Free Maxwell’s Movie by M. J. Trow Page A

sisters.’
    ‘They could. And who do you suppose their third sister is?’
    He blinked at her. Jacquie would have to help him. ‘OK, so they’ve both got chestnut hair and their eyes are grey. You can’t tell that from these photos. Fuller lips, perhaps …’
    ‘Alice Goode,’ he said, the penny dropping with a jarring clang.
    ‘Alice Goode,’ she nodded.
    He grabbed her arm. ‘Jacquie, that’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. What a detective!’
    ‘Yeah,’ she grinned, ‘tell me about it.’
    ‘So,’ his mind was racing now, ‘what have we got? Three women what?’ and he found himself dangling in mid-hypothesis, already twirling over an abyss that threw his unanswered questions back, like echoes in the night.
    ‘Slow down,’ she said, ‘you’re running before you can walk. Georgianna Morris was abducted from a cinema in Notting Hill. She’s alive.’
    ‘Alive?’
    ‘But traumatized.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘She was found running in her underwear in a local park. She’d been slashed across the face and forearms, probably with a bread-knife.’
    ‘Sexual assault?’
    ‘Attempted. We think the bastard was disturbed.’
    ‘In all sorts of ways,’ Maxwell agreed.
    ‘Georgianna couldn’t help apparently. The Met tried everything. We’ve got special officers trained in rape cases, shrinks who aren’t associated with the police directly. They even tried the girl’s priest – she was Catholic. Nothing. She couldn’t remember anything. Not even the film she’d been to see.’
    ‘Unsolved,’ Maxwell said, gazing at Georgianna Morris through the ambered distortion of his glass.
    ‘Unsolved.’ She sat back.
    ‘Even so,’ Maxwell wasn’t one to be defeated so easily, ‘you’re saying there’s a pattern here. Two girls, presumably abducted from cinemas. A third – Alice Goode – from the Museum of the Moving Image. It all fits.’
    ‘Nothing fits!’ she slammed her file shut. ‘Not in the eyes of my lords and masters, anyway’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘When you’d gone the other night, I did a bit of thinking. You were talking about Alice Goode and I was wrapped up in Ronnie Parsons. So I stood back from it all, saw it from another point of view. I did a bit of digging in the computer. Routine stuff, but I accessed these cases. I thought, what if Alice’s disappearance wasn’t the first one? Well, there was nothing else from the Museum, but I found these two from cinemas.’
    ‘Look … er … this isn’t some elaborate ploy, is it? I mean, I’m not in the frame, am I?’
    ‘You were off sick on the day in question,’ she told him. ‘Flu. You had a temperature of 102.’
    ‘Yes,’ he said, slightly alarmed, ‘yes, I was. How …?’
    ‘How did we know?’ she smiled. ‘It’s our business to know. We talked to Deirdre Lessing who’d talked to Sylvia Matthews. And please don’t think any the less of them. Casual conversations have taken men to the gallows before now. How do you know which university a kid should apply to? Or why the Russian Revolution started?’
    ‘Sheer bloody brilliance, I suppose,’ he beamed modestly. ‘When I gave all this to the Chief Inspector, however, he wasn’t impressed.
    ‘Henry Hall?’ Maxwell knew the man. ‘Well, no, he wouldn’t be.’ Hall was a copper of the new school, University educated, bookish, careful. He and Peter Maxwell instinctively gave each other a wide berth.
    ‘Why, he asked, has our man changed his MO? Carly was strangled. If Georgianna hadn’t got lucky, she’d probably have been stabbed to death. And why switch to the Museum? Cinemas are so much easier. Dark, secret places with almost no security.’ She sighed. ‘Hall didn’t buy it.’
    ‘Well, I’m going to,’ Maxwell said.
    She looked at him. ‘Good,’ she said.
    ‘Good?’ he repeated. ‘Woman Policeman Carpenter, do I detect a little trappette here?’
    ‘Max,’ she leaned towards him, ‘I don’t know if Alice Goode is alive or dead, but I didn’t sleep