Stagestruck

by Peter Lovesey

‘Mr Melmot.’

  ‘How exactly – a note, a phone call?’ ‘Personally. He came to the stage door and told me himself.’ ‘This was hot news.’ Binns shrugged in contempt at the obvious. ‘Tell anyone else, did you?’ He didn’t like that. ‘What do you take me for? It’s more than my job is worth to go blurting it out.’ ‘So what happened?’ ‘I carried out his instructions to the letter. Waited out front for her to come in her black limo. Escorted her round to the side door and up the back stairs to the top box. Mr Melmot was already up there and greeted her and my job was done.’

  ‘She arrived by limo, you said?’ ‘Chauffeur-driven Mercedes, like I was told to look out for.’ ‘Was anything said when she first got out?’ ‘Not by her. She had a scarf across her face like one of them Arab women and the hood of her jacket was over her head. I told her to come with me and she did.’ ‘Did she appear nervous?’ ‘How would I know when all I could see was her eyes?’ ‘You’re in the security business. You can tell a lot from a person’s behaviour, or you ought to.’ ‘She was in control of herself, if that’s what you’re asking.’ ‘Was it busy outside the theatre?’ ‘It was past the time when they’re hanging about outside.

  The show was almost starting. No one took any notice of her.’ ‘Was anyone lurking around the stairs to the box?’ ‘No.’ ‘After taking her upstairs, where did you go?’ ‘Back down and round to the stage door. I was there for the rest of the evening.’ Just a functionary. That was his defence, anyway. If anyone had a case to answer, it wasn’t Charlie Binns. Diamond kept an open mind. If Binns and Shearman could be believed, the people ‘in’ on the secret visit amounted only to three. But at the interval Fräulein Schneider was mouthing off to Gisella and Preston and everyone who happened to be in the wings that she’d seen the grey lady in the upper box. Anyone who guessed the truth or simply went to investigate could have attacked Clarion. Her death had taken place in that twenty-minute slot.

  Was it murder?

  He returned upstairs, fixed on dragging some definite information out of Dr Sealy. The stairs didn’t do anything to lower his blood pressure.

  ‘What killed her, then?’ he said when he’d got his breath back.

  Sealy was still crouched over the body. ‘I told you -’ he barely managed to say before Diamond cut him off.

  ‘You told me nothing. You’ve been studying the body for

  – what? – forty minutes and given me no help at all. I’ve got all of fifty people down there wanting to get off home. I can’t hold them indefinitely.’

  ‘Your call, old boy, not mine,’ Sealy said without looking away from the body.

  ‘Is there anything I should be told?’

  ‘About her death? Nothing I can tell you.’

  ‘Are you saying it was natural?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Unnatural?’

  ‘I reserve judgement. I’ll do the PM tomorrow. Do you want to be there?’ He knew what to do with a knife, how to twist as well as dissect.

  ‘Not even a suspicion?’

  ‘I’m a scientist, my dear fellow. Suspicion is speculative and I don’t have any truck with it.’

  ‘Put it this way, then. Is it possible she was killed and no mark was left?’

  ‘Entirely possible, but don’t ask me to list the possible causes or we’ll be here all night.’ He stood up. ‘It gets to your knees, all this stooping. Pity she didn’t die sitting up in the chair.’

  ‘Just for your comfort?’ ‘Well, if she had, she’d have been visible to the audience and I imagine someone would have spotted something was wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know. People fall asleep watching dull plays.’

  The first glimmer of concern crossed Sealy’s features. ‘Is it dull? I was given tickets for Saturday.’

  ‘I haven’t seen it. Look, if you’re not going to tell me anything, I might as well be off.’

  ‘There’s something I can tell you,’ Sealy said.

  ‘About the cause of death?’

  ‘No. About the victim. Take a look at her arms.’ He crouched again and rolled back one of the sleeves of the grey jacket as far as the elbow.

  Diamond leaned over his shoulder for a better look. There were scars on the inner side of the forearm. ‘She was a druggie?’

  ‘No. These old injuries are not the same as you get from shooting up. She’s cut her wrists more than once. Clarion Calhoun was a self-harmer.’

  17

  An event as sensational as the sudden death of a major pop star becomes international news in a short time. Well before midnight on Thursday the police switchboard was jammed with media enquiries. Diamond issued a statement confirming that a woman had been found dead in a box at the Theatre Royal and that a postmortem would be conducted next morning and a press conference would follow.

  Early Friday he phoned Ingeborg at home and confided what the press didn’t yet know.

  He heard her intake of breath.

  The shock was still with him too, and gave more bite to his words than he intended. ‘When I asked you to bone up on Clarion’s life you didn’t tell me anything about self-inflicted injuries.’

  The criticism hurt. ‘Be fair, guv. Don’t you think if I’d found even a hint of anything like that, I’d have told you right away?’

  As so often, his plain speaking had caused more offence than he intended. ‘I’m saying this has come out of the blue, that’s all.’

  ‘If you remember, I was looking at websites and fanzines. This isn’t the kind of stuff a pop star wants to be known for.’

  He backed off a little. ‘You’d think the tabloids would have been onto this.’

  From Ingeborg’s tone, she appreciated the shift of focus. ‘She must have kept it well hidden. Thinking about it, all the pictures I’ve ever seen show her with her arms covered up.’

  ‘Well, you can’t hide much when you’re on the dissecting table. Sealy says he can use ultra-violet light to enhance old scars and give us an idea how long she was doing this.’

  ‘Can we be certain they were self-inflicted?’

  ‘They’re classic signs, he says.’

  Ingeborg moved on quickly to the key question. ‘Are you thinking she may have damaged her own face with the caustic soda?’ She paused, shocked by her own statement. ‘It changes everything.’

  He’d debated this with himself for much of the night. What if no crime had been committed at all and the whole of CID was flat out on a barren investigation? ‘Let’s find out if Sealy is right. That agent you and I met at the hospital – the dragon. What’s her name?’

  ‘Tilda Box.’

  ‘Yes. She must know what her client got up to. Where is she based? London, I suppose.’

  ‘We have her mobile number.’

  ‘You’ll get more out of her if you meet.’

  ‘We need someone to identify the body.’

  ‘Neat.’ Not for the first time, he valued Ingeborg’s quick brain. ‘What time is it? Wake her up and tell her we want her here before they start the PM.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Call me back as soon as you’ve fixed it. I’m at home.’ He put down the phone.

  Raffles was pressing against his leg, reminding him of a duty that couldn’t be ducked. There was barely time to open a pouch of tuna before the phone rang.

  ‘She’s catching an early train,’ Ingeborg told him. ‘I’m meeting her at the station and driving her to the mortuary.’

  ‘She’d heard, of course?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She’s been up some time answering the phone.’

  ‘You can you handle this, can’t you, Inge?’

  ‘Getting her to open up? No problem, guv.’

  ‘She’s a hard nut.’

  ‘Brittle. I watched you deal with her.’

  This sounded like a compliment, but it wasn’t. Cracking a difficult witness was a skill Ingeborg had learned in her days as a journalist. There were times when Diamond suspected she could crack him, too. Right now he wanted her opinion on the
excesses of her age group. ‘You hear quite a lot about self-inflicted injuries among young women. Why do they do it?’

  ‘Guys do it as well.’

  He smiled to himself. ‘Point taken.’

  ‘It’s often a teenage thing,’ she said, and then conceded a little. ‘I don’t know what the stats say, but you could be right that females are in the majority here. As to why, you’d better ask a shrink.’

  Perish the thought. ‘I was hoping to get an opinion out of you.’

  She took a moment to think. ‘It’s often triggered by stress. Situations they can’t cope with. I did see a theory that they’re suffering such pain from within that they take to cutting themselves to transfer the pain to the outside.’

  ‘There’s something wrong with the logic there.’

  ‘I don’t think so. The cutting brings temporary relief.’

  ‘By pain from within, you mean anxieties?’

  ‘Out of all proportion. You know how tough it can be when you’re growing up.’

  ‘Clarion was no teenager.’

  ‘Right, but what kind of adolescence did she have? She was into the world of pop from an early age. Her growing up must have been distorted.’

  ‘Arrested development?’

  ‘If you want to put a label on it. She would have been okay while things were going well but as she sank in the charts she would have been deeply troubled. Her great days as a singer were over. We don’t know when she started cutting herself. It may have been when she was younger, but all the recent disappointment must have been hell to endure.’

  ‘Are you saying she was immature?’

  A sigh came down the phone. ‘Emotionally, maybe. Unable to cope. She had the acting as a back-up, but everyone says she was rubbish in rehearsals. First night nerves plus the knowledge that she couldn’t hack it as an actor must have really got to her.’

  ‘Damaging her own face would be a step on from cutting her arms,’ Diamond said.

  ‘I know, but self-harmers use anything that comes to hand, a hot iron sometimes, a lighter, boiling water, acid.’

  His flesh prickled.

  She went on, ‘And she had the extra incentive that scarring her face would save her from being savaged by the critics and all the bad publicity, which she must have been dreading.’

  ‘I thought self-harming was done in secret and covered up.’

  ‘She did cover it up by blaming the theatre.’

  ‘But the pain was very public.’

  ‘No one knew it was her own doing. She would have secretly brushed caustic soda on her face just before going on, so the cause of it wasn’t obvious. She had the credit of making an entrance and the agony that followed actually saved her from having to remain on stage.’

  ‘This is getting too deep for me. We didn’t find any trace of the stuff in her dressing room.’

  ‘She would have flushed it away, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘You really believe this, Inge, don’t you?’

  ‘It makes sense to me, guv.’

  ‘Why did she threaten to sue? Wouldn’t a self-harmer stay silent?’

  ‘To make her story stand up. She wasn’t going to admit that the scarring was self-inflicted or she’d have been crucified by the press. So she had to point the finger at someone else. She waited a few days and then let it be known she was withdrawing the action, but without saying why.’

  He was being persuaded, and now he added his own twist. ‘I wonder if she ever did instruct her lawyers. That’s something else you should ask the agent.’

  ‘Do we agree that the threat to sue was all a bluff?’

  ‘Could well have been, if this theory is correct. Her stay in hospital may have given her pause for thought. The doctors who treated her at Frenchay would have seen the state of her arms and worked out that she had a history of this.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they have informed us?’

  ‘Patient confidentiality.’

  ‘I’m all for that,’

  ‘So am I, until it gets in the way of a police enquiry.’ He drummed his fingers on the edge of the worktop. ‘And so we come to the even bigger question: does self-harming lead to suicide?’

  ‘You mean did she kill herself?’ The question hung unanswered for a long interval before Ingeborg said, ‘I don’t think it follows. Most of them are content to damage their bodies without wanting to destroy them.’

  ‘It’s not a slippery slope, then?’

  ‘You’d have to ask an expert, but I don’t believe it’s inevitable or even likely.’

  He’d done enough theorising. ‘We have no clue as to what caused her death last night.’

  ‘But we should find out from the postmortem. Will Keith be sitting in?’

  ‘He’s got lucky again, yes. But of course we’ll have the usual wait for test results.’

  ‘Is poison a possibility?’ Ingeborg said, her voice rising in anticipation.

  ‘She wasn’t shot, stabbed or strangled. There were no obvious injury marks, apart from those we’ve talked about.’

  ‘So it is.’

  ‘The trouble is we won’t know if she took poison herself or was given it.’

  ‘Was there an empty cup or glass in the box?’

  ‘I didn’t see one.’

  ‘Most poisons are slow-acting, aren’t they? I don’t think I’m with you on this.’

  He let it pass. In fact he hadn’t declared for poisoning or any other form of death. He’d simply complained about waiting for results. But he wanted Ingeborg on side. ‘Hope it didn’t ruin your evening, turning out last night.’

  ‘It wasn’t a problem. I was ironing.’

  ‘Ironing?’

  ‘And listening to the radio.’

  A domestic scene he hadn’t remotely imagined. He’d pictured her clubbing at Moles. It seemed even the funky Ingeborg wasn’t whooping it up every night of the week.

  It was still early. After shaving, he got on the phone again and put in several calls to police authorities in the home counties. He’d given a promise to Paloma that he would follow up on that call he’d made to the Yard seeking information on Flakey White. She was right. For peace of mind, the damage of long ago had to be repaired if at all possible. Everyone he phoned said they would ‘look into it’. He suspected that their priority was at a lower level than his.

  His first move of the day wasn’t to the theatre or Manvers Street nick, but south, into Somerset, with Paul Gilbert as back-up and chauffeur. An early call on Francis Melmot was essential.

  The sun came out and Melmot Hall appeared dramatically out of an early morning mist, much of the west wing still obscured. A little over a week ago, Clarion had been driven here to be the guest of her unlikely fan and his sharp-asnails mother. What had the pop star expected of her stay in a stately home, and what had she experienced? She hadn’t remained here long.

  ‘Do you like lemon drizzle cake?’ Diamond asked young Gilbert as they approached the pedimented entrance.

  ‘I don’t even know what it is, guv.’

  ‘You’ve led a sheltered life. You could find out today. They’re famous for it here.’

  Their knock was answered after a long delay by Melmot himself, wearing an ancient brown dressing gown over bare legs and with flecks of shaving foam around his nose and ears. ‘Do you know what time this is?’

  ‘Time for some questions about last night,’ Diamond said. ‘You know what happened in the theatre?’

  ‘Of course. I was there.’

  ‘Not when I needed to question you. May we come in?’

  Melmot held onto the large oak door. ‘Can’t you come back later?’

  ‘That’s something you don’t say to the police, Mr Melmot.’

  ‘If you must, then. I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

  ‘You coped with hundreds the other day.’

  ‘Only in the grounds. That’s different.’

  When they entered, it was apparent what the problem was. The grounds had been trimmed, clipped a
nd weeded for the open day. The interior of the house, a spacious entrance hall with a curved, cantilevered staircase, was like a tip, cluttered with bulging carrier bags, piles of books and junk mail, all covered in dust.

  ‘As you see, I don’t employ staff in the house,’ Melmot said, opening a door. ‘You’d better come in here.’

  They entered a large, high-ceilinged room almost empty of furniture and with patches on the wallpaper showing where pictures had hung.

  ‘Find yourselves a pew.’

  The only possibilities were dining chairs heaped with cardboard boxes containing crockery.

  ‘These things are waiting for a valuation,’ Melmot said.

  ‘Selling up?’ Diamond asked, gesturing to DC Gilbert to clear some space for them all. The prospect of coffee and lemon drizzle cake had all but vanished.

  ‘Not the house. Just some of the contents. You wouldn’t believe the upkeep of a place this size. It’s death by a thousand cuts. Most of my ancestors’ portraits have gone, including, I may say, two Knellers and a Gainsborough. Each time I sell something I have to justify it to my mother, who thinks I’m a wastrel. By the way, she won’t interrupt us if you’re brief. She remains in her room until eleven. After that, she’ll be on the warpath.’

  ‘Let’s go for it, then. I was told you were phoned some time yesterday by Clarion wanting to see the evening performance.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘You knew already that she’d dropped the lawsuit. You heard from her lawyers, you told me.’

  Melmot nodded, wary of what he might be asked.

  ‘So you were well disposed to the lady?’

  ‘We’ve been over this before. I told you I was a fan.’

  ‘But your admiration must have been tested by the lawsuit hanging over you.’

  ‘A temporary difficulty. Others took it more seriously than I.’

  ‘Denise, for one.’

  ‘That’s a matter of conjecture, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not since we found the suicide note.’ Diamond watched the reaction before adding, ‘Didn’t you hear?’

  Melmot blinked several times and turned a shade more pink. Plainly, the Theatre Royal’s bush telegraph had malfunctioned. But then Diamond remembered that the discovery had been known only to Ingeborg, Fred Dawkins and himself. If three members of CID can’t keep quiet, who can?