by M. J. Trow
‘Oh, come on, Max …’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’ve been down this road before, haven’t we, you and I?’
‘You and I, kemosabe?’ she said.
Maxwell laughed. He loved it when Jacquie came out with phrases she only knew from him. The Lone Ranger and Tonto had been his Saturday morning viewing, not hers.
‘What does Hall think?’ she asked him.
‘Do you know,’ he smiled. ‘I was just going to ask you that very question.’
There was a pause. Maxwell knew what that meant. ‘Oh, no.’ Yep, that was the response he’d expected. ‘Out of the question.’
‘Why?’ It was a whining, wheedling tone Peter Maxwell had learned from Years Eight and Nine. His answer to them was invariably because I said so, sunshine. Any problem with that, kiss your arse goodbye.
‘Because.’ Jacquie was emphatic, rummaging in her cupboard for the cocoa.
‘Go on,’ he lapsed into his Private Pike. ‘Go on, Captain Mainwaring, why? Why?’
‘Stupid boy,’ she growled dutifully. ‘Because Hall is there with you. And I’m here … without you. I mind about that, by the way …’
‘Me too,’ he smiled. ‘Join me, then.’
‘You what?’
‘Hop in the car tomorrow. Tell Hall he forgot his thermos flask or something and you’ve kindly brought it for him.’
‘That’s believable.’ She switched on the kettle.
‘I need someone on the inside, Jacquie,’ he told her, knowing she was already shaking her head.
‘I can’t, Max.’ It was a well-worn track in their mutual CD. ‘And it’s nothing to do with ethics this time. Hall’s on secondment on his own. He’s got all the back up he needs your end from the local nick. If I turned up, he’d just turn me round again. Result? No help to you and a double bollocking for me; one from Hall and another from my DI.’
‘Doesn’t promotion give you any power?’ But he already knew the answer to that one. A man doesn’t get to be Head of Sixth Form for a thousand years and not realize where the corridors of power are. Peter Maxwell would never make the Senior Management Team – he’d trodden on too many toes and ruffled too many feathers and used too many metaphors over the years.
‘I’m a DS, for Christ’s sake,’ she chuckled. ‘Not Commissioner of the Met.’
‘Ah,’ he smiled. ‘It’s early days.’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘What?’
‘Hall. He knows you’re there. He’s bound to want to talk to you. Get some information back.’
‘Like who killed Bill Pardoe, Chief Inspector?’
‘If that’s the information you want. Rest assured, the Fourth Estate will be asking.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘The paparazzi.’
‘Have they been around, yet?’
‘I haven’t seen them. I expect George Sheffield has gun emplacements on the gates and searchlights on the cricket pavvy. Private schools are always paranoid about their reputations.’
There was a silence between them, one that even at either end of a phone call they were comfortable with. ‘There’s one more thing, Jacquie,’ he said, reaching a page in the Grimond’s glossy where lads were enthusiastically climbing wall bars. ‘How up are you on the gay porn scene?’
‘Not my favourite bedtime reading,’ she told him. ‘Why?’
‘There was a mag I caught a brief sight of in Bill Pardoe’s office … oops, study.’
‘What was it?’
‘Well, that’s just it,’ Maxwell said. ‘I didn’t see the title. It was open at a page with what appeared to be two naked lads wrestling.’
‘Colour?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see any text?’
‘Don’t think so.’ He frowned, trying to remember. ‘Is it important?’
‘Not necessarily. But lack of text implies foreign import. It’ll be Dutch or Swedish. I’ll have a discreet word with our Dirty Squad, if you like.’
‘Thanks, darling,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it. You take care, now. I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Why?’ she asked, wide-eyed, ‘when my name’s Jacquie?’
Maxwell’s groan said it all, but he was already dialling another number. ‘Sylv?’ The matron’s voice had sounded odd.
‘Jesus, Max. Do you know what time it is?’ She’d rolled over, peering from under the duvet, trying to sound coherent and to focus on her bedside clock at the same time.
‘Damn,’ he snapped his fingers. ‘It’s probably quarter-past-twelve there. I keep forgetting the time zone thing. It’s only half-past-three here. Soz.’
‘You utter shit,’ she yawned. ‘What’s the matter? I do have eighty Heaf tests to sort out in the morning.’
‘I know, sweetheart,’ he cooed. ‘I’m out of order, I know that, but I really need to talk to your Mr Graham.’
‘He’s not exactly mine, Max,’ she scolded him. ‘He’s probably asleep.’
‘Ah, not coping, eh?’
‘Would you?’ Sylvia Matthews was not at her best in the wee-wee hours of the morning. ‘I tell you, talking to Tony has opened my eyes about Leighford High School, and no mistake.’
‘That be mutiny, Nurse Matthews,’ he rasped out his best Robert Newton. ‘“Them’s that die’ll be the lucky ones.” Wake him up, will you, Sylv? It’s important.’
He waited while she tutted off into the middle distance. There was the rattle of a door and a thud, followed by a ‘bugger’ as the school nurse collided with something on her landing. Maxwell heard muffled voices and lighter feet dancing on the stairs.
‘Hello?’ A male voice had picked up.
‘Tony?’
‘Max? What’s up?’
‘You haven’t heard … from Grimond’s, I mean?’
‘No. Should I? What’s the problem?’
‘Look, Tony. Sit down, will you?’
‘Max,’ he could almost hear the frown in the man’s voice. ‘I’m standing in the bedroom of my landlady wearing not a great deal and although she is a perfect lady, I cannot vouch for the propriety of the situation. What’s happened?’
‘There isn’t an easy way of doing this, Tony. It’s Bill Pardoe.’
‘Bill? What about him?’
‘He’s dead.’
For a moment, so was the line. ‘Oh, my God.’ Tony Graham was sitting down now, as Maxwell had suggested, perched on Sylvia’s bed in the lamplight.
‘I’m sorry. I thought Dr Sheffield would have been in touch.’
‘Er … um … yes. Yes, so would I. What was it? Heart?’
‘He jumped, Tony. From the roof of Tennyson.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
‘Look, I know this is a shock for you. I don’t know yet how everybody’s coping. Will you be coming back?’
‘I suppose I’ll have to. Somebody will have to run Tennyson. What about you?’
‘I’m seeing Sheffield tomorrow. I’d like to stay on.’
‘You would? Why?’
‘Tony, you must have known Bill Pardoe pretty well.’
‘Well, not really. Okay, I was his junior in Tennyson, but only for the last year. This is pretty unbelievable, actually. No,’ he was talking to Sylvia now, partly covering the receiver with his hand, ‘No, I’m fine. Just some bad news. Thanks, Sylvia.’ Sylvia Matthews knew the signs. She’d been on bereavement counselling courses. But Tony Graham was public school. He seemed calm, collected; perhaps they took things like this differently there.
‘Would you say,’ Maxwell asked Graham, ‘he was the suicidal type?’
‘Max, I don’t know what the suicidal type is. There were rumours, of course.’
‘Rumours?’ Maxwell was all ears.
‘No, look, I’m not going down that road. It’s all just innuendo and I’m not even getting into it. I’ll see Diamond in the morning and get to you by midday. All right? How’s John taking it?’
‘John?’
‘John Selwyn, Capta
in of House. He and Bill were close.’
‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’m not sure how I’d have coped when I was eighteen, not with something like this.’
‘Christ, Max,’ Graham muttered. ‘Age has got nothing to do with it. I’m thirty next month and I’m shaking like a bloody leaf. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight, Max.’
‘Goodnight, Tony.’
He waited until Sylvia came on the line. ‘Can you tell me, Max?’ she asked, as quietly as she could.
‘Tony’s immediate supremo,’ the Head of Sixth Form told her, ‘apparently killed himself last night.’
‘Oh, how awful.’
‘Look after him, Sylv. There are a lot of Leighford colleagues I’d cheerfully strangle with their own underwear, but seeing them lying dead at the bottom of A-Block is a completely different story.’
It was that hour again; the one at which Maxwell had been jolted awake the night before. He forced his eyes to focus on the digital green: two forty-five. He lay on his back for a while, staring at the blackness of the ceiling. He’d got his bearings during the day. Bill Pardoe, Lord of Tennyson House, had left the parapet diagonally above the room in which Maxwell lay. His study and its accompanying flat occupied the floor below. On his way back after meeting Jenkins, he’d tried to gauge the direction of the noises he’d heard twenty-four hours ago from now. His own stair ended in his room, an L-shaped contrivance not unlike his rooms at Jesus all those years ago in the Granta days. For Bill Pardoe to have walked up to the roof, he would have had to have taken the next staircase, the one that led from the corridor. He would have passed the bottom of Maxwell’s spiral and three, perhaps four doors before he reached them. He couldn’t have come up the other way because the corridor ended in solid wall.
There’d been nothing out of the ordinary up on the leads. No tell-tale marks of a scuffle. No obvious footprints. And anyway, Maxwell reflected as he lay there in his bed, Bill Pardoe was a large man and reasonably fit. Who could have dragged him all the way up to the roof in the dark? And how could they be sure they’d cleared up behind them? Drag a dead man, drag a unconscious man and you’d leave heel marks. Besides, the SOCO team had been up there already, their heads bobbing up and down on the parapet and glancing down to the quad like a latter day team of Isaac Newtons testing gravity. They would have found prints if there were any. All that day, when he wasn’t bored to death in various classes, he’d watched Henry Hall’s men going about their macabre business. The men in the white suits measured, photographed, bagged, talking in monotones and whispers.
Walls, especially in a school, have ears. Maxwell knew that. What he didn’t know is why he got out of bed at that unusual hour at the dead of the night and why he didn’t switch on his bedside lamp. Come to that, he didn’t know why he twitched his curtain aside. But he did, nevertheless.
There was no moon tonight to lend a silvered Unreality to the rooftops. He could make out the police marquee, a ghostly white virtually below. He found himself gripping the mullion stone at what he saw next. What appeared to be a funeral procession was winding its way across the quad, past the chapel and out across the First Eleven’s hallowed turf. They were soldiers, ramrod straight in their khaki and berets, not unlike the melancholy troop that probably laid Edward Thomas in the Arras clay. Between the six, arms locked across each other’s shoulders, they carried a coffin, draped with what looked, even in the darkness, like the Grimond’s flag, the gold lions on the sable field. Eeriest of all, they made no sound. Maxwell squinted to see their boots. Army issue ought to be clattering on that tarmac, but there was no sound at all. It was just as if someone had pressed the mute on their TV remote. He watched them until they’d vanished beyond the elms that ringed the fields, sloping down to the lake. Then he went back to bed. But not to sleep.
The chaplain did the honours the next morning, saying a few words over the missing body of Bill Pardoe. He was a large, balding man with a silver tongue and a voluminous cassock. It was like a scene from Lyndsey Anderson’s If. Maxwell half-expected the padre to emerge out of a desk drawer any minute and Malcolm McDowell to leap down the aisle spraying everybody with machine gun bullets. But a lunatic had done that already in a school. For real. At a place called Dunblane. The Headmaster was standing in the chaplain’s place now, like God in a pulpit, staring down at the massed rows of his flock, immaculate in his gown and his dark suit and his black tie.
‘We will all miss Mr Pardoe,’ his voice rang out high and firm, with a power that belied his wiry stature, ‘and that is right. But life must go on. We have all learned a lesson from what happened yesterday. None of us is invulnerable. None of us is here for ever. It’s a lesson worth noting. It may be this is the hardest one you’ll ever learn at Grimond’s.’
His cold grey eyes raked them all. ‘What happened must make us stronger,’ he told them. ‘Make us one. We are a good school, a proud school. In the days and weeks ahead, it may be that you will hear unkind things, cruel things. It may be you are asked difficult questions by the police. You must talk to no one else. Not the newspapers, not even your parents at this stage. Day pupils will have a harder time of it than boarders. But I remind you all of your loyalties, to yourselves, to Grimond’s and to Mr Pardoe. For whom now, a moment’s silence …’ and he bowed his head.
Peter Maxwell felt like Charlton Heston’s El Cid, in the film of the same name, standing alone against the guilty King Alfonso. All the other Castilians grovelled to their liege lord – the Cid, sans peur and sans reproche, could not. So now, Maxwell’s head remained unbowed. He watched the blazered rows, the solemn, still uncomprehending faces. Here and there shoulders shook and arms furtively crept out for comfort.
‘Show some respect, for God’s sake,’ a voice hissed next to him. ‘You might not have known Bill Pardoe, but that’s rather beside the point, isn’t it?’
Maxwell turned to his accuser. She was mid-forties with a mass of wild, red hair and a Cambridge gown. Her head was down but her eyes were everywhere.
‘Thank you.’ Sheffield broke the silence. ‘Mr Larson will dismiss you.’ He paused on the top step of the chaplain’s pulpit. ‘Tuesday. Business as usual, please, everybody.’ And there was an audible breath as he clattered down the aisle, gown flying in his wake and backed by the prefects of Tennyson and Dickens and Kipling and Austen, glittering in coloured ties and silver braid.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs …’ Maxwell turned to the redhead.
‘Miss,’ she snapped.
‘Of course,’ Maxwell smiled. He hadn’t heard such a convincing Dick Emery in years. ‘I meant no disrespect to Bill Pardoe, I assure you.’
‘So why didn’t you bow your head?’
‘I’ve got this neck problem,’ Maxwell smiled at
‘No doubt this is not how you do things in Dropout Comprehensive or wherever you come from.’
‘No,’ Maxwell told her. ‘Not exactly. And that’s Leighford, by the way. Leighford High.’ He held out a hand as the ranks began to file past. ‘I’m Peter Maxwell.’
Her green eyes flickered in hesitation, then she managed an apology. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re all a bit on edge. I’m Maggie Shaunessy. I’m Head of Austen House.’
‘Miss Shaunessy.’
She turned to go as her girls trooped out. Then she stopped. ‘Look, er … Mr Maxwell. I feel … oh dear, I’m not good at this. I’ve got a free now. Would you care for some coffee? I owe you that at least.’
Maxwell smiled. ‘Coffee would be nice,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘I can’t guarantee that. Cassandra.’
A beautiful girl with eyes a man could drown in swung to her side. ‘Miss Shaunessy?’ Cassandra was tall and elegant in her silver-braided Prefect’s blazer and her neat, pleated skirt. Next to her, Maggie Shaunessy looked like an unmade bed.
‘Mr Maxwell will be taking coffee with me in Northanger. Tell Dr Sheffield I’ll be along later, will you?’
‘Of course, Mis
s Shaunessy,’ and the girl was gone.
‘Is this some kind of fact-finding tour, Mr Maxwell?’ the Housemistress asked. ‘Your being at Grimond’s?’
‘Max,’ he said. ‘Call me Max. In a way. But it’s all rather eclipsed now, isn’t it?’
He walked with her across the quad and between the red brick buildings that housed the Art Department. ‘I suppose it is,’ she said. ‘God, it’s unbelievable. This way.’
Austen House was very definitely not part of old Jedediah Grimond’s grand design. It looked very eighties, but the pale pink of the bricks showed a real attempt to make it blend with the original. Maggie Shaunessy led Maxwell up a broad open-plan staircase lined with vast oil canvasses of girlie subjects. Then they were in the rather pleasant suite of rooms she called Northanger, all plants and air and light. Rowing trophies lined the corridor and ancient shields and cups shone silver in glass-fronted cabinets.
‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘Not exactly an abbey, is it? But it’s in keeping with Jane Austen. The trophies are all from St Hilda’s.’
‘You teach English?’
‘For my sins,’ she trilled. The Killarney brogue was there still. Overlaid perhaps with Benenden and Girton, but there all the same. She busied herself with the coffee makings. Not for Austen House the clapped out kettles of Leighford. This was a rather suave espresso maker, puffing and bubbling as it went through its motions.
‘You knew Bill Pardoe well?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I’m from St Hilda’s you see. We only joined Grimond’s two years ago. I was Head of Sixth there.’
‘Dear lady,’ Maxwell sat up on the soft, pastel chair she’d given him, saluting a kindred spirit when he saw one. ‘There aren’t many of us left.’
She laughed. ‘You too? I miss it. I wasn’t sure I’d be very good with the little ones. Eleven and so on. It’s a terrible age. Look,’ her eyes dropped as she fought for words, ‘what I said about Dropout Comprehensive … I didn’t mean …’
He held up his hand, shaking his head. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘If you went there, it would probably reinforce your view.’
