Stagestruck

phone call to his sister Jean had raised more questions than it had answered. What could have triggered the incident at Llandudno when he’d first exhibited signs of this panic about theatres? It had been a variety show, for pity’s sake. What was sinister about that? More than a year later he’d been able to face Treasure Island at the Mermaid. No qualms about Long John Silver and the black spot and poor Ben Gunn, which you’d think might have unsettled a nervous kid. Then there was that one-act play about Richard III that Jean had recalled. It hadn’t been a school play. The art teacher – whose name he couldn’t remember – had belonged to some amateur dramatic society in Surbiton. They’d needed two boys and he’d been recruited along with another kid from his class. They’d rehearsed in some old army hut and the performances were one weekend in a church hall and that was as much as his memory would dredge up. He couldn’t even bring back the name of the other boy. He felt it was somewhere in his brain. It began with G, he thought. He wouldn’t remember the first name; boys all called each other by surnames then.

In the small hours when he should have been asleep he was going through the alphabet, trying different letters after G. When he’d been through the vowels he tried consonants. At G with L he felt he was getting closer. Not Glass, but something roughly like it. Gladstone, Glaister, Glastonbury.

And then it came to him: Glazebrook.

Having got the surname, the rest followed. Mike Glazebrook.

At three in the morning, he was downstairs going through phone directories looking for Glazebrooks. Ridiculous. He didn’t have directories for the whole country and anyway a lot of people were ex-directory these days. He made tea and went back to bed and still didn’t sleep. In the night hours a simple query can easily be magnified into a compulsion. It became a matter of urgency to find Glazebrook. How would you trace a schoolboy more than forty years later? Secondary schools mostly had old boys’ associations, but primary schools seemed not to bother. He’d heard of the Friends Reunited website and never looked at it until this night at 4.15 a.m. No joy. No Glazebrook. His contempt for websites was confirmed. It was beginning to seem a lost cause. If only Mike Glazebrook had progressed at the age of eleven to the same grammar school as Diamond, he’d have been sharper in the memory. He must have gone to some other school. Go through the local schools, then, and see if they had any record of the boy and what had become of him.

Before setting off for work he was phoning schools in the Kingston area. The second he tried came up trumps. ‘We have a Mr M.G.Glazebrook on our board of governors,’ the secretary said. ‘I believe he attended the school as a child.’

‘The M – does that stand for Michael?’

‘I believe it does.’

‘And does he live near the school?’

‘I’m not at liberty to tell you where he lives.’

‘If you’re worried about Data Protection, I’m a police officer and a one-time friend of Mike’s. He’s not in any trouble, by the way. What age would this gentleman be?’

‘Fiftyish, I would say.’

‘He was ten when I saw him last. Listen, I’m not going to press you for his contact details, but would you do me a great favour and phone him now and tell him his school friend Peter Diamond would like to hear from him today if possible? I’m at Bath Central police station.’

He was late getting in and slow to get a grip. Worse, the CID

office was empty except for a civilian computer operator.

‘Am I missing something? Was there a bomb alert?’

‘They were all in first thing, sir.’

That comment shamed him into checking the clock. Already Halliwell would be an hour into observing the postmortem, getting to the gory stage, and Paul Gilbert would be standing over a forensic scientist analysing the contents of the powder box. Someone else, presumably, was at the theatre searching for Denise’s handbag.

‘Sergeant Dawkins ought to be in.’

‘He was, but earlier, sir. He’s out on an assignment with Ingeborg Smith.’

‘Doing what, for Christ’s sake?’

‘They didn’t say.’

He had his answer five minutes later when Ingeborg walked in with a fashion plate: Fred Dawkins, transformed, in a black leather jacket, white T-shirt and jeans.

‘Strike a light!’

‘Cool?’ Ingeborg said.

He couldn’t bring himself to say so. ‘He needs a haircut and the brown shoes look wrong. Aren’t they the same ones he was wearing yesterday?’

‘Give me a break, guv,’ she said. ‘I can’t fix everything.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Charity shops mostly. The jacket is Oxfam.’

‘How do you feel?’ Diamond asked Dawkins.

‘Like the proverbial pox doctor’s clerk,’ the fashion victim answered. ‘However, if it gets me out on active duties, I shall be more than compensated.’

‘It’s taken ten years off you,’ Ingeborg said.

‘It’s added ten to me,’ Diamond said. ‘I’m promising nothing, Fred. We’ll see how the day develops. Is John Leaman in?’

‘At the theatre with two from uniform searching for the hand bag,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Keith said you suggested it