Maxwell’s Reunion (4 page)

She threw something at him.

‘I remember doing that in geography in the Upper Fourths,’ he told her. ‘The colonic irrigation of the Nile Delta. Got an A- for my map from old Bloxham just before we got him on to his war stories. Never did another stroke of geography.’

‘One of the Few, was he?’

‘Wrong war, my dear. He got dysentery at Harfleur before marching on to Agincourt.’

Jacquie gave him an old-fashioned look. You never knew with Peter Maxwell. She kicked off her other shoe, to join the first near the bed. She sat in front of the mirror at the dressing table and let her hair cascade over her shoulders.

‘Time for the mud pack and cucumbers,’ she said, looking at him.

Maxwell smiled and finished his Southern Comfort. ‘A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse,’ he said, and dragged himself off the bed. ‘You know,’ he bent down and kissed the top of her head, ‘I was the luckiest man there tonight.’

‘Oh?’ She arched an eyebrow at him, watching his face in the mirror. ‘I should have thought you’d have given that distinction to David.’

‘Ash?’ He frowned. ‘Oh, you mean Veronica?’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Nah,’ he decided. ‘Airhead.’ He lifted her gently by the shoulders and turned her round. ‘I like my women to understand what I’m talking about,’ he said.

‘Your women?’ She widened her eyes. ‘And anyway, I don’t understand; not always.’

‘Nearly always is good enough.’ He laughed. ‘I asked Veronica to pass me the salt at one point and she had to reach for a dictionary.’

They heard the grandfather clock strike two, distant, as though in a dream. ‘That’ll be me away,’ Maxwell said, retrieving his shoes and his tie, before finding his jacket.

She stopped him. ‘I’m only next door, Max,’ she said, and she kissed him, a deep kiss, long and close. He held her at arm’s length. ‘What a coincidence,’ he said. ‘So am I.’

The dead man hung at the end of the rope, creaking slowly on its taut housings. One shoe had dropped with a thud, echoing through the empty hallway and the dark, dead corridor beyond. His hands dangled at his side, the fingers hooked as he’d fought for breath, a little away from his body, as though balancing as he walked on air. His head was at an odd angle with the knot of the noose behind his left ear, his eyes bulging in the darkness, trying to see through the night gloom. His tongue protruded obscenely through the clenched teeth and the peeled-back lips, his final gesture to the world.

Ahead of him the wrought iron of the first landing glowed eerily in the fitful moon. After the rain, a scattering of clouds sailed past the tall oriel window with its coat of arms and its school motto. No school song now; no rousing chorus roared until the rafters rang, but the slow, swinging creak of the rope and the moan of the wind on the lonely stair.

3

The dew was still heavy on the ground as six of the Magnificent Seven wandered the grounds they all knew so well. Maxwell had left Jacquie sleeping, grabbed some orange juice and coffee in the Graveney’s breakfast room and piled into Cret Bingham’s Galaxy.

‘Tom Wilkinson was killed there,’ Richard Alphedge remembered on their way over. ‘Back there, on that bend. Some stupid bastard in a juggernaut. Do you remember, Max?’

‘I remember hearing about it in chapel the next day.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘You could have heard a pin drop. The HM was steady.’

‘The HM?’ Bingham called from the driving seat. ‘Heart of stone, that man. You don’t get tears from granite. My God, look at that.’

They had. Beyond the wild privet, tipped silver in the fading frost, the sweep of Halliards hung like a ghost in the morning. The Galaxy snarled through the open wrought-iron gates, the gilded arms peeling now in the autumn weather, in the twilight of their years. To the left, the concrete block that was the science lab, new in the Seven’s time, its walls corroded and grey. To the right, the bulk of the chapel and the Old School beyond. Matthew Arnold would have been at home here.

‘Parking under the limes, Anthony?’ Maxwell clicked his tongue. ‘Old Gregson’ll get you.’

‘Old Gregson!’ Muir laughed. ‘Now there’s a name I’d forgotten. Groundsman extraordinaire.’ Their minds raced back to the surly old sod they all swore had been drummed out of the Cheka for excessive inhumanity.

‘And bastard by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.’ Asheton chuckled. ‘It was you who turned the hose on the First Eleven Square, wasn’t it, Max?’

Maxwell drew himself up to his full height. ‘That is a gross calumny, sir, and you will withdraw it.’

‘Not very good at withdrawing, old Ash.’ Muir grunted and laughed as the blond man cuffed him round the ear.

Then an odd silence fell as the Galaxy crunched to a halt on the gravel, each man alone with his thoughts. The Preacher was out first, gazing up at the school chapel with its Gothic crosses and its stained glass. Somebody had put the Head of Classics’ bike up on that roof once, a miracle of engineering, ingenuity and schoolboy pluck. Alphedge took in the fives court wall and the workshops beyond, looking oddly derelict and silent, like a concentration camp. He remembered the stage with its worn, scarred surface and that indefinable smell in the wings, born of greasepaint and first-night nerves.

‘Do they still do woodwork and stuff in school, Max?’ he asked.

Maxwell gave him a faraway look. ‘When I looked last,’ he said, ‘it was called Design Technology – or was it Craft, Design Technology? You can’t give the little darlings a hammer or they’ll bash their thumbs and sue the county.’

‘Or kill each other.’ Muir slammed the door behind him.

‘Ah, yes.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I teach Peter Sutcliffe Appreciation classes every Thursday.’

‘Thursday!’ Alphedge dashed on to the dewy grass. ‘I remember Thursday. CCF!’ And he broke into a brisk march, swinging his left arm while his right held his rifle butt at the carry. He sang out the monotonous notes of the parade ground.

‘God, yes,’ Bingham groaned. ‘That bloody bugle. Weren’t you something in the CCF, Max?’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Company deserter.’

‘That’s right.’ Muir clicked his fingers. ‘Didn’t you ask Captain Bashford if you could form a cavalry arm?’

‘And didn’t he cane you to within an inch of your life for impudence?’ Asheton joined in.

‘Yes on both counts,’ Maxwell confessed.

‘Bingham laughed. ‘Mad as a bloody snake.’

‘Oh, God. Look at that.’ They followed Alphedge’s finger to what was once the pool. The cold blue water had gone now, as had the roars of the house-mad crowd, cheering home the swimmers. The rectangle, with its peeling pale blue plaster, was full of debris, brick, glass and timber.

‘You know what that is, don’t you?’ Bingham asked.

‘The cricket pavilion.’

They turned to look at the Preacher. It was the first time Wensley had spoken that morning.

‘God, he’s right.’ Instinctively, their eyes came up to the distant line of cedars looming in the grey of the morning. It had stood there, by the far hedge, where Asheton made small talk with the stragglers from Cranton, the girls’ school down the road, who were going through the motions of cross-country; where Bingham had thrown up most of the smoke from his first cigarette; where Quentin had rammed home the hundred that took the Public Schools’ Cup from Rugby that year.

‘God, it’s like a grave,’ Bingham said. ‘I’m not sure I can face going inside.’

‘Yes, you can,’ Maxwell told him. ‘It’s why we came. Why we all came. Stenhouse, got the key?’

Muir had. They crossed the grass in front of the old Tuck Shop, padlocked now, but with most of its windows gone. How many iced buns, Maxwell wondered, how many packets of hamburger-flavoured crisps had disappeared down his ravenous maw before the world had invented E numbers and cholesterol? Then their shoes were clicking on the flagstones where the local town crier had stood all those years ago, looking a prat in his stockings and tricorn hat, to grant them their half-day holiday in honour of something or other that everybody had forgotten; probably it was International Doo-Dah Day. They wandered into the darkness of the cloisters, where dog-eared papers still flapped on their rusty drawing pins. Maxwell tried to read the faded notices. The Shakespeare Society was to meet on Wednesday. There was house cricket practice on the West Field. The orchestra was to meet for rehearsals in Gatehouse Lodge at four-fifteen.

‘Sorry, Preacher,’ Muir called back to the tall man at the back of the meandering line. ‘I don’t have a key to the chapel.’

Wensley glanced to his right and ran his finger lightly over the carved oak of the doors.

‘Didn’t you sing falsetto in the choir, Dickon?’ Asheton asked Alphedge.

‘Only until gravity and nature combined to lower my testicles, dear boy. And anyway, it’s called treble. I, of course, had perfect pitch.’

‘“A perfect pitch and a blinding light,”’ Maxwell misquoted, but Newbolt’s poem was lost on these scholars of yesteryear. Muir’s key grated in the side-door lock. They stood, the six, staring down the long corridor ahead, the massive water pipes dark with dust.

‘I’m sorry there’s no light,’ Muir said. ‘All the power in the place was switched off last month.’ They had to rely on the gleam from the high windows overhead.

‘Jesus,’ Asheton moaned. ‘It’s as cold as a witch’s tit in here,’ and he watched his breath smoke out.

They heard their footfalls echo as they ambled past the cream-painted walls and the silent classrooms with their half- frosted windows. Somehow, impossibly over the years, the old indefinable smell was still there.

‘In Latin lessons,’ Muir’s voice was dark brown, ‘no one can hear you scream.’

They all remembered the rows of ancient photos that once lined these walls. Faces long dead had stared back at them beneath tasselled, gold-laced caps and above striped jerseys. The First Eleven, the First Fifteen, Boxing Team A and Boxing Team B. The fives teams had been there and the Rowing Eight, proud and haughty and sure of themselves and their world. Then had come the Great War and the names of those who perished were gilded in the locked sanctums of the chapel. Bastard, E.F.L., Featherstonehaugh, B.F., Golighty, A.J.S., all lying together in foreign mud to prove there was a corner of a field that was forever Halliards.

‘The bell!’ Alphedge shouted. ‘I used to ring it when I was a prefect. Race you for it!’ And he shot off down the corridor, leaving the others in his wake.

‘Not bad for an out-of-work luvvie,’ Bingham commented, ‘that turn of speed.’

Alphedge had spun on his heel in a pool of light at the bottom of the central staircase. In profile to the others, his jaw had dropped and his fists had clenched. To the Preacher, it seemed that the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end.

‘Oh, my God.’

Asheton laughed. ‘Don’t tell me. They’ve carpeted Big School.’

But Alphedge wasn’t looking at Big School. He had his back to it, as they all knew, as Asheton should have known. One by one they reached him, and one by one they saw what he had seen. The body of a man twirled in the updraught, a half a twist to the left, another to the right, like some demented Newton’s cradle in Hannibal Lecter’s study.

‘Who is it?’ It was Bingham who gave voice to the question rising to all their throats.

‘It’s Quentin.’ The Preacher saw it first, mounting the worn stone of the steps so that he was on the dead man’s level.

Bingham moved for the rope, lashed around the banisters.

‘Don’t touch it!’ Maxwell shouted. And they all looked at him.

‘For Christ’s sake, Max,’ Asheton screamed at him. ‘We must. That’s Quent up there – George Quentin. We can’t leave him like that.’

Maxwell grabbed Bingham’s arm, staring steadily into his eyes. ‘We can and we must,’ he said.

‘He’s right,’ Bingham echoed, looking up at the bell rope creaking on its housings. ‘Old Harry will hold him till the police arrive.’

The Preacher’s eyes were closed now and his lips were moving silently in prayer.

‘Yes,’ said Alphedge. ‘We must call the police.’

But nobody moved. Nobody except George Quentin at the end of his tether.

‘Anybody got a mobile?’ Maxwell asked.

Asheton shook himself free of the moment and flicked his from his pocket. ‘999?’ he asked them.

Maxwell shook his head. ‘No, there’s one nearer than that.’

The frost had gone by the time they took George Quentin’s body away. A line of blue-and-white tape fluttered across the open gateway and men in white hoods and galoshes tiptoed their way across the gravel to waiting vehicles.

‘Max.’ His head came up at the sound of Jacquie’s voice. ‘Max, are you all right?’

He eased himself up off the fallen lime that lay sawn and trimmed at the end of the avenue of trees. ‘I’m fine.’ He held her hand briefly, sensing a figure at his elbow.

‘Max, this is DI Thomas, Warwickshire CID. Peter Maxwell.’

Thomas nodded. He was the wrong side of forty-eight, Maxwell guessed, and could probably have given David Jason a run for the most slovenly clothed detective around. ‘You found the body?’ He also sounded like something out of
The Grimleys
.

‘One of several who did,’ Maxwell told him. Thomas looked at Jacquie.

‘The others are back at the Graveney,’ she told him. ‘I checked it with your DS Vernon.’

‘Can we get one thing straight, Ms Carpenter?’ Thomas said. ‘As far as I am concerned, you are a civilian. You have no more jurisdiction here than any other member of the public, and anyway, in my patch, detective constables don’t conduct enquiries; detective inspectors do. Clear?’

Maxwell’s mouth opened, but it was Jacquie who spoke. ‘Perfectly,’ she said, and shepherded Maxwell away. She got him to her car without too much of a scene and bundled him inside.

‘One of nature’s gentlefolk, I presume?’ Maxwell hauled off his shapeless tweed cap, and fumbled for his seat belt.

‘I have met more co-operative colleagues.’ Jacquie slammed her door and kicked the engine into life. ‘The Graveney?’

‘That depends,’ Maxwell said.

‘On what?’

He turned to face her. ‘On whether George Quentin took his own life or whether he was murdered.’

Jacquie chewed her lip. ‘Do you want my best guess?’