Authors: M. J. Trow
‘Trust me!’ he said, smiling. ‘I really am very embarrassed about all this.’
‘No, no,’ she said, smiling back. ‘It was an accident.’
‘I’m just glad it wasn’t a lolly’ Maxwell said. ‘They stain so, don’t they? Enjoying the film?’
‘Er… yes.’
‘Seen it before?’
‘No, no, I haven’t. Look, would you excuse me?’
‘Of course,’ and gentleman that he was, he got out of his seat and watched her go. She didn’t run. Didn’t look back. He knew she wouldn’t. She turned left at the top of the stairs, making for the loo. Was that, Maxwell wondered, how it was done? How Carly Drinkwater and Georgianna Morris had been picked up? He sat back down, extricating the last of the popcorn from under his bum. Of course, he didn’t know if the victims had known their assailant or not. But if they hadn’t – or even if they had in a passing sort of way – wouldn’t that have been their instinctive reaction? It was all about body language really. In the dark of a cinema, countless millions had lost themselves to the magic, the make-believe. What woman’s heart had not leapt when Clark Gable had told Vivien Leigh where to stick it? Who had not gulped back a tear when Dirk Bogarde stood on his tumbril in the shadow of Madame Guillotine and told a frightened peasant girl it was a far, far better thing than he’d ever done before? And somewhere in a South Wales cinema, Maxwell had good reason to believe, still lay, in the dust and sweet wrappers under the seats, the dentures of an aged great aunt of his, so terrified by Lon Chaney’s
Phantom of the Opera
, that her scream had sent her false teeth hurtling through the air.
But Maxwell had done the unthinkable. Whoever the girl was over whom he had tipped his popcorn, she’d had her evening ruined. She’d felt threatened, vulnerable. He, an old pervert in a bow tie and ridiculous hat, had invaded her space, engaged her in conversation. And she’d retreated. She’d run. There were those who’d have brazened it out. The little hussy who showed Maxwell into the Girlie Peep Show in Soho would have sat there, legs open and breasts uptilted, and would have fetched him a nasty one in the nuts if he’d got fresh. But this girl had taken refuge in an inner sanctum, that last of sanctuaries now that the medieval church was no more. She’d gone to the Ladies’. She’d gambled that Maxwell would not follow her there. For Maxwell, like the men who killed Caesar, was an honourable man.
But the man who killed Carly Drinkwater and did his damnedest to kill Georgianna Morris wasn’t an honourable man. That’s how he got her out of the cinema. There were always fire exits in those places and they were invariably near the loos. Maxwell wandered to the back to check. Sure enough, there it was, feet rather than yards from the door marked ‘Ladies’. There’d be … what? Three, four cubicles inside? It would take Carly two or three minutes to reckon she’d shaken Lover Boy off and then she’d nip out. Except that she hadn’t shaken him off. He was there, by the loo door. He’d have grabbed her wrist, quietly, quickly, pulling her to him. She’d have felt the knife rip through her coat and he’d have rasped some cliché like ‘Scream and you’re dead.’ Except that Carly Drinkwater couldn’t have been thinking about clichés at a time like that, even assuming she knew what a cliché was. She’d have been in a blind panic, the normal, everyday safe world hurtling by her in a blur as he waited until the coast was clear and smuggled her out of the back way, down the fire exit stairs and beyond into the Raines Park night.
Then what? A car? A van? Somewhere where he could throw her and she’d stay thrown. He couldn’t have risked a struggle in the street. It would have been dark, but not invisibly dark. For Maxwell’s money, it was a van. He probably knocked her out, a single powerful fist in the face, and threw her in, perhaps sampling the goods as he did so, sliding his hands over her breasts, under the skirt. Then he slammed and locked the doors and no one saw Carly Drinkwater again.
It must have been similar with Georgianna Morris, except she screamed or struggled or both. She was in her underwear, so he must have got her into the van, if van it was. Perhaps he couldn’t wait this time. Perhaps she came to as he was stripping her. He panicked, there in the cramped space in the lights of the High Street, and thumped her again to shut her up. Perhaps he used his knife there. Perhaps later. Perhaps he locked her in, drove like a madman for the Park intending to rape her, strangle her and dump her, like a used condom, like a broken doll, like Carly Drinkwater. But when he opened the van doors, she lashed out at him, caught him off balance with both feet. Now he had to kill her quickly. They were in the Park and it was night time. But the Park was still open and there were people here and there, shadows under the dripping trees. He slashed her again – or was it for the first time? Hacking at her, trying to stop her from screaming, from crying out. But her arms were in the way. There was blood, flying in the rain, trickling the length of his blade, over his knuckles, but he couldn’t reach her throat. He couldn’t cut her head off That would stop her. That would shut her up. Just the gargle of her death rattle. That was what he wanted to hear. But he slipped on the wet tarmac, lost his balance and she was gone, rain plastering her hair to her head, her arms dripping blood. He’d slammed the van into gear and was away, his heart racing with the engine revs.
Perhaps. It was all perhaps. Maxwell turned to the couple necking in the back row now that the lights were dimming again. ‘I’ll be asking you questions about this film tomorrow,’ he said. ‘So keep your eyes on the screen and your hands where I can see them. Oh and by the way, Casanova, Nazi Germany GCSE coursework. My office. Nine ack emma. Or I’ll nail your nuts to the wall.’
‘You want to do what, Max?’ Jim Diamond, Headteacher of this parish, couldn’t believe his ears.
Maxwell sat in the not very great man’s office that Wednesday morning, the window in his day between 8A1 and the Double Coma the timetable laughing called Year Ten History. ‘It’s quite simple, Headmaster,’ Maxwell was talking slowly, ‘I want to take another trip to the Museum of the Moving Image. Using exactly the same people as before. Except of course for poor Alice. I shall play her.’
‘It’s out of the question, Max. The parents.’
Maxwell leaned to his man, ‘I’m not inviting the parents, Headmaster,’ he said.
‘I mean they’ll never wear it.’
‘What harm can it do?’
‘What good?’
‘Good?’ Maxwell smiled at the Head’s unintentional pun. ‘Quite. It’s a long shot, but I think it’ll help catch Alice Goode’s killer.’
‘You can’t use children like that, Max,’ Diamond said, his by-the-bookishness displayed for all to see.
‘As far as they’re concerned,’ his Head of Sixth Form told him, ‘it’s just another “jolly”. And as you know, Headmaster, on my trips, nobody disappears.’
‘How does Anthea Edwards feel about all this?’ Diamond set great store by embracing democracy, casting his safety net as wide as he could.
‘She’s ready to help catch Alice’s murderer, of course,’ Maxwell smiled. ‘As you’d expect.’
‘I don’t follow any of this, Max,’ the Headmaster confessed. ‘You’ll have to be more explicit?’
‘All right,’ Maxwell said, ‘M-O-M-I. A little testette for you, Headmaster. What does it stand for?’
‘Urn … the Museum of the Moving Image?’ Diamond guessed, never liking to look a complete prat.
‘Close,’ Maxwell winked. ‘And on one level, you’re right. But in fact,’ and he stood up, longing to meet the intellectual challenge of 10C3, ‘I got to thinking in the wee, small hours, like we bachelors do, and I came up with what it really stands for. The magic ingredients of murder. M is for Motive, O is Opportunity, M is Means.’
‘And I?’ Diamond frowned.
Maxwell half turned at the Head’s door. ‘Ah, yes,’ he chuckled. ‘I is for Incompetence. Mine.’
What are you doing on the eighteenth?’ Jacquie Carpenter heard the voice say at the other end of the phone. ‘If you’re asking me out on a date, Max,’ she answered, ‘I shall have to disappoint you.’
‘Gee Gosh A’mighty.’ Maxwell’s Doris Day as Calamity Jane needed a little work, it had to be said. He just didn’t have the freckles. ‘How about a trip to MOMI?’
‘MOMI?’
‘The Museum.’
‘Yes. Yes. I know. Why?’
‘A little action replay. It might refresh a few memories, Anthea’s, in particular. Ronnie’s too. I need to pinpoint precisely how Alice left the Museum.’
‘I can’t,’ she muttered.
‘Can’t?’ he challenged her. ‘Or won’t?’
There was a pause during which he could have kicked himself. ‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s the day of my internal enquiry. Besides, you’ll never walk alone,’ and she hung up.
‘Well, who’d have thought it, Count,’ Maxwell turned to the cat, the receiver still in his hand, ‘Woman Policeman Carpenter is a football fanatic. She’s not old enough to remember Gerry and the Pacemakers, let alone
Carousel
.’ He put the phone down, frowning, ‘Unless …’ and he crossed the living room to the window. He flicked aside the blinds, glancing down at the twilit street where Mrs Troubridge, his neighbour of the Abyss, was just out on her way to her Thursday Bingo and the ecstasy of instant riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Across the road, well away from the orange glow of the oncoming streetlight, a parked car crouched in the shadows. Dark. Unmarked. Police.
‘Well, well,’ whispered Maxwell, ‘Hello, hello, hello.’ He turned to the cat, stretched in feline abandon on the settee, ‘It looks like the Force is still with me, Count,’ but his Alec Guinness was wasted on Metternich, who merely yawned, having heard it all before.
Now this cinema was vastly different from the one in Leighford High Street. And it seemed oddly different from its Wednesday night atmosphere too. There was no bill on the wall by the green door, no ‘open to the public’. This was by invitation only and it was Maxwell’s inaugural visit.
If he’d been expecting some ceremony, some baring of the right nipple or locking of buffalo horns and aprons, he was singularly disappointed. The clientele he’d never seen before. He’d lived in Leighford half his life, teacher and boy and he didn’t recognize any of them. One of them, in unseasonal mac, might have been Alec Crossman’s dad. But then one of them might have been Lord Lucan, for all Maxwell knew. They had a certain out-of-townness about them. They looked furtive, hunted, watching each other’s faces until the eye contact was made, then turning away.
The only friendly face in the place appeared alongside his now as the muttered conversations grew less and the whispers even more hushed. ‘Mr Maxwell. Max, isn’t it?’
‘Indeed … er … Dee?’
‘That’s right,’ Douglas McSween shook his hand. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Thanks for inviting me. I came a little on spec. Is there a programme?’
McSween chuckled. ‘Well, yes and no. Sorry to sound cryptic, but you can’t be too careful. We used to have printed programmes, but you can’t always get the films and to be honest, one or two of the wives got a little curious.’
‘Did they?’ Maxwell bluffed. All sorts of pennies were just beginning to drop in the minefield he called a brain. The audience were all men. The only girl appeared on the screen ahead of them both now. And the audience fell silent. Dave Freeman’s gypsy warning echoed in Maxwell’s ears.
‘Jonathan’s on the projector tonight,’ McSween whispered, ‘I’m taking the month off. You’ll like this one.
Sweet Seventeen
,’’ and he was gone into the rustling darkness.
Maxwell had seen films like this before. They had been sold over the counter in the good old days of the ’80s when the world was agonizing over whether to buy VHS or Betamax and before the Mary Whitehouse Parliament realized what was happening. In the days of his youth, Maxwell had snuck into the bioscope theatres of the Lumiere brothers to watch the odd skin flick. Plotless stories, lots of ripe lips and heavy breathing, ever-so-slightly-out-of-sync with the action.
But what he saw now was different. In the years of under-the-counterness since the exhilarating eighties, the subject matter had got nastier, the writhing more explicit. But it wasn’t that that bothered Maxwell. It wasn’t the girls peeling off their fol-de-rols in the dry ice and flashing lights of the Vegas flip-joint. It wasn’t the stiffness of their ice-cubed nipples or the urgent thrusting of their hips against the lubricated poles. It wasn’t even the furtive jerking of arms to his left and right in the cinema. It was the second girl from the end, with the long black wig and the carefully trimmed pubic hair. The camera lovingly followed her bouncing breasts, the curve of her hips and belly to focus brazenly on her groin and what her fingers were doing there. Then the lens flashed upwards to her face, trickling with perspiration to the unrelenting beat of the music and the look of pain and ecstasy that distorted it.
Maxwell’s colleague. Alice Goode.
He coughed loudly, painfully. And went on coughing until his fellow punters began to turn round and give him annoyed looks. He apologized a few times, then got up and made his exit, in search of a drink of water. His eyes hadn’t acclimatized to the light on the stairs before he collided with someone on his way up as he was on his way down.
‘Sorry,’ they both said simultaneously and recoiled. The newcomer spun on a sixpence and bolted down the stairs, but Maxwell was faster. He caught up with him at the bottom and pushed him against the wall, gripping his collar with one hand and pointing a finger at his nose with the other. Fisticuffs weren’t really Mad Max’s strong suit. His heart was firmly in his mouth and he couldn’t feel his legs at all. But Piers Stewart didn’t know that.
‘Well, well,’ Maxwell said, ‘I’m glad I bumped into you. Felt badly about not leaving a tip when I last visited your establishment.’
‘Now, look …’
‘Uh-huh.’ Maxwell wagged a finger under the restaurateur’s nose, ‘You see that car over there,’ and he pointed to the solitary vehicle in the car park that abutted the bus station, ‘that’s driven by a Detective Sergeant Hennessey. Nice man. Sticks very close to me at the moment. If I nip out now and flag him down, he’ll take about … oh … ten seconds to feel your collar.’
‘Piers?’ a voice broke the moment.
Both men turned to see Douglas McSween at the top of the stairs, peering at them in confusion, ‘Is anything the matter?’
‘I just had a bit of a coughing fit,’ Maxwell beamed. And who should I bump into but my old friend Piers. Dee, you dark horse, you didn’t tell me Piers was a member.’
‘Er … confidentiality, old boy, that sort of thing.’ McSween didn’t like the look on Piers Stewart’s face. ‘Piers, are you all right?’
Piers Stewart didn’t like the look on Peter Maxwell’s face either, even though it was smiling. ‘Fine,’ he sounded a little strangled.
‘Look, Dee,’ Maxwell was bonhomie itself, ‘I’d love to rejoin the film, but …’ and he burst out coughing again, ‘I’d only spoil it for the others. Lovely bits of tottie, by the way’
‘We like to please,’ McSween said, still searching both men’s faces for an explanation.
‘You haven’t got a room somewhere, have you? There’s a little business venture Piers and I would like to discuss and it’s rather private. Could you oblige?’
‘Er … well …’
‘That one at the back,’ Stewart remembered, ‘where you keep your archives.’
‘Well, all right, but isn’t there a pub or somewhere?’
‘Rather private, old boy.’ Maxwell tapped the side of his nose.
‘Ah,’ McSween tried to share Maxwell’s private joke, ‘of course. This way,’ and he showed them upstairs and along the corridor to a poky little room he unlocked.
‘Thank you, Dee,’ Maxwell beamed, ‘we won’t be long. Be in for the film later. Tell me, have you seen it before?’
‘Oh, yes,’ McSween enthused, ‘I vet all our stuff.’
‘Excellent. That bit of skirt, the one with black hair …’
‘Hmm?’ McSween’s eyes were bright at the memory of her.
‘See her again, do we?’
‘Rather,’ he smirked like a naughty schoolboy, ‘shags like a rabbit in the second half
‘Great,’ said Maxwell through gritted teeth, resisting the climbing urge to break the man’s nose. ‘We’ll be in presently, then,’ and he ushered McSween out of the door before whirling to haul Stewart down onto a chair across the table from his own. A naked light bulb swung in the dusty office space overhead, throwing lurid shadows across the sweating forehead of the restaurateur.
‘You told me you weren’t police,’ Stewart hissed, pulling away.
‘You told me I was a pimp,’ Maxwell retaliated. ‘But then, Richard Nixon said there’d be no whitewash at the White House, didn’t he? Life’s all lies and videotape, isn’t it? You see, I didn’t twig at first, amateur as I am at the sleuthing game. You said when I dined at your rather dubious caff that you’d had the law swarming all over your place after they’d found Alice Goode’s body and that she was some sort of tart. Now, having only a Cambridge MA and an IQ in a mere four figures, I naturally assumed that those two facts were related. In other words, that in the course of their conversations with you, the Surrey Plod had let something slip, intentionally or otherwise, about Alice’s erstwhile career. And that didn’t square with what I knew about that, that the police hadn’t cottoned on to that at all. I got there before they did. So how did you know about Alice? Answer, you were a member of the Leighford Low-life Filth Club, Douglas McSween, prop. You’d seen her as you saw her in your car park, hadn’t you? Naked as the day she was born.’
Maxwell was shaking. It was all he could do not to snake out his right hand and knock Piers Stewart through the wall.
‘Yes!’ the restaurateur hissed. ‘Some bastard stitched me up. As soon as I saw the face I recognized her. Christ, I’d seen her dozens of times. She made films with Pryce Garrison about three or four years ago, when the club was in Guildford.’
Maxwell leaned back. ‘So the club moves around?’
‘Of course,’ Stewart said. ‘It has to. You can only keep up the front of respectability – the odd Wednesday showing – for so long. Then tongues begin to wag.’ Piers frowned. ‘Are you kosher? As a member, I mean?’
Maxwell smiled. ‘I’m an agent provocateur,’ he said, ‘And they don’t come much more provocative than me, I can tell you.’
Stewart was on his feet before Maxwell gripped him by the sleeve. ‘Look,’ the man was sweating, ‘I can’t afford to get involved. Wendy, my wife …’
‘Doesn’t she understand you?’ Maxwell mocked. ‘I thought you’d turn out to be the awfully wedded husband.’
‘She owns the business. If she had an inkling of all this … I’d be out on my ear, for Christ’s sake. Look, can’t we do a deal? Er … if it’s money. What are you, an Inspector or something?’
‘Or something,’ Maxwell nodded.
‘Look,’ Stewart fumbled in his pocket, his fingers trembling on his wallet, ‘I’m not a rich man. I mean, it’s all tied up in the business, but, well, I can manage … five grand.’
Maxwell chuckled.
‘All right, all right. Ten. Ten thousand pounds. It’ll take me a day or two.’
‘Answers,’ Maxwell said.
‘What?’
‘Just give me some answers. And we’ll call it quits.’
Stewart all but collapsed into the chair, his nerve gone. ‘You don’t understand,’ he whispered, ‘I can’t get my name in the papers. The police …’
Maxwell leaned back, bluffing for all he was worth. ‘Contrary to popular belief,’ he said, ‘we’re reasonable men.’ He threw his head in the direction of the theatre where Alice Goode was moaning her head off as though her life depended on it, ‘Men of the world.’
Stewart visibly relaxed. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.
Piers Stewart had got involved in the film club before its Guildford days. The main distributor then was a man called Gregory Villiers and Dee – Douglas McSween – fronted the club and found the members. The list was impressive – businessmen like himself, academics like Maxwell, even the odd copper when the whole thing ran from Greek Street. It was an addiction really, like the Lottery or the arcade games. You got hooked on the skin game. It was too risky to get your hands on the totty themselves, although some punters were up for it. Invariably it led to broken noses, blackmail and a lot of awkward questions. The more technocratically minded had veered away into surfing the net for likely talent, but Stewart had never been into kids like that. He knew damn well that Alice Goode wasn’t really ‘sweet seventeen’, but that hardly mattered.
Imagine his horror then when a girlie he’d been drooling over for nearly two years in celluloid turned up dead by his back door. The irony was that that was why he’d come down to Leighford tonight, not to watch, but to have it out with Dee. Some bastard had deliberately dumped that poor girl’s body where he could be implicated. And it had to be someone at the club. Stewart had wrestled with it, chewed it over, whatever analogy you like, but it wouldn’t go away. Who? Maxwell had asked. Stewart had shrugged. He didn’t know anyone capable of murder. People at the club just before he’d stopped going regularly had talked about snuff movies – you know, where they actually killed people. Stewart didn’t want to know about any of that.
To Peter Maxwell, that was an urban myth, like choking Dobermen. To Piers Stewart, it seemed highly real. But then, presumably, to Piers Stewart, Alice Goode was grinding her crotch against him.
Maxwell maintained the policeman myth to the very end. It was very much on a need-to-know basis and Piers Stewart, a rather sad and frightened man for all his green Mercedes and his righteousness, didn’t need to know the truth about Peter Maxwell. The Head of Sixth Form made his excuses and left.
In the car park, he took his time adjusting his cycle clips under the stars. It would be June tomorrow and Alice Goode had been dead for six weeks. Time to cross a few t’s and dot a few i’s. At least put in a few full stops. He’d start with the club. He saddled White Surrey and wobbled past Dick Hennessey, who slithered down in his seat in an attempt to stay out of sight. It didn’t really convince anybody.