Maxwell's Mask Read online

  And she nuzzled under his chin. ‘I’ll let you know,’ she said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘I have to say, Mrs Elliot, you were a little difficult to trace.’ Henry Hall was standing in her hotel lounge as the morning sun lit it, throwing strange September shadows across the magazine racks and the tourist posters that offered so much from sunny Leighford.

  ‘Was I?’ The woman looked a little more relaxed than when she and Henry Hall had parted last, looking down at an old woman, dead on a mortuary slab. ‘In what way?’

  ‘In the way that we didn’t know where you were,’ Hall felt obliged to explain.

  ‘I didn’t care for my first hotel,’ she explained. ‘Too many draughts. And the room service was abysmal. No wonder people go abroad these days. Well, now you’ve found me – what progress on the murder of my aunt?’

  ‘Were you in regular touch?’ Hall asked, watching an old boy wandering through in search of his morning paper.

  ‘Aunt Martita and I?’ Fiona sat back in the snug fit of the Lloyd Loom. ‘Not until very recently.’

  ‘How recently?’ Hall asked. ‘I have your address here as West Bromwich.’

  ‘Since last week,’ she told him.

  Hall blinked, but behind those bland glasses’ lenses, who could tell? ‘But your aunt died two weeks ago.’

  Fiona Elliot closed to the Detective. ‘She has been in touch from the Other Side.’

  ‘The other side?’ Hall echoed.

  ‘The Other Side,’ she confirmed.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to explain that one, Mrs Elliot.’

  ‘My husband and I have been members of the Christian Spiritual Church for several years.’

  ‘I see,’ Hall said. ‘And your aunt has been in touch…’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ she snapped. ‘Well, we’re used to it, God knows. The arrogance of little men, with their rationalism and logic, their earth-bound science. How often have you heard some over-qualified, over-paid idiot on the television say that there can be no life on other planets because those planets do not contain carbon? And, of course, all life contains carbon. Bunkum and hogwash! I have seen dead men walk, Chief Inspector. That’s why I wanted to see my aunt.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Her neck was broken,’ Fiona Elliot explained, ‘but her legs were intact. She was able to come across.’

  ‘Across?’

  ‘From the Other Side.’ The woman was incredulous. ‘How can you be so blinkered? The newspapers said you were using a psychic on this case. I can’t tell you how overjoyed I was to hear you say that. Sense at last. I thought you’d go down in history as an enlightened liberal, with an open mind and deep respect for the spirit world. Instead, I find you’re a myopic idiot, with all the prejudices of your calling.’

  ‘My mind is as open as anybody’s, madam,’ Hall told her. ‘I’ll try any avenue to catch a murderer. Right now, I’m concentrating on the here and now. This Side, so to speak.’

  ‘Very well,’ she sighed.

  ‘Other than…very recently…when were you in touch with your aunt last?’

  ‘Oh, let me see.’ The woman stared out across the sea front and the gardens where the grey sea rolled high and menacing beyond the peeling paint of the hotel’s portico. ‘Two, two and a half years ago.’

  ‘You say she lived alone?’

  ‘Yes. She had some sort of companion, an older woman, a few years back. I understand there was some sort of falling out and the woman left.’

  ‘Was she, from what you know, self-sufficient?’ he asked. ‘I mean, did she have a cleaner, shopper, any help from the neighbours?’

  ‘I believe she coped by herself, by and large,’ Fiona said. ‘Like all us Winchcombes, Martita was a stalwart. Came from a long line of copers. My great-great-great-grandmother was with her husband through the siege of Lucknow, you know.’

  Hall didn’t know, but he wasn’t sure it had much bearing on his case.

  ‘One or two of the theatre crowd used to help her occasionally,’ Fiona said. ‘You know, shopping on line, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘You’d have to ask them,’ Fiona said. ‘But I understand that Daniel Bartlett was one such.’

  ‘Daniel Bartlett is dead,’ Hall told her.

  ‘I have read the papers, Chief Inspector,’ she assured him. ‘What are you telling me? That someone killed my aunt and then killed Mr Bartlett because he was kind to her? That would seem to be taking spite to extremes.’

  Hall’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that what we’re looking for, Mrs Elliot?’ he asked. ‘Someone with spite in them?’

  ‘After tomorrow night,’ she said, leaning back and folding her arms over her ample bosom, ‘I shall be able to tell you who you are looking for. You can judge their spite for yourself.’

  ‘Tomorrow night?’ Hall repeated. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Clearly.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Tomorrow night, we are holding a séance. Aunt Martita will tell us what you want to know.’

  He was only a blur at first, bits of leaf and twig flying in the air. And Maxwell heard him rather than saw him. One of those tractor jobbies that the Council use for their playing fields was rattling its way across the turf of the Francis Chichester Centre, ripping shit out of a hedge.

  In a gentler age, Maxwell told himself, there’d be an old hedger standing there in the mad, unstable changeability of the weather, a little nut-brown man with hands and face of leather, leaning for a moment as he sharpened his hook and caught his breath. He’d toil all day under an English heaven, in his gaiters and waistcoat, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a navvy’s scarf and laying the most immaculate hedge, weaving the saplings into a pattern that would last for years.

  Now, the tractor with its murderous blade fitment was hacking branch and root and stem, great filches of ground bouncing and flying as it took the crest of the hill. Maxwell stood like an ox in the furrow and waved him down. The driver considered evasive action, but thought better of it and switched his engine off, hauling on the brake and tilting up his visor.

  ‘Mr Lincoln?’ Maxwell called. The man didn’t look like an ex-rail splitter with Marfan’s syndrome, but you couldn’t have everything.

  The tractor driver wrenched the earmuffs off and sat in his saddle, glaring down at this interruption.

  ‘Mr Lincoln?’ Maxwell asked again.

  ‘I’m Martin Lincoln,’ he nodded. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Peter Maxwell.’ The Head of Sixth Form held out his hand. ‘Wrongful Dismissal Claims.’ He’d been careful to leave his scarf and cycle clips at home.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Maxwell rummaged in his jacket pocket and produced his Teachers’ Countdown card. ‘Social Services. Legal Department. We’re investigating cases of wrongful dismissal.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of that,’ Lincoln told him.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell closed to him, popping the card away quickly. ‘Strictly between you and me, it’s a bit of a sop.’

  ‘Is it?’

  It was difficult to gauge Martin Lincoln’s age in the earmuffs and the County overalls and the grime of oil hanging round him like a shroud.

  Maxwell moved closer still, braving the heat of the machine’s engine and the overwhelming smell of diesel. ‘One of the criticisms of the government just prior to the last election. It’s all about targets, isn’t it? We’re having to move fast, fulfilling a few manifesto promises, if you catch my drift.’

  ‘Drift caught,’ Lincoln said, wiping his forehead with a grubby towel on the tractor’s controls. ‘Why are you talking to me?’

  ‘Well, our records show that you recently lost your job with Ampleforth Components?’ Maxwell pretended a certain vagueness. He’d met jobsworths before. They were about as interested in details as in flying to the moon.

  ‘That’s right,’ the tractor man nodded. ‘Two months ago, now.’

&nb
sp; ‘Can I be absolutely frank?’ Maxwell asked. He risked the old joke in reply, but all he got was a nod. Disappointing, really. ‘We have reason to believe that a Mr…Gordon Goodacre…’ he was carefully reading his shopping list from his other pocket, ‘may have been, shall we say, a little overzealous in his hiring and firing.’

  ‘Gordon?’ Lincoln blinked. ‘Never. Er…you know he’s dead, don’t you?’

  ‘Dead?’ Maxwell decided to play a hunch.

  ‘About two weeks ago now. Tragic accident at the local theatre.’

  ‘No! What happened?’

  ‘Seems a ladder fell on him. There’s a certain irony there, of course.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘Well, Gordon was personnel manager. Sedentary occupation if ever there was one. And he’s killed by a ladder. Here I am, accountant of sorts and I’m doing one of the most dangerous jobs known to man.’

  ‘Accountancy?’ Maxwell was surprisingly good at playing the idiot. It must be the people he worked with.

  ‘Tractor driving!’ Lincoln realised he had a bright one here. ‘Do you know how often these things turn over?’

  ‘Just once, I guess,’ he said, but Lincoln wasn’t in a responsive mood. ‘But to get back to Gordon Goodacre.’

  ‘Nice bloke,’ Lincoln concluded.

  ‘Even though he fired you?’

  ‘Look, Mr…er…Maxwell. I know you’ve got a job to do and so on, but really, this is a no-no. All right, so Gordon called it wrong. He thought my bookkeeping was less than immaculate. I disagreed. But I didn’t bear him any ill will or anything. To be honest, Ampleforth’s and I had reached about the end of our run anyway. No, I’m freelancing now, building up my own client base. Oh, it’ll take time, of course. Hence this bit of groundsmanship. It’s marvellous, really. I just went down the Job Centre, filled in a few forms, did a few circuits on this thing and here I am. It’s quite therapeutic. I recommend it. You ever leave the rat race of the fake claims world,’ he slapped the tractor, ‘this is the life. I’ve never felt so well.’

  ‘So…you didn’t bear Mr Goodacre a grudge, then?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Matter of fact, I had a drink with him, only a couple of days before the poor bloke bought it.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, at the Sword and Buckler. Mind you,’ Lincoln frowned at the memory of it. ‘I must say he didn’t seem himself that night. Not himself at all.’

  ‘So who did he seem, Count?’ Maxwell’s hands were clasped behind his back as he lolled back in his modelling chair. ‘Well may you ask.’

  The great black and white beast appeared to be dozing in his time-honoured place on top of the basket in Maxwell’s inner sanctum under the eaves at 38 Columbine, his War Office. He appeared to be but, actually, one eye was open. It was a subterfuge many an ex-rodent had fallen for.

  ‘It seems that our Gordon was quietly petrified in his own suburban little way. Ever seen Night of the Demon, Count? It’s occasionally on TCM, quite late, but I appreciate you’re often out on your rounds by then, so you may have missed it. Poor old Dana Andrews, of all people, is the recipient of a curse, a mere slip of paper that prophesies that the demon of the title is on its way to get him. It’s based on a short story by that creepy old bugger late of my own university, MR James. From what Martin Lincoln told me, Goodacre was afraid of something in the theatre. Or perhaps the theatre itself.’

  Maxwell let his chair rock forward and uncoupled his hands to pour himself another Southern Comfort. ‘What do you think of all this, Count? The supernatural, I mean. Things that go bump in the night. Happens to you all the time, I suppose.’

  The cat flicked an ear. The only things that went bump in his night were the mice he flicked across the kitchen floor in what would prove to be their last ever game of footie.

  ‘There are some people,’ Maxwell said, ‘who believe that evil can lurk in a building. That something happened in a place, so appalling that it’s somehow imprinted in the very stones, the very fabric of the building itself. Let’s see, the Arquebus has been on that site for…what…a dozen years or so. Before that, warehouses. Derelict. Abandoned. Great happy hunting ground for you, I shouldn’t wonder, as a kitten on the quays.’ He glanced at the cat. ‘No, you can’t use that one, it’s copyright P. Maxwell. Eat your heart out. It was like that for ever, if I remember rightly. Let’s see.’ He lolled back again, talking to the cat and the air and watching the dark clouds scudding across the moon through his skylight. ‘I came to Leighford in ’75. Maggie Thatcher became the new leader of the Tories that year, ousting the best band leader of our times, Edward Heath. King Faisal was killed by his mad nephew and the then unknown Jack Nicholson made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And what, I wonder, was happening – or had happened – at the warehouses along the Leigh? What do you think, Count, a local history project for Year Eight or should I wait till Hell freezes over?’

  He took a sip of the amber nectar and glanced at the open trap to his left. ‘On the other hand,’ he murmured, ‘I know a woman whose investigative skills are second to none. And she’s not doing very much at the moment…’

  She heard the voice as if far off, in the echoes of her mind, down the labyrinthine tunnels which offered no escape, the endless dark twists of her own fear. ‘How are you feeling now?’ the voice asked, over and over again. It was cold. It was mocking, and it didn’t really want an answer.

  ‘Max?’ Patrick Collinson was peering over the balustrade to the auditorium below, leering, like dear old Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, at the crowd below. ‘Max, can I have a word?’

  ‘Sure.’ Rehearsals were over for the week and the cast of Shop of Horrors had been given the weekend off for good behaviour. And because they were all knackered, falling prey to that eternal disease of school plays the length and breadth of the land – cold feet. What had seemed a rattling good idea when Angela Carmichael had bullied Geraint Horsenell into it last year, was everybody’s worst nightmare now that Opening Night loomed. Horsenell had wanted to do The Threepenny Opera, complete with unplayable music and a plot more lifted than Zsa Zsa Gabor. It was time to take stock. Time for a rest. Psyche up. Focus. Focus.

  ‘Are we…er…are we alone?’ Collinson had padded down to Maxwell’s level via the back stairs, his shadow positively Hitchcockian on the wall.

  ‘I believe so,’ Maxwell said. ‘I was just off myself.’ He was rummaging for his hat and scarf.

  ‘Yes, sorry.’ Collinson looked around him, easing his collar. ‘I won’t keep you. I only wanted a word.’

  ‘Yes?’ Maxwell waited.

  ‘Well, this is…ah…a little awkward, really. I had a…well, let’s just say, incident earlier. With Deena Harrison.’

  ‘Incident?’ This was déjà vu country for Maxwell. For seven years he heard similar laments in the staff room at Leighford High.

  ‘A moment.’ Collinson tried to find the right words. ‘A cri de coeur if you will.’

  ‘What sort of cri?’ Maxwell asked. The déjà vu, when the name of Deena Harrison was on everybody’s lips, crept up his spine and parted his hair.

  ‘Well, it was earlier this evening. Before anyone had arrived. As you know, it was my turn to unlock and lock up tonight. She came up to me and threw her arms around my neck.’

  ‘Did she now?’ Maxwell had been here before too.

  ‘She made an allegation, Max. And I don’t really know what to do about it.’

  ‘An allegation?’ Maxwell repeated. ‘What sort of allegation? Against whom?’

  Collinson sighed sharply. ‘I find all this rather distasteful,’ he muttered. ‘Deena made an allegation against Ashley Wilkes. She claims he raped her.’

  ‘All right, boys and girls.’ Henry Hall clapped his hands together. It wasn’t his best Mad Max impression, but it got the attention of the Incident Room, an ever more motley crew of professionals whose inquiries were going precisely nowhere. ‘Nobody goes home tonight until we’ve talked about telephone calls. What’ve
we got, Gavin?’

  ‘Daniel Bartlett’s telephone calls.’ Henslow had the stage as the neon strip nearest him popped and spluttered. ‘On the day he died, he made a call to Ralph’s Express Pizza at six thirty-four. It lasted nearly two minutes.’

  Everybody looked at everybody else.

  ‘Sorry, guv.’ Tom O’Connell didn’t mind admitting, ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Tell him, Gavin.’ Hall had been over this already. It didn’t exactly have breakthrough written all over it, but it was something at least.

  The golden boy beamed. This was his call. He could see promotion and the George Medal staring him in the face. ‘I paid a visit to Ralph’s Pizzas this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Spoke to Liam.’

  All eyes were still on the ambitious little shit. Presumably this was going somewhere?

  ‘Liam assured me,’ Henslow went on, refusing to be rattled by the icy silence, ‘that he had an order for pizza from a Mr Bartlett at about half past six.’

  ‘So?’ Walters couldn’t see what cause the lad had to smirk.

  ‘So, Mr Bartlett was most insistent that the pizza was delivered at ten-thirty.’

  They all waited.

  ‘That is the time,’ Henslow couldn’t believe how slow his colleagues were on the uptake, ‘that we assume Dan Bartlett was in his bath. Now, who orders pizza for a time when he’s in the bath?’

  ‘A forgetful bugger?’ Bill Robbins suggested.

  ‘A screaming poof who wants an excuse to flash at a pizza delivery man?’ Dave Walters was too long in the tooth to start worrying about political correctness now. He could have been Peter Maxwell’s time twin.

  ‘Not exactly, Dave.’ Henry Hall stepped in to give the earnest lad a fraction of a chance against these old cynics. ‘Who orders pizza for a man in the bath? The same person who has carefully doctored the house’s wiring system and knows his victim will get out of said bath to answer the door. Unwittingly, Liam is an accessory to a murder. He duly arrived at ten-thirty, as instructed. It was his last order of the night and he was on his way home. He rang four or five times but didn’t get a reply. What he did get was annoyed. He saw the lights go out and thought the occupant was having a laugh. In fact the occupant was dying in that instant, two hundred and forty volts going through his body. Liam wasn’t remotely aware of this, of course, and continued to ring and knock, but the place was locked up. He was all set to go back there the next day and settle the payment, but he caught the item on the local lunchtime news and recognised both Bartlett’s name and the house. Now, everybody,’ he walked out from behind his desk, ‘this is not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. But let’s hope it is the end of the beginning. Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow, I want Dan Bartlett’s place turned over again. And this time, I want some answers.’