by M. J. Trow
He sat by Anthea Edwards, who wanted to relive this day like she wanted a frontal lobotomy. The rain bounced on Freeman’s wind-screen and the traffic roared past in a blur of lights and toxic waste. Maxwell smiled at Anthea. He turned to smile at Ronnie Parsons and Leila Roberts, sitting across the aisle behind the driver. Then he changed places.
‘This is how it was, then, Ronnie, right?’ he asked above the snarl of the engine and whatever cacophony the kids’ tape was belting out. ‘Alice was sitting where I am now?’
‘That’s right,’ Ronnie said. ‘Oh, by the way,’ and he fumbled in his coat pocket, ‘guess what?’
‘Today’s object,’ said Maxwell in his BBC voice, looking at the grey thing in the boy’s hand, ‘is a flexicurve. A flexicurve. Yours?’
‘Mine,’ Ronnie beamed. ‘I went back home last night. Got a call from my mum. Dad was out so I went round, you know, just to get a few things. I was cleaning out my room and there it was I half hidden under the carpet. The law told me Miss Goode was strangled with something like this and when they searched my place while I was away, they couldn’t find mine. Don’t know why I kept it really. I just do graphs on computers these days.’
Ronnie was disappointed. He’d expected Mad Max to jump about and sing. All he got was a faint smile.
‘Well, aren’t you pleased, Mr Maxwell?’ the boy asked. ‘It’s evidence, isn’t it? Proof I didn’t kill Miss Goode. If I had, it would have her fingerprints or something on it …’
‘Ronnie, Ronnie,’ Maxwell said as softly as the engine’s roar and kids’ chatter would let him, ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t prove a damn thing. Who’s to say you didn’t go out and buy that yesterday?’ He saw the crestfallen look in the boy’s face and thumped his shoulder. ‘But you went home. That’s good. I’m pleased about that.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie, turning his face to the misted window.
Maxwell leaned forward over the driver’s shoulder, ‘Did you make a loo stop, Mr Freeman,’ he asked, ‘the last time?’
‘Yes,’ Freeman shouted back, ‘Guildford Cathedral. Do you want me to do the same again?’
Maxwell surveyed the gum-chewing hordes behind him, delirious to be out of uniform and destroying their eardrums with their Walkmans. ‘We’d better,’ he said, ‘my money’s on Tamsin Gregory, ninth row back, the one who pinched her Mum’s makeup this morning.’
The fifty-three seater snarled around the curve and up the rise to the monstrosity that was Guildford Cathedral. The sky was as dark and threatening over its black tower as it had been when they’d filmed it for The Omen, although Maxwell suspected they’d cheated there with filters and wind machines.
‘Got a touch of PMT this morning, Anthea,’ he told her as he helped her down off the coach. ‘Always the same before a storm -pre-Maelstrom tension.’
‘And don’t drop any litter!’ Leila was practising her school-ma’am routine.
‘I don’t know what she does to the enemy,’ he gave Anthea his best Arthur Wellesley, ‘but she terrifies me.’ And a gaggle of giggling girls ran past him, bound for the loo. Sure enough, Tamsin Gregory was at their head.
‘Coming with us, Mr Freeman,’ Maxwell asked as the coach coughed to a halt in that labyrinthine, road-worked entrance to the Museum of the Moving Image, ‘when you’ve parked this monster?’
‘No, thanks,’ Freeman said. ‘Not this time.’
‘Go on,’ Maxwell urged, ‘it’ll be like old times. Picnic at Hanging Rock is bound to be shown in the Odeon inside. Go on, give it a whirl.’
‘Well, OK, then,’ Freeman grinned, ‘I’ll be about ten minutes.’
‘That’s fine,’ Maxwell said, ‘I want a word with the kids anyway.’ And he waited while Leila clapped her hands for quiet. Nothing. The kids were on the pavement, jostling, restless now that the rain had stopped and the sun was threatening to burst through the leaden cloud banks.
‘Right!’ Maxwell roared and half London came to a halt. Leila looked astonished, making a mental note to pay for some voice-training so that she too could roar like the MGM lion. He had the full attention of fifty-two people and most of the others on their way in and out of MOMI. Even the bloke with the road drill had switched off and hauled off his ear-muffs.
‘Now then,’ Maxwell’s voice was steady and calm, ‘you all know that you haven’t paid for this visit. And some of you might think it odd. The reason that Mr Diamond has been so generous is that he wants – and I want – you all to help us in an experiment.’
‘Like in science, sir?’ one of the braver lads piped up.
‘Sort of,’ Maxwell nodded, ‘but nothing like so boring. Now you all know that when you were here last, Miss Goode was with you.’ He watched their faces as he spoke, their eyes fixed to his. No one was jostling now. The Walkmans were away. Those with chewing gum in their mouths swallowed hard. ‘You also know that Miss Goode disappeared inside this Museum,’ he waved to the glass front and the blue lights behind him. ‘Now I want you to help me find out what happened to her. In there.’
He saw some mouths open, silently. He saw eyes widen, heads turn. ‘And remember,’ he said, ‘Miss Goode didn’t just vanish. Whatever you see in there is make-believe. What I think happened to her is that she was taken out of the Museum, not by a monster, not by an alien, not by a ghost, but by a man. Now, this time, keep together. Miss Edwards and Leila will lead us in. Ronnie and I will bring up the rear. And no one,’ and his bass voice burned into their souls, ‘no one is to wander off alone. Do I make myself clear?’
Maxwell did. And to those fifty kids, he was God Himself. Maxwell’s word was law.
Anthea got the group ticket, the one with the strange wording that said you weren’t allowed to stand up inside MOMI. The prospect of getting the entire party to crawl was too daunting, however. Napoleon may have said that an army marches on its stomach, but fifty kids? Never. Dave Freeman joined the slowly moving column as it clicked and creaked its way past the turnstiles of yesterday. The lights went down and they were in the land of lost content again, each of them with his or her own dreams and memories. Maxwell watched their reflections on the first stairway, saw their anoraked shapes scatter and fan out on the black and white check of the floor. Here the zogroscope whirled and the shadow puppets danced on sticks. A massive human eye looked down on them, watching as it had watched Alice Goode making her last journey. There was no readmission.
Maxwell paid particular attention to the exits. They all seemed to be alarm activated and there were cameras everywhere. Tamsin’s heart sank anew at the signs which told her that these were the last toilets for two thousand years. The Leighford party did as it was told happily enough and followed the yellow brick road into the gloom. In the Phantasmagorie the silent eighteenth-century crowd in their grey plaster Macaronis watched, along with the camera-clicking Japanese tourists, the face on the screen turn into the face of Satan. The Satan who had stalked Alice Goode that day, the last time. Slithery-tailed rats emerged from the spinning hole of the Phenakistoscope before the fresh-faced Edwardian toff hailed Maxwell.
‘Sir,’ he boomed, doffing his wideawake and sweeping open his fur-collared coat, ‘do I understand you have the misfortune to be in loco parentis today?’
‘And everyday, sir,’ Maxwell doffed his tifter in return.
‘My condolences,’ the toff beamed, ‘but come, children of tomorrow, and let me tell you all about Mr Mack Sennett and his Keystone Cops …’ and he held the braver ones enthralled with his well-rehearsed patter.
The cinema went to war in the next section of the Museum, with sepia photographs of mud and khaki. The kids looked up the periscopes at the barbed wire and bodies hanging out on No Man’s Land. At this point, Maxwell calculated, it was about fifteen minutes to the last positive sighting of Alice Goode.
‘Uniform’s good,’ Maxwell commented to Dave Freeman, both of them looking at the huge poster of Pola Negri in a dashing white pelisse.
‘I didn’t know you were that old sir.
’ Leila Roberts swept past her esteemed Head of Sixth Form and the poster that read ‘Max et les Crêpes’ circa 1918. He merely beamed beatifically. As the ragged column marched past the glitter of Gloria Swanson’s dress and the mirrored walls and giant caryatids of the stars, a dismembered voice blared over the intercom about a child who had gone missing. Maxwell caught Anthea’s gaze and they both shook their heads. Not one of theirs.
The Chaplin memorabilia window stood at the top of the cinema staircase and the neon sign flashed to herald in the Talkies – ‘OK for sound’. Maxwell let the kids onto the Agit-Prop train again, not because they enjoyed Russian history or understood Communism in the slightest, but because they were determined not to miss out on anything.
‘Daddy,’ a little girl asked her father in the forbidden films section, ‘why are they cutting that lady’s eye open with a razor blade?’
‘That’s Continental cinema for you,’ her well-informed dad said. Maxwell wandered away, checking that his own eyeballs were intact. Some of those creepy thirties numbers made Quentin Tarantino look like a choirboy. Through opaque glass, the sinister, jerking image of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu stared coldly at him. There was no sunlight down here to dissolve his cadaverous body. No shining Christian cross to thwart his evil ends. Just shadows.
‘How technical are you, Mr Freeman?’ Maxwell asked as they reached the window that looked in on the Museum’s Control Centre. The kids had gone surging ahead into the Paramount set, anxious to replay the end of Ricco. This was boring. They were even bored by the Outlaw censorship story and brooding, heaving, pouting Jane Russell. ‘Just some woman wiv big tits,’ as young Jamie put it later.
‘I can fix a fan belt,’ the driver said. ‘Why?’
‘I was just wondering,’ Maxwell pointed at the myriad television screens beyond the glass, ‘whether all exits are covered in there. And whether they record the video footage. If they do …’
Freeman saw the point. ‘If they do,’ he clicked his fingers, ‘they’d have your teacher’s disappearance on film. If somebody snatched her, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ said Maxwell, shaking his head, ‘but that’s the first thing the police would have checked, once they’d discovered Alice s body And by then I’d be prepared to bet it’d be too late. My guess is they keep the loop intact for twenty-four hours, perhaps forty-eight, then change it. Ironic really. They probably filmed Alice’s abduction and it ended up on the cutting-room floor.’
‘But that bloke,’ Freeman was clutching at straws, ‘he – or whoever was on duty – must’ve seen it happen.’
‘Indeed,’ Maxwell nodded, ‘if it happened in the angle of a camera. But how many screens has he got to watch? Twenty? Thirty? If Alice went quietly, he’d have no reason to notice it, would he?’
The two men drifted into the kiddies’ corner where talentless little oiks were scribbling on pieces of paper in an effort to prove they were the Walt Disneys of the Millennium. Their proud mums looked on. Tired teachers wandered away.
‘A duel then, Mr Freeman.’ Maxwell was looking up at the rapidly changing clips outside the Odeon cinema, where a liveried commissionaire, all burgundy and gold lace, waited to admit them.
Freeman chuckled, ‘Oh, I doubt I’m in your league, Mr Maxwell.’
‘Don’t do yourself down,’ Maxwell said. ‘Yul Brynner, Magnificent Seven.’ The scenes flashed thick and fast, as the black-shirted gunfighter flicked to the thatch-haired Greek.
‘Tom Conti, Shirley Valentine,’ Freeman said.
‘Ingrid Bergman, For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ Maxwell gabbled, ‘I particularly liked Katina Paxinou in that.’
‘Laurence Olivier, Henry V. I liked Felix Aylmer in that.’
‘Right,’ chuckled Maxwell, ‘they say he’s not dead yet, you know. Oh, bugger,’ it was on the tip of his tongue, ‘Charles Boyer, Arch of Triumph. Christ knows who else was in that.’
‘Ah,’ Freeman was home and dry, ‘William Holden, Sunset Boulevard. Crap musical.’
‘Tragic waste,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘Rod Steiger, The Pawnbroker.’
‘Blimey you’re good,’ Freeman gulped, blinking at the rapidity of the clips. ‘Jamie Lee Curtis, A Fish Called Wanda.’
‘Robin Williams, Mrs Doubtfire.’
‘Kurt Russell, Tombstone.’
‘Ah, not a patch on Burt Lancaster.’
‘No, no,’ Maxwell laughed. ‘No one’s a patch on Burt Lancaster.’
And it was with sheer physical relief that the two of them collapsed into the Odeon to feel the fuzzy flock of the seats and let the gentle Plasticine creatures of Nick Park lull them into quietude.
Beyond the Odeon, where all the kids were now, was the television section, where Hughie Green was wowing audiences by doubling their money and a dusty fifties family sat enthralled around their nine-inch screen. It had happened. The goggle-box, the one-eyed monster, had found its way into people’s living rooms. And consigned the cinema to a long and lingering death. Longer and more lingering, Maxwell hoped, than the death of Alice Goode.
He felt a tug on his sleeve. ‘They’re everywhere, Tamsin,’ he told the girl who looked up at him with anxiety all over her face. ‘The loos. Lots of them.’
‘No, Mr Maxwell, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘This was the place. This is where I saw Miss Goode last.’
Maxwell looked at the pale face and beyond it the mad staring yellow eyes of Dr Mabuse. He half turned and Mohawk the Gremlin stood there, hideous arms trailing the ground, ears spread and teeth like razors, laughing at him.
‘Naughty, naughty boy’ He heard the harsh, expressionless tones of Maggie Thatcher boom from the window of Number Ten as she soundly smacked the bottom of John Major, sitting sheepishly on her lap.
‘Here,’ Tamsin shouted, her memory of it vivid now in that rush of sound and colour and light. She was pointing upward. Up at the huge Brain that crackled and spat electrically overhead. ‘There was a man,’ she screamed, ‘I saw him. I saw him. He was in there.’ Maxwell put his career on the line again. He grabbed the girl, held her to him, cradling the shaking head, feeling the tears splash onto his hands as he hugged her. He looked up. The giant Brain showed their reflection, distorted, swaying together. The crowds moved away from them, like the slithering rats in the Phenakistoscope, embarrassed at the silly, hysterical girl and her over-protective dad.
For a moment, Maxwell and his little girl saw the same thing. They saw Alice Goode in the reflection of the Brain, for all the world as if she was really there. And they saw a man gripping her arm, pulling her backwards to an exit. An exit with no alarm. An exit with a door already ajar. Maxwell tried to focus on the blurred face of Alice’s abductor, on the flashing silver of the knife. Then he turned to find Dave Freeman. But Dave Freeman had gone.
He calmed Tamsin Gregory down. He took her to Anthea and the others in the gift shop, which was all T-shirts and pencil sharpeners and kaleidoscopes. ‘Stay here,’ he told them all. ‘Nobody goes home.’
‘Mr Maxwell …’ Ronnie was at his elbow, fists clenched. Ready.
‘No, Ronnie,’ Mad Max said, ‘you stay here. This time, huh? This time you stay.’
And the boy nodded. And the man in him understood.
Maxwell leapt the steel turnstile back into the Museum. He hurtled along the passage and down the stairs, his reflection looming and vanishing again in the fish-eye reflection of the Brain, as Alice Goode’s had loomed and vanished all those weeks before. He was out of the side entrance where the sunlight hurt his eyes. The street lay empty to right and left. He ran forward, past the parked cars, the meandering knots of tourists, the posed Japanese group, one camera taking a photograph of half a dozen others. He rounded the corner and was there. In the new coach park. Face to face with the sleek red and white luxury vehicle, the fifty-three-seater ten-tonner that had carried Alice Goode to her death.
Dave Freeman was sitting on the steps, the door slid back, the keys in his hand. Maxwell walked towards him, carefully, slowly.
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br /> ‘How did you know?’ the driver asked.
‘I didn’t,’ Maxwell said, ‘not until you ran.’
‘That kid,’ he was staring at the ground. ‘She couldn’t have seen me.’
‘She did, Mr Freeman,’ Maxwell assured him. ‘It’s a funny thing, the mind. And in there, of all places, it takes over. The mind is a blank wall, a screen. Life throws images at it, shadows like the Zeotrope and it blends and blurs and twists. Then somebody puts the lights on and the image is gone for ever. That’s what happened to Tamsin. She got lost in the magic in there. All those images. All those shadows. You threatening Alice with a knife and taking her out, all of it seen in the fish-eye lens of the Brain – it was just one more image. One more piece of make-believe. It wasn’t real. None of it. But it was, Mr Freeman, wasn’t it?’
The driver buried his face in his hands. When he looked up at Maxwell, his cheeks were wet with tears. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ he said, softly. ‘She was so … I’d seen her on the films. I knew what she was like under the clothes. Under that front. Pretending to be a teacher!’ He spat contemptuously. ‘I knew better. On the way into the Museum I asked her. Told her what I’d seen. Asked her if she was up for it. What she charged. You should have heard her language. I’ve got girls myself, Mr Maxwell. I wasn’t having that. Nobody talks to me like that. So I stayed with her, only behind, of course, so nobody from the school knew I was there, watching, waiting. I knew the Museum, of course. I knew my way around. But there were too many people. Always too many people. The Brain was my last chance. She’d have been in the gift shop next and I’d have no chance then. So I grabbed her, told her I’d cut her if she struggled or made a fuss and brought her out here.’
‘You killed her here?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘In broad daylight?’
Freeman stood up slowly. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, and climbed to the aisle of the coach. Maxwell followed carefully, keeping his distance. ‘See, you’re higher than the ground by a long way,’ the driver said. ‘Can’t be seen from the road. I closed the door and strangled her.’
