MOUSE (a psychological thriller and murder-mystery)

by D. M. Mitchell

  Monica was only thirty-years-old but looked ten years older than that. Her middle name, he discovered, was Dorothy, named after Judy Garland’s character in The Wizard of Oz. Vince thought she looked more like the scarecrow. She was the group’s unofficial leader. Loud-mouthed, chain-smoking, tending towards the fat, greasy hair. It would have been a desperately sorry rich foreigner who felt impelled to invite Monica along to his chateau. As a kid she must have been the type who pulled the legs off spiders, or who put unwanted kittens into sacks and threw them into rivers. She certainly treated him like he was a legless spider or a helpless kitten. As soon as he appeared within her sights she’d turn her full attention on him.

  ‘Here he is,’ she’d say. ‘Had a woman yet, Vince? Know what one is, Vince? Bet you wouldn’t know what to do with one if you had one, eh, Vince?’

  Always the same little jibe intended to make him blush. To make him squirm in discomfort. And he couldn’t help but feel his cheeks get all stoked up before her nasty button eyes and vindictive yellow-toothed smile.

  ‘Come on, Vince; show us what you’ve got,’ she’d carry on, if she was in the mood to really get stuck into him, if her daily gripe hadn’t been sufficiently offloaded onto her cronies and she needed a straw dummy to beat till she felt she’d gotten the crap out of her system. ‘How big is it, Vince? A little worm, I’ll bet,’ she’d say, holding up a crooked little finger, causing him to lower his gaze in embarrassment. ‘I’d get more satisfaction from this here broom handle!’ she’d titter, and the other three cleaners would laugh in unison. Invariably one of them would tell her to let him be, and say it in such a pitiful way that it would make him feel even more like a legless spider or bagged-up kitten. Their feigned pity stung as readily as if they flung felt-covered rocks at him.

  So unless it was absolutely necessary, Vince would avoid the cleaners. Even Martin Caldwell, the Empire’s manager, steered well clear of them if he could. Mind you, he tended to steer clear of everyone. Vince wasn’t sure exactly what he did as manager. Caldwell had the tiniest of offices located in one of the many back corridors and spent a good deal of his time shut away in there doing whatever he was paid to do and leaving Vince to get on with what they paid him to do. It wasn’t much of an office for a manager, thought Vince – a desk, phone, filing cabinets, and a badly-made reproduction of an Oscar that Caldwell had brought along with him, a film-related gift from his wife to help him settle into his new job. Oscar was kept on his desk as a paperweight that never had any paper under it. Caldwell didn’t like it but as it was a gift it had to stay there, staring at him and constantly reminding him he didn’t know much about the world of film.

  Vince Moody was Chief Projectionist. That sounded rather grand, as he was effectively a chief without any Indians, so to speak. Once upon a time, when Vince first started work at the Empire, there had been three of them sharing the projection booth shifts: the Chief Projectionist, an elderly man called Alan who sported a badly-cut mop of unruly grey hair, thin of frame and slightly stooped, with a habit of looking at you from under his large, furry eyebrows in a most sinister way; there was Michael, the Assistant Chief Projectionist, who was fat, bald, religiously ate a bag of sugared almonds every day, rode a motorbike and lived at home with his parents; then there was Vince, the new kid, the trainee projectionist, who landed the job mainly because he shared a passion for Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis with the Chief Projectionist and it just happened to come up in the interview.

  Those days were long gone. The Chief retired and died the same year; Michael was promoted, stayed a while and then followed the lure of better money with the Rank chain of cinemas, ominously declaring to Vince that the Empire was dead and finished and that he ought to get out whilst he could. That left Vince, and a local part-timer they wheeled in when Vince was on holiday or they had an extra shift, to pick up the reins in what was proving to be tough economic climes for cinemas. It was tough for everyone these days, he thought.

  Everyone was blaming TV. Why pay to sit in an old, draughty cinema when you can sit at home in comfort and watch films – and in colour too? The aged manager of the Empire decided he too had had enough, cashed in his premium bonds and went off to live in Spain. So the company brought in a relative youngster, in cinema manager terms, to turn things around. A new broom, they said, and gave him a broom cupboard of an office to work from.

  Martin Caldwell was everything Vince wasn’t; nicely spoken, well educated, wore a suit, good-looking like David Essex, had plenty of money, drove an MGB GT and married to a very pretty woman like the kind of models who appeared in him mum’s Littlewoods catalogues. Not long after he’d started, Caldwell had sat down with Vince in his broom cupboard of an office one day.

  ‘The future’s big for cinemas,’ he enthused. ‘How old are you, Vince?’

  Vince didn’t see the connection but humoured him anyway. ‘Twenty-six, Mr Caldwell.’

  ‘And how long have you been here at the Empire?’

  ‘Ten years, Mr Caldwell.’

  He looked surprised. ‘As long as that?’

  ‘Started straight from school, near enough,’ explained Vince. ‘I like film,’ he added, because Caldwell had made it sound like ten years in the Empire was decidedly unnatural.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ he said. ‘The future is going to be big! We’ve got plans for the Empire,’ he said. ‘Think about it; lots of small screens instead of just the big one. More films, more bums on seats, more X-rated films of an evening, securing your future and mine. What do you think about that, Vince?’

  Vince didn’t think much about it if he had to be honest. He liked the Empire with its large auditorium, the massive pleated curtains that hid a tremendously huge white screen, the Art Deco detailing on the ceilings and walls. He knew 2001: a Space Odyssey would have looked naff on a small screen instead of it being projected in stunning 70mm as it had been when it was first screened at the Empire. That was an event. But it wasn’t his place to say anything so he didn’t. What he did notice was that Martin Caldwell appeared to be trying to convince himself more than anything and was using Vince as a sounding board.

  Anyhow, that was two years ago now and recently Mr Caldwell had taken to shutting himself away from the world, every now and again popping out to see Mrs Kimble in her small office. She was an elderly bookkeeper who did bookkeeper things like typing, doing the banking and sorting out the weekly wages. Then he’d duck back inside his own office and close the door on everyone. Whenever Vince saw Mr Caldwell, and that wasn’t often, he looked paler, thinner, increasingly stressed with each passing week, having all the appearance of a man shipped out to the colonies, lost in the far reaches of the Empire, so to speak.

  Apart from one other man who was contracted to maintain the ancient electrical and plumbing systems, and the two women who came in to man the ticket and refreshment booth in the foyer, that was everyone at the Empire. And for a lot of the time it belonged exclusively to Vince Moody.

  When he’d first started at the Empire he thought all he’d do was project films. That’s what projectionists did. But, as assistant, whilst the Chief and sugared-almond-Michael swapped stories he was never a part of, Vince had to go around emptying bins, changing light bulbs, cleaning up what the cleaners didn’t clean, then polish the tiled floor with an electric floor polisher, take out and wash air filters, fetch and carry cans of films from the lockup outside in the yard, make tea, get the fish and chips for lunch, answer all calls at the back door and a multitude of other tasks which the Chief had put on a long list of weekly chores that only Vince appeared to be in charge of, and all of which had little to do with projecting films.

  Finally he was let loose on the twin projectors. They looked faintly frightening, like two prehistoric beasts in a dull lead colour, relics from the 1940s, he guessed, lit not by bulbs but two arc-light copper rods, one positive the other negative, which when brought almost to touching point erupted into a sun-like flame. He found it difficult to keep the rods i
n the correct position as they burned down, adjusting knurled knobs on the side of the projector to keep them aligned. He soon brought the beasts under his control. So too he mastered the lacing of the projectors with film, in and out of sprockets, under levers and through gates in a complicated order that, if gotten wrong, tore up the film which raced through the projector at twenty-five frames a second.

  He learned how to do the changeover from one projector to another, waiting for the black changeover dots to appear on the film, the change from one reel to another, from one projector to another, never even noticed by the cinema audience. And the orchestrating of the many lights around the auditorium, all done from a bank of around thirty switches that controlled ceiling lights, sidelights, lights in front of the curtain, lights on the floor. And when it was all done in conjunction with the moving of the black masks over the screen, the fading of the auditorium music, the dimming of the lights, each bank at its allotted time, the slow peeling open of the curtains and the final appearance of the film on the screen as the last of the lights faded into dark – now that was masterful! That was when he felt like he was conducting a huge orchestra, all the different parts coming together like sweet music. And no one knew of the skill and artistry it required.

  This had become his Empire. His refuge from the world. A place where people came to forget the power cuts, the endless news reports of industrial unrest and strikes and the bombs in Ireland. The Empire was a place of dreams. And before the people filed in, and after they had all left in the evening, the Empire returned briefly to him. No one knew it like he did. He was the cinema’s longest-serving employee now. He’d tour the old building whilst it was wreathed in quiet, wandering up and down the many rows of empty seats, onto the stage, behind the screen, up into the lofty dark roof space, down into the basement where dusty old things had been stored and long forgotten, down the many corridors that laced through the building like mould in Stilton.

  It suited him, this job. He was on his own most of the time. He was never comfortable in the company of others, often painfully shy and uncommunicative, except when he talked about film. He knew tons about film and didn’t have anyone to share it with. Mr Caldwell only cared about figures, profits and losses, and especially the losses. Vince adored the Empire. It was a sort of second home. In fact he felt more at home here than he did in his real home. The Empire was more of a mother, he thought, than his real mother.

  And when the film was running and the rods were set, the light and sound were good, he’d often creep out of the projection booth and stand in the dark behind the last row of seats. He’d simply watch the film for ten minutes or so, listening to the sound, looking over the focus, feel the heat in the auditorium – not too hot, not too cold – but sometimes he’d people-watch. Check out the backs of heads, guess who they were and where they’d come from; the singles, the couples, the groups. Here he was in charge. People looked to him, to the man with the faceless head sometimes glimpsed at the tiny rectangle of glass in the projector room wall, though they did not know this. They didn’t know him, he didn’t know them, but they were united by their love of film and for a few hours they were in his capable hands.

  He secretly envied the couples, though he was too embarrassed to stare too long at the courting couples in the back row. But you never miss what you never had, his mother often said and he’d try to convince himself that this was so. He’d never had a girlfriend, never even kissed a girl, and something inside him missed that no matter how he’d try to tell himself otherwise.

  He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he wasn’t ugly either. He was so plain as to be invisible, he guessed, and his crippling shyness didn’t help matters either, didn’t endear him to the opposite sex who appeared to like their men straight from a Marlborough advert. The only female attention he’d ever got was from the cleaners and he began to believe that this was all he deserved; it was all that fate had in store for him in that particular area.

  Nobody knew he was here. No one cared he was here. In some ways that suited him just fine. It was a place to hide from disappointment before disappointment struck. Ten years had passed him by in a blink, and he supposed the next ten, and the ten after that, would come and go just as fast. It never occurred to him that things could change, either carving up the Empire into smaller pieces of itself, or that he might one day fall in love.

  But fall in love he did. It had been on one of those trips down to the auditorium during the feature. He happened to glance over the back row and saw her, her face lit up by the light reflected from the screen. A woman sat all by herself. Small, neat hair, maybe a little on the plump side. But he was inexplicably smitten with her.

  He wasn’t rightly sure what was happening to him, because the emotions were so alien. Couldn’t understand why he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Why his heart leapt on seeing her, why his stomach went all empty and fluttery. Or why he had to keep coming down to try to look at her, to see if she came back to the cinema. And he was delighted to discover that she did. When that happened it was always the same seat she occupied, though it might be weeks between visits. Yet the effect on Vince Moody was always the same; sheer elation on seeing her.

  Once, he lingered just a little too long and then noticed that the picture was growing darker. He ran back up to the booth in a panic, managing to adjust the rods so that the light burnt bright again, before it went out altogether and triggered the alarm bell and accompanying boos and shouts of displeasure from the audience.

  But that would have been a small price to pay. He loved her, this unknown woman, even though he didn’t know what love was. He’d seen enough of it on the big screen, however, to convince himself that’s what it must be. So she wasn’t pretty in a Marylyn Monroe or Jane Russell way, but neither was he Steve McQueen or Robert Redford, and that fact alone told him they were made for each other.

  But when the picture finished and the lights went up, when the people all went home, the dream was over. His life, though, had changed subtly. No longer was the Empire the refuge of before. Without her it was cold, dark and lifeless. Without her he felt cold, dark and lifeless. He felt dead. A corpse. She became his life. A reason to live.

  * * * *

  3

  The Witch of Devereux Towers

  Vince Moody owned a tiny terraced house in the most run-down part of Langbridge. He liked to think he owned it but in reality he had borrowed the sizable deposit, and more besides, from his parents, who didn’t have much in the way of money and constantly reminded him of the fact, but in truth he knew they had been desperate to get the last of their four children off their hard-worked hands. There was no way Vince would have been able to afford to buy a home otherwise, run-down area or not, so he was grateful, up to a point. Having to be forever beholden to his parents and shouldering the guilt he felt at being a major contributor to their supposed poverty being exactly that point.

  He was anxious to pay them back, but the wages at the Empire had never been brilliant, even for the position of Chief Projectionist, and had in reality been standing perfectly still for a number of years whilst inflation had decided to take off like a Saturn Five rocket. So the little spare cash he had he squirreled away to pay back the loan, which meant he led a pretty Spartan life. He rarely bought new clothes, left it ages between haircuts – though the fashion was for long hair, which helped disguise belated trips to the barbers somewhat – he ate frugally, could not afford to smoke or drink even if he had the inclination, which he didn’t, and instead of owning a car he owned and rode a bicycle. He would have loved to have taken driving lessons, shoot around the lanes in an MGB GT like his boss, but that wasn’t going to happen in a hurry.

  He was also partially trapped by his lack of ambition; or more to the point his crippling shyness, which in turn hobbled his ambition before it ever got going. It had been one of the driving factors behind his parents’ scraping out the dregs of their savings to pay for a deposit on a house for him; anything to get him out into the
real world, to give him that little bit of oomph, as his father used to say. They were almost embarrassed of him. He wasn’t so much the black sheep of the family as the bald one. They liked to brag off about the other siblings, who had all gone on to really good, steady jobs, even married and provided grandchildren. But Vince? Well, Vince was always considered not very bright, not quite with it, even before he went to school. He was the baby that took the longest to walk, the longest to talk, the longest to potty train. It suited his parents to have him out of the house and out of sight, a distant, almost invisible slur on their genes.

  Still, the things he could indulge in that didn’t cost anything gave him some pleasure. He loved film, and his job gave him some access to that. In theory he had free passes to the cinema that he could use to come in and sit down and watch one properly, but given that he was the only real projectionist and had to work every day except Sunday, when the cinema wasn’t even open anyhow, he never got to use the passes for himself. And when he was on holiday – a brief two weeks in summer, one week in winter – he wasn’t in the mood for going back to his place of work. So he gave the passes away to his mother and father, who never went out because they had no money, they said, putting the passes into an old wooden biscuit barrel they used to hoard unpaid bills.

  Another love was the detective novel. The library was free and they had a good stock of all his favourites, Agatha Christie in particular, though he had read every James Herbert books ever since The Rats scared him half to death, and he couldn’t go into the dark storerooms in the Empire for ages without taking a shovel with him. Both occupations added cheap thrills to an altogether un-thrilling life. But Vince wasn’t complaining. Vince rarely complained. To do that you had to have an opinion and his opinions counted for nothing. You also had to have the guts to voice them and he didn’t have those either.