Maxwell’s Curse by M. J. Trow Read Free Book Online Page B

century is going to be like?’
    Peter Maxwell wasn’t exactly a party animal. It was commonly believed in the staffroom at Leighford High that the last one he’d been to was the night they relieved Lady Smith. In fact the old duck had more right to be relieved than anybody at Leighford knew – Maxwell had been busy that night.
    But it was Saturday. And Jacquie had asked him. And she did know a few vital Ju-jitsu holds that were guaranteed to make a man’s eyes water, should he refuse. Besides, he wanted to talk to her.
    ‘Tell me about Myrtle Cottage,’ he said in the green glow from Jacquie’s dashboard lights.
    He didn’t see her knuckles whiten on the steering wheel, nor the muscles in her jaw flex. ‘Where?’ she asked, and felt his eyes burning into her as he lolled sideways, his head on her shoulder. Peter Maxwell had invented body language – the fawning adulation of a lap-dog and the inquisitional skills of the Gestapo all rolled into one. ‘Oh, all right, but first …’
    ‘I know.’ He straightened up again and raised both hands. ‘Not a word to Bessie and I’ve never seen you before in my life, have I, darling?’
    ‘That’s not what I was going to say – although, yes, it’ll do for starters.’ She swung the wheel and purred onto the flyover, the tail lights of cars magic in their road-spray radiance. ‘What I was going to say was – how did you know about Myrtle Cottage?’
    ‘Ah, well,’ Maxwell wriggled lower in his seat to ease the numbness in his left buttock. What had possessed Jacquie to buy a Ka? ‘Therein lies the essential schizophrenia of today’s police force, my dear. On the one hand, there’s you, the dutiful detective constable who clams up. On the other, there’s your boss, the DCI, with as clear a case of verbal diarrhoea as I ever saw.’
    ‘Hall talked to you?’ There was a distinct wobble in Jacquie’s road positioning and from nowhere a horn blasted the night.
    ‘Indeed,’ Maxwell still had his two fingers in the air. It was the knee-jerk reaction of the lifelong cyclist.
    ‘When? Where?’
    ‘Last Tuesday. At school. You know, you’re getting more like Mrs B. every day.’
    ‘Thanks. What did he say?’
    ‘Told me the dead woman’s name and where she lived.’
    ‘Christ.’ Jacquie looked at him for as long as staying alive on the flyover would allow. ‘Why?’
    ‘Am I your DCI’s keeper?’ Maxwell asked her. ‘Maybe he felt lonely, needed a chat; perhaps he’s a one-man pilot scheme for Jack Straw’s Freedom of Information Act; I don’t know.’
    ‘This is weird, Max.’ She was shaking her head and frowning.
    ‘No more weird than someone leaving a frozen body on my doorstep. But now the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak, Myrtle Cottage?’
    ‘The old girl lived there,’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘SOCO have been all over it. Nothing that would indicate how she died or who killed her.’
    ‘How did she die?’
    ‘Oh, no,’ Jacquie laughed, joining the queue to the A27. ‘We may have something going here, Max, you and I – I hope we have …’ and she looked across at him waiting for confirmation, while he stared stoically ahead. ‘Bastard,’ and she thwacked him – lovingly – around the ear. ‘Even so, I can’t go into any of that – you know I can’t. What if I came snooping around Leighford High?’
    ‘You’d find an open book,’ he said. ‘Several hundred of them, in fact. We have no secrets. Legs Diamond, the Headmaster, is an ineffectual nerd; his deputies Bernard Ryan and Roger Rabbitt are slightly worse. David Boston, Head of Drama …’
    ‘I think you’re deliberately missing the point, Max,’ she interrupted him.
    ‘You’re right,’ he beamed, ‘but that’s what points are for.’
    ‘Here we are,’ she tucked the Ka in behind a Range Rover so that it looked like the dot of an exclamation mark. ‘Willoughby’s.’
    ‘His name isn’t really Willoughby, is it?’ he asked as he disentangled himself from