by M. J. Trow
Imagine his horror then when a girlie he’d been drooling over for nearly two years in celluloid turned up dead by his back door. The irony was that that was why he’d come down to Leighford tonight, not to watch, but to have it out with Dee. Some bastard had deliberately dumped that poor girl’s body where he could be implicated. And it had to be someone at the club. Stewart had wrestled with it, chewed it over, whatever analogy you like, but it wouldn’t go away. Who? Maxwell had asked. Stewart had shrugged. He didn’t know anyone capable of murder. People at the club just before he’d stopped going regularly had talked about snuff movies – you know, where they actually killed people. Stewart didn’t want to know about any of that.
To Peter Maxwell, that was an urban myth, like choking Dobermen. To Piers Stewart, it seemed highly real. But then, presumably, to Piers Stewart, Alice Goode was grinding her crotch against him.
Maxwell maintained the policeman myth to the very end. It was very much on a need-to-know basis and Piers Stewart, a rather sad and frightened man for all his green Mercedes and his righteousness, didn’t need to know the truth about Peter Maxwell. The Head of Sixth Form made his excuses and left.
In the car park, he took his time adjusting his cycle clips under the stars. It would be June tomorrow and Alice Goode had been dead for six weeks. Time to cross a few t’s and dot a few i’s. At least put in a few full stops. He’d start with the club. He saddled White Surrey and wobbled past Dick Hennessey, who slithered down in his seat in an attempt to stay out of sight. It didn’t really convince anybody.
The Great Man stepped silently over Metternich the cat a little before two thirty. Not that the Count let him get away with it. The man laughingly known as his master was dressed in a black track suit he’d worn on Mufti Day at school last year, when he’d gone as a Ninja. It didn’t fit him anywhere and the balaclava itched like buggery. Metternich turned away. Maxwell didn’t take White Surrey, resting in the back alley. Instead he padded out of the house and across the lawn, careful not to collide with the rotary clothesline. Damn. That pair of Y-fronts still dangled there like a battle standard. They’d been dangling there since last Monday.
All the back gates along Columbine opened onto a path they used to call a gully in working-class areas when Maxwell was a lad and David Lloyd George was Prime Minister. He felt like a burglar, with his striped vest and bag of swag. ‘Ho-ho for the robbers,’ he heard himself muttering, ‘the cops and the robbers, ho-ho.’ Shit! Why did there have to be a full moon? He kept to the hedge for as long as he could, but it was nearly a mile to the centre of town and there wouldn’t be cover all the way.
About twenty times in the steady stride to the bus station Maxwell nearly changed his mind. To say he had cold feet was an under-statement – they were blocks of ice. It was the glorious first of June, the day that Admiral Howe had trounced the French over two hundred years ago. That only served to remind Maxwell, not only how ridiculous he must have looked, but of the daunting task ahead. He’d never broken into anywhere in his life. Wasn’t the wrong side of fifty-two a little late to start? But he needed the information he suspected lay behind that green door. And the face of Alice Goode spurred him on.
Bus stations by night aren’t the most enticing places. A cat was rummaging in the dustbins at the back of the Asda store as he got there – some ginger oppo of Metternich’s he supposed, although to be fair he was guessing the animal’s sexual orientation. The deckers, double and single of the Leighford and District Bus Company were safely under lock and key in vandal-proof compounds, where the more dissolute members of Leighford High School couldn’t get at them. A dog was barking sporadically somewhere behind the High Street where the shop signs creaked in the summer breeze.
This was ridiculous. He hauled off the balaclava and stuffed it into his pocket. Shit! A car’s headlights circling the tarmac. Maxwell ducked back into the shadows, his back to the wall. He heard the braying from the passenger seats. Pissheads out on the tiles. The car lurched off in the direction of Tottingleigh and the sea. Maxwell reached the green door. It rose above him like the Tower of Babel. He’d seen a kid do this at school. Some herbert in Year Nine whose dad was an old lag. The kid had slipped his way into the examination cupboard, where they kept all the GCSE and A-level papers, just by using his library ticket. It had made Maxwell’s blood run cold at the time, but mercifully the herbert wasn’t the type to want to cheat in exams. He didn’t turn up for them anyway. He was, however, the first name on the police’s list when a couple of computers went walkabout from the school the following term.
Maxwell dropped his credit card at first – damn slippy those Lloyds Bank Gold jobbies. He picked it up in gloved fingers and pressed it into the door jamb. He leaned against it, sliding it up and down, listening for the telltale click. Bugger! Nothing. He wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead – it would all add to the realism if he was stopped and claimed to be a jogger on a midnight run. This was useless. He toyed for a moment with shoulder-barging the door, taking a flying kick at it, smashing through the flimsy woodwork with his trusty torch. Each of those approaches was flawed He’d probably break his shoulder, for all that the wood was flimsy, in which case he’d been in no fit state to drop-kick anything. And as for the torch, well it came free with something so there was no telling how much punishment that would take.
At least he hadn’t been followed. No dark car had begun to crawl behind him, at a nonchalant distance, no echoing feet on the tarmac behind. He looked up at the windows above. Hopeless. He couldn’t even get up there. The drainpipe was yards away, and anyway he’d then have to smash the glass and all these modes d’emploi would bring the entire West Sussex constabulary down on his neck.
He kicked the club’s brickwork for good measure and jogged back home.
Wednesdays were not red-letter days for Peter Maxwell. He’d been up half the night on a wild goose chase and was still feeling murderous at those pompous old hypocrites dribbling over the celluloid writhings of Alice Goode. He vowed that if a kid looked at him funny that morning, he’d kill him.
‘Penny for your thoughts, Max.’ Sylvia Matthews was snatching a rare respite in the safety of the staffroom, well away from the PMT and classroomphobia that filled her day.
‘Ha, Nursie,’ he smiled, emerging from behind his coffee cup, ‘I’m thinking of changing my career.’
‘Oh?’ For a moment, she half believed him and a sudden emptiness yawned before her.
‘Burglary,’ he said. ‘Pays better than teaching.’
‘Ah,’ she smiled, relieved it was just more of Mad Max’s nonsense. ‘But the penalties.’
‘Well, it’s not so much that as the basics. There’s probably a GNVQ course somewhere in sheer wall climbing and jemmying. It’s just that I’m too old to enrol.’
‘Don’t do yourself down,’ she scolded him. ‘Where do you want to break into?’
He flashed her one of his smiles. Perceptive cattle, women, he pondered, but he knew it was more than his life was worth to say so. ‘Nowhere in particular,’ he lied, ‘anywhere.’
‘Can you get into this place legally?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he frowned, ‘but I can’t steal what I want in broad daylight.’
‘No, of course not,’ she flicked open her copy of the Nursing Times, ‘but you’d wait, wouldn’t you?’
‘I would?’
‘Really, Max, I thought you were a Cambridge graduate.’
‘So I am,’ he bridled mischievously, ‘but I didn’t read Quantum Deviousness.’
‘Take the Tower of London,’ she said. ‘You queue along with everyone else and in you go. You ogle all the armour and stuff and then pop to the loo. At closing time they lock you in, you help yourself to the Crown Jewels and when they open up the next morning, you walk out with everybody else. Simple.’
‘You clearly haven’t seen Topkapi, Sylv,’ he sighed, but he was beaming broadly, ‘but I love you anyway.’ He bent to plant a smacking kiss on her forehead.
‘You’ve made a middle-aged man very happy.’
And he didn’t see the look on her face as he left. It was a look of pure joy.
Maxwell couldn’t help chuckling as he queued along with everybody else outside the cinema club that night. Wednesday. Open-to-the-public night. He was chuckling because they were showing Mission Impossible. Now, he’d find out how to break into places. All you really needed was a genius for disguise, several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of sophisticated computer equipment and the backing of the American government and it was simple. He enjoyed the film, but it had to be said he missed the comfortable, craggy face of dear old Peter Graves marshalling his troops. There was a new realism about the Tom Cruise version, a sense of the Establishment cracking, the work coming unglued, which fitted the ’90s – and Peter Maxwell – well. Somehow, in the days of the Cold War, when everybody’s finger was poised on the button, you felt safer. It was just Us and Them. Now it was Us and Everybody Else.
There was no sign of Douglas McSween, nor, naturally, of Piers Stewart. The restaurateur had told Maxwell, just before he threw up in the litter bin, that he had no intention of returning to the club, ever. He wanted his name off the membership list. And it was precisely the membership list that Maxwell was here for. He blessed dear old Sylvia Matthews again, but her scam was flawed. All right, so there’d be no electronic devices to worry about in this building, but the next time it was open to anybody was in a week from now, next Wednesday, ready for the next Open-to-the-Public showing. Maxwell would have died of starvation by then, his passing made all the more painful by the smells wafting from the Leighford bakery next door.
He slipped out in that nail-biting bit when Tom Cruise and Jon Voight are fighting it out in the Channel Tunnel, and ducked onto the landing. The projection room he knew was to his left, at the end of the corridor. Ahead of him was a second landing, up three stairs, and it contained the office where he and Stewart had had their little tête-à-tête the night before, the room where Dee McSween ‘kept his archives’; that door he knew was locked so in a sense he was back to square one. But in a sense he wasn’t. Interior doors were weaker than exterior ones. He wouldn’t bother with credit cards and hair grips and effete nonsense like that. This time he’d take it head on – well, shoulder on.
This time he reeled back, clutching the great throbbing pain he used to call a shoulder. He didn’t remember loose rucks being that hard in the rugger days of his youth. He rested against the wall, ready to try again, checking that the thud hadn’t been heard in the projection room. Then something, and he never knew what, made him reach gingerly forward and try the knob. It turned under his hand and the door swung wide.
A number of expletives tripped whisperingly off his tongue. Then he was inside and rummaging in Douglas McSween’s drawers. Thank God. No safe. If the list was here at all, it was in an unlocked drawer. Bills. Letters. Copies of porn magazines you couldn’t buy over the counter anywhere except Holland. Nothing. He tried the second drawer and the third. More of the same. The fourth was empty, but the fifth contained nuggets of gold – a printed list, on long, tatty computer paper, perforated at intervals with those annoying holes at each side. Names. Addresses. Telephone and fax numbers. If Peter Maxwell had been of a certain persuasion, the scope for blackmail was immense. He ran his finger down the list, anxious not to miss anybody. Stewart had been right – businessmen, professionals, the odd copper or two. McSween had carefully listed their occupations, presumably because you never knew when a club member, grateful for continuing titillation – and continuing anonymity – wouldn’t be useful. There could be no other reason for a list like this. The News of the World would go ape.
But Maxwell threw it back in disgust. The one name he wanted wasn’t there. The one person who had to have killed Alice Goode and Jean Hagger didn’t show on the printouts at all. Unless he’d used an alias. But if he had, he’d also have had to lie about his address and his job. And if he’d done that, there’d be no chance of Maxwell tracking him down. He switched off the light and got back into the theatre just as Lalo Schifrin’s thumping score was belting out under the credits.
He tried to make it out innocuously, as Sylv had suggested he should, along with everybody else, but he was hailed at the top of the stairs by Douglas McSween.
‘Max,’ he motioned, ‘can I have a word?’
‘Er … well, it is a little late, Dee,’ Maxwell hedged, ‘lots and lots of marking.’
‘It won’t take long.’ McSween was more insistent than Maxwell remembered, his face set, his voice hard.
He extricated himself from an old lady already unfurling her umbrella, just in case the flaming June night was less than clement, and slipped into the office he’d just burgled. His prints were on the doorknob, the light switch, all over the desk, not to mention the paper in the fifth drawer down.
‘Max,’ McSween had closed the door, ‘I think I’m going to have to ask you to revoke your membership of the club.’
‘Dee.’ Maxwell looked mortified. ‘Why, for Heaven’s sake? I’ve only just joined.’
‘It’s about Piers, really’ McSween told him. ‘He was very upset last night. I don’t know what you said to him, but he barely spoke to me before he left. I can’t have you upsetting an old and valued friend like that. The whole point of the club is the calm and confidentiality it engenders. We don’t let just anybody in, you know. I was only admitting you in the first place to oblige a friend.’
‘Really?’ Maxwell could play the ingénue with the best of them and launched into his Ardal O’Hanlon, ‘Who’s that then, Ted?’
McSween’s face darkened, ‘That doesn’t matter.’ He realized he’d said too much. ‘The point is, you’re out. I must admit I had my reservations about you in the first place.’
‘Too normal?’ Maxwell beamed. ‘Sorry about that. And anyway, I’m afraid it wasn’t I who upset poor old Piers. It was you. Showing him porn films of Alice Goode one day and dumping her body on his tarmac the next. Not a very friendly gesture, was it?’
McSween stood there, open-mouthed. ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ he said.
Maxwell sighed, shaking his head. ‘That’s an appalling cliché, Dee,’ he said. ‘And yes you do. The girl in Sweet Seventeen with the black hair. “Shags like a rabbit in the second half.” A colleague of mine. Alice Goode. She was found murdered in the car park of Piers Stewart’s restaurant a few weeks ago. Are you seriously telling me you didn’t know about that?’
McSween blustered, ‘I knew about the body, yes,’ he said. ‘In fact I rang Piers the next day to commiserate. But he didn’t say … You mean, she’s the girl with Pryce Garrison? Temp Girl, Legends of Bondage, all those?’
‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell said, ‘I haven’t seen all those. Some of us consider cinema to be fine art, not filth. Alice Goode may have been sex on a stick to you, but to me she was a sweet kid embarking on a career in teaching. I’m prepared to bet she was trying to put her past behind her. Living a normal life …’
‘Normal? With that old dyke Jean Hagger?’
Maxwell paused. McSween had gone too far, his neck mottling crimson, beads of perspiration forming on his lip, trickling from his ever-receding hairline.
‘Would you like to reconsider what you just told me?’ Maxwell asked.
‘All right!’ McSween shouted, throwing himself down in the chair. ‘All right. Of course I knew who Alice Goode was. It’s not the name she used of course in the flicks, but as soon as I saw her photograph in the papers, I recognized her. But I didn’t know she lived here in Leighford until …’
‘Yes?’ Maxwell’s patience was fast running out.
‘Until that frightful cow Jean Hagger came to the club.’
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know. It was the day I turned down the membership of … well, never mind. Come to think of it, this Hagger woman was funny about him. Here we were, in this very office and I was having to tel
l him no – for all sorts of reasons – and she came storming in, ranting about my showing disgusting material of her Alice and how all men are beasts. Well, I ask you. Contrary to her view – and clearly, yours – the films Alice starred in are art; things of beauty.’
‘What about Jean Hagger? How did she find out about the club?’ Maxwell asked.
‘She said someone had told her. Tipped her off. She’d had a phone call.’
‘And what about your would-be member? Why did she react to him?’
‘I really haven’t the faintest idea,’ McSween said. ‘All I know is that she screamed we were both perverts, that we’d kidnapped the girl and were doing unspeakable things to her. She said she was going to the police.’
‘And did she?’
‘How the hell should I know? I assume not, in that the club is still here and there’ve been no boys in blue sniffing around so far.’
Maxwell smiled. ‘It’s early days, Mr McSween,’ he winked at him.
‘Look, Maxwell,’ the club’s proprietor’s gloves were off, his defences down, ‘all I can say for sure is that I didn’t kill Alice Goode or dump her body in Piers Stewart’s backyard. And I didn’t kill Jean Hagger either.’
‘Haha,’ Maxwell wagged a finger at him, ‘but you know a man who did.’
14
Wouldn’t you know it would be raining? Rory had gone down with appendicitis two days before, but other than that, and Mr Maxwell substituting for Miss Goode, it was the same team. Maxwell had haggled with Hamilton’s Coaches. No, Dave Warwick wouldn’t do. Nor Bert Fentiman. Nor John Harold. And were they seriously suggesting that Sandra Wickham could handle a fifty-three seater? Even allowing for the fact that Maxwell was letting his male chauvinist piggery show, they’d let him have Dave Freeman after all.
