scarf, or something. Not really bucket and spade weather, is it?’

Maxwell shook his head as Bill Lunt went down the stairs two at a time. The thing on the dunes would turn out to be a branch caught in the wind, or similar; an Asda trolley somehow washed up from Dar-es-Salaam. Except that – he cast his mind back – it was particularly calm last night. No raging storm, no writhing swell. Well, he pondered further as he picked up a pile of exercise books, it would be some seaweed or something. A sea bird. A weather balloon reflecting the moon. Part of a wrecked spacecraft from Roswell. Or, of course, just possibly, an arm, stabbing someone to death.

He opened the door to his office just as a hooded figure ran past.

‘Jones. Take that stupid hood off. Stand up straight. Don’t run. And why aren’t you teaching Nine Zed?’ He tutted. Maths teachers might be hard to find, but really! There was surely a limit. And, whistling quietly, he was off, to teach some kids, as if they needed teaching, some more about Man’s inhumanity to Man.

As things turned out, Peter Maxwell didn’t have to be economical with the truth over his up-coming spot of sleuthing. Yes, he did have a reputation for these things and as luck would have it, Jacquie had been poached by DCI Henry Hall to collate age statistics on local ASBO holders; woman policeman meets number cruncher. He had already done the adding up, and had made the average age
ninety-seven
. He had done it again – three this time. Even allowing for the granny on the Barlichway who had perfected the art, to everyone’s horrified amazement, of peeing through letterboxes, and also allowing for the tot who had bitten and spat his way through every playgroup in town, he knew his maths was dodgy somewhere. He was banging his calculator on his desk and was about to follow it with his head when Jacquie had wandered past and taken pity on
him. All right, so Hall, all bland and unreadable behind the rimless specs, was a fast-track graduate of the new school, but electronics were nearly as alien to him as those new-fangled Belisha beacons were to Peter Maxwell.

Nolan was with the child-minder, according to Jacquie’s phone message. He would be fine there until she could pick him up. The wind was a bit keen for a ride on the back of Daddy’s bike, no matter how well wrapped. And the velocipede that was White Surrey was not the most comfortable ride in the world. That honour, if the graffiti behind the Sports Hall were to be believed, belonged to Jemma Davidson of Year Eleven. There was a stew in the fridge, if he fancied that. Or she would bring chips. Let her know.

Maxwell rang back and left a message with Ken Wertham, the rather curmudgeonly desk sergeant; Dixon of Dock Green, thou shouldst be living at this hour. What with 999 and 101 and practically every number in between, the last few months before retirement were hanging heavily on the desk man’s hands. He toyed with not passing the message on, just to spite the stuck-up sod. What was he doing, old as Methuselah and no better than he should be, with a nice bit of tottie like Jacquie Carpenter? Then he remembered what had happened the last time he had ‘forgotten’ to pass on the message. His ears still
rang in cold weather. He picked up the phone.

‘Jacquie Carpenter.’

‘Desk here, Sergeant. Your…Mr Maxwell has just rung. Says thanks for the stew, but he thinks perhaps it’s had all its useful life and even Metternich doesn’t want it.’

‘Cheeky.’

‘I’m sure it’s lovely. He says don’t worry about the chips, he is going out with a colleague. Something about lesson planning.’

‘Really?’ Jacquie was amazed. ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’ Jacquie knew Maxwell hadn’t planned a lesson since Mafeking was relieved. ‘Lesson planning.’ She repeated it because she wasn’t sure she’d ever said those words before, not in that configuration anyway.

‘Yes. I wrote it down.’ Wertham sounded peeved and not a little apprehensive.

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure you did. Well, thanks for letting me know.’

Jacquie put the phone down and tapped a pencil against her front teeth pensively.

Alerted by the cessation of the tapping of calculator keys, Hall looked up through his open doorway.

‘Everything all right, Jacquie?’ he called.

Jacquie Carpenter had been DCI Henry Hall’s
favourite detective for more years than he cared to acknowledge. She’d been a slip of a thing in uniform when they’d first met and he could still remember her, ciggie shaking in her pale hand as she stood outside her first murder scene at the ruin the kids called the Red House all those years ago. She’d long since given up the smoking and the shaking, but murder scenes? Well, some things never changed. Motherhood had rounded Jacquie Carpenter. She was an inch fuller everywhere in the literal sense, more careful perhaps with her own life, slower to judge, but quicker to leap to the defence of woman or child.

‘Hmm?’ She looked up and met his frown. ‘Oh, yes, no worries. Umm, sir?’

Hall came over. ‘What is it?’ Henry Hall was a three-piece-suit man, in an age when no one wore three pieces any more. Without noticing it, the fast-track whiz kid with all the smart answers had become a middle-aged man. Promotion had passed him by because he wanted it to. Above his rank was all political correctness, quotas, community policing, ethnic understanding and glorified social work, hobnobbing with magistrates and chief constables over rounds of golf and dry Martinis. Here it was still the cops and the robbers, ho ho. And when Jacquie called him ‘guv’ he listened; when she called him ‘sir’ he came over.

‘Are there any new unexplaineds at the moment?’

‘Not that I know of,’ he shrugged. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing concrete,’ she said. ‘It’s just that Max has rung and said he’s going out with a colleague.’

Like Jacquie and Hall, Hall and Maxwell went way back. It was the Red House case, funnily enough, where they had met too. It was Hall’s case, but people in Leighford with long memories still called it Maxwell’s House and they didn’t mean the coffee. The two men walked wide of each other most of the time, a nod, a grim smile, a small wave, even a microwave, from a car or the saddle of a bike respectively. But somehow, in Hall’s inquiries and in Hall’s cases, Peter Maxwell was always there, like Banquo at the feast.

Hall turned to go back into his office. ‘For goodness’ sake, Jacquie. Why not just marry the man and make the cliché complete?’

‘No, no, guv, don’t get me wrong. He can do what he likes. Does, in fact, do what he likes. It’s just the rest of the message that has me worried.’

‘What else did he say, then?’ Hall’s blank glasses turned back to her, his face somewhere behind them.

‘He said they would be lesson planning.’

‘I still don’t quite see…’ Hall knew Maxwell was a loose cannon, but teaching was a foreign
country; they did things differently there.

‘Guv, Max hasn’t planned a lesson in his life. He has told Nolan on many an occasion to shoot him if he ever found him writing a lesson plan.’

‘Perhaps he’s been told to. Perhaps there’s another Ofsted inspection – although after last time, let’s hope not.’ The last time, Hall remembered, people had died. You didn’t mess with Ofsted in Tony Blair’s Britain. ‘Perhaps…’ Hall brightened, with his finger in the air. ‘Perhaps it’s a new directive from County Hall and he’s…’ Hall stopped. ‘You’re right. That is odd. I’m sure there’s nothing pending, though.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Jacquie picked up her calculator again. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

And she was talking to herself really as she started tapping in numbers and Hall returned to his desk. He sat for a moment, then made a note on a post-it and stuck it to the edge of his monitor screen. Just in case.

Maxwell stood on the corner of Columbine with his shoulders drawn up and his chin drawn down into the shelter of his colourful scarf. His habitual hat was in place, pork pie with the brim down, but it was a comfort thing; like a blanket, but infinitely less stylish. It gave very little warmth. He couldn’t feel
his ears at all. The sunny February day, a sure sign of global warming or a sure sign of an impending mini-ice age, depending on which ranting scientist was in the ascendancy, had begun to cool with the dark and as far as Maxwell was concerned, Bill Lunt and his nice warm car couldn’t get there quickly enough. The cold was beginning to creep up his legs and heaven only knew what might happen when it got to the top.

It was the jeering he heard first and the laughter that followed. Loud, belligerent, like the SA in some Nazi town, swaggering down the street in the sound archive of his brain. Then he saw them; a knot of hoodies hunched like the camels of the night milling round a smaller figure in their centre. Instinctively, most people would walk away, cross the road, reckon it wasn’t their fight. Instinctively, Peter Maxwell crossed the road too, into the thick of it. He was a Samaritan at heart.

‘Thick indeed,’ Maxwell’s breath snaked out on the night air as he reached the nearest rough, shoving around an old man two-thirds his height and four times his age.

‘You what?’ the hoodie tried to vocalise.

‘Let me see,’ Maxwell peered at him. He didn’t know the face, but he knew the type only too well. ‘Yep. CAT score 74.3. SAT 69.8. Grade A GCSE
in Unpleasantness. But I bet you can text on your stolen mobile faster than I can say “Leave the old man alone, you little shit, or you’ll be going home tonight via A & E at Leighford General”.’

The hoodie blinked and the jeering had stopped. Six pairs of eyes were on Maxwell now and the first to flicker were those of the old man. He ducked out of the vicious circle surrounding him and scuttled away into the darkness.

‘Do you wanna kickin’?’ the hoodie asked.

‘Thank you, no,’ Maxwell stood his ground, nose to nose with the moron. ‘I’ve just had one. You know,’ he beamed at them all, ‘I’ve been rash. It was wrong of me to brand you all as low-life garbage just because you were all about to kick the crap out of a defenceless old man. That nice Mr Cameron has said we are supposed to hug people like you. So, whaddya say, guys? Group hug?’ And he held out his arms.

Two of them were all for wading in, fists and boots at the ready, but the chavviest of them crossed in front of them. ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Not this one. It’s Mad Max. Let’s go.’

‘Who?’ one of them asked.

‘What? Him?’ the first hoodie jeered. ‘That’s Mad Max?’

Maxwell closed to him so that hat brim and
hood brim touched for a second. ‘Would you like to find out how mad?’ he asked.

And the hoodies were gone, thudding away round the corner before the bravest of them called back, ‘You’re a wanker, Maxwell!’

The height of wit and repartee.

The sound of a discreetly sounded car horn made Maxwell turn.

‘Mr Maxwell?’ Bill Lunt had the loudest whisper Maxwell had ever heard. Even so, the cloak and dagger was a little unnecessary.

‘The cloak and dagger is a little unnecessary, Bill,’ Maxwell said as he climbed into the car. Lunt Photographic was obviously doing all right. Leather seats, unless he missed his guess.

‘Sorry, Mr Ma…Max,’ the photographer said, as he released the handbrake. ‘What was all that about?’

‘Just chillin’ wit me bros,’ Maxwell jived. ‘Talking of which, does this heater work?’ He fiddled with a few dials on the car’s fascia.

‘I wasn’t sure what you had told your wife. About tonight, I mean.’

‘Not wife, Bill, Significant Other. Soulmate. Partner. Divida Anima Mea. Other Half. Detective Sergeant Carpenter. Call her what you want, really.’

Bill Lunt swerved and clipped the kerb. ‘Detective
Sergeant? Is this OK, then? I had no idea.’

Maxwell shrugged. ‘I can’t see why not, Bill.’

‘Well, she’s a policeman. Er…policewoman.’

‘She is, she is indeed, Bill.’ Maxwell unwound his scarf to let the ends dangle. ‘And as such, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind two thoughtful citizens investigating a potential crime scene, trampling all over it with their clodhopping feet and obliterating all clues, making the job of the aforementioned police twenty zillion times more difficult.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course not, Bill,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘She’ll be livid, but that’s my problem. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. We’ve rowed about it, I’ve promised never to do it again, we’ve rowed some more. It’s who we are. Don’t worry. Call it a compulsion. Some men gamble. Others drink. Yet others womanise. I investigate murder. Heigh ho. Waddya going to do?’ It was a perfect Homer Simpson.

‘But I do worry, Max. If poking around crime scenes is what you do, worrying is what I do. Emma’s always telling me about it.’

‘Well,
don’t
worry, Bill. I dare say you’ve already been told it may never happen.’

‘About fifty times a day.’

‘There you are, then. Everyone can’t be wrong.’

‘But there’s so much out there, isn’t there? There’s accidental death, there’s tripping hazards, there’s
electricity
! There’s bodies of water, there’s ice falling from aeroplanes, there’s
killer bees
!’ Bill’s grip on the steering wheel was getting harder; his knuckles stood out like quail’s eggs under his skin in the scudding street lights. Maxwell hadn’t realised that the nice, easy-going photographer of Leighford High was such a neurotic. ‘There’s thunder. There’s lightning.

There’s trains, both derailed and carrying nuclear waste.’

‘There’s a huge Tesco lorry.’

‘Yes, true, there’s all sorts of lorries.’

‘No, Bill, I mean, there’s a huge Tesco lorry, over there, coming at us round the roundabout.’

Bill swallowed a scream and screeched to a halt. ‘Oh Max, I’m sorry. That was a close one.’ He sat with both hands frozen to the wheel, staring straight ahead.

‘Yes, Bill.’ Maxwell felt his heart descend slowly from his mouth again. ‘But that’s what it was. A close one. We have close ones all day long, but we negotiate the stairs, we float, we swat the bee. We even,’ and he patted the man’s white knuckles with a smile, ‘miss the lorry. Think of all the things that happen every day to feel lucky about. Not the things that could ruin your life.’

‘It’s OK for you, Mr Maxwell,’ he said peevishly. ‘You’re all right. Lovely wife…er…policewoman. Lovely baby; I’ve seen him on the back of your bike.’

Maxwell snorted softly down his nose and smiled. It’s what he did when his natural reaction would be to let a tear roll softly down his cheek. He waited while the man found his gears again and drove on.

‘Oh, Bill,’ he said, patting the man’s arm and making the car buck wildly across the carriageway for a moment. ‘Bill, I
am
lucky. I
am
all right.’ He let a moment pass, while he got his throat ready to speak through again. He looked out of the window, saw in the dark glass the faces of his first wife and baby daughter, torn from him when his life was so very, very all right. Before that day when the wet road had killed them, and the sharp bend and the flying police car, all sirens and flashing lights and macho bravado. He touched a forefinger tip to his ghostly baby’s nose and looked away.

‘Right then, Bill,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Are we there yet?’ All in all, it was a pretty good Bart and Lisa Simpson.