by Simon Brett
Mark Lear gave his friend a pitying look. “And then the body is discovered with the tape still in the tape recorder just beside it. No criminal would leave such a huge signpost pointing straight at him, would he?”
“No. So I’m really back to Square One. Trouble with this case is a dearth of suspects.”
“Who else have you got?”
“No one, really. Well, I had one other, but he’s ruled out by sheer logistics.”
“Who was he?”
“Boy Trubshawe.”
“Oh, him. Malicious old queen, isn’t he?”
“You can say that again. Do you know him well?”
The producer shook his head. “No, met him for the first time this week. Sort of cocktail party at Lucinda’s. He’d just come in from a trip to the States, which he was very full of.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Not a single reputation on Broadway was unsullied by the end of the evening.”
“That’s my Boy,” said Charles wryly. “When was this?”
“What, Lucinda’s party?”
“Uhuh.”
“Monday night.”
“Can’t have been.”
“What do you mean?”
“Monday night Boy was still in New York. I know that. I saw him Wednesday and he said he’d come back in the small hours of Tuesday morning.”
Mark Lear shook his head. “Charles, I know I drink too much in the BBC Club, but I can tell the days apart. I have good reason to remember Monday night. After Lucinda’s I had dinner with that actress with the purple hair and let me tell you—”
Charles cut short this sexual reminiscence. “Good God! You swear that Boy Trubshawe was here on the Monday?”
“Of course I do. What the hell should I—”
“So he lied to me! And he could easily have—”
The phone rang from the landing. Charles was silent.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“No. It’ll be for one of the Swedish girls.”
But apparently none of the Swedish girls was in. The phone rang on.
Charles picked up the receiver.
“It’s Mariana.”
“What’s up? Has something happened?”
“Charles, I’m worried.”
“Why?”
“I thought I could hear some noise from the fire escape. Outside the kitchen.”
“What sort of noise?”
“Well, as if someone . . . I don’t know . . . as if someone—”
There was a sudden sound of breaking glass from Mariana’s end of the phone. She let out a little whimper. There was a heavy thud.
Then silence.
The caretaker was roused from his basement in the adjacent block and, responding to the urgency of Charles’s demands, hurried up the stairs and unlocked the door to Mariana’s flat.
She lay by the door between the sitting-room and the kitchen. The phone, receiver off, was on the floor at the full extent of its cable. When she rang Charles, she must have been trying to see what was happening in the kitchen. The glass of the door to the fire escape was shattered.
Mariana herself was moaning softly. As Charles gently raised her body to cradle it, she put her hand to her forehead where a marked swelling showed already.
“She all right?”
Charles looked up into the anxious face of the elderly caretaker. “I think so. Better get a doctor. Do you know who her doctor is?”
The old man shook his head.
Mariana’s eyelids opened and the pupils swam into focus. “Charles,” she whispered gratefully.
“Mariana, who is your doctor?”
She spoke slowly, as if drunk. “Oh, he doesn’t make house calls. If I’m ill, I have to go there.”
“I think he’ll come this time. What’s his name?”
She told him. “But it’s not necessary. I’m all right.”
Charles told the caretaker to ring the doctor, as he picked Mariana up gently and moved towards the bedroom.
“Shall I ring the police as well, guv?”
Charles looked off into the kitchen. “No, hold fire on that for the moment.”
He stayed with Mariana until the doctor arrived. The latter’s complaints about actually having to visit a patient and to have to do so late in the evening justified the old lady’s comment on him. But at least he had arrived and Charles left him with the patient.
The actor went into the kitchen. He looked at the floor by the exit door, then turned the handle. It was not locked.
On the metal grille of the fire escape landing outside lay a brick, surrounded by a few larger pieces of glass.
“Mr Paris.”
The doctor was standing in the doorway from the sitting-room.
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing wrong with her. Just a bruise on the forehead. I must say I resent being called out for something so minor.”
“She is an old lady, doctor.”
“If I came out on a call for every old lady who fell over, I would never get home at all.”
“She didn’t fall over.”
The doctor shrugged. “That’s not really important. The fact is that she has suffered a very minor injury and I have been called away from a dinner party.”
“It’s not the minor injury that should worry you, doctor.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Mr Paris?”
“I am talking about the effect a shock like that might have on Miss Lythgoe’s heart.”
Charles sat on the side of Mariana’s bed. She smiled up at him. She looked weary, but peaceful. The soft bedside light washed years off the perfectly shaped face.
“Has the doctor gone?”
Charles nodded. “He doesn’t seem too worried about you. Rest, he says, that’s the answer.”
She grinned. “Not a lot else one can do at my age.”
“No.” There was a silence before he continued. “Mariana, you asked me last week to do some detective work for you.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve done it.”
Her greying eyes sparkled. “You mean you know who it is who’s been doing all these things?”
“Yes.” The word came out like a sigh.
“Who? Charles, tell me who.”
“Mariana, I’ve looked in the kitchen and on the fire escape. There is no glass on the kitchen floor. There is a brick and some broken glass on the fire escape.”
“Yes, well, that’s how he must have got in. It means—”
Charles shook his head slowly as he interrupted. “It means that the window was broken from inside the flat, Mariana.”
“Oh.”
“I spoke to the doctor about your health. He was very complimentary about your general condition. Your heart, in particular, he said, would do credit to a woman twenty years your junior.”
“Ah.” She looked up at him. Frail, vulnerable, but still in control, still with a small twinkle of humour.
Charles grinned. “Why, Mariana?”
She spread her hands in a gesture of selfishness. “What I’ve always suffered from, Charles—innate sense of theatre. And, I suppose, the desire to be the centre of attention.”
“But to go to the lengths you did . . . Even to hit yourself on the forehead . . . I mean, why?”
“Sorry. Got carried away. Always like that on stage—really got into my parts. I never could play any character unless I believed, at least for a few moments, that I was that character.”
“Which is what made you a great actress.”
“Thank you.” Once again, by her usual blend of charm and cunning, Mariana had exacted her tribute of compliment.
“And what made you so convincing to me. I believed you were really frightened because, at the moment you told me all that nonsense, you believed it. You really were frightened.”
She nodded with a mixture of shame and impertinence, like a schoolgirl caught smoking.
“Have you done this sort of thing before,
Mariana?”
“No. I promise. Really. When I retired ten years ago, I was determined to sink gracefully into anonymity. And I managed it. I was really good about it. I had friends, I spent time with them, and, for the first time in my life, I took a back seat. And, to my surprise, I found I didn’t really mind.”
“What changed things?”
She smiled sadly. “My friends died. I was increasingly alone. Yes, I must use the word—increasingly lonely. But what really started it was the book. Writing it, thinking about all those performances . . . and then the ‘promotional tour’. I’m afraid once again I was centre stage—and I found I hadn’t lost the taste for it.”
“I’m a small audience, Mariana,” said Charles gently.
“I know. I’m sorry it was you who got involved. Unfair. You didn’t deserve it. It’s just, when Mark said you were a bit of a detective . . . And then I got caught up in the drama of the situation—as I say, got carried away. I’m sorry. You were just the victim of another lonely old lady, craving attention.”
Charles gave a little laugh. “And has my ‘attention’ been satisfactory?”
Mariana Lythgoe’s famous smile irradiated her face. “Oh yes, Charles. Thank you.”
He picked up her fine but freckled hand and kissed it. “I must go.”
“Yes.” A little silence hung between them. “But, Charles, you will come and see me again, won’t you?”
“Oh yes, Mariana,” said Charles Paris. “I will.”
About the Author
SIMON BRETT has been interested in theatre from an early age. A former president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, he appeared in cabarets and reviews there and directed the Oxford Theatre Group’s late-night show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1967. He has produced radio and comedy shows for the BBC and for London Weekend television, but he now devotes himself full time to writing plays and scripts for radio and television as well as his popular Charles Paris novels. His most recent novel was A Shock to the System.