Authors: M. J. Trow
There probably wasn’t a day when Sylvia Matthews was truly alone. An endless stream of malingerers drifted down her corridor – and left again just as smartly. But she was Auntie to them all, the waifs and strays, the abused, Those Who Cannot Cope. She had sticking plaster and crepe bandages for the luckless in the gym or the just plain cack. She had advice to the lovelorn – especially to them – and cups of tea or coffee and morning after pills. Monday was a madhouse after a weekend of frayed tempers, late night bar extensions and unbridled passion in the shelters along the Front.
She’d just chalked up her bi-annual sighting of James Diamond on her school calendar – the man was obviously lost – when a face she knew appeared around the door.
‘Sylv, are we alone?’
She looked at Maxwell and raised her eyebrows, then tapped on a side door and hauled out a particularly repellent member of Year 10.
‘Come on, Mandy. See me at the end of the day if you have to Maths now, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t do it,’ Mandy was a prey to her sinuses, a lump of a girl blessed by nature with acoustic catarrh.
‘Neither can I,’ Maxwell smiled at her, ‘and total ineptitude with figures has got me where I am today – like the Flying Dutchman, doomed to wander the corridors of Leighford High for ever.’
Mandy looked at him. What was the mad old git going on about now?
‘So,’ Maxwell registered the look of utter bewilderment on the girl’s face, ‘if you don’t do well in Maths, then you’ll be here for ever. And you won’t do well in Maths unless you get to the odd lesson now and again. By the way,’ he stopped her in the doorway, ‘has Mrs Wilkins seen you about that nose jewellery yet?’
‘Yeah, she …’
But Maxwell couldn’t wait for an answer. The girl could malinger for England. ‘Later, Mandy,’ he said and closed Sylvia’s door.
‘I was worried, Max,’ the School Nurse said. ‘I waited for you to ring back. What’s all the mystery?’
Maxwell threw himself down on the plastic couch, and rested his head on his hands. ‘Well, when I was six I used to wear my sister’s dresses …’
‘Max!’ she growled, knocking his legs so that he swung back into a sitting position.
‘Sorry, Sylv,’ he said. ‘I was burgled last night.’
‘What? What did they take?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ Now Sylvia Matthews had been around kids all her life too. She knew porkies when she heard them – even from a consummate porker like Mad Max.
‘All right, an item I was looking after. For somebody else.’
She pulled a face. ‘You can be a cryptic bastard, Peter Maxwell.’ She shook her head.
‘Thank you, Matron,’ he said, bowing. ‘You’re most kind. The point is, Sylv, the game’s changed.’
‘What game?’ Life was one long game to Peter Maxwell.
‘The Larry Warner game,’ he murmured. ‘Do not collect £200, go to jail if you did it. Or, if I’m not mixing my metaphors, Corporal Mustard with the high-powered rifle in the park.’
‘You’ve lost me, Max.’ Sylvia’s phone was ringing.
‘If somebody can get into my house like you and I get into a paper bag, then the girls aren’t safe, Sylv. Can they stay with you?’
‘Nurse.’ She’d already picked up the phone. ‘Yes. Yes. All right. Give me a second.’ She looked at the man she loved, sitting on her plastic couch, swinging his legs a little off the floor. ‘Dan Roberts’s ankle has gone again. I told him to keep it strapped up. You’re not really worried, are you, Max? About the girls, I mean.’
‘What was that god-awful Anthony Newley song in the seventies? Or was it Val Doonican?’
‘Before my time,’ she said, unfolding the school wheelchair from her walk-in cupboard.
‘“When you’re the father of boys you worry”,’ Maxwell was quoting, ‘“But when you’re the father of girls, you do more than that, you pray.” Just now,’ he looked at her with those huge brown eyes, ‘I’m the father of girls.’
What will you tell them?’ she asked as he held the door open for her. ‘Why I’m having them, I mean.’
‘That your lasagne is to die for,’ he said. And the phrase left an oddly nasty taste in his mouth.
He waited as long as he could. All through break while young Paul Moss, the Head of History, was waxing eloquent over Saving Private Ryan, all through Lesson Three when Year 12 were delivering their halting, woeful seminar papers on the Enlightenment, all through Lesson Four when Maxwell was balancing on his chair, itself perched on his desk, charging with Seven A One as he and Prince Rupert’s Bravoes of Alsatia drove Henry Ireton’s Horse from the field. Then, when Ten Bee Two were silent, trying to make head or tail of Elizabeth’s religious settlement as part of their In-Depth Study, he snuck out of H4 and slipped next door where the History Department kept Mr Bell’s extraordinary invention.
‘Jacquie?’ he whirled away from the window where he’d just spotted that idle oaf Bennington sloping off early again, nipping past the Biology labs where he thought he couldn’t be seen and out behind the oaks that fronted the staff car park. That would mean public castration for young Bennington in tomorrow’s assembly – Maxwell’s standard punishment for a second offence.
‘Who’s this?’ Jacquie Carpenter didn’t really want the answer. She was up to her ears in depositions and she’d had no lunch.
‘Me,’ he said, ‘Maxwell.’
‘Yes,’ her voice was just as frosty now she knew. That was because she was staring across the West Meon Incident Room at Frank Bartholomew. Then his phone rang and she could turn her back. ‘Max, you mustn’t ring me here.’
‘I know.’ He was as sotto voce as she was, although only several past papers and a couple of hundred exercise books could have eavesdropped on him. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got no choice. You didn’t call at my place, did you? Get the video back?’
‘What?’
‘I thought not. Well, it’s gone.’
‘Jesus,’ he heard her hiss, then louder. ‘Are you reporting this, sir? I could send someone along.’
‘Other than a busted lock, there’s no damage. Nothing else has gone.’
‘Where did you leave it?’ She was whispering again, cupping the receiver with her hand. People seemed to be around her, here, there, everywhere, chattering, joking, putting the final screws in the coffin of the man who said he had killed Larry Warner.
‘Out,’ Maxwell said. ‘On the coffee table.’
‘In clear view?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, if you aren’t prepared to make a formal complaint, sir, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.’ And the line went dead.
Maxwell sighed. The brush-off, the cold shoulder. Jacquie knew the call would be logged – where it came from and when, who took it. That was a bridge she’d cross if she had to. Shit! She was chewing her finger nails again. Who knew? She looked at her oppos, blokes in shirt sleeves and hanging ties, girls in starched white shirts and unflattering flat shoes. Had any one of them noticed her slip into the video room at the nick? Seen her lift the interview tape out of the machine and back again two hours later? She didn’t know them all. Men and women who were routinely drafted in from elsewhere at the start of a murder inquiry. It would only take one to be ultra-observant, nosy, up for promotion. And then it would be the Complaints Authority and investigation by another force. Suspension – with full pay of course. And the sniggering behind her back and the lack of trust. She slammed shut the open file and marched off to the loo. Just for a bit of peace. A bit of space.
Maxwell hit H4 like a Scud missile. ‘If I have to leave the room for any reason,’ he bellowed till the windows rattled, ‘I do not expect to hear any noise at all when I come back. You people shouldn’t even know I’ve gone. In there,’ he tapped the cranium of the nearest hapless child, ‘it should be 1559.’ He sat down heavily at his desk. ‘And I’m here to see that it is.’
Silence, along with Elizabeth I, reigned.
He saw them in his office as the battle-smoke of the day cleared and eleven hundred school-weary kids began the long trudge home. It was like the children of Israel on the march, going to the promised land of microwaved dinners and
Home and Away
. A few of them, those Year 11 students who had no intention of coming in to sit an exam, no one would ever see again. They’d slope off, smoking, swearing, ‘forgetting’ to return books and costing the school a fortune in wasted exam entry fees. Come the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, they’d start breeding another generation who would behave in exactly the same way sixteen years from now. Heigh-ho.
They didn’t mind, Tiffany and Lucy. In fact, they were secretly very pleased. Sylvia Matthews was a laugh. And a good cook. And Tiffany of course had her own agenda, anyway. That agenda had swept past her in the corridor and had brought his sandwiches to eat alongside her in the dining hall; Mark Irwin, God’s gift to women, a light in Tiffany’s darkness.
‘See you tomorrow, darlings.’ And Maxwell cuddled them both before Mrs B. swept in, all fag ash and industrial strength stair cleaner.
‘I just seen that Whatsisface Bennington down the town.’ When it came to reporting skiving children, Mrs B. could shop till she dropped.
‘Yes, he’s on my list for tomorrow,’ Maxwell told her, holding an exercise book at eye level and closing one eye to see if Susan Darby was purloining the History Department’s stationery yet again by teasing pages from the middle to use to pass notes to her mates as to who said what to who and why.
‘Ooh, before I forget,’ she rummaged in the pocket of her County contract cleaners’ overall, ‘there’s a message for you.’ And she handed him a memo, plugged in her vacuum cleaner in his office and disappeared.
Maxwell reached for his phone. ‘Thingee?’ It was the closest he could get to the name of the girl who manned the switchboard. ‘There was a message for me, from Chris Logan. Timed at 2.38.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, why didn’t you call me?’
‘You were teaching, Mr Maxwell,’ Thingee explained. ‘I didn’t like to interrupt.’
‘Thingee,’ Maxwell leaned back in his chair, as though explaining matters to a piece of chalk, ‘I’ve told you – teaching is something I do in my spare time. I never let it interfere with my social life. What did Chris want?’
‘He said you’d never believe it. That he was right and he’d be round tonight. About seven.’
‘That was it?’
‘Yes. I wrote it down.’
‘Good girl,’ Maxwell blew her a kiss over the phone. ‘Getting better all the time.’
But Chris Logan didn’t call at seven. He didn’t call at all. Maxwell hadn’t got his home number, but there was only one ‘C. Logan’ in the Leighford book and someone with Maxwell’s research skills took such things in his stride. It was an answerphone, cleverly impersonating the reporter’s voice.
‘You’ve reached Chris Logan. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back.’
‘Get back, Logo,’ Maxwell found himself muttering, in a vague memory of a Beatles’ number, but he hung up as the thing bleeped at him and he reached for his cycle clips.
‘Mountains, Count,’ he swept past the dozing cat, ‘and Mohammed. I’ll explain that to you sometime. Stay well.’
He pedalled out past the flyover and skirted the Dam, that rolling open parkland where lovers wandered in the sun’s embers and the professional vandals of Year 8 planned their night’s escapades which always seemed to involve setting fire to yards of loo roll and writing ‘Mr Ryan is a Wanker’ somewhere prominent in permanent ink. White Surrey flashed pure silver as he crested Lantern Hill and joined, briefly, the steady traffic flow of the B2132 before swinging east towards Oakdene and the sea. Number 56 looked just like all the other houses in the street, opulent semis of a bygone age, when middle-class families could afford a live-in maid who may or may not have been given one by the master of the house. So 56 had a basement and an attic, but like so many of them, 56 was subdivided now into flats. All that remained of its former glory was the old brass bell-pull and the rusted housings of the long-gone shutters.
Chris Logan’s name was printed above the ground floor bell, but there were no lights blazing, so near, as it was, to dark. Maxwell rang and waited. Nothing. He took the little concrete path past the side of the house, edging his way round the dustbins and a pile of building debris. There was another door here, leading to a porch and a second bell. He tried that too and there was no reply.
Most men would have got the message about then, cut their losses and gone to the pub. But he was not most men. He was Mad Max and there was something about Chris Logan and his messages that didn’t feel right. He leaned on the porch door and it opened, creaking against his weight. There was a pair of green wellies standing sentinel by the back door proper and a folded umbrella. Maxwell glanced back down the long narrow strip of garden where a rotary washing line twirled slowly in the rising breeze, trailing a solitary white T-shirt. From somewhere a dog barked in the distance and a car pulled away – the sounds of suburbia on a summer’s night.
Then his skin crawled and he felt suddenly cold. He reached to his right and his fingers curled around the umbrella. Not exactly a three-bar hilt, 1821 pattern cavalry sword, officers, for the use of, but it might give him a two and a half foot advantage in a crisis. The crisis yawned before him in the shape of an open door. The tell-tale marks on the frame said it all. He knew because his door looked the same. Someone had broken into Chris Logan’s flat exactly as they had broken into his. He pushed the door open with the umbrella tip and let his eyes get accustomed to the dark. A passageway stretched ahead of him, with rooms off and open doors. The locked front door faced him, its fanlight letting in the amber glow from the street. From a side door came a faint glow, like the sort Mulder and Scully were constantly running into in their search for the truth, which was out there.
That was the room he took first. It was a study of sorts, with a desk and a computer, leads and wires like spaghetti over the carpet. The glow came from a fish tank in the corner, whose electrically-bright denizens of the deep darted here and there in their own watery world. Logan’s answerphone was switched on and flashing red alongside the computer. Maxwell could just make out the buttons and played the tape.