Authors: M. J. Trow
‘The Parsonage’ as Maxwell called it, was actually a semi-called ‘Rondo’. It wasn’t named after a piece of music, but after Ronald and Dorothy Parsons, who with their offspring, had lived in the dull-looking stuccoed semi for nearly ten years. You’d think a builder would have a bit more imagination.
Maxwell had dozed for at least half of the staff meeting. It was the bi-annual financial report and the silly old fart who in a public school would be called a bursar, had droned on about this balance and that deficit until the Lethe had rolled over Mad Max and he’d fallen fast asleep.
Nothing else had happened. There was no line of obnoxious newshounds at Leighford’s front gate, anxious to interview the Headmaster, to harass some unprepared and unsuspecting kid into a reaction to the news that their favourite teacher had been murdered. And Legs Diamond seemed the same boring, plodding ineffective he always was. If he’d received a call from DCI Hall that one of his staff had been found dead, he was being pretty cool about it. Maxwell wasn’t. All day, the face of Alice Goode, strangled, cold, dead, swam in his vision. In the lunch queue, he thought he saw her and again crossing the quad. Like the ghostly wife of William Wallace in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, she probably glided past him a dozen times that day. But the key still dangled in her locker where she’d left it and her name had not been removed from her pigeon-hole in the staffroom. Of the thousand souls who thronged through the corridors of Leighford High, each on his way to the stars, only Mad Max knew the girl was dead. It was the loneliest feeling in the world.
A little girl answered the door marked ‘Rondo’. This was Sonya Parsons and her Mum weren’t in. Where was she? Up Tesco’s. When would she be back? Dunno. Sonya was of the generation told never to talk to strange men – and they didn’t come much stranger than Mad Max. Only her left eye peered round the door jamb, only her left hand clutched it nervously. Her big brother had gone. Her mum spent her nights crying. Only her dad didn’t seem to care.
So, up Tesco’s it was. Out of town shopping had come a long way since Stanley Cohen had trundled his barrow in the Old Kent Road of a Sunday. Maxwell parked White Surrey near the sliding doors and lashed the machine to the frame that held the trolleys, just in case. Well, a funny lot shopped in Tesco’s these days – you couldn’t be too careful. Dorothy Parsons wasn’t on any of the checkouts. Perhaps she’d been demoted? Perhaps she was packing shelves, along it seemed, with half of Leighford High. How different they looked, Maxwell observed for the umpteenth time, in their white hats on the fish counter and their polythened fingers hacking and probing through the delicious array of cheeses. Kids who last year had been flicking paper pellets and vying with each other to see who could gob furthest down the school stairwell, were now model members of corporate Britain, where the customer was always right. Only the pieces of bright blue tape on their ear lobes bore faint testimony to the fact that they wore earrings. Half the girls probably had bright blue tape on their navels too.
He fought his way past the queue of hopefuls and compulsive gamblers who waited patiently in the lottery line for the winning-ticket-that-would-change-their-lives-for-ever, and sat himself down in the cafe over a hot chocolate and Danish. From here, he could see the tills in both directions. So he sipped and supped and waited.
Dorothy Parsons came back from her tea break around six. Maxwell helped himself to a bottle of Southern Comfort and something indescribable of the Vindaloo variety and headed for the till.
‘It’s quicker down the end, sir.’ A helpful supervisor motioned the two-item customer in the direction of those with nine items or less.
‘Thank you.’ Maxwell beamed at her, but made absolutely no effort to move.
‘Do you have a Clubcard?’ Dorothy Parsons had not looked up. After all her years chained to the till, all customers looked alike.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Maxwell said, then he leaned over the plastic screen. ‘Mrs Parsons, I need to talk to you.’
It was then that she looked up. She seemed years older than Maxwell remembered her from only days ago. Her eyes flickered for a moment. ‘Mr Maxwell,’ she said.
‘Do you have any news?’
An elderly woman behind him was already unloading her tins of doggie-goo on the checkout.
‘About Ronnie,’ he urged the till operator, ‘any news?’
She shook her head. Two toddlers from the next checkout had spilt over into Maxwell’s and they decided to wrestle with each other inches from his knee-caps, shrieking and laughing.
‘No,’ he heard her say flatly over the noise. ‘No, nothing.’
“The police,’ he moved as far as he could to get out of the toddlers’ way, ‘they’ve been to see you.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yes,’ she nodded, sliding his purchases down the conveyor belt. He struggled with the carrier bag, he, who had no life skills at all when it came to separating pieces of polythene.
‘What …’ he carefully edged his way past the squabbling, hysterical children, ‘what did they say?’
She glanced at the stone-faced woman, who seemed to have amassed enough dog-food to survive the millennium. ‘That’ll be eighteen pounds thirty-four, please,’ Dorothy said.
Maxwell fumbled for his wallet. ‘What time do you get off duty?’ he asked. ‘I must talk to you.’
‘Look here’ – the dog-food woman had had enough – ‘I don’t expect to have to wait while you two arrange some clandestine liaison.’
Maxwell turned. ‘Tell me,’ he asked sweetly, surveying the old crone’s purchases, ‘do you have that on toast?’ He turned back to Dorothy Parsons, ‘What time?’
‘Nine,’ she said, ‘when the store closes. But …’
‘What?’
She gave him his change and the receipt, ‘Well, Ron, my husband … comes to pick me up.’
‘Disgusting,’ the dog-lady hissed.
‘I’ll be waiting.’ Maxwell took up his shopping. ‘Madam,’ he turned to the daffy thing at the next checkout, wrestling with her carrier bags and talking hairstyles to her till operator, ‘are these delightful children yours?’
The daffy thing frowned at him. Some old pervert wearing a bow-tie and asking about her kids? Something unnatural here, ‘Jason,’ she bawled at one, ‘Shane.’ They ignored her completely, so Maxwell batted them aside with his carrier bag.
‘Yes,’ he smiled, ‘what charming names. How did I guess that’s what they’d be called? How old are they?’
‘Jase is four and Shane’s two and a half. Why?’ The daffy thing was even more suspicious now. Well, you heard such things, didn’t you? About them paedophile rings and so on.
‘Oh good,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘by the time they’re eleven, I’ll have taken early retirement.’ He raised his hat. ‘Good afternoon.’ And he was gone.
The car park had thinned out by nine. Only one or two vehicles still waited under the twilight sky. This was as downtown as Leighford got, scruffy Victorian buildings with peeling paint and boarded-up windows. The kiddies’ playground was locked and deserted and only the odd, stray gull winged its way overhead, crying into the distant darkness far out to sea. The season had not bitten at Leighford yet. The great British public were waiting to see which way the weather jumped before they made their final holiday choice – Leighford or Lanzarote; what a facer!
‘Evening, Dee for Douglas.’ A sandy-haired man with a freckled face got out of his Mondeo.
Douglas was older, waistline widening, hair-line retreating. ‘Jonathan,’ he nodded.
‘What is it tonight?’ Jonathan asked. ‘Cynthia was getting a little inquisitive. I had to burn my programme.’
‘I’ve got it billed as
Desert Death
,’’ Douglas told him. ‘It’ll have to go some to beat last month’s.’
‘Little corker, wasn’t she?’ Jonathan smirked. ‘What an arse.’
And they made their way through the back streets to that green door marked ‘film club’.
A battered black Capri, on its way to becoming a classic car, crunched its way onto the Tesco forecourt. Maxwell had parked himself on a trolley rail for the last quarter of an hour. It was chilly now as the lights went out all over Tesco’s and night came to Leighford. He pulled his jacket round him and kept faithful watch on the staff entrance, all feeling gone from his bum.
A jolly woman with scraped-back hair came clattering out and with her was Dorothy Parsons. Maxwell hopped off his perch and swooped on his prey.
‘Mrs Parsons,’ he lifted the shapeless tweed hat.
‘Oh, Mr Maxwell … See you tomorrow, Ellen.’
‘Yeah, tara!’ Ellen, the jolly woman called, looking Maxwell up and down so that she could commit him to memory for tomorrow’s gossip in the staff canteen.
‘The police …’ Maxwell said.
Ellen lingered a little longer, taking her time to get away. The gossip would be juicier than she hoped. But the horn on the Capri was insistent and she had to go.
‘All right!’ she bellowed as the security manager rattled his locks behind her. ‘Keep your bloody hair on!’
Dorothy scanned the car park. No beige van. She’d have to wait. ‘Look, Mr Maxwell,’ she looked up at her son’s teacher, ‘I told the police I can’t help. I just don’t know nothing. Ronald and me, we’re worried sick, that’s all.’
‘The police found something,’ Maxwell said. ‘A letter. What was all that about?’
Dorothy Parsons looked away again. Where was he? When would her Ronald come? He was already ten minutes late.
‘Some letter,’ she flustered, ‘some stupid thing. I don’t know what it was. He’d written that teacher a letter. There wasn’t nothing in it, Mr Maxwell. You know Ronnie. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
Not a fly, no. But Alice Goode was dead and Dorothy Parsons didn’t know that. ‘Did you see the letter, Mrs Parsons?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Do you know what was in it?’
‘Dot.’ She jumped at the sound of her own name. Ronald Parsons stood behind her, the van keys in his hand, his dark eyes narrowed in Maxwell’s direction.
‘Oh, Ron,’ she whined, ‘where were you?’
‘I parked round the back,’ he said. ‘What’s up, Dorothy? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, Ron,’ she said quietly, taking her husband by his thickset arm. ‘I thought you’d be here early tonight.’
Ron hadn’t taken his eyes off Maxwell. ‘Mr Maxwell.’
‘Mr Parsons,’ Maxwell nodded back at him. If this was downtown Chicago, Ronald Parsons would have passed for a goodfella, with his slim moustache and his wardrobe-sized shoulders.
‘Thanks for waiting with my wife,’ Parsons said, ‘There’s some funny people about these days, isn’t there? It’s good to know she’s in safe hands.’ And he hustled Dorothy around the corner to the beige van tucked away out of sight.
‘How did you get this number?’ Jacquie Carpenter snapped angrily.
‘I keep my nose to the wheel and my flies open,’ Maxwell said. ‘What – if you’ll excuse the vernacular – the shit is going on?’
‘What do you mean?’
Maxwell sat down heavily on his bottom stair. ‘Woman Policeman Carpenter, did you or did you not tell me only yesterday that your Metropolitan colleagues had found Alice Goode’s body?’
‘That’s right,’ she confirmed.
‘And did you not say that your boss was due to speak unto my boss on that very same revelation?’
‘Well, yes, I …’
‘Well, why hasn’t he? I know Legs Diamond. He couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it. There was no such call.’
‘I know!’ she shouted.
He held the receiver away from his eardrum.
‘Look,’ she’d regained whatever composure she had left and was back on track again, ‘I can’t be held responsible. I shouldn’t have told you anything in the first place. For whatever reason, the DCI had held the story back.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘I’ve just seen the non-item on the local news. Chap called Cainer posing outside a nick I’ve never seen, saying, in effect, “Mind your own business”.’
‘They have their reasons,’ Jacquie told him.
‘Oh, great!’
‘Max!’ she bellowed. It wasn’t like Jacquie Carpenter, but she’d compromised herself. Her job was on the line and all the time she felt the train was getting closer. It frightened her. She’d never done anything like this before. Never broken rules or her word. And now, here she was, in over her head, with panic at her elbow.
It was his turn to calm down. ‘Tell me about the letter.’
There was a pause. ‘I can’t.’
‘Ronnie is in trouble,’ Max reminded the detective.
‘Exactly,’ her voice was cold, different, official. ‘In more trouble than you know. Now, Max, please, for my sake, for Ronnie’s sake, for yours, I’m asking you to stay out of this. Please don’t call this number again.’
And the line went dead.
Maxwell looked at his cat. ‘First she’s in,’ he said to the animal, ‘then she’s out. Now she’s shaking it all about. It looked suspiciously to me, Count, as if Woman Policeman Carpenter’s losing it.’
Metternich yawned ostentatiously. He could have told his master, had man-animal communications improved over the last seven million years, that that was women for you. Maxwell would have to try another tack.
Exactly how long Sylvia Matthews had loved Peter Maxwell, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t something she’d scrawled in graffiti paint across the bike sheds or carved with her Girl Guide penknife into the bark of the sweetheart tree. It was just a feeling she had, every time she saw him in the corridor, heard his voice booming through the hall, caught the wind as he rattled past her on White Surrey, pedalling north. Every time, she felt her stomach tighten and her heart loop. Then she’d mentally shake herself free of it, of him. How stupid, Sylvia, she’d say to herself; you’re old enough to know better, dammit. You’ll never see forty again. Nor come to think of it, forty-five. Now, pull yourself together and get back on that shelf, where you belong.
So when his barbed-wire hair appeared around her office door that Wednesday afternoon, a little after lunch, followed almost immediately by his smiling face, she felt it all happening all over again. As if she wanted to run home and say ‘Mummy, Mummy, he did it. He smiled at me. He talked to me.’
But Emma Dollery was having her period pains again and sat sullenly against Sylvia’s office wall, blaming the world in general and ‘that horrible Mr Ryan’ in particular. As Sylvia had pointed out to the girl, the Second Deputy may have his faults, but gynaecological irritations were not among them. Emma had just fled from a particularly bad lesson with Mr Ryan. She was unconvinced.