Murder of a Movie Star

by L. B. Hathaway

  ‘I know a little. My father dabbled in painting and taught me what he knew. He loved Singer Sargent’s work: said he captured the souls of people. That’s you and Silvia, right? When you knew what made her happy, and what made her sad. And you must feel something for Silvia to keep that painting hanging up there. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  Pamela smiled, just a tiny wrinkling at one corner of the mouth. ‘Quite correct, Miss Parker. You’re good. They were happier times. Much happier times.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Everything.’ She pursed her scarlet lips. ‘It would take too long to tell you.’

  ‘Try. Please. I’m frightfully sorry but you never know what’s important in my line of work.’

  Pamela stared at Posie in a slightly disbelieving way. She shrugged eventually. ‘Somehow, Miss Parker, you’re the type of girl to whom one wants to tell the truth. Goodness knows, I have few enough people to tell it to nowadays. Or who want to hear.’

  Pamela Hanro fetched more tea, and Posie got out her notebook and listened.

  She heard how the Hanro parents had been famous bohemians, part of the London set; they had been friends with William Morris and early patrons of his work. They had also been extraordinarily wealthy, the money flowing from the mother’s side. Mr and Mrs Hanro had known every famous artist in Europe.

  Posie heard how Pamela and Silvia had been raised as free spirits in a huge house with many servants just off Hyde Park. Silvia and Pamela had been two little girls with the world at their feet.

  ‘My parents were truly amazing. They took us everywhere on their travels. They believed their family was all-important, and worth defending: they never gave up on us, ever. I was wild in my pursuit of what I thought was right, and they backed me all the way. Getting me out of messes time after time.’

  ‘You mean when you were a suffragette?’

  Pamela nodded, her mouth a tight, grim line. ‘That’s right. If you’ve spoken to Scotland Yard I expect they’ve mentioned the rumours about me starting the fire at Kew Gardens. Well? Don’t tell me that you disapprove?’

  ‘Not at all. My best friend Dolly was a suffragette. Got locked up with the best of them several times over. I think you two might get on very well, actually.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Pamela shrugged carelessly as if she had a surfeit of friends and didn’t need one more. ‘Anyhow, I was lucky. My parents were right behind me, pulling me out of hairy situations: paying for lawyers and forking out vast sums by way of bail fees to keep me this side of the law.’

  ‘What about your sister, was she a suffragette too?’

  Pamela laughed bitterly. ‘No. Absolutely not. She had no interest in women’s rights; probably felt she had no need of them; life was good enough already. You see, my elder sister Silvia was always beautiful, startlingly so, and she touched whatever she happened to do with magic: ballet, gymnastics, singing. By the time I was involved with the suffragettes she’d been bitten badly by the cinema bug. It was all she could think about: becoming a movie star. She persuaded my parents to get her an acting coach, and she was hanging around with every famous movie person she could. She met her first boyfriend at Flicker Alley before the war and that was that.’

  ‘Flicker Alley?’

  ‘Golly, you really don’t know much about the film industry, do you?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘I like you all the better for it, Miss Parker. Just so you know, Flicker Alley is Cecil Court, just by Leicester Square, where all the aspiring actors and beauties of the day hung around, and still hang around, hoping to be noticed. It’s where all the famous directors go and eat lunch. Quite a place.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Indulge me. Is my sister still with her original boyfriend? The man who was injured in the war, I mean, not Robbie Fontaine.’

  There was a note of imploring curiosity in Pamela’s eyes. ‘It’s okay. I do realise it’s difficult. You’ve probably been sworn to secrecy. Are they together unofficially, I mean.’

  Posie looked over at the Singer Sargent painting and back at the grown-up Pamela. She nodded.

  ‘Yes. Yes, they are together. You know Tom?’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘The injured boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Tom… Sorry. I knew him. At the time. I knew several of my sister’s movie star crowd quite well, but I stopped seeing them when Silvia and I cut off contact. But that poor man, oh my goodness…’

  Pamela looked shaken for a moment. She whispered, almost to herself:

  ‘It was summer 1917. I was still talking to Silvia a bit when it happened, although she only spoke of it to me once. She told me he had survived, but with life-changing injuries. Silvia was traumatised: didn’t think she could visit him in the hospital. But who knows if she did or not? I haven’t seen him, of course, but it all sounded horrendous. What a huge tragedy for him, those injuries…’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Sorry, I digress. So Silvia and I began to see less of each other as she ran with her acting crowd and I had my own, more political chums. We’d always been very different, even as little girls. And then of course the war came along, and we saw even less of each other. I was helping out here in London with clothes for soldiers, and my sister was helping make movies with Brian Langley for showing to the troops. She got her lucky break then, as it happened. Became a cinema sweetheart. It was around about 1917. Of course, she was nothing like as famous as she is now, but it was a start.’

  ‘Your parents must have been very proud.’

  ‘They never lived to see her become really famous, I’m afraid.’

  Pamela looked away quickly. She swallowed as if she had a golf ball stuck in her throat.

  ‘My parents left for Vienna in early 1918, to visit some artist friends of theirs who were having a special exhibition. They caught the round of Spanish flu which was sweeping the city on just their second day there. By the third day they were both dead, as were most of their artist friends. It was very quick. We weren’t even allowed for their bodies to be brought back home to London, for risk of the infection spreading, you see.’

  Posie had stopped writing in her pad. She looked up, appalled.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  Pamela shrugged. ‘And that was the end of the fairy-tale, I am afraid. I saw my sister last at my parents’ memorial service. Five years ago.’

  ‘But why the estrangement?’ Posie picked up her notepad again. ‘Surely their deaths should have brought you closer. Not pushed you further apart?’

  That mocking bark of laughter came again:

  ‘Miss Parker, my elder sister really is a fine actress, and a beauty, and a fine woman too. The thing is, she let me down, twice, in the same year, in 1918. And I can’t forgive her for it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The first time she let me down was over money, of course. You must be sharp as a tack; I’m sure you’ve wondered why it is that I’m living here, raising a child above a chip shop, sharing a bathroom with a drearily annoying snoop who serves tea to the drivers in the Kensington Bus Depot at the crack of dawn?’

  ‘Well, it’s not my place to wonder anything, but…’

  ‘The answer is that this is all I can afford in a good area. I take work as a seamstress. I do piecework for Nathan’s, the costumiers, when they need an extra pair of hands: theatre costumes, like that old-fashioned wedding dress over there; it’s for a performance at the Royal Opera House in a couple of weeks. And I work for private ladies, too. I’ve been here since 1918. I need a place which is handy for the rich women who live in this area. It’s also good for Hilda to be so central. She’s well-catered for.’

  ‘But how come…’

  ‘I’ve fallen so low? Well, my parents had money, but it wasn’t really theirs as such. It was all tied up in a big family trust, on my mother’s side. You know about such things?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Posie knew all about trusts: how Alaric’s family had been riven apart by
the inequalities which had followed the portioning off of family money into trusts, with payments being made to some family members and not to others.

  ‘In the absence of a male heir, this particular trust followed the first-born female’s line. After my mother’s death, the trust income went to Silvia. The trustees who run the trust were two male cousins of my mother’s – awful old stick-in-the-muds – who were only too delighted that their beautiful and now-famous little cousin was going to benefit in this way. She played up to it, of course. Acted very grateful.’

  ‘And you? What did you get?’

  ‘From the trust? Nothing. There was a provision in the trust that if everybody agreed, then a portion of the trust income could be paid out to another family member; someone such as myself. But, despite my writing to all of them in late 1918 what I was ashamed to call “begging letters”, in which I requested an income from the trust, however small, I got nothing.’

  Pamela frowned at the memory. ‘Worse than nothing, really, as I lost my home during the process. The Hyde Park house of my parents was made over to Silvia, who promptly ordered that I leave. She emptied it and announced that it was to be rented out for yet more income. Most of my parents’ paintings were auctioned off, as well as their more expensive belongings. All of the money made from the sales was tipped back into the Trust Fund.’

  ‘Golly.’

  Pamela shook her head suddenly, at pains to get things right.

  ‘Actually, that’s not strictly true. I got a legal letter saying that after much consideration, the trustees and Silvia had decided not to pay anything to me as I had a criminal record and had brought shame upon the family, and that such actions shouldn’t be rewarded. They did, however, invite me to take my pick of items, up to a maximum of ten things, from the house before everything was sold. You can pretty much see what I took all around you: the furniture, the crockery, the gramophone, the Singer-Sargent painting. I must confess I was surprised to see it still there, on the wall in the old living room. I had thought Silvia would have taken it, as she had first dibs on everything. But the painting – and what it represented – obviously wasn’t important to her.’

  ‘And since?’

  ‘Since then I’ve lived by my wits alone, and my sewing skills, which are really pretty good, even if I do say so myself. But I’m not registered as such. I can’t be an official seamstress, working in-house: no big fashion house would have me work for them, probably not even piecework stuff, because of my criminal record.’

  You haven’t really asked. And you’re too proud to beg again, thought Posie sadly.

  ‘So I moved here, which was cheap. And I’ve never bothered to tell my sister where I live, although she could get in touch with me if she really wanted, through the family lawyers, Carver & Nicholas, in the city.’

  Posie nodded. ‘I know them. Tell me, does Silvia still get the trust money?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware. And as far as I understand, she’d get even more, the capital itself, hundreds of thousands actually, if she married. But of course that won’t happen.’

  ‘Oh? Why not?’

  ‘Remember, Silvia is first and foremost a movie star. That’s not something she’s going to give up in a hurry, is it? Not while she’s still beautiful and able to take star roles.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘She can’t marry. The film industry, like so many other stupid professions, has a marriage bar in place for women: once you’re married, that’s it. No more job. And what if the story leaked that she had married Tom and that the whole sorry story with Robbie Fontaine was revealed to be the fiction that it really is? It would be a disaster for her. And for Brian Langley. Nope. She wouldn’t do it; couldn’t risk it.’

  Pamela sighed. ‘So their lives are just suspended.’

  ‘I see. I wondered why Tom and Silvia hadn’t married.’

  ‘Now you know.’

  Posie stared at her notepad, at her scribbles there.

  ‘Do you know what happens to the trust money if Silvia were to die now?’

  Pamela shrugged. ‘I don’t, I’m afraid. I think it either goes to me, or to one of those awful male cousins who act as trustees.’

  Pamela got up and put the needle back on the record again, and the jangly notes and false-jolly voices of children’s music filled the room.

  ‘You mentioned two things your sister had let you down about. What was the second thing?’

  Pamela’s face darkened and the initial anger Posie had seen at the start of their meeting returned. Then the woman drew herself up straight in her chair, almost haughtily, and she clammed up as tightly as an oyster.

  ‘I’m very much afraid that I can’t mention it. No offence, Miss Parker, but I swore I would never speak of it. It doesn’t touch on anything you are looking into, believe me. It shouldn’t change your opinion of Silvia, either. Most people who meet her believe her to be a really first-class professional. And they’re right. Our disagreement was quite personal.’

  Something in Pamela’s voice made Posie look at her curiously, but then she nodded. She was disappointed, but she understood; Pamela had been more than forthcoming on many other matters.

  Posie realised that Pamela Hanro was one of life’s survivors, and that she would always have found a way of getting by, with or without her sister’s help and with or without handouts from an old Trust Fund. Money hadn’t been the pivotal thing in this second, personal row.

  And although Pamela Hanro hadn’t used the word ‘hate’ or ‘hatred’ when talking about her sister, the word, unspoken, bubbled beneath the surface of everything she said. Posie saw very clearly that whatever the second thing Silvia had done in 1918 to let her sister down was unforgivable indeed.

  But was it anything to do with the death threats?

  She glanced down at her list of suspects.

  ‘Could you help me, Pamela? I’m looking into the motives and backgrounds of the various people who might have sent the death threats. You said you used to know her film crowd: do you think Brian Langley, or Tom, or Robbie Fontaine would want your sister dead? Do you know of any reason in their histories which I might not have come across yet?’

  Pamela Hanro paused for a few seconds, her mind running backwards through the past, dredging it for memories.

  ‘I’ll tell you this for nothing: Brian Langley is like a sharp pain in the behind, but he’s not a murderer. In fact, he’s one of the most reliable and trustworthy people you will ever meet, although he hides it well. He’d do anything for those close to him, and Silvia, for all that she doesn’t deserve it, is close to him.’ She sniffed. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘You knew him well?’ Posie asked this innocently, thinking of the mysterious green-penned letter she had found on the Producer’s desk from the woman sitting just opposite her now. Obviously quite a recent letter.

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, we don’t have anything to do with each other now, of course. But I met him properly time and again in the early days, the Flicker Alley days.’

  ‘And Tom?’

  ‘If I were you I’d strike him off that list. He adored my sister. He’d have no reason to kill her, either. He’s wealthy, too: he made a stack of money before the war. For all his injuries now.’

  ‘And Robbie?’

  ‘That cocaine head? He spends his life either snorting the white-stuff or else looking for his next hit. And that’s all between learning his lines and being the Eighth Wonder. Haven’t you seen the magazines? I’d hardly imagine he has time to think about killing my sister, let alone composing letters about it, or organising severed fingers. No way.’

  Posie blinked stupidly.

  She had been called innocent by Chief Inspector Lovelace when it came to drugs on several occasions before, and she still didn’t register their presence quickly enough now. So much made sense now about Robbie Fontaine: the general feeling that everything to do with the star seemed wrong: his lack of attention; his wild eyes; his shiftiness. Perhaps the drug
s explained all of this, or was there something else?

  There was little else holding Posie in that peculiarly-furnished room, and she started to rise and gather her things. Pamela Hanro handed her the House of Harlow yellow linen jacket, fingering the stuff and admiring the seam-work as she did so.

  ‘That’s beautiful. But you know that, of course.’

  ‘Thank you. And this meeting has been really helpful, thank you for your time.’

  Posie had been peculiarly touched by Pamela Hanro in a way she had not expected, and she also felt she had been caught a little off-kilter: she had liked the girl.

  But Posie had to be careful: it didn’t mean the girl wasn’t a suspect.

  And with the half-made revelations of hatred towards Silvia hanging tentatively in the air, and that tell-tale bottle of green ink sitting on the shelf, and the possibility of hundreds of thousands of pounds from a trust coming Pamela’s way with her sister dead, Posie found herself asking the unavoidable question:

  ‘Forgive me, but you must realise you are on my list of suspects?’

  There was an unexpected wry grin. ‘Naturally. I hoped I would be. I count it as an honour.’

  ‘And if anything happens to your sister tomorrow, I’m going to be obliged to hand over your name to the police.’

  ‘Oh, do. They know me of old.’ Pamela gave a rather fearful smile. ‘Have you got anything by way of evidence against me?’

  ‘No. Only that you use green ink.’ She pointed over at the bottle on the stash of paper. ‘Feeble, I know. But it happens to be the colour the death threats have been written in.’

  Pamela threw up her arms in mock horror.

  ‘So lock me up for it. Do you know why I use green ink? And why half the nation does, I expect? No? That’s because you don’t need to use it; you with your wonderful clothes and your snappy boyfriend. Green ink is the cheapest type you can buy at the stationer’s: it costs half the price of blue, and a tenth of the price of black. Cheap turns like me can only afford green ink.’

  Posie flushed red. It was true, she hadn’t known that.

  Posie paused at the door. She chewed her lip. ‘I can’t work you out, Miss Hanro. And that’s something I say very, very rarely. I don’t believe you would wish your sister dead, and you certainly don’t benefit by her death under her personal Will.’