by M. J. Trow
‘Oh, Christ,’ he heard a male voice. ‘Oh yes. Cassandra. Yes.’
It was a voice he thought he knew.
7
He heard the scratching again that night, softer this time and nearer to his door. The time was wrong too, not two something but nearer five and he hadn’t long fallen asleep. He thought it was part of his dream at first, that Dierdre Lessing, the Fata Morgana of Leighford High School, was running her Nosferatu nails down his blackboard. He woke up sweating, a faint pounding in his head. Then he heard it again.
This time, he didn’t bother with the view from the window, whatever that view may give him this me. This time he wrenched open the door and trod on something hard and sharp. ‘Shit,’ he hissed in the darkness, although the pain told him at once that his diagnosis was wrong. He grovelled on the carpet and stumbled back into is room, holding whatever it was up to the light under his lamp. A cassette, ninety minutes play and with nothing written on it. Surely not Tony Graham giving him a sneak-preview of tomorrow’s French lesson with the Upper Sixth? If Peter Maxwell had been Batman, he’d have had a cassette player on his trusty Utility Belt. As it was he’d have to wait until morning.
Actually, Mr Maxwell, at Grimond’s we don’t encourage staff to bring coffee into the classroom. It’s dangerous and smacks of sloppiness.’
‘Quelle fromage,’ beamed Maxwell, but the bon mot was lost on Stella Cousins, the Head Modern Languages, a steel-haired blue stocking who might actually have been older than Maxwell and he carried on drinking. ‘I’ve come to have a look at Mr Graham’s lesson,’ he said.
‘Ah, I see.’ Stella Cousins was of the old, old school. A teacher from St Hilda’s, she realized that women now had the vote and padded shoulders and so on, but her own dear Mama had told her that, deep down, Papa knew best, so at the merest hint of an obstacle, she tended to defer to men. ‘Well, you won’t interrupt, will you? The Upper Sixth are off to Avignon week after next and Mr Graham’s working on the dialect. It’s all about langue d’oeil and langue d’oc, you know.’
Maxwell knew. He’d cut his teeth on Albigensian crusade and was the only person still alive to have bought the single of almost the same name by Dominique, the Singing Nun. And anyone more likely to end up in the dock than this frosty old matron, the visiting Head of Six Form had yet to meet. It was with something a relief that he caught sight of Tony Graham wrestling his way in with an armful of exercise books. ‘Let me help you with those, Mr Graham.’
The acting head of Tennyson took in situation at a glance. ‘Stella driving you to drink already?’ he whispered, smirking, passing bundle of books to Maxwell.
‘You might have warned me,’ Maxwell hissed.
‘Ah, she’s Grimond’s secret weapon,’ Graham told him, leading the way into a classroom. ‘I’m surprised Dr Sheffield doesn’t just unleash her on those people on the gate.’
Three or four sixth formers, in their braided prefects’ blazers, were ambling into the room, positioning themselves at computers and adjusting headphones. One of them Maxwell knew. It was the plain, heavy girl he’d seen crying buckets the day before. He smiled at her. ‘You okay now?’ he asked. She ignored him.
‘To work, mes enfants,’ Graham commanded. ‘Helen, let me have that Voltaire by week today, will you? Time and tide, you know.’
It was debatable whether Helen knew much at all by the expression on her bovine face, but the key difference, Maxwell had realized, between his kids and Grimond’s is that the Grimond’s people had the panache to look as if they knew. ‘Wander round, Max, if you like. It won’t be chalk and talk today. By the way, can you join us in Tennyson tonight? Film Club.’
‘Delighted,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘What are you showing?’
‘Witchfinder General.’
‘Ah,’ the Head of Sixth Form beamed. ‘Dear old Mad Vince at his maddest.’
‘John,’ Graham caught the lad’s eye. ‘Can I have a word?’ John Selwyn, the Captain of Tennyson, looked very different from Maxwell’s previous sightings of him. He’d first seen him in his regulation Grimond pyjamas, directing his House away from the body of Bill Pardoe. Yesterday he’d seen him losing his temper behind his fencing mask and beating seven bells out of the lovely Cassandra. And last night? Well, Peter Maxwell hadn’t really seen John Selwyn last night, but he had a pretty good idea he’d heard him being altogether gentler with the girl. Then again, in the dark, voices could be deceptive. And he wasn’t absolutely sure.
‘Hi,’ Maxwell perched on the desk next to PC of the plain girl. ‘What are you doing?’ asked good-naturedly.
‘Logging on,’ said the girl, with undisguised contempt, wondering what sort of idiot this man was.
‘Ah, yes, of course,’ Maxwell beamed, the man to whom a spreadsheet was something you had on a picnic. He held out his hand. ‘I’m Peter Maxwell, by the way.’
She looked at it as though Maxwell had just exposed himself and touched his fingers in most cursory of ways.
‘And you are?’ It was like drawing teeth.
‘Janet Boyce,’ she told him.
‘You’re Cassandra’s friend?’
He watched Janet turn the colours of rainbow. Her eyes flashed fire, in any direction but his. Then her hand was in the air. ‘Sir!’
Tony Graham drifted away from the far corner where he was talking House to his Captain. ‘Yes, Janet. What?’ Maxwell knew that tone well. Clearly Janet Boyce was someone who would try the patience of a saint.
‘I can’t work here, sir. I’m being distracted.’ Her mouth was a sullen slit in her large, now pallid face.
‘Janet …’
‘That’s all right,’ Maxwell cut in. ‘I’m being nuisance. Mr Graham, do you have a spare cassette player?’
‘Of course, Mr Maxwell. Homework?’
Maxwell smiled. ‘It is actually,’ and he patted the tape in his jacket pocket. ‘Something I forgot to check earlier.’
‘John,’ he beckoned the lad over. ‘Show Mr Maxwell the studio, will you? Cassette players aplenty there, Mr Maxwell.’
‘Thanks.’
John Selwyn was a head taller than Peter Maxwell with a thatch of curly brown hair he probably longed to be straight. He had that patrician disdain that is born of money and the careless assurance that comes with having a nose like Basil Rathbone’s.
‘In here, Mr Maxwell.’ He switched on the light in a small windowless room. A fan hummed into life. ‘We call this the hotel loo,’ Selwyn confided, ‘for obvious reasons.’
‘Loo?’ Maxwell raised both eyebrows.
Selwyn grinned. ‘Well, bog, actually.’
‘That’s more like it,’ Maxwell smiled, transported instantly to his own school days when no one wept except the willow. ‘You’ve got quite a right arm on you there, young man.’
‘Hmm? Oh, the bout. I lost my cool. That was unforgivable. It’s not like me.’
‘Still,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘You and Cassandra probably kissed and made up later, eh?’
Selwyn’s smile seemed somehow less, but the answer was firm, the gaze still steady. ‘We’re the best of chums, yes.’
Chums, mused Maxwell. This post-pubescent little shit was taking the piss, going all ’thirties o him. Still, enough boats were being rocked a Grimond’s, especially last night in the boat-house He’d bide his time before rocking any more.
‘Cassette players aplenty,’ Selwyn said and bowed out, closing the door behind him.
What he heard when he’d worked out the gadgetry made Peter Maxwell’s skin crawl. He’d heard the tone before, mocking, taunting. Then, it had been the Geordie hoaxer claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper – ‘I’m Jack.’ And he’d heard it on the radio, on the television, on specially recorded free-phone numbers. This accent was decidedly Home Counties, but it was weird, distorted, as though the words were delivered through a sock. ‘We know about you, Bill,’ the tape whirred. ‘The little boys. We’ve got your number. The whole school knows about your dirty little habits. What with the boo
ks and the showers. I don’t know how you can live with yourself. Why don’t you do the decent thing? Why don’t you end it all? After all you’re no use, are you?’
The hum continued, the mic still on, but no one speaking. Then there was heavy breathing rapid, rhythmic and a stifled snigger. Silence Maxwell rewound it, played it again and a third time. He knew what it was. But he needed a second opinion.
He was gratified to note that Grimond’s had it knot of clandestine smokers too, just like Leighford. They were probably Gauloises or something even more ostentatiously exotic, but he had neither the time nor the interest to find out. The skulking culprits cupped their ciggies behind their hands in that sullen, guilty, hormonal teenage way as ‘the enemy’ loomed into view. Maxwell cut across the sloping ground that led to the cricket pavilion and found her waiting.
‘God, Max, it’s freezing out here.’ Jacquie’s breath snaked out on the lunchtime air. ‘I feel like a schoolgirl again with all this pussyfooting around. What’s going on?’
‘You got my note, obviously,’ he said, uncoiling a set of headphones from his pocket. ‘Sorry about the melodrama, but I wanted you to hear this before Hall does. Put these on.’
She shrugged and did as she was told. He clicked on the battery operated cassette player and waited. Grimond’s children wandered in the distance under the limes, stuffed with Mrs Oakes’ ratatouille and spotted dick. The more studious huddled in windy corners swotting and sweating for a Physics test that the afternoon would bring. The studs swapped unlikely bonking stories, looking wistfully at the girls of Austen House, but always from a safe distance. Snatches of their universal dialogue reached Maxwell, leaning on the pavvy post as he was. Were it not for the cut-glass accents, he could have been back at Leighford.
‘Gagging for it, she was … right there, in the living room … just as well her parents were away … four times, yeah … oh, yeah, nice girls swallow all right …’
‘Jesus.’ Jacquie was frowning, pulling off the headphones as Maxwell read the ancient graffiti carved into the woodwork. He’d never heard that about Mr Chamberlain. ‘Max, where did you get this?’
He turned to sit beside her on the hard wood of the seat worn smooth by the flannelled bums o. First Elevens over the years. ‘Outside my door in the wee-wee hours. A calling card.’
‘Did you see who left it?’
He shook his head. Then nodded in the direction of the school. ‘One of them,’ he said.
‘A kid?’
‘Kid, member of staff, dinner lady, bedder,’ he shrugged. ‘Who knows. What do you make of it?’
‘Distorted voice, obviously, but definitely male.’
‘Age?’
It was Jacquie Carpenter’s turn to shrug. ‘Could be anything from fifteen to fifty.’
‘Addressed to Pardoe,’ Maxwell was thinking aloud.?
‘“We know about you, Bill”,’ Jacquie was quoting. ‘Presumably. But where’s this been? We didn’t find anything like this in Pardoe’s study.’
‘Of course not,’ Maxwell said. ‘He wouldn’t want it broadcast on the school radio, would he? An everyday story of paedophile folk. “The whole school knows”,’ Maxwell was quoting now. ‘Do they? Anybody you’ve spoken to given you an inkling?’
‘That Pardoe was not as other Housemasters?’ Jacquie was shaking her head. ‘No. Oh, wait. There was a photograph.’
‘A photograph?’ Maxwell turned to her.
‘Hall’s got it in the Incident Room.’ Jacquie was trying to focus, to see it in her mind’s eye. ‘It was of a boy.’
‘A Grimond’s boy?’
She shook her head. ‘No uniform. Just a plain grey jumper, I think.’
‘What colour was his hair?’
‘His hair? Good God, Max, I don’t know. Er … blond, I think. Why?’
‘Michael Helmseley, Head of Classics – have you talked to him yet?’
Jacquie hadn’t.
‘He told me about a photograph. It was of a woman and a boy. He’d seen Pardoe looking at it in his study. Evidently, Pardoe didn’t want it noised abroad, whatever it was. Stashed it away as soon as Helmseley came in.’
‘When was this?’ Jacquie asked.
Maxwell didn’t know.
‘Pardoe was here long before the St Hilda’s girls amalgamated.’ Jacquie was trying to work it out. ‘“Books and showers”. Max, you went to a school like this. Do Housemasters supervise showers?’
‘Thorough ones do,’ he told her.
She clicked her fingers. ‘The mag you saw on his desk when you arrived.’
‘Oh, yes. Any joy with that yet?’ he asked. ‘Your dirty squad?’
She shook her head. ‘They don’t give much away, that lot,’ Jacquie told him. ‘You know the expression tight as a vice?’
Maxwell smiled. ‘So much for inter-departmental cooperation. “Why don’t you end it all?’” He remembered the last words of the tape. ‘Somebody knew about Pardoe’s little secret and was suggesting he top himself. Is that a crime?’
‘Suggestion to murder?’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘I doubt the CPS would entertain that for moment. And suicide hasn’t been on the statute books for a hell of a long time.’
‘Until 1833,’ Maxwell told her, ‘they’d bury the poor bastard at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. Undeserving of Christian burial, with his soul forever pinned to the ground. Ah, the good old days. What’ll you do with this?’ He pointed to the tape.
‘Give it to Hall, of course,’ she said. ‘It’s evidence, Max. It might also be the first break we’ve had. Forensic will dust it for prints, eliminating yours and mine. They’ll be able to do magic things with the sound quality, isolate the voice patterns, despite the distortion.’
‘What do you do then?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Finger and voice print the whole school?’
Jacquie laughed. ‘Ever heard of the Court Human Rights, Max?’
‘No,’ he said, frowning in mock-fascination ‘That’s a new one on me.’
She cuffed him on the arm. ‘It’s my guess any one of these little darlings has parents with enough clout to bring Strasbourg and Brussels down on our necks if we so much as look at their loops and whorls. You’d have no objection, suppose? To a voice test, I mean?’
‘Me?’ Maxwell was aghast. ‘Woman Policeman Carpenter, are you telling me I am a suspect?’
‘Mervyn Larson thinks you are,’ she smirked.
‘The bastard!’
‘And that’s classified, by the way,’ Jacquie was quick to warn him. ‘I don’t want you calling the bloke out or whatever idiotic romantic thing you’d do. Pistols at dawn behind the bike sheds. Hall will have me back on the beat.’
‘Hmm, not a bad idea,’ Maxwell mused. ‘You must look very fetching in a blue and white headband. Then there’s the blouse, the stockings, the handcuffs. Ooh, I’m getting all hot!’
‘Behave yourself,’ she growled at him. ‘Gallow suspects you too.’
‘What?’ He gave her the full John McEnroe. ‘You cannot be serious.’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘But I think he was.’
‘Great. Nice to know one can rely on a fellow historian. Bloody revisionist!’
‘See it from their point of view, Max,’ she urged. ‘You arrive out of the blue on Monday – apparently Sheffield had neglected to tell anybody until the day before – and on Tuesday morning, they find the body of Bill Pardoe. The death of a colleague isn’t an everyday occurrence, you know.’
‘So they do believe it’s murder, then?’
‘That seems to be the trend,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘Although the official line from George Sheffield, who apparently got it from Arthur Wilkins, his Chairman of Governors, is that it’s suicide.’
‘What about Tim Robinson? He didn’t care for me much either.’
‘Don’t know. Haven’t seen him.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Maxwell was confused. ‘I thought you were starting with him this morning – or so you told me last night.’
> ‘Quite right,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t show. We saw the chaplain instead. That man could bore for England. I bet he doesn’t get many taking communion.’
‘He’s not much of a fencing instructor,’ Max well volunteered.
‘The chaplain?’
‘Robinson. I watched him in the gym yesterday. Didn’t know an epee stroke from a sabre cut.’
‘Well, fan my flies,’ Jacquie said. ‘Haven’t you always told me nobody in the private sector knows what they’re doing? Isn’t that why they’re in the private sector? Hiding from the competence of the world? Isn’t that the Gospel according to St Max?’
‘Now, Policewoman,’ he chided her. ‘I do believe I’m being quoted out of context here, think what I actually said …’
But Peter Maxwell never finished his sentence. It was punctuated by a scream from the direction of the lake and the thud of a dozen feet rushing uphill past the cedars with shouting and chaos.
‘He’s dead!’ one shrill voice rang out above the pandemonium. ‘It’s Mr Robinson. Come quick somebody. He’s dead!’
‘Here’s to you, Mr Robinson,’ Dr Firmin tilted his glasses on top of his head and leaned back in his swivel chair. He didn’t mind the pressure via DC Hall from Chief Superintendent Mason to get his arse in gear. He didn’t even mind working late into the night. What he did object to was having to write up his own report. But then, he reflected in the chill glow of the computer screen, he did work for a Third World Health Service. How many hospital trolleys full of patients had he tripped over just getting here? They’d be stashing the poor sods in his own mortuary lockers next.
He’d read the report from the police surgeon and the one from DCI Hall. Firmin couldn’t help smirking. The DCI must be feeling more than a little vexed with himself – a body found under his own nostrils. At least that tended to clarify the position vis-a-vis Bill Pardoe. A suicide followed by a murder, all in the space of a few days? It strained credulity. And whereas he still had forensic and professional doubts about Pardoe, he had none about Robinson. The Games master lay in a dark, cold drawer behind the pathologist, his viscera in assorted jars, carefully labelled.
