Maxwell's Revenge Read Free Page B

don’t help you. I appear to have done something to my back.’
    ‘You should look where you’re going,’ snapped the old man. ‘This school isn’t what it was since my poor Dierdre went.’
    Maxwell almost felt pity for him. He was a really horrible man, with no one to love now his niece was gone. But then the horrible old git ran over his toe with his trolley and his sympathy withered on the vine – which gave it something in common with Oliver Lessing.

Chapter Three
    Maxwell was thoughtful as he pedalled White Surrey home. The bike was beginning to show its years; this one really had been made by Walter Raleigh. There was a persistent though quiet click with every revolution of the wheels which had become a subliminal speedometer in the recesses of Maxwell’s brain. The brakes came with their own built-in alarm and many was the pedestrian who had collapsed panting on the pavement, watching in panic as Maxwell sailed past, waving his apology as he slowed, noisily and just a bit too late. The saddle had been given expert attention during the holidays. It was one thing for a bike to give off random noises. Incipient castration was not a fault with which Maxwell cared to become familiar.
    The start of term at Leighford High was always a mystery and a wonder. The wish list of Post-16 students which Maxwell compiled in hishead in quiet moments in the watches of the night never quite materialised. The high-flyers went elsewhere, to the Martin Bormann comprehensive down the road; the low-flyers, flying so low they went under any bar he could set, turned up in vast numbers. There were always a few staff missing; in previous years they had included the lottery winner, the one with all those knives in his back; the rather mousey woman from Art who had married a Masai warrior and was living in his hut, on the proceeds of the donation from the Mail on Sunday ; and any number of men and women now living quiet lives courtesy of Eli Lilly and his little pills. But none had left a hole so gaping as had Dierdre Lessing. True, she had been gone for almost two terms already. But somehow, the beginning of a year flagged up changes like these and Maxwell missed her, in his way. When he tired of baiting Diamond, she had always been there, snake-hair coiling in the winds that shook her world. When Bernard Ryan came out with an especially banal banality, she had always backed it up with just a little bit more. Like Archimedes, Maxwell needed a long enough lever to move his world. And Dierdre had been his lever. When Maxwell opened his mouth to speak, she was the fool everyone heard. And yet, he found himself thinking, she wasn’t such a bad old stick. Oh, God! He was turning into his granny.
    Never mind. Had he not been bowling down the slight incline that led into Columbine he would have rubbed his hands together. Her replacement might be fun. And not necessarily in a good way – fun in a good way was no fun at all.
    He stowed White Surrey neatly in the garage. He didn’t have to be neat – the inside of the garage at 38 Columbine was a car virgin. Until he met Jacquie, Maxwell had no recourse to cars and over the years the garage walls seemed to have thickened out, with layers of Notes To Self, bent hammers (used for unblocking drains), bent screwdrivers (used for opening paint) and bent saws (Maxwell himself couldn’t understand that one, but they were bent nonetheless), and there was no room even for Jacquie’s tiny Ka.
    The door from the garage into the hall had long ago healed up, so he had to go outside again to get into the house. Humming almost silently to himself, he put his key in the lock and as he turned it a voice, at the same time both raucous and virtually inaudible, came from the level of his elbow. It was as if a mouse had laryngitis. Without turning, he answered it.
    ‘Mrs Troubridge. Hello.’ Beaming, he turned to her, doffing his shapeless tweed hat. ‘How is Miss Troubridge?’
    His neighbour sniffed. ‘I