Maxwell's Inspection (28 page)

‘So he did. Didn't exactly please his wife, I
understand
.'

‘Mrs Whiting?'

‘Have you met her?'

‘Yes,' Maxwell said. ‘Yes, I have as a matter of fact. She seemed the soul of correctness and dignity.'

‘Oh,
she
is, yes. It's her sister I've got my doubts about.'

‘Her sister?' Maxwell was lost.

Simmonds looked at him. ‘Well, surely you know,' he sneered. ‘What with your “little ways” and all. Sally Meninger is Pamela Whiting's sister.'

He stumbled into the bright lights of Leighford nick, his tie gone, his inevitable three piece suit replaced with an anorak and jeans.

‘Can I help you, sir?' the desk man peered at him. This was still a working police station and not Fort Apache, the South Coast, complete with push-button answerphone and couples having it away in the ever-dimming glow of the blue lamp.

‘Yes,' he said, summoning up the courage to look the man in the face. ‘My name is James Diamond. I've come to confess to the killing of Alan Whiting.'

It was Philip Bathurst who drew the short straw. It was two minutes into Tuesday and he should have gone home hours ago. Instead he found himself staring across the desk in Interview Room One, the tape whirring and DS Jacquie Carpenter by his side. The girl looked tired and drawn under the strip light.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Diamond?' she asked, looking for something normal in the situation facing them all.

‘Er … no, thanks,' Diamond said. ‘I just want to get this over with.'

‘When we spoke last, Mr Diamond,' the DI began slowly, choosing his words as he cradled his fingers, ‘I was apologizing to you for the precipitate behaviour of
one of my DCs. Are you telling me Geoff Baldock was right, after all?'

The Head's eyes flickered. He looked a hundred. ‘I'm afraid so,' he said.

‘All right,' Bathurst leaned back, sliding an ashtray away from him. ‘Tell me why. Tell me why you killed Alan Whiting.'

‘I didn't mean to,' he said. ‘I want that understood from day one.'

‘It's on the record.' Bathurst nodded to the tape recorder.

‘He was … pestering Sally. Sally Meninger, treating her like a tramp.'

‘What was that to you?' Jacquie asked.

‘We … I knew Sally some time ago. We were lovers.'

‘How long ago?' Bathurst asked.

‘Three years. No … four. We met at a conference.'

‘And had an affair?' Jacquie said.

‘We fell in love,' Diamond insisted. ‘“Had an affair” sounds sordid. Furtive fumblings in cheap hotel rooms. It wasn't like that.'

‘What
was
it like?' the DI could think of no finer way to spend his early Tuesday mornings.

‘Love,' Diamond repeated.

‘And how did your wife take it?' Jacquie asked. Such relationships loomed large in her thinking at the moment.

‘Margaret?' Diamond was twisting his plain gold
wedding
ring round his finger, unaware that he was doing it. ‘She never knew.'

‘Until DC Baldock arrested you?'

‘Yes,' Diamond said. ‘Until then.'

‘All right.' Bathurst folded his arms, eyeing up his
man, taking his time. ‘You don't approve of furtive
fumblings
in cheap hotel rooms; so where did you meet? You and Sally? How did you keep your passionate love going for three … no, four years?'

Diamond's jaw was flexing and his lip curling. ‘You're making fun of me, aren't you?'

Bathurst leaned forward, his tether well and truly ended. ‘No, Mr Diamond. That's more than my job's worth.' He snapped off the tape. ‘You and Sally Meninger have a fling, an affair, a knee-trembler, she's the love of your life,
whatever
three or four years ago. You conduct a relationship, presumably by e-mail with the odd Christmas card and then she pops back into your life. Joy unconfined, you might think, but no – there's a
complication
in the form of Alan Whiting. Mr Octopus. A wolf in wolf's clothing. Sally comes to you distraught and you put a skewer through his throat.'

‘You make it all sound so simple,' Diamond said.

‘No, Mr Diamond.' Bathurst scraped his chair back. ‘That's what you must think we are. Why did you kill Paula Freeling?'

‘She saw me,' Diamond snapped back. ‘She saw me kill Whiting. I had to shut her up. That's why I went to the Cunliffe, to reach her.'

‘And where did you keep her?' Jacquie asked.

‘What?'

‘We know from our forensics that the woman was kept bound, for perhaps two days before she was killed,' Bathurst obliged. ‘Where did you keep her?'

‘In my garage,' he said.

‘Mrs Diamond feed her, did she?' Jacquie asked. ‘Or just moan at you to tidy up after yourself?'

‘I can't believe you're taking this attitude,' Diamond said. It was as though he were talking to a recalcitrant Year Ten student.

‘Why did you kill Craig Edwards?' Bathurst snapped, leaning over his man, nose to nose.

‘Who?'

‘The photographer.'

‘I …'

The DI stood up. ‘Get him out of here, Jacquie, before I lose what little cool I've got left. No, wait. Charge him. Charge Mr Diamond here with wasting police time. After all, we've go nothing better to do at the moment.'

There were a lot of rumours about Lord Cardigan, the last of the Brudenells who led the Charge of the Light Brigade. One was that on the night of Balaclava he left his
exhausted
, wounded men and slept aboard his yacht after a champagne supper. In fact, he didn't. He wrapped
himself
up in a horse blanket and held his bugler in his arms as the boy died. Peter Maxwell didn't intend to go that far, but he couldn't see his lads, the Hippos, stretched on the cold, cold ground while he lorded it in hotel-land luxury. So he dossed down with them, on a layby outside Davizes and waited for the dawn. The van was full of noises, mostly from Wal and nobody what you might call, slept.

Wal was a sight to behold in the early light. A stranger to soap since his GCSE days, the bass man took more care of his guitar than himself. He lovingly cleaned the strings as the sun crept over the bottle bank and Iron Man went off in search of a Circle K, via a pee in the hedge. Breakfast was a six pack and assorted tortilla chips paid for by Mr Maxwell, but then nobody said Iron Man was your
galloping 
gourmet. The van played up as Duggsy surfaced from the indefinable grunge of his sleeping bag and Iron Man and Wal soon had their heads buried under its
bonnet
, clattering spanners and crooning to it.

‘Well, why didn't you bring the other bloody one, then?' Wal asked.

‘'Cause it hasn't got Yawning Hippos on the side, man,' the drummer told him.

‘Yeah,' Duggsy chimed in. ‘Gotta advertise.'

Nobody feared the Reaper when the Hippos were on the road.

They'd rattled past Gloucester on the M5 by
midmorning
, stopping only for petrol and pee-breaks. It was just another Band on the run, two musicians, a drummer and an old bloke standing line abreast and widdling up a castle wall in the middle of nowhere.

‘Is it me or is this bloke crap?' Maxwell muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

Bob Templeton leapt a mile. ‘For God's sake, Maxwell. What are you doing here?'

The Head of Sixth Form from another school began to come out with the cliché, and suddenly couldn't be
bothered
. ‘The door was open.' He pointed to one at the side of the classroom. ‘Thought I'd just say “Hi”.'

He caught the eye of the French teacher clearly
struggling
at the front of the class and waved at him. The French teacher's heart plummeted still further. He'd been doing pretty badly with one Ofsted Inspector in the room; now he had two, and still Seven Eff were hanging from the chandeliers.

‘This is unforgivable,' Templeton hissed. ‘Outside!'

One or two of Seven Eff were turning to stare at them. The younger bloke looked furious, as though he was about to hit the older bloke. This was great.

‘Only if you come with me,' Maxwell minced.

Templeton scowled at the French teacher and strode for the door.

‘Maxwell…' they were nose to nose on the walkway outside the Modern Languages block.

‘How did I find you?' the Head of Sixth Form saved them both time. ‘By impersonating David Simmonds and pretending I needed to reach you urgently – which I do. That got me to the gates of Whatever School This Is, Nuneaton, Warwickshire. And I got here because of the very helpful – and rather lax – work experience kid on the front desk.'

‘I shall of course be reporting this,' Templeton snapped, all the relaxed bonhomie of the Cunliffe
breakfast
having vanished.

‘Well, not to my Headmaster, please, Mr Templeton, because he's under suspicion of murder at the moment. Which brings me to cases. Did you know that Sally Meninger was Alan Whiting's sister-in-law?'

‘No,' Templeton said after a few minutes' reflection. ‘Why should I know that?'

Maxwell sighed. He was tired, all travelled out and this detour to the back of beyond had clearly been a waste of time.

‘All I
do
know – and God help me, I should have told the police this – is that Paula Freeling was a bloody thief.'

‘What?'

‘Quite,' Templeton blustered. ‘Cuff-links, cash, even a spare tie – the woman was a bloody kleptomaniac.
That's 
why she left the Cunliffe in such a hurry, and that
could
be why she was murdered.'

‘And you didn't think to mention it to the boys in blue?'

‘I couldn't be sure,' Templeton bluffed. ‘Actually, I still can't. Things vanished from my room after a visit from her, that's all I know.'

‘Well,' Maxwell nodded. ‘We all know a little bit more now, don't we?' He glanced back into the classroom where Seven Eff appeared to be re-enacting the attack on the Bastille. ‘Don't let me keep you from the fun,' he said.

‘I shall still be reporting this, Maxwell,' Templeton warned.

But the Head of Sixth Form was striding away. ‘Whatever,' he said.

On the road again by tea-time, Iron Man was accelerating past Sheffield, a
very
wise move, and it wasn't until the sun began to dip that they reached their final destination.

‘There's a great castle at Skipton,' Maxwell told them. ‘Moat, dungeons, the whole nine yards.'

‘Fuck the castle, Mr Maxwell, with respect,' said Duggsy from his position bent double in the back. ‘Where's the nearest bloody pub?'

They settled for the Goat and Gargoyle off the High Street where the metal frames of the street market stalls littered the tarmac and rubbish still piled high on the pavements. Southerners though they all were, they tucked into their chips with gravy with relish – all except Maxwell, who wasn't fond of relish. The drinks and the grub, like the petrol, were on Maxwell.

‘Where are we then, Mr M?' Duggsy got outside his
pint of something dark and menacing from Yorkshire.

‘Skipton, you twat,' said Wal. ‘I know that and I haven't been navigating.'

‘I mean, in terms of our enquiries, you stupid shit,' Duggsy countered, with all the wit and repartee at his
disposal
. It had been a long day for them all.

‘Well, the odd thing is, lads,' Maxwell sucked the gravy from his chip, ‘that it turns out Sally Meninger and Pamela Whiting are sisters.'

‘Well, there's a turn up,' Iron Man was rolling his own.

‘It's certainly a step in an odd direction,' Maxwell
nodded
. ‘As is the fact that Paula Freeling was a tea-leaf.' The Hippos knew lots of those and they were strangely unmoved by the news. Maxwell might as well have said she was a Liberal Democrat.

‘How you gonna play it with the tart, then, Mr M?' Duggsy had a way of cutting to the chase. ‘Me and Wal ain't much on the heavy side, but we'll slap her about if you like.'

‘Nice of you to offer, boys,' Maxwell smiled. ‘But I think we'll do the softly, softly approach first. Are we
laybying
again tonight, Iron?' He dreaded the answer.

The drummer paused in mid-lick, his tongue stuck to his roll-up. ‘It was good enough for Hendrix,' he croaked. A glazed look came into the eyes of the guitarists. Maxwell was out of his league. To him, Jimi Hendrix was just a great jacket. He checked his watch.

‘While you boys were getting some in,' he said, ‘I cased the joint. Only two likely hotels. My guess is it'll be the Wheatsheaf. That's where I'll start. It's nine now. If I'm not back by last orders, you have my official permission to head south.'

Wal nodded appreciatively. ‘Still got time to make Guildford,' he said.

And Maxwell was gone.

Henry Hall sat alone in his conservatory that night. Moths danced around the light and the fan twirling lazily above his head did nothing to move the still, heavy air. From where he sat he could hear the stream ripple at the end of his garden and the soft hum of the traffic on the A259. All day, he'd been closeted with his Murder Team in the Incident Room, checking this, rechecking that. His Press Officer had threatened to resign, hand in her badge because of the barrage of calls she'd received that day alone. Why was there no progress, everybody wanted to know from the Chief Constable to the editor of
Woman's Weekly
. Surely,
someone
had seen
something
in the
photographer's
? And as for the Alan Whiting killing, that was nearly two weeks old, for God's sake. What were they paying these outrageous police salaries for? And what about the overtime? The last two questions had mostly come from the Chief Constable.