Murder of a Movie Star

by L. B. Hathaway

  ‘Dangerous stuff, Miss?’ The boy looked excited.

  ‘Hopefully not. But I could do with a lad like you today.’ Posie waved the pound note. ‘There’s this in it for you, at the end of today, if you do everything I just told you and show up for duty at my office. Think of it as payment for today and as compensation for your job ending with Mr Fontaine.’

  The boy nodded eagerly, a thin sheen of excitement glowing in his eyes. ‘Right you are, Miss. See you later, then. I promise.’

  Posie turned to see the Chief Inspector looking in at her. He rolled his eyes in disbelief. He had seen the white brightness of the note, too.

  ‘Always were a soft touch, weren’t you, Posie Parker?’ he said, barely bothering to conceal his fondness.

  ****

  Thirty-One

  They travelled in an uncomfortable silence as Binny drove as fast and as smoothly as he could along the burning heat of the small tarmacked road back to London.

  For a while they had the road all to themselves, but after twenty minutes or so a blue-and-gold Nathan’s van appeared behind them, dipping in and out of view every few minutes. The rest of the time the roads were totally deserted, the fierce heat keeping most people inside.

  Posie studied her fellow passenger, who was looking pointedly out of the window, as if for privacy. Silvia Hanro was obviously lost in a cloud of sadness or regret for a man she had claimed to have hated.

  ‘Couldn’t you just have told me?’ asked Posie, matter-of-factly, as they were entering the outskirts of London again, the car passing through Earl’s Court with its metal rush and blur of railways and squiggly junctions.

  ‘About Mrs Cleeves being “Sheila”, I mean?’

  Posie felt ruffled and insulted, somehow. Like she had deliberately been kept in the dark about nearly everything. She hated that. That feeling of being taken for a fool.

  But she was a fool. A stupid little fool.

  Silvia turned at last to Posie. She had a thinly veiled look of contempt on her face.

  ‘You’re supposed to be the Detective. Why should I have told you? I told you that Sheila was part of the scenery, and I also told you that Brian kept a Housekeeper. Did I have to spell it out for you?’ Silvia shrugged. ‘I thought you knew everything, anyhow.’

  They had come to a stop at a level-crossing and waited as a steam locomotive screamed through. Silvia shifted in her seat. It was very hot and sticky in the car and the railway-scented air outside brought no freshness. The gates lifted.

  ‘Besides,’ said Silvia, ‘I didn’t tell you any lies. And if you want the truth now – although I feel sorry for her in her current predicament, of course – I despised Sheila. Not for where she came from, as Robbie always thought. It was her nature I hated.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sheila was friends with that horrible fat cook, wasn’t she? And they suit each other very well. Both of them are money-grubbing horrors. It was well known at Worton Hall that if you slipped Mrs Thynne the right amount of money she would go out of her way to see you were well fed. Her husband’s a notorious poacher and she was always trying to offload his ill-gotten wares to people on set. In fact, rumour had it that she’d do pretty much anything for cash. Sheila was always after money, too.’

  Posie puckered her brow. ‘But what did Sheila have to offer people at Worton Hall? Not food or favours, surely?’

  Silvia’s face darkened. ‘No. Worse. She traded in secrets.’

  ‘Secrets? You mean blackmail?’

  Silvia sneered. ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that, no. That would be acknowledging that the things she said had some truth to them. The things she said were ludicrous, absolute drivel. Can you believe she had the gall to tell me that Tom – my own dear Tom! – was having an affair with the dresser?’

  ‘Elaine?’ Posie repeated.

  ‘That’s right. She said she’d give me evidence if I’d give her ten pounds. I told her to sling her hook! You can imagine that Tom and I laughed ourselves silly about it later!’

  ‘When was this?’

  Silvia hunkered down at the window, shrugging, losing interest.

  ‘Oh, goodness. I can’t remember now. Saturday? Sunday, maybe? But it was typical of her, I can tell you that for nothing.’

  They were driving through High Street Kensington now, and the smart shopping street lay deserted. A cinema next to the Underground station had a small crowd of people around it, and a queue was snaking down the street in the cool shade of the shop fronts. A glossy poster advertised the name of Brian Langley and one of Sunstar’s most recent films, and Silvia Hanro and Robbie Fontaine were superimposed in a tight, passionate clinch on a grand scale high above the entrance to the cinema.

  Silvia recoiled in horror from the image, her eyes filling with tears.

  But what the crowd were paying attention to mainly was a large bill poster which said:

  AIR CONDITIONING HERE!

  Silvia groaned. She seemed, now she was talking, in the mood for conversation. And sympathy.

  ‘I still can’t believe he’s dead. Robbie. And while I loathed him, it felt as if he’d always be there, you know?’ She shivered. ‘I can’t get that image to go away. His head like that…’

  ‘Try not to think of it.’

  ‘And that Brian could do that? Really do that, I mean. Kill us, or kill me. In cold blood. It’s horrible.’

  ‘But you thought the same, earlier this week? You thought Brian was behind the threats, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t think he actually meant anything by it. And you think it was for money? To save Sunstar? It just doesn’t make sense…he has all of his orchid income. And does that mean he killed Elaine, too? Or was she actually a suicide?’

  At Posie’s unhelpful silence the actress frowned. ‘And I can’t understand what my sister Pamela was doing at the party, either. Those two have no connection to each other. Brian barely met Pamela back in the old days…’

  She turned, seeking some sort of reassurance or explanation from Posie. But Posie said nothing.

  She was thinking about Pamela. And blackmail.

  She remembered Pamela’s comments about someone blackmailing her over Hilda’s parentage. The threats had started up again very recently. But she had also mentioned that it had occurred before. Twice before. Last year. It had been a woman. And Pamela had dealt with the threat by paying up.

  Posie remembered that Pamela had written to Silvia asking for money last year. Twice. Money which had been grudgingly paid out. What if that money was paid out to stop someone from spilling a secret? What if the person doing the blackmailing had been Sheila?

  It all fitted together.

  Sheila had somehow got wind of the existence of the child, Hilda, presumably by rifling through Brian Langley’s personal mail; a letter from Pamela about school fees, maybe. Sheila had hunted down her prey and blackmailed Pamela, no doubt secretly ecstatic at finding such a complicated and potentially devastating state of affairs, injurious to so many people. Sheila had gone back to Pamela for more money, a second time over, and had obviously been about to do the same thing again.

  Posie knew the one thing about blackmailers was that they were greedy: they always came back for more.

  And suddenly, and clear as a bell, she knew she was right.

  She remembered the distracted manner of Pamela on the edges of the dance floor, how she had been staring at someone uncertainly, and then in a horrified way. Posie remembered the howl from Pamela on the floor of the ballroom when the lights had come on. Her words, over and over again:

  ‘That woman! That woman! She ruined my life!’

  Pamela had spotted Sheila, and had recognised her. She hadn’t been talking about Silvia at all.

  And if that was correct, Silvia Hanro was wrong: Sheila wasn’t a woman in possession of stupid tittle-tattle. In her dealings with Pamela she had shown herself quite capable of using big, dark secrets. Secrets which ruined lives. Which cost lives.

  A c
lever wee woman, after all.

  ****

  Grape Street was slumbering fitfully in the heatwave. It was very quiet and dirty-looking.

  ‘Is this where you work?’ said Silvia Hanro in a shocked-sounding voice. Posie didn’t bother to answer, getting her key out of her carpet bag, thinking instead of Bute Street and Pamela’s neatly pristine flat above the fish and chip shop. Where Silvia’s child had spent her life.

  She could just imagine Silvia’s words:

  ‘Is this where you live?’

  Sergeant Binny parked the car up against the entrance to the Grape Street Bureau, and told the women to go on up. Posie informed him that Sidney, the stringer, might be along at any moment, and Binny nodded. He then revealed the fact that, completely against normal Scotland Yard policy, he had been authorised by the Chief Inspector to carry a handgun, and felt he was best suited to stand outside the entrance on the street level with it, watching and waiting, until further police back-up came. They left him, still in his black tie, looking somewhat nervously up and down the tiny dusty street.

  Up on the third floor it was terribly hot. Dust motes were dancing in the sunshine out on the landing with its faded blue carpet and somehow it made the place look even more grubby, even more third-rate than it really was. Posie didn’t look at Silvia, just put the key in the lock of the glass-stencilled front door to the Detective Agency.

  Inside, the client waiting room and the tiny offices were deadly quiet. No-one was about. Posie locked the door behind them and thought anxiously of Len, and his gun, which he always kept with him. She needed both of them right now.

  Where was he, anyway?

  It dawned on her in a strangely inappropriate manner that it had been Len that she had requested to help her in her hour of need, when she had asked Sidney to make a call, not Alaric, who would, no doubt, be fretting about getting his upcoming talk for the Royal Geographical Society ready just now.

  She brushed the thought quickly aside.

  It had been because Len was so firmly associated with this place, of course. And because of the gun. That was it.

  Not that Len had bothered to hang around, though, by the looks of things.

  ‘What was that noise?’ whispered Silvia, looking about the place in some trepidation. She had hung her red headdress and bag up on the hat stand in the waiting room as if the piece of bland furniture might bite her. Her arms and her hands were still covered in bits of dried, encrusted blood.

  ‘There it is again. A moaning noise? A kicking sound?’

  Posie cocked her head and listened. A second later she dashed across to the tiny kitchen out the back and opened the door. Mr Minks sprung out, mewing, vastly annoyed. He came up to Posie and ran his talons up her leg, ripping her stockings to shreds. On purpose.

  He suddenly saw Silvia and hissed, arching his back. It was an acknowledged fact that he vastly preferred men to women. Any man would do. And if no men were around, then Posie had to suffice.

  ‘It’s only my Siamese, Mr Minks,’ said Posie, slightly apologetically, although her nerves were strung out tightly and she felt like screaming. She picked up the cream-and-brown cat, stroking him as much as he deigned to allow.

  ‘Mr Minks needs feeding and my partner, Len, has obviously been remiss. Len doesn’t keep him in the style to which he has grown accustomed.’

  Posie grabbed a clean towel and a new bar of Pears soap from the cleaning cupboard and indicated towards the kitchen sink. It was slightly more presentable in here than the tiny horrible bathroom out on the landing with its cracked sink and chipped mirror. ‘Do you want to clean up?’

  Silvia nodded, and tried as best she could to wash in the confined space. Her mouth was a prim, grim line and Posie wondered like mad what she was thinking about. Robbie Fontaine, presumably, and his blood which she was washing off her hands.

  Mr Minks was hissing furiously.

  ‘Don’t mind him. Shall I make us both a cup of tea while we wait for Scotland Yard to arrive?’

  Silvia eyed the cat with some distaste but nodded. While Posie prepared cups and tea, Silvia stood on the scratched lino of the tiny kitchen and stared out of the high sash window with its ragged red velvet curtains.

  ‘Nice view.’

  From the little kitchen window it was a sheer – and fatal – drop down to the courtyard.

  ‘We keep the window closed at all times,’ Posie explained, indicating towards the cat, while simultaneously remembering that there was no milk for the tea, as it was simply too hot to keep it out on the windowsill.

  ‘Blast and botheration.’

  And Posie didn’t have the luxury of an ice-box. Or biscuits, come to think of it. With Prudence away mostly everything came a little undone.

  ‘Do feel free to smoke. Be my guest.’

  Posie passed across the black tea in a blue china cup and saucer normally kept for clients, and the sugar jar with the silver tongs which she normally kept for best, too. Silvia nodded a thanks and lit a cigarette, shaking out her match in great exaggerated gestures.

  ‘How long will I have to stay here do you think?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say.’

  Hopefully not much longer, Posie thought to herself, jumpily. She took a hopeful slurp of tea from her mug and almost choked; it was too hot without milk.

  Mr Minks had now slunk to the opposite end of the kitchen, as far away as possible from the two women. Seeing as how there was no food on immediate offer, he had given up any semblance of affection.

  ‘I couldn’t keep a cat like that,’ the actress said, turning from the window at last and sitting languidly in a kitchen chair across from Posie.

  ‘Oh?’ Posie said automatically, a tad defensively. ‘Well, I didn’t really have a choice. He was my father’s. He would have been homeless without me. But he’s wonderful, in his own unique way.’

  ‘You remind me of my sister a bit, you know.’ Silvia took a careful sip of her tea and grimaced at the taste. ‘You know, the girl in bright pink whom they just arrested?’

  Posie hadn’t bothered to mention that she had actually met Pamela, in her own time. Or that Pamela had helped supply a good deal of Posie’s knowledge about Silvia.

  ‘She was always hunting down lost causes, too. Injured animals, sometimes. Or helping with workhouse fundraisers. All that. She always did that; she thought it was the noble thing to do. Those lost causes never brought her anything but hard work though, and no thanks in the end. And she would have been better off without them. Happier, probably.’

  Posie tried to stop the anger bubbling over. She gripped the edge of the tiny, cheap wooden table until her knuckles turned white.

  ‘Perhaps it runs in the family, then,’ Posie whispered, too loud.

  Fool.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Posie snapped.

  ‘Lost causes. It’s obvious, isn’t it? You’ve just married your lost cause. Tom – let’s call him that – and all because you think it’s the noble thing to do. You went out of your way to tell me you were in love with him. But you’re no more in love with him than I am!’

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘But you’re not going to be happy, are you? And all you will get is hard work, and no thanks. You might be better off without him, don’t you think? Like your sister and her stray dogs. Or was it cats? Or workhouse children? I’m paraphrasing, obviously.’

  Silvia stood up. She stubbed out her cigarette in the nice blue saucer. Anger was written all over her beautiful face.

  ‘I don’t have to listen to this. You’re crazy. Completely.’

  Posie continued to sit. She continued in the calmest, coolest voice she could muster:

  ‘Am I though? It’s the only way I can explain it. Although I still don’t know what the rush in marrying Tom this week was for. You feel guilt that Tom lost his looks and his career in the war, and that he almost lost his mind, too; especially since your career is still going strong, for now. Even though you’re about to be repl
aced by some new young thing…’

  ‘How dare you! I’m only turning thirty next month!’

  ‘Happy birthday. But I’m right, aren’t I? About Tom? And the guilt? Guilt is stamped all over this. You feel guilt for involving him in Worton Hall and Sunstar Films again, after him being such a long time away from the industry. You feel guilt about your affair with Brian Langley while Tom was away, and guilt about the child you had. Brian’s child. A lost child with the man you still love.’

  Silvia gasped and stood rooted to the spot.

  Posie stood at last. ‘And I’m guessing that you feel guilt at not loving Tom. Worse, you feel guilty because you feel disgusted, repelled by Tom.’

  Posie felt terribly tired, and sad:

  ‘So you ran away on your wedding night, didn’t you? Because you were desperate to be alone: to walk in the rain in a disguise; to party hard as if you could blot out the marriage you had just entered into. A marriage you saw as your duty, as Tom’s right. You weren’t reconsidering it, were you? You knew you had made your uncomfortable bed, and you knew you had to lie in it. But you wanted one last night of freedom. You told me you’d left Tom a note when you rang me from the Royal Oak. I think you told Tom that you wanted to be alone in that note, didn’t you? That’s why he wasn’t worried about you, but he must have been embarrassed, not to mention hurting like hell inside. He knows why you don’t want to be with him. Is that why you don’t help him more financially? Why you’re so wretchedly mean towards him?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I bet I do. Poor man. Isn’t that what happened?’

  Silvia was reaching for the door of the kitchen, but Posie was faster. She slipped through it and pushed it shut again behind her and quick as a flash she had used her office key to lock the door. Silvia was locked inside the kitchen with only Mr Minks for company.

  ‘Good,’ Posie breathed, panting. ‘Serves her jolly well right. Cold-hearted harpy.’

  ‘Let me out!’ shouted the actress furiously. She hammered on the door uselessly.