Maxwell's Retirement (4 page)

‘Correct.’

‘And playing with Julie?’

‘Again, right on the button.’

‘What are we going to do with her?’

‘Well, help her sort herself out, if we can. It would be nice if we could show her rather horrible family that she is worth more than being an unpaid babysitter to the Midwich Cuckoos.’

‘I mean now. This evening.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, what if we invite her to do a bit of proper babysitting, with a proper boy. You can get her away from her phone perhaps and then you can watch for texts. Is it possible to trace a sender?’

‘I’ll have to ask the IT guys. I suspect more than one phone is being used, though.’

‘More than one person sending these things.
Might that explain why they are sometimes worse than others?’

‘No, just more than one phone. You can buy a pay-as-you-go in any supermarket for around twenty pounds. It’s a stalker’s charter. And while we’re on the subject of phones,’ she pointed at hers, sitting on the table, ‘pick that up and join me in the study. Lesson One is about to begin.’

‘Awww, miss,’ Maxwell whined. ‘I’ve got a stomach ache. I’ve got a bone in my leg. It’s my granny’s funeral. The dog ate my homework. Anyway,’ his expression became one of low cunning, ‘you know that my phone is at school.’

She pointed at the door. ‘If you haven’t brought a note from home, you can’t skip this lesson. And no, before you ask, I am not going to write you a note! Now, scram,’ and they made for the stairs, not forgetting to look in to check on their injured son on the way. He was bouncing up and down on the spot with his legs crossed, in a way that can only be done by contortionists and those under six. He was winning – whether by skill or Julie’s good offices – they couldn’t tell.

‘We’re upstairs in the study, Nole,’ Jacquie announced.

‘Laters,’ he said, waving his fingers at her.

‘Right, then.’ She went up to the study, laughing. ‘How old is he?’ she asked his father.

‘Twenty. Three. Forty-two. Who knows? He’s a human being, and that’s the important thing.’

‘Every child is a human being, Max,’ she said.

‘My dear, dear girl,’ he said, pushing open the door of the study. ‘How sweet of you to think so. And how incredibly wrong. Now, no more
shilly-shallying
, you. Just get that walkie-talkie out and tell me how it works. What does this button do, for example?’

‘That switches it on and off, Max. And let’s be honest, you don’t have any trouble switching it off, do you? Just sit down there and don’t let me hear another peep or there’ll be trouble.’

‘Have you ever considered teaching, at all?’ he asked, head on one side and a winning expression on his face.

‘No,’ she sighed, sitting down beside him. ‘I’ve seen what it can do.’

And so, little by little, with much sighing and sobbing, mostly from Jacquie, Peter Maxwell learnt all he would ever know about mobile phones. Which was about half of what most people knew, but at least three times more than he knew before. He could already send a text, but after these lessons it would now usually get to the right destination. When he rang someone, the chances now were that they would get the call, rather than someone rather puzzled in Turkey. He had the phone set to vibrate so he would never miss a call. He had privately designated the very desk drawer where it could vibrate itself to death and no one would ever know. He had agreed to
check messages and voicemail in every break and before he set off home. He had worded the promise very carefully, and at no time had he undertaken to have it with him.

‘Right then, sweetheart,’ Jacquie said, leaning over and kissing him on the nose. ‘I think we’re all set.’

He smiled sweetly up at her. ‘You betchya,’ he agreed.

‘Oh, and by the way,’ she added.

‘Yes, oh queen of my heart,’ he smiled.

‘Having the phone with you is understood – just because you didn’t positively say you’d have it doesn’t mean you can leave it behind.’

‘Well, really!’ He looked outraged. ‘As if I would do such a thing!’

‘Yes, well, just so you know that
I
know,’ she said. ‘Tell you what, just to check your skills. The Chinese restaurant takes orders by text. Go and ask Julie what she’d like and we’ll have a takeaway as a treat.’

‘I’ll phone it in,’ he beamed.

‘Text it in.’

‘Phone.’

‘Text.’

‘Do you
want
five portions of special fried and a side order of duck’s feet, hold the guano?’

He had a point. ‘Phone it is, then. But only because I’m hungry.’

And chuckling quietly to himself, Maxwell
headed downstairs to take the order. By the time he reached the sitting room door, he was virtually indistinguishable from Charlie Chan himself.

The house was still faintly redolent of Hung Woo’s Special Dinner for Three as Maxwell and Jacquie got ready for bed. Julie had eventually been prised from Nolan, who had welcomed a playmate so accommodating with open arms, and had been driven home by Jacquie. Nolan had been put to bed, with another dose of paediatric painkiller hidden in his bedtime milk. His chin had taken on a rather attractive shade of lilac, shot with navy blue, and by morning would be twice its normal size; he’d look more desperate than Dan. Metternich had mooched off in search of amusement. No one really wanted to know the details, but it probably involved rodents.

‘Well, tiddles,’ Maxwell said, snuggling up to Jacquie in the lavender-scented dark. ‘What do you think?’

‘About what?’ she asked. ‘Surely, you can’t want my opinions on the aberrant apostrophe again?’

‘My good woman,’ he said, ‘your opinion on that is surely in no doubt. Should there
be
doubt in your mind, I suggest that the place to think it over is the spare room.’

She poked him in the side, with her specially trained Woman Policeman’s forefinger.

‘Ouch. No, I mean about all this texting lark. What is going on?’

‘Hmm.’ He heard her scratch her head in the darkness. ‘I don’t know, to be honest. My first thought was that it was kids, as you know, ganging up. Then, when I saw it, I thought it was an adult, but who, and how did they get the number? Now, I’m thinking … I’m not sure. But Julie did tell me something on the drive home which I am going to share with you on the very strictest understanding that you won’t tell a soul. OK?’

There was no reply. Surely, he hadn’t dropped off?

‘Max? OK?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Well, answer, then.’

‘I was nodding.’

‘In the dark?’

‘I thought you would be able to tell. That your extraordinary hearing would be able to discern the slide of my golden tresses on the pillow. But I understand now that you can’t, so, yes, I promise not to tell a soul.’

‘Good, because Julie was most insistent.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Well,’ Jacquie snuggled closer and tucked her head just under Maxwell’s ear. He obediently bent his legs to make a chair and she sat in her favourite place, knees bent, ankles crossed, hands
clasped at her waist. ‘Apparently, Julie is not the only one getting these.’

‘Really?’ He pulled his head away as if to look at her. Although the thick curtains made the dark as deep as a well, he could see her face as clearly as if she was on stage, lit by limelight. Her presence, there in his arms, in his bed, was so intense he almost felt that he could smell her face changing as she smiled, frowned, cried.

She pulled his head back into position and made herself comfortable. ‘Yes. Someone called Lee.’

‘A boy?’

‘Oh, that’s a thought. I didn’t get that impression. Is there a girl called Lee?’

‘No, not in the Sixth Form at any rate. But these days, with that great blurring of names that has accompanied political correctness, gender neutralisation and global warming, who knows?’

‘Lower down the school? Perhaps a neighbour she travels with.’

‘No, no. Julie has gone up in the world. She gets brought to school by her mother, driving a huge behemoth fit to climb Everest. Not so much a four-by-four as a forty-by-forty. No, no, let me think.’

She almost dozed off there in the warm bed as he put his cogs to work.

‘I’ve got it!’ He leapt as he said it and nearly catapulted her onto the floor. ‘Oh, soz, heart.
Did I make you jump?’ She was lying on her side of the bed, the cold side of the bed, making little whimpering noises and clutching her chest histrionically. ‘Leah. That must be who she means.’

‘Leah? Yes, she may have said that. But I was accelerating over traffic lights and I may have misheard.’

‘Bit of amber gambling, dearest?’ Maxwell was only half scolding. He was a nervous-driver husband and she was a bit of a chancer.

‘Oh, possibly. But, yes, Leah. That sounds right. She has a bit of a feckless mother, rich dad, new stepmother.’

‘That’s the one. As Julie has gone up, so Leah has come down in the world. I understand from Sylv that she looks after a young sister much of the time. Her grades are slipping.’

‘Well, it might not be because of the baby minding. Julie says Leah gets far more texts than she does and they are much nastier.’

‘Poor kid. She tries her best to look as though she’s coping, but her mother is really the child in the relationship. The father, I think I’m right in saying, is in business somewhere along the coast and was a bit of a ladies’ man. Probably still is, but at the moment is managing to hide that behind a new wife. Possibly a baby as well, I can’t quite remember.’

‘Can’t remember, Max?’ Jacquie was genuinely surprised. That wasn’t something he often said.

‘Well,’ he expelled his breath in a sigh, ‘there are so many in this situation now. When I was first Head of Sixth Form …’

‘… when Adam was in the Militia …’

‘I only had a few single-parent families.’ He completed the sentence. ‘In fact, we had so few, I don’t think we even had a phrase for it. But now it seems they outnumber the other sort of family.’

‘Our sort of family,’ Jacquie chimed in. He gave her a squeeze.

‘I hate the stereotyping of so-called “broken” homes. Some are better off broken, when you meet some of the parents who have snapped off, so to speak. But there are some, Julie’s, Leah’s, which don’t seem so bad when you look in from the outside. Plenty of money. New mobiles, new shoes. Cars as soon as they are old enough and often before. But no love, from anywhere. They often end up being quite desperate and that’s why you see these beautiful girls walking along with tattooed louts with only one brain cell.’

‘Bit sexist, Max,’ Jacquie protested.

‘Count them next time you’re out and about,’ he said. ‘Look into their eyes and see what’s in there.’

‘What will I see?’ she said quietly.

‘Nothing, that’s what. Their mouths are smiling, with their perfect teeth, but their eyes are empty. Poor little girls.’

‘They wouldn’t want to be called little girls, I don’t think,’ said Jacquie. ‘They like to think of themselves as women. That’s why we have to patrol the city centre every night, to pick women up off the pavement where they are lying passed out from bingeing.’

‘What little right-wingers we sound, here in the dark,’ muttered Maxwell.

Jacquie patted him absently on the arm. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘Long as I’ve known you, I still don’t know your politics, do you know that?’

‘And nor will you, madam.’ He was suitably outraged. ‘Since William Gladstone brought in the secret ballot in 1872, no one has known my politics. Of course, I had only been voting for a while at the time. It was such a pain putting your arm in the air every seven years, but the free beer was good.’

She chuckled and turned over on her side, pummelling the pillow into a comfortable shape underneath her head. He turned to kiss her goodnight and inhaled a strand of hair. By the time the coughing had more or less subsided, she was asleep and the subject of the lost girls was shelved for the day. But they were on his mind as he closed his eyes and his dreams were of looking for something lost, in a place he didn’t know.

The seamlessly organised morning chez Maxwell was not taking its usual course. For one thing, Nolan’s chin had indeed swollen overnight and now taking off his pyjamas had become a major issue, involving cajoling, threats and, ultimately, scissors. He was inordinately proud of his stitches, sprouting like a witch’s whiskers from his lilac chin, and the offer of a day off school – usually a popular choice – was instantly rejected. So, late and more than a little testy, Jacquie had driven off with her wounded soldier in the child seat in the back of her newly acquired Doblò, chosen for two reasons, both Maxwellian – his bike would fit in the back without having to strap Nolan on the roof, and it reminded him of his first train set. He inevitably referred to it as the Hornby, to the confusion of all.

Maxwell and Metternich still had time for a quiet cup of something when the pair had driven
away. ‘Well, Count,’ Maxwell remarked. ‘Once more unto the breach. Now, where did I leave that mobile phone?’ Metternich obligingly lifted his head and looked around in a desultory fashion. This was a trick learnt by accident in kittenhood and even now was still good for an extra pouch of something in gravy. ‘Thank you for looking, Count. But in fact I know it is in my office. I’m just getting used to asking. Something in gravy?’ Maxwell got up and reached for the cat food cupboard, an interrogative eyebrow raised. What a sap this man was. The cat extended both arms in an extravagant stretch and walked over to his bowl, the general impression being that he would indeed do Maxwell the honour of eating his kindly offered food. It was usually a messy job, but somebody had to do it.

Maxwell raised his voice for his next conversational sally, to be heard over the noise of one pouch of unidentified abattoir sweepings disappearing into a cat. ‘What do you know of mobile phones, Count?’ The cat stopped gulping for a microsecond, but this was long enough to express his contempt that Maxwell could even ask the question. ‘Yes, exactly,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Me too. But I think that I know enough in this instance. Julie and Leah must have given their numbers to someone, because this isn’t like an old-fashioned heavy-breathing call. In the good old days, if anyone wanted to ask a random
housewife what colour her underwear was, he would dial numbers at random and if he struck lucky that was a bonus. The more organised of them would write the number down first, so that if he
did
strike lucky, he could always try that one again. Are you with me so far?’

Metternich gave the bowl one last, lingering lick and looked up. The old geezer had paused and had that hopeful expression on his face again. Better humour him. He jumped, a blur of white and black, onto Jacquie’s only recently vacated chair and licked one paw, he hoped intelligently. Perversions of the past weren’t really his thing, but he could blag it along with the rest of the feline community.

‘Good,’ Maxwell said. ‘I thought I’d lost you for a minute there. ‘Well, the old-fashioned heavy breather knew he had struck lucky, of course, because he had a reply from the other end. A little horrified scream, an answer, whatever he wanted. But someone
texting
gets no reaction. They just send the text and that’s it. Nothing.’ He looked the cat in the eye. ‘I know what you’re thinking. When I send a text and get nothing it is often because I haven’t sent it at all. But that’s not what I mean. I happen to know,’ he said proudly, ‘that you get a little message on your phone saying “message sent” but you don’t know if the person to whom you have sent it has received it. So, why would you send it in the first
place? But even if there was a reason, why would you send more? They might be going to a docker in Glasgow, an all-in wrestler in Ynysybwl or a bouncer in Scunthorpe. You wouldn’t know it had gone to a rather sad girl in Leighford, would you?’

For some reason, Metternich did not reply to that one and Maxwell had to concede that he probably was not very up on mobile phones, even for a cat.

‘You wouldn’t, anyway. Take it from me. So, what we’ve got to find out is, how has the sender – let’s call him a “he”, shall we, because I just can’t picture it being a girl somehow– got their numbers? And to do this I will have somehow to think of a question I can ask Julie and Leah without letting Leah know that I know that she has had these texts.’ There was a pause. ‘Don’t just look at me, Count. Do you have an answer – yes or no?’

Metternich flicked an ear and, jumping from the chair, was down the stairs and out of the cat flap before you could say ‘vole’.

‘I’ll take that as a no, then.’ Maxwell yawned, stretched and, rather more slowly than the cat and, this time, not using the cat flap, made his way into the big wide world and beyond. Springtime in Leighford. What could be nicer? How long have you got?

The morning light, filtered through the blackthorn blossom and unfurling leaves of the woodland, stroked the man’s cheek with its pollen-sparkled fingers. The catkins shook and trembled above him, but in the wind, not because of any disturbance he made. His chest was still, the one half-open eye did not flicker as the sun struck the pearly cornea. His lips were parted over his teeth, as if a smile had been frozen in the making. A beetle walked over his lip and investigated the edge of his nostril. An early fly, drowsy in the
still-chilly
spring morning, walked round the spiral of the ear and, without a moment’s hesitation, disappeared inside. Either this man was a very determined naturalist, or he was dead.

Jacquie made her way to her office through a thicket of concerned women. As she had barrelled out of the station the afternoon before, the tales had grown and spread and so by the morning it was common knowledge that Nolan had been squashed by a runaway steamroller whilst being mauled by a rabid Komodo dragon, despite both fates being rather unusual in Leighford.

Her desk was in an even worse state than she had feared. A report that she had been annotating was in the middle, with the pen still in place where she had been underlining a witness’s non sequitur which might be vital. A coffee cup with a greasy slick on top of its grey contents stood in
the dried spill caused when she had leapt to her feet, flinging on her coat and grabbing her bag. Someone had pushed the chair under, but that was all. Otherwise it was a testament to her flight. She sat down, picked up the pen and tried to gather her thoughts again. She had only just got back to understanding the gist when Henry Hall’s head popped round the door.

‘Jacquie? Have you got just a minute?’

‘Yes, guv.’ She put down her pen again. One day, if she was lucky, she would finish that report and also, with luck, it might get to the court before the subject had completed his tariff.

Henry Hall was already behind his desk when she went in, closing the door behind her. In a cruel light, the DCI was beginning to look his age these days. An old fart like Maxwell could see something of the old copper in Henry Hall, with a whiff of Hilaire Belloc’s lion – ‘his shoulders are stark, and his jaws they are grim, And a good little child will not play with him’. All very apt.

‘Are you in the middle of something?’ Hall asked as soon as she had sat down.

‘Well, I’m trying to do a report on that robbery last week. He’s got a sheet as long as your arm and he was caught with all the stuff in his lock-up, but he also has a damned good brief and we want to be sure of getting him this time.’

‘Who is it?’ Hall was not known for his expressive voice or, come to that, his expression,
but Jacquie was trained in the small nuances and knew that this was just a courtesy question.

‘Oh, whatsisface, Enfield. No bother, guv. Anyone can do it.’

‘Fine. Because I want you to concentrate on something else now, Jacquie. And, look, this is a bit awkward, really, but I have to ask. HR are wondering whether Nolan has … well, anything wrong with him?’

Jacquie flew straight up out of her chair; had she had feathers, they would have been filling the room. ‘
What?
’

Hall held out his hands in supplication. ‘Please, Jacquie, don’t shoot the messenger. It’s just that you’ve had a lot of odd half days and things lately – yesterday, for example.’

‘I’m sorry, guv, about yesterday, but he fell over and had to have stitches. I tried to get Max onto it – Sylv would have helped out, but … well …’ her voice trailed away, ‘I couldn’t reach him, and Nole needed to go to A&E.’

‘I do understand, Jacquie,’ Hall said. He wasn’t exactly a hands-on dad, Heaven knew – his boys could testify to that – but Maxwell seemed to dodge the column rather more than he would have expected. ‘But Max has short days and—’

‘Yes, I know, long holidays. Yes, yes.’ Jacquie was beginning to feel quite cornered. ‘And he has Nolan all through those holidays, in case anyone
hasn’t noticed. But his days aren’t all that short. He has meetings. He has detentions.’

Had Henry Hall had the necessary muscles, he would have smirked.

‘And before you say anything, he isn’t
in
detention himself. And – I can tell you, Henry, for goodness’ sake we all go back far enough – he never has his phone on. Well, that’s not true, he does sometimes, but it is becoming a bit of an issue, I will admit.’

Hall sat immobile, the strip-lights on his glasses obscuring his eyes, windows to what he probably thought of as his soul.

‘So, last night we had a little lesson and now he will be using his phone, carrying it at all times. He will be able to take his turn at any emergency. And, to get back to HR,’ Jacquie almost spat, ‘no, there is nothing at all wrong with my child, unless being bright is wrong. And a bit on the clumsy side, possibly. Two left feet, bless him.’

Hall breathed a sigh of relief. He knew Jacquie and he knew Maxwell and he knew Nolan. A brighter trio would be hard to find. He also knew that Jacquie could morph into an outraged mother tiger at the drop of a criticism and he despised the lily-livered HR manager for giving him the task of asking if Nolan had a problem. Why not just put his head in a vice and be done?

‘Well, that’s excellent, then.’ He made a note,
which Jacquie tried, unsuccessfully, to read upside down. ‘How busy are you right now?’

‘Just the Enfield thing, ongoing. There is plenty else I could be starting, but they are still in my ‘to do’ pile. I suppose a few more days in there won’t hurt them.’ She smiled up at him, to show there were no hard feelings. He looked back. Probably, in his head, thought Jacquie, he thinks he is smiling. ‘But that’s it.’ She spread her arms, palms up.

‘Well, that’s good, because I have a job here which is right up your street. I’ve got this file here,’ he picked it up and let it fall, ‘of reports and complaints from concerned parents about mobile phone abuse. Apparently, someone is sending rather nasty texts to a whole lot of girls in Leighford.’

Jacquie’s mouth fell open with surprise and it took her a moment to recover her composure. ‘Guv, that’s amazing,’ she finally said.

‘Why?’ He felt a Maxwell problem raising its ugly head and his stomach plummeted. Why did his favourite sergeant have to be married to his least favourite meddler? In fact, even that wasn’t fair. At all other times – at their wedding, at the occasional staff party – he found Maxwell perfectly good company. In fact, at the occasional staff party, he and Maxwell were often to be found glorying in their shared wall-flowerdom. Maxwell’s idea that pubs should have two seedy
gazebos out back, one for smokers and one for people who hated staff do’s, struck an echoing chord with Henry Hall.

‘Well,’ she hesitated. ‘Oh dear, Henry. This is so difficult. It means betraying a confidence.’

‘What, a confidence from Max?’

‘No, no. Well, I suppose in a way. One of his students came round last evening. She was totally desperate. She has been getting unpleasant texts and she doesn’t know who from. From whom, perhaps I should say.’ She gave a little chuckle. She wasn’t just married to Maxwell. She was turning into him.

Henry Hall knew what she meant. He was pretty sure that Maxwell had inserted a clause into the wedding vows pertaining to the use of correct grammar at all times.

‘She didn’t swear me to secrecy about her texts. In fact, she seemed quite relieved to get it off her chest. But she did tell me about a friend of hers who is getting even worse stuff and
that’s
what she asked me to keep secret.’

‘That’s not too bad,’ he conceded. ‘We can perhaps work on the first girl. Did you see the texts?’

‘Only the one that came while she was at our house.’

‘Just one? In how long?’

‘Ooh, let me think. She arrived around about four-thirty, I suppose. She left about eightish.’

‘That seems a long time just to tell you about nasty texts.’ Henry Hall was pedantic by nature and also nurture. He left no pernickety bit of gravel in a story unturned, even when the teller was one of his staff.

‘Well, yes, I suppose it does. But she was very upset and we wanted to calm her down. She started a computer game with Nolan and then we had Chinese. I took her home and got back just as
Panorama
was starting, so I suppose she was with us until about quarter past eight, something like that.’

‘So, in nearly four hours, she only got one text?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was her phone still switched on? She wasn’t trying to hide things from you?’

‘I don’t think so, guv. Why would she want to? She had come to us about it, after all. And I must admit, the text wasn’t all that horrible. It was a bit seedy, you might say. Real heavy breather stuff. Except one thing; he said that he knew what she was doing. That he was watching her. Obviously, that bit was worrying, although thinking it over there was no way in which he could actually do that. But it
has
worried her, naturally. The fact that someone can send you texts from a number you don’t know is creepy enough.’

‘Did you copy it down?’

‘Better. I forwarded it to myself.’ She fished in
her bag and pulled out her phone, pressed a few keys and passed it over.

‘Nice phone,’ Hall remarked. ‘Fancy.’

Jacquie shrugged. ‘It came with the tariff. To be honest, I’d be happy with something simpler.’