Maxwell’s House (5 page)

‘A rather furtive one, yes.’ Her Head of Department grinned. He was mid-thirties, ambitious, with a boyish look and a mop of fair hair. ‘But you know how it is. The English Department rules OK.’

‘Ah, you’ve been listening to Mr Smith again,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘The English Department does nothing OK.’

‘I thought Geoffrey Smith was a friend of yours,’ Anthea said. Ever the literal one, she’d never really mastered the ancient art of cynicism. It would keep her third in a department for ever.

‘Oh, he is,’ Maxwell humoured her. ‘I’d go through the shredder for that man. But trust him to set the kids accurately? Or drive anywhere with him? I’d rather he set my broken arm.’

‘What were the police doing here this morning?’ Sally asked. They all looked at her. Sally Greenhow looked like a tall kid.

She still had the frizzy hair, round face and dimpled cheeks of a little girl – a sort of ten-year-old on stilts. Only the cigarette, endlessly twitching between her fingers, betrayed an adult’s neuroses.

‘They seemed to be checking the bike shed,’ Anthea said.

‘Why?’ Moss asked.

‘Don’t tell me we’ve had a theft already?’ Anthea poured herself a second cup of tea. It was quite stewed at the bottom by now.

‘No, it’s Jenny Hyde,’ Sally said as though the walls had ears. Matilda Ratcliffe had, and they pricked up now as she busied herself filing behind her counter.

‘What?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Well, they’re looking for the bike.’ Sally thought it was obvious.

‘What bike?’

‘They saw a bike parked outside the Red House on the day she … you know.’

‘How do you know that?’ Maxwell’s Hobnob plummeted into his tea, the victim of over-dunking.

‘I don’t know.’ Sally dragged deeply on her cigarette. ‘Somebody told me.’

‘I don’t know how you tell one bike from another,’ Moss shrugged.

‘They were looking for cars, too.’

All eyes turned to the voice from beyond. Matilda Ratcliffe was still filing, her face downcast, but the words had definitely come from her.

‘Did somebody come in?’ Maxwell looked at his fellow historians.

‘Oh?’ Moss thought he ought to try to coax the librarian back to life. ‘Were they?’

‘I went out to get my packed lunch,’ she told them, avoiding their gaze and suddenly hating the spotlight in which she found herself. ‘They were noting down registration numbers.’

‘Were they now?’ Maxwell muttered.

‘I thought it was the height of cheek, those reporters pestering kids this morning,’ Anthea said. ‘Did anybody see them go?’

‘I think the rain drove them away,’ Moss said. ‘Certainly they’d gone by the time I went out for my lunch.’

‘I’m afraid I talked to them,’ Anthea confessed, pausing in mid-nibble.

‘Really?’ Maxwell beamed. ‘I hope the Headmaster doesn’t get to hear of this, Mrs Edwards.’

He watched her neck mottle and her lips miss the crumbs.

‘You’re such an arsehole, Max,’ Sally scolded him. ‘The rumour is they’re only here because you shot your mouth off to the Advertiser anyway.’ Here was one young, female member of staff who had no fear whatever of Mad Max Maxwell.

Maxwell sucked in his breath, and smacked his left wrist. ‘Well, hush my puppies,’ he said. So it was all-girls-together-week, he realized as he saw the fire in Sally’s eyes. Twenty years ago, he’d have pulled her pigtails. Still, the rumour was correct. The old Leighford grapevine was working, well as ever.

‘What did you say?’ Moss wanted to know.

‘Nothing.’ Anthea was quick to defend herself. ‘Nothing much. I only taught her in Year 9. I just said she was bright, conscientious.’

Maxwell inhaled sharply again. ‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said. ‘That’ll be banner headlines in the
Sun
tomorrow. And I don’t want to think what the
Daily Sport
will do with it.’

‘For God’s sake, Max!’ Sally hissed. ‘This isn’t easy for any of us, you know. It was bad enough when Jenny went missing.’

Maxwell’s cup hit the saucer unexpectedly hard. ‘What?’ he said.

‘I said …’ Sally enunciated slowly. Obviously the march of time had caught up with one geriatric Head of Sixth Form.

‘That Jenny went missing. Yes, I heard that. When? Where?’

‘Where,’ she leaned back in her chair, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. When, at the end of last term … But surely you knew that?’

‘No.’ Maxwell felt the ground vanish beneath him, an alienation perhaps everybody starts to feel when they’re fifty-two. ‘No, I didn’t know that. How do you know it?’

‘Special Needs,’ Paul beamed. ‘They always pick up the scandal down there.’

Sally laughed. ‘Usually, yes. But not this time. No, it was Janet Foster, Jenny’s form tutor. Apparently Jenny wasn’t in during the last week of term. Janet followed it up.’

‘Of course she did.’ Maxwell was nodding, frowning at the same time. ‘She would. She would. Damned good form tutor is Janet. Wonder why she didn’t tell me.’

Sally shrugged. ‘Slipped her mind, I suppose. You know what the last week of term’s like. That quiet time when Years 11 and 13 have gone and we all have so many free periods.’

‘That quiet time,’ Moss took up the irony, ‘when the timetable for September doesn’t work even though three blokes and an entire computer network have been working on it all year?’

‘Anyway, weren’t you off yourself?’ Anthea remembered.

‘Er … from the Monday to Thursday, yes. My knee was playing me up. I had those physio appointments.’

‘Well there you are,’ Sally said, ever willing to defend the feminist right. ‘I expect Janet saw Alison about it.’

‘Alison?’

The Special Needs teacher leaned forward, as though coping with one of her most special charges. ‘Alison Miller, your deputy. Are you all right, Max? Been a bit of a strain, has it, today?’

‘All right.’ Moss actually clapped his hands. ‘Let’s get back to some departmental business, shall we? Coursework for Year 10.’

And they all let out the inevitable, universal groan.

Bill Foster had left Janet nearly ten years ago. There wasn’t another woman or anything like that. They’d just been incompatible from the start. She was a sculptress of talent, had exhibitions from time to time. He was a couch potato in an engineering firm. God knew what had brought them together in the first place, but time had driven them apart. He’d gone off with the stereo, half the furniture and no regrets. She’d got the house, which she’d converted into an enormous studio overlooking the sea, and a geriatric dog and the other half of the furniture. Regrets? She had a few. The nights were cold in the winter and the plumbing, in the rambling Victorian house, was a bitch.

‘Max?’ Janet looked quite deathly without her make-up. Her mousy hair was wrapped in a pink towel that made her look vaguely like Hogarth.

‘I’m sorry, Janet.’ He swept off his shapeless hat. ‘I know it’s late.’

She fiddled with the chain. ‘No, no,’ she flustered, closing the top of her housecoat, ‘not at all. It’s just that … Have you ever been here before?’

‘Er … once, I think,’ he told her, edging past into the hall. ‘It was old Whatsisface’s retirement. I’d had a few and Bill brought me here to dry out. Remember?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she laughed. ‘Can I get you a drink now?’

‘You can get me a cocoa,’ he smiled. Then he saw the dog waddling lamely over to him. ‘Hello, Dick.’

‘Dirk,’ she corrected him.

‘Dirk.’ He took the outstretched paw. ‘Yes, of course. Charmed. How old is he now?’

‘Nearly eighteen.’ She padded into the kitchen. ‘That’s over a hundred and twenty in human terms.’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell mused, ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to shake anybody’s hand when I’m over a hundred and twenty.’

‘What’s the matter, Max?’ She had her back to him, filling the kettle.

‘Jenny Hyde,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She reached into the fridge for the milk. ‘I thought it would be.’

‘Did you?’ He perched himself on one of her high stools at the breakfast bar. Beyond his reflection in the window he saw the lights twinkle on the sea and he knew the wind sighed in the dunes.

‘You didn’t mention her in assembly this morning.’

‘It didn’t seem the moment,’ he said.

‘Bit corny of Diamond, wasn’t it?’ she asked him. ‘That ghastly one minute’s silence. Anybody’d think he was a real Headmaster. Did you know he was going to do that?’

‘If it’s anything to do with the sixth form,’ Maxwell told her, ‘you can bet I’m the last to know.’

‘Sugar?’

‘Two, please,’ he said.

‘I thought you were dieting?’

‘I am,’ he told her. ‘Two sugars is the diet.’

She laughed and shook her head. ‘I went to the funeral, you know.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks for doing that.’

She looked at him. I don’t need thanks, Max,’ she said. ‘I liked Jenny. Everybody did.’

‘Somebody didn’t,’ Maxwell reminded her.

Her face was suddenly older, sadder. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Somebody didn’t.’

‘Who was there?’ he asked her. ‘At the funeral, I mean.’

‘Oh, her family. Mum, dad. Others I didn’t know. There were quite a few of the sixth form. Tim, of course. Tim Grey. They were going together, weren’t they?’

Maxwell shrugged. ‘What am I?’ he asked. ‘The Leighford High Lonely Hearts Club? I can’t keep tabs on all these pubescent gropings.’

‘Well, he was there, anyway.’

‘I heard something today. Oh, thanks.’ He took the proffered cup.

‘Oh?’

‘I heard Jenny ran away from home. Is that right?’

She looked warily at him. ‘Who told you?’ she asked.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Did she?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘I was told not to.’

‘Oh?’ His eyebrows and hackles rose simultaneously.

‘By whom?’

‘Mrs Hyde.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m not sure you do. I’ve told the police already.’

‘You have?’

‘Max, you weren’t here,’ she explained.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to feel like Ray Milland in
The Lost Weekend
, as though a whole chunk of my life is missing.’

‘A whole chunk of Jenny’s is,’ she said, solemnly.

‘I want to know,’ he told her.

‘I told Inspector Hall I wouldn’t talk to anyone else,’ she said.

‘Janet,’ he held her shoulder, ‘I liked Jenny, too,’ he said.

And she looked at him.

And she told him.

5

There was no doubt about it, Janet Foster made a mean cup of cocoa. Maxwell blew the froth from the top until he realized that Janet was looking at him. Some days, when he felt at his most self-reflective, he began to make mental lists of the odd habits that bachelorhood had imposed upon him. Blowing on his cocoa was only the tip of the iceberg. He smiled at Janet, knowing he was sparing her from his bathtime rendering of the Everley Brothers’ Greatest Hits.

‘So what was it all about, then?’ he asked.

‘Jenny wasn’t the confiding sort,’ Janet said. ‘She had that rather enigmatic smile, didn’t she? A sort of Leighford Giaconda. God knows what sort of turmoil went on behind that placid smile.’

‘But you had an inkling?’

Janet propped one leg up on Maxwell’s foot-rung, balancing that by resting her towelled head on her elbow. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. I don’t suppose an old chauvinist like you believes in intuition, do you?’

‘Is the Pope multi-lingual?’ he asked her. This wasn’t Anthea Edwards. He knew she wouldn’t say yes.

‘Three days, your writ says,’ she murmured.

‘What?’

‘Three days’ absence, then we have to send out a note to parents asking why their darlings have been away.’

‘Diamond’s writ,’ Maxwell told her, ‘not mine.’

‘Well, anyway. It didn’t come to that because I saw Mrs on the Wednesday night.’

‘Mrs Hyde?’

‘Yes. You know I run an evening class at the Tech?’

Maxwell didn’t. There was a lot, he was beginning to realize, he didn’t know.

‘Just basic sculpture.’ She offered him a cigarette. ‘Oh, you don’t, do you? Always surprises me, that. You may look dissolute …’

‘Thanks!’ He punched her gently in the shoulder.

‘Oh, Max,’ she laughed. ‘You’re a grand old man; you know you are. No, I think it’s sexual.’

‘What? Me not smoking?’

‘No, the people at the pottery class. They like the feel of wet clay oozing through their fingers …’ Her voice died away. For all Janet Foster was the one who’d introduced life drawing classes for the A level course, she had a rudimentary prudery somewhere.

‘That’s why Mrs Hyde joined the class?’ Maxwell asked.

‘It’s possible.’ Janet, while still defending her viewpoint, had retreated a few miles. ‘She’s a very attractive woman. More so than Jenny, wouldn’t you say?’

Maxwell could barely remember the woman. He’d met her perhaps three times in his life, always across a cramped table during the melee of parents’ evenings. Both the Hydes had radiated arrogance. Jennifer, it seemed, had decided against Oxbridge. Snobbery wasn’t her forte. Wait until you’re asked, Jennifer, Maxwell had thought. Not a single member of staff had mentioned the girl to Maxwell as somebody with a fighting chance at either of the country’s oldest universities. The spires would not dream in the Hyde household. Perhaps sensing this, Jenny herself had turned them down, denying the world of academe the keen thrust of her biological mind. What a waste to natural science. And what a waste of Geoffrey Smith’s time, too, when, in accordance with Mr and Mrs Hyde’s wishes, he’d given up his own time to polish her English in readiness for the entrance exam. Even had her round to his house from time to time. As for snobbery not being her forte, that had a ring of truth. At Leighford, she was Jenny, ordinary, popular, gregarious. At home she was Jennifer, blue-stocking extraordinary. It was not the first time that Maxwell noted two utterly different kids – one at school, the other at home. Literally, in this instance, Jekyll and Hyde.

‘Anyway,’ Janet was cradling her cocoa in both hands. ‘Marianne – that’s Mrs Hyde to you – came up to me afterwards. She made small-talk for a while, then asked me if I’d noticed anything … odd … about Jenny.’

‘Odd?’

‘Yes. Apparently, just recently, two days or so before this, she’d become quiet, moody.’

‘Had you noticed that?’

‘No, I can’t say that I had. Course, it’s difficult when you don’t actually teach them. And you can’t count the tutorial period.’

That blissless state when every tutor at Leighford High spent fifty minutes a week in the company of twenty-five strangers, attempting to discuss the Great Issues of Life. No, Maxwell agreed, nodding; you can’t count the tutorial period.

‘It all came out in the wash that Jenny had asked to stay with Anne Spencer for that last week of term. They were working on some biology assignment or other and as Anne’s house is out on the Shingle, it made some sense. They were doing something on seaweed or whatever. I happened to mention that I hadn’t seen Jenny that week and Mrs H. turned quite pale.’

‘She wasn’t at Anne’s?’

‘Well, the next day I spoke to Anne in the corridor. No, Jenny wasn’t with her. She’d never actually stayed with her, not overnight.’

‘Didn’t Mrs Hyde check with the Spencers?’

‘She might have done after she talked to me. I don’t know. The point was, though, that no one knew where Jenny was.’

He got up and wandered to the window. From here, he could see the headland called the Shingle, a black dragon lying prone in a silver sea, wrapped now in autumn’s mist.

‘Look, Max,’ she followed him, ‘I should have told you all this. I can’t think why I didn’t.’

He turned to her. ‘Mrs Hyde asked you not to, didn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Janet said. ‘That evening at the pottery class she said – and I’ll never forget her words – she said, “Please don’t tell anyone, especially Mr Maxwell.”’

Mr Maxwell shrugged. ‘Don’t worry. It happens all the time,’ he reassured her. ‘Remember that Atkins girl a couple of years ago? I didn’t know where she was living from one day to the next. She might have been on the game in Soho for all I knew. Did the Hydes call the police?’

‘Well, I rang Marianne from school that morning. To tell her what she probably already knew, that Jenny wasn’t at the Spencers’. Of course, two days later, they found her body at the Red House. Do you know the Red House, Max?’

‘Not really,’ he shrugged.

‘We used to take kids sketching there.’ She looked at their reflections in the window. ‘It’s hindsight, I suppose,’ she shuddered a little at the memory of it, ‘but I never felt quite at ease there.’

‘Hindsight?’ He leapt back in mock amazement. ‘Look, do you mind? Leave that sort of language to us historians, please, young lady. I don’t go around spouting nonsense about chiaroscuro, do I?’

It was her turn to swipe him round the shoulder. ‘Oh, bollocks, Max,’ she laughed. ‘You’d pinch anybody’s jargon without a second thought.’

He laughed with her and put his cup down on the draining board. ‘I’d wash it up,’ he winced, holding his head, ‘but my old trouble’s playing up again.’

But Janet was staring out at the Shingle too and at the line of the headland that led to the Red House. ‘What happened, Max?’ she murmured, not looking at him. ‘What happened to Jenny?’

He crossed to her, hesitated, then put his strong hands on her narrow shoulders. ‘She died, Janet,’ he said softly. ‘She just died.’

Perhaps that wasn’t the best time to do it, but he couldn’t sleep anyway. Maxwell made his excuses to Janet Foster and pedalled for the Shingle, crossing the road that winds uphill all the way. Now that it was autumn, the fudge-coloured ponies were locked away in warm, sickly-smelling stables and the riding school lay black and bleak under a fitful moon.

At the gate of St Asaph’s, he swung from the saddle and parked White Surrey against the old tree that the storm of ’87 had failed to uproot. There was a short-cut, he vaguely remembered, from the churchyard across the fields to the Red House, but the clouds were thickening from the west and the going would be rough in the dark. So he stuck to the road, that ribbon of moonlight that formed the sunken lane. In the shelter of the bushes here was a stillness he found eerie. You’d never think the sea was just over that hill. Or that the M27 thundered east and west only three miles away, juggernauts roaring through the night.

It was a steep climb by the road, but he made it and picked his way through the barbed wire some thoughtful soul had tangled round the old, rusted railings. He hadn’t got a torch, but he could make out the sign that said ‘Keep Out. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ Or strangled, he thought to himself.

The Red House was half a house, derelict, silent. The wind of early evening had dropped now, giving no explanation to the curiously stunted trees that slanted to the north, like something out of a Tolkien landscape. He knew enough about police procedure to know there would have been a blue and white tape stretched across here when they’d found her body. It was not there now, only tyre tracks of Range Rovers cut deep into what was once the croquet lawn. He ducked under the wild rhododendrons, free now to spread where they would without the cramping confines of human taste.

‘Hello, hello, hello.’

The voice froze Maxwell’s heart in the darkness. He felt his throat tighten and his skin crawl. And he spun round.

‘I’d know that scarf anywhere. Returning to the scene of the crime, Maxie, me ol’ mucker?’

There could only be one head that bald in the moonlight.

‘Geoffrey, you total arsehole. I could have died.’

Smith laughed. ‘Not you, Maxie, you’re immortal. Shouldn’t we exchange clichés about now? Like “What are you doing here?”?’

‘All right.’ Maxwell was still fighting the urge to throw up. ‘I was about to ask the same of you.’

‘“We’ll ask the questions if you don’t mind.”’

‘Yes, well,’ Maxwell had tired of the game already. ‘That’s enough of that.’

‘“That’s enough of that.” No,’ Smith confessed, ‘I don’t recognize that one. Unless it’s dear old Jack Warner, is it?
The Blue Lamp
?’

‘I’ve stopped doing it now, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell said, as though to a village idiot. ‘It’s not funny any more.’

‘“Last night,”’ Smith was giving his best Joan Fontaine, ‘“I dreamed I went to Manderley again …”’

‘I said,’ Maxwell grew louder, ‘“I’ve stopped doing it now.”’ He paused. ‘Anyway, that’s nothing like Laurence Olivier.’

‘Ooh, you bitch. Nip?’

Smith had one of those walking sticks with a glass tot-carrier in the top. Reproduction, of course. ‘No, thanks.’

‘Good God, Maxim. Aren’t you well?’

‘Not as well as I was,’ Maxwell confided, fumbling at his wrist, ‘it’s nearly midnight. What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

‘I thought you’d stopped all that,’ Smith observed, ‘I could say I was walking the dog, but for one thing …’

‘No dog.’ Maxwell’s finger pirouetted into the air.

Smith clicked his. ‘It’s easy to see how you became a senior teacher in a third-rate comprehensive no one’s ever heard of. You, presumably, are out looking for your cat, Tiddles.’

‘My cat is called Metternich,’ Maxwell reminded him. ‘And don’t call me Tiddles.’

‘
Airplane
.’ Smith jabbed the sky at him. ‘One of Leslie Neilson’s lines. Why
is
your cat called Metternich, Maxie? I’ve often wondered.’

‘Ah, well,’ Maxwell’s feet crunched on the gravel, ‘if you’d followed a cultured discipline like History instead of wasting your time on English literature and similar crap, you’d know that Metternich was the Austrian Big Enchilada back at the Congress of Vienna.’

‘Sort of Douglas Hurd?’

‘Yes, but with presence and a brain.’

‘Right.’

‘He was a manipulator par excellence. Known as “the Coachman of Europe”.’

‘I knew that,’ Smith told him.

‘Well, then. If you’ve ever seen my Metternich playing with a mouse, you wouldn’t have to ask.’

‘I’m here,’ Smith was suddenly serious, ‘for exactly the same reason you are, Max. Because I couldn’t keep away.’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Thank Christ,’ he said. ‘I thought it was just me slowly going mad with this Jenny Hyde thing. Shall we?’

They did. Two grown men behaving like a percentage of the Famous Five. Or was it the Secret Seven?

‘You didn’t think to bring a torch, I suppose?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Sorry. Shit!’ Smith’s shin collided with something. ‘Spur of the moment thing, really. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Hilda?’ Maxwell suddenly remembered the rather crabby little woman his old mate had inexplicably married years before.

‘At her mother’s. Tending to Godzilla.’

‘I thought she was dead.’

‘Wishful thinking,’ Smith laughed.

‘So you’re a grass widower, then?’

‘After a fashion. Where did they find her, exactly?’

Maxwell shrugged. They stood in the vestibule. High above them the sky broke bright through the shattered roof where the rafters jutted against the clouds. ‘The
Advertiser
didn’t say,’ he said.

‘Who uses this place, Max?’ Smith batted aside the damp cobwebs.

‘Winos, by the look of it.’ His feet crunched on glass. He crouched for as long as his knee would let him. ‘Strongbow.’ He peered at the faded label.

‘Not even well-heeled winos, then?’ Smith commented.

‘What did you expect?’ Maxwell was at his elbow again. ‘Moet et Chandon?’

‘That’s not what I meant. The nationals said this place was a favourite with local lovers.’ He tapped a broken pipe that jutted through the wall. ‘Must be pretty desperate.’

Maxwell tested the first stair. ‘My guess is they found her up there.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look.’

‘Maybe it’s lighter up there. You know, this must have been quite a place in its day. I seem to remember when Hilda and I first moved here it was still lived in. Not that you ever saw anyone coming or going, but I remember it looked a sad place.’

‘Sad?’

‘Yes.’ Smith reached for a banister that wasn’t there as the stairs spiralled up to the left. ‘Its windows looked like eyes, big with tears.’

Maxwell paused on the turn. ‘Dylan Thomas?’

He felt his oppo’s stick tap the back of his leg sharply. ‘Geoffrey Smith, you bastard. And by the way, Maxie, this is me – Geoffrey. You don’t have to come that cynical bit with me, you know.’

Maxwell smiled, anonymously and unobserved in the darkness. ‘It’s a mask I’ve worn for so long,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I’d know how to drop it, now. Even with you. Here.’