this one conversation. Charles pressed further. ‘What’s worrying you?’
Willy hesitated. Then, ‘I’ve found out something I’d rather not know, something that might be dangerous.’
‘Something about a person?’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone connected with this group?’
A slight pause. ‘Yes.’ There was fear in the brown eyes.
Charles pushed on, mesmerised by the direction of the conversation. ‘Who?’
Willy opened his mouth, but paused for a moment. Stella Galpin-Lord’s piercing voice was suddenly isolated. ‘… and lost my virginity when I was fourteen…’ The spell was broken. ‘No, I didn’t come in quick enough,’ said Willy. ‘I ask. How old are you?’
The exercise continued, but Charles felt a vague unease.
The Truth Game was followed by a Contact Game. ‘O.K.? We close our eyes and move around. When you touch somebody, you make contact. Feel, explore, encounter. Get to know them with your hands. This will increase your perceptions. O.K.?’
Perhaps it was by chance that the first person Charles touched was Anna. In accord with his director’s instructions, he made contact, felt, explored, encountered and got to know her with his hands. Her eyes opened to a slit of navy blue. He smiled. She smiled.
‘Are you rehearsing tonight?’
‘No.’
‘Fancy dinner?’
‘O.K.’
Charles moved away to feel, explore and encounter someone else. His probing hand felt the arm of a tweed jacket, then up, over a chest criss-crossed with leather straps to the bristly wool of a beard.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doin’?’ The voice had the broken-bottle edge of Glasgow in it. ‘I’m the photographer. Who’s Michael Vanderzee?’
Getting people into costume took some time. The photographer fretted and cursed. Then Michael announced he did not want posed shots; he wanted natural action shots. That involved rehearsing whole chunks of the play. The photographer cursed more.
‘Right, come on. Let’s do the scene of Rizzio’s murder. O.K.? You’ll get some good shots from this. Action stuff. Violence.’
‘How long’s the bloody scene?’
‘We’ll only do the end. Three, four minutes.’
‘Why you can’t just pose them… I’ve got some fashion pictures to do later this afternoon.’
‘I don’t want them to look like amateur theatricals.’
‘Why not? That’s what they bloody are.’
The scene started and Charles sat under a light at the back of the hall to watch. Mary, Queen of Sots was written in a blank verse that was meant to sound archaic but only sounded twee. Since Willy needed a prompt every other line, it was heavy going.
‘Willy, for God’s sake!’
‘Shut up, Michael!’ The tall figure looked incongruous in doublet and hose.
‘Look, for Christ’s sake, can’t we get these bloody photos taken? My time’s expensive and these models are waiting.’
‘I say, we haven’t got the daggers,’ said Martin Warburton suddenly from the recesses of a dramatic conspirator’s cloak.
‘Oh, Pam, where the hell are they? Here, quick. Look, the blades retract on the spring like this. O.K.? Now come on, let’s get it right first time.’ Charles started to scan his So much Comic… script.
Suddenly his eyes were jerked off the page by a scream. Not a theatrical workshop scream, but an authentic spine-tingling cry of horror from Stella Galpin-Lord.
Onstage the scene was frozen. Anna stood white-faced in her black Tudor costume, looking down at Willy Mariello, whose great length had shrunk into a little heap on the stage. Around him were a circle of cloaked conspirators clutching daggers with retracted blades. In the centre Martin Warburton gazed fascinated at the weapon in his hand. Its blade was metal and the Arterial Blood which dripped from it was not made by Leichner’s.
CHAPTER THREE
The BLOODY HAND significant of crime,
That glaring on the old heraldic banner,
Had kept its crimson unimpaired by time,
In such a wondrous manner.
The police arrived promptly and were very efficient. An ambulance took Willy to hospital, but he was dead on arrival. Everyone gave statements and was told to expect further enquiries. Pam Northcliffe and Martin Warburton were taken away for extended questioning. A distraught Pam was returned to Coates Gardens in the early hours of the Wednesday morning and treated in the girls’ dormitory with sleeping-pills and inquisitive sympathy.
The atmosphere in the house throughout the Wednesday was charged with tension. The accumulated pressures of living together and building up to the shows’ openings were aggravated by the shock of Willy’s death. Rehearsal schedules were thrown out and the continual reappearance of policemen at the house and hall got on everyone’s nerves. All day Coates Gardens was full of uneasy jokes, sudden flares of temper and bursts of weeping.
Charles escaped the worst of it. Fortunately James Milne had suggested that he might be glad of a little seclusion from the community hysterics and offered the sanctuary of his flat. It was a great relief to be with someone who did not want to discuss the death. Milne dismissed the subject. ‘I didn’t know the boy well and I wasn’t there at the time, so I don’t feel too involved. It’s an unpleasant business. And the best thing to do about unpleasant things is to put them out of your mind.’
But Charles did not find it so easy. He felt he was involved and, as he tried to concentrate on revising So Much Comic…, his mind kept returning to the scene in the Masonic Hall. He suffered from the communal shock. And another uncomfortable feeling which he did not want to investigate.
By the Thursday morning the atmosphere among the D.U.D.S. was more settled. The Procurator-Fiscal’s enquiry (which is held instead of a public inquest in Scotland) was no doubt following its private course, but the students were unaffected by it. Only Martin Warburton remained hysterical, which was hardly surprising after his long ordeal of questioning.
The police were not making any charges against him and, though the investigation was far from complete, the general impression was that they considered the death to have been a ghastly accident. The real knife had been put in one of Pam’s carrier bags with the treated ones by mistake and foul play was apparently not suspected.
On the Thursday afternoon rehearsals restarted in earnest. More than in earnest, in panic. Everyone realised at the same time that a day and a half had been lost and there were still three shows opening on the following Monday. Brian Cassells’ rehearsal schedule was ignored. (Since its originator was still in London he could not argue.) Stella Galpin-Lord commandeered the Masonic Hall for the rest of the day as her right and Michael Vanderzee demanded it for the Friday. Charles began to think he would be lucky to get onstage there for his actual performances. Rehearsal in the house was equally impossible. In the basement Pam and a couple of A.S.M. s were building a wall for Pyramus and Thisbe. Three smelly technicians lay over a greasy lighting plot in the men’s
