Maxwell's Return

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Can you move the cat? Quickly. I need to sneeze and he’ll have the skin off my chest if I take him by surprise like that.’

  Maxwell moved with stealth but precision and whipped the huge animal up in the air in the nick of time. Jacquie’s sneeze could have woken the dead and Metternich reacted as she knew he must, but it was Maxwell’s forearm that took the brunt. She was still applying tea tree ointment to the scratches when the phone rang.

  Jacquie got there first. ‘Hello? Oh, Jason. Hello.’ She raised an eyebrow at Maxwell who swirled his drink and tried to look as if he wasn’t there.

  ‘You have? Do you need me? Thanks. I appreciate that. I’ll see you tomorrow. ’Bye.’

  She put the phone down and stood there, screwing the top on the tea tree ointment slowly.

  ‘That was Jason.’

  ‘The Argonaut?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The new sergeant.’

  ‘Yes. Well, not that new. New to me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’ve not managed to isolate any DNA from the second girl yet, but they have a blood group. Apparently, our man was conveniently a secretor.’

  ‘Now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in quite a while,’ Maxwell remarked.

  ‘No. I would imagine Angus had to get his text books out for this one. They are still trying to use various methods to get a useable amount of material, but for now we just have a blood group. And as it is quite unusual, they are going to pick up a suspect now.’

  Maxwell didn’t ask, he told. ‘Bernard Ryan.’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘Bernard Ryan. He’ll be on his way back to the Nick by now.’ She looked at him. ‘I’m sorry, Max. This means no more cosy little chats about murder.’

  ‘Darn. Whatever can we do instead?’ He spoke lightly, but she could hear the tension in his voice. He was asking himself if he could possibly have been so wrong about the man. If someone he had seen for at the very least two hundred days of every year, for years and years… if that someone could really be a person who stalked little girls, groomed them, had sex with them and then threw their strangled bodies onto a beach? If he was so wrong about this man, what else was he wrong about?

  ‘Max…’

  ‘It’s no good, Jacquie. I hate to say it, because the man is a shit, but he didn’t do it.’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘He just didn’t. That’s it and all about it.’

  Thursday, Thursday. Hate that day. Peter Maxwell had just come back from the land of Mama Cass and it was as though he had never been away. He had taken his trusty bicycle, the steed he called White Surrey, out of mothballs, scraped off the surface rust and oiled the chain and brakes. Then it was ‘Look out, Bradley Wiggins!’ Mad Max was on the road. He hadn’t been back to his office yet – he knew as soon as he went in there and smelled that heady mixture of stale biscuits, paper and the massed effluvium of Mrs B’s hoover bag, the last seven months would just disappear. So instead, he had headed straight to the Hall, to see how the results were being received by His Own. Heads of Sixth Form, he knew, were supposed to look across the board, at all the subject results of Year 13, looking for balance, width, improvement, differentials. Bollocks to that; he went straight to the History list.

  He was still chuckling to himself as he swept into the Hall through a throng of milling hopefuls, all in jeans and scruffy t-shirts, much the same as they had worn for the last two years, really. He took in the room with its squeaky floors and long, faded curtains. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. The same spider that had been building its web last Christmas still sat there in the far corner at the centre of the biggest Arachno Condo Maxwell had ever seen, a small piece of tinsel caught at the edge, the spider version of archaeological evidence. Then he smiled again because nowhere did he see a sign that read This Is A Drug Free School. He felt good about that.

  ‘McSween, you old shit!’ The Head of Sixth Form was selective with his expletives. Tom McSween was eighteen going on forty. Apart from the hair, which was Justin Bieber meets Cher, he could have been at school with Maxwell himself in the great days of yore. ‘Well done. Brasenose?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy beamed, feeling a surge of pride as his Head of Sixth Form gripped his hand.

  ‘Bad luck,’ Maxwell commiserated. ‘If you ever see sense and want to go to a real university, I still have a few friends at Jesus. Cambridge, that is,’ and he winked. ‘Geoffrey, you dark horse. B, eh? Well done, well done.’

  ‘It’s all thanks to you, Mr Maxwell,’ Geoffrey grinned goofily.

  ‘Flatterer,’ Maxwell laughed. ‘But I think Mr Moss and Mr Gold had something of a hand in your success, didn’t they?’

  ‘Ah, it was the groundwork, sir,’ the happy lad assured him, ‘in Year 12. Before you went to…’

  ‘Abroad, lad,’ Maxwell finished the sentence for him. ‘It’s a bloody place, believe me.’

  Then he was glad-handing with all of them and commiserating with the few. Time was that he would have been there as they collected the dreaded brown envelopes, watched for the falling of crests and the crises of confidence. He would have put his arm round the distressed, taken them down the pub and put their worlds to rights. Not any more. Over half of them had their results already, the day before, online. Only the successes came in to get results these days. To jog a lap of honour, to laugh and cry with happiness… and to take a last look at the school they had called home for seven years and would never see again until their own children went there. And anyway, putting an arm around a student these days was equivalent to signing up to Gary Glitter’s gang or enrolling in Yewtree. What a sad indictment of the times.

  And, talking of sad indictments, where was that excuse for a headmaster, Legs Diamond? If anyone knew anything about Bernard Ryan, surely he would.

  James Diamond was having the worst summer of his life. He was one of nature’s worriers anyway, but he usually had Bernard Ryan on hand to take the flak. He had always thought that Bernard Ryan didn’t have an emotion in his body but he had seen the man crumble, albeit briefly, when the police had taken him away. The fear in his eyes only flashed there for a second, but it had been enough to make the smoke that Diamond knew was never there without fire. And now…

  The tap on his door made him sit up straight, every hair on his neck tingling. Although he didn’t know it, he was briefly at one with the rodentia of Columbine. No one, no one tapped at a door quite like that. He thought he wouldn’t be back for weeks. And yet, here he was, outside his door. The headteacher cleared his throat. He had learned that when you were dealing with Peter Maxwell, you had to be careful to show no weakness. The man could smell fear.

  ‘Come!’

  Outside the door, Maxwell mouthed ‘in’. How much breath did you save in an average life by not saying that tiny word? He would have to ask the Maths Department. He pushed open the door and went into Diamond’s office. There was no reason for the room to have changed, but somehow there was a subtle difference. Legs looked less assured, the desk was certainly fuller and there was an air of desolation, of loss that Maxwell thought he understood.

  ‘Did you miss me, headmaster?’ he asked, flinging himself into a chair.

  Diamond pinned a smile on his face as best he could. ‘Of course, Max. Welcome back. We… we weren’t expecting you just yet. We thought you might be enjoying the Californian sun for a while longer.’

  ‘Over-rated,’ Maxwell said shortly. ‘And you seem to be having sun here, anyway. Without the smog and the wind.’

  Diamond was not a geographer, but that didn’t sound right to him. ‘You can’t have both, can you?’ he asked.

  ‘You’d think not,’ Maxwell remarked then, leaning forward, ‘What are you doing about Bernard?’

  For a horrible moment that turned his bowels to water, Diamond thought that Maxwell was offering to be his Deputy and swallowed hard. When he didn’t answer, Maxwell filled the silence with words that brought relief.

  ‘I don’t mean a
s a deputy head. I imagine you’ve already got something sorted on that score. Mmmm,’ he looked at the ceiling briefly, thinking. ‘It’s Jane Taylor, I would imagine. IT.’ He looked at the headteacher and smiled. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Diamond said. ‘But… I only rang her yesterday. I told her not to tell anyone.’

  ‘She didn’t. I worked it out. She is the obvious choice, especially since she has been doing the timetabling for years.’

  Diamond’s eyebrows shot up.

  Maxwell held up a calming hand. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not common knowledge by any means. But she is a nice woman and no one hates her.’ He almost added the ‘yet’ but managed to restrain himself. ‘Good choice.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’ Diamond settled his ruffled feathers. ‘It’s just a temporary measure, of course. Until Bernard…’ he narrowed his eyes at Maxwell. ‘How much do you know about Bernard and his troubles, by the way?’

  The answer obviously was a lot more than you, headmaster, but again, the Head of Sixth Form forebore to say what was in his mind. ‘Not much, headmaster. I was away when it all began.’

  ‘Your wife…?’ Legs knew how many beans made five. But only approximately.

  Maxwell shrugged, an elaborate gesture that took in his entire body, from his barbed-wire hair to the cycle-clip indents at the bottom of his trouser-leg. ‘She was away as well, if you remember.’

  Diamond was not convinced, but the need to share was overwhelming and although Maxwell was the reason for almost every one of his grey hairs, for at least fifty percent of his ulcer and all of his nervous tics, he had experience in this kind of thing. Too much experience, in Diamond’s opinion, but needs must when the devil drives.

  ‘It was last term,’ he began and Maxwell settled his features into an expression of interest. He would get nowhere by bursting out with the proper version of events, the Matthews Version; Diamond could spin for England but Maxwell would have to play a waiting game. On one balmy evening, sitting out in what he had learned to call the yard, he, Jacquie and Nolan had watched a gecko stalking a locust, each movement tiny, slow and controlled so as not to lose its prey. He decided to take a leaf out of its book and he all but disappeared into the chair. Gordon (as they had inevitably named the creature) would have been proud.

  ‘It was last term. Bernard hadn’t spoken to me, but he had had concerns about a girl he was tutoring. I haven’t had all of the facts, but it seems the long and the short of it is that Bernard may have been the last person to see her alive.’

  Maxwell may have been in gecko-mode, but he had to speak. ‘The next to last person, surely,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Diamond blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Her murderer would be the last person, surely?’ he said, with a small smile.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Diamond was cross with himself. He shouldn’t have fallen into that trap – it looked bad. ‘Yes, as you say. There were… certain factors that made the police come and take Bernard in for questioning.’ He took off his glasses and peered short-sightedly across his desk at Maxwell. ‘Only questioning, mind you. There was no arrest.’

  Maxwell inclined his head, reptile-style.

  ‘I did ask Bernard later how things had gone and he told me that he had declined to give an alibi. That’s the actual word he used, Max. Declined. So, of course, I had no option but to ask him to accept suspension from his post. I told him he could have a union representative with him, or a friend from the staff, but he said no, there was no point.’ Diamond managed a wintry smile. ‘In fact, he said with you not around, there was no one he would choose.’

  ‘Me?’ Maxwell was staggered. He had exchanged few words with Bernard Ryan that could not be classed as frankly hostile, as far as his innate public-schoolboy manners would allow. If he was the nearest thing to a friend that Ryan could summon up, it was a sorry state of affairs to be sure.

  ‘I don’t think as a friend, so much, as someone who knew what the score was. You have been… in trouble,’ the headteacher had the grace to look a little shamefaced, ‘yourself and of course you do have your links with the police.’

  ‘Well, my wife is a detective inspector,’ Maxwell conceded.

  Diamond looked at the man. He was no less exasperating now than when he had seen him last. He would never help you out of a hole if he could throw more earth in instead. He let it go. ‘Quite so. Anyway, Bernard took his suspension and he is still off, as you already know. I suppose you also know he has been taken in by the police a second time.’

  Maxwell could not use a five and a half thousand mile distance as an excuse this time and decided to give the sucker an even break. ‘Yes, I did hear something about that.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  This wasn’t right. He was in here to ask Diamond the questions, not the other way around. He toyed briefly with swivelling the headmaster’s lamp into his eyes and rapping out something from The Untouchables, but he knew that Legs Diamond had no sense of humour at all. ‘I got a tiny gist, but I can’t really…’

  ‘I do understand, Max. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  Diamond the humble was not something you saw very often and Maxwell felt the earth tremble slightly beneath his feet. ‘If it’s any comfort,’ he said, ‘Jacquie is sure there is nothing in it. It was simply the police exploring every avenue.’

  Diamond perked up a little, as far as he ever perked. He gave a nervous laugh. ‘I thought it was probably something like that. So he’ll be back soon, you think?’

  Maxwell had heard that tone before. When Nolan’s goldfish had died, he had asked when it would wake up in exactly the same way.

  ‘It’s not for me to say,’ Maxwell said, ‘but in his shoes I think I would wait a while longer until he was sure that he wouldn’t be pulled in again. It wouldn’t look too good, would it, if the police…’

  Diamond shied like a startled filly. ‘Oh, no, no, you’re right. I’ll tell him to not even think of coming back until… well, until…’ He had picked up the phone and stabbed a fast dial code. He waited, receiver to ear, smiling vaguely at Maxwell. The sound of the phone ringing at the other end oozed through his head and into the room. After a moment or so he put the receiver down. ‘Not in,’ he said. ‘I wonder where he might be.’

  Maxwell pressed his lips together in what in certain circumstances might pass for a smile. He knew where Bernard Ryan was and he wouldn’t be in a position to answer the phone. He decided to try to find out at least a little more than he knew already. ‘Any idea why Bernard wouldn’t give an alibi?’ he asked. ‘It would have prevented all of this, right from the start.’

  Diamond spread his arms out wide. ‘I have no idea. I think I always assumed that he didn’t have one. That he was out for a walk, at the cinema, something like that; somewhere anonymous.’

  ‘But that isn’t declining to give an alibi, is it?’ Maxwell persisted. ‘That’s just having a rubbish alibi. No, Bernard must have something to hide. But what?’ He waited expectantly.

  Diamond leaned forward and briefly looked almost human. ‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about this, Max, because a day hasn’t gone by since the police took him away that I haven’t thought about it. You have no idea how awful it was. They didn’t bother to be even slightly subtle. They used handcuffs! On Bernard!’

  ‘I’m sorry Jacquie and I weren’t here,’ Maxwell said, and meant it. ‘I’m sure she could have… well, she just doesn’t do handcuffs unless there is no option.’

  ‘Of course, the students loved it. It was all I could do to make them put their mobile phones away. Bernard isn’t popular, as you may know.’ Diamond made the last statement sound like news and Maxwell felt for the man; that he could be so unaware of other people was almost a talent. ‘Bernard behaved with a lot of dignity but he was very short with me when we spoke on the phone a few days later. I got the impression he had someone with him, and of course…’ he looked left and right and then dropped his voice, ‘I couldn’t help thinking if you know what
I mean?’

  ‘Indeed, headmaster,’ Maxwell said, getting up abruptly. For a moment there, he had felt sorry for the man. But he was clearly an arse. ‘I must go. I’m on Nolan duty until we start term. His mother is back at work, as you know, so I must be away. Mrs Troubridge isn’t getting any younger and Nole’s a bit young yet to be calling ambulances. I’ll see you at the start of term.’ And he turned on his heel and was gone. He sighed. He had hoped to sort things out here, but the horse’s mouth it would have to be. And, after a brief word with morning Thingie, who asked if he’d met Brad Pitt, he and White Surrey were purring through the highways and byeways of Leighford, Columbine-bound.

  Maxwell rapped on Mrs Troubridge’s door with his usual élan and waited patiently for her to answer. He and Jacquie had realised long ago that they and Mrs Troubridge saw a completely different thing when they looked at Nolan. They saw a feisty child, slightly on the stocky side, with hair that would lie down sometimes for as many as three minutes together, with the heart of a lion, with a mouth on him that would get him into serious trouble one day and the brain of a rather sophisticated thirty year old. She saw a delicate creature, put on earth to be wrapped in velvet with a protective layer of bubble wrap for safety, with a fragile ego that could be crushed like an eggshell by the smallest slight, a creature of air and cobwebs who she, Mrs Troubridge, must guard to her last breath. Therefore, when he was on the Troubridge side of the door, he was not allowed to hurtle down the stairs to open it, for fear of broken bones on the way down and potential shock forward slash abduction when he got there. Maxwell heard the tell-tale signs of Mrs Troubridge’s careful steps underscored by Nolan’s cry of ‘We’re on our way, Dads!’

  ‘It might not be your father, dear,’ he heard his neighbour say, her voice now clearly just the other side of the door. ‘Let me look through the letterbox to see before we open the door.’

  Maxwell always felt faintly embarrassed as Mrs Troubridge’s critical gaze examined his general crotch area and he never knew what to do with his hands. But whatever it was she used as criteria clearly passed muster this time and she opened the door, sliding bolts and chains until it was free.