Read Online Maxwell's Inspection by M.J. Trow - Free Book Online Page A

Tom, you about done?’ he asked the photographer.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Got it, sir.’
    â€˜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.
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    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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Alan Whiting,’ Bathurst was clearing his throat, ‘Forty-five years old, married, no children.’
    â€˜Mrs Whiting?’ Hall butted in.
    â€˜Lives in Matlock, sir,’ the DI said, ‘Local force have been in touch. She’s driving down as we speak.’
    â€˜Go on.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Popular man?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜The Cunliffe,’ someone told him.
    â€˜Anybody on that?’ Hall wanted to know.
    â€˜A plainclothesman on the main entrance and exit,’ the same someone explained.
    â€˜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