by M. J. Trow
‘Er…oh, it’s boring stuff, John. Those AVCE students…’
‘Who?’
‘Duke of Edinburgh Award. Bronze. Just crossing t’s, dotting i’s you know. Bernard Ryan’s been on my back.’
If John Fry had not been suspicious before, he was now. Bernard Ryan was Leighford High’s Deputy Head and Fry knew that rather than being on Maxwell’s back, he was usually under Maxwell’s shoe. And as for the Duke of Edinburgh Award, Leighford High hadn’t gone in for that since the said Duke of Edinburgh got engaged to the Princess Elizabeth.
‘Get me another, then, El, would you?’ Fry raised his empty can in the air and they watched his wife turn on her heel and go indoors. ‘We don’t do Duke of Edinburgh, Max,’ Fry said. ‘What’s all this about?’ He waved the man to another chair opposite his.
‘Annette Choker.’ Maxwell cut to the chase, checking that, Eleanor Fry-wise, the coast was clear.
‘Who?’
‘Well, I don’t know why Bernard wants the report now,’ he suddenly said, a little too loudly. ‘Some sponsorship bid or something. It’s all about kite marks these days, isn’t it? In my day, a kite was something you went out with on a windy day.’ Eleanor Fry had emerged silently and with alarming speed onto the patio steps and hurried past Maxwell to bring her husband his beer. Her body language said it all and a line of G.K. Chesterton crept into Maxwell’s mind. ‘Silence itself made softer by the sweeping of her dress.’
‘Yes.’ Fry’s smile was frozen behind the shades. ‘Yes, it is. So, what do you need?’
Eleanor had gone again, the door clicking behind her.
‘The truth.’ Maxwell leaned forward. There was a hedge to his front and a hedge to his back and God knew how many neighbourly eavesdroppers beyond each one; the kind and the caring who also doubled as the vigilantes of the Neighbourhood Watch.
Fry wasn’t having any. He lolled back on the steamer, hissing open his can. ‘You’ve lost me.’
Maxwell had expected this. He pulled a crumpled note from his jacket pocket and passed it to his man.
‘So?’ Fry shrugged. It was easy to hide behind dark glasses, even if the eyes had it.
‘It’s your writing, John.’
‘Bollocks,’ the Business Studies teacher snapped.
‘I’ve had more memos from you than hot dinners,’ Maxwell was patience itself. ‘Remember last year? Taffy Iliffe gave you a special award at the Christmas dinner. You were the Memo King, weren’t you? The man voted most likely to pop pointless pieces of paper into everybody’s pigeonhole. I just want to know two things. Where is this confined space of yours? And who else is involved?’
Fry was sitting upright now. ‘Look, Max. This…note or whatever it is,’ he handed it back, ‘is nothing to do with me, and what’s it got to do with Annette Choker?’
‘So you do know her?’
‘I know of her. She’s in Year Eleven, isn’t she? I don’t teach her myself.’
‘John,’ Maxwell began, ‘…look, will you take those bloody glasses off? I need to see the whites of a man’s eyes.’
Fry took his time, then he whipped the shades away. ‘Just what is it you’re accusing me of?’
It was Maxwell’s turn to sit back. ‘Got any kids, John?’ he asked, looking round at the neat garden, with its borders, its shrubs, its privet boundaries.
‘No,’ the Head of Business said.
‘Maybe, if you had…’
‘Unless you’ve got some specific allegations,’ Fry was on his feet, ‘I’d like you to leave.’
Maxwell glanced across to the kitchen window where Eleanor Fry was moving about, wiping this, polishing that. Displacement for the displaced. He stood up, then closed to Fry, toe to toe, head to head.
‘I’d like to think you’re the victim of a vicious schoolgirl scam,’ he said softly. ‘The sort the Mail on Sunday dredges up occasionally. But I’ve got a nasty feeling you’re a pervert meeting a couple of fifteen year-olds for sordid sex sessions. Starting to sound pretty News of the World now, isn’t it? I’ll see myself out.’
He toyed with going back through the house, making his excuses, commenting on the lovely microwave, engaging in small talk, but the side gate suddenly seemed strangely appealing.
Bernard Ryan stood in the foyer of Leighford High School that morning, still, for reasons only he understood, wearing his name badge. He had been at the school as Second, then First Deputy, for too many years now and time, that Grand Illusion, had passed him by. He wasn’t really old enough for redundancy, but he’d asked the Head anyway if he could go, on the grounds of his obnoxiousness and ineptitude. In a moment of unusual and dazzling quippery, the Head had told him no; he was not quite incompetent or obnoxious enough.
‘Forgotten who you are, Bernard?’ Maxwell tipped his hat as he swept past him.
‘Morning, Mr Maxwell,’ Bernard Ryan bridled; he had all the sense of humour of a walnut.
The Head of Sixth Form hopped down the main corridor, removing his cycle clips as he went, much to the delight of a gaggle of Year Seven girls on their way to registration. ‘I’ll have you know,’ Maxwell rounded on them, ‘that this dance was all the rage back in the Summer of Love. Called the Bee Hip Hop. Ask your granddads about it.’ Just a little more confirmation, were it needed, that Peter Maxwell was mad. And he was gone into that Inner Sanctum, that haven of peace that is the staff room. Bolt-hole of sanity, oasis of calm.
‘I don’t give a flying fuck!’ were the first words that Maxwell heard. ‘You sort it out.’
A decidedly rattled John Fry crashed past him, shoulder-barging Maxwell aside as he disappeared through the doors.
Dierdre Lessing stood there, open-mouthed. She was the Senior Mistress at Leighford High, or Head Procuress as Maxwell occasionally called her when he was feeling very tried. Live cobras hissed and writhed on her head and most people avoided her deadly gaze lest they be turned to stone.
‘Dierdre,’ Maxwell whispered, smiling. ‘Mouth. You’re gaping, dear.’ It was like talking to his cat.
‘Did you hear what that man said?’ she shrilled, hands on hips, still staring at the still-flapping door.
‘I did,’ Maxwell nodded, tutting. ‘Most un-Businesslike. What did you say to upset him?’ It was the sort of stupid question the sillier Year Heads asked the pulverized victims of bullies.
‘Well, nothing.’ Dierdre was mentally unravelling the conversation of the past few minutes. ‘We were talking about progression; you know, Year Eleven into Year Twelve. Each Department Head is supposed to… I just asked him to be a little more proactive…’
Maxwell inhaled savagely, recoiling and clutching his throat, steadying himself against the wall. ‘You…you used the p-word?’ he hissed in disbelief. ‘Dierdre, how could you? I must rush and console Mr Fry. Poor dear, he’s in need of counselling.’
Dierdre Lessing’s face said it all. ‘You’re the end, Maxwell,’ she growled and stormed out, to a gentle ripple of applause.
Maxwell bowed to his assorted colleagues and turned to his pigeon-hole. Ben Holton, the Head of Science, was at his elbow. ‘Wanker,’ he chuckled. Holton was bald as a badger, the wrong side of a messy divorce and would never see fifty again. Laughs didn’t happen often in his life.
‘You talking about me, Dierdre or John Fry?’ Maxwell didn’t glance in the man’s direction, but started to sort his mail.
‘Take your pick,’ Holton said.
Maxwell laughed, carrying a telephone-directory’s thickness of bumf to the bin. ‘Let’s do Thursday.’
The slope of the headland above Leighford that was called Staple Hill was like a battlefield. Vehicles lay at rakish angles, among them Leighford High’s minibus, the ghastly Nineties logo emblazoned on the side, sponsored by everything from Nike to Leerdammer. Tents littered the skyline, canvas flapping in the stiff spring breeze, straining against the guy-ropes, like those of Maxwell’s beloved Light Brigade in the Crimean Autumn in olden times.
A host of sixth former
s clustered inside one, around Mr Moss, their Head of History, that old bastard Mad Max and an odd-looking tall bloke with a ragged beard and sandals. They were all looking at a dead man, his bones splayed out on the table under the shade of the tent’s roof. He looked like a construction kit, with his body parts exploded prior to cementing.
‘If you look here,’ the bearded man lifted up the grey-brown skull, ‘you’ll see what killed him. A single blow has shattered the cranial area. Probably an axe.’
Cecily Jenkins pulled a face. She’d never liked hittie-hittie things and often had to leave Mr Moss’s or Mr Maxwell’s lessons when the history got a bit rough.
‘Is this a battlefield, Mr Russell?’ Paul Moss wanted to know. He’d only been a historian for nine years. He was still wet behind the ears.
‘No evidence of that,’ Douglas Russell told him. ‘No, we’re investigating a Saxon cemetery. But this body was found much further up the slope, outside the perimeter trench. We’ve no idea why it was separate. Some sort of taboo, perhaps. We know that in the ninth century…’
It all blurred into gobbledegook in the brain pan of Robbie Wesson. This was a punishment trip. Whereas the sixth form, those privileged wankers in Year Twelve and Thirteen who were allowed to wear their own clothes were here for their edification and delight, Robbie was a pressed man. Mr Moss, his History teacher, had told him that in the olden days people were sent out to crack rocks as a punishment, chained together. They were black people, Robbie knew, and sometimes they were on a ship, picking cotton or something. So it didn’t come as too much of a surprise to Robbie that Mr Moss had turned his detention into this boring visit. He looked at the bloke with a beard. He knew words were coming out of his mouth and he understood about one in four. Okay, so there was a dead bloke. That was mildly interesting, but when he’d picked up a bone, Mr Moss had screamed at him. There were computers in the tent, but they were all showing really boring stuff and he wasn’t sure he’d get away with accessing his BMX sites.
So Robbie went on a wander. He often did it, dawdling between lessons, taking twenty minutes to go to the lav, inventing urgent embassies on behalf of Miss So-and-so or Mr Whatsisface. The fact that Robbie couldn’t remember half his teachers’ names spoke volumes. He found himself outside the tent. Robbie could slip out of places for England. Shit! He’d left his fags in his locker, back at Leighford. What a plonker. Never mind, perhaps he could cadge one off of one of the people up to their waists in various holes on the hillside.
‘What you doing?’ Even in misfits like Robbie Wesson, the flame of intellectual curiosity burned bright occasionally.
‘Digging.’ The woman didn’t look up. She was wearing gardening gloves and her bare shoulders were pink and blotchy under the afternoon sun. She had a really silly straw hat, like one Robbie’s gran had. She looked like that woman with big tits on the gardening programme on the telly, that Charlie Buttock.
‘What for?’
Charlie Buttock rested back on her heels, wiping the sweat from her forehead under the hat brim. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, instantly suspicious of anyone who didn’t reach her waist.
‘I’m Robbie.’
‘Are you with the school party?’
Robbie hadn’t been asked to a party since he was eight. The old girl was clearly as daft as a brush. And she had to be forty if she was a day.
‘Shouldn’t you be with the others?’ Charlie Buttock felt a vague sense of unease.
‘Yeah.’ This was Robbie’s way in. ‘But Mr Moss sent me to get his ciggies.’ Robbie’s razor logic told him that this woman wouldn’t know that Mr Moss had never knowingly had a ciggie in his life. ‘Only, the van’s locked. You haven’t got one, have you?’
‘I don’t smoke,’ Charlie Buttock told him. ‘Now, please go away. I’m busy.’ And she got on with her trowelling again, hoping the ground would swallow the child up like the mountain behind the Pied Piper.
Robbie wandered away, muttering. He turned again, briefly, to stare with disbelief at the size of the woman’s arse in her tight jeans. Not even Marcia Wapham had an arse that size and all Year Eight agreed that Marcia Wapham was huge. What was it that lured little Robbie towards the copse? The cool of the trees, perhaps, in the unseasonable heat of the May day sun. It would be minutes before they noticed he’d gone. And anyway, he was busting for a pee. He ducked past the dumper truck and balanced dangerously on the planking that led to the myriad spoil heaps, scattering a couple of mud-caked buckets in his wake. For a recidivist offender, Robbie was bloody loud. Then, he was in the shadows of the trees. This would do. He wasn’t normally so coy. Usually he’d point percy at any old porcelain, from church walls to Old Peoples’ Homes but he didn’t want the old cow digging to see him in case she thought he was flashing her. And that would be just too gross to contemplate.
He was just in mid-rip, watering the ash tree roots, when he saw it. It looked like a bundle of rags at first, dark against the tangle of vegetation, except…except there was a hand sticking out of it, the fingers curled towards him, beckoning. He clenched his muscles, stopping with difficulty in mid-pee. He whipped up his flies and peered closer, his heart thumping, his mouth dry. He’d never seen a dead body before, not one that still had flesh on it. And the skeleton in the tent didn’t look real anyway. He kicked the bundle with his trainer. Nothing. Maybe it was a wino, like that old bloke who lived on and off the Barlichway, near Robbie’s home, the one they threw lighted matches at to make him jump. A flap of blanket flopped aside and a face stared up at him, dark eyes sunken in the head, mouth half open as though in mid-sentence. The neck was at a weird angle, the head to one side, like somebody’d stuck it on funny. And there was dark brown stuff all around the collar.
‘Fuckin’ ’ell,’ Robbie hissed and crashed back through the undergrowth. ‘Mr Moss, Mr Moss! There’s a dead bloke!’
Chapter Three
‘What’s that stupid boy shouting about?’ Charlie Buttock wanted to know. She was kneeling up in her trench, glowing a little, as Maxwell would have put it, with the exertions of the day.
Paul Moss was probably still the right side of thirty-five. He was out of the main tent like a bat out of hell and haring across the site, mixing metaphors as he went, leaping trenches and kicking trowels like a man born to it. ‘Robbie!’ he screamed. ‘Have you touched anything?’
Robbie was stumbling back out of the clutch of trees, his trainer-laces flapping, his hands flapping, the baseball cap that was the mark of the stupid person from George W. down, lying discarded in the dust. Moss put his career on the line by grabbing the boy’s elbow and steadying him.
‘Robbie,’ he shook him. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘It’s a body,’ Robbie was shouting, pointing to the trees. ‘Over there.’
‘We haven’t excavated over there yet,’ Charlie Buttock was explaining. ‘There can’t possibly…’
But Peter Maxwell was creeping over the ash tree roots, feeling his way in semi-darkness, trying to force his eyes to focus after the sharp light of the sun. He couldn’t make out anything at first, then his foot hit something, soft but solid.
‘Jesus!’
‘What is it, Mr Maxwell?’ Douglas Russell, their archaeologist guide, was standing with the Leighford sixth formers at his elbow.
‘Nothing,’ Maxwell turned to face them. ‘Paul, get the kids in the minibus, will you?’ In such moments, even Peter Maxwell was apt to denigrate his own sixth form, but in the face of death, the sophisticates of Year Twelve were children indeed.
‘What?’ Moss frowned, but he’d worked man and boy with Peter Maxwell for years now, almost all his working life. Mad the man may have been, but he was only mad nor’ by nor’west. And when Mad Max told you to do something, he had his reasons. And you did it. ‘Oh, right. Come on, people. Home-time.’
‘But sir…’ Robbie couldn’t believe what was happening.
‘Yes, Robbie. Tell me all about it later.’
The Year Twelve
students, in jeans and t-shirts, had been grateful enough to take a break from the rigours of their AS revision slog to look at a few artefacts, but this was different, frightening, urgent. Had Robbie Wesson been literally burning, not one of them would have pissed on him to put him out, but there was something wrong. They all sensed it. Mad Max’s face was odd, serious and suddenly grey. His voice was hard, his words deliberate, and in such moments, you didn’t cross him. You just kept your head down and you moved. A couple of girls put their arms around Robbie’s skinny little shoulders and instantly turned into their mothers, leading the bewildered boy back to the minibus.
Douglas Russell was in the undergrowth now, squatting with those muscles that archaeologists the world over develop in their years at the soil-face. ‘My God,’ he hissed, staring at what Peter Maxwell was staring at.
‘That is…was…David Radley?’ Maxwell needed confirmation. He’d only met the man once and the light was poor in the ash-tree thicket.
Russell was nodding. ‘God in Heaven…’ and his hand instinctively went forward.
‘No!’ Maxwell was faster, snatching the man’s wrist and holding it firm. ‘Evidence,’ he said more softly. ‘You, of all people…’
‘Yes,’ Russell visibly pulled himself together, ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. An eleven-hundred-year-old body I can cope with. But this…’ He realized he was shaking. He was going to throw up.
‘Do you have a mobile phone?’ Maxwell asked, as much to give the man something to do as anything else.
‘Er…yes…I…I don’t know…’ He slapped his pockets uselessly. It would be in his jacket, in the tent, in the four-by-four, at the hotel. At that precise moment, he didn’t really know.
The Head of Sixth Form stood up, lifting the shaken archaeologist with him. He led the man into the sunlight. Charlie Buttock stood there, one or two other diggers alongside her, watching the scene unfold as if in a film. Somebody else’s screenplay, somebody else’s set.