Murder Unprompted: A Charles Paris Murder Mystery

by Brett, Simon

  ‘As I say, only for a few days. Then she’ll be fine. It’ll be a good three months before she shows, and, with skilful dressing, she could go on a lot longer.’

  ‘But,’ said Charles, ‘It’s going to curtail her theatrical career a bit, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Valerie Cass looked at him radiantly. ‘I’ve got it all worked out. I will be able to look after the baby. Lesley-Jane’s career will be hardly interrupted. No, no, my little girl’s talent will still take her right to the top.’

  The prospect realised Valerie Cass’s most exotic dreams. Her daughter would be perpetually in her debt, perpetually chained to her, and she would have the new stimulus of another baby to bring up. Best of all, there would be no father around to challenge her supremacy over either her child or her grandchild.

  ‘Hmm,’ grunted Paul Lexington. ‘I still think she should see a doctor.’

  ‘I’ll get our family doctor to take a look at her in the morning. There – will that satisfy you?’

  ‘I suppose it’ll have to. Let me know what the prospects are.’

  ‘I will.’

  Paul Lexington moved towards the door.

  Charles stood aside, and let him go.

  ‘Well, now, Charles. As you see, everything is fine. I’m now going to take my little baby home. So there’s nothing to keep you here.’

  ‘Oh, but there is,’ said Charles. ‘I want to talk about Alex Household.’

  ‘I can’t think what relevance he has to anything.’

  ‘Can’t you? He’s the child’s father.’

  ‘As I say, I can’t think what relevance he has to anything.’ In those words Valerie Cass expressed everything she felt about the relationship between the sexes.

  ‘You think the father is irrelevant?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the woman who carries the child, the woman who does the work, the man does nothing.’

  Charles restrained his anger, and started on a new tack. ‘It was on the first night that Lesley-Jane told you she was pregnant.’

  Valerie Cass was silent, surprised by the change of direction. ‘She told you Alex was the father, and suddenly you saw the awful vision of history repeating itself. You saw Lesley-Jane’s career being cut short by pregnancy, just as yours had been. And all your hatred of men, all the anger you have used to make your own husband’s life a misery, it all became focused on Alex Household. Not only did he threaten your daughter’s career, he also threatened to take her away from you.’

  Valerie Cass now looked as pale as her daughter. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m talking about the death of Michael Banks. I’m talking about the taking of human life. I’m talking about murder.’

  There was a wail from the bed and, for the first time since Charles had entered the room, Lesley-Jane spoke. ‘I have taken human life,’ she cried. ‘I am the murderer!’

  They both looked at her in amazement. Tears were running freely down the girl’s face. She clutched at herself to claw away a sudden pain.

  Charles understood. He hadn’t known until that moment, but now he understood. ‘But the life you have taken,’ he said gently, ‘was not that of Michael Banks. Was it?’

  The girl shook her head tearfully.

  ‘No, the life you have taken is the life of your baby. You had an abortion today, didn’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Which is why you passed out. Why you are in this state now.’

  ‘No!’ screamed Valerie Cass. ‘No, you didn’t!’ Lesley-Jane looked at her mother. The tears were receding and there was a hardness in her eyes.

  But Valerie refused to believe their message. ‘It’s a woman’s sacred duty to bear children. That’s what we were put here for.’

  ‘Listen, Mummy.’ Lesley-Jane had control of herself again and spoke evenly. ‘The child effectively had no father.’

  ‘But it would have had you. And me.’

  ‘I didn’t want it. I got pregnant because you spent all my life filling my head with romantic ideas rather than giving me any practical advice. If I had had the baby, I would never have been able to pick up my career again.’

  ‘But as I said, I would have looked after it.’

  ‘What?’ hissed Lesley-Jane. ‘And turned it into another confused, neurotic mess like me?’

  ‘But, darling, suppose I had done the same when I was expecting you? Suppose I had had an abortion?’

  Lesley-Jane looked at her mother without any trace of affection. ‘It would have been the best thing you could ever have done for me. Someone like you is not qualified to bring up children.’

  Valerie Cass sank back into a chair as if she had been slapped. There was no resistance left in her, just a void of pain.

  Charles said what he had to say, softly but firmly.

  ‘What you did after you heard about your daughter’s pregnancy was hardly rational. You went down towards the stage, vowing revenge on her . . . her what? . . . seducer? You looked for him in the Green Room, but found only his jacket. In its pocket you found the gun.

  ‘You went into the wings on the O.P. side of the stage to shoot Alex Household. He saw you coming and begged for mercy, not realising that his words were being transmitted and repeated by Michael Banks on stage. At the moment you fired the gun, Alex dodged, and Michael was killed.

  ‘Alex rushed off. You left the stage, abandoning the gun as you went. Then I should think you came up here, and that was probably the first time you realised what had happened. Also the first time you realised how unlikely your crime was ever to be discovered. No one had seen you, you were wearing gloves so there were no fingerprints on the gun, and Alex Household’s flight looked like an admission of guilt.

  ‘If he had never been found, you’d have got away with it. But I spoke to Alex today, and he confirmed what I’ve just described to you.’

  ‘He’s alive?’ asked Lesley-Jane softly.

  ‘Yes, he’s alive.’

  There was a long silence. Then Valerie Cass looked at Charles. There was a new glow of resolution in her eyes, and he feared she was about to deny everything. If she did, he didn’t know what he would do; he had not a shred of evidence.

  But no.

  ‘Very well,’ she announced. ‘I admit it. I killed Michael Banks.’ She spoke boldly, like Charlotte Corday, like Joan of Arc. Charles understood what had caused her new surge of spirit.

  Valerie Cass had found a new role to play. It was the one she had been rehearsing for all her life – that of martyr.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  DURING THE ensuing week, The Hooded Owl seemed to be gaining momentum. The audiences were growing almost imperceptibly, and the word-of-mouth was good. One or two of the national papers, feeling guilty about the show’s first night, sent second-string critics along for a second look, and their reports were, on the whole, favourable.

  The performances gained in strength. On the Thursday, Lesley-Jane Decker came back into the cast. After the abortion and her mother’s arrest, she seemed to have matured. She approached her work with a new single-mindedness, and acted better than ever.

  Charles Paris got better, too. On the Tuesday night, as an experiment, without telling anyone (least of all Wallas Ward), he had a word with the A.S.M. before the show, and asked him not to feed the lines until absolutely necessary. To Charles’s amazement, he managed to get through the whole show without a single prompt. The constant repetition had fixed the lines indelibly in his mind.

  The loss of this crutch did not, as he had feared, diminish his confidence. Instead, it made him feel more relaxed, stronger, more in control. And he knew this improvement was reflected in his acting.

  He also came to rely less on drink. He had proved he could give a performance without it, and, though it frightened him to remove another support, he dared another night without his customary stimulus. To his surprise, he found his head was clearer, his concentration better, and his nerves no worse. He repeated the experiment on subseq
uent nights, and felt better for it. He’d still wind down with a couple of large Bell’s, but he got out of the habit of drinking before the show.

  He also spoke to his agent, and the company Equity representative, and finally to Paul Lexington direct, about his unsatisfactory status in the play, acting the part regularly and being paid only as an understudy. The producer, probably already under pressure from Equity, and unwilling to take on the expense of another star, agreed that he would regularise the position as soon as possible.

  So, for a couple of weeks, The Hooded Owl soldiered on in the West End. Everyone knew the early weeks would be tense. Like a sick baby, a show has to be carefully nursed until it can build up its own strength.

  But The Hooded Owl seemed to be winning the fight for survival. The audiences in the second week after Valerie Cass’s arrest were definitely getting bigger, and their reaction more positively approving. At this rate the production should soon reach the break-even point its budget required.

  A few coach parties started to come. Soon the show would be an established signpost in the Entertainments columns of the newspapers, and begin to run on its own momentum.

  When the company was summoned to a meeting on stage at the ‘half’ on the Friday of that week, they expected some sort of announcement of how near they were to their break-even. The signs were good. They had been running for nearly a month and were gaining strength daily.

  They were in for a disappointment.

  Wallas Ward clapped his limp hands for silence, and began without Paul Lexington’s ambivalent opening.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid I have some bad news.

  ‘As you know, today is the day you should be paid. Since the money goes to your agents in most cases, you won’t yet have noticed anything wrong. But I’m afraid I have to tell you that no money has been sent to your agents.’

  He raised his hands again to still the outcry which this provoked.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry, but it appears that there is no money anywhere in this show. The production company has gone bankrupt.’

  The screams of fury which greeted this finally resolved themselves into one question: Where was Paul Lexington?

  ‘I am sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but I cannot answer that. Not for any reason of discretion or protecting him; the fact is, I do not know where Paul Lexington is. He hasn’t been seen round the theatre for two days and, when I spoke to his landlord this afternoon, I discovered that he had left his flat yesterday, taking all his belongings and owing three months’ rent.’

  In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Paul Lexington had done a bunk. Living up to another stereotype of the theatrical producer, though not usually the sort of producer who reached the heights of the West End.

  So that was it.

  ‘As a result, ladies and gentlemen,’ the Company Manager concluded unctuously, ‘I regret to inform you that the notices will go up tonight. We will do the two performances tomorrow, because of advance bookings, but I’m afraid otherwise, that is the end.’

  So it was that, after three and a half weeks at the Variety Theatre, The Hooded Owl by Malcolm Harris closed.

  ‘Could I speak to Gerald Venables, please? It’s Charles Paris speaking.’

  ‘I’ll put you through.’

  ‘Charles! Sorry to hear about the show. I’m afraid that Paul Lexington was a bad lot.’

  ‘To put it mildly.’

  ‘Indeed. As you know, I’m trying to sort out Bobby Anscombe’s end, and it’s only now I’m beginning to see the full extent of the mess. Lexington owed money everywhere. God knows how he got as far as he did. So far as I can see, once Bobby was out, he was running the production on sheer cheek.’

  ‘That was one thing he didn’t lack.’

  ‘No. He seems to have kept going for a while by constantly starting up new companies and borrowing on them, but quite honestly it’s going to be some time before everything’s crawled out of the woodwork and I can get a clear picture.’

  ‘What’ll happen to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I doubt if he’ll get prosecuted unless one of his creditors decides to make the effort. He hasn’t got any assets – apart from the fact that he’s vanished off the face of the earth – so there’s not a lot of point in suing him. That’s what I’m going to advise Bobby.’

  ‘He seemed so plausible.’

  ‘Of course he did. To all of you in the company. He always said what you wanted to hear. He painted in your dreams for you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Trouble is, he was really out of his league. Trying to tangle with the big boys like Bobby. And Denis Thornton was ripping him off, too.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Oh yes. Lanthorn Productions only took on the show because they didn’t want the Variety Theatre dark.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. They just wanted a show in there, because they’d acquired the lease and wanted to demonstrate that it could still work as a theatre.’

  ‘But I thought The Hooded Owl was going to be their big opening.’

  ‘No, no. That’s going to be a revival of Flower Drum Song in March. Been planned for months.’

  ‘But if The Hooded Owl had run, we’d still have been there in March.’

  ‘Denis Thornton knew it wouldn’t run. He’s a wily old bird. Best thing that happened for him when Paul agreed to let Show-Off do the publicity. Since they’re part of Lanthorn, Denis could control how much coverage your show got.’

  ‘You mean he deliberately limited our publicity?’

  ‘Ooh, mustn’t say that. Might be slander. Let’s just say that most of Show-Off’s energies during the week of your opening went into Lanthorn Productions’ new musical at the King’s.’

  ‘But surely that’s criminal?’

  ‘Tut, tut, you mustn’t use words like that, Charles. When you’ve been dealing with theatre managements as long as I have, you come to realise that there’s a very thin dividing line between skilful dealing and what you choose to call crime. Paul Lexington wasn’t sufficiently experienced, so he ended up the wrong side of that line.’

  ‘Hmm. I wonder what’ll happen to him.’

  ‘Well, I think it’ll be a long time before he surfaces in the West End again. The Society of West End Theatre Managers’ll see to that.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve somehow a feeling he’ll pop up again somewhere. That sort always finds someone new to believe them.’

  ‘True. Incidentally, Charles, Kate was saying the other day what a long time it is since we’ve seen you, and wouldn’t it be nice if you could come over for dinner one of these evenings. I said it’d be difficult because you d got the show, but now of course . . .’

  ‘Yes. Sounds great.’

  ‘With Frances, of course. I mean, I gathered at that first night that you were back together again. You are, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well . . . er . . . not exactly.’

  So what happened to them all in the weeks running up to Christmas?

  Valerie Cass was convicted of killing Michael Banks, but the charge, to which she readily confessed, was manslaughter, and she was sentenced to three years in prison.

  Lesley-Jane Decker landed a very good part in a television series about the Bloomsbury Group, which guaranteed her six months’ work and national recognition when the show hit the screens. She also, in her mother’s absence, got to know her father for the first time, and found she got on with him very well.

  Alex Household spent two weeks in hospital and, when he came out. decided to give up acting and join a monastery dedicated to a pantheistic view of the universe.

  Peter Hickton kept his cast up most nights rehearsing for the Prince’s Theatre, Taunton’s, annual pantomime, Babes in the Wood, in which Salome Search played a somewhat gnarled principal boy.

  Paul Lexington, from his new base in Hull, set up a company called Pierre Productions, whose aim was to put Northern club comics into end-of-the-pier summer seasons.
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br />   Malcolm Harris, who had received no money from the production of The Hooded Owl except for the pittance of the long-lapsed option, went back to his school teaching. In his evenings he worked on a play about Mary, Queen of Scots, because his wife’s mother had read somewhere that costume drama was coming back.

  Dottie Banks continued to entertain a stream of men in Hans Crescent. Then, to everyone’s surprise, she died of a drug overdose on Christmas Eve. She must have missed her husband more than she showed.

  George Birkitt received the first scripts for a new series of Fly-Buttons and sent them back to the producer, complaining that his character hadn’t got enough lines. He also opened two supermarkets, which pleased him greatly. suggesting as it did that people were starting to think of him as a star.

  Wallas Ward met a very nice black dancer at a party and settled down with him in Pimlico.

  Frances Paris had an offer on the house in Muswell Hill. It was two thousand less than the asking price, but, because the housing market was depressed, and on the advice of her son-in-law, she accepted it.

  And Charles Paris? He got drunk.