Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  Matilda fixed the little woman with her terrible stare, the one that she usually used to curdle the milk. ‘Balderdash!’ she roared. ‘I am not a spirit and I am going no further with this nonsense until I know who I am sitting down with.’

  ‘You have already changed the venue,’ Fiona Elliot spat back at her. She was only an inch or so shorter than the Dame of the Arquebus and nearly as wide; in a cat fight, it could go either way. ‘Let that be enough.’

  ‘My husband died up there!’ Matilda snapped, gesturing with her right hand in a way that Maxwell had often seen Hitler do in the old newsreels. He hoped the woman had no plans to invade Poland.

  ‘And my aunt died in her home!’ Fiona bellowed back. ‘It is vital to the spirits to come together on neutral ground. You’ve probably ruined everything already.’

  ‘OK!’ A man’s voice brought the proceedings to an abrupt halt. They all turned to the tall man in the grey three-piece and the glasses. ‘Let’s do it. I am Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall, currently conducting police inquiries here in Leighford. I have a wife and three sons. And I must confess I don’t quite know what I’m doing here.’

  Fiona crossed to him. ‘Do you believe, Chief Inspector?’ she asked him levelly.

  ‘I’m a policeman, madam,’ he told her. ‘I believe what I can see and hear. I have to deal in reality.’

  ‘Please, Chief Inspector,’ Rowena said. ‘Take a seat on the far left, can you?’

  Hall looked around the assembled group, not a little surprised to see the latest arrival, the one in the scarf and cycle clips. Everybody else he could put in the context of the case. But the uninvited? You never knew what he was doing there. But he was there, nonetheless.

  ‘Ashley Wilkes,’ the Theatre Manager announced. ‘I run this place. Acting background, currently divorced.’ He managed a weak smile.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Wilkes,’ Rowena was in the driving seat again. ‘Next to the Chief Inspector, if you please.’

  ‘Patrick Collinson.’ The crimson man reached the bottom of the steps. ‘Theatre Secretary. My day job – which I can’t afford to give up – accountancy.’ No one but Collinson tittered at the weak joke and he waited patiently to be placed next to Hall, on the opposite side from Wilkes.

  ‘Carole Bartlett.’ The widow of the late Artistic Director could hardly be more of a contrast to the widow of the late set painter. She was wearing a skimpy pair of jeans a couple of sizes too small and twenty years too young for her and a man’s shirt tied around her midriff, in the navel of which jewellery sparkled. ‘My husband was Daniel Bartlett, of anything but blessed memory. All this,’ she gestured at the table and chairs, ‘is just so much bullshit. It’s like those corny old movies where a bunch of misfits agree to spend the night in a creepy old house. But that’s usually for money. What’s in it for us, eh?’

  ‘The truth, perhaps.’ Fiona Elliot was walking up the steps. ‘Martita Winchcombe was my aunt. I have been a member of the West Bromwich spiritual circle for many years. And,’ she glanced at Rowena, ‘I know exactly where to sit.’ And she placed herself next to Collinson. That was actually the seat that Carole Bartlett had intended to take, and she flounced around the table to sit opposite Hall.

  ‘Not there!’ Rowena snapped, then gentler, ‘that’s reserved for someone else.’

  ‘You already know who I am.’ Matilda seemed to float onto the stage. ‘Life chairperson of the Arquebus Theatre Committee, widow of Gordon Goodacre, may his soul rest in peace.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Rowena softly. Then she was looking at the gaunt, angular woman who stood next in line. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ she said as if neither meeting, this one nor the last, had been much of a pleasure. ‘You know where to sit.’

  ‘I am Magda Lupescu,’ the woman said in her rich, dark voice. ‘Just think of me as an interested bystander.’

  ‘No,’ said Fiona. ‘That won’t do. You are more than that, Ms Lupescu. You are legend.’

  ‘Very well,’ the woman smiled. ‘I am legend. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’ and she sat with a strange silence next to Matilda.

  ‘Er…’ Rowena blinked at the man in the scarf and the cycle clips. ‘I don’t believe you’re on my list,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, now, don’t you believe it,’ Maxwell chuckled, pinging the clips into his pocket and draping his scarf over the seats. ‘I’m always on somebody’s list. I’m Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High. I’ve been teaching for a little over two centuries and have a passing acquaintance with History.’

  ‘No.’ Rowena stopped him on the steps. ‘I mean you weren’t invited.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Maxwell beamed at her. ‘I thought I’d explained.’ He looked directly at Ashley Wilkes, then Henry Hall. ‘Deena Harrison couldn’t make it. She asked me to come instead. Ah,’ he glanced down at the seat between Magda and Carole Bartlett, ‘the siege perilous.’ And he sat down, his back to the auditorium, uneasily aware that the late James Butler Hickok was sitting thus at a card table in downtown Deadwood when somebody blew out the back of his head. All right, so that was a saloon, but the analogy was close enough.

  Rowena Sanders was still staring uneasily at Maxwell as she took the last seat, opposite Hall at the other end of the oval table, stage right. ‘I am Rowena Sanders,’ she said, ‘of the Leighford Spirit Circle. For those of you unused to such gatherings, I would like to explain what will happen. First, Mr Wilkes,’ she looked at him, ‘is the theatre locked?’

  ‘As per your instructions,’ he told her. ‘No one can disturb us.’

  That was just as well, thought Maxwell; most of them around the table were disturbed enough already.

  ‘We are going on a journey,’ Rowena said, placing the tips of her fingers together, ‘to the Other Side. Who we will meet there, I have no idea. I would ask you all, whatever happens, to stay in your seats. On no account must you leave the stage. You may feel cold. You may…hear things. See them. Smell them even. But remember, we are seeking our loved ones and we are seeking the truth. As long as we cling to that, nothing can harm us. Now,’ she closed her eyes and tilted her face upwards, ‘let us place our hands palms down on the table so that our thumbs are touching and our little fingers are touching the little fingers of those next to us.’

  She waited until everyone had shifted.

  ‘There,’ she smiled. ‘Can you feel the presence? The circle is complete. Breathe with me. Softly now. That’s it. In…out…’

  Maxwell had been here before. He habitually had to remind Year Seven how to breathe. And the Advanced Classes, by the end of the summer term, included chewing gum too. As for the rest, very clever auto-suggestion. Tell someone they’ll feel cold, see things, hear them and smell them and some of them will. Fiona Elliot, for a start. It was the cleverest media April Fool’s joke he could remember – a cooking programme from the Seventies advertising Smell-o-Vision and inviting television viewers in their own homes to get down on those knees and smell the lowest fifty of the four hundred and five lines on the screen. Hmm, smell those onions!

  ‘Let us close our eyes,’ Rowena said.

  Now, this was a challenge. It was one of the great games of childhood. Prayers of a sultry afternoon in infant school. ‘Hands together and eyes closed,’ the mantra dear to the heart of every teacher – another day done. And Peter Maxwell, long before he was Mad, used to keep one eye open, just in case… And in case of what, he never knew. So, here he sat, in a hushed and darkened theatre where at least one man had died, holding hands with perfect strangers and with one eye open. To his right, Magda Lupescu’s eyes were shut; so were Fiona Elliot’s and Matilda Goodacre’s. Wilkes’ eyelids were fluttering a little, as Maxwell expected. Rowena’s were closed and he couldn’t see Patrick Collinson. As for Henry Hall, behind those damned glasses, who knew?

  A low, keening sound was coming from Rowena Sanders to Maxwell’s left. He kept one eye trained on her, watching for all the telltale signs of the Victorian faker
s: the Gladstone bag, the fake wax hands, the yards of luminescent cheesecloth. All of it was mysteriously absent. Rowena began to sway, her hair swirling as if in slow motion around her face. Her eyes were still closed. There was a shuddering, a rattling of the table under their hands, as if someone was drilling deep under the stage.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Magda Lupescu’s unmistakable voice was saying. ‘Stay where you are.’

  ‘Who’s there?’ Rowena’s head was cocked on one side, listening intently, a frown on her pale, flat face.

  ‘Is it Aunt Martita?’ Maxwell saw Fiona Elliot leaning forward in her chair.

  ‘Gordon,’ Matilda Goodacre insisted. ‘If it’s anybody, it’ll be my Gordon.’

  There was a rattling of the door far across the auditorium, and instinctively, everyone turned. Somebody screamed, although to his dying day, Maxwell never knew who. And they looked up at the low rake of the empty seats and the solitary figure approaching the stage.

  ‘Hello?’ a voice called. ‘Is anybody there?’

  It was Dan Bartlett, come to visit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Jesus!’ Ashley Wilkes was the first to react to the shattering sound of glass and the roar of flame. What sounded like a bomb had gone off in the theatre’s foyer, and for a moment Dan Bartlett stood silhouetted by fire, that indefinable colour curling and billowing down the aisle towards the stage and bouncing in burning debris onto the seats on either side.

  ‘Fire!’ Wilkes bellowed, which had to be one of the most obvious statements any of them had ever heard. But he was the Theatre Manager. Health and Safety was his stock-in-trade and instinct took over. ‘This way!’ he commanded as the sitters, already standers, were now running towards the wings. All, that is, except Peter Maxwell, whose stare was riveted on the lighting and sound box high above.

  ‘Maxwell!’ Wilkes yelled at him. ‘This way. The side door. Come on.’

  ‘Get the others out,’ Maxwell shouted back. ‘There’s someone up there.’ And he was gone, hurtling up the other aisle where the fire had not yet caught hold, making for the stairs that led to the upper floors.

  ‘Police business now,’ Henry Hall said to Wilkes. ‘Do as he says and get the others to safety. You’ve got a mobile?’

  Wilkes nodded. He was already punching buttons as the theatre’s wailing alarm system kicked in and sprinklers showered the whole place. He turned back to shepherd the others out of the side door, kicking open the bar with his foot while Patrick Collinson steadied the fainting Carole Bartlett. Henry Hall had disappeared into the smoke.

  The DCI reached the stairs in the foyer. Wilkes had locked the front doors, whose giant glass panes flashed fire with reflected flames. Hall had seen this before and as soon as he heard the sound he knew what it was. Officially an incendiary device. To his grandparents it was a Molotov cocktail. A petrol bomb. And whoever had thrown it had tossed it into the other entrance to the auditorium, beyond the ticket office, itself now alight. The sprinklers were beginning to cope with the flames at ground level, but fire had leapt upwards with its terrifying speed, engulfing the joists overhead and spreading outward.

  Thick, choking black smoke was filling the auditorium now and Hall coughed and spluttered his way along the landing. He knew the auditorium and stage had to be below him, to his right, but he couldn’t see it for the smoke and the incessant downpour of water. Wilkes would have got the others out by now and the fire engines would be on their way. But where the hell was Maxwell and what had possessed him to go this way? Into the jaws of death. Into the mouth of Hell.

  Glass shattered to Hall’s left as the front of Ashley Wilkes’ sound and lighting box blew out. It felt like a thousand needles and the DCI was flung sideways, cracking his ribs against the balustrade. Blinded and bleeding, in agonising pain whenever he breathed, Hall managed to crawl forward, inch by painful inch, keeping the flames and smoke above him, looking for the other stairs.

  But the other stairs had gone and he heard the appalling crack of timbers as the floor beneath him began to give way. A column of flame shot towards him, jerking him backwards as it defied the water jets in its unstoppable thirst for oxygen and the night sky.

  Then Hall felt himself grabbed by the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder and he was being lifted bodily, slung like a trophy over somebody’s shoulder. And that somebody was carrying him back the way he had come, crunching on broken glass, batting aside burning debris. And the last thing Henry Hall remembered, head down, bouncing along with every cough that jolted and seared his lungs, was the thought, ‘Aren’t our firemen wonderful?’

  ‘We know all about it, Deena,’ Peter Maxwell said, easing himself down on the sloping ground under the concrete girders of the Flyover. The scene below them was chaos. The Arquebus’ fire was out now, but smoke still rose from windows where the glass had gone and the fire engines stood at crazy angles to each other, along with ambulances and police cars, the whole place a mad fairyland of flashing lights and water and people trying desperately to be British and to stay calm.

  Maxwell’s face was a mask of blood, where the flying glass had ripped him moments before he’d dragged Henry Hall to safety. Fancy him remembering how to do a fireman’s lift after all these years. That’s what being a Boy Scout does for you. When all this insanity was over, he made a mental note to ring Akela and tell him all about it. He’d have a word with Henry Hall too. The curmudgeonly bugger could do with losing a few pounds; he’d been unconscionably heavy on the turns of those stairs.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the girl asked. The fire had burned her parka hood and her hair smelt singed.

  ‘I will be,’ he nodded, sniffing in the damp, smoky October night air. ‘You?’

  She looked at him, at her old Year Head and History teacher, unrecognisable under the blood. ‘No,’ she said, suddenly cold. ‘I’m not all right. And I’m not sure I ever will be.’

  ‘Tell me about Oxford,’ he said, looking into her cold, dead eyes.

  ‘Oxford,’ she tried to smile, ‘was so twelve months ago.’

  ‘No, Deena,’ he shook his head sadly. ‘It was more than that. You haven’t been to Oxford since halfway through your very first term. Where have you been since?’

  Her face said it all and it all came flooding back like the worst nightmare, the one from which she couldn’t wake up. Candles fluttered in front of Maxwell’s face until she couldn’t see him anymore and there was a sigh, half human, half not. 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 wanted to scream but she couldn’t and she was grateful for the sudden darkness.

  ‘They never turned the light off, you know,’ she said softly.

  ‘Why, Deena?’ Maxwell asked. He was gentleness itself. ‘Why didn’t they turn the light off?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged, the tears near. ‘They wanted to study me, I suppose. Watch me all the time.’ Her eyes suddenly flashed up at him, briefly lit like the flames in the theatre that would roar and dance and leap in Maxwell’s memory for ever. ‘And they talked about me. All the time, talking about me. Do you know what that’s like?’

  Maxwell shook his head.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘How did you know,’ she asked him, smiling now, ‘that I didn’t stick it out at Oxford?’

  Maxwell’s gaze fell. ‘We don’t need to do this, Deena,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, but we do,’ she laughed. ‘That philosophical debate – remember? I said we’d have it one day – that or a fuck.’ She suddenly frowned. ‘And that wouldn’t be right, would it?’

  ‘No,’ Maxwell said. ‘That wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘So tell me.’ She reached out and tapped his arm, sitting as he was, cross-legged in front of her. ‘How did you know about Oxford?’

  ‘The red carnation,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before we started work at the Arquebus,
I said to you, “So you’re a red carnation woman now”. And it was obvious you didn’t have the first clue what I was talking about. Now, I went to the Other Place, Deena, as you know, but at Oxford there’s a tradition that finalists at the end of their third year, especially very able people like you, wear red carnations in their buttonholes in the last exam. You didn’t know about it because you never sat that final exam. Or any exams.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she nodded, like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. ‘When Mummy and Daddy died…’

  ‘Mummy and Daddy didn’t die, Deena,’ he told her. ‘There was no fatal crash, no death visitant. That was all in your head, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she blinked, bewildered now and afraid.

  ‘I went to see your old professor,’ he said. ‘At Corpus. Paul Usherwood. He was a nice man, Deena, a very nice man. At the time you claimed he seduced you, he was sixty-seven years old, paralysed from the waist down. His secretary had never heard of you – that’s because the woman had only been at the college for two years and you’d already gone by then, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, her dark eyes bubbling with tears. ‘When Alex – that was my fiancé – killed himself…’

  ‘He didn’t kill himself, Deena.’ Maxwell reached out to hold the girl’s trembling hands. ‘He drowned, in a punting accident on the Isis. Before I left Oxford, I checked the back copies of the local paper, just to confirm what Professor Usherwood had told me. It was one of those silly, student things. We did them all the time on the Cam but perhaps the Isis is a less forgiving river. Alex couldn’t swim, could he? And you,’ he wrapped his arms around her narrow shoulders, ‘you couldn’t live with the loss. You had a nervous breakdown. Your world fell apart. And that world had always been fragile, darling, hadn’t it? We remember, don’t we, you and I, the fire in the toilet Block at dear old Leighford High? Ollie Wendell on the Science block stairs? The water fight when you were in Year Twelve? Oh,’ and he looked down at the aftermath of the blaze, still smouldering and scorched below the slope, ‘and, of course, the fireworks.’ He put his blood-dried face close to hers, staring into those dark, frightened eyes. ‘The people talking about you,’ he said. ‘A man’s voice? A woman’s?’