Maxwell's Mask (21 page)

‘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.

‘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
mat
ernity 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.

Everybody was on his back on this one. The Fourth Estate, those gallant, sensitive and helpful gentlemen and ladies of the Press, had done little but ridicule Hall and his entire investigation ever since the leak about psychic detection. At least they did not have the name of Magda Lupescu – yet. But it could only be a matter of time. Fiona Elliot may have been trusting of messages from the Other Side, but she seemed particularly keen that the terrestrial police from This Side solve her late aunt's murder and pdq. And the grating Carole Bartlett was almost a daily visitor, demanding to know what had happened to the missing copy of the Sheridan play and how long it would be before her husband's entangled finances were sorted out.

Jane Blaisedell was flaky. Jacquie Carpenter was better. But that was another odd thing for Henry Hall: not that Jacquie had agreed to act as Jane's stand-in – he knew instinctively that she would – but that Peter Maxwell hadn't gone ape-shit about it; he knew instinctively he'd do that too. In the silence and the solitude, Henry Hall allowed himself the teensiest of smiles. Peter Maxwell 
would go ape-shit, all right; it was just that, with Peter Maxwell, you could never be sure exactly when. And many was the kid, and the colleague and the copper, who had rued the experience.

Christ Church meadow lay wreathed in the October mist as Jacquie's Ka purred past, grateful to be off the A338 and gliding past the Thames.

‘Isis,' said Maxwell, apparently dozing beside her, slumped in the passenger seat with his tweed hat over his face.

‘Hmm?'

‘The Thames becomes the Isis when it goes past Oxford. Christ knows why. Pure snobbery, of course.'

‘You don't like this town, do you?' she smiled, vaguely aware that the number of cyclists whizzing around her had trebled in the last few minutes.

‘Oh, it's all right.' He stretched. ‘Nobody lives here now, of course, after all those serial killings in the Morse series. Entire population's been wiped out. It's a ghost town. Rumour has it there's a university here somewhere.'

‘Which college did you say you wanted?'

‘Corpus Christi,' he told her, straightening up and pulling the cap off his face. ‘That's body of Christ to you non-Classicists.'

‘Bollocks!' she snorted and hung a right. They were in the High now – Oxford students for generations apparently being congenitally unable to pronounce the word ‘street'. 

‘Founded in the year of Our Lord 1517.' Maxwell was giving Jacquie the guided tour. ‘The same year in which Fr Luther upset everybody in Christendom with his ninety-five theses pinned to the door of Wittenberg cathedral. God, I had trouble just doing one. There are twenty-seven sundials in Front Quad, topped with a pelican pecking out its own heart; like you do. Corpus is the only college to have its original founder's plate. All the others gave theirs to Charles I for his war effort. So…'

‘So?' It had been a long time since Jacquie Carpenter had done the Tudors and Stuarts.

‘So either the college was tight as a gnat's chuff or they were secret parliamentarians. Like I said, they're a dodgy lot in Oxford. Next right.'

‘How do you know?' She jammed on the brakes to avoid yet another cyclist. ‘All these buildings look alike.'

‘I have a nose for academe.' Maxwell duly tapped it. ‘That's Merton, with the oldest library in England – after mine – built in the 1370s. Didn't start out too well, mind. Even Geoffrey Chaucer had more books than they did and he was a bloody customs officer. Here we are.'

She stopped the Ka. ‘There's nowhere to park.'

He smiled. ‘Welcome to Oxford.'

On his way up the stairs, Peter Maxwell tossed a coin.

‘Heads,' Jacquie said, steadying herself on the banisters. She'd been here before, not Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but wheeling and dealing with Mad Max.

‘Sorry, heart,' he consoled her. ‘It's tails. My way, then.' His Sinatra was perfect. Flat and heartless.

‘Thank you, Frank,' she grinned. ‘I just hope it works.'

As they reached the door, he leaned to her. ‘Trust me, lady, I'm a Cambridge man.'

In the lobby, a grey-haired woman in a starched white blouse appeared to be a leftover from the days of Gibson girls, with an upswept bun of a hairdo and a pearl-clasped choker, longing for the day when they invented brassieres and gave girls like her the vote.

‘Good morning.' Maxwell swept off his hat and beamed. ‘I wonder, is Professor Usherwood in?'

The Gibson girl looked over her pince-nez, sizing up the pair. Effete, over-the-top gent with his pregnant daughter. She looked a little long in the tooth for someone hoping for a place, but the Gibson girl had known stranger attempts to get into Oxford, circumventing little things like
A-levels
and university-applications procedures. Usually it was fathers and pushy mothers who claimed they'd gone to the college in their day and surely, there was some obscure little bursary…

‘Who wants to know?'

Rather churlish riposte, Maxwell thought, the sort of comeback he'd expect on Leighford sea front of a Saturday night, but it merely confirmed what he'd always maintained about Oxford. ‘I am Peter Maxwell,' he told her. ‘This is Ms Jacquie Carpenter. An old pupil of mine suggested if ever I were in Oxford, to look up the Professor.'

‘Really?' The Gibson girl rose and crossed to the counter on which Maxwell lolled. ‘And who may this pupil be?'

‘Deena Harrison,' Maxwell said.

The Gibson girl looked vacant. ‘Don't know her,' she said.

‘How long have you been at Corpus, Mrs…?'

‘For two years,' she said. ‘And that's Miss.'

‘Yes, of course it is,' Maxwell smiled. ‘Well, Deena came down this summer – the one that's just gone, I mean. She was reading Drama.'

‘As I said,' the Gibson girl was standing her ground. ‘I have never heard of her. You must have the wrong college.'

Maxwell was about to launch into Plan B when a warrant card flashed into the air inches from his nose.