by M. J. Trow
‘Tell me about it,’ she moaned.
‘Well, we’re not. Ofsted comes but once every four years, like an American election – and look how rigged they are.’
‘Don’t you get internal inspections?’
Maxwell chuckled. ‘Indeed we do,’ he told her. ‘Last year it was Legs Diamond himself for me, the Big Enchilada – only because I’d refused to be assessed by either Bernard Ryan or Dierdre Lessing.’
‘And was he impressed?’
‘Legs?’ Maxwell snorted. ‘Let’s just say he threw down his rifle and applauded. You’d think he’d be a tougher nut to crack, wouldn’t you?’
‘How do you mean?’ she frowned.
‘Well, a man on his salary. What’s he on? Fifty, sixty grand? All it cost me was a tenner to get him to go away. No pride, some people!’
‘So … you think Whiting’s death has nothing to do with Leighford?’ she checked.
‘That’s about the size of it.’
She snuggled closer so that her hand was against his shoulder and her long flame hair splayed across his chest. ‘What if you’re wrong, Max?’ she asked. ‘What if Whiting’s death had everything to do with Leighford? What if, tomorrow, when you walk into school, you’re walking past a killer?’
‘Please accept our condolences, Mrs Whiting.’
It was rather like a message from an I-Speak-Your-Weight machine. Perhaps Henry Hall had done this once too often; perhaps he’d allowed himself to be too detached; perhaps it went with the job. He got the impression that Pamela Whiting was on something, something that calmed, soothed, took away the edge of reality. She was an attractive woman with short-cropped dark hair and eyes that danced and sparkled on a good day. Today was not a good day. Today was the day she had just come from Leighford Council’s Mortuary and an odious toad of a man called Astley had asked her to identify her husband’s body.
‘Thank you,’ was all she could think of to say. The policeman in front of her was about her own age. His jaw was strong, his mouth kind and sensitive, but she couldn’t see his eyes, because they were hidden behind the lenses of his glasses and those lenses just reflected the frosted panes of the windows of Interview Room Two at Leighford Police Station. Across to her right, she was dimly aware of a woman, plainclothes, with light auburn hair fastened into a plait swept up behind her head. She looked concerned, as if she were trying to understand what Pamela Whiting was going through.
‘I have to ask you some questions,’ Hall was saying, as though down a long tunnel in her mind. ‘Are you all right with that?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘DS Carpenter will make notes at this stage,’ Hall said. ‘We don’t need tape recorders, do we?’
Pamela Whiting had no idea. Her husband had never been murdered before.
‘When did you last see your husband?’ Hall asked.
‘Er … let’s see … Saturday. He caught the train from Matlock.’
‘You saw him to the station?’
‘No, he took a cab. I do Keep Fit on Saturday afternoons. I was the other side of town.’
‘And he came to Leighford?’
‘I believe he had to change in London. I don’t do the train thing any more, Chief Inspector. They’re so appalling, aren’t they?’
‘But your husband did?’
‘Oh yes. If truth be told, he wasn’t much of a driver. Found it too stressful to add that to a week’s inspection. I don’t think anyone realizes quite how exhausting it is, being an Ofsted Inspector.’
‘Hmm,’ Henry Hall probably had his own views on that score, but he wasn’t likely to share it with the world. ‘Did you talk to him, on the phone I mean, since then?’
‘No,’ the widow shook her head. ‘I never liked to bother Alan while he was working. Perhaps towards the end of the week, but never at the beginning.’
‘Mrs Whiting,’ Hall slid a sheet of paper across the desk, ‘Do you recognize any of these names?’
She pulled a pair of glasses from her handbag and checked the list, ‘This is the Ofsted team, isn’t it?’ Hall nodded.
‘This one,’ she tapped it with her finger. ‘Sally Meninger. Alan worked with her before, I believe.’
‘Have you met her?’
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘But none of the others.’
She looked again. ‘No, I don’t think so. No, wait – Templeton; Robert Templeton. I know that name from somewhere… Sorry, I can’t place it.’
Henry Hall leaned back, resisting the urge to look too casual by resting his hands behind his head. ‘Mrs Whiting, it’s rather a clichéd question in my profession, but is there anyone you can think of who would want to see your husband dead?’
Pamela Whiting managed a smile. ‘Ofsted Inspectors are a bit like traffic wardens when they first invented them, Chief Inspector. They must be among the most loathed people in the world. But I don’t suppose that helps you very much, does it? When may I have my husband back? There are arrangements to make.’
Peter Maxwell had hung his cycle clips on the hook he’d put on the back of his own door. It was one of those things about teaching. He’d been doing it for fifteen years before he had an office. A carpet had followed three years later and an internal phone. Anything else, like a kettle or a hook, he’d had to find out of his own vast pockets. It was Wednesday, the something or other of July and the sun was still shining on a sleepy seaside town less buzzing with tourists year by year.
But today was not an ordinary Wednesday. He’d passed a crowd of paparazzi at the school gates in earnest conversation with Bernard Ryan, sent out by a harassed Legs Diamond to warn them off council property. He wasn’t doing very well. He’d passed a uniformed constable on the school steps who nodded in his direction as he staggered up them. Kids moved in knots of twos and threes, whispering, heads down. Was this how it was after Dunblane? At that school where the Headmaster was knifed at his own gates? The bell went for the end of Lesson One. Time for all to be revealed. Time for all to be put right; because Legs Diamond was in his heaven.
Maxwell always felt sorry for his pastoral colleagues, the other Year Heads. He had the civilized end of the sausage-machine that was modern education. Only a few of his sixth formers still wore baseball caps and rode skateboards; only a few still, in the grim depths of winter, wore mittens with strings attached by their mummies. Most of them were developing nicely into those unlikely imagos, human beings. Rosie Leaper, the ex-Head of Year Eleven, was the only one with a spring in her step at this dog-end of the year. The head-cases of her Year Group were just a memory now, washed away with Valium and her Threshold Payment. The nice ones would come back in September to be Maxwell’s Own, the others, by and large, would go to Leighford Tech or join that happy band, the Giro Collectors’ Club. It would be many weeks yet before she had to turn her attentions seriously to the incoming horrors of Year Seven.
As he joined the group in Diamond’s office that side of morning break, the others sat as though in therapy. Graham Hollis had Year Ten, already flexing their muscles to take over their role as the eldest in the main school, already sure their GCSEs would lead nowhere, so what was the use of finishing coursework? The misfits of Year Nine were captained by Jo Pearson, a voluminous woman addicted to nicotine and Ferrero Rocher, balanced perfectly to control her weight. Neil Grannum had Year Eight, but only in the vaguest of senses. The same crowd of in-trouble delinquents hung around his door at the end of the day who had been there in the morning. And Janet Valentine was in loco for Year Seven, that quiet interim bunch who only now were following their elders, if not betters, into the bad habits of the future by not wearing uniform whenever they could get away with it.
They all sat in the Head’s office, with Diamond, Bernard Ryan and Dierdre Lessing, the unblessed Trinity, presiding over it all. Was anybody still teaching, Maxwell wondered.
‘I’ve just come off the phone to County,’ Diamond told them all gr
imly, ‘The CEO recommends we stay open and field the flak as best we can. The Chairman of Governors is of the same mind.’
It came as a surprise to Maxwell that the Chairman of Governors had a mind at all, but he let it pass.
‘The police will start their interviews this afternoon. I’m on first, then Bernard, then Dierdre. This is all very difficult, everybody and I’ve asked you all together for your advice, really. Max?’
All eyes in the room were on him.
‘Why ask me, Headmaster?’ the Head of Sixth Form could be bloody obtuse when the mood took him.
‘Well, you’ve … how shall I put it, had experience of this sort of thing, Max. Murder, I mean.’
It was true. He had. Of all of them squeezed into Diamond’s office he was the only one with experience like that. ‘You’ve got the paparazzi at the gate. Presumably, Bernard, you’ve told them to stay off school property.’
‘Yes,’ said Ryan, ever on the defensive. ‘But how do we stop them talking to the kids?’
‘We can’t,’ said Maxwell. ‘Can I suggest assemblies this afternoon at which we spell out to our little dears the need for discretion. Don’t talk to strangers, that sort of thing?’
‘Will that work?’ Graham Hollis asked.
‘No,’ Maxwell admitted. ‘But it’s our best shot. That’s the trouble with a democracy, Graham, every bugger’s got the right of free speech.’
‘And how’s it going to look,’ Dierdre Lessing wanted to know, ‘if word gets out that we’ve told the kids to clam up? The teaching profession isn’t the most popular in the country without a conspiracy charge being added to our reputation.’
‘All the same …’ Diamond began.
‘All the same … and with respect, Headmaster … we should keep our eyes and ears open. This is a big school and somebody, somewhere will know something. We can help on that score.’
‘How?’ Jo Pearson asked.
‘We’ll have to ask our colleagues for total honesty,’ Maxwell said.
‘In what way?’ Diamond wanted to know.
‘Alan Whiting was murdered, we can assume, during the Fire Drill. If we know who rang that bell, we’d have a pretty good handle on who killed him.’
‘How are we going to find that out?’ Ryan asked.
‘We can start by finding out who was out of a classroom at the time,’ Maxwell said. ‘Which little darling was bursting to go to the loo or desperate to return a library book. Was anybody put outside a classroom for arsing about? Sorry, misbehaving, Ms Lessing.’
Dierdre snorted at him.
‘That’s why we need honesty.’
‘You won’t get it,’ grunted Neil Grannum.
‘Oh, come on,’ Diamond leapt in. ‘That’s a pretty appalling indictment of one’s colleagues, Neil.’
There was a hubbub which subsided only when Maxwell intervened.
‘Appalling but accurate,’ he said. ‘How many times in staff briefing, Headmaster, have you told us not to put kids outside doors? How often has Hannah Snooks nevertheless nipped off to continue her sexual lifestory on the wall of the girls’ loos? And how many cases of lung cancer have we condoned by letting the lads out early from PE so that they can come back from the fields the long way round, via Benson and Hedges?’
‘Surely,’ Dierdre bridled, ‘you’re not suggesting that one of our children …’
‘Dierdre,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Light of my life, we have to face facts.’
‘What facts?’ Ryan snapped. ‘There’s no evidence at all that a child did this terrible thing.’
‘And,’ the Head of Sixth Form reminded them all, ‘there’s no evidence that they didn’t.’
‘Good God, Max,’ Diamond stared at him. ‘You can’t be serious.’
It wasn’t a very impressive John McEnroe, but from Legs Diamond, nobody was expecting it would be.
‘All right,’ Maxwell said, ‘Let me put it another way. I don’t happen to think, for what it’s worth, that any child at Leighford High is involved in this, but what if they saw something? What if Hannah Snooks bumped into the murderer on her way to write chapter three next to the sanitary disposal unit? What if Gary Spenser was just lighting up when Person or Persons Unknown was setting off the fire alarm or worse, going into Aitch One with a sharp object in his hand? Whichever way you hack it, our kids are at risk, people.’ And he instantly became the wise old sergeant in Hill Street Blues. ‘Let’s be careful out there.’
From lunchtime that day, all Hell broke loose. The school switchboard was inundated with irate calls from irate parents wanting to know what was being done. There was, after all, a maniac on the loose and little Jason/Sharon/Fat Josh was likely to be next on his list. To a generation brought up on Crimewatch and Crime on the Streets, everybody was a serial killer. It was, in a way, no more than Peter Maxwell had said in the Headmaster’s office, but screamed down the buzzing phone lines with a string of expletives, it had all the more punch.
By the time the assemblies were called, in hasty and unlikely corners of the school, Year Group numbers had dwindled and Thingy Two, who had just come on to the switchboard to relieve a sobbing and near-hysterical Thingy One, had no clear idea of who was on site and who wasn’t. Her first call, oddly enough, was from a mother complaining that her little Tommy had been told to change his trainers by a teacher whose name she did not know and did the school realize the cost of school shoes, even with that Gordon Brown’s Children’s Trust money, what with Little Tommy’s dad being out of work for nearly four months and her on the social? Well, did they? All in all, Thingy Two, with her mind on grimmer things, was stuck for an answer.
At the end of another imperfect day, a little knot of teachers sat in Peter Maxwell’s office, awaiting the Great Man’s arrival. It didn’t take long.
‘Max, we do have homes to go to, you know,’ Ben Holton’s irritation threshold had been passed by half past ten that morning. Were it not for the situation they all found themselves in, he’d have admitted to feeling pretty homicidal by now.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Maxwell hurtled in, flicking on the kettle instinctively. ‘Coffee, anyone?’
‘I’d kill for one,’ Sally Greenhow confessed and shrank down a little as she realized her unfortunate choice of words.
‘Right,’ Maxwell was busy flicking lids and spooning brown granules, ‘Let’s recap, people,’ he said.
‘What?’ Jeff Armstrong’s patch had gone now, leaving him with a painful-looking eye, purple and puffy lid over a blood-red iris.
‘Think back, Polyphemus,’ Maxwell suggested, the classical allusion lost on Armstrong, who had only seen Jason and the Argonauts once, ‘to the curious incident of the Ofsted Inspectors in the night-time.’
‘Oh, the courting couple.’ Paul Moss was getting a head-start on marking the pile of battered exercise books in front of him on Maxwell’s coffee-table.
‘And they weren’t just whistling Dixie, bub,’ Maxwell informed them.
‘What do you mean?’ Holton wanted to know.
‘Well, call me old-fashioned if you like, but I was rather surprised by it all.’
‘You don’t get out enough, Max.’ Holton was the only one in the room with the age and the gravitas to say it. ‘They were only having a drink.’
‘And sexual intercourse – you’ll excuse my French, Sally.’ He passed her her coffee.
‘What?’ It was Armstrong who found his voice first and, single syllable response though it was, it seemed to say it all.
‘In the Gentlemen’s Rest Room,’ Maxwell explained, ‘whence I had gone to point Percy at the porcelain.’
‘What, you mean they were actually at it?’ Paul Moss had suddenly lost interest, if he’d ever had any, in the Elizabethan Poor Law. ‘In the bog?’
‘Elegantly paraphrased, dear boy,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘and, in essence, yes.’
‘Do the cops know?’ Sally asked.
‘One of them does.’ Maxwell made no bones about his relationship with Jacquie
, although there were times when he had to tread warily.
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ Holton asked him.
‘Well, I don’t know.’ Maxwell winced as the hot coffee burnt his lip. ‘Public schoolboy, I suppose. Mixed company. Delicate matter. Sheer bloody disbelief. That sort of thing.’
‘She must be cut up, then,’ Sally was thinking aloud.
‘Who?’ Jeff Armstrong was, after all, a Craft and Design Technology teacher.
‘Sally Meninger,’ Sally Greenhow said. ‘I mean, if they were an item.’
‘Max,’ Holton sighed, ‘I’m very grateful for this hint of salacious tittle-tattle of course, but I still don’t see why you asked us all here.’
‘Trying to get a handle on it all,’ Maxwell said. ‘Think about it. There we all were, in the Vine, enjoying a quiet drink when a pair of Ofsted Inspectors came in, groping each other like a couple of kids. Is that how we all remember it?’
They looked at each other, nodding and making general agreement noises.
‘Well, not exactly.’ Paul Moss was frowning, wrestling with it.
‘Ah,’ beamed Maxwell. ‘It takes a Head of History to be so perspicacious.’ He knew. He’d been one himself. ‘Say on, oh wise one.’
‘Well, she was all over him, I’ll grant you. Looked a bit one-sided to me,’
‘No, no.’ Holton was shaking his head. ‘He was loving it. I’m just surprised they were so public. But actually having it away … What do you make of that, Max?’
‘I’m asking the questions today, Ben,’ Maxwell said. ‘That’s why I got us all together – several heads etcetera. For what it’s worth, I can only conclude it was done for effect.’
‘What? For our benefit?’ Sally asked.