Merely Players

by J M Gregson

  ‘I do indeed, sir. The identity of the victim is yet to be formally confirmed, but we believe it to be one Adam Cassidy. More familiar to some as Alec Dawson, I believe. The man who, according to your own account, made you look a right arse before millions of television viewers. Hence my request for a statement, sir.’

  ‘And I repeat to you, Peach, don’t be bloody ridiculous!’

  There was steel in the tone at last. It was time to be on his way. Peach addressed an apology to the golfing companions of his chief, as if he had noticed them for the first time. ‘Just police routine, gentlemen. Just an attempt to eliminate one person who recently had occasion to dislike the man who is now a murder victim.’ He dropped his formal tone and added in a lower voice. ‘In my own personal view, I think your golfing chum is not really a dangerous or violent man. I think you should have no fear of completing the rest of your round with him. Sorry to have interrupted your game.’

  Tucker had limped painfully away from the tee during this. He brushed his rear carefully free of frost and grass, wincing at the physical hurt as well as the damage to his amour-propre. Through gritted teeth he ordered, ‘Be on your way, Peach!’

  ‘Yes, sir. Enjoy your game, sir. Hope the fall hasn’t affected your googlies.’

  ELEVEN

  There could be no doubt that Jane Cassidy was genuinely upset by the news of her husband’s death. She burst into tears, and asked if the police were really sure that it was Adam. When told there could be little doubt of that, she sank on to the sofa, and allowed the young woman in police uniform to make her a cup of tea.

  PC Nell Hayward recorded these things carefully in her report. It was distressing to have to report sudden deaths like this to the next of kin, but the case was going to be a big one, and she had a career of her own to consider. She gave Mrs Cassidy the few details she had been told to release about the death. Over the tea, she told her that it would be necessary that she answer a few questions for Detective Chief Inspector Peach, who had taken charge of the investigation. Mrs Cassidy said that she certainly couldn’t do that today. She had to break the news about Adam to the children and she would be in no state to answer questions after doing that. Tomorrow morning would be quite acceptable, said PC Hayward firmly. They were sorry to intrude at a time like this, but the circumstances demanded it. She was sure that Mrs Cassidy would want to give them all the information she could, to ensure that they arrested someone quickly.

  Was this Mr Peach a good man, the widow wanted to know. Very good indeed, said PC Hayward. No, she hadn’t worked with him herself, but she was sure he would solve the case quickly and bring the culprit to justice. DCI Peach had a considerable local reputation. Nell just managed to prevent herself from saying formidable. That didn’t seem quite the right word, being police code for a right bastard if you riled him.

  The mortuary attendant sized up the man carefully. You had to be very careful with the identification of dead bodies, particularly when they followed violent and unexpected deaths; the next of kin could collapse on you. He wondered if this man had been summoned here so quickly because of the fame of the corpse. He fancied so: the powers that be wouldn’t want the faintest possibility of error, if they were about to announce to the world that the man who played Alec Dawson was dead.

  At least this haste meant you didn’t have to disguise the effects of a post-mortem; that could be very tricky. He liked the look of the man who had come here to do the identification. He was white and drawn, but you would expect that. He also looked composed and determined. You could never be sure, but experience told the attendant that this man was unlikely to disintegrate under the weight of emotion when he saw what he had to see.

  He took him through the formalities, filling in the boxes on the form for him to sign. He found himself instinctively producing his best script when the man said he was a teacher. ‘Relationship to the deceased?’

  ‘I’m his brother. His elder brother by three years.’ Luke answered the routine questions, watched the man completing the form for him, told himself that this was reality, not a dream from which he would shortly awake. ‘Do you want me to sign that?’

  ‘Not just yet. You can do that after identification. So as to confirm it, you see.’

  He watched his man carefully as he took him into the room where the corpse lay. ‘We prefer it that you don’t touch the deceased, please.’ He would explain why if the man queried this; otherwise he wouldn’t upset him with the information that there might still be traces of a murderer to be lifted from the flesh, that the passionless butchery of a post-mortem was compulsory once foul play was suspected.

  But this man merely nodded and said, ‘I shan’t need to touch him. I never intended to do that.’ He followed the attendant along the corridor, looking straight ahead of him as he had done throughout, as if he was deliberately remaining unaware of his surroundings.

  He stopped suddenly and instinctively when he saw the body of his brother. The sheet was drawn tightly up to the chin, so that the awful damage to the chest was quite invisible. The handsome face was pale and spotlessly clean; the eyes had been closed. He might at first sight have been merely asleep. Luke knew that was the kind of banal thing that people often felt in this situation. A few of the wrinkles of early middle age seemed to have dropped away from round the eyes and the features seemed quite relaxed, as if they welcomed this repose. Otherwise, the face was as he remembered it.

  A few seconds elapsed whilst he steadied his breathing. Then Luke Cassidy said quietly, ‘Yes, that’s my brother. That is Adam.’

  The person who had so abruptly ended Adam Cassidy’s existence waited all weekend for an announcement that the remains had been discovered.

  The hours crept by slowly on Saturday, with no word on television, on radio, even on local radio, that a body had been found. But the killer knew that this death was much too big for local radio. The evening news at six o’clock on Radio Four revealed that a famous author had died in Hampshire, and that a movie star of the nineteen fifties and sixties had died in Santa Monica at the age of ninety-four. There were potted biographies of both of them, but no word yet of this much more sensational death.

  Surely the body could not be lying up on the moors, still undiscovered? Yet on Sunday morning and at Sunday lunchtime there was still nothing. The Sunday evening bulletin gave lengthy details of the key clash between Manchester United and Arsenal in the Premier League, where there had been goals and a sending off. There was still no mention of Adam Cassidy. Surely the authorities must know by now? They must be deliberately holding back the release of the information. Yet no one had come to the door with questions. That ought to be reassuring.

  It was not until Monday morning that the first bald details were announced. A body believed to be that of the television star Adam Cassidy had been discovered on moorland between Darwen and Bolton. Foul play was suspected.

  It was almost a relief that it was out at last.

  Neither radio nor television was switched on early in the big new house near the Trough of Bowland.

  Jane Cassidy had told the children last night that Daddy had met with an accident, that they wouldn’t be seeing him again. That was enough; she didn’t want them to hear the harsher truths which might be announced to the public. They had cried last night, so that she had eventually pushed Kate’s cot into Damon’s room and allowed them to sleep together. But they had seemed curiously composed this morning, in that surprising, brittle calmness which seems only available to children. The advice from the policewoman had been to get them back into their normal routine as quickly as possible, and both Damon and Kate seemed happy enough to go to school.

  She was glad that she had a nanny available to take them, though. Jane hugged them a little more tightly than usual, then waved to them from the door until they were out of sight. It hurt her a little that they should seem so little affected. Each of them had a hand in Ingrid’s; they seemed to be chatting to her quite happily as they disappeared.
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br />   Adam should have seen more of them than he did. He would never have the chance now. She switched the radio on and heard the formal police announcement on the nine o’clock bulletin. The calm tones of the newsreader seemed to be talking about someone else entirely. She made herself a beaker of tea and tried to organize her mind, but it did not work. Her usually calm and efficient brain seemed in this crisis to refuse her commands. When she eventually remembered the tea, she found it untouched and cold. She looked at the clock and discovered that it was ten to ten.

  The CID people came at exactly ten o’clock, the time they had arranged with her. She watched them get out of the police Ford Mondeo; a shortish, muscular man with a bald head, in an immaculate grey suit, and a very tall black man who had been driving, who had a black roll-neck sweater above navy trousers. They looked up automatically at the front elevation of the house. She could imagine what they were saying to each other: that its harsh modern brick and ostentatious size looked inappropriate in this quiet country setting. Adam had assured her that it would mellow and blend with the landscape in a few years, as the shrubs in the garden matured and the trees at the boundary grew taller.

  Ingrid had offered to let the officers in, but Jane preferred to answer the door herself rather than play the grand lady. The shorter man said, ‘I am Detective Chief Inspector Peach and this is Detective Sergeant Northcott.’ They were polite and apologetic, apologizing for having to intrude at a time like this and promising to be as brief as they could be. She realized after the first minute that they were watching every movement she made. When she herself had commiserated with people after a bereavement, she fancied she looked at anything around them rather than their faces, to cover her embarrassment. Yet these men, despite their sympathy, were observing her intently, noting her every reaction to whatever they asked her. That was part of detection, she supposed; she found it unnerving, nonetheless.

  They would be able to see that she’d been crying. Deep within her, a voice said that was a good thing.

  Peach said quietly, ‘We need to know when you last saw your husband, Mrs Cassidy. It might help us to fix the time of his death more clearly, you see. At the moment, we cannot be certain of that.’

  ‘Why? When was he found?’

  He smiled, not unkindly. ‘You mustn’t answer our questions with questions of your own, I’m afraid. That isn’t the way this works.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Friday night was the last time I saw him. I brought the children down to say goodbye in their pyjamas. It must have been between half past seven and eight o’clock, I think.’ She watched the black man making a note. He seemed to write very quickly, but the ball-pen looked ridiculously small in his huge and powerful hand.

  Peach nodded and said, ‘Do you know where he was going?’

  ‘He was going away for the weekend on a shooting party. I can’t tell you exactly where that was to be. The Border country, I think he said. I – I expect he’d have rung me on his mobile when he got there.’

  Northcott spoke for the first time, his voice deep, brown, somehow reassuring. ‘And did he ring you during the evening, Mrs Cassidy?’

  ‘No. But he never got there, did he?’

  For a moment, Peach thought she was going to break down. From the puffing around the eyes in the oval, attractive face, he knew that she had been weeping and that her control was brittle. He said gently, ‘He didn’t, no. Weren’t you disturbed by that? Didn’t you think of contacting the police when you didn’t hear from him?’

  She managed a wan smile. ‘Adam didn’t always do what you expected or what he’d said he’d do. I just thought he was enjoying his weekend and the company up there. He was really looking forward to it. He’d bought himself a new shotgun and he was as excited as a kid about it. Men are like that, aren’t they? They always keep a bit of the boy inside them – sometimes quite a lot of the boy. Not many women are like that.’

  Clyde Northcott said, ‘Do you remember the make of this new shotgun?’

  She frowned. ‘I’m afraid I don’t. I’m not very interested in these things. I’ve never shot things myself and I never will . . .Oh, I think I remember now. A Purdey, I think. I have heard that name before. He told me it was the best you could buy. Did you find – find it with him where he died?’

  If she was acting this, she was doing it very well. But Peach remembered ruefully that a highly competent actress was exactly what Jane Cassidy was: he could remember watching her on the box as Jane Webster. ‘The Purdey shotgun has been recovered, yes. I’m afraid we will not be able to release it for a considerable time.’

  She shook her head sharply, her dark-blonde hair fluttering with the vigour of the movement. ‘I don’t want ever to see that gun again.’

  There was no doubt about her vehemence, but she hadn’t asked whether the Purdey had been the instrument of his death. He wondered if she already knew the answer to that. ‘This is difficult for me as well as for you, but the situation demands it. I have to ask you about the state of your relationship with your husband at the time of his death.’

  She supposed she should have been annoyed, should perhaps have bridled at this intrusion into the intimacy of their marriage. Instead, Jane felt curiously detached. It was the only matter she had thought about before they came here. She said as evenly as she could, ‘I understand why you have to ask that. You want to know if I was desperately unhappy, if I had a motive for killing Adam. Well, I’m sorry if it disappoints you, but we were perfectly happy. He was busy, of course. In our business, where so many people are “resting” for long periods, you welcome that. But the more successful you are, the more calls there are upon your time. He couldn’t spend as much time with me and the children as we both wanted him to, but as an actress myself, I understood why that was.’

  ‘He’d just finished a series of the Alec Dawson tales, hadn’t he?’

  She wondered if beneath the studiously neutral tone there lurked the contempt for the improbabilities in the Alec Dawson tales of derring-do which she’d expect from professional policemen. ‘He had, yes. We were hoping to get away for a holiday, some time after Christmas.’

  ‘But you weren’t disappointed that he was going to be away for the whole of the weekend?’

  He was quietly insistent beneath the politeness. It wouldn’t do to underestimate this man, she decided. ‘I wasn’t, no. I knew how excited he was about the shooting, which is quite a new hobby for him. These opportunities aren’t available to you all the time, as he said. He needed to wind down, after a period of hectic work. And he’d have been with us all for Christmas, which is far more important.’

  Perhaps the lady doth protest too much, thought Peach. He looked away from her for a moment, round the huge room with its expensive, brand-new furnishings. ‘It’s a beautiful spot this, and you have built a splendid home here. I walked a lot round here as a boy. Don’t you find it a little quiet, after a busy life as an actress?’

  Again the wan smile, her face looking even whiter with the golden hair falling across it. ‘We built here because it was quiet. Adam is – was – a very well-known face. You not only treasure your privacy, you need it. I’m not complaining, and neither did he, because that sort of exposure also makes you very rich. We were able to build this place and have more or less anything we wanted. We chose it because the Trough of Bowland and the whole area to the west of it is, as you said, a beautiful place.’

  It was a well-argued explanation. It was delivered so convincingly that Peach could not be sure whether it was prepared to conceal the sort of loneliness he had met before in women isolated with young children after leading a busy professional life. Perhaps it was a reply she had delivered to other people who had asked similar questions. He nodded and said, ‘But you’ve seen very little of your husband over the last few months.’

  ‘No. I didn’t expect to. That’s the advantage of being in the business, as I said. You understand that there will be periods of intense activity. You are grateful for them, when you se
e what it brings for you.’

  He saw her face closing with her repetition of this sentiment. If she was concealing anything about her own life, he wasn’t going to prise it from her today. He said quietly, apologetically, ‘Are you aware of any complications in your husband’s life?’

  She was quiet for a moment. He had thought she might allow herself the relief of anger. Instead, she said wearily, ‘You mean did he have other women on the go, don’t you? Do you expect me to answer a question like that?’

  ‘I mean did he have anything at all which might complicate what you have already told us was a very busy life. And yes, I do expect you to answer, because I expect you to want to give us anything which might eventually lead us to the person who killed him.’

  It was his first direct acknowledgement that this was murder or manslaughter. You tried to skate round the brutality of violent death, if you could. But this young widow seemed unaffected by the idea. She nodded slowly two or three times, as if accepting the logic of his arguments. ‘A handsome, successful actor like Adam is constantly receiving sexual offers, from men as well as women. I knew that when I married him. I don’t know where he’s been for every minute of the last six months, but I’m confident that there has been nothing which threatens – threatened – our marriage.’

  Clyde Northcott gave her his first smile. It transformed the stern, dark features, as he made a note and thanked her for her frankness. She watched the rapid movement of the pen in the long fingers, then said rebukingly, ‘If you are interested in his movements, you need to know that Adam had an ageing father in Brunton, whom he visited regularly.’

  Northcott noted the address and that of the deceased’s brother, Luke Cassidy. He was aware that Luke had by now identified the body, but he thought it better not to remind the widow of that melancholy necessity. Then he said in that persuasive, dark-brown voice, ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wished ill against Adam, Mrs Cassidy? Anyone who has had a serious difference with him in the last year, say?’