putting on expressions of private suffering which they had learnt when rehearsing Chekhov. It helped to make the atmosphere around Lumpkin! suddenly spiky.
Charles just made it to the pub as time was being called after a sedate Bristol house had given its qualified support to the evening performance. He was the only one of the company who went. Most went straight home to nurse themselves in anticipation of The Cold.
He managed to get in an order for a pint of bitter (performing always made him thirsty) and was letting the first mouthful wash down when the girl came up to him. The American voice twanged. ‘Did you ask him?’
‘Who? What?’ He pretended innocence, but knew full well what she meant.
‘Christopher Milton. You were going to ask him about the interview.’
‘Oh yes, of course. I hadn’t forgotten. Trouble is, today was very busy, what with the two shows. And we were rehearsing some new arrangements this morning.’ It sounded pretty feeble.
But she didn’t seem to notice. ‘Never mind. You’ll do it sometime.’ Surprisingly benign. He’d expected her to tear him apart for his omission. ‘Some time,’ she repeated and he realised that she was drunk.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Haven’t they closed?’
‘Nooo. Never. Barman. What is it, Suzanne?’
‘Vodka tonic.’
‘One of those, please.’
She took the drink and gulped it down like water. She stood close to him and swayed so that they almost touched. ‘How’d the show go?’
‘Not world-shattering.’
‘’Smy birthday today.’
‘Ah.’
‘Had a few drinks to celebrate. Alone in a foreign country.’
‘Ah.’
She leant against him. ‘Give me a birthday kiss. Back in the States I never go without a birthday kiss.’
He kissed her dryly on the lips as if she were a child, but he felt uncomfortably aware of how unchildlike she was. Her breasts exercised a magnetic attraction as she swayed towards him. He drained his beer. ‘Well, better be off. They’ll be turfing us out shortly.’
‘You going to see me home?’ she asked kookily. Miss Suzanne Horst with a few drinks inside her was a very different proposition from the hyper-efficient lady who was about to set British journalism afire.
‘Is it far?’
‘Not far. Staying at a hotel.’
‘Ah.’ Charles found he said a lot of ‘Ahs’ in conversation with Suzanne. Because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
They hadn’t got far from the pub when she stopped and rolled round into his arms. ‘Kiss me properly,’ she mumbled. Light filtered across the road from the lamp over the stage door.
He held her warm and cosy in his arms. He didn’t kiss her. Thoughts moved slowly, but with great clarity through his mind. The girl was drunk. He was nearly fifty. He should keep away from women; it always hurt one way or the other. The silent resentment of Ruth was too recent a memory. And before that there had been Anna in Edinburgh. And others. A wave of tiredness swept over him at the eternal predictability of lust.
He felt a shock of depression, as if the pavement in front of him had suddenly fallen away. What was the point of anything? Women could alleviate the awareness of the approach of death, but they could not delay it. He was cold, cold as though someone was walking over his grave. The intensity and speed of the emotion frightened him. Age, it must be age, time trickling away. He thought of Frances and wanted her comforting touch.
The girl in his arms was still, half dozing. He took her elbow and detached her from him. ‘Come on. I’ll get you back to your hotel.’ Gently.
At that moment he heard the clunk of the stage door closing and looked across to see Pete Masters emerge with a brief-case under his arm. The M.D. didn’t see him, but started to cross the road, going away from him.
The Mini must have been parked near by, but Charles wasn’t aware of it until it flashed past. He turned sharply, seemed dumb for a moment, then found his voice, too late, to shout, ‘Look out!’
Pete Masters half-turned as the wing of the Mini caught him. He was spun round on his feet and flung sprawling against a parked car. From there he slid down to lie still in the road. The Mini turned right at the end of the street and disappeared.
CHAPTER TEN
And Dickie Peck had not been in Bristol at the time of the accident. Charles tried to reason round it, but the fact was incontrovertible. According to Christopher Milton, the agent was not expected to come and see Lumpkin! again until Brighton. In case that information wasn’t reliable, Charles went to the extreme of phoning Creative Artists to check it. He used a disguised voice and pretended to be a policeman investigating the accident to Pete Masters. It was a risky expedient, one that had turned sour on him before, but he couldn’t think of another. As soon as he put the phone down, he realised that if Dickie Peck had anything to hide, he was now going to be a hundred times more careful. And he could well have been lying about his movements anyway.
All the same, Charles had already started to remove the agent from the front rank of his suspicions. Though he might be involved, might be directing operations, Dickie Peck wasn’t the one to do the heavy stuff. The more Charles thought about it, the more incongruous it became — a successful agent, with a lot of artists on his books, going round running people over and slipping them liquid paraffin? No. What was needed was a logical reappraisal of the situation.
He sat in Julian Paddon’s sitting-room on a bright autumn day and once again wrote down James Mime’s headings, ‘Incident’, ‘Suspect’ and ‘Motive’. He only filled in the middle column. Three names — Dickie Peck, Christopher Milton and Christopher Milton’s driver.
Then, as if imposing logic by committing conjecture to paper, he wrote another heading, ‘Reasons for Innocence’. Against Dickie Peck’s name he filled in, ‘Not on scene of last incident (i.e. in London) — position to keep up — discovery would ruin career’. Against Christopher Milton — ‘Last point above to nth degree — v. concerned with public image — could not afford the risk of personal action’. Against the driver he put a neat dash, then changed his mind and wrote, ‘The only question is who he’s taking orders from — D.P. or C.M. — or is he acting off his own bat?’
Written down it looked convincing. Charles felt a satisfaction akin to completing The Times crossword. He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of the driver before. Very distinctly he remembered the first time he had seen the man, advancing threateningly towards the crowd of boys who mobbed Christopher Milton outside the Welsh Dragon Club. He remembered how the driver had been halted by a gesture and how he had hovered protectively until the star wanted to leave. Like a bodyguard. It was quite logical that Christopher Milton should have a bodyguard. People in the public eye are instant targets for freaks and lunatics. And in a way everything untoward that had happened on the show could be put down to an exaggerated interpretation of a bodyguard’s role. Whether the man interpreted it that way for himself or at someone else’s suggestion was a detail which could wait until there was some actual evidence of guilt.
In Charles’ new mood of logical confidence he felt sure that proof would not be difficult to find now that he had a definite quarry. He took his sheet of paper with the winning formula on it and burnt it carefully in the grate of the fireplace, pulverising the black ash until it could yield nothing to forensic science. Even as he did so, a sneaking suspicion that he concentrated too much on the irrelevancies of detection started to bore a tiny hole in his shell of confidence.
‘Charles, what the hell’s going on?’
‘What do you mean, Gerald?’
‘Well, there’s a little piece in the Evening Standard about this M.D. being run over.’
‘Ah.’
‘It also mentions Kevin being mugged in Leeds. No comment, just a juxtaposition of the two facts. It’s worse
