Maxwell’s Reunion (8 page)

‘Indians, please.’ Muir wagged a finger at him.

‘Native Americans, if we’re going down that road.’ Alphedge smirked. ‘PC is as PC does.’

‘Where did they take the ladies?’ Bingham asked.

‘Some WPC whisked them upstairs,’ Alphedge told him.

‘Divide and conquer.’ Bingham nodded. ‘They’ll get Thomas. We’ll get Tyler.’

‘Sexy policeperson, repulsive policeperson?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Something like that,’ Bingham said.

The clock on the wall said ten to twelve. A pale sun was streaming in through the slats of the blinds, the trees of the carpark silhouetted like ghosts on the blankness of the wall, shifting in the morning breeze.

‘What do you know about this, Stenhouse?’ Asheton asked.

The mock Scotsman looked at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well, this whole thing,’ Asheton said. ‘This reunion nonsense. It was your bloody idea.’

‘So, what are you saying?’ Muir was leaning forward in his chair, facing his man down. ‘That Quentin’s death is my fault?’ He knew Asheton was only putting into words what he’d said to himself a thousand times in the last twenty-four hours.

‘You had the key,’ Asheton said. ‘Who else could it have been?’

‘Look, come on, boys.’ Alphedge was on his feet, ever the mediator, the go-between.

Then they were all shouting at once, except the Preacher, who sat beneath the clock, his face motionless, his eyes closed. He looked like a Norman Rockwell painting.

The door flew open and a burly copper stood there in a blue jumper with sergeant’s chevrons glittering silver on his shoulder. ‘Mr Maxwell?’

‘Yes.’ Maxwell was glad of the moment. The six were falling apart. It was
The Usual Suspects
and only one of them knew who Keyser Söze was.

‘The DCI would like a word. Can I get the rest of you gentlemen a cup of tea?’

Maxwell grabbed a baguette to keep body and soul together. He sat in the lounge of the Graveney, sunk in the leatherette of a massive armchair. He was on his second Southern Comfort when the man he wanted to talk to strode through the lobby.

‘Preacher?’

John Wensley turned and half smiled. ‘Hello, Max,’ he said.

Maxwell crossed to him. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he asked.

‘I’ll have an iced tea,’ Wensley said.

Maxwell raised an enquiring eyebrow to the girl at the bar. This was likely to tax her NVQ training to the limits, but she bustled away to do her very best. Maxwell wasn’t to know that she came of stiff-upper-hp stock and her great-granny had worked in the NAAFI when they bombed Coventry.

‘I haven’t really had a chance for a chat.’ Maxwell ushered his man to the little circle of chairs. ‘How the hell are you?’ As he said it, his focus inevitably settled on the man’s dog-collar, but he was in for a penny by this time and a tactical withdrawal would only make matters worse. ‘What did the police ask you?’

‘What did they ask you?’ John Wensley had been a careful boy. Now he was a careful man.

‘My whereabouts on what they predictably call the night in question.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘The truth.’

‘Which was?’

Maxwell leaned back in the snug of his chair, crossing his legs. ‘I was in my room, number forty-six, on the first floor.’

‘Asleep?’

‘No.’ Maxwell was prepared to play along for the moment, but it would be the Preacher’s turn next. ‘I read until about one, one-fifteen. Some tosh, before you ask, on the death of Christopher Marlowe.’

‘Interesting man.’ Wensley nodded. ‘An atheist.’

‘It’s at times like these I thank God I’m one.’ Maxwell beamed. The joke died in the ether.

Wensley’s tea arrived and he called the girl back. ‘What’s this?’ he asked her, holding up the sweet in the saucer.

‘That’s your free chocolate augmentation,’ she said.

‘I don’t want it,’ he told her. ‘Take it away.’

She looked embarrassed, but Maxwell saved the day. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he said, and snatched it expertly from Wensley’s fingers. ‘Thank you, my dear. Delicious.’

‘So you’re a teacher, Max?’ Wensley stirred the cubes with the long, elegant spoon.

‘For my sins,’ Maxwell said. ‘But don’t change the subject, Preacher. What did the police ask you?’

‘It sounds very similar,’ Wensley said, leaning back and crossing his legs too. ‘They wanted to know my movements on Friday night, particularly the early hours of Saturday morning.’

‘What about your movements last night?’ Maxwell asked him, slowly rolling the cut glass between his fingers.

‘Last night?’ Wensley frowned.

‘I came a-calling,’ Maxwell told him. ‘It was late. About half twelve. You were probably asleep.’

‘No,’ said Wensley. ‘I wasn’t there. What did you want?’

‘To make some sense of all this, John.’ Maxwell couldn’t remember when he’d used the man’s name before. It didn’t sound right.

Wensley nodded. ‘That’s what we’d all like to do,’ he said. ‘But it won’t happen without God’s grace.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Maxwell had known this moment would come. ‘Tell me about this church of yours.’

‘My church?’ Wensley looked at him. ‘It’s not mine, Max, it’s for all of us. Anyone who wants to come in. The door’s always open.’

‘Where were you last night?’ Maxwell was suddenly aware of how cold the lobby was and how still. The hubbub from the dining room had stopped, as though every punter in there had paused, Yorkshire-laden fork inches from their mouths, to hear the Preacher’s answer.

‘Wandering, Max,’ Wensley said as he sipped his tea. ‘It’s what I do.’

Goodbyes had been difficult. Muir and Asheton weren’t speaking. Their respective women had followed suit, Janet Muir all too keen to loathe Veronica on account of the woman’s age and looks alone. Both Alphie and his wife had hugged Maxwell, in the way that luvvies do, and this bonhomie had extended to Jacquie, who was still wiping off Cissie’s lipstick as she drove for the Graveney’s gates.

The Preacher hadn’t been there as the others settled their bills in reception. Maxwell imagined he was wandering again. They’d all promised Maxwell they’d see him again, all swapped addresses and phone numbers. When it came to e-mails, Maxwell gave up. His old oppos appeared to have embraced the twenty-first century. He was almost as aghast at this as at the death of George Quentin. The stone-faced Bingham implied that when they met again it might be across a court of law; there were testing times ahead. Maxwell suddenly had a mental picture of how fatuous the man must look in his wig.

‘I’m sorry, Jacquie.’ Maxwell was looking at her as they inched their way through the traffic on Warwick’s High Street, the Tudor timbers of the Lord Leycester Hospital looking surreal in the afternoon sun, like a film set waiting for Joseph Fiennes.

‘Max,’ she scolded him, slapping his leg. ‘Even in my professional capacity, I don’t think for a moment any of this is down to you.’

‘At the very least,’ he said, ‘it was something of a busman’s holiday for you.’

‘I’m the one who’s sorry, Max. Halliards won’t be the same again, will it?’

He shook his head. ‘We all thought we were coming to witness the death of a school, and what we actually saw was the death of a scholar. How was DI Thomas?’

‘Once he’d got over whatever chip he’s carrying on his shoulder, he was all right. What’s this DCI like?’

‘Tyler?’ Maxwell let his head loll back on the rest. ‘Not a suitable job for a woman, is it, Jacquie?’ he asked her.

‘Any more than it is at my level, you mean. God, Max, you’re a dinosaur. I love you dearly, but …’

‘Ah, yes.’ Maxwell laughed. ‘The cruelty of that word “but,” eh? DCI Tyler is … what’s the word? Predatory.’

‘Insecure,’ Jacquie said.

‘Ah.’ Maxwell smiled. ‘A woman’s point of view. You mean she’s got a lot of living up to to do?’

‘Something like that,’ Jacquie said. ‘When she started in the job, there’d have been the name-calling, the sexual innuendo, the sending her on endless trips upstairs so the blokes could have a butcher’s up her skirt.’

‘Just like school,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Did you know Josie Fancut in Year Ten wears pink knickers?’

‘No.’ Jacquie bridled in mock horror. ‘And I don’t think you should, either.’

‘If I had the time, dear girl,’ he said, folding his arms and closing his eyes, ‘I’d fill you in on the complex socio-erotic nature of teenage girls and their relationships with male teachers. On second thoughts, you’d probably arrest me.’

‘What are you going to do, Max?’ she asked him.

He didn’t open his eyes. ‘There’s a little-known passage in Genesis,’ he said. ‘And on the eighth day, the Lord rested, decided he was still pretty bushed, so he made half-term that man may be exceeding glad and rejoice in his name, saying, “Yea, God is good and we shall gather and give thanks for the breather and the lie-in.” That great event happens next week.’

She laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘You old hypocrite,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I didn’t ask when you were going to do it, I asked what you were going to do.’

Maxwell opened his eyes and sat up. ‘What are our options, Jacquie?’ he asked. ‘Quent’s murder, I mean. Passing maniac?’

Her eyes flickered across to him, leaving the traffic for as long as she dared. ‘Motiveless murder, you mean?’

‘It happens, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded. ‘And with increasing frequency. Some poor bastard is found by a battery of psychologists and psychiatrists to be deranged. He serves time in a secure unit, drugged to the eyeballs, whereupon a different battery of psychologists and psychiatrists decides he’s fine now and releases him into the community. Except, he’s not fine. He’s a danger to himself and others.’

‘And he kills George Quentin?’

Jacquie was shaking her head. ‘If George Quentin died in a street, and if nothing had been taken from the body, I’d say yes, that’s definitely a scenario worth considering. As it is, no. Unless, of course, your maniac wandered into Halliards School late on Friday night and bumped into him.’

‘All right.’ Maxwell was eliminating possibilities. ‘Theft.’

‘Well,’ Jacquie said, raising a casual middle finger to a white van driver who had just cut her up. ‘Now I know what it feels like to be on the outside of a case. We don’t know, do we, if Quentin was robbed?’

‘No, we don’t,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘None of us touched the body. I’ve no idea if Quentin’s wallet was on him or not.’

‘Had he checked into the hotel?’

‘No,’ Maxwell told her. ‘That I was able to verify. His name isn’t in the signing-in book, he hadn’t paid for the room, and no one had seen him on the hotel premises.’

‘No one?’ In Jacquie’s profession, it paid to be sure.

‘No one I spoke to,’ Maxwell qualified. ‘None of the six.’

‘Theft is a possibility,’ Jacquie went on, mechanically going through the motions of driving south along the M40. ‘Let’s suppose Quentin disturbed a burglar.’

‘Were there any signs of that?’

‘None that I could see,’ Jacquie said. ‘Of course, Halliards is a big building. How many doors are there?’

‘Christ knows.’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘There were parts of the place I never went into in my seven years there. I’d stick my neck out and guess at six entrances on the ground floor; that’s apart from windows, of course. Stenhouse used a key.’

‘On the Saturday?’

Maxwell nodded. ‘When we found Quent. We went in by the chapel cloisters.’

‘Where did he get it?’

‘Stenhouse? I’ve no idea. Presumably off the property developers. Unless, of course, he’d had it all along, ever since we left school. That wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘Is that likely?’ Jacquie asked. ‘After all these years?’

Maxwell hadn’t considered it to be, but now, he wasn’t so sure.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s go with the burglary theory for a moment. Let’s assume that somebody in a striped T-shirt and mask gets into the school by some means we didn’t have a chance to find. There he is, filling his bag marked “swag” with … what? What’s to steal?’

‘What was there?’ Jacquie had only had time to check the entrance hall, corridor and Big School before the local force had arrived. The rest of the place was a closed book to her.

‘Bugger all, as far as I know. The school itself closed last year, according to Stenhouse, and they were about to turn it into a conference centre, knocking walls down, putting in jacuzzis, whatever. I know from my own dear experience what our lights fingered friends go for in school attacks is computers, music centres. There’s no money in books and, anyway, Jo Scuzzball can’t read.’

‘All the hardware had gone from Halliards, then?’ Jacquie asked.

‘My dear girl.’ Maxwell spread his arms as far as safety allowed. ‘We’d only just finished writing on slates the year before I left. I don’t think Halliards was ever at the cutting edge of technology. Anyway, we’re missing the point.’

‘Which is? Oh, sorry.’ Jacquie thumped Maxwell’s knee with a particularly cavalier gear change.

‘Which is, what was Quent doing at Halliards the night he died? Did I go there? No. I went to the Graveney, as per Stenhouse’s invitation. And that’s three miles away as
Corvus corone
flies. If Quent received the same invitation, and presumably he did, why not do likewise?’

‘Which brings us back to one of you,’ Jacquie said.

‘Thanks, light o’ my life.’ Maxwell frowned.

‘All right, one of them,’ Jacquie corrected herself. ‘Can you live with that, Max?’

‘That’s not the point, Jacquie,’ he told her. ‘The point is, George Quentin couldn’t.’

In the beginning, there were open fields on the high ground above Leighford, within a walk of the sea. The little village that one of William of Normandy’s clerks had noted in the Domes day Book as having eight ploughs in demesne in the vill of Aelfric in the Confessor’s time had grown a tad by the time the bulldozers moved in and they built Leighford High School. They skimped, of course, dreaming of a secondary modern of a mere three hundred pupils where the hewers of coal and drawers of water would learn the rudiments of the arts their ancestors had followed since the Conqueror’s time, plus a bit of readin’, ritin’ and ’rithmetic. Since then, the great Comprehensive Revolution had followed, whereby everybody from the Prime Minister to the groundsman had come to believe that Jack was as good as his master and the great leveller, the National Curriculum, had produced generations that couldn’t read or write or do arithmetic and had long since forgotten how to hew coal or draw water.