Free Maxwell’s Reunion by M. J. Trow Page B

again. They’d all promised Maxwell they’d see him again, all swapped addresses and phone numbers. When it came to e-mails, Maxwell gave up. His old oppos appeared to have embraced the twenty-first century. He was almost as aghast at this as at the death of George Quentin. The stone-faced Bingham implied that when they met again it might be across a court of law; there were testing times ahead. Maxwell suddenly had a mental picture of how fatuous the man must look in his wig.
    ‘I’m sorry, Jacquie.’ Maxwell was looking at her as they inched their way through the traffic on Warwick’s High Street, the Tudor timbers of the Lord Leycester Hospital looking surreal in the afternoon sun, like a film set waiting for Joseph Fiennes.
    ‘Max,’ she scolded him, slapping his leg. ‘Even in my professional capacity, I don’t think for a moment any of this is down to you.’
    ‘At the very least,’ he said, ‘it was something of a busman’s holiday for you.’
    ‘I’m the one who’s sorry, Max. Halliards won’t be the same again, will it?’
    He shook his head. ‘We all thought we were coming to witness the death of a school, and what we actually saw was the death of a scholar. How was DI Thomas?’
    ‘Once he’d got over whatever chip he’s carrying on his shoulder, he was all right. What’s this DCI like?’
    ‘Tyler?’ Maxwell let his head loll back on the rest. ‘Not a suitable job for a woman, is it, Jacquie?’ he asked her.
    ‘Any more than it is at my level, you mean. God, Max, you’re a dinosaur. I love you dearly, but …’
    ‘Ah, yes.’ Maxwell laughed. ‘The cruelty of that word “but,” eh? DCI Tyler is … what’s the word? Predatory.’
    ‘Insecure,’ Jacquie said.
    ‘Ah.’ Maxwell smiled. ‘A woman’s point of view. You mean she’s got a lot of living up to to do?’
    ‘Something like that,’ Jacquie said. ‘When she started in the job, there’d have been the name-calling, the sexual innuendo, the sending her on endless trips upstairs so the blokes could have a butcher’s up her skirt.’
    ‘Just like school,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Did you know Josie Fancut in Year Ten wears pink knickers?’
    ‘No.’ Jacquie bridled in mock horror. ‘And I don’t think you should, either.’
    ‘If I had the time, dear girl,’ he said, folding his arms and closing his eyes, ‘I’d fill you in on the complex socio-erotic nature of teenage girls and their relationships with male teachers. On second thoughts, you’d probably arrest me.’
    ‘What are you going to do, Max?’ she asked him.
    He didn’t open his eyes. ‘There’s a little-known passage in Genesis,’ he said. ‘And on the eighth day, the Lord rested, decided he was still pretty bushed, so he made half-term that man may be exceeding glad and rejoice in his name, saying, “Yea, God is good and we shall gather and give thanks for the breather and the lie-in.” That great event happens next week.’
    She laughed her tinkling laugh. ‘You old hypocrite,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I didn’t ask when you were going to do it, I asked what you were going to do.’
    Maxwell opened his eyes and sat up. ‘What are our options, Jacquie?’ he asked. ‘Quent’s murder, I mean. Passing maniac?’
    Her eyes flickered across to him, leaving the traffic for as long as she dared. ‘Motiveless murder, you mean?’
    ‘It happens, doesn’t it?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded. ‘And with increasing frequency. Some poor bastard is found by a battery of psychologists and psychiatrists to be deranged. He serves time in a secure unit, drugged to the eyeballs, whereupon a different battery of psychologists and psychiatrists decides he’s fine now and releases him into the community. Except, he’s not fine. He’s a danger to himself and others.’
    ‘And he kills George Quentin?’
    Jacquie was shaking her head. ‘If George Quentin died in a street, and if nothing had been taken from the body, I’d say yes, that’s definitely