Beggars Banquet

‘Nothing to worry about, sir,’ said the more loquacious of the pair.

Well, I thought, thank God for that.

I didn’t go with Alice. I lay along the sofa, finding it curiously comfortable. The TV wasn’t on. I stared at the blank screen until, hours later, there was the sound of a key shivering in the lock. Alice looked exhausted and numb. Without demur she flopped on to the beanbag.

‘You won’t believe this,’ she said. ‘They think I had something to do with it.’

I sat up. ‘What?’

‘They think there was something going on. Between Maxwell and me.’

‘What?’ This time I stood up. Alice eyed the empty sofa, so I sat back down again. ‘They think what?’

So she told me about the interrogation. She called it that, not an interview but an interrogation. A nice WPC who didn’t say anything except when the two fat male detectives left the room.

‘She asked me if I wanted a cup of tea.’

The whole thing had been tape-recorded. ‘They kept on at me about Maxwell, how well I knew him, what he was like, did we ever see one another alone. Christ, he was your friend, not mine. Besides, I told them he was gay. One of them smiled. He didn’t say anything, but he gri

‘Solicitor?’

‘The one we used to buy this place. I told them, I said I was going to talk to my solicitor.’

‘What did they say?’

She swallowed drily. ‘They said that might be a good idea.’

The following morning, they came for me.

Not constables this time, but a detective sergeant and another man. The other man drove, while we sat together in the back. The detective sergeant had bloodshot eyes and was overweight. He took me to an interview room where Detective Inspector Claverhouse was waiting. There was a tape recorder on the table between us. On another table sat a TV monitor with a video player built into its base. We had something similar at the school.

It took a lot of questions, some of them about parties I’d attended at Maxwell’s flat. Then Inspector Claverhouse rose from his chair.

‘There’s something we’d like to show you, sir. Just so you can give us an opinion.’

Although they must have watched the video a dozen times, they still drank it in, especially the latter sections. Then they turned to me.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the first bit… with my wife…’

‘You recognise your wife then?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘That was her. At a party of Maxwell’s. I didn’t realise he’d taken so much film of her.’ He hadn’t, of course. After a while he’d handed the camera to me, and I’d concentrated for a few minutes on Alice, trying to work out if she looked better or worse through a lens. Better was the answer. The distance helped, and she did possess a camera-ready figure.

‘And the, er, material after that?’ said Inspector Claverhouse.

I raised my eyebrows and exhaled. ‘Looks like something home-made,’ I replied. ‘I know it’s said that couples will rent video cameras for a weekend so they can record… you know.’

‘But they don’t need to rent the camera if they already own one,’ said Claverhouse.

‘True.’

Claverhouse ejected the tape and examined it. ‘You couldn’t identify the participants?’

I smiled bleakly. ‘You didn’t exactly see their faces.’ Of course you didn’t, I’d made sure of that. But I’d also chosen models whose physical shape was at least similar to Maxwell and Alice. I didn’t think anyone would notice that part of the way through the male model actually changed identity. By that stage, all you could see was skin and hair. Claverhouse was looking at the spine of the videotape.

‘True enough, I just wondered. There’s some writing on here, just initials. MG and AB. What do you make of that?’

I stared at him, then at the detective sergeant, and laughed uneasily. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘You know damned fine MG is Maxwell, and you’re implying AB is my wife.’

‘Your wife is on the tape, sir.’

‘Yes, but not…’ I nodded towards the machine. ‘I mean, it’s not them doing…’ My voice died away again. ‘It’s not,’ I said quietly. I did not tell a lie. The two detectives understood. Inspector Claverhouse sat down again.

‘There’s also a letter, sir,’ he said sympathetically. ‘It appears to be from Maxwell Gray to someone called Alice. Perhaps you’d care to take a look.’ He produced a photocopy of the crumpled sheet for me to read. I read through it twice.

‘Alice, there’s no easy way to put this. I want out, pure and simple. It’s not your fault, it’s mine; or maybe it’s neither’s fault. I don’t know any more. It would break Ke

Two notes jarred. He wouldn’t have called himself Maxie, but then the police weren’t to know that. It had just been devilment on my part. But neither would he have used a semicolon. Only people like me use semicolons in this day and age. I doubted CID would notice this either. I looked up at Inspector Claverhouse. There were tears in my eyes. Then I broke down altogether.

And still it dragged on.

With Alice under suspicion, I became her champion, protecting her from police and media alike. She didn’t understand any of it. How could there be a letter? How could there be a video? It wasn’t her on the video, she told Claverhouse. It wasn’t. I backed her up. I was sweating about that video. If the police watched it often enough – and I didn’t doubt it was required viewing between shifts at the station – maybe they’d begin to see discrepancies. Then again, all they’d want to watch were the dirty bits, and they would be watching for all the wrong reasons. I’d chosen the seediest, most amateurish tapes in Maxwell’s collection. They really did look home-made. The police meantime were interviewing more friends of Maxwell’s, and his colleagues. Again and again they called us to interview. It was a wearing process.

They knew they were dealing with manslaughter at least. The pathologist had been able to say that Maxwell had fallen with some force, almost certainly not of his own volition. What’s more, the body had been moved, then placed back at the foot of the stairs, as if someone had thought to dispose of it, but been unable to. A woman, for example, might not have the weight and power necessary to shift such a load very far.

It turned out, of course, that the police had wanted to prosecute at quite an early stage, but the Crown Office kept pressing for more evidence. At one stage, it seemed that the inquiry was turning more towards me. For a few days I looked like a chief suspect, but by then I was confident the police were just fishing (and sans hooks at that). When they’d wheelbarrowed enough information over to the Crown Office, someone must have decided something should happen. Everyone took one step forward. There was to be a trial. A trial not for manslaughter but for murder.

The police produced a witness, a neighbour of Maxwell’s who was sure she’d seen a woman of Alice’s description going in and out of the flat at irregular intervals. I took a deep breath, and began to view Alice for the first time with suspicion. What if the two of them had really been…? And all her talk to me of Maxwell being gay was just to throw me off the scent? Was there to be a brilliant twist right at the end of the film? I asked Alice, but she denied and denied. She’d lost some weight, a lot of weight actually. And the fire had disappeared from her eyes. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been. She was obedient to commands, compliant, weepily grateful for my many kindnesses. In other words, she’d been broken. I liked her more than I had in years.