Maxwell’s Match

by M. J. Trow

  Ape and Splinter were standing next to Graham, their fists flexing, their faces set. But Ape was blinking and Splinter glancing nervously at Graham. Selwyn was still in his chair, face in his hands. Maxwell walked up to the pair. ‘Which one of you bastards,’ he asked, ‘tried to drive a pencil into my brain in the rugger match the other day?’

  There was a sudden thud and crash at the auditorium doors and the room was alive with uniformed police, thumping down the stairs to the stage. Graham tried to run, but there was no escape to left or right. Jacquie was alongside Maxwell who had dropped down to floor level again. He lifted his shapeless tweed hat from his coat and with it the mobile phone underneath.

  ‘The hat, Ape,’ he waved it at the boy. ‘If you’re going to frisk somebody – don’t forget the hat.’

  One by one the characters on the stage were cuffed to officers and led away. Cassandra, snarling and spitting, Selwyn in tears, Ape and Splinter bewildered and confused. Only Tony Graham stood tall, still in his mortar board, still in his gown.

  ‘Brilliant timing, Woman Policeman,’ Maxwell smiled, kissing her cheek. ‘I guessed when you got my call and heard snatches of conversation, you’d realise something was wrong. Much later, though, and I’d have had to hack my way out with a copy of the Times Educational Supplement.’

  ‘Thank Jeremy Tubbs,’ she told him. ‘And, indirectly, DCI West.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tubbs confessed to being involved in the death of Pardoe, working with that foul girl and Tony Graham to get him up to the roof. When he accidentally dropped the name Arbiters to you he panicked and ran, fearing what they’d do to him or you would find out. It took all of Tony Graham’s persuasion apparently to get him back here, to the last place any of us would think of looking for him. West was about to get here with the cavalry when Henry’s balloon went up on the paedophile tape.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Max.’ She held up his mobile phone and waved it, shaking her head. ‘If you’re going to do your super-sleuth bit, at least switch the bloody thing on!’

  ‘You’ll be on your way back, then, Henry?’ Chief Superintendent Mason was sitting across the desk from Detective Chief Inspector Hall. ‘Case closed.’

  Hall nodded. ‘Never much fun, is it?’ he asked. ‘One of your own?’

  ‘No,’ Mason shook his head. Instinctively, he glanced down to his right wrist and saw, just for a fleeting moment, the scar on Mark West’s arm. The one caused by the bullet that was meant for him.

  ‘And all this started with an anonymous tip-off about Grimond’s?’

  ‘And other things,’ Mason sighed. ‘Rumours, little changes in West’s behaviour. It will all be in the final report. Andy Love was on to him, tracking him around Petersfield on his nightly wanderings. Course, with a bike, he couldn’t do much.’

  ‘So West killed Love to shut him up?’

  Mason shrugged. ‘Looks that way. He hasn’t coughed yet, but he will. I thought Love’s cover as Robinson was pretty good. Wonder how Mark sussed it.’ He stood up, hand outstretched. ‘I want to thank you, Henry,’ he said. ‘It’s a lonely road you’ve travelled. I’m afraid I had to tell Mark a few fibs.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He was getting persistent the other night, about you, I mean. I told him you’d been seconded from West Sussex because you were under suspicion there. That relaxed him, made him careless, maybe; I don’t know. If you ever want a change of air, Henry, I could use a man like you here in Hampshire.’

  Hall almost smiled. ‘No you couldn’t, David,’ he said.

  Mason did smile. ‘You know what gets up my nose most about this stinking business?’ he asked. ‘When Mark West was going around on the prowl, picking up those kids, he had the gall to use my name. “Call me Dave”. What a complete shit!’

  Hall saw himself out.

  Jacquie Carpenter took over George Sheffield’s outer office late that night to complete the preliminary stages at least of the paperwork. She’d made the phone calls; DI Berman would be over at first light with half his team to co-ordinate things that end. Now that Mark West had been closed down there was no need to keep Grimond’s as a no-go area. She’d let the Hampshire top brass deal with the Grimond’s people. Didn’t their Chief Constable get pissed regularly with their Chairman of Governors? The network would take over, rally round as it always did. No doubt some parents would accept Sir Arthur Wilkins’ offer of waived fees. In time, the world would forget.

  Peter Maxwell wandered by the lake in the wee, small hours. It was cold for spring and his breath smoked out. He felt chilled, numbed, vowing to himself to master the bewildering array of buttons on his mobile phone.

  He didn’t see her at first, the solid, dumpy shape in the cedars that lined the hill. Then she was walking towards him, in a hood and long trailing cloak like the Scottish widow in the telly advert.

  ‘Janet.’ He looked at her. ‘Shouldn’t you be in Northanger?’

  ‘Northanger’s lonely,’ the girl said. ‘Cassie’s gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell nodded, his hands in his pockets. ‘Yes, I know. And I’m sorry.’

  ‘Are you?’ Janet asked him. ‘Are you really? Mr Robinson was sorry.’

  ‘Mr Robinson?’ Maxwell indulged her.

  ‘He raped Cassandra.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Down there. In the boat-house. I saw them together.’ She was crying softly, the salt tears trickling into her mouth.

  ‘Did you, Janet?’ Maxwell was close to her now.

  ‘I couldn’t let him do that,’ the girl sobbed. ‘Defile her like that. She was mine.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said softly. ‘Yes, of course. I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t!’ Janet shrieked. ‘None of you! Men! All you want to do is fuck us, pull us about. You don’t love us. None of you. You don’t know what love is.’

  A shiver was running up Maxwell’s spine as realization kicked in with all its gut-wrenching force. ‘Is that why you killed him, Janet? Mr Robinson? Is that why you hit him with the oar?’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult,’ she said, sniffing back the tears. ‘He was always asking questions, sticking his nose in. So I told him something was going on. Something to do with Mr Pardoe. There were all kinds of rumours. He seemed interested in that. I said I had to see him down by the lake, by the boat-house, that I had evidence for him and I couldn’t see him in school time. It was too dangerous. It had to be in the early hours, like it is now. I just took an oar from Northanger and waited down there, in the bushes. He didn’t see me at all. I just hit him. Just the once. There was hardly a splash when he fell in. But it served him right. It showed him he couldn’t do what he did to dear Cassie.’

  ‘But he didn’t, Janet,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘I saw them.’

  ‘No, darling,’ Maxwell was shaking his head. ‘What you saw was Cassandra and John Selwyn.’

  ‘No,’ she was shaking her head too. ‘No, it couldn’t have been John. Oh, I knew John loved her too, like I do. But he wouldn’t touch her. She wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Janet …’ Maxwell reached out a hand.

  ‘You!’ she hissed, her eyes rolling in the dim light. ‘You wanted to do it to her as well, didn’t you? Well, you can’t. Not now.’

  ‘Janet.’ He let the hand fall. ‘I don’t know what will happen to Cassandra …’

  ‘Neither do I,’ the girl sobbed. ‘But I know what will happen to you!’

  The cloak fell away, suddenly revealing the girl in all her plump nakedness. But Peter Maxwell wasn’t looking at her full breasts, or the curve of her thighs. He was looking at the knife coming at him through the air. He felt it bang and slice across his cheek, like the sabre cut of the schlager, felt the blood hot on his face. Then he’d caught the girl’s hand and twisted it, pulling her towards him and wrenching the blade out of her grasp. There was no fight in Janet Boyce. She crumpled to the grass, her pale naked body convulsed in shuddering sobs. Maxwell put the knife in his p
ocket, wiped the blood from his face and knelt beside the crying child, wrapping her up in her cloak.

  The first birds were stirring in the cedars. It was a new Grimond’s day.

  ‘Lights out in the dorm,’ Maxwell whispered. ‘All’s well.’

  Dr George Sheffield reversed his car carefully into the allocated space at the municipal tip. First he opened the boot in the early morning and threw his gown and mortar board into the skip marked ‘General’. Then he opened the suitcase, the one with the tapes sent to him over many months by Mark West, snapped it shut again and locked it. Then that too sailed through the air to land in the rubbish where it belonged. He revved the engine and drove away.

  Dierdre Lessing, Senior Mistress, was standing at the window in the staffroom of Leighford High again that Wednesday afternoon, just in time to see Peter Maxwell, his face neatly dressed from Casualty, walking up the steps to the front door.

  ‘Good God,’ she muttered. ‘What’s he done to himself now?’ She reached for the yellow memo pad that was never very far from her person and made a note. ‘Must ask Maxwell what on earth he hoped to accomplish in the private sector. Judging by the look of him, he must have been in way over his head. Met his match at last.’