Maxwell's Mask (9 page)

‘Well, someone has,' Fiona Elliot growled. ‘The person who has come between me and my rightful inheritance. And let me assure you, I have ways of finding out who that person is.'

‘You have? How?'

‘That,' the woman looked at him levelly, ‘is entirely my business. But the information will, so to speak, come from the horse's mouth.'

Private William Pennington's face wore an anxious look in the glare of the modelling lamp, later that night. He was an actor, Maxwell reasoned, a sensitive soul who probably worried more than most. All morning, Cardigan's Light Brigade had waited for the off. And now, here it was, in the form of that cocky bastard Captain Nolan with his flash uniform and his leopard-skin flounces. He was supposed to be a staff officer, for God's sake, not some clown in fancy dress.

‘So, there it is, Count.' Maxwell dipped his brush into the white spirit and laid the theatrical private down on his back, alongside the plastic hoofs of his horse. ‘Ashley Wilkes didn't know Gordon Goodacre very well, could think of no reason why anyone should want to kill him and had no idea who might have tampered with the ladders.'

The black and white beast twitched his left ear, his yellow eyes watching the mad old bugger closely. Why did it always smell so awful up here under the eaves? And why did he only wear that ridiculous cap when he had that wooden and fur thing in his hand? In a quiet moment, when the old bugger wasn't there, Metternich had snuck up on that wooden thing, smelt the fur in a hopeful,
meal-in
-a-moment sort of way and recoiled in shock and horror as powerful chemicals tore through his nostrils. Still, the old bugger provided the hard, crunchy, scrummy stuff in his bowl every day
downstairs, so he couldn't be all bad. What
was
he talking about now?

‘I get the impression our Mr Wilkes is watching his back,' Maxwell went on, sliding the magnifying glass on its stand to one side. ‘After all, he
is
theatre manager. The cock-up with the ladders
was
, technically, his fault, wasn't it? I mean, directly or indirectly, in this great blame-culture society of ours, Mr Wilkes has a helluva lot of can to carry.' He reached for his Southern Comfort, but the glass was empty. ‘It's your shout, I believe.'

‘Jacquie!' Jane Blaisedell was already in her
four-by-
four the next morning, ready for the off. ‘How the hell are you?' The day was bright and crisp, the slight hint of frost that had laced 38 Columbine's front lawn long gone by now, leaving a seasonal dew in its wake.

‘Fishing,' the woman told her straight.

‘Do you fancy a bevy?' Jane asked her. ‘What with the baby and all?'

‘He's Peter Maxwell's, isn't he?' Jacquie asked, climbing in and belting up as best she could. She was belting up for two now.

‘Is that just a rhetorical question?' Jane asked. ‘Sorry,' she laughed. ‘Just joking. How is the old reprobate?'

‘Nosy,' Jacquie said as Jane swung the wheel onto the main road.

‘I know. I made the mistake of giving him a lift
the other night. Did he tell you?'

‘He did,' Jacquie nodded. ‘I must say you were particularly loose of lip.'

‘Was I?' Jane frowned. ‘You can go off people, you know. I thought I was being helpful.'

‘Jane,' Jacquie said. ‘I love the man dearly, but he
does
have this habit of sticking his nose in…'

‘Somebody'll break it for him one day,' Jane warned. ‘Look, I don't fancy the Ferret. How about an early lunch up at the Clarendon?'

‘Max is doing his Gary Rhodes bit in the kitchen,' Jacquie smiled. ‘Although he calls it his Philip Harbin, whoever he was. Won't be ready for yonks, though, so I'll sit and watch you eat yours. Pick at the odd roaster, you know, bit of crackling, the merest suggestion of glazed carrots.'

‘What's Max doing?'

‘Egg and chips.'

‘Ah, the delights of wedded bliss,' Jane laughed.

‘Not exactly wedded,' Jacquie waggled a ringless finger at her. ‘Talking of which, how's the
ever-gorgeous
Michael?'

Jane beamed archly as the four-by-four shot a red light. ‘So what did you want to know about Martita Winchcombe?'

‘Well, I wasn't going to waddle into Leighford nick,' said Jacquie as his kitchen clock showed
two-thirty
, ‘make small talk about booties, matinée jackets and baby sick and somehow bring the
conversation round to current murder cases. Give my colleagues
some
credit, Max; they wouldn't have bought it. The last time Dave Walters saw a baby he was looking in a mirror forty-five years ago and if Henry Hall
did
father those three kids, he's well and truly beyond that now. As for Gavin Henslow, he's still a baby himself…'

‘Fair enough.' He shovelled two eggs expertly onto her plate. ‘So what did you do?'

‘Talked to Jane Blaisedell, woman to woman, as she munched her way through the carvery at the Clarendon. And I
mean
the carvery. All of it. God, that woman can eat. How come she's only five feet and a perfect ten?'

‘She's made a pact with Lucifer,' Maxwell told her, straight-faced. ‘Picture in the attic. No shadow. No reflection. The whole nine yards. Red sauce, I suppose?'

She nodded beatifically. ‘And brown.'

‘God save us!'

Pregnancy was a brilliant cover for delinquent behaviour and they both knew it. He sat down opposite her and watched her tuck in. ‘You didn't have any, then? Of Jane's lunch, I mean?'

She looked at him for a moment. ‘Nah!' she said. It didn't fool either of them.

‘So what did you learn?' He delicately reached for a little salt and a glass of invigorating tap water.

‘You do realise, Max,' she said in all earnestness, ‘that
none
of this – absolutely none of it – must get
back to the nick. This isn't my little old career we're talking about – God knows I've risked that often enough. We're talking about Jane's. She's new at Leighford and I don't know how Henry rates her.'

‘Discretion, dear heart,' he held the flat of his right hand over his own, ‘is my middle name. Anyway, Jane has been wonderfully indiscreet with me already.'

‘Oh?' she arched an eyebrow in the way she'd seen him do. ‘Anything I should know about, due to my slight indisposition?'

‘She told me Martita Winchcombe was murdered.'

‘Oh, that.'

‘How are the chips?' he said, through a mouthful of his own.

‘Divine,' she assured him. ‘You do a mean chip, Peter Maxwell.'

‘It was touch and go when I was a lad,' he told her, ‘whether I'd go to Cambridge or the Tante Marie. I often feel I lost my calling there somewhere.'

‘Believe me,' she reached for her tea. ‘You didn't.'

‘So, what of the Treasurer of the Arquebus?'

‘Tripwire across the stairs.'

‘Nasty. When?'

‘Tuesday night. Astley estimates between nine and twelve.'

‘So when Bed and George found her…'

‘She'd been dead for about twenty-four hours or just over.'

‘Rigor on its way out?'

‘I
am
having my lunch, Max,' she reminded him.

‘So am I.' He spread his arms wide. ‘I still feel like a bit of a shit shopping those two; George especially. What did you say they'll get?'

‘Time off for good behaviour,' Jacquie told him. ‘George has no form at all and there'll be an army of social workers and child psychologists all over Anthony telling us how society has let him down and offering him holidays in the Seychelles, courtesy of the taxpayer. I don't know about you, but I can't sleep sometimes because of it.'

Maxwell tutted and shook his head. ‘So young, so cynical,' he said. ‘And you about to be the mother of my baby.'

‘Jane'll be coming to talk to you tomorrow.'

‘Will she? Why?'

‘You were one of the last people to talk to the old girl – at the theatre.'

‘Well, it was hardly a conversation,' Maxwell shrugged. ‘Wait a minute – tomorrow's Monday.'

She reached across and patted his cheek. ‘Not just a pretty face,' she smiled, adding a little more brown sauce.

‘No, I mean…is she coming to school?'

‘Of course,' Jacquie smiled. ‘Maximum disruption. Rattle you, annoy your colleagues, intrigue the kids. It's what we do, we upholders of the law, Max, you know that. You wouldn't have us any other way. Pass that ketchup, will you? I've still got a couple of chips left. Anything for pud?' 

‘So,' Dan Bartlett leaned back in the snug of the Volunteer, one of the more upmarket watering holes that Leighford now boasted as part of its Regeneration scheme. ‘Tell me about Oxford.'

‘Oh, Lord,' Deena Harrison snorted, toying with her ciggie and Long Slow Screw. ‘I'd rather put all that behind me.'

‘Really? Some people dine out on Oxbridge. Take that Maxwell fellow, for instance. Still wears the bloody scarf, though he must have been an undergraduate when they opened the place.'

‘Max?' Deena smiled. ‘He's an old sweetie. It was under his auspices I tried for Oxford in the first place. Trust me, he's one of the good guys.'

‘If you say so. I'm afraid I can't see it, myself.'

‘Where did you go?'

Dan Bartlett extended his longish neck still further. ‘Rose Bruford,' he said.

Deena smiled. Further comment seemed superfluous. ‘Oxford was so twelve months ago,'
she said. ‘Full of pretentious people all trying to outdo each other. Pitiful, really.'

‘Hmm,' Bartlett nodded. ‘Rose Bruford was like that. Luvvies to a man.'

Now, if truth were told, Deena Harrison had Dan Bartlett down for a luvvie. He wore a dark crocheted scarf of ludicrous length, a long leather coat and a silly peaked cap which made him look like a cross between a poor man's Tom Baker out of one of the far too many reincarnations of Dr Who and Roman Polanski in his Sixties heyday.

‘How long have you been at the Arquebus?'

‘Oh, my dear,' Bartlett raised both eyebrows. ‘For ever. Whatever you do with your life, don't end up in am dram. It's fatal.'

‘It certainly seems to be,' she said. ‘What with Mr Goodacre and that nice old Miss Winchcombe.'

Bartlett's smile could have curdled milk. ‘My dear,' he hissed, ‘nice has nothing to do with it. She was a venomous old toad who made the lives of several perfectly pleasant people Hell on earth. I wouldn't have wished her dead, of course, but I can't help thinking the curve of the stairs did us all a favour.'

He squeezed himself nearer to her on the pretext of people pushing past to the bar and that gave him a better angle to gaze at her cleavage.

‘What about Mr Goodacre?' Deena asked, fully aware of Bartlett's line of vision. ‘Was he horrible too?'

‘Gordon?' Bartlett sipped his G'n'T with an elegance learned of too many play launches and not enough plays. ‘Hardly knew him. But you know yourself, theatres are dangerous places.'

His arm had crept along the back of her seat. She noticed it, let him know she'd noticed it and smiled. ‘You're right,' she said. ‘They can be. Well,' she checked her watch, ‘I'd better be getting home.'

‘Home?' Bartlett repeated. ‘Surely not. The night is young.'

‘Can we go on somewhere?' she asked, looking up a little breathlessly into his mahogany tanned face.

‘What had you in mind?' he asked. Dan Bartlett was on familiar territory. The old charm hardly ever failed. Even so, this one did seem a trifle easy to get.

She licked her lips and jutted her breasts at him, cocking her head to one side. ‘How about your place?' she asked and ran her hand obligingly over his crotch.

Bartlett swallowed hard, thinking how lucky the girl was. ‘Er…yes. Yes, of course.' And he necked his G'n'T in one. ‘Fancy a pizza on the way?'

‘No.' She barely recognised it as her own voice at first. ‘No, I don't want to go there. Not there. You can't make me.'

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 screamed. And then the darkness.

‘Tell me about Charles Stuart, then, Jason.'

The sound, again, of silence. It was Tuesday morning. Lesson One. Aitch Four was Maxwell's classroom. Posters of Adi Hitler and Joe Stalin, those old chums well known to every secondary school child in the land in the twenty-first century, decorated the walls. There was a world map, too, on the grounds that Geography teaching had failed generations of children abysmally and nobody but Maxwell knew where anywhere was any more. There was a picture of Nelson walking down some steps; another one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel smoking a cheroot, with his hands on his lapels, looking pretty damn smug and self-made in front of the anchor chains of the Great Eastern. Even Winston Churchill, God rot him, was up there. There was no sign of Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. That was because Peter Maxwell was teaching British History at the moment and had forgotten to take down Adi and Joe. In Maxwell's classes, you left your political correctness, along with your pointless baseball cap and idiotic skateboard, at the door.

Jason took all this in through tunnel vision. None of the pictures was helping at all. Why, why,
why, he wondered, and not for the first time, did Mad Max pick on him? That dick-nose Carter hadn't been listening either, so it couldn't have been that. That tart Joanne was texting under the desk like a maniac, so that couldn't have been the reason either. No, it was just pure, old-fashioned picking on, that's why he did it.

‘He was a king,' Jason offered.

The Great Man hovered at his elbow, looming over him like the sword of Damocles Jason knew nothing about. ‘Spot on, my old Argonaut. I don't suppose you remember his number at all?'

‘Er…'

‘Sir! Sir!' Lobelia's hand was in the air again. Maxwell – and indeed the rest of Eight Eff Four – didn't know why she didn't just keep it up permanently, perhaps in a splint. But Mad Max wasn't looking for answers; he was looking for attention. Not because, like most of the little horrors in their seats in Aitch Four, he was a sociopath and misfit who craved it, but because he had that long ago discredited idea that it was his job, nay his duty, to thump some learning into their empty heads.

‘So, what are we talking about, Mr Carter?' Mad Max could spin on his heel for England and Charlie Carter was caught in mid-daydream. Maxwell lifted the
Biking
magazine from the child's lap. ‘Ah, a counterfactual hypothesis, I see, in that it has precisely nothing to do with History. Just so that
your civil liberties aren't infringed, I will refrain from tearing this up before your very eyes, Charles. You will, nevertheless, not see it until the end of the day – and that only if you report to my office to collect it.'

‘Yes, Mr Maxwell.' Charlie Carter was secretly seething. It was only Lesson One and he had another five to go without his
Biking
mag. Could he survive?

‘And what have we here?' Maxwell had whirled again, like the Dervish he was, and held out his hand for Joanne's mobile phone. At first, she toyed with stashing it away, but the mad old bastard would only tip her upside down until it fell out onto the floor, so she meekly passed it to him. ‘Just as I thought,' the Great Man nodded. ‘“I go fm a cptble to an incptble cwn, wh no dstbnce can b, no distbnce in th wld.” Excellent, Joanne. A text version of Charles I's last words from the scaffold, delivered at the king's palace of Whitehall on January 30 1649. How imaginative of you.' He closed to her, invading her privacy, scaring the bejazus out of her. ‘You will, nevertheless, have to live without this gadget for the rest of the week.'

‘The week?' Joanne was incensed. ‘But you only took Carter's magazine for the day.'

‘I can read a
Biking
mag in a day,' Maxwell explained. ‘It'll take me five to work out how this little gizmo works. And it's all about punishment fitting the crime, my pet. Give me an innocent,
healthy, boyish
Biking
mag any day of the week over one of these instruments of Satan.' As usual, nobody knew what he was talking about.

There was a knock at the door. It was the one he'd been expecting. Paul Moss, Maxwell's
long-suffering
Head of History, stood there, all newly spiked hair and corduroy jacket. Paul was a bit of a cipher really. Oh, he was fine on target setting and lesson dynamics and group hugs, but if anybody wanted to know any history, they went to Peter Maxwell. ‘Mr Maxwell, you have a visitor.'

‘Ah, yes. Mr Moss, I shouldn't be long. Could you hold the front line here for me, please? Lobelia over there has the lowdown on King Charles I and why he managed, over a fifteen- year period, to piss off just about everybody in England.' He beamed at the class as he reached the door. ‘And I
shall
be asking questions again when I return,' he said. He winked at Moss and bounded down the corridor, past the fluttering notices of September, the reminders that ski-trip money was overdue and that Afterbirth were performing at the Stag on Naughties Night. That was one Maxwell was determined not to miss.

A short, freckled, dark-haired detective stood inside his office, fairly gobsmacked by the sheer wealth of film postery around the walls.

‘Jane.' He reached down to kiss her hand. ‘How lovely to see you.'

‘Cut the crap, Max,' she scowled, allowing the
physicality only on sufferance. ‘This is official.'

‘You know,' he smiled, ‘I could have done with you in my Joe Stalin re-enactment lesson last week. The uniform's wrong, but the attitude's spot on.' He made for the kettle. ‘Are you officially allowed to have a cup of coffee?'

‘No, thanks. When did you last see Martita Winchcombe?'

‘Er…' he invited her to sit down on the excruciating County furniture and flopped onto his own chair. ‘The night before she died, I suppose. That would be last Monday.'

‘Where was this?' Jane had her notebook poised. She was an attractive woman, with her coal-black hair and large, brown eyes. She seemed to have a broom up her arse this morning however, a reminder of how a woman can turn on a sixpence, whatever that used to be.

‘At the Arquebus Theatre,' Maxwell told her.

‘What did she say? As exactly as you can.'

‘Look…Jane,' Maxwell could see the end of his tether looming. ‘…the other day you were sweetness and light. You kindly gave me a lift, asked after Jacquie. You were even moderately indiscreet in confiding that Martita was murdered. I live with your best friend, Goddammit.'

‘What point are you trying to make, Max? I'm just doing my job,' she said.

He stood up. ‘So am I,' he said. ‘It's called teaching. And you're keeping me from it.'

‘All right.' Her voice checked him at the door. ‘All right. I'm sorry. I'm being… Look, this is a little difficult. You were possibly one of the last people to see her alive.'

Maxwell relented. Everybody was a little on edge this morning. What with murder and Eight Eff Four…come to think of it, those terms did tend to blend a little. He wandered to the settee and sat close to his interrogator. ‘Let's start again, then,' he said. ‘What do you need?'

‘What do you remember about your conversation? Did anything strike you as odd?'

He of the total recall kicked into action. ‘Well, she introduced herself. We did the British thing and whinged about the weather. As soon as she realised that I taught within these hallowed portals, her demeanour changed completely. She didn't approve of children, or indeed anybody much under seventy. She was a little mutt, if I remember rightly. It was only a fleeting chat at best, but…'

‘Yes?' Even for her tender years, Jane Blaisedell was good at nuances, inflections, dots. She was like Jacquie Carpenter through a funny mirror; one of those they used to have down on the Front before electronic gamesmanship took over and people only laughed if electronic blood spurted all over the screen.

‘Well, all this was on the way into the theatre. I spent the best part of twenty years sitting through a committee meeting and met her again on the way out.'

‘You mean she wasn't in the meeting?'

‘No. I assumed she had other fish to fry. I was just leaving the Arquebus when she collared me. Told me she knew me from the
Advertiser
's
always-inaccurate
stories as something of a sleuth.'

Jane Blaisedell's face said it all.

‘Yes, yes.' He caught it. ‘I know. None of my business. Civilians keep out. I know the drill. Anyway, she told me that Gordon Goodacre's death wasn't an accident. She said that someone killed him.'

‘Did she say who?' Jane couldn't believe her job could be
this
simple.

‘No, we were interrupted at that point and the world moved on. I had a sou'westerly to face cycling home.'

‘But it got you snooping anyway?'

Maxwell shrugged. ‘You know me,' he said. ‘Can't keep an incorrigibly, morbidly macabre man down.'

‘Who interrupted you?' Jane wanted to know. She still wasn't smiling.

‘The theatre's Artistic Director, Dan Bartlett.'

The Artistic Director, Dan Bartlett, lay on the floor in his sprawling bungalow on the edge of Tottingleigh, where the South Downs began and suburbia ended. He was stark naked and stiff as a board and SOCO men in white coats and masks flitted around him like extras in a Sci-fi film. One
of them was Jim Astley and he was secretly wishing he hadn't overdone it on the golf course the other day because he was kneeling down and his sciatica was killing him.

‘This is a weird one, Henry,' he nodded as the familiar square face of the DCI appeared around the door. ‘Electrocution.'

‘Talk me through it.' Hall had Tom O'Connell at his elbow that Wednesday morning, mechanically going through the note-taking. Giles Finch-Friezely was still in the van outside, swapping his day clothes for the SOCO whites. Cameras were flashing, measurements being taken. Men dabbed paintbrushes on door frames, window catches. Others scraped samples from carpets. Nobody had been told yet to dig over the garden, but the spades were ready in the van, just in case.