‘Mrs Shiva.’
A long silence. Then…
‘Mrs Shiva?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ A dark brown voice shattered the moment. Deena was not having a good evening. And if she didn’t, nobody else did either. Like a whirlwind in the trees, like a deluge on the dykes, she tore up the central aisle, script in one hand, soul in the other.
‘Mr Mushnik,’ she turned to the hapless fat lad playing the flower shop proprietor. ‘What are you?’
‘Sorry?’
She looked into his dark, slightly mystified eyes. ‘Apart from being a talentless little shit, of course.’
Mr Mushnik was actually Dominic Reynolds. He had been the only lad in Year Nine who had auditioned for Willy Wonka, so, almost by default, he had become a male lead in every one of Leighford High’s productions since. Anyway, Dominic had a quiet sense of pride. If you’re doing A-level Theatre Studies, you should put your money where your mouth is. Get up on stage and act. And that, deep down, was all Deena was asking him to do.
Even so, the lesson came hard and the lad stood there, jaw open. Mrs Carmichael had never spoken to him like this.
‘You are a Jewish shopkeeper in downtown Nowheresville. You only have a tiny coterie of clients – Mrs Shiva is one such – and you have yet to fully grasp the enormity of Audrey II’s money-making capacity. You’re…what…fifty-five? Sixty? Your parents came over, before you were born, to Ellis Island, from some ghastly Eastern European existence. Let’s try some method here, can we, and forget we’re from a bog-standard comprehensive in Leighford? OK with you?’
Before Mr Mushnik had time to forget anything, Deena had wheeled to Seymour. She narrowed her eyes, hands on hips, bristling with attitude. ‘There are nerds,’ she growled, ‘and there are nerds. At the moment, Seymour dear, you have all the believability of that bloody cardboard flower.’
‘But in the film…’
‘We’re not doing the fucking film!’ she screamed at him. ‘And Rick Moranis you ain’t.’
No, he wasn’t Rick Moranis. He was Alan Eldridge, an up-himself ex-private schoolboy whose parents had fallen on hard times and been forced to send him to that sink of mediocrity that was Leighford High. He could do a pretty good Bronx while carrying a tune in a bucket and Mrs Carmichael was running out of options.
‘Boys and girls!’ The familiar voice made them all turn. A silhouette in cycle clips filled the doorway that led to the auditorium. The light was behind him, but the hat, the scarf, the presence. Who else could it be? The Cavalry had arrived. There was a warmth in that voice, a comfort. Sally Spall as Audrey I nearly burst into tears. But then, she’d been doing that since Year Seven. Sally was a tiny flower of a thing with freckles, a lisp and a little, pointed chin. She could have been born to play the downtrodden, single-braincelled florist kicked around by her mad psycho dentist boyfriend. No problems for Angela Carmichael there.
‘Mr Maxwell,’ Deena’s smile was serene from centre stage. ‘Lovely. Come on, then, people.’ She clapped her hands around the script. ‘From the top. We have an audience tonight.’
He waited until she reached the back row then hauled off his hat and scarf and sat beside her in the darkened theatre. ‘Problems?’ he asked, as the cast went through their paces, improvising with cardboard boxes as furniture.
‘No,’ she trilled. ‘Au contraire. They’re very good, aren’t they?’
‘I think so. How’s Dominic settling in?’
‘Dominic?’
‘Oh, excellent,’ she said quickly. ‘Bags of motivation.’
‘Angela Carmichael was a bit worried about him. Rather flat, apparently.’
‘No, not at all,’ Deena assured him. ‘I was just congratulating him on his delivery.’
‘Fine. Benny?’ Maxwell had the skill of all teachers – conducting an apparently innocuous conversation while actually spotting delinquents skulking at all points of the compass. He motioned a lad across to him. Benny was dressed in black, trailing leads and looking very techie.
‘Mr Maxwell?’
‘I realise you’re something terribly important in the Woofers and Tweeters Department, but get in touch with your feminine side, would you, and make your old Head of Sixth Form a cup of coffee, there’s a good Key Grip.’
Benny had been Leighford High’s general factotum for years. Rumour had it he was thirty-eight and they’d kept him on just for productions. Nobody knew exactly what he did on a daily basis. There was talk of Social and Health Care AVCE, but that was only talk. Real men didn’t take subjects like that and real schools didn’t teach it. Whatever, Benny seemed to live in the little room behind the stage at school and seemed forever to be fine-tuning the PA. He tugged his forelock and trudged off in search of a kitchen. ‘That’ll be no problem at all, Mr M,’ he winked.
‘Is it true, Mr Maxwell?’ Deena asked as the action resumed on stage and flower shop customers came in droves from the wings to gawp at Audrey II, looking at the moment spectacularly like a badly painted stage prop.
‘Is what true?’
‘That a man died over there? About where Seymour is standing now.’
‘I believe so,’ Maxwell said. ‘Does that bother you?’
‘Me?’ She turned to him in the half-light. ‘God, no. I’ve been in haunted places before.’
‘Haunted?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘What makes you think the Arquebus is haunted?’
She looked at him for a moment, a weird enigmatic light in her dark, sparkling eyes. ‘Oh, I know it is,’ she said. ‘Audrey,’ and she was on her feet. ‘Excuse me, Mr Maxwell. Audrey, can we try that again? That crossing bit? It was excellent, darling, excellent, but it needs just a teensy bit of timing. Seymour?’
Maxwell sat back and watched. He had to admit it: Deena Harrison was good. He remembered her Mary Magdalene in Superstar, her Maid of Orleans in St Joan. OK, so you didn’t turn your back. But that was a long time ago – the mischievousness of youth, little more. And on stage, what a presence! Now she was driving another cast on, as Maxwell had in years gone by. What a Roxanne she would have made to his Cyrano. And he let it all wash over him as Benny brought his coffee and Deena transformed a handful of quite limited kids into smooth-moving, harmony-singing Sixties kitsch. Of course, he reasoned in a less than euphoric moment, it would be radically different when Geraint Horsenell came on board. Heads of Music would roll along with his drums.
‘Right, everybody,’ Deena called the cast to order. ‘Well done tonight. Work on that shoulder thing, Mr Mushnik. Let’s have more awe when we see the plant for the first time. Tomorrow night, please,’ she consulted her clipboard. ‘Principals at seven, please. Audrey, Seymour and the Dentist. The rest of you guys, words, words, words. You don’t know ’em; Mr Maxwell can’t hear ’em.’
‘It’s my age,’ Maxwell yelled back.
‘Eh?’ Benny shuffled past under a stepladder.
‘I’ll do the jokes, Barber,’ Maxwell reminded him. ‘And for God’s sake, be careful with that thing.’
That thing exercised Peter Maxwell’s mind long after the kids had gone home. They left the premises, in knots, gaggles or clumps, depending on their taste. Seymour and Mushnik were off to the Vine, masters as they both were in the art of fake ID, to drown their sorrows and bitch about Deena. Audrey was swept up by her boyfriend, a bit of rough her parents detested; even though he wasn’t a dentist, it did seem a little like life imitating art. The extras just seemed to vanish into the dark of the September night, flower shop frequenters and down-and-outs and radio DJs and the line-up of chorus girls. Maxwell would have offered to give Deena a lift home, but that would have meant his crossbar and all sorts of articles, not just in the Advertiser but in the Smut on Sunday, and not a few probing questions in the Crown Court. The night air, she said, would do her good. She had rather a lot on her mind at the moment. That Maxwell didn’t doubt and he took the opportunity to tread the boards himself.
He checked out Benny’s ladder in the silence of the theatre, propped and silent against the back wall. He ran his finger over the three or four that rested there with it. Cold, aluminium rungs and steel safety chains. He put his weight on each of them. Two of them gave a little way, one moved several inches. The others didn’t move at all.
‘Mr Maxwell?’ The voice made him turn. For a moment he couldn’t see anyone, because all the house lights were full on, then a figure sauntered out from under the dark of the balcony.
‘Mr Bartlett, isn’t it?’ The Head of Sixth Form crossed to the apron, talking to the Artistic Director.
‘I was just about to lock up. It’s half past ten.’
‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I was miles away.’
‘No, you weren’t,’ Bartlett smiled up at him, keys in hand. ‘You were wondering how it was possible for one of those to fall on poor old Gordon.’
‘Sorry,’ Maxwell confessed. ‘A macabre turn of mind, I’m afraid.’
‘The chains weren’t in place,’ Bartlett told him. ‘They should have been. And they weren’t.’
‘Whose responsibility was that?’ Maxwell asked, coming down the steps stage right.
Bartlett wagged a finger at him. ‘Ah, the blame culture,’ he sighed. ‘Everything has to be somebody’s fault, doesn’t it?’
‘I didn’t mean…’
Bartlett shook his head. ‘No, I’m sure you didn’t. The theatre manager is Ashley Wilkes,’ he said. ‘Health and Safety issues rest with him. Want to cast the first stone?’
Not a million miles away from the Arquebus, as the moon risked the odd visit from behind the scudding clouds, two policemen sat in Leighford nick. The place, within and without, was the same as police stations everywhere – Thirties-ghastly, replacing its rather homely Victorian predecessor with the blue lamp outside it; that was now a trendy wine bar. It had no personality, no presence. It was square and it was there – a depressing combination, really. One of the men was a double-barrelled SOCO with shoulders like tallboys; the other was DCI Henry Hall. Both of them had long ago given up their private lives.
‘Well, I must confess, guv,’ the earnest lad told him, ‘I nearly missed it. Two treads down from the landing at the Winchcombe house. Blu-Tack on both sides. It was less clear on the banister base oddly enough, more obvious on the wallpaper; got sort of caught in the knobbly bits.’
‘What does this tell us?’ Hall was playing stupid policeman tonight.
‘What’s Blu-Tack for, I asked myself.’
‘And what did you reply?’ Hall hadn’t got all night.
‘Putting up posters, notes, whatever.’
‘And?’
‘And who puts up posters four inches above a stair riser?’
‘Go on.’
‘The Blu-Tack was obviously the residue of larger bits – quite large blobs, I’d say, judging by what was left. They were in an exact line with each other.
‘Which told you what?’
‘A tripwire. Somebody had placed a tripwire two stairs below the landing. Even in daylight, it’s not likely the old girl would have seen it.’
‘All right,’ Hall nodded, peering into the steam of his coffee cup. ‘Let’s brainstorm. Martita Winchcombe is a spinster lady. Lives alone.’
‘Has a niece,’ Finch-Friezely was flicking through his pocket book. ‘A Mrs Elliot.’
‘I’ve got people working on that. She’s next of kin and she’s been informed. Lives in West Bromwich and is not exactly hurrying down.’
‘Worth a bob or two, though, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Finch-Friezely reflected. ‘The old girl.’
‘We’re working on that too,’ Hall assured him. ‘You’ve been to the place. Seems a little run down. Central heating on the blink. If she’s worth anything, she’s not spending it on the house.’
‘What time of death have we got?’ the lad asked.
‘Astley thinks about nine or ten on Tuesday night. The boy from Leighford High fell over her just over twenty-four hours later.’
‘I checked the lights,’ the DC told his boss. ‘If Astley’s right about the time, she’d already be in bed, I guess. Certainly she was wearing her nightie and dressing gown and was wrapped in a blanket. How cold was it Tuesday night?’
‘Seventy-plus years cold,’ Hall told him. ‘In old people, it’s nothing to do with the weather.’
‘Right. So Miss Winchcombe was in bed. She gets up. Why? Call of nature?’
‘Disturbed by something,’ Hall preferred. ‘If somebody stretched a wire across the stairs, they might want to stay around to see that it worked.’
‘You think they were in the house all along?’
‘It’s possible. You and I might have seen the wire immediately, but even if not, it’s possible to step over it, walk right through it. What have you boys got on the prints?’
‘Usual partials all over the place,’ the SOCO man said. ‘I don’t think anybody realises the sheer number of fingerprint details in the average house.’
‘Put in for overtime,’ Hall said impassively. He didn’t like whingers and didn’t care who knew it. ‘So, she walks along the landing. Her bedroom was…where?’ He checked the rough plans another of the SOCO team had sketched for him. ‘Second door on the left as you look from the top of the stairs. Where’s the light switch?’
‘Top of the stairs.’ Finch-Friezely craned his neck to decipher his colleague’s doodles. ‘That would have operated two bulbs, one on the landing and one in the hall.’
‘And when we got there?’
‘No lights on at all.’
‘So?’ Hall was used to masterclasses like this, piecing together the jigsaw of a life.
‘So she either didn’t put the lights on at all…’
‘Unlikely,’ Hall reasoned.
‘Or someone came along afterwards and switched them off.’
‘Not realising,’ Hall finished the thought, ‘that we’d know the time of death was at night. The old girl’s night attire would give it away, though. So what was that all about?’
‘Beats me, guv,’ the lad confessed.
Hall leaned back in his chair. ‘She goes downstairs, not merely to the bathroom which is along the landing, and she trips. Falls down… what…twelve stairs?’
‘Fifteen.’ Finch-Friezely had counted them.
‘Breaking her neck at the bottom. No doubt Jim Astley will be more precise, but that’s the long and short of it.’
‘Are we talking Incident Room, then, guv? Full-blown inquiry?’
Hall sighed. It looked like things were going that way. ‘Full blown, yes,’ he said. ‘But no Incident Room. If we make too much of this, we’ll have every old duck this side of Brighton screaming “Boston Strangler”. Softly, softly, I think, on this one, Giles.’
‘Qui bono?’ Peter Maxwell let his head loll back on the pillow that Thursday night, not a million miles away from Leighford nick.
‘Hmm?’ Jacquie was dozing beside him. He had watched her Jackie Collins drop towards her bump several times already.
‘Qui bono?’ he repeated. ‘Dear old Marcus Tullius Cicero, the greatest advocate in Roman history. He was the first lawyer to pose the question in a murder trial. “Who gains?” Who gains from the deaths of Gordon Goodacre and Martita Winchcombe?’
‘Max,’ Jacquie struggled out of her sleep. ‘Are you sure they’re linked? Come to think of it, are you sure they’re murders at all?’
‘Come on, Jacquie. You and I have been around this kind of thing for all the time we’ve known each other. I’ve never trusted statistics in my life. Me and old Dizzy – you know, “Lies, damned lies and statistics”.’ Jacquie knew. She’d heard Maxwell quote the late Prime Minister often enough. ‘But when two people from the same theatre troupe die within a couple of days of each other, I smell skulduggery.’
‘A falling ladder,’ Jacquie reminded him. ‘It can happen. I told you…’
‘I know.’ He turned to her. ‘You can quote me the stats. But I told you, I don’t believe in them.’
Jacquie sighed, sticking to logic, sticking to reality. ‘As far as we know, the old girl fell downstairs.’
He propped himself up on one elbow, staring into her sleepy face, the little freckles peppering her ski-jump nose. ‘You…er…don’t fancy a visit to Leighford nick, do you? You know, just to say “hi” and show ’em your predicament.’
‘And ask them the score on the death of Martita Winchcombe? No, I don’t. This isn’t just an interest of yours, is it, Max? It’s a bloody obsession.’
‘Well, I just thought…’
But Jacquie was already singing loudly, her pillow over her head.
‘There’s a Mrs Elliot to see you, guv.’ Dave Walters was the desk man that morning, a grumpy old git with dyspepsia and a martyr, on and off, to sciatica too. Who says you can’t have the lot? An Indian summer had settled on the south coast and the sun dazzled on the cars parked beyond the grimy glass. Leighford nick was one of the few still open in Tony Blair’s England and Sergeant Dave Walters one of that vanishing breed of men, a boy in blue. It wouldn’t be too long before Sir David Attenborough was discovering the shy woodland creature in some woodland somewhere and doing a survival special on them. He could even call it Blue Planet Two.
‘Right.’ Walters unpressed the intercom. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Hall is on his way down, madam. If you’d take a seat.’
She did. Around the walls of the waiting room, posters warned of rabies and wondered whether anyone had seen a particularly unprepossessing adolescent, last known in Southampton. It occurred to Fiona Elliot this was someone she’d rather not see, especially after dark. Still others asked, rather belatedly, whether you’d locked your car because there were thieves about. Of course there were; this was a police station. Dave Walters hadn’t left his Ginsters more than three feet from his elbow in ten years.
‘Mrs Elliot?’ A tall man in a three-piece suit put his head around the door. ‘I’m DCI Hall. This is DC Blaisedell.’ He pointed to the short, dark-haired woman beside him. ‘Won’t you come through?’
Fiona Elliot had never been in a police station before. It was cold, clinical, for all the sun sparkled outside. Spider plants reflected the woman’s touch and the woman walking with her now seemed pleasant enough. She was…late twenties, perhaps early thirties and her clothes looked too big for her. The DCI held the door open for them both. Then they were sitting in Interview Room Two. Fiona had seen this sort of place before, on the telly. There was always a two-way mirror along one wall, with either Trevor Eve or David Jason standing behind it. Come to think of it, Trevor Eve was always shouting at his oppos in ludicrously dark corners and David Jason was filling his face in the nick canteen. This place was nothing like that. The light was bright and artificial, the room without windows and every wall was painted an acidic green. The only gadget in the room appeared to be a tape recorder and that wasn’t switched on.
‘First,’ Hall started the ball rolling, ‘can we say how very sorry we are about your aunt. And to thank you for coming in so promptly.’ When the moment called for it, Henry Hall could lie for England.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Fiona Elliot was a bulky woman, utterly unlike the frail, bird-like corpse lying on one of Jim Astley’s slabs in a cold corner of Leighford morgue. She was attractive in a matter-of-fact sort of way, with a steady gaze that was quite compelling. ‘I’d like to see my aunt.’
‘Of course,’ Hall nodded. ‘DC Blaisedell will arrange that. In the meantime, if I could just ask you some questions.’
She nodded.
‘We are making the assumption that your aunt lived alone?’
‘That’s right. She had for years.’
‘And had she always lived in Leighford?’
‘She was born in that house, Chief Inspector. Rather fitting, in a way, that she died in it.’
‘Indeed?’
‘My aunt had a hatred of hospitals,’ Fiona told them. ‘She once told me she’d put an end to herself rather than go into one.’ She looked at them both, the skinny, pretty girl and the bland, expressionless DCI. ‘Is that what happened?’ she asked, unable to read the body language. ‘Suicide?’
Jane Blaisedell looked at Hall. He was the guv’nor, in the hot seat. Questions like that she left to the top brass.
‘Mrs Elliot,’ Hall leaned forward across his desk. ‘We think your aunt may have been the victim of foul play.’
She blinked. This wasn’t happening. This was for other people. Crimewatch, news items, the Discovery Channel. ‘Do you mean murder?’ she asked.
Hall nodded.
‘My God.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Jane Blaisedell braced herself to react. For all she was only twenty-six, she’d been here before, too many times already. Some victims’ relatives fainted away like a lily at bedtime. Others, in insane denial, refused to accept it; the police were lying; it was all some ghastly mistake, a macabre joke. Was Beadle about? Others cried uncontrollably, sobbing as their bodies shook and reality dawned. Somebody’s mother. Somebody’s son. Still others were like Fiona Elliot.
‘What are you doing about it?’ she wanted to know. She was calm, matter of fact, precise. But her voice was ice in the cool of that Interview Room.
‘Making our inquiries,’ Hall assured her. ‘That’s why I need to ask you some questions.’
But Fiona Elliot was on her feet. ‘Later, there are things that will need to be done,’ she said. ‘Now, I want to see my aunt.’
Hall nodded at his DC. ‘Very well,’ he said, standing too. ‘I daresay it’ll wait.’
After all, he told himself as the women left, Martita Winchcombe wasn’t going anywhere.