Maxwell’s Match (7 page)

‘Thank you.’ Sheffield broke the silence. ‘Mr Larson will dismiss you.’ He paused on the top step of the chaplain’s pulpit. ‘Tuesday. Business as usual, please, everybody.’ And there was an audible breath as he clattered down the aisle, gown flying in his wake and backed by the prefects of Tennyson and Dickens and Kipling and Austen, glittering in coloured ties and silver braid.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs …’ Maxwell turned to the redhead.

‘Miss,’ she snapped.

‘Of course,’ Maxwell smiled. He hadn’t heard such a convincing Dick Emery in years. ‘I meant no disrespect to Bill Pardoe, I assure you.’

‘So why didn’t you bow your head?’

‘I’ve got this neck problem,’ Maxwell smiled at

‘No doubt this is not how you do things in Dropout Comprehensive or wherever you come from.’

‘No,’ Maxwell told her. ‘Not exactly. And that’s Leighford, by the way. Leighford High.’ He held out a hand as the ranks began to file past. ‘I’m Peter Maxwell.’

Her green eyes flickered in hesitation, then she managed an apology. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re all a bit on edge. I’m Maggie Shaunessy. I’m Head of Austen House.’

‘Miss Shaunessy.’

She turned to go as her girls trooped out. Then she stopped. ‘Look, er … Mr Maxwell. I feel … oh dear, I’m not good at this. I’ve got a free now. Would you care for some coffee? I owe you that at least.’

Maxwell smiled. ‘Coffee would be nice,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘I can’t guarantee that. Cassandra.’

A beautiful girl with eyes a man could drown in swung to her side. ‘Miss Shaunessy?’ Cassandra was tall and elegant in her silver-braided Prefect’s blazer and her neat, pleated skirt. Next to her, Maggie Shaunessy looked like an unmade bed.

‘Mr Maxwell will be taking coffee with me in Northanger. Tell Dr Sheffield I’ll be along later, will you?’

‘Of course, Miss Shaunessy,’ and the girl was gone.

‘Is this some kind of fact-finding tour, Mr Maxwell?’ the Housemistress asked. ‘Your being at Grimond’s?’

‘Max,’ he said. ‘Call me Max. In a way. But it’s all rather eclipsed now, isn’t it?’

He walked with her across the quad and between the red brick buildings that housed the Art Department. ‘I suppose it is,’ she said. ‘God, it’s unbelievable. This way.’

Austen House was very definitely not part of old Jedediah Grimond’s grand design. It looked very eighties, but the pale pink of the bricks showed a real attempt to make it blend with the original. Maggie Shaunessy led Maxwell up a broad open-plan staircase lined with vast oil canvasses of girlie subjects. Then they were in the rather pleasant suite of rooms she called Northanger, all plants and air and light. Rowing trophies lined the corridor and ancient shields and cups shone silver in glass-fronted cabinets.

‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘Not exactly an abbey, is it? But it’s in keeping with Jane Austen. The trophies are all from St Hilda’s.’

‘You teach English?’

‘For my sins,’ she trilled. The Killarney brogue was there still. Overlaid perhaps with Benenden and Girton, but there all the same. She busied herself with the coffee makings. Not for Austen House the clapped out kettles of Leighford. This was a rather suave espresso maker, puffing and bubbling as it went through its motions.

‘You knew Bill Pardoe well?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I’m from St Hilda’s you see. We only joined Grimond’s two years ago. I was Head of Sixth there.’

‘Dear lady,’ Maxwell sat up on the soft, pastel chair she’d given him, saluting a kindred spirit when he saw one. ‘There aren’t many of us left.’

She laughed. ‘You too? I miss it. I wasn’t sure I’d be very good with the little ones. Eleven and so on. It’s a terrible age. Look,’ her eyes dropped as she fought for words, ‘what I said about Dropout Comprehensive … I didn’t mean …’

He held up his hand, shaking his head. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘If you went there, it would probably reinforce your view.’

‘Sugar?’

‘One. Thanks. Ah,’ his eyes lighted on a poetry book on the Head of House’s shelves. ‘Up the Line to Death. Edward Thomas lived near here, didn’t he?’

‘Over at Steep, yes. Are you English Lit., Max?’

‘No. God, no. History. English is my subsid, but I’ve never taught it for real. What was Bill?’

‘Classics.’

‘Ah,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Now that really is the Great Divide between us, isn’t it? Thanks.’ He took the proffered cup.

‘Not done at … er … Leighford?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘Although I do have several kids to whom every subject is Greek.’

‘Mind you, it’s dying here,’ Maggie Shaunessy said and instantly regretted it. ‘God, this is so difficult.’

‘Soldiers,’ Maxwell changed the subject. ‘You have a Cadet Force?’

‘Army, yes. It used to be combined, I believe, but that was before my time. Those things depend of staffing, don’t they?’

‘Indeed. Who runs that?’

‘David Gallow, Head of History. He’s a Captain or something in the T.A. I’m afraid, coming from a girls’ school, I don’t know much about it. Coffee not too awful?’

‘The coffee’s fine,’ Maxwell smiled.

There was a knock at the study door and the lovely girl popped her head around it.

‘Cassandra?’ Maggie Shaunessy was arranging herself on the chair opposite Maxwell’s.

‘Sorry to bother you, Miss, but Dr Sheffield would like to see Mr Maxwell. Now.’

‘Oh?’ the Head of House frowned. ‘But …’

‘No, no,’ Maxwell was on his feet. ‘His Master’s Voice,’ he swigged what was left in the cup. ‘Thanks … Maggie. Perhaps we can talk again.’

‘I’d like that. Cassandra, take Mr Maxwell across, will you?’

He walked with the girl down the open staircase and out into the day. They passed the limes and made for the main buildings, old Jedediah’s house.

‘Cassandra,’ he said. ‘Old Priam’s daughter.’

‘Sir?’ the girl arched an eyebrow, looking him up and down with vague disgust.

‘In Greek mythology,’ Maxwell explained. ‘Cassandra was the daughter of the Trojan king. The God Apollo was transfixed by her beauty and gave her the gift of prophecy.’

‘I was actually named after the Gulf of Cassandra,’ she told him flatly, ‘in Southern Greece. Where, apparently, I was conceived. That’s fairly typical of my mother, to remember where, but not necessarily with whom.’ They had reached the Headmaster’s door and Cassandra rapped on it. ‘You have a nice day, Mr Maxwell.’ And she was gone, her school skirt swinging to the sway of her hips.

‘Agamemnon’s plaything,’ Maxwell was talking to himself now in the corridor at the end of the world.

‘Ah, Maxwell.’ The Headmaster had dropped the ‘Mr’ in the space of twenty-four hours. Maxwell had been to a school like this; he wasn’t surprised. Surnames were de rigeur – that and silly, politically incorrect sobriquets. He stood in the opulence of Sheffield’s study and wasn’t asked to sit down.

‘Leave?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘That’s a shame, sir.’

‘Yes, well, there it is. No one’s going to be themselves for a while, not really.’

‘All the more reason for me to stay,’ Maxwell told him.

Sheffield looked up at his man. There was a steel about Maxwell he hadn’t noticed before, an inner strength.

‘I could tell you to go,’ Sheffield reminded him.

‘You could,’ Maxwell nodded slowly. ‘But I don’t think that’s the Grimond’s way, is it?’

‘Er …’ Sheffield was rather flustered. One of his housemasters was dead. There were policemen in the quads, paparazzi at the gates in ever increasing numbers, nosing, poking about, photographing. And a stubborn stranger staring back at him across his own carpet. George Sheffield’s world was becoming decidedly pear-shaped.

5

The whispers began that afternoon, shortly after Mrs Oakes had done everybody proud with her baked cod. Maxwell tried to catch them as he wandered the library, drooling at the array of A-level texts for which he himself, given another throw of the psychopathological dice, might have killed Bill Pardoe.

‘They say he was pushed,’ was the sage comment of a Lower Fifth kid out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Sheffield did it,’ his ginger oppo told a little huddle who were supposed to be researching land forms for Geography.

‘They never got on,’ a fat girl from Austen House confided, but what did she know, the lads silently asked themselves.

‘I heard it was Tubbsy.’

‘Never!’

‘He wouldn’t have the nerve.’

‘There’s only one of ’em in the clear,’ the ginger nut participated. ‘Mr Graham. He was the only one not here.’

‘What about … him?’ the fat girl’s breasts were oozing out over the table as she leaned low to Whisper. Her thumb shot out in Maxwell’s direction.

‘Who the fuck is he?’ the sage hissed. And the question had barely left his lips when Maxwell was hovering over them all.

‘I’m your worst night mare,’ he smiled. ‘A teacher with twenty-twenty hearing and eyes in my arse. Does that answer your question, young man?’

And suddenly, for the whole table, Geography landforms, open on their books before them, had never seemed so fascinating.

At Grimond’s front gates, between the pillars with their stone gargoyle lions, the Horatius that was George Sheffield stood squarely in front of the invading hordes that were the Fourth Estate To his right, Mervyn Larson, his Deputy, stood like Herminius. And to his left, the Lartius of the Grimond three was Anthony Graham, hot foot from Leighford to the sunny south-east. He had taken his leave of Sylvia over a grabbed breakfast, dashed in to Legs Diamond’s office as a courtesy and had driven north-west.

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen,’ Sheffield raised both hands for quiet. All three had left their gowns on their hooks, lest they inflamed the more Leftie tabloids, their politics bristling with envy. All would have been well for the
Mail
and the
Telegraph
, but the
Guardian
was there and the
Independent
. Readers of the
Sun
and the
Mirror
would have assumed they were wearing fancy dress. The blokes from the
Daily Sport
were skirting the hedge, trying to get photos of the girlies in a netball match.

‘I’m sorry, but I have no intention of letting you in,’ the Headmaster was saying. ‘There are over five hundred children in this school and they are all in my care.’

‘What about the dead man, Dr Sheffield?’ a journalist asked between the popping of the camera flashes.

‘I have been instructed by the police to say nothing to you,’ the Headmaster went on, clearly irritated by the lights and the booms pushed under his nose.

‘Is Superintendent Mason calling a press conference?’ another asked.

‘I have no idea. This whole thing is a tragic accident. Can we please leave it at that?’

He turned away from another barrage of questions, then turned back. ‘Just one thing more,’ he bellowed, the veins in his neck standing out. ‘I will not tolerate any of my staff or my pupils being pestered by you people. Rest assured, I shall be straight on to the Press Complaints Commission the instant I get wind of anything like that.’

And he marched off, leaving Larson and Graham to swing the iron gates to and lock them.

‘How do they find out about these things, Mervyn?’ a bewildered Sheffield asked his Number Two as the man joined him, their feet crunching in time on the gravel.

‘Blood.’ From nowhere, Peter Maxwell was with them. No one had seen him striding out across the Grimond grass. ‘They smell it, like sharks in the water. Hello, Tony.’ He nodded at Graham.

‘Have you some experience of this sort of thing, Maxwell?’ Sheffield asked.

‘Some,’ Maxwell nodded, tilting back his tweed hat. ‘Who’s your newest recruit?’

‘Staffwise?’ Sheffield pondered. ‘Tim Robinson. Games and Physical Education. Been with us since the start of term.’

‘That’s who they’ll go for.’

‘Mr Maxwell,’ Larson smiled, unconvinced ‘You sound like an old pro.’ The Deputy Head master had met the Head of Sixth briefly at lunch the previous day. He was a tall man with chiselled features and iron grey hair, immaculately groomed.

‘Earning my last five bob,’ Maxwell winked at him. ‘Trust me, gentlemen.’ He turned to face them where the Science Block arched to the south. ‘I’ve been in your position before. One o my sixth form was killed, some years back. A least,’ he pointed to the gate, ‘you’ve got some sort of security here. Our site is wide open.’

‘But that’s trespass, surely,’ Graham said, ‘if one of them comes onto Grimond’s property.’

‘This isn’t the Dark Ages, Tony,’ Maxwell growled. ‘What are you going to do? Set the dog on them? The man-traps? They’ll have every excuse under the sun for being somewhere they shouldn’t. And if they can’t wriggle out, they’ll just stump up whatever fine the law throws at them. They can afford it, all of them. Christ, the sons of the heir to the throne can’t get any privacy. What chance do you think you stand?’

‘What’s your advice?’ Sheffield asked, hating himself for doing it.

‘Talk to your new man – Robinson? Make sure he’s sound. Send out a letter to parents, day kids and boarders. Explain the reason for “softly softly”. Work with Hall.’

‘I wanted to ask you about that,’ Sheffield said waiting until a brace of children had passed, saluting them with a frosty ‘Good afternoon, whoever you are. How do you know him?’

Maxwell chuckled. ‘We’re old sparring partners,’ he said. ‘He’s almost as cuddly as a barracuda – no station hugs for him. But he’s shrewd as all get out and I’d go to the wire with him.’ He looked at their faces. ‘Sorry,’ he smiled. ‘A few too many clichés there, I’m afraid. I watch a lot of television.’

Sheffield closed to Maxwell. ‘Can you talk to him?’ he asked. ‘I want the lid kept on this. And if you know the man …’

Maxwell raised his hands. ‘I’m not sure that would work,’ he said.

‘Mr Maxwell,’ politeness had returned. ‘An hour ago I was all set to kick you off the premises. Now, well … I may have been hasty. I’d like you to stay and I’d like you to work with Inspector Hall. Please?’

Maxwell looked at his man. George Sheffield had aged a thousand years in the last day and the straw he was clutching at was a crusty old Head of Sixth Form from Dropout Comprehensive. ‘I’ll give it a whirl, Headmaster,’ he smiled.