And making the ritual noises that local big-wigs take for granted as one of the perks of office, Nichols put the phone down and turned towards an annoyingly complacent Ricci.
‘Looks as if you’re in the clear,’ he said. ‘For the Harrison murder anyway.’
‘I can’t say I blame you for not trusting me,’ said Ricci, his fingers now completely still. ‘But I assure yon you’ll find that I was singing at that concert.’
‘You seem to assume,’ said Nichols with pardonable sourness, ‘that because you are in the clear for the Harrison murder, you are in the clear all around.’
‘Not at all,” said Ricci. ‘I’m just asking you to take the chance you just now said you were unwilling to take. Because I’m in the clear for Harrison, and because the same person probably did both, the risk is less than you made out. Therefore it’s worth giving me a few hours to clear my story, and then hopefully, as the Americans say, I’ll be back to lay it on the line, go the hang-out road.’
His voice had taken on an American twang, and his face had assumed a comically furtive, Nixonian expression. Nichols didn’t much like his over-confidence, because, like all policemen, he objected to being lied to. Still, leaving aside the fact that he didn’t greatly like this young man, what he said made a kind of sense.
‘OK,’ he said wearily. ‘You can go. But I shall want to see you tomorrow morning, before eleven if you please. And I shall want the story to be good.’
‘Good I cannot promise you,’ said Raymond Ricci, ‘but interesting—probably.’
‘I still don’t trust him,’ said Sergeant Chappell, as he went out.
‘He seems to go out of his way not to be trusted,’ said Nichols. ‘These people are rather like children in a lot of ways—no one wants to be the good boy in the class.’
‘The devil of it is,’ said Chappell, ‘if he is in the clear we are pretty much back to square one.’
‘Exactly. A lot of singers with no alibis, one or two with dicey alibis for one or other of the attempts which are pure hell to check and probably hold very little water, and no lead towards a motive except general and freely admitted dislike. It’s a hell of a small haul after four days’ work.’
‘What will the next step be, then?’
‘I suppose we dig into the background of all the more important people who have been around Gaylene Ffrench for these past few weeks. And failing that, into the recent career of the girl herself, which should be a jolly task for someone or other. If she hasn’t made life-long enemies in every single city she’s sung in since she came to these shores, I’m no judge of character. Then there are these various slanders against one or other of the cast—the slanders which Ricci repeated so readily. We’ll have to look especially hard at those, I suppose, but really we need to dig deeply into everyone’s background, and that will be pure slog.’
‘I wonder if the girl had any friends,’ said Chappell, ‘not sleeping partners, which is all we’ve dug up here, but the sort of girl-friend she might really natter away to.’
Nichols contemplated the suggestion with some contempt.
‘Have you ever known a girl like that have friends of her own sex?’ he asked. ‘Any other woman would reach for her hat-pin at the mere sight of her. As for nattering—well, we haven’t lacked for a natter so far, have we? And has there been anything in it to go on? We could have done with a good deal less nattering, in my opinion, and a good deal more hard, observed fact.’
Sergeant Chappell looked depressed. ‘I wonder if she said anything in her letters home,’ he said.
‘ “Dear Mum and Dad, had a fabulous success last week. Please send large jar of vegemite, love Gaylene.” All right—it’s something we could look into, but if our Miss Ffrench was the writing home type, I’ll eat my police medal.’ He got up. ‘Well, I suppose that’s it for the night. Tomorrow morning I think I’ll have a word with this man Mulley. We’ve no particular reason to think that he and Gaylene ever crossed swords, but he looked an interesting type. Bigamy was his particular little secret, wasn’t it, according to Gaylene? That’s a real, nice, old-fashioned crime, like breach of promise, or conspiracy to publish an obscene article. I don’t see murder being committed to hide it, though, do you? With the sleeping habits of these people we should be so pleased if any of them consent to get married at all that we ought to turn a blind eye if they decide to do it twice.’
Outside the stage-door-keeper’s office he heard the sounds of a theatre closing down for the night. He heard Bob whistling in the distance, and saw Bridget Lander departing after what he guessed was another clamorously received performance. He must try to talk to her tomorrow too, but he hoped against hope she had nothing to do with it: he hadn’t yet had time to see her Fiordiligi himself.
He was about to turn out into the street when his departure was arrested by an apparition, an incongruous vision. The stage-door opened, and there floated through it a stunning woman: a woman of great natural beauty and some unobtrusively applied beauties, a woman whose rose pink freshness not even the grime of late-night Manchester could sully, a woman whose simple, striking clothes seemed to bear a tiny label saying ‘outrageously expensive’. But overpowering all these impressions was one of sheer femininity, the sort of femininity which began going out of fashion with the silent screen, and received its death-blow with the onrush of militancy in the sixties. This was a woman of charm, ambiguous attractions, tantalizing promise, unspoken invitation. This was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted, and would get it.
Who on earth was she? Nichols asked himself. Not, he felt sure, an opera-singer. None but the most lavishly overpaid could afford to dress like that, and none of the three or four current idols of the galleryites and micro-groove fanatics looked like that. Not remotely like that.
She was about to pass him when she pulled herself up short, with great grace, and fixed him with the sort of ravishing smile that sent men off to die happy in the trenches, and might have doomed the bachelorhood of Sherlock Holmes himself.
‘Superintendent Nichols?’ she said with an enchanting query in her Fenella Fielding voice. ‘My husband has told me about you. Are you any further forward with this awful business of that poor girl?’
Husband? What husband? thought Nichols to himself. Paul Getty Jnr? A minor Rockefeller? One of the Bay City Rollers?
‘Not too far forward, I’m afraid,’ he said, with one of the cagily ingratiating smiles policemen keep for monied nobs with a tendency to interfere. ‘It’s one of those amorphous cases where even the times are difficult to pin down, let alone anything else.’
‘I gathered from the little Michael told me . . . ’ began the vision.
Michael. Must be Mike Turner’s wife, thought Nichols. And then, irreverently: Christ, he managed to land himself a world-beater. His emotion, most uncharacteristically, must have surfaced on to his face, because the vision noticed it and pulled herself up.
‘Maddening of me not to have introduced myself—do forgive me,’ she said. ‘Cecily Turner—though I’m afraid most people still think of me as Cecily Dobber.’
The voice sank with husky insinuation. Dobber. Unusual name. Was she bringing it to his notice with some ulterior purpose? Suddenly the name rang a tiny bell inside Nichols’s brain, and the ex-Miss Dobber seemed to hear it ring.
‘Exactly,’ she said, with a deprecating smile. ‘Dobberware. I’m afraid my father invented it, and made unconscionable amounts of money out of it. Sets of little plastic bowls and boxes and pots and saucers and goodness knows what—though what people found to do with them, I’ve never quite discovered.’
Dobberware, thought Nichols—the foundation for the Turner smoothness. Once again the splendid creature seemed to follow his thoughts, and leap ahead of him.
‘Quite,’ she said with a dazzling smile. ‘Hence this.’ She gave a graceful wave of the hand which seemed to imply the opera company as a whole. ‘Or part of it Rather a larger part, it sometimes seems to me, than . . . ’ She p
aused for a second in mid-sentence, and then said: ‘I mean, of course, that I’m not quite sure whether I intended to marry an opera company when I married Mike. But I suppose you can say it has given him a plaything, and me an excuse for leave of absence—anywhere rather than this terrible city—not even the most unreasonable husband could have expected it. Certainly Michael didn’t. Which is why I never met the poor girl herself . . . ’
Nichols’s mind had been travelling exotically, visualizing this creature in Cannes, in Tangiers, in African big-game reserves. He realized with a start that she was again talking about Gaylene. She seemed to be leading up to something, and as usual she got there disconcertingly quickly.
‘I suppose you couldn’t say whether Mike and she had been sleeping together, could you?’ she said.
He was so taken off his guard that he nearly behaved unprofessionally. After a pause he cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid that’s something I . . . ’
‘No, of course you couldn’t. Foolish of me to ask it, wasn’t it? But it would have made things so much simpler.’
At that moment Bob appeared down the dusty corridor, about his late-night business. Mrs Turner flashed in his direction a smile which seemed to leave him groggily uncertain whether to tug his forelock or wilt at the knees. He smiled feebly and took to his heels. Cecily Turner apparently decided it was time to be going.
‘I mustn’t keep you,’ she said, in a voice that Nichols could have sworn was leading up to something. ‘Silly of me to have prattled on like this when you have so much to do.’ She floated a few steps along the corridor, and then turned with a smile which had clearly been under preparation while her back was towards him—a smile of great subtlety and insinuation.
‘Tell me, Superintendent,’ she said, fluting her voice across the distance between them with no attempt at concealment or confidentiality at all, ‘if I were to find my financial affairs were . . . not quite as I expected them to be, and if it turned out not to be a matter for an accountant, but for the police, would you, I wonder, would you allow me to come with my little troubles to you?’
‘I should be del . . . ’
‘Too kind,’ cooed Cecily Turner. ‘Really terribly kind. I have had so little experience of anything of that sort . . . Hitherto . . . ’
And with a ‘Goodbye’ that held acres of wistfulness and promise, she resumed her forward progress. Nichols felt he had to steady himself by the doorpost a moment to cushion the after-effects of her impact. When rationality and scepticism regained some foothold in his mind, it occurred to him that his part in the conversation had hardly amounted to more than a dozen words. It also occurred to him that he was being used. An interesting experience, and by no means an unpleasant one. But still, as a policeman he felt he had to know: used for what?
Another thought came to him, and this time an unworthy one: if Mrs Turner of the plastic pots was going to visit Mr Turner of the opera company, would they talk about? And—more to the point—where would they talk about it? In view of the personal nature of the conversation she had just had with him, a complete stranger, in the corridor of a theatre, it did not seem as if privacy were one of Cecily Turner’s aims. He lit a cigarette, with the conscious aim of giving the Turners time to get together and stuck into whatever subject was closest to the gorgeous Cecily’s heart. If she had taken the trouble to come to the theatre after the performance, it was to be presumed that they wouldn’t go home to have it out.
After he had puffed his way through a third of his Player’s he decided he was strong enough to resist the divine Cecily’s charms, particularly if they were directed against somebody else. He set off down the corridor, his nostrils twitching to discover the direction taken by a subtle perfume which had environed Mrs Turner—a perfume, no doubt, with a sensual name and an unearthly price. Finally the murmur of voices from the stalls convinced him he had reached his goal. He made his way to the main exit at the back—where, he had previously noticed, there were double swinging doors which opened and shut quite noiselessly. He tested them out, and stood quite quiet behind heavy curtains, now and then peeping through to see the two people in the body of the murky theatre. Mike had been conducting earlier in the evening, and had probably come back for his score. He was still in tails, and he had obviously just descended from the podium in order to confront at closer quarters his wife, who was draped over a seat in the front row. Together they looked like something out of Noel Coward or early Waugh.
‘But why?’ Mike was saying. ‘Why now? Everything’s been going all right, hasn’t it?’
‘As far as I can see,’ drawled Cecily, ‘nothing much has been going at all. Not that you are particularly to blame for that, and I won’t deny it has suited me. You’ve been going your way, I’ve been going mine—just as we said. We’ve had a business arrangement, haven’t we, rather than a marriage. Well, the fact is, darling, it’s become a bit of a bore having a husband and not having a husband. It gives you all the disadvantages of respectability with none of the advantages. And the fact is, I want to get married—really married this time.’
‘In other words, you don’t just want a divorce, you want a quick, easy divorce.’
‘Precisely. You know I believe in keeping men waiting just so long and no longer. I don’t intend to let my little lordling get tired of waiting for me.’
‘Aha—it’s a title you’re after, is it?’
Cecily shrugged her shapely shoulders. ‘Not exactly, darling. I mean, not any old title. I wouldn’t fall over backwards for one of Mr Wilson’s life peers, for example. Even daddy refused one of those. But this is an awfully good title—I mean old, and hereditary—lots of money and land, and a family that’s been perfectly useless and undistinguished for generations. That sort of thing does rather attract a woman, you know. Such a piquant contrast to the Dobberware!’
‘And you expect me to provide evidence of “irretrievable breakdown” or whatever they call it so that you can take up your position as a lady of the manor, serving nourishing soup to the poor in Dobberware bowls?’
‘Precisely, dear. Bouillabaisse, I think, with coq au vin to follow. No point in stinting things. And by the way, it’s rather more than a manor. The point really is, my dear Michael, that the courts won’t need much evidence. We’ve hardly been together for more than four or five weeks in the past eighteen months. And I’ve no doubt at all that you’ve been amusing yourself now and then on the side, though I’ve never till now been interested enough to want to know for certain.’
There was a pause. ‘There has been no one,’ said Mike.
‘Oh come, darling,’ cooed Cecily. ‘Utter celibacy? I know you better than that.’
‘No one,’ repeated Mike.
‘Do I detect,’ said Cecily, still perfectly dovelike but with a few traces of Noel Coward’s Amanda showing through her poise, ‘do I detect signs of non-co-operation? A digging in of the heels?’
‘Call it that if you like. I’m damned if I’m going to let the marriage tail off without we make some attempt to make a go of it. For a start all this—’ he gestured round the grubby plush and gilt of the Prince of Wales Theatre—‘collapses round my ears.’
‘I thought that’s what would worry you most,’ said Cecily. ‘And I’d be willing to continue a small grant, annually. Now someone who is as near tone-deaf as makes no difference couldn’t say fairer than that, could she?’
Nichols, peeping through the curtains, noted there was one man who was completely impervious to Cecily’s charms.
‘A small grant,’ Mike said impatiently. ‘What do you think a small grant buys these days? A few bangles for Carmen and a couple of pillars for Sarastro’s temple. Thanks for nothing.’
Mike’s voice was getting desperate, but Cecily seemed to have no trouble at all in keeping her beautifully articulated cool.
‘I think you’ll find I have a better idea than you imagined as to how far money goes these days. In fact, you’ve been finding that even a quite generous grant
doesn’t go as far as you thought, haven’t you? I know perfectly well, my dear Michael, that one can’t run an eight-month opera season on the pittance you got from the Arts Council last year and the sum we agreed on together.’
There was silence in the theatre. Then Cecily’s voice came clear and cold—a voice with money in it, not the money that buys luxury, but the money that buys power.
‘Unless you do as I ask, the accountants will be looking into my financial affairs by the weekend, and the police will be brought in by Monday. Do I make myself clear?’
CHAPTER XV
Recapitulation
‘Do you think we should go and see Owen?’ said Calvin to Bridget, as he watched her dress and make up for the final dress-rehearsal, and wished she, rather than the unexciting Giulia Contini, were playing Gilda. Bridget peered closely at her face in the mirror, then expertly pencilled over her eyebrows.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Well,’ said Calvin, and hesitated, because there was no very obvious reason except pity, ‘it seems tough on him—being sacked after all those rehearsals, and then breaking down in front of all of us.’
‘But what makes you think he would want to see us?’ asked Bridget, attacking an eyelash and blinking experimentally.
‘Well—’ again Calvin was irresolute, ‘it’s just that Owen hadn’t many friends . . . ’
‘True. And we certainly weren’t among them,’ said Bridget. ‘The fact is that he hadn’t many friends—or to be more exact he hadn’t any friends—because he didn’t want friends. I suppose you think I’m being hard?’
‘Yes, I do rather.’
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