Maxwell’s Match (12 page)

‘Hmm, not a bad idea,’ Maxwell mused. ‘You must look very fetching in a blue and white headband. Then there’s the blouse, the stockings, the handcuffs. Ooh, I’m getting all hot!’

‘Behave yourself,’ she growled at him. ‘Gallow suspects you too.’

‘What?’ He gave her the full John McEnroe. ‘You cannot be serious.’

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘But I think he was.’

‘Great. Nice to know one can rely on a fellow historian. Bloody revisionist!’

‘See it from their point of view, Max,’ she urged. ‘You arrive out of the blue on Monday – apparently Sheffield had neglected to tell anybody until the day before – and on Tuesday morning, they find the body of Bill Pardoe. The death of a colleague isn’t an everyday occurrence, you know.’

‘So they do believe it’s murder, then?’

‘That seems to be the trend,’ Jacquie nodded. ‘Although the official line from George Sheffield, who apparently got it from Arthur Wilkins, his Chairman of Governors, is that it’s suicide.’

‘What about Tim Robinson? He didn’t care for me much either.’

‘Don’t know. Haven’t seen him.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Maxwell was confused. ‘I thought you were starting with him this morning – or so you told me last night.’

‘Quite right,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t show. We saw the chaplain instead. That man could bore for England. I bet he doesn’t get many taking communion.’

‘He’s not much of a fencing instructor,’ Max well volunteered.

‘The chaplain?’

‘Robinson. I watched him in the gym yesterday. Didn’t know an epee stroke from a sabre cut.’

‘Well, fan my flies,’ Jacquie said. ‘Haven’t you always told me nobody in the private sector knows what they’re doing? Isn’t that why they’re in the private sector? Hiding from the competence of the world? Isn’t that the Gospel according to St Max?’

‘Now, Policewoman,’ he chided her. ‘I do believe I’m being quoted out of context here, think what I actually said …’

But Peter Maxwell never finished his sentence. It was punctuated by a scream from the direction of the lake and the thud of a dozen feet rushing uphill past the cedars with shouting and chaos.

‘He’s dead!’ one shrill voice rang out above the pandemonium. ‘It’s Mr Robinson. Come quick somebody. He’s dead!’

‘Here’s to you, Mr Robinson,’ Dr Firmin tilted his glasses on top of his head and leaned back in his swivel chair. He didn’t mind the pressure via DC Hall from Chief Superintendent Mason to get his arse in gear. He didn’t even mind working late into the night. What he did object to was having to write up his own report. But then, he reflected in the chill glow of the computer screen, he did work for a Third World Health Service. How many hospital trolleys full of patients had he tripped over just getting here? They’d be stashing the poor sods in his own mortuary lockers next.

He’d read the report from the police surgeon and the one from DCI Hall. Firmin couldn’t help smirking. The DCI must be feeling more than a little vexed with himself – a body found under his own nostrils. At least that tended to clarify the position vis-a-vis Bill Pardoe. A suicide followed by a murder, all in the space of a few days? It strained credulity. And whereas he still had forensic and professional doubts about Pardoe, he had none about Robinson. The Games master lay in a dark, cold drawer behind the pathologist, his viscera in assorted jars, carefully labelled.

Some kids had found the man floating face down in the lake at the school, his arms trailing ahead of him in the water, his legs slightly below the surface with the sheer weight of liquid in his tracksuit bottoms. The first copper on the scene was a woman, a DS Carpenter, accompanied by a civilian, Peter Maxwell. Together, they’d hauled the man out of the water in case there were still signs of life. There were none. All this was at twelve-forty-eight. The DCI had arrived four minutes later, but Carpenter had already raised the hue and cry and SOCO were on their way inside ten minutes. They’d been delayed by traffic and a newly galvanized gaggle of reporters at the school gates, suddenly aware that something was up but even so they were at the water’s edge by one-thirty-two.

Firmin had removed the dead man’s clothes, his tracksuit, sports vest, underpants and socks. He carried nothing but a handkerchief in his pocket and a whistle still dangling from a ribbon round his neck. The wreck that was the back of his head told the story eloquently enough. Someone had caved in his skull with a blunt object probably wood and very possibly an oar. He’d lost consciousness and his footing and had gone into the water where the shock of the cold revived him. Bleeding profusely, dazed and confused Tim Robinson had floundered around. He had not gone into shock, the dry drowning of laryngeal spasm and cardiac arrest. Too weak to get himself out of the water and the weed at the lake’s edge – it was trapped between his teeth and clung to his fingers – he’d struggled for perhaps minute before sinking.

It was text-book stuff, really; a fine white froth coating his drooping moustache, the lungs ballooned to bursting with the contents of the lake. People drown more quickly in fresh water than salt, the water seeping with a frightening speed through the mucous membranes of the lungs by osmotic pressure. Analysis of Robinson’s heart blood had confirmed this, thinned and diluted, with a sharp resultant drop in its chloride concentration.

The pretty little diatoms which Firmin had found under his microscope slide confirmed that the man had been alive when he hit the water. They floated invisibly in their millions in the waters of an inland lake, gulped into the lungs and passed into the bloodstream and the heart. Firmin’s own heart had sagged when he realized what he’d got. There was no doubt where the body had been found, but what if he’d been killed elsewhere and his corpse dumped into Grimond’s lake? Hall would want to know this for a fact; Firmin already knew the DCI was not a man to go on surmise. And there were over fifteen-thousand species of diatoms to check. Miracles Firmin could do now; that little job he might have to leave until later.

Time of death was tricky. Robinson’s toes and fingers had not yet thickened and whitened with the immersion of water, so he’d been in the lake for less than twenty-four hours. Police reports confirmed this; Robinson’s movements on Wednesday evening were well catalogued. No one except his killer had seen him after late afternoon, but Firmin was sticking his neck out that the man had died somewhere around four in the morning. The temperature of the water had fluctuated sharply – a cold snap developing during the morning and it played hell with his rectal thermometer readings.

Quite a waste, really. Firmin had rarely seen a corpse in this condition. Robinson clearly didn’t smoke, drink or abuse substances. It took all the good doctor’s restraint not to type into his report, ‘Must be boring as hell.’

The Film Society meeting went ahead that night. Tony Graham, as shaken as anyone by Tim Robinson’s death, agonized long and hard and decided it was business as usual. So Peter Maxwell came into his own, courtesy of Tennyson’s leading lights.

They stood up to a man as he and Graham walked in to the little theatre that doubled as a cinema. The seats were plush, but Maxwell saw no Mighty Wurlitzer and missed the popcorn girl enormously.

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ Graham waved to them and to a man they sat down.

‘Impressive!’ Maxwell murmured. ‘At Leighford they wouldn’t have noticed anybody’d come in.’

‘Oh, now,’ Graham laughed. ‘That may be true generally, but not of you, Max.’

‘Would you care for a pint of beer, Mr Maxwell?’ John Selwyn was barman for the evening and Graham caught the raised eyebrow of visiting Head of Sixth.

‘The sixth are each allowed one pint per showing,’ he explained. ‘Tradition, isn’t it, John?’

‘It is, sir.’

‘Then, I’d be delighted.’ Maxwell took the foaming tankard. Nothing as wussy as glass in Tennyson. He noticed the younger lads sitting in their seats, nattering together, but watching intently. ‘No alcohol for the little ones, I assume?’ he asked.

‘Cocoa in the dorm later,’ Graham said, ‘about as exciting as it gets, I’m afraid. John, the honours, would you?’

‘Of course,’ Selwyn emerged from behind his makeshift bar. He looked even older in his civvies like those gods of yesteryear, the prefects who had terrified Peter Maxwell when he was eleven and Mafeking was mightily relieved. ‘I’d like to introduce you, Mr Maxwell, this is my Sub, Rog Harcross.’

‘Known as Ape,’ Graham raised his glass to giant oaf who took Maxwell’s hand. ‘We don’t know why.’

There were guffaws and whistles all round. ‘And Tennyson’s Secretary, Antonio Splinterino.’

‘Splinter,’ the dark eyed boy smiled, sounding about as Italian as a Domino’s pizza.

‘Secretary?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘What is it you do, Splinter?’

‘Paperwork, sir,’ came the obvious reply. ‘I’m the recorder for the House, letter writer, front man and so on.’

‘And you’re all Prefects, I assume?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Ape and Splinter nodded.

‘Gentlemen,’ Graham had reached a desk at the front of the auditorium and called them to order. He chose his words carefully. ‘So soon after the loss of Mr Pardoe,’ he glanced across at young Jenkins, huddled with his mates a couple of rows back, ‘which we all feel so keenly, we are today faced with another tragedy. Most of you will have been taught, albeit briefly, by Mr Robinson. We must mourn him too.’

A hand was in the air, four or five rows back.

‘Andrews.’ Graham pointed at him and the boy was on his feet,

‘Sir, what’s going on, sir? We don’t understand this.’

There were murmurs around the auditorium. All eyes were on Graham. Graham’s eyes were on Maxwell, the Housemaster looking as lost and infused as his charges. ‘I don’t know, Tom,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t know anybody does. But remember Dr Sheffield’s words. And remember this,’ he stilled them with a raised hand. ‘We aren’t just Grimond’s, important though that is; we’re Tennyson. What are we?’

‘Tennyson!’ Selwyn shouted back and alongside Maxwell, Ape and Splinter took up the chant, echoed back by row after row of post voices. ‘Tennyson! Tennyson!’

It was the
sportspalatz
in Berlin all over again – the mesmerised crowd roaring their adoration of the Fuhrer. This was as far from Leighford High as Pet could imagine being. Then Tony Graham it down with a wave of a hand as expert as Herr Hitler himself.

‘Let us stand,’ he said and there was a thud as the spring-loaded seats flipped upwards. ‘And in a moment’s silence, pay our respects - Tennyson’s respects – to Mr Robinson.’

Maxwell watched them again, as he had in chapel when George Sheffield had the death of Pardoe. Maggie Shaunessy would have been appalled – he was still not bowing his head. Neither were Selwyn, Ape or Splinter, the Captains of the House, they stood ramrod-backed, unflinching, staring at the blank white screen ahead and Tony Graham just in front of it.

‘Mr Maxwell,’ Graham broke the silence at last. ‘Are you familiar with this film?’

‘I am,’ Maxwell told him.

‘Gentlemen,’ Graham addressed ‘This is Mr Maxwell. He is an historian and the Head of Sixth Form at a school in West Sussex. Mr Maxwell, would you come on down and introduce it for us? As usual, gentlemen, there will be discussion afterwards. Mr Maxwell?’

The House erupted into applause as Maxwell reached the podium. Maxwell held up his hand. ‘
Witchfinder General
,’ he said. ‘Known in the States, I believe, as
The Conqueror Worm
. It stars the late, great Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a particularly nasty piece of work who made a lot of money denouncing witches in East Anglia a few years ago. Directed by a ludicrously young Michael Reeves and based on the novel by Ronald Bassett, it has rightly reached cult status and I am delighted to be among you watching it tonight. By the way, I confess when I saw it first, long before any of you were twinkles in your various fathers’ eyes, I fell madly in love with the leading lady, Hilary Dwyer.’

There were hoots and whistles from the Sixth Form.

‘Sadly,’ Maxwell went on, it was an unrequited love.’

‘Aahs’ broke from the back.

‘But don’t my personal problems spoil your evening.’

‘Perhaps you could tell us, Mr Maxwell,’ Graham winked at him, ‘who was key grip on the picture.’

‘Of course,’ Maxwell said. ‘Nigel Benington.’

Claps and whistles as Graham shook Maxwell’s hand and the men took their seats side by side. They weren’t to know he’d just made that up.

Peter Maxwell slept alone that night. All in all it had been quite a day. He’d helped the woman he loved drag corpse out of a lake and shooed away a horde of children, at once horrified and fascinated by death. One by one the Grimond’ staff had come hurrying to the scene; Richard Ames, the Head of Games, sprinting appropriately ahead of the rest, Sheffield and Graham in their gowns, Larson in his. Behind them 1ay half-eaten lunches and a forgotten rubber of bridge as the cry had gone up – ‘Master down!’

Maxwell had followed instructions to the letter as Jacquie had screamed orders at him. She pulled the choking weed from the dead man mouth, closing her lips to his; dry and warm against wet and cold; living to dead. Gulping in lungs-full of air, she bobbed down again and again, then straddled the sodden body a bashed his chest with both fists, hammering on the tracksuit until Maxwell gently and firmly led her away.

She’d been all right at first, while the last of the kids were shepherded away by staff and prefects and the SOCO team arrived. Then, she’d suddenly lost it and buried her face in Maxwell’s rough tweed.

‘We’ll talk,’ DCI Hall said to him at the water’s edge and turned to face the music of yet another scene of crime; more men in alien white suits, more fluttering tape; more
Do Not Cross
. It would mean a press conference, cries for heads. ‘Get her out of here.’

They hadn’t talked. Not then. Not later. Maxwell took Jacquie back to her car and she drove, still numb with shock, her coat and jeans still wringing wet, through the Hampshire lanes, back to Barcourt Lodge. He should have driven. But he’d forgotten how. In the dead space of years between now and the death on the road of his own wife, his own child, he’d lost first the will and now the ability. There, in the stillness of her room, they’d lain side by side on the double bed and Jacquie Carpenter had cried and cried.