Maxwell's Mask Read online

  ‘Max, Max,’ Collinson’s laugh was brittle. ‘That flying glass must have done more damage than you thought. You’re talking nonsense.’

  ‘No, I’m not, Patrick,’ Maxwell shook his head with difficulty. ‘That’s why I set young Benny up with the disguise and recorded my Dan Bartlett impersonation, just to see the reaction. I knew Henry Hall wouldn’t buy it. Rowena Sanders, Fiona Elliot and probably Magda Lupescu would believe the whole thing. I wasn’t interested in Carole Bartlett’s response. No, it was down to you and Ashley Wilkes. You see, I invented body language, Patrick. I know all the signs – fear, panic, guilt. Ashley Wilkes reacted like a theatre manager. You reacted like a murderer. Dan Bartlett had lived high off the hog once – family money and so on. But he’d spent it – alimony, girlies, the gee-gees, unwise investments, who knows? So he went cap in hand to the Arquebus Treasurer, a slightly dotty old duck who was absolutely loaded. Big house, cash in the bank, more money than you could shake a stick at. And she turned him down. She had two loves in her life, did Martita Winchcombe – one was the Arquebus Theatre and she intended to leave all her worldly goods to that. That was because the other love in her life was financially secure and didn’t need the handouts. Did you, Patrick?’

  ‘Max…’

  ‘That’s where dear old Doris comes in. We got talking, Doris and I, about you; what a good, understanding employer you are and your passion for the theatre and your generous bonuses…and the fact that you moved here from Cheltenham.’

  ‘Is that a crime?’ Collinson felt obliged to ask.

  ‘I have a neighbour,’ Maxwell went on, ‘a Mrs Troubridge. Nice old duck, and terribly helpful in the local history stakes. Knew Martita Winchcombe long years ago. Knew about her little spot of bother. She got herself in the family way, did Martita, at a time when doing…that sort of thing without a husband was frowned upon by polite Leighford society. So she went away for a while. To have the baby. She went to Cheltenham and the little boy was christened Patrick. Tell me, Patrick, when you first discovered Martita was your mother.’

  ‘Twenty-one years ago,’ Collinson said, slumping down into a seat across the aisle from Maxwell. ‘I did some sleuthing – I’m nearly as good as you are, Maxwell – and I traced her. I was petrified when I came to see her, already a middle-aged man with a life and a successful career of my own. She just…wrapped her arms around me on the threshold of Dundee and that was it. I had come home, the Prodigal, the long-lost son. Except, she still didn’t want it known. It must be our secret. And so we kept it, until now.’

  ‘And Dan Bartlett?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘You were right,’ Collinson sighed. ‘He was worming his smarmy way into my mother’s affections – or so he thought. One day, he asked her outright. Would she leave everything to him? Think of him as the son she never had. She refused him, told him to get out. Never to call on her again.’

  ‘But he did?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I was driving over to see her one night – the night she died. I saw Bartlett’s car leaving the drive. I have a key of course so I let myself in, although she had a habit of forgetting to lock the back. I found her.’ Collinson’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Lying at the bottom of the stairs. He’d…I don’t know…lost his temper, decided to punish her. Something. I think Gordon’s death – the whole accident thing – made him choose the method he did. A tripwire I believe the papers speculated. All I know was that my mother was lying dead at the bottom of the stairs.’

  ‘So you covered her up?’ Maxwell checked.

  ‘I put her blanket over her, yes,’ Collinson sobbed quietly. ‘I couldn’t leave her like that.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just call the police?’ Maxwell asked. ‘You’d seen Bartlett leave. You knew he was pressurising your mother financially…’

  ‘And achieve what?’ Collinson shouted. ‘They haven’t caught me, have they, for Dan Bartlett’s murder? I couldn’t rely on that bunch of no-hopers. And anyway, even if they got their act together and the case went against him in court, what then? Fifteen years? Ten with good behaviour? Colour telly and ping-pong with Internet access? No, Max, no. It wasn’t enough.’

  ‘So it was revenge then, on the son Martita never had by the son she did?’

  Collinson nodded. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘It was all about minutes of the day. Bartlett was a pushover because he kept a rigid routine. Even when he was seducing someone he was checking his watch behind their back. That and his obsession with pizza. All of us on the Arquebus Committee had keys to each other’s houses by mutual agreement – that’s how Bartlett would have got into Dundee should the unlikely have happened and mother locked the door. I knew he wouldn’t be in his ghastly little bungalow in the early evening so I made a call, booking a pizza delivery at ten-thirty, when I knew he’d be in the bath. That way, his phone records would merely log that a call was made from his place and, everyone would presume, by him. I’ve been around theatres long enough to know how to make wires lethal, so I set to. With dry feet, you’d get away with light charring, but wet from the bath…well. Curtains!’ Collinson sat upright, defiant, even proud. ‘I’m just sorry I wasn’t there to see it.’ He blinked, looking at the bandaged sight in front of him. ‘What happens now?’ he asked.

  ‘Now…’ Maxwell sighed, but he never finished his sentence.

  ‘Max!’ Jane Blaisedell was hurtling down the aisle, leaping over debris as she ran, crashing through rubbish. ‘The baby. It’s Jacquie. Thank God I found you. The baby.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They let Henry Hall out of Leighford General a few days later and with a little help he staggered back to his office in the Incident Room at Tottingleigh. He had a murderer to interrogate, paperwork to finish, tees to cross and eyes to dot.

  He didn’t quite know whether to include Magda Lupescu’s work in the official report. And he was still wrestling with the problem, when something caught his eye, a sudden movement to his left as he sat at his desk. He turned and there, crouching behind the green-fronted filing cabinet, was a frightened little boy, with a dunce’s cap on his head.

  And when Henry Hall looked again, he’d gone.

  Maxwell held his baby boy in his arms. Little Nolan, named for the hot-headed officer who brought the fatal order to the Light Brigade that long-ago October day. It was November now, crisp underfoot and wreathed in mist. It would be a long, hard winter, global warming notwithstanding.

  He carried the pink bundle up the wooden stairs to his Inner Sanctum, his War Office.

  ‘This,’ he said to the boy, pointing to the plastic soldiers, ‘is your namesake, Captain Louis Edward Nolan, 15th Hussars. Next to him, James Brudenell, the Seventh Earl of Cardigan… I hope you’re listening, Nolan, ’cos I shall be asking questions later.’

  He caught the light in the picture frame to his left and broke away from his Brigade, to look at the photo. His Jacquie. And it all came flooding back; that day that they arrested Patrick Collinson, the day Jane Blaisedell had come to tell him that the baby was early, the baby was here. He remembered the clanging of the police car siren, the flashing light. There were complications, Jane was gabbling, with Jacquie. But she’d be all right. Wouldn’t she? Jacquie would be all right.

  Maxwell looked at the girl. And the boy they’d made together. He had her nose, all right. Maxwell felt his eyes fill with tears. ‘Well, kid,’ he nuzzled against the baby’s cheek, ‘it’s just you and me, now.’ And he turned back to the Light Brigade.

  ‘Max!’

  ‘Up here,’ he called, frowning.

  Her head popped up on a level with the floor.

  ‘I thought you were going to your mother’s,’ he said, confused.

  ‘I was,’ she said. ‘Then I thought about my boys and thought “She’ll keep”. I rang her to cancel before I’d got to the bottom of the road. Fancy a coffee?’

  ‘In a minute,’ he smiled at her. ‘In a minute, Woman Policeman. Your son and I have a little Charge to ride.’

&nbs
p; If you enjoyed this book, you may like to read the other books in the Peter ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell series.

  * * *

  ‘Trow has the reader chuckling while tussling over the intricacies of his dexterous plotting. Tragic and humorous by turns, the Maxwell novels are packed with dry wit and keep the readers guessing to the last page’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Trow’s skill at spinning mysteries a twist further then expected keeps him at the top of the form’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘No one, no one at all, writes quite like Trow… It’s almost impossible to second guess Trow, so top marks for the scholarly sleuth’

  Yorkshire Post

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  About the Author

  M.J. TROW has recently retired as a history teacher – he has been doubling as a crime writer for twenty-six years. He is the author of the Inspector Sholto Lestrade and the Kit Marlowe series and twenty-one non-fiction books as well as the Peter ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell novels.

  AVAILABLE FROM ALLISON & BUSBY

  In the Peter ‘Mad Max’ Maxwell series

  Maxwell’s Match

  Maxwell’s Inspection

  Maxwell’s Grave

  Maxwell’s Mask

  Maxwell’s Point

  Maxwell’s Chain

  Maxwell’s Revenge

  Maxwell’s Retirement

  Maxwell’s Island

  Maxwell’s Crossing

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

  12 Fitzroy Mews

  London W1T 6DW

  www.allisonandbusby.com

  First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2006.

  This ebook edition first published in 2013.

  Copyright © 2006 by M.J. TROW

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–1361–5