by M. J. Trow
Maxwell didn’t doubt it. He didn’t doubt it either when he felt a fist in the small of his back and heard his own skull crack on brickwork. And so he wasn’t at all surprised when the lights went out.
Gregory Villiers tapped his phone numbers with his plump glittering fingers. He let it ring four times.
‘Dee?’ He recognized the voice on the other end of the line. ‘It’s Gregory. What do you know about an old geezer called Maxwell? Fiftyish, bow tie; smartarse type. Says he’s a teacher. He’s sniffing round about Alice Goode. Right. Yeah. Your patch, I should think. Make a few enquiries, will you? I’ve given him a bit of a smacking, but he might be the persistent type. Can’t have that, can we? Keep an eye.’
8
‘Contusions,’ the freckle-faced kid was saying, ‘suspected concussion. Severe bruising.’
Maxwell groaned.
‘Painful, sir, I expect,’ the lad said, poised by the bed with his notepad. Maxwell was vaguely surprised they didn’t give the coppers lap-top computers these days. Or at least a course in shorthand. The lad wrote down everything laboriously. That he could write at all, Maxwell silently thanked a teacher.
‘It’s my bum.’ Maxwell steeled himself to adjust whatever of his tackle remained intact. ‘You’ve seen The Eiger Sanction, The Hudsucker Proxy? Well, this feels like The Maxwell Prolapse.’
‘Just bruising.’ A crisp, Irish nurse swept in through the screens. ‘Are you going to be long, officer?’ she asked, hands on hips. ‘Only some of us have a hospital to run.’
‘Nearly finished,’ the lad said and waited for her to tut at him, look at Maxwell, tut at him and go. ‘I don’t suppose,’ the boy-detective said, leaning a little closer to his victim, ‘you’d care to tell me what you were really doing in Soho?’
Maxwell toyed with chuckling, but discretion was the better part of valour and he abandoned the idea in a blur of pain. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘just taking in the sights. That little card on the door frame offering French lessons on the third floor didn’t sound very kosher, but when another read “Quantum Physics Explained”, well, I obviously jumped at the chance. Wouldn’t you?’
The lad’s cold blue eyes just got colder. He closed his notebook with a sigh and stood up. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t leap at anything in Soho, especially after dark. We’ll do what we can, of course, but … “I was hit from behind, officer. It all happened so quickly”, isn’t a lot to go on, is it?’
‘Your life must be full of clichés, I suppose.’ Maxwell looked up at his man. As he feared, the lad didn’t know what a cliché was and he nodded vaguely before disappearing behind the green screen.
No sooner had the material stopped shaking than the Irish nurse was back, all flaming red hair and starch and belt. ‘Bath time,’ she announced. Maxwell was about to protest, when it suddenly crossed his mind that that belt might not be a nursing credential at all. What if Judy O’Grady here was seventh Dan of a seventh Dan? He’d taken one beating this weekend already; he really wasn’t up to another. So his sole effort of protest was to try to hide under the covers.
‘Jesus!’ Sylvia Matthews hauled open the front door of her flat and helped the walking wounded inside. She ran her fingers lightly over the purple ridge above Maxwell’s right eye, the blue swelling across his left jaw. Both his eyes were black and there was a plaster across the bridge of his nose – clearly a bridge too far. ‘Max, Max,’ and she cradled his head, ‘what happened to you?’
‘This is what you get,’ he slurred, ‘for trying to ride first class on British Rail without a first-class ticket.’
She helped him limp over to the settee and eased him down. ‘Where’ve you been?’ She fussed around him, the nurse in her taking over from the lover. The man she’d loved now for more years than she cared to remember lay broken in her living room, his body stiff and hurt, his eyes wild with pain.
‘Soho,’ he told he. ‘You should see the other guy’
‘Should I?’ she wondered aloud.
‘Not a mark on him. Actually, there were two of them.’
‘Soho, Max?’
He caught the whiff of disapproval in her voice. ‘Now, don’t come the Victorian matron with me, Matron. I got a lead on Alice Goode.’
‘A lead? Max, what are you getting into?’
‘Why, Nursie,’ he shook his head, ‘are you or are you not the one who got me embroiled when Jenny Hyde was killed?’
‘That was different,’ Sylvia flustered. ‘Jenny was one of your girls.’
‘And Alice was one of my colleagues,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘It’s the same thing.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ She plumped up the cushions for him. ‘If you were in Soho, Max, you were out of your league. And if Alice was there, so was she.’
‘Yes,’ Maxwell admitted, ‘Now, there, I think you’re right. I got onto a decidedly shady character who goes by the name of Gregory Villiers. Nice and aristocratic that – family name of the Dukes of Buckingham and so on. In fact, our Mr Villiers comes from down-town Athens unless I miss my guess – Greg the Greek – though he’s quite good at accents.’
‘Can I get you anything, Max?’ She was still appalled by the state of his face. ‘A drink?’
‘Southern Comfort would be dandy, Sylv,’ he said. ‘And one of those bendy straws.’
She crossed to the cupboard that passed for her drinks cabinet. ‘What’s Villiers’ link with Alice?’
‘He employed her last year, making porn movies.’
Sylvia stood up, bottle in her hand. ‘Really?’ Her eyes widened.
‘The girl needed money, apparently.’
‘Rubbish. Nobody needs money that badly.’ She poured him a drink.
‘Now, Nursie,’ he smiled as well as he could, ‘there’s nothing like a bit of salaciousness to reveal peoples’ prejudices.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, Max,’ she gave him the glass, ‘but this isn’t the Dark Ages: girls driven onto the streets by abject poverty. It’s like something out of Gaslight.’
Maxwell was too polite to point out how woefully off Sylvia was in her periodization. Still, it was probably meant as a figure of speech. ‘So maybe she enjoyed it,’ he suggested. Her look said it all. ‘I know,’ he stepped in as quickly as his swollen tongue would allow, ‘you’re the sort of person who goes around the London Underground sticking “This degrades women” all over the bra adverts, but you’ve got to accept that not everyone subscribes to that view’
‘That’s not fair, Max,’ she scolded him. ‘Anyway, they stopped doing those years ago. I just can’t believe it of Alice.’
‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ He rested his head back and closed his eyes. ‘We didn’t know Alice; any of us. She was a colleague, an NOT. I expected her to crawl along walls and avert her gaze as the great Maxwell swept past. Her role was to laugh at my jokes, be in awe of my dazzling brilliance – oh, and maybe learn how to be a teacher somewhere along the way. I don’t suppose I addressed more than a dozen words to her since she joined us.’
‘And now she’s dead!’
That was one of the things Maxwell hated about Sylvia Matthews. She had a habit of being right so bloody often. Actually, he didn’t hate it in Sylvia Matthews. It was exactly how he felt and he hated it in himself.
‘Are we saying,’ Sylvia sat at his feet, resting her head on his good knee, ‘that Alice was killed because of her porn activities?’
‘I don’t know’ He wanted to shrug, but that gesture was beyond him at that moment and he let it go. ‘But I’d probably place odds on it.’
‘Why now?’ she asked him. ‘I mean, was Alice still involved in all that?’
Again, I don’t know.’
‘Max, who did this to you?’ She was looking at his wounds again.
‘One of them was a black man the size of an outside lavatory. His name was Prince. The other one I only saw fleetingly. First they knocked me along the corridor and then down some steps, I think. I’d show you my bruises exc
ept it would embarrass you.’
‘I’m a nurse, remember.’ She looked at him knowingly, ‘But why did they do it?’
‘Orders from Villiers would be my guess. Perhaps he doesn’t like snoopers, or perhaps …’
‘Max,’ she looked at his dark-circled eyes, ‘you’ve got that old inscrutable look in your eyes. What is it?’
Maxwell gave her his Christopher Lee Fu Manchu. ‘Perhaps I got too close.’
‘You can say that again. Max, you must tell the police.’
‘I have, or rather they’ve already talked to me. Some fresh-faced kid still wet behind the ears interviewed me in hospital. It was a patrol car that picked me up – I think; it was all something of a blur. But how did he know?’
“The fresh-faced kid?’
Maxwell was propping himself up on his one good elbow. ‘No, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Where did we hear about Alice?’
‘Er …’
‘At the Devil’s Ladle,’ he reminded her. ‘Stewart, that officious prig of a proprietor, said she was some sort of tart.’
‘Was she?’
‘No. He was a bit off there. Although God knows how else she eked out her grant. The point is where did Stewart get his information?’
‘The papers?’
‘Nothing there.’ Maxwell shook his head as vigorously as he dared. ‘All the stories I read carried the same thing. Teacher at Leighford High. Most of them also carried Diamond’s official “No comment”. Looked really caring, that, didn’t it?’
‘Perhaps Stewart had heard some gossip,’ Sylvia offered.
‘Ah yes, Nursie, but the source. We historians always consider the source. Is it reliable? Does it show any signs of bias – and the other codswallop they invented when they dreamed up GCSE courses … how long ago was it now?’
‘We could always ask him,’ Sylvia said.
‘Mr and Mrs Ronay? No, I think we’ve blown our cover there, old girl. He wouldn’t give us the time of day. But …’ and he propped himself up still further, ‘… I know a woman who could.’
Monday mornings at Leighford High were something else. The foyer was full of Year Nine girls gossiping about what they had or had not done at the weekend and with whom and how – the graphic and feeble fumblings of adolescence. It all stopped, however, as Maxwell shuffled past them, his bandages contrasting nicely with his swarthy face. They stared at him in disbelief.
‘Good God, Max,’ Roger Garrett, the First Deputy, stepped aside in the main corridor as though Maxwell were a leper.
‘Thank you for your concern, Roger,’ the Head of Sixth Form mumbled. ‘Got caught in a revolving door at Allders. Bitch, isn’t it?’
‘Bloody ’ell, sir,’ was the next compassionate rejoinder.
‘Joseph.’ Maxwell nodded at the brick shithouse in Year Ten who blocked the stairway.
‘Me and Eric’ll sort him, sir, whoever it was panned your head,’ Joseph promised solemnly.
‘I’m sure you would.’ Maxwell couldn’t have put a sheet of paper between the boys’ biceps, standing as the lads were, shoulder to shoulder. ‘And if I had the bugger’s address, I’d send you round there, believe me. Now, off the stairs, ’cos you’re a fire hazard, know what I mean?’
The shoulders broke. Mad Max had asked. That was enough.
‘I should take more water with it next time, Max,’ was the cold comfort of the Ice Maiden, Deirdre Lessing, as she swept past him on the upper corridor.
‘You’d know, dear lady,’ he beamed, raising his hat with what bonhomie he could muster and he half fell into his office, careful to reach the soft chair before the floor reached him.
‘Max!’ Helen Maitland was the Deputy Head of Sixth Form; a French teacher who’d discovered that perennial pregnancy could get you away from the chalk face for months at a time. In common with most men, Maxwell thought there ought to be a law against it, but he was too much of a public schoolboy to say so. ‘What on earth happened?’
‘Not so much earth, my dear,’ Maxwell plonked his hat on the desk beside him, ‘more carpet, followed by stone steps, followed by narrow passageway. Helen, can you handle the UCAS Assembly today? The thought of explaining the university entrance process to the hundred herberts of Year Twelve is a little daunting for me this morning.’
‘Max,’ Helen sat next to him, ‘you ought to be home in bed.’
‘Aha,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘I bet you say that to all the boys.’
Helen’s face said it all. She lived for her own kids these days, not somebody else’s. Gareth had walked out on her, on them. There’d be no more pregnancies, no more maternity leave, no more going home to the strong arms and the discarded socks. But what did Maxwell know? The cantankerous old bastard was a bachelor. He’d probably never had a relationship in his life. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’ll do the Assembly. You go home. Roger will cover you.’
‘Now, there’s a prospect I don’t relish,’ Maxwell grimaced, ‘being covered by Roger Rabbit.’
‘Oh, Max.’ She’d crossed to the door, an armful of paper clutched across her chest. ‘I almost forgot. There was a phone call for you. About ten minutes ago.’
‘Oh, who?’
‘Don’t know. Ask Pamela.’
‘Who?’
‘The girl on the switchboard.’
‘Oh, Thingee. I do wish you’d be more accurate, Helen.’
‘Max.’ His Number Two had stopped in the doorway. ‘What happened to Alice? Really, I mean?’
‘Really?’ Maxwell hobbled across to his phone. ‘Someone killed her, Helen. That’s all I know’
‘No, Max,’ Helen shook her head. ‘I know you. You’re Mad Max. That’s not all you know’ And she exited with the heavy tread he’d learned to recognize in her year at the school, her great white blouse and oatmeal skirt reminding him again why the sixth form called her The Fridge.
‘Young, Count,’ Maxwell was dabbing the bruise on the ridge of his eyebrow with the stuff they’d given him when he discharged himself from hospital. ‘That’s all Thingee could remember.’ He paused and looked in the mirror to where his black and white Tom who-wasn’t-quite-a-Tom-any-more sat on the linen basket, flicking his tail in an irritated sort of way. Had he passed up a good night’s hunting for this? Who the Hell was Thingee?
‘You know,’ Maxwell read the beast’s mind again, ‘the girl on the switchboard. Apparently her name’s Pamela. There, now, I knew it was worth going in on a Monday, the things you find out.’ And he found himself singing through a thick lip the words of the old Wayne Fontana song ‘ “Pamela, Pamela, remember the days, of inkwells and apples and books and school plays.” Anyway, ow,’ his fingers had probed too far against his sensitive cheekbone, ‘the phone call came from a young male, Thingee didn’t know how old. She’s only a slip of a thingee herself, of course. Still it was odd.’
Maxwell turned to his pet, ‘Why, I don’t hear you ask? Because the caller said he had to talk to Mr Maxwell and that he was afraid no one else would do. That’s what Thingee’s note said. Unfortunately, punctuation isn’t her strong suit. Remember The List of Adrian Messenger, Count? Of course you do. Kirk Douglas is the baddie but half the cast are in disguise. Well, that bit where the Frenchman is remembering, for George C. Scott’s benefit, his conversation after the plane crash with the dying Messenger? It’s all to do with punctuation, really, the stresses on various words and so on. Insert the odd full stop, Count, and what do we have? “I have to talk to Mr Maxwell and I’m afraid no one else will do” – that could be my bank manager, my dentist or the man from the Forestry Commission telling me I can sponsor that sapling after all. But with that full stop, that little black spot that killed old Billy Bones, what do we have now? “I have to talk to Mr Maxwell and I’m afraid. No one else will do.’ That makes it one person only, Count. That makes it Ronnie Parsons.’
‘Mr Maxwell?’
The Head of Sixth Form didn’t know the voice at all, the one at the other end of the phone. ‘Hello?�
�
‘It’s Dave, Mr Maxwell. Dave Freeman, Hamilton’s Coaches.’
‘Mr Freeman,’ Maxwell’s mind was focusing now. He vaguely remembered the man wiping his fingers on his overalls.
‘Look,’ the voice faltered on the other end of the line, ‘I’ve been thinking about this business.’
‘You have?’ Maxwell was grateful to put his red pen down. He hadn’t read a bigger load of tosh on the causes of World War One since he’d been forced to read A. J. P. Taylor a long, long time ago.
‘Well, I mean, this Alice Goode business. It’s terrible, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve got girls myself
‘Yes,’ Maxwell was still in moving gently mode, ‘yes, it’s terrible.’
‘I hope you don’t mind me ringing you, at home, like.’
‘No,’ Maxwell assured him, reaching for a top-up to his Southern Comfort – it was all that made Year Ten marking bearable. ‘No, not at all.’
‘Well, the truth is,’ Freeman went on, ‘I feel responsible.’
‘No, no,’ Maxwell said, ‘how can that be?’
‘Well, it was my coach,’ the driver said. ‘When you’re behind the wheel of a ten-tonner like that, the passengers are your responsibility. Especially when they’re kids.’
‘Alice wasn’t a kid, Mr Freeman.’ Maxwell was looking for let-out clauses for the man.
‘She wasn’t much more,’ Freeman said. ‘Don’t you feel it too?’
Damn, thought Maxwell. Another Sylvia Matthews. His own conscience was talking to him on the other end of the receiver, reverberating around his brain. It was like that robot cop in the Phantom Tollbooth, the one that came from nowhere, belching exhaust and muttering ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we teachers have a saying, Mr Freeman – in loco parentis – in place of parents. That’s what we are. And you’re right. Alice Goode wasn’t much more than a kid. You know I should have been there?’
‘Yeah,’ Freeman said, ‘you told me.’
