Free Maxwell's Return by M. J. Trow

cycle-clip indents at the bottom of his trouser-leg. ‘She was away as well, if you remember.’
    Diamond was not convinced, but the need to share was overwhelming and although Maxwell was the reason for almost every one of his grey hairs, for at least fifty percent of his ulcer and all of his nervous tics, he had experience in this kind of thing. Too much experience, in Diamond’s opinion, but needs must when the devil drives.
    ‘It was last term,’ he began and Maxwell settled his features into an expression of interest. He would get nowhere by bursting out with the proper version of events, the Matthews Version; Diamond could spin for England but Maxwell would have to play a waiting game. On one balmy evening, sitting out in what he had learned to call the yard, he, Jacquie and Nolan had watched a gecko stalking a locust, each movement tiny, slow and controlled so as not to lose its prey. He decided to take a leaf out of its book and he all but disappeared into the chair. Gordon (as they hadinevitably named the creature) would have been proud.
    ‘It was last term. Bernard hadn’t spoken to me, but he had had concerns about a girl he was tutoring. I haven’t had all of the facts, but it seems the long and the short of it is that Bernard may have been the last person to see her alive.’
    Maxwell may have been in gecko-mode, but he had to speak. ‘The next to last person, surely,’ he said.
    ‘What?’ Diamond blinked. ‘What?’
    ‘Her murderer would be the last person, surely?’ he said, with a small smile.
    ‘Yes, yes.’ Diamond was cross with himself. He shouldn’t have fallen into that trap – it looked bad. ‘Yes, as you say. There were… certain factors that made the police come and take Bernard in for questioning.’ He took off his glasses and peered short-sightedly across his desk at Maxwell. ‘Only questioning, mind you. There was no arrest.’
    Maxwell inclined his head, reptile-style.
    ‘I did ask Bernard later how things had gone and he told me that he had declined to give an alibi. That’s the actual word he used, Max.
Declined
. So, of course, I had no option but to ask him to accept suspension from his post. I told him he could have a union representative with him, or a friend from the staff, but he said no, there was no point.’ Diamond managed a wintry smile. ‘In fact, he said with you not around, there was no one he would choose.’
    ‘Me?’ Maxwell was staggered. He had exchanged few words with Bernard Ryan that could not be classed as frankly hostile, as far as his innate public-schoolboy manners would allow. If he was the nearest thing to a friend that Ryan could summon up, it was a sorry state of affairs to be sure.
    ‘I don’t think as a friend, so much, as someone who knew what the score was. You have been… in trouble,’ the headteacher had the grace to look a little shamefaced, ‘yourself and of course you do have your links with the police.’
    ‘Well, my wife is a detective inspector,’ Maxwell conceded.
    Diamond looked at the man. He was no less exasperating now than when he had seen him last. He would never help you out of a hole if he could throw more earth in instead. He let it go. ‘Quite so. Anyway, Bernard took his suspension and he is still off, as you already know. I suppose you also know he has been taken in by the police a second time.’
    Maxwell could not use a five and a half thousand mile distance as an excuse this time and decided to give the sucker an even break. ‘Yes, I did hear something about that.’
    ‘Do you know why?’
    This wasn’t right. He was in here to ask Diamond the questions, not the other way around. He toyed briefly with swivelling the headmaster’s lamp into his eyes and rapping out something from
The Untouchables
, but he knew that Legs Diamond had no sense of humour at all. ‘I got a tinygist, but I can’t really…’
    ‘I do understand, Max. I shouldn’t have asked.’
    Diamond the humble was not something you saw