Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  The Chief Inspector wasn’t going to give the Psychic the pleasure of looking to his left. He knew what he’d see – a green-fronted filing cabinet. Jane Blaisedell, even Jacquie Carpenter, might have fallen for this woman’s party tricks; but not him. He was made of sterner stuff.

  Magda began to look around her. ‘This is a school,’ she chuckled, with a sudden happy realisation. ‘They are still here, the children. The boy in the corner, he hated this place, but he cannot leave. The others loved it. They do not want to leave. They are confused…’ she closed her eyes and cocked her head again. ‘They want to know why you are here. This is their school. They do not know what you are doing.’

  Hall let out a sigh. ‘That makes several of us,’ he said. Though Magda Lupescu didn’t realise it, it was the nearest thing to a joke she was likely to get from Henry Hall.

  ‘Whatever was at the theatre watching Gordon Goodacre was not like these children. Except the one in the corner. It was quite like him. And that one was alive.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Lupescu.’ Hall was on his feet, hand extended.

  ‘We have not yet spoken about Martita Winchcombe or Daniel Bartlett,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Another time, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Can you reschedule for this time tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But my findings will not be any more comfortable to you then. You are disturbed.’

  ‘I am?’ Hall cleared his throat, on the spot, on the back foot. It was not a position he enjoyed.

  She got up slowly and placed her cold, bony hand briefly in his. ‘You know you are,’ she said.

  And Henry Hall waited until she’d left the room before he glanced, briefly, to his left. There, in the shadow, just below the window, stood a green-fronted filing cabinet.

  ‘A chap can get frostbite,’ Maxwell called across the Tottingleigh car park. For the last hour, he’d wandered about beyond the Victorian wall of the old school as Leighford rush hour had disgorged its Lowrie people along the Flyover, hurrying east and west and north into the chill of the October evening. He’d stamped his feet, wrapped his Jesus scarf around his nose and stuffed his hands into his pockets. A degree or two colder and his breath would be snaking out and winter would be here.

  ‘Max.’ Jane Blaisedell shouted back. ‘You’ve gone blue. Can I give you a lift?’

  ‘At least.’ He tried to smile, but was afraid his cheeks would crack. ‘But what I’m really after is a cup of your legendary cocoa.’

  She laughed and clicked open her four-by-four. He clambered in beside her, fumbling for the belt.

  ‘What’s going on, Max?’ she asked, her hand nowhere near the ignition.

  ‘Que?’ It was a masterly Manuel, the scurrying little Spaniard of Fawlty Towers.

  Jane looked ostentatiously round. ‘No Jacquie,’ she said. She glanced down into the well where his feet used to be attached to his legs before the cold had got to him. ‘No Surrey. Otherwise you’d be wearing cycle clips. And if you had Jacquie, you wouldn’t need Surrey. And vice versa.’

  ‘Anybody would think you were a woman policeman.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘Which means,’ she checked her watch,’ you left Leighford High nearly two hours ago…’

  ‘One,’ he corrected her. ‘Pastoral meeting. I can show you the agenda if you like. It’s not the perfect alibi, though; I was asleep through most of it, even though I was in the chair.’

  ‘…and you probably caught the 109 from Eagle Street.’

  ‘You’ve got me.’ He held up both hands. ‘I used my OAP bus pass for the hell of it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I can.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Max,’ she said flatly. ‘I’ve had a bitch of a day and I’m not in the mood for your eccentricities. What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know about Uncle Tony,’ he said.

  Jane turned away from him sharply. ‘Get out,’ she growled.

  ‘Jane…’

  ‘Fucking get out!’ she shrieked.

  He leaned across to her. The tough little Cockney from south of the river was losing the hard-nosed shell she built and rebuilt around herself with every reversal in her life. ‘Jacquie’s putting her sanity on the line for you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ The girl was blinking, staring into the face of this old mad man.

  He leaned back, giving her space. ‘You didn’t know.’

  ‘I still don’t. For fuck’s sake, Max, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Henry’s taken you off the Lupescu thing, hasn’t he? You couldn’t handle it.’

  She turned to him, her face white with rage. ‘No,’ she snarled. ‘I couldn’t handle it. I wake up shitting myself every bloody night. You know that. I’m not proud of the fact. I cried all over both of you. Isn’t that enough? How much more humiliation do you want?’

  ‘No,’ he told her flatly. ‘No, it isn’t enough. Henry asked Jacquie to take your place.’

  He heard the girl’s intake of breath. ‘Jesus!’ she whispered. ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’

  ‘Potentially, yes,’ he nodded. ‘Jane, are you on tablets? Getting counselling?’

  ‘Both,’ she said. Suddenly, she was a very little girl, crouched behind her steering wheel, lost, alone.

  One by one, her colleagues were scattering to their cars, giving the pair odd glances. She noticed and tried to smile.

  ‘Bastards!’ she hissed through the tears. ‘They’re loving this.’

  ‘I’ve got colleagues like that,’ he nodded, taking in their leering faces. ‘Can you drive this thing? Or did we give you people the vote all those years ago for nothing?’

  She sniffed defiantly and kicked the ignition into life, jamming the stick into gear and roaring out of the gateway in a flurry of gravel.

  ‘Stuff ’em,’ said Maxwell, waving at Gavin Henslow with a winning smile. ‘Let ’em think we’re having a torrid affair.’

  She looked at him, scowling through tear-filled eyes. ‘I’m having counselling, Max,’ she said. ‘But I’m not that far gone.’

  ‘Atta girl!’ And he nudged her knee with his fist, in the most fatherly way he could.

  ‘She knew about Uncle Tony.’

  ‘What?’ Jacquie hadn’t seen Maxwell all day. He’d been off at the crack of eight o’six, pedalling like a banshee – and you know how they can cycle – along Columbine to fight the good, underpaid, outnumbered fight. Then he’d chaired his wretched pastoral meeting, hearing himself drone on about academic mentoring and target setting and all the other re-visited ideas that Educationists kept recycling every decade or so. He’d stopped off for a bite at that centre of world-renowned cuisine, the KFC in Mortimer Street, asking the terminal acne case behind the counter just what was a Zinger exactly; and on to the Arquebus, where Deena Harrison was notable by her absence and they’d run through a couple of scenes and gone home. It was late now, the October night enfolding sleeping Leighford in its arms, the sea a wild, grey thing searching hungrily for its prey in the darkness.

  ‘Jane’s Uncle Tony,’ Maxwell said. ‘Magda Lupescu knew about him.’

  ‘No.’ Jacquie shook her head against the padding of the bed head. ‘You’ve lost me a few times in the years I’ve known you, Max; there, I’ve admitted it. But now I’m as lost as…’

  ‘The lost Dutchman mine,’ he smiled, remembering the magical cowboy books of his childhood, where board games lay back to back with articles on how to make your own lariat and understand smoke signals. ‘Think back, heart of darkness. Remember when Jane came to see us in that dreadful state after her experience with Lupescu at the murder site?’

  Jacquie remembered. How could she forget? She’d been there herself.

  ‘She said, between her tears, that Magda even knew about Uncle Tony. Then she clammed up. I asked her about it.’

  ‘When?’ Jacquie frowned.

  ‘Between my pastoral meeting and the culinary apogee of my entire life.’

  ‘
Max,’ she sat as upright as her bump would allow, ‘you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘That’s what I’m doing now. See – watch my lips. I’m talking about today. ’

  Jacquie was appalled. ‘You pried into my friend’s private life.’

  ‘You bet your sweet bippy I did.’ Jacquie was too young for Rowan and Martin’s catchphrase from the Sixties, but a little generation-leaping had never fazed Mad Max. ‘Three people are dead and the woman who is carrying my child is frightened to death. I feel a little prying is in order, don’t you?’

  ‘So who is Uncle Tony? Jane certainly doesn’t talk about him.’

  ‘That’s because he molested her when she was ten. Then he killed himself.’

  ‘My God. She told you this?’

  ‘It took a while,’ he said. ‘I was late for rehearsal as a result. Look, Jacquie, I wouldn’t have done any of this without good reason, you know that.’

  She did. Peter Maxwell was the kindest person she knew. He would never hurt anyone. Oh, unless it was Dierdre Lessing, the Kraken of Leighford High. Oh, or Bernard Ryan, Lord of the Flies. But they both had it coming. ‘It’s not uncommon, I guess.’ The policewoman in Jacquie kicked in. ‘Most sexual cases against children are perpetrated by a family member. What happened?’

  ‘It started shortly after her tenth birthday,’ he told her, folding his pyjamaed arms over the quilt cover. ‘Just cuddling at first, then it got a bit sweatier. I suppose you don’t have to groom kids if you’re related to them. Apparently, he tried full intercourse…’

  ‘Bastard!’ Jacquie hissed.

  ‘But had an attack of the consciences. They found him a few days later. He’d hanged himself.’

  ‘Hanged?’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘The point is, Jacquie,’ he said, ‘that Jane has never told anyone about this until me, earlier tonight. I think she feels better for it now.’

  She looked at the familiar face, the bright, sad eyes. ‘I’m sure she does,’ she said. ‘But why did you need to ask her in the first place?’

  ‘Because,’ he turned to her, ‘I need to know whether this Lupescu woman is a fraud who gets lucky sometimes or whether there’s anything in her.’

  ‘And?’ Jacquie’s face had darkened. Darkened because she didn’t really want to know Maxwell’s answer.

  ‘She knew about Uncle Tony.’ Maxwell was repeating himself, and Peter Maxwell never did that lightly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Paternity leave, Max?’ Legs Diamond swept off his specs in the manner of great headmasters throughout time. Except that Diamond wasn’t a great headmaster; come to think of it, he wasn’t even a headmaster, on the grounds that he’d never mastered anything.

  ‘I’m shocked you haven’t heard of the concept, Headmaster.’ Maxwell’s eyebrows had nearly reached his hairline. ‘You being of the post-modernist persuasion and all.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Diamond flustered. ‘Of course I’ve heard of it. It’s just that, well…you?’

  Maxwell took in the plastic, grey-suited idiot sitting in his plastic, grey office. ‘I don’t know which aspersion you are casting in my direction, Headmaster; whether I lack the physical capability of fathering a child or whether I am so appallingly insensitive and chauvinist that I would not contemplate even launching such a request.’

  ‘No, no, Max.’ Diamond was well and truly wrapped up, as usual. ‘I didn’t mean either, I assure you.’

  ‘So it’s settled, then.’ Maxwell was already on his feet. ‘I’ll see Paul Moss about my cover on my way out.’

  ‘No, that’s not how it works,’ Diamond called. ‘It’s like maternity leave, Max. From date A to date B.’

  ‘Ah, that’s maternity leave, Headmaster,’ Maxwell patronised. ‘Paternity leave may be like it, but it is not it. Physiological differences demand different considerations.’

  ‘So what do you need?’ Diamond was confused, as he often was, in fact, in the presence of his Head of Sixth Form.

  ‘A couple of days should do it,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘A couple of days?’ Diamond blinked.

  ‘Starting this afternoon.’ He stopped in the doorway. ‘Did anyone ever tell you what a brick you are, Headmaster? It just isn’t true what the others say.’ And he was gone.

  Maxwell was still pedalling home when Jacquie came back from shopping. From the bushes beside the front door of 38 Columbine, a yellow-eyed killer watched her every move, his nostrils quivering, his ears pricked. He saw her struggle out from that appalling machine, the one with the roar and the smell, though it had a nice warm bit he liked stretching on in the cold weather. She was carrying those white plastic things again, the ones he knew carried food. This was a good sign. Chicken, perhaps? Or steak? Metternich was a surf ’n’ turf man as any self-respecting maritime feline should be. He yawned and stretched, easing the claws from their hoods. A startled sparrow screeched, flapping skyward from the ground yards away. Still got it, Metternich, old boy.

  ‘Hello, dear.’ The unmistakable chirrup of Mrs Troubridge caught Jacquie as she reached her front door. The little square by Mrs Troubridge’s vestibule had to be the most gardened four inches in Tony Blair’s Britain.

  ‘Hello,’ the policewoman smiled. ‘How are you?’

  ‘No, no.’ The old girl appeared through the gap in the privet, the one carefully crafted by years of nosiness. ‘That’s what I should be asking you.’ She pointed with her trowel to Jacquie’s bump. Jacquie had never seen Mrs Troubridge without a gardening implement in her hand.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jacquie told her, grateful to rest the shopping bags against each other on Maxwell’s step. ‘Over that ghastly morning sickness, thank God.’

  ‘Oh, good, my dear.’ Mrs Troubridge nodded. ‘Dreadful. Dreadful. Those men don’t know what they put us through, do they? Do they know who killed that appalling Winchcombe woman yet?’

  Jacquie was expecting a little more balance in the question, perhaps, a little more getting round to things gradually, but Mrs Troubridge was a gardener, used to calling a spade a spade, and she’d clearly dispensed with the small talk. ‘Er…I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘But you’re in the police, my dear.’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ Jacquie reminded her, patting her excuse.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs Troubridge shrilled. ‘But you can’t plead the belly for ever, you know. Besides, your rather bossy friend, what’s her name? Jane? She keeps you…what do you young people say? Up to pace, hmm?’

  ‘You are very well informed, Mrs Troubridge,’ Jacquie said, narrowing her eyes at the old girl and making a mental note to watch her like a hawk in future.

  The neighbour poked her gently with her trowel, gripped in a pink rubber hand. ‘My dear,’ she smiled softly. ‘I’m an old woman. I’ve lost my husband and God didn’t bless us with children. I don’t have any family and most of my friends have shuffled off this mortal coil. What I do have is an insatiable interest in what goes on around me.’ She closed to the younger woman. ‘Did you know, for instance, that that snooty bitch at number 30 is on the game?’

  ‘Really?’ Jacquie’s eyes were wide.

  Mrs Troubridge leaned even closer. Her nose was now nearly in Jacquie’s cleavage. ‘And Mrs Wickens, in that ghastly mock-Tudor monstrosity on the corner, used to be Charles Williams, a steel fabricator of Hove?’

  Jacquie’s speechless response said it all.

  ‘Exactly.’ The old girl tapped the side of her nose. ‘No, I knew no good would come of Martita Winchcombe. I could have predicted she’d meet a sticky end ever since she fell pregnant.’

  ‘Hardly that terrible,’ Jacquie smiled, having fallen pretty far herself.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ Mrs Troubridge chuckled. ‘How times have changed. You and Mr Maxwell make a delightful couple, for all you’re living in sin and he’s old enough to be your father. But I’m talking about the Forties. Yes, I know, there was a war on and we all thought we’d be blown to bits any minute and those
ghastly Americans were over-paid, over-sexed and over here, but some of us retained our principles. I happen to know Mr Troubridge was a virgin when we wed and him in the navy for five years. No, in some places, back then, they still put girls…like that…into institutions, you know?’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘The news was all over Leighford. We didn’t have abortions on the NHS in those days. In fact, we didn’t have an NHS. Martita passed out one morning at my very feet. We all knew why.’ Mrs Troubridge bridled quietly. ‘She had to go away – to have the baby, I mean. When she came back, well, no one said anything of course. She’d been on a scheme, as the Canadians called it then. Had the little bastard adopted.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot about it, Mrs Troubridge,’ Jacquie commented.

  The old girl chortled. ‘I have to confess my insatiable interest in what goes on around me is not something that developed with maturity. I’ve always had it. Little boy, apparently. Brought up in Cheltenham, so the story went, by very respectable people. Martita never set her cap at anyone after that.’

  ‘Whereas…before?’ Jacquie ventured.

  A shadow came over her neighbour’s face and Mrs Troubridge turned back to her gardening. ‘I told Mr Maxwell,’ she said. ‘Venetian blinds. You’ll forgive me, my dear, if I don’t elucidate.’

  Henry Hall was slumped in his office back at the nick. A less professional man would have run out of the Incident Room screaming long before that wild, wet Wednesday night. The rain hit his window like machine-gun bullets, the wind hammering in vicious gusts from the north. He was still swilling the dregs of his coffee around the bottom of the plastic cup in his hand, poring over the paperwork that comes with murder. His computer was switched resolutely off, as his back and his eyes and his mouse finger told him he’d done enough of the superhighway for one day. He toyed for a while with jacking in his police career and making a fortune by inventing computer pop-ups that said ‘Tiredness Kills. Take a Break’. But there was probably a copyright clause somewhere, so it was back to sleuthing.