by M. J. Trow
‘Where did she go?’
‘Oh, Christ, now you’ve asked me. I’ll have to check the files, of course, but I think it was Sussex. What, you think Ronnie was carrying on a seduction correspondence course with Dannie and they arranged for him to slip away from MOMI and catch a southbound train for an idyllic mid-week at Fulmer? Come on, Nursie, my garden’s a better plot than that. Besides, I would have thought darling Dannie’s shacked up with some ageing juvenile luvvie who’ll never see forty again.’
‘Oh,’ Sylvia was arch when she wanted to be, ‘went for the older man, did she?’
‘Only when I conducted private, personal interviews with her. Oh, and every time I got some file paper from the History stock cupboard.’
‘You’re just an old pervert, Peter Maxwell.’ She clicked her tongue.
‘One of the few – the very few – perks of the job, Nursie,’ he smiled at her. Then he grimaced. ‘Did you put any sugar in this coffee?’
Detective Constable Jacquie Carpenter knew Peter ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell. A girl from Leighford had been murdered a few years back – one of Maxwell’s Own, one of his sixth form. So she knew the face and she knew the style. She knew Jim Diamond too and what a waste of time it was talking to him. She flashed her warrant card and got herself conducted as soon as possible to Maxwell’s office at Leighford High.
The Great Man wasn’t there. He was, at that moment, attempting to guide a pretty comatose Year Ten class through the intricacies of the Schools History Project. They still, all these years on, had no real notion of primary and secondary sources or how binding bias could be. The office junior in the tight skirt had led Jacquie into the Inner Sanctum, that bourne from which few sixth formers returned. And in a dither, she’d hoped she’d done the right thing by leaving her there. After all, if you couldn’t trust the police not to pinch County Council property, who could you trust?
Jacquie Carpenter didn’t sit down. She took in the film posters that lined the walls: Gregory Peck glaring at loony Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear; Charlton Heston apparently rubbing noses with Laurence Olivier in Khartoum; Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn scratching each other’s eyes out in The Lion in Winter.
‘Of all the sixth form offices in all the world, you had to walk into mine,” Humphrey Bogart lisped behind her.
‘Mr Maxwell.’ She was flustered, but tried not to show it.
‘Woman Policeman Carpenter,’ he bowed and threw a pile of exercise books onto the coffee table.
Jacquie looked older. Her hair was scraped back into a single plait and she wore less makeup than he remembered. Was her mouth harder? Her eyes less kind? Maxwell decided that was what working with the girls in blue did for you.
‘Why didn’t you go into the film business?’ she asked him.
He chuckled. ‘You see this?’ He patted the Acorn on the desk. ‘Apparently, it’s a computer. My colleagues tell me it’s linked up to every University in the country. At a touch of a key, my sixth formers can find out what courses are on offer anywhere in this great country of ours. If they want Nuclear Physics with Basketry, then I’m sure there’s somewhere – probably Scunthorpe – that does it. Whereas in my day …’ He waved her to a seat. ‘Roughly speaking, when Julia Margaret Cameron got her first box Brownie for Christmas, my old careers master said to me, “History, eh, Maxwell?” He had this dribble problem. Shrapnel in the Great War, we thought. “History, eh?” he said. “Right, that’s teaching or the Civil Service for you, my lad.” Well, I vaguely knew, even at seventeen, that the Civil Service didn’t give much of a service and they certainly weren’t civil, so here I am. What can I do for you, Woman Policeman?’
‘Ronnie Parsons,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye.
‘Ah, yes,’ he passed her the cardboard file, ‘that won’t take you long to sift through. In the meantime, can I make you a coffee? Tea?’
‘No, thanks.’ She read the file as she spoke. ‘I should explain that we are liaising with our colleagues in the Met on this one.’
‘No luck their end?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But these things take time.’ ‘You’ve talked to the parents?’ Maxwell sat down in his county chair, worn after all these years to the contours of his bum.
‘Yes. Have you?’
‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘Why do you ask?’
She thought for a moment before speaking. ‘Let’s say you have something of a reputation, Mr Maxwell.’
‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow in a passable Dirk Bogarde, but Jacquie Carpenter was too young to appreciate it. ‘Should I be flattered?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, still smiling. ‘You seem to have a habit of … getting involved, shall we say?’
‘I have been compared with Don Quixote in my time,’ he said, ‘and I suppose my old bike is the twentieth-century equivalent of Rosinante. The trouble is, the windmills. They just get bigger and bigger, don’t they?’
‘Tell me about Miss Goode,’ she said, the file on Ronnie discarded, the notebook at the ready.
‘I think you’ll find that’s Ms,’ he confided.
‘Ah.’
‘And I’m afraid I can’t tell you a great deal. She’s an NQT …’
‘A what?’
‘Aha, quite,’ he chuckled. ‘My sentiments exactly. She’s a Newly Qualified Teacher – a rookie in your manor, I expect. Been with us since September.’
‘Good at her job?’ Jacquie asked.
‘You’d have to ask Deirdre Lessing.’ It pained him to say it.
‘Who?’
‘You know,’ he smiled, ‘it’s quite uncanny how alike we are. Sadly, I do know the answer to that question. Deirdre is Senior Mattress – er … Mistress here at Leighford. In charge of girls’ welfare and distaff matters generally, She’s also Alice Goode’s mentor. Or is that mentress? I’m not sure.’
‘What was Ms Goode’s relationship to Ronnie Parsons?’
‘Relationship?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘I’m not sure she knew who he was. Leighford has over a thousand kids, Woman Policeman. Ronnie wasn’t taking English. Anyway, it’s not policy here to unleash NQTs on the sixth form.’
‘Not fair on the sixth form?’
‘Not fair on NQTs.’ Maxwell grinned. ‘Tell me, am I following the drift of this conversation right? Do you think that Alice Goode and Ronnie Parsons have … what? Eloped?’
Jacquie Carpenter wasn’t smiling now. She just gazed steadily with those smouldering grey eyes at the smouldering grey old man across the desk from her. ‘We’re keeping an open mind,’ she said.
‘Do you know,’ he stroked his chin, ‘I remember seeing a painting of your sister in the Louvre a long time ago. Enigmatic to the last.’
‘How was Ronnie doing, at school, I mean?’ Jacquie Carpenter could change tack with the best of ’em.
‘No outstanding problems,’ Maxwell said. ‘Sinking a little in Bismarck’s Foreign Policy, but you show me a seventeen-year-old who doesn’t.’
‘Friends?’
‘A popular lad.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Kicked a ball around with the lads at lunchtime.’
‘Girls?’
‘Nobody special, although …’
‘Yes?’ Jacquie Carpenter was very good at recognizing the un-finished sentence, the silence that betrays.
‘Well, I understand that Ronnie and Leila Roberts were something of an item a little while ago.’
‘She was the other sixth former on the trip?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Is that usual, taking sixth formers on a trip, I mean?’
‘Standard enough.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘It’s good practice for them. Leila’s thinking of going into teaching, so she’s clearly insane; but the practice’ll do her good. I don’t know who chose Ronnie – Anthea Edwards, I expect.’
‘We’ve already talked to Miss Edwards,’ Jacquie told him. ‘This should have been your trip, shouldn’t it?’
Maxwell paused. His conscience sat staring him straight i
n the face. It had slipped a little from his sleeve. ‘Yes,’ he said levelly, the eyes dark, the jaw set. ‘Yes, it should.’
‘All right, all right,’ Maxwell slammed the glue down. ‘You’ve made your point, Metternich, now leave it alone, will you?’
The cat glowered at him, sullen, resentful, but all the smugger for being right. Night had come to Leighford, all the better for being Friday night. The day’s rain had given way to a fine night and the half-moon played games of pitch and toss with the faery clouds. Maxwell leaned back in his attic hideaway and looked at the stars through his skylight. ‘You have the column, Mr Sulu.’ He slipped inexorably into his William Shatner.
‘Missing,’ he said, back in Maxwell mode again and picked up the white plastic soldier before placing him astride his white plastic charger. ‘Presumed killed?’ He didn’t like the sound of that. The presumption frightened him. ‘Do you know who this is, Count?’
The cat twitched an ear. No doubt the boring old fart would tell him in the fullness of time.
‘Well, when I’ve painted him up and stuck him all down, he’ll be Captain John Augustus Oldham, 13th Light Dragoons.’ He glanced across to Oldham’s plastic comrades, kitted out for their unfaded glory on that October day in 1854. ‘He drew the short straw did Oldham, Count. Lieutenant-Colonel Doherty was laid up with cholera at the time, so was Major Gore. Holden was the senior captain, but he was with the Depot troop back home, so that left Oldham in charge at the Charge.’ His eyes narrowed on the brave features, the strong jaw, the curling moustaches. ‘He was last seen, sword in one hand, pistol in the other, bleeding from his wounds.’ Maxwell sat back again. ‘The point is, Count, they never found his body.’
He sighed and swivelled to the cat, ‘Is that how it’ll be for Ronnie, do you think? That they’ll never find his body?’
Metternich raised his black and white head for a moment, but it was only to find a more comfortable spot for his chin, and he returned to his snoring on the wicker basket he’d made his home in Maxwell’s loft.
‘One of these days,’ tutted Maxwell impatiently, ‘you’ll give me a straight yes or no to a question. All right.’ He pulled off the gold-laced forage cap, the Crimean one he wore when painting his Light Brigade, to give him empathy with the chaps, and reached for his glass of Southern Comfort. ‘What do we know in the strange-but-true disappearance of Alice Goode and Ronnie Parsons? One, they both disappeared on the same day and ostensibly from the same place – the Museum of the Moving Image. Two, there was nothing to denote a problem in the demeanour of either. Three – and I hope you’re taking notes, Count, ’cos I’ll be asking questions later – said disappearances are either linked or they’re one helluva coincidence. Four – no apparent ransom note … or was there? Damn, I should have asked Woman Policeman Carpenter about that. Not that she’d tell me a great deal. She was being particularly tight-lipped this morning, I thought. Five … buggeration, there isn’t a five, Count. I actually know sweet F.A. about this business. Better stick to teaching, eh?’ He glanced furtively at the beast with four paws, who lashed his tail, just the once, from side to side.
‘I know,’ Maxwell said, ‘and of course, you’re right. It was my trip – you’ve been colluding with Woman Policeman Carpenter, haven’t you? It was my trip, so I can’t just stick to teaching. Somewhere,’ and he kicked himself free of the chair, ‘is Deirdre Lessing’s address in my Directory of the Damned.’
If you’d asked Peter Maxwell – and occasionally, when they were feeling brave or had several hours to spare, people did – what he disliked about Deirdre Lessing, he’d have said ‘Everything’. And it galled him, that Saturday morning, as he pedalled across the Common on White Surrey, that he had to go, cap in hand, to the Morgana le Fay of Leighford High. He hadn’t rung her in advance, because she’d know he’d half-inched her ex-directory number from the school office. It was only a short step from knowing her phone number to making disgusting, obscene calls and she was perfectly willing to concede that Peter Maxwell was clever enough to ring 141 before his perverted little fingers pattered out her digits. So he wouldn’t give her the edge. He’d catch her like the law might, before breakfast, with her curlers in and her teeth in a jar by the bed.
He was all the more disappointed then when she opened the door to him in a rather fetching pink and blue jogging suit, with a sweat band where her hair line usually was.
‘What a fetching glow band,’ Maxwell beamed, patting White Surrey on the bell. ‘Ex-kamikaze, Senior Mistress?’
Her face said it all. ‘I presume this visit has a point, Max?’ she bridled.
‘Of course,’ he assured her, ‘I don’t waste valuable tyre rubber on trivia. It’s about Alice Goode.’
She looked up and down the road. Thank God there was no one about yet to see the freak that stood before her front door, in scarf and cycle clips, like some sort of deranged Doctor Who. ‘You’d better come in.’
He did. Her hall wallpaper was indescribable, as he knew it would be, and he was sure the certificates on the stairs were tokens of gratitude from the SS and signed by Himmler himself.
‘Coffee?’
‘Dash’d civil,’ Maxwell beamed, his Hush Puppies padding across the Flotex of her kitchen.
‘You’ll have to excuse the mess. It is the weekend.’
It was, but Maxwell couldn’t see any. He felt a little guilty really. He hadn’t seen all of his lounge carpet since 1986.
‘Black?’ She poured for them both.
‘White, please. Two sugars.’
She looked at him and tutted. Green wasn’t just a colour for Deirdre Lessing; it was a way of life. She offered him an excruciatingly high stool in the crisp, state-of-the-art kitchen and poured herself a grapefruit juice that Maxwell just knew she’d squeezed between her breasts.
‘Lovely place, Deirdre,’ he heard himself lying.
‘Thank you.’ She took the compliment at face value. In fact, it was the value of the place that intrigued Maxwell. Even Senior Mistresses received a pittance in John Major’s England. This was an executive home, way out of Deirdre’s league. Then he remembered the divorce. Deirdre had clearly taken Mr Lessing to Bolloms and back with a vengeance. If she never worked again – and Maxwell was by no means sure she ever had in the true sense of the word – it wouldn’t really matter to Deirdre Lessing. To Peter Maxwell and Leighford High, however, it would be pure joy.
‘How long have we known each other, Max?’ she asked him, holding her coffee with both hands, as though the shock of the answer might be too much.
‘Eight years, man and woman,’ he told her.
‘And in all that time, this is the first time you’ve crossed my portals.’
‘Pressure of work,’ Maxwell beamed.
‘So it must be something important.’
So, mused Maxwell; pretty astute. Deirdre wasn’t just a pretty pair of padded shoulders, then. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘Alice Goode.’
‘Ah, yes.’ She put down her cup with the air of someone who knows something – like the superior bastard across the desk from you in an interview. ‘Jim said you’d be asking questions.’
‘Jim? Oh, you mean Legs?’
‘Why do you call him that?’ she said, exasperated as always by Peter Maxwell within the first few minutes of any conversation.
‘Legs Diamond,’ Maxwell explained.
Nothing.
‘He was a gangster. Twenties. Prohibition. You know – Eliot Ness, Al Capone. Ray Danton played him in the film.’
‘I thought that was Robert de Niro.’
‘No, no.’ Maxwell could just about follow the woman’s insanity. ‘That was The Untouchables. De Niro played Capone in The Untouchables. Ray Danton played Legs Diamond in The Rise and Fall of the Same.’ Maxwell could tell that Deirdre was none the wiser.
‘But you were saying that Diamond prophesied I’d be here.’
‘Well, he didn’t exactly say you’d come round to my house.’ It was clear that the tr
auma of the event had left its mark on Deirdre. ‘But he certainly implied you wouldn’t be able to let it lie.’
‘He was right there. Tell me about Alice.’
‘I don’t know what I can say’ The Senior Mistress sipped her chilled juice. It probably froze further, Maxwell thought, on contact with her digestive tract. ‘As you know, she joined us from college in September …’
‘Which one?’
‘The London Institute.’
‘The London Institute?’ Maxwell frowned.
‘Yes, you know, it’s a big place, where they keep the government and that sort of thing.’ Sarcasm didn’t sit well on Deirdre Lessing; she hadn’t the wit for it.
‘Go on.’
‘She majored in English.’
Maxwell shuddered at the Americanism, promising himself that if Deirdre said ‘Have a nice day, y’all’ he’d leave. ‘And her subsid?’
‘French. But of course we’re fully staffed there.’
Maxwell nodded. Deirdre was technically correct, but the vacuous thing who ran the Modern Languages Department could scarcely be called a full-timer and at least one of the assistantes was mad as a snake.
‘You met her … what … twice a week as her mentor?’
‘More often than that at first. Until she found her feet, you know. After Christmas she relaxed a little.’
‘A little too much?’
Deirdre frowned. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I’m just fishing, I suppose.’
‘Well,’ Deirdre looked at the man, her bête noire for eight long years, the thorn in her side, the itch she couldn’t scratch, ‘there were, of course, rumours.’
Of course there were. Leighford High was a melting pot of passions, a bubbling cauldron of pubescence. And as for the kids, well …
‘What sort of rumours?’
‘Max,’ Deirdre was punctuating her sentences now with the firm putting down of her coffee cup, ‘you know I won’t deal in innuendo.’
Deirdre Lessing might have dealt in marijuana for all Maxwell knew. Two perfectly ordinary, perfectly everyday people had gone missing. There was a great deal that Peter Maxwell didn’t know. ‘Have the police talked to you?’ he asked her.
