Maxwell's Mask (19 page)

‘I'm having lunch with Jane, all being well. You know Henry's taken her off the case.'

‘Has he?' Maxwell slurped some coffee. ‘Common sense at last.'

‘Well, at least the psychic part of it.'

‘Ah, yes. Madame Arcati. I'd love to meet her.'

‘Would you?'

Again, Maxwell stopped, wiping crumbs from his bow tie. ‘Darling,' he closed to her. ‘Are you sure you're all right?'

‘Just tired,' she said. ‘Some days – Sonny Jim, you know. You should try it some time.'

‘D'you know,' he winked, ‘I think I might. I'll
have a word with dear old Doc Shipman and see if I can get the op on the NHS. But in the meantime, hey nonny-nonny. See you later, darling heart,' and he kissed her and was gone.

She watched him from the lounge window as he led Surrey out down the garden path. He'd fixed the puncture now and the contraption's chrome sparkled in the weak October sun. He raised his shapeless hat to Mrs T, forever clipping the other side of their communal hedge. He turned to wave as he wobbled out into the road, doffing his cap to her and bouncing low in Surrey's saddle. She smiled and loved him all over again. Mad as a tree.

‘Look after yourself, Peter Maxwell,' she whispered. She went to the bathroom and mechanically turned on the taps. Then she looked in the mirror. ‘God, Jacquie,' she heard herself saying. ‘Not only do you feel like shit, you look like it too.'

While the Stress Relief bath pong spread bubbles in the water and the steam coated mirror and window, Jacquie rang Leighford nick. ‘Dave?' She recognised the desk man's quiet, calming tones. ‘Jacquie Carpenter. Put me through to the guv'nor, will you?'

‘This,' Peter Maxwell had halted temporarily on his way into Leighford High that morning, wheels spinning on the gravel as his laser eyes caught sight of an erring child, ‘is what I believe the working
classes call a football.' He was spinning the thing in his hand. ‘That, not ten yards from it, is a
plate-glass
window. The oldest known in Western Europe was made for General Lucius Lucullus so he could look out and enjoy his stupendous garden in bad weather. Know what happens, Joshua, when one meets the other at several miles an hour?'

‘Er…it smashes.' Joshua was doing GCSE general science. Eat your heart out, Einstein.

‘Indeed it does.' Maxwell was impressed. ‘And?'

‘Sir?' Joshua was looking up at the Great Man. He hadn't heard the hiss of Surrey's tyres behind him and not until Maxwell grabbed the ball had he realised he was there at all. Staff in cars he could spot half a mile away, but sneaky old bastards on bikes were a different matter altogether.

‘The inevitable corollary is that I cuff you round the ear and a whacking great bill is sent to your mum and dad. Do you get the picture?'

‘Yes, sir.' Joshua's middle name could have been contrition.

‘Good. I'm glad, because the ball you haven't got. Pick it up from my office at the end of the day.'

‘Aw, sir, that's not fair…'

Maxwell checked his stride on the school's front steps. ‘You're right. The punishment must fit the crime,' he said. ‘Justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done. Let's make it the end of tomorrow.' And he was gone.

A mass of tangled, greying hair appeared around the sliding hatch door of Thingee One, already fielding phone calls from the hapless bunch of incompetents who called themselves parents. ‘Thingee, light o' love – you've changed your hair.'

‘Last term, Mr Maxwell,' Thingee replied resignedly. ‘Had it done to go on holiday.'

‘Right.' Maxwell clicked his fingers, remembering their conversation intimately. ‘Barbados. Weather was lovely.'

‘Lanzarote,' she corrected him. ‘It rained.'

‘Excellent. Tell me, do we have a current address for Deena Harrison?'

‘Deena?' She ferreted on her computer screen. ‘Yes, I think so. 14 Delaware Avenue.'

‘Brill! Oh,' and he threw the football at her, gently of course. ‘That's Joshua Fairbrother's. I've told him I've got it, which is a lie, so he'll probably check with you four or five times during the day, to see if you've got it. Just tell him you haven't seen it since Mr Maxwell stuck a compass point in it and threw it in the school skip, all right? Oh, Thingee. I'm out of school for a while. No cover required Lessons One and Two. And make sure nobody pinches my bike space, will you?'

‘But Mr Maxwell,' she called after him as he hurtled out of Reception like a bat out of Hell. ‘I've put you down to cover Mr Holton's Science, Lesson One.'

‘Give it to Mr Ryan,' he waved back through the
front door. ‘He only teaches five periods a week and desperately needs the practice.' He stared back at two wandering girls who were staring at him. ‘Yes?' and they scurried away. Madder than ever.

‘And that's it?' Henry Hall sat in his Lexus on the slope of Staple Hill. The new yet-to-open golf course tumbled away below him and the sky was astonishingly cloudless for an October day at the height of the Global Warming Season.

Jacquie Carpenter sat next to him, glad to release the seat belt from her bump. ‘That's it,' she said. ‘The rest of the tape's dead. As if it never recorded. Or refused to work after a certain point.'

Hall nodded. ‘I've never liked these things,' he said, pushing buttons in a futile attempt to make the gadget behave. ‘More trouble than they're worth. It's just that when I couldn't get much sense out of Jane, I thought this might be useful. I should have had her wired too.'

‘You'd probably have got the same result,' Jacquie said.

He looked at her, his favourite detective sergeant. She didn't look too well today, he thought. Pregnancy affected women in different ways. His Margaret had been healthy as a pig all three times, but it didn't always go like that. ‘Are you OK?' he asked solemnly.

‘If you mean was I scared shitless by that dodgy woman and her circus act…yes, I was. It's been a long time since I didn't sleep at all.'

‘This voice…?' Hall was pointing to the tape recorder.

‘If it's her,' Jacquie said, ‘doing one of her impersonations, it wasn't something she said last night. Believe me; I'd remember. Do you recognise the voice?'

He shook his head. ‘No.'

‘Could it be the tape?' she asked him, still trying to make sense of it. ‘Some defect?'

‘Could be,' Hall nodded. ‘It's a new tape, as far as I know, but I'll get it checked. See if the lab can come up with anything.'

‘You might want to check for background noise too – the white stuff. It sounded pretty weird to me last night. Not…' she looked into her twin reflections in his lenses, ‘not of this world.'

‘Why did you want us to drive, Jacquie?' he asked her. ‘You could have given me this at the nick.'

‘It's Max,' she told him, gnawing her lip and looking out of the window to the bare horizon and its single pine tree, the sea a peacock blue beyond. ‘He doesn't know about any of this.'

‘I see.'

‘And I don't like that.' She turned back to him. ‘I don't like having to lie to him.'

‘Nobody's asking you to,' Hall told her. ‘You could have said no.'

‘Could I, guv?' she asked him. ‘You've seen what a wreck Jane Blaisedell's become. Do you think I could leave her like that?'

‘What you tell Max is up to you,' Hall said, ‘and I seem to remember we've been having this conversation on and off for years.'

She smiled. ‘On and off is right,' she reminded him. ‘Sometimes it was “Don't you dare tell Maxwell a bloody thing”.' That was an unfair characterisation; Henry Hall hardly ever swore. But he acknowledged the sentiment anyway.

‘Do you think she's a con woman, Jacquie?' he asked her, switching track with a suddenness that pulled her up short. ‘Magda Lupescu? Do you think she's pulling our collective chains?'

Jacquie stared ahead, out of Hall's tinted windscreen. ‘Somebody is, guv,' she said. ‘I just wish I knew who.'

Teachers rarely know where their kids live, let alone ex-kids. If they're sensible, they'll buy a house out of the catchment area, because even if they're popular, they'll be met with a barrage of ‘'Ello, sir!' ‘'Ello, miss!' every time they go out. If they're not popular, they'll have shit through their letterboxes.

So Peter Maxwell had had no clue where Deena Harrison lived, until Thingee had found the address for him on the school computer. He'd then rung her on her mobile and invited himself over. It was a Monday lunchtime and with Lesson Five being free, he'd just have time to pedal like a thing possessed along the Front and up into the high country above the Shingle, before dropping down into Tottingleigh and the Littlehampton Road. A more determined trencherman would have grabbed a Ginsters on the way and risked a few minutes' wobbly handlebars to slake his morning hunger pangs. As it was, Mad Max pinched a chip off
Slobbo Allen in Eight Eff Two as he left the building.

‘Thanks, Slobbo!' he called.

‘'Ere!' Slobbo didn't take the theft too kindly. ‘I'll have the law on you, Mr Maxwell.'

‘If you made a complaint today,' Maxwell was swinging his good leg over White Surrey's crossbar, ‘thank a teacher.'

And he was gone, down the plantain-bordered highway, out into the world of freedom and adventure that was Leighford, West Sussex. He ran a red light at the intersection of Wilding and Albemarle like the road hog he was, cut through the pedestrian precinct area outside Boots as old men with sticks roared at him about the insolence of the youth of today. He was Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
, a delinquent after his time. Then it was rubber to the pedal and the snarl of synchromesh as he took the rise with the great, grey sea sparkling on his right and the gorse-strewn heathland of the South Weald above him to his left.

He could see the little cluster of police cars in the car park of what had once been Tottingleigh Mixed Infants School and now doubled as a Day Care Centre and occasional Incident Room. Henry Hall would be there, he knew, wrestling with the same problems that Maxwell faced, worrying them in his own police procedural way; worrying them to death. He had a fine mind, did Henry, but he also had a manual, one by which he had to live.
Peter Maxwell didn't have a manual at all.

What he did have was a new problem now, one that might become Henry Hall's in the fullness of time. He eased Surrey's brakes and the noble machine's rear wheel hissed and skidded on the gravel. The Harrison house was large, solid, Edwardian with tall hedges to keep out the prying world. If Maxwell remembered aright, Deena was a singleton. All this would be hers now; a property owner at twenty-two. Still, it would, no doubt, not be the way she would have wanted to inherit.

‘Mr Maxwell?' A puzzled face peered round the door.

He swept off his hat. ‘Deena,' he said. ‘I was sorry to be so cryptic on the phone. May I come in?'

‘Cryptic indeed,' she said. ‘Please.' The girl wore her hair piled up in an untidy tangle on top of her head. A large, floppy jumper hung off one shoulder and there were once-fashionable designer tears in her jeans.

She led him into a large, elegant hall with heavy oak furniture and a hat stand. It was like something out of
Flog It
and he half expected a deliriously excited Paul Martin to leap out of a cupboard in his enthusiasm any minute. Mock Rennie Mackintosh panels lit the Edwardian gloom, all pale pinks and greens, until they reached the living room, which was strewn with mags and coffee cups that reminded Maxwell of his own rooms in those
far-off 
Granta days. He had been the only student in Cambridge not to have a Che Guevara poster on his wall. Asthmatic medical student drop-outs had never impressed him much.

‘Have they let you out?' She tidied the worst of the
Cosmos
into a neater pile.

‘Ticket of leave only, I'm afraid,' he said, shaking a leg at her. ‘This damn tag on my ankle itches to buggery.'

‘Can I get you anything?' she asked. ‘I don't do lunch any more – call me faddy if you like – but I can make you a coffee.'

‘No, thanks, faddy.' He smiled and sat upright in one of her armchairs to wait until she sat down too. ‘Look, Deena…there's no easy way to say this. Patrick Collinson had a word with me last night.'

‘Really?' Deena chirped. Then her face fell. ‘Oh, God, there isn't a problem with the show, is there? I mean, the cast haven't…'

‘No, no, it's not the show, Deena. It's you.'

‘Me?' The girl sat forward. ‘What do you mean?' She wasn't as chirpy now.

‘Ashley Wilkes,' Maxwell said quietly.

Deena blinked, frowning. ‘Mr Maxwell, I'm afraid I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about.'

Ever had times in your life when everybody's singing from a hymn sheet and so are you, but you're on the wrong page? Peter Maxwell felt a little like that. ‘Deena.' He leaned forward, cradling
one hand in the other, choosing his words carefully. ‘Patrick told me that you told him Ashley Wilkes raped you.' He was Head of Sixth Form again, quiet, patient, loving in his old grammar school sort of way.

For a second, Deena Harrison sat bolt upright, a frozen look of horror on her face. Then she crumpled and fell back in hysterical laughter. When she'd finished, the tears running down her cheeks, Maxwell hadn't moved. He was still looking at her with the utmost concern, the utmost solemnity. He'd talked to raped girls before, but he had to admit he'd never known a response quite like this one. Slowly, Deena pulled herself together, drying her eyes and clearing her throat.

‘Oh, I'm sorry, Mr Maxwell,' she said, still trying to stifle her giggles. ‘It's just that I've never heard anything so preposterous. When…when did Mr Collinson say this conversation of ours took place?'

‘At the Arquebus,' Maxwell said, ‘last night. I missed the whole rehearsal because I had a puncture and didn't get there until you people had gone home. He didn't go into details, but he was quite sure of what had happened.'

Deena was frowning again. ‘This is downright peculiar,' she said, looking into the middle distance as though wrestling with a problem.

‘What is?' Maxwell was more confused than ever.

‘Ever heard of Paul Usherwood?'

‘I don't think so,' Maxwell shook his head.

‘Paul was my professor at Oxford. He was quite a dish and very kind. One of the youngest professors in the university in fact. And when…my parents died…well, he sort of took me under his wing. Literally. Or tried to…'

‘I'm sorry,' Maxwell said. ‘I don't follow.'

‘I'm not saying Paul raped me,' she said, shaking her head, ‘but he certainly, shall we say, took advantage of my vulnerability. But I've never told anyone about that. Until now.' She reached out and touched his hand. ‘I suppose, what with everything else, I just put it to the back of my mind. He was going through a bad patch at the time. His marriage was on the rocks and I was…needful, I suppose. These things happen, don't they? And they don't all make the
News of the World
. It wasn't violent or anything. But as for Mr Collinson, I don't know what he's talking about.'

‘So you and he never had a conversation about Ashley Wilkes?'

‘No, of course not,' she chuckled. ‘Why would I confide in a man I hardly know? If anything had happened, Mr Maxwell,' she tightened her grip on his hand, ‘I would have come to you.' She eased herself forward so that their knees were nearly touching and she held his right hand in both of hers. ‘I will always come to you, if you'll let me.'

He stood up. To check his watch would have been rude and clichéd, but he really did have to get
back. Time, tide and Eleven Bee Nine would wait for no man. They'd be tearing off his Derry Irvine wallpaper and swinging from the Rococo chandeliers in Aitch Eight. You couldn't turn your back… ‘I'm sorry, Deena,' he said. ‘This is some sort of sick joke. And I'm afraid it's on me. I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

‘Mr Maxwell,' she held his arm. ‘I'm sure Mr Collinson meant no harm. He seems a nice old boy. Don't be hard on him.'

‘Do you have an appointment?' Patrick Collinson's secretary was still asking as Peter Maxwell crashed through his office door. Patrick Collinson worked from home. And it was quite a home. Out beyond Staple Hill where the Weald began and serious money held sway. The lawns were trimmed after the summer's croquet and the whole place oozed opulence. As an accountant, Collinson had achieved the impossible – a fortune from sitting on his arse. And, as Rod Steiger's Napoleon said of Christopher Plummer's Wellington in
Waterloo
, Maxwell was going to move him off it.

Collinson looked up in some alarm as the
be-scarfed
whirlwind hurtled across the deep shag of his carpet, reached his desk and slammed his fist down. Computer and papers jumped along with the accountant.

‘We're going to be brutally frank with each other in a minute, Patrick. Do you really want your
secretary to witness you picking up your teeth?' The woman hovered in the doorway, her hands flapping as if her fingers were on fire.

‘Er…it's all right, Doris.' Collinson was patting the air with his left hand, trying to calm everybody down, not least himself. The other hand hovered near his desk drawer. For an instant, Maxwell wondered whether he had an alarm button connected to the nick or a Magnum .357 tucked away like most accountants did.

‘Shall I call the police, Mr Collinson?' Doris asked, dithering between her boss's would-be assailant and the land line. If truth be told, Maxwell hadn't taken the time to suss her out as he barged his way past her desk, but she didn't have the look of a seventh dan, so he'd probably be all right.

‘No, no,' Collinson blustered. ‘I'm sure whatever grievance Mr Maxwell has, we can sort it out.'

‘But…' Doris was not convinced. She'd seen various degrees of raised dander before, but nothing quite like this.

‘Thank you, Doris.' Collinson was firmer with the loyal old girl than perhaps he intended to be, but it did the trick. She closed the door quietly, but hovered just outside, just in case, trying to memorise Maxwell's features and appearance for when he was on the run for murdering her employer.

‘Max…' Collinson spread his arms in a gesture of innocence and bewilderment.

‘Deena Harrison wasn't raped by Ashley Wilkes, Patrick,' Maxwell told him levelly, ‘so why did you tell me she was?'

The accountant who doubled as theatre secretary blinked and dithered. He began to say something, but thought better of it and just sat down.

‘Well?' Maxwell was looming over him, leaning on his knuckles, arms straight, legs braced. Many was the homework-forgetter who'd had a similar view.

‘Max,' Collinson gabbled. ‘I just don't know what to say…I…' and he shook his head.

Maxwell straightened, giving the man some space. Clearly, he was rattled, put out, confused. He'd give him time, let him breathe. ‘I was wondering on my way over here why you'd invent a thing like that. I saw Deena at lunchtime. She found it astonishing that you'd spoken to me about something that never happened. I worried about it all afternoon, while casting historical pearls before teenaged swine. Had you misunderstood, I wondered? Misheard, perhaps? Hardly. So that left me with two choices – either you've got some vendetta against Ashley Wilkes that I don't know about or this is all part of a delusional fantasy in whatever sick world you inhabit. Put me out of my misery, Patrick: which is it?'

‘Neither,' Collinson bleated. ‘I mean, this is nonsense. It happened just as I told you. Deena was at the Arquebus last night, distraught. Ashley
Wilkes had raped her. I was on my way to the police when I shut up shop for the night.'

‘Were you?' Maxwell stood, drumming his fingers on Collinson's desk. ‘You'll forgive me if I find that a tad unlikely.'

‘As God is my witness, Max,' Collinson pleaded. ‘I'm not some sort of pervert who goes round inventing lurid stories about young girls.'

‘But you didn't go? To the police, I mean?'

‘No.' Collinson looked a little crestfallen.

‘Why not? If she told you and you believed her…'

‘Well, that's just it. As for Ashley Wilkes, I'll admit he's not my favourite theatre manager, but that doesn't mean I'd swear away his reputation in a court of law on what is patently a lie.'

‘Why is it patently a lie? When you told me about it, you believed her.'

‘Didn't you?'

‘She didn't tell
me
!' Maxwell bellowed.

‘Dan Bartlett now.' Collinson changed tack. ‘That wouldn't have surprised me at all. If Deena had come to me with a tale about him, well…'

Maxwell sat down in the huge leather chair alongside Collinson's coffee table. Either this man was one of the best liars he'd ever met – to rival Ben ‘Pinocchio' Williams of Ten Bee Seven – or…

‘What did Deena say?' he asked, calmer now, trying to make sense of it all. ‘
Exactly
.'

‘Exactly? God, I can't remember. I'm a bachelor, Max, tried and tested. When a young girl starts
sobbing on my shoulder, well, I must admit, I was a little out of my depth. I mean, I've barely exchanged pleasantries with the woman, and here she was, pouring her heart out.'

‘Details,' Maxwell persisted.

‘Now who's having delusional fantasies?' Collinson demanded to know.

Maxwell leaned forward ominously. ‘I am a Western buff, Patrick,' he said quietly, patiently. ‘And in a lot of Westerns in the Fifties, the hero – that's me, by the way – was so lost for words at the appalling behaviour of the villain – that's you – that he grabbed said villain by the shirt, yelled, “Why, you…” and proceeded to knock seven kinds of shit out of him. That's more or less where we are now, bad screenplay or no. And please don't think I'd worry about the lawsuit you'd inevitably bring, because your teeth on the carpet would be well worth it. I've put up with thirty very odd years at the Chalk Face, which has now mysteriously not only turned white but is interactive. It would be rather ironic, wouldn't it, if all that pent-up fury was unleashed not on some behooded moron it is my misfortune to have to teach but on a respectable pillar of the theatrical community. Details!'