Maxwell’s House (9 page)

‘What then?’ Maxwell didn’t really have to cut in. Marianne Hyde was there now, reliving it like some ghastly action replay on the telly.

‘Clive went round there. I stayed by the phone. I rang my sister in Orpington. A cousin in Wakefield. Friends. Anyone I could think of. Jenny had been gone for forty-eight hours and I hadn’t got a clue where she was. When Clive came back, we called the police.’

‘Helpful?’

‘They were very quick. I was surprised by that. A plainclothes officer and a WPC. She was pretty, I think. We never saw her after that first night. Do you know, it’s funny,’ but neither of them laughed, ‘I’d never talked to a detective before. He was calm, solemn even. He asked if we’d had a row. If we had a recent photo. I hadn’t got one that recent, but they said they’d take it all the same. It might help. Might jog someone’s memory. The WPC made us all a cup of tea. I couldn’t have found the kitchen that night, never mind the kettle. The detective asked if Jennifer had been in trouble. Clive got … difficult then and asked him what he meant. It was all so silly. We were all on the same side, after all, weren’t we?’

Maxwell nodded.

‘“Boys,” the detective said. “Drugs.” I thought Clive was going to go through the roof.’

‘Boys,’ Maxwell repeated, assuming the policeman’s role.

‘There’s Tim,’ Marianne told him. ‘Tim Grey.’

‘I couldn’t think of a nicer boy,’ Maxwell assured her.

‘I don’t think that’s what the detective meant.’ Marianne looked up at him, her chin between her knees. ‘He meant sex. Was Jennifer mixed up in sex?’

‘And drugs?’

For a moment it looked as though Marianne Hyde almost smiled, but it must have been a trick of the leaden September light. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not our Jennifer. She was a good girl, Mr Maxwell. Sensible. We’d always discussed things. She knew how dangerous drugs were. Clive has a thing about them.’

‘What else did the police ask?’

‘They insisted on seeing this room.’ She looked around, at the ceiling, the walls, trying to imagine the impact they would have on strangers seeing them for the first time. ‘They stood near the door while I went through her things. It was then I realized that her money had gone.’

‘Money?’

‘She had … well, here it is, a piggy bank.’ She passed him one of those porcelain pigs that the Nat West had been promoting a few years back. It had a porcelain nappy on, held in place by a porcelain pin. ‘We gave her an allowance, Mr Maxwell, once she turned sixteen.’

‘Do you know how much money she had?’

‘In her actual bank account, a little under a hundred pounds. The police told me the next day that she’d drawn almost all of it out. Just left in the nominal pound to keep it open. In the room here, she had … I don’t know, perhaps ten. I kept asking the police what had happened. I expected answers. They must have done this before, I remember thinking. Talked to parents in similar situations. They must have some answers. But they didn’t. They just said it was a good sign. It was a good sign that she’d taken clothes and money because that meant she’d just run away.’

‘They couldn’t tell you why?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘They had all kinds of statistics. I couldn’t take them in. Couldn’t think. Neither of us slept that first night. Nor the second. The WPC had told us not to worry. That’s like saying, “Don’t breathe.” We just sat, each side of the phone. Clive’s not a very responsive person, but we held hands, all night. Both nights. Like kids on our first date. Another WPC came back the second morning. They’d tried various avenues, apparently, various contacts. This woman was harder than the first, not as caring. Well, I thought so, at least. She said that legally Jennifer could leave home whenever she liked; she didn’t have to ask our permission to go nor to tell us where she’d gone. She kept patting my hand saying, “She’ll be back. She’ll be back. It’ll be some boy. You’ll see. Girls of today …” She was only a slip of a thing herself. How can they become so ingrained?’ She frowned at him, perhaps even hoping for an answer. She didn’t get one.

‘I suppose they see so much of it.’

She shrugged. Marianne Hyde was an intelligent woman. She’d worked that out for herself. ‘Then came the sighting.’

‘Sighting?’

‘Three, in fact. All at once. Or that’s how it seemed. A car towards Hincham way spotted a girl who could have been Jennifer. It wasn’t. An elderly couple gave a lift to a hitchhiker answering her description on the A27. And someone saw her talking to a boy on the Dam.’

‘That was on
Crimewatch
.’

‘Was it?’ Marianne nodded. ‘I don’t know. We couldn’t watch it. After they … after they found her, we just … well, I don’t know. It’s all rather a blur. I don’t really remember. I remember walking up to the Cross, where she used to get off the bus. I did that every day until the Friday. On the Friday night, they told us she was dead.’ Her eyes were clear now, her face cold, blank. ‘The WPC was there again, the second one. But it was a different detective. A Chief Inspector Hall. I hit him.’

‘You hit him.’

Marianne nodded. ‘Dreadful, wasn’t it?’ Maxwell watched a single tear roll down the woman’s left cheek. ‘It was a stupid, pointless, cruel thing to do. A release of tension, Clive called it. As soon as Hall had broken the news, I just slapped his face. Snapped, I suppose. He just stood there, rearranging his glasses. I think Clive and the WPC put me to bed. It certainly wasn’t until the next day that we went to identify her.’

‘Jesus!’

Maxwell spun round at the sudden interruption. In the doorway stood Clive Hyde, an open anorak dripping on to the landing carpet.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’ he bellowed.

‘Clive …’ Marianne let the scarf go for the first time, but only with one hand.

‘I’m talking to him.’ The dead girl’s father had filled the door with his bulk.

‘Mr Hyde.’ Maxwell was half a head shorter than Clive Hyde and ten years older.

‘Don’t say anything,’ Hyde snapped, his jaw flexing. ‘Just get the hell out of my house.’

‘I was just …’

‘You were just going,’ Hyde finished the sentence for him. As Maxwell brushed past, he felt his lapels being ripped forward and Hyde was snarling in his face, crimson, furious. ‘You leave us alone, you degenerate old bastard. Do you hear? Leave us alone!’ and he bounced Maxwell off the door frame.

For a second, Peter Maxwell looked at Marianne Hyde. She was still sitting on her daughter’s bed, still holding her ankles and with one hand on the scarf. And she looked at the two angry men in front of her as though she were watching wrestling on the box. It was all a show, theatrical and far away.

And both men were angry, not with each other, but with the same thing. Their little girl was dead and neither of them knew why. Maxwell shook himself free of the distraught father and stumbled for the door, remembering to fish out his coat, hat and scarf as he went.

He lay in the bath that night, mulling over the day. In the steam Dan Guthrie squatted on the squally beach, the seaweed thick and brown after the storm. His mouth hung open with his gappy gape, his good eye burning into Maxwell’s soul. And Marianne Hyde, her face a ghastly white, sat rocking on the shingle, Jenny’s scarf pulled tight around her own throat. And through the swirling blur, Clive Hyde, big, roaring, loomed over them all, his hands huge and his fingers curled as though around a young girl’s neck. He shuddered and spent the next few minutes trying to find the soap, somewhere under the suds.

Then a thought occurred to the Head of Sixth Form, ‘Metternich?’ he shouted through to the lounge. The cat snored on, unperturbed. ‘What did Clive Hyde mean when he called me a degenerate old bastard?’

9

People forget. Even about murder, people forget. Or life has to go on, whichever cliché you prefer. So it was that Monday morning at Leighford High. There was the usual queue of malingerers outside Sylvia Matthews’ door, wanting everything from tea and sympathy to morning after pills. The usual log jam in the corridors as friends met up to spread the gossip of the weekend. The usual gridlock when the bell went as the flow from Modern Languages hit the contraflow from the Science block. The hapless members of staff who had mistimed their own movements now found themselves, an island of calm in a sea of trouble, slowing kids down, tapping shoulders, pointing fingers. Jim Diamond had the usual urgent business in his office which meant that his door was firmly shut against all the hullabaloo. And so the day began as the days usually did.

Peter Maxwell had to see Geoffrey Smith. Metternich the cat was a good listener, but short on repartee and singularly mum when it came to advice. In the oddly lonely world of Mad Max, he needed a human being to bounce his ideas off; not that he’d ever, in public, end a sentence with a preposition.

‘I can’t hear a word,’ Smith was roaring, the sun slanting in through the Drama studio windows and glancing on his bald head. ‘Give it some wellie, Morrison. You have the misfortune to live in a sleepy little resort on the south coast of England. That means that a good fifty per cent of your audience will be geriatric. What does that mean?’

The luckless Morrison shifted his weight from leg to leg. ‘Old,’ he said.

‘Not precise enough,’ Smith countered. ‘For your purposes, it means deaf. Mutter at them and even the immortal lines of the Bard will go right out of the window. Ah,’ Smith heard the scrape of a chair behind him, ‘Mr Maxwell has come to spot talent. I fear he’ll have a rather long wait.’ He threw himself down in the chair next to the Head of Sixth Form. ‘From the top,’ he sighed. ‘And Davina, dear, I know it’s difficult to empathize with a Renaissance Italian merchant prince, but not even Wops stand like that. Do try to stay in character. Go on.’

And as GCSE Drama rehearsals slowly limped on, Smith did what he was brilliant at, he divided his attention in at least two directions. ‘Morning, Maxie. Come for a spot of team teaching?’

‘I’d rather die than teach with you, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘You know that.’

‘To what do I owe the pleasure, then? Oh, come on, Glenda,’ he suddenly bellowed, ‘have I taught you nothing since Year 7? Project!’ He leaned his head in the direction of Peter Maxwell. ‘Singularly cruel of Mr and Mrs Jackson, don’t you think? Saddling their youngest with the sobriquet Glenda. So much to live up to, somehow. You’re going to tell me you’ve solved the Jenny Hyde case, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Geoff,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Remember when they brought in CPVE?’

‘Er …’ Smith wrestled with the letters. ‘Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education, wasn’t it?’

Maxwell slapped his wrist. Shylock and Bassanio lost their lines for a moment. ‘Don’t get arch with me, Geoffrey. That bloody course dominated our lives for four years. I seem to remember you had hair when it started.’

‘That’s a gross calumny,’ Smith said blandly, ‘I was born without hair. What’s Jenny Hyde got to do with CPVE?’

‘Nothing,’ Maxwell confessed, ‘except that I remember sending a memo to Legs which said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what I’m doing. What are we all doing?”’

‘And you feel you’re at that point with the Jenny Hyde thing?’

‘Worse,’ Maxwell moaned.

‘Well, well. While these two wooden herberts get splinters off each other, let’s nip next door. You put the kettle on. I’ll listen.’ As Maxwell waddled out, Smith turned to his two hopefuls. ‘You know’, he said, ‘that one of my many talents is being able to hear through walls. I shall be listening to every word.’

The Drama office was a shambles, which said a lot about Geoffrey Smith’s mind. Rumour had it that he’d been in Nottingham Rep once and certainly he had all the affectations of an actor manqué. Staff went in slight fear of him, especially when they left, because his take-offs were legendary and the farewell speech parodies hilarious – unless it was you he was parodying. And many was the colleague who had turned up after an urgent summons over the phone from the Headmaster, only to find that the Headmaster was out of school on a course somewhere.

‘There’s that instant tea under the table, Max,’ Smith said. ‘Can you see the kettle?’

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Maxwell pointed. ‘Silver thing, black handle? Mind you, I’m clutching at straws. They didn’t have Home Economics in the school I went to.’

Smith picked the kettle up and shook it. There was water there somewhere and he plugged it in. ‘Well,’ he beamed, ‘what news on the Rialto?’

I found the tramp.’ Maxwell moved a pile of exercise books and sat down.

‘Oh … Guthsomething.’

‘Guthrie. Yes. You remembered it perfectly well at Dr Astley’s the other day.’

‘Remembered what?’

‘Oh, ha!’

‘Helpful, was he? Guthrie? Oh, shit!’ A rogue spoonful of instant tea sprinkled itself over Smith’s hand.

‘Yes and no.’

‘Christ, you’re cryptic this morning. Would you care to elucidate?’

‘With these teeth?’ Maxwell clasped his hands across his waistcoat. ‘He was in one of the downstairs rooms at the Red House. Didn’t go upstairs.’

‘Or so he says.’

Maxwell looked at his old oppo. ‘Why should he lie?’

Smith chuckled. ‘Maxie, Maxie,’ he said, ‘why should Bill Clinton be President of the United States? Why haven’t I been shortlisted for the Booker again this year?’

‘Because you never write anything, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell told him.

‘That’s never stopped Salman Rushdie. There are just some things in life that have no rhyme or reason. You shouldn’t be so trusting.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Maxwell said, ‘but I’ve been around people a long time now, Geoff. You get a nose for these things.’

‘So you believe him?’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell told him, ‘yes, I do.’

‘Good for you. So Guthrie is downstairs at the Red House. And upstairs?’

‘Upstairs,’ Maxwell’s face was dark in the darkened office, ‘was the body of Jenny Hyde.’

The kettle clicked as the cut-out mechanism came into play, punctuating the silence.

‘Did he see anything?’ Smith asked.

‘A car.’

‘A car? Did he get the number?’

Maxwell shook his head. ‘Didn’t even know what colour it was.’

Smith snorted. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Test drive green or perhaps vomit yellow with just a hint of metallic flesh.’

Maxwell twisted his nose. ‘Something tells me you aren’t taking this sighting very seriously, Mr Smith.’

‘I’m sorry, Max,’ Smith poured them both a cup, ‘but you know as well as I do how unreliable eyewitnesses are. You’re a historian, for God’s sake. Didn’t you tell me once how many people claimed to have put the pennies on the eyelids of Abraham Lincoln?’

‘Four,’ Maxwell nodded.

‘So unless the man had eight eyes, which is unlikely, three of the buggers are lying. Is that a fair assumption?’

‘It is,’ Maxwell agreed.

‘Well, there you are, then. And this bloke Guthrie. What’s he on?’

‘What?’

‘Well, out in all weathers with only the road for company. Cider? Meths? Boot polish? He probably wouldn’t know a car if it drove right through him. I don’t suppose he knows what day it is.’

‘Well, thank you, Geoffrey, for that magnificent expression of support.’

Smith laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Max. I don’t want to belittle your efforts. Christ, you seem to be getting further than the police have.’

‘No,’ Maxwell said, ‘I’m aeons behind them. At the moment. But I’m ahead in one sense.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’

‘Jenny’s diary.’

‘Diary?’

‘Betty Martin found it stuffed behind some lockers.’

‘Get away. What did it say?’

‘Cryptic stuff. I’ve got to decipher it yet.’

‘What did the police say about it?’

‘I haven’t shown it to them.’

Smith paused before the cup reached his lips. ‘Is that wise, Maxie?’ he asked. It was the first time Smith had been serious all morning.

Maxwell shambled to his feet. ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘But the other day you were telling me to stay away from them.’

‘The other day I didn’t know you’d got Jenny’s diary.’

‘Thanks for the tea, Geoffrey,’ Maxwell said. ‘Please don’t get up. I’ll find my own way out.’ He jerked his head towards the partition, where the actors moaned their lines. ‘Coming on, that Hamlet.’

Peter Maxwell remembered Tim Grey from his first week at Leighford High. He was one of those natural targets in life, a small, unprepossessing, thin-shouldered kid you naturally want to hit. Unfair, really. But then life was full of little unfairnesses, wasn’t it? Like some people being asthmatic or blind or poor or stupid or murdered.

And Tim Grey hadn’t changed very much really. He was taller, his face harder, leaner, but he still had the scrawny shoulders and he still didn’t quite look people in the face. Peter Maxwell had him in the soft chair in his office, his fingers curled around the mug of an Arsenal supporter. He didn’t pretend it was his. He’d rather support a hernia any day. Oblique. That was the way forward. He’d been too abrupt with Anne Spencer. Too direct. What was the old adage? ‘Softly, softly catchee monkey’? Or was that a line from Hiawatha?

‘How’s the term going, Tim?’

‘OK.’

Maxwell reached over to rummage in some papers on his desk. Every time he saw it his heart sank with the sheer weight of paper and he wandered off to do something else. ‘Let’s see, you’re applying for … civil engineering. Fine. Fine. Of these colleges here on your UCAS form, which is the one you really want to go to? Your first choice?’

‘Don’t mind.’

Maxwell found himself taking refuge in another swig of his coffee. It was that or drive his fist down the lad’s throat.

‘Tim … I need to talk to you …’ and the phone rang. Damn. Maxwell picked it up. ‘Yes?’

A disembodied voice Maxwell recognized as the school secretary wheedled at him over the internal wires. ‘The Headmaster wants to see you, Mr Maxwell.’

‘Joy!’ said Max, but his face remained stony. ‘And when will this meeting of like minds take place, Margaret? It is Margaret, isn’t it? Not Geoffrey Smith being incredibly witty?’

‘Of course it is,’ the humourless secretary snapped. ‘The Headmaster wants to see you now.’

‘Ah. Now as in immediately?’

There was a pause. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘No can do, I’m afraid. I’ve got a bit of a crisis over here. I’ll be along when I can.’

She began to say something but he’d already put the receiver down and he carefully hooked his foot under the wire to pull the plug out of the wall. ‘Oops,’ he said and sat down again.

‘Tim, I have to go.’ He looked the boy in the face, trying to catch his eye. ‘So I’ll have to come to the point. You know what the point is, don’t you?’

Tim Grey nodded. ‘Jenny,’ he said.

Maxwell leaned back, cradling his knee with both hands. ‘That’s right. Look, Tim, it’s not my place to pry,’ he told the boy, “but I have to know. I have to know some things about her.’

‘Such as?’

‘Were you … in love with her?’ It was a strange question for a teacher to put to a pupil. Maxwell certainly felt uncomfortable with it.

I don’t know,’ Tim said. ‘I miss her.’

That was a breakthrough at least. Anne Spencer had lost her cool and told Maxwell nothing. Tim Grey was perfectly friendly and was still telling Maxwell nothing. Until now. Now there was a glimmer of hope. ‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘Of course you do. Tell me, when did you start going out together?’

The boy gazed into the middle distance, trying to remember. Maxwell remembered his lamentable performance in GCSE History. Tim Grey was not good on dates. ‘About Easter time,’ he said. ‘April, last year.’

‘Did you see a lot of each other? Outside school, I mean?’

‘We used to go out at weekends,’ he said. ‘I got this part-time job.’

Maxwell knew that and he didn’t approve. He’d never approved of part-time jobs. They detracted from the main thrust of a sixth-former’s life – academe. But that was a heresy these days. Increasingly, Maxwell was a dodo, out of line with ’90s educational thinking. As it was he was the last of that line. ‘Where did you go?’ he asked. ‘What did you do?’

The boy shrugged. His eyes never for a moment met Maxwell’s. ‘Bowling,’ he said. ‘You know, the King Pin Club.’

Maxwell nodded. He didn’t know it, of course. He’d never set foot inside the place, but he knew of it. People held birthday parties there and tournaments. He was more cerebral. A dominoes man to his fingertips.

‘Cinema sometimes.’

‘Ah.’ This was home territory for Maxwell. ‘What was the last thing you saw?’ He could have kicked himself. He hadn’t realized how final that innocent question sounded. He needn’t have worried. Apparently, Tim Grey hadn’t realized it either.

‘
Beauty and the Beast
,’ he said.

Maxwell smiled. ‘Back to the old Disney, I thought,’ he said, ‘the ones I remember. The classics. Before your time, of course. Did the police talk to you Tim?’

‘Yes.’ The boy looked down. Maxwell was suddenly aware that Tim’s fingers, cradled in his lap, were knotted together. It reminded him of Jenny’s scarf in the hands of Marianne Hyde. ‘Yes, they talked to me when she went missing.’

Maxwell allowed the silence to stand between them. Then he said, ‘Where was she, Tim? Those days she went missing? What was it; from the Sunday to the Friday, the last week of term? Where was she? Was she with you?’

For the first time he could remember, Peter Maxwell saw Tim Grey look him in the face. It was for a fleeting moment only, then he looked away. ‘No,’ he said, ‘she wasn’t with me.’

‘Do you know where she was? Did you look for her?’

There was a sharp rap at the door. Tim’s eyelids flickered. He ran a nervous tongue over his dry lips.

‘Not now!’ Maxwell bellowed. ‘Tim, if you knew where Jenny was that week, I have to know.’

Nothing. The knock came again. Maxwell ignored it. ‘Did you tell the police?’