by Peter Helton
Emms stood by the monitor, rehearsing, checking, changing. She had the kind of authoritative voice I always imagined directors to have. ‘That was good, Guy, but can you do that again, only a tad faster this time so you finish on “lead plumbing” before you get to the next column or you’ll disappear from view at the critical moment . . .’ To me it seemed a maddening procedure but everyone appeared to have endless patience with the process. With only minutes to spare before crocodiles of tourists descended on the place the shoot was wrapped up and everyone was nods and smiles again. The moment he was released Guy strode out of the colonnade and disappeared up the stairs towards the exit – his first day’s work done. Cy took me aside.
‘That was another typically unnecessary, typical Guy Middleton delay. This show would be a lot easier to produce without a prima donna at the centre. Tomorrow morning we’ll start later, around eight, at the site of the dig. The archaeologists have to make up their minds about things before Guy is needed. It’s a week-long shoot so it’s nice and relaxed. Looks like we’re going to get some rain during the week but we should be fine. We rarely stop for rain unless it’s a real deluge. Make sure Guy makes it there by eight. It’s only four, five miles outside Bath; you can leave just after seven from his hotel. He’ll have his own car and he knows the way. You’ll follow him there.’
‘Still keeping it a secret?’
‘No offence. Not that I don’t trust you, but you could be talking in your sleep for all I know and the owner of the place would give us a mountain of grief if he found himself beleaguered by sightseers in the morning. He hates the great unwashed even more than Guy does.’
‘Oh, by the way, is there a Mrs Middleton at all?’ I asked. I had been wondering.
Cy smiled as he walked away. ‘There’ve been a few. But the last one walked out on him a few years back. Because he can’t keep it in his pants!’ he called loudly across the pool as though hoping Middleton might still be able to hear him.
On the other side of the pool Paul the cameraman was taking last-minute stills shots with an SLR camera, his long lens pointing directly at me. He waggled one hand in acknowledgement, of what I wasn’t sure. I waggled a hand back and left the Roman Baths complex through the gift shop. It was time for a bit of wheelchair watch.
FIVE
You’re thinking of setting up as a private eye? Learn to make interesting sandwiches. Invest in the right technology, too: your most exciting gadget will be your Thermos flask. Ah, the glamour of it.
You’ll be sitting in your car a lot or standing around waiting and watching the people someone suspects of doing this, that or the other. Especially the other. Because mostly it’s infidelity, sometimes runaways, and often insurance work. If your insurance premiums have gone up relentlessly then I can offer you two reasons. One is the boundless greed of insurance companies, the other is the army of so-called injury lawyers advertising on TV, encouraging chancers to make false claims for injuries that never happened, or happened elsewhere. Crack your ankle playing football in the park? We can help. Find a bit of uneven pavement and sue the council. Faking a life in a wheelchair however was in a different league altogether. It was in a different league not simply where the prize money was concerned but because it required a life-long commitment to deception.
Because you never know who’s watching. As I was staring at Mike Dealey’s bungalow from the incomplete shelter of a substation at the top of his street I wondered whether Dealey – always considering he was in fact faking it – was planning at some point to have a miraculous recovery. Presumably though, the size of the payout had been tailored to a projected lifetime on wheels, with all the pain and frustration that brought. Would he have to give back part of the money if he was suddenly capable of walking again? I didn’t know. Forgot to ask. Typical, as Annis would say.
There was the other possibility of quietly slipping away unnoticed, to Spain perhaps, or somewhere else where you are whoever you say you are. Change addresses a few times, then lose the wheelchair, settle down under a different name, a few hundred grand richer. It was an elaborate scheme and strewn with possible pitfalls. Not the least of which was someone grassing you up to the insurance company by sending them a picture of you, taken while you absentmindedly stepped out of your wheelchair to stretch your legs.
It was a very quiet neighbourhood and simply standing here would eventually attract someone’s attention. I couldn’t park in the cul-de-sac itself; I’d get rumbled even more quickly there if this surveillance went on for a while. Once Dealey knew someone was after him he would be too careful to make any mistakes and short of using illegal means I’d probably never prove he was faking it. The proof I obtained had to stand up in court as well as being admissible in the first place, which meant I couldn’t exactly set fire to his house and see if he came running out. Tempting though it was; one per cent of three-quarters of a million buys a lot of firelighters.
I withdrew to the car I had left around the corner. He’d never make a mistake round his own house; the neighbours would instantly notice. I would have to wait until he went out. Since it was a cul-de-sac I’d definitely spot him when he came out in his car. If he came out.
I snaffled a smoked salmon and cress sandwich. Drank another cup of tea from the flask. Nibbled broken hotel biscuits from my jacket. Fiddled with the radio. Stopped fiddling with the radio. Always kept a sharp eye on the top of his street so I could follow him the moment his red Honda appeared.
I woke up with a start at the noise of school kids calling to each other from opposite pavements. Damn it, school was out. How long had I snored behind the wheel? I had slept at an awkward angle, too; it hurt to straighten my neck. I sat up, checked my watch: half past three. I had slept for two hours. Dealey could have been out and come back for all I knew, doing cartwheels past my car each way. I went and checked on his Honda. It was still there, and it didn’t look like it had moved. Of course, just because his car was there didn’t mean he was. For all I knew he could be on the Costa del Sol, sitting by the pool and painting his toenails. I slouched back against the tide of chattering school kids and sat behind the wheel, brooding on the tediousness of the job. I shook my flask; there was enough left for a cupful and I’d need it to wake up properly. I had poured a brimful cup, shaking the last drops from the flask, when the red Honda appeared and turned left into the main street. Bum. I was facing the wrong way, too. And had a brimful cup of hot tea in my hand. I sipped some of it, too hot still, poured some of it back into the flask, some of it over my trousers. Started the car. I had to do a U-turn first, trying not to squash dopey kids wandering into the road.
Now where had he gone? I drove down the road until I came to a double roundabout choked with school-run traffic and no red Honda. I briefly considered another U-turn to explore some of the side roads I had passed but the tea was cooling in the wet patch on my trousers, making me feel more than a bit stupid and anyway, I couldn’t possibly leave the car in public looking like I had just copiously wet myself. Well, there was no hurry. I was sure to catch Dealey some other time.
Wasn’t I?
The sun rose on the first day of the dig and I was awake to watch it creep over the edge of our valley. At first, leaving from the Royal Crescent Hotel just after seven had sounded quite civilized but in reality it meant I had to be up before six, not something Mill House was used to. Last night Annis had decamped to her own room, unwilling to share my early alarm misery for a second time, so I groaned and harrumphed all alone into the shower and grumbled on my lonesome downstairs to the kitchen.
Another culinary addition from my sojourn in Corfu was Greek coffee, which is just what you need to wake you up at unholy hours. I had brought back a vriki, a long-handled little pot, and now brewed cups of strong sweet coffee at the slightest provocation. Accompanied by a five-minute egg, croissants and quince jam it made the early start almost bearable.
In front of Middleton’s door at one minute to seven I took a deep breath before I knocked. I
had a moment’s doubt, wondering what state he might be in, but I worried unnecessarily. He yanked the door open wide, still in his dressing gown and towelling his hair, and left me to close the door while he went back into the bathroom.
‘Shan’t be a moment; plenty of time, though,’ he called back. He kept on talking but his voice was drowned out by the whine of the hairdryer. There were the remnants of a continental breakfast on a tray. A different bottle of Scotch had kept Guy company on the sofa last night, not a thousand-pound Glenfiddich this time but a more modest ten-year-old Laphroaig. I held it up to the light – he had made quite a dent in it, nearly halfway down the label, and by the looks of it he had drunk alone. Yet when the dryer stopped and he came back into the room he looked fine, certainly a lot better than the day before, and his mood was more upbeat.
‘As long as we get there on time they won’t pester us much this morning,’ he promised. I wondered if this was the ‘royal we’ or whether he now considered us an item, him and me against the rest of Time Lines, at least one of whom definitely wished him ill.
‘Are you now allowed to let me into the big secret? Where are we going?’
‘Oh, good Lord, no one’s told you yet.’ He was dressed now and flinging a last few things into an open suitcase. ‘Tarmford Hall is where it’s happening. Suspected Roman villa, no less, that’s why we have a one-week special on. Of course if it all goes tits-up we’ll pack up early.’
‘What’s so special about the place that even yesterday Cy wouldn’t tell me?’
‘Tarmford Hall? Owned by Mark Stoneking. He bought it quietly a few years back.’
‘The rock musician? Of Karmic Fire? He’s still alive then.’
‘Alive, immensely rich and eccentric. That’s the best way to be, don’t you think?’
‘One of those keeps eluding me.’ I watched Guy stash the bottle of Laphroaig in his shoulder bag.
‘That’s why we had to be more secretive than usual. He’s quite keen on his privacy where the general public is concerned, doesn’t mind mixing with us media types though, it seems. We’re all staying at the Hall, plenty of room, by all accounts. It’s quite a pile; I saw it briefly from the outside.’
‘Is he still making music?’ Karmic Fire had been huge in the seventies, churning out nine albums of rock music vaguely inspired by Eastern sounds and religions. And even though any survivors of the group were probably using walking frames now, compilations, ‘best ofs’ and ‘previously unreleased tracks’ seemed to keep at least the brand going. Annis quite liked them, had two of their albums – recorded long before she was born – and would be dead jealous to know I was at a rock legend’s house. I would let her know and rub it in at the first opportunity.
Guy picked up the phone. ‘Is he still making music? No idea, you’ll have to ask him. Not my kind of sound. Not that he’d have to; I’m sure he gets by.’ He spoke into the receiver. ‘Would you pick up my suitcase? And I’m ready for my car now . . . Oh good.’ He hung up. ‘Car’s out front.’
A moment later a porter arrived and he followed us down with Guy’s suitcase.
We swanned out of the front door into the early-morning sunshine. Suitcase stashed in the back of Guy’s Range Rover and the porter tipped, Guy fiddled briefly with his sat-nav, then we set off in convoy down the cobbled crescent. Right from the start Guy drove like an idiot. This was predictable since he also wore his wide-brimmed hat in the car. He caned the big four-litre engine as though it ran on water and had used his horn three times by the time we made it to the Circus two hundred yards further on. He kept this up all the way through the city and up Wellsway. Even when we turned off the Midford Hill and on to narrow country lanes he still drove as though on a broad one-way street, simply blaring his horn then surging through the blind bends. I hung back far enough not to get embroiled in any accident but his luck held and the head-on collision he was surely looking for didn’t happen.
Tarmford was a small village five miles south of Bath. It was picturesque, with a pub, the Druid’s Arms, beside a village green and duck pond. They had somehow managed to hang on to their post office-cum-grocery store and a red phone box – the picture postcard stuff Somerset does so well.
Guy whizzed past the place, splashed through the ford of the tiny River Tarm and soon took a left into another narrow lane. A high freestone wall appeared by the side of the lane and it was some time before we reached a wide wrought-iron gate with rusting scrollwork between the bars.
Guy was out of the car, thumbing the button on the intercom. Nothing happened for a few moments, so I got out myself. Had I not known better I’d have thought the place was deserted. One of the two carved-stone urns on either side of the gate had half its shoulder missing; weeds and ivy grew out of it. The gate itself was in need of repainting and the circa 1980s security camera on top of the wall above me looked dead. But then the intercom croaked, Guy said the magic word – Middleton – and soon the ghostly gate groaned open by itself. Beyond it lay a long, curved drive lined with horse chestnuts and as I followed Guy in I got an early glimpse of architecture at the end of it. Both Guy’s Range Rover and the fabled suspension of my Citroën made light work of the rills and potholes in the much-patched drive. By the looks of it someone had given up patching it in the third quarter of the twentieth century.
Mill House, with its three acres, ramshackle outbuildings and the barn on top of the meadow, was a big place and difficult to keep up, but manor houses are in a different category altogether. One look at the many-angled roof which was probably the size of a rugby pitch and I realized that here repair bills weren’t just difficult to pay but took on the magnitude of natural disasters. The house itself was massive and looked complicated and of several periods, with a tower here, some crenellations there, a wing jutting out on the right and stuck to the end of it a coach house, now a six-bay garage by the looks of it. A dozen cars and vans of all shapes and sizes stood in front of the house, yet there was still space for a few more on the gravelled forecourt. We parked our cars at luxuriously wilful angles and got out.
Guy Middleton, in wide-brimmed hat, faded waxed hunting jacket, khaki trousers and decoratively worn-out boots, looked ready to raid tombs. He shouldered his leather bag that I knew contained his whisky and I wondered if he was ever parted from it. ‘Not bad, eh?’ Guy said to me as I caught up. He made a theatrical gesture. ‘All this for one ageing rock star. What’s he do with it all?’
‘You can ask him,’ I said, nodding my head at the man who was just then stepping out between the columns of the stone porch in the centre of the building.
Mark Stoneking. It was unmistakably the same guy who with Karmic Fire had rocked huge audiences all around the world, yet he looked older than any rock star should, even in blue jeans, purple tee-shirt and black trainers. His hair had receded at the front but was still long at the sides and back and darker than was plausible at his age. He was tanned on face and arms but no more than a man with a fifty-foot verandah during an English summer ought to be.
‘Welcome to my humble abode.’ He stretched out a bony hand and shook ours. I wondered if he used the ‘humble abode’ line every time he opened the door. ‘Good to meet you, Guy. You look just like you do on telly.’ He turned to me with questioning eyes.
Middleton obliged. ‘Oh, this is Mr Honeysett; he’s looking after me on this shoot.’
‘Chris,’ I offered.
‘Mark. The others are already on the verandah, come in, come through.’
We followed him into the lofty, two-storey hall, equipped with all the clichés you could ask for – a grand curved blue-carpeted staircase, sinister daubs in elaborate gilt frames every few steps, a lugubrious long-case clock under the arch of the stairs and grey marble floors strewn with well-worn rugs. Dark doors off to either side. The walls were painted wine-stain red and together with the long blue tongue of the stairs made me feel like I had stepped into the toothless mouth of an enormous chow chow. Once the door had closed behind us the foy
er became a dim and echoing space. ‘This way.’ Stoneking waved us on down a shadowy passage and into a long gallery at the centre of the house. We passed a much less grand set of stone stairs. ‘You can leave your bag here,’ Stoneking said to Guy. ‘Carla will take it to your room.’
Guy patted the bag. ‘I’ll hang on to it. It’s got stuff in it I’ll be needing soon.’
Through open double doors we came to a long bright drawing room. This looked much more like it had been furnished by a rock star and less like it had come with the house. It had an inglenook fireplace, three leather sofas grouped around a knee-high, intricately carved Nepalese table, several armchairs and a scatter of tables and rugs. The paintings on the pale green walls were bland contemporary fare. In one corner stood a gleaming Yamaha grand piano. There were four hi-fi speakers in walnut cabinets that were so large that I first mistook them for cupboards. It was an uncertain mix of styles and centuries but extremely bright with tall sash and enormous French windows, the latter wide open to the verandah.
Guy made all the diplomatic noises about the interior while rolling his eyes at me. ‘Extraordinary place, Mark . . .’ Stoneking seemed pleased by what he took for approval. I just nodded at stuff, like the enormous china elephant and the five-foot carved-wood golliwog holding a tray.
As we followed him on to the verandah where the production team were sunning themselves at two tables, the scale of the place began to sink in. Beyond the verandah stretched a vast lawn, gently sloping towards clumps of trees and unkempt hedges a hundred or more yards away, with just a glimpse of glittering water beyond. The verandah faced west and the lawn was bound on the north and south sides by dense woodland. To the far right I could just make out the long roof of a greenhouse above a dense hedge. Odd statuary and stone carvings were dotted about the place and the verandah was punctuated by waist-high stone urns covered in green algae.