Maxwell's Mask Read Online Free PDF

Queen. I remember her wailing in the High Street when we ratified the Maastricht Treaty. Fine sentiments, of course; just a little over the top. What happened?’
    â€˜Oh, carelessness, I suppose,’ Jacquie shrugged. ‘Jane said Goodacre had been working late on the scenery and a ladder had slipped. Fractured his skull.’ Jacquie looked up at him suddenly, struck by a thought. ‘ You’ll be careful out there, won’t you, Mr Maxwell?’
    He smiled. ‘Careful,’ he said, ‘is my middle name.’
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    â€˜It’s a little late for you, Henry,’ the man in the white coat said. He checked his watch. ‘Come to think of it, it’s a little late for me.’
    â€˜Sorry, Jim.’ DCI Henry Hall emerged in the pool of light that flooded the stainless-steel heart of the mortuary at Leighford General. In Morse or Midsomer Murders those places were always dark, mysterious, like the doings that were investigated in them. In reality, they were neon-stripped, chemical-coated , like slightly upmarket abattoirs. ‘I was just on my way home.’
    Jim Astley chuckled, the bow tie wobbling under the once-firm chin. ‘If you’re going to get all busier-than-thou on me, I’m out of here now. In the comparative stakes, pathologists’ hours versus policemen’s, I’m not sure which one of us would come up smelling of roses. I was off to the George. Time for a quick one?’
    Jim Astley didn’t offer to buy a round often. He had too many Porsches to run, his wife’s habit to control and probably Scottish blood in his veins a few generations back. So it hurt like hell for Henry Hall to have to pass it up. ‘Not tonight, I’m afraid. I was wondering if you’d made any progress with Gordon Goodacre.’
    Astley hauled off his coat at the end of another long day, throwing it vaguely at some hooks. ‘You know what they say,’ he said, ‘about miracles taking longer?’
    â€˜Sorry,’ Hall shrugged. He and Astley went backa few years. They’d come to know each other pretty well. Astley was a vain prig whose orifice housed the rising sun. Long years ago he’d opted for that branch of medicine where the patients don’t talk back. And in these litigious days, he was increasingly grateful for that. Hall was an unfathomable bastard, the consummate professional with no smiling muscles at all, a thinking machine in a grey three-piece who hid his hard eyes behind curiously opaque glasses. Jacquie Carpenter had never seen another pair like them. Hall could see out; no one could see in. What else was there to know?
    â€˜I can confirm my preliminary verdict.’ Astley hunted for his coat in the bowels of his office off the morgue, realising again what a slob his assistant Donald was. ‘The skull was fractured in two places, both occipital, by a blunt instrument, viz and to wit, a ladder. Death would have been virtually instantaneous. Routine one, this, Henry. Unless…’
    â€˜Unless?’
    Astley pushed the man gently aside so that he could close the door and lock it. ‘Unless your nose tells you something else.’
    â€˜Should it?’ Hall was as impassive as ever. He let other people do the sniffing around. The wait was usually worth it.
    â€˜It’s half past nine, Henry,’ Astley told him. ‘You’re a detective chief inspector and it’s Friday. A man died last night at about eleven o’clock in whathas all the appearances of a tragic, but not unusual, accident – shall I quote you the ladder death stats? So why the interest? Unless…’
    There was a slight twitch to one side of Henry Hall’s mouth. It would be the nearest he was likely to come to a smile, at least this side of Christmas. ‘You’re right, Jim,’ he said. ‘I don’t get out enough. Love to Marjorie.’
    â€˜And to Margaret. A bientôt , Chief