There was a raw wind rising the next morning as Peter Maxwell put sole to pedal. Sunday, bloody Sunday. The gentlefolk of Leighford paced their living rooms, desperate for the supermarkets to open or the papers to arrive. The younger generation, anybody under thirty, was still driving them home in the snoring department.
Mrs Troubridge would ordinarily have been up and pruning. She didn’t sleep so well these nights, so dawn clipping was no hardship for her. Today, however, one of those erratic, temperamental gusts might blow her over, so she stayed indoors and demolished an illicit bacon sandwich.
Metternich the cat watched Maxwell go, pedalling down Columbine like a demon, his cycle clips flashing in the early light, his scarf flying in the wind. Metternich the cat got back to his breakfast, founder member of the Pigeon Fanciers’ Club as he was. The trouble with that mad old bastard on the thing with wheels is that he didn’t appreciate the finer things in life.
The wind was against Maxwell – it wasn’t just his paranoia – it was an easterly and it took him a little longer than usual to reach the Arquebus. He recognised Ashley Wilkes’ car in the car park along the riverbank as the ducks quacked at him, annoyed by the wind ruffling their feathers. Then he was in at the front door, dashing up the stairs to the man’s office.
‘Mr Maxwell.’ The Theatre Manager was in his shirt sleeves, shredding cables with a Stanley knife and not a little skill. ‘You’re early. I thought we said five.’
‘We did,’ Maxwell told him. ‘But something’s come up.’
‘It has indeed,’ Wilkes responded. ‘I was about to ring you.’
‘Oh?’
‘There’s been a double booking.’
Maxwell frowned under the rim of his tweed. Ashley Wilkes seemed to be reading from his script. ‘There has?’
‘Yes, look.’ The Theatre Manager got up from the job in hand. ‘This is all a bit embarrassing, really. I mean, I know you guys have your technical rehearsal tonight – hence my wiring – but…well, I’ve had a request.’
Maxwell never did requests, but he was older school than Wilkes.
‘A Mrs Elliot has booked the stage this evening.’
‘For a séance,’ Maxwell nodded.
Wilkes blinked at him. ‘How the hell did you know that?’
‘“I’d be a fine soothsayer if I didn’t!”’ he snarled, bulging his eyes and throwing his arms in all directions; but his Zero Mostel on his way to the Forum was lost on Ashley Wilkes. ‘I’ve been invited too.’
‘You have?’
‘I came over to ask you to reschedule. I was wondering how we’d all squeeze in.’
‘Why you?’ Wilkes was suspicious.
‘Why here?’ Maxwell countered.
‘Gordon,’ the Theatre Manager explained. ‘Apparently this Rowena Sanders woman was going to use her place, but one of the invited is Matilda Goodacre and she insisted, since her late husband is potentially going to be there, that we hold it at the spot where Gordon died, i.e. down there.’
Both men looked at the stage, deserted now save for three differently sized incarnations of an altogether terrifying carnation, Audrey II, the man-eating plant. An apparition wandered across it, draped in cables.
‘Is that Benny?’ Maxwell peered through the gloom. ‘I need to have a word. Remind me of the time again, Ashley.’
‘Eight,’ Wilkes told him.
‘Do we have to bring anything?’
‘An open mind, apparently,’ Wilkes shrugged.
‘Well, that’s a bit of a tall order,’ Maxwell smiled.
‘You’ve said it,’ Wilkes agreed. ‘I’ve got to make a few calls. I couldn’t get through to all your kids yesterday – hence Benny this morning.’
‘No reply from Deena, I suppose?’ Maxwell checked.
Wilkes’ face fell. Needling from this man was something he didn’t need. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No reply.’
Maxwell beamed broadly and bounced down the plush-carpeted stairs to the ground floor and the auditorium. ‘Benny Barker as I live and breathe.’
‘Morning, Mr M.’ The lad peered round an outsize speaker system.
Maxwell rested his elbows on the stage and his chin on his folded arms. ‘Tell me, Benjamin: are you familiar with the Scottish play?’
Maxwell was a little late for lunch that day. Jacquie didn’t scold. After the night before, they’d lain awake for hours, each afraid for the other, neither saying so. Parents’ evenings weren’t normally quite so scary.
Her chicken was, as usual, splendid, but neither of them was much in the mood and they drove their veg around their plates for a while before giving up with a shake of the head and an inane grin.
‘There’s an all points out for Deena Harrison,’ Maxwell said as he pushed his plate away.
‘I know,’ she nodded. ‘The guys were talking about it last night.’
‘In view of that,’ he said, ‘and in view of what we discovered in Oxford, don’t you think you ought to have a chat with Henry?’
Her eyes widened. ‘I thought you told me I had to stay away.’
‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘And I hate to have to change my mind, but Henry needs to know what he’s up against.’
She nodded. ‘I think he’s got a pretty good idea already,’ she said. ‘But I’ll have a word.’ And she got up, fumbling for her keys and her coat.
‘Aren’t you going to call?’ he asked.
Jacquie looked at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Some conversations you’ve just got to have face to face.’
At the top of the stairs, she stopped and turned, waddling back to him and cradling his head as he sat there. ‘Max,’ she said. ‘This séance tonight. You will be careful, won’t you?’
He got up and held her, kissing her forehead. ‘We have room,’ he said, ‘for a few ghosts.’ It was pure Charlton Heston in El Cid, but Jacquie wasn’t listening to the characterisation. She just heard the word ghosts. And it frightened her.
They came in ones and twos under the overhanging span of the Flyover, solemn, silent; the only noise the clatter of their feet on the tarmac.
Then the hiss of tyres as the last one arrived – the uninvited. They acknowledged each other briefly in the portico, where the great and not so good of Leighford’s am dram over the years smiled down at them from tired posters. The crimson carpet was reflected in pools of light and the double doors to the auditorium were thrown wide open.
‘Welcome.’ Ashley Wilkes met them there and ushered them into the theatre itself. It struck cold here after a day’s emptiness, with that indefinable mustiness that theatres acquire when they have been warehouses and places of death, dramatic and real.
The Theatre Manager had followed Rowena Sanders’ instructions to the letter. Centre stage in a dim pool of blue light stood an oval table and around it eight high-backed chairs. One by one, they trooped down to the front, divesting themselves of their outdoor clothes. With a natural sense of leadership, Rowena Sanders began pointing to the chairs, arranging the arrivals for what was to come.
‘No.’ The imperious Matilda Goodacre was having none of it. ‘First, I want to know who these people are,’ she said, along with St Joan and Blanche du Bois and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
‘That is not the way,’ Rowena said, frowning. ‘The spirits know everybody.’
Matilda fixed the little woman with her terrible stare, the one that she usually used to curdle the milk. ‘Balderdash!’ she roared. ‘I am not a spirit and I am going no further with this nonsense until I know who I am sitting down with.’
‘You have already changed the venue,’ Fiona Elliot spat back at her. She was only an inch or so shorter than the Dame of the Arquebus and nearly as wide; in a cat fight, it could go either way. ‘Let that be enough.’
‘My husband died up there!’ Matilda snapped, gesturing with her right hand in a way that Maxwell had often seen Hitler do in the old newsreels. He hoped the woman had no plans to invade Poland.
‘And my aunt died in her home!’ Fiona bellowed back. ‘It is vital to the spirits to come together on neutral ground. You’ve probably ruined everything already.’
‘OK!’ A man’s voice brought the proceedings to an abrupt halt. They all turned to the tall man in the grey three-piece and the glasses. ‘Let’s do it. I am Detective Chief Inspector Henry Hall, currently conducting police inquiries here in Leighford. I have a wife and three sons. And I must confess I don’t quite know what I’m doing here.’
Fiona crossed to him. ‘Do you believe, Chief Inspector?’ she asked him levelly.
‘I’m a policeman, madam,’ he told her. ‘I believe what I can see and hear. I have to deal in reality.’
‘Please, Chief Inspector,’ Rowena said. ‘Take a seat on the far left, can you?’
Hall looked around the assembled group, not a little surprised to see the latest arrival, the one in the scarf and cycle clips. Everybody else he could put in the context of the case. But the uninvited? You never knew what he was doing there. But he was there, nonetheless.
‘Ashley Wilkes,’ the Theatre Manager announced. ‘I run this place. Acting background, currently divorced.’ He managed a weak smile.
‘Thank you, Mr Wilkes,’ Rowena was in the driving seat again. ‘Next to the Chief Inspector, if you please.’
‘Patrick Collinson.’ The crimson man reached the bottom of the steps. ‘Theatre Secretary. My day job – which I can’t afford to give up – accountancy.’ No one but Collinson tittered at the weak joke and he waited patiently to be placed next to Hall, on the opposite side from Wilkes.
‘Carole Bartlett.’ The widow of the late Artistic Director could hardly be more of a contrast to the widow of the late set painter. She was wearing a skimpy pair of jeans a couple of sizes too small and twenty years too young for her and a man’s shirt tied around her midriff, in the navel of which jewellery sparkled. ‘My husband was Daniel Bartlett, of anything but blessed memory. All this,’ she gestured at the table and chairs, ‘is just so much bullshit. It’s like those corny old movies where a bunch of misfits agree to spend the night in a creepy old house. But that’s usually for money. What’s in it for us, eh?’
‘The truth, perhaps.’ Fiona Elliot was walking up the steps. ‘Martita Winchcombe was my aunt. I have been a member of the West Bromwich spiritual circle for many years. And,’ she glanced at Rowena, ‘I know exactly where to sit.’ And she placed herself next to Collinson. That was actually the seat that Carole Bartlett had intended to take, and she flounced around the table to sit opposite Hall.
‘Not there!’ Rowena snapped, then gentler, ‘that’s reserved for someone else.’
‘You already know who I am.’ Matilda seemed to float onto the stage. ‘Life chairperson of the Arquebus Theatre Committee, widow of Gordon Goodacre, may his soul rest in peace.’
‘Amen,’ said Rowena softly. Then she was looking at the gaunt, angular woman who stood next in line. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ she said as if neither meeting, this one nor the last, had been much of a pleasure. ‘You know where to sit.’
‘I am Magda Lupescu,’ the woman said in her rich, dark voice. ‘Just think of me as an interested bystander.’
‘No,’ said Fiona. ‘That won’t do. You are more than that, Ms Lupescu. You are legend.’
‘Very well,’ the woman smiled. ‘I am legend. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’ and she sat with a strange silence next to Matilda.
‘Er…’ Rowena blinked at the man in the scarf and the cycle clips. ‘I don’t believe you’re on my list,’ she said.
‘Oh, now, don’t you believe it,’ Maxwell chuckled, pinging the clips into his pocket and draping his scarf over the seats. ‘I’m always on somebody’s list. I’m Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High. I’ve been teaching for a little over two centuries and have a passing acquaintance with History.’
‘No.’ Rowena stopped him on the steps. ‘I mean you weren’t invited.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Maxwell beamed at her. ‘I thought I’d explained.’ He looked directly at Ashley Wilkes, then Henry Hall. ‘Deena Harrison couldn’t make it. She asked me to come instead. Ah,’ he glanced down at the seat between Magda and Carole Bartlett, ‘the siege perilous.’ And he sat down, his back to the auditorium, uneasily aware that the late James Butler Hickok was sitting thus at a card table in downtown Deadwood when somebody blew out the back of his head. All right, so that was a saloon, but the analogy was close enough.
Rowena Sanders was still staring uneasily at Maxwell as she took the last seat, opposite Hall at the other end of the oval table, stage right. ‘I am Rowena Sanders,’ she said, ‘of the Leighford Spirit Circle. For those of you unused to such gatherings, I would like to explain what will happen. First, Mr Wilkes,’ she looked at him, ‘is the theatre locked?’
‘As per your instructions,’ he told her. ‘No one can disturb us.’
That was just as well, thought Maxwell; most of them around the table were disturbed enough already.
‘We are going on a journey,’ Rowena said, placing the tips of her fingers together, ‘to the Other Side. Who we will meet there, I have no idea. I would ask you all, whatever happens, to stay in your seats. On no account must you leave the stage. You may feel cold. You may…hear things. See them. Smell them even. But remember, we are seeking our loved ones and we are seeking the truth. As long as we cling to that, nothing can harm us. Now,’ she closed her eyes and tilted her face upwards, ‘let us place our hands palms down on the table so that our thumbs are touching and our little fingers are touching the little fingers of those next to us.’
She waited until everyone had shifted.
‘There,’ she smiled. ‘Can you feel the presence? The circle is complete. Breathe with me. Softly now. That’s it. In…out…’
Maxwell had been here before. He habitually had to remind Year Seven how to breathe. And the Advanced Classes, by the end of the summer term, included chewing gum too. As for the rest, very clever auto-suggestion. Tell someone they’ll feel cold, see things, hear them and smell them and some of them will. Fiona Elliot, for a start. It was the cleverest media April Fool’s joke he could remember – a cooking programme from the Seventies advertising Smell-o-Vision and inviting television viewers in their own homes to get down on those knees and smell the lowest fifty of the four hundred and five lines on the screen. Hmm, smell those onions!
‘Let us close our eyes,’ Rowena said.
Now, this was a challenge. It was one of the great games of childhood. Prayers of a sultry afternoon in infant school. ‘Hands together and eyes closed,’ the mantra dear to the heart of every teacher – another day done. And Peter Maxwell, long before he was Mad, used to keep one eye open, just in case… And in case of what, he never knew. So, here he sat, in a hushed and darkened theatre where at least one man had died, holding hands with perfect strangers and with one eye open. To his right, Magda Lupescu’s eyes were shut; so were Fiona Elliot’s and Matilda Goodacre’s. Wilkes’ eyelids were fluttering a little, as Maxwell expected. Rowena’s were closed and he couldn’t see Patrick Collinson. As for Henry Hall, behind those damned glasses, who knew?
A low, keening sound was coming from Rowena Sanders to Maxwell’s left. He kept one eye trained on her, watching for all the telltale signs of the Victorian fakers: the Gladstone bag, the fake wax hands, the yards of luminescent cheesecloth. All of it was mysteriously absent. Rowena began to sway, her hair swirling as if in slow motion around her face. Her eyes were still closed. There was a shuddering, a rattling of the table under their hands, as if someone was drilling deep under the stage.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Magda Lupescu’s unmistakable voice was saying. ‘Stay where you are.’
‘Who’s there?’ Rowena’s head was cocked on one side, listening intently, a frown on her pale, flat face.
‘Is it Aunt Martita?’ Maxwell saw Fiona Elliot leaning forward in her chair.
‘Gordon,’ Matilda Goodacre insisted. ‘If it’s anybody, it’ll be my Gordon.’
There was a rattling of the door far across the auditorium, and instinctively, everyone turned. Somebody screamed, although to his dying day, Maxwell never knew who. And they looked up at the low rake of the empty seats and the solitary figure approaching the stage.
‘Hello?’ a voice called. ‘Is anybody there?’
It was Dan Bartlett, come to visit.