Maxwell's Retirement (25 page)

Maxwell lay on the verge counting his limbs by twitching them one by one. Everything seemed to be present if not correct and he rolled over carefully to survey the damage to Surrey. Again, everything seemed present and correct. He clambered to his feet, not such an easy task without Mrs Troubridge to depend on, and was dusting himself down when a breathless voice called his name. He looked up to see Nicole
Thompson jogging round the corner, sweat-bands on her wrists and some serious-looking trainers on her feet.

‘Max! Are you OK? I saw that. He looked as if he was aiming straight at you.’

‘Did you get a number? A description?’

‘Sorry, Max.’ She was alongside now, fresh as a daisy, not a drop of sweat anywhere. He wasn’t surprised. He often found that seriously ambitious people weren’t built quite the same as the common herd. ‘All I saw was a bloody great car nearly run you down. Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, yes. Just a bit shaken. I’ll just walk Surrey into the bike shed. Erm … Nicole?’

She was shocked. He had called her by her real name. ‘Yes, Max.’

‘Not a word about this, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to worry people.’

‘Well, I think someone ought to know. Your wife, for instance. Isn’t she a WPC?’

‘Well, a detective sergeant, as a matter of fact.’ He felt petty but he hated it when women tried to belittle other women to make themselves feel more important. And whatever else he knew about Nicole Thompson, she liked to feel important. ‘But you’re right about the woman bit. No, really, she doesn’t need to know. And, to be honest with you, Clara, I’ve got so many bruises because of Friday, she’ll never notice.’ He saw her stricken face. ‘I am so sorry, really I am. What
was I thinking? Are you totally recovered? From the shock.’

She smiled, but it was rather wobbly. ‘They kept me in until Saturday morning. Apparently I was in acidotic shock. Hyperventilation. My heart was a bit—’

‘Irregular? Pounding?’

She nodded.

‘That’s me getting out of bed in the morning,’ he laughed. ‘But you seem better now.’ That wasn’t particularly true, but he didn’t think that she would welcome being told that if she was going to be this fragile about finding a not terribly upsetting body of a complete stranger, then she wasn’t going to do so well working in a
cutthroat
job in a school where everyone was out to getchya.

‘Well, I’ve got some tablets,’ she said. ‘In case I feel, you know, wobbly again.’

‘That’s good,’ Maxwell said, patting her shoulder. ‘Mother’s little helpers.’ He had been quite a Stones fan for a day once. He held out a hand and made a small bow. ‘Shall we?’

And the dinosaur and the IT girl walked up the drive to face another Leighford High day.

Maxwell was having a quiet ache in his office during what people laughingly called a ‘free’ period when the door crashed back and Sylvia Matthews stood there, armed with some rubbing
liniment and, therefore, dangerous. ‘Peter Maxwell, what are you playing at?’

‘I’m sorry, Sylv,’ he said mildly. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You certainly have,’ she said menacingly. ‘You came off your bike today and you have kept it to yourself.’

‘I knew you’d come up here with that horse ointment,’ he said. ‘Do you remember the last time you used that on me?’

She looked at her feet and muttered something unintelligible.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he leant forward, cupping an ear.

‘I may have been a little over-generous. It may have trickled down … somewhere it had no business,’ she said. Her straight face cracked and she laughed out loud. ‘You were so funny, Max. I’ve never seen anyone run round my treatment room at head height before.’

‘It was extremely painful, I’ll have you know, Nursie, and I won’t have you near me with that stuff. I took a small tumble because some imbecile driving a car the size of a small town nearly crushed me. But I’m all right and Surrey’s all right, so no harm done.’

‘Car?’ Sylvia looked puzzled. ‘I heard you’d just fallen off.’

Maxwell looked even more puzzled. ‘But … wait a minute. Where did you hear this?’

‘Nicole. From IT.’

‘I know where she’s from. Hell. What have I done to her that she’s always out to get me?’

‘Max. Just because you’re paranoid …’ Sylvia began.

‘Yes, yes. Good joke, but I’m too annoyed.’ He gestured for her to sit down and, closing to her, took both hands in his. ‘Sylv, listen to me. I was riding in …’

‘… on the wrong side of the drive …’

‘… if you say so, and this huge, I really mean it, a huge car came off the road, where it had been going in the same direction as me, and deliberately tried to clip me. I twisted out of its way and instead of carrying on up the drive, as it had started to do, it turned in front of me and took off back in the way it had come. It nearly got me in the turn as well. Then, a couple of minutes later, while I was still checking that everything was in working order, Nicole Thompson comes trotting up and tells me how dangerous the car’s driver was, how she had seen everything. How …? Sylv, she wasn’t even sweating. She had jogged to school, and her hand was as dry as a bone.’

‘Not everybody sweats a lot, Max. It’s still quite chilly in the mornings.’

Maxwell ignored her and the train of thought he had been following. He stored that one away for later. ‘And then she goes round school telling everyone I fell off. I am assuming she is implying
that in my geezerhood I just stopped pedalling and fell sideways onto the verge. That the balance of my mind, etcetera, etcetera. Is that right?’

Sylvia squeezed his hands. ‘Pretty much on the button, Max. I’m sorry. The woman’s a bitch. I’ll tell everyone …’

Maxwell hitched back in his seat, releasing her hands. ‘Don’t bother, Sylv. Really. If people want to believe her, then they’ll believe her. And they all know she’s a bitch anyway. But, whatever the reason for my hitting the deck, you can clear off with that stuff. I still get the pain in wet weather.’ He adjusted himself, Frankie Howerd to the life, and shooed the nurse away. She gave him a tap on the shoulder and left the room, waving as she went. He didn’t look up. His head was full of threads, waving this way and that, and he was trying to make them all come together. He sent up a small prayer to St Fiacre, patron saint of knitters, and then went over to his desk. He fished under it and brought out his laptop and switched it on. While he waited for it to lurch into life, he pulled a pad and a pen towards him. In an historian’s world, the old ways are best.

He had cross-hatched the page into columns. They hadn’t got headings yet, but he felt better having something to work with. He was just about to start filling in some boxes when the phone rang.

‘Ahoy, ahoy.’ Mr Burns to the life. He hoped
it was Pansy; it always annoyed her when he answered the phone in any way other than the guidelines she had printed out and glued to each desk.

‘It’s me.’ Jacquie, in the office and therefore being eminently sensible and also, to judge from the level of her voice, quite sneaky.

‘Heart. How the devil are you?’ He kept it light-hearted. If some busybody had seen fit to let her know about his fall off his bike, he wanted to scotch that little rumour before she got going.

‘Max, I’m going to ask you something which I’m pretty sure you won’t know the answer to, but I’m going to ask you all the same.’

‘Well, that sounds sensible, my little currant bun. Good use of everyone’s time.’ There was a knock at the door and he held the phone away from his face to call, ‘Come in.’ Alice stood there, tiny and frail-looking, and he motioned her to come in.

‘Sorry?’

‘No, just talking to Alice. Go on.’

‘If you’ve got someone there …’

‘No. Go on. I can still talk even though I am looking at Alice.’ He smiled encouragingly and she crept further into the room.

‘Have you heard of a site on your intranet called itsgoodtotalk, where the kids can take part in chat rooms anonymously?’

‘Any reason?’

‘It’s up and running in Maisie’s school. Which means the Thomas twins are part of it. I think it might have a bearing.’

‘Oh, yes, good thinking. But you’re right that I’m not the man to ask. Hold on.’ He pressed the phone to his shoulder. ‘Alice. Do we have a thing called it’s good to talk here at school?’ The effect was electric. Alice jumped as though he had hit her and ran blindly out of the room. He looked at her in amazement and slowly put the phone up to his ear. ‘I’ve just asked Alice,’ he said.

‘And?’

‘I think the answer is yes. Can I get back to you later?’

‘Max? Max? Are you there? What’s wrong?’ But the phone was down and he was on the warpath.

Pansy Donaldson had heard the news from Nicole that the mad old bastard had fallen off his bike. Surely now Diamond would be getting rid of him. He was a Health and Safety issue now. Old people falling over all around the place. Students might fall over them. Bacteria might settle. They could be victims of Swine Flu. The school would have to be closed. She could hardly contain herself, such was her glee. Thingee found the whole thing most distasteful, especially when Pansy’s dewlap started to sway. She rang Maxwell’s number to warn him of the impending
doom of a final visit from Pansy, but she was too late. The school manager – or seeker after world domination, as Maxwell preferred to think of her – had met the Head of Sixth Form at the top of the stairs.

‘Mr Maxwell!’ she hailed him as though he was half a mile away, the odd errand-running child turning to stare at her.

‘Mrs Donaldson. Not precisely the person I was looking for, but, by God, in a pinch you’ll do.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Maxwell?’ She bridled and set everything a-sway again. ‘What can you mean?’

‘I’m going to clean up this town,’ he menaced. He had no physical characteristic in common with Lee Van Cleef, but to hear him you wouldn’t know it. ‘You can start by going downstairs and taking that ridiculous wall of information down. You can then go outside and, careless of Health and Safety requirements, you can set fire to it.’ Maxwell shot a fiery glance at the errand-runner, who promptly vanished.

‘But, Mr Maxwell, I need my information.’

‘You ludicrous woman,’ Maxwell spat, his famous gentlemanly behaviour hanging by a thread. ‘Have you any idea how many rules you have broken by having all that up in public? Does the data protection act ring any bells? When I can be randomly rung by a member, no matter
how well meaning, of the kitchen staff because my number is three feet high on your wall, what does that tell you? When small girls are driven to nervous breakdowns because their email addresses and mobile phone numbers are on that self-same wall, does that make you proud?’

She was, for the first time in many years, totally speechless.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ Maxwell snarled. ‘Do it.’

She turned and went down the stairs like a slinky, with one part naturally following the other due to gravity. He watched until she reached the bottom of the stairs. She turned and looked up at him, with malevolent eyes, watching him until he turned away.

Maxwell took a folded piece of paper from one pocket and a pen from another and made an extravagant tick. ‘One down,’ he muttered. ‘One to go.’

Maxwell pounded up the stairs and proudly paused at the top. Not even slightly out of breath, although he had to be far above the tree-line. He slipped one hand inside his jacket and counted his heart beats. Steady as a rock and well within the normal for his age. This was an assumption on his part as he neither knew nor cared what that normal count might be. He shrugged his jacket to fit his suddenly macho shoulders better
and marched along to the IT Department, tucked away in what had once, when Leighford High and the world were young, been the smokers’ room. This was an irony Maxwell had enjoyed, as the smokers could hardly manage the stairs.

He threw open the door and was met by two pairs of puzzled eyes. He nodded. ‘Mike. Ned. Any idea where Nicole might be?’

Mike paused from his task of printing out the postage labels for his eBay sales. ‘I think she went down to see if she could see Mr Diamond. I don’t know what about.’ He smirked at Ned, who dipped back to his magazine.

‘I think I know why she’s down there. I just want her up here. Now.’

‘I don’t see how I can do that, Mr Maxwell,’ Mike said, still smirking.

‘Ring her up,’ Maxwell said. ‘I can’t imagine that she doesn’t carry her mobile at all times. Just because the kids are banned from it and the staff discouraged, doesn’t mean that you guys, the IT crowd, have to obey the rules, does it?’

Ned cracked first. ‘I’ll text her, Mr Maxwell. In case she’s in with Mr Diamond.’

‘Ring. Her.’ Maxwell was close to losing his temper. He didn’t turn green and burst out of his clothes but there were grown men out there in the real world who still went pale when they remembered the day he had lost it with them.

‘Ring who?’

Maxwell turned gracefully, grateful that he didn’t fall over. That manoeuvre was always a tricky one. ‘Clara. Lovely to see you. I think I have a bone to pick with you.’

‘Do you? Boys, if you would go and … I don’t know. Do something useful with the mainframe. There’s always something.’ She smiled coldly at them and they scraped their chairs back and left in a hurry. She waited a moment before opening the door they had slammed behind them. ‘Mainframe’s on the ground floor,’ she reminded them. ‘Back of the library. Sorry,’ she corrected herself, ‘the old library. The book store, you know.’ Sheepishly, they walked slowly down the corridor and she watched them to the head of the stairs. She went back into the room and, smiling at Maxwell, offered him a chair. ‘How can I help you, Max?’ she asked him.

‘You’re very cool, Clara,’ he remarked.

‘I try to be,’ she said. ‘My outburst on Friday was very out of character.’

‘Yes, why did you get so upset? If you didn’t even know the man?’

‘It was so sudden. I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. I was a bit disoriented. It’s not what I usually do, running around in woods and things. I just … overreacted.’

Maxwell crossed his legs and leant back. Nicole sprang forward.