Maxwell's Inspection (15 page)

‘Pamela.' He fought for the words. ‘If I help you, there are two conditions.'

‘Name them.

‘You must accept that I cannot guarantee results – not results you'd particularly want, anyway.'

‘No one can,' she said.

‘Second, you're going to have to be totally honest with me about your husband. You know there's been a second
killing?'

‘Oh, my God,' Pamela looked as though she'd been poleaxed. ‘No, no I didn't. Who?'

‘Will you be totally honest with me?' He ignored her question.

‘Yes.' She composed herself. ‘Yes, I will, Mr Maxwell.'

‘Then,' he smiled and held up his glass, ‘you'd better call me Max.'

Henry Hall had planned to hold his press conference on the Monday. Ademure little spinster had changed all that. Leighford CID was looking at two murders now. Leighford High's child population was dwindling by the day and with Paula Freeling found in Southern Water's bore hole, there was a serious risk of an exodus from the town too. Leighford nick had been bombarded with calls from hoteliers, B & B proprietors, Amusement Arcade impresarios and the Council. Leighford Theatre was
seriously
considering cancelling Jimmy Tarbuck for the August season and the under-rehearsed dance troupe that no one had heard of. Everybody wanted the same thing – answers. And Henry Hall didn't have any.

‘So, how did it go?' Peter Maxwell had just fought his way back from the Carvery with the expertise of a bachelor who often took his Sunday lunch al fresco.

Jacquie had passed on seconds and was sipping her half-and-half in the shade of the parasol thoughtfully
supplied
by the Oak. ‘Let's just say it went.'

‘Fill me in on the late Ms Freeling.' He reached for the salt.

‘Now, Max …'

He looked pointedly at his watch. ‘For the last
forty-five
minutes, Woman Policeman, you have made every attempt to small talk for England. First, it was where to have lunch; then what to have; then, what astounding views there are over the Downs; then …'

‘Yes, all right,' she smiled. ‘Point taken. It's just that the DCI is pretty tight on this. I had strict instructions after Alan Whiting not to talk to you.'

‘Alan Whiting?' Maxwell swigged his Stella. ‘That was an eternity ago. You're right,' he sat as far back on the
trestle
seat as his sense of balance would allow. ‘The view is breathtaking, isn't it?'

He saw her blink. ‘You're changing the subject,' she said.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I thought I had to.'

She looked out across the fields, the trees heavy in the midday heat. The Oak itself was said to have been the haunt of highwaymen once upon a time in the south. On windy nights, they said, the clatter of hoofs could be heard on the cobbles outside the tap and the rattle of a whip on the window-shutters. There again, it could have been the plumbing. True, the flagstones in the cool of the bar were worn, but you could buy them like that these days and the beams that lined the ceiling were just a tad B&Q for Peter Maxwell's liking. All around them and the old building, holidaymakers clinked their glasses and filled their faces and laughed at the antics of their ghastly children scampering around the adventure playground, carved incongruously into a pirate ship on the hillside. Were Jacquie and Maxwell the only ones, she wondered, talking about sudden, violent death?

‘I can only tell you what was said at the press
conference
this morning.'

‘That's not much of a deal,' he wheedled, running his fingertips around the rim of his glass.

‘Save you … what … twenty hours wait. And the cost of tomorrow's dailies.' It was the best she could offer.

‘Ah,' he raised his glass to her. ‘You can always find a way to a man's heart. Time
and
money – although of course they're the same thing. Go on, then.'

‘First – and this is the only bit you
won't
find in the papers.' She closed to him. ‘The Ofsted Team, or what's left of them, is staying on at the Cunliffe until next
weekend
. They'll be under close surveillance, so stay away, Max.'

‘That must disrupt their lives a tad,' he mused. ‘Are you sure we're talking about
next
weekend?'

‘Let's say they weren't over the parrot when Henry broke the news to them. His argument is that they are all potential targets and we can protect them better if they're in one place.'

‘All right,' he nodded. ‘Paula Freeling.'

Jacquie leaned back, putting her feet up on the rail under the table and letting her sunglasses drop back onto her nose. ‘She was found yesterday morning by a
contractor
on the water board site in Lysander Road.'

Maxwell knew the place. There seemed to have been a hoarding and piles of gravel there forever. ‘Cause of death?'

‘Same as Whiting. Stab to the throat.'

He leaned forward. ‘What do you make of that? Quite cranky, isn't it?'

‘Uh-huh.' She wagged a finger at him. ‘That's out of bounds. That wasn't in the press conference.'

‘Only,' he demolished the last of the roast beef with a satisfied flourish, ‘because the boys of the Fourth Estate don't know what to ask. All I want is your professional opinion, Jacquie, in a hypothetical sort of way.'

‘Bollocks!' she snorted.

He looked appalled. There were, after all, women and children present. ‘Tsk, tsk,' he whispered. ‘That a Woman Policeman should even know how to pronounce that word. How about it?' He leaned across the table and took her free hand.

She screwed up her elfin face. ‘You're a transparent bastard, Peter Maxwell,' she said. ‘All right. But just this once.' And she knew how hollow that sounded before it had left her lips. ‘We're obviously making enquiries
elsewhere
, with other forces. But before Whiting, I've never come across it. Stabbing is usually gang-related,
dark-alleyway-outside-pub
stuff. It's a spur of the moment thing.'

‘What,' Maxwell chuckled, ‘the perp just happens to have a carving knife about his person when he loses his cool?'

‘Not exactly,' she explained. ‘Oh, he's carrying a knife “for protection”,' her fingers were in the air, ‘of course – but we're not usually talking malice aforethought here. I've even known it be manslaughter.'

Maxwell shook his head. His old headmaster used to flog people for having their shoelaces undone. Ah, the good old days. ‘But this is different?'

‘Of course,' Jacquie nodded. ‘For a start, Whiting and Freeling aren't exactly your dark-alleyway clients, are they? Second, they're Ofsted Inspectors working in the same team at the same school. And third, one of them at least was done in broad daylight, virtually under the noses of a thousand people.'

‘From which you conclude?'

Jacquie began to answer him, then clammed up, removing her hand from his. ‘
I
don't conclude anything,'
she said. ‘I am a mere cog in a justice machine.'

It was his turn to say bollocks and he did. ‘Humour me, heart,' he said.

‘Hitman.'

‘What?'

‘A professional contract.'

‘But that's fiction, surely. Like nymphomaniacs…' but Maxwell knew as he said it that it was a bad analogy. The aptly-named Danni Grewcock in Eleven Eff Four a few years back sprang to mind. What she hadn't done with half of Year twelve in the science labs probably wasn't possible. At least, not in science labs.

‘It's rare,' Jacquie agreed, ‘but it's not fiction, Max. It's all factual.'

Images of John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson sprang to Maxwell's cinematic mind – large, black-suited men walking into restaurants and blasting away with outsize automatics. But this was Leighford, a quiet sensible town on the quiet south coast. The Oaks up here on the Downs, a family pub which specialized in Dinosaur-shaped
chicken
nuggets and West Country cider. It was a Sunday, the day for people to wash their cars and mow the lawn. Some people still went to church, for God's sake. There wasn't even a cure for that yet.

‘And if I'm right,' she tilted her glasses up so that he could see her sparkling grey eyes, ‘that gives us a double whammy. The thing about hitmen is that they don't do it for laffs. They work, like you and me, and somebody pays them. So, whatever the papers tell you tomorrow, Mr Maxwell, we are in fact looking not for one murderer, but two.'
‘Jesus!' It happened to be Geoff Baldock who said it, but it could have been anyone in Leighford nick that Sunday afternoon. He was standing behind the desk man's
sliding
glass partition and he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

‘Who's in charge?' the woman wanted to know.

‘I'm afraid the DCI's not here at the moment, madam.' Baldock tried to keep his composure.

‘I am not familiar with your in-house initials, young man. You'll have to translate.'

‘Er … sorry … the Detective Chief Inspector is Mr Hall. He's not in.'

‘I presume he has a number two, so to speak? Some sort of second-in-command?'

‘DI … er … Detective Inspector Bathurst, yes.'

‘Is he in?'

‘Er… no. I'm DC … Detective Constable Baldock. Can I help?'

‘I very much doubt it.' She looked at him with disdain – the eager face, the blonde hair impressed her not one jot. ‘I'm Deborah Freeling. I understand that someone has killed my sister.'

‘Jesus!' It was Hall's turn to say it.

‘That's more or less what I said, guv.' Baldock was looking through the same two way mirror his boss was. The thing had cost half the capitation for the entire CID division last year but it had its uses.

‘They could be twins.'

Deborah Freeling was being interviewed by Philip Bathurst in Interview Room Number One. Essex CID had talked to her already, but that was routine, when Paula
Freeling had merely been a missing person. Now that she was a guest of Dr Astley it was an altogether different proposition. Deborah had refused the offer of a police car and the arm of a policewoman. As Phil Bathurst was now discovering, Deborah Freeling was very much her own woman.

‘I was hoping for something more than platitudes, Detective Inspector.'

Phil Bathurst had drawn the short straw here. It was curiously unnerving to be looking at the animated, mobile face of a woman he had last seen as a corpse hours before. Peas in a pod, eggs in a basket, didn't come close. It was as though it had all been some ghastly mistake, a bad dream, and that someone was playing some sort of sick joke on Her Majesty's Office of Standards in Education.

‘We are at the early stages of our enquiries, Ms Freeling.'

‘Miss, please,' Deborah said, looking the man squarely in the face. ‘Ms I assume was invented by dysfunctional and probably hysterical women who wanted to convince the world that society is not run by men and that they have no need of their titles. The opposite is plainly true. Which is why I am talking to you and your boss is
likewise
, I understand, a male.' Her cold grey eyes had already flickered sideways. ‘This is a two-way mirror, isn't it?' She got up and walked right up to the glass, nose to chin with the crouching Geoff Baldock.

‘Christ, I wish people wouldn't do that,' he hissed.

‘Keep still,' Hall muttered. ‘If you don't move, she won't see you.'

‘Oh, it's like
Jurassic Park
,' Baldock chuckled. Hall was
curiously unmoved.

‘How did Paula die?' Deborah Freeling wanted to know. She turned back to face her interrogator.

Henry Hall could tell plainly that Phil Bathurst felt uncomfortable. But he wasn't about to crash in and undermine the man's credibility. The man was a DI – in a fleeting analogy of which Peter Maxwell would have been proud, Hall decided to let him win his spurs.

‘She was stabbed, Miss Freeling,' the DI said. ‘More than that, I cannot say.'

There was no emotion from the woman, no change of expression. She merely sat there, narrow-shouldered, tight-lipped, watchful.

‘When did you last see your sister, Miss Freeling?' Bathurst sounded like a take-off of a famous old painting.

‘As I told your colleagues in Colchester, not for some months. We were not close, Inspector, for all our similar looks. Paula went her way. I went mine.'

‘Her way being …?'

‘Into teaching and eventually the Inspectorate.'

‘I was thinking about her private life,' Bathurst said. He usually was. In murder cases, it went with the
territory
. The odd quirk, the unlikely link, the weird practice – motives all.

‘She had a small circle of friends, I believe. I never met any of them.'

‘No one in particular?'

Deborah fixed the man with a steely stare. ‘If you're hinting at sex, Inspector, I fear you are wasting your time. Paula was engaged, briefly, at university. It didn't last. She was rather a fastidious person, fussy even. I doubt anyone would have spent any extended time with her for that
reason. I expect she was rather lonely.'

‘You can't tell me much about her friends, Miss Freeling. What about her enemies?'

For the first time, Deborah Freeling laughed. It was brittle, sharp and all the more unexpected in that bleak, chill room discussing her sister's death. ‘If you mean, was there an army of disgruntled teachers queuing up to kill her, I very much doubt it. Although …'

‘Although?'

‘The last time we spoke, on the phone, she told me she'd been receiving abusive letters.'

‘What sort of abuse?'

‘She didn't elaborate. Merely that she found them
hurtful
.'

‘Did she tell the police?'

‘That was my question. She said she was thinking about it.'

‘Did she keep them, do you know, the letters?'

Deborah shook her head. ‘I really don't know. She seemed genuinely rattled by them, though. Not like Paula. She was, in her way, something of a brick.'

For a moment the pair faced each other. In the
adjoining
room, beyond the tell-tale glass, Hall motioned to Baldock. ‘Geoff, get on to Colchester. I want Paula Freeling's house gone over with a microscope. We're especially interested in threatening letters.'

‘We'll need a warrant, guv,' Baldock's grasp of
procedure
was commendable.