Maxwell's Mask (5 page)

‘Yeah, well,' George whined. ‘Maybe not hundreds.'

‘Well you're doing it now,' Anthony assured him. ‘Keep low and follow me.'

‘What we looking for?'

‘Jewellery. Cash. Credit cards. Nothing heavy. Nothing marked. There's an old lady lives here. Now either she'll sleep through a fuckin' earthquake or she'll be wide awake wandering about in the kitchen, muttering the bollocks they do. Just like my bleedin' granny.'

‘But it's late,' George pointed out. ‘She ain't gonna buy that meter reader bit.'

‘You know, George, Mad Max is right about you. If I had a quid for every time he says, “Mr Lemon, you're not concentrating”, I wouldn't be reduced to turning over this old lady's gaff tonight. We're fourteen, for fuck's sake! How many fourteen-year-old meter readers do you know? I was merely regaling you with stories of my uncle Anastas and his MO back in London. Anyway, he
was
a meter reader. No need for fake ID and bullshit there. Here we go.'

Like the natural he was, Anthony was gone across the gravel, his trainers padding like cat prints as he bounced off the porch wall, and he melted into the shadows. George was altogether slower, bulkier, but he made it in record time. Together, the likely lads skirted the lounge window. No lights and the curtains were drawn.

‘Yurghh!' whispered George. ‘Snail shit.'

‘Yeah, you getta lotta that in people's gardens. Occupational hazard, that is. You tooled up?'

‘You what?'

Peter Maxwell didn't know it, but Anthony Wetta was a lot like him really. Born out of his time and with a passion – albeit as yet unrealised – for old movies. When the mood took him, he could recite the screenplays of
The Italian Job
and
The Long Good Friday
by heart.

‘Are you carrying an object of metal for breaking
into places like this?' It was like a foreign language.

‘No,' said George.

‘You're fucking useless, you,' Anthony assured his friend. ‘Keep up.'

And the lither lad was gone, scuttling through the foliage like a rat up a pipe. This side of the house looked even more deserted than the front, but the cloud cover was breaking now and the privet came to an abrupt stop. Nothing ahead but moon and lawn. Not a good combination for those of the larcenous persuasion.

‘Who did you say lived here?' George hissed, trying to keep his hoodie out of his mouth, and his heart in more or less the right place.

‘I dunno. Some old trout. She lives alone, though. Look,' Anthony pointed. ‘There's the kitchen door. Waddya think?'

‘What about?' George had never been asked the merits of gentrified Victorian architecture before. He was a bit stumped for an answer, to be honest.

‘I mean, shall we make a run for it? Try the door and if no go, hit them bushes on the far side.'

‘'Ere, Bed, we're not going on the roof, are we?' George asked in sudden horror. ‘I mean, the ground floor's one thing. But I dunno about the roof. I get funny on the pier sometimes.'

‘Yeah, I know, George,' Anthony nodded, frowning at the lad and the embarrassed memories that came flooding back. ‘You wait here. If I can see a way in, I'll give you a signal.'

‘What signal?' George gripped his oppo's arm. This was all getting just a little heavy for him now.

‘I'll do this,' Anthony waved frantically. ‘Got it?'

A nod. As good as a wink to a blind horse, Anthony supposed, and anyway, that looked like it was all he was going to get. ‘Right, then.'

If truth were told, Anthony was quietly shitting himself, as teenage boys will when their macho bravado has placed them in impossible positions. His hands felt like lead and his knees like water. His throat was bricky-dry and his heart was pounding an inch or two above his Adam's apple. But he wasn't letting George see any of this. Crouching like a hidden tiger, he suddenly sprang into the moonlight, a black shadow against the pale yellow brick of the house.

George couldn't see what happened next, but Bed seemed to stop, check himself as though in disbelief and turn back to his chum. ‘Fuck me!' George heard himself whispering. The door was opening. Bed was in the fucking house. It was George's turn to feel the thumping in his chest. This was beginning to freak him out. Bed had bragged how he could break into anywhere, take out any lock ever made. Had George seen
Gone in Sixty Seconds
, Bed had asked him. Well, Bed could do that to houses.

From the darkness of the kitchen, Bed's arm was summoning his sidekick. Too late to turn back now. Bed would think George was chicken if he didn't
cross that grass. Worse, he'd
tell
everybody he was. Time for some decisive action. All right, so he slipped. Fell over on the bloody gravel, didn't he? But never mind. He was up again and running, like a fucking greyhound. He who always had a sick note signed by ‘George's Mum' so he couldn't do PE up at the school. He was like a fucking greyhound.

The greyhound skidded to a halt at the door and felt himself yanked down in the darkness.

‘Give your eyes time,' Anthony ordered through clenched teeth. ‘They'll become clematised in a minute and you'll be able to see stuff. All right?'

‘How d'you do that, Bed?' George couldn't help but let his admiration show.

‘Do what?'

‘Open the bloody door.'

‘Skill,' Anthony shrugged. ‘Now. Are you starting to see what I am?'

‘What?' George was peering through the gloom. ‘What are you?'

‘No, Nutbar. I mean, can you see what I can see?'

‘It's a kitchen.'

‘Yeah, I know it's a fucking kitchen, George. But if you and me's gonna make a living out of this, we've gotta get the feel of a place. Point one,' Anthony was holding his thumb upright, ‘No dogs. Otherwise,' he raised his head, scenting the air, ‘we'd smell 'em. And they'd smell us.'

‘I can only smell old lady,' George sniffed.

‘That's good, George. That's very good. Using your old factory organs now, mate. No cats either.'

‘No smell?'

Anthony tapped the door behind them with his heel. ‘No cat flap. What else?'

‘Um…'

‘No burglar alarm, George.' Anthony had thought of everything. ‘Otherwise, there'd be flashing lights, ringing bells and a fucking army of Old Bill tramping all over the place.'

‘Wadda we do now?'

‘Now, old son,' Anthony peered along the line of work surfaces, gleaming in the moonlight that streamed in through the window over the sink and the glass in the door behind him. ‘We see where the old girl keeps her stash.'

‘What? You mean she smokes stuff?'

‘Put these on,' Anthony sighed. It was like wading through treacle.

‘What are these?'

Anthony paused for a moment. This couldn't be happening. ‘They're gloves, George. Like the ones you had when you was a kid. Remember? They had no fingers in 'em and your mum tied 'em together up your sleeves, in case you lost 'em.
But
,' he pressed his button nose close to his friend's, ‘you lose 'em 'ere, mate, and you're talking about a stretch in Parkhurst.'

‘Gettaway,' George demurred, but he made sure the gloves fitted tightly even so.

Anthony slithered across the floor, moving noiselessly forward until he reached the open archway that led into the hall. George was with him as the two boys stood up. It was darker here, much darker, and the only light came from a small window above the front door; the one Anthony had tried – the one that was locked. The underfoot sensation here was soft – carpet. There was a sound, too, the steady, deadly ticking of a grandfather clock. George had seen them on
Flog It
. Worth a few bob. Even so, he prayed that Bed wouldn't decide to nip off with that under their respective arms.

‘What's that?' George was pointing to what looked like a small bundle of clothes at the foot of the stairs.

‘Crafty old tart,' Anthony chuckled in a hushed sort of way. ‘Burglar alarm.'

‘You what?' George's heart stopped beating for a second.

‘It's what old people do to protect themselves. Can't afford a real alarm, so they put piles of crap in corridors, hoping we'll fall over it. Only, they ain't dealing with a pair of mugs 'ere, y'know. Go on, then.'

‘What?'

‘Climb over it.'

‘What? You mean we're going upstairs?'

‘Well, that's where old ladies stash their stuff, ain't it?' Anthony could only wonder anew at
George's
naïveté
. ‘They're shit scared of being burgled, so they take all their valuables to bed with them.'

‘I'm not going into some old cow's bedroom,' George announced horrified. ‘You didn't say nothing about that.'

‘You won't have to,' Anthony reassured him. ‘That sort of job you leave to the professionals.' And he patted his own chest, in a modest sort of way.

‘I dunno,' George dithered.

‘Oh, for fuck's sake,' and Anthony took the lead. He grabbed the banister with his right hand, twisting himself over the heaped clothes and landing neatly on the fourth or fifth stair. What an athlete. George, it must be said, was less secure. He approached from a bad angle, too low to the ground, and missed his footing. His right foot missed the stair completely and his left got entangled in the bedclothes. As he thudded down to the hall floor, Anthony flattened himself against the wall, ready to leap down and do a runner. He hadn't expected the old duck's improvised burglar trap to be so effective.

As for George, he was undergoing an entirely different experience and one that he'd remember for the rest of his life. Wrapped in the bundle of clothes was an old woman. She was cold. And for one brief, appalling moment, George had looked straight into her dead eyes.

‘I thought you ought to hear this, Mr Maxwell.' When Nurse Sylvia Matthews used a colleague's surname, there was clearly trouble in the wind. Or there was a kid in the vicinity. This time, it was both.

Maxwell took in Nursie's room. When he was a kid himself and Andrew Bonar Law was at Number Ten, this sort of place was called the San. Chaps would end up there after too many hours under a fierce July sun at the wicket or crocked up after a pummelling in the scrum. He ended up there once when somebody tried to throw a gym bench at him. Now, it was all morning-after pills and cosy,
anti-suicide
chats. Sylvia Matthews had her special Mr Maxwell's-Been-Horrid-To-Me chair. Other than that, the place was scrupulously clean and Spartan and simple. In a plastic-covered chair in the far corner was one of the simplest of them all. George Lemon.

‘George isn't feeling too well this morning, Mr Maxwell,' Sylvia said.

‘Oh dear.' Maxwell's sincerity had barely reached room temperature.

‘George,' Nursie sat down next to the boy. ‘Tell Mr Maxwell what you told me.'

George's usually bovine face had an odd look about it this morning, a different one altogether from that caused by the prospect of double French before lunch. If Maxwell didn't know better, he'd swear the lad had been crying. ‘I seen something last night,' George muttered. ‘I didn't like it. I couldn't sleep thinking about it.'

George lived on the Barlichway. This could have been anything. Drug abuse. Gangland slaying. Visit by a prospective UKIP candidate. Maxwell braced himself. ‘What was it, George?' He perched on the end of Nursie's bed, lolling back to ease the moment and to give the boy plenty of space.

‘It was an old lady,' he mumbled. ‘She was dead.'

Maxwell looked at Sylvia. Both of them had been here before.

‘Where was this, George?' the Head of Sixth Form asked.

‘Bottom of the stairs. I thought it was just a pile of old clothes. Bed said…'

‘Whoa, whoa.' Maxwell reined the boy in. ‘Let's back up a little bit there, George. Bottom of the stairs, where?'

‘In a house.'

Maxwell nodded. This was a kind of progress.

‘I dunno where.' George sensed somehow that
his explanation lacked a certain something. In History lessons, Mad Max usually wanted to know what evidence he'd got. It was all becoming horribly relevant now.

‘All right.' Maxwell had given Torquemada a few tips in his day and any fan of Python knew that nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition. He slipped his trusty thumbscrews back in his pocket and changed tack. ‘What time was this, George? Do you remember?'

‘Haven't got a watch,' the boy told him, the
red-rimmed
eyes never making contact with anything other than the floor and occasionally Nurse Matthew's feet.

‘About, then,' Maxwell shrugged. ‘About what time was it?'

‘Eleven. Twelve.'

‘OK. Not your house, then.' Maxwell was feeling his way, leading the clearly terrified boy through it. His voice was soft and gentle. ‘Not Granny or the lodger at the bottom of the stairs?'

George looked at him. These teachers were supposed to be clever, for fuck's sake. What would an old lady be doing in his own house, dead at the bottom of the stairs? The Lemons didn't have a lodger. And his granny was only forty-seven. For his part, the Head of Sixth Form had seen George's CAT scores. He had the IQ of a cat.

‘I dunno whose house it was,' the boy volunteered.

‘Well,' Maxwell had no choice now but to grasp the nettle. ‘What were you doing there, George? In somebody else's house at eleven or twelve o'clock at night?'

He saw the boy's eyes flicker for a second. ‘I dunno,' he said.

‘Come on, George,' Maxwell said softly, holding up a hand as he noticed Sylvia about to intervene. ‘You can do better than that.'

‘I dunno,' George insisted, getting louder. ‘I get confused.'

‘What about Bed?' Maxwell asked. ‘Shall I ask him?'

‘Who?'

‘Bed,' Maxwell repeated. ‘A minute ago, you said “Bed said”. I didn't catch the rest.'

‘No, I never!' George was looking at him now, for the first time, the fear in his eyes turning to hostility, panic.

The sound of silence.

‘All right, Nurse Matthews.' Maxwell broke the moment and leapt to his feet, bored with the whole charade, tired of the game. ‘Call the police, will you? Whatever this is, it's out of our hands now.'

‘All right!' George was on his feet, trembling, crying, the words tumbling from him in a torrent. ‘Me and Bed broke into a place last night. There was a dead old lady in the hall. I fell over her… On her…' and he collapsed in a quivering heap on the ample chest of Nurse Matthews. A goodly
percentage of Leighford's alumni had been there before him.

Maxwell waited while she calmed him down, patting his distressing hair, passing him tissues and giving him strict, no-nonsense orders about blowing his nose. He sat down and waited until George had composed himself.

‘We didn't kill her, Mr Maxwell,' the boy said, his lip quivering. ‘She was already dead. Bed reckoned she'd fallen downstairs.'

‘I'm sure he's right, George,' Maxwell told him. ‘But we can't just leave her there, can we? What if she's got no friends? No family? We need to sort this out. Maybe then you can get some sleep.'

‘But I don't know where it is,' George whined.

Maxwell looked at Sylvia, acting, as he usually did, on impulse. ‘Can you take me there, George? You and Bed?'

‘Not Bed,' George shouted. ‘He'd fucking kill me…er…I mean he'd kill me. I shouldn't have said anything.'

‘No, George.' Sylvia wrapped an arm around him. ‘You should have. It's great that you have.'

‘What's your problem, George?' Maxwell asked, matching her female softness with his macho masculinity. ‘You'd make three of Bed. You could sort him out easily.'

‘It ain't him,' George explained. ‘It's his brothers. They're built like brick shithouses…er…toilets.'

‘All right,' Maxwell said. ‘Just you and me, then.'

George looked at the man, blinking. He was…what? Eighty-three, eighty-four? Wearing that poncy bow tie and those tweedy old togs. What
did
he look like? And what would it do to George's street cred to be seen with him? ‘I dunno,' he said.

Maxwell shrugged and leaned back with his head on the wall and his arms folded. ‘It's the Old Bill then,' and he reached across for the phone.

‘OK, OK!' George shouted. ‘But you ain't coming round my house. I'll never live it down.'

Maxwell chuckled. ‘Don't worry, George. I won't lower the tone of the neighbourhood. What shall we say? Ten o'clock? The Old Spike?'

George looked from one to the other – the kind, almost beautiful face of the School Nurse, her blue eyes smiling at him. And the lived-in, unfathomable face of the Head of Sixth Form. He was going out on a date with Mad Max. What, he wondered a little before his fifteenth birthday, was the world coming to?

‘This is not sensible, Max,' Jacquie warned, sliding the salt across the kitchen table.

‘A three-egg omelette? Oh, come on, heart of hearts. They still had rationing when I was a shaver. I was forty-two before the threat of nuclear war receded, give or take a Middle Eastern megalomaniac or two. Give me a break, will you? It's one of my civil liberties to be able to take
responsibility for my own cholesterol. Can I have survived all that and not cope with three eggs?'

‘I am talking,' she said archly, ‘as well you know, about your little escapade tonight. The implications don't bear thinking about.'

‘Ordinarily, no,' Maxwell agreed, tucking in to the excellent little Spanish number Jacquie had rustled up. ‘But I know enough about kids to realise that we won't get anything out of George Lemon beyond the time of day because he's terrified of the Cypriot connection.'

‘Have you spoken to Anthony Wetta?'

‘Bed? No. I gave George my word. Besides, Bed's an altogether tougher nut to crack. Oh, I could do it, of course, given Skeffington's Gyves or the Duke of Exeter's Daughter. But either of those little torture gadgets would play merry Hamlet with the concept of political correctness. And anyway, think of the mess… I'm not sure the rack would fit in my classroom.'

‘I'm thinking of you,' she told him. Jacquie always was. They'd known each other now for nearly ten years. She'd been a struggling DC in those days, smoking too much, drinking ditto. They'd found a body at the Red House – and it was one of Maxwell's Sixth Form, one of His Own. Oddly, she couldn't remember the first time she'd actually seen him. And Christopher Marlowe was wrong with all that tosh about love at first sight. Peter Maxwell grew on you, like an old warm
jumper she'd grown to like, to love and now, could not live without, its warmth and softness holding her, caressing her, keeping her – sometimes – together.

He reached across and patted her hand. ‘I know,' he smiled. ‘We'll be careful out there.' They both remembered
Hill Street Blues
on the telly, with its flaky cops working out of a Precinct from Hell and the kindly old sergeant's message to his people as they went out to face the mean streets. It packed more of a punch than dear old George Dixon's ‘Mind 'ow you go' and ‘Look after dear ol' Mum', but essentially it said the same.

‘If this turns out to be genuine,' Maxwell said, ‘the dead woman, I mean, what'll your people do to George Lemon?'

‘He won't get much more than a caution,' Jacquie told him. ‘First offence and – apparently – nothing taken. Anthony Wetta, now… Well, I'm afraid he's on file already.'

‘Yes,' Maxwell sighed. ‘I thought he might be.' And he put his fingers in the corners of his mouth. ‘Cracking eggs, Grommit,' he croaked, in a near-perfect Peter Sallis.

There was no moon that night to light their way. Only clouds scudding darkly, threatening rain for the morning. He kissed her at the car door and jogged up the hill that led to the Old Spike. Jacquie shook her head. She didn't approve of what he was
doing, with all her training and experience. Maxwell should have passed George Lemon and his night terrors over to the police this morning. Come to think of it, Sylvia Matthews should. She knew perfectly well that telling Max anything like this was like waving a red rag at a bull. Mixing her metaphors madly, she knew that all anyone had to do was wind him up and let him go. On the other hand, she couldn't help chuckling. The man she loved, the Cambridge historian, all tweeds and college scarf and elbow patches and bow tie, was jogging up the hill on the edge of the Dam in trainers, jeans and a hoodie. He was, indeed, a funny age.

The Old Spike wasn't a spike at all any more than there had ever been a dam on the open stretch of gorse-strewn headland that went by that name. It was one of those things that just grew up with time, those myriad factettes about places that no one remembered. The Spike, they said, was a beacon from the Armada, when nervous Englishmen scanned the horizon for the huge and deadly Spanish sails, dripping with Catholic symbols and glittering with gilt. Others said it went back much further, to the time when flaxen-haired Saxons watched the mists of another September, long ago, when William the Bastard's Normans rode the high seas. Only Peter Maxwell seemed to know that it was actually a Napoleonic early warning system as the Leighford Fencibles manned
their posts and tried desperately, in that long tense summer of 1804, to learn one end of a musket from another. Now it was just a twisted tangle of metal, a rusting monstrosity the local council kept meaning to take down. It was a health and safety issue and might upset our near neighbours, the French.

‘Jesus!' George Lemon couldn't believe his eyes. Mad Max was madder than anyone realised. The old git was in fancy dress, lolling against the base of the Spike like something out of
Shaun of the Dead
.

‘Evening, George.'

‘Mr Maxwell,' the lad managed.

‘Got your bearings, then?'

George thought they were things that whizzed round in his bike gears. He wasn't going to enjoy tonight. Together, the unlikely pair retraced the steps the lads had taken the previous night. From the Spike, they took one of the dozen or so bike trails that criss-crossed the Dam, dipping down into the oak-treed hollow where Bud cans nestled among the nettles and marked the last resting place of a Morrison's trolley. A thick length of rope with a tyre tied to its free end hung strangely silent and still from a high oak branch. Then they were out on Sycamore Grove, keeping to the shadows at George's request. He had family in this street; he was sure Mr Maxwell understood.

As they swung left into Martingale Crescent, George's resolve left him and he stopped dead. ‘I
thought it was,' he said, waving an uncertain arm ahead. ‘That's the place. On the corner.'

‘That Victorian place?' Maxwell realised he'd asked a question too far. ‘That big house with the bushes?'

George nodded. ‘I can't do this, Mr Maxwell,' he blurted suddenly. ‘I can't go back in. What if she's still there?'

‘I expect she will be, George,' Maxwell told him. ‘That's why we're here; remember?'

George remembered. But he didn't want to remember. He backed off into the privet that lined the pavement, then turned and fled, years of pasta and chips taking their toll long before he reached the darkness of the Dam again. Ahead was the Barlichway and home and a return of the nightmares before the cops came calling. And Maxwell didn't chase him. Time was when he would have done, but then time was when he wouldn't have got involved in things like this anyway. Perhaps it was all too weird. Perhaps it was time to hang up his board-marker and shuffle off to that great Staff Room in the sky. But not yet awhile; he had a few jobs to do first.