Maxwell’s Match Read Online Free PDF Page B

the ground. A figure – no, two – hovered in the angle of the old house, dipping in and out of the darkness. They seemed to be waiting for something, glancing backwards and forwards, left and right. One, Maxwell could make out, was female, her hair long and dark under the moon, swaying as she rocked in, then out of the shadow. The other was taller, more solid, clearly male and dressed in black. Surely, that couldn’t be a gown? Then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, the pair had gone, their shapes melding with the shadow of the chapel and the stand of birches. Nothing more. No thumps now. No scratching. No lights and shadows. Maxwell let the curtain fall, wrestling with it all on his way back to bed. Comings and goings between the dorms. He couldn’t get his bearings yet. Austen House, the girls’ dorm, he’d only seen briefly in the harsh light of a Grimond day. The dark and the moonlight threw it all into confusion and he couldn’t be sure where it was in relation to Tennyson. The other boys’ Houses, Dickens and Kipling, were only names to him as yet. Forget it, he told himself as his head hit the pillow. Whatever it was, it couldn’t hold a candle to the nocturnal prowlings of his Leighford Highenas along the sea front of a Friday night. Suffice it to say that the sex education programme provided by the Social and Religious department was one huge waste of time; and after all, wasn’t that what bus shelters were made for? Sleep knit up the unravelled sleeve of Maxwell’s care.
    Most of them had never seen a corpse before. Not one with a broken neck, anyway. Bill Pardoe lay in the quad in the chill of that Tuesday morning, sprawled at an impossible angle. He was wearing his pyjamas and, bizarrely, his gown. His right leg was twisted under him and his head lay against the chapel wall. Beneath it, like a dark pillow, his blood had congealed, running down the slight gradient into the drain nearby. His beard was matted with it and the kind, grey eyes stared intently at the clouds.
    In the silent, motionless crowd, most of them still in pyjamas and dressing gowns, one girl started to cry. Like an infection, it spread along the rows, mounting hysteria, until the Captain of Tennyson forced his way through.
    ‘Get them away, Splinter!’ he barked. ‘All of you, back to your dorms. Somebody get Dr Sheffield.’
    An ambulance arrived first, clanging and flashing through the Hampshire lanes, but far too late to be of much use. It would do duty as a hearse later. Then the squad cars, three, four, five and a police Landrover for good measure, all flashing lights and wailing sirens. Pale, eager faces pressed to the windows – the wide-eyed ingénues of the Lower Fourth and the sophisticates of the Sixth, as one in their sense of shock and bewilderment. Their harassed teachers, desperate to make sense of the madness, shooed them away to their desks and made some attempt at normality.
    ‘Please sir, what’s happened to Mr Pardoe?’
    Out of the one unmarked car stepped a tall, square detective in a three piece suit. Aliens in white zip-ups and hoods were already erecting a flimsy marquee over the body.
    ‘Nothing to see here, children,’ a junior housemaster was hurrying his charges past. ‘Nothing to see. Come on, now. We’ve places to be.’
    The suit waited with an oppo until the marquee showed some degree of permanence, hammered into the tarmac with steel guy pegs.
    ‘Jesus!’ It was the wailing sirens that had woken Peter Maxwell. He’d overslept. He knew when breakfast was and where it was. But the bloody alarm hadn’t gone off. Now, he was standing in his pyjamas staring down at the mayhem below him. Dr Sheffield was in the thick of it all, pointing up to his corner of the building. And he was talking to someone Maxwell knew.
    ‘Jesus,’ he said again and turned to fight his way into some day clothes.
    ‘Inspector …’ Sheffield had never looked at a dead colleague before.
    ‘Hall,’ the suit told