Maxwell's Inspection

by M. J. Trow

  ‘That’s not what happened.’ Sally was shaking her head.

  ‘No,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘I realize that now. I pride myself on the old body language. Either you deserve an Oscar for Best Actress or you had no idea about Edwards. Since whoever killed him killed the others, you’re sort of off the hook, Inspector.’

  She sighed and shuddered.

  ‘So what was it all about?’ he asked.

  Nothing.

  He made it easy for her. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your sister?’

  She turned to face him, eyes smouldering. ‘You know, don’t you?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, but I’d rather you told me.’

  She got up and wandered to the window. The Hippos still dawdled by their van, Wal now stretched out on the low wall that formed the hotel’s boundary. ‘Pamela and I …’ she said. It sounded like ‘James and I …’ but this time it had an altogether truer ring, ‘by definition go back a long way.’

  ‘She’s the elder?’ Maxwell checked.

  ‘Elder, brighter, smarter. Daddy’s girl who got all the boys.’

  ‘Maybe you tried too hard,’ Maxwell suggested.

  ‘Save me your homespun psychology, Maxwell,’ she snapped. ‘Let’s just say Pamela and I didn’t get on. Everything she wanted, from dolls to roller skates to university choice to men – dear Pammie got the lot. She even inherited Daddy’s money. I mean, can you believe that? The partisan old bastard left her everything. The house, the shares, the lot. Did I resent it? You bet! Did I get mad? Yes. And then I got even. Or tried to.’

  ‘The seduction of Alan,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘The irony was she’d only met him because of me. On the Ofsted circuit. It was lust at first sight. Although to this day, I could never understand that – the Vine merely confirmed my suspicions. He was about as well hung as an old tea-towel. Have you ever hated someone, Max? Hated them so much you lived with it, slept with it, couldn’t spend a waking moment without thinking of it?’

  ‘I can’t say that I have,’ he murmured. ‘Not like that.’

  ‘You can’t imagine what joy it was when Alan and I were working on the same team at Leighford. It was like manna from Heaven. I hatched, in the Baldrick phrase, a cunning plan and contacted photographers. Oh, the first couple were useless. Didn’t want to know. But Edwards was quite amenable. I was to take Alan to the Vine – Edwards told me where it was – on the Tuesday and get him into the gents. I’d tease him, get him worked up and have his wicked way with me while Edwards took some compromising photos. The fact that you and your colleagues were there just gave me a captivated audience – so thanks for that. I nearly trod on Armstrong’s tongue, I seem to remember. Then with the photos done I’d decide – either blackmail poor, squirming Alan or send the piccies to Pamela or both. It would be a hoot.’

  ‘But it didn’t work,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Edwards blew it. I knew Alan would be a walkover, vain, conceited sod that he was. But the photographer was late. Traffic, he said, on the Flyover or somewhere.’

  ‘It happens,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘That’s clearly what your idiot drummer overheard in the car park. I was bloody furious. And after Alan’s pathetic behaviour in front of your lot from Leighford, I wasn’t sure I could arrange an action replay. I refused to pay Edwards his fee and in fact demanded my deposit back.’

  ‘And your action replay was, in any case, spoiled a little by Whiting’s death the next day?’

  She turned to face him, nodding. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was. Oh, Max, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I lied to you and to the police. Above all, I’m sorry about James Diamond. He was just a bit of fun once on a weekend conference, you know how they are.’

  Maxwell shrugged; perhaps he’d been going to the wrong conferences.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, Sally,’ he said. ‘It’s more a matter of what you’re going to do. You’ve left a lot of loose ends in Leighford. Go south. Maybe it’s time you tied a few of them up.’

  Now, Peter Maxwell was already middle-aged when they’d invented mobile phones. He’d been a slip of a thing when the aptly named Alexander Graham Bell had called from one room to another, ‘Come here, Mr Watson, I need you.’ And truth be told, he’d never been really au fait with the things. For a start, they reeked of built-in obsolescence and backward technology. No sooner had the Great Man mastered one set of incomprehensible symbols, they streamlined/upgraded/outmoded the old one and on with the new, simpler of course, cheaper certainly and even more designed to confuse. But Maxwell had one in his pocket and if there was ever a time to use it, it was now.

  Once out of the Wheatsheaf, he was striding across the tarmac, pushing buttons with the best of them. It was ringing. Good sign. He’d triumphed again. He heard her voice as the Hippos hove into view.

  ‘I can’t come to the phone right now,’ she said. ‘But leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’

  Will you, Jacquie? He wondered as he waited for the bleep. Will you?

  ‘Jacquie. It’s Max. Look, I can’t tell you in detail now. It’s the sister. Got it? The sister … Damn!’ He knew the change of sound, for all he hated these things. He looked at the screen. Menu. He’d lost her.

  Jacquie touched base that lunchtime, hurtling through her hallway to grab a sandwich before getting back to the nick. She pressed her answerphone on the way through and was in the kitchen before she heard his voice. ‘Jacquie. It’s Max. Look, I can’t tell you in detail now. It’s the sister. Got it? The sister …’ and it went dead. She stood there for a moment, staring at the machine, willing it somehow to go on with the rest of the message. Nothing.

  Whatever emotions churned inside her, she stifled them, the copper kicking in. Think. She replayed his message, as though this time he’d say something more, something else. He didn’t. She returned his call, landline to mobile. Nothing. Not even a ring. Just the faceless woman telling her that the subscriber she was calling was not answering. She rang his number at Columbine, punching numbers wildly, feeling the seconds crawl like years.

  ‘War Office,’ she heard him say. ‘If you have a message for me or the cat, please speak clearly after the Anthony.’

  She slammed the phone down. Did he get any messages at all with nonsense like that? Her heart was thumping under her blouse. She switched on the kettle and fumbled in the cupboard for the instant coffee. The sister. She kept repeating it over and over in her head. Fuck communications! Why was it, in the brave new world of super-technology, you might just as well bash the jungle drums?

  Jacquie stood there, fingers tapping the smooth work surface, waiting for the watched pot to boil. She felt like crying all over again, hearing his voice one more time. But his voice sounded urgent, needful and she hadn’t heard that often. She shook herself free of it, switched off the kettle and grabbed her car keys. She drove to Columbine.

  ‘Hello, Jacquie,’ a voice called from beyond the privet.

  ‘Mrs Troubridge,’ the girl had her breath in her fist, peering over the leaves. ‘Is he home?’

  ‘Why, no, dear,’ the old neighbour smiled, pinging off one pink rubber gardening glove. ‘It’s Wednesday, I believe and he’s at school. Always sounds so silly, don’t you think? A grown man still being at school. He’s at work, I should say.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Troubridge, I just left something …’ and she was in through his front door, up the stairs past the uncollected mail with its offer of Saga holidays and pension plans, to his lounge and kitchen on the first floor. Nothing. A half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort still graced his coffee table and a set of scruffy exercise books that looked as if the dog had eaten them all and shat them out. Of Metternich and Maxwell there was no sign.

  She climbed the stairs to his bedroom two at a time. The bed was unmade, the duvet thrown back and a pair of slippers on the fleece rug. She noticed a book there too, some historical tosh by somebody she’d never heard of. Vlad the Impaler. Was Maxwell
losing it in his old age? She looked at his pillow for a moment, the dent where his head had been still visible. She’d lain there with him now for nights without number, feeling his kisses warm on her cheek, his gentle hands fondling her breasts and tickling her navel until she shrieked with mock-hysteria. How many times, she wondered, had she lain there as dawn’s rays crept over his windowsill, watching the steady, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, the soft smile on his lips. She glanced up at the open door to his attic. Some people never imagine the man they love dying. They just live in a cloud cuckooland that they never would. But Jacquie was different. She was a policewoman and that made all the difference. And for all he’d always promised her they’d jump off that cliff together, leaping hand-in-hand into that great goodnight at the surging sea’s edge, she’d always known he would go first. Logic and all her training told her so. And she always imagined him dead among the soldiers in his attic. She’d come upon him one day when they were both very old. He’d just have put the last one in place in the diorama. She knew who it would be, too, because he’d told her. It would be Edwin Hughes, late private of Her Majesty’s Thirteenth Light Dragoons. She could hear Maxwell say it as she climbed the open stairs. ‘He was born in Wrexham, North Wales, Woman Policeman, and his horse was killed in the Charge. He died in 1927, the last survivor of the Light Brigade.’

  Jacquie popped her head into the attic, shielding her eyes as the sun streamed in through the skylight. The Light Brigade she swore, shifted slightly in their saddles at her approach, scenting an intruder on the breeze. So did Metternich, the black and white bastard, lowering his head and staying upwind of her.

  ‘Tut, tut,’ she smiled, tilting her head to one side to look at him, perched on a linen basket as he was. ‘I don’t think you’re really supposed to be up here, are you, Count?’

  No woman could get round Metternich, dimples and angel voice though she may have. He’d heard it all before. Anyway, he was a man’s cat. Nothing odd about Metternich. He extended an elegant dancer’s leg and began the serious work of licking his bum. Just because he could.

  She was gone, down the stairs at breakneck speed, scribbling a note on the white board in Maxwell’s kitchen. I love you, you old bastard. Where are you?

  ‘Have you time for a cup of tea, dear?’ Mrs Troubridge asked on the path outside. ‘I’ve just put the kettle on …’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jacquie waved back. ‘Haven’t the time.’

  And the Ka was screeching out of Columbine like a bat out of Hell.

  ‘But he must have said where he was going!’ Jacquie exploded in Bernard Ryan’s office.

  ‘Can you hear yourself?’ Ryan was equally forthright. ‘This is Peter Maxwell we’re talking about. I’m only the Acting Bloody Headteacher. And, as Max would no doubt be the first to announce, I’m doing it bloody badly. You live with him, for God’s sake. He doesn’t let his left hand know what his right’s doing.’

  Silence lay between them. Jacquie had parked illegally outside the school’s front doors, much to the chagrin of a delivery man with a large consignment of new chairs. She’d flashed her warrant card at Thingee Two on Reception and had made for the History floor. She’d got a confused wave from Paul Moss and in Maxwell’s room, facing thirty-four of Tomorrow’s Finest, a weasly-looking man with glasses was posing as a supply teacher.

  The Great Man’s office was empty, post-it notes stuck at rakish angles all over his desk, the aspidistra in the corner still flying, the film stars of yesteryear looking down at her.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Helen Maitland had appeared at her elbow, answering Jacquie’s question before she’d asked it. ‘Better see Bernard.’

  So here she was, doing just that.

  ‘When are we going to get our Head back?’ the long-suffering Deputy wanted to know.

  ‘Content yourself,’ she said in a phrase worthy of Peter Maxwell. ‘It’s not many people get to take over a school because their Head has confessed to murder.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Ryan hissed, eyes wide. ‘You mean he did it?’

  ‘No, Mr Ryan,’ Jacquie told him. ‘I mean he confessed to it. Which, believe me, isn’t the same thing at all. Now, let’s go over this again, can we, please?’

  Ryan sighed. He’d been Head of Leighford High now, man and boy, for forty-eight hours, give or take and he looked like Methuselah. ‘Max asked James for a couple of days unpaid leave. Well, I’m not sure he actually asked for unpaid leave, but that in effect is what he’s got. But I’ve no idea, Jacquie, where he was going. If I knew, I’d tell you. He did promise, however, to bring Alan Whiting’s killer’s head back on a plate.’

  Jacquie was already on her way out. ‘Well, that’ll pep up school dinners, won’t it?’

  And she understood now how easy it was for Peter Maxwell to loathe the man.

  ‘Miss Freeling?’

  The dead woman’s sister looked up from her knitting. It was cool here in the otherwise sweltering mid-afternoon sun and quiet. The world and his wife were on the beach or in the Amusement Arcades on the pier with all the fun of the fair.

  ‘I’m DS Jacquie Carpenter.’ She held her warrant card high. ‘Could I have a word?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Miss Carpenter. We met at the police station. Has there been any progress?’

  ‘I was hoping you might tell me.’ Jacquie sat down in the chintzy chair opposite.

  ‘Shall we have some tea?’

  It was like something out of Jane Marple. Adotty old spinster helping the police with their enquiries.

  ‘Why not?’ Jacquie said and called the lad over from the bar.

  ‘A pot of tea for two, please,’ said Deborah. ‘Would you like some cakes, my dear?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Jacquie said. ‘I’d like some answers.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Tell me about your sister,’ she said. ‘Your relationship with her.’

  ‘Relationship?’ Deborah resumed her knitting, clacking the needles together with a practiced hand.

  ‘Did you get on?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘Do you have any siblings, Miss Carpenter?’ It was Deborah’s turn to ask the questions.

  ‘No, I’m an only,’ Jacquie said. ‘And that’s Detective Sergeant, Miss Freeeling.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Deborah pulled a face. ‘How formal. You said a moment ago you hoped I might tell you how it’s going. Well, nothing’s happening, really. I mean, I understand why Mr Hall wanted me to stay on in the town, but I’m not sure it’s working. Since that poor man died in his studio the other day …’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘I was, as a matter of fact. Soon afterwards.’

  ‘What time would that be?’

  ‘On the Saturday? Ooh, let me see, ten, ten thirty. I’d been wandering about all week, as your Mr Hall asked me to. I will admit I had one or two odd looks, from people who no doubt had seen poor Paula’s picture in the paper. When you left me at Leighford High, several teachers there seemed a little, shall we say, confused? But really, it’s frightening how unobservant people are, isn’t it? As a policewoman, you must have noticed that. If Mr Hall was hoping for someone to leap out on me or scream that I was a ghost, I’m afraid it hasn’t happened yet.’

  Jacquie leaned back in the armchair, looking the woman in the face, staring down suddenly at the knitting needles, sharp and gleaming, dancing in a blur in her hands. ‘No, Miss Freeling,’ she said, ‘I think you must have misunderstood the situation. Mr Hall asked you to stay in Leighford because he suspects you of murder.’

  Luck like that didn’t often come to coppers. And when it did, it was hardly ever to coppers like Geoff Baldock. He couldn’t wait for the summons from the DCI’s office so he barged straight in.

  ‘Come in, why don’t you?’ Hall looked up at him, the glare icy, the glasses blank. How did he manage to do that? No matter what the lighting or what the time of day, subordinates rarely caught the look in Henry Hall’s eyes.

  ‘Sorry, guv.’ Confidence had made Baldock jump f
rom ‘sir’ to ‘guv’. This had better be good, Hall thought. ‘I just thought you might like to know.’ He put the scanned photo set, the one he’d dug up the night before, on the DCI’s desk. ‘That’s Ken Lummis. That’s Barbara Payne.’

  ‘Ken and Barbie?’ Hall said. ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘House to house came up trumps. Mr Lummis is a worried man now. We know these were taken three weeks ago, when Mrs Lummis thought Mr Lummis was away on business. And Mr Lummis knew nothing about the photos.’

  ‘And Miss Payne?’

  ‘Is a neighbour. They’ve had the hots for each other for months and started an affair in early May. Mr Lummis started denying it, according to house to house, saying it was a stitch up and remember how they doctored the Lee Harvey Oswald photos.’

  ‘Which you didn’t?’

  ‘Have a heart, guv,’ the lad said. ‘I wasn’t born.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Hall nodded. When policemen started to look younger than you …

  ‘Miss Payne was more forthcoming. Said, yes, it was her. Proceeded to prove it by showing me a mole on her left buttock.’

  Hall’s eyebrow threatened to reach his hairline. ‘You had a policewoman present while all this was going on, I trust?’

  ‘Well, er … no, sir …’

  ‘Then you’d better pray she doesn’t realize the possibilities and blackmail the shit out of you. Where were these taken?’