The Final Curtain

by Priscilla Masters

  The son of a friend? That had been her statement. Oh, no. Much closer to home.

  The case would have been so much easier had Timony only been honest with them about her entire past. Maybe if she had she would still be alive. But none of this was taking her any nearer unmasking the killer.

  She moved on. ‘And did you have any luck tracking down any of the stolen jewellery?’

  ‘None of it’s turned up yet,’ Paul Ruthin said. ‘I’ve pasted a notice out to jewellers, checked eBay and spoken to one or two people who can give me information about fences for stolen goods,’ he said. ‘Most of the pieces were distinctive and one of the local dealers in antique jewellery told me those pieces might have already been broken up or melted down. There are a few places who will take precious metals and even stones, no questions asked. Just stuff them in a Jiffy bag.’ He looked apologetic. ‘Sorry, but these days, with the economic downturn, it’s not uncommon for people to raid their jewellery boxes.’

  Joanna nodded and tried to suppress her growing irritation. So many factors were making this investigation difficult.

  She turned next to Timmis and McBrine. ‘You were looking into the two farmers and our Happy Hikers. Have you got anything to add?’

  They blew out their cheeks, unconsciously mirroring her own frustration. ‘No. Both the farmers say they don’t know anything about Mrs Weeks, that they aren’t interested in the property at all, not even in the land, and they can’t help us in any way, because …’ He grinned at his fellow officers and quoted the farmers’ words verbatim and in a broad Staffordshire accent, ‘“We know nowt.”’

  ‘What about our happy hikers, Roger and Helen Faulkener?’

  ‘They’ve gone back to London but we managed to contact them on their mobiles. They can’t help us either.’

  ‘Did you ask them why they chose that particular spot to have their picnic?’

  ‘Just because they thought it looked a nice place to stop.’ Saul McBrine paused, frowning. ‘Mrs Faulkener, Helen, said it reminded her of somewhere in a film.’

  ‘How right she is. OK.’ She addressed the entire room. ‘Well done. I think in spite of all the blind alleys we are getting somewhere. It’s just a bit slow. There are still some good lines of enquiry and plenty of work to do.’ She smiled encouragingly round the room, looking at each face in turn, trying to instil confidence in them. ‘Keep at it. We’ll meet again in the morning.’

  She turned to her side. ‘Mike, I want you to do something for me. I want to pursue two other lines of enquiry, but low profile. Get in touch with James Freeman, the producer. I want to interview him again myself. Face-to-face this time. And the other person I want to speak to is the guy that played Lily Butterfield’s older brother, Sean. What was his real name – Malcolm?’

  ‘Hadleigh,’ Korpanski supplied, a little surprised. ‘Malcolm Hadleigh.’

  ‘Track him down, Mike. I will get to the bottom of this.’

  Korpanski frowned. ‘By “this” I take it you mean Mrs Weeks’ murder?’

  ‘Which surely has its roots in her abuse as a child? Someone didn’t want the truth to come out.’

  Korpanski looked sceptical. ‘This many years later? What could it possibly matter?’

  ‘I think, to someone, it does.’

  ‘OK.’ Korpanski sounded dubious. ‘So why haven’t they destroyed Timony’s manuscript? Broken the computer, lost the backup files?’

  ‘It’s not that easy these days, Mike. She had Cloud Cover. Anyone could access those files as long as they had her code. Every word as she wrote it became indestructible.’

  He blinked. ‘And you? What are you going to do?’

  She patted his muscular shoulder. ‘I’ll be busy. Don’t you worry.’

  The officers filed out and Joanna sat at a table and read a little more of Timony Weeks’ autobiography. She’d got to the end of 1964 and wasn’t surprised that events were sounding much more complicated.

  Sean has been really nice to me lately. He told me only yesterday that I’d improved. He’s started flirting with me, saying things like I was getting more beautiful every day. I just giggled at first. And then he told me as we were brother and sister we could … The writing stopped. And then it was as though Timony’s current voice cut in. Baldly, she stated, I can’t say. I won’t say. Even now, years later, I cannot write it down. I know now that what he said was nonsense. What he did was evil.

  I reflect now, so many years later: how many people watching that wonderful, beautiful series, supposed to portray a perfect, happy family, had any idea of what was really going on behind the scenes? That I was abused in one way or another from the day I arrived on set. I’d always thought that the studio picked me because I was pretty or showed talent. That was not true. They picked me for two reasons. One: I was completely innocent. Like raw pastry they could do as they liked with me. Flatten me, roll me out, cook me till I was hard and when I became stale they could just throw me out. And the second reason I was fit for purpose was that my family were quite happy to abandon me. This meant that the studio could do as they liked with me because I had no one to run to – except my sister …

  Joanna stared into the distance, shocked by Timony’s naivety and vulnerability then which had been exploited, and her venomous insight now.

  She continued reading, still wondering what bearing these words and the story behind them had on its author’s murder. But now she had confidence. She would understand all this in the end. It was just so much more complicated than she had initially realized. She continued scanning the words and knew, without a doubt, that this book would be a bestseller. But a cruel exposure to anyone who had watched and loved Butterfield Farm. Like Colclough’s sister, Elizabeth Gantry.

  1965.

  Sean has been funny with me for a month or so, sometimes looking as though he wants to hurt me. He’s always been a bit cruel. Even on set he’ll pinch my arm hard enough to bruise me. He pushed me over once when I was about ten and I hurt my arm very badly. It felt terrible. I cried and cried it hurt so much. Ever since then I’ve been a bit frightened of my ‘big brother’. He has a nasty streak to him all right. He loves to humiliate me. At times I think he wants to kiss me. At other times I think he would be more likely to kill me. Bang bang. He says his lines in a nasty, mocking way and when this distracts me so I forget my own lines and get everyone angry he just laughs. I can’t work him out. And he loves this. It puts him in the driving seat, right there in full control.

  There were a few empty pages where nothing was written and then in April there was another entry.

  Sean asked me what I would be doing later, after rehearsals. I told him Diana and I were going to the pictures. He asked if he could come instead of Diana so I told her I didn’t want her to come. That I was going with someone else. But I didn’t tell her that someone else was Sean.

  We didn’t go to the pictures that night. Instead we went back to his flat. He talked to me first, telling me what he wanted me to do, as though he was the director and we were in rehearsals.

  ‘Let’s pretend it’s just a scene,’ he said. ‘You’re about to have a bath.’

  When I said no, I didn’t want to have a bath, he grabbed my shoulder. ‘It isn’t real,’ he said, sounding as though he was laughing at my stupidity. ‘It’s just a scene.’

  I didn’t want to but I didn’t want to appear a silly little girl any more either.

  Joanna read through the account, feeling vicious, as many people do, towards a person who assaults a child. But then she looked around her and thought a little deeper. Timony hadn’t really been a child, except in the eyes of the law. She had been a stunted adult and would remain so for the rest of her life. She had kept her secret well until now. And Joanna’s policeman’s nose, which Matthew laughingly told her actually twitched when she was on to something, sniffed out that this was the reason why Timony Weeks had had to die. Bang, bang. One shot in the head, another in the heart.

  She continued reading
. Timony had finished the chapter and moved on seven months. It was an account of Dariel’s assault. I hadn’t been well. I’d been feeling very sick and my stomach was swelling. Diana was looking at me in a very odd way, as though something was very much the matter. I found her uncomfortable company so I avoided being with her as much as possible. I often told her to stay at home when I went for rehearsals.

  Joanna frowned. It appeared that, if her theory about Stuart Renshaw’s identity was right, Timony was writing some very selective memoirs indeed. Some bits in, others out. For example, when was she going to pen in her pregnancy? Where was Freeman in all this, the producer who was supposed to be in loco parentis? And how much of this was actually true? Diana had suggested Timony might have dramatized events in her life to spice up her memoirs or maybe, even, to invite sympathy. Or was Diana herself to be believed? Might she have an ulterior motive for casting doubt on Timony’s memories?

  It was in November 1965. I was coming out of the studio after some late rehearsals when a young man came towards me. He looked quite nice. He was smiling and had lovely blue eyes. I smiled back. I thought he wanted my autograph so I asked my bodyguard for a pen. He was fishing in his pocket for it when I felt something hit my face. Then something warm ran down my cheek. I put my hand up and it came away smeared with blood. The man was still looking at me, still smiling. I screamed and my bodyguard grabbed him but I was bleeding and screaming and terrified. Some blood must have trickled into my eye because I couldn’t see. I thought I would be blind. I don’t know why he did it. He said I was evil. He said lots of things but I don’t know why he wanted to blind me. It made me frightened but Gerald comforted me and then Malcolm did.

  Joanna frowned. Years later she had an explanation – of sorts.

  I heard later that the person who’d attacked me was someone called Paul Dariel and that he was crazy, telling lies about me. I took a few months off from filming after that.

  So that was how they had covered Timony’s pregnancy up, by calling Dariel crazy and avoiding a public court case. The assault had been opportune. While the nation’s sweetheart crept off to give birth and dispose of the child they had had the perfect excuse.

  Further on she read: ‘I feel so guilty. So neglectful. Responsible. They told me I had led him on but I didn’t know what I was doing. He told me it was all my fault.’

  The voice was pathetic, childish, vulnerable and naïve, but Joanna was puzzled. Whom did she mean? Who had told her, so cruelly, that the assaults, whether from Dariel or members of the Butterfield cast, were all her fault? Who was it she was supposed to have ‘led on?’ And who had spun this monstrous lie? Gerald or Sean Butterfield? Or someone else, someone so far faceless? There were bits missing and bits out of place and the rest was all jumbled up.

  Joanna sat and puzzled over the words then left the barn and slowly walked back towards the house. The door was unlocked and she walked in and found Diana Tong, on the floor of the sitting room, surrounded by a scatter of photographs.

  She looked up when Joanna entered but said nothing. Joanna sat down and picked up a couple of the pictures. Names and dates were pencilled in on the back. Me – on set.

  She turned it over. Timony, aged about eight, looking about six, leaning precociously forward, big bow in her hair, short nylon dress, hands clasped together, head coquettishly to one side, smiling into the camera. Joanna stared at it for a while, reflecting what a strange childhood Timony Weeks had had. Abandoned by her parents, the darling of the country throughout her childhood and into her teens. Behind the scenes abused and belittled, scolded and scorned. Multiple marriages which, if Joanna remembered from her psychology degree, usually meant someone desperately seeking an idyllic, perfect love. Desperately trying to cling on to her youth, cosmetic surgery for the physical ageing and five marriages to preserve the illusion of still being the nation’s pet. But a pet is constrained and has to live by the rules of her master – in this case the general public. And when a pet is beyond his or her usefulness he or she can be taken to the vet’s and ‘put down’. Joanna met Diana’s calm grey eyes and sensed a communication that Timony’s death had been fitting, the final act in a play. A death as theatrical as her life. The last scene.

  She looked again at the companion. Diana Tong would be a woman who would do ‘the necessary’. Whatever needed to be done she would do. It was as simple as that.

  Wordlessly she leafed through more of the photographs. Gawky teenager, smartly suited in Crimplene, wearing clothes too old for her, white gloves, pillbox hat, standing with a tight-lipped smile into the camera. The wedding photograph of a very, very young Timony clutching the arm of Gerald. Joanna peered closer. He was wearing the Rolex watch on his wrist. The one which had been buried with him? Or the one which had turned up here a few weeks ago? Were they one and the same? Who knew?

  She smiled to herself. Even if Colclough had not been about to be replaced by Chief Superintendent Gabriel Rush she knew she would never get permission to exhume Gerald’s body purely on the pretext of checking whether he was still wearing his Rolex watch.

  She picked up another wedding photograph. Sean Butterfield, aka Malcolm Hadleigh, stood proudly, legs apart, hips thrust testosterone forward. Gerald’s best man. Hadleigh was keeping a wary eye on Timony, glance sliding surreptitiously to his side. Joanna studied the bride’s face under a magnifying glass. Her head was facing forwards as though if she did not hold it rigidly it would swing around to Hadleigh. Joanna sat back and thought. So who was Stuart Renshaw’s father? DNA would prove the point quickly enough. It was very possible that Timony had borne Hadleigh’s child three years before this picture was taken, way before she had been of marriageable age. It was also possible that Renshaw’s father was someone else. Joanna looked for clues at the other members of the wedding group. May Butterfield, Lily’s mother, was watching, a little detached from the others, a slightly sour expression on her face. She looked as though she wanted no part in this. Keith and David were lined up but also looking as though they were playing no part in the proceedings, as though they too, wanted to detach themselves from this particular scene. No – the magic triangle existed between Timony, Gerald and Sean. Magic triangle? Joanna questioned her phrase. If it was magic it was black magic. There was nothing good about this. Behind Timony stood a tall, bulky woman who glared into the camera as though she resented being there. Joanna looked up and saw the same angry glare in Diana Tong’s face. She smiled. The dogsbody hadn’t changed much. But she was waiting for Joanna to see something else. She looked back at the photograph. In the place where Timony’s father should have stood was a tall, thin man with a hooked nose. He had thick grey hair, eagle eyes and a hooked nose.

  ‘James Freeman,’ Diana said. ‘Producer.’ Then, quietly, ‘There’s somewhere you should visit.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Friday, March 16, 11 a.m.

  And so on the following morning Joanna found herself driving along a small lane in Worcestershire, turning into a farm entrance and standing on the hallowed turf of what had once been the real Butterfield Farm. One sign remained: a battered piece of wood with its name painted on still attached to a five bar gate. Joanna parked up and stood, leaning over it, staring, her mind’s eye seeing what it must have been like.

  The approach was a tarmac drive, weeds sprouting up the middle. There were muddy puddles dotted here and there and the grass was unkempt, almost obscuring the way. There were nettles and brambles. It spoke of years of decay and neglect. Hard to think that it once would have been a hive of bustling activity and glamour.

  As the gate was padlocked she climbed over, glad she was sensibly dressed in jeans, low-heeled boots and a skiing jacket, thick gloves keeping her hands warm and dry as she crunched up the drive.

  Years ago, it must have been, the real Butterfield had clearly been burnt down almost to the ground. Nothing was left now but a shell, a few piles of discarded bricks. The roof had long ago fallen in, leaving the interior open to the elements.
Elders sprouted here and there, nature reclaiming its own. There were large clumps of nettles and the usual detritus of dereliction: rusting cans, a vague stink of stale urine, a few MacDonald’s and KFC’s Styrofoam boxes and a pile of broken beer bottles. It was a forlorn, depressing place now. Whatever its glamorous past no one loved it now. It had been abandoned rather than rebuilt. Half a mile up the road Joanna had passed another sign for Butterfield Farm. It was the most modern of bungalows, solar panels on the roof, triple glazing to the windows. She assumed that it was the rebuild and this was the wreck. After the fire the farmer must have abandoned Butterfield to its fate and replaced it with something much more practical. She searched around, wondering if she would find any sign at all of Butterfield’s past, but she found nothing. Not even an ancient clapper board or a rusting lipstick. Not a piece of sodden paper holding a line of script or a scrap of material from a costume. She would have liked to have found a piece of Timony’s hair ribbon or a piece of shoe leather; something concrete to prove to her that Butterfield really had existed. But standing here, on a cold day, without even a hint of sunshine, it was easier to believe that it never had existed in reality but was all fantasy, something that only existed inside the wooden box of an old-fashioned television. It was not real at all. It never had been.

  So what did you expect, Piercy? she muttered. It was fifty years ago.

  She turned away, glad she had come alone, without Korpanski. She could just imagine his groan at another wasted morning. But she wished she had gleaned something from the visit. The atmosphere here was oppressive. Depressing. There was finality about this obliteration. It wasn’t just decay. It was more as though it never had been. Well, there was no chance of Butterfield being resurrected, she thought, except it had been. Not here but elsewhere, it had been faithfully copied in the Staffordshire Moorlands. Had this Butterfield been deliberately torched, she wondered, when it had been superseded? Had its destruction been the result of a simple accident? Or deliberate arson? Had someone wanted to cover up what had happened here? Why had it been so neglected when it had once been the epicentre of an iconic series of the sixties? It could have been turned into a tourist attraction. But instead it had been left to ruin, as though it was ashamed of its past and wanted to forget it. Perhaps there was nothing to be learned here because there was nothing of its past left here. She looked around and wondered how many times the actors had stood in this exact spot, replaying scene after scene while Freeman shouted, ‘Cut’, and, ‘Let’s do that scene again’. While the wardrobe mistress fretted over costumes, the animal trainers fussed over their charges, the continuity team and the rest produced what today appeared a heavily dated and rather stilted soap. It must have been so different in those far-off days. Joanna closed her eyes and pictured it as it would have been then, bustling with people and animals, the farmhouse itself pristine, grass and drives manicured as she had seen on the television. Now the place had reverted to a wilderness; nature had claimed her own back.