by M. J. Trow
‘Let it go, Dierdre,’ he said softly. ‘Better we know. Both of us.’
She looked into those dark, flashing eyes. God, how she hated the man. Yet now, he was her dad, her big brother, the husband she’d loved once and lost, her priest. She wanted to tell him, wanted to trust him, just this once …
‘I opened the door,’ she said. ‘She was in there.’
‘Who?’
‘Sally Meninger.’
‘And?’
‘They were … canoodling, Max. There, in his office.’
Maxwell’s hands fell away from her shoulders and he sat there, open-mouthed. ‘Canoodling?’ he had to hear the word again to convince himself he hadn’t misconstrued the first time. ‘We are talking about Legs Diamond here, Dierdre, the most insipid …’
‘Max!’ she bellowed, on her feet now, dry-eyed, Morgan Le Fay again, chewing on men’s bones in her blood-slick lair.
‘All right.’ He followed her to the window, hands in the air. ‘I’m sorry, Dierdre. I shall need details.’
‘What?’ she spun to face him. ‘So you can gloat?’
‘She came to see me last night,’ he told her. ‘Sally Meninger.’
‘What? At home?’
He nodded. ‘I think we’re talking chameleon-woman here, Dierdre. She’s involved and she’s scared. Now tell me exactly what you saw in Diamond’s office.’
Dierdre Lessing was taking several deep breaths. This was Mad Max, the man who had solved the murder of Jenny Hyde, the man who had faced lunatics with high-powered rifles. Insufferable old fart he undoubtedly was, but he got results. ‘They were the other side of his desk,’ she said. Maxwell could picture the scene. ‘They had their arms around each other. He was kissing her.’
‘Fully clothed?’ he checked.
‘Of course,’ Dierdre snorted. ‘Good God, Max. There’s a limit.’
‘Is there?’ he asked her. ‘I wonder. Think back, Dierdre – when Whiting came on that preliminary visit, the one before half term, did Sally come with him?’
‘No,’ Dierdre said. ‘He was by himself. Why?’
He brushed past her to consult his desk diary. ‘You’re privy to the Ofsted timetable. What is it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘How many sessions did Sally have with the Headmaster? Before the balloon went up, I mean?’
‘None, as far as I know.’
‘None?’ Maxwell looked at her.
‘Why should she? She’s Humanities and Pastoral. She may have had a plenary session with him and the others and I daresay she’d be in at the final briefing – that was supposed to be happening this afternoon. But the only one who had one-to-ones with James was Alan Whiting.’
‘Not much time to strike up a relationship, then?’ Maxwell asked.
‘None at all, I shouldn’t have thought.’
‘Unless Sally is a very fast worker.’
‘I still can’t believe I saw what I did. Poor Margaret.’
‘Poor Margaret indeed,’ agreed Maxwell. Diamond’s wife deserved a medal for marrying the lacklustre git in the first place.
‘What did she come to see you about?’ Dierdre asked.
‘One thing at a time,’ Maxwell brought her back to the here, the now. ‘What was their reaction when you walked in on them?’
‘Well, James was flustered. You know how he blushes in moments of stress?’
Maxwell did, but unlike Dierdre apparently, found it less than cute.
‘He straightened his tie, came out with something about a rescheduling of the Inspection and sort of… hopped from foot to foot.’
‘Par for the course,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘What about her?’
‘Well,’ Dierdre was letting her Puritan streak hang out. ‘If you ask me, she’s no better than she should be. She looked like the cat that’s got the cream.’
Some cream, Maxwell thought. Dierdre had already convinced herself that Legs Diamond was the innocent party, that Sally had thrown herself on him, tearing at his clothes and compromising him. ‘Was he enjoying it?’ he asked her.
‘What?’
‘The snog, the embrace, the moment of passion, the clacking of tongues; call it what you will.’
‘Of course not,’ she bridled.
‘Dierdre …’ His tone said it all.
‘Oh, all right,’ she flustered. ‘Yes, if truth be told, he was. He was enjoying it. That’s what’s so … oh, Max. What can we do?’
‘We, white man?’ It was the old Tonto and Lone Ranger joke, but since Dierdre Lessing would deny ever having heard of the pair, it fell a little flat. He took her by the hand, leading her to his office door. ‘You do nothing. When you see Legs today, smile and nod as though nothing had happened. Leave the rest to me.’
He opened the door for her. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked him. Outside in the corridor, the Leighford world was already buzzing, kids wondering who’d be left in their classes today and whether the law would be back to arrest anybody. They’d resist, of course and there’d be a fantastic shoot-out in the Sports Hall, all flak jackets and SWAT teams. Instead, for some of them at least, it was Double Physics.
‘Me?’ he said, watching the merry throng jostling its way down the corridor. ‘I’m going to earn my embarrassingly inflated salary and teach some history.’
‘Right.’ Henry Hall’s ham sandwiches lay like lead on his diaphragm. It was Friday lunchtime and the July sun was at its zenith, burning through the Venetian blinds in the Incident Room at Leighford Nick. ‘Let’s recap. Philip, Miss Freeling.’
‘Paula Freeling,’ Bathurst took centre stage in the smoke-filled, coffee-brown room. ‘Last seen for certain in the Cunliffe, presumably making her way towards her room at some time during Wednesday evening. We know from the hotel staff that her bed had not been slept in – that was confirmed by Sally Meninger who went to call for her the next morning. Her handbag had gone which presumably contained cash, credit cards and so on, but her suitcase and clothes were still in the room. None of the staff remembered seeing her after Wednesday’s dinner.’
‘What about surveillance?’
‘Ah, well, there’s a snag there, guv.’
Henry Hall wasn’t surprised by this. Any police operation was only as good as the team. ‘Who fouled up?’ the DCI wasn’t in the mood for papering over the cracks.
Bathurst shifted uneasily. He didn’t like his lads exposed like this. Everybody was human. Well, everybody except Henry Hall. ‘Roger King does admit to a little ziz, sir,’ he said quietly.
Hall scanned the room. If Roger King had been standing in front of him, he’d let him have a totally different definition of being on the carpet. ‘King was on the nine ‘till six slot?’ the DCI asked.
‘Yes sir.’
‘And this … ziz. Is DC King remotely aware of when or for how long he dropped off his twig?’
‘He thinks … about twelve thirty, but he can’t be sure.’
‘Time enough for Miss Freeling to leave the building.’ Hall was clarifying the situation. ‘Or to be helped out by person or persons unknown. The Cunliffe doesn’t have anything helpful, I suppose, like a video loop?’
‘No, sir. At least, it has, but it’s faulty.’
‘Do tell,’ Hall sighed. Twenty first century technology was wonderful were it not for the gremlins, the ghosts in the machines, the dipsticks to whom maintenance was an empty gesture. ‘All right. Tell DC King I shall be seeing him in my office tomorrow morning, nine sharp. Clear?’
‘Crystal, guv.’ Bathurst could only protect his lads so far.
‘Right. Where are we on Miss Freeling? Jacquie?’
‘Spinster lady.’ Jacquie took over from a grateful Bathurst. ‘Fifty-eight years of age. Lives alone in Eastbourne. Local CID there have checked. She hasn’t been home since last weekend. According to a neighbour, she left on Sunday afternoon. The Ofsted team seem to think she travelled by train. Southern Trains have yet to confirm this. Their computer was down yesterday
and this morning.’ She couldn’t help an inner smirk. Infuriating though it was to police enquiries, it would have given the technophobic Peter Maxwell yet another chance to say ‘I told you so.’
‘Next of kin?’ Hall asked.
‘There’s a sister in Colchester; another Miss Freeling who hasn’t seen her sister in months. We’re still checking on friends, but she seems to have been a bit of a loner.’
‘Are we going Crimewatch on this one, guv?’ somebody asked.
‘No, no,’ Hall was shaking his head. ‘Chins up, everybody. It’s only Day Four. I’ve arranged a Press Conference for Monday. I don’t want to break our stride as early as this. If we go public at the weekend there’ll be questions about our efficiency. And that would never do, would it?’ He scanned the room like Robocop. ‘Especially for efficient, dedicated officers like DC King.’ This wasn’t like Henry Hall. Everybody in the room had worked with him before. He had his levels of tolerance, but they were usually higher than this and Jacquie couldn’t remember him as waspish. ‘She found the body,’ Hall reminded the room.
‘Allegedly seconds after Mr Peter Maxwell.’ Geoff Baldock was a young man in a hurry. Reputations and promotion didn’t come to blokes who sat on their arses all day long. One or two in the room, those in the know, risked sideways glances in Jacquie’s direction. She ignored them.
‘Who interviewed her?’
‘I did, guv.’ Pat Prentiss was reaching for his notepad. ‘This was Tuesday, five thirteen. I’ve got it all on tape, of course.’
‘Just the basics, Pat,’ Hall nodded.
‘Well, she was pretty shaken up at first, as you’d expect. Obviously, the thrust of my enquiry was Alan Whiting, what she knew about him and so on. She’d never worked with him before, although they did know each other.’
Hall had read all his team’s interview transcripts and he’d made a start on listening to the tapes. Even so, it didn’t hurt to go over old ground, especially now that the focus had changed. ‘In what context?’
‘Various conferences, workshops, that sort of thing.’
‘But never on an actual inspection?’
‘No, guv.’
‘Remind us of her movements last Monday,’ Hall said.
Prentiss flicked back in the book. ‘She was in the Music Department when the fire alarm went off. Seemed a little confused by it, apparently, but followed the crowds to the assembly area.’
‘She was back sooner than most,’ Hall observed. ‘We’ve depositions from teaching staff that they got back to their rooms ahead of the hordes to get the little darlings back to work. But they know the short cuts and most of them are fit enough to double up. Was she fit, would you say, Pat, Miss Freeling?’
‘Not in any sense of the word, sir,’ the sergeant said and Henry Hall was content to let the ripples of laughter build around the room. Time, maybe, for a little light relief. But he’d still be seeing DC King in his office next morning, nine sharp.
‘Could a woman have done it, Jim?’ Henry Hall didn’t like mortuaries. He liked corpses even less, especially now in the height of summer, when the blue-bottles droned, heavy with blood. It made his flesh crawl. Mercifully, he’d caught Dr Astley on the golf course, it being the good doctor’s day off and the good doctor was less than pleased about that.
‘It could have been the fairies, Henry,’ he scowled as his ball sailed high through the blue to thump into a thicket. ‘Shit!’
‘Seriously, though,’ Hall followed the cloth-capped pathologist as he rammed home his iron and hauled the bag over his shoulder. Above them was a cloudless sky and the breeze was stiffening from the south-west. Out to sea, a crowd of sails billowed together as the yachts went through their paces, making for the sea-roads of the Solent. Rich men without a care in the world.
‘Seriously?’ Astley looked at him. ‘It’s possible. The skewer was pretty sharp, wasn’t it? I mean, I don’t know much about these things. Contrary to every other family in the land, Marjorie always does our barbecues – excuse for her to nip the Meths. Now, where the bugger is that ball?’ He’d sloped off beyond the green to rummage in the rough.
‘You’re saying if the skewer was sharp enough, it could have been used by a woman?’
‘Yes. How can you lose something that’s brilliant bloody white?’ He was hacking about in the undergrowth. ‘But you’ve got the weapon, surely?’
‘We have. It’s your bog standard barbecue skewer. Comes with a spatula and a pair of tongs. Every garden centre and supermarket sells them, from here to John O’Groats. Except this one had been doctored.’
‘Oh?’ Astley paused in his vicious attack on the undergrowth. ‘In what way?’
‘The point had been filed.’
‘That would make sense,’ he nodded. ‘The wound definitely tapered. No prints, of course.’
Hall shook his head. ‘Chummy wore gloves.’
‘Ever known this before?’ Astley asked. ‘Skewer as a murder weapon, I mean?’
‘No,’ Hall admitted. ‘It’s not text book. Still, pretty efficient though. Someone deliberately sets a fire alarm, runs a carefully prepared but otherwise anonymous skewer through a man’s throat and disappears like the phantom tiddler.’
‘Unless … Ah, you little bastard. Got you!’ and he stooped to retrieve his ball.
‘Unless?’ For Hall, it was still Day Five, but high afternoon. It wouldn’t be long before Day Five became Day Six. And the Press weren’t getting any less impatient and Jim Astley had nothing to do but play a round all day.
‘Unless it’s an inside job. Why did you ask if it could be a woman? Got someone in the frame?’
Henry Hall didn’t usually discuss cases with the pathologist. He and Jim Astley went back more years than either of them cared to remember, but Astley was a difficult, arrogant bastard and his perspective wasn’t always the right one. Even so, needs must when the devil drove. ‘Possibly,’ Hall said as Astley motioned him to stand aside. The breeze slapped the little flag that fluttered in Hole Eight and Astley crouched, shoulders down, lining up the ball and it.
‘Say on.’ Astley’s swing thwacked the ball to bounce on the far side of the green before it rolled obligingly into a bunker. ‘Well, for fuck’s sake.’ He glanced quickly around. He’d already received a threatening letter for using that sort of language in the Clubhouse. True, it was to the wife of the President, but you couldn’t be too careful.
‘Paula Freeling,’ Hall said, trying out the sound in the blaze of a golf course on a sunny summer’s afternoon.
‘No,’ muttered Astley. ‘Never heard of her.’
‘Oh, I think you will by tomorrow.’ Hall sat himself down on the bunker’s edge. ‘The gentlemen of the Press will have twigged that Miss Freeling is the Ofsted Inspector who got away.’
‘Done a runner?’
‘Perhaps. She was the one who found the body.’
‘Bit obvious then, isn’t it?’
‘Finding the body, no. Actually, it’s surprisingly common. Chummy, because he’s obsessional or terrified or a smartarse, leads the police to the crime by ‘coming across’ the corpse. He helps said police with their enquiries. You’ve seen it before, Jim, I know.’
‘I have.’ Astley swung again, clumps of sand flying upward and, mercifully, a little white ball with them. ‘So, what, the woman sets off a fire alarm, drives a skewer through her boss’s throat? Why?’
‘Indeed.’ The DCI was growing more pensive by the minute. ‘That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. I don’t know enough about either of them yet.’
‘Well,’ Astley’s ball had clunked at last into the Eighth Hole. ‘Got you, you little beauty! When and if, Heaven forefend, you find a woman’s body, give me a bell. Until then, I can’t be a whole lot of use, can I?’
‘It won’t take long, Headmaster.’ Maxwell was standing along with the man, cheek by jowl as they made for Diamond’s office.
‘Well, good, Max.’ The Head was a little flustered, it being Fri
day and all and an Ofsted Inspector being murdered in his school. ‘Because I have a Full Governors’ at five.’
The Head of Sixth Form waited until the door had closed before he put a metaphorical toe into James Diamond’s murky waters. ‘Where did you say you knew Sally Meninger from?’
Dierdre Lessing had been right. The Head did blush, a rather mottled leprous inflammation spreading up above his tie-knot. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he bridled. ‘Who said I did?’
‘Sally,’ Maxwell lied.
‘What?’
‘What’s the matter, Headmaster? Are you all right?’
Diamond rounded on him, his jaw flexing. His fists clenched. ‘When did Sally say this? What did she say?’
‘When? I really can’t remember. As to what, well it was all rather vague, really. Asort of throwaway line. Is there a problem?’
He saw Diamond turn the colours of the rainbow before the man relented and slumped into his chair. Maxwell looked at him, a now colourless man in a colourless room, not a teacher but a manager; a suit held together by conference sound-bites and buzzwords. And the suit was worried and his paranoia was showing.
‘Was that it?’ Diamond scowled. ‘Was that what this was all about? A Peter Maxwell fishing expedition?’
Maxwell clicked open the door. ‘Better I reel you in than the law do, Headmaster,’ he said. ‘Because they’ve got an altogether bigger line than I have. I’ve been known to throw tiddlers back; but Mr Plod? Well, he quite often bashes their brains out on a rock. You enjoy your Full Governors’, now, y’hear.’
Chapter Seven
It must be understood that Peter Maxwell didn’t usually go out looking for fifteen-year-old boys on Friday nights. Leave that sort of thing to choirmasters and the Catholic church. No, he saw more than enough of them during the day, those curious denizens of the dark who normally shunned sunlight, who scowled under cowls throughout the winter and wore shorts down to their ankles in the height of summer. But this one was different. This was the anorak Olly Carson, who took his summer holiday in Roswell and whose bedroom door bore the triangular no-go sign ‘Area 51’.
