by Simon Brett
Ned English was thoughtful. ‘Sounds like a woman’s crime.’
‘Mm?’
‘Done by someone who knows how women’s minds work, how often they tidy up their make-up and so on.’
‘Maybe. What would you say to the theory, Ned, that Billie-Louise, realizing there was no way you were going to do it for her, sabotaged Katrina’s mascara herself?’
‘Doesn’t work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the night Katrina died – and indeed the nights either side – Billie-Louise was staying in my flat in London.’
‘She couldn’t have come down here without you knowing?’
Ned shook his head. ‘I spoke to her a good few times every day on the landline.’
‘Ah.’
‘But,’ the director went on, ‘if you’re right about that business with bleach or acid in the mascara, then I saw something rather interesting that evening.’
‘Oh?’
‘I didn’t think about it at the time, because why should I? But during the first act, after your scene on the battlements – you know, Hamlet and the Ghost, just before the Polonius and Reynaldo scene – I came backstage to give Sam a note. I’d thought of something he could do differently in the Play Scene. Anyway, as I was going into the wings, I met someone who was holding a tube of mascara.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ Ned nodded thoughtfully as a new block of logic slotted in. ‘And it was someone who would benefit very directly from Katrina being out of the show.’
Charles Paris felt pretty sure he knew the answer, but still asked, ‘Who?’
‘Milly Henryson,’ said the director.
TWENTY-ONE
When he woke on the Saturday morning, for some reason Charles Paris didn’t have the hangover that his antics of the previous day so richly deserved. Dryish mouth and the shadow of a headache, but that was all. And copious draughts of water dealt with those symptoms.
His condition made him feel perversely virtuous. And his mind was working beautifully.
It would be the Hamlet company’s last day in Marlborough. A matinee and an evening performance, then the whole bandwagon would move on to Malvern. The skull set would hopefully be re-erected in the theatre there in time for a Dress Rehearsal on the Monday evening, and the play would open to an Elgar-loving audience on the Tuesday. Just one week in Malvern, then on for weeks in Wilmslow and Newcastle before – hopefully – after another week of rehearsal in London, the Tony Copeland production of Hamlet would take up its rightful berth in the West End’s Richardson Theatre.
In the old days, thought Charles Paris nostalgically, we’d have worked through the weekend and opened in Malvern on the Monday. But astronomical rates of overtime and revised Equity regulations had made working on Sunday a rare event for most contemporary actors. So immediately after that Saturday evening’s performance, many of the Hamlet company would shake the dust of Marlborough off their heels and be in cars on their way back to London. And those who didn’t go then would be off first thing on the Sunday morning.
Charles Paris would be one of the latter group, travelling by taxi and train. He hadn’t owned a car since the early, ‘conventional’ period of his marriage to Frances, when they’d spent much of their time ferrying their daughter Juliet to school, ballet classes, parties and all those other essential social commitments of a young girl’s life. It felt like a very long time ago, before the encroachments of working away from home, infidelities and booze had put too much strain on the relationship for Charles and Frances to continue cohabiting. He’d asked himself the where-did-it-all-go-wrong question too many times to bother asking it again that Saturday morning.
Given the natural break in the Hamlet production schedule, Charles really hoped that he could unravel the mystery of Katrina Selsey’s death before the company left Marlborough. There would be a neatness about that, for one thing. Also, Charles Paris had read enough crime fiction to know how difficult it is to investigate a crime when you’re away from the place where it happened.
His optimism about a successful outcome was higher than it had been at any time since Katrina died. Milly Henryson had always been in the frame. Nobody had a stronger motive for getting Katrina Selsey out of the way, and the understudy was already reaping the benefit of her crime by playing the part of Ophelia.
And now Charles had what amounted to a witness statement from Ned English. The director had seen Milly Henryson holding a tube of mascara on the night that Katrina’s tube of mascara had been fatally doctored. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to join the dots on that one.
Charles Paris found that crime investigation was very like doing The Times crossword. Some days its logic was impenetrable, he couldn’t find any verbal links anywhere. Then came the occasional day when he got the first answer the moment he looked at the clue and put in the rest of the solutions almost as quickly as he could write them down.
That Saturday morning felt like one of those Times crossword moments. And, as if to confirm the feeling that everything was going his way, the moment Charles had this thought his mobile bleeped, telling him he’d got a text message.
It was from the stage management, listing the day’s calls for the Hamlet company. The actors were called for the customary ‘half’, thirty-five minutes before the start of the matinee. But the backstage crew were called for twelve o’clock to plan the get-out after the evening show.
And, of course, as she’d told him in The Pessimist’s Arms, Milly Henryson was still expected to fulfil her ASM duties.
Charles kind of knew that Milly was one of those people who’d be early for things. Well brought up, polite, thoughtful girl. Well educated too – she’d been to a school with a very good headmistress.
So, because he was experiencing one of those rare days when nothing could go wrong, he was unsurprised to find the girl alone in the Green Room when he arrived at the Grand Theatre at eleven thirty. And – another measure of how good a day he was having – she was alone, reading a copy of The Stage.
He did not hesitate about going to sit next to her. ‘So,’ he said, ‘soon it’ll be goodbye to Marlborough.’
‘Yes.’
‘And will you leave with pleasant memories?’
She grimaced. ‘Some. It’s kind of my first professional job in a proper theatre, which is good. And then it’s been great, getting my big break, getting a chance to act with Sam. But …’ Her expression suggested those pluses were outweighed by the minuses.
‘Hm.’ Charles realized he didn’t have time to be delicate in his approach. Soon other members of the stage management team would be arriving. The window for private conversation would be a short one. ‘I wanted to talk to you about getting your big break.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s an ill wind and all that. You get your big break, but what did Katrina Selsey get?’
Milly Henryson coloured. ‘Look, obviously I’d rather the circumstances had been different, but I don’t have to tell you, Charles, how important a part luck plays in the theatre. Yes, my good luck was a result of Katrina’s incredibly bad luck, but it’d be stupid for me to feel any guilt about that.’
‘Would it?’ asked Charles Paris pointedly.
‘What do you mean?’
No time for equivocation. Hit her with the facts. ‘During the first half of the show, Milly, the night Katrina died, you were seen backstage with a tube of mascara.’
‘Yes.’ The girl turned the full beam of her dark-blue eyes on him. She looked completely innocent, but Charles Paris had encountered too much duplicity in his life to be fooled by that.
He was, however, a little taken aback when Milly said, ‘I have it with me every night.’
‘What for?’
‘Well, for Sam, obviously.’
‘For Sam?’
‘Charles, you know Sam has very pale eyelashes. For them to register onstage he has to use a lot of mascara.’
‘Oh?’ said Charles Paris
, feeling his card-house of conjecture beginning to topple.
‘And always when he comes off after his scene with you on the battlements … well, it’s so powerful, the way the two of you play it …’
‘Thank you,’ said Charles Paris, unable to curb the actor’s instinctive hunger for a compliment.
‘And Sam almost always ends up with tears pouring down his cheeks, so I stand in the wings with the mascara, so that I can repair the damage before his next scene.’
‘Oh. And what do you do with the mascara once you’ve done that?’
‘Put it in Sam’s dressing room.’
‘So the night Katrina died, what—?’
Charles looked up to see Bazza enter the Green Room. The stagehand scowled at him. The tête-à-tête with Milly Henryson was at an end.
Thank God, thought Charles, that I didn’t actually accuse her of doctoring Katrina’s mascara, that I didn’t accuse her of murder.
But that was lower in the pecking order of his thoughts than the main one. With a sickening crunch of logic, Charles Paris realized that every idea he’d had about the case up until that moment had been based on a false premise.
TWENTY-TWO
Charles left the theatre to buy a sandwich for his lunch, then went up to his dressing room to eat it. There was no one else there and there wouldn’t be till round one fifty-five, the ‘half’ before the two-thirty matinee.
His mind was too full to notice what was in the sandwich. He thought back again to the evening of Katrina Selsey’s death. Nobody but Peri Maitland knew of the plan to hijack Sam Newton-Reid’s dressing room. Milly Henryson had returned the tube of mascara there once she’d repaired his make-up after the battlements scene with the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father. There was a perfectly reasonable chance that whoever introduced the corrosive into the tube had effected the sabotage then, before Katrina’s invasion. The StarHunt winner had never been the target, Sam Newton-Reid had. And, as with Katrina, the aim had been to cause an injury rather than death.
So Charles was no longer looking for someone with a grudge against Katrina Selsey. Now it was someone with a grudge against Sam Newton-Reid.
He rang through to Peri Maitland.
‘Charles,’ she said before he had a chance to identify himself. Which must have meant she’d saved his number. ‘I thought we’d agreed that any conversation between us was now closed.’
‘I know we did, but there’s something I need to check with you.’
‘What?’ Her tone was not welcoming.
‘Listen, it’s going back to the night Katrina died.’
‘Surprise, surprise.’
‘I want to know about the mascara.’
‘We went through all this at the hotel.’
‘Yes, but there’s something else I need to check. The mascara tube that Katrina used … was it definitely hers?’
‘I assume so, yes. Why should she be using anyone else’s?’
‘But, I mean, did she actually take it out of her own make-up bag?’
‘No, she picked it up off the table in front of the mirror.’
‘And do you recall bringing that from her previous dressing room?’
‘Charles, for God’s sake! I can’t remember every bloody detail. It’s not as if I was making a video of what we were doing.’
‘No, but—’
‘Look, we were in a rush. I was just going along with Katrina’s mad idea to avoid another tantrum from her. And we were worried about people seeing what we were doing, so we just grabbed everything from Katrina’s dressing room and dumped it in Sam’s. Then we grabbed his clothes and bag and stuff and dumped them in Katrina’s old dressing room. The whole exercise probably took less than a minute.’
‘And did you take anything of Sam’s from the table in front of the mirror?’
‘I don’t think there was anything of his there.’
‘But there could have been?’
‘What are you on about, Charles? What do you actually want to find out?’
‘I want to find out if it’s possible that the mascara Katrina used was already on the table when you came into the dressing room.’
‘Ah.’ Peri Maitland mulled that over for a moment. ‘Well, yes, I can see that’s a reasonable question to ask. And the answer is: I just don’t know. I suppose it could have been. But then again, that wouldn’t make any sense. Sam Newton-Reid is a chap, Charles. Dong!’ she said in a way he’d noticed young people using to point up a statement of the bleeding obvious. ‘Chaps don’t use mascara. Or at least some do, but I wouldn’t have thought Sam was the type. He seems all red-blooded male, happy with that Milly he’s got.’
Charles didn’t waste time explaining about Sam Newton-Reid’s pale eyelashes. He just said, ‘But it would in theory be possible that Katrina picked up a tube of mascara that was already in the dressing room when you entered it?’
‘It would,’ Peri Maitland replied in a tone of great exasperation, ‘in theory be possible. Though I can’t for the life of me see how that could be important. Now, Charles, will you get off the phone and out of my bloody life!’
Charles Paris felt pretty sure now that he had the solution to the mystery. And his view had shifted a bit. He was moving away from the theory that someone had had a grudge against Sam Newton-Reid. Now he was thinking of someone who had a grudge against the whole show, someone whose aim was to mess things up for Tony Copeland Productions. As Frances had pointed out, you can’t do ‘Hamlet without the Prince’. And a severe eye injury to the actor playing the eponymous hero could really screw things up.
There weren’t many candidates for the role of saboteur. Charles remembered the lines he had heard in The Pessimist’s Arms after Jared Root’s accident. ‘I could also arrange some other accident to screw up your plans.’ And then: ‘If I don’t get more money, you just wait and see what happens.’
Charles reckoned Bazza hadn’t got more money, so he’d taken affairs into his own hands.
TWENTY-THREE
Charles Paris came offstage after the matinee battlements encounter with Hamlet to the sight that Milly Henryson had promised him. She was waiting in the wings, soon to enter for her first scene with Polonius. As Sam Newton-Reid came offstage, she had a handkerchief ready to mop up his tears and a tube of mascara to repair the damage to his wood-shaving eyelashes. They stood close as she titivated his make-up, a rather touchingly domestic scene.
Charles went slowly up to his dressing room, knowing that it would be empty and knowing that he needed time to think. He sat heavily in front of the mirror. Framed by the Ghost’s helmet, the false-bearded face that stared back at him looked distressingly old.
Bazza. He was now convinced of Bazza’s guilt. He remembered the last encounter they’d had in The Pessimist’s Arms. Though the details had been subsequently eclipsed by Doug Haye’s attack on him, Charles had been surprised at the time by Bazza’s overreaction to the accusation of causing Jared Root’s ‘accident’. But he recalled suggesting that the two events might be linked. If the stagehand had thought he was about to be accused of causing Katrina’s death as well, then his response was perhaps not so disproportionate.
The more Charles thought about it, the better Bazza fitted the profile. He might also have had access, amongst all the backstage paraphernalia, to some corrosive substance more powerful than household bleach. Yes, it was definitely Bazza.
Charles Paris’s day was still going well, and he felt excited rather than apprehensive about the forthcoming confrontation. He knew the form. He’d acted out such scenes in any number of dire stage thrillers. (‘As the Detective Inspector, Charles Paris was about as menacing as a kitten.’ – Coventry Evening Telegraph.) The gap between the matinee and the evening performance would probably be his best chance to get Bazza on his own.
His mobile rang. It was on the table where he’d left it when he went on stage. The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father’s armour hadn’t been designed with a suitable pocket for a phone.
�
��Hello?’
‘Charles, it’s Tibor.’
‘Oh, good to hear you. Most enjoyable lunch yesterday.’
‘Well, yes, enjoyable for people who like listening to Portie.’
‘Oh, he’s not so bad. The self-appointed life and soul of any party. Very entertaining.’
‘I agree. But like most entertainments Portie’s conversation should be of finite duration.’
‘Ah, you went on a bit after the lunch, did you?’
‘And how. You see, Portie’s just landed on me. He asked to stay at my place and I couldn’t really say no. He’s drinking me out of house and home. Got to bed at four this morning.’
‘Ah. With Portie talking all the time?’
‘Yes,’ Tibor Pincus replied through clenched teeth. ‘I didn’t get in many words edgeways.’
Charles tried to keep a giggle out of his voice as he said, ‘You have my sympathy.’
‘And what’s more, he hasn’t got any money. God knows what went wrong in the States, but he’s completely skint. Keeps touching me for the odd twenty.’
‘So how on earth did he afford the fare to cross the Pond?’
‘His son paid for that.’
‘Really? So why’s he over here? Just to meet up with his far-flung family?’
‘If he’s going to do that, with the number of bastards he claims to have spawned, it could take quite a long time. But no, I think he’s just come over to see the one son. Which is why I wanted to warn you, Charles.’
‘Warn me of what?’
‘That Portie is about to descend on you.’
‘On me? Why?’
‘Because he knows you’ve got digs in Marlborough and he’s reckoning to crash out there.’
‘But why on earth is Portie coming to Marlborough?’
‘To see his son.’
‘His son’s in Marlborough?’
‘Yes. He’s in your production of Hamlet.’
‘Really?’ But even as he spoke, Charles remembered something. Bewilderment gave way to understanding. Portie’s real name came back to him. Jeremy Portlock. Will Portlock must be his son.
