Maxwell’s House (7 page)

He only ever bothered people when he wanted to complain. And he was bothering Peter Maxwell at nine o’clock the next morning.

‘Hello, Betty.’ Maxwell was facing the third day of the new term. It had been a long week.

‘I was turfin’ out them old lockers,’ Martin said, never one to stand on ceremony, ‘and I found this.’

Maxwell squinted at the man framed by his office door. ‘What is it?’ he had to ask.

‘Well,’ Martin coughed with the volume and precision of a thirty-a-day man, ‘in my day we called ’em nodders or French letters. They seem to ’ave invented a new name for ’em now – condoms.’

Gingerly, Maxwell took the packet, eternally grateful that it didn’t seem to have been opened. ‘Ah, so it’s that Condom Moment?’ Betty Martin wasn’t smiling. ‘And this was in a locker?’

‘Be’ind, to be precise,’ Martin told him, ‘along wi’ this.’

‘This’ was an exercise book, blue, with a marked crease down the centre, as though it had been wedged somewhere tight for some time.

‘Bin it,’ Maxwell shrugged.

‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ Martin said and threw the book on to Maxwell’s desk. ‘Not when you read the name on the front. You ’avin assembly again this mornin’?’

‘No, thanks, Betty,’ Maxwell frowned. ‘Thursday this term.’

‘Just as long as I know.’ Martin was clumping away down the corridor. ‘Chairs don’t get put out by their bloody selves, you know.’

‘Indeed not,’ but Maxwell wasn’t thinking about chairs. Or who put them out. He was reading the name on the book’s cover. The name Jenny Hyde.

Sylvia Matthews, when she wasn’t sorting out other people’s period pains and whizzing the odd dislocation in PE lessons down to the Casualty Department at Leighford General, was an addict of those nasty little booklets that purport to carry logic puzzles. Not the kind of logic that Sherlock Holmes was addicted to, but the sort of methodical reasoning where you put crosses in boxes to eliminate the obvious. And she was cerebellum-deep in one of these when her door bell rang.

‘Max?’ She saw his distorted profile in her door-lens. But he wasn’t carrying flowers this time, not even her own. She opened the door to him. ‘The start of term was three days ago. Max, we’ve had our annual nosh,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Girls,’ said Max, brushing past her with the air of a man whose mind was elsewhere. ‘Tell me about girls,’ and he threw himself down uninvited on Sylvia’s settee.

‘Well,’ she widened her eyes, ‘it depends on which version you want. If it’s the Biblical one, they came after boys. An afterthought made from Adam’s spare rib. If it’s the biological one …’

He screwed up his face at her. ‘You too saw the Spencer Tracy last Sunday,’ he nodded.

‘The what?’

‘
Inherit the Wind
– a rattling good yarn based on the “monkey trial” in Tennessee in the ’30s. Spencer Tracy was Clarence Darrow …’

‘Max,’ she sat opposite him, ‘what are you talking about?’

He ran his hands through the shock of barbed wire hair. ‘Buggered if I know, Sylv,’ he said. ‘Let me be more specific. Don’t tell me about girls. Tell me about girls and their diaries.’

‘Ah.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s something else entirely.’

‘Is it?’

‘I kept one. Didn’t you?’

‘No time,’ he shrugged. ‘Not when you’re making dens out of grass and rushing around the streets carving a Z for Zorro on people’s walls with your plastic rapier. Boys don’t have time.’

‘Well, there you are.’ Sylvia sat back. ‘It’s precisely because boys don’t have the time – or inclination – that we girls confide things in our diaries.’

‘I last read psychology nearly thirty years ago, Sylv,’ he apologized. ‘I think you’ll have to pass that one by me again.’

She looked at him. ‘A crusty old bachelor like you wouldn’t notice,’ she observed, ‘but girls develop earlier than boys. Hormones and so on.’

‘With you so far, Matron mine,’ he nodded.

‘They have crushes on people while boys are still kicking footballs or doing whatever Zorro did – whoever he is.’

Maxwell sucked in his breath. ‘That was barbed, Nursie,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Barbed.’

‘Now, a love-struck young girl can confide in her mother – if her mother is the understanding sort. But so often she’s not, so she doesn’t – if you follow me.’

Maxwell nodded.

‘She can confide in her friends – but there’s a problem there. What if her friends laugh at her? Worse, what if they’re love-struck over the same boy?’

‘It’s a bitch.’ Maxwell saw the dilemma.

‘So, she confides to her diary. The one thing that won’t laugh or answer back. That’s no rival. No threat. That’s where you’ll find the secrets of her heart. Mine had a lock on it.’

‘Your heart?’

She threw a cushion at him. ‘My diary, idiot!’

‘Because your mother didn’t understand?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sylvia shrugged. ‘I never told her. I suppose I thought she wouldn’t. That’s the other thing, of course. When you’re thirteen, you tend to misunderstand people yourself. Then, my mother seemed positively ancient. I couldn’t believe she’d ever been through anything like this herself.’

‘What about when you’re seventeen?’ Maxwell asked her.

‘Seventeen?’ Sylvia sighed, remembering. ‘No, I was too busy myself by then.’

‘Fighting them off, eh, Sylv?’

She attempted a laugh, but it didn’t come off. ‘That’s right. And there were A levels and my dad died that year. No, there didn’t seem a place for “Dear Diary” in all that. I’d just grown up, I suppose.’

‘Hmmm.’ Maxwell chewed his lip. ‘Maybe Jenny Hyde hadn’t.’

‘Jenny?’ Sylvia sat up. ‘What’s this got to do with Jenny?’

‘Betty Martin found her diary today.’

‘Her diary?’

‘Back of some lockers.’

‘Where is it? Have you got it?’

‘No,’ Maxwell told her. ‘It’s at home.’

‘Did you read it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, good God, Max, don’t sit there like some bloody Buddha. What did it say?’

‘I don’t know where to start, really. Your diary – what did it look like?’

‘Mine? Why are we talking about mine when you’ve got Jenny’s?’

He lapsed into his best
Dragnet
, long before Sylvia Matthews’ time. ‘We’ll ask the questions, ma’am.’

‘Oh, all right,’ she humoured him. ‘I told you. It had a lock.’

‘Sort of purpose-built, then?’

‘Yes. I bought it in Boots. It had a red leatherette cover and gilt clasps. It’ll probably turn up on
Antiques Roadshow
one of these days.’

‘And you never used an exercise book?’

‘For personal, bottom-of-my-soul secrets? I should say not.’

‘Why not?’ he harried her.

‘Because it might be found,’ she told him. ‘Read by Tom, Dick or Harry.’

Maxwell smiled broadly, his tongue appearing in the gap between his front teeth. ‘Sylvia Matthews, I love you,’ he said.

Her smile vanished. For a second, she stared at him, willing the moment to be different. Maxwell sensed it too and his smile changed, to one of regret. To one that said, ‘Never mind.’

‘In my experience as an historian,’ he said, ‘diaries are written for two purposes. There’s the sort pretentious people write purely for publication purposes. Oscar Wilde knew that. Sadly, he didn’t know much else.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘There’s a kind of arrogance,’ Maxwell said, leaning back, ‘in Evelyn, Pepys, even Queen Anne, stupid, rheumy, gout-ridden old cow that she was, that makes some people say, “Listen to this, everybody. This is worth hearing. Or reading. Because I wrote it.’”

‘Are you saying that Jenny’s diary …’

‘Was written in the knowledge – or at least the hope – that somebody would find it, yes.’

‘But …’

Maxwell’s mind was racing ahead. ‘She didn’t leave it lying about at home. She left it at school. Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sylvia admitted.

‘Neither do I. Except …’

‘What?’

You always knew when a new idea had filtered into Peter Maxwell’s mind. He frowned and his eyes went distant, cold. ‘Except I think her death had something to do with … school.’

‘With school?’ Sylvia took time to digest it. ‘What?’

Maxwell had anticipated the question and was already shaking his head. ‘Buggered if I know, Nursie,’ he muttered.

‘You haven’t told me what was in the diary,’ she reminded him.

‘Why wasn’t it in her locker?’ He was asking himself really.

‘Too obvious?’ she suggested. ‘Max, you’ve got to tell me what the diary said.’

He looked at her. ‘Not yet,’ and he was on his feet, making for the door.

‘Peter Maxwell, you’re a bastard,’ she scolded him.

‘Yes,’ he concurred, ‘and I’m a mean one as well.’

‘At least,’ she said, ‘you must take it to the police.’

He stopped at the door. ‘Must I?’ he asked her.

‘Of course.’ She frowned, suddenly frightened. ‘Max. Of course. You must.’

But he couldn’t hear her as he reached the bottom of the stairs.

‘Max. You must.’

He’d wanted to ask her something else, he realized, but he was in the saddle of White Surrey now, pedalling up Overdale Hill like a thing possessed. He never noticed these things himself, but perhaps an observant female like Sylvia Matthews would.

He wanted to know if, at the end of a hot July, it was likely that Jenny Hyde had worn tights.

7

Metternich the cat circled Maxwell’s lap, head down, tail up, searching in that inscrutable feline way for the optimum position to sleep. Each time he turned, his claws raked Maxwell’s trousers and sank to the skin.

‘I know what this is all about, Count,’ Maxwell murmured, lifting the book to accommodate the animal, ‘it’s revenge, isn’t it? Revenge for the fact that I had you bricked. Well, I’m sorry. But I couldn’t have you over-populating the neighbourhood, could I?’

Metternich looked at his master, utterly unconvinced.

‘People would be endlessly bringing me baskets full of kittens with black and white markings saying, “Yours, I believe.” And anyway, you’d make the whole place smell like a knacker’s yard.’ He grimaced and twirled the cat’s tail so that it had to change position. ‘Thank you, Count,’ he said, ‘but there can be few less entrancing sights in the whole world than a close-up of a cat’s bum. Will you sit down?’

All in his own good time, the animal did and proceeded to doze on the Great Man’s knees. Maxwell was back where he’d started, all those years ago, at Jesus College, Cambridge; back where he was happiest, really, handling original documents. But these documents were different. They were among the last recorded memories of a dead girl. Nothing odd about that – many historical records could be described in that way. But these were the collected works of Jennifer Antonia Hyde and she’d been murdered. He recognized the distinctive loops she gave her Ts and noted how she still continued that silly habit of making flowers of the dots of her ‘i’s. Nice to have the time, he thought. Then again, the whole thing seemed rushed, hurried, cobbled together without patience or reflection. Inevitable, he supposed, in a seventeen-year-old who had not yet learnt the value of wisdom or known the immensity of silence. Maxwell knew it, but he doubted if he’d ever truly be wise.

He began to note mentally the jumble of events that lay scattered over the pages. ‘
Quarrel with Tim
.’ ‘
How can he be such a bastard?
’ ‘
Went to K’s
.’ ‘
He’s lovely
.’ ‘
K told me he loved me
.’ ‘
What shall I do about P? Why do I always fancy the married ones?
’

He found himself chuckling as he reached the bottom of the page. ‘
Mad Max had a go at me today over deadlines. He’s such a shit
.’

‘Thanks, Jenny,’ the Head of Sixth Form murmured. ‘Glad we’re on the same side.’

It had to be said that Anne Spencer wasn’t Peter Maxwell’s favourite sixth-former. There was something in the way she carried her head, wore her hair, affected a viceregal iciness that froze blood. She was sitting the next day in the common room, that sprawl of vandalized furniture and unwashed cups that was home to the sixth form. A couple of the Year 13 hardmen loafed with her, skiving, had Maxwell had time to check the register, from private study in the library. He hooked a finger at her and beckoned. She rolled her eyes heavenward in an open gesture of contempt that Max would have felled her for once. Not now. It wasn’t worth the blood pressure. He motioned her into his office, the ex-classroom that gave him space to pace, room to boom, whatever tactic he needed to use on whoever was in The Chair.

But he didn’t offer her Old Sparky, the grim, upright job he reserved for troublemakers. Instead he offered her the low, mock-leather number for those in trouble. It’s doubtful if the Anne Spencers of this world recognized the difference. And if they did, they weren’t letting on.

‘Well, Anne.’ Maxwell sat opposite her, the low coffee table between them. ‘Time we had a little chat, I think.’

‘What about?’ She pouted her dark lips at him and tilted her head to one side, which gave him the distinct message that she was doing him a favour by talking to him at all.

‘About Jenny,’ he said softly.

For a moment her eyes flickered, then she was outstaring him again. ‘What about her?’ she challenged him.

‘It must have been a terrible blow for you,’ Maxwell said. ‘You being her best friend.’

‘Yes,’ her voice was iron-hard. ‘Yes, it was.’

‘Have the police talked to you?’

She nodded. ‘They came to the house,’ she told him, ‘a couple of days after they found her.’

‘Anne,’ Maxwell leaned over his knees, looking as deep as he dared into her eyes, ‘Jenny ran away, didn’t she?’

Anne shrugged; enigmatic; non-committal. ‘Did she?’

It only took so long for Peter Maxwell’s hackles to rise. He could feel them now, wherever men keep their hackles. It started as a rush in the chest, a crawling along the nape of the neck, a vibration up the scalp. But he held it all in check. ‘I think you know she did,’ he said. ‘Didn’t the police ask you about it?’

‘They may have done.’

He chuckled and she sensed the irony of it. ‘Look, it was weeks ago, right?

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Your best friend is killed, strangled to death six weeks ago and you don’t remember?’ When the moment came, Maxwell could be deadly.

‘Yeah, all right.’ Anne was rattled, her voice loud, her colour high. She’d uncoiled her nubile body and was toe-to-toe with Maxwell. Or she would have been, if the coffee table hadn’t been in the way. ‘All right. I know she’s dead. That’s bloody obvious. But I don’t know nothing about why, all right? I don’t want to get involved.’

‘But you are involved, Anne.’ Maxwell was calmness itself. ‘Whether you like it or not. Because Jenny told her parents she was with you in the last week of last term.’

‘Well, she’s a bloody liar, then … isn’t she?’ Anne wasn’t just loud now; she was shouting, her eyes wild. ‘Keep out of my bloody life, you old bastard!’

And she was gone, crashing out of the office, barging aside the Year 12 couple looking for the right room for Business Studies. There was a time when Maxwell would have gone after her, worrying, searching. He’d have found her distraught in Nursie’s arms or curled up in a loo somewhere, lips quivering too much to light the calming fag. Now, he’d let her go her own way. Find her own salvation. In the event, Alison Miller put her head around the door.

‘Is everything all right, Max?’ she asked. She’d never heard anyone call Maxwell a bastard before. Not to his face anyway. And certainly not a kid.

‘I’m losing it, Alison,’ Maxwell sighed, crossing to his desk.

She came in and closed the door. ‘What did you expect?’ she asked him. ‘From Anne Spencer of all people. I was always amazed the Hydes let Jenny mix with her. She was always in trouble in the main school. I tried to teach her Biology once …’

‘I remember that day,’ Maxwell chuckled. He looked at his Number Two. Like some fifteenth-century damosel, with the high waistband to accentuate her fecundity. ‘How are you, Alison?’ he asked. ‘Did you have a good summer?’

She smiled so that her teeth showed, a rare phenomenon for sad little Alison Miller. It was a standing joke between them, being too busy in the first days of the academic year to have time for the pleasantries of life.

‘No,’ she said and her pale face crumpled like paper. She drove her head into Maxwell’s chest and he folded his arms around it, burying his face into her frizzy dark hair. As she sobbed painfully, uncontrollably, he gingerly extended his right leg and made sure the door was closed.

‘What’s the matter?’ he whispered and the sound of it carried her back. Back to the childhood she’d left behind, the childhood she’d passed to her own children. But Alison couldn’t tell him. Not in any detail. All she would say, could say, was her husband’s name, over and over again – ‘Keith. Keith.’

Mrs B. was there as usual by quarter-past four, wrapped in her regulation contract maroon overall, mop and duster at the ready. She peered around Maxwell’s door and he prayed again, as he did every day, that she wouldn’t actually say, ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ But Mrs B. – Maxwell didn’t have a clue what the woman’s name was – didn’t go back as far as ITMA, so he really needn’t have worried.

‘Hello, Mr Maxwell,’ she called, ‘it’s only me.’ Sadly, Mrs B. did go back as far as Harry Enfield. ‘Did you have a nice holiday? Ain’t it a bleedin’ shame about that girl? She was raped, you know. Well, it’s the times, ain’t it? What can you expect?’

Maxwell blinked smilingly. But he was a past master at Mrs B.’s barrages and he turned to answer her steadily. ‘Yes, thanks. Yes, it is – a bleedin’ shame. I know. Yes, I suppose it is. I don’t know.’ He mentally ran through the number of rhetorical questions on his fingers. Yes, he thought he’d covered them all.

‘’Course,’ Mrs B. moved his jacket so that her duster could reach the parts other cleaners couldn’t, ‘you know who done it, don’t you?’

‘No.’ Maxwell was all ears. Chars with verbal diarrhoea and hearts of gold might yet solve the mysteries of the universe. ‘Who?’

‘That bleedin’ tramp, that Guthrum.’

Now Maxwell knew that Guthrum was a Danish king of Mercia defeated by Alfred at Edington, but he guessed that Mrs B.’s scholarly grasp of the Dark Ages was less than his own and he let it go.

‘Excuse me.’ The promising conversation was interrupted by a big-shouldered intruder who filled the doorway. ‘Could you leave us? I’d like a private word with Mr Maxwell.’

‘Well, pardon me,’ snorted Mrs B., never a respecter of persons, and she clattered out into the corridor with the maximum of fuss, crooning loudly, ‘The minute I walked in the joint, boom, boom …’ and waggled her overalled bum at the visitor.

‘Esmerelda.’ Maxwell launched into his Charles Laughton impression, twisting his lips and nose and dragging his left leg. The woman before him didn’t react. Didn’t move. Her face remained cold. Impassive. ‘Oh.’ Maxwell straightened up. Even then he was barely level with her nose. ‘Not a social call, then, Deirdre?’

Deirdre Lessing had invented power-dressing. She swept past the Head of Sixth Form and sat down, uninvited. ‘It’s about Anne Spencer,’ she said.

Maxwell looked at the pearl-grey suit, the padded shoulders, the upswept hair. Was she really, he wondered again, an ash-blonde? Rumour had it that there were several men along the south coast who could answer that one and none of them was her hairdresser. And Mr Lessing? Rumour had it that he had died of shame years ago, what with his wife wearing the pants and removing everybody else’s. But that was only speculation.

‘Anne Spencer.’ Maxwell sat opposite her. ‘You do surprise me.’

‘Do I, Max?’ Her grey eyes burned into his, her voice like a razor’s edge. ‘Let’s be quite clear on this, shall we? You’ve always resented me, haven’t you?’

Maxwell smiled. ‘Resentment is too strong for it, Deirdre,’ he said.

She pursed her lips. ‘What word did you have in mind?’

He scanned his mind and his bookshelves for an answer. ‘Ooh, I don’t know,’ he said, stroking his chin. ‘Indifference, perhaps.’

For a moment it seemed as though Deirdre Lessing was going to hit Peter Maxwell. In the event, she crossed her formidable thighs and took several deep breaths, any one of them blouse-threatening. ‘I
am
Senior Mistress,’ she reminded him.

‘Indeed.’ Maxwell’s smile could be as inscrutable as a Ming Emperor’s when he wanted it to be. ‘Whose?’ was the question that sprang to mind, but he was too much of a gentleman to ask it. He remembered suddenly that his old oppo Geoffrey Smith referred to the lady as ‘The Senior Mattress’ and prophesied, when he’d had a few, that she was likely to be buried in a Y-shaped coffin.

‘I am in charge of girls’ welfare,’ Deirdre went on, mercifully ignorant of the depth of Maxwell’s scorn. ‘Anne Spencer came to me very upset.’

‘Yes,’ said Maxwell. ‘That’s how she left me.’

‘Well, can you wonder at it?’ Deirdre asked.

‘Look, Deirdre.’ Maxwell leaned across to her. ‘One of my sixth form – one of your girls, come to that – was murdered a few weeks ago. Nobody seems to give a tinker’s damn about that.’

‘Rubbish, Max,’ she snorted. ‘We all do. You’re taking this far too personally. Jenny Hyde was, as you say, one of my girls too. She belonged to all of us. You can’t go around bullying people. What do you hope to achieve?’

‘Answers,’ he told her.

‘But the police …’

‘Deirdre, Deirdre.’ He found himself chuckling at her naivety. ‘Did I ever tell you I taught in Bermondsey?’

‘No,’ she confessed, ‘you never did.’

‘Well, it’s not something I bandy about generally, but I did.’

‘So?’

‘So until I went there, I believed in the police. Something to do with asking the time and trusting the boys in blue and hearing dear old Jack Warner reminding me to look after dear old mum and so on.’

‘And Bermondsey changed all that?’

irrevocably,’ Maxwell said. ‘Because I met parents – honest, hardworking parents – who had information on the police. I saw it myself one night. There was an old girl loitering in a doorway. I was on my way home from one of those interminable moderation meetings we used to have in those days. All right, the old girl was giving the law a hard time. She was drunk. She was shouting, cursing them up hill and down dale. Then they started hitting her. One of them kept thumping her in the stomach until she went down.’

‘What did you do?’ Deirdre asked.

‘Got off my bike and went up to them.’

‘And?’

‘And – if I remember the words aright – the constable told me to piss off. It was, he said, none of my effing business. They bundled the old girl into a Maria.’

‘Disgraceful!’

‘I’ve never quite felt the same about the upholders of the law since then.’

‘That was a one-off incident, Max.’ Deirdre had rationalized it. ‘One division of one police force. You can’t generalize and you don’t know what sort of provocation …’

‘I know, I know.’ He raised his hands in agreement. ‘But people do generalize, Deirdre, you know that. Rightly or wrongly, dear old Jack Warner became Mr Nasty Guy. Nobody talks to the police because they don’t trust them. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps Anne Spencer wouldn’t have talked to them. Just because they’re the police. And perhaps, I thought, just perhaps, she might talk to me.’

‘Well, you were wrong,’ Deirdre told him. ‘Anne doesn’t think you have a right to probe and neither do I.’