It’s quite easy really. To kill somebody. All you need is nerve. All right, in a perfect world, planning too. In a perfect world, you’d take a leaf out of Hitchcock’s book and kill a stranger – perhaps the man sitting opposite you on the train, or the woman walking her dog on the common. But then, you’d have to be Robert Walker – and remember, with all his planning, he didn’t get away with it.

But it’s not a perfect world, is it? And each man, they say, kills the thing he loves – not a stranger. That’s for celluloid and serial killers. Most of us, if we kill at all – and we all have it in us – kill somebody we know. And we do it for a reason.

So there was a victim, that dull Thursday in May, wandering through the dark passageways that ran the width of the building, looking for the photocopying room. Had you been there – and perhaps it’s best you weren’t – you’d have made out that she was short and rather dumpy with straight dark hair. It was that straight dark hair her murderer aimed for, on the corner as she turned left. A pity really, because the photocopying room was to the right. Anyway, there it was. Her murderer had just enough light here from the stairs to see what he was doing. She didn’t see him, didn’t hear him until it was too late. She couldn’t even find the bloody light switch.

He’d hit her, a little before lunchtime, a crippling blow horizontally across the head. Under that long, dark hair, her parietal bone had shattered, the largest fragments slicing into her brain. She’d buckled and fallen to her knees and he’d hit her again as she’d gone down. The third time, the top of her skull caved in and blood was trickling like some ghastly crimson mask over her upturned face.

For a moment, he caught his breath. She was staring at him, her mouth open, both arms outstretched. He always wondered afterwards whether she could see him, what with the blood and the trauma to her brain. She probably could, because she tried to speak. Perhaps they made perfect sense to her, the guttural, choking grunts that came from her throat. She was bleeding from the nose now and her whole body was quivering, rather like a wasp you kill in summer.

So he’d hit her again. Well, he couldn’t leave her like that, could he? What could she hope for if he left her? A few weeks or months tethered to a machine in some off-white hospital ward, where nurses would come to regard her as part of the furniture before somebody decided to switch her off? What sort of life was that for anybody? And this time he used both hands, demolishing her forehead until her lifeless body jerked backwards and the arms flopped uselessly at her sides.

And that was where the planning bit came in. Or rather the lack of it. How do you get rid of a nine-stone human being whose blood is spreading like a black puddle over the corridor tiles? And when you’ve found somewhere, some niche hidden from the world, what then? Do you just wipe the floor, the walls, the heavy object and go back about your business?

Can it really be that easy?

They say that everybody remembers where they were the day it happened. It was one of those momentous events of the twentieth century – a scene of horror that would be etched for ever on those who witnessed it. As though time, for those nine seconds, stopped. And the repercussions of it – the ripples on the darkling waters of life – spread outward for ever too.

One of the first to know was Margaret Vincent, peering into the green screen of her word processor and glancing back again to try for the umpteenth time to decipher the Head’s memo. She swore afterwards that her begonias shook and trembled on the shelf overhead and the cursor leapt in panic from the screen. It was probable that Heather Robotham heard the same tremor and felt it too. She was on one of those errands foisted on Head Girls from time to time, just to remind her that the post that carried no privileges at all, had responsibilities too. And her errand took her past the Head’s office at the crucial time when the balloon went up and the world stopped turning. She thought it best to hurry on.

‘Doc’ Martin, the school caretaker, was also on an errand. Amazing how easy it was to look busy, with a clipboard in one hand and screwdriver in the other. He remembered checking his watch seconds before he’d heard it. Nine twenty-eight. Tens-es soon – a welcome tea break. Where had he left his kettle? He’d seen Heather, tight little bum swaying ahead of him, down the corridor. Well, there Weren’t many perks to being a school caretaker in the ’90s, but ogling sixth-formers was one of them and bearing in mind Mrs Martin had all the allure of a school pizza these days, he’d settle for that.

Unlike Heather Robotham, though, he had the nerve – and the time – to listen at the Head’s door. If anybody else passed, he could always scrutinize the door frame suddenly, looking for those bloody ants. They didn’t have very strong doors at Leighford High School – veneer and cardboard to save money now that the school was responsible for its own finances – so he caught most of it.

‘GNV what, Headmaster?’ Martin recognized the stentorian tones of Peter Maxwell, Leighford’s Head of Sixth Form, a cantankerous old bastard who looked as though he’d been in teaching for a hundred years.

‘Now, come along, Max,’ the caretaker heard his Headmaster wheedle. It was a Friday and the term was six weeks old. For James Diamond, BA, MEd, it was the worst possible combination. The honeymoon period of the start of term was over. People were not yet all-forgiving in the warm glow of the end-of-term knees-up and by Friday, tetchiness had always developed into a fine art. ‘Roger did brief you on this last term, you know.’

Peter Maxwell had gone a rather curious shade of purple, contrasting oddly with the iron grey of his side-whiskers. He raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Brief to the point of non-existence, Headmaster. If our illustrious Second Deputy mentioned it, I, to quote Trevor Howard in
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, am a Turk’s arse. Take my word for it – Deputy Heads will roll.’

Jim Diamond looked at his Head of Sixth Form. It was rather like looking at Medusa – Maxwell’s tangle of barbed wire hair coiled like snakes. Not that a classical training brought the similarity to Diamond’s mind, for he had the misfortune to be a biologist. No, he had once seen
Clash of the Titans
and the image of Ray Harryhausen’s repellent monster had stayed with him.

‘Roger handles all the INSET provision,’ the Headmaster said patiently, ‘and GNVQ is upon us, Max, whether we like it or not.’

Maxwell took in the figure across the desk from him as he had so often in the past few years. As ever, the desk was empty – the mark of a man who delegated. As ever, the perfectly horrendous blond, buck-toothed children grinned at their daddy from Boots frames, just to remind the world that the grey-suited anonymous bugger at the helm was a human being too.

‘And who runs the sixth form in my absence?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Well, I know it’s difficult with Alison on maternity leave, but I thought … perhaps … Deirdre?’

Jim Diamond had never seen Maxwell’s knuckles whiten like that before, not even when that HMI had rather cruelly christened him a dinosaur. Even more bizarre was the spectacle of Maxwell’s mouth opening and no sound coming out.

‘Deirdre?’ The Head of Sixth Form forced his vocal cords into action. ‘You threaten me – my sixth form – with Deirdre Lessing, the Typhoid Mary of West Sussex?’

‘Now, Max –’

‘I’m sorry, Headmaster,’ Maxwell leaned back, his hands clasped on his shirt front, ‘but it’s out of the question.’

‘Mr Maxwell …’ The worm that was Jim Diamond, BA, MEd, had turned, as he did about once a term when pushed beyond endurance. ‘In-service training is now a recognized part of a teacher’s life. It has been arranged, quite properly, though perhaps a little belatedly, by Roger Garrett, as part of his job description. This school needs to attract more students to its sixth form in September in order to survive. And in order to do that, we needs must embrace the General National Vocational Qualification package. And someone must oversee that. That someone, Mr Maxwell, is you.’

All this had been delivered in one breath, rather as Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney talked to each other in the ’30s and ’40s – at the rate of two hundred words a minute. It occurred to Maxwell that Diamond daren’t have stopped for fear he would not have the bottle to continue.

‘I see,’ he said, putting his fingers together and tapping them on his lower lip. ‘Well, since I find that I am once again indispensable to Leighford High in its upward quest for academic excellence, what can I say?’

‘It is only for one week, Max.’ Diamond had subsided, still quivering internally. He couldn’t quite believe it. He’d stood toe-to-toe with ‘Mad Max’ and the old bastard hadn’t bitten through his windpipe. Perhaps there was a God.

‘And Deirdre?’ Maxwell riveted the Headmaster with the eyes of the Basilisk. Try as he might, Jim Diamond was powerless to back away. He’d won one round, or thought he had. He wouldn’t risk another.

‘Oh, I’ll keep an eye on things,’ he flustered, ‘with Deirdre, I mean. How much harm can she do in one week, Max?’

Maxwell smiled and lifted his rickety old body out of Diamond’s knobbly office furniture. ‘Unchained,’ he said, ‘that woman could have destroyed the Roman Empire in a single day.’ He paused at the door to hear the Head say, ‘I promise you, Max, there’ll be no changes.’

Maxwell turned to him from his vantage point of a loftier IQ and centuries of culture and smiled again. ‘Ah, Headmaster, all History is change. But Deirdre Lessing merely teaches Business Studies, so we’ll be all right, won’t we?’

Lieutenant John, Viscount Fitzgibbon was turning in the plastic saddle of his plastic charger, scanning the half-formed line of cavalrymen behind him with his one good plastic eye. A flick of paint from Maxwell’s brush and the Lieutenant’s face assumed a more human flesh tint, in stark contrast to his white busby and jacket.

‘What do you think happened to this one, Count?’ Maxwell asked, squinting to paint the hands. ‘Eyewitnesses say he was hit in the chest by two bullets shortly after the Brigade moved off. There is a story, however,’ he slipped the slim brush between his teeth as he eased the scabbard up a little, so that it rested nonchalantly against Fitzgibbon’s left leg, straight in the stirrup, ‘that he survived, was captured by the Russians and returned home in 1870. Despite appeals in various newspapers, though, he didn’t come forward. Now, why was that, Count, eh?’

Count Metternich, as usual, offered no solution, shed no light. When you’re a potentially raunchy torn whose master has had you neutered by a sadistic bastard in a white coat, the last thing you intend to do is give said master the time of day. The flick of a right ear was all Maxwell had a right to and a flick of the right ear was all he got.

‘Perhaps he couldn’t stand his wife.’ Maxwell resumed his painting of the plastic hero. ‘Perhaps it pissed him off no end when the Russians released him. What do you think?’

Nothing.

Maxwell looked at the feisty feline, curled on top of his linen basket, a languid tail swaying a little, as if irritated by Maxwell’s constant questions.

‘Well,’ Maxwell went into his Mandy Rice-Davies routine from the ’60s, ‘you would say that, wouldn’t you? Oh, shit!’

The door bell had interrupted his reveries. And Christine Keeler’s sidekick, sixteen, blonde, voluptuous, on the game, smiled at him again from the faded newspapers of his memory as he gingerly put down Fitzgibbon at the rear of the left-hand squadron of the 8th Hussars. Why was it, he asked himself as he parked his paintbrush behind his ear and made for the stairs, that someone always rang that bloody bell just as he started work? At the entrance to the hatch into his loft, he stopped and surveyed, as he did most days, the panorama he had been working on now for nearly fourteen years – Cardigan’s Light Brigade drawn up on that fateful October afternoon, ready to ride into legend down the Valley of Death. Briefly, Lord Cardigan caught his eye, sitting impatiently on his chestnut, Ronald, hand on hip, as if to say, ‘I’m waiting, Mr Maxwell. My Brigade can’t start without you.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Maxwell muttered, ‘just as soon as I can. Bugger!’ and he hit his head on the hatch as he went down. He scowled at the pile of washing left untended in the corner. ‘So many undies,’ he sighed, ‘so little time.’

The bell rang again. ‘Yes, yes, I’m on my way. This is a town house, you know. I do have four storeys to negotiate.’

Through the lumpy glass of his front door, where the purple sunset of the May day was giving way to the orange artificiality of the street light, Maxwell made out a mop of frizzy blonde hair and a green shapeless body.

‘Sally Greenhow.’ He opened the door to her. ‘You’ve come to seduce me. How nice.’

‘It might be for you,’ she said and swept past him. ‘Max, is that a paintbrush behind your ear or are you pleased to see me?’

‘Ah.’ He flicked the thing out of his barbed wire curls. ‘That’s where I put it. Go on up, oh wise Second in the Special Needs Department. Coffee to the left. Southern Comfort to the right. Do with me what you will.’

‘I’m turning right,’ she called down to him, ‘and stop looking up my skirt, you warped old bugger.’

‘Heaven forfend.’ Maxwell feigned outrage and held an upturned hand across his forehead. ‘I’ll move into a bungalow immediately.’

She hovered in his lounge while he poured them both a Southern Comfort from the bottle in his Arts and Craft Movement drinks cabinet. She crashed into his Oxfam sofa and all but disappeared in its clapped-out centre.

‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ he snarled in his best Bogart. And he did. And she was. Sally Greenhow hadn’t changed for twenty-eight years now. And she was nearly twenty-nine. Old enough to be Maxwell’s daughter. Her face was round and soft, with large, blue-grey eyes and a perfect pair of matching dimples. Maxwell wondered again if she smelt of baby oil, but that whole image gave rise to cries of ‘warped old bugger’ again in his brain and he sat down opposite her.

She raised her glass in response to his toast. ‘May all your Ofsteds be successful ones,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ he beamed, ‘so you’ve heard the word.’

BOOK: Maxwell’s Flame

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