Maxwell's Revenge (8 page)

‘Coco Pops it is,’ agreed Maxwell. He glanced down at Metternich. ‘Coco Pops?’ The cat’s disdain was palpable and he showed Maxwell a clean pair of heels as he sped off down the stairs. Maxwell looked at his son who shrugged his shoulders and spread his arms, palms uppermost; a facsimile in miniature of his mother that made his father laugh out loud. The boy’s lip quivered for a moment and then he laughed too. A chip off each block, and no mistake.

As they sat together in companionable silence, watching the apparent acid trip that was the Night Garden, Maxwell began to wonder, ever so slightly, if he should find out where his
wife-to
-be had gone. As if in answer, the phone began to ring.

‘Hello?’

‘Max? Is that you?’ Jacquie asked, puzzled.

‘Who were you expecting?’

‘Well, no “War Room”? No “Piccadilly Circus”? No “Bedlam”?’

‘All of the above, obviously. But I didn’t know who it might be.’

‘Max, it’s quarter to eight in the morning. Who else might it be?’

‘Your kidnapper?’

‘Hmm, all right, sorry. I should have left a note, but I had to dash. I’m at the hospital. Someone had another go at Mrs Bevell last night.’

‘My God!’ Maxwell nearly dropped his Coco Pops. ‘Is she … I mean, did they …?’

‘Succeed? No. But obviously, she is very scared and also she did take in a bit of the poison, so is back in intensive care big time. She is now planning to sue the paramedic and also Leighford General.’

‘I hope she makes a bundle.’

There was another silence. ‘Max, are you sure it’s you? First answering the phone like a sane person and then applauding the blame culture. I’m in shock.’

‘No, no. Blame culture be buggered. I just mean that if she wins, she won’t need the job, so we won’t have her at Leighford High.’

‘Thank goodness. You had me worried, there. Anyway, the reason I rang was to check you were up, firstly.’

‘No trouble. The time bomb that is your son was primed and ready to go at seven-thirty.’

‘Good. Also, I managed to get one of the mums from nursery to pick him up at around eight-fifteen. Are you all right with that? Will you be ready?’

Maxwell looked down at his son. If there was
a category in the
Guinness Book of Records
for how many Coco Pops could be embedded in one child’s hair, then Nolan was a contender. ‘Ready? Aye, ready. We’ll be fine. We’re all ready and dressed as a matter of fact.’

‘My word,’ Jacquie said, with scarcely a trace of irony showing through. ‘In that case, my work is done. I’ll either see you tonight or let you know what’s going on. Oh, and Max, just one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘The only way to get Coco Pops out of his hair is to rinse them out. If you try combing, they just squash further in. Bye.’ And she was gone.

Slowly replacing the phone, Maxwell asked Nolan, ‘Did you see when she put the cameras in place? Do you know where they are, eh, little man?’ And he scooped him up, all chocolately, and took him off for a bit of a rinse, careful all the time to keep him at arm’s length.

Leighford High School didn’t look any different on that Friday morning. The dining hall was cordoned off with stripey police tape and the kids were a little subdued, but most staff agreed that that was a definite plus. Maxwell, Acting Headteacher, decided against a special assembly. He opted for a staff meeting instead. He stood at the front of the room, and waited patiently for the staff to settle down. He cleared his throat quietly and the room was still. So this was what
power felt like from the front. He took a deep breath and waited for the comments from the old geezer sitting at the front. Oh, but hang on, he was that old geezer, so no point in waiting.

He consciously copied Herr Hitler at the Berlin Sportpalast at his first big rally as Chancellor. He glowered left and right, but mostly right, and slicked down his hair, which sprang back immediately. Then he folded his arms until all the shuffling had stopped.

All eyes were on him now – aged shits like Ben Holton, the Head of Science who was at school with Isaac Newton. Crawling toadies like Philippa Parses, distraught that poor Mr Diamond was no longer at the helm. And a goodly smattering of his old gang – Sally Greenhow of Special Needs, Paul Moss of the History Department, both Thingees from reception – rubbed shoulders with bright young things newly appointed by Legs Diamond; NQTs as green as grass who would be mown down by the withering fire of Year Eleven.

‘As of this morning,’ he said, no longer thinking in German, ‘our Lords and Masters at County Hall have decreed that, as a temporary measure, I shall be Acting Headteacher of Leighford High School.’

Whoops and cheers all round, followed by laughter. Some were genuinely delighted. Some were hysterical. Some would not know what hit them.

‘This has been ratified by the Chair of Governors – and it’s nice to have the furniture on our side, isn’t it, boys?’

Philippa Parses could not sit there and take all this. ‘Is this flippancy going to continue?’ she snapped.

There was a silence. All eyes were on Maxwell.

‘I will attribute that remark to the fact that you are still in shock after the events of yesterday, Pippa,’ he said quietly. ‘If you wish to apply for compassionate leave …’ he peered at her more closely, ‘or early retirement, I shall be only too happy to consider it. In the meantime, I have a school to run. Can I or can I not count on your support?’

Philippa wanted the floor to swallow her, but it wasn’t going to oblige. She lost eye contact and muttered a rather feeble, ‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ said Maxwell, ‘Now, people, to business …’

Jacquie sat at the bedside of Mrs Bevell and listlessly flicked one more time through a very old copy of Hello. The corners had worn off with use, so it was not possible to tell exactly how old the issue was, but Jacquie gave a wild guess at 1990 as there was coverage of Ulrika Johnson’s first marriage and Jacquie felt for her as she stood there next to Mr Right.

Mrs Bevell was mercifully unconscious, as were all the Leighford staff, current and potential, who surrounded her, swathed in white sheets and punctuated by tubing. It was an eerie feeling, a little like being on the set of a real, honest-to-God sci-fi movie or that one with Genevieve Bujold where Richard Widmark is up to no good in cryogenic skullduggery. Even the world of
Hello
was a welcome link with reality.

She had interviewed the night nurses as they went off, standing in a smoke-wreathed group at the cigarette-end-carpeted spot just outside the hospital gates where they were no longer thanked for not smoking. They all agreed that they had seen nothing unusual that night, no furtive figures, no syringes left on bedside tables, no cries or screams to break the rhythm of assisted breathing. No, the Senior Night Sister had said, taking one last desperate drag and throwing aside the filter, the only odd thing had been Mrs Bevell’s relapse into unconsciousness.

The others agreed, with varying degrees of thankfulness at the woman’s sudden silence. Jacquie had noted their names and gone on to interview the patients.

But answer came there none. Those who could be wakened were not to be wakened. The others were well and truly unconscious. Only Miss Mackenzie was back on an ordinary ward, and she was now under twenty-four-hour guard.
Helen Maitland was in an orthopaedic ward, leg in plaster and still more or less as happy as a clam on pain killers. The stunned, bruised and otherwise knocked-about members of staff had gone home hours before to relive their moment of glory by not being mentioned at all on the local news bulletin.

So Jacquie sat there, quietly leafing.

There came a croaking noise from the bed and Jacquie looked up and threw down her magazine. She leant forward and then hurriedly drew back. Having a tube down her throat and nothing to eat for the best part of twenty-four hours had done nothing to improve Mrs Bevell’s almost terminal halitosis. ‘What happened?’ asked the woman, as best she could through all the hardware. ‘Where did that doctor go?’

‘Doctor?’ Jacquie said and reached for her notepad. As far as she knew, only nurses had been present when the woman had relapsed.

Mrs Bevell licked her lips and tried to be more precise. ‘Doctor. Consultant, I think. Gave tablet.’

‘Consultant? Had you seen him already?’

‘No.’ The reply was as sharp as the woman could make it. Broken ribs and poisoning weren’t going to make her gentle on the stupid. And everyone but her was stupid, that much was clear, and she’d known it all her life.

‘How did you know he was a consultant, then?’ Jacquie asked, quite reasonably.

Mrs Bevell’s eyes began to close, but before she drifted away to a dreamland where everyone did as she told them with no argument, she muttered just one word. ‘Old.’

‘Old? Mrs Bevell, did you say old? Mrs Bevell?’ Jacquie resisted the urge to shake her awake. The sister, leaving her glass-fronted fastness, was beginning to come her way.

‘Can we help you?’ the nurse said frostily in Jacquie’s ear.

Ah, the royal we. How Jacquie had missed it since her days in ante-natal. She turned. ‘If you can wake her up, that would help.’ She forced herself to be polite.

‘Sorry.’ The nurse almost smiled. ‘I’m afraid she’s sedated. I’m surprised she woke up at all.’

‘She’s a very determined woman,’ Jacquie replied. ‘Perhaps you can help in another way, then. She spoke of a consultant who came to see her in the night.’

The nurse snorted derisively. ‘A consultant? In the night? Are you nuts? They’re strictly daytime. A registrar, perhaps? A houseman? But they usually only come when we call them and we had no need to do that.’

Jacquie gestured at the full beds. ‘These people seem quite ill,’ she said.

‘They are, but they are also quite stable. We didn’t need to do anything except check signs regularly and they are all doing OK. In fact, apart
from Mr Ryan, they are all improving. Most of them will be on open wards by the weekend.’

‘So who could it have been, then?’ Jacquie asked.

‘I have no idea. Could she have imagined it? Is she an imaginative woman?’

‘No one knows her. She’s not from round here. She was only down for an interview. The school have been trying to contact her family, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone at home.’

The nurse snorted again. ‘They’ve probably been down here, trying to kill her.’ She gave the unconscious woman a poisonous look. ‘I know I would.’

Jacquie smiled. That seemed to fit with everyone else’s opinion. ‘I think he was real. He gave her a tablet.’

‘Well, there you are, then,’ said the nurse. ‘She wouldn’t have drugs by mouth. We’d add it to her drip.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jacquie, making a note. ‘Look, I need to make a call. Can you watch her for a moment? No one, absolutely no one, is to go near any of these people, is that all right?’

The nurse shrugged. ‘I’ve got nowhere to go,’ she said. ‘I’ll watch them from in here if you think it’s necessary.’

‘I do,’ said Jacquie and went into the nurses’ station to the phone. She stood there, tapping her fingers on the desk as she waited for a reply.
The nurse’s rather more up-to-date copy of
Hello
– spookily featuring Ulrika Johnson standing next to Mr Right – lay open on the desk. So, she didn’t spend every second watching her charges after all, thought Jacquie. If the night staff were the same, then anyone could have come in, as long as they were quiet and were ready with an excuse if challenged. A picture was emerging, though, of someone …

‘Hall.’ He had finally answered his phone.

‘It’s Jacquie here, guv. I’m at the hospital. I’ve managed to have a word with Mrs Bevell.’

‘Well done. And?’ Hall wasn’t wasting words today. He was a man down and the paperwork on that fact alone could keep him busy until doomsday.

‘And she isn’t saying much, but what she did say was interesting.’ Jacquie knew her man too well to pause for a reaction, so she ploughed on. ‘Apparently, an old man gave her a tablet.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Ermm, yes, guv. But that fits with the person that Sylvia and I saw yesterday, the one who took the cocktail glasses. He looked old, well, ol
der
, we thought.’

Jacquie sensed rather than heard Hall take off his glasses, rub his eyes and sigh. ‘Well, it cuts it down a bit, I suppose. Come back to the station, Jacquie. We need to discuss this Bob Davies business.’

Jacquie’s heart rose into her mouth. She knew she needed to address it, the constant carping, the unprofessional behaviour, but at the end of the day it was the man’s career they were messing with and she wasn’t sure she was comfortable with that. ‘OK, guv. I’ve just got to make sure everyone from Leighford High is under permanent watch, then I’ll be on my way.’

‘You really think they’re still at risk. Not just Mrs Bevell?’

‘Why just her?’

‘Well, we’ve been doing a bit of brainstorming here and the consensus is that the poisoner was after one person and didn’t mind poisoning a whole lot of people, just to get that one. It’s not unknown.’

In an Agatha Christie, perhaps, thought Jacquie, but she said, ‘Well, it’s certainly a theory, guv. I’ll be back soon,’ and hung up. She made sure that the nurse knew how important it was that she put aside her magazine and actually watched the patients, not just for medical problems, but for the approach of any dodgy old men, even actual consultants. She checked on the other wards to make sure the same was happening throughout the hospital, wherever a Leighford High teacher might be languishing. This was more than slightly embarrassing for the lab technician who had hoped that the lancing of his gluteal boil might remain his secret, but better safe than sorry.

Finally, she got to the car park, removed the parking ticket from under her windscreen and explained to the attendant where it might end up if he didn’t cancel it. She got into the car and checked her phone. Three messages. One from Maxwell, one from Henry and one withheld. She dialled 1571 and listened.

‘Hello, Immortal Beloved. Me here, speaking after the beep. This Headmaster lark is like falling off a log. I’ve done a bit of light ordering and a bit of light ordering around. Everyone here would really appreciate a bit of an update, if that’s possible. The hospital is being cagey as usual, although we did get some detail about a boil. Can that be right? At any event, heart, can you get back to me? Just ask for the Headteacher. They won’t know what Headmaster means. Acting,’ and he broke into a flurry of Sir John Gielgud and gales of laughter, before ringing off. She obediently pressed two to save for thirty days. She always saved his messages; a little superstition of her own. She pressed one.