by M. J. Trow
Maxwell chuckled. ‘Good Lord, Helen. You’ve known the man for almost as long as I have. Surely that didn’t surprise you.’
‘Surprise, no. Annoy, yes, as a matter of fact. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know, as we had chatted this morning.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve made the right decision, if only for selfish reasons. But you’re far too normal to go and live in SLT-land.’
She chuckled in return. ‘Thanks, Max. See you tomorrow.’
‘Yes. A bientôt.’
‘With bells on. Bye.’
He looked up at Jacquie. ‘Well, that’s great. Helen isn’t going for Dierdre’s job.’
‘I gathered that,’ Jacquie said, going back to her own seat. ‘Something about Legs.’
‘Yes. He told us this afternoon there were three candidates and in fact Helen made it four. He was just being his usual crass self, but it made her make the right decision. At least, it’s good for me, but she would have done a good job, I think.’
‘Well, of course she would, but she would have hated it, surely?’
Maxwell leant back, hands behind his head. ‘Yes, very likely. Anyway, we now just have the three candidates in the frame – sandwiches at one o’clock in the dining room.’
‘When?’
‘Ummm – day after tomorrow. It will be the usual: curly sandwiches for us, a few rather more elegant bits for the SLT and the candidates slightly to one side.’
She laughed. ‘Come on, Max. Even County Hall aren’t that cheap. Surely the food is for everyone.’
‘By no means,’ he said. ‘Legs has already warned the entire PE department to hold back. One sandwich is enough for anyone and the usual turkey twizzlers are available to fill up the little corners. Any scraps go to the school cat – begging your pardon, Count,’ he called to the snoring black and white heap in the corner, ‘and the cleaners, probably in that order.’
‘I’ll pack you a goodie bag to take in with you.’
He clapped his hands. ‘Yes, please. Egg sandwiches, please, with cress, easy on the mayo. No, make it salad cream. A packet of crisps – cheese and onion, so as to make myself extra charming when introduced to the candidates to date …’ He paused as Jacquie dutifully hummed a few bars of ‘Mrs Robinson’, an ancient song her beloved had told her about. ‘… and a bottle of Orangina, for the burping.’
‘No problem,’ she said. ‘It will be good practice for when Nole goes on school trips.’
‘Aah,’ he said, sitting up and steepling his fingers. ‘School trips call for specialised packing. Can you still buy nasty plastic duffle bags with drawstrings? All the aforementioned, but plus a banana, rather old and black, for squashing into the inside of his bag and stinking out the bus; an orange, but the sort you can’t peel without spraying everyone in sight and, finally, some really brightly coloured chewy sweets, so that he and his friends will bounce hysterically off walls all day long.’ He smiled at her and added, ‘And do you know what the best bit of all that will be?’
‘Go on.’
‘It will be some other poor sod who will have to take that trip because I will be … da da da da da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa … retired.’
‘But you’re only a hundred,’ she cried in mock alarm. ‘Surely you aren’t thinking of retiring yet!’
He looked at her fondly and then spoke more seriously than usual. ‘I’m thinking about it, yes. I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for this game. Just getting to the mezzanine floor takes its toll. My left leg fell off this morning and all I’d done was cough. The little buggers seem to get more obstreperous every day, barrack-room lawyers to a man, and I’d quite like to live my life surrounded by nice people, for a change. You, Nole and, to a lesser extent, Metternich.’
She looked almost as shocked as she felt. The age gap was only something other people noticed. Sometimes she felt as if she had two two-year-olds in her care, and now, out of the blue, he had made an old-person remark. Her foundations rocked a little. ‘Won’t you be bored?’
‘Probably. In which case, I’ll look for something else to do. Work in B&Q. Give old ladies a lift to the hospital on my crossbar. Garden.’
‘Solve crimes,’ she said, a trifle stiffly.
‘A spot of that, possibly. But only if asked, naturally.’
‘Huh.’
He had often wondered how a policewoman could get so much meaning into such a small sound. How could ‘huh’ mean ‘you must be joking, since when have you waited to be asked, you’ve even risked my career with your meddling, almost died half a dozen times, been arrested, beaten up and who knows what, yeah right,’ and so much more? ‘If I’m not working, I probably won’t even have any solving to do. Anyway, I’ve always preferred the word sleuthing. It’s so first conjugation, isn’t it? I sleuth, you sleuth, he, she or it sleuths.’
Jacquie opened her mouth to say something much more than ‘huh’ but he was saved by the bell. And this time, it really was her mother.
It was twelve of the clock when Peter Maxwell finally put down his paintbrush. Above him, through the skylight, the silent stars of September shone down, over the sleeping little town at the end of the season.
He pulled the gold-laced pillbox cap off his barbed-wire hair and hung it on its hook.
‘You should take that to the Antiques Roadshow,’ somebody had suggested. ‘They’re at the Winter Gardens in November.’ The problem was Fiona Bruce might assume that Maxwell himself was the antique and it was just not possible to put a price on him. Flog It had connotations of a vicious and even perverted past. Cash in the Attic? Well, no one got into this particular attic, the one where Maxwell sat now in his modelling chair, except Nolan (accompanied), Jacquie (by appointment) … oh, and …
‘Metternich!’ It wasn’t often that the Great Man used the surname. Only when needs must and the interminable flea-catching out of the corner of his eye drove Maxwell to distraction. ‘Come on, then. I told you I’d be asking questions later. Who’s this one?’
The black and white beast raised his elegant head and looked at the pieces of white plastic scattered in front of his Master. How the hell was he supposed to know? He hadn’t even been listening when Maxwell had reeled off the facts. And he’d been putting these bits of plastic together now for so long, Metternich had lost the will to live.
Maxwell waited. As usual, nothing. If any number of Nine Ex Eight had been so stubbornly defiant, he’d have shot them.
‘This one, Count,’ the great modeller under the skylight told him again, ‘is Cornet Fiennes Wykeham Martin, as you can tell from his jacket, an officer in Her Majesty’s 4th Light Dragoons. His mummy was a daughter of Lord Cornwallis – you know, the Johnny who surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown.’
Metternich didn’t.
‘He was Lord Paget’s Adjutant in the Charge of the Light Brigade – Martin, that is, not Cornwallis – do keep up, Count. Poor bugger, having survived the Charge, died from a brain abscess, almost certainly triggered by a fall from his horse. Life’s something of a bitch, isn’t it?’
Metternich yawned. He hardly needed the Master to tell him that. Anyway, he had places to be. The Old Duffer would switch off the modelling lamp any minute, but not before placing the partly stuck, partly unpainted Adjutant at the right elbow of Lord Paget on the huge diorama of plastic soldiers that filled the rest of the room. Then he’d totter downstairs and check on The Boy before hitting the hay with that woman. Well, he could be as boring as he liked. Metternich stretched and slunk off down the stairs, like the silent killer he was. What would it be tonight? Vole-au-vent perhaps?
Chapter Four
Maxwell had always had a thing about Wednesdays. In all the years he had been teaching, it had always been the day with the worst timetable; the day with the most boring meetings. Its one saving grace had been that it was Roast Day. The menu never varied, summer and winter. Two slices of grey meat, identified only by the accompaniments; mint sauce, lamb, obviously; Yorkshire pudding, beef.
Stuffing was more of a challenge. With apple sauce, then it was pork, without, chicken. The pièce de resistance, though, and Maxwell had found this had come down through the years unchanged, had been about a gallon of gravy and the best roast potatoes this side of the Pecos.
So, on a Wednesday at 12.30 he was very easy to find. At the head of the queue, plate in hand and large piece of absorbent paper ready tucked into his shirt collar. On this particular Wednesday, he was even easier to find than usual, because of the noise.
‘There’s no what, Freda?’ he was yelling at a hapless school cook, or defroster, as she would more accurately be called.
‘No Roast,’ Freda said, in as unthreatening a tone as possible. She had been taught by Mad Max Maxwell and she still had the nightmares. ‘The menu’s changed.’
Maxwell’s eyes blazed and he looked from left to right. ‘I’m going to track down and kill that bloody Jamie Oliver,’ he promised the delighted queue of kids forming behind him.
‘Yeah, go on, sir. He’s a wanker.’ Normally, Maxwell would have admonished the child for his language, but not this time.
‘It’s cutbacks,’ Freda told him, not sure whether that was a good or a bad thing to say.
‘Cutbacks? Do they want the entire child population of Leighford to die of starvation? Where will they be without their Roast? Look at this lot,’ he turned to the queue again, ‘climbing the walls because of sticky sweets and fizzy pop. Limbs twisted with rickets, teeth down to their gums. Oh, no, wait, that’s me.’
That would be a bad thing, then. ‘The take-up was falling and it was expensive buying the meat.’ She smiled up at him, hopefully, like she used to on Friday afternoons in his History lessons. It hadn’t worked then, either. He fixed her with a glare. ‘There was wastage.’
He took a deep breath. ‘I see. I’m sorry, Freda. It’s not your fault.’ He turned a lighthouse smile on the assembled school. ‘I’m sure the options you have prepared for us are totally delicious.’
She smiled encouragingly, but didn’t speak.
He leant nearer. ‘What are they?’
‘What are what?’ Yep. Friday afternoon History. The Corn Laws; the causes of the First World War. It had all been one to Freda. Silence.
‘The delicious options.’
She pointed anxiously with her spoon. ‘Baked Mediterranean vegetables with vegan cheese. Gluten-free tortilla wrap. Coley à la king. And to follow, dairy-free rice pudding with sugar-free jam garnish.’ She looked up. He was still there, leaning forward, one eyebrow raised expectantly. ‘Or fruit,’ she finished, desperately.
‘Lovely. What’s in the wrap?’
She brightened up. ‘There are two choices for the contents of the wrap,’ she said. ‘Either baked Mediterranean vegetables with vegan cheese, or coley à la king.’
‘That would be just the one choice, then,’ Maxwell corrected her.
‘No,’ she felt on firm ground here. The Old Bugger hadn’t, after all, taught her English. ‘Two. Baked Medit—’
‘Exactly. A choice between those lovely comestibles. Two options. But not two choices. However, this isn’t keeping the queue moving, is it? I think I’ll have … hmm …’ His eye was suddenly caught by a row of small glass dishes filled with pink goo lined up on a counter at the back of the kitchen.
‘Come along, Mr Maxwell!’ Ben Holton, the Head of Science, thundered from further back in the queue. ‘Some of us have lessons to prepare.’
Maxwell stared back at the man in total disbelief. ‘And I’m a Seventh-day Adventist,’ he admitted, before turning back to Freda. ‘I’ll have one of those. Prawn cocktail, is it?’
She turned her head. ‘Oh, sorry, Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘They’re for tomorrow. You know, for the special lunch.’
He sighed. Special lunch was right, if they were going to stay out on the side for much longer. He didn’t much like prawns anyway. He knew when he was beaten. ‘I’ll have an apple and a banana, then, Freda, please.’
She cast her eyes down and almost whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Maxwell.’ She was beginning to feel that that was her only line. ‘County cutbacks. Only one piece of fruit per person.’
‘Just the banana, then,’ he said and, taking it, made his way back to his office. He hoped that Jacquie wasn’t joking about his goodie bag for Thursday.
And, good policewoman that she was, she had not been joking. There it sat on the work surface in the kitchen, everything beautifully wrapped in its own plastic bag (don’t tell the Daily Mail), sealed with tape. Closer examination revealed the bags to be evidence bags, and Maxwell sent up a fervent prayer that they were not second-hand, Bernard Spilsbury and Keith Simpson for the use of. He cycled off towards Leighford High School, a little anachronistic bubble in the hurly-burly of Leighford’s early morning. Purring over the Flyover, clicking past the Dam, skirting the eternal roadworks at Asda and on to the yellow-brick road. He swung out of the saddle and lashed Surrey to a bollard, prior to trotting up the stairs and stowing his little package in the fridge in his office.
He was making his way to his Lesson One, British History with Year Thirteen; learning objective: ‘was Gladstone really a pervert? – a good deed in a basically naughty world’, when he heard the not too dulcet tones of Bernard Ryan call his name. His nerve endings fired like lightning. He usually ignored Ryan, just as a matter of course; the man was essentially something you scraped off your shoe. But this morning he was likely to be showing round the candidates and Maxwell was, if nothing else, a polite and gentle man; he wouldn’t deliberately snub a lady. Not yet, at least. Let her get the job first. He spun on his heel, smiling in readiness.
‘Mr Ryan. How may I help you?’
Ryan walked towards him, against the flow of backpack-toting children, all resolutely ignoring the polite, reasonable, pinko-liberal requests on the walls to keep to the left. There was a tinge of grey about Bernard Ryan these days. Less of the Young Turk and more of the old turkey. He had increasingly the air of a Deputy Head who had left it ten years too late to float any higher in the cesspool of modern education. In tow Ryan had three women, clearly the candidates, if only by virtue of the fact they were each wearing a version of the same clothes: crisp white shirt, dark suit, with skirt of a sensible length and smart shoes, clearly cripplingly uncomfortable. They also wore the same smile, with the same strained quality found on any lips that had been in Bernard Ryan’s presence for more than half an hour.
‘Max, may I introduce the candidates for Dier … for the post of Assistant Headteacher?’ He ushered them forward, one by one, as best he could in the press of bodies. The woman nearest to him had a face like a Botticelli angel. It was hard to estimate her age, but Maxwell guessed it was more than was immediately obvious. Her mouth, though delicately drawn, looked obstinate. Her eyes were intelligent, though baby-blue. She would take watching. ‘Miss Mackenzie,’ he placed his hand in the small of her back and pushed her forward just a tad. ‘May I introduce Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form and,’ he broke off with a little laugh, ‘our longest-serving member of staff.’
Maxwell shook her hand. ‘Miss Mackenzie. It’s very nice to meet you.’ She was ripped from his grasp as a gangling youth with a larger than normal pack on his back hit her amidships. He bowed slightly towards her and yelled, ‘Bloxham! Get back here this minute.’ The boy froze like a special film effect. It shouldn’t have been possible for a person to balance on one toe like that. Billy Elliot would have been proud. He slowly turned and inched back to confront Maxwell. ‘First of all, apologise to this lady at once.’
The boy dipped his acne and muttered ‘’m sorry, miss.’
‘Well, not gracefully done, but it will do as we are pressed for time. Now go and sign in as late and then go and report to Mrs Maitland. At lunchtime, come and see me and we will arrange something along the lines of a detention, but more like the cat-o’-nine-tails you actually deserve.’
The boy’s head snapped up. ‘Oh, but sir …’
‘Come on,
Bloxham. Even you can’t have too many detentions yet. We’ve only been back three days. See me at 12.30. Don’t be late. Don’t knock anyone else over.’
With a final injured glance, the boy was gone.
Ryan tugged down the hem of his jacket and cleared his throat. He reached for the second woman but before he could touch her she had frozen him with a basilisk glare. She stepped forward under her own steam and grasped Maxwell’s hand in a grip of iron. ‘Smollett!’ she snapped. It sounded like an order, but Maxwell hadn’t smolled anything for years and was just about to say so when she explained herself a bit more. ‘Fiona Smollett,’ she said. ‘Liked the way you dealt with that. Good man.’ She dropped his hand and stepped back. He almost saluted but managed to stop himself just in time. Save for the different scale, she would have been at home in Maxwell’s attic with the assembled Six Hundred. She was so perfectly groomed her hair looked painted on to her skull and her neat suit wasn’t just for interviews, that was clear; it was for all time. A suit for all seasons. Her pyjamas were probably identical to it with, just possibly, a small embroidered teddy bear on one pocket, to relieve the gloom. A black teddy, obviously, with a black ribbon round its neck. A black teddy called Adolf. Maxwell’s arm felt chilly and he flexed his fingers to bring some life back.
‘Thank you, Fiona,’ he smiled.
‘I prefer Miss Smollett.’
‘Of course,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘So do I.’ He snatched a glance under his brows at Bernard Ryan, but he looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights. CVs are wonderful things, aren’t they? They never prepare you for the truth. The corridor was largely empty of children now and the silence was palpable. ‘Well, Bernard,’ he said and inclined his head to the other Candidate.
Ryan visibly jumped and said, ‘Oh, sorry. Miles away. Yes, Max, may I introduce you to Mrs Bevell. She comes to us from Littlehampton. You may have met her at courses or whatnot.’ The Deputy Head remembered who he was speaking to; Maxwell was not the natural choice for sending on courses. He annoyed too many people, and also people often seemed to get killed. But he could hardly introduce him to the woman in those terms.
