Maxwell's Mask (27 page)

Dierdre Lessing was at her conspiratorial best that Monday morning. The menopause was not being kind to her, turning her into even more of a withered old prune than she had been erstwhile. As always, the Sir Mordred of Leighford High was fawning around his Morgana Le Fay.

‘You've heard about that business at the Arquebus last night,' she said. It was a statement, nothing more.

‘I have,' Bernard Ryan said. ‘Deena Harrison, I understand.'

‘Doesn't surprise me at all.' Dierdre was nibbling her wafer thins. ‘I don't know what possessed James to take the girl on. I think we all told him.'

‘I think we all did.'

‘Of course,' Dierdre leaned slightly across Ryan's cluttered desk. ‘You know who was behind the whole thing, don't you?'

Ryan did, but he'd like it confirmed.

‘Peter Maxwell,' she bridled. Dierdre Lessing
bridled every time she heard – or spoke – Peter Maxwell's name. ‘He's off today, of course.'

‘Hurt in the fire, I understand,' Ryan nodded.

‘The only thing of his that'll be hurt is his pride. And to think he's got that girl pregnant. Well, it's just nauseating.'

‘He's your age, isn't he, Dierdre?'

But the Senior Mistress of Leighford High School had already left, her coffee unfinished, her wafer thin crumbled on Ryan's paperwork.

‘Oh, my God.' A startled Rowena Sanders peered around her vicarage door at the apparition in front of her.

‘Forgive me, Mrs Sanders,' the apparition said. ‘Under all these bandages, I'm Peter Maxwell. One of your companions to the Other Side last night.'

‘Yes,' she faltered. ‘Yes, I know who you are.'

Peter Maxwell looked like the Invisible Man. Only his eyes, his nose tip and his mouth were uncovered. Everything else was National Health Service white. ‘I came to apologise,' he said. ‘And to explain.'

‘Perhaps you'd better come in.' And she checked up and down the road before she closed the door. Many were the oddities who had crossed that threshold, but none
quite
so odd as Peter Maxwell. ‘Er…the room on the right,' she said.

There was an oval table in the room's centre and seven chairs around it. Maxwell took it in 
immediately. ‘So we were one chair too many last night,' he said. ‘Is that why it went wrong?'

‘It went wrong because you made it go wrong, Mr Maxwell. You weren't even invited. Oh, God!' Rowena sat down suddenly, on a settee below the window. Maxwell was standing behind one of the upright dining chairs, his back to a large, solid Victorian fireplace. ‘Maxwell,' she said, her eyes wide at the sudden memory of it. ‘You've been here before.'

‘No,' said Maxwell, frowning as well as he could, what with the cuts and the bandages. ‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Yes, yes.' Rowena was intermittently closing her eyes, then glancing at Maxwell. ‘Tall.' She'd got that right. Maxwell was nearly six-one in his
corespondent
shoes. ‘Dark.' That too she could tell by the thatch, now greying, that sprouted out on top of the bandages. ‘Not handsome exactly…'

‘Oh, thanks,' Maxwell murmured.

‘But with a certain roguish charm.'

‘Aw, shucks,' Maxwell was giving Rowena his best Jed Clampett impression. ‘Ah bet yuh say that tuh all yuh travellers tuh the Other Side.'

‘I held a séance, here in this room,' Rowena gabbled. ‘I can't remember when – five weeks ago, six? You were here. Oh, not in the flesh; I don't mean that. In the spirit. You were talking to me,' she looked at him, her grey eyes ever wider, popping out of her head. ‘And you are going to die.' 

‘Well,' said Maxwell after a pause. ‘That's one thing you clairvoyants will always get right.'

‘I am not a clairvoyant, Mr Maxwell. I am a conduit. A guide for travellers. No more. That was a cruel trick you played on Mrs Bartlett last night.'

‘Cruel?' Maxwell repeated. ‘Yes, perhaps it was. But not as cruel as fastening a tripwire across an old lady's stair or shooting a few hundred volts through a wet carpet. We're talking ends and means here, Mrs Sanders.'

‘Well, then,' she breathed to compose herself. ‘You said you had come here to explain. And please move away from that fireplace. It…it disturbs me.'

Maxwell sat alongside the medium on her settee and took up the tale. ‘“Daniel Bartlett” was my idea,' he said. ‘I rather lost touch with everybody when the torch went up last night or I'd have come clean then. I hope you weren't too hard on poor old Benny.'

‘Benny,' she repeated. ‘He was the lad in the disguise?'

‘That's right. He's one of My Own at Leighford High, although to be honest, he's not exactly a regular. No, his love is woofers, tweeters and all the rest of the theatrical backstagery that means a show will go on. He moonlights – or, in Benny's case, daylights – at the Arquebus. I needed him to do a Banquo, Mrs Sanders.'

‘The character in
Macbeth
?' the medium checked. 

‘The ghost at the feast,' Maxwell nodded, ‘whom only the guilty Macbeth can see. There, I admit it – I pinched an idea from the Bard; how often do you see that done? The Scottish play's the thing wherein I intended to catch the conscience of the king. And it damn near worked.'

‘But Mrs Bartlett told us, and she's hardly a believer,' Rowena said, ‘but just for a second, she thought the boy
was
her late husband. How did you do it?'

‘It was a bit of luck that Benny was about the right build for Bartlett. Actually, I think he's nearly three inches shorter, but in the dark and in the charged atmosphere you had helped create, I didn't think anybody would have a tape measure. The coat and cap were borrowed from the Arquebus' wardrobe department. As for the voice…well, modest to a fault though I am, that was me,
pre-recorded
and set off by Benny with some sort of timing mechanism from the theatre's sound box. I've got to hand it to the boy – it worked a treat.'

‘But the fire…'

‘Ah, well,' Maxwell shook his head, ‘the
best-laid
plans of mice and men.
That
wasn't supposed to happen.'

‘So what did you achieve?' Rowena wanted to know. ‘You terrified us all and what is worse, you tried to make light of my powers and the genuine need of Mrs Elliot to find closure in the death of her aunt.' 

‘If I terrified you,' Maxwell was on his feet, ‘I'm truly sorry. And if your powers are genuine, Mrs Sanders, they won't be diminished by a little subterfuge of mine. As for Mrs Elliot, her closure can only be achieved by catching her aunt's killer. That's what I achieved last night.'

‘You did?' Rowena was staring at him. ‘But who…?'

Maxwell paused in the doorway and risked tapping his bandaged nose. ‘Someone at that table,' he said.

Jacquie had been right. Maxwell should have stayed in the ward they put him in, not just overnight but the next day too, and he certainly shouldn't have been cycling all over the town. Apart from his own cut, singed and shocked condition, she reasoned, what about the motorists swerving at the sight of the Invisible Man on his bike? But Maxwell wasn't having any. He resisted her concerned fussing and positively forbade her to follow him. He also refused to carry his mobile, the umpteenth one she'd bought him so that he could keep in touch. ‘If the Good Lord had intended us to have mobiles,' he often said to her, ‘then there was something wrong with his grand design.'

So he eased himself off the saddle in the drive of Patrick Collinson's house, the one that doubled as his office, and dragged himself up the steps.

It was a wary Doris who sat, riveted, at her desk 
in the outer office. When Maxwell had called last, she'd been uncertain whether she should call the police. Now, she faced the same dilemma, except that this time perhaps she should call the men in white coats too.

Jacquie paced the living room, tidying his
sixth-form
essays into a neat stack. Then she busied herself in the kitchen, rattling cups and wiping surfaces. Then she turned to take the stairs, carrying a couple of towels to the airing cupboard. She was filling time and it lay heavy on her hands. Time passing. Clock ticking. Time wasting.

Then she took the second set of stairs, the wooden ones to the attic, to the Inner Sanctum below the eaves. Only her head appeared above the parapet and the black and white killer in the corner lurking there had smelt her long before. She didn't see him at first, crouched as he was on the old linen basket.

Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade sat their horses in the centre of the room, the diorama that Maxwell had been working on for so long. It had filled the hours of his loneliness, framed his thinking as he wrestled with his problems – how to teach Seven Zed Four or how to catch a murderer. She couldn't crouch any more to see their detail at eye level – Sonny Jim wouldn't let her. He was just too big now and too boisterous, although he was particularly quiet that morning. She walked around 
the end of the table where Cardigan and Lucan sat with the impetuous Captain Nolan, his arm flung out behind him, pointing down the wrong and fatal valley with the careless and deadly words – ‘There is your enemy, my lord; there are your guns.' Less than two-thirds of the Brigade would ride back.

‘Well, Count.' Jacquie lowered her head to look the animal in its green, smouldering eyes. ‘Time for a reckoning, don't you think? You see, it's not just your Lord and Master now. It's me too. And soon,' Sonny Jim failed to kick on cue, ‘a third party. The days of the bachelor club are over. Can you handle that, you murderous bastard?'

Metternich stretched, his claws extending in the morning light, and yawned, his eyes closing, his teeth bared – all the apparatus of the perfect killing machine. Then, he did something he hardly ever did to Peter Maxwell. He reached up and planted a lipless kiss on Jacquie's nose. I can handle that – thanks for asking.

‘Who's there?' Peter Maxwell was standing on the Arquebus stage. He had just clambered over the still wet debris in the foyer and picked his way carefully down the shallow steps of the auditorium's aisle.

‘It's me, Max; Patrick Collinson.'

‘Patrick,' the Head of Sixth Form hailed him. ‘Thank God.'

‘My God!' was the accountant's riposte.

‘Yes, yes, I know.' Maxwell was attempting a chuckle. ‘It's worse than it looks. Where the hell are we on insurance on this lot?'

‘Oh, we'll be all right,' Collinson told him. ‘And for all it looks terrible, it could have been far, far worse. Shame about
Shop of Horrors
though.'

‘Oh, we'll put that on at Leighford High,' Maxwell told him. ‘Back to Plan A, I suppose.'

‘The firemen told me that mad girl had used two fire bombs,' Collinson said. ‘What had she got against the place, Max?'

‘Paranoid schizophrenia is the official term, Patrick,' Maxwell said sadly. ‘But in layman's terms, God knows. They just let her out into the community too soon, that's all.'

‘She could barely have known Gordon Goodacre.'

‘Gordon?' Maxwell blinked. ‘I didn't think she knew him at all. She told me…' and he thought of chuckling, but it was taking too much of a toll. ‘I was going to say she told me she started here days after his death, but then she told us a lot of things, didn't she, which bore no relation to the truth.'

‘That's right,' Collinson sighed, wiping his sooty hands on a cloth. ‘No, she joined two days
before
Gordon died. She obviously slipped the chains on the ladders and pushed them over while he was working.'

‘Obviously,' Maxwell nodded. ‘But how did she get access to Martita Winchcombe's place? That's the one I can't work out.' 

‘Well,' Collinson gave it some thought. ‘She was plausible enough. Had me believing all sorts of things about poor old Ashley, for instance. I daresay she befriended the old girl and wormed her way into her confidence. In the case of Dan Bartlett now…what
was
all that about, Max? With the fire and everything, that little piece of play-acting went rather out of the window. But when we talked to that lad of yours – Benny, is it? When we talked to him after the fire was under control, he said
you'd
put him up to it.'

‘Did he?' Maxwell was appalled. ‘Well,' he tutted. ‘There's loyalty for you. You were saying – “In the case of Dan Bartlett…”'

‘Hmm? Oh, yes, well, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that he lured her into his bed. The old lecher had no scruples whatsoever. He upset her somewhere, I suppose, and she snapped. We all saw her in action last night. Absolutely terrifying.'

‘Terrifying indeed,' Maxwell agreed. ‘But not guilty, nonetheless.'

‘Not…? Oh, come off it, Max,' Collinson chuckled. ‘I mean, I know she was one of yours and you want to be loyal and all…'

‘There you go again, Patrick,' Maxwell tutted. ‘That word loyalty. Yes, I like to think I'm loyal. But then, so are you. So is Doris.'

‘Doris?' Collinson was frowning.

‘Oh, didn't I tell you? I've just come from your place. She told me you were here.' 

‘Well,' Collinson was chuckling again. ‘Yes, I suppose that's an example of loyalty. Although in the case of some clients, I'd rather they didn't know where I was every minute of the day.'

‘Indeed,' Maxwell nodded. ‘Minutes of the day is what the whole thing is all about, isn't it? Made everything very neat and easy. And it all began with Gordon.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘The only thing you're sorry about, Patrick,' Maxwell eased himself carefully down onto a theatre seat, one of the few unscathed by the fire, ‘is the death of Martita Winchcombe.'