Maxwell’s Match

by M. J. Trow

  ‘About that, sir,’ Parker nodded. ‘But it wasn’t that regular.’

  ‘And which department was this?’ Hall asked. ‘Where you found the old envelopes?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly a department, sir. It was a House. Austen House.’

  The rump of the paparazzi left the wrought iron gates of Grimond’s that Monday morning. They’d been moved on by the police, not because they were beginning to resemble a miniature gypsy encampment and give off noisome odours but because DCI West wanted a word. One by one he put them through their paces in his inner office at Selborne, watching them as they strained their story-hungry necks to catch a glimpse of something, anything flapping on the display boards.

  ‘Ghouls,’ he said to Martin Skinner, lighting up his umpteenth ciggie that morning. ‘That’s what you people are.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you want my co-operation after all,’ the hack said, getting up to go. He was the last of the four to be seen and the most forthcoming.

  ‘All right,’ West cracked his mirthless smile and shook loose another ciggie from the pack, pointing it in the man’s direction. ‘Let’s stop pussyfooting around. You’re a freelance, Mark …’

  ‘Martin.’

  ‘Martin. And you’ve got to make a buck, just like the rest of us. You don’t mind if my detective sergeant takes the odd note?’

  Skinner glanced across to where Jacquie Carpenter sat, one knee hooked over the other. The view was fine from where he sat and he shook his head. ‘As odd as you like,’ he said.

  ‘You were in the school grounds?’ West watched the man’s face light up as he flicked his lighter for the cigarette.

  ‘Now then,’ Skinner inhaled deeply and sat back, his smile wreathed in smoke, ‘that would be telling, wouldn’t it?’

  Mark West had worked with slime like Skinner before. They wanted it all, all the dirt, all the gut-wrenching horror of a murder enquiry details, but they didn’t want to give much back.

  West drew on his own fag and carefully placed the lighter on its end among his copious paperwork. ‘We have ways of fudging these things,’ he said. ‘Depending on the nature of your evidence.’

  Skinner looked at Jacquie who had yet to put pen to paper. Sneaking into Grimond’s grounds to get a story was one thing. Obtaining potential trial evidence illegally was something else. ‘I will get an exclusive, won’t I?’

  ‘Do bears shit in the woods?’ West asked him but the man was freelance so the answer might take a little longer.

  ‘There’s something … uncanny going on at that school,’ Skinner told him.

  ‘Uncanny?’ West frowned, spitting a sliver tobacco out from between his teeth. ‘That’s an old-fashioned word you don’t hear much these days. Do you, Jacquie?’

  His hired DS raised both eyebrows at Skinner, waiting.

  ‘Perhaps you could be a little more explicit?’ West hoped.

  ‘All right. Incantations. Spells. Surreal, really. Like a bad B feature. Sub-Hammer, you know?

  Jacquie knew that Peter Maxwell would.

  West sighed. ‘I’m going to have to ask you for some sort of chapter and verse, I’m afraid, Mr Skinner.’

  ‘All right.’ The hack leaned back, enjoying centre stage. ‘Thirteen nights ago. Tuesday night to be exact, I’d drawn the short straw and was on duty. You know, we’ve got a little hut thing down the road from the gates? Well, I was on the midnight to eight haul; wee small hours, you know.?

  ‘That was the night after Pardoe’s body was found,’ Jacquie said.

  ‘And?’ West ignored her. He was still resting elbows on his desk, holding his ciggie inches from his face, watching his man through narrowed eye and a haze of smoke.

  ‘I went over the wall, you might say. Oh, yeah, we had a gentleman’s agreement with Dr Sheffield, what with him being a gentleman and us being gentlemen of the press and all, but hey, this is the twenty-first century for fuck’s sake. I’ve got a mortgage, kids.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure your motives are understandable.’ West was nodding. Jacquie could believe the mortgage, but she was less convinced about the kids. ‘But it would help my enquiries enormously if you’d get to the bloody point.’

  ‘I wanted to see the scene of crime,’ Skinner told him. ‘Or at least one of them. I drew the line at sneaking around the buildings, which you blokes might look on as breaking and entering, but the details of the Press Conference on Robinson said he was found in the boating lake. That’s where I went.’

  West and Jacquie were still looking at him, still waiting.

  ‘There was nothing at the lake. But from there there’s a path that winds up to the cedars. It used to be an orchard, apparently. I could see somebody in the trees. Stark fucking naked.’

  West looked at Jacquie.

  ‘What sex?’ she asked.

  ‘Female,’ Skinner leered at her. ‘Big with it.’

  ‘What was she doing?’ West wanted to know.

  ‘Some sort of weird dance thing. She was swaying round in a circle, a sort of spiral, getting tighter, singing to herself.’

  ‘What time was this?’ the DCI checked.

  ‘Two, half-past. Well after lights out, I reckon.’

  ‘Did she see you?’

  ‘Christ, no, I hid behind the bushes out by the boat-house. She seemed to be waving some sort of knife in the air. I couldn’t make it out. Then she knelt down, looked like she was burying something.’

  ‘What?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘Couldn’t make it out.’ Skinner was shaking his head.

  ‘What happened then?’ West asked him.

  ‘The girl had a coat, a wrap of some kind, on the ground. She put it over her shoulders and was clearly heading back to the school. I did a runner.’

  ‘This girl,’ Jacquie asked. ‘How old would you say she was?’

  ‘Hard to tell in the dark. She was pretty well formed, though, big tits. I’d say, seventeen, eighteen.’

  ‘Would you know her again?’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ Skinner grinned. ‘A naked line-up?’ He winked at Jacquie. ‘Well, it’s a shitty job, but somebody has to do it – in the interests of solving a crime, of course.’

  ‘DS Carpenter,’ West stubbed his cigarette out; ‘You’re persona grata at Grimond’s. Take Mr Skinner onto school premises, will you? I want to know exactly where you saw this girl. And if there’s anything buried there, I want it excavated.’

  ‘What about my exclusive?’ Skinner knew the bum’s rush when he was being given it.

  ‘In the fullness of time,’ West snarled on his way out. ‘Right now, I’d like you to accompany my sergeant. There’s a constable outside the door who’ll see you off the premises, should that become necessary.’

  ‘It won’t sir,’ Jacquie assured him, picking up her coat. ‘Where’ll you be, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s time I stopped this nonsense with your DCI,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘I’m going to the Country Club; I’m going to see the Chief Super.’

  The drone of a vacuum cleaner welcomed Maxwell back to Tennyson House. Grimond’s own Mrs B was skimming over the floors below the spiral stairs that led to what had been his room and beyond that, to the roof. The cab had left him at the gates and he was surprised to find them unlocked, if not exactly open and the paparazzi gone. He nodded to the cleaner and edged past her into the Prefects’ Study, the abode of Selwyn, Ape and Splinter, the dauntless three. It was deserted. Like the Marie Celeste. Like Jeremy Tubbs’ flat and Tim Robinson’s house. An emptiness where there should have been bustle. Deadness where there should have been life.

  Maxwell checked his watch. Four-thirty. He’d broken his journey in Petersfield, prowling the bookshops, lingering over a late lunch and a long coffee, planning his next move, thinking things through. His head ached like buggery and his vision still blurred if he moved too quickly, but he had no intention of doing that too often.

  It was happy hour at Grimond’s. Through the window, from the
second floor where he was now, he saw the stragglers of the day students making their way home, carefully watched from the side gate by Mervyn Larson and David Gallow, guardians of the good, protectors of the privileged, lest the paparazzi merely be lurking around the corner. They had been there, at these wrought iron gates, man and boy, for nearly a fortnight. Grimond’s was old news now. There were other shock horror stories out there for the cheque-booking.

  ‘Max?’ The Great Man turned slowly at the sound of his name.

  ‘Hello, Tony.’

  The Housemaster shook him by the hand. ‘How the hell are you? And if it isn’t too rude a question, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come for the debate,’ Maxwell told him.

  ‘Debate?’ Graham looked confused. ‘What debate?’

  ‘I don’t know the motion, I’m afraid. John Selwyn invited me.’

  ‘John?’ Graham’s confusion was deepening. ‘When was this?’

  ‘This morning,’ Maxwell said. ‘There was a message on my answerphone.’

  ‘Well, that’s odd.’

  ‘What is?’

  Graham looked at Maxwell. The man didn’t look at all well. ‘There’s no debate, Max. At least, not today. In fact …’ he brushed past him to check notices on the study wall. ‘Not ’til next week – “This house believes that the House of Lords reform has gone far enough”.’

  ‘Selwyn was definite about the date,’ Maxwell remembered. ‘Said it was due to begin after prep at eight. He said “tonight if you can”.’

  ‘The time’s right,’ Graham said, ‘but the date isn’t. I don’t know what’s got into Selwyn at the moment. He’s not himself. Skipped my French lesson this morning. Come to think of it, I didn’t see him at lunch, either.’

  ‘Do you recognize this writing, Tony?’ Maxwell ferreted in his briefcase and produced the note that had arrived that morning with the mail.

  Graham was shaking his head. “‘We know all about you, Maxwell”,’ he read aloud. ‘That sounds cryptic. What does it mean?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘It was in my pigeonhole this morning. Along with this,’ and he thrust the porn mag into Graham’s hand.

  ‘Good God!’ The Housemaster had turned pale and was glancing frantically around him. ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘A glimpse of a way of life I don’t want to go into,’ Maxwell said.

  Graham checked that the two of them were alone, leading Maxwell down the corridor into what had been Bill Pardoe’s study. The place had changed with new trophies everywhere, different photographs and memorabilia from another life, another time. ‘This was in your pigeonhole?’

  ‘In the post,’ Maxwell nodded as best he could. ‘In a plain white envelope with a Petersfield postmark. Silly, really, on my way here, I stopped off in the town, hung around the Post Office like some sort of ghoul. What I hoped to see, I don’t know. That was the stuff Bill Pardoe used to get regularly.’

  ‘Bill? No, I don’t believe it. How do you know?’

  ‘Jacquie, remember? My woman on the inside? But that piece of information will cost you.’

  ‘It will? What?’

  ‘A strong coffee.’

  ‘Here,’ he stuffed the mag back into Maxwell’s hand. ‘I don’t really want this.’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘And it’s my guess neither did Bill Pardoe.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’ Graham rattled among his coffee cups.

  ‘I think the senior law have labelled Pardoe as a paedophile, molester of boys, collector of porn.’

  ‘It pains me to say it, Max,’ Graham sighed, ‘but there were rumours.’ He flicked on the kettle.

  ‘Really? From whom?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know … er … Tubbsy, for one.’

  ‘From what I know we can’t take much of what Mr Tubbs says as gospel.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Graham conceded. ‘But the thing about Tubbsy is that he’s an inveterate gossip. Such people notice things – it’s their stock-in- trade.’

  ‘The fact is, Tony,’ Maxwell said, easing himself into a leather chair, ‘the police found nothing here in Pardoe’s study or anywhere else where he operated. Nothing in his classroom, his filing cabinets, under his carpets, in the lining of his mattress.’

  ‘I don’t see …’

  ‘When I first came to Grimond’s, I saw another mag like this over there, on his … your … desk.’

  Graham was looking blank.

  ‘If you collect porn, you don’t have it sent to your place of work, even if your place of work is also your home. What if somebody else opened it in error? Parker when he sorted the mail? Sheffield if he had a penchant to check on his staff?’

  ‘I’d be fairly appalled if George went through my mail,’ Graham said.

  ‘You don’t get out much, do you?’ Maxwell grunted. ‘Believe me, it happens. Then, there’s the erratic pattern.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Mags, even porn mags, are published regularly. If Pardoe had an account with a friendly neighbourhood Pederast Peddler in downtown Uppsala, wouldn’t that have come at regular intervals, say every week, every month?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘According to Parker, they came at all sorts of times, two days apart, three, five. No rational pattern at all. What I got this morning confirms it.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Contrary to what some will tell you, I am a white, Anglo-Saxon denizen of Middle England. Cranky, tetchy, eccentric even, but heterosexual as Casanova – if not quite so lucky. So why is someone sending me this stuff? An introductory offer, perhaps?’

  ‘You can be arrested for receiving that, can’t you?’

  ‘Probably,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But I’ve got an almost live-in lover and a string of broken female hearts from here to … ooh, your study door. Ah, thanks,’ and he gratefully accepted Graham’s steaming mug. ‘Not that either of those criteria make me snowy white, of course. Bill Pardoe had … what? Years teaching in a boys’ school, irrespective of his previous experience in a comprehensive. You know what the world at large thinks about Housemasters, don’t you? Especially Housemasters in private schools?’

  Graham was nodding. ‘I’m afraid I do,’ he said. ‘But what’s the point of it all, Max? Everybody loved Bill. Who’d stitch the poor sod up like that?’

  ‘The same person who killed him,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘All right,’ Graham winced as the hot coffee hit his tonsils. ‘Why send it to you?’

  ‘Because I’m close, Tony. So close I can almost taste it. And chummy’s scared, if I don’t sound too much like Jack Hawkins’ Superintendent Gideon. He’s sending a shot over my bows, in naval parlance, hoping I’ll back off, sail to leeward. Well, damn the torpedoes, as dear old Admiral Farragut was wont to say steaming into Mobile Bay. It’s a case of full speed ahead, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Here,’ Martin Skinner was getting his bearings, lining up the cedars from the boat-house down below them. One or two curious kids, still in their uniforms, watched them intently from the water’s edge, dawdling before wandering in for supper.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Jacquie wasn’t about to embarrass herself in the damp grass for nothing.

  ‘As sure as I’ll ever be,’ he told her.

  She knelt down, driving in the trowel she’d brought for the purpose into the moist earth, flicking out clods left and right. For a while there was nothing but soil springing out over her sleeve and Skinner’s shoes, then she felt the cold metal strike something hard. She looked at the hack, hovering triumphantly over her below the cedar’s spreading arms. Jacquie dug with both hands now, abandoning the trowel and felt something soft that was not earth. It was cloth. She pulled it free of its shallow grave and held it upright.

  It was a heart, dirty and torn, but lovingly handstitched with sequins forming the intertwined initials J and C.

  From the school they heard the bell calling the boarders for supper as the light faded and the wind rustled in the ceda
rs. Night was coming to Grimond’s.

  ‘Course,’ Skinner crouched down beside Jacquie, ‘there’s a lot more I could tell you ’bout this place.’

  ‘Really?’ Jacquie looked at him with contempt. ‘And what would that cost me, exactly?’

  Skinner looked at the woman’s spread thighs and the cleavage above her blouse. ‘Oh,’ he grinned. ‘I’ll think of something.’

  19

  ‘My darling,’ Chief Superintendent David Mason raised his glass to the elegant, coiffured woman sitting opposite him. ‘Here’s to the next twenty years,’ and their glasses clinked in the candlelight.

  ‘Mr Mason,’ the Maitre d’ was at his elbow, penguin-suited, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry to bother you …’ and he bent low to whisper in the man’s ear.

  The elegant woman put down her glass. She’d lost count over the last twenty years of the times that this had happened. Interruption after interruption. Weddings, christenings, parties, there’d always been that bloody phone call, that dark, usually helmeted bulk in the doorway. This time it was DCI Mark West. No helmet, but bulk nonetheless.

  ‘That obnoxious man,’ she hissed. ‘What’s he doing here, Dave?’

  ‘What he’s always doing, dear,’ her husband sighed. ‘He’s working. I won’t be a minute. Have the sorbet, will you? I’ll try and get rid of him.’

  He dropped his napkin on the table and reached across to kiss her forehead. The Maitre d’ held his chair aside for him and he crossed the dining room in three strides, taking West into the vestibule where ball-gowned ladies strolled with ancient, florid-faced county types.

  ‘This had better be important, Mark,’ Mason muttered. ‘It’s my wedding anniversary, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ West said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Mason sighed. ‘Why would you? Developments?’

  ‘We need to talk,’ the DCI nodded sulkily to a couple he vaguely knew. ‘It’s about Hall.’

  Mason glanced through to where his wife was being accosted by an elderly woman with lariats of pearls around her neck.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Fiona’s just been got by Lady Whatserarse. That should give you a clear window of two hours or so.’