MAXWELL’S MOVIE a thrilling murder mystery with plenty of twists (Schoolmaster Murder Mysteries Book 3) by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow [Trow, M.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JOFFE BOOKS crime thrillers and mysteries
Published: 2024-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Junior and Infant Schools aren’t the same as High Schools. The chairs are smaller and there’s less revolting graffiti in the loos. There’s not much to choose between the standards of spelling. It’s not just that the kids are less surly, more bubbly, omnipresent, but the teachers are different too. Like Maxwell’s colleagues, those of Jean Hagger had an air of resignation, world-weariness. But theirs was born of bum-wiping, pencil-sharpening, sticking bits of screwed-up tissue paper onto walls full of spring lambs, each one of them looking like a Chernobyl fallout in terms of deformity.

Easter had already gone, but the ‘Easter Story’ still dominated the headlines in Jean Hagger’s classroom as Peter Maxwell sat gingerly on her desk, waiting for the woman to arrive at the end of her day. In the corner, a cluster of malevolent looking locusts crawled over each other to get nearest to the scorching heat of the light bulb in their sweaty glass case. Around the room, he was pleased to note a historical time chart from the Stone Age to the assassination of J.F.K., the day the music died. You could tell a school that had recently been Ofsteded.

You could tell a school after Dunblane too. And no school would be the same again. Not since a lone gunman had wandered into a gym in Scotland and emptied a pistol magazine into a class and its teacher. Peter Maxwell had had to sign the visitors’ book and fill in the time. He was given a sticky Visitors’ label in bright yellow, like Southwark tart in Good King Henry’s golden days, and he was taken to Room Six by Bishop Billington’s answer to Thingee, the girl on the switchboard.

Thingee had told Jean Hagger that a Mr Maxwell was waiting.

‘What do you want?’ She swept past him with the air of someone who had been trapped between a double-glazing salesman and a Jehovah’s Witness.

‘To offer my condolences about Alice,’ he said. Mad Max had a way of disarming most people.

‘Thank you.’ She put what Maxwell would have called a Gladstone bag on a side table and rummaged about in it. ‘Do you?’

He declined the cigarette. ‘I’d rather go of something historical, thanks,’ he said. ‘The plague of Justinian, perhaps. Or off to Prague for a spot of defenestration.’

She lit up for herself. ‘I do have marking,’ she told him, waiting, flicking the noxious weed nervously from side to side of her brown fingers.

‘Of course.’ He eased himself back onto her desk. ‘I just wanted to talk about Alice.’

‘And I don’t,’ she told him, slamming a pile of books down on the table, ‘Ever since they found her, I’ve had the media on my doorstep, here at school, ringing me up. I’ve gone ex-directory now,’ she exhaled savagely. ‘Those bastards.’

‘I’m not a journalist,’ he reminded her.

‘No’ — she sat down, flicking open the first exercise book, looking at him hard — ‘I’m not just talking about journalists. Those scum from . . .’ and she stopped, checking herself, flicking glances at the door.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.