Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  Jacquie smiled benignly at him. ‘I don’t doubt that for a moment, my darling,’ she said. ‘Anyway, how do you know all this stuff?’

  ‘Leviticus?’ he sighed. ‘Well, let’s see. When I was a lad they hadn’t invented computers or skateboards. I had yet to discover the dizzying world of women and drink. So I hunkered down with the Good Book. Actually, it wasn’t all that good – I guessed who’d done it by Deuteronomy.’

  ‘May you be struck down, Peter Maxwell.’ She tutted around a particularly obstinate piece of lettuce.

  ‘More importantly, anima divina mea,’ he stabbed a particularly recalcitrant bit of salami, ‘who is next to be struck down at the Arquebus?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask this Magda Lupescu,’ Jacquie suggested.

  ‘The wolf,’ he mused, half to himself.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Lupescu in Wallachian – er, Romanian – means wolf.’

  ‘God, Max, are we into vampire country now? This is all getting a bit weird.’

  ‘Wolfcoats.’ Maxwell leaned back, masticating. ‘The undead wandering graveyards wreathed in mist. Ms Lupescu comes from the most vampire-haunted country in the world. But I’d be even more worried if she came from California. The West Coast has more Goth and Visigoth weirdos per square inch than you’ve had takeaway pizzas. They make dear old Vlad the Impaler look like a choirboy. But, stick to the point, Woman Policeman, and tell me about psychics,’ he repeated. ‘Allowing for the Chief Constable and his course.’

  ‘Well,’ Jacquie leaned back on Maxwell’s woodwork. It had to be said, her bump was causing her more than a little gyp today and judging by his wrestling skills, Sonny Jim didn’t appreciate Napolitana and Pellegrino. Maxwell had already predicted that his offspring was more of a steak and kidney pie man, if indeed he was to be of the masculine persuasion. ‘Usually, of course, psychics are brought in by the back door by some desperate, hick sheriff in the Boondocks whose case is going nowhere.’

  ‘And that’s not true of this one?’

  ‘Max,’ she pointed to the slowly gyrating Sonny Jim. ‘It may have escaped your notice, but I’m not actually down the nick at the moment. I’ve no idea how far Henry’s got.’

  ‘No, no.’ Maxwell cradled his glass in both hands. ‘But you’ve worked on dozens of cases with the man. You know how his mind works. How’s he going to use the Madame Arcati of Sighisoara?’

  ‘That depends on what kind of psychic she is,’ Jacquie explained. ‘Some use physical objects, from the crime scene. Er…the paintbrush that Gordon Goodacre was using, the blanket wrapped around Martita Winchcombe, Dan Bartlett’s towel. Mind you, that buggers up crime scenes pretty comprehensively and the whole chain of custody thing becomes a complication.’

  ‘How?’

  Jacquie never knew when Maxwell was being patronising. Was he putting her through her paces to make her feel useful, she whose brain was already addled with domestic boredom? Or was he thick as a parrot?

  ‘Chummy kills Martita Winchcombe,’ she patronised right back at him, using his own Fifties police jargon too. ‘Person unknown, motive unknown. He – or she – covers her body in a blanket – reason unknown. Whose dabs are on the blanket?’

  ‘Miss Winchcombe’s, if Chummy wore gloves.’

  ‘And if Chummy didn’t?’ It was like drawing teeth.

  ‘Chummy’s too.’ Maxwell was coming along like a copper.

  ‘SOCO will handle it with every non-contaminant known to man, so will the lab. If we give it to Magda Lupescu, that’s another set of gloves, dabs. At very least, it’ll cause confusion in court. Chummy’s brief will get him off on a careless technicality. Anyway, that’s not Lupescu’s method.’

  ‘Jane said she just walked about, didn’t she?’

  Jacquie shrugged. ‘Seemed to,’ she said. ‘But Jane’s really frightened, Max. She obviously thinks the woman has genuine powers.’

  ‘Uncle Tony,’ Maxwell remembered.

  ‘Yes.’ Jacquie risked leaning forward and incurring the wrath of her little bundle. ‘Whatever that’s all about. Of course, it’s important to the investigation that she believes.’

  ‘Is it?’ Maxwell was on a learning curve, a rare experience for him.

  ‘Anybody who’s anti – any copper, I mean – shouldn’t work with them. I imagine that’s why Henry didn’t get involved directly. Their negativity can block the psychic’s energy. Allegedly.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Maxwell smiled, ‘but aren’t they supposed to get results? That Peter Hurkos bloke back in the Fifties was pretty impressive, if memory serves.’

  ‘Psychics? Yes. But since my own profession’s clear-up rate is only running at twenty-three per cent at the moment, I’m not sure league tables should be the name of the game.’

  ‘Wash your mouth out,’ he growled, wide-eyed with mock fury as he topped up her glass with fizzy water and his with still wine. ‘I don’t want to hear the LT phrase mentioned again in this house. Savvy?’

  She chinked her glass against his. ‘What’ll you do when Sonny Jim’s taking his GCSEs?’ she asked. ‘What’ll you do about LTs then?’

  ‘I shall be dead,’ he laughed.

  Very quickly, Jacquie’s face darkened. And she started to cry. Out of a blue, cloudless sky. Maxwell scurried around the table to hold her, cradle her head, kiss the tears away.

  ‘Hey,’ he whispered, lifting her tear-streaked face. ‘You know I’ve got a picture of myself in the attic,’ he said. ‘Along with the lads of the Light Brigade. And haven’t we always promised ourselves, when the time comes, that we’ll drive to Brighton and beyond and go off Beachy Head together, hand in hand?’

  She nodded, sniffing, trying to smile through the tears. ‘Don’t say that again, Max,’ she pleaded. ‘Promise me. Promise me you’ll never say that again.’

  He didn’t have to ask her which phrase she meant and he promised her.

  Jane Blaisedell was on the phone to Jacquie Carpenter for nearly an hour the next day. It was her lunch break and she was psyching herself up for what was to come. And what was to come was night and Magda Lupescu.

  ‘Tell me.’ The Romanian woman stood just inside a dead woman’s front door. At her request, no one turned on the lights.

  ‘About Martita Winchcombe?’ Jane was at her elbow, watching, waiting, her heart thumping under her ribcage. Jane had Martita’s house keys in her hand and had turned the heavy lock in its rattling hole. Ahead lay the hall, lit only by the fitful moon from the skylight over the door, and the deadly stairs rising to the left.

  ‘No, no,’ Magda said quickly. ‘The boys who found her.’

  ‘Er…well, they’re fourteen-year-olds, go to the local comprehensive school. They were out to burgle.’ Jane was more rattled than ever now. What did this mad bitch want to know about the boys for? How relevant could those little bastards be? Unless…but that didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘They didn’t come in the way we did.’ Magda jerked her head behind her to the heavy, Victorian front door.

  ‘No. From the kitchen. Straight ahead.’ Jane could have kicked herself. She was doing what fairground fortune tellers relied on, giving too much information. Well, in for a penny… ‘They’ve both coughed.’

  ‘Coughed?’ Magda frowned.

  ‘Confessed,’ Jane clarified. ‘Told us everything.’

  ‘Their names?’

  ‘Is this relevant?’ the Detective asked, snapping at last. ‘I mean, we have rules in this country about minors.’

  ‘It is relevant,’ Magda assured her. She had that annoying habit of Eastern Europeans on unfamiliar ground; she didn’t smile. Jane found herself wondering anew about Henry Hall’s antecedents; was the bland bastard from Romania too?

  ‘Er…Anthony Wetta and George Lemon.’

  ‘Wetta is the thief,’ Magda said, ‘the professional. This Lemon, he is the…fall-guy, hm? Went along for the ride?’

  Her English was clearly learned from some mid-Western university Stateside.
>
  ‘Probably,’ Jane nodded. ‘That would be my reading of it.’

  ‘There.’ The Romanian pointed to the base of the stairs. ‘That is where she died. Her neck was broken.’

  ‘That’s right.’ It was happening again. Jane had seen the SOCO photographs, the sprawled corpse wrapped in a blanket, the weird angle of the head. Jane had seen these. Magda had not.

  The Psychic crossed to the stairs and knelt on one knee, tracing the ghastly swirl of the hall carpet with her fingers. ‘Pain,’ she frowned, her face a living mask in the half-light of the stair windows. ‘She felt pain here.’ She was running a hand around her throat. ‘And another…’ She slid upright, using the banister as a counterweight and almost slithered up the stairs, gripping the smooth, worn wood as she went. ‘Another, here. Her ankle. She tripped…’ She was on the third stair from the top now, looking up into the total blackness of the landing.

  ‘Don’t you want some light?’ Jane asked. She’d had enough of the darkness, fear lying like a cold mask over her face and creeping down her neck onto her shoulders.

  ‘Not yet,’ Magda said. She knelt down on both knees on the top stair, head bowed, back straight, hands extended and touching the wall on her left, the banister on her right. ‘She’s cold. It’s night. “What do you want?”’

  Jane Blaisedell froze, the hairs on her arms and neck standing upright. Two days ago, she’d heard the woman barking in a man’s voice. A voice that ended in a scream. Now she was quavering like an old woman, the voice this time high and brittle. ‘“What are you doing in my house? You’ve no right to be here. No right. I’ve told you. You’re wasting your time.”’

  It was a bleary-eyed Peter Maxwell who cautiously opened the door. Minutes ago, he’d been asleep. Then he’d heard the doorbell, shattering his dreams, insistently forcing him to the here and now. It was gone midnight, the witching hour when demons stalked the earth in the shape of black and white cats. And his eyes hadn’t quite acclimatised to recognise the shape beyond the glass of his front door. It was Jane Blaisedell and she was crying.

  ‘Oh, Max!’ She threw herself into his arms. ‘Max! For God’s sake…’

  He caught her with a dexterity born of a lifetime of coping with fainting girls and boys and he bundled her inside. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, patting her head and bearing the weight of her quivering body as he half carried her up his stairs, trying to find a way of doing it without grabbing her breasts. After all, he was a public schoolboy.

  Jacquie was at the top of the stairs, struggling into her house coat and doing the soft-shoe shuffle in her mules. ‘Jane.’ She reached out and together they helped the girl to the settee.

  ‘The dead,’ Jane was whispering, clinging to them both as though she daren’t let go. ‘The dead are all around us. Did you know that, Jacquie? Max; Max, you’re the cleverest man I know – did you know that? Magda sees them. All the time. Gordon Goodacre with his skull stoved in. Martita Winchcombe with her neck snapped and her spinal cord severed. She can see them, like I can see you. Oh, Jesus!’ and the girl fell sobbing into Jacquie’s comforting arms.

  ‘Brandy, Max.’ The policewoman in Jacquie Carpenter took over now. Last time, it was Maxwell who did the honours, said the right things, calmed the girl down. Now, it was her turn. ‘And ring Jane’s mum and dad, can you? Their number’s in my phone book. She’s out of it now.’

  ‘Jacquie!’ Henry Hall got up at the woman’s entrance. A lesser man would have beamed to see his favourite DS back for a visit, kissed her even, hugged her with the pleasure of just saying ‘Hello’. Henry Hall just got up. ‘I thought I’d have heard more of a welcome outside.’ He nodded to the ante-room where his team were up to their eyes in depositions, leads and cross-references, heads down, foci engaged.

  ‘I didn’t come that way, guv,’ she said quietly. ‘I nipped in by the back door. This isn’t exactly a social call – I just wanted a word.’

  ‘Have a seat.’ He slid the hard, upright chair out for her. ‘Can I get you a coffee? Is there a problem?’

  Henry Hall and Jacquie Carpenter went back a decade. They’d faced death together – murder up close and personal. You develop a bond in those circumstances like no other.

  ‘It’s Jane,’ Jacquie said, looking her boss straight in the glasses. ‘Jane Blaisedell.’

  ‘I thought it might be.’ Hall leaned back.

  ‘I know I’m out of this,’ Jacquie said. ‘And it’s none of my business.’ She’d been wrestling with this all night. Jane had sipped her brandy, blurted out the whole story and gone home with her mum and dad, something she hadn’t done for years, and they’d put her to bed. Like she was a little girl again, hoping that Uncle Tony wasn’t going to call.

  ‘Jane’s been sucked in, hasn’t she?’ Hall asked. ‘And she’s in over her head.’

  ‘A psychic, guv? What’s it all about?’

  Hall shrugged. ‘Just one initiative too many,’ he said. ‘An experiment on somebody’s record sheet, a tick-box ticked.’

  ‘That’s fine for somebody,’ Jacquie said. ‘What about Jane?’

  Henry Hall looked at the woman. She’d grown a few yards since they’d seen her off with jibes interlaced with their blessings. Their Jacquie was going to have a baby. The Maternity Unit would call it a senile pregnancy; after all, Jacquie Carpenter was thirty-four. Now, she was back. And she’d changed. Perhaps it was that new life inside her, the new responsibility. It was the she-wolf defending her cub.

  ‘What about Jane?’ Hall clasped his fingers together in front of him and looked steadily at his DS. ‘How is it with her?’

  ‘You’ve put her with this nutter,’ Jacquie almost shouted. She suddenly saw Henry Hall as outsiders saw him, cold, aloof, using people to get results. And she didn’t like what she saw.

  ‘Psychic consultant,’ Hall corrected her.

  ‘The devil,’ she growled, ‘is in the detail. The woman goes into trances, speaks in tongues. Even her face changes to look like the corpse she’s investigating.’

  ‘Jane told you this?’

  ‘She’s seen it, guv, heard it. She was there, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘And she doesn’t want to be there,’ Hall nodded.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He leaned back again, assessing the situation. ‘Did she send you, Jacquie?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ It was Jacquie’s turn to lean back, easing off, echoing her boss’s posture. She’d come on too strong, behaved like a bull in a china shop. ‘I came on her behalf, guv. She can’t handle it.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you do what Jane can’t? Stand in dead men’s shoes?’

  Jacquie blinked, licked her lips. This had thrown her. She’d expected blandness, political correctness. Possibly, if she rattled his cage enough, fireworks. What she hadn’t expected was a job.

  ‘I’m on maternity leave, guv.’

  ‘“Five o’clock,”’ Hall seemed to be remembering something. ‘“Fed the chickens and ploughed the Lower Meadow. Eight o’clock was delivered of my fifth child.”’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Had the guv’nor flipped too? The whole place had become a madhouse since Jacquie had gone on leave.

  ‘Your Peter Maxwell would recognise that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why it stays in my mind. It’s from the diary of a pioneer woman in Oklahoma in the 1880s.’

  ‘Well, with respect, Chief Inspector,’ Jacquie was even beginning to sound like Peter Maxwell, ‘I am not a pioneer woman.’ She struggled to her feet. ‘I just hope you can live with yourself,’ she said, pale-faced and iron-jawed. She saw herself out.

  ‘That’ll be a no, then,’ Henry Hall murmured.

  There was water dripping from an oar, the blade dipping through reeds that rustled and whispered as the dawn came creeping over the misty meadow. He lay cold and dead in the boat, his hand trailing in the black of the water. She knelt over him. And she cried.

  Her love, her life, had
gone.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘You know Ellen Terry once played the Arquebus?’ Matilda Goodacre asked, tracing her fingers over the sepia photograph of the great actress. ‘Of course, it was a real theatre then, where the Nat West stands today.’

  ‘Yes.’ In telling Peter Maxwell all this, she was probably talking to the wrong person. ‘She was Ophelia to Irving’s Hamlet. They were on a tour of the south coast. Nice to think dear old Leighford was at the cutting edge of culture in those days.’

  ‘It still is, Mr Maxwell.’ Matilda Goodacre seemed to grow three or four inches whenever she climbed on her high horse. ‘You know Anthony Minghella saw my Eleanor of Aquitaine last year?’

  ‘Really?’ Maxwell raised an impressed eyebrow. ‘That must have been a privilege for him. For you both.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she swept imperiously across her lounge. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me – I take it that it was not about the theatre.’

  ‘Just about the Arquebus Theatre,’ he said, accepting her offer of a chair. Matilda’s home was rambling, a little down-at-heel perhaps, along Mock-Tudor Row as Maxwell called it, just south of the pitch and putt and within a golf-ball thwack of the boating lake.

  She fixed him with the look of Eleanor, of Blanche du Bois, of St Joan. ‘You have something of a reputation as a sleuth, Mr Maxwell,’ she said.

  ‘I dabble.’ He was suitably humble, buried in opulent chintz as he was.

  ‘How does that work, exactly?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘It just does,’ he told her. ‘I ask questions. And like the old, not very savoury joke, I get some rebuffs. I also get some answers.’

  ‘But how do the police react to all this?’

  ‘Badly,’ he confessed. ‘Oh, it’s fine in fiction, isn’t it? Dotty old Jane Marple is related to the copper in charge of the case. Impossibly irritating Hercule Poirot is a buddy of Chief Inspector Japp. Poor old Gregson/Jones/Lestrade, whichever tec Conan Doyle was using, go cap in hand to see the Monstrous Ego of Baker Street. But in practice…well, I think our boys in blue are wonderful – and most of them would like to give me a good smacking.’