Maxwell’s Reunion (30 page)

She kept to the centre of the corridor, unsure of the classrooms to her right, the dark little doors to her left. Then she was at the foot of the stairs, rising dark and worn to one side. To the other, the statue of the school’s founder, standing proud and erect on his marble plinth; he who had seen so much, and watched George Quentin die.

She was afraid to turn, but she had to turn; to her right, as the hairs on her neck stood on end and the only sound was the creak of her shoe and her own heart thumping.

‘Max!’

A body twirled in the darkness, a long scarf trailing almost to the floor. There was a click and Jacquie felt simultaneously the cold muzzle of a gun behind her ear and her handbag being snatched away. A solitary light floodlit the scene; a hurricane lamp to dispel the darkness.

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ Richard Alphedge swung forward, his foot in a stirrup at the end of the long, dangling rope. ‘It took quite a long time to rig all this up again, after those bastard coppers took it all down.’ He hopped to the floor. ‘But this,’ he looped the cord around its iron housing on the wall, ‘this was my job. I was the Bell Prefect.’ He looked at the two women in front of him. ‘Thank you, my dear, for looking after Cissie so nicely for me.’

Something heavy and metal sailed through the air and Alphedge caught it expertly. ‘This,’ he held the automatic out straight, its muzzle unmistakably locked on to Jacquie’s head, ‘is not a film prop.’

‘Sorry, Jacquie,’ Cissie slipped from behind her to stand alongside her husband, ‘but you really shouldn’t have meddled, should you?’

‘Where’s Max?’ Alphedge growled.

‘I thought he was here.’ Jacquie’s voice echoed in the stillness of that great hall. The hurricane lamp at Alphedge’s feet threw huge, bizarre shadows on the walls. The gun in the man’s hand looked to be three feet long.

‘He is!’ It was Maxwell’s voice, echoing and re-echoing round the stairwell.

‘Max!’ Jacquie had never been so glad to hear a voice in her life.

Alphedge’s gun swung right and left. He was gripping it with both hands now, probing it into the dark recesses of the lamp’s shadows.

‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘Show yourself, Max,’ Alphedge snarled. They all heard the safety catch click. ‘Or the girl dies.’ He was closing on Jacquie, pointing the gun at her head again.

‘Oh dear, Alphie.’ Peter Maxwell sauntered into the light from under the stairwell at the far side, where a bank of lockers had hidden him from view. ‘Have you stooped so low? That’s a B-feature line if ever I heard one.’

‘Don’t patronize me, you bastard. Is that the money?’ He was talking about the large suitcase by Maxwell’s feet.

‘It might be,’ Maxwell hedged. ‘There again, it might be your dirty linen.’

‘Cissie,’ Alphedge ordered.

The silver-haired woman strode across the tiled floor, scattering dust and spiders.

‘Uh-huh.’ Alphedge had sensed Maxwell about to move. ‘You won’t outrun this bullet,’ he said.

Maxwell sighed. ‘Really, Alphie. This is quite appalling. One clumsy cliché after another. Why don’t you nip up on to the roof and shout “Top of the world, Ma”? At least the old Cagney number had some class.’

Cissie retrieved the case and lugged it across to her husband.

‘What’s all this about?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Why are you doing all this to get your own money back?’

‘Do you want to tell her, Max?’ Alphedge called over his shoulder, trying to keep an eye on them both. ‘I expect you’ve worked it out by now.’

‘I hadn’t.’ Maxwell sat down, slowly crossing his legs like some unlikely Buddha, folding his hands in his lap. Jacquie hadn’t moved, her head still tilted slightly back away from the muzzle of the PPK that was invading her space, threatening to blow that head away. ‘Not until I bumped into two little girls on my way here tonight. By the way, Cissie.’ He looked at her with genuine admiration. ‘Why you’ve never got a BAFTA is beyond me. Wasn’t she good, Jacquie? Played the part of the loving, increasingly frantic wife to perfection. You, Alphie …’ Maxwell grimaced in the sharpness of the lamp’s light. ‘Well, I don’t want to be a critic …’

‘Why not?’ Alphedge snarled. ‘Everybody else is.’

‘Yes, I know. Well, you fell apart too soon. All that shaking, nervous-breakdown, I’m-next stuff. It wasn’t only the lady, I thought, who doth protest too much. The threatening voice over the phone was good though.’

‘We’re still waiting, Max,’ Alphedge said. ‘And my trigger finger’s getting tired.’

Maxwell shook his head, tutting. ‘There you go again. Well, well, to cases.’ He suddenly linked his fingers and cracked them. Alphedge licked his lips and blinked at the sound. Jacquie hadn’t taken her eyes off the gunman’s face. What game was Max playing? She’d seen faces like that before – faces of men on the edge whose every nerve was concentrated in that trigger finger like a watch spring.

‘Quent and Cret were dead, like old Marley. Jacquie and I had dismissed coincidence, random killings, that sort of thing. That left me – and I knew
I
hadn’t done it,’ Maxwell looked his cutest, fluttering his eyelashes at Cissie, ‘the Preacher, Ash, Stenhouse or you. Now everybody wanted to believe it was the Preacher because he comes across as barking. You, I take it, knew about his parents?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Alphedge half smiled. ‘But I thought bringing it up might be a tad heavy handed of me and lead to other suspicions elsewhere, so I decided to let someone like Miss Plod here dig that one up.’

‘Indeed.’ Maxwell beamed. ‘No, the Preacher was just too likely – the weird garb, the spooky sect. Like a male model from the Serial Killers R Us catalogue. I had to check him out, of course, but he was never really in the running.’

‘And then?’

‘Stenhouse. Now there’s a tragedy you could have played one day, Alphie.’

‘Meaning?’

‘What a sad case. Opportunities wasted, dreams turned to dust. “He could have been a contender”,’ it was pure Brando, ‘but all he had in the end was a bitter, twisted drunk of a wife who tried to turn him in.’

‘What?’ Alphedge gave a brittle chuckle. ‘For the murders?’

‘Yep. No, Stenhouse organized the reunion, Stenhouse had the key – it was just too pat. Unless he was operating a double bluff and I knew he wasn’t clever enough for that. So that reduced it to two – you or Ash. And that’s why I was late getting here tonight, funnily enough. I gave old Ash a ring, on that mobile you gave me, Jacquie. You see, it was those two schoolgirls I bumped into; those two from Cranton …’

Jacquie frowned. ‘Cranton?’

‘The girls’ school down the road,’ Maxwell reminded her. ‘God, we had some times there, didn’t we, Alphie, huh?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Alphedge’s eyes were burning into Jacquie’s now, his lips twisted in a hideous half-smile.

‘You see, I kept thinking whoever killed Cret Bingham was just covering up for the real murder – poor old Quent. It must have been the Sunday we all left the Graveney. You or Cissie let something slip, didn’t you? And I’m sure it wasn’t you, Cissie, my dear – you’re far too good an actress. No, it was Mighty Mouth here.’

‘That’s enough, Max,’ Cissie scolded.

‘No,’ shouted Alphedge. ‘Let him go on. Let him have his moment of glory.’

‘You knew Cret had sussed you the moment you said it. You must have followed him, hung around, seen what he did. A long shot, of course, because he could simply have rung the boys – and girls – in blue.’

‘I knew he wouldn’t do that,’ Alphedge snarled. ‘When you’re an actor, dear boy, you know human nature, read it like a book. Bingham may have been a High Court fucking judge, but he always deferred to you, Maxie. You were the brains of the Seven always, weren’t you? I knew he’d go to see you, compare notes, test theories. I just got to him first.’

‘With that?’ Maxwell pointed to the gun.

Alphedge nodded. ‘It’s a great persuader.’

‘Shame about the pale blue carpet, though, Cissie,’ Maxwell murmured. ‘What with Cret’s blood all over it and all. Still, someone who can rustle up a half a mill ransom money can manage a bit of One Thousand and One for the Axminster, eh?’ Maxwell was delighted – it didn’t hurt to wink any more. ‘I presume it was a cricket bat you hit them both with?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Alphedge assured him. ‘After Cret, I burned it in the incinerator.’

‘Then you thought, “Why not implicate dear old Maxie?” After all, Cret told you, I assume at gunpoint, that he was coming to see me. So you drove with the body to Tottingleigh woods and dumped it under that old settee on Ryker Hill. Inspired choice that – although you couldn’t have known I often take constitutionals there. I thought planting the note was a bit of overkill, though.’

‘Note?’ Jacquie saw Alphedge falter for a split second, but it wasn’t long enough.

‘The note you stashed round here somewhere that put me in the frame for George Quentin.’

‘You’re talking bollocks, Max.’ Alphedge sneered. ‘You know, perhaps Cret was wrong, perhaps we all were. You’re not the brains, you’re a rank amateur.’

‘Which brings us to Cranton. Quent’s death had to be something to do with our time at school – everything else was a red herring. Ash confirmed it when I spoke to him a few moments ago. Cranton, ’62. We mentioned it, he and I, at the Graveney on the Friday we arrived. But we were talking at cross-purposes. I was referring to the old dog pinching my girl, as he did at the Cranton ball in ’62; he was referring to what he’d caught you and Quent up to.’

‘Get it over with, Richard,’ Cissie snapped, the strain of the last few minutes beginning to tell.

‘Oh, no,’ Alphedge growled. ‘I want Maxwell to know why he’s going to die.’

Slowly, keeping his back to the wall, Maxwell got up. Jacquie blinked. How had he done that from a sitting position? ‘Cranton ’62,’ Maxwell remembered. ‘A still and tropic night in the grounds of the school. It was magic, wasn’t it, Alphie? There were lights in the trees, our joint orchestras belting out the hits of the year interspersed with the odd waltz. I had a gorgeous girl on my arm. So did Ash … And you had George Quentin. Modesty forbids me in mixed company to be graphic as to which parts of your bodies you’d linked, but it sure as hell wasn’t your arms, was it?’

‘Shoot him, Richard!’ Cissie screamed.

Maxwell was walking towards his man, his heart thudding. Alphedge’s gun was – what? – two feet from the head of the woman he loved. ‘It was all so silly, Alphie,’ Maxwell said quietly. ‘Oh, I know they were different days and the law was the law then, but Christ, you were kids. We all were. Somebody asked me recently if I knew that Quent was gay. I didn’t. I’d forgotten all about Cranton ’62, because I didn’t see it. It was just gossip at the time, just rumours. We’d all forgotten about it, Alphie, so why?’ He pointed at the rope, taut on its housings. ‘What in God’s name was the point?’

‘Point, you imbecile?’ Cissie screamed at him. She took one stride and slapped him across the face. Jacquie jumped, but Maxwell rolled with it. ‘Quentin was a predatory homosexual. He forced Richard. That appalling night at Cranton, he forced him, had him bent over a tree. It’s something people never talk about, isn’t it? Male rape – the last taboo.’

‘Cissie …’ Alphedge was shaking his head, the tears streaming down his face.

‘He’s lived with that ever since. The shame. The disgrace. You say they were different days. Yes, they were. But you say that from today’s liberal vantage point. Richard went to pieces from that day. His father disowned him. Don’t you remember any of this?’

Maxwell shook his head.

‘You smug, conceited bastard,’ she growled. ‘Richard was raped by that … that animal and you didn’t even know.’

‘It’s in here, Max,’ Alphedge said quietly, pointing to his head. ‘It has been ever since it happened. I swore one day I’d kill George Quentin. I had dreams of it happening – of him dangling from this rope, my rope. Perfect, poetic justice. Cissie knew, of course. There are some things you can’t keep from your wife. When I heard from Stenhouse, suggesting the reunion, it was like a gift from God. Unlike the rest of you, I knew exactly where George Quentin lived and worked. I got Cissie to ring him, to set up a joke. Quent would go to Halliards, not the Graveney, and help me rig up a hanged-man scam to scare the shit out of Stenhouse. It tickled him enormously. The poor, stupid bastard didn’t know he was going to his death. Cissie and I, of course, had got to the Graveney early and pinched Stenhouse’s key. Then we met Quentin and it was pure, bloody joy. Replacing the key in Stenhouse’s pocket over breakfast the next morning was the most difficult thing about it.’

‘But why all this?’ Jacquie asked. ‘This whole ransom nonsense?’

‘To get me here,’ Maxwell said. ‘You knew I’d worry at it, didn’t you, Alphie?’

The actor nodded. ‘Like some bloody terrier,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d end it here, now. Where, in a way, it all started.’

‘That’s all fine and dandy, Alphie.’ Maxwell’s face still stung from Cissie’s slap. ‘But you won’t make it this time. It was all a bit OTT, wasn’t it? A little on the luvvie side, all this. Did you seriously think, with Jacquie around, the police wouldn’t be called in to look for you? They’re outside now, Jacquie, aren’t they?’

Jacquie nodded. ‘Ten-man team. Plus DS Rackham. Six of them are marksmen, Richard. One of them will get you. You know it.’

‘And Cissie,’ Maxwell threw in. ‘In the dark, they won’t take the chance she isn’t armed too. Give it up, old son. It’s all over.’

‘Oh, no,’ growled Alphedge, lining up his aim on Jacquie’s jaw. ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady …’

Maxwell didn’t give him time to finish the cliché. Dragging from nowhere his distant memories of the ruck and the maul, he drove his shoulder hard into Alphedge’s body. The actor’s arm came up and the gun barked in the sharp light, sending a bullet ricocheting against the marble statue. Both men hit the wall beyond and Maxwell rolled clear. Alphedge didn’t roll at all, but lay in a heap with his head still upright.

Jacquie moved for the first time in what seemed hours. She kicked the gun away from him and snatched it up, holding it with both hands, aimed first at Alphedge and then at Cissie. The actress was wailing as if in a scene from Electra, kneeling beside her husband and cradling his head. Her fingers were bloody in the lamplight.