by M. J. Trow
‘I’m sorry, Jacquie.’ Maxwell was looking at her as they inched their way through the traffic on Warwick’s High Street, the Tudor timbers of the Lord Leycester Hospital looking surreal in the afternoon sun, like a film set waiting for Joseph Fiennes.
‘Max,’ she scolded him, slapping his leg. ‘Even in my professional capacity, I don’t think for a moment any of this is down to you.’
‘At the very least,’ he said, ‘it was something of a busman’s holiday for you.’
‘I’m the one who’s sorry, Max. Halliards won’t be the same again, will it?’
He shook his head. ‘We all thought we were coming to witness the death of a school, and what we actually saw was the death of a scholar. How was DI Thomas?’
‘Once he’d got over whatever chip he’s carrying on his shoulder, he was all right. What’s this DCI like?’
‘Tyler?’ Maxwell let his head loll back on the rest. ‘Not a suitable job for a woman, is it, Jacquie?’ he asked her.
‘Any more than it is at my level, you mean. God, Max, you’re a dinosaur. I love you dearly, but …’
‘Ah, yes.’ Maxwell laughed. ‘The cruelty of that word “but,” eh? DCI Tyler is … what’s the word? Predatory.’
‘Insecure,’ Jacquie said.
‘Ah.’ Maxwell smiled. ‘A woman’s point of view. You mean she’s got a lot of living up to to do?’
‘Something like that,’ Jacquie said. ‘When she started in the job, there’d have been the name-calling, the sexual innuendo, the sending her on endless trips upstairs so the blokes could have a butcher’s up her skirt.’
‘Just like school,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Did you know Josie Fancut in Year Ten wears pink knickers?’
‘No.’ Jacquie bridled in mock horror. ‘And I don’t think you should, either.’
‘If I had the time, dear girl,’ he said, folding his arms and closing his eyes, ‘I’d fill you in on the complex socio-erotic nature of teenage girls and their relationships with male teachers. On second thoughts, you’d probably arrest me.’
‘What are you going to do, Max?’ she asked him.
He didn’t open his eyes. ‘There’s a little-known passage in Genesis,’ he said. ‘And on the eighth day, the Lord rested, decided he was still pretty bushed, so he made half-term that man may be exceeding glad and rejoice in his name, saying, “Yea, God is good and we shall gather and give thanks for the breather and the lie-in.” That great event happens next week.’
She laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘You old hypocrite,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I didn’t ask when you were going to do it, I asked what you were going to do.’
Maxwell opened his eyes and sat up. ‘What are our options, Jacquie?’ he asked. ‘Quent’s murder, I mean. Passing maniac?’
Her eyes flickered across to him, leaving the traffic for as long as she dared. ‘Motiveless murder, you mean?’
‘It happens, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded. ‘And with increasing frequency. Some poor bastard is found by a battery of psychologists and psychiatrists to be deranged. He serves time in a secure unit, drugged to the eyeballs, whereupon a different battery of psychologists and psychiatrists decides he’s fine now and releases him into the community. Except, he’s not fine. He’s a danger to himself and others.’
‘And he kills George Quentin?’
Jacquie was shaking her head. ‘If George Quentin died in a street, and if nothing had been taken from the body, I’d say yes, that’s definitely a scenario worth considering. As it is, no. Unless, of course, your maniac wandered into Halliards School late on Friday night and bumped into him.’
‘All right.’ Maxwell was eliminating possibilities. ‘Theft.’
‘Well,’ Jacquie said, raising a casual middle finger to a white van driver who had just cut her up. ‘Now I know what it feels like to be on the outside of a case. We don’t know, do we, if Quentin was robbed?’
‘No, we don’t,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘None of us touched the body. I’ve no idea if Quentin’s wallet was on him or not.’
‘Had he checked into the hotel?’
‘No,’ Maxwell told her. ‘That I was able to verify. His name isn’t in the signing-in book, he hadn’t paid for the room, and no one had seen him on the hotel premises.’
‘No one?’ In Jacquie’s profession, it paid to be sure.
‘No one I spoke to,’ Maxwell qualified. ‘None of the six.’
‘Theft is a possibility,’ Jacquie went on, mechanically going through the motions of driving south along the M40. ‘Let’s suppose Quentin disturbed a burglar.’
‘Were there any signs of that?’
‘None that I could see,’ Jacquie said. ‘Of course, Halliards is a big building. How many doors are there?’
‘Christ knows.’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘There were parts of the place I never went into in my seven years there. I’d stick my neck out and guess at six entrances on the ground floor; that’s apart from windows, of course. Stenhouse used a key.’
‘On the Saturday?’
Maxwell nodded. ‘When we found Quent. We went in by the chapel cloisters.’
‘Where did he get it?’
‘Stenhouse? I’ve no idea. Presumably off the property developers. Unless, of course, he’d had it all along, ever since we left school. That wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘Is that likely?’ Jacquie asked. ‘After all these years?’
Maxwell hadn’t considered it to be, but now, he wasn’t so sure.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s go with the burglary theory for a moment. Let’s assume that somebody in a striped T-shirt and mask gets into the school by some means we didn’t have a chance to find. There he is, filling his bag marked “swag” with … what? What’s to steal?’
‘What was there?’ Jacquie had only had time to check the entrance hall, corridor and Big School before the local force had arrived. The rest of the place was a closed book to her.
‘Bugger all, as far as I know. The school itself closed last year, according to Stenhouse, and they were about to turn it into a conference centre, knocking walls down, putting in jacuzzis, whatever. I know from my own dear experience what our lights fingered friends go for in school attacks is computers, music centres. There’s no money in books and, anyway, Jo Scuzzball can’t read.’
‘All the hardware had gone from Halliards, then?’ Jacquie asked.
‘My dear girl.’ Maxwell spread his arms as far as safety allowed. ‘We’d only just finished writing on slates the year before I left. I don’t think Halliards was ever at the cutting edge of technology. Anyway, we’re missing the point.’
‘Which is? Oh, sorry.’ Jacquie thumped Maxwell’s knee with a particularly cavalier gear change.
‘Which is, what was Quent doing at Halliards the night he died? Did I go there? No. I went to the Graveney, as per Stenhouse’s invitation. And that’s three miles away as Corvus corone flies. If Quent received the same invitation, and presumably he did, why not do likewise?’
‘Which brings us back to one of you,’ Jacquie said.
‘Thanks, light o’ my life.’ Maxwell frowned.
‘All right, one of them,’ Jacquie corrected herself. ‘Can you live with that, Max?’
‘That’s not the point, Jacquie,’ he told her. ‘The point is, George Quentin couldn’t.’
In the beginning, there were open fields on the high ground above Leighford, within a walk of the sea. The little village that one of William of Normandy’s clerks had noted in the Domes day Book as having eight ploughs in demesne in the vill of Aelfric in the Confessor’s time had grown a tad by the time the bulldozers moved in and they built Leighford High School. They skimped, of course, dreaming of a secondary modern of a mere three hundred pupils where the hewers of coal and drawers of water would learn the rudiments of the arts their ancestors had followed since the Conqueror’s time, plus a bit of readin’, ritin’ and ’rithmetic. Since then, the great Comprehensive Revolution had foll
owed, whereby everybody from the Prime Minister to the groundsman had come to believe that Jack was as good as his master and the great leveller, the National Curriculum, had produced generations that couldn’t read or write or do arithmetic and had long since forgotten how to hew coal or draw water.
Peter Maxwell had stood out against all that. During all his years in teaching he had railed against those no-hopers who split their infinitives like matchsticks and ended sentences with prepositions. So much for his colleagues; some of the kids were just as bad.
That Monday morning, Maxwell once more bestrode the narrow world of Leighford High like a colossus. ‘Morning, Matilda,’ he bellowed at the hapless librarian, not in fact of that name, who stood dithering next to a computer screen. He held up her copy of the Grauniad. ‘Encouraging leftist twaddle again, librarian mine? I must have a word with the Thought Police about you.’
The woman’s frozen smile said it all. She’d never been able to cope with Mad Max. As if on cue, the Prefect of the Thought Police swept through the library on one of his rare forays. When you’re a head teacher, with degrees in education and biology, books are an alien concept to you.
‘Performance management, Mr Maxwell.’ James Diamond, BSc, MEd, was always formal with his staff in open-plan areas of the school. Lest there should be a child lurking.
‘Wash your mouth out, Headmaster!’ Maxwell was appalled.
‘Seriously, Max.’ Diamond was more relaxed once he’d satisfied himself that there were no students in sight. ‘I need your input on this. You’re a senior teacher – bound to be a mentor.’
‘Oh, bound to be,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘I’ll get straight on it, right after 9C4 have done their “I can tie my shoelaces” lesson.’
‘Max.’ Diamond was a boring fart, it had to be said. He looked Maxwell in the eye through the curve of his gold-rimmed glasses and straightened his Marks and Spencer tie. ‘Do you have to be so flippant?’
Maxwell stared back at the man. ‘About performance management? Indubitably, Headmaster. But about the serious business of education, never. Can I have Friday off?’
‘What? Why?’
‘A friend of mine died at the weekend. Friday’s the funeral.’
‘Oh, Max, I’m sorry. Er … yes, of course. See Tom about cover, will you? Um. A friend, you say?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, how good a friend?’
‘An old friend,’ Maxwell insisted. Unlike the headmaster, Maxwell had a choice.
‘Well, you see, unless it’s family, I shall have to ask you to lose a day’s pay.’
Maxwell beamed at the petty bureaucracy of the man. ‘Consider it lost, Headmaster,’ he said.
He made his way across the quad past children without number trudging to their first lesson. Patiently, he placed one or two mavericks on the right side of the corridor as he swept through H Block. Then he was up the stairs and into the staffroom. ‘Bugger and poo!’ was Maxwell’s usual expletive when he saw yet another memo in his pigeonhole. Today was no exception.
‘Morning, Max.’ Sally Greenhow, the tall blonde who was number two in Special Needs, hurtled past him, carrying the usual bundle of rap sheets for a case conference.
‘Morning, light of my darkness,’ but he wasn’t looking at her. The memo in his hand said there’d been a phone call, at eight-thirty that morning. More, it was a message on the school answerphone. ‘Shit!’ and he was gone, hurtling down the corridor, notices on walls fluttering in his wake.
‘Thingee!’ He came down like a wolf on the fold into reception, firing his deadly stare at the hapless girl on the switchboard, whose name was no more Thingee than the librarian was Matilda. ‘You’ve got a message for me?’
‘Yes, Mr Maxwell.’ She turned to the incomprehensible machine to her left and pushed buttons. There was a ping and a whirr, followed by an electronic whine, all the noises of the twenty-first century.
‘Max, it’s Anthony Bingham. Look, I’m sorry to leave a message like this, especially at work. I tried your home number, but you’d clearly left. I need to see you. Urgently. I’m coming to Leighford this afternoon. I’ll be at yours by … five-thirty.’
And the line went dead.
‘Is everything all right, Mr Maxwell?’ Thingee noticed that Maxwell had gone a funny colour.
He looked down at the girl with the headset. ‘I hope so, Thingee,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know.’
6
Five-thirty of the clock came and went, as it tends to do at least twice a day. Peter Maxwell had abandoned the curry he’d intended for Monday night – bad Korma – and promised himself pie and chips at his local later. Except now it was later and he was still waiting. He took one last look at the naked street outside 38 Columbine, the tarmac orange under the streetlamp. Then he climbed the stairs to his Inner Sanctum.
They stretched out before him under the lamplight, the riders of Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade, immaculately recreated by the Head of Sixth Form in all their fifty-four millimetre splendour. Cardigan himself sat with Lord Lucan, the plastic brother-in-law he hated, listening to an exasperated Captain Nolan pointing down the Valley of Death. Beyond this knot of officers, the men of the 13th Light Dragoons were still smoking their pipes, their plastic stomachs still rumbling from a lack of breakfast. Maxwell had been lovingly collecting these models for years. They were his weakness, his indulgence; they and Southern Comfort. Oh, and Metternich, the cat.
He threw himself down on the swivel chair and switched on his modelling lamp. He caught his own reflection in the skylight as he patted the jaunty Crimean forage cap into place on his forehead. Then he went to work. Captain Soames Gambier Jenyns lay on his back on a sheet of newspaper. Beside him, his bay charger, Moses, champed the plastic grass. Maxwell put the man into the saddle, lining up the stirrup irons and checking the length of the rein.
‘A cigar, I think, Count, don’t you? Someone with names like Soames Gambier would be smoking a cigar as he reasoned why, don’t you think?’
He didn’t glance up. He knew the great black-and-white beast was watching him from his perch on the linen basket that housed only God knew what, ears flat, tail idly lashing. The darkness of the mid-October evening all but complete, it would soon be time for the hunt.
‘Mind you …’ Maxwell whittled the tiny piece of plastic with his craft knife and stuck it expertly to the man’s lips. ‘The good captain hadn’t been well, Count. He was at Scutari in September, before Ms Nightingale got there, of course. A touch of gut rot, I shouldn’t wonder. Christ, Cret!’ and he threw the good captain down, scraping back his chair and pacing the attic room. ‘Where the hell are you?’
No one could measure the hell where Anthony Bingham was. His mortal remains could be measured easily enough. They’d been found the next morning, a little after six-thirty, by a jogger pounding up the gentle gradient on Ryker. Hill. His arm had been sticking out from under an upturned sofa the colour of mud through which the rusty springs poked. The jogger hadn’t seen clearly in the half-light, which is why he’d stumbled over the hand. Then he crouched to feel it. He would never be quite the same again.
By the time Henry Hall arrived, it was already mid-morning and the blue-and-white tape and knot of constables kept the morbidly curious back. Geeks in anoraks huddled in the rain and the first of the paparazzi were sheltering under the trees, keeping their cameras and their powder dry, waiting for developments. Hall’s arrival galvanized them into action.
‘What can you tell us, Chief Inspector? Any clues as to the victim’s identity? Got a motive yet?’
Hall didn’t break his stride. ‘Later,’ he growled at them. That was when he’d know anything; when he might, God forbid, have need of them. All he knew so far was that a man was dead.
Henry Hall was a bland bastard, fortysomething, fast track, as inscrutable as Maxwell’s cat, but without the attitude.
‘Guv.’ The burly DS in the parka nodded at him.
‘What have we got, Graham
?’ Hall crouched by the settee, pulled back now to reveal its secret.
‘Male Caucasian, guv.’ Graham Rackham was prepared to go only so far. ‘Mid-fifties. There’s a lot of muck where the back of his head used to be.’
‘Where’s Astley?’
Dr James Astley, the police surgeon, was slithering down the slope ahead, the only one of them, in his white plastic outfit, not getting wet. ‘Sorry,’ he called. ‘Having a pee. Bloody bracken’s thick up that way. Are you well, Henry?’
Astley was the wrong side of fifty-five, solid rather than overweight, core hair rather than balding, a middle-aged man in a hurry.
‘I was,’ Hall told him, ‘before I got this call. What can you tell me, Jim?’
‘Sergeant.’ Astley cocked his oddly garbed head to one side. ‘Feet.’
‘Oh, sorry, Doc.’ Rackham stepped backward.
Astley looked at the SOCO boys going about their business, measuring, photographing, weighing and collecting the evidence. ‘I don’t know how much good that little lot’ll do. It’s like the night before Agincourt around here. I’ve never seen so many footprints and this bloody rain isn’t helping.’
It wasn’t, and Hall knew that Jim Astley was right. Ryker Hill, with its woodland path that wound through the ferns and the silver birch, had blossomed in recent years. Discarded tissues and condoms dripping off the bracken told the tale that this was a lovers’ trysting place, for spotty sixth-formers with nowhere else to go and ageing roués with their bits on the side. The piles of doggie poo through which Hall and Astley had just waded spoke volumes for the incidence of canine exercising. Then there were the pony-trekkers and the joggers and the ramblers and the twitchers, all the flotsam that used the countryside. And every single one of them would be a suspect.
‘Your best shot, then?’ Hall said to Astley.
The doctor crouched, as well as his sciatica would allow, and pointed with his pen. ‘He didn’t die here, I’d lay money on that.’ And Hall knew that Astley didn’t make that offer every day. ‘See?’ He pointed to the flattened bracken that led to the path. ‘That’s been recently done, I’d say by dragging the body across.’
