Murder Unprompted

by Simon Brett

  And, even more unfortunately, that was the line Charles repeated. The audience probably didn’t notice anything wrong; their reactions were so minimal, anyway, that it hardly mattered. But Lesley-Jane certainly did, and she started to giggle. That, and the mild hysteria that a tiny audience always engenders, got Charles going too, and the pair of them were almost paralysed by laughter. It was what actors call a total ‘corpse’, and, although they managed to get through to the end of the play, any tension they might have built up was dissipated.

  The lapse was duly noted by the Stage Manager and no one was surprised to be summoned on stage at the ‘half’ for the evening show, and receive a dressing-down from the Company Manager.

  ‘You’re all meant to be professionals,’ Wallas Ward berated them petulantly, ‘and this sort of behaviour is unforgivable. We already have our problems with this show, and we’re at a very pivotal point. If we are to survive in the West End, we have to guarantee that every performance is up to scratch. Nothing brings a show’s reputation down quicker than the rumour going round the business that the cast has started sending it up. You really should know better.’

  Charles owned up, like a naughty schoolboy. ‘Sorry, it was my fault. I got fed the wrong line.’

  ‘Well, you should have been concentrating on what you were saying. You are meant to think, not just relay the lines like some glorified loudspeaker.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry. Lapse of concentration. Won’t happen again.’

  ‘It’d better not. I think you ought to be off the deaf-aid by now.’

  ‘What?’ Charles was very taken aback.

  ‘Well, you are going to learn the lines at some point, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I . . . er . . . I hadn’t really thought about it.’ He hadn’t. Now he had sorted out the technique of using the deaf-aid, he found it wonderfully relaxing. The strain of remembering the lines was removed, and he could enjoy the acting. It hadn’t occurred to him that at some point his life-support system would be taken away.

  ‘I think you should be off the deaf-aid now,’ asserted Wallas Ward righteously. ‘But Paul says wait a bit, no hurry, and it’s his decision.’

  ‘Right, well, I’ll wait till I hear from him.’

  ‘And, in the meantime, let us have no repetition of this afternoon’s disgusting display of amateurism.’

  Very good, Wallas, yes, Wallas, certainly, Wallas, said all the cast, touching their forelocks in mock-abasement.

  ‘Maurice Skellern Personal Management.’

  ‘Still holding out for the twenty per cent, I see, Maurice.’

  ‘Charles, one has to pay for personal service in this day and age. It’s the same all over the board, you know.’

  ‘Humph.’

  ‘Well, and how’s the show going?’

  ‘Oh, thank you for asking. I take it that question is an example of your Personal Management, the individual care you lavishly bestow on your clients.’

  ‘Exactly, Charles.’

  ‘Listen, Maurice, we last spoke nearly a fortnight ago. Since then, not only has the show opened in the West End, but also I, your client, have taken over the leading part. And during that time, what kind of “individual care” have I received? Not even a lousy telephone call. I always have to end up ringing you.’

  ‘I’m never sure where you are, Charles.’

  ‘Rubbish. You could always find me if you tried.’

  ‘I think you’re being very hurtful, Charles. I spend all day beavering away on your behalf and –’

  ‘Oh, damn it, Maurice, can’t you –’

  ‘That’s very good, Charles, very good.’ Wheezes of laughter wafted down the telephone line.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Beavering – damn it. Very good.’

  ‘Listen, Maurice, as I say I am now playing the lead in this show, and I think it is about time you sorted out some deal on the money I get for doing it.’

  ‘Now, Charles, if you would calm down a moment and allow me to get a word in, I would be able to inform you that I have already negotiated just such a deal for you.’

  ‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because the details have only recently been finalised with Paul Lexington.’

  ‘Well, when did you ring him?’

  ‘He rang me, actually.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘And I suppose that was the first you knew of my taking over the part?’

  ‘It was, as it happens.’

  ‘I don’t bloody believe it. Your office must have a great pile of sand in it instead of a desk, so that you can keep your head buried all bloody day.’

  ‘Now, Charles . . . An agent’s job is difficult enough without his clients being offensive.’

  ‘All right. Tell me what the deal is.’

  Charles had devoted considerable thought to this subject. He knew that he wasn’t the most eminent actor in the world, but he still knew that nobody played a starring part in the West End for peanuts. He had to be on three hundred and fifty a week minimum, surely? Maybe a bit more. Maybe a lot more.

  ‘Paul Lexington was very fair on the phone, I thought, very fair.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘What he said was . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘. . . that he’d continue to pay your existing contract –’

  ‘But that’s only a hundred and fifty a week.’

  ‘Wait, wait. But, on top of that, he was prepared to pay a supplement.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  ‘Because you are actually playing the part.’

  ‘I certainly am.’

  ‘A supplement of ten pounds for each performance you do.’

  ‘Ten pounds! But that’s nothing!’

  ‘It’s quite generous for an understudy.’

  ‘But I’m not an understudy. This isn’t the part which I was understudying, anyway. And I am actually playing the part.’

  ‘Not according to Paul Lexington.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘According to him, you are acting as understudy. And, in a few weeks when he sees how business is going, he will make the decision as to whether to confirm you in the part or to recast.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘As I say, I thought it very fair. I mean, considering your stature in the business.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Charles dully.

  ‘I pushed him up, you know. He only wanted to give you eight pounds a performance, but I pushed him up.’

  ‘Terrific, Maurice.’

  But the sarcasm was wasted. ‘Good, I thought you’d see it my way. And now perhaps you understand what I mean by Personal Management.’

  ‘Oh yes, I think I do.’

  ‘Good. Well, nice to talk to you.’

  ‘Hmm. I don’t suppose your Personal Management and “individual care” would actually extend to coming along to see the show, would it?’

  ‘Oh now, Charles . . . I spend all day in the office slaving away on your behalf. Surely you don’t want me to give up my evenings too. Do you . . .?’

  Michael Banks’s death niggled away at Charles like a hole in the tooth. He had done all the sums, and he knew only one answer fitted, but still something snagged. There seemed little doubt that Alex was the murderer, but Charles felt somehow he owed it to his friend to isolate the element about the case that was worrying him.

  So, just before the ‘half’ on the Thursday night, he knocked on Lesley-Jane Decker’s dressing room door.

  She was dressed in a silk kimono and lying on the daybed when he went in. Her face was scoured of street make-up, prior to the application of her stage make-up. The result was pale and sickly, stress lines showing how much she would look like her mother in a few years’ time. It was brought home to Charles for the first time how much of a strain the last weeks must have been for a girl of her age. To have broken off one affair and started another, then to have witnessed the shooting
of her new lover by the old one, was quite a lot to take. He knew some actresses, hard-boiled as eight-minute eggs, who would have revelled in the situation, casting themselves as femmes fatales with enormous relish. But Lesley-Jane didn’t seem the type. Her sophistication was paper-thin, and underneath she was just a very young, and probably over-protected, girl.

  She made no attempt to move when he came in, just lay there looking vulnerable. Nor did she say anything beyond ‘Hello, Charles.’ Her champagne bubble was distinctly flat.

  ‘Tired out?’ he asked solicitously.

  ‘Shattered.’

  ‘Yes, it’s been tough for all of us. Doing eight shows a week is enough, without all this other business.’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at him, curious as to why he was there. But not that curious; she seemed too tired to be very interested.

  ‘I wanted to talk about Michael’s death,’ he began bluntly.

  ‘Ah.’ Even this didn’t animate her much.

  ‘I’m sorry to go through it all again, but there’s something about it that seems odd to me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You see I don’t know. There’s just something that doesn’t seem right about it.’

  ‘I don’t think murder’s often right,’ she observed with a touch more spirit.

  ‘No. By definition it isn’t. But listen, we both witnessed that murder. I was out front, and it was pretty horrible from there. From where you were standing, it must have been . . .’

  She gulped, forcing back nausea, and nodded.

  ‘But what interests me, what I wanted to ask you, is about how you reacted.’

  ‘I screamed, didn’t I? I can’t remember very well, but I thought I . . .’

  ‘Yes, you screamed all right. It was when you screamed that interests me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yes. What happened was this: Micky stopped getting the lines, turned round in confusion, then presumably saw someone in the wings pointing a gun at him. He said ‘Put it down. You mustn’t do that to me’ or something and then he was shot.’

  Lesley-Jane nodded. She wasn’t enjoying the re-creation of the shock.

  ‘But you didn’t scream then.’

  ‘Didn’t I? I can’t remember. It was all confused . . .’

  ‘No, you didn’t scream until you looked off into the wings.’

  ‘Delayed shock, I suppose. I couldn’t believe what had happened to Micky straight away, I didn’t even know what had happened to him.’

  ‘But when you looked into the wings you did know. And you also knew who had done it. And then you screamed.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it brought it home to me.’

  ‘And who did you see in the wings?’

  She looked at him as if he were daft. ‘Well, Alex, of course.’ He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but he felt very disappointed. Something inside had been hoping against all logic for a different answer. He didn’t know what, just anything that would settle the unease he felt about the death.

  ‘What exactly did you see?’

  ‘I’ve been through all this with the police.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I wasn’t backstage for all the police inquiries, and I really would like to know,’ he appealed pathetically.

  ‘All right. I saw Alex. He was very near the edge of the set . . .’

  Must have been. He knew how impenetrable the shadows were in the wings.

  ‘He looked over his shoulder at me, our eyes met for a split-second, then he rushed off and I screamed. I suppose it was the expression on his face that made me scream.’

  ‘Because it made you realise what he’d done?’

  ‘Yes, I think he’d only just realised himself. His face was . . . I don’t know . . . it was full of fear.’

  ‘Was the gun in his hand?’

  ‘The police asked me that, too, and honestly, I just can’t remember. I didn’t notice his hands.’

  ‘Was he wearing his jacket?’

  ‘Again I just don’t know. All I seemed to see was his face – or maybe just his eyes. I can’t get them out of my mind even now. Those eyes full of terror. I felt awful, as if I had hurt him. He was always very unstable, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’ Charles reckoned he could take advantage of her lethargic state to push a bit further. ‘I suppose, of course, you had hurt him.’

  ‘You mean by going off with Micky?’

  Charles nodded.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. It didn’t really seem like that at the time. I mean Micky just seemed so nice, so friendly and, in a strange way, so lonely. Going and having a few meals with him didn’t seem evil or furtive in any way. Somehow it was difficult to feel anything was wrong with Micky around.’

  He knew what she meant. Michael Banks’s effortless charm no doubt carried through into his romantic life.

  ‘And it was just a few meals . . .?

  He had hoped she wouldn’t notice the impertinence, but she coloured and began angrily, ‘I don’t see that that’s any business of yours . . . but yes, it was.’

  ‘Whereas with Alex . . .?’

  ‘That again is no business of yours . . .’

  ‘Come on, we were all in Taunton together . . . It certainly had the look, to the impartial observer, of a full-blown affair.’

  ‘All right, yes. But I had wanted to break it off after Taunton. It was getting awkward, even before I met Micky.’

  ‘Awkward?’ Charles fed gently.

  ‘Alex was so strange. The more time I spent with him, the stranger he seemed to be. All his mystical religion thing, his faddishness about food, his belief in being close to nature, following nature . . . all that appealed to me at first. It was so unlike anything I had come across before. He was so unlike any of the people I had met before . . .’

  Certainly unlike the nice middle-class friends of Mr. and Mrs. Decker, Charles imagined.

  ‘But, after a time, I began to see all his ideas as sort of odd, not charming eccentricities, but . . . you know, symptoms.’

  ‘Symptoms of what?’

  ‘Of his mental state. I knew he had had the breakdown and at first I didn’t mind. I thought, oh, he just needs someone who really loves him and will look after him . . .’

  ‘And you thought you could supply that want?’

  She nodded. ‘I thought we really would make a new start, that I would sort of . . . make him blossom.’

  She blushed as if aware of the cliché she was using. Charles wondered how many naive young girls had got caught in messy affairs with older men from the belief that they could bring new love into their lives and ‘make them blossom’.

  ‘But,’ he prompted.

  ‘But I came to realise that it’s all very well gambolling about the countryside feeling at one with nature, but people don’t change completely. We couldn’t go on pretending that the first forty-seven years of Alex’s life hadn’t happened. And, as soon as I realised that, as soon as I thought about his breakdown, I started to worry, I started to see just how unstable he still was. I started to be afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Afraid he would do something . . . well, something like he did do last week.’

  Charles nodded slowly. ‘What about now? Where do you think he is now?’

  Tears came to her eyes. ‘I think he’ll have killed himself.’

  Charles nodded again. It seemed depressingly likely.

  Further conversation was prevented by the door opening, unknocked, to admit Valerie Cass. She was smartly dressed in a fawn trouser suit and seemed in high spirits.

  ‘Hello, darling, I’ve brought you some – oh, hello.’ This last was to acknowledge Charles, whom she looked at for a moment with suspicion.

  ‘Charles just dropped in to wish me luck,’ Lesley-Jane supplied hastily.

  Don’t worry, Valerie, I’m not another older man sniffing round your precious daughter. Which, considering the fate of the last two, is perhaps just as well.

  As
a matter of fact, I don’t really fancy her. I used to, I think, but since I met you and saw what she was likely to turn into, I seem to have gone off her. In spite of your excellent state of preservation, Valerie Cass, I’m afraid there’s something about you that doesn’t appeal to me.

  Valerie cut short further interior monologue by gracing him with a smile and saying, ‘I just brought Lesley-Jane some home-made soup for the interval. She doesn’t eat properly. I keep saying she should eat little and often, but the young don’t listen. You have a daughter, don’t you, Charles?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t see her that often.’

  She leapt on this, a useful confirmation of one of her pet theories. ‘Yes, as usual no doubt it’s the woman who’s left to take care of things. Poor Frances, I do feel for her.’

  ‘My daughter is twenty-eight, you know, quite capable of looking after herself without her parents breathing down her neck all the time.’ He just managed to resist adding, ‘Yours is twenty, and I would have thought the same went for her too.’

  Sensing that something of the sort might be going through his mind, Lesley-Jane interposed, ‘We were just talking about Micky’s death.’

  ‘Oh, what a terrible tragedy.’ Valerie Cass made an elaborate gesture, reminding Charles once again what a bad actress she had been. ‘It was so awful for all of us. Lesley-Jane was desolated, but desolated. I was so glad that I was up here when she came off stage. If ever there was a moment when a girl needed her mother, that was it. And to sort of protect her during all that police interrogation. I was just glad I could be of help.’

  She smiled beatifically. She seemed to have new confidence in her hold over her daughter. It’s an ill wind, thought Charles. Micky Banks’s death and Alex Household’s disappearance were tragedies, but at least they had removed possible rivals for Valerie’s daughter’s affections.

  And Lesley-Jane didn’t seem to mind her mother’s renewed take-over. In her shocked lethargy, she seemed content to let Valerie run around after her and do everything for her.

  But Michael Banks’s memory remained sacred. Perhaps, after all, Valerie hadn’t resented him, grateful for his reflected glory. That seemed to be the case from what she said next. ‘Poor, dear Micky. Such a terrible tragedy. And just when he and Lesley-Jane were getting close. Oh, I know some people would say it was May and December, but I thought it was a lovely relationship. He just seemed so delighted, so rejuvenated to meet my little baby. What might have been . . .’