Maxwell’s House (19 page)

‘Jesus!’ The voice was so falsetto Smith had to do a double take.

‘Max,’ he cried out.

‘Tell me about Jenny Hyde.’ Maxwell ignored him.

‘Okay, okay.’ Maz was gabbling. ‘All right. You mad bastard. Just… just put the razor down.’

‘Down where?’ Maxwell raised an eyebrow.

‘She used to hang around the Dam from time to time,’ Maz said, the fear still etched on his pallid face. ‘Stuck-up bitch. Bit of a smell under her nose.’

‘Ah, but that didn’t impress you, did it, sonny Jim?’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Not with your accent and designer viciousness. What are you? An old boy of Eton? Harrow?’

‘Winchester,’ Maz confessed.

‘Ah,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘The
fons et origo
of public schools. Daddy owns Berkshire, does he? And you couldn’t stand the pressure of it all so you dropped out? Left home to shack up with kids?’

‘Max …’ Smith said.

‘Shut up, Geoff. This bastard knows who killed Jenny Hyde and he’s damned well going to tell us.’

‘No,’ Maz said, ‘no, I don’t. She came to me. On the Sunday … the Sunday before she died. She’d left home. She was scared.’

‘Of what? Her old man?’ Maxwell was chasing his man now, crowding him, the open razor still firm in his fist. He could still remember the look on Clive Hyde’s face that day he’d talked to Marianne. The hatred in the eyes. The sense of loss.

‘No, not the family. School. Leighford High.’ He looked from one pair of burning eyes to the other. ‘You … you’re teachers … you work there.’

‘Perhaps “work” is a bit strong in the case of Mr Smith,’ Maxwell hissed. ‘What was Jenny scared of? At Leighford High? What?’ He shook the boy like a rag doll.

‘I don’t know!’ Maz shouted. ‘She … she would only say that she’d seen something. Something that frightened her. And she didn’t know what to do about it.’

‘Where did she go? In that last week of her life?’

‘With me,’ Maz muttered. ‘Over there. In the squat. There are a few of us. They come and go. She just joined in. Except she didn’t.’ He scowled at the memory of it. ‘Stuck-up bitch. She came to me a virgin and she stayed that way.’

‘What were you arguing about?’ Maxwell wanted to know. ‘That Friday – the day she died. A woman saw you on the Dam and Jenny was saying “No”. What were you asking her to do, you sick little bastard?’

Maz began to laugh, a brittle, hysterical laugh, born of terror, ‘I was asking her,’ he said, shivering with the damp grass and the situation he was lying in, ‘I was asking her to go to the police. That’s rich, isn’t it? Me, asking her to go to the filth? She said “No”, she couldn’t. No one would believe her, she said. She’d tried to tell her parents, but couldn’t find the words. There was one guy,’ he suddenly remembered. ‘Some old sod who was Head of the Sixth Form. She thought he might understand. And then she said no, of all people she couldn’t tell him.’ Maz shook his head. ‘She was one mixed-up kid. I’ve never known anyone straight so out of her tree.’

Maxwell looked at Smith. He looked at the razor gleaming in his hand. Then he threw it away and heard it land in the bushes. He hauled himself upright with Smith’s help and the two of them looked down at the bedraggled, panting boy.

‘Lucky he was wearing brown trousers, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell said.

Smith nodded. ‘Let’s go, Max. Before I throw up.’

Neither of them spoke in the car on the way back to Columbine Avenue. Not until they got there. Geoffrey Smith switched off the ignition. ‘Best Reggie Kray I ever saw, Maxim,’ he said softly. ‘And I didn’t like it.’

Maxwell looked across at his old oppo. ‘I’m not exactly proud of myself, Geoff,’ he said, ‘but it’s gone way past that now. Look.’ He pointed to the bus on the main road beyond the huddle of new houses he called his country estate. ‘It’s the 18A taking a whole load of our pupils to Leighford High. Drive like the maniac you are and you’ll make it by nine o’clock.’

‘Tell me, Max,’ Smith said, ‘what did that achieve? That histrionic bit with the razor? Anything? Did it have any point at all?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘It confirmed what I’d always thought. That Jenny Hyde was killed because of something to do with school. Now I know.’

‘You do?’

Maxwell nodded, it was all in Jenny’s diary,’ he said, it could only have been one of two people. I thought at first it was K. – Keith Miller. But when Maz said that Jenny had seen something at school, something that frightened her, then it had to be P. – “Why do I always fancy the married ones?’”

‘But … who’s P?’ Smith asked.

Maxwell clicked open the door and let his left foot fall to the pavement. ‘You’re going to see him in a minute or two, Geoff,’ he said. ‘Better you don’t know.’

‘Maxwell!’ Smith leaned across, grabbing the man’s coat. ‘This is me, Geoffrey. Your fellow Old Contemptible. I think I’ve a right to know.’

Maxwell leaned on the car, his head heavy, his eyes tired of the world. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid Jenny wasn’t very cryptic after all. K. turned out to be Keith Miller. And P. … well, P. is Paul Moss.’

He watched Smith’s jaw drop. ‘Have a nice day, Geoffrey.’

He winked at him and clicked his thumb as though firing a pistol.

Jessica Troubridge, pruning her rose bushes in the garden next to Maxwell’s, thought it all highly peculiar and tottered off for a little drinky.

One way or another, Geoffrey Smith had had a bit of a day. First his mad old mate had rung to tell him he was on rape charges in the local nick, while being suspected of murder on the side. Then he’d spent all night in a freezing car deciding whether or not to tackle some young weirdo Maxwell had told him the police had already eliminated from their enquiries. He’d been forced to lean on said weirdo, in broad daylight, while said mad old mate brandished a cut-throat razor, apparently with every intention of using it. And all day, apart from the normal day terrors that attend every teacher, he’d been catching sight of the murderer, Paul Moss. He thought how cheerful the Head of History looked, blissfully ignorant of the noose that was tightening round his neck.

And as the last of the little dears fled the building that was the bane of their lives, lighting up on street corners, rough-housing outside the Happy Shopper and throwing bangers from the top of double-decker buses, Geoffrey Smith crashed into the shambles that was the Drama office.

‘Bloody hell, Max!’ He steadied himself against the door. Then he remembered the situation and shut it quickly. ‘I thought excommunication – even pending excommunication – such as yours resulted in removal of the right hand if you returned. Is it wise to be on the premises?’

‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit, Margaret Rutherford thou never wert. And I’ve never done anything wise in my life, Geoff,’ Maxwell said. ‘But you know what I did today?’

‘You went to the law, I presume, about Paul?’ Smith found the other chair under a pile of exam papers.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Maxwell told him. ‘I went to Kew.’

‘Kew?’ Smith blinked. ‘Maxie,’ he chuckled, ‘it’s not even lilac time.’

‘No.’ Maxwell looked at the little unfinished model of the set that lay on the desk beside him. The set for The Merchant of Venice. ‘But perhaps it’s time for the final curtain on the story of Jenny Hyde. And of Tim Grey. And of Hilda Smith.’

‘What?’ Smith blinked again, ‘I don’t follow.’

‘Oh, yes, you do, Geoff,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘And just three little mistakes gave you away. When you stole the diary – Jenny’s diary – from my place, you were too damned nice. Oh, you forced the lock, yes. But you didn’t so much as scratch the paintwork. And you left my Light Brigade totally intact. Bless you for that.’

‘Max,’ Smith chuckled, ‘it must be that blow to the head

‘Don’t patronize me, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell warned, his face hard and cold. ‘Hall thought I’d rigged the break-in myself, got Sylvia Matthews to steal the diary so that I couldn’t be implicated.’

‘All right,’ Smith humoured him, ‘I’ll play along. What was my second mistake?’

‘Not being a cat owner,’ Maxwell said, watching his old friend drowning in front of him. ‘You see, they don’t react like dogs. But they don’t forget, either. When you brought me home last night, Metternich turned his tail on you. He’d seen you trash my place and it frightened him. He couldn’t work out why you’d behave like that, not even the Coachman of Europe.’

Smith threw his head back, chuckling. ‘I’m not sure DCI Hall would be terribly impressed by your logic, Holmes.’ He was Nigel Bruce again. ‘Circumstantial at best. Downright cranky at worst.’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell slipped inexorably into his Basil Rathbone, ‘but that’s because I have not yet postulated your third mistake, my dear fellow.’

Bruce had vanished, but Smith was still smiling. ‘Go on, then,’ he said, ‘I like a laugh. Somehow makes the marking all the more bearable.’

‘Your third mistake was the clincher,’ Maxwell said, ‘and I don’t think DCI Hall will have any trouble with this one. You said that Hilda was away looking after her mother. “Tending to Godzilla,” I think, was your immortal phrase. And I said …’

‘“I thought she was dead”,’ Smith remembered.

‘And you said, “Wishful thinking.” But it wasn’t, Geoff, was it? It was deadly accurate. And suddenly, it all fell into place. If this wretched business had done nothing else, it’s taught me the importance of reading newspapers. Ever since Tim Grey died, I’ve followed them avidly. And guess what the Advertiser came up with a couple of days ago. A by-line from that arsehole Tony Young, of all people. A body. The body of a woman. Washed up in Leighford Bay. It was Hilda, wasn’t it, Geoffrey?’

Peter Maxwell had never heard Geoffrey Smith laugh like that before. It made the hair crawl on the back of his scalp and he suddenly felt very cold.

‘Hilda’s at home,’ Smith said. ‘You talked to her on the phone only last night.’

Maxwell shook his head, answering in the way he always answered Mrs B., the cleaner. ‘She isn’t and I didn’t.’

‘What?’

‘I normally enjoy research, Geoff,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Nothing I like better than rooting around up to my bollocks in archives, you know that.’

Smith didn’t respond; he just sat there, staring at Maxwell.

‘Well, I didn’t enjoy it today. Those damned microfiches at Kew. It’s all bloody computerized.’

‘Get to the point, Max,’ Smith was curt. ‘I’ve a lot to do tonight …’

‘The point’, Maxwell cut in, ‘is that Mrs Phyllis Dixon, Godzilla, Hilda’s mum – who I remember very well, by the way – died on 8th June 1984; that’s nine years ago, Geoff. So why should Hilda be visiting a corpse? Unless, of course, she’d become one herself. It’s been a bit of a rush, of course, today. I’m not a hundred per cent, as you can imagine, but I got a cab from the station to your place. You will leave your back door open, Geoff,’ he scolded him. ‘You’re the bane of Neighbourhood Watch, aren’t you? So I went in. “He won’t mind,” I thought, “not my Old Contemptible.” Well,’ Maxwell’s bonhomie vanished, ‘contemptible’s the word, Geoff, isn’t it? Because there’s nothing of Hilda Smith nee Dixon left, is there? Not a dress, not a bra, not a Barbara Cartland. You’ve wiped her from your life like a bit of software, I think the Young People call it. Okay,’ he shrugged as far as he was able, ‘so she’s left you and you’re too macho to admit it, even to me. But then,’ he leaned forward, ‘there’s that phone call, isn’t there, Geoff? I remembered you’ve got one of those answerphones where the caller can be heard. You knew it was me because you were here, at home, with the thing switched on. And you thought, what a chance to persuade poor, stupid old Maxie that Hilda was still around.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Geoff,’ he said. ‘Your impressions are legendary, but that one … I take my hat off to you.’

‘Poor, stupid Maxie.’ It was Smith’s turn to shake his head. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he sneered.

‘Well,’ Maxwell was politeness itself, ‘why don’t you tell me, then?’

‘All right,’ Smith snapped, sitting upright. ‘All right, I will. That bitch Hilda has made my life hell for years. Carping. Sniping. Nothing I did was right. Since the boys left home, she’d become unbearable. I always planned to kill her. Had a whole scheme worked out. Some poetic nonsense about pouring poison into her ear, a la Hamlet. All fantasy of course. Until one night … it was the week before the end of term. Hilda was worse than ever, that rat-trap mouth of hers, that whine, that sour, sour look. I don’t remember exactly the details – before it happened, I mean. I only know I hit her. With one of those brass candlesticks her mother left. She’d turned away, about to flounce out of the room, and I hit her. Again and again. I don’t know how many times. When I stopped, I looked up. And there, looking at me through the window, was Jenny Hyde.’

Smith looked into Maxwell’s eyes as he’d looked into the dead girl’s. ‘I was what she’d seen. I was the thing that had frightened her. The thing that Maz didn’t know because she wouldn’t tell him.’

‘And couldn’t tell me,’ Maxwell nodded sadly, ‘because I was your friend. And Jenny knew that.’

‘She was still chasing the Oxbridge notion then,’ Smith said. ‘Remember, she used to come to my house sometimes? I’d arranged for her to come that night. I’d forgotten all about it. Then there was the row with Hilda and … well, there it was.’

‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do?’ Smith shrugged. ‘Jenny’d gone in a second. My only hope was to clean up and hide the body as fast as I could. I wrapped Hilda in a couple of bin liners, roped her up and dumped her in the boot of the Honda. Then I washed the blood as best I could and drove to the sea. It was dark by then. She weighed a bloody ton, but somehow I got her on to the Shingle and threw her over. I didn’t bother with gloves or anything. I fully expected the police to be there when I got back. They weren’t. I couldn’t understand it. I knew Jenny had seen me. Why hadn’t she told the law? Her parents? Somebody? That was the longest weekend of my life. Believe me, Max, Ray Milland was a teetotaller compared with the amount I put away. But Monday morning, Christ, that was something else. How I got up the front steps to the door of this building, I’ll never know. But she wasn’t there. I checked Janet Foster’s register. Absent. And the next day. And the next. And still nothing from the police. I thought I’d go mad. “Down, down, thou climbing sorrow. Hysterica Passio.”’