Maxwell’s Match (8 page)

‘Thank you,’ Sheffield shook his hand warmly. ‘Mervyn, get hold of Robinson, will you?’ He patted his Deputy’s arm. ‘Word to the wise and so on. Now, Tony,’ he put his arm around Graham’s shoulder, ‘about running Tennyson …’

Incident Rooms are the same the world over. It doesn’t matter whose patch they’re on; whether they’re in a state of the art nick or a village hall. This one was a village hall, in the heart of Selborne, with the dark-treed Hanger rising above it The Ladies’ Bridge Club had put in an official complaint to the Chief Constable and the Ladies’ Aerobics Group (virtually the same ladies, in fact) had done a runner at the arrival of the fuzz. Only their Treasurer, a feisty old biddy addicted to re-runs of the
Golden Girls
, had stood her ground spitting blood in the face of a rather bemused sergeant about how she paid his inflated salary. It was just the pique of someone tragically losing life’s eternal battle against cellulite.

The phone points moved in, the electricians and the computers. There were more miles of cable than crossed the Atlantic on a daily basis. And of course, it was raining. Henry Hall’s anonymous specs were beaded with water as he ducked in under the Gothic porchway some Victoria Selbornians had lovingly arched over the door, providing a reading room all those years ago for the natives of Gilbert White’s village.

‘Here,’ he pointed to the corner of the ante room where he wanted his desk and a pair of long-suffering constables gratefully deposited the load. ‘Afternoon, Mark.’

DCI West had arrived, unannounced, his hair plastered to his forehead and his raincoat steaming. ‘Settling in all right, Henry?’

‘It’s early days, as you see.’

West did. It irked him all the same, that it was his officers bustling hither and yon, at the diktat of an outsider. His smile was pure cyanide. ‘The Chief Super asked me to look in.’

‘He did?’ Hall had wiped his glasses now and hi eyes behind them had resumed their lifelessness.

‘In a manner of speaking.’ West was mechanically taking stock, watching the whirl of activity around him. ‘Not like that, Carter, you’ll rupture yourself. Any chance of a coffee, Lynda?’

‘Er … Mark,’ Hall clicked open the side door. ‘A word?’

West followed his Sussex counterpart into the Inner Sanctum, where another desk, chair and computer were already set up. ‘The Chief Super didn’t send you, did he?’ He looked his man squarely in the face.

West’s jaw flexed, then he relaxed and smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s a fair cop. Look, you know how it is. My patch and all. You’ll be the same when I return the compliment.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You know,’ West was still smiling. ‘When I come to your manor. Any date fixed for that, yet?’

Hall shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard,’ he said. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, Mark.’ He checked his watch.

‘Yes,’ West sighed. ‘Of course. I’ve got a bank |ob in Petworth to sort out. You wouldn’t credit what goes on behind locked doors in these sleepy little towns, eh? Well, keep in touch.’ And he swept out, slamming the door just a little hard for Hall’s liking and whisking a WPC away by the elbow as he made for the door. Hall let him go and gave his new team ten minutes. Then he called them to order.

‘For those of you who don’t know me,’ he said, hands on hips to show off his three-piece, ‘I’m DCI Hall, out of Leighford, West Sussex. I’m here because of politics – inter-force co-operation between top brass.’ He raked them all with those unfathomable eyes, knowing the reaction of hardnosed coppers to the very word ‘brass’. ‘I know there are those of you who would prefer to work with DCI West.’ There was the odd shuffle and flicker of eyeballs. ‘Well, that’s understandable. But there’s a man dead at Grimond’s school and until I decide otherwise, we’re treating the death as suspicious and you will take orders from me. Is that understood?’

There were murmurs and the odd, scraping cough.

‘Half an hour,’ he said. ‘Then I want everybody back here in full reporting mode. Got it?’

More murmurs.

‘Lynda?’ He caught the eye of the pretty; dumpy WPC in the corner.

‘Sir?’

‘Any chance of a coffee?’

Henry Hall’s new team didn’t know much. William Francis Pardoe was fifty-one years old when he went off the Grimond’s roof. He’d been educated at Charterhouse and Merton College Oxford. After a brief spell in insurance, he’d gone into teaching, a state school somewhere in the North East. He’d joined Grimond’s twenty-on years ago, as Assistant Classics teacher. He’d taken over Tennyson House eight years later. Nothing was known of his private life. The team had drawn a blank there. Henry Hall thanked them and told them all to carry on. He didn’t like brick walls and dead ends; and that, in the life of Bill Pardoe, seemed to be all there was. If he killed himself, why? If someone else had done it, who?’

As another spring dusk descended on sleepy Selborne, the Chief Inspector hung his jacket over the back of his chair and looked at the objects on his desk, lit with the radiance of his lamp. They were all the worldly goods of William Francis Pardoe, apart from the books that still lined his study at Grimond’s. There was a Swiss Army knife, a glass paperweight with swirling bubbles, a letter opener and a pipe with a worn, gnawed stem.

‘No tobacco pouch, Mr Pardoe?’ Hall murmured to himself. ‘Where’s that, I wonder? And who …’ Hall picked up the handsome silver- mounted photograph of a pretty blond boy, ‘… is this?’

The boy was sitting cross-legged on what appeared to be a tree stump. An alert-looking Border Collie sat with him.

He clicked the intercom. ‘Lynda. Get me Leighford nick, will you. DS Jacquie Carpenter. I’ll wait.’

Michael Helmseley served a mean brandy. Mean in the sense that Peter Maxwell could barely see the film of it covering the bottom of the glass. Clearly, ‘three fingers’ was a measurement lost on the head of Classics. He was a large man in a shapeless grey suit that looked like an old one of Patrick Moore’s. His glasses were thick and he had the smallest mouth Maxwell had ever seen on a grown man.

‘Domineering wives,’ he murmured. ‘That’s what that lot need.’

‘Sorry?’ Maxwell was relaxing in the lamp-lit corner of the Senior Common room, which the historian in him knew had been old Jedediah’s master bedroom. Helmseley was lounging in what was clearly ‘his’ chair and probably had been since St Patrick had kicked all the snakes out of Ireland.

‘Those arrogant buggers in Upper Five Bee. You know the sort, Maxwell, I’m sure; think they know it all because they learn a bit of
Caesar
.
Caesar
!’ he downed his brandy. ‘It’s like reading
Noddy Goes To The Toilet
. You don’t have Latin, I suppose, where you are?’

‘No,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘When I first joined there was an elder statesman on the staff who hand-picked the Oxbridge types and took them through a bit of Virgil, I believe.’ Maxwell smiled to himself. That was a long time ago and he was that elder statesman now.

‘Even here, of course,’ Helmseley ruminated, ‘it’s all watered down. Classical civilization. The language and literature element is only a minor part. Might as well pass it all over to Gallow’s department. You’re an historian, aren’t you?’

‘So rumour has it,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Tell me, Michael, how are you going to manage without Bill Pardoe?’

‘Lord knows,’ Helmseley sighed. He was leaning back in the huge, leather armchair, his hands clasped across his chest, the brandy balloon stem cradled between his fingers. ‘I expect George will place an advertisement after a suitable period. What possessed him?’ He was shaking his head.

‘You’re surprised?’

Helmseley’s eves flickered behind the bottle-bottomed lenses. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really. Would you care for another brandy, Maxwell?’

The Head of Sixth would, in that he’d barely had a first one, and he held out his balloon. Helmseley struggled over to the drinks cabinet and poured for them both. ‘You know,’ said the Head of Classics, ‘I lived on this stuff at Oxford. Brandy and Mars Bars. No wonder I lost control of my waist years ago. Here’s to happier times,’ and they clinked glasses.

‘You were telling me about Bill Pardoe,’ Maxwell settled back on the Chesterfield.

‘Was I?’ Helmseley frowned. ‘Oh, yes. Well, I’ve known Bill Pardoe for the best part of sixteen years, man and boy. He wasn’t happy lately.’

‘Oh?’

‘Little things, you notice. He took to late night walks when the school had gone to bed, down by the lake mostly. Developed an obsession about mail.’

‘Mail?’

‘Yes.’ Helmseley was still trying to puzzle it out. ‘We get the conventional two deliveries a day here at Grimond’s. He’d be there when he could, waiting for the postman, as if he were perpetually expecting some vital missive.’

‘Did it ever come?’ Maxwell asked.

‘God knows!’ Helmseley shrugged. ‘Bill was never exactly the demonstrative type. In the life of a boarding school you get to know the House staff pretty well, really. David Gallow now, is an open book; cricket-mad with a nodding awareness of his subject. Tony Graham; keen as mustard and a nice chap to boot. Old Tubbsy … well, enough said, really. You know the names of their first pet hamsters and their invisible childhood friends, which rugger team they support and so on. But Bill … well, he was a charming man and a bloody good Housemaster, but he’d only let you know what he wanted you to know. I think he might have been married once.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, not in the time I knew him, obviously. I’ve never been tempted to tie the knot myself, but I remember one time he was looking at a photograph, thing in a frame. It was a woman and child if I remember rightly.’

‘And?’

‘Well, this was in his study at Tennyson. I’d gone to sort out a time-tabling glitch with him and there he was, just standing there, staring at it. He pushed it into a drawer as I arrived, saying it was an old photo of his mother and him as a boy.’

‘And it wasn’t?’

‘Fashions were wrong. The boy in the photo was flaxen. Bill’s hair was still brown then. Unless he’d become a slave in the intervening years to Grecian 2000 and his mother was the Nostradamus of the catwalk, it didn’t make sense.’

‘Would that explain his waiting for the post?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Some contact with his family?’

Helmseley shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘In the last couple of weeks particularly, Bill became … well, withdrawn, distant. I wish now I’d talked to him. You know, sat him down and talked him out of it. It’s funny, I’d never have said Bill was the suicidal type. He always seemed so strong, somehow. Capable. I’m not sure Tony’s got it.’

‘What?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Whatever it takes,’ Helmseley said. ‘That indefinable something that makes a good Housemaster. He’s a good listener though, I suppose, but all the same, a little too intense. You’re a Head of Sixth, aren’t you? It must be the same for you.’

Maxwell quaffed the last of his brandy. ‘I’m not sure, Michael, that anything at Leighford is the same as here.’

‘It’s late, Max.’ Tony Graham was already in a towelling bath robe and slippers, in the rooms down the stairs and along the corridor from Maxwell’s landing.

‘It is,’ Maxwell checked his watch. The witching hour. ‘I’ll call back.’

‘No, no,’ the acting Housemaster opened the door more fully. ‘Don’t be silly. Come in. I’m trying to make sense of all this.’ He waved around the interior of Bill Pardoe’s study. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m feeling bloody guilty about being here.’

‘Guilty?’

Graham closed the door behind his visitor. ‘Like standing in a dead man’s shoes. What the hell happened?’

Maxwell shook his head. There were papers everywhere, piles of books and student files. ‘Damned if I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come from Michael Helmseley.’

‘Christ, then you’ll need a drink.’

Maxwell laughed. It seemed almost sacrilegious in Bill Pardoe’s Sanctum. ‘That infamous, is he? I did get two brandies.’

‘No, you didn’t. You barely got one.’ Graham clinked glasses as he rummaged in Pardoe’s cabinet. ‘That won’t have touched the sides. Doesn’t have much of a giving nature, our revered Head of Classics. Sylvia Matthews tells me you’re a Southern Comfort man. ‘And he pulled out a bottle of the same.

‘Manna!’ Maxwell beamed. ‘I didn’t know Bill Pardoe but I’m warming to him already. Have you been able to talk to anybody yet?’

‘Dr Sheffield had a word. Funny, suddenly it’s “call me George”. I remember it was the same when I made House Prefect all those years ago.’ He whistled through his teeth.

‘You’re Head of Tennyson now?’

‘Acting,’ Graham told him. ‘I won’t take it, of course. Dead men’s shoes. Not a good omen. The chaps are pretty cut up.’

‘Jenkins especially.’

‘Jenkins?’ Graham passed Maxwell his glass.

‘Lower Fourths or thereabouts. Jug-handle ears. Always twentieth man in the Cross Country team.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Graham placed him. ‘Jenkins. Look at this place.’ He slid a pile of files off a chair for Maxwell to sit down. ‘It was turned upside down when I got here. Looked as though it had been ransacked.’

‘That’ll be the boys in blue.’

‘The police?’

‘It’s routine. When a man dies, they go through his desks, his laundry basket, every orifice the poor bastard’s got. And they’re not very particular about putting anything back afterwards, cither. My light o’ love is a detective.’

‘Ah, that’ll be Jacquie,’ Graham smiled, sitting opposite his man and sipping his drink.

‘I knew it was a mistake sending you to Sylvia’s. Is there anything you don’t know about me?’

Graham laughed. ‘You know that woman used to be in love with you, don’t you?’

‘Sylv?’ Maxwell’s eyes widened. ‘You’re having me on.’

‘Just an observation,’ Graham shrugged.

‘You’ll be telling me next Dierdre Lessing, our beloved Senior Mistress, has the hots for me.’

‘Ah,’ Graham’s face fell. ‘No, I can’t bullshit you there, Max. Bit of a dragon, isn’t she?’

‘The original Drakul, dear boy. When the boilers pack up, we get her to breathe on them. Invaluable, really.’

‘Something else I don’t know about you,’ Graham said.

‘Oh? What’s that?’ Maxwell quaffed the amber nectar.