Maxwell’s Reunion (9 page)

Peter Maxwell had stood out against all that. During all his years in teaching he had railed against those no-hopers who split their infinitives like matchsticks and ended sentences with prepositions. So much for his colleagues; some of the kids were just as bad.

That Monday morning, Maxwell once more bestrode the narrow world of Leighford High like a colossus. ‘Morning, Matilda,’ he bellowed at the hapless librarian, not in fact of that name, who stood dithering next to a computer screen. He held up her copy of the
Grauniad
. ‘Encouraging leftist twaddle again, librarian mine? I must have a word with the Thought Police about you.’

The woman’s frozen smile said it all. She’d never been able to cope with Mad Max. As if on cue, the Prefect of the Thought Police swept through the library on one of his rare forays. When you’re a head teacher, with degrees in education and biology, books are an alien concept to you.

‘Performance management, Mr Maxwell.’ James Diamond, BSc, MEd, was always formal with his staff in open-plan areas of the school. Lest there should be a child lurking.

‘Wash your mouth out, Headmaster!’ Maxwell was appalled.

‘Seriously, Max.’ Diamond was more relaxed once he’d satisfied himself that there were no students in sight. ‘I need your input on this. You’re a senior teacher – bound to be a mentor.’

‘Oh, bound to be,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘I’ll get straight on it, right after 9C4 have done their “I can tie my shoelaces” lesson.’

‘Max.’ Diamond was a boring fart, it had to be said. He looked Maxwell in the eye through the curve of his gold-rimmed glasses and straightened his Marks and Spencer tie. ‘Do you have to be so flippant?’

Maxwell stared back at the man. ‘About performance management? Indubitably, Headmaster. But about the serious business of education, never. Can I have Friday off?’

‘What? Why?’

‘A friend of mine died at the weekend. Friday’s the funeral.’

‘Oh, Max, I’m sorry. Er … yes, of course. See Tom about cover, will you? Um. A friend, you say?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, how good a friend?’

‘An old friend,’ Maxwell insisted. Unlike the headmaster, Maxwell had a choice.

‘Well, you see, unless it’s family, I shall have to ask you to lose a day’s pay.’

Maxwell beamed at the petty bureaucracy of the man. ‘Consider it lost, Headmaster,’ he said.

He made his way across the quad past children without number trudging to their first lesson. Patiently, he placed one or two mavericks on the right side of the corridor as he swept through H Block. Then he was up the stairs and into the staffroom. ‘Bugger and poo!’ was Maxwell’s usual expletive when he saw yet another memo in his pigeonhole. Today was no exception.

‘Morning, Max.’ Sally Greenhow, the tall blonde who was number two in Special Needs, hurtled past him, carrying the usual bundle of rap sheets for a case conference.

‘Morning, light of my darkness,’ but he wasn’t looking at her. The memo in his hand said there’d been a phone call, at eight-thirty that morning. More, it was a message on the school answerphone. ‘Shit!’ and he was gone, hurtling down the corridor, notices on walls fluttering in his wake.

‘Thingee!’ He came down like a wolf on the fold into reception, firing his deadly stare at the hapless girl on the switchboard, whose name was no more Thingee than the librarian was Matilda. ‘You’ve got a message for me?’

‘Yes, Mr Maxwell.’ She turned to the incomprehensible machine to her left and pushed buttons. There was a ping and a whirr, followed by an electronic whine, all the noises of the twenty-first century.

‘Max, it’s Anthony Bingham. Look, I’m sorry to leave a message like this, especially at work. I tried your home number, but you’d clearly left. I need to see you. Urgently. I’m coming to Leighford this afternoon. I’ll be at yours by … five-thirty.’

And the line went dead.

‘Is everything all right, Mr Maxwell?’ Thingee noticed that Maxwell had gone a funny colour.

He looked down at the girl with the headset. ‘I hope so, Thingee,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know.’

6

Five-thirty of the clock came and went, as it tends to do at least twice a day. Peter Maxwell had abandoned the curry he’d intended for Monday night – bad Korma – and promised himself pie and chips at his local later. Except now it was later and he was still waiting. He took one last look at the naked street outside 38 Columbine, the tarmac orange under the streetlamp. Then he climbed the stairs to his Inner Sanctum.

They stretched out before him under the lamplight, the riders of Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade, immaculately recreated by the Head of Sixth Form in all their fifty-four millimetre splendour. Cardigan himself sat with Lord Lucan, the plastic brother-in-law he hated, listening to an exasperated Captain Nolan pointing down the Valley of Death. Beyond this knot of officers, the men of the 13
^th
Light Dragoons were still smoking their pipes, their plastic stomachs still rumbling from a lack of breakfast. Maxwell had been lovingly collecting these models for years. They were his weakness, his indulgence; they and Southern Comfort. Oh, and Metternich, the cat.

He threw himself down on the swivel chair and switched on his modelling lamp. He caught his own reflection in the skylight as he patted the jaunty Crimean forage cap into place on his forehead. Then he went to work. Captain Soames Gambier Jenyns lay on his back on a sheet of newspaper. Beside him, his bay charger, Moses, champed the plastic grass. Maxwell put the man into the saddle, lining up the stirrup irons and checking the length of the rein.

‘A cigar, I think, Count, don’t you? Someone with names like Soames Gambier would be smoking a cigar as he reasoned why, don’t you think?’

He didn’t glance up. He knew the great black-and-white beast was watching him from his perch on the linen basket that housed only God knew what, ears flat, tail idly lashing. The darkness of the mid-October evening all but complete, it would soon be time for the hunt.

‘Mind you …’ Maxwell whittled the tiny piece of plastic with his craft knife and stuck it expertly to the man’s lips. ‘The good captain hadn’t been well, Count. He was at Scutari in September, before Ms Nightingale got there, of course. A touch of gut rot, I shouldn’t wonder. Christ, Cret!’ and he threw the good captain down, scraping back his chair and pacing the attic room. ‘Where the hell are you?’

No one could measure the hell where Anthony Bingham was. His mortal remains could be measured easily enough. They’d been found the next morning, a little after six-thirty, by a jogger pounding up the gentle gradient on Ryker. Hill. His arm had been sticking out from under an upturned sofa the colour of mud through which the rusty springs poked. The jogger hadn’t seen clearly in the half-light, which is why he’d stumbled over the hand. Then he crouched to feel it. He would never be quite the same again.

By the time Henry Hall arrived, it was already mid-morning and the blue-and-white tape and knot of constables kept the morbidly curious back. Geeks in anoraks huddled in the rain and the first of the paparazzi were sheltering under the trees, keeping their cameras and their powder dry, waiting for developments. Hall’s arrival galvanized them into action.

‘What can you tell us, Chief Inspector? Any clues as to the victim’s identity? Got a motive yet?’

Hall didn’t break his stride. ‘Later,’ he growled at them. That was when he’d know anything; when he might, God forbid, have need of them. All he knew so far was that a man was dead.

Henry Hall was a bland bastard, fortysomething, fast track, as inscrutable as Maxwell’s cat, but without the attitude.

‘Guv.’ The burly DS in the parka nodded at him.

‘What have we got, Graham?’ Hall crouched by the settee, pulled back now to reveal its secret.

‘Male Caucasian, guv.’ Graham Rackham was prepared to go only so far. ‘Mid-fifties. There’s a lot of muck where the back of his head used to be.’

‘Where’s Astley?’

Dr James Astley, the police surgeon, was slithering down the slope ahead, the only one of them, in his white plastic outfit, not getting wet. ‘Sorry,’ he called. ‘Having a pee. Bloody bracken’s thick up that way. Are you well, Henry?’

Astley was the wrong side of fifty-five, solid rather than overweight, core hair rather than balding, a middle-aged man in a hurry.

‘I was,’ Hall told him, ‘before I got this call. What can you tell me, Jim?’

‘Sergeant.’ Astley cocked his oddly garbed head to one side. ‘Feet.’

‘Oh, sorry, Doc.’ Rackham stepped backward.

Astley looked at the SOCO boys going about their business, measuring, photographing, weighing and collecting the evidence. ‘I don’t know how much good that little lot’ll do. It’s like the night before Agincourt around here. I’ve never seen so many footprints and this bloody rain isn’t helping.’

It wasn’t, and Hall knew that Jim Astley was right. Ryker Hill, with its woodland path that wound through the ferns and the silver birch, had blossomed in recent years. Discarded tissues and condoms dripping off the bracken told the tale that this was a lovers’ trysting place, for spotty sixth-formers with nowhere else to go and ageing roués with their bits on the side. The piles of doggie poo through which Hall and Astley had just waded spoke volumes for the incidence of canine exercising. Then there were the pony-trekkers and the joggers and the ramblers and the twitchers, all the flotsam that used the countryside. And every single one of them would be a suspect.

‘Your best shot, then?’ Hall said to Astley.

The doctor crouched, as well as his sciatica would allow, and pointed with his pen. ‘He didn’t die here, I’d lay money on that.’ And Hall knew that Astley didn’t make that offer every day. ‘See?’ He pointed to the flattened bracken that led to the path. ‘That’s been recently done, I’d say by dragging the body across.’

Hall looked down to the road that lay half-hidden below them. ‘Someone could have brought a vehicle up so far. That would mean the body need only be carried a hundred yards or so.’

‘And the sofa was too good a chance to pass up.’

‘Not the best hiding place.’ Hall looked around. There were other items of furniture too – a broken bar stool, a soaking mattress, an elderly kettle. Incomprehensibly, but inevitably, a rusting supermarket trolley. ‘It’s quite exposed.’

‘Thankfully,’ Astley straightened up with a grunt, grateful to change position for a while, ‘that’s not my province. John Doe here was clobbered from behind, probably three or four times. Until I get him on the slab, I can’t tell you with what.’

‘Any ID, Graham?’ Hall asked the sergeant.

‘Nothing, guv.’ Rackham shook his head. ‘But the suit is Savile Row. Everything about him reeks of money.’

‘Let me do the rounds, Jim,’ Hall said, and crossed to the police van where a shaken jogger sat on the tailgate, his hands around a flask of tea. Somebody had put a blanket around his shoulders.

‘Jacquie.’ Hall nodded at the plainclothes policewoman standing with him, the rain soaking through her anorak despite its promise of proof.

‘Morning, sir. This is Mr Beddoes. He found the body.’

‘Mr Beddoes.’ Hall didn’t smile. He could see that the man was still shaking, the rainwater dripping off his nose into his tea. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Course I’m not all right,’ the jogger blurted. ‘I’ve been here for three bloody hours. I found the bloody body. Of course I’m not all right.’

‘DC Carpenter.’ Hall motioned Jacquie aside. ‘Didn’t you tell him he could go home?’

‘Of course, guv,’ Jacquie said. ‘He said he’d rather not. Wanted to help.’

Hall glanced back at him. ‘What are we looking at? Delayed shock?’

‘I’d say so,’ was Jacquie’s verdict.

‘Don’t give him the option, then,’ Hall said. ‘The last thing we want is another death on our hands, from pneumonia. Bad enough with John Doe.’

‘Anthony Bingham, sir.’

‘What?’ Henry Hall blinked at the girl through the rain-lashed blankness of his glasses.

‘I didn’t say anything to DS Rackham because I wasn’t sure at first. Now I am.’

‘Is he local?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Jacquie, what’s going on?’

Jacquie didn’t like Henry Hall’s office. She’d been on the carpet in here once too often for that. And it had always been because of Max; her relationship with him. It was again now.

‘So, let me get all this straight.’ the Chief Inspector sat across the desk from her, leaning back in the chair, his jacket gone, his hands behind his head. ‘You met this Bingham last Friday at a reunion in Warwickshire.’

‘That’s right, guv.’

‘And he’s a judge?’

‘In the High Court.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Hall nodded. ‘I’ve heard of him. One of the no-nonsense school. Not exactly a copper’s friend, but a sound officer of the law, I believe. I’d not have recognized him in the bracken this morning, not from the odd photo I’ve seen. He’s a crony of the Lord Chief Justice.’ He focused on Jacquie again – the honest grey eyes, the firm mouth and cheeks. ‘And there was a murder?’

‘An old school-friend of his, George Quentin. He was found hanging from the bell rope of the old school. He’d been battered over the head beforehand.’

‘Warwickshire CID on it?’ Hall asked.

‘Yes, sir, a DCI Tyler.’

‘You met?’

‘Briefly.’

‘Thorough sort of bloke?’

‘Woman.’

‘Really?’ It wasn’t often anyone saw Henry Hall smile. He regarded it as a weakness. ‘Well, well, well.’

Jacquie didn’t want to plumb the depths of meaning in any of those wells. She knew the question that was coming next. ‘And you were there, at this reunion. Why?’

‘I was with a friend, sir,’ Jacquie said.

Hall paused. If Jacquie knew the question, he knew the answer. ‘Does this friend have a name?’

‘Peter Maxwell.’ She cleared her throat in the vague hope that he wouldn’t hear.

‘Well, well, well.’ Hall unlocked his fingers and reached for the phone. ‘Get me a car. And put a call through to DCI Tyler at …’

‘Leamington, sir.’

‘Leamington CID. If she’s available, I’ll take it on my mobile.’

And he was on his feet. So was Jacquie. ‘Sir, I …’

‘Haven’t you got some reports to write up?’ he asked her.