by M. J. Trow
‘If you don’t want to do it, Jacquie,’ he said, the light sparking off the glasses, shining again to mask his face, ‘you just have to say so.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it. It’s been a strange enough day already so far. I might just as well let it have its head.’
‘Anything strange that I ought to know about?’
‘Yes and no. The no bit is that Max asked me to send him an email. You may not realise how odd that is…’ she paused.
Henry Hall did not know Maxwell that intimately, but he had never had him down for a technical type. ‘Assume I do. So what else is strange?’
‘It may be nothing. Tony Deacon took a computer from the home of Bill Lunt last night. The lads checked for his mobile, of course, standard, but he doesn’t have one. But Max says he heard a phone beeping as they walked over the dunes on the night they found the body.’
‘Beeping?’
‘You know, that beep they make when the battery is low or when a text comes in.’
‘He’s sure?’
‘No. That’s the problem. He’s not exactly a phone expert. He has one, but it doesn’t get many outings. It’s for emergencies, he says, though the emergencies that are likely to happen to him while standing in the hall next to the table would be fairly few, I should think. He’s better at carrying it now we have Nolan; he always has it then.’
‘So, it might not have been a phone?’
‘He said it might be the Lesser Spotted Wheebling Gannet, but it’s more likely to have been a phone.’
‘Carried by Bill Lunt?’ Hall didn’t have time for Maxwell’s inanities and if he had, he sure as hell wouldn’t smile about them.
‘I don’t think he actually gave it that much thought. He naturally assumed…Oh, I see. You think it might have belonged to Lara Kent?’
‘Yes, I do.’ He picked up the phone and stabbed at the numbers. ‘I think we’d…Oh, hello? Tony? I need to get some men down to the dunes. SOCO for preference. Yes. Nearby, basically. A phone. Mobile. No idea. How many mobile phones can there be buried on the dunes? Point taken, but… OK. Well, as soon as possible, by which I mean immediately. Who knows what will happen to it after a few dunkings in the sea? Oh, really. Well, I don’t have much time for walking, personally.’ He slammed down the phone. ‘Know-all,’ he hissed uncharacteristically, and went back into his office and slammed the door. Seconds later, he opened it again. ‘Jacquie,’ he said. ‘Sleuthing. Get the details from Alan Kavanagh,’ and he waved in the man’s general direction. The door shut again and she got up and put her coat back on. The place was humming already, like Bedlam in slowmo. Phones rang, keyboards clacked. From everywhere the clatter of heels and the grinding scream and slam of filing cabinet doors.
‘Out and about?’ asked Alan Kavanagh smugly as he gave her a very slim file. ‘Nice weather for it.’ Judging by the paperwork on his desk, Alan Kavanagh wasn’t going out and about – or indeed anywhere – for some time yet. He was one of those unfortunate people whose hair had left him before he was twenty-five. It gave him the air of a thallium victim.
Jacquie just nodded and went out. She had her explicit instructions from Henry Hall. Take Maxwell sleuthing and take Maxwell sleuthing was just exactly what she intended to do. However, Maxwell didn’t finish school until 3.30. Plus he was planning to take Gregory Adair out for a crumby thing and a fatherly chat. That would mean the Toasted Bean on the top floor of what passed for a department store in Leighford, since everything else closed at about three o’clock. Which in actual fact meant that the hoovering started anytime around two, the cashing up at half past one. The joy of living in a tourist trap, she thought to herself. All of the amenities which a normal town would take for granted twelve months of the year only opened in Leighford from April to August. Less, if it was cold. Or wet. Or the owner was on holiday. Still, and she gave herself a secret hug, she could nip off home and have an illicit late morning in, by herself. She loved her menfolk dearly, but a few hours on her tod were like hens’ teeth.
She almost skipped down the back steps of the nick.
Down on the dunes, the mood was less jolly. The weather was closing in, a dank sea mist which felt to the digging men as if they were wearing a damp blanket. It seemed to creep down inside their clothes and chill their important little places. What with that and the fine sand which clung to every inch of exposed clammy skin, they were cursing whoever set them on this search. It didn’t help the SOCO team that their boss, Brian Meredith, had succumbed to the lurgy and phoned in sick.
‘Why are we digging for this phone, exactly?’ Dave Wallace wanted to know.
‘That bloke of Jacquie’s,’ Tony Deacon sniffed, the beads of moisture getting to him. ‘You know the one. Well, he reckoned he heard a phone on the night him and that photographer found the first body.’
‘So? I expect it was Lunt’s.’
‘Doesn’t carry one, apparently.’
‘Says he doesn’t,’ Tim Fryer snorted.
‘There wasn’t one in the house,’ Deacon reminded them.
‘Not that we found.’ Tim Fryer could be Mr Negativity on days like this.
‘Well, Hall is taking…’ Deacon was interrupted by a sudden shout from over the next dune.
‘Sarge! Over here.’
Spades were thrown down and Deacon and the rest ran round to where the shout came from. And there was a sand-covered Peta Brady, unrecognisable in her white suit, holding aloft a mobile phone.
‘Well, bugger me,’ said Deacon. ‘I suppose we’re all allowed to be right once in a while.’
Tony Deacon had had the misfortune to have tangled with the Maxwell logic more than once, and he thought grimly that the mad bugger seemed to get it right more than once in a while. And he lived with that cracker Jacquie Carpenter. And he got long holidays. Jammy git!
Peter Maxwell prided himself on being an avuncular sort of chap. He didn’t have a pastoral role as such among the young staff – they’d given that job, incomprehensibly to the Deputy Head – but they seemed to like him. It was probably because he didn’t try to bond with them, like Bernard Ryan did, with random cries of ‘Hi guys, how’re you doing?’ Maxwell was interested, but not embarrassing. He was the uncle who gave you a fiver, not the one who did the Mash with all the actions at family weddings. And that sweet little Human Resources girl meant well, but you couldn’t go to her with much more than Women’s Trouble.
So it came as rather a shock when Gregory Adair refused his offer of a crumby thing after school as if Maxwell had made an indecent suggestion. Adair bore a vague resemblance to Reinhard Heydrich, but without the charisma, the fencing, boxing and riding skills and hopefully, the full-blown anti-Semitism. It would be a cold day in hell before anyone referred to Greg Adair as the Blond Beast.
‘I don’t eat cake,’ he had said, shortly.
‘Everyone eats cake,’ Sylvia Matthews had butted in, passing the pair in the corridor just outside the staff room after lunch. ‘I’ve just had roast with all the trimmings but I could still eat a cake.’
‘There you are,’ smiled Maxwell, hands spread wide. ‘Nurse Matthews could eat a cake. And she’s had medical training. So, what do you say?’
‘I said,’ said Adair, rather bluntly, ‘that I do not want to come out for cake. Or a drink. Or a chat. Or any of the things that the senior staff in this school have been offering me over the past few weeks. I don’t have a problem. I haven’t broken up with my girlfriend. I do have a girlfriend. I like girls and if I didn’t I still wouldn’t mind. My car goes. My flat is small but adequate. My degree is real. I know my History. I just don’t quite see why everyone else wants to know it.’ With that, he turned on his heel and walked off, slamming through the double doors to the car park and nearly taking Dierdre Lessing’s nose off in the process.
‘Well, nothing wrong there then,’ Maxwell murmured. ‘Do you think that means he’s not coming over?’
A rare thing then took place. Dierdre walked up to M
axwell and touched his sleeve. Things weren’t as frosty between them as they had once been, but she still wouldn’t have featured on a list of Maxwell’s one hundred favourite people, nor he on hers. And as for mouth-to-mouth, both of them prayed it would never come to that.
‘Can we have a word, Max?’ she breathed in his ear.
‘Certainly, Dierdre,’ he cried, full of bonhomie, though following Adair with his eyes as he made his way through the parked cars, the newer, nicer ones belonging to the Sixth Form. ‘What word would you like?’
‘In my office,’ she said, ‘and please don’t say that that is three words because I may scream. I have been trying to attract your attention for several days now, and you have been ignoring me.’
‘Dear lady!’ he said, ushering her into her own office at the end of the notice-strewn corridor. ‘Never! Now, what would you like to talk to me about? If it’s that business about Last Tango in Paris…’ He was about to launch into his perfect Brando when she closed her eyes and held up her hand. Nuff said. A nod was as good as a wink to a blind Head of Sixth Form.
Dierdre Lessing had been on the Senior Leadership Team for ever. It had once been called the Senior Management Team until someone realised they couldn’t actually Manage anything. Neither, it transpired, could they Lead very much. And so, SMUTS had become SLUTS. Heigh ho!
‘I think that Gregory may be having an unfortunate relationship with…someone,’ she said, as she sat down behind her desk.
Maxwell stood by the window. Gregory Adair had not got into his car but was walking out of the gate. Age had compensations and incredibly long sight was probably the most useful. ‘He just said he preferred girls.’
She gaped at him. ‘Whatever would have made him say that?’ she asked. ‘What had you said to him?’
‘Good Lord, Dierdre! How long have you known me?’
She pursed her lips. He was a funny age and Mrs B did her office too. Rumours spread around the corridors of Leighford High like wild fire.
‘No,’ he continued. ‘I just asked him out for something crumby at the Toasted Bean and he was…well, let’s say, rather adamant that he didn’t want to come. He listed all the things that are all right in his little NQT world.’
With a rare moment of insight, Dierdre offered, ‘But not what was wrong?’
Maxwell was secretly impressed. ‘Got it in one, Dierdre. On the nose. But what is all this about an unfortunate relationship?’
She coloured and clammed up. ‘I spoke out of turn, Max. No, really, just me being a little over-zealous. As long as someone has noticed he isn’t quite what we were expecting from his references, that’s all I want.’
‘We are on his case, Dierdre,’ Maxwell said. ‘Paul Moss and I are trying to help him, but if he doesn’t want to be helped…what can we do?’
There was not a lot Paul Moss could do about anything really. He was the Head of History in the unenviable position of having, in his Department, a man who had lived through most of the periods he was trying to teach.
‘Nothing. Of course, nothing. It’s just that…he seemed to begin so well. And I’ve seen him a few times, in the evenings, you know…’
‘When you’re on your way back from “Pottery Class”.’
The nearest thing to a pottery class that Dierdre Lessing had been to was that time she applied for a job in Stoke. Maxwell couldn’t resist a spot of fly-fishing for the hell of it, especially where Dierdre was concerned. Rumour had it, on its way through the corridors of Leighford High, that she was seen on her broomstick, floating over many a beach hut on her way to the Sabbat.
‘That sort of thing, yes.’
Dierdre Lessing had never heard of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, but she might have been looking at him now, reincarnated in the shape of Peter Maxwell, Factfinder General. For a brief moment, the Head of Sixth Form toyed with running Dierdre around the room until she collapsed with exhaustion and then forcing her to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Ah, the good old days.
‘Well, what is he doing, when you have occasionally seen him?’
‘Gregory tends to mix with the students, Max. And I don’t think that’s always a good idea.’
‘Well, no. But let’s not forget, Dierdre, they aren’t that different in age.’
‘That’s not at all the point, Max, as well you know.’
He sighed. She was right. He and Dierdre were more or less of an age. When they were both bright young teachers at the furthest ends of the universe, a surprising number of young staff knocked off their sixth formers. It sometimes made lessons a little awkward, but the results were generally better. As it was, those days had gone and a righteous right-wing press echoed high court judges with stern phrases like ‘positions of trust’. For all Maxwell knew, that was page 32 in the Kama Sutra. To admit such things today was tantamount to confessing to having been a guard at Auschwitz.
He’d have to consider what to do with this information. Without, of course, giving away Dierdre’s potting secrets, or the shed she may have been doing them in.
At the end of the day, baulked of his Crumby Thing, Maxwell cadged a lift home from Sylvia Matthews. These two had been an item way back, at least from Sylvia’s point of view. They had gone their separate ways since then, in the maelstrom of human relationships, but they were allies forever and stood foursquare together against the monster that was modern education. By the time they reached Columbine, they had put the world to rights. Kids should leave school at ten, be pushed up chimneys, sent down coal mines, chained to the oars of galleys and then, realising how ghastly the world can be, come back to school for the comfort and safety of the classroom and the incalculable bounty of learning.
Sylvia dropped him at the end of the road. She’d run the gauntlet of Mrs Troubridge’s disapproving gaze in the past. She knew when she was beaten. Those gimlet eyes could freeze a basilisk right off its perch.
Maxwell let himself in and threw his hat randomly down the hall. Humming to himself, he trotted up the stairs, all ready for half an hour or so of illicit modelling. Bridles were a bitch at the best of times and he needed to be moderately awake to get them right. The whingeing Corporal Morley’s, he just knew would be worse than usual. As he passed the sitting room door, something unusual caught his eye. It was, he would almost be prepared to bet, the sight of his Good Lady, curled up on the sofa reading a book, with Metternich curled up similarly leaning on her legs. The cat wasn’t reading, but otherwise their looks of contentment were identical.
He stuck his head round the door.
‘Hello?’
They both looked up. One of them said, ‘Oh, hello. It’s you.’
‘Have a care,’ he said, going into the room and sprawling in a chair. It was the line delivered by murder victims without number on daytime television. ‘I’ll have to shoot you if you’re not careful. What are you doing here?’
‘Likewise,’ she said. She was particularly honed on the clichés, having just pigged out on a double dose of Murder She Wrote. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she straightened up, dislodging Metternich, who growled at her and half-heartedly flexed his claws. ‘As a matter of fact, I am waiting for you. We are to go sleuthing.’
He sat up and looked at her askance. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sleuthing. Henry Hall’s specific instructions. I am to sleuth and I am to take you with me.’
‘Hang on a second.’ He went to the window and looked out. ‘No, no flying pigs. The moon is up already and it doesn’t look blue.’ He turned to her. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Apparently,’ she put the book down, ‘there have been reliable sightings of some hoodies near the sites of both murders and Henry wants us to check out the gangs in Leighford.’
Maxwell swept his hands down his body with a flourish. ‘No problem, I’ll fit right in,’ he said. ‘Just let me listen to some gangsta rap and get back to the silly walk. Perhaps I could give Ross Kemp a call?’
‘I think he means you might know
these kids. I told him you don’t know every kid in Leighford, but…’
‘I can save us a cold night out,’ he said, suddenly remembering. ‘I broke up a little light mugging activity the other night. The night we found the body, as a matter of fact. And I didn’t know those kids. Although I seem to remember that one of them knew me. There’s no reason to suppose they were the ones, but it proves your point.’
‘We’ll have to go out for a while, Max,’ she said. ‘I can’t make up all of a report. And Henry did ask for your help. Sort of.’
‘Yes, he did,’ Maxwell conceded. ‘Something of a red-letter day. But only as grass. Stoolie. Nark.’
She walked over to him and pulled him to his feet. She put her arms around him and hugged him tight. ‘My grannie told me about The Sweeney,’ she laughed. ‘John Thaw and Dennis Waterman running around randomly hitting people. I feel as if I’m living in an episode sometimes. Without the hitting, of course.’
‘Shut it,’ Maxwell snarled, Regan to the life.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, ‘before I forget what I said about the hitting.’
Chapter Nine
Brushed clean of sand, the mobile phone sat in the middle of a boffin’s bench in the SOCO lab, perched under the eaves of Police Headquarters in Chichester, one of those square, vast buildings they’d put up when Lord Trenchard ran the Met and despite there being millions of unemployed, at least Police Headquarters served to remind everybody that Mr Baldwin was at No 10 and God was in His heaven.
It was a Nokia so bog standard that it was currently available in supermarkets as a pay-as-you-go for free if you bought your recommended five portions of fruit or vegetables in one go. Since the kids thought that meant tomato sauce and baked beans, it was even cheaper. Its one concession to individuality was a small purple star hanging from a loop at the bottom corner. A be-gloved technician called Angus was poking it with the end of a pen.
‘Well?’ Henry Hall was tapping the edge of the bench testily. ‘What does it tell us?’ Hall knew better than anyone that if murders weren’t solved in the first three days, chances were they wouldn’t be solved at all.