Maxwell's Mask (26 page)

Maxwell had been here before. He habitually had to remind Year Seven how to breathe. And the Advanced Classes, by the end of the summer term, included chewing gum too. As for the rest, very clever auto-suggestion. Tell someone they'll feel cold, see things, hear them and smell them and some of them will. Fiona Elliot, for a start. It was the cleverest media April Fool's joke he could remember – a cooking programme from the 
Seventies advertising Smell-o-Vision and inviting television viewers in their own homes to get down on those knees and smell the lowest fifty of the four hundred and five lines on the screen. Hmm, smell those onions!

‘Let us close our eyes,' Rowena said.

Now, this was a challenge. It was one of the great games of childhood. Prayers of a sultry afternoon in infant school. ‘Hands together and eyes closed,' the mantra dear to the heart of every teacher – another day done. And Peter Maxwell, long before he was Mad, used to keep one eye open, just in case… And in case of what, he never knew. So, here he sat, in a hushed and darkened theatre where at least one man had died, holding hands with perfect strangers and with one eye open. To his right, Magda Lupescu's eyes were shut; so were Fiona Elliot's and Matilda Goodacre's. Wilkes' eyelids were fluttering a little, as Maxwell expected. Rowena's were closed and he couldn't see Patrick Collinson. As for Henry Hall, behind those damned glasses, who knew?

A low, keening sound was coming from Rowena Sanders to Maxwell's left. He kept one eye trained on her, watching for all the telltale signs of the Victorian fakers: the Gladstone bag, the fake wax hands, the yards of luminescent cheesecloth. All of it was mysteriously absent. Rowena began to sway, her hair swirling as if in slow motion around her face. Her eyes were still closed. There was a shuddering, a rattling of the table under their 
hands, as if someone was drilling deep under the stage.

‘Don't be alarmed,' Magda Lupescu's unmistakable voice was saying. ‘Stay where you are.'

‘Who's there?' Rowena's head was cocked on one side, listening intently, a frown on her pale, flat face.

‘Is it Aunt Martita?' Maxwell saw Fiona Elliot leaning forward in her chair.

‘Gordon,' Matilda Goodacre insisted. ‘If it's anybody, it'll be my Gordon.'

There was a rattling of the door far across the auditorium, and instinctively, everyone turned. Somebody screamed, although to his dying day, Maxwell never knew who. And they looked up at the low rake of the empty seats and the solitary figure approaching the stage.

‘Hello?' a voice called. ‘Is anybody there?'

It was Dan Bartlett, come to visit.

‘Jesus!' Ashley Wilkes was the first to react to the shattering sound of glass and the roar of flame. What sounded like a bomb had gone off in the theatre's foyer, and for a moment Dan Bartlett stood silhouetted by fire, that indefinable colour curling and billowing down the aisle towards the stage and bouncing in burning debris onto the seats on either side.

‘Fire!' Wilkes bellowed, which had to be one of the most obvious statements any of them had ever heard. But he was the Theatre Manager. Health and Safety was his stock-in-trade and instinct took over. ‘This way!' he commanded as the sitters, already standers, were now running towards the wings. All, that is, except Peter Maxwell, whose stare was riveted on the lighting and sound box high above.

‘Maxwell!' Wilkes yelled at him. ‘This way. The side door. Come on.'

‘Get the others out,' Maxwell shouted back. ‘There's someone up there.' And he was gone,
hurtling up the other aisle where the fire had not yet caught hold, making for the stairs that led to the upper floors.

‘Police business now,' Henry Hall said to Wilkes. ‘Do as he says and get the others to safety. You've got a mobile?'

Wilkes nodded. He was already punching buttons as the theatre's wailing alarm system kicked in and sprinklers showered the whole place. He turned back to shepherd the others out of the side door, kicking open the bar with his foot while Patrick Collinson steadied the fainting Carole Bartlett. Henry Hall had disappeared into the smoke.

The DCI reached the stairs in the foyer. Wilkes had locked the front doors, whose giant glass panes flashed fire with reflected flames. Hall had seen this before and as soon as he heard the sound he knew what it was. Officially an incendiary device. To his grandparents it was a Molotov cocktail. A petrol bomb. And whoever had thrown it had tossed it into the other entrance to the auditorium, beyond the ticket office, itself now alight. The sprinklers were beginning to cope with the flames at ground level, but fire had leapt upwards with its terrifying speed, engulfing the joists overhead and spreading outward.

Thick, choking black smoke was filling the auditorium now and Hall coughed and spluttered his way along the landing. He knew the auditorium and stage had to be below him, to his right, but he couldn't see it for the smoke and the incessant 
downpour of water. Wilkes would have got the others out by now and the fire engines would be on their way. But where the hell was Maxwell and what had possessed him to go this way? Into the jaws of death. Into the mouth of Hell.

Glass shattered to Hall's left as the front of Ashley Wilkes' sound and lighting box blew out. It felt like a thousand needles and the DCI was flung sideways, cracking his ribs against the balustrade. Blinded and bleeding, in agonising pain whenever he breathed, Hall managed to crawl forward, inch by painful inch, keeping the flames and smoke above him, looking for the other stairs.

But the other stairs had gone and he heard the appalling crack of timbers as the floor beneath him began to give way. A column of flame shot towards him, jerking him backwards as it defied the water jets in its unstoppable thirst for oxygen and the night sky.

Then Hall felt himself grabbed by the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder and he was being lifted bodily, slung like a trophy over somebody's shoulder. And that somebody was carrying him back the way he had come, crunching on broken glass, batting aside burning debris. And the last thing Henry Hall remembered, head down, bouncing along with every cough that jolted and seared his lungs, was the thought, ‘Aren't our firemen wonderful?' 

‘We know all about it, Deena,' Peter Maxwell said, easing himself down on the sloping ground under the concrete girders of the Flyover. The scene below them was chaos. The Arquebus' fire was out now, but smoke still rose from windows where the glass had gone and the fire engines stood at crazy angles to each other, along with ambulances and police cars, the whole place a mad fairyland of flashing lights and water and people trying desperately to be British and to stay calm.

Maxwell's face was a mask of blood, where the flying glass had ripped him moments before he'd dragged Henry Hall to safety. Fancy him remembering how to do a fireman's lift after all these years. That's what being a Boy Scout does for you. When all this insanity was over, he made a mental note to ring Akela and tell him all about it. He'd have a word with Henry Hall too. The curmudgeonly bugger could do with losing a few pounds; he'd been unconscionably heavy on the turns of those stairs.

‘Are you all right?' the girl asked. The fire had burned her parka hood and her hair smelt singed.

‘I will be,' he nodded, sniffing in the damp, smoky October night air. ‘You?'

She looked at him, at her old Year Head and History teacher, unrecognisable under the blood. ‘No,' she said, suddenly cold. ‘I'm not all right. And I'm not sure I ever will be.' 

‘Tell me about Oxford,' he said, looking into her cold, dead eyes.

‘Oxford,' she tried to smile, ‘was so twelve months ago.'

‘No, Deena,' he shook his head sadly. ‘It was more than that. You haven't been to Oxford since halfway through your very first term. Where have you been since?'

Her face said it all and it all came flooding back like the worst nightmare, the one from which she couldn't wake up. Candles fluttered in front of Maxwell's face until she couldn't see him anymore and there was a sigh, half human, half not. There were shadows on the wall. A man's voice. Then a woman's. A sigh, slow, long-drawn-out. From nowhere a light flashed across her eyes, sharp, white, blinding. She wanted to scream but she couldn't and she was grateful for the sudden darkness.

‘They never turned the light off, you know,' she said softly.

‘Why, Deena?' Maxwell asked. He was gentleness itself. ‘Why didn't they turn the light off?'

‘I don't know,' she shrugged, the tears near. ‘They wanted to study me, I suppose. Watch me all the time.' Her eyes suddenly flashed up at him, briefly lit like the flames in the theatre that would roar and dance and leap in Maxwell's memory for ever. ‘And they talked about me. All the time, 
talking about me. Do you know what that's like?'

Maxwell shook his head.

‘Tell me,' he said.

‘How did you know,' she asked him, smiling now, ‘that I didn't stick it out at Oxford?'

Maxwell's gaze fell. ‘We don't need to do this, Deena,' he said.

‘Oh, but we do,' she laughed. ‘That philosophical debate – remember? I said we'd have it one day – that or a fuck.' She suddenly frowned. ‘And that wouldn't be right, would it?'

‘No,' Maxwell said. ‘That wouldn't be right.'

‘So tell me.' She reached out and tapped his arm, sitting as he was, cross-legged in front of her. ‘How did you know about Oxford?'

‘The red carnation,' he said.

‘What?'

‘Before we started work at the Arquebus, I said to you, “So you're a red carnation woman now”. And it was obvious you didn't have the first clue what I was talking about. Now, I went to the Other Place, Deena, as you know, but at Oxford there's a tradition that finalists at the end of their third year, especially very able people like you, wear red carnations in their buttonholes in the last exam. You didn't know about it because you never sat that final exam. Or any exams.'

‘You're right,' she nodded, like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. ‘When Mummy and Daddy died…' 

‘Mummy and Daddy didn't die, Deena,' he told her. ‘There was no fatal crash, no death visitant. That was all in your head, wasn't it?'

‘What are you talking about?' she blinked, bewildered now and afraid.

‘I went to see your old professor,' he said. ‘At Corpus. Paul Usherwood. He was a nice man, Deena, a very nice man. At the time you claimed he seduced you, he was sixty-seven years old, paralysed from the waist down. His secretary had never heard of you – that's because the woman had only been at the college for two years and you'd already gone by then, hadn't you?'

‘Yes,' she nodded, her dark eyes bubbling with tears. ‘When Alex – that was my fiancé – killed himself…'

‘He didn't kill himself, Deena.' Maxwell reached out to hold the girl's trembling hands. ‘He drowned, in a punting accident on the Isis. Before I left Oxford, I checked the back copies of the local paper, just to confirm what Professor Usherwood had told me. It was one of those silly, student things. We did them all the time on the Cam but perhaps the Isis is a less forgiving river. Alex couldn't swim, could he? And you,' he wrapped his arms around her narrow shoulders, ‘you couldn't live with the loss. You had a nervous breakdown. Your world fell apart. And that world had always been fragile, darling, hadn't it? We remember, don't we, you and I, the fire in the toilet Block at dear old 
Leighford High? Ollie Wendell on the Science block stairs? The water fight when you were in Year Twelve? Oh,' and he looked down at the aftermath of the blaze, still smouldering and scorched below the slope, ‘and, of course, the fireworks.' He put his blood-dried face close to hers, staring into those dark, frightened eyes. ‘The people talking about you,' he said. ‘A man's voice? A woman's?'

‘How…how do you know?'

He shook his head. ‘I know people,' he told her. ‘I know how the system works because I'm part of it. My guess would be the people in your nightmares were your mum and dad, distraught, desperate to help you in the only way they could. Doctors, educational psychologists, specialists. Between them all, they kept you on the straight and narrow, didn't they? But then, with Alex at Oxford…then it was the whitewashed rooms, the lights they never turned off. Broadmoor?'

She looked back at him. ‘Rampton,' she said. ‘But I hadn't
done
anything, Mr Maxwell. Not really.'

‘It was what you might have done, Deena,' he said, looking down at the theatre. ‘What you might be capable of.'

She dropped his hands, struggled out of his hold. ‘
They
,' she was on her feet, pointing at the Arquebus, ‘
they
had it coming. Just like Ollie Wendell. He called me a fucking bitch. Just like that. No reason for it. So I threw him down the 
stairs. And that lot – that simpering bitch Sally Spall, that freak Andy Grant, that no-hoper Alan Eldridge – all of them, whispering about me, sniggering. Carrying on behind my back. They even went to the Head of Sixth Form about it. Can you imagine? Mad Max? What's he got to do with any of this?'

Maxwell saw the two uniformed men scrambling up the grassy slope towards them. ‘What indeed?' he sighed. And that sigh, to Deena, was half human, half not.

‘Max, oh, my God, Max.' Jacquie didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Maxwell was sitting on the tailgate of a squad car, swathed in blankets. His face was black with blood and it looked as if he'd been crying. ‘Max, thank God.'

‘There, there, Woman Policeman,' and he kissed her, stroking her hair as she clung to him, sobbing her heart out.

‘What happened here?'

‘Deena.' He tried to smile. ‘Deena Harrison happened. I should have listened to Sylvia Matthews. She warned me about Deena from day one, but I wouldn't have it. Well, next time,' and he winced as a thousand pin pricks pierced his face again, ‘no more Mr Nice Guy. How's Henry?'

‘What?' She was fussing round him, using her handkerchief to dab away the blood, trying to see in the floodlit darkness how bad it all was. ‘Oh,
he's fine. The lads who fetched me said he was OK. Couple of broken ribs apparently. Lots of glass damage. Bit like you, I should imagine.' She was sniffing now, choking back the tears, glad to be busy, doing stuff. There was a churning in her stomach. ‘Not now, Jim,' she hissed.

‘No,' Maxwell growled. ‘Thank you, but Henry Hall is
nothing
like me. Wash your mouth out.'

‘Mr Maxwell,' DS Tom O'Connell was at their side, helping Maxwell up. ‘I'd like to shake your hand, sir,' he said. ‘I wasn't exactly pleasant when we first met. Goes with the territory, I guess. Anyway, I understand you saved the guv'nor's life. That was brave. You'll get a medal, I shouldn't wonder.'

‘Yippee,' said Maxwell flatly, unable in his present state to even
think
of a smile. ‘And as for saving Henry's life, I was under the impression he was trying to save mine.'

And O'Connell helped the pair, the old crock and the pregnant one, into the ambulance.

‘At least,' he said as he closed the door on them, ‘we can wrap this one up.'

‘What do you mean, Detective Sergeant?' Maxwell was grateful to be lying down.

‘Well, the murders.' O'Connell frowned at the man. The old bastard must be in shock. ‘Deena Harrison.'

Maxwell lifted himself up on to his better elbow. 
‘Deena Harrison no more committed these murders than this good lady here.' He reached out for Jacquie's hand. ‘And believe me, I shall be asking her a lot of questions on the way to the hospital.'