Death and the Chaste Apprentice

by Robert Barnard

  “A countertenor, as I understand it,” said Dundy, “is a choirboy who keeps his voice high by a big effort, right?”

  “Something like that. The trouble is, the castrato roles call for brilliance and volume, and a countertenor voice is too weak; it won’t fill a modern opera house. And a woman’s voice is quite different, too, and she always looks like a woman in men’s clothes.” He cast them a look of feeble cunning. “It’s a problem nobody has been able to solve.”

  “Until you came along,” said Dundy quietly. “Until you decided to fill a long-felt want.”

  Brad Mallory sparked up a little. “It’s not as though there weren’t any eunuchs around! People talk as if you couldn’t do that today. That’s just ignorance. It’s being done all over the world—Turkey, India . . .”

  “Yes, indeed: India. How did you come to know about the survival of the practice in India?”

  Brad Mallory looked down into his lap and again spoke low. “I went there often when we used to arrange a World Theater Festival in London. I was one of the directors. I got to know all the major Indian troupes and some of the lesser—”

  “These would have been some of the lesser, wouldn’t they?” Dundy shook his head. “This was something that Des Capper also proved to be expert in, wasn’t it?”

  “Damn the man! Damn the bloody little know-it-all! . . . Yes, I suppose so. We never talked about how he came to know. Part of his Indian experiences, presumably.”

  “Yes, it must have been. Of course, he’d never done most of the things he claimed to have done, but he had been there. This is what I think happened. Des came along to the rehearsal of Adelaide, and he happened to come backstage at the moment when you and Singh had gone onstage to comfort or reassure Natalya Radilova. He’d always assumed that Singh was ‘an operatic gentleman,’ in his words, and this confirmed him in his mistake.”

  “I can’t think what part he imagined he played.”

  “Ah, but remember that the version of Adelaide that is being played here is Donizetti’s rewrite from the 1830s, which was only discovered last year. When he went to the standard work on Donizetti, all he found was an account of the original opera of 1825, written for the castrato Velluti. So he assumed that Singh was playing Velluti’s part of Robert the Bruce. What was actually going on onstage during the bit of rehearsal he saw meant little to him, because it was in Italian, and he hadn’t then done a great deal of homework on the opera. He was looking for some way of getting revenge on Gottlieb, particularly later, after the scene in the Green Room. He didn’t have much luck with Gottlieb’s taste in young girls, because his minder was being careful. So when he got the idea that you had got hold of a real castrato for the Velluti part, he got the notion of getting at Gottlieb by turning his operatic triumph into a scandal and disaster that the popular press would seize on like vultures over carrion.”

  “That’s something I don’t quite understand, sir,” said Nettles. “Would they have been that interested? Opera’s pretty much of a minority interest.”

  “Oh, but they would, they would.” Dundy turned to Mallory. “I’m sure you realized that throughout.”

  Mallory nodded sadly. “Oh, yes. I always knew the public would never stand for a castrated male if they knew. Imagine what the Daily Grub would make of the sick tastes of”—his voice took on an Australian twang—“ ‘so-called culture vultures.’ Think of the great mountain of pretended outrage and vulgar ridicule they would pile up. They would have a field day. If it were known, Singh could never perform in public again. People would be sickened.”

  “And Gottlieb’s opera would be a disaster. He would be buried in sludge. Except, of course, that unknown to Des Capper, Singh had nothing to do with Adelaide. It would have been you who was buried.”

  “So what we think happened,” put in Charlie, “is that Capper saw the rehearsal, went away and read about Donizetti writing the opera for a castrato, and something clicked in his mind, something he remembered from his Indian experiences.”

  “That’s it,” resumed Dundy. “India has been in everybody’s minds recently, what with Jewel in the Crown, Gandhi, A Passage to India, and the rest. No doubt Des bored his saloon-bar regulars with his superior knowledge of the place each time one of them was shown on television. But knowledge he did have, and some reading, too, and when he thought of the subject of eunuchs, he remembered the hijras. He not only remembered them. There was a note in his little book of useful bits of information: HAD 9. He’d remembered that they appeared in Heat and Dust and had gone away and looked them up.”

  “I still don’t understand who or what the hijras were,” said Nettles. “Or are.”

  “Are, definitely. Perhaps you could tell him, Mr. Mallory,” said Dundy. “I presume it was from them, or through them, that you—what shall we say?—acquired Singh?”

  Brad Mallory flinched. His voice was still low, as if he were a great distance away. “They are bands of traveling entertainers. They perform on the streets, at stag parties and suchlike occasions. Probably it would have been at a stag party that Capper saw them. They’re hermaphrodites and eunuchs, and their act is scabrous, very sexual, really rather horrible. There is a religious basis somewhere—they have a shrine in Gujarat—but it’s not very strong. In fact, for the ordinary Indian they’re the next thing to outcasts, though they’re very often beautiful, weirdly so, and sometimes talented. Sometimes they buy children; sometimes they kidnap them. Then they castrate them.”

  “As you knew from your visits to India.”

  “Yes. I saw a troupe of them the very first time I went there. They fascinated me. They planted a seed in the back of my mind. And when early operas became more and more popular, I thought: That’s what is needed. Only that sort of voice can really do justice to the music.”

  “And probably you were right. As we can see from these reviews.” Dundy tapped the already pasted in collection of reviews. “They all exclaim how different Singh’s voice is from the usual countertenor—so much more powerful and brilliant. They guess it’s something to do with his being Indian. None of them guesses the real reason. It’s interesting that Des Capper did. I wonder what gave him the clue.”

  “I don’t know. I always insisted that Singh was English,” said Brad Mallory. “I think I overdid it and gave him the first clue.”

  “Yes, and I suspect that he was puzzled by your homosexual performance. I suppose you did that to give Singh some kind of sexual identity?”

  “Yes. I adopted them gradually, as if I was changing my . . . my sexual orientation. It was a preparation for when I would bring Singh forward, launch him on his career.”

  “But I suspect that Des learned from the room maids here that there didn’t seem to be anything going on between you. ‘Where do they do it?’ he asked in his little book. . . . But you haven’t told us how you procured Singh.”

  “If you’re suggesting that I had him . . . done, you’re mistaken,” said Brad with a brief spurt of fire. “He was twelve when I saw him and had already been . . . operated on. I listened to several of the boys, heard their singing voices, chose the one that seemed most beautiful and most Western. Then I arranged for the boy to be adopted by an Indian couple that I knew in this country. He had no obvious parent or protector, so it was quite easy. From the day he came here he has been having music lessons. Everything has been geared towards his debut. . . . The man who will show us how Handel opera should be sung. . . .”

  His voice faded into silence, but then he looked wildly round at the other three men. “I mean, why not?” he almost cried.

  They didn’t tell him. They left a pause, and then Dundy said quietly: “I imagine it hasn’t been easy.”

  Brad Mallory smiled sadly. “Oh, no. It hasn’t been easy. As you’ve seen, he’s very vain and childish. It’s almost as if he stopped growing up when . . . I’m used to artists who view the world as revolving around themselves. That’s usual. And they are artists. Singh is a baby. At the center there is . . . a
hole. Sweet nothing. And he can be cruel, too. To defenseless things. And he eats sweets. . . .”

  “Eats sweets?” asked Nettles, mystified.

  “I tell him not to. Already he’s getting very chubby. If he becomes grossly fat, he will remind people of nothing so much as the old castrati, and then someone will ask questions. I tell him this over and over, but he takes no notice. . . . He has no gratitude.”

  “Gratitude?”

  “You think he shouldn’t have? Maybe. Anyway, he has none. I have this fear that in two or three years, when he has made his name, he will throw me over. All the financial gains will go to someone else. And I’ll have nothing to threaten him with to keep him faithful. Any revelation about his . . . state would tarnish me much more than it would tarnish him. No, it has not been easy.”

  “I must say I’m rather glad to hear that,” said Iain Dundy briskly. “Now, let’s come to the night of the murder, sir. Let’s hear exactly what happened?”

  “Oh, God.” Bradford Mallory went white. “It was a nightmare. It needed all my little . . . queer mannerisms to carry it off. . . . After I’d telephoned, I went back to the Town Hall to hear Singh’s arias. He was brilliant, but I could hardly concentrate. What was I going to do? Was I going to offer him money? If so, how much? Was it possible to brazen things out? Because, after all, I didn’t see how he could know.”

  “You left the concert as soon as Singh was finished, did you? When was that?”

  “About ten past eight, as I told you before. I was back at the Saracen by a quarter past. I came to this room, put a flannel over my face, lit a cigarette, and put it straight out. It was so damnable, after all my work, and just when it was coming to fruition. But I hadn’t made up my mind what to do when I went along and knocked at his door. That was about twenty past eight or so, as you said. If only I’d decided to face it out or decided to pay up. I put up a front, but I think Capper could see from the moment I walked into the room that I was beaten. He behaved as if I was a mouse he’d brought in and was preparing to torment.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Oh—horrible. Rubbing his hands with glee, making barroom jokes, leering . . . He was quite disgusting. I tried to face it out, to say there was nothing to it, but the mere fact that I was there told him that wasn’t true. He said a medical examination could prove it one way or another. He said he had a good mate on the Daily Grub. I could believe it. It’s just the paper Des Capper would know someone from. He said it was the sort of story that paper would love, and he was right there: salacious, voyeuristic, anti-art, and the racial overtones wouldn’t have come amiss—they could make something of them. I can just see the headlines. They’d have gloated for days over the sick tastes of opera lovers who could watch a nonman who sang like a woman. . . . All this time he was rubbing his hands and leering and making elephantine innuendos. My God, he deserved to die. I shouldn’t say that, but he did.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I offered money, of course. That seemed to delight him even more. It was me wriggling on the hook. His hook. He positively chortled. It wasn’t money he was after, he kept saying. It was to get even. I was quite bewildered. I asked him why he wanted to get even with me. What had I done? Or was it Singh he wanted to get even with? He said he had one or two little scores to settle against both of us, but it was neither, and so there was nothing in the world I could do about it. I just didn’t understand. How could revealing Singh’s secret get him even with anyone other than Singh or me? He was rubbing his hands and chortling to himself. I just didn’t know what to do. It was like being in a maze.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I? I kept thrashing around in my mind: Could I explain why I’d brought Singh over, trained him? Would he understand? Was there anything he wanted besides money? He was positively gleeful that there was nothing I could do: ‘It’s a very unfortunate position for you, Mr. Mallory,’ he kept saying, ‘caught up in a quarrel that’s not your own. I’m afraid there’s just no way you can prevent me making a splash of it.’ He was loving it, of course. . . . Normally I’m quite tough. You’re quite right about my little mannerisms; they’ve become a cover. If you deal with singers all the time, you’ve got to be tough, believe me. But this situation was beyond me. In the end, with his standing there grinning at me as I wriggled, I just turned and walked out.”

  There was silence in the room. “Are you telling me that you didn’t kill him?” asked Dundy.

  Mallory’s face was suffused by a hopeless, beseeching expression. “Of course I didn’t kill him. I knew there was no chance of your believing me; that’s why I didn’t even try to tell you part of the story. I knew I probably wouldn’t believe it myself if I were in your shoes. But it’s the truth. I’m not the killing type.”

  “When you left the room, he was still alive?”

  “Yes!”

  “What time was this?”

  “About a quarter to nine. The Interval was still on— I remember hearing talking and laughter coming up from the Shakespeare Bar.”

  “And you never went back to the flat?”

  Brad Mallory swallowed. “I went back to the flat. I never went into it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I went back to my room. It’s just along the corridor, as you know. I lay down on the bed and tried to think. I was desperate for a way out, but there was none. Even in a maze you know there is a way out, but now it seemed as though I’d been put down in the middle of one which had had its way out blocked. But—I don’t know—perhaps I’m a congenital optimist; perhaps I don’t like admitting defeat. I convinced myself I hadn’t pushed the money solution hard enough. Perhaps he was just playing with me, I thought, and was really after money all the time. Everyone responds to money, I thought, if you offer enough—and we hadn’t even mentioned specific sums. I decided to try again.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Just about nine. I saw the news headlines, downed a quick scotch, and went along that damned corridor again. My hand was just knocking the first knock at Capper’s door when it struck me there were low voices inside. And the moment I finished knocking—”

  “Yes?”

  “I heard a cry—a grunt—and then a heavy thump.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ran. I knew then that someone had killed him. I ran back to my room and thought over what the hell I should do. For God’s sake, I’m not stupid. I knew then that somebody was going to suspect me of murder.”

  His face was so agonized that it was almost possible to believe him. From Singh’s bedroom came the sound of a high soprano voice assuring him that a spoonful of sugar would make the medicine go down.

  Chapter 16

  The Shakespeare Again

  THE LAST THING Dundy did before he left the suite was caution Brad Mallory not to leave the hotel without getting police permission first. When the three of them were out in the corridor, Charlie noticed a look of dissatisfaction on Dundy’s face, a look of niggling doubt. It disappointed him, but he respected the man’s greater experience. Dundy walked on but paused at the little dark alcove where the telephone was. There was a sofa there, and an easy chair. Dundy took the latter and sent Nettles to the kitchens for three coffees. Then he took out a cigarette, lit it—the first time Charlie had seen him smoke—and soon began leafing through his notebook. The three of them sipped strong, hot coffee, and all of them kept silent. Charlie was wondering why Dundy was unsatisfied with Mallory as murderer and what were the consequences for the case if his story was believed. Nettles was somehow simultaneously thinking when his wife and new baby would be home and what would be the ideal side for England to field against the West Indies in the first Test. It was a companionable, not a strained, silence. After twenty minutes or so, Dundy’s expression of dissatisfaction began to lift.

  “You believe him, don’t you?” said Charlie.

  The disappointment in his voice was palpable. It had been his brill
iant deduction that had led them to Mallory, and it should have been crowned by the coup of his arrest.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t,” said Dundy slowly. “We wouldn’t have any difficulty in making one hell of a good case against him. All I’ve got on the other side is instinct.”

  “Instinct about—?”

  “Character, I suppose. I just don’t feel he has it in him to commit murder. Oh, I grant you he’s tougher than he’s been pretending. His job proves that. And the motive is there all right. I believe what he says about Singh’s career being ruined is true. It would be destroyed by the popular press. There might be a few recordings, because that’s closed-door stuff, but a stage career? I doubt it. I suspect that there is one thing Mallory has lied about. I think it may be that he did “choose” Singh, did pick out the boy with the best voice and the best appearance, and then have him “done.” And if that is so, he has a motive whether or not Singh’s career would be ruined—because sure as hell his would be. The papers would crucify him. So there’s no doubt whatever about motive. But guts, courage, bottle, nerve—call it what you will. I don’t think he has it to the sort of degree that murder demands. I still think he’s basically a gadfly, a dilettante. When he shed all those gay mannerisms, there somehow—how shall I put it?—there wasn’t much left. I try to square him with all I’ve ever learned in my life about killers, and all I’ve ever read about them, and I can’t.”

  “But where does that leave us, sir?” asked Nettles. “Back at square one?”

  “No, of course not,” said Dundy crossly. “Think, man. Surely you can see that if we believe him it alters our whole perspective on the case.”