Death on the High C's

by Robert Barnard

  The mere thought of the ramifications of this case made Nichols wilt. The various attempts previous to the successful one, for example: he had read about (and sniffed suspiciously over) these practice runs in the press, and the thought of checking up the various alibis of a whole opera company was the stuff of which policemen’s nightmares are made. Then all the theatricality, the boasting, the attitudinizing that he would be letting himself in for—but he was getting in front of himself, and he pulled himself together. No point in taking your hurdles early. He turned to a passing constable, and said: ‘We’ll want the best shorthand writer in the force for this case. It’s going to be one hell of a complicated one, if I’m not mistaken. If we can’t have Chappell, I want nothing less than McLintock, and make that clear to them at Headquarters.’

  After making a close survey of the dressing-room, Nichols left it to the experts, who could be relied on to find something to do there for hours yet. In the corridor he met up with Sergeant Chappell, bright, bushy tailed and a shorthand whizz-kid, and together they went looking for an office. They needed one if they were to be jawing and niggling at the various company members for days, as he suspected they would.

  ‘The stage-door-keeper’s away today,’ said Nichols, and they went and looked at his little room. Bob was there, and he protested that Sergeant Harrison wouldn’t like it, but he looked the type who was used to not getting his own way, and Nichols overruled him.

  ‘I’m sure Sergeant Harrison will understand our needs,’ he said. ‘I like the look of this place. It smells military.’

  And he immediately began settling himself in.

  Superintendent Nichols was in his forties—stocky, not yet running to fat, and not yet worn down by his job into weariness or cynicism. Perhaps the close observer would notice something sad about his eyes, something withdrawn, as if he saw more than he wanted of things that had no cure. But on the surface Nichols was a cheerful, business-like man, who worried about his family, and did his job efficiently. He had no flamboyance, not an ounce of skill at public relations, and so he was a breed of top policemen that is dying out. His accent was not broad, but he was a Lancashire man through and through. He could keep his counsel as well as any man on the Manchester force.

  Settled into the stage-door office, a roomy place that seemed to double with lost-property office and was neatly stored with old umbrellas, odd shoes, walking sticks and bags of all kinds, Nichols set about the task of getting the immediate facts square and ship-shape. He got on to Headquarters and had them look out all the newspaper cuttings on the previous attempts, as well as anything else they could dig up on Gaylene. Then he called in Mike Turner to start filling in his own mental picture of the girl whose hefty body was still prone in the corridors of the theatre, surrounded by all the official technicians of death.

  His first impressions of Mike were none too favourable. Mancunians do not greatly like smooth people, especially smooth Mancunians. Nichols certainly distrusted people who dressed casually in a way that could only be described as impeccable. That sort of wear was for glossy ads. After a time, though, he began to detect a nervousness in Mike, which removed some of his distrust, and he wondered if it was a congenital personal nervousness. It was almost as if the smoothness was only a cover—but for what Nichols did not feel sure.

  ‘I understand you’re what we might call the boss of the company, is that right, sir?’ said Nichols in his not-too-bright-policeman manner.

  ‘In a way, I suppose, Superintendent,’ said Mike, smiling brilliantly, and then switching the smile off suddenly when he realized exactly why he was being interviewed. ‘I’m the administrator, or director—call it what you will. And I’m chief conductor as well. Normally these would be two quite distinct posts, of course, but we’re a small company, with a very small subsidy, and of course we have to cut our suit according to our cloth.’

  ‘In any case, it would be you who engaged Miss Ffrench as a member of the company?’

  ‘That’s right. I saw her Carmen at Cardiff. There were all sorts of things wrong with the performance, but still it did have a lot of life . . . guts—call it what you will. My idea was that she’d go down well here in some of the earthier parts.’

  ‘So she’d only been in Manchester since the beginning of the present season?’ asked Nichols.

  ‘That’s right. Rigoletto—that’s the piece we should be rehearsing now—would have been her first opera with us, and it had a very good role for her.’

  ‘So she’d been around for a few weeks, had she?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How had she fitted in with the rest of the company?’

  ‘Oh, very well. She was a . . . frank, open kind of girl . . . everyone liked her very . . . Do you want the truth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everyone thought she was a pain in the neck.’

  Mike Turner settled back in his chair, and smiled his handsome, charming smile, as if it was a great relief to him to have told the truth. Nichols’s eyes narrowed infinitesimally. Turner reminded him of a certain brand of politician.

  ‘Well, thank you for being honest about that,’ said Nichols, ‘though I imagine we would probably have got the idea before too long. Could you tell me why she wasn’t liked?’

  ‘I can’t speak for the others,’ said Turner cautiously. ‘You’d better ask them. But for myself alone, I’d say that she was as vulgar, boastful, and untruthful as anyone I’ve ever met, and one of the biggest trollops to boot.’

  The somewhat old-fashioned language slipped elegantly off Mike’s tongue. Again he leaned back in his chair, and smiled his charming-adolescent smile.

  ‘She slept around, I take it,’ murmured Nichols.

  ‘She slept around,’ assented Mike.

  ‘With you, sir?’

  ‘A couple of times, when she first got here—no, three. I suspect she decided to start at the top and work her way down.’

  ‘She went on elsewhere, then. Who to, do you know?’

  ‘Owen Caulfield, in the first place, I think. And then Raymond Ricci, and then—God knows who. You’d better ask one of the women—they probably kept their eyes on her.’

  ‘Why did you split up, sir?’

  ‘Split up? I don’t know that we split up, not as I understand the term. You can only split up if you’ve been going together, can’t you? We just went to bed a couple of times, then didn’t go to bed. I think that was pretty much the pattern with Gaylene.’

  ‘You would say she was something of a nymphomaniac?’

  ‘I’d say she was a nymphomaniac.’

  ‘If she went to bed with so many, I presume not all the company can have thought her a pain in the neck?’

  ‘I don’t think that follows, Superintendent. People went to bed with her and thought her a pain in the neck. It happens all the time, you know.’

  Nichols sighed, and went on. ‘These attacks on her—’

  ‘You’d better ask Owen Caulfield about those, or someone who was at the rehearsals. This was to be the first orchestral rehearsal today, so I haven’t really been in on things. All I know is, no one’s been taking them terribly seriously. Rather typically Gaylene, they were, so everyone thought.’

  ‘Until today.’

  ‘Right. Right.’ Mike looked obviously nervous and uncertain for the first time in the interview, and then repeated: ‘Right. Of course everyone will be having second thoughts now. And in point of fact, when she made the first accusation, I know everybody thought she did a pretty convincing acting job.’

  ‘These attempts, or supposed attempts, complicate things for us,’ said Nichols. ‘I was wondering if you could help me there. If you were to ask your whole company to write down—on a card, say—what they were doing at the relevant times, that would save an awful lot of routine questioning.’

  ‘I could, of course,’ said Mike dubiously. ‘But two-thirds of the company would never even have swapped words with Gaylene—members of the orchestra, the chorus,
the stage-hands, and so on. Do you think it would be worth it?’

  ‘I think it would, sir. For one thing it makes it less invidious. Of course we’ll be checking up mainly on those who seem to come into the picture as possible suspects, but at least in the first instance I’d like to make our enquiries as general as possible. I’ll give you the dates and times as soon as I’ve got the newspaper reports from HQ. Then perhaps you could talk to the whole company together.’

  ‘Very well. Anything to help.’ Mike seemed a little embarrassed. ‘By the way, this probably seems heartless, but I was wondering when we could start using the theatre again—for rehearsals and so on.’

  ‘Well, I hope tomorrow,’ said Nichols. ‘I imagine we can finish with the stage and auditorium then, since there’s not likely to be much of interest there. But there’ll be a lot of restrictions on the back-stage areas—tomorrow and for some days to come, I imagine.’

  ‘We can get around that,’ said Mike, already planning the rehearsal for tomorrow and a show-must-go-on speech.

  ‘Of course,’ said Nichols, ‘as far as we are concerned the crucial time is that for the present attempt, the successful one. I imagine it could have been set up at any time from last night onwards, and we’ll want to know who had access to the dressing-room, and so on. Who would you suggest I see?’

  ‘Well—Sergeant Harrison, of course. The stage-door-keeper. Knows everything about the theatre there is to know—and pretty much the same about most of the members of the company. Actually he’s off sick today. Bloody lucky for him as it turns out: he usually goes round checking the rooms in the morning before a rehearsal. But he was on last night, so he may have gone round checking up after the performance was over.’

  ‘About what time would that be, sir?’

  ‘Fairly late. There was an awful lot of cheering for Miss Lander—very exciting. The last of the audience wouldn’t have left until about a quarter to eleven. Then of course the cast would have been mulling around a bit afterwards—there’s always a lot of fuss and congratulations after an evening of that kind. I’d been back-stage, but I went off afterwards with one of the local businessmen: trying to persuade him to sponsor a new production specially for Miss Lander. She came along later. I would imagine the whole cast was here till a quarter or half past eleven, at the very least.’

  ‘Well, we’ll get on to Harrison as soon as we can. Now, I’ll probably want to see you again later, sir, but before you go, is there anything about the girl herself, her relationships with the others and so on that you think we ought to know? I just ask because you could save us a lot of time.’

  For the first time in the interview Superintendent Nichols almost liked Mike Turner. His cool manner, his air of sitting for his own portrait to a fashionable photographer, were all forgotten, and he seemed to be wrestling with himself as to whether to say anything or not. Finally he muttered: ‘I’d rather you asked Owen Caulfield that. As I say, he’s been in on all the rehearsals. And it is my company, you see—’

  As he went out, Superintendent Nichols turned to Sergeant Chappell, the shorthand genius, and raised an interrogative eyebrow.

  ‘That’s the sort of chap that makes people want to abolish Manchester Grammar,’ said Chappell curtly.

  ‘Watch it,’ said Nichols. ‘You’re talking to an old boy.’

  • • •

  There was no prospect of rehearsal that day. It was early evening by the time Mike Turner called the company together in the stalls and told them that there would be a regular Rigoletto rehearsal the next day, possibly without many back-stage facilities. He went on to report to them Superintendent Nichols’s request concerning alibis for the various attempts on Gaylene’s life. He tried to avoid using the word alibis, but for the life of him he could think of no other. Then he exhorted them to help the police as far as possible, and come to the memorial service when it was arranged. Then they all drifted off, leaving their addresses with the constable on the door.

  It was a strange end to a strange day. For Owen it was not quite ended, since he had been asked to go along to see Nichols in the stage-door office. The others, uncertain of what was to come, and not even quite sure what had actually happened, did not know what they ought to feel. What they actually did feel was an odd mixture of fear, excitement, pity and apprehension—a sort of catharsis. Nobody felt any grief for Gaylene, and nobody had the bad taste to pretend to feel any.

  In the course of the evening, though, various obituaries were said over her. The Guardian had had its ready, and altered it slightly to suit the circumstances of her death. After a summary of her brief career to date (rather less spectacular than it had always sounded in Gaylene’s own version) it said that her death was ‘a tragically early end to a career of exceptional premise’. They probably meant ‘promise’.

  In Calvin’s pokey rooms not far from the Methodist Hall, he and Bridget brewed Nescafé, talked over last night’s Così, and inevitably went on from that to the murder.

  ‘Well,’ said Calvin, who like most of the rest of the cast could not find it in him to be nicer to Gaylene in death than he had been to her in raucous, flabby life, ‘this is one murder you don’t have to look for a motive for. It was Gaylene—that was motive enough.’

  But in the pub in the west of the city, where it had been rumoured, wrongly, that bottles of Resch’s lager were to be had, Hurtle, relaxing after a game, grew almost lachrymose over a pint of English imitation beer, as he called it, and quite embarrassed the team-mates with him by coming close to showing a strong emotion: ‘She was a marvellous lay, but not for someone in training,’ he said, gazing introspectively into the flat brown depths of his pint mug.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Producer

  It was nearly nine in the evening when Nichols went over with Owen Caulfield the last moments of Gaylene Ffrench, and the finding of the little wire trick that cut off her career of exceptional promise. Owen had looked around him uncertainly as he had come in to Sergeant Harrison’s orderly little office with the neat piles of other people’s belongings and the lines of nails with keys on them. He sprawled himself somewhat diffidently in the armchair, and then tried to sit up straight, as if this were some kind of confirmation class. Nichols was by now fairly used to people who did not quite know how to behave when confronted with the death of an obvious monster like Gaylene, but Owen from the first struck him as a puzzling and rather unnerving character. He could add nothing to what the police already knew about the death of Gaylene except a fairly exact time—between five and ten past twelve. He also gave them a gruff description of the process of her dying.

  In a sense, what he added of most value to Nichols’s knowledge of the affair was himself. Nichols sat at Sergeant Harrison’s little desk, forming the sort of instant impressions that are a policeman’s business, categorizing and cross-referencing in his mind, and one of the first things he registered was that Owen was not at all interested in doing the same thing to him. In Nichols’s experience this was very rare in people being interviewed about any serious matter: whether they were suspect or witness, innocent or guilty, almost all looked closely at their interrogator, tried to sum him up, see where he could be appealed to, what were his weak points.

  Owen made no attempt at all to do any of these things. It could have been because he was so upset, though he did not now look upset; it could have been because he was so completely innocent that the thought did not occur to him, but Nichols wanted to reserve judgement about his innocence or guilt; in fact he suspected the reason to be that Owen was one of those people for whom other people are never more than objects, to be used, bullied, cajoled—though usually ineffectually, because they are not understood. Put in a situation where he had no authority, Owen was out at sea, and searching for a new identity, a new attitude. Basically, it seemed to Nichols that he was a very empty person, and that he was panicked by his emptiness.

  Owen made no bones about the fact that he had slept with Gaylene. Mike had already to
ld him the Superintendent knew this.

  ‘Yes, we went together for a bit, not very long after she arrived,’ he said, as if it was a matter of no importance.

  ‘For how long?’ asked Nichols.

  ‘About a week or so, as far as I remember,’ said Owen. ‘Certainly not more than ten days.’

  ‘Who broke things off?’

  ‘I don’t know that anyone did,’ said Owen. ‘I started rehearsing the Rigoletto production, and the whole thing just sort of faded out—you know how it is.’

  She broke it off, said Nichols to himself. He said: ‘And she went on to Raymond Ricci, a member of the cast, is that right?’

  ‘I think so. Among others.’

  ‘You weren’t jealous?’

  ‘Good Lord no. There’s always someone like Gaylene in any theatre company, Superintendent. Sleeps around with most of the actors, moves from one to another in a matter of days. People just sleep with her as a matter of convenience—one never gets actually involved with someone like that.’

  Owen’s manner was man-of-the-world. Nichols was watching him closely, but try as he might he couldn’t penetrate the pose to find out his actual attitude to his affair with Gaylene.

  ‘I gather on the whole that Miss Ffrench was not generally liked, is that right?’ Nichols said.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Owen judiciously. ‘She didn’t go out of her way to be, certainly. On the other hand, I doubt whether you could say she was positively disliked. If you were sensible you didn’t take her seriously enough to dislike her.’

  ‘Who would you say got on least well with her?’ Nichols asked.

  There was a pause, and Nichols could feel Owen changing his pose from one of judicial impartiality to one of an agonized wrestler with his conscience. Nichols was beginning to find these roles the most fascinating thing about Owen. He guessed that in a situation where his authority as producer meant nothing, Owen had had to give up his usual performance and was desperately thrashing around to find another. The poses were all of lay figures, and Nichols wondered whether Owen even convinced himself.