Maxwell's Inspection (7 page)

‘Not planned,' he told the Incident Room. ‘The bloke in charge of fire drills is Bernard Ryan, Deputy Headteacher. He normally has them on Thursdays, usually in the morning. This one took them all by surprise.'

‘Not an actual fire, I assume?' Hall grimaced as the stale, cold coffee hit his tonsils.

‘No, guv.' Prentiss shook his head. ‘Leighford hasn't had a real fire since …' he checked his notes, ‘ninety-eight. Some basket case kid seeing if crêpe paper in the Art Room would burn.'

There were murmurings around the room. Empirical, investigative education was a wonderful thing.

‘There is one kid known to us as a bit of an arsonist, but he was firmly ensconced in a French lesson at the time and the teacher swears he didn't move. Except when the fire-bell went of course and then he was out of there like a bat out of hell.'

‘So who set the alarm off?' Hall asked.

‘We don't know, guv,' Prentiss said. ‘I talked to the caretaker, bloke called Bert Martin and he narrowed it
down to an alarm in Aitch Block.'

‘Jacquie,' Hall turned back to the flip chart. ‘Where's that in relation to Aitch One?'

She checked the plans. ‘Here, guv,' she said. ‘Down the corridor and in that direction.'

Hall tapped his teeth with his biro. ‘So what are we saying? The killer sets off the alarm, makes his way from the alarm to Aitch One, kills Whiting, who is either deaf or hasn't bothered to obey the implicit instructions of the fire-bell and is obligingly sitting there. Then he walks out of the school through eight hundred witnesses.' He let it all sink in. ‘Well, that's straightforward then.'

‘Getting out wouldn't be a problem.' Baldock the boy detective gave everybody the benefit of his superior
intellect
. ‘The assembly point was here, right?' he had crossed to the flip chart. ‘So everybody's there, everybody's
attention's
there. Chummy just has to walk out the other side.'

Chummy? Thought Hall. The lad had been watching too many re-runs of
Gideon of the Yard
on TCM on his days off. Even so, the little bastard was essentially correct.

‘Or,' Philip Bathurst wasn't going to let it go. He knew when a little shite was after his job. ‘He didn't walk out at all.'

‘Go on Phil.' Hall was all ears.

‘If it's one of the Ofsted team, if it's one of the staff, even if, God help us, it's one of the kids, a cool customer would just mingle with the crowd, wouldn't they,
muttering
about what a bloody waste of time fire drills were.'

Everybody in that room had been thinking that since word of Whiting's death got around. What if it was one of the kids? Could it be? They all knew that kids killed. From Mary Bell to Venables and Thompson, those two twisted
little bastards who battered the toddler Jamie Bulger to death, there were psychos out there who just started out on the trail of havoc a little earlier than most. But Whiting, surely, was different. Most murderous children killed
children
younger than themselves or at least their own age. When they killed adults, it was the result of a mugging, a burglary gone wrong, the eventual ghastly retaliation for years of abuse. This was altogether something else.

Hall waited until the muttering and the murmuring died down. ‘Cause of death.' He had changed tack now, knowing how useless, at this stage of a murder enquiry, speculation was. ‘That's down to Dr Astley.' And the
mutterings
and the murmurings began again.

Dr James Astley wouldn't normally have worked nights. His patients, after all, were not usually in a hurry and they certainly weren't going anywhere. But his bridge
tournament
had been cancelled and his wife had her sister over and suddenly, that Tuesday night, the mortuary seemed the only place to be.

Astley would never see sixty again. Unless he
really
squeezed
, he couldn't often see his own genitals either, but hey, that was what growing old disgracefully was all about. And as for genitals, well, in his line of work, you got to see plenty of other people's. In his line of work too, you talked to yourself. He hadn't bothered to get his
long-suffering
assistant, Donald, out of his slippers for routine stuff like this, so he went about the business for which he had been trained and which most of us would find too ghastly to contemplate, alone and talking into a mike that was suspended from the ceiling.

‘Well-nourished male,' Astley mumbled, knowing that
Donald could translate his mutterings into coherent English for the report later. ‘Age … mid-forties.' He mechanically checked the knees, the shins and the elbows for childhood scars. Nothing. Perhaps Alan Whiting had been a fastidious child. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Whiting had kept their little boy in a glass bubble. The world of a
forensic
pathologist was littered with the word ‘perhaps'.

For a brief moment, Jim Astley and Alan Whiting held hands. The nails were good, clean and trimmed, the
fingers
strangers to manual work. No scars even here, no signs of slippage with the hedge trimmer, no careless swing with a hammer which chipped the nail and
coarsened
the skin. Alan Whiting had been a paper pusher all his life. There was a discoloration around the cuticles that Astley recognized, chemical staining. At some point, the dead man had had access to a chemistry set and over a period of time, well, well, well … join the club; the man was a scientist.

Astley had scraped the dried blood from the man's chest. His shirt, bow tie and other clothing were with Henry Hall's people now, going through the third degree as all objects from a crime scene did. All that remained now to tell the world how he died was a small black hole in the mid line of his body.

‘Incision measuring four milimetres through the
ster-no-cleido
mastoid,' he tilted the dead man's head, ‘exiting through the trapezium to the right of the mid line. So,' he dropped the head back and straightened up, adjusting the dangling mike as he went, ‘my guess at this stage – and we'll do the surgery tomorrow, Mr Hall, if it's all the same to you, is that the murder weapon is a sharp-pointed, dull-sided narrow blade which passed through the
ster-no-hyoid 
above or below the third vertebra. Resistance would have been slight if the blow missed the bone and the impact would have carried the head backwards if …' he checked the papers alongside him, ‘as the notes
contend
, Mr Whiting was pinned by said weapon to his chair. Fibres on his hair will confirm that.'

Astley switched off the mike and looked down at the placid face of the dead man, his head supported by the pads. ‘Neat but not neat enough. Professional, but
amateur
. You're a mass of contradictions, aren't you, Chief Inspector?'

And in that chill, stainless steel room as another
summer's
day died around him, even Jim Astley wasn't sure whether he was talking about Alan Whiting or Henry Hall.

‘That's enormously hurtful, you know.' Peter Maxwell was talking to Jacquie Carpenter on her front doorstep in Sandcroft Way as darkness came down over Leighford.

‘What is?' She kissed him and took one of the
takeaway
bags.

‘What you just did,' he told her. ‘Looking round to see if anyone noticed my arriving. You're ashamed of me, aren't you? Aren't you?' He was screaming now. ‘It's because I'm so old, isn't it? So decrepit. That's what all this is about.'

She kissed him again, giggling and pushing him back in the doorway and draping herself over him, grinding her hips against his. Then she pulled back. ‘You,' and she batted him on the nose with a prawn cracker, ‘are just a dirty old man.'

He winked at her. ‘Works every time, doesn't it?'

She led him through into her kitchen, opening
cupboards
and clattering crockery as she went. The sun
gilded
her spice rack and her assorted whisks. ‘Anyway,' she said. ‘Where's your key?'

‘Ah.' His face dropped along with the takeaway bags. ‘I've been meaning to talk to you about that.'

‘You've lost it,' she said, looking at him sharply.

‘Not so much lost as mislaid,' he explained. ‘Mrs B …'

Jacquie held up her hand. She knew Maxwell's
cleaning
lady whom he held in common both at home and work. She wouldn't hear a word spoken against her. ‘I know for a fact that Mrs B. wouldn't move
any
of your
personal items. She's left your truss out on the line for the past three months.'

‘Some things just have to be properly aired,' he said, ‘lest you reap the repercussions. This may be the warm south, but a damp gusset …' his eyes crossed at the thought of it. ‘Don't go there, Woman Policeman. Well, you can later.'

‘Not tonight, Max,' she sighed.

‘That's probably the worst Josephine de Beauharnais I've heard,' he told her. ‘Soy?'

‘Top shelf. Are you feeling brave enough for
chopsticks
?'

‘If it's good enough for Russ Conway,' Maxwell smiled. That was two people in quick succession that Jacquie Carpenter had never heard of. But she loved Peter Maxwell despite his madness.

‘So?' he said once they were hunkered down in her lounge and tucking into Numbers 16, 34, 73 and a double portion of 118.

‘Scrummy,' she said, wrestling with a king prawn and looking at him cheekily.

‘There's none so obtuse,' he said, ‘as they who will not cough. If it's not too much of a mixed metaphor over this particular meal, are you going to spill the beans?'

She looked at him, the sad, dark eyes, always alive at moments like these, sensing the razor mind behind the boyish enthusiasm. He wasn't so different from Geoff Baldock really, except for the brain. Oh, and the insanity.

‘You know I can't,' they both intoned together.

‘Yes,' Maxwell continued alone. ‘Of course I do, but there's a difference this time.'

‘Oh?' She raised an eyebrow. ‘Why so?'

‘Come on, Jacquie.' He'd diced with other people's deaths before. This conversation between them had become oddly routine. ‘A man died on school premises.
My
school, to be exact.'

‘
Your
school?' She was playing with him along with her noodles. It was a losing battle really; only the noodles would go to the wall.

‘Figuratively, metaphorically, morally, spiritually,' he confirmed. ‘As of last December when old Bill Cater
finally
did the decent thing and shot himself, I am the oldest serving teacher at Leighford High. Legs Diamond was still working his way through the joined-up writing course at Luton Tech for the Maladjusted when I started there. Paul Moss was at kindergarten.'

‘Yes, but it's always different, isn't it, Max?' she reminded him. ‘One of your sixth form, an old school chum, the old girl on your doorstep. There's always a
reason
to be involved.'

‘That's how it goes,' he shrugged. ‘But this one really is different. I wonder what the stats are?' Peter Maxwell had never really had any faith in statistics. Along with Disraeli, he'd rather take the lies and the damned lies any day. ‘I wonder how many murders are committed in schools?'

‘Dunblane?' She'd stopped chewing now. ‘Everyday occurrence in the States, I understand.'

He nodded. ‘And I
am
involved already,' he didn't have to remind her.

‘You are.' She twisted up her face, sighing. ‘And that's why I shouldn't be talking to you now. God knows what would happen if …'

‘If Henry found out?' Maxwell chuckled. He and
Jacquie's boss went back a fair way by now. He'd sparred with him before, but usually had his man on the ropes after a couple of rounds. ‘Well, let's not tell him, shall we?'

‘Maxwell,' she growled, shaking her head. ‘At the moment, I'm in the dark.'

He put down his chopsticks with gratitude and
resorted
to his fingers for the last pork ball. ‘Delicious.' He smacked his lips. ‘And only two per pig. Right, heart of hearts,' he wiped his fingers on her kitchen roll. ‘Let's put on the metaphorical light, shall we? Alan Whiting. What do we know?'

She sighed as she started. He'd done it again, as he always did. Her career flashed before her, as it had so often in the past. She had dreams about this; Henry Hall standing in front of her, shaking his head in abject
disappointment
. ‘Ofsted Chief Inspector,' she told him. ‘
Exchemistry
teacher, science adviser, something or other in the corridors of power in Derbyshire LEA.'

‘Lots of knives in his back, I shouldn't wonder.'

‘But that was rather a long time ago,' she put it in
perspective
. ‘No doubt he's made other enemies since then.'

‘No doubt he has,' Maxwell nodded. ‘Hair of the dog, poppet?' he nodded in the general direction of her drinks cabinet. ‘You know I do my best work pissed.'

She poured for them both, a Scotch for her, a Southern Comfort for him.

‘Here's to crime,' he raised his glass.

‘It pays the bills,' she had to admit.

‘Where was his last Ofsted?'

‘We don't know.'

‘It's on that thing, what do you young people call it? The Net? It's done by school, so it might take a bit of
finding. 
Or of course you can just ring up and ask David Bell.'

‘Bell?'

‘The Big Cheese who runs Ofsted. He must have a list somewhere, written down on a fag packet or whatever.'

‘Where's this going, Max?' she asked.

‘Consider the situation. There's a headmaster
somewhere
– or a headmistress … after all, we've given you people the vote now, so it's not
too
long a shot – who was heartily pissed off by Whiting. Not a failing school, that's too general. For all that heads carry the can, a failing school is a collective responsibility thing – everybody shares in it. There'd be eighty skewers in Whiting's neck. No, this would be a situation where the head is singled out personally. He or she festers, worrying it, teasing it, bemoaning the unfairness of it. He or she hatches a plot. Revenge – it's been done before.' He was lolling back against the sofa, looking at the ceiling as the scenario formed in his brain. ‘You let a little time go by; wait ‘till Whiting's done … what, two, three more schools? Just to muddy the waters. Then you hit him, when he's
somewhere
else entirely, somewhere like Leighford High so that suspicion falls on them – us.'

‘And it wouldn't have to be a headteacher,' she was reasoning with him.

‘No, indeed. Anybody. Anybody who'd been singled out, unfairly, as they saw it, criticised.'

‘Do people
really
feel like that?' she asked. ‘Teachers, I mean.'

Maxwell smiled. ‘There's no job in the world like teaching,' he told her, he who had had no other. ‘What was it Lord Randolph Churchill said to young Winston? “It's the best career in the world if you work at it and the
worst if you shirk.” All right, he was talking about the army, but the idea applies. Except that today you can't shirk. God, when I started, revered Heads of Classics would get their classes working silently on a bit of Virgil while they had their afternoon nap. Exercise books went for whole terms without being marked. The most we ever had to write on school reports was “unsatisfactory”. And it really rankled having to add that “un” to denote the misfits, wierdos and layabouts. These days every report I write takes me twenty minutes
and
it has to be done
electronically
.'

‘What?' Jacquie was disbelieving. ‘You mean, you write on a computer? You?'

‘Actually,' he closed to her confidentially, ‘it's a
hologram
of myself I cunningly set up in the Computer Room, but don't tell the Director of Studies. No, teaching is a
solitary
occupation, Woman Policeman. Oh, there's a little thing called the National Curriculum and there are syllabi and so on. But they threw team-teaching out with school milk and now, once that classroom door closes, it's just me and a couple of dozen fine young cannibals. And if I want to teach them the moon's a balloon or Adolf Hitler was a nice man, it'll be a hell of a long time before anyone can stop me.'

‘So you're saying …'

He leaned across and stretched an arm around her as she snuggled around to his side of the left-over Chinese. ‘I'm saying that, as a profession, we're solitary people. Team-teaching went out in the eighties. Classroom Assistants? They stir the paint and make the tea. No, we're lords unto ourselves and we don't welcome
interference
. Most of us accept Ofsted as an occupational
hazard. 
We know it's for the best. But what if there's someone who doesn't? Someone who rather enjoys his or her
relative
freedom? Someone who doesn't want to be
controlled
by David Bell or any of his minions? You ladies of the law are assessed constantly, aren't you?'

‘Tell me about it,' she moaned.

‘Well, we're not. Ofsted comes but once every four years, like an American election – and look how rigged they are.'

‘Don't you get internal inspections?'

Maxwell chuckled. ‘Indeed we do,' he told her. ‘Last year it was Legs Diamond himself for me, the Big Enchilada – only because I'd refused to be assessed by either Bernard Ryan or Dierdre Lessing.'

‘And was he impressed?'

‘Legs?' Maxwell snorted. ‘Let's just say he threw down his rifle and applauded. You'd think he'd be a tougher nut to crack, wouldn't you?'

‘How do you mean?' she frowned.

‘Well, a man on his salary. What's he on? Fifty, sixty grand? All it cost me was a tenner to get him to go away. No pride, some people!'

‘So … you think Whiting's death has nothing to do with Leighford?' she checked.

‘That's about the size of it.'

She snuggled closer so that her hand was against his shoulder and her long flame hair splayed across his chest. ‘What if you're wrong, Max?' she asked. ‘What if Whiting's death had
everything
to do with Leighford? What if, tomorrow, when you walk into school, you're walking past a killer?'

‘Please accept our condolences, Mrs Whiting.'

It was rather like a message from an
I-Speak-Your-Weight
machine. Perhaps Henry Hall had done this once too often; perhaps he'd allowed himself to be too detached; perhaps it went with the job. He got the
impression
that Pamela Whiting was on something, something that calmed, soothed, took away the edge of reality. She was an attractive woman with short-cropped dark hair and eyes that danced and sparkled on a good day. Today was not a good day. Today was the day she had just come from Leighford Council's Mortuary and an odious toad of a man called Astley had asked her to identify her
husband's
body.

‘Thank you,' was all she could think of to say. The policeman in front of her was about her own age. His jaw was strong, his mouth kind and sensitive, but she
couldn't
see his eyes, because they were hidden behind the lenses of his glasses and those lenses just reflected the frosted panes of the windows of Interview Room Two at Leighford Police Station. Across to her right, she was dimly aware of a woman, plainclothes, with light auburn hair fastened into a plait swept up behind her head. She looked concerned, as if she were trying to understand what Pamela Whiting was going through.

‘I have to ask you some questions,' Hall was saying, as though down a long tunnel in her mind. ‘Are you all right with that?'

‘Of course,' she said. ‘That's why I'm here.'

‘DS Carpenter will make notes at this stage,' Hall said. ‘We don't need tape recorders, do we?'

Pamela Whiting had no idea. Her husband had never been murdered before.

‘When did you last see your husband?' Hall asked.

‘Er … let's see … Saturday. He caught the train from Matlock.'

‘You saw him to the station?'

‘No, he took a cab. I do Keep Fit on Saturday
afternoons
. I was the other side of town.'

‘And he came to Leighford?'

‘I believe he had to change in London. I don't do the train thing any more, Chief Inspector. They're so appalling, aren't they?'

‘But your husband did?'

‘Oh yes. If truth be told, he wasn't much of a driver. Found it too stressful to add that to a week's inspection. I don't think anyone realizes quite how exhausting it is, being an Ofsted Inspector.'