Authors: M. J. Trow
‘Here,’ Tamsin shouted, her memory of it vivid now in that rush of sound and colour and light. She was pointing upward. Up at the huge Brain that crackled and spat electrically overhead. ‘There was a man,’ she screamed, ‘I saw him. I saw him. He was in there.’ Maxwell put his career on the line again. He grabbed the girl, held her to him, cradling the shaking head, feeling the tears splash onto his hands as he hugged her. He looked up. The giant Brain showed their reflection, distorted, swaying together. The crowds moved away from them, like the slithering rats in the Phenakistoscope, embarrassed at the silly, hysterical girl and her over-protective dad.
For a moment, Maxwell and his little girl saw the same thing. They saw Alice Goode in the reflection of the Brain, for all the world as if she was really there. And they saw a man gripping her arm, pulling her backwards to an exit. An exit with no alarm. An exit with a door already ajar. Maxwell tried to focus on the blurred face of Alice’s abductor, on the flashing silver of the knife. Then he turned to find Dave Freeman. But Dave Freeman had gone.
He calmed Tamsin Gregory down. He took her to Anthea and the others in the gift shop, which was all T-shirts and pencil sharpeners and kaleidoscopes. ‘Stay here,’ he told them all. ‘Nobody goes home.’
‘Mr Maxwell …’ Ronnie was at his elbow, fists clenched. Ready.
‘No, Ronnie,’ Mad Max said, ‘you stay here. This time, huh? This time you stay.’
And the boy nodded. And the man in him understood.
Maxwell leapt the steel turnstile back into the Museum. He hurtled along the passage and down the stairs, his reflection looming and vanishing again in the fish-eye reflection of the Brain, as Alice Goode’s had loomed and vanished all those weeks before. He was out of the side entrance where the sunlight hurt his eyes. The street lay empty to right and left. He ran forward, past the parked cars, the meandering knots of tourists, the posed Japanese group, one camera taking a photograph of half a dozen others. He rounded the corner and was there. In the new coach park. Face to face with the sleek red and white luxury vehicle, the fifty-three-seater ten-tonner that had carried Alice Goode to her death.
Dave Freeman was sitting on the steps, the door slid back, the keys in his hand. Maxwell walked towards him, carefully, slowly.
‘How did you know?’ the driver asked.
‘I didn’t,’ Maxwell said, ‘not until you ran.’
‘That kid,’ he was staring at the ground. ‘She couldn’t have seen me.’
‘She did, Mr Freeman,’ Maxwell assured him. ‘It’s a funny thing, the mind. And in there, of all places, it takes over. The mind is a blank wall, a screen. Life throws images at it, shadows like the Zeotrope and it blends and blurs and twists. Then somebody puts the lights on and the image is gone for ever. That’s what happened to Tamsin. She got lost in the magic in there. All those images. All those shadows. You threatening Alice with a knife and taking her out, all of it seen in the fish-eye lens of the Brain – it was just one more image. One more piece of make-believe. It wasn’t real. None of it. But it was, Mr Freeman, wasn’t it?’
The driver buried his face in his hands. When he looked up at Maxwell, his cheeks were wet with tears. ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ he said, softly. ‘She was so … I’d seen her on the films. I knew what she was like under the clothes. Under that front. Pretending to be a teacher!’ He spat contemptuously. ‘I knew better. On the way into the Museum I asked her. Told her what I’d seen. Asked her if she was up for it. What she charged. You should have heard her language. I’ve got girls myself, Mr Maxwell. I wasn’t having that. Nobody talks to me like that. So I stayed with her, only behind, of course, so nobody from the school knew I was there, watching, waiting. I knew the Museum, of course. I knew my way around. But there were too many people. Always too many people. The Brain was my last chance. She’d have been in the gift shop next and I’d have no chance then. So I grabbed her, told her I’d cut her if she struggled or made a fuss and brought her out here.’
‘You killed her here?’ Maxwell frowned. ‘In broad daylight?’
Freeman stood up slowly. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, and climbed to the aisle of the coach. Maxwell followed carefully, keeping his distance. ‘See, you’re higher than the ground by a long way,’ the driver said. ‘Can’t be seen from the road. I closed the door and strangled her.’
‘With what?’ Maxwell had to know.
‘A fan belt,’ Freeman said. ‘I was carrying a spare in my pocket. It didn’t take long.’
‘So,’ Maxwell was trying to stay calm, trying to stay rational in talking to this madman, ‘her body was here. On one of those seats. But you were due to pick up the party shortly. What did you do with her?’
Freeman smiled, tapping the side of his nose, suddenly proud of his prowess, smug in his skill. ‘Black bags,’ he said, ‘all coach drivers carry them for the tons of rubbish your little out-of-control bastards leave on our coaches. I wrapped her up in them. It only took three, curled up as she was. She was still soft of course at that stage. I popped her in the boot. There’s a lot of storage capacity under these seats.’
Maxwell gripped one of those now. ‘Are you telling me that Alice was under here when you drove my kids back?’
‘Yeah,’ Freeman shrugged, ‘what of it? The rest of it was easy. I doubled round to the front entrance and found the party again. I felt sorry for that other teacher, mind. Chasing her own arse, she was.’
‘Why did you dump Alice’s body at the Devil’s Ladle?’
‘I got my own lock-up, see.’ Freeman was smirking now, enjoying the memory. ‘I kept Alice for a while. You know, loving her, stroking her … but she’d start to smell soon. I had to lose her. Then I had a brainwave. Those smug, self-satisfied wankers at the film club. You know, they’d got the nerve to turn me down. And why? ’Cos I ain’t a bleedin’ banker or doctor or ty-fucking-coon, that’s why. That toffee-nosed git McSween told me ’cos I was just a coach driver, he couldn’t allow it. I told him straight … him and that arsehole friend of his, that Piers Stewart. I told him I wasn’t having any of that. Nobody talks to me like that. That I’d sort ’em.’
‘But you sorted yourself, Mr Freeman, didn’t you?’ Maxwell said. ‘So anxious were you to finger the film club, you pointed the finger squarely at yourself
‘No other way.’ Freeman shook his head. ‘I had to nobble Stewart and I had to get you onto him.’
‘So you left Alice on Stewart’s doorstep?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Because they wouldn’t let you play with them?’ The contempt was thick in Maxwell’s throat as he watched Freeman turn self-righteous.
‘Then it dawned on me. When I realized that Parsons kid had gone missing. What a perfect opportunity. Just before we left the Museum, I half-inched his bag from the cloakroom, pretending to be looking for Alice. In the fullness of time I stashed Alice’s clothes in it. ’Cos the problem was that old bag Jean Hagger. That lesbian.’
‘You knew her?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Oh yeah,’ Freeman was walking back towards the door now, edging Maxwell in front of him. ‘Yeah, I knew her. She’d run a trip to Chessington last year, said I was interfering with her kids. I mean, the cheek of the cow! I’ve got girls myself. Happily married man, me. She put in a complaint to Hamilton’s, trying to get me the bleeding sack. Then, when I was having it out with that ponce McSween, who would walk in, effing and blinding, but her. She was whingeing on about her Alice this and her Alice that. Well, I wasn’t having any of that. I rang her at the school, told her I had news of Alice. She came like a shot, of course, tongue hanging out. I took my knife. I took my belt, but when I’d got her in the living room I see this lump of stone on the hearth.’
‘A Jurassic ammonite.’ Maxwell couldn’t help correcting him.
‘Yeah, whatever.’ Freeman waved his hands. ‘So I stove in her head. Christ, it was messy. Had to clean myself up good and proper before I left. Then I left the kid’s bag there, just to point the filth in the wrong direction, you know?’
‘Yes,’ Maxwell nodded, ‘I know’
‘Now, Mr Maxwell,’ Freeman sighed, ‘it’s been fun having this little chat, but I really have to go now’
‘Go?’ Maxwell looked at the man, astonished. ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Mr Freeman. Especially now we’ve had this little chat.’
Freeman gurgled with laughter. Though Maxwell didn’t know it, it was the man’s death rattle. He should have been ready for the boot in the pit of his stomach as he heard the hydraulic whoosh of the opening door. He should have half expected the coach to spin in his vision and to feel the fan belt hook under his chin and slice into his throat. And he certainly should have anticipated the sickening thud against his back as he toppled forward down the steps to roll clear of the coach.
‘Thank you for travelling Hamilton’s,’ he heard Freeman shout above the throaty rattle of the engine. Then, with lights flashing, Dave Freeman drove through the coach park, bouncing off other vehicles as he went, his wipers lashing non-existent rain.
And Mad Max should certainly have been prepared for the thud and crash as the fifty-three-seater ten-tonner ploughed into the wall of the Museum of the Moving Image, leaving its driver’s shattered body twisted like a broken doll in the red of the brick dust and the silver of the crystal glass.
Peter Maxwell sat that night in front of the blank television screen. He’d given his story to the police. He’d refused to give it, or any part of it, to the media and eventually, past midnight, even the most tenacious paparazzi had gone home.
There was a ring at his doorbell. He put down the glass of Southern Comfort. He padded down the stairs. In the frosted glass of his front door he saw the face of Jacquie Carpenter, Woman Policeman.
‘Do you believe in happy endings?’ she asked him.
‘Is the Pope Polish?’ Maxwell countered, and motioned her inside.
‘Do you feel like talking?’ she asked when he’d closed the door.
‘I’m Mad Max,’ he told her softly, ‘I always feel like talking.’ And he followed her upstairs.
‘Dorothy Parsons came to see us today’ she said, ‘or rather, to see the DCI.’
He waved her to his sofa. ‘Drink?’
She shook her head and spread her coat as she flopped.
‘She told us a rather interesting story.’
‘Oh?’ He was trying to stay awake, trying to come to terms with his day. Just another routine ‘jolly’ for Leighford High.
‘Her husband, Ron. He’s a jobbing builder.’
‘Well, I never …’ Maxwell rescued his drink.
‘In March, two years ago, he was working on a travel agent’s in Raines Park. One of their part-time operatives was a student called …’
‘Carly Drinkwater!’ Maxwell was on the edge of his seat now, the exhaustion gone in an instant from his face.
‘Correct.’ Jacquie was smiling. ‘In July of last year, he was doing some repairs to an estate agent’s in Streatham …’
‘… where Georgianna Morris worked,’ Maxwell was smiling at her.
‘One of the witnesses who saw Georgianna running in the park remembers seeing a light-coloured van, possibly grey, possibly beige. Ron Parsons drives a beige van.’
‘Can you prove any of this?’ Maxwell asked.
‘He’s confessed,’ Jacquie said. ‘Forensics will be able to tie him in with Carly at least. DNA’s a bitch to buck. We’ve got him bang to rights.’
‘And I thought it was Dave Freeman,’ Maxwell said, ‘I was just about to broach the subject when he kicked me off his coach.’
‘Happy endings,’ smiled Jacquie.
‘Indeed,’ Maxwell said. ‘Now, how about that drink?’
‘Better not,’ she said, ‘not when I’m on duty.’
Realization dawned on Peter Maxwell. This was the day. The day of Jacquie’s internal enquiry. He saw the tears in her eyes, the quiver of her lips and he hugged her and he kissed her.
‘Jacquie,’ he said, ‘I’m so pleased. Pleased for you, I mean.’
She nodded through the tears. ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘if we aren’t going to have that steamy sex scene, I’d better go.’
He nodded and saw her out.
‘Will we meet again, do you think?’ he called after her, trying not to sound too much like Vera Lynn.
She turned at the end of his garden path, ‘I’d be prepared to bet on it,’ she said.
And Peter Maxwell ran back up his stairs three at a time.
‘Count,’ he said, snatching the miffed animal up in his hands. ‘It’s not often I’m sufficiently overcome to clasp you to my bosom, so, be grateful. Tell you what, let’s have a spot of telly, shall we?’
He fumbled for the remote, Metternich sliding out from under his arm as he hit the settee, grateful to assert his independence again. BBC1 flashed into focus and the logo twirled. ‘And now,’ said a disembodied voice, ‘in a change to our advertised programme, BBC1 presents Alfred Hitchcock’s classic,
Psycho
.’
Cut to blackness.