Maxwell's Mask Read Online Free PDF Page B

Inspector.’
    Â 
    Peter Maxwell went to the Arquebus Theatre that night. He saddled his bike, White Surrey, named for the charger of England’s most maligned king, Richard III (Henry VII did it, by the way), and pedalled through the mizzle over the Flyover and down the maze of streets that led to the Quay.
    The building itself still retained an exterior that spoke of grander days, when Leighford had been a minor port on the south coast and sugar and rum and slaves and molasses had come creaking in under full sail with the smell of hemp and tar. The old pulley was still there, high above its column of doors on four storeys and the forecourt where timber was piled and manifests checked now housed the ghastly new glass entranceway.
    Maxwell remembered the Arquebus as a row of warehouses, derelict, rat-infested, open to the weather and the winos. In a glass case by the front door, a rather long-in-the-tooth Matilda Goodacre smiled at him, wearing a ludicrous wimple à la theredoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine. Other faces, the grave old plodders and gay young friskers of Leighford’s am dram community, he didn’t know. He tethered White Surrey to some railings with his trusty padlock – this was downtown Leighford of a Monday night, after all, and you couldn’t be too careful. Then he pushed the glass door and he was in, his damp feet on plush red carpet in the refurbished atrium. Dim lights revealed the ticket office and the stairs curving to left and right. As he read the notices, he heard the rain start with a vengeance, bouncing on the glass roof of the portico and running like tears down the high windows.
    â€˜Hello. Oh, it’s cats and dogs out there!’ The wrinkled little woman in the Fifties pac-a-mac shook her tousled hair in the doorway. ‘You are?’
    â€˜A little drier than you, it seems. Luckily, it was fine when I arrived. I’m Peter Maxwell.’ He held out a hand.
    She took it in the bird-like, fragile way that women do, limp and not quite real. ‘Maxwell. Maxwell. Now, I know that name. Ring of Bright Water chappie. Any relation?’
    â€˜Er…I don’t think so.’
    â€˜Probably just as well. That whole episode put the cause of wildlife back by a generation, I always thought. I’m Martita Winchcombe, the Arquebus Treasurer. Are you the new lighting man?’
    â€˜No, I’m afraid not. I’m with Leighford High.’
    â€˜Oh.’ The Treasurer’s face fell a little. ‘Can I be frank, Mr Maxwell?’ The old girl wrestled to close her umbrella.
    â€˜Please,’ the Head of Sixth Form suggested. A woman with dentures as ill fitting as hers surely had the right to be anybody she wanted to be.
    â€˜Well, children nowadays are a pretty unruly bunch, aren’t they? I mean, I’m sure they mean well, but their manners…’
    â€˜Ah, sign of the times, I fear, Ms Winchcombe.’
    â€˜Miss,’ she corrected him tartly. ‘Miss Winchcombe.’
    Yes; Maxwell thought it might be.
    â€˜And I have to say that teacher person, what’s her name? Mrs Carbuncle?’
    â€˜Carmichael.’
    â€˜Yes, I knew it was some sort of car. Heart’s not in it. Too self-absorbed if you catch my drift.’
    â€˜You mean pregnant?’
    Miss Winchcombe looked up at the man. The bow tie, the tweed jacket. Seemed acceptable enough. And that, surely, was the scarf of one of the more reputable universities around his neck? Still, you heard such stories about teachers these days. ‘That’s not a word we bandied about in my youth,’ she told him crisply.
    â€˜Quite,’ Maxwell nodded, straight-faced. How old was this woman? ‘Well, Mrs Carmichael has had to bow out, as it were, from this production.’
    â€˜Oh, so you’re her replacement?’ She peered athim more closely. ‘I thought there was another girl I met. Oh well…I suppose you’ll do. Come on