Maxwell's Revenge (19 page)

Jacquie felt for a thorn-free area of Henry Hall to hold on to and finally found his elbow. They eased themselves slowly towards the double doors of A&E, with frequent pauses to allow Henry to adjust his clothing and manage his limp. Before they went in, Jacquie stopped.

‘I’ll just switch my phone off, guv. I read the other day that they don’t make a ha’p’orth of difference to machines, but most places prefer to be safe than sorry.’ She reached into her bag and brought out her phone. ‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘How typical. Max has left it on the menu screen. He’s really got no idea about phones.’ She looked closer. ‘Wait a minute. That’s odd.’

‘What is?’ grimaced her boss. He was beginning to think he even had thorns in his teeth; everything hurt.

‘Well, your number is shown as engaged. When Max rang you, it didn’t go through.’

‘Of course it did. It rang and we found it in the bush.’

‘It may well have done. But it wasn’t Max ringing you. Check.’

‘Oh, God. It might have been one of the
boys.’ The punctured policeman tried his best to reach into his jacket, but had to admit defeat. Jacquie reached carefully inside and pulled the phone out. He inclined his head to her, asking mutely that she check. He just couldn’t move fast enough, and he really
had
to know. Now.

She flicked it open and chose ‘missed calls’. Her own number was there, but several down the list and not in the last ten minutes. The number at the top of the list was not one she knew and, like Hall, she was afraid it was one of his sons’ mobiles. She read it out to him.

He shook his head. ‘Say it again. No, not all of it. I recognise the last three digits of numbers; otherwise it takes too long.’

‘Nine one seven.’

‘No, that’s not one of ours. Is it someone from the nick?’

‘Not that I can think of. Anyway, wouldn’t it come up as a name?’

‘That’s true. Yes, it would. Look, Jacquie, I’ll be all right in here on my own. Anyway, it won’t do much for our working relationship if you find out exactly where I’ve got these thorns sticking in me.’

She grinned, knowing that he wouldn’t.

‘Get off to the nick, or use your mobile from your car. Take mine as well. Find out who that phone belongs to and get a half a dozen squad cars round to his house. Take the ram. Beat the
bastard’s door down. Just don’t kill him. I want to do that.’

‘Guv!’ She was genuinely shocked. He was usually so by the book.

‘Sorry, Jacquie, to spoil your image of me. But I’ve never had thorns up my arse before, if I may be blunt, and I’m not feeling quite myself.’ He turned slowly and waited for the automatic door to creak open, before allowing himself to be swallowed by the murk of the energy-saving bulbs of A&E. Fifties lighting at Two Thousand’s prices.

Jacquie turned away and heard Maxwell’s voice in her head. ‘Never had thorns up his arse before, perhaps. That’s because it’s where he keeps his head.’ She smiled a small smile and made her way to the car. She had a lot of phoning to do, while Maxwell enjoyed himself taking off the Prince of Wales around the sickbeds of Leighford General.

The Acting Headmaster made his way through the maze of ill-lit and worse-signposted corridors to the General High Dependency Medical
Non-Emergencies
Mixed Gender Bed Unit, formerly known as Tottingleigh Ward. Visiting hours were well and truly past but, as he might have expected, the Senior Night Nurse was an old Leighford Highena and so his passage was smooth.

‘Hello, Louise,’ he said, in that strange
half-whisper
that hospital visitors adopt, opening his mouth very wide and enunciating the husked vowels very clearly. ‘I’ve come to visit Mr Diamond and the rest of the staff you have in here. Also, I have a message for Mrs Hall’s visitors.’

‘Well,’ she replied in stentorian tones which made him wince, ‘Mrs Hall is down on the left, with the curtains round. The others,’ she made a sweeping gesture with her left hand, ‘are spread around. Help yourself.’ He turned towards Margaret Hall’s shrouded bed. ‘But, Mr Maxwell?’

‘Yes?’ he mouthed.

‘You will be quiet, won’t you?’

He nodded, stunned at the injustice of the reminder. Louise, it had to be said, looked different in a different uniform. But the level of inanity hadn’t changed.

‘You still up at the school?’ she bellowed.

He grinned like a death’s head – his usual rejoinder to that question.

He popped his head round the curtains and gestured one of Hall’s boys to join him on the outside. In sotto voce, he sketched out the policeman’s dilemma, and somehow the surroundings made it easy not to laugh. Hall Jnr – for the life of him, Maxwell couldn’t remember the lad’s name – nodded and slipped back behind
the curtains, to keep up the droning duologue with which he and his brother were trying to rouse their mother.

Further down the ward, but on the same side, were the beds containing the job hopefuls, ranged one after the other as if laid out for the choice to be made. Miss Mackenzie was first, lying back on her raised pillows in a pink nightie of such outstanding femininity that Maxwell felt it needed some kind of warning label. She was reading a book, with unlikely dark-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose. She looked good enough to eat and Maxwell stood at the foot of her bed, enjoying the view with one half of his brain and sending telepathic messages of apology to Jacquie with the other half.

Sensing him standing there, she looked up, over the top of her specs. ‘Hello?’ she said, doubtfully.

He moved round the bed and sat down on her chair, bona fide visitors for the use of. It was suitably tatty, plastic and just a soupçon Third World. ‘You probably don’t remember me,’ he said. ‘We met on Thursday at the school.’

She gave him a wan smile. ‘It seems very long ago,’ she said. ‘But I do remember you. That boy knocked me over and you …’

He grinned. ‘Yes, that was me. Maxwell. Call me Max.’

‘Thank you, Max, I will. But I doubt we will
be meeting again, unless your other job is as hospital visitor.’

‘Now, now,’ he said, patting her hand. ‘The interviews still have to be held, don’t forget. It’s not over till the fat lady sings … and,’ he nodded behind him to where Mrs Bevell lay, a huge mound under the bedclothes, ‘she seems quite quiet tonight.’

‘Max, you’re very naughty,’ she said, smiling. ‘But, no, I don’t think I will be continuing with my career under Leighford’s roof. I have found all this to be very unsettling.’ Her eyes opened even wider than usual. ‘Even if I wasn’t the target, someone had a go at killing me, Max. Is that normal at an interview?’

‘I’ve never come across it before,’ Maxwell said, ‘I have to admit. He sighed. ‘Still, it’s not the profession I came into, in so many ways. The police are working on the case, of course, and they now think that the poisonings are random.’

‘Random?’ she said. ‘Poisonings? Do you mean there have been more? At other schools, you mean? What
do
you mean?’ Annette Mackenzie was sinking further into la-la-land with every part of the conversation. Surely, she’d wake up soon.

Maxwell looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m guessing that you haven’t been watching the news,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘We don’t have televisions
in here, too much electronic gear around. Why?’

‘There have been … a number of other episodes, yes,’ he said, sounding horribly like Henry Hall.

‘Well,’ she said, throwing her hands in the air and letting them fall into her lap. ‘In my opinion all the more reason
not
to come to live in Leighford. Everyone is clearly nuts.’

‘Well,’ Maxwell conceded, ‘it appears
one
person is. Some of us would pass for normal on a dark night.’

She closed her eyes and lay back on the pillows. ‘Possibly, Max, very possibly. But if you’ll excuse me, I’ll say goodnight and very possibly goodbye.’ She turned her head and flashed her amazing blue eyes one more time at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think we could have been friends.’

He patted her hand. ‘I think we could have been,’ he agreed. ‘Goodnight. Sleep tight.’

‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ she added, reaching up and switching off her light.

He stood looking down at her for a few moments, a pale orange in the street light’s glow from the window, and then moved on. Fiona Smollett was lying, not unexpectedly, flat on her back with the bedclothes immaculately tucked around her. Although not out of character, this was not all of her doing. The NHS had given her a present; not of emergency nightclothes or a free toothbrush, but of a particularly nasty
dose of clostridium difficile, introduced with the needle delivering her poison antidote. Her bed was enlivened, but not by much, by a series of signs warning off the potential unwary. Maxwell hadn’t much reason to touch Miss Smollett and he was quietly delighted to heed what they said and moved on across the ward to where Mrs Bevell lay, guarded ferociously by Mr Bevell, whom no nurse had been brave enough to see off.

‘Good evening, Mr Bevell,’ Maxwell ventured. ‘How is your wife?’

‘Who are you?’ barked Bevell, flicking open his notepad and putting aside the bowl of fruit he had been nursing jealously on his lap.

Maxwell swallowed his natural antipathy to the horrible little man and his natural inclination to put one on him and said in his most pleasant Acting-Headmasterly voice, ‘We’ve met, Mr Bevell. Peter Maxwell, Acting Headmaster of Leighford High School.’ He leant forward helpfully. ‘I believe I may be on your list.’ Using his skills honed to perfection in years of waiting in front of the desk of Legs Diamond, he read the listings upside down. ‘Yes, there I am.’ He pointed towards the bottom of the page. ‘Just below Virgin Rail and just above the Home Office.’ He glanced up. ‘Home Office?’ he queried.

Bevell looked at him with scorn. ‘Generic
term,’ he said, ‘to cover all of the police misdemeanours.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Maxwell straightened up and stepped back a pace. No point in adding trespass into personal space to his list of crimes.

‘Anyway,’ Bevell said with a nasty edge to his voice. ‘How may I help you?’ As if ‘help’ was in the man’s vocabulary.

‘I’m just here to see how your wife is getting on. And the other victims of Thursday’s events, of course, in my current capacity.’

‘I couldn’t help noticing you were speaking to that lad over there,’ Bevell observed, ‘the one whose mother is behind the curtains. I hope they are suing for personal distress, poking your nose in at a time like this. I am coming to the conclusion that you are morbidly curious.’

‘No, no,’ Maxwell said, backing away. ‘Peter Maxwell, as I said. But I’ll leave you now to get on with your … jotting. Bye now. Enjoy your fruit.’ And he turned and hurried away as fast as dignity would allow, past the nurses’ station where Louise was adjusting her nicotine patch and on to the bedside of James Diamond, erstwhile Headteacher of Leighford High School.

He looked somehow smaller even than when he was upright and trying to run the school, as he lay there under his hospital-issue covers. Maxwell had never seen the man without a tie before and it was something of a shock. Declining standards,
dumbing down – it all lay there on the hospital bed. He was drip-free, but very pale and wan. The sedge had clearly withered from his lake. He turned his head and focused his eyes on his visitor. ‘Hello, Max,’ he said, with a ghost of a smile. ‘How nice of you to come and visit.’ Then his expression changed to a look of mild panic. ‘Everything’s all right, isn’t it? At the school?’

Yet again, Maxwell found himself patting someone’s hand. If he had ever had the leisure time to list potential hand pattees, Diamond’s name would have been among the substitutes at best, and yet here they were, patter and pattee. ‘Don’t worry, Headmaster,’ he said. ‘Everything is absolutely running like clockwork.’

‘Really?’ Diamond looked a little crushed.

‘Well,’ Maxwell hastened to comfort the man, taking a calculated guess that he hadn’t watched John Cleese in
Clockwise
. ‘Not like when
you
are there, of course, Headmaster. But it is all running smoothly.’ He looked down into the stressed face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re just going to have to trust me on this one. Have I
ever
let you down?’

Diamond looked as though he was going to cry. Surely, there wasn’t time before lights out to even begin to list all of the times that Maxwell had been suspended, absent, beaten up and all the rest. Just because his exam results were the best in the school bar the Japanese department – teacher, one; pupil cohort, one, in the shape
of James Kagamoshi – it didn’t mean Diamond trusted him further than he could throw him. And, in his current weakened state that wasn’t very far, although he liked to tell himself that, with health and strength on his side, he could give it a go. He closed his eyes. This was all too much.

‘Goodnight, Max,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you for dropping by.’

Dismissed, Maxwell shrugged his shoulders and went in search of Bernard Ryan. He found him in a side room, with more admonitory notices, this time on the door and small window that let visitors get a glimpse of the man within. He turned to a nurse that was hurrying past. She was not, amazingly, a Leighford Highena, but someone of the northern persuasion by her accent – perhaps Petersfield.

‘Can I visit Mr Ryan?’ he asked, in his hospital hush voice.

She looked him up and down with distaste. ‘Are you family?’

‘Er, no. A colleague.’

‘Not a doctor, then?’

‘No, a teacher.’

‘So, not a nurse.’

‘No, I’m—’

‘Ancillary staff?’

‘No. I—’

‘Can you read?’

‘Yes, I’m a—’

‘I’ll make it easy for you, shall I, then?’ she said, shifting the gum to the other cheek. ‘No. You can’t visit Mr Ryan. If, as you claim, you can read you would be able to tell that.’ And she stalked away, to bring comfort and succour to some poor damned soul.

Maxwell looked around for a trusty Highena, and finally Louise, the Senior Nurse, came round a corner, holding a bedpan at arm’s length.

‘Louise … I … oh, my word,’ he said, backing away. ‘Can we talk in a minute when you’ve …?’ He waved at the pan.