Maxwell's Academy

by M. J. Trow

  ‘No I bleeding well do not have an appointment, ’scuse my French,’ she said. ‘If she won't see me she just won't have a clean school no more, that’s all. My girls and Daniel ain’t putting up with it. It’s not right, is it? Messing about with our schedules.’

  It wasn’t like Mrs B to only have one question in a speech, but Maxwell couldn’t help it. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘Who’s Daniel, by the way?’

  ‘He does the rough,’ she replied, enigmatically. She stalked into the reception area and tapped on the counter. Maxwell couldn’t hear her exact words but the gist was clear. Sadly, Mrs Braymarr seemed to be currently at one of her other schools – this piece of information eliciting a snort from Mrs B that made Thingee’s hair ruffle – but if Mrs B would like to wait ...?

  ‘Wait? Wait for that trollop?’ she said, returning to Maxwell in a state of the highest dudgeon. ‘No, I will not wait.’ She looked at him again and cocked her head. ‘So, what d’you want me to have a look at? Not that ancient thing in your office, I hope? There’s nothing can help that old rubbish, is there?’

  ‘I should think not,’ Maxwell was almost weak with relief. For a moment, he thought that Mrs B had disappeared for ever beneath the mantle of a political firebrand. ‘Not for a trollop like her, certainly. I need your internet expertise. No, it isn’t. Probably not; you know best.’

  ‘Just as well I’ve got me tablet,’ she said, patting her huge handbag.

  Maxwell’s heart did a little lurch. Was the woman ill? Mrs B was immortal, surely?

  ‘It’s Android,’ she said, inexplicably, ‘so you’ll recognise some of the commands.’

  He nodded and shook his head by turns. She probably knew what she was talking about. Since her emergence some years before as a computer geek, nothing she did could ever surprise him again.

  ‘We’ll go to your office, shall we?’ she said, and led the way, hauling herself up each step with a grunt. Mrs B had spent years cultivating her persona and even righteous anger couldn’t make a dent in it. Once ensconced at Maxwell’s desk and with a steaming cup of builder’s tea in front of her, she delved into her bag and fished out her tablet, complete with detachable keyboard.

  ‘Oh!’ Gautama Buddha had never had a more profound experience. ‘A laptop.’

  For a moment, Mrs B considered patting him, condescendingly, the way the shop assistants in PC World had once done to her, but she decided against it. ‘Yes, Mr M. Sort of. Let’s call it that, if that makes you comfy. Now, what did you want me to show you?’

  ‘It’s not so much show me as ... it’s a bit difficult for me, because I don’t really know the jargon.’

  Bless him! This time, Mrs B did pat him. This man had a brain as big as the great outdoors, but when it came to computing, it was just as empty. ‘Don’t worry about the words, Mr M,’ she said, kindly, as though to a child. ‘Just tell me what you need.’

  Maxwell tried never to condescend, but he recognised it when he saw it. Never mind, it might make his task easier if he started from a position of idiot. The savant could come later. ‘I understand that people have Googled Mrs Braymarr, but she doesn’t come up in the searches.’

  Mrs B raised an eyebrow. ‘That don’t seem very likely,’ she said, turning to her tablet. ‘She’s one of them super heads, ain’t she?’ She swiped the screen a couple of times and then applied herself to the keyboard. ‘How’d you spell her name again?’

  ‘B-R-A-Y-M-A-R-R.’

  ‘There you are, y’see, loads of ... wait a minute.’ She peered more closely. ‘No, that can’t be right ... hang on, I’ll check again.’ She tapped and swiped, then tapped and swiped and swore. ‘Bugger me, Mr M, excuse as always, but you’re right. There isn’t even a Fiona Braymarr on LinkedIn. Facebook. Nuthin. It’s not normal. She strikes me as the kind of woman as can’t keep her hands off Twitter. But even if she doesn’t do social media ...’ Mrs B’s hands were on the keys again, ‘where’s her other schools? Where’s ... well, anything?’

  ‘So, it is unusual, Mrs B?’

  ‘Not so much unusual, as ... well, I never seen it before. Let me show you something.’ She typed and turned the tablet’s screen to face him. ‘Got your glasses?’

  ‘I don’t wear glasses, Mrs B.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ She looked at him appraisingly. ‘Good for your age.’

  ‘Thank you.’ And he really meant it. Mrs B of all people was not given to praise.

  ‘Have a look then. D’you know what that is?’

  ‘A list of ... websites?’

  ‘Correct. About ...?’

  ‘I don’t know him. Should I? Is he famous? I’m really bad at singers and so on.’ The man didn’t look like a singer, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the music business these days. ‘Britain’s Got Talent runner up? Sorry.’

  She gave another snort and shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t know him, but it’s my old man. Rest his soul, I suppose I oughter say.’

  Maxwell peered closer. He had never met the man, who seemed to most people who knew Mrs B to be as legendary as any unicorn. There were images, there were websites about long-ago darts matches – the list went on and on. ‘But ...?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, triumphant. ‘If you Googled me, you, Mrs M, little Nole, even that bleeding cat of yours, I bet there are pages of hits.’ She looked up and quickly translated. ‘Websites with their name on at the very least, but often a picture or a bit of news. But Mrs Bloody Hitler Braymarr, nothing. It’s not right.’

  ‘So, what is it, then?’ Maxwell stopped looming over her and pulled up a chair. ‘How can she not be on the web?’

  ‘You can do it,’ Mrs B said, ruminatively. ‘The new Google rules mean you can ask them to remove sites you don’t want there, but it takes a while and they still get to decide what stays and what goes. There is software ...’ a few more clicks and she was pointing to the screen again, ‘but I dunno how well they work. You can overload your name. Put loads of the same article up with your name in and Google will think you’re a spammer and take you to the bottom of the rankings. But still ... can you give me a while, Mr M? You’ve got some teaching to do anyway, haven’t you, I expect?’

  Maxwell looked over his shoulder at the clock, which stood at a rather disconcerting nine fifteen. ‘Oh, bugger and poo, Mrs B. I should be with Ten Zed Ex Oh! They will have ripped the windows out of the frames by now; I’m late!’

  ‘Off you go, then,’ she said, already hunched over the keyboard, a woman on a mission. ‘I’ll winkle this tart out if it’s the last thing I do!’

  Although winkle tart sounded rather unappetising, Maxwell applauded her enthusiasm and raced down the corridor, jacket flapping, to quell the riot he could hear dimly from below. Even without Dee MacBride, ring leader extraordinary, it wasn’t going to be pretty in there.

  The MacBride house, like 10ZXO was totally MacBride-free. Jacquie had rung to check before she arrived, but the answerphone simply asked her to leave a message. She checked the dealership and he wasn’t there either. Council offices; the same. Jacquie had always suspected that Geoff MacBride was a slippery customer, able to play both ends against the middle and this was proof positive. What she needed was a warrant and her next stop had been the Law Courts, to get a magistrate to sign the paperwork. And here was where the embarrassment had begun because, contrary to popular opinion, Geoff MacBride was not hiding under the nearest rock, he was in court, his turn on the JP roster having come around. Keeping her head down, Jacquie had got one of his colleagues to put pen to paper. Then, all she had to do was get to the house and meet the forensics team, before giving it the once-over. No one expected to find anything, but they had to go through the motions. A similar team, led by Rick Shopley, were combing the dealership. Jacquie hated this riffling through someone else’s stuff. It wasn’t like a quick pat down, this was seriously intrusive. She always had in the back of her mind the thought of what anyone would think of 36 Columbine, should they decide to do a search. Maxwell�
��s attic diorama, for a start, with his beloved Light Brigade drawn up before the Heights. What did that say about a grown man, that he spent a considerable amount of time, energy and money on what most people would think of as toys? Would they check the garden over, drawn by the clear signs of digging? They would only find out later that it was only Nolan trying to find Troy. And the final nail in the coffin would be when they checked with the neighbours; what on earth would Mrs Troubridge have to say about them?

  The house would have been easy to find even without the SOCO van parked outside. A couple of forensics staff were lounging in the open rear, one hurriedly pinching out a cigarette as she drew up behind them.

  ‘Morning, guv,’ he said, snapping on his latex gloves and trying to look all attention. ‘Bit warmer this morning, don’t you think? Feels a bit like spring at last.’

  Jacquie looked around. It was true that the garden of the MacBride house was a colourful sight. The deep Mediterranean blue of grape hyacinths edged the brick driveway and the daffodils had put in an appearance, just in time for St David’s Day. A couple of hanging baskets in the rather over-large porch were full of winter pansies and in tubs beneath, crocuses were just getting past their best. Someone loved this garden and Jacquie felt sad when she realised it was almost certainly Denise MacBride who had lavished the attention on it and that it would never look this good again. It was a pleasant change to be able to do her work without a gaggle of gawping neighbours foregathered, but this was simply not that kind of road; any peeping was being done discreetly from behind net curtains or, more likely in these affluent homes, bespoke vertical blinds.

  She rubbed her hands together and smiled at the men. ‘It does feel a bit warmer, Josh, now you come to mention it. Right, let’s get this started.’ she looked at each man in turn and they suddenly felt like a million dollars. A smile from DI Jacquie Carpenter-Maxwell could do that to a man, even when he was encased in a disposable white suit that made him look like a mixture of Baymax from Big Hero 6 and the Staypuft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. Before Jacquie lived with the Maxwell boys, a film analogy would have been completely alien to her, but now it was a shorthand she couldn’t have avoided had she tried.

  She walked up the drive, taking in the house frontage as she did so. The place was as good an advertisement for MacBride Motors as the showroom itself. It said ‘success’ with every brick – there had to be five bedrooms if there was one. She guessed there would be rather a lot of bathrooms too. She turned to the forensics guys. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I was expecting the house to be this big. Do you want to call for more help? I’ll sign it off when I get back to the nick.’

  ‘Nah,’ Josh turned to his silent friend, who nodded his agreement. ‘There’s nobody in, is there?’

  ‘No. The girls are with their grandmother, or so I understand. That was all arranged yesterday. And I know Geoff MacBride is at the courts – I nearly bumped into him when I went to get this.’ She brandished the warrant.

  ‘Got the keys?’ So, he could speak after all. His name was Robert and he deliberately modelled himself on the silent one of the same name.

  ‘I have.’ Jacquie fished the keys out of her bag, a Yale and a Chubb on a piece of string and with a brown label attached. ‘Mrs MacBride thoughtfully provided them.’

  Behind her back, the two men looked at each other. It wasn’t like Jacquie Carpenter-Maxwell to indulge in gallows humour. They both correctly guessed that she didn’t like the widower; what they couldn’t work out was whether the man was in the frame.

  ‘Got anything in mind, guv?’ Josh asked.

  ‘No.’ She pushed the door open and a waft of warm, slightly stale air came out to greet them. ‘Just look around. Especially bedrooms. I want to know who sleeps where.’

  Robert raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Apparently,’ Jacquie said, ‘his wife didn’t understand him.’

  ‘Gotchya.’ Robert’s wife often kicked him out of her bed, but in their flat his only recourse was the sofa.

  The forensics team split up at the foot of the stairs, Robert going up to dig what dirt he could, Josh heading for the kitchen. Although this wasn’t the scene of crime according to first impressions, he had read the PM notes and, like everyone, found the cleaned fingernails to be a red flag. If she had been killed or at least rendered unconscious here, he would find proof.

  Jacquie paused in the hall, getting her bearings. A slim unit holding a phone caught her eye. As might be expected in this house, the whole thing was state of the art. The phone, though clearly a landline, looked like a mobile, with a blank screen waiting to spring to life. She put out a latex-gloved finger and felt around for buttons on the base unit, but it all seemed to be housed in the phone. For a moment, she saw the world through Maxwell’s eyes – it could be a cold and technological place, that was certain. She picked the phone itself up and it did indeed spring to life. The screen was simpler than a mobile, she could see now, with numbers along the bottom and a few app style logos along the top. One was two circles joined by a line and she smiled to herself. How very retro – a whole generation was growing up not knowing a tape recorder from a hole in the ground, and yet the go-to logo for a recording was still based on a tape. But, and more to the point, there was a red dot in the right hand circle, and it was slowly flashing. A message. She touched the logo and the screen changed.

  ‘You have ... three ... messages and ... one ... caller who left no message. To hear your messages, press or say one.’

  ‘One.’ Jacquie had to admit it, she still loved voice technology, although it rarely worked.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Sorry,’ the condescending woman continued after a pause. ‘I didn’t catch that. To hear ...’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Jacquie muttered, and jabbed the ‘one’.

  ‘First message. Message received ... Monday, 23 February at ... thirteen hundred hours.’

  There was a buzz and a pause and then a man’s voice filled the hallway. ‘Mrs MacBride, I think we ought to talk. I’m not sure whether you are aware of this, but your husband is seeing my wife ... and of course you will understand that I use the word in its biblical sense. Now, I don’t know how you feel about this, but it is making me rather annoyed.’ The caller gave a neighing laugh that could have been genuine or could have been his idea of ironic banter. ‘I think it would be good if we could meet, to chat over what’s going on. I know my wife and she won't have thought of this despicable behaviour on her own. It’s your husband who is to blame and I also feel you are not totally innocent in all this.’ The voice was rising, becoming less controlled and then, almost as if he knew it, the man brought himself back to his first pleasant tones and gave a little laugh. ‘Mrs MacBride, I don’t want to talk about this on the phone, but if you meet me tonight at the corner nearest your husband’s car dealership at nine thirty, perhaps we can plan where we can go from here? I know what you look like, so don’t worry about recognizing me; I’ll recognise you. Although we have met, in fact, some time ago. You may be surprised when you see who I am. Perhaps the name Freeman might give you a clue. Goodbye.’

  Jacquie looked up to see Josh standing in the kitchen doorway. She widened her eyes at him and he shrugged. The language of SOCO, in miniature.

  ‘End of message. Next message.’ The woman sounded as imperturbable as ever. ‘Message received ... Monday, 23 February at ... twenty two twenty seven.’

  This time the voice was clearly that of Geoff MacBride, but not the usual honeyed tones he used in public. He was clearly speaking from some public space, because there was a babble of voices in the background, two of them closer than the others.

  ‘Denise,’ he snapped. ‘Where the bloody hell are you? Drugged up to the bloody eyes I suppose, as per usual. Well, if you get this message you do, if you don’t, you don’t.’ He heaved a sigh and said something over his shoulder to one of the closer voices, who laughed. ‘Something’s come up ...’ more laughter, ‘and I won't
be home tonight. I’ll be calling in for a shirt in the morning, but don’t get up specially, will you?’ He almost spat the words and Jacquie wondered, as she so often did when dealing with domestic disputes, how parents could possibly think it was good for their children to let them live with such hatred. ‘So ... you’re not going to pick up, I can see that, so ... that’s the message. Say goodnight to the girls for me if they’re still up.’ And that was clearly that.

  ‘End of message. Next message.’ The woman was unstoppable. ‘Message received ... Monday, 23 February at ... twenty three thirty five.’

  Jacquie listened carefully, expecting it to be MacBride again, if not apologizing at least explaining a bit more now he was not in the company of his cronies. But no – it was another voice, but one she recognised nonetheless.

  ‘Denise? Sorry, I know it’s late. Can you ring me when you get this? Something’s happened. Umm ... Bye. Oh, I’m on the mobile. Bye.’

  Jacquie looked at the phone in amazement. She couldn’t have been more surprised had it grown wings and flown away. The caller had not identified himself, always a sign of either malice, as in the first call, or friendship. And this was definitely a friendly call. And it came from Thomas Morley.

  Josh appeared again in the kitchen doorway, snapping the wrist of his glove in a rather irritating manner. ‘Anything important, guv?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Jacquie sounded distant. ‘I think it must be, but ... Josh, how often has there been a night with two murders in Leighford?’

  ‘Murders as opposed to deaths?’ Like all forensics geeks, Josh was a stickler for accuracy.

  ‘Yes. Murders.’

  The forensics man cast his eyes up, lips muttering soundlessly. ‘Since I’ve been here, which is, as you know, for ever ... never.’

  ‘As I thought. So what are the odds of one murder victim having a call from the husband of the other?’

  Robert had come soundlessly down the stairs. He was the department statistics man. ‘Disappointingly boring, actually,’ he said. This was the longest statement anyone had heard from him in years, so was statistically important in itself.