by M. J. Trow
‘Er … I think that’s Bernard’s now, Dierdre,’ Maxwell said gently. ‘When the colonel’s dead and the gatling’s jammed, it’s usually the number two who takes over. That would be Major Ryan here …’ and the film buff couldn’t resist, ‘… recently promoted from Private.’
‘For God’s sake, Max,’ Ryan thundered. ‘Have a heart, will you? Didn’t you hear what Dierdre just said?’
‘With respect, Acting Headmaster,’ and those words brought terror to the hearts of any Senior Management Team member who had ever worked with Peter Maxwell. ‘I am waiting for some semblance of sanity to emerge from this morning. Who arrested Diamond and for what?’
‘I didn’t catch his name,’ Dierdre said. She was twisting her many rings as she tried to make sense of it all, too.
‘Baldock.’ Ryan had caught it. ‘DC Baldock. Some kid still wet behind the ears.’
Maxwell was secretly impressed. Ryan was starting to sound like the Head of Sixth Form. ‘And the cause?’
Ryan glanced at Dierdre. Neither man had seen her so drawn before, so old, so ill. Better leap back into that magic flame, Maxwell thought, or she’d crumble into dust, thousands of years old, the Ayesha of Leighford High.
‘Suspicion of murder,’ the Acting Headmaster said.
‘He’s what?’ DI Bathurst was incredulous.
‘Interview Room Two,’ Jacquie said, waving her arms in the same disbelief.
‘Who the fuck authorised this?’ Bathurst was on the move already.
‘Nobody, Phil,’ Jacquie told him. ‘He just bulldozed his way into Leighford High this morning and brought him in here. He’s been closeted away for nearly two hours.’
‘You’re a bloody detective sergeant!’ he yelled at her while grabbing a pile of incident sheets. ‘Why didn’t you pull him out of there? We’ve got enough to do without fending off the bleeding Complaints Authority.’ And he was gone, his heels clattering along the corridors that led to his quarry.
‘Geoff,’ he put his head round the door. ‘A word?’
Baldock got up, looking at James Diamond sitting opposite like the cat who’d got the cream. The Headteacher looked ghastly, pale and gaunt under the brightness of the neon strips. His tie was loose, his jacket hanging on the back of his chair. Bathurst nodded to him before he closed the door.
‘Before you say anything, sir,’ the DC had prepared for the onslaught he knew was coming. Baldock may have been green, but he wasn’t emerald. ‘You’d better read this.’
Bathurst was boiling mad, but the professional policeman in him took over for long enough for him to take in the gist of the sheet of paper Baldock had given him; Diamond’s statement. ‘These are his words?’ he checked, eyes still blinking, teeth grinding in annoyance.
‘They are,’ Baldock assured him.
‘Procedure,’ Bathurst snapped, slapping the younger man in the chest with the statement sheet. ‘You, as a detective constable, do not, ever interview a potential suspect or even a witness, without the express authority of your case officer – in this case, me. And, regardless of where this leads, you may well have compromised our position hopelessly by going out there like a bull in a fucking china shop. Where’s his brief? Where’s the tape? Have you taken leave of your bloody senses?’
The corridor was still ringing with Bathurst’s verbals and various personnel, who felt it necessary to walk in that direction carrying vital pieces of paper, scurried away when faced with the DI’s scowl. Where was that nice, reasonable Mr Hall when you needed him? Bathurst’s finger was prodding Baldock in the chest. ‘You will write all this up, now. You will explain in words of one syllable – because that’s probably all you can manage – why you took the action you did.’ He closed to his man. ‘And if you still have a job by this evening, you obnoxious, cocky little wanker, I’m a one-legged transvestite.’
Bathurst waited until the DC had gone, then he took several deep breaths and went back into the Interview Room. He noted that a tape was still, in fact, recording in the machine to his right. At least Baldock had got something right. James Diamond, B.A., B.Sc., M.Ed., was not a happy man.
‘How much longer am I to be kept here?’ he asked.
‘That all depends,’ Bathurst slid back the chair opposite. ‘DI Bathurst continuing the interview with Mr James Diamond at …’ he checked the wall clock ‘… eleven twenty-one.’
‘On what?’ Diamond wanted to know.
‘On your answers to some questions.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘No.’
‘No?’ Diamond looked the man in the face. ‘But the other officer said …’
‘Form of words,’ Bathurst attempted to gloss over the faux pas.
‘So I’m free to go?’
‘Not until I’ve finished, no.’
Diamond slumped into his chair again.
‘Now, what precisely is your relationship with Ms Sally Meninger?’
There was a knock at the door.
‘Sir?’ Jacquie Carpenter’s head popped round the door. ‘There’s a Mr Maxwell here, demanding to see Mr Diamond.’
Bathurst switched off the tape. What was going on this morning? The lunatics appeared to have taken over the asylum. ‘Demanding?’ he repeated. ‘Does Mr Maxwell have power of attorney?’
‘No, sir,’ Jacquie was acutely embarrassed, toeing that delicate line as she always was. ‘He says he is appearing as Teacher’s Friend.’
‘Teacher’s …?’ Bathurst was even more nonplussed. ‘Send him away,’ and he turned back to the tape recorder, switching it on in readiness.
‘Aren’t I allowed a phone call?’ Diamond asked.
‘I told you,’ Bathurst explained patiently. ‘You are not under arrest.’ Clearly, James Diamond had been watching too many old B-movies.
‘But I have the right to have my solicitor present, even in witness questioning?’ Diamond was on shaky ground. Like most members of the great British public saddled with an unwritten constitution, he had no idea what his rights were.
‘Indeed …’ Bathurst was forced to concede.
‘Then I’d like to have Mr Maxwell present, please.’
‘But he’s not your solicitor,’ Bathurst objected.
‘My choice, surely?’ Diamond stuck to his guns.
The DI sighed. ‘Very well. DS Carpenter, would you show Mr Maxwell in?’ Jacquie had waited there, knowing exactly which way this conversation would go. ‘Interview temporarily halted at … eleven twenty-seven.’
They clattered down the corridor side by side, the lovers. Except that she was working, she was a detective sergeant and this was her patch. He was working too, although at that moment, back at Leighford High, a luckless supply teacher was doing his best with Eight Zed Six. The pair did not hold hands or even look at each other – both professionals to the core.
‘Max, what the hell are you doing?’ she hissed out of the corner of her mouth.
‘Riding with the Seventh Cavalry to the rescue, heart,’ he hissed back. ‘Although I’m buggered if I know if Legs Diamond deserves it.’
‘You’re in over your head,’ she said, a little too loudly perhaps as they rounded the corner by Interview Room One.
‘My favourite position!’ he turned to her for the first time, winked and they were there.
‘DI Bathurst.’ Jacquie did the honours. ‘Peter Maxwell.’
The DI nodded. This was not a handshaking moment. Maxwell let his hand fall – his back was broad; he’d get over the slight, in time. He knew this interview room of old. He’d sat there opposite Henry Hall on more than one occasion, in the chair himself, under the spotlight. He, who had two degrees, had faced the third.
‘Headmaster,’ the Head of Sixth Form nodded to Diamond. He wasn’t going to shake his hand, either – throat, possibly, but that would come later. ‘Has Mr Diamond been charged?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Well, er …’
‘Yes or no, Inspector?’ Maxwell had been here before. He didn’t ha
ve time and he didn’t take prisoners.
‘No.’
‘Then he’s free to leave. Headmaster?’ He gestured towards the door.
‘He is still being interviewed, Mr Maxwell.’ Bathurst halted the hasty exit. ‘Do you have any legal qualifications?’
‘I have a smattering of common law, more than a passing acquaintance with Roman. I concede my Ecclesiastical is a little ropey. Will that do?’
‘You see,’ Bathurst tried it on. ‘If you and Mr Diamond leave these premises, I’d be within my rights to do you both with conspiring to pervert the course of justice.’
‘Ah, the course of justice.’ Maxwell’s impersonation of Homer Simpson downing a keg of Duff beer would have brought a smile to anyone’s lips – except those of DI Bathurst, DS Carpenter and James Diamond. ‘Now, that ol’ thing never did run very smooth, did it?’ He turned to face his man, head on. ‘Let’s recap, shall we, Inspector, because I’m a little confused. You see, I was told at first that Mr Diamond was under arrest on suspicion of murder. Admittedly that was the opinion of the Senior Management Team at Leighford High – never the brightest apples in any barrel. Now you tell me that he’s not under arrest at all, but is merely helping you with your enquiries. You understand my confusion?’ Maxwell was all disarming smiles.
‘It’s quite simple, really,’ Bathurst began still desperately trying to defuse Baldock’s gaffe, but Maxwell wasn’t having any.
‘Yes, it is,’ he interrupted. ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one, Inspector. Pushy young detective wants to notch up a couple of stripes on his sleeve by arresting prominent citizen – on what grounds, I’ve no idea. More streetwise, slightly older detective inspector realizes the kid’s blown it and tries to backtrack, saving whatever face and thumping great lawsuit for wrongful arrest he can.’
Bathurst’s face said it all.
‘Yes, I know, it’s a hackneyed old plot, isn’t it? Police incompetence only matched by police corruption. But you see, Mr Bathurst, we live in a blame culture, don’t we? Now, Mr Diamond here is obscenely overpaid in some people’s opinion, but not so obscenely he wouldn’t mind a cool half a mill for wrongful arrest. Then, there’s the whole defamation of character thing. People are so distrustful, aren’t they?’
‘All right!’ Bathurst held both hands in the air. ‘You’ve made your point, Maxwell. Take him away. But,’ and he jabbed an index finger towards Diamond, ‘we’ll talk again, sir, don’t you worry.’
‘Come along, Headmaster,’ Maxwell took the man’s arm. ‘Mr Diamond has been running a comprehensive school for years. Do you seriously think he’d be worried by a little thing like a murder charge?’ He beamed at Diamond. ‘Fancy a ride on my crossbar?’
James Diamond couldn’t face going back to school that day. He and Maxwell took a cab from Leighford nick to somewhere on the Downs and walked and talked. In the brief moments they’d had together, Maxwell had given Jacquie Surrey’s padlock and told her to be extra careful – parking it outside a police station was probably asking for trouble; such riff raff were always going in and out. And then, there was the criminal fraternity.
Two middle-aged men, both in shirt-sleeves, both with jackets draped over their shoulders, one with a silly hat and bicycle clips, one not, wandered the high country in the still of a summer’s day. Bees droned on the ox-eye daisies, nodding in the softest of breezes. Anyone who had seen the pair would have assumed they were nature lovers, communing with the flora; ramblers establishing their ancient rights of way; in the endless war between town and country; lovers in the easy-going, enlightened twenty-first century enjoying togetherness under the newly-tolerant eye of the Church of England. In fact, one was a desperate headteacher under suspicion of murder, the other was his Head of Sixth Form. More hang-ups there than stockings at Christmas time.
‘From the beginning then, Headmaster.’ Maxwell could feel his shirt clammy in the small of his back and the long grass catching in his cycle clips as he walked.
Diamond looked at him. For more years than he cared to remember, Peter Maxwell had been a thorn in his side. He was the conscience of Leighford High School, a dinosaur somehow preserved in the amber of the School That Time Forgot. People called him Mad Max and generations of kids, now parents themselves, had loved him for it. The Blue Max, Maxx Headroom, Max Taste, the nickname might change with the ad man’s weather, but the man himself was unchanging. Never bending, never accepting second best. Diamond knew very well that Peter Maxwell should have been sitting in his study and drawing his inflated salary, the last of the Grand Old Men, but not even in his darkest nightmares would James Diamond have admitted that.
‘It was all rather a long time ago, Max,’ the Head said and eased himself down in the shade of a little broken hedge that followed the dry bed of what was once a stream, before Geographers and scaremongers had invented global warming. ‘Sally Meninger and I met on a course. Brighton, I think.’
‘You were already married at the time?’
‘Yes.’ Diamond looked away. For most of the day he’d been thinking how he could break all this to Margaret. She never rang him at school, so he’d had the time to prepare. But how could he? His sins, albeit on a conference, would find him out. All in all, it was a mess. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What can I say? What sort of contrition are you looking for? It happens all the time.’ Defensive bastard. The front fooled no one – least of all Diamond’s Head of Sixth Form.
‘It does.’ Maxwell rested on one elbow, sliding a piece of grass between his lips and chewing the end of it as he had done as a child in leafy Warwickshire, far to the north. ‘And I’m not your Father Confessor, Headmaster. What you do in your spare time is up to you. Except,’ he pulled the grass out, ‘murder doesn’t happen all the time, for all they’ll tell you differently in the Daily Mail. And, as far as I’m aware, it’s never happened on the premises at Leighford High. So let’s start for real, shall we? Did you have an affair with Sally Meninger?’
‘Yes,’ Diamond said. He was sitting up now, staring out across the broad sunlit fields that sloped down to the sea. ‘It lasted on and off for about six months.’
‘And Margaret never suspected?’
‘No, bless her, I don’t believe she did.’
‘Did you know Sally Meninger would be on this particular Ofsted team?’
‘Not until the week before. Anyway, you can’t pick and choose your teams. How would it have looked if I’d written to Ofsted to say “Not Ms Meninger, please. She and I had a fling a few years ago and there’s a certain amount of baggage.”’
Maxwell took the point. ‘So how was she? In the strictly non-sexual sense, that is? When you met, I mean?’
‘Polite,’ Diamond remembered. ‘Frosty. A little arch.’
‘You’d dumped her?’
‘That’s an over-simplification, Max. There was never going to be any future in it.’
‘But she bore a grudge?’
‘That’s putting it a little strongly. But, yes, eventually. I instigated the end of the whole thing. It was going nowhere and … well, I suppose I felt guilty.’
‘Why did the police come to arrest you this morning, Headmaster?’ Maxwell was going for the jugular now. ‘Not even the greenest rookie does that kind of thing on spec. What do they know that you’re not telling me?’
Diamond hung his head for a moment. ‘Sally … came on to me.’ He looked away. It all sounded so puerile. Here he was, a man fast approaching fifty, spilling the nasty little secrets of his life to the last man in the world he wanted to confide in. He felt like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar, caught in the glare of the world’s spotlight.
‘Headmaster,’ Maxwell said softly, looking the man in the face. ‘If we’re to get to the bottom of this, I shall need chapter and verse.’
For a moment, Diamond hesitated. There was so much between these two, so many times when Maxwell had outgunned Diamond. In staff meetings and briefings and corridor-passes without number, his famous ‘With res
pect, Headmaster …’ heralded some new disaster, some impediment to Diamond’s otherwise meteoric career. The rise and fall of Legs Diamond at the merest whim of Mad Max. But then again, Maxwell had that infuriating habit of usually being right. ‘She first came to see me on Monday afternoon,’ he said.
‘The first day of the Inspection?’ Maxwell checked.
The Head nodded. ‘We weren’t exactly in private of course. You know what school’s like, Max. Phones going all the time, people popping in, just wanting a word. We … made small talk. I personally felt very awkward.’
‘That was it?’ Hardly News of the World stuff yet.
‘Then, yes. On Tuesday, it got rather … heavier.’
‘You grappled?’ Maxwell remembered Dierdre Lessing’s unlooked for experience, the one that had turned the Mummy to jelly.
‘It wasn’t like that, Max. She… she was being, well, stalked, I suppose.’
‘Stalked?’
‘Harassed; sexually, I mean, by Whiting.’
‘Was she now?’ Maxwell was all ears.
‘Apparently, this had been going on for some months. He requested her as part of his team, told his bosses what a marvellous rapport they had. She detested him, called him the Octopus. She turned to me for help, Max – a sort of crie de coeur. Oh, I shouldn’t have responded, I suppose, but, hell, I owed the woman something.’
‘She asked for your help? How?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Nothing specific. Just to be there for her.’
‘Not to bisect Whiting’s windpipe with a barbecue skewer, then? Or was that just your interpretation?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Maxwell.’ Diamond sat bolt upright in the grass. ‘Not even that schoolboy detective came on that strong.’
‘You do have a solicitor, Headmaster?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Could you, just for once,’ Diamond held both hands in the air, ‘call me James? Or Mr Diamond, if you must. But this … formality is ludicrous. Here I am discussing the most intimate details of my private life …’