by M. J. Trow
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid of the bogeyman I used to think lived in the folds of my curtains. And the gurgle of the plumbing when I pulled the chain as a kid. But most of all … most of all, I’m afraid of the Red House, Max. I’m afraid of the Red House.’
3
It had been the Clarion once, at a time when newspapers were new and editors men of the people. Now it was the Advertiser, and the change of title reflected the way of the world. Maxwell had been to the front office before to look up old stories on the microfiche. That was an eternity ago when Leighford ran that ghastly Mode 3 CSE course on local history. It should have been a good one, but unfortunately, Mode 3 was synonymous with moron and the hapless Waynes and Traceys who were expected to tackle it couldn’t cope with the present, never mind the past.
He asked at the desk in the palatial new offices. Whatever the depth of the recession, he noticed the media hadn’t felt it. A middle-aged woman looked at him suspiciously, then with reluctance collected a bundle of blue gels and switched on the machine for him. It was quicker, she said, than ploughing through the paper itself. Anyway, it had been the lead story for three weeks and there was the letters page. Easier to find it quickly on the screen.
Maxwell forced himself to it. What had wood pulp done that the world so scorned it now? Why did an entire generation think it right to spend a fortune on computers and nothing on books? He shook his head as he twiddled the gadget. Then, there was Jenny. Looking at him. It wasn’t her school photo, the proof of which was clipped to her file. It must have come from home and it was out of date. Her hair was shorter, lighter. There seemed to be some tinsel behind her head. Christmas. She had been a pretty girl, if skinny. Not for her the blandishments of the tuck shop and school pizzas. She’d offered him a lunch time sandwich once. Wholemeal bread with something-good-for-you on it. He’d turned it down, on his way to the pub.
To be honest, there wasn’t much in the story that helped. Not much he didn’t know. There was a bad photo of Tim Grey, Jenny’s boyfriend, an insipid, scrawny lad now entering Year 13 – unlucky for some – without any clear ambition at all. His parents were working-class people who couldn’t decide if they wanted their Tim to go to university. If he did, he’d be the first Grey ever to do that. Maxwell didn’t want to think of the odds against it. Chief Inspector Hall was quoted as saying something obvious and trite. There was a creepy photo of the Red House, suddenly made all the more sinister because you knew what had happened there. Except that Maxwell realized he didn’t know what had happened there and the not knowing haunted him.
He checked the by-line – Tony Young.
‘Tony? Anyone seen Tony?’
Upstairs in the palatial new office of the Advertiser was a bedlam of VDUs and coffee cups and bits of paper. There was no privacy here, no peace. Only the bustle of a local paper trying to make its name in the world. Someone had once told its managers that the Guardian had been a local paper once, so the precedent was there and the world had better look out.
A hawkish young man in jeans and T-shirt emerged from the shredding room.
‘Hello,’ he said, his face humourless and cold. ‘I’m Tony Young.’
‘Peter Maxwell,’ Maxwell said and something told him not to extend a hand.
‘Yes?’ Clearly the name meant nothing to Young.
‘I teach at Leighford High.’
‘Well, we’ve all got our cross to bear,’ Young told him. ‘Look, I don’t do school events. Brenda Somebody-or-other covers that. It’s probably her coffee break now.’
‘It’s about Jenny Hyde,’ Maxwell said.
The journalist’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is it now?’ he said. ‘Well, you’d better have a seat.’
He ushered Maxwell to a soft chair under the window. There was a low coffee table and a picture and a plant, to give an aura of a reception/interview area. It didn’t really fool anyone. It was just part of the corridor.
‘You covered the story of her murder,’ Maxwell said.
‘That’s right,’ Young nodded. ‘Look, can I get you a coffee, Mr …’
‘Maxwell. Peter Maxwell. No thanks. I just want some information.’
‘Shouldn’t I be asking the questions?’ Young said.
‘There’s nothing I can tell you.’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘I’m buying, not selling.’
Young smirked. ‘This isn’t the fucking Sun, Mr Maxwell. I’m not authorized to carry a cheque book. If you’ve read my articles, you know what I do.’
Maxwell smiled. ‘I doubt that, Mr Young,’ he said. I know there are things you can’t print. Theories you have.’
Young looked at him. ‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘Like what?’
‘Your article talked about sexual assault. Was she assaulted?’
Young hesitated, then he grabbed a jacket hanging on a chair-back and hauled a cassette-recorder out of the pocket. He clicked it on. ‘You don’t mind?’ he said. ‘Just for the record.’
Maxwell clicked it off. ‘Yes I do,’ he said. ‘This meeting is off the record. You don’t have to talk to me.’
Young grinned at him, with what contempt Maxwell could only guess. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘As long as you don’t call anybody a bastard over the air, you’ll be all right.’
Maxwell leaned forward, invading the other man’s space. ‘I want to know who killed Jenny,’ he said steadily. ‘That’s all.’
‘We all do,’ Young answered, just as levelly, ‘but for me, it goes with the territory. She was killed on my patch, so to speak. I should imagine Chief Inspector Hall feels the same way. What’s your interest?’
‘She was one of my sixth form,’ Maxwell said. ‘My responsibility.’
Young leaned back. ‘Do you mind me asking how old you are?’ he said.
‘I don’t mind,’ Maxwell answered. ‘I’m fifty-two. Why?’
Young snorted. ‘Well, well. Perhaps you are,’ he said.
‘Perhaps I are what?’
‘Old enough to have that quaint old sense of vocation teachers apparently used to have.’
‘Used to have?’
‘Yes, you know. Before the industrial action. Before it became a battle of wits between you and the government, with kids bouncing around like tennis balls between you both.’
‘Well, well,’ Maxwell said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough.’
‘For what?’ Young sensed the ground shifting beneath him.
‘Old enough to have that quaint old sense of the quest for the truth journalists apparently used to have.’
Young stood up, a muscle in his jaw ridged and flexing. ‘I’d like to help you, Mr Maxwell,’ he said, ‘but I’m a busy man. On the day after Jenny’s body was found I tried to talk to your Head. He was singularly unhelpful.’
‘Legs? Of course he was.’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Unhelpful is his middle name.’
‘I then tried County Hall.’
‘Who?’
‘Jenkins.’
‘Ah, the Chief Education Officer himself. Now, there’s a cautious man.’
‘Cautious to the point of not giving interviews, in fact. Where were you when all this broke?’
‘On holiday in Cornwall,’ Maxwell told him. ‘That’s why I’m here this morning. I’m trying to put flesh on the bones.’
Young looked down at the greying, side-whiskered teacher. ‘For that you’ll need to go to the cemetery,’ he said. ‘Plot 841. There’s no headstone yet.’
Then he turned on his heel and vanished into an inner office. First he typed something on to his computer screen. Then he faxed the incident room at Tottingleigh that was handling the Jenny Hyde case.
The pace had yet to slacken in the Tottingleigh incident room; the dogs had yet to be called off. Men in shirt-sleeves sat in front of computers or hunched over phones. Cups of coffee sat with stewed contents on table corners and the air was heavy with cigarette smoke.
‘Well, well, well.’ DI Johnson paused in the middle of his t
akeaway pizza. ‘A fax from our favourite newshound.’
Jacquie Carpenter stuck her head around the VDU. ‘What’s it about, sir?’
‘Dave,’ Johnson leered. ‘We agreed. Dave.’
‘What’s it about?’ she repeated, noncommittally.
‘That weirdo Maxwell; that Head of Sixth Form or whatever he calls himself from Leighford High. He’s been snooping around the Advertiser.’
‘About Jenny?’
‘Yeah.’ Johnson put Young’s fax on a pile in his in-tray. ‘What do you make of that, Jacquie, darling?’
She looked at her superior with ill-disguised loathing. ‘If he killed her, sir, he’d hardly be asking questions at the Advertiser, would he?’
‘Of course he would.’ Johnson spat pepperoni in all directions. ‘He wants to know how much we know. To cover his back.’
‘Perhaps you should tell the DCI then,’ Jacquie suggested.
‘Yeah,’ Johnson grunted. ‘Or maybe I should just break Maxwell’s kneecaps while asking him a few questions?’ And he threw his remaining pizza into a bin before dragging himself out of his chair. ‘Must just point Percy at the porcelain,’ he said and fondled the girl’s shoulder through her blouse as he walked past.
‘How can you stand it, Jacquie?’ the WPC next to her asked.
Jacquie Carpenter picked up the fax. ‘I just console myself with the daydream that one day I’ll plug his bollocks into this computer and switch on.’
She read Young’s blurb to herself. ‘Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form, Leighford High. Asking questions re Jenny Hyde. Thought you ought to know.’
The oldest graves were nearest the road. When the town had become respectable and upper middle class, and colonels from the hill stations of the Raj had decided to retire there, they’d expanded it to the south-west. Inevitably, in a seaside town, the navy was there too and fouled anchors green with verdigris lay at rakish angles on carefully rough-hewn cairns.
The last resting place of Jenny Hyde was far away from these, among the polished marble and green chippings that were the trappings of modern death. Most people were cremated nowadays, but Jenny’s granddad had insisted, apparently, that she should be buried, his little girl and when they’d finished cutting her about in the post-mortem room, that’s what they did.
It was just a little mound of earth and a simple plywood cross, smothered in flowers, some still in their cellophane wrappers. He read the cards – ‘Goodbye, darling Jenny, Mum and Dad.’ ‘We miss you, Darling, Auntie Ethel and Uncle George.’ ‘For Jenny, with love from Tim.’ Funny that, Maxwell noticed, as he knelt in the wet grass of the September evening; the card from Tim Grey was the only one that mentioned love. Then he stood up. He didn’t like graveyards. They were empty places where you stared down at your own mortality. Look. Look around. There is a stillness in the cold wrought iron that is deadly. Maxwell found himself breathing loudly, just to prove that he could.
‘Goodbye, Jenny,’ he whispered.
No one could have called Peter Maxwell windy. When he’d been to see The Exorcist years ago, he was the only one still sitting upright in the cinema. Everybody else was hiding under their seats. Yet now, with the dead for company, he felt it: a chilling, creeping something that he couldn’t place, didn’t like. What was that line in that old biography he’d read – ‘the scythesman at your elbow’? He turned sharply, half expecting to see him, cloak outspread, hourglass in hand and the sand drifting through. Instead, it was an old boy in a grubby anorak, leaning on a spade.
‘I’m locking up,’ he said through ill-fitting teeth. ‘You goin’ to be long?’
Maxwell smiled. The Bard of Avon would have recognized this old bugger and used him for comic relief. Perhaps some things were eternal, after all.
‘Just going,’ said Maxwell and made his way to the gate.
He didn’t look back.
He wheeled his bike across Wellington Road, down Buckett Street and on towards the golf course. Three streets away, he knew, the Hydes lived. At Number Thirty-two. He should go to see them; offer his condolences. After all, he’d missed the funeral. And even if Diamond had gone or some county representative, it wasn’t the same. He should have been there. But now, at the last moment, his nerve failed him. He was at the end of the road; could see the house with its clematis trellis, its bird bath on the front lawn, the green Rover in the drive. Then he swung his leg over the crossbar and pedalled White Surrey away into the rain.
It was like the siege of Troy the next morning. The rain had gone and left dark concrete patches under the drying sun. Arrayed in all their panoply along Hardens Lane, the gentlemen of the press stood in little knots, like so many Ajaxes and Achilles, probing the weak spots of the citadel that was Leighford High. In a brief and heated exchange, Diamond and Garrett had ordered them off County Council property. The staff weren’t there to see it – they wouldn’t have believed it if they had been. But there was no law to stop the paparazzi standing on the pavement, cameras at the ready, ciggies blowing smoke to the morning.
No law either that could stop them accosting each likely-looking kid who arrived for the first day of term. You could tell them, the different groups. The first year, all crisp shirts and ties and blouses, the girls in white ankle socks below summer-tanned legs. They said little to each other, each one in his or her own private anxiety – the first day of the rest of their lives. The older ones, battle-hardened, boisterous, barely conventional in what was left of their uniforms, pushing and laughing their way along the streets. The hardliner lads were instantly recognizable. They flouted regulation as brazenly as they dared. They wore trainers, scuffed and old, with the laces loose and the tongues protruding in defiance at the ankle. Ear-rings caught the sharp morning sun and the last of their ciggie smoke wafted away on the September air as they rounded the corner. Their faces said it all. They brooked no interference, no insult. They watched for the lingering look, the stare of disapproval or contempt. Their fingers were in the air instantly as they slouched past the Old People’s Home where ancient citizens, barely human, despised them from behind fading nets. The older girls, their molls in an earlier generation, chewed gum and vied with each other in having the dangliest ear-rings. They already wore their winter uniform – the ubiquitous thick black tights under the ankle socks, snagged here and there by the over-rough approaches of the lads, whose long-nailed fingers were forever straying, in a pubescent way, up their skirts.
But none of these were the targets of the paparazzi. They were here to talk to anyone who might have known Jenny Hyde. And the sixth form weren’t hard to spot. They wore no uniform. So, go for the older ones – the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Two in particular the pressmen knew, because they’d talked to them before, way back in July when it happened. Anne Spencer, Jenny’s best friend. And Tim Grey, the boy she was going out with. They’d set up a similar siege around the Spencer and Grey houses for three or four days. But no one was talking then. Mr Grey had come out and threatened to put one on them. That went with the territory.
What the paparazzi didn’t know, however, was that most of the sixth form came in the back way, across the common from Andersleigh. That was where the sixth form block lay, jutting out to the south-west, beyond the Art block and the tennis courts. They should have known that, because at least two of the cameramen exchanging titbits with the national boys were former alumni of Leighford themselves. Still, show me a crowd of reporters and I’ll show you a room temperature IQ.
So Maxwell missed the barrage of questions that morning, his ancient Raleigh wheeling over the still-dewy grass. His way in took him past all those memories of his childhood, a long, long time ago and many, many miles to the north. Something of the terror of a new academic year gripped him still, if he was honest about it. The mist in the morning, the jewelled cobwebs in the hedgerows as he rode. Then, when he was eleven, his bike was smaller and the stiff, new, detachable collar of his shirt rubbed his neck. The satchel bounced uncomfortably on his back
and he could still smell its glorious leather and the saddle soap his dad had used on it.
Well, the bike was bigger now, fattier. The collar was soft and his satchel was the old, battered briefcase they’d given him when he’d left his second job, strapped behind his saddle. He looked at the world through different eyes now, but the little pangs were still there, even after all these years. The tightness in the chest, the tingle in the wrists. And this term, of all terms, wasn’t just his thirtieth in the business. It was altogether different. Altogether sadder. Altogether more haunting.
‘Well, I was here at eight,’ Alison Miller told him, as though to justify all the times she hadn’t been, ‘and they were here then.’
‘What did they want to know?’ Maxwell hauled off the double-length scarf that told, in faded wool, the pedigree of his academic past.
‘If I knew Jenny,’ she said, watching his face, unsure of how he’d react. Like most Maxwell’s younger colleagues, male and female, she was a little afraid of him.
‘What did you say?’
‘I thought “No comment” was best. Then they asked me if I knew you.’
‘Me?’ Maxwell plugged the kettle in. ‘Why me?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sorting out papers. ‘They didn’t say.’
‘And what did you say to that?’
‘“No comment”,’ she shrugged. It had got her out of a jam once. It could do it again.
He patted her cheek. ‘Consistency,’ he laughed. ‘I like that in a woman.’ Then he looked down at her bulge, quite increased since July, and was reminded of her frailty, the cop-out clause all women carried under their frocks. ‘How are you?’ He nodded in the direction of her stomach and immediately wished he hadn’t bothered. The whole litany of morning sickness came pouring out.
‘Of course, Keith’s been great,’ she smirked, as though somehow it was a special honour for her husband to behave well towards her.
‘Oh.’ Maxwell knew the man. And knew things about him that Alison didn’t. Or claimed she didn’t. What a good man, she had said, too often to be convincing, a moral man. So good, Maxwell knew, so moral that he’d knock off anything in a skirt, whether his wife was pregnant or not. You don’t tell colleagues that sort of thing about their husbands. You just carry on drinking your coffee and you keep your thoughts to yourself.