An Expert in Murder

son on the special stand at the front which once sported a machine gun but which had been cleverly adapted into the most thrilling of vantage points for a tiny boy. His earliest memories were of the excitement he felt as he swung round with the handlebars, confident in his father’s deft handling of the machine. Never again had he felt so close to danger, and yet so safe. By then, it was just the two of them – he had lost his mother during the war and had to rely on his father’s stories for most of what he knew of her – and the bond was unbreakable. Many years later, when his father died, he had ridden the Ariel for hours, not caring where he went but desperate to escape the most powerful grief he had ever known. It proved to be unshakeable, though, and it had travelled with him ever since.

Several kicks were needed to fire the reluctant engine into life in 58

such unpleasant weather, but he felt the pressures of the day lift as soon as he moved out into the traffic, weaving effortlessly between the cars and making better time than he could have hoped. When he reached the King’s Road, he slackened his pace and pulled over by Chelsea Town Hall, leaving the motorcycle where he could keep an eye on it and waiting impatiently outside the telephone box while a lanky man with a ruddy face and an enormous raincoat finished his call. An unpleasant odour of rain mixed with sweat and tobacco bore down on him in the confined space, offending his natural fastidiousness, and he was relieved when a voice at the other end of the line demanded his attention.

‘Yes?’ The musical quality for which Terry’s delivery was so lauded by the critics could not have been more absent from this clipped greeting. It was obviously a bad moment, but beggars could not be choosers and a beggar was essentially what Swinburne was about to become.

‘It’s Swinburne. I wanted to talk to you before this afternoon.

Do you have any idea which way Aubrey’s going to jump?’

Although not yet thirty, John Terry was beginning to wonder if he had already enjoyed the greatest success of his career. He had known as soon as he opened the manuscript of Richard of Bordeaux, with its neat pages carefully typed in blue ink, that he was looking at a gift from heaven. Reading it in his dressing room during a matinee of The Good Companions, he had almost missed his cue, so taken was he with its charm and humour, with the modern dialogue which turned a king into a man of the people. He learned later that the play had been inspired by his performance as Richard II at the Old Vic a number of years ago, but he knew nothing of the author at the time. He had not needed to, because the script spoke for itself. Aubrey had required no persuading to back a commercial run and their instincts had soon been rewarded. A clash with another opening night had meant a sub-dued first performance but, at ten minutes past one on the following day, the telephone began to ring at the box office and had not stopped since. For fourteen months, there had rarely been an 59

empty seat in the house, and some people had seen the play thirty or forty times.

At first, he had been pleased by the adulation. Supper at the Savoy was a novelty which he had never before been able to afford, and he enjoyed being recognised in the street. But pleasure turned to embarrassment, embarrassment to boredom, and now he was utterly sick of Richard. He had been photographed, carica-tured and painted, and had had everything from dolls to bronze sculptures fashioned in his image. White harts – the King’s emblem

– rained upon him in every conceivable form, embroidered on handkerchiefs and stamped on cigarette boxes. Young girls followed him from the theatre to his flat; others turned up unan-nounced in the middle of the night; and he had lost count of the times he answered the telephone only to be greeted by adolescent giggles and the click of the receiver as the callers lost their nerve before speaking.

But worse than all of that was the knowledge that his performances had lost their sincerity, that he was becoming mannered and exaggerated in an attempt to keep alive his interest in the role. A year ago, exhaustion had forced him to take a short holiday but, unable to keep away, he had returned early from the west country for the pleasure of slipping into a box and watching his understudy on stage. Back then, the play had moved him to tears; now, he often asked someone else to stand in simply because he could not face going through it all again himself. He bitterly regretted the early enthusiasm that had contracted him to the role both in London and on tour, but he could see no way out other than to make Aubrey change his mind, and he knew hell would freeze over before that happened.

He looked around the small, unpretentiously furnished flat in the hope that the familiar surroundings might outmanoeuvre a new emotion which he recognised as despair. His gaze rested on the toy theatre that his mother had given him for Christmas when he was just seven years old: its cream and gold pillars had become chipped and scratched over the years, the plush red velvet curtains were now faded and worn, but he still saw in it the endless possi-60

bilities that had absorbed him throughout his childhood. As a boy, he had existed in an intense fantasy world, unaware of all that went on around him, and this miniature stage was at its centre.

When he was introduced to the real thing he knew he was lost completely, less to the carefree attractions of make-believe than to what he revelled in as a complete sensual experience: the colour and the lights, the textures of the spoken word, the physical presence of the crowds, the exhilarating taste of success and, as its understudy, the pungent whiff of failure. He had become the biggest star of his day, but recently he had found himself hanker- ing after that toy theatre and a world which had also seemed to be of a more manageable scale. It had to stop. He needed a new challenge before his ambition and his desire faded away into comfortable certainties. He had to hold his nerve with Aubrey and get out of this rut once and for all.

A tall, gauntly handsome young man appeared at the bedroom door, rubbing his eyes and running his fingers through thinning fair hair. ‘Who was that on the telephone?’ he asked, and the soft, Irish inflection made the question seem more casual than it really was. ‘Let me guess: there’s a problem with a play and only you can sort it out. Am I right or am I right?’

Without much hope of success, Terry attempted to defuse another fruitless round of bickering before it started. ‘It was only Rafe Swinburne adding one more demand to the list for this afternoon. If Aubrey’s not in the right mood, we’ll all find ourselves carrying spears in Morecambe before the month’s out.’ It was a feeble effort at lightness, he knew, and the only response it brought was a wearily raised eyebrow.

‘Would that be such a bad thing? At least you might come home occasionally.’

‘Don’t be so fucking sanctimonious – it doesn’t suit you,’ said Terry, his frustration quickly getting the better of him. ‘I’m not sleeping with him, if that’s what this is about, so you can stop worrying.’

‘You really don’t understand, do you? If it were about sex I’d almost be relieved, but it’s more than that. I might stand a chance 61

against another man, but I can’t take on the whole of the West End. You’re obsessed.’

‘You used to say that was sexy.’

‘That was before I lived with you. Then you had to make an effort to see me; now I’m just an inconvenient interruption to the working day. The actors, the writers, the boy that sweeps the stage