Maxwell's Inspection

by M. J. Trow

  The reluctant deputy straightened too, more slowly, more furious. ‘You’re telling me you’ll take the time anyway, whether I sanction it or not.’

  ‘Acting Headmaster …’ Maxwell was appalled.

  ‘You’re beneath contempt,’ Ryan growled.

  ‘Yeah,’ Maxwell grinned, pinching the man’s scowling cheek. ‘But ain’t I just adorable with it?’ He saw himself out. ‘Don’t worry, Bernard,’ he called back. ‘I’ll make sure Thingee has my lesson details. Paul Moss can handle the Department and as we both know, Sixth Form-wise, Helen Maitland’s a brick.’

  ‘So,’ Henry Hall was leaning forward across the desk. ‘It is your contention that you visited Ms Meninger in her room at the Cunliffe Hotel last Wednesday night.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Diamond told him.

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘You don’t have to answer that, James,’ the pompous arse said.

  ‘Oh, but I do, Gerald,’ Diamond said. ‘I’ve told my wife, for God’s sake. Telling the police will be a doddle, believe me. I went there to end it, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘End it?’ Hall was confused. ‘I didn’t think there was anything to end.’

  ‘Perhaps yes, perhaps no,’ Diamond and Hall could have been clones of each other. Like bookends they sat there in that sunless interview room, the clock ticking, their arms folded in postural echo. ‘When someone comes into your life from the past … someone as sexual as Sally, well … you weigh up the pros and cons. Oh, I admit, I was tempted. She made all the running in my office that day. But I owed it to Margaret and to my children – and I just thank God they’re still away at university – not least to Leighford High. I owed it to them all to stop anything before it started.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Diamond’s gaze faltered. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘James…’ the solicitor warned again.

  ‘It’s all right, Gerald, really. This is all supposed to be good for the soul.’

  ‘I’m more concerned with your career at this precise moment in time,’ Gerald snapped.

  ‘Spoken like a true brief, sir,’ Hall nodded, stone-faced. ‘But souls and careers don’t hold a candle to murder, I’m afraid.’

  ‘We had sex,’ Diamond said, cutting to the chase. ‘I’m not proud of it and it wasn’t in my game plan. But there it is.’

  ‘And what time did you leave Ms Meninger’s room?’ Hall wanted to know, the book-end unfolding his arms and leaning back in his chair.

  ‘I don’t know. Twelve, half past.’

  ‘Not exactly the demon lover, then?’ Hall ventured.

  ‘Chief Inspector …’ Gerald scowled.

  ‘I withdraw the slur,’ Hall waved a hand. ‘There’s no need to add insult to injury, is there? When you left Ms Meninger’s room, at twelve or half past, where did you go?’

  ‘Home. No,’ Diamond changed tack abruptly. ‘No, I drove around for a bit.’

  ‘Drove around? Where?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Along the Front, out on to the Shingle. I was upset, confused. That terrible business with Alan Whiting …’

  ‘Did anybody see you?’ Hall asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Diamond snapped. ‘What a bloody silly question. How do I know whether anybody saw me or not?’

  ‘All right.’ Hall was reason itself. ‘Let me put it another way. Did you see anybody?’

  ‘What? On foot, you mean? No, nobody. It was late. There was the odd vehicle. Oh, I remember I saw a fox down on the beach.’

  ‘A fox?’ Hall frowned, looking at Diamond, then at the brief.

  ‘Yes, odd, wasn’t it? I know they’re urban and so on, but you don’t expect to see them by the sea. He was … sort of … playing with the surf, chasing the waves and trying not to get his feet wet.’

  There was a pause. ‘So what time did you get home?’ Hall asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Two, half past. I don’t remember. It was late.’

  ‘Do you have a garage, Mr Diamond?’ the Chief Inspector wanted to know.

  ‘Yes, of course. What.’

  ‘I’d very much like to see it, if I may.’

  ‘You’ll need a warrant, Chief Inspector,’ Gerald told him flatly.

  ‘Will I, Mr Diamond?’ Hall ignored him. ‘Will I really have to go to these lengths with a man who assured me not an hour ago that all he wanted to do was to help?’

  ‘No,’ Diamond said quietly, avoiding Hall’s blank glasses and the blank eyes that lay behind them. ‘No, you won’t.’

  Chapter Twelve

  It was a little after lunchtime that they arrived at Leighford High; two women striding purposefully across the car-laden tarmac in the blazing afternoon sun. The taller and younger of them flashed her warrant card at the Reception Desk and Thingee Two went through the motions. The police had been wandering in and out all week, checking on this, verifying that. But still no interviews of the staff, still no interviews of the kids.

  Peter Maxwell did a double-take. He was striding the mezzanine floor like a Colossus when he saw her, his Jacquie, wandering back to her Ka. He tried to slide up the window, but it was jammed by years of regulation white gloss paint, so he hammered on the glass. She turned at the sound, along with a trio of sixth formers about to slope off rather than face double Business Studies. Their eyes locked across a crowded school and no one moved. Then she turned and vanished behind the tress. The sixth formers looked suitably sheepish, astonished anew by their Year Head’s ability to smell their scam at a couple of hundred yards. How did he do it, the eagle-eyed old madman?

  What the eagle had not seen from his sixth form eyrie was the other woman, the little one with the wiry frame and sprightly step. But everyone who passed her did. Deborah Freeling walked the way that Jacquie had shown her, noting the reactions of all she saw, as Jacquie had asked that she should. The odd wandering kid on his way to the loo via lung-cancer paid her no attention, but every teacher looked twice. Dierdre Lessing opened her mouth to challenge her, she who routinely turned publishers’ reps away, but she couldn’t find the words. It was as if Paula Freeling had come back to the scene of the first crime. And from the look on Dierdre’s face, she’d just vanished through a wall.

  That was the night of the Grad Ball. They held it that year at the Old Mill in Tottingleigh and the Ball Committee of Year 13 had decided it should be masked. Umpteen Zorros turned up and even one Lone Ranger, but most of the girls, shining in their lovely gowns, simply wore glittering sequinned and feathered creations which caught the starlight in the Mill’s grounds. The place had been gentrified years ago and hadn’t seen a corn ear ground in anger for aeons. At the bar, the collective rowdies of the Gorilla Club spent most of the evening belching, trying to outdrink each other and guessing which girl was which by the size and inclination of their breasts.

  ‘That’s Hannah Willoughby,’ insisted one.

  ‘Never!’ another bellowed. ‘Janet Levington.’

  ‘Come on, you people,’ a third piped up. ‘Look at the left one – Sam Haygarth.’

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ said a voice behind the long, slightly uptilted nose, ‘that it’s Georgina Adams.’

  A pause.

  ‘God, he’s right.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Maxwell.’ And the impressed Gorillas saluted him with their raised pints as he swept out onto the terrace.

  ‘Lovely night, Senior Mistress Mine,’ the Head of Sixth Form said to Dierdre Lessing, looking positively skeletal in a black velvet number.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Max.’ She stepped aside. ‘I didn’t recognize you without the hat. Who are you supposed to be?’

  ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ he felt it a little superfluous to say, bowing low with a flourish. ‘Swordsman, poet, scientist, man of letters, most of them French. Very like my good self, really, without the scientist bit.’

  ‘What news of James?’

  ‘I’d hoped he’d be here,’ Maxwell surveyed the mingling crowd looking for the demon Headmaste
r.

  ‘Would you,’ Dierdre asked him, ‘given the situation?’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Given the situation I most assuredly would,’ he said. ‘If he has nothing to hide. Bearing in mind he was whisked away with a great deal of excitement by the boys in blue, I’d have thought it incumbent upon him to show his face, albeit unmasked.’

  ‘Well, you galloped off the other morning to his rescue,’ Dierdre retorted. ‘What does he have to hide?’

  ‘That, Senior Mistress, remains to be seen. Don’t they look lovely?’

  Maxwell grinned broadly. The Old Mill was aglow with soft mock-candlelight, the coloured bulbs strung across the terrace swaying in the gentle breeze and just beginning to jump a little as the DJ got into full swing, his woofers and tweeters working overtime as the Peaveys kicked in. The cocktail sausages and other finger-food still lay untouched on the long tables as bevies of lovelies rolled up in the constant relays of stretch limos, black and white, that brought them to the door. They giggled together behind their masks, eyeing the Gorilla Club who lined the bar, each of the lads wearing a bandanna over their noses and mouths which they had to lift up each time they wanted a sip of their drinkies. Not much forward planning had gone on there. The more athletic of the girls were whirling round the tiny dance floor where coloured lights flashed in the semi-darkness. In Maxwell’s day, they’d have been dancing around their handbags. On the terrace and the lawns that rolled away to the lake, knots of lovers took advantage of the increasing dark.

  ‘I wonder how many pregnancies Leighford High will be responsible for tonight?’ Dierdre asked, eternally seeing life’s glass as half-empty.

  ‘”After the Ball was over”,’ sang Maxwell softly, ‘”Oh we had such fun, putting the girls in the corner and …” you should have more faith in the school’s sex education programme, Dierdre. Anyway,’ he looked her up and down sharply under the mask, ‘Weren’t you young once?’

  She scowled at him. Maybe not.

  ‘Mr Maxwell, Mr Maxwell,’ a breathless girl bounced against him as he lolled against the parapet.

  ‘Judith.’ He caught her in an expert way that avoided a handling charge, and recognized the matronly bosom. ‘Having a good time?’

  ‘We’re going to get married,’ she slurred happily, dragging a captive geek by the hand. ‘Aren’t we, Tom?’

  Tom wasn’t sure what the question was and looked decidedly pissed in his hired black tie and his new marital status.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Maxwell.

  ‘And we’re going to call our first baby after you,’ Judith wobbled, trying to keep the great man in focus.

  ‘Head of Sixth Form Jennings,’ Maxwell smiled, benignly. ‘Yes, that has a certain ring to it.’ And he barely had time to duck before Judith had planted a slobbery kiss on his cheek and giggled away into the long goodnight.

  ‘Disgusting!’ growled Dierdre.

  ‘Lighten up, Senior Mistress. Tomorrow, Judith will have forgotten this conversation ever took place and Tom will be a happier man for it. Look at them.’ He raised his glass to them all. ‘You and I remember this lot when they were eleven, all bony knees and big eyes. What’s that corny song from Fiddler on the Roof? “When did she get to be a beauty? When did he grow to be so tall?” Corny, but true.’

  ‘Max, you old bastard!’ Ben Holton slapped the man on the back. It was odd to see him without his white coat.

  It was Dierdre’s cue to slope off. ‘Thank God for that,’ the Head of Science muttered, watching her go. ‘I haven’t had half enough of the tincture to cope with that all evening. What news on Diamond?’

  ‘Is that everybody’s sole topic of conversation?’ Maxwell asked him. ‘Look around you, Ben. The crème de la crème of Leighford High – the golden girls and the lovely lads – or is it the other way round? We made them, Ben, you and I – oh, and their parents of course, a gene here, a chromosome there and a lot of environmental tosh, I’m sure.’

  ‘Could you be any more maudlin?’ Holton wondered aloud, slurping his pint.

  ‘Sorry,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘I’m a funny age. Tell you what,’ he twisted his long nose from side to side, ‘it’s a bitch trying to drink in this.’

  ‘That’s why I didn’t bother,’ Holton said, swigging again.

  ‘Aaarghh,’ Maxwell staggered sideways. ‘You mean, that’s not a grotesque mask?’

  ‘Oh, ha,’ was Holton’s best response. ‘Let me get you another.’

  ‘Thanks, Ben.’ Maxwell held up his glass. ‘Some of whatever that was. I’d better not mix my drinks. It’s not the witching hour yet and I’m cycling later.’ And the Head of Science disappeared into the bowels of the Mill, blissfully ignorant of the V signs from the Gorilla Club behind his back.

  ‘No Jacquie tonight, Max?’ Sally Greenhow was wearing a stunning emerald green creation that clung to her body like a lawyer to his client.

  ‘Er … no,’ Maxwell bluffed, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Something came up.’

  ‘Diamond?’ she whipped up her feathery mask to her hairline to look him straight in the eye.

  ‘I really can’t say,’ Maxwell said. ‘Where’s your better half?’

  ‘Looking down some girl’s cleavage at the bar. They look nice, don’t they?’

  ‘Cleavages?’

  ‘The kids,’ she tapped him with her stole ends.

  ‘They do,’ he nodded. ‘I was saying as much to Dierdre and Ben. They can’t see it.’

  ‘Well, there’s a surprise. You know Margaret’s left him, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  Sally nodded. You got a superior kind of tittle-tattle in Special Needs. ‘As I live and breathe. This morning, apparently. Gone to her mother’s.’

  ‘A little stereotypical, perhaps,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘Mother of God, what’s that?’

  A crash punctuated proceedings followed by a wailing sound. All heads turned in the direction of the ballroom.

  ‘That’ll be the Live Music starting,’ said Sally. ‘Nice of you to book the Hippos – old Leighford Hyenas and all.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Maxwell told her. ‘Helen,’ he growled.

  Maxwell’s Number Two had not chosen wisely. Already known as the Fridge by generations of sixth formers, her cream creation with the mock pearl motif merely confirmed the sobriquet. ‘Hello, Max.’ She appeared to have a male stag beetle on her head.

  ‘I thought the Ball Committee had hired Afterbirth,’ he pecked her on the cheek and she kissed thin air.

  ‘Lord, no, they’re signed, whatever that means. Luckily, Glenys Turnbull’s sister goes out with the lead singer of the Yawning Hippos. So here they are. Stroke of luck, eh?’

  ‘Top hole.’ Maxwell’s grin froze as Duggsy’s tonsils shattered glass, ‘I think you’ll find however, there is only one singer, so “lead” is a little optimistic.’

  ‘Who the fuck booked them?’ groaned a passing sixth former.

  ‘Shrewd question as always, Dean,’ Maxwell called. ‘But I’d remind you there are ladies present.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Maxwell. Sorry, Mrs Maitland. Sorry, Mrs Greenhow.’

  ‘Such a polite boy,’ beamed Helen.

  ‘Mr Maxwell!’ a voice made them all turn. ‘They’re playing our tune.’

  ‘No.’ Maxwell retreated, both hands outstretched at the advance of Sylvia Matthews. It was a ritual they’d played out now for years. ‘No, really, Sylv.’

  The Nurse still turned heads in her red sequinned dress and could cut a swathe with the best of them. ‘That’s what they always say.’ She laughed and grabbed his wrists, whirling him towards the floor and pecking him on the cheek.

  ‘How can we possibly dance to this?’ he shouted as the cheer went up as his sixth form recognized him, elegant and black and white as his cat, but topped with an outsize nose.

  ‘It’s a sort of foxtrot,’ she lied. ‘You’ll get the hang of it.’

  ‘Hanged if I will,’ he said, pointing his finger skyward in a passable John Travolt
a, to the roar of his thousands. ‘Anyway, I’m that unfortunate generation that falls between two stools – too young for the foxtrot and decidedly too old for whatever these people do nowadays. I’m more your Gay Gordons, but I’ll sue the arse off anybody who says so.’ And he wheeled her away in something somewhere between the Veleta and the Mashed Potato.

  ‘At last!’ Helen Maitland was patrolling the edge of the dancing area as Maxwell came off the bend like Tony Curtis hurtling out of the Triple in Trapeze.

  ‘You can say that again,’ he wheezed, steadying himself against a pillar. ‘Thank you for caring about me, Helen,’ and he mimed a kiss.

  ‘Not you, you old layabout. The photographer’s here. We got a call to say he’d been held up. I’ll just get whatsisface with the microphone to announce it.’ And she was gone, all bustle and flurry.

  ‘So who’s doing the speeches in the absence of Diamond?’ Ben Holton passed a drink to the grateful Head of Sixth Form, as his graduates got down to some serious boogying.

  ‘Me, I suppose,’ Maxwell bowed to Sylvia Matthews who beetled off in search of her life, as opposed to her dancing, partner.

  ‘That’ll give us a few yucks, then.’ Holton yawned. ‘Tell me, Max, what’s the school policy on nookie on Grad Ball night?’

  Maxwell groaned. ‘Judith and Tom in the rhododendrons?’

  ‘Jeff Armstrong and Hayley Skeggs in the car park.’

  Maxwell raised the Cyrano mask and one stern eyebrow. ‘As in Jeff Armstrong, of the Design and Technology Department, teacher in loco parentis and with a legal position of trust; and Hayley Skeggs, the Lolita of Modern Languages?’

  ‘More or less,’ Holton nodded ruefully. ‘She’s a bit older than twelve, though, isn’t she?’

  Maxwell was secretly impressed. That a scientist should know the age of Nabokov’s heroine was little short of miraculous. ‘Twelve is young Jeffrey’s IQ,’ he sighed. ‘Of course, it’s an actual crime now.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Holton agreed.