But Letty had made it clear she expected them to raise funds for themselves. All hands to the pump, she implied. In addition, the Theatre Workshop was getting a subsidy from the Enterprise Fund. But life was expensive. They were a professional theatre, not a theatre club, and therefore had to keep the rules about fire risks. It all needed money, and about money, Letty ran a tight ship.
So Stella did her bit, and obliged the cast to do theirs, by inviting the trustees and their friends in for a look and a meeting with the cast, who were instructed to behave well.
The Lupuses were there now, they usually came together. Ted Lupus was a large, gentle man with square, workmanlike hands, whom Stella found attractive. She had been their guest at dinner, enjoying the food and admiring the terrace garden in pots. Perish the thought, Stella, she told herself, you have enough to do. Anyway, the friendliness and affection he radiated was general, he was just a man who liked women, thought they needed looking after and was willing to be the one to do it. A rich man now, he had created his business from nothing, but Kath Lupus had supported him all through the tough early days. She was both proud and protective of him. Stella offered them coffee and sandwiches, both made and delivered by Max in person (he too was a theatre buff), and thought that Kath Lupus was a lucky lady. And for such a lucky lady she ought to look less tired and fraught, but, as she said herself, being the head of a large school was no sinecure. A wave of illness had hit her staff, causing more problems.
Psychosomatic, she whispered to Stella as they apologized for being late. ‘I can’t blame them. With all this reorganization and a new Educational Authority in charge they are worried about their jobs. So they are hiding behind illness.’ A ’flu-like one on this occasion.
Not the way worry took actors, Stella thought. They could be neurotic enough, as she well knew, but never would an illness keep them away from work. Whatever ailment brought on by depression infected them, they would get on the stage and perform. This was well known in the profession.
But, as now, stress showed in the way Lily Goldstone was complaining about her costume for the first act. ‘I’m a bride, damn it,’ she was saying to the wardrobe mistress. ‘Just back from a honeymoon trip. I look like a mute at a funeral in this dress.’
It was actually a very attractive dress which she had praised the other day. Now she gave it a baleful stare and flung it from her. It was not needed, they were not dressing for the run-through and Lily was in her usual sweatshirt and jeans with Up the Revolution written across her chest. The wardrobe mistress carefully picked up the abused garment. She knew, and Lily knew, that Lily would be wearing it in Act One on the night.
Jojo Bell was going round offering herbal tea—this was her way of showing tension. Bridie was feeling sick, and Charlie Driscoll was telling anecdotes from his life—that was his.
On the whole, Stella thought, she preferred Lily’s downright bad temper.
The first act was about to start and Stella stood up the better to be in command. She herself had a distinct ache and loss of strength in her right leg. If I was a dog, I’d drag it, she thought. She really must see a doctor when she had time.
They were playing a new translation of Hedda Gabler, one specially done for them, and in three acts. JoJo Bell, who played the aunt, and the girl who was both assistant stage manager and the maid in Act One, were standing ready.
Stella had assembled a strong but economical cast. She had to think of costs, of which salaries were the greater part. Lily Goldstone as Hedda was earning most, but even she had accepted a cut because she was living with Fergus Abbey, the young man who had done the translation.
Charlie Driscoll was Judge Brack, JoJo Bell was old Aunt Juliane, Will was the young philosopher, Eilert Lovborg, whose book Hedda destroys, while Bridie was Mrs Elvsted, the woman in love with him. Jorgen Tesman, Hedda’s indestructible husband, was being played by Bob Tinker, an anxious bit of casting, because as well as being a name, he was also a drunk. But you had to take what you could get, Stella thought, and he was what she had got. At least long years and many playings together had taught her his little ways and what to look out for.
Not too much had been seen of him lately on the London stage because he had been filming (he acted just as well drunk or sober on film), but he was with them now looking pale and punctilious. She had heard he was into faith-healing, which ought to suit JoJo.
She walked forward, feeling miraculously strong now they were about to begin. Funny, her leg was fine now.
She consulted the plan of the scene on a pad before her. She was discovering herself to be one of those directors who have every move in every scene plotted out even before the first read-through. Needless to say, this tight control provoked fierce explosions from Lily Goldstone, who favoured a more spontaneous approach. The noisy arguments were much enjoyed by both parties, with the rest of the cast dividing fairly equally behind each protagonist.
Behind her, she was aware of John Coffin sliding into a seat next to Ted Lupus and Charlie’s voice starting on his tale of a bottle of sherry (which was very far from being what it seemed) and a trifle and two other actors in Newcastle when he was in digs about twenty years ago.
The story itself must be a good hundred years older than that and had probably been going the rounds when David Garrick was on the boards.
She gave John Coffin a smile and a wave; he was almost punctual, half an hour late, she would settle for that. At that moment the bond between them was so strong that it overrode any sexual boundaries and stretched between them like a piece of ectoplasm, moving slightly in the hot air of the theatre, like a new organ joining their bodies. Coffin shifted uneasily in his seat.
‘Let’s get going then, JoJo.’
Enter Miss TESMAN from the left carrying a letter. THE MAID is centre stage.
MISS TESMAN: ‘Why, I don’t believe they are up yet.’
BERTA: ‘That’s what I said too, miss. But then the boat was so late in last night.’
The rehearsal got under way.
Those of the cast not actually on stage at that moment sat around watching what was happening from a seat in the stalls, or drank coffee in their dressing-room, or just hung about waiting to make their entrance.
The decapitation of Peter Tiler was now common gossip among them, the subject of much speculation, some alarmed, some bawdy, none well informed.
Charlie Driscoll had abandoned his joke session and joined the backstage party.
‘Cheer up, you two,’ he said to Bridie and Will. ‘This is a rehearsal, not a wake.’
A certain tenseness hung over all the cast, showing itself in a telling manner during Stella’s pre-run-through talk earlier that evening.
‘The police will want to speak to us all,’ she had announced. ‘Not sure when. About Peter Tiler.’
Dead silence greeted her. Lily Goldstone lit a cigarette, Bridie and Will moved closer to each other, and JoJo examined her nails. Little Billy, who was helping Max bring in the coffee and sandwiches, retired to a discreet spot to listen. He was so often about the place that he was taken for granted.
‘Well, yes, we’d all rather not, but after all he did work here.’
‘He was a swine and a pig,’ announced Lily loudly. ‘Do you know he tried to get money out of me? Blackmail. Got hold of some letters. I soon showed him the door. Publish and be damned.’
Silently the rest of the cast agreed that there was little in the way of revelations that could shame Lily. She was open in all she did. Peter Tiler had picked the wrong one there.
‘He had a go at me too,’ said Stella. ‘Nothing very important, tried to hint I had been making a profit on the accounts.’
‘Me too, as a matter of fact,’ said Charlie diffidently.
‘Really, Charlie? So what did you do?’
‘Sent him away with a flea in his ear.’
‘Good for you, Charlie.’ No one asked him that which they all longed to know: what he had done that he could have been blackmailed for
. After all, everyone had little matters they would prefer to keep quiet.
‘Just as well he left when he did,’ said Stella. ‘Or he’d have got the sack.’
‘So what do we do?’ asked Charlie. ‘Tell the police about the old bugger?’
‘I ought to say yes,’ said Stella. ‘But I’m not your keeper. You’re adults. Decide for yourself.’
Little Billy thought there were one or two other people who might have spoken but hadn’t. He took a tin of Coke from the table. Grown-ups really were extraordinary. Peter Tiler hadn’t left, he’d been murdered.
He took his can of Coke and went out to join the audience. He sat next to Ted and Kath Lupus. Kath knew him, he had been a member of her school before his parents despatched him to a smart prep school. That lad’s up to something, she thought. Sometimes Little Billy signalled things much more clearly than he knew. She gave him her professional, headmistress’s smile, which he rightly interpreted as ‘Watch it, I am on to you.’
When John Coffin arrived, Billy ran to offer him some coffee and sandwiches. ‘You remember me, sir? I’m the one who found the head. And, sir, I know who did it.’
He whispered, but it was a stage whisper, and owing to the excellent training at the Baddeley School of Drama was distinctly audible.
‘I’ll talk to you later,’ said Coffin, his eyes on the stage, where Charlie Driscoll was making a formidable Judge Brack, revealing a side of his character that one might not have suspected. Lily was magnificent as Hedda, malignant and powerful.
The assistant stage manager crept up and touched John Coffin on the arm. ‘You’re wanted on the telephone, sir.’ She was impressed that there was someone so important in the house that he could be tracked down wherever he was.
On stage Hedda burnt the book written by her husband’s rival, pretending it was her child; Judge Brack began the process of cold, sexual blackmail while her husband remained unaware; shortly Hedda would retire behind the curtain to shoot herself and the play would be over.
Coffin got up. ‘Don’t get lost,’ he muttered to Little Billy, who looked surprised. He never got lost.
When Stella looked round as Hedda went behind the fatal curtain, she saw Coffin had gone.
The house in Hillington Crescent was bathed in the late evening sun. It had been a wet day which had now redeemed itself with steamy heat. Damp was rising from the heaps of earth in the garden. The policemen who had been digging it up had done their job well, back garden and front had been thoroughly turned over.
A uniformed constable stood at the gate, and Archie Lane was in the garden behind him. He saw Coffin looking at the bare earth.
‘Disappointing, eh, sir?’
‘You found nothing?’
‘The remains of a dog, sir. Been there years. Nothing else.’
The door of the house stood open and Coffin walked straight in.
In the hall, messy and earth-stained where a lot of feet had walked in and out, stood Superintendent Paul Lane. DI Young was in attendance.
Lane came forward. ‘Just having a look round for myself. It alters everything, this bit of news.’
‘So it was murder?’
‘Yes. Perhaps you were expecting it.’
‘I think I was. It didn’t feel right.’
‘Bill Baines rang me up as soon as he was certain. Mrs Tiler was murdered. Strangled and then hung up.’
‘When? Can he say how long she has been dead?’
‘The state of the body makes that difficult. But the neighbours put the last time she was seen as over fifteen days ago, memories are a bit vague. So between two and three weeks ago is as near as we can get at the moment.’
Coffin thought about it. ‘And Tiler himself? I suppose he might have been killed about the same time.’
‘Baines won’t say yet.’
‘We need to find the rest of the body.’
‘Well, he isn’t in the garden.’
A good idea that hadn’t worked. The two people who had lived in this house had been murdered, but by whom and for what reason was still obscure.
‘What about the house?’
‘No sign of a struggle and no blood. Wherever Peter Tiler was killed, it wasn’t here.’
‘I’m going to have a look round.’
Accompanied by the other two, Coffin made a slow survey of the house. All the rooms were as he remembered them, but all now showed the marks of the police teams that had gone over them, searching and photographing. Never tidy, they now looked tumbled. If Mrs Tiler had been a keen housewife, as she might have been in her way, she would not have liked the state of her house now.
But she was dead, murdered, and so was Peter Tiler.
Coffin went back down the stairs and through to the kitchen. On the table was an old tin biscuit box.
‘What’s that?’
‘The only thing we found that was interesting. Under the floorboards in the kitchen.’
Coffin looked inside the box. ‘Photographs.’ They looked as though they had been cut from magazines. They had a glossy shine to them that reminded him of something.
‘All women. Young ones.’
‘Dirty old man, was he?’ asked Lane.
‘Bit of a creep, sir.’
Coffin picked one up, handling it carefully because of fingerprints. A pretty blonde face stared out at him. ‘I’d say these could have come from theatre programmes. Photographs of the cast, that kind of thing.’
Coffin went out into the garden. Slowly he walked down the narrow path, this garden had something to say to him and he wanted to read the message. A worm was sliding across a mound of freshly turned earth.
The black cat sat on top of the garden shed, eyeing him with expressionless yellow eyes.
Coffin went back up the garden path to the house, taking his time.
‘What about the shed?’ he asked Archie Young.
‘Had a look round. Nothing much to see.’
‘Dig it up. Go right underneath it.’
Without a word, the Inspector went out to the police car in the street and gave the orders.
Coffin sat waiting in the kitchen. Presently he was joined by Paul Lane. Archie Young stayed out with the diggers.
The light faded from the sky, lamps were rigged up in the garden to give the diggers light to see. The black cat removed himself to the safety of some bushes but remained around to watch.
Cats have memories, if no power to communicate them. And if he could have spoken what was in his mind, it would have been a catly memory. He remembered lights and movement and earth being dug once before, but what he chiefly remembered was the small furry animals that scuttered out disturbed and looking for fresh tunnels.
After a while, a man came out of the shed and spoke to Inspector Young, who turned and went back to the house.
‘We have found a body,’ he said to Coffin. ‘About three feet down. But you’re in for a shock. It’s not Tiler. It’s the body of a woman.’
Coffin followed Archie Young down the garden path. In the shed, by the yellow light from the lamp, he looked down into the hole. The girl lay on her back with her hands folded neatly on her stomach.
What was left of them, for natural decay and small animals had worked upon them. As with her face. But her hair was still golden and curly, although a potato was about to root itself in her heart.
Rosie Ascot was found.
CHAPTER 6
Their half-brother, William, did not, after all, fall in with Lætitia’s plans about where they should eat lunch. Instead, he wrote to her saying he would take them to Green’s off Jermyn Street, he had heard the salad there was good.
‘But this cannot be the reason,’ observed Lætitia, as she passed on the news to Coffin. It was now Monday, three days after the finding of the second body in Hillington Crescent. The invitation was fixed for three days ahead, a Thursday. Coffin could attend, although the days between were busy and the finding of the body of the young actress and their complete failure to find the
body of Peter Tiler had thrown the case wide open. ‘Our brother is a dissembler.’
‘It’s in the blood,’ answered Coffin, thinking of their mother who must have been the arch dissembler of all time. ‘And he may just fancy champagne.’ He had no idea of the surprise that William was about to spring on them. Nor that his brother was to prove, in the end, an acute commentator on the murder of Peter Tiler.
‘I fancy it myself,’ said Lætitia with a giggle. ‘By the way, I do not think you are protecting my investment in St Luke’s. Too much murder.’
‘You’re getting publicity.’ This was certainly true. The papers for the last few days since the discovery in Hillington Crescent had been full of the case. Stella Pinero had nervously identified the body as that of the missing actress but one famous daily paper was flying over from New Zealand Rosie Ascot’s only relatives, an elderly aunt and uncle.
‘But not the right sort.’
‘The great British public loves murders, you know that.’
‘I am bound to say that Stella tells me people are flocking to book.’
Years ago, and more than once since, Stella Pinero had complained that murder came too close to John Coffin. It was his job, granted, but was it also his fate? Arriving at the right place in time for the deed, just as a great artist is always there for the view, the theme, which he needs. An artist in crime? Stella found this disturbing.
St Luke’s Mansions and the Theatre Workshop were certainly getting publicity now with three murders associated with them. MURDER THEATRE, was one newspaper headline. DEATH IN THE GARDEN, said another.
‘But they all feel under suspicion,’ complained his sister.
‘They are under some suspicion. Can’t be avoided.’ To a certain extent every one connected with St Luke’s, or with access to it, was under suspicion. Letty herself was probably being quietly investigated. And he would give something to know if there was a secret file on him. He had to assume there was.
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