Maxwell’s Match (20 page)

‘Cassie?’ The voice was a hoarse whisper in the darkness.

‘What?’

‘You wouldn’t let a man touch you, would you?’

Cassandra’s face was lit by the moonlight through the half-open curtain as she sat up, chin on her knees. ‘No way,’ she said.

‘Good.’ The plumper girl turned to face her, nuzzling her nose into the soft warm heaven of her friend’s side, kissing the petal skin tenderly.

‘I don’t like that Mr Maxwell, though.’

‘Maxwell?’ She broke off the kisses. ‘He hasn’t done anything to you?’

‘No, no,’ Cassandra said, glancing down at the plain, earnest face looking up at hers. ‘No, it’s just that, he might. I don’t like the way he looks at me. You’ll take care of me, though, won’t you, Janet darling?’

Janet threw her arms around the girl, squeezing hard. ‘Of course I will, my dearest, my dearest.’

Under the moon, she slipped off the dark bath robe with its Grimond’s crest, feeling the sharp breeze of night prickle her skin. She raised h knife to the stars, clasping the hilt with both hands, then threw herself onto her knees, driving the tip again and again into the damp of the soil moaning the words of hate.

‘Die, Maxwell,’ she rasped. ‘Die.’

She didn’t see the shiver in the shadows.

12

‘I’m sorry about the other day, Max.’ Tony Graham was nibbling his toast. ‘It was stupid of me, flouncing out like that.’

The sun of Tuesday was streaming in through the stained glass of Grimond’s dining room, the dust particles whirling in the spring morning. A small bunch of freesias lay in yellow and purple at the place usually occupied by Bill Pardoe on High Table.

‘No, no,’ Maxwell was helping himself to a second cup of coffee. ‘I was out of line. Nobody wants to think of their colleagues as homicidal maniacs, love to hate them though we do.’ He winked at his man.

‘You know the counselling starts today?’ the Housemaster asked.

‘Counselling?’

Graham chuckled. ‘Yes, that apparently was the response of our revered Chair of Governors, although I understand it was suitably laced with expletives that would make a sailor blush – which is, of course, what rumour has it he used to be.’

‘Doesn’t approve of our caring, sharing twenty-first century then?’

Graham quaffed his orange juice. ‘Fucking – and I quote – namby-pamby bollocks.’

‘Is he still intending to close the school?’

Graham’s eyes raked the room. There was no set pattern to Grimond’s breakfasts and it was not compulsory. John Selwyn was there with House prefects from Tennyson and a scattering of younger boys. Only one or two girls from Austen had made an appearance and Maggie Shaunessy, was selecting her Jacobs cream crackers from Mrs Oakes in the far corner. ‘Rumour has it that Sir Arthur and George Sheffield had the mother of all rows last night. Damn near came to blows, apparently.’

‘Really?’ Maxwell couldn’t quite see Georg Sheffield as something in the Red Corner, coming out fighting. ‘Who won?’

‘Suffice it to say Dr Sheffield still has his job and the shrinks are moving in at nine. My own house first. And the school’s doors are still open. Wilkins will have made him pay however – you can be certain of that.’

‘Who are the counsellors?’ Maxwell asked.

Graham shrugged. ‘Local social services, suppose. I must admit, I’m not convinced. Oh, the boys are cut up, of course. That’s inevitable. But Bill … well, I’m afraid he was losing it a little.’

‘He was?’

‘May I join you?’ Maggie Shaunessy had arrived.

Both men were public school; both men scraped back their chairs and stood up.

‘Anyone seen Jeremy Tubbs?’ she asked.

‘Not since lunchtime yesterday.’ Maxwell poured some coffee for her.

‘Thank you, just black. What time was that?’

‘He dropped me in the quad about two-fifteen, two-thirty. Told me he had a meeting with you.’

‘Yes, he did.’ She buttered her crackers with an elegance born of Benenden and Oxford. ‘Or rather, he didn’t.’

‘No show?’ Graham asked.

‘Ah, I can probably explain that,’ Maxwell said. ‘When we parted, Mr Tubbs was a little … shall we say, merry?’

‘Ah,’ Maggie said. ‘No surprises there, then. One of his famous liquid lunches. Janet will have to wait.’

‘Janet?’ Maxwell repeated.

‘Janet Boyce, one of my charges. A sweet child, but a martyr to a sense of inadequacy. Last year it was a crush on Jane Devereux, Head of Art and Design. This year she’s falling flat in Geography. I wanted to run the situation past Jeremy. Legend has it he teaches her. Do you have this problem …?’

‘At Dropout High?’ he winked at her. ‘Oh, yes, although we probably have fewer schoolgirl crushes than you do.’

‘It’s the hothouse environment.’ Maggie took her coffee cup in both hands. ‘It was worse when we all were at St Hilda’s.’

‘Now, presumably, you have the added complication of boys.’

Maggie glanced across at Graham. ‘All men are beasts, Max,’ she smiled. ‘It’s just a question of which are the worst, the men of Dickens, Kipling or Tennyson.’

‘I can assure you, Madam,’ Graham beamed, ‘the men of Tennyson are above reproach.’ He leaned across Maxwell. ‘Strictly entre nous, Maggie dearest, my money’s on Kipling.’

‘Why Kipling?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Tubbsy’s House,’ Graham laughed.

‘I didn’t know he was a Housemaster.’

‘Oh, he isn’t, in the sense that he doesn’t live in. But it’s a Grimond’s tradition that everybody except the Games staff are attached to a House. Tubbsy is Kipling.’

‘’Nuff said,’ Maggie trilled.

‘Miss Shaunessy.’ All three of them looked to see a solemn-looking Janet Boyce standing there, full English steaming on the plate in her hand. ‘Have you spoken to Mr Tubbs yet?’

‘No, Janet, but rest assured, I will later. Do you have him today?’

‘This afternoon,’ the girl said.

‘I’ll talk to him this morning,’ Maggie nodded. ‘I promise.’

‘Thank you, Miss Shaunessy,’ and the girl wandered away.

‘Sad one, that,’ Maxwell commented.

Maggie watched her go. ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Yes, I’m afraid she is.’

‘This is ludicrous.’ DCI Henry Hall whirled away from his desk. ‘This is the third time he’s stood us up.’

Jacquie was on her mobile. ‘Hello, Miss Taylor?’

She heard the starchy tones of the school secretary at the other end. Jacquie could almost hear her pearl lariat clashing on her brillo pad cardigan. ‘We’ve been waiting for Mr Tubbs for nearly half an hour now. Have you any idea where he is?’

‘As I told you,’ the harassed woman said, ‘According to the timetable he was teaching until ten-fifteen. He usually takes break in the Senior Common Room. His free periods he spends in the Geography department. I have rung through there three times now. No one’s seen him.’

‘Since when?’

Miss Taylor had had a week and a half. They’d taken that silly slip of a thing off the switchboard after Bill Pardoe’s death. What with the media pestering hourly, parents ringing up demanding George Sheffield’s head and the Chair of Governors insisting on more or less the same, Millie Taylor had nearly given in her notice.

‘Since I don’t know when,’ she hissed. ‘He was not in his room Period One.’

‘He wasn’t?’

‘Mr Larson had to cover for him.’

‘So let me get this straight.’ Jacquie was circling the ante-interview room. ‘No one has seen Mr Tubbs today at all?’ And she held the phone away from her ear rather than have it shattered by Miss Taylor’s confirmation.

‘Jacquie?’ Hall could read the face of his favourite DS after all these years.

‘No Tubbs,’ she said, pocketing the phone.

‘The last member of staff who stood us up …’

‘… we fished him out of the lake.’ Jacquie finished the DCI’s sentence for him, remembering the moment all too well.

‘Right. Get his home number from the front desk. I’m going to the Geography Department. Talking to us is not an optional extra.’

‘Jenkins?’ Maxwell was leaning against a lime tree, the sun dappling through its buds onto the tarmac below. He looked for all the world like the sudden black appearance of Bill Sykes in the sunlit crescent when Mark Lester was buying a wonderful morning.

The blond lad stopped short, trudging between lessons as he was with his mates.

‘Can I have a word?’

All three of them stopped.

‘I’ve got lessons, sir.’

‘Oh?’ Maxwell took his hands out of his pockets. ‘What lesson in particular?’

‘History.’

‘Really?’ Maxwell beamed. ‘You boys run along. Mr Gallow, is it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the other two chorused.

‘Tell him I’m keeping young Jenkins a minute – apologize for me.’

They hesitated, then trudged on.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Maxwell said. ‘What are you doing in History?’

‘The agrarian revolution, sir.’

‘Ah, where would we be without dear old Jethro Tull, uh? Designer of the seed drill by day, wacky Luton-based rock band by night. What’s your first name, Jenkins?’

‘Joseph, sir.’

‘Joe?’

Jenkins nodded.

‘I’ve been wanting to chat for a while, Joe,’ Maxwell sat himself down on the wooden seat named in honour of some long-forgotten Old Boy and patted the planks beside him. ‘Ever since you left that tape outside my room.’

Jenkins’ bum was already off the seat, almost before it had touched it.

‘It’s all right, Joe,’ Maxwell held the boy’s arm and sat him down again. ‘It’ll be our secret.’

Jenkins was staring at the ground, fumbling with his briefcase handle, unable to look Maxwell in the face.

‘Two questions,’ the Head of Sixth Form said. ‘First, where did you get it? Second, why did you leave it for me?’

For what seemed an eternity, the boy sat there, frozen. Then he looked up at Maxwell, his face a pale mask of fear. ‘I found it, sir,’ he managed between gasps.

‘Where?’ Maxwell leaned back, talking softly, looking at Joe Jenkins with those smiley eyes as if the pair were talking about the weather.

‘In the skip, sir, at the back of Tennyson.’

‘Tell me, Joe, is that something you do often, rummage about in the rubbish?’

‘No, sir,’ Jenkins rumbled as low as he could for a lad whose voice has yet to break. ‘I saw Mr Pardoe put it there, sir. He was upset.’

Still Maxwell didn’t move. ‘When was this, Joe?’ he asked. ‘It might be important.’

‘I don’t know.’ The boy was staring at the ground again. ‘A couple of days before … you know.’

‘You played it, obviously?’

Jenkins nodded, feeling the salt tears trickle into his mouth and wanting the ground to swallow him up.

‘What did you think it meant?’

Jenkins was shaking his head. ‘I don’t know. Not really.’ Then he was on his feet. ‘Sir, I’ve got to go.’

‘Why me?’ Maxwell was on his feet too, his second question still unanswered. ‘Joe, why did you leave it for me to find?’

The boy stopped, his back to Maxwell. The History Department, Mr Gallow’s lesson, Jethro Tull and his bloody seed drill – it had never looked so appealing. The man behind him and the questions he was asking were the lad’s waking nightmare.

‘I thought you could help,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you could end it.’ He turned sharply, the tears streaming now down his cheeks. ‘I thought wrong,’ he shouted and dashed away.

They’d never had counsellors at Grimond’s before. But then, they’d never had murder either. Peter Maxwell watched them arrive from the back of David Gallow’s Lower Sixth History lesson on the second floor. Four lefty-looking types in anoraks and trainers. Neither of the men clearly knew what a tie was and the women looked like bag ladies, all no doubt designer-chic to put the children at their ease. The Head of History was talking about British Foreign Policy in the early nineteenth century to a less-than-gripped Lower Sixth set; Shelley’s poem kept thumping through Maxwell’s head – ‘I met murder in the way; he wore a mask like Castlereagh.’ Masks was what all this was about, whatever was happening at Grimond’s. Everyone wore a mask, every day, but behind one of them lay evil, more sinister than even poor deluded Shelley imagined Castlereagh to be.

The counsellors were emptying from two unmarked cars; even the vehicles had Social Services written all over them. George Sheffield greeted them at Jedediah Grimond’s Greek portico with the briefest of handshakes and led the way inside. They would start with Tennyson House, the boys who knew Bill Pardoe best, then attempt to identify those who had not been shooed away in time from the lake’s edge when they found Tim Robinson white and swollen in the water. In the meantime, another Range Rover was taking another child away in search of a school where the staff weren’t dying.

Henry Hall had the tape. Henry Hall had the porn mag. But he had no access to forensics on his own. He’d dutifully passed both, via Jacquie, to DCI West at Selborne and the Hampshire boffins were working on it. Maxwell could have guessed the outcome on the tape. There would be four sets of prints – his, in that he was the last to play it before he gave it to the suitably-gloved police; Jenkins’, in that the lad had retrieved it from the skip; Pardoe’s, in that he had, presumably, played it, if only out of curiosity and A.N.Other’s. And it was A.N. Other who was stringing them all along; Maxwell, Hall, Jacquie, West and everybody else touched by the death of Bill Pardoe. The forensic result of the porn mag was something else. Here the evidential chain of custody would be shadowier, more vague. Maxwell had handled it, Parker and some anonymous postmen. But again, it was A.N.Other who had put it in the envelope. And again, he was will o’ the wisp.

‘It’s a Swedish import, guv,’ DS Walters informed the Incident Room. ‘The lads from the Dirty Squad say it’s published in Oslo, usually distributed via Holland and is not available over the counter here.’

‘Yet,’ somebody grunted from the back, to murmurs of agreement round the room. Policemen, like teachers, were forever at the retreating edge of civilization, forced to pick up the pieces of its collapse.

‘Pardoe on their mailing list, was he?’ West asked, still leafing idly through the mag’s contents.

‘Tricky one, that, guv,’ Walters went on. ‘We’d have to work with Interpol and even then, I don’t think we’d be sure of a result.’