Passion in the Peak

by John Buxton Hilton

  That was at first. He soon became sickened by mediocrity. By now he knew a good deal about what the pop public wanted. He worked on the means of spreading fashions and fulfilling the demand for them. There had to be traces of individualism, but it had to be an individualism that could be ruthlessly governed. He scouted round for marketable, trainable, governable talent. And he found Wayne Larner.

  When Dyer first billed The Stalagmites, it was by the name under which he had first found them performing. Their material and their execution were equally lamentable. So were their personalities, except for their lead singer. But Dyer did not interfere with them immediately. He let them continue together for a fortnight. Then he sacked all but Larner, paying the others a flat week’s money. He paid the going rate to get Larner an audition: more than one recording company at this time was looking for a new name to bait its hooks with. The adolescent market thought it knew what it wanted. It did not know how effectively its wants were being moulded. Larner was malleable. Many people had tried to guess how much Dyer spent on plugging Larner’s early titles. He found him the song that was his first rave success: Forty Shades of Blue. It paid for Larner’s first honeymoon—with Sue Bistort, who had graced the school register under the name of Bickerstaffe. Dyer used his share of the proceeds to buy a substantial holding in a pirate radio ship, the plugging machine par excellence, but he pulled out when a Westminster lobby began to get restive—his nervous eye always on legality. But by then he had the supply and demand for Wayne Larner beautifully balanced. Blue Baby sold a million. Larner went twice to the States, came back with his Filipino, ditched Sue Bistort. Dyer added new names to his stable: Sally Foster-Lunn, The Whodunnits. Names rose and fell in the charts. Larner’s stayed steady.

  Dyer could have lived opulently. By now he had a headquarters cadre: lyricists and composers whom he paid enough—and who had large enough collections of rejection slips—not to care who got the credit as long as they got the cash. Starlets had to be drilled in speech and posture—in some cases, even in table manners. Some jibbed at the discipline—and found themselves derelict. Styles changed, but Dyer kept Larner in the top league. His ghost-written autobiography was well up in another breed of chart.

  What interested Dyer was making money, not making use of it. He lived less stridently than many a suburban executive. He had a reasonable house at Pangbourne, but it was modest by the standards of his neighbours. He drank no more than an occasional bottle of light ale. He did not like spirits, was happy with supermarket wines, did not smoke. He ran an old Cortina and was married to a self-effacing wife, by whom he had two girls and a boy who went to a very minor public school. He had no sexual adventures. He was no spender, but it wasn’t for the hoarding of it that he liked money. It was for the getting of it. He was said to be a bastard to negotiate with.

  Dyer was glad to see Kenworthy. He badly wanted to talk. He was looking moodily out of his window when he called to Kenworthy to come in. The superstructure of the proscenium arch was just visible over the tree-tops. It was a frank imitation of Oberammergau, with the back of the stage open to a living backcloth of green hills.

  ‘Let’s hope that now you’ve come, we’re going to see some sense. Anyone would think I was Gleed’s number one suspect, the way he asked me what I was doing on Saturday night. Christ—if ever a man had anything to lose! And I wish that silly bastard Furnival would let his mind stay made up. Look how he’s dithered about these Mary Magdalenes. I could have given him the choice of half a dozen at overnight notice, ranging from coloratura to Gospel Rock. Do you know what he suggested to me at breakfast this morning? To have Christ played by a woman. The name of Bridget Doyle has been mentioned, do you mind! How would that be for gimmickry? He says that on Shakespeare’s stage, the lead was always played by a girl. Says it would go down big with the feminists.’

  ‘I should have thought you’d known him long enough,’ Kenworthy said, ‘to know when he’s pulling your leg.’

  ‘In any case, it wouldn’t surprise me if Larner turns up again yet. He’s capable of having gone to ground for a bit. I wouldn’t put it past him to have taken himself off to London for a few days.’

  ‘If he’s still alive.’

  ‘He must have been alive to have got out of that car, mustn’t he? Don’t any of you know what I’ve lost, if Larner’s dead? Does anybody know what I put into Larner—and I don’t mean money? I doubt whether Larner had ever heard of the New Testament before we showed him this script. He thought Christ was something you said when your shoelace broke. Can you picture him, the night I found him, Kenworthy? It was in a cellar in Finsbury Park, the Stalag, a one-room nightclub, seating about twenty-five, average age not a day more than seventeen. There were seventy in there, and they stank. It was done up to look like a prisoner-of-war hutment, because that was the décor Izzy Ginsberg found there when he took on the lease. The Stalagmites. Four quid a night between them, so that Izzy could sell instant coffee at five bob a cup. Three yobbos and one girl. Verminous, the place was. I bought a stone of DDT and dusted myself from head to foot, the only night I sat through the floor show at the Stalag.’

  Dyer’s talk kept his anger on the boil.

  ‘Their idea of the big time was cans of crap from the Delicatessen. Fish, chips and paw-paws. And it looked as if they were taking it in turns with Susan Bistort, as they called her. Bickerstaffe, her name was—Larner’s first marriage. Later, when I was beginning to get him four figures for an engagement, she had both her eyes blacked when a gang of adolescents mobbed them at Heathrow. They set up home in Virginia Water—and then I wouldn’t let her go to America with him. Damn it, man, she was five months pregnant. What would that have done to the image? Larner came back with his South Sea Island piece. “All I want,” Susan told the columnists, “is for Wayne to be happy.” Do you know what it cost me to get that said, heard and printed?’

  ‘It beats me how you spot these people,’ Kenworthy said. ‘Would you reckon to groom practically anyone you picked? If so, you can have a go at me if you like. Singing ex-fuzz: mightn’t that go down big?’

  But that strain of humour was alien to Dyer’s mood. He went off tangentially.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong, Kenworthy. Larner had what it takes. He had all that it takes, and a bonus. His body, his limbs, his hair, his skin—after I’d persuaded him to wash it and keep it washed. Perhaps you never got near enough to him to notice the texture of his skin? He had a voice, too—once we’d taught him not to try too hard. God, when I listen to some of those early recordings, even now, I could bloody well weep. We even managed to teach him to play more than the three regulation chords on his guitar. There was a number he sang for the first time in this theatre last week: Trodden Palms. It had stage-hands dabbing their eyes with their cuffs.’

  ‘Yes. I can see what you stand to lose, Dyer. But it isn’t the first time you’ve lost him, is it? Ten years you had to get by without him, didn’t you?’

  Dyer spread his hands.

  ‘His contract came up for renewal, and he wouldn’t sign on reasonable terms, wanted a glutton’s share of the takings. He thought that it was his ability that had got him where he was, that always was his trouble. And there were plenty of so-called agents waiting round the corner for him with promises.’

  ‘Is any of what you’re saying true in any respect, Dyer?’

  Dyer looked at him wildly.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean you might as well tell the truth to me, who has neither rank nor office, than wait for it to be dug out by Gleed and Fewter and Co. Because they’re going to find it, Dyer. There are going to be some pretty sharp-edged inquiries. It isn’t through neglect that Gleed’s spending a lot of his time out of Peak Low. He knows where the answer might lie. There’s been more than one round of bother in your log-book of Larner, hasn’t there? Didn’t something rather special happen in Nottingham?’

  ‘Why does that have to keep rearing its head?
’

  ‘Because such things have that habit. Tell me what happened.’

  Dyer was quick-witted enough to know that what Kenworthy said made sense.

  ‘He seduced a girl who spent her living days in a wheel-chair. Ex polio. Paraplegic. He laid her. Myself, I always believed that she wasn’t uncooperative—to the best of her ability. But her father sussed it out and played all kinds of hell, saw what he was on to. She was too scared to tell the truth.’

  ‘You mean the truth as you’d like to see it. And you bought them off?’

  ‘I paid compensation,’ Dyer said, with self-convincing piety. ‘And made bloody sure that Larner contributed the lion’s share.’

  ‘Using the hoary old stand-by, I suppose, of saving her from the witness-box. So Larner was that sort of bastard, was he?’

  ‘You didn’t know him, Kenworthy. He could have had the pick of three or four thousand prize tarts in any town he sang in. And he did. But he liked now and then to get hold of some girl so damned unendowed, for preference deformed, that he got the feeling that he really meant something to her. That was the way his mind worked. He liked being that kind of Prince Charming. But once was enough for him with most of his Sleeping Beauties. Kenworthy, when you’ve had all there is to be had a thousand times over by the time you’re nineteen, you go looking in strange places for new angles.’

  ‘So he didn’t branch out, Dyer. You dropped him. And now you’ve brought him back. And you find he’s learned nothing. Nothing’s changed. Rehearsals have barely started, and he’s having it away with Ricarda Mommsen. Tell me this about Larner, Dyer—did he turn his back on everybody who had to do with the old days—The Stalagmites?’

  ‘Is it Alfie Tandy and Jimmy Lindop you’re thinking of? They should never have let anybody from the Stalag era on to this campus. Have you come across Alfie Tandy yet—a silly bugger who goes about with all his gear in a broken-down old banjo-case? Alfie was the uncle of one of the kids in the original group. The mother was widowed and had swanned off God knows where. The kid was grandmother-reared, and this nut-case uncle was the only male influence in his life. Well, I’ll give Alf Tandy his due. He was as clueless about the pop scene as he was about growing boys—but he did back those youngsters. He’d no idea of music, outside a knees-up, but if the lads were friends of his nephew’s, then they must be good. He found them an old warehouse to practise in. He paid the hire purchase deposit on cheap instruments. He got them dates with Izzy Ginsberg—and saw to it that Izzy paid up. And, of course, he took it amiss when I wanted Larner. I broke the group up. How much longer could they have lasted? And where would Larner have got with them round his neck?’

  ‘You mentioned another name just now. Lindop, was it?’

  ‘Jimmy Lindop. He was the only Stalagmite with a modicum of brains. He looked after their electronics. The sort of kid you’d never see without a screwdriver or a soldering iron in his hand. He attended to their mikes and amplifiers. It’s a wonder they weren’t all electrocuted more than once. He didn’t know much—but he never stopped learning. When The Stalagmites broke up, he went to Technical College, got down to it properly. I won’t deny that he’s now one of the best acoustic engineers in the business. But I’d never have given him a job on the same production as Wayne Larner. I told Furnival and Cantrell so—but they preferred not to listen. At least, Furnival made an idiotic joke about it and Colonel Sir Echo can be relied on to laugh on cue.’

  ‘And what’s Lindop’s status here?’

  ‘Chief Sound Engineer. And I’ve dropped all the hints I could the way of Gleed. He ought to be asking Jimmy Lindop what he was doing on Saturday night.’

  ‘Purely as a matter of interest,’ Kenworthy said, ‘what did you tell Gleed you were doing on Saturday night?’

  ‘No alibi at all,’ Dyer told him. ‘As far as time and place were concerned, I made myself available for any crime that Gleed cared to nail on me. I spent the evening in my own room, had no visitors and no phone calls—just drank two glasses of white wine over a John le Carré. I won’t say Gleed looked happy about it, but he didn’t hammer at it over-much.’

  ‘Because there was nothing for him to hammer at. When I was in the Force I eventually came to the conclusion that no alibi was sometimes Bill Sykes’s safest bet, if he really wanted to impress.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Every day in some little way the stage-set looked as if an eventual public performance might be feasible. Newly painted canvas flats would appear, the shepherds’ cauldron, the pillars of the Temple. And sometimes these things would vanish again to have fresh things done to them—as was the case of the Sepulchre, which was scheduled to be brought back into the action on the morning of Kenworthy’s second day in Peak Low. But it was not brought back; because when the scene-shifters went to fetch it from its dock, they found a body in it—a murderer’s final act of cynicism—of blasphemy, some said.

  But this news was slow to reach Kenworthy, who at the time was taking a leisurely walk planned to bring him past a twentieth-century house at the lower end of the village, where a brook made its way down a broad valley to a deeper cleft. Since the heart of Peak Low was protected by the planners, it was only on this southern outer ring that any new building was allowed. But Notre Abri had been sensitively co-ordinated with the rest of the settlement, and a few years’ weathering of its locally quarried stone would enable it to hold up its head among neighbours two centuries its senior.

  No one would have thought that the house interested him, but Kenworthy took note of Laura Ashley curtains, bookcases covering whole areas of wall, and a large abstract painting in pastel shades: a home in which funds and educated taste were not lacking. He sauntered past and returned at a gentle pace through a field that brought him close to the rear of the property, separated from the back garden only by a low drystone wall. There were several sheds, all in good trim, and two of them served by mains electricity, borne from the house on heavy duty cable. A youth was carrying into one of these sheds a half-finished wooden model of a boat, powered by a spirit motor. He had roughly cut, longish hair, whose styling obviously did not interest him. The last time Kenworthy had seen him, Cantrell was ejecting him from the theatre. Kenworthy tried to catch his eye, but it was an eye that did not care for human contact.

  ‘Looks a nice little job you’ve got there,’ Kenworthy said. Young Harpur grunted something unintelligible and vanished into the shed. Kenworthy climbed the wall—which would have been an ill-advised action by a serving policeman—crossed to the shed and looked in at the door. He saw an interesting collection of unidentified equipment. The shelves were filled to capacity, everything neatly labelled with Dymo tape. Most of the objects seemed to be working models of considerable complexity: some belt-driven, some cog-driven, some cam-controlled. There were a lathe and a power drill. The youth looked up as Kenworthy entered: he was planing a flank of his craft.

  ‘Some original ideas you have here.’

  The lad grunted again. Kenworthy did not propose to show anything but friendship.

  ‘What’s this one?’

  He was looking at a water-pump with a heavy flywheel, apparently water-powered by gravity-feed. Harpur took his time before he looked round again, and when he did he seemed to be considering whether to answer or not. But he did answer.

  ‘Kid’s stuff. Used to play about with perpetual motion.’

  Contemptuous—even, it seemed, of his past self. His voice was grating, as if it had only recently broken—which could hardly have been the case.

  ‘Had ideas about that myself, when I was a boy,’ Kenworthy said brightly, ‘though I never got round to making a prototype: I fancied a dynamo that drove a motor that powered the dynamo.’

  ‘Wouldn’t work,’ the youth said. ‘Too much energy loss from engine-friction. No way round that.’

  ‘That’s what my physics teacher told me, when I was at school,’ Kenworthy said, with heavy parody of ruefulness, but the lad was apparently not given to hum
our.

  ‘What’s that you’re working on now, then?’

  ‘Submarine.’

  He turned his back on Kenworthy and went on with his planing. Kenworthy waited until he paused to test the balance of his model across the palm of his hand.

  ‘Where do you mean to sail her, then?’

  ‘Water-swallow. Up in Meeting House Dale. Want to chart it, but it’s too narrow to crawl in.’

  ‘Won’t you risk losing her?’

  ‘Radio control.’

  He bent back to his work. Kenworthy looked about himself, taking in greater detail. And he saw at the back of a bench a couple of Z-shaped spikes that were surely of the type that had been used up Brackdale Hill. There were vices and blacksmith’s tongs and even a small forge in a corner: certainly enough equipment to have made the infernal things here.

  Kenworthy stretched across and picked them up. Harpur saw the action, and his attitude changed immediately. Kenworthy could see that his hands were shaking.

  ‘Where did you get these—and what do you use them for?’

  He kept his voice gentle and his tone was as factual. But that was insufficient to put Julian Harpur back at his ease. He seemed to be having difficulty in accommodating his Adam’s apple.

  ‘Did you make them yourself?’

  The lad could only produce the sort of sound that might come from a deaf mute. But at least he was trying to get something out.

  ‘I found them here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Somebody put them here.’

  Kenworthy made a quick decision. He was not going on with this. He knew that he could handle this boy as well as anyone could, but that was not the point. He had to be handled by the man who was going to carry the whole action through—and that man was Gleed. There were telephone wires to the cottage and he would ring Gleed from here, stay here making innocent conversation, get Julian Harpur back on to the subject of his models until Gleed or one of his officers arrived.