what’s the name of that terrible piss-artist?’
Charles knew the answer as he spoke. ‘Everard Austick?’
‘Yes.’
‘And was there a pianist called Frederick Wooland?’
‘Good Lord, yes. I’d never have remembered his name. How did you know? Look, I’ve got to dash.’
Julian’s car roared off, leaving the road empty. And Charles feeling emptier.
It was with a feeling of nausea, but not surprise, that he heard next day that Mark Spelthorne had been found hanged in his digs.
PART IV
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It seemed strange to continue working with Christopher Milton after that. Or perhaps the strangeness lay in how easy it was, how much of the time it was possible to forget the grotesque suspicions which had now hardened in Charles’ mind. And they were busy. Lumpkin! was scheduled to open at the King’s Theatre on November 27th and the problems of re-rehearsing great chunks of the show were now exacerbated by extra rehearsals for Mark Spelthorne’s understudy. (The management were dithering in London as to whether they should leave the part in the understudy’s hands or bring someone else with a bit more name value. The boy who’d taken over wasn’t bad… and he was cheaper than his predecessor… but was his name big enough…? Or with Christopher Milton above the title, did one perhaps not need any name value in the supports…? And after the cuts Young Marlow wasn’t much of a part anyway… The usual impersonal management decisions continued to be made a long way from the people they concerned.)
There was not much fuss over the death. Police were round asking about Mark’s state of mind before the incident and there were rumours that some representatives of the company might have to attend the inquest, but the assumption of suicide was general. The coincidence of the failure of the radio pilot, the demise of the Fighter Pilots and troubles over Lumpkin! were thought to be sufficient motive. To a character like Mark Spelthorne, whose life was driven by ambitions of stardom, this sequence of blows, with the implication that he was never going to make it in the way he visualised, could be enough to push him over the edge.
Even Charles found the explanation fairly convincing and tried to make himself find it very convincing. But other thoughts gatecrashed his mind.
An unwelcome logical sequence was forming there. What he had heard from Julian provided the thread which pulled all the wayward strands of the case together into a neat little bundle. Christopher Milton’s history of mental illness was just the sort of thing that he would fight to keep from his adoring public. The mass audiences for popular entertainment are not the most liberal and broad-minded section of the population and they would not sympathise with anything ‘odd’.
Everard Austick and the pianist Frederick Wooland had passed unnoticed through Dickie Peck’s Approval of Cast net and Christopher Milton must have recoiled in shock when he saw them at rehearsals. They were links with the one episode in his past he was determined to keep quiet and so far as he was concerned, they had to be removed. Not killed or even badly injured but kept out of Lumpkin! Hence the airgun pellet and the shove which sent poor, pissed Everard downstairs. Charles kicked himself for being so blinkered about the evidence he had found in the Corniche. He had been looking for something to incriminate the driver and had found what he wanted, without considering that its location could be equally damning to the car’s owner.
Because now he had no doubt of Christopher Milton’s personal involvement. Apart from anything else, at the time of Mark’s death, Dickie Peck was in London and the driver was in hospital. And everything became quite logical if the star was considered as potentially unbalanced. In his morbid self-obsession he saw everyone who challenged him as a serious threat to his personality and as such someone who should be removed or punished. It wasn’t a case of Dickie Peck or the driver being overprotective; it was a paranoid man protecting himself. And it meant that Charles was dealing with a madman.
Only a madman would believe that he could continue to behave like that without ultimate discovery and disgrace. Only someone totally locked in his own world, someone who had lost touch with everyday reality. Christopher Milton’s unshakable belief in his talent was matched by a belief in his immunity from discovery.
And he had been skilful. All of the crimes had the appearance of accidents or unrelated acts of violence. Charles felt certain that no one else in the company saw any pattern in them. And because Lumpkin! was on the move, it was unlikely that the different police forces involved would be aware of a sequence of crimes.
But now, with the death of Mark Spelthorne, the whole situation became more serious. Beating up people who get in your way is one thing; killing them puts you in a different league.
And Charles was still left with the dilemma of what he should do about it. Gerald’s original instructions to him to protect the show and its star from sabotage now seemed grotesquely irrelevant. The situation had got beyond that. But he still did not have enough evidence to go to the police with a tale which must strain their credulity. The airgun pellets and the liquid paraffin were unsubstantiated evidence; he could have planted them, and anyway his own behaviour in snooping around the Holiday Inn car park could be liable to misinterpretation. He didn’t have any proof that Christopher Milton was at the scene of most of the incidents.
He considered the possibility of talking directly to his suspect, but he couldn’t imagine what he would say. A quiet word in the ear may stop a schoolboy from smoking behind the cycle sheds, but in a case of murder it’s seriously inadequate. And if he was dealing with a potentially homicidal maniac, it was asking for trouble to draw attention to such suspicions. But the alternative was sitting and waiting for someone else to get hurt or even killed.
He wanted to discuss it with someone, but Gerald Venables, who was the only suitable confidant, was too involved in the situation and might panic.
So he would have to work it out on his own. He thought through the known facts and wished there were more of them. He made vague resolutions to find out as much as he could about Christopher Milton’s past and current activities. One useful idea did come into his head. He recollected that the first two crimes had been committed between nine and ten in the morning and suddenly tied this up with the unusual ‘no calls before ten- thirty’ clause in the star’s contract. It would be interesting to find out what he did in the mornings. Was it just that he liked a lie-in? That did not tally with the voracious appetite for work he demonstrated the rest of the day. He was prepared to stay up all night getting a new number together and yet the day never began until half past ten. That was worth investigating.
But it was one stray positive thought in a scrambled mind. Everything else circled round uselessly, tangling with emotions and producing nothing.
The Queen’s Theatre, Brighton, was one of the great old touring theatres of Britain. It had been built for more spacious times, in the 1870s, before the cinema had cheapened illusion by comparisons with the real thing. When the Queen’s was put up, people went to the theatre for spectacle and they got it. Entertainments were built round special effects — shipwrecks, fires and falling buildings, magic, ghosts and live animals. And the theatres were designed to cope.
The original stage machinery had been built for the Rise and Sink method of set changing, whereby the stage was made up of separate narrow sections, which could be raised and lowered with different sets on them by an elaborate system of pulleys and counterweights. There was a cellar below the stage as deep as the proscenium was high and above the audience’s sight lines there was equivalent space in the flying gallery. The complex of girders and hawsers in the cellar was a feat of engineering comparable to one of the great Victorian railway bridges.
When the stage was designed, it had been equipped with the full complement of trap doors which were written into many plays of the period. Downstage were the corner traps, small openings used for the appearance or
