A Walk With the Dead (23 page)

The smile that came to Jeffries' face signalled that he thought he was just about to win the argument.

‘So you're understaffed, are you?' he asked.

‘That's what I said.'

‘I take it that means that sometimes you have to go out on foot patrol yourself?'

‘Of course not! That would be ridiculous.'

‘Would it? Well, sometimes
we're
so understaffed that I personally have to work one of the shifts. Me – the Chief Officer!'

‘My heart bleeds for you,' Baxter said.

‘I don't want your sympathy, I just want you to appreciate the conditions we have to work under here,' Jefferies countered. ‘We have to make-do-and-mend, so if the photocopies I provided you with aren't very good, it's because the machine I used wasn't very good – and if the machine I used wasn't very good, it's because we can't afford a new one.'

‘If that's the case, then I'd better see the originals of the time sheets, hadn't I?' Baxter asked.

‘The originals are official documents,' Jeffries told him.

‘And I'm conducting an
official
inquiry,' Baxter reminded him. ‘I want those time sheets on my desk by – at the latest – eight o'clock tomorrow morning.'

‘And what if I can't produce them?'

Baxter shook his head. ‘You still don't get it, do you?' he asked. ‘If you refuse to deliver them – or come up with some pathetic excuse like they've been lost or destroyed – I'll get straight on the phone to the Home Office, and you'll be out of a job.'

‘If you – or any other do-gooder bloody liberal – ever came to work here, you'd soon learn what prison was all about,' Jefferies snarled. ‘And I'll tell you something for nothing – you wouldn't last a week.'

Baxter lit up his pipe and took a reflective puff. ‘You may well be right,' he agreed, ‘but that still doesn't alter the fact that I
will have
those reports.'

Jeffries turned on his heel, and stormed off down the corridor.

The chief officer was like a rat trapped in a corner, Baxter thought – and he wondered just what Jeffries would do next.

The headmaster of Wood Rise High School was called Coles. He was in late middle age, tall and thin. His eyes were cold, his head was almost shaven, and if he'd ever had any laughter lines, they'd probably been surgically removed.

The office was as Spartan as the man, and the chairs that he invited Meadows and Crane to sit down on seemed to have been deliberately designed for maximum discomfort.

‘It must have been a great shock for you to learn that one of your pupils had been murdered,' Meadows said, ‘but, I have to admit, looking at you now, it really doesn't show.'

Crane recognized this gambit of Meadows' for what it was. In training, you were told that you'd get most out of a witness by being sympathetic and giving them the impression you were on their side. And sometimes, Meadows
was
sympathetic – genuinely so. But there were other occasions – and this was clearly one of them – when she decided that she'd get better results by deliberately poking the witness with a sharp mental stick.

The headmaster winced slightly at Meadows' comment, then thought for perhaps ten seconds before he spoke.

‘I am sorry that Margaret Hudson is dead – of course I am,' he intoned finally. ‘As the poet says, the death of anyone, however much we may dislike them personally, diminishes us all.'

‘But . . .?' Meadows prompted.

‘But while I am surprised that she died
so
young, it is not surprising at all that she came to a violent end.'

‘Because . . .'

‘You're a police officer,' the headmaster said. ‘You will have seen some unpleasant things in your time, so I assume that you don't subscribe to the view that no one is ever really guilty of anything they do – that, for example, when a group of thugs beat up an old-aged pensioner, it's only because they've had an unhappy childhood, and so they are entitled to our sympathy rather than our condemnation.'

‘I'm with you so far,' Meadows said, non-committally.

‘Margaret Hudson was a vicious young woman, and the people she attracted to her were also vicious,' the headmaster said. ‘She was a bully. She was disruptive. And she had the morals of an alley cat.'

‘That seems a bit harsh,' Meadows said, prodding again.

‘Does it?' the headmaster asked. ‘Perhaps you'll no longer think so when I tell you that my senior mistress caught her having sexual intercourse with a boy behind the bicycle sheds, and that there were another four boys lined up to take his place when he'd finished the filthy business.'

‘Well, at least they'd formed an orderly queue,' Meadows said. ‘That shows some sense of propriety.'

‘It's not funny!' the headmaster said.

‘No, of course it isn't,' Meadows replied, with mock contrition. ‘I apologize unreservedly. Do carry on.'

‘We can't prove she stole from the school office, any more than we can prove she smashed up the girls' toilets – but we know she did both things. She could poison any class, and whenever a teacher had a nervous breakdown – and there've been a few of those – she took it as a personal triumph.'

‘In other words, despite what you said earlier, it's a relief that she's dead,' Meadows said.

‘It's a relief that she'll no longer have such a disruptive influence on this school,' the headmaster replied.

‘Was she in school yesterday?' Meadows asked.

The headmaster consulted the register, which was lying on the desk. ‘She was here yesterday morning – though only because her social worker personally frogmarched her in – but she was missing at afternoon registration. So I would imagine that –' he scanned the columns of the register – ‘yes, Polly Johnson and Lillian Beakes were absent, too.'

‘They would be her gang,' Meadows said.

‘They would be her gang,' the headmaster confirmed.

‘And are they in school today?'

The headmaster scanned more of the register's columns. ‘Yes, by some miracle, they are.'

It wasn't a miracle at all, Meadows thought. When you're upset, there's some comfort to be found in being in familiar places, even if they happen to be places you hate.

‘I'd like to see both girls,' she said. ‘When would it be convenient to speak to them?'

‘Whenever you like,' the headmaster said. ‘If you want to talk to them, it's no problem at all. But getting them to talk back to you – well, that's a different matter entirely.'

T
he deputy headmaster's name was Hughes, and an aura of disillusioned idealism clung to him like a thick and uncomfortable overcoat. When he arrived at the conference room, he was accompanied by two girls.

‘They look so much like Maggie Hudson that they could be her sisters,' Crane thought.

But after a few seconds reflection, he realized that his first impression had been wrong, and that the girls had very little in common with Maggie in terms of either figure or bone structure. One of them – Polly Johnson – had quite delicate features, and could have been rather pretty if she'd made the effort. The other – Lillian Beakes – had a quirky face which, framed differently, could at least have been charming. But these two girls didn't want to look either pretty or charming. With their rats-tail hair and permanent scowls, they wanted to look like Maggie, their leader.

‘Will the parents be attending this interview?' Kate Meadows asked the deputy head.

Hughes shook his head. ‘We haven't seen either set of parents since the girls were enrolled in this school. That's right, isn't it, Lil and Polly?'

‘They got better things to do with their time,' replied Lillian Beakes, not even looking at him.

And Polly Johnson said nothing at all.

‘Well, take a seat, girls,' Meadows said, in a jolly girl-guide leader sort of way. She waited until the girls had plopped themselves reluctantly into the seats opposite her, then turned to the deputy head, and gave him what Crane could only describe as an alluring smile. ‘I don't really think it's necessary for you to stay, Mr Hughes,' she continued.

‘Aren't I supposed to?' the deputy asked.

‘Possibly – in theory,' Meadows said, still smiling. ‘But a man like you must have many more important things to do – and if you don't tell anybody you weren't here, then I most certainly won't.'

‘I'm not sure . . .' Hughes began.

‘Of course, I'd be very disappointed if I didn't get the chance to talk to you later,' Meadows interrupted him. ‘I'm certain there's a great deal I could learn from you. Do you think it might be possible for us to meet over a coffee – or perhaps a quick half in the nearest pub?'

Hughes pretended to be considering it. ‘Yes, I think I can find the time for that,' he said finally.

‘Wonderful!' Meadows gushed. ‘Then I'll come and find you as soon as I've finished talking to Lil and Polly.'

‘I don't want you giving the sergeant any trouble,' Hughes warned the two girls. Then, in the face of their blank indifference, he stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind him.

‘When you've had a drink with him, are you going to shag him?' asked Lil challengingly.

‘I might,' Meadows said airily. ‘It depends how I feel at the time.' She turned to Crane. ‘Why don't you take yourself off as well, Jack?'

‘I really don't think that would be a good idea,' Crane said firmly.

‘No, perhaps not,' Meadows agreed, ‘but the least you can do is to go over into the corner, where you won't be in the way.'

The two girls were looking questioningly at each other, and were clearly wondering what made this strange bobby tick.

‘Off you go then,' Meadows said, and when Crane had stood up, she reached into her handbag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Fancy a gasper, girls?'

The girls exchanged another look, as if they suspected a trick, then Lil – who was clearly the bolder of the two – reached out for a cigarette, and Polly quickly followed.

Meadows produced a lighter and lit up the cigarettes. She didn't take a cigarette for herself, because she didn't smoke.

From the corner of the room, Crane shook his head in either admiration or disgust – and he still wasn't sure which.

Meadows pushed her chair back, and put her feet on the table. ‘I'm sorry your mate got murdered,' she said.

Lil sniffed slightly, and Polly said, ‘She was one of the best.'

‘It's my job to catch her killer,' Meadows said. ‘Will you help me?'

The two girls nodded.

‘So the first thing I want to know is where you all were yesterday afternoon,' Meadows continued.

‘We were—' Polly began.

‘We were round and about,' Lil interrupted her.

‘Did you see anybody paying any special attention to you when you were “round and about”?' Meadows asked.

‘Not particularly,' Lil said.

‘No more than usual,' Polly added.

‘No more than usual,' Crane repeated silently from his corner.

He imagined that three girls like them – “out and about” when they should have been in school – would attract attention and probably concern wherever they went, and that by the time he and Meadows got back to police headquarters, there would be reports of several sightings waiting on Meadows' desk.

‘Did Maggie have any enemies?' Meadows asked.

‘Lots of them – everybody hates us,' Lil said fiercely.

‘Except the lads,' said Polly, with a snigger.

‘They only like us as long as we're giving them what they want,' Lil said, slapping her down.

‘What I meant was, did anybody hate Maggie enough to want to kill her?' Meadows said.

Both girls looked blank, then Lil said, ‘Nobody would risk going to prison just to kill one of us – not even our dads.'

‘OK, let's go back to where you were yesterday afternoon,' Meadows suggested. She raised her hand, as if to hold back the flood of information she was expecting. ‘No, don't tell me – let me guess.' She pressed the fingers of her free hand to her brow. ‘Now where would three young girls, who were out for a good time, decide to go? My best guess would be the new shopping precinct out on the Preston Road.'

‘No, not there,' Lil said quickly. ‘We don't like it there.'

‘Oh well, good try,' Meadows said, philosophically. ‘Let's have another shot at it, shall we? You went to the Corporation Park.'

Polly shuddered. ‘No, not there, neither.'

‘Then you must have bought a couple of bottles of cheap cider – don't worry, I know all about that, and I'm not bothered – and taken it down to the river.'

‘That's right,' Lil agreed. ‘We bought some cider and took it down to the river.'

‘Well, there we are then,' Meadows said, taking her feet off the table, and standing up. ‘That's about it, girls. Thanks very much.'

‘You mean we can go?' Polly asked.

‘I mean you can go,' Meadows confirmed.

Seeming hardly able to believe they'd got off so lightly, the two girls stood up and headed for the door.

Meadows waited until Lil's hand was on the handle, then said, ‘Hang on a minute!'

The girls turned again, the expressions on their faces saying they had always known it was a trap.

Meadows smiled at them, and held out the waste paper basket.

‘I know you don't really give a toss what your teachers think, but if I was you, I still wouldn't step out into the school corridor with a burning cigarette in my hand,' she said.

The two girls returned the smile, and stubbed out their cigarettes on the inside of the basket.

‘I wish my mum was like you,' Lil said.