Maxwell's Grave (12 page)

‘Get away.’ George came from Romford. ‘What for?’

Julian looked at him. ‘To have sex with the corpses. It’s what they get off on, these people. Necromancers, they’re called. People who have affairs with dead women. Makes your hair curl, don’t it? I seen this documentary on Channel Five…’

If he’d had any hair, George might have agreed with him. ‘But the corpses are bloody Saxon, ain’t they?’ The senior security man was bringing all his powers of logic into play. ‘That’s like the olden times. Can’t be much fun in that, surely? Where would you put your todger, for a start?’

‘He’s on the move.’ Julian snatched at his oppo’s sleeve.

The dark shadow was flitting across the site now, the long coat like a cloak flying behind him.

‘Not windy, are you, Julian?’ George nudged his number two.

‘Me?’ he said quickly. ‘No fucking way. You tooled?’

He saw the barrels of George’s Purdey gleam under his coat. ‘I can’t actually fire this thing you know,’ George reminded him. ‘There’d be bloody hell to pay.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Julian said. ‘But
he
don’t. Let’s do it.’ And he stood up, bellowing. ‘Oi. You!’

And the shadow paused for a second, looking up at the equally dark figures on the ridge.

George and Julian crawled down the ridges, stumbling over gravel heaps, sliding on shale, scattering spades and
trowels. George, shotgun levelled, bounced over the guy ropes of the main tent and hurtled round the corner, only to collide with Julian, running from the other angle.

‘Where’d he go?’ Julian hissed, his left buttock giving him gyp where he’d wrenched it skirting the ash grove.

‘I thought you had him,’ George spun round, barrels at the ready.

‘I thought you did.’

George straightened, smoothed down his tie and broke the gun over his arm. ‘Well, that’s it, then.’

‘Yeah,’ Julian agreed, wondering where he’d dropped his fag, then louder, ‘Well, he’d better watch it, whoever he is. We’ll have the dogs with us tomorrow night.’

‘Bloody right,’ George confirmed, suddenly as windy as his oppo. Whoever it was had vanished like a ghost. ‘Got a ciggie, Julian?’

Chapter Eight

Peter Maxwell had occasionally been summoned to the Senior Management Team meetings they held every Thursday afternoon. That was when there was some post 16 initiative in the offing and they needed his unique input. They needed it again now, but it had nothing to do with post 16. The meetings were held, not in the cubby-hole belonging to Bernard Ryan, nor the bone-strewn lair of Dierdre Lessing, but in the nasty, cheap, bright office of James Diamond, BSc, MEd Some of the more acceptable examples of GCSE Art tried desperately to liven the bland wallpaper. Derry Irvine it was not.

James Diamond looked greyer than usual, of a piece with his suit. There was an untouched glass of water on the oval table in front of him.

‘The crux of the matter, Max,’ he was saying, ‘is John Fry. We don’t know what to do.’

‘Supply cover, Headmaster,’ Maxwell spread his arms, and got up to go. What could be simpler? If only all of life’s little problems could be solved so easily. ‘Will that be all?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Maxwell!’ Bernard Ryan snapped. ‘We don’t need your flippancy.’ The Deputy scowled at the Head of Sixth Form that he’d hated on sight.

‘Exactly,’ Maxwell smiled, doing up his jacket and
wrinkling
his nose at the Deputy Head. ‘I expect, somewhere deep down, you have plenty of your own.’

‘No, Max,’ Diamond stopped him a look of desperation on his face. ‘Please. Wait a minute. Look, you…you’ve had more experience of this sort of thing than most of us. We…we need your help, dammit.’

Maxwell looked at them, denizens of the oval office. Indeed they did. Bernard Ryan had an unerring nose for
making the wrong decision and doing it without style. When Maxwell had lost it with the man last year and called him an inept Machiavellian in a governors’ meeting, he’d had to go away and look up ‘inept’ as well as ‘Machiavellian’. Every year he didn’t do the timetable – the timetable did him. Dierdre Lessing coiled in her lair,
slithering
over the bones of dead men. Countless careers had crashed as a result of her bitching, not a few good men frozen by her basilisk stare. And then, there was James Diamond himself. Where do you start with a man like that? The truth? James Diamond couldn’t handle the truth. Maxwell was nearly fifty-six; he just didn’t have the time.

The Head of Sixth Form sat back down again, opening the jacket, coiling one leg over the other, like a rather macho Quentin Crisp. ‘How much do you know?’ he asked.

‘Dierdre?’ Diamond delegated.

‘No one has seen John since last Wednesday,’ the Gorgon said, hating herself and Diamond for having to treat Maxwell as an equal rather than the oik he so plainly was. ‘He rang in to leave a message on the school answerphone. Said he wouldn’t be in on Thursday. His back was playing up again. He left work for his classes.’

‘And that’s it?’ Maxwell checked. He couldn’t remember when
he’d
set work for his classes last.

‘When we had no word on Monday morning of this week, Emma rang his home. There was no reply.’ Emma’s real name was Thingee, as Maxwell knew full well. Her oppo, Harriet, who manned the school switchboard in the afternoons, was called Thingee Two. It wasn’t rocket
science
.

‘He’s got a mobile, presumably?’ It was a fair
assumption
; everybody but Peter Maxwell did. He
had
carried one
in the past, just to please Jacquie, but suddenly, one
summer
, he’d rebelled. He’d thrown it into the sea in a fit of Luddism. And, do you know, he didn’t miss the damn thing at all.

‘Emma doesn’t have a list of mobile numbers – not unless there’s a trip involved and then somebody usually takes the school mobile. You know all this, Max.’ Dierdre hated Peter Maxwell with a passion, hated him because she knew he knew where the bodies were buried and had a long list of her incompetences which at any moment might appear in an after-dinner speech or the front page of the
TES
or the
News of the World
. And she hated him, too, because he was always so bloody
right
.

‘Yes,
I
do,’ he told her. ‘I just wonder how much the
Advertiser
knows as we speak.’

‘Exactly,’ mumbled Diamond. ‘That was my next gambit. What do we tell the Press?’

‘Nothing until they ask,’ Maxwell said. ‘Have they asked?’

‘Not yet,’ Ryan told him. ‘But it’s only a matter of time.’

‘Prepare a Press statement against the day, then,’ Maxwell said. ‘Nothing committal. It’s all in the hands of the police, blah; in whom you have the utmost confidence, etc etc and as matters are sub judice, your hands are tied.’

‘Is it that simple?’ Diamond asked, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it.

‘For the moment,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘One bridge at a time, Headmaster. We’ve got a long way to go and must be steady. Is there anything else?’

‘Yes, Max,’ Diamond looked nervously at his colleagues. ‘Yes, there is. Look, ever since the incident in the Red House all those years ago, you’ve been involved in…shall we say, unpleasant incidents. I…
we
would like you to get
involved in this one.’

‘Involved, Headmaster?’ Maxwell frowned, leaning
forward
and stroking his chin. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Yes, you do, Max,’ Dierdre snapped, tired of fencing with the man. ‘It must be obvious even to you that John Fry has run off with this wretched tart in Year Eleven. We’re all of us anxious to keep the whole sordid business under wraps. You have a certain…rapport with lowlife like Fry. I never liked him.’

‘Let me understand this, Headmaster,’ Maxwell leaned further forward still in the half-circle of no-hopers. ‘You want me to find John Fry?’

‘Yes,’ muttered Diamond. ‘Whatever classes you’ve got tomorrow, Max, we’ll cover them. Tell the others you’re on some conference or other. It’s half-term next week…’

‘So I won’t need cover,’ Maxwell beamed, clicking his
fingers
and leaning back. ‘Timing’s damn-near perfect, Headmaster. What with budgetary restrictions and so on. Well done!’

‘Maxwell!’ growled Diamond. ‘Do you want me to beg?’

‘Do you have so little faith in the police?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked. ‘They
do
have rather superior resources to mine.’

‘The most vital thing,’ Diamond said slowly, ‘is to keep this in-house. Eleanor Fry is dead already. We don’t want any more tragedies.’

Maxwell nodded, looking at each of them, making them wait.

‘Well, Max?’ Diamond was the first to break the silence.

‘How about it?’

‘I’ll need access to Annette Choker’s file.’

‘Annette?’ Ryan repeated.

‘She’ll be easier to find than John Fry,’ Maxwell said.

‘What if they’re not together?’ Diamond asked.

‘Then we’ll have to ask ourselves a whole new batch of questions, won’t we?’ Maxwell said. He saw himself out.

They built the Barlichway in the Sixties when the Four were Fab, Harold Wilson was at Number Ten and Peter Maxwell was a struggling undergraduate at Cambridge. It would be fifteen years before the social engineers who plan towns for a living realized that flat roofs, high-rise and miles of concrete created more problems than they solved. And by then, it was too late.

Peter Maxwell wheeled into Pear Court as the sun died below the Leighford gasworks. Some wag had painted
letters
in front of the title – Despear Court. That was rather good; Maxwell wished he’d thought of that. Come to think of it, he probably had. A knot of hooligans in baseball caps and trainers with undone laces were kicking a can around the gutter, shouting obscenities to each other. It could have been worse, Maxwell reasoned; they could have been
kicking
the cat.

‘I hope you boys have done your homework,’ he called.

For a moment, they stopped, looking at the old bugger in disbelief. It couldn’t be him? Could it? Same bike. Same stupid hat. Christ, it was an’all. Then they wandered across to him. ‘Mr Maxwell. Gonna buy me a pint?’

‘You can buy me one, Roger, in three years time when you’re old enough.’ Roger had been a geezer in the cradle. He was not of an age, but for all time.

‘Come off it, Mr Maxwell,’ another said. ‘Tit’s been in pubs since he was this big, ain’t you, Tit?’

Roger nodded proudly. Bearing in mind where his mate had raised his hand above the ground, that would have made him an alcoholic at three. Nothing absurd about that
when you’re fourteen and your IQ is the same.

‘Mr Maxwell ain’t here for the good of his healf.’ Norman was the Einstein of the Pear Court Mob.

‘Sensitive of you to understand, Norman,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Annette Choker.’

Roger pushed his fingers down his throat.

‘That’s a
little
unkind, Roger,’ Maxwell frowned.

‘Well, she lives up there,’ Norman said, pointing to a
balcony
that ran, draped with washing, high above. ‘With her mum.’

‘That’s Number 61?’ Maxwell checked.

‘Yeah, but she’s done a runner,’ Roger said. ‘Gone off with that w… Mr Fry in Business.’

‘You know that for a fact?’ Maxwell asked him.

‘Near as dammit,’ Roger assured him.

‘Common knowledge around Leighford High…’ Norman said.

‘Yeah,’ somebody else chipped in. ‘She was always
bragging
about it. How he took her out to this restaurant and that nightclub. All a load of bollocks.’

‘So you didn’t believe it?’ Maxwell rounded on the child.

‘Not that spending money stuff, no.’

‘She’s a lightweight, sir,’ Norman assured the Head of Sixth Form. ‘Wouldn’t need to spend much money on her to get her to drop her knickers. You got a feel, didn’t you, Tit, in Year Eight, for a jammy dodger?’

Roger nodded. ‘That’s on account of my sex appeal,’ he said, triumphantly. The others hit him round the head.

‘Any one of you guys ever see Mr Fry around here?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Nah,’ they chorused, collectively. ‘We’d have had his hub caps off if he’d showed his face round here.’

‘Yeah,’ Roger grunted. ‘I hate Business Studies.’

‘Talking of hub caps,’ Maxwell chose his man with care. ‘Norman, want a fiver to mind my bike?’ He held up a crisp one to prove he was a man of his word.

‘Yeah!’ Roger lunged for it. Norman was faster. ‘Not you, Tit,’ and he slapped the lad’s hand away. ‘Just me. Mr M, your bike’s safe with me. ‘Ere, ain’t you got no helmet?’ Moron Norman may have been, but he was a safety-
conscious
one.

‘Can’t afford it, Norman,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘I keep
giving
people fivers to mind my bike.’

Predictably, there were babies crying and dogs barking as Peter Maxwell took the concrete stairway that led to the heaven that was the first floor balcony. There were
nameless
stains in dark corners and nasty smells and a reminder in spray paint to Mr Blair that, despite all his hard work at Number Ten, Rod Rules. He stepped carefully over the toddler straddling a plastic trike outside Number 59 and knocked gingerly on the red-painted, peeling door of 61. A dog barked inside followed by a high-pitched yell and the rattling of dead-bolts.

‘Yes?’ an overweight woman with her hair piled high stood there, squinting at him through the cigarette smoke that curled up past her eyes. She had another toddler in her arms. Mucus dribbled into the child’s mouth and the front of her bib was like Joseph’s coat of many colours.

‘Mrs Choker?’ Maxwell tipped his hat, a gesture the woman had probably never seen before.

‘Who wants to know?’ This bloke looked like a bailiff, but equally he could have been a bloody Jehovah’s Witness. He had a bloody bow tie on. How up himself was that?

‘I’m Peter Maxwell, from Leighford High School.’

‘Oh,’ the hardness vanished from the face and she grinned a gappy smile. ‘You Annette’s teacher?’ The Mrs
Chokers of this world were often over-awed by people of Maxwell’s persuasion. It was all part of the race memory of when their great-grandfathers had been caned for breathing too loudly.

‘Not exactly,’ Maxwell said. ‘But I
am
looking for her.’

‘You and the whole bloody world. Look, um, Mr Maxwell, come in will you? Jenny!’ she shrieked into the flat’s grubby interior. ‘Jenny! Get yer arse out here.’

A girl of about ten, the living spit of the missing Annette, clopped into the hall, balancing on pink fluffy mules. ‘Take her, will you, love? Mr Maxwell and me need a moment.’

‘Oh, Mum!’ the girl whined.

‘Just fucking do it. And shut that bloody dog up!’

She bundled the toddler into Jenny’s skinny arms and pushed them both through a door. Maxwell followed her through a narrow corridor into the room at the far end.

‘Won’t you have a seat, Mr Maxwell?’ She swept some clutter off a chair in the tiny kitchen and Maxwell sat down. Through the pointless nets on the north side of Pear Rise, he could see the Downs rise to the sky, the gorse dark patches on the paler grass of Staple Hill. To the right, he knew, just blocked by the jutting corner of the gasworks, lay the old streambed of the Leigh, and the ash grove where little Robbie Wesson had found Dr David Radley and older graves yawned, naked to the probing of twenty-first
century
man.