Maxwell’s House Read online

  The Inspector looked blank. They had initials run riot in the police force, but nothing like this.

  ‘Jennifer was applying to university?’ Hall checked.

  ‘I believe so. You’d have to ask Maxwell.’

  ‘Not much here.’ Hall closed the file. His own on the dead girl was already four times as thick.

  ‘No,’ Diamond agreed. ‘No, perhaps not. It’s difficult, you see. With nearly eleven hundred pupils, it’s difficult for my staff to compile a vast amount. Anyway, we don’t usually need it… I mean … well …’

  ‘What sort of a girl was she, Mr Diamond?’ Hall asked, his fingers pressed to his expressionless lips.

  ‘Oh, bright,’ he said quickly, confidently, ‘very bright. Yes, she’d have been good red brick. Not Oxbridge, I don’t think, although I understand she intended to try for it; but red brick, certainly.’

  ‘Popular?’

  ‘Very. Very. I was about to make her a prefect next year. Perhaps even Head Girl, if it weren’t for Heather Robotham.’

  ‘Heather …’ Johnson was writing things down in a little black book.

  ‘Robotham,’ Diamond repeated. ‘Father’s a doctor. Practice down on the front.’ The policemen nodded.

  ‘Jenny was a good girl, though. Able. Co-operative. She was something-or-other in Godspell last year.’

  ‘Boys?’ Hall let his fingers drop.

  Diamond frowned at him. ‘I’ve really no idea,’ he smiled. ‘You’d …’

  ‘… have to ask Maxwell,’ Johnson chimed in. ‘Yes, well, where do we find him?’

  ‘Margaret will let you have his address, although …’

  ‘Yes?’Hall said.

  ‘Well, I don’t think he’s here. I mean, he’s gone away.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Quite a while, I believe. But don’t worry, he’ll be back by 19th August.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Johnson asked.

  Diamond leaned back in his chair, patting his waistcoat complacently. ‘A level results,’ he beamed. ‘Peter Maxwell hasn’t missed those in twenty years. Ah,’ he reacted to the knock on the door. ‘Come in.’

  The mousy woman came in carrying a tray and assorted mugs, one of which proclaimed the marriage made in heaven of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

  ‘Thank you, Margaret. Sugar, gentlemen?’

  They shook their heads. Johnson knew he was sweet enough as he was. Hall had flipped open the file again. And was looking at the toothy grin of a little girl whose hair was lighter in the years behind. Whose eyes were bright. Whose hope was gone.

  They couldn’t find Peter Maxwell. His house, yes. And the old girl who fed his cat. They even saw a glimpse of his white bike parked in his back passage. But for the rest … silence. They’d have to wait until 19th August. He’d keep until then. And in the mean time, there was a murder enquiry under way.

  The jangling, fierce signature tune gave way to flashing blue lights and screaming vehicles. Then it was the studio with slightly embarrassed-looking men and women sitting by phones and VDUs. The camera panned back to the friendly, comfortable face of Nick Ross.

  He was only half listening to the special edition of Crimewatch they’d put on in the holiday month of August and, in that endless struggle with nature in which most men wrestled with needle and thread, he wasn’t watching the screen at all. Just darning his walking socks. It came to him as though in a dream. A series of names. Images. Coincidences. Then he looked up and could not look away. The socks were a tangled heap on the floor.

  ‘It was 23rd July,’ Ross was saying from the television screen, ‘the last day of the school term. A tramp found Jennifer’s body here, in this old house at the end of Kissing Tree Lane. She had been strangled.’

  He watched Ross cross the studio floor and a different camera took him up. ‘Jenny was a bright, clever girl, in the first year of her sixth form at Leighford High School.’

  A rather flattering library picture of the school’s frontage appeared on the screen. He fancied it had been taken when the school was the focus of all that industrial action back in ’86. Or was it ’87? Hard to remember now.

  ‘Friends describe her as a friendly, outgoing girl. She was last seen alive at three thirty that afternoon. School had broken up at two o’clock and Jenny had gone with her boyfriend to a cafe in the town. At two forty-five he left her here, at the corner of Grassington Street and Rodwell Avenue. Did you see where she went after that?’

  A lookalike was on the screen now, crossing Rodwell Avenue, plodding on towards the golf course.

  He shook his head. ‘Too heavy,’ he said. ‘That’s all wrong.’

  But Ross couldn’t hear him. ‘Jenny was wearing her school uniform. Black skirt. White blouse. Black shoes. She was carrying a school bag, like this one …’ He paused by a table and held up a grey Samsonite. ‘Her own has not yet been found. At about three thirty, a woman on her way home from work saw a girl who may have been Jenny talking to a young man here, on the edge of the Dam, an area well known by courting couples. She remembers they seemed to be arguing and she heard her say “No” several times.’

  The lookalike and a tall bit-player duly went through the motions, then she turned and followed the line of the old railway towards Moorfields and the sea.

  ‘It’s not known what Jenny did for the next half an hour, but at just after eight o’clock this man, David Arnold, was walking his dog along Kissing Tree Lane. After a fine day, it had started raining and Mr Arnold put his anorak hood up. His dog wouldn’t come when he called and Mr Arnold had to enter the grounds of a ruined house, known locally as the Red House, in search of him.’

  The Red House filled the screen, the room, his mind. Mr Arnold was suddenly sitting in an indescribably awful living-room, reminiscing. He had thick, bottle-bottom glasses and a shapeless cardigan. The wayward dog sat at his feet, its tongue lolling under the studio lights.

  ‘I remember seeing a bike, like,’ Arnold told his viewers, ‘sort of leaning up against the Red House. I thought to myself, that’s unusual. Because it was. Oh, the Red House used to be a place for courting couples. You know, just kids. But I’d seen no one there for months on account of it was so derelict, you know. Anyhow, old Shep here, he’d gone inside and he wouldn’t come down, so I went in after him. It was then I saw the tramp.’

  ‘Dan Guthrie’, Ross was in command again, taking the story on, ‘was a well-known figure in the neighbourhood. He’d been sleeping rough throughout most of July – remember the weather had been good until that last week – and he’d gone into the Red House about eight o’clock, hoping to find shelter.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Henry Hall.’ Ross sat beside a tight-lipped detective in immaculate gold-rimmed glasses. ‘You’re in charge of the case. Is there any message you have for our viewers tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hall seemed at ease with the radio mike clipped to his tie. ‘The dead girl was just seventeen years old …’

  ‘Seventeen years and four months,’ he argued with the television.

  ‘She had her whole life before her. Someone out there knows why she died and who killed her. 23rd July. A Thursday. Did someone you know come home later than usual that night? Was he behaving strangely? Has he been behaving strangely since?’

  ‘Presumably, you want to interview that man seen talking to Jenny at the Dam? Let’s just have a description again.’

  A bad drawing filled the screen of a scruffy lad of twenty or so, with dead, pencilled eyes and an attempt at stubble.

  ‘He was eighteen to twenty-five years old.’ Ross padded it out. ‘Wearing denim jeans and a white or cream shirt. He was well-spoken.’

  ‘We need him to come forward,’ Hall said, as the camera swung back, ‘to eliminate him from our enquiries.’

  ‘A particularly senseless killing,’ Ross commented. ‘There is an incident room set up at Tottingleigh and you call it on 0391 421638 or the studio h
ere on 0500 600 600; that’s 0500 600 600, where a team of detectives is waiting for your call. Remember, if you’d like to speak to a BBC researcher instead, your call will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.’

  Ross turned to a third camera, outstaring every villain in the land. ‘Jenny Hyde was only seventeen. She hadn’t an enemy in the world. But it’s possible that the killer may strike again. It’s up to you to make sure he doesn’t.’

  Then the mood was lifted, the silence gone, and the smiling face of Sue Cook filled the screen. ‘Were you in the centre of Birmingham on 14th May?’ she asked.

  He stood up, crossed the room and switched off the set. ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in the centre of Birmingham,’ he said. He looked down at the blackened screen, lifeless, blank. ‘And don’t tell me not to have nightmares, Nick. Because they’re already here.’

  2

  There was only one topic of conversation really. Jenny Hyde.

  ‘I taught her French in Year 9.’

  ‘Wasn’t she in Godspell?’

  ‘It’s come to something, hasn’t it, when you can’t let your kids out after dark?’

  ‘The death penalty. That’s the answer.’

  ‘I blame the ’60s, of course. All that peace and beads bollocks. It’s left us with no morals. No norms. We’ve lost our way.’

  Ever been in a staff room? It’s more or less like hell must be. Or purgatory. John Milton would have been a comprehensive schoolteacher, if only he hadn’t been born three hundred years too soon. ‘The awful sound of hissing in the hall.’ They sat, clutching assorted mugs and whispering. In the Special Needs corner, the Nappy Brigade, Joan Wilson’s needles clacked together like those of Madame de Farge as something shapeless for the latest grandchild grew inexorably. Next to her, Sally Greenhow was shaking her head, smoking frantically and muttering about how society had gone to the dogs.

  Under the window, the 1981 Committee, all track suits and cynicism, lounged amidst their piles of comics and collected memorabilia of all the school-generated gaffes of the last thirteen years. The clannish Modern Languages Department, separated from their fellows by a European understanding, a devotion to Maastricht and the smoking of Gauloises, attempted to make small-talk with the extraordinarily homely French Assistante who had just got off the garlic train and wondered what she had come to.

  Then the suits walked in. James Diamond, forty something. A bright young creature of the ’80s, he had not moved on and up, as everyone predicted he would. Instead, he got older and greyer, but no wiser, as the government and governors and parents threw things at him from all directions at once. He stayed inscrutable behind his gold-rimmed specs. Roger Garrett was a year or two younger; still forty something, but less forty something than his boss. When you’re First Deputy, they shit on you from two directions – above and below. He was responsible for the curriculum, and his waking nightmare was the timetable, that all-destructive juggernaut in which people were sacrificed to mathematical equations; in which humanity sank without trace in a morass of options and coloured pegs on an office wall. And whom did he blame, when all about him were losing their heads and blaming it on him? SIMS, of course. The computer system that was to revolutionize administration but which never quite did what you wanted it to. How many kids were in Year 7 doing Geography? The computer knew, but it wasn’t telling. Some days it was down. Some days it was out. Down and out in Leighford High. Then there was the third triumvir – Lepidus to Diamond’s Caesar and Garrett’s Mark Antony – Bernard Ryan. What, you may ask, is a Pastoral Deputy? Not Bernard Ryan, certainly. When you’re still wearing nappies and your knees aren’t brown yet, how can you pretend to cope with the social hell of the underprivileged, the children of the flower children? Young Bernard was discipline’s last resort. Many was the wayward urchin with the wedge haircut who was sent to his office for a damned good letting off.

  Peter Maxwell sat in the corner he had made all his own and turned to his fellow Old Contemptible, Geoffrey Smith, the Head of English. ‘Don’t you just love being in control?’

  Smith smirked. He was a bald, sparkly fifty-one, with a penchant for black and white films and Dylan Thomas. He’d scored a victory recently with his refusal to administer Key Stage 3 Standard Attainment Tests in English; the government’s attempt to impose conformity on a system that was as individualistic as kids in a school. In an oblique way, John Patten, the Secretary of State for Education, and John Major, the First Lord of the Treasury, had shaken their fists at him and prophesied classroom chaos in the summer because of his intransigence. But the summer had gone and no one had noticed. And not many of them could spell intransigence anyway.

  ‘Can we make a start, please, ladies and gentlemen?’ Diamond begged.

  The hubbub around the room barely subsided. He went on anyway.

  ‘Ever seen Seduction of a Nation, Geoff, me ol’ mucker?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ the Head of English said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A documentary on Hitler. The most marvellous footage of the former art student giving a speech. He’s got ten thousand people in the palm of his hand, just waiting. He just stands there until they’re quiet. Riveting.’

  ‘Did he pass that on to you for your classroom control?’

  ‘No,’ said Maxwell, straight-faced, ‘I passed it on to him.’

  ‘A number of things …’ Diamond was saying.

  ‘Jenny,’ Maxwell shouted. ‘What about Jenny?’

  The hubbub stopped. All eyes turned to the Headmaster. In the loneliness of command he stood there, his trousers oddly ill-fitting for a former whizz-kid.

  ‘I don’t think this is the time or place, Max,’ he said quietly.

  The eyes swivelled to the grizzled old man in the corner. Not a punch-up already? Not so soon in the term?

  ‘Here we go.’ Paul Moss was the Head of History and he muttered under his breath. Peter Maxwell was the worst maverick in his department, but he loved these moments. They were pure gold. He saw the man reach up slowly to take off his shapeless tweed hat – who the hell wore a hat in the ’90s? He saw the barbed-wire hair spring free, the forehead furrow, the eyes focus. Maxwell was uncoiling, like a mamba. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

  ‘With respect, Headmaster,’ he said slowly and you felt the gravel of his voice scrape you to the bone, ‘Jenny Hyde was one of my sixth form; a member of this school. She’s dead. If this isn’t the time and place, I don’t know what is.’

  There were cries of ‘Hear, hear,’ around the room and the Headmaster knew what defeat was. He’d experienced it before. Every time he’d crossed swords with Maxwell, in fact.

  ‘Now, come on, Max …’ Ryan’s high-pitched whine attempted to extricate his Head from a jam, but he got no further, because Maxwell’s eyes burned into him and he sat back, the smile frozen on his lips.

  ‘You know as much as I do,’ Diamond said, perching now on the counter that ran the length of the staff room. ‘The police are carrying out their own enquiries. I understand they have been talking to various people over the holidays. Friends of Jenny’s and so on. I spoke to them myself the day after it had happened.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘And that’s it?’ Maxwell asked.

  The hubbub began again. The Head raised a hand. ‘Roger, would you like to go over the timetable changes, since July, I mean?’

  And that was it. The Staff Development Day. Before the kids came back and made the place untidy again. But the weather knew. August had been wet and blustery. Ian McCaskill grinning, with no apology whatever, to tell a waiting world that tomorrow would be more of the same. Then, it was term time again and the Indian summer came – a cloudless blue sky and sharp shadows on the fields and across the quad.

  Peter Maxwell carried his coffee across to the sixth form block. He wheezed his way up the two flights of stairs and down the corridor, gleaming now after the annual polish. He fumbled for his keys. Somebody had fixed the lock at last and the door swun
g wide. He threw his hat at the hook he had treated himself to at B&Q: one of those plastic, self-adhesive jobs that needed no screws. Put a screw into a wall or a door around here and the lot would come down.

  It dawned on him as he opened his filing cabinet that he hadn’t seen Alison this morning. Don’t say she was starting already? Here was a woman, his Assistant, who took morning sickness to a fine art. This was her third pregnancy. How the hell could she claim to be a teacher at all? Still, her subject was Biology, so that must explain it. No doubt she’d stagger in later, palely loitering with the distaff section on the staff, talking endlessly about painful nipples and back-ache. What a cop-out, he thought. Then a memory hit him. Sharp. Painful. And he slammed the cabinet drawer shut.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ A voice made him turn.

  A grey-suited man stood in his doorway, flanked by another.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, frowning. These two didn’t look like prospective parents. And anyway, the new Year 12 wasn’t due until the afternoon.

  ‘I am Chief Inspector Henry Hall. This is Detective Inspector Johnson.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell said, ‘I’ve been expecting you, gentlemen.’

  ‘Really?’ Hall allowed himself to be ushered to one of the hard, upright seats. ‘Why is that?’

  Maxwell took his own seat across the desk from the policemen. ‘I suppose because I’m the nearest thing to a father figure Jenny Hyde had, here at school, that is. How are the Hydes taking it?’

  ‘How d’you think?’ Johnson asked.

  Hall flashed him a telling glance. ‘As you might expect,’ he said softly. ‘Only child and so on. They’re still distraught. I don’t think it’s something you can come to terms with easily.’

  Maxwell nodded.

  ‘What was your relationship with the dead girl, exactly?’ Hall asked.

  ‘I was her Year Head,’ Maxwell said, ‘and her History teacher.’

  Hall exchanged another glance with his Number Two. ‘You’ll have to explain that,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember having Year Heads when I was at school.’