by M. J. Trow
The phone was already ringing by the time he got there, and he all but fell on it. ‘Yes?’ he wheezed.
‘Almost didn’t make that one,’ the chilling voice said. ‘But I guess you really are on your own. All right. No more pissing about. Halliards.’
Peter Maxwell leaned against the glass as the line went dead in his hand. His lungs hurt like hell and he was alone. From somewhere a bell tolled to tell the lurking world that the Jephson Gardens were closing. He put the receiver back. Halliards. He kicked open the door and strolled into the darkening night. This was it. Full circle. Where are you, Jacquie? he wondered as he forced his tired legs to run again. Where are you?
18
She watched him burning shoe leather past the Pump Rooms, that faded reminder of Georgian times when people still took the waters in this spa town and everyone knew his place. She kept the engine idling as he whistled down a cab – he who had no breath left at all.
The taxi turned left along a street that edged the gardens, swung left again and then right, past another park and out under the giant archways the Victorians had built to carry their trains, the glory of their age when the Queen, God bless her, came to Leamington and made it Royal. Jacquie Carpenter spun the wheel, her mobile clamped between her cheek and shoulder, breaking every rule in and out of the book.
‘He’s going right, Graham,’ she said, ‘right,’ and she hauled the wheel over to follow him. All she had now, as the night drew in, was taillights. She didn’t want to get too close because she didn’t know who was watching, or from where. Maxwell had no idea where she was and she had only the vaguest notion of how much back-up she had and didn’t know the area at all.
‘Bugger!’ She hit the steering wheel with both hands. A red light had separated her from the taxi and she’d been forced to stop. Either that or hit the amber gambler screaming out from her right. ‘I’ve lost him, Graham,’ she hissed into the phone.
‘Where are you?’
‘Christ knows.’ She looked around. ‘I can’t see a place name anywhere. There’s a garage to my right – oh, and the station beyond. Max has come back the way he went, more or less. Done a circle.’
Rackham grunted. ‘That’ll be the cabbie building up his fare. Hang on.’
Graham Rackham was in his own vehicle in a lay-by ten minutes away, acting as a go-between for Jacquie and the local force. It wasn’t easy. They had the tracking gear; he and Jacquie didn’t. Right hand, left hand.
‘Jacquie, the local boys tell me he’s likely to have gone straight ahead – that’ll put him on the road to Halliards.’
‘Halliards?’ Jacquie had never waited so long in her life for traffic lights to change. ‘So that’s it.’
‘They don’t know. They’re awaiting instructions.’
She tried to remember the layout of the place, its angles, its views. ‘How big’s the team?’ She waited while Rackham relayed the question down the line, handling his twin mobiles like juggling balls.
‘Ten,’ he told her. ‘Four marksmen.’
‘How near are they to Halliards?’ She was moving again now, cutting up a dithery dear and slicing past cyclists, crashing through the gears as she left the lights of the town behind and took the gradient that curved to the right.
‘They’re on their way,’ she heard Rackham say. ‘As indeed am I. The team’s ETA is niner, repeat, niner minutes.’
‘Got it,’ she said. ‘Fuck knows how far away I am. I hope I know it when I see it. Keep in touch, Graham. Graham?’ She rattled her phone, looking at it. Graham Rackham had broken up. The connection was dead. As he pulled out into the traffic, Rackham’s rear wheel had clipped the kerb and the car had slewed across the road. The DS heard the shuddering of metal and felt the sickening thud as something hit him in the side. The airbag inflated like a giant white mushroom, sending both his mobiles hurtling somewhere in the car’s interior. He slammed on the brakes, blind and sliding, twisting the wheel the way he thought it should go. He didn’t see the juggernaut behind him, its cab a merry-go-round of fairy lights. He didn’t see its driver, wrestling with the wheel, locking the brakes and screaming at him. All he felt was the jolt as his car buckled from behind and the glass blew out with a series of bangs.
Whatever sounds followed – the scream of tyres and the falling of shattered glass and the rip and bounce of twisted metal – Graham Rackham didn’t hear them. Graham Rackham had broken up.
Black trees rose like sentinels along the line of hedges as Jacquie drove past them. The white line and the cat’s-eyes led her on. To left and right, the occasional outline, the odd lights from a farmhouse and the orange glow of what must have been the M40 to the west. She hadn’t caught the cab, though she’d tailgated cars without number to check the plates, only to swerve out past them, hearing the searing siren of their angry horns. She checked her phone again. Nothing from Rackham. And without him, nothing from the team beyond.
What if Halliards was only a guess? Maxwell could be anywhere, anywhere the instructions from this mad bastard took him. Nine minutes to the arrival of the team at Halliards – if Halliards it was. If only Cissie had allowed a proper monitoring. If only Jacquie had been able to organize a wire on Maxwell.
Then, there it was. A black silhouette filling the skyline to her left, empty and sad eyed. She cut her headlights and her speed simultaneously, sliding the Ka under the overhang of the trees, scraping the wild hawthorn of the hedge. It was at moments like these she wished she hadn’t bought a yellow car. The engine was off. The lights were out. She tried her mobile one last time. Nothing. Shit! How useless all this technology was after all – Max was right.
She got out, easing the door closed behind her. How long had this taken her? Five minutes? Six? She kept close to the hedge, grateful for the dark and the silence. If there was a team in the area, she couldn’t see them. Maybe they were on their way. She could have used some company about then. Most of all, Peter Maxwell’s. She saw a dark car parked tight to the hedge. It was empty. No back-up there.
Now Jacquie was touching brickwork. The pillars of the main gates reared up before her, topped with the stone griffons that were the Halliards crest. The great wrought-iron gates were thrown back, as though the property developers had given up the hopeless struggle to keep kids out. But what kids would come here? Jacquie wondered, glancing back along the pale and lonely road. Above her, the clouds covered the stars. There’d be no moon tonight.
She crept towards the arts block, skulking in the shadows of the low-spreading cedars, keeping off the path where her telltale heels would give too much away. The chapel loomed before her like a fortress, solid and black. The stained glass reflected dully the dead light of the leaden sky, threatening rain by morning. She edged around its buttresses, where staff, long dead, had leant their bikes, where town criers without number had rung their passing bells. The archway in front of her was as black as pitch, but she couldn’t risk her torch. Acclimatized as her eyes were to the dark of the grounds, she wasn’t ready for this. It sucked her in like a black hole, like some magnetic void she was powerless to resist.
Now she was in the cloisters, her right hand clasped around the mace can in the handbag over her shoulder. A chilling wind whipped the corner here, riffling the faded papers that Maxwell had tried to read three weeks before when they’d found the hanged body of George Quentin. She reached to her right, using her left hand, and felt the chiselled iron of the Gothic handle that was bolted to the chapel door. She tried twisting it. Locked. As locked as it was the night Veronica had said she’d made love on the altar with the Preacher.
Jacquie walked on, feeling as though she was treading on eggs. The archway to her right led out to the curve of the drive and the Headmaster’s house, shrouded in cedars and guarded by a high privet hedge. Ahead, the door that Stenhouse had unlocked led to the main corridor, Big School and the entrance hall where George Quentin had died. She tried the handle here and this time it worked.
There was no rattling o
f locks, no scream of hinges long rusted, just the whisper of a draught excluder. She caught the door before it slammed against the wall and stood there, waiting. Ahead, the corridor was long and dark, but there was the faintest of lights halfway along. She’d always seen this place in the daylight, never in the dark, and it frightened her. More than the Lodge with its antiseptic chill and its eternal light twirling on the floor. She felt so cold she thought she’d be sick.
The light, she knew, came from the oriel window beyond where the bell rope that hauled Old Harry from his slumbers and summoned the lost generations of Halliards to their lessons once hung. In her mind, she watched them go, legions of them, laughing and chattering in a dim echo down the years, with their tasselled caps and bright blazers and undying hopes.
She kept to the centre of the corridor, unsure of the classrooms to her right, the dark little doors to her left. Then she was at the foot of the stairs, rising dark and worn to one side. To the other, the statue of the school’s founder, standing proud and erect on his marble plinth; he who had seen so much, and watched George Quentin die.
She was afraid to turn, but she had to turn; to her right, as the hairs on her neck stood on end and the only sound was the creak of her shoe and her own heart thumping.
‘Max!’
A body twirled in the darkness, a long scarf trailing almost to the floor. There was a click and Jacquie felt simultaneously the cold muzzle of a gun behind her ear and her handbag being snatched away. A solitary light floodlit the scene; a hurricane lamp to dispel the darkness.
‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ Richard Alphedge swung forward, his foot in a stirrup at the end of the long, dangling rope. ‘It took quite a long time to rig all this up again, after those bastard coppers took it all down.’ He hopped to the floor. ‘But this,’ he looped the cord around its iron housing on the wall, ‘this was my job. I was the Bell Prefect.’ He looked at the two women in front of him. ‘Thank you, my dear, for looking after Cissie so nicely for me.’
Something heavy and metal sailed through the air and Alphedge caught it expertly. ‘This,’ he held the automatic out straight, its muzzle unmistakably locked on to Jacquie’s head, ‘is not a film prop.’
‘Sorry, Jacquie,’ Cissie slipped from behind her to stand alongside her husband, ‘but you really shouldn’t have meddled, should you?’
‘Where’s Max?’ Alphedge growled.
‘I thought he was here.’ Jacquie’s voice echoed in the stillness of that great hall. The hurricane lamp at Alphedge’s feet threw huge, bizarre shadows on the walls. The gun in the man’s hand looked to be three feet long.
‘He is!’ It was Maxwell’s voice, echoing and re-echoing round the stairwell.
‘Max!’ Jacquie had never been so glad to hear a voice in her life.
Alphedge’s gun swung right and left. He was gripping it with both hands now, probing it into the dark recesses of the lamp’s shadows.
‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘Show yourself, Max,’ Alphedge snarled. They all heard the safety catch click. ‘Or the girl dies.’ He was closing on Jacquie, pointing the gun at her head again.
‘Oh dear, Alphie.’ Peter Maxwell sauntered into the light from under the stairwell at the far side, where a bank of lockers had hidden him from view. ‘Have you stooped so low? That’s a B-feature line if ever I heard one.’
‘Don’t patronize me, you bastard. Is that the money?’ He was talking about the large suitcase by Maxwell’s feet.
‘It might be,’ Maxwell hedged. ‘There again, it might be your dirty linen.’
‘Cissie,’ Alphedge ordered.
The silver-haired woman strode across the tiled floor, scattering dust and spiders.
‘Uh-huh.’ Alphedge had sensed Maxwell about to move. ‘You won’t outrun this bullet,’ he said.
Maxwell sighed. ‘Really, Alphie. This is quite appalling. One clumsy cliché after another. Why don’t you nip up on to the roof and shout “Top of the world, Ma”? At least the old Cagney number had some class.’
Cissie retrieved the case and lugged it across to her husband.
‘What’s all this about?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Why are you doing all this to get your own money back?’
‘Do you want to tell her, Max?’ Alphedge called over his shoulder, trying to keep an eye on them both. ‘I expect you’ve worked it out by now.’
‘I hadn’t.’ Maxwell sat down, slowly crossing his legs like some unlikely Buddha, folding his hands in his lap. Jacquie hadn’t moved, her head still tilted slightly back away from the muzzle of the PPK that was invading her space, threatening to blow that head away. ‘Not until I bumped into two little girls on my way here tonight. By the way, Cissie.’ He looked at her with genuine admiration. ‘Why you’ve never got a BAFTA is beyond me. Wasn’t she good, Jacquie? Played the part of the loving, increasingly frantic wife to perfection. You, Alphie …’ Maxwell grimaced in the sharpness of the lamp’s light. ‘Well, I don’t want to be a critic …’
‘Why not?’ Alphedge snarled. ‘Everybody else is.’
‘Yes, I know. Well, you fell apart too soon. All that shaking, nervous-breakdown, I’m-next stuff. It wasn’t only the lady, I thought, who doth protest too much. The threatening voice over the phone was good though.’
‘We’re still waiting, Max,’ Alphedge said. ‘And my trigger finger’s getting tired.’
Maxwell shook his head, tutting. ‘There you go again. Well, well, to cases.’ He suddenly linked his fingers and cracked them. Alphedge licked his lips and blinked at the sound. Jacquie hadn’t taken her eyes off the gunman’s face. What game was Max playing? She’d seen faces like that before – faces of men on the edge whose every nerve was concentrated in that trigger finger like a watch spring.
‘Quent and Cret were dead, like old Marley. Jacquie and I had dismissed coincidence, random killings, that sort of thing. That left me – and I knew I hadn’t done it,’ Maxwell looked his cutest, fluttering his eyelashes at Cissie, ‘the Preacher, Ash, Stenhouse or you. Now everybody wanted to believe it was the Preacher because he comes across as barking. You, I take it, knew about his parents?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Alphedge half smiled. ‘But I thought bringing it up might be a tad heavy handed of me and lead to other suspicions elsewhere, so I decided to let someone like Miss Plod here dig that one up.’
‘Indeed.’ Maxwell beamed. ‘No, the Preacher was just too likely – the weird garb, the spooky sect. Like a male model from the Serial Killers R Us catalogue. I had to check him out, of course, but he was never really in the running.’
‘And then?’
‘Stenhouse. Now there’s a tragedy you could have played one day, Alphie.’
‘Meaning?’
‘What a sad case. Opportunities wasted, dreams turned to dust. “He could have been a contender”,’ it was pure Brando, ‘but all he had in the end was a bitter, twisted drunk of a wife who tried to turn him in.’
‘What?’ Alphedge gave a brittle chuckle. ‘For the murders?’
‘Yep. No, Stenhouse organized the reunion, Stenhouse had the key – it was just too pat. Unless he was operating a double bluff and I knew he wasn’t clever enough for that. So that reduced it to two – you or Ash. And that’s why I was late getting here tonight, funnily enough. I gave old Ash a ring, on that mobile you gave me, Jacquie. You see, it was those two schoolgirls I bumped into; those two from Cranton …’
Jacquie frowned. ‘Cranton?’
‘The girls’ school down the road,’ Maxwell reminded her. ‘God, we had some times there, didn’t we, Alphie, huh?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Alphedge’s eyes were burning into Jacquie’s now, his lips twisted in a hideous half-smile.
‘You see, I kept thinking whoever killed Cret Bingham was just covering up for the real murder – poor old Quent. It must have been the Sunday we all left the Graveney. You or Cissie let something slip, didn’t you? And I’m sure it wasn’t you, Cissie, my dear – you’re far too good an actress. No, it was M
ighty Mouth here.’
‘That’s enough, Max,’ Cissie scolded.
‘No,’ shouted Alphedge. ‘Let him go on. Let him have his moment of glory.’
‘You knew Cret had sussed you the moment you said it. You must have followed him, hung around, seen what he did. A long shot, of course, because he could simply have rung the boys – and girls – in blue.’
‘I knew he wouldn’t do that,’ Alphedge snarled. ‘When you’re an actor, dear boy, you know human nature, read it like a book. Bingham may have been a High Court fucking judge, but he always deferred to you, Maxie. You were the brains of the Seven always, weren’t you? I knew he’d go to see you, compare notes, test theories. I just got to him first.’
‘With that?’ Maxwell pointed to the gun.
Alphedge nodded. ‘It’s a great persuader.’
‘Shame about the pale blue carpet, though, Cissie,’ Maxwell murmured. ‘What with Cret’s blood all over it and all. Still, someone who can rustle up a half a mill ransom money can manage a bit of One Thousand and One for the Axminster, eh?’ Maxwell was delighted – it didn’t hurt to wink any more. ‘I presume it was a cricket bat you hit them both with?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Alphedge assured him. ‘After Cret, I burned it in the incinerator.’
‘Then you thought, “Why not implicate dear old Maxie?” After all, Cret told you, I assume at gunpoint, that he was coming to see me. So you drove with the body to Tottingleigh woods and dumped it under that old settee on Ryker Hill. Inspired choice that – although you couldn’t have known I often take constitutionals there. I thought planting the note was a bit of overkill, though.’
‘Note?’ Jacquie saw Alphedge falter for a split second, but it wasn’t long enough.
‘The note you stashed round here somewhere that put me in the frame for George Quentin.’
‘You’re talking bollocks, Max.’ Alphedge sneered. ‘You know, perhaps Cret was wrong, perhaps we all were. You’re not the brains, you’re a rank amateur.’
