Maxwell's Retirement (5 page)

Hall raised one eyebrow. ‘Max?’

‘He’d be happier with a pigeon, or failing that, two baked-bean cans and a nice long string. But he’s managing.’ She hoped that was true, because she was going to test him later.

Hall finally found the right angle to view the screen, turning it first so the light didn’t reflect off it, then to accommodate the extreme edges of his varifocals and then back again to rid it of the reflection. ‘Hmm,’ he said at last, refocusing on Jacquie with difficulty. ‘Text speak isn’t my forte, of course, but I would say that this is a bit of a hybrid at best.’

Jacquie just forbore from applauding and crying ‘Well done!’ Instead, she said, ‘Yes, guv. I thought that. Definitely not a kid. Their texts don’t have any full words in and I don’t think anyone under forty uses the word “panties”, do you?’

Hall handed back her phone and thought for a moment. Nothing Henry Hall said was off the cuff. Maxwell often said that if Hall was caught in a towering inferno, he would think many more times than twice before shouting ‘Fire!’ ‘It could be someone trying to fool us,’ he said at last.

‘But why would anyone do that, guv?’ Jacquie said. She and Maxwell had been over this already and she had all the bases covered. ‘She’s not supposed to tell anyone.’

‘That’s a valid point. But he might assume she would.’

‘I think we’re reaching a bit, there, if you don’t mind my saying so, guv. I think that this is some kind of game that the sender of these texts is playing, and I don’t know what it is, or even who he is playing it with.’

‘Sorry,’ Hall said. ‘I assumed he – or don’t forget, it could be a she – is playing it with these girls, if it is a game.’

‘I think it is definitely a he, and can we keep to that, so we don’t go bonkers?’

He inclined his head. It would certainly make it easier.

‘I think he
is
playing with the girls, but I find it strange that he is doing it without any feedback. We all remember the old days, with the anonymous calls. I don’t remember any of those where they would just leave a message. What would be the point? No, I think he is playing with
lots
of girls, not just these two. And he knows at least one in his net, so he can get gratuitous feedback. If Julie just got one text in all that time, I’m assuming the other girl she told me about, Leah, probably gets about the same. So I’m tempted to think that the gaps between are filled
with him sending merry little messages to other phones.’

‘I agree.’

‘Just like that?’ Jacquie was a little taken aback. ‘That’s nice, Henry.’

‘I’m glad you think so, Jacquie. But in fact, not only is it nice, I agree because I have had rather a lot of reports of similar texts coming in from all over town. Some of the girls have parents who are either much nosier, or perhaps just more hands-on than the families of your two girls.’

‘Well, they both come from single-parent families.’

‘Well, so do some of my complainants,’ Henry said, rather acidly. He was tired of hearing that as an excuse. Only the previous week, in court to give evidence in a rather unpleasant fraud case, he had listened with growing amazement as the accused blamed the whole thing on his broken home. Since the man in this case was sixty-three and his home had been broken only two years before when his ninety-two-year-old father had died and left a widow of ninety to mourn his passing, Henry Hall had found the excuse rather a lame one. So he wasn’t really all that sympathetic to the broken-home excuse.

‘Max and I wondered whether he might be targeting lonely kids from … that kind of family situation.’ Jacquie could recognise a sore subject when one bit her on the leg.

Hall looked down at the open file on his desk and flicked over a page or two. ‘Let’s see.’ He kept a count under his breath and after a moment looked up at her. ‘Right. Twenty-five complaints.’

‘Twenty-five!’

‘Yes, and I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg. Of that twenty-five, we have fifteen with two parents, by which I mean the original pair. Another four have two parents, but one is a step. The other …’ he quickly checked his maths in his head, ‘yes, the other six have one parent, that’s five with a mother, one a father.’

Jacquie shrugged her assent. ‘Right, so that blows our first theory out of the water.’

‘Never mind.’ Henry Hall knew how irritating that could be. ‘What was your second theory?’

‘I don’t think we had one, as such.’

Hall pushed himself back from his desk and picked up the folder. He handed it across the desk to Jacquie and, as she took it, she felt it momentarily turn into a poisoned chalice.

‘Is anyone else working on this one, guv?’ she asked, hopefully.

‘Not as such,’ he admitted.

‘So, I’m on my own?’

‘Well, obviously you can have help as and when you need it,’ he said magnanimously.

‘Lovely,’ muttered Jacquie, and turned to the door. ‘Who is taking my burglary off me?’

‘Look, Jacquie,’ Hall said. ‘I don’t want to
overburden you, but I must admit I have a sneaking suspicion even now that this might be a hoax. Don’t rush on this. Do your burglary first.’

‘Thanks, guv,’ she said. ‘Any chance of a quiet room to work?’

‘Of course, of course,’ he said, ushering her out. The feeling that the whole thing had gone quite well wouldn’t quite come together in his mind. He felt like a bit of a shit, truth be told, and someone would be getting it in the neck, just to pass it on. ‘I’ll get Matt out of his office. He doesn’t need it now he’s finished that drug thing. I’ll go and tell him now.’

‘Oh, thanks.’ Jacquie wasn’t happy with getting the rough end of the stick, but the rough end of the stick had fewer splinters when you were holding it in the corner office one floor up from the hoi polloi. As she went back to her desk, she heard the door to the stairs swing to behind Henry Hall. Fortunately, she couldn’t hear the shouts when Matt was thrown out of his nest; he was calling her a lot of things, but ‘cuckoo’ wasn’t one of them.

Maxwell made his way to his office through a thicket of concerned women. The rumour of the content of Jacquie’s calls trying to reach Maxwell had spread school-wide. It had not reached the dizzy heights of the nick, having stopped short at the steamroller. The reduced severity was offset by the fact that whereas Jacquie worked with about
seven women, Maxwell had a total of around five hundred to wade through.

‘Sir, sir, is your little boy all right, sir?’

‘Is it true you were in hiding, sir, when your wife tried to phone you?’ This one from one of the boys, of course.

‘Sir, sir …’

Maxwell turned to face the mob. He knew they meant well. He knew that if he had a Kalashnikov right now, Leighford High School would be another victim of falling rolls. ‘Ladies and …’ he looked around. Just the one boy. Not much of a surprise. ‘Gentleman. Nolan is fine. He took a bit of a tumble at school and needed a few stitches. That’s all. There will be another press statement on the hour.’

‘Aaah,’ came as a general comment from the crowd.

‘He hasn’t hurt his face, has he?’ said a mascaraed ghoul midway back in the press. ‘He’s ever so pretty.’

‘No, Holly-Jane,’ Maxwell said. ‘Thank you for the compliment, though I think he might prefer handsome. He’ll just have a scar under his chin.’ Two hundred heads tilted back to salute the club. ‘Yes, exactly. Just like yours. At the moment he’s a bit sore, but he’s back at his pre-school, so don’t worry. I’ll pass on your regards. Now, off you go. You must have
something
you should be doing. Even here.’

Muttering mumsily, the crowd dispersed and Maxwell made his way to the staffroom, that haven of sanity in the middle of Bedlam. While the doors were still swinging behind him, there was an indrawn breath as everyone prepared the same question. He got in fast with the stock answer and, grabbing a coffee from the machine, went to sit next to Sylvia Matthews, a calm centre in an hysterical world. On the walls around him the NUT posters demanded a four-day week, a ten per cent pay rise and a whole squadron of flying pigs. Alongside that a photograph of the Secretary of State for Education beamed down benignly and someone had written the legend ‘Edward Testicles’ under it. The Family Trust stats facing the door, which placed Leighford High somewhere other than the bottom of the league tables, continued to give frazzled staff the false impression that their daily toil had
some
purpose.

‘Sylv,’ Maxwell acknowledged, throwing himself down in the chair.

‘Max,’ she replied. Since her marriage at Christmas, she had become even more
Madonna-like
, serene, peaceful to be with. There were some days when Maxwell just wanted to be near her, to soak up some of the atmosphere. The days when she pined for him were long gone, but they had left a cool shadow where he could recharge his batteries. ‘Nolan’s OK, then?’

‘Fine,’ he said and gestured vaguely to his
chin. ‘Few stitches. A bit of swelling.’ He fought down the memory of the screaming that morning as Jacquie and he had struggled to part the child from his pyjamas.

‘Very common injury,’ Sylvia offered. She hadn’t been the school nurse for three decades for nothing.

‘So I gather,’ sighed Maxwell. ‘The whole thing got me into a bit of hot water, actually.’

Sylvia paused mid-sip. ‘Why? You didn’t push him over, did you?’ She twinkled at him. ‘I thought that you were just AWOL, not lurking in the bushes having done the deed.’

He smiled at her. ‘No, no. I just didn’t have my phone with me.’

‘Of course you didn’t.’

He waited for the next comment, but for some reason she seemed to consider the statement complete.

‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you expected me to be surprised.’

‘A bit of empathy might be nice.’

‘Oh, no, Peter Maxwell. You’ll get no empathy, sympathy or any other athy from me. You have a small child and a wife who might be up to her neck in other peoples’ entrails at any moment of the day.’

‘Sylv, I must just stop you there. You seem to have a glamorised view of police work. This is Leighford, not Fort Apache, the Bronx.’

‘Glamorised?’

‘Well, perhaps that’s not the right word, but I can assure you that Jacquie is rarely up to her neck in entrails. I’m more likely to be in that situation than her.’

‘I’m talking literal entrails here, Max, not metaphorical.’

Mavis, the rather shy little woman from the Textiles Department who had been about to join them, backed away. Entrails had never featured in her conversational gambits thus far and she had no wish to add them to her portfolio at this stage in her life. She had just fancied a little chat about her impending retirement, which had been her sole topic of conversation since the decision had been made on the day before they had broken up for Christmas. It had not been made so much as thrust upon her; Diamond had decided in the previous year that, should she be sewn up in Santa’s sack and left in the car park one more time, she’d have to go.

‘Mavis,’ Maxwell nodded in a friendly fashion as she retreated.

‘Don’t!’ hissed Sylvia out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Don’t encourage her. She’ll start talking about retiring. And,’ she added, in the nick of time, ‘don’t say the R word, or she’ll come over.’ She raised her head and smiled at Mavis, just to convince her that the hiss was not about her.

‘Can I spell it, like w-a-l-k-i-e-s for a dog?’ asked Maxwell.

‘She may only teach Textiles, Max,’ said Sylvia, ‘but I do believe she can spell.’

‘Oh?’ Maxwell was surprised but pleased to hear it. ‘Anyway, to get back to entrails … I know what you mean. You mean that she can’t leave her entrails, however metaphorical, at one bound, whereas I can leave thirty twelve-year-old homicidal maniacs to wreak whatever havoc they wish every time there is an emergency.’

She leant back and looked at him long and hard. Then, ‘Got it in one, Max.’

He deflated, beaten. When Sylvia Matthews was not on your side, you didn’t have a side. ‘I’m not that much help, though, Sylv. I don’t drive.’

She smiled at him ruefully and patted his hand. She knew that and she knew why. The battered photos in the Great Man’s wallet were a permanent reminder of what it is to drive. And to die. A family one moment. Old photos the next. Unfortunately, Maxwell’s hand was holding his hot coffee at the time and after much mopping and soothing, she spoke. ‘I know that, Max, and no one is expecting you to start. But if you were only contactable, it would save a lot of time with Jacquie phoning round to find you. I can imagine how it looked yesterday. That particular injury bleeds as though your throat’s been cut. She just needed the moral support.’

‘I know.’ He looked as contrite as he felt. ‘I’ll try, Sylv. Old habits, you know.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But give it a try, eh?’

‘All right. I’ll do my best.’

‘Where is the phone now?’

‘Mrs B answered it last night so I am assuming it is in my office somewhere.’

‘Mrs B answered your phone? It’s a smartphone, isn’t it?’

Maxwell made a noise which was difficult to quantify. It somehow encompassed amazement, confusion and mild distress.

Sylvia made it easier for him. ‘Is it one of those phones with a little keyboard?’ she asked in the tones she usually kept for her grandmother, ninety-seven, still going strong but without a functioning synapse to her name.

‘Yes,’ he smiled happily. ‘It has got a little keyboard. Yes, it has. And I have to say – perhaps I should say that
even
I have to say – that it makes the occasional text I send much easier. None of that silly tapping at one key all the time.’ He had never really understood why the people who invented the earlier type assumed it was all right to reduce twenty-six letters of the English alphabet to eight buttons.

‘Well, there now!’ Sylvia could not have been happier had his ears sprouted multi-coloured balloons to the strains of
Cavatina
. ‘That’s excellent! But I am surprised that Mrs B tackled one of those.’

‘You can’t miss the ring,’ Maxwell said. ‘It’s
The Bum of the Flightlebee
.’

Mavis from Textiles bridled as she walked behind his chair. They were talking about bums now. Thank
goodness
she was retiring soon.