Maxwell’s Ride (12 page)

‘Right, dears,’ Maxwell sat them down. ‘Between nine and four of the clock, this is where I live. If I’m not here, I’ll be in the History Department, which is one floor above. H4 is my room. If there are any problems during the day, you’ll find me here or there, so to speak. Tiff, it’s only for a few days, so I’m putting you in Mr Macdonald’s tutor group. He’s the best of a had bunch in Year Ten and even better news is that you’ll be in Set Ten A One for History where your teacher is perhaps the finest brain in Tony Blair’s Britain – me. Lucy, you’ve got Mrs Greenhow. Salt of the earth is our Sally, for all she’s a Special Needs Teacher deep down. That way, you’ll be in Eight B One where your History teacher is that same miracle worker of whom we spoke a few moments ago. Mr Irwin!’

His shout rattled glass and a rather dishy young man, all curls and smoulder, sauntered in.

‘Mr Maxwell,’ he beamed, eyeing Tiffany up like Freddie Starr with a hamster.

‘Ladies, this is Mark Irwin. He’s in my Year Twelve, that’s Lower Sixth to you. He’s a mean bass guitarist, whatever that is, shoots a decent amount of pool and if he ever does any work, may get to Exeter University in fifteen months’ time. But his real asset is that he knows where your classrooms are and will take you there, won’t you, Mr Irwin?’

‘It will be my pleasure, sir,’ the boy grinned.

‘These are my nieces, Irwin,’ Maxwell snarled. ‘I will expect you to keep your hands in your pockets at all times.’

‘That would be slouching, sir,’ Irwin winked at him. ‘Whereaway, ladies?’

‘Mr Macdonald and Mrs Greenhow,’ Maxwell told him, wondering again why each school generation only produced one public-school throwback like Mark Irwin. ‘I’ve got to get you dears on roll, which means seeing a nice lady who understands the mechanical gubbins she calls a database. See you later.’

‘See you, Uncle Maxie,’ Lucy waved at him. Tiffany was already somewhere else and his eyes rolled heavenward as he heard Irwin purr to her, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

A certain peace descends on High Schools come the business end of the summer term. Those heady weeks when Year 11 have gone and Year 13 are about to go. It had to be said that Bernard Ryan, the Deputy Head in charge of timetabling, the calendar and all that makes the heart of a great school beat, had got it wrong that year. He’d spent months telling everybody that it was a computer glitch and the stand-up row he’d had with Maxwell in the staffroom was still imprinted on the memories of those who heard it – ‘I don’t know a megabyte from a Jacobite, Bernard, but I know what comes next after Wednesday. It’s a pity you’re a little lacking in that particular set of basics, isn’t it?’

Peter Maxwell, one; Bernard Ryan,
nul point
, disappeared in confusion. So it was that the GCSE exam study leave didn’t actually start until Wednesday and some of them were actually gullible enough to believe it. Maxwell would have to go on telling them stories until then.

‘Gemma,’ he cornered a gum-chewing girl in the first lesson after break, ‘what, in your erudite and ever-welcome opinion, was the main problem facing the Weimar republic?’

Gemma looked blank, but at least she had the sense to stop her jaws working.

‘Well,’ Maxwell roamed the classroom, like a lion probing the defences of a herd of wildebeest. ‘Was it split ends, I wonder? Broken nails? Perhaps jogger’s nipple?’ He thrust a litter bin under her nose. ‘Spit it out, there’s a dear. And when you get home tonight, write out a thousand times: “I’ve got ten days until my GCSE History; I must find out something about Adolf Hitler”. Okay?’ He watched the grey blob ping into the metal. ‘Jolly good. Right,’ and he spun back to the wary, milling herd, ‘who’s got a brain? Nobody. Well, never mind. Simon, you’ll have to do.’

‘What was the question, sir?’ Simon felt his heart pounding.

‘Ah,’ luckily for Simon, Maxwell was feeling particularly generous that day. He’d let the boy live. He had reached the window and was looking at the staff cars parked below, ‘What indeed?’

He kept an eye on them, of course, as only experienced teachers can. The school timetable told him where they’d be and he acted on it. ‘Got any chalk, Ben?’ he asked the Head of Science in whose class young Lucy was conducting an experiment.

‘No, we use whiteboards here, Max,’ the Head of Science was confused, glancing at the gleaming wall behind him, just to make sure.

‘Of course you do,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Silly me. I’ll see myself out.’

He breezed down F corridor, past the mezzanine floor where they kept Business Studies, removing with deft swipes of his hand the misspelt posters that proclaimed that Acne were playing at the Dog’s Head tomorrow night and that Melanie Stinks. He didn’t want to hear Acne (he wasn’t sure you could) and he already knew about Melanie anyway. He popped his head round the door of the French Department, where Tiffany had her head down over a book.

‘Bonjour, Monsieur Maxwell,’ chirped the head of Modern Languages, a reasonably pleasant woman in a bun, who shared that arrogant trait of language teachers everywhere that only their adopted tongue seemed to count.

‘Bonjour, Madame Da Farge.’

The reasonably pleasant woman scowled.

‘Got anything on the appalling performance of the Free French on D-Day?’ he asked, ‘Or how it was that 30,000 Germans could control the whole of France during the war?’

‘Er … I’m afraid not.’

‘Heigh-ho.’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Not to worry.
Au revoir
, Madame Guillotine,’ and he vanished.

Lunchtime comes but once a day and unusually, Maxwell was spending it in the staffroom, that strange cluster of assorted furniture to which hapless teachers retreated as a last resort, rather like the 24th Foot behind their mealie bags at Rorke’s Drift. Even more unusually, Deirdre Lessing appeared in her cloud of sulphur smoke to join him.

‘Max,’ she sat down to his right. ‘Oh, my God, what’s that?’

‘Oh, I do apologize, Senior Mistress,’ and he made great play in doing up his flies and pulling his sports jacket across his lap.

‘I mean,’ Deirdre Lessing had never let a little thing like levity spoil her morning, ‘that thing you’re eating.’

‘Oh, that.’ Maxwell studied it too. ‘Well, Edna in the kitchen assured me it was a pizza slice, but having sampled it, I prefer to keep an open mind.’ He winked leeringly at her. ‘Want a bit?’

‘Thank you,’ she sat back, but upright in the chair. ‘I think I’ll stick to my yoghurt.’

‘Very wise.’

‘Max, I’ve something to ask you.’

‘Oh?’ A thousand possibilities sprang to Maxwell’s ever-fertile mind, but a request to be allowed to commit hara-kiri loomed largest, preferably in the quad with the whole school’s company forming hollow square.

‘I have to go to a wretched Charts meeting tomorrow afternoon, in London. Could you come with me?’

Maxwell’s pizza slice toppled inexorably into his lap. ‘Well, I’m flattered of course, Deirdre,’ he said, extracting slices of pepperoni from his gonadal regions.

She turned to him with her Gorgon stare. If only he’d brought his polished shield with him that morning. ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘James insisted.’

‘Who?’ For the briefest of moments, he was nonplussed. ‘Oh, the Headmaster.’

‘Why do you call him Legs?’ she asked.

Maxwell could blush at will and he did so now. ‘Please, Deirdre,’ he whispered. ‘It’s personal.’

The staffroom door burst open and Tom Sugden, the Head of Technology stood there, fuming. ‘Bloody Ten C Six,’ he snarled at nobody in particular. ‘You know, sometimes I think Hitler was right.’

‘Only sometimes?’ Maxwell was retrieving garlicky crumbs from his corduroy. Deirdre’s glance failed to wither him. No sooner had Sugden sulked off to the coffee machine than Camp David arrived. ‘Do you know what that new girl in Eight B One asked me a few minutes ago?’

No one in the staffroom did.

‘“Are you homosexual?” I ask you!’ and he minced to his pigeon hole.

‘New girl, Ca … er … David?’ Maxwell had to ask.

‘Lucy something,’ David growled. ‘Stuck up little tart.’

‘Absolutely,’ nodded Maxwell. ‘And no judge of character whatsoever.’

‘How do you stand it, Uncle Maxie?’ Lucy asked, lobbing dishes into Maxwell’s dishwasher.

‘What, my darling, the decay of civilization or yet another television mini series starring John Thaw? Although, come to think of it, one is a sign of the other.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘Leighford High.’

‘Hey,’ he gave her his best Sly Stallone, ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.’

‘I have tried it, Uncle Maxie,’ she reminded him.

‘Oh, yes,’ he chuckled. ‘Well, then, just thank your lucky stars that dearest Mummy and Daddy are loaded enough to send you elsewhere. And spare a thought, once you’re back there, for your dear old uncle. Where’s Tiff?’

‘On the phone.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Maxwell paled. ‘Not long distance?’ And he bounced into the lounge on some pretext. Sure enough, Tiffany was curled up on his settee, winding the phone cord round her fingers as surely as one day she would wind some hapless lad.

‘I don’t know,’ she was saying, ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ll have to ask. Why?’ Her eyes widened and she laughed mischievously. ‘Certainly not.’ She covered her mouth briefly to giggle, then sat po-faced. ‘Out of the question.’ She snorted again, then said imperiously, ‘Perhaps, but never on a first date,’ and put the receiver down.

‘Wrong number?’ Maxwell asked, pointlessly straightening some books.

‘Mark Irwin,’ she told him. ‘He’s asked me out.’

Maxwell had never felt like this before. In one brief sentence he’d changed from Mr Pinko-Liberal to Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street by way of Attila the Hun. ‘What?’

‘Uncle Maxie,’ Tiffany scrabbled up from her seat. ‘You really should be careful, you know. You go a really funny colour when you’re cross.’

‘I’m not cross, dear girl,’ he assured her, ‘just careful. What, for instance, would your father say?’

Tiffany snorted again. ‘He wouldn’t even notice.’

‘Your mother, then?’

‘Mummy?’ Tiffany thought about it, running a pensive finger through her golden hair. ‘She’d give me a lecture.’

‘Good,’ Maxwell concurred.

‘Then she’d give me a condom.’

‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’

‘No need to blaspheme, Uncle Maxie,’ Lucy called from the kitchen. ‘You can get flavoured ones nowadays.’

‘Oh, joy,’ Maxwell said, horrified to find himself a father again after twenty-five years – and the father of call girls at that. ‘Just a minute,’ he said to Tiffany, ‘I didn’t hear the phone go. Who rang who then?’

‘I rang him,’ she confessed, without a hint of shamefacedness.

‘He gave you his number?’

‘No. I looked it up in the book. Uncle Maxie, this is 1999. We don’t sit around walls fanning ourselves any more in the hope that some bloke will ask us to do the gallop with him.’

‘It is about riding, though, isn’t it?’ Lucy called.

Tiffany raised an eyebrow, followed by a languid middle finger. ‘I thought he was rather impressive, Uncle Maxie – for a comprehensive oik, that is. Don’t you?’

Maxwell had known a lot of comprehensive oiks in his time. Some he’d welcome like public schoolboys, at dances or shipwrecks. Some he’d trust to cross the road by themselves. There may even have been one or two he’d have trusted with his life. But leave one alone with his niece? Never. He grumbled something impenetrable and trudged upstairs to continue work on the plastic fifty-four millimetre Sergeant Mitchell of the 13th Light Dragoons.

‘He’s not going to let you go out tonight, you know,’ Lucy said as her big sister swanned into the kitchen.

‘No problem,’ Tiffany said. ‘It’s tomorrow night he’s asked me out. I’ll have worked on Uncle Maxie by then.’

Uncle Maxie popped his head around the door. Neither girl had heard him come back down. He beamed at his elder niece.

‘Tomorrow night?’ he asked. ‘Is that when Hell freezes over? Because that’s when you can go out with Mark Irwin.’

By the time Chris Logan had watched the hot police video, it was late. He stretched on Maxwell’s settee and rummaged for his shoes. The girls had long since shuffled off to bed, Tiffany to dream of her new love and Lucy wondering who she could annoy tomorrow. Metternich the cat was curled on the pouffé, happy at last in the company of men.

‘Bloody Hell,’ was Logan’s informed and inestimably useful comment.

‘Now, Chris,’ Maxwell said, ‘I don’t have to tell you again that all this is highly confidential. There is no possibility of a story. I can’t compromise my source.’

‘You said you had nobody on the inside,’ Logan remembered.

‘I lied,’ Maxwell smiled.

‘So why did you show it to me, Max? I mean, I’m delighted you did of course. But I don’t see how I can help.’

‘I hoped you might know Bartlett.’

‘The psychiatrist? No, I don’t. Well, I did attend a press conference he gave in London. On the Critchley case.’

‘The abattoir killings?’

Logan nodded. ‘Very messy. I couldn’t face goulash for a while, I can tell you. I was impressed by him.’

‘What about this?’ Maxwell wanted to know.

‘Well … yes. I’d say he’s got his man.’ He caught a look in his old teacher’s eye. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘Was A-level History all in vain, dear boy?’ he asked sadly, disappointment furrowing his brow.

‘Well, I …’

‘Hamlyn,’ Maxwell made the newsman focus, ‘what about his performance?’

‘Performance?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s the only word for it. He’s acting.’

‘Acting?’

‘If you’d just killed a man, premeditatedly gone out and put a high velocity bullet into him, then walked into a police station to confess, would you be as calm as this guy? Wouldn’t you sweat a little? Shake?’

‘Ha,’ Logan stabbed the air with his finger, ‘but I’m not a member of the SAS.’

‘And we don’t know he is, either,’ Maxwell told him.

‘Ah.’ Logan had found his shoes and was slipping them on. ‘Anyway, Max, we didn’t see his face. He could have been showing any number of emotions.’

‘Body language,’ Maxwell said.

‘You what?’

‘Look at you, for instance.’