Maxwell's Mask Read online

  Maxwell was warming to his theme now, or was it the Southern Comfort kicking in? ‘How long had they been married, I wonder? Twenty years? Thirty? More? Things irritate, don’t they? The way he sucked his dentures, picked his feet, farted in bed – all those little endearments which wear thin as time itself wears on. Did she finally snap, old Matilda? Oh, of course, she could have gone for him with the bread knife, the poker, the wasp killer in the shed, but all that would have tied her in, wouldn’t it? You know Henry Hall, Count – he’d have had her on Leighford’s Death Row before you could say “Where are my bollocks?” – No, don’t look for them now.’

  But it was too late. The cat had jack-knifed, as felines do, and was munching the fur perilously close to where his testicles had once been housed.

  ‘So she had to kill him away from chez ons. Even so, the Arquebus seems a little near to home, too, to be honest. Anyhoo,’ he took a swig of the amber nectar before inspecting his paintwork’s drying time, ‘Scenario Two…’

  ‘Max!’ It was Jacquie calling from two floors below. ‘Max, can you come down?’

  In the lounge on the first floor, Jane Blaisedell stood with her back to where a blazing log fire would have been if 38 Columbine hadn’t been built by a four-year-old chimpanzee with acne. She was clutching a large glass of Maxwell’s Southern Comfort. A very large glass.

  ‘I think you’d better hear this,’ Jacquie said, passing him another, unaware that he already had one simmering upstairs.

  He took it, winking at Jane. ‘I’m not driving, Woman Policeman,’ he said. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  The girl sat down on Maxwell’s settee, Jacquie next to her for moral support. Maxwell took the chair opposite. Jane had always been, if truth were told, just a little in awe of Peter Maxwell. People didn’t call him Mad Max for nothing. And Jane always felt a bit like a little girl in her Headteacher’s office when she saw him, for all the forthright spade-calling she tried to do.

  ‘Look,’ she said firmly, fortified by one giant slug for mankind. ‘I know I shouldn’t have come here, but I’ve seen things today… Jesus, Jacquie,’ and she swigged again, her face contorting as the liquor hit her tonsils. ‘The guv’nor’s called in a psychic.’

  Jacquie and Maxwell looked at each other. ‘What?’ She popped the question first, laughing.

  ‘Her name is Magda Lupescu,’ Jane said. And she wasn’t laughing at all. ‘I’ve seen her in action.’

  Jacquie was frowning now, putting her Pellegrino on the hearth. ‘I’ve known Henry Hall for the best part of ten years now,’ she said, ‘and never, in all that time…’

  ‘It’s not the DCI,’ Jane said, staring at the carpet. ‘It’s from the top floor – the Chief Constable.’

  ‘Waste of bloody space!’ Jacquie growled.

  ‘Tsk, tsk,’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘Such disloyalty.’ But then he didn’t know David Slater at all. ‘What have you seen, Jane?’

  ‘What?’ She blinked at him, her eyes flicking up to his face from the carpet.

  ‘You said you’d seen things today,’ Maxwell reminded her. ‘What things?’

  She looked steadily at him for a moment, then looked away, lip trembling, fumbling for the right words. ‘We went to the theatre,’ she said, ‘to the Arquebus. She picked out the precise spot where Gordon Goodacre died – not just the stage, mind, but the exact place. As if it had been marked with a cross.’

  ‘She’d seen the crime scene photos.’ Jacquie, ever the realist, offered a sensible solution.

  ‘No.’ Jane was adamant. ‘No, she hadn’t. That’s just it. She refused to see them. Henry told me to give her every help, any paperwork she wanted. She took nothing. Didn’t even open the file. Christ, Jacquie. She knew. And about Uncle Tony…’

  ‘Who?’ Maxwell asked. This wasn’t a name he’d come across at the Arquebus. Uncle Vanya, yes; Uncle Tony, no.

  ‘Nobody,’ Jane said quickly. ‘It’s not important. Let’s just say this woman’s for real.’

  ‘Where’s she from?’ Jacquie asked.

  ‘London. Although she’s living in Brighton at the minute. She’s been involved with the Met before now. Half a dozen European forces. Apparently, they think highly of her at Quantico.’

  ‘So who did it?’ Maxwell asked. Quantico was just a place that was vaguely suspicious of the whackier exploits of Scully and Mulder; and where Clarice Starling ran through dark woods before chatting to Hannibal Lecter. None of it seemed very real, somehow.

  ‘Hmm?’ Jane was far away.

  ‘Who killed Gordon Goodacre? That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? How she gets there is irrelevant. Except of course that none of it is acceptable in a court of law.’

  ‘She…she became Gordon,’ Jane said, emptying her glass with a shudder.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Jacquie was lost.

  Jane blurted it out as if she could only bear to say it once. ‘She stood on the spot where Goodacre died and she started talking in a man’s voice. “Who’s there?” she said. “What do you think you’re playing at?” And her face…oh, God,’ and the girl ran her hands down her pale, sweating cheeks.

  ‘What about it?’ Jacquie’s own voice was shaky now.

  Jane half turned to her. ‘It…I don’t know. She…she actually looked like Gordon Goodacre.’

  Instinctively, Jacquie’s hand snaked out, not to Jane, but to Maxwell. Fear was climbing her spine, spreading across her shoulders, tightening her jaw and making her skin crawl.

  ‘You knew Gordon?’ Maxwell asked Jane.

  The policewoman shook her head. ‘I’ve only seen the photos from the morgue,’ she whispered. ‘But that’s how she looked. Shadows around her eyes, like…just like a corpse. Christ, I think I’m going to throw up.’

  ‘Jacquie,’ Maxwell said softly. ‘Some black coffee, darling, please. Jane, look at me.’ He leaned forward and took both her clammy hands in his. ‘Here. Up here.’ And she tried to focus on him. ‘Breathe in. That’s it. Gently, now. And out. That’s the way.’

  Jacquie was in the kitchen, clattering the kettle, spooning the coffee. She’d seen shock before, they all had. And they all knew how to cope with it. But no one was better than Mad Max in mad moments like these.

  ‘All right?’ Maxwell slowly relaxed the pressure on the girl’s hands and held her face in both his. ‘Jane, are you all right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How did you know this psychic sounded like Goodacre?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said she spoke in a man’s voice. Was that Goodacre’s voice? You’d never heard his voice, surely?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s right. But the theatre manager, Ashley Wilkes, he was standing next to me. And he said, “That’s him, Jesus, that’s him.” Jack, I can’t do this any more.’

  Jacquie was back with the black coffee in record time and sat down next to her colleague, patting her arm and cradling her shoulder. ‘Talk to Henry,’ she advised. ‘This is putting you under a lot of strain. You don’t need this.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Jane said, the tears near now. ‘That’s the problem. I can take the corpses, the mutilations, the heartbreak of the bereaved. All that goes with the job, doesn’t it? Like a bloody warrant card and a night stick and a cold cup of tea. But this…I…I just can’t work out how she does it. And it scares me, Jacquie. Max. It scares me.’

  Saturday night. And Henry Hall had nobody. He sat alone at his desk, the lamp illuminating the scattered papers in front of him and the light bouncing back from his glasses, as always. He whipped them off suddenly and rubbed his tired eyes. Day Twelve of a double – or was it a triple? – murder inquiry. And he knew all too well what they said. If you hadn’t solved it by Day Four, perhaps you’d never solve it.

  He looked up to see Tom O’Connell standing there. ‘Detective Sergeant,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d gone home.’

  ‘What, and miss out on all the overtime, guv?’ The sandy-haired serg
eant crashed into a chair. He went far enough back with Henry Hall to risk a line like that.

  ‘Read the Lupescu report?’ Hall asked him.

  O’Connell nodded.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well…’ the Detective Sergeant was being just a little cagey.

  ‘Come on, Tom.’ Hall flicked his glasses back on. ‘I’ve known you now, man and boy, for the best part of three years. That’s for ever in our business. No bullshit. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s bollocks, guv.’

  ‘Well,’ Hall sighed. ‘Thank you for your candour, at least.’

  ‘I mean, what’s it all about? Some nutter with a ouija board goes down to the theatre and starts talking in tongues. Do you reckon Jane’s all right, guv?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s a perfectly accurate reflection of what happened,’ Hall said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you seen Jane? Since this morning, I mean?’

  ‘No.’ Hall frowned, sensing an undercurrent here. ‘No, she emailed this to me.’ He lifted a four-page dossier from his desk. ‘Is there something I should know?’

  ‘Well, I saw her at the station late this afternoon,’ O’Connell told him. ‘White as a bloody sheet. Looked to me like…’

  ‘What is it, Tom?’ Hall leaned back, giving the man time, giving him space.

  ‘Guv, I don’t want to land the kid in it.’

  The DCI shrugged. ‘This is between you and me, Tom,’ he said, indicating the empty room. ‘Nobody else here.’

  ‘Well, I’d say she’d had a few. Her voice was shaky and just a tad slurred.’

  ‘What time did you say this was?’

  ‘Five-ish, half past, maybe.’

  Hall checked the report again. ‘And she’d gone to the theatre with Magda Lupescu this morning. Did she say where she’d been in the meantime?’

  ‘Working on the report, I guess, guv. But she wasn’t working here or I’d have seen her. I’ve been on the Winchcombe woman’s last known movements for most of the day.’

  Hall nodded. ‘Did she say where she was going?’ he asked. ‘Home, I hope.’

  ‘No, guv,’ O’Connell said seriously. ‘She said she was going to see Jacquie Carpenter.’

  ‘Did she now?’ Hall’s face hadn’t changed at all.

  O’Connell nodded. ‘And doesn’t that mean Peter Maxwell?’

  It was Hall’s turn to nod. It always meant Peter Maxwell. Every time he turned his back.

  She wandered down a narrow corridor. It was dark and the only light came from its end. Everything seemed far away. As though, at one moment, she might reach out and hold the light in the palm of her hand. Then, it was gone again. Not one light, but many. Not many, but the same one. Repeated and repeated, again and again. And the noise. She hadn’t noticed the noise before. It was a gentle sound, caressing like the lapping of water. And the smell came again as it always did, a rising tide of nausea that filled her throat and coated her parched lips. And the solitude. That was the all-defining emotion at times like these. The feeling of being totally, unutterably alone.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ The woman was old enough to be Florence Nightingale. ‘Do you intend to be present at the birth?’

  ‘Yes, Middie Prentice, I do.’

  The woman frowned. Her lips pursed like an old pea pod. ‘Why are you calling me that?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘It’s just that it says Prentice here on your desk. I naturally assumed…’

  ‘Not that,’ she interrupted him. ‘That…what is it, Middie thing?’

  ‘Oh, it’s Puritan-speak,’ Maxwell beamed. ‘In the seventeeth century, Mrs was Goodwife, or Goodey for short. You’re a midwife, so Middie for short. No offence, I hope. Just my idea of levity, to lighten the moment.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive him, Mrs Prentice.’ Jacquie thought it was time to step in, for all their sakes. ‘He’s a historian.’

  ‘Is he?’ The Midwife looked the man up and down as if the term had more in keeping with paedophilia. ‘Well, I’m afraid we don’t do the hot water and towels thing any more. And positively no cigars in the theatre. You’ll have to gown up, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Maxwell nodded solemnly. ‘Will my old Jesus one do? I mean, I can get it dry cleaned, if you like.’

  Jacquie flipped her handbag strap quickly so that it stung his hand under the midwife’s desk.

  ‘Have you had any home visits yet?’ the woman asked.

  ‘No,’ Jacquie said, smiling serenely in an effort to counter the idiocy of the father of her unborn child. ‘One was due in August, but there was a kerfuffle. You said you’d rearrange.’

  ‘Yes, of course we will.’ Mrs Prentice scanned her ledger. ‘It says here you are a teacher, Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘Does it?’ He craned round to read the line.

  ‘So, if somebody called, say on Wednesday, you’d be at school, would you?’

  ‘I think you can take that as a racing certainty,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Good.’ The Midwife slammed the book shut. ‘Wednesday it is, then.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘What do you make of it all, Patrick?’ Peter Maxwell was getting outside a large Southern Comfort. It was Patrick Collinson’s shout. And they were in the Vine again. The place was a bit like the Trenches really. You hated it, but you just couldn’t help going back.

  ‘My dear boy, I am at a loss. Gordon was such a lovely man.’

  ‘So I believe,’ Maxwell nodded, feeling the amber nectar coat his tonsils. ‘Did nobody have a bad word to say for him?’

  ‘Well,’ Collinson shrugged. ‘I suppose the thing is we none of us knew him very well. He was always Matilda’s other half, as it were. It sounds rather cruel, but Matilda’s other quarter would have been more accurate. You know the sun fish, Max?’

  The Head of Sixth Form was pretty sure it used to be on the menu at Leighford High before the world turned Green and they’d banned chips and chocolate, along with Southern Comfort, the staples of society. ‘Not intimately,’ he admitted.

  ‘The female sun fish is huge, omniscient and omnipotent, not unlike our Matilda. The male is tiny, insignificant. It attaches itself to the female during mating and there it stays, anchored until it shrivels and dies. Isn’t that ghastly?’

  ‘It brings tears to the eyes, certainly,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘And it’s not an exactly apposite analogy. Not really. Bit unkind to poor old Gordon, who I’m sure had his moments. May I ask why the particular interest, Max?’

  ‘Some people say I am morbidly curious, Patrick,’ Maxwell confided in a low, conspiratorial voice. ‘Others,’ and he was thinking of Henry Hall and his boys in blue, ‘think I’m a pain in the arse. The bottom line?’ He tossed a peanut skyward and caught it expertly in his teeth. He was as gobsmacked as Collinson that he could do that, but he didn’t let it show. ‘The bottom line is that while rehearsals for the Little Shop of Horrors are running at the Arquebus, I am sort of in loco parentis for the horrors from Leighford High. And people are dying around them, Patrick. The parental backlash hasn’t started yet, but it will. What can you tell me about Martita Winchcombe?’

  ‘Ah,’ Collinson beamed. ‘Much maligned was old Martita. Oh, potty as a shepherd’s pie, of course, but I’d grown quite fond of her over the years.’

  ‘You’d known her long?’

  ‘Oh, let’s see.’ Collinson was wrestling mentally with the maths of it all. ‘Must be nearly twenty years. I got involved with the Arquebus when it was that ghastly Methodist chapel place on Godolphin Street.’

  ‘I remember,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘I saw Sweeney Todd there.’

  ‘Did you?’ Collinson enthused. ‘That was my first production; as secretary, I mean. That awful old humbug Edward Royce was in the lead, wasn’t he? Claimed he knew Olivier. I mean, please.’

  ‘And Martita was already there then?’ Maxwell wanted to keep his man in the nearly here and now. People were dying – and not like Edward Royce used to, cent
re stage, every night.

  ‘She was. Very much the heart of the place, in fact. She really had her finger on the financial pulse in those days. More recently, of course…well, it was rather emeritus, to be honest. Nobody had the heart to kick the old girl out. Although I believe Dan Bartlett wanted to.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Maxwell asked, cradling his drink in both hands in their corner of the snug. ‘What makes you say that?’ There was a roar from the pinball machine in the far corner. Clearly, Tommy was in again.

  ‘Max,’ Collinson smiled benignly. ‘How often did you meet Dan?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘A couple of times, I suppose. Why?’

  ‘What impression did you form?’

  ‘Er…well, that’s a little difficult. He was a bit…arrogant, I suppose.’

  Collinson snorted into his Scotch. ‘Well, that’s the understatement of the decade. How many people do you think we meet in our lifetimes, Max? Thousands, surely.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ the Head of Sixth Form agreed.

  ‘Well, in all those thousands, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite so detested as Dan Bartlett. You’re not a fan of Murder She Wrote, are you? Dear old Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher from Cabot Cove?’

  ‘Ah, daytime television.’ Maxwell glazed over in a perfect Homer Simpson, drool forming on his open lips. ‘Sadly, in a busy world…’ He shook himself free of it.

  ‘Oh, quite, quite.’ Collinson understood. ‘The point is that every week, Jessica meets an absolute stinker who is so repellent that everybody wants to kill him – or her. One of these days, it’ll be Jessica herself.’