Romesh was fortunately nowhere to be seen, but on the largest of the sofas in the lounge – holding court as king of his domain – was Grayson Gilbert, his hand possessively placed on Diana Christmas’s thigh.
My word, she looked breathtaking! She was dressed in a long, flowing white dress, which hung over her shoulders by the thinnest of spaghetti straps. Her hair had been blow-dried and when she tossed her head it seemed to catch any and all light in the room. That gleaming hair trailed down her naked back and it was impossible not to be struck by how perfectly smooth and ivory her skin was. She was a queen, a princess, a goddess all rolled up into one delicious parcel.
Her arm hung idly around Gilbert’s shoulders, and even though I could only see the back of her head, I assumed she was gazing at him adoringly. Hanging on every syllable like everyone else of the sainted crowd. Around them – sitting in a semicircle on the floor, staring up, entranced – was a coterie of young, good-looking men who I could only assume were actors. They were listening raptly to every priceless word Gilbert uttered, seemingly taking their lead from Diana as to when they should laugh.
I couldn’t hear what he was saying, wasn’t going to get close enough to eavesdrop on whichever well-worn showbiz anecdote he’d embarked upon. I couldn’t help staring at them, blatant and obvious staring from the hallway straight into the lounge. Even though I could feel the sweat on my back like it was ice water and my fists clenched and unclenched furiously, I couldn’t break the spell.
Then, so slowly it was as if the world’s projector had dropped to half-speed, Diana turned her head and stared straight at me. It was probably just a glance, nothing more, and it didn’t seem like she even noticed I was there. Her face wasn’t as adoring as I thought; it wasn’t totally entranced with Gilbert and his story and the life he’d brought her into. If anything, her expression was bored. Bored and annoyed and as sad as I’d ever seen her.
It could only have lasted a second, before I ducked my head and scuttled away. No more hesitation – hesitation could be fatal – I had to move quickly. Upstairs was where I needed to be. That could have been problematic, as of course upstairs was out of bounds to the waiting staff, but there was no one guarding them, so I just marched up two steps at a time. No officious or outraged voice called me back.
When I’d looked through the cuttings file back at the office, there had been the A Life in the Day piece from The Sunday Times Magazine. It was a standard and really quite dull interview with Gilbert, covering his films, his parties and the life of this elegantly decrepit bachelor. What really interested me though was the photo which accompanied it: Gilbert smiling enigmatically on a leather swivel chair in his study. Typical enough for a magazine profile, but behind his left shoulder seemed to be some kind of closet, a storage room, and on the shelves were an array of film cans.
During my recuperation, I’d travelled to Gloucester library and found the article again on microfiche, then blew up that snap as large as I could make it. At first glance, I’d thought they were the reels from his own movies, but when I looked more closely, I realised they were smaller than that. It was difficult to tell truly, and I might have been making a mistake with the perspective, but it looked to me like they were 16mm cans. Home movie cans.
And what kind of home movies would Grayson Gilbert have in his collection? In passing, he’d told me what one of the films was already. I could make a damn good stab at another.
I had no idea which room was the study, so I moved as swiftly and carefully as I could, trying every door I found. The first three were all bedrooms, and I surprised two different canoodling couples by opening them – one a brutish-looking middle-aged man with a mono-brow and a much younger sexy senorita, both of whom snarled at me with matching teeth; the other were two young men far too preoccupied to notice me appearing suddenly in the doorway.
The fourth door was the study.
It looked exactly as it did in the magazine. The room was dominated by a mightily high and wide oak desk, which was as untroubled by papers as it had been in the photograph. In the corner was the biggest globe I’d ever seen – an old one too, a mass of red indicating the range and scope of the British Empire. And, just to the side of the desk, was the pine four-panel door beyond which – I hoped – lay the great director’s personal movie collection.
The beat of the music had got louder, and I heard cheers of moneyed debauchery from below. My right hand, shaking with adrenalin, grabbed the bronzed door handle.
It stuck fast. The damn thing was locked.
Tears bursting to my eyes, I nearly gave a cry of pain, but swiftly got control of myself. I had come so far, done so much. I was not going to sink to despair now.
Swift but unhurried, I scanned the room for something I could smash the door open with. The party below was too raucous, nobody was going to hear me. That’s what I told myself.
The implement I used was so perfect. On his desk Gilbert had no papers, but he did have a paperweight. It was a big one, heavy and bronze, shaped like a 1930s cinema camera.
I yanked it up from the desk and with no further hesitation swung the base straight into the lock. There was an incredible smash, like a cannon being fired, but it didn’t do more than make the door shudder. Nervously I stared around, holding my breath, wondering if I’d been heard, wondering whether Romesh was going to burst in and grab me.
There was nothing, just the noise of a good time elsewhere. Other people having great fun at parties I wasn’t invited to – it was the story of my life. This time though, I was glad.
My hands gripping the paperweight tightly, I swung again. And again. On the third try the lock buckled and seemed to sink back into the wood. Then the door swung in with a satisfying creak.
Of course, there was the fear that since that photo had been taken, Gilbert had refurbished and in the closet now were suits, or canes, or hats. Nothing I’d be able to make any use of. But no, everything was the way the magazine showed it to be. Actually, rather than one shelf, there were three – each of them crammed with shiny silver 16mm film canisters.
I breathed deeply. The dread now was that they’d be impossible to identify, or arranged according to a system I couldn’t fathom. But no, they were all laid out alphabetically. And there under D were two silver tins labelled “Diana Christmas”.
There was no way Diana could have suspected they were there. She’d hunted the first film so ruthlessly that if she’d known it was here, in the house, she would never have let it sit there. No, she’d have taken it, done what she needed to do with it. There were two films with her name printed on them, and I bet that movie he filmed the night of the murder hadn’t been destroyed. Obviously she didn’t suspect that, either.
If Diana even had a glimmering, the lock on the door would long before have been shot apart.
Practically rubbing my hands, I grabbed both and held them to my chest, clutching them tight, determined not to let them go.
I made sure the door to the closet was pulled shut again, so that if anyone did glance into the study, they wouldn’t immediately see it was broken. Then, with the lights out, I turned the leather chair so that its back faced the door and sat there and waited. On another day I’d have probably marvelled at its comfort, but as the seconds dragged agonisingly past, comfort was like an alien concept.
The sounds of the party were giddy and loud, the music at high volume. As the minutes ticked on there were more raucous noises: vomiting, overindulgence, cheers of delight. Upstairs I heard the bedroom doors open and shut, and the tell-tale cries of desire, but no one tried the study door.
Maybe the invited guests knew it was Gilbert’s domain, his own private space. Gilbert himself didn’t disturb me. Why would he come up mid-party? Why would he leave the fun? What would be so urgent?
The music died down at about 2.30am, I’m sure much to the neighbours’ delight. From outside there were the boozy cries of goodbyes, of loud voices moving sated into the road, of cabs swinging up and slurred
instructions yelled to the drivers.
I swallowed, closed my eyes in a silent prayer, and moved. When I went down, everybody had their backs to the staircase; few were in a sober enough state to even notice me. I thought the bouncers might still be there on the front door but they’d gone off duty for the night, and so it was no trouble to file out with the guests. Two precious film cans stashed under my shirt.
Chapter Twenty-Four
26th June, 1980
“Michael? Oh my word! Is that really you?”
The surprise echoed right through her voice.
I’d sent her an envelope. All it contained was a frame of her and Sylvia Van Burlow, and a frame of Raymond Wilder starting to topple back in the face of her smoking gun. I could imagine her squinting at them in the window light, gasping as she realised what they were. With them was a piece of paper giving the time I’d call her at home.
“I don’t understand this, Michael. What is all this about? What do you want?”
I’d made sure I was miles across London from her, stood in a piss-smelling phone box in Greenwich, overlooking the Cutty Sark.
“I want to talk, Diana.”
“Talk? Well, darling, of course we can talk. We’re talking now, aren’t we? When would you like to meet? You can come over, if you like? It would be good to see you, I really mean that.”
I steeled my jaw. Her charm came so easily; she could flick it on like a light switch, and the stupid thing was I knew I was still so susceptible to it.
“The last time I saw you, you wanted to kill me, Diana.”
“Did I? I don’t really remember. I know things were overwrought the last time I saw you. It was a tumultuous night, a lot went on that evening – I don’t really know what I said or did. If I did or said anything to hurt you, then I’m sorry, Michael. Truly I am.”
“They took me away in an ambulance.”
“And I felt terrible for that, I really did, darling. I even said to Gray that we should pay for your treatment, but he said you were on the NHS.”
I gripped the phone tight, trying to keep calm, desperate to hold my voice level and unemotional.
“I bet he told you he destroyed it, didn’t he?”
“Sorry?” she asked.
“The film Gilbert shot that night. The one he kept the set lit to make. Camera at the ready, having no idea of what a thriller we were going to offer him. He did tell you he destroyed it, didn’t he?”
Her silence confirmed it.
“I got the other one from him as well, Diana. He had both films. He was keeping them for himself.”
The only large item I’d brought into my poky room in Vauxhall was a fourth-hand 16mm projector I’d picked up for the lowest price I possibly could on Tottenham Court Road. It took me a few hours to figure out how to work it properly – it was a lot older than the machine I’d used at the Ritzy cinema – but eventually I mastered it.
I projected both films onto a white bed sheet I’d bought crisp and fresh from BHS, hanging it up on an old electrical cable, securing it with clothes-pegs.
The murder was the first one I saw. It flickered stark and expressionist. The image was grainy and bounced around a lot, so it was often difficult to determine quite what was happening. But when you saw the body and the gun, you knew. Gilbert did linger on the corpse, on the blood pumping out of what used to be Raymond Wilder’s face. Then it was all Diana, her close-lipped grin showing exactly how much she’d enjoyed her evening’s work.
It made the memories of that night career back. Even though the film was black and white, and silent, the flashing lights and endless repetitive noise ground into me once again. I watched it perched on the end of my bed, and felt every one of my injuries ache afresh.
I watched it once, then put it aside. The second film starred a much younger Diana. She was so beautiful in it, so magnificently sexy. I’d thought she was phenomenal when I was with her, but it was nothing compared to seeing her that young.
The late Raymond Wilder had been right: Diana was a lot more compos mentis than she’d told me. Sylvia Van Burlow seemed drunk and high and giggly, but Diana looked intense. Like she wanted to be there, to be with Sylvia. She looked like she wanted to please them both: the younger actress just as much as Carlisle Collins on the other side of the camera.
Again it was silent, but it didn’t appear as if anyone was yelling instructions at her. She never glanced up at the lens to see what she should do next. No, she took control and led a compliant and zoned-out Sylvia Van Burlow. Undeniably it was erotic, undeniably it was a turn-on. I watched it twice and then threw up. Seeing her with someone else, smiling down as she’d once smiled at me – adoringly and lovingly: emotions that weren’t true then, and no doubt weren’t true with me, either – made me want to cry out.
It was all about control. Diana liked to be in control, needed it. Who knows why she chose to star in that film, or why Carlisle Collins did what he did with it. But once he started to disseminate it, he betrayed her. She lost that control. I could imagine, as the viewings went wider in the circles in which she moved, all the lewd comments and smutty remarks coming her way. The fact she could do nothing about them must have broken Diana.
She brooded about that film for years, and then I came along – smitten and easily manipulated – and she suddenly saw a way to get control back.
On the phone, there was a crackly pause as she absorbed the news of Gilbert’s home-movie collection, and then all pretence of warmth or flirtatiousness vanished from her voice. “Just tell me what is it you want, Michael?”
“To talk,” I said.
“What about?”
“What do you think?”
I could hear her swallow, as if she was being made to eat something distasteful. “Fine, then. Where?”
“There’s a café called Giovanni’s. It’s at the Angel end of Upper Street in Islington. I’ll meet you there at two o’clock sharp.”
The hesitation was unmissable in her voice. “Okay.”
“Diana,” I said. “I will be in place beforehand. If I see either Gilbert or Romesh, or anyone else I don’t like the look of, then I’ll leave. I’ll leave and you’ll never get those films. I’ll keep them to do with as I like.”
Her voice was tight and angry. “I’ll be alone.”
“Good. I’m looking forward to it.”
“Oh, I wish I could say I was, Michael. I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me, I really don’t. After everything we had together, how can you treat me like this?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she hung up.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I got there half an hour early, but she was sitting, waiting in the café already.
Somehow I knew she would be.
The films were still tucked under the mattress of my room. There was no way I was going to bring them in case I was smacked hard to the ground, by Romesh or anyone else, before I even spoke to her.
But there she was, seemingly alone and already waiting. Even though the café was busy, as I gazed through the window, there was nobody else at all, nothing else at all. Just Diana Christmas, dominating everything. Call it star power or charisma, or blame it on my still yearning heart, but all I could think was that everyone’s eyes must be as fixed on her as mine.
And that was odd, as, sitting there by herself, she didn’t resemble a movie star at all. Not one who’d been famous a long time ago, and certainly not one who was on the verge of a comeback. She didn’t look like Diana Christmas. Instead, it was like I was seeing the Diane Smith she’d once been. Her hair was untidy and lank, even a bit greasy. The day was another sunny one, but all colour seemed washed out of it. It was as close to dull as red hair could possibly be. Her face was pale and haggard, with the lack of concealer revealing dark bags under her eyes. She’d obviously been crying, even if she’d dried the tears now. Crying for real this time, most probably, the kind of tears I don’t think I ever saw. Looking back, I’m not proud of the feel
ing, but there was a dark buzz of satisfaction that I’d finally managed to affect her.
Warily, I hung back. My gaze took in every passing man, every passing car. I kept an eye on her, checked that no one else was with her. There was no way I was going to back down now, but I wanted to see what I was up against.
From the other side of the street I watched her through the window for about ten minutes. She seemed so cut off from everybody around her, so without glamour. Even her clothes seemed like they belonged to someone else. Laura Ashley patterns, baggy and loose-fitting, as if she’d raided another woman’s much blander wardrobe.
Thinking back to that afternoon, the last time I saw and spoke to Diana Christmas, the last time anyone spoke to her, I wonder what I was doing there. In my lonely thoughts at night, I try to justify what I was doing. Revenge was top of my list, and it’s such an unpleasant emotion that I can’t feel proud of myself for being consumed by it. Righteousness was another driver: she had killed two men, so surely she couldn’t go off and have a wonderful life on the back of that. It wasn’t right. It simply wasn’t right.
But the main reason I was there, I realise now, was that I wanted her to notice me again. She had thrown me aside, literally left me crumpled on a concrete floor. I wanted her to see me again, to know that she couldn’t crush me and forget about me. I needed to mean something to her, not just be a stepping stone on her way elsewhere, but instead be someone she had to remember.
I’m not proud of myself.
I had no idea how much that final meeting would cost.
Chapter Twenty-Six
At ten past two, I finally made my move. Pushing all doubt aside, I strolled as confidently as I could across Upper Street, and with barely any hesitation pulled the door to Giovanni’s open.
Diana greeted me with a smile. Although her face was pale with worry, the lines around her eyes having aged her (so she did then look like what I thought she’d be at the start of our acquaintance, a grieving widow), she still managed to produce an almost electric smile for me. It wasn’t full voltage, not even close, but still it felt genuine. As if I was a fondly remembered acquaintance arriving back from a long-forgotten war.
Diana Christmas (Screen Siren Noir Book 1) Page 13
