Maxwell’s Reunion Page 25

  ‘Which brings us to Cranton. Quent’s death had to be something to do with our time at school – everything else was a red herring. Ash confirmed it when I spoke to him a few moments ago. Cranton, ’62. We mentioned it, he and I, at the Graveney on the Friday we arrived. But we were talking at cross-purposes. I was referring to the old dog pinching my girl, as he did at the Cranton ball in ’62; he was referring to what he’d caught you and Quent up to.’

  ‘Get it over with, Richard,’ Cissie snapped, the strain of the last few minutes beginning to tell.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Alphedge growled. ‘I want Maxwell to know why he’s going to die.’

  Slowly, keeping his back to the wall, Maxwell got up. Jacquie blinked. How had he done that from a sitting position? ‘Cranton ’62,’ Maxwell remembered. ‘A still and tropic night in the grounds of the school. It was magic, wasn’t it, Alphie? There were lights in the trees, our joint orchestras belting out the hits of the year interspersed with the odd waltz. I had a gorgeous girl on my arm. So did Ash … And you had George Quentin. Modesty forbids me in mixed company to be graphic as to which parts of your bodies you’d linked, but it sure as hell wasn’t your arms, was it?’

  ‘Shoot him, Richard!’ Cissie screamed.

  Maxwell was walking towards his man, his heart thudding. Alphedge’s gun was – what? – two feet from the head of the woman he loved. ‘It was all so silly, Alphie,’ Maxwell said quietly. ‘Oh, I know they were different days and the law was the law then, but Christ, you were kids. We all were. Somebody asked me recently if I knew that Quent was gay. I didn’t. I’d forgotten all about Cranton ’62, because I didn’t see it. It was just gossip at the time, just rumours. We’d all forgotten about it, Alphie, so why?’ He pointed at the rope, taut on its housings. ‘What in God’s name was the point?’

  ‘Point, you imbecile?’ Cissie screamed at him. She took one stride and slapped him across the face. Jacquie jumped, but Maxwell rolled with it. ‘Quentin was a predatory homosexual. He forced Richard. That appalling night at Cranton, he forced him, had him bent over a tree. It’s something people never talk about, isn’t it? Male rape – the last taboo.’

  ‘Cissie …’ Alphedge was shaking his head, the tears streaming down his face.

  ‘He’s lived with that ever since. The shame. The disgrace. You say they were different days. Yes, they were. But you say that from today’s liberal vantage point. Richard went to pieces from that day. His father disowned him. Don’t you remember any of this?’

  Maxwell shook his head.

  ‘You smug, conceited bastard,’ she growled. ‘Richard was raped by that … that animal and you didn’t even know.’

  ‘It’s in here, Max,’ Alphedge said quietly, pointing to his head. ‘It has been ever since it happened. I swore one day I’d kill George Quentin. I had dreams of it happening – of him dangling from this rope, my rope. Perfect, poetic justice. Cissie knew, of course. There are some things you can’t keep from your wife. When I heard from Stenhouse, suggesting the reunion, it was like a gift from God. Unlike the rest of you, I knew exactly where George Quentin lived and worked. I got Cissie to ring him, to set up a joke. Quent would go to Halliards, not the Graveney, and help me rig up a hanged-man scam to scare the shit out of Stenhouse. It tickled him enormously. The poor, stupid bastard didn’t know he was going to his death. Cissie and I, of course, had got to the Graveney early and pinched Stenhouse’s key. Then we met Quentin and it was pure, bloody joy. Replacing the key in Stenhouse’s pocket over breakfast the next morning was the most difficult thing about it.’

  ‘But why all this?’ Jacquie asked. ‘This whole ransom nonsense?’

  ‘To get me here,’ Maxwell said. ‘You knew I’d worry at it, didn’t you, Alphie?’

  The actor nodded. ‘Like some bloody terrier,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d end it here, now. Where, in a way, it all started.’

  ‘That’s all fine and dandy, Alphie.’ Maxwell’s face still stung from Cissie’s slap. ‘But you won’t make it this time. It was all a bit OTT, wasn’t it? A little on the luvvie side, all this. Did you seriously think, with Jacquie around, the police wouldn’t be called in to look for you? They’re outside now, Jacquie, aren’t they?’

  Jacquie nodded. ‘Ten-man team. Plus DS Rackham. Six of them are marksmen, Richard. One of them will get you. You know it.’

  ‘And Cissie,’ Maxwell threw in. ‘In the dark, they won’t take the chance she isn’t armed too. Give it up, old son. It’s all over.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ growled Alphedge, lining up his aim on Jacquie’s jaw. ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady …’

  Maxwell didn’t give him time to finish the cliché. Dragging from nowhere his distant memories of the ruck and the maul, he drove his shoulder hard into Alphedge’s body. The actor’s arm came up and the gun barked in the sharp light, sending a bullet ricocheting against the marble statue. Both men hit the wall beyond and Maxwell rolled clear. Alphedge didn’t roll at all, but lay in a heap with his head still upright.

  Jacquie moved for the first time in what seemed hours. She kicked the gun away from him and snatched it up, holding it with both hands, aimed first at Alphedge and then at Cissie. The actress was wailing as if in a scene from Electra, kneeling beside her husband and cradling his head. Her fingers were bloody in the lamplight.

  ‘The ricochet,’ Jacquie said, and fumbled in her pocket for her phone, stabbing out 999.

  ‘Cissie.’ Maxwell could see that the man was dead as he crouched next to them both. ‘Cissie, you can’t help him any more.’

  ‘But I have to,’ she blurted. ‘Can’t you see? He can’t help himself. He never could.’ And she fell on to Maxwell’s chest, crying into his shirt.

  At the far end of the corridor a door crashed back. There were shouts, torch beams flashing in all directions. ‘Armed police!’ a voice barked. ‘Put your weapon down and lie on the floor. Face down. Now.’

  ‘Police,’ Jacquie called back, throwing Alphedge’s gun down with a clatter. ‘DC Carpenter, Leighford CID.’

  ‘Christ almighty.’ Ben Thomas pushed his way through the flak-jacketed marksmen and stared at her. ‘Alphedge?’

  Maxwell looked up at him.

  ‘I don’t get it, guv.’ DS Vernon was at his boss’s elbow. ‘That note I found …’

  ‘You found?’ Jacquie turned to him. ‘Where?’

  ‘Just up there,’ Vernon told her. ‘First landing, under the skirting board.’

  Thomas was checking Alphedge for a pulse. There wasn’t one. Jacquie was looking down at him. ‘Who suggested, Sergeant,’ she asked, ‘that you look there?’

  ‘The DI …’ Vernon stopped in mid-sentence.

  Thomas and Maxwell were kneeling together, staring into each other’s eyes. They were both surprised by what happened next. Jacquie Carpenter grabbed Thomas’s collar and yanked him upright. She spun him round to face her. ‘Are you going to DCI Tyler with this or am I?’ she asked. His face said it all.

  ‘Anybody seen my sergeant?’ Jacquie asked as the marksmen took Cissie away.

  ‘DS Rackham?’ Vernon shuffled a little by the stairwell. He looked at her. ‘I’m afraid DS Rackham died this evening, DC Carpenter. An accident in his car. I’m sorry.’

  Maxwell’s hand flew out to catch Jacquie’s.

  ‘Somebody switch that bloody lamp off,’ he said.

  Captain Soames Gambier Jenyns was placed, smoking his cigar, at the head of C Troop, 13th Light Dragoons, in the diorama on the trestle table in Maxwell’s attic. Like the case of Halliards’ hanged, he was finished.

  Maxwell hung the gold-laced forage cap on its hook and padded down the stairs. When he reached the lounge, the doorbell rang, so he kept on walking. Beyond the swirled pattern of the frosted glass was a face he knew, a face he loved. He let her in, kissing her in the lit hallway.

  ‘How was the funeral?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said, her head on one side. ‘As well as can be expected. He was all right, was
Graham Rackham.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He hugged her. ‘Come on.’ And he led her up to the lounge.

  It was warm and the lamplight was soft as the November evening settled in. Metternich the cat had vibes about this. There was something in the air, a chemistry that he, feline eunuch that he was, couldn’t quite fathom. But he felt, in his own tommish way, a bit of a gooseberry. He looked up at Jacquie, lashed her with his tail as if to say ‘Just remember who really runs this place’, and left, off to the world of the chase and the kill.

  ‘Cocoa?’ Maxwell asked her.

  She smiled. ‘Southern Comfort.’

  Maxwell frowned. ‘Wait a minute. That’s the good stuff’ And he poured for them both.

  They touched glasses in the firelight. ‘Here’s to them all,’ Maxwell said. ‘To Quent, to Cret, to Ash, to Stenhouse, to the Preacher … and to Alphie. He was really the saddest of us all, wasn’t he?’

  She nodded. Then she put her glass down and relieved him of his. ‘No sadness tonight,’ she said, and took his hand, leading him to the stairs.

  ‘Do this mean,’ he asked her, ‘what I think it do?’

  ‘It do!’ She smiled at him.

  ‘You know,’ he said, switching off the lights as he followed her up, their fingers still twined, ‘if this were a novel, what is about to follow would have to be shown, even in this permissive age, as a row of dots. Wouldn’t you say?’

  She would ..............