Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  ‘At the theatre – the Arquebus. I’m working there on a show with some of our kids. I understand Miss Winchcombe was the Treasurer.’

  ‘Was she now?’ O’Connell was scribbling away furiously.

  ‘May I ask, Chief Inspector,’ Maxwell said, ‘whether Miss Winchcombe met her death by natural causes?’

  ‘She fell downstairs, Max.’ Jacquie was pouring coffee for them both, that grey, dull Thursday morning. ‘Isn’t that what Henry said?’

  ‘Henry,’ he fished in the fridge for the milk, ‘wasn’t saying anything.’

  ‘Oh, you know what he’s like,’ she said. ‘Tighter than a gnat’s chuff. You didn’t expect him to give anything away, surely?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Do we have any chocolate digestives, light o’ love – or are we in divorce discussions already?’

  ‘Third shelf,’ she directed him, squeezing herself into the kitchen chair. ‘No, back. That’s it. Behind the muesli. Jane was more forthcoming.’

  ‘Ah,’ he sat down opposite her. ‘I hoped she would be. Didn’t want to disturb you last night when I got in so late, but it’s high time some bean-spilling went on. Say on, oracle mine.’

  ‘Max,’ Jacquie looked at him. ‘Miss Winchcombe was an old lady. Unsteady on her pins. Jane said there were a helluva lot of empties in her rubbish. She’d probably gone one over the eight, lost her footing at the top of the stairs and wallop. Broken neck.’

  ‘That was the cause of death?’

  ‘Well, we won’t know for sure, of course, until Jim Astley’s done his stuff, but it seems likely. Jane’s seen it all before.’

  ‘And has she seen a corpse wrap itself in blankets?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, we have to rely in this situation on the less than spectacular witness skills of one George Lemon, who could thick for England, and one Anthony ‘Bed’ Wetta, known associate of every gang since Robin Hood and his Merry Men. George must have fallen over the old girl to come face to face with her as he seems to have done. I doubt whether a casual glance at a bundle of cloth would have quite so unhinged him as the sight apparently did. So George probably rearranged the blankets, at least by accident. God knows what Anthony’s involvement was and, ashamed though I am to confess it, I may have been instrumental in a little fabric dislodgement myself.’

  ‘Old people frequently wrap themselves in blankets,’ Jacquie said, sipping her coffee. ‘Was it cold in the house?’

  ‘Like a tomb,’ Maxwell nodded.

  ‘Well, there you are. Huge great place like Dundee, living on a pension. She can’t afford to heat it, so she wraps herself in an extra layer one night. Gets a bit tanked up and a loose stair carpet and gravity do the rest.’

  Maxwell looked into his love’s cool, grey eyes. Was anybody out there listening to him? ‘The old girl was wrapped, Jacquie. Having fallen downstairs. Someone had carefully arranged the body – it doesn’t just happen that way. And then there’s Gordon Goodacre,’ he said. ‘Friend of the Arquebus, hit by a flying ladder on stage. Martita Winchcombe, Treasurer of the Arquebus, leaps, blanket-shrouded, to her death at the bottom of her stairs. Let me introduce you to a phrase that may not be in police procedural vocabulary – bloody enormous coincidence.’

  Even routine departures have to be investigated. That’s what SOCO are for. Scenes of Crime Officers. Men and women. Old ones, new ones, some as big as your head. Giles Finch-Friezely sounded like he’d stumbled out of a PG Wodehouse novel, a Drone lost in the corridors of time. In fact he’d gone to a bog-standard comprehensive not unlike the one in which Peter Maxwell was squandering the last remaining years of his sanity and he’d got the scars to prove how awful it was in that situation to be saddled with a name like his. He’d toyed with doing the deed poll thing but, as he was built like a brick shithouse, had gone for the quicker option and battered seven bells out of anybody who so much as sniggered.

  That Thursday morning, while Peter Maxwell was pedalling White Surrey over the Flyover on his way to another dazzling day of intellectual cut and thrust, Finch-Friezely was crouching on the stairs of Martita Winchcombe’s house at Dundee, on the curve of Martingale Crescent.

  ‘Bugger me,’ he muttered to himself, peering at the wallpaper and then at the banisters on the other side. ‘Blu-Tack.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Mrs Shiva.’

  A long silence. Then…

  ‘Mrs Shiva?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ A dark brown voice shattered the moment. Deena was not having a good evening. And if she didn’t, nobody else did either. Like a whirlwind in the trees, like a deluge on the dykes, she tore up the central aisle, script in one hand, soul in the other.

  ‘Mr Mushnik,’ she turned to the hapless fat lad playing the flower shop proprietor. ‘What are you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  She looked into his dark, slightly mystified eyes. ‘Apart from being a talentless little shit, of course.’

  Mr Mushnik was actually Dominic Reynolds. He had been the only lad in Year Nine who had auditioned for Willy Wonka, so, almost by default, he had become a male lead in every one of Leighford High’s productions since. Anyway, Dominic had a quiet sense of pride. If you’re doing A-level Theatre Studies, you should put your money where your mouth is. Get up on stage and act. And that, deep down, was all Deena was asking him to do.

  Even so, the lesson came hard and the lad stood there, jaw open. Mrs Carmichael had never spoken to him like this.

  ‘You are a Jewish shopkeeper in downtown Nowheresville. You only have a tiny coterie of clients – Mrs Shiva is one such – and you have yet to fully grasp the enormity of Audrey II’s money-making capacity. You’re…what…fifty-five? Sixty? Your parents came over, before you were born, to Ellis Island, from some ghastly Eastern European existence. Let’s try some method here, can we, and forget we’re from a bog-standard comprehensive in Leighford? OK with you?’

  Before Mr Mushnik had time to forget anything, Deena had wheeled to Seymour. She narrowed her eyes, hands on hips, bristling with attitude. ‘There are nerds,’ she growled, ‘and there are nerds. At the moment, Seymour dear, you have all the believability of that bloody cardboard flower.’

  ‘But in the film…’

  ‘We’re not doing the fucking film!’ she screamed at him. ‘And Rick Moranis you ain’t.’

  No, he wasn’t Rick Moranis. He was Alan Eldridge, an up-himself ex-private schoolboy whose parents had fallen on hard times and been forced to send him to that sink of mediocrity that was Leighford High. He could do a pretty good Bronx while carrying a tune in a bucket and Mrs Carmichael was running out of options.

  ‘Boys and girls!’ The familiar voice made them all turn. A silhouette in cycle clips filled the doorway that led to the auditorium. The light was behind him, but the hat, the scarf, the presence. Who else could it be? The Cavalry had arrived. There was a warmth in that voice, a comfort. Sally Spall as Audrey I nearly burst into tears. But then, she’d been doing that since Year Seven. Sally was a tiny flower of a thing with freckles, a lisp and a little, pointed chin. She could have been born to play the downtrodden, single-braincelled florist kicked around by her mad psycho dentist boyfriend. No problems for Angela Carmichael there.

  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ Deena’s smile was serene from centre stage. ‘Lovely. Come on, then, people.’ She clapped her hands around the script. ‘From the top. We have an audience tonight.’

  He waited until she reached the back row then hauled off his hat and scarf and sat beside her in the darkened theatre. ‘Problems?’ he asked, as the cast went through their paces, improvising with cardboard boxes as furniture.

  ‘No,’ she trilled. ‘Au contraire. They’re very good, aren’t they?’

  ‘I think so. How’s Dominic settling in?’

  ‘Dominic?’

  ‘Mr Mushnik.’

  ‘Oh, excellent,’ she said quickly. ‘Bags of motivation.’

  ‘Angela Carmichael was a bit worried about him. Ra
ther flat, apparently.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Deena assured him. ‘I was just congratulating him on his delivery.’

  ‘Fine. Benny?’ Maxwell had the skill of all teachers – conducting an apparently innocuous conversation while actually spotting delinquents skulking at all points of the compass. He motioned a lad across to him. Benny was dressed in black, trailing leads and looking very techie.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’

  ‘I realise you’re something terribly important in the Woofers and Tweeters Department, but get in touch with your feminine side, would you, and make your old Head of Sixth Form a cup of coffee, there’s a good Key Grip.’

  Benny had been Leighford High’s general factotum for years. Rumour had it he was thirty-eight and they’d kept him on just for productions. Nobody knew exactly what he did on a daily basis. There was talk of Social and Health Care AVCE, but that was only talk. Real men didn’t take subjects like that and real schools didn’t teach it. Whatever, Benny seemed to live in the little room behind the stage at school and seemed forever to be fine-tuning the PA. He tugged his forelock and trudged off in search of a kitchen. ‘That’ll be no problem at all, Mr M,’ he winked.

  ‘Is it true, Mr Maxwell?’ Deena asked as the action resumed on stage and flower shop customers came in droves from the wings to gawp at Audrey II, looking at the moment spectacularly like a badly painted stage prop.

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That a man died over there? About where Seymour is standing now.’

  ‘I believe so,’ Maxwell said. ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘Me?’ She turned to him in the half-light. ‘God, no. I’ve been in haunted places before.’

  ‘Haunted?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘What makes you think the Arquebus is haunted?’

  She looked at him for a moment, a weird enigmatic light in her dark, sparkling eyes. ‘Oh, I know it is,’ she said. ‘Audrey,’ and she was on her feet. ‘Excuse me, Mr Maxwell. Audrey, can we try that again? That crossing bit? It was excellent, darling, excellent, but it needs just a teensy bit of timing. Seymour?’

  Maxwell sat back and watched. He had to admit it: Deena Harrison was good. He remembered her Mary Magdalene in Superstar, her Maid of Orleans in St Joan. OK, so you didn’t turn your back. But that was a long time ago – the mischievousness of youth, little more. And on stage, what a presence! Now she was driving another cast on, as Maxwell had in years gone by. What a Roxanne she would have made to his Cyrano. And he let it all wash over him as Benny brought his coffee and Deena transformed a handful of quite limited kids into smooth-moving, harmony-singing Sixties kitsch. Of course, he reasoned in a less than euphoric moment, it would be radically different when Geraint Horsenell came on board. Heads of Music would roll along with his drums.

  ‘Right, everybody,’ Deena called the cast to order. ‘Well done tonight. Work on that shoulder thing, Mr Mushnik. Let’s have more awe when we see the plant for the first time. Tomorrow night, please,’ she consulted her clipboard. ‘Principals at seven, please. Audrey, Seymour and the Dentist. The rest of you guys, words, words, words. You don’t know ’em; Mr Maxwell can’t hear ’em.’

  ‘It’s my age,’ Maxwell yelled back.

  ‘Eh?’ Benny shuffled past under a stepladder.

  ‘I’ll do the jokes, Barber,’ Maxwell reminded him. ‘And for God’s sake, be careful with that thing.’

  That thing exercised Peter Maxwell’s mind long after the kids had gone home. They left the premises, in knots, gaggles or clumps, depending on their taste. Seymour and Mushnik were off to the Vine, masters as they both were in the art of fake ID, to drown their sorrows and bitch about Deena. Audrey was swept up by her boyfriend, a bit of rough her parents detested; even though he wasn’t a dentist, it did seem a little like life imitating art. The extras just seemed to vanish into the dark of the September night, flower shop frequenters and down-and-outs and radio DJs and the line-up of chorus girls. Maxwell would have offered to give Deena a lift home, but that would have meant his crossbar and all sorts of articles, not just in the Advertiser but in the Smut on Sunday, and not a few probing questions in the Crown Court. The night air, she said, would do her good. She had rather a lot on her mind at the moment. That Maxwell didn’t doubt and he took the opportunity to tread the boards himself.

  He checked out Benny’s ladder in the silence of the theatre, propped and silent against the back wall. He ran his finger over the three or four that rested there with it. Cold, aluminium rungs and steel safety chains. He put his weight on each of them. Two of them gave a little way, one moved several inches. The others didn’t move at all.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ The voice made him turn. For a moment he couldn’t see anyone, because all the house lights were full on, then a figure sauntered out from under the dark of the balcony.

  ‘Mr Bartlett, isn’t it?’ The Head of Sixth Form crossed to the apron, talking to the Artistic Director.

  ‘I was just about to lock up. It’s half past ten.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I was miles away.’

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ Bartlett smiled up at him, keys in hand. ‘You were wondering how it was possible for one of those to fall on poor old Gordon.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Maxwell confessed. ‘A macabre turn of mind, I’m afraid.’

  ‘The chains weren’t in place,’ Bartlett told him. ‘They should have been. And they weren’t.’

  ‘Whose responsibility was that?’ Maxwell asked, coming down the steps stage right.

  Bartlett wagged a finger at him. ‘Ah, the blame culture,’ he sighed. ‘Everything has to be somebody’s fault, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t mean…’

  Bartlett shook his head. ‘No, I’m sure you didn’t. The theatre manager is Ashley Wilkes,’ he said. ‘Health and Safety issues rest with him. Want to cast the first stone?’

  Not a million miles away from the Arquebus, as the moon risked the odd visit from behind the scudding clouds, two policemen sat in Leighford nick. The place, within and without, was the same as police stations everywhere – Thirties-ghastly, replacing its rather homely Victorian predecessor with the blue lamp outside it; that was now a trendy wine bar. It had no personality, no presence. It was square and it was there – a depressing combination, really. One of the men was a double-barrelled SOCO with shoulders like tallboys; the other was DCI Henry Hall. Both of them had long ago given up their private lives.

  ‘From the top then, Giles.’

  ‘Well, I must confess, guv,’ the earnest lad told him, ‘I nearly missed it. Two treads down from the landing at the Winchcombe house. Blu-Tack on both sides. It was less clear on the banister base oddly enough, more obvious on the wallpaper; got sort of caught in the knobbly bits.’

  ‘What does this tell us?’ Hall was playing stupid policeman tonight.

  ‘What’s Blu-Tack for, I asked myself.’

  ‘And what did you reply?’ Hall hadn’t got all night.

  ‘Putting up posters, notes, whatever.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And who puts up posters four inches above a stair riser?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The Blu-Tack was obviously the residue of larger bits – quite large blobs, I’d say, judging by what was left. They were in an exact line with each other.

  ‘Which told you what?’

  ‘A tripwire. Somebody had placed a tripwire two stairs below the landing. Even in daylight, it’s not likely the old girl would have seen it.’

  ‘All right,’ Hall nodded, peering into the steam of his coffee cup. ‘Let’s brainstorm. Martita Winchcombe is a spinster lady. Lives alone.’

  ‘Has a niece,’ Finch-Friezely was flicking through his pocket book. ‘A Mrs Elliot.’

  ‘I’ve got people working on that. She’s next of kin and she’s been informed. Lives in West Bromwich and is not exactly hurrying down.’

  ‘Worth a bob or two, though, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Finch-Friezely reflected. ‘The old girl.’

&nb
sp; ‘We’re working on that too,’ Hall assured him. ‘You’ve been to the place. Seems a little run down. Central heating on the blink. If she’s worth anything, she’s not spending it on the house.’

  ‘What time of death have we got?’ the lad asked.

  ‘Astley thinks about nine or ten on Tuesday night. The boy from Leighford High fell over her just over twenty-four hours later.’

  ‘I checked the lights,’ the DC told his boss. ‘If Astley’s right about the time, she’d already be in bed, I guess. Certainly she was wearing her nightie and dressing gown and was wrapped in a blanket. How cold was it Tuesday night?’

  ‘Seventy-plus years cold,’ Hall told him. ‘In old people, it’s nothing to do with the weather.’

  ‘Right. So Miss Winchcombe was in bed. She gets up. Why? Call of nature?’

  ‘Disturbed by something,’ Hall preferred. ‘If somebody stretched a wire across the stairs, they might want to stay around to see that it worked.’

  ‘You think they were in the house all along?’

  ‘It’s possible. You and I might have seen the wire immediately, but even if not, it’s possible to step over it, walk right through it. What have you boys got on the prints?’

  ‘Usual partials all over the place,’ the SOCO man said. ‘I don’t think anybody realises the sheer number of fingerprint details in the average house.’

  ‘Put in for overtime,’ Hall said impassively. He didn’t like whingers and didn’t care who knew it. ‘So, she walks along the landing. Her bedroom was…where?’ He checked the rough plans another of the SOCO team had sketched for him. ‘Second door on the left as you look from the top of the stairs. Where’s the light switch?’

  ‘Top of the stairs.’ Finch-Friezely craned his neck to decipher his colleague’s doodles. ‘That would have operated two bulbs, one on the landing and one in the hall.’

  ‘And when we got there?’

  ‘No lights on at all.’

  ‘So?’ Hall was used to masterclasses like this, piecing together the jigsaw of a life.