Free Maxwell's Mask by M.J. Trow

classroom.’
    â€˜I’m thinking of you,’ she told him. Jacquie always was. They’d known each other now for nearly ten years. She’d been a struggling DC in those days, smoking too much, drinking ditto. They’d found a body at the Red House – and it was one of Maxwell’s Sixth Form, one of His Own. Oddly, she couldn’t remember the first time she’d actually seen him. And Christopher Marlowe was wrong with all that tosh about love at first sight. Peter Maxwell grew on you, like an old warmjumper she’d grown to like, to love and now, could not live without, its warmth and softness holding her, caressing her, keeping her – sometimes – together.
    He reached across and patted her hand. ‘I know,’ he smiled. ‘We’ll be careful out there.’ They both remembered Hill Street Blues on the telly, with its flaky cops working out of a Precinct from Hell and the kindly old sergeant’s message to his people as they went out to face the mean streets. It packed more of a punch than dear old George Dixon’s ‘Mind ’ow you go’ and ‘Look after dear ol’ Mum’, but essentially it said the same.
    â€˜If this turns out to be genuine,’ Maxwell said, ‘the dead woman, I mean, what’ll your people do to George Lemon?’
    â€˜He won’t get much more than a caution,’ Jacquie told him. ‘First offence and – apparently – nothing taken. Anthony Wetta, now… Well, I’m afraid he’s on file already.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘I thought he might be.’ And he put his fingers in the corners of his mouth. ‘Cracking eggs, Grommit,’ he croaked, in a near-perfect Peter Sallis.
    Â 
    There was no moon that night to light their way. Only clouds scudding darkly, threatening rain for the morning. He kissed her at the car door and jogged up the hill that led to the Old Spike. Jacquie shook her head. She didn’t approve of what he wasdoing, with all her training and experience. Maxwell should have passed George Lemon and his night terrors over to the police this morning. Come to think of it, Sylvia Matthews should. She knew perfectly well that telling Max anything like this was like waving a red rag at a bull. Mixing her metaphors madly, she knew that all anyone had to do was wind him up and let him go. On the other hand, she couldn’t help chuckling. The man she loved, the Cambridge historian, all tweeds and college scarf and elbow patches and bow tie, was jogging up the hill on the edge of the Dam in trainers, jeans and a hoodie. He was, indeed, a funny age.
    The Old Spike wasn’t a spike at all any more than there had ever been a dam on the open stretch of gorse-strewn headland that went by that name. It was one of those things that just grew up with time, those myriad factettes about places that no one remembered. The Spike, they said, was a beacon from the Armada, when nervous Englishmen scanned the horizon for the huge and deadly Spanish sails, dripping with Catholic symbols and glittering with gilt. Others said it went back much further, to the time when flaxen-haired Saxons watched the mists of another September, long ago, when William the Bastard’s Normans rode the high seas. Only Peter Maxwell seemed to know that it was actually a Napoleonic early warning system as the Leighford Fencibles mannedtheir posts and tried desperately, in that long tense summer of 1804, to learn one end of a musket from another. Now it was just a twisted tangle of metal, a rusting monstrosity the local council kept meaning to take down. It was a health and safety issue and might upset our near neighbours, the French.
    â€˜Jesus!’ George Lemon couldn’t believe his eyes. Mad Max was madder than anyone realised. The old git was in fancy dress, lolling against the base of the Spike like something out of Shaun of the Dead .
    â€˜Evening,