Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘You reached the till at one thirty-eight,’ Slider said. ‘So it must have taken you fifteen minutes or so to do that bit of shopping.’

  ‘It may have done,’ Lavender said indifferently. Then, ‘One thirty-eight? How do you know that?’

  Slider waved the question away. ‘Carry on. You paid for your shopping. What then?’

  ‘I went back to the car, of course.’ He hesitated, and Slider braced himself for the lie. Lavender said, ‘This is going to sound ridiculous. I’m afraid it will all sound very foolish from now on. But I said I would tell you the truth. When I got in the car and turned on the ignition, the radio came on, of course. I have it tuned to Classic FM – a poor compromise. I hate having music torn into meaningless gobbets, but there’s no alternative, is there? The piece that was playing was the Brahms violin concerto. A great favourite of mine, and the centrepiece of the first concert Rowland and I ever went to together. And it started me thinking.’

  He stopped, his stare gone into the past.

  ‘Thinking about what?’ Slider prompted in the end.

  He roused himself, but his eyes were still far away. ‘I sat listening to the music, and thinking about Rowland, and myself, and all the years we had been friends and partners. Much of it – most of it – good. But you can’t think about the good things and not remember the bad. Rowland is – was – a difficult person. He always was, but the little faults that were forgivable, even endearing, when he was younger have hardened as he’s got older, and particularly so since he’s become famous. He really was the last person who ought to have gone into television. It’s made him something of a monster.’

  ‘In what way?’ Slider slipped the question in as smoothly as possible, sensing Lavender was on a roll.

  ‘In the ways you associate with a spoiled Hollywood star – the conventional, hackneyed ways. Stardom makes you believe you are more important than “ordinary” people, that everyone else is there to do your bidding, that your wishes must be paramount and anyone else’s feelings are unimportant. He was demanding, arrogant, selfish, thoughtless and devious. And I was finding it harder and harder to be dependent on him.’

  ‘You sound as if you were starting to hate him,’ Atherton suggested.

  Lavender didn’t look at him, so deep in his memories that he was hardly aware of his surroundings. ‘No, never that,’ he said. ‘If you once truly love someone, that never changes at bottom. I was starting to hate what he was becoming.’

  ‘In what way were you dependent on him?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Business was bad,’ he said. ‘The recession hit the antiques trade hard. Overheads keep going up, you have to hold on to stock for longer, and the public are getting tougher about haggling over prices – partly thanks to those same television programmes that Rowland stars in. That’s an irony. If it wasn’t for his television fees, we couldn’t have kept going through the recession. And I didn’t want to go on like that indefinitely.’

  ‘Did you think he might be going to withdraw that support?’

  ‘No, on the contrary. He liked the fact that I – that the business was dependent on him. He crowed about it – made a point of reminding me whenever the opportunity arose. “If it wasn’t for me,” he’d say, “where would you be?” And I was supposed to pour out my gratitude. I was never allowed to say to him, “If it wasn’t for me, where would you be?” Because the fact of the matter is,’ he went on, anger bringing colour into his ashen face, ‘I made Rowland Egerton. He knew nothing about art and antiques when I met him. All he had was charm and a way with words – the gift of the gab, as the Irish say. He could talk anyone into anything. He used to say he could sell freezers to Eskimos.’

  ‘That’s quite a talent, isn’t it?’ Atherton said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Lavender said. ‘I always acknowledged as much. But you see, he didn’t want to sell to Eskimos. He was a social climber. He wanted to sell to the upper-middle classes. Even to the aristocracy. He wanted to be accepted as one of them. Rather pitiful, really. But those people don’t respond to the same triggers. You can’t behave like a second-hand car salesman. You need the right manner, the right vocabulary. And you need to know what you’re talking about. That was where I came in.’

  ‘You trained him.’

  ‘I taught him everything he knew. Not just about art and antiques but about his customers, too, and how to get on with them. I even gave him his new name, indirectly. You know what his real name was?’

  ‘Phil Harris,’ Atherton supplied.

  ‘Not smart enough for him. So he changed it. Two of my old addresses in South Kensington – Roland Gardens and Egerton Terrace. I had a flat in each of them at one time.’ His mouth turned down. ‘But he didn’t like being reminded of it. I had to learn not to call him Phil, even when we were alone.’

  ‘So you were sitting in your car, thinking all these resentful thoughts,’ Atherton prompted.

  ‘I told you it would sound ridiculous,’ Lavender said dully. ‘You must be thinking me a poor specimen. But these things build up over the years. And things had been particularly uncomfortable at the last recording at Wykeham Hall.’

  ‘How was that?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Oh, he’d been in a bad mood for a couple of weeks. First there was Bunny dying – they’d been good friends – and then the ridiculous scene at her funeral.’

  ‘He told you about that?’

  ‘He said Philip had asked him to leave. He was furious that he’d been humiliated, as he saw it. I’d told him not to go, but there was an example of his “star” mentality, if you like! I said he should respect Philip’s wishes, but he thought he was more important than a minor MP, so his friendship with Bunny gave him greater rights than her husband and family. He brought that on himself – I had no sympathy. And then he’d had a letter from the television company about Going, Going, Gone, saying they were considering getting him a female co-presenter for the next season to boost ratings. The idea that he couldn’t hold up the ratings on his own, without some simpering female tagging along, infuriated him.’

  ‘Were those his words? Some simpering female?’

  ‘Yes. He was sure they wanted to bring in a pretty face with no knowledge whatsoever.’

  ‘Which was rather ironic, really,’ Atherton suggested, ‘given that that’s what he was, before your make-over.’

  Lavender shuddered. ‘Don’t use that expression – “make-over”. It encapsulates what’s wrong with television today.’

  ‘So what happened at Wykeham Hall?’ Slider asked.

  ‘He was in a bad mood to begin with. And then there was that ridiculous Rupert Melling annoying him with his vulgar jibes. And of course he took it out on me, as he always does. He complained I wasn’t finding him anything interesting on the trawl. Then when the Aldburys invited us to supper – the owners of Wykeham Hall – he wanted me to excuse myself so he could go alone. He said, “You’re not very good company, you know. You just sit there without opening your mouth. Better leave them to me. I can have them eating out of my hand.” Mrs Aldbury was quite young and attractive, and I suppose he wanted to flirt with her to soften her up. There was a pair of early Georgian wine-coolers he’d spotted, and he thought he could get them to sell. I lost my temper a little and told him he needed me with him because his ignorance would betray him unless I gave him his cues. And we had a bit of an argument.’

  ‘Understandable,’ Slider said.

  He looked shamefaced. ‘It was sordid. I’ve seen him do it with other people, but I’ve never indulged in that sort of thing – throwing up every insult and bad memory you can muster. I could see he was rather surprised. The biter bit, I suppose. When I realized, I stopped myself. I said if he wanted to go alone he could, and he said no, I was right, we should go together. But there was an awkward feeling all evening.’ He stopped.

  ‘And that’s what you were thinking about, sitting in your car in the car park?’ Atherton prompted.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And it crys
tallized something I’d been half-thinking for a while – that it was time we broke up the partnership. The lease on the shop was going to fall in soon, anyway, and the landlord was bound to put up the price, probably to a level that would make the shop unviable. I was tired of being dependent on his television fees, and running around fetching and carrying for him. I decided I was going to tell him that evening that we should wind it up. He’d hardly miss it anyway, with his TV career, and I could set up on my own. Not with a shop – there’s no future in that, and I haven’t the capital anyway. Just doing sourcing – bespoke work – and restoration and valuation. You can do a lot of that from home on a computer. You don’t need premises, all you need is knowledge, and that’s what I have. That’s all I have,’ he added with a hint of bitterness.

  ‘You were going to end up rather badly off from the split,’ Atherton suggested, ‘while he’d carry on living in luxury. The house and everything in it was his. You’d even lose your flat over the shop.’

  He managed a sort of shrug. ‘The flat was nothing. I don’t care where I live. Anyway, better to be poor and have your self-respect.’

  ‘So, thinking all these angry thoughts, you were driving – where?’ Atherton asked.

  Lavender looked up. ‘I told you, I was sitting in the car.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘I don’t know. A long time. I was lost in thought.’

  ‘Can you make a guess at how long?’ Slider asked. ‘Ten minutes? Longer?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. I didn’t look at the time.’

  ‘Weren’t you expected at Mr Egerton’s?’

  ‘Not at any particular time. We were going to have a meal together, but not until the evening. He was going to cook for me. I think he felt bad about what happened at Wykeham Hall, and it was his way of making it up to me. I’d said I’d be over in the afternoon, that was all.’

  ‘Very well. Carry on,’ Slider said. ‘You were sitting in the car, in the car park …?’

  ‘I’d been sitting there thinking for some time, and I suddenly resolved that I would talk to him that day about breaking up. I’d see what sort of a mood he was in when I arrived, and either tell him straight away, or wait until after dinner when we’d had some wine and he might be in a more mellow mood.’

  ‘You anticipated that there’d be a row?’ Slider queried.

  ‘I thought he’d try to talk me out of it. He liked to get his own way. And if he couldn’t get it by charm, he was capable of being very nasty. But I’d thought long and hard and I was ready.’

  ‘So you drove over to the house. Every detail now, please.’

  ‘There was a parking space right outside, which was lucky. I went in, called out, “It’s only me,” and took the shopping straight downstairs to the kitchen. I went back upstairs to see if he wanted a cup of tea. Took my coat off, hung it in the cupboard under the stairs. Looked into the study – I thought he’d be working there. But he wasn’t. I knew he was in, because his overcoat and scarf were in the cupboard. So I went into the drawing room. And there he was.’ He stopped, swallowing hard. He put a reflexive hand up to his nose, but there was no blood this time. Perhaps now he was telling the truth and there was no need for the pressure-valve.

  ‘What did you do?’ Slider asked quietly.

  ‘Nothing, at first. I stood there, staring, trying to make sense of it. I knew he was dead; there was no need to go near him. But it was such a shock, such an awful thing to be looking at. I saw straight away that the malachite box was missing, and it came into my head that a burglar had stolen it and killed him when he got in the way. I don’t know why I was so convinced that was what had happened, but I was. It seemed the only explanation.’

  ‘What then?’ said Slider, to keep him going.

  ‘I don’t know how long I stood there. But then I started thinking of all the trouble this was going to cause. It was one thing to decide to split up and wind up the business, but another to have it thrust upon me. The business debts – would I be liable for them? I had no money, nothing saved, and all his wealth would go to his daughter now. I could be ruined. And I was angry with him. For getting himself killed in this stupid, pointless way. For making me so dependent on him that I didn’t know what to do next. Angry for all the slights and insults and playing second fiddle, and having him take the credit for everything when I was the one with the real expertise. Then suddenly I thought of the painting, the Morisot, and it somehow encapsulated all my feelings. I realized that it would go with the rest of the contents, and that Dale would probably sell everything via a house-clearance, because she cares nothing about art or antiques.’

  ‘So you decided to take it,’ said Slider.

  ‘I thought if I sold it, it would at least give me some funds to tide me over. I could probably get eighty to a hundred thousand for it. And in justice, it was mine really, anyway – he’d never cared for it. If I took it now, everyone would think that the burglar had taken it along with the box. So I took it into the study to wrap it up, then out to my car, put it in the boot. Then I came back in. Looked at the clock. It was nearly twenty-five past. I knew I had to call the police. I realized that I’d been there a long time, and it would look suspicious if I hadn’t called the police straight away. So I had to work out my story.’

  ‘That’s when you decided to say you had left your shop at half past one?’ said Atherton.

  He looked embarrassed. ‘I didn’t think anyone would believe me, if I said I was sitting in the car thinking all that time. So I had to have left later.’

  ‘Very ingenious,’ said Atherton.

  Lavender frowned, sensing irony. ‘I was trying to think – what would I naturally have done? I didn’t want to arouse any suspicions. I thought perhaps I would have gone to him, to see if he was still alive – though I knew from the beginning he wasn’t. So I went and knelt down beside him and touched him. I got blood on the knees of my trousers. I thought that was probably a good thing.’ He looked at Slider. ‘My thoughts – it was like being in a fever, when everything seems terribly clear and yet utterly surreal. It was a kind of madness. I can’t explain any other way why I did what I did, but I assure you it seemed rational at the time.’

  Slider nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘There isn’t any more. I telephoned the police and went back downstairs to wait. You know the rest.’

  He stopped, and the silence felt like a dark hole opening up. While the narrative was going on, Slider had been there, in that house, with Lavender, seeing and feeling what he had seen and felt. He had to shake himself back to the here-and-now and ask the question that had bugged him most from the beginning. ‘Why did you rearrange the paintings on the wall where the Morisot was?’

  Lavender put a hand up to his forehead in a helpless sort of gesture. ‘I don’t know. It seems mad now, when I think of it. I suppose I thought if there wasn’t an obvious gap in the arrangement, it might not be missed. So I moved the still life to fill it.’

  ‘But,’ said Atherton, ‘you wanted it to be missed. You wanted us to think the burglar had taken it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lavender. ‘I can see that now, but at the time it seemed to make sense.’ He shook his head. ‘It must have been the shock. I was standing there with my closest friend dead at my feet and my life in ruins, and I did the most idiotic thing. No,’ he corrected himself with a touch of bitterness, ‘the most idiotic thing was being scared into trying to sell the painting. After your visit to the flat I was afraid you might come back and search it, so I thought I’d better get rid of it at once. The sale at Banbury gave me an excuse to get it away. I should have known you’d have some way of looking out for it. I was a fool, an absolute fool. I behaved like a complete idiot.’

  Lavender rubbed his hands together slowly, as if they were cold. When he looked up now, it was with appeal, his worn, pale, craggy face uncertain, afraid. ‘I know there must be consequences for what I have done. I misled you. I tried to steal the painting. Will I – will I be s
ent to prison? I am,’ he added in a low voice, ‘very afraid of that.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slider said, and Atherton was surprised at the lack of sympathy in his voice. He thought Lavender a venial ass, but he’d expected his boss to feel for him. ‘That’s not for me to decide. You have committed at least two criminal offences – obstructing a police officer, and theft. You may well be prosecuted.’

  The cheeks trembled, and Lavender clenched his hands and forced himself to sit up straight, taking his lumps like a man, as they taught you at school. ‘But you believe me?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t kill Rowland. Whatever happened, I could never have done that. He was dead when I got there. You do believe me?’

  ‘Interview terminated at—’ Slider said, looked up, and added the time. He stood up, glanced at Atherton, and walked away without answering.

  Outside, Atherton said, ‘Well, do you believe him?’

  Slider sighed. ‘I’m afraid I do. It’s screwy enough to be the truth. And it answers all the questions.’

  ‘Except the big one – if he didn’t do it, who did?’

  ‘Ah yes, except that one,’ said Slider.

  ‘He still had the best motive,’ Atherton said. ‘A lifetime of service, and he ends up living in the attic on the scraps from the table like a sort of mad maiden aunt.’

  ‘Your imagination!’

  ‘Still, resentment,’ Atherton urged. ‘Best of all the emotions for fuelling murder. It’s a good, slow burner; it’ll keep you warm for years.’

  ‘But was this that sort of murder?’

  ‘Let’s not get too particular,’ Atherton advised.

  Porson was sitting down for once, looking almost as grey in the face as Lavender – but strip lights were nobody’s friend. He listened to the story in neutral silence. ‘Mad as a March hatter,’ he remarked at the end. ‘That’s a lot of barminess for one painting.’

  ‘Quite a valuable painting,’ Slider pointed out. ‘But it wasn’t just the money. He’d tried to buy his friend something special, and his friend had scorned it. It was the symbol of all his woes.’