by M. J. Trow
But Maxwell wasn’t actually listening. He had other things on his mind than the awful coffee and the congested jungle that was commuter travel in the twenty-first century. The woman he loved had gone, into the hands of a bunch of madmen. And, he realized as dawn had crept up over Columbine, he didn’t have the first clue how to get her back.
They’d fought not one, but two battles near Newbury, in that pointless war to decide who had the more clout – king or parliament. Since both institutions had survived, cheerfully co-existing, it all seemed rather a waste of time. Maxwell found a cabbie anxious to fill him in on exactly how Gordon Brown would take down Tony Blair and if he did, he would personally be voting British National Party next time out; but, more importantly, he found 93 Wentworth Way.
The house before him had sad windows, blinking in the scurrying clouds of the morning. He heard his feet crunch on the gravel of the drive, heard his heart pounding even louder. He rang the bell and waited. A woman, not much older than he was, stood there.
‘Mrs Carpenter?’ he tipped his hat. ‘I’m Peter Maxwell.’
Jacquie had lived half her life in this house. Her father had died eight years ago and her mother rattled around the place, time on her hands and memories in her heart. She sat Peter Maxwell down on the swinging seat in the back garden. He knew this place; knew it because Jacquie had talked about it. There’d been a rabbit hutch in the far corner where the compost now lay and to its left, the home of Anstruther, the tortoise. Her dad had told her that Anstruther was 400 years old and she’d believed him. She’d believed him too, when her dad had said he’d never leave her; see her married with kids of her own. But that hadn’t been true either. Cancer had seen to that.
‘I didn’t want you to hear it first from some spotty kid of a policeman, Gwen,’ Maxwell explained, grateful for the tea and the shade now that the clouds had gone and the sun was a demon again.
‘I’m grateful to you,’ she said. There was something of Jacquie in Gwen Carpenter, though from the photos he’d seen in Jacquie’s flat and again in Gwen’s living room, she was mostly her father. The grey eyes, the smile – they were his. Only flashes of Gwen came through, when she was angry, brittle, short. ‘So, you’re Peter Maxwell.’
‘Guilty,’ he smiled. ‘And, believe me, you don’t know how sorry I am that we’ve had to meet under these circumstances.’
‘I could have wished it otherwise,’ she said. ‘What do you think has happened?’
‘The Sepulchre Society.’
‘No, no, no,’ Gwen held up her hand. ‘That’s nonsense. That’s bad melodrama. What’s really happened to Jacquie?’
He took her hand and held it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘All I know is that she’s got great colleagues. They won’t stop looking until they find her.’
‘And you, Peter Maxwell,’ she frowned at him. ‘You must know from Jacquie that she and I are not…close. Never have been, really. Not, anyway, since her father died. But if anything were to happen…’ She looked up at him sharply, correcting herself, keeping it all in check. ‘You’ll look for her too, won’t you?’
Peter Maxwell along with fifteen-sixteenths of the county’s teaching profession always prayed for five-day weekends and two-day weeks. It was pie in the sky of course, all part of that never-never land where marking was unheard of and children ran merrily into school shouting ‘Yippee, the term is here!’ But this weekend, Maxwell wanted to last for ever, just to give him a chance to find the little girl lost. That was three of them gone now – in order of disappearance: Annette Choker, Alison McCormick, Jacquie Carpenter. Three little maids who, all unwary, got mixed up with a Saxon cemetery. Well, it didn’t scan very well, but there was more than a modicum of truth behind it.
Maxwell prowled Leighford that Sunday afternoon, wheeling Surrey up and down the High Street, down the back doubles, along the Front. This was pointless, he realized for the umpteenth time, as various kids waved to him for the umpteenth time. Was this it, some of them wondered? Had Mad Max at last literally earned his nickname? He even toyed with nipping into the Ladies by the adventure playground, but discretion and probable arrest were the better part of valour.
At night, like most of the south coast, Leighford became another place. Girls from Year Nine slunk past him into the shrubbery with older lads, tottering on Fuck-Me shoes, with jewellery glittering in their navels. Lads whom Maxwell used to teach argued with each other outside the Taj Mahal Curry House. One of them chucked up in the gutter.
‘Evening, Mr Maxwell.’
The Head of Sixth Form spun round. He wasn’t really in the mood for social chitchat, even if it was with a boy he used to teach. Except it wasn’t a boy he used to teach. Mad Max prided himself on his ability to put names to faces and this young man was a stranger.
‘Dave Garstang, Leighford CID.’
Maxwell waited for the flash of the warrant card. ‘Sorry,’ Garstang sensed it. ‘I’m off-duty.’
‘Do I know you?’ Maxwell asked.
‘No,’ the young man said. ‘But I know you.’
‘That could be scary,’ Maxwell said.
‘What are you doing, Mr Maxwell?’ Garstang asked. ‘Having a night out?’
‘You might say that,’ the Head of Sixth Form nodded. ‘You?’
‘Much the same,’ Garstang said and they began to wander down the High Street. ‘You’re looking for her, aren’t you?’
Maxwell stopped. ‘You might say that too,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘Much the same,’ Garstang said and the two men, strangers till now, laughed out loud, exhausted, worried. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘No, you can’t,’ Maxwell slapped the man on the shoulder. ‘Let me buy you one.’
The Vine was enough off the beaten track of under-age drinkers for neither Maxwell nor Garstang to be constantly on their guard against fourteen-year-olds at the bar. The carpet had a repellent yellow and red swirl and the jukebox had seen decidedly better days. At least, there was no live music tonight – the Yawning Hippos having been lured down to the Isle of Wight Festival for a weekend of birds, booze and extortionate ferry prices. The low, grunting microphoned questions of the Exciting Quiz Nite were not grating enough to be a nuisance.
‘Jacquie often talks about you,’ Garstang said, wiping the pint’s froth from his lip. ‘How’s the face, by the way?’
‘I’m fifty-five,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’ve got used to it now, really. Oh, I see what you mean. No, it’s fine. I thought what I was doing was pretty useless, tonight.’
‘Looking for Jacquie in all the old, familiar places?’ Garstang asked. ‘Yeah. Well, call me stupid too. Mind if I ask you something?’
‘Go ahead.’
The microphone droned, ‘In which year was the Crystal Palace burned down?’
‘1936,’ Maxwell couldn’t help answering.
‘Do you actually live with Jacquie?’
Maxwell guffawed over his Southern Comfort. ‘Impudent young puppy!’ he roared. Then, himself again, ‘No, I don’t. Too long in the tooth, I’m afraid. Anyway, she doesn’t approve of my habits.’
‘Really?’
‘What is known as the ship of the desert?’
‘A camel,’ Maxwell replied softly to the Quiz Master’s question. ‘I can’t help thinking though,’ he closed to Garstang, ‘that if I did, Jacquie wouldn’t be missing now.’
‘How so?’ The lad took another sip.
‘Look, Dave, is it? Dave, how much can you tell me? I mean, I know it’s difficult. You’re a copper. I’m a civilian…’
‘We’re both after the same thing,’ Garstang cut him short. ‘After the bastards who’ve got Jacquie Carpenter.’
‘Right,’ Maxwell nodded, smiling. It looked as though he had somebody else on the inside.
‘What is the last man-made object to be seen from Outer Space?’ the Quiz Master wanted to know.
‘The Great Wall of China,’ Maxwell told nobody in particular. ‘So?’
Garstang took a deep breath. ‘We think she was taken from outside her garage.’
‘At the back of the block?’
‘That’s right.’
‘When?’
‘Well, that we don’t know. Our best guess is as she returned home on Thursday night.’
‘Two weeks after the death of David Radley.’
‘You think there’s a link?’
Maxwell looked up at the lad. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Garstang said. ‘We’ve been kicking ideas around for days. You get a bit punchy in the end.’ Maxwell knew that feeling well enough; the hours staring at brick walls, sharpening pencils, marking exercise books.
‘What level of hardness has a diamond?’ the microphone grated.
‘Ten,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Could she have known her abductor?’ Maxwell could multi-task for England.
‘Why?’ Garstang asked.
‘If she was taken by force in the garages at the back, someone, surely, would have noticed. Not only does Jacquie pack a mean left hook, she carries Mace in her bag or pocket and her scream can shatter glass. Try it yourself. Stand in front of that garage block and yell. It’ll bounce back at you from eight different directions before twenty windows fly up and you’re told in no uncertain terms to eff off.’
‘Christ, you’re good,’ Garstang whistled. ‘Wanna job?’
Maxwell smiled grimly. ‘With Henry Hall? No thanks. I’d rather gargle barbed wire.’
‘Traditionally,’ the microphone echoed, ‘how many lives has a cat?’
‘That,’ Peter Maxwell was telling his nearly empty glass, ‘no one knows.’
Chapter Sixteen
Monday. Monday. Hate that day.
‘Think positive,’ Ben Holton winked at Peter Maxwell as he met him in the corridor as the day after D-Day began. ‘Only six weeks to go and we’re out of this place for the summer hols!’
‘Yippee!’ muttered Maxwell, flicking his cycle clips into his pocket.
‘Good God, Max,’ the Head of Science looked his colleague in the face for the first time in the full light of the staff room’s neon. ‘Bit of a rough half-term, eh? Jacquie keeps you in line, I see.’
Maxwell looked at his man. He and Ben Holton went back more than a few years. Initiatives had come and gone. So had Heads and their Deputies. But he and Ben had grown old disgracefully together, letting all the bollocks and the educational hogwash roll over them like the breaking tide. But one more mention of Jacquie Carpenter and Mad Max would put one on him.
‘Max,’ Bernard Ryan was brimming with bonhomie as he hurtled into the room, memos clutched in his fist. ‘Good God.’
‘Yes.’ Maxwell decided to stop this now. ‘I walked into a door. What price this cheer, Bernard, unless you’re taking a greater delight than usual in a colleague’s misfortune?’
‘Not at all,’ Ryan bridled. ‘I was about to congratulate you.’
‘Really?’ Maxwell said. Not another Most Difficult Teacher award from the DES? He was running out of space on his mantelpiece.
‘Well, John, of course.’ Ryan looked a little nonplussed but he was still smiling. ‘John Fry. He’s back. James is over the moon. We all are. Well done!’ But Bernard Ryan couldn’t quite bring himself to slap the man’s back; he’d planted too many knives there in the past.
‘Oh,’ Maxwell said. ‘It was nothing. Really.’
And he was gone, marching along the main corridor, barking at children, collecting baseball caps. He was on his way to that centre of mediocrity, the Business Studies Department.
If there was one thing guaranteed to get firmly up the still-swollen purple nose of Peter Maxwell, it was open-plan schools. In the brave days of the Seventies, when comprehensives were new and Jack was as good as his Master, the educational bashaws of Whitehall had believed that all kids were equal, they could all get to Oxbridge and they all could be taught together in one huge room; literally a jungle, in that there were no doors or walls. That was long before, of course, Political Correctness had kicked in, when social misfits were allowed to sit in the same room as nice people, adding to the chaos. Some of the kids were worse. The Business Studies Department at Leighford High was like that. Peter Maxwell had briefly met the architect of the new block when he’d come to discuss his visual conceptualisation a few years back. Funnily enough, after that meeting, he had not returned, but by then it was already too late. The money had been allocated and the bulldozers had moved in, together with trannie-playing, whistling contractors and a great deal of chipboard, specifically designed to enable sound to carry from area to area. Nobody used the word ‘room’ any more. It was all ‘areas’ and ‘space’ and ‘circulation vectors’. Plain English died in the 1980s and no one, except Mad Max, noticed.
Nevertheless, that Monday morning, John Fry was in a room and it may as well have been a rubber one. He was sitting slumped, with his head in his hands, out of sight of the chattering classes that made up his department. None of his minions was with him. Only, sitting close and patting his arm, Sylvia Matthews, the School Nurse. She looked up as Maxwell came in, alarm etched on her face.
‘John,’ Maxwell said quietly, ‘How’s it hanging?’
‘She’s left me, Max,’ he muttered, eyes wild with disbelief.
‘Eleanor. She’s gone.’
The Head of Sixth Form sat down opposite them both. ‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I’m so very sorry, John.’
Fry sat up, squaring his shoulders, focusing on Maxwell. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s not the end of the world. Ben Holton’s wife left him, didn’t she, a couple of years back? Came crawling back, I seem to remember he said. I’ll go and see Ellie. She’ll be at her mother’s. I rang there last night. No reply, of course. But I know she was there. Playing her usual little games.’
‘Er…John…’ Maxwell looked at Sylvia, who was shaking her head.
‘The devil of it is, I can’t find my lesson plans for Year Ten this morning. My Schemes of Work. I didn’t leave them in your office, did I, Max? The other day?’
‘No, John, no,’ Maxwell said. ‘Look…um…Jenny can handle all that, can’t she?’
‘Jenny?’ Fry looked confused.
‘Jenny Clark, your Number Two,’ Maxwell explained, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that Fry should have forgotten.
‘Handle all what? What do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s just that Sylvia gave me a call a minute ago, didn’t you, Sylv?’
The Nurse knew Peter Maxwell of old. Like Paul Moss and all his colleagues and kids who loved him, you didn’t question, you didn’t doubt; you just went with it. ‘Yes,’ she smiled, cheerily. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘There’s something going round, John,’ Maxwell said. ‘A bug of some sort.’ He closed to the man, peering into his eyes. ‘Looks like you’ve got a touch of it, old son.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Fry looked more confused than ever.
‘The thing of it is, it’s highly contagious. Oh, Nursie and I are all right. We’ve both had it. But young people are particularly vulnerable; aren’t they, Sylv?’
‘Absolutely.’ She was with him now. ‘Teenagers. They’re notorious. Pick up every damned infection known to man.’
And a few that aren’t, Peter Maxwell mused. ‘So, the bottom line, John, is that we’ve got to get you to a doctor, old son. Oh, not so much for you, of course. It’s for the kids.’
‘The kids,’ Fry repeated as if their existence too, were a closed book.
‘Yes,’ Maxwell patted his hand. ‘How about it, eh? If Sylv takes you to the hospital. Just for a check-up. Hmm?’
Fry looked at them both, from one to the other. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said and stood up, Sylvia with him. ‘But they won’t keep me long, will they?’ he asked her. ‘Because I’ve got to get in touch with Ellie.’
‘No,’ Maxwell patted the man’s shoulder. ‘No, John, they won’t keep you long. Sylv – are you all right with this?’
Sylvia Matthews nodded. She’d seen it all before; not often it was true, but she knew the symptoms. She led the man out of his office and through the open-plan throng of kids, clacking away on computers. His staff, one by one, broke off from their teaching, to watch him go.
‘In layman’s terms, Headmaster,’ Maxwell was saying, ‘a nervous breakdown.’
‘My God,’ James Diamond sat back in his opulent office swivel, ordered from the County Consortium only last month. Cut backs. ‘But he seemed fine earlier.’
‘What time was this?’ his Head of Sixth Form asked.
‘Just before school started. Half eight, quarter to nine.’
‘You spoke to him?’
‘Of course. Look, Max, I don’t understand any of this. I thought you’d found him.’
Maxwell snorted, still not an altogether agreeable experience. ‘The furthest I got down that road was somebody’s skull in my face. It wasn’t my finest hour, Headmaster.’ James Diamond didn’t want to go down that road either.
‘So he just came back of his own accord?’ Diamond was checking.
Maxwell shrugged. ‘Appears that way. What did he say to you? Or you to him, for that matter?’
James Diamond wasn’t given to offering his staff much in the way of hospitality, especially pains in the proverbial arse like Peter Maxwell. This morning, though, he felt bound to make an exception and crossed to the coffee percolator. ‘You like it black, don’t you? No sugar.’
‘Close, Headmaster,’ Maxwell leaned back on Diamond’s settee. ‘White and two. But, hey, who’s counting? John Fry.’
‘John Fry. Right.’ Diamond poured for them both, ferreting in his fridge for the milk. ‘Well, Bernard tipped me off. Saw John Fry crossing the car park on his way in.’
‘Christ!’ hissed Maxwell. ‘He drove?’
‘Possibly. I asked to see him and we had a bit of a man to man, as it were.’
Hardly appropriate in the circumstances, Maxwell thought. But he was a public schoolboy and public schoolboys didn’t bitch. Much. Diamond got back behind his desk, where he had a barrier against the wickedness of the world, where he felt safe. ‘I asked John outright where he’d been. He said he’d been away for a few days. Half-term break and so on. All very vague.’
