Maxwell's Inspection

by M. J. Trow

  ‘I presume he has a number two, so to speak? Some sort of second-in-command?’

  ‘DI … er … Detective Inspector Bathurst, yes.’

  ‘Is he in?’

  ‘Er… no. I’m DC … Detective Constable Baldock. Can I help?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’ She looked at him with disdain – the eager face, the blonde hair impressed her not one jot. ‘I’m Deborah Freeling. I understand that someone has killed my sister.’

  ‘Jesus!’ It was Hall’s turn to say it.

  ‘That’s more or less what I said, guv.’ Baldock was looking through the same two way mirror his boss was. The thing had cost half the capitation for the entire CID division last year but it had its uses.

  ‘They could be twins.’

  Deborah Freeling was being interviewed by Philip Bathurst in Interview Room Number One. Essex CID had talked to her already, but that was routine, when Paula Freeling had merely been a missing person. Now that she was a guest of Dr Astley it was an altogether different proposition. Deborah had refused the offer of a police car and the arm of a policewoman. As Phil Bathurst was now discovering, Deborah Freeling was very much her own woman.

  ‘I was hoping for something more than platitudes, Detective Inspector.’

  Phil Bathurst had drawn the short straw here. It was curiously unnerving to be looking at the animated, mobile face of a woman he had last seen as a corpse hours before. Peas in a pod, eggs in a basket, didn’t come close. It was as though it had all been some ghastly mistake, a bad dream, and that someone was playing some sort of sick joke on Her Majesty’s Office of Standards in Education.

  ‘We are at the early stages of our enquiries, Ms Freeling.’

  ‘Miss, please,’ Deborah said, looking the man squarely in the face. ‘Ms I assume was invented by dysfunctional and probably hysterical women who wanted to convince the world that society is not run by men and that they have no need of their titles. The opposite is plainly true. Which is why I am talking to you and your boss is likewise, I understand, a male.’ Her cold grey eyes had already flickered sideways. ‘This is a two-way mirror, isn’t it?’ She got up and walked right up to the glass, nose to chin with the crouching Geoff Baldock.

  ‘Christ, I wish people wouldn’t do that,’ he hissed.

  ‘Keep still,’ Hall muttered. ‘If you don’t move, she won’t see you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s like Jurassic Park,’ Baldock chuckled. Hall was curiously unmoved.

  ‘How did Paula die?’ Deborah Freeling wanted to know. She turned back to face her interrogator.

  Henry Hall could tell plainly that Phil Bathurst felt uncomfortable. But he wasn’t about to crash in and undermine the man’s credibility. The man was a DI – in a fleeting analogy of which Peter Maxwell would have been proud, Hall decided to let him win his spurs.

  ‘She was stabbed, Miss Freeling,’ the DI said. ‘More than that, I cannot say.’

  There was no emotion from the woman, no change of expression. She merely sat there, narrow-shouldered, tight-lipped, watchful.

  ‘When did you last see your sister, Miss Freeling?’ Bathurst sounded like a take-off of a famous old painting.

  ‘As I told your colleagues in Colchester, not for some months. We were not close, Inspector, for all our similar looks. Paula went her way. I went mine.’

  ‘Her way being …?’

  ‘Into teaching and eventually the Inspectorate.’

  ‘I was thinking about her private life,’ Bathurst said. He usually was. In murder cases, it went with the territory. The odd quirk, the unlikely link, the weird practice – motives all.

  ‘She had a small circle of friends, I believe. I never met any of them.’

  ‘No one in particular?’

  Deborah fixed the man with a steely stare. ‘If you’re hinting at sex, Inspector, I fear you are wasting your time. Paula was engaged, briefly, at university. It didn’t last. She was rather a fastidious person, fussy even. I doubt anyone would have spent any extended time with her for that reason. I expect she was rather lonely.’

  ‘You can’t tell me much about her friends, Miss Freeling. What about her enemies?’

  For the first time, Deborah Freeling laughed. It was brittle, sharp and all the more unexpected in that bleak, chill room discussing her sister’s death. ‘If you mean, was there an army of disgruntled teachers queuing up to kill her, I very much doubt it. Although …’

  ‘Although?’

  ‘The last time we spoke, on the phone, she told me she’d been receiving abusive letters.’

  ‘What sort of abuse?’

  ‘She didn’t elaborate. Merely that she found them hurtful.’

  ‘Did she tell the police?’

  ‘That was my question. She said she was thinking about it.’

  ‘Did she keep them, do you know, the letters?’

  Deborah shook her head. ‘I really don’t know. She seemed genuinely rattled by them, though. Not like Paula. She was, in her way, something of a brick.’

  For a moment the pair faced each other. In the adjoining room, beyond the tell-tale glass, Hall motioned to Baldock. ‘Geoff, get on to Colchester. I want Paula Freeling’s house gone over with a microscope. We’re especially interested in threatening letters.’

  ‘We’ll need a warrant, guv,’ Baldock’s grasp of procedure was commendable.

  ‘Correction,’ Hall rumbled, ‘Essex CID will need a warrant.’

  ‘On it, guv,’ and the DC was gone.

  ‘Inspector,’ Deborah Freeling broke the silence. ‘You have no doubt formed the opinion that I am a heartless, unfeeling sister. Well, let me assure you that isn’t quite so. But I feel more anger than grief at the moment. Daddy always taught us to be proud of the Freeling name; he was on the North Atlantic convoys during the war. Grandfather was at Jutland. No one, no one in the world, has the right to take a life. And never, never, never the life of a Freeling. You will solve this case, won’t you?’

  Bathurst just looked at her, for the moment all platituded-out.

  Usually, the Monday after an Ofsted Inspection would be rather a joyous affair. In every school that had passed, the Headmaster would wheel in several cases of Moet and Chandon, the children would be given a holiday and there would be massive staff bonuses for colleagues who had done such a fine job. And that was fine for the readers of Mr Chips and Enid Blyton. Reality was curiously muted. Neurotics who had underachieved during the Inspection just whinged more loudly about the unfairness of the system, the straitjacket of the National Curriculum and what an unprincipled wanker James Diamond was.

  Except that the Monday following Leighford’s inspection was anything but usual. For a start, there had been no inspection after halfway through Day Two. No one had been properly inspected. There were no plus points, no minuses, nothing, as yet, needing urgent attention. Everything and everyone was in limbo, like a film frozen. Piles of lesson plans still lay unread, stacked in Aitch One, feet from where a man had died. Piles of exercise books remained unchecked. And Aitch One was a murder scene, the tape gone now in deference to the kids’ sensibilities, but locked and still a no-go area nonetheless. So it was all rather muted; all rather odd. Knots of teachers clustered in corridors, hovered in doorways, huddled in whispers for all the world like the men waiting for Julius Caesar at the Capitol on the Ides of March. A cursory head count via the registers that morning revealed that slowly the clientele was returning, their mothers doubtless driven to distraction by having the little shites underfoot; let them take their chances with a serial-killer – what were the odds? How often could lightning strike twice?

  Using that magical free first period, Peter Maxwell went in search of Betty Martin. He wasn’t really called Betty of course – Mr and Mrs Martin hadn’t been that unkind. He was Bert and most of the kids knew the ghastly school caretaker as ‘Doc’ after the boots he’d never actually worn. Medievalist that he was, Peter Maxwell called him Betty after the old proverb ‘all my eye of a yarn and Betty Martin’, its
elf a parody of an old Catholic prayer to the saint – ‘O mihi beati Martini’. There was no point to it, really, just another reminder that this man was Mad Max.

  The pair of them were standing on the edge of the school fields, the sun already merciless as white-kitted Ten Eff Four dawdled out onto the green for some vague, American-inspired ball game. Maxwell looked uneasy – what were the PE Department thinking, giving a baseball bat to Eddie Lurch? Weren’t two murders enough?

  ‘So this is the blind spot, then, Betty?’

  Betty would never see fifty-five again. And many was the kid and member of staff who vowed he’d never see retirement either. He had all the compassion of Heinrich Himmler and, despite his job, care was something he very rarely took.

  ‘I told ‘em,’ the caretaker was the master of self-justification. ‘I told ‘em ‘till I’m blue in the bloody face. What’s the point of a CCTV camera that don’t bloody work?’

  It was a fair question.

  ‘It’s always money, ain’t it? Saving here, scrimping there. If that was a real one, we’d have got your bloke on footage. Mind you, that’s crap too, ain’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Ain’t yer seen it on the telly? That bloody Crime-watch.’ Betty Martin tried to turn himself into Nick Ross – it wasn’t very convincing – ‘“We’d like your help in locating this man.” Okay, the bloke’s as black as your hat, but you daredn’t say so for fear the bugger’ll sue you for racial discrimination. And as for a clear picture, it might as well be Wile Bloody E Coyote.’

  It was a fair comment.

  ‘Thanks then, Betty.’ Maxwell tapped the man’s arm. ‘Catch you later.’

  ‘You know who I’ve got my money on, don’t yer?’ the uncaring caretaker shouted as the Head of Sixth Form made for the buildings. ‘That bastard Ryan.’

  Maxwell chuckled and winked at him, raising his hat. Now there was a possibility devoutly to be wished.

  He took the way Boiler Man would have gone. If Martin was right and the fire alarm was smashed in the Art Block, it would have taken him … what … two minutes to reach it? Maxwell did it now, reconstructing the thing without the aid of a BBC camera crew, checking himself as he did. The six or seven herberts from Ten Eff Four who had excuse notes ranging from Impetigo to Don’t Wanna and were lounging on the edge of the field, watched his antics with disbelief. The Head of Sixth Form was walking purposefully from the hedge that fringed the road, looking at his wrist every few seconds, checking sight lines on building corners, glancing backwards over his shoulder. He was Mad all right, they concurred; could anyone seriously doubt it?

  Maxwell was up the stairs to the mezzanine floor. The glass would have been smashed by now, he told himself, the bell ringing, the meter running. Children would have been streaming out of buildings, pouring like ants along the corridor-arteries, delighted at being dragged from Maths / French / Whatever. Boiler Man wouldn’t have run as some of them did; that would draw too much attention. He’d have walked, ready with a story, a plausible excuse for being there. Perhaps here, on the landing, Olly Carson would have spotted him. Perhaps it was in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs. But Boiler Man would have had a problem as he pounded the History department’s corridor. Once that alarm went off, there’d be kids everywhere and behind them, staff closing windows, slamming doors, shutting down sections of the school. And once that alarm went off, Alan Whiting would surely be out of his seat and joining the throng. Even an Ofsted Inspector would recognize a fire alarm. So Boiler Man had to linger long enough to avoid being seen by a nosy member of staff and yet move sharpish enough to stop Whiting even before he left his desk. Split-second timing didn’t begin to describe it.

  Maxwell got to Aitch One, approaching it from the opposite direction. Had Boiler Man waited until Paul Moss had evacuated his teaching base next door, then gone in to the room through the stock cupboard? All was locked and barred now by order of Henry Hall, but Maxwell knew that Boiler Man could have entered from behind Whiting’s chair, like the actor Wilkes Booth in the box at Ford’s Theatre that night he shot Lincoln. One of the many crucial differences of course was that Booth had hit the President from behind, whereas Boiler Man had self-evidently struck from the front. Of course! That was why Alan Whiting hadn’t moved. Boiler Man would have come in from the door to Aitch One. Maxwell moved to it now, sliding round the corner out of sight to all except a bemused Year Seven kid on a vital errand for Mr Ryan. Boiler Man would have crossed the corridor, gone on with some guff about it being routine and there was no need to leave the room. It was just a drill and the Ofsted people were exempt. No need to leave his chair, in fact. That would have been fine by Whiting, busy as he was. He’d have nodded, muttered something, sat back down and probably wouldn’t have even looked up again as Boiler Man went about what the Ofsted Inspector thought was his business. And of course, it was – the business of murder. The skewer out of the pocket, the skewer in the hand, the skewer thrust forward, buried deep in the throat and left there, nodding like the brightly coloured banderillas in the shoulders of a dying bull. Wham, bam, thank you, Boiler Man.

  Maxwell swept down the stairs in the other direction, to the main corridor and the nasty little cubicle called Reception where Thingee One was the Front Line against the hells of the outside, alien world. A publisher’s rep, already risking a double hernia and the fitting of a pacemaker by carrying a cargo of books was being given the third degree by a rampant Dierdre Lessing, a fate Peter Maxwell would not even wish on Messrs Hodder and Stoughton themselves. Didn’t publishers read papers? Had they no idea of security? The Risk Assessment paperwork alone. How could anyone be so insensitive?

  ‘Thingee,’ he ducked past the demolition job and into the outer sanctum where the Ladies of the Office sat surrounded by endlessly ringing phones and the flicking monitors of the school’s only partially helpful CCTV. ‘The Day in Question.’

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ Thingee One was never exactly quick on the uptake, especially on a Monday morning and Peter Maxwell was an old man in a hurry, with a murderer to catch. Anyway, she was trying to earwig Dierdre Lessing’s unprovoked attack on the helpless hawker of books.

  ‘The day of the murder,’ he enlightened her. ‘Last Tuesday. Can you dree your weird and press any key and give me a butchers at the timetable for that morning?’

  Thingee duly complied and the screen in front of her went through the motions under her fingertips, a bewildering series of bars and options and menus, things Maxwell had only ever seen in restaurants. He checked the rooms as she scrolled down for him. His encyclopaedic knowledge of the school grounds told him that the only class on the blind side of the building would have been Eight Dee Three when the fire alarm went off. Maxwell knew them well. Even collectively, their IQs barely reached room temperature. If Boiler Man had marched stark naked through their teaching base, they wouldn’t have noticed. If pressed, Melanie would have said he was a big black man with dread locks. Bryony would have said he looked like David Beckham and Racquel would have just grinned at him. So, Maxwell patted Thingee on the shoulder and blew her a kiss. Either Boiler Man had the luck of the devil or … And the ‘or’ Maxwell realised as he went back to his office, meant that the killer was on the inside. One, as Maggie Thatcher was prone to say of her old, loyal Conservative cabinet, of us.

  Working lunch at Leighford nick that Monday was a particularly unedifying banquet. Besporting itself as a turkey salad baguette, DI Bathurst knew he could get the canteen on the Trades Descriptions Act for either of those falsehoods. The salad was warm and limp, with indescribable purple bits in it and the meat rather more Turkish than turkey. Henry Hall was sticking his finger in a less than Chief Inspectorly way inside his Salt and Vinegar crisp packet to extract the full benefit. Jacquie was on mineral water.

  ‘What have we got, then, Phil?’ The DCI was feeling particularly brittle this morning. Most of the dailies had given him a battering over the previous day’s press conference. Even the Beeb on the one o�
��clock news was persisting in using his bad side. Nothing had come down from Upstairs yet, but Henry Hall sensed it couldn’t be long. The Chief Constable’s reputation for reasonableness was legendary, but there was talk of importing foreign police chiefs; and anyone could be leaned on.

  ‘Well, these are faxes of photocopies obviously, guv,’ Bathurst spread the shiny papers on Hall’s desk, ‘so they’re not top quality. Colchester are going over the originals in their labs, but they’re not over hopeful. Six letters, the first one posted March of this year, the last one nearly three weeks ago. All word-processed, all with an Ipswich postmark. Second class stamp.’

  ‘Not only a bastard,’ Jacquie muttered, ‘but a mean one as well.’

  ‘The late Ms Freeling … sorry, Miss … is addressed formally. Obviously no signature, not even a pen name.’

  ‘What did you expect, Phil?’ Hall consigned his crisp packet to the bin. ‘Jack the Ripper?’

  Bathurst shrugged. ‘It would have been something. What’s interesting is the spelling. “Their” in place of “there”.’

  ‘Didn’t use the spell checker,’ Jacquie commented.

  ‘Spell checkers can’t help in things like that,’ Hall mused, reaching for his canteen coffee and vaguely wishing he hadn’t, once he’d tasted it. ‘Marks him down as a semi-literate, though.’

  Jacquie Carpenter knew differently. Nattering to Peter Maxwell in the long watches of the night, their conversation occasionally turned to the educational state of the nation – well, neither of them got out much – and she was perfectly aware that such errors were uncommonly common even among the relatively smart. About a third of Maxwell’s colleagues couldn’t spell – the other three-quarters couldn’t do Maths. But she wasn’t going to drag Peter Maxwell into any conversation that didn’t absolutely demand it. Instead, she played the sex card. ‘Him, sir?’

  Hall looked at her over the blankness of his glasses. ‘See something we don’t, Jacquie?’