Death and the Chaste Apprentice

by Robert Barnard

  But it was all, somehow, a bit academic. A bit of a sideshow. Because at half past eleven the superintendent, who had only been glimpsed hitherto walking purposively around the hotel, began interviewing people who he thought might be of help to him. And since the staff of the hotel had all been together at the crucial time and had been given a thorough going-over by one of his men, that left the actors and the residents. And of course, it was all quite ridiculous, but . . . but one really had to decide how much to tell him, didn’t one? And one had to decide which of one’s fellow actors one could talk to about how much to tell him. Probably it would be mostly routine, wouldn’t it, and rather dreary, but then there would be those areas . . .

  And it was mostly routine, this preliminary round of interviews. But there were areas in which Dundy and his men found tiny nuggets of interest.

  • • •

  “But I can’t see,” said Clarissa Galloway, “why we can’t be interviewed together. We do everything together. Except sleep together, sometimes, but that goes in waves.”

  She crossed a shapely black-stockinged leg, doing it at Charlie Peace, as being the youngest man in the room. His eye gleamed with a spark of amused appreciation. Iain Dundy’s mouth tightened. Of course with these arty people it all came back to sex in the end.

  “I’m afraid interviewing you together would be quite against regulations,” he said.

  “It must be terrible to be so bound by regulations,” said Clarissa with stage thoughtfulness.

  “You say you do everything together, but in fact you weren’t playing husband and wife in this play, were you?”

  “Good God, no. Ralph Greatheart is an ancient character.”

  “Do your parts link up? Are you together onstage a great deal in the course of the evening?”

  “No, we have a scene together at the end of the first act, but then we’re hardly onstage at all together until the last act.”

  “Then were you offstage together a lot?”

  “Oh, yes, a fair bit.”

  “Talking together in the dressing rooms behind the stage?”

  “Well, I don’t remember talking together,” said Clarissa, again with that contrived thoughtfulness. “But of course terribly aware of each other. Always terribly aware. It’s what distinguishes us as a partnership.”

  And that, Dundy suspected, was nothing but the truth, in spite of the stagy manner in which it was delivered.

  “I see. While you were backstage, were you aware of anyone leaving the dressing room—the two dressing rooms, rather, in part of the kitchen and the private functions room—to go into the main part of the hotel?”

  “No, I can assure you Carston didn’t. As to the others—Well, of course there was young Peter Fortnum.”

  “Ah.”

  “Quite a talented beginning. Plays Peter Patterwit and has some quite frightful jokes, which is almost inevitable in this kind of comedy, but he carries them off rather well. . . .”

  “Yes, I’m sure. But it was his trip into the main part of the hotel you were going to tell me about.”

  “Was I?” She smiled dazzlingly at the three men. “Well, if you want to hear about it. It’s surely of no importance. Let me see . . . He came offstage—it was towards Interval time, perhaps a quarter of an hour before—and Connie Geary was complaining that she’d run out of gin. She’s a dipso, poor old thing, though quite a happy one, which is a blessing when you see the other kind. Where was I? Oh, yes, Peter Fortnum had just come off, and he wasn’t due to launch any more of his leaden innuendos at the audience until after the Interval, and he said straightaway that he’d go and fetch her a half, which is what he did. Actually, it did seem to some of us that he was gone an awfully long time.”

  “I see,” said Iain Dundy. “Well, no doubt it’s something I shall be able to follow up. Now, about the dead man himself—what were your impressions?”

  She leaned forward. She had decided that honesty would be the best policy and sincerity the best manner. She delivered herself of a great deal of sincerity.

  “Quite frightful! A squirt, a pusher, a bore. And of course dreadfully inquisitive! I don’t expect that’s news to you, is it? He made no secret of it. Now when you’ve been a star for . . . some years, as I have, as Carston and I have, you get used to inquisitiveness—from fans, from the press, and so on. But quite naturally some of the others here aren’t used to it in the same way and react very badly to prying and snooping. I think you’ll discover in the end that that’s where the answer lies. His snooping was the death of him.”

  And a very satisfactory end, too, her dazzling smile to all three men seemed to imply.

  • • •

  “My movements?” said Brad Mallory. “My dear man, they are an open book and vouched for by thousands. I was in the Town Hall. I had a seat in the back row—in case I was needed behind the scenes. I had people beside me who would certainly remember me even though I didn’t have any conversation with them. I should think Frank, the doorman, noticed me when I left, and I remember speaking to him when I returned at Interval.”

  “You actually left the concert at Interval?”

  “Exhausted by the splendor of Singh’s performance.”

  His hand flapped, like a vulture’s wing.

  “And you came straight back to the Saracen?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  “Straight to my room—to recover some degree of equilibrium.”

  Unvouched for by thousands, thought Dundy.

  • • •

  “Ralph Greatheart is, I suppose, the biggest part in the play,” said Carston Galloway judiciously. He made it sound as if he were calculating the number of lines rather than being immodest. “I think it’s bigger than the apprentice himself. So I’m onstage a great deal of the time. Last night, when I wasn’t onstage, I was in the improvised dressing room backstage.”

  Iain Dundy was conscious of movement behind Galloway in the cramped quarters of the manager’s room, which had been put at his disposal to conduct the interviews in. It was Charlie Peace, who had been making signs and who now cleared his throat.

  “Yes, Constable?”

  “If I may, sir, there’s one question I would like to ask the gentleman. I should say that I happened to be in the audience last night. There is one time, isn’t there, Mr. Galloway, when you actually appear on the balcony? You and one or two others?”

  “That’s right. The upper stage. I included that, of course, when I talked of being onstage.”

  His manner was that of one rebuking an inattentive schoolboy. Nevertheless, he hadn’t mentioned it, Dundy noted. If Peace hadn’t been in the audience, would it have come up? He shot a grateful glance at Charlie, then took over the questioning again.

  “This upper stage, sir—is it part of the regular balcony around the courtyard?”

  “That’s right. Divided off from the rest of the balcony by a couple of makeshift partitions.”

  “And reached through a bedroom?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And how, sir, did you reach that bedroom?”

  “We went up a little service staircase in the corner of the kitchen. Apparently it’s one that’s used by the cleaning women and sometimes by the maids when they’re taking up breakfasts in bed or room orders.”

  “I see. You say we went up, sir. Could you tell me who the other actors were who were on with you?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a scene where the Greatheart family have been woken up at night by the horseplay of the apprentices, which of course has been taking place below on the main stage. It’s a fairly traditional situation—”

  “And your family in the play is—?”

  “Joan Carley, who plays my wife—my stage wife—and Gillian Soames, who plays my daughter. Oh, and I think Jason Thark, the producer, followed us upstairs to see how the scene went.”

  The wonderful casualness of these arty people when they lob their grenades, Dundy thought!

  �
�Ah, he would remain in the bedroom, I suppose?”

  “Yes . . . Though now that you mention it . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I seem to remember, as we all went into the bedroom, sounds from the corridor—almost like a row.” He passed his hand over his forehead in one of those stage gestures that he and his wife specialized in, which set Dundy’s teeth on edge. “No, it’s too vague. Remember I was about to go out onto the balcony. It’s a scene that calls for a lot, vocally and dramatically, so I was only thinking of that. You’ll have to ask Jason.”

  And you’ve made quite sure that I do, thought Dundy.

  “This Jason Thark is the man your wife says, er . . .”

  “They’ve been sleeping together since we got here,” said Carston indifferently.

  “I see . . . And did you all go back to the kitchens together after the scene was over, sir?”

  “Er, no. The ladies, you see, go twittering off quite early in the scene, after a drunken obscenity from Matthew Cotter, one of the apprentices—only it’s an obscenity nobody understands any longer, so it rather misfires. After they go, I have several more minutes haranguing the lads; then I go in.”

  “And last night they’d already gone downstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then did you go down with Mr. Thark?”

  “No . . . No, Jason must have gone down by that time. I went down to the kitchen alone.”

  “I see. About what time was this scene, Mr. Galloway?”

  “Oh, good Lord, one doesn’t notice times. Well on in the first half but not Interval by a long chalk. I may say that I spoke to little Soames the moment I got down to the bottom of the stairs. Asked her how she thought it’d gone.”

  “And you couldn’t put a time to it, roughly?”

  “Oh, say, five to eight, or eight—something like that.”

  “I see. Thank you.”

  Iain Dundy did not have to look down at his notes to remind himself of the police doctor’s preliminary estimate of the time of death. He thought it had occurred at some time between eight and a quarter past nine.

  • • •

  “I was in my bedroom,” said Gunter Gottlieb. “I plan, I read the score, I hear the music to myself. So do I feel my way into the performance tomorrow—that is, tonight. Even Donizetti—which is piffle, pure piffle!—even Donizetti has to be felt, experienced, heard inside.”

  “I see,” said the superintendent, feeling an intense dislike for the lean, arrogant figure sitting opposite him. “So you were here in the hotel, alone in your room, all evening?”

  “Yes. Oh—one moment. A girl came.”

  “A girl? Her name?”

  Gunter Gottlieb shrugged.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did she come for?”

  “Sex. We just have sex; then she go.”

  “I see. Was she a prostitute?”

  “Certainly not. I don’t use prostitutes.”

  “How did you meet this young lady, then?”

  “Meet? I not meet her. I have sex with her. My bodyguard, Mike, he got her for me.”

  “I see. He made all the arrangements?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was this? How long did it take?”

  “It was, oh, seven something. I suppose altogether it took about twenty minutes. It usually does.”

  “I see . . .” Iain Dundy sighed internally. He was being very honest, this repulsive man. Was a lack of hypocrisy to be commended in a matter like that? he wondered. “Tell me, Mr. Gottlieb, can you think of any reason why Mr. Capper should feel a particular dislike for you?”

  “Who?”

  “Des Capper, the dead man.”

  Again Gottlieb shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “You did nothing to him?”

  “I was quite unaware of his existence.”

  Dundy felt quick glances in his direction from both Nettles and Peace. That was a lie, surely. The hatred of that “Get Gottlieb” scrawl could only have come from some incident the man would be sure to remember. Did the lie spring from his prodigious arrogance? Or was it a clumsy attempt to disguise guilt?

  • • •

  “Oh, he was the most horrible little man,” said Gillian Soames. She had decided that Iain Dundy was just the kind of man she liked and was talking a lot to cover the fact. “Well, not little at all—all too large. You know the type—the sort of man who, the moment he puts out his hand to shake yours, you know you don’t want to touch. Shiversome. Yukky. But I’m talking nonsense. You must meet a lot more of that type than most of us.”

  Iain Dundy had relaxed considerably. This was the sort of witness he liked: nervous, for some reason, but direct, reliable. Not arty at all, he told himself.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said expansively. “Most of the people we meet are pretty average individuals. But it’s interesting you should say that. When you connect him with the kind of people I meet, do you mean you thought there was something . . . criminal about him, right from the start?”

  Gillian considered. “No, that would be going too far. I just took a dislike to him. Later on, when one heard of the man’s snooping activities, one did start wondering what was the end in view.”

  “What snooping activities were these?”

  “Oh, it was Clarissa who made the big fuss. He’d been snooping around in her room, she said, looking in drawers and so on. Occasion for big scene. But I’m sure on this occasion Clarissa was telling the truth. In fact, the more one took notice of him, the more he seemed to be snuffling around after information that might prove useful to him.”

  “May I test him on something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “He thought you might be having an affair with someone called Ronnie Wimsett.”

  Gillian laughed uproariously. Iain Dundy felt obscurely glad that Des Capper had been wrong, which was odd, because he had not yet swapped a word with Ronnie Wimsett. Behind Gillian’s back a tiny glance passed from Charlie to Nettles and from Nettles back to Charlie. They recognized a sexual spark when they saw one. They were seeing one now.

  “I take it he was wrong?”

  “Of course. Want to know how he got the idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was going round from table to table in the Shakespeare, pushing himself into all the conversations. That was my first evening here. When he got near our table, Ronnie and I held hands and looked into each other’s eyes to keep him away. Somewhat surprisingly, it worked.”

  “Couldn’t see below the appearances, eh?”

  “Well, with the performance Ronnie and I put on, that’s not surprising. I was just surprised he thought being in love was a sufficient reason for his staying away. But often he got things wrong even when nobody was trying to mislead him. Like when he oozed up to Peter Fortnum and me the day we arrived and assumed we must be ‘the operatic lady and gentleman.’ The fact that we were gazing reverently at the stage should have told him that we were actors. Still, it doesn’t do to assume that everything he thought he’d found out was wrong.”

  Dundy sighed. “No. The likelihood is that in one case he hit the jackpot. And a lot of good it did him. Now, can we talk a bit about that scene in the play that takes place on the balcony?”

  Gillian crinkled her forehead. “Yes, I assumed you’d want to talk about that. It’s funny, you know, but we discussed and discussed how we—the actors—couldn’t have done it, and yet we never thought of that scene or never admitted we realized its significance.”

  “It seems to me,” said Dundy, “that you never thought of the staircase, either.”

  Gillian smiled at him self-deprecatingly. “You must think us very dim. But in fact there were a number of people sitting around the bottom of that staircase all the time, so it would have been pretty difficult to slip up it without being noticed. That scene, of course, was different; that was legitimate business.”

  “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

  “
I’ll try—as I remember it. I think we gathered at the foot of the staircase and all went up together. That was Carston, Joan, myself, and Jason following. I remember Carston being first into the bedroom and then being in there with him and Joan just before going out onto the balcony. . . .”

  She became silent.

  “You don’t remember Mr. Thark being there?”

  “No. I have to be honest, don’t I? I remember, just before we went on, hearing voices in the corridor. Angry voices.”

  “And the other voice?”

  “Well, it could have been Des Capper.”

  “You can’t be more definite than that?”

  “No, it wouldn’t be fair to.”

  “And when the scene was over?”

  “Joan and I came out first. Joan went down, and I watched a minute or two more of the scene through the window. Then I went down, too.”

  “Do you remember when Mr. Thark and Mr. Galloway came down?”

  “No. I went to talk to Connie Geary. Jason may even have been back in the kitchen already. But I’m afraid I didn’t notice at all.”

  Charlie Peace cleared his throat. “Mr. Galloway remembers coming up to you after he came down, miss. To ask you how you thought it had gone.”

  Gillian frowned. “Oh, yes. I think you’re right. He did come up at some stage. I’m sorry I can’t remember exactly when.”

  “You’re a good, careful witness,” said Dundy.

  Or a clever one, thought Charlie.

  • • •

  “I sang,” said Singh.

  He looked towards the mirror at the far end of the manager’s office and was annoyed to find it angled to reveal whether there was anyone standing at Reception outside. So it was reserved for Iain Dundy to gaze on that smooth light brown skin, those doelike dark eyes, those perfect girlish features, that plump, underexercised body. Singh brought back all his distrust of “arty” people that Gillian Soames had done so much to banish.

  “Yes, I realize you sang,” he said, his irritation showing through for the first time that day, perhaps because subconsciously he was judging Singh to be as yet a person of little importance in any world. “I gather your arias were towards the end of the first half, is that right?”