Maxwell's Inspection

by M. J. Trow

  She looked at them both. Both her superiors, both men. The way of the world. ‘It’s just that in my experience, it’s women who usually write these things, sir. Men can’t be bothered.’

  Phil Bathurst smiled. Jacquie was right. Blokes didn’t get mad, they just went round and punched somebody’s lights out. Smiling wasn’t likely to happen in the case of Henry Hall. ‘What’s the tenor of them?’ he asked his people.

  The DI shrugged. ‘Nothing that malicious,’ he said, glancing again at each one. ‘And nothing that specific either. This phrase for instance – “I know all about you. And soon everyone will”. It’s pretty schoolboy – er, sorry, Jacquie, schoolgirl. It’s as if the writer picked a series of unpleasantries from Every Child’s Book of Poison Pen Letters.’

  ‘Jacquie?’ Hall wanted a second opinion.

  ‘I agree, sir. On the other hand, there may well be a lot of things we don’t know about Paula Freeling … yet.’

  The men were nodding. Bathurst had conceded defeat on the baguette and thrown it in the bin.

  ‘Which brings me to a proposition,’ Hall said. ‘Deborah Freeling.’

  ‘Guv?’ Already Bathurst didn’t like where this was going.

  ‘Can we use her in some way?’

  ‘What? A reconstruction?’

  ‘Not officially,’ Hall said.

  Bathurst had worked with this particular DCI for less than a year. Hall and Jacquie went way back to when she was a rookie in uniform and he’d taken her under his chill wing. She, quaking in the Red house over the strangled body of a sixteen-year-old girl. He calm, telling her quietly to go outside into the fresh air. They both thought they knew the man. And they knew that just sometimes, Henry Hall threw the rule-book away.

  ‘We keep her in the area,’ Hall said, watching them both intently. ‘Put her up at the Cunliffe – in her sister’s room if we can. We get her into Leighford High on some excuse. Get her to visit the Waterworks on the Front. Let her be seen around town a bit.’

  ‘Why, guv?’ Bathurst found his voice first.

  Hall leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. ‘I want to give our man a bit of a fright,’ he said.

  ‘What? You mean he’ll think he’s seen a ghost?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘Not quite as crude as that,’ Hall said. ‘But you’ve got the gist of it.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t see her, sir?’ Bathurst asked. ‘Or he does and fails to react?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll react all right. If you see the living spit of someone you think you’ve put away with a skewer to the throat, don’t you get just a little rattled?’

  ‘What do we do?’ the DI wanted to know. ‘Put a disclaimer in the Nationals? Sorry, we’ve got the wrong woman; Paula Freeling is alive and well after all?’ Bathurst was chuckling. Hall was not. Neither was Jacquie.

  ‘If I’d seen Deborah Freeling before the Press Conference,’ the DCI said. ‘That’s exactly what I’d have done. The woman in the bore-hole would have been Jane Doe and then we could really have made some capital. As it is … well, it’s worth a shot. We get a plainclothes tail on her at all times. Relays round the clock, watching for reaction.’

  ‘Will she go for it?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘I think she will,’ Hall nodded. ‘I think she wants to help us catch her sister’s killer, don’t you?’

  Duggsy slumped in the corner of the darkened bar, slurping gratefully on his pint. He’d been playing the Vine for two hours and had lost the will to live.

  ‘Kickarse crowd,’ mused Iron Man who joined him from one of his many visits to the loo, sliding his sticks into their case and squatting on an upturned beer crate. The domino players near the door had shuffled off into the night for their cocoa and the idiot playing air guitar was still three numbers behind, oblivious to everything but the noises in his head.

  ‘What the fuck was that riff supposed to be?’ The ever-beige Wal returned from the not-exactly-groaning bar with three pints of Stella, some of it at least dribbling down his front.

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ Duggsy muttered. ‘I’m having an off night. Got any weed, Iron?’

  The drummer’s hand slipped automatically into his jacket pocket. ‘That stuff’ll kill you, y’know.’ He passed it sideways.

  ‘Yeah.’ Wal coated his mouth with Stella foam. ‘Killed you years ago, didn’t it, Iron? Did you know, Duggsy, Iron here was killed in the war?’

  ‘What the fuck do you know?’ the drummer growled.

  The lads chuckled. When Iron growled, it was best to leave him alone.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Wal was pointing to the door. A finger was curling towards them from the door to the Snug, attached to a hand and a tweed sleeve.

  ‘Looks like the grim fuckin’ reaper.’ Duggsy tried to focus. ‘Piss me, it’s Mad Max.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Well, he’s banned, ain’t he? That fuckwit over there threw him out last Bikers’ Night. And he’s a straight-up bloke is Max. If he’s banned, he’s banned. Toes the line, he does.’

  ‘Looks like he wants another word.’ Trust Iron Man to cut to the chase.

  ‘If he wants us to play a gig,’ said Duggsy, ‘he only has to ask.’

  ‘I don’t know any Count Basie numbers,’ Wal said.

  The three of them reached the door of the Vine and sauntered out into the warm night air, trying to look casual, past the air guitarman who was having trouble finding F. The stars were bright over the rooftops and the chorus of goodnights and the slamming of car doors told the world that another Leighford day was coming to an end. The gulls had gone wherever gulls go at night time and exhausted families slumbered in their nasty little B and Bs that had looked so inviting in the brochures.

  ‘Mr Maxwell…’ Duggsy bowed, ‘… and Mrs Maxwell?’

  Couldn’t be, thought Wal. Talk had been at Leighford High that Maxwell was as queer as a row of tents. Then again, looking at the woman with him, this could have been his daughter. ‘Course, if this was his daughter, that sort of implied that he couldn’t, in fact, be as queer as … it was getting late and Wal was already out of his depth.

  ‘Iron,’ Maxwell gripped the man’s hand and the five of them sat down at the empty table on the pub’s gravelled front, carefully raked to hide the vomit. ‘When we spoke last you said you’d seen the woman at the bar …’

  ‘The pissed one?’ Iron Man had seen a lot of women in his time and a lot of them in bars. It was important he got it straight.

  ‘That’s right. Mrs Meninger. You said you saw her having a row with a bloke out here, in the car park. The bloke with the black bag.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Iron Man remembered.

  ‘Did he look like this?’ Maxwell held a sheet of paper up to the light above the table. It had a face on it.

  ‘’Ere,’ Duggsy squinted at it. ‘That’s an E-fit, ain’t it? I seen ‘em on Crimewatch.’

  Iron Man was staring at the face.

  ‘Does it look familiar, Iron?’ the woman with Maxwell spoke for the first time.

  ‘Maybe,’ the drummer was nodding. ‘Maybe …’

  ‘What’s your interest then, darling?’ Wal adopted his most casual bass player pose. He was a rock star on the way up. He’d once had a pee alongside Iggy Pop. Not many people could say that. And she wasn’t a bad looker, this one. She was clearly wasted on an old geezer like Maxwell; whereas, anyone with taste might fall prey to his raffish charms.

  ‘That’s DS darling to you, sonny,’ Jacquie flashed her warrant card and a smile at the same time. Maxwell enjoyed moments like these.

  ‘Blimey!’ Wal took an involuntary lean backwards and almost fell off his chair.

  ‘Iron,’ Jacquie focused on the drummer, talking to him softly and slowly. She’d met the type before, an ageing rocker with a brain fuddled by too much booze, too much grass, too much noise and too many late nights. That’s okay when you’re twenty, but Iron Man was way, way past that. ‘I’d like you to help us put together
a picture of the man you saw with Mrs Meninger. At the station. Can you do that?’

  ‘No.’ Iron Man looked her full in the face. ‘No, lady, I can’t do that,’ and he’d scraped his seat away and was gone into the bowels of the Vine again to de-rig, to collect his money, to go home.

  ‘Er … Iron Man don’t do police stations, officer,’ Duggsy smirked. ‘Far too many unpaid parking tickets, know what I mean?’

  ‘What about you two?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Did you see the man with Ms Meninger?’

  ‘No,’ said Wal, looking vague. ‘No, we didn’t. We saw the bloke she was with at the bar. The dead bloke. Iron says it wasn’t the same one though.’

  ‘Did he do it, then?’ asked Duggsy, suddenly fascinated to be at the centre of a murder enquiry. ‘Did he top him?’ Pound signs flashed into his eyes at the thought of his exclusive story to the News of the World.

  ‘That, Matthew,’ Maxwell tapped him on the scrawny chest, ‘is exactly what we’re trying to find out.’

  And the couple took their leave, turning away into the night.

  ‘What about that then?’ said Duggsy. ‘Old Mad Max helping the police with their enquiries, eh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ muttered Wal, feeling brave enough now to take a drag of his friend’s roll-up. ‘Who’d have thought it. Do you think he’s slipping her one, as well?’

  ‘What, in bed with Joe Law?’ Duggsy watched their silhouettes disappear around the corner. ‘It’s possible. We didn’t call him Mad Max for nothing, did we?’

  Maxwell looked at the E-fit again in the brief glow from Jacquie’s courtesy light. He had gone to the station late that afternoon when the DCI had gone home to tease his problems over a gin and tonic on the patio. He knew a friendly Woman Policeman who knew a computer whizzo who knew which buttons to press.

  ‘I can remember when these things were done by an artist,’ he said. ‘Budding Van Goghs were queuing up for the job.’

  ‘Too many variables.’ She closed the door. ‘Artistic licence gets in the way. Computers don’t have interpretation. Still think it’s a good likeness?’

  ‘Of the man I saw in the Little Teachers’ Room at yon hostelry only a week since? Yes, I do. Smaller eyes, perhaps. Oh, God, Jacquie, I don’t know. How sure can you be? A total stranger in the gents – chaps that piss in the night.’

  She snorted in spite of herself. ‘Let’s get you home, Peter Maxwell, before we both turn into pumpkins.’

  ‘Does this mean you aren’t coming across … er … over?’ She thwacked him with the E-fit before belting up and hitting the ignition. ‘Early start tomorrow. We’re trying to reconstruct Paula Freeling’s known movements.’

  ‘No chance of me talking to the Ofsted team, I suppose?’

  She eased off the brake and the Ka purred down the hill towards the sea. ‘Absolutely none,’ she said. ‘I suppose there’s no point in me asking you not to show that E-fit to Olly Carson?’

  He shook his head in the darkness. ‘Absolutely none,’ he said.

  Chapter Nine

  It rained that Thursday. Had Leighford been in India, people would have been dancing in the streets after weeks of drought, grateful for the life-giving water. As it was, Leighford was in Sussex and people just moaned about the god-awful weather. Some summer, eh? ‘Still,’ Peter Maxwell heard Mrs Troubridge say as he saddled White Surrey in the morning, ‘the gardens need it.’ There’d be a hosepipe ban by nightfall.

  Henry Hall had taken over the suite of offices on the first floor of his nick as an incident room. Twice the number of deaths, twice the space needed to investigate them. Or so it seemed. It was time to take stock. House-to-house depositions were piling up on woodwork, phones were ringing off their hooks. VDU screens flickered green in the suddenly dull, dark July day.

  ‘Stop me if I go wrong,’ he said to his assembled team. For all it was raining outside, large drops bouncing off the foliage that fringed the nick, it was still unremittingly sticky, so that Hall’s shirt was clinging to him already. ‘Paula Freeling was last seen alive on Wednesday night, after supper at the Cunliffe. She’d seemed in tolerably good spirits, bearing in mind her shock at finding Alan Whiting dead. The Ofsted inspectors had played a few hands of cards, although inevitably the mood was solemn. What’s the next step, Jacquie?’

  ‘She was reported missing the next morning, sir,’ Jacquie filled in for him. ‘When Sally Meninger went to her room. Her bed had not been slept in, from which we conclude she’d left the hotel the previous night.’

  ‘Right.’ Hall stepped in again. ‘Thoughts on that.’

  ‘Two possibilities.’ As the senior man, Bathurst thought he ought to comment. ‘Either she left of her own accord. Or she was abducted.’

  ‘Right,’ said Hall again, gratefully accepting a fresh cup of coffee from a WPC. ‘Go with the first.’

  ‘If she went voluntarily,’ Bathurst had been wrestling with this one for the past two days, ‘where did she go? We’d asked the team to stay on at the Cunliffe, but they were free to come and go as they pleased. The inspection at the school had been cancelled, so technically she had nothing to do the next day. Now, we’ve been working on contacts for her. There’s a sister, Deborah, who’s staying at Dornford Lodge, in the town.’

  ‘Where?’ Pat Prentiss wanted to know.

  ‘Hotel along Sea Street,’ Bathurst confirmed, perhaps a little too quickly. Only he and Hall and Jacquie Carpenter knew of the plan to move her into the Cunliffe. ‘She’d had no word from the dead woman for several weeks and hadn’t seen her for months. Friends are few and far between, but we’ve drawn a blank so far. She certainly wasn’t in touch with Ofsted Head Office – they’ve no record of a call, e-mail or fax.’

  ‘So, if she left of her own accord,’ Hall was still worrying it, ‘where did she go and why should she leave?’

  ‘More rattled by her experience than anybody realized, guv?’ DC Baldock thought it was time to make his mark on the day’s proceedings. Never let a briefing go by. ‘Temporarily off the rails?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Hall nodded, ‘but the bottom line is that somewhere along the way she met up with our friend with the skewer. So, let’s assume he’s proactive in this. He gets into the Cunliffe on the Wednesday night. How?’

  There was a pause. ‘It’s hardly Fort Knox,’ Pat Prentiss had worked on the place. ‘It doesn’t have CCTV and there are three entrances even without the kitchen door. Chummy could have got in easily without passing the front desk.’

  ‘How would he know which room she was in?’ Baldock asked. Henry Hall raised an eyebrow. The man with the blonde hair and the baby face wasn’t going for Pat Prentiss’s job; he was going for his. All eyes turned to Pat.

  ‘O.K.,’ the older DC shrugged. Prentiss was unfazed by whippersnappers. ‘He went in past the front desk. That’s the only place the register is kept. He must have had a shufti.’

  ‘Get onto that one, Pat. Check with the desk man.’

  ‘I did, sir.’

  ‘Check again.’ Hall was firm. He didn’t like loose ends. And he didn’t like chasing will o’ the wisps.

  ‘On it, guv.’

  ‘All right,’ Hall leaned back on his desk top, cradling his knee. ‘He gets to Paula Freeling’s room. Why is he there?’

  A silence.

  ‘Anybody?’

  ‘He’s on a mission,’ Bathurst proffered.

  ‘What?’ someone asked. ‘To wipe out the whole Ofsted team?’

  There were murmurings. It didn’t sound likely.

  ‘She’d seen him,’ Jacquie suggested. ‘Either killing Whiting or at least leaving the room at Leighford High. That whole episode called for split-second timing.’

  ‘She’d seen him,’ Hall repeated, recognizing the logic in that. ‘Why didn’t she tell us?’

  ‘You interviewed her, guv,’ Bathurst was the only one with the rank and gravitas to bring it up. ‘Did she give any hint?’

  Hall was jogging his memory, reliving the moment, shaking
his head. ‘She was upset, of course,’ he said. ‘She screamed when she saw the body.’

  ‘Peter Maxwell confirmed that, sir,’ Jacquie said.

  Hall looked at her. It was That Man Again, although the DCI was too young to remember the programme of the same name. ‘She certainly didn’t say anything about a sighting, no.’

  ‘Which she would have done, surely,’ Bathurst said.

  ‘So, it was only his perception, then,’ Jacquie followed on, ‘that she’d seen him.’

  ‘Ironic,’ Hall nodded. ‘But the bottom line’s the same. Whether she actually saw him or he merely thought she did, the solution would be identical. He had to shut her up. So,’ Hall crossed to the plan of the Cunliffe on the flip-chart to his left. ‘Our man gets to her room, number Thirty-Two here on the first floor. She opens the door. He’s in. What then? Does she struggle? Does he kill her there? Forensics?’

  ‘Things don’t match, guv,’ Prentiss was checking his notes. ‘Astley says she died on the Thursday. That wouldn’t give us a hotel killing. And, besides, her room was clean. No blood, no signs of a struggle.’

  ‘Right,’ Hall stood, still looking at the hotel’s layout. ‘So, he takes her, still alive and presumably dressed, down the stairs and out … how? The rest of the Ofsted team. Where are they?’

  ‘Depends what time the perp arrived,’ Prentiss said. ‘The front door is self-locking. After midnight, you’d need a pass key to get in. All the other doors are locked by then, but openable, for fire reasons, from the inside.’

  ‘And by that time,’ Baldock added, ‘as far as we know, all the Ofsted team are in bed.’

  ‘Or at least their rooms,’ Hall was thinking aloud.

  ‘Guv?’ Jacquie frowned. ‘You don’t think, one of them …?’

  ‘That’s what we’re following up today, people,’ the DCI told them. ‘We’re going back to the Cunliffe for some straight-talking. Meantime, we’re back last Wednesday night. The perp is taking Paula Freeling down the stairs, here.’ He pointed to it with his ballpoint. ‘Which way does he go?’