Star Trap cp-3

by Simon Brett

  He cleared his throat to remonstrate, but fortunately Winifred Tuke anticipated him. ‘We can’t have this song.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Dickie Peck aggressively, pausing with a match held up to a new cigar.

  ‘Well, honestly, darling, I mean, I know we’re not doing She Stoops… straight, but this does make nonsense of it.’ It was daring and impressive and she should have left it at that. Instead she went on, getting more actressy and vague. ‘I mean, the whole thing about this play is that it’s Town life versus Country and we’re already losing that by playing Tony London, but if we start putting in bits from other shows then — ’

  ‘It isn’t a bit from another show,’ said Christopher Milton softly.

  ‘Not exactly, darling, but this song is absolutely based on that divine character you play in the telly, and I mean it just isn’t Tony Lumpkin… is it?’

  Her ginny voice faltered as he gazed at her coldly. The tableau was held in silence for a full minute. Then Christopher Milton turned to David Meldrum and said, unfairly, ‘Come on, we should be rehearsing if we’re to get this number in by tonight.’

  ‘And are we?’

  ‘Yes, we bloody are. For Christ’s sake assert your authority.’ Which was rich, coming from the person who had done most to undermine it.

  I Beg Yours? was in the show on the Tuesday night. It was under-rehearsed and a little untidy, but the audience loved it. Once again, Christopher Milton’s instinct seemed to have been vindicated. The reaction to the rest of the show was mixed, but they latched on to that number.

  Ruth was out front. Charles had given her a ticket, though after their silent parting in the morning he wasn’t certain that she’d come. However, there she was at the stage door after the show. When he saw her, he felt an awful sense of shame. It was not exactly that he was ashamed of her, but he felt wrong with her. He tried to hurry her away, but Michael Peyton called out to him just as they were leaving, ‘Hey, everyone’s going out for a curry. You want to come?’

  Charles started to refuse, but Ruth chipped in and said she hadn’t eaten and would love to go.

  He hated the meal, because he hated being thought of in conjunction with Ruth. He knew how cruel it was to resent someone’s company in that way and the knowledge only made him feel guiltier. Ruth, on the other hand, enjoyed herself. Surprisingly, Christopher Milton and Dickie Peck had joined the party, the star having decided to be one of the boys for a night, and he chatted up Ruth shamelessly. She luxuriated in this and Charles, embarrassed by her naive questions and provincial tastes, was annoyed to find that he felt jealous too. To be jealous about a woman whom he was embarrassed to be with, it all got far too complicated to cope with. He drank heavily and wished Frances were there.

  Ruth was drunk too and drove back unsteadily, chattering about Christopher Milton, to the grim inevitability of bed.

  There was a small paragraph in the Yorkshire Post on the Wednesday morning, which mentioned the mugging of Kevin McMahon. From the management’s point of view, it could have been worse. It didn’t make a big issue of the incident and, on the bonus side, it was a free advertisement for the show.

  The morning’s rehearsal schedule was more work on I Beg Yours? which didn’t involve Charles, so, hoping to shrug off the depression engendered by the scene with Ruth, he set off for the home of Kevin McMahon’s parents. Remembering a mention of Meanwood in their conversation in the pub, he easily found the right McMahons in the phone book and rang them to check that Kevin was out of the Infirmary.

  He travelled by bus. The pebble-dash semi had a two-tone doorbell.

  Mrs McMahon was small and sixtyish, with fuzzy white hair. She went on about how nice it was for one of Kevin’s friends from the play to come along and treated Charles like one of her son’s school friends. She also muttered regretfully about this terrible thing happening to Kevin on the night of his great triumph.

  ‘You enjoyed the show on Monday?’

  ‘Oh, we thought it was grand. That Christopher Milton, he’s lovely, isn’t he? I bet he’s one of those who’s just the same offstage as he is on. No side, if you know what I mean, isn’t that right?’

  Charles replied appropriately, making a mental note that Kevin was beyond the age for confiding in his parents. The writer was in his childhood bedroom and seemed to have grown younger to match his surroundings. There was a poster of the Leeds United team of 1961. Uneven piles of magazines and carefully dusted Airfix aeroplane models suggested that his mother had kept his room ‘just as he liked it’ for whenever he decided he needed the comfort of home. But this could hardly have been the return she had hoped for.

  Kevin’s eyes were nearly closed by puffy blue lids. Face criss-crossed with strips of plaster and open scratches. His right hand was bandaged in gauze and one finger stiffened with the square outline of a splint. No doubt the covers hid comparable injuries on the rest of his body.

  ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Not too bad, Charles. It’s good of you to come.’ He was subdued and formally polite, as if his surroundings brought back years of being taught good manners.

  ‘No problem. I wasn’t called for rehearsal this morning. They’re doing the new — something that doesn’t involve me.’

  Kevin showed no interest in what was happening to the show. There was a silence.

  ‘Was it very bad?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I was more or less anaesthetised by alcohol at the time it happened.’ Charles chuckled encouragingly. ‘And when I came round, the hangover was so bad I hardly noticed my injuries. It’s only today I’m really beginning to feel it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not too bad. Just very stiff all over. As if every bone in my body has been pulled out of its socket and reassembled by an enthusiastic amateur.’

  ‘Hmm. Do you mind talking about it?’

  ‘No, but there’s nothing to say.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was so honked I can’t remember anything. There was one bloke, that’s all I know. And no, I didn’t get a look at him. The police have asked me all this.’

  ‘You couldn’t even say whether he was old or young?’

  ‘No. Why do you ask that?’

  Charles decided honesty might elicit the best response. ‘I was wondering if it was Dickie Peck who got at you.’

  ‘Dickie Peck? Why?’ The question was dully asked; there was no animation.

  ‘Well, you had that fight earlier in the evening…’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded very tired. ‘Look, Charles, I was mugged. It’s not nice, but it happens. I have no reason to believe it was anyone I know who did it. My only comfort is that it was hardly worth his while. I’d drunk away practically all the money I had, so all he got was a couple of credit cards.’

  ‘Did he say anything to you, or just hit?’

  ‘Just hit.’ Kevin winced at the recollection.

  ‘Surely the average mugger starts by asking for the goods and then comes in with the heavy stuff when you refuse.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The intonation was meant to end the conversation, but Charles had to continue. ‘Kevin, Dickie Peck protects Christopher Milton like a eunuch in a harem. If anyone argues with his blue-eyed boy, he stops them. And I don’t think he’s too fussy about his methods. He used to be a boxer and, as we saw the other night, he’s still pretty tough.’

  ‘I was mugged,’ said Kevin doggedly.

  ‘You’re not holding out on me? There is nothing to make you think it could have been Dickie?’

  ‘I am not holding out on you. There is nothing to make me think it could have been Dickie,’ came the repetition on a monotone.

  Charles sighed. ‘Okay. Thanks. Well, I expect you’ll soon feel better. What’ll you do — come down and join us in Bristol?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I’ll bother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think I’ll follow your earlier advice — take the money and run. What was it you said — that I must
think of it as a grant to buy time to go off and write what I really want to? That’s what I’ll do. There’s no point in going on banging my head against a brick wall.’

  ‘Or having your head banged against a brick wall.’ But Kevin did not rise to the bait. Whoever it was had got at him had achieved the objective of the Christopher Milton/Dickie Peck camp. There would be no more interference in Lumpkin! by the writer of Liberty Hall.

  He managed to get a word with Pete Masters, the musical director, during a break in the morning rehearsal. ‘Good number, that I Beg Yours?’ he offered. Compliment is always conducive to confidence.

  Pete, however, showed discrimination. ‘It’s all right. Rather cobbled together. I don’t really think it’s that great. Lyric could do with a bit of polishing. The basic tune’s okay, but it needs a proper arrangement. I’ll do it as soon as I get time.’

  ‘Still, the product of one night. A whole song. Did you find it hard?’

  ‘What, doing it in the time? Not really. Did lots of revue at — university and got used to knocking up stuff quickly.’

  ‘People who hesitate before they say “university” either went to somewhere so unmentionably awful that they’re afraid of shocking people or went to Oxbridge and are afraid of being thought toffee-nosed.’

  Pete’s boyish face broke into a smile. Charles’ guess had been right. ‘Cambridge, actually.’

  ‘Ah, the Footlights.’

  ‘Exactly. By the way, you’re right, people do get a bit shirty if you talk about it. Especially in the music business.’

  ‘Did you read music?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So this is slumming for you.’

  Again the tone had been right. Pete laughed. ‘You could say that.’ As he relaxed, his nondescript working-with-musicians voice gave way to his natural public school accent.

  ‘Tell me, when you wrote that new song, did you actually stay up all night?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘In the Dragonara?’

  ‘In Christopher Milton’s suite, yes.’

  ‘And you all worked on it, him and you and Wally and Dickie Peck?’

  ‘Yes. Well, we talked it through first and then Wally and I went down to the ballroom, which was the only place where there was a piano. I think Christopher Milton and Dickie may have got some sleep while we did that.’

  ‘Or I suppose they could have gone out.’

  Pete treated the idea as a joke rather than as grounds for suspicion, which was just as well. ‘What, in Leeds? There’s nothing to do here during the day-time, leave alone at night.’

  Charles chuckled. ‘So how long did it take you and Wally actually to write the number?’

  I don’t know exactly. I suppose we went down to the piano about two-thirty and maybe finished about five.’

  So it was possible that Dickie Peck could have left the hotel to get Kevin McMahon. If, of course, he knew where to find him. Which was unlikely. But possible. The case seemed full of things that were possible, but not likely.

  Charles wandered aimlessly around Leeds, trying to work it out, just to get one line of logic through all the strange events of the past few weeks. But it seemed as impossible to impose a pattern as it was to work out the geography of Leeds town centre. After half an hour of circling round identical pedestrian shopping precincts, he went into a little restaurant called ‘The Kitchen’ in Albion Street.

  Over the Dish of the Day and a glass of red wine, he got out a notebook and pencil bought for the purpose in a W. H. Smith’s he’d passed three times in the last half hour. James Milne, whom he’d met in Edinburgh over the Mariello murder the previous summer, had taught him the advantages of writing things down to clarify thoughts.

  Three headings — ‘Incident’, ‘Suspect’ and ‘Motive’. In the first column — ‘Pianist shot at’, ‘Everard Austick pushed downstairs’, ‘Flats allowed to fall’ and ‘Kevin McMahon beaten up’. He filled in a question mark after the first two, thought for a moment, and put one after the third. He started on ‘Suspects’. Dickie Peck and Christopher Milton’s driver for the second two ‘Incidents’ and question marks for the first two. ‘Motive’ offered ‘Protection of CM., seeing that he gets his own way’, again only for the second two. More question marks.

  If only he could get some line which linked the first two victims with the later ones. He’d asked Michael Peyton about any altercations between the star and the pianist or Everard and received the information that, in the first case, the two didn’t even meet at rehearsal, and in the second, an atmosphere of great cordiality had been maintained. So, unless there were some unknown link in the past, the motive for the first two attacks couldn’t be the same as for the subsequent ones. Oh dear. He had another glass of wine.

  In one respect at least the attack on Kevin McMahon had changed the situation. It had been publicly recognised as a crime by the cast, the police, the press. That meant that any subsequent incidents might be related by people other than Charles and Gerald Venables. The criminal, if criminal there were, would have to be more careful in future.

  Having come to this conclusion, Charles looked at his watch. Five to two. God. There was a two-thirty matinee on Wednesday and if he hadn’t signed in at the theatre by the ‘half’, there’d be trouble.

  In fact, there was trouble, but not the sort he feared. It was gastric trouble, and it only affected one member of the cast, Winifred Tuke.

  Very interesting. If the pattern of accidents Charles suspected did exist, and if the motivation he had assumed were correct, then it was natural that Winifred Tuke should be the next victim. Since her clash with Christopher Milton over I Beg Yours? she had made no secret of her feelings and, being a theatrical lady, she made no attempt to make her umbrage subtle. Gastric trouble also fitted. After the dramatic fate of Kevin, the criminal was bound to keep a low profile. Winifred Tuke had to be punished for opposing the will of Christopher Milton, but it couldn’t be anything too serious, just an embarrassing indisposition which would put her out of action while the new number was rehearsed and became an established part of the show.

  She had started to feel queasy at the end of the matinee, and only just managed to get through the last number. She did not appear for the curtain call. The company manager questioned her in her dressing-room and gathered, not so much from her genteel explanations as from her constant departures to the Ladies, that she was suffering from acute diarrhoea. She was sent back to her digs in a taxi, moaning imprecations against the previous night’s curry, and her under-rehearsed understudy took over for the evening performance.

  Charles was not convinced about the curry. For a start, he would have expected food poisoning to manifest itself more quickly, and also it seemed strange that Winifred Tuke should be the only one affected by it. The meal had been one of those occasions when everyone ordered something different and had a bit of everything.

  But nobody else seemed worried and certainly no one talked of links between the incident and Kevin’s mugging. It seemed strange to Charles that in a large company of actors, who are the most superstitious of people, no one had spoken of bad luck or a jinx on the show. Perhaps he was too close to it. If it hadn’t been for his unconventional recruitment, he probably wouldn’t have found anything odd himself.

  But at least this could be investigated. If Winifred Tuke had been slipped something, the chances were it had happened in the theatre. So, in the dead time between the matinee and evening performance, Charles took a look around.

  The silence of empty dressing-rooms is almost tangible. He could feel the great pull of sentimentality which has led songwriters to maunder on about the smell of grease-paint, the limpness of unoccupied costumes, the wilting flowers, the yellowing telegrams of congratulation and all that yucky show business rubbish. Distant sounds from the stage, where the indefatigable Spike and his crew were going through yet another flying rehearsal, served only to intensify the silence.

  Fortunately, Winifred’s hasty exit
had left her dressing-room unlocked. Inside it was almost depressingly tidy. A neat plastic sandwich-box of make-up, a box of tissues and a Jean Plaidy paperback were the only signs of occupation. Someone with Winifred’s experience of touring didn’t bother to settle in for just a week.

  What Charles was looking for was not in sight, but it didn’t take him long to find it. His clue came from the smell on Winifred Tuke’s breath during rehearsals and, more particularly, performances. It was in the bottom of the wardrobe, hidden, in a pathetic attempt at gentility, behind a pair of boots. The middle-aged actress’s little helper, a bottle of Gordon’s gin.

  The investigation was an amateur detective’s dream. It was so easy Charles almost felt guilty for the glow of satisfaction it gave him. He opened the bottle and sniffed. Gin all right. He took a cautious sip and immediately felt suspicious. It wasn’t the taste, but the consistency, the slight greasiness the drink left on his lips.

  He poured a little into a glass and his suspicions were confirmed. Though it didn’t show through the dark green of the Gordon’s bottle, in the plain glass it was clear that the liquid had separated into two layers. Both were transparent, but the one that floated on top was viscous and left a slight slime round the glass. He dabbed at it and put his finger to his tongue. Yes, he wouldn’t forget that almost tasteless taste in a hurry. It was his prep school matron’s infallible cure for constipated boys — liquid paraffin.

  He was excited by the discovery, but controlled his emotions while he washed up the glass. The slime clung on stubbornly and he had to wipe at it with a tissue.

  A doubt struck him. If he had discovered the doctoring of the drink so easily, why hadn’t Winifred noticed it? But the concealment of the gin bottle in the wardrobe answered that. If she kept her drinking a secret (or at least thought she did), then probably she would only whip the bottle out for a hasty gulp and pop it straight back to its hiding place. And if she’d been drinking during the show, she would probably put the greasy taste down to make-up on her lips.