by M. J. Trow
‘Repellent little man,’ Gaynor shuddered. ‘I didn’t like being in the same room as him.’
‘Past tense?’ Maxwell looked up at her.
‘You’re a naughty man, Max,’ she scolded him. ‘A terrible picker-up of innuendo.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he smiled. ‘I have a naturally suspicious nature. What was/is so repellent about Tubbsy?’
‘He’s a voyeur for a start.’
‘Is he?’
Gaynor Ames looked out beyond her garden gate and then down at Maxwell. ‘If that was Jeremy Tubbs sitting there, he wouldn’t be sitting there – if that doesn’t sound too Irish – he’d be out on the touch-line making notes or watching from the cedars with a pair of binoculars.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Gaynor said. ‘Very. Richard tackled him about it once. Said he was just supporting the school and happened to be a keen ornithologist. All bollocks of course, and you’ll excuse my French.’
Maxwell smiled. ‘So where’s he gone?’
‘Tubbsy?’ she sighed. ‘Damned if I know. But I do know this much. Grimond’s is better off without him.’
‘Not a welcome guest here, then?’
She shrieked with laughter. ‘The last time he was here, it was the Christmas party. I didn’t want him at all, but Richard felt sorry for him. He got rat-arsed, of course, Jeremy that is and when he hadn’t got his nose in Cassandra James’ cleavage, he was whinging how tired he was of – and I quote – being treated like a pissed up bastard.’
‘Cassandra was at the party?’
‘Yes, and John Selwyn. It’s traditional. Head Boy and Head Girl. They make a lovely item, don’t you think?’
‘I hadn’t really considered it,’ Maxwell lied. ‘Tell me, did Tubbs have any aspirations there?’
‘With Cassandra? Oh, I expect so. Probably has a modest collection of the girl’s underwear in his sock drawer.’
‘Apparently not,’ Maxwell corrected her, sure that if that had been the case, Jacquie would have mentioned it.
‘Don’t give the slime the benefit of too many doubts.’ Gaynor vanished to pour the coffee. Maxwell heard her rattling cups and ripping open biscuit packets. She was soon back.
‘I find all this difficult,’ Maxwell was saying.’ a male teacher looks at a girl funny in the state sector, that’s grounds for suspension.’
‘You mean nothing goes on? I find that hard to believe.’
‘Oh, it does, of course,’ Maxwell said. ‘But we don’t have the same opportunity – the whole boarding thing. By one minute past four the school’s empty – of staff as well as kids.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Gaynor laughed. ‘The boarding thing – sweaty fumblings in the dorm. Much of that is just adolescent wet-dreaming – every schoolboy’s fantasy.’
‘And that of a few members of staff, it seems.
She sat down at the table opposite him. ‘Allegedly,’ she said.
‘Curious,’ Maxwell looked at her. ‘That was the word Tubbsy used when I spoke to him.’
She looked at him under her eyelids, a smouldering woman who oozed sexuality. ‘He hated Bill Pardoe, you know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Maxwell told her. ‘Er … you don’t mind if I dunk?’
She didn’t and he dipped the chocolate finger accordingly. ‘Why did he hate Bill?’
‘Bill was everything Tubbs wasn’t – isn’t. clever, successful, popular. People deferred to him. After George and Mervyn, Bill was Grimond’s. Jeremy resented that. He’d been here for eight years or whatever and had made no mark whatsoever. No promotion, no impact. Still thirteenth in the geography department. And destined to remain so.’
Maxwell knew that that was the lowest of the low the wide world o’er. ‘Seems a bit drastic to kill the man, though.’
‘I didn’t say he did,’ Gaynor shook her head. ‘But I have to say I think him capable of it.’
‘Can I ask you a rather personal question?’ Maxwell looked at her over his coffee-cup rim.
She nodded.
‘Did Jeremy Tubbs ever try anything on with you?’
She shuddered again. ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘But only because, I suspect, I didn’t give him the opportunity. You know what I think, Max?’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘I think you scared Jeremy off.’
‘I did?’ Maxwell frowned.
‘You said you talked to him.’
‘That’s right.’
‘When was that?’ she asked.
‘Er … the lunchtime of the day he went missing, apparently.’
‘Well,’ Gaynor nodded in an ‘I told you so’ sort of way. ‘Whatever you said to him did the trick. What’s the secret of your success?’
‘I’m not sure it was what I said to him,’ Maxwell was suddenly remembering. ‘More a case of what he said to me. Who are the Arbiters?’
‘The what?’
‘You don’t recognize the term?’
Gaynor shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Was that something Jeremy said?’
‘Yes, it was. I didn’t know what he meant and haven’t seen him since.’
‘Has anybody?’ she asked.
‘That,’ Maxwell felt his chocolate finger disintegrate and plop into the cup, ‘remains to be seen.’
DCI Mark West was standing in his shirt sleeves, an inevitable ciggie dangling from his lips. Jacqui Carpenter was standing before him in his inner office at Selborne and the air was electric. The sun hadn’t reached this part of the old village hall and it was oddly chill for a spring morning.
‘I wasn’t aware there was an embargo of any kind, sir,’ Jacquie had been in these situation before. She knew a wide-eyed innocence, a ready smile and a hint of bust could work wonders Except that the DCI seemed immune; perhaps he’d seen it all before.
‘Yes, you were,’ West boomed. ‘You and Hall handle interviews at the school, I handle everything else. So why were you at Jeremy Tubbs’ place?’
‘He didn’t show up for his interview, sir. I was just checking why not.’
West snorted, stubbing the cigarette on his ashtray. ‘You have a phone, detective sergeant,’ he snapped, ‘as does your DCI. All you’ve got to do is pick the bugger up, which in fact you did to tell us Tubbs was missing. You didn’t need to go there yourself. What did you find there?’
‘Nothing,’ Jacquie said.
West emerged from his side of the desk. ‘Don’t think for one fucking moment I’m going to let you and Henry Hall get away with soft soaping me. I know about the drugs bust and I know who’s involved. Now let’s cut the bullshit. What did you find?’
‘Nothing of any value, sir,’ Jacquie had not moved as his purple face closed to hers. ‘It looks to me as if Tubbs left in a hurry.’
‘Of his own accord?’
‘Apparently,’ Jacquie told him. ‘Although I can’t be sure about that.’
‘You are sure, are you, of what the bloke looked like?’
‘No, sir, I never saw him.’
‘Christ Almighty!’West spun away, running an exasperated hand through his thatch of grey, spiky hair. ‘All right. Car. What sort of car does he drive?’
‘MG Midget. Bright yellow. Second hand.’
‘Registration?’
‘It’s on the school computer.’
‘Denise!’ he roared over Jacquie’s shoulder and his own DS appeared. ‘Ring Grimond’s. I want the licence plate of an MG belonging to Jeremy Tubbs, one of their geography teachers. And if they’ve got a photo of the bastard in their files, I want that too. Then I want an alert sent out, nation-wide. Tubbs is to be stopped and apprehended. Ports. Airports. That car’ll be a sore thumb and I want it found. Got it?’
‘Yes sir.’
West grabbed another packet of cigarettes and looked at Jacquie. ‘You still here?’ he grunted.
14
‘This House believes that adoption of the Euro is the first step to the abolition of Britain.’ David Gallow launched the debate that evening in the Gre
at Hall at Grimond’s. Maxwell remembered moments like this from his own school days. The Hall had been called Big School then, but it smelt the same, redolent of years of worsted trousers polishing hard wooden seats and the kind of furniture polish they only sell to old schools. Emblazoned on the walls in faded gilt were the names of Old Boys who had fallen, along with Edward Thomas, under the stuttering death of No Man’s Land or those of the next generation, fluttering to ground zero around the bridges of Arnhem.
The theme of the debates had been different in Maxwell’s day – whether public schools could survive the permissive barrage of the ’60s; why Princess Margaret couldn’t marry Group Captain Townsend; whither Brahms and Liszt after Bill Haley? Maxwell had spoken in most of them, either for or against or merely from the floor. He was impressed with John Selwyn, the smooth Captain of Tennyson, who spoke for the motion and equally delighted with the Europhile response of Cassandra James, using her tongue almost as effectively as she tended to down at the boat-house of a spring night.
The Tennyson prefects were there in their finery, Ape and Splinter and others Maxwell recognized from his sojourn in their House, braided badges on their blazers and striped ties, thundering with their black, polished boots on the floor every time Selwyn scored a point. It was the fencing practice bout all over again, but Maxwell noticed that Janet Boyce wasn’t in tears, this time, but whooping with the other girls when Cassandra hit home.
‘They’re good,’ Maxwell whispered to Tony Graham. ‘Bill Pardoe must have coached them well.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Graham nodded. ‘I’m proud of my boys. Any news on Tubbsy?’
‘You’re asking me?’
‘Come on, Max,’ Graham smiled, still watching Selwyn’s second punching home a few points to the thudding of his mates. ‘I’m wise to you.’
‘You are,’ Maxwell gaped. ‘That’s bad news.’
‘Jacquie Carpenter,’ Graham tapped the side o his nose. ‘Your woman on the inside.’
‘Implying?’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow.
‘Implying,’ to Graham this was like drawing teeth, ‘that you have the ear of the constabulary.’
‘Perhaps,’ Maxwell conceded. ‘But I haven’t actually spoken to Jacquie since last night. The smart money is on Tubbsy doing a runner.’
Graham looked at him. ‘Why?’
‘Why indeed? I was going to ask you that. You must know the man pretty well.’
‘Not really,’ Graham shrugged. ‘Oh, well done!’ and he was clapping a particularly vicious aside from Selwyn’s second. ‘No, Tubbsy is … well, you’ve got them at Leighford, I’m sure … a sort of fly in the ointment, really. He thinks the world owes him a living. Well, he’s lost that now.’
‘His job, you mean?’ Maxwell turned to the Housemaster. For all he had often told Metternich the cat that that was it, he’d had enough, over some trifling incident that had got right up his nose, actually leaving the profession was anathema to the Head of Sixth Form.
Graham nodded.
‘Sheffield’s given him the elbow?’ Maxwell wanted confirmation.
‘Not so much Sheffield, as that insufferable bastard Wilkins.’
‘Ah, yes, the Chair of Governors,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Not just part of the furniture, then?’
‘I shouldn’t say this,’ Graham was earnest, leaning closer to Maxwell, ‘but I’ve been very surprised at the way the Headmaster has handled all this. Or rather hasn’t. He’s gone to pieces apparently. Mervyn Larson was filling me in. Much more of it and we Housemasters will be running the place ourselves. Ever known anything like that?’
‘I have, actually,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Not at Leighford but in another of my previous incarnations. The Head went doolally and the Year Heads took over. It’s not ideal, but, like shit, it happens. And it might just save a school.’
‘I can’t see Sheffield surviving,’ Graham was shaking his head.
‘Deputy Headship for you, then?’
Graham chuckled. ‘I’m only just getting used to running my House,’ he said. ‘How many dead men’s shoes can any one person fill? By the way, after the debate, come along to the Fox and Grapes, will you? It’s traditional. Losing House buys the drinks.’
There were whoops and cheers from the girls as Cassandra’s second weighed in with a particularly unanswerable bon mot. Maxwell turned to Graham. ‘Looks like you could cop a packet.’
The Fox and Grapes was within spitting distance of Grimond’s. ‘Only a yard of ale away’ as Bill Pardoe used to say. It was a typical old coaching inn that had had the heart ripped out of it to become a fast-food outlet. The beams were a little on the plastic side and the beer somewhat characterless, but it was better than meths strained through a sock. The dead Housemaster was never very keen on his charges nipping to this or any other hostelry. Grimond’s sixth form were immaculately behaved of course and the landlord had a tendency to blindness in one eye where the law of the land was concerned. He couldn’t tell the time either, so it was well after eleven when the Fox and Grapes hand-bell was rung for last orders.
‘Max, what’ll it be?’ Tony Graham was buying among the quietly inebriated hum of the night. ‘One for the dorm, eh?’
‘All right, Tony, thanks. I’ll break the habit of a lifetime and have a small Southern Comfort.’
And the new Housemaster was gone into the hurly-burly of the bar.
‘You know,’ Maxwell turned on his monk’s bench near the empty fireplace to John Selwyn, ‘you were very good tonight. In the debate. You should have won.’
‘Let’s just say it was Cassandra’s turn,’ he raised the remains of his pint to her.
The Captain of Austen looked years older out of her school uniform, sitting with similar sirens around a far table. She winked and raised her Malibu and Coke to him.
‘Oh, now don’t tell me the whole thing was fixed,’ Maxwell was appalled.
‘Oh, no,’ Cassandra was still all ice after her encounter with Maxwell the other night. ‘John lost fair and square.’ She beamed broadly at him. ‘He usually does.’
‘Bitch,’ Selwyn grinned.
‘How’s the House coping without Mr Pardoe, John?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Oh, you know,’ Selwyn said, a little grimly. ‘The show must go on. He’d have wanted it that way.’
‘Mr Graham settling in?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Selwyn finished his pint. ‘He’s a natural. In fact, I’m not sure we’d have quite got through all this without him.’
‘Hear, hear!’ boomed Ape from the next seat along.
‘You’re off to Cambridge, I understand?’
‘Oxford. Merton,’ Selwyn said.
‘To read?’
‘As little as possible,’ Selwyn joked.
‘And you, Cassandra?’ Maxwell called across to her. ‘Oxford?’
‘Cambridge,’ she told him. ‘I shall be reading around the subject.’
She and Selwyn convulsed in laughter. It was the way she pronounced the word that caused it. Janet Boyce at her elbow stood up, her face a mask, and she flounced out into the night. A couple of other girls saw it and sidled out after her. After all, there was a maniac on the loose at Grimond’s and Miss Shaunessy had given them all explicit instructions. No one was to go home alone.
‘Tell me, John, do the prefects at Grimond’s wear gowns?’
‘Gowns?’ Selwyn stopped laughing. ‘No. Not in my time here, anyway. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, no reason. You know how it is when you’re plunged into a strange institution; it’s all new. It was just something I saw the other night, that’s all. I don’t suppose you know, either of you, what’s become of Mr Tubbs?’
‘Your very good health, Max,’ and Tony Graham was back with the drinks.
It was David Gallow who ran Maxwell back to Grimond’s that night. The others piled into Graham’s Range Rover and the school mini-bus, the unmarked one without the school coat of arms specially kept for such outings. Miss Shaunessy had not joined them, a stre
ss migraine overtaking her just at the moment of her girlies’ triumph.
‘You know, Mr Maxwell, it’s not really on.’
‘What? Under-age drinking? No, I suspect not, but if the sons of the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales can do it, we teetotallers are swimming against the tide rather, aren’t we?’ and he winked in the dashboard glow of the car’s interior.
‘I’m not talking about that,’ Gallow snarled his way through the gears. ‘I’m referring to the way you pump my students.’
‘Your students?’ Maxwell looked at the man’s face, illuminated by the glow of his fascia-panel lights. ‘I had no idea you took it so personally.’
‘I think these children have been through enough in the last ten days.’
‘It’s only going to get worse,’ Maxwell told him. ‘They’ve asked me to play rugger against them on Saturday.’
‘Who has?’ It was Gallow’s turn to look at Maxwell.
‘John Selwyn and the hearties of Tennyson.’
‘Oh, the Arbiters. Well, there you go.’
Maxwell froze. ‘The what?’
‘It’s the annual staff versus First Fifteen. Aren’t you – forgive me for saying so – a little long in the tooth for that sort of thing? A man of your age – it might kill you.’
‘Who are the Arbiters?’ Maxwell wasn’t listening.
‘What? Well, Selwyn and co. of course. It’s an old Tennyson House tradition, going back to the school’s early years. The Arbiters were the first House prefects at a time when there was only the one House – Tennyson. They ran the place, acting as a sort of drum-head court martial for unruly fags. They decided guilt or innocence – hence Arbiters. And punishments. Why the interest?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Maxwell said. ‘It was just something Jeremy Tubbs said the day before he disappeared. We were talking about the boat-house in actual fact and he mentioned the Arbiters.’
‘Right. Well, my point is that Grimond’s is convulsed enough as it is, Mr Maxwell. We’ve got social services and policemen all over the place.’
‘Two staff dead and one missing,’ Maxwell interrupted. ‘Don’t you think it’s time someone asked some questions?’