Maxwell's Inspection (5 page)

‘Matthew Hopkins,' Maxwell tapped the man's name he had written on the whiteboard behind him. He secretly hated it – the glossy surface that stained at the drop of an aitch; the useless markers that dried up as you looked at them, so that in seconds, the purest sable became the most dismal grey and the most verdant green turned an odd kind of puce. ‘What do we know about him?'

The silence could have shattered glass.

‘Ah.' Maxwell smiled at the assembled multitude. ‘How soon they forget. Jade?'

Jade was a bouncy blonde. Sitting next to Timbrel as she was, the sultry brunette, the pair were every Year Ten boy's wet dream. Maxwell had intercepted the notes last term which left him in no doubt about how Dave felt about them and Tom and Jimbo and Fat Josh. Maxwell had doubted whether Fat Josh could really do what he claimed he could, but it gave him a chuckle before he
consigned
the note to the bin and Fat Josh to his Year Head for a good letting off.

‘Um … he was a witchfinder,' Jade managed.

‘I'm glad you can read Timbrel's book,' Maxwell said to her, ‘but I'd rather it was written in yours. Better still, I'd rather it was engraved on your memory. Can you help us, Dave?'

Dave looked barely able to help himself. A martyr to catarrh, the boy's mouth hung open and his eyelids
drooped. Life, to Dave, was one perpetual sniff. ‘He used to catch witches.'

‘Classic, Dave,' Maxwell smiled. ‘I like the keen thrust of your mind. When was this, Tom?'

To Tom, it could have been a week last Wednesday. ‘Er …'

‘I'm not being too picky here,' Maxwell was
reasonable
. ‘I'll settle for a century.'

‘Seventeenth.' Dave was getting into it now.

‘Spot on, Davidovitch.' Maxwell clapped his hands. ‘So those dates start with …'

‘Sixteen something,' most of the class intoned. This drill was well-rehearsed.

‘All right,' Maxwell moved through the fair – and not so fair. ‘We know who, we know what, we even know approximately when. How about where. Jimbo?'

Now if there was one subject which perplexed Jimbo more than History, it was Geography. ‘Um …'

Jimbo hated being put on the spot. Maxwell knew that, but a little grilling,
mano a mano
, was good for the soul. ‘Come on, Jim.' Maxwell stood behind the lad,
circumnavigating
the room as he was. ‘Think East.'

East, West, North, South, they were all one to Jimbo.

‘Anybody?' Jimbo's shoulders visibly sagged. He was off the hook. Mad Max was a bastard, but he wasn't a vicious one. The Great Man saw Sally Meninger
scribbling
away in the corner, no doubt damning him to all eternity.

‘East Anglia,' someone called.

‘Nice one, Evelyn.' Maxwell knew if he waited long enough, the class swot would open up her big guns. All year he'd been trying to persuade Paul Moss to promote
the girl, because she was clearly misplaced, but there were set complications apparently. Social reasons. You couldn't fight City Hall. ‘East Anglia,' Maxwell crossed to the map in the far corner to point to it. He knew perfectly well that Ten Aitch Two were highly conversant with Orlando and Lanzarote – in a couple of years they'd be equally at home in Ibiza. But their own land? Oh, that was a foreign
country
– they did things differently there. ‘Witch country.' He tapped the towns in turn. ‘Ipswich, Chelmsford, Colchester, Lavenham. In 1646, if you were an elderly lady in any of these places, if you'd ever crossed anybody, looked at anybody funny, then look out. Somebody would make a quick phone call and that was it – send for Matthew Hopkins and it's a quick few hours being dragged around a room until you confessed. What's wrong with what I've just said, Josh?'

Fat Josh was ready for this one. ‘It's not right, Mr Maxwell,' Josh said triumphantly.

‘Er … good,' Maxwell nodded. ‘Good. Like it so far. Why isn't it right, though, Josh?'

‘Well, it's rubbish, innit?' Josh could have debated with Dr David Starkey. ‘Stands to reason nobody's going to confess to nothing just being dragged round a room.'

‘No phones then, dickhead.' Evelyn may have been the class swot, but nobody said she was nice.

‘How does it go, Evelyn?' Maxwell reined it all in.

‘Sorry, Mr Maxwell. But he is.'

‘Well, that's something we can talk about later, isn't it? Now, compadres, what's it going to be?' He stationed himself between the board and the telly. It could go either way. ‘Half an hour's silent reading on the definitive study of East Anglian witchcraft by Professor McFarlane or a
few minutes of Mad Vincent Price in
The Witchfinder General
?'

The hubbub gave him the answer he expected, and as a man, Ten Aitch Two slid sideways or clambered on desks for a good view of the screen.

‘We watching a video?' How did Peter Maxwell know the question had come from Dave? He flicked all the
necessary
buttons, since the remote had vanished within minutes of its arrival at Leighford High, along with scart leads and a whole nest of mouse balls. Maxwell clocked Sally Meninger's demeanour out of the corner of his eye. He'd followed his Lesson Plan to the letter so far – Paul Moss would be proud of him. Now, though, he was
sticking
his neck out. There were copyright issues about movies in schools and this one, grim little piece that it was, had an 18 category. He saw her write something down. He'd face the music later, reading the banner
headlines
in what passed for his mind ‘Pervert Teacher Depraves Young'. What a load of warlocks.

On the screen, a bunch of murderous seventeenth century villagers were dragging a hapless crone up a bleak windswept hillside while the priest, whose hysteria had caused all this, intoned mumbo-jumbo behind the lynch mob. The camera wobbled and jostled with the crowd as they hanged the woman from the make-shift gibbet and her body slumped, to dangle in the wind, the hempen rope creaking in its housings. The camera swept away and the orchestra crashed into life. Sitting his horse, cloaked in black, sat Mad Vince himself, Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General.

‘I've seen this,' Dave said, although actually he was thinking of
Plunkett and Maclean. 

A bell shattered the moment and Ten Aitch Two descended into uproar.

‘All right,' Maxwell switched off the set. ‘Leave your stuff, everybody. Jimbo. Leave that.'

‘It's my football.'

‘You're on form today, Jim,' Maxwell told him. ‘But even so, it stays here. You go.'

‘What if it's burned to death?' Jimbo asked against the repetitious clanging of the bell.

‘That's what God invented insurance for. Straight out, everybody,' Maxwell called. ‘Double doors at the end. You know the drill.' And he supervised them as they went, closing windows with one hand. At the door, he met Sally Meninger.

‘Is this planned?' she asked.

Maxwell shrugged. ‘The Fire Master is Bernard Ryan,' he told her. ‘Our revered Deputy. I can't believe even he would be imbecilic enough to plan one of these, this week of all weeks. Unprofessional of me to say so, of course.' But he had a feeling ‘unprofessional' was Sally Meninger's middle name.

‘Where do we go?'

He closed the door behind her. ‘Follow me,' he said, and quickly abandoning the old joke, came out with the feed line anyway. ‘Walk this way.'

And he led her into the sunlight.

The bell was still ringing as the hordes assembled on the tennis courts, just far enough away so that flames
wouldn't
engulf them. All in all, they didn't look unlike Maxwell's Light Brigade, drawn up in his attic – except the uniforms, of course, and the swords – oh, and the horses. The Head of Sixth Form had taken his place ahead of his Year Twelve cohorts, mixing his military metaphors though he was, the Legatus Legionis standing with his arms folded while chaos sorted itself into a kind of order in front of him.

His own Year were neat enough, in approximate lines behind their respective Form Tutors, answering to the call of their names ringing out on that bright Tuesday
morning
. Year Seven as always were hysterical with the
excitement
of it all. Where's the fire, sir? Where are the fire engines? Is anybody burned yet, stuck in one of the bogs? Who started it? What's going to happen to him? It was always the same. Some wag, probably in Year Ten, would have smashed the glass somewhere, probably in the Art Rooms. Motive? Bravado. It was a rite of passage, really. Year Eleven had gone, their GCSEs over, into that glad goodnight that was forever composed of shelf-filling at Asda or Tesco. The main school had no head, no focus for delinquency. That was where Year Ten came in. And of course, this week of all weeks was a heaven-sent
opportunity
.

Maxwell could pinpoint it with reasonable accuracy. It could be Jason ‘The Torch' Piggott of Ten Why Three,
egged on by Squirt Tollfree from Sally Greenhow's Remedials. Sanjit Singh, Mr Diamond's nark, would already be standing in the corridor of power, all too
anxious
to blurt what he knew. You could bet your life on it.

‘All clear, Tutors?' Maxwell called and one by one, they waved to him.

‘Kelly's gone,' Helen ‘The Fridge' at his elbow told him.

‘No,' Maxwell shook his head. ‘Tell me it isn't so.' He was always staggered when Kelly showed at all. Mistress of the catwalk and the parachute pants, Kelly's ambition was to get up early enough in the morning to hold down a part-time job in HMV. ‘Mr Smith.'

The finger of God beckoned Ben Smith across. ‘And the purpose of those shorts would be?' Maxwell looked down at the lad's nether wear. ‘Shorts' was perhaps a brave choice of word. They actually reached to mid-calf and could have housed most of the kindergarten class at Leighford JMI across the road.

‘Summer, sir.' Ben Smith was always deferential,
especially
when he was about to get a bollocking.

‘And your body is a temple, etcetera, etcetera.'

‘Sunshine's good for you, sir.'

‘So it is,' beamed Maxwell, more than a little ray of the stuff himself. ‘To that end, when this little bit of nonsense is over, you will sign yourself out at Reception and enjoy the sunshine on your way home to change. Clear?'

‘Yes sir.'

‘What'll you miss?'

A cleverer or a braver man would have quipped back, ‘You, sir, always.' But Ben Smith was neither clever nor brave and he came clean. ‘Physics.'

‘Then you will apologize to Mr Saunders and offer to make up the time at his convenience. You'll do that for me, won't you, Ben?'

‘Yes, sir,' and the lad moved the regulation three paces backwards.

‘That's about it, then, Max,' Helen handed in the
registers
.

He winked at her. ‘Thou, good and faithful servant,' he said and ambled with his armful across to the centre of the courts where the knot of Senior Managers darted hither and yon, doing their best to disappear up their own
arseholes
.

‘All clear, Max?' Bernard Ryan asked.

Maxwell could barely disguise his contempt for this man. Not fit to run a jumble sale, Ryan had inexplicably risen to become Deputy Head of a large comprehensive school somewhere on the south coast. That was because he'd learned the jargon, carried Legs Diamond's books and got his knees and his nose equally brown. It brought him forty-four grand a year and an ulcer the size of the Millennium Dome. He hadn't slept since 1998. And it was beginning to show; wrinkles like the Grand Canyon, more bags under his eyes than were carried by the aptly named Ryanair.

‘As clear as it'll ever be,' the Head of Sixth Form told him. ‘This little walk in the sun your idea, Bernard?'

‘Certainly not,' Dierdre Lessing, Leighford's redoubtable Senior Mistress chipped in.

How could one describe Dierdre? A cross between Beowulf's Grendel and a pit-bull with attitude wouldn't really come close.

‘Didn't see your lips move, Bernard.' Maxwell wasn't
looking at her at all.

‘Somewhere in C Block, apparently,' Ryan told him.

‘The Torch?'

‘We don't know yet, Max,' Ryan said, clearly sighting the end of his tether.

‘Miracles take a little longer,' Dierdre told him.

He faced her for the first time, smiling broadly. ‘Indeed they do, Senior Mistress Mine,' he said. ‘When you and Mother Theresa here get to the bottom of it all, I trust there'll be a public flogging? School paraded in hollow square, groundsmen laying on with the cat, that sort of thing?'

Bernard Ryan was called away with a query from someone in Year Eight, never normally the most
inquisitive
Year Group in any school.

‘It's difficult to see how you can be so insufferable,' Dierdre snapped at Maxwell.

‘It's not easy, Dierdre,' he admitted, stone-faced. ‘None of this comes naturally, you know.'

Dierdre Lessing, Maxwell had to admit in his more maudlin moments, had been a handsome woman in her day. In an Arnie Schwarzenegger sort of way. She was tall and elegant but her hair was so backcombed now that she was in danger of becoming a laughing stock. She and Maxwell went back a long way. He'd been a mere Head of History then and she Head of Business Studies. It did gall the Great Man a little that a typist should be promoted over his head, but he'd long ago decided it wasn't worth the op to become Head of Girls' Welfare. Every now and then, when she'd been particularly psychotic, he toyed with shopping her to the Equal Rights Commission. For Miss PC to be a woman in the post she held was akin to
being a Nazi in the twenty-first century.

‘We don't know who broke the glass,' she said softly, her lips as tight as a gnat's arse. She looked him up and down. The old reprobate had left his tweed jacket behind. And that ludicrous hat. But he still sported that fatuous bow tie and those ghastly suede brothel-creepers that had jarred as a fashion accessory even in 1975. ‘It wasn't you, I suppose?'

‘I was just wondering,' he ignored her, ‘what
they
think of all this.' He nodded in the direction of Her Majesty's Inspectors, standing apart near the Sports Hall wall, watching with interest the comings and goings of the
gallopers
feeding information from one command post to another. He could see Sally Meninger with her arms
folded
around
his
lesson notes,
his
academic future in her
all-too-welcoming
arms. She was staring at the tarmac.

‘There's proof, Dierdre my darling,' Maxwell said, ‘if ever it were needed. What do you notice about the Ofsted Six?'

Dierdre looked at them. Just a routine bunch of
inspectors
. She'd met them all in the last day and a bit. Except there weren't six, there were only five.

‘One of them's missing,' she frowned.

Maxwell shook his head. ‘Uh-huh,' he said, and his face took on a tortured, terrified look. ‘No shadow.' His voice was barely audible and his eyes rolled in his head.

Sally Meninger had turned on her heel and was already marching back into what might have been a
blazing
building before Bernard Ryan began shouting
incomprehensively
through the megaphone. Maxwell knew the drill. He returned to his Sixth Form lines, walking
backwards
and bowing before Dierdre as he went. One by one,
the tutor groups were dispersed. Back to Matthew Hopkins and Ten Aitch Two. How was he going to keep them down on the farm after this? And would Sally Meninger have mercy on him, the lesson disrupted by idiocy as it had been?

There was one good thing about Leighford High. Only one. And that was that staff could cut through the kitchens on their way to almost anywhere.

‘Morning, Sharon,' Maxwell called to the girl wrestling with a huge tray of pizza. ‘I'll have the devilled kidneys please, followed by crown roast, bread and butter
pudding
and an amusing little Chablis from the Loire.' He paused at the door. ‘
South
side of the vineyard, of course.'

Sharon waved at him, grinning inanely. The only bit of his conversation she'd recognised was bread and butter pudding, but that wasn't on the menu today. It was never on the menu at Leighford High.

The wizened old crone who was her superior scattered an armful of superfries onto a baking tray. ‘Bloody mad, that bloke,' she muttered, blowing her chewing gum into a huge balloon.

Maxwell's way took him up the stairs by the side of the hall, with its cups and shields and trophies of a bygone era, when kids believed in their school and the
government
hadn't told them that competition was the dirtiest word in the English language. It took him past his own office on the mezzanine floor and into that heartland of Culture known as the History Department. All sixty-three clauses of Magna Carta hung from its hallowed walls, along with the famous lines of Martin Neimoller. And a suitably doctored phrase of Henry Ford's. To his original
‘History is bunk', Maxwell had added, ‘But what do I know? I'm a car salesman.' From here, as he flashed past the grimy, annually cleaned windows of the first floor, he could see the stragglers of Year Nine dawdling on the edge of the tennis courts, driven grudgingly forward by a less-than-temperate Ben Holton, white coat dazzling in the July sun and arms flying in all directions. His
sulphuric
acid titration would be well past its flocculation point by now.

And to his left loomed the office commandeered by the Ofsted Inspectors. Dierdre had been right, though it stuck in Maxwell's craw to admit it. There had only been five of them. And as he looked in, he saw why. Alan Whiting was still sitting there, apparently engrossed in some papers, his head resting against that expensive high-backed
swivel
Bernard Ryan had treated himself to out of some
development
money. Maxwell shook his head. What a bastard. Not content to make an idiot of himself in public last night, now Whiting was ignoring a fire-bell, which
could
have been the real thing on this sweltering summer's day, as though the rules of the rest of the world didn't apply to him. Maxwell could already hear the clacking heels of the others behind him. He half-turned to see the frail
shadowy
figure of the other female in the Ofsted team and smiled at her in an I-don't-really-want-this-job-anyway sort of way. He'd just reached the end of the corridor, ready to plunge two steps down to his teaching lair when he heard a scream that rattled the windows.

He doubled back to see Paul Moss's head pop out of his classroom. ‘Flanders – is that you?' Moss shouted, head see-sawing from side to side.

‘Suspended for three days,' Maxwell called back.
‘Harassing that girl in Year Nine.'

‘Oh, yes.'

Maxwell peered into each classroom he reached. A handful of kids in each one were jostling in the doorways to see what had happened, the odd member of staff
circling
round, shooing them back to their seats. At the door to the Ofsted office, the inspectress was still standing there, her fingers gripping the woodwork, her knuckles white. She was staring ahead, the scream still dying in her throat, the glasses that were seconds ago on the bridge of her nose dangling on their chains on what passed for her breasts.

‘Are you all right?' Maxwell asked her, not usually so guilty of so redundant a question.

‘It's Alan,' she said, trying in her panic to focus on who was talking to her. Instinctively, the old professionalism kicked in. ‘It's Mr Whiting. The Chief Inspector's not well.'

Indeed he wasn't. Maxwell should have looked closer a moment ago. Paul Moss was at his elbow, staring as wild-eyed as the inspectress was.

‘Paul.' Maxwell's voice made him jump. ‘Get her out of here, will you? And keep the kids away. For God's sake, do that.'

The Head of History had never seen a dead man before. But Peter Maxwell had and Moss knew his place. All his professional life at Leighford High, he'd been a rookie to the Great Man, a number two, a sidekick. He was always destined to be Tonto to the Lone Ranger and he knew it. He gently eased the woman's fingers off the doorframe and led her away down the corridor, barking at children to get back into their classrooms. Concerned
staff picked up the vibes and one by one, they closed their doors, trying to answer questions and stifle the chorus of ‘Sir' and ‘Miss'.

So did Peter Maxwell. It was oddly chilly on this side of the building where the sun had not shone since early morning and some at least of the Inspectorate's blinds were drawn. The Head of Sixth Form approached the man in the expensive swivel chair. He wasn't reading any papers. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle
distance
, about halfway to the door. Except they couldn't see anything. Alan Whiting had stopped seeing anything by this stage. And he would never see anything ever again. He was still wearing the same suit he'd had on the
previous
day and at the Vine the previous night. At first sight, Maxwell thought Whiting was wearing a rather dissolute dark red tie; but then he realized it was a trail of blood, extending from the dead man's throat to run into a small pool in the folds of his lap. Jutting out of his throat, just below the adam's apple, was a barbecue skewer, driven in so far that it had pinned him to the chair and it was this, rather than intense concentration, that held the Chief Inspector so upright.