Maxwell's Inspection (14 page)

Down there, in the shadow where the sun had not yet burned, nothing was normal. A hand jutted above the level of the sand, its fingers curled, as though beckoning, saying softly through all the nightmares of his years ahead, ‘Come on down.' Nearby a face, old, wrinkled, the mouth pursed, the eyes closed, the skin yellow with dust, protruded from the rubble. Brian McGhee sat back on his monkey wrench, utterly oblivious of the pain that shot through his right buttock.

‘Fuck me,' he whispered.

Southern Water were no more enamoured of one of its sites being turned into a murder scene than was Leighford High School. But by lunchtime on that Saturday, that was exactly what had happened. Blue and white tape fluttered everywhere, police cars stood at
rakish
angles on spoil heaps and an unusually quiet Brian McGhee was helping their occupants with their enquiries, still sitting down, still trying to take it all in.

‘What have we got, Phil?' the DCI was in his shirt sleeves, a sure sign of the mounting mayhem as well as the heat.

‘Well, at first the site manager thought someone had wandered onto the site and slipped into that bore hole over there. Now …' He was keeping pace with his guv'nor, striding across the yard stacked with every
diameter of pipe.

‘Now?' Hall wanted one sensible answer at least.

‘Now, we know she used to be an Ofsted inspector and there's a deep incision through her throat.'

‘It has all the hallmarks, Henry, if you'll excuse the pun.'

Dr Astley's voice sounded echoey, far away at the other end of the phone. That was because he was in Leighford Mortuary at the end of another blistering Saturday. Say one thing for morgues, they were excellent places to be in a heatwave.

‘I didn't get you off the golf course?' Hall wasn't about to be Mr Popular and he needed all the friends he could get.

‘Not at all. As a matter of fact, you got me out of a
wedding
. Some ghastly niece I haven't seen for twenty years and her lout of a husband. Chap has earrings and, I understand, tattoos. Is it me or is civilization going
backwards
?'

‘Civilization seems to be a pretty thin veneer in Leighford at the moment,' Hall commented. Even with the fan whirring in his office, his collar felt like a yard of tripe.

‘Indeed. “I am down on Ofsted Inspectors and I shan't quit skewering them ‘till I do get buckled” – I'm
paraphrasing
, of course.'

‘Of course.' Every senior copper in the county knew the famous Ripper letters, those hoaxes sent in by a sick prankster to muddy the Met's waters long, long years ago, when policemen had to be five feet nine, of good character and vaguely male. Even so, Hall was impressed that Astley knew it too. ‘Nothing sexual?'

‘Nothing yet,' Astley was peering intently at the pale naked corpse on his stainless steel. Hall knew that and was heartily glad they hadn't got video-phones yet. ‘The old girl was fully clothed in the sand-pit thingy, wasn't she? As you know, Donald did the honours of stripping her while I was driving back from the wedding of the
century
. Christ alone knows what she was wearing.'

‘The deceased?'

‘No, my niece. It was some sort of black creation. She's a Goth, apparently. I always thought they'd sacked Rome or somewhere. Strange that. Her mother's C of E.'

‘Your man Donald …' Hall began.

‘Yes, I know. I can only apologize. Given a head wind and about another four decades, he'll make a tolerable mortuary assistant. I shouldn't have sent him, really.'

‘I couldn't find another GP in the whole bloody town, would you believe, to issue a death certificate,' Hall explained.

‘I would believe that, dear boy. Ah, appendix scar. Ancient,' Astley was going about his grisly business as he cradled the phone in the crook of his neck. ‘It is after all a Saturday in the sailing season and my profession, if it's in practice on the coast, owns boats. Otherwise, what's the point?'

‘You don't,' Hall pointed out.

‘Ah, but I'm not your run of the mill medical
practitioner
, dear boy. What's this woman's name, Henry?'

‘Freeling. Paula Freeling.'

‘Well, Ms Freeling – and I say that because I suspect she's still relatively
virgo intacta
– was tied up for a while.'

‘Alive or dead?'

‘Both.'

‘Sorry?'

‘Well,' Astley was concentrating on the dead woman's wrists, ‘judging by these marks, I'd say she was tied up while still alive, her hands behind her back. Then she was killed. Then she was left, still tied. There seems to be extra drag on the front of her forearms. I'd say she was standing up, tied to a pipe or something and when she died, she fell forward, but the ropes held her up.'

‘They
were
ropes?' Hall was scribbling notes.

‘Oh yes. Clear weave marks. It'll be a while before I can tell you what type.'

‘Cause of death?' Hall had moved on. He'd had two bodies dumped in his lap in five days and he and the world wanted answers.

‘Same old, same old,' Astley assured him. Peering again at the woman's throat. ‘Neat as you please through the mid-line. I'd say our friend had more time on this one.'

He followed the dark red rivulets down between Paula Freeling's breasts. At the navel, they divided, like some sort of macabre delta and there were runs into her pubic hair and splashes on her thighs. The blouse, skirt, panties and bra that Donald had removed all bore smudges and splashes of the same.

‘A skewer?' Hall checked.

‘Consistent bastard, isn't he? Except that this time,
presumably
, there's no weapon,' Astley mused. He'd read the preliminary reports. ‘Want my scenario, then, Henry?'

‘I could do with somebody's,' the DCI admitted.

‘She's been dead for a day, perhaps two.' Astley could hear Hall limbering up for an interruption on his end of the phone. ‘Yes, I know. Rectal temperature
shemperature. 
I'd say something sick about the smile on the camel and the sphinx if I weren't a thoroughly well-brought-up medical student. Like civilization, we're going backwards on time of death, Henry. Sometimes I feel betrayed by my own science. I'll be lucky if I get the year right in the future. Maybe I'll take up carbon dating.'

Henry Hall knew that Jim Astley's dating days were over, but now wasn't the moment to say so.

‘He did the deed in some sort of garage or warehouse. I've found diesel oil under the poor dear's fingernails. There's also severe bruising – ante mortem, by the way – on the upper arm. I'd say he grabbed her, pulling her with a fair degree of force. And at some point too, her knees were folded up, like a foetus. Lividity's obvious. Now, where all this happened of course, is anybody's guess, but Donald's buggered off already with her clothes, so your lab boys should be on that by now.'

Indeed they were. Hall had checked on that personally.

‘She was killed in said garage or warehouse and left to bleed to death. She wouldn't have lasted long – minutes only. And there she stayed, I'd guess, for the best part of … ooh, six, seven hours. Then she was wrapped in a
plastic
bag.'

‘What?'

‘Plastic bag. Bits of it caught in her hair. There's
something
else, only I don't know what it is.'

‘Something else?'

‘Yes.' Astley was annoyed with himself when he couldn't cross tees and dot eyes. ‘A residue of some kind, again in the hair. It's not sand from the bore-hole. I'll let you know.'

‘Sooner rather than later, Jim?' Hall asked.

Had it been anybody else Jim Astley would have bitten the man's head off, miles apart or no miles apart. But he'd worked with Henry Hall now, doctor and policeman, for a long time and he recognized the desperation edging into the man's voice.

‘You'll be the first to know, Henry,' Astley said, and, as he was about to hang up, ‘Go home, Detective Chief Inspector,' he said. ‘Tiredness kills.'

Hall let the phone click and whirr in this hand. ‘So,' he said to the ether, ‘does a maniac with a skewer.'

Maxwell had said it before. And Maxwell would say it again. Why, why, why did their lordships at the Horse Guards decide on dark blue for the colour of the Light Cavalry? That had been mistake one, some vague
indefinable
time in the 1750s. Mistake two was that Messrs Humbrol, paint manufacturers to the gentry, excellent colour-meisters though they were, did not make a colour of the self-same hue. So obsessive oddballs like Peter Maxwell had to
mix
the colours themselves – just the right blend of black and blue. And once this was made up, it had to be used quickly before it went solid and unusable.

‘Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!' The inevitable had
happened
. Maxwell had just blended his colours to
perfection
, to begin work on plastic Bob Portal's jacket and overalls, when the doorbell rang. He checked the clock across the attic from his modelling chair. Half eight. The dying sun was still streaming in through his skylight as he popped the brush back into the white spirit, hung his pill box on its hook and legged it down the stairs.

Who could this be? He knew it wasn't Jacquie. She'd rung him that afternoon with the news of the finding of
Paula Freeling's body and the equally unwelcome
information
that all police leave was cancelled and the Home Office was about to cop a packet in overtime payments. Couldn't be the Kleeneze man. He only ever called on Wednesdays. If it was the little shit from Number
Thirty-Two
wanting his ball back again, Maxwell would risk the law suit and shove it right up his …

‘Mr Maxwell?'

An attractive brunette stood in the Great Man's
doorway
. She clearly had not come for her ball and didn't look as if she knew how to pronounce Kleeneze.

‘Yes?' he said.

‘I'm Pamela Whiting. May I talk to you?'

Maxwell was not good around widows. A widower
himself
, he still remembered the empty small-talk his friends made in the days after his wife died. The futility of it all; the attempt to make the time fly, to put a decent distance between death and life; between then and now. He gave the woman a stiff drink and sat in his lounge, waiting.

‘I don't know what you must think of me,' Pamela Whiting said. ‘Just turning up on your doorstep like this.'

‘I don't know,' Maxwell said, ‘if there are any words …'

She held up her hand, fighting with all the emotions he had all those years ago. He imagined her wrestling with the same old questions – why him/her? Why us? And why, the most guilty question of all, why me? ‘I don't want words,' she said, ‘I want action.'

‘Action?' Maxwell frowned. ‘May I ask …'

‘Your Head, Mr Diamond. He suggested I come and see you.'

‘Legs?' Maxwell was amazed. ‘I don't know whether to be horrified or just plain old suspicious.'

‘Suspicious?' She looked quizzical.

‘Let's just say, Mrs Whiting, that Diamond and I carry rather a lot of baggage between us. He and I are the British Airways of Leighford High. But why would he …'

‘I went to see him,' she explained. ‘It wasn't a good time. He had a governors' meeting. I would assume it was a very difficult one.'

‘I'm sure the governors were very supportive,' Maxwell knew a party line when he was toeing one.

‘I'm sure they were.' She sat back on his settee for the first time, cradling the cut-glass in both hands. ‘But
neither
he nor they can help me now. I believe you can.'

‘Mrs Whiting …' Maxwell wriggled in his chair.

Again, her hand was in the air. ‘Please, Mr Maxwell. Hear me out. My husband was murdered last Tuesday, in your school. You, I understand, were first on the scene.'

‘Second,' Maxwell corrected her, knowing now the fate of the first.

‘I also understand you have … shall we say, a
reputation
for this sort of thing?'

‘“Behold, a pale horse”,' muttered Maxwell. ‘Mrs Whiting, I am not a policeman. I am not a private
detective
…'

‘But you solve murders,' she ended the sentence for him.

‘If you mean, I can work out who dear old John Nettles is looking for in murder-infested Midsomer, well, yes, sometimes.'

‘No, Mr Maxwell.' Pamela was sitting up again, staring into the man's face. ‘No, I'm talking about reality. Some
…' and they both heard her voice go, ‘some bastard killed my husband. Snuffed out his life.' She clicked her fingers. ‘That's not good enough. Not good enough at all.'

She sat in his lamplight, the sun gilding her face and etching her tears.

‘The police,' he said.

‘Oh, Mr Maxwell.' Pamela shook her head, a
humourless
smile on her face. ‘I lost faith in them a long time ago. They're shackled by political correctness and bureaucratic inefficiency on a monstrous scale. I just don't trust them to get results.'

‘They've talked to you?'

‘Of course. A DCI Hall.'

Maxwell nodded. ‘Henry's a good man.'

‘No, Mr Maxwell. My husband was a good man, and now he's dead.'

There was a pause, a stillness. Outside, on the catflap's rim, Metternich the cat sensed the moment, sniffed once and tiptoed away.

‘If it's money …' she went on.

This was the second time in two days that an attractive woman had sat in this lounge, offering Peter Maxwell money. ‘No, it's not that. Mrs Whiting …'

‘Pamela, please.'