Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  ‘And didn’t you do Macbeth?’

  ‘Scottish fight arranger only,’ Maxwell corrected him. ‘And all that was a long time ago, Headmaster – when the Scottish play was still current affairs.’

  ‘All right,’ Diamond relented, with a heartfelt sigh. ‘It’ll have to be Dierdre. Have a good morning, Max.’ And he slunk back behind his desk.

  ‘What?’ The Great Man had turned, like the hellhound he was, in the head’s doorway.

  ‘I said “Have a good…”’

  ‘Before that.’

  ‘Oh, well, if you don’t feel you can do it, it’ll have to be Dierdre Lessing.’

  Maxwell had crossed Diamond’s office in three strides, his knuckles on the man’s desk, taking the weight of his arms. ‘You know,’ he growled, his face inches from his headteacher’s, ‘you’re getting pretty good at this. I’ll have to watch my step.’

  Slowly, Diamond’s face melted into a smile. He’d have to mark this on his calendar. Friday the 13th – the Day He Put One Over On Peter Maxwell. ‘Thanks, Max,’ he said. ‘I knew I could count on you.’

  The bell shattered the moment and Maxwell regained his composure. ‘No cover lessons for the duration of the rehearsal time. A late start every Thursday. And a personal chauffeur called Les.’

  But wheeling-and-dealing humour and pinching lines from telly ads was lost on James Diamond. Maxwell saw himself out. ‘Bugger,’ he said just before he closed the door. ‘No time to set up PowerPoint now. It’ll just have to be talk and chalk for Nine Eff. God, I just hate being so old-fashioned. Heigh-ho!’

  ‘I just can’t believe the bastard did it,’ Maxwell was saying, snug in the confines of 38 Columbine. ‘I’m getting slow.’

  ‘But Dierdre would have been a disaster.’

  ‘Exactly. But you’ve got to hand it to Legs. He knew exactly which buttons to press. He’s been going to realpolitik classes again.’

  ‘I thought you gave those.’

  ‘Ah, Woman Policeman,’ he smiled, stroking her arm. ‘You know how to lift a man when he’s down. I only give biennial masterclasses. Low life like Legs aren’t invited. Some bastard must have published my stuff on the Internet, whatever that is.’

  She freshened his drink as the glow brightened behind the plastic coal of his electric fire. ‘How is Dierdre this term?’

  ‘Same as she is every term,’ he hissed as the amber nectar of his Southern Comfort hit his tonsils. ‘Like the Marie Celeste in full sail. Responsible for every evil in the world from Hoodies to Global Colding. She ate a peripatetic music teacher last week.’

  She snuggled closer to him, curled up as they were on his settee. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d played Cyrano de Bergerac.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He let his head loll back and closed his eyes. ‘Beat the long-nosed bastard in straight sets. Mind you, they were different days. We all seemed to have so much more time then. Putting in twenty-eight hours a day wasn’t only possible, it was fun. Old Bill Vintner was head at Leighford. And it was a…’ he checked to see the coast was clear and that they were alone, ‘grammar school.’ He whispered it; the education that dared not speak its name. ‘Lovely old boy, was Bill.’ The fireglow and the Southern Comfort and the warm woman were beginning to get to Peter Maxwell. He was in memory mode. ‘Claimed to have ridden up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt.’

  Jacquie Carpenter loved Peter Maxwell with every fibre of her being, but there were times when she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. This was one of them. ‘But he didn’t?’ she asked tentatively.

  He looked at her. What a love. So much to learn. So little time. Bit like Year Ten, really. ‘No,’ he said, kindly. ‘But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn it was Senlac Hill with William the Conqueror.’

  She was on safe ground now and slapped his drinking hand, just for good measure. William she’d heard of. Senlac Hill, Mad Max had had her wandering all over, not six months before. ‘So, when do you start?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, Monday, I suppose. I must admit, it’ll be intriguing to tread the boards again. But, I ask you, Little Shop of Horrors – what’s that about?’

  ‘Well,’ she put down her coffee mug and adjusted the protuberance in front of her. ‘There was this flower shop in downtown…’

  ‘Oh, ha!’ he snorted. ‘I mean, why couldn’t it have been Ibsen, or Chekhov, or, Heaven forfend, the Bard?’

  ‘Because nobody’d go,’ she told him. ‘At least this way you’ll get an audience. If somebody’s little Johnny was playing Uncle Vanya, not even little Johnny’s mum would turn up. As it is, no doubt you’ve got a thousand girlies anxious to strut their stuff – all their mums will be there. So will the dads, having an illicit shufty at their daughters’ friends fol-de-rols…’

  ‘Disgusting,’ snarled Maxwell.

  ‘And the geeks will be there to see how you do Audrey.’

  ‘Audrey?’

  ‘The man-eating plant. God, Max, I thought you were kidding about not knowing what the show is about.’

  ‘I am, dear girl, I am. You seem very clued up about it.’

  ‘Did it in Year Eleven, didn’t I? And before you ask, yes, that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Well, the Arquebus doesn’t know what’s going to hit it.’

  ‘The Arquebus?’

  ‘The theatre. Along Quay Street.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Why there?’

  ‘Well, it’s Angela Carmichael’s idea, apparently. Theatre in the Community or something crappy. We don’t use the Hall and invite the locals to come to us. No, that’s far too boring and obvious. We go to them. Sort of mountain and Mohammed.’

  ‘There was an accident there last night.’

  ‘At the Arquebus?’

  ‘Hm. Fatal, actually.’

  ‘Really?’ He sat up a little, and looked her in the grey, sparkling eyes. ‘Have you been listening in to Police Wireless again?’ he asked, the eyebrow of disapproval threatening his hairline.

  ‘Jane Blaisedell called round this morning. You know, just to see how I was.’

  ‘How are you?’ He looked down at her, attentive, solicitous, taking the mick.

  ‘Piss off and listen,’ she insisted. It was one of Jacquie’s stranger stage directions, but Maxwell let it pass. ‘Somebody was killed, working on the set.’

  ‘Anybody we know?’

  ‘Gordon Goodacre. Didn’t ring any bells with me.’

  ‘God, yes.’ Maxwell was frowning.

  ‘Did you know him?’

  He moved a little way away from her and held up his fingers in the sign of the cross. ‘Put those lighted matches down, Woman Policeman. I know nothing.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Seriously, no. But I have had the pleasure of Mrs Goodacre – and not, mercifully, in the biblical sense. She’ll love this.’

  ‘Max!’ she squeaked. ‘That’s not very nice.’

  ‘Sorry, no,’ he checked himself. ‘No, it’s tragic. But Matilda Goodacre is the original Drama Queen. I remember her wailing in the High Street when we ratified the Maastricht Treaty. Fine sentiments, of course; just a little over the top. What happened?’

  ‘Oh, carelessness, I suppose,’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘Jane said Goodacre had been working late on the scenery and a ladder had slipped. Fractured his skull.’ Jacquie looked up at him suddenly, struck by a thought. ‘You’ll be careful out there, won’t you, Mr Maxwell?’

  He smiled. ‘Careful,’ he said, ‘is my middle name.’

  ‘It’s a little late for you, Henry,’ the man in the white coat said. He checked his watch. ‘Come to think of it, it’s a little late for me.’

  ‘Sorry, Jim.’ DCI Henry Hall emerged in the pool of light that flooded the stainless-steel heart of the mortuary at Leighford General. In Morse or Midsomer Murders those places were always dark, mysterious, like the doings that were investigated in them. In reality, they were neon-stripped, chemical-coated, like slightly upmarket abattoirs. ‘I was just on my wa
y home.’

  Jim Astley chuckled, the bow tie wobbling under the once-firm chin. ‘If you’re going to get all busier-than-thou on me, I’m out of here now. In the comparative stakes, pathologists’ hours versus policemen’s, I’m not sure which one of us would come up smelling of roses. I was off to the George. Time for a quick one?’

  Jim Astley didn’t offer to buy a round often. He had too many Porsches to run, his wife’s habit to control and probably Scottish blood in his veins a few generations back. So it hurt like hell for Henry Hall to have to pass it up. ‘Not tonight, I’m afraid. I was wondering if you’d made any progress with Gordon Goodacre.’

  Astley hauled off his coat at the end of another long day, throwing it vaguely at some hooks. ‘You know what they say,’ he said, ‘about miracles taking longer?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Hall shrugged. He and Astley went back a few years. They’d come to know each other pretty well. Astley was a vain prig whose orifice housed the rising sun. Long years ago he’d opted for that branch of medicine where the patients don’t talk back. And in these litigious days, he was increasingly grateful for that. Hall was an unfathomable bastard, the consummate professional with no smiling muscles at all, a thinking machine in a grey three-piece who hid his hard eyes behind curiously opaque glasses. Jacquie Carpenter had never seen another pair like them. Hall could see out; no one could see in. What else was there to know?

  ‘I can confirm my preliminary verdict.’ Astley hunted for his coat in the bowels of his office off the morgue, realising again what a slob his assistant Donald was. ‘The skull was fractured in two places, both occipital, by a blunt instrument, viz and to wit, a ladder. Death would have been virtually instantaneous. Routine one, this, Henry. Unless…’

  ‘Unless?’

  Astley pushed the man gently aside so that he could close the door and lock it. ‘Unless your nose tells you something else.’

  ‘Should it?’ Hall was as impassive as ever. He let other people do the sniffing around. The wait was usually worth it.

  ‘It’s half past nine, Henry,’ Astley told him. ‘You’re a detective chief inspector and it’s Friday. A man died last night at about eleven o’clock in what has all the appearances of a tragic, but not unusual, accident – shall I quote you the ladder death stats? So why the interest? Unless…’

  There was a slight twitch to one side of Henry Hall’s mouth. It would be the nearest he was likely to come to a smile, at least this side of Christmas. ‘You’re right, Jim,’ he said. ‘I don’t get out enough. Love to Marjorie.’

  ‘And to Margaret. A bientôt, Chief Inspector.’

  Peter Maxwell went to the Arquebus Theatre that night. He saddled his bike, White Surrey, named for the charger of England’s most maligned king, Richard III (Henry VII did it, by the way), and pedalled through the mizzle over the Flyover and down the maze of streets that led to the Quay.

  The building itself still retained an exterior that spoke of grander days, when Leighford had been a minor port on the south coast and sugar and rum and slaves and molasses had come creaking in under full sail with the smell of hemp and tar. The old pulley was still there, high above its column of doors on four storeys and the forecourt where timber was piled and manifests checked now housed the ghastly new glass entranceway.

  Maxwell remembered the Arquebus as a row of warehouses, derelict, rat-infested, open to the weather and the winos. In a glass case by the front door, a rather long-in-the-tooth Matilda Goodacre smiled at him, wearing a ludicrous wimple à la the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine. Other faces, the grave old plodders and gay young friskers of Leighford’s am dram community, he didn’t know. He tethered White Surrey to some railings with his trusty padlock – this was downtown Leighford of a Monday night, after all, and you couldn’t be too careful. Then he pushed the glass door and he was in, his damp feet on plush red carpet in the refurbished atrium. Dim lights revealed the ticket office and the stairs curving to left and right. As he read the notices, he heard the rain start with a vengeance, bouncing on the glass roof of the portico and running like tears down the high windows.

  ‘Hello. Oh, it’s cats and dogs out there!’ The wrinkled little woman in the Fifties pac-a-mac shook her tousled hair in the doorway. ‘You are?’

  ‘A little drier than you, it seems. Luckily, it was fine when I arrived. I’m Peter Maxwell.’ He held out a hand.

  She took it in the bird-like, fragile way that women do, limp and not quite real. ‘Maxwell. Maxwell. Now, I know that name. Ring of Bright Water chappie. Any relation?’

  ‘Er…I don’t think so.’

  ‘Probably just as well. That whole episode put the cause of wildlife back by a generation, I always thought. I’m Martita Winchcombe, the Arquebus Treasurer. Are you the new lighting man?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. I’m with Leighford High.’

  ‘Oh.’ The Treasurer’s face fell a little. ‘Can I be frank, Mr Maxwell?’ The old girl wrestled to close her umbrella.

  ‘Please,’ the Head of Sixth Form suggested. A woman with dentures as ill fitting as hers surely had the right to be anybody she wanted to be.

  ‘Well, children nowadays are a pretty unruly bunch, aren’t they? I mean, I’m sure they mean well, but their manners…’

  ‘Ah, sign of the times, I fear, Ms Winchcombe.’

  ‘Miss,’ she corrected him tartly. ‘Miss Winchcombe.’

  Yes; Maxwell thought it might be.

  ‘And I have to say that teacher person, what’s her name? Mrs Carbuncle?’

  ‘Carmichael.’

  ‘Yes, I knew it was some sort of car. Heart’s not in it. Too self-absorbed if you catch my drift.’

  ‘You mean pregnant?’

  Miss Winchcombe looked up at the man. The bow tie, the tweed jacket. Seemed acceptable enough. And that, surely, was the scarf of one of the more reputable universities around his neck? Still, you heard such stories about teachers these days. ‘That’s not a word we bandied about in my youth,’ she told him crisply.

  ‘Quite,’ Maxwell nodded, straight-faced. How old was this woman? ‘Well, Mrs Carmichael has had to bow out, as it were, from this production.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re her replacement?’ She peered at him more closely. ‘I thought there was another girl I met. Oh well…I suppose you’ll do. Come on up.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Maxwell followed her up the velvet-carpeted stairs as the old girl flicked lights on in all directions. On the first half-landing, she stopped. New-smelling parquet floors led off in what seemed all directions, some ending in closed doors, others extending around the auditorium to culminate in gantries with lanterns and cables and all the other inexplicable gadgetry of theatre land. ‘Wait,’ she all but shrieked. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Through the door,’ he told her slowly, as though feeling his way through a trick question.

  ‘I see. Well, that must mean Patrick’s around somewhere. Was that your bicycle I almost fell over outside?’

  ‘Probably,’ Maxwell confessed. ‘Whitish frame? Two wheels? Racing basket?’

  ‘I didn’t look that closely. Ah, Patrick. There you are.’

  Ahead of them on the upper landing, at the end of one of the narrow, darker corridors, a large crimson man in a cravat was carrying a large bundle of scripts.

  ‘This is Mr Marple. He’s producing the musical whatnot.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Maxwell said, but the old girl was already dripping her way to the next landing, rattling keys as she went and opening doors, apparently at random.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive Martita,’ said the crimson man. ‘She was Treasurer here when this place was still an indigo warehouse or whatever it was. Patrick Collinson. I’m Theatre Secretary, moonlighting from the day job. And you’re not the producer.’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘And I’m not Mr Marple, either. Maxwell. Peter Maxwell.’ He shook the man’s hand.

  ‘You’re from Leighford High, aren’t you?’ Collinson pointed at him. ‘I caught your Sp
artacus lecture at the Historical Association last year. Masterly.’

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  ‘Look, you’ll have to forgive us. I’m afraid there’s no rehearsal tonight.’

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell frowned. Legs had sold him a pup yet again. Perhaps his assumption of a Monday start was a little premature.

  ‘Cancelled at the last minute. We had a bereavement last Thursday.’

  ‘A bereavement?’ Maxwell had long ago learned not to let anything slip he heard from Jacquie via police sources.

  ‘Down there,’ Collinson pointed to the dimly lit stage, below them and to his right. ‘Gordon Goodacre, poor chap. He was working on the set and a ladder fell on him. Couldn’t have known what hit him.’

  ‘Will the production go ahead?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Lord, yes.’ Collinson ushered the man along the corridor and down again to the back of the auditorium. ‘Matilda insisted on it.’

  ‘Matilda?’

  ‘Confusing, isn’t it? Martita, Matilda. Worse last year; we had a Martina as well, but mercifully she moved to Glossop.’

  Maxwell breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘No, Matilda is Gordon’s wife – widow, I suppose now. She’s Chairperson for the duration. Life and soul of the Arquebus Committee. She’s called an Extraordinary Meeting tonight which is why Martita and I are here. Ashley’ll be along presently and the whole motley crew.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take my leave…’ Maxwell said.

  ‘Nonsense!’ Collinson insisted. ‘Now you’re here, you might as well meet everybody. You are going to be part of the family for a while, after all.’

  ‘Well, all right.’ They both heard the rain thundering on the skylights. ‘It’s a filthy night… If you’re sure I won’t be intruding.’

  ‘Dear boy, think nothing of it. Come and have a coffee. I’d offer you something stronger, but we’re only licensed during runs. You look like a b and s man.’ Collinson looked him up and down.

  ‘Southern Comfort.’ Maxwell knew the mantra from his AA days.