Maxwell’s Ride (6 page)

Maxwell would rather not talk to David Boston. The new Head of Drama had not really impressed the old Head of Sixth Form. He was too stereotypical, too limp of wrist. Not for nothing had Maxwell christened him Camp David.

‘The PTA are doing all they can – coffee mornings, car boots, the usual stuff, but really big money comes from bids. We could have tried the Lottery, Council for the Arts, the Prince’s Trust even. In the end we went for Charts, especially since David knows Wiseman.’

‘Would that be in the Biblical sense?’ Maxwell wondered aloud; but sensing that had just sailed unerringly over the Senior Mistress’s head, changed tack. ‘And Larry Warner?’

‘Larry is one of the accountants Charts uses locally. It’s a huge operation, Max, monopoly money, really. He’s also been the school auditor since ’96, so it all ties in rather well. I really can’t get over this. The poor man.’

‘I don’t suppose he felt much,’ Maxwell reassured her.

‘What I can’t understand is – what was he doing in that park in the first place?’

‘Ah yes,’ mused Maxwell, ‘the “solitary mister”. That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, Deirdre.’

‘Oh no,’ she arched her back and her left eyebrow simultaneously, ‘the sixty-four thousand dollar question is – what were you doing there?’

He looked from side to side, checking that they were alone. ‘The usual,’ he leered, in a perfect Lewis Carroll, ‘exposing myself – to danger.’

5

‘How were they today?’ Maxwell looked at Sylvia Matthews through the amber distortion of his Southern Comfort. She always looked years younger in shirt and jeans, without the pale blue orthodoxy of her nurse’s uniform, school matrons for the use of.

‘Fine,’ she told him. ‘They’re lovely girls, Max. How are you is more to the point?’

‘Me?’ He leaned back, stretching his toes out along the settee. ‘Same as always, nursie. Suicidal.’

She looked at her watch. ‘God, Max, it’s nearly midnight.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Maxwell looked at her in the lamp’s glow. ‘“The lights burn blue. Give me another horse, bind up my wounds. Have mercy, Jesu!’”

She shook her head, laughing. Mad as a March hare. ‘How did
you
get on?’

‘In the Inner Sanctum, you mean? The white man’s grave laughingly known as Deirdre Lessing’s office? The bourne from which etc, etc? Well, the late Larry Warner was helping her out with some fund raising.’

‘Oh, yes, the Theatre Bid.’

He sat up. ‘Am I the only one at Leighford High not to have heard of this?’

‘If you listened a bit, Maxie,’ she scolded gently, ‘read the paperwork.’

‘Paperwork, schmaperwork,’ he muttered. ‘There are only so many hours in the day, Nurse Matthews.’

‘Lucy didn’t mention it at all,’ Sylvia told him, ‘the murder, I mean. Tiffany … well, it’s difficult, Max, I don’t know them.’

‘They seem to have taken a shine to you, though,’ he said, offering her another glass. She held her hand over hers and shook her head.

‘I’ve seen kids in shock before. I think Lucy’s all right, but Tiffany … I’m not so sure … I noticed her looking around, watching everything. She didn’t stray very far. Neither of them ate very much – but that’s teenage girls for you.’

‘Right,’ he nodded. ‘What is that stuff they have for breakfast? It looks like budgie seed and sawdust.’

‘That’s Muesli, Max, as you very well know. Did Deirdre shed any light?’

‘On Warner? No, not really. Mind you, she’s a suspicious old cat – nothing personal, Count.’ He threw a glance at the dozing animal on the pouffé. Metternich was about to offer to fetch this intruder’s coat. He’d always sensed a certain chemistry when Sylvia Matthews was around. And his powerful nostrils could pick up oestrogen at forty paces. ‘Wouldn’t give me the time of day without checking why I wanted to know first. He lived in Portsmouth, but she didn’t know where precisely. Drove a Peugeot – odd for a woman to notice that.’

‘Careful, Max,’ she warned him. ‘Teensy bit of male chauvinist piggery seeping in there.’

‘You’re right,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve got the tie, somewhere; founder member of the club an’ all. No, Deirdre was as forthcoming as a clam. Mrs B. put me on to the Leighford connection. When I saw Warner at Magicworld, he didn’t look familiar at all. Just struck me how odd it was that a single bloke would be there, in his three piece and all. Square peg in a round hole.’

‘Max,’ she looked oddly at him, ‘you’re thinking again.’

‘Right again,’ he laughed. ‘I really must stop it or the Secretary of State for Education will be demanding my resignation. Of course, we historians are a bunch of crypto-lefties as it is, denying children their birthright, mustn’t mention the war and so on. Of course we should be grateful for an extra two grand a year, etc, etc.’

‘Stop changing the subject,’ she was leaning forward now, cradling her glass in both hands. ‘What do you mean “a square peg in a round hole”?’

‘It’s an old English saying, nursie. Bit like “a rolling stone butters no parsnips” or “many a muckle mak’s a mickle” – although actually, that’s Scottish.’

‘Max!’ she screamed at him.

‘Damn good Marge Simpson there, Sylv,’ he had to admit. ‘Why, I asked myself, did Larry Warner go to Magicworld? If he was a family man, he’d have gone with the family; with just the kids, maybe, to give the missus a break. If he was a single man, going for the thrill of the rides – sad bastard – then wouldn’t he have gone casual – shirt, jeans, blue suede shoes? If he was a pervert, wouldn’t he have worn a mac? Oh,’ he smacked his forehead, ‘There I go again, being Politically Incorrect about perverts – stereotyping them.’

‘So what’s your conclusion?’

Maxwell leaned forward so that he echoed her posturally, their glasses almost touching in the lamplight. ‘He went there in a suit, Sylv, dressed for work. He was meeting someone. A client, perhaps.’

‘At Magicworld?’

‘A client who didn’t want to meet him at his office. Didn’t want an accountant traipsing all over his flowerbeds. I don’t know. Somewhere neutral? Some bland, public territory where there’d be no advantage, no quarter?’

‘He sounds like an agent,’ she said, ‘in one of those sixties films where they swap spies over the border.’

He nodded. ‘The chartered accountant who came in from the cold.’

‘You’re getting involved in this, aren’t you, Max?’ she asked him after a moment.

‘Me?’ He held his heart in mock astonishment.

‘I know you too well, Peter Maxwell,’ she said. ‘We’ve been together now …’ But she’d said too much and her voice trailed away.

He stood up sharply, putting his glass down on the coffee table and offering his arm. ‘Come on, then, my dear old Dutch, I’ll walk you to your car.’

‘Why, Max?’ she stood up with him. ‘Why are you getting involved?’

He smiled slowly, his eyes flashing in the half light. ‘Because it’s there,’ he said. ‘And because a little girl asked me to.’

He led her to the door as Metternich rolled over and launched himself onto her recently vacated seat. His sighing purr was the feline equivalent of ‘Thank Christ’.

‘Bloody Hell,’ Chris Logan was on his fourth cup of coffee that morning, staring out of the window where the rain drove hard against it. Below him, in the back car park of the
Leighford Advertiser
, a figure he knew was parking his bike. ‘I thought he was dead.’

‘Yehudi Menuhin?’ His oppo Keith Kershaw didn’t look up. ‘Yeah, he is.’

‘Mad Max.’

‘You wanna lay off that crumbly white stuff, Christophe, me ol’ mucker. It’s giving you hallucinations now.’

‘Christ, he’s coming up here.’

He was. Peter Maxwell had given his girls strict instructions. They were to stay securely in Number 38 Columbine.

They were not to answer the door, the phone, any question Chris Tarrant might put to them and above all, if either of them touched his beloved Light Brigade in the attic, he’d hang them both out on his rotary washing line and bore them to death by reading them chunks of Professor Trevor-Roper. Now he was standing at the
Advertiser’s
front desk, steaming in the warm rain of the morning, water seeping into his socks.

The dim-looking woman opposite picked up the intercom aid it buzzed upstairs. ‘Chris, there’s a Mr Maxwell to see you. He says it’s urgent.’

There was a muffled response in the dim-looking woman’s ear.

‘What’s it about?’ she asked.

‘It’s about an essay he owes me on Hitler’s Polish policy,’ Maxwell told her, straight faced.

‘Foreign affairs,’ the woman said into the intercom. ‘We don’t cover any of that, do we?’

There was another buzz in her ear, the only buzz, Maxwell guessed, she was ever likely to get.

‘He’s on his way down,’ she told him. ‘Won’t you take a seat?’

Maxwell raised his dripping hat and paddled off to a corner where a retired colonel was scanning the microfiche to find something to complain about and a travelling couple were combing the small ads.

‘Mr Maxwell,’ the Head of Sixth Form didn’t have to look up to recognize the nasal whine. True, it was over-larded with Fleet Street Speak and the outstretched hand spoke volumes for the Confidence Building For Young Journalists Course, but it was still, in essence Christopher Bites-Yer-Bum Logan, sub-editor of the school magazine, in the days when Leighford High still had a school magazine. He came down the spiral staircase like a ginger Gloria Swanson, if that wasn’t too much of a contradiction in terms.

‘Chris,’ Maxwell stood up and shook his hand. ‘It’s been.’

‘Must be ten years.’ The hand-wringing ritual was exhausting, designed to assure his old teacher by his grip that Chris Logan had grown up in that time, was shaving now and quite possibly had had carnal knowledge of a live woman. He’d also thickened around the girth and wore contact lenses to replace the geek glasses that were once his trademark. His gingerness seemed to have diminished not one jot.

‘Still hacking, I see,’ Maxwell beamed.

‘Oh, yes,’ Logan nodded. ‘Come back for a bit of a break actually. You know, after the hurly-burly of the
Sun
.’

‘Quite,’ Maxwell nodded, frowning, sharing for a fleeting moment what must have been the endless agony of the Murdoch years.

‘What can I do for you? Looking up old pupils?’

‘Shame on you,’ Maxwell slapped the younger man’s arm. ‘That’s illegal, you know.’

‘Oh yes, ha, ha.’ The braying laugh and delayed humour were still the same, despite a 2.2 in Media Studies from Salford and the years at the computer interface.

‘No, it’s about Larry Warner.’

‘Ah,’ Logan’s grin had already frozen. ‘Mavis?’

The dim-looking woman glanced up from her phone. ‘Any chance of two coffees, in here?’ he pointed to a dingy office.

‘I’ve got the leader of the council on two,’ she cupped her hand over the receiver.

‘Well, that’s one more vote than he’ll get next time round,’ Maxwell quipped.

‘Hah, oh quite,’ Logan grinned. ‘Tell him I’m out to lunch, Mavis.’

Maxwell was quite prepared to believe that.

‘Have a seat, Mr Maxwell.’

‘Max’ll do,’ the Great Man said, removing past copies of the Advertiser and arranging his coat over a computer terminal.

‘Max,’ Logan sat opposite him. ‘It seems strange after all these years. I remember when you ran the school magazine.’

‘Oh no,’ Maxwell corrected him. ‘You were the driving force there, Chris.
Logan’s Run
I used to call it, remember?’

‘Oh yes.’ Logan hadn’t understood the comment then and he didn’t understand it now. ‘Now then, Larry Warner.’

‘Right.’ Maxwell got down to business. ‘You covered the story.’

‘That’s right. It was my first murder for the
Advertiser
.’ He leaned forward, sotto voce, ‘Not exactly the cutting edge here, Max,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve actually been brought in as a sort of galvanizer …’

‘Really?’ Maxwell leaned back, impressed.

‘Kick a bit of arse, you know.’

‘Long overdue.’

‘Well, it’s all new marinas and chrysanthemum shows. Odd bit of lavatory cowboying is as risqué as it gets. Larry Warner was a godsend, really. I got in fast and networked it. The editor was well chuffed, I can tell you.’

‘I’m sure he was. So what else can you tell me?’

Logan blinked. ‘What can
I
tell
you
?’ He launched into a very bad Nazi ‘Ve vill ask ze qvestions’. And he brayed like a donkey.

‘Absolutely.’ Maxwell chuckled for old time’s sake. After all, it was he who had told Logan what a Nazi was. ‘But I have a special interest in the case.’

‘Why?’

‘Tut,’ Maxwell scolded. ‘There you go again!’

‘Ha,’ Logan giggled. ‘Sorry, Max, occupational hazard, I suppose.’

‘I was there.’

‘What? When it happened? Excellent.’ Logan reached for his notepad.

‘Uh-huh,’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘No exclusives just yet. I wasn’t alone.’

‘Oh,’ Logan’s eyes widened. ‘Anything Mrs Maxwell should know about?’ He couldn’t for the life of him remember whether there was a Mrs Maxwell or not.

‘Nothing like that,’ Maxwell said. ‘I had my nieces with me. I don’t want them involved any more.’

‘Ah, Mavis.’ The dim-looking woman popped her head around the door and brought in a tray with polystyrene cups and a single plastic spoon.

‘You’re spoiling me,’ Maxwell beamed.

‘Thank you, Mavis. Can you get the Warner file, please?’

‘Well, it’s nearly my lunch break,’ Mavis whinged.

‘It won’t take you a minute, Mavis,’ Logan insisted and she trudged off, wondering if she couldn’t take the matter to the NUJ.

‘I happened to be the first journalist on the scene. Oh fuck, that’s hot.’ Logan felt a rush to his head, not just with the pain of the coffee on his lips, but that he’d sworn in front of his old teacher. Funny how the old things still mattered.

‘Who did you talk to, in the police, I mean?’

‘DCI Hall. It’s his case, apparently.

‘Ah.’

‘Do you know him?’

‘We’ve crossed truncheons before,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘It’s always been … a pleasure.’

‘He wasn’t giving much away.’

‘No, that’s our Henry’s way,’ Maxwell commented.

‘I’m following up on Warner this afternoon, funnily enough.’