Maxwell’s Movie (11 page)

‘That’s a very old joke,’ Mrs Quinn had bellowed.

‘I’m a very old comedian,’ Maxwell had admitted with a twinkle.

There was a rumour that she’d once killed a man for coughing.

At closing time a bell sounded. Fighting down his Pavlovian urge to go and teach, Maxwell watched as Georgianna began to put away her clippings, switch off her computer and glance at the old men. One by one, they scattered the dailies so that the place looked like a bomb site, and shuffled out, Maxwell the last to go. How could he play this? A discreet word here in the library where she could summon help with a deft flick of an alarm switch? Or should he tackle her outside in an alleyway, where the reminiscent shock might kill her? He took his chance.

‘Miss Morris?’ He stood at her desk.

The dark eyes flickered up to his and then away. ‘The library’s closing,’ she told him.

‘Yes, I know. I just wanted a word.’

‘You’ll have to come back tomorrow’ She was busy herself with something, anything, and the seconds crawled by like years.

‘Tomorrow may be too late.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Peter Maxwell,’ he said. ‘I’m a teacher from Leighford on the South Coast.’

The dark eyes flickered. She took him in. Middle aged, well spoken. Eyes. He had kind eyes. But his face was battered, yellow. He’d been in an accident. ‘Well,’ she sat down, ‘what do you want?’

‘Alice Goode,’ he said. ‘The woman who was found murdered at the Devil’s Punchbowl; she was a colleague.’

For a moment, her mouth hung slack, as though in a silent scream. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Miss Morris’ – Maxwell had the good sense not to move. One wrong word in his body language now and he’d blow it – ‘I have reason to believe that whoever attacked you also attacked Alice.’

That was it. The thunderbolt. The shattering. He waited for the scream, for the hysterics. At least the flexing of her shoulder as she pushed the panic button under her desk rim. Nothing. No sound. No movement. Georgianna Morris just sat there as if she was watching something, something in the middle distance.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said, but it didn’t sound like her voice. ‘They asked me, all of them, the police, the psychiatrists. I don’t remember.’

‘Excuse me,’ the voice was an intrusion on the moment. Maxwell swung around to face a pot-bellied man with unlikely side-whiskers, ‘Excuse me, the library is closing now’

‘You are …?’

‘The Chief Librarian.’ The little man extended his neck so that his eyes were level with Maxwell’s bow tie. ‘I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.’ He looked like ET.

‘I was just having a word with Miss Morris,’ Maxwell explained, catching the heat that was thrown at him.

‘In your own time, please.’ The Chief Librarian’s face began to change colour as he squared up to his man. That was the trouble with the Reference Library – all sorts of riff-raff drifted in. Half of them couldn’t even read.

‘Miss Morris …’ Maxwell began, ignoring the pompous idiot under his nose.

‘I don’t really like popcorn,’ she said, ‘thanks all the same.’

And the nothingness behind those dark eyes told Peter Maxwell he was wasting his time.

‘So, what have we got, Count?’ Maxwell set aside the shabraque of the officer’s charger to dry and leaned back in his hard camp stool. Before him lay the debris of another character of the Light Brigade, shattered pieces of white plastic as though man and horse had already ridden into the Jaws of Death and not come out of it too well. ‘This,’ he held up the Hussar officer’s torso, legs and head to the light, ‘is, or will be when he’s finished, Colonel Shewell of the

Eighth. His men called him “The Old Woman”. A teetotaller and a fussy martinet. Say hello to Count Metternich, Colonel; Count, say miaow to the Colonel.’

The cat failed to oblige and Colonel Shewell was oddly reticent as well.

‘His was one of only two horses unhurt in the entire Brigade. Poor bastard died on leave two years later – er, Shewell, that is, not the horse. Where was I?’ He put the figure down. ‘Oh, yes, I do wish you’d stop distracting me, Count. What have we got?’ He reached for the Southern Comfort and freshened his glass, then leaned back again, staring up at his own reflection in the dark of the skylight where the rain bounced on the glass and put out the stars. ‘We’ve got a dead woman, who may or may not be one in a series. Snatched at random by a madman? Or is there a pattern here? Georgianna Morris, abducted from a cinema by person unknown – I hope you’re listening, Count, I shall be asking questions later. Carly Drinkwater likewise – except she, poor soul, didn’t survive. So why did chummie change his pattern? Why grab Alice Goode from the Museum of the Moving Image? Moving Image. Movie. Is that it, Count? The click-click of the film in the machine? The staccato of the sprockets. Celluloid. The ultimate fantasy. Then, of course, there’s Alice’s chequered past. I doubt our Mr Diamond would have been as quick to employ her had he seen the dark side of her CV “Immoral earnings” doesn’t look too good, does it? “Deep throat a speciality”. God!’ He hauled his hands down his tired face, looking for a moment like Lon Chaney in the first
Phantom
before they killed it stone dead by making it into a musical. ‘That’s what I love about you, Count, your words of encouragement.’

Maxwell was in bed when the doorbell rang. He’d had a few minutes with Schama and with all due respect to a rattling good historian, had dropped back on his pillows like something out of the death of Chatterton. He fumbled for the clock. Half past twelve. Who the bloody Hell was this? Some stupid kid staggering home with his mates from a drunken revel, thinking it a great wheeze to get old Mad Max out of bed and then leg it? Or perhaps Deirdre Lessing’s broomstick had run out of fuel and she’d come to use his phone.

His feet found his slippers unerringly and he grappled with his dressing gown as the bell rang again, ‘All right,’ Maxwell yawned, ‘I’m doing my best. Keep your hair on.’ And he was still muttering as he reached the front door.

He swung it wide. There was no one there. He peered out. If this was some herbert’s idea of a laugh … Then he saw him, huddled in the driving rain, against the laurel hedge that was Maxwell’s sole barrier between him and Mrs Troubridge, the Neighbour from Hell. And he looked ill. And he looked scared. But it was him all right. It was Ronnie. Ronnie Parsons. Back from the dead.

Maxwell had hung the boy’s things in the kitchen. He’d offered him a bath or a shower, but the lad was already soaked. So Maxwell threw him a towel and the only spare bath robe he possessed and sat him down to a bacon sandwich and a cup of cocoa. Ronnie Parsons didn’t like bacon. And he didn’t like cocoa. But he’d been given these things by Mad Max. You just swallowed. That was it.

‘Where’ve you been, Ronnie?’ Maxwell held off the inevitable as long as he could. ‘Your mum and dad have been frantic’

‘Have they?’ the boy asked, his pale eyes blinking.

It suddenly reminded Maxwell of the Harrison Ford film of the same name, the one where Ford’s wife disappears in Paris. He thought at the time the title should have read ‘Mildly Worried’. Mr and Mrs Parsons had been a bit like that.

‘Of course.’ Maxwell was still part of the Establishment. Hell, he was the Establishment. There could be no breaking ranks now. He leaned towards the boy. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Brighton University.’

Maxwell smiled. ‘When I suggested you should visit some higher ed. places, I didn’t mean stay for a fortnight. There’s what the American cops would call an APB out for you.’ He gave Ronnie his best Kojak, except that Ronnie was too young to appreciate it.

‘I know,’ Ronnie nodded.

‘How is she?’ Maxwell was smiling again.

‘Who?’

Maxwell raised an eyebrow; the same one he’d raised back in Year Nine when young Ronnie had tried his ‘the dog ate my homework’ routine. It hadn’t worked then. It wasn’t working now.

‘Dannie’s all right,’ the lad grinned. He didn’t feel he’d done that in a long time. ‘She sends you hers.’

Maxwell laughed. ‘Does she now? I’m not sure I want it.’

‘Mr Maxwell …’ Ronnie frowned.

His Head of Sixth Form held up his hand. ‘Nothing personal against your light o’ love,’ he said, ‘but the Dannie Roth you know and the one I remember are two vastly different people.’

‘She’s not.’ Ronnie was staring at the carpet.

‘Not what?’ Maxwell was losing the thread.

‘Not my “light o’ love” as you put it. I found that out the hard way’

‘Ah, seduced by the hard men of Finals Year, eh?’ Maxwell remembered his own days. Then a woman at Cambridge was as rare as anything that made sense by Rainer Fassbinder.

Ronnie shook his head. ‘Some fuckin’ poncy lecturer!’ he snarled. ‘Oh, sorry, Mr Maxwell.’

The Head of Sixth Form reached across to his drinks cabinet. ‘That’s all right, Ronnie. Some of the lecturers I’ve known, you couldn’t have found better adjectives for them. Tell me, are you a Southern Comfort man?’

The boy frowned. ‘Got any lager?’

Maxwell chuckled, his hopes for the youth of today shattered again. ‘I think so.’ He hauled out a can. ‘It’s not chilled, I’m afraid.’

After the bacon sandwich and the hot cocoa, Ronnie didn’t give a damn about that.

‘Ronnie, why have you come here? To me, I mean?’

The boy thought for a moment. ‘Is it awkward, Mr Maxwell? Difficult for you, I mean? Look, I can go …’

Maxwell held his arm. ‘You stay and finish your drink,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll see about getting you home.’

Ronnie was sitting on the floor, his arms folded across his knees, shaking his head violently. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No, that’s one place I’m never going back to.’

‘Your mum and dad, Ronnie …’

‘My dad …’ the boy was staring at Maxwell now, his eyes wild and big with tears, ‘… my dad doesn’t give a shit about me. He never has. You wouldn’t remember this, Mr Maxwell; it was before I was in the Sixth Form, but I never wanted to do games. It wasn’t that I was no good. I can run with the best and my ball skills ain’t bad. You wanna know why I never did games?’ He suddenly hauled the towelling robe over his head and showed Maxwell his ribs. There were parallel rows of white scars, wealed and jagged here and there. ‘That’s how frantic Dad is.’ Ronnie was choking back the tears. ‘If I was late for a meal, if I didn’t make my bed right, if I stayed out after a certain time. He did that. Him and his studded belt. And Mum …’ He lowered the bath robe, ‘Well, Mum just stood there, saying nothing, doing nothing. I used to cry, to scream and run to her, trying to hide in her arms. Know what she’d say, Mr Maxwell? She’d say, “You know what your father’s like, Ronnie. Don’t upset him. You’ll be all right.” For the last three years my Dad hasn’t spoken a word to me. As long as he’s got his smutty videos and me out of the way, he’s as happy as a pig in shit. So, please, Mr Maxwell, spare me the trauma about what my mum and dad have gone through. If he’s bothered at all, it’s because of what I might tell Social Services or the police. Anyway,’ the boy subsided a little. ‘I can’t go anywhere near the police now, can I?’

‘Why not?’ Maxwell asked him. ‘Ronnie, why not?’

The lad looked bewildered. For all he was nearly eighteen, tall and spare, he was a child again, lost, confused. ‘Ain’t you seen the news? I thought when you said there was an APB out for me, you knew’

‘Knew what? For God’s sake, Ronnie, what are you talking about?’

‘There’s a woman, right, Jean Hagger. Lived with Miss Goode.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, she’s dead, for Christ’s sake. Didn’t you know?’

‘Dead?’ Maxwell was on his feet. ‘When?’

‘I dunno. It said on the news at lunchtime. I caught it in Currys. I was on my way to the law. To tell them what I knew about Miss Goode. I was trying to get up the bottle, I suppose, killing time until I’d found the nerve. They showed it on the news, Mr Maxwell. They found a grey bag in her flat. It’s my bag, Mr Maxwell. It’s got my bloody name in it. They think I did it. They think I killed her.’ His eyes widened as the cold light of it hit him. ‘They think I killed them both. Her and Miss Goode.’

Peter Maxwell turned to the window where the last lights along the shore twinkled through the storm and the house lights flickered in sympathy.

‘Help me, Mr Maxwell.’ The boy was crying now, his nose red, his forehead creased in a frown. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

And Peter Maxwell, who had had so many sons, found himself hugging this one. ‘Don’t worry, Ronnie,’ he whispered, ‘we’ll think of something.’

10

Jean Hagger had been battered to death with a fossil she kept in the corner. ‘A Jurassic ammonite, to be precise.’ Jim Astley was weighing part of it in his hand. ‘Funny to think a cephalopod from a hundred and thirty million years ago can kill people today, isn’t it? Especially as it was harmless when it was alive.’

‘That’s unusually poetic of you, Jim,’ DCI Henry Hall said, ‘if I may make the observation.’

Astley looked at the copper over his rimless specs. They didn’t exactly go back a long way, these two, yet there was something there, some spark of mutual respect. ‘I’m a funny age,’ the police surgeon muttered. ‘Are these the photographs?’

Hall slid them across Astley’s desk. In the harsh, unflattering flash of the police photographer, Astley saw again what he had seen the previous day. Jean Hagger lay on the hearth rug with one leg up on the artificial gas fire, the other sprawled on the carpet, its vicious blue now black with the appalling amount of blood from her head. Her sightless eyes stared out of their sockets through a mask of crimson, as though she was furious with the photographer for catching her at a bad moment, the worst moment of her life.

‘She put up a helluva struggle,’ he nodded, as if to confirm his findings of the day before.

‘He’d be heavily bloodstained?’

‘No,’ Astley reached for his coffee cup over the shattered remnants of the murder weapon, ‘because he washed it all off in the bathroom. Then he washed the bathroom. Clothes too.’

‘You mean the cocky bastard used her washing machine?’ Hall asked.

‘Why not? She was in no position to object.’

‘Even so, that’s odd.’

‘What is?’

Hall looked at the good doctor, sipping elegantly from the canteen crockery. ‘Ever killed anybody, Jim?’ he asked.

Astley chuckled. ‘Are we talking on or off the operating table?’ he asked.

‘All right.’ Hall never chuckled. It might crease his face. ‘Let me put it another way. Ever stoved in the head of a divorced middle-aged teacher with an ammonite?’

‘Don’t tell me I’m a suspect!’ Astley stared wide-eyed. ‘What’s your point, Henry?’

‘Where’s the panic?’ Hall was asking himself the question. ‘The fear? This is my eighth murder case, Jim, and in every single one of them, I’ve seen it somewhere. Whether it’s premeditated, planned to the nth degree or the frantic fury of a split second, it hits them like a wall. Every murderer I’ve talked to, read about, it’s always the same. You want to get away, run. You don’t want to look at the mess you’ve made, the butcher’s yard.’

‘What about Ed Gein?’ Astley asked, serious now. ‘Didn’t he wrap himself up in the skins of his victims? Became them, so to speak?’

‘Is that what we’ve got here, Jim?’ Hall still talking to himself. ‘The South Coast’s own Ed Gein? Jesus, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘What about the Parsons boy?’ Astley returned his cup to the saucer. ‘The bag?’

‘You saw it,’ Hall reminded him, ‘in the middle of the floor like a flashing neon sign. Tastefully filled with the clothes of the late Alice Goode.’

‘Too pat,’ Astley commented.

‘You’d have made a reasonable detective,’ Hall mumbled, ‘given time.’

‘So, what are you saying?’ Astley leaned back in his swivel. ‘The bag’s too obvious. It isn’t the Parsons boy.’

‘Time of death you estimate at …’ Hall leaned to his man, talking it through, worrying it, probing for a solution. Perhaps if he kicked the idea round for long enough …’

‘Twelve, twelve thirty, not later than one.’

‘The middle of the day,’ Hall underlined it.

‘Why wasn’t she at school?’ Astley asked.

‘She was. She had a phone call,’ Hall told him. ‘A man’s voice. There was a serious problem and she had to come home at once.’

‘What problem?’

Hall shook his head, ‘The school receptionist didn’t know. It just sounded urgent. She fetched Mrs Hagger at once. And Mrs Hagger said she had to go. Her Headteacher covered her class and she was off.

‘What time was this?’

‘Half-eleven. It would have taken her twenty minutes, perhaps a little more, to reach her flat.’

‘And chummie was waiting for her?’

‘Nobody saw a damn thing. There was a sighting at the corner of Arundel Street half an hour earlier. But it’s vague. Probably a window cleaner. At least he had a ladder and a bucket.’

‘She let him in.’

Hall nodded. ‘Like people let in the Boston Strangler. There was no sign of a break-in. The outside door was kept locked and can be operated only from the inside or with a key. Likewise, Jean Hagger’s own flat door.’

‘So she knew him?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Hall said. ‘Perhaps whatever his message was overrode that.’

‘In what way?’

Hall shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What if it had something to do with Alice? That would bring her running, wouldn’t it? We know they were close.’

‘So, once he’s inside, he turns nasty.’

‘She fought for her life, certainly. You thought four blows?’

‘Possibly a fifth,’ Astley acknowledged. ‘The third killed her. But with a weapon like that,’ he handled it again, the iron-hard ridges still dark with blood and matted hair, ‘you can’t be sure. In fact, Mrs Hagger had an unusually thick skull. The first blow would have done for most people.’

‘How damaged is our man?’ Hall asked.

‘Difficult to say,’ was the best Astley could do. ‘There was no sign of debris under the fingernails, but the knuckles of her right hand were grazed.’

‘She thumped him?’

‘Possibly, but we don’t know what she made contact with. It could have been the wall, the furniture, even the ammonite.’

Hall mused a little space, checking the photographs again. ‘Nothing sexual here?’ He wanted reassurance.

‘Nothing obvious,’ Astley confirmed it, ‘no signs of rape. No bruising. No semen traces.’

‘But not premeditated.’ Hall was talking to himself again.

‘You think not?’

‘You don’t go along for a murder and hope there’s a convenient blunt instrument lying about. With different luck he might have had to have used a rolled-up newspaper, if that was all that came to hand.’

‘What if …? No.’

Hall collected up his photographs. ‘You’re an inscrutable sod, Dr Astley,’ he said. ‘Give me no ifs. What are you thinking?’

‘Well, what if he did bring his own weapon? Knife, iron pipe, bazooka, in the bag he left behind? What if he saw the ammonite and saw his chance to reduce the risk of detection? If he used his own DIY gadget, he’d either have to lose it or sterilize it so that people like Forensic can’t come along and find the odd telltale hair, the sliver of skin. By using something of hers, something that belonged in the flat anyway, he’s shifting the probables, isn’t he? Saving his arse.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Hall nodded, feeling worse now that Astley had confirmed what he already knew. “There’s little doubt our killer has done that. Not a print, or smudge. He’s a calculating bastard, cool as a mountain stream.’

‘And the Parsons boy?’

‘The Parsons boy,’ Hall dragged himself up from Astley’s other chair, ‘is alive and well and knows more than he’s telling. And somebody’s shielding him.’

‘Did he do this? Smash the skull of Jean Hagger and rape and strangle Alice Goode?’

Hall turned in the doorway, ‘We’ll be in touch, Jim,’ he said.

It was one of those curious lulls that soldiers say descend on battle-fields, when footweary grumblers lie in water-filled foxholes and light a lucifer before the flak starts again. Teachers call them free periods. There are never enough of them, they are always at the wrong time of day and, depending on the sickness record of your colleagues, you often lose them anyway to cover somebody else’s classes.

Peter Maxwell was lucky that day. He hadn’t lost his free so he was taking a rare moment to flick through
The Times Educational Supplement
in the staffroom. He was too old to get another job and besides, as usual, somebody had pinched the classified section. It was then that Anthea Edwards walked in.

‘All hail!’ Maxwell shuffled his paper at her.

‘Sorry, Max,’ she said. Whenever she saw Maxwell in the staff-room, it was like Boodles or the Garrick. She hated to disturb the old man in his club.

‘Sit ye doon,’ he was still in North British mode, ‘an’ stint not. I’ve been meaning to talk to you.’

She did as she was told. Mad Max scared Anthea Edwards. Come to think of it, nearly everybody scared Anthea Edwards. And the trip to MOMI hadn’t helped. Deirdre Lessing had offered to arrange counselling. Almost daily the Head of Special Needs clutched the girl to her ample bosom and they talked knitting, and Delia Smith.

‘About the trip.’ Maxwell folded his paper and put it down.

‘Yes?’ It had been over four weeks now since she’d gone, but every night she sat on that phantom coach and wandered those dark and magic slide shows.

‘Where exactly did you see Ronnie last?’ he asked her. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Is it important?’ She sorted her marking on the coffee table in front of her.

‘It might be,’ he told her.

‘Well, I think …’ and she screwed her face with the effort of remembering, shutting her eyes tight, ‘… I think it was at the Barry Norman interview bit, but I couldn’t swear to it, Max. Why?’

‘I know where he is.’ Max muttered it out of the corner of his mouth.

She turned to face him, her eyes bright. ‘You mean, he’s alive?’

‘Look,’ the door had crashed back and Roger Garrett, the First Deputy, stood there. ‘I’ve got a bit of a flap on,’ he said. ‘Angela Lord’s gone home.’

‘Well, fan my flies,’ said Maxwell. ‘And only the second time this week, today being Tuesday.’

‘Have a heart, Max …’ Garrett said.

‘We are rather busy, Roger.’ Maxwell stared his man down. ‘You’re free, I notice.’

A strange look came over Roger Garrett’s face. It passed as a smile but Maxwell knew a sneer when he saw one. Ah, well, I’m time-tabling,’ he explained.

‘Oh, goody.’ Maxwell clapped his hands together. ‘Forward planning. I’m impressed.’

‘It’s only for half an hour,’ Garrett wheedled. ‘10A4.’

‘Now how did I guess that?’ Maxwell smiled, wide-eyed. ‘Funny how it’s never 10A1, isn’t it? Still,’ he got up, sighing, ‘it could be worse. I could be a supply teacher.’ He looked down at Anthea, still open-mouthed on the chair next to him, ‘Flies, dear,’ he said and winked at her. ‘Where away, oh, disturber of my dreams?’ It took Garrett a while to realize that Maxwell was talking to him and he passed him the nasty little yellow lesson cover-slip that was Leighford High’s equivalent of the Black Spot.

At the staffroom door, Maxwell stopped, tapping the side of his nose as Garrett scuttled off in search of a computer, ‘Mum’s the word now, Anthea. OK? I thought you’d feel better if you knew’

She did. It was like a huge weight off her soul. She closed her eyes and found herself crying.

Peter Maxwell didn’t usually go to the pictures with strange men. Not anyone quite as strange as Alec Crossman, the 1930s public schoolboy who’d got caught in a time warp and was in a ’90s comprehensive by mistake. Alec had been insistent and it did kill two birds as far as Maxwell was concerned. The coach driver, Dave Freeman, had rung him a few days ago with the gypsy’s warning about the new cinema club behind the bus station. In the helter-skelter days since then, he’d all but forgotten about it. Freeman was trying to be helpful, no doubt. The man felt guilty because Alice Goode and Ronnie had disappeared on his trip too. Not that anyone could hold anything against Hamilton’s or their drivers, any more than anyone could hold anything against the Museum of the Moving Image. That was just how it was.

The green door was thrown back that Wednesday evening and a steady trickle of the faithful went through it. Young Alec met Maxwell outside – young Alec dropped off by his dad, Jonathan, who was actually the Crossman family member and sometime club projectionist, old Maxwell parking his bike next to the riderless supermarket trolleys that the day’s shoppers had abandoned, much as the French army did their horses in the dripping Belgian orchards after Waterloo.

Alec had a girl with him, a nonentity in a thin summer frock. She was introduced to Maxwell as Arabella which told him immediately that she went to the Grange Private School down the road. All she said all evening was ‘Hello’ with that upper-class twang that cuts like a knife through the water of the working class and that was guaranteed to turn Maxwell into an instant Marxist.

Ian McKellan hauled off his balaclava, having put a single bullet through the forehead of the Prince of Wales. HRH’s HQ didn’t look very much like the bloody meadow at Tewkesbury, but if you couldn’t take liberties with the Bard, with whom could you take liberties? Maxwell enjoyed himself. The theatre was very intimate to the point of incestuousness. Room for what? Fifty bums, top whack? Only half the seats were taken, of course, in the manner of the great British cinema of these days. No ice cream, no popcorn, not even much by way of Pearl and Dean. As Sir Ian fell dying through the flames of his own destruction on the screen, Maxwell excused himself from his protégé and his piece and made his way to the exit. On the landing he ducked to his left through a black-painted door and found himself in a corridor, dark and narrow. He looked for the telltale flicker of the projector on the wall, listened for the whirr and click of what was probably a secondhand job lot. All he got was a solid, balding man who didn’t take kindly to strangers wandering through his club.

‘Can I help?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell said, ‘I was hoping to find someone to talk to about the club.’

‘Really?’ The balding man placed a proprietorial arm across the corridor, ‘Why?’

‘I’m something of a film buff myself,’ Maxwell told him, ‘I’d like to join, Mr … er …’

‘I’m sorry, membership by invitation only’ The balding man was firm.

‘Oh, but I’ve just seen tonight’s show,’ Maxwell explained.

‘That’s fine. Wednesdays are open to the public’

‘Ah, I see,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Well, how do I go about attending on the other nights of the week? I can’t usually do Wednesdays.’