He went on with his enquiries about my fortunes. I retaliated by asking about his; all was well, he had just had a grandson. But with Maxwell the questions tended to flow one way.
“What are you here for, anyhow?” his eyes were unblinking and wide.
“That’s almost what I’ve come to ask you.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Your people have been dealing with this murder, haven’t they? I mean, the boy who disappeared.”
He stared at me.
“What’s the point?” he asked.
I thought it better not to hedge. “I happen to know a relative of one of those young women—”
“Do you, by God?”
Across the table his big face was looking at me, open, not expressionless, but with an expression I couldn’t read. His reactions, like his movements, were very quick. He was wondering whether to tell me that he couldn’t speak. Yes or no. I had no idea of the motives either way.
As though there hadn’t been a hesitation, he said: “You’d better come to the office. Too many people here.”
He looked round the bar with his acquisitive glance, the same glance, I guessed, that he had used as a detective in London pubs, picking up gossip, talking to his informers, just as much immersed in the profession of crime as if he were a criminal himself. Nowadays he was too conspicuous a figure to do that magpie collecting job. Yet the habit was ingrained. Leave him here, and he would find someone who would gossip, and information, irrespective of value (perhaps about the domestic habits of commercial travellers), would be docketed away.
“When you’ve finished your beer—” Now that he had made up his mind, he was eager to be off.
Through the familiar market place he walked with short quick steps, faster than I should have chosen. Then up the street where the recognition symbols were disappearing: the pavements were crowded, every third or fourth face seemed to be coloured; I mentioned to Maxwell that when I was a boy it was an oddity to see a dark skin in the town.
“Mostly Pakistanis,” said Maxwell. “Don’t give much trouble.”
Keeping up his skimming steps, he was telling me, as it were simultaneously, that the police headquarters weren’t far off and that the town had less than the nation’s average of crime. On one side of the street were a few shops whose names hadn’t changed: on the other, a building vast by the side of its neighbours, bare and functional. Maxwell jerked his thumb.
“Here we are,” he said, taking my arm and steering me across, as though the traffic didn’t exist.
In the great entrance hall, policemen said Good evening, Superintendent. The lift was painted white, so was the fourth floor corridor. Maxwell opened a door, whisked through a stark office where sat men in plain clothes, opened another door into his own room. After all the austerity, it was like going into a boudoir. The furniture, I imagined, was official issue, though at that, he had a couple of armchairs. There were flowers on his desk and on a long committee table. Flanking the vase on his desk stood two photographs, one of a middle-aged woman and one of a baby.
“That’s the grandson,” said Maxwell. “Have you got any yet?”
“No,” I said.
“They’ll give you more pleasure than your children,” said Maxwell. “I promise you they will.”
We had sat down in the armchairs. He pointed to a cigarette box on the desk, then said, without changing his tone of voice: “I want you to keep out of this.”
I replied (despite his quiet words, the air was charged): “What could I do anyway, Clarence?”
He looked at me with an intent expression, the meaning of which again I couldn’t read.
Suddenly he said: “Who is this relative?”
He was speaking as though we were back in the pub, the past twenty minutes wiped away.
“Cora Ross’ uncle. A man called Passant.”
“We know all about him.”
I was taken aback. “What do you know?”
“It’s been going on a long time. Corrupting the young, I should call it.”
I misunderstood. “Is that why you want me out of the way?”
“Nothing to do with it. We can’t touch Passant and his lot. Nothing for us to get hold of.”
“Then what are you warning me about?”
For once his response wasn’t quick. He seemed to be deliberating, as in the pub. At last he said, “Those two women are as bad as anything I’ve seen.”
“What have they done?”
“You’ll find out what they’ve done. I tell you they are bad. I’ve seen plenty, but I’ve never seen anything worse.”
I had heard him speak pungently before, but not like this. His feeling came out so heavy that I wanted to divert it, to return to the matter-of-fact.
“You can prove it, can you?” I said.
“We’ve brought them in, haven’t we?” At once he was a professional, cautious, repressed, telling me that I ought to know the police didn’t arrest for murder unless they were sure.
“And can you prove it?”
“We can prove enough,” he said in a businesslike fashion, a good policeman at the end of his career, one who had brought so many cases to the courts. “You can trust us on that.”
“Yes,” I said, “I can trust you on that.”
“They’ll go down for life, of course. There’s just one dodge they might pull. And you know that as well as I do.” He stared at me, with meaning and, at last I realised, with suspicion.
He said, in a level, controlled tone: “I’m going to tell you something. I mean every word of it. Those two are as sane as you or me. When we had them in here and found out what they’d done, if I could have got away with it, I’d have put a bullet in the back of both their necks. It would have been the best way out.”
Once more I wanted to get back to something matter-of-fact, or innocent.
“They’ll get life, you said. This isn’t a capital murder, then?”
At this time we were still governed by the 1957 Act, a bizarre compromise under which the death penalty was kept, but only for a narrow range of murders, depending on the choice of weapon and the victim: that is, poisoning was not capital, unless you poisoned a police officer; but murder by shooting was.
“No,” said Maxwell.
“How did they do it?”
“They beat him to death. In the end.”
“You may as well tell me—”
“We don’t know everything. I doubt if we ever shall know.”
I said, once again, tell me.
“We’re pretty sure of this. They played cat-and-mouse with him. He wasn’t a very bright lad. They picked him up at random, they don’t seem to have had a word with him before. They’ve got a hideout in the country, they took him there. They played cat-and-mouse with him for a weekend. Then they beat him to death.”
He wasn’t being lubricous about the horrors, as I had heard other policemen or lawyers round the criminal courts, telling stories of killings which I remembered clinically, as though they had happened to another species: I had to remember them clinically just to remember them at all, and yet I believed that, despite appearances, I was less physically squeamish than Maxwell.
“The worst they can get for that,” he said, “is life. Which doesn’t mean much, they’ll be let out all right, you know that. But it’s the worst they can get, and by God they’re going to get it.”
“The alternative is—”
“The alternative is, a nice comfortable few years in a blasted mental hospital. Diminished responsibility. They’ll try that. What do you think I’ve been talking to you about tonight?”