by M. J. Trow
‘Yes. Look, I’m so sorry, that was dreadful. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. The news didn’t give the name, did it? I wanted to choose my time. I … oh, shit!’ and he thumped the dashboard.
‘No,’ she said, her knuckles still white on the wheel, the engine idling. ‘No, it’s all right. It’s just … well, I didn’t know’
‘I know’ He took her in his arms, seat-belt allowing, and kissed her forehead. For a moment her face came up to his and their eyes locked. Then there was a blast from a passing motorist and a car screamed past, yobboes hanging out, thrusting fingers skywards.
‘That’ll be the Scholarship Sixth,’ mused Maxwell, ‘on their way to debating society. Sylv, I’m a complete arsehole. I’ve got you here under false pretences.’
The beginnings of a smile played around her lips. ‘I don’t think even Emma believed your archaeological dig story, Max.’
‘No,’ he sighed. ‘Not one of my most inspired. However, here we are.’
‘We’re going there, aren’t we?’ she asked him. ‘Where they found her?’
‘No, Sylv,’ he said softly. ‘Not if you don’t want to.’
She slammed the car into gear, straightening her rearview mirror,
‘You know,’ she said, sniffing back what might have been hayfever, might have been tears, ‘you’re right, you are an arsehole,’ and she drove off the kerb and went north.
‘What do you mean, by the way,’ she said, after a while. ‘Mrs B.’s idea?’
‘Well, you know Tuesday is the night she does for me?’
Sylvia nodded. Mrs B., full name unknown, a tall, angular woman, who may have been ITMA’s original Mrs Mopp were she not too old, may have had a heart of gold, but her mouth was pure sewer.
‘Well, she’d seen the item at six. “What abaht that woman, then, Mr Maxwell?” she said to me, “The one they found in that lino? Me and Mr B.’s got some just like it. And I’ve eaten at that restaurant too, that Devil’s Label. They do a bleedin’ beautiful plaice and chips there, they do. Fancy, having been to the scene of a murder.” Well,’ Maxwell was himself again, ‘perhaps “fancy” is the wrong word, but I had a feeling, a sense I ought to be there.’
‘But how do you know, Max?’ Sylvia asked him. ‘There was no mention of a name on the telly last night. How do you know it’s Alice?’
‘I can’t tell you that, Sylv,’ he said. ‘Let’s just let it be our little secret for a while, hmm?’
Maxwell was buying. It wasn’t quite the weather for eating on the patio and Sylvia was grateful for that. She wasn’t sure she could eat much anyway, knowing what she now knew; but to eat at all overlooking the spot where the dead woman had been found would require all her sangfroid. Piers Stewart, all DJ and prosperity, had put them in Nookie Corner, as he pleased to call it, irrespective of any embarrassment he might cause his customers by seating them there.
‘Mr Stewart.’ Maxwell hailed him as he tackled his coffee. The place was fairly empty as yet and the restaurateur seemed to be free enough.
‘Sir?’ The word stuck in Piers Stewart’s throat every time he heard himself saying it. He had yet to meet any one of his customers who was on the same intellectual and social level as he himself.
‘I’m making enquiries into the death of Alice Goode. Can we talk?’
The restaurateur looked about him, then he leaned over Maxwell’s table. ‘Are you the police?’ he asked.
‘No, I was a colleague of the dead woman.’
‘A colleague?’ Stewart’s face had contempt written all over it. ‘You mean you’re a pimp?’
Sylvia looked as startled as Maxwell. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Stewart looked around him before scraping a chair back and sitting down with them. ‘Look, I’ve had the law swarming over this place for the last three days. This Alice Goode was some sort of tart. God knows what riff-raff she knew. Now I’d be very grateful if you’d finish up your meal and go.’
‘She was an English teacher,’ Maxwell said steadily, ‘with a subsidiary in French. I think you’ve been misinformed, Mr … er … Stewart.’ Maxwell had read the sign over the door.
The restaurateur looked at the couple before him. Clients, he guessed, of Alice Goode. Middle-aged swingers still trying to pull the birds. He could just imagine the ads they placed in the Contact mags – ‘She, forty-something, good body. Likes adventure. He, hung like a mule. Travel anywhere’. Stewart stood up. ‘I have a choice who I serve,’ he said loudly and, as if from nowhere, two heavies stood at his elbow. ‘This gentleman and his wife were just leaving,’ he said.
Maxwell didn’t like the look of either of the waiters, so he lifted Sylvia gently by the arm. ‘You’ll forgive me,’ he said, ‘if under the circumstances I don’t leave a tip.’ And he led her to the door. ‘Just as well he doesn’t recognize me, isn’t it, Mrs Ronay?’ he said loudly as dining couples turned to stare. They saw themselves out.
Maxwell broke into the Headmaster’s study the next day. Well, no, that phrase needs qualification. Legs Diamond wasn’t a headmaster; he was a headteacher and there was a world of difference. And he didn’t have a study; he had an office. And breaking in? Well, not really. Maxwell merely waited until the man had gone to some out-of-school management meeting, then he’d knocked boldly and gone in. The key was in the Head’s top drawer, unlike the Head himself. Maxwell lifted it with the ease of the Artful Dodger and rummaged in the filing cabinet that he knew contained the confidential staff files.
Jacquie Carpenter had had an attack of professionals or the consciences – he couldn’t be sure which. So he was on his own now, Maxwell PI, a gumshoe down on his luck, a dick in several senses of the word. He found her file, the one marked Alice Goode. First post, bla, bla. Goldsmith’s. Oh dear. Second-class degree. Specialized in Philip Larkin. Jesus! It just got worse. PGCE from the London Institute. Glowing references from a school in Essex, another in Kent. They farmed them far and wide did the London Institute. No home address. No next of kin.
‘Who mourns for Adonäis?’ Maxwell murmured to himself. Then he heard the door click. But the Head of Sixth Form was faster. Years of turning tight corners to catch smokers had given him the edge. The file was away, the cabinet locked and the key returned before Margaret, Legs’ secretary, stood there staring at him.
‘Maggie, thank God!’ Maxwell rushed to her side, gripping her shoulders warmly. ‘A beacon in the darkness as always. You haven’t seen the Head’s copy of the Deering report, have you? I seem to have misplaced mine.’
It was on Thursday that DCI Henry Hall decided to unburden himself to the world. A quick phone call to Jim Diamond and a press conference hard on the heels of that did the job effectively. The body in the lino on the car park had a name at last. The paparazzi gathered at the gates of Leighford High and laid siege to Alice Goode’s flat where a distraught Jean Hagger came home from junior school to be hit with the news right between the eyes.
At Leighford High, there was a whole school assembly. Only the Sports Hall was big enough to hold the huddled masses of a big comprehensive and Peter Maxwell stood at the back while Bernard Ryan attempted to assert what authority he felt he had to bring the multitude to order. They paid about as much attention to him as to a woodlouse and in the end, Maxwell took pity on him and took up Ryan’s position at the front of the Hall where the PA system had been hastily set up by the Drama Department.
‘Allrighteethen.’ He gave the entire school his best Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura and the chattering stopped. ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ – the Head of Sixth Form was giving them his best Peter Maxwell now – ‘we have some rather sad and some rather serious news. Mr Diamond?’
Maxwell had never seen Diamond perform better. He told the school that Miss Goode was dead. He told them the police were treating her death as suspicious. He told them all to talk to no one except the police. And if the police asked to talk to them, they must have their parents present at the interview. There was silence in that Hall where
the trampolines bounced and the shuttlecocks flew. Diamond saw the odd lips quiver on the faces of some Year Seven girls sitting cross-legged in front of him.
‘Mr Ryan, please dismiss the school row by row. The buses will be waiting. Duty staff to accompany them, please. Mr Maxwell,’ he turned to his Head of Sixth Form and waited until they’d both slipped out of the side door. ‘Is it me or is the Leighford grapevine working extra well today?’
‘Headmaster?’ Maxwell was a genius at the evasive line, the hurt look. It wasn’t like Diamond to be so on the ball.
‘“Some rather sad and some rather serious news” I think you said. You knew, Max. You knew about Alice before I told you. Only Roger and Bernard knew. How did you know?’
Maxwell folded his arms languidly. The day he’d be fazed by anything Legs Diamond did, hell would freeze over. ‘I have a degree, Headmaster,’ he said. ‘First Class Honours from Cambridge University. That gives me an MA which is, in effect, a licence to think. One of my colleagues, a pretty young girl, goes missing on a school trip and no one hears from her for nearly a week. Then the police find a body not many miles to the north. The body of a young girl. You call a whole school assembly at the wrong end of a routine day. Now pardon me all to hell if I make the odd deduction.’
Diamond looked a little shamefaced. ‘I see.’ He shifted a little, clearing his throat under Maxwell’s steady barrage and Maxwell’s steady gaze. ‘Right. Well, thanks, Max.’
‘What did the police say?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked.
Diamond shrugged. ‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘They’re coming over shortly. Chief Inspector Hall.’
He nodded at Maxwell as the clatter of doors announced that the kids had gone. Why my school? he thought to himself. Why me? Maxwell went back into the Sports Hall where knots of his colleagues still stood in stunned tableaux around the room. He picked up a stray piece of chewing-gum wrapper on his way out.
7
That Friday, Peter Maxwell played hookey for the first time in his life. He rather enjoyed it, in fact, pedalling past the science labs where rows of children were dying of terminal boredom, wrestling with the complexities of the latent heat of fusion of ice or grappling with the various coefficients of linear expansion. God, what a waste of precious time when there was so much they didn’t know about that magic land, the past.
At home, he swapped his cycle clips for a pair of corduroys, threw a few things together and popped a note through old Mrs Troubridge’s door next to his, asking the old trout to feed Metternich for the weekend as he’d been called away. By just after four, he was standing in the rather tatty foyer of the London Institute, looking for someone, anyone, who might be able to help. Knots of education students, some shell-shocked and shaking after a week’s teaching practice, hurried past him to the nearest pub. A whistling cleaner directed him to the Students’ Union on the first floor.
Grubby posters about Saving the Unborn Gay Whale flapped in the breeze of an open window. Above the hum of a photocopier, Maxwell called to its operator, a black girl who must have spent days braiding her hair into tight little curls.
‘Miss … er …?’ Maxwell raised his hat.
‘Ms,’ she told him dispassionately.
‘Of course,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘I wonder if you can help me. I’m trying to trace a former student of yours. A Miss Alice Goode.’
‘You a relative?’
‘Uncle,’ Maxwell lied.
‘Name?’
‘Peter Maxwell,’ he didn’t intend to compound the felony.
‘How long ago did she leave?’
‘Last year. Last July.’
The girl had crossed to a computer and was fiddling with that plastic thing that IT people for some reason best known to themselves call a mouse and slid back her swivel chair. She crossed to a filing cabinet. ‘Is that G-o-o-d?’
‘E,’ said Maxwell. ‘There’s an ‘e’ on the end.’
‘Right. What did you say? Alice?’
‘Yes.’
She flicked her way through the index cards. ‘No. Oh, hang on. Yeah. Here we go. Alice Goode. Date of birth 6.8.73.’ Maxwell’s heart sank. He was on his third plastic hip by the time this girl was born. ‘Got a job at Leighford High School, West Sussex.’
‘That’s right,’ Maxwell said.
‘There’s no address,’ the girl told him.
‘No, I don’t want a current address,’ he explained. ‘I want to find out where she lived when she was here.’
‘I thought you said you wanted to find her.’
‘Find her?’ Maxwell grinned. ‘No, no, you misunderstand. I’m trying to locate her former landlady. They were very close and Alice has lost touch with her.’
‘Landlady?’ The girl frowned. ‘Christ, mate, she lived at Twenty-seven Napier Road, Balham. If she had a landlady there, it was bloody Lizzie Borden.’
‘That’s it,’ Maxwell clicked his fingers. ‘Miss Borden. Alice speaks so warmly of her. Good afternoon.’
The girl watched the silly old fart trundle out through the doors. Obviously a poof, she assumed. Just as well he hadn’t committed the cardinal sin of middle-aged honky poofs everywhere and called her ‘my dear’ or she’d have been forced to fell him.
It wasn’t Lizzie Borden who opened the front door at Twenty-seven Napier Road an hour later, but a thin West Indian who might have been Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, except that he was about twenty years too young to remember Starsky and Hutch. ‘Miss Borden?’ Maxwell raised his hat.
‘You what?’ for all his Dreadlocks and Rasta shirt, the man was pure Balham.
‘I was looking for the owner,’ Maxwell said.
‘Oh yeah? Why’s that then?’
‘Alice Goode,’ Maxwell said and watched the Rasta’s face fall.
‘You filth?’ He scanned the road, looking for the dubious unmarked car.
‘Teacher,’ Maxwell smiled.
‘Yeah,’ the Rasta grinned, ‘that’s what I said. Alice don’t live here any more.’
‘Yes,’ said Maxwell, ‘I know that line. What I want to know is something about when she did. You knew her?’
‘Look, man,’ Huggy Bear leaned menacingly on the doorframe, ‘what’s your angle?’
‘Obtuse, as always,’ beamed Maxwell. ‘You know Alice is dead?’
The Rasta nodded. ‘I watch the fuckin’ telly,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Maxwell, ‘so do I.’ And he pushed past his man into the scruffy hall.
‘’Ere.’
‘If the “filth” haven’t been yet, Mr … er …?’
‘William Shakespeare.’
Maxwell looked oddly at him. ‘Mr Shakespeare, then rest assured they will. If I can find Alice’s old address, it’s only a matter of time before they do.’
The Rasta hesitated. ‘They’ve been ’ere, all right,’ he said. ‘You’d better come in.’
‘In’ was a dingy room strewn with old copies of Viz and Time Out. Here and there, the odd empty beer bottle lay among the dust.
‘It’s the cleanin’ lady’s day off,’ Shakespeare told him. ‘If you can find the sofa, you’re welcome to park your arse.’
Maxwell could and did. It was the big, grey piece of furniture under the remains of the KFC wrappers.
‘Difficult to beat a good Zinger, isn’t it?’ He tweezered the crushed carton from under his bum.
‘What’s your thing with Alice?’ Shakespeare leaned back against the door, his arms folded, his jaw flexed.
‘I am … was … a colleague of hers.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Want to see my NUT card? My piece of chalk?’
‘How’d you find this place?’
‘Same way the police did I imagine. Student records at the London Institute. Most places keep files for two years at least, five in some cases. Her Majesty’s Government keep them for up to a hundred years and then snigger “No, you can’t see them, you nosy piece of shit”.’
The Rasta’s lips broke in
to an uneasy smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Right on.’
‘What did the police want to know?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Dunno. I wasn’t ’ere. My oppo gave ’em the brush-off. When “Tight-Lips” Henderson don’t want to talk to you, man, you stay not talked to.’
Maxwell took off his hat and plopped it down beside him, careful it didn’t land in anything too gruesome. He looked at Shakespeare. ‘Somebody strangled Alice Goode and dumped her body in a car park,’ he said. ‘Now, I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to do, do you, Mr Shakespeare?’
‘No,’ The Rasta shook his head. ‘No, I don’t, man.’
‘And I intend to find out who did that. And to put the bastard away. With or without your help.’
‘You sure you ain’t the filth?’
‘Positive.’
For a moment, Shakespeare tried to weigh his man in the balance. He’d heard nothing of Alice Goode for nearly a year and now, four times in two days. First, he’d seen the car park where they’d found her, then a photo of the girl herself. Then the filth come calling. And now this old honky was sniffing around.
‘Teachers!’ Shakespeare spat into the corner. ‘I spent the best years of my life getting shat on by fuckin’ teachers.’
Maxwell sighed. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I suppose I owe you the truth.’
‘Yeah,’ said Shakespeare, nodding slowly, ‘right.’
‘MI5,’ Maxwell said.
‘You what, Grandad?’ Shakespeare sniggered. ‘You’re winding me up.’
‘What do you think we look like, Mr Shakespeare? Pierce Brosnan by way of Sean Connery? I’m a civil servant, concerned with the defence of the realm. I can give you my Whitehall office number, if you like.’
‘Yeah,’ Shakespeare’s smile had gone, ‘right.’
‘We have reason to believe that Alice had got in with the wrong crowd.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘We know from her time at Goldsmith’s College that she had … shall we say, Leftist tendencies?’
‘Come off it, man’ – Shakespeare spread his arms – ‘that cold war guff’s all over now. All that George Smiley bollocks.’
