Authors: M. J. Trow
‘Here’s some light,’ he heard Wiseman say and the spot wavered as Hart’s concentration broke. A stage light, heavy, black and metal hurtled across the room as Maxwell launched it, followed by his own body and they both crashed into Hart. The Ruger came up, the bullet thudding through the ceiling and the two men scrabbled on the floor, both of them gripping the rifle and trying to pull the other one off. Neither of them heard Wiseman at the bottom of the stairs, but Maxwell was first to see his feet. He rolled sideways, dragging the lighter Hart with him and sending Wiseman tumbling back against the wall. Maxwell broke free of Hart’s grip and was up the stairs again, the door crashing back as Hilary St John stood there, poised and ready. But Maxwell was in full flight. A bullet behind or a fashion photographer in front and it was no contest really. What was it his old rugger master had said? ‘Get him low, Maxwell.’ So he did, driving his shoulder into the man’s groin and cracking his cranium on the corridor wall. The man just groaned and lay there, all fight and consciousness gone.
Then Maxwell was off, running left along the darkness, twisting right into the stores. He stopped, panting, trying to catch his breath, trying to get his bearings. He was next to the stage again now, facing the auditorium but on the intercom side of the wings. There was no noise of breathing from that, so LeStrange had gone. He heard by the mutterings and swearings behind him that Hart and Wiseman had disentangled themselves and were back on the scent.
Scent. That was it. Calvin Klein. It hit Maxwell’s nostrils like a wall. She was here. Somewhere. Tiff was here. He edged his way, groping through flats and furniture, catching himself a nasty one as he ducked under a bar.
‘Uncle Maxie?’ It was Tiff’s voice, suddenly, in that enormous silence, very much afraid. He reached out in the darkness and felt her hair, her face and he pulled her to him. He buried her mouth in his shoulder, feeling her whole body go limp. Not now, he willed her. Don’t fall apart on me now, Tiff. Not now. Remember you’re a Maxwell. He gingerly eased her away, trying to see her face in the darkness, feeling her cheeks wet with tears. He kissed them away and put his finger vertically against her lips. She nodded. She understood.
They crouched together in the darkness.
‘Props Store Two.’ LeStrange’s voice boomed in the stillness, back at the mike again and Maxwell felt Tiffany jump in his arms. A neon strip pinged on overhead, bleak, bright. Maxwell dragged the girl into a corner, surrounded by black curtains and nets. This time his finger was to his own lips.
‘Maxwell.’ It was Hart’s voice, not over the intercom but nearby and getting closer. ‘You may have found one niece, but I’ve got the other.’ Maxwell’s heart stopped again. ‘And that bitch Sylvia Matthews. You didn’t seriously think we’d risk our little enterprise without all the aces, did you?’
Maxwell could see in the dim light Tiffany’s eyes, wide with fear, staring up at him. What now, knight errant? Eat your heart out, Don Quixote.
‘I went down there,’ Hart was making his way steadily towards the corner, not anxious to tangle again with a lantern. Blood was trickling from his head and it felt as if it was bursting. ‘Down to Leighford, that god-awful place you call home. Now, I’m tired of this crap. You come out now and finish this. Or the little girl dies. And what’s going to happen to your little nursie friend, you don’t want to know.’
‘Lucy told you, Uncle Maxie,’ Tiffany hissed, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘She told you. Robert de Niro’s waiting He’s got her.’
Maxwell hadn’t seen it before, but now he could by ducking his head under the bar and craning uncomfortably to the left, he had a clear view of the lit stage and the wings to its left. Amy Weston and Archie Godden were still m the auditorium, flapping around like spare parts, panic rising in their hissing voices. What happened next was like a dream Anthony LeStrange was standing with his mouth near the mike. ‘Maxwell, if you want Tiffany and Lucy to live, come out now. Don’t make Hart come in and get you …’ His voice tailed away and there was suddenly a character on stage, a lean, powerfully built man with cropped hair and the combat jacket and trousers of Desert Storm.
‘Neil,’ LeStrange’s voice sounded brittle, near to breaking. ‘Hello, Neil,’ softer, coaxing, disarming.
‘What’s the matter with me?’ Hamlyn’s voice was picking up on the intercom. ‘What have you done?’
‘Now, Neil,’ LeStrange was backing slowly away from the mike, testing his options, assessing the distance. ‘Hart. Where the fuck are you?’
There was a rattle and crash backstage and the sniper doubled back from Maxwell, colliding with the flats as he went. He tumbled onto the stage as Maxwell watched, spellbound, from his hiding place. Hamlyn stood square on, his hands loose at his side, facing both men.
‘Wiseman,’ LeStrange snapped. ‘Hamlyn worked for you. Come out here and call him off, for God’s sake.’
‘It’s all going tits up!’ was Godden’s helpful contribution from the floor. ‘I warned you. I warned all of you.’
‘Shut up, Godden, you pathetic misfit,’ LeStrange snarled. ‘Fighting among ourselves is exactly what he wants.’ He dashed back to the mike. ‘Isn’t it, Maxwell?’
‘What have you done to me?’ Hamlyn’s voice was rising now and he was staring hard at LeStrange.
‘He hypnotized you,’ Godden spat with contempt. ‘Said it was easy. It would wipe your feeble little mind of everything but the idea that you’d killed Larry Warner. Well, eminence grise, it hasn’t bloody well worked, has it?’
‘Kill him!’ LeStrange growled, but he’d reckoned without Neil Hamlyn. Hart’s rifle was barely up to the level when the SAS man had snatched LeStrange and spun him round, gripping his neck in the vice of both arms. The magician’s mouth hung open and his arms flailed uselessly, his body a human shield between Hamlyn and Hart’s bullet.
‘My God,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘The head shot.’
There was a scream and a shout of ‘No!’ from who could tell how many mouths. But Maxwell heard the crack as Hamlyn broke LeStrange’s neck with a single twist and the great magician’s head hung at an improbable angle in the soldier’s arms.
‘Put the gun down! Armed police!’ It was a barked order, followed by thudding feet and pandemonium. Maxwell craned to see what seemed an army of uniforms crashing through the auditorium, enveloping Godden and Amy Weston and thundering onto the stage to grab the gun and the gunman. In a second, Hart was on the stage where he’d killed Chris Logan, face down as someone put the bracelets on him.
Maxwell hauled Tiffany upright and she threw her arms around him.
‘Lucy was right,’ she sobbed into his neck. ‘You are Nick Nolte, Uncle Max. You’ve saved us from Robert de Niro.’
Maxwell patted the matted hair, glancing back through the slit that showed him the stage. Neil Hamlyn was being gently unwrapped from the corpse of Anthony LeStrange and the handcuffs flashed silver in the light. He saw Jacquie Carpenter, centre stage, with DS Bartholomew and DCI Hall.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Me and the SAS and the Leighford Constabulary – oh, and the Seventh Cavalry.’
‘Well, are you going to ask him, Sylvia?’ Lucy was sitting next to Nurse Matthews, belted up and braced for another day at Leighford High.
She swung right along the flyover, the sea silver and silent to their left. ‘Am I going to ask who what?’
‘You know,’ Lucy said, grinning, but looking straight ahead. ‘Are you going to ask Uncle Maxie to marry you?’
‘Uncle Maxie wouldn’t like that,’ Sylvia said, looking at her own eyes in the driving mirror. ‘He belongs to the generation when the man always asked the lady.’
‘Actually …’ Lucy was particularly irritating that morning. ‘Uncle Maxie told us in History the other day that the man always asked the lady’s dad. What do you think your dad would say if Uncle Maxie asked him?’
‘My dad,’ Sylvia sighed, ‘would probably think he was being proposed to and would run a mile, muttering things about the youth of today.’
They purred around the corner to catch the central tower of Leighford High in all its morning glory. Sylvia pushed the Clio’s electric window button as she passed through the gate. ‘Janice,’ she called to a passing Year 12 smoker trying desperately to hide the fag behind her hand and not to exhale. ‘I’ll tell you later how many people those things kill every year. In the meantime, report to Mr Maxwell to give you a damn good thrashing.’
Sylvia parked, perhaps a little erratically, in the space reserved under the birches for the School Nurse.
‘No, Lucy,’ she switched off the engine and unbuckled her seat belt, ‘I won’t be asking your Uncle Maxie to marry me and he won’t be asking me to marry him.’
‘But why not?’ Even at her ripe old age, Lucy still had the power to be disappointed. It showed in every inch of her face, every droop of her shoulders.
‘Because,’ Sylvia sighed, the door half open, ‘he won’t ask me because he doesn’t love me. And I won’t ask him because …’ There was a sudden tap at the window and she spun round.
‘Excuse me.’ A rather dishy young man stood there, straddling thirty-five, with a rucksack and curly, dark hair. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. My name’s Guy Morley, supply teacher for Mrs … Grafton, is it?’
‘Yes,’ Sylvia cleared her throat and he stood back as she got out of the car. ‘Helen Grafton, yes. Maternity leave. I’m Sylvia Matthews, School Nurse.’
‘Sylvia …’ She stood there astonished as he bowed and kissed her hand. ‘Delighted to meet you. Er… your daughter?’
Lucy was leaning on the car bonnet, looking through slitted eyes at the interloper.
‘No,’ said Sylvia, perhaps a shade too quickly. ‘Niece of a friend.’
‘Ah.’
‘Er … do you have children, Guy?’
‘Me? No,’ he smiled. ‘I like them of course, but I couldn’t eat a whole one. Anyway,’ he waved his left hand in the air, ‘nobody’s caught me yet. I move too fast.’
Lucy shook her head and wandered off in disgust in search of another seven hours’ savage amusement. God, the older generation.
‘Do you?’ Sylvia gave Guy her best Eddie Izzard, the one she’d learned from Peter Maxwell ‘Do you really? Let me show you around.’
‘Response time,’ DCI Henry Hall was standing in the West Meon Incident Room at the end of another day, ‘was slow
He looked at the tired faces in front of him, the smoke strained eyes. ‘
But
,’ and he held his head up again, ‘we got a result!’ There were whoops and cheers and whistles all round, back-slapping and winks. Hall’s hands were m the air for quiet. ‘Joe Public will just have to get used to missing Anthony LeStrange. I doubt any of the others will be missed.’
‘Sir?’ It was Jacquie Carpenter on her feet. ‘What about Neil Hamlyn?’
All eyes turned to Henry Hall. Where they always were. He was the boss, the guv’nor. He called the shots, whistled the tune, whatever analogy you chose. The main man. ‘Hospital,’ Hall said. ‘Apparently, it’s all going to take a little time.’
The room had fallen silent. ‘People,’ Hall broke it, ‘a good job, all of you. But there’s one person I want to single out because without her, we’d still all be working tonight.’
‘I thought we were,’ somebody shouted, to guffaws and chuckles.
‘Jacquie,’ Hall said. ‘You followed your man, you made the right moves.’
‘I lost him at the theatre,’ she shook her head. ‘Couldn’t see at first how he’d got in.’
‘We all missed that,’ Hall told her. ‘Looks as though he was SAS all along. Let’s close this place down.’
And the back-slapping and the partying began.
Henry Hall crossed to Jacquie Carpenter and pulled a video tape from his jacket pocket. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how this ended up in Bob Hart’s flat. You do know what it is?’
She felt her throat iron hard, her blood pounding in her ears. ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘It’s Neil Hamlyn’s interview with Dr Bartlett. I …’
And his raised hand stopped her. ‘Bin it, will you, Jacquie? I can’t see any evidential value in it. After all, we’ve got the original.’ And he laid it into her hand.
‘Well,’ Frank Bartholomew was at her elbow as the guv’nor got lost in the melee, ‘who’s the blue-eyed girl, then?’
She gazed after Hall for a moment, her eyes wet. Then she turned to the man. ‘I am, Sergeant Bartholomew,’ she said, ‘I am.’ And she turned on her heel and marched away.
‘I am just so relieved,’ Maxwell stood in his Sixth Form office, smiling down at Tiffany standing under the limes by the bike sheds, holding hands with Mark Irwin and staring into his eyes.
Jacquie crossed to him, nodding. ‘She’ll be okay,’ she said softly. ‘They’re very resilient, you know.’
‘I know,’ he sighed, turning to her. ‘They’re Maxwells, you see, deep down. No, it’s Lucy and Sylvia I meant. That bastard Hart trying to con me he’d snatched them too.’
‘He was there,’ Jacquie said, ‘Sylvia told us. Perhaps he thought better of it. More complications, more baggage. I want to thank you, Peter Maxwell.’
‘Me?’ he blinked. ‘Why?’
‘Because you put your life on the line to get the White Knights. That’s a pretty rare thing to do.’
‘Well,’ he shuffled awkwardly, kicking the furniture and lapsing into hill-billy, ‘Aw, shucks, Ms Carpenter, it ain’t nothin’ that any good ol’ boy wouldn’t do.’ He was Maxwell again. ‘Or did I put too many negatives in there? And Henry Hall did ask me nicely, with reference to brick walls and so on.’
‘Will you do something else for me?’ she asked.
‘Name it, dear heart,’ he said.
‘Will you take me to the pictures tonight? If you can get a sitter for the girls, that is?’
‘Sitter?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘What do they need a sitter for? What’s on?’
‘
Shakespeare in Love
,’ she smiled.
‘Rattling good yarn,’ he smiled back. ‘I’ll ask Sylv …’ and his voice trailed away. Crossing the car park below his window as the summer sun began to lend that magic glow to the world of Leighford High, strolled one person he knew very well and the other he’d nodded to in the corridor early in the day. One was a good-looking, curly headed supply teacher. The other was the School Nurse. They were chatting and laughing, lost in each other’s company.
‘There again,’ said Maxwell, ‘perhaps I won’t. He held out his arm, bent at the elbow. ‘What the Hell?’ he said ‘
Shakespeare in Love
it is. But … the treat’s mine.’