‘It wasn’t the play that affected me.’
‘Stage fright, was it? You seemed very confident in front of an audience.’
‘Come on, we both know it wasn’t stage fright.’ He was losing patience.
‘You’d better enlighten me.’
‘No, Mr White. I want you to enlighten me. I want to know what happened between you and me.’
The old man blinked and shook his head and talked on in the same urbane way. ‘I’m sorry. I’m at a loss. As I recall it, I didn’t force you to take part. I offered you the role and you were keen to take it up. I would have got your parents’ permission, I’m certain. From what you say, something was amiss and I apologise for that. To the best of my recollection nothing happened, as you put it.’
‘Why did you choose me?’
‘I expect because you were a confident child who wouldn’t mind appearing on a stage. If you don’t mind me saying so, you have quite a forceful presence as an adult.’
‘I’m a police officer.’
The effect was dramatic. White’s hand went protectively to his throat. His face drained of colour, his voice husky. ‘I think I will sit down.’
Diamond got up from the chair and set it in the centre of the room. White was so shaken that he had to support himself briefly, holding onto the back before getting seated.
‘I know about your prison term,’ Diamond said.
Almost in a whisper, White said, ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘But it happened.’
‘I served my sentence.’
‘Early release after three years.’
‘It was no picnic. They make sure everyone knows what you’re in for and you get it tougher than anyone else. You’re called a nonce and that’s the lowest form of humanity inside. Sub-human, in fact.’
‘You won’t get sympathy from me.’
‘I’m not asking for any. I deserved all I got. I did my time and I haven’t offended since. You can check the records.’
‘I have,’ Diamond said. ‘All it means is that you weren’t caught again. People like you don’t reform. The perversion is permanent.’
He didn’t deny it. He nodded. ‘In that way it’s a unique crime. Other prisoners can wipe the slate clean. I’m a child molester, a paedophile, and that’s how the world will always see me, even at my age. Is this about the sex offenders’ register?’
‘No. It’s about you and me.’
As if he hadn’t heard, White continued, ‘All I can repeat to you is that I never worked in a school again. I was unemployed for a long time, incapable of getting my life back on track. When I did, it was my facility at drawing that was my salvation. I could have illustrated books for children. That’s where most of the work is. I deliberately stayed out of that. Eventually I found a niche in graphic novels for adults. Why are you here, Mr Diamond?’
The anger was hard to hold down. ‘Isn’t that bloody obvious? You say you changed your job and your style of life. At least you had the chance. It’s not so easy for your victims, is it? They have to live with the trauma of what you did to them.’
White lowered his head. ‘I’m aware of that. As a child I was abused myself. Many who commit these crimes had it happen to them. It’s self-perpetuating. Please understand I’m not whingeing. I made these choices. I knew my conduct was wicked and unlawful. Believe me, after I came out of prison I stopped.’
Diamond still despised him. ‘Mr White, I’m not interested in what happened after you came out or how you live now. I’m here because of what went on when I was a kid with a teacher I trusted, and who my parents trusted, apparently.’
He looked up wide-eyed and said, ‘I didn’t abuse you.’
Now he was denying it, the filthy creep.
The red mist descended. Diamond grasped him by the shoulders. ‘What are you saying, you faggot, that it wasn’t abuse?’
‘I swear to God I didn’t do anything to you.’
‘Don’t give me that. Think about someone else for a change instead of yourself.’ Diamond hauled him out of the chair and held him up like an old suit. They were eye to eye. ‘Each time I step inside a theatre something so foul is triggered in my brain that I want to throw up. I don’t know exactly what. Mentally a shutter comes down. But I know precisely when all this started – during that weekend when I was in the play.’
White’s face was contorted with terror. He tried to mouth some words and couldn’t. All that came out was bad breath.
Diamond shoved him back into the chair so hard that it skidded across the floor, rocked back and almost overbalanced. He advanced on him, fists clenched. The impulse to hit him was huge.
White screamed. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.
‘I didn’t touch you,’ Diamond said, disbelieving.
He was whimpering. When he opened his mouth it was obvious that he’d bitten his tongue.
The blood was White’s salvation. The sight of it acted as a check on Diamond, reminding him of all the promises he’d made to himself about non-violence. It wouldn’t take more than a few blows to kill this old perv, and what would that achieve?
‘Admit it,’ he said, panting for breath himself. ‘You know what you did to me. I need to hear you say it.’
White simply shook his head.
This was not going as planned.
Diamond made a fist again and then unclenched it. He was making huge efforts to stay in control. He took a step back, grasping his own hands to stop them from lashing out. ‘I didn’t come here to beat you up. The least you can do is tell me the truth.’
White wiped some of the blood from his chin and succeeded in saying, spacing the words, ‘I have never assaulted you in any way. Never touched you.’
‘Bloody liar.’
‘Really.’
‘How can you say this? Come on, the truth.’
He raised a pacifying hand while he gasped for air. Finally, he spoke. ‘Will you hear me out?’ Breathing hard, pausing often, he said, ‘You don’t know as much about me as you think. There are different sorts of child sex, Mr Diamond. I wasn’t ever attracted to small boys. Yours was a primary school. My offences were all at Manningham Academy. That’s a private school for girls aged eleven to eighteen. I took advantage of underage girls of fourteen and fifteen. I’m a paedophile and ashamed of it, but I was never a pederast.’
Diamond heard the words and didn’t at first believe them. He did a rapid rethink of how he’d learned about this. Mike Glazebrook had said his mother had read in the News of the World that White had been convicted of sex offences against minors at a private school in Hampshire. And Scotland Yard had later confirmed it was Manningham Academy. That much, at least, was fact.
Was the rest a misunderstanding? The way the newspapers reported such cases, the names of the victims protected by law, there was scope for uncertainty. Mrs Glazebrook had questioned Mike to find out if he’d been abused. She’d evidently assumed that the victims were young boys and this assumption had stuck with Glazebrook and been accepted unquestioningly by Diamond.
Big mistake, was it?
Apparently so. It would have been easy to find out what sort of school it was. He’d failed to make a basic check. How unprofessional was that? He knew why he hadn’t looked at the newspaper files himself or tried to contact the school: because it was so personal. He’d backed off from the nauseating detail.
Yet the truth solved nothing. The facts still didn’t add up. He could trace his theatre episodes back to immediately after the Richard III play, when he’d gone on holiday with the family and refused to stay in the theatre at Llandudno.
‘I’m certain something deeply upsetting happened to me over the weekend of the play,’ he told White with a huge effort to sound reasonable. ‘You knew the people involved. Was there anyone else who could have targeted an eightyear-old boy? The actor who played the king? He would have handled us.’
‘Angus Coventry? I think not,’ White said. ‘He was having a passionate affa
ir in real life with the actress playing Lady Anne. He wasn’t interested in anyone else.’
‘One of the others, then?’
‘I doubt it. There wasn’t the opportunity. It was a church-hall production, if you remember. The backstage area was minimal, and just about everything had to be done there, so it was always crowded with actors and scene-shifters and what have you.’
This chimed in with Diamond’s memory. He was forced to conclude that he wasn’t being duped.
White added, ‘I remember a scene when you and the other prince were smothered. In the Shakespeare version the murders were done off stage, but this was very far from Shakespeare. Could that have been what upset you?’
‘The smothering? I’m certain it wasn’t.’
‘I was thinking if Angus pressed too hard -’
‘No,’ Diamond said from direct memory. ‘The pillow was placed lightly over my face and I had plenty of space to breathe. That wasn’t the cause.’
‘I can’t think of anything else.’
‘And neither can I.’ To say that he was disappointed was an understatement. He’d psyched himself up, confident of getting the truth, however painful. To be denied any explanation at all was so unexpected that he had difficulty dealing with it.
‘What will you do about me?’ White asked.
‘You?’
‘If it gets known locally what I am, people are going to feel threatened, concerned for their children.’
‘Afraid of vigilantes, are you?’
‘It’s happened before. I’ve had to move out each time.’
‘Why didn’t you change your name?’
‘Because when you get found out, as you will in time, you become an even more sinister figure, a pervert trying to pretend he’s someone else, somebody normal.’
Diamond saw sense in that. ‘This was a personal visit, nothing to do with my job. If someone in the police asks me if I know your whereabouts, I’ll tell them. I know of no reason why they should.’
‘What about the other man, Glazebrook?’
‘He won’t come near you.’
During the drive back to Salisbury District Hospital, Diamond reflected on his failure. The visit to Wilton had not been one of his more glorious hours. He’d messed up, big time. He could have killed that old man, and all through a mistaken assumption. He felt more shamed, more tarnished, than before he’d started. And he still didn’t know how to deal with his private nightmare.
22
Lew Rogers was still in the Accident and Emergency waiting area.
‘What’s the latest?’ Diamond asked.
‘She’s going to be okay. They’re keeping her overnight as a precaution, but there’s nothing seriously wrong.’
‘Can we see her?’
‘She’s being moved to another ward as we speak, and we can talk to her there. Two of the local traffic guys are waiting to interview her as well.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Grabbing a coffee while they can.’
‘Let’s beat them to it.’ He called to a nurse.
They found Kate in a room of her own in a white dressing gown seated in an armchair beside the bed. Her forehead was bruised and she had a bandaged arm. She produced a smile fit to fill the royal circle and said, ‘Hi, darlings.’
‘You’re so lucky,’ Diamond told her while Rogers was collecting chairs from the stack outside. ‘We saw the state of your car.’
‘Is it a write-off?’
‘Total. Do you know what caused the accident?’
The smile surfaced again. ‘I got into one almighty skid coming round a bend and hit a tree. Simple as that.’
‘Going too fast, then?’
‘Story of my life.’
‘Was anyone else involved?’
‘Did I hit anyone?’ Her own words took a moment to sink in before the amusement stopped and she scratched her head. ‘I’d have noticed, wouldn’t I?’
‘I meant were you trying to avoid another vehicle? Someone trying to overtake, perhaps?’
The giggle returned. She was in a strangely playful mood. ‘Are you offering me an alibi, my love? I appreciate that. But I was a Girl Guide once and promised always to tell the truth. The crash was down to me entirely, driving too fast with my little mind on other things.’
‘Like being sacked from the Theatre Royal?’
‘God, no, that’s water under the bridge. I was daydreaming about all the gorgeous fellows I’d like to sleep with.’
At this point, Rogers came in with two chairs, heard what was said, and dropped one of them. Diamond used the interruption to turn to him and mutter, ‘Was she breathalysed?’
Rogers nodded. ‘At the scene, I was told. Negative.’
Kate’s light-minded talk had to be put down to shock, or a side-effect of medication.
She called out to Diamond, ‘Were you asking if I was breathalysed? Christ, yes. They asked me to blow into something as soon as they dragged me out of the wreckage. I’m not stupid. I don’t drink and drive.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ Diamond said, finding it hard to believe.
‘But they rescued my handbag as well, and luckily I keep a small pick-me-up for stressful situations.’ She patted her hand against the pocket of the dressing gown and Diamond saw the glint of a silver flask.
‘Do the hospital staff know you’ve got this?’
She winked. ‘You bet they don’t. No need to look so disapproving, ducky. It’s brandy. It’s medicinal.’
The good thing was that the drink hadn’t taken over entirely. She was speaking coherently even if the delivery was overblown. Maybe a few extra truths would come out.
‘So were you on your way home?’
‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like it, yes. What with this week’s show closing, today was my last in the Theatre Royal. I collected my few possessions and walked.’
‘Feeling depressed?’
‘Positively murderous. Is that what you want to hear?’
‘We want honest answers.’
‘Well, you’re getting them. There are sod-all wardrobe jobs in these parts.’
He took the chair Rogers had brought in and moved it so close he caught the brandy on her breath. ‘Why did you let it happen, Kate? You were inviting trouble. You can’t deny that the wardrobe room is in a mess. Even I can see it isn’t meant to be like that.’
‘It wasn’t until lately. I ran it like Buckingham Palace for two years. No complaints and oceans of praise and I dressed some spectacular productions in that time, I can tell you, gents. Imagine all the costume changes in a musical, not just a handful of actors, but twenty or more dancers with about nine changes. Wardrobe has to run like mission control to stay on top.’
‘What went wrong, then?’
‘Sabotage by a certain member of my team.’
‘Denise?’
She rolled her eyes upwards. ‘I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but I will. That bitch was out to get me. She’d worked in this theatre longer than anybody and wanted to queen it over us all backstage. She was only a dresser, bugger it, the senior dresser, I admit, but she was supposed to be under me. She saw I was running my wardrobe superbly and she hated it.’
‘Jealous?’
‘And some. Then things started going wrong. Clothes went missing mysteriously, the washing machine kept flooding, the irons overheated and scorched things. One morning I came in and found my button collection, thousands of them, all over the floor. You’re thinking these are silly little glitches, but they ruined my system. Actors would come complaining about their costumes and I’d find the labels had been switched or seams had been loosely tacked and wouldn’t stand any sort of use. I was forever trying to catch up. I stayed late, lost sleep, had to take tranquillisers. In the end, I thought what the hell and just did the minimum. I can’t tell you the snide remarks and the gripes I endured from that woman on a daily basis. She could have run wardrobe so much better, in her opinion.’
‘Had she put in for the job when you applied?’
‘No – or she would have been handed it on a plate, according to her. She was one of those people – I expect you have them in the police – who won’t take responsibility but are the first to slag off anyone who does.’
‘I thought she held down some high-powered jobs before coming to Bath. You were telling me about them when we first spoke.’
‘I wouldn’t call putting cosmetics on corpses high-powered. I’m talking about heading a key department in a major theatre.’
‘Didn’t you say she ran a drama group in Manchester?’
‘The prison. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she was an inmate.’
‘Manchester is men only.’
‘Anyway, it must have been voluntary work, not professional. And when you say ‘ran’ it, I’m sure the screws were there to make sure no one stepped out of line.’
Kate wasn’t giving an inch in her demolition of Denise’s CV.
‘She also toured Bosnia, you said, with some theatre group. Presumably they were professional?’
‘It was only a road show, darling. They all fitted into a minibus – cast, crew, costumes, scenery and all the props. That’s not theatre. That’s busking.’
‘Did you ever accuse her of undermining you?’
‘Frequently, and she laughed in my face and dared me to take it up with the management. She had a line into the board room, didn’t she?’
‘Francis Melmot?’
‘Yes. Every time I had a crisis in wardrobe, his lordship would hear about it and come gunning for me. Bloody Denise was running a campaign to get me fired and eventually she succeeded.’
‘Was she friendly with him?’
‘You mean sleeping with the shitbag? I doubt it. She may have dangled the bait, but he’s an odd fish, very odd. More like a jellyfish. And she was a stingray.’ She giggled again. ‘I shouldn’t be talking like this. You’ll be thinking I topped her. Actually I didn’t. I wouldn’t risk a life sentence for that creepy dame.’
‘Was she telling tales about anyone else?’
‘I couldn’t tell you.’ She smiled. ‘Well, I expect she told Melmot about Hedley and me, just more proof that wardrobe had gone to the dogs.’
Stagestruck Page 30
