Maxwell's Mask (14 page)

‘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.'

‘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, centre 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.'

‘So, such a one was Daniel Bartlett?' Maxwell asked.

‘I'm afraid so.'

‘Any particular motive?' Maxwell chased it.

Collinson sighed. ‘Does that still count?' he asked.

‘MMO,' Maxwell flicked three fingers in the air.
‘The Holy Trinity of violent death – motive, means, opportunity. Yep, it still counts.'

‘It's just that these days people are killed for looking funny at other people, aren't they? Trainers, mobile phones, Koranic differences. It's all gone rather pear-shaped, don't you think?'

‘If the world was a pear tree, that wouldn't matter, would it?' Maxwell smiled. And Collinson gave him an old-fashioned look. There was no doubt about it – Peter Maxwell didn't get out enough.

‘Let me understand this, Max.' Bernard Ryan may have been the First Deputy at Leighford High School, but he'd also been Maxwell's whipping boy cum sparring partner for more years than either of them cared to remember. Time was when Ryan had been earmarked for promotion – von Ryan's Express as the ever-filmic Maxwell put it – but then reality had dawned and it became obvious he was always going to be third spear-bearer. He invariably lost his clashes with Maxwell and took his punishment like a man. ‘You want to go to the funeral of someone you never met, just to pay your respects.'

‘It's a vital PR exercise, Bernard.' Maxwell perched on the Deputy's desk, swinging his off-
the-ground
left foot to some irritating tune he couldn't get out of his head.

‘Come again?' Dierdre Lessing was Bernard
Ryan's hatchet woman. The scary thing was that when Legs Diamond was away, these two were directly responsible for the education of nearly eleven hundred children. Pray God their parents never found out.

Maxwell had been holding his mirrored shield in front of him to face Dierdre for years. The serpents writhed around her head and her terrible eyes glowered at him. He was patience itself. ‘PR,' he said, slowly. ‘Public relations – and not, as you might think from my legendary Politics Enrichment lessons of last year, Proportional Representation.'

‘You've lost me, Max,' Dierdre snapped, irritated by the man beyond measure. What was new?

‘I know,' Maxwell beamed. Dierdre Lessing had been a handsome woman once, but years of bitterness had etched themselves into her pores, carving furrows over her glacier face, contrasting oddly with the serpents that coiled from her hair. ‘One more time, then,' he said to them both, as though Seven Eff Three didn't quite get that bit about Existentialism. ‘Leighford High School – the institution to which you and I, colleagues both, are shackled for life – is putting on a musical extravaganza called
Little Shop of Horrors
. We are using the services of a local theatre, the Arquebus…'

‘Max!' Dierdre snapped, the snakes twisting and hissing at him.

‘I'll cut to the chase,' the Movie Man said. ‘This
afternoon, at half past one, they're burying Gordon Goodacre, who worked as a volunteer at said theatre. Since I am consulting director in the absence of Angela Carmichael, I thought it would be a nice gesture if I attended his passing.'

‘What are you really after, you ghoul?' Dierdre wanted to know.

Even Bernard was taken aback. ‘Dierdre, I don't think…'

‘Perhaps it's time you did, Bernard,' she hissed, along with her snakes.

He ignored her. ‘What'll you be missing, Max?'

He smiled broadly at the Senior Mistress. ‘Why, Dierdre, of course.' And he kissed the air alongside her. ‘Thirteen Bee.' His smile vanished. ‘No cover required.' And he'd reached the door. ‘I was merely being civil, Senior Managers,' he scowled. ‘Next time, it's a bad back and no more Mr Nice Guy.'

‘What are we going to do about him?' Dierdre wanted to know.

‘You were a
little
harsh, Dierdre,' Bernard chided her.

‘Men!' she growled and stormed out of the room, fire and brimstone scorching the woodwork.

It always rains, doesn't it, at the best funerals? Maxwell approved. Matilda Goodacre, with the unmistakable panache of a born actress, had pulled out all the stops. Two glossy black horses, their manes and tails hogged and flowing, stood
steaming in the grey drizzle from the west. Their heavy, long-haired hooves clattered and splashed down the slope that led to St Wilfred's. And tall men in top hats lifted the gilded coffin that bore the mortal remains of Gordon Goodacre from the glass-sided hearse and into the tiny porch of the oldest church in Leighford. All that was missing from the black, Victorian magnificence of the occasion was the forest of ostrich feathers that once crowned the hearse, the stallions and the hats of all the mourners. The RSPB had galvanised themselves into action and ostrich was something it was rumoured they put into upmarket burgers in supermarkets in the Nineties but the feathers, you just couldn't get. It was the way of the world – Maxwell, like everyone else, had to accept it.

Leighford had moved. Just as Old Sarum, the accursed hill of the Saxons, had become Norman Salisbury, so the centre of gravity had slipped from the little river that leapt and sparkled through the heather and the dunes to the sea. It spread and sprawled, from its fishing village and its Domesday Mill, to its sea front, its candy floss and its kiss-me-quick hats. No Regency opulence for Leighford, no namby-pamby Jane Austen wandering the Shingle in search of inspiration. Just the spur of the Southern Railway Company slicing through the landscape as the Victorians discovered a new word – tourism. And townies came from miles away to gawp at the sea and paddle in it, trousers rolled up
daringly and hankies tied to their heads. They took strolls along the Promenade, had their photos taken by dodgy men in straw boaters and buried their children, temporarily of course, in the sand.

Only St Wilfred's stayed where it was – the little chantry chapel of the medieval monks had grown as far as it was going to by the end of the fifteenth century, and now it would accept the soul of Gordon Alan Goodacre.

Peter Maxwell did his best to blend with the crowd of mourners. Few of them, perhaps, had known Gordon. But all of them knew Matilda, serene and stately as a galleon. Some he recognised from the Arquebus – Ashley Wilkes in a long, dark coat, his face pale, his mood quiet. Patrick Collinson, fussy, crimson-faced, ever-solicitous, checking that all was well and everyone knew what to do. Maxwell vaguely recognised others, one or two minor celebs from the world of yesterday's telly; that bloke who played the serial killer in one of the
Taggarts
; the woman-who-looked-as-though-she-might in
Flambards
; Bev from the car ads. One by one, they kissed Matilda Goodacre, held her, whispered all the empty words of condolence that well-meaning people do at moments like that.

They sang the hymns, heard the poetry delivered in a stentorian tour de force by a luvvie Maxwell couldn't quite place. The vicar, bloody nice fella, shook their hands solemnly at the graveside as the
descendants of Hamlet's people lowered Gordon Goodacre to the flowers.

‘Ashes to ashes…' came and went on the wind that suddenly whipped from the north. Fallacy had never been more pathetic than this. A clap of thunder and a jagged lightning fork would round it all off nicely, but it never came. Just Mad Max standing by the horses, stroking the soft, warm muzzle as the bits jingled and the hoofs stamped. For the most fleeting of moments, he was waiting in the Valley of Death for Louis Nolan to arrive with his fated order.

‘Mrs Goodacre,' he extended a hand as the widow passed him with her entourage. ‘Please accept my condolences.'

‘Mr…Maxwell.' She took it. ‘It's good of you to come.'

‘I…er…I'm afraid I had something of an ulterior motive,' he said, gazing into the steady, cold grey of the woman's eyes, shrouded under the monstrous sweep of her hat.

‘Really?'

‘May I call on you, perhaps in a day or two?'

‘Of course,' she said. ‘But what…'

‘In a day or two,' he smiled. ‘Thank you.'

And they swept by him, to the waiting cars and the baked meats and all the tragicomic reminiscences that mark the passing of a life.

Henry Hall hadn't gone to Gordon Goodacre's funeral. He was in two minds about releasing the body for burial at all. Something didn't sit right about this man's death; all his experience told him so. But Jim Astley was adamant. There was no evidence of foul play. The forensics pointed to one of those futile accidents that occasionally make Christians doubt the existence of God and atheists talk of the lottery of life and statistics. So, he'd relented and Matilda Goodacre had her day in widow's weeds, centre stage where she loved to be.

The groundlings stood before the DCI now, in the neon-lit Incident Room he'd been forced to set up in Tottingleigh, west of the Arquebus and a little south of the Flyover.

‘Where are we on Dan Bartlett?' Hall wanted to know.

‘Well, he wasn't as well off as we thought he was, guv.' Gavin Henslow was the one with A-level Maths; he always got the financial aspects of a killing.

‘Go on.' Hall settled back in the uncomfortable chrome chair with his coffee cup crumpled in its plastic nastiness beside him.