by M. J. Trow
‘No, Headmaster,’ growled Maxwell. ‘What is ludicrous is a married man in your position in charge of a school carrying on with a tart like some overgrown schoolboy. I don’t need to mention things like pillar of society, position of trust, in loco parentis, do I?’
‘I resent that!’ Diamond was on his feet, shouting.
Maxwell was with him. ‘And no doubt you’ll resent it even more when they send you down for fifteen years.’
‘That’s preposterous!’ Diamond turned away.
‘Is it?’ Maxwell spun his man round to face him. ‘Let’s just recap, shall we? A courtroom … oh, let’s call it Winchester, shall we? Pretty building, up on the hill, next to that flinty place with Arthur’s Round Table – you know the one. The CPS will have appointed a smartarse lawyer with more tricks up his sleeve than you’ve been off on pointless conferences. You, of course, charged with murder, are assumed in English law to be innocent. Except that in the eyes of the jury on whom your freedom depends, half of them don’t think you are. They’re the half who’ll be carrying all kinds of secret baggage from their own schooldays. They don’t like teachers and they especially don’t like headteachers. They’ll all have read about the case in the Press and the Press don’t like teachers either. We’re all supposed to be like Caesar’s wife, except the public don’t buy that. We’re either drip-feeding leftie ideas into their little darlings’ empty heads or we are spreadeagling them over their desks as a perk of the job. The clever ones among us are fiddling the dinner money and the school trip budget. Oh, and of course we’re all bullying sadists. And I haven’t started on the facts of the case yet.’
Diamond’s eyes flickered away. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he muttered.
‘The smartarse lawyer,’ Maxwell hounded him, ‘will have to establish means, motive and opportunity.’ He stood in front of Diamond, his hands on the lapels of his invisible lawyer’s robes. ‘Mr Diamond, do you own a barbecue set? Does it have a skewer?’
The Head shook his head.
‘Of course you do and of course it does. But then, there was the spare you bought, wasn’t there, the one you sharpened to a razor point.’
‘No one could prove that.’
‘No, because you paid by cash in a big store – Tesco’s, Woolies – and you deliberately picked a checkout where the girl was not an old Leighford Hyena. But then, actual proof isn’t necessary, is it? We all know that. That scintilla of doubt that lawyers prattle on about over their port cuts both ways. Remember, half the jury hates you anyway. They’re going to believe that’s exactly what you did. And the other half?’
Maxwell let his man wander away through the tall grass.
‘Well, they’ll be sold on the motive and the opportunity.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Diamond muttered.
‘I’m talking about an old flame of yours – the smartarse lawyer will call her your mistress, with all the delicious prurience that that wonderfully old-fashioned word conjures up. The mistress who came to see you the day before Alan Whiting died, sobbing on your shoulder. “James, darling, Alan Whiting is a beast. He’s all over me. Please help me, please.”’ All in all, it wasn’t a bad impression of Sally Meninger and at least, in a way, Maxwell had called his Headmaster by his Christian name. ‘So you, twisted, deranged, knight-errant that you are, decide to sort out Whiting once and for all. Oh, perhaps you didn’t intend to kill him. Perhaps just threaten him a bit with the skewer. But he gets shirty, tells you to take a running jump. You lose your cool and whammo!’
Diamond was silent now, shaking his head.
‘Which brings me to opportunity. And your window was pretty large, wasn’t it, Headmaster?’ He closed to his man. ‘Because I think the smartarse lawyer will find three, perhaps four dozen witnesses who would swear under oath that you were not in the Fire Assembly Area. And I’m afraid, Headmaster, that I’d be one of them.’
‘Jesus!’ Diamond groaned.
He suddenly looked years older, the bottom gone from his world and dizzying destruction below. ‘I was busy,’ he muttered. ‘Some last minute paperwork, the attendance records. By the time I left my office everybody was moving back in. There seemed no point.’
‘There was every point, Headmaster,’ Maxwell sensed the man’s despair. ‘But, ever the optimist, let’s consider other possibilities. There were other smartarses on the scene. We know there was an intruder on the premises at the time of the fire alarm. We’ve got to find him, of course, but he’s our man.’
‘Do the police know this?’
‘One of them does. Jacquie Carpenter will decide when to go public with her boss.’
‘I’m not sure that helps,’ Diamond scowled.
‘Really? Why?’
‘Max … I haven’t been totally truthful.’
Maxwell raised a deadly eyebrow.
‘You see, I went to the Cunliffe. Sally rang me and I went to visit her.’
‘When was this?’
‘When?’ Diamond was fighting back his fear. ‘That was on the night that Paula Freeling disappeared.’
Chapter Eleven
‘How much can you tell me?’ Maxwell was on the phone in his lounge at Columbine, defiantly staring at that pile of exercise books that had been staring back at him now for over three days. He’d have to get them back to Seven Gee Eight tomorrow because even his excuses were wearing a little thin – ‘I want you to work on paper today’; ‘it’s a sort of test’; ‘if it’s good enough, it’ll go up on the wall.’
‘If we had vision-phone,’ Jacquie said, ‘I’d say something like “I’ll show you mine” etcetera, etcetera.’
‘So, it’s a Leighford standoff,’ he laughed. ‘Ladies first, of course.’
‘All right.’ She relented or they would have been swapping platitudes all night. ‘Geoff Baldock over-reacted this morning. Phil Bathurst went mildly apeshit and it wasn’t helped by your grand entrance.’
‘Now, Woman Policeman,’ he chided gently. ‘Somebody has to stand up to you bullying bastards in this great Police State of ours.’
‘I should’ve thought James Diamond could have looked after himself.’
‘Legs?’ Maxwell sucked in his breath. ‘Not a hope. How that man got beyond third in a department, I’ll never know. Besides, I don’t expect he’s been arrested before.’
‘We’re looking into previous now,’ she chuckled.
‘Oh, come on, Jacquie. Legs Diamond may be a sorry excuse for a Headmaster, but a murderer? What’s Bathurst doing about Baldock?’
‘Sent him home with a flea in his ear this morning.’
‘Suspended?’
‘Not officially. Just told to cool off, consider his future and so on. It’s up to Henry Hall ultimately. Now it’s your turn…’
‘Uh-huh,’ he shook his head, sipping the huge Southern Comfort he’d poured for himself. ‘I haven’t gleaned anything like enough information yet. Why was Baldock so over-zealous?’
‘Hey, that’s two bits of information,’ she sulked, curled up as she was on her settee in a dressing gown with a Patricia Cornwell.
‘Au contraire,’ he argued. ‘It’s only an extension of the first bit. Probably not even buckers for promotion go out to arrest anyone arbitrarily.’
‘All right,’ she said after a pause. ‘But then it’s definitely your turn.’
‘Cross my heart.’ He did it automatically, those long ago mantras of childhood engraved on people, as they are, for ever.
‘Sally Meninger,’ she said. ‘She told Baldock Whiting was giving her a hard time. Sexual harassment. And she told James Diamond the same – on the day before Whiting was killed. Geoff just put two and two together.’
‘Aha,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘And got twenty-two.’
‘Your turn,’ Jacquie reminded him. ‘What did you get out of Diamond this afternoon?’
‘Who says I got anything?’ he said coyly.
There was a pause. ‘Don’t give me that crap, Peter Maxwell,’ she warned.
‘I rang you at school about three. Talked to the switchboard girl.’
‘Yes,’ Maxwell stretched his tired feet. The Downs had been hot and the ground had been iron. ‘Thingee Two.’
‘I think you’ll find her name is Amy,’ Jacquie said.
‘Get away!’ Maxwell was learning something every day. ‘Amy, Emma; you can see why I can’t tell ‘em apart, can’t you?’
‘She said you and the Head left a message that you were in conference. So what did the conference throw up?’
‘Ah, conferences.’ Maxwell saw a smokescreen shimmering on his horizon. ‘Did I ever tell you about the time …?’
‘Max!’ He pulled the receiver away in time to save his eardrums from a damn good shattering.
‘Sorry,’ he chuckled. ‘I digress. Diamond told me the same essentially that Baldock got from Ms Meninger. He and Sally were an item, albeit illicitly. He had no idea she’d be on the team and she came to him in desperation.’
‘Baldock seemed to think she thinks Diamond did it.’ ‘How are you spelling Baldock?’ Maxwell checked. ‘B-o-l-l-o-c-k-s?’
‘So what’s your reading of it?’ Jacquie asked.
‘Well, from what I saw in the Vine last week – God, is that all it was? Last week? From what I saw, the sexual harassment was going in the other direction. Sally Meninger seemed to have got Alan Whiting like a rabbit in the headlights. She came to me waving a wad of fivers …’
‘What?’
‘I told you.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ Jacquie was sitting up, the Cornwell book flung aside.
‘Surely …’
‘Max.’ Her voice was hard. ‘I’d have remembered.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I honestly thought … Anyway, she turned up at mine out of the blue, basically offering me a bung to keep my mouth shut. I pointed out to her that I wasn’t alone in witnessing the Vine performance and that hush-money could get very expensive.’
‘How did she react?’
‘Took my point and left.’
‘And that was it?’
‘At that stage, yes. Dear old Dierdre Lessing more or less confirms Diamond’s story concerning him and Sally at Leighford.’
‘She does?’ Jacquie was wide-eyed. ‘Max, you arsehole, you haven’t told me any of this.’
‘I’m sure …’
‘Look!’ she snapped. ‘I’m putting my career on the line – again – for you and I’m getting jack shit in return. What did Dierdre say?’
‘Just that she caught Legs and Sally in flagrante in his office. Not as in flagrante as I caught the Whiting and Sally in the Vine loos, mind, but in flagrante nonetheless.’
‘And when were you going to tell me this?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Jacquie, it’s not my fault if Henry Hall hasn’t interviewed the staff at Leighford High. It’s the first thing I’d have done. Then I’d have started on the kids. A man died on our premises, for God’s sake.’
‘I’m not running the bloody case!’ she screamed at him. It was simply a reminder and no more than the truth, but it served to provide a full stop.
His ear rang again as she slammed the phone down. He sat there fuming for a while, then took a hefty swig of his drink. If Jacquie had waited, of course, he could also have told her that there was Pamela Whiting who’d visited him here at the dead of night, enlisting his help. There was Henry Hall, who’d basically called to say ‘stay out of it’. All in all, 38 Columbine was a magnet for people like Tom, Dick and Henry. And there was the fascinating piece of news, that Legs Diamond was sniffing round Sally Meninger on the night that Paula Freeling vanished from the Cunliffe.
But Jacquie was right. He’d been remiss. He knew more than the police now and he really ought to have shared that with her. He dialled the number. Engaged. He shook his head. She’d left the phone off the hook. And for the next couple of hours, as he half-heartedly checked Seven Gee Eight’s grasp of Cromwell’s Interregnum, he kept trying. And each time, the line was dead.
‘Hello, this is the Cunliffe,’ a jovial voice crackled over a particularly bad phone line. ‘George speaking. How may I help you?’
Why was it, Maxwell wondered, that public relations firms the world o’er taught their operatives such banal telephone procedures?
‘George, it’s Mr Maxwell, from Leighford High.’
‘Hello, Mr Maxwell. This is a pleasant surprise. What can I do for you?’
‘Can you see the front gate from where you are?’
He imagined George leaning far left and standing on one leg. ‘Er … yes, yes I can Mr Maxwell.’
‘Is there a policeman in the foyer, George?’
‘Yes, Mr Maxwell.’
‘Well, could you do me a small favour, George and stop calling me Mr Maxwell?’
‘Of course, Mr … Of course.’
‘Right. Look at the front gate again. Got it?’
There was a strangled sound as George adjusted his footing. ‘Yes,’ he managed.
‘Now, don’t draw attention or wave or anything, but I’m standing in the callbox to the left. See me?’
‘Yes.’
Maxwell was impressed. He could see George now and sure enough, he wasn’t jumping up and down or doing cartwheels, just a night porter having a rather loud conversation with someone; could be anyone, really.
‘Now, George, I want you to help me and I don’t want the policeman in the foyer to know you’re doing it. Are we on the same wavelength, George?’
‘Gotchya, M … mate.’ George was warming to all this now.
‘I need to get into the hotel, George,’ Maxwell told him. ‘Unobserved, shall we say. How do I do that?’
Maxwell watched as George disappeared behind the bar. A muffled voice came back at him. ‘Side door, Mr M.,’ the lad mumbled. ‘Give me five.’ And he was gone. Maxwell saw him fiddling with the optics behind the bar, tapping them and checking them. Good move. Now, he’d need to go and refill. That would mean a trip to the cellar and the way to the cellar would almost certainly be via the kitchen. Why wasn’t this guy in MI5?
Meanwhile, Maxwell had problems of his own. He’d left his trademark tweeds at home and slid quietly out of the telephone kiosk in his gardening anorak. The outcrop of rocks loomed dark against the pale sand of Leighford Beach beyond the road and the surf roared and crashed against them to mark the incoming tide. A wind had risen from nowhere and the strings of lights along the Front were dancing and bouncing, throwing weird shadows over pavement and shrubbery. He padded on his brothel creepers to the right, away from the kiosk, away from the Cunliffe’s locked front door and towards the clock and the Amusement Arcade. Suddenly, when he judged the coast, literally, to be clear, he ducked sideways in the lee of the Cunliffe’s hedge and strode across the car-park. Now was the danger time. Should any nosy copper be looking out of the hotel’s windows now, Maxwell would be a sitting duck. Then, he was lost in the shadows and tapping on the side door.
It swung open. ‘Mr M…’ but even George knew what a hand clapped over his mouth meant and he let Peter Maxwell push him gently back inside. George closed and locked the door. ‘More roof problems, Mr Maxwell?’ he whispered.
‘Something like that,’ Maxwell nodded, checking the corridors were empty. ‘George, did anyone ever tell you what a thoroughly good chap you are? Which room is Sally Meninger’s?’
The lad’s mouth popped open. ‘Mr Maxwell, I couldn’t …’
‘George.’ The Great Man sensed a certain faltering in the boy’s loyalty. ‘It might literally be a matter of life and death. Now please. Remember Leighford High, eh? Best days of your life and all that?’
‘Well, I …’
‘George,’ Maxwell spun the boy round to face a door. ‘What does that say?’
‘Fire Exit,’ George read the sign. This was a test. He’d had them from Maxwell before.
Maxwell spun him back. ‘And for that,’ he said, slapping the boy’s shoulder, ‘thank a teacher.’
‘But …�
�
‘George,’ Maxwell used the killer tone that had silenced multitudes. It was a risk, so loud so late, but it had to be done.
‘Thirty-One,’ George told him.
‘Thank you, George.’ A lesser man would have had to have used a monkey wrench. ‘When I leave, I can just nip out this way, yes? The door’s self-locking?’
‘Yes,’ confirmed George.
‘Right.’ Maxwell tapped the lad on the chest. ‘Back to your desk before you’re missed. I shall, of course, remember you in my will.’ And he was gone, hot-footing it up the back stairs with the dreadful carpet to the second floor. Here, all was silence. His footfalls made no sound as he padded past the Brannon engravings of Old Leighford when the place boasted one inn and a row of excisemen’s cottages. Lord Liverpool was Prime Minister then and a bunch of softies founded the RSPCA. He tapped lightly on the door, glancing left and right. He checked his watch. Christ, it was gone midnight. He’d left the whole thing far too late. Then it opened and Sally Meninger stood there, her long hair, usually neatly folded and pinned, splayed over her dressing-gowned shoulder.
‘Max?’ she blinked at him.
He gently pushed her backwards, closing the door as quietly as he could. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t really want to be seen hovering in your hallway.’
‘Well,’ she raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘It’s late, Sally and I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly. Actually, I’m glad to see you. You’ve no idea how boring it is here. We’ve all agreed to stay put until Saturday – and that seems an eternity away. Drink?’
‘Thanks.’
‘I haven’t any Southern Comfort, I’m afraid,’ she said.
‘Scotch?’
‘Fine.’
‘Water?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Take off your … things.’ She raided the mini-bar for them both, emptying the little bottles. With the light behind her, in fact with the light in front of her, Sally Meninger was a beautiful woman. The white bath-robe showed off her figure to perfection. But then, she knew that perfectly well. She handed him his glass. ‘Now, let’s see,’ she said. ‘You haven’t come to take up my rather clumsy cash offer of the other night, surely?’
