Maxwell’s Match Read Online Free PDF

on his bed and staring at the swirls on the artex ceiling. ‘Even the smell of the place. Polish and cabbage. You never lose it.’
    ‘I don’t think we had either of those at my school,’ Jacquie told him from her end of the mobile super-highway. ‘Are you bored yet?’
    ‘To sobs,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘You lady detectives don’t miss much, do you? Still, I think I’m allowed into the library tomorrow, so I’ll see how much half-inching I can do for my own dear History Department. Ah, how I miss it; Paul Moss screaming at Year Seven, Sally Greenhow blowing Joe Plumley’s nose for him one lesson, me knocking his block off the next. The essential rhythm of life.’
    ‘I gather Grimond’s is not like that.’
    ‘You gather right, Woman Policeman. Our kids at Leighford have only just realized they can walk on water, courtesy of Political Correctness and the Court of Human Rights. The kids here have always had power; the sort that comes with money and birth and privilege. It might not be Eton or Harrow, but it’ll do. The Captain of House calls me “Mr Maxwell” but he’d clearly like his fag to polish his boots with me. I’m some sort of nasty smell under his nose.’
    ‘Oh, Max …’
    ‘I kid you not, dearly beloved. The lad’s eighteen going on fifty with all the bonhomie of Osama bin Laden.’
    ‘Darling,’ he heard her say. ‘I’ve got to go now. Early shift in the morning.’
    ‘Of course.’ He sat up on the bed. ‘Give my love to that humourless bastard you work for.’
    ‘Henry sends you his best wishes, too,’ Jacquie laughed. ‘Love you, Peter Maxwell.’
    ‘Love you too, Woman Policeman,’ and he heard the line go dead. He held the mobile out under the bedside lamp, wondering again which button you had to use to switch the thing off. Did people really get mugged for this irritating piece of plastic, he asked himself as the midnight lamps burned. Why, oh why? There again, he now had hard evidence that using one dims the little grey cells; he’d known how to switch it off when the call began.
    He couldn’t tell the time in his moment of waking. And it was a while before he remembered where he was. Something had woken him. One thump or two? It seemed to be overhead at first. But there was nothing overhead. Except the roof. Outside, then, on the spiral? There it was again, a single thump. Then scurrying. Rats in the wainscoting? Cockroaches? The people who live under the stairs? He was wide awake now, his digital alarm winking at him. Two-thirty-eight. Was there such an hour? He’d heard the sounds all evening: comings and goings below, footsteps, laughter. At ten, a solemn bell had sounded across the quad and the House began to settle. At ten-thirty, a voice he recognised as that of John Selwyn, the Captain of Tennyson, echoed through the corridors. ‘Lights out in the House. All’s well.’
    How quaint, Maxwell thought; every man his own town-crier. Unless the Lord keepeth the city, the wakeman waketh in vain. Perhaps this was standard. Perhaps at two-thirty-eight every morning there was a series of thumps and a scratching. Perhaps it was an old Grimond custom. Or the long-gone ghosts of mob-capped servants carrying steaming bowls of hot water. But he was suddenly on his feet anyway, fumbling his way to the window, agonizing cramp freezing his toes as he hobbled around trying to end it. Below, frozen in the moonlight, old Jedediah Grimond’s courtyard stretched away into darkness. Here the horses had once whinnied and clashed, steel on cobbles and the post-chaise had creaked on its housings as the master came home. The birch next to the chapel spread its shadow arms across the tarmac, dappling silver on the ground and the roofs shone in the fullness of the moon.
    At first he saw nothing moving, just the odd set of headlights on the horizon, on the far A3, a long-distance tanker making the hard miles. Then a shadow flitted across the moment and Maxwell’s eyes were drawn down to