Maxwell's Mask (12 page)

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 the 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.

‘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, the 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.'

‘Tell me,' he said.

‘I wasn't feeling too good,' she said, focusing on events, trying to get them straight in her mind. ‘It was a Sunday and we'd all been to a Valentine's bash the night before. I guess it was the same in your day, Mr Maxwell, at Cambridge?'

‘No, no,' he assured her. ‘We were all teetotal at Jesus in those days. Honey still for tea was about as exciting as it got.'

She managed a smile. Mad Max was good at that, coaxing happiness out of the sad, smiles from the tears. ‘I was pretty hungover, lying on my bed when, quite suddenly, I felt cold. I thought at first it was just the morning after the night before. Somebody'd spiked the punch and I felt like shit as the day wore on. Then, there was Daddy. Just standing there, in that baggy old jumper I'd knitted for him in my gap year. I remember thinking – how did he get in? I hadn't heard the door go and he certainly hadn't knocked. I…' she struggled to get the memory straight. ‘I remember saying to him, “What are you doing here, Dad?” Ever the original, that's me. “You're supposed to be going on holiday. Why…?” He just smiled and said, “Just checking, sweetheart. Just checking you're all right.” Just like that. As if…'

The tears shook her body and she buried her face in her knees. Maxwell reached out and cradled her in his arms, holding her tight. He'd been here before, with sobbing girls whose lives lay in ruins. Girls whose boyfriends had left them; girls whose girlfriends had left them. Girls who had failed their exams; girls who were pregnant. Girls who were hopelessly hooked on drugs. The father in him always wanted to hold them, hug them, kiss away their tears, make everything all right. The teacher in him knew the risk he was taking – the professional suicide of the closed office or classroom door, the unpredictability of females scorned, the rampant prurience of the national press. It had never stopped him. It wouldn't stop him now. And besides, the relationship was different. Deena wasn't a student any more. She was a woman grown. And Jacquie would understand. He buried his face in her hair and kissed it gently.

‘They never did get to go on holiday,' Deena said, holding up her head suddenly. ‘My college mother got the details from the Dean who got it from the police. They'd been on the M25 on their way to Gatwick. An artic came off the slipway. The car…' and she burst into uncontrollable sobs again, nuzzling against his cheek. When she lifted her face again, her soft mouth was slightly open and the tears ran silver alongside it. He smiled and wiped them away, but that wasn't enough. She kissed him, softly at first, like the frightened little girl she was,
the little girl whose daddy had come to say goodbye. Then, it turned into something else. And she closed to him, swinging her knees sideways, so that she could hold him too and her tongue pressed against his lips.

‘Deena,' he pulled away gently. ‘Deena, it's all right.'

She pulled back too, head up, sniffing sharply, changing direction, putting her demons back in the box. ‘So, yes, Mr Maxwell,' she said. ‘I guess I'm too hard on people now. Instant rejection, sudden death – it'll do that to you. You know I was engaged?'

‘You were?'

She nodded, finishing his tear-wiping job with the back of her hand. ‘His name was Alex. He was nice, really. We might have made a go of it. But after Mum and Dad…well, I just couldn't get it together any more. Perhaps one day…' and she smiled at him through her tears.

‘Oh, yes,' he nodded, smiling broadly. ‘You've a helluva lot to offer, Deena Harrison,' he told her. ‘One day soon.'

She screwed up her face and shrugged. ‘That's why the Arquebus doesn't bother me.'

‘The rehearsals?'

‘No, the ghosts.'

‘The ghosts?'

‘Oh, I'm sorry.' She rummaged in her big knitted bag for a tissue. ‘I think you either feel these things
or you don't. The Arquebus is haunted all right. As soon as I went there, I knew. It starts with a sort of…tingling…hairs on the back of your neck sort of stuff. There's a particularly nasty cold spot at the back of the stage.'

‘That's where Gordon Goodacre died,' Maxwell muttered, staring at her.

‘Was it?' she asked. ‘Well, I didn't join the theatre until a couple of days after that and nobody seems to want to talk about it.'

‘Have you…heard anything?' he asked. ‘Seen anything?'

Deena was laughing now. ‘Mr Maxwell,' she said. ‘Don't be afraid of it. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” And I always thought
you
were only mad Nor' by Nor'West.'

‘Very perceptive, my dear.' It was his turn to laugh now. ‘We're not going to have a philosophical debate, are we? Sitting on a bloody uncomfortable heap of concrete between the Flyover and the river on a dark and dismal Leighford night?'

‘Which would you rather?' she asked, her voice hard and tight suddenly. ‘A philosophical debate or a fuck?'

‘Er…I think you should know, Miss Harrison,' he said softly, ‘I am a partnered man. And I think you'd be disappointed.'

Her face, cold and pale in the half shadows, softened into a smile. ‘Just checking,' she said.
‘Who's the lucky woman?'

‘Jacquie Carpenter,' he told her. ‘She's a Woman Policeman.'

‘Good for you,' Deena said. ‘When I was at Leighford, we all thought you and Sylvia Matthews were an item.'

Sylvia Matthews. One of those who had loved Maxwell when Maxwell had not yet rediscovered love.

‘Others of us, of course,' she scrabbled to her feet, ‘thought you gay as a wagon-load of monkeys.'

‘Ah,' he stood up with her. ‘I'm like Cleopatra,' he said. ‘“Custom cannot stale my infinite variety”.' He stepped back to negotiate the slope and collect White Surrey. And he felt her hand on his arm. Slowly, she reached up and kissed him, just a peck on the cheek.

‘Thank you, Mad Max,' she said.

‘Why, honey-chile,' he gave her his best Steppin' Fetchit from the black stereotype films of the Thirties. ‘It ain't hardly nothing. Whatchu thankin' me for?'

‘For being mad,' she said. ‘We'll have that philosophical debate one day. Now I've got a bus to catch.' And she was running away from him,
sod-off
bag bouncing on her hip. ‘And I'll be nice to the kids,' she promised to the Leighford night. ‘And there
are
such things as ghosts. I'll prove it to you.'

DCI Hall had dragged his feet on this one. In the past, when he was a young DI in charge of his first case, he'd rushed to set up Incident Rooms, hold press conferences, engage Joe Public's help while at the same time reassuring himself that all was well and that Henry Hall was in his Heaven.

But press conferences could backfire, public support vanish like the sea mists that rolled in over Leighford's beaches at this time of year. It was a chill, grey Saturday morning as September was thinking of turning into October and, not for the first time, the late Mr Keats had got it wrong. The season wasn't very fruitful and it sure as hell wasn't mellow.

A barrage of microphones faced the DCI and Henry Hall had never felt so alone at one of these. The Ballin Hotel had done the honours; tea, coffee and water was provided and the bar was open. There were even trays of vol-au-vents and bits of cheese and pineapple on sticks. For those of the paparazzi who led less frenetic lives than their colleagues or who took the gastronomic delights of their calling more seriously, luncheon was provided at one-thirty, as if the ‘eon' referred to the quality of the meal, rather than the time it took to be served.