Final Act

by J M Gregson

  So what she and Martin thought of as their secret hadn’t died with Sam Jackson, as they had both presumed when they spoke on Wednesday. Clark had known all about it, and his death last night hadn’t released them. He’d left things behind which these quietly insistent men were now aware of. Sandra said dully, hopelessly, ‘You’re right. It wasn’t just the relationship between Martin and me that Sam and apparently Eric knew about. He could hardly have blackmailed us with that, which was what in effect he was doing.’

  ‘You’d appeared in a porn movie together in 1987.’ Let’s have that on the table and move forward, Lambert thought impatiently.

  ‘Yes. We were very young and very stupid. I was nineteen or twenty and Martin was just a little older, but still completely unknown and unsuccessful as an actor. I’d had my tits on page three and not much beyond that; I was still trying to get into acting. You took whatever you could get as youngsters trying to scratch a living out of a profession which didn’t want you. That’s how it felt. We took a porn movie because it was the only thing that had been offered to us in months. The maker of it knew that we were an item at the time so that it was nothing new for us to get our kit off and give each other one with enthusiasm – I remember that phrase even now, you see. The only thing different is that there would be a discreetly placed camera, he said. By today’s standards it was pretty mild stuff and it didn’t pay much, but we were both desperate for money and even more desperate for any kind of work in the profession. I can see now that it was hardly that, but it seemed like some sort of stepping stone into professional acting at the time.’

  ‘We’re not interested in taking high moral ground, Miss Rokeby. We’re interested in any connection this might have had with the murders of Samuel Jackson and Ernest Clark.’

  It sounded odd to hear Sam and Ernie named formally like that. More threatening, somehow. She said as brightly as she could, ‘That’s good, then. Because it had nothing to do with either of these deaths.’

  ‘That porn movie was being used against you, wasn’t it?’

  She smiled, still pale beneath her minimal make-up. ‘I’ve had worse things to contend with than that over the last twenty-five years.’

  ‘Maybe. But Sam Jackson and Ernie Clark knew that publicising the fact that you appeared in something like that would seriously affect your career and even more seriously affect Martin Buttivant’s career.’

  She looked at him as coolly as she could. ‘It’s a motive, I suppose. We knew all about it with Sam because he used anything that he could against you. Sometimes it would be to keep your salary down when you had a recurring role, as Martin had. Sometimes it would be to make you appear in a particular episode when you had other plans for the summer, as I had.’ She didn’t see how they could contest that, whether they believed her or not. ‘I didn’t know that Ernie Clark knew about it; I don’t imagine Martin did, either. So it’s not a motive for killing him for either of us, so far as I can see.’

  ‘Unless one or both of you found out that Mr Clark knew about the porn movie between Jackson’s death on Tuesday and his shooting last night.’

  ‘I didn’t. I don’t suppose Martin Buttivant did either. I know I didn’t kill Ernie and I should be astounded if Martin had done it.’

  ‘This would have been a convenient joint killing. If you had enticed Mr Clark here, for instance, and Mr Buttivant had put the bullet in his head.’

  Sandra flinched instinctively at the image. She said rather desperately, ‘And where would we have acquired a pistol, if that’s what it was that killed Ernie?’

  ‘I don’t know that. Do you or Mr Buttivant own a pistol?’

  ‘I don’t. Any sort of firearm has always scared me. I wouldn’t have one in my house. I imagine Martin feels much the same. We’re actors, Mr Lambert. We deal all the time in make-believe, not in genuine violence.’

  ‘And yet one of you actors seems to have committed two murders in a week. Whom do you suspect, Miss Rokeby?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s your job, not mine. I wish you’d get on with it. It’s not pleasant, looking round the table at dinner and wondering which of your companions might be a killer.’

  THIRTEEN

  David Deeney phoned his partner in Oxford. It was a fraught exchange, because Deeney was in the grip of a cold, dangerous annoyance he couldn’t remember feeling in years. ‘I didn’t even know you’d seen me dumping those trainers. You certainly shouldn’t have mentioned it to the police. Not without contacting me first.’

  Trevor Fisher sounded like a boy who had been doing his best in an alien adult world, not a mature man. ‘I didn’t know that. You hadn’t said anything to me. I was trying to help the young officer who took my statement. She was very young. Her uniform looked brand new. She’s just making her way in a new career, I think. I was just trying to give her what help I could.’

  David wanted to yell at him for his naivety, to scream at him that he must grow up and live in the real world. The innocence, the unawareness of the darker elements in life had been part of the man’s attraction for him when they had got together. It now seemed not only tiresome but dangerous. He forced himself to speak evenly, feeling as though he was conforming to a part in a play rather than expressing his real feelings. ‘These are police officers, Trevor, whether they’re the grizzled chief super I’ve been dealing with or the newest recruit who apparently was sent out to see you. Their job is to arrest people. If they see the chance of pinning a crime on someone and making an arrest, they’re on to it in a flash. They talk about justice and the long arm of the law, but what they want are arrests and convictions.’

  ‘You’re very cynical. We’re in Britain, not some third -world country. It is our duty to help the police. I thought that you believed in that.’

  David took two very deep breaths before he replied. He was abruptly aware that their whole relationship was at stake here and suddenly conscious that he did not want to lose this wonderfully innocent and unspoiled man from his life. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong, not really. It’s just that we’ve had two murders in our midst in the last three days and things are very fraught here. We’re all looking round and wondering which of us might be mixed up in this. Which of us might even have killed two people.’

  ‘What’s your schedule for today?’

  ‘I’m in the first scene we’re shooting on location. Then I should be free for most of the rest of the day. Unless the bloody police collar me again, of course. I’m now a leading suspect, thanks to you.’ He couldn’t resist the barb; he was reminding the man he loved that his wretched innocence could be a liability amidst the blood and iron which characterized the real world.

  Trevor said, ‘I’ll drive over and see you. I’m due a break from my work, anyway. And I’ve a quiet day today. I was translating stuff for ten hours yesterday, so I’ve earned myself a break.’

  Why did a man in his thirties have to be so damned conscientious, sounding like a dutiful child? Working from home and earning his living as he did from translations, Trevor was his own boss. But David wanted to see Trevor, to assure him that things were all right in the long term, that this wasn’t going to be allowed to spoil things. Unless … That train of thought was better left unexplored. ‘I don’t want you coming to the location site. Meet me in Ross-on-Wye. By the old market cross in the centre. Twelve o’clock?’

  ‘Midday would be ideal for me. I’ll be there. And I’m sorry.’

  Fisher stood looking at his phone for a moment after David had rung off. He’d always known acting was a strange profession, totally alien to him. He was wondering now quite how strange, and whether he should ever have got involved with someone so deeply immersed in it.

  On the location site near Oldford, David Deeney was donning his dog collar and mentally easing himself into the role of vicar. He wasn’t addressing a congregation in the ancient country church in this scene, but talking with his stage wife and two other women in the vicarage. One of the good things about acting was that
you had to forget everything else to do it successfully. Unless you shut out the rest of your life and everything that had happened in the last few days, you wouldn’t be able to play the character as the script required you to do. Concentration had now become a mercy as well as a necessity.

  The vicar who had been so convincing as a man who could communicate with his flock in the church scene he had filmed on Wednesday had another, less public, dimension to demonstrate in this scene. He needed to be enigmatic, to give the merest suggestion that there might be a more sinister side to him. Fortunately, people were quite prepared to consider that clergymen might be morally suspect nowadays, after the revelations of the last few years. Paedophilia and deceit were everywhere among people of the cloth, according to the followers of the more sensationalist tabloids. Nothing was what it seemed and even the most conventional, pious statements should not be accepted at face value.

  David Deeney privately deplored this cynicism in the public, but he found it useful to him this morning as he tried to suggest the many layers of the clergyman he was playing in Herefordshire Horrors. He delivered his unremarkable lines to his wife in a thoroughly conventional way, then introduced a subtle change in tone as he talked to the other women. He was talking about parish matters, but the movements of his eyes suggested a hidden and more devious purpose. There might be a sexual suggestion, even lechery, behind his innocent words, or so the impish brown eyes suggested.

  David enjoyed making his vicar more enigmatic, enjoyed injecting the subtle shaft of danger into his bearing. This was a murder mystery, after all, and the vicar by the end of the proceedings was to be one of the suspects. But you must be subtle: the merest facial suggestion was enough, for a television audience. This was a modern detective mystery, not a Victorian melodrama being played for laughs. People sitting comfortably in front of their television sets must be puzzled, not amused or outraged.

  It took Deeney a couple of minutes to shrug off his television persona after the take was successfully concluded. He folded his dog collar and cassock carefully away in the wardrobe department and offered the girl there a few kind words; it always paid to keep in with the wardrobe staff if you wanted your costumes to fit exactly and becomingly. He sighed as he went out to his car; the real problems of David Deeney were so much more pressing and pertinent than those of the character he was leaving behind. He was almost glad that he had to park a street or two away from his destination. Locking up his car and walking slowly and deliberately up the slope to the meeting place he had suggested gave him a little time to calm his mind and organize what he wanted to say.

  Trevor Fisher was waiting for him in the market square at Ross-on-Wye when he arrived there. David said simply, ‘I’m glad you came.’

  He meant it and it was the right thing to say. Trevor smiled and visibly relaxed. He would never have made an actor, David thought happily. He was far too honest and transparent. There was no malice in him, and without a knowledge of malice, as well as of a lot of other vices, you would always be limited as an actor. Trevor said, ‘I’m sorry again about the trainers. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to mention them to the police. You should have told me that.’

  He was like a large, well-meaning child. Unless you knew him well, you would never realize what an intelligent, thinking, caring man he also was, thought David. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Not really. It caused me a certain amount of embarrassment with the police. It wasn’t something I could easily explain away.’

  ‘Why did you need to explain it away, David?’

  He wouldn’t understand, of course he wouldn’t. Tell the truth and shame the devil was something Trevor Fisher had learned in childhood and observed ever since. And it had served him surprisingly well. He was a respected member of the intelligentsia in Oxford where he worked, respected for his facility in four different languages. Translating at home wasn’t especially lucrative, but it was the right occupation for him. He would never have risen in any business in the city, because he would never tell the small lies and do the small, mean actions which might get him ahead of others. But Fisher was happy with what he did, far happier than he would be if he’d had to work with others and accept their foibles and weaknesses. Happy is he who is without pettiness and has found an occupation which will accommodate him, thought David Deeney. He took his lover’s hand and said, ‘It will be all right, Trevor, really it will. Let’s find somewhere where we can get a bite to eat.’

  They found a small café which served light lunches and sat in a quiet alcove where they could talk. David had felt exposed, even for an instant ashamed, as he had taken Trevor’s hand with people hurrying past them in the market square, but that was something he would never be able to explain to Trevor. Instead, he said, ‘It’s all been very fraught in the hotel, since Sam Jackson was killed on Tuesday. It’s going to be even more so, now that we’ve lost Ernie Clark.’

  ‘He was murdered too, not just lost, you said.’ It was characteristic of Fisher that he could not accept even that small evasion.

  ‘Yes. Everyone is on edge. Everyone is looking at the others across the table and wondering what they know.’

  ‘It must be horrid for you. Have you any idea who killed these men?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t like them, did you? You didn’t like either of them.’

  It was a statement, not a question. David wondered what implications his partner was drawing from it. He tried a full, patient explanation. ‘No one liked Sam Jackson. We worked with him because we had to do that or not work at all. He had the money to finance things. Finance is a permanent problem in the theatre and in drama generally. Plays are expensive things to produce, particularly if they have big casts and varied locations. That’s why so many things in the theatre now have only three or four actors. Television has potentially a much wider audience and thus more potential, but drama is still the most expensive thing it does. That’s why more and more of it is bought in from independent companies. That’s why people like Sam Jackson are more powerful than they’ve ever been: there aren’t many people around prepared to put up the money for risky projects.’

  He couldn’t remember if he’d said any of this to Trevor before. Probably not; Fisher had always shied away from theatre talk, as he said it made him feel very ignorant. It was more likely that he felt sullied by such things, thought David Deeney resentfully. Some of us have to live in the real world so that others can refuse to be soiled by it. That wasn’t fair; Trevor didn’t earn as much as he was bringing in at the moment, but he earned enough, and he brought it home regularly and reliably, unlike all but a very few actors.

  Trevor said, ‘Sam Jackson didn’t like people like us, did he?’

  David shrugged, perhaps a little too elaborately. ‘Sam didn’t like anyone, as far as I could see. He used whatever he could to insult people and keep them in their subordinate places. In my case, it was my homosexuality. If I hadn’t been gay, he’d have found something else; he was that sort of man.’

  ‘Homosexuality.’ Trevor enunciated the seven syllables carefully and slowly. ‘It must be horrible when someone who controls your life treats you like that. It must make you very angry. It must make you want to kill him.’

  It was spoken quietly but very deliberately. It was no more than speculation, but it rang like an accusation over the slice of cheesecake which Trevor was dividing carefully with his cake fork. Deeney’s brown eyes looked hard into Fisher’s blue ones for seconds which seemed to stretch painfully long. ‘You’re right. It did make me angry. But I’ve met with lots of that sort of thing over the years and I’ve learned to grind my teeth and ignore it. I didn’t kill Sam Jackson.’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t. I never thought you did. But why get rid of a perfectly good pair of trainers which were scarcely worn?’

  He was like a child picking at a scab because he could not leave it alone. He really doesn’t live in the real world, David thought irritably. ‘Because it seemed rational to me a
t the time to do that. The police obviously considered me a suspect. I would have done the same, in their position. I’d worn those trainers when I’d been to see Sam in his caravan within hours of his death. I watched the scene of crime team picking up soil samples from the carpet in there and from the steps outside and I knew that some of it, perhaps all of it, must have come from the soles of my shoes. I felt threatened. The logical thing at the time seemed to be to ditch the shoes.’

  He’d almost said ‘the evidence’, but that would have been the wrong word to use with Trevor.

  Fisher said, ‘You didn’t like Ernie Clark either, did you?’

  Deeney wanted to deny that, but he knew he must have said it to Trevor Fisher at some time, for that very literal man to be quoting it at him now. He wished in a frantic second of self-knowledge that he could be as honest and straightforward as his companion. ‘No, I didn’t. I’m not quite sure why. He didn’t go out of his way to be deliberately offensive, like Sam. I think he just didn’t much like actors. It’s emerging now that he knew everything that Sam knew about all of us. I suppose we should have expected that. As producer and assistant producer, they had mutual interests; the secrets which gave Sam power over us could be just as useful to Ernie, if he chose to use them.’

  ‘And someone’s now killed Ernie.’

  Trevor was looking full into his face as he said it. It seemed again like an accusation, but it might have been no more than a genuine curiosity – after all, not many people had to deal with murder once in their lives, let alone twice in three days. David said carefully, ‘Yes they have. Last night, it seems, from what I was able to gather from the others. He wasn’t staying in the hotel, but he came there in his car. The rumour is that someone shot him.’ He’d chosen that word ‘rumour’ deliberately. It somehow seemed to make the crime more distant from him than if he’d stated it as an established fact. ‘The police were swarming all over the hotel and the car park when I left to go for the filming at the location site.’