Maxwell’s Movie

by M. J. Trow

  ‘All right, all right,’ Maxwell said softly, raising both his hands to calm the boy down. ‘If you won’t do either of those things, then just sit tight here, just for a day or two. I need the time to think.’

  Ronnie sat down again. ‘You won’t … you won’t turn me in, Mr Maxwell?’ he asked. ‘Over to the law, I mean? I ain’t done nothing, you know that.’

  ‘Yes, Ronnie,’ Maxwell nodded, looking the frightened boy in the face, ‘I know that.’

  Peter Maxwell was vaguely surprised that Ronald Parsons senior had an answerphone. When he rang the number that Thursday, he understood the reason. The man’s monotone spoke of building jobs. He wasn’t in at the moment, but the caller could leave a message after the tone. The caller didn’t. He told Ronnie junior to stay away from the window, saddled White Surrey and pedalled into the gathering gloom.

  All day he’d seen them – the photocopies of Ronnie’s last school photo. Plastered all over town – ‘Missing. Ronnie Parsons. If anyone has any information on this boy’s whereabouts …’ The eyes in the photo burned into his, like those of Carly Drinkwater and Georgianna Morris and Alice Goode and Jean Hagger. The eyes of the dead and the damned.

  He rang the doorbell at Rondo. There were lights on in the living room and the kitchen at the side. There was a rattling of lock. A solid, swarthy face peered around the door. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Peter Maxwell, Mr Parsons. Can I come in?’

  Parsons scanned the road. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a word.’

  ‘I’ve had bloody coppers here all day. Not to mention the fucking press. I’d like a bit of peace now, if it’s all right with you.’

  ‘Do the police know where Ronnie is?’ Maxwell was prepared to slog it out on Parsons’ front doorstep if he had to.

  ‘If they did, they wouldn’t be asking us, would they?’ the man snarled.

  ‘Is your wife in?’ Maxwell tried another tack. Ronald Parsons was a brick wall, but Dorothy was the chink in it.

  He watched Parsons’ face darken. ‘Piss off!’ the builder growled and he started to close the door. Maxwell was faster, for all his aches and pains, and his foot stopped it. ‘Why did you beat Ronnie up, Mr Parsons?’ he asked loudly. ‘Not just once, I mean, but systematically?’

  Parsons opened the door again, straightening. ‘Who says I did?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Ronnie does.’ Maxwell removed his foot from the builder’s doormat. He stepped back and tipped his hat. ‘It’s been … an experience, Mr Parsons,’ he said.

  Ronnie was still asleep in Maxwell’s spare room the next morning when the doorbell rang. The rain was drifting in from the west, as Suzanne Charlton had predicted it would, with the aid of several million pounds of sophisticated equipment and a bit of seaweed. The face under the rainhat was a picture of fear and grief. Dorothy Parsons.

  ‘I can’t stop, Mr Maxwell,’ she said, ‘I’m on my way to work. Ron doesn’t know I’m here.’

  Maxwell opened the door for her and she stood awkwardly, dripping onto his carpet. ‘Let me take your coat,’ he said.

  ‘No, really. I’ll be late. And … I don’t want Ron to know I’ve been here. He’d … well, he wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘At least come up,’ Maxwell offered, ‘into the lounge.’

  She climbed the stairs, but wouldn’t take the seat he proffered.

  ‘Last night,’ she said, ‘when you called, I was there. I wanted to talk to you, but … Is there any news, Mr Maxwell? Have you heard anything? Anything at all? Every night, I just sit by the phone and cry. Ron’s sick of it. He just goes out. Goes to the yard. Or his club. Oh, the police are as kind as they can be. But … well, this other teacher, this Mrs Hagger. They think Ronnie’s involved in that. But he can’t be. I’ve told them he can’t be.’

  ‘Who have you been dealing with?’ Maxwell asked her. ‘In the police, I mean?’

  ‘Urn … there’s an Inspector Hall who’s leading the case apparently, but we’ve had most to do with a Sergeant Hennessey and a policewoman.’

  ‘Jacquie Carpenter?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s her. She’s ever so nice. Tells us not to worry and that. But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?’

  Maxwell heard a click upstairs. Damn. He knew all too well what that was.

  ‘Would you excuse me, Mrs Parsons? Sounds like my cat’s up to no good again. I shan’t be a moment.’

  Metternich hadn’t heard the slander, because he was still asleep in the bathroom linen basket. But it wasn’t the bathroom Maxwell was making for. It was Ronnie’s room. But Ronnie wasn’t there. The bedcovers were thrown back, the curtains flapping wide in the unseasonable weather. Maxwell grabbed the window catch so that the whole thing wouldn’t crash back in the wind and shatter glass. There was no sign of Ronnie Parsons. The sprinter had gone, out onto the silver birch branch of Mrs Troubridge’s tree, down over her hedge and snaking off down Columbine Avenue, through the still-waking estate, making for anywhere, nowhere.

  ‘Shit!’ Maxwell hissed, bolted the window and rejoined the boy’s mother.

  ‘Sorry about that.’ He did his best to smile. Difficult when your heart’s on the floor.

  ‘I just wondered if you’d heard anything.’

  For a moment he couldn’t look the woman in the face. He’d never been, by grace of God, a mother. He’d only been a father briefly. What right had he to lie to Dorothy Parsons, whose only fault was that she loved her son? For a moment, he felt his nerve slip, his resolve buckle, then he tossed the moment aside. ‘No,’ he looked at her again. ‘No, not a word.’ And the lie hung between them like poison on the morning air.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’

  The Head of Sixth Form didn’t recognize the voice over the phone.

  ‘Dave Freeman, here, Mr Maxwell. Hamilton’s Coaches.’

  ‘Mr Freeman. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Fine. How’s yourself?’

  ‘Been better actually.’

  ‘Right. Yeah. I was just wondering if you’d taken in the cinema club in Henshaw Street yet?’

  ‘Yes, I did, thanks. McKellan’s Richard III. Excellent.’

  There was a pause. ‘Oh, you went on Wednesday. No, you want to join the club, if you can. Go on Thursday, Mr Maxwell. I think you’d learn something to your advantage.’

  ‘Would I? Hello. Hello. Mr …?’ And Maxwell put the phone down. ‘We can’t go on meeting like this.’

  There was usually a small queue outside Mad Max’s door at Leighford High. Not the brave band of paparazzi who still waited in the drizzle beyond the school gates for any word. More of them beseiged Bishop Billington Junior School where Jean Hagger had recently taught. Phone calls from there and from Leighford to County Hall in Winchester had elicited a measured and careful response from the Chief Education Officer, requesting respect, forbearance. Sadly, they were not words in the vocabulary of the media. And the paparazzi stayed.

  But there was no one outside Mad Max’s office on this Thursday morning. Only a man inside it, chain-smoking. He leapt up at the Great Man’s arrival.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ he inhaled savagely before extending a hand. ‘DS Hennessey,’ and he flicked open his warrant card, ‘I couldn’t find an ashtray.’

  ‘That’s because I don’t smoke.’ Maxwell took the hand and invited the detective to resume his seat. He passed him a particularly revolting yucca, complete with plastic pot. ‘Feel free to flick in there,’ he said, edging himself into his chair. Peter Maxwell had invented body language and he loomed over the detective, across the safety barrier of his desk, across the vantage of the years.

  ‘Er … the young lady on the desk showed me up. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not. What can I do for you, Mr Hennessey?’

  ‘Well,’ the copper reached into his back pocket for his notebook, ‘I’m following up an incident in Soho earlier this month.’

  ‘This is astonishing,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘What
is?’ Hennessey was smiling too.

  ‘Your inter-force after-sales-care service. I thought you blokes were overworked.’

  Hennessey chuckled, flicking the notebook shut. ‘Oh, we are, sir. We are. It’s just that … well, the officer who took your details thought you might have been a little … shall we say overwrought? Didn’t get all the information at the time and when you discharged yourself … well, it was really down to us then.’

  ‘I see.’ Maxwell clasped his hands across his chest. ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘Well,’ Hennessey was still smiling, ‘for a start what the fuck do you think you’re doing with Jacquie Carpenter?’

  ‘Tut, tut,’ Maxwell shook his head slowly, ‘and I thought that sort of language went out with the Sweeney.’

  ‘You know she’s under suspicion, don’t you?’ Hennessey asked.

  Maxwell was more inscrutable than the corpse of Mao Tse Tung, when he wanted to be. Only his fingers tensed. Only his knuckles whitened. His heart and head were screaming. He just hoped Hennessey couldn’t hear. ‘Jacquie Carpenter?’ he said. ‘That’s DC Carpenter?’

  Hennessey leaned forward in the soft plastic chair, one of those salvaged from the sixth-form common room before the neurotic bastards had started pulling the stuffing out of it. He wasn’t smiling now. ‘Look, Maxwell, I know. All right? I’ve seen it happen before. I’ve got a lot of time for Jacquie. She’s a sweet kid, but she can’t take the flak. She lets things get to her. Now she’s cracked, basically. Gone under. Another WPC found her crying in the ladies’ at the nick. Not like you cry when you’ve caught your finger in the door or your budgie dies. The DCI sent her home. Then he sent me round to talk to her. And she told me. She told me all about you.’

  ‘I see.’ Maxwell unbuckled his fingers. ‘So the follow-up from the Met was just a front, then?’

  Hennessey leaned back. ‘It’s all bound up, isn’t it? All part of the same story.’

  ‘You tell me.’ Maxwell could evade with the best of ’em.

  ‘You know,’ Hennessey said, ‘Jacquie speaks highly of you. And that’s the only reason we’re doing this here rather than down the nick. At the very least you’ve been wasting police time. But I think there’s more to it. I think you know something. Something about Alice Goode.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Maxwell asked the younger man.

  Hennessey chuckled coldly. ‘Uh-uh,’ he shook his head. ‘No doubt you’d say it’s a cliché, but I’ll ask the questions.’

  All right,’ Maxwell said, ‘I went on a sleuthing spree at the end of last month. It was such basic detective work, that I expected you boys to have been there before me. I wanted to know something about Alice’s past. Something that might have explained her disappearance and her murder.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Porn. When she was a student, she did modelling for a company in Soho. That’s where I got my beating.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell the Met that?’

  ‘I didn’t think it was any of their business. How is Jacquie?’

  Hennessey shook his head, reaching for another cigarette. ‘I don’t know. The police doctor’s given her something to make her sleep. There’ll have to be an enquiry’

  ‘Into what?’

  ‘Into what she told you.’

  Maxwell saw a loophole yawning before him, a light at the end of the tunnel. ‘What did she tell me?’

  ‘Don’t muck me about, Mr Maxwell. I need to know’

  ‘What if I told you she didn’t tell me anything?’

  Hennessey blinked. ‘We know she came to see you,’ he said. ‘We know you rang her up at home.’

  ‘Aren’t policewomen allowed to have a social life?’ Maxwell asked.

  Hennessey felt the tables turning, ever so slightly. ‘You mean …’

  ‘I mean that Jacquie Carpenter is a very attractive girl. Unattached, I believe. I may not be in her league in the attractiveness stakes – it’s hardly for me to say – but they don’t come any more unattached, believe me.’

  ‘So … Carly Drinkwater? Georgianna Morris?’

  Maxwell frowned, a smile playing over his lips. ‘Who?’ he asked.

  It was Hennessey’s turn to smile, ‘You’ve never heard of them, I suppose.’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘You hear a lot of names in my profession, sergeant. I shudder to think how many have passed through my hands at one stage or another.’

  Hennessey stood up, ‘If what you’re telling me is true …’ he began.

  ‘Then Jacquie Carpenter’s in the clear, isn’t she? Not very well, perhaps, in need of a rest, certainly, but her job’s not in jeopardy, is it?’ Maxwell stood up too.

  ‘No,’ Hennessey smiled. ‘No, I wouldn’t think it was.’

  There was a jarring electronic clanging in the corridor outside. ‘Ah, la damn bell sans merci,’ he said, ‘Now, unless you want to hear Thomas Jefferson lying through his teeth in the Declaration of Independence with Year 12, I’m going to have to love you and leave you. Well,’ he smiled broadly, ‘leave you, anyway.’

  11

  Maxwell’s confirmation came through the next day. The Travellers, the Conservative, the Cavalry, Boodles – one by one they’d blackballed him, but the Leighford film club’s doors were open wide. For a mere £200 p.a. he could attend their monthly meetings on Thursday evenings in that pokey little place in Henshaw Street behind the bus station.

  ‘There’s an old piano,’ he found himself crooning to Metternich, ‘and they play it hot behind the green door. Frankie Vaughan, Count, a singing star of my youth, when you weren’t even a twinkle in your great-grandfather’s eye.’

  ‘Wass all this, then?’ Mrs B. had a devastating line in originality italicized all the more by the thud of her size nines on Maxwell’s stairs. She was holding up a fairly revolting T-shirt with the words ‘Pearl Jam’ scrawled all over it. A boy’s T-shirt. Ronnie Parsons’.

  ‘Where did you find that, Mrs B?’ Maxwell’s grin was frozen as a Tesco chicken.

  ‘Stuffed down behind the bed in your spare room,’ she told him, waving it about.

  ‘What the devil was it doing there?’ Maxwell wondered aloud.

  ‘Is it yours, Mr Maxwell?’ The cleaning-lady had her doubts.

  ‘Please, Mrs B.,’ the Head of Sixth Form frowned, ‘if it were mine it would have “Perry Como” on the front. No, I found it at school the other day and, without thinking, popped it in my briefcase. I keep meaning to take it to Lost Property.’

  ‘But there’s blood all over it.’

  ‘Blood?’ Maxwell crossed the living room to her. The old girl was right. On the left sleeve and in short, sharp dashes across the chest, brown stains. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ve seen enough in my time,’ she said. ‘Mr B. used to play for Leighford Rovers. ‘’E was always comin’ ’ome with blood on ’isself. Looked just like that. What are these kids doing up at the school, Mr Maxwell? Killin’ each other?’

  Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall didn’t like working Saturdays. Perhaps it was only rabbis who did. He didn’t like it even more when things didn’t add up. And that particular Saturday in the middle of May, he was like a man with no batteries in his calculator, no beads on his abacus. And the sour face of Dick Hennessey didn’t help.

  ‘Will this take long?’ he asked.

  ‘Hope not, guv,’ Hennessey said. ‘I was just wondering about Jacquie.’

  Hall looked at his man. ‘No comment, Dick,’ he said.

  ‘The boys … well, no, I was wondering what the score was.’

  ‘The score is that she discussed confidential matters with a member of the public. That’s the subject of an internal enquiry. Until that takes place, she’s under suspension.’

  ‘Can I go and see her?’

  ‘I wouldn’t, Dick,’ Hall advised. He’d seen men go this way before. The contamination of corruption. It was like a computer virus, but more deadly and more difficult to stamp out. ‘Keep
your nose clean. Let internal affairs handle it.’

  ‘But she’s not well, guv …’

  Henry Hall wasn’t given to outbursts of any kind. He hadn’t shown an emotion since he was six and he was damned if he was going to start now. But he took off his rimless glasses and threw them down on his desk, the desk cluttered with the paperwork of two murders. ‘Off the record,’ he said, ‘I know perfectly well she isn’t well. But which came first, Dick? The chicken or the egg? Did she blab to Joe Public and is she shamming to cover her tracks? Or is she genuine and did she blab out of confusion or whatever private Hell she may be in? Am I qualified to judge that? Are you?’

  Hennessey took a chance. ‘What about Peter Maxwell?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’ Hall took up his glasses again.

  ‘It’s common knowledge, guv,’ Hennessey said. ‘Everybody in the nick knows it was him she talked to.’

  ‘Do they now?’ Hall doubted it. He had talked to Jacquie Carpenter, on her own. It was his distinct impression that she’d told no one else. ‘Well, we know Mr Maxwell of old, don’t we? The Sherlock Holmes of Leighford High. He can’t help himself

  ‘What if he says Jacquie didn’t talk to him?’ Hennessey was looking for a way out, the same one that Maxwell had taken. A lifebelt to throw to Jacquie, floundering in life’s seas as she was.

  ‘If Mr Maxwell says the Queen of England is Elizabeth II, I’d like to check it first,’ Hall said. ‘I’m afraid our Mr Maxwell has the right end in sight, but his ways and means bother me.’

  ‘He’s a liar?’ Hennessey didn’t know the man as well as Hall did.

  ‘Let’s say he’s capable of bending the truth,’ Hall nodded.

  The phone rang for the umpteenth time that morning.

  ‘Hall. What? Where? Good. No. Incident Room. Number Two. Do his parents know? Good. Keep it that way for now’ He hung up. ‘The missing link, Dick.’ The sergeant thought he saw his DCI smile, but it was obviously a trick of the light. ‘We’ve found Ronnie Parsons.’ And he grabbed his jacket and made for the door.

  The missing link. Dick Hennessey knew that story. If DCI Hall was talking about the Piltdown skull, the missing link between ape and man, then that was a hoax. This missing link was a lie.