by M. J. Trow
Jacquie sighed when she saw him. His laconic voice on the end of the phone was enough to make most police personnel turn to the Prozac. Face-to-face, he was even harder to take and when he stood up his head seemed to reach the ceiling. ‘Hello, Angus. I have a bit of a rush job, here.’
He shifted his gum to the other side of his mouth, ever the professional. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yes. It’s a suspected poisoning.’
‘Dunnit.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Dunnit, en’ I? Yesterday. Phoned results to Hall. Aconite.’
‘Or a derivative, yes,’ Jacquie agreed. ‘But this is another case of poisoning.’
‘Dunnit.’
‘What?’ Her patience was wearing thin.
‘Blood test on that woman what had the tablet. Same. Aconite.’
‘No. Angus, listen to me. This is not something you have done. This is a bag of sausage rolls from Leighford High School, one of which poisoned a member of staff. This morning.’ She looked for some spark of intelligence in his eyes. ‘Today.’
He picked up the evidence bag, opened it and shook out the contents onto his counter. ‘I hate these,’ he remarked. ‘They sell them down our all-night garage. I had some last night. They’re ’orrible.’
Jacquie knew she shouldn’t, but she asked anyway. ‘Why did you eat them, then?’
‘Munchies.’
Well, that explained part of his personality anyway. ‘Right. Well, these were bought today in the school canteen and the thing is that they came from the same place the prawn cocktails did, though obviously packaged, not prepared by the chefs there.’
‘Chefs. Ha. That’s a laugh. Frozen prawns and ready-made sauce. Not exactly cordon-bleeding-bleu, is it?’
‘Well, no. But the difference is that the prawn cocktails …’
‘… had been put together by hand, yes I know. Whereas the poison in these rolls had been injected.’
‘How on earth could you know that?’ she asked. Angus had hidden depths, although she didn’t care to plumb them.
He held up the bag. ‘Hole,’ he said.
She peered at it. ‘It’s tiny,’ she said.
‘Course it is. Needle, ennit?’
‘Um, yes, I suppose it is. But how do you know it isn’t just a hole?’
‘Because,’ said Angus, as though speaking to a slow child, ‘because if you look, there is a kind of raised rim, yes, can you see it? A bit like a really tiny volcano? Yeah?’ He sounded almost enthusiastic in his use of the aptly named moronic interrogative.
‘Yes,’ Jacquie said, adjusting the distance to suit her eyes. ‘Yes, I can.’
‘So,’ Angus said, triumphantly, ‘that’s where the needle went in, pushing the plastic, stretching it a little bit and then, when it was pulled out,’ and he mimed the movements as he spoke, ‘it pulled that little frill out with it. So, unless a weevil or something shot out like a bullet, then it was a hypodermic. In. And out.’
‘Angus. You’re a marvel,’ said Jacquie, fingers crossed behind her back.
He looked down and blushed slightly. ‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘Now then, I’ll see if I can find out what the poison was, but don’t hang around, it might take me a few minutes. Ha ha.’
Jacquie smiled at him and meant it. She left him her card in case he had mislaid the last one and left the lab. Angus picked up the sausage rolls and went over to the fume cupboard. Triple and a half time and a few quiet minutes with Jacquie Carpenter. Days didn’t get much better than this.
The Headmastering lark was turning out to be a bit more work than Maxwell had envisaged. Diamond was not brilliant academically and now, Maxwell thought to himself as he ploughed through mounds of paperwork, he understood why. An intelligent man, skating along the sharp white cutting edge of original thought, would put a ball through his brain after less than a day of this. It was that most irritating of tasks, both boring and difficult. It needed full attention, but to the most mind-numbingly boring subject matter. Time sheets. EMA approval. Memos from days before seemed almost poignant: little billets-doux from Bernard Ryan, with pencilled notes in their margins in Diamond’s pernickety hand. Of one thing, though, Maxwell approved. Despite huge pressure from the Paperless Office Company, Diamond had not yet gone totally over to the death knell of civilised behaviour, the endless email.
Maxwell was conscientious in everything he did, be it solving murders, teaching History or being the Acting Headmaster. So he tried not to give in, but then came the memo which made him throw in the towel. An email, printed out despite the County exhortation to save paper, from Bernard Ryan, bore the pencilled comment – ‘Yes, Bernard. That is the elephant in the room. JD.’
‘That’s it!’ cried Maxwell. ‘I can’t stand any more.’ He walked to the inner door which led to the office suite and stuck his head round it. ‘Michelle!’ he yelled. ‘Michelle!’
Diamond’s secretary came running. ‘Yes, Mr Maxwell?’ She was finding being the Great Man’s secretary rather strange. There seemed to be both less and more to do. Less running to and fro with coffee. More spelling mistakes to correct in her own typing.
‘I’m off home. Tell me, does Mr Diamond have all his emails printed out?’
‘Oh, yes, Mr Maxwell. In triplicate.’
‘Triplicate?’ Maxwell was not a byword where environmentalists gathered, but he did want there to be a planet for his son to grow up on. Or in, as the case may be. ‘I hesitate to ask, but really, why on earth does he do that?’
‘One for file.’
‘Yes.’ He supposed there had to be a paper trail, especially with the standard of IT at Leighford High. After all, had Herr Hitler faced trial at Nuremburg, he would have got off precisely because there was no paper trail. What Holocaust?
‘One for his personal file.’
‘Hmm. That sounds a bit like duplication to me, Michelle. And the third?’
She went a little pink. ‘To be quite honest, Mr Maxwell, I can never remember and I don’t like to ask Mr Diamond. So I just make the copy, keep it for a while and then …’ Her voice died away.
‘And then?’ Maxwell tried to sound managerial.
‘I shred it.’
He tried not to overreact. ‘Shred it? But isn’t that a terrible waste?’
She brightened up. ‘Oh, no, Mr Maxwell. It doesn’t go to waste. It goes as bedding for the school hamster.’
He sighed and reached for his coat. He would have to have a word with Ben Holton, the Head of Science, who was clearly running some sort of health spa for rodents in the bowels of his laboratories. ‘Bye-bye, Michelle. Have a good weekend now, y’hear?’ It was a perfect Beverley Hillbillies but, as Michelle was too young to remember that, largely wasted. Maxwell jammed on his hat and moved towards the outer door, rummaging in his pocket for his cycle clips.
Michelle appeared in the doorway from her office. ‘I’m going to see Mr Diamond this evening, Mr Maxwell. Any message?’
He turned, something scathing on his lips. But she looked so anxious to please, so willing, that all he said was, ‘Yes. Tell him get well soon.’ He walked into the foyer and added under his breath, ‘Really really soon. Now, where did I leave my bike?’
As Maxwell smoothly took the curve of Columbine in his stride, something struck him as rather odd. A car, not a Ka, was pulled up at the kerb and it seemed to have attracted a small but significant crowd, composed of Mrs Troubridge, a rather unpleasant dog-walking woman who tramped the roads in all weathers accompanied only by a disgruntled Peke and a bag of doggie-detritus, the rather nice woman from over the road and, almost inevitably, Mrs B. As the squeal of Surrey’s brakes announced Maxwell’s presence, they turned as one woman to stare at him.
Mrs B broke the silence first. ‘See, I said ’e’d be along in a minute.’ She was proud of how well she knew her man.
‘That poor little mite,’ said the dog walker. ‘Someone should be informed.’
‘He would have been perfectly happy with me, wouldn’t
you, Nolan?’ Mrs Troubridge crooned. ‘I often babysit.’
‘Then they should be ashamed,’ snapped the dog walker. ‘You must be nearly a hundred.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Mrs Troubridge began, ‘I’ll have you know …’
Maxwell swung his leg over Surrey’s crossbar and came to an elegant stop, more by luck than judgement. He had often ended up in the fuchsias. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’
The door of the car opened and Nolan’s voice added to the din. ‘Daddy,’ he carolled. ‘Daddeeeeee.’
‘Hello, mate,’ Maxwell said, reaching in and ruffling the boy’s hair. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, but these ladies seem to have a problem.’ In best teacher style, he had singled out the troublemaker and spun round to face her. The dog walker took a step backward. She had heard he was mad. ‘What, I repeat, seems to be the trouble?’ His smile could have turned milk.
‘Um, well, I was passing,’ she stuttered. ‘This child, it appears, had been left on the doorstep.’
‘What?’ came a voice from the car. ‘Nolan, pet, go to Daddy. I must just get out and speak to the silly lady.’ Sarah, the owner of Nolan’s nursery, erupted like a force of nature from the driver’s side. ‘Mr Maxwell, I simply brought Nolan home. I know you usually pick him up on a Friday, but Jacquie had explained about things at the school, so when you didn’t come, I just brought him here. This woman,’ she raked the dog walker with a basilisk glare, ‘seems to have got the wrong end of a very strange stick.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, I’m sure,’ said the dog walker and stalked off, nose in the air, Peke at her heels.
‘She’s a nasty piece of work,’ said the nice woman from over the road. ‘She lets her dog do its business wherever it wants, you know. It’s disgusting. That scooper she carries is just for effect.’
The conversation looked set to become a marathon and Maxwell just wanted to take his son and get indoors. To be civil, he asked Sarah in. To his annoyance, she accepted. But before they went inside, he asked Mrs B what she was doing there, Friday not being her day for doing for him.
‘I do up the road on a Friday, Mr Maxwell. Mrs Briggs, you know, her with the leg. She can’t do the rough.’
Mrs Troubridge bridled. She had heard otherwise. It was reputedly the smooth that got the better of Mrs Briggs.
‘So, and you’ll forgive me for asking so bluntly, what are you doing actually here, outside Number 38, as opposed to being in the general vicinity?’
Mrs B leant in, carefully angling her cigarette end away from the little boy now clinging to Maxwell’s leg. ‘I was just bein’ nosey, Mr M.’
Faced with such devastating honesty and economy of speech from his cleaning lady, Maxwell could only raise an eyebrow and usher his son and his minder in through the door.
Upstairs in the sitting room, Nolan toddled off to persecute Metternich in front of the television. Maxwell and Sarah decamped to the kitchen. She was a good-looking woman in a children’s institution sort of way, a slightly wonky Doris Day. Only dark. And no freckles. ‘I’m sorry about that, Sarah,’ he said, filling the kettle at the sink. ‘To be honest, I forgot it was Friday, what with one thing and another.’
‘Don’t give it another thought, Mr Maxwell,’ the woman said, patting his hand. She had always been led to believe that teachers never forgot it was Friday. ‘This happens all the time, honestly. I’m sorry about the crowd. They just seemed to appear from nowhere.’
‘Yes,’ he smiled ruefully. ‘They tend to do that here in 1984-land. I think they hide under the hedge. But still, Sarah, they were right …’ He was interrupted by the phone ringing. ‘Hello? Bedlam.’
Jacquie’s voice was warm with relief. ‘Oh, Max. Thank goodness. You’re home. I thought you might have forgotten Nole and everything, what with the poisoning and whatnot.’
‘Well, yes, about that …’
Her voice rose to a shriek. ‘What? Don’t tell me you haven’t got him.’
‘Not exactly. Look, sweetness, we’ll have to have a chat about what to do about this. Until he can reach the keyhole by himself, that is. Sarah brought him home, but it’s not really the answer. Mrs Troubridge is too slow for him nowadays and anyway, he’s almost as tall as she is.’ He looked up and saw Sarah dissolve into giggles.
Jacquie sighed. ‘There’s only one answer, Max. I’m sorry.’
‘We can’t sell him, Jacquie. I don’t think eBay allows people these days. Not after there was all that fuss.’
‘Be serious. I mean that, while you’re Acting Head, we’ll have to have my mother to stay.’
‘Hell’s teeth!’ wailed Maxwell. ‘Not the Wedding Planner?’
‘The same. Now, be good boys and I’ll be home as soon as I can. With news, I hope, of sausage rolls.’
‘And cabbages and kings,’ added Maxwell. ‘Don’t think you can sweet talk me with forensics, woman policeman. There’s got to be some sort of deal in this.’
‘There is,’ Jacquie said. ‘Social services don’t get to grab the kid. Kisses to Nole and say a big thank you to Sarah for me. Is that the kettle I can hear? Bye-bye.’ And she rang off.
Sarah smiled in the embarrassed way that people do when they have overheard a phone conversation. She looked around aimlessly and said, ‘What a nice house.’ She accompanied the remark with a nervous laugh.
Maxwell poured some water into the teapot and swilled it round, then spooned in the tea. He brought the kettle back up to the boil and added it to the pot.
‘I do like to see tea made properly,’ the woman said. ‘So many people just use a tea bag in a mug.’
He smiled grimly. ‘I’m just limbering up,’ he said, ‘for the visit of Jacquie’s mother. We’ll have to dust off the doilies and get out the guest soaps. And if you are wondering why we have such things, it is because she has bombarded us with them and their ilk ever since we decided to get married. The fact that we have lived in our own houses for a total of over forty years and have enough stuff to stock a shop seems to have passed her by. We’re going to have a bottom drawer and like it.’ He peered into the pot and replaced the lid. He looked up. ‘Is that brewed, do you think?’
‘I haven’t a clue. I usually just use a mug and a tea bag.’
He laughed. ‘Me too. Let’s risk it.’ He poured a little. ‘Looks all right. Anyway, where was I? Yes, Jacquie’s mother. She has planned this wedding about twenty times and that’s just so far. She has had Nolan as everything from ring bearer to vicar. The top number for bridesmaids was twelve, but Jacquie beat her down on that.’
‘I must say, Mr Maxwell, your … wife-, er, to-be seems to have a very strong character.’
‘Oh yes, that she has. But, and here’s the thing, where did she get it from? Not her father, that’s for sure, who just died quietly at some point, not wanting to be any trouble and desperate, no doubt, to escape from the wrath of Khan. She means well, of course, Jacquie’s mother I mean, not Jacquie.’ He sipped his tea. ‘It’s all right, isn’t it? But hardly worth the bits.’ He spat out an errant leaf. ‘But she is just so single-minded over the wedding plans that I doubt she will ever remember to pick up Nolan either.’
The nursery nurse looked serious. ‘Is she able to drive at all?’ she asked. ‘I think what I mean is, is she an elderly lady, your mother-in-law-to-be?’
Maxwell hooted with laughter. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, laughing so hard he had to put down his cup. ‘Definitely. She’s a whole six months older than I am, and I don’t let her forget it, oh dearie me, no.’
The woman blushed.
‘Please,’ he said, leading her through into the sitting room, where Nolan was wrapped round the cat, watching The Weakest Link. Either of them was smarter than Anne Robinson. ‘Don’t think she’s not capable of looking after Nole. She’s brilliant with him. Although he finds her a bit tiring. You know how you can scare children with tales of the bogey man?’
She nodded.
‘We don’t need that here. Just mention G-R-A-N-N-Y,’
he spelt it out in a half whisper, ‘and he’s as good as gold. Watch this. Nole?’ The little boy turned his head and smiled widely, sensing a party piece coming up.
‘’Es, daddy?’
‘Where’s Granny?’
The boy’s eyes widened and he looked momentarily frantic.
‘Don’t worry,’ Maxwell soothed him. ‘Daddy’s just teasing.’ He turned to Sarah and said, comfortingly, ‘He loves her to bits, as the saying goes. He just needs a bit of warning of her arrival, as do we all.’
‘Well, I’m glad to have had some as well, Mr Maxwell. What does she look like, so we’ll know her when she picks up Nolan?’
‘Hmm, well,’ Maxwell pulled his lip thoughtfully. He reached down and scooped up his boy and, inadvertently, his cat, who promptly bit him on the leg. ‘Let’s think. She looks very like Jacquie, I suppose. But … bigger. In all directions. You know Jacquie’s eyes? Soft and lovely.’
Sarah smiled politely.
‘Well, they are, take it from me. Like his.’ He pointed at Nolan. ‘Well, her mother’s are the same colour, but like gimlets. And really close together. Think The Dark Crystal …’ He appeared to be gathering himself together for a minute description, but Sarah had places to be.
‘Well, I’m sure we’ll know from Nolan’s reaction. But even so, it would be good if one of you could introduce her to us, you know, on the first day.’
‘I’m sure one of us will,’ said Maxwell, silently delegating that one onto Jacquie.
‘I’ll be off then,’ the woman said. ‘We can see if the crowd has dispersed.’
‘It never completely disperses,’ said Maxwell, in a resigned tone. ‘It just alters in size and personnel.’ He got up, hitching Nolan on to one hip. ‘I really can’t thank you enough, Sarah, for bringing Nole home.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, patting the little boy’s cheek. ‘See you next week, poppet,’ she said.
‘And Nolan as well,’ added his father, with a chuckle.
With another nervous laugh, she went down the stairs and let herself out. He was just the same as when she had been to Leighford High: mad. At least he hadn’t remembered her and her disastrous showing at A Level.