by M. J. Trow
‘Did you sleep with her?’ Jacquie didn’t want to look him in the face. Not then.
‘What?’ Maxwell swallowed a corner of his fried bread. It hurt like hell?
‘She said you did.’
He chuckled. ‘Sorry. That whole experience must have been so distasteful I blinked and missed it.’
She looked at him now and her lips curled into a smile. ‘Well, good,’ she said.
There was a relative silence while Maxwell chewed his bacon. ‘You’d been worrying about that, hadn’t you?’ he asked.
‘I’d no right …’ she said.
Maxwell shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ Jacquie was cradling her coffee in both hands, ‘I didn’t either.’
‘What? Sleep with Ash?’
‘Either.’ She looked at him, wide eyed. ‘Both.’
‘Ah.’ Maxwell paused with the thick Irish sausage inches from his lips. ‘Well, chacun à son goût, as the French have it.’
‘It was how the Ashetons have it that bothered me,’ Jacquie told him. ‘Ash is impotent.’
Maxwell nodded. ‘I know. Still, after a hard day at the chalkface I know how he feels.’
‘I’m talking about motive, Max,’ Jacquie said.
‘Say on, Woman Policeman.’ Maxwell poured himself another cup. It may have been Jacquie’s kitchen-diner they were sitting in, but when it came to coffee with which to face the barbarian hordes, it was su casa mi casa.
‘What if they do this for a hobby, Ash and Veronica?’
‘What, swap you mean?’
‘Well, keys on the mat is a little before my time. It’s your generation.’
‘Oh, no.’ Maxwell laughed. ‘You’re not putting that one on me. My generation put a man on the moon.’
‘And they put keys on mats,’ Jacquie insisted.
‘How does all this fit with Quent?’
‘Well, he was gay.’
‘So?’
‘So …’ Jacquie poured herself a second coffee too. ‘What if Veronica tried it on, not with the preacher, but with Quentin?’
‘Go on.’
‘He doesn’t want to know. There’s an ugly scene. Rejection is something Veronica doesn’t handle well – I know.’
Maxwell bridled. ‘As do I.’
Jacquie hit him – gingerly, of course, because of his head. But inside she was glad. ‘Veronica loses her cool, lashes out and all but kills him.’
‘With a cricket bat?’
‘It’s plausible,’ Jacquie said. ‘It was a school, Max. There could have been bits of kit all over the place.’
‘All right, why the school in the first place?’
‘That I don’t know, yet. Some weird game that Ash and Veronica were playing? Except that Ash didn’t know that Quent was gay.’
‘And Quent didn’t know that Ash was impotent.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘What a pair.’
‘Hang-ups,’ Jacquie said solemnly. ‘That’s what this is all about. Hang-ups.’
‘Hangs-up I believe you’ll find is the correct term, Woman Policeman. Oh, Christ, look at the time.’
‘You’ve got another half an hour yet, Max,’ Jacquie said. ‘I’ll take you.’
‘Drop me off at Columbine, there’s a love. If I don’t get back on White Surrey’s saddle soon, he’ll rust.’
‘It’s like falling off a bike, Max.’ She smiled. ‘You never forget.’
The local boys were out combing outhouses for Richard Alphedge. It had been four days and so far there had been nothing. No phone call. No sightings. No word.
‘Publicity stunt, darling,’ the actor’s agent said to the one person in the entire country who’d bothered to call. ‘If I know Richard – and sadly I do – he’ll be holed up in a cottage somewhere, waiting for the world to give a fuck. Well, he’ll have a rather long wait, won’t he? Goodbye.’
DI Ben Thomas was back at Halliards that Friday. It was bitterly cold, but at least the rain had stopped. Holmes was helping the Warwickshire CID with their enquiries, trying, as was Leighford, to sift the dozens of tyre tracks at the main gate. Everybody knew the place was empty. An old mattress leaned against the hedge that old Gregson, the groundsman, had once lovingly tended. The ubiquitous supermarket trolley lay upside down to the left of the drive, rusting in the winter weather. Already, local kids had used the windows as target practice. But none of them went too close or crossed the police tape that still flapped there. A bloke had hung hisself inside – best not get too near.
Thomas was looking up at the staircase to his right and the great blank mass of the oriel window with its school crest that let the winter light flood in. The rope had gone now to the labs in Leamington. He climbed the stairs, feeling the cold brass of the banisters under his fingers. Clean as a whistle. SOCO had combed and recombed the place. They’d found plenty of Quentin’s blood and bits of Quentin’s skull and brains. They’d found footprints all over the area – on the stairs, the landing, in the hall. It didn’t help. Contractors, builders, cleaners – God alone knew how many people had come and gone over the last few weeks. And all the suspects’ prints were there too – Asheton’s, Alphedge’s, Muir’s, Wensley’s and Maxwell’s.
The DI thumped the balustrade and it gave off a low, reverberating hum. His boss had let Wensley walk, the stupid cow, over a pushy lawyer and a technicality. DI Thomas didn’t object to a little rule-bending himself. Whoever that bloke was who’d lifted Wensley’s file should have been given a bloody promotion, not the caution he presumably did get. Not that DI Thomas ever had Wensley in the frame, not really. He pulled the leather gloves from his pocket and put them on. Then he produced the carefully folded piece of paper and smeared it in the dust and grit on the landing floor. Finally, he tucked it under a skirting board so that just the corner protruded.
Then he put his gloves away and bounced down the stone staircase.
‘Vernon!’ he bellowed.
‘Yes, guv?’ The DS put his head round one of the classroom doors.
‘Give the stairs a final once-over, will you? I’m off for lunch.’
‘But, guv …’
Thomas came alongside his man and tapped him lightly on the cheek. ‘We’ve been over and over it. Yes, I know. It’s a million-to-one shot, certainly. But this case is going nowhere. As,’ and he tapped the side of his nose, ‘is my career and yours. Have another shufti, there’s a good lad.’
16
‘Stenhouse?’
Maxwell had been in his Inner Sanctum at the top of the house at 38 Columbine. Pouch belts were bastards to paint anyway, especially when they were on the fifty-four-millimetre scale, but it hadn’t helped when the doorbell had rung and Maxwell’s brush had leapt skyward, daubing gold all over the plastic face of Captain Soames Gambier Jenyns of the 13th Light Dragoons.
‘For fuck’s sake, Max, it’s pouring out here, or hadn’t you noticed?’
Maxwell hadn’t, if truth were told. He’d been engrossed, while painting the good captain’s accoutrements, with the case of Halliards School. It could have been a three-pipe problem if Maxwell smoked a pipe. As it was, it was several Southern Comforts and a cup of cocoa.
The drenched journalist pushed past his old oppo. ‘Good God.’ Muir looked from left to right. ‘You’ve got no rooms in your house, Maxie. Is that an old Leighford custom?’
‘It’s a town house, Stenhouse.’ The Head of Sixth Form was patience itself. ‘Not very different from your own. You go up the stairs – those are those carpet-covered things ahead of you. Want to put that in the downstairs cloakroom?’
‘That,’ Muir held it out to him, ‘is my very heart and soul. It is a laptop, Maxwell, a personal computer. The very essence of a journalist’s being. Old, but precious. Where’s your modem?’
Maxwell raised an eyebrow. ‘Do I look like a man on whom the twenty-first century has dawned?’ he asked. ‘I remember the song, though,’ and he broke into it, shaking his hands like a possessed Al Jols
on. ‘Moh, dem golden slippers …’
‘Max.’ Muir frowned before climbing the stairs. ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Just a threat,’ Maxwell acknowledged. ‘Well, it’s wonderful to see you, Stenhouse.’
They’d reached the lounge, all soft in its lamp-glow. ‘Ah, a room. You got my message?’ Muir laid the polythene-wrapped contraption on Maxwell’s coffee table.
‘Message?’ Maxwell repeated.
‘Oh, for crying out loud. Have you left any drink?’
‘Scotch?’
‘Is there any other kind?’ Muir unzipped his dripping mac and stood there holding it.
‘Kitchen.’ Max pointed through to the neon-lit room. ‘Should be a hook or two there.’
‘No, I rang here first,’ Muir called. ‘Realized you’d be casting pearls before swine, and talked to your receptionist – what’s her name?’
‘God knows. Thingee.’
‘Right. Well, she said she’d pass it on.’
‘Pass what on?’ Maxwell held out a towel for his damp visitor.
‘Do stay with the conversation, Max.’ Muir sighed. He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to … safer times.’
Maxwell had found his Southern Comfort glass and raised that in salute.
‘No, I told your Thingee I was on my way and could you put me up for a day or two.’
‘I shall doubtless be informed a week on Tuesday.’ Maxwell gestured for his old friend to sit. ‘In education, the wheels of communication grind slow. I read the Hadow report yesterday and that came out in 1926. Put you up for a day or two?’ The horror of it all was beginning to dawn. ‘Doing a story on the South Coast?’
‘Well, I might.’ Muir loosened his tie. ‘To keep the wolf from the door, you know. The long and the short of it, Max, is that Janet’s thrown me out.’
‘What?’
‘I know.’ Muir shook his head. ‘Bloody outrageous, isn’t it? You give a woman the best years of your life, scrimp and save, working your bollocks off in every bar in the land, and sod me, she packs my bags!’
‘Good God. Er … the house?’
‘Hers. Mummy was something big in the ATS and Daddy owned Midlothian. All I’ve got is that bloody laptop and printer and a liver like a bar of Aero. Same again?’ His glass was empty. ‘Course, you haven’t heard the best bit yet.’
Maxwell refilled. It was going to be a long night.
‘She tried to fit me up. With Quent’s murder. Went to the law about that bloody silly cricket bat of mine. I ask you.’
‘But that’s in the clear, isn’t it? Jacquie put it through forensics.’
‘Did she, by God? Well, there you are. Could have saved the taxpayer an awful lot of money there. I didn’t use it on Quent, and I didn’t use it on Bingham.’
‘So how did it break?’
‘What? Oh, the tape?’ Muir leaned back, cradling his glass. ‘Promise you won’t laugh? I was reliving the old days, just before the Halliards weekend, as a matter of fact, driving to silly mid- off …’
‘As you do,’ Maxwell murmured.
‘Quite. Unfortunately, I was doing it in the kitchen. Dinged the willow, good and proper, I can tell you. Didn’t do much for Janet’s imported Italian tiles either. God, that woman’s a bitch.’
‘So, let me get this straight. Janet went to the police to tell them you killed Quent and Cret?’
Muir nodded. ‘And stole the Mona Lisa, and helped myself to the Crown Jewels. According to her, I’m Jack the fucking Ripper!’
‘And now you’re my guest,’ Maxwell mused.
‘Do you mind, old man?’ Muir looked oddly small in the half-light, defeated and old. ‘Just for a day or two?’
‘Where did you say you found it, Sergeant?’ DCI Nadine Tyler was holding the see-through wallet up to the light.
‘Under the skirting board on the landing at Halliards, ma’am. Must have got kicked there in all the kerfuffle.’
‘But it’s been three weeks.’ The DCI looked at him.
‘These things happen, ma’am,’ was the best DS Vernon could do.
‘Yeah, so does shit, but not on my patch, Sergeant.’ The DCI assessed him coldly. ‘Give DCI Henry Hall a bell at Leighford. Tell him I’m on his doorstep first thing Monday morning.’
‘Under the skirting board?’ Henry Hall blinked. ‘You mean behind it?’
‘Protruding from beneath, I understand,’ Nadine Tyler said. ‘As though kicked.’
‘Kicked or placed?’
‘Henry, I’ve had a bitch of a drive down and I’m tired. I would guess from your e-mails that you and I are staring at the same brick wall about now. Well, that,’ she pointed to the note held in its polythene wrapper, ‘is a chink in the bloody thing. It’s the first one I’ve seen and I’m not letting it get away. Now I only came to you as a matter of courtesy. Do I go and see him myself or are you going to join me?’
Hall handed back the wallet. ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world,’ he said, reaching for his coat.
‘You’ve got the address?’ she asked.
Hall nodded. ‘Oh, yes. But he won’t be there. He’ll be doing his day job.’
Deirdre Lessing was the Senior Mistress at Leighford High. Although she was nominally in charge of girls’ welfare, the girls would rather break a nail or suffer the agonies of split ends than go to her with their problems. Everybody in the school knew that, and none of them could quite work out therefore exactly what it was that Deirdre did. Except Peter Maxwell; he knew perfectly well. She made potions in her office, maimed cattle and sank ships in storms. And Deirdre Lessing cast no shadow and no reflection. Spooky or what?
‘Why wasn’t I told the maths interviews were today?’ She watched the pair coming up the steps on the CCTV cameras. Thingee, who crouched over her machinery in reception like an astronaut in a space capsule, all wires and headphones, hunched over with the weight of the abuse she received daily from parents, told her, ‘They’re not. They’re tomorrow, Miss Lessing.’
‘Good God,’ Jessica Evans, the Head of RE, said rather appropriately, seeing the same thing from her classroom windows. ‘I thought we’d stopped having the Gideons in school.’
As always, the kids were wiser, closer to the mark. Amy and Karen watched the pair who had aroused all the comment striding across the quad. ‘That’s that copper, that Mr Hall,’ Amy observed. ‘He done my mum last year for possession.’
‘Who’s that with him? His bit of stuff?’ Karen wondered, while transferring the gum around her train tracks.
‘Nah, that’ll be his DI. They always come in pairs. They’re looking for a woman. They have to have a woman copper in case he tries it on.’
‘Who? Him?’ Karen looked astounded. ‘But he’s gotta be forty.’
Amy nodded. ‘Old perv. Worst sort.’
‘Who they after, then? You don’t reckon it’s that Mrs Lessing, do you?’
‘I wish!’ Amy said with conviction. ‘’Ere, did you shift that consignment of nose studs I gave you?’
‘Course,’ Karen assured her, rather hurt that her friend should somehow impugn her fencing techniques.
‘Not you, then,’ Amy concluded. ‘It’ll be that nurse, that Mrs Matthews, selling crack on the seafront.’
‘Nah, she’s all right, she is, Mrs Matthews. Got any more gum?’
The Gideons slid up the staircase to the mezzanine floor, where their quarry lay. Sticky labels with the school logo clung desperately to their lapels. It was Leighford High’s answer to Dunblane. Any mad machine-gunner in the world could wander into Leighford and gun down anybody — but at least he’d do it with a visitor’s sticker on his lapel.
The door was open. And their quarry lolled back on his chair, his feet on the desk. He stood up abruptly as the pair walked in.
‘Mr Hall, Ms Tyler, Detective Chief Inspectors, this is a pleasant surprise. Any answers?’
They didn’t take his offer of seats, but stood inside his doorway. ‘We were hoping you’d have some of
those, Mr Maxwell,’ Nadine Tyler said.
‘I’ll just close this.’ Hall pushed the door to. ‘We don’t want children hovering, do we?’
‘God, no.’ Maxwell shuddered. ‘Nothing more unsettling than a hovering child, in my experience.’
‘Are you always so flippant?’ Nadine Tyler wanted to know, along with so many other people.
‘It’s a defence mechanism,’ Maxwell said, emerging from behind his desk. ‘I can’t help it. Are you sure you won’t sit down?’
Nadine Tyler did, hooking one leg over the other so that her skirt rode up just enough to establish the fact that she was a woman before she was a DCI. Hall leaned his bum against Maxwell’s window ledge, glancing out briefly at the cars parked below.
‘What do you know about this?’ Tyler asked, handing the Head of Sixth Form the wallet. ‘No, don’t take it out. You can read it perfectly clearly through the plastic.’
Maxwell looked closely. He really must get his eyes tested. Years of having them in the back of his head at the chalkface had taken their toll. ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ he asked.
‘Oh, it’s no joke, Mr Maxwell,’ Tyler said. ‘Neither is life imprisonment. Care to tell us about it?’
‘You think this was written by me?’ he queried.
‘It has your name at the bottom,’ Nadine Tyler said, ‘and your signature.’
‘My signature? Looks more like Rin Tin Tin’s.’
‘It’s addressed to George Quentin,’ the DCI said. ‘Asking him to meet you at Halliards at midnight on the night he died.’
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Where George Quentin dropped it,’ she told him, ‘or you let it fall. It probably dropped from his pocket as he went down in a pool of blood. Or perhaps when you hoisted him on to the end of the rope. Careless of you, wasn’t it?’
‘Very.’ Maxwell nodded, looking all the time at Henry Hall.
‘Can I take that to be an admission?’ Nadine Tyler was leaning forward, forcing Maxwell’s gaze to focus on her.
‘Admission one shilling,’ Maxwell said. ‘That was what they’d charge schools at Stratford when I was a kid. You’d get in to watch rehearsals. Brave of them, really, those actors, to expose themselves to the potential ridicule of all us kids.’