Maxwell's Mask (13 page)

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, of 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.'

‘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 muttered 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?'

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 sergeant 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.