Maxwell's Retirement (6 page)

‘Very lovely,’ Sylvia patronised. ‘But I meant she might not know how to answer one of those.’

Maxwell tutted. ‘Don’t get me started on Mrs B and technology. She seems to be morphing into Bill Gates. It gave me quite a turn.’ He was interrupted by the bell, yammering away in the corner of the room. He slurped his remaining coffee. ‘Ah,
la
damn bell
sans merci
,’ he said; it was a mantra for him. ‘Oh well, time to face Ten Oh Zed Pea. Or is that Oh Zee Pea, if my television watching is any guide.’

‘Don’t despair, Max,’ Sylvia chuckled. ‘American pronunciation will never invade your little corner of England.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘It will, Sylv, but I’m going down fighting.’ He made for the door and ended up holding it open for Mavis. The last thing Sylvia heard was his merry, ‘Mavis, dear thing, I understand you are leaving us …’

The door swung closed and she heard no more. But she thought to herself as she watched through the glass door as his barbed wire head disappeared down the corridor, bent in fascination to Mavis’s Seventies perm, that greater love hath no man.

Briefly dropping into his office before the delights of Year Ten, Maxwell found his phone where he had left it, in the drawer. His detective’s nose smelt polish and old cigarettes and so he knew that Mrs B had indeed been the answerer of Jacquie’s call. Trying to remember his masterclass of the previous evening, he tentatively probed a few buttons and found that his wife had not lied; the phone was indeed easy to use, and so he set it to silent and put it back in the drawer. As an
aide-memoire
he wrote a Post-it note to himself and stuck it on the top of his desk. He left the room, a bewildered Al Pacino as Serpico looking at him in disbelief from his poster on the wall.

Seconds later, he was back. Perhaps ‘Phone in top right-hand drawer’ was a little obvious. So, instead, he wrote ‘custard, rhs’. He was pretty sure this would not alert anyone to the presence of what he understood was called a blackberry in his
desk. On another wall, The Duke in
The Shootist
was already cocking his forty-five.

A few strides along the corridor and he was with Ten Oh Zed Pea.

‘Damian.’ The Head of Sixth Form collared the smallest boy in the class, a pasty-faced weasel who would have looked more at home in Year Five. ‘Stand out here, could you, dear boy?’

Damian pointed silently to himself.

‘Yes, Damian. You. That’s right. First one foot, then the other. Good. Good.’

The hapless lad had reached the front. Anything could happen now and Ten Oh Zed Pea were more than up for it; they had just had two hours of General Science.

‘Now, Damian,’ Maxwell broke every rule in the Modern Teachers’ Handbook by placing his hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder in order to position him, metaphorically, somewhere in central Europe. ‘You are Serbia. All right?’

Damian didn’t have a clue, but if Mr Maxwell said so, it must be all right.

‘Jake.’

A lumbering lout with pecs like body armour clambered to his feet.

‘Here, dear boy, front and centre.’

Jake complied and even let Maxwell place him alongside Damian.

‘Right, you two. Face each other.’

They did, Damian frowning into Jake’s chest,
Jake looking into the middle distance over Damian’s head. There were giggles all round.

‘I was going to ask,’ Maxwell said, ‘what differences you notice here, boys and girls, but I see you are way ahead of me. Damian,’ he turned to the lad. ‘You have upset Jake here. You are Serbia, remember, and you’re possibly responsible for the murder of Jake’s archduke, Franz Ferdinand. Jake – who as you have all worked out by now, I’m sure, is Austria – of course is much bigger than you. He’s upset. You’re going to get it. What do you do?’

‘Run!’ half the class shouted, hoping to see blood on the mat.

‘There’s only one way to settle it.’ Maxwell, to the delight of the class, had turned into Harry Hill, climbing on his desk. ‘Fight!’

The rest of Ten Oh Zed Pea joined in with a will, but Maxwell’s hand was already in the air for quiet.

‘Or …’ he beckoned Luke forward. The boy was in fact bigger than Jake, but probably slower on the turns. He stood him next to Damian. ‘Now you’ve got a mate,’ he said. ‘Serbia, say hello to Mother Russia.’

‘Mother?’ Luke was going through his most macho phase.

‘Figure of speech, dear boy,’ Maxwell calmed him. ‘Figure of speech. Father, if you prefer.’

‘He’ll never be a father!’ a class wag piped up.

‘Quite,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Mother it is, then. Now, Jake,’ the Great Man turned to Austria. ‘Not so easy now, is it? What do you do?’

‘Er … I get a mate too,’ the boy said.

‘You’ll never have a mate.’ The wag was on good, if repetitive form today.

‘Excellent, Jake. You’ve got realpolitik written all over you. Who do you want?’

‘Er … Jimbo.’

‘Jimbo!’ Maxwell echoed. ‘Excellent choice.’ He waited until the lad was in position alongside Jake. ‘Germany stands with Austria. How do you feel now, Damian?’

The little lad looked at Luke alongside him. He looked at the two opposite. All in all, he didn’t like the odds. ‘Are there any more mates allowed?’ he asked.

‘There are indeed,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Who would you like to be France?’

‘Um … Tommy.’

Poilou
would have been better, but that would have gone over the class’s heads and anyway, there wasn’t a
poilou
in Ten Oh Zed Pea.

As Tommy made his way to what was rapidly becoming the Front, a girl’s voice piped up. ‘Why are they all boys, sir?’

Maxwell beamed broadly. ‘Sophie, light of my life; well spotted. What we are doing here, dearly beloved, is to build up the two armed camps in Europe in 1914. This was a man’s business –
killing usually is. But don’t worry, Sophie. We’ll be looking at Edith Cavell – she was a brave nurse, and a woman by the way, shot by Jimbo here. And Mata Hari, she was a spy. Now, just a few more volunteers and we’re ready to play World War One. Nobody wants to be Belgium, I suppose?’

Nicole Thompson was still mulling over the events of the day before. School systems were not the most sophisticated in the world, she had often had to accept. But, so far, she had never felt the need to increase security in any way. But the email she had received along with her department yesterday was so clearly not from Peter Maxwell that she felt sure she had a hacker in the school. The problem was … who? She couldn’t think of a single staff member who had both the skill and the residual humour to do it. There were quite a few kids who could do it, but she knew who they were, and if they went a-hacking, the directgov or inlandrevenue sites were where they liked to make merry. Many was the heart-stopping tax demand that they had engendered. Sending an only slightly amusing email purporting to come from Maxwell was beneath their contempt. She didn’t go along with Mike’s theory that Maxwell had had a sudden overload. Ned was right. When Maxwell was waiting for the last trump and Peter was twirling his keys in his face, he would be
insisting on correct grammar and spelling. So, she tapped her teeth with the key to the mainframe cupboard; who was it? Who
was
it?

She pushed herself off from her desk and shot across the room, to the not very well stifled chuckles of Mike and Ned. The mind of a computer geek is a simple one and prat-fall jokes were still their favourite.

She stifled them with a look. ‘Put the
WD-40
can on my desk by the time I get back and if any of it gets into the office again, there will be trouble. I mean
serious
trouble. I mean,’ and she rested on her knuckles on Ned’s desk, ‘permanent staff record trouble.’

The two managed to look crestfallen while she was in the room. As soon as she had left they both shrugged. How much trouble could a computer-stored record be? Bless James Diamond and his paperless office. With a casual high five they both bent to their tasks: reading
What Computer?
in the case of Ned, listing old county laptops on eBay in the case of Mike. Another day, another dollar.

Nicole strode along Maxwell’s corridor. She was pretty sure that that was where the answer lay. She knocked on his door but there was no reply. Listening carefully, she could hear his voice along the corridor in the hell-hole that was the History Department and so now she had a dilemma:
should she go away and come back later, or should she go in and say nothing? Obviously, the right thing to do would be to go away and come back later but, oddly, her hand was on the handle and she was on the threshold of the room.

To her surprise, his laptop was not in evidence. So there went one plan of action; to open it up and check when he had last sent an email from it. She went round behind the desk, expecting to find it stashed under there. But no, nothing. Perhaps, against all the odds, Peter Maxwell was actually intending to register classes electronically! Then, she saw the
Post-it
on his desk: ‘custard, rhs’. Surely he didn’t keep custard in what she correctly guessed was his right-hand desk drawer? Looking round furtively, she slid it open. No … no custard, just a rather spiffy mobile phone. Probably one he had confiscated from a kid. She couldn’t really picture Peter Maxwell with a Blackberry. But the custard note was a bit worrying. What if he
was
losing it? What if the email had actually come from him? Nicole wasn’t a malicious woman, but she was a woman on the make. There were many opportunities within the school for advancement, if you knew what moves to make. County directives were always chopping and changing and she had seen a preview of the latest bulletin from on high. Human Resources were leaving the ivory tower of County Hall and were coming to a
school near you. £35k a year – she almost rubbed her hands together in glee but stopped herself in the nick of time – in the warm, no heavy lifting. No spending hours trying to get these antiquated dinosaurs of computers to work for just one more day. She sighed happily and shut the drawer. Yes, a little visit to James Diamond’s office, a casual mention of Peter Maxwell’s odd behaviour and bingo! She would be down there in Diamond’s brain as a caring colleague and a definite definite – Nicole didn’t do maybe – for the new job. She almost skipped out of Maxwell’s office and down the corridor, pausing only briefly to listen outside his classroom. The kids were actually
singing
.

‘We’re ’ere because, We’re ’ere because, We’re ’ere because, We’re ’ere.’

And over it all, Maxwell’s belting baritone; ‘I shall kiss the sergeant-major …’

She raised her face to heaven and murmured, ‘Thank you.’ She loved it when a plan came together.

Back in Maxwell’s office, underneath the carefully arranged pile of marking on a chair, the laptop slumbered, dreaming its silicon dreams. As always, Maxwell had used the tried-and-tested technique of hiding in plain sight. It hadn’t let him down in four hundred years of teaching, and it hadn’t let him down now.

Jacquie’s quiet office was not quite what she had hoped. It was quiet. It was an office. And that was more or less as far as it went to fulfilling her dreams. There were eight filing cabinets ranged against one wall, each with only two functioning drawers. Should anyone accidentally pull out one of the broken ones, the others all fell off their runners, trapping the unwary hand. Along the top of the cabinets were a range of dead plants. They reminded Jacquie of a sequence puzzle in an IQ test. The one on the left was so totally dead that only the pot remained. The next one along had a brown stick poking out, the next had three leaves, also brown. And so it went, until at the extreme right it was still just about possible to identify the poor wilted thing as a
pogonatherum
, should anyone care to take the time.

The window, which had a rather good view of the Downs once the eye had negotiated the car park and the low-rise office blocks, was so filthy that the view was a suspicion, rather than a fact. Jacquie extended a cautious finger to see which side of the glass was dirty and discovered that it was both. The desk, recently vacated by the cursing and spitting Matt, was covered in a kind of gritty dust, left behind when his paperwork had been unceremoniously swept into a black bag. Jacquie felt rather sorry for him. She hadn’t meant to get anyone thrown out in order to have
her quiet space, but then again, she couldn’t understand why he was so upset. After all, the place was a tip.

Down in the main office, DS Matt Carter was happily reintegrating with his peers. He had managed to hang on to the office longer than anyone so far and he knew he had already won the sweepstake based on tenure, which finished on the Labour Day Bank Holiday. If Jacquie thought she owed him a few cups of coffee and a chocolate biscuit now and again, he wasn’t going to disabuse her. He had only gone up there to do his expenses and had been forgotten about for seven peaceful weeks.

Jacquie had found an almost empty can of Pledge thrown in a corner, wrapped in a cloth which on closer inspection turned out to be a pair of boxer shorts, torn beyond repair. Suppressing a shudder, she weighed up her options. Either work on a desk so filthy she would need a total strip and a shower before she left the nick, or risk the underpants. She convinced herself that the pants had been a duster for longer than they had been used for their proper purpose and, spraying happily, spruced up the space. Soon, it was a bit more like an office and a bit less like a pesthouse.

She popped downstairs for a coffee, making a note to self to bring in kettle and comestibles from tomorrow. Matt Carter was standing by
the machine, looking disconsolately through a handful of small change.

‘Matt,’ she said, with extravagant bonhomie. ‘Let me.’

He shook his head and foraged through the change again.

‘No, really. It’s my treat.’

‘Oh, as long as you’re sure,’ he said, with a small smile. ‘Cappuccino, then, please.’

‘Of course.’ Jacquie fished out another coin. Froth was extra. ‘Biscuit?’

‘That’s very good of you,’ he said, trying not to smirk at his mates over her shoulder. ‘A Kit Kat would be lovely. Ooh,’ he feigned surprise, ‘they do Chunkies in this machine. One of those would be smashing.’

Jacquie threw him a suspicious look but put in the necessary coins.

‘Thanks, Jacquie. I appreciate this. Enjoy the office.’

‘I’ve thrown your plants out, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘They were dead.’

‘Not my plants,’ Carter said. ‘I thought they were part of the decor.’

‘Not any more they’re not,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve binned your grit as well.’

He smiled. Women, eh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live with ’em.

‘I thought you would like this back, though,’ she said and delved into her bag. ‘It was in the
drawer.’ She waved the girlie magazine in the air as she handed it over.
Best of Barely Legal
Bumper Edition.

He recovered quickly. ‘Not mine,’ he said, with a nervous laugh.

She snatched it back and flicked through until she found what she wanted. ‘No, I definitely think it’s yours.’ She pointed to a page. ‘That
is
your writing, isn’t it?’