Maxwell's Mask (20 page)

Collinson took off his glasses and threw them down on the desk. Then he remembered the old adage about not hitting a man with glasses and quickly put them back on. ‘If I remember rightly,' he said quickly, ‘she told me with much sobbing
and sniffing, you understand, that Ashley had invited her out for a drink. He insisted on taking her home and on the way, pulled into a lay-by where he assaulted and raped her.'

‘That's it?'

‘Isn't that enough?' Collinson asked.

‘I mean, is that all she said or are you being coy because we don't know each other very well?'

‘You have my word, Max,' Collinson insisted. ‘That's all she said. No times. No places. Not even the make of car, although I happen to know that Ashley drives a Mondeo. She swore me to secrecy, however.'

‘She did?'

‘Yes. As I've said, I've no experience of this sort of thing, but I have read the more salacious Sundays in my time. It makes women feel dirty, doesn't it? A sexual assault, I mean. Used? It's understandable.'

‘Why did she talk to you?' he asked.

‘Hmm?'

‘Deena. Why did she unburden herself to you, a virtual stranger?'

Collinson sighed, still coming to terms with the bizarreness of the situation he had been in and the very different one he was in now. ‘I really have no idea,' he said. ‘Wait a minute.' An odd smile crept over his face. ‘That's what this is all about, isn't it? You're pissed off because she didn't come to you?'

‘No,' Maxwell shook his head. ‘She might have come to me when I was her Year Head, maybe even
when I was her History teacher. But not now. That's not how it works. You want your teachers to remember you at your best, winning cups and scoring goals. You don't want them to know you when you're down.'

‘Parents, then?' Collinson suggested. ‘Why didn't she turn to them?'

‘Because they're dead,' Maxwell told him. ‘Killed in a car crash a couple of years ago.'

‘Oh, dear. Well, then, I'm simply at a loss, Max. Do you think…do you think she's entirely well? Emotionally, I mean?'

Maxwell stood up, sliding back the accountant's leather chair and striding for the door. ‘Are any of us?' he asked.

In the outer office, Collinson's loyal secretary stood with a cast iron doorstop in her hand. Loyalty and a sense of survival had driven her to it. ‘You can put that down, Doris,' Maxwell said. ‘I've decided to let your lord and master live – for now. And whatever you're paying this woman, Patrick, it isn't enough. You two have a nice day, y'hear.' And the psychopath with the Cambridge scarf and the deep Alabama drawl had gone.

‘Max.'

Silence.

‘Max.'

He heard his name whispered, as though far away. In the super eight reels of his dreaming, he
was chasing the wind across the heather. An altogether younger Maxwell, not yet Mad, not yet cranky. No cycle clips in those days, no black and white cat ignoring his every word. No sadness. No sorrows. Just sun in meadows of lavender and the drone of bees. Bright eyes and laughter.

‘Max.'

‘Hmm? What time is it?'

‘Um…time we talked.'

Maxwell jolted himself awake. The liquid green digits of the bedside clock answered his question more accurately. It was three thirty-eight. The witching hour when his bladder usually drove his dreams away anyway and he'd find himself padding along the passage in search of the little teacher's room. Jacquie was sitting upright, cradling her raised knees with her encircling arms, crying softly to herself.

‘Darling.' He struggled up alongside her, wrapping her in his gentle grip. ‘What is it, sweetheart? Bad dreams?' and he recited the mantra he used to recite to his little girl long, long ago. ‘Dreams, dreams, go away, come again another day.'

‘It's no good, Max,' she sniffed. ‘I've tried to keep it all to myself, but I just can't.'

‘Darling?' Maxwell was fully awake now, frowning and turning her gently to face him. ‘Darling, what's the matter? Is it the baby? Anything wrong?'

‘No, you soppy old thing.' She smiled through her tears. ‘The baby's fine. I'm fine. I'm…just a little scared, that's all.'

‘Now, now.' He smoothed her hair, pale in the dim light of the master bedroom at 38 Columbine. ‘I know a baby's a pretty scary thing. The responsibility and so on. But I've been
in loco parentis
now for nearly four hundred years. We'll manage, really we will. We'll have the little bugger up chimneys earning his keep before you can say Climbing Boys Act.'

‘No, Max,' she sniffed and he let her wipe her nose on his pyjama sleeve. Greater love hath no man… ‘There's something else. Something I should have told you a week ago.'

He waited, unsure whether to be flippant or grave. He opted for the latter, saying nothing, and that rattled her even more. After what seemed an eternity, she broke the silence. ‘I've gone back to work,' she told him. ‘Only on a part-time basis.'

‘Back to work?' he repeated. ‘Don't tell me you're bored already.'

‘Henry asked me.'

‘Henry asked you?' Maxwell frowned. ‘Is he really that short-staffed?'

‘It's nothing to do with him,' she sniffed, feeling her lip tremble again. ‘I did it for Jane.'

‘For Jane.' There was already a chill realisation in Maxwell's voice, there in the darkness.

‘She can't handle the whole psychic thing,' Jacquie said. ‘You have to be strong.'

‘And you are,' he said. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact.

‘I thought I was,' she said, fighting the tears still. ‘But now…I'm not so sure.'

‘Tell me,' he said, holding up her face by the chin and looking into her tear-filled eyes. ‘Tell Uncle Max all about it.'

‘We went to Dan Bartlett's house,' she told him. ‘The nasty little bungalow on Haslemere Road. Magda was…confused.'

‘Confused?'

‘Look, I didn't want to believe it, Max; any of it. I told myself, I told Henry, I'd be detached. Cool. It wasn't quite like that.'

‘What happened?'

‘She…' Jacquie was trying hard to focus, to rationalise the whirlwind in her head. ‘Magda registers pain. She feels heat. Cold. Fear. Joy. She recounts – don't ask me how; I've no idea – actual conversations with the dead.'

‘Like a séance?'

‘No, no, I don't mean that. It's as if she…like Jane said, she
becomes
the dead. Her…oh, Jesus.' Jacquie shuddered at the memory of it, her scalp crawling in the darkness of the bedroom; even here where she used to feel so safe. ‘Her voice changes. Hardens. Becomes male. Her face…I just can't describe it.'

‘What did you hear?' Maxwell asked.

‘A male voice. I assumed it was Dan Bartlett's.'

‘But it wasn't?'

She looked deep into his eyes. ‘Brace yourself, Max,' she said. ‘I was wired.'

‘You were?'

She nodded. ‘Henry insisted on it. To give us some sort of record of what Magda's MO actually is. All the poor bastard's got is some ludicrous edict from on high. The Chief Bloody Constable belongs in a straitjacket. He left it to Henry to work out the how of everything. Jane's garbled accounts were of no help, really. I've read them; you've heard them, from Jane herself. Wait till he reads mine.'

‘And?'

‘And the tape didn't work properly.'

‘Doesn't surprise me,' Maxwell said. ‘Electronics are about as useful as a chocolate teapot.'

‘No,' she sniffed. ‘No, you don't understand. The machinery worked. It's just that, somehow it picked up words I didn't hear spoken. And in a voice I didn't know.'

‘But you don't know Dan Bartlett's voice,' Maxwell reminded her.

‘No. Agreed. But what was recorded on the tape was not the voice I had heard coming from Magda minutes before. One was Dan Bartlett. The other wasn't. Another place. Another time. Christ, Max,' she let out a long sigh. ‘I don't want to do that again.'

‘You won't have to,' he said firmly. ‘Henry Hall, Jane Blaisedell. They can sort out their own problems. Jacquie,' he held her face firmly between his hands. ‘It's over, Jacquie. You're on maternity leave now, remember? You are never, ever to work with this Lupescu woman again. Are we on the same page on this? The same line?'

She looked at him, tears breaking over her eyelashes and tumbling down her cheeks. ‘Yes, Max,' she blurted. ‘The same line. Exactly the same line.' And she cried into his shoulder like she hadn't cried since she was a little girl. 

Henry Hall and Magda Lupescu looked at each other across his desk in the Tottingleigh Incident Room – the bland leading the bland. It would be difficult to find two people less capable of showing their emotions. And that would be for the same reason – that neither of them dared; they had both seen too much.

The team watched her as she walked across the uneven floorboards of the old school. No one quite knew who she was, walking like a ghost alongside the bulky form of Sergeant Dave Walters; no one except Jane Blaisedell, who shrank down in her chair, hoping the computer screen would hide her. It didn't. The most fleeting of smiles passed over the pale, gaunt face of the visitor, but Magda didn't acknowledge her. Then she was gone through Hall's glass-panelled door and the WPC watched as he got up and they shook hands.

‘Don't let her touch you,' Jane found herself thinking. ‘She can see into your soul.'

‘Well,' Hall broke the ice. The woman had already refused coffee or tea and sat bolt upright in her chair. ‘You've visited all three of our murder sites. I have the reports of DC Blaisedell and DS Carpenter here in front of me.' The folders were manila and already dauntingly thick.

‘They do not help,' Magda said, reaching into her handbag. ‘Is this place no smoking?'

‘This office, yes,' Hall said, ‘but I think in your case we can make an exception.'

‘Why?' she snapped. ‘Because I am a woman or because I have the power?'

‘Because you are a civilian,' Hall told her, ‘and a guest.' He ferreted in the desk drawer and slid a glass ashtray across to her, one somebody had pinched from a Met convention a few years back. She lit up, her hollow cheeks flaming for a moment in the match light. Her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared and she crossed one slim leg over the other.

‘You are confused by these reports.' It was a statement, not a question.

‘Yes, frankly,' Hall said. ‘What I have here is my officers' perceptions of what happened. Now I'd like your version.'

‘You English have a phrase that I have learned,' she smiled. ‘It is the organ grinder and his monkey, no?'

‘Something like that,' Hall nodded. If Magda Lupescu was waiting for a smile in return, she
would have to learn another English phrase. It had to do with Hell and freezing over. ‘Tell me about Gordon Goodacre,' he said. ‘At the theatre.'

Magda frowned, closing her eyes and blowing smoke down her nose like some contemplative dragon. ‘He was working late. Painting.' This much Hall knew already. ‘He did not like the place.' Her head was on one side now, her eyes still closed, as though she was listening. ‘He felt its presence.'

‘Presence?' Hall repeated.

Magda's eyes flashed open. ‘What you would call ghosts,' she said, looking into the strongly reflective lenses of the Chief Inspector.

If Hall had been a laughing man, now would have been the time. ‘Miss Lupescu,' he said. ‘I have been a policeman now for more years than I care to remember. And I have gained experience from colleagues with more experience still. I have never, in all that time, heard of a murder committed by a ghost.'

Magda looked at him, then stubbed out her cigarette. ‘And that is why you will never know what happened to Gordon Goodacre,' she said. ‘I can only tell you what I felt.'

‘All right.' She still had his attention.

‘He heard voices,' she told Hall. ‘I cannot say what. I only know what I heard.'

‘Which was?'

‘A man hanged.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘In your country, judicial hangings,' she explained. ‘You take a man to the scaffold, no? You place his feet on a trap door. The hangman binds his ankles, his wrists. He places a…what you call…hood over his head and the noose around his neck. The hangman pulls a lever. Smack!' She brought the flat of her hand down sharply on Hall's desk so that the ashtray jumped. ‘The bolts on the underside of the trap door slide, the trap opens and a man twists in eternity. That's what I heard. Not once, but several times. The snarl of the iron bolts, the thud of the trap, the breath as it leaves the body, the creak of the rope taut and swaying with its weight. Is that what Gordon Goodacre heard just before he died? I do not know.'

‘We haven't hanged anyone in this country for forty years, Miss Lupescu,' he told her.

‘That is not my concern,' she said.

‘So… What are you saying? That someone was hanged at the Arquebus?'

She uncrossed her legs and smoothed down her skirt. ‘It has not always been a theatre,' she said.

‘No,' he confirmed. ‘It was originally a warehouse, I believe. Storing…I don't know… grain, cotton, whatever.'

‘There would have been…what is it you call them? Er…jousts?'

Hall blinked. ‘Joists?' he suggested.

‘Joists,' she clicked her fingers. ‘They are used to pull up the goods from the boats, yes?'

‘I believe so,' Hall nodded. Just for a moment, too fleeting to register really, he wished that Peter Maxwell was at his elbow, with his infuriating historian's grasp of the nuts and bolts of these things.

‘Men can be hanged from those. Like the children's game at school. Hangman, yes?'

‘Yes,' Hall said, grim-faced.

‘He was on the stage. Gordon Goodacre,' Magda went on. ‘He heard a sound – the bolts, the trap, the sigh? I do not know. It was coming from the right.' Her eyes were closed again and she was frowning, shaking her head. ‘I do not like that place, it is dark. Cold. Gordon…he did not like it either.' She opened her eyes suddenly. ‘But he's an Englishman.' She smiled wistfully. ‘Like you. Stolid, hmm? No imagination. His instincts told him he was not alone. He was right.'

‘There were…presences?' Hall asked.

‘Of course,' Magda said. ‘But a living person too.'

‘In the Arquebus?' Hall checked. ‘At the time of his death?'

‘I do not know when he died,' she shrugged. ‘But when the ladder fell, he was not alone.'

‘Who?' Hall sounded a little over-eager perhaps, and consciously relaxed, drawing himself back. ‘Who was it?'

‘Evil,' Magda told him flatly. ‘Hurt. Broken. I felt it again at Daniel Bartlett's bungalow.'

‘The same presence?'

‘In my world, Chief Inspector,' the Psychic
explained, ‘the distinction between the living and the dead is not so clear. We are not talking about life in terms of a beating heart or inhaling and exhaling lungs. We are talking about what survives all that. What stays.'

‘Miss Lupescu…'

‘I know.' She held up her hand. ‘You cannot debate the other world with me because you do not have the time or the interest.' She leaned towards him. ‘But it is, in fact, because you are frightened by it. They are all around us, you know. All the time. As we speak.'

‘Really?' Henry Hall leaned back in his chair.

‘That corner,' she pointed to his left, beyond a green-fronted filing cabinet, ‘there is much sadness there. I see a little boy. He's there now. What is he…five? Six perhaps? He is crying. He has a pointed cap on his head. Is this some sort of ritual? He has been punished. And not for the first time. He is as afraid as you are.'

The Chief Inspector wasn't going to give the Psychic the pleasure of looking to his left. He knew what he'd see – a green-fronted filing cabinet. Jane Blaisedell, even Jacquie Carpenter, might have fallen for this woman's party tricks; but not him. He was made of sterner stuff.

Magda began to look around her. ‘This is a school,' she chuckled, with a sudden happy realisation. ‘They are still here, the children. The boy in the corner, he hated this place, but he cannot
leave. The others loved it. They do not want to leave. They are confused…' she closed her eyes and cocked her head again. ‘They want to know why you are here. This is their school. They do not know what you are doing.'

Hall let out a sigh. ‘That makes several of us,' he said. Though Magda Lupescu didn't realise it, it was the nearest thing to a joke she was likely to get from Henry Hall.

‘Whatever was at the theatre watching Gordon Goodacre was not like these children. Except the one in the corner. It was quite like him. And that one was alive.'

‘Thank you, Miss Lupescu.' Hall was on his feet, hand extended.

‘We have not yet spoken about Martita Winchcombe or Daniel Bartlett,' she reminded him.

‘Another time, perhaps,' he said. ‘Can you reschedule for this time tomorrow?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘But my findings will not be any more comfortable to you then. You are disturbed.'

‘I am?' Hall cleared his throat, on the spot, on the back foot. It was not a position he enjoyed.

She got up slowly and placed her cold, bony hand briefly in his. ‘You know you are,' she said.

And Henry Hall waited until she'd left the room before he glanced, briefly, to his left. There, in the shadow, just below the window, stood a
green-fronted
filing cabinet.

‘A chap can get frostbite,' Maxwell called across the Tottingleigh car park. For the last hour, he'd wandered about beyond the Victorian wall of the old school as Leighford rush hour had disgorged its Lowrie people along the Flyover, hurrying east and west and north into the chill of the October evening. He'd stamped his feet, wrapped his Jesus scarf around his nose and stuffed his hands into his pockets. A degree or two colder and his breath would be snaking out and winter would be here.

‘Max.' Jane Blaisedell shouted back. ‘You've gone blue. Can I give you a lift?'

‘At least.' He tried to smile, but was afraid his cheeks would crack. ‘But what I'm really after is a cup of your legendary cocoa.'

She laughed and clicked open her four-by-four. He clambered in beside her, fumbling for the belt.

‘What's going on, Max?' she asked, her hand nowhere near the ignition.

‘
Que
?' It was a masterly Manuel, the scurrying little Spaniard of
Fawlty Towers
.

Jane looked ostentatiously round. ‘No Jacquie,' she said. She glanced down into the well where his feet used to be attached to his legs before the cold had got to him. ‘No Surrey. Otherwise you'd be wearing cycle clips. And if you had Jacquie, you wouldn't need Surrey. And vice versa.'

‘Anybody would think you were a woman policeman.' He clicked his tongue. ‘I'm impressed.'

‘Which means,' she checked her watch,' you
left Leighford High nearly two hours ago…'

‘One,' he corrected her. ‘Pastoral meeting. I can show you the agenda if you like. It's not the perfect alibi, though; I was asleep through most of it, even though I was in the chair.'

‘…and you probably caught the 109 from Eagle Street.'

‘You've got me.' He held up both hands. ‘I used my OAP bus pass for the hell of it.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I can.'

‘Don't bullshit me, Max,' she said flatly. ‘I've had a bitch of a day and I'm not in the mood for your eccentricities. What do you want?'

‘I want to know about Uncle Tony,' he said.

Jane turned away from him sharply. ‘Get out,' she growled.

‘Jane…'

‘Fucking get out!' she shrieked.

He leaned across to her. The tough little Cockney from south of the river was losing the hard-nosed shell she built and rebuilt around herself with every reversal in her life. ‘Jacquie's putting her sanity on the line for you,' he said.

‘What?' The girl was blinking, staring into the face of this old mad man.

He leaned back, giving her space. ‘You didn't know.'

‘I still don't. For fuck's sake, Max, what are you talking about?'

‘Henry's taken you off the Lupescu thing, hasn't he? You couldn't handle it.'

She turned to him, her face white with rage. ‘No,' she snarled. ‘I couldn't handle it. I wake up shitting myself every bloody night. You know that. I'm not proud of the fact. I cried all over both of you. Isn't that enough? How much more humiliation do you want?'

‘No,' he told her flatly. ‘No, it isn't enough. Henry asked Jacquie to take your place.'

He heard the girl's intake of breath. ‘Jesus!' she whispered. ‘Oh, that's terrible.'

‘Potentially, yes,' he nodded. ‘Jane, are you on tablets? Getting counselling?'

‘Both,' she said. Suddenly, she was a very little girl, crouched behind her steering wheel, lost, alone.

One by one, her colleagues were scattering to their cars, giving the pair odd glances. She noticed and tried to smile.

‘Bastards!' she hissed through the tears. ‘They're loving this.'

‘I've got colleagues like that,' he nodded, taking in their leering faces. ‘Can you drive this thing? Or did we give you people the vote all those years ago for nothing?'

She sniffed defiantly and kicked the ignition into life, jamming the stick into gear and roaring out of the gateway in a flurry of gravel.

‘Stuff 'em,' said Maxwell, waving at Gavin
Henslow with a winning smile. ‘Let 'em think we're having a torrid affair.'

She looked at him, scowling through tear-filled eyes. ‘I'm having counselling, Max,' she said. ‘But I'm not that far gone.'

‘Atta girl!' And he nudged her knee with his fist, in the most fatherly way he could.

‘She knew about Uncle Tony.'

‘What?' Jacquie hadn't seen Maxwell all day. He'd been off at the crack of eight o'six, pedalling like a banshee – and you know how they can cycle – along Columbine to fight the good, underpaid, outnumbered fight. Then he'd chaired his wretched pastoral meeting, hearing himself drone on about academic mentoring and target setting and all the other re-visited ideas that Educationists kept recycling every decade or so. He'd stopped off for a bite at that centre of world-renowned cuisine, the KFC in Mortimer Street, asking the terminal acne case behind the counter just what was a Zinger exactly; and on to the Arquebus, where Deena Harrison was notable by her absence and they'd run through a couple of scenes and gone home. It was late now, the October night enfolding sleeping Leighford in its arms, the sea a wild, grey thing searching hungrily for its prey in the darkness.