Maxwell's Point by M.J. Trow Read Free Book Online Page B

only fire you for two things – fingers in the till or in the knickers. Oh, he’d known colleagues who’d dated pupils, even married them in some cases. But that was then. It all seemed like a different world now. No, it wasn’t wise to close a door with you and a student on one side of it, for fear of accusations of rape. And that was just from the boys.
    ‘I didn’t think you taught her,’ Jacquie went on. ‘So why you?’
    ‘Father-figure,’ Maxwell posited. ‘Impossibly handsome, a brain the size of the great outdoors. But that’s enough about me.’
    It went very quiet.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he guffawed, then settled himself as Nolan stirred, his little fingers twitching in his dream-sleep. ‘I’m sorry,’ softer now, ‘I assumed that was what
you
saw in me, too.’
    ‘What I saw in you,’ she twisted up her face and wrinkled her nose, ‘was a mad old bastard who needed to be taken into care. So here I am. My role in life, my cross to bear.’ And they laughed together.
    ‘It’s probably…’ he began.
    ‘Yes?’ she waited.
    ‘It’s probably that from time to time I get caught up in the odd bit of skulduggery. Have you ever noticed?’
    Had she ever noticed? For years, ever since Jacquie Carpenter had known Peter Maxwell, he’d been there at her elbow, usually, in fact, in
front
of her elbow, digging, ferreting with that razor mind, teasing murder enquiries, worrying evidence along with the sheep, tramping crime scenes withoutnumber. Ever since the early days, when one of Maxwell’s Own was found strangled in the haunted ruin they called the Red House. It had never gone away since then. And Jacquie’s life and Jacquie’s career had been shared with this man – the career she’d nearly lost because of him; the life she still had because of him. It wasn’t a bad trade, really.
    ‘Tell me about it,’ she purred, chuckling. ‘All right, so you’re the Miss Marple of Leighford High School and you trust Steph Courtney. Tell me again what she said.’
    ‘Murder,’ he repeated. He chose the Margaret Rutherford version of the dotty old biddy from St Mary Mead. ‘She said she’d seen a murder.’
     
    Steph Courtney was a pretty little thing with large blue eyes and a shock of blonde curls. She’d sung in the choir when she was younger and her parents had put her through the usual gamut of girlie things – piano lessons, tap, a little light gymkhanering. She’d sat in Maxwell’s office earlier that day with her best friend Emma and told Mr Maxwell all she knew. She’d been out with the improbably named Toto, her dachshund, on the rolling common land called The Dam, not far from her home. Unlike the coastal path, this
was
a Lovers’ Lane. Worse, it was dogging country and that had nothing to do with little Toto. Steph wasn’t remotely aware of it, thank God, but various text numbers on telephones and in the smuttier newspapers gave sites all over the country where people of a certain persuasion could watch people, of a slightly different persuasion, having sex. Steph, of course, had not mentioned anything of this to Maxwell, but Maxwell had friends in low places and Merv ‘the Perv’ O’Brien, in theMedia Department, kept everybody abreast of the places not to be. Everyone – except Merv – was suitably horrified or disappointed or both. Merv felt a certain local pride that there was such a place in his area. He’d probably been Dutch or Swedish in a previous incarnation.
    Steph had been walking Toto on the high ground. The sea was far away to her right. In fact, Maxwell realised, she could have seen Dead Man’s Point briefly until Toto took her down below the line of trees into the glade. There was a car there, Steph had told him. And a couple in it. Or rather, not in it. They were each side of the vehicle, one by each of the rear doors and they occasionally leaned in. It was a man. And a woman. Steph hadn’t seen them before. And it was getting dark by this time. In fact, she