by M. J. Trow
The sea was restless below the grass-blown cliffs that edged the Shingle, that spit of land that ran, like Nature’s pier, out into the Channel. In the distance, the tankers crawled by in the evening sun, bright in their port colours and the gulls’ wings caught the dying embers of its rays.
From the beach below, where the darkening headland had spread its chill, the chatter and laughter of the barbecuers came as snatches of a song, now soft, now loud and the dim, distant racket of the fairground.
Maxwell’s brave new world had polarized tourists. Only the very young and the very old came to Leighford now. The bright young things were off to Ibiza or Tenerife; the bright old ones had fallen for John Thaw’s old flannel and bought a cheap, crumbling house in Provence. And so the Leighford hotels charged more to keep profits up and so fewer people came and so Leighford spiralled downwards still further. One day it would be a ghost town in some post-apocalyptic world, with tumbleweed blowing along its deserted streets and bloated corpses rolling at the water’s edge.
Maxwell’s quarry did not concern himself with the micro-economics of an ageing seaside town. His sights were set on altogether higher things as he sat, knees under his chin on the grass of the headland, a bag of sustenance by his side, binoculars on the grass beyond that.
‘Hello, Olly.’
‘Mr Maxwell.’ The lad jumped. Odd enough to be hailed at all, at sunset on a summer’s day, but to be hailed by one of your teachers, and a mad one at that …
‘You’re supposed to say “What are you doing here?” and then I kill you.’
‘What?’ Olly Carson looked perplexed.
‘Never mind.’ Maxwell sat down beside the boy. ‘May I?’
‘It’s a free country,’ Olly shrugged.
‘Ah, but is it, Olly?’ Maxwell tapped the binoculars. ‘I never took you for a twitcher.’
‘Not the nervy type,’ Olly assured him.
‘No, I meant … what are the binocs for?’
Olly opened his mouth to say something, then changed tack. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
Maxwell threw his hat down on the flattened grass, careful to avoid the sheep currants and tucked his knees up under his chin. Nothing like a bit of postural echo to make an oddball feel relaxed. ‘What if I said I was just out for a walk and we just bumped into each other?’
Olly leaned a little sideways to look the man fully in the face. ‘I’d say that wasn’t true,’ he said.
‘Stout fellow,’ Maxwell risked the wrath of Political Correctness and slapped the boy’s shoulder. For two years he’d been trying to drum a healthy scepticism into Olly Carson and it seemed to have paid off. ‘No, I went to see your dear old mum after school today. She told me where you’d be … approximately. Any luck?’
Maxwell noticed Olly’s face darken. ‘She shouldn’t have told you, my mum. Had no right.’
‘I expect she thought it was important, Olly – why I wanted to talk to you, I mean.’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He tapped the binoculars again. ‘Any luck?’
Olly took his time, wrestling with himself. When people have spent years of their lives laughing at you – never with, just at – well, you’ve got to choose carefully. Maxwell was mad, but he wasn’t barmy. The boy looked out to sea, feeling the breeze ruffle his hair. ‘Too early yet,’ he muttered.
‘Too early?’
Olly nodded. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.
Maxwell checked his watch. ‘Half eight,’ he said.
Olly nodded. ‘It’ll be about nine, nine fifteen.’
‘What happens?’
‘Foo fighters.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, they’re not really Foo fighters, of course. I just call them that.’
‘Where do you see them, Olly?’ Maxwell was well out on the ledge of no return now. He needed this boy’s help, but he needed his trust, too. At the moment he was the old duffer who screamed at him every Thursday because he hadn’t finished his GCSE coursework – didn’t do much for bonding, that kind of thing.
‘Usually low, over the horizon. Bit of a sea-mist building tonight. Might not be lucky.’
‘What do you think they are?’ Maxwell asked.
Olly shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’ But Olly Carson had been here before. He was used to grown-ups patronizing him with transparently obvious suggestions, so he thought he’d beat Maxwell to it. ‘They’re not bird formations ‘cos they’re too fast. They’re not clouds, even lenticular ones – I know the difference. They’re not aircraft either ‘cos the flight path is too erratic.’
‘From which you conclude?’ Maxwell was almost afraid to ask.
‘They are semi-luminous, cigar-shaped objects which routinely invade our air space, travelling, as far as I can calculate, at speeds in excess of eleven thousand miles an hour. That’s faster than any aircraft known to exist, Mr Maxwell. I’ve been observing them now for months.’
Maxwell didn’t really know how to follow that. ‘Do you come here often?’ sounded impossibly clichéd even as it left the Great Man’s lips, but Olly Carson was fifteen and, UFO-spotting apart, he didn’t get out much.
‘Every Friday and Saturday night,’ the boy told him.
‘But that’s party time, isn’t it? Down the Front, smashing windows and terrorizing old ladies.’
‘I don’t do that, Mr Maxwell,’ Olly told him straight-faced.
‘Tell me, Olly, how long do you stay up here on your own?’
Olly shrugged. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Sometimes three hours, four. A couple of times I’ve stayed up all night.’
‘All night?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘What does your mum say about all this?’
Olly turned away. ‘Mum don’t say nothing. She’s got a new boyfriend.’
Unlovable as Olly Carson was, the father in Peter Maxwell wanted to hug him. He’d been a dad once, long, long ago. And her photo was in his wallet now, on that darkening hillside, under his jacket – a little girl with eyes to drown in. A little girl who was gone. A little girl who was dead. He shook himself free of memories. ‘Tell me about the fire drill, Olly,’ he said.
‘What about it?’ This was one leap of logic too many for Olly Carson.
‘Nurse Matthews tells me you saw someone; a visitor, not from the school.’
Olly nodded. ‘That’s right, I did.’
‘This could be important, Olly,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Do you remember what he looked like, this man?’
‘Wore a boiler suit,’ Olly frowned, trying to reconjure it. ‘Blue. Bit grubby. Had a baseball cap on.’
In the twenty-first century, that almost went without saying. ‘Where did you see him, Olly?’
‘Round the bike sheds, going towards Art. I was late getting down the stairs.’
‘The bike sheds,’ Maxwell mused. In his mind’s eye, he pictured Leighford High’s topography. The bike sheds were a stone’s throw from the Art Department and the Art Department flowed into the Humanities Block as effluent down a sewer. ‘Tell me, this boiler man, did he seem to know where he was going?’
‘Don’t know,’ Olly said. ‘He wasn’t going to the Assembly area, that’s for sure.’
‘What about his face, Olly? Height? Colour of hair?’
The boy was shaking his head. ‘Sorry, Mr Maxwell,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t really looking at him, you know, in detail.’
‘No, of course not, Olly,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Why should you? Have you told the police about this?’
‘The police?’ The boy looked askance. ‘No fear. They’re in on it.’
It was Maxwell’s turn to frown. ‘In on what, Olly?’
‘The conspiracy,’ the boy mumbled, checking from side to side. ‘Crop circles, animal mutilations; whatever my foo fighters are. Stands to reason. That’s why no one knows what’s causing it all. The cops say they’ll investigate and then they do nothing. They’re in on it, all right.’
Maxwell smiled at the strange, lonely lad on the
hill. ‘Well, Olly,’ he said, creaking to his feet. ‘You may well be right. Hope you get some good sightings tonight.’
‘Thanks, Mr Maxwell…for not laughing at me, I mean.’
Maxwell winked at the boy. He’d never laugh at Olly Carson again.
‘Shit!’
‘What?’
Peter Maxwell sat up in bed, flinging the covers from him, wiping his face with his hand.
‘Can’t sleep, pet?’ Jacquie was less than understanding in the bed next to him as she tried to focus in the sudden flare of the lamp. It had been a bitch of a day for them all.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he threw himself back on the pillow again. ‘It’s all whizzing round, you know, like it does.’
She knew. The terrors of the night, when the little things you said and the little things you did blend and blur with the huge things yet to be said and yet to do. It all adds up to the nightmares.
‘Tell me,’ she said, knowing how just talking brings things into perspective.
‘The bike sheds.’ Maxwell was now staring at the ceiling. ‘If Boiler Man came from the bike sheds, he’s not on video. The camera at that side of the building is a dummy.’
‘We know that,’ she told him. ‘Pat Prentiss has been over the CCTV footage with a magnifying glass. Nothing.’
‘But don’t you see,’ he sat up again, wishing at times like these, that he had taken up smoking. ‘That proves it’s an inside job.’
‘What?’ Jacquie was sitting up too now, tucking the duvet over her breasts in that pointless way that women have. ‘Why?’
‘Because he knew that the camera wasn’t working. It’s the only one of the five that doesn’t.’
‘Do the kids know that?’
‘God knows,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘So what are we saying? One of the kids disguises himself as a Boiler Man by nipping off to the loo to change into a suit, nips back past the non-working camera and stabs an Ofsted Inspector just so he can add it to his CV? Come on. Max, that’s ridiculous.’
‘It all depends,’ he was wagging his finger in the half light, ‘on how much we can rely on Olly Carson.’
‘Well, you know him,’ Jacquie said. ‘What do you think?’
Maxwell wished she hadn’t asked him that. ‘This is a lad who watches cigar-shaped objects moving at umpteen times the speed of sound. He wanders the Shingle all night in search of an obsession. For all I know he’s barking.’
Jacquie Carpenter knew Peter Maxwell of old. ‘But you think?’
He looked at her. ‘I think he’s telling the truth. I think he saw what he says he saw. Maintenance men, contractors, parents, anybody, is supposed to report to Reception, at the front of the school where the CCTV picks them up. They have to sign the book and wear a badge. It’s not foolproof, but if you’re an honest citizen going about your business, it’ll do.’
‘But if you’re a killer bent on murder …’
‘Then you bypass the system.’
‘And you have to know how.’
‘Which brings us back to an inside job.’
There was a silence between them. She lay down again. ‘How many people know Leighford High?’ she asked.
‘God,’ Maxwell flung himself down beside her. ‘Nearly twelve hundred kids, eighty-plus teaching staff, over twenty auxiliaries, cooks, cleaners, groundsmen. And that’s before we get to parents, old Hyenas, governors, people coming for interviews. How many door-to-door have you got?’
He heard her chuckle gaily as she switched off the bedside light. ‘Not nearly enough. Now, go to sleep, Peter Maxwell.’ And she pulled the covers over her head.
‘You mean we aren’t going to play around?’
She half turned, reaching behind her, coming out with the old Ronnie Corbett joke. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got a golf club down there?’ There was a pause as her hand brushed against something. ‘Oh, I see you have.’
And they laughed in the darkness.
‘Fuck Saturdays!’ The day had not gone well for Brian McGhee. He shouldn’t have been here at all, but his fucking boss had rung last night and asked him to fucking do the early morning shift. Well, fuck. Not for Brian the philosophical approach to life. Not for him the joy of helping his fellow man to enjoy a clean and sparkling water supply along the south coast of this great country of ours. He grunted at Mavis, his long-suffering wife who looked less alluring by the day, whichever kid it was, and Brian had more or less stopped counting by now, clamped to one of her breasts. He’d grabbed a cup of tea he’d had to make himself and now he was off to the delights of the Leighford Sewage Plant, Southern Water’s show piece west of Brighton.
How fucking come, Brian wondered as he passed the hoarding with its glossy logo and its promise of a brave new water world, that he was actually up to his ankles in other people’s shit all day. And on a Saturday.
But it was a different kind of other people’s shit looking up at him from the bottom of the bore-hole and he’d had to sit down. He looked around. The sky was a cloudless blue, the sun climbing already and bouncing off his bright yellow hard hat. There was his van, where he’d parked it, keys still in the ignition, ready for the off later. There was the portacabin with that frosty bitch who handled the incoming calls on the Complaints Desk. He could hear the rattle and roar of the JCBs being started up on the far side of the site as Patel whatsisface kicked the beast into action. All normal. Everything as usual. Except it wasn’t. He got up again, eyes wobbling in the sweat that was running down his forehead and bouncing off his eyebrows. He rubbed his hands on his check shirt and squatted down so that his tools clunked in the leather belt around his waist. He bit his lip, screwed his courage to the sticking place and looked into the bore-hole again.
Down there, in the shadow where the sun had not yet burned, nothing was normal. A hand jutted above the level of the sand, its fingers curled, as though beckoning, saying softly through all the nightmares of his years ahead, ‘Come on down.’ Nearby a face, old, wrinkled, the mouth pursed, the eyes closed, the skin yellow with dust, protruded from the rubble. Brian McGhee sat back on his monkey wrench, utterly oblivious of the pain that shot through his right buttock.
‘Fuck me,’ he whispered.
Southern Water were no more enamoured of one of its sites being turned into a murder scene than was Leighford High School. But by lunchtime on that Saturday, that was exactly what had happened. Blue and white tape fluttered everywhere, police cars stood at rakish angles on spoil heaps and an unusually quiet Brian McGhee was helping their occupants with their enquiries, still sitting down, still trying to take it all in.
‘What have we got, Phil?’ the DCI was in his shirt sleeves, a sure sign of the mounting mayhem as well as the heat.
‘Well, at first the site manager thought someone had wandered onto the site and slipped into that bore hole over there. Now …’ He was keeping pace with his guv’nor, striding across the yard stacked with every diameter of pipe.
‘Now?’ Hall wanted one sensible answer at least.
‘Now, we know she used to be an Ofsted inspector and there’s a deep incision through her throat.’
‘It has all the hallmarks, Henry, if you’ll excuse the pun.’
Dr Astley’s voice sounded echoey, far away at the other end of the phone. That was because he was in Leighford Mortuary at the end of another blistering Saturday. Say one thing for morgues, they were excellent places to be in a heatwave.
‘I didn’t get you off the golf course?’ Hall wasn’t about to be Mr Popular and he needed all the friends he could get.
‘Not at all. As a matter of fact, you got me out of a wedding. Some ghastly niece I haven’t seen for twenty years and her lout of a husband. Chap has earrings and, I understand, tattoos. Is it me or is civilization going backwards?’
‘Civilization seems to be a pretty thin veneer in Leighford at the moment,’ Hall commented. Even with the fan whirring in his office, his collar felt like a yard of trip
e.
‘Indeed. “I am down on Ofsted Inspectors and I shan’t quit skewering them ‘till I do get buckled” – I’m paraphrasing, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Every senior copper in the county knew the famous Ripper letters, those hoaxes sent in by a sick prankster to muddy the Met’s waters long, long years ago, when policemen had to be five feet nine, of good character and vaguely male. Even so, Hall was impressed that Astley knew it too. ‘Nothing sexual?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Astley was peering intently at the pale naked corpse on his stainless steel. Hall knew that and was heartily glad they hadn’t got video-phones yet. ‘The old girl was fully clothed in the sand-pit thingy, wasn’t she? As you know, Donald did the honours of stripping her while I was driving back from the wedding of the century. Christ alone knows what she was wearing.’
‘The deceased?’
‘No, my niece. It was some sort of black creation. She’s a Goth, apparently. I always thought they’d sacked Rome or somewhere. Strange that. Her mother’s C of E.’
‘Your man Donald …’ Hall began.
‘Yes, I know. I can only apologize. Given a head wind and about another four decades, he’ll make a tolerable mortuary assistant. I shouldn’t have sent him, really.’
‘I couldn’t find another GP in the whole bloody town, would you believe, to issue a death certificate,’ Hall explained.
‘I would believe that, dear boy. Ah, appendix scar. Ancient,’ Astley was going about his grisly business as he cradled the phone in the crook of his neck. ‘It is after all a Saturday in the sailing season and my profession, if it’s in practice on the coast, owns boats. Otherwise, what’s the point?’
‘You don’t,’ Hall pointed out.
‘Ah, but I’m not your run of the mill medical practitioner, dear boy. What’s this woman’s name, Henry?’
‘Freeling. Paula Freeling.’
‘Well, Ms Freeling – and I say that because I suspect she’s still relatively virgo intacta – was tied up for a while.’
