by M. J. Trow
Maxwell did. One might drop out because they’d changed their mind or already got a job. Two … that seemed like carelessness. ‘Didn’t they apologise?’’
‘Er … no, actually, they didn’t. Bad form, that. That’s more like it, Selwyn.’ A crunching tackle had brought the Head of Tennyson down but he rolled clear and was back in the attack immediately. ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ Ames roared, cheering on the drive. ‘Don’t you remember? We built this city on ruck and maul!’ Complete with a tune of sorts and fist punching the sky, it was the Head of Games’ idea of being hip, bonding with his back row. ‘He seemed okay, though,’ Ames was back with Maxwell, eyes still following the play. ‘Keen enough.’
‘Except he forged his references.’
Ames stood stock still for the first time since Maxwell had joined him. ‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘He was never at Haileybury. The police don’t know who he is.’
‘Good God … Crap, Johnson! One more mis-tackle like that and you’re out of the game this afternoon. Now, bloody well wake up!’ Ames closed to his man. ‘How do you know what the police know? You’re not one, are you? Cop, I mean?’
‘Heaven forbid,’ Maxwell held up both hands. ‘I just don’t like having to haul dead men out of lakes, that’s all.’
‘Look,’ Ames had forgotten the action on the field behind him for the moment. ‘Come over tonight, will you? That’s my place, over there,’ he pointed to an elegant house, half hidden by rhododendrons far more ancient. ‘Gaynor usually does a mean curry on Saturdays. Around seven?’
‘It’s a date,’ said Maxwell, leaping aside in time to avoid a hearty tackle over the touchline.
Henry Hall had never been so grateful for a cup of coffee in his life. ‘Thanks, Jacquie.’ He sat in the annexe of Sheffield’s study, his Interview Room since last Tuesday. These five days had felt like years. ‘How many have we seen?’
She checked the ledger on the desk in front of her. ‘Twenty-three,’ she said. ‘Another eight to go.’
‘And then the kids.’ He leaned back in his chair, tilting the glasses back on his head. His eyes looked red-rimmed and tired. ‘I don’t even want to think about that,’ he said. ‘Still,’ he swung the swivel in the direction of the window. ‘There aren’t as many as there were.’ Outside on the gravel drive, yet another Range Rover was being loaded up with trunks and suitcases and a pair of irate parents were cold-shouldering Mervyn Larson, standing limply in his gown to see off another three sibling charges. Rumour had it that the Bursar would hang himself if it got much worse, fees fluttering out of the window like confetti.
‘Sir,’ Jacquie leaned forward across the desk littered with depositions. ‘We need back up. Two of us just can’t …’
He held up his hand. ‘DCI West has got his beloved Incident Room back,’ he told her.
‘West?’ Jacquie frowned. ‘He’s the local DCI?’
Hall nodded. ‘Of course, you haven’t met him, have you? One of nature’s gentlefolk. Your Max would love him.’
Jacquie’s face gave nothing away. For more years than she cared to remember, she’d been wedged between these two – the man she worked for and the man she loved. Sometimes she couldn’t breathe; sometimes she couldn’t sleep. But sometimes, she wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘So West’s handling the Incident Room? Can’t he spare any of his people here at Grimond’s?’
‘No,’ Hall said flatly. ‘No, that’s not going to happen. I talked to Chief Superintendent Mason on the phone this morning. Officially, West and I are giving each other every co-operation. Unofficially, we’re giving each other a wide berth.’
‘Politics!’ moaned Jacquie, shaking her head. ‘It always comes down to that.’
Hall let his glasses drop back into place. ‘We could debate the need for a national police force,’ he said, ‘Or we could talk to Teacher Number Twenty-Four. Who is he?’
She checked. ‘Jeremy Tubbs, Geography.’
Hall opened his file, moving the coffee to one side. ‘Wheel him in, Jacquie.’
Richard Ames’s house had once been the stables at Jedediah Grimond’s country pad. Now it was a tasteful and extended four bedroom house and he acknowledged he’d been lucky to get it – one of the perks, arguably the only perk, of being Head of Games at Grimond’s.
Gaynor Ames was a strikingly attractive blonde, whose curves filled her clothes and whose photographs appeared everywhere in the living room, posed with three adorable children, all now safely tucked up in their beds. Had Maxwell listened carefully, he’d have heard the gentle whiffling of the youngest over the intercom in the corner. As it was, he merely stumbled over their Bob the Builder toys, a testimony to the 21st century god, merchandizing, every parent’s dread.
Richard Ames had not been exaggerating about his wife’s curry; the smell of it from the kitchen was mouth-watering. Ames and Maxwell sat in the den, an Americanism Maxwell could frankly have done without. He had, after all, yet to forgive that great nation for Yorktown. All this and Southern Comfort too – Maxwell could put aside his prejudices for a cup of the warm South. Sporting trophies littered the surfaces and Richard Ames stood smiling alongside Will Carling on several photos.
‘Christ, Richard, cats and dogs out there!’ a dripping Tony Graham called from the hall, letting his coat dangle on the pegs. ‘Max,’ he shook the man’ hand. ‘Haven’t seen you since yesterday.’
‘How’s everybody taking the Tim Robinson business?’ Maxwell asked.
‘How d’you think? Ah, bless you, Richard Ames,’ and he gratefully accepted a large Scotch ‘Here’s to crime! Oh, sorry, bad taste,’ and he took a swig. ‘You know the Ratcliffes took their three away today?’
‘God,’ Ames muttered, freshening Maxwell’ glass, ‘that’s a future fly-half gone west.’
‘Well done this afternoon, by the way. Twenty four, six. Quite a trouncing.’
‘The wind was with us,’ Ames said modestly.
‘Young John’s on form, though.’
‘Indeed,’ Ames sat himself back down. ‘John Selwyn has all the hallmarks of a first class player. Maybe even international. All credit to the Housemaster,’ and he raised his glass to Graham.
‘That was Bill, wasn’t it?’ Gaynor Ames had joined the trio, bringing her glass of red wine with her from the kitchen.
‘Gaynor.’ Graham was on his feet, planting a not-altogether-solicited peck on the woman’ cheek. ‘Good of you to have me.’
‘Yes.’ She looked at him with a stoniness Maxwell couldn’t fathom. ‘Mr Maxwell, how are you at salad tossing?’
‘Marginally worse than caber tossing,’ he confessed. ‘But if I can be of any assistance.’
‘Gaynor,’ Ames protested. ‘You can’t take Max away. He’s a guest. I wanted a chat.’
‘He’s my guest as well as yours,’ she pointed out. ‘You boys will be talking rugger into the wee smalls, long after I’ve gone to bed. Let me see how domesticated they are in comprehensives these days,’ and she dragged him into the brightly neon-lit kitchen. ‘There you go,’ she said, pointing out the basics. ‘Vinaigrette to your left, balsamic to the right. I was going to ask you, Mr Maxwell, how you were enjoying Grimond’s, but that’s rather like that old joke about Mrs Lincoln and the play now, isn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ he nodded, hacking lettuce with a will. ‘And that’s Max, by the way.’
‘Oh,’ she said archly, leaning over his shoulder. ‘You’re a pro. Is there a Mrs Max?’
Maxwell smiled. There had been. A lovely girl with dark eyes that sparkled on a summer’s day. She was dead now, her body broken as her car rolled over and over on a stretch of wet road far to the north. He shook himself free of the thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No Mrs Max. You have a lovely home, Gaynor.’
‘Thank you,’ she busied herself at the cooker. ‘I used to think so. Now … well, it’s all turned a bit sour somehow.’ She turned to him. ‘Max, this is not a happy school. Even before poor
old Bill, there were … shall we say undercurrents?’
‘Undercurrents?’ Maxwell continued chopping. Had he found, and purely by accident, the chink in Grimond’s armour?
She stopped and put her spatula down. ‘Richard is a good man, Max,’ she said. ‘Oh, I know; I’d be bound to say that, wouldn’t I? But he is, honestly. He wanted to talk to you about … things. But now Tony’s here, I don’t suppose he will. Yes, Richard’s a good man, but those others … well …’
It was Maxwell’s turn to stop. ‘Do you think Bill Pardoe killed himself, Gaynor?’
She looked steadily into his eyes. They were smiling eyes; it was a face to trust. She closed to him, almost whispering. ‘Never in a million years,’ she said. Then she straightened, ‘but he was old school. He played things by the book.’ She turned back to her dishes. ‘He had enemies.’
‘Enemies,’ Maxwell followed her, ‘who would push him off a roof?’
Her hazel eyes flickered for the first time. ‘Have you met Tubbsy?’ she asked. ‘Geography?’
‘No,’ Maxwell told her. ‘I don’t believe I have.’
‘Talk to him.’ She heard the others coming through to take their places at the candlelit dining table. ‘He’ll tell you nothing sober. But after three G ‘n’ T’s, he’s anybody’s. Good luck, Max!’ And she whisked away with a hot tureen in her oven-mitted hands. ‘Starters, everybody!’
10
‘What the fuck do you mean, nothing?’ DCI West was scowling at his sergeant.
‘It’s true, guv,’ Steve Chapell shrugged. ‘He stepped fully formed from somewhere. I’ve even been back to forensic, looking for old scars, operations, bridgework. Nothing. At least nothing that helps. Where’s his wife, mum, dad, the bloke who repaired his car?’
‘He hasn’t got a car,’ Sandy Berman was ever the dotter of i’s and the crosser of tees. ‘Travelled everywhere by bike. It’s back in the sheds at Grimond’s on the grounds that we didn’t know where else to put it.’
‘Clean?’ West asked.
‘As a whistle. His prints only.’
It was a Sunday morning, wet and wild after a torrential night. The wind had built a little after three, driving through the cedars that ringed Grimond’s lake, chiselling its cold, dead surface. It had torn down the rickety picket fence that separated Tim Robinson’s ex-Council house from Harold Blundell’s next door. It was rattling now around the Victorian locks on the Incident Room at Selborne that was once again Mark West’s.
‘All right,’ the DCI had his team’s full attention. They all knew where they were with Mark West. He was a hard bastard, tight as arseholes and he didn’t take prisoners. At least, though, you could read his eyes. Not like that bland bastard Hall, forever hiding behind those gold-rimmed glasses. Now that West was back on the case, Hall was like a bacon sandwich at a Jewish wedding and people kept away from him. Increasingly, all the Sussex man’s time was spent at the school. The cooperative gulf was widening. ‘What are the links between Pardoe and Robinson?’
‘Both taught at the same school,’ Berman kicked off with the brain storming.
‘But Robinson only since January. They couldn’t have known each other well,’ DS Walter reminded everybody.
‘Pardoe was a Housemaster,’ West orchestrated their thinking. ‘What about Robinson?’
Chapell shook his head. ‘Not attached to any House. School policy apparently – PE staff aren’t.’
‘So what were they?’ West wanted to know, drawing viciously on his ciggie. ‘Ships that pas in the night?’
‘With respect, guv,’ DS McGovern was sipping her coffee in a corner. ‘Are we definitely calling the Pardoe thing murder? And are the two necessarily linked?’
West’s scowl could turn people to stone. ‘Are you serious, Denise? Whether Bill Pardoe jumped or whether he was pushed is, I’ll grant you, still up for grabs. But linked? Come on; I like, as they say, a laugh. Anything on the murder weapon for Robinson?’
‘Still nothing, guv,’ DS Walters volunteered. ‘All the oars in the boat-house are clean.’
‘What sort of oars are we talking here, Pete?’
‘Sculls, guv, aptly enough.’
That earned him one or two guffaws and a few more grins. Nothing politically correct about Mark West’s Incident Team.
‘What are we talking? Six, seven feet long?’
‘Thereabouts,’ Walters nodded.
‘Not something you’d carry about without being noticed.’ West was thinking aloud.
‘Unless you were a member of the rowing team,’ Berman threw in.
‘Go on, Sandy.’ West lit a second ciggie from the first. He knew his DI was no slouch in the deductive department. More than that, he was lucky.
‘Well, it’s the old needle in the haystack bit. The best place to hide something is in the middle of a thousand similar things. No one would think it odd to see a rower carrying an oar; whereas if you or I …’
‘Yeah, but it’s the timing, isn’t it?’ Chapell reasoned. ‘Forensic gives us a window of the early hours. Nobody’s rowing at that time of night. Under the cover of darkness, it wouldn’t matter who was carrying what; there’d be nobody to see.’
‘We could drag the lake,’ Berman suggested.
There were groans and chuckles at all points of the compass.
‘I’m not sure the Chief Super’s budget runs to that,’ West grinned. ‘But I’ll think about it. Who’s checked the boathouse itself?’
‘I have, guv.’ Denise McGovern held her biro in the air.
‘And?’
‘Bit of a knocking shop, by all accounts.’
‘Oh?’ Berman leaned across to her, winking.
‘Semen-stained tissues.’ The DS ignored him. ‘Areas flattened by what appears to be human contact.’
‘Analysis of semen?’
‘Not Robinson’s,’ McGovern assured them.
‘So what do we do?’ Berman asked. ‘Bio group every bloke in the school?’
‘If it comes to that,’ West nodded.
There was movement near the door and a rattle of wood a glass. Jacquie Carpenter dashed in, doing her drowned rat impression and apologizing silently with an awkward grin.
‘Right, people.’ West stubbed the ciggie out briskly. ‘To work. Steve, keep on the background thing. I want photo circulated. Morgue ones if you have to, suitably cleaned up. Go house to house in Petersfield. I want somebody who knew who the bloody hell this Robinson was. Denise, the bike. Get the serial number. I want to know where and when it was bought. Sandy, get your team over to Robinson house …’
All eyes had turned to Jacquie Carpenter now.
‘I believe DCI Hall was working on that o guv,’ Berman said.
‘Is that right, DS Carpenter?’West asked her.
Jacquie nodded.
‘I think it’s time we got to know each other, don’t you?’ And he nodded at the others to into action, holding open the door into his in office. She trudged in, dripping all over his lino.
‘Smoke?’ He held the packet out to her.
‘I gave up,’ she said, still wiping rain from her forehead and arranging herself on the chair, dumping her bag on the floor.
‘Good for you.’ West sat on the corner of his desk. ‘Coffee, then?’
‘No, thank you, sir. I’ve just had one.’
‘Yeah,’ West was lighting up again. ‘I’ve just had one of these, too. What difference does that make?’ He inhaled. ‘These bastards’ll kill you in the end. It’s Jacquie, isn’t it?’
‘Sir.’
‘I’m Mark,’ and he held out a stubby-fingered hand.
‘Sir.’ She took it dutifully.
‘Let’s get something straight.’ West poured himself a coffee from the dead-looking brew on the side-counter. ‘Your DCI Hall was seconded to my patch, stumbled on an incident and blew it. I was ordered off at first. “Let Henry Hall do it. He’s a fucking whiz-kid” – this, in essence, was Chief Superintendent Mason’s dictum. Except
,’ he sat himself down in the swivel, ‘he was a little over-optimistic there. Your DCI bit off a little more than he could chew. So now, change of heart for the Chief Super, here I am.’
‘We’ll see you at Grimond’s, then, sir?’ Jacquie said.
‘Er … no,’ West conceded. ‘No, for reasons best known to the Chief Super, that’s still Henry’s province. My people can poke around in the shrubbery, check the bike sheds and so on, but Hall interviews the kids. I can, I’m sure, count on your full co-operation?’
‘In the interests of closing the case, sir, yes, of Course.’
‘Good.’ West leaned back. Jacquie still sat upright, steaming slightly in the clammy atmosphere of the office, as co-operative as a barracuda. ‘Now, you went to Robinson’s house?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And found?’
‘Nothing.’
West blinked. ‘Nothing?’
‘I’ve never seen a place so clean, sir.’
‘You talked to neighbours?’
‘A mad old couple on one side.’
‘And?’
‘Didn’t know anything. Like two thirds of wise monkeys.’
‘And the other side?’
‘Nobody in. I’ll call back.’
‘No, no. I’ll take over that one now. Can I see your report?’
‘You’ll have to ask DCI Hall, sir.’
‘Now, Jacquie,’ West’s smile was like the silver plate on a coffin. ‘Didn’t we talk about full cooperation a minute ago?’
‘I can assure you, sir, I’m not being uncooperative. It’s just that DCI Hall has my only copy. I can get it for you if you like.’
‘Tell me,’ West watched his brown-ended fingers curling around the smooth white of cigarette. ‘Why did Hall send for you?’
‘Support, I suppose,’ Jacquie said. ‘You know how it is, a long way from home.’
‘He’s got support here.’ West waved to the hive of activity in his outer office, men and women phones and photocopiers and computers.
‘Has he, sir?’ Jacquie said, wide-eyed. ‘I know he’d like to think so.’