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out of The Grimleys .
    ‘One of several who did,’ Maxwell told him. Thomas looked at Jacquie.
    ‘The others are back at the Graveney,’ she told him. ‘I checked it with your DS Vernon.’
    ‘Can we get one thing straight, Ms Carpenter?’ Thomas said. ‘As far as I am concerned, you are a civilian. You have no more jurisdiction here than any other member of the public, and anyway, in my patch, detective constables don’t conduct enquiries; detective inspectors do. Clear?’
    Maxwell’s mouth opened, but it was Jacquie who spoke. ‘Perfectly,’ she said, and shepherded Maxwell away. She got him to her car without too much of a scene and bundled him inside.
    ‘One of nature’s gentlefolk, I presume?’ Maxwell hauled off his shapeless tweed cap, and fumbled for his seat belt.
    ‘I have met more co-operative colleagues.’ Jacquie slammed her door and kicked the engine into life. ‘The Graveney?’
    ‘That depends,’ Maxwell said.
    ‘On what?’
    He turned to face her. ‘On whether George Quentin took his own life or whether he was murdered.’
    Jacquie chewed her lip. ‘Do you want my best guess?’
    ‘I’d settle for that,’ Maxwell said.
    She looked into the steady, brown eyes. ‘I’d guess it was murder, Max.’
    He nodded slowly and mechanically pulled the seat belt around him. ‘Not the Graveney, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s drive. Directions are on me.’
    Maxwell hadn’t been to the Badger’s Ease at Charlecote since he was a carefree young undergraduate with fluff on his chin and a Cambridge scarf around his neck. He still had the scarf, of course, but in those days, shortly after they’d invented the wheel, and only let 7.3 per cent of the population’s youth into universities, he’d been a driver and had coughed up to the Badger’s main doors in his dad’s Triumph Herald. He was young. He was carefree. He was broke.
    A lot of water. A lot of bridges. A lot of sighs. Maxwell was a teacher now and still broke. The Badger’s had had a face-lift and it was busy. They’d added a carvery on a wing that rolled to the west and a pétanque piste beyond that. A giant orange elephant formed a slide for the kiddies, and the little dears even had their own menu that boasted Dinosaur Dips and Brontosaurus Bites. In Maxwell’s day ancient biddies who had won the vote came staggering in for a Danish or, throwing caution to the winds, a French fancy. Now, most soul-destroying of all, the place was called Zak’s. No explanation was given.
    ‘Tell me again.’ Maxwell’s pickled onion bounced wilfully off his plate and rolled under somebody else’s table. No matter – it would be back in the jar by evening.
    ‘It wouldn’t have been a painless death, Max.’ Jacquie was pushing her coleslaw around her plate. ‘He’d been hit over the head, I don’t know how many times, on the landing at the top of the first flight of stairs. There was blood …’
    An old crone, whose hearing was the healthiest thing about her, looked up sharply at a nearby table, her dentures parting company with their neighbouring gums. Jacquie’s head leaned closer to Maxwell’s. He looked tired. For the first time since she had known him, nearly six years, he looked old.
    ‘Hit from behind.’ Maxwell was musing, picturing it in his mind, trying to make sense of it.
    ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘We don’t know.’
    ‘It would have to be,’ he told her. ‘Quent was the best of us. Captain of the First Eleven. Victor Ludorum three times. House Captain, of course.’
    She looked at him. It was like something out of that depressing play she’d done at school – Journey’s End . They didn’t have houses at Jacquie’s comprehensive, still less captains of things. And as for Victor Ludorum, Maxwell might as well have been talking about Victor Meldrew. Come to think of it, he was dead too.
    ‘That was a long time ago, Max,’ she said softly. ‘People slow down. Reflexes …’
    He flipped a beer-mat into the air