Maxwell’s House (3 page)

‘Thank you for these, Max,’ she said, taking the flowers from him. ‘I’d been meaning to cut them down myself. The wind plays havoc with my front.’

‘Not from where I am.’ Maxwell suddenly jack-knifed so that he was puffing an imaginary cigar, Groucho Marx style, at the level of her bosom. She tapped him playfully around the head so that his hat fell off.

‘Loosen your cycle clips,’ she chuckled. ‘I’ll find some water for these.’

He joined his hat on the settee. ‘Any fear of a drink?’ he asked.

He heard her clattering in the kitchen. ‘Help yourself,’ she called. He tugged off his clips and rolled on to his knees in front of the MFI cabinet. Pine, certainly. MFI nevertheless. Pernod. Vodka. Sherry. Ah, Southern Comfort.

‘Can I get you one?’ he shouted.

‘Got one.’ She was back in the lounge, a glass in her hand. ‘How was your day?’

‘“All Hell Day”, Nursie,’ he sighed. ‘I write it in my diary every year. I interviewed sixty-three little shits today, one by one, all of them, for reasons I can only guess at, wanting to join the sixth form. All of them clutching in their grubby little hands their results of the Greatest Cock-up Since the Eleven plus.’

‘I saw that toe-rag Henderson,’ she said, kicking off her shoes and stretching out on the settee. ‘Oh, sorry, Max, I’ve pinched your seat.’

‘Not often enough.’ He winked at her. ‘Yes, I didn’t interview Henderson. Alison did. One of the eighteen she had time for.’

She caught his mood. ‘Now, Max,’ she scolded gently, ‘Alison is having rather a hard time at the moment. I thought she looked awful this afternoon.’

‘Yes,’ he nodded, sipping his drink, ‘you’re right. She did. Not as awful as Henderson though, I’ll wager.’

‘I thought you said he’d be back in the sixth form over your dead body?’

Maxwell looked at his watch. ‘There are four more hours of the day to go yet, Nurse Matthews. Who’s to say by the time it’s over I won’t be twirling from your banisters?’

‘I am,’ she said, moving smartly into the kitchen at the sound of a hissing saucepan, ‘because in a flat on the fourth floor you’d be hard put to it to find any banisters. Ratatouille.’ She announced the menu as though she’d read his mind. ‘OK?’

‘Delicious,’ he called back. ‘And knowing your culinary expertise, Sylvia darling, it’ll have just the right amount of rat. Talking of which, how is Roger Rabbit by the way?’

He counted silently to himself with a rather silly grin on his face. In three seconds, well, a little less actually, she was framed in the doorway, a rather vicious-looking ladle in her hand. ‘If you are referring to the Deputy Headmaster,’ she said, ‘you know very well that was a ridiculous rumour put about by …’ Then she saw his face and snorted, returning to her pots and pans.

‘… me, I expect.’ He joined her in the steam.

‘There’s only one man in my life,’ she said, clattering again and straining things over the sink. Then she stopped, quite suddenly, and looked at him. ‘And that didn’t work out, did it?’ She swept past him, busying herself hurriedly. ‘Will you open the wine?’

‘Oh, God!’ He banged his head on the cupboard. ‘I would, Sylv, but it’s lying disconsolately in my fridge at home. What an arsehole. Oh, pardon my French.’

‘Never mind,’ she smiled. ‘There’s a bottle of something Australian in the rack. No. To your left. That’s it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Sit down. The corkscrew’s on the table. Oh, can you carry this through?’

He took the dish of steaming goodies and attacked the cork.

‘Max.’ She was suddenly serious as she sat opposite him, holding up her glass for him to fill.

‘Hmm?’ He poured for them both.

‘Who killed her, Max? Who killed Jenny?’

He put the bottle down. Sylvia Matthews was still a striking-looking woman with a mass of auburn hair and bright eyes in which the candlelight danced. She’d been the Matron at Leighford High for nearly six years, at once Florence Nightingale and Claire Rayner, though she’d never been known to carry a lamp or call anyone lovey. ‘It’s been going through my mind,’ he said, passing her the salt. ‘How long have we been doing this, Sylv, you and I?’

‘What? Having dinner on the day before the term starts?’ She smiled at him. ‘For ever.’

‘For ever,’ he smiled back. ‘And in all that time, in all those for evers, have you ever known me unable to give you an answer?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

‘Well, this time, I can’t.’ He took his first mouthful. ‘Nursie,’ he moaned, closing his eyes, ‘you’ve excelled yourself.’

‘Did the police talk to you?’ she asked. I heard they were at school.’

He nodded. ‘Some Chief Inspector named after a ’30s band-leader and a noxious sidekick like something out of
The Sweeney
.’

‘What did they want to know?’

He looked at her, sipping his wine, biding his time. ‘The same thing you do,’ he said, ‘except they were less direct. They asked me what my relationship was with Jenny.’

‘Relationship?’ she repeated. ‘You didn’t have one … did you?’

He leaned back in his chair. ‘Good God, Sylvia, if I’d known your line of attack I’d have worn my body armour – or at least my mac and trousers cut off at the knee with nothing above them.’

‘Oh, Max.’ She tapped his knuckles with her fork. ‘You were Jenny’s Year Head, that’s all. I know that.’

‘That’s right,’ he nodded, suddenly distant, elsewhere. ‘And that wasn’t enough, was it?’

‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself for.’ She tore into the baguette.

‘Haven’t I?’ he asked her. ‘A detective asked me today what I knew about a dead girl, a girl I’ve taught for three years, and I was stuck for an answer. She was my responsibility, Sylv. I should have been there. What is it the Americans say – “for her”. I wasn’t there for her.’

‘Oh,’ she threw her napkin down and topped up their glasses, ‘now you’re being daft, Max. She was seventeen …’

‘Seventeen and four months,’ he reminded her.

‘All right, then, seventeen and four months. She had a mind of her own, that one. And she had parents. Your responsibility only goes so far, you know.’

‘In loco parentis, Sylv. That’s the phrase. How’s your Latin?’

‘Non-existent,’ she admitted. ‘Except for bits of the body, but that one I do know. Teachers are, under the law, said to be in loco parentis – in place of parents. But that’s during the day, surely? Nine to four?’

He looked at her, sure, steady as she was. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I only know she was one of mine and she’s dead. And you know what?’

‘No. What?’ She smiled at him, recognizing that certain light that shone from his eyes.

‘I’m going to do something about it. Care to help?’

They sat as the mock coal glowed flickering orange on the ceiling. Maxwell had removed his shoes, his tie and as much of the front he wore for the world as he was ever likely to. Sylvia Matthews curled up at the feet of the Great Man – her Alexander to his Aristotle; except that she had no worlds to conquer and his philosophy was born at the chalk face – a quarter of a century of civilization against the barbarian hordes.

‘Shouldn’t you be chewing a meerschaum by now?’ she asked.

‘Indeed, Watson.’ He flared his nostrils much after the manner of Basil Rathbone by way of Arthur Wontner. ‘A three-pipe problem and a seven and a half per cent solution.’

She frowned up at him. ‘I’m sure that’s clever, Max, but I haven’t actually ever read any Conan Doyle.’

He patted her head. ‘Nor I Gray’s Anatomy,’ he said. ‘Of course, if this were the ’50s, we’d be wearing trenchcoats and drinking tea and talking about “chummie” in terribly plummy voices.’

‘Weren’t you at Cambridge in the ’50s?’ she asked.

He swiped her round the head with his scarf end. ‘’60s, dear girl,’ he said. ‘Early ’60s, I’ll grant you, but ’60s nonetheless. When you were screaming over the Fab Four, I was struggling with tripos complexities. And no, before you ask; I did not know Burgess and Maclean! How old do you think I am?’

She patted his knee. ‘You’re timeless, Max,’ she said. ‘So what do we know?’

‘Jennifer Antonia Hyde.’ Maxwell leaned back on the settee. ‘Date of birth 16.3.76. God, I took a trip to the American Revolution Exhibition at Greenwich that year. Quite good. A bit expensive.’

‘Max!’ She brought him back to the present.

‘Sorry. I digress. Eight GCSEs. Currently taking Biology, Chemistry and History to A level.’

‘Form tutor?’

‘Janet Foster, spinster of this parish and Head of Art.’

‘Divorcee.’

‘Just a figure of speech,’ Maxwell said. ‘A woman of discernment, vision, finesse. And I’ve just remembered the old besom owes me five quid.’

‘When did Jenny … you know … When did it happen? Precisely?’

‘Well, that’s the bitch of it.’ Maxwell got up and freshened their drinks. ‘I was taking those three weeks in Cornwall and despite the assurances of the inventory they sent, the cottage telly was on the blink. I even missed the last
Taggart
episode as a result.’

‘It was the hotelier,’ she told him.

‘Yes, of course.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Had to be, really. Anyway, I pestered the owners who lived down the road and they got an engineer in. It was that night I saw
Crimewatch
.’

‘Didn’t you see a newspaper?’

‘You know I don’t read newspapers, Sylv,’ he said. ‘In the beginning God made newspapers for us British to wrap our fish and chips up in. Now that some Eurocrat has stopped all that, they have no function in society whatsoever. Anyway, you know I like to switch off entirely in the summer. Back to nature for a bit. You can reach out and touch the past. But you were here.’

‘Yes, I was. I didn’t get off till the following week.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘Well, it was on the Saturday lunchtime news. I’d got it on for the weather forecast. I couldn’t believe it. It was awful. The next day, of course, the Sundays were full of it. The
Mail
had a double-page spread. That school photo of Jenny and one of Diamond.’

‘Ah, so Legs made the big time for a day, did he?’

‘It was the parents I felt sorry for. You know how the media hound people. They were there on Monday. Giving a press conference. It was awful. Just awful. Some bastard actually asked Mr Hyde how he felt. Can you imagine that? He was younger than I expected, Mr Hyde. Have you met them?’

‘Once, I think. I wasn’t smitten. She was something of a cow, I thought.’ He held his hand up. ‘I know, you shouldn’t speak ill of the parents of the dead. But life has to go on.’

‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ she asked him.

‘What?’

‘Investigating her death?’

He chortled. ‘I’m not investigating her death,’ he said.

‘Well, what else would you call it, then?’

‘This?’ he asked. ‘Moving mountains, my dear girl, that’s all.’

‘I see.’ She looked up at him. ‘And tell me, Mr Maxwell, Mr I-Don’t-Want-To-Get-Involved Maxwell, whose mountains are they? Somebody else’s? Or yours?’

He looked down at her, at her eyes bright in the firelight. Then he nodded. ‘They’re mine,’ he said. ‘My mountains.’

She nodded. ‘Yours. Where will you start?’

‘That “you” has an appalling singularity about it, Sylvia darling. What happened to the “we” of earlier this evening, Kemo Sabe?’

She rested her chin on his knee. ‘You can call round whenever you want to, Max,’ she told him. ‘I’ll burn the midnight oil with you. I’ll give you the benefit – for what it’s worth – of my feminine intuition. But more than that … No. You see, I saw their faces, the Hydes. I saw what it’s done to them. I’m not cut out for investigative journalism. Leave that to Fleet Street or wherever it is they keep journalists now. And the police. Leave it to the police.’

‘Is that what you’re telling me to do?’ he asked. ‘You just told me they’re my mountains. Jenny Hyde was my girl. As much as she was the Hydes’. Nobody kills one of my girls and says, “Lump it.” I’m not made that way.’

She was smiling at him, her eyes glistening. ‘I know you’re not,’ she said, an iron-hard lump in her throat. Then she knelt up and kissed him hard on the lips. ‘Take care of yourself, Peter Maxwell. Because … because I’m afraid.’

He smiled and held her face in his big, comfortable hands. ‘Why?’ he asked her. ‘Why are you afraid?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid of the bogeyman I used to think lived in the folds of my curtains. And the gurgle of the plumbing when I pulled the chain as a kid. But most of all … most of all, I’m afraid of the Red House, Max. I’m afraid of the Red House.’

3

It had been the
Clarion
once, at a time when newspapers were new and editors men of the people. Now it was the
Advertiser
, and the change of title reflected the way of the world. Maxwell had been to the front office before to look up old stories on the microfiche. That was an eternity ago when Leighford ran that ghastly Mode 3 CSE course on local history. It should have been a good one, but unfortunately, Mode 3 was synonymous with moron and the hapless Waynes and Traceys who were expected to tackle it couldn’t cope with the present, never mind the past.

He asked at the desk in the palatial new offices. Whatever the depth of the recession, he noticed the media hadn’t felt it. A middle-aged woman looked at him suspiciously, then with reluctance collected a bundle of blue gels and switched on the machine for him. It was quicker, she said, than ploughing through the paper itself. Anyway, it had been the lead story for three weeks and there was the letters page. Easier to find it quickly on the screen.

Maxwell forced himself to it. What had wood pulp done that the world so scorned it now? Why did an entire generation think it right to spend a fortune on computers and nothing on books? He shook his head as he twiddled the gadget. Then, there was Jenny. Looking at him. It wasn’t her school photo, the proof of which was clipped to her file. It must have come from home and it was out of date. Her hair was shorter, lighter. There seemed to be some tinsel behind her head. Christmas. She had been a pretty girl, if skinny. Not for her the blandishments of the tuck shop and school pizzas. She’d offered him a lunch time sandwich once. Wholemeal bread with something-good-for-you on it. He’d turned it down, on his way to the pub.

To be honest, there wasn’t much in the story that helped. Not much he didn’t know. There was a bad photo of Tim Grey, Jenny’s boyfriend, an insipid, scrawny lad now entering Year 13 – unlucky for some – without any clear ambition at all. His parents were working-class people who couldn’t decide if they wanted their Tim to go to university. If he did, he’d be the first Grey ever to do that. Maxwell didn’t want to think of the odds against it. Chief Inspector Hall was quoted as saying something obvious and trite. There was a creepy photo of the Red House, suddenly made all the more sinister because you knew what had happened there. Except that Maxwell realized he didn’t know what had happened there and the not knowing haunted him.

He checked the by-line – Tony Young.

‘Tony? Anyone seen Tony?’

Upstairs in the palatial new office of the Advertiser was a bedlam of VDUs and coffee cups and bits of paper. There was no privacy here, no peace. Only the bustle of a local paper trying to make its name in the world. Someone had once told its managers that the Guardian had been a local paper once, so the precedent was there and the world had better look out.

A hawkish young man in jeans and T-shirt emerged from the shredding room.

‘Hello,’ he said, his face humourless and cold. ‘I’m Tony Young.’

‘Peter Maxwell,’ Maxwell said and something told him not to extend a hand.

‘Yes?’ Clearly the name meant nothing to Young.

‘I teach at Leighford High.’

‘Well, we’ve all got our cross to bear,’ Young told him. ‘Look, I don’t do school events. Brenda Somebody-or-other covers that. It’s probably her coffee break now.’

‘It’s about Jenny Hyde,’ Maxwell said.

The journalist’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is it now?’ he said. ‘Well, you’d better have a seat.’

He ushered Maxwell to a soft chair under the window. There was a low coffee table and a picture and a plant, to give an aura of a reception/interview area. It didn’t really fool anyone. It was just part of the corridor.

‘You covered the story of her murder,’ Maxwell said.

‘That’s right,’ Young nodded. ‘Look, can I get you a coffee, Mr …’

‘Maxwell. Peter Maxwell. No thanks. I just want some information.’

‘Shouldn’t I be asking the questions?’ Young said.

‘There’s nothing I can tell you.’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘I’m buying, not selling.’

Young smirked. ‘This isn’t the fucking
Sun
, Mr Maxwell. I’m not authorized to carry a cheque book. If you’ve read my articles, you know what I do.’

Maxwell smiled. ‘I doubt that, Mr Young,’ he said. I know there are things you can’t print. Theories you have.’

Young looked at him. ‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘Like what?’

‘Your article talked about sexual assault. Was she assaulted?’

Young hesitated, then he grabbed a jacket hanging on a chair-back and hauled a cassette-recorder out of the pocket. He clicked it on. ‘You don’t mind?’ he said. ‘Just for the record.’

Maxwell clicked it off. ‘Yes I do,’ he said. ‘This meeting is off the record. You don’t have to talk to me.’

Young grinned at him, with what contempt Maxwell could only guess. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘As long as you don’t call anybody a bastard over the air, you’ll be all right.’

Maxwell leaned forward, invading the other man’s space. ‘I want to know who killed Jenny,’ he said steadily. ‘That’s all.’

‘We all do,’ Young answered, just as levelly, ‘but for me, it goes with the territory. She was killed on my patch, so to speak. I should imagine Chief Inspector Hall feels the same way. What’s your interest?’

‘She was one of my sixth form,’ Maxwell said. ‘My responsibility.’

Young leaned back. ‘Do you mind me asking how old you are?’ he said.

‘I don’t mind,’ Maxwell answered. ‘I’m fifty-two. Why?’

Young snorted. ‘Well, well. Perhaps you are,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I are what?’

‘Old enough to have that quaint old sense of vocation teachers apparently used to have.’

‘Used to have?’

‘Yes, you know. Before the industrial action. Before it became a battle of wits between you and the government, with kids bouncing around like tennis balls between you both.’

‘Well, well,’ Maxwell said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough.’

‘For what?’ Young sensed the ground shifting beneath him.

‘Old enough to have that quaint old sense of the quest for the truth journalists apparently used to have.’

Young stood up, a muscle in his jaw ridged and flexing. ‘I’d like to help you, Mr Maxwell,’ he said, ‘but I’m a busy man. On the day after Jenny’s body was found I tried to talk to your Head. He was singularly unhelpful.’

‘Legs? Of course he was.’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Unhelpful is his middle name.’

‘I then tried County Hall.’

‘Who?’

‘Jenkins.’

‘Ah, the Chief Education Officer himself. Now, there’s a cautious man.’

‘Cautious to the point of not giving interviews, in fact. Where were you when all this broke?’

‘On holiday in Cornwall,’ Maxwell told him. ‘That’s why I’m here this morning. I’m trying to put flesh on the bones.’

Young looked down at the greying, side-whiskered teacher. ‘For that you’ll need to go to the cemetery,’ he said. ‘Plot 841. There’s no headstone yet.’

Then he turned on his heel and vanished into an inner office. First he typed something on to his computer screen. Then he faxed the incident room at Tottingleigh that was handling the Jenny Hyde case.

The pace had yet to slacken in the Tottingleigh incident room; the dogs had yet to be called off. Men in shirt-sleeves sat in front of computers or hunched over phones. Cups of coffee sat with stewed contents on table corners and the air was heavy with cigarette smoke.

‘Well, well, well.’ DI Johnson paused in the middle of his takeaway pizza. ‘A fax from our favourite newshound.’

Jacquie Carpenter stuck her head around the VDU. ‘What’s it about, sir?’

‘Dave,’ Johnson leered. ‘We agreed. Dave.’

‘What’s it about?’ she repeated, noncommittally.

‘That weirdo Maxwell; that Head of Sixth Form or whatever he calls himself from Leighford High. He’s been snooping around the Advertiser.’

‘About Jenny?’

‘Yeah.’ Johnson put Young’s fax on a pile in his in-tray. ‘What do you make of that, Jacquie, darling?’

She looked at her superior with ill-disguised loathing. ‘If he killed her, sir, he’d hardly be asking questions at the Advertiser, would he?’

‘Of course he would.’ Johnson spat pepperoni in all directions. ‘He wants to know how much we know. To cover his back.’

‘Perhaps you should tell the DCI then,’ Jacquie suggested.

‘Yeah,’ Johnson grunted. ‘Or maybe I should just break Maxwell’s kneecaps while asking him a few questions?’ And he threw his remaining pizza into a bin before dragging himself out of his chair. ‘Must just point Percy at the porcelain,’ he said and fondled the girl’s shoulder through her blouse as he walked past.

‘How can you stand it, Jacquie?’ the WPC next to her asked.

Jacquie Carpenter picked up the fax. ‘I just console myself with the daydream that one day I’ll plug his bollocks into this computer and switch on.’

She read Young’s blurb to herself. ‘Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form, Leighford High. Asking questions re Jenny Hyde. Thought you ought to know.’

The oldest graves were nearest the road. When the town had become respectable and upper middle class, and colonels from the hill stations of the Raj had decided to retire there, they’d expanded it to the south-west. Inevitably, in a seaside town, the navy was there too and fouled anchors green with verdigris lay at rakish angles on carefully rough-hewn cairns.

The last resting place of Jenny Hyde was far away from these, among the polished marble and green chippings that were the trappings of modern death. Most people were cremated nowadays, but Jenny’s granddad had insisted, apparently, that she should be buried, his little girl and when they’d finished cutting her about in the post-mortem room, that’s what they did.

It was just a little mound of earth and a simple plywood cross, smothered in flowers, some still in their cellophane wrappers. He read the cards – ‘Goodbye, darling Jenny, Mum and Dad.’ ‘We miss you, Darling, Auntie Ethel and Uncle George.’ ‘For Jenny, with love from Tim.’ Funny that, Maxwell noticed, as he knelt in the wet grass of the September evening; the card from Tim Grey was the only one that mentioned love. Then he stood up. He didn’t like graveyards. They were empty places where you stared down at your own mortality. Look. Look around. There is a stillness in the cold wrought iron that is deadly. Maxwell found himself breathing loudly, just to prove that he could.

‘Goodbye, Jenny,’ he whispered.

No one could have called Peter Maxwell windy. When he’d been to see The Exorcist years ago, he was the only one still sitting upright in the cinema. Everybody else was hiding under their seats. Yet now, with the dead for company, he felt it: a chilling, creeping something that he couldn’t place, didn’t like. What was that line in that old biography he’d read – ‘the scythesman at your elbow’? He turned sharply, half expecting to see him, cloak outspread, hourglass in hand and the sand drifting through. Instead, it was an old boy in a grubby anorak, leaning on a spade.

‘I’m locking up,’ he said through ill-fitting teeth. ‘You goin’ to be long?’

Maxwell smiled. The Bard of Avon would have recognized this old bugger and used him for comic relief. Perhaps some things were eternal, after all.

‘Just going,’ said Maxwell and made his way to the gate.

He didn’t look back.

He wheeled his bike across Wellington Road, down Buckett Street and on towards the golf course. Three streets away, he knew, the Hydes lived. At Number Thirty-two. He should go to see them; offer his condolences. After all, he’d missed the funeral. And even if Diamond had gone or some county representative, it wasn’t the same. He should have been there. But now, at the last moment, his nerve failed him. He was at the end of the road; could see the house with its clematis trellis, its bird bath on the front lawn, the green Rover in the drive. Then he swung his leg over the crossbar and pedalled White Surrey away into the rain.

It was like the siege of Troy the next morning. The rain had gone and left dark concrete patches under the drying sun. Arrayed in all their panoply along Hardens Lane, the gentlemen of the press stood in little knots, like so many Ajaxes and Achilles, probing the weak spots of the citadel that was Leighford High. In a brief and heated exchange, Diamond and Garrett had ordered them off County Council property. The staff weren’t there to see it – they wouldn’t have believed it if they had been. But there was no law to stop the paparazzi standing on the pavement, cameras at the ready, ciggies blowing smoke to the morning.

No law either that could stop them accosting each likely-looking kid who arrived for the first day of term. You could tell them, the different groups. The first year, all crisp shirts and ties and blouses, the girls in white ankle socks below summer-tanned legs. They said little to each other, each one in his or her own private anxiety – the first day of the rest of their lives. The older ones, battle-hardened, boisterous, barely conventional in what was left of their uniforms, pushing and laughing their way along the streets. The hardliner lads were instantly recognizable. They flouted regulation as brazenly as they dared. They wore trainers, scuffed and old, with the laces loose and the tongues protruding in defiance at the ankle. Ear-rings caught the sharp morning sun and the last of their ciggie smoke wafted away on the September air as they rounded the corner. Their faces said it all. They brooked no interference, no insult. They watched for the lingering look, the stare of disapproval or contempt. Their fingers were in the air instantly as they slouched past the Old People’s Home where ancient citizens, barely human, despised them from behind fading nets. The older girls, their molls in an earlier generation, chewed gum and vied with each other in having the dangliest ear-rings. They already wore their winter uniform – the ubiquitous thick black tights under the ankle socks, snagged here and there by the over-rough approaches of the lads, whose long-nailed fingers were forever straying, in a pubescent way, up their skirts.

But none of these were the targets of the paparazzi. They were here to talk to anyone who might have known Jenny Hyde. And the sixth form weren’t hard to spot. They wore no uniform. So, go for the older ones – the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Two in particular the pressmen knew, because they’d talked to them before, way back in July when it happened. Anne Spencer, Jenny’s best friend. And Tim Grey, the boy she was going out with. They’d set up a similar siege around the Spencer and Grey houses for three or four days. But no one was talking then. Mr Grey had come out and threatened to put one on them. That went with the territory.