Maxwell’s Movie Read online

  ‘I found Georgianna Morris.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’m an historian, Chief Inspector, I looked up primary source material, as any good historian should. The Evening Standard gave me an old job address. The rest was something your boys specialize in, foot-slogging.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The poor kid’s mind’s gone. Or at least her memory. Whoever the bastard was who did that to her made a pretty thorough job of it.’

  ‘Not as thorough as the job he made of Carly Drinkwater.’

  ‘And Alice Goode,’ Maxwell said. ‘What about Alice?’

  ‘You tell me, Mr Maxwell,’ Hall murmured. ‘Carly Drinkwater and Georgianna Morris were snatched from cinemas. Alice Goode from a cinema museum. Was Jacquie right after all? Was I just too busy and too blind to see it?’

  Maxwell looked at Henry Hall, his heart on his sleeve, his conscience naked to the neon light. ‘I’ve got a lead,’ the Head of Sixth Form said. ‘Are you going to let me follow it up?’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell shook his head.

  ‘I could do you for obstructing the police,’ Hall warned.

  ‘There’s nothing you could do to me I haven’t done to myself already,’ Maxwell told him. ‘It was my trip, remember. This is my movie, Mr Hall, and if you’ll stay out of my way, I’ll load the last reel.’

  ‘You know you can’t see Ronnie alone,’ Hall said.

  Maxwell nodded. ‘What about Jacquie?’

  ‘I’ll do what I can. You’ve got my word on that.’

  ‘And my last reel?’ Maxwell was on his feet.

  Hall hesitated. ‘You’re the projectionist, Mr Maxwell.’ He shrugged. ‘It looks like the rest of us are just the audience. Roll em.

  12

  They let Ronnie Parsons go the next day. First, because they couldn’t legally hold him any longer and second because of the miracles of modern science. They’d taken a blood sample from him and it didn’t match the semen traces found in the body of Alice Goode. That wasn’t in itself, of course, conclusive. He could still have kidnapped and strangled her; and as for the murder of Jean Hagger, that was still wide open. Henry Hall was keeping a very open mind on that one.

  And Ronnie? Well, Ronnie still had to check in with the police every Thursday – ‘for a good smacking’ as they put it jovially down at Leighford nick. But the boy was a known runner. You couldn’t be too careful with a boy like that. He wouldn’t go home. Couldn’t bear the atmosphere at Rondo again. It was because of that that he’d vanished in the first place, just taken off, doubling out of the side doors in the Museum of the Moving Image, nipping over the barrier, out of the fire exit. He’d half expected an alarm to be triggered, but he heard nothing. It wasn’t until he was across the river, losing himself in the roaring maze of the Underground just to put everybody off his scent that he realized he’d left his bag, the grey holdall with his spare underpants, socks and sandwiches, in the Museum cloakroom. Too bad. He wasn’t going back for it.

  ‘Did they give you a hard time?’ Maxwell’s office was the safest haven a lad like Ronnie had just at that moment, cosier than the council flatlets in Monterey Street, with their elegant view of the Tottingleigh gasworks.

  Ronnie shrugged. ‘Not as bad as French GCSE oral,’ he remembered.

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to thank you,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Not mentioning that you shacked up with me for that couple of days.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Ronnie said. ‘I shouldn’t have done it anyway. Shouldn’t have landed you in it.’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell had put on his stern face, ‘what you shouldn’t have done was a runner when your Mum called round.’

  ‘You’d have shopped me,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘You’re right,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘That’s how I discovered you’d gone. A couple of minutes and there’d have been a reconciliation. How did your parents take it when they saw you at the cop-shop?’

  Ronnie hung his head. ‘Well, Mum was Mum, you know. All tears and hugs. Dad, well, he just stood there, like the shit he is. It’s what I expected.’

  ‘Tell me about the blood, Ronnie,’ Maxwell said softly.

  The hum of Mrs B’s polisher started up in the corridor outside. It was the butt-end of another day. In the common room, the politicos of the Sixth Form Council were arguing the toss about the washing-up rota and the Leavers’ Ball, the meeting chaired, in Maxwell’s absence, by his Number Two, Helen Maitland, The Fridge.

  ‘What blood?’

  Maxwell rummaged in the battered portmanteau he called a briefcase, the scraps of leather and brass that he’d carried his soul in since the heady days by the Cam when he lay under Grantchester skies with Rupert Brooke and played with Lord Byron’s bear on his staircase at St John’s. It was the Pearl Jam T-shirt, its sleeve still stiff and brown.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’ Ronnie seemed to have turned paler so that his face matched Maxwell’s wall.

  ‘Mrs B. found it in my spare room,’ the Head of Sixth Form told him. ‘First the bag at Jean Hagger’s, now this. You seem hell bent on leaving telltale evidence of scenes of crime behind you, Ronnie.’

  ‘Look, it’s not what it seems.’

  Maxwell knew panic when he saw it. Ronnie was licking his lips because they were dry as a brick, waving his arms around because he wanted to lash out at his tormentor, bracing his legs with both feet on the ground because he wanted to run. The door was shut and older as he was, slower as he was, Maxwell knew he could get to it before Ronnie. Ronnie knew it too.

  ‘Read my thoughts, Ronnie.’ Maxwell’s George Bush was lost on the boy. ‘What does it seem? You’re an historian, dammit. This is primary evidence.’ He shook the rag in his hand. ‘Whose blood is it?’

  ‘His name’s Justin somebody,’ he was shouting and Maxwell’s quiet, calm delivery made him sound all the louder.

  ‘Who’s Justin?’

  ‘Some bloke, some lecturer. I told you. Dannie Roth was going out with him. I didn’t like that. He got funny and I hit him. It was daft, really.’

  ‘Daft, indeed,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘So this isn’t Jean Hagger’s blood?’

  Ronnie’s eyes said it all. He forgot the rising terror inside him. ‘No,’ and his voice had dropped to a whisper.

  Maxwell looked at the gangly lad in front of him. Then he slid back his desk drawer, slipped the T-shirt inside to join the confiscated bits and pieces he’d collected over the term – the fags, the chewing gum, the lighter, the dog-eared copy of Fiesta – and he turned the key in the lock.

  ‘Did the police accuse you of murdering Jean Hagger?’ he asked.

  Ronnie was blinking back the tears. Why was Maxwell doing this? He had been the only one he could trust when he came back to Leighford. There had been no one else. But now he was like a Rottweiler with attitude. ‘More or less,’ he managed.

  Maxwell threw down his drawer key. ‘You look after that for me, Ronnie,’ he said, ‘for the time being. If I have a sudden hankering for a fag, a piece of chewing gum or a quick shufty through Fiesta, I’ll get it back from you. Fair enough?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the boy nodded and he felt the warm metal burn into the palm of his hand.

  Old cases. Dead cases. They’d long ago closed down the Incident Rooms on Carly Drinkwater and on Georgianna Morris. They’d happened out of Henry Hall’s manor, out of present time. But a murder was a capital offence. If there was a referendum today, Joe Public would bring back hanging. In his darker moments, Chief Inspector Hall often mused on that. They still tested, he knew, the apparatus of death at Wandsworth Jail, still placed the sack of sand on the doors, still hooked up the hemp and drew the bolts to eternity. But there was no Jack Ketch now, no Albert Pierrepoint. Another Old English craft had gone. And if Joe Public got his way, who’d train the hangman?

  So the cases of Carly Drinkwater and Georgianna Morris lay open, like gaping wounds
; untended, festering, but never quite forgotten. Hall looked at the paperwork obligingly passed to him by the Met. He was still looking at it that night when his wife finally dropped her Patricia Cornwell over the edge of the bed and muttered something he didn’t catch. And he was somewhere in the forensic reports on Carly Drinkwater when the kids kissed him and dashed off for the bus, leaving him in the kitchen on his rest day, with the clock ticking and the rumble of the tumble drier for company.

  Carly Drinkwater was twenty when she died. A student at the LSE, she was, as they always said on Crimewatch, a likeable girl with a bubbly personality who hadn’t an enemy in the world. She lived at home. Mum. Dad. No siblings. In the holidays she worked in a travel agent’s in Raines Park. She had a steady boyfriend, Kenneth Cassidy, who’d been interviewed by the police on four occasions. He was a likeable boy too – Carly’s parents spoke warmly of him. But the likeable boy and the likeable girl had had a row on the night she died. He said it was about a party she wanted to go to and he didn’t. Carly had no comment at all on that. But her body told tales out of school when the Council stray-dog catcher found it on the waste ground where the old Devonshire Hotel used to stand years before.

  Hall had the scene-of-crime photographs in front of him now, the sort he’d vowed never to let his wife and kids see. When he brought this stuff home and it wasn’t in his hands it was in his study, under lock and key. She was a pretty girl, with short, bobbed hair. Or she had been, before some maniac took her off the street. Except it wasn’t the street, it was the Studio 3 Cinema in Leopold Road. The usherette remembered her going in to see The Unforgiven. She’d remembered because the girl had mascara running down her face and she’d asked what the matter was. The girl had shaken her head. Nothing.

  Now, the camera didn’t lie. The dog catcher had found her under an old sheet of corrugated iron. She was lying on her back, her head inclined to her left, her pale purple tongue contrasting oddly with the pallor of her skin. A more poetic man than Henry Hall would have remembered G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’ – her face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey, like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day.

  But there was nothing poetic about this death. Nothing quick about the kill. There was a livid crimson line around her neck where something, perhaps a clothes line, had cut deep as the bastard strangled her.

  The forensic report told the rest. Bruising on the thighs and vagina spelt out forcible intercourse – rape. Abrasions on the face, knuckles and ribs meant that she’d put up a struggle. In the closing minutes and seconds of her life, she’d fought back, against the worthless piece of shit who was not killing her softly. And it hadn’t happened on the scattered bricks and debris of the Devonshire. She’d been killed somewhere indoors, wrapped in a blanket with pale blue fibres and dumped. It would have had to have been at night. The area was too open for a daylight drop, too well frequented. The waste ground was surrounded by a wire-mesh fence, ten feet high, but the wire had broken in places and kids played their games there, as their grannies and granddads had when London was ringed with bomb craters and lives and houses were smashed to pieces.

  And Carly Drinkwater’s life had been smashed to pieces too. And those of her parents. And Kenneth Cassidy, her boyfriend.

  And Henry Hall found himself musing once again, that there were no winners in the game of murder. Only losers. And the loss was real and the loss was for ever.

  Georgianna Morris had gone to the cinema too. That was in Notting Hill, a year after the murder of Carly Drinkwater. She’d been luckier – or had she? Hall looked at the broad, smiling face, the holiday snapshot taken three months before. The girl had survived, but who knew in what private hell? Her priest had spoken to her, good Catholic girl that she was, hour after hour in the kindly quiet of the confessional. He’d taken down the mesh partition, slid aside the screen, sat with his hands on hers. Father Conlon was out of his depth and he told her so. How could he know her pain? Her terror? He couldn’t. But God could. And God was there, listening. And he’d seen the disbelief on Georgianna’s face. Where was God when she’d needed Him most? When some madman was hacking at her body with a breadknife as though she was a crusty cob?

  The rape-crisis counsellor fared no better. She didn’t have Father Conlon’s kindly eyes, but she was professional, she was experienced and she was female. No good. Georgianna couldn’t remember even the name of the film she’d been to see. The Met had established that it must have been Four Weddings and a Funeral, but all the girl could remember was leaving home that night. She’d crossed London from Streatham, where she worked in an estate agent’s, and had gone to the cinema, the Star in the High Street, to meet a friend. Except that the friend never turned up. The Met had checked her out. She’d gone down with flu that day and had forgotten all about her date with Georgianna. They’d checked the estate agent’s too – Marples of Streatham – Georgianna’s colleagues, Georgianna’s clients. Not that she had clients in the accepted sense. She was too young for business of her own and ever since Suzy Lamplugh, no estate agent in the country sent out young women on their own. Too many weirdoes buying property these days.

  Georgianna had been found in the driving rain, in Holland Park. Her shoes had gone, so had her dress and tights. There was no sign of her coat and she was cowering in some bushes in only her bra and panties when an elderly couple walking their dog had found her. She had bruising to her face and thighs and six separate cuts, one deep, the others superficial, to her forearms.

  Hall could see all that. What he couldn’t see were the scars on her mind. That coloured canvas where our memory is etched, where sights and sounds and smells take us back to our childhood. And Mad Max could have told Hall that Georgianna was a child again – ‘I don’t really like popcorn’.

  Mad Max sat in the cinema that night. He’d always avoided Jurassic Park. Not because it was a bad film, but just because it was hyped to death. Now, on its umpteenth tour of duty, he succumbed. He was glad he did, smiling with delight as that dishonest fat bloke got his, being impressed as always by Jeff Goldblum, wondering what women saw in Sam Neill and which parts of Scotland Lord Dickie Attenborough was supposed to hail from. But that wasn’t really why Maxwell had come. He’d come to watch the audience.

  The four Years Tens in the front behaved themselves as soon as they saw him. Shit! No sliding on the seats and lobbing ice cream at each other now. And Tommy Hollis, the Don Juan of Year Eleven, felt he couldn’t shove his hand quite so far up Tracey Eccleston’s skirt as he’d planned to do before he caught sight of Mad Max. But Maxwell wasn’t interested in them. There were two unattached women in the theatre. One was knocking sixty and Maxwell was mildly astonished to find she’d brought her crocheting along – she’d obviously seen the film before.

  The other was in her late twenties, early thirties, attractive in a boyish sort of way with a long trench coat over a loose and shapeless jumper. Maxwell waited for the Pearl and Dean to finish, then trotted down the shallow, plush-carpeted steps and bought a carton of popcorn from the raddled old floozy who sold it. So different, Maxwell thought, from the radiant popsy of yesterday, whose fish-net stockings and tray of Kia-Ora filled the silver screens of his youth.

  At the stair nearest the single girl, he tripped and the popcorn went everywhere. The Year Ten kids stifled their giggles and Don Juan missed the whole thing because he was too busy eating Tracey Eccleston at the time.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Maxwell flustered, raising his hat.

  ‘That’s all right.’ The girl was brushing popcorn off her lap. Before she knew it, Maxwell was on the seat beside her, flicking the sticky bits in all directions. He felt her stiffen, edge away.

  ‘Trust me!’ he said, smiling. ‘I really am very embarrassed about all this.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, smiling back. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘I’m just glad it wasn’t a lolly’ Maxwell said. ‘They stain so, don’t they? Enjoying the film?’

&nbs
p; ‘Er… yes.’

  ‘Seen it before?’

  ‘No, no, I haven’t. Look, would you excuse me?’

  ‘Of course,’ and gentleman that he was, he got out of his seat and watched her go. She didn’t run. Didn’t look back. He knew she wouldn’t. She turned left at the top of the stairs, making for the loo. Was that, Maxwell wondered, how it was done? How Carly Drinkwater and Georgianna Morris had been picked up? He sat back down, extricating the last of the popcorn from under his bum. Of course, he didn’t know if the victims had known their assailant or not. But if they hadn’t – or even if they had in a passing sort of way – wouldn’t that have been their instinctive reaction? It was all about body language really. In the dark of a cinema, countless millions had lost themselves to the magic, the make-believe. What woman’s heart had not leapt when Clark Gable had told Vivien Leigh where to stick it? Who had not gulped back a tear when Dirk Bogarde stood on his tumbril in the shadow of Madame Guillotine and told a frightened peasant girl it was a far, far better thing than he’d ever done before? And somewhere in a South Wales cinema, Maxwell had good reason to believe, still lay, in the dust and sweet wrappers under the seats, the dentures of an aged great aunt of his, so terrified by Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, that her scream had sent her false teeth hurtling through the air.

  But Maxwell had done the unthinkable. Whoever the girl was over whom he had tipped his popcorn, she’d had her evening ruined. She’d felt threatened, vulnerable. He, an old pervert in a bow tie and ridiculous hat, had invaded her space, engaged her in conversation. And she’d retreated. She’d run. There were those who’d have brazened it out. The little hussy who showed Maxwell into the Girlie Peep Show in Soho would have sat there, legs open and breasts uptilted, and would have fetched him a nasty one in the nuts if he’d got fresh. But this girl had taken refuge in an inner sanctum, that last of sanctuaries now that the medieval church was no more. She’d gone to the Ladies’. She’d gambled that Maxwell would not follow her there. For Maxwell, like the men who killed Caesar, was an honourable man.