Maxwell's Retirement (15 page)

Steve, the desk guy, was smiling. ‘Gotcha, Sergeant,’ he smiled.

‘Well, of all the …’ She was lost for words. It was so unlike Henry to dump on his staff a job he didn’t want to do – he was as much of a gentleman, in his policemanly way, as Maxwell.

‘Don’t think badly of him,’ the sergeant said. ‘He’s gone off to track down the parents who aren’t here. He’s left the Melkins to you. Better the devil you know, eh?’

Jacquie had to concede that that was true. Henry could be up all night trying to find them, especially the mother from what she had heard. And then he would have to put on an alert and intelligent face for the inevitable press conference. And that would be a minefield; if he spooked the parents of the area, the nick would be besieged. She shrugged her shoulders and turned to meet her fate at the hands of the pompous, pretentious, pillocky prat. She suppressed a smile. Instruction 8.1.1.z in the
Jacquie Carpenter Interview Handbook
: if they piss you off, imagine
them naked or give them a silly name. Gregory Melkins looked a bit too upholstered to look very appetising naked, so the names it would have to be. She looked over her shoulder. ‘No calls, Steve,’ she said, and the doors swung closed behind her.

The phone rang. ‘Leighford Police Station. How may I help you?’ God, how he hated saying that! He felt like a drone selling double glazing. ‘Oh, Mr Maxwell, hello. I’m afraid DS Carpenter has just gone into an interview. Can I take a message?’

But there was no message. How can you explain the inexplicable? Quote the unquotable? ‘No,’ said Maxwell. ‘No message. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said the desk sergeant. May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. ‘Have a nice evening, Mr Maxwell.’

‘Oh, er, thank you. I’ll try.’ Maxwell put the phone down and shook his head as though to resettle his brain. He briefly toyed with the idea that he had rung the wrong number and had just been speaking to the gas board, BT or similar, but decided he had struck lucky and had got through to the only policeman in Leighford in a good mood. He wasn’t to know that being in a position to inconvenience Maxwell put any policeman in Leighford in a good mood, they just didn’t always choose to share it.

He turned again to the screen. The message was still there, so it hadn’t been a mirage.

‘A family,’ it began, ‘will be almost overcome by death.’ Whose family was this? Maxwell’s one rainy Saturday on a tight bend? And who knew about them, Maxwell’s loved ones, Maxwell’s dead? But the next line threw him completely. ‘The red red ones will knock down the red one.’

Maxwell pushed back his chair and blew out a long breath. He was by no means a cryptic expert, but it rang distinct bells. Was this all part of the game? Were the girls getting nonsense like this too? Then, like a flash on the Damascus Road … he got up from the desk and went to the bookshelf behind him and ran a finger along the tightly packed spines. He knew Jacquie had bought him a book on dear old Nostradamus for Christmas a year or so ago; now, where was it? Jacquie had offered to list his library on her system, but to Maxwell the old ways were always best. He remembered it as a blue paperback … no, here it was. A black hardback with red writing; just as he thought. The tome was huge, but so was Maxwell’s capacity for speed reading. Yes, he was right – these lines had been taken from Century VIII, Quatrain 19. So, not too difficult to get hold of; the prophecies of the Seer would be on millions of websites and even, if his memory served, in this very book in the school library.

So, as clues went, not very helpful. Which was why he needed Jacquie home. There must be other
clues embedded in this thing which might help. Emails had to come from someone; no doubt there was some clickage which could be done which would show who that person was.

But it was no good mulling over that. He didn’t want to mess about with it in case he deleted it altogether. It had been known to happen and to better men than he – Bernard Ryan, though not one of the better men of whom he was thinking, had once deleted the entire school’s record of every child there had ever been through its doors with one uninformed keystroke. Maxwell wasn’t going to risk a similar happening. But he was awaiting his moment to shop the incompetent bastard to the
Mail on Sunday
.

The best thing to do, he decided, was to pour a nice large Southern Comfort, check on Nolan and go up into the attic to work on his latest project, the half-finished figure of Private John Swiney of the 17
^th
Lancers.

He went into the kitchen to pour the drink and wash up their pizza-smeared plates. He topped up Metternich’s bowl while he was at it, and then went to the top of the stairs to switch on the outside light for Jacquie when she got home. He looked down to the half-glazed door at the bottom. This time of the year, with the blossom just breaking on the trees that lined Columbine, was one of his favourites. The street lights gave odd shapes to the most mundane things. For
example, it sometimes looked as though someone was waiting just outside the door. He had often mistaken the silhouette for Jacquie coming home and had dashed downstairs to meet her, only to realise that it was a blossom-laden branch across the lamp which had caused the illusion. He went into the sitting room to draw the curtains and keep the night out, as his mother had always said – he looked out and noticed that the tree across the light had been pruned. The branch wasn’t there any more; victim, no doubt, of the credit crunch or swine flu, whichever came first.

He went back to the head of the stairs, the soles of his feet buzzing with the tension. He looked down. The bubbly glass of the door just showed a wavy image of the path, the green of the hedge, the pale glow of the slabs leading to the pavement. No ghostly figure at the door. Scalp prickling, he went down and flung open the door. There was no one there. He shook his head and pushed back his shoulders to ease the tension which had built up in his neck and spine.

Back to Plan A, he told himself. A drink. A quick check on the Boy and a nice evening of modelling, until the Mem got back. Just the ticket. But, even so, he checked the door was locked before he climbed the stairs.

Drink in hand, he eased open Nolan’s bedroom door. The DVD was long finished and the TV had been turned off. What a good boy, Maxwell
mused. Unless the cat had done it, of course. He raised an eyebrow and the glass at the Count, who rose carefully to his feet and stretched, whiskers forward in the aftermath of an enormous yawn which showed his razor-sharp fangs to perfection. He kissed the Boy’s hand in farewell with his cold, pink nose and followed Master II up the stairs to the attic room. They did their best thinking up there.

Maxwell’s attic was the War Office, an Inner Sanctum where only two members of the family were allowed. All right, Jacquie could pop her head over the parapet to tell the Great Modeller near the sky that supper was ready. And Nole could stay as long as he didn’t touch anything.

‘Anything’ meant Maxwell’s Light Brigade. For years now, man and boy, he’d been lovingly recreating all 678 riders bound for the half a league that turned them into legend back in the autumn of 1854. With glue, a magnifying glass, small pots of Humbrol and a lot of patience, he turned Messrs Historex’s white plastic 54mm figures into real people, and positioned them as they might have looked to the north of the Woronzoff Road that chilly October day.

Maxwell sat in his creaking old swivel chair and began gluing Private Swiney’s lance to private Swiney’s hand.

‘Well, Count,’ Maxwell began. ‘It seems a coon’s age since we last talked. It’s hard to believe
it was only this morning. Does that look like nine feet of bamboo to you?’

Metternich crashed over onto his side and began to nuzzle his flank looking for his pet flea. Sometimes it just had to be told who was boss.

‘I know.’ Maxwell shared the cat’s amazement. ‘It’s hard to credit, isn’t it? Well, I suppose you missed the Mrs B fandango, as she would doubtless call it in her more frivolous moments. She’s in a bit of a state, I don’t mind telling you. Count?’

The cat looked up with a chirrup. The old coot had made him jump; he had been really concentrating then. He so wished the old fool would just whitter and stop just saying his name like that. Did he not know that cats were hardwired to hear their own names, and respond, even if they had trained themselves to generally give no outward sign?

‘Are you listening? This is important. If I collapse with Humbrol fumes, you’ll have to repeat all this to the Mem. Anyway, where was I?’ He laid the lancer on his back to give the glue time to work. ‘Yes. Mrs B is in a bit of a flutter over her nephew, who has obviously just done a runner. But he is a computer nerd, which is a bit of a coincidence, bearing in mind our main problem of the hour.’ Impatiently, he sat the all-white Swiney astride his horse. ‘This poor bugger lost an arm at Inkerman,’ he told the cat. ‘Swiney, that is, not the
horse. He eventually died in Chingford – nothing else to do there, I suppose. No, it’s no good asking me, Count, because I really don’t know the links between all this. Texting, emails, it’s all Greek to me. Well, let’s call it Serbo-Croat because I do read Greek up to a point. I’m not just a member of the
you know.’

As a paid-up member of the
un
common herd, Metternich kept his counsel. As everyone knew, cats walked by themselves; except when in need of the odd bowl of cat food, in which case there would be a human on tap to pander to them and they’d walk with anybody. A cushion was nice. A warm room with no draughts. But, no, essentially, a cat was definitely not a herd animal. He licked a paw derisively.

‘Ah, you old softie,’ Maxwell said, prodding him with a slippered toe. ‘Thank you for agreeing with me.’

Whatever
, Metternich thought, yawning again and licking the slipper grime off his flank.
He means well. Oh, hello, he’s off again
.

‘So,’ Maxwell crouched to line up Swiney in his place on parade, behind Captain Morris on the left of the line. ‘Jacquie and Henry are on the case, now. I don’t think that Julie and Leah are missing in the police sense. I think they have just decided not to be around at the moment. It’s all got too much. I mean, look at little Alice today at school.’

The cat obediently twisted his head round in both directions as far as it would go.

‘No, I don’t mean look at Alice as in look
for
Alice. She isn’t here, Count. I was speaking metaphorically. And, by the way, it’s really scary when you do that with your head, has anyone ever told you that? Like
The Exorcist 28
.’

Metternich lay back and closed his eyes to the smallest slit. That way, he might shut the old fool up, but could still watch for any movement in the shadows and, possibly, kill it.

‘Am I boring you, Count?’

The cat opened one eye and made his feelings so clear that he might as well have said it aloud – you have no idea.

‘Well, tough. As I said, little Alice today, obviously one of life’s goody two-shoes, even so she’s scared to death that someone knows something bad about her and that that someone will “tell”. That’s the schoolkid’s fear, Metternich. That someone will “tell” on them. There is a web of fear around, and I don’t mean that as a joke, although I could work it into quite a good one given time. Someone is sitting in the centre of it pulling the strings and I’m going to find out who it is before some poor little girl does something stupid.’

No. He didn’t want Swiney there. He put him next to the ex-factory grinder William Purvis, who didn’t seem to mind.

‘And now, Count,’ the Head of Sixth Form said, loud in the enclosed space, ‘I’m getting the things as well. Who knows my phone number? My email address? I don’t know them myself.’

The cat sat up and stretched out to his full length. He yawned, showing pink gums and tongue and teeth that wouldn’t shame a tiger. He let go the tension in his muscles and sprang back like an elastic band to a sitting position, where he stayed for a few seconds, licking his lips and twitching the skin on his back. He’d dropped off for a minute there. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and touched Maxwell’s bare ankle with his freezing cold wet nose. It was the nearest he would ever come to an apology for his rudeness, but it was enough between old friends. Maxwell bent to his gluing again and muttered, ‘Abyssinia. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

That left him with an extremely short list of night-time activities and so he had no intention of following
that
instruction. The cat pattered down the stairs, checking on the Boy on his way through. To take first things first, it was highly unlikely that Maxwell would enjoy the cat food he finished up on his way to the cat flap. And as for the rest – best not go there. The cat oozed out of the cat flap just as Jacquie drove up to the kerb. Out of politeness, he waited until she got out and came down the path.

‘Hello, Count,’ she whispered, in view of the
lateness of the hour. ‘Are you coming out or in?’

He brushed her legs with his silky flank and was off through the hedge and away.

She laughed quietly. ‘Out, I see,’ she said and, straightening up, put her key in the keyhole and turned it as quietly as she could, easing the door closed behind her.