Maxwell's Mask Page 15

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t feeling too good,’ she said, focusing on events, trying to get them straight in her mind. ‘It was a Sunday and we’d all been to a Valentine’s bash the night before. I guess it was the same in your day, Mr Maxwell, at Cambridge?’

  ‘No, no,’ he assured her. ‘We were all teetotal at Jesus in those days. Honey still for tea was about as exciting as it got.’

  She managed a smile. Mad Max was good at that, coaxing happiness out of the sad, smiles from the tears. ‘I was pretty hungover, lying on my bed when, quite suddenly, I felt cold. I thought at first it was just the morning after the night before. Somebody’d spiked the punch and I felt like shit as the day wore on. Then, there was Daddy. Just standing there, in that baggy old jumper I’d knitted for him in my gap year. I remember thinking – how did he get in? I hadn’t heard the door go and he certainly hadn’t knocked. I…’ she struggled to get the memory straight. ‘I remember saying to him, “What are you doing here, Dad?” Ever the original, that’s me. “You’re supposed to be going on holiday. Why…?” He just smiled and said, “Just checking, sweetheart. Just checking you’re all right.” Just like that. As if…’

  The tears shook her body and she buried her face in her knees. Maxwell reached out and cradled her in his arms, holding her tight. He’d been here before, with sobbing girls whose lives lay in ruins. Girls whose boyfriends had left them; girls whose girlfriends had left them. Girls who had failed their exams; girls who were pregnant. Girls who were hopelessly hooked on drugs. The father in him always wanted to hold them, hug them, kiss away their tears, make everything all right. The teacher in him knew the risk he was taking – the professional suicide of the closed office or classroom door, the unpredictability of females scorned, the rampant prurience of the national press. It had never stopped him. It wouldn’t stop him now. And besides, the relationship was different. Deena wasn’t a student any more. She was a woman grown. And Jacquie would understand. He buried his face in her hair and kissed it gently.

  ‘They never did get to go on holiday,’ Deena said, holding up her head suddenly. ‘My college mother got the details from the Dean who got it from the police. They’d been on the M25 on their way to Gatwick. An artic came off the slipway. The car…’ and she burst into uncontrollable sobs again, nuzzling against his cheek. When she lifted her face again, her soft mouth was slightly open and the tears ran silver alongside it. He smiled and wiped them away, but that wasn’t enough. She kissed him, softly at first, like the frightened little girl she was, the little girl whose daddy had come to say goodbye. Then, it turned into something else. And she closed to him, swinging her knees sideways, so that she could hold him too and her tongue pressed against his lips.

  ‘Deena,’ he pulled away gently. ‘Deena, it’s all right.’

  She pulled back too, head up, sniffing sharply, changing direction, putting her demons back in the box. ‘So, yes, Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘I guess I’m too hard on people now. Instant rejection, sudden death – it’ll do that to you. You know I was engaged?’

  ‘You were?’

  She nodded, finishing his tear-wiping job with the back of her hand. ‘His name was Alex. He was nice, really. We might have made a go of it. But after Mum and Dad…well, I just couldn’t get it together any more. Perhaps one day…’ and she smiled at him through her tears.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he nodded, smiling broadly. ‘You’ve a helluva lot to offer, Deena Harrison,’ he told her. ‘One day soon.’

  She screwed up her face and shrugged. ‘That’s why the Arquebus doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘The rehearsals?’

  ‘No, the ghosts.’

  ‘The ghosts?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She rummaged in her big knitted bag for a tissue. ‘I think you either feel these things or you don’t. The Arquebus is haunted all right. As soon as I went there, I knew. It starts with a sort of…tingling…hairs on the back of your neck sort of stuff. There’s a particularly nasty cold spot at the back of the stage.’

  ‘That’s where Gordon Goodacre died,’ Maxwell muttered, staring at her.

  ‘Was it?’ she asked. ‘Well, I didn’t join the theatre until a couple of days after that and nobody seems to want to talk about it.’

  ‘Have you…heard anything?’ he asked. ‘Seen anything?’

  Deena was laughing now. ‘Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid of it. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” And I always thought you were only mad Nor’ by Nor’West.’

  ‘Very perceptive, my dear.’ It was his turn to laugh now. ‘We’re not going to have a philosophical debate, are we? Sitting on a bloody uncomfortable heap of concrete between the Flyover and the river on a dark and dismal Leighford night?’

  ‘Which would you rather?’ she asked, her voice hard and tight suddenly. ‘A philosophical debate or a fuck?’

  ‘Er…I think you should know, Miss Harrison,’ he said softly, ‘I am a partnered man. And I think you’d be disappointed.’

  Her face, cold and pale in the half shadows, softened into a smile. ‘Just checking,’ she said. ‘Who’s the lucky woman?’

  ‘Jacquie Carpenter,’ he told her. ‘She’s a Woman Policeman.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Deena said. ‘When I was at Leighford, we all thought you and Sylvia Matthews were an item.’

  Sylvia Matthews. One of those who had loved Maxwell when Maxwell had not yet rediscovered love.

  ‘Others of us, of course,’ she scrabbled to her feet, ‘thought you gay as a wagon-load of monkeys.’

  ‘Ah,’ he stood up with her. ‘I’m like Cleopatra,’ he said. ‘“Custom cannot stale my infinite variety”.’ He stepped back to negotiate the slope and collect White Surrey. And he felt her hand on his arm. Slowly, she reached up and kissed him, just a peck on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you, Mad Max,’ she said.

  ‘Why, honey-chile,’ he gave her his best Steppin’ Fetchit from the black stereotype films of the Thirties. ‘It ain’t hardly nothing. Whatchu thankin’ me for?’

  ‘For being mad,’ she said. ‘We’ll have that philosophical debate one day. Now I’ve got a bus to catch.’ And she was running away from him, sod-off bag bouncing on her hip. ‘And I’ll be nice to the kids,’ she promised to the Leighford night. ‘And there are such things as ghosts. I’ll prove it to you.’

  DCI Hall had dragged his feet on this one. In the past, when he was a young DI in charge of his first case, he’d rushed to set up Incident Rooms, hold press conferences, engage Joe Public’s help while at the same time reassuring himself that all was well and that Henry Hall was in his Heaven.

  But press conferences could backfire, public support vanish like the sea mists that rolled in over Leighford’s beaches at this time of year. It was a chill, grey Saturday morning as September was thinking of turning into October and, not for the first time, the late Mr Keats had got it wrong. The season wasn’t very fruitful and it sure as hell wasn’t mellow.

  A barrage of microphones faced the DCI and Henry Hall had never felt so alone at one of these. The Ballin Hotel had done the honours; tea, coffee and water was provided and the bar was open. There were even trays of vol-au-vents and bits of cheese and pineapple on sticks. For those of the paparazzi who led less frenetic lives than their colleagues or who took the gastronomic delights of their calling more seriously, luncheon was provided at one-thirty, as if the ‘eon’ referred to the quality of the meal, rather than the time it took to be served.

  Henry Hall had held dozens, nay, scores of these. The reason he felt so alone was that the Chief Constable, no less, had leaked to an expectant and breathless media lobby the information about the divine help he had enlisted.

  ‘Guardian, Mr Hall,’ a Young Turk called. ‘Could I just paraphrase the great Mr McEnroe and say “you cannot be serious”?’ Guffaws all round and cameras flashed to catch the DCI’s facial reaction to perfection. There was none, o
f course. It was as though someone had asked him to pass the salt.

  ‘We intend to leave no stone unturned,’ he told the Guardian’s man.

  ‘I don’t think platitudes will cut the mustard, Chief Inspector,’ somebody else called. ‘I’ve got a whole file of Constabulary clichés like that on my laptop already.’ More laughter.

  ‘Three people are dead,’ Hall felt it necessary to remind the entourage. In the world of the cynic, reporters left everybody else for dead.

  ‘Have you established a tangible link yet, Chief Inspector?’ the Telegraph wanted to know.

  ‘Other than all three of the deceased have links with the Arquebus Theatre, no.’

  ‘Mr Hall.’ It was Tom Lederer of the Leighford Advertiser. Rumour had it he’d been kicked off the Sun by Rupert Murdoch himself for being too nasty. ‘Are you saying that there’s something sinister about our local theatre? And if so, why haven’t you closed it down?’

  Hall waited until the chorus of assent died away. ‘I have no reason to,’ he said. ‘We continue to believe at this stage that the only death at the theatre, that of Gordon Goodacre, was nothing more than a tragic accident…’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Chief Inspector,’ the Mail man broke in. ‘We’re not going to start trading the statistics of coincidence here, but what are the odds, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Can we cut to the chase, Chief Inspector?’ the Telegraph’s representative chipped in. ‘Who is this clairvoyant and what’s his role, exactly?’

  Again, the beleaguered policeman waited for the derision to die down. ‘We are not talking about clairvoyance, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said squarely, the lenses of his glasses reflecting their cameras. ‘The West Sussex police service does not go in for Madame Zsa Zsa and a reading of tea leaves.’

  Hoots of laughter. This was descending into a circus.

  ‘You’re going more for the runes, are you, Chief Inspector? Or a spot of spirit writing? The old planchette?’

  Hall was on his feet. ‘People,’ he said calmly. ‘Someone is out there who knows what happened to Martita Winchcombe and Daniel Bartlett. It may be someone who sat by you on the train this morning; someone you let past on the pedestrian crossing. Perhaps it’s even someone you had breakfast with or are going to have lunch with. When you’ve let that sobering thought sink in a little, perhaps you’ll all use your considerable talents to help me catch a killer. Good morning.’

  He ignored the barrage of questions, the flashing lights, the stumbling over camera bags and sound booms, and marched swiftly into the Ballin’s foyer. Jane Blaisedell was standing there with a gaunt-looking woman alongside her.

  ‘And that, Detective Constable,’ Hall said to her as he brushed past without breaking his stride, ‘is how not to run a press conference. Mark it well.’

  ‘Deena Harrison believes in ghosts,’ Maxwell muttered.

  ‘Ghosts?’ Jacquie was handing him his elevenses – milky coffee and a four-finger KitKat, a dying breed specially flown in from KitKatland for the connoisseur.

  ‘Spirits,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Phantasms. Death visitants.’

  ‘Well, you said she was a nutter.’

  Maxwell looked at the other half of his soul over the top of the pince-nez he had taken to wearing for close work. ‘I hope I didn’t put it quite so bluntly, sunshine of my life.’

  ‘No, indeed.’ She humoured him. ‘Your exact words were “Deena Harrison is as mad as a partridge.” I don’t remember that feathered link on my behavioural psychology course.’

  He smiled at her. The steam from the coffee frosted his glasses and for a fleeting moment he looked like Henry Hall, Jacquie’s once-and-future boss. He took them off, realising he could find his coffee without them after all. ‘I didn’t ask to share my life with a smartarse,’ he said. Secretly, he was delighted. Jacquie was turning into him. Younger, certainly, far more attractive in a girly sort of way, but him nonetheless. Soon, they’d be calling her Mad Maxine down at the supermarket. Joy!

  ‘What did she say?

  ‘Said her father came to visit her at university – on the day he was killed in a car crash.’

  ‘Oh, Max.’ She put her coffee down. ‘Oh, my darling, I’m sorry.’ She put her arms around his neck and looked deep into those sad, dark eyes. ‘She didn’t…well, she didn’t go into details, did she?’ Jacquie knew what pain her man had gone through. She’d been no more than a baby at the time, but ever since she’d known him, she knew that Maxwell had ghosts of his own. Sometimes, she’d seen them, the faded, grey photos in his wallet, carried near to his heart. She dared not hope to replace the beautiful, dark-haired woman in that photograph, but perhaps the life inside her might one day hold its place alongside the little girl with her mother.

  ‘She wanted to talk,’ he said. ‘She needed to.’

  ‘And you?’ Jacquie put her face close to his. ‘Did you need to listen?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said softly, kissing the tip of her nose. ‘Perhaps I did.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘What’s she doing now?’ Ashley Wilkes hissed to Jane Blaisedell at the back of the auditorium.

  ‘Mr Wilkes!’ she hissed back. ‘If you persist in these interruptions, I shall have to ask you to leave.’

  ‘This is a theatre, policewoman, not an extension of your bloody Incident Room.’ Wilkes was a patient man. But his theatre had come into disrepute recently. He felt fingers pointed at him wherever he went over Gordon Goodacre and the whole place felt like an endless crime scene. It was like doing An Inspector Calls for ever.

  Jane had no time to take the awkward bastard out. ‘Jane. Over here.’ Magda Lupescu stood stock still centre stage right, looking up, her elegant hands posed theatrically on her pointed chin. Jane scowled at Wilkes and pounded off down the gentle, carpeted slope of the central aisle. She found herself climbing the steps and standing downstage of the strange woman.

  ‘Something?’ she asked.

  Magda’s eyes were closed, one foot pointing downward on tip-toe. ‘How old was Gordon Goodacre?’ she asked.

  ‘Fifty-seven,’ Jane told her. She’d gone over the man’s life often enough in the last couple of weeks.

  ‘He had a bad heart.’

  ‘Did he?’ Jane didn’t remember that from the details of Astley’s post-mortem and she didn’t have her notes with her. Magda gasped, spinning fast on the flat heel, frowning into the shadows of the wings. ‘He heard something. Over there.’ She was striding across the stage now, her heels clacking on the boards. She stopped abruptly, shuddering. ‘Here,’ she said loudly. She looked up suddenly and followed something with her eyes. Jane looked up too, but there was nothing there. Nothing but lanterns and the tangled cables that always festooned theatre ceilings. Then, quieter, Magda said, ‘He died here.’

  Jane was nodding. ‘That’s right.’ She hadn’t seen the body in situ, but she’d studied the SOCO photographs and diagrams minutely.

  Magda was looking backwards and forwards, then up into the tangle of cables and gantries and lights overhead again. ‘He was afraid,’ she said softly. ‘When he died, Gordon Goodacre was afraid.’

  ‘Of what?’ Jane asked, eyes wide.

  Magda seemed to come to, as though out of a trance. She smiled darkly at the raven-haired girl. ‘Perhaps of that.’ She pointed to the largest incarnation of Audrey II lying in sections behind the tabs, its tendrils stretched across the apron, where a grateful, exhausted David Balham had left it. ‘After all, it eats people, doesn’t it?’

  From his skylight world, Peter Maxwell could see the lights twinkling out on the Shingle, the dark spur of land that jutted out to sea like the black carcass of some huge, stranded whale. He’d lost track of time painting the tiny crimson vandyking around the sheepskin of Private Pennington’s horse. His mind wandered at times like these, when he could switch off from the cares of the world. And when he switched off, the Great Man’s thoughts turned, inevitably, to murder.

  ‘Well, frankly, Count,’ he mut
tered to the cat lolling on the upturned linen basket in the corner. ‘I’d expected rather more. What do you think of Scenario One – the Jacob’s Ladder theory?’

  Metternich twitched his left ear and stared Maxwell down. He’d need more advance notice than this for God’s sake. He had a whole night’s hunting to plan. And then, there was the sortie into Mrs Troubridge’s rubbish… Did this man have no sense of priorities at all?

  ‘Gordon Goodacre is still a blank canvas.’ His master was putting it all together, slumping down in his modelling chair again and tilting the gold-laced pill box over his eyes. He locked his fingers behind his head and swivelled. ‘I don’t even know yet what the man did for a living, still less for a dying. I think it’s fair to say he didn’t exactly wear the pants in the Goodacre family, however. I get the distinct impression that Matilda, his good lady, has that privilege and, indeed, distinction. So what do we know?’

  Clearly, the Count was from Barcelona. He knew nothing.

  ‘Gordon was apparently alone in the theatre on the night in question and fell foul of a ladder. Did it fall or was it pushed? Catch!’ He suddenly hurled a cushion at the cat, the one he used when his back had given up the ghost completely. Metternich dodged aside and pirouetted off to a perch high up, where Maxwell’s many battered suitcases lay in the semi-darkness of his attic.

  ‘Exactly.’ Maxwell loved it when a plan came together. ‘If you know something’s coming at you, you get out of the way, don’t you? Now, admittedly, at his advanced age, I think it’s probably true to say that Gordon Goodacre didn’t have your lightning reflexes – no, now don’t be modest, Count; you know it’s true. But that ladder is nearly twenty feet long – I know, I’ve seen it. Damn, I wish I’d listened in those Physics lessons all those years ago when I was doodling obscenities in my homework book. There must be a ratio for the length of time it takes a ladder to fall from the vertical to the horizontal, pinning an unsuspecting set painter beneath it. But,’ he picked up his glass of Southern Comfort and pointed a finger at Metternich, ‘there’s no ratio known to man that explains how such a ladder can slip its chains without human agency at the very time that said set painter is passing under it. Who stood to gain?’ He echoed the great Cicero again, in English this time for the benefit of the cat, who, let’s face it, had little Latin and no Greek. ‘Matilda Goodacre, if she cleans up financially. Or maybe she just hated the old man’s guts. Cherchez la femme, Count? Can it be that simple?’