Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  ‘She’s a fuckin’ nutter.’

  Some of the demonstrators froze. Others grinned sheepishly. All of them watched Maxwell. What would the Great Man do? They’d all heard since Year Seven that he once hung a kid from the school flagpole for swearing. And some of them believed it.

  ‘Come off the fence, now, Benny,’ Maxwell growled with a smile in his voice. ‘Let’s analyse this, my children. Spread yourselves.’

  One by one they found chairs or arms of chairs or corners of carpets, sitting at the Great Man’s knee. ‘Let’s see. You want Mrs Carmichael back, right?’

  There were nods and grunts and ‘hear, hear’s in all directions. Benny whistled. ‘And you want the smoking ban lifted and a bar in the Common Room and free contraception and the abolition of exams and… Anybody catching my drift, yet?’

  They all were, but nobody said so.

  ‘But if we said you could smoke, some of you wouldn’t want to and there’d be howls of complaint about passive smoking and you’d upset the government initiatives of that nice Mr Blair. If we put a bar in the Common Room, Benny, you’d whinge about the price and Sian, you wouldn’t like the pork scratchings. Rijiura,’ he singled out a Tendril, ‘it would be against your religion and you’d be torn by impossible peer pressure. If we gave out free contraception, there’d be naughty fumblings in dark corners…sorry, even more naughty fumblings than there are now…’

  A ripple of laughter.

  ‘And if we abolished exams, how would we decide who were the chiefs and who were the Indians? We’d be consigning you to a lifetime of filling shelves at Tesco’s – oh, no offence, Dominic.’

  The Mr Mushnik of Leighford High grinned. Many was the bottle of Southern Comfort he’d passed obligingly to Mr Maxwell on his trolley runs.

  ‘That’s not the real world, people,’ Maxwell told them, looking into each and every disappointed face. ‘I could have a word with Mr Diamond and I could probably persuade him to dispense with Miss Harrison’s services. And then what? You’d have no show. Nothing. Mrs Carmichael’s just not well enough. If she knew what you guys were going through now, she’d jump through hoops to come back; you know she would.’

  Some of them nodded. All of them agreed.

  ‘And she might just lose her baby. That’s the real world.’

  The grumblers had stopped grumbling, the back row element a rabble no more. They knew he was right. Bugger Mad Max. He was always right.

  ‘OK,’ Maxwell had done it again. ‘Guys? OK?’ The Americanisation of Emily was extending to Peter. ‘So Deena shouts at you. Why?’ He held up his hand. ‘No, Benny, she’s not a fucking nutter. Sally, you miss a note. What does Deena do?’

  ‘Calls me useless.’ The girl looked close to tears, lisping more than ever.

  Maxwell nodded. ‘Andy, you miss your entry cue. What happens?’

  ‘She bawls me out,’ the scrawny dentist said. ‘In front of everybody.’

  Maxwell nodded again. ‘Tendrils, the dance routine goes haywire. Deena’s reaction?’

  They looked at each other, unsure, unsettled, looking for an answer.

  ‘She’s cross with us,’ Tina Morgan suggested.

  ‘Right. Now see it from Deena’s point of view. She’s not much older than you. And she doesn’t know any of you. She’s got a helluva job on and she’s doing it out of the goodness of her heart. To help Mrs Carmichael. To help her old school. To help you. Nobody’s paying her very much and it must seem, about now, to be a bit of a thankless task. Sally, you don’t miss notes. You sing like an angel – I know, I’ve heard you. Get it right next time. Andy, you’ve trod the boards before – your Sweeney Todd was legendary; what’s with missing cues? Tendrils, how much rehearsal time do you need? Remember Grease?’

  They all did.

  ‘It was magic,’ he told them. ‘Four nights and four standing ovations. You can do this, everybody. I know it. You know it. Deena knows it. That’s why she’s riding you hard. If you were really useless, do you think for one moment she’d say so? Remember, before you judge Deena, walk a mile in her shoes. Then, when you judge her, you’re a mile away and you’ve got her shoes.’

  The sniggers rose and grew into open guffaws and hysterics. It wasn’t original, but it got the team back onside again. ‘And if you’d enjoy wearing Deena Harrison’s shoes, Benny, I’d rather not know about it. All right?’

  They laughed again.

  ‘Now, get out of here. I’ve got to do the near-impossible and teach Year Seven some history and you have got a show to put on!’

  He waited until they’d gone, their steps lighter, their faces brighter with smiles. They were chattering in the corridor, laughing. When the door had closed, he reached for his phone.

  ‘Thingee?’ It was, as far as he was concerned, the name of the girl on the school switchboard. ‘Have we got a number for Deena Harrison? I need a word.’

  ‘A psychic what?’ Margaret Hall couldn’t believe her ears. Over the years, she’d seen her husband come home with some pretty cranky initiatives, psychobabble dreamed up by a Whitehall think tank only marginally in touch with reality. But this…

  She was already in bed when Henry thudded up the stairs. He’d ignored her note on the kitchen table, the one that told him the outside tap was leaking again and there was shepherd’s pie in the fridge. He reached over in the soft lamplight and kissed her forehead.

  ‘Didn’t think you’d still be awake,’ he said, hauling off his tie.

  ‘And miss your psychic consultant announcement? Not a bit of it.’ She yawned and fumbled with the bedside clock. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Hall sat next to her and let his shoes thud to the floor.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Margaret struggled to sit up, her nightie ruched under her. She and Henry had shared a life now for a long time. He was a quiet man, close – some would say secretive. If he mentioned things at nearly two in the morning, it was because they worried him.

  ‘Well,’ Hall peeled off his socks and flexed his toes for the first time in hours. Conferences! What crap! ‘I could embrace the whole initiative in the visionary spirit in which it is offered.’

  ‘Christ, Henry,’ Margaret frowned. ‘That’s very management of you. What’ll you really do?’

  He turned and in the confines of their bedroom, in the dim light of their bedroom lamp, in the company of his wife, his companion of a mile, he risked a smile. ‘I’ll give it to the only one of my team who won’t piss themselves with laughter and chuck the woman’s findings in the nearest bin. I’ll give it to Jane Blaisedell.’

  ‘Mrs Lupescu?’ A fresh-faced detective stood in the elegant doorway.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Jane Blaisedell.’ She flashed the inevitable warrant card. ‘Leighford CID. My guv’nor suggested we had a chat.’

  Magda Lupescu could have been anything between thirty and late fifties. She was a gaunt woman with a riot of dark, ringleted hair and a sallow complexion. She was dressed in a crisp, white, man’s shirt and tight jeans with a broad belt of silver filigree.

  ‘Your guv’nor is Detective Chief Inspector Hall?’ The accent was slight, the words slow and deliberate.

  Suppressing the urge to giggle and say ‘You must be psychic’, Jane just nodded. Magda showed her into one of those opulent flats that front onto the sea at Brighton, once the drawing room of a fashionable Regency family when the house was all one and new and frothing with guests and bobbing servants. Its owners had strolled in the Steyne around the corner and bowed or curtseyed to the fleeting plumpness that was HRH the Prince Regent. Now, the house’s rooms were sub-let microcosms of a different time, peopled by stockbrokers, publishers – and at least one psychic consultant.

  ‘My God!’ Jane Blaisedell stood in Magda Lupescu’s hall. Huge black and white drawings of a young girl smiled back at her from every wall.

  ‘She was Gary Gilmore’s wife,’ Magda told her. ‘You know the case?’

  Jane did. Gilmore was t
he psycho who shot people indiscriminately in Utah back in the Seventies in lieu of the girl who smiled down from Magda’s white walls. On Death Row he had demanded his own death by firing squad and only achieved his ambition after months of wrangling with the pinko-liberal do-gooders who wanted to save his life. ‘It was a little before my time,’ she said.

  ‘Mine too,’ Magda said, leaving Jane none the wiser as to the woman’s real age. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Er…no, thanks,’ Jane smiled. ‘Duty and all that.’

  Magda flashed her an odd look. She invited the Detective to sit on a cream-coloured sofa buried under scatter cushions. Charles Manson stared maniacally at her from the far wall, a swastika on his forehead and hatred in his eyes. Beyond the fireplace, John Reginald Christie stood in his garden at 10 Rillington Place, his wife beside him, unknown corpses at his feet. She was in the garden; he was in a graveyard.

  ‘I don’t know that one,’ Jane said, pointing to an anonymous little man in a Homburg and grey suit, standing just to the left of a table lamp.

  ‘Peter Kurtin,’ Magda said, lighting a cigarette. She offered one to Jane, who declined. ‘Of course,’ the consultant smiled, ‘You’re on duty. Kurtin was the monster of Düsseldorf, one of those social misfits who gave Weimar Germany such a bad name.’

  ‘Are you German?’ Jane was still trying to place the accent.

  ‘Romanian,’ Magda corrected her. ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Tell me…Ms Lupescu. Why…?’

  ‘The pictures?’ She blew smoke to the high, plastered ceiling. ‘A reminder,’ she said. ‘Know thine enemy. Oh, these are the worst of them, of course. And I’m glad to say I’ve never met anyone on their plane of sheer evil. But it’s only a matter of scale.’

  ‘It is?’

  Magda looked hard at the girl. ‘How can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ Jane rummaged in her bag for the paperwork. ‘You came highly recommended by my ultimate boss, the Chief Constable.’

  No response.

  ‘Mr Slater. His suggestion was that you might be able to shed some light…’

  Suddenly, the gaunt woman lunged forward. She snatched Jane’s bag and held it tight to her chest, then smelt it, then let it go. ‘Why didn’t you like your uncle?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ Jane sat there, frozen.

  ‘Your uncle… Tony, was it?’

  Jane’s eyes swivelled. She licked her lips which were suddenly bricky dry. She was nodding slowly, scared of where this was going.

  ‘He used to come to visit sometimes, didn’t he?’ Magda went on with a relentlessness that was unnerving. ‘In the house at Leopard’s Leap.’

  ‘How…?’ the girl was frowning, rattled now in a world she didn’t understand.

  ‘He touched you, didn’t he?’ Magda asked. ‘You were… what…nine? Ten? You never told anybody.’

  Jane had already frozen. Now she wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. No one had known about that. No one but her and Uncle Tony. And Uncle Tony was dead.

  Magda Lupescu was leaning towards her, gazing steadily into her eyes, handing back the trailing strap of Jane’s discarded bag. ‘It is only a matter of scale,’ she said softly. ‘Charlie Manson, Gary Gilmore, Peter Kurtin, whoever you’re looking for. You deal in death in your business from time to time, Detective Blaisedell. I deal in it all the time. Now, again, how can I help you?’

  There was a light. There was always a light. It never went out. When she finally went to sleep, it was burning. When she woke up, it was burning still.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘Two weeks in, then, Deena,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘How do you think it’s going?’

  The girl gave a brittle, slightly bitter laugh. ‘You tell me, Mr Maxwell. I suspect you’ve done more of this than I have.’

  ‘Ah, but never at OUDS,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Footlights, surely?’ Deena always gave as good as she got.

  ‘I may have given a rendition or two. I was the retired colonel in Agatha Christie’s A Decimalisation of Vertically Challenged People of Ethnic Persuasion when it was still called Ten Little Niggers.’

  ‘And that’s not all,’ she said. ‘I bumped into Sylvia Matthews the other day.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She told me your Cyrano was to die for.’

  ‘Ah,’ he laughed. ‘Had to be mine, really. I was the only one who had an artificial nose. Along with the leg, of course. You don’t think…you don’t think you’re pushing the kiddywinkies a bit hard?’

  ‘Ah.’ Her smile froze. ‘There’ve been complaints.’ Always quick on the uptake was Deena.

  ‘Not complaints, exactly,’ he told her. ‘Concerns. I was going to ring you, but I thought I’d wait until after tonight’s rehearsal.’

  She looked at him, sitting opposite the Great Man on the hard, uncomfortable chairs on the Arquebus stage. ‘Can we get out of here?’ she asked. ‘I’m beginning to feel like I’ve moved in.’

  ‘Of course,’ he laughed. ‘Deena, this is not the type of question a teacher should be asking a student, even an ex-student, but can I buy you a drink?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said.

  ‘Mr Wilkes!’ Maxwell was on his feet, trying to locate the sound and lighting box in the semi-darkness.

  ‘Mr Maxwell?’ a disembodied voice boomed around the auditorium.

  ‘We’re off now, thanks.’

  ‘OK,’ Wilkes answered. ‘See you Monday night.’

  The rain had eased off by the time Deena Harrison and Peter Maxwell left the theatre. The Arquebus rose black and oddly derelict against the purple of the late September night. They walked side by side, Deena clutching a sod-off great knitted bag full of scripts and whatever women carry in their sod-off knitted bags, Maxwell wheeling the faithful Surrey, purring at his side as they took the curve of the pedestrianised bit by the river.

  ‘I’ll ease off,’ she promised him in the context of rehearsals. ‘I just get a bit…well…intense, I suppose. Ever since Mum and Dad…’

  Maxwell looked at her. ‘Mum and Dad?’

  ‘They were killed, Mr Maxwell. Head-on crash. Three years ago.’

  ‘Deena,’ he stopped the bike and turned to face her. ‘I am so sorry. I had no idea. I thought they had moved away.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s what most people think. When something like that happens, you’re devastated at first. Can’t understand it. Can’t come to terms. Then, you feel numb. As if nothing matters. Nothing at all. Not career. Not relationships. Nothing. You come out of that, eventually, and everybody treats you like a leper. “I am so sorry,” they say. But it’s just words, isn’t it?’

  Maxwell opened his mouth to say something, but it would only have been to say sorry for saying sorry and that was so flat, so wrong. Neither could he say ‘I know how you feel’, because the strange thing was that he did, but he couldn’t tell her that. He remembered the devastation all too well. A Saturday afternoon in a wild and wet March, long years ago, but it could have been yesterday. A grim-faced copper standing at his front door, miles from here, and a WPC behind him. ‘Mr Maxwell?’ He didn’t really hear the rest. No, he couldn’t understand it either. His wife was a damned good driver, better than him; focused, sensible, careful. And no, he couldn’t come to terms. For weeks afterwards – or was it months – he’d hear her key in the lock, hear her singing in the bath, rattling cups in the kitchen. Smell the soft, impossibly smooth back of his baby’s neck as the tears rolled and fell. And nothing mattered, nothing at all. People said he should have been a Head in two or three years, something big in County Hall, or, for God’s sake, running a Cambridge college with a K for good measure. And people had loved him, or at least they told him they did. He couldn’t quite remember them now. Their names and their faces blurred. ‘For I was nothing to him and he was the World to me.’ He had, indeed, come out of that eventually, but not for him the rest of what Deena was talking about. He couldn’t bear the kind eyes, th
e quiet sympathy, the pats on the back and the pale Christians muttering that it was all right because his loved ones were with God. So he’d left. Got a new job. Emerged like an imago from the pupa of his pain, crusty before his time. He put the O in Over-the-Top, wore bow ties and battered hats and growled in Latin at the uncomprehending, bewildered children in his care. He bought himself a tatty old bike, White Surrey of blessed memory, and he never sat behind the wheel of a car again. That was something Deena hadn’t mentioned. Hadn’t mentioned, perhaps, because she’d never felt it. Guilt. Because Peter Maxwell should have been driving that wet, wild Saturday in March. He should have picked up his little girl from that party, not his wife. If only, if only…he looked into the deep, dark eyes of the girl with him, hoping that, at least, she’d been spared that.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked.

  She nodded, the tears near. ‘Mr Maxwell, I don’t feel like a drink tonight. Can we just…stay here?’

  It wasn’t the most elegant of settings, under the roar of the Flyover, where the river curved and the ducks settled down on its banks for the night. ‘Sure,’ he said, and parked Surrey on the grassy slope, where it was dry. She climbed the ramp of concrete that took them out of the weather and sat down, cradling her knees with both arms and resting her chin on her tattered jeans.

  ‘It was my first year at Corpus Christi,’ she said, staring ahead where the dull purple of the sky lit the water in myriad rippling reflections. ‘My college mother came to my room late one night. She told me my parents were dead. But I knew already.’

  ‘Sixth sense?’ he asked, easing himself down beside her.

  ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘My dad told me.’

  ‘Your dad?’ Maxwell wasn’t quite following this.

  ‘I believe it’s what they call in parapsychology a death visitant.’

  Maxwell said nothing.

  ‘It’s the corny old line, isn’t it?’ she said, still staring at the darkening waters. ‘I saw a ghost and sure enough, I learned later that at that very moment, my father died. Load of old bollocks, I always thought. Though, in my case, it’s true.’