Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  ‘So I believe,’ he sighed.

  ‘Tonight, though. Half-seven, if that’s OK?’

  ‘Half-seven would be fine.’

  ‘I’d offer to pick you up – still got old Surrey, I hope?’

  ‘My trusty steed,’ he smiled. ‘Oh, yes. She’s got a few years in her yet.’

  ‘Well, my car’s off the road at the moment. Soon as it’s fixed though… Look, this is awfully good of you.’

  ‘No, no,’ he assured her. ‘It’s good of you. The production would have fallen apart without your stepping in.’

  ‘Well, I felt so sorry for Mrs Carmichael. Are things all right? I mean, as all right as they can be? With her baby, I mean?’

  ‘I believe so,’ he told her.

  ‘Good.’ She flashed him her broadest smile. ‘Well, till tonight, then.’

  ‘Looking forward to it.’

  And she was gone, tripping gaily through Mrs B’s crisp packet collection on her way out.

  Peter Maxwell watched her go, with the old bounce he remembered and then some. It was odd about ex-students now that nobody called them Old Boys or Old Girls. Some of them were strangers whose faces were the same but whose lives had moved on. As if they were husks of their former selves, inhabiting familiar bodies but with souls and experiences and memories that were far away. Others couldn’t keep away, like those sad people who haunt the superhighways of Friends Reunited. ‘Hi, I’m still mad as a skunk and Party Animal. Oh, by the way, I’ve had three divorces, six kids, a prison sentence for fraud and am currently living on my own. Would love to hear from the Old Gang.’ Still others had changed beyond recognition – mice who scurried along corridors were now men and women of the world, with firm handshakes and steely gazes. And Deena? Well, Deena seemed the same as ever.

  Anthony Wetta was of Cypriot extraction via the Balls Pond Road. His family had been shunted down to Leighford, to that spur of protected family housing they’d built off the already vast and sprawling Barlichway Estate, to make a fresh start in life. Anthony’s big brother, Charalambos, collected ASBOs like most people collected other people’s chewing gum on their soles. Anthony’s dad was inside, although how much pleasure he actually gave Her Majesty was a moot point.

  ‘Bed,’ the hiss came from the privet. ‘Can you see anything?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ Anthony hissed back. ‘I’m thinking.’ And for that, the boy needed silence. He checked his position. He was…what…a hundred metres from the road? Two? The place was big and he couldn’t see any lights. He checked his watch in the fitful moonlight, the one he’d liberated from the KwikiMart by the bus station. Pity he hadn’t liberated some batteries for it really. The time said ‘88’. Still, it must be past eleven. They were still rolling out of the Moon and Sixpence down the road, but the landlord there was one of Anthony’s ‘uncles’ and his time-keeping was not as immaculate as it might be.

  ‘Bed.’

  ‘Stuff me sideways.’ Anthony leapt a mile in his hedge hideaway, shaking the foliage and ducking down again. ‘If I was this much older,’ he whispered, holding his thumb and forefinger close together, ‘I’d’ve had a fuckin’ connery there. You’re supposed to stay over the other side. We’re casing the joint.’

  ‘But I can’t see anything.’

  Anthony looked at his partner in crime. George Lemon looked even more stupid in the moonlight than he did under a neon strip getting a good letting off from Mr Diamond. The word bovine was unknown to Anthony – he just thought George looked like a cow. Just as large, but nothing like as useful.

  ‘All right,’ the master-cracksman whispered, taking George resolutely by the horns. ‘We go left.’

  ‘What if they’ve got dogs?’ George had been to Literacy and Numeracy classes. He’d been around.

  ‘Then we’ll hear the bloody barking, won’t we? And you and I’ll make a bleedin’ world record getting back to the gate. If I’d known you was this windy, I’d have asked Jazzer.’

  ‘Jazzer’s a prick.’ Clearly, George had been to Psychology hour too.

  ‘Yeah, well he ain’t the only one. Now, pull yourself together. You told me you’d done this hundreds of times.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ George whined. ‘Maybe not hundreds.’

  ‘Well you’re doing it now,’ Anthony assured him. ‘Keep low and follow me.’

  ‘What we looking for?’

  ‘Jewellery. Cash. Credit cards. Nothing heavy. Nothing marked. There’s an old lady lives here. Now either she’ll sleep through a fuckin’ earthquake or she’ll be wide awake wandering about in the kitchen, muttering the bollocks they do. Just like my bleedin’ granny.’

  ‘But it’s late,’ George pointed out. ‘She ain’t gonna buy that meter reader bit.’

  ‘You know, George, Mad Max is right about you. If I had a quid for every time he says, “Mr Lemon, you’re not concentrating”, I wouldn’t be reduced to turning over this old lady’s gaff tonight. We’re fourteen, for fuck’s sake! How many fourteen-year-old meter readers do you know? I was merely regaling you with stories of my uncle Anastas and his MO back in London. Anyway, he was a meter reader. No need for fake ID and bullshit there. Here we go.’

  Like the natural he was, Anthony was gone across the gravel, his trainers padding like cat prints as he bounced off the porch wall, and he melted into the shadows. George was altogether slower, bulkier, but he made it in record time. Together, the likely lads skirted the lounge window. No lights and the curtains were drawn.

  ‘Yurghh!’ whispered George. ‘Snail shit.’

  ‘Yeah, you getta lotta that in people’s gardens. Occupational hazard, that is. You tooled up?’

  ‘You what?’

  Peter Maxwell didn’t know it, but Anthony Wetta was a lot like him really. Born out of his time and with a passion – albeit as yet unrealised – for old movies. When the mood took him, he could recite the screenplays of The Italian Job and The Long Good Friday by heart.

  ‘Are you carrying an object of metal for breaking into places like this?’ It was like a foreign language.

  ‘No,’ said George.

  ‘You’re fucking useless, you,’ Anthony assured his friend. ‘Keep up.’

  And the lither lad was gone, scuttling through the foliage like a rat up a pipe. This side of the house looked even more deserted than the front, but the cloud cover was breaking now and the privet came to an abrupt stop. Nothing ahead but moon and lawn. Not a good combination for those of the larcenous persuasion.

  ‘Who did you say lived here?’ George hissed, trying to keep his hoodie out of his mouth, and his heart in more or less the right place.

  ‘I dunno. Some old trout. She lives alone, though. Look,’ Anthony pointed. ‘There’s the kitchen door. Waddya think?’

  ‘What about?’ George had never been asked the merits of gentrified Victorian architecture before. He was a bit stumped for an answer, to be honest.

  ‘I mean, shall we make a run for it? Try the door and if no go, hit them bushes on the far side.’

  ‘’Ere, Bed, we’re not going on the roof, are we?’ George asked in sudden horror. ‘I mean, the ground floor’s one thing. But I dunno about the roof. I get funny on the pier sometimes.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, George,’ Anthony nodded, frowning at the lad and the embarrassed memories that came flooding back. ‘You wait here. If I can see a way in, I’ll give you a signal.’

  ‘What signal?’ George gripped his oppo’s arm. This was all getting just a little heavy for him now.

  ‘I’ll do this,’ Anthony waved frantically. ‘Got it?’

  A nod. As good as a wink to a blind horse, Anthony supposed, and anyway, that looked like it was all he was going to get. ‘Right, then.’

  If truth were told, Anthony was quietly shitting himself, as teenage boys will when their macho bravado has placed them in impossible positions. His hands felt like lead and his knees like water. His throat was bricky-dry and his heart was pounding an inch or two above his Adam’s apple. But h
e wasn’t letting George see any of this. Crouching like a hidden tiger, he suddenly sprang into the moonlight, a black shadow against the pale yellow brick of the house.

  George couldn’t see what happened next, but Bed seemed to stop, check himself as though in disbelief and turn back to his chum. ‘Fuck me!’ George heard himself whispering. The door was opening. Bed was in the fucking house. It was George’s turn to feel the thumping in his chest. This was beginning to freak him out. Bed had bragged how he could break into anywhere, take out any lock ever made. Had George seen Gone in Sixty Seconds, Bed had asked him. Well, Bed could do that to houses.

  From the darkness of the kitchen, Bed’s arm was summoning his sidekick. Too late to turn back now. Bed would think George was chicken if he didn’t cross that grass. Worse, he’d tell everybody he was. Time for some decisive action. All right, so he slipped. Fell over on the bloody gravel, didn’t he? But never mind. He was up again and running, like a fucking greyhound. He who always had a sick note signed by ‘George’s Mum’ so he couldn’t do PE up at the school. He was like a fucking greyhound.

  The greyhound skidded to a halt at the door and felt himself yanked down in the darkness.

  ‘Give your eyes time,’ Anthony ordered through clenched teeth. ‘They’ll become clematised in a minute and you’ll be able to see stuff. All right?’

  ‘How d’you do that, Bed?’ George couldn’t help but let his admiration show.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Open the bloody door.’

  ‘Skill,’ Anthony shrugged. ‘Now. Are you starting to see what I am?’

  ‘What?’ George was peering through the gloom. ‘What are you?’

  ‘No, Nutbar. I mean, can you see what I can see?’

  ‘It’s a kitchen.’

  ‘Yeah, I know it’s a fucking kitchen, George. But if you and me’s gonna make a living out of this, we’ve gotta get the feel of a place. Point one,’ Anthony was holding his thumb upright, ‘No dogs. Otherwise,’ he raised his head, scenting the air, ‘we’d smell ’em. And they’d smell us.’

  ‘I can only smell old lady,’ George sniffed.

  ‘That’s good, George. That’s very good. Using your old factory organs now, mate. No cats either.’

  ‘No smell?’

  Anthony tapped the door behind them with his heel. ‘No cat flap. What else?’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘No burglar alarm, George.’ Anthony had thought of everything. ‘Otherwise, there’d be flashing lights, ringing bells and a fucking army of Old Bill tramping all over the place.’

  ‘Wadda we do now?’

  ‘Now, old son,’ Anthony peered along the line of work surfaces, gleaming in the moonlight that streamed in through the window over the sink and the glass in the door behind him. ‘We see where the old girl keeps her stash.’

  ‘What? You mean she smokes stuff?’

  ‘Put these on,’ Anthony sighed. It was like wading through treacle.

  ‘What are these?’

  Anthony paused for a moment. This couldn’t be happening. ‘They’re gloves, George. Like the ones you had when you was a kid. Remember? They had no fingers in ’em and your mum tied ’em together up your sleeves, in case you lost ’em. But,’ he pressed his button nose close to his friend’s, ‘you lose ’em ’ere, mate, and you’re talking about a stretch in Parkhurst.’

  ‘Gettaway,’ George demurred, but he made sure the gloves fitted tightly even so.

  Anthony slithered across the floor, moving noiselessly forward until he reached the open archway that led into the hall. George was with him as the two boys stood up. It was darker here, much darker, and the only light came from a small window above the front door; the one Anthony had tried – the one that was locked. The underfoot sensation here was soft – carpet. There was a sound, too, the steady, deadly ticking of a grandfather clock. George had seen them on Flog It. Worth a few bob. Even so, he prayed that Bed wouldn’t decide to nip off with that under their respective arms.

  ‘What’s that?’ George was pointing to what looked like a small bundle of clothes at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Crafty old tart,’ Anthony chuckled in a hushed sort of way. ‘Burglar alarm.’

  ‘You what?’ George’s heart stopped beating for a second.

  ‘It’s what old people do to protect themselves. Can’t afford a real alarm, so they put piles of crap in corridors, hoping we’ll fall over it. Only, they ain’t dealing with a pair of mugs ’ere, y’know. Go on, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Climb over it.’

  ‘What? You mean we’re going upstairs?’

  ‘Well, that’s where old ladies stash their stuff, ain’t it?’ Anthony could only wonder anew at George’s naïveté. ‘They’re shit scared of being burgled, so they take all their valuables to bed with them.’

  ‘I’m not going into some old cow’s bedroom,’ George announced horrified. ‘You didn’t say nothing about that.’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ Anthony reassured him. ‘That sort of job you leave to the professionals.’ And he patted his own chest, in a modest sort of way.

  ‘I dunno,’ George dithered.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ and Anthony took the lead. He grabbed the banister with his right hand, twisting himself over the heaped clothes and landing neatly on the fourth or fifth stair. What an athlete. George, it must be said, was less secure. He approached from a bad angle, too low to the ground, and missed his footing. His right foot missed the stair completely and his left got entangled in the bedclothes. As he thudded down to the hall floor, Anthony flattened himself against the wall, ready to leap down and do a runner. He hadn’t expected the old duck’s improvised burglar trap to be so effective.

  As for George, he was undergoing an entirely different experience and one that he’d remember for the rest of his life. Wrapped in the bundle of clothes was an old woman. She was cold. And for one brief, appalling moment, George had looked straight into her dead eyes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I thought you ought to hear this, Mr Maxwell.’ When Nurse Sylvia Matthews used a colleague’s surname, there was clearly trouble in the wind. Or there was a kid in the vicinity. This time, it was both.

  Maxwell took in Nursie’s room. When he was a kid himself and Andrew Bonar Law was at Number Ten, this sort of place was called the San. Chaps would end up there after too many hours under a fierce July sun at the wicket or crocked up after a pummelling in the scrum. He ended up there once when somebody tried to throw a gym bench at him. Now, it was all morning-after pills and cosy, anti-suicide chats. Sylvia Matthews had her special Mr Maxwell’s-Been-Horrid-To-Me chair. Other than that, the place was scrupulously clean and Spartan and simple. In a plastic-covered chair in the far corner was one of the simplest of them all. George Lemon.

  ‘George isn’t feeling too well this morning, Mr Maxwell,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Maxwell’s sincerity had barely reached room temperature.

  ‘George,’ Nursie sat down next to the boy. ‘Tell Mr Maxwell what you told me.’

  George’s usually bovine face had an odd look about it this morning, a different one altogether from that caused by the prospect of double French before lunch. If Maxwell didn’t know better, he’d swear the lad had been crying. ‘I seen something last night,’ George muttered. ‘I didn’t like it. I couldn’t sleep thinking about it.’

  George lived on the Barlichway. This could have been anything. Drug abuse. Gangland slaying. Visit by a prospective UKIP candidate. Maxwell braced himself. ‘What was it, George?’ He perched on the end of Nursie’s bed, lolling back to ease the moment and to give the boy plenty of space.

  ‘It was an old lady,’ he mumbled. ‘She was dead.’

  Maxwell looked at Sylvia. Both of them had been here before.

  ‘Where was this, George?’ the Head of Sixth Form asked.

  ‘Bottom of the stairs. I thought it was just a pile of old clothes. Bed said…’

  ‘
Whoa, whoa.’ Maxwell reined the boy in. ‘Let’s back up a little bit there, George. Bottom of the stairs, where?’

  ‘In a house.’

  Maxwell nodded. This was a kind of progress.

  ‘I dunno where.’ George sensed somehow that his explanation lacked a certain something. In History lessons, Mad Max usually wanted to know what evidence he’d got. It was all becoming horribly relevant now.

  ‘All right.’ Maxwell had given Torquemada a few tips in his day and any fan of Python knew that nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition. He slipped his trusty thumbscrews back in his pocket and changed tack. ‘What time was this, George? Do you remember?’

  ‘Haven’t got a watch,’ the boy told him, the red-rimmed eyes never making contact with anything other than the floor and occasionally Nurse Matthew’s feet.

  ‘About, then,’ Maxwell shrugged. ‘About what time was it?’

  ‘Eleven. Twelve.’

  ‘OK. Not your house, then.’ Maxwell was feeling his way, leading the clearly terrified boy through it. His voice was soft and gentle. ‘Not Granny or the lodger at the bottom of the stairs?’

  George looked at him. These teachers were supposed to be clever, for fuck’s sake. What would an old lady be doing in his own house, dead at the bottom of the stairs? The Lemons didn’t have a lodger. And his granny was only forty-seven. For his part, the Head of Sixth Form had seen George’s CAT scores. He had the IQ of a cat.

  ‘I dunno whose house it was,’ the boy volunteered.

  ‘Well,’ Maxwell had no choice now but to grasp the nettle. ‘What were you doing there, George? In somebody else’s house at eleven or twelve o’clock at night?’

  He saw the boy’s eyes flicker for a second. ‘I dunno,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, George,’ Maxwell said softly, holding up a hand as he noticed Sylvia about to intervene. ‘You can do better than that.’

  ‘I dunno,’ George insisted, getting louder. ‘I get confused.’

  ‘What about Bed?’ Maxwell asked. ‘Shall I ask him?’