Free Maxwell’s Match by M. J. Trow Page A

the same, that it was his officers bustling hither and yon, at the diktat of an outsider. His smile was pure cyanide. ‘The Chief Super asked me to look in.’
    ‘He did?’ Hall had wiped his glasses now and hi eyes behind them had resumed their lifelessness.
    ‘In a manner of speaking.’ West was mechanically taking stock, watching the whirl of activity around him. ‘Not like that, Carter, you’ll rupture yourself. Any chance of a coffee, Lynda?’
    ‘Er … Mark,’ Hall clicked open the side door. ‘A word?’
    West followed his Sussex counterpart into the Inner Sanctum, where another desk, chair and computer were already set up. ‘The Chief Super didn’t send you, did he?’ He looked his man squarely in the face.
    West’s jaw flexed, then he relaxed and smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s a fair cop. Look, you know how it is. My patch and all. You’ll be the same when I return the compliment.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘You know,’ West was still smiling. ‘When I come to your manor. Any date fixed for that, yet?’
    Hall shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard,’ he said. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, Mark.’ He checked his watch.
    ‘Yes,’ West sighed. ‘Of course. I’ve got a bank |ob in Petworth to sort out. You wouldn’t credit what goes on behind locked doors in these sleepy little towns, eh? Well, keep in touch.’ And he swept out, slamming the door just a little hard for Hall’s liking and whisking a WPC away by the elbow as he made for the door. Hall let him go and gave his new team ten minutes. Then he called them to order.
    ‘For those of you who don’t know me,’ he said, hands on hips to show off his three-piece, ‘I’m DCI Hall, out of Leighford, West Sussex. I’m here because of politics – inter-force co-operation between top brass.’ He raked them all with those unfathomable eyes, knowing the reaction of hardnosed coppers to the very word ‘brass’. ‘I know there are those of you who would prefer to work with DCI West.’ There was the odd shuffle and flicker of eyeballs. ‘Well, that’s understandable. But there’s a man dead at Grimond’s school and until I decide otherwise, we’re treating the death as suspicious and you will take orders from me. Is that understood?’
    There were murmurs and the odd, scraping cough.
    ‘Half an hour,’ he said. ‘Then I want everybody back here in full reporting mode. Got it?’
    More murmurs.
    ‘Lynda?’ He caught the eye of the pretty; dumpy WPC in the corner.
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘Any chance of a coffee?’
    Henry Hall’s new team didn’t know much. William Francis Pardoe was fifty-one years old when he went off the Grimond’s roof. He’d been educated at Charterhouse and Merton College Oxford. After a brief spell in insurance, he’d gone into teaching, a state school somewhere in the North East. He’d joined Grimond’s twenty-on years ago, as Assistant Classics teacher. He’d taken over Tennyson House eight years later. Nothing was known of his private life. The team had drawn a blank there. Henry Hall thanked them and told them all to carry on. He didn’t like brick walls and dead ends; and that, in the life of Bill Pardoe, seemed to be all there was. If he killed himself, why? If someone else had done it, who?’
    As another spring dusk descended on sleepy Selborne, the Chief Inspector hung his jacket over the back of his chair and looked at the objects on his desk, lit with the radiance of his lamp. They were all the worldly goods of William Francis Pardoe, apart from the books that still lined his study at Grimond’s. There was a Swiss Army knife, a glass paperweight with swirling bubbles, a letter opener and a pipe with a worn, gnawed stem.
    ‘No tobacco pouch, Mr Pardoe?’ Hall murmured to himself. ‘Where’s that, I wonder? And who …’ Hall picked up the handsome silver- mounted photograph of a pretty blond boy, ‘… is this?’
    The boy was sitting cross-legged on what appeared to be a tree stump. An