Maxwell’s Ride (18 page)

Gallagher shook his head. ‘Like the fucking living dead. We only talk to them if we have to and they never talk to us. One thing is certain – your bloke Logan didn’t belong to any of that.’

‘You think not?’ Hall was trying to limit his horizons too. Alongside sleepy Leighford, the Thames Embankment was the dark side of the moon.

Gallagher shook his head, sipping again from his coffee. ‘No needle marks, no glue stains round the mouth. No obvious stretching of the anal sphincter … This doesn’t bother you, does it, dear?’

Jacquie realized the DCI was asking her. ‘No,’ she said, with a head held high and a clear voice. ‘Not at all.’

That’s good,’ Gallagher grinned. ‘Only a few years ago … well, it’s all changed now, hasn’t it? So, I can’t be certain of course, but I’m satisfied your man wasn’t a user, a wino or a shirt-lifter. Somebody dumped him under the Arches like people dump an old mattress. He was just in the way. Stuff him in a dark corner and forget about it.’

‘What’s the forensic score?’ Hall asked.

Gallagher chuckled. ‘Henry, I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but round here miracles take a little longer. As any fartarsed crime writer will tell you, we haven’t caught Jack the Ripper yet. Still,’ and he winked at Jacquie, ‘it’s only a matter of time.’ She couldn’t help herself but smile.

‘What about Maxwell?’ It was becoming Frank Bartholomew’s favourite topic of conversation. The rain had stopped by mid-afternoon and the traffic was building up on the M3 as they drove south. He looked at Jacquie’s face through his driving mirror, but she was sitting in the back, staring out of the window, refusing to acknowledge him, refusing to be drawn.

‘Maxwell?’ Henry Hall was sitting in the back too, wrestling with the problem of the man under the Arches.

‘He was at Logan’s – remember?’

Hall remembered. And he rather resented Bartholomew’s implication that he hadn’t. ‘What’s your point, Frank?’

A more observant man than Frank Bartholomew would have seen the left corner of Jacquie Carpenter’s lips curl for a second into a smile. Then it was gone. ‘My point, guv … wanker!’ he suddenly shouted to the BMW that purred past him like a bat out of hell, ‘is that our friend Mr Maxwell knows a fuck sight more than he’s letting on. I mean, it speaks for itself, doesn’t it? We’re called to what appears to be a break-in at a premises in Tottingleigh and the next day the owner of those premises is found with a bloody great hole where his voice box used to be.’

‘Are you saying Maxwell did it?’ Jacquie had come out of her shell.

Bartholomew straightened, checking his mirror, reading her face. Bitch. ‘It wouldn’t bloody well surprise me,’ he growled. ‘Tosser!’ he suddenly screamed as an ambulance came from nowhere, bells clanging and sirens wailing.

‘Can you just drive, Frank?’ Hall asked, leaning back and closing his eyes. ‘One thing at a time, I think. Jacquie, tomorrow I want you to have a little word with Mr Maxwell.’

‘Is that both of us, guv?’ Bartholomew asked.

‘No, Frank,’ Hall clasped his hands across his waistcoat. ‘It’s just Jacquie. You I want with your ear glued to a phone to Hendon. I want the ballistics on Logan. And I want it yesterday.’

‘How did he do that?’ Sylvia Matthews always found herself open mouthed watching an Anthony LeStrange show. The man specialized in outdoor magic, making tigers appear in Basildon High Street, that sort of thing. Not for him a curtained stage and suspect cabinets. And he was such a dish, Sylvia realized anew. In those leather trousers, nothing false about
his
bottom.

‘Mirrors,’ Tiffany told her.

Sylvia looked at the girl languishing on her settee, hair wet from the shower, towelling robe wrapped around her like cotton wool.

‘Oh, really?’ the school nurse said.

‘Miss Hussey explained it all in the Upper Fourths,’ Tiffany said.

‘Miss Hussey?’ Sylvia checked.

‘Lesbian!’ Lucy chimed right on cue from the kitchen where she was making short work of a sandwich.

Tiffany’s face said it all. ‘And Physics teacher.’

‘How’s it going, by the way?’ Sylvia asked. ‘At Leighford High, I mean? It must be very difficult adjusting.’

‘It’s all right,’ Tiffany said. ‘And it’s not for much longer.’

‘Except for History, of course.’ Lucy came in with a mouth full of cheese and tomato. ‘Uncle Max is so weird. What do you see in him, Sylvia?’

The older woman looked at her. ‘God!’ Tiffany’s head dropped onto the back of the settee.

‘What?’ Lucy looked from one to the other. ‘What did I say?’

‘Nothing, darling,’ Sylvia said. ‘Nothing at all.’

But Lucy was still staring at her big sister. ‘What?’ she whined, like a female Kevin out of Harry Enfield. ‘You are in love with him, Sylvia, I know you are.’

‘Shut up, you little shit!’ Tiffany hissed through clenched teeth. ‘I’m sorry, Sylvia. Dear little Lucy is a sweet child, but sometimes she just sticks both feet in her mouth and the rest of her body just naturally follows.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lucy had showered too and stood there with a sandwich in one hand and a hairdryer in the other, the quintessential symbol of the threshold of womanhood.

In the end it was Anthony LeStrange who answered her from the screen of the one-eyed monster in the corner. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that what you just saw was a trick, an illusion.’ The camera closed in on his lofty temples, his long, ringleted hair and his eyes burned into Sylvia’s soul. ‘Or was it?’ The voice was sonorous, like a symphony in stereo, coming now from one direction, now another. ‘Or was what you have just seen magic? Only I can know that. Until next week,’ and his astonishing eyes merged with those of the tiger, growling deep from somewhere in the dark. Then a rather silly woman said ‘This is BBC Two,’ and the spell was broken.

It was broken too by a simultaneous ringing.

‘I’ll get it,’ and Tiffany had gone like a pink streak, dashing to the hall where Sylvia Matthews kept the phone. ‘Oh, hi.’ The Miss Cool voice was totally at odds with the sparkling eyes, the pounding heart. Lucy wandered past her sister as she twined the phone cord around her arm and purred into the receiver. The younger girl, whose sandwich had gone, stood there staring at her sister and forced two fingers into her mouth as though to vomit. Tiffany lashed out with a powerful left leg, but Lucy had been here before. Months of telephone love affairs had taught her speed and timing. She twirled away, smirking, to tackle every thirteen-year-old girl’s worst nightmare – split ends.

‘I’ll get the door, then, shall I?’ Sylvia said to no one in particular.

No!’ she heard Tiffany squeal down the phone and the girl carefully turned her back, almost whispering. ‘I don’t know if I can.’

Sylvia padded through on slippered feet to the frosted glass of her front door. There were no surprises there. She knew the silhouette in the faint evening sun, the glow on the cycle clips. He’d been there before, countless times. All through her divorce he’d been there, a rock in the swirling sea of failed relationships, a beacon in the darkness. She’d run out of metaphors for him years ago. He was mad, bad and dangerous to know. And she loved him for all of that.

‘Yes?’ He gave her his Billy Connolly take-off as she opened the door. And she reached up and kissed him quickly on the cheek, as friends do.

‘Come in, Max. Take the weight off your feet.’

He doffed his shapeless tweed hat, the one he used to tell his Year 7 kids had been given to him by William Tell in that unfortunate incident with the apple and the baddie, Landberger Gessler. That was in the days of course before the National Socialist Curriculum when History teachers were allowed to tell it like it was. ‘Where away are the little darlings?’ he asked her.

‘Lucy’s doing her hair, Bedroom Two,’ Sylvia led him past the shrieking Tiffany. ‘Tiffany is on the dog and bone.’

Maxwell smiled at her and she blew him a kiss. ‘No,’ he heard her say into the receiver. ‘No. Just Uncle Maxie.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll tell him you said that.’

‘Anybody I should know?’ Maxwell asked, collapsing uninvited into a chair, ‘or is it the usual heavy breather?’

‘I’ve never noticed him breathing heavily,’ Sylvia smiled, pouring the man a glass of his favourite tipple. ‘My guess would be Mark Irwin.’

‘Ah, the Rudolph Valentino of Leighford High. We’ll have to watch that one, Nursie.’

‘We?’ Sylvia widened her eyes as she passed Maxwell his drink and closed the door on Tiffany’s titterings.

‘I never really thanked you, Sylv, for all this. Come here.’

Her heart jumped. An involuntary nervous reaction the nurse in her knew all about. She was the wrong side of forty, for God’s sake. She wasn’t Tiffany going weak at the knees at the sound of some stud’s voice; or Lucy, looking for closet lesbians on the staff now that somebody had told her she was too old to climb trees any more. Sylvia knew she ought to know better. She’d been there. She’d done that. But this was Mad Max, the man she loved and she melted into his arms. He hugged her, rubbing his cheek against hers, squeezing her shoulders. Then he kissed the top of her head, as he used to kiss his sister’s long years ago, on one of those rare days when they weren’t trying to kill each other.

‘It’s just,’ he let her up to sit next to him, ‘What with my house and Chris’s flat. I don’t know …’

‘No news on Chris?’ she asked.

Maxwell shook his head. ‘Not a whisper,’ he said.

‘Max,’ she was serious suddenly, ‘that policeman who interviewed you, Bartholomew …’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s not going to make trouble for you, is he? You know, hurt you?’

Mr smiled at her over his glass of amber nectar. ‘Me?’ he said.‘Old Ironsides? Call me indestructible.’

‘Oh. Max.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Don’t be too sure.’

The door burst open and Lucy scampered through. ‘Hello, Uncle Max. Oops!’ She saw the held hands. At least Sylvia couldn’t be a lesbian. ‘Did you see Anthony LeStrange tonight? He’s brill. I missed the tiger trick though, ’cos I was making a sandwich.’

‘Sylvia!’ Maxwell sat bolt upright. ‘This appears to be a clear example of child abuse. You’re making this poor darling make her own sandwiches!’

‘Oh, Lor!’ Sylvia held up her hands in mock horror.

‘Actually,’ Maxwell sat back again, ‘I’m afraid that in my capacity as burster of bubbles, I have to tell you he’s not nearly so dazzling in the flesh.’

‘You’ve met him?’ Lucy had to sit down. ‘Oh, wow!’

‘Wow indeed,’ agreed Sylvia. ‘When was this?’

‘Yesterday. I went to see him in his London flat.’

‘Phone number,’ Sylvia burbled. ‘Phone number. Give me his phone number.’

‘He gave me the time of day,’ Maxwell was remembering.

‘What?’

‘His phone number was in Chris Logan’s little book,’ Maxwell explained. ‘No name. Just a number and an address. A very upmarket place in Bloomsbury. He gave me a drink.’

‘So?’ Lucy had inherited some of the critical faculties of her uncle. ‘He obviously knew you were an alcoholic, Uncle Maxie.’

He threw a cushion at her. ‘It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? A relative stranger turns up unannounced on your doorstep and you greet him like an old lost buddie.’

‘A relative stranger?’ Sylvia asked.

‘Yes, I’d met him a couple of days before at some God-awful bash to do with the school’s building programme. Deirdre Lessing’s idea. One of her worst.’

‘Well, if he’d met you,’ Sylvia reasoned, ‘perhaps he was only being polite.’

‘Trust me, lady, I’m a teacher,’ Maxwell said. ‘He was too friendly. Too open. And why, if LeStrange didn’t know who he was should Chris Logan just happen to have the man’s private number?’

‘Mr Maxwell?’

‘Thingee.’ A stickler for names, was Peter Maxwell.

‘There’s someone to see you. A Miss Carpenter… Hello? Mr Maxwell?’

But Peter Maxwell had gone, hurtling down the stairs three at a time, feeling chewing gum of various ages under his hand on the stair-rail as he went. ‘Keep left, Lee, you mindless dolt,’ he bellowed at a passing child who was on his way up, but only in the literal sense. ‘How many times must I tell you?’

She was waiting for him in Reception, that weird room where they kept the tradescantia and the Investors in People plaque. Thingee was pressing buttons like a thing possessed trying to reconnect the History Department and Thingee Too was working on the day’s absentee lists to send to that nice Mr Blunkett.

‘Jacquie.’ He took her by the hand, nodded at both Thingees and swept her away down the corridor. ‘Any news?’

‘This isn’t a social call, Max.’ She was aware of her heels clattering on the chill of the parquet. Then they stopped as they reached flotex and they were suddenly on the stairs.

‘You’re timing is impeccable,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’ve got a free.’

‘How quaint,’ she half smiled.

‘Don’t give me that,’ he growled, holding open his office door. ‘I don’t know what a rest day is.’

‘Six weeks summer holiday,’ she said wistfully. ‘Isn’t it funny the things that occur to you in your dreams?’

‘What do you dream about, Jacquie?’ he asked her. She was in his demesne now, on his turf. Film posters peppered the w alls, there were videos stacked on shelves along with text-books and quotations from Martin Niemoller. She blinked, the question searing into her soul. None of your damned business, you nosy old bastard, one side of her brain was idling her. You, purred the other side. It was night and day. Yin and Yang.

‘May I?’ and she sat down.

He took the other chair, the one under the window that looked out onto the car park below and the summer-green fields beyond the hedgerows. ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘Christopher Logan is dead,’ she said.

He sat down heavily, having been on his feet ready to hit the switch on the kettle. ‘Jesus!’ he was frowning, thinking, trying to make some sense of some of this. Any of it. ‘How?’

‘Shot, we believe. Still waiting for the full forensics.’

‘I just can’t believe it. I mean, how many clichés are there in a situation like this?’

‘You were at his flat two days ago.’ It was a statement, based on the one he’d made. Maxwell nodded. He wasn’t really listening to her. They heard through the open window the distant roar as a contract groundsman opened up the throttle and began to mow the perimeter of the field, just to make life hell for the hay-fever sufferers in the Examination Season.