Maxwell's Mask (16 page)

Jacquie was at the top of the stairs, struggling into her house coat and doing the soft-shoe shuffle in her mules. ‘Jane.' She reached out and together they helped the girl to the settee.

‘The dead,' Jane was whispering, clinging to them both as though she daren't let go. ‘The dead are all around us. Did you know that, Jacquie? Max; Max, you're the cleverest man I know – did you know that? Magda sees them. All the time. Gordon Goodacre with his skull stoved in. Martita Winchcombe with her neck snapped and her spinal cord severed. She can
see
them, like I can see you.
Oh, Jesus!' and the girl fell sobbing into Jacquie's comforting arms.

‘Brandy, Max.' The policewoman in Jacquie Carpenter took over now. Last time, it was Maxwell who did the honours, said the right things, calmed the girl down. Now, it was her turn. ‘And ring Jane's mum and dad, can you? Their number's in my phone book. She's out of it now.'

‘Jacquie!' Henry Hall got up at the woman's entrance. A lesser man would have beamed to see his favourite DS back for a visit, kissed her even, hugged her with the pleasure of just saying ‘Hello'. Henry Hall just got up. ‘I thought I'd have heard more of a welcome outside.' He nodded to the
ante-room
where his team were up to their eyes in depositions, leads and cross-references, heads down, foci engaged.

‘I didn't come that way, guv,' she said quietly. ‘I nipped in by the back door. This isn't exactly a social call – I just wanted a word.'

‘Have a seat.' He slid the hard, upright chair out for her. ‘Can I get you a coffee? Is there a problem?'

Henry Hall and Jacquie Carpenter went back a decade. They'd faced death together – murder up close and personal. You develop a bond in those circumstances like no other.

‘It's Jane,' Jacquie said, looking her boss straight in the glasses. ‘Jane Blaisedell.'

‘I thought it might be.' Hall leaned back.

‘I know I'm out of this,' Jacquie said. ‘And it's none of my business.' She'd been wrestling with this all night. Jane had sipped her brandy, blurted out the whole story and gone home with her mum and dad, something she hadn't done for years, and they'd put her to bed. Like she was a little girl again, hoping that Uncle Tony wasn't going to call.

‘Jane's been sucked in, hasn't she?' Hall asked. ‘And she's in over her head.'

‘A psychic, guv? What's it all about?'

Hall shrugged. ‘Just one initiative too many,' he said. ‘An experiment on somebody's record sheet, a tick-box ticked.'

‘That's fine for somebody,' Jacquie said. ‘What about Jane?'

Henry Hall looked at the woman. She'd grown a few yards since they'd seen her off with jibes interlaced with their blessings. Their Jacquie was going to have a baby. The Maternity Unit would call it a senile pregnancy; after all, Jacquie Carpenter was thirty-four. Now, she was back. And she'd changed. Perhaps it was that new life inside her, the new responsibility. It was the she-wolf defending her cub.

‘What about Jane?' Hall clasped his fingers together in front of him and looked steadily at his DS. ‘How is it with her?'

‘You've put her with this nutter,' Jacquie almost shouted. She suddenly saw Henry Hall as outsiders saw him, cold, aloof, using people to get results.
And she didn't like what she saw.

‘Psychic consultant,' Hall corrected her.

‘The devil,' she growled, ‘is in the detail. The woman goes into trances, speaks in tongues. Even her face changes to look like the corpse she's investigating.'

‘Jane told you this?'

‘She's
seen
it, guv, heard it. She was there, for Christ's sake.'

‘And she doesn't want to be there,' Hall nodded.

‘What do you think?'

He leaned back again, assessing the situation. ‘Did she send you, Jacquie?'

‘No, of course not.' It was Jacquie's turn to lean back, easing off, echoing her boss's posture. She'd come on too strong, behaved like a bull in a china shop. ‘I came on her behalf, guv. She can't handle it.'

‘Can you?'

‘What?'

‘Can you do what Jane can't? Stand in dead men's shoes?'

Jacquie blinked, licked her lips. This had thrown her. She'd expected blandness, political correctness. Possibly, if she rattled his cage enough, fireworks. What she hadn't expected was a job.

‘I'm on maternity leave, guv.'

‘“Five o'clock,”' Hall seemed to be remembering something. ‘“Fed the chickens and ploughed the Lower Meadow. Eight o'clock was delivered of my fifth child.”'

‘I'm sorry?' Had the guv'nor flipped too? The whole place had become a madhouse since Jacquie had gone on leave.

‘Your Peter Maxwell would recognise that,' he said. ‘I don't know why it stays in my mind. It's from the diary of a pioneer woman in Oklahoma in the 1880s.'

‘Well, with respect, Chief Inspector,' Jacquie was even beginning to sound like Peter Maxwell, ‘I am not a pioneer woman.' She struggled to her feet. ‘I just hope you can live with yourself,' she said,
pale-faced
and iron-jawed. She saw herself out.

‘That'll be a no, then,' Henry Hall murmured.

There was water dripping from an oar, the blade dipping through reeds that rustled and whispered as the dawn came creeping over the misty meadow. He lay cold and dead in the boat, his hand trailing in the black of the water. She knelt over him. And she cried.

Her love, her life, had gone.

‘You know Ellen Terry once played the Arquebus?' Matilda Goodacre asked, tracing her fingers over the sepia photograph of the great actress. ‘Of course, it was a real theatre then, where the Nat West stands today.'

‘Yes.' In telling Peter Maxwell all this, she was probably talking to the wrong person. ‘She was Ophelia to Irving's Hamlet. They were on a tour of the south coast. Nice to think dear old Leighford was at the cutting edge of culture in those days.'

‘It still is, Mr Maxwell.' Matilda Goodacre seemed to grow three or four inches whenever she climbed on her high horse. ‘You know Anthony Minghella saw my Eleanor of Aquitaine last year?'

‘Really?' Maxwell raised an impressed eyebrow. ‘That must have been a privilege for him. For you both.'

‘Tell me,' she swept imperiously across her lounge. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me – I take it that it was not about the theatre.'

‘Just about the Arquebus Theatre,' he said, accepting her offer of a chair. Matilda's home was rambling, a little down-at-heel perhaps, along Mock-Tudor Row as Maxwell called it, just south of the pitch and putt and within a golf-ball thwack of the boating lake.

She fixed him with the look of Eleanor, of Blanche du Bois, of St Joan. ‘You have something of a reputation as a sleuth, Mr Maxwell,' she said.

‘I dabble.' He was suitably humble, buried in opulent chintz as he was.

‘How does that work, exactly?' she asked.

He shrugged. ‘It just does,' he told her. ‘I ask questions. And like the old, not very savoury joke, I get some rebuffs. I also get some answers.'

‘But how do the police react to all this?'

‘Badly,' he confessed. ‘Oh, it's fine in fiction, isn't it? Dotty old Jane Marple is related to the copper in charge of the case. Impossibly irritating Hercule Poirot is a buddy of Chief Inspector Japp. Poor old Gregson/Jones/Lestrade, whichever tec Conan Doyle was using, go cap in hand to see the Monstrous Ego of Baker Street. But in practice…well, I think our boys in blue are wonderful – and most of them would like to give me a good smacking.'

‘And you believe my Gordon's death was not an accident.'

‘Martita Winchcombe didn't think so,' he told her.

Matilda sat upright, blinking behind her chained spectacles. ‘Martita Winchcombe talked to you about this?'

‘Briefly,' Maxwell nodded. ‘Before the tide of modern living tore us apart.'

‘What did she mean?' Matilda asked.

‘Murder, Mrs Goodacre,' he said.

She whipped off her glasses, letting them dangle, and turned dramatically to the window. ‘Do you know how that makes me feel?' she said.

‘I can't imagine,' he said. ‘I'd be furious.'

‘Furious?' She turned to face him.

‘If my nearest and dearest died in suspicious circumstances, I'd move heaven and earth to find the person responsible.'

‘And I suppose
you
are heaven and earth?' she asked, straight-faced.

‘Mrs Goodacre.' He rose and stood beside her. ‘I've just told you – I don't know how I get involved in these things, but I do. Three people linked to the Arquebus have died suspiciously in as many weeks.'

‘The coroner's verdict was that Gordon's death was misadventure – an accident.'

‘Coroners have been wrong before,' Maxwell told her. ‘Their job is to speculate on evidence placed before them. If the evidence isn't there…'

‘Then the police must investigate.'

It was Maxwell's turn to spin away. He could match Matilda Goodacre move for move and he crossed to the window. The lawns fell away to a
neat hedge and beyond that the chiselled gardens of the West Ground, laid out in the Hungry Thirties to provide work for the unemployed, hope for the hopeless. Beyond that was the sea, endless and with no horizon. ‘Do you know Henry Hall?'

‘The Chief Inspector? Yes, I've met him.'

‘So have I. He's a good copper. By the book. Honest, bright, efficient. But he doesn't have a nose for these things. He'll go by the coroner's verdict. There'll be stones left unturned.'

‘Whereas those stones will be turned by you?'

‘I know where to find them,' Maxwell said.

‘I don't understand.'

‘How long had you and your husband been married, Mrs Goodacre?'

Time for another theatrical move, regal, imperious, St Joan condemned at Rouen, Eleanor leaving Chinon for the last time. Years of playing deranged French women had given Matilda Goodacre a legendary quality, an aura of the untouchable. ‘Thirty-three years,' she told him. She picked up a photograph of the dead man, the only one in the room that wasn't of her. ‘I shall miss him.'

‘That's a thirty-three-year advantage you have over me, Mrs Goodacre. I never knew your husband. An awful lot of stones gather over thirty-three years.'

She looked at Gordon again, smiling at her from the silver confines of the frame. Then she looked at
Peter Maxwell. ‘I understand from the children working at the Arquebus that they call you Mad Max. Is that right?'

‘Among other things,' he smiled. ‘In the Seventies, I was the Blue Max, courtesy of George Peppard in the film of the same name; in the Eighties Max Headroom. Mercifully, dear old Mel Gibson came to my rescue, roaring through some ghastly Australian Future Neverland, or I might be called Pepsi by now.'

‘All right,' she smiled. ‘Mad Max. What do you need to know?'

‘Everything,' he said. ‘Everything you can tell me about the man who was Gordon Goodacre.'

‘Gordon Goodacre.' Graham Larter kicked his swivel chair across the flotex to reach a filing cabinet. ‘Yes. Yes. Tragic.'

Peter Maxwell had skived off his last two lessons at the great centre of excellence that was Leighford High. He had no lessons and the looming nearness of the Oxbridge UCAS entry deadline could loom for a day or two yet. Thingee One, the switchboard operator newly promoted to doing the day's cover, had tried to pass him one of the ominous green sheets that meant that Maxwell had to babysit a Chemistry lesson. He would normally have just raised an eyebrow and consigned the sheet to the bin, but Thingee was new in post and the job carried more opprobrium than that dished out to
traffic wardens and Conservative MEPs, so he had the courtesy to give her an explanation of why he couldn't do it. He could have told her he'd rather die than enter a science lab. He had a
degree
for God's sake, in History! He had allergies to the smell of Something or Other Phosphate and he'd come out in hives. His sciatica wouldn't stand the backless torture of the lab stools. And the vertigo! Dear God!

As it was, he just said, ‘Thingee, darling. Find somebody else, there's a good girl.' And he threw the sheet into the bin. Game, set and mismatch.

So here he was, still cycle-clipped from his hurtle across town that Wednesday afternoon, sitting in the MD's office at Ampleforth Components. The MD looked about six, longing for the day when his acne would leave him and he could have his first shave. But he had a plastic name on his desk and an air of being in control. For the moment, Maxwell would go with that.

‘What exactly is your interest, Mr Maxwell?' he asked, lifting out a manila folder with a dead man's name on it.

‘I am here on behalf of Mrs Goodacre,' Maxwell told him.

‘Ah, yes.' Larter was the soul of concern. ‘How is she? I wasn't able to attend the funeral, I'm afraid.'

‘She's suspicious,' Maxwell told him.

‘Sorry?'

‘Not happy with the coroner's verdict. Asked me to step in.' Technically, this was Maxwell's script, not Matilda's, but would a six-year-old Managing Director of a company that made components be aware of that?

‘So you're a private detective?'

‘Such a dramatic term, don't you think?' Maxwell smiled. ‘Smacks of Philip Marlow, Sam Spade, guys in trench coats with broads and attitudes.' He'd lapsed into his best Bogart.

Larter looked oddly at him. Yep, he was six. Nope, he wasn't aware that Maxwell was running the show. ‘This,' he held up the file, ‘is, of course, confidential.'

‘Of course,' Maxwell nodded. ‘Do you know Henry Hall?'

‘Who?'

‘Local DCI based at Leighford nick. He's about to re-open inquiries.'

‘Is he?' Larter asked. ‘Into what?'

‘The murder of Gordon Goodacre.'

‘Murder?' Larter blinked.

‘Oh, damn,' Maxwell clicked his tongue. ‘There I go again. Sorry. Death. Death of Gordon Goodacre.'

‘How do you know?' The six-year-old suddenly looked four in the grey afternoon light.

Maxwell drew back, crossing one cycle-clipped leg over the other. ‘How do I know the police are about to launch a new inquiry, Mr Larter?' he said.
‘That's an irrelevance, really, isn't it? What do you actually make here at Ampleforth Components?'

‘Components,' the MD told him, increasingly nonplussed by this interview.

‘And you have a fine reputation in the area.'

‘Well, we like to think…'

Maxwell held up his hand. ‘Now, now, Mr Larter. This is no time for false modesty. The name of Ampleforth Components is known the length of the south coast. Didn't I hear dear old Declan Whatsisface give you a plug on
Breakfast
last week?'

‘Did you?' Larter was astounded. ‘I didn't know…' His PR people were letting him down
big-time
.

Maxwell waved him aside. ‘And then this nasty business with Gordon. Well, it's a shame.' And he stood up. ‘Give my regards to Henry,' and he flipped his shapeless tweed cap onto his head and turned for the door. ‘When he arrives.'

‘Wait,' Larter shouted, on his feet too. ‘Wait.' Calmer now, trying to smile. ‘Isn't there some way out of this? I mean, can't we keep the lid on things?'

Maxwell sighed, frowning, thinking it over. ‘I don't really see how,' he said. ‘I mean, they'll want access to all your records. Personnel, audit, tax, sales. They're quite clinical, those forensic accountants. Still, it's in a good cause.'

‘No, no.' Larter was fumbling at the door as Maxwell opened it. ‘Look, er…what do you need?'

‘Me?' Maxwell asked, bewildered. ‘I'm sorry, Mr Larter, I got the distinct impression that you couldn't help me.'

‘No, no.' The MD's smile was as broad as it was brittle. He suddenly looked like Tony Blair on Election Night, a rabbit in the headlights of a fading majority. ‘All I meant was, this dossier on Gordon…well, it's confidential to the firm. Delicate. I can't just give it out to… Can you divert the police? I mean, is there a way…? Perhaps a word from you?'

Graham Larter knew when he was beaten. He hadn't been MD long and had only got the job because it was his daddy's firm anyway. And Daddy would be furious if he thought great hairy coppers with their size elevens were trampling all over his creation. And against Maxwell? Well, AVCE Business meets History Honours, 1st Class, Cantab. Done and done. ‘What do you need?' he asked.

‘That folder.' Maxwell pointed to it lying on Larter's desk. ‘For five minutes.'

‘All right,' Deena Harrison shouted through the darkened auditorium. ‘Take five, everybody.'

It wasn't going badly tonight. Alan Eldridge had almost got Seymour's words right and Andy Grant, the dangerous dentist, was warming to the essential psychopathy of his part. The Tendrils crashed into varying positions of gratitude around the
auditorium. Their ra-ra skirts, black lacquer wigs and Fifties platform shoes were all in place by now and were combining to kill them.

‘Miss Harrison.' Ashley Wilkes padded down the auditorium steps to where the director was lighting up. ‘You
are
aware of the No Smoking nature of the theatrical tradition?'

Deena flicked off the lighter. ‘God,' she sighed. ‘Mr Wilkes, I am so sorry. It's been a long haul.'

He smiled. ‘OK.'

‘Oh, Ashley.' She followed him into the darkness.

‘You don't mind if I call you Ashley?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘Could I have a word?' And some of the cast couldn't help but notice that she had a gentle hand on his shoulder.

Would you Adam and Eve it? White Surrey had a puncture.
And
it was pissing down with rain. But Peter Maxwell had once been a Boy Scout, with an armful of badges for proficiency in everything from Woodcraft to tying a knot in his granny. So such reversals held no terrors for him. Had he got a puncture kit? No, of course not. He just belted Surrey a few times
à la
John Cleese in
Fawlty Towers
and pushed the battered old thing along the edge of the Dam, squeaking and rattling as they went, and out towards the Flyover. He would have been late anyway, because all evening, over a particularly challenging baguette of gargantuan
proportions, he and Jacquie had been wrestling with the quickly photocopied contents of the late Gordon Goodacre's dossier. The boy MD had winced as he'd watched him do it, smarming around his Girl Friday, but the whole thing was – literally – out of his hands now.

Gordon himself had been Personnel Manager at Ampleforth Components for nearly sixteen years. In that time, he'd hired and fired his share of people, from shop floor machine operators to boardroom execs. Maxwell focused on the fired, that list of the damned whose faces hadn't fitted, whose time-keeping was suspect, whose hands were in the till. Any one of them could have hated Gordon Goodacre. Peter Maxwell had never known the pain, the despair, the hopelessness of redundancy, the curt order to clear your desk, the ignominy of being escorted off the premises. But in the real world beyond the halcyon existence that was teaching, such things happened. And sometimes, people didn't get mad; they got even.