Maxwell’s Reunion (5 page)

‘I’d settle for that,’ Maxwell said.

She looked into the steady, brown eyes. ‘I’d guess it was murder, Max.’

He nodded slowly and mechanically pulled the seat belt around him. ‘Not the Graveney, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s drive. Directions are on me.’

Maxwell hadn’t been to the Badger’s Ease at Charlecote since he was a carefree young undergraduate with fluff on his chin and a Cambridge scarf around his neck. He still had the scarf, of course, but in those days, shortly after they’d invented the wheel, and only let 7.3 per cent of the population’s youth into universities, he’d been a driver and had coughed up to the Badger’s main doors in his dad’s Triumph Herald. He was young. He was carefree. He was broke.

A lot of water. A lot of bridges. A lot of sighs. Maxwell was a teacher now and still broke. The Badger’s had had a face-lift and it was busy. They’d added a carvery on a wing that rolled to the west and a pétanque piste beyond that. A giant orange elephant formed a slide for the kiddies, and the little dears even had their own menu that boasted Dinosaur Dips and Brontosaurus Bites. In Maxwell’s day ancient biddies who had won the vote came staggering in for a Danish or, throwing caution to the winds, a French fancy. Now, most soul-destroying of all, the place was called Zak’s. No explanation was given.

‘Tell me again.’ Maxwell’s pickled onion bounced wilfully off his plate and rolled under somebody else’s table. No matter – it would be back in the jar by evening.

‘It wouldn’t have been a painless death, Max.’ Jacquie was pushing her coleslaw around her plate. ‘He’d been hit over the head, I don’t know how many times, on the landing at the top of the first flight of stairs. There was blood …’

An old crone, whose hearing was the healthiest thing about her, looked up sharply at a nearby table, her dentures parting company with their neighbouring gums. Jacquie’s head leaned closer to Maxwell’s. He looked tired. For the first time since she had known him, nearly six years, he looked old.

‘Hit from behind.’ Maxwell was musing, picturing it in his mind, trying to make sense of it.

‘Probably,’ she said. ‘We don’t know.’

‘It would have to be,’ he told her. ‘Quent was the best of us. Captain of the First Eleven. Victor Ludorum three times. House Captain, of course.’

She looked at him. It was like something out of that depressing play she’d done at school –
Journey’s End
. They didn’t have houses at Jacquie’s comprehensive, still less captains of things. And as for Victor Ludorum, Maxwell might as well have been talking about Victor Meldrew. Come to think of it, he was dead too.

‘That was a long time ago, Max,’ she said softly. ‘People slow down. Reflexes …’

He flipped a beer-mat into the air with the back of his finger and caught it in the same hand.

She laughed. ‘How did you do that?’

‘Reflexes.’ Maxwell smiled for the first time that morning. ‘It was a party piece of ours, the Magnificent Seven. We could all do it. Used to bore everybody to death, girlfriends and barmen alike. But Quent could do it with both hands, simultaneously.’

She looked at him. ‘It was a long time ago,’ she said softly.

‘You’re right.’ He sighed, leaning back in his chair, and pushed the uneaten ploughman’s away from him.

‘Everything all right, sir?’ the child waitress asked, sweeping past buried in trays.

‘Delicious, thank you.’ Maxwell was still looking at Jacquie. Then his eyes swivelled to the girl, chancing, dancing, backing and advancing on her way to the kitchen. ‘Year Eleven,’ he said. ‘Mum doesn’t want her to have this Saturday job, because it might bugger up her GCSEs. She does, though – it’ll be a useful cop-out if she does. And anyway, she might pick up the makings of a GNVQ Retail Management qualification. By the way, her name is Jade, her favourite band is Westlife and her boyfriend’s called Lee.’

‘Max.’ Jacquie frowned. ‘Do you know all this?’

‘Of course not.’ He smiled at her. ‘It’s the educated guess of someone who’s been around kids for ever.’ Then he was serious again. ‘And I’ve been around corpses too, Jacquie. Remember how we met?’

She did. When both of them were trying to find out who killed one of Maxwell’s Own, one of his sixth form at Leighford High. He’d been around nearly as many corpses as she had.

‘So, Quent was still alive when somebody put a rope around his neck?’

She nodded. ‘It’s my guess he’d have been too weak to resist after the hammering he took.’

‘Why the rope?’

‘What?’

‘Why the rope? Why not finish the job with whatever blunt instrument we’re talking about? What blunt instrument are we talking about, by the way?’

Jacquie shrugged. ‘Sorry, Max. That’s forensic. You heard DI Thomas’s attitude. I won’t get a smell at that.’

‘Where’s dear old Jim Astley when you need him?’

There was nothing dear about Jim Astley, except perhaps his hourly rate; although ‘old’ was fair enough. But he was the pathologist-cum-police surgeon on Maxwell’s own turf, far to the south. Not for him the Midlands, which were sodden and unkind.

‘This Thomas.’ Maxwell was running a finger round the rim of his lager glass. ‘Did he give you a hard time?’

‘Let’s say he didn’t appreciate outside help,’ she said.

‘So he’d appreciate mine even less.’

She nodded. ‘When did the DS say he wanted a statement?’

Maxwell checked his watch. ‘They’re coming to the hotel at six. I thought they might want us at the station.’

‘Not yet.’ Jacquie was shaking her head. ‘They’ll try you on friendly turf first. There’ll be two of them, plainclothes, discreet.’

‘Softly, softly, eh?’

Her eyes flickered. ‘Something like that. What can you tell me about him, Max?’

Maxwell sat back in his chair. ‘Quent?’ He shook his head, swilling what was left of the lager at the bottom of the glass. ‘Christ knows. When asked to decline the verb “to be” in a French lesson, he began “I be, you be, he be …”’

Jacquie couldn’t help but laugh. Neither could Maxwell.

‘That’s when I first became aware of him. We called him “Hebe” for a while. That was the Lower Fourths. We were eleven, still wearing short trousers. Course, I had the knees for it.’ And he slapped them both, just to make sure they were still there. ‘That would have been around 1956. People were ripping up cinemas as they rocked around the clock and the Hungarians told the Russkies they were tired of being pushed around. Wars and rumours of wars, Jacquie; nothing changes.’

‘What kind of man was he?’

Maxwell shook his head slowly. ‘That’s just the point,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Oh, I can tell you what sort of boy he was – sporty and funny and brave. But I hadn’t seen George Quentin – until today – for thirty-seven years. Not in the flesh. All the clocks stopped in ’63, Jacquie. As far as this lot goes, when I threw my blazer into that damned swimming pool, time stood still.’

She reached across and held his hand. ‘Have I told you how sorry I am?’ she asked.

He held hers. ‘I know.’ He nodded. ‘I know. Come on. We’ve got some years to roll back.’

‘Max …’

He held up his hand. ‘“It’s not your business,”’ he said. ‘“It’s all a long time ago. There’s nothing you can do. Leave it to the professionals.” Is that what you were going to say?’

She smiled in spite of herself, arching an eyebrow at the same time. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she leaned towards him, ‘I was going to say “Be careful out there”. Hill Street Blues, remember?’

Peter Maxwell did. ‘Careful?’ He threw his head back and laughed. ‘Careful is my middle name.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Let’s see if we can track down Jade and pay the bill. Last one back at the Graveney’s a suspect.’

The Graveney had thoughtfully set aside the under-manager’s office for interviews. ‘There’ll be two of them,’ Jacquie had said, and she was right. DS Vernon was there, mid-thirties perhaps, thick black hair, a London Scottish set to his nose. Maxwell had met him, of course, at Halliards when the squad cars rolled in, all flashing blue lights like something out of The Bill. The one he hadn’t met was the DCI.

‘Nadine Tyler.’ She had a powerful grip for a woman. ‘It’s Mr Maxwell, isn’t it?’

‘Peter Maxwell.’ The Head of Sixth Form smiled.

‘Do sit down.’ DCI Tyler was tall, statuesque even, well aware that she was a woman in a man’s job and that she had just crashed through the glass ceiling. Well aware too that the resultant shards had embedded themselves in the backs of some of her male colleagues, who were bitter, touchy, resentful.

Maxwell looked at her across the desk. She was playing the body language game well. He was in a low chair; she in a high swivel. The light was behind her so that sometimes, depending on her angle to the late afternoon sun, she looked like the winged devil out of The Exorcist, with beams from Hell at her elbows.

‘You realize this is not a formal interview,’ she said in what Maxwell took to be a cultured Wolverhampton accent, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms. ‘Just a little chat?’

‘Of course.’ He nodded.

‘But equally, you won’t mind if DS Vernon takes a few notes?’

‘Of course not.’ Maxwell smiled at the man with his notebook on his knee across the office.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ Nadine Tyler said, leaning back in the chair. There were no rings on her fingers, no jewellery round her neck. The eyes were hard and grey, flinty in the afternoon light.

‘Well …’ Maxwell cradled his left knee in locked hands, as relaxed as she was. ‘Let’s see. I’m an eligible bachelor. I live in Leighford with my cat and collection of model soldiers. Oh, and I’ve been teaching for nearly four hundred years.’

Vernon, Maxwell could see, had written nothing down, but Nadine Tyler was smiling. ‘What do you teach?’ she asked.

‘Children.’ Maxwell smiled back, wondering just how much rope she’d give him. ‘History,’ he said. ‘I’m Head of Sixth Form.’

‘Nice job?’ she asked.

‘Nicest in the school.’ He shrugged. ‘Nicer than yours, I’d wager.’

Nadine Tyler laughed. When she did the years seemed to fall away and Maxwell was looking at a girl again. ‘Let’s stay with you.’ She leaned forward, her hands clasped quietly on the under-manager’s desk. ‘Obviously you and George Quentin go back a long way?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Maxwell nodded, resisting the urge to echo her posturally. ‘I’ve known George for years, boy and boy. I suppose you’d say we were inseparable.’

‘Were?’

‘Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell felt obliged to confess, ‘I haven’t seen George Quentin since 1963, not in the flesh.’

‘In the flesh?’

‘I caught him on the telly once, some chat show on City stockbrokering. I was just flicking through the channels, like you do, and there he was.’

‘Tell me about the others.’

‘Others?’

‘Richard Alphedge.’ She wasn’t reading from any notes; she was staring straight at Maxwell.

‘I don’t really think …’

‘Mr Maxwell.’ The smile had gone and the eyes were cold and hard. ‘You do realize that I’m conducting a murder enquiry?’

‘Yes.’ He unlocked his fingers and shifted his position. Time for the serious stuff now.

‘And that I need to know.’

‘And that we are all suspects,’ Maxwell added.

She nodded. ‘That too,’ she said. ‘That’s one thing that’s not very nice about my job, Mr Maxwell; you start to suspect everybody, all the time. Is that woman really collecting for Help the Aged? Is that bloke really a Scout leader? Where did a dropout like that get a Ferrari? It just goes with the territory.’

‘And you’ll be talking to the others?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded. ‘Depend on it. Alphedge.’

‘Alphie is an actor; to be precise, an actor’s actor. He doesn’t do much any more, I understand. Bad agent, one performance, who knows? I remember he was St Joan in St Joan when we were in the Upper Fifths – diabolical. Some of us wanted to burn him for real. I understand his wife gets all the parts.’

‘You mean, he’s a kept man?’

Maxwell laughed. ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said. ‘Looking at the biceps on Mrs Alphedge, I’m not sure I dare. Chief Inspector,’ he shuffled forward a little in his chair, ‘can I ask you some¬thing?’

She raised her hands in the air and lolled back on the pale blue of the swivel.

‘How did George Quentin die?’

The DCI thought for a moment. ‘You’re familiar with the cliché “I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind”?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Jack Frost, Adam Dalgleish, even Jane Tennyson, they all say it.’

‘Yes,’ she said coldly. ‘But this is real, isn’t it? Your friend is dead.’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell said flatly. ‘Yes, he is.’

‘What about Bingham?’ she asked.

‘Cret? Um … Anthony? On your side, isn’t he? Judge and all?’

The DCI shook her head. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ she grunted. ‘As a profession, lawyers are second only to journalists as prize bastards.’

‘Ah.’ Maxwell sensed a twinge of pique there.

‘Have you seen Bingham recently?’

‘Until yesterday, no. Again, not since we all left school.’

‘Tell me, Mr Maxwell.’ Nadine Tyler got up from behind the desk and sauntered to the far window, watching weekend guests coming and going in the carpark outside. ‘The seven of you … were you some sort of club, a gang?’

‘What, you mean the Famous Five meet the Lords of Flatbush? No, not really. Oh, I suppose we hung around together. In the sixth form we were going to form a group, except that none of us could really play anything, and only Alphie could sing and we realized that Ash was only in it for the groupies. Then we had this ludicrous schoolboy plan to spend the night at Borley rectory, the most haunted house in England …’

‘Yet you didn’t keep up your friendship. Why was that?’

Maxwell shrugged. ‘Why indeed?’ He sighed. ‘It happens. We none of us ended up at the same college. Cret … er, Anthony, went to Balliol, Oxford; Alphie to RADA. Stenhouse was with me at Cambridge, Peterhouse in fact, but he broke his leg skiing in his first Christmas vac and had to miss the rest of the year; we never got back together after that.’

‘And Quentin?’

‘LSE, I’m afraid.’ Maxwell screwed up his face in mock disgust. ‘We didn’t talk about it. The LSE in those days was one up from borstal. Asheton went to Durham, although somebody told me years ago, he’d got a girl pregnant and threw it all up.’