Maxwell’s Ride (28 page)

‘I’d already met him at Leighford High,’ Maxwell said. ‘Now it’s my turn to confess. As well as being Superteacher who could have put Socrates in the shade, a historian’s historian par excellence, and a thunderingly good Head of Sixth Form, I am also infuriatingly modest and a bit of a sleuth in my spare time. I knew Warner knew Wiseman, so I went asking questions. He couldn’t help.’

‘Perhaps not then,’ Godden mused, ‘but I think he can this time. Max, can you play along tomorrow? I’m going to suggest to Tony that we all go to Harold’s theatre. I’ll think of a reason. Once we’re there … well, trust me, will you?’

‘I don’t have much choice, do I? Not if I want to see my niece again.’

Godden nodded. ‘You know, Max, I want to thank you,’ and he held out a chubby hand.

‘Me? Why?’ Max took it.

‘Because you’ve helped me find myself. Oh, it’s a cliché I know and a columnist should know better, but … well, I’m bound to do time for all this. The fraud. The embezzlement. But at least you’ve kept me out of murder. I knew your heart wasn’t in the White Knights.’

‘God, was I that obvious?’ Maxwell chuckled.

‘Goodnight, Max,’ Godden smiled, getting to his feet. ‘And don’t worry about young Tiffany. She’ll be fine.’

Sylvia Matthews stood at the window, the one that looked out onto the street. She couldn’t sleep anyway and a little before four, she’d got out of bed, popped her head around the door to check on Lucy and wrestled with a Tom Clancy. It was no good – her heart wasn’t in it and she threw the thriller aside. She never knew what it was that made her look out of the window. But when she did, she saw him, standing in the dappled shadows of the street lamp. A silhouette with head and shoulders and a heavy coat. Just standing there. Looking. Looking, she knew, at the house. And at her. Most especially at her.

She dashed across to the phone, punching out Jacquie’s number and waiting in an agony of silence, heart pounding, throat dry, waiting, waiting.

‘Come on,’ she hissed. ‘Be there, for God’s sake.’

‘Hello,’ a recorded voice clicked in. ‘I’m afraid I can’t come to the phone at the moment …’ And she slammed the receiver down. In her rising, blinding panic, she checked the security in her head. All doors were locked. All window catches fastened, exactly as Jacquie had told her. No lights anywhere in the house. Curtains on the ground floor drawn. But windows were only glass. Doors only ply and sawdust. If that bastard wanted to get in, he could. She ducked across to the wrought-iron Punch doorstop that kept the bathroom door ajar and carried it back to the window. He was still out there. With difficulty, she hauled the chair into place, where she could still watch him, arms on the sill, and kept her feet on Mr Punch.

What did the bastard want? Was he real, that he stood there, so still, so unmoving? Was he an extension of her own worn out, jangled nerves? ‘Where are you, Jacquie?’ she found herself wondering. And she heard herself saying, softly, in the shadows, ‘Where are you. Max?’

Robert de Niro was waiting.

19

The sun was shining on the sandstone cliffs of Hengistbury as LeStrange’s Range Rover crested the hill. No one was talking as it joined the steady trickle of traffic winding its way west where Alfred the Great’s fortress once stood in the killing ground between the Avon and the Stour. Maxwell saw the dazzling white tower of Christchurch priory and the huge signs that welcomed a marvelling world to Tucktonia, four acres of replica buildings on a 1:24 scale (for anybody who was interested).

Breakfast had been coffee. Godden had managed some toast. Conversation on the way down, along the M3 and beyond the Ringwood Interchange, had been minimal, each of them alone with his own conscience. The Wyndham, that Saturday morning, was festooned with posters advertising its current show,
The Duchess of Malfi
. Not bad that a work written four hundred years ago by a carter from Cow Lane should still be wowing them to packed houses. But then, the play was all about murder and death loves a crowd.

‘Right,’ LeStrange was first out of the Range Rover, looking up at the building’s facade. ‘Ready for your initiation then, Mr Maxwell? Archie, you seemed very keen to do it all here, so you’d better lead the way. I just hope Harold’s in.’

He was. The impresario was crossing the plush-carpeted foyer as the three got there.

‘Gentlemen?’ Wiseman took off his glasses and let them dangle from the little gilt chain around his neck. ‘I’m afraid you’re a little early for the matinee.’

‘I believe you know Mr Maxwell, Harold,’ LeStrange said.

‘Indeed,’ Wiseman nodded, but made no attempt to accept the Head of Sixth Form’s outstretched hand.

‘Mr Maxwell is a novitiate, Harold,’ LeStrange walked with the ex-thespian into the darkened auditorium. Wiseman glanced back. ‘Is he now?’ he smiled. ‘Well, then, Tony, centre stage, d’you think?’

‘Centre stage, Mr Maxwell?’ LeStrange asked.

‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else,’ Maxwell beamed.

Wiseman disappeared through a side door and the maroon curtains slid back. There was a series of thuds and the stage flooded with light. The set was Jacobean, with gnarled old wood trestle tables and joint stools.

‘All right, Tony?’ Wiseman’s voice bellowed around his theatre, coming in stereo from the wooden O and bouncing back to the balcony and beyond.

‘Mr Maxwell,’ LeStrange held out his right arm and Maxwell mounted the steps.

Halfway up he stopped as the floorboards creaked. ‘“I pray you,” he said to LeStrange, “see me safe up, and as for my coming down let me shift for my self.”’

‘Thomas More,’ Wiseman’s voice boomed across the stage. ‘One of my favourite lines. It’s an honour to welcome a fellow intellectual, Mr Maxwell.’

But Maxwell wasn’t listening to the compliment. He was listening to the voice. It was a gentle, sonorous Northern accent. It was South Yorkshire. He was on the stage now, bathed in light and he turned back. From the footlights he could make out Godden, making himself comfortable three rows back, aisle seat. Wiseman emerged from the wings, smiling, licking his lips in that way that luvvies do.

‘Look at me,’ LeStrange was suddenly in front of him, waving his hands in space like a virtuoso. ‘Watch.’ From nowhere, the magician had produced a coin. ‘Hold that.’

Maxwell did. It was a twopenny piece, complete with princely feathers and the head of the Queen, God bless her.

‘A perfectly conventional coin of the realm, you’ll agree?’

‘Yes.’ Maxwell nodded, not quite sure where any of this was leading.

‘Bite it.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Bite it.’

‘All right.’ Maxwell was still game. Follow instructions was what Godden had said. ‘Once we get to the theatre, play along.’ Maxwell was playing. Calcium met metal and he stood there, holding the coin. ‘Seems genuine,’ he said.

LeStrange took it from him, spun it in the air, as DCI Hall had done days before when he offered Maxwell the choice of brick walls or loose ends. The magician caught it in his teeth with a reptilian jerk of the head and handed it back to Maxwell. There was a jagged piece missing from the rim. Despite himself, Maxwell shouted out ‘How did you do that?’

LeStrange smiled slowly, then took the coin back and spun it again. ‘Catch it,’ he shouted. Instinctively, Maxwell did. The coin was whole again. ‘How did you do that?’ he shouted again.

‘Magic,’ growled LeStrange and he wandered towards the wings.

‘I was hoping for something more spectacular, Tony,’ Maxwell stopped him. ‘Say, hypnosis?’

Wiseman chuckled, busying himself with his set.

‘Hypnosis?’ LeStrange came back. ‘Mr Maxwell, you’ve been hypnotized ever since you nearly got in the way of the bullet that killed Larry Warner. Murder is a form of hypnosis in itself, isn’t it? And you are one of the most easily hypnotized subjects I’ve ever met. It doesn’t take me to draw you in. Archie did it perfectly.’

Maxwell glanced down to where the fat critic sat. He could see his sides wobbling with self-gratification. ‘You fell for it, Max,’ he said. ‘My hysteria, my conscience. Harold, you’d have been proud of me. I was magnificent.’

Maxwell smiled too and crossed to the set, straddling a particularly painful bench. ‘You were pretty good,’ he admitted, ‘except for three things.’

‘Oh?’ Godden, the critic, didn’t really care for criticism.

‘First, you were a little too ready to trust me. It was obvious at the Garrick it was loathe at first sight, yet in Oxford, among the dreaming spires, you were chumminess itself. It was all Maxie and Archie and I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Now, nobody involved in an organization as vile and clever as yours is so easily persuaded to drop their guard. Take my word for it, Harold, you wouldn’t have been proud at all.’

‘And the second little thing?’ Godden roared, his anger rising.

‘Mentioning my niece by name. I hadn’t, you see. And you, overly solicitous, overly concerned, told me not to worry “little Tiffany” would be all right. Where is she, Harold? Where’ve you got her?’

Wiseman was standing now, glancing nervously at LeStrange across the stage from him.

‘The third thing was putting your bloody great foot on my mobile so that I couldn’t ring out of the nice little web of deceit you were spinning for me. You owe a dear friend of mine about seventy quid for that, by the way.’

‘You want to see some real magic, Maxwell?’ LeStrange asked him. He pointed to the rafters, where pulleys and weights and beams cluttered the ceiling. ‘There’s magic.’

Maxwell didn’t know he was rising from his seat. He couldn’t see the glaring lights or the silhouettes forming at the back of the auditorium. All he could see was Tiffany, floating across the tangle of wires, her arms by her sides, her eyes closed, her trainers dangling with loose laces. She was lit from below and looked, Maxwell imagined as the Angel of Mons must have appeared to the exhausted, terrified troops of 1914.

‘Jesus,’ he whispered, not daring to move, not daring to breathe. ‘How do you do that?’

‘Maxwell,’ LeStrange snarled, his arm outstretched, his finger pointing. ‘If you want your little Tiffany to live, don’t say another word. Don’t breathe.’

Maxwell turned to face the girl, passing directly over the stage as though caught in a current, a shaft of light. He had never seen anything like it. Suddenly, the light went out and Maxwell stood alone, centre stage, staring up into the dark and silent rafters.

‘A little to the left,’ a voice commanded over the intercom. It was LeStrange’s voice this time. ‘To the left, Maxwell.’

Maxwell hadn’t seen it before, but he did now. There was a red light, about the size of a twenty-pence piece on his chest. As he obeyed the voice and moved left, it moved with him.

‘Stop.’ He heard another voice, coming this time from the back of the auditorium.

He turned to face front, arms outstretched. ‘How’s that, Bob?’ he asked.

A figure emerged into the creeping light along the rows of empty seats. ‘Well, well, well.’ Maxwell brought his arms down slowly. ‘The second gunman on the grassy knoll. You know, you almost convinced me, Bob.’

‘Really?’ Robert Hart was looking along the barrel of a idle, his face half hidden by the sights. ‘And what was my mistake? You’ve demolished Archie pretty effectively.’

‘Bastard!’ the critic growled, turning casually in his seat.

‘Oh, the general chain of events,’ Maxwell rested his hands on his hips. ‘Would you like to hear about it?’

‘Finish it,’ Godden grunted. ‘We’re all here.’

‘Yes,’ Maxwell shouted. ‘I can just about make you out. At the back there.’ He lapsed into his Marine Sergeant, straight out of Full Metal Jacket. ‘Front and centre, mister.’

A solitary figure wandered down the far aisle, careful not to get further forward than Hart.

‘Hilary,’ Maxwell began a slow hand clap. ‘How nice.’

And another figure, slim, hesitant, came out of the shadows on the left. ‘And Amy,’ Maxwell stopped clapping. ‘The circle’s complete. The magic circle of course, Tony.’

‘Get it over with, Hart,’ Godden snapped. ‘We don’t have time for all this.’

‘No,’ LeStrange’s voice boomed around the theatre like the Wizard of Oz. ‘We owe Mr Maxwell his moment in the spotlight.’

‘Go on, then, Max.’ Hart’s muzzle hadn’t wavered a millimetre. That damned red spot was still nudging Maxwell’s bow tie. ‘But I must warn you, my trigger finger gets tired eventually.’

‘All right.’ Maxwell hadn’t moved. ‘The chain of events. Back in the ’sixties …’

‘Don’t try our patience, Maxwell,’ LeStrange warned. ‘There’s no Seventh Cavalry on its way for you, I assure you.’

‘All right,’ Maxwell licked his lips. They felt like sandpaper. ‘Archie had a little right-wing club going at Oxford. A few fashionable Fascists. They organized a little Paki-bashing, that good old British sport of yesteryear, but then Archie grew up. He got famous writing bollocks about classical music and even more famous writing unsupportable political claptrap under an assumed – dare I say, Nazi – name. He’s not an Action Man – he told me that himself. So instead, he started to fund those who were; soccer hooligans, National Front, British National Party. Toxteth, Broadwater Farm, little happy-go-lucky killings like that, all funded by our Mi Godden. Of course, he wasn’t made of money. He needed some support, so he recruited the rest of you one by one. The Arty Farty circle whose racism is all the more sick because it’s overlaid with a dollop of political correctness as long as your arm. But there was a fly in the ointment, wasn’t there? You needed a legitimate front for funding right-wing activities and you called it Charts – isn’t the Prince of Wales himself your patron? Gala bashes, celebrity knees-ups, Garrick Club, royal approval. You’d got the lot. And sad, innocent dupes like Deirdre Lessing were sucked right in, delighted to receive the odd crumb from top table. But you’d all reckoned without Larry Warner, hadn’t you? Look, Bob, do you mind if I sit down?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Hart,’ Godden screamed, ‘kill the sonofabitch.’

‘Tut, tut, Archie,’ Maxwell still had the nerve to scold. ‘I’m not sure the
Observer
would print anything quite so direct. Or, if I may say so, quite so American.’