“Don’t worry. It’s all right.”
“You should tell him now, darling,” Syd prompted. “About the tape.”
We’d come, then, to Audrey’s very particular reason. Syd swivelled round to pluck some replacement tissues for her from a box on a shelf behind the sofa. She dried her eyes and blew her nose.
“Well, Toby, the thing is this. None of us may have foreseen these dreadful events. But it seems…Derek had some inkling…that it might all go terribly wrong.”
“How do you know that?”
“I…sense certain things, Toby. It’s part of my calling. Or my curse, depending how you look at it. Anyway, this morning I…played the tape of the séance I conducted for Walter. Derek copied the original and returned it to me several months ago. Something made me…play it to the end. And there I found…waiting for me…for us…a message…from Derek.”
“What did it say?”
“Hear for yourself.” She picked up a remote that had been lying, unnoticed by me, on the arm of the sofa, aimed it at a hi-fi stack in the corner of the room and pressed a button.
There was a click from the tape player, followed, after a pause of a few seconds, by Derek’s voice.
“I don’t know whether you’ll ever hear this. Perhaps I’m being too clever by half. Dad often said I was. And Dad was right about most things. Not everything, though. He shouldn’t have accepted Roger Colborn’s offer. He shouldn’t have agreed to kill Sir Walter. The fact that he did it for my sake only makes it worse. But he was ill. He wasn’t thinking straight. I forgive him. Roger Colborn wasn’t ill, though. He knew exactly what he was doing. I don’t forgive him. And I won’t, until he’s paid for what he did. I’ve thought of a way to make him pay now. It involves Toby Flood, the actor. He’s coming to Brighton in December to perform in a play. His estranged wife, Jennifer, lives with Roger Colborn. That’s the connection I propose to exploit. I’ll tell you about it soon. But not all about it. There are risks, you see. More than I’ll let you know of. They’ll be worth running, though. I hope to do more than punish Roger Colborn. I hope to make him see the error of his ways. And to atone for them. I also hope to persuade him to acknowledge me as his brother. Because that’s what we are. Brothers. And brothers shouldn’t be apart. They should be together. Which is what I think Roger and I can be, at the end of this, if all goes well. But if it doesn’t go well, I want you to know that it’s my fault. Not yours, Mrs. Spencer, or Mr. Porteous’s, or even Mr. Flood’s. But mine. I accept full responsibility for the consequences of my actions. Dad would have said that’s what growing up is all about. Thanks for helping me understand what I have to do, Mrs. Spencer. And just in case I need to say it: goodbye.”
“Derek exonerates us, Toby,” said Audrey, after the tape had run to the end and clicked off. “One and all.”
I looked across at her. “But can we exonerate ourselves?”
“I don’t know. I only know he’d want us to. And therefore…perhaps we should.”
“Will you try to contact him?” I asked Audrey a little while later, as I stood in the open doorway of her house. Syd was already sitting in his car, waiting for me, with the engine running. I’d left the obvious question late. But not too late.
“Of course,” she replied. “But the dead speak—or not—as they please. I don’t contact them. They contact me. I’ll try. But the question is: will he? He may have said…all he has to say.”
“Do you think he really knew what was going to happen?”
“Yes. But without necessarily knowing that he knew. They died together, didn’t they, he and Roger? Together. Not apart.”
It was true. I’d seen them fall. I knew. Derek had been acknowledged by his brother. In the end.
Neither Syd nor I felt the need to say much as we drove back to the Sea Air. Syd’s loquacity had reached its limit long since. And my thoughts could no longer be expressed in words.
It was a relief in a way to find that Eunice wasn’t at home. I fetched my bag from my room, left the key, a farewell note and a cheque on the hall table, then let myself out.
“That was quick,” said Syd as I climbed back into his car.
“Eunice wasn’t there,” I explained.
“We can wait, if you like.”
“No need.”
“Had a bellyful of goodbyes, have you, Tobe?”
“Yes. I think I have.”
“Understood.” He started away. “I’ll keep ours short and sweet.”
“Thanks. In return, I won’t take you to task for playing fast and loose with the facts during our sessions at the Cricketers.”
“I never told you any out-and-out porkies, Tobe.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Well, maybe just the one. And it didn’t amount to anything.”
“Which one was that?”
“When we first bumped into each other in the Cricketers last Sunday, I told you I’d met Joe Orton there on a Sunday night in the summer of ’sixty-seven. Not strictly true, I have to admit. In fact, not true at all.”
“You made it up?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Why?”
“Sensed our chance encounter was slipping through my fingers. Needed something to get your attention. Keep us talking. Simple as that.”
“But how did you know you could get away with it? I’ve read Orton’s diaries. He was in Brighton the last weekend of July, nineteen sixty-seven. And he was out on the town, alone, on the Sunday night. So, theoretically, you could have met him. I can’t believe you just got lucky with your choice of day.”
“Ah, well…” Syd treated me to a sly, sidelong grimace. “Truth is, there was this dwarf lodging in the same house as me back then. Used to perform on the pier. Made up in personality what he lacked in height. After Orton’s murder was splashed all over the papers, he told me he’d—”
“It’s OK,” I interrupted, recalling Orton’s matter-of-fact account of oral sex in a Brighton public convenience on Sunday, 30 July 1967. “I get the picture.”
“You do?”
“In Cinemascope. Besides…” We’d passed the Royal Pavilion by now. It wasn’t much farther to the station. “You don’t have time to do justice to the story, Syd. Leave me to imagine the details.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting alone at a table outside Bonaparte’s Bar at the edge of the station concourse, sipping a whisky to while away the half-hour I had to wait for the next train to London. I’d pulled my copy of The Orton Diaries out of my bag to double-check Syd’s story. Orton’s encounter with Syd’s neighbour, the cottaging dwarf, was much as I remembered it.
What I’d forgotten, though, was that afterwards Orton had gone into the station for a cup of tea. The café he’d used had presumably transmogrified itself since into Bonaparte’s Bar. Selling whisky on a Sunday afternoon back then would have been inconceivable as well as illegal, of course. But that and most of the other changes were largely superficial. Thirty-five years, four months and one week ago, Orton could have been sitting exactly where I was sitting today.
“I had a cup of tea at the station,” he wrote. “I thought a lot about Prick Up Your Ears” (the next play he was planning to write, but, in the event, never did). “And things in general.”
Ah yes. Things in general. “They can be a bugger, can’t they, Joe?” I murmured.
The train was announced. I went through the barrier and boarded one of the front carriages, hoping that would mean no-one would sit next to me. I’d bought an Observer to hide behind if I needed to.
I looked out of the window. There was a view across the platforms of the station car park, washed with rain, and, beyond that, the soaring flank of St. Bartholomew’s Church. I checked my watch. We’d be under way in a few minutes. I was taking my leave of Brighton. My week was over. My time was up. In so many more ways than one.
Then I saw something I couldn’t quite believe. A woman was hurrying across the car park towards the station: a woman in jeans and a short wat
erproof; a woman I recognized very well.
I watched, transfixed, as she moved out of the rain into the shelter of the station canopy and headed along the far platform towards the concourse, her pace quickening as she went.
Then I too started moving.
I forced a passage to the barrier through a ruck of London-bound passengers. Jenny was standing beyond them on the concourse, staring at me between their shoulders and hoisted bags. They were there, jostling past me. But, in another sense, they weren’t there at all.
My ticket wouldn’t operate the exit gate. I kept looking at Jenny as I moved to the manned barrier, mumbled a request to be let out and was ushered through.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” was all I could manage to say when I finally reached her.
“I didn’t expect you would either,” she said softly.
“How did you know which train I was catching?”
“I didn’t. I went to the Sea Air first. Eunice had just got back and found your note. She hadn’t been out long, though, so we reckoned it was worth me coming on here. I very much wanted…not to leave things as they were.”
“How do you want to leave them, then?”
She shrugged. “I’m not really sure.”
I went back to Bonaparte’s Bar. This time, I wasn’t alone. I bought Jenny a cup of coffee. And myself another whisky. We sat at the table I’d only recently vacated. The London train pulled out. The hubbub it had generated died. The concourse grew quiet enough for me to hear the cooing of a pigeon from some perch above us in the station roof.
“I don’t know what to say,” I admitted.
“Neither do I,” said Jenny.
“Shall we just sit here, then?” I suggested. “Until we think of something.”
We looked at each other. Several seconds passed. Then Jenny smiled hesitantly. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s do that.”
And we did.
End of transcription
LATER DAYS
Lodger in the Throat by Joe Orton ran for five months on the London stage. The part of James Elliott was played throughout the run by Toby Flood. He never missed a performance.
The High Court upheld a claim by a group of twelve former employees of Colbonite Ltd to the estate of Roger Colborn, who was found to have died intestate. Under the rules of intestacy, his estate devolved upon his half-brother, Derek Oswin, who had died with him, but, being the younger of the two, was deemed to have died second. Derek Oswin had on the other hand made a will, the terms of which were therefore held to apply to Roger Colborn’s estate. Derek Oswin’s property was left to be shared among any former employees of Colbonite Ltd in need of financial assistance. Gavin Colborn, Roger Colborn’s uncle and only surviving blood relative, appealed against this decision, but died before the appeal could be heard. An inquest subsequently found that he had suffered a fatal head injury in a fall down a steep flight of stairs at his home in Brighton while under the influence of alcohol.
Jennifer Flood never made the necessary application to the High Court for her divorce from Toby Flood to be declared final and absolute. The couple remain married.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to the following for the help they generously gave me in the writing of this book. My dear friend Georgina James plied me with invaluable information about Brighton as well as various nuggets of legal advice. Peter Wilkins, David Bownes and the great man himself, Duncan Weldon, ensured my portrait of an actor did not stray too far from the reality with which they are so familiar. Veronica Hamilton-Deeley provided a diligent coroners perspective on events. And Rene-Jean and Tim Wilkin ensured that those fictional events took place in genuine Brighton weather. Thank you, all.
ALSO BY ROBERT GODDARD
AVAILABLE FROM BANTAM DELL
INTO THE BLUE
BORROWED TIME
HAND IN GLOVE
AND COMING SOON
FROM DELACORTE PRESS
SIGHT UNSEEN
If you enjoyed Robert Goddard’s PLAY TO THE END, you won’t want to miss any of his enthralling novels of suspense. Look for HAND IN GLOVE, BORROWED TIME, and INTO THE BLUE, all now in Delta trade paperbacks, at your favorite bookseller.
And read on for an exciting early look at Robert Goddard’s latest electrifying suspense novel,
SIGHT UNSEEN
coming from Delacorte Press
in Spring 2007
SIGHT UNSEEN
by
Robert Goddard
On sale Spring 2007
It begins at Avebury, in the late July of a cool, wet summer turned suddenly warm and dry. The Marlborough Downs shimmer in a haze of unfamiliar heat. Skylarks sing in the breezeless air above the sheep-cropped turf. The sun burns high and brazen. And the stones stand, lichened and eroded, sentinels over nearly five thousand years of history.
It begins, then, in a place whose origins and purposes are obscured by antiquity. Why Neolithic henge-builders should have devoted so much time and effort to constructing a great ramparted stone circle at Avebury, as well as a huge artificial hill less than a mile away, at Silbury, is as unknown as it is unknowable.
It begins, therefore, in a landscape where the unexplained and inexplicable lie still and close, where man-made markers of a remote past mock the set and ordered world that is merely the flickering, fast-fleeing present.
Saxon settlers gave Avebury its modern name a millennium and a half ago. They founded a village within its protective ditch and bank. Over the centuries, as the village grew, many of the stones were moved or buried. Later, they were used as building material, the ditch as a rubbish-dump. The henge withered.
Then, in the 1930s, came Alexander Keiller, the marmalade millionaire and amateur archaeologist. He bought up and demolished half the village, raised the stones, cleared the ditch, restored the circle. The clock was turned back. The National Trust moved in. The henge flourished anew—a monument and a mystery.
Nearly forty years have passed since the Trust’s purchase of Keiller’s land holdings at Avebury. The renovated circle basks unmolested in the heat of a summer’s day. A kestrel, soaring high above on a thermal, has a perfect view of the banked circumference of the henge, quartered by builders of later generations. The High Street of the surviving village runs west–east along one diameter, crossing the north–south route of the Swindon to Devizes road close to the centre of the circle. East of this junction, the buildings peter out as the effects of Keiller’s demolition work become more apparant. Green Street, the land is aptly called, dwindling as it leaves the circle and winds on towards the downs.
As it passes through the village, the main road performs a zigzag, the north-western angle of which is occupied by the thatched and limewashed Red Lion Inn. East of the inn, on the other side of the road, are the fenced-off remains of an inner circle known as the Cove—two stones, one tall and slender, the other squat and rounded, referred to locally as Adam and Eve. There is a gate in the fence, opposite the pub car park, and another gate in Green Street, on the other side of Silbury House, a four-square corner property that formerly served as the residence of Avebury’s Nonconformist minister.
It is a little after noon on this last Monday of July, 1981. Custom is sparse at the Red Lion and visitors to the henge are few. When the traffic noise ebbs, as it periodically does, somnolence prevails. There is a stillness in the air and in the scene. But it is not the stillness of expectancy. There is no hint, no harbinger, of what is about to occur.
At one of the outdoor tables in front of the Red Lion, a solitary drinker sits cradling a beer glass. He is a slim, dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, dressed in blue jeans and a pale, open-necked shirt rolled up at the elbows. Beside him, on the table, lie a spiral-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen. He is gazing vacantly ahead of him, across the road, towards the remaining stones of the southern inner circle. They do not command his attention, however, as a glance at his wristwatch reveals. He is waiting for something, or someone
. He takes a slurp of beer and sets the glass down on the table. It is nearly empty. Sunlight glistens on the swirling residue.
A child’s voice catches his ear, drifting across from the Cove. There is, at the moment, no traffic to mask the sound. The man turns and looks. He sees a woman and three children approaching the Cove from the direction of the perimeter bank. Two of the children are running ahead, racing, perhaps, to be first to the stones: a boy and a girl. The boy is nine or ten, dressed in baseball boots, blue jeans and a red T-shirt. The girl is a couple of years younger. She is wearing sandals, white socks and a blue and white polka-dot dress. Both have fair hair that appears blond in the sunshine, cut short on the boy but worn long, in a ponytail, by the girl. The woman is lagging well behind, her pace set by the youngest child, toddling at her side. This child, a girl, is wearing grey dungarees over a striped T-shirt. There can hardly be any doubt, given the colour of her hair, tied in bunches with pink ribbon, that she is the sister of the other two children.
It is much less likely that the woman escorting her is their mother. She appears too young for the role, slim, fine-featured and dark-haired, surely not beyond her early twenties. She is dressed in cream linen trousers and a pink blouse and is carrying a straw hat. Her attention is fixed largely on the little girl beside her. The other two children are dashing ahead.
As they approach the stones, a figure steps out from the gap between Adam and Eve, hidden till then from view. He is a short, tubby man in hiking boots, brown shorts, check shirt and some kind of multi-pocketed fisherman’s waistcoat. He is round-faced, balding and bespectacled, aged anything between thirty-five and fifty. The two children stop and stare at him. He says something. The boy replies and moves forward.
The man outside the Red Lion watches for lack of anything more interesting to watch. He sees nothing sinister or threatening. What he does see is a flash of sunlight on glass as the man by the stones takes something out of one of his numerous pockets. The boy steps closer.
Play to the End Page 31
