Maxwell’s Reunion (29 page)

‘No, we’re not,’ she told him.

He opened the passenger door. ‘How will I know the Warwickshire boys in blue?’ he asked.

‘You won’t. They’ll be passengers, porters, used-car salesmen. The point is that they’ll know you. That’s where Rackham was this morning. While I took Cissie to the bank and you manned the phone, he was arranging for a mug shot to be sent from Leighford to the Warwickshire lads.’

‘Could Brother be any bigger?’ Maxwell wondered, gripping the case tightly.

‘Max, you really should have a chain for that,’ she said.

‘Don’t bother me now, Ms Carpenter,’ he scolded, and reached in to kiss her. ‘Jacquie …’

She quickly raised a finger to his lips. ‘Get going,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at the other end.’ And she rammed the Ka into gear and was gone, fighting back the tears. In her rear-view mirror, the man she loved got smaller and smaller until, suddenly, he wasn’t there at all.

Leamington station. Four fifty-seven. A garbled voice over the intercom had told passengers it was sorry for the delay but there were track-laying problems near Banbury and the train was running approximately sixteen minutes late.

Maxwell hit the platform running. Somewhere among the throng of people standing around, were the team Rackham had sent in; the passengers, porters and used-car salesmen who worked for the Warwickshire constabulary. He could see the phone box, a soulless glass thing which had replaced the red one he remembered as a boy, where an anonymous voice had patiently told him over and over again to push button B. Shit! A large woman was filling it, along with two pampered poodles attached to slender leads and diamante collars.

The Head of Sixth Form wrenched open the door. ‘Madam, I’m sorry,’ he blurted. ‘I’m expecting a vital call on this line any minute.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ the startled woman snorted. ‘People don’t ring empty call-boxes.’

‘They do today,’ he assured her. ‘Please, madam. It won’t take long, but I must have the phone.’

The dogs looked up at him, whining and yapping.

‘Go away or I shall call a policeman,’ she shrilled.

Maxwell’s nose hovered near hers. ‘I am a public schoolboy, madam,’ he growled, ‘and ordinarily, believe me, I would not behave this way, but if you don’t put that phone down now and fuck off, I’m going to throw those two posing pooches of yours on to the line. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Help! Help! Police!’ the woman shrieked, rather stereotypically, Maxwell thought, as she dropped the receiver and fled, dragging the poodles in her wake.

Maxwell replaced the phone. He didn’t see the toilet attendant silently whisk the scene-making woman out of harm’s way. He looked up and down the platform. The train he’d been on was pulling out, with a thud and rattle of rolling-stock, the engines building momentum as the thing gathered speed. He checked his watch. Shit. It was 5.04. Had he blown it? Had Railtrack and that stupid old besom conspired to make him miss the call? Perhaps to kill Richard Alphedge?

He spun round in the goldfish bowl that was the call-box. If anyone left on the platform was an undercover cop, they showed no sign. Two girls in a uniform he knew came hurtling along the concrete. The hats had gone and the ghastly grey socks, but the blazers were the same. Cranton. He thought that school had closed too, yet here they were, laughing and joking like the ghosts of his boyhood. Cranton, the private girls’ school down the road where Ash and who knew how many others had lost their virginity. Cranton – those heady summer balls the joint staffs of their two schools allowed, but always under the most careful supervision. Cranton …

The phone shattered the moment and Maxwell snatched it up. ‘Hello?’

‘The Jephson Gardens close in thirteen minutes. Get to the phone by the lake. Speak to anybody, Alphedge dies. One minute late, Alphedge dies. Do it.’

‘But …’ The line was silent.

Maxwell bashed open the door, nearly colliding with the schoolgirls. ‘You know,’ he said, raising his hat, ‘your mothers probably made some of us very happy,’ and he was gone, out of the side gate he remembered as a kid, trotting along the pavement towards the bridges.

He knew this routine well. It was Dirty Harry, the first of the Eastwood Callahans. He ran the storyline in his head. The loony who’s kidnapped the fourteen-year-old bounces Callahan all over town, just to check he’s not being followed. Corny on celluloid, but this was for real. And there were two important differences. Eastwood was a fit forty-year-old at the time, carrying a .44 Magnum and a flick-knife. Maxwell … well, the pounding of his heart as he dashed past All Saints said it all.

The Leam swirled dark under the bridge as he hurtled over it, his hat gone, the heavy suitcase bouncing against his thigh. His breath came in sobbing grunts and he felt as if his lungs were going to burst. Then he was in the park, the lights twinkling among the trees as he scurried along paths without end, making for the lake.

Bugger! Memory had gilded his lily and he’d reached a dead end. He’d remembered the path curving to the left, and now he found himself outside a gents’. In the shadows, a rather unsavoury type half turned, flashing at him in the hopeful anonymity of gathering dusk.

‘Perhaps later,’ Maxwell called out, doubling back the way he’d come, ‘when I get my Aids test result,’ and he scuttled past the aviary with its chattering finches and took the slope to the lake.

The phone was already ringing by the time he got there, and he all but fell on it. ‘Yes?’ he wheezed.

‘Almost didn’t make that one,’ the chilling voice said. ‘But I guess you really are on your own. All right. No more pissing about. Halliards.’

Peter Maxwell leaned against the glass as the line went dead in his hand. His lungs hurt like hell and he was alone. From somewhere a bell tolled to tell the lurking world that the Jephson Gardens were closing. He put the receiver back. Halliards. He kicked open the door and strolled into the darkening night. This was it. Full circle. Where are you, Jacquie? he wondered as he forced his tired legs to run again. Where are you?

18

She watched him burning shoe leather past the Pump Rooms, that faded reminder of Georgian times when people still took the waters in this spa town and everyone knew his place. She kept the engine idling as he whistled down a cab – he who had no breath left at all.

The taxi turned left along a street that edged the gardens, swung left again and then right, past another park and out under the giant archways the Victorians had built to carry their trains, the glory of their age when the Queen, God bless her, came to Leamington and made it Royal. Jacquie Carpenter spun the wheel, her mobile clamped between her cheek and shoulder, breaking every rule in and out of the book.

‘He’s going right, Graham,’ she said, ‘right,’ and she hauled the wheel over to follow him. All she had now, as the night drew in, was taillights. She didn’t want to get too close because she didn’t know who was watching, or from where. Maxwell had no idea where she was and she had only the vaguest notion of how much back-up she had and didn’t know the area at all.

‘Bugger!’ She hit the steering wheel with both hands. A red light had separated her from the taxi and she’d been forced to stop. Either that or hit the amber gambler screaming out from her right. ‘I’ve lost him, Graham,’ she hissed into the phone.

‘Where are you?’

‘Christ knows.’ She looked around. ‘I can’t see a place name anywhere. There’s a garage to my right – oh, and the station beyond. Max has come back the way he went, more or less. Done a circle.’

Rackham grunted. ‘That’ll be the cabbie building up his fare. Hang on.’

Graham Rackham was in his own vehicle in a lay-by ten minutes away, acting as a go-between for Jacquie and the local force. It wasn’t easy. They had the tracking gear; he and Jacquie didn’t. Right hand, left hand.

‘Jacquie, the local boys tell me he’s likely to have gone straight ahead – that’ll put him on the road to Halliards.’

‘Halliards?’ Jacquie had never waited so long in her life for traffic lights to change. ‘So that’s it.’

‘They don’t know. They’re awaiting instructions.’

She tried to remember the layout of the place, its angles, its views. ‘How big’s the team?’ She waited while Rackham relayed the question down the line, handling his twin mobiles like juggling balls.

‘Ten,’ he told her. ‘Four marksmen.’

‘How near are they to Halliards?’ She was moving again now, cutting up a dithery dear and slicing past cyclists, crashing through the gears as she left the lights of the town behind and took the gradient that curved to the right.

‘They’re on their way,’ she heard Rackham say. ‘As indeed am I. The team’s ETA is niner, repeat, niner minutes.’

‘Got it,’ she said. ‘Fuck knows how far away I am. I hope I know it when I see it. Keep in touch, Graham. Graham?’ She rattled her phone, looking at it. Graham Rackham had broken up. The connection was dead. As he pulled out into the traffic, Rackham’s rear wheel had clipped the kerb and the car had slewed across the road. The DS heard the shuddering of metal and felt the sickening thud as something hit him in the side. The airbag inflated like a giant white mushroom, sending both his mobiles hurtling somewhere in the car’s interior. He slammed on the brakes, blind and sliding, twisting the wheel the way he thought it should go. He didn’t see the juggernaut behind him, its cab a merry-go-round of fairy lights. He didn’t see its driver, wrestling with the wheel, locking the brakes and screaming at him. All he felt was the jolt as his car buckled from behind and the glass blew out with a series of bangs.

Whatever sounds followed – the scream of tyres and the falling of shattered glass and the rip and bounce of twisted metal – Graham Rackham didn’t hear them. Graham Rackham had broken up.

Black trees rose like sentinels along the line of hedges as Jacquie drove past them. The white line and the cat’s-eyes led her on. To left and right, the occasional outline, the odd lights from a farmhouse and the orange glow of what must have been the M40 to the west. She hadn’t caught the cab, though she’d tailgated cars without number to check the plates, only to swerve out past them, hearing the searing siren of their angry horns. She checked her phone again. Nothing from Rackham. And without him, nothing from the team beyond.

What if Halliards was only a guess? Maxwell could be anywhere, anywhere the instructions from this mad bastard took him. Nine minutes to the arrival of the team at Halliards – if Halliards it was. If only Cissie had allowed a proper monitoring. If only Jacquie had been able to organize a wire on Maxwell.

Then, there it was. A black silhouette filling the skyline to her left, empty and sad eyed. She cut her headlights and her speed simultaneously, sliding the Ka under the overhang of the trees, scraping the wild hawthorn of the hedge. It was at moments like these she wished she hadn’t bought a yellow car. The engine was off. The lights were out. She tried her mobile one last time. Nothing. Shit! How useless all this technology was after all – Max was right.

She got out, easing the door closed behind her. How long had this taken her? Five minutes? Six? She kept close to the hedge, grateful for the dark and the silence. If there was a team in the area, she couldn’t see them. Maybe they were on their way. She could have used some company about then. Most of all, Peter Maxwell’s. She saw a dark car parked tight to the hedge. It was empty. No back-up there.

Now Jacquie was touching brickwork. The pillars of the main gates reared up before her, topped with the stone griffons that were the Halliards crest. The great wrought-iron gates were thrown back, as though the property developers had given up the hopeless struggle to keep kids out. But what kids would come here? Jacquie wondered, glancing back along the pale and lonely road. Above her, the clouds covered the stars. There’d be no moon tonight.

She crept towards the arts block, skulking in the shadows of the low-spreading cedars, keeping off the path where her telltale heels would give too much away. The chapel loomed before her like a fortress, solid and black. The stained glass reflected dully the dead light of the leaden sky, threatening rain by morning. She edged around its buttresses, where staff, long dead, had leant their bikes, where town criers without number had rung their passing bells. The archway in front of her was as black as pitch, but she couldn’t risk her torch. Acclimatized as her eyes were to the dark of the grounds, she wasn’t ready for this. It sucked her in like a black hole, like some magnetic void she was powerless to resist.

Now she was in the cloisters, her right hand clasped around the mace can in the handbag over her shoulder. A chilling wind whipped the corner here, riffling the faded papers that Maxwell had tried to read three weeks before when they’d found the hanged body of George Quentin. She reached to her right, using her left hand, and felt the chiselled iron of the Gothic handle that was bolted to the chapel door. She tried twisting it. Locked. As locked as it was the night Veronica had said she’d made love on the altar with the Preacher.

Jacquie walked on, feeling as though she was treading on eggs. The archway to her right led out to the curve of the drive and the Headmaster’s house, shrouded in cedars and guarded by a high privet hedge. Ahead, the door that Stenhouse had unlocked led to the main corridor, Big School and the entrance hall where George Quentin had died. She tried the handle here and this time it worked.

There was no rattling of locks, no scream of hinges long rusted, just the whisper of a draught excluder. She caught the door before it slammed against the wall and stood there, waiting. Ahead, the corridor was long and dark, but there was the faintest of lights halfway along. She’d always seen this place in the daylight, never in the dark, and it frightened her. More than the Lodge with its antiseptic chill and its eternal light twirling on the floor. She felt so cold she thought she’d be sick.

The light, she knew, came from the oriel window beyond where the bell rope that hauled Old Harry from his slumbers and summoned the lost generations of Halliards to their lessons once hung. In her mind, she watched them go, legions of them, laughing and chattering in a dim echo down the years, with their tasselled caps and bright blazers and undying hopes.