by M. J. Trow
‘Perhaps they’d have found me wrapped up in lino if I had been.’
‘I don’t think so, Mr Maxwell,’ the driver told him. ‘Look … er … do you know the old Labour Club in Henshaw Street, back of the bus station?’
‘Yes,’ Maxwell did.
‘It’s a film club, now. Newly opened.’
‘Really? Are you a member?’
There was a pause. ‘Me?’
‘Didn’t you say you were into films? Picnic at Hanging Rock, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, I am,’ Freeman said, ‘but not films like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Mr Maxwell, you go along. You have a look for yourself. Have a good look, know what I mean?’
‘Mr Freeman?’ But the line had gone dead, like Alice Goode.
He had planned to call on her, but in the event she called on him. It was a little before midnight, the witching hour, and Peter Maxwell had nodded off over Sir Ron Dealing’s 16-19 Recommendations. The doorbell made him drop the thing with a jolt.
‘Sorry, Sir Ron,’ he bent as best he could to pick it up, ‘nothing personal,’ and he padded off down the open-plan stairs, promising himself for the umpteenth time that he must get an intercom gadget like Jean Hagger had.
‘You haven’t seen a black and white cat, have you?’ he asked the girl on his doorstep. ‘Sort of slow, sort of easy-go, smell under his nose?’
‘Christ, it’s true, then?’ Jacquie Carpenter was staring at the battered apparition in front of her.
‘This?’ Maxwell’s crooked smile was straightening all the time, ‘Self-inflicted. I’d just got so tired of being ignored in the staffroom. Now, I’m the centre of conversation.’
‘Mr Maxwell, I have to talk to you.’
‘Miss Carpenter, I’m really very happy about that,’ and he held the door open for her. ‘But what happened to “Max”?’
‘I’ve just read the Met reports passed to us at Leighford nick.’ She took in his face properly now that she could see it in the full light of his hall. ‘Could we?’ She flicked a glance at the front door.
‘Oh, sorry,’ and he closed it. ‘I didn’t think we were speaking any more.’
‘Look,’ she was in his hall now, searching for the words, the way, ‘I’m … I’m out of my depth with all this. I told you things I shouldn’t have. You,’ she jabbed a gentle finger into his chest, ‘are a difficult man to stop talking. I was wrong. And you were right. Could I sit down, please?’
‘Dear lady’ and he swept his arm up the stairs, ‘after you. And I promise not to look up your skirt. Tell me, is this visit an official one?’
At the top she turned to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Unless you’d care to become a Special?’
He frowned and sucked in his breath. On his list of priorities it was below joining the Methodists – way below.
‘As I thought.’ She plonked herself down on his disorganized settee and the rough pile of books slid everywhere, ‘Oh, God, sorry.’
‘How did you know?’ he asked her, shuffling through into his kitchen.
‘Know what?’
‘My marking technique. That’s what I do. I knock the books over and the ones at the bottom get four out of ten, the ones on the top get eight.’
She couldn’t see his face to know if he was joking or not. ‘Don’t you ever give more than eight?’ she asked.
He was back in a trice with two steaming cups of cocoa. ‘Never,’ he shuddered, the very idea appalling him. ‘Gets the little bastards excited, then blasé. History is too sophisticated a discipline to get full marks -1 leave that to a Mickey Mouse subject like Maths.’ He pointed to the mug in her hand, ‘That’s got two sugars with full cream milk – the most politically incorrect cocoa in the world. Get it down your neck. You look dreadful.’
‘I look dreadful?’ she laughed.
‘That’s better’ – he sat opposite her, cradling the mug in his hands – ‘you should do that more often. Laugh, I mean.’
‘In my job?’ she asked.
‘Aha,’ he managed a reasonably normal chuckle, ‘so it’s going to be the Who’s-Got-The-Worst-Job contest, is it? Ready? Fingers on buzzers. No conferring,’ he was already well into his Jeremy Paxman.
‘No.’ She was serious again. ‘What happened to you in Soho, Max?’
Max? Were his ears playing tricks? Had the beating dulled his brain?
‘I had an altercation,’ he told her.
‘I read the report,’ she reminded him. ‘You weren’t being terribly helpful. You’ll get a follow-up visit tomorrow, probably from Dick Hennessey. Needless to say, you haven’t seen me.’
‘Absolutely’ he nodded. He looked at her again, this pale, thin girl with the tired eyes. And he sighed. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘The truth. But,’ and he raised a grazed finger, ‘just as your visit is unofficial, so is this conversation. I went to the Devil’s Ladle.’
‘Where they found Alice’s body? Why?’
He shrugged as well as could be expected. ‘Because I’m a ghoul. Remember the crowds outside 25 Cromwell Street?’
She did. Night after night as solemn, shell-shocked policeman carried away the last mortal remains of the victims of Fred and Rose West, the television had shown lines of weirdoes, hoping for the worst, the nastiest.
‘No, you’re not.’ She dismissed it.
All right, then. I’m a sucker. Sylvia Matthews has me down as some latterday knight errant, the Don Quixote of Leighford High. So have you. The trouble is, I’m not sure who my Sancho Panza is. Is it you, Jacquie? Are you my right hand man?’
Jacquie Carpenter hadn’t read the book but she’d seen the musical. She shook her head. ‘I can’t get involved,’ she said.
‘Jacquie,’ he put his cocoa down, ‘you came to me in the first place, remember? And now you’ve come to me again. I need some help, for God’s sake; I don’t know which way you’ll jump. The bottom line is that I’m not very good at sleuthing. Sylvia thinks I’m in over my head. And Sylvia might be right. What has the Met got on Villiers, can you tell me?’
‘Who?’
‘Gregory Villiers,’ Maxwell repeated, as though for the record. ‘The charmer whom I suspect is largely responsible for my condition.’
She looked exasperated. ‘Max, you didn’t tell the Met this. You didn’t give them a name. They may be good, but they’re not psychic’
He’d lost the thread of all this. ‘Do you know how far they’ve got in the Alice Goode case?’ he asked her.
‘Nowhere, as far as I know. Cold trails. Brick walls.’
‘Yes,’ he felt his cheek, just to make sure it was still there, ‘I’ve met a few of those recently. But surely they’ve traced her old digs by now? Napier Road? William Shakespeare?’
‘I’m sorry, Max,’ Jacquie frowned, ‘If they have, they’re holding out on us. Who, if you avoid the obvious, is William Shakespeare?’
Maxwell tried to clear his head. Had he dreamed the London Institute where he posed as Alice Goode’s uncle? Of Napier Road, where he played the spy? He certainly hadn’t imagined Gregory Villiers or the meatballs who’d worked him over in a Soho alley.
‘Do your powers of arrest extend as far north as the Devil’s Punchbowl?’ he asked.
‘If they have to,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Because there’s a particularly shifty restaurateur whose collar I’d like you to feel at the earliest opportunity, that’s why’
9
Junior and Infant Schools aren’t the same as High Schools. The chairs are smaller and there’s less revolting graffiti in the loos. There’s not much to choose between the standards of spelling. It’s not just that the kids are less surly, more bubbly, omnipresent, but the teachers are different too. Like Maxwell’s colleagues, those of Jean Hagger had an air of resignation, world-weariness. But theirs was born of bum-wiping, pencil-sharpening, sticking bits of screwed-up tissue paper onto walls full of spring lambs, each one of them looking like a Chernobyl fallout in ter
ms of deformity.
Easter had already gone, but the ‘Easter Story’ still dominated the headlines in Jean Hagger’s classroom as Peter Maxwell sat gingerly on her desk, waiting for the woman to arrive at the end of her day. In the corner, a cluster of malevolent looking locusts crawled over each other to get nearest to the scorching heat of the light-bulb in their sweaty glass case. Around the room, he was pleased to note a historical time chart from the Stone Age to the assassination of J.F.K., the day the music died. You could tell a school that had recently been Ofsteded.
You could tell a school after Dunblane too. And no school would be the same again. Not since a lone gunman had wandered into a gym in Scotland and emptied a pistol magazine into a class and its teacher. Peter Maxwell had had to sign the visitors’ book and fill in the time. He was given a sticky Visitors’ label in bright yellow, like a Jew in Nazi Germany, and he was taken to Room Six by Bishop Billington’s answer to Thingee, the girl on the switchboard.
Thingee had told Jean Hagger that a Mr Maxwell was waiting.
‘What do you want?’ She swept past him with the air of someone who had been trapped between a double-glazing salesman and a Jehovah’s Witness.
‘To offer my condolences about Alice,’ he said. Mad Max had a way of disarming most people.
‘Thank you.’ She put what Maxwell would have called a Gladstone bag on a side table and rummaged about in it. ‘Do you?’
He declined the cigarette. ‘I’d rather go of something historical, thanks,’ he said. ‘The plague of Justinian, perhaps. Or off to Prague for a spot of defenestration.’
She lit up for herself. ‘I do have marking,’ she told him, waiting, flicking the noxious weed nervously from side to side of her brown fingers.
‘Of course.’ He eased himself back onto her desk. ‘I just wanted to talk about Alice.’
‘And I don’t,’ she told him, slamming a pile of books down on the table, ‘Ever since they found her, I’ve had the media on my doorstep, here at school, ringing me up. I’ve gone ex-directory now,’ she exhaled savagely. ‘Those bastards.’
‘I’m not a journalist,’ he reminded her.
‘No’ – she sat down, flicking open the first exercise book, looking at him hard – ‘I’m not just talking about journalists. Those scum from …’ and she stopped, checking herself, flicking glances at the door. ‘And you, I don’t know what your game is.’
‘Mrs Hagger,’ Maxwell closed to her, his black and swollen face inches from hers, ‘Jean, how can I persuade you we’re on the same side?’
She leaned back, searching that battered face, those sad eyes. ‘Are we?’ she asked him. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘Miss Hagger,’ a child’s voice broke the moment, and a ragged blond kid stood at the classroom door. ‘Can I get my ball now? Cor, what happened to you?’
‘Keith!’ she screamed at him. ‘How about a few manners?’
‘No, it’s all right.’ Maxwell raised his hand, smiling at the boy. ‘It’s a perfectly fair question. Keith, is it?’ The boy nodded.
‘Well, Keith, I was rather rude to Mrs Hagger the other day’ He watched the boy’s eyes widen. Then the kid turned to his teacher, ‘Tell you what, Miss,’ he said. ‘You keep the ball, yeah? I don’t want it no more.’ And he looked at Maxwell once more before making for the door. ‘You want me to feed the locusts tomorrow, Miss?’
‘Thank you, Keith,’ she said, ‘I’d like that.’ And he was gone. She looked at Peter Maxwell.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘Keith knows you didn’t really do this.’
‘Oh?’ She decided to humour him. ‘How do you know?’
‘How old is he?’
‘Nine,’ she told him.
‘In these days of Enlightened Video Watching and Abandonment of Parental Responsibility, he’ll have seen Dirty Harry, where good old nutcase Andy Robinson claims Clint Eastwood beat him up. Eastwood denies it, saying that Robinson’s clobbered face looks too damned good.’
For a moment, Peter Maxwell thought that Jean Hagger would throw him out. Instead, he saw a sight he’d never seen before and perhaps wouldn’t again – Jean Hagger laughing. ‘What did happen?’ she asked.
‘I was beaten up,’ he told her. ‘Asking too many questions about Alice Goode.’
He watched her smile fade. And she gazed again into his face. ‘You look like I feel,’ she said. And he sat back, waiting for her to go on. She got up and wandered to the window. ‘They’re not a bad bunch, this lot,’ she said, ‘my current Year Six. You’ll have to watch out for Fiona Grayson, bed-wetter, tea leaf. Jamie McFee’s quite a handful for us, but you’ll cope better at the High School. Then there’s Keith you just met …’
‘Alice Goode,’ Maxwell said softly, ‘How will we cope with her?’
And Jean Hagger’s back was still turned to him as he heard her say, ‘Alice Goode I loved. She was like …’ and he saw her shoulders square, ‘… well, how would you know?’
It surprised them both when Mad Max put a gentle hand on the woman’s arm. He felt her stiffen. She hadn’t felt a man’s hand in so long, she’d forgotten how to react. ‘Try me,’ he said. And he turned her round.
For a moment she couldn’t face him, couldn’t look him in the eye, then she took a deep breath. ‘We were lovers,’ she said, ‘Alice and I, not just flatmates. There was something … small about her, tiny and vulnerable. She was like … like an eggshell.’ He saw a single tear splash her cheek. ‘That sounds silly, doesn’t it?’
‘She returned your love?’ Maxwell asked, a little out of his depth if he was honest.
‘Oh, yes.’ Jean closed her eyes, choking back the urge to cry, to scream.
‘Was there – this is difficult for you, Jean – was there anybody else?’
The junior school teacher blinked, confused, lost. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, of course not. Why do you ask?’
‘Men, I mean.’
She shook herself free of his spell, the old Maxwell charm offensive. ‘There were no men in Alice’s life,’ she said. ‘Only those sad bastards … I’d have known. I mean, she wasn’t a virgin or anything like that. It’s just that she preferred women. She preferred me.’
‘Did she ever mention a Gregory Villiers?’ he asked, but Jean had gone back to her books. He was losing her.
‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘I don’t recall that name.’
‘William Shakespeare?’
‘Are you winding me up?’ she frowned.
‘No. Honestly.’
‘No,’ she shook her head again, ‘I’d have remembered.’
‘Of course. What about Carly Drinkwater? Georgianna Morris?’
‘No. Look, Mr Maxwell, who are these people?’
Maxwell sighed and Maxwell shrugged. ‘Ghosts,’ he said, ‘shadows of a life. The more I think about it, the less real they become.’
‘Seen McKellan’s Richard III yet, sir?’ It was Alec Crossman, Leighford’s resident eccentric, asking the questions.
‘No, dear boy.’ Maxwell swept past him on his way to an Assembly. ‘Any good?’
‘Brill. Encapsulating as it does the quintessence of Hitler’s decadent Reich and Shakespeare’s sense of evil.’
‘How does he get away with the “My Kingdom for a horse” bit then?’ Maxwell wanted to know.
‘Jeep gets stuck on the battlefield,’ Crossman told him.
‘It’s a bugger,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘By the by, oh-you-whose-excuses-for-missing-deadlines-are-legion, where’s that little number you promised me on the rise and fall of the Chartists?’
‘Ah, power-cut, sir.’ There wasn’t a glimmer of remorse in Crossman’s eye.
‘New York, Seventy-nine?’
‘Probably,’ Crossman nodded, ‘But also Tottingleigh, last night. Nearly wiped my entire disc’
‘You know I shall be checking with the National Grid,’ Maxwell said.
‘Of course, sir,’ Crossman smiled, ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
‘That odd little place. The Leighford Film Club, Henshaw Street, back of the bus station. Surprised you aren’t a member, sir. My revered papa is.’
And the denizens of Year Twelve fell silent as the Great Man hobbled in to throw more of this pearls before them.
‘UCAS,’ he said, ‘another four letter word to add to your dismally limited vocabularies.’
Of all the names Peter Maxwell had rattled off to Jean Hagger, hoping for a response, a flicker, something, none burned into his own soul more than that of Georgianna Morris. But how do you find the victim of a madman? Answer – you talk to those whose job it is to deal with madmen. You talk to the law. To be precise, Peter Maxwell talked to Jacquie Carpenter.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not this one, Max. Leave this one alone. She’s been through enough.’
Maxwell rested the receiver against his chest. ‘She’s playing hard to get again, Count,’ he told the cat, who liked to be kept informed of these things. ‘I thought you wanted my help,’ he spoke down the phone.
‘Look, it takes training,’ he heard her say, ‘I told you – we have people who specialize in rape cases. That’s all they do. The girl can’t remember anything.’
‘Does your boss still think there’s no connection, between these abductions, I mean?’
‘I haven’t raised it with him again. I’m waiting for the right moment.’
‘Then no one’s talked to Miss Morris about it?’
‘About Alice? No.’
‘Then how do you know, Jacquie?’ Maxwell caught himself waving his arms around, like some demented Italian, and stopped himself. ‘You can’t know, can you? Now, do we have an address?’
‘Yes, but … my career’s on the line as it is. I can’t …’
‘Jacquie. I came damn close to being steam-rollered the other day on behalf of Alice Goode. I hope that wasn’t all for nothing. More importantly, if your theory’s right, that chummie has killed twice and missed once, who’s to say he won’t do it again?’
“The last time we spoke you wanted to arrest a restaurateur.’
