Maxwell's Point (3 page)

Jacquie shook her head. ‘No, Max,’ she said. ‘There was no car outside when I got back. She drives a clapped out Hyundai, right?’

Maxwell nodded, though he had to confess car makes weren’t exactly his thing.

‘I just assumed she was out for the night, not that she’d been out for the whole bloody day as well.’

‘It couldn’t have been all that long,’ he reasoned.

‘Why not? What state was Nolan in when you found him?’

‘Happy as larry,’ he shrugged. ‘Full nappy, but then the little fella can poop for England, as we know, so that didn’t tell me
much. There was water in his tray and a drop of the hard stuff – oh, wait a minute; that’s Metternich.’

Jacquie pulled a face. It wasn’t the first time her husband had mixed the two up – son and heir and cat hair. He was a funny age – her mother had warned her, but Jacquie thought she knew better. The woman who was partner, mother and detective sergeant was on her feet. ‘I’m going round there,’ she said.

‘No,’ Maxwell held her arm. ‘Darling, it’s nearly one o’clock and Mrs Troubridge won’t hear the bell.’

‘We’ve got a key – remember?’ she asked him.

‘If you walk in on her, she’ll probably have a heart attack. Let it go. There’s nothing to be done tonight.’

For a moment, Jacquie dithered. Then she relented. It
had
been a long day. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But first thing tomorrow, I’m round there.’

First thing in the morning, Jacquie was round there. Like many old people, Mrs Troubridge didn’t actually sleep well, for all Maxwell had painted a picture of her dead to the world for the statutory eight hours. When Jacquie Carpenter had originally planned to storm her portals in the wee small hours of the morning, Mrs Troubridge was actually up playing patience in her conservatory. Now, as the sun climbed to the Heavens for another relentless, hosepipe ban day, she was doing what she did best, playing merry Hamlet with the convolvulus in her flower beds. She could have sworn she’d cleared this lot only yesterday.

‘Hello, my dear,’ she waved a green-gloved hand at her neighbour. ‘Would you like some lavender?’

‘Thank you, no, Mrs Troubridge. Just some answers.’

The old girl stopped in mid-prune. ‘Oh, how wonderful. Am I a suspect? I’ve always admired what the police do and a distaff policeperson living next door now, well, it’s a real bonus, isn’t it? I tell all my friends about you, you know.’

Jacquie smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘No, it’s not an enquiry of that sort,’ she told her. ‘I was wondering if you’d seen Juanita at all?’

‘You’re the second person to ask me that,’ she said, cryptically, rather foolhardily tapping her nose with her secateurs.

‘Oh? Who was the first?’

‘Mr Maxwell,’ Mrs Troubridge confided. ‘Just yesterday.’

‘Quite,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘But did she come back last night? Perhaps after you’d gone to bed?’

‘No, dear,’ the old neighbour confided. ‘I’m sure I would have heard her. I don’t think her bed has been slept in, though I have to confess, it’s difficult to tell. She does her own laundry and so on. I don’t interfere.’

‘Did she say she was going anywhere, Mrs Troubridge?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Been called away suddenly, perhaps?’

‘No,’ the old girl frowned. ‘No, I’m sure I’d have remembered. Oh, can I have your dear little man today? Just until Juanita turns up? I’m sure she won’t be long.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Troubridge,’ Jacquie smiled. ‘You’re so kind, but I’m going to drop Nolan at a friend’s for the day. He’ll be fine. She’s got a girl about the same age.’

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Mrs Troubridge trilled, tottering off in search of more plant-life to kill.

Jacquie doubled back home and dashed up the stairs to the
second lounge, which they’d turned into a study. She checked her computer one more time in case an email had arrived from the wayward au pair. Nothing. Just a dazzling hotel offer in sunny Leighford. Jacquie couldn’t wait.

‘I’ve got him, Max,’ she called, lifting Nolan, plus bags and baggage, out of the nursery on the next floor up. He clung to her, looking loving and confused at the same time, as kids do until they’re about fourteen.

‘Is Pam all right about this?’ Maxwell emerged from the bathroom, his lower face a disturbing white with shaving cream. Nolan couldn’t remember his first Christmas. Perhaps Daddy was reinforcing the existence of Santa?

‘She’s fine,’ Jacquie told him. ‘We got on like a house on fire in the Maternity Unit. Look, I’ve no idea how today’s going to go. Pear-shaped if I know the first day of a murder enquiry. Can you get him on the way home?’

‘Of course,’ Maxwell came barrelling down the stairs, whirling the baby away from his mother and throwing him in the air. Nolan laughed hysterically every time. Maxwell rubbed noses with the boy. ‘So trusting, aren’t they?’ he grinned. ‘Little does he know I’m going to do that one day and just walk away.’

She hit him with a box of nappy liners. ‘He thinks you’re joking,’ she said. And she took the boy back. ‘Come on, little baby boy, don’t let that horrid, nasty man hurt you.’

Maxwell kissed Nolan on the head. ‘Be good, old man,’ he told him. ‘Do everything Auntie Pam tells you – persevere with the tinned macaroni cheese and remember, whatever little Zoë does,’ he lapsed into his Edward Fox out of
The Go Between,
‘it’s never a lady’s fault.
Ciao, bambino.
’

Jacquie’s eyes rolled skyward. ‘Robert de Niro’s waiting,’ she muttered, ‘talking Italian. You have a good day, Peter Maxwell.’

‘Likewise, half my soul,’ and he kissed her too.

And on the fifth day, God created Friday. Surely, nowhere in His Great Plan, however, was Eight Eff. They had the collective IQ of the spider plant that had somehow snuck into Maxwell’s office, the one that Mrs B grudgingly dusted once a term whether it needed it or not. But at least they hadn’t yet started to smell. That unique privilege belonged exclusively to Year 9, when hormonal changes brought on a sour odour that was probably acceptable when their ancestors still hunted the cave bear. By Year 10, they’d discovered Lynx with its ability to stop asthmatics in their tracks and a certain equilibrium of pong had settled on their lives.

So, it had to be admitted that Cromwell’s Irish policy left Eight Eff a
little
bewildered, but Maxwell’s impeccable Richard Harris gave it a bit of a lift and when he threatened to introduce more role play with him as the New Model Army and Eight Eff as the hapless inhabitants of Drogheda and Wexford, they sat up and took notice.

He’d just settled down to put the latest Self Evaluation document to good use by rolling it up as a fly swat when Nursie popped her head round his office door. She closed it quickly. ‘Morning, Max.’

Sylvia Matthews was a good looking woman in the
mid-morning
light. She wasn’t bad in any light, in fact, but Maxwell really loved her for her goss. She was that indispensable
digger-out
of unconsidered trifles that makes the world go round in
secondary schools, and quite probably everywhere else. There was a time when she had loved Peter Maxwell too, not in the sense he meant it, but for real. But he’d been blissfully unaware, married to his job, his cat, his model soldiers, his bike and had been oddly distant in a way Sylvia had never quite fathomed. Then there was Jacquie for him, and Guy for her, and the moment had gone forever. Perhaps it was just as well…

‘Morning, Matron Mine. Anything untoward?’

Maxwell and Sylvia Matthews went back a long way. He knew her moods as she knew his. She’d seen it all, heard it or occasionally done it herself. There wasn’t much she didn’t know about teenage kind. But today she looked a little rattled. ‘Steph Courtney,’ Sylvia said in hushed tones, perching on the arm of Maxwell’s indescribably uncomfortable L-shaped sofa, the one he’d half-inched from a Deputy Head, long gone, during a decorating spree some years back.

Maxwell frowned, closing his eyes. ‘Verbal Cat Score 114. Non-Verbal 109. Predicted History Grade B with a following wind. Nice kid. I used to teach her dad.’

‘I’m sure all that is spot on, Max,’ the School Nurse told him. ‘But she’s outside now. And she’s sort of scared.’

He looked across at her. ‘I don’t do Year Elevens, Nursie, you know that. Head of Sixth, that’s me. You know, Years Twelve and Thirteen. In September, I’ll be delighted to talk to her.’

‘Don’t be picky, Max,’ Sylvia scolded. ‘She’ll be Year Twelve as you say a couple of months’ time. And anyway, she asked for you. Says she’s seen a murder.’

The Head of Sixth Form was suddenly all ears. ‘You’d better show her in,’ he said.

Jim Astley had excelled himself. In times gone by, he’d have been taking advantage of the glorious weather to be up at the golf course, teeing-off with the County Set whose company he craved. Today, however, he did his job instead and got his head round how a man had died. Well, if truth be told, his game was a bit off these days. He was better at the old Nip and Tuck.

It may have been brilliant sunshine out there, with children who should have been at school splashing happily in the warm ripples of Willow Bay, and the patrons of the Leighford Bowls Club at the other end of the town and the age spectrum, gliding across matchless turf in their off-whites, dentures rattling in the gentle breeze, but in Jim Astley’s morgue, it was business as usual. Donald, a martyr to KFC and indeed any food that was fast, sat in a corner in his slightly snug white coat and noted down, for the record, what the great man was saying.

‘Caucasian male,’ Astley was peering down on the handiwork created by God, parents unknown, a killer and his own Y-shaped surgery. Bits of the Caucasian male lay in chrome vessels around the room, rather like a sanitised 13 Miller’s Court, the home of the luckless Mary Kelly when Jack the Ripper had finished with her back in the Autumn of Terror, 1888. Peter Maxwell was in Nursery School at the time, so at least he had an alibi for that one. ‘Age…’ Astley checked the teeth again and measured the thigh. Never do these things just once, his old mentor had told them. Do them as often as necessary to be sure. There’ll always be some bastard brief for the defence who’s paid to rattle you. ‘Forty to forty-five. Well-nourished to the point of obesity.’

Donald bridled a little, but Astley was unaware. Donald had long ago realised that the clinical definition of obesity was ludicrously wrong – Victoria Beckham was a borderline case if you believed the stats. ‘We’ve got some old scarring on the forearms and legs. Childhood, most probably. Tree-climbing sort of thing; nothing sinister. Most of this later scarring on the legs is post-mortem. He was dragged over rough ground before being placed in the body bag.’ Astley stopped in mid-probe. ‘Has that gone to the lab, by the way?’

‘This morning,’ Donald assured him. ‘Usual courier.’

‘Good, good. Adenoids the size of walnuts. I don’t think he’d have won any public-speaking competitions. Cause of death…’ Astley was turning the bloated, blackened head from side to side. ‘Strangulation by ligature. Viz and to wit…’

He waited for Donald’s response, ‘Er…silver crucifix. Also sent to the lab.’

‘Excellent. The marks of the chain links are very clear on the right, so something was used as a kind of tourniquet to twist the chain on the left. Hyoid bone,’ Astley’s scalpel hit something hard, ‘broken in two places.’ He straightened, much to the relief of his back. ‘This was a vicious one, Donald. He wouldn’t have gone quietly. Killed indoors, by the way.’

‘Oh?’ Donald paused. ‘How do we know?’

‘
We
know nothing, Donald,’ Astley told him, pursing his lips afterwards as he always did when Donald got too pushy. ‘
I
know because there are fibres all over the back of the body and legs. And he was naked when he died.’

‘Somebody dressed him?’ Donald asked.

‘Corpses don’t dress themselves,’ Astley looked over his
pince-nez at the man. ‘Not in my experience.’

‘So this is a sex thing, then?’

Astley screwed up his face. ‘He may have been sodomising every choir boy between here and Dungeness, Donald,’ he said. ‘But that’s not what we do here in pathology, is it? We don’t indulge in idle speculation. We leave that sort of amateurism to Henry Hall.’

Henry Hall sat in his office in Leighford Nick, a range of depositions in front of him. Out there, beyond the glass, his Murder Team had assembled, those hapless human beings who were going to have to put their own lives on hold for a time, while they worked out how the man at the Point lost his. They’d done this before, all of them. And as sure as God made little green men from Mars, they’d be doing it again one day. Hall looked at his SOCO photographs – the car park, empty in its black and white starkness apart from police vehicles. The little steps that led up to the lane that wound its way through the trees, the gnarled oaks blown and stunted by the winter winds. The sudden dips and hollows in the sandy soil where the short, rabbit-chewed grass vied with spurge and sea pinks, all curiously grey in the photography. One wistful vista could have come straight out of
South Coast Visitor,
a moody shot of the sunset over the sea and the eroded sandstone of the cliffs. Then, the serious business began – the close-ups of a dead man, in ghastly colour this time; the arm that Patches had half dug up; the torso with its cheap jewellery and ruptured throat; the legs uncovered by SOCO. All of it so badly done, so shallow and so near to the cliffs. So near to the cliffs and so near to the road.

Why was that?

There’s something about an Incident Room. Oh, they’d upgraded themselves in terms of technology. When Henry Hall was a green, wet-behind-the-ears copper, there were shoe boxes where now there were computers. At least shoe boxes didn’t shut down suddenly for no reason. It was almost impossible – unless you were
very
peculiar – to complete an illegal operation on them. And they hardly ever needed defragging. That said, they were kind of slow.
Cross-referencing
a car number plate could take weeks. As for
tyre-tracks
, forget it. But it wasn’t the technology that Hall noticed every time he set one up; it was the tension, the air of expectancy, of urgency. In the United States of America, a homicide takes place every three minutes; that’s how long it takes to boil a very runny egg in Leighford. Now that was a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that murder was rare in this little seaside resort along the South Coast. And bad in that Murder Teams were rusty and had to be brought up to speed quickly – instantly, in fact, before the trail went cold.
Forty-eight
hours was the allotted time to find a murderer. After that, it wasn’t impossible, but the odds lengthened uncomfortably.

Bringing up to speed was the DCI’s job and Henry Hall
stepped out of his office to do it. The hubbub died down as he took centre stage.

‘Yes, George.’

George Bronson was the new DI on the block. ‘New’ was a bit of a misnomer actually, because his dad used to be the desk man at Leighford back in the Seventies and George had served his time in the Thames Valley force before too many corny old jokes about Inspector Morse had made him leave. He hadn’t got round to changing his name, however, so people still called him Charles behind his back. Some of them meant the Polish-American actor of
Magnificent Seven
and
Death Wish
fame (actually, only Peter Maxwell); others (that was everybody else) the moustachioed thug-turned-celebrity of Her Majesty’s detention centres various. There was one thing in common; George was built like a brick shithouse.

‘Dr Astley’s working on the body as we speak,’ the DI told everybody. ‘Preliminary reports suggest our boy is
middle-aged
and was strangled with his own jewellery.’

There were a few camp ‘coo-ies’ until Hall’s expressionless stare silenced them.

‘We don’t have an ID at the moment, but we don’t think he’s local.’

‘Why not?’ Hall wanted to know. A Murder Team had a job to do, but Hall saw them as learning exercises too – keep everybody in the loop.

‘No missing persons reported, guv,’ Bronson told them all. ‘Astley’s rough guess at this stage is that the body had been in the ground between two and three weeks. In that time we’ve had three missing persons across the manor – one of them’s turned up and the other two are the wrong sex and the wrong age.’

‘Anything wider?’ Hall asked. ‘Who’s on inter-force?’

‘That’ll be me, guv,’ Sheila Kindling was a bright young thing, newly seconded. There was a book going round among the lads on whether she was a natural blonde or not. Benny Palister had drawn the straw to find out, but the date hadn’t gone wonderfully and Benny found himself going home alone after the first course. He was still trying to work out, three months on, what he could have said to upset her. Surely there was nothing offensive in ‘How do you like it?’ this far beyond the Millennium? The woman must have been brought up in a convent.

‘We’re making the usual enquiries country-wide,’ Sheila told them, tucking her biro behind her right ear as she usually did when the spot-light was on her. ‘Nothing conclusive so far.’

‘Well, it’s early days,’ Hall acknowledged. ‘Jacquie, you’ve talked to witnesses.’

Jacquie Carpenter sat in the second row. ‘Yes, guv. Nothing else known at this time. A middle-aged couple – the Downers – found the body. We’re working on crowd elimination, but by the time the scene was sealed off, there were quite a few of them.’

‘Yes,’ Hall scowled, ‘and I’m not a happy bunny about that, people. Rubber-neckers we can do without. First, because following up on them wastes our time. And second, because they’re likely to have compromised the crime scene. That was sloppy. George, have a quiet word with the ice-cream man – what’s his name? Luigi? Let him know we don’t approve. Next time,’ he lashed them all with his cold, vacant stare, ‘and there will
be
a next time, somewhere, somehow, I want that
eliminated. Right, compromised or not – Geoff, what have we got from SOCO?’

Geoff Hare was Jacquie’s opposite number on the
non-distaff
side. He was thirty something, rather good looking in a Peter Lorre sort of way, though, as you’d expect, his eyes were a
little
on the poppy side and he didn’t have much of a thatch. ‘How scientific do you want this, guv?’ he asked.

‘Just the basics, Geoff,’ Hall told him. ‘We don’t want to confuse anybody.’

A few chuckles. That was good. Everybody was up. Everybody was alert.

‘Right,’ Hare crossed to the whiteboard, ‘Tom?’

The AV man switched on the gubbins and a beam of light threw a map of Dead Man’s Point onto the screen.

‘For the benefit of anybody new to the area – that’ll be you, Mr Bronson…’

‘Oh, ha!’ the DI grunted.

‘…here we are. Leighford Seafront. The Shingle. Willow Bay. And here,’ he tapped it with a finger, ‘Dead Man’s Point. So called because…’

‘Spare us the History lesson,’ Hall checked him, looking straight at Jacquie, she who was living with the oldest giver of History lessons in the world.

‘OK,’ Hare smiled. A second image flicked onto the screen, this time a photograph. ‘This is the view from the rocks below,’ he said. ‘It’s a fifty- or sixty-foot drop.’

‘Didn’t a bloke go over there a few years back?’ somebody asked.

‘Suicide,’ Hall remembered. ‘Widower couldn’t cope any more.’

‘Sad,’ somebody else commented.

‘Geoff,’ Hall wanted them all on the here and now, whatever local reputation the Point had.

Another image hit the whiteboard. ‘This is an aerial shot,’ Hare said. ‘Sorry about the quality. New camera on board the chopper apparently. Leaves something to be desired in the crispness department.’ He helped them out with his pointing finger. ‘Here’s the road, obviously, Ringer’s Hill and the Point car park. Then, we’ve got the trees to the right and that leads to…’

The next photograph was clearer, taken as it was from ground level, ‘…the steps and the path through said trees. Then…’ the slide show went on with a clinical thoroughness, ‘we’re out onto the coastal path proper. SOCO tell me we’ve got sandstone cliffs here, falling away and pretty eroded.’

‘Lot of work there last year,’ George Bronson remembered. ‘Couldn’t take the mother-in-law because they were having to shore it up.’

‘Going to throw her over, were you, Inspector?’ somebody chipped in from the back.

Bronson didn’t turn as the chuckles spread. ‘When I do, Jenkins, you can accompany her on the way down. Just to make sure she’s all right.’

Hare waited for the noise to subside. For once, Hall didn’t intervene. Let it happen. Unless it breaks concentration, leads in the wrong direction, let it happen. It builds a team, cements relationships, does the job. Let it happen. ‘Sandstone cliffs, so the soil is very light. Easy to dig, but conversely, holes fill up quickly with sand.’

‘So what are you saying, Geoff?’ Jacquie asked. ‘A two man job, the burial?’

‘It could have been,’ Hare conceded. ‘Whatever, it wasn’t well done.’

‘What do you conclude from that, Geoff?’ Hall asked, sipping his by-now-lukewarm coffee.

‘Done in a hurry, I’d say, guv. Foxes may have dislodged enough earth for the Downers’ dog to find the body. Dr Astley will tell us if any fingers are missing.’

‘Early June,’ Hall mused. ‘Height of the season. Who’s on this? How busy is the Point at this time of year?’

‘Difficult to say, guv,’ Benny Palister opened his mouth for the first time that morning. ‘Tourist Board don’t keep stats like that. It’s not your lovers’ lane type place.’

‘I can confirm that,’ Hare chipped in, to a chorus of ‘Aye ayes’ from the Back Row Element. ‘SOCO found nothing of what my old Forensics Tutor at the Shop used to call “the detritus of lovemaking”. No knickers, johnnies or even used tissues.’

‘No hayfever sufferers, then?’ somebody wanted to know.

‘No,’ Palister went on. ‘The path goes to the east for nearly three miles out towards Littlehampton. To the west not much more than a mile before it hits the Shingle and terminates at Willow Bay. And the going gets rough to the east. Serious climbing needs to be done along the Middens. Just before you get to Star Rock. Not for the faint-hearted.’

‘You could do most of it, though?’ Hall checked. ‘Any age? Moderate disabilities?’

By now the ciggies were out. The addicts in any workplace thought more clearly when their nerves weren’t frayed. And the Incident Room was the one place where smoking was allowed, by order of the General Officer Commanding, Henry Hall.

‘We’re still faced with the fact,’ Jacquie said, ‘that we don’t know how busy the place gets. But,’ she was looking at the photo still on the screen in the thickening smog of the ciggie smoke, ‘it’s damn near the road.’

‘Exactly,’ Hall nodded, pointing at her with an approving finger. ‘Let’s go with that, people. From the shallow grave of the man with no name to the car park is…what…two hundred yards? Three?’

‘I paced it at near four, guv,’ Hare said.

‘Four hundred yards.’ Hall stood corrected. ‘All right. Conclusions?’

‘Mr Nobody was brought by car,’ somebody said.

‘When?’ Hall pushed them.

‘Early June – 4
^th
, 5
^th
? Night.’

‘Night,’ Hall echoed. ‘Who’s got an almanac? We can’t be certain about the date until Astley’s done his stuff, but we can find out what the moon was doing on the likely dates and what time it got dark. And get on to the Met Office; Sheila, that’s your job. Sun, rain, hail – I want to know what the weather was like in the first two weeks in June.’

‘Bloody hot, guv,’ someone intervened. ‘Same as now.’

‘Let’s not get casual on this one,’ Hall warned them. ‘We’re doing it by the book and we’re doing it precisely. George,’ he swivelled to his DI, ‘get over to the lab, will you? It may be Friday afternoon, but I don’t want a Friday afternoon job from them. Nor do I want us all to be kicking our heels for two days. When you’ve chivvied Luigi, chivvy them along too, will you?’

Bronson smiled. ‘Chivvy is my middle name, guv,’ he said.

‘Murder, she said.’

Peter Maxwell was sprawled on his settee, his son sprawled across his chest. Opposite them, Jacquie Carpenter was grateful to put her feet up on the pouffé.

‘Come on, Max.’ She shook her head. ‘Delusional. Teenage girls from here back to Salem, Massachusetts. You know the score.’

‘Indeed I do,’ he snorted. ‘In fact, heart of darkness,
I
told
you.
You may have attended the half hour lecture on hormonal imbalance in the pubescent female, but I have to work with the little buggers – oh, saving your presence, old man,’ and he put his hands belatedly over the baby’s ears. ‘You thought Salem was a car boot until I took you on that educational canter through the History of Witchcraft for Beginners.’

‘How bloody dare you!’ she trilled, her eyes big. ‘You don’t have a monopoly on female delinquency and if you weren’t hiding behind the kid, I’d throw something at you.’

‘All right,’ he laughed. ‘I’ll concede you know what you’re talking about most of the time. So why don’t you buy this one?’

She sipped her coffee. ‘Why do you?’

‘That’s it,’ he muttered, tutting. ‘That’s it. Answer a question with a question. All right. The bottom line is that I suppose I trust Steph Courtney. Sure, I’ve known lots of liars in my time, practitioners of the Big Whoppa theory. It’s usually to gain attention or to get them out of trouble. And yes, you’re right, it’s usually girls.’

‘Steph Courtney’s not the type to be in trouble, then?’ Jacquie checked.

Maxwell shook his head. ‘She forgot her exercise book in Year Seven once. Inconsolable.’

‘Come on, Max,’ Jacquie urged him. ‘She’s in Year Eleven now. On Study Leave, aren’t they? I dare say there are a few distractions out there for her. You know, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll.’

‘Oh, probably,’ Maxwell conceded. ‘I’m not saying she’s Mary Poppins. But the fact that she’s temporarily off roll at the moment points in the not guilty direction. Why should she come into school – to see me in particular – when there’s no need to?’

‘Attention-seeking.’ Jacquie was playing devil’s advocate, but she couldn’t resist a certain smugness. She did it so well.

‘Balanced girl,’ Maxwell countered. ‘Only child, so there are no siblings to put her nose out of joint. Two parent family. I taught the dad. Seem to be loving. At least, they’ve been together since Steph joined the school.’

‘That’s sort of superficial,’ Jacquie felt bound to say. ‘How do you know Daddy isn’t playing away? Just ’cos he didn’t do it in your History lessons. Mummy hasn’t got a cocaine habit? Both of them aren’t into Satanic Abuse?’

Maxwell looked at her. ‘It’s obviously being so positive keeps you cheerful,’ he said.

Jacquie laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Max, but you do take my point.’

Maxwell did. He’d been at the chalkface now, man and probationer, since old Socrates used to walk about Greece talking to people in some vague belief he was educating them. No, you never knew kids well. You daren’t. ‘Don’t get involved’, a wise old Head of Department had once told him
when he, Maxwell, was still wet behind the ears. They can only fire you for two things – fingers in the till or in the knickers. Oh, he’d known colleagues who’d dated pupils, even married them in some cases. But that was then. It all seemed like a different world now. No, it wasn’t wise to close a door with you and a student on one side of it, for fear of accusations of rape. And that was just from the boys.

‘I didn’t think you taught her,’ Jacquie went on. ‘So why you?’