Maxwell's Inspection (13 page)

‘That would make sense,' he nodded. ‘The wound
definitely
tapered. No prints, of course.'

Hall shook his head. ‘Chummy wore gloves.'

‘Ever known this before?' Astley asked. ‘Skewer as a murder weapon, I mean?'

‘No,' Hall admitted. ‘It's not text book. Still, pretty
efficient
though. Someone deliberately sets a fire alarm, runs a carefully prepared but otherwise anonymous skewer through a man's throat and disappears like the phantom tiddler.'

‘Unless … Ah, you little bastard. Got you!' and he stooped to retrieve his ball.

‘Unless?' For Hall, it was still Day Five, but high
afternoon
. It wouldn't be long before Day Five became Day Six. And the Press weren't getting any less impatient and Jim Astley had nothing to do but play a round all day.

‘Unless it's an inside job. Why did you ask if it could be a woman? Got someone in the frame?'

Henry Hall didn't usually discuss cases with the pathologist. He and Jim Astley went back more years than either of them cared to remember, but Astley was a
difficult
, arrogant bastard and his perspective wasn't always the right one. Even so, needs must when the devil drove. ‘Possibly,' Hall said as Astley motioned him to stand aside. The breeze slapped the little flag that fluttered in Hole Eight and Astley crouched, shoulders down, lining up the ball and it.

‘Say on.' Astley's swing thwacked the ball to bounce on the far side of the green before it rolled obligingly into a bunker. ‘Well, for fuck's sake.' He glanced quickly around. He'd already received a threatening letter for using that sort of language in the Clubhouse. True, it was to the wife of the President, but you couldn't be too
careful
.

‘Paula Freeling,' Hall said, trying out the sound in the blaze of a golf course on a sunny summer's afternoon.

‘No,' muttered Astley. ‘Never heard of her.'

‘Oh, I think you will by tomorrow.' Hall sat himself down on the bunker's edge. ‘The gentlemen of the Press will have twigged that Miss Freeling is the Ofsted Inspector who got away.'

‘Done a runner?'

‘Perhaps. She was the one who found the body.'

‘Bit obvious then, isn't it?'

‘Finding the body, no. Actually, it's surprisingly
common
. Chummy, because he's obsessional or terrified or a smartarse, leads the police to the crime by ‘coming across' the corpse. He helps said police with their enquiries. You've seen it before, Jim, I know.'

‘I have.' Astley swung again, clumps of sand flying
upward and, mercifully, a little white ball with them. ‘So, what, the woman sets off a fire alarm, drives a skewer through her boss's throat? Why?'

‘Indeed.' The DCI was growing more pensive by the minute. ‘That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. I don't know enough about either of them yet.'

‘Well,' Astley's ball had clunked at last into the Eighth Hole. ‘Got you, you little beauty! When and if, Heaven forefend, you find a woman's body, give me a bell. Until then, I can't be a whole lot of use, can I?'

‘It won't take long, Headmaster.' Maxwell was standing along with the man, cheek by jowl as they made for Diamond's office.

‘Well, good, Max.' The Head was a little flustered, it being Friday and all and an Ofsted Inspector being
murdered
in his school. ‘Because I have a Full Governors' at five.'

The Head of Sixth Form waited until the door had closed before he put a metaphorical toe into James Diamond's murky waters. ‘Where did you say you knew Sally Meninger from?'

Dierdre Lessing had been right. The Head
did
blush, a rather mottled leprous inflammation spreading up above his tie-knot. ‘I don't know what you mean,' he bridled. ‘Who said I did?'

‘Sally,' Maxwell lied.

‘What?'

‘What's the matter, Headmaster? Are you all right?'

Diamond rounded on him, his jaw flexing. His fists clenched. ‘When did Sally say this? What did she say?'

‘When? I really can't remember. As to what, well it was
all rather vague, really. Asort of throwaway line. Is there a problem?'

He saw Diamond turn the colours of the rainbow before the man relented and slumped into his chair. Maxwell looked at him, a now colourless man in a
colourless
room, not a teacher but a manager; a suit held
together
by conference sound-bites and buzzwords. And the suit was worried and his paranoia was showing.

‘Was that it?' Diamond scowled. ‘Was that what this was all about? A Peter Maxwell fishing expedition?'

Maxwell clicked open the door. ‘Better I reel you in than the law do, Headmaster,' he said. ‘Because they've got an altogether bigger line than I have. I've been known to throw tiddlers back; but Mr Plod? Well, he quite often bashes their brains out on a rock. You enjoy your Full Governors', now, y'hear.'

It must be understood that Peter Maxwell didn't usually go out looking for fifteen-year-old boys on Friday nights. Leave that sort of thing to choirmasters and the Catholic church. No, he saw more than enough of them during the day, those curious denizens of the dark who normally shunned sunlight, who scowled under cowls throughout the winter and wore shorts down to their ankles in the height of summer. But this one was different. This was the anorak Olly Carson, who took his summer holiday in Roswell and whose bedroom door bore the triangular
no-go
sign ‘Area 51'.

The sea was restless below the grass-blown cliffs that edged the Shingle, that spit of land that ran, like Nature's pier, out into the Channel. In the distance, the tankers crawled by in the evening sun, bright in their port colours and the gulls' wings caught the dying embers of its rays.

From the beach below, where the darkening headland had spread its chill, the chatter and laughter of the
barbecuers
came as snatches of a song, now soft, now loud and the dim, distant racket of the fairground.

Maxwell's brave new world had polarized tourists. Only the very young and the very old came to Leighford now. The bright young things were off to Ibiza or Tenerife; the bright old ones had fallen for John Thaw's old flannel and bought a cheap, crumbling house in Provence. And so the Leighford hotels charged more to keep profits up and so fewer people came and so Leighford spiralled downwards still further. One day it would be a ghost
town in some post-apocalyptic world, with tumbleweed blowing along its deserted streets and bloated corpses rolling at the water's edge.

Maxwell's quarry did not concern himself with the micro-economics of an ageing seaside town. His sights were set on altogether higher things as he sat, knees under his chin on the grass of the headland, a bag of
sustenance
by his side, binoculars on the grass beyond that.

‘Hello, Olly.'

‘Mr Maxwell.' The lad jumped. Odd enough to be hailed at all, at sunset on a summer's day, but to be hailed by one of your teachers, and a mad one at that …

‘You're supposed to say “What are you doing here?” and then I kill you.'

‘What?' Olly Carson looked perplexed.

‘Never mind.' Maxwell sat down beside the boy. ‘May I?'

‘It's a free country,' Olly shrugged.

‘Ah, but is it, Olly?' Maxwell tapped the binoculars. ‘I never took you for a twitcher.'

‘Not the nervy type,' Olly assured him.

‘No, I meant … what are the binocs for?'

Olly opened his mouth to say something, then changed tack. ‘How did you know where to find me?'

Maxwell threw his hat down on the flattened grass, careful to avoid the sheep currants and tucked his knees up under his chin. Nothing like a bit of postural echo to make an oddball feel relaxed. ‘What if I said I was just out for a walk and we just bumped into each other?'

Olly leaned a little sideways to look the man fully in the face. ‘I'd say that wasn't true,' he said.

‘Stout fellow,' Maxwell risked the wrath of Political
Correctness and slapped the boy's shoulder. For two years he'd been trying to drum a healthy scepticism into Olly Carson and it seemed to have paid off. ‘No, I went to see your dear old mum after school today. She told me where you'd be … approximately. Any luck?'

Maxwell noticed Olly's face darken. ‘She shouldn't have told you, my mum. Had no right.'

‘I expect she thought it was important, Olly – why I wanted to talk to you, I mean.'

‘Is it?'

‘Oh, yes.' He tapped the binoculars again. ‘Any luck?'

Olly took his time, wrestling with himself. When
people
have spent years of their lives laughing at you – never with, just at – well, you've got to choose carefully. Maxwell was mad, but he wasn't barmy. The boy looked out to sea, feeling the breeze ruffle his hair. ‘Too early yet,' he muttered.

‘Too early?'

Olly nodded. ‘What time is it?' he asked.

Maxwell checked his watch. ‘Half eight,' he said.

Olly nodded. ‘It'll be about nine, nine fifteen.'

‘What happens?'

‘Foo fighters.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Well, they're not really Foo fighters, of course. I just call them that.'

‘Where do you see them, Olly?' Maxwell was well out on the ledge of no return now. He needed this boy's help, but he needed his trust, too. At the moment he was the old duffer who screamed at him every Thursday because he hadn't finished his GCSE coursework – didn't do much for bonding, that kind of thing.

‘Usually low, over the horizon. Bit of a sea-mist
building
tonight. Might not be lucky.'

‘What do you think they are?' Maxwell asked.

Olly shrugged. ‘Don't know.' But Olly Carson had been here before. He was used to grown-ups patronizing him with transparently obvious suggestions, so he thought he'd beat Maxwell to it. ‘They're not bird
formations
‘cos they're too fast. They're not clouds, even
lenticular
ones – I know the difference. They're not aircraft either ‘cos the flight path is too erratic.'

‘From which you conclude?' Maxwell was almost afraid to ask.

‘They are semi-luminous, cigar-shaped objects which routinely invade our air space, travelling, as far as I can calculate, at speeds in excess of eleven thousand miles an hour. That's faster than any aircraft known to exist, Mr Maxwell. I've been observing them now for months.'

Maxwell didn't really know how to follow that. ‘Do you come here often?' sounded impossibly clichéd even as it left the Great Man's lips, but Olly Carson was fifteen and, UFO-spotting apart, he didn't get out much.

‘Every Friday and Saturday night,' the boy told him.

‘But that's party time, isn't it? Down the Front,
smashing
windows and terrorizing old ladies.'

‘I don't do that, Mr Maxwell,' Olly told him
straight-faced
.

‘Tell me, Olly, how long do you stay up here on your own?'

Olly shrugged. ‘Depends,' he said. ‘Sometimes three hours, four. A couple of times I've stayed up all night.'

‘All night?' Maxwell frowned. ‘What does your mum say about all this?'

Olly turned away. ‘Mum don't say nothing. She's got a new boyfriend.'

Unlovable as Olly Carson was, the father in Peter Maxwell wanted to hug him. He'd been a dad once, long, long ago. And her photo was in his wallet now, on that darkening hillside, under his jacket – a little girl with eyes to drown in. A little girl who was gone. A little girl who was dead. He shook himself free of memories. ‘Tell me about the fire drill, Olly,' he said.

‘What about it?' This was one leap of logic too many for Olly Carson.

‘Nurse Matthews tells me you saw someone; a visitor, not from the school.'

Olly nodded. ‘That's right, I did.'

‘This could be important, Olly,' Maxwell told him. ‘Do you remember what he looked like, this man?'

‘Wore a boiler suit,' Olly frowned, trying to reconjure it. ‘Blue. Bit grubby. Had a baseball cap on.'

In the twenty-first century, that almost went without saying. ‘Where did you see him, Olly?'

‘Round the bike sheds, going towards Art. I was late getting down the stairs.'

‘The bike sheds,' Maxwell mused. In his mind's eye, he pictured Leighford High's topography. The bike sheds were a stone's throw from the Art Department and the Art Department flowed into the Humanities Block as effluent down a sewer. ‘Tell me, this boiler man, did he seem to know where he was going?'

‘Don't know,' Olly said. ‘He wasn't going to the Assembly area, that's for sure.'

‘What about his face, Olly? Height? Colour of hair?'

The boy was shaking his head. ‘Sorry, Mr Maxwell,' he
said. ‘I wasn't really looking at him, you know, in detail.'

‘No, of course not, Olly,' Maxwell sighed. ‘Why should you? Have you told the police about this?'

‘The police?' The boy looked askance. ‘No fear. They're in on it.'

It was Maxwell's turn to frown. ‘In on what, Olly?'

‘The conspiracy,' the boy mumbled, checking from side to side. ‘Crop circles, animal mutilations; whatever my foo fighters are. Stands to reason. That's why no one knows what's causing it all. The cops say they'll
investigate
and then they do nothing. They're in on it, all right.'

Maxwell smiled at the strange, lonely lad on the hill. ‘Well, Olly,' he said, creaking to his feet. ‘You may well be right. Hope you get some good sightings tonight.'

‘Thanks, Mr Maxwell…for not laughing at me, I mean.'

Maxwell winked at the boy. He'd never laugh at Olly Carson again.

‘Shit!'

‘What?'

Peter Maxwell sat up in bed, flinging the covers from him, wiping his face with his hand.

‘Can't sleep, pet?' Jacquie was less than understanding in the bed next to him as she tried to focus in the sudden flare of the lamp. It had been a bitch of a day for them all.

‘I'm sorry, darling,' he threw himself back on the
pillow
again. ‘It's all whizzing round, you know, like it does.'

She knew. The terrors of the night, when the little things you said and the little things you did blend and blur with the huge things yet to be said and yet to do. It all
adds up to the nightmares.

‘Tell me,' she said, knowing how just talking brings things into perspective.

‘The bike sheds.' Maxwell was now staring at the
ceiling
. ‘If Boiler Man came from the bike sheds, he's not on video. The camera at that side of the building is a dummy.'

‘We know that,' she told him. ‘Pat Prentiss has been over the CCTV footage with a magnifying glass. Nothing.'

‘But don't you see,' he sat up again, wishing at times like these, that he had taken up smoking. ‘That proves it's an inside job.'

‘What?' Jacquie was sitting up too now, tucking the duvet over her breasts in that pointless way that women have. ‘Why?'

‘Because he knew that the camera wasn't working. It's the only one of the five that doesn't.'

‘Do the kids know that?'

‘God knows,' Maxwell shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don't know.'

‘So what are we saying? One of the kids disguises
himself
as a Boiler Man by nipping off to the loo to change into a suit, nips back past the non-working camera and stabs an Ofsted Inspector just so he can add it to his CV? Come on. Max, that's ridiculous.'

‘It all depends,' he was wagging his finger in the half light, ‘on how much we can rely on Olly Carson.'

‘Well, you know him,' Jacquie said. ‘What do you think?'

Maxwell wished she hadn't asked him that. ‘This is a lad who watches cigar-shaped objects moving at umpteen
times the speed of sound. He wanders the Shingle all night in search of an obsession. For all I know he's
barking
.'

Jacquie Carpenter knew Peter Maxwell of old. ‘But you think?'

He looked at her. ‘I think he's telling the truth. I think he saw what he says he saw. Maintenance men,
contractors
, parents,
anybody
, is supposed to report to Reception, at the
front
of the school where the CCTV picks them up. They have to sign the book and wear a badge. It's not
foolproof
, but if you're an honest citizen going about your business, it'll do.'

‘But if you're a killer bent on murder …'

‘Then you bypass the system.'

‘And you have to know how.'

‘Which brings us back to an inside job.'

There was a silence between them. She lay down again. ‘How many people know Leighford High?' she asked.

‘God,' Maxwell flung himself down beside her. ‘Nearly twelve hundred kids, eighty-plus teaching staff, over twenty auxiliaries, cooks, cleaners, groundsmen. And that's before we get to parents, old Hyenas, governors, people coming for interviews. How many door-to-door have you got?'

He heard her chuckle gaily as she switched off the
bedside
light. ‘Not nearly enough. Now, go to sleep, Peter Maxwell.' And she pulled the covers over her head.

‘You mean we aren't going to play around?'

She half turned, reaching behind her, coming out with the old Ronnie Corbett joke. ‘Don't tell me you've got a golf club down there?' There was a pause as her hand
brushed against something. ‘Oh, I see you have.'

And they laughed in the darkness.

‘Fuck Saturdays!' The day had not gone well for Brian McGhee. He shouldn't have been here at all, but his
fucking
boss had rung last night and asked him to fucking do the early morning shift. Well, fuck. Not for Brian the philosophical approach to life. Not for him the joy of
helping
his fellow man to enjoy a clean and sparkling water supply along the south coast of this great country of ours. He grunted at Mavis, his long-suffering wife who looked less alluring by the day, whichever kid it was, and Brian had more or less stopped counting by now, clamped to one of her breasts. He'd grabbed a cup of tea he'd had to make himself and now he was off to the delights of the Leighford Sewage Plant, Southern Water's show piece west of Brighton.

How fucking come, Brian wondered as he passed the hoarding with its glossy logo and its promise of a brave new water world, that he was actually up to his ankles in other people's shit all day.
And
on a Saturday.

But it was a different kind of other people's shit
looking
up at him from the bottom of the bore-hole and he'd had to sit down. He looked around. The sky was a
cloudless
blue, the sun climbing already and bouncing off his bright yellow hard hat. There was his van, where he'd parked it, keys still in the ignition, ready for the off later. There was the portacabin with that frosty bitch who
handled
the incoming calls on the Complaints Desk. He could hear the rattle and roar of the JCBs being started up on the far side of the site as Patel whatsisface kicked the beast into action. All normal. Everything as usual. Except it
wasn't. He got up again, eyes wobbling in the sweat that was running down his forehead and bouncing off his
eyebrows
. He rubbed his hands on his check shirt and
squatted
down so that his tools clunked in the leather belt around his waist. He bit his lip, screwed his courage to the sticking place and looked into the bore-hole again.