by M. J. Trow
Hall looked at Maxwell again. ‘Oh, yes, Dr Sheffield. It does.’
Like a torrent in the trees, like a deluge on the dykes, Mark West hurtled up the granite steps into his boss’s office, Headquarters Building of the Hampshire Constabulary.
‘What the fuck is going on?’
It wasn’t the best way to address a Chief Superintendent with toothache. ‘Do you want to pass that by me again, Chief Inspector?’ The Chief Superintendent was keeping his cool admirably, all things considered.
‘DCI Hall,’ West snapped, leaning towards his superior and swaying with fury.
‘What about him?’ the Chief Super, ever the Deflator of Situations, sat down. Going head to head with Mark West was always counterproductive.
‘He’s trampling all over my patch. There’s been a death at Grimond’s.’
‘So I believe,’ the Super nodded, resting his elbows on his desk and his lips against his raised fingers, trying not to feel the throbbing in his lower jaw.
West sat down unbidden. ‘Look, Dave …’
Dave did and West didn’t like what he saw. He stood up again. ‘Shall we try this one again, Mark?’ he asked, plugging the raging molar with his tongue. ‘Do, please, have a seat.’ The DCI did. ‘Now, what seems to be the trouble?’ It was the sort of ice-breaker you heard in any doctor’s surgery in the country on any day of the week (except Sundays when they shut).
West’s jaw flexed in the mid-day light. The glare of the March sun was in his eyes and patience was one virtue the DCI did not possess. ‘I think you know, Mr Mason,’ he growled.
When David Mason heard his surname, he knew he was in for a bitch of a day. ‘You’re tied up with the bank job in Petworth – or you damned well should be. Hall was at a loose end …’
‘But what’s he doing here?’ West wanted to know.
Mason looked at his man. Mark West was knocking forty, solid with a close-cropped head that would not look out of place on the football terraces. He was short on charm and short on fuse, but he got results. ‘You’re a man down.’
‘Yes,’ West leaned back in his chair for the first time. ‘Ben Pollard’s broken his collar bone, so I’m a sergeant down. Another DCI I don’t need. What are we, Castor and bloody Pollux?’
David Mason, like Peter Maxwell, had been to a good school. He was impressed by the classical allusion. ‘I won’t bore you with the Chief Constable’s initiative details, Mark,’ he said. ‘Caring, sharing – it’s all part of his mission statement.’
West’s hands were in the air. ‘When I was a beat copper, we caught villains, we didn’t have mission statements.’
‘That’s why you’re a DCI,’ Mason told him disarmingly, ‘why I’m a Chief Super and the Chief Constable is a Chief Constable. He’s paid to have the big picture. You and me, well …’
‘We’re in the frame,’ Mark West could out-analogy his Chief Super any day.
‘Quip while you’re ahead,’ Mason winked at him and felt his tooth throb anew.
‘Where does that leave Henry Hall?’
‘On our patch,’ Mason said, ‘sharing experience, good practice. Don’t you read your interdepartmental memos?’
‘Is the Pope a Shi’ite?’ West wanted to know, reaching for the ciggies metaphorically burning a hole in his pocket.
‘Just think, Mark,’ Mason patronized, ‘You could be going back to West Sussex with him in a week or so.’
‘Joy,’ West growled.
‘In the meantime,’ the Chief Super leaned forward in the way that Chief Supers do when they’re no longer being Mr Nice Guy, ‘Henry Hall is observing how we do things here in Hampshire. He has my full authority to co-ordinate and to lead on any case that naturally comes his way. You will give him every co-operation, Detective Chief Inspector; is that clear?’
‘Crystal,’ West growled again.
‘Good,’ Mason leaned back in his swivel. ‘Now, put that bloody cigarette out.’ West fumed, but did as he was told. ‘That translates as keeping out of Hall’s face as far as the Grimond’s thing’s concerned. Right?’
West shrugged. ‘Fine,’ he said.
‘I think that about wraps it up then, Mark,’ the Chief Super said. ‘You’ll keep me posted on Petworth?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ West sighed and saw himself out.
‘Marcia,’ Mason pressed his intercom, desperate to alleviate his problem, ‘Do we have such a thing as oil of cloves in this man’s police force?’
‘Did you know,’ Dr Robert Firmin was at his most expansive over the hospital’s cottage pie, ‘that the New York Medical Examiner’s Office carries out seven thousand post mortems a year?’ A blob of mince fell off his fork and he had to retrieve it. ‘Of course, they call them autopsies over there, but a rose by any other name …’
‘Riveting,’ Henry Hall stuck to coffee. If truth were told, he’d never really been happy around corpses – he who had seen so many. He’d lingered for as long as he’d had to in Firmin’s basement mortuary, but the bright lights and moving people of the hospital canteen were altogether more comforting. Even so, the memory of the dead man on the stainless steel kept him away from the culinary delights across the counter.
The ritual of English law had begun. The police had contacted the coroner; the coroner had contacted the pathologist; and the pathologist, he’d gone to work. Firmin’s findings were neatly labelled on the pink form alongside his trifle, all of it surprisingly legible for a medical man. Identification of William Francis Pardoe had come from DCI Henry Hall, via Dr George Sheffield, there being no known relatives to do those particular honours for the dead man. On the slab, Bill Pardoe had been photographed again, as he had been on the tarmac at Grimond’s, his pale, dead eyes immune to the camera flash, his pupils dilating no longer. Piece by piece, Firmin and his assistant had peeled off the dead man’s clothes – his black gown, stiff with his blood around the nape and shoulder, then his pyjama jacket and trousers, a sickly green and white stripe under the arc lights. There was a small, three-cornered tear on the jacket sleeve and he was wearing no underwear.
Bill Pardoe dead weighed ninety-nine kilos, about right for a man of his height and age. Slowly, the magnifying lens attached to his forehead, Firmin had covered every inch of the Housemaster’s body, from the blood-matted thatch of silver-grey hair to the broken toe-nail on his left foot. He mechanically noted on the pink form every mole, scar and blemish. Appendicitis. Three teeth extracted. Four fillings. Numerous old lacerations to both knees – the scrapes of boyhood or the clashes of lusty youth. There was a thickening of the skin on the middle finger of the right hand – that trade mark of teachers, the writer’s ridge, born of years of marking. Bill Pardoe was a smoker. His tongue, his teeth, his fingers all bore testimony to that long before Firmin got to his lungs.
Firmin noted it all on the body outline diagram on his form, paying particular attention to the angle of the neck where the impact of the fall had snapped his third vertebrae and to the ghastly crush fracture that had caved in the occipital plate of his skull.
Then, as rigor was fading and Pardoe’s limbs hung loose and flabby at his sides, the good doctor had gone to work with those instruments of ingenuity that Henry Hall would rather not think about, but that Peter Maxwell would have recognized as being appropriate to the Holy Inquisition. Not that Bill Pardoe would have cared – he was way beyond torture now. Firmin sliced a ‘Y’ into his body, lifting the neck and thorax with a skill that often astounded his guests over the Sunday roast.
One by one he filled the canoptic jars of modern pathological science – samples of Bill Pardoe’s skin, bone, blood, muscle, urine and stool tissue, brain and spinal cord.
‘Hmm,’ Firmin scooped his trifle, ‘just like dear old Mum used to make.’ He waved a cheery hand to the floozy beyond the counter, who smiled ingratiatingly back; she still harboured secret hopes of marrying a doctor, even one who was up to his elbows in dead people all the time.
‘So, the cause of death?’ Hall had to
hurry his man along. There were questions waiting to be asked at Grimond’s and no one but he to ask them.
‘Broken neck, my dear chap; in layman’s terms, that is. I suppose that’s what you’re after.’
‘And the damage to the head?’
Firmin flicked a walnut fragment out of the gap in the front of his teeth. ‘You told me he fell from a building, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘What are we talking? Thirty feet?’
‘Forty,’ Hall reckoned.
Firmin shrugged. ‘That’ll do it. I haven’t done much pure velocity since A-level Physics, but it’d be rather like being hit by a train. In falls, the body pivots forward, head and upper torso leading. Depending on the weight, side winds and so on, it twists, arms and legs flailing. No matter how determined you are, or how inevitable the descent once it’s underway, it’s instinct. You fight it. It’s involuntary. Your hands claw the air, looking blindly for a ledge, your feet for a footing, however flimsy; something to break the fall. And if you’ve changed your mind, I don’t even want to think about what’s going on inside your brain.’
He reached for his coffee. ‘Shite,’ he hissed, ‘cold again.’ He looked at Hall, hiding, as he always did, behind his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘You turn, once, perhaps twice in a forty foot drop. It was evens that Pardoe would hit the ground on his front or his back. Never on your feet. It just doesn’t happen. He fractured his left arm, too, but it was the snapping of the spinal cord that killed him.’
Hall waited. Nothing. ‘All right,’ he said, tapping a spoon gently on the Formica surface of the table. ‘Let me ask you a question you’ve probably heard before: did he fall or was he pushed?’
The sun was gilding the arms of old Jedediah Grimond on the cupola and the breeze that blows between the worlds slapped the rope against the flagpole. The Grimond crest flew at half mast and there was a funereal stillness about the place.
Peter Maxwell stood out on the leads of the old house, watching a straggling line of cross country runners winding its way over the darkening fields. It would be dusk soon, the new buds of spring shrinking in against the threat of the still-chilly night. From where he stood. Maxwell could see the wooded slopes of Selborne Hanger, the beeches silent sentinels above the granite called the Wishing Stone on its summit. Two hundred years ago Gilbert White had sat there, noting the nature around him in all its summer glory. The patchwork of fields showed a dull green with the spring sowing and a lonely tractor rattled its way across Wheatham Hill. To the south, Maxwell could make out the pretty wooden tower of the perpendicular church at Steep and the dark tunnel of yews that shielded coffin bearers with their heavy loads. Someone was ringing the peal of bells, a mournful sound that echoed the solemnity of the time, the place. ‘My name is Mary, I ring to the Glory of God.’ One the pall bearers had not carried there, though his cottage still stands nearby, was Edward Thomas, who slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack and the Royal Garrison Artillery until a bullet found him on 9th of April 1917.
‘“No one cares less than I,’” Maxwell found himself murmuring, remembering, ‘“Nobody knows, but God, whether I am destined to lie under a foreign clod.” You are, Edward,’ he sighed, his voice dying on the wind.
Below him in the quad, the police marquee was a living reminder of a newer death, as pointless as the poet’s perhaps, and the blue and white tape fluttering around it in the afternoon breeze. What was the drop from here? Thirty-five feet? Forty? It couldn’t be less. From somewhere, he heard a sound not often heard in the Rother valley on a spring day in the 21st century. It was halting and under-rehearsed, but it was unmistakable. It was the Last Post. ‘“But laughing, storming, scorning,’” Maxwell recited to himself, ‘“Only the bugles know what the bugles say in the morning, and they do not care, when they blow …’”
Forty feet. He ran his hands over the smoothness of Jedediah Grimond’s stone, mellow in the fading light. The knot of runners cursed and slipped their muddy way below the limes, past the curve of the Astroturf and on out to the cricket pavilion for the last, lung-tearing lap. He looked over the edge, at the certainty of the drop. Was it gravity that pulled him forward, willing him to jump? To feel, for a moment, the air rush through his veins in the exhilaration of flight? Is that what Bill Pardoe had felt? Before he leapt into eternity by way of Grimond’s quad? Before the ground had come up to hit him like a sledgehammer and All Things Ceased?
Peter Maxwell shook himself free of it – the pull of freefall. He was Mad Max, for Christ’s sake. He’d stood on the sites of men’s deaths before. They don’t really come back. Dead men don’t tell tales. All that is Hammer and Hollywood. All there is is emptiness and pointlessness. A sad, disturbed man had taken his own life. It happened every day. But what kind of man was it that did it so publicly? What kind of teacher killed himself in a place where he knew his kids would see him, all dignity gone, all life spent?
He was glad to be inside, on the stairs again, the brightness of the evening sky behind and above him, going down the slow way. He’d just reached the corridor that led to his twist of the stairs when he saw a boy framed in the last shaft of the dying sun. He was carrying rugger boots in his hand and the laces dangled to the floor. His yellow shirt was splattered with mud and his legs caked the colour of his socks. It was Jenkins, Bill Pardoe’s twentieth man, the eternal runner.
‘Sir.’ The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve.
‘Yes?’ Maxwell faced him.
‘Mr Pardoe, sir …’ Jenkins’ voice trailed away and Maxwell saw the chin quiver, the eyes large with tears the boy was willing not to fall.
‘What about him, Jenkins?’ The voice was soft and strong and safe.
‘He didn’t do it, sir.’ Jenkins’ chest was heaving and not because of the run. ‘He didn’t kill himself, sir. Not Mr Pardoe.’
Then he was gone, his stockinged feet sliding on the polished floor, the tears streaming down his grimy cheeks, his sobs bursting from him in a pain he’d never known.
‘Do you know, Jenkins,’ Maxwell whispered to himself, ‘I’m beginning to think you may be right.’
4
‘The sixty-four thousand dollar question is, heart of hearts, what is Henry Hall doing here?’ Peter Maxwell had asked himself the question all day. Now he was asking somebody who might conceivably know the answer – Jacquie Carpenter.
‘Secondment,’ she said. Jacquie had put off that mess under the stairs for too long. Now, at last, she was putting the cleaning into spring, the phone tucked under her angled neck in the way that everyone except Peter Maxwell could do. She hauled a box of dead Cosmos out from the dark, wondering privately how long it would be before they were Women’s Weeklies or even People’s Friends.
‘Is that usual?’ she heard Maxwell ask.
She felt her back go just a little as she straightened up. ‘It’ll be some initiative,’ she told him, ‘at Chief Constable level. Well, they’ve got to earn their obscene salary somehow, when they’re not banding together against the Home Secretary. Is he on his own?’
‘Er …’ Maxwell had to think about that one. ‘Seemed to have another suit with him. Nobody I knew.’
‘It’ll be a DI,’ Jacquie was sure. ‘Local bloke, somebody who knows the form. How’s everybody taking it? The kids, I mean?’
Maxwell shrugged. Cradled in his hands was the Grimond’s prospectus, all gloss and achievement, with the Combined Cadet Force doing hearty Outward Bound things and the First Fifteen grinning alongside a rather confused looking Martin Johnson. ‘Don’t know. The Captain of House was magnificent, apparently, when they found the body. He took charge, shooed everybody away, just like a public schoolboy in a shipwreck, really. They’re holding a service in the chapel tomorrow.’
‘Anything like this ever happen in a school of yours, Max?’ Jacquie was sifting through her mags.
‘Not exactly. Oh, a couple of nervous breakdowns, tears, tantrums. I believe it’s called CWS – class war syndrome. But suicide, no. There again …’
/>
Jacquie Carpenter sat upright, transferring the cordless to her left ear. ‘What?’ she wanted to know.
‘Sorry,’ Maxwell chuckled, crossing his feet at the ankles like some crusader knight on a memorial slab. ‘Do I detect a change in tone, Woman Policeman?’
‘There’s that word “detect” again,’ she said, getting to her feet and slopping on her mules into the kitchen, staggering just a little as the blood trickled back into her ankles. ‘What are you up to, Peter Maxwell?’
‘Twelve-year-olds,’ Maxwell murmured.
‘Really?’ she arched an eyebrow. ‘I don’t remember your name from our files and does West Sussex Education Authority know?’
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘I’m not talking about the Sex Offenders Register, I’m talking about the sagacity of the age.’
‘You what?’
‘Kids are queer cattle, Jacquie,’ he sighed, beginning to itch at this witching hour for a pint or two of Southern Comfort. ‘Until they’re eleven, they’re appalling – juvenile, smelly, with no common-sense at all. Somebody farts and they think it’s the funniest thing in the world. The word alone brings on paroxysms. At thirteen, it starts all over again. Friend Shakespeare got it wrong; there are eight ages of man, not seven. No sooner have they stopped mewling and puking than they’re farting and smoking – not to mention the Act That Makes You Blind.’
‘What are you talking about, Max?’ Jacquie was looking for her kettle under the debris of J-cloths.
‘Puberty, dear heart. Hormones whizzing around like there’s no tomorrow … Of course, for Bill Pardoe, there isn’t a tomorrow, is there?’
‘Max …’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m rambling and it’s late. No, the age of twelve, Jacquie – that tiny window of perspicacity and clear thinking as the age of innocence ebbs and the age of GCSE Guilt begins. I met a little boy yesterday – and again today. His name’s Jenkins.’
‘And he’s twelve?’
‘I’d say so,’ Maxwell nodded at his end of the mobile. ‘And he doesn’t think Pardoe jumped.’
