Merely Players

by J M Gregson

  They were on their feet when Mark Gilbey said, ‘I’ve been reading about your considerable reputation in the national press, Detective Chief Inspector Peach.’ He indicated the Daily Mail and the Sun and some lurid headlines about the case. ‘If you decide you’d like to publish your memoirs, we’d be interested in acting for you. When you finally retire and become plain “Mister Peach”, perhaps. We can always find you a ghostwriter.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ said Percy, with a last look at Salford Quays.

  There was one highly interesting piece of information awaiting them when they got back to the nick at Brunton.

  The forensic labs had compared DNA in the sample of human hair retrieved from the passenger seat of Cassidy’s BMW 110 with the samples volunteered by the people who had worked with the deceased in the last weeks of his life. There were several hairs in the sample, which had all come from the same scalp: they appeared to have been extracted from the teeth of a comb.

  There was a definite and indisputable match with the DNA sample given by one of Cassidy’s acting colleagues. Michelle Davies.

  There was a definite and indisputable match with the DNA sample given by one of Cassidy’s acting colleagues. Michelle Davies.

  SEVENTEEN

  The person who had killed Adam Cassidy was feeling unnaturally calm. That seemed odd, but when everything seemed to be going your way, it was surely natural. There was nothing on the one o’clock television news about the case; that was probably the first time it hadn’t merited a mention. Tomorrow night, it would be seven days since the killing. Didn’t they say that murders unsolved within a week tended to remain unsolved?

  This Chief Superintendent Tucker, who was fronting up the television and radio releases, was a self-righteous prick, and no danger. He was plainly just a front man for the police. That Peach fellow was the real enemy. He knew what he was about and it wouldn’t do to underestimate him. Detective Chief Inspector Peach would probably be back again, throwing his weight about and trying to give the impression that he was on the verge of solving the case. But from the other side, you knew better; you knew that he was up against it and just putting on a brave face.

  Roast in hell, Adam Cassidy! No one’s going down for you. Confidence, but not over-confidence, that’s the tactic. Calmness will have its reward.

  James Walton told Michelle Davies she could use his office when he heard that the CID officers were coming to the studios to see her. He still felt guilty about having to go back on the offer he had made to her in good faith of the role in the Call Alec Dawson series. It might give her a little lift with her fellow-actors to be offered the senior producer’s quarters for her interview.

  Michelle forced herself to sit in the leather chair behind the big desk. It felt as if she was an upstart usurping the master’s position, but it also felt reassuring to have this solid expanse of wood between her and her interrogators. Peach and DS Northcott settled themselves unhurriedly, looking round the walls at the stills of scenes from the studio’s most memorable series of the past thirty years, letting the tense silence in the room stretch another few telling seconds.

  Then Peach looked hard at her and said evenly, ‘We needed to see you again, Ms Davies. As I warned you on Tuesday, new issues always emerge as we gather more knowledge about the murder victim and the people whom he most closely associated with. This shouldn’t take very long, if you are completely frank with us. Which I have to advise you will be much the best strategy for you.’

  ‘I’ve cooperated very fully with this investigation. I’ve done everything asked of me. Like most of the other people involved in the Call Alec Dawson series, I’ve even given a voluntary DNA sample.’

  ‘Yes. Useful thing, DNA. Very difficult to argue with it; even the bloody lawyers find that. Kind of blackmail about it, too, don’t you think? You’re asked to volunteer a sample, but you feel that if you refuse, you will inevitably be suspected of having something to hide. Hardly voluntary, is it, in those circumstances? Still, the law hedges us poor policemen about with all kinds of unreasonable restrictions. We deserve to have the odd thing running in our favour.’

  Michelle, who had felt exactly the dilemma he had outlined when asked to provide a saliva sample, said primly, ‘I gave a sample because I had nothing to fear – because I felt it could only eliminate me from suspicion.’

  Peach looked at her with his head on one side, like an intelligent and slightly surprised cocker spaniel. ‘Really? Well, I must say that is a refreshing attitude. And a commendably brave one also!’

  ‘No, not brave. I gave a sample because I knew it could only help to clear me from suspicion.’

  ‘Which it has failed to do. Indeed, it seems to have had the reverse effect. Ms Davies, a sample of head hair which was found in Mr Cassidy’s BMW sports car at the scene of his death has now been analyzed. I have to tell you that there is a match with the sample you volunteered to our murder team on Tuesday.’

  There was no acting needed now. She felt the blood draining from her face as she said dully, ‘I’ve never been in that car. There must be some mistake.’

  ‘There is no mistake, Ms Davies, except on your part. Any court would accept that the hairs recovered from the passenger seat of the BMW came from your head.’

  ‘But I’ve never been in that car. The only car of Adam’s I was ever in was the maroon Mercedes.’ She looked at the closed door behind them and spoke like one in a hypnotic trance.

  ‘Then how do you explain the findings of our forensic analysts?’

  ‘I cannot do that. And I’m not mistaken. I was never in that BMW.’

  ‘Is that your last word on the matter?’

  ‘It is.’ Michelle gave herself a tiny but perceptible physical shake, as if emerging from a trance. She knew that she wasn’t behaving with her normal confidence. She told herself firmly that the proper strategy in this crisis was to assert herself, to show them that she must not be condemned, however inescapable the evidence might seem. She leaned forward and drummed her small fingers on the big desk, trying to recapture and enjoy her moment of playing the tycoon. ‘You said this wouldn’t take long, Mr Peach. We’re doing the first read-through of a new drama downstairs in the studio. I can’t afford to be away for long without disrupting things.’

  Peach smiled slowly as he looked at her. He seemed to enjoy the spectacle of this medieval Madonna, with her long black hair and her smooth pale skin, attempting to play the modern industrial mogul. ‘I said it wouldn’t take long with just one proviso, Ms Davies. That was that you were perfectly frank with us. Which means much more so than you were on Tuesday.’

  She withdrew her hands from their slightly ridiculous position on the big desk and folded her arms, trying now to simulate a calmness she did not feel. ‘I told you the truth on Tuesday. You cannot instance a single lie!’

  Instead of being confounded, Peach leapt eagerly upon her words; the spaniel had found a bone. ‘Some truth, indeed, Ms Davies. But not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as the immortal legal phrase has it. You chose to withhold certain things, which in our view is as damaging as the lie direct. Sometimes more so.’

  Michelle felt her arms tightening across her breast, her fingers digging hard into the soft flesh at the top of them. It was like being in one of the hoary old thrillers the older actors said used to be played regularly in rep. Except that this was grim reality. ‘I didn’t kill Adam Cassidy. I had nothing to do with his death.’

  ‘Difficult for us to accept, that is. Especially now we have the DNA evidence. Had it not been for you, I don’t believe he would have been in the lonely place where he met his death last Friday night.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  But she did; it showed for a moment in her face as well as in her voice. It was Clyde Northcott who spoke, deep-voiced and inescapable. ‘You told us on Tuesday that you and Mr Cassidy were lovers. You did not tell us that you were planning to go to the Lake District with him on the eveni
ng when he died. That was what you chose to withhold.’

  ‘Someone told you about that?’ Michelle spoke dully, her brain still struggling to work out the implications of this for her.

  ‘We have Mr Cassidy’s phone and its messages.’ They would protect Dean Morley, who had confirmed this. Confidentiality mattered, and murder investigations left behind quite enough scars without needless additions. That was assuming that neither Morley nor Davies had committed murder, Clyde Northcott reminded himself wryly.

  Peach, sensing that Davies was now at her most vulnerable, said softly, ‘Did you arrange to meet him eight miles up the road from here, Michelle? On that lay-by beside the A666?’

  ‘No, I know exactly where it is. I’ve used it myself.’ It was suddenly important to her to give them that curious, irrelevant detail, as if it might help to establish her innocence.

  ‘Then how were you to meet?’

  ‘He was to pick me up here. About half past nine. We weren’t going earlier because he said he couldn’t get away in time for dinner. But we’d have been in Grasmere by eleven, he said, and then we’d have the rest of the weekend to ourselves.’ Again she was giving them every detail she could think of, as if that might add substance to her tale.

  ‘Did he know you’d been told you were out of the next series of Call Alec Dawson?’

  ‘I don’t know. I presumed he wouldn’t have arranged the weekend if he had. But I knew by then that Adam was a strange man. I was planning to have an almighty row with him. If I’m honest, I think I also believed that I might somehow persuade him to reinstate me during the weekend.’

  ‘Much better to be honest, Ms Davies, as you now realize. We’d be more willing to take your statements at face value, if you’d been fully honest with us on Tuesday.’

  ‘I’d have been telling you that I had an assignation with Adam on the very night he was killed. At almost the very time he was killed, as I now understand it.’

  ‘And we’d have been able to accept more easily that you had that assignation but didn’t kill him, if you’d told us about it from the start. As it is, we have to ask you again, did you in fact meet him up on that moor and blow him into the next world with his own shotgun?’

  She winced at that image, but seemed now to have recovered from the shock she had shown two minutes earlier. ‘No. I waited here for him to arrive. When it got to half past ten, I decided he definitely wasn’t coming. I’d tried his mobile, but there was no reply. I thought he must have realized I’d been told I was losing the part in his next series and just didn’t want to confront me. I could understand that. The longer I waited, the more determined I was to have that matter out with him.’

  Northcott’s quiet basso profundo voice, which rang in her ears with a curiously comforting tone, said, ‘If you didn’t kill Cassidy last Friday night, you must have some idea who did.’

  ‘No. I’ve thought about it, because it would get me off the hook. But I can’t think it would be anyone who’d worked with him on the last series. I know I had a motive and I felt when I first heard about his treachery that I could cheerfully kill him for it. But I couldn’t and I didn’t. Dean Morley had much more to lose than me; he felt his whole existence, the way of life he’s only recently established for himself, was threatened by the loss of his role as leading villain in the new series. But Dean doesn’t strike me as a man who could plan and execute murder.’

  ‘Then who else?’

  ‘I don’t know. Adam told me a couple of weeks ago that he was planning to change his agent because he wanted to break into Hollywood. I told him to think hard about it, because Tony Valento would cut up rough. Did he change his agent?’

  Old Harry Cassidy was failing badly. His elder son Luke had never witnessed the lengthy process of dying before. His mother had died suddenly, passing away with the minimum of fuss which had characterized her life of quiet but sturdy labour and virtue. Now he was finding his father’s slow, inevitable and now accelerating decline more harrowing than he would have believed possible.

  ‘You need to eat something, Dad.’

  ‘Why do I?’

  ‘You can’t bring Adam back by punishing yourself.’

  ‘Who did it? They got anyone for it yet?’

  ‘Not yet, Dad. But the police are working hard on it.’

  ‘Be those bloody Pakis, shouldn’t wonder.’

  Luke came and stood in front of his father, where the old bigot could see his face. ‘Dad, I think one of the few things the police know for certain is that it was probably one of the people who’d been working with him.’ Or one of his family; he couldn’t tell the old man that his other son and Adam’s only brother was still under suspicion.

  Harry Cassidy hacked a cough which seemed to shake every bone in his upper body. ‘Bloody police don’t know what they’re bloody doing, nowadays.’

  ‘Dad, you really should eat something, you know. Give it a try, before it goes cold.’

  ‘Don’t want it. Don’t bloody need it.’

  The old man’s lips set in sullen rejection. Luke was reminded against his will of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man. Harry was now at the ‘lean and slipper’d pantaloon’ stage, querulous of aid and sullenly rejecting all argument. Luke wasn’t sure he could cope with that final stage, the one the remorseless Shakespearean eye saw as:

  ‘Second childishness and mere oblivion,

  Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’

  Would it come to that? In the years to come, would he still be able to remember that other man, who had swung young Luke high above his head on summer walks, who had taught him marbles and football and how to catch a cricket ball? Would this earlier and happier image survive after Harry was reduced to that living death where he did not even recognize the people who loved him?

  Perhaps he shouldn’t keep insisting that the old man should eat.

  ‘You can take the lead in this one,’ said Peach. ‘It was your snout who gave us the information. You’re the sort of hard bastard who might frighten even a wrong’un like Tony Valento.’

  Coming from Percy Peach, that was probably a sort of compliment, Clyde Northcott told himself. Or at any rate the nearest thing to a compliment he was likely to get.

  ‘CID. Mr Valento is expecting us,’ Clyde said to the PA who rose to greet them. He waved his warrant card under her nose and was at her boss’s door whilst Peach was still visiting his most cheerful smile upon the bewildered lady.

  Perhaps Cassidy’s ex-agent had always intended to be aggressive, or perhaps he decided to meet fire with fire. Either way, it was a mistake.

  ‘I won’t ask you to sit down, because I don’t expect you to be here long,’ Tony Valento said.

  He was a large, formidably muscled man, but at fifty he was running a little to fat. Clyde Northcott advanced so quickly upon him that he recoiled a pace backwards. Unexpectedly, Northcott’s formidable features formed a smile, but it was plainly a smile of contempt at his quarry’s retreat. ‘We’re busy people, Mr Valento. We don’t intend wasting much time with the likes of you. The question is whether we depart here as the twosome who came to question you or as a trio, with you in handcuffs.’ There was no doubt from the set of the ebony features which alternative DS Northcott would prefer.

  Like most men who employ serious muscle to do their dirty work for them, Valento was a coward at heart. It was also many years since he had felt himself threatened with physical violence. He told himself that the British police couldn’t beat people up, that the whole weight of the law was nowadays against it. But with Northcott’s face three inches higher than his and only a foot away, he wasn’t convinced of that. He said, ‘There’s really no need for this attitude, you know. I’ve nothing to hide from you. Perhaps after all we’d better sit down.’

  He sank into the chair behind his desk. DCI Peach, who had witnessed the exchanges so far with the delight of a sadist in a ringside seat, dusted the immaculate leather of the indicated chair with the flat of his ha
nd, sat down, and crossed his legs to await further developments. Only when he saw both of them sitting did Clyde Northcott accept the third chair in the room. He did so with obvious reluctance, sitting on the front of it, testing it for size, then pulling it forward to the very edge of the desk, so that his uncompromising features were still within three feet of his prey. He evinced every intention of leaping across those three feet, if he did not receive the responses he required from the hapless occupant of this room.

  In his apprehension, Valento made the mistake of looking towards Percy Peach for some sort of relief, an error which would have been scarcely credible to the Brunton criminal fraternity. But this was Manchester, and a man not used to Peach’s idiosyncrasies. Valento felt an irresistible need to break the silence. ‘I’ve nothing to hide. You’ve got nothing on me.’

  Clyde Northcott paused briefly to examine his immaculate nails and fingers, as if indicating what a shame it would be to contaminate them by violent contact with this recalcitrant subject. ‘Lies, Mr Valento, lies. I thought we were agreed that we weren’t going to waste time on this?’

  ‘I didn’t kill that bastard Cassidy and there’s no way you’re going to pin it on me.’

  ‘You hired someone to kill him. You don’t sully your delicate paws with the nasty stuff.’ Clyde looked at the rather pudgy hands in question with some distaste and saw them instantly withdrawn from the top of the desk.

  Valento licked his lips, made himself look into the stern black face, and said, ‘Prove it! Prove your bloody fantasy or take it back!’

  Clyde took his time over his trump card, allowing himself a smile, savouring the apprehension he could scent like a raw stink around the man opposite him.

  ‘Charlie Ford.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’ But Tony Valento was not a good liar once he was frightened. The phrase carried no conviction.