Maxwell's Mask

by M. J. Trow

  ‘So, such a one was Daniel Bartlett?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Any particular motive?’ Maxwell chased it.

  Collinson sighed. ‘Does that still count?’ he asked.

  ‘MMO,’ Maxwell flicked three fingers in the air. ‘The Holy Trinity of violent death – motive, means, opportunity. Yep, it still counts.’

  ‘It’s just that these days people are killed for looking funny at other people, aren’t they? Trainers, mobile phones, Koranic differences. It’s all gone rather pear-shaped, don’t you think?’

  ‘If the world was a pear tree, that wouldn’t matter, would it?’ Maxwell smiled. And Collinson gave him an old-fashioned look. There was no doubt about it – Peter Maxwell didn’t get out enough.

  ‘Let me understand this, Max.’ Bernard Ryan may have been the First Deputy at Leighford High School, but he’d also been Maxwell’s whipping boy cum sparring partner for more years than either of them cared to remember. Time was when Ryan had been earmarked for promotion – von Ryan’s Express as the ever-filmic Maxwell put it – but then reality had dawned and it became obvious he was always going to be third spear-bearer. He invariably lost his clashes with Maxwell and took his punishment like a man. ‘You want to go to the funeral of someone you never met, just to pay your respects.’

  ‘It’s a vital PR exercise, Bernard.’ Maxwell perched on the Deputy’s desk, swinging his off-the-ground left foot to some irritating tune he couldn’t get out of his head.

  ‘Come again?’ Dierdre Lessing was Bernard Ryan’s hatchet woman. The scary thing was that when Legs Diamond was away, these two were directly responsible for the education of nearly eleven hundred children. Pray God their parents never found out.

  Maxwell had been holding his mirrored shield in front of him to face Dierdre for years. The serpents writhed around her head and her terrible eyes glowered at him. He was patience itself. ‘PR,’ he said, slowly. ‘Public relations – and not, as you might think from my legendary Politics Enrichment lessons of last year, Proportional Representation.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Max,’ Dierdre snapped, irritated by the man beyond measure. What was new?

  ‘I know,’ Maxwell beamed. Dierdre Lessing had been a handsome woman once, but years of bitterness had etched themselves into her pores, carving furrows over her glacier face, contrasting oddly with the serpents that coiled from her hair. ‘One more time, then,’ he said to them both, as though Seven Eff Three didn’t quite get that bit about Existentialism. ‘Leighford High School – the institution to which you and I, colleagues both, are shackled for life – is putting on a musical extravaganza called Little Shop of Horrors. We are using the services of a local theatre, the Arquebus…’

  ‘Max!’ Dierdre snapped, the snakes twisting and hissing at him.

  ‘I’ll cut to the chase,’ the Movie Man said. ‘This afternoon, at half past one, they’re burying Gordon Goodacre, who worked as a volunteer at said theatre. Since I am consulting director in the absence of Angela Carmichael, I thought it would be a nice gesture if I attended his passing.’

  ‘What are you really after, you ghoul?’ Dierdre wanted to know.

  Even Bernard was taken aback. ‘Dierdre, I don’t think…’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time you did, Bernard,’ she hissed, along with her snakes.

  He ignored her. ‘What’ll you be missing, Max?’

  He smiled broadly at the Senior Mistress. ‘Why, Dierdre, of course.’ And he kissed the air alongside her. ‘Thirteen Bee.’ His smile vanished. ‘No cover required.’ And he’d reached the door. ‘I was merely being civil, Senior Managers,’ he scowled. ‘Next time, it’s a bad back and no more Mr Nice Guy.’

  ‘What are we going to do about him?’ Dierdre wanted to know.

  ‘You were a little harsh, Dierdre,’ Bernard chided her.

  ‘Men!’ she growled and stormed out of the room, fire and brimstone scorching the woodwork.

  It always rains, doesn’t it, at the best funerals? Maxwell approved. Matilda Goodacre, with the unmistakable panache of a born actress, had pulled out all the stops. Two glossy black horses, their manes and tails hogged and flowing, stood steaming in the grey drizzle from the west. Their heavy, long-haired hooves clattered and splashed down the slope that led to St Wilfred’s. And tall men in top hats lifted the gilded coffin that bore the mortal remains of Gordon Goodacre from the glass-sided hearse and into the tiny porch of the oldest church in Leighford. All that was missing from the black, Victorian magnificence of the occasion was the forest of ostrich feathers that once crowned the hearse, the stallions and the hats of all the mourners. The RSPB had galvanised themselves into action and ostrich was something it was rumoured they put into upmarket burgers in supermarkets in the Nineties but the feathers, you just couldn’t get. It was the way of the world – Maxwell, like everyone else, had to accept it.

  Leighford had moved. Just as Old Sarum, the accursed hill of the Saxons, had become Norman Salisbury, so the centre of gravity had slipped from the little river that leapt and sparkled through the heather and the dunes to the sea. It spread and sprawled, from its fishing village and its Domesday Mill, to its sea front, its candy floss and its kiss-me-quick hats. No Regency opulence for Leighford, no namby-pamby Jane Austen wandering the Shingle in search of inspiration. Just the spur of the Southern Railway Company slicing through the landscape as the Victorians discovered a new word – tourism. And townies came from miles away to gawp at the sea and paddle in it, trousers rolled up daringly and hankies tied to their heads. They took strolls along the Promenade, had their photos taken by dodgy men in straw boaters and buried their children, temporarily of course, in the sand.

  Only St Wilfred’s stayed where it was – the little chantry chapel of the medieval monks had grown as far as it was going to by the end of the fifteenth century, and now it would accept the soul of Gordon Alan Goodacre.

  Peter Maxwell did his best to blend with the crowd of mourners. Few of them, perhaps, had known Gordon. But all of them knew Matilda, serene and stately as a galleon. Some he recognised from the Arquebus – Ashley Wilkes in a long, dark coat, his face pale, his mood quiet. Patrick Collinson, fussy, crimson-faced, ever-solicitous, checking that all was well and everyone knew what to do. Maxwell vaguely recognised others, one or two minor celebs from the world of yesterday’s telly; that bloke who played the serial killer in one of the Taggarts; the woman-who-looked-as-though-she-might in Flambards; Bev from the car ads. One by one, they kissed Matilda Goodacre, held her, whispered all the empty words of condolence that well-meaning people do at moments like that.

  They sang the hymns, heard the poetry delivered in a stentorian tour de force by a luvvie Maxwell couldn’t quite place. The vicar, bloody nice fella, shook their hands solemnly at the graveside as the descendants of Hamlet’s people lowered Gordon Goodacre to the flowers.

  ‘Ashes to ashes…’ came and went on the wind that suddenly whipped from the north. Fallacy had never been more pathetic than this. A clap of thunder and a jagged lightning fork would round it all off nicely, but it never came. Just Mad Max standing by the horses, stroking the soft, warm muzzle as the bits jingled and the hoofs stamped. For the most fleeting of moments, he was waiting in the Valley of Death for Louis Nolan to arrive with his fated order.

  ‘Mrs Goodacre,’ he extended a hand as the widow passed him with her entourage. ‘Please accept my condolences.’

  ‘Mr…Maxwell.’ She took it. ‘It’s good of you to come.’

  ‘I…er…I’m afraid I had something of an ulterior motive,’ he said, gazing into the steady, cold grey of the woman’s eyes, shrouded under the monstrous sweep of her hat.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘May I call on you, perhaps in a day or two?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But what…’

  ‘In a day or two,’ he smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  And they swept by him, to the waiting cars and the baked meats and all the tragicomic reminisc
ences that mark the passing of a life.

  Henry Hall hadn’t gone to Gordon Goodacre’s funeral. He was in two minds about releasing the body for burial at all. Something didn’t sit right about this man’s death; all his experience told him so. But Jim Astley was adamant. There was no evidence of foul play. The forensics pointed to one of those futile accidents that occasionally make Christians doubt the existence of God and atheists talk of the lottery of life and statistics. So, he’d relented and Matilda Goodacre had her day in widow’s weeds, centre stage where she loved to be.

  The groundlings stood before the DCI now, in the neon-lit Incident Room he’d been forced to set up in Tottingleigh, west of the Arquebus and a little south of the Flyover.

  ‘Where are we on Dan Bartlett?’ Hall wanted to know.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t as well off as we thought he was, guv.’ Gavin Henslow was the one with A-level Maths; he always got the financial aspects of a killing.

  ‘Go on.’ Hall settled back in the uncomfortable chrome chair with his coffee cup crumpled in its plastic nastiness beside him.

  ‘Ask yourself,’ Henslow rather enjoyed the limelight, even among this most critical of audiences, his own oppos, ‘why a bloke whose family is supposed to have owned half of Sussex is living in a poxy little bungalow.’

  ‘Wasn’t that poxy,’ Bill Robbins felt he had to counter. ‘Damn sight bigger than mine.’

  There were heartfelt grunts all round.

  ‘Alimony.’ Jane Blaisedell provided the woman’s touch.

  Henslow clicked his fingers. ‘What she said,’ he nodded. ‘If you ask me, Mrs Bartlett was bleeding him dry.’

  ‘We are asking you, Gavin,’ Hall said, straight-faced as only he could be. ‘I don’t want assumptions, lad.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Henslow might have got A-level Maths, and a degree in Social Sciences, but he wasn’t a total ignoramus. He recognised a knuckle-rap when he felt it. ‘These are the figures according to the dead man’s bank account. But he may have had offshore.’

  ‘May have had?’ Hall queried.

  ‘His High Street bank said they couldn’t shed any light, guv.’ Henslow realised now how empty that sounded. When he’d been face to face with the pretty Polish teller, commiserating with her lot in life, that sort of stonewalling seemed entirely reasonable; now, he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Midland?’ Hall wanted to know.

  Henslow nodded.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, Gavin, you will go back to the premises of the Midland HSBC in the company of DS Walters here. And he will stand over you, or hold your hand, whatever it takes – until we have those offshore details. Are we at one on this, Gavin?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

  ‘Good. Anything on forensic follow-up, Giles?’ Hall scanned the tired faces in front of him.

  ‘No prints in Bartlett’s house have produced anything meaningful, guv. Nothing on central computer. Ditto in Brighton and Hove records.’

  ‘We do have a possible sighting, guv.’ Tom O’Connell was pounding his cigarette butt into submission in an ashtray by his PC.

  ‘When was this?’ Hall was all ears.

  ‘On the night in question. A girl, well, woman, I guess. Mid- to late twenties.’

  ‘Whose sighting?’

  ‘Neighbour.’ O’Connell was tapping keys, flicking images across his screen. ‘A Mrs Wilkins. Lives at number 86, diagonally opposite the Bartlett house, but some way away.’

  ‘What did she see?’

  ‘Bartlett arrived home at some time in the evening. Mrs Wilkins wasn’t certain of the time. He had this woman with him.’

  ‘What did Bartlett drive?’

  ‘Toyota,’ Dave Walters chimed in. ‘Soft top.’

  ‘So,’ Hall crossed to the street plan in the corner, on the third of the hastily erected whiteboards. ‘Where’s this Mrs Wilkins live?’ He was tracing the area with his Biro tip.

  ‘There, guv.’ O’Connell talked him through it. ‘No, south. That’s it.’

  ‘Did Mrs Wilkins say which direction Bartlett drove in from?’

  ‘West, guv,’ O’Connell was sure. ‘Leighford.’

  ‘Could be the theatre.’ Jane Blaisedell, like everybody else there, was going through the route in her mind.

  ‘Could be,’ Hall nodded, scanning the options in front of him. ‘There again, it could be any of the discos in the High Street or the pubs west of the river. Bartlett goes cruising – we know from his wife he had a penchant for that – and picks somebody up. They go back to his place. Nightcap. Whatever.’

  ‘And he’s made a bad choice.’ Henslow was with him. ‘Gets a psycho, a night stalker.’

  ‘Or somebody who just wouldn’t play along.’ Jane was there with the woman’s angle again.

  ‘Did you get the impression,’ Hall asked her, ‘from Mrs Bartlett that her husband was into anything odd? Kinky?’

  ‘She was a bit coy about that,’ Jane told him. ‘Said it was all a long time ago. They had been separated for some time.’

  ‘Eight years,’ Hall put something finite into it. Cross tees and dot eyes and you catch murderers. ‘What’s wrong with the night-stalker scenario, Gavin?’

  The DCI had sauntered back to his chair. The DC had the spotlight again and he wasn’t sure he liked it anymore. It made him feel vulnerable, alone. ‘Umm…?’

  ‘Anybody?’ Hall switched the spotlight off and Henslow breathed again.

  ‘MO.’ O’Connell was already reaching for another ciggie.

  ‘How?’ Hall chased him.

  ‘If he picked up a casual for a one-night stand and suggested something she didn’t want to play or maybe refused to pay her, she’d…what? Grab the poker, a bottle, some objet d’art.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Hall said, glad his team were still thinking, wrestling with it. ‘The frayed flex is premeditated, remember. It was the work of somebody who knew the layout of Dan Bartlett’s house. Knew the wiring. Knew his habits, too. His bath time. Now who would fit that description, hmm?’

  Hall said nothing else. But he saw it all. For Gavin Henslow to fall short was one thing. He was new, green, over-ambitious. The rest of his team were experienced detectives; and they were missing things, perhaps vital, perhaps not, but missing them nonetheless. And that Henry Hall didn’t like.

  ‘Let me put one over-riding question to you all,’ he said. ‘What made Dan Bartlett get out of his bath and walk, wet and semi-naked, along the corridor? If we can get a handle on that, we might just have our killer.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Pizza, mate?’

  ‘Hawaiian, easy on the pineapple, anchovies and olives?’ The man with the wiry hair peered round the door at him.

  ‘No,’ the delivery man frowned, looking instinctively down at the box in his hand although he knew perfectly well what was in it.

  ‘Just checking,’ Maxwell smiled and passed him the cash. ‘Keep the change…Ralph.’ He was reading the name on the van.

  ‘No, mate.’ The delivery man felt he had to put his deranged customer right. ‘Ralph was four managing directors ago. I’m Liam.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ Maxwell winked, wondering anew why a beautiful Celtic name was always given to idiots, the rather large Mr Neeson excepted, of course. ‘Thanks again.’

  He turned with a dexterity surprising in a man of his years and took the stairs of 38 Columbine two at a time, hurtling through the lounge and into the kitchen, careful to keep his box level.

  ‘So, Signorina,’ he lapsed into his Italian waiter routine with an almost legendary smoothness. ‘Pizza Napolitana – without the odd bits they put on a real Neapolitan pizza – we bigga Italian boys, we knowa what you Englisha girlsa like.’

  ‘Wine?’ Jacquie held up the bottle, an amusing little Chianti from the south side of Tesco’s.

  Maxwell obliged of course with a high-pitched nasal intonation that had the Count flexing his claws in the lounge next door. It was trite, it was corny, but it was all part of Mad Max an
d his lady and neither of them would change it for the world.

  She poured for them both as Maxwell unpacked and bisected the pizza with an expert hand, only a few mushrooms going wild. ‘Oops,’ he apologised. ‘Just dropped yours.’

  She raised her glass while he threw the salad together, having inadvertently watched a Jamie Oliver programme once. And he did it fully clothed. ‘Here’s to Sonny Jim,’ she smiled.

  ‘Sonny Jim,’ he clinked his glass with hers. ‘May all his bills be little ones.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ she said. ‘I heard from Jane today.’

  ‘Oh?’ He sniffed the dressing and thought better of it. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Still scared shitless, by the sound of it. It’s too bad of Henry to pass the buck to her like that. She’s not up to it.’

  ‘She always struck me as being quite resilient,’ he said, burning his tongue on a piece of salami.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Jacquie agreed. ‘On the outside. In the Incident Room, brief and debrief, she’ll be as cool as a cucumber. Inside, she’s falling apart.’

  ‘Tell me about psychics, then.’

  Jacquie took a large gulp of her Pellegrino; the Chianti was for Maxwell. ‘I thought we’d had this conversation.’

  ‘That was for Jane’s benefit,’ he said. ‘There comes a time when the bullshit has to stop.’

  ‘Well, talking of bullshit, the idea comes from America, of course – psychics helping police, I mean. According to Jane, it’s all the Chief Constable’s idea – that dickhead Slater – he must have been on a course. Who knows, he might come out with something really cutting edge like fingerprints next.’

  ‘Ah.’ Maxwell wagged a wedge of Napolitana at his love. ‘But as Leviticus tells us, “Do not turn to mediums or spiritists, do not seek them out to be defiled by them. I am the Lord thy God.”’