‘Just hit.’ Kevin winced at the recollection.
‘Surely the average mugger starts by asking for the goods and then comes in with the heavy stuff when you refuse.’
‘I don’t know.’ The intonation was meant to end the conversation, but Charles had to continue. ‘Kevin, Dickie Peck protects Christopher Milton like a eunuch in a harem. If anyone argues with his blue-eyed boy, he stops them. And I don’t think he’s too fussy about his methods. He used to be a boxer and, as we saw the other night, he’s still pretty tough.’
‘I was mugged,’ said Kevin doggedly.
‘You’re not holding out on me? There is nothing to make you think it could have been Dickie?’
‘I am not holding out on you. There is nothing to make me think it could have been Dickie,’ came the repetition on a monotone.
Charles sighed. ‘Okay. Thanks. Well, I expect you’ll soon feel better. What’ll you do — come down and join us in Bristol?’
‘No, I don’t think I’ll bother.’
‘What?’
‘I think I’ll follow your earlier advice — take the money and run. What was it you said — that I must think of it as a grant to buy time to go off and write what I really want to? That’s what I’ll do. There’s no point in going on banging my head against a brick wall.’
‘Or having your head banged against a brick wall.’ But Kevin did not rise to the bait. Whoever it was had got at him had achieved the objective of the Christopher Milton/Dickie Peck camp. There would be no more interference in Lumpkin! by the writer of Liberty Hall.
He managed to get a word with Pete Masters, the musical director, during a break in the morning rehearsal. ‘Good number, that I Beg Yours?’ he offered. Compliment is always conducive to confidence.
Pete, however, showed discrimination. ‘It’s all right. Rather cobbled together. I don’t really think it’s that great. Lyric could do with a bit of polishing. The basic tune’s okay, but it needs a proper arrangement. I’ll do it as soon as I get time.’
‘Still, the product of one night. A whole song. Did you find it hard?’
‘What, doing it in the time? Not really. Did lots of revue at — university and got used to knocking up stuff quickly.’
‘People who hesitate before they say “university” either went to somewhere so unmentionably awful that they’re afraid of shocking people or went to Oxbridge and are afraid of being thought toffee-nosed.’
Pete’s boyish face broke into a smile. Charles’ guess had been right. ‘Cambridge, actually.’
‘Ah, the Footlights.’
‘Exactly. By the way, you’re right, people do get a bit shirty if you talk about it. Especially in the music business.’
‘Did you read music?’
‘Yes.’
‘So this is slumming for you.’
Again the tone had been right. Pete laughed. ‘You could say that.’ As he relaxed, his nondescript working- with-musicians voice gave way to his natural public school accent.
‘Tell me, when you wrote that new song, did you actually stay up all night?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘In the Dragonara?’
‘In Christopher Milton’s suite, yes.’
‘And you all worked on it, him and you and Wally and Dickie Peck?’
‘Yes. Well, we talked it through first and then Wally and I went down to the ballroom, which was the only place where there was a piano. I think Christopher Milton and Dickie may have got some sleep while we did that.’
‘Or I suppose they could have gone out.’
Pete treated the idea as a joke rather than as grounds for suspicion, which was just as well. ‘What, in Leeds? There’s nothing to do here during the day-time, leave alone at night.’
Charles chuckled. ‘So how long did it take you and Wally actually to write the number?’
I don’t know exactly. I suppose we went down to the piano about two-thirty and maybe finished about five.’
So it was possible that Dickie Peck could have left the hotel to get Kevin McMahon. If, of course, he knew where to find him. Which was unlikely. But possible. The case seemed full of things that were possible, but not likely.
Charles wandered aimlessly around Leeds, trying to work it out, just to get one line of logic through all the strange events of the past few weeks. But it seemed as impossible to impose a pattern as it was to work out the geography of Leeds town centre. After half an hour of circling round identical pedestrian shopping precincts, he went into a little restaurant called ‘The Kitchen’ in Albion Street.
Over the Dish of the Day and a glass of red wine, he got out a notebook and pencil bought for the purpose in a W. H. Smith’s he’d passed three times in the last half hour. James Milne, whom he’d met in Edinburgh over the Mariello murder the previous summer, had taught him the advantages of writing things down to clarify thoughts.
Three headings — ‘Incident’, ‘Suspect’ and ‘Motive’. In the first column — ‘Pianist shot at’, ‘Everard Austick pushed downstairs’, ‘Flats allowed to fall’ and ‘Kevin McMahon beaten up’. He filled in a question mark after the first two, thought for a moment, and put one after the third. He started on ‘Suspects’. Dickie Peck and Christopher Milton’s driver for the second two ‘Incidents’ and question marks for the first two. ‘Motive’ offered ‘Protection of CM., seeing that he gets his own way’, again only for the second two. More question marks.
If only he could get some line which linked the first two victims with the later ones. He’d asked Michael Peyton about any altercations between the star and the pianist or Everard and received the information that, in the first case, the two didn’t even meet at rehearsal, and in the second, an atmosphere of great cordiality had been maintained. So, unless there were some unknown link in the past, the motive for the first two attacks couldn’t be the same as for the subsequent ones. Oh dear. He had another glass of wine.
In one respect at least the attack on Kevin McMahon had changed the situation. It had been publicly recognised as a crime by the cast, the police, the press. That meant that any subsequent incidents might be related by people other than Charles and Gerald Venables. The criminal, if criminal there were, would have to be more careful in future.
Having come to this conclusion, Charles looked at his watch. Five to two. God. There was a two-thirty matinee on Wednesday and if he hadn’t signed in at the theatre by the ‘half’, there’d be trouble.
In fact, there was trouble, but not the sort he feared. It was gastric trouble, and it only affected one member of the cast, Winifred Tuke.
Very interesting. If the pattern of accidents Charles suspected did exist, and if the motivation he had assumed were correct, then it was natural that Winifred Tuke should be the next victim. Since her clash with Christopher Milton over I Beg Yours? she had made no secret of her feelings and, being a theatrical lady, she made no attempt to make her umbrage subtle. Gastric trouble also fitted. After the dramatic fate of Kevin, the criminal was bound to keep a low profile. Winifred Tuke had to be punished for opposing the will of Christopher Milton, but it couldn’t be anything too serious, just an embarrassing indisposition which would put her out of action while the new number was rehearsed and became an established part of the show.
She had started to feel queasy at the end of the matinee, and only just managed to get through the last number. She did not appear for the curtain call. The company manager questioned her in her dressing-room and gathered, not so much from her genteel explanations as from her constant departures to the Ladies, that she was suffering from acute diarrhoea. She was sent back to her digs in a taxi, moaning imprecations against the previous night’s curry, and her under-rehearsed understudy took over for the evening performance.
Charles was not convinced about the curry. For a start, he would have expected food poisoning to manifest itself more quickly, and also it seemed strange that Winifred Tuke should be the only one affected by it. The meal had been one of those occasions when everyone ordered something different and had a bit of everything.
But nobody else seemed worried and certainly no one talked of links between the incident and Kevin’s
