Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  There were shadows on the wall. A man’s voice. Then a woman’s. A sigh, slow, long drawn out. From nowhere a light flashed across her eyes, sharp, white, blinding. She screamed. And then the darkness.

  ‘Tell me about Charles Stuart, then, Jason.’

  The sound, again, of silence. It was Tuesday morning. Lesson One. Aitch Four was Maxwell’s classroom. Posters of Adi Hitler and Joe Stalin, those old chums well known to every secondary school child in the land in the twenty-first century, decorated the walls. There was a world map, too, on the grounds that Geography teaching had failed generations of children abysmally and nobody but Maxwell knew where anywhere was any more. There was a picture of Nelson walking down some steps; another one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel smoking a cheroot, with his hands on his lapels, looking pretty damn smug and self-made in front of the anchor chains of the Great Eastern. Even Winston Churchill, God rot him, was up there. There was no sign of Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. That was because Peter Maxwell was teaching British History at the moment and had forgotten to take down Adi and Joe. In Maxwell’s classes, you left your political correctness, along with your pointless baseball cap and idiotic skateboard, at the door.

  Jason took all this in through tunnel vision. None of the pictures was helping at all. Why, why, why, he wondered, and not for the first time, did Mad Max pick on him? That dick-nose Carter hadn’t been listening either, so it couldn’t have been that. That tart Joanne was texting under the desk like a maniac, so that couldn’t have been the reason either. No, it was just pure, old-fashioned picking on, that’s why he did it.

  ‘He was a king,’ Jason offered.

  The Great Man hovered at his elbow, looming over him like the sword of Damocles Jason knew nothing about. ‘Spot on, my old Argonaut. I don’t suppose you remember his number at all?’

  ‘Er…’

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ Lobelia’s hand was in the air again. Maxwell – and indeed the rest of Eight Eff Four – didn’t know why she didn’t just keep it up permanently, perhaps in a splint. But Mad Max wasn’t looking for answers; he was looking for attention. Not because, like most of the little horrors in their seats in Aitch Four, he was a sociopath and misfit who craved it, but because he had that long ago discredited idea that it was his job, nay his duty, to thump some learning into their empty heads.

  ‘So, what are we talking about, Mr Carter?’ Mad Max could spin on his heel for England and Charlie Carter was caught in mid-daydream. Maxwell lifted the Biking magazine from the child’s lap. ‘Ah, a counterfactual hypothesis, I see, in that it has precisely nothing to do with History. Just so that your civil liberties aren’t infringed, I will refrain from tearing this up before your very eyes, Charles. You will, nevertheless, not see it until the end of the day – and that only if you report to my office to collect it.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Maxwell.’ Charlie Carter was secretly seething. It was only Lesson One and he had another five to go without his Biking mag. Could he survive?

  ‘And what have we here?’ Maxwell had whirled again, like the Dervish he was, and held out his hand for Joanne’s mobile phone. At first, she toyed with stashing it away, but the mad old bastard would only tip her upside down until it fell out onto the floor, so she meekly passed it to him. ‘Just as I thought,’ the Great Man nodded. ‘“I go fm a cptble to an incptble cwn, wh no dstbnce can b, no distbnce in th wld.” Excellent, Joanne. A text version of Charles I’s last words from the scaffold, delivered at the king’s palace of Whitehall on January 30 1649. How imaginative of you.’ He closed to her, invading her privacy, scaring the bejazus out of her. ‘You will, nevertheless, have to live without this gadget for the rest of the week.’

  ‘The week?’ Joanne was incensed. ‘But you only took Carter’s magazine for the day.’

  ‘I can read a Biking mag in a day,’ Maxwell explained. ‘It’ll take me five to work out how this little gizmo works. And it’s all about punishment fitting the crime, my pet. Give me an innocent, healthy, boyish Biking mag any day of the week over one of these instruments of Satan.’ As usual, nobody knew what he was talking about.

  There was a knock at the door. It was the one he’d been expecting. Paul Moss, Maxwell’s long-suffering Head of History, stood there, all newly spiked hair and corduroy jacket. Paul was a bit of a cipher really. Oh, he was fine on target setting and lesson dynamics and group hugs, but if anybody wanted to know any history, they went to Peter Maxwell. ‘Mr Maxwell, you have a visitor.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Mr Moss, I shouldn’t be long. Could you hold the front line here for me, please? Lobelia over there has the lowdown on King Charles I and why he managed, over a fifteen- year period, to piss off just about everybody in England.’ He beamed at the class as he reached the door. ‘And I shall be asking questions again when I return,’ he said. He winked at Moss and bounded down the corridor, past the fluttering notices of September, the reminders that ski-trip money was overdue and that Afterbirth were performing at the Stag on Naughties Night. That was one Maxwell was determined not to miss.

  A short, freckled, dark-haired detective stood inside his office, fairly gobsmacked by the sheer wealth of film postery around the walls.

  ‘Jane.’ He reached down to kiss her hand. ‘How lovely to see you.’

  ‘Cut the crap, Max,’ she scowled, allowing the physicality only on sufferance. ‘This is official.’

  ‘You know,’ he smiled, ‘I could have done with you in my Joe Stalin re-enactment lesson last week. The uniform’s wrong, but the attitude’s spot on.’ He made for the kettle. ‘Are you officially allowed to have a cup of coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks. When did you last see Martita Winchcombe?’

  ‘Er…’ he invited her to sit down on the excruciating County furniture and flopped onto his own chair. ‘The night before she died, I suppose. That would be last Monday.’

  ‘Where was this?’ Jane had her notebook poised. She was an attractive woman, with her coal-black hair and large, brown eyes. She seemed to have a broom up her arse this morning however, a reminder of how a woman can turn on a sixpence, whatever that used to be.

  ‘At the Arquebus Theatre,’ Maxwell told her.

  ‘What did she say? As exactly as you can.’

  ‘Look…Jane,’ Maxwell could see the end of his tether looming. ‘…the other day you were sweetness and light. You kindly gave me a lift, asked after Jacquie. You were even moderately indiscreet in confiding that Martita was murdered. I live with your best friend, Goddammit.’

  ‘What point are you trying to make, Max? I’m just doing my job,’ she said.

  He stood up. ‘So am I,’ he said. ‘It’s called teaching. And you’re keeping me from it.’

  ‘All right.’ Her voice checked him at the door. ‘All right. I’m sorry. I’m being… Look, this is a little difficult. You were possibly one of the last people to see her alive.’

  Maxwell relented. Everybody was a little on edge this morning. What with murder and Eight Eff Four…come to think of it, those terms did tend to blend a little. He wandered to the settee and sat close to his interrogator. ‘Let’s start again, then,’ he said. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘What do you remember about your conversation? Did anything strike you as odd?’

  He of the total recall kicked into action. ‘Well, she introduced herself. We did the British thing and whinged about the weather. As soon as she realised that I taught within these hallowed portals, her demeanour changed completely. She didn’t approve of children, or indeed anybody much under seventy. She was a little mutt, if I remember rightly. It was only a fleeting chat at best, but…’

  ‘Yes?’ Even for her tender years, Jane Blaisedell was good at nuances, inflections, dots. She was like Jacquie Carpenter through a funny mirror; one of those they used to have down on the Front before electronic gamesmanship took over and people only laughed if electronic blood spurted all over the screen.

  ‘Well, all this was on the way into the theatre. I spent the best part of twenty years sittin
g through a committee meeting and met her again on the way out.’

  ‘You mean she wasn’t in the meeting?’

  ‘No. I assumed she had other fish to fry. I was just leaving the Arquebus when she collared me. Told me she knew me from the Advertiser’s always-inaccurate stories as something of a sleuth.’

  Jane Blaisedell’s face said it all.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He caught it. ‘I know. None of my business. Civilians keep out. I know the drill. Anyway, she told me that Gordon Goodacre’s death wasn’t an accident. She said that someone killed him.’

  ‘Did she say who?’ Jane couldn’t believe her job could be this simple.

  ‘No, we were interrupted at that point and the world moved on. I had a sou’westerly to face cycling home.’

  ‘But it got you snooping anyway?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘You know me,’ he said. ‘Can’t keep an incorrigibly, morbidly macabre man down.’

  ‘Who interrupted you?’ Jane wanted to know. She still wasn’t smiling.

  ‘The theatre’s Artistic Director, Dan Bartlett.’

  The Artistic Director, Dan Bartlett, lay on the floor in his sprawling bungalow on the edge of Tottingleigh, where the South Downs began and suburbia ended. He was stark naked and stiff as a board and SOCO men in white coats and masks flitted around him like extras in a Sci-fi film. One of them was Jim Astley and he was secretly wishing he hadn’t overdone it on the golf course the other day because he was kneeling down and his sciatica was killing him.

  ‘This is a weird one, Henry,’ he nodded as the familiar square face of the DCI appeared around the door. ‘Electrocution.’

  ‘Talk me through it.’ Hall had Tom O’Connell at his elbow that Wednesday morning, mechanically going through the note-taking. Giles Finch-Friezely was still in the van outside, swapping his day clothes for the SOCO whites. Cameras were flashing, measurements being taken. Men dabbed paintbrushes on door frames, window catches. Others scraped samples from carpets. Nobody had been told yet to dig over the garden, but the spades were ready in the van, just in case.

  ‘Worst case I ever saw was on a golf course, funnily enough,’ Astley said, grunting to stand up again. ‘Some chap killed by lightning. You’d swear he’d been through some kind of shredder. Half his hair was gone and his skin and muscles were torn to pieces. Even his arms were fractured. Greenstick cracks all the way down the humerus, radius and ulna. Damnedest thing I ever saw. And the smell! Well, you can’t describe it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hall held up his hand. ‘Thank you for your breadth of experience, Doctor. Let’s deal with the here and now, shall we?’

  ‘Well, as you can see, nothing like as bad.’

  Dan Bartlett’s left leg was black up to the groin, his foot charred across the sole, and his hands were raised in some ghastly, frantic dance to escape the pain. His eyes were wide open, glazed and dull and his back was arched. But it was his face that held Henry Hall’s attention and he’d see it throughout many a sleepless night to come. Just another to add to his collection. Dan Bartlett’s lips were peeled back from his bared teeth and he grinned like a deranged Cheshire cat.

  ‘There’s your culprit,’ a SOCO man said, pointing to the scorched carpet between the dead man’s feet. ‘Faulty wiring. If I had a quid…’

  The SOCO was right. An electric cable lay exposed where the team had peeled away the carpet with its ghastly swirls of blue and grey. ‘Routine, then?’ Hall straightened to look at the man in the white hood. Bob Hartley. On loan from Sussex University.

  ‘Routine my arse,’ Hartley said. ‘Look at that cable again. You don’t get fraying like that from ordinary wear and tear. Look here.’

  Hall did. There were tiny shavings of plastic and wire in the fibres of the underlay and scattered on the floorboards. ‘You only get this sort of thing if you go at it with a Stanley knife. I think we can assume somebody didn’t like Mr Bartlett.’

  ‘If you must know, I despised him with every fibre of my being.’ Carole Bartlett was not a woman to mince words. Her lips were tight, a living version of her dead husband’s, and she sat bolt upright in Henry Hall’s second Interview Room in the nick at downtown Leighford. It was a grey, dismal Wednesday afternoon in Tony Blair’s England and Henry Hall was trying, not for the first time, to piece together a life. The woman was tall, probably more scrawny now than when Dan Bartlett had married her, but she carried herself well and had a rather haughty way with her, underlined by a habit of looking people up and down with a withering scorn. Her clothes were far too young for her and she had a rather tarty air.

  ‘You found the body?’

  Hall was sitting alongside Jane Blaisedell, quietly wishing, as he’d found himself doing ever more frequently over the last few weeks, that she was Jacquie Carpenter. Oh, Jane was doing a good job, certainly. She’d make a decent DS in twenty or twenty-five years, but with Jacquie…well, there was an indefinable something.

  Carole Bartlett nodded. ‘It was horrible,’ she shuddered. ‘Quite horrible.’

  ‘But I thought you said…’ Jane began, confirming anew why Henry Hall wished she was Jacquie.

  ‘I know what I said,’ the widow snapped. ‘But I did once share a life with that man, a bed. If it weren’t for the way of things, we’d have shared children too. And anyway, even if I’d never seen him before, finding a naked corpse in that revolting position is not one of the moments in life I shall look back on and cherish.’

  ‘The way of things?’ Hall liked to leave no stone unturned and was a past master at spotting important adverbial clauses.

  She looked at him, blinking in a blind fury born of life’s little injustices. What did he know? A mere man? She wasn’t going to share her innermost secrets with him. ‘Let’s just say there were…complications. Medical, I mean.’

  ‘Him or you?’ Jane cut to the chase.

  ‘Hah!’ the woman snorted. ‘No, there was nothing wrong with Daniel’s “wedding tackle”, as he so grotesquely put it. And put it he did, wherever and whenever he could. The whole of the south coast is probably littered with his bastards.’ She composed herself as the venom subsided. ‘My ex-husband was a serial philanderer, Chief Inspector, and he liked them young. Obsessed with tottie and pizza – oh, and the time, of course, but above all, himself.’

  ‘The time?’ Hall frowned.

  ‘Anal.’ Carole Bartlett threw her hands in the air. ‘Utterly anal. Everything had to be done just so. Breakfast 7.40, lunch 1.15, bath time…’

  ‘Ten-thirty,’ Hall said.

  ‘Close,’ she said. ‘Ten-fifteen, actually, unless of course there was some tart in there with him.’

  ‘You still keep the name Bartlett,’ Hall observed.

  ‘As I kept the family home and the Porsche. Daniel was not only unutterably vain and self-obsessed, he was also loaded. After I found him in bed with some revolting little chorus line member in 2001, I gave him his marching orders and took him to the cleaners. Not mixing too many metaphors, am I, for you?’ she snapped at Jane, who was busily taking notes.

  The policeman thought of smiling. Jane did not.

  ‘As long as I was still Mrs Bartlett, I was a constant reminder to him. A thorn in his side. The alimony was very satisfying.’

  ‘You went to see him earlier today?’ Hall clarified.

  ‘I did,’ Carole said.

  ‘Was this a regular thing?’

  ‘Certainly not. I’d come for the Sheridan.’

  ‘The Sheridan?’

  ‘Daniel came from old money, Chief Inspector. Apart from poncing around on stage and being “creative” as he called it behind the scenes, he never actually did a hand’s turn in his life. His grandfather was something out in Kenya before the blacks took over. Among the old boy’s souvenirs was an original copy of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Oh, hopelessly overrated and unfunny now, I’ll grant you, but in the right auction worth several times the salary of this gel here.’

  Jane looked at her flatly, but knew
better, in the DCI’s presence, than to respond.

  ‘I fancied a few weeks in the Seychelles and decided to fund it via the Sheridan. Sotheby’s would have been more than interested.’

  ‘Would have been?’

  ‘It wasn’t there.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bartlett.’ Hall was frowning behind the blank specs, more than a little confused. ‘Can you talk me through the events of this morning – in as much detail as you can.’

  Carole Bartlett sighed, as if all this was slightly irritating, rather than the shock of her life. ‘Very well. I got to Daniel’s wretched little bungalow at about nine-thirty, perhaps ten; I’m not sure.’

  ‘You have a key?’

  ‘Of course. But I never used it if he was there. In case I caught him in some degrading situation. He wouldn’t have minded about that, of course. All part of his appalling arrogance. “Look at me, I can still pull, while you’re a dried-up…” Well, whenever I had to go there, I’d ring the bell first.’

  ‘As you did this morning?’ Hall checked.

  ‘Indeed. Of course, there was no answer. So I let myself in.’

  ‘And then?’ It was Jane’s turn to move the story on.

  ‘I assumed he was out. As I presume you know, the garage is separate from the house and I wouldn’t have known whether the car was there or not. I went straight to the lounge, looking for the Sheridan.’

  ‘Which is why the place looked a little…shall we say…done over?’ Hall had noticed that before his SOCO team’s work confirmed it.

  ‘If you mean by your vulgar police parlance, disturbed, yes. The Sheridan, when I saw it last, was on the highest shelf to the left of the fireplace. I “did over” the rest of the room, but to no avail. So I tried the study.’

  ‘The study.’ Hall was remembering the layout of the Bartlett bungalow as best he could, but the SOCO photographs and diagrams hadn’t come through yet.