by M. J. Trow
‘Pretty observant old bird was Paula,’ Harding murmured. ‘Now, there is a mystery.’
‘What is?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Why anyone would want to kill her,’ Harding shrugged.
‘You’ve answered your own question,’ Maxwell told him. ‘The old bird was too observant, I suspect. Look,’ he fumbled in his wallet, ‘I don’t usually carry these things, but,’ he handed him a card, ‘if anything occurs to you, anything at all, give me a ring, will you?’
And he made for the door.
‘Just a minute.’ Harding stopped him. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘Basingstoke!’ boomed Maxwell in his best Ruddigore. ‘You told me yourself. I’m off to Basingstoke you said when we had breakfast together at the Cunliffe. They’re very helpful at the Bishop Latymer School, aren’t they? When I told them I was your flatmate and that you’d left the iron on, they fell over themselves to give me your accommodation address. Lovely name, isn’t it, Staystill? Unfortunately,’ he beamed, tipping his hat again, ‘that’s one thing I can’t do. Oh, by the way,’ in the door he turned, apart from the lack of mac and two good eyes, a dead ringer for Lootenant Columbo, ‘there’s just one more thing. Sally Meninger.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Harding’s face darkened. ‘She’s trouble, that one.’
‘Oh? In what way?’
Harding got up and closed to his man. ‘A liar, a schemer, a tart, will that do for openers?’
‘Come along now, Mr Harding,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘Come off the fence. What do you really think of Sally Meninger?’
And he was gone.
‘But how did you know I was at the Bishop Latymer School?’ Harding called after him. Answer came there none.
‘Lads.’ Maxwell tapped on the van’s side window and Duggsy nearly choked mid-puff. ‘Thanks for the lift. But you boys have to be elsewhere and so do I.’
‘Where’s that, Mr Maxwell?’ Duggsy wanted to know.
‘Wiltshire. Devizes, to be precise.’
‘Well, that’s it, then.’ Duggsy said, nudging Iron Man who kicked over the ignition. ‘Should make it by nightfall.’
‘Whoa, hang on.’ Maxwell stopped the headlong rush to judgement. ‘Look, guys, I’m grateful for the lift, but I can’t impose …’
‘We’ve been talking it over, haven’t we Iron? Wal?’
‘Yeah,’ came a confident voice from the darkening bowels of the van.
‘We’re unanimous, Mr Maxwell,’ Duggsy said.
‘Yeah, we all are,’ chimed in Iron.
‘We’re your Irregulars, remember?’
Maxwell laughed. ‘But that was on home turf, lads, back in Leighford. Now, you did me a good turn the other day by recognizing Craig Edwards, but this is different.’
‘Mr Maxwell,’ Iron Man leaned across, looking up at the man who was never his Head of Sixth Form. ‘You’re going it alone, right? Looking for the bloke what iced this Whiting bloke and that old broad and now the photographer?’
‘That’s right,’ Maxwell was patience itself. He’d been talking to younger Iron Men all his working life; just talking to, never down.
‘Who’d you talk to in there?’ the drummer asked.
‘Malcolm Harding, one of the Ofsted people.’
‘He your bloke, d’you reckon?’
‘The killer?’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘No chance. Malcolm’s too full of himself. I’m looking for a loner, somebody who’d blend in a crowd. Mr Opinion in there couldn’t keep his mouth shut for long enough.’
‘There you are, then,’ Iron Man shrugged, his piercings rattling, ‘If it ain’t him, it’s one of the others. You look like you need a bit of protection.’
Both Wal and Duggsy had seen Mad Max in action, as much a master with a piece of chalk or with a well-aimed door. But Iron Man was older than they were; perhaps he sensed a vulnerability the younger ones didn’t.
‘All right,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘But I’m a teacher, men; I can’t afford five star for us all.’
‘Christ, Mr Maxwell,’ Duggsy was appalled. ‘We’re rock stars, man, living out of guitar cases. Apart from the vans, everything Iron owns is in that coffin, ain’t it, Iron?’
‘Yeah,’ Iron conceded.
‘Look, Mr Maxwell,’ Duggsy clambered out of the vehicle. ‘You’d better ride up front. Wal was on the chilli burgers earlier and it ain’t going to be no pot pourri back there; get the picture?’
Maxwell did and belted up next to the drummer as the Hippos and Mad Max drove south west.
They rattled down the dear dead days of the Vale of the White Horse, where iron warriors had long ago rattled in their chariots, praying to Taranis, the thunder god, and wearing their swirling torcs of gold.
‘Look at that,’ Iron Man pointed to the ghostly silhouette of Silbury Hill. ‘Christ, I could tell you some stories about that place. And Henge, of course. If only I could remember them.’
Maxwell could as well, but they would be altogether more historical than Iron Man’s fume-fuddled fondnesses. He knew that to their right, on the star-jewelled Wansdyke, the battlefield of Roundhay Down lay in the summer darkness, the clash of its Puritan steel echoing across the years. Behind them, vanished warriors of another time still lay in the rich, brown earth near the ransacked barrows of East and West Kennet and the canal, with its ramshackle warehouses and breweries ran gleaming into sleeping Devizes.
‘Have you any idea of the bloody time?’ David Simmonds was not best pleased. Peter Maxwell had posed as his brother in the reception area of the Bear Hotel, come with some dreadful family news. It made him sound like something out of Dickens and he’d tried the same story in three other hotels already, but this time, he struck gold.
‘It’s half past midnight, Mr Simmonds,’ the Leighford man told him, checking his watch in the quiet corridor. ‘How’s the Inspection business?’
‘What are you doing here?’ Simmonds was beside himself and threatening to wake the entire floor. ‘This is a fucking outrage.’
‘Tsk, tsk,’ Maxwell oozed past the quivering inspector into his room. ‘Such language from the uncle of Selina Barrington, late of Trinity, Oxford. And that’s before we get on to the reputation of the Bear Hotel.’
‘My niece may have thought highly of you, Maxwell,’ Simmonds snapped. ‘But I don’t have to. How did you find me?’
‘Process of elimination,’ Maxwell said. The Bear wasn’t as ancient as Staystill House, but its architecture was impressive nonetheless. ‘You gave me Wiltshire. Aphone call to Ofsted HQ gave me the rest.’
Simmonds blinked in disbelief. He was looking at Peter Maxwell, but he was hearing Malcolm Harding. ‘This is surreal.’ He shook his head. ‘You actually pretended to be Malcolm Harding on the phone to HQ?’
‘And you,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘Not to mention Bob Templeton. Even I baulked at taking off Sally Meninger however – it needs work, I must confess.’ He helped himself to a chair. ‘And speaking of surreal, so is an Ofsted inspector being skewered to death in a room not a million miles from my teaching base. We have unfinished business, Mr Simmonds, you and I.’
‘Look,’ the Ofsted man subsided. ‘I told the police …’
‘That Whiting was a sex maniac. Yes, I know.’
‘How …?’
‘I have my little ways,’ Maxwell told him, wondering how his little way was now. She’d be snug in her bed, the bed she’d shared with him. Or bent double over a computer looking for clues to murder on the superhighway. Perhaps she was looking up at the stars, as he had been on the Plain with Duggsy and Wal snoring softly in the back, a dreadlocked head lolling on a dreadlocked shoulder. ‘You implied that Whiting went for anything in a skirt.’
‘So he did. Didn’t exactly please his wife, I understand.’
‘Mrs Whiting?’
‘Have you met her?’
‘Yes,’ Maxwell said. ‘Yes, I have as a matter of fact. She seemed the soul of correctness and dignity.’
‘Oh, she is, yes. It�
��s her sister I’ve got my doubts about.’
‘Her sister?’ Maxwell was lost.
Simmonds looked at him. ‘Well, surely you know,’ he sneered. ‘What with your “little ways” and all. Sally Meninger is Pamela Whiting’s sister.’
He stumbled into the bright lights of Leighford nick, his tie gone, his inevitable three piece suit replaced with an anorak and jeans.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ the desk man peered at him. This was still a working police station and not Fort Apache, the South Coast, complete with push-button answerphone and couples having it away in the ever-dimming glow of the blue lamp.
‘Yes,’ he said, summoning up the courage to look the man in the face. ‘My name is James Diamond. I’ve come to confess to the killing of Alan Whiting.’
It was Philip Bathurst who drew the short straw. It was two minutes into Tuesday and he should have gone home hours ago. Instead he found himself staring across the desk in Interview Room One, the tape whirring and DS Jacquie Carpenter by his side. The girl looked tired and drawn under the strip light.
‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Diamond?’ she asked, looking for something normal in the situation facing them all.
‘Er … no, thanks,’ Diamond said. ‘I just want to get this over with.’
‘When we spoke last, Mr Diamond,’ the DI began slowly, choosing his words as he cradled his fingers, ‘I was apologizing to you for the precipitate behaviour of one of my DCs. Are you telling me Geoff Baldock was right, after all?’
The Head’s eyes flickered. He looked a hundred. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said.
‘All right,’ Bathurst leaned back, sliding an ashtray away from him. ‘Tell me why. Tell me why you killed Alan Whiting.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘I want that understood from day one.’
‘It’s on the record.’ Bathurst nodded to the tape recorder.
‘He was … pestering Sally. Sally Meninger, treating her like a tramp.’
‘What was that to you?’ Jacquie asked.
‘We … I knew Sally some time ago. We were lovers.’
‘How long ago?’ Bathurst asked.
‘Three years. No … four. We met at a conference.’
‘And had an affair?’ Jacquie said.
‘We fell in love,’ Diamond insisted. ‘“Had an affair” sounds sordid. Furtive fumblings in cheap hotel rooms. It wasn’t like that.’
‘What was it like?’ the DI could think of no finer way to spend his early Tuesday mornings.
‘Love,’ Diamond repeated.
‘And how did your wife take it?’ Jacquie asked. Such relationships loomed large in her thinking at the moment.
‘Margaret?’ Diamond was twisting his plain gold wedding ring round his finger, unaware that he was doing it. ‘She never knew.’
‘Until DC Baldock arrested you?’
‘Yes,’ Diamond said. ‘Until then.’
‘All right.’ Bathurst folded his arms, eyeing up his man, taking his time. ‘You don’t approve of furtive fumblings in cheap hotel rooms; so where did you meet? You and Sally? How did you keep your passionate love going for three … no, four years?’
Diamond’s jaw was flexing and his lip curling. ‘You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?’
Bathurst leaned forward, his tether well and truly ended. ‘No, Mr Diamond. That’s more than my job’s worth.’ He snapped off the tape. ‘You and Sally Meninger have a fling, an affair, a knee-trembler, she’s the love of your life, whatever three or four years ago. You conduct a relationship, presumably by e-mail with the odd Christmas card and then she pops back into your life. Joy unconfined, you might think, but no – there’s a complication in the form of Alan Whiting. Mr Octopus. A wolf in wolf’s clothing. Sally comes to you distraught and you put a skewer through his throat.’
‘You make it all sound so simple,’ Diamond said.
‘No, Mr Diamond.’ Bathurst scraped his chair back. ‘That’s what you must think we are. Why did you kill Paula Freeling?’
‘She saw me,’ Diamond snapped back. ‘She saw me kill Whiting. I had to shut her up. That’s why I went to the Cunliffe, to reach her.’
‘And where did you keep her?’ Jacquie asked.
‘What?’
‘We know from our forensics that the woman was kept bound, for perhaps two days before she was killed,’ Bathurst obliged. ‘Where did you keep her?’
‘In my garage,’ he said.
‘Mrs Diamond feed her, did she?’ Jacquie asked. ‘Or just moan at you to tidy up after yourself?’
‘I can’t believe you’re taking this attitude,’ Diamond said. It was as though he were talking to a recalcitrant Year Ten student.
‘Why did you kill Craig Edwards?’ Bathurst snapped, leaning over his man, nose to nose.
‘Who?’
‘The photographer.’
‘I …’
The DI stood up. ‘Get him out of here, Jacquie, before I lose what little cool I’ve got left. No, wait. Charge him. Charge Mr Diamond here with wasting police time. After all, we’ve go nothing better to do at the moment.’
There were a lot of rumours about Lord Cardigan, the last of the Brudenells who led the Charge of the Light Brigade. One was that on the night of Balaclava he left his exhausted, wounded men and slept aboard his yacht after a champagne supper. In fact, he didn’t. He wrapped himself up in a horse blanket and held his bugler in his arms as the boy died. Peter Maxwell didn’t intend to go that far, but he couldn’t see his lads, the Hippos, stretched on the cold, cold ground while he lorded it in hotel-land luxury. So he dossed down with them, on a layby outside Davizes and waited for the dawn. The van was full of noises, mostly from Wal and nobody what you might call, slept.
Wal was a sight to behold in the early light. A stranger to soap since his GCSE days, the bass man took more care of his guitar than himself. He lovingly cleaned the strings as the sun crept over the bottle bank and Iron Man went off in search of a Circle K, via a pee in the hedge. Breakfast was a six pack and assorted tortilla chips paid for by Mr Maxwell, but then nobody said Iron Man was your galloping gourmet. The van played up as Duggsy surfaced from the indefinable grunge of his sleeping bag and Iron Man and Wal soon had their heads buried under its bonnet, clattering spanners and crooning to it.
‘Well, why didn’t you bring the other bloody one, then?’ Wal asked.
‘’Cause it hasn’t got Yawning Hippos on the side, man,’ the drummer told him.
‘Yeah,’ Duggsy chimed in. ‘Gotta advertise.’
Nobody feared the Reaper when the Hippos were on the road.
They’d rattled past Gloucester on the M5 by midmorning, stopping only for petrol and pee-breaks. It was just another Band on the run, two musicians, a drummer and an old bloke standing line abreast and widdling up a castle wall in the middle of nowhere.
‘Is it me or is this bloke crap?’ Maxwell muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
Bob Templeton leapt a mile. ‘For God’s sake, Maxwell. What are you doing here?’
The Head of Sixth Form from another school began to come out with the cliché, and suddenly couldn’t be bothered. ‘The door was open.’ He pointed to one at the side of the classroom. ‘Thought I’d just say “Hi”.’
He caught the eye of the French teacher clearly struggling at the front of the class and waved at him. The French teacher’s heart plummeted still further. He’d been doing pretty badly with one Ofsted Inspector in the room; now he had two, and still Seven Eff were hanging from the chandeliers.
‘This is unforgivable,’ Templeton hissed. ‘Outside!’
One or two of Seven Eff were turning to stare at them. The younger bloke looked furious, as though he was about to hit the older bloke. This was great.
‘Only if you come with me,’ Maxwell minced.
Templeton scowled at the French teacher and strode for the door.
‘Maxwell…’ they were nose to nose on the walkway outside the Modern Languages block.
‘I shall of course be reporting this,’ Templeton snapped, all the relaxed bonhomie of the Cunliffe breakfast having vanished.
‘Well, not to my Headmaster, please, Mr Templeton, because he’s under suspicion of murder at the moment. Which brings me to cases. Did you know that Sally Meninger was Alan Whiting’s sister-in-law?’
‘No,’ Templeton said after a few minutes’ reflection. ‘Why should I know that?’
Maxwell sighed. He was tired, all travelled out and this detour to the back of beyond had clearly been a waste of time.
‘All I do know – and God help me, I should have told the police this – is that Paula Freeling was a bloody thief.’
‘What?’
‘Quite,’ Templeton blustered. ‘Cuff-links, cash, even a spare tie – the woman was a bloody kleptomaniac. That’s why she left the Cunliffe in such a hurry, and that could be why she was murdered.’
‘And you didn’t think to mention it to the boys in blue?’
‘I couldn’t be sure,’ Templeton bluffed. ‘Actually, I still can’t. Things vanished from my room after a visit from her, that’s all I know.’
‘Well,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘We all know a little bit more now, don’t we?’ He glanced back into the classroom where Seven Eff appeared to be re-enacting the attack on the Bastille. ‘Don’t let me keep you from the fun,’ he said.
‘I shall still be reporting this, Maxwell,’ Templeton warned.
But the Head of Sixth Form was striding away. ‘Whatever,’ he said.
On the road again by tea-time, Iron Man was accelerating past Sheffield, a very wise move, and it wasn’t until the sun began to dip that they reached their final destination.
