Maxwell's Return (7 page)

‘Where does Bernard fit in, though?’

‘His lack of alibi is still there, like the elephant in the room.’

Pinned down as he was, Maxwell couldn’t react to the pachyderm remark. Usually, he would fling cushions hither and yon, looking for the
pesky creature and priming his invisible twelve-bore. He settled for flicking her on the top of her head.

‘Ow. I know, no elephant. But you get the general drift. If what he told Sylv is true, why won’t he tell us where he went? He just says it’s private.’

‘Well, sometimes it just
is
.’

‘I agree,’ she said. ‘But when you are a suspect in a murder case, two murder cases, pretty much, you would think that he would tell us. It wouldn’t go any further. It’s not as if we would let the world know where he had gone.’

‘He might worry you would tell me.’

‘I wasn’t here when he was pulled in. For all he knew, we wouldn’t be back for months.’

‘True.’ Maxwell took another sip of his drink. ‘I have known Bernard Ryan for more years than I care to remember, but in fact, you know, I don’t know him at all. I don’t even know where he lives.’

‘Across the Dam.’

‘Swish. Married?’ He answered himself. ‘No, I know that one. He’s single.’

‘Correct.’

‘Parents? Siblings? Cat? Dog? Significant other? Nothing. He’s just a pain in the arse who works at Leighford High School. That’s it.’

‘He teaches Business Studies.’

‘Allegedly. I have never known a man more adept at avoiding actually having anything to do with kids.’

‘And yet,’ she pointed out, ‘he did tutoring.’

‘Yes,’ he said, tapping his glass on his teeth. ‘Why did he do that?’

Jacquie bridled and put her hand down to restrain the cat. ‘Don’t do that, Max. Metternich doesn’t like the noise. And I don’t like the claws.’

‘Sorry, both. Did you check Bernard’s bank records?’

‘This is sounding very much like you finding things out that you shouldn’t know,’ she remarked smoothly.

‘I could always ask Bernard,’ he said.

‘You don’t even know where he lives,’ she said.

‘Thingie would tell me. Up at the school.
She
knows everything.’ He sounded terribly like Violet Elizabeth Bott.

‘Possibly. Yes, we did check his bank statements. He is very well off, thank you very much. Why aren’t you a deputy head? I could become a lady of leisure.’

‘I can see you doing that,’ he laughed, pulling the errant lock of hair gently. ‘So, he gets a big salary. That doesn’t mean he is comfortably off.’

‘It does, actually,’ she said. ‘He goes on holiday once a year, although to fairly fancy places. Usually at Christmas, somewhere hot. He has the occasional weekend away, again somewhere quite swish, but he can easily afford it. Plus the money he gets from tutoring. He puts it all in the bank, with a note to identify it. All above board.’

‘On
Law and Order
they have credit card slips.’

‘Come up to date, you old dinosaur,’ she said, reaching down and patting his leg, the most she dared do with Metternich poised on her chest. ‘It’s all done with swiping and heaven knows what. And it does look as if Bernard uses cash quite a lot, for shopping and whathaveyou.’

‘Something to hide!’ Maxwell said, triumphantly.

‘Prefers cash,’ she returned. ‘People still do.
You
for example.’

‘Does he have an alibi for the second girl?’

‘Who knows? We’re not sure when it would need to be for. And anyway, Max, can you really see Bernard as a serial killer? As a predator of young girls?’

Maxwell pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling, whistling silently. Bernard Ryan had been a thorn in his side for years, handing out risk assessments, creating paperwork and forms to be filled in in triplicate for the slightest reason. Legs Diamond he could work with; even Dierdre Lessing, God rest her evil soul, had had her good points, but Bernard Ryan was not a nice man. He always saw the worst in people and Maxwell was a great believer in the theory that people who only saw the bad only had bad within themselves. But, a serial killer and predator of young girls…?

‘No. No, I can’t.’

‘Precisely. Neither can I. But he’ll have to come up with an alibi for the first murder if he is ever to get back to school. Or wait until we find
the real killer, of course, which could be never.’ She lay there for another moment or two and then asked, ‘Max? Can you do me a favour?’

‘Anything, dear one. What can I do to help, oh fount of my being?’

‘Can you move the cat? Quickly. I need to sneeze and he’ll have the skin off my chest if I take him by surprise like that.’

Maxwell moved with stealth but precision and whipped the huge animal up in the air in the nick of time. Jacquie’s sneeze could have woken the dead and Metternich reacted as she knew he must, but it was Maxwell’s forearm that took the brunt. She was still applying tea tree ointment to the scratches when the phone rang.

Jacquie got there first. ‘Hello? Oh, Jason. Hello.’ She raised an eyebrow at Maxwell who swirled his drink and tried to look as if he wasn’t there.

‘You have? Do you need me? Thanks. I appreciate that. I’ll see you tomorrow. ’Bye.’

She put the phone down and stood there, screwing the top on the tea tree ointment slowly.

‘That was Jason.’

‘The Argonaut?’

‘No.’

‘The new sergeant.’

‘Yes. Well, not that new. New to me.’

‘And?’

‘They’ve not managed to isolate any DNA from the second girl yet, but they have a blood group. Apparently, our man was conveniently a secretor.’

‘Now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in quite a while,’ Maxwell remarked.

‘No. I would imagine Angus had to get his text books out for this one. They are still trying to use various methods to get a useable amount of material, but for now we just have a blood group. And as it is quite unusual, they are going to pick up a suspect now.’

Maxwell didn’t ask, he told. ‘Bernard Ryan.’

Jacquie nodded. ‘Bernard Ryan. He’ll be on his way back to the Nick by now.’ She looked at him. ‘I’m sorry, Max. This means no more cosy little chats about murder.’

‘Darn. Whatever can we do instead?’ He spoke lightly, but she could hear the tension in his voice. He was asking himself if he could possibly have been so wrong about the man. If someone he had seen for at the very least two hundred days of every year, for years and years… if that someone could really be a person who stalked little girls, groomed them, had sex with them and then threw their strangled bodies onto a beach? If he was so wrong about this man, what else was he wrong about?

‘Max…’

‘It’s no good, Jacquie. I hate to say it, because the man
is
a shit, but he didn’t do it.’

She didn’t answer.

‘He just didn’t. That’s it and all about it.’

Thursday, Thursday. Hate that day. Peter Maxwell had just come back from the land of Mama Cass and it was as though he had never been away. He had taken his trusty bicycle, the steed he called White Surrey, out of mothballs, scraped off the surface rust and oiled the chain and brakes. Then it was ‘Look out, Bradley Wiggins!’ Mad Max was on the road. He hadn’t been back to his office yet – he knew as soon as he went in there and smelled that heady mixture of stale biscuits, paper and the massed effluvium of Mrs B’s hoover bag, the last seven months would just disappear. So instead, he had headed straight to the Hall, to see how the results were being received by His Own. Heads of Sixth Form, he knew, were supposed to look across the board, at
all
the subject results of Year 13, looking for balance, width, improvement, differentials. Bollocks to that; he went straight to the History list.

He was still chuckling to himself as he swept into the Hall through a throng of milling hopefuls, all in jeans and scruffy t-shirts, much the same as they had worn for the last two years, really. He took in the room with its squeaky floors and long, faded curtains. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. The same spider that had been building its web last
Christmas still sat there in the far corner at the centre of the biggest Arachno Condo Maxwell had ever seen, a small piece of tinsel caught at the edge, the spider version of archaeological evidence. Then he smiled again because nowhere did he see a sign that read This Is A Drug Free School. He felt good about that.

‘McSween, you old shit!’ The Head of Sixth Form was selective with his expletives. Tom McSween was eighteen going on forty. Apart from the hair, which was Justin Bieber meets Cher, he could have been at school with Maxwell himself in the great days of yore. ‘Well done. Brasenose?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the boy beamed, feeling a surge of pride as his Head of Sixth Form gripped his hand.

‘Bad luck,’ Maxwell commiserated. ‘If you ever see sense and want to go to a real university, I still have a few friends at Jesus.
Cambridge
, that is,’ and he winked. ‘Geoffrey, you dark horse. B, eh? Well done, well done.’

‘It’s all thanks to you, Mr Maxwell,’ Geoffrey grinned goofily.

‘Flatterer,’ Maxwell laughed. ‘But I think Mr Moss and Mr Gold had something of a hand in your success, didn’t they?’

‘Ah, it was the groundwork, sir,’ the happy lad assured him, ‘in Year 12. Before you went to…’

‘Abroad, lad,’ Maxwell finished the sentence for him. ‘It’s a bloody place, believe me.’

Then he was glad-handing with all of them and commiserating with the few. Time was that he would have been there as they collected the dreaded brown envelopes, watched for the falling of crests and the crises of confidence. He would have put his arm round the distressed, taken them down the pub and put their worlds to rights. Not any more. Over half of them had their results already, the day before, online. Only the successes came in to get results these days. To jog a lap of honour, to laugh and cry with happiness… and to take a last look at the school they had called home for seven years and would never see again until their own children went there. And anyway, putting an arm around a student these days was equivalent to signing up to Gary Glitter’s gang or enrolling in Yewtree. What a sad indictment of the times.

And, talking of sad indictments, where was that excuse for a headmaster, Legs Diamond? If anyone knew anything about Bernard Ryan, surely he would.

James Diamond was having the worst summer of his life. He was one of nature’s worriers anyway, but he usually had Bernard Ryan on hand to take the flak. He had always thought that Bernard Ryan didn’t have an emotion in his body but he had seen the man crumble, albeit briefly, when the police had taken him away. The fear in his eyes only flashed there for
a second, but it had been enough to make the smoke that Diamond knew was never there without fire. And now…

The tap on his door made him sit up straight, every hair on his neck tingling. Although he didn’t know it, he was briefly at one with the rodentia of Columbine. No one,
no one
tapped at a door quite like that. He thought he wouldn’t be back for weeks. And yet, here he was, outside his door. The headteacher cleared his throat. He had learned that when you were dealing with Peter Maxwell, you had to be careful to show no weakness. The man could smell fear.

‘Come!’

Outside the door, Maxwell mouthed ‘in’. How much breath did you save in an average life by not saying that tiny word? He would have to ask the Maths Department. He pushed open the door and went into Diamond’s office. There was no reason for the room to have changed, but somehow there was a subtle difference. Legs looked less assured, the desk was certainly fuller and there was an air of desolation, of loss that Maxwell thought he understood.

‘Did you miss me, headmaster?’ he asked, flinging himself into a chair.

Diamond pinned a smile on his face as best he could. ‘Of course, Max. Welcome back. We… we weren’t expecting you just yet. We thought you might be enjoying the Californian sun for a while longer.’

‘Over-rated,’ Maxwell said shortly. ‘And you seem to be having sun
here, anyway. Without the smog and the wind.’

Diamond was not a geographer, but that didn’t sound right to him. ‘You can’t have both, can you?’ he asked.

‘You’d think not,’ Maxwell remarked then, leaning forward, ‘What are you doing about Bernard?’

For a horrible moment that turned his bowels to water, Diamond thought that Maxwell was offering to be his Deputy and swallowed hard. When he didn’t answer, Maxwell filled the silence with words that brought relief.

‘I don’t mean as a deputy head. I imagine you’ve already got something sorted on that score. Mmmm,’ he looked at the ceiling briefly, thinking. ‘It’s Jane Taylor, I would imagine. IT.’ He looked at the headteacher and smiled. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ Diamond said. ‘But… I only rang her yesterday. I told her not to tell anyone.’

‘She didn’t. I worked it out. She is the obvious choice, especially since she has been doing the timetabling for years.’

Diamond’s eyebrows shot up.

Maxwell held up a calming hand. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not common knowledge by any means. But she is a nice woman and no one hates her.’ He almost added the ‘yet’ but managed to restrain himself. ‘Good choice.’

‘Well, thank you.’ Diamond settled his ruffled feathers. ‘It’s just a temporary measure, of course. Until Bernard…’ he narrowed his eyes at
Maxwell. ‘How much do you know about Bernard and his troubles, by the way?’

The answer obviously was a lot more than you, headmaster, but again, the Head of Sixth Form forebore to say what was in his mind. ‘Not much, headmaster. I was away when it all began.’

‘Your wife…?’ Legs knew how many beans made five. But only approximately.

Maxwell shrugged, an elaborate gesture that took in his entire body, from his barbed-wire hair to the cycle-clip indents at the bottom of his trouser-leg. ‘She was away as well, if you remember.’

Diamond was not convinced, but the need to share was overwhelming and although Maxwell was the reason for almost every one of his grey hairs, for at least fifty percent of his ulcer and all of his nervous tics, he had experience in this kind of thing. Too much experience, in Diamond’s opinion, but needs must when the devil drives.