The Fethering Mysteries 09; Blood at the Bookies

More or less exactly what Pauline and Ryan had said. Carole asked, without much hope, “So you wouldn’t know her name, would you?”

This question produced another beam. “As a matter of fact I do. Melanie Newton.”

“But if you didn’t speak to her, how do you know that?”

Gerald Hume’s expression combined shame with pride as he replied, “One day when she was in the betting shop, she had made a note of her fancies on an envelope. When she went, she screwed it up and left it on a shelf. I’m afraid, out of pure curiosity – and because she seemed rather different from the average run of betting shop habitue – I uncrumpled the envelope and looked at it.”

“So do you have an address for her too?” asked Carole excitedly.

Gerald shook his head apologetically. “I’m afraid I don’t have a photographic memory for such things. Though I do have a vague recollection that she lived in Fedborough.”

¦

Carole still felt good about herself when she got back to High Tor at about eight o’clock. She had a new lead. Melanie Newton. She was going to share the good news with Jude, when she remembered that her friend was out seeing some theatre show at Clincham College.

But as well as a new lead, she thought she might have something else. Though Gerald Hume would never be a lover (which was, if she was honest with herself, quite a relief), it was not impossible that over time he could turn into a very good friend.

? Blood at the Bookies ?

Eighteen

Jude picked up the ticket that Andy Constant had promised would be left at the box office and went through into the theatre. The building was named after the company which had stumped up the money for its construction, with a view to raising their local charitable profile. (They had made a very favourable deal with the university, which would allow them free use of the halls of residence for conferences during the vacations.) As Andy had said, the theatre was new, new even to the extent of still smelling of paint and freshly varnished wood. And it was a rather splendid structure.

The auditorium was buzzing with the sounds of young people, fellow students there to support their mates, but there were also quite a few parents, coming to see what all those tuition fees were being spent on.

Jude had been presented with a programme, just an A5 sheet printed in black with a list of actors and production credits. The title of the evening’s entertainment was Rumours of Wars: The Interface Between Society and Violence. She noted that the show had been ‘Conceived and Directed by Andy Constant’.

She saw him briefly before the show. He gave her a wave of acknowledgement as he bustled busily up the aisle from the pass-door by the stage. He was dressed exactly as when she’d last seen him, but there was now a greater aura of importance about him. In his wake scuttled the pretty dark-haired girl who had summoned him from the university coffee shop on their last encounter. As he passed Jude, Andy Constant said, “If I don’t see you in all the confusion after the show, let’s meet up in the Bull. Just opposite the gates of the campus – do you know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Won’t be such a scrum there as there will in the student bar.”

“Can I set one up for you?”

“Pint of Stella would be wonderful.”

And he whisked his important way to the back of the auditorium, where the dark-haired girl was now waiting for him.

Just as the lights were dimming, Jude caught sight of Ewan and Hamish Urquhart a few rows in front, presumably there to cheer on Sophia.

The show was not bad, but it did feel slightly over-inflated for its own good. The subject of war is a big one and Rumours of Wars tried to take on all of it. There were the obligatory scenes of carnage from 1914-18, juxtaposed with the clinical battles of new technologies. There were scenes of everyman squaddies punctiliously obeying orders given to them by idiots, of bereaved mothers weeping over the deaths of children in air raids, of blimpish generals planning mass slaughter over post-prandial port.

All of this was realized in a form that involved much shouting, a certain amount of dance, some a cappella singing and a lot of mime (which was about as interesting as mime usually is). The show was built about a lot of tableaux of human bodies, dramatic images precisely engineered. It was all impressive and just a tad worthy.

Also old·fashioned. Andy Constant must have been very young during the sixties, but that was definitely the period when his ideas of theatre had been formed. Jude got the feeling that he’d definitely seen Oh! What A Lovely Wars at an impressionable age. There was a simplicity in his anti-war message which accorded better with the protest years of Vietnam, when there were still perhaps some illusions remaining to be shattered, than the cynical wartime of Iraq. The show seemed to be taking a battering ram to a door that was already wide open.

And the acting wasn’t terribly good. The kind of slick ensemble playing required by that kind of theatre was beyond the capacity of the University of Clincham’s Drama students. Though individual talents shone through in various areas, none had the all-round versatility that the piece demanded. And of all the cast Sophia Urquhart was probably the weakest. She looked pretty enough and went through the motions of what she had rehearsed, but didn’t convince. However much she threw herself around the stage, she remained quintessentially a young lady of the Home Counties who had been to all the right schools. Wherever the girl’s future lay, it wasn’t in acting.

Her singing voice, though, was something else. In the one solo number she had, she was transformed. This, again harking back to the sixties, was Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ As the girl’s pure unaccompanied soprano spelt out the message of pacifism, she seemed not only to evoke an earlier era, but also to swell with confidence and to take effortless control of the whole auditorium. As a singer, Sophia Urquhart might make it.

The best thing about Rumours of Wars, in Jude’s view, was its length. An hour and twenty minutes with no interval. Quite long enough to preach to the converted that war is a bad thing.

Jude’s overall impression of the evening was the dominance of Andy Constant. The show was supposedly built up from improvisation, but had all the hallmarks of contrivance. Yes, the students may have come up with individual ideas, but they had been welded into a preconceived form by the director. The iron will of Andy Constant lay behind every line and every gesture. In a way, the weakness of the material served only to highlight the skill with which it had been pressed into theatrical shape.

In her brief experience as an actress Jude had come across directors like that. For them the written text was an irrelevance, an obstacle to be overcome by their stagecraft. And working from improvisation gave them the perfect opportunity to impose their wills on actors. The aim of the production was only to show how clever they, the directors, were. The whole exercise was an ego-trip.

Jude knew that that was exactly how Andy Constant would have treated his students during the rehearsal period. What he was after was control, pure and simple.

And even as she identified the kind of man he was, she was aware of the way she was drawn towards him. She could regret, but she couldn’t deny it.

Andy had said that the Bull pub would be less of a scrum than the student bar, but it was still pretty crowded, the regular clientele augmented by parents who had just experienced Rumours of Wars. From the conversations Jude overheard as she struggled towards the bar, they had thought rather more of the show than she had. Or maybe it was just because their offspring had been participating.

There were also quite a few of the students who’d been in the show, and a lot of their friends who hadn’t. Jude saw the girl with long dark hair at the centre of a giggling bunch of youngsters.

Given the crowd, she was glad she’d suggested setting up a drink for Andy Constant. One trip to the bar took long enough. As she eased her way through the crowd with a Chardonnay and a pint of Stella, she found herself face to face with Ewan and Hamish Urquhart, both dressed in Drizabone coats over their corduroy.