Maxwell’s Ride (5 page)

‘Protocol?’ she blurted. ‘What sort of protocol was it when you told me to make some coffee at yours yesterday? What sort of message did that give to that bastard Bartholomew – who is no more “mine” by the way, than you are.’

‘Ah.’ Maxwell’s relative silence said it all. The verbal swordsman reduced to quietude.

‘Oh, Max, I’m sorry.’ She was quieter, calmer, her anger controlled, her fire out. ‘That was unkind. You know … you know how difficult my job is. You’ve been …’

‘In the way?’

‘No.’ She was quick to correct him. ‘No, not that. But they don’t understand. About you and me …’

7 don’t understand about you and me,’ he confessed.

She bit her lip, fighting off the army of emotions inside her. She looked at him, this man old enough to be her father. She felt, as she always felt in Maxwell’s company, her legs turning to water, her throat tightening and her heart crying out to him. But this was new. This was different. Maxwell had been involved before, nosing, asking questions, the Sherlock Holmes of Leighford. Now, it was personal. It was family. For the sake of the girls, he was scared. Not for himself. But for them.

‘One question,’ he told her. ‘Just answer me that and I’ll go away. For good.’

‘For good?’ she repeated mechanically as though someone had just read out her death sentence before the firing squad.

He nodded.

‘What’s the question?’

‘Larry Warner, the dead man …’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you got a motive?’

She looked to her right, through the windscreen, to where an old couple were trudging home with their shopping bags. And to her left, through the back window where the street was empty and the trees heavy with their May blossom.

‘He was a forensic auditor.’

‘You what?’ That was a new one on Maxwell.

‘An accountant. A financial adviser’s financial adviser. That’s what we’re working on at the moment.’

‘Why … ?’

‘You said one question, Max,’ she reminded him.

He looked at her. And he sighed. ‘You’re right, Policewoman Carpenter.’ He hadn’t called her that in a long time, not since they’d first met and she was a little afraid of him and he’d kept her at arm’s length. Then he was out of the car and gone, trotting off down the blossomed avenue, remembering where he’d left his bike. He didn’t look back. And as the tears started, she was glad of that.

He sat in the lounge, head lolling on his own sofa, pondering that he must do something about that crack in his ceiling. He heard the rattle in the lock, the whistling gypsy that was his cleaning lady pattering about in his hall downstairs.

‘It’s only me,’ he heard her growl in a passable Harry Enfield.

‘Afternoon, Mrs B.,’ he called back.

‘Oh, bloody hell, don’t I know it. Sorry, Mr Maxwell, I’d have been here sooner, but it’s my Wilfred’s piles. You know how he is. Where’s them girls you’ve got staying with you?’

‘Of course you would. Don’t I just! Out for the day.’ He well was used to Mrs B.’s barrage. She was the Mrs Mopp of Leighford High School, probably quite an attractive woman once, but the years of scraping chewing gum off the furniture had taken their toll. Heart of gold was Mrs B., straight out of ITMA. She probably ‘did’ for Tommy Handley in any number of ways.

‘Ooh,’ she appeared at the top of his stairs, unwrapping several layers of clothes, for all it was a sunlit Whitsun day. ‘You don’t wanna let ’em go out, ducks. How old did you say they was?’

‘Tiffany’s fifteen, going on forty. Lucy’s thirteen. But don’t worry, they’re with Sylvia.’

‘What, that Sylvia Matthews?’ Mrs B. was digging around in her overall pocket for the first of her many ciggies of the day. ‘Well, that’s all right, then.’ She looked slyly at her employer. ‘Somebody oughta make a honest woman of her, you know.’

‘They should, Mrs B.,’ he agreed and missed completely the moment as her eyes rolled heavenwards. For a bloke with a Cambridge degree, Mr Maxwell was pretty bleeding thick, really.

‘’Ere, what about this bloke, then?’ She threw a newspaper at him.

‘What bloke?’

‘This whatsisface … Larry Warner. It’s in there.’

‘Yes, shocking.’ Maxwell didn’t want to mix it with Mrs B. or he’d have been there, swapping non sequiturs all day. He was wrestling with what he knew already, trying to sift the situation for himself. Her input would only cloud the issue.

‘I only ran into him the other day.’ She pottered off into the kitchen. ‘Mind if I have a cuppa first? Only my bleeding feet are something else.’

Maxwell was with her, leaning on the doorframe, frowning. ‘You did? No, not at all. I’m sure they are.’

‘Well, of course. Up at the school. It’s not every day you know someone what’s murdered, is it?’

‘At Leighford High?’ Maxwell checked.

‘Yeah.’ She filled the kettle with a vicious burst of tapwater. ‘Buggered if I know what he does there, but you must have seen him. It’s in the paper, look. Have a look. You’ll know him as soon as you see his photo.’

Maxwell did. He ducked back to the settee, rustled his way through the Advertiser’s letters about the proposed new marina and the Tottingleigh Whitsun Carnival and found the offending article. He scanned it quickly, hoping his lips weren’t moving at the same time. There was the photograph. A slim, weasel-eyed man with a small moustache.

‘Course,’ Mrs B. was clattering with the mugs. ‘You probably wouldn’t know him. You’ve usually gone by the time he’s around. He’s always with that Mrs Lessing, the cow.’

‘The cow’ was a fairly mild epithet for Deirdre Lessing. And to be fair, it didn’t really do her justice. Devil-bitch from Hell, the Morgana Le Fay of Leighford High, She Who Must Be Obeyed, Maxwell’s Medusa – not even these handles, all of them Maxwell’s, could come close. She was the Senior Mistress at Leighford High School, with a brief to comfort hysterical girls. So in what context did she know Larry Warner? Had he perhaps, in the words of the late Noel Coward, been her lunch?

‘Got to go, Mrs B.’ Maxwell was already hunting for his cycle clips, the full dress ones he only wore when he wanted to impress. ‘Can you feed Metternich for me?’

Who to?’ she muttered when he’d gone.

They’d built Leighford High in the ‘sixties, when all was optimism and windy corridors and flat roofs that collected the rain and the seagull shit. Kidbrooke was a flagship school and the Labour party was telling Mr and Mrs Nonetoobright that of course their little Duane could go to Oxford. To be fair, the views from the Year 12/13 Common Room were magnificent, out over sleepy Leighford town to one side, the sweep of The Shingle and Willow Bay to the other. Due south, across the grey and shifting sea was Abroad, the ‘bloody place’ that Maxwell warned his A-level historians about. Not that there was much risk of them ever setting foot on the soil of France. When they travelled, it was either to Lanzarote or Orlando. Did American culture have nothing to commend it but Walt Disney? When they left school, of course, assorted A levels under their belts, they did the pilgrimage to Ibiza, the Twentieth Century’s Grand Tour, to pray at the shrine of St Gazza.

Deidre Lessing was ex-directory, like all hated teachers.

She hadn’t been, in fact, until that glorious day, about which Maxwell still chuckled, when a reprobate in Year 10 had made an obscene phone call, having reversed the charges first. Maxwell pondered long and hard whether to give the kid a bollocking or a medal. He knew she lived somewhere off the park, in the more civilized area of Tottingleigh, out of brick-range of the unspeakable Barlichway Estate, but that wasn’t narrowing it down enough.

So Leighford High it had to be. He guessed the place would be open and he wouldn’t have to use the side-door key no one knew he had. Schools in the holidays quickly become building sites, workmen in overalls wandering about calling incomprehensibly to each other ‘einer liner’, to which the impenetrable answer always seems to be ‘burr’. Only now they do it with mobile phones.

One of them grunted to Maxwell as he leaned White Surrey on Leighford’s steps and bounded up them two at a time to the foyer. Exam timetables flapped in the afternoon breeze and a pile of unsorted mail lay on the Reception counter. You couldn’t get the staff any more. Already, there was a phone ringing. Probably some parent begging the school to reopen early. The door to the inner office was open and Maxwell knew exactly where Thingy, the girl on the switchboard, kept the private addresses of staff.

‘It’s half term, Max,’ a voice like cold steel hit him in the small of the back. ‘You’re not supposed to be here this week.’

He turned, smiling. She’d saved him a trip. ‘You know how it is, Deirdre,’ he said. ‘Just couldn’t keep away.’ He looked at his bête noire, the perfect cross in fact between Bette Midler and Bette Davies. Except she had Hitler’s eyes, blue and ice – although where she kept them, no one knew. ‘Doing a bit of senior mistressing?’

She ignored him, sweeping past like a galleon in full sail. ‘The Theatre Bid,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’ Maxwell wasn’t fluent in Sanskrit.

‘Surely you know about the Theatre Bid?’

‘Dame Judi may be a bit long in the tooth,’ Maxwell conceded, ‘but “bid” is a little demeaning, don’t you think?’

‘I sometimes wonder if you’re a part of this school at all, Max.’ She picked up a fat folder lying on the secretary’s desk.

‘My dear,’ he beamed, ‘I
am
Leighford High. Don’t you know the hymn?’ And here he broke into baritone song. ‘“Peter Maxwell is our corner stone; on him alone we build.”’

‘I think that would be blasphemy in an earlier age,’ she said.

‘“Blasphemy, blasphemy”,’ he parodied the late, great Kenneth Williams, ‘“they’ve all got it blasphemy”.’

‘Why is it,’ she turned to face him, ‘that I don’t always know what you’re talking about?’

He looked at her carefully, searching the face. ‘Alzheimer’s?’ he suggested.

She whirled away. ‘See you next Monday, Max.’

‘Actually, Deirdre,’ he was at her elbow, trotting with her down the darkened main corridor, ‘it was you I came to see.’

She paused, an eyebrow raised. ‘Why?’ she felt bound to ask.

‘Your ravishing beauty, your womanly body, the heaven- scent of your …’

‘Animal!’ she snarled and slammed into her office.

Morgana Le Fay ought to have lived in a cave with writhing snakes and sulphur smoke and dead men’s eyes. Instead, there was a desk, a VDU, some spring flowers in a vase and a rather awful cuddly toy.

‘But seriously, Max,’ she stood waiting, deciding whether to offer him a seat or the door.

‘But seriously, Deirdre,’ he took the former, lounging so that his cycle clips dazzled in the sun, ‘Larry Warner.’

‘Dreadful,’ she shuddered. ‘Positively dreadful.’

‘I was there.’ Maxwell’s Max Boyce impression was utterly lost on Deirdre.

‘When he was killed? My God.’ She had sat down now, beyond her desk so that a few feet of County Hall compressed cardboard stood between her and Maxwell.

‘How well did you know him?’

‘Well, we worked on the Theatre Bid together – that is, the technical side.’

‘I’m sorry, Deirdre, you’re going to have to explain all this, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, really.’ The Senior Mistress tossed aside a Biro like the discarded husk of a man. ‘It was announced in the Weekly Bulletin.’

‘Never read it.’ Maxwell was proud of the fact.

‘Discussed at the Year Heads’ Meeting.’

‘Fast asleep.’

‘Aired at the Staff Meeting.’

‘Wasn’t there,’ he confessed. ‘Pressure of work.’

‘Max,’ she sighed. ‘You’re impossible.’

‘Ah, but you wouldn’t have me any other way.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Maxwell, I wouldn’t have you at all.’

‘Touché, Senior Mistress mine,’ he bowed in his chair. ‘Now, Larry Warner.’

She sighed again. ‘In the beginning,’ she began, ‘there was LMS.’

‘London, Midland and Scottish – a fine railway company,’ he nodded sagely.

‘Local Management of Schools. Really, Max, if you don’t want to know …’

‘Sorry, Deirdre.’ He raised his hands in supplication. ‘It’s been one of those half terms one way and another. Sniper’s bullets whizzing all around one.’

Deirdre was horrified. ‘How can you be so flippant?’ she shook her head.

Maxwell was about to tell her, but he needed to know what Deirdre knew and in his experience, she was the sort who would suddenly clam up or change the subject. ‘LMS,’ he repeated. ‘Basically, we have to find our own cash.’

‘Basically, yes. Or at least be responsible for it.’

‘And the supply budget is currently half a grand in the red and it’s only May.’

‘How did you know that?’ she bridled.

He tapped the side of his nose. ‘I have friends in low places,’ he told her, ‘and a wine glass held against the First Deputy’s wall works wonders.’

Deirdre Lessing never knew when to believe Mad Max. It was a trump card he played again and again. ‘We have to watch the pennies in the way County Hall used to in the good old days.’

‘Ah, but Deirdre,’ he smiled at her, ‘a slip of a thing like you can’t possibly remember the good old days.’

‘All right, then.’ She was on form this afternoon. ‘Something my mother told me about. Has it escaped your attention that we are trying to build a school theatre?’

‘Harold Wiseman,’ Maxwell clicked his fingers.

‘Exactly. He talked to the staff in January and to the sixth form in March.’

‘Bit of a pompous old fart, I thought.’

‘Perhaps,’ Deirdre pursed her lips, ‘but he’s a rich fart and owns a theatre.’

‘The Wyndham in Bournemouth. Ellen Terry played there.’

‘So have a good many other people. Harold is a big wheel in Charts.’

‘He sings as well?’ Maxwell was impressed. Universal men were rare these days. In fact he thought he was the last of the breed.

‘Not
the
Charts,’ Deirdre fumed. ‘Charts. Charity Arts – it’s the Arts Council without the paperwork. Oh, really, Max, are you a
total
philistine?’

Maxwell smiled. He knew that Deirdre’s alma mater was Salford. ‘Total,’ he sighed. ‘So, Wiseman is giving us his expertise?’

‘He is,’ Deirdre enthused, ‘and it’s
very
exciting. You’ll need to talk to David Boston about the plans. We may even, eventually, perform in the Millennium Dome.’