by M. J. Trow
‘There’s proof, Dierdre my darling,’ Maxwell said, ‘if ever it were needed. What do you notice about the Ofsted Six?’
Dierdre looked at them. Just a routine bunch of inspectors. She’d met them all in the last day and a bit. Except there weren’t six, there were only five.
‘One of them’s missing,’ she frowned.
Maxwell shook his head. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, and his face took on a tortured, terrified look. ‘No shadow.’ His voice was barely audible and his eyes rolled in his head.
Sally Meninger had turned on her heel and was already marching back into what might have been a blazing building before Bernard Ryan began shouting incomprehensively through the megaphone. Maxwell knew the drill. He returned to his Sixth Form lines, walking backwards and bowing before Dierdre as he went. One by one, the tutor groups were dispersed. Back to Matthew Hopkins and Ten Aitch Two. How was he going to keep them down on the farm after this? And would Sally Meninger have mercy on him, the lesson disrupted by idiocy as it had been?
There was one good thing about Leighford High. Only one. And that was that staff could cut through the kitchens on their way to almost anywhere.
‘Morning, Sharon,’ Maxwell called to the girl wrestling with a huge tray of pizza. ‘I’ll have the devilled kidneys please, followed by crown roast, bread and butter pudding and an amusing little Chablis from the Loire.’ He paused at the door. ‘South side of the vineyard, of course.’
Sharon waved at him, grinning inanely. The only bit of his conversation she’d recognised was bread and butter pudding, but that wasn’t on the menu today. It was never on the menu at Leighford High.
The wizened old crone who was her superior scattered an armful of superfries onto a baking tray. ‘Bloody mad, that bloke,’ she muttered, blowing her chewing gum into a huge balloon.
Maxwell’s way took him up the stairs by the side of the hall, with its cups and shields and trophies of a bygone era, when kids believed in their school and the government hadn’t told them that competition was the dirtiest word in the English language. It took him past his own office on the mezzanine floor and into that heartland of Culture known as the History Department. All sixty-three clauses of Magna Carta hung from its hallowed walls, along with the famous lines of Martin Neimoller. And a suitably doctored phrase of Henry Ford’s. To his original ‘History is bunk’, Maxwell had added, ‘But what do I know? I’m a car salesman.’ From here, as he flashed past the grimy, annually cleaned windows of the first floor, he could see the stragglers of Year Nine dawdling on the edge of the tennis courts, driven grudgingly forward by a less-than-temperate Ben Holton, white coat dazzling in the July sun and arms flying in all directions. His sulphuric acid titration would be well past its flocculation point by now.
And to his left loomed the office commandeered by the Ofsted Inspectors. Dierdre had been right, though it stuck in Maxwell’s craw to admit it. There had only been five of them. And as he looked in, he saw why. Alan Whiting was still sitting there, apparently engrossed in some papers, his head resting against that expensive high-backed swivel Bernard Ryan had treated himself to out of some development money. Maxwell shook his head. What a bastard. Not content to make an idiot of himself in public last night, now Whiting was ignoring a fire-bell, which could have been the real thing on this sweltering summer’s day, as though the rules of the rest of the world didn’t apply to him. Maxwell could already hear the clacking heels of the others behind him. He half-turned to see the frail shadowy figure of the other female in the Ofsted team and smiled at her in an I-don’t-really-want-this-job-anyway sort of way. He’d just reached the end of the corridor, ready to plunge two steps down to his teaching lair when he heard a scream that rattled the windows.
He doubled back to see Paul Moss’s head pop out of his classroom. ‘Flanders – is that you?’ Moss shouted, head see-sawing from side to side.
‘Suspended for three days,’ Maxwell called back. ‘Harassing that girl in Year Nine.’
‘Oh, yes.’
Maxwell peered into each classroom he reached. A handful of kids in each one were jostling in the doorways to see what had happened, the odd member of staff circling round, shooing them back to their seats. At the door to the Ofsted office, the inspectress was still standing there, her fingers gripping the woodwork, her knuckles white. She was staring ahead, the scream still dying in her throat, the glasses that were seconds ago on the bridge of her nose dangling on their chains on what passed for her breasts.
‘Are you all right?’ Maxwell asked her, not usually so guilty of so redundant a question.
‘It’s Alan,’ she said, trying in her panic to focus on who was talking to her. Instinctively, the old professionalism kicked in. ‘It’s Mr Whiting. The Chief Inspector’s not well.’
Indeed he wasn’t. Maxwell should have looked closer a moment ago. Paul Moss was at his elbow, staring as wild-eyed as the inspectress was.
‘Paul.’ Maxwell’s voice made him jump. ‘Get her out of here, will you? And keep the kids away. For God’s sake, do that.’
The Head of History had never seen a dead man before. But Peter Maxwell had and Moss knew his place. All his professional life at Leighford High, he’d been a rookie to the Great Man, a number two, a sidekick. He was always destined to be Tonto to the Lone Ranger and he knew it. He gently eased the woman’s fingers off the doorframe and led her away down the corridor, barking at children to get back into their classrooms. Concerned staff picked up the vibes and one by one, they closed their doors, trying to answer questions and stifle the chorus of ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’.
So did Peter Maxwell. It was oddly chilly on this side of the building where the sun had not shone since early morning and some at least of the Inspectorate’s blinds were drawn. The Head of Sixth Form approached the man in the expensive swivel chair. He wasn’t reading any papers. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance, about halfway to the door. Except they couldn’t see anything. Alan Whiting had stopped seeing anything by this stage. And he would never see anything ever again. He was still wearing the same suit he’d had on the previous day and at the Vine the previous night. At first sight, Maxwell thought Whiting was wearing a rather dissolute dark red tie; but then he realized it was a trail of blood, extending from the dead man’s throat to run into a small pool in the folds of his lap. Jutting out of his throat, just below the adam’s apple, was a barbecue skewer, driven in so far that it had pinned him to the chair and it was this, rather than intense concentration, that held the Chief Inspector so upright.
Maxwell checked the man’s pulse. Nothing, but he was still warm. He glanced up to see a small trickle of bloody saliva slide down the man’s chin. He reached for the phone, then everything he’d learned from Jacquie clicked in and he used a hanky instead, tapping buttons carefully with his pen tip.
‘Matron,’ he heard Sylvia Matthews say. He knew she’d be up to her nurse’s buckle in Heaf papers and period pains by now, not to mention the malingerers wandering back from Fire Drill the long way round, already claiming sunstroke.
‘Nursie. Aitch One. On the double,’ and he was already punching other numbers.
Sylvia Matthews was on her feet in seconds and she’d cleared the walking wounded from her room. She’d known – and loved – Peter Maxwell for years. She knew when there was trouble – the gravel in his voice, the urgency. She knew the signs. Mad Max had pushed the panic button.
‘Emma,’ Maxwell was onto Reception now. ‘Get me an ambulance and call the police. There’s been an accident in Aitch One. Put me through to Diamond.’
Emma’s fingers were a blur on her switchboard, lights flashing and winking at her in all directions. ‘It’s Mr Maxwell,’ she turned to her oppos in the Front Office. ‘He’s never got my name right before. He’s always called me Thingy. Something’s wrong. Very wrong.’
‘James Diamond,’ Maxwell heard the Head say.
‘Headmaster, Maxwell.’
‘Yes, Max.’
�
�You’d better come to Aitch One right away. One of your Inspectors is missing.’
It looked so incongruous, the blue tape fluttering across the top of Aitch corridor with the words ‘Do Not Cross’. More incongruous still were the white-suited members of the SOCO team, like something out of Outbreak or any infection-disaster movie you’ve ever seen. They padded on their cushioned feet in and out of Aitch One, the dead man’s office. All the classes on that floor had been rerouted so that the SOCO people had a free hand, and harassed staff stood at the bottoms of stairs, answering, explaining, trying to diffuse a nightmare situation.
The whole school buzzed with rumour and counter-rumour. All the Ofsted inspectors had been butchered, their heads cut off and scattered in waste paper baskets all over the building. A lunatic had gone berserk and had machine-gunned them all. One or two of the more erudite of Maxwell’s sixth form, brought up on their dads’ cult film of If believed the killer was Malcolm McDowell and the school padre would pop out of a desk drawer any minute. The word ‘Dunblane’ was on the lips of people who had no idea what the word meant. Year Ten were already running a book on who the murderer was. That Mrs Lessing was odds-on favourite by several miles. Had he heard about it, Peter Maxwell would have had a flutter on that and would have bobbed each way with the best of them.
Henry Hall sat opposite the dead man as the men in white coats who were not Ben Holton went about their business. Henry Hall was an Inspector too, a Detective Chief Inspector to be precise. There was talk of an imminent Superintendency, but for the moment, the paperwork and the PR would have to wait. Here he was on this hot, sticky afternoon, still staring into the eyes of a dead man. Hall had been the wrong side of forty for some time now. He was as bland in his way as Legs Diamond and wore a suit of nearly the same colour. Except Henry Hall knew what he was doing and no one could second guess what was going on behind those curiously blank spectacle lenses. DS Jacquie Carpenter stood across the room, resting her bum against a table she knew had already been dusted by SOCO. The cameras still popped in the shaded office and the blinds were fully drawn against prying eyes.
‘Only a matter of time, I suppose,’ DCI Hall said, still looking at the corpse.
‘Sir?’ Jacquie was poised in mid-note, waiting for her chief’s words of wisdom.
‘Before a murder was committed right under Peter Maxwell’s nose.’
Jacquie didn’t respond. She’d been here before, between the rock that was Henry Hall and the hard place that was Peter Maxwell. Her career had been on the line more than once, her loyalties divided, her heart and her warrant card both on her sleeve.
‘Who found the body?’
She checked the notebook. ‘A Miss Paula Freeling, another of the Ofsted team.’
‘Time?’
‘Shortly after the Fire Drill. That was at nine forty. Must have been nine fifty-five, fifty-six.’
Hall turned to Jacquie for the first time. ‘She any use?’
Jacquie knew Henry Hall. In his three piece suit, with his bland, gold-rimmed specs and with his inability to smile, he came across as a hard, taciturn bastard. But underneath that was a loving family man, even more grateful now, no doubt, that he’d sent his boys to Harperwell down the road. There’d been sneers about the private sector behind his back, but Henry Hall’s back was broad. If they’d invented a private police force, he’d have been part of it.
‘Still in shock,’ Jacquie told him. ‘She’s in the school nurse’s office.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘In the Head’s office. Their number two has taken over – er – Sally Meninger.’
Hall looked askance. ‘Surely, they’re not going ahead with the inspection?’
Jacquie shrugged. ‘I’m not sure they know what to do,’ she said. ‘I expect Leighford High will go down in the Guinness Book of Records as the first school to kill an inspector.’
Hall looked over the rims of his glasses at her. ‘So what have we got? Twelve hundred suspects?’ He was hoping against hope it couldn’t be that many.
‘Year Eleven and Thirteen are in the clear,’ she said, straight-faced. ‘They’re off on study leave or officially left. That only leaves eight hundred.’ It was worthy of Peter Maxwell.
‘Wonderful,’ said Hall, unmoved by levity in any form, given the situation. He dragged himself to his feet, crouching down on an eyelevel with the dead man’s desk. ‘Barbecue skewer,’ he said. ‘Seasonal weapon, that. Single thrust through the throat.’ He took in the position of the dead man’s hands. ‘No struggle. Not even a reaction. That means it was a) unexpected and b) fast. Professional. Neat.’ He stood up, already looking beyond the dead man. ‘Where does that door go?’
‘Er … next door, I think, guv,’ she followed his gaze. ‘To another classroom.’
‘Whose?’
‘Um,’ Jacquie was flicking through her notebook. ‘I don’t know,’ she confessed.
Hall tapped the desk with fidgety fingers, then turned his back on the dead man; he didn’t think he’d object, all things considered. ‘Right, Jacquie. Finish up here. Tom, you about done?’ he asked the photographer.
‘Half an hour, Mr Hall,’ Tom reckoned.
Hall nodded. ‘Half an hour it is.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’ll meet at six thirty, Jacquie. Leighford Nick. I don’t suppose there’ll be anywhere here big enough to set up an Incident Room, without causing even more mayhem than there’s probably been already. So we’ll do this one from home. I’m going to talk to the Headteacher. You get an up-to-date map of this place and you seal this room good and tight. Got it?’
‘Got it, sir.’
‘Oh and Jacquie,’ he paused in the doorway, looking deep into her cool, grey eyes. ‘Peter Maxwell is just one of several people we’ll have to talk to here, okay? And if he so much as clears his throat, I want to know about it. All right?’
She stared back into those blank, impenetrable lenses, trying to be just as enigmatic in return. ‘Absolutely, sir,’ she said.
The David Bailey of Leighford Nick had done his job well, as always. Several Alan Whitings were ranged around the wall of Henry Hall’s Incident Room by mid-evening, a one hundred and eighty degree vista of death. His left side was undoubtedly his best and there wasn’t a hair out of place. All of them at the nick had seen corpses before and you got to be detached in the end. Never immune exactly, never quite able to forget that this was once a living, breathing human being. The men and women in that fan-assisted room with the Leighford sun streaming in through the windows had all had their share of violent ends – the kid hit by the drunk-driver, the lonely old woman who had hanged herself with the extension lead, the wife who had irritated her old man just once too often. But none of them had seen a man killed with a barbecue skewer. And no one had ever seen a dead Ofsted Inspector.
‘Office for Standards in Education,’ Henry Hall stood in the gap in the horseshoe of his team. ‘That’s who the dead man worked for. Philip, what do we know about him?’
Philip Bathurst hadn’t been a DI for long. He was the same age as Jacquie Carpenter, but of the Sex-More-Likely-To-Succeed, with no glass ceiling in the way and was clearly going places. He was an earnest young man with a permanently furrowed forehead, as though life was one long uphill struggle surrounded by problems on the way.
‘Alan Whiting,’ Bathurst was clearing his throat, ‘Forty-five years old, married, no children.’
‘Mrs Whiting?’ Hall butted in.
‘Lives in Matlock, sir,’ the DI said, ‘Local force have been in touch. She’s driving down as we speak.’
‘Go on.’
‘He’s been an Inspector for eight years. Started as a Chemistry teacher, became a Science adviser in Derbyshire, then did a stint at County Hall up there.’
‘Popular man?’
‘Difficult to say, guv,’ Bathurst shrugged. ‘The Ofsted teams are continually changing. Only one of them, Sally Meninger, had worked with him before. We’ve not got very far with questioning the
others.’
‘All right,’ Hall nodded. ‘That’s on hold. Jacquie and I will begin those interviews for real tomorrow, starting with the Meninger woman. Where are they staying?’
‘The Cunliffe,’ someone told him.
‘Anybody on that?’ Hall wanted to know.
‘A plainclothesman on the main entrance and exit,’ the same someone explained.
‘Right. Jacquie. Leighford High.’
Jacquie Carpenter emerged from the horseshoe, the smells of ciggie smoke and instant coffee wreathing around her. She flipped back the cover of the appropriately named flip-chart to reveal architect’s plans of a building. Like Bathurst, she cleared her throat. ‘The school was built in the ‘sixties,’ she said. ‘What you’re looking at is the Centre Block, the oldest part. There are three floors here, but we’re concerned with the second. They put in a new staircase in ‘eighty-three and a mezzanine floor … here.’
She was pointing directly at the office of the man she loved, Peter Maxwell M.A., Ph.D. pending. It had been pending for thirty years now, but somehow the time had never been right. She could see, in her mind’s eye, his film posters, the wilting, unmemorable plant in the corner that Mrs B., Centre Block’s cleaner, somehow never got round to dusting. She could see his piles of essays and exercise books, smell his coffee, hear the clatter of kids as they moved about the building. This one was close to him, horribly, chillingly close.
‘This,’ she was using a board marker, ‘is Aitch One, actually a History classroom which was used by the Ofsted team as a base for the week. There are two doors … here … and here. The second one leads into an adjoining room via a store cupboard. Beyond that is another classroom.’
‘Are all these doors open?’ somebody wanted to know.
‘Usually, yes. Only staff and sixth form have access to the store-cupboard. This week the room itself was off limits to everyone, staff included, unless they’d been specifically invited.’
‘Anybody specifically invited today?’ Hall asked her.