Final Act

by J M Gregson

  It was bold, even impertinent, Sandra thought. But there was reason in it. Deeney was a highly capable actor. His Warwick would be quiet but menacing, an obvious danger to Joan even in the scenes where her enthusiasm carried her forward and made her seem more than mortal.

  David said, ‘I would be interested, were it ever to come to fruition. I should point out that I already have an agent with whom I am well satisfied.’

  ‘That’s no problem,’ said James brightly. ‘I wouldn’t be looking for any profit from the casting of Warwick. It’s simply that I want Peg as my client to be surrounded with the best possible players and I think that your experience and ability would be of great help to her.’

  Deeney looked at him for a moment, then turned and beamed unexpectedly upon Peg Reynolds. ‘He might go far as an agent, this man. He already has all the right talk.’

  It was spoken light-heartedly and Turner knew it. But he said earnestly, ‘Do you know, I think you might be right? I think I might be much better at representing good actors than trying to be one myself! I’ve already had three important phone conversations and I have to say I positively enjoyed myself. Maybe I’ve found my natural metier at last!’ He grinned at Deeney and then at Peg, who looked both delighted and relieved.

  It was John Watts, fulfilling his function as the unofficial factotum of the company, who spoke from four places away down the table. ‘Good for you, James! I speak as a failed actor myself. I was struggling in bit parts for a couple of years before someone gave me my chance as a director. I wondered constantly why small parts didn’t lead in turn to bigger ones, but the truth was that I simply wasn’t good enough. It’s not easy to be objective about oneself and the effects one is making, and least of all in acting. If you’re an accountant, I presume you get things right or wrong and the evidence stares up at you on paper. When you’re on stage, it’s such a nervy business and everyone is so much on edge about their own performance that they tell you you’re marvellous, even if you’re crap. Eventually, I saw the rushes of a little scene I’d done for telly and realized I was rubbish. I think it was something in which Sir Bradley was starring, actually!’

  Morton smiled at him graciously. ‘I don’t remember, John. It was no doubt a long time ago, because you’ve been known as a highly successful director for at least twenty years. So the stage lost an indifferent actor and gained an imaginative and sensitive director, from which actors have benefited ever since. These things work themselves out, if we allow them to.’

  It was perhaps too glib a cliché to stand up to close examination, but it was the sort of thing they all wanted to hear. Despite the sensational crimes which beset them still, this was after all the conclusion of a successful week of location shooting, and they were allowed to be sentimental and affectionate towards each other. They drank freely as the laughter rose higher, but not as much as they would have expected. There was the pleasant fatigue which follows high tension, and each of them was reluctant to be the one who broke up the company.

  They did not go out and walk by the river, as many of them had intended to do. Their warm lethargy kept them tonight in the lounge, where the laughter and the ancient theatrical reminiscences continued. They didn’t see the trophy retrieved from the Wye by the policeman-angler and the frogman-angler whom Bert Hook had recruited earlier in the day. It was a clear, sunlit evening and the twilight lasted for a long time. But the light was fading fast when they lifted their trophy from a shallow pool where the river turned gently towards the west.

  The pistol which had ended the life of Ernest Clark gleamed softly in the near-darkness.

  Back in the bungalow which was his haven, John Lambert set the remote control firmly into Christine’s hands and demanded that she make the television decisions.

  The decision was in fact quite easy – probably the one John would have made for himself had he been in control. Several nights earlier, they had recorded a BBC documentary about Melvyn Bragg. John was an admirer as she was of the Cumbrian polymath. They had been looking forward to watching this together. It wasn’t disappointing. It was the kind of thing the BBC did well and American television would never have ventured upon, said John after twenty minutes.

  They went through Bragg’s early life as a humble working-class boy and his gaining entry to the grammar school. As always, there was a teacher who had been a particular inspiration. Melvyn was generous about his influence and his work with the brighter sixth-form boys, and the programme dug him out as an alert ninety-three-year-old and united him with his former protégé. Bragg was lively as always and as Labour peer in the House of Lords, contrived effortlessly to insult both Eton and its latest Conservative prime minister.

  It was an item towards the end of the documentary which made John Lambert ease himself softly forward on to the edge of his seat and become full of rapt attention. He sat very still for five minutes when the recording had finished, then rang Bert Hook. His sergeant had seen the programme when it was first broadcast several days previously, but he had not made the connection his chief had made with the key item in it.

  It was well after ten now, but the pair spent twelve minutes in earnest exchanges before Lambert said almost as an afterthought, ‘Your men found what I’m certain will prove to be the weapon which murdered Ernie Clark, by the way. They came up with a pistol in the Wye, almost exactly opposite the spot in the car park where Clark died. The station rang me an hour or so ago.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll get a confession?’

  ‘I don’t know. These actors operate in a different world from yours and mine. I’ll pick you up at around a quarter to nine.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Lambert drove slowly through the lanes of Herefordshire, which were heavy with the bright green of new leaves. He was giving himself time to think. As he’d said to Hook last night, he wasn’t used to actors and he wasn’t sure of the best tactics to adopt with this one.

  Sir Bradley Morton was standing by the desk in the reception area of the hotel, perusing a copy of The Times. He greeted them affably. When they said that this needed somewhere private, he suggested immediately that they should retire to his room. ‘We shall all be moving out today, I expect,’ he said as they mounted the stairs. ‘It’s a relief to have this week over.’ It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to the location filming or to the dramatic deaths on Tuesday and Thursday of the week. Strange lot, these actors, Lambert told himself once again.

  Sir Bradley had the best accommodation in the hotel, as befitted a well-loved national treasure. It was a suite rather than a single bedroom, the spacious main room had a king-size double bed, a large wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and two armchairs. There was a small dressing room between the bedroom and the spacious en suite bathroom beyond it.

  ‘I didn’t ask for this,’ said Morton, almost apologetically. ‘I think it’s supposed to be the bridal suite. I was simply allotted it amongst the accommodation which had been booked for the company. I suppose having a title helps. The British are still very class conscious, aren’t they, and hotels more than anyone?’ He set his visitors comfortably in the two armchairs and perched himself on the edge of the bed to face them. ‘And what can I do to help the long arm of the law today?’

  ‘You went to hospital in Gloucester yesterday. You were driven there by Miss Rokeby, I believe. Could you tell us the nature of your illness, please?’

  His bonhomie faded. ‘That is private. If I choose to keep the details to myself, that is surely my business.’

  ‘Not if it has any sort of bearing upon events earlier in the week.’ Lambert’s tone was as uncompromising as his expression.

  Morton glared at him, tried to stare him down, and failed. He dropped his eyes to the carpet, focussed on a wisp of cotton which must have fallen from the bed, allowed the silence to stretch whilst he thought. ‘I don’t suppose it matters. I was going to tell the others when it was time for us to break up and go our separate ways. I planned to tell them today that I wouldn’t be
working with them again and thank them for what we’ve had together – what they’ve given to me and what I hope I’ve given to them.’

  ‘You were going to tell them this morning that your illness was terminal?’

  Lambert seemed to know and Brad decided that made it easier. They knew all sorts of things, these coppers, and this John Lambert seemed to know more than most. ‘I was going to tell them that I expect to be dead in six weeks, two months at the outside. That somehow seems more dramatic than terminal. We actors like to be dramatic, whenever we can. You may have noticed that.’

  ‘When did you decide to kill Sam Jackson?’

  The detective was making it easier for him with his knowledge, with his assumption that they both knew all about this. But Brad answered him with another question: ‘What was it that made you suspect me? I’ve less obvious motive than most of the others.’

  ‘You told me five minutes into our first meeting how much you admired Dennis Potter as a television playwright.’

  ‘Ah, vanity, you see. The actor’s besetting sin. I have an image as a chaser of skirts and a leerer at camera lenses and I wanted to be associated with something more worthy and intellectual and challenging. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” as the Good Book tells us. Dennis was born in the village of Berry Hill in the Forest of Dean, you know. I was born within ten miles of there, a year or two later than him. We both endured bible quotations at least twice on Sundays, when we were children.’

  ‘But you had more personal connections than that. You appeared in some of his plays, as you told us on Thursday.’ He wanted suddenly to be generous to this peacockish, mistaken, dying man.

  ‘Yes. I was in Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton back in 1965. I was only a lad then, taking my first steps in acting. And I was in Pennies from Heaven in 1978. Only bit parts, mind you, both times. You’d hardly have noticed me if you hadn’t been vigilant. My mum was vigilant; she was still alive then.’ Death had strange effects, he thought. It was making him both honest and modest, two of the things he had long since forgotten in his acting and public personas.

  ‘It was your mention of Potter which connected you with this week’s deaths. Not until last night, unfortunately.’

  The old knight frowned. ‘Why then?’ He wasn’t going to argue his innocence – there was no point, with the grim reaper waiting in the wings.

  Lambert smiled sadly. ‘My wife played me a recording she’d made of a BBC programme. A documentary about Melvyn Bragg. I don’t know when it was first broadcast.’

  ‘They tried to get him to interview me once, you know. Just after I’d been knighted, I think. My people thought it would be good for me to appear with an intellectual heavyweight and his people thought – well, I don’t quite know what they thought. Perhaps that it would be good for Melvyn to be seen slumming it with popular culture. Anyway, it never came off. “Pressure of commitments” both sides said. That’s what they always say when they don’t want to reveal the truth.’

  This was the most curious unmasking of a killer John Lambert had ever undertaken. He said almost reluctantly, ‘There was a brief extract from Bragg’s interview with the dying Dennis Potter in the programme I saw last night. It was when he was in the grip of cancer and had to take swigs of morphine juice.’

  ‘I remember. I expect I shall get to that stage, eventually.’ He spoke as if that would satisfy some of his curiosity about the process of death. ‘That was a magnificent last outburst from Dennis. The dying of the light. He did not go gentle into that good night.’

  ‘Indeed he didn’t. Unfortunately, I remembered some of the things he said. And one in particular.’

  ‘Did you really? It’s never been rebroadcast in its entirety, that interview, which is a great pity, in my view.’

  ‘You obviously recall it very well, Brad.’ It was the first time he had used the old actor’s first name: an acknowledgement that the normal formalities of police interviewing had gone for ever now for Morton. ‘Dennis Potter said that impending death absolved you of the consequences of your actions. He said that he would like to kill someone, because of what he considered his baleful influence on the media. No one took him seriously, because he was far too ill by then to make the journey and take the steps to kill anyone.’

  ‘Rupert Murdoch.’

  ‘That’s whom Dennis had singled out for dispatch, yes. The victim scarcely matters. It was the idea of being able to kill someone without retribution when you are under a natural sentence of death yourself which interested you – and which now has to interest me.’

  ‘It’s quite an attractive option, don’t you think? But then I don’t suppose you’d feel qualified to comment, not having experienced the situation for yourself.’

  ‘You decided that you would rid the world of Sam Jackson.’

  ‘I decided that he was my equivalent of what Murdoch was for Dennis. I have a narrower perspective than Dennis Potter, as befits my inferior intellect. But I could offer a great service to my fellow actors, many of whom I had grown to love, by removing that vile man from their presence and from the world’s presence.’

  ‘You should tell us now how you did it, Brad, to complete the formalities.’

  ‘It was surprisingly easy, you know. I walked into that caravan of his on Tuesday and waited for him to insult me or threaten me. It took him about thirty seconds to do both. He didn’t realize that I was near death and therefore unassailable. He’d left his tie conveniently loose for me, almost as if he was a willing accessory to the deed. I freed the knot and twisted both ends vigorously, more vigorously than I would ever have thought possible. I think he must have been almost dead before he even realized what I was about.’

  ‘Why did you kill him, Brad? What had you to gain by having him dead?’

  Sir Bradley Morton smiled benignly, first at Lambert and then at Hook, as if they were merely inviting him to state the obvious. ‘I was rendering a public service. Surely you can see that? Just the same as Dennis Potter felt he would have been, if he could have got at his target.’

  ‘But Potter recognized even as he stated the idea that he couldn’t possibly reach his target, didn’t he? There was something rather impish about it, as I remember it.’

  ‘Maybe. That means I was much luckier, then, doesn’t it? My target was accessible. And the world is much better off without Jackson, isn’t it? Have you heard one person regret his death?’

  There was little point in discussing ethics or morality with this bright-eyed, confident man. ‘There would be anarchy if no one respected the law, Brad.’

  ‘But most people do. For most of their lives, they have to. Only a tiny minority are in a position to behave as I have done. If every person who knows that he is about to die took out one villain, the world would be a better place.’

  ‘We cannot allow people to make arbitrary decisions about who deserves to be eliminated and who should survive.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe not everyone is as clear-sighted as I was. Maybe not everyone will have as unequivocal a villain as Sam Jackson to attack.’

  ‘But violence leads to more violence. We see it all the time, in our work. You went on to kill Ernie Clark.’

  ‘Yes. I hadn’t envisaged that at all. But Ernie brought it upon himself.’

  The old killer’s mantra. The absence of any hint of conscience as one crime led on to another. ‘You contacted him – arranged to meet him in the car park here.’

  Morton glanced automatically though the window of his suite, towards the spot at the end of the car park where Clark had carefully parked his Jaguar thirty-six hours earlier. ‘I found that he was proposing to carry on in the same way Sam Jackson had done. That was shocking, to me. That’s why I asked him to meet me privately.’

  ‘I think you should tell us what happened at this private meeting, don’t you?’

  He nodded, as casually as if he had been accepting a suggestion for a minor move on stage. ‘Ernie wasn’t as flamboyant as Sam had been, but he mad
e it clear to me that he had all the information on the people in his cast that Sam had accumulated. He made it clear that he would blackmail people with their past sins just as unscrupulously, if he found it necessary to do so. That was his phrase. He said Sam had enjoyed being a bastard and that he wouldn’t enjoy it, but he would behave like a bastard if necessary. He said I wasn’t being realistic if I thought anything was going to change with Sam’s death. That was when I decided that he would have to go. I’d never planned on that, but it became necessary.’

  It was the sort of phrase they’d heard before from ruthless killers who had lost all moral sense. It came oddly from his amiable, grey-haired, seventy-three-year-old whom the media had installed as a national treasure. It was Bert Hook who took it upon himself to prompt the recital of the next part of the story. ‘Mr Clark had a pistol.’

  ‘Yes. He was absurdly proud of it. I think he enjoyed boasting about how he was bold enough to possess it. It’s not usual in our game to be armed, you know. I think Ernie is the first man I’ve known in the world of drama who actually possessed a firearm and boasted that he’d be able to defend himself if necessary.’

  ‘How long had he had it?’

  Sir Bradley looked into Hook’s rubicund, curiously innocent features and found them strangely reassuring. ‘Certainly since we began filming the first episode of the Inspector Loxton series. Maybe longer than that. A Beretta, it was. As far as I know, he’d never fired the thing. He just seemed ridiculously pleased to have it. He called it his “little weakness” to me. I don’t think many of the others even knew that he had such a weapon. Actors don’t usually offer much of a physical threat – not to powerful men like producers. But he was quite vain about that pistol. When I asked if he still had it, he produced it from the glove box of the Jag. He showed me that it was loaded and where the safety catch was. Then he waved it about and said it was always available to him if people got above themselves and forgot who was really the boss.’