Maxwell's Inspection

by M. J. Trow

  He stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I let myself in and it sort of got darkish. I was sitting here thinking.’

  ‘You should have called.’ She closed the door and tried to sweep past him, but he stopped her, holding her gently with one arm.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘Several times. Your landline, your mobile. Much longer and I’d have had to break the taboo and ring your place of work.’

  ‘Not a good idea.’ She carried on into the kitchen, throwing car keys onto a surface, looking for a beer.

  ‘All right.’ He stuffed his hands into his pockets. ‘What’s it all about?’

  Jacquie flicked off the bottle top with the gadget and turned to look at him. ‘It’s not you,’ she said. ‘It’s me. It’s this case. It’s getting to us all.’

  ‘We were supposed to go to the Grad Ball last night, Cinders,’ he reminded her. ‘Instead I got Dierdre Lessing – both of the ugly sisters rolled into one.’

  ‘Oh, Max.’ She slapped her forehead with her hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she lied. ‘I forgot. Really, I did. Drink?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll pass.’ Something told him tonight was not going to be a glittering social occasion.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘The Ball? Oh, fine, fine. Usual mix of emotions. Lads trying to get laid. Girls trying to be the belle of the ball and then get laid. Longing to take that leap into adulthood and the brave new world of University or whatever. Yet oddly terrified to kiss school and childhood goodbye. Same every year.’ He chuckled.

  She nodded. She wasn’t really listening.

  ‘Tell me about the photographer,’ he said.

  She looked at him. ‘No,’ she said, turning away to sort the mail she’d brought in with her.

  He looked at her. ‘No, in the sense of …?’

  ‘Max, this is over. I can’t go on just being your way into police enquiries.’ It was one of the hardest sentences she’d ever said.

  He crossed the lounge and looked her squarely in the face. ‘Is that what you think you are?’ he asked. She nodded, her eyes full of tears.

  ‘Are you asking me to go?’ he said.

  She nodded again, unable to trust her voice, unable to look him in the face. It had been a long time since Peter Maxwell had known rejection like this. Not since those long ago Granta days, punting down the Cam for strawberries and cream at Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester. That had been a different time – the past, that foreign country where they did things differently. He was not the same Peter Maxwell then. And he could barely remember the girl’s name, still less her face. And since then he had known the worst rejection of all – that wet, wild Saturday when his darlings, his family, died on a crazy bend on a slippery road in the middle of nowhere. No goodbyes, only fading memories and fading photographs. And years of emptiness in which he became Mad Max, the dinosaur, his heart, forever broken, on his sleeve. He wanted to say … so much. And yet he couldn’t. His mind raced over the years they had known each other, he and Jacquie, the dear, already dead days. He’d always teased her, called her Woman Policeman, swept the pale auburn hair from her face, kissed away the tears. He’d been there for her as she had for him, the late night calls and the warm silences, tucked up in his bed or hers. He’d loved the glow of the fire on her cheek, the light of the candles in her eyes and the wind in her hair. They’d laughed along the water’s edge and rolled in the sand, her bright face and her musical laughter always in his mind, filling his head, warming his heart.

  He took her house key out of his pocket and put it on the kitchen surface. She had books of his. He had CDs of hers. Presents, tokens, the silly trinkets that litter a relationship. He took her hand and kissed it – the old, romantic gesture that only someone like Mad Max remembered. Jacquie stood there, not knowing quite how her legs were still holding her up. He seemed a long, long way away at the end of a spiralling tunnel of loss and emptiness. And the old, sad lines of Rupert Brooke rang out on the velvet of his voice – ‘And I shall find a girl, perhaps, and a better one than you. With eyes as wise, but kindlier, and lips as soft, but true.’

  He looked into her eyes as they swam with unshed tears, tears which matched his own.

  ‘And I daresay she will do.’ He let her hand fall away and as suddenly as they had met, he was gone.

  She didn’t hear the click of her front door or the hiss of Surrey’s wheels on her gravel. She didn’t see his reflector lights wobbling away in the evening. That was because she was sitting on her settee in the still part-lit living room, her knees under her chin, rocking backwards and forwards like a baby. The unshed tears ran now down Jacquie Carpenter’s face and she knew they would never stop.

  Another Saturday night and Peter Maxwell had nobody. He lay in his lounge, on his settee and stared at the ceiling. He toyed with modelling, but Bob Portal was all but finished except for his horse’s reins and that was always the worst part of any modelling job – ask Kate Moss. He tried to think, but thinking was difficult because a smiling girl kept filling his mind. ‘I love you, Peter Maxwell,’ she said over and over again.

  He reached for the Southern Comfort, that glass of the warm south. Excellent though it was, it offered him little comfort tonight. The less-than-demon headmaster had gone, getting a cab back to his empty house. Maxwell knew the feeling. Except that unlike the Diamond estancia, Maxwell’s house was always empty. Empty that is except for the black and white bastard that oozed around the door, tail erect, shoulders set, wondering which of his master’s walls he should demolish tonight.

  ‘There’s been another one, Count.’ Maxwell didn’t have to glance across to know he was not alone. ‘A photographer this time. Pass me the Yellow Pages, will you?’

  Metternich looked at him with disdain. Skivvying was no part of his brief. He had a reputation in the area, for God’s sake. Hunter, night-prowler, cat-about-town. He stretched on the rug and found his left forepaw absolutely fascinating. Maxwell rolled off the sofa and got them himself. You couldn’t get the staff these days.

  ‘Off the High Street, Pamela Whiting said.’ Maxwell was explaining to the cat. ‘Just before she saw the ghost of Paula Freeling. So that means either Belvedere Street or Seacrest Road. Aha,’ he tapped the page. ‘Craig Edwards, photographer. Edwards. Edwards.’ He could picture the shop, but not its owner. He slumped back against the furniture, the phone book abandoned, the drink cradled in both hands. ‘So … stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Count, but what do two Ofsted Inspectors and a photographer have in common?’ He mused for a moment. ‘Fucked, as Year Ten would say, if I know.’

  The lights were still burning in Leighford nick that night and Henry Hall was in conference with Phil Bathurst, both men tired, both men aware of drowning in what was fast becoming a sea of panic.

  ‘Take me through it again, Phil,’ the DCI yawned, lolling back in his chair. ‘We’re missing something.’

  ‘According to Astley,’ Bathurst obliged, ‘our friend struck as Edwards opened the shop this morning.’

  ‘So did he have an appointment?’

  ‘There’s nothing in his diary,’ the DI had it with him, resting on the edge of Hall’s cluttered desk, ‘’till a wedding at two o’clock. St Andrews, Tottingleigh and a do at the Belmont.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hall. ‘We’ll come back to that. Astley’s scenario.’

  ‘Is that the attack began at the front door.’

  ‘Right. So our man rings the doorbell.’

  ‘Edwards opens it. This is before eight o’clock.’

  ‘Skewer to the throat. Blood drops on the carpet. Edwards staggers backwards, ends up collapsing behind his desk.’

  ‘Out of sight of the pavement so passers by would not spot the body.’

  ‘And nobody was due to call in the morning.’

  ‘Except that John Anderson did.’ Bathurst was good at Incident Room ping-pong and providing you didn’t miss a return shot, it got you Brownie points as well.

  ‘And found Edwards, no doubt
still warm.’

  ‘This was nine fifteen at the latest.’

  ‘Which gave Chummy over an hour to ransack the place. Why?’

  ‘Ah,’ Bathurst smiled. ‘The case of the missing film.’ Like everyone in the last sixty years, he’d been brought up on a diet of Perry Mason, the first thirty through the books of Erle Stanley Gardner and the second via the telly version of Raymond Burr.

  ‘Now, tell me, Phil,’ Hall reached for the paper cup containing the dregs of his coffee. ‘Why would Chummy want to steal film?’

  ‘Something to hide.’

  Hall nodded. ‘Something caught on film he doesn’t want us to see. But what?’

  ‘Pat Prentiss is working on his computer.’

  Bathurst flicked through the dead man’s desk diary. ‘There again, it could be anybody in here,’ he said.

  ‘Who was working on that?’

  ‘Jacquie Carpenter. I sent her home at nine. She was losing it by then.’

  Hall’s eye’s narrowed and he tapped his teeth with his pen top. ‘Seems strangely distracted at the moment, does Jacquie. Any views on that?’

  ‘Peter Maxwell?’ Bathurst ventured. He’d been at Leighford less than a year, but the policewoman’s dangerous liaison was always bubbling under the surface of station conversation. If the old bastard just got on with his day job, no problem, but he would insist on being in at the kill, so to speak and that, mixed metaphors notwithstanding, muddied the waters.

  Hall was nodding. ‘Peter Maxwell,’ he sighed. ‘I went to see him, you know. Oh, unofficially, of course. Warned him off.’

  ‘And?’

  Hall shook his head. ‘Might as well have pissed into the wind. What did Jacquie glean from the diary?’

  Bathurst flicked through her typed up notes. ‘The diary dates from 2001, July. He’s had some two hundred and sixty jobs in that time, mostly weddings, birthdays, graduations. Couple of bar mitzvahs. Pat Prentiss had been on the filing cabinet contents, putting names to faces, as it were. Most photographers keep negatives for six months, then ditch – space problem, I suppose. This might be something, though.’

  ‘Oh?’ Any straw would be useful to Henry Hall about now. The killing this morning would only increase the media hysteria. The locals from the Advertiser were all over him like flies on shit by lunchtime. The nationals, having lost interest in the events at Leighford High and the Southern Water site, would be swarming all over the little photographic studio in Belvedere Street by morning. Simon Heffer and Peter Hitchens would be hoarse, yelling for a return of the rope.

  ‘Well,’ Bathurst was trying to fathom it. ‘Jacquie’s identified eight entries in that diary which just have a venue and a time. No name.’

  ‘Is that particularly odd?’ Hall wondered.

  ‘Eight out of two hundred and sixty-eight sort of limits the odds, don’t you think?’

  ‘Got a for-instance?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘Last April. The Dam. Ten p.m.’

  Hall frowned. The Dam was open commonland, on the high ground above Tottingleigh, the haunt, in its day, of glue-sniffers, black magicians and lovers of both sexes. They’d found bodies there before now. ‘Well and truly dark by then,’ the DCI observed, ‘in April. So what sort of photographer goes out to do a job after dark?’

  ‘One with good lighting gear and a state of the art camera.’

  ‘Did he have those?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Bathurst confirmed. ‘Nothing like that had been touched. It was all there in the studio. All that’s gone is the film.’

  ‘Was he into wildlife? Birds? Bees?’

  Bathurst chuckled. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘In an odd sort of way. But no, nothing like that in his portfolio. Strictly a people man.’

  ‘Any more?’

  ‘This one might interest you, guv.’ Bathurst passed Jacquie’s sheet across and pointed it out. ‘The Vine. Nine thirty p.m. That was the night before Alan Whiting was killed.’

  So it was.

  Henry Hall watched them go that Sunday morning. He had a brief word with each of them in the foyer of the Cunliffe as they checked out, paid their bill and prepared to pass it all on to the taxpayer. Peter Maxwell watched them too, fuming at not being able to have a chat for one last time. The clues to the three deaths in Leighford, he knew, lay with those vanishing Ofsted inspectors, allowed at last to return to the real world and to do what they did best, stick their noses into other peoples’ business. Bob Templeton was crisp and efficient-looking in his suit; Malcolm Harding an unmade bed in his. David Simmons had made good use of his enforced days in the sun by buying an indescribable Hawaiian shirt. Only Sally Meninger looked enigmatic, her hair in a flowered headscarf, her eyes hiding behind shades. With her in particular, Maxwell had wanted a quiet word, accompanied, were he not a public schoolboy, by inserting lighted matches under her fingernails or tying her in a ducking stool. One or more of them was lying, Maxwell was sure of that. But which one? They piled into separate taxis, each one no doubt anxious to put this little episode behind them. Their goodbyes, even a distance away across the Cunliffe’s car park, seemed muted and surreal.

  Maxwell leaned against the wall across the road, Surrey parked around the back of the Old Library. He saw Hall chatting to his plainclothesman in the car park, saw him get into his car, saw him drive away. No point in tackling loquacious George again. What you saw with the hotel deskman was what you got. The Head of Sixth Form looked up at the fierce sun already burning through the shoulders of his shirt. Phew! Another scorcher. He wondered where Jacquie was this morning, what she was doing and how she felt. ‘A bit like shit, I expect,’ he muttered as he swung Surrey into action. He knew. He was there himself.

  It wasn’t the droning that woke him. It had been the droning that had sent him to sleep. It was what summer Sunday afternoons were all about. An Englishman mowing the lawns of his castle, thanks to the ingenuity of Messrs Black and Decker and the twenty percent off of Messrs B and Q. No, what woke Peter Maxwell on that impossibly hot Sunday was the ringing of his phone.

  Metternich the cat lay on the Great Man’s patio, looking for all the world as though he’d been flattened by a steam-roller, to allow his important little places to be as cool as possible. Nobody who didn’t wear a fur coat for a living could possibly understand. There was that irritating noise again and sure enough, yes, there he went. The mad old duffer was clambering off his garden recliner and dashing indoors.

  ‘Jacquie?’

  ‘Er …no, it’s Duggsy, Mr Maxwell. Matthew Douglas.’

  ‘Matthew.’ Maxwell tried to contain his disappointment. ‘How the Hell are you?’

  ‘Never better, Mr M. Sorry I couldn’t talk the other night – you know, at the Grad Ball.’

  ‘Well, you were obviously busy, Matthew. And I never stay to the end of these bashes, in case I turn into a pumpkin or worse, have to clear up somebody’s vomit. Been there; done that.’

  ‘Yeah, quite.’ Duggsy gurgled. He wasn’t sure what a pumpkin was, but he was at home with vomit. You had to be, in his line of business. ‘Well, I just wondered if you’d caught the lunchtime news.’

  ‘No, Matthew, sorry,’ his ex-Head of Sixth Form said. ‘Leighford High burnt down?’ There was always hope. Or was Matthew hoping to enrol in September in the school’s new Current Affairs AS level? It was to be run by Dierdre Lessing and the prospect of the Senior Mistress dealing with Affairs was something Peter Maxwell was probably not going to be able to resist.

  ‘No. It’s him, Mr Maxwell. Wal wasn’t sure. Iron Man was adamant it wasn’t, but I know it was.’

  ‘Sorry, Matthew,’ the Great Man confessed. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘The photographer at the Ball.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was him. It was that bloke they found murdered in his studio. Craig Edwards. He was the photographer at the Ball.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Suddenly, Maxwell was wide awake.

  ‘And that’s not all. Iron Man said no, but I reckon
he’s wrong. It’s the bloke, Mr Maxwell. That bloke having an up and a downer with that Ofsted woman at the Vine. The one in the e-fit. And now, somebody’s gone and put his lights out.’

  Peter Maxwell was no stranger to the Leighford Advertiser nor they to him. At one time half its reporters were Old Leighford Hyenas or else Old Leighford Hyenas had made the front page for various crimes against humanity. He took advantage of his first lesson being ‘free’ that Monday morning (although he knew, like every teacher, there was no such thing as a free lesson) and cycled to their offices in Handover Street.

  Neil Henslow had been one of the Great Man’s great white hopes some years ago, but he’d never quite got it together. Oxford aspirations ended in Sheffield Hallam and the dreaming steelworks equipped him, not for Fleet Street’s cutting edge after all, but the flower shows and car boots of the Advertiser.

  ‘Day off, Mr Maxwell?’ the cub reporter asked.

  ‘We never sleep,’ Maxwell winked at him, a Pinkerton man at heart. ‘What’ll you have, Neil?’

  A floozy had appeared at their table in the welcome cool of the Jury House coffee shop and patisserie, order pad in hand, gum in cheek.

  ‘Oh, er … latté, please.’

  ‘Two of whatever that is,’ Maxwell beamed up at her. The floozy scribbled something down, transferred her gum from one side to the other and disappeared into the bowels of the building. ‘I appreciate this, Neil.’

  ‘We could have talked across the road, Mr Maxwell,’ Henslow said.

  ‘Too open.’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘I’ve often wondered why newspaper offices the world o’er are open plan.’

  ‘Nothing secret about the Press, Mr Maxwell,’ the lad said earnestly. Maxwell looked at him. What was he? Twenty-five? He’d never get away from the flower shows with an attitude like that. Napoleon Bonaparte had been a general at his age and William Pitt had been running the country for a year.