by M. J. Trow
‘Was it?’
‘Well, I don’t know about your day, mate, but in mine we didn’t have any women teachers. To be honest, I was astonished at the way he was talking to her.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Well, taking liberties, you know. They were sitting behind me, over there. That other teacher and the sixth-form girl sat there, across the aisle. Course, you can’t hear complete conversations, but I picked up the odd snippet here and there. Sounded to me like he was chatting her up. And the thing was, she was loving every minute of it. Wouldn’t have done in my day.’
‘Nor mine,’ agreed Maxwell. ‘Is that what you meant by peculiar?’
‘Well, yes, that and the disappearing act. Mean, that other teacher lost them both in the museum, didn’t she? By the time I come to get them, she was running around in circles. Damn near disappearing herself, up her own backside.’
Maxwell thought it best for the moment to laugh with the idiot. He might remember more in congenial company.
‘It’s like that film, isn’t it?’ Freeman went on. ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock. Did you ever see that?’
‘Yes, I did.’ Maxwell beamed. Could this be a kindred spirit, working for Hamilton’s? ‘One of my favourite films, in fact.’
‘No, really?’ Freeman laughed. ‘Mine too. There’s something mystic about it, isn’t there? Something indefinable. Do you know, when I went to see that in the cinema, I just sat there at the end, riveted. I hadn’t noticed everybody else filing out.’
‘That’s extraordinary,’ Maxwell said. ‘That’s exactly what I did. Started getting funny looks from the usherette in the end. Where did you see it?’
‘Er … Brighton. You?’
‘Here in Leighford. Well, well, well.’
‘Sort of fitting, really, isn’t it?’ Freeman said.
‘What?’
‘Well, a film like that, where people disappear on a school outing. And here we have people disappearing on an outing to a museum of film.’
‘Know the museum well?’ Maxwell asked.
Freeman shrugged, reaching into his overalls for a cigarette. ‘Not really. Oh, I’ve been in once or twice; you know, with kids. Great place. I’m not too ashamed to admit I climbed inside the Dalek and made “Exterminate” noises.’
Maxwell extended his hand again, ‘A chip off the old block,’ he said, delightedly, ‘I did exactly the same thing.’
‘Bloody marvellous. Look, what’s your favourite film; ever, I mean?’
‘Er … oh, God.’ Maxwell gnawed his lip. ‘Difficult one, that. Charge of the Light Brigade, I think – the Tony Richardson version.’
‘Yeah, brilliant,’ Freeman enthused. ‘One or two dodgy bits of direction though.’
‘Charles Woods’s dialogue made it for me.’
‘Shame about the red trousers for the whole Brigade.’
‘Mr Freeman,’ Maxwell asked after a pause, ‘you’re not a wind-up, are you?’
‘You what?’ the driver looked confused.
‘It’s just that we’ve got an Ofsted Inspection coming up soon and I wondered if you were some sort of advanced guard sent ahead to catch me out.’
‘No,’ Freeman chuckled.
‘Well, it’s not many people know that only the 11th Hussars wore crimson overalls. Presumably, Richardson had them all dressed that way for reasons of cost.’
‘Blimey!’ Freeman stubbed his ciggie out on the floor. ‘Overalls. I’ve got to get these hydraulics sorted this morning or I’ll be an usherette by tomorrow’ He stood up, ‘Look, Mr Maxwell, I’m sorry I can’t help with your little problem. If anything occurs, can I reach you?’
‘You certainly can,’ Maxwell said, ‘I’m in the book. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got a better video collection than John Paul Getty, so if you ever want to come and share the one-and-nines with me …’
Freeman shook his hand again, ‘You may have made me an offer there I am powerless to refuse,’ he said.
As a kid, which essentially he still was, Peter Maxwell had always hated Sundays. It was the day his mother had done the washing, and he never popped his head out of the covers on a Sunday morning without smelling that starchy, ironing smell and hearing the thrub of thumbs on skiffle board. Those are the memories you have when your mother was Lonnie Donegan.
He heard the bells of St Olave’s clanging somewhere beyond the neat lawns of the estate where the proverbial English were resolutely ignoring the call to prayer and starting on the important things like tinkering with their cars and watering their flowerbeds before Southern Water got serious with a hosepipe ban. Driest April since records began, they claimed. But they claimed this sort of thing like some people claimed benefits.
He spent the morning ploughing through the timed essays that the A-level historians had offered him rather as ancient man had given sacrifices to his gods. But there was no appeasing Mad Max, no dodging his thunderbolts. Just the deadly aim of his pen, circling bad grammar, unsplitting split infinitives, ridding the land of the ever-present apostrophe. And from these things there was no escape.
Lunch was a cheddar ploughman’s at The Green Man, washed down with a pint of his host’s best. Then back to Columbine Avenue, where most men of his age would doze over the Sunday papers or snore their way through the Sunday match. Peter Maxwell put on his video of Picnic at Hanging Rock and watched with growing fascination as the Pan pipes and sunlight played on those weird stones and the lovely, frothy girls who vanished among them. Ronnie Parsons had gone that way, drawn into the magic of MOMI, and Alice Goode had followed him. Or was it the other way round? They had vanished into the whirring spools, become invisible in the subliminal scenes.
He was just staring at the dead face of Rachel Roberts, lying in the shattered glass of the school conservatory, when the doorbell rang. He checked the clock. Half past four. Not likely to be a Jehovah’s Witness. The last one had run away screaming after half an hour’s diatribe from Mad Max. He put his slippers on and flopped downstairs from the living room. Through the distortion of his front door glass, he could make out a woman’s shape.
‘Woman Policeman Carpenter.’ He bowed low as he held the door open to her.
‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that,’ she said, glancing nervously from side to side, ‘Jacquie. Call me Jacquie.’
All right … Jacquie,’ said Maxwell. ‘Is this a social call?’ The girl was wearing jeans and a dark blouse, utterly unlike the office efficiency uniform she’d worn last night. Her hair reached her shoulders and there was a holdall in her hand. ‘Should I get my piggy bank down for your collection for the police benevolent fund?’
Her eyes smouldered at him. ‘Do you ever drop that irritating front of yours?’ she asked.
‘All right,’ he said, the smile gone. ‘Consider it dropped. What do you want, Jacquie? What are you doing here?’
‘What am I doing here?’ She found the second question easier to answer than the first. ‘I’m putting my career on the line, that’s what I’m doing here.’
Maxwell’s smile was back, and broader and bigger than before. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in that case you’d better come in.’
5
‘From the beginning, then,’ Jacquie Carpenter said, rummaging in the holdall that served as her handbag off duty. ‘I shouldn’t show you these. I shouldn’t even tell you about them.’
‘Would you like some tea?’ Maxwell asked. It looked as though the girl needed something to steady her, some reassurance.
Jacquie looked at him. ‘You haven’t got anything stronger?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ he smiled, ‘I’m a Southern Comfort man, myself
‘Fine,’ she said and he clattered about in his drinks cabinet. ‘You realize that what I’m about to tell you is absolutely confidential?’
Maxwell looked at her. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘inscrutability is my middle name. By the way, you’d better call me Max if we’re going to be working together.’
‘Who said anything ab
out working together?’ Jacquie sat upright.
‘Nobody,’ Maxwell beamed, swiftly, ‘nobody at all.’
She snapped shut her file and stuffed it back into her bag. ‘I can’t do this,’ she said and she stood up to go.
‘Wait,’ Maxwell was standing with her, ‘if this was a movie, I’d stop you with a kiss now, wouldn’t I? Cut to steamy sex scene.’
Jacquie Carpenter looked at him in an old-fashioned way. ‘As this isn’t a movie, try anything like that and you’ll have an extra pair of tonsils, followed by a charge of assaulting a police officer.’
‘Well, fine,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘I just like to know my parameters, you know – just in case.’
She stood there for a moment, facing him. Then she collapsed into giggles and sat down. ‘All right.’ She took the glass from him as he sat beside her. ‘But you breathe a word about this to anyone and I’m finished.’ Her smile had gone. ‘Now let’s get on with it before I change my mind again.’
‘I’m sitting comfortably.’ He sat back and raised his glass to her. ‘You may begin.’
‘Carly Drinkwater,’ she said, ‘a twenty-year-old student,’ she placed a black and white photograph on Maxwell’s coffee table, ‘from the London School of Economics.’
Maxwell crossed himself. ‘God save us,’ he muttered. ‘By the way, are these the things you shouldn’t be showing me?’
She looked at him, out of touch with the depth of his academic snobbery, ‘Yes. And He didn’t save her. She was found dead on waste ground in Raines Park two years ago. She’d been raped and strangled.’
Maxwell looked at the dead girl, the clear eyes, the warm smile, the everything-to-live-for in her face.
‘Unsolved,’ Jacquie said. ‘Incident Room closed down.’
‘You mean, you’ve just given up?’
‘I mean,’ she told him, ‘you can only do so much. The Met is the most public institution in the world. It’s also one of the busiest forces in the world. Do you remember this case?’
‘No.’ Maxwell shrugged.
‘Well, there you are. She was somebody’s daughter, Max. She could have been yours.’
He looked at the photograph again and for a moment a little girl sat smiling back at him. His own little girl, Jenny, two and a half. Then there was a roar of screaming tyres and he wrenched himself back to the safety of the here and now.
‘I expect you read about it in the papers,’ Jacquie was saying, ‘You saw it on the news. Crimewatch did a piece on it. But it was just another statistic, wasn’t it? To you, to Joe Public. But to the blokes – and the women – who worked on this, it was more than that. Far more. You had to be there. To pick up the pieces of somebody’s life. I’ve been to murder scenes like the one they found her in. It’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. She’d have looked like a broken doll. Naked. Sodden with rain. The rats had already taken bits of her. And people ask why the police want the death penalty brought back.’
There was a silence. ‘How do I feel?’ Maxwell said at last.
‘The investigating officers tried all the usual angles. There was a boyfriend, um …’ she rummaged through her notes, ‘a Kenneth Cassidy. They’d had a row’
‘Ah …’
‘Apparently not.’ She saw the way his mind was working and shook her head, ‘He was eliminated. Watertight alibi. He was distraught, the report says. Either he was genuine or a bloody marvellous actor. The irony was, she’d gone off in a huff to the cinema immediately after their row. That was the last time he’d seen her.’
‘He identified the body?’
‘No. That’s done by next of kin wherever possible. Her father did that. Didn’t want to put his wife through it.’
‘I don’t really see …’
‘That was March two years ago.’ Jacquie produced a second photograph, ‘This is June of last year. Georgianna Morris, twenty-three. What do you notice?’
Maxwell placed the girls’ photographs side by side. ‘My God,’ he murmured, ‘they could be sisters.’
‘They could. And who do you suppose their third sister is?’
He blinked at her. Jacquie would have to help him. ‘OK, so they’ve both got chestnut hair and their eyes are grey. You can’t tell that from these photos. Fuller lips, perhaps …’
‘Alice Goode,’ he said, the penny dropping with a jarring clang.
‘Alice Goode,’ she nodded.
He grabbed her arm. ‘Jacquie, that’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. What a detective!’
‘Yeah,’ she grinned, ‘tell me about it.’
‘So,’ his mind was racing now, ‘what have we got? Three women what?’ and he found himself dangling in mid-hypothesis, already twirling over an abyss that threw his unanswered questions back, like echoes in the night.
‘Slow down,’ she said, ‘you’re running before you can walk. Georgianna Morris was abducted from a cinema in Notting Hill. She’s alive.’
‘Alive?’
‘But traumatized.’
‘Oh.’
‘She was found running in her underwear in a local park. She’d been slashed across the face and forearms, probably with a bread-knife.’
‘Sexual assault?’
‘Attempted. We think the bastard was disturbed.’
‘In all sorts of ways,’ Maxwell agreed.
‘Georgianna couldn’t help apparently. The Met tried everything. We’ve got special officers trained in rape cases, shrinks who aren’t associated with the police directly. They even tried the girl’s priest – she was Catholic. Nothing. She couldn’t remember anything. Not even the film she’d been to see.’
‘Unsolved,’ Maxwell said, gazing at Georgianna Morris through the ambered distortion of his glass.
‘Unsolved.’ She sat back.
‘Even so,’ Maxwell wasn’t one to be defeated so easily, ‘you’re saying there’s a pattern here. Two girls, presumably abducted from cinemas. A third – Alice Goode – from the Museum of the Moving Image. It all fits.’
‘Nothing fits!’ she slammed her file shut. ‘Not in the eyes of my lords and masters, anyway’
‘Oh?’
‘When you’d gone the other night, I did a bit of thinking. You were talking about Alice Goode and I was wrapped up in Ronnie Parsons. So I stood back from it all, saw it from another point of view. I did a bit of digging in the computer. Routine stuff, but I accessed these cases. I thought, what if Alice’s disappearance wasn’t the first one? Well, there was nothing else from the Museum, but I found these two from cinemas.’
‘Look … er … this isn’t some elaborate ploy, is it? I mean, I’m not in the frame, am I?’
‘You were off sick on the day in question,’ she told him. ‘Flu. You had a temperature of 102.’
‘Yes,’ he said, slightly alarmed, ‘yes, I was. How …?’
‘How did we know?’ she smiled. ‘It’s our business to know. We talked to Deirdre Lessing who’d talked to Sylvia Matthews. And please don’t think any the less of them. Casual conversations have taken men to the gallows before now. How do you know which university a kid should apply to? Or why the Russian Revolution started?’
‘Sheer bloody brilliance, I suppose,’ he beamed modestly. ‘When I gave all this to the Chief Inspector, however, he wasn’t impressed.
‘Henry Hall?’ Maxwell knew the man. ‘Well, no, he wouldn’t be.’ Hall was a copper of the new school, University educated, bookish, careful. He and Peter Maxwell instinctively gave each other a wide berth.
‘Why, he asked, has our man changed his MO? Carly was strangled. If Georgianna hadn’t got lucky, she’d probably have been stabbed to death. And why switch to the Museum? Cinemas are so much easier. Dark, secret places with almost no security.’ She sighed. ‘Hall didn’t buy it.’
‘Well, I’m going to,’ Maxwell said.
She looked at him. ‘Good,’ she said.
‘Good?’ he repeated. ‘Woman Policeman Carpenter, do I detect a little trappette here?’
‘Max,’ she leaned towards him, ‘I don’t know if Alice Goode is alive or dead, but I didn’t sleep last night. I don’t know what it is about you. You have a way of … I don’t know … You make people do the out-of-the-ordinary, the unexpected. But I can’t get involved. Not officially. I can do some snooping around, some digging into the files. But that’s all I can do. If my guv’nor says there’s nothing in it, then there’s nothing in it. Nobody likes a maverick in the police. It’s by the book or not at all.’
‘Why, Ma’am,’ Maxwell delivered a devastating James Garner, ‘Maverick’s ma middle name. Now, if we’re not going to have that steamy sex scene, let’s go over all this again.’
Benny Pallister hadn’t had the job long. He’d drifted from one waste of time to another, achieving nothing in particular, except a dedicated sense of aversion to hard work. His idea of a perfect life was lying on his bed at home watching endless videos, the nastier the better. But eventually, his mum had snapped and told him to get off his backside and down the Jobcentre. So here he was that morning as May broke, gazing out over the wild sweep of forest that was the Devil’s Punchbowl. He saw the sun flash on the metal and glass of the traffic, already building up for the morning’s helter-skelter along the A3. For all it was nearly summer, on his slope of the hill the sun had not yet reached and it was still chilly. He pulled his jacket closer round him and hauled the rubbish for the last trek across the car park. The ground fell away sharply to his left. He was just glad he wasn’t still working for Sainsburys and having to wrestle with twenty trolleys at an angle like this. The green Mercedes was already there, parked under the patio where the braver diners downed their prawn cocktails and poire Helene of an evening. What a total shit Piers was, he thought again, as he did every time he saw the man or his car. Piers! What a poncy bloody name. And the bugger was mean. He toyed with slashing the bastard’s tyres, except that the windows of the Ladle looked out over the car park and you never knew who was watching.
He stuffed the fag back in his mouth and whistled to himself as he reached the bins. Mechanically, he slid back the lid and emptied the black plastic bag.
