Maxwell’s Match

by M. J. Trow

  The Headmaster was probably just the wrong side of forty, but he’d clearly founded the Young Fogeys’ Club. His tweed jacket looked like an old one of Jack Hawkins’ and his gown hung like an old one of Bela Lugosi’s on the back of his door. Maxwell’s office would have vanished without trace in Sheffield’s Inner Sanctum. He recognized it for what it had once been – Jedediah Grimond’s drawing room, in which the old East Indiaman had toasted his nuts against the unaccustomed cold of English Hanoverian winters. Its walls were a dark English oak and the volumes that lined them of faded leather and clearly bought by the yard.

  ‘James thought you might fit in quite well.’

  ‘James?’

  ‘Mr Diamond.’

  ‘Oh, Legs.’ It had been three days since Maxwell had seen his own beloved Lord and master. That was a lifetime in teaching. ‘Well, sort of. I went to Halliards.’

  ‘Really?’ Sheffield lit his pipe, an act of bestiality Maxwell hadn’t seen since he was a green probationer in the year the Germans had shot Edith Cavell. ‘They closed last year, didn’t they?’

  ‘They did,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘End of an era, in some ways.’

  ‘Sad,’ Sheffield nodded. ‘We can’t afford to lose schools like these. You’ll be staying in Tennyson House. Bill Pardoe’s the Housemaster there. I think you’ll be all right.’

  ‘I’m sure I will, Headmaster. Tell me, will I be doing any teaching?’

  ‘Teaching?’ Sheffield chuckled. ‘No, I don’t think so, Mr Maxwell. James thought you’d be able to …’

  ‘Pick up a few tips?’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘That sounds patronizing,’ Sheffield said. ‘It isn’t meant to.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’m sure your Mr Graham will come back a changed man too.’

  ‘Ah,’ Sheffield smiled. ‘Tony can look after himself. Strictly between you and me, there are other colleagues at Grimond’s who could learn a great deal more from this exchange than he.’

  A bell rang in the corridor of power. ‘Lunch, Mr Maxwell. Shall we join the staff for a sherry?’

  The last time Peter Maxwell had seen sherry on school premises was when Eight Eff had discovered Sharon Claverhouse reeling around the bike sheds at Leighford High, off her face on Croft Original. Maxwell had carried her to Sylvia Matthews and Sylvia Matthews had force-fed her black coffee, hosed her down in sick bay and driven her home. Just as well Sharon Claver- house was Head of Food Technology; if a kid had got hold of the bottle, God knows what the upshot would have been.

  ‘Charming!’ Maxwell beamed.

  Sherry was delightful. Old Peculiar if Maxwell was any judge. Lunch was food; hot and edible. Maxwell even found himself joining in the Latin grace, roared in stentorian tones by a colleague pointed out to him as the Head of Physics. The oik from the comprehensive sat elbow to elbow with Dr George Sheffield and watched the kids. He was pleased to see that they were kids, for all they wore blazers, ties, polished shoes and attitudes; they were kids for all that. Laughing and joking in the last careless rapture before the mortgage and the kitchen sink and the rat race took hold. Perhaps, however, Maxwell might have had the foresight to bring his gown. But then, he wasn’t really having to blend.

  On his right, Bill Pardoe, Head of Tennyson House, was a giant of a man with a full beard, curling grey. He was Maxwell’s age, perhaps a year or two younger, with kind grey eyes and a gentle smile.

  ‘I used to teach in a comprehensive, Mr Maxwell.’ He was wrestling with a recalcitrant piece of bread and butter pudding.

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell was impressed.

  ‘There were people back then who said I sold out.’

  Maxwell looked at his man. ‘Did you?’

  ‘I used to think so,’ Pardoe said, his gaze somewhere in the middle distance. ‘Swapped problem kids for boys with cellos and IQs off the scale. Now, I’m not so sure. You’re staying in Tennyson, I believe.’

  ‘So I understand,’ Maxwell accepted the extra custard from the white-coated girl hovering at his elbow. ‘Thank you.’

  Pardoe paused. ‘There’s an inter-house Cross Country this afternoon. If you’d like to freshen up first, I’ll take you over. Rather a lot of standing around, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Goes with the territory,’ Maxwell remembered from his school days. ‘I’d be delighted.’

  They crossed the Quad under the awning of the new chapel with its sandstone facings and its arty-farty cross, no doubt something by Basil Spence on a bad day. Boys in rugger shirts clattered past them in their studded boots.

  ‘Jenkins,’ Pardoe stopped one of them. ‘Twentieth man, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Jenkins pulled up short.

  ‘Twentieth man is just as important as the first. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy smiled and Pardoe ruffled his hair.

  ‘I wouldn’t dare do that,’ Maxwell said as the lad dashed off to join the others. ‘I’d be struck off.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Pardoe’s comeback was too fast, too abrupt.

  ‘Just an observation,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘One of those little differences that divide our worlds, yours and mine.’

  ‘Your loss,’ Pardoe held open an oak-panelled door.

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘I think you’re right.’

  The Head of Tennyson swept into his study, as oak-panelled as the Headmaster’s and the door they’d entered by. The walls were hung with old photographs, the ones Maxwell remembered from his own schooldays, unsmiling young men with arms folded, sitting on their dignity, all tasselled caps, long shorts and incipient moustaches. Where have all the young men gone, long time passing? But it wasn’t the decor that caught Maxwell’s eye first; it was the full colour magazine open on Pardoe’s desk where two blond boys, of uncertain age, writhed naked on a wrestling mat. Pardoe saw it too and swept it quickly into the sleeve of his gown before turning to Maxwell.

  The Head of Sixth Form had never seen a man age so fast. Pardoe was the colour of parchment. ‘Mr Maxwell, I … Could you wait here, please? I’ll have my Captain of House show you to your rooms. Excuse me.’

  And there was no sound but the click of his heels retreating along the corridor.

  3

  That night, Maxwell perched under the eaves like a rather puzzled bat. The room must have belonged to the tweeniest of Jedediah Grimond’s servants, up a tight spiral twist of stairs. It had been tastefully done out, Maxwell guessed, in about 1958. Since then, it had probably doubled as a storeroom, where old Latin Primers had mildewed against the day that the Secretary of State for Education should see the light and reintroduce real Classics in schools.

  Dinner was good, rather more substantial than lunch but with the same grace. The Day Boys and Girls had gone home, of course, so that the ranks over the evening meal tables were thinner. Courtesy of the Headmaster, the Boarders were allowed to wear mufti, although most of them seemed to be modelling for Next or else in mourning for Gianni Versace. After nearly three hours of standing on the touch-line as over a hundred grunting, gasping teenagers staggered back from the agonies of Cross Country, Maxwell was more than ready for the vat of Mrs Oates’ minestrone soup that lay waiting on High Table. Maxwell empathized with the runners, like Pheidippides dragging back from Marathon. He remembered it well, the torture in the lungs, the feet of clay. Somewhere in a Warwickshire field, his gymshoe still lay after all these years, sucked from his foot by the clawing mud. And his shin still carried the scar of the barbed wire that he hadn’t seen until it was too late.

  He hob-nobbed with the Headmaster and David Gallow as the evening shadows lengthened and the chandeliers sparkled in the dining hall. He became engrossed after dinner in a postprandial chat in the Senior Common Room with Michael Hemsley, the Head of Watered-Down- Classics, on the merits of Hancock’s Half Hour and its role in Fifties Ultra-Realism.

  Of Bill Pardoe, there was no sign.

  ‘Takes me back, really,’ Maxwell said, lolling on his bed and staring at the swirls on the
artex ceiling. ‘Even the smell of the place. Polish and cabbage. You never lose it.’

  ‘I don’t think we had either of those at my school,’ Jacquie told him from her end of the mobile super-highway. ‘Are you bored yet?’

  ‘To sobs,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘You lady detectives don’t miss much, do you? Still, I think I’m allowed into the library tomorrow, so I’ll see how much half-inching I can do for my own dear History Department. Ah, how I miss it; Paul Moss screaming at Year Seven, Sally Greenhow blowing Joe Plumley’s nose for him one lesson, me knocking his block off the next. The essential rhythm of life.’

  ‘I gather Grimond’s is not like that.’

  ‘You gather right, Woman Policeman. Our kids at Leighford have only just realized they can walk on water, courtesy of Political Correctness and the Court of Human Rights. The kids here have always had power; the sort that comes with money and birth and privilege. It might not be Eton or Harrow, but it’ll do. The Captain of House calls me “Mr Maxwell” but he’d clearly like his fag to polish his boots with me. I’m some sort of nasty smell under his nose.’

  ‘Oh, Max …’

  ‘I kid you not, dearly beloved. The lad’s eighteen going on fifty with all the bonhomie of Osama bin Laden.’

  ‘Darling,’ he heard her say. ‘I’ve got to go now. Early shift in the morning.’

  ‘Of course.’ He sat up on the bed. ‘Give my love to that humourless bastard you work for.’

  ‘Henry sends you his best wishes, too,’ Jacquie laughed. ‘Love you, Peter Maxwell.’

  ‘Love you too, Woman Policeman,’ and he heard the line go dead. He held the mobile out under the bedside lamp, wondering again which button you had to use to switch the thing off. Did people really get mugged for this irritating piece of plastic, he asked himself as the midnight lamps burned. Why, oh why? There again, he now had hard evidence that using one dims the little grey cells; he’d known how to switch it off when the call began.

  He couldn’t tell the time in his moment of waking. And it was a while before he remembered where he was. Something had woken him. One thump or two? It seemed to be overhead at first. But there was nothing overhead. Except the roof. Outside, then, on the spiral? There it was again, a single thump. Then scurrying. Rats in the wainscoting? Cockroaches? The people who live under the stairs? He was wide awake now, his digital alarm winking at him. Two-thirty-eight. Was there such an hour? He’d heard the sounds all evening: comings and goings below, footsteps, laughter. At ten, a solemn bell had sounded across the quad and the House began to settle. At ten-thirty, a voice he recognised as that of John Selwyn, the Captain of Tennyson, echoed through the corridors. ‘Lights out in the House. All’s well.’

  How quaint, Maxwell thought; every man his own town-crier. Unless the Lord keepeth the city, the wakeman waketh in vain. Perhaps this was standard. Perhaps at two-thirty-eight every morning there was a series of thumps and a scratching. Perhaps it was an old Grimond custom. Or the long-gone ghosts of mob-capped servants carrying steaming bowls of hot water. But he was suddenly on his feet anyway, fumbling his way to the window, agonizing cramp freezing his toes as he hobbled around trying to end it. Below, frozen in the moonlight, old Jedediah Grimond’s courtyard stretched away into darkness. Here the horses had once whinnied and clashed, steel on cobbles and the post-chaise had creaked on its housings as the master came home. The birch next to the chapel spread its shadow arms across the tarmac, dappling silver on the ground and the roofs shone in the fullness of the moon.

  At first he saw nothing moving, just the odd set of headlights on the horizon, on the far A3, a long-distance tanker making the hard miles. Then a shadow flitted across the moment and Maxwell’s eyes were drawn down to the ground. A figure – no, two – hovered in the angle of the old house, dipping in and out of the darkness. They seemed to be waiting for something, glancing backwards and forwards, left and right. One, Maxwell could make out, was female, her hair long and dark under the moon, swaying as she rocked in, then out of the shadow. The other was taller, more solid, clearly male and dressed in black. Surely, that couldn’t be a gown? Then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, the pair had gone, their shapes melding with the shadow of the chapel and the stand of birches. Nothing more. No thumps now. No scratching. No lights and shadows. Maxwell let the curtain fall, wrestling with it all on his way back to bed. Comings and goings between the dorms. He couldn’t get his bearings yet. Austen House, the girls’ dorm, he’d only seen briefly in the harsh light of a Grimond day. The dark and the moonlight threw it all into confusion and he couldn’t be sure where it was in relation to Tennyson. The other boys’ Houses, Dickens and Kipling, were only names to him as yet. Forget it, he told himself as his head hit the pillow. Whatever it was, it couldn’t hold a candle to the nocturnal prowlings of his Leighford Highenas along the sea front of a Friday night. Suffice it to say that the sex education programme provided by the Social and Religious department was one huge waste of time; and after all, wasn’t that what bus shelters were made for? Sleep knit up the unravelled sleeve of Maxwell’s care.

  Most of them had never seen a corpse before. Not one with a broken neck, anyway. Bill Pardoe lay in the quad in the chill of that Tuesday morning, sprawled at an impossible angle. He was wearing his pyjamas and, bizarrely, his gown. His right leg was twisted under him and his head lay against the chapel wall. Beneath it, like a dark pillow, his blood had congealed, running down the slight gradient into the drain nearby. His beard was matted with it and the kind, grey eyes stared intently at the clouds.

  In the silent, motionless crowd, most of them still in pyjamas and dressing gowns, one girl started to cry. Like an infection, it spread along the rows, mounting hysteria, until the Captain of Tennyson forced his way through.

  ‘Get them away, Splinter!’ he barked. ‘All of you, back to your dorms. Somebody get Dr Sheffield.’

  An ambulance arrived first, clanging and flashing through the Hampshire lanes, but far too late to be of much use. It would do duty as a hearse later. Then the squad cars, three, four, five and a police Landrover for good measure, all flashing lights and wailing sirens. Pale, eager faces pressed to the windows – the wide-eyed ingénues of the Lower Fourth and the sophisticates of the Sixth, as one in their sense of shock and bewilderment. Their harassed teachers, desperate to make sense of the madness, shooed them away to their desks and made some attempt at normality.

  ‘Please sir, what’s happened to Mr Pardoe?’

  Out of the one unmarked car stepped a tall, square detective in a three piece suit. Aliens in white zip-ups and hoods were already erecting a flimsy marquee over the body.

  ‘Nothing to see here, children,’ a junior housemaster was hurrying his charges past. ‘Nothing to see. Come on, now. We’ve places to be.’

  The suit waited with an oppo until the marquee showed some degree of permanence, hammered into the tarmac with steel guy pegs.

  ‘Jesus!’ It was the wailing sirens that had woken Peter Maxwell. He’d overslept. He knew when breakfast was and where it was. But the bloody alarm hadn’t gone off. Now, he was standing in his pyjamas staring down at the mayhem below him. Dr Sheffield was in the thick of it all, pointing up to his corner of the building. And he was talking to someone Maxwell knew.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said again and turned to fight his way into some day clothes.

  ‘Inspector …’ Sheffield had never looked at a dead colleague before.

  ‘Hall,’ the suit told him, kneeling over all that was left of Bill Pardoe. ‘And that’s Chief Inspector, Mr … er … ?’

  ‘Sheffield,’ the Headmaster said, ‘and if we’re being meticulous with our titles, that’s Doctor.’

  ‘Touché,’ Hall said. It was the nearest to drollery you got with Henry Hall. ‘What do you make of this, sir?’

  Sheffield was at a loss. He stood in the eerie lighting of the marquee while SOCOs traipsed round him setting up cameras and wires, taking measurements with metallic tape measures. ‘I don’t know what t
o say, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘You could start with his name,’ Hall said, running a latex gloved finger under the man’s hairline behind his ear.

  ‘Pardoe,’ a voice behind him made the Chief Inspector turn. ‘He was a housemaster here.’

  Hall was on his feet, staring intently at the arrival. ‘Thompson!’ he snapped, his face pale, his jaw-ridge flexed.

  ‘Guv?’ a uniformed face appeared around the marquee flap.

  ‘Would you escort this gentleman outside, please?’

  Thompson’s face fell. ‘Sorry, guv, he said …’

  ‘I’m sure he did,’ Hall cut in. ‘Outside. Now.’

  The arrival left, followed by Henry Hall. ‘Mr Maxwell,’ the DCI gave himself a moment. ‘How many schools do you teach at in this great country of ours?’

  ‘I was about to ask you a very similar question, Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘In purely jurisdictional terms, you’re a long way from West Sussex. Still, manors maketh man, I suppose.’

  ‘Secondment,’ Hall snapped, in no mood for Maxwell’s wit at this hour of the morning. ‘You?’

  ‘Observation,’ Maxwell replied. ‘I hadn’t expected to observe anything like this.’

  ‘Thompson,’ Hall turned to the uniform. ‘The next time you let an unauthorized civilian cross a ribbon and invade a scene of crime, I’m going to have your warrant card. Do we understand each other?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Thompson stood there, under his peaked cap, like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar.

  ‘God, this is awful.’ Dr Sheffield had joined the two. ‘I just had to get some air. I feel sick. Is that usual?’

  Hall looked at him, then at Maxwell. ‘Dr Sheffield, I will need to talk to you. And your staff …’

  ‘Of course.’ Sheffield consciously tried to pull himself together. ‘Look, the children … I mean, we can keep all this quiet, can’t we?’

  ‘A man is dead, Headmaster,’ Hall said, ever the master of the cliché.

  ‘Of course. Yes. I see. It’s just that … well, suicide has a certain … stigma, doesn’t it?’