Maxwell’s Reunion by M. J. Trow Read Free Book Online Page A

years, boy and boy. I suppose you’d say we were inseparable.’
    ‘Were?’
    ‘Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell felt obliged to confess, ‘I haven’t seen George Quentin since 1963, not in the flesh.’
    ‘In the flesh?’
    ‘I caught him on the telly once, some chat show on City stockbrokering. I was just flicking through the channels, like you do, and there he was.’
    ‘Tell me about the others.’
    ‘Others?’
    ‘Richard Alphedge.’ She wasn’t reading from any notes; she was staring straight at Maxwell.
    ‘I don’t really think …’
    ‘Mr Maxwell.’ The smile had gone and the eyes were cold and hard. ‘You do realize that I’m conducting a murder enquiry?’
    ‘Yes.’ He unlocked his fingers and shifted his position. Time for the serious stuff now.
    ‘And that I need to know.’
    ‘And that we are all suspects,’ Maxwell added.
    She nodded. ‘That too,’ she said. ‘That’s one thing that’s not very nice about my job, Mr Maxwell; you start to suspect everybody, all the time. Is that woman really collecting for Help the Aged? Is that bloke really a Scout leader? Where did a dropout like that get a Ferrari? It just goes with the territory.’
    ‘And you’ll be talking to the others?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded. ‘Depend on it. Alphedge.’
    ‘Alphie is an actor; to be precise, an actor’s actor. He doesn’t do much any more, I understand. Bad agent, one performance, who knows? I remember he was St Joan in St Joan when we were in the Upper Fifths – diabolical. Some of us wanted to burn him for real. I understand his wife gets all the parts.’
    ‘You mean, he’s a kept man?’
    Maxwell laughed. ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said. ‘Looking at the biceps on Mrs Alphedge, I’m not sure I dare. Chief Inspector,’ he shuffled forward a little in his chair, ‘can I ask you some¬thing?’
    She raised her hands in the air and lolled back on the pale blue of the swivel.
    ‘How did George Quentin die?’
    The DCI thought for a moment. ‘You’re familiar with the cliché “I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind”?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Jack Frost, Adam Dalgleish, even Jane Tennyson, they all say it.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said coldly. ‘But this is real, isn’t it? Your friend is dead.’
    ‘Yes,’ Maxwell said flatly. ‘Yes, he is.’
    ‘What about Bingham?’ she asked.
    ‘Cret? Um … Anthony? On your side, isn’t he? Judge and all?’
    The DCI shook her head. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ she grunted. ‘As a profession, lawyers are second only to journalists as prize bastards.’
    ‘Ah.’ Maxwell sensed a twinge of pique there.
    ‘Have you seen Bingham recently?’
    ‘Until yesterday, no. Again, not since we all left school.’
    ‘Tell me, Mr Maxwell.’ Nadine Tyler got up from behind the desk and sauntered to the far window, watching weekend guests coming and going in the carpark outside. ‘The seven of you … were you some sort of club, a gang?’
    ‘What, you mean the Famous Five meet the Lords of Flatbush? No, not really. Oh, I suppose we hung around together. In the sixth form we were going to form a group, except that none of us could really play anything, and only Alphie could sing and we realized that Ash was only in it for the groupies. Then we had this ludicrous schoolboy plan to spend the night at Borley rectory, the most haunted house in England …’
    ‘Yet you didn’t keep up your friendship. Why was that?’
    Maxwell shrugged. ‘Why indeed?’ He sighed. ‘It happens. We none of us ended up at the same college. Cret … er, Anthony, went to Balliol, Oxford; Alphie to RADA. Stenhouse was with me at Cambridge, Peterhouse in fact, but he broke his leg skiing in his first Christmas vac and had to miss the rest of the year; we never got back together after that.’
    ‘And Quentin?’
    ‘LSE, I’m afraid.’ Maxwell screwed up his face in mock disgust. ‘We didn’t talk about it. The LSE in those days was one up from borstal.