Passion in the Peak

by John Buxton Hilton

  Joan Culver turned on her heel and the women moved from left to right behind her. The filmed background took them along another enclave in the ramparts. Joan Culver suddenly screamed—and it was not a scream from Mary Magdalene: it was a scream from Joan Culver.

  ‘Cut! Cut! Cut! What the hell now?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hajek. There was somebody here—somebody real.’

  Feet scurried away, behind a canvas flat.

  ‘A stage-hand—What the hell? When are we going to do this scene in one piece?’

  ‘No, Mr Hajek—it was not a stage-hand.’

  While the Road to the Sepulchre was being rehearsed. Gleed, Fewter and Nall were in conference. Gleed was not at his most patient. He was taking them—he hoped for the last time—through their report on the delivery of the crate in which Larner’s body must have been brought into the wings.

  ‘You’ve established that it was a dirty white Bedford van with no contractor’s name on the side—’

  ‘But discoloration where a previous owner’s name had been painted out. Illegible.’

  ‘Dozens of people must have seen it—but no one noticed the registration.’

  ‘No one. Why should anyone? People don’t go about noting car numbers.’

  ‘You questioned the whole village, more or less. No one saw the vehicle come in?’

  ‘Why should anyone? Vans are coming and going all day. This one was doing nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘No one even happened to notice which direction it came from?’

  ‘From the angle at which it approached the theatre, we assume that it came from the Manchester road, north of the village. Ninety-five per cent of traffic here comes from that road.’

  ‘And the delivery men?’

  ‘Looked like delivery men. Faces not known to anyone in Peak Low or in the Show.’

  ‘And nobody started to unpack it?’

  ‘As far as we can see, it was addressed to no one. No one took it as his responsibility. Lights thought it belonged to Scenery, Scenery thought it was meant for Props.’

  ‘So we’re back to the original assumption that it was unpacked at night.’

  ‘It must have been.’

  ‘And Cantrell’s mobile patrols are supposed to have been making snap checks all night?’

  ‘Yes—and if their logs are correct, that’s what they were doing. And those timings show that the corpse must have been unloaded between two and three in the morning.’

  ‘How efficient are these patrols?’ Gleed asked.

  ‘I think they were slack at one time, but Cantrell has tightened things up since Larner’s crash.’

  ‘So whoever unpacked the corpse must have taken chances. Unless he knew the movements of the patrol in advance. Are they scheduled—or random?’

  ‘Scheduled. With random variations.’

  ‘So someone may have been in cahoots with the patrol.’

  ‘I’m dead sure someone was,’ Fewter said. ‘Somebody must have been in cahoots with somebody else, somewhere along the line. How hard have we to carry on looking for that van?’

  ‘We haven’t the manpower to give it priority. Keep your eyes and ears open. We can hardly do more than that.’

  When Kenworthy went back to his apartment after Joan Culver’s burst of hysteria, he found that a large and heavy cardboard carton had been delivered to him. It was filled with magnetic recording tapes of all makes and sizes.

  You’ll find they’re not logged. Hard work for someone, finding out what’s where. Sorry I can give you nothing stronger than my word that this is the whole collection. I hope that this will be interpreted in the right quarters as an act of good faith. I am pulling out—permanently. I hate admitting you’re right, but there’s too much ill-will about here. No doubt someone will come trying to find me. A waste of somebody’s time. JL

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Freddy Kershaw ran a G registration Morris Minor, an obvious object of bathos after the Lotus. Joan laughed at the racket of an engine that had topped 150,000 miles. It was a laugh that said a number of difficult things, things that it would be far better not to try to say in ordinary words. Freddy had been to see her once before, and conversation had been like crossing a dark room known to be littered with broken glass. Now he had turned up unexpectedly to suggest a change of scene and a meal out: to take her out of herself, to break the pattern—that kind of rationalization. To his surprise, she did not produce any counter-rationalizations. He drove them up into gritstone country. The tappets rattled on gradients. Great tracts of country opened themselves up, around and below them. They ate at an unfrequented pub. Joan found Freddy’s bearing different from Wayne’s. His attitude to waitresses was different. He lacked Wayne’s urbanity, but he was more restful than Wayne, more reminiscent of her own kind. She felt as if she had been exiled from her own kind for a very long time. Yet it was only last weekend that she had branched out experimentally for a matter of hours.

  ‘Freddy—what is happening?’

  There were, of course, village rumours. Joan had heard only snatches. Since Saturday, people had tended to drop their voices when they thought she was within listening range.

  Freddy Kershaw had heard rumours, too, but had heard no more confidences from Kenworthy; and such members of the Force as he had managed to get to talk to had been lower than policy-makers. Last night he had ventured into a pub where he knew that he might meet men of his own vintage coming off duty. He did come across a few, and they made him feel as if he no longer belonged, as if an aeon had passed since he had been one of them. But a man with whom he had done his initial training had drifted into talk with him, though only minutes ago he had been treating him as vaguely hostile. So Freddy did at least pick up what theories were being canvassed on the perimeter of informed circles.

  ‘They seem to have been holding this man Tandy for a long time now, don’t they?’ Joan asked him. ‘And it was given out on the news this morning that they have charged no one yet. What’s holding things up?’

  ‘The buzz is that Tandy knows something—that he saw someone up in Brackdale on Saturday night. He reckons it’s someone near the top. But he’s holding out—a stubborn man.’

  ‘Near the top? You mean one of the producers? Hajek? I know he’s temperamental. He’s had a lot to put up with. But he surely wouldn’t go so far as to—’

  ‘Hajek? You’ll be suspecting Szolnok next. But then, why not? At this stage of a case, everybody’s suspect. I’ve heard nothing official, but it seems that it’s the upper few that all eyes are on.’

  ‘Even Lord Furnival and his friends?’

  ‘They do rather a lot of this sort of thing in the circles I used to move in—casting people in criminal roles. Let’s find six good reasons why Furnival might want to murder Wayne Larner.’

  ‘Why one earth should he? Wayne was the keystone of his show.’

  ‘His voice was—and they’ve still got his voice, haven’t they? And his charisma. That word’s been used a lot in Peak Low in the last few weeks. Larner’s voice is his charisma—thanks to the technicians.’

  ‘Couldn’t you possibly bring yourself to use his Christian name?’ Joan said.

  ‘I don’t want to make too much of this, Joan. I hesitate to mention it at all. But there were times when Wayne Larner was an embarrassment to the play. It must have plagued Furnival.’

  ‘But what did he ever do?’

  ‘It’s the old one about Caesar’s wife. The lead in a religious show has to be above gossip. And Larner came with a reputation.’

  ‘An unfair one.’

  ‘The justice of it isn’t relevant. There’d been a nasty business in Nottingham, ten years ago. And there’s been talk here. Honestly, Joan—I’d rather not go into detail.’

  ‘I wish you would, please. I’d like to know what detail people think there is.’

  ‘There was the girl who was playing the daughter of Jairus. And then one of the chorus of angels. And then Ricarda Mommse
n—’

  ‘Then me, I suppose?’

  ‘Joan—you went shopping with him in Buxton on a Saturday afternoon. He took you for a ride round Cheshire and a meal. That’s all it amounted to.’

  ‘No. That was not all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She had decided to tell him, had decided not to tell him, had vacillated again, had come down, she thought finally, on the side of not telling him. And here she was, blurting it out.

  The Badminton Hotel—the essence of Buxton’s heyday gentility, a harking back to the era of the Palm Lounge string trio. It was the first time in her life that she had been through those revolving doors.

  ‘Don’t they turn people away if they arrive without luggage?’ she asked Wayne, remembering that from some novel.

  ‘Are you kidding? What century are we living in?’

  ‘Never mind what century. We’re in Buxton.’

  ‘You’ve not been around much, have you?’

  ‘Hardly at all.’

  ‘It’s not too late to put that right.’

  Blue and gold putti clung to clouds on domed ceilings; murals portrayed the Pavilion Promenade and the Pump Room. And there were living throw-backs to the period: a hall porter who looked like a combination of regimental sergeant-major and kirk elder. The residents’ lounge must surely enshrine the last word in moral censoriousness. Wayne Larner had obviously been here before. He was known and expected at Reception. Then they were following a key-carrying porter to the lift. She knew that she was going to have to talk her way out of this, but she went up with Wayne because she had not the nerve to protest under the eyes of the guests in the foyer.

  It was not a room, it was a suite. The porter tested the radiator with his hand, showed them the bathroom and the bedroom. He was too old a hand to give a knowing look—but that seemed to make him all the more knowing. Their windows overlooked a car park, and the rain was sheeting across it. Joan stood and looked out until the porter had left them. The wooded hills on the rim of the town’s bowl were almost totally eclipsed by heavy cloud.

  Then Wayne came to her, put an arm round her shoulders and kissed her. She had been kissed before—but never as a frank statement of hungry intent. She told herself that she was not a prude. She could be unconventional if she wanted to. She could throw to the winds everybody’s code but her own—when the time came. But the time had not come in this hotel with Wayne Larner.

  She gave him back only token acquiescence, released herself as quickly as she could on the not unreasonable grounds that he was crushing her ribs.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  She tried to make something of a joke of it, to escape amiably if he would let her.

  ‘I don’t think I’m specially delicate. But I am breakable. Besides—’

  ‘Besides?’

  ‘Besides, Wayne—I shouldn’t have let us come here.’

  ‘Rather be out in the rain, would you?’

  ‘No, but we don’t know each other, do we?’

  ‘I know a good way of putting that right.’

  ‘Wayne—please understand.’

  The truth sank in on him.

  ‘You’re one of those, are you?’

  He was a man blind to everything but the frustration of the moment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Wayne.’

  ‘What did you think we were coming here for?’

  ‘I didn’t know we were coming here.’

  ‘You thought we were coming to Buxton to paddle in the puddles, did you?’

  She was not far from tears. He partially relented, but it was with a shrug rather than a smile. He recited one of Max Miller’s jingles.

  I like the girls who do,

  I can take the girls who don’t,

  I hate the girl who says she will,

  And then she says she won’t—

  ‘I’m sorry, Wayne.’

  He switched the piped radio from channel to channel, switched off again.

  ‘What did you think we were going to do?’ he said.

  ‘We didn’t know the weather was going to be so foul, for one thing. I thought there’d be somewhere we could go and talk—to get to know each other.’

  ‘I say again—there’s one sure way of doing that.’

  ‘That doesn’t come first, Wayne.’

  ‘It does with some people.’

  ‘Do all the girls you know look at things that way?’

  He appeared to give some sort of thought to the question.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said at last. ‘Yeah. Maybe you’ve got a point.’

  ‘Wayne—I’m not saying I’d never—’

  What was she telling him now?

  ‘But it would have to be with someone I knew—someone I knew I could love. And that doesn’t come all at once, does it?’

  ‘You take things too seriously,’ he said.

  ‘That isn’t necessarily harmful.’

  ‘So what do you want to do now?’ he asked sulkily.

  ‘Let’s talk for a bit.’

  ‘OK then—talk.’

  Not the most fruitful opening for a duologue. But she did talk. She started asking him questions about his mode of life. And he perked up. Talking about himself was no burden.

  ‘Then he told me about them not letting him use his car, and as I told you before, I encouraged him to go to the garage.’

  Her cheeks were red. Freddy’s reaction seemed no more than embarrassment and confusion.

  ‘You took a risk going into that hotel with him,’ he said.

  He still looked on her as a young innocent. There was another story—but she did not propose to tell him that one: Llandudno, three years ago. She had gone for a fortnight’s holiday with two girls she had been at school with. They were man-mad, and Joan had found a man, too, a business type—so he looked and said. She had slept with him, the last night but one. As an experience on any level, it had been a failure. The next day he had been offhand with her. She had written to him when she got home, but weeks later her letter came back from the post office: the address he had given her did not exist. She told herself she had to forget the incident: there were plenty of men about who would not behave like that. But she could not get it out of her mind. But she knew that she must not tell Freddy.

  The sweet trolley arrived, and she went into delight about the gateau. She had such moments of brittle gaiety, when she remembered to force them on herself.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ Freddy said. ‘But you’ve got to try to put Wayne Larner out of your mind, Joan.’

  ‘How can you expect me to do that? Freddy, he meant nothing more to me than a singer I was nuts about when I was too young to know any better. But the man’s dead. How can I forget him? There are too many things I can’t forget. Like making an ass of myself on the stage—’

  Her shriek of terror—because there had been a man lurking behind the mock-up Sepulchre. A man? A boy— a lout—that young Harpur. Leering at her—practically drooling. She had made such a fool of herself that they had not continued with the scene. Hajek had contemptuously got on with something else. He had not asked Joan to help out again. It was rumoured that a new—and permanent— Mary Magdalene was on the way.

  ‘And never mind my troubles, Freddy. You have enough of your own. If I hadn’t asked you to get me my bag—’

  ‘You didn’t ask me to get it.’

  ‘As good as. What will they do to you, Freddy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is there any chance that they might reinstate you?’

  ‘Probably not. I’m not even sure that I want them to. I’m going to play it by ear. It depends on whether they treat me as an adult.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘So?’

  Gleed squared up a stack of pro formas—nothing more romantic or sinister than overtime sheets.

  ‘You’ve inspired a few useful leaks?’

  ‘I’ve scattered a few crumbs. Appetites varied.’

  ‘Did you learn a
nything?’

  Kenworthy said he thought the exercise had been useful. It had been Gleed’s idea, but it had clearly been better for someone outside the Force to handle the deception that Kenworthy had just put over. It had been a question of letting unauthorized persons know this afternoon’s plans.

  ‘I dropped hints round Furnival’s table first. He’s my employer, so he has the right to expect it. But he didn’t behave quite as expected.’

  ‘Perhaps he thought you were spilling the beans a little too easily.’

  ‘It wasn’t that. I really don’t think he was interested. He didn’t seem to want to know.’

  ‘That’s my reading of Furnival all along the line. A master of the art of seeming not to do things. I’ve never seen Furnival in action. He’s a man who gets his own way, down to the last detail—yet I’ve never seen or heard him insist on anything. And I’ve never heard of him punishing a backslider.’

  ‘I first met him in the army,’ Kenworthy said. ‘He had a staff appointment at a rear HQ: a penthouse office. He had to have everything spelled out twice over for him. He never seemed to understand a thing that was happening—or to care. That was all a pose. His job was sending men out on tasks from which he knew they wouldn’t come back.’

  ‘I fancy it’s always wartime for Furnival—when he wants something. He fights his wars with a quiet smile on his face. What about Dyer?’

  ‘Even less obliging than Furnival. Dyer didn’t even seem to take any of it in: showed no interest at all.’

  ‘Being subtle, you think? Or a case of bad hamming?’

  ‘I’m tempted to think it was Dyer being Dyer. I wouldn’t put much money on Dyer’s staying out of the shrink’s hands much longer.’

  ‘I think that Dyer had become afflicted by the insipidity of life in general. Or by his conscience.’

  ‘I think Dyer’s conscience is a faithful servant. He’s used to keeping it in order.’

  ‘So you think the man on his tail is going to have an easy run?’

  ‘I’d make sure he stays on his tail, all the same.’